Eichmann in Jerusalem (Penguin Classics)

A great book which has not fared well. As Eichmann Before Jerusalem shows, Arendt was a little naive in her interpretation of Eichmann, although the banality of the man and the Germans involved in the Holocaust does not mitigate the enormity of their crime.

This is a great book reporting on the Eichmann trial, held in Jerusalem. Arendt provided background information so it helps people that do not have a of of knowledge about the Holocaust. She does occasionally go off topic, but it is still a good read.

Well narrated and rich in pertinent details of an era that even science fiction will have hard time emulating it. Human nature is such that crimes against humanity continue to take place but we seem not to be touched by it and people by the thousands die because of poverty and hunger, specially children. Read carefully the epilogue, it helps to understand the complexity of the legal system vis a vis the moral issues involved. Great book.

The book is full of important historical facts and interpretations, and is well worth the read. However, I must add that Arendt's ability to write a clear sentence is repeatedly challenged. Reading the text was a drudgery.

the final conclusion , that the evil is banal, is outstanding.

It ca be applied to the US policy of killing vietnamese patriots , that fight for his country independence, first from the French, second from the Japanese, finally from the occupation american troops...

The book is beautifully written! It made for a lively discussion. The subject I would not have chosen on my own, but
found it to be one I thought aboutfor awhile after reading it. Penguin is a publisher I choose to read frequently.

I bought this book because it was required for one of my classes. Personally, I found that the style of writing was pretty hard to follow and understand. In general, the sentences are extremely long and several ideas are connected with a string of commas, dashes, and semicolons. However, Arendt makes really great arguments that are definitely worth the time.

This is a very important book, which I discovered so late, but still so important in the contemporary Hollywood world where so many Nazi and Jews victims films are made and viewed annually around the world.

This is a controversial book. I could of read it many times to understand all that the author was saying. I think she was right and wrong in her assessment of Eichmann. The banality of evil is not a monster but an everyday person who gets caught up as a cog in a wheel of a machine. Eichmann was one of an ordinary person who was following a law and not breaking a rule. I disagree with the
portrayal of Eichmann in this book. He was a German Nazi who willingly took actions to murder people that did not fit "The Nazi Aryan Type". While I believe it to be true that there were many Germans that did fit " the banality of evil", Eichmann wasn't one. He knew what he was doing and took pride in his day to day duties of organizing transportation of mostly Jews to their deaths in concentration camps.

Arendt's report on Eichman's trial in Jerusalem is very enlightening and even-handed. Those interested in the psychological makeup of Nazi perpetrators of crimes will see that they were not the average Germans, who in general were well educated, cultured and civilized, quite unlike the members of the Nazi hierarchy. Unfortunately Arendt's writing style is rather poor, which makes for a difficult reading.

Well done & very comprehensive. Wish, however, she would have detailed even more the cooperation of many of the very wealthy Jews & their organizations (so called Jewish leaders) that helped the Nazis organize & carry off the deportations to the death camps. Don't tell me that they didn't know! Many were self serving

Johanna "Hannah" Arendt (1906-1975) was a German-born political theorist, who wrote many books such as Antisemitism: Part One of The Origins of Totalitarianism,Imperialism: Part Two Of The Origins Of Totalitarianism,Totalitarianism: Part Three of The Origins of Totalitarianism,The Life of the Mind,The Human Condition, etc. [NOTE: page numbers below refer to a 312-page paperback edition.]

She stated in the “Note for the Reader”: “This is a revised and enlarged edition of the book which appeared in May, 1963. I covered the Eichmann trial at Jerusalem in 1961 for the New Yorker… The revisions for this edition [1964] concern about a dozen technical errors, none of which has any bearing on the analysis or argument of the original text. 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. This 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, and the same is true of the totals for each of the countries concerned.”

She wrote in the first chapter, “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.’ … Justice demands that the accused be prosecuted, defended, and judged, and that 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 ‘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 [Eichmann’s] deeds, not the suffering of the Jews, not the German people or mankind, not even anti-Semitism and racism.’ (Pg. 4-5)

She asks rhetorically, “Did [Attorney General] 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 anybody 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.” (Pg. 7-8)

She continues, “For it was history that, as far as the prosecution was concerned, stood in the center of the trial… 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.” (Pg. 19)

She points out, “[The prosecution’s] 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.” (Pg. 26-27)

She recounts, “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 … 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.” (Pg. 46-47)

She notes, “Technically and organizationally, Eichmann’s position was not very high; his post turned out to be such an important one only because the Jewish question, for purely ideological reasons, acquired a greater importance with every day and week and month of the war, until, in the years of defeat… it had grown to fantastic proportions. When that happened, his was still the only office that officially dealt with nothing but ‘the opponent, Jewry,’ but in fact he had lost his monopoly, because by then all offices and apparatuses, State and Party, Army and S.S., were busy ‘solving’ that problem.” (Pg. 70-71)

She argues, “The Madagascar plan was always meant to serve as a cloak under which the preparations for the physical extermination of all the Jews of Western Europe could be carried forward (no such cloak was needed for the extermination of Polish Jews!), and its great advantage … was that it familiarized all concerned with the preliminary notion that nothing less than complete evacuation from Europe would do… When, a year later, the Madagascar project was declared to have become ‘obsolete,’ everybody was psychologically, or rather logically, prepared for the next step: since there existed no territory to which one could ‘evacuate,’ the only ‘solution’ was extermination.” (Pg. 76-77)

She acknowledges, “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 up to a hundred thousand inmates, and all kinds of prisoners were held there, including non-Jews and slave laborers, who were not subject to gassing. It was easy to avoid the killing installations, and [Rodolf] Höss, with whom he had a very friendly relationship, 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… and in the camps elaborate precautions were taken to fool the victims right up to the end.” (Pg. 89-90) Later, she adds, “As Eichmann told it, the most potent factor in the soothing of his own conscience was the simple fact that he could see … no one at all, who was actually against the Final Solution.” (Pg. 116)

She records, “as the months and the years went by, [Eichmann] lost the need to feel anything at all. This was the way things were, this was the new law of the land, based on the Führer’s order; whatever he did he did, as far as he could see, as a law-abiding citizen. He did his DUTY, as he told the police and the court over and over again; he not only obeyed ORDERS, he obeyed the LAW. Eichmann had a muddled inkling that this could be an important distinction, but neither the defense nor the judges ever took him up on it.” (Pg. 135)

She summarizes, “And just as the law in civilized countries assumes that the voice of conscience tells everybody, ‘Thou shalt not kill’… so the law in Hitler’s land demanded that the voice of conscience tell everybody: ‘Thou shalt kill,’ although the organizers of the massacre knew full well that murder is against the normal desires and inclinations of most people. Evil in the Third Reich has lost the quality by which most people recognize it---the quality of temptation. Many German and many Nazis, probably an overwhelming majority of them, must have been tempted NOT to murder, NOT to rob, NOT to let their neighbors go off to their doom… and not to become accomplices in all these crimes by benefiting from them. But, God knows, they had learned how to resist temptation.” (Pg. 150)

She observes, “Politically speaking, [the lesson] is that under some conditions or 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)

Of course, her final conclusion is, “Adolf Eichmann went to the gallows with great dignity. He had asked for a bottle of red wine and had drunk half of it. He refused the help of the Protestant minister… who offered to read the Bible with him… ‘I don’t need that,’ he said when the black hood was offered him. He was completely in command of himself… Nothing could have demonstrated this more convincingly than the grotesque silliness of his last words… ‘After a short while, gentlemen, we shall all meet again… Long live Germany, long live Argentina, long live Austria. I shall not forget them.’ … 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.” (Pg: 252)

She adds in the Postscript, “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---this was, in fact, the lesson one could learn in Jerusalem. But it was a lesson, neither an explanation of the phenomenon nor a theory about it.” (Pg. 288)

This is a frightening, highly insightful account not just of the trial, but of the events surrounding it. It will be “must reading” for anyone studying the Holocaust , the Nazi regime, and Fascism.

Johanna "Hannah" Arendt (1906-1975) was a German-born political theorist, who wrote many books such as Antisemitism: Part One of The Origins of Totalitarianism,Imperialism: Part Two Of The Origins Of Totalitarianism,Totalitarianism: Part Three of The Origins of Totalitarianism,The Life of the Mind,The Human Condition, etc. [NOTE: page numbers below refer to a 312-page paperback edition.]

She stated in the “Note for the Reader”: “This is a revised and enlarged edition of the book which appeared in May, 1963. I covered the Eichmann trial at Jerusalem in 1961 for the New Yorker… The revisions for this edition [1964] concern about a dozen technical errors, none of which has any bearing on the analysis or argument of the original text. 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. This 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, and the same is true of the totals for each of the countries concerned.”

She wrote in the first chapter, “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.’ … Justice demands that the accused be prosecuted, defended, and judged, and that 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 ‘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 [Eichmann’s] deeds, not the suffering of the Jews, not the German people or mankind, not even anti-Semitism and racism.’ (Pg. 4-5)

She asks rhetorically, “Did [Attorney General] 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 anybody 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.” (Pg. 7-8)

She continues, “For it was history that, as far as the prosecution was concerned, stood in the center of the trial… 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.” (Pg. 19)

She points out, “[The prosecution’s] 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.” (Pg. 26-27)

She recounts, “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 … 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.” (Pg. 46-47)

She notes, “Technically and organizationally, Eichmann’s position was not very high; his post turned out to be such an important one only because the Jewish question, for purely ideological reasons, acquired a greater importance with every day and week and month of the war, until, in the years of defeat… it had grown to fantastic proportions. When that happened, his was still the only office that officially dealt with nothing but ‘the opponent, Jewry,’ but in fact he had lost his monopoly, because by then all offices and apparatuses, State and Party, Army and S.S., were busy ‘solving’ that problem.” (Pg. 70-71)

She argues, “The Madagascar plan was always meant to serve as a cloak under which the preparations for the physical extermination of all the Jews of Western Europe could be carried forward (no such cloak was needed for the extermination of Polish Jews!), and its great advantage … was that it familiarized all concerned with the preliminary notion that nothing less than complete evacuation from Europe would do… When, a year later, the Madagascar project was declared to have become ‘obsolete,’ everybody was psychologically, or rather logically, prepared for the next step: since there existed no territory to which one could ‘evacuate,’ the only ‘solution’ was extermination.” (Pg. 76-77)

She acknowledges, “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 up to a hundred thousand inmates, and all kinds of prisoners were held there, including non-Jews and slave laborers, who were not subject to gassing. It was easy to avoid the killing installations, and [Rodolf] Höss, with whom he had a very friendly relationship, 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… and in the camps elaborate precautions were taken to fool the victims right up to the end.” (Pg. 89-90) Later, she adds, “As Eichmann told it, the most potent factor in the soothing of his own conscience was the simple fact that he could see … no one at all, who was actually against the Final Solution.” (Pg. 116)

