Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

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Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt

Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arndt is a legend. It is the kind of book that is more referenced than read. Arendt's catchphrase – “the banality of evil” – beautifully summarizes the modern view of bureaucratized evil, although, interestingly, the phrase is only used once, right at the end of Arendt's book, in the context of describing Eichmann's employment of thought-smothering clichés as he faced his hanging:

“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.

Arendt attended the Eichmann trial and used the subject of Eichmann and his trial as the spine for reflections on the multifaceted human experience of the holocaust. (Arendt used the term “holocaust” in this 1963 book, even though I have read that “Holocaust” became popular only in the late 1970s.) As the Holocaust recedes as a historical memory, it becomes a cliché. The other populations who were targeted by the Nazis are forgotten as the Jewish victims occupy the principle, and, then, the only position in memory. For example, this was new information to me:

“Hitler had pointed out that he rejected all notions of conquering foreign nations, that what he demanded was an “empty space” [volkloser Raum] in the East for the settlement of Germans. His audience— Blomberg, Fritsch, and Räder, among others— knew quite well that no such “empty space” existed, hence they must have known that a German victory in the East would automatically result in the “evacuation” of the entire native population. The measures against Eastern Jews were not only the result of anti-Semitism, they were part and parcel of an all-embracing demographic policy, in the course of which, had the Germans won the war, the Poles would have suffered the same fate as the Jews— genocide. This is no mere conjecture: the Poles in Germany were already being forced to wear a distinguishing badge in which the “P” replaced the Jewish star, and this, as we have seen, was always the first measure to be taken by the police in instituting the process of destruction.)”

I had never heard of the Poles being forced to wear a badge, but the idea that Hitler's plan was to eliminate the population of Eastern Europe ties in nicely to the thesis of Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder that the aim of Hitler was to eliminate some thirty million Eastern Europeans in order to free up food supplies for Germans.

This point also indicates how radical the Nazis were, and how they represented a break with traditional Christian antisemitism. Arendt points out that the theme of the prosecution in the Eichmann trial was the Holocaust was just one more instance of antisemitism in a history of Jewish suffering as a stateless people. Arendt points out that the paradoxical effect of this approach was that Eichmann's responsibility, as well as that of the Nazi movement, threatened to become minimized as he became a tool of the forces of history rather than an autonomous agent.

Eichmann is the focus of the book. Arendt's depiction of Eichmann is that of an opportunistic loser. Eichmann was a failure in school. He was handed his job as a salesman by his family. He was not a reader or intellectually curious. He joined the Nazis after their electoral breakthrough in 1933. He was handed the assignment of the Jewish desk and then became the expert at deportations, from which he became the expert at moving the Jewish population around by trains. That experience made him responsible for coordinating the train transportation of Jews from Western Europe, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Germany and Austria to the death camps. Eichmann himself never killed anyone or selected anyone for murder, but he certainly knew that the million or so Jews that he transported were to be killed at the end of the line.

In Arendt's telling of the story, Eichmann comes across as superficial in the extreme. His chief characteristic appears to have been his ability to adopt trite slogans in lieu of real thought. Arendt describes how he seems to have adopted a series of slogans based on political realities, each of which became the way that Eichmann defined himself. It was this superficiality, and lack of any depth of self-reflection, that Arendt meant by “banality of evil.”

Perhaps because it predates the epoch when the clichés about the Holocaust hardened, the book is filled with some surprising facts, to me at least. These are the sections that got Arendt in trouble with the Jewish community after the publication of this book. For example, Arendt has a section on Jewish “complicity” with the holocaust. One of her theses is that Jews would have been better served if they had not had a leadership during the holocaust. Jewish community leaders cooperated with the Nazis in making lists of Jews, getting Jews to move into ghettoes, and ultimately to board trains to death camps. At the camps, the camps were largely staffed by Jews who worked the machinery of death. Arendt speculates that if Jews had not been organized, they might well have scattered to the winds, where more would have survives. She writes:

“To a Jew this role of the Jewish leaders in the destruction of their own people is undoubtedly the darkest chapter of the whole dark story. It had been known about before, but it has now been exposed for the first time in all its pathetic and sordid detail by Raul Hilberg, whose standard work The Destruction of the European Jews I mentioned before. In the matter of cooperation, there was no distinction between the highly assimilated Jewish communities of Central and Western Europe and the Yiddish-speaking masses of the East. In Amsterdam as in Warsaw, in Berlin as in Budapest, Jewish officials could be trusted to compile the lists of persons and of their property, to secure money from the deportees to defray the expenses of their deportation and extermination, to keep track of vacated apartments, to supply police forces to help seize Jews and get them on trains, until, as a last gesture, they handed over the assets of the Jewish community in good order for final confiscation. They distributed the Yellow Star badges, and sometimes, as in Warsaw, “the sale of the armbands became a regular business; there were ordinary armbands of cloth and fancy plastic armbands which were washable.” In the Nazi inspired, but not Nazi-dictated, manifestoes they issued, we still can sense how they enjoyed their new power—“ The Central Jewish Council has been granted the right of absolute disposal over all Jewish spiritual and material wealth and over all Jewish manpower,” as the first announcement of the Budapest Council phrased it. We know how the Jewish officials felt when they became instruments of murder— like captains “whose ships were about to sink and who succeeded in bringing them safe to port by casting overboard a great part of their precious cargo”; like saviors who “with a hundred victims save a thousand people, with a thousand ten thousand.” The truth was even more gruesome. Dr. Kastner, in Hungary, for instance, saved exactly 1,684 people with approximately 476,000 victims. In order not to leave the selection to “blind fate,” “truly holy principles” were needed “as the guiding force of the weak human hand which puts down on paper the name of the unknown person and with this decides his life or death.” And whom did these “holy principles” single out for salvation? Those “who had worked all their lives for the zibur [community]”

