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Hannah Arendt: Eichmann in Jerusalem – A Report on the Banality of Evil.

Writer's picture: Steve CrowtherSteve Crowther

I thought the book almost perversely courted controversy. Right at the start Arendt seemed to undermine the proceedings by claiming that:


  • the translations were ‘excellent in French, bearable in English, and sheer comedy, frequently incomprehensible, in German’. 


  • he was treated unfairly.


  • the courtroom was more like an auditorium - ‘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...’ Show trials are a done deal, a formal ritual with a predetermined outcome.


  • the capture (by Israeli agents) of Eichmann in Argentina and his transportation to Israel was an illegal act and as he didn’t commit his ‘crimes’ in Israel there was no legal right to try him there. And she’s probably right.


For me the controversial aspect was her assertion that the leaders of the Jewish councils cooperated with the Nazis. ‘Wherever Jews lived, there were recognised Jewish leaders, and this leadership, almost without exception, cooperated in one way or another, for one reason or another, with the Nazis.’ What Arendt is questioning regards the extent to which Jews are to blame for their ‘passive acceptance of the German mass murders’ - Günter Gaus  

 

Surely this account from the Holocaust Encyclopedia is an altogether saner, more realistic view:  

 

‘During World War II, the Germans established Jewish councils, usually called Judenraete . These Jewish municipal administrations were required to ensure that Nazi orders and regulations were implemented. Jewish council members also sought to provide basic community services for ghettoised Jewish populations. Forced to implement Nazi policy, the Jewish councils remain a controversial and delicate subject. Jewish council chairmen had to decide whether to comply or refuse to comply with German demands to, for example, list names of Jews for deportation.’ 

 

Finally, there is the famous subtitle: ‘The banality of evil’. 

 

Arendt claims that Eichmann was basically not an evil, deranged psychopath, that his motivation was not the actual hatred of Jews, but professional; a role with efficient outcomes. He was given a task, a problem of mass transportation, and his job was to deliver it. He had to divert, to reconstruct rail transportation of soldiers from the battle zones (the East) to one of delivering mass numbers of Jews to the concentration camps. 

 

In this job description Eichmann referenced Immanuel Kant’s philosophical theory that ‘individuals must act without regard to personal desires or incentives’.  However, to quote from Wikkishit:


‘Eichmann attempted to follow the spirit of the laws he carried out, as if the legislator himself would approve. In Kant's formulation of the categorical imperative, the legislator is the moral self, and all people are legislators; in Eichmann's formulation, the legislator was Hitler. Eichmann claimed this changed when he was charged with carrying out the Final Solution, at which point Arendt says: ‘He had ceased to live according to Kantian principles, as he had known it, and that he had consoled himself with the thoughts that he no longer “was master of his own deeds”, that he was unable to change anything.’

 

Although I can grasp this distancing, this focus on process, of a practical ‘final solution’ I simply cannot accept it. It was handed down by his boss, the architect of The Final Solution, Reinhard Heydrich. Nevertheless, though unintended, the term ‘banality of evil’ does resonate. It explodes out of the history books, lays down the ultimate marker for pure evil because it was systematically planned. * 

 

* Echoes here of the massacre of innocent civilians by Hamas on 7 October 2023.


Arendt ended the book by writing:  


‘And just as you [Eichmann] 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.’ 


I do not believe in the death penalty, but I suppose I can make an exception for Eichmann. Possibly. But this signing off seems predetermined, too intellectual and devoid of the emotion one would expect from someone who sat through the trial. Holocaust researcher David Cesarani claimed that Arendt attended only four days of the trial and based her writings [mostly] on recordings and the trial transcript.


This is pretty much how I see the book itself. It seemed to be driven by Arendt’s philosophising on the nature of mankind: that ordinary people are capable of ‘evil’ acts through ambition and an inability to empathise. This is the definition of a psychopath. Eichmann was a psychopath and a seriously twisted, fucked-up one at that.

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