Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

by Hannah Arendt

When Adolf Eichmann was brought to trial in Jerusalem, the eyes of the world were on the courtroom. The drama of his kidnapping, the bitter controversies over jurisdiction, the scope and solemnity of the trial, its passionate undercurrents, racial and political - all these caught the imagination of mankind. But as week succeeded week and the courtroom drama ebbed and flowed, excitement was replaced by bewilderment. What were the issues? For what was Eichmann being tried? Under what law? By what precedent? The world was puzzled, and yet the world's first intuition had been right: an event of unique importance was taking place.

For Dr. Arendt, the theatrical courtroom and the performance staged there, with its unexpected villains and buffoons, were only a beginning. With a directness and power of analysis that will inevitably remind the reader of Rebecca West's The Meaning of Treason, she goes straight to the issues at stake, ruthlessly dismissing the rhetoric and the bluster. To this task she brings unmatched qualifications. Her knowledge of Germany and the Germans enables her to penetrate beneath the surface to the subterranean forces that shaped the trial. Her command of politics and philosophy, her study of the Nuremberg trials and the Successor trials make it possible for her to isolate the points of international law and human justice raised in Jerusalem and valid throughout the world. The New Yorker, which sent her to the trial, has serialized this report - a report that not only expounds brilliantly the actual work carried out by Eichmann and the context in which he did it, but by its deeper analysis marks a step forward in the exploration of the human condition.

Genres: Nonfiction, Politics, History, Philosophy, Classics, Holocaust

312 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1964

About the author

Hannah Arendt (1906 – 1975) was one of the most influential political philosophers of the twentieth century. Born into a German-Jewish family, she was forced to leave Germany in 1933 and lived in Paris for the next eight years, working for a number of Jewish refugee organisations. In 1941 she immigrated to the United States and soon became part of a lively intellectual circle in New York. She held a number of academic positions at various American universities until her death in 1975. She is best known for two works that had a major impact both within and outside the academic community. The first, The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951, was a study of the Nazi and Stalinist regimes that generated a wide-ranging debate on the nature and historical antecedents of the totalitarian phenomenon. The second, The Human Condition, published in 1958, was an original philosophical study that investigated the fundamental categories of the vita activa (labor, work, action). In addition to these two important works, Arendt published a number of influential essays on topics such as the nature of revolution, freedom, authority, tradition and the modern age. At the time of her death in 1975, she had completed the first two volumes of her last major philosophical work, The Life of the Mind, which examined the three fundamental faculties of the vita contemplativa (thinking, willing, judging).

Reviews

[Darwin8u · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is amazing. In it, Arendt struggles with three major issues: 1) the guilt and evil of the ordinary, bureaucratic, obedient German people (like Eichmann) who contributed to the attempted genocide of the Jewish people, 2) the complicity of some jews in the genocide (through organization, mobilization, passive obedience, and negotiations with the Nazis, 3) the logical absurdity the Eichmann and Nuremberg Trials, etc.

In this book (and the original 'New Yorker' essays it came from) Hannah Arendt isn't going for easy, cliché answers. She isn't asking rhetorical or weightless questions. While some of her positions might not be fully supportable, the very act of asking tough questions (that don't fall into easy boxes) is a gift to humanity. Arendt's tactic of giving no one an automatic free pass, while also not allowing people like Eichmann to become cartoonish characters of evil, allows her the room to push the idea that the potential for evil exists not just in dark, scary places, but in well-lit, and very efficient bureaucracies and we all (even Israel) might be asked to push or pull a lever if we aren't paying close attention.

[Michael Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

[TODO: A good account of the trial of Eichmann in Jerusalem. Very good take on the legal matters; surprisingly difficult to convict and even to bring to trial a person who was a primary perpetrator of a genocide. Timely topic: Rwanda, Kosovo, Sudan. Good discussion about Eichmann's character; banality of evil. Somewhat coarse: factual role of other nations and of the Jewish collaborators. Controversial: the roles these should have played; the claim that with enough resistance the Holocaust would not have happened, or it would have been reduced at least tenfold.]

[Cat · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m recommending this to everyone I know at the moment. I’m in awe of how Arendt makes every point so clearly and precisely. Her theory feels terrifyingly relevant.
Also, I was surprised by how much history it taught me. Not only about the holocaust itself but as a snapshot of its aftermath in the 60s.

