To many people, one of the most surprising and troubling aspects of this trial was Eichmann’s commonplace appearance, bland affect, and extraordinary ordinariness. He appeared to be an average, unremarkable-looking man in a plain dark suit, balding, gray-complexioned, and wearing horn-rimmed glasses. Rather than a sadistic monster of unparalleled dimensions, an inhuman anomaly of nature, he seemed to be more of a colorless functionary, a bureaucrat, a man of average abilities. Political theorist and writer Hannah Arendt, who was covering the trial, was so struck by these features that she
...more
