Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

by Hannah Arendt

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.”

For the truth of the matter is that there existed not a single organization or public institution in Germany, at least during the war years, that did not become involved in criminal actions and transactions.

According to the directives of the Wannsee Conference, which was held in the heyday of Hitler’s victories, the Final Solution was to be applied to all European Jews, whose number was estimated at eleven million, and such things as nationality or the rights of allied or neutral countries with respect to their citizens were not even mentioned. But since Germany, even in the brightest days of the war, depended upon local good will and cooperation everywhere, these little formalities could not be sneezed at.

The story was confirmed by sworn and unsworn statements, usually given by witnesses and defendants in previous trials and frequently by persons who were no longer alive. (All this, as well as a certain amount of hearsay testimony, was admitted as evidence according to Section 15 of the law under which Eichmann was tried, which stipulates that the court “may deviate from the rules of evidence” provided it “places on record the reasons which prompted” such deviation.)

It served to refute Israel’s claim that an Israeli court was, at least technically, the “most suitable for a trial against the implementers of the Final Solution,” because documents and witnesses were “more abundant than in any other country”; and the claim with respect to documents was doubtful in any event, since the Israeli archive Yad Vashem was founded at a comparatively late date and is in no way superior to other archives. It quickly turned out that Israel was the only country in the world where defense witnesses could not be heard, and where certain witnesses for the prosecution, those who had given affidavits in previous trials, could not be cross-examined by the defense. And this was all the more serious as the accused and his lawyer were indeed not “in a position to obtain their own defense documents.”

Eichmann had written a “book” in the time between the adjournment of the court in August and the pronouncement of judgment in December, and the defense offered it as “new factual evidence” in the revision proceedings before the Court of Appeal—which of course the newly written book was not.

After a short re-examination by his lawyer, which took less than a session, he was examined by the three judges, and they got more out of him in two and a half short sessions than the prosecution had been able to elicit in seventeen.

This, to be sure, was an exception, but if it was an exception that proved the rule of normality, it did not prove the rule of simplicity or of ability to tell a story, let alone of the rare capacity for distinguishing between things that had happened to the storyteller more than sixteen, and sometimes twenty, years ago, and what he had read and heard and imagined in the meantime. These difficulties could not be helped, but they were not improved by the predilection of the prosecution for witnesses of some prominence, many of whom had published books about their experiences, and who now told what they had previously written, or what they had told and retold many times.

At the end of this procession, “the right of the witnesses to be irrelevant,” as Yad Vashem, summing up the testimony in its Bulletin, phrased it, was so firmly established that it was a mere formality when Mr. Hausner, during the seventy-third session, asked permission of the court “to complete his picture,” and Judge Landau, who some fifty sessions before had protested so strenuously against this “picture painting,” agreed immediately to the appearance of a former member of the Jewish Brigade, the fighting force of Palestine Jews that had been attached to the British Eighth Army during the war.

Thus, every once in a long while one was glad that Judge Landau had lost his battle, and the first such moment occurred even before the battle had started. For Mr. Hausner’s first background witness did not look as though he had volunteered. He was an old man, wearing the traditional Jewish skullcap, small, very frail, with sparse white hair and beard, holding himself quite erect; in a sense, his name was “famous,” and one understood why the prosecution wanted to begin its picture with him.

But such a moment came a few weeks later, and it came unexpectedly, just when Judge Landau was making an almost desperate attempt to bring the proceedings back under the control of normal criminal-court procedures.

During the few minutes it took Kovner to tell of the help that had come from a German sergeant, a hush settled over the courtroom; it was as though the crowd had spontaneously decided to observe the usual two minutes of silence in honor of the man named Anton Schmidt. And in those two minutes, which were like a sudden burst of light in the midst of impenetrable, unfathomable darkness, a single thought stood out clearly, irrefutably, beyond question—how utterly different everything would be today in this courtroom, in Israel, in Germany, in all of Europe, and perhaps in all countries of the world, if only more such stories could have been told.

