Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

Simply magnificent. Arendt uses the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem as a platform for examining the evil behind the Holocaust and the level of responsibility held by each faction of the conflict. She is absolutely uncompromising in her examination of the responsible parties, giving nobody, not even the Jews themselves, a free pass. Her discussions of the situations in Denmark and Bulgaria are particularly revealing, and even inspiring. The skill Arendt possesses in ignoring all of the trivialities of a situation in order to penetrate to the deeper and profoundly relevant truths is astounding. Her portrait of Eichmann is shocking, not because she shows that his crimes were due to his inherent monstrosity but rather because she show more higlights the incredible thoughtlessness that allowed him to shirk any conceivable pangs of conscience. show less

I've read two by Hannah Arendt previously—On Violence, which I think I enjoyed, and The Origins of Totalitarianism, which I couldn't finish. However, a recent book I read about humanist Zionism mentioned this book as an inspiration—so I picked it up because I've been obsessed with learning more about the creation of Israel, the holocaust, and Judaism in general. Someone worded my journey as “reading history through the lens of identity,” and I like that.
My grandparents were Holocaust survivors. After the war, they tried to return home, only to find their land taken and their neighbors hostile. With emigration to the U.S. and Canada heavily restricted, they attempted to reach Palestine but were turned away and ended up in Germany show more for a time before eventually settling in the U.S. I could’ve been born a Sabra. And if I had, I would’ve understood why my grandparents made the decision they did—while also opposing the ongoing genocide committed by my people.
Adolph Eichmann (if you don't know who he is, go read some history) was captured (or “kidnapped”) in Argentina, around twenty years after the war ended, and put on trial in Jerusalem. Hannah Arendt was a reporter at the time, and covered the trial, eventually putting it all together into a fascinating book. I wasn't able to read the whole book because my copy had a 30+ page printing error that made it unreadable.
Eichmann was a weird dude, and I'm glad I got to learn more about him for many different reason. For starters, he didn't seem to be a monster. How could a man who was responsible for that many horrible deaths not be a monster? Well, he loved and needed structure (he was German, after all) and joining the military provided him with this in abundance; he was all about following those orders, even if it meant going against his consciousness. Also, he claimed to love Jews and from the evidence presented I believe that he believed that. He considered himself a zionist, had many Jewish friends, tried to help some escape, and was obsessed with all things Jewish; pretty weird for a dude who did what he did, but as he said, he would have killed his own father if he was so ordered. I found these facts most interesting when I compared them to the modern white supremacist MAGA movement.
Personally, I'm glad Eichmann was taken off this planet, but Israel went about it in a weird way. It's true that too many former Nazis got off far too easy, but Israel's reason for doing what they did is very zionist. They claimed that only a Jewish court could render justice to Jews, and used the trial (as they also often use genocide) to claim that Jews were too meek (sound familiar?) and this would help them be heroes. Arendt didn't go too deeply into this, but it's not hard to see the zionist mythmaking involved. Again, I have no problem with any means used to kill this piece of shit, but using it to justify the founding of a genocidal state doesn't sit well with me. Vengeance is a slippery slope.
The main reason I'm not complaining about Israel seeking justice in the way they did is because of the lack of response from the rest of the world. Germany put a few former nazis on trial, but it was a joke: in one example a man was convicted of 6,280 women and children. His sentence: six years and six months in prison. There were countries like Argentina, where little nazi communities sprung up because of the refusal of the government to do anything. Even worse, the US and USSR both gave former nazis immunity for their help in scientific matters.
Perhaps the most controversial part of this book (not by my standards) is Arendt's criticism of her people for selling out their own communities, helping the Germans commit genocide, and being assholes to one another. Personally I have no idea why this is controversial: the Germans would not have been able to do what they did without the overwhelming help of Jewish Councils. These “important” Jews existed in every community and help feed the nazi death machine by handing over the people they were supposed to be looking out for. Then, once in camps, it was mostly fellow Jews who were Kapos and the ones who gassed the inmates and were often more cruel to each other than the nazis were. Finally, there was the division within the oppressed—the fact that Jews from western Europe judged Jews from the east; that Jews living in the place they were born, treated refugee Jews like second class citizens; rich Jews hating on poor Jews; and more.
This isn't much different than the situation we're in today. I don't know how many times I've been called a self-hating Jew or not a real Jew because I don't support my people destroying an entire nation just to feel some fake sense of security. We also see this in the middle and lower classes of all groups—the upper class (who have hella class solidarity) convince the rest of us that Mexicans are coming here to steal our jobs or Black people are criminals, in order to stop us from uniting and taking them down.
Speaking of comparisons, there are so many between 1940s Germany and 2020s US. The way the Germans (and other shitty countries like Hungary, Romania, and Greece) spoke about the Jews as being immigrants and invading their countries sounds exactly like what we're hearing today about non-white people in the US. The amount of people who have loyalty not to their home or a specific political party, but to their leader is the same as it was. Snatching people off of the streets, threatening to invade and take over other countries, and the slow crawl to fascism are some more things that should be raising alarms for everyone.
Something Arendt heard a lot when talking of residents of the countries affected by this is that most of the residents didn't think that something like that could happen “here.” This is also something I've heard from my grandparents and other survivors—they saw what was happening or heard rumors but either refused to believe them or figured they were safe where they were. It reminds me of a podcast called It Could Happen Here, the premise of which is that if we're aware of the possibility of war or genocide or fascism, it will be less likely to happen.
I see why this book is important, even if it was misprinted and not quite what I expected. Arendt forces readers—especially Jews like me—to sit with deeply uncomfortable truths: that complicity isn’t limited to villains, that fascism doesn’t look like evil at first, and that none of us are immune. It’s not a perfect book, but I’m better for having read it. show less

