Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Penguin Classics)
Author:
Genres: History, Nonfiction, Law, Substores
Book Type: Paperback
Author:
Genres: History, Nonfiction, Law, Substores
Book Type: Paperback
This is, simply put, one of the most important books of the 20th century, and should be required reading for every high school and/or college student, along with other crucial Holocaust literature, including the works of Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi. This books takes a very different tone, however, focusing specifically on a singular figure, Adolf Eichmann, one of the "architects of the Holocaust," as journalist Walter Cronkite once called his ilk, himself a correspondent at the Nuremberg trials, one of his first official assignments.
Also simply put, it isn't an easy book to read, for a number of reasons. Author Hannah Arendt, herself a survivor, fled Germany following Hitler's rise to power, and eventually found herself reporting on Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem.
The focus of the book, which has generated enormous controversy, also for a variety of reasons, is to understand how a "normal" human being could engage in the murder of untold millions of their fellow human beings, seemingly without remorse, or even an acknowledgement of responsibility. What made this individual capable of the things he carried out, seemingly without thought, and certainly without regret after the fact? Several of Eichmann's other cohorts were certainly sociopaths, if not, as many no doubt were, psychopaths, incapable of any normal emotion, pity, mercy, empathy or normal attachment or bonding with other human beings. As Arendt, and, indeed, the psychiatrists who examined him, noted, however, that apparently wasn't the case with Eichmann himself.
Otto Adolf Eichmann was born in 1906, and is widely considered to be one of the primary organizers of the "Final Solution," Nazi jargon for the murder of the entire population of European Jews. Eichmann was given the responsibility of orchestrating the mass deportation and extermination of untold millions. A lackluster student (he apparently attended the same high school in Linz that Hitler himself had attended, some 17 years prior) Eichmann worked briefly in his youth for his father's mining company, then as a sales clerk, and then as a traveling salesman. He joined the Nazi party and the SS in 1932, then the SD, the Nazi "Security Service" in 1933, where he served as the head of the department of "Jewish Affairs," which was at the time chiefly concerned with facilitating Jewish emigration, the preferred method of disposal before the Final Solution became the adopted policy at large. It is estimated that some 250,000 of Germany's total population of around 437,000 Jews emigrated between 1933 and 1939.
When war formally erupted in September, 1939, Eichmann was charged with the duty of facilitating the forced expulsion of Jews from their homes all over Europe and relocating them to ghettos in major cities, still, at that time, with the ultimate goal of emigration. When the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in June, 1941, however, emigration gave way to extermination, although plans had probably been in the works for some time prior. Eichmann himself was responsible for coordinating and carrying out the mass deportation and extermination of nearly the entire Jewish population of Hungary, after March, 1944, where an estimated 75% were killed in camps immediately upon arrival, primarily Auschwitz.
Eichmann was captured by US forces, but escaped from a detention camp. He spent the next several years in hiding in Germany until 1950 when he apparently moved to Buenos Aires using false papers, sending for his family two years later. Survivors of his atrocities were committed to hunting him down, however, including the famed Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, the latter of whom read in a letter that he had been seen in Buenos Aires.
The story of his capture is a long and intricate one, but, in short: the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad, tracked him down (a recent movie loosely based on the circumstances of his capture was made a few years ago), essentially kidnapping him near his home in Buenos Aires. He was seized by three agents and taken to a safe house, where he was held for nine days while his identity was confirmed. He was then drugged and dressed as a flight attendant and smuggled out of Argentina to Israel in May, 1960.
Eichmann was taken to a fortified prison and interrogated daily for months, which produced over 3,500 pages of transcripts, some of which Arendt uses as source material. He was finally brought before a special tribunal for formal charges, which included crimes against humanity, war crimes, and crimes against the Jewish people, many of which were capital crimes. Three judges presided over the trial, and Eichmann was represented by a German attorney who is frequently mentioned by Arendt, one Robert Servatius.
The trial went on for four months, with the prosecution calling 112 witnesses, most Holocaust survivors. Eichmann himself testified in his own defense, something that would likely not occur today, as he was mauled during cross examination. The verdict was not handed down until four months after the conclusion of the trial, which pronounced that he had been convicted on fifteen counts, including crimes against humanity and the Jewish people, despite the fact that the judges determined that he had not himself actually killed anyone. Eichmann was also found guilty of crimes against other groups, including Poles, Slovenes and the Roma, another highly persecuted group. Notably, he was found responsible for the reprehensible conditions of transport, which included victims being sealed for sometimes up to a week in cattle cars with no food or water. On December 15, 1961, he was sentenced to death by hanging.