“We knew this. We did nothing. Anyone who had seriously protested or done anything against the killing unit would have been arrested within twenty-four hours and would have disappeared. It belongs among the refinements of totalitarian governments in our century that they don’t permit their opponents to die a great, dramatic martyr’s death for their convictions. A good many of us might have accepted such a death. The totalitarian state lets its opponents disappear in silent anonymity. 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. None of us had a conviction so deeply rooted that we could have taken upon ourselves a practically useless sacrifice for the sake of a higher moral meaning.” Needless to add, the writer remains unaware of the emptiness of his much emphasized “decency” in the absence of what he calls a “higher moral meaning.”

It is true that totalitarian domination tried to establish these holes of oblivion into which all deeds, good and evil, would disappear, but just as the Nazis’ feverish attempts, from June, 1942, on, to erase all traces of the massacres—through cremation, through burning in open pits, through the use of explosives and flame-throwers and bone-crushing machinery—were doomed to failure, so all efforts to let their opponents “disappear in silent anonymity” were in vain. 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. One man will always be left alive to tell the story. Hence, nothing can ever be “practically useless,” at least, not in the long run.

Politically speaking, it is that 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. Humanly speaking, no more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation.

Eichmann, though no legal expert, should have been able to appreciate that, for he knew from his own career that one could do as one pleased only with stateless people; the Jews had had to lose their nationality before they could be exterminated. But he was in no mood to ponder such niceties, for if it was a fiction that he had come voluntarily to Israel to stand trial, it was true that he had made fewer difficulties than anybody had expected.

What prevented him from returning to Germany of his own free will to give himself up? He was asked this question, and he replied that in his opinion German courts still lacked the “objectivity” needed for dealing with people like him. But if he did prefer to be tried by an Israeli court—as he somehow implied, and which was just barely possible—he could have spared the Israeli government much time and trouble.

Dr. Servatius, as it turned out, appeared quite alone most of the time. The result of all this was that Eichmann became the chief assistant to his own defense counsel, and, quite apart from writing books “for future generations,” worked very hard throughout the trial.

The court then adjourned for four months, and reassembled on December 11 to pronounce judgment. For two days, divided into five sessions, the three judges read the two hundred and forty-four sections of the judgment. Dropping the prosecution’s charge of “conspiracy,” which would have made him a “chief war criminal,” automatically responsible for everything which had to do with the Final Solution, they convicted Eichmann on all fifteen counts of the indictment, although he was acquitted on some particulars.

He was guilty of their extermination in exactly the same way he was guilty of the extermination of the Jews. Count

Eichmann, it will be remembered, had steadfastly insisted that he was guilty only of “aiding and abetting” in the commission of the crimes with which he was charged, that he himself had never committed an overt act. The judgment, to one’s great relief, in a way recognized that the prosecution had not succeeded in proving him wrong on this point. For it was an important point; it touched upon the very essence of this crime, which was no ordinary crime, and the very nature of this criminal, who was no common criminal; by implication, it also took cognizance of the weird fact that in the death camps it was usually the inmates and the victims who had actually wielded “the fatal instrument with [their] own hands.”

these crimes were committed en masse, not only in regard to the number of victims, but also in regard to the numbers of those who perpetrated the crime, and the extent to which any one of the many criminals was close to or remote from the actual killer of the victim means nothing, as far as the measure of his responsibility is concerned. On the contrary, in general the degree of responsibility increases as we draw further away from the man who uses the fatal instrument with his own hands [my italics].”

