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Rating: 
Summary: Desktop murderers
Review: It is an excellent exploration on the actions, the dynamics and the moral choices of desktop murderers. The book aims to criticize a concept posited by Hannah Arendt, the banality of evil.It is impressive in the quality of the documents and testimony chosen to expose the inner working of the bureaucrats. The author selects passages from the trial of Adolf Eichmann and other archives sources, such as OSSOBI (Moscow)or ZSL(Germany). Lozowick extracts light out of gloomy documents to demonstrate that these bureaucrats were uncommon people, fiercely anti-semitic, cunningly deceptive and consciously able in to distinguish right from wrong. These bureaucrats are described as "a group of people completely aware of what they were doing, people with high ideological motivation, people of initiative and dexterity who contributed far beyond what was necessary." The book, particularly Chapter 2, is an excellent guide on the treatment and evaluation of documents, of source content, author, date and language. A footnote on p.273 is an example the selectivity of memory of testimonials, that is, on how witness choose what to remember and what to forget.
Attention is given to bureacrating language, terminology and euphemisms such as "constant tension", "severity", "disposal", "transport", "evacuation", "change of address", "resettlement", "special treatment". That attention to language strengthens the author's argument since it implies that bureaucrats made a conscious decision on what should be made publc and how.
It is a fine book, which has a concise description of the new historiographical current from Germany, and a good bibliography.
Rating:
Summary: A Refutation of Arendt
Review: This book establishes that Eichmann and his co-conspirators really believed Jews to be below human and planned with self-conscious ideological murderousness the forced extinction of Judaism from the planet... The historical scholarship is praiseworthy, but where Lozowick really excells is in his sensitive and compelling mastery of human ethics. An near-essentiality in an age of moral breakdown.
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