Despite his appeals, which took place for a further six months, Eichmann's death sentence was upheld. His wife Vera was allowed to travel to Israel to say her final goodbyes, and shortly thereafter, the Supreme Court rejected his appeal and quashed the final legal challenge. As a last act of desperation to save him from the gallows, Eichmann and his legal team petitioned Israeli president Ben-Zvi for clemency, as did some other prominent figures who opposed the death penalty, but clemency was denied. This is perhaps a fitting conclusion, as none of the untold millions of murdered men, women and children were extended clemency by the Nazis.
Eichmann was hanged in prison just a few minutes past midnight on June 1, 1962. His last words were reportedly, "I die believing in God." Within hours his body was cremated and his remains scattered in the Mediterranean Sea, beyond Israeli territorial waters.
A flurry of published works followed, including Hannah Arendt's. She had reported extensively on the trial for "The New Yorker." With regard to his role in the Holocaust, Simon Wiesenthal had a similar opinion to Arendt's, in some respects, writing in his 1988 book "Justice, Not Vengeance" that "the world now understand the concept of 'desk murderer.' We know that one doesn't need to be fanatical, sadistic or mentally ill to murder millions; it is enough to be a loyal follower eager to do one's duty."
CONTROVERSY
Arendt's work met with almost immediate controversy. Many took issue with her portrayal of Eichmann as nothing more than a mindless idiot, who, despite his intellectual inferiority, orchestrated efforts to send millions to their deaths.
Hannah Arendt's own personal story certainly deeply affected her writings. She was born to a wealthy merchant family in Hanover, but was raised in what is now Russian Kaliningrad. Although acting here as a journalist, she studied philosophy at the University of Marburg, and later at the Universities of Freiburg and Heidelberg where she earned a Ph.D. in 1929. She shortly thereafter moved to Berlin and worked for the Zionist Federation of Germany. She was even arrested for anti-state propaganda by the Gestapo, and fled Germany after her release. She and her husband later fled to New York after being again imprisoned. "Eichmann in Jerusalem" was not her first major work: she published on philosophy throughout the 1950s, including the acclaimed "The Origins of Totalitarianism" in 1951, which brought her much renown. Arendt died of a heart attack at the age of 69.
Many criticized her for suggesting that the primary reason why the prosecution attempted to lay greater blame on Eichmann than he deserved was for propaganda purposes, specifically that it wanted to hang one of the primary architects of the Final Solution to avenge the Jewish people as a whole. She genuinely seemed to think that portraying him as a mindless bureaucrat made him a more hideous figure than acknowledging that he was one of the masterminds of the greatest mass slaughter in human history.
She wasn't alone: even the Israeli prosecutors at Eichmann's trial raised the question of whether the Jews in any way bore responsibility for their own fates in their seeming failure to fight back, to organize or resist in any meaningful way. Arendt has frequently been criticized, I believe wrongly, for victim blaming. An entire book, entitled "And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight," was even published in response to "Eichmann in Jerusalem," which specifically refuted her claims that he was a mindless idiot just doing his job.
Others have been even more critical, attacking Arendt herself. Another author, British historian David Cesarani, claimed that her own personal prejudices and biases influenced her writings, specifically that as a German Jew, she held personal animosity toward "Ostjuden," "Eastern Jews" from Poland and Eastern Europe, which even caused her to question the competence of the chief prosecutor. This argument apparently was considered at least somewhat meritorious, as she had written in a letter to psychiatrist Karl Jaspers that the prosecutor was a "typical Galician Jew [Ashkenazi Jews from the Ukraine and southeast Poland] ... constantly making mistakes. Probably one of those people who doesn't know any language."
Later, she reportedly articulated her belief in something of a Jewish hierarchy, with German Jews at the top, followed by other "European" Jews, then Middle Eastern Jews who "speak[] only Hebrew and look[] Arabic," with the "Oriental mob, as if one were in Istanbul or some other half-Asiatic country" and "peies and caftan Jews, who make life impossible for all reasonable people here" at the bottom. She even suggests that the courtroom appears more theater than trial, with center stage constructed by Prime Minister Ben-Guiron to feature the Jewish people's historic suffering, as well as its heroism. The judges, all German Jews, in contrast, are portrayed as cognizant of the prosecution's aims and keep the trial geared toward justice for the accused.
