Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

by Hannah Arendt

Of these, only the last, the crime against humanity, was new and unprecedented. Aggressive warfare is at least as old as recorded history, and while it had been denounced as “criminal” many times before, it had never been recognized as such in any formal sense. (None of the current justifications of the Nuremberg court’s jurisdiction over this matter has much to commend it. It is true that Wilhelm II had been cited before a tribunal of the Allied powers after the First World War, but the crime the former German Kaiser had been charged with was not war but breach of treaties—and specifically, the violation of Belgium’s neutrality. It is also true that the Briand-Kellogg pact of August, 1928, had ruled out war as an instrument of national policy, but the pact contained neither a criterion of aggression nor a mention of sanctions—quite apart from the fact that the security system that the pact was meant to bring about had collapsed prior to the outbreak of war.)