Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

by Hannah Arendt

There is no doubt from the very beginning that it is Judge Landau who sets the tone, and that he is doing his best, his very best, to prevent this trial from becoming a show trial under the influence of the prosecutor’s love of showmanship.

Clearly, this courtroom is not a bad place for the show trial David Ben-Gurion, Prime Minister of Israel, had in mind when he decided to have Eichmann kidnaped in Argentina and brought to the District Court of Jerusalem to stand trial for his role in the “final solution of the Jewish question.” And Ben-Gurion, rightly called the “architect of the state,” remains the invisible stage manager of the proceedings. Not once does he attend a session; in the courtroom he speaks with the voice of Gideon Hausner, the Attorney General, who, representing the government, does his best, his very best, to obey his master. And if, fortunately, his best often turns out not to be good enough, the reason is that the trial is presided over by someone who serves Justice as faithfully as Mr. Hausner serves the State of Israel.

Justice demands that the accused be prosecuted, defended, and judged, and that all the other questions of seemingly greater import—of “How could it happen?” and “Why did it happen?,” of “Why the Jews?” and “Why the Germans?,” of “What was the role of other nations?” and “What was the extent of co-responsibility on the side of the Allies?,” of “How could the Jews through their own leaders cooperate in their own destruction?” and “Why did they go to their death like lambs to the slaughter?”—be left in abeyance.

On trial are his deeds, not the sufferings of the Jews, not the German people or mankind, not even anti-Semitism and racism.

Crucial

Justice does not permit anything of the sort; it demands seclusion, it permits sorrow rather than anger, and it prescribes the most careful abstention from all the nice pleasures of putting oneself in the limelight. Judge Landau’s visit to this country shortly after the trial was not publicized, except among the Jewish organizations for which it was undertaken.

For “if we shall charge [Eichmann] also with crimes against non-Jews, ... this is” not because he committed them, but, surprisingly, “because we make no ethnic distinctions.” Certainly a remarkable sentence for a prosecutor to utter in his opening speech; it proved to be the key sentence in the case for the prosecution. For this case was built on what the Jews had suffered, not on what Eichmann had done. And, according to Mr. Hausner, this distinction would be immaterial, because “there was only one man who had been concerned almost entirely with the Jews, whose business had been their destruction, whose role in the establishment of the iniquitous regime had been limited to them. That was Adolf Eichmann.” Was it not logical to bring before the court all the facts of Jewish suffering (which, of course, were never in dispute) and then look for evidence which in one way or another would connect Eichmann with what had happened?

Did Mr. Hausner really believe the Nuremberg Trials would have paid greater attention to the fate of the Jews if Eichmann had been in the dock? Hardly. Like almost everybody else in Israel, he believed that only a Jewish court could render justice to Jews, and that it was the business of Jews to sit in judgment on their enemies. Hence the almost universal hostility in Israel to the mere mention of an international court which would have indicted Eichmann, not for crimes “against the Jewish people,” but for crimes against mankind committed on the body of the Jewish people. Hence the strange boast: “We make no ethnic distinctions,” which sounded less strange in Israel, where rabbinical law rules the personal status of Jewish citizens, with the result that no Jew can marry a non-Jew; marriages concluded abroad are recognized, but children of mixed marriages are legally bastards (children of Jewish parentage born out of wedlock are legitimate), and if one happens to have a non-Jewish mother he can neither be married nor buried.

Hence it is hardly respect for the faith or the power of the fanatically religious minority that prevents the government of Israel from substituting secular jurisdiction for rabbinical law in matters of marriage and divorce. Israeli citizens, religious and nonreligious, seem agreed upon the desirability of having a law which prohibits intermarriage, and it is chiefly for this reason—as Israeli officials outside the courtroom were willing to admit—that they are also agreed upon the undesirability of a written constitution in which such a law would embarrassingly have to be spelled out. (“The argument against civil marriage is that it would split the House of Israel, and would also separate Jews of this country from Jews of the Diaspora,” as Philip Gillon recently put it in Jewish Frontier.) Whatever the reasons, there certainly was something breathtaking in the naivete with which the prosecution denounced the infamous Nuremberg Laws of 1935, which had prohibited intermarriage and sexual intercourse between Jews and Germans.

