Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

by Hannah Arendt

the main difficulty at Nuremberg lay in the indisputable fact that here, again, the tu-quoque argument applied: Russia, which had never signed the Hague Convention (Italy, incidentally, had not ratified it either), was more than suspected of mistreatment of prisoners, and, according to recent investigations, the Russians also seem to be responsible for the murder of fifteen thousand Polish officers whose bodies were found at Katyn Forest (in the neighborhood of Smolensk, in Russia). Worse, the saturation bombing of open cities and, above all, the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki clearly constituted war crimes in the sense of the Hague Convention. And while the bombing of German cities had been provoked by the enemy, by the bombing of London and Coventry and Rotterdam, the same cannot be said of the use of an entirely new and overwhelmingly powerful weapon, whose existence could have been announced and demonstrated in many other ways. To be sure, 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.”