She records, “as the months and the years went by, [Eichmann] lost the need to feel anything at all. This was the way things were, this was the new law of the land, based on the Führer’s order; whatever he did he did, as far as he could see, as a law-abiding citizen. He did his DUTY, as he told the police and the court over and over again; he not only obeyed ORDERS, he obeyed the LAW. Eichmann had a muddled inkling that this could be an important distinction, but neither the defense nor the judges ever took him up on it.” (Pg. 135)

She summarizes, “And just as the law in civilized countries assumes that the voice of conscience tells everybody, ‘Thou shalt not kill’… so the law in Hitler’s land demanded that the voice of conscience tell everybody: ‘Thou shalt kill,’ although the organizers of the massacre knew full well that murder is against the normal desires and inclinations of most people. Evil in the Third Reich has lost the quality by which most people recognize it---the quality of temptation. Many German and many Nazis, probably an overwhelming majority of them, must have been tempted NOT to murder, NOT to rob, NOT to let their neighbors go off to their doom… and not to become accomplices in all these crimes by benefiting from them. But, God knows, they had learned how to resist temptation.” (Pg. 150)

She observes, “Politically speaking, [the lesson] is that under some conditions or 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)

Of course, her final conclusion is, “Adolf Eichmann went to the gallows with great dignity. He had asked for a bottle of red wine and had drunk half of it. He refused the help of the Protestant minister… who offered to read the Bible with him… ‘I don’t need that,’ he said when the black hood was offered him. He was completely in command of himself… Nothing could have demonstrated this more convincingly than the grotesque silliness of his last words… ‘After a short while, gentlemen, we shall all meet again… Long live Germany, long live Argentina, long live Austria. I shall not forget them.’ … 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.” (Pg: 252)

She adds in the Postscript, “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---this was, in fact, the lesson one could learn in Jerusalem. But it was a lesson, neither an explanation of the phenomenon nor a theory about it.” (Pg. 288)

This is a frightening, highly insightful account not just of the trial, but of the events surrounding it. It will be “must reading” for anyone studying the Holocaust , the Nazi regime, and Fascism.

Eichmann in Jerusalem is rich in detail but misses the main point in the legalese.

There are crimes that are so obvious, so massive and so heinous that if elements of them are unproven/unprovable in a legal proceeding, they simply should not matter. Eichmann was not the most responsible for the Holocaust. And, he was possibly following the orders many of the times unaware of the precise consequences. Without him, the fate of most of his victims could have been similar or worse. His abduction was not completely legal and his trial had proponents with their own agenda. None of these remotely matters to the end justice, in this reviewer's view.

If Eichmann was responsible for even one innocent death, he was culpable. In reality, he was responsible for multitudes. There may be criminals who have perpetrated similar horrors (cannot be a huge number though) and escaped punishment, but this is no justification here. His crimes were against humanity, but it is clear that no one was standing up for the race to bring him to trial. A part of the humanity, the Jews, suffered the most and their representative state bent rules to bring him to trial - there is something not right here for most circumstances, but not in this instance. One can argue who decides without any convenient conclusions about good process, but once again that cannot be used to castigate Israel in this particular case.

Our society needs people like Ms Arendt to throw light on what the rest of us deem obvious and point to our errors. They must be read given their expertise, ability to focus on the details and courage to stand up.This book should be read also for the details on the way ordinary Germans and Europeans, including the Jews, worked with some of the era's psychopaths to turn murderers of their neighbours. But for some of the points that try to defend Eichmann on irrelevant details (in my view), this is an excellent book.

Today I finished reading "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil" by Hannah Arendt. In 1960 Israeli operatives seized fugitive Nazi Adolf Eichmann - one of the most prominent figures of the Holocaust - near his home in Argentina and brought him to Israel to be put on trial for his crimes. German-born Jewish author Hannah Arendt was sent to cover the trial for The New Yorker magazine. What emerged is cited as one of the most definitive pictures of how standards of normality and decency degenerate in a totalitarian state and rightly so. For in Eichmann Arendt reveals not the snarling demon the world might expect, but a lazy, unmotivated, selfish man of no particular talent or charisma who fell almost by accident into a career of organizing the deaths of millions of people seemingly because he had nothing better to do.

Arendt is nothing if not an objective reporter. That she has nothing kind to say about Adolf Eichmann is expected, but she has little charity for the Israeli government staging the trial either. Indeed, she spends great swathes of text openly questioning the Israeli government - namely then-prime minister David Ben-Gurion - and their motives behind and handling of the trial. But if Israel's methods were dubious and unorthodox, they pale in comparison to the tale that unfolds the deeds of Eichmann and his colleagues. The tale of Adolf Eichmann is a tale of Nazi Germany as a whole and one can see the entire country's gradual slide into the unthinkable mirrored in Eichmann's own as his treatment of the Jewish people becomes more and more monstrous. It all happened so gradually that Eichmann never seems to register that he was doing anything wrong and at times seems genuinely not to comprehend the gravity of the charges arrayed against him. Arendt herself acknowledges the complex and unprecedented nature of many of these charges and dedicates the book's final chapters to them.

Arendt is both verbose and dense in her writing, but what makes her the most challenging to read can be her own cynicism. This is seen most jarringly in her attitude toward those who actively resisted the Holocaust within the Third Reich. It doesn't matter if you're a pair of brothers who willingly accepted death rather than be conscripted into the SS, or the government of Denmark who openly defied Nazi Germany and saved thousands of Jewish lives, or anyone in between. In Hannah Arendt's eyes your actions were either pointlessly ineffectual or cloaked in some self-serving ulterior motive. However, in the epilogue she does acknowledge that a proper discussion of the resistance in Germany and German-held territories was outside the scope of the work so perhaps she understood her own shortcomings.

"Eichmann in Jerusalem" is a difficult read for many reasons, but also a vital and rewarding one. If you only read one book to understand the advance of totalitarianism and how it can happen anywhere, read this one.

Johanna "Hannah" Arendt (1906-1975) was a German-born political theorist, who wrote many books such as Antisemitism: Part One of The Origins of Totalitarianism,Imperialism: Part Two Of The Origins Of Totalitarianism,Totalitarianism: Part Three of The Origins of Totalitarianism,The Life of the Mind,The Human Condition, etc. [NOTE: page numbers below refer to a 312-page paperback edition.]

She stated in the “Note for the Reader”: “This is a revised and enlarged edition of the book which appeared in May, 1963. I covered the Eichmann trial at Jerusalem in 1961 for the New Yorker… The revisions for this edition [1964] concern about a dozen technical errors, none of which has any bearing on the analysis or argument of the original text. 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. This 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, and the same is true of the totals for each of the countries concerned.”

She wrote in the first chapter, “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.’ … Justice demands that the accused be prosecuted, defended, and judged, and that 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 ‘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 [Eichmann’s] deeds, not the suffering of the Jews, not the German people or mankind, not even anti-Semitism and racism.’ (Pg. 4-5)

She asks rhetorically, “Did [Attorney General] 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 anybody 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.” (Pg. 7-8)

She continues, “For it was history that, as far as the prosecution was concerned, stood in the center of the trial… 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.” (Pg. 19)

She points out, “[The prosecution’s] 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.” (Pg. 26-27)

She recounts, “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 … 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.” (Pg. 46-47)

She notes, “Technically and organizationally, Eichmann’s position was not very high; his post turned out to be such an important one only because the Jewish question, for purely ideological reasons, acquired a greater importance with every day and week and month of the war, until, in the years of defeat… it had grown to fantastic proportions. When that happened, his was still the only office that officially dealt with nothing but ‘the opponent, Jewry,’ but in fact he had lost his monopoly, because by then all offices and apparatuses, State and Party, Army and S.S., were busy ‘solving’ that problem.” (Pg. 70-71)

She argues, “The Madagascar plan was always meant to serve as a cloak under which the preparations for the physical extermination of all the Jews of Western Europe could be carried forward (no such cloak was needed for the extermination of Polish Jews!), and its great advantage … was that it familiarized all concerned with the preliminary notion that nothing less than complete evacuation from Europe would do… When, a year later, the Madagascar project was declared to have become ‘obsolete,’ everybody was psychologically, or rather logically, prepared for the next step: since there existed no territory to which one could ‘evacuate,’ the only ‘solution’ was extermination.” (Pg. 76-77)

She acknowledges, “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 up to a hundred thousand inmates, and all kinds of prisoners were held there, including non-Jews and slave laborers, who were not subject to gassing. It was easy to avoid the killing installations, and [Rodolf] Höss, with whom he had a very friendly relationship, 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… and in the camps elaborate precautions were taken to fool the victims right up to the end.” (Pg. 89-90) Later, she adds, “As Eichmann told it, the most potent factor in the soothing of his own conscience was the simple fact that he could see … no one at all, who was actually against the Final Solution.” (Pg. 116)

She records, “as the months and the years went by, [Eichmann] lost the need to feel anything at all. This was the way things were, this was the new law of the land, based on the Führer’s order; whatever he did he did, as far as he could see, as a law-abiding citizen. He did his DUTY, as he told the police and the court over and over again; he not only obeyed ORDERS, he obeyed the LAW. Eichmann had a muddled inkling that this could be an important distinction, but neither the defense nor the judges ever took him up on it.” (Pg. 135)

She summarizes, “And just as the law in civilized countries assumes that the voice of conscience tells everybody, ‘Thou shalt not kill’… so the law in Hitler’s land demanded that the voice of conscience tell everybody: ‘Thou shalt kill,’ although the organizers of the massacre knew full well that murder is against the normal desires and inclinations of most people. Evil in the Third Reich has lost the quality by which most people recognize it---the quality of temptation. Many German and many Nazis, probably an overwhelming majority of them, must have been tempted NOT to murder, NOT to rob, NOT to let their neighbors go off to their doom… and not to become accomplices in all these crimes by benefiting from them. But, God knows, they had learned how to resist temptation.” (Pg. 150)

She observes, “Politically speaking, [the lesson] is that under some conditions or 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)

Of course, her final conclusion is, “Adolf Eichmann went to the gallows with great dignity. He had asked for a bottle of red wine and had drunk half of it. He refused the help of the Protestant minister… who offered to read the Bible with him… ‘I don’t need that,’ he said when the black hood was offered him. He was completely in command of himself… Nothing could have demonstrated this more convincingly than the grotesque silliness of his last words… ‘After a short while, gentlemen, we shall all meet again… Long live Germany, long live Argentina, long live Austria. I shall not forget them.’ … 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.” (Pg: 252)

She adds in the Postscript, “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---this was, in fact, the lesson one could learn in Jerusalem. But it was a lesson, neither an explanation of the phenomenon nor a theory about it.” (Pg. 288)

This is a frightening, highly insightful account not just of the trial, but of the events surrounding it. It will be “must reading” for anyone studying the Holocaust , the Nazi regime, and Fascism.

