On Thursday April 18, the conference of Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Rima Hassan, which was to be held at the University of Lille, was canceled by the prefect of the north and the president of the university, Régis Bordet. It was enough for the leader of La France insoumise to become indignant and launch one of his usual outbursts, comparing the president of the faculty to the former Nazi dignitary Adolf Eichmann. Faced with the controversy sparked by his comments, Jean-Luc Mélenchon does not budge. Onhe persists and signs: Bordet’s complicity in the cancellation of which he is the victim would be an illustration of the mechanism of the “banality of evil”.
This concept was theorized by Hannah Arendt in 1963. In her famous work Eichmann in Jerusalemthe philosopher describes Eichmann not as a monster of sadism, but as a surprisingly banal bureaucrat, a perfect example of this famous “banality of evil” which explains, according to her, that atrocious acts can be committed by normal men, simple executioners. of the bureaucratic machine.
But for Yariv Mozer, director of the documentary Adolf Eichmann: confessions of the devil (2022), Jean-Luc Mélenchon is doubly wrong. Not only is Régis Bordet nothing like Adolf Eichmann, but the Eichmann that Arendt describes and to whom the Insoumis refers, a small, docile civil servant who would only apply the orders of his hierarchy, never actually existed. .
What does the comparison made by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, between the president of the University of Lille and Adolf Eichmann, inspire you?
Yariv Mozer This comparison is insane. Jean-Luc Mélenchon is completely wrong if he thinks that this shameful comparison is an intelligent way of invoking Hannah Arendt’s concept of “banality of evil”. He must update his understanding of Arendt’s philosophy, because the majority of historians now take a critical look at her interpretation of the character of Eichmann during his trial in 1961. Since the publication of Arendt’s work Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1963, many discoveries were made.
With this concept, Arendt certainly formulated an exciting idea, but she found in Eichmann the worst possible example. Eichmann was a devoted Nazi, a fascist ideologue who sincerely believed that the Jewish people should be eliminated from the world. This is what I try to demonstrate in my documentary The Devil’s Confessionsbased on the words of Eichmann himself, in interviews given to Dutch journalist and Nazi sympathizer Willem Sassen, in Argentina, in the 1950s. In these interviews, which I was able to consult, Eichmann states that he truly believed in what he was doing, that he wasn’t just following orders.
Adolf Eichmann was therefore far from corresponding to the model of the small bureaucrat who only obeys the orders of his hierarchy, which Arendt describes in Eichmann in Jerusalemand to which Jean-Luc Mélenchon is referring?
Very far from there! There are countless decisions made by Eichmann that demonstrate the dedication with which he carried out his task, which was to implement the final solution. Far from being a simple cog in the Nazi bureaucracy, he knew how to manipulate it, understanding its functioning down to the smallest detail, so that he was able to obtain much more than what his initial missions required.
“Eichmann is anything but a petty official who obediently follows orders.”
An example to illustrate this function overflow. At the end of the war, he was appointed to Hungary. The trains were expected at the front to help the German army, which was in a very bad situation. Despite this and against Germany’s military interests, he insisted that trains send 450,000 Jews from the Hungarian Jewish community to Auschwitz.
It is clear that Eichmann is anything but a petty official who obediently obeys orders. He went beyond his duties to pursue very personal ideological objectives.
What role did Adolf Eichmann play in the Nazi regime?
Eichmann was in charge of a department of the Schutzstaffel (SS) within the Gestapo, the political police, dedicated to the question of the enemies of the Nazi state, and more particularly the Jews. He was responsible for locating Jews, particularly in the occupied territories. Eichmann and his collaborators were to identify, locate and capture all Jews in order to put them on the trains that would take them to the death camps.
Unfortunately, he excelled in this role. It led to the death of at least 2.5 million people, coming from the Netherlands, Greece, Hungary, Denmark, Austria… But for Eichmann, that was not enough. In the recordings, he can be heard saying: “If we had killed 10.3 million Jews, I would have been satisfied and I would have said: ‘Very good. We exterminated an enemy’.”
