Hannah Arendt’s fitfully brilliant Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Even though it kept self up till the wee hours (4 a.m.) for the second night in a row (this is getting serious, dear blog reader, but self quite helpless to disrupt the process — when self is into a book, she simply has to plow on, like a galloping rhinoceros). But, at least, she did manage to get back to sleep after feeding the dogs (6:30 a.m.) and, when next she opened her eyes, bright sunlight was streaming in from all the windows.
Here’s the latest (appalling) quote, from pp. 109- 110:
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It has frequently been pointed out that the gassing of the mentally sick had to be stopped in Germany because of protests from the population and from a few courageous dignitaries of the churches, whereas no such protests were voiced when the program switched to the gassing of Jews, though some of the killing centers were located on what was then German territory and were surrounded by German populations.
And, about this whole gassing thing? It was also apparently considered a viable option for good Germans in the unlikely event of a German defeat:
In “the summer of 1944,” a female “leader” came to Bavaria “to give the peasants a pep talk.” She “faced frankly the prospect of defeat, about which no good German needed to worry because the Fuhrer in his great goodness had prepared for the whole German people a mild death through gassing in case the war should have an unhappy end.” (p. 110)
And, truly, the book’s subtitle is so apt, for who knew that the hated Adolf Eichmann had been, in a former life, a vacuum cleaner salesman, and that Joachim von Ribbentrop, head of Hitler’s Foreign Office, had been “a former champagne salesman”??? (p. 112)
Stay tuned, dear blog readers, stay tuned.