Over 50 years ago Hannah Arendt wrote “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.”Naturally, for who reads it now the impact of the book is immediate and sincere on the moment, as though it had been written a few days ago, but the book itself has a history, the Author, especially the famous Author, has a history of her own, and history…. Well history is rewritten every time we tell or even read it. So we have to rewrite and reread two histories.

So where to start from? Let’s start from the beginning. Who was Hannah Arendt? Or better still who was Hannah Arendt in the moment she wrote the book? Hannah Arendt was already a very well known Jewish intellectual professor residing in the US. She had left Germany in 1933 due to racial persecution, during her studies she had gone through a long love story with her former philosophy professor Heidegger, had written books, lived for a while in France and married. When Eichmann, after having been abducted from Argentina by orders from Ben Gurion, was put on trial in Israel, Hannah proposed herself to follow the trial for “The New Yorker”. She moved to Jerusalem and wrote articles while the trial was ongoing and successively rearranged them in this book. She had somehow, like the rest of the world, expected to see a Nazi on the bench, instead she saw a grey bureaucrat that stated that he was guilty only of having followed orders and that also affirmed that he could not have done all that he did hadn’t he have benefitted from the help of the Jewish councils of the Jewish Communities. So the book is centered around these two major issues.

After a brief description of the setting, the Court, the lawyers, she passes to the question Who was Eichmann? And the first part of the book deals with Eichmann’s biography in a very deep and detailed fashion and the emerging picture is that of a career oriented, Aspergerish, absolutely insignificant German bureaucrat. Now this was the impression Eichmann gave of himself during the process, but was it true? Who can know? That was how the world and the Author saw him then, but in these 50 years many documents have emerged that make us believe that he was not so banal as H.A. hypothesizes. His participation to the “final solution” probably was also more “active” and his Anti-Semitism stronger than what emerged from the trial. The banality of Eichmann’s personality is the base however of H.A. main theme during the book. She implies that evil might not be radical. On the contrary, it is the absence of roots, of memory, of not rethinking one’s convictions and actions through a dialogue with oneself (internal dialogue that according to her is the source and justification of moral action) that causes apparently banal people to transform themselves into agents of evil. It is this same banality that renders a population, as in Nazi Germany, acquiescent when not also accomplice to the most terrible crimes of history and that can cause an individual not to feel responsible of his own crimes, without a whatsoever sense of self-criticism.

The second part of the book gives a detailed description of how deportation worked in the different European Nations. It sheds light not only on the relationships of Nazi Germany with the neighboring countries but also with the nature of these countries governments and populations and mainly Jewish Institutions. The statement made by Eichmann that help from Jewish authorities was indispensable for the success of the mass deportations is analyzed down to the bone. And this point in particular caused the rage and indignation toward H.A. and the miscomprehension of some of her friends and even the Israeli government after the publication of the book. H.A. interprets this fact according to her previous theories on Totalitarianism and Anti-Semitism, partially explaining and justifying but basically accepting this unpopular sociological dynamic. Not everyone however was ready to accept this interpretation as well.

The book concludes with the story of the trial, the proof produced by testimonies and the difficulties encountered with these stories, the judgment and execution of Eichmann. The last chapter The Epilogue could alone stand as an essay on the problems of doing justice, on the absence of laws to punish terrible and unheard of crimes, the difference between the Nurnberg Trial and Eichmann’s Trial, the reason’s of state and what is the meaning of a crime committed against humanity, when its indispensable to have an international court of justice.
This is a book a little difficult to read today, because of its detailed description of even minor facts, because the happenings described are so far away in time, because in some way the theories that are derived from the story itself or the issues and discussions it raised have become a filter through which many of us have read the terrible history of the Holocaust till now. However, it still has a freshness of approach and an internal rigor that astonish and move.

“Consigned to the dustbin of history” is a statement made in one of the many reviews written on this book during the recent years. No, definitely I wouldn’t say so. Read it, contextualize it and make up your own idea, but take into careful consideration how much H.A. theory on the banality of evil has influenced the way this dramatic episode of recent history has been seen and judged.

By the way all these discussions have been named the “Arendt-wars”, can we fight them without having read the original?

In an interview Hannah Arendt presented herself as a Political Thinker. She is concerned with "understanding" -- understanding reality and history, not simply theory. How she defined herself was probably not so much from modesty as an awareness of what matters to her -- not the status of being called a Philosopher.

Her writing can be misinterpreted if you don't understand who she is. She is the opposite of a politician or advocate, because her ultimate goal is UNDERSTANDING, not dressing up the political world for one's own ends. Political platforms are expected to be smooth, canned, and geared to appearance. Do not demand or expect that from this expert in the dark side of propaganda.

After reading this book and her book The Origins of Totalitarianism, I see her strengths as honest thinking without mercy, searching for the truth without intimidation, and always struggling to see beyond the surface, after much study. Thinking is a PROCESS for her, not a destination, a process of refining and going deeper, circling often. She does not present her views as final views, but she is not afraid to speak with authority.

Arendt develops her solid themes but she also expects to learn and see new things herself as she shares her mind as a living feeling person, Her writing voice does not deny her own presence as a human being, as many writers do. This is philosophically significant.

The slog of the raw messiness of being a human being in a real messy world, a step this way, then the other way, working through the different reactions (call them feelings if you will) has it's value. But always her grounding value and emphasis is the MIND, without apology, the mind and it's unrelenting demand for light.

This can give the impression of coldness (as at the end of the movie of her, in the classroom with her critics). However, in this book, we see that justice IS of the heart, for example, from justice comes her demand that all categories of Jews be seen as of equal value and worth. I began to see her heart in her study of "the masses" in the end section of the Origins of Totalitarianism after slogging through all the cataloging of displaced persons without homes or identities. Then her understanding and analysis, again without escape.

Certainly heroic tough love is present in her facing hellishness so thoroughly and deeply, risking hatred and misunderstanding when so many turned from this task and essentially denied its relevance to their lives.

She has weaknesses: the thinking process is more important to her than clarity of communication or writing. Her writing is filled with gems and clarity of thought, but the messy process is also there, unedited. Read her as if she were a friend letting you in on her thinking experience. To expect or demand only a quick final summary from a friend would be to miss out on the subtleties of the experience, however painful at times.

In the Postscript to this book Arendt attempted to address her critics and public misunderstanding: she was reporting in this book on what she saw and experienced, as a reporter on the scene in real time, yet with years and years of focused study on Totalitarianism (a word she coined).

She was not trying to give the final word on Eichmann. His self-presentation and behavior in court gave her glimpses into the many ordinary people that bumbled-dumbed through what can only be called evil. "Everyone was doing it....we didn't know....we couldn't do anything....at least we helped mitigate things. Doesn't work!

Seeing the truth is unavoidably paired with judgment. Judgment in the very seeing is the moral act demanded regardless of the court's maneuvers and outcome. Nothing else will satisfy. That the evil is judged as banal need not soften it's weight. Rather it is a way for each observer to carry its weight home.

This naturally included the Jewish organizations during the Holocaust. I was not particularly surprised by this. This seems only natural, and something we all can learn from. Fight back against respectability and "proper procedure," Don't trust authorities of any kind, not ultimately.

Why would Jewish organizations and authorities be any different? Purity does not come from suffering in itself. One can feel sympathy but yet see the dark participatory nature of their behavior. I totally agree with Hannah: first see the truth, don't pretend and cover. In excuses all credibility is lost. It would seem that only through truth can compassion, true compassion and healing happen. Otherwise the process is prolonged.

Of course the prosecution could not escape her insightful mind. I thought her analysis of the court procedures and the ins-and-outs of finding a perfect milieu was profound, thorough and thought provoking. Of great relevance to the present.

Arendt was not trying to give the final word on evil either, though she coined the phrase "banality of evil" based on what she experienced at the trial. It's clear she was determined to present her best observations and thought without censorship. Thankfully she wrote this book before she was censored for thinking and seeing reality for herself.

Eichmann in Jerusalem is on the surface an account of the 1960-62 trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. In reality, the book explores a number of issues relating to the Holocaust.

The book was very badly received upon its release. The author was vilified and accused of everything and anything, from excusing Eichmann's crimes to being a self-hating Jewess and a Nazi apologist. Anyone who had read the book will tell you that these accusations are absurd.

The reason for all this criticism comes from the fact that the author points out that Eichmann was never the monster he was portrayed to be, and also because she talks a lot about Jewish collaboration with the Nazis, which reopened a painful wound in collective Jewish memory.

As the years went by, the passions surrounding the book cooled down. When Eichmann's trial was taking place, the memory of World War II was still very fresh. Jewish survivors of the Holocaust were everywhere and every middle aged adult had memories of the war. Slowly, slowly, the survivors aged and started to die out. The younger men and women who started to replace them had no personal experience of the war, and therefore they could approach this book with more detachment. Also, a lot of historical and psychological research has been done since the sixties, and most of the findings support the author's observations and conclusions.

Still, even if today the book is not as relevant as it was when it came out, I would recommend it not only to the ones who are interested in World War II, but anyone who wants to research about genocide and atrocities in general. In fact, at the end of the book, the author warns precisely of that. As I was reading her words, I thought of later genocides such as Cambodia or Rwanda, and these are only two examples out of many.

As I already said, the book is a look at the Holocaust through examination of Adolf Eichmann. Who was Adolf Eichmann? He was born in Austria in 1905 into a lower middle class family. Right from the early age, he was, at least in his own opinion, a failure. He dropped out of technical school where he was studying to become an engineer and never got any higher education, which was not good for his self-esteem. Through family connections, he got a job as (I kid you not) a travelling vacuum hoover salesman. By the time he reached his late 20s, he was deeply dissatisfied with his life and was looking for something else to do with himself. Fortunately for him and unfortunately for the rest of the world, the Nazis were on the rise as that time in Germany.

Eichmann joined the SS, not out of any political beliefs, but because he saw them as an opportunity to finally achieve some success in life. He was not anti-Semitic in any way. He had distant Jewish relatives (whom he helped to escape to Switzerland much later) and even a Jewish mistress.

In 1930s, he was put in charge of an office that "encouraged" and "helped" Jews emigrate out of Germany. Once the Final Solution was started, he was responsible for organizing some of the transports carrying Jews to extermination camps. He was also one of many emissaries sent to Nazi-allied countries to help them with their "Jewish question."

Early in the war, Eichmann had achieved the rank of a colonel in the SS, and he never (much to his chagrin) progressed beyond it.

After the war, he stayed in hiding in Germany for few years, and then escaped to Argentina. There, he lived a very simple life of a manual laborer and factory worker. Although he was in contact with the Nazi "diaspora" in Argentina, he was never involved in their activities. Probably because he himself was not interested and partially because fellow Nazis thought him to be of no importance.

