Thoughts about Himmler and Eichmann

I wrote about teaching about the Holocaust in my previous blog. Today I read an article in Tablet about the newly discovered papers of Himmler and interviews with Eichmann. Should I even take an interest in these? Both of these men, to me sitting on the other side of the cultural divide, were embodiments of evil. I know a good deal about both. Do I need to waste my time learning more about them? The day has only 24 hours. Yet you could not find a better confirmation of the Nazi denial of humanitarian values that my last blog discussed then these two. Himmler talks of the 'moral right, an obligation, to take the people who want to kill us, and to kill them.' But really he is not talking about people who want to kill him personally, or kill his soldiers, or kill citizens of his country. He is talking of phantom killers, the emaciated, helpless victims of his persecution, whom he sees as such threat that refined, educated moral person that he is, he still feels morally obliged to murder them. They are different. They are a danger to what he believes, that 'order creates the nation, the culture, and order creates the state'. Not that his victims were disorderly. He just didn't consider them to be part of the orderly fabric of his nation. He thinks of himself and his SS officers who carried out the genocide of the Jews as fundamentally upstanding people. 'Most of you will know' he said in his speech to his troops in Posen in 1943, 'what it means when a hundred corpses lie side by side,  whether there are five hundred or one thousand, and endure that, and apart from a few exceptions, remain decent.' This makes them tough, even if their achievements are not glorified in history. What sort of strange mentality, what warped values, drives a man like that?  Yet Eichmann, living in Argentina, met regularly with a group of Nazis and Nazi sympathizers, and talked about  how Nazism, suitably cleansed of tainted leaders, could become a revitalised political force. They were true believers, but perhaps even in their wildest dreams they could not imagine the resurgence of anti-semitism and Nazi ideology in Europe some fifty years after Eichmann's capture. Or perhaps they could, as Gudrun Himmler, Heinrich Himmler's daughter, now 85 years old, for whom her father is still a hero, probably still does.