Eichmann in Jerusalem

Based on Wikipedia: Eichmann in Jerusalem

Here is the most unsettling thing about Adolf Eichmann: six psychologists examined him before his trial, and not one of them found any trace of mental illness. No personality disorder. No pathology. One doctor even remarked that Eichmann's attitude toward his family and friends was "highly desirable." Another noted something stranger still—that the only unusual trait Eichmann displayed was being more normal in his habits and speech than the average person.

This is the horror at the heart of Hannah Arendt's 1963 book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. The man who helped orchestrate the murder of millions was not a monster. He was a joiner, a bureaucrat, a man who couldn't finish high school and got his first real job through family connections. He was ordinary. And that ordinariness, Arendt argued, was precisely the problem.

The Trial That Sparked a Controversy

Arendt was herself a Jewish refugee who had fled Germany during Hitler's rise to power. In 1961, she traveled to Jerusalem to cover Adolf Eichmann's trial for The New Yorker. Eichmann had been one of the major organizers of the Holocaust—the man responsible for the logistics of transporting millions of Jews to their deaths. Israeli agents had kidnapped him from Argentina the year before, and now he sat in a glass booth in a Jerusalem courtroom, facing charges of crimes against humanity.

What Arendt saw in that courtroom disturbed her, but not in the way she had expected.

She had anticipated a fanatic, perhaps. A true believer consumed by ideological hatred. What she found instead was something closer to a mid-level manager—a man who spoke in clichés, who couldn't express an original thought, who kept insisting he was just following orders and doing his job. He displayed neither guilt for his actions nor hatred for those trying him.

"He did his duty," Arendt wrote, her tone layered with irony. "He not only obeyed orders, he also obeyed the law."

The Banality of Evil

The phrase that would become one of the most memorable in twentieth-century intellectual life—"the banality of evil"—appears in the book's subtitle. But what did Arendt actually mean by it?

She did not mean that Eichmann's crimes were ordinary or unremarkable. The Holocaust was unprecedented in its horror. What she meant was something more subtle and more troubling: that the man who helped make it possible was himself utterly unremarkable. His evil was not the product of demonic ambition or psychopathic cruelty. It was the product of something far more common—a failure to think.

Eichmann, Arendt observed, could not speak without relying on what she called "stock phrases and self-invented clichés." He wrapped the mass murder of millions in the antiseptic language of bureaucracy—the German term was Sprachregelung, or "convention of speech"—that made implementation of Hitler's policies "somehow palatable." He was a man who had traded his capacity for independent thought for the comfort of following rules.

This is not the same as saying he was stupid, though Arendt did note his intellectual limitations. He had failed to complete high school or vocational training, and during both his career in the Nazi SS and his trial in Jerusalem, he tried to cover up his lack of education. He "blushed" when these facts came to light.

But his real deficit was not intelligence. It was imagination. He could not step outside the narrow world of orders and protocols to see what he was actually doing. He suffered, Arendt said, from a "lack of imagination" and an "inability to think."

The Misreading of Kant

One of the most striking moments in Eichmann's testimony came when he claimed he had always tried to live according to Immanuel Kant's categorical imperative. This is the central principle of Kantian ethics—roughly, the idea that you should act only according to rules that you could will to become universal laws. It is, in a sense, the philosophical version of the Golden Rule: treat others as you would want to be treated.

Arendt was astonished. Not because Eichmann knew who Kant was, but because he had so completely misunderstood him.

In Kant's formulation, the "legislator" whose law you should follow is your own moral self. Every person is a moral legislator, capable of reasoning about what is right. Eichmann had taken the wrong lesson entirely. For him, the legislator was not his own conscience but Hitler. He had understood only that one's actions should coincide with general law, without understanding that in Kant's system, you are the one who determines what that law should be through your own moral reasoning.

Eichmann himself seemed to recognize the contradiction at some level. He told the court that once he was charged with carrying out the Final Solution—the Nazi euphemism for the systematic murder of European Jews—he had ceased to live according to Kantian principles. He knew it. But he consoled himself with the thought that he was no longer "master of his own deeds," that he was unable "to change anything."