An article which also appeared in the "New Yorker" by defense witness Michael Musmanno claimed that her prejudices against even the prosecution were so vicious that her book could not be considered a legitimate historical work. Arendt was also even accused of near-plagiarism, for her reliance on other material, including and a book by H.G. Adler (Theresienstadt 1941-1945), which she had read in manuscript form, leading the author to write her own essay on Arendt's work, "What does Hannah Arendt know about Eichmann and the Final Solution?" which was published in 1964, and Raul Hilberg's "The Destruction of the European Jews."
Other issues, in a more philosophical sense: she (I believe) mistakenly argued that Eichmann was in some ways a pawn, if not an outright victim, of the highly effective Nazi tactic of replacing individual morality and moral systems with blind obedience to the state in the person of its figurehead, a godlike entity who served as the arbiter of morality rather than the individual. This total subversion of the self to the state, as in the case of most totalitarian dictatorships, was a chief tenant of Hitler's program, one which had no place for the individual or thought in contradiction to the official state status quo.
Eichmann's entire life, it seemed, revolved around the singular focus on belonging to something larger than himself. Being such a pathetic mediocrity, in Arendt's view, he sought to live vicariously through the greater whole, assimilating group accomplishments and accolades unto himself, unable to make any meaningful achievements as an individual. He reportedly joined the Nazi party simply because he wanted to belong to something, not necessarily because he was an ardent supporter of their ideology, she thought: the proof was his ultimate loyalty to the regime, despite his claimed protestations about the death factories, which he himself had visited. Eichmann believed that obedience to the state and acting as a "law-abiding citizen" in carrying out the deportations which led to mass extermination was not only the right thing to do, but the only thing to do, without question or hesitation.
The primary objection I have to her otherwise capable presentation of this tragic episode in human history is her mischaracterization of Eichmann's intellectual capacity and his ability to understand what he was doing. Making him out to be a mindless idiot in some respects accomplishes his purpose. He's certainly no genius, but he's not a moron, either, who was so mindless that he wasn't responsible for his reprehensible actions. As presented by Arendt, Eichmann's fundamental defense was simply that he bore no responsibility for anything for which he was being indicted, including the slaughter of potentially ten million people, when considering the other victims of the Nazis who were executed in ways even the most extreme horror writers can't fathom, because he was either 1) just "doing his job," a frequently employed defense of many of the other high-ranking officials who had faced similar trials immediately after the war, and that 2) what he had done was perfectly "legal": he was simply obeying the law of the day.
Eichmann also made some rather elaborate arguments with regard to his defense and as an explanation of his actions, including invoking Kant's "categorical imperative," (135-137) which he interpreted . As Arendt noted, however, Eichmann either did not have the intellectual capacity to understand Kant's ultimate point, including the notion of reciprocity, but simply employed those facets of philosophy which supported his views, specifically that he was doing nothing more than complying with the "spirit of the law," as he described it. This meant, Eichmann reasoned, in his flawed and banal interpretation of a complex philosophical concept, that he was no longer "master of his own deeds," and instead had simply followed the diktat of the ultimate legislator, Hitler.
Arendt interpreted this as evidence that Eichmann was so intellectually and morally challenged that he was simply unable to think for himself, another frequently employed defense of other high-ranking Nazis, whose arguments largely and correctly fell on deaf ears. She refers repeatedly to his use of "stock phrases" and "cliches," which we might today call "sound bytes," thereby demonstrating a lack of ability to understand the gravity of his actions. Arendt likewise cites, repeatedly, Eichmann's lack of personal animus against the Jews or any other targeted group.
I'm not convinced.
