(Author: Ralph Zulman, Vol. 67, No. 3, Chanukah 2012)
More than sixty years after the advent of the National Socialist genocides, the question still remains: How could a state-sponsored terror that took the lives of millions of men, women and children happen? Eichmann’s Men, Hans Safrian’s path-breaking work on Adolf Eichmann and his Nazi helpers, attempts to provide the answer. The book examines a central group of National Socialist perpetrators who expelled German, Austrian, Polish, Russian, French, Greek, Italian, and Czech Jews from their homelands and deported massive numbers of them to ghettos, concentration camps and killing centers of occupied Eastern Europe. Safrian reconstructs the ‘careers’ of Eichmann and these men in the implementing the Nazi regime’s racial policies, from the gradual marginization of their victims through the escalation to boycotts and segregation, to deportation and forced labor, and finally, to mass murder.
Dr Safrian received his PhD in history from the University of Vienna in Austria and his Master’s degree in history and German literature from the Free University in Berlin. He lectures in history at the Institute fur Zeitgeschichte at the University of Vienna. He was also a Paul Resnick Fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Research Team Leader for the Independent Commission of Experts – Second World War, and a research historian for the Historical Commission of the Republic of Austria. He is the author of numerous works on World War II and Nazi war crimes. In November 2011, he visited South Africa and delivered the Kristallnacht Commemoration Lecture at the Goethe Institute in Johannesburg. The book is dedicated to his grandfather Otto Haas, born in 1897 in Breclav, Moravia, and probably murdered in 1943 in Auschwitz-Birkenau after being deported from Paris. It is also in memory of Raul Hilberg, the foremost Holocaust historian whom, Safrian writes, “taught me to ask the right questions”.
Professor Deborah Lipstadt of Emory University makes the trenchant point that Safrian provides readers “with excellent insight into how Adolf Eichmann and a small group of men around him were able to coordinate and manage a major portion of the Final Solution. He demonstrates that the desk murderers, rather than simply shuffling papers, played a tremendously important role in coordinating and carrying out the murder of millions of European Jews. They were creative, pro-active, energetic, and completely devoted to their work”.
David Cesarani, a Research Professor in History at the University of London, describes the book as “a break-through in the study of Eichmann, his office and the men who implemented anti-Jewish policy in the Third Reich – culminating in the grotesquely efficient management of genocide. It is the standard work on the subject. It deserves to become a classic”.
George C. Bowder of Holocaust and Genocide Studies regards the book as a major contribution to our understanding of the evolution of perpetrator mentality. He writes, “With Safrian’s fine biographical sketches of these men and descriptions of their behavior … a convincing picture of their character and motivation emerges … The view [then] broadens well beyond the Eichmann men to their collaboration in the Wehrmacht occupation administrators, Nazi allied governments and indigenous populations”.
The book makes reference to Captain SSH auptsturmfuhrer Alois Brunner, one of Eichmann’s men. Despite brutal manhunts in Paris, Nice and other French cities, Brunner was unable to meet the quotas set in Berlin. The book ends with the question whether Brunner had any pangs of conscience regarding his more than active contribution to the National Socialist genocide. According to the Chicago Sun Times, his answer was quite the contrary. The Jews, he said, deserved to die because they were “agents of the devil, human scum. I regret nothing and would do it all over again”.
Eichmann’s Men by Hans Safrian, translated from the German by Ute Stargardt, Cambridge University Press, in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2010, 328pp.
Mr Justice Ralph Zulman is a long-serving member of the editorial board of and regular contributor to Jewish Affairs.
