Photo Gallery Genocide's Middle Managers
Adolf Eichmann at his trial in Jerusalem in 1961. The son of an accountant from the western German city of Solingen, Eichmann was no intellectual. In fact, he left school early and then dropped out of an apprenticeship to become a mechanic. Still, he was shrewd enough to understand that his rise to power depended on an institution -- "his" Nazi Party -- that looked after him and to which he, in turn, devoted himself unconditionally.
Kaing Guek Eav, AKA "Duch," is a 67-year-old former Khmer Rouge official who was the commandant of the most notorious prison and torture house in Phnom Penh. A verdict in his trial in Cambodia is expected soon. The son of a farmer, Duch was always a model student. He valued precision and logic; his favorite subject was mathematics. To him, the clear distinction that Khmer Rouge ideologues made between a life that was useful and one that merited destruction made perfect sense.
Hannah Arendt covered the Eichmann trial and wrote a very controversial book on it, which had the subtitle "The Banality of Evil." She believed that it is misguided to interpret the genocide of the Jews as some kind of metaphysical event and to transform Eichmann into some inhuman demon. She recognized that a person could commit monstrous crimes without being a Satanic Übermensch and that, accordingly, even the unspeakable crime against the Jews has a political and historical context.
