Abstract
Adolf Eichmann was hanged shortly before midnight on 31 May 1962 and his ashes were scattered on the Mediterranean, outside the territorial waters of Israel. What were his thoughts as he took his last steps? Probably no more, or less, revealing than anything he said during his trial. Not that any confession or transfiguration on his part would have helped answer the question with which this book began: what is the relationship between antisemitism and the genocide of the Jews? The magnitude of the latter — its organization embracing a continent as against the former’s locus in the minds of individuals — precludes analysis of the sort we usually seek, such as would reveal clear lines of causation or responsibility and thereby distance us from a dreadful reality we can no more confront than look directly at the sun.
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Notes
As on the frontispiece of Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1989 ).
G. Kren and L. Rappaport, The Holocaust and the Crisis of Human Behavior ( New York: Holmes & Meier, 1980 ), 70.
Emil Fackenheim, ‘The Holocaust and Philosophy’, Independent Journal of Philosophy 5 /6 (1988), 63–9.
Daniel J. Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners (New York: Knopf, 1996), 593 f., n. 53.
Ian Kershaw, ‘The Persecution of the Jews and German Popular Opinion’, Leo Baeck Institute Year Book XXVI (1981), 280 f.
Christopher Simpson, The Splendid Blond Beast (New York: Grove Press, 1993), 57, 61, 64 f., 68.
Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View ( London: Tavistock, 1974 ).
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© 1998 Lionel B. Steiman
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Steiman, L.B. (1998). Epilogue. In: Paths to Genocide. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230371330_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230371330_10
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