The trial was supposed to show them what it meant to live among non-Jews, to convince them that only in Israel could a Jew be safe and live an honorable life.

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. As witness followed witness and horror was piled upon horror, they sat there and listened in public to stories they would hardly have been able to endure in private, when they would have had to face the storyteller.

It was precisely the play aspect of the trial that collapsed under the weight of the hair-raising atrocities. A trial resembles a play in that both begin and end with the doer, not with the victim. A show trial needs even more urgently than an ordinary trial a limited and well-defined outline of what was done and how it was done. In the center of a trial can only be the one who did—in this respect, he is like the hero in the play—and if he suffers, he must suffer for what he has done, not for what he has caused others to suffer. No one knew this better than the presiding judge, before whose eyes the trial began to degenerate into a bloody show, “a rudderless ship tossed about on the waves.” But if his efforts to prevent this were often defeated, the defeat was, strangely, in part the fault of the defense, which hardly ever rose to challenge any testimony, no matter how irrelevant and immaterial it might be.

Thus, the trial never became a play, but the show Ben-Gurion had had in mind to begin with did take place, or, rather, the “lessons” he thought should be taught to Jews and Gentiles, to Israelis and Arabs, in short, to the whole world. These lessons to be drawn from an identical show were meant to be different for the different recipients. Ben-Gurion had outlined them before the trial started, in a number of articles designed to explain why Israel had kidnaped the accused. There was the lesson to the non-Jewish world: “We want to establish before the nations of the world how millions of people, because they happened to be Jews, and one million babies, because they happened to be Jewish babies, were murdered by the Nazis.”

again in Ben-Gurion’s own words, “We want the nations of the world to know ... and they should be ashamed.” The Jews in the Diaspora were to remember how Judaism, “four thousand years old, with its spiritual creations and its ethical strivings, its Messianic aspirations,” had always faced “a hostile world,” how the Jews had degenerated until they went to their death like sheep, and how only the establishment of a Jewish state had enabled Jews to hit back, as Israelis had done in the War of Independence, in the Suez adventure, and in the almost daily incidents on Israel’s unhappy borders. And if the Jews outside Israel had to be shown the difference between Israeli heroism and Jewish submissive meekness, there was a lesson for those inside Israel too: “the generation of Israelis who have grown up since the holocaust” were in danger of losing their ties with the Jewish people and, by implication, with their own history. “It is necessary that our youth remember what happened to the Jewish people. We want them to know the most tragic facts in our history.” Finally, one of the motives in bringing Eichmann to trial was “to ferret out other Nazis-for example, the connection between the Nazis and some Arab rulers.”

Equally superfluous was the lesson to the Jews in the Diaspora, who hardly needed the great catastrophe in which one-third of their people perished to be convinced of the world’s hostility. Not only has their conviction of the eternal and ubiquitous nature of anti-Semitism been the most potent ideological factor in the Zionist movement since the Dreyfus Affair; it was also the cause of the otherwise inexplicable readiness of the German Jewish community to negotiate with the Nazi authorities during the early stages of the regime.

German Jews were not the only ones to underestimate their enemies because they somehow thought that all Gentiles were alike. If Prime Minister Ben-Gurion, to all practical purposes the head of the Jewish State, meant to strengthen this kind of “Jewish consciousness,” he was ill advised; for a change in this mentality is actually one of the indispensable prerequisites for Israeli statehood, which by definition has made of the Jews a people among peoples, a nation among nations, a state among states, depending now on a plurality which no longer permits the age-old and, unfortunately, religiously anchored dichotomy of Jews and Gentiles.