[Tentatively, Convenience · Rating 5 out of 5]

review of
Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jersulalem - A Report on the Banality of Evil
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - January , 2012

I haven't previously read anything by Arendt but I'm sure that I'm far from the 1st to remark that she's an astonishingly rigorous & painstaking scholar & critic who 'spares no-one' in her analysis. One of the ironies of her depth didn't, however, become apparent to me until I reached page 122 where she writes:

"Much of the horribly painstaking thoroughness in the execution of the Final Solution - a thoroughness that usually strikes the observer as typically German, or else as characteristic of the perfect bureaucrat - can be traced to the odd notion, indeed very common in Germany, that to be law-abiding means not merely to obey the laws but to act as though one were the legislator of the laws that one obeys. Hence the conviction that nothing less than going beyond the call of duty will do."

& this is, indeed, a great way to describe Arendt's thoroughness in her fairness & comprehensiveness in this bk. Arendt deliberately goes further than the court does in Eichmann's trial (at least according to her own report) - both in her analysis of Eichmann's apparently peculiar vulnerableness to expression thru cliché & 'euphemism' (a nazi specialty) & in the court's (alas, understandable) avoidance of elucidation of Jewish cooperation in the genocide of their own people.

I decided to read this b/c I'm currently making an ambitious sampling movie called Robopaths culling from an abundance of sources that basically reinforce my not-particularly original contention that robopaths [people who follow orders w/o any internal free-thinking resistance] enable the genocidal plans of megalomaniacs. & as one of the main texts that I'll be extensively quoting from in Robopaths, I cd've hardly picked a more relevant source.

Reading Eichmann in Jersulalem makes me re-realize why I've found the lifestyles of punk anarchists so strikingly 'valid'. It seems to me that many punks have learned a particular lesson of Nazi Germany & Imperialist America & Britain (etc) well - even if often mainly intuitively: viz: that ALL nations & other entities that oppressively shape a group identity have to be resisted from the inside w/o being so naive as to think that "it can't happen here" (as Sinclair Lewis &, later, Frank Zappa, satirized). In other words, if Nazi Germany had had a resistance culture like anarchistic punk built into it more than maybe there wdn't've been so many Good Germans who 'went w/ the p(r)ogram'.

Unfortunately, Nazi Germany probably did have "a resistance culture like anarchistic punk built into it": viz: cabaret culture & what the nazis called Entartete Kunst und Musik (degenerate art & music) &, alas, it wasn't strong enuf to withstand the shocking tide of Hitler's methamphetamine-fueled mania & the average German's lazy willingness to be lead into sado-masochistic obedience. An obedience that psychologist Stanley Milgram researched later w/ great clarity in the USA w/ more-or-less identical results that the nazis got: IT CAN (& does) HAPPEN HERE. Fortunately, Milgram's intentions were cautionary - but I'm sure that many führers in the USA (governmental, religious, military) have taken note of how this caution cd be thrown out w/ other 'undesirables'.

Nonetheless, let's keep in mind that it's mainly governments (& big businesses) that're capable of appropriating, accumulating, & coordinating resources on such a large scale that tanks & trains & fighter planes can be made - & that such a process is dependent on the enforced cooperation of large numbers of people. DIY culture, on the other hand, is much smaller scale & more dependent on individual initiative &, hence, on individuality. It's my hope that such DIY culture is much less likely to be prone to the robopathia that made Nazi Germany so rapidly effective in its genocide. Maybe that's just wishful thinking insofar as Fundamentalist Islam seems to be pretty handy w/ total conformity combined w/ the individual initiative of IEMs (Improvised Explosive Devices). Fundamentalist USA doesn't have to have much individualized initiative since it's already got a big connection to mainstream power's control of resources.

At the risk of providing a Reader's Digest Condensed Book version of Eichmann in Jersulalem, I provide the following quotes that I've chosen as possible text for my movie Robopaths. Please don't read these & feel like you don't 'need' to read the entire Arendt bk. READ IT FROM COVER-TO-COVER! It's too important to neglect.

