Angelus Thomsen works at Auschwitz, he doesn’t want to be here—if you want to kill Berlin, kill his uncle, he’s just a cog-turner in the factory of Nazi bureaucracy; he’s just doing his job. Paul Doll works at Auschwitz, he doesn’t want to be here—he’s exhausted, the toiling, the stench—in fact, if the thousand-year Reich truly craves consolidation, he’s better off in the East trampling the Bolsheviks—but no, he’s here, he’s following orders; he’s just doing his job. Szmul works at Auschwitz, he doesn’t want to be here—work is a loose word, Arbeit macht frei, he’s a Geheimnisträger, “martaur”—keeper of secrets, witness bearer—he lives and his brothers die, he eats and his brothers die; he’s just doing his job.

From 14th May to 9th July of 1944, Adolf Eichmann sent four transports daily—each carrying 3000 Hungarian passengers—to Auschwitz. That’s 12,000 per day which made at least 437,000 Jews in that period alone. Eichmann signed the papers and made the calls, he did his job. The next gear was Rudolf Höss—from whom Aktion Höss would derive its name. The trains arrive and Höss would be there at the ramp to oversee the transfer of its passengers to the chambers mere meters away. Höss didn’t shoot them, stab them, he didn’t draw blood—he did his job. The SS manned the gas chambers, they were glorified footmen at best, hardly the conductors of genocide. They dropped Zyklon B through the vents and waited, they would not watch them die, they did not kill them, the gas did—they did their jobs. The Germans were not concerned with the corpses, that was the burden of the Sonderkommandos. They were prisoners too, lucky or unlucky enough to be allowed to live so that they could burn the bodies of their neighbors, friends, mothers, sisters, and sons. They had to do their jobs.

The Holocaust was not a slaughter, it was a fatal yet precise and efficient assembly line. Totalitarian evil thrives on order, on systems, on bureaucracy, on administration—it’s frigid and dispassionate. Unlike earlier Christian anti-semitism, which accused the Jews of the murder of Jesus, Nazi anti-semitism was justified by pseudo-scientific and racial means. Eugenics was born out of Darwinism, survival of the fittest and all. There are superior races just as there are superior species. It’s in the blood, it’s scientific, it’s factual, it’s emotionless.

The characters in Martin Amis’s 2014 novel are also entirely emotionless—towards their job at least. They have their motivations, needs, and wants, but all that precedes the backdrop of their work—of Auschwitz, of the Holocaust. The story is narrated by three characters. Thomsen who describes himself in his own words as “-obstruktiv Mitlaufere (obstructive followers). We went along. We went along with, doing all we could to drag our feet and scuff the carpets and scratch the paraquet, but we went along.” He’s a Nazi officer, not too low, not too high on the pecking order. His uncle is the real life Martin Bormann. Life isn’t bad—but he isn’t a fanatic, he’s just along for the ride. Paul Doll is the commandant of Auschwitz, based on the real Rudolf Höss. Doll insists repeatedly that he is “completely normal.” He’s a borderline alcoholic and everyone refers to him as “the Old Boozer”. Sometimes he’s even comedic relief. Szmul’s sections are short and the most poetic. He’s the Sonderkommandofuhrer, the special command leader, “-we are the saddest men in the Lager. We are in fact the saddest men in the history of the world. And of all these very sad men I am the saddest. Which is demonstrably, even measurably true. I am by some distance the earliest number, the lowest number—the oldest number.”

Like a fugue, their narratives are sometimes complementary, sometimes repeating, sometimes dividing—but Hannah Doll connects them all. Hannah is the wife of Paul Doll, viewed through the lens of three men, her character isn’t complete—but she isn’t flat, she’s elusive. Thomsen is infatuated with Hannah, Paul’s aware of this—when his last efforts to control his wife fail, he coerces Szmul to help him kill her.

That is the driving force, the plot behind The Zone of Interest. Not Operation Barbarossa, not the Judenfrage, not the war, not the camp. Banality is the lack of originality, novelty—it’s something that’s commonplace. For the men of Auschwitz, they smell the fetor in the morning, they feel the thrum of the train tracks at midday, they hear the hushed screams in the afternoon, they see the smoke at night. It’s the same everyday and it’s been the same for years. Nothing new, it’s commonplace—murder is commonplace, it’s trite, it’s ordinary, it’s banal. The Final Solution is implicit in this book, Amis sneaks in pieces of the full picture, it’s all we get—pieces, but each are delivered with such apathy, such banality that one could easily zone out and let the pieces fly past as if they described mere numbers on an accountant’s paper or graphs on a banker’s report. Szmul tells Doll the number of femurs, Doll asks if he still needs to divide by two; the final number is 107,000. Thomsen finds a young prisoner and gives him a Hershey’s bar, he’s inquiring on the whereabouts of the Jewish gardener after his sudden disappearance. “-291 men, were uneventfully shot between 17:10 and 17:45.”