Evil, as [Hannah Arendt] saw it, need not be committed only by demonic monsters but – with disastrous effect – by morons and imbeciles as well, especially if, as we see in our own day, their deeds are sanctioned by religious authority. [pg. xi, from the introduction by Amos Elon]


This is an important book. That this book is not taught in high schools across the country seems to be a severe oversight on the part of the U.S. education system. That aside, the exploration of the personality of a man responsible for one of the greatest (and unfortunately not the first nor the last) crimes against humanity is fascinating and terrifying because of his lack of imagination, averageness, and banality. It was all just another day at the office show more for him.


He [Eichmann] had no time and less desire to be properly informed [about the Nazi party], he did not even know the Party program, he never read Mein Kampf. Kaltenbrunner had said to him: 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. [pg.33]


The book consists of a long and very interesting introduction (by the late Amos Elon, Israeli journalist and author), the main text documenting the trial and Adolf Eichmann, an Epilogue that is as dry as they come, and an equally dry but worthwhile Postscript (by Hannah Arendt). You have to take the whole ride for the “banality of evil” to really hit its target and terrify you with all the similarities found in the power elite today. I took my time to read and absorb this one, more time than I usually afford a single work. So, yeah, I cannot recommend this book enough, it is very important to read as it is unfortunately as relevant today as it was in its own time, maybe more so today than in its own time.


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 […] when he told the Jerusalem court that he had not known Hitler’s program he very likely told the truth: “The Party program did not matter, you knew what you were joining.” [pg.43]


Sounds much like MAGA to me. No. I do not think that I’m being hyperbolic. Likewise, the following quote illustrates the similarity between Eichmann’s state of mind (and braggadocio) and Trump (though Eichmann appears to have been much more eloquent):


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.” […] 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 nauseum 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. [pgs.46-48]


[O]fficialese became his language because he was genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché. […] To be sure, the judges were right when they finally told the accused that all he had said was “empty talk” – except that they thought the emptiness was feigned, and that the accused wished to cover up other thoughts which, though hideous, were not empty. This supposition seems refuted by the striking consistency with which Eichmann, despite his rather bad memory, repeated word for word the same stock phrases and self-invented cliches (when he did succeed in constructing a sentence of his own, he repeated it until it became a cliché) each time he referred to an incident or event of importance to him. [pgs.48-49]


And his similarity to Trump’s followers:


“His [Hitler’s] success alone proved to me that I should subordinate myself to this man.” [pg.126]


I have several pages of notes and can go on for probably way too long. So, I hope I have made my case with these quotations from the introduction and main text convincing you to read this book and how it is frighteningly still applicable to the world at large and especially the U.S. today. It does have some very slow and well, very boring, passages, but again, the trip is worth the price in time spent.


Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil. [pg. xiv, from the introduction by Amos Elon] show less

Banal means lacking in originality or boring. It is a fitting description of the Nazis’ imaginations behind the Holocaust. This crime against humanity was so hideous that international laws were created to try those culpable. Adolf Eichmann was among the planners of the “Final Solution” and fled to Argentina. The new state of Israel had to kidnap him in order to bring him to justice in Israeli courts. He never denied the charges against him and was eventually hanged as punishment. In this book, Hannah Arendt analyzes his trial to show how even an “enlightened” country like Germany could fall to such evil.

This report is not an exciting work. Though crimes and wars are often glamorized, she shows how utterly boring they are. She show more further demonstrates how an entire culture can fall prey to hideous evils through pride and an excuse that everybody’s doing it. When humans become only self-interested and driven only by self-promotion, we are capable of ignoring our consciences and our own humanity. In the modern world, individuals must learn to say, “no” and “never again,” instead of just passing the buck to the next person.

I appreciate this book’s insights about how Nazi Germany took shape. Before World War I, Germany was considered to have the leading culture in the world – educationally, ethically, scientifically, and artistically. Yet they fell prey to a nationalism that denied the humanity of those not of the “Aryan race,” whatever that means. If they can fall, anyone can fall.

This account, though heavy throughout, reminds me of the seriousness of national politics. It’s easy in a democracy to look upon our political class as entertainers, not leaders. Often, that entertainment leads to beating up on and “othering” someone else. This story shows how that mistake can happen even to the best and the brightest. It shows how only care and conscience can bring justice and love into the world. show less

Eichmann non fu un mostro, questo emerge dalle corrispondenze della Arendt, che seguì il processo tenuto a Gerusalemme.
Non fu un mostro, eppure fu qualcosa di peggio: una persona qualsiasi, dall'intelligenza mediocre, con la personalità di un gregario, ma soprattutto incapace di esercitare qualsiasi tipo di critica nei confronti del sistema costituito.
Esattamente come molti altri assieme a lui, in quei tempi e anche oggi. Volonterosi carnefici di Hitler, secondo una definizione successiva al libro della Arendt, e volonterosi carnefici al servizi di chiunque dia un atomo di potere a queste persone infinitamente piccole.

Eichmann in Jerusalem is famous for giving us the phrase "the banality of evil". 50+ years on, in the face of a worldwide refugee crisis and official policies of exclusion, denial of services, and child separation that have not yet risen to extermination, this examination of the complicity of one man, a Nazi expert in "Jewish resettlement", remains an important and challenging book.

From the start, Arendt has little sympathy for the juridical theater of David Ben Gurion's statemaking exercise of a trial for Adolf Eichmann. As a refugee herself, a former Zionist, still Jewish, always a philosopher, she sees through the contradictions in the trial. Israel kidnapped Eichmann from Argentina and is trying him retroactively for the crime of show more genocide, rather than any individual murder. The purpose of the trial is not to decide if Eichmann is guilty, it never would have been held if he were not undoubtedly guilty, but to demonstrate Eichmann's guilt to the world, and Israel's new power to advocate for the Jews by proclaiming it. The more important question, for Arendt and for us, is what precisely is Eichmann guilty of?