He may have been legitimately stupid (he was unable to even complete high school, recall) and was only able to procure a job through family connections... but he wasn't that dumb. Others share this opinion. In her 2011 book "Eichmann Before Jerusalem," Bettina Stangneth argues conversely to Arendt that Eichmann was, in fact, a cold and calculating disciple of Hitler, one of his most ardent followers and a trusted member of the inner circle. He certainly had help, but he was able to, in some cases, almost single-handedly orchestrate the complex logistics of mass-murder, facilitating the shipment of millions of people swiftly and efficiently to their deaths. That feat could not have been accomplished by the simpleton Ardent, and, likely, his lawyers, wanted to make him out to be. Stangneth likewise argues that both he and his attorneys simply built a "straw man," that of the mindless drone bureaucrat for the purpose of his defense, as he was unquestionably guilty.
In short, I think Arendt is just mistaken about Eichmann. That's excusable; one is permitted to make mistakes about a person's nature and character. There was certainly no ulterior motive to it. I think she was just taken in by his "act" in court. One of the more frequent tactics people employ, especially when they must acknowledge that they have no real affirmative defense, even if they themselves believe their actions are justified, is to "play stupid." It's also an attempt to evoke in others some sense of pity, sympathy, or at least, empathy, which the killers themselves profoundly lack, in order to further a belief that the individual is too intellectually challenged to understand the seriousness of their actions, and, as such, shouldn't be punished as harshly.
Clearly, that didn't work out for Eichmann. His incessant displays of narcissism and self-righteousness didn't endear him to anyone, either, which, in fact, suggests that he was not actually a psychopath, due to his lack of ability to effectively manipulate others and to attract supporters. He also waffled back and forth between bragging that, as a member of the Einsatzgruppen, he was a member of the "intellectual elite," but in the next breath, he claimed that he was essentially a dope, simply doing his masters' bidding, unable to think for himself, a contradiction which certainly hurt his defense. However, his elaborate play "act" also suggests that he could, indeed, be calculating and strategic, clearly sufficient to orchestrate efforts to send millions to their deaths: neither the insanity nor the stupid defense was enough to save his neck.
In short, where Arendt is certainly correct is that it doesn't take a demon, an inhuman monster channeling the forces of darkness to effect unspeakable evil, but simply a committed, even legitimately misguided human being with no superlative characteristics, who wanted to be a part of something great, not caring how they got there. She surmises that "everybody could see that this man was not a 'monster,' but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown."
The banality of evil, she postulates, the phrase she coined, is simply that normal, even mediocre people, those just like everyone else, are capable of committing unspeakable atrocities, apparently without even thinking too hard on it. That, perhaps, is this individual's legacy: that anyone is capable of just about anything; it really all boils down to circumstance.
Sage wisdom, indeed, considering the times we live in.
Also simply put, it isn't an easy book to read, for a number of reasons. Author Hannah Arendt, herself a survivor, fled Germany following Hitler's rise to power, and eventually found herself reporting on Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem.
The focus of the book, which has generated enormous controversy, also for a variety of reasons, is to understand how a "normal" human being could engage in the murder of untold millions of their fellow human beings, seemingly without remorse, or even an acknowledgement of responsibility. What made this individual capable of the things he carried out, seemingly without thought, and certainly without regret after the fact? Several of Eichmann's other cohorts were certainly sociopaths, if not, as many no doubt were, psychopaths, incapable of any normal emotion, pity, mercy, empathy or normal attachment or bonding with other human beings. As Arendt, and, indeed, the psychiatrists who examined him, noted, however, that apparently wasn't the case with Eichmann himself.
Otto Adolf Eichmann was born in 1906, and is widely considered to be one of the primary organizers of the "Final Solution," Nazi jargon for the murder of the entire population of European Jews. Eichmann was given the responsibility of orchestrating the mass deportation and extermination of untold millions. A lackluster student (he apparently attended the same high school in Linz that Hitler himself had attended, some 17 years prior) Eichmann worked briefly in his youth for his father's mining company, then as a sales clerk, and then as a traveling salesman. He joined the Nazi party and the SS in 1932, then the SD, the Nazi "Security Service" in 1933, where he served as the head of the department of "Jewish Affairs," which was at the time chiefly concerned with facilitating Jewish emigration, the preferred method of disposal before the Final Solution became the adopted policy at large. It is estimated that some 250,000 of Germany's total population of around 437,000 Jews emigrated between 1933 and 1939.