Eichmann lived under a false identity, but he was careless and often let slip out, or even bragged, who he really was. In 1960, he was kidnapped by Israeli agents and smuggled into Israel for a trial. He was found guilty and executed in 1962.

That, in short, is the life and times of Adolf Eichmann. The author came under very intense criticism (that sometimes crossed over into insults and character assassination) because she had pointed out that Eichmann was not as big criminal as he was painted to be. For various reasons (some purely political), he was decried as the sole organizer of the Holocaust. There were even those who claimed in all seriousness that it was Eichmann who gave the idea to Hitler. (The two men had never met.)

The thought that a mere colonel came up with the idea of the genocide program, convinced the Nazi leadership to adopt it, and then ran it almost all by himself is plainly absurd. Especially in light of testimonies and documents plainly proving otherwise. Yes, Eichmann was a senior officer in the SS, but he was not even close to Hitler's inner circle. His job was to carry out orders. He had some leeway in how to carry them, but he still had to carry them out.

This in no way means that Eichmann was innocent. He wasn't, and the author makes clear that he wasn't. What made people angry was that the author points out that he was never as big a criminal as he was made to be. Think of it this way. When someone murders five people, and is accused of murdering hundreds, truth and fairness demand to point out that no, he had murdered five people instead of hundreds. Doing so in no way absolves him of the five people he did murder.

But I believe that the biggest controversy originated with the author's psychological profile of Eichmann. The two never met (she attended his trial, but the two never spoke with each other), but she compiled his psychological profile based on her own observations, testimonies of people who knew him, painstaking research into his past, the narratives written by Eichmann himself, and the psychological evaluation that he underwent before the trial. What shocked the world (and her probably too) was the fact that Eichmann was perfectly normal.

In the book, Eichmann comes out as an insecure individual who desperately wanted acceptance and recognition. He hoped to achieve it through loyal, efficient and enthusiastic service to his superiors. In other words, he wanted to please those above him.

Eichmann also happened to suffer from selective memory and had a tendency to stretch the truth and to exaggerate. He was not deliberately lying (in fact, he was quite honest), but subconsciously building a better image of himself to make himself feel better about his own person. He was prone to bragging and self-aggrandizing caused, most likely, by his insecurity and neediness.

Eichmann comes out as a flawed human being, but still a human being. We all have our faults and flaws. Eichmann comes out as no worse or better than any of us. Moreover, even more disturbing, Eichmann, his "job" aside, was a decent human being. From accounts we know that he was polite, even kind, to all those around him. He even treated Jews with respect. With the exception of his involvement in the Holocaust, he had never committed any serious crime, nor is there even the thinnest shred of evidence to suggest that he was a psychopath or mentally deranged in some other way.

Was he a fervent Nazi then? No. Like any Party member, he had to pay lip service to Nazi ideology, but it seems that deep in his heart he did not believe in it. He was not anti-Semitic in the least and had no personal reasons to wish harm to Jews.

Well then, why did he participate in mass murder? Not only he participated in it, he was not bothered by it very much.

Eichmann's own explanation was that he was just following orders. That is the explanation offered by pretty much all war criminals. At the time of Eichmann's trial, no one accepted it, but later psychological research demonstrated amply that humans do give in to orders coming from authority figures, and they are submissive towards peer pressure.

Eichmann was told by all his superiors (whom he regarded as legitimate authority figures) that the Final Solution might be unpleasant, but is the morally right thing to do. When he looked at his peers and fellow Germans, everyone held essentially the same position. Who was Adolf Eichmann, insecure and desperate to please as he was, to say otherwise?

The example of Denmark, which is described in the book, illustrates my point. The people of Denmark fiercely protected "their" Jews. Most of the time, the Germans backed away and left Danish Jews more or less in peace. On the few occasions when the occupying authorities were told by Berlin to take aggressive action against Jews, they came up with excuses not to do it or just plainly and flatly refused. This disobedience occurred even amongst the ranks of SS units stationed in Denmark.

Why was it that the "Danish" SS refused to harm Jews while their SS "brothers" elsewhere were all too happy to forcibly put Jews on trains bound for Auschwitz or to shoot them on the spot?

No doubt there were practical reasons, such as fear of provoking a rebellion, but a lot of those men were refusing to obey their orders for moral reasons. They were surrounded by a population who believed that the persecution of Jews was immoral, and some of that belief rubbed off on "Danish" Germans. In case someone wonders, Nazis managed to murder only few dozen Danish Jews out of a population of thousands.

The reason why I am talking about it, as does the author, is that genocides are committed by individuals who are otherwise normal. A handful of exceptions aside, none of those mass murderers are insane or brainwashed. They murder because all those above them and all those around them tell them that what they do is permissible, even desirable.

This does not absolve them. Murder is evil, even when your bosses and coworkers tell you otherwise. But explaining away genocide by saying that those who commit it are evil monsters and that is the end of it will not prevent it in the future.

Johanna "Hannah" Arendt (1906-1975) was a German-born political theorist, who wrote many books such as Antisemitism: Part One of The Origins of Totalitarianism,Imperialism: Part Two Of The Origins Of Totalitarianism,Totalitarianism: Part Three of The Origins of Totalitarianism,The Life of the Mind,The Human Condition, etc. [NOTE: page numbers below refer to a 312-page paperback edition.]

She stated in the “Note for the Reader”: “This is a revised and enlarged edition of the book which appeared in May, 1963. I covered the Eichmann trial at Jerusalem in 1961 for the New Yorker… The revisions for this edition [1964] concern about a dozen technical errors, none of which has any bearing on the analysis or argument of the original text. 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. This 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, and the same is true of the totals for each of the countries concerned.”

She wrote in the first chapter, “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.’ … Justice demands that the accused be prosecuted, defended, and judged, and that 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 ‘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 [Eichmann’s] deeds, not the suffering of the Jews, not the German people or mankind, not even anti-Semitism and racism.’ (Pg. 4-5)

She asks rhetorically, “Did [Attorney General] 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 anybody 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.” (Pg. 7-8)

She continues, “For it was history that, as far as the prosecution was concerned, stood in the center of the trial… 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.” (Pg. 19)

She points out, “[The prosecution’s] 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.” (Pg. 26-27)

She recounts, “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 … 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.” (Pg. 46-47)

She notes, “Technically and organizationally, Eichmann’s position was not very high; his post turned out to be such an important one only because the Jewish question, for purely ideological reasons, acquired a greater importance with every day and week and month of the war, until, in the years of defeat… it had grown to fantastic proportions. When that happened, his was still the only office that officially dealt with nothing but ‘the opponent, Jewry,’ but in fact he had lost his monopoly, because by then all offices and apparatuses, State and Party, Army and S.S., were busy ‘solving’ that problem.” (Pg. 70-71)

She argues, “The Madagascar plan was always meant to serve as a cloak under which the preparations for the physical extermination of all the Jews of Western Europe could be carried forward (no such cloak was needed for the extermination of Polish Jews!), and its great advantage … was that it familiarized all concerned with the preliminary notion that nothing less than complete evacuation from Europe would do… When, a year later, the Madagascar project was declared to have become ‘obsolete,’ everybody was psychologically, or rather logically, prepared for the next step: since there existed no territory to which one could ‘evacuate,’ the only ‘solution’ was extermination.” (Pg. 76-77)

She acknowledges, “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 up to a hundred thousand inmates, and all kinds of prisoners were held there, including non-Jews and slave laborers, who were not subject to gassing. It was easy to avoid the killing installations, and [Rodolf] Höss, with whom he had a very friendly relationship, 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… and in the camps elaborate precautions were taken to fool the victims right up to the end.” (Pg. 89-90) Later, she adds, “As Eichmann told it, the most potent factor in the soothing of his own conscience was the simple fact that he could see … no one at all, who was actually against the Final Solution.” (Pg. 116)

She records, “as the months and the years went by, [Eichmann] lost the need to feel anything at all. This was the way things were, this was the new law of the land, based on the Führer’s order; whatever he did he did, as far as he could see, as a law-abiding citizen. He did his DUTY, as he told the police and the court over and over again; he not only obeyed ORDERS, he obeyed the LAW. Eichmann had a muddled inkling that this could be an important distinction, but neither the defense nor the judges ever took him up on it.” (Pg. 135)

She summarizes, “And just as the law in civilized countries assumes that the voice of conscience tells everybody, ‘Thou shalt not kill’… so the law in Hitler’s land demanded that the voice of conscience tell everybody: ‘Thou shalt kill,’ although the organizers of the massacre knew full well that murder is against the normal desires and inclinations of most people. Evil in the Third Reich has lost the quality by which most people recognize it---the quality of temptation. Many German and many Nazis, probably an overwhelming majority of them, must have been tempted NOT to murder, NOT to rob, NOT to let their neighbors go off to their doom… and not to become accomplices in all these crimes by benefiting from them. But, God knows, they had learned how to resist temptation.” (Pg. 150)

She observes, “Politically speaking, [the lesson] is that under some conditions or 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)

Of course, her final conclusion is, “Adolf Eichmann went to the gallows with great dignity. He had asked for a bottle of red wine and had drunk half of it. He refused the help of the Protestant minister… who offered to read the Bible with him… ‘I don’t need that,’ he said when the black hood was offered him. He was completely in command of himself… Nothing could have demonstrated this more convincingly than the grotesque silliness of his last words… ‘After a short while, gentlemen, we shall all meet again… Long live Germany, long live Argentina, long live Austria. I shall not forget them.’ … 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.” (Pg: 252)

She adds in the Postscript, “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---this was, in fact, the lesson one could learn in Jerusalem. But it was a lesson, neither an explanation of the phenomenon nor a theory about it.” (Pg. 288)

This is a frightening, highly insightful account not just of the trial, but of the events surrounding it. It will be “must reading” for anyone studying the Holocaust , the Nazi regime, and Fascism.

Johanna "Hannah" Arendt (1906-1975) was a German-born political theorist, who wrote many books such as Antisemitism: Part One of The Origins of Totalitarianism,Imperialism: Part Two Of The Origins Of Totalitarianism,Totalitarianism: Part Three of The Origins of Totalitarianism,The Life of the Mind,The Human Condition, etc. [NOTE: page numbers below refer to a 312-page paperback edition.]

She stated in the “Note for the Reader”: “This is a revised and enlarged edition of the book which appeared in May, 1963. I covered the Eichmann trial at Jerusalem in 1961 for the New Yorker… The revisions for this edition [1964] concern about a dozen technical errors, none of which has any bearing on the analysis or argument of the original text. 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. This 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, and the same is true of the totals for each of the countries concerned.”

