Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

by Hannah Arendt

In matters of elementary morality, Arendt warned, what had been thought of as decent instincts were no longer to be taken for granted.

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. That is the banality of evil.

Most people still assumed that murder was committed by monsters or demons.

the implication being that the coexistence of normality and bottomless cruelty explodes our ordinary conceptions and present the true enigma

Should the Judenräte have told the Jews the truth, when they knew it, about where they were being deported to? How many might have been able to save themselves somehow had they known the truth? Why were the Judenräte notables so disciplined and servile to authority? Some community leaders were well aware that the deportees were going directly to Auschwitz (and not to some resettlement area in the east as the Nazis claimed). Open rebellion was of course unthinkable under the circumstances. On the other hand, why didn’t the leaders of the Jewish councils refuse to accept the responsibilities assigned them by the Nazis? Insofar as they had moral authority, why didn’t they advise the Jews to run for their lives or try to go underground? If there had been no Jewish organizations at all and no Judenräte, Arendt suggested, the deportation machine could not have run as smoothly as it did.

beleaguered people have a tendency to hope against hope that somehow things will turn out better if they can only buy time.

Rolf Hochhuth for displacing guilt from the Nazis to the pope.

Hochhuth, of course, had done nothing of the sort.

Banality is the adopted disguise of a very powerful will to abolish conscience.

if you say to yourself, “Who am I to judge?” you are already lost.