Kershaw commended Cesarani's "expert guidance through the web of lies, deceit, and contradictions built into Eichmann's various tendentious accounts of his life and career. He hammers home the message that, far from being merely an industrious underling dispassionately implementing orders, Eichmann was a convinced anti-Semitic ideologue in a key position where he himself could initiate action and make things happen." He described Cesarani's "revision of Arendt's interpretation" of Eichmann as "an unideological bureaucrat diligently doing his job, the archetypal middle-manager on the lookout for career advancement, but otherwise without motive – 'the classic desk-killer who mechanically and thoughtlessly arranged for millions to die as the culmination of a routinised and sanitised process or destruction'" as "surely correct".