"Sixteen years ago, while still under the direct impact of the events, David Rousset, a former inmate of Buchenwald, described what we know happened in all concentration camps: "The triumph of the S.S. demands that the tortured victim allow himself to be lead to the noose without protesting, that he renounce and abandon himself to the point of ceasing to affirm his identity. And it is not for nothing. It is not gratuitously, out of sheer sadism, that the S.S. men desire his defeat. They know that the system which succeeds in destroying its victim before he mounts the scaffold . . . is incomparably the best for keeping a whole people in slavery. In submission, Nothing is more terrible than these processions of human beings going like dummies to their deaths" (Les Jours de notre mort, 1947)." - page 9

"Would he 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." What he had done he had done, he did not want to deny it; rather, he proposed "to hang myself in public as warning example for all anti-Semites on this earth." By this he did not mean to say that he regretted anything: "Repentance is for little children." (Sic!)" - page 21

"According to his religious beliefs, which had not changed since the Nazi period (in Jerusalem he declared himself to be a Gottgläubiger, the Nazi term for those who had broken with Christianity, and he refused to take his oath on the Bible), this event was to be ascribed to "a higher Bearer of Meaning," an entity somehow identical with the "movement of the universe," to which human life, in itself devoid of "higher meaning," is subject. (The terminology is quite suggestive. To call God a Höheren Sinnesträger meant linguistically to give him some place in the military hierarchy [..]" - pages 23-24

"Before Eichmann entered the Party and the S.S., he had proved that he was a joiner, and May 8, 1945, the official date of Germany's defeat, was significant for him mainly because it then dawned upon him that thenceforward he would have to live without being a member of something or other. "I sensed I would have to lead a leaderless and difficult individual life, I would receive no directives from anybody, no orders and commands would any longer be issued to me, no pertinent ordinances would be there to consult - in brief, a life never known before lay before me."" - page 28

"Dimly aware of a defect that must have plagued him even in school - it amounted to a mild case of aphasia - he apologized, saying, "Officialese [Amtssprache] is my only language." 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? [..] )" - pages 43-44

"It was not until the outbreak of the war, on September 1, 1939, that the Nazi regime became openly totalitarian and openly criminal. [..] All officials of the police, not only of the Gestapo but also of the Criminal Police and the Order Police, received S.S. titles corresponding to their previous ranks, regardless of whether or not they were Party members, and this meant that in the space of a day a most important part of the old civil services was incorporated into the most radical section of the Nazi hierarchy. No one, as far as I know, protested, or resigned his job." - page 63

"This "objective" attitude - talking about concentration camps in terms of "administration" and about extermination camps in terms of "economy" - was typical of the S.S. mentality, and something Eichmann, at the trial, was still very proud of." - pages 63-64

"Apart from the not very important industrial enterprises of the S.S., such famous German firms as I.G. Farben, the Krupp Werke, and Siemens-Schuckert Werke has established plants in Auschwitz as well as near the Lublin death camps. Cooperation between the S.S. and the businessmen was excellent; Höss of Auschwitz testified to very cordial social relations with the I.G. Farben representatives. As for working conditions, the idea was clearly to kill through labor; according to Hilberg, at least twenty-five thousand of the approximately thirty-five thousand Jews who worked for one of the I.G. Farben plants died." - pages 73-74

"Thus, for instance, a high official in the Foreign Office once proposed that in all correspondence with the Vatican the killing of Jews be called the "radical solution"; this was ingenious, because the Catholic puppet government of Slovakia, with which the Vatican had intervened, had not been, in the view of the Nazis, "radical enough" in its anti-Jewish legislation, having committed the "basic error" of excluding baptized Jews." - page 80

"The member of the Nazi hierarchy most gifted at solving problems of conscience was Himmler. He coined slogans, like the famous watchword of the S.S., taken froma Hitler speech before the S.S. in 1931, "My Honor is my Loyalty" - ctach phrases which Eichmann called "winged words" and the judges "empty talk" - and issued them, as Eichmann recalled, "around the turn of the year," presumably along with a Christmas bonus. Eichmann remembered only one of them and kept repeating it: "These are battles which future generations will not have to fight again," alluding to the "battles" against women, children, old people, and other "useless mouths." Other such phrases, taken from speeches Himmler made to the commanders of the Einsatzgruppen and the higher S.S. and Police Leaders, were: "To have stuck it out and, apart from exceptions caused by human weakness, to have remained decent, that is what has made us hard. [..]"" - page 92

