There is nothing either good or bad, the Nazis liked to insist, but thinking makes it so. Eichmann, interviewed in Argentina shortly before his abduction by Mossad agents, scorned the notion that there was anything evil about his role in the Holocaust. Far from repenting the deaths of six million Jews, he expressed regret that so many had survived the genocide. Just as it was the responsibility of a doctor to combat viruses, or a pest-control agent to eliminate vermin, so was it the responsibility of a good Nazi to defend the fellow members of his race from its most noxious and pestilential foes. To steel oneself for one’s duty, to suppress enfeebling notions of humanity, to keep always before one’s mind loyalty to blood: this, quite simply, was the right thing to do. What, then, was there for Eichmann to repent? “I cannot pretend,” he declared, “that a Saul has become a Paul.”