She wrote in the first chapter, “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.’ … Justice demands that the accused be prosecuted, defended, and judged, and that 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 ‘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 [Eichmann’s] deeds, not the suffering of the Jews, not the German people or mankind, not even anti-Semitism and racism.’ (Pg. 4-5)

She asks rhetorically, “Did [Attorney General] 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 anybody 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.” (Pg. 7-8)

She continues, “For it was history that, as far as the prosecution was concerned, stood in the center of the trial… 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.” (Pg. 19)

She points out, “[The prosecution’s] 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.” (Pg. 26-27)

She recounts, “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 … 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.” (Pg. 46-47)

She notes, “Technically and organizationally, Eichmann’s position was not very high; his post turned out to be such an important one only because the Jewish question, for purely ideological reasons, acquired a greater importance with every day and week and month of the war, until, in the years of defeat… it had grown to fantastic proportions. When that happened, his was still the only office that officially dealt with nothing but ‘the opponent, Jewry,’ but in fact he had lost his monopoly, because by then all offices and apparatuses, State and Party, Army and S.S., were busy ‘solving’ that problem.” (Pg. 70-71)

She argues, “The Madagascar plan was always meant to serve as a cloak under which the preparations for the physical extermination of all the Jews of Western Europe could be carried forward (no such cloak was needed for the extermination of Polish Jews!), and its great advantage … was that it familiarized all concerned with the preliminary notion that nothing less than complete evacuation from Europe would do… When, a year later, the Madagascar project was declared to have become ‘obsolete,’ everybody was psychologically, or rather logically, prepared for the next step: since there existed no territory to which one could ‘evacuate,’ the only ‘solution’ was extermination.” (Pg. 76-77)

She acknowledges, “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 up to a hundred thousand inmates, and all kinds of prisoners were held there, including non-Jews and slave laborers, who were not subject to gassing. It was easy to avoid the killing installations, and [Rodolf] Höss, with whom he had a very friendly relationship, 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… and in the camps elaborate precautions were taken to fool the victims right up to the end.” (Pg. 89-90) Later, she adds, “As Eichmann told it, the most potent factor in the soothing of his own conscience was the simple fact that he could see … no one at all, who was actually against the Final Solution.” (Pg. 116)

She records, “as the months and the years went by, [Eichmann] lost the need to feel anything at all. This was the way things were, this was the new law of the land, based on the Führer’s order; whatever he did he did, as far as he could see, as a law-abiding citizen. He did his DUTY, as he told the police and the court over and over again; he not only obeyed ORDERS, he obeyed the LAW. Eichmann had a muddled inkling that this could be an important distinction, but neither the defense nor the judges ever took him up on it.” (Pg. 135)

She summarizes, “And just as the law in civilized countries assumes that the voice of conscience tells everybody, ‘Thou shalt not kill’… so the law in Hitler’s land demanded that the voice of conscience tell everybody: ‘Thou shalt kill,’ although the organizers of the massacre knew full well that murder is against the normal desires and inclinations of most people. Evil in the Third Reich has lost the quality by which most people recognize it---the quality of temptation. Many German and many Nazis, probably an overwhelming majority of them, must have been tempted NOT to murder, NOT to rob, NOT to let their neighbors go off to their doom… and not to become accomplices in all these crimes by benefiting from them. But, God knows, they had learned how to resist temptation.” (Pg. 150)

She observes, “Politically speaking, [the lesson] is that under some conditions or 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)

Of course, her final conclusion is, “Adolf Eichmann went to the gallows with great dignity. He had asked for a bottle of red wine and had drunk half of it. He refused the help of the Protestant minister… who offered to read the Bible with him… ‘I don’t need that,’ he said when the black hood was offered him. He was completely in command of himself… Nothing could have demonstrated this more convincingly than the grotesque silliness of his last words… ‘After a short while, gentlemen, we shall all meet again… Long live Germany, long live Argentina, long live Austria. I shall not forget them.’ … 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.” (Pg: 252)

She adds in the Postscript, “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---this was, in fact, the lesson one could learn in Jerusalem. But it was a lesson, neither an explanation of the phenomenon nor a theory about it.” (Pg. 288)

This is a frightening, highly insightful account not just of the trial, but of the events surrounding it. It will be “must reading” for anyone studying the Holocaust , the Nazi regime, and Fascism.

Hannah Arendt considers the career of one man, Adolf Eichmann, his role in the Holocaust (i.e. the Final Solution), and his trial for these crimes in Jerusalem--and fills this account with so many ironic details that it seems like something out of fiction. Indeed, this would seem to be an example of the adage that "truth is stranger than fiction."

In accord with her Heiddegerian subtitle, "The Banality of Evil," Eichmann is presented as a completely ordinary man with few abilities, little education, and no imagination or insight. Eichmann is shown to be the ultimate faceless bureaucrat who follows the directives passed down by his chain of command faithfully and uncritically. In any organization Eichmann would be considered a "Boy Scout" who follows institutional rules to a ridiculous degree. Eichmann's adherence to Hitler's dictates far exceeded that maintained by either his superiors or his underlings--especially as the war approached its end and other Nazis sought to cover their tracks.

Even Himmler, the head of the Nazi S.S., the organization to which Eichmann belonged, deviated from Hitler's orders and attempted to curtail the elimination of Jews in the last months of the war due to "the illusions he had concocted about his future role as a bringer of peace to Germany" (p.144). This action on Himmler's part corresponded to the birth of the so-called "moderate wing" of the S.S., "consisting of those who were stupid enough to believe that a murderer who could prove that he had not killed as many people as he could have killed would have a marvelous alibi" (p.145). Eichmann, however, "never joined this "moderate wing" and essentially lacked the savior-faire to see either see the necessity to conceal his involvement in the final solution or visualize a strategy for doing so. Eichmann's deficiencies in this area were so glaring that one of his defense attorneys in Jerusalem "seemed to be shocked less by Eichmann's crimes than by his lack of taste and education" (p.145).

Eichmann's administrative responsibilities dealt with transportation of Jews to concentration camps or death centers. Indeed, "Eichmann's position was that of the most important conveyor belt of the whole operation" (p.153). Despite his dedication to the transportation of Jews to these sites of execution, however, Eichmann had no personal animosity towards Jews. "A cousin of his stepmother... was married to the daughter of a Jewish businessman" (p.29). And it was this Jewish businessman who used his influence to secure employment for Eichmann as a traveling salesman (p.30). It seemed that Eichmann never forgot the good turn this Jewish businessman performed for him, and granted his daughter permission for emigration to Switzerland in 1943 or 1944 (p.30). In addition, while serving the S.S. in Vienna "he had a Jewish mistress, an `old flame' from [his home town of] Linz" (p.30).

Ultimately, Arendt traces Eichmann's undoing to his bragging about the importance of his role in executing the final solution. "Bragging was the vice that was Eichmann's undoing" (p.46). He went so far as to state that "I will jump in my grave laughing, because the fact that I have the death of five millions Jews on my conscience gives me extraordinary satisfaction" (p.46). Arendt observes that "To claim the death of five million Jews, the approximate total of all Nazi offices and authorities, was preposterous, as he knew very well, but he 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 the stage in this way' " (p.47). Eichmann's behavior stood in stark contrast to that of his immediate superior, Heinrich Muller, "who was known for his sphinx-like conduct [and] succeeded in disappearing altogether" after the war (p.66).

It might even seem that Eichmann's absurdly exaggerated notion of his importance in the implementation of the final solution made its way into the minutes of the famous Nuremberg Trials. No less august personage than Nazi Germany's Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop told Nuremberg judge Michael Musmanno that "Hitler would have been all right if he had not fallen under Eichmann's influence"--a clearly ridiculous claim!

As for the proper genesis of the Holocaust or Final Solution, Arendt brings the actual source of these horrors to light. The formal beginnings are seen to make their first appearance at the Wansee Conference in January 1942, where Eichmann was the lowest ranking member of the S.S. allowed into the proceedings, and then only as a secretary to record the minutes of the meeting (p.122). This meeting was led by S.S. General Reinhard Heydrich, the founder and head of the Nazi security apparatus, who received the order for executing the final solution from Hitler himself (p.82). In addition, Hitler's plans for ethnic cleansing were laid out as early as November 1937 as part of the "Hossbach Protocal" which, in anticipation of the invasion of Poland, included planning for the Polish (though by no means exclusively Jewish) genocide (p.217).

Though critical of Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem, Arendt does not go so far as to exonerate him as a mindless underling who actions only involved "aiding and abetting" (p.246) rather than outright murder. The principal problem with someone like Eichmann, as Arendt saw it, was that there were so many like him (p.276). Indeed the acts of ordinary men like Eichmann constituted what Arendt famously characterized as "the banality of evil" (p.287).

I must say, however, that Eichmann's stalwart adherence to Hitler's dictates brought him somewhat outside of the ordinary. Eichmann's actions stand in stark contrast to that of his less zealous colleagues. Even Eichmann's immediate underling, Dieter Wisliceny, frustrated the execution of the final solution by allowing himself to be swayed by bribes from Zionist organizations (p.204). According to Arendt, "It is very unlikely that Wisliceny ever did anything except read books and listen to music, and, of course, accept whatever he could get" (p.204). As for other Nazis, some apparently sought entertainment by insisting that Czech brides of German soldiers provide photographs of themselves naked (p.128). In the end, however, a photograph of the bride in a bathing suit was deemed acceptable.

Hannah Arendt attended the Eichmann Trial that took place in 1961 in Jerusalem, Israel. Her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, A Report of the Banality of Evil, published in 1963, is basically a compilation of her reports, from the actual trial, to the New Yorker magazine (I used to watch televised clips from the Jerusalem court room. I also read the New Yorker).

I don't have a doctorate in philosophy as Hannah Arendt had. I know very little about philosophy, not much about anything. Since the Nazis stopped me from attending school when I was thirteen years old, I have been trying to educate myself since the libration from a concentration camp, in May 1945. My English is still scanty; I had to look up for the definition of banality; a phrase in book's title. I found out that banality is a synonym of triviality, trite, obvious, predicable, or common place (The banality of the speaker's remarks put the audience to sleep, television commercials are full of banalities) I am puzzled whether Arendt really considered Adolf Eichmann to be trivial, or common.

Eichmann stood accused for committing crimes against the Jewish People, crimes against humanity, and war crimes during the whole period of the Nazi regime and especially during the period of the Second World War. Eichmann pleaded "Not guilty in the sense of indictment" I never killed a Jew, or a non-Jew, I never gave an order to kill a Jew or a non-Jew" Like Eichmann, Hitler didn't kill anybody (other than himself); he didn't even visit a concentration camp. Nevertheless, both Hitler and Eichmann were aiding and abetting the annihilation of six million Jews, and other "undesirables." This is one of the greatest crimes in the history of humanity. Hannah Arendt deems Adolf Eichmann not to be a monster, a wicked or cruel person but "terribly and terrifyingly normal."