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. But although the prosecution as conducted by Mr. Hausner went as far afield as to put witness after witness on the stand who testified to things that, while gruesome and true enough, had no or only the slightest connection with the deeds of the accused, it carefully avoided touching upon this highly explosive matter—upon the almost ubiquitous complicity, which had stretched far beyond the ranks of Party membership.

This promise was not kept, nor could it have been kept in the form in which it was made. For there never existed a “council that resolved” anything, and the “robed dignitaries with academic degrees” never decided on the extermination of the Jews, they only came together to plan the necessary steps in carrying out an order given by Hitler.)

For it was history that, as far as the prosecution was concerned, stood in the center of the trial. “It is not an individual that is in the dock at this historic trial, and not the Nazi regime alone, but anti-Semitism throughout history.” This was the tone set by Ben-Gurion and faithfully followed by Mr. Hausner, who began his opening address (which lasted through three sessions) with Pharaoh in Egypt and Haman’s decree “to destroy, to slay, and to cause them to perish.” He then proceeded to quote Ezekiel: “And when I [the Lord] passed by thee, and saw thee polluted in thine own blood, I said unto thee: In thy blood, live,” explaining that these words must be understood as “the imperative that has confronted this nation ever since its first appearance on the stage of history.” It was bad history and cheap rhetoric; worse, it was clearly at cross-purposes with putting Eichmann on trial, suggesting that perhaps he was only an innocent executor of some mysteriously foreordained destiny, or, for that matter, even of anti-Semitism, which perhaps was necessary to blaze the trail of “the bloodstained road traveled by this people” to fulfill its destiny.

Dr. Servatius could no longer resist temptation and asked the obvious questions: “Why did all this bad luck fall upon the Jewish people?” and “Don’t you think that irrational motives are at the basis of the fate of this people? Beyond the understanding of a human being?” Is not there perhaps something like “the spirit of history, which brings history forward ... without the influence of men?” Is not Mr. Hausner basically in agreement with “the school of historical law”—an allusion to Hegel-and has he not shown that what “the leaders do will not always lead to the aim and destination they wanted? ... Here the intention was to destroy the Jewish people and the objective was not reached and a new flourishing State came into being.” The argument of the defense had now come perilously close to the newest anti-Semitic notion about the Elders of Zion, set forth in all seriousness a few weeks earlier in the Egyptian National Assembly by Deputy Foreign Minister Hussain Zulficar Sabri: Hitler was innocent of the slaughter of the Jews; he was a victim of the Zionists, who had “compelled him to perpetrate crimes that would eventually enable them to achieve their aim—the creation of the State of Israel.” Except that Dr. Servatius, following the philosophy of history expounded by the prosecutor, had put History in the place usually reserved for the Elders of Zion.

Despite the intentions of Ben-Gurion and all the efforts of the prosecution, there remained an individual in the dock, a person of flesh and blood; and if Ben-Gurion did “not care what verdict is delivered against Eichmann,” it was undeniably the sole task of the Jerusalem court to deliver one.

The Nazis and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law of 1950, under which he was tried, provides that “a person who has committed one of these ... offenses... is liable to the death penalty.” To each count Eichmann pleaded: “Not guilty in the sense of the indictment.”

Ex post facto law

In the long cross-examination of the accused, according to him “the longest ever known,” neither the defense nor the prosecution nor, finally, any of the three judges ever bothered to ask him this obvious question. His lawyer, Robert Servatius of Cologne, hired by Eichmann and paid by the Israeli government (following the precedent set at the Nuremberg Trials, where all attorneys for the defense were paid by the Tribunal of the victorious powers), answered the question in a press interview: “Eichmann feels guilty before God, not before the law,” but this answer remained without confirmation from the accused himself. The defense would apparently have preferred him to plead not guilty on the grounds that under the then existing Nazi legal system he had not done anything wrong, that what he was accused of were not crimes but “acts of state,” over which no other state has jurisdiction (par in parem imperium non habet), that it had been his duty to obey and that, in Servatius’ words, he had committed acts “for which you are decorated if you win and go to the gallows if you lose.” (Thus Goebbels had declared in 1943: “We will go down in history as the greatest statesmen of all times or as their greatest criminals.”)

