This book presents you with the background profiles of those mass exterminators of National Socialism who wound up in court. It pictures their ‘route to crime’ and explains why their court room profiles have always remained so controversial in the eyes of post-war observers and commentators. Both inside and outside academia, this controversy continuous to flare up every now and then. It invariably focusses on Hannah Arendt’s famous thesis about the personality of Adolf Eichmann, Hitler’s manager of mass destruction. We will take a closer look at the arguments involved in this ‘debate’ on the Banality of Evil and see how Arendt’s interpretation of Eichmann relates to the perspectives of the post-war courts who tried other exterminators of Hitler’s empire.
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Dick W. de Mildt. The Palmstroem Syndrome
Dick de Mildt. The Palmström Syndrome. Mass Murder and Motivation. A Study of Reluctance
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Dedicated to the memory of Lothar Kreyssig
M.S. Arnoni
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Such considerations may well have played a part in Von dem Bach’s statement before the IMT, and, as we shall see, they initially determined the defense of some of his former SS colleagues.20 But there can be no doubt that they are not the intention of the advocates of the patho-ideological interpretation of the perpetrators’ conduct. And yet, they form its logical outcome. Thus we arrive at the bizarre situation in which the very same arguments applied by the Nuremberg defense counsel to exonerate their clients were subsequently adopted by their ‘historical prosecutors’ to emphasize the exact opposite.
