How did Eichmann contrive to entertain the macabre confusion of vanities, loyalties and callousness now revealed in the thousands of pages of transcripts of Sassen's interviews with him and of his own writings when awaiting execution? He lived at the central European intersection of  philosophy, religion, ideology and history. In all these categories and their recipes for salvation, "the Jews" were almost invariably an indigestible, if not poisonous, element. As Bettina Stangneth has the steady nerve to remind us, in 1933 Martin Heidegger called for ". . . ethnic science . . . The mental world of a people [lay in] the power of preserving the strength that lies in its blood and soil . . . the power that excites the deepest feeling and shakes the furthest reaches of existence."  How can a man capable of such verbiage have beguiled and enthused so many post-war pundits, from Jean-Paul Sartre to George Steiner?

As for Hannah Arendt, might it be that she dumped on Eichmann much of the scorn which she preferred not to unload on her quondam lover, the Nazi-loving professor, to whom she could not resist making a pilgrimage after that Jerusalem assignment? In the condemned cell, Eichmann asked his brother to seek the ex-seminarist Heidegger's opinion about the last rites: "Not that I would presume to liken myself to this great thinker in anything, but it would be important to me with regard to my relationship with Christianity." It seems that Heidegger didn't reply. Perhaps he and his wife were too busy trying to get Arendt to be their idea of a good Jew in negotiating the sale of his notebooks in the US.