"None of the various "language rules," carefully contrived to deceive and to camouflage, had a more decisive effect on the mentality of the killers than this first war decree of Hitler, in which the word for "murder" was replaced by the phrase "to grant a mercy death." Eichmann, asked by the police examiner if the directive to avoid "unnecessary hardships" was not a bit ironic, in view of the fact that the destination of these people was certain death anyhow, did not even understand the question, so firmly was it still anchored in his mind that the unforgivable sin was not to kill people but to cause unnecessary pain. During the trial, he showed unmistakable signs of sincere outrage when witnesses told of cruelties and atrocities committed by S.S. men [..] and it was not the accusation of having sent millions of people to their death that ever caused him real agitation but only the accusation (dismissed by the court) of one witness that he had once beaten a Jewish boy to death." - page 96

"The story is told by Count Hans von Lehnsdorff, in his Ostpressisches Tagebuch (1961). He had remained in the city [Königsberb, in East Prussia, Germany, in January, 1945] as a physician to take care of wounded soldiers who could not be evacuated [..] There he was accosted by a woman who showed him a varicose vein she had had for years but wanted to have treated now, because she had time. "I try to explain that it is more important for her to get away from Königsberg and to leave the treatment for some later time. Where do you want to go? I ask her. She does not know, but she knows that they will all be brought into the Reich. And then she adds, surprisingly: 'The Russians will never get us. The Führer will never admit it. Much sooner he will gas us.' I look around furtively, but no one seems to find this statement out of the ordinary." The story, one feels, like most true stories, is incomplete. There should have been one more voice, preferably a female one, which, sighing heavily, replied: And now all that good, expensive gas has been wasted on the Jews!" - page 98

"The legal experts drew up the necessary legislation for making the victims stateless, which was important on two counts: it made it impossible for any country to inquire into their fate, and it enabled the state in which they were resident to confiscate theit property. The Ministry of Finance and the Reichsbank prepared facilities to receive the huge loot from all over Europe, down to watches and gold teeth, all of which was sorted out in the Reichsbank and then sent on to the Prussian State Mint. The Ministry of Transport provided the necessary railroad cars, usually freight cars, even in times of great scarcity of rolling stock, and they saw to it that the schedule of the deportation trains did not conflict with other timetables. the Jewish Council of Elders were informed by Eichmann or his men of how many Jews were needed to fill each train, and they made out the list of deportees. The Jews registered, filled out innumerable forms, answered pages and pages of questionnaires regarding their property so that it could be seized the more easily; then they assembled at the collection points and boarded the trains. The few who tried to hide to hide to escape were rounded up by a special Jewish police force. As far as Eichmann could see, no one protested, no one refused to cooperate." - page 102

"What he fervently believed in up to the end was success, the chief standard of "good society" as he knew it. Typical was his last word on the subject of Hitler - whom he and his comrade Sassen had agreed to "shirr out" of their story; Hitler, he said, "may have been wrong all down the line, but one thing is beyond dispute: the man was able to work his way up from lance corporal in the German Army to Führer of a people of almost eighty million. . . . His success alone proved to me that I should subordinate myself to this man." His conscience was indeed set at rest when he saw the zeal and eagerness with which "good society" everywhere reacted as he did. He did not need to "close his ears to the voice of conscience," as the judgment had it, not because he had none, but because his conscience spoke with a "respectable voice," with the voice of respectable society around him." - pages 111-112

[Kyra Boisseree · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well, I didn't expect to enjoy this book, but I still think it was good. Emotionally exhausting though. It's easy to see why it's so controversial, but I don't think it was terrible. I'm still glad I read it, and I think it will be useful for my thesis.