Then came Eichmann’s last statement: His hopes for justice were disappointed; the court had not believed him, though he had always done his best to tell the truth. The court did not understand him: he had never been a Jew-hater, and he had never willed the murder of human beings. His guilt came from his obedience, and obedience is praised as a virtue. His virtue had been abused by the Nazi leaders. But he was not one of the ruling clique, he was a victim, and only the leaders deserved punishment. (He did not go quite as far as many of the other low-ranking war criminals, who complained bitterly that they had been told never to worry about “responsibilities,” and that they were now unable to call those responsible to account because these had “escaped and deserted” them—by committing suicide, or by having been hanged.) “I am not the monster I am made out to be,” Eichmann said. “I am the victim of a fallacy.” He did not use the word “scapegoat,” but he confirmed what Servatius had said: it was his “profound conviction that [he] must suffer for the acts of others.” After two more days, on Friday, December 15, 1961, at nine o’clock in the morning, the death sentence was pronounced.

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.

The most common argument was that Eichmann’s deeds defied the possibility of human punishment, that it was pointless to impose the death sentence for crimes of such magnitude—which, of course, was true, in a sense, except that it could not conceivably mean that he who had murdered millions should for this very reason escape punishment.

(It is strange that Buber, a man not only of eminence but of very great intelligence, should not see how spurious these much publicized guilt feelings necessarily are. It is quite gratifying to feel guilty if you haven’t done anything wrong: how noble! Whereas it is rather hard and certainly depressing to admit guilt and to repent. The youth of Germany is surrounded, on all sides and in all walks of life, by men in positions of authority and in public office who are very guilty indeed but who feel nothing of the sort.

Those young German men and women who every once in a while—on the occasion of all the Diary of Anne Frank hubbub and of the Eichmann trial—treat us to hysterical outbreaks of guilt feelings are not staggering under the burden of the past, their fathers’ guilt; rather, they are trying to escape from the pressure of very present and actual problems into a cheap sentimentality.)

the law presupposes precisely that we have a common humanity with those whom we accuse and judge and condemn. As far as I know, Buber was the only philosopher to go on public record on the subject of Eichmann’s execution (shortly before the trial started, Karl Jaspers had given a radio interview in Basel, later published in Der Monat, in which he argued the case for an international tribunal); it was disappointing to find him dodging, on the highest possible level, the very problem Eichmann and his deeds had posed.

He was in complete command of himself, nay, he was more: he was completely himself. Nothing could have demonstrated this more convincingly than the grotesque silliness of his last words. He began by stating emphatically that he was a Gottgläubiger, to express in common Nazi fashion that he was no Christian and did not believe in life after death. He then proceeded: “After a short while, gentlemen, we shall all meet again. Such is the fate of all men. Long live Germany, long live Argentina, long live Austria. I shall not forget them.” In the face of death, he had found the cliché used in funeral oratory. Under the gallows, his memory played him the last trick; he was “elated” and he forgot that this was his own funeral.

It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us—the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.

irregularities and abnormalities of the trial in Jerusalem were so many, so varied, and of such legal complexity that they overshadowed during the trial, as they have in the surprisingly small amount of post-trial literature, the central moral, political, and even legal problems that the trial inevitably posed.

Israel herself, through the pre-trial statements of Prime Minister Ben-Gurion and through the way the accusation was framed by the prosecutor, confused the issues further by listing a great number of purposes the trial was supposed to achieve, all of which were ulterior purposes with respect to the law and to courtroom procedure.

The purpose of a trial is to render justice, and nothing else; even the noblest of ulterior purposes—“the making of a record of the Hitler regime which would withstand the test of history,” as Robert G. Storey, executive trial counsel at Nuremberg, formulated the supposed higher aims of the Nuremberg Trials—can only detract from the law’s main business: to wei...

