ADOLF EICHMANN, AS everyone knows, was the man responsible, literally, for shipping millions of European Jews to their deaths in the extermination camps in Poland during the Second World War. He has become, as David Cesarani reminds us in this perceptive and intelligent new account of Eichmann’s life, a familiar image in the grim iconography of genocide.

This image owes a great deal to the dramatic way in which he was finally caught by an Israeli snatch squad in Argentina, taken to Israel and put on trial in 1960 in front of a world which knew much less about the Holocaust than it does now. The Eichmann trial finally brought home to world opinion just how extraordinary, even incomprehensible were the crimes committed by the Third Reich’s masters. If Eichmann had never been caught he would now be another scarcely remembered name, like his boss, the Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller, who disappeared in 1945 and now enjoys an unmerited oblivion.

At the end of the war Eichmann hardly featured on the Allies’ ‘most wanted’ list; his role in the genocide, as director of the Gestapo’s Jewish office, was only gradually revealed. In any other system he would have been a middle-ranking civil servant doing his job, historically insignificant. But because his job was cataloguing, rounding up and deporting millions of people to a certain death he has generated a large historical literature and the reputation of having been an inadequate, embittered young man whose warped personality was attracted to life in the SS and the prospect of revenge on the Jews. Eichmann was simultaneously a petty bureaucrat and a colossal criminal, but it is the second for which history has remembered him.

The great merit of Cesarani’s book is his willingness to set aside the mythology that surrounds Eichmann the satanic criminal and to give us Eichmann the petty bureaucrat, whose job happened to be genocidal. This is an interpretation that can be overplayed, and at times Cesarani’s revisionism becomes too strident; the images of Eichmann as mindless, murderous robot or satanic mastermind are popular impressions which historians have not taken seriously for a long time. Recent scholarship in Germany on Eichmann and the bureaucracy of racism has given us a much more balanced account of the apparatus and its incumbents. The terrible truth which all this has shown is that Eichmann was neither automaton nor psychopath, but a normal individual with ambitions, interests and feelings little different 6om those of thousands of his fellow countrymen who climbed on the bandwagon of Hitler’s Reich.

Cesarani begins by scraping away the many smaller myths that surround Eichmann’s origins and early enthusiasm for National Socialism. He was not a lonely teenager alienated by a dysfunctional stepfamily but an apparently normal though rather lazy schoolboy, brought up in a loving and pious household. He did not resent his father’s move from Germany to Austria, but liked his adopted country. He was not a drifter in the 1920s, unemployed and resentful, but a successful salesman and commercial traveller for a petrol company who managed to stay employed through much of the slump that overtook Europe after 1929. Far from showing him as someone who gravitated towards the National Socialists as a loser and outsider, Cesarani paints a picture of a more gregarious and successful individual who joined the party because it brought status. Above all he was not, on the evidence, a convinced anti-Semite embittered by some early encounter with Jews at school or in business; he learned to hate the Jews once he had become a National Socialist and swallowed its package of prejudices.

After that Eichmann’s star rose rapidly. He joined the SS security service, assuming responsibility for intelligence on the German-Jewish population, running the Jewish emigration office in Vienna following the German occupation of Austria in 1938, and ending up in charge of the Jewish desk in the Gestapo, where from 1942 he organised the transport of European Jews for which he became notorious. There is little hint of abnormality. His personnel file records that he was ‘reliable and conscientious’, a good party comrade. The picture of the unobtrusive middle-aged man in the dock during his trial in Jerusalem shows no hint of a disordered mind.

What then made Eichmann what Cesarani calls a génocidaire? The answer is unclear. Cesarani rejects the idea that he had a particular psychological predisposition to commit awful crimes; he rejects too the idea that Eichmann just obeyed orders, even when those orders were to enable genocide, though he does show the extent to which Eichrnann was obsessed with loyalty to the National Socialist cause. He focuses instead on two explanations. First, that Eichmann was an ambitious careerist who rose rapidly to high office, enjoyed the perquisites of power and competed against others to cling on to that authority; this would confirm the now widely held view that genocide was a product of ‘cumulative radcalisation’ by racist bureaucrats who pushed policy to extremes to serve their own political interests. Second, Eichmann was entirely seduced by the idea that the Jew was the ultimate enemy of the German people, allowing no moral qualms to inhibit his own contribution to the war against world Jewry. This is the more convincing of the two approaches, because, as in other genocides, the compelling desire to annihilate the chosen victims rests on an (often temporary) conviction that they represent real ‘enemies’ who will get you if you do not get them first. The gtnocidaire may be a normal individual with rational career ambitions, but he is consumed by irrational impulses which enjoy an exceptional psychological power and moral certitude while genocide is in progress.

Cesarani is at pains to point out that this approach does not make all of us potential killers, but his emphasis on just how ordinary Eichmann was comes close to suggesting as much. He avoids this by arguing that Eichmann had to learn to become a perpetrator in a particular political and ideological milieu and willingly chose to become one when German anti-Semitism turned to mass murder. This is a rather circular argument, but without the opportunity to cross-examine Eichmann it is a difficult circle to break. David Cesarani comes closer than anyone to solving the puzzle of what made Eichmann do what he did, but the awful gulf between ordinary killer and incomprehensible crime remains.