[Steven H · Rating 5 out of 5]

A CONTROVERSIAL YET PERCEPTIVE COMMENTARY ON THE WAR CRIMINAL’S JERUSALEM TRIAL

Author Hannah Arendt wrote in the ‘Note to the Reader’: “This is a revised and enlarged edition of the book which first appeared in May, 1963. I covered the Eichmann trial at Jerusalem in 1961 for The New Yorker, where this account, slightly abbreviated, was originally published in February and March, 1963. The book was written in the summer and fall of 1962… The factual record of the period in question has not yet been established in all its details, and there are certain matters on which an informed guess will probably never be superseded by completely reliable information. Thus the total number of Jewish victims of the Final Solution is a guess---between four and a half and six million---that has never been verified… Some new material… came to light after the publication of this book but none of it was important for the event as a whole.”

She wrote in the first chapter of this 1963 book, “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 kidnapped in Argentina and brought to the District Court of Jerusalem to stand trial for his role in the ‘final solution of the Jewish question.’ … On trial are his deeds, not the sufferings of the Jews, not the German people or mankind, not even anti-Semitism and racism.” (Pg. 4-5)

She continues, “It is one thing to ferret out criminals and murderers from their hiding places, and it is another thing to find them prominent and flourishing in the public realm---to encounter innumerable men in the federal and state administrations and, generally, in PUBLIC office whose careers had bloomed under the Hitler regime.” (Pg. 17)

She reports, “His lawyer… [said] in a press interview: ‘Eichmann feels guilty before God, not before the law.’ … 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… that it had been his duty to obey and that… he had committed acts ‘for which you are decorated if you win and go to the gallows if you lose.’” (Pg. 21-22)

She notes, “Bragging was the vice that was Eichmann’s undoing. It was sheer rodomontade that 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… on my conscience gives me extraordinary satisfaction.’ … But… 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.” (Pg. 46-48)

She reports, “Heydrich opened his interview with Eichmann with ‘a little speech about emigration’ … and then said: ‘The Führer has ordered the physical extermination of the Jews.’ … I was unable to grasp the significance of what he had said… and then I understood, and didn’t say anything, because there was nothing to say any more.” (Pg. 83)

She notes that “all correspondence referring to the matter was subject to rigid ‘language rules,’ and, except in the reports from the Einsatzgruppen, it is rare to find documents in which such bald words as ‘extermination,’ ‘liquidation,’ or ‘killing’ occur. The prescribed code names for killing were ‘final solution,’ ‘evacuation’… and ‘special treatment’… deportation… received the names of ‘resettlement’ and ‘labor in the East’… the point of these latter names being that Jews were indeed often temporarily used for labor.” (Pg. 85)


She explains, “The fact is that Eichmann did not see much. It is true, he repeatedly visited Auschwitz… but Auschwitz … was by no means only an extermination camp; it was a huge enterprise with … all kinds of prisoners… including non-Jews and slave laborers… [Höss] spared him the gruesome sights. He never actually attended a mass execution by shooting, he never actually watched the gassing process, or the selection of those fit for work… He saw just enough to be fully informed of how the destruction machinery worked… The facts of the case, of what Eichmann had done---were never in dispute; they had been established long before the trial started, and had been confessed to by him over and over again.” (Pg. 89-90)

She states, “The Führer’s order for the extermination of all, not only Russian and Polish, Jews… can be traced much farther back. It originated … [in] Hitler’s personal office. It had nothing to do with the war and never used military necessities as a pretext.” (Pg. 107)

She argues, “the Jerusalem trial failed to put before the eyes of the world … its true dimensions, because it offers the most striking insight into the totality of the moral collapse the Nazis caused in respectable European society… Eichmann, in contrast to other elements in the Nazi movement had always been overawed by ‘good society,’ and the politeness he often showed to German-speaking Jewish functionaries was to a large extent the result of his recognition that he was dealing with people who were socially his superiors.” (Pg. 125-126)

She says, “The case of the conscience of Adolf Eichmann… is scarcely comparable to the … German generals, one of whom … at Nuremberg… replied that it was ‘not the task of a soldier to act as judge over his supreme commander. Let history do that or God in heaven.’ … This is also the true reason why the Führer’s order for the Final Solution was followed by a huge number of regulations and directives, all drafted by expert lawyers… [which] served most effectively to give the whole business the outward appearance of legality.” (Pg. 149-150)