When war formally erupted in September, 1939, Eichmann was charged with the duty of facilitating the forced expulsion of Jews from their homes all over Europe and relocating them to ghettos in major cities, still, at that time, with the ultimate goal of emigration. When the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in June, 1941, however, emigration gave way to extermination, although plans had probably been in the works for some time prior. Eichmann himself was responsible for coordinating and carrying out the mass deportation and extermination of nearly the entire Jewish population of Hungary, after March, 1944, where an estimated 75% were killed in camps immediately upon arrival, primarily Auschwitz.
Eichmann was captured by US forces, but escaped from a detention camp. He spent the next several years in hiding in Germany until 1950 when he apparently moved to Buenos Aires using false papers, sending for his family two years later. Survivors of his atrocities were committed to hunting him down, however, including the famed Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, the latter of whom read in a letter that he had been seen in Buenos Aires.
The story of his capture is a long and intricate one, but, in short: the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad, tracked him down (a recent movie loosely based on the circumstances of his capture was made a few years ago), essentially kidnapping him near his home in Buenos Aires. He was seized by three agents and taken to a safe house, where he was held for nine days while his identity was confirmed. He was then drugged and dressed as a flight attendant and smuggled out of Argentina to Israel in May, 1960.
Eichmann was taken to a fortified prison and interrogated daily for months, which produced over 3,500 pages of transcripts, some of which Arendt uses as source material. He was finally brought before a special tribunal for formal charges, which included crimes against humanity, war crimes, and crimes against the Jewish people, many of which were capital crimes. Three judges presided over the trial, and Eichmann was represented by a German attorney who is frequently mentioned by Arendt, one Robert Servatius.
The trial went on for four months, with the prosecution calling 112 witnesses, most Holocaust survivors. Eichmann himself testified in his own defense, something that would likely not occur today, as he was mauled during cross examination. The verdict was not handed down until four months after the conclusion of the trial, which pronounced that he had been convicted on fifteen counts, including crimes against humanity and the Jewish people, despite the fact that the judges determined that he had not himself actually killed anyone. Eichmann was also found guilty of crimes against other groups, including Poles, Slovenes and the Roma, another highly persecuted group. Notably, he was found responsible for the reprehensible conditions of transport, which included victims being sealed for sometimes up to a week in cattle cars with no food or water. On December 15, 1961, he was sentenced to death by hanging.
Despite his appeals, which took place for a further six months, Eichmann's death sentence was upheld. His wife Vera was allowed to travel to Israel to say her final goodbyes, and shortly thereafter, the Supreme Court rejected his appeal and quashed the final legal challenge. As a last act of desperation to save him from the gallows, Eichmann and his legal team petitioned Israeli president Ben-Zvi for clemency, as did some other prominent figures who opposed the death penalty, but clemency was denied. This is perhaps a fitting conclusion, as none of the untold millions of murdered men, women and children were extended clemency by the Nazis.
Eichmann was hanged in prison just a few minutes past midnight on June 1, 1962. His last words were reportedly, "I die believing in God." Within hours his body was cremated and his remains scattered in the Mediterranean Sea, beyond Israeli territorial waters.
A flurry of published works followed, including Hannah Arendt's. She had reported extensively on the trial for "The New Yorker." With regard to his role in the Holocaust, Simon Wiesenthal had a similar opinion to Arendt's, in some respects, writing in his 1988 book "Justice, Not Vengeance" that "the world now understand the concept of 'desk murderer.' We know that one doesn't need to be fanatical, sadistic or mentally ill to murder millions; it is enough to be a loyal follower eager to do one's duty."
CONTROVERSY
Arendt's work met with almost immediate controversy. Many took issue with her portrayal of Eichmann as nothing more than a mindless idiot, who, despite his intellectual inferiority, orchestrated efforts to send millions to their deaths.
Hannah Arendt's own personal story certainly deeply affected her writings. She was born to a wealthy merchant family in Hanover, but was raised in what is now Russian Kaliningrad. Although acting here as a journalist, she studied philosophy at the University of Marburg, and later at the Universities of Freiburg and Heidelberg where she earned a Ph.D. in 1929. She shortly thereafter moved to Berlin and worked for the Zionist Federation of Germany. She was even arrested for anti-state propaganda by the Gestapo, and fled Germany after her release. She and her husband later fled to New York after being again imprisoned. "Eichmann in Jerusalem" was not her first major work: she published on philosophy throughout the 1950s, including the acclaimed "The Origins of Totalitarianism" in 1951, which brought her much renown. Arendt died of a heart attack at the age of 69.