After the war, Adolf Eichmann was captured by the United States before he made his escape to North Germany, then eventually to Argentina in 1950. He remained there until 1960 when Israeli forces apprehended him and brought him to Jerusalem for trial. His defense was standard, it’d come up multiple times over in Nuremberg—he was just following orders, he was doing his job. “My heart was light and joyful in my work, because the decisions were not mine.” Eichmann was found guilty on the 15th of December, 1961—and sentenced to death. As Arendt wrote, “Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there.”

To not think is wholly different from to not know. One can know yet still not think. Eichmann surely knew, stating in 1945 “I will leap into my grave laughing because the feeling that I have five million human beings on my conscience is for me a source of extraordinary satisfaction.” Eichmann knew the consequence of deportation—but he did not think of the consequence of deportation. Perhaps everyday he set his briefcase down and viscerally imagined the women and children, then consigned them to their deaths, perhaps he even derived joy from it—to be wicked for the sake of wickedness. But what is far more likely, given the scope and capacity of the Holocaust is that every man behaved as so because they did not think. What is more probable—a contingent of wicked men who derive joy from being wicked and lack in totality good of any kind are born in the same generation at just the right economic and political state of unrest and who all happened to be German? Or that perhaps in his mind, Eichmann consigned numbers to death and not people—and that perhaps for the governing bureaucracy, they are so detached from the actual murder that they don’t truly process it. After all, they’ll read about it but the bureaucracy doesn’t see the corpses, hear the screams, see the blood—the trees are still green and their beer will still taste the same.

All of this is not to say that banality is a justification of any kind, it doesn’t lessen their evil or dilute their actions. Totalitarian evil is merely an idea as to how evil can function on a mass scale. The readiness of the assignment of people to either possessing good, or lack of good—and such implying that certain people are just inherently evil so evil people perform evil because they enjoy it—is archaic and uninspired. That line of thought implies that evil is inevitable and that there will always be evil people—but so much evil is avoidable. The Holocaust was the product of evil people making evil decisions because of some specific reason—not because wicked people were there to enjoy their own wickedness and thus commit inevitable genocide en masse. Again, it must be stressed absolute evil—or inherent pure evil where the will to do evil solely derives from the state of lacking good, is not morally better or worse than totalitarian evil; the Nazis are in no way justified or vindicated.

Take anti-homeless architecture for an example. One can apply the idea of the banality of evil and say the detachment of bureaucracy from the people they’re affecting and overall lack of thinking is resulting in the shoddy decision. So from this we can discern the point of impact—detachment may be the cause of evil and thus by ameliorating this issue we can hope to lessen the evil created. This is a much more productive way of thinking than just concluding that lawmakers consciously want to torture homeless people.

Thomsen is evil because he does not think—he has disassociated, disconnected any action he cannot immediately reconcile to a different projection, so he doesn’t have to think. “In the Kat Zet, like every perpetrator, I felt doubled (this is me but it is also not me; there is a further me).” Doll is evil because he does not think—he cannot think. “Here at the KL, in the cremas, in the pits; they’re dead. But then so are we, we who obey…The questions I asked myself on the Reich Day of Mourning: they must never recur. I must shut down a certain zone in my mind.” If Doll starts thinking, he will not be able to continue doing.

Eichmann did not have to fire a gun or sharpen a blade, but he murdered millions of Jews with ink and paper. How many people can kill one million with a knife? How many people can kill one million if all they had to do was sign—if they believed that one million would do the same to them, if their tea doesn’t get any colder and the sky doesn’t grow any darker with each passing thousand—if they’ve been doing the same thing for the past month—what’s another 12,000? Such is the banality of evil.

The columns stay ashy and the crematorium is always burning. The Sonderkommandos are building another pyre because the buildings are full. The trains keep coming—the stench heaves farther day by day. Someone is planting flowers in their garden. The machine churns, nobody quite knows what it is that they’re doing—but they know exactly what’s going on. The machine churns, everybody has a job to do in the zone of interest.

1. Arendt H. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Penguin Books; 1963.
2. Longerich P. Holocaust : The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews. Oxford University Press; 2010. ‌3. Waysman D. The Mossad man behind Eichmann’s capture - interview. The Jerusalem Post | JPost.com. December 22, 2021. Accessed February 18, 2024. https://www.jpost.com/j-spot/article-689497.
3. Author: Martin Amis. The Zone of Interest. Vintage Books; 2015.
4. Eichmann, Revisited. The Jerusalem Post | JPost.com. Published April 20, 2011. Accessed February 18, 2024. https://www.jpost.com/Jerusalem-Report/Jewish-World/Eichmann-Revisited
5. Plotinus, The Perfect Library. Plotinos Complete Works. CreateSpace; 2015. ‌7. Eugenics and antisemitism – The Holocaust Explained: Designed for schools. The Holocaust Explained.org. Accessed February 18, 2024. https://www.theholocaustexplained.org/how-and-why/why/eugenics-and-antisemitism/
6. Chare N, Williams D. Testimonies of Resistance. Berghahn Books; 2019.