This is speculation, of course, and hindsight is 20/20. These were people making the best decision in very bad circumstances they did not create. However, this is something to keep in mind when similar charges are levied against other people in similar situations.

Another point is Arendt's distinction between Italian Fascism and German totalitarianism. Moderns tend to equate the two, but Arendt does not. One way in which they differed was with respect to antisemitism, which the Fascists did not take very seriously:

“An element of farce had never been lacking even in Italy's most serious efforts to adjust to its powerful friend and ally. When Mussolini, under German pressure, introduced anti-Jewish legislation in the late thirties he stipulated the usual exemptions— war veterans, Jews with high decorations, and the like— but he added one more category, namely, former members of the Fascist Party, together with their parents and grandparents, their wives and children and grandchildren. I know of no statistics relating to this matter, but the result must have been that the great majority of Italian Jews were exempted. There can hardly have been a Jewish family without at least one member in the Fascist Party, for this happened at a time when Jews, like other Italians, had been flocking for almost twenty years into the Fascist movement, since positions in the Civil Service were open only to members.”

Arendt explains this difference as follows:

“Assimilation, that much abused word, was a sober fact in Italy, which had a community of not more than fifty thousand native Jews, whose history reached back into the centuries of the Roman Empire. It was not an ideology, something one was supposed to believe in, as in all German-speaking countries, or a myth and an obvious self-deception, as notably in France. Italian Fascism, not to be outdone in “ruthless toughness,” had tried to rid the country of foreign and stateless Jews prior to the outbreak of the war. This had never been much of a success, because of the general unwillingness of the minor Italian officials to get “tough,” and when things had become a matter of life and death, they refused, under the pretext of maintaining their sovereignty, to abandon this part of their Jewish population; they put them instead into Italian camps, where they were quite safe until the Germans occupied the country. This conduct can hardly be explained by objective conditions alone— the absence of a “Jewish question”— for these foreigners naturally created a problem in Italy, as they did in every European nation-state based upon the ethnic and cultural homogeneity of its population. What in Denmark was the result of an authentically political sense, an inbred comprehension of the requirements and responsibilities of citizenship and independence—“ for the Danes ... the Jewish question was a political and not a humanitarian question” (Leni Yahil)— was in Italy the outcome of the almost automatic general humanity of an old and civilized people.”

This point also highlights differences in the Jewish world. Zionism got quite a boost from National Socialist policies in that Zionists and the Nazis were both opposed to assimilation, and, for a time, both wanted to get Jews to leave Europe for Palestine. This resulted in the odd situation of Nazi-Zionist economic cooperation at a time when the world was boycotting German goods:

“During its first few years, Hitler's rise to power appeared to the Zionists chiefly as “the decisive defeat of assimilationism.” Hence, the Zionists could, for a time, at least, engage in a certain amount of non-criminal cooperation with the Nazi authorities; the Zionists too believed that “dissimilation,” combined with the emigration to Palestine of Jewish youngsters and, they hoped, Jewish capitalists, could be a “mutually fair solution.” At the time, many German officials held this opinion, and this kind of talk seems to have been quite common up to the end. A letter from a survivor of Theresienstadt, a German Jew, relates that all leading positions in the Nazi-appointed Reichsvereinigung were held by Zionists (whereas the authentically Jewish Reichsvertretung had been composed of both Zionists and non-Zionists), because Zionists, according to the Nazis, were “the ‘decent' Jews since they too thought in ‘national' terms.” To be sure, no prominent Nazi ever spoke publicly in this vein; from beginning to end, Nazi propaganda was fiercely, unequivocally, uncompromisingly anti-Semitic, and eventually nothing counted but what people who were still without experience in the mysteries of totalitarian government dismissed as “mere propaganda.” There existed in those first years a mutually highly satisfactory agreement between the Nazi authorities and the Jewish Agency for Palestine— a Ha'avarah, or Transfer Agreement, which provided that an emigrant to Palestine could transfer his money there in German goods and exchange them for pounds upon arrival. It was soon the only legal way for a Jew to take his money with him (the alternative then being the establishment of a blocked account, which could be liquidated abroad only at a loss of between fifty and ninety-five per cent). The result was that in the thirties, when American Jewry took great pains to organize a boycott of German merchandise, Palestine, of all places, was swamped with all kinds of goods “made in Germany.”

Eichmann was hanged for his crimes. Arendt's concluding section has some interesting points about the basis of international law and the jurisdiction of the Israeli court over a war criminal kidnapped from Argentina. This section highlights the breadth of Arendt's interests and underscores the intellectual issues involved in assessing the crimes against humanity.