First of all, the indictment for murder was wrong: “With the killing of Jews I had nothing to do. I never killed a Jew, or a non-Jew, for that matter —I never killed any human being. I never gave an order to kill either a Jew or a non-Jew; I just did not do it,” or, as he was later to qualify this statement, “It so happened ... that I had not once to do it”—for he left no doubt that he would have killed his own father if he had received an order to that effect.

accused only of “aiding and abetting” the annihilation of the Jews, which he declared in Jerusalem to have been “one of the greatest crimes in the history of Humanity.” The defense paid no attention to Eichmann’s own theory, but the prosecution wasted much time in an unsuccessful effort to prove that Eichmann had once, at least, killed with his own hands (a Jewish boy in Hungary), and it spent even more time, and more successfully, on a note that Franz Rademacher, the Jewish expert in the German Foreign Office, had scribbled on one of the documents dealing with Yugoslavia during a telephone conversation, which read: “Eichmann proposes shooting.” This turned out to be the only “order to kill,” if that is what it was, for which there existed even a shred of evidence.

Would he then have pleaded guilty if he had been indicted as an accessory to murder? Perhaps, but he would have made important qualifications. What he had done was a crime only in retrospect, and he had always been a law-abiding citizen, because Hitler’s orders, which he had certainly executed to the best of his ability, had possessed “the force of law” in the Third Reich.

(The defense could have quoted in support of Eichmann’s thesis the testimony of one of the best-known experts on constitutional law in the Third Reich, Theodor Maunz, currently Minister of Education and Culture in Bavaria, who stated in 1943 [in Gestalt und Recht der Polizei]: “The command of the Führer ... is the absolute center of the present legal order.”) Those who today told Eichmann that he could have acted differently simply did not know, or had forgotten, how things had been. He did not want to be one of those who now pretended that “they had always been against it,” whereas in fact they had been very eager to do what they were told to do. However, times change, and he, like Professor Maunz, had “arrived at different insights.”

The indictment implied not only that he had acted on purpose, which he did not deny, but out of base motives and in full knowledge of the criminal nature of his deeds. As for the base motives, he was perfectly sure that he was not what he called an innerer Schweinehund, a dirty bastard in the depths of his heart; and as for his conscience, he remembered perfectly well that he would have had a bad conscience only if he had not done what he had been ordered to do—to ship millions of men, women, and children to their death with great zeal and the most meticulous care.

Behind the comedy of the soul experts lay the hard fact that his was obviously no case of moral let alone legal insanity. (Mr. Hausner’s recent revelations in the Saturday Evening Post of things he “could not bring out at the trial” have contradicted the information given informally in Jerusalem. Eichmann, we are now told, had been alleged by the psychiatrists to be “a man obsessed with a dangerous and insatiable urge to kill,” “a perverted, sadistic personality.” In which case he would have belonged in an insane asylum.) Worse, his was obviously also no case of insane hatred of Jews, of fanatical anti-Semitism or indoctrination of any kind. He “personally” never had anything whatever against Jews; on the contrary, he had plenty of “private reasons” for not being a Jew hater.

They preferred to conclude from occasional lies that he was a liar—and missed the greatest moral and even legal challenge of the whole case. Their case rested on the assumption that the defendant, like all “normal persons,” must have been aware of the criminal nature of his acts, and Eichmann was indeed normal insofar as he was “no exception within the Nazi regime.” However, under the conditions of the Third Reich only “exceptions” could be expected to react “normally.” This simple truth of the matter created a dilemma for the judges which they could neither resolve nor escape.