This book is at it's best when Arendt confronts Eichmann, and tries to probe his essence. He is a small man, unremarkable, totally normal except for the bulletproof glass cage around him. His testimony, thousands of pages of conversation with an Israeli interrogator, reveal a mind incapable of thought, of seeing the world from any viewpoint other than his own. Eichmann misappropriates a German idiom 'winged words' literally meaning 'quotations from the classics' to mean any cliche, and when he utters a sentence in his own words, he repeats it until it is a cliche. A repeated failure in business, Eichmann joined the SS in the early 1930s, where he rose to a middle-rank equivalent to Lt. Colonel. His job was quite literally making sure that the trains ran on time, that the transit between the ghettos and death camps was efficient and organized. He was quite good at it, and his main complaint was that he was never promoted to general.

But Eichmann is only a small part of this book, because he was only a bystander at his own trial. For much of this book is a recapitulation of the epoch-defining crime of the Shoah. Jewish communities across Europe were transported and exterminated, but there were key differences in every province of the Reich in how Jews were rendered stateless and then lifeless, with varying degrees of assistance from local anti-Semites and Jewish leaders. Arendt relies heavily on some contemporary accounts of the Holocaust here. The machinery of death is hard to grasp, both because it is horrific, and because contrary to the common conception of totalitarian as efficient, it was a mess of at least a dozen different agencies working at cross-purposes on their own version of the Holocaust.

Arednt closes the book by gesturing at 'acts of state' as transcending common morality, the Shoah as a crime against the order of nations rather than Jews in particularly, and the vagaries of responsibility in Europeans who have to live with the fact that almost all of them knew at some point, and did all too little to help. But these points are buried under the six million dead.

Evil has no depth. Evil is banal. Evil is mediocre little men who can't think in straight lines. But evil can still kill you dead. show less

It's very hard to see, at this point, what on earth in this book made everyone so angry, and, apparently, still does make everyone so angry. Arendt's argument here (though note that in other places she insists, disingenuously, that she made no argument and just presented the facts) is that ordinary people do evil things ('banality of evil'), that this is best understood in the context of modern bureaucracy, and that the Eichmann trials bear more than a little resemblance to Soviet show trials--with the key difference being that Eichmann deserved to be put on show.

Perhaps what angers people is Arendt's general slipperiness. She extols the impersonality of justice over the personal nature of power, but never seems to worry that show more bureaucratic impersonality and judicial impersonality are uncomfortably similar. She criticizes the Eichmann court for admitting so much irrelevant 'evidence,' in the form of holocaust survivor's testimony--the court, she says, can only judge the moral guilt of a person for their actions, the court is not the place for social theory or wider considerations. And she's right... but her book is not a court, and she uses the "in court we can only judge one person, not a society" argument to avoid dealing with larger historical and social questions (*why* in Germany?)

She has a good reason for this: claiming that 'all are guilty' erases important distinctions between, e.g., Eichmann, and a Hausfrau just trying not to get imprisoned by the SS. Analyzing societies tends to suggest that everyone in the society is guilty to some degree. Therefore analyzing societies would erase the distinction between Eichmann and our Hausfrau.

Arendt wants to think and write about human freedom; she wants to stand against the social-engineering of totalitarian societies; she wants to do this so badly that she simply refuses to engage with the *actually existing* social engineering that goes on even in democratic societies (see: mass media); she refuses to engage with the actually occurring structural forces that shape our world (see: global capitalism).

So although Arendt is, on the one hand, the smartest person in the room (particularly when that is a court-room), she also comes across as stunningly obtuse. She seems to be caught halfway between traditional philosophy (she remained close to and impressed by Karl Jaspers), political theory (obsessed as it is with political freedoms and giving short shrift, all too often, to social issues), and social theory. She seems to have realized that one can't analyze the modern world without social theory, but also to fear it, as if the analysis of social determination was itself social determination, and not a necessary step towards recognizing and overcoming the forces that shape our world.

I don't think this is the only way to hold on to a sense of human freedom, and it's tremendously frustrating to read this brilliant woman--head and shoulders above almost all twentieth century theorists--not engage with the most important intellectual tradition of her time. show less