Lecture
Leon Duval
Tuesday 26.05.2026
Leon Duval
Who Was the Real Adolf Eichmann?
Tuesday 26.05.2026
How to watch
This lecture starts on 26 May at 5:00pm (UK).
Summary
Adolf Eichmann (1906–62) was an accomplished role player; one of his greatest performances was in the Jerusalem court where he was on trial for his life. Here he portrayed himself as an insignificant little cog following orders given by superiors. Three years before, in Argentina, Eichmann held court in the salon of a Dutch Nazi sympathiser Willem Sassen. Surrounded by his peers, this Eichmann spoke into a tape recorder revealing an unrepentant Nazi, a narcissist devoid of empathy who believed “World Jewry” under its führer Chaim Weizmann had declared war on Germany. In this session we discuss why the recording sessions were organised, and by referring to the transcripts investigate what Eichmann had to say about the Final Solution and his part in it. His words force us to consider an alternative paradigm for measuring how evil is represented, one that does not coincide with the word “banal” favoured by Hannah Arendt.
Leon Duval
Leon Duval was born in Johannesburg but moved to Australia with his wife and daughters in 1975. The Victorian culture confronted in the days before Australia became ethnically diverse prompted them to shorten their surname to Duval. An accountant by profession, Leon discovered that many of the clients he looked after were Holocaust survivors which prompted him to search for a greater understanding of his Jewish inheritance and the underlying causes driving antisemitism. After retiring from professional life and moving to Jerusalem, Leon undertook an extensive course to train as a guide for the Yad Vashem history museum and is now a committed amateur historian spending many hours researching the history of the Jews in Europe and that of his own family’s Lithuanian roots. His occasional blog appears on the Times of Israel platform and he recently published a book telling the story of a Kindertransport survivor.