She recounts, “Eichmann claimed more than once that … [he] had in fact helped his victims; it had made their fate easier. If this thing had to be done at all, he argued, it was better that it be done in good order. During the trial no one, not even counsel for the defense, paid any attention to this claim, which was obviously in the same category as his foolish … contention that he had saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of Jews through ‘forced emigration.’” (Pg. 190)

She notes, “The prosecution, bas[ed] its case upon sufferings that were not a bit exaggerated… the judgment of the Court of Appeal was handed down, in which one could read: ‘It was a fact 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.’” (Pg.. 210) Later, she adds, “If the judges had cleared Eichmann completely on these counts connected with the hair-raising stories told over and over by witnesses at the trial, they would not have arrived at a different judgment of guilt, and Eichmann would not have escaped capital punishment. The result would have been the same. But they would have destroyed utterly, and without compromise, the case as the prosecution presented it.” (Pg. 219)

She summarizes, “the lesson … is simple and within everybody’s grasp. 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.”(Pg. 233)

She points out, “it was Eichmann’s de facto statelessness, and nothing else, that enabled the Jerusalem court to sit in judgment on him… 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 would 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. In fact, he had made none.” (Pg. 241)

She acknowledges, “Israel had indeed violated the territorial principle… This, unhappily, was the only almost unprecedented feature in the whole Eichmann trial, and certainly it was the least entitled ever to become a valid precedent. (What are we going to say if tomorrow it occurs to some African state to send its agents into Mississippi and to kidnap one of the leaders of the segregationist movement there?) … Its justification was the unprecedentedness of the crime and the coming into existence of a Jewish State. There were, moreover, important mitigating circumstances… Argentina had an impressive record for NOT extraditing Nazi criminals.” (Pg. 264)

She summarizes, “Had the court in Jerusalem understood that there were distinctions between discrimination, expulsion, and genocide, it would immediately have become clear that the supreme crime it was confronted with, the physical extermination of the Jewish people, was a crime against humanity… Insofar as the victims were Jews, it was right and proper that a Jewish court should sit in judgment; but insofar as it was a crime against humanity, it needed an international tribunal to do justice to it.” (Pg. 269)

She admits, “I also can well imagine that an authentic controversy might have arisen over the subtitle of the book; for when I speak of the banality of evil, I do so only on the strictly factual level, pointing to a phenomenon which stared one in the face at the trial.. Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all. And this diligence in itself was in no way [exceptional]; he certainly would never have murdered his superior in order to inherit his post. He ‘merely,’ to put the matter colloquially, ‘never realized what he was doing.’ It was precisely this lack of imagination which enabled him to sit for months on end facing a German Jew who was conducting the police interrogation… In principle he knew quite well what it was all about, and in his final statement to the court he spoke of the ‘revaluation of values prescribed by the [Nazi] government.’ He was not stupid. It was sheer thoughtlessness… that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period. And if this is ‘banal’ and even funny, if with the best will in the world one cannot extract any diabolical or demonic profundity from Eichmann, that is still far from calling it commonplace…. That such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together which, perhaps, are inherent in man---that was, in fact, the lesson one could learn in Jerusalem.” (Pg. 287-288)

She concludes, “the question of individual guilt or innocence, the act of meting out justice to both the defendant and the victim, are the only things at stake in a criminal court. The Eichmann trial was no exception, even though the court here was confronted with a crime it could not find in the lawbooks and with a criminal whose like was unknown in any court, at least prior to the Nuremberg Trials. The present report deals with nothing but the extent to which the court in Jerusalem succeeded in fulfilling the demands of justice.” (Pg. 298)

This book is ‘must reading’ for anyone interested in the Eichmann trial, but also to the fate of Nazis-in-hiding after the Nuremberg Trials were over.

[Alan Wightman · Rating 4 out of 5]

A serious and detailed account of the 1962 trial in which Adolf Eichmann stood accused of crimes against humanity and specifically against the Jewish people. In such an extraordinary trial there were naturally many interesting and controversial points and Arendt seems to deal with them in a neutral and fair-minded way.