This is the voice of someone who has surrendered moral agency entirely. And Arendt found it chilling precisely because it was not the voice of a madman.

A Joiner, Not a Believer

To understand Eichmann, Arendt suggested, you had to understand his pathological need to belong.

He was a joiner his entire life. As a young man, he belonged to the Young Men's Christian Association (the YMCA), then the Wandervogel (a German youth movement emphasizing hiking and nature), then the Jungfrontkämpferverband (a veterans' organization). In 1933, he tried to join the Schlaraffia, a men's organization similar to Freemasonry. When that failed, a family friend—who would later become a convicted war criminal—encouraged him to join the SS instead.

At the end of World War II, when the Nazi regime collapsed, Eichmann found himself depressed. Not because of guilt over what he had done. Not because of the millions dead. He was depressed because, as he put it, "it then dawned on him that thenceforward he would have to live without being a member of something or other."

His own words are haunting in their emptiness:

I sensed I would have to live a leaderless and difficult individual life, I would receive no directives from anybody, no orders and commands would any longer be issued to me, no pertinent ordinances would be there to consult—in brief, a life never known before lay ahead of me.

This was not ideological commitment. This was dependency. Eichmann's crimes were driven not by hatred of Jews—Arendt argued he showed "no case of insane hatred of Jews, of fanatical antisemitism or indoctrination of any kind"—but by his need to belong, to follow, to be part of something larger than himself.

The Wannsee Conference and the Corruption of "Good Society"

One moment in Eichmann's career particularly interested Arendt: his presence at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942.

The Wannsee Conference was a meeting of senior Nazi officials convened to coordinate the logistics of the Final Solution. Reinhard Heydrich, one of the chief architects of the Holocaust, laid out the plan for systematically murdering the Jews of Europe. What struck Eichmann—and what Arendt found significant—was the reaction of the other attendees.

These were not wild-eyed fanatics. They were civil servants, bureaucrats, men of what Eichmann considered "respectable society." And they heartily endorsed the program. They discussed the details with enthusiasm. They competed to participate in the planning.

Upon seeing this, Eichmann felt his moral responsibility relax. He felt, Arendt wrote, like "Pontius Pilate"—the Roman governor who washed his hands of responsibility for Jesus's execution. If all these respectable people approved, who was he to object?

This is how evil becomes banal. Not through isolated acts of cruelty, but through the gradual corruption of social norms. When mass murder becomes official policy, when respectable people discuss it over lunch, when it is wrapped in the language of logistics and efficiency, then ordinary people—people without the moral imagination to resist—go along.

The Question of Choice

Many readers of Arendt's book concluded that the Holocaust showed how ordinary people could be made to commit horrendous crimes under the right circumstances. If Eichmann was normal, if situations could corrupt anyone, then perhaps we are all potential Eichmanns.

Arendt adamantly disagreed with this interpretation.

Yes, Eichmann was normal. Yes, circumstances mattered. But moral choice, she insisted, remains even under totalitarianism. And that choice has political consequences even when the person making it is politically powerless.

Her evidence? Denmark.

When the Nazi regime tried to implement the Final Solution in Denmark, something remarkable happened. The Danish people refused to cooperate. Not just the government or the resistance—the people. And this refusal was contagious. Even the German personnel stationed in Denmark found themselves infected by it. They were unable to overcome their "human aversion" with the appropriate ruthlessness, as their peers in more cooperative countries had done.

Arendt called this "the enormous power potential inherent in non-violent action and in resistance to an opponent possessing vastly superior means of violence."

Under conditions of terror most people will comply but some people will not, just as the lesson of the countries to which the Final Solution was proposed is that "it could happen" in most places but it did not happen everywhere. Humanly speaking, no more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation.

The lesson is not that everyone would have done what Eichmann did. The lesson is that most people did—but some did not. And that difference matters.

The Clown in the Glass Booth

Arendt's portrait of Eichmann is unsparing. She describes his bragging, his exaggeration of his own importance, his claims to responsibility for atrocities he lacked the power to commit. She notes that these claims actually hurt his defense, but he made them anyway. "Bragging was the vice that was Eichmann's undoing."

