Eichmann in Jerusalem

Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil is a 1963 book by the philosopher and political thinker Hannah Arendt. Arendt, a Jew who fled Germany during Adolf Hitler's rise to power, reported on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the major organizers of the Holocaust, for The New Yorker. A revised and enlarged edition was published in 1964.

Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

Cover of the first edition
Author	Hannah Arendt
Language	English
Publisher	Viking Press
Publication date	1963
Media type	Print (Hardcover, Paperback)
Pages	312

Theme

Arendt during the trial

Arendt's subtitle famously introduced the phrase "the banality of evil." In part the phrase refers to Eichmann's deportment at the trial as the man displayed neither guilt for his actions nor hatred for those trying him, claiming he bore no responsibility because he was simply "doing his job." ("He did his 'duty'...; he not only obeyed 'orders,' he also obeyed the 'law.'")^[1]

Eichmann

Arendt takes Eichmann's court testimony and the historical evidence available and makes several observations about him:

• Eichmann stated in court that he had always tried to abide by Immanuel Kant's categorical imperative.^[2] She argues that Eichmann had essentially taken the wrong lesson from Kant: Eichmann had not recognized the "Golden Rule" and principle of reciprocity implicit in the categorical imperative, but had understood only the concept of one man's actions coinciding with general law. 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, that 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'".^[3]
• Eichmann's inability to think for himself was exemplified by his consistent use of "stock phrases and self-invented clichés". The man demonstrated his unrealistic worldview and crippling lack of communication skills through reliance on "officialese" (Amtssprache) and the euphemistic Sprachregelung (convention of speech) that made implementation of Hitler's policies "somehow palatable".
• While Eichmann might have had antisemitic leanings, Arendt argued that he showed "no case of insane hatred of Jews, of fanatical antisemitism or indoctrination of any kind. He personally never had anything whatever against Jews" according to his own testimony.^[4]
• Eichmann was a "joiner" his entire life, in that he constantly joined organizations in order to define himself, and had difficulties thinking for himself without doing so. As a youth, he belonged to the YMCA, the Wandervogel, and the Jungfrontkämpferverband. In 1933, he failed in his attempt to join the Schlaraffia (a men's organization similar to Freemasonry), at which point a family friend (and future war criminal) Ernst Kaltenbrunner encouraged him to join the SS. At the end of World War II, Eichmann found himself depressed because "it then dawned on him that thenceforward he would have to live without being a member of something or other".^[5] Arendt pointed out that his actions were not driven by malice, but rather blind dedication to the regime and his need to belong, to be a joiner. In his own words: "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."^[6]
• Despite his claims, Eichmann was not, in fact, very intelligent. As Arendt details in the book's second chapter, he was unable to complete either high school or vocational training, and only found his first significant job, as a traveling salesman for the Vacuum Oil Company, through family connections. Arendt noted that, during both his SS career and Jerusalem trial, Eichmann tried to cover up his lack of skills and education, and even "blushed" when these facts came to light.
• Arendt confirms Eichmann and the heads of the Einsatzgruppen were part of an "intellectual elite." Unlike the Einsatzgruppen leaders, however, Eichmann would suffer from a "lack of imagination" and an "inability to think."^[7]
• Arendt confirms several points where Eichmann actually claimed he was responsible for certain atrocities, even though he lacked the power or expertise to take these actions. Moreover, Eichmann made these claims even though they hurt his defense, hence Arendt's remark that "Bragging was the vice that was Eichmann's undoing".^[8] Arendt also suggests that Eichmann may have preferred to be executed as a war criminal than live as a nobody. This parallels his overestimation of his own intelligence and his past value in the organizations in which he had served, as stated above.
• Arendt argues that Eichmann, in his peripheral role at the Wannsee Conference, witnessed the rank-and-file of the German civil service heartily endorse Reinhard Heydrich's program for the Final Solution of the Jewish question in Europe (German: die Endlösung der Judenfrage). Upon seeing members of "respectable society" endorsing mass murder, and enthusiastically participating in the planning of the solution, Eichmann felt that his moral responsibility was relaxed, as if he were "Pontius Pilate".
• During his imprisonment before his trial, the Israeli government sent no fewer than six psychologists to examine Eichmann. These psychologists found no trace of mental illness, including personality disorder. One doctor remarked that his overall attitude towards other people, especially his family and friends, was "highly desirable", while another remarked that the only unusual trait Eichmann displayed was being more "normal" in his habits and speech than the average person.^[9]