In court, Eichmann gave the impression of a typical member of the lower middle classes, and this impression was more than borne out by every sentence he spoke or wrote while in prison. But this was misleading; he was rather the déclassé son of a solid middle-class family, and it was indicative of his comedown in social status that while his father was a good friend of Kaltenbrunner’s father, who was also a Linz lawyer, the relationship of the two sons was rather cool: Eichmann was unmistakably treated by Kaltenbrunner as his social inferior.

any rate, he did not enter the Party out of conviction, nor was he ever convinced by it—whenever he was asked to give his reasons, he repeated the same embarrassed clichés about the Treaty of Versailles and unemployment; rather, as he pointed out in court, “it was like being swallowed up by the Party against all expectations and without previous decision. It happened so quickly and suddenly.”

Why not join the S.S.? And he had replied, Why not? That was how it had happened, and that was about all there was to it.

From a humdrum life without significance and consequence the wind had blown him into History, as he understood it, namely, into a Movement that always kept moving and in which somebody like him—already a failure in the eyes of his social class, of his family, and hence in his own eyes as well—could start from scratch and still make a career.

he might still have preferred—if anybody had asked him—to be hanged as Obersturmbannführer a.D. (in retirement) rather than living out his life quietly and normally as a traveling salesman for the Vacuum Oil Company.

In 1934, when Eichmann applied successfully for a job, the S.D. was a relatively new apparatus in the S.S., founded two years earlier by Heinrich Himmler to serve as the Intelligence service of the Party and now headed by Reinhardt Heydrich, a former Navy Intelligence officer, who was to become, as Gerald Reitlinger put it, “the real engineer of the Final Solution” (The Final Solution, 1961).

And since Hitler, in the Röhm purge in 1934, had broken the power of the S.A., the Storm Troopers in brown shirts who had been almost exclusively responsible for the early pogroms and atrocities, and since the Jews were blissfully unaware of the growing power of the black-shirted S.S., who ordinarily abstained from what Eichmann contemptuously called the “Stürmer methods,” they generally believed that a modus vivendi would be possible; they even offered to cooperate in “the solution of the Jewish question.” In short, when Eichmann entered upon his apprenticeship in Jewish affairs, on which, four years later, he was to be the recognized “expert,” and when he made his first contacts with Jewish functionaries, both Zionists and Assimilationists talked in terms of a great “Jewish revival,” a “great constructive movement of German Jewry,” and they still quarreled among themselves in ideological terms about the desirability of Jewish emigration, as though this depended upon their own decisions.

required him to read Theodor Herzl’s Der Judenstaat, the famous Zionist classic, which converted Eichmann promptly and forever to Zionism. This seems to have been the first serious book he ever read and it made a lasting impression on him.

Zionists of long standing, were thoroughly satisfactory. The reason he became so fascinated by the “Jewish question,” he explained, was his own “idealism”; these Jews, unlike the Assimilationists, whom he always despised, and unlike Orthodox Jews, who bored him, were “idealists,” like him. An “idealist,” according to Eichmann’s notions, was not merely a man who believed in an “idea” or someone who did not steal or accept bribes, though these qualifications were indispensable. An “idealist” was a man who lived for his idea—hence he could not be a businessman—and who was prepared to sacrifice for his idea everything and, especially, everybody. When he said in the police examination that he would have sent his own father to his death if that had been required, he did not mean merely to stress the extent to which he was under orders, and ready to obey them; he also meant to show what an “idealist” he had always been. The perfect “idealist,” like everybody else, had of course his personal feelings and emotions, but he would never permit them to interfere with his actions if they came into conflict with his “idea.” The greatest “idealist”

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. Eichmann, as we have seen, was free of such deplorable habits, and when he told the Jerusalem court that he had not known Hitler’s program he very likely spoke the truth: “The Party program did not matter, you knew what you were joining.” The Jews, on the other hand, were old-fashioned enough to know the Twenty-Five Points by heart and to believe in them; whatever contradicted the legal implementation of the Party program they tended to ascribe to temporary, “revolutionary excesses” of undisciplined members or groups.

