The undeniable merit of Stangneth's clear-eyed scholarship is that she spells out the genesis and "logic" of Holocaust denial in all its macabre absurdity. The neo-Nazi Argentine magazine Der Weg chose to shift the blame onto the Gestapo and its envy of the SS. Its purpose was to "damage Germany's status in the world which Adolf Hitler had done so much to advance". Heinrich Müller who was "not a National Socialist at all, organised the extermination in the east", while Gestapo leaders "unthinkingly drove people into concentration camps . . . in order finally to strike down a king — Adolf Hitler." The latter never ordered a "programme of murdering Jews. Since the Führer's HQ was a "concentration cloister", he never got the news that Zionists were busy arranging the deaths of "assimilators" in order to get their own state. "This made the extermination of the Jews look like an internal Jewish matter, against which the poor Führer in his bunker could do nothing."

In the light of this revision of the truth, Eichmann's persistence in saying that he had been fulfilling orders issued directly by Hitler lost him his neo-Nazi friends. After his capture, it suited them to disclaim any but casual connection with him during his time in Buenos Aires. His execution was openly deplored only by Josef Mengele, the infamous concentration camp doctor who was clever enough to stay safely in remote places. A few years ago, driving across the arid plain on the Paraguay-Argentina border, we were shown the high-hedged "Hotel Tyrol" where he and fellow-refugees used to holiday. Mengele died only in 1979, when he drowned while swimming in the ocean.

Eichmann's early and abiding enthusiasm for Nazism is here proved beyond question. He did not, as Himmler did, believe in witches and he was quick to see that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (still gospel in some Arab countries) were a fake, but he bought the whole völkische farrago: "Only thinking based on ethnicity offers a chance of final victory in the battle of all living things . . ." Unlike his confederates, such as Kurt Becher, he was an unwavering believer, without the humanity to be venal. "Thank God I did not become a swine," Eichmann said. Because others did "is why there are still a whole lot of Jews enjoying life today who ought to have been gassed".

Eichmann's notion of duty was based on the axiom of a war to the death between the Jews and the Germans as the champions of unalloyed Aryan blood. While maintaining that he never killed anyone, he would have gassed Jews if ordered: ". . . no point peeing against the wind". There was "no difference between the annihilation of enemy powers (by whatever means) when a total war has been declared" — not by Adolf Hitler, of course, but by Chaim Weizmann, president of the World Jewish Congress.