Many criticized her for suggesting that the primary reason why the prosecution attempted to lay greater blame on Eichmann than he deserved was for propaganda purposes, specifically that it wanted to hang one of the primary architects of the Final Solution to avenge the Jewish people as a whole. She genuinely seemed to think that portraying him as a mindless bureaucrat made him a more hideous figure than acknowledging that he was one of the masterminds of the greatest mass slaughter in human history.
She wasn't alone: even the Israeli prosecutors at Eichmann's trial raised the question of whether the Jews in any way bore responsibility for their own fates in their seeming failure to fight back, to organize or resist in any meaningful way. Arendt has frequently been criticized, I believe wrongly, for victim blaming. An entire book, entitled "And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight," was even published in response to "Eichmann in Jerusalem," which specifically refuted her claims that he was a mindless idiot just doing his job.
Others have been even more critical, attacking Arendt herself. Another author, British historian David Cesarani, claimed that her own personal prejudices and biases influenced her writings, specifically that as a German Jew, she held personal animosity toward "Ostjuden," "Eastern Jews" from Poland and Eastern Europe, which even caused her to question the competence of the chief prosecutor. This argument apparently was considered at least somewhat meritorious, as she had written in a letter to psychiatrist Karl Jaspers that the prosecutor was a "typical Galician Jew [Ashkenazi Jews from the Ukraine and southeast Poland] ... constantly making mistakes. Probably one of those people who doesn't know any language."
Later, she reportedly articulated her belief in something of a Jewish hierarchy, with German Jews at the top, followed by other "European" Jews, then Middle Eastern Jews who "speak[] only Hebrew and look[] Arabic," with the "Oriental mob, as if one were in Istanbul or some other half-Asiatic country" and "peies and caftan Jews, who make life impossible for all reasonable people here" at the bottom. She even suggests that the courtroom appears more theater than trial, with center stage constructed by Prime Minister Ben-Guiron to feature the Jewish people's historic suffering, as well as its heroism. The judges, all German Jews, in contrast, are portrayed as cognizant of the prosecution's aims and keep the trial geared toward justice for the accused.
An article which also appeared in the "New Yorker" by defense witness Michael Musmanno claimed that her prejudices against even the prosecution were so vicious that her book could not be considered a legitimate historical work. Arendt was also even accused of near-plagiarism, for her reliance on other material, including and a book by H.G. Adler (Theresienstadt 1941-1945), which she had read in manuscript form, leading the author to write her own essay on Arendt's work, "What does Hannah Arendt know about Eichmann and the Final Solution?" which was published in 1964, and Raul Hilberg's "The Destruction of the European Jews."
Other issues, in a more philosophical sense: she (I believe) mistakenly argued that Eichmann was in some ways a pawn, if not an outright victim, of the highly effective Nazi tactic of replacing individual morality and moral systems with blind obedience to the state in the person of its figurehead, a godlike entity who served as the arbiter of morality rather than the individual. This total subversion of the self to the state, as in the case of most totalitarian dictatorships, was a chief tenant of Hitler's program, one which had no place for the individual or thought in contradiction to the official state status quo.
Eichmann's entire life, it seemed, revolved around the singular focus on belonging to something larger than himself. Being such a pathetic mediocrity, in Arendt's view, he sought to live vicariously through the greater whole, assimilating group accomplishments and accolades unto himself, unable to make any meaningful achievements as an individual. He reportedly joined the Nazi party simply because he wanted to belong to something, not necessarily because he was an ardent supporter of their ideology, she thought: the proof was his ultimate loyalty to the regime, despite his claimed protestations about the death factories, which he himself had visited. Eichmann believed that obedience to the state and acting as a "law-abiding citizen" in carrying out the deportations which led to mass extermination was not only the right thing to do, but the only thing to do, without question or hesitation.
The primary objection I have to her otherwise capable presentation of this tragic episode in human history is her mischaracterization of Eichmann's intellectual capacity and his ability to understand what he was doing. Making him out to be a mindless idiot in some respects accomplishes his purpose. He's certainly no genius, but he's not a moron, either, who was so mindless that he wasn't responsible for his reprehensible actions. As presented by Arendt, Eichmann's fundamental defense was simply that he bore no responsibility for anything for which he was being indicted, including the slaughter of potentially ten million people, when considering the other victims of the Nazis who were executed in ways even the most extreme horror writers can't fathom, because he was either 1) just "doing his job," a frequently employed defense of many of the other high-ranking officials who had faced similar trials immediately after the war, and that 2) what he had done was perfectly "legal": he was simply obeying the law of the day.
