No Middle Ground for the Eichmann Männer? in Yad Vashem Studies, Volume XXXI

No Middle Ground for the Eichmann Männer? Yaacov Lozowick, Hitler’s Bureaucrats: The Nazi Security Police and the Banality of Evil, Translated by Haim Watzman, London and New York: Continuum, 2002.xx + 297 pp.

Yaacov Lozowick’s study of the Jewish Experts of the Gestapo and SD and their role in the Shoah counters Hanna Arendt’s depiction of unemotional cogs in a bureaucratic machine that never allowed them to realize what they were doing. He demonstrates convincingly that they were hate-driven antisemitic fanatics, but he goes farther to argue that they were “unique” and “aberrational,” dedicated antisemites before they assumed office, coming “equipped with their ideological identification from home.” Browder presents literature and evidence arguing for a middle position, describing most perpetrators as originally normal men who either internalized or simply “wore” rabid antisemitism after emersion in their roles and missions in Sipo and SD.