Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

by Hannah Arendt

The Palestinians bore no responsibility for the collapse of civilization in Europe but ended up being punished for it.

Arendt subscribed to no isms and mistrusted sweeping theories.

Evil, as she saw it, need not be committed only by demonic monsters but—with disastrous effect—by morons and imbeciles as well, especially if, as we see in our own day, their deeds are sanctioned by religious authority.

Thirty or forty years ago the mixture of social analysis, journalism, philosophical reflections, psychology, literary allusion, and anecdote found in the best of her work exasperated and annoyed critics. Today, it fascinates and appeals.

She ought to have known better. Hitler would not have cut a better figure under the circumstances. Out of power, most tyrants and serial murderers seem pathetic or ordinary, harmless, or even pitiful, as Saddam Hussein did coming out of his rathole with an unkempt beard.

she insisted that only good had any depth. Good can be radical; evil can never be radical, it can only be extreme, for it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension yet—and this is its horror!—it can spread like a fungus over the surface of the earth and lay waste the entire world. Evil comes from a failure to think.

The Israeli court psychiatrist who examined Eichmann found him a “completely normal man, more normal, at any rate, than I am after examining him,”

But in this audience there were hardly any young people, and it did not consist of Israelis as distinguished from Jews. It was filled with “survivors,” with middle-aged and elderly people, immigrants from Europe, like myself, who knew by heart all there was to know, and who were in no mood to learn any lessons and certainly did not need this trial to draw their own conclusions.

During the ten months that Israel needed to prepare the trial, Germany was busy bracing herself against its predictable results by showing an unprecedented zeal for searching out and prosecuting Nazi criminals within the country.

Surely, the greatest political hazard of an Eichmann trial in Germany would have been acquittal for lack of mens rea, as J. J. Jansen pointed out in the Rheinischer Merkur [August 11, 1961].)

The logic of the Eichmann trial, as Ben-Gurion conceived of it, with its stress on general issues to the detriment of legal niceties, would have demanded exposure of the complicity of all German offices and authorities in the Final Solution—of all civil servants in the state ministries, of the regular armed forces, with their General Staff, of the judiciary, and of the business world.

The Party program was never taken seriously by Nazi officials; they prided themselves on belonging to a movement, as distinguished from a party, and a movement could not be bound by a program. Even before the Nazis’ rise to power, these Twenty-Five Points had been no more than a concession to the party system and to such prospective voters as were old-fashioned enough to ask what was the program of the party they were going to join.

whatever contradicted the legal implementation of the Party program they tended to ascribe to temporary, “revolutionary excesses” of undisciplined members or groups.

(Dostoevski once mentions in his diaries that in Siberia, among scores of murderers, rapists, and burglars, he never met a single man who would admit that he had done wrong)

Despite all the efforts of the prosecution, everybody could see that this man was not a “monster,” but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown.

As we shall see, this horrible gift for consoling himself with clichés did not leave him in the hour of his death.

Thus, we are perhaps in a position to answer Judge Landau’s question—the question uppermost in the minds of nearly everyone who followed the trial—of whether the accused had a conscience: yes, he had a conscience, and his conscience functioned in the expected way for about four weeks, whereupon it began to function the other way around.

“At that moment, I sensed a kind of Pontius Pilate feeling, for I felt free of all guilt.”

he was neither the first nor the last to be ruined by modesty.

The legal experts drew up the necessary legislation for making the victims stateless, which was important on two counts: it made it impossible for any country to inquire into their fate, and it enabled the state in which they were resident to confiscate their property.

As far as Eichmann could see, no one protested, no one refused to cooperate. “Immerzu fahren hier die Leute zu ihrem eigenen Begräbnis” (Day in day out the people here leave for their own funeral), as a Jewish observer put it in Berlin in 1943.

Defections from the ranks of the ruling élite and notably from among the Higher S.S. officers hardly occurred at the beginning, when people might still have had a conscience; they made themselves felt only when it had become obvious that Germany was going to lose the war.

the most potent factor in the soothing of his own conscience was the simple fact that he could see no one, no one at all, who actually was against the Final Solution.

Hitler, he said, “may have been wrong all down the line, but one thing is beyond dispute: the man was able to work his way up from lance corporal in the German Army to Führer of a people of almost eighty million …. His success alone proved to me that I should subordinate myself to this man.”

His conscience was indeed set at rest when he saw the zeal and eagerness with which “good society” everywhere reacted as he did. He did not need to “close his ears to the voice of conscience,” as the judgment has it, not because he had none, but because his conscience spoke with a “respectable voice,” with the voice of respectable society around him.

no secret in the secret-ridden atmosphere of the Hitler regime was better kept than such “inward opposition.”

For those who did not want to close their eyes it must have been clear from the beginning that it “was a general practice to allow certain exceptions in order to be able to maintain the general rule all the more easily” (in the words of Louis de Jong in an illuminating article on “Jews and Non-Jews in Nazi-Occupied Holland”).

It was at this time that a “moderate wing” of the S.S. came into existence, consisting of those who were stupid enough to believe that a murderer who could prove he had not killed as many people as he could have killed would have a marvelous alibi, and those who were clever enough to foresee a return to “normal conditions,” when money and good connections would again be of paramount importance.

Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it—the quality of temptation.

Many Germans and many Nazis, probably an overwhelming majority of them, must have been tempted not to murder, not to rob, not to let their neighbors go off to their doom (for that the Jews were transported to their doom they knew, of course, even though many of them may not have known the gruesome details), and not to become accomplices in all these crimes by benefiting from them. But, God knows, they had learned how to resist temptation.