Eichmann also made some rather elaborate arguments with regard to his defense and as an explanation of his actions, including invoking Kant's "categorical imperative," (135-137) which he interpreted . As Arendt noted, however, Eichmann either did not have the intellectual capacity to understand Kant's ultimate point, including the notion of reciprocity, but simply employed those facets of philosophy which supported his views, specifically that he was doing nothing more than complying with the "spirit of the law," as he described it. This meant, Eichmann reasoned, in his flawed and banal interpretation of a complex philosophical concept, that he was no longer "master of his own deeds," and instead had simply followed the diktat of the ultimate legislator, Hitler.
Arendt interpreted this as evidence that Eichmann was so intellectually and morally challenged that he was simply unable to think for himself, another frequently employed defense of other high-ranking Nazis, whose arguments largely and correctly fell on deaf ears. She refers repeatedly to his use of "stock phrases" and "cliches," which we might today call "sound bytes," thereby demonstrating a lack of ability to understand the gravity of his actions. Arendt likewise cites, repeatedly, Eichmann's lack of personal animus against the Jews or any other targeted group.
I'm not convinced.
He may have been legitimately stupid (he was unable to even complete high school, recall) and was only able to procure a job through family connections... but he wasn't that dumb. Others share this opinion. In her 2011 book "Eichmann Before Jerusalem," Bettina Stangneth argues conversely to Arendt that Eichmann was, in fact, a cold and calculating disciple of Hitler, one of his most ardent followers and a trusted member of the inner circle. He certainly had help, but he was able to, in some cases, almost single-handedly orchestrate the complex logistics of mass-murder, facilitating the shipment of millions of people swiftly and efficiently to their deaths. That feat could not have been accomplished by the simpleton Ardent, and, likely, his lawyers, wanted to make him out to be. Stangneth likewise argues that both he and his attorneys simply built a "straw man," that of the mindless drone bureaucrat for the purpose of his defense, as he was unquestionably guilty.
In short, I think Arendt is just mistaken about Eichmann. That's excusable; one is permitted to make mistakes about a person's nature and character. There was certainly no ulterior motive to it. I think she was just taken in by his "act" in court. One of the more frequent tactics people employ, especially when they must acknowledge that they have no real affirmative defense, even if they themselves believe their actions are justified, is to "play stupid." It's also an attempt to evoke in others some sense of pity, sympathy, or at least, empathy, which the killers themselves profoundly lack, in order to further a belief that the individual is too intellectually challenged to understand the seriousness of their actions, and, as such, shouldn't be punished as harshly.
Clearly, that didn't work out for Eichmann. His incessant displays of narcissism and self-righteousness didn't endear him to anyone, either, which, in fact, suggests that he was not actually a psychopath, due to his lack of ability to effectively manipulate others and to attract supporters. He also waffled back and forth between bragging that, as a member of the Einsatzgruppen, he was a member of the "intellectual elite," but in the next breath, he claimed that he was essentially a dope, simply doing his masters' bidding, unable to think for himself, a contradiction which certainly hurt his defense. However, his elaborate play "act" also suggests that he could, indeed, be calculating and strategic, clearly sufficient to orchestrate efforts to send millions to their deaths: neither the insanity nor the stupid defense was enough to save his neck.
In short, where Arendt is certainly correct is that it doesn't take a demon, an inhuman monster channeling the forces of darkness to effect unspeakable evil, but simply a committed, even legitimately misguided human being with no superlative characteristics, who wanted to be a part of something great, not caring how they got there. She surmises that "everybody could see that this man was not a 'monster,' but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown."
The banality of evil, she postulates, the phrase she coined, is simply that normal, even mediocre people, those just like everyone else, are capable of committing unspeakable atrocities, apparently without even thinking too hard on it. That, perhaps, is this individual's legacy: that anyone is capable of just about anything; it really all boils down to circumstance.
Sage wisdom, indeed, considering the times we live in.