Eichmann claimed that he was just a "little cog" carrying out terrible orders. In fact, during the Holocaust no German perpetrator was ever killed, sent to a concentration camp, imprisoned, or punished in any serious way for refusing to kill Jews. They did not have to kill, because their commanders explicitly told them so. Some men accepted their commander's offer and removed themselves from the task of killing. Nothing happened to them; they were given other duties" (Read: Worse than War by Goldhagen p.149). Eichmann could have not accepted the appointment as the chief operational officer of the Final Solution, but chose to be a major Nazi architect of the Holocaust, completely cognizant of his crimes. There is no question in my mind that Eichmann was not only a megalomaniac but an evil person. In the year 2000, the FBI declassified documents pertaining to Hitler. In one of the documents, Dr. Ferdinand Sauerbach, Hitler's personal physician, in 1937, stated that the German dictator was showing signs of growing megalomania; so was Adolf Eichmann. He might not have joined the SS out of any political belief but a place to advance in life. He might not be a vicious anti-Semite but a vicious person he definitely was. If carried out murderous acts or delegated and ordered others to do so don't really change the outcome of the crime. People cannot choose the time or place of their birth and can never control the timing of their last breath (excluding suicide). Hitler felt that his birth was a miracle and he was empowered to be in control of the world. The hunger for recognition motivated Hitler to seek glory aggressively and kill those who disrespected his ambitions. Hatred was the motor of his existence. Eichmann had similar traits.

I was a captive in camps for three years and 123 members of my extensive family were murdered, because of an evil Hitler and his cohorts like Eichmann. I experienced and witnessed Nazis' looting, deporting, beating, torturing, shooting, hanging, babies smashed to death. I am still wailing from the abyss of horror. The perpetrators carried out those atrocities with impetuosity and enthusiasm; they didn't cringe! Eichmann didn't cringe; he was incisively evil. Facing the accusers during trial, Eichmann's face beamed with hostility. Arendt is vastly misinterpreting Eichmann's evil actions. She is profiling a brutal Nazi into silken characteristics. To be unrealistic seems to me to be unproductive. THE BANALITY OF EVIL didn't enlighten my mind and didn't lift my spirit. Some readers express ultimate validation for Arendt's assertions and observations. I can't see her inculcated views to have an enduring influence. As a Holocaust survivor I doubt the veracity of my memory, as well as Arnendt's memory who is also a Holocaust survivor. Nevertheless, I understand why some readers feel differently than I do.

Earlier this year I read a brutal, monolithic novel about how the Third Reich actually operated called 'The Kindly Ones', apparently 900 brilliantly researched pages weren't enough to sate my curiosity on this awful era, so I picked this up.

This is a fearsome work. In the course of trying to explore and explain the nature of the man on trial Arendt becomes, variously, a journalist, historian, biographer and political philosopher. She offers a stunningly researched mini-history of the actual bureaucracy of the third Reich, and shows the labyrinthine complexity of jurisdictions, turf battles and petty politicking that took place behind the most notorious death machine in history.

More then that, she calls into question the very limits of what justice and law can accomplish, and how those ancient ideas are necessary yet obviously inadequate to fully address the sheer magnitude of the wrong that Eichmann and those like him perpetrated.

And, most famously and controversially, she shows the sheer human banality and mediocrity of men like Eichmann and the smallness of their own minds in the face of despicable actions. Arendt pulls the idea of evil out of the clouds of cosmic myth and situates it right in front of our face, where we can see all too well how wretchedly human it is, and how woefully little seems to separate those who engage in it from any of us.

This book, I think, started a trend that continues into our own era. By humanizing evil and incompetence, Arendt makes sarcasm and mockery powerful tools against it. She heaps scorn on seemingly everything in site here. Sometimes, perhaps unsuccessfully. She was a German philosopher after all, and like so many of that type the view she presents here is systemic and total (and at times, a bit of a slog). But I have to have major respect for anyone from that tradition who is willing to wade so fearsomely into the darkest moral questions of our age. Not for Hannah Arendt is the navel gazing of pure idealists. This is a grim but necessary read

Hannah Arendt's controversial report on the trial of Adolph Eichmann is one that refuses to view the event in black and white terms meaning that Eichmann is to be seen as a diabolical villain and the Israeli court as a righteous executor of justice. Although she judges Eichmann to be evil, it is through a moral vision that only sees shades of gray. It is easy to see why so many were (and still are) upset with her writing. Nonetheless, I found myself resonating with the following quotes:

"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." (p. 109).

"Let us assume for the sake of argument, that it was nothing more than misfortune that made you a willing instrument in the organization of mass murder; there still remains the fact that you have carried out, and therefore actively supported, a policy of mass murder. For politics is not like the nursery; in politic obedience and support are the same. And just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations--as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world--we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang." (p. 279)

"Eichmann was not Iago or Macbeth, and nothing would have been farther from his mind than to determine with Richard III "to prove the villain." Except for extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all. And this diligence in itself was not criminal; 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 has doing. [...] It was sheer thoughtlessness--something by no means identical with stupidity--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 commonplace." (p, 287, 289)

Having recently watched the film on Hannah Arendt, I was moved to re-read her her 1963-64 book. It was worthwhile doing so as the film left me thinking maybe she got it so wrong. But it is more sobering. Her detailed analysis of the Eichmann trial is engaging, considered; and forces you to face aspects which even today have not been part of the public discussion about this era of human history. Ms Arendt's looks face on at evil as is not deflected by demonising it. She presents Eichmann as a second tier bit player but notes he was a representation of many who did not see anything inherently evil in their actions in this time in Nazi Germany and other countries. At the end of the book she provides a history of how a range of countries dealt with their Jewish communities. Ms Arendt demands we consider the complicity we all have in allowing ordinary actions to be used to destroy and humiliate others. The complex web of murder and de-humanisation of Jewish people and many others that Eichmann was part off defies logic for the numbers involved in making this machine work its way to the end result of the death camps. More philosopher than journalist but who still packs a punch as a historian, Ms Arendt is able to stand back and look dispassionately at the human condition but as a reporter she spares no details in telling her story. I could not look on with dispassion, for me this remains the single most damning stain on humankind of recent times. The details are the reminders of so many anonymous lives removed without care that they lived, who they were, the promise they held and the future still has a void they have left.

Regrettably I feel I can give this only 3 stars. The detail was incredible, almost too much, especially when it came to the Nazi organization and bureaucracy. Undoubtedly it was an integral part of the book because it was necessary to show how Eichmann fit into the Nazi's "Final Solution" and his roll in it. Altho Arendt explains it well, it still becomes difficult to keep track of the various offices and officials. The book is not an easy read, and perhaps it is fairer to blame that on this aspect of the book rather than on Ms. Arendt's writing style.

The book can be quite depressing. When you read about how other countries reacted to the Nazi's and how many turned a blind eye to the "final solution" even when it became clear what it meant, you can start to lose respect for humanity at that time in history, and you see first hand what "man's inhumanity to man" really means.

Ms. Arendt pulls no punches, and is very critical of the Isrealis and of the trial in general. It is easy to see why the book was not well received by the Jewish community. She raises many questions of how the Jews comported themselves during the rise of Hitler, during the various stages of the Nazi's 3 solutions to ridding Germany of Jews, and during the war. These are tough questions, questions, and possible answers, I would like to read more about. Its not a happy book, not one you will feel good about after reading.

For Hannah Arendt, Adolf Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem was deeply unsatisfying and morally perturbing. For Arendt, there was no doubt that Eichmann was guilty, and that he deserved the death penalty. But for her the question was who ought to have been on trial, and who ought to have been the judge and jury.

For Israeli prosecutors to condemn Eichmann as the chief architect of the Holocaust and to condemn him to death for orchestrating the mass slaughter of Jews was for Arendt to completely miss the point. Eichmann was just a mere functionary in the Nazi regime, a man who in his own words was just good at following orders, and whose virtues were his organizational ability (he was in charge of transporting Jews) and his obedience. As anyone who saw Eichmann in the flesh could testify, he was more a weak and pathetic and stupid man than he was a psychopath. He was obsessed with success, and thought highly of Hitler because Hitler had gone from a lance corporal to the fuhrer. In many ways, Eichmann was more indicative of the Nazi regime than anyone else. Even the SS ferreted out psychopaths as dangerous elements, and the Nazi regime prided itself on its organizational efficiency in carrying out orders. In this way, and the real horror here, the Nazi regime was typical of many twentieth century mass society bureaucracies. And in their bureaucratic tunnel vision, the Nazis were not intent on just eliminating all Jews -- they wanted to eliminate everyone who didn't fit their limited definition of Aryanism. In this way, the Nazis were committing a crime against all humanity, destroying all that was normal and sane and just in society. (Eichmann as a man who obeyed and thus supported a regime that was intent on murderously practicing its intolerance couldn't complain when society deemed his presence on the earth no longer tolerable.) But if that is the case then Eichmann should have been tried for crimes against humanity, and condemned to death by an international tribunal.

Eichmann claimed that obedience was a virtue, but as Arendt points out if the law and the state are both criminal, then the only virtue is disobedience. And if enough good people disobey the law and the state cannot operate. She points to countless examples, primarily in the Scandavinian countries, where by refusing to participate many individuals made the Holocaust impossible to implement in their home countries. Eichmann may not have killed anyone, but his obedience was enough to condemn him because it was the obedience of banal individuals like him that made the Nazi regime function.

"Eichmann in Jerusalem" is a prophecy, more than just a report. More than anyone else in her time, Hannah Arendt grasped the dark forces that a combination of bureaucratism, technology, and ancient human intolerance could unleash in the world. What is to stop another bureaucracy from using technology to effortlessly and painlessly murder all those under a certain IQ?, Hannah Arendt asks. And when that were to happen, how would we interpret and condemn such an action? Could the Eichmann trial serve as a precedent and as a warning? Unfortunately, because of the way it was handled or mishandled, it cannot.

I've been thinking and thinking about this book since I read it. To be honest, I'm at a little bit of a loss how to construct a review.

It isn't a straightforward book, and the chronology seems to wander across the pages. By all accounts, the trial was absolutely mind-numbing, so perhaps we're getting a taste of the flow Arendt's thoughts took?

Even before I read this, I'd read many commentary pieces about it-- some extremely critical of what they saw as Arendt's efforts to excuse Eichmann. I didn't have that experience of the work at all. Arendt makes the clear point that he was not a cartoon monster, nor a true believer. I, however, found the picture she draws of the thoughtless bureaucrat more terrifying than the worst serial killer. The thoughtless bureaucrat capable of mass murder seems to me quite a bit more common. There's also a really good point in there about needing to learn to fear precisely this sort of person. The point she makes about the Jewish leaders not recognizing the inevitable comes in part from the unwillingness to believe that something that looks so harmless (bureaucracy) can be worse than a horde at the gates. People all over are like this-- if there are *rules* it can't be that *bad.*

Anyhow. I'm still thinking. I learned a lot from the sections on the various European countries and their responses to the Final Solution. Some of it I knew, some of it was new.

