Main Review: Not just following orders

The time for the consumption of yet another Scandinavian thriller sensation will soon be upon us.

However, in the light of the recent 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, and a BBC film, The Eichmann Show, detailing the story of the television crew that broadcast Adolf Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem in 1963, here's a book that changes our understanding of a man made famous by Hanna Arendt as the epitome of "the banality of evil".

Bettina Stangneth's meticulously researched account draws on previously unavailable documents to turn on its head the accepted idea of Eichmann as "just a small cog in Adolf Hitler's extermination machine", a bureaucrat who followed orders .

As Stangneth acknowledges, all books on Eichmann inevitably enter into a dialogue with Arendt's 1963 account of his trial Eichmann in Jerusalem: The Banality of Evil. As head of the SS's department for Jewish affairs, Eichmann sent hundreds of thousands of Jews to their death in concentration camps, but Arendt maintained that he was not a psychopath or even a devoted anti-Semite. She bought into what Stangneth shows to be the greatest performance of his life - the one he gave during his trial.

By examining in particular Eichmann's life in hiding in Argentina, where he was captured in 1960, Stangneth shows that he was anything but a retiring figure who said nothing of his previous life and spent his time breeding rabbits and playing his violin to his children.

Eichmann had a pathological need for recognition that propelled him through the ranks of the Nazi party and continued during his decade in hiding in Argentina. There he signed photos "Adolf Eichmann - SS Obersturmbannführer (retired)," hung out with other Nazis discussing the Final Solution and granted a series of interviews to a former Dutch Nazi journalist, Willem Sassen. In one of these interviews Eichmann told Sassen he was sorry the Nazis had not killed more Jews.

Stangneth's book shows a new, horrific and three-dimensional Eichmann. He might have appeared banal but he was clearly evil, committed his crimes with full knowledge of their consequences and was guided by an all-consuming desire for recognition.

• Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer by Bettina Stangneth, Bodley Head, R350