What did Eichmann mean when he said in 1952, "I was an idealist"?

Exactly four weeks ago the magazine Der Spiegel wrote that Adolph Eichmann was recorded at his hide-out in Argentina in 1952 as saying: "I would not have accepted orders just so. If I had, I would have been a fool. Rather, I was part of the thinking process. I was an idealist". This very frank statement, which contradicts the line which the defense took in the Eichmann trial in 1961, is not only something new, but can also create confusion, nor is it consistent with accepted theories in Holocaust research, which are based on the assumption that the annihilation of the Jews was the distorted climax of extreme anti-Semitism. Under this assumption it is impossible to understand how burning hatred can be associated with "ideals" (especially as expressed in the only expression of remorse uttered by Eichmann in the 1952 recording, namely that he had "made the mistake of not having murdered all the Jews").

The book The Germans: Absent Nationality and the Holocaust, which was published by the Sussex Academic Publishing House more than a year before the publication in Der Spiegel, provides an accurate description of the ideological motivation behind the German killing machine, explains its compelling motives whose roots go back over centuries of German history, and in fact predicts the possibility of Nazi leaders expressing themselves in the way in which Eichmann did in the tape recording that remained hidden in the archive in Koblenz, Germany for almost sixty years.

The book is part of a study of six national collectives in Europe and constitutes a "Copernican" revolution in the study of the Holocaust, which is here for the first time treated not as an extreme event in Jewish history ("studying the victim"), but as an integral part of the Germans' history of absent nationality ("studying the criminal"), in light of which it also analyzes the Germans' behavior after the Holocaust and makes predictions concerning Germany's role in the European Union.