Adolf Eichmann

Until the trial began in Jerusalem in 1961, Adolf Eichmann was a stranger to public opinion. And those who were familiar with his name preferred to forget it. It was understandable: the survival of a key witness and actor in the extermination of the Jews during World War II went against the strategy of overcoming the past through the denial and concealment of it. But when the figure of Eichmann comes to light, the history of Nazism changes. The judicial process opens up new avenues of investigation. His role in the final solution is discovered, the way in which he escaped to Argentina in the early 1950s and the network of complicities that allowed him to live in relative tranquility there for almost a decade. However, until the appearance of this extraordinary book by Bettina Stangneth it was thought that Adolf Eichmann had abandoned any militancy in favor of National Socialism, that he had decided to start another life. It was exactly the opposite: he maintained the illusion of returning to the center of politics. To do this, he gathered a group of followers and fought to activate a resistance network from Latin America. He wrote an open letter to the then German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and, together with his collaborators, falsified evidence to rewrite the Nazi horror and hide the reality of the Holocaust. Adolf Eichmann. Story of a Mass Murderer is a monumental and dazzling investigation. It is not just a biography; it is the historical, social and political reconstruction of those places that allowed a ruthless war criminal to live in hiding, working in the shadows, under an apparently bland existence. Thanks to previously unknown documents and an exhaustive analysis of everything about the character and his context, Bettina Stangneth has written a classic, and also the definitive work on Eichmann.