Instuctive

Bragging was the vice that was Eichmann’s undoing. It was sheer rodomontade when he told his men during the last days of the war: “I will jump into my grave laughing, because the fact that I have the death of five million Jews [or “enemies of the Reich,” as he always claimed to have said] on my conscience gives me extraordinary satisfaction.” He did not jump, and if he had anything on his conscience, it was not murder but, as it turned out, that he had once slapped the face of Dr. Josef Löwenherz, head of the Vienna Jewish community, who later became one of his favorite Jews. (He had apologized in front of his staff at the time, but this incident kept bothering him.) To claim the death of five million Jews, the approximate total of losses suffered from the combined efforts of all Nazi offices and authorities, was preposterous, as he knew very well, but he had kept repeating the damning sentence ad nauseam to everyone who would listen, even twelve years later in Argentina, because it gave him “an extraordinary sense of elation to think that [he] was exiting from the stage in this way.”

But bragging is a common vice, and a more specific, and also more decisive, flaw in Eichmann’s character was his almost total inability ever to look at anything from the other fellow’s point of view.

The German text of the taped police examination, conducted from May 29, 1960, to January 17, 1961, each page corrected and approved by Eichmann, constitutes a veritable gold mine for a psychologist—provided he is wise enough to understand that the horrible can be not only ludicrous but outright funny.

But the point here is that officialese became his language because he was genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché. (Was it these clichés that the psychiatrists thought so “normal” and “desirable”? Are these the “positive ideas” a clergyman hopes for in those to whose souls he ministers? Eichmann’s best opportunity to show this positive side of his character in Jerusalem came when the young police officer in charge of his mental and psychological well-being handed him Lolita for relaxation. After two days Eichmann returned it, visibly indignant; “Quite an unwholesome book”—“Das ist aber ein sehr unerfreuliches Buch”—he told his guard.)

The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else. No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such.

Is this a textbook case of bad faith, of lying self-deception combined with outrageous stupidity? Or is it simply the case of the eternally unrepentant criminal (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) who cannot afford to face reality because his crime has become part and parcel of it? Yet Eichmann’s case is different from that of the ordinary criminal, who can shield himself effectively against the reality of a non-criminal world only within the narrow limits of his gang. Eichmann needed only to recall the past in order to feel assured that he was not lying and that he was not deceiving himself, for he and the world he lived in had once been in perfect harmony. And that German society of eighty million people had been shielded against reality and factuality by exactly the same means, the same self-deception, lies, and stupidity that had now become ingrained in Eichmann’s mentality. These lies changed from year to year, and they frequently contradicted each other; moreoever, they were not necessarily the same for the various branches of the Party hierarchy or the people at large.

But the practice of self-deception had become so common, almost a moral prerequisite for survival, that even now, eighteen years after the collapse of the Nazi regime, when most of the specific content of its lies has been forgotten, it is sometimes difficult not to believe that mendacity has become an integral part of the German national character.

Eichmann, after reading the document carefully, said immediately that he was convinced that “final aim” could only mean “physical extermination,” and concluded that “this basic idea was already rooted in the minds of the higher leaders, or the men at the very top.” This might indeed have been the truth, but then he would have had to admit that the Madagascar project could not have been more than a hoax. Well, he did not; he never changed his Madagascar story, and probably he just could not change it. It was as though this story ran along a different tape in his memory, and it was this taped memory that showed itself to be proof against reason and argument and information and insight of any kind.

(as distinguished from the Party) hierarchy. The letter commissioned Heydrich to prepare “the general solution [Gesamtlösung] of the Jewish question within the area of German influence in Europe,” and to submit “a general proposal ... for the implementation of the desired final solution [Endlösung] of the Jewish question.”

“The Führer has ordered the physical extermination of the Jews.” After which, “very much against his habits, he remained silent for a long while, as though he wanted to test the impact of his words. I remember it even today. In the first moment, I was unable to grasp the significance of what he had said, because he was so careful in choosing his words, and then I understood, and didn’t say anything, because there was nothing to say any more. For I had never thought of such a thing, such a solution through violence. I now lost everything, all joy in my work, all initiative, all interest; I was, so to speak, blown out.