The first controversial element of the trial, although dealt with in detail near the end of the book, is the method of Eichmann's arrival in Jerusalem - kidnapped by Israeli agents in Buenos Aires and brought to Israel without the consent (or possibly the knowledge) of the Argentine authorities. Despite the kidnapping being of little surprise to Eichmann, indeed little resisted by him, and it receiving the retrospective consent of Argentina, it was not an auspicious preface to a trial about justice. If indeed justice to the defendant was the aim. For it is Arendt's viewpoint that the aim of Israel's prime minister and attorney general (who was lead prosecutor) was less to do with the defendant, and more to do with putting the whole of Jewish suffering in the Second World War on display. In short, a show trial.

The prosecution firstly called a huge number of witnesses to (undisputed) Jewish suffering, most of which had little to do with Eichmann - a procedure that would not be allowed in an ordinary criminal trial - and then attempted to portray Eichmann as chief architect and executor of the Final Solution. Whereas Arendt argues that Eichmann was in fact only a man of average intellect, not especially evil, with an interest mostly only in the progression of his career, and a tendency to boast and exaggerate his achievements. Indeed Eichmann reached only the equivalent rank of Lt Colonel in the SS. His great skill, it would appear, lay in organisation; for putting aside its immorality, the transport of millions of people from across much of Europe to death camps mostly in Poland, in the midst of a world war, sometimes with competition from other departments of the Reich is a challenging operation, successfully executed, and Eichmann appears to have been its major administrator.

There are some mitigating factors - Eichmann was a Zionist, who believed in the emigration of Jews to Israel, and was attempting to forcibly expel them, rather than eliminate them, before the implementation of the Final Solution circa 1941. He was not, it would appear, an anti-Semite, at a time when anti-Semetism was rife in Europe and not just, one suspects, within the Axes powers.

There is little doubt that he was simply following orders but also little doubt that he knew the fate to which he was dispatching the Jews (and others). The uncomfortable conclusion is that many, perhaps most people, put in Eichmann's position would have acted similarly to him. Therein lies the crux of the second part of the book's title. Arendt asks does the idea that so many of us would have acted as Eichmann did excuse him of his crime, or remove our right to judge him? And Arendt concludes no, the three judges (whom she mostly praises) were perfectly within their moral rights (legal rights is a much murkier matter) to give judgement.

[Gigi Beridze · Rating 4 out of 5]

FIRST, I THOUGHT TO ASSESS THE BOOK WITH THREE STARS, WHICH COULD BE UNJUST SINCE IT IS QUITE GOOD PIECE TO READ, WITH SMART REMARKS AND PERFECT FACTUAL INTERVENTIONS. HOWEVER, THE REASON WHY I WOULD MURMUR TO MYSELF, HEY DUDE, JUST PUT THREE STARS ON THAT CLASSIC, IS THAT BANALITY OF EVIL IS NOW CLEARLY VISIBLE IN GAZA AND NOW THOSE ISRAELI WOMEN, MEN, AND YOUTH, WHO DEFINETELY ARE NICE PERSONS AMONG THEIR FRIENDS/RELATIVES AND TECHNICALLY, MOST OF THEM ARE GOOD PEOPLE ONE ON ONE, ARE BEHAVING AS SIMILARY AS THOSE HANGMEN OF THEIR ANCESTORS 80 YEARS AGO.

EVEN MORE, I DID NOT LIKE MENTIONING OF ARABS BY ARENDT, WHEN THE BOOK WAS ABOUT NAZIS, I UNDERSTAND THAT PALESTINIAN ARABS AND HEBREW PEOPLE ARE MUTUALLY HATEFUL, HOWEVER, THE ONE WHO IS MORE POWERFUL BEARS MORE RESPONSIBILITY, AS THE UNCLE BEN HAS ONCE TOLD PETER PARKER

[Sohum · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading this book is a minor struggle but Arendt here is more accessible than usual. She makes numerous reasonable, or one might say, rational points on law and human guilt. She even makes a good point about the communal harms the criminal trial intends to address. But I am not convinced of much more than her own rationality in her inability to truly grapple with, of course, the irrational nature and impacts of the Shoah as led by Eichmann and his company. Rationality and banality as cousins, but no more than that.

[Juliana Leyva · Rating 5 out of 5]

Acompanhar o julgamento de um nazista por meio das palavras da Hannah Arendt, numa obra que teve tamanho impacto, é muito interessante.
Percebemos o papel da linguagem, da medriocridade e do contexto para perpetuação de absurdos contra a vida das pessoas.