Arendt suggests that this most strikingly discredits the idea that the Nazi criminals were manifestly psychopathic and different from "normal" people. From this document, many concluded that situations such as the Holocaust can make even the most ordinary of people commit horrendous crimes with the proper incentives, but Arendt adamantly disagreed with this interpretation, as Eichmann was voluntarily following the Führerprinzip. Arendt said that moral choice remains even under totalitarianism, and that this choice has political consequences even when the chooser is politically powerless:

[U]nder 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.

Arendt mentions, as a case in point, Denmark:

One is tempted to recommend the story as required reading in political science for all students who wish to learn something about the enormous power potential inherent in non-violent action and in resistance to an opponent possessing vastly superior means of violence. It was not just that the people of Denmark refused to assist in implementing the Final Solution, as the peoples of so many other conquered nations had been persuaded to do (or had been eager to do) — but also, that when the Reich cracked down and decided to do the job itself it found that its own personnel in Denmark had been infected by this and were unable to overcome their human aversion with the appropriate ruthlessness, as their peers in more cooperative areas had.

On Eichmann's personality, Arendt concludes:

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 [his trial], 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.^[10]

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.

Legality of the trial

Beyond her discussion of Eichmann himself, Arendt discusses several additional aspects of the trial, its context, and the Holocaust.

• She points out that Eichmann was kidnapped by Israeli agents in Argentina and transported to Israel, an illegal act, and that he was tried in Israel even though he was not accused of committing any crimes there. "If he had not been found guilty before he appeared in Jerusalem, guilty beyond any reasonable doubt, the Israelis would never have dared, or wanted, to kidnap him in formal violation of Argentine law."
• She describes his trial as a show trial arranged and managed by Prime Minister Ben-Gurion, and says that Ben-Gurion wanted, for several political reasons, to emphasize not primarily what Eichmann had done, but what the Jews had suffered during the Holocaust.^[11] She points out that the war criminals tried at Nuremberg were "indicted for crimes against the members of various nations," without special reference to the Nazi genocide against the Jews.
• She questions Israel's right to try Eichmann. Israel was a signatory to the 1950 UN Genocide Convention, which rejected universal jurisdiction and required that defendants be tried "in the territory of which the act was committed" or by an international tribunal. The court in Jerusalem did not pursue either option.^[12]
• Eichmann's deeds were not crimes under German law, as, at that time, in the eyes of the Third Reich, he was a law-abiding citizen. He was tried for 'crimes in retrospect'.^[13]
• The prosecutor, Gideon Hausner, followed the tone set by Prime Minister Ben-Gurion, who stated, "It is not an individual nor the Nazi regime on trial, but antisemitism throughout history." Hausner's corresponding opening statements, which heavily referenced biblical passages, was "bad history and cheap rhetoric," according to Arendt. Furthermore, it suggested that Eichmann was no criminal, but the "innocent executor of some foreordained destiny."^[14]

Banality of evil

Arendt's book introduced the expression and concept of the banality of evil.^[15] Her thesis is that Eichmann was actually not a fanatic or a sociopath, but instead an average and mundane person who relied on clichéd defenses rather than thinking for himself,^[16] was motivated by professional promotion rather than ideology, and believed in success which he considered the chief standard of "good society".^[17] Banality, in this sense, does not mean that Eichmann's actions were in any way ordinary, but that his actions were motivated by a sort of complacency which was wholly unexceptional.^[18]

Many mid-20th century pundits were favorable to the concept,^[19][20] which has been called "one of the most memorable phrases of 20th-century intellectual life,"^[21] and it features in many contemporary debates about morality and justice,^[16][22] as well as in the workings of truth and reconciliation commissions.^[23] Others see the popularization of the concept as a valuable warrant against walking negligently into horror, as the evil of banality, in which failure to interrogate received wisdom results in individual and systemic weakness and decline.^[24]

Alleged Jewish cooperation

Another controversial point raised by Arendt in her book is her criticism of the alleged role of Jewish authorities in the Holocaust.^[25][26] In her writings, Arendt expressed her objections to the prosecution's refusal to address the cooperation of the leaders of the Judenräte with the Nazis. In the book, Arendt says that Jewish organizations and leaderships in Europe collaborated with the Nazis and were directly responsible for increasing the numbers of Jewish victims:^[21]

Wherever Jews lived, there were recognized Jewish leaders, and this leadership, almost without exception, cooperated in one way or another, for one reason or another, with the Nazis. 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. According to Freudiger's calculations about half of them could have saved themselves if they had not followed the instructions of the Jewish Councils.^[27]

She adds that Pinchas Freudiger, a witness at the trial, had managed to survive the genocide because he was wealthy and able to buy the favors of the Nazi authorities, as did other leaders of Jewish Councils.^[28]

On several occasions, most notably in her interviews with Joachim Fest and Gunter Gaus, Arendt refuted this characterization of her writing,^[29] describing instead ways in which the Judenräte were coerced and intimidated into their roles, and how the Nazis made examples of populations that resisted,^[30] saying in a response during an interview with Gunther Gaus, "When people reproach me with accusing the Jewish people [of nonresistance], that is a malignant lie and propaganda and nothing else. The tone of voice, however, is an objection against me personally. And I cannot do anything about that."^[31]

Reception and controversy

Eichmann in Jerusalem upon publication and in the years following was controversial.^[32][33] Arendt has long been accused of "blaming the victim" in the book.^[34][35]

Allegation of Slander Against Zionism

She responded to the initial criticism in a postscript to the book:

The controversy began by calling attention to the conduct of the Jewish people during the years of the Final Solution, thus following up the question, first raised by the Israeli prosecutor, of whether the Jews could or should have defended themselves. I had dismissed that question as silly and cruel, since it testified to a fatal ignorance of the conditions at the time. It has now been discussed to exhaustion, and the most amazing conclusions have been drawn. The well-known historico-sociological construct of "ghetto mentality"... has been repeatedly dragged in to explain behavior which was not at all confined to the Jewish people and which therefore cannot be explained by specifically Jewish factors ... This was the unexpected conclusion certain reviewers chose to draw from the "image" of a book, created by certain interest groups, in which I allegedly had claimed that the Jews had murdered themselves.^[36]

The allegation Arendt’s mischaracterization of the Zionists and of her misreadings of Eichmann’s motivations are the two major themes of the critique of the article and run throughout every phase of the article’s reception and criticism. Taken as a whole, Arendt’s article largely refutes the claims made against it without the necessity of an external defense.

However critics focus on the tone of individual sections, the lack of rhetorical handholding in segments of the article where Arendt summarizes Eichmann’s defense (whose transcripts run to many thousands of pages).

Allegation of Mischaracterizing Eichmann

Regarding this latter concern: Arendt’s critics tend to insinuate that the confidence she places in her audience to know—and to be capable of steadily holding in mind throughout her presentation—that Eichmann is so obviously and inarguably an objective antisemite, whatever he might claim in his defense, that it is unnecessary for her to point this out at every turn in an incantatory rhythm of denunciation. These two accusations (mischaracterization of Zionism, mischaracterization of Eichmann) recur in every phase of the backlash into the 21st century.

From Arendt’s perspective on slogans and magical phrases discussed in the article as constitutive of Eichmann’s defenses against empathy, the style of presentation inferred from the demands of her critics on this point would itself be...banal; if—generously read—not yet evil.

Conformity & Cliché as Determining Forces in Human Behavior

Stanley Milgram, who would conduct controversial experiments on obedience, maintains that "Arendt became the object of considerable scorn, even calumny" because she highlighted Eichmann's "banality" and "normalcy", and accepted Eichmann's claim that he did not subjectively experience himself as having evil intents or motives to commit such horrors; nor did he have a thought to the immorality and evil of his actions, or indeed, display, as the prosecution depicted, that he was a sadistic "monster".^[37] Milgram’s experimental findings would tend to verify Arendt’s emphasis on Eichmann’s bureaucratic careerism being a powerful driver of actions and decision-making by extrapolations from qualitative and quantitative behavioral research data.

But Arendt also notes very explicitly in the article, Eichmann’s evident pride in having been responsible for so many deaths.^[24] She notes also the rhetorical contradiction of this pