Arendt's best-seller established the abiding image of Eichmann as a mundane family man, skulking under the pseudonym Ricardo Klement in Juan Perón's Argentina, until abducted by Mossad and crated out of the country. For the first time, we are now given a wealth of documented detail about Eichmann's central, undisguised role in the wide circle of ex- and neo-Nazis in Buenos Aires in the 1950s, where he was happy to sign photographs for attendant groupies as "Adolf Eichmann — SS Obersturmbannfuhrer (retired)". He took pronounced pride in the remark by the Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller that, if there had been fifty Eichmanns, Germany would have won the war. 

In their impatient, impenitent exile, Eichmann and his unreformed chums continued to believe that Hitler might yet be vindicated. The Cold War might yet lead to a Fourth Reich to replace the Weimar-style quisling-democracy presided over by Konrad Adenauer. In 1959, the latter's wincing agreement to pay reparations to Israel led to a recrudescence of at least 470 anti-Semitic episodes in Germany itself. This fostered the long-running story of Jewish duplicity in fabricating the supposed "myth" of six million deaths in order to license, and finance, the establishment of the Zionist state. Hence Holocaust-denial became cardinal in procuring respectability for those for whom the Jews were, and had to remain, the root of all evil. 

Abundant evidence of Eichmann's centrality in the Holocaust lies in the long interviews with him recorded by Willem Sassen, a Dutch Waffen-SS volunteer and, post-war, a right-wing journalist alert to any money-making opportunity. Their cosy causeries in BA were conducted in a party atmosphere. Only the "white-gloved" Ludolf von Alvensleben, once Himmler's adjutant, showed signs of second thoughts when he claimed to be "against taking defenceless people, even if it's my greatest enemy . . . and simply hounding them into a gas oven." Eichmann's fidelity to the Nazi myth, in which "the Jews" had declared war on Germany and deserved no mercy, was unwavering. He was never persuaded to vary the figure of six million dead, even when it began to embarrass those whose recourse was to claim that "the Jews" had inflated the figure (from a mere 365,000) in order to make money.  Eichmann proved "too proud of having implemented the murder project to deny it".

His affectations of insignificance in Jerusalem were seemingly backed by the fact that his name was scarcely mentioned at the 1946 trial of Nazi bigshots at Nuremberg. The extermination of the Jews was not a major item on the charge sheet. In the limited time devoted to it, however, Eichmann was repeatedly cited. Having walked out of an allied prison camp, he had good reason to hide in rural north Germany and, later, no shortage of friends to help him on the way to Argentina. In Rome, the Austrian Bishop Alois Hudal made it his business, and his pleasure it seems, to protect "persecuted and tortured persons". In 1960, after Eichmann's transport to Israel, Vatican diplomats encouraged UN members to press for his return to Argentina. Rome dreaded the revelation of the clergy's role in saving him and many others from justice.