Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

by Hannah Arendt

The judgment of the Court of Appeal was actually a revision of the judgment of the lower court, although it did not say so. In conspicuous contrast to the original judgment, it was now found that “the appellant had received no ‘superior orders’ at all. He was his own superior, and he gave all orders in matters that concerned Jewish affairs”; he had, moreover, “eclipsed in importance all his superiors, including Müller.” And, in reply to the obvious argument of the defense that the Jews would have been no better off had Eichmann never existed, the judges now stated that “the idea of the Final Solution would never have assumed the infernal forms of the flayed skin and tortured flesh of millions of Jews without the fanatical zeal and the unquenchable blood thirst of the appellant and his accomplices.” Israel’s Supreme Court had not only accepted the arguments of the prosecution, it had adopted its very language.