This is, to my mind, a book that should be read. If only for the food for thought.

because Arendt never ever used the term. Not even once.

Her point is much more profound. It is not so much that Eichmann was a mere cog, a faceless bureaucrat, not too bright, who was simply following orders. That is NOT her argument. Her argument is that Eichmann wanted to belong, wanted to join something larger than himself, and once he had done so, gave his allegiance (and his conscience) over to a higher "power". This is what explains soldiers committing unspeakable crimes, or people aiming drones at innocent people. It is not that they are cogs, but rather that they embrace a higher allegiance (God or country or whatever) that absolves them (in their minds) of moral culpability. One could better call it "the enthusiasm of evil".

This book is even better today than when it was written, and one of the most important books of its, or any, time.

Hannah Arendt's book is a powerful and disturbing account of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, and the subtitle, A Report on the Banality of Evil, couldn't be more apt. According to Ms. Arendt, Eichmann wasn't an evil fanatic but just an unquestioning bureaucrat who felt very proud of his achievements, a person who thought his professional advancement was more important than the lives of millions of people. Without shifting any responsiblity from the Nazi leadership, Ms. Arendt argues that if society at large hadn't consented and in many cases cooperated, the extermination of human beings in such an enormous scale could have never been accomplished. Eichmann always maintained that he didn't agree with his superiors' policy, but he didn't disobey or even question his orders and eventually became one of the key figures in the deportation of millions of people from the occupied countries to the extermination camps in Eastern Europe.
The book also includes a lot of information about the reactions to the deportations in different countries, ranging from the zealous cooperation of the Poles to the admirable refusal of the Danes who eventually managed to save all their Jews by transporting them to neighbouring Sweden. Ms. Arendt has a very clear, analytic and eminently readable style and her book is an essential work that should be read by anyone who wants to know more about the implementation of the Final Solution and the personality and ideas of one of the individuals that made it possible.

"For, obviously, things were not so simple as the framers of the laws had imagined them to be, and if it was of small legal relevance, it was of great political interest to know how long it takes for an average person to overcome his innate repugnance of crime, and what exactly happens to him once he has reached that point. To this question, the case of Adolf Eichmann supplied an answer that could not have been clearer or more precise." (Eichmann in Jerusalem, Chr. VI)

Hannah Arendt's "Eichmann in Jerusalem" is many things. It is a detailed report on the trial of Adolf Eichmann for war crimes, it is a history of the Holocaust through the lens of the said trial, it is a psychological probe into Eichmann himself, and it is a philosophical rumination on what makes average people do bad things. Arendt manages to straddle between these layers seemlessly.

Of most interest to its readers - and the original cause of the book's controversey - are the last two: the psychology and philosophy parts. Arendt's report overthrows, or at least calls into question, the prevalent view of what evil is. Eichmann did evil things, she tells us, but was not really himself evil. He was many things - a fairly uneducated and unreflexive man, ambitious to a fault, and easily swayed. But was he evil? If by 'evil,' we mean 'someone who sets out or derives pleasure from doing bad things,' then the answer must be: no.

In fact, a most revealing moment sees Eichmann invoking the name of Kant to put a more positive spin on his action, adding that once the "final solution" was ordered by Hitler, Hitler's will supplanted Eichmann's own. ("Act in such a way that the Fuhrer, if he knew your action, would approve.") So we see a man who reasons thus: "I admire Hitler, and as such, if he says it, it must be right." Pretty chilling stuff. It is small wonder this book stirred such controversey. Who wants to think of "evil" being conducted not by snarling criminal masterminds, but by bumbling "John Q. Public"s just following orders?!

In all this it should be noted that Arendt keeps a very ambivalent tone. It may seem like she is trying to excuse Eichmann. She is not, and she admits several times that she is extremely skeptical of much of his justificatory rhetoric. At the same time that she is not trying to excuse him, she IS trying to explain him - something that is so little done because of the emotion attached to the subject (as evidenced by the very shallow review directly below mine chronologically). Arendt straddles the fence between trying to understand Eichmann on his terms, and trying to challenge Eichmann on hers.

To conclude, this book is of immense value to anyone who honestly wants to understand how such a thing as the Holocaust (or any large human-made catastrophe on a grande scale) could happen. Does it take a group of evil people, or does it just take a group willing to 'follow the orders'? As already suggested, this would be a good companion piece, or segue, to Arend't "Origin of Totalitarianism."

This is a great book, filled with details and the following review is just a few thoughts jumping around the place to gain a general idea. I find Hannah Arendt a very credible author, a German, who attended Heidelburg University with a doctorate in philosophy and studied under Karl Jaspers and visiting professor at several prestigious universities in the United States. Her account takes in both her German experience, her stay at Jerusalem, attending the Eichmann trial, the reading of various court manuscripts of Eichmann and others. The book is rather detailed on the entire Jewish question of WWII, yet is not a book on the whole "Final Solution," persay, but an account of the Eichmann trial.

While nonexhaustive, Arendt is penetrative, far more than these few paragraphs attempt to relate, and I highly recommend this book, Some of the ideas raised are the questions of ethnic restrictions, as even Israel and Judaism in endorsing marriage within the race and separation. There is the question of whether the trial should have been in Jerusalem or of an international court - inquiring as to crimes not only against the Jews but against humanity on a global scale. The charges of the defense aimed at Israel's competence in the trial location. Yet here we can see each European country holding trials in their own localities on Nazi war criminals, whereas Israel at that time did not have a nation when the Nuremburg and other trials took place. There are also the issues of the crimes themselves; personal responsibility, obedience to superiors, actions taken apart from superiors, the idea of the legality of the State (raison d'etat) overriding law in criminal actions to preserve itself verses the individual committing criminal actions. Yet here the State's action should be the exception to the rule, not the norm, for this was systematic genocide in a non-war capacity, actions taken apart from the reason of war and State preservation.

The fact that this man was not a monster, not a sadistic hate filled orgasmatic murderer but instead the epitome of a valueless or extreme relativistic void in existential space. Here was a logical man yes, but one who had morals? Eichmann was familiar, reading Theodore Herzel and so who was more fitted for the Nazi's to deal with the Jewish question? His morals conveniently fit the role he was actively pursuing. What was ultimately noted were his personal autonomous decisions apart from his superiors, particularly at the end of the war when Himmler ordered the cessation of the exterminations, attempting to put many of the prominent Jews up in Hotels in France to pacify the allies, thinking this could be his ticket to more lenient penalties, as though all would be forgiven as conscious guilt and crimes against humanity were not in his psyche, nor Eichmann's for that matter. Eichmann, claiming Himmler's orders against the Furers, continued the deportations/liquidations - genocidal actions.

There are the issues raised of the Jewish counsels selling out their own people and subsequent convictions, also the Germans separation of prominent Jews in the Jewish Ghetto, Theresienstadt, mostly for monetary purposes and trades, and the ironic half-Jews that Hitler himself left unmolested, and amazingly, one (some) of the mass murder responsible parties, as in Eichmann's superior, Heydrich, was also a half-Jew, which was kept in secrecy. And speaking of secrecy, Arendt writes of the Nazi "language rules", how terms like the "final solution," "evacuation" and the likes, hid the realities of terms such as mass murder, torture and genocide. I can't help but be reminded of Orwell's "newspeak" language in "1984," and the fact that language plays such a large part in all the distortions of the media that so influence society today.

Also informational, the communities/countries, such as the oppositions of Denmark and France. France became resistant when their own French Jews were demanded from them, then the Germans had to back down, neither having the strength nor organization to fully implement their plans there. It's just a horror that all countries didn't fight for their Jewish residents and those made stateless by Germany. There's much more to this book, the moral, social, political issues that question the validity of the case, how emotional detachment from the most horrendous crimes leave a cold objective reality where facts must be presented, and when they do, they almost always occur with paradox with shades of meanings that question others which are considered as valid.

The most important factor in my decision to give this book five stars is courageousness with which Arendt was willing to expound controversial ideas, especially since her subject matter was intimately related to such a sensitive topic, the Holocaust. A few of those ideas come to mind:

1. The principal concept formulated in this book is that atrocities such as the Holocaust are not the result of evil masterminds. Even though Arendt leaves room for evil masterminds as secondary factors, to her the most important factor contributing to such crimes against humanity is the "banality" (best understood as "commonplaceness", not "boring", as another reviewer suggests) of evil. We are all evil, in the end. The biggest moral lesson from the book is derived from this concept; that moral lesson is that we are all frighteningly too capable of the kind of evil the Nazis were guilty of. If we spend all day captivated by the evil of Hitler we will have no time left to reflect on our own immorality.

2. Another concept that Arendt develops is that the Jews were surprisingly passive in response to their situation. Now, obviously there are room for exceptions, and perhaps fairly large exceptions, but nevertheless this turned out to be a very controversial idea. I do, however, feel that Arendt successfully defends this position to the point that perhaps a second subtitle to this book might have been: "the banality of cowardice". This problem, too, must be seen in the proper light, for it show us that when faced with an evil attacker too many of us are willing to shy away from the fight.

Aside from the philosophical point, this book is about a remarkable trial. Adolf Eichmann was a former Nazi official, kidnapped out of Argentina by Israeli Mossad agents, and tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity by the Israeli government. I especially admire Arendt's position on this point because she isn't afraid to criticize the Israeli government for its conduct during the trial (Arendt is Jewish, in case you didn't know). Specifically, Arendt shows that the government attempted to make the world feel guilty about the Holocaust by painting Eichmann as the mastermind of the evil scheme.

This book is well written and helps the reader understand the complexities surrounding the Holocaust and the trial of Eichmann, issues that most people tend to see a simply black and white. I think this book should be required reading in high school because it is a model of good writing and effective academic inquiry.

Such was the description of Eichmann given by his lawyer, Dr. Servatius. "Mailman" is quite apropos. What we have in Eichmann is the farthest thing from a dominant personality. He was a joiner and a conformist, but not a man who'd likely be evil outside the historical context of the Third Reich. Honestly, as Arendt's account makes clear, the fellow was a complete non-entity who only felt comfortable when speaking in his native tongue of officialese. As one of the Israeli interrogators pointed out, it is rather inconceivable that such a marginal talent could rise to the level of Lieutenant Colonel in the SS (but look at his peers).