All attempts to widen the range of the trial had to be resisted, because the court could not “allow itself to be enticed into provinces which are outside its sphere.... the judicial process has ways of its own, which are laid down by law, and which do not change, whatever the subject of the trial may be.” The court, moreover, could not overstep these limits without ending “in complete failure.” Not only does it not have at its disposal “the tools required for the investigation of general questions,” it speaks with an authority whose very weight depends upon its limitation. “No one has made us judges” of matters outside the realm of law, and “no greater weight is to be attached to our opinion on them than to that of any person devoting study and thought” to them. Hence, to the question most commonly asked about the Eichmann trial: What good does it do?, there is but one possible answer: It will do justice.

objections raised against the Eichmann trial were of three kinds. First, there were those objections that had been raised against the Nuremberg Trials and were now repeated: Eichmann was tried under a retroactive law and appeared in the court of the victors. Second, there were those objections that applied only to the Jerusalem court, in that they questioned either its competence as such or its failure to take into account the act of kidnaping. And, finally, and most important, there were objections to the charge itself, that Eichmann had committed crimes “against the Jewish people,” instead of “against humanity,” and hence to the law under which he was tried; and this objection led to the logical conclusion that the only proper court to try these crimes was an international tribunal.

“This particular legislation,” the judgment pointed out, “is totally different from any other legislation usual in criminal codes,” and the reason for its difference lies in the nature of the crimes it deals with. Its retroactivity, one may add, violates only formally, not substantially, the principle nullum crimen, nulla poena sine lege, since this applies meaningfully only to acts known to the legislator; if a crime unknown before, such as genocide, suddenly makes its appearance, justice itself demands a judgment according to a new law; in the case of Nuremberg, this new law was the Charter (the London Agreement of 1945), in the case of Israel, it was the Law of 1950.

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.)

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.”

For the truth of the matter was that by the end of the Second World War everybody knew that technical developments in the instruments of violence had made the adoption of “criminal” warfare inevitable. It was precisely the distinction between soldier and civilian, between army and home population, between military targets and open cities, upon which the Hague Convention’s definitions of war crimes rested, that had become obsolete. 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.

The notion that aggression is “the supreme international crime” was silently abandoned when a number of men were sentenced to death who had never been convicted of a “conspiracy” against peace.

what had prevented the Nuremberg Tribunal from doing full justice to this crime was not that its victims were Jews but that the Charter demanded that this crime, which had so little to do with war that its commission actually conflicted with and hindered the war’s conduct, was to be tied up with the other crimes. How deeply the Nuremberg judges were aware of the outrage perpetrated against the Jews may perhaps best be gauged by the fact that the only defendant to be condemned to death on a crime-against-humanity charge alone was Julius Streicher, whose specialty had been anti-Semitic obscenities. In this instance, the judges disregarded all other considerations.

The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg had been established for war criminals whose crimes could not be localized, all others were delivered to the countries where they had committed their crimes. Only the “major war criminals” had acted without territorial limitations, and Eichmann certainly was not one of them.

(Mr. Hausner, in the last of his articles in the Saturday Evening Post, unwittingly added new fuel to this argument: he said that the prosecution realized at once that Eichmann could not be defended by an Israeli lawyer, because there would be a conflict between “professional duties” and “national emotions.” Well, this conflict constituted the gist of all the objections to Jewish judges, and Mr. Hausner’s argument in their favor, that a judge may hate the crime and yet be fair to the criminal, applies to the defense counsel as well: the lawyer who defends a murderer does not defend murder. The truth of the matter is that pressures outside the courtroom made it inadvisable, to put it mildly, to charge an Israeli citizen with the defense of Eichmann.)

In the interest of justice (as distinguished from the concern with certain procedures which, important in its own right, can never be permitted to overrule justice, the law’s chief concern), the court, to justify its competence, would have needed to invoke neither the principle of passive personality—that the victims were Jews and that only Israel was entitled to speak in their names—nor the principle of universal jurisdiction, applying to Eichmann because he was hostis generis humani the rules that are applicable to piracy. Both theories, discussed at length inside and outside the Jerusalem courtroom, actually blurred the issues and obscured the obvious similarity between the Jerusalem trial and the trials that had preceded it in other countries where special legislation had likewise been enacted to ensure the punishment of the Nazis or their collaborators.