If I have described these meetings with Eichmann at such length, it’s not because I remember them better than the others: but this little Obersturmbannführer, in the meantime, has become a kind of celebrity, and I thought that my memories, shedding light on his character, might interest the public. A lot of stupid things have been written about him: he was certainly not the enemy of mankind described at Nuremberg (since he wasn’t there, it was easy to blame everything on him, especially since the judges didn’t understand much about how our services functioned); nor was he an incarnation of banal evil, a soulless, faceless robot, as some sought to present him after his trial. He was a very talented bureaucrat, extremely competent at his functions, with a certain stature and a considerable sense of personal initiative, but solely within the framework of clearly circumscribed tasks: in a position of responsibility, where he would have had to make decisions, in the place of his Amtschef Müller, for example, he would have been lost; but as a middle manager, he would have been the pride of any European firm. I never perceived that he nourished a particular hatred of the Jews: he had simply built his career on them, they had become not just his specialty but, in a way, his stock in trade; later on, when they tried to take it away from him, he defended it jealously, which is understandable. But he could just as easily have done something else, and when he told his judges that he thought the extermination of the Jews was a mistake, we can believe him; many people, in the RSHA and especially in the SD, thought similarly—I’ve already shown this—but once the decision was made, it had to be seen through to the end, he was very aware of that; what’s more, his career depended on it. Of course he wasn’t the kind of person I liked to see frequently, his ability to think on his own was extremely limited, and when I returned to my place, that night, I wondered why I had been so expansive, why I had fallen so easily into that familial, sentimental atmosphere that is usually so repugnant to me. Maybe I too had some need to feel I belonged to something. His interest was clear; I was a potential ally in a higher sphere to which he would normally have had no access. But despite all his friendliness I knew that for him I remained an outsider to his department, and thus a potential threat to his domain. And I sensed that he would cunningly and stubbornly confront any obstacle to what he regarded as his objective, that he wasn’t a man to let himself be easily checked. I understood his apprehensions, faced with the danger posed by concentrations of Jews: but for me this danger, if needed, could be minimized, one simply had to be aware of it and take the necessary measures. For the moment, I kept an open mind, I hadn’t reached any conclusions, I reserved my judgment till my analysis was complete.
