Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

by Hannah Arendt

For this case was built on what the Jews had suffered, not on what Eichmann had done.

Wherever Jews lived, there were recognized Jewish leaders, and this leadership, almost without exception, cooperated in one way or another, for one reason or another, with the Nazis. The whole truth was that if the Jewish people had really been unorganized and leaderless, there would have been chaos and plenty of misery but the total number of victims would hardly have been between four and a half and six million people.

The Nazis knew well enough that they had more in common with Stalin’s version of Communism than with Italian Fascism, and Mussolini on his part had neither much confidence in Germany nor much admiration for Hitler.

Schäfer had to stand trial in a German criminal court after the war. For the gassing of 6,280 women and children, he was sentenced to six years and six months in prison.

It is the same story repeated over and over again: those who escaped the Nuremberg Trials and were not extradited to the countries where they had committed their crimes either were never brought to justice, or found in the German courts the greatest possible “understanding.”

the Nazis were in principle, of course, as anti-Christian as they were anti-Jewish.

The Slovaks’ being Christians meant not only that they felt obliged to emphasize what the Nazis considered an “obsolete” distinction between baptized and nonbaptized Jews, but also that they thought of the whole issue in medieval terms. For them a “solution” consisted in expelling the Jews and inheriting their property but not in systematic “exterminating,” although they did not mind occasional killing. The greatest “sin” of the Jews was not that they belonged to an alien “race” but that they were rich.

The chief handicap of the defense, at Nuremberg as at Jerusalem, was that it lacked the staff of trained research assistants needed to go through the mass of documents and find whatever might be useful in the case.

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.

Criminal proceedings, since they are mandatory and thus initiated even if the victim would prefer to forgive and forget, rest on laws whose “essence”—to quote Telford Taylor, writing in the New York Times Magazine—“is that a crime is not committed only against the victim but primarily against the community whose law is violated.” The wrongdoer is brought to justice because his act has disturbed and gravely endangered the community as a whole, and not because, as in civil suits, damage has been

done to individuals who are entitled to reparation.

If genocide is an actual possibility of the future, then no people on earth—least of all, of course, the Jewish people, in Israel or elsewhere—can feel reasonably sure of its continued existence without the help and the protection of international law.

Numerous events since Arendt wrote those words (such as the international community’s passiveness in the face of the genocide in Rwanda, for example) have undermined the idea of international law. Far from being an unreachable blessing, an international tribunal governed by international law would be a catastrophe that humanity has thus far managed to avoid.