Wannsee
I finished Eichmann in Jerusalem on Saturday. (I lost my original copy in L.A. last week, so I had to buy a new copy to finish the book.) The Holocaust in Eichmann in Jerusalem is a lot more subtle and complex than the Holocaust I had heard of before -- for example, take the "deportations" sections, with their discussions of various countries' responses to Nazi requests. You might have thought that, roughly speaking, other European countries, when asked by Nazi Germany, largely all rounded up their Jews right away and shipped them off to concentration camps (with the exception of Denmark, right?).
But the countries actually exhibited a bewildering variety of behaviors in response to the German demands. Some complied eagerly, some dragged their feet, some (not just Denmark) resisted, and one, Arendt says, was so zealous in killing Jews that the Nazis actually intervened to get them to tone it down a little. The factors that went into these decisions were incredibly many and directly affected who lived and who died.
This is just one of the complexities Arendt raises in her account of the Eichmann trial.
What I would like to do now is finish my essay about my visit to the House of the Wannsee Conference and post it together with my pictures of the same.