She even suggests he may have preferred execution as a war criminal to living as a nobody. This was a man who had overestimated his own intelligence his entire life, who had inflated his importance in every organization he joined. Obscurity may have seemed worse than death.

And yet, for all his pettiness and self-delusion, the prosecution wanted to paint him as a monster. This, Arendt felt, was a mistake:

Despite all the efforts of the prosecution, everybody could see that this man was not a "monster," but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown. And since this suspicion would have been fatal to the entire enterprise, and was also rather hard to sustain in view of the sufferings he and his like had caused to millions of people, his worst clowneries were hardly noticed and almost never reported.

A clown who helped murder millions. That was what made the trial so disturbing—not the presence of evil, but its inadequate vessel.

The Controversies

Arendt did not simply report on Eichmann. She also raised uncomfortable questions about the trial itself and about the conduct of Jewish leaders during the Holocaust.

She pointed out that Eichmann had been kidnapped by Israeli agents in Argentina—an illegal act under international law. She questioned Israel's jurisdiction, noting that the country was a signatory to the 1950 United Nations Genocide Convention, which required that defendants be tried either where the crime was committed or by an international tribunal. Jerusalem was neither.

She described the trial as a "show trial" arranged by Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion for political purposes—to emphasize Jewish suffering rather than to establish individual criminal responsibility. She criticized the prosecutor, Gideon Hausner, whose opening statement referenced biblical passages and historical antisemitism stretching back centuries. This was "bad history and cheap rhetoric," Arendt wrote. Worse, it suggested that Eichmann was not a criminal but "the innocent executor of some foreordained destiny."

Most controversially, she criticized the role of Jewish community leaders—the Judenräte, or Jewish Councils—during the Holocaust. These councils, established by the Nazis to administer Jewish communities, had often cooperated with German authorities, maintaining order and even helping compile lists of names. Arendt wrote that this cooperation directly increased the death toll:

The whole truth was that if the Jewish people had really been unorganized and leaderless, there would have been chaos and plenty of misery but the total number of victims would hardly have been between four and a half and six million people.

This passage ignited a firestorm. Arendt was accused of "blaming the victim," of slandering the Jewish people, of providing ammunition to antisemites. She spent years defending herself against these charges, insisting that she had never blamed ordinary Jews—only certain leaders who had cooperated with the Nazis, often under unbearable duress. "When people reproach me with accusing the Jewish people, that is a malignant lie and propaganda and nothing else," she said in an interview.

The controversy has never entirely subsided. Historians continue to debate the role of the Judenräte and whether Arendt's characterization was fair or accurate.

Why Eichmann Had to Hang

Arendt ended her book with a direct address to Eichmann, explaining why the death sentence was justified:

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.

Note what she does not say. She does not say he must hang because he was a monster. She does not say he must hang because of the scale of his crimes. She says he must hang because he participated in a project that claimed the right to decide who deserved to live on this planet—and anyone who participates in such a project forfeits their own claim to remain among us.

Adolf Eichmann was executed by hanging on June 1, 1962. His body was cremated and his ashes scattered in the Mediterranean Sea, outside Israeli territorial waters.

The Enduring Question

More than sixty years later, Arendt's phrase—"the banality of evil"—continues to resonate. It appears in debates about morality and justice, in the work of truth and reconciliation commissions, in discussions of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Some see it as a warning against the "evil of banality"—the danger of failing to interrogate received wisdom, of going along with systems without questioning them. Others find in it a kind of hope: if evil is not the product of superhuman malice but of ordinary human failings, then perhaps it can be prevented through ordinary human vigilance.

The most unsettling interpretation may be this: Eichmann was not exceptional. He was a particular kind of ordinary—the kind of ordinary that flourishes when thinking is abandoned, when belonging matters more than morality, when the language of bureaucracy obscures the reality of murder.

The six psychologists found nothing wrong with him because, in a certain sense, there was nothing wrong with him. He was a product of his society, his circumstances, his desperate need to fit in. He was what happens when an entire civilization decides that some people do not deserve to exist, and ordinary men sign the paperwork.

That is the banality of evil. And that is why it remains, after all these years, so difficult to face.