Forty-five years ago today, Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi war criminal responsible for transporting hundreds of thousands of European Jews to their deaths, was hanged just outside Tel Aviv.  He had initially escaped justice by fleeing to Argentina after the war, but had been captured in 1960 by agents of the Mossad and brought to Israel for trial.

Hannah Arendt’s 1963 book on that trial, Eichmann in Jerusalem, was subtitled “A Report on the Banality of Evil” – and “the banality of evil” is now a part of our language and our understanding of human behavior, even among those who have never heard of Eichmann.

Eichmann in Jerusalem also provided one of the epigraphs for George Zebrowski’s 1984 short story “The Eichmann Variations”:

“And just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations — as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world — we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you.  This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang.”

In the alternate world of “The Eichmann Variations” (first published as the anchor story in Michael Bishop’s landmark anthology Light Years and Dark), Adolf Eichmann is captured in Argentina and smuggled to Israel just as he was in our world (albeit via submarine rather than airplane).  But here, instead of being tried and hanged himself, he is duplicated over and over again, year after year – and his doppelgangers are executed “Ten per hour, these years . . . it will be six million one day.”

“The Eichmann Variations” hit me like a ballpeen hammer to the forehead when I first read it.  It’s rare indeed that a story just over 3,000 words long is powerful enough to do that to me — and even rarer still that it’s powerful enough to hit me just as hard twenty-three years later.  It’s a tremendously disturbing story, and is supposed to be.

As far as I know, the text of “The Eichmann Variations” is not available online.  But it can be found in Light Years and Dark (Berkley, 1984), in Nebula Awards 20 (HBJ, 1985), and in Mr. Zebrowski’s story collection Swift Thoughts (Golden Gryphon, 2002).

It must be read.

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Another powerful story dealing with the same basic theme as “The Eichmann Variations” — and posing equally disturbing questions – is Terry Bisson’s “macs” (1999). 

It must be read, too.