Exemplars of the Potential for Evil
HANSER, RICHARD
Exemplars of the Potential for Evil Minister of Death. By Quentin Reynolds, Ephraim Katz and Zwy Aldouby. Viking. 246 pp. $5.00. Dr. Goebbels. By Roger Manville and Heinrich Fraenkel. Simon...
...One might hope to obtain a clearer understanding of it in a book about Joseph Goebbels, who was so largely responsible for creating that atmosphere and generating the climate...
...Statements about Goebbels by those who knew him are accepted uncritically, and such valuable material about him as the book does include is simply borrowed from other readily available sources, such as the Goebbels diaries...
...The outlines of Eichmann's defense are forecast by quoting from memoirs which he is reported to have written: "I carried out with a clean conscience and faithful heart the duty imposed on me...
...None of the three authors seems aware of Goering's letter of July 31, 1941 in which the expression ("Endlosung") appeared, or of its repeated use in the minutes of the January 1942 conference at Wannsee, where the program of mass extermination was launched...
...Further books, articles and dramas are in preparation and...
...Thus they wallow for pages in his shoddy little affair with the Czech actress, Lida Baarova, while telling us virtually nothing about such characteristic feats of propaganda mastery as his handling of the Stalingrad disaster and the July 20 bomb plot...
...The authors, neither of whom appears to have any particular qualification in the field, treat their subject as if he were a Sunday-supplement celebrity, rather than the phenomenon of contemporary history that he was...
...The speed with which the book was produced, and perhaps the three-man method of its composition, have resulted in some superficialities and inaccuracies...
...7.50...
...all in all, Eichmann is being exploited as a "hot" publishing property, his story a kind of super-Hitchcock thriller embellished not merely by one paltry corpse but six million of them...
...This frankly commercial exploitation of the story is not, however, all to the bad...
...Everything we learn about Eich-mann from this book indicates that as a personality he is quite drab and ordinary, a mediocre little man who in other circumstances might have lived out his life unnoticed or, at worst, wound up in an asylum as a mild psychotic of some sort...
...First published in 1952, it now appears again in a new and revised edition, the emendations dealing mainly with Hitler's ancestry and boyhood...
...Reynolds, a seasoned and versatile journalist, has done an expert's job of weaving the material into a clear and well-paced narrative...
...306 pp...
...776 pp...
...All earlier descriptions of Hitler's family and first years will have to be more or less corrected on the basis of his findings...
...4.50...
...For those who wish to understand the times which could produce an Eichmann and a Goebbels, and to learn about the astonishing personality without whom neither would have been possible, no better biographical study exists in English than Alan Bullock's Hitler...
...Hitler: A Study in Tyranny...
...As the Hitler era fades more and more into the past, as a new generation grows up for whom the Nazi atrocities take on the dimness of ancient history, there is an increasing tendency to doubt that the horrors many of us lived through happened at all...
...To take only one example, the origin of the phrase "final solution" is wrongly given...
...New material has come to light on these matters since the first edition appeared, notably August Kubizek's The Young Hitler I Knew and Franz Jetzinger's Hitler's Youth, which has not been published in this country...
...Goebbels is hardly worth mentioning at all, except as another example of the inferior quality of so much of the writing offered the American public on the Nazi era...
...It was written by Quentin Reynolds from research provided by two Israeli journalists, Ephraim Katz and Zwy Aldouby...
...This was the first full-length biography of Adolph Hitler in any language and it remains one of the best...
...Simon and Schuster...
...The social atmosphere, the moral climate, in which a man like Eich-mann could not only operate but actually believe that he was doing his duty by slaughtering millions of his fellow creatures is, of course, a major factor in his story, but it is not adequately dealt with in Minister of Death...
...Reviewed by Richard Hanser Co-author of the award-winning documentary of Hitler, "The Twisted Cross" MINISTER OF DEATH has the distinction of being the first hard-cover version of the Eichmann story to reach the stands, but it was preceded by at least three paperbacks, several television dramas and any number of magazine articles...
...Harper...
...This version of the career of the Reich Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda unfortunately adds little to what was already known about him except some insignificant details about his love-life, surely the least interesting phase of his remarkable story...
...People who met him outside his sphere of mass extermination speak of him as "always smiling and good-natured," and even those who worked with him at his grisly trade regarded him more as a niggling bureaucrat than a monster...
...The book concludes with an illuminating discussion of the legal aspects of Eichmann's abduction from Argentina and his forthcoming trial in Israel...
...But Dr...
...Many who begin to read this book only for thrills may pause to ponder...
...What it lacks in depth and scope it perhaps compensates for in sheer readability, which should assure it the audience it deserves...
...Adolf Eichmann has unwittingly performed the valuable service of acting as a jolting reminder to the world...
...Jetzinger, librarian of the Provincial Archives at Linz, made a painstaking search for every possible scrap of evidence on Hitler's clouded parentage and boyhood, and has uncovered fascinating information on both...
...One of the most admirable of these is Alan Bullock's Hitler: A Study in Tyranny...
...By Alan Bullock...
...What is most frightening, as this book once again makes clear, is that the Eichmanns, the Hoesses and the Himmlers stand before us as enduring warnings of the bottomless potential for evil in modern man...
...Short as it is, the book is studded with elementary errors and marred by pointless repetition...
...Any thrown-together, off-the-cuff piece of journalism seems to pass editorial muster and is promptly clapped between covers, as long as some headline name can be emblazoned on the title page and some hint of scandal worked into the blurb...
...Goebbels, written by two British journalists and published some months ago, is distinctly disappointing...
...But monster he was, and nobody has yet been able to explain satisfactorily how a smiling, amiable mediocrity could come to commit the enormities he is undoubtedly guilty of...
...There are, fortunately, more solid and lasting works on the period...
Vol. 43 • November 1960 • No. 45