You mentioned the recordings of the interviews with Willem Sassen. What was the purpose of these interviews, and why did Eichmann agree to be recorded, knowing that as a former Nazi dignitary he was highly sought after?
“One wonders if Eichmann, in his subconscious, was not trying to get caught, as he wanted to be remembered for what he had done.”
Eichmann felt that he had not received the credit and recognition he deserved for his work during the war. While all the regime’s top officials were put on trial at the Nuremberg Trials, Eichmann fled to Argentina and changed his name.
After occupying a role of power, anonymity was very heavy for him. When Sassen came to him and offered to write a book about him, it spoke to his lack of recognition. Except that to make this book, Sassen needed to record their exchanges. Eichmann knew it was risky, but his narcissism and need for recognition took over.
This was what differentiated him from Josef Mengele [NDLR : officier de la SS et médecin à Auschwitz] who was his best friend. Mengele, unlike Eichmann, did not seek recognition. He was pure paranoid, he would never have agreed to give a recorded interview. The result was that Mengele was never captured, unlike Eichmann.
In a way, one wonders if Eichmann, in his subconscious, was not trying to get caught, as he wanted to be remembered for what he had done.
Eichmann had expressly requested that the recordings never be released before his death. How come they fled before he was captured?
When Eichmann was caught by the Israeli Mossad and brought to trial in Jerusalem, Willem Sassen was having money problems. It is for this reason that he decided to betray him by selling an article, based on these recordings, to the American magazine life. However, he did not give journalists the recordings.
During the trial, the prosecution attempted to present the article published in life as an exhibit, but the absence of the original recordings did not allow these recordings to be used in the trial.
Sassen gave the tapes to the Eichmann family, who subsequently sold them to a publishing house in Switzerland. They passed from one hand to another, until they arrived in the German national archives. After negotiating with the archives, I was able to gain full access to the recordings, and was able to include them in The Devil’s Confessions.
In these recordings, Eichmann is heard proudly saying that he was not a pure bureaucrat, and that he believed deeply in Nazi ideology. “I saw the Jewish people as a threat to German blood and the German nation,” he said. We even hear him mention regrets, but not the ones we expect: “Our younger generation will always be angry because we didn’t get the job done.”
Despite the publication of the article in life, how come he was able to fool everyone during his trial? Even a woman of Hannah Arendt’s intelligence was fooled…
German philosopher Bettina Stangneth, author of a notable book on the subject, entitled Eichmann Before Jerusalem (2015), explains that Eichmann was the very type of SS officer. Trained as a spy, he was very good at changing identities and lying. As can be seen in the photos taken during his cabal, he was a master in the art of changing his identity and appearance, by changing his haircut, dressing differently, etc. He knew how to pass himself off as an ordinary man, the opposite of a mass murderer. This is what he did during the trial, playing the role of the naive and slightly stupid little official. It was difficult to believe that such a character could be behind what he was accused of.
But all the people who met Eichmann during the war and who testified at the trial, only about ten, said the same thing: “Don’t believe the person sitting in front of you. The real Eichmann is the opposite of what he thinks. “We see here. When he wears his black SS uniform, with a pistol in his belt, he is an arrogant, cruel man, who forbade Jews to sit in front of him, took pleasure in humiliating them.”
It is this Eichmann that we are confronted with in Sassen’s recordings. He speaks with pride of his war memories. He is not a timid person, who would not be aware of what he would have done during the war. On the contrary.
Do you think that the fact that Arendt was wrong about Eichmann therefore delegitimizes the concept of the banality of evil?
I do not think so. Arendt’s banality of evil helps explain the behavior of many people in fascist dictatorship regimes, those masses of ordinary people who find themselves doing bureaucratic work without relating it to the broader consequences that this work entails. It is a useful concept, a warning to all human beings, to remind us what we are capable of doing in particular situations.
But simply, we must use it correctly, and not exploit it as Mr. Mélenchon did, by referring to Eichmann who, again, was not at all the right person for this theory.
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