Review of Eichmann (2007) by Stuart M — 28 Jan 2015

This film is a prime example of missing the point. Adolf Eichmann was responsible for organizing and running the Holocaust. He was a heartless bastrd and his subordinates had pretty well sold him up the river as soon as they got the chance. Everyone knew he was guilty as sin. Which makes the whole dramatic theme of the movie insane: that they needed to get him to admit to the murders or set him free. Eichmann admits from the start that he was in charge, but argues that he was just following orders, a defense already tried by dozens of deceased war criminals at the Nuremberg Trials. But apparently it's not enough to have just organized the largest genocide in human history. No, he has to have done it for evil reasons or he's a free man. Because apparently the crime of murdering millions of people is somehow less than the crime of being an anti-semite.

In trying to turn him into more of a comic book supervillain they miss the entire point of Eichmann. He WAS just following orders. He was a dull petty-minded bureaucrat who was content to leave the moral decisions to his superiors. It's one of the scariest things about him. Crazy raving Hitler is easy to understand. But having the man in charge of so much murder kill not through a bottomless well of malice but through sheer indifference⦠well that's a harder thing to come to terms with. But instead they need to make him malicious, because simplifying villainy is the easiest way to not have to come to terms with the evil in all of us. To say that the final revelation that, gosh, maybe he wasn't so fond of the Jews after all, is a major anticlimax is understating the case. It should never have been an issue.