What for Hitler, the sole, lonely plotter of the Final Solution (never had a conspiracy, if such it was, needed fewer conspirators and more executors), was among the war’s main objectives, with its implementation given top priority, regardless of economic and military considerations, and what for Eichmann was a job, with its daily routine, its ups and downs, was for the Jews quite literally the end of the world.

Clearly, it was not the administrative apparatus that these first operations were supposed to test. The objective seems to have been a test of general political conditions—whether Jews could be made to walk to their doom on their own feet, carrying their own little valises, in the middle of the night, without any previous notification; what the reaction of their neighbors would be when they discovered the empty apartments in the morning; and, last but not least, in the case of the Jews from Baden, how a foreign government would react to being suddenly presented with thousands of Jewish “refugees.” As far as the Nazis could see, everything turned out very satisfactorily.

They had met resistance based on principle, and their “toughness” had melted like butter in the sun, they had even been able to show a few timid beginnings of genuine courage.

“The subject of a good government is lucky, the subject of a bad government is unlucky. I had no luck.”)

What in Denmark was the result of an authentically political sense, an inbred comprehension of the requirements and responsibilities of citizenship and independence—“for the Danes … the Jewish question was a political and not a humanitarian question” (Leni Yahil)—was in Italy the outcome of the almost automatic general humanity of an old and civilized people.

one thought foolishly: Everyone, everyone should have his day in court. Only to find out, in the endless sessions that followed, how difficult it was to tell the story, that—at least outside the transforming realm of poetry—it needed a purity of soul, an unmirrored, unreflected innocence of heart and mind that only the righteous possess. No one either before or after was to equal the shining honesty of Zindel Grynszpan.

It is certain that anyone who had dared to suffer death rather than silently tolerate the crime would have sacrificed his life in vain. This is not to say that such a sacrifice would have been morally meaningless. It would only have been practically useless.

The holes of oblivion do not exist. Nothing human is that perfect, and there are simply too many people in the world to make oblivion possible.

under conditions of terror most people will comply but some people will not, just as the lesson of the countries to which the Final Solution was proposed is that “it could happen” in most places but it did not happen everywhere.

the most obvious reason that the violations of the Hague Convention committed by the Allies were never even discussed in legal terms was that the International Military Tribunals were international in name only, that they were in fact the courts of the victors, and the authority of their judgment, doubtful in any case, was not enhanced when the coalition that had won the war and then undertaken this joint enterprise broke up, to quote Otto Kirchheimer, “before the ink on the Nuremberg judgments had time to dry.”

Hence, it was felt that under these new conditions war crimes were only those outside all military necessities, where a deliberate inhuman purpose could be demonstrated.

Mr. Hausner opened his address with the following words: “When I stand before you, judges of Israel, in this court, to accuse Adolf Eichmann, I do not stand alone. Here with me at this moment stand six million prosecutors. But alas, they cannot rise to level the finger of accusation in the direction of the glass dock and cry out J’accuse against the man who sits there …. Their blood cries to Heaven, but their voice cannot be heard. Thus it falls to me to be their mouthpiece and to deliver the heinous accusation in their name.” With such rhetoric the prosecution gave substance to the chief argument against the trial, that it was established not in order to satisfy the demands of justice but to still the victims’ desire for and, perhaps, right to vengeance.

Criminal proceedings, since they are mandatory and thus initiated even if the victim would prefer to forgive and forget, rest on laws whose “essence”—to quote Telford Taylor, writing in the New York Times Magazine—“is that a crime is not committed only against the victim but primarily against the community whose law is violated.” The wrongdoer is brought to justice because his act has disturbed and gravely endangered the community as a whole, and not because, as in civil suits, damage has been done to individuals who are entitled to reparation. The reparation effected in criminal cases is of an altogether different nature; it is the body politic itself that stands in need of being “repaired,” and it is the general public order that has been thrown out of gear and must be restored, as it were. It is, in other words, the law, not the plaintiff, that must prevail.

the piracy theory served only to dodge one of the fundamental problems posed by crimes of this kind, namely, that they were, and could only be, committed under a criminal law and by a criminal state.

Israel had indeed violated the territorial principle, whose great significance lies in the fact that the earth is inhabited by many peoples and that these peoples are ruled by many different laws, so that every extension of one territory’s law beyond the borders and limitations of its validity will bring it into immediate conflict with the law of another territory.

But can we prosecute paedophiles who go abroad to do things that are illegal in the UK?

the Bonn government had earlier sought extradition from Argentina of such well-known Nazi criminals as Karl Klingenfuss and Dr. Josef Mengele (the latter implicated in the most horrifying medical experiments at Auschwitz and in charge of the “selection”) without any success.

In short, the realm of legality offered no alternative to kidnaping.

None of the participants ever arrived at a clear understanding of the actual horror of Auschwitz, which is of a different nature from all the atrocities of the past, because it appeared to prosecution and judges alike as not much more than the most horrible pogrom in Jewish history.

Expulsion and genocide, though both are international offenses, must remain distinct; the former is an offense against fellow-nations, whereas the latter is an attack upon human diversity as such, that is, upon a characteristic of the “human status” without which the very words “mankind” or “humanity” would be devoid of meaning.

Had the court in Jerusalem understood that there were distinctions between discrimination, expulsion, and genocide, it would immediately have become clear that the supreme crime it was confronted with, the physical extermination of the Jewish people, was a crime against humanity, perpetrated upon the body of the Jewish people, and that only the choice of victims, not the nature of the crime, could be derived from the long history of Jew-hatred and anti-Semitism.