Professor offers own take on Nazi's 'significance'

Charlie Brennan, Rocky Mountain News

Published June 4, 2005 at midnight

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Many reacted with revulsion to Ward Churchill's comparison of 9/11's dead to Adolf Eichmann - knowing little more than that Eichmann was a Nazi.

In fact, Karl Adolf Eichmann was head of the Department for Jewish Affairs in Adolf Hitler's Gestapo from 1941 to 1945, serving as chief of operations for the deportation of 3 million Jews to extermination camps.

Eichmann escaped from a U.S. prisoner of war camp, making it to Argentina, where he lived until his recapture by Israeli Mossad agents in 1960. He stood trial in 1961 in Jerusalem for war crimes, was sentenced to death, and was executed in Ramleh Prison on May 31, 1962.

In a footnote to a subsequent version of the essay published in his 2003 book On the Justice of Roosting Chickens, Churchill offered his own portrait of Eichmann.

"Let it be observed, then, that he was a mere midlevel officer in the SS, by all accounts a good husband and devoted father, apparently quite mild-mannered, and never accused of personally having murdered anyone at all. His crime was to have sat at several steps remove from the holocaustal blood and gore, behind a desk, in the sterility of an office building, organizing the logistics - train and 'cargo' schedules, mainly - without which the 'industrial killing' aspect of the Nazi Judeocide could not have occurred."

Stephen Feinstein, director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota, said Churchill is recounting a phenomenon called "desk-murderers," which he called "one of the strongest motifs that comes out of Holocaust study."

Eichmann testified at his trial that "orders were orders," Feinstein said.

brennanc@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-892-2742

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