A complete psychological study of the man is what Arendt's account achieves, and this is a book to read and read again. Eichmann in Jerusalem is valuable for its journalism, as it covers his trial aptly, but also for its history. As a narrator, Arendt is erudite and clever; although, sometimes she can border on the snide. There are a few things she makes note of which are not entirely accurate as well such as assuming that the July 20th conspirators only turned on Hitler when events went badly in the war. That's not the case. They leaked information to the allies before the war even started. Also, that the Nazis would back down when presented with determined civilian resistance to their anti-Jewish measures is highly dubious. Generally, they always met force with more force, and reprisals were their rule-backing down was the exception. Of course, the information available to Arendt back in 1961 cannot be compared to the tsunami of documentation we have at our fingertips today. Overall, this is a stunning work.

If you are looking for a detailed lesson about the Final Solution and its significant operator who faithfully carried out the killings, this will be an enlightening and disturbing read. The truth is that wickedness can coexist with an apathetic lifestyle of doing the same things without challenging assumptions. And the excellent qualities of loyalty, duty, dependability, trustworthiness and consistency can be used for evil purposes.

I had long wanted to read Hannah Arendt's (1906 -- 1975) study of the Eichmann trial, "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil" and was prompted at last to do so when I found the book on sale at my local library. As I read, the controversial nature of Arendt's book was brought home to me. I decided I needed to read Arendt in tandem with a recent study of the trial, "The Eichmann Trial" (2011) by historian Deborah Lipstadt. The Eichmann Trial (Jewish Encounters) Lipstadt devotes a lengthy chapter to analyzing Arendt's book. Lipstadt, perhaps with the passage of time, sees the trial and its significance differently than does Arendt. Her treatment of Arendt is critical but balanced. She offers many of the criticisms of Arendt's book that were made when the book was published but finds a good deal to praise in Arendt's account. Although Arendt's and Lipstadt's book take opposing positions in many respects, this is not at all unusual in serious historical study. There is much to be learned from both books. They are better read, I believe, as complementary, rather than as opposed. For all its flaws and datedness, Arendt's book remains tough minded, provocative, and deeply thoughtful. Even for readers who disagree with Arendt or who become angry with her, the book is worth reading and pondering.

Arendt was a political philosopher who received an extraordinary education in pre WW II Germany. Her teachers included the philosophers Martin Heidegger (with whom she had an affair) and Karl Jaspers. Arendt immigrated to the United States in 1941 and soon became a famous public intellectual.

On May 11,1960, Adolph Eichmann was captured by Israeli operatives in Argentina and brought back to Israel to stand trial for his activities in the Holocaust. The capture and kidnapping of Eichmann resulted in substantial international controversy as did the trial itself. Eichmann's trial began in April, 1961, with the accused sitting in a bullet-proof glass both which became famous in itself. The trial was held before three distinguished Israeli Judges, each of whom had received their legal training in Germany. The chief prosecutor was Israeli Attorney General Gideon Hausner. Eichmann was defended by counsel of his choice, Robert Servatius, who had also been a lawyer for Nurenberg defendants. After a lengthy trial, in which Eichmann testified and was cross-examined in great detail, the court found Eichmann guilty and sentenced him to death in December, 1961. The Israeli Supreme Court rejected Eichmann's appeal on May 29, 1962; and Eichmann was hanged two days later on May 31, 1962. Arendt covered the trial for "The New Yorker". Critics point out that she was not present for the entire trial. Her book is based not only on observation of the trial but upon Arendt's reading of the transcripts, affidavits and other materials, including Eichmann extensive pretrial statements, that Israel's government made available to the media at the time as well as upon additional sources.

With all the criticism the book received at the time, Arendt's account of the trial was careful. The book is difficult to read and, in spite of her protestations to the contrary, is as much a work of political philosophy as it is a journalistic account of a trial. Arendt criticized the kidnapping of Eichmann and the manner in which prosecutor Hausner conducted the trial. She praised the Israeli judges and their approach to the case. It is sometimes overlooked that Arendt found that the Israelis were in the right in kidnapping Eichmann and in trying him before an Israeli court. Arendt found that Eichmann amply deserved the sentence of death, and she approved of the Israelis carrying the sentence out expeditiously in the face of widespread arguments for commutation.

Among other things, Arendt is criticized for applying the term "banal" to Eichmann. He appeared to her and to others as a mediocrity interested in his own career and in carrying out his orders rather than as a rabid Nazi and anti-Semite. She emphasized as do many modern writers the pervasive character of evil in WW II Germany and the lack of resistance. Documents that were not available to Arendt suggest to some historians that she overstated Eichmann's "banality", and that he was a far more committed Nazi and vicious anti-Semite than she realized. Arendt was also criticized for emphasizing the lack of resistance of the Jewish victims and the alleged cooperation of the Jewish leaders with Eichmann in carrying out the transports to the camps. Her manner of presentation was thought to be insensitive and ahistorical. Arendt attempted, with some plausibility, to respond to these criticisms. I don't think Arendt was as insensitive or as mistaken as her strongest critics suggest. There is still, as Lipstadt acknowledges, a great deal of historical discussion about the means in which the Holocaust was carried out. Arendt's tone, however, was that of a detached academic, and it sometimes became provocative and unduly combatative.

The main issues raised with Arendt's book seem to me her understanding of the purpose of the trial and her view of the nature of the Holocaust and of Eichmann's crimes. The prosecutor, Hausner, wanted to use the trial to educate the world further about the nature of the Holocaust. He put on the stand 100 witnesses, most of whom were Holocaust survivors. Many of these witnesses offered testimony that had little to do with Eichmann or that was unreliable. The Israeli court frequently grew impatient with Hausner and criticised his conduct of the trial, describing it as "picture painting." For Arendt, the trial was a legal proceeding that should have been focused on a single question, the actions of the accused and his guilt or innocence of the charges. She found overwhelming evidence to convict Eichmann. In this, the Israeli court at the time agreed with her. Many more recent scholars, including Lipstadt praise Hausner's approach to the trial.

Arendt saw Eichmann's guilt as a "crime against humanity" directed against the Jewish people against the background of a long history of anti-Semitism. Her approach tended towards universalism. Lipstadt and Hausner, in contrast, see the Holocaust as the final and direct result of centuries of anti-Semitism and violence. She, of course, does not deny the universal character of the Holocaust. The different approaches are important but matters of emphasis. It is here that I think that Arendt and Lipstadt may both be right.

Arendt's book remains worth reading as a historical document and for the views, sometimes ingraciously expressed, about the nature of law, government, evil, and personal responsibility.

Robin Friedman

The story floating around in the zeitgeist about Eichmann in Jerusalem is that Hannah Arendt established how boring the Nazis were: that the men responsible for the destruction of millions were just paper pushers. This captures part of Arendt's book, but not nearly all of it. Overall, I think it's best to describe Eichmann in Jerusalem as a clear-eyed look at the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a study of guilt, and a dispassionate analysis of war-crimes trials. It's a tremendous book.

Many Jews may stop reading when Arendt seems to accuse them of collaborating with the Nazis. I know virtually nothing about how this book was received, but it wouldn't surprise me at all if it offended a lot of people. If the historical record is as clear as Arendt claims, however, then there's nothing to get upset about. Councils of Jewish Elders, says Arendt, were formed in every country that the Nazis took over; those Councils documented the assets of the Jews within their communities, dutifully went around collecting them, turned them over to the Nazis, and only later found themselves herded into cattle cars to Auschwitz. In the death camps, she says, Jews did much of the gruesome work, like removing gold teeth from gas-chamber victims.

This is obviously sensitive stuff. Arendt's style is to deliver it as honestly and forthrightly as possible. Her style, indeed, is tightly bound to her subject. She writes of Eichmann,

[H]e apologized, saying, "Officialese . . . 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 ... 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 ...

She says elsewhere in Eichmann that the man's inability to speak was a symptom of his inability to think. It is her duty, then, to view Eichmann's trial with the clearest eye and sharpest mind possible.

Readers may recall the backstory here: the Israelis kidnapped Eichmann from Argentina in 1960, tried him in Israel, and hanged him in 1962. The trial sought to paint Eichmann as one of the masterminds behind the Holocaust and the vilest sort of monster. Arendt retorts that he was, at best, a high-level functionary, and indeed a paper pusher, and that everyone at the trial could see immediately that this was the case. He never killed anyone, and indeed it seems pretty clear that the merest sight of blood would make the man queasy.

None of this lets Eichmann off the hook, though, which is exactly the point: there's a world of difference between passers-by, who allowed the European Jews to be destroyed, and the Eichmanns who filed away the forms to send them to their destruction.

Granted, then, that Eichmann deserved to pay in a way that the silent millions did not, why was Israel the proper forum for his punishment? Arendt is skeptical that it was. Eichmann's crime was a crime against humanity, and he should have been punished the same way that other Nazis were punished at Nuremberg. At the same time, no other nation had stepped up to try Eichmann, and Argentina was refusing to turn over the Nazis within its borders, so Israel may have had no choice. Arendt, and the court's decision itself, approvingly quote Grotius's line: "punishment is necessary `to defend the honor or authority of him who was hurt by the offence so that the failure to punish may not cause his degradation.'"

Israel seemed to believe that it had the right to try Eichmann because of his crimes against the Jews, which makes me wonder: does Israel automatically grant itself the right to try crimes against Jews even today? Suppose some other country tried to kill all the Jews within its borders now; would Israel grant itself the right to try the leaders of that country?

Arendt says that Israel's trial of Eichmann was much less about Eichmann and much more about the history of anti-Semitism from the time of Pharaoh all the way up to the Germans. There is an element of farce in all of this, and I think it's fair to say that Arendt took offense: a crime as serious as Eichmann's deserves a serious trial, rather than a circus. Fortunately the legal decision that came down at the trial's conclusion was a model of seriousness.

Even with Eichmann swinging from the gallows, there's still the matter of Europe's guilt. Arendt, as ever, is only as brutal as she needs to be here: the nations of Europe stand guilty of allowing the slaughter to happen. The French, for instance, allowed foreign Jews within French borders to be shipped off to Germany, but put their foot down when the Nazis demanded French Jews. Their refusal to export their own Jews points out another matter: when nations said no to the Nazis, the Nazis often backed down. They were by no means an immovable wall of violence. The evil that European nations allowed to happen is all the more inexcusable when we know that there were exceptions.

At the heart of all of this is the basic principle, which Arendt summarizes so well:

There remains, however, one fundamental problem, which was implicitly present in all these postwar trials and which must be mentioned here because it touches upon one of the central moral questions of all time, namely upon the nature and function of human judgment. What we have demanded in these trials, where the defendants had committed "legal" crimes, is that human beings be capable of telling right from wrong even when all they have to guide them is their own judgment, which, moreover, happens to be completely at odds with what they must regard as the unanimous opinion of all those around them.

This moral question, and the denunciation that necessarily follows it, doesn't go away even if the Nazis mercilessly destroyed those who refused to follow their orders. We wish for a clear voice calling out from the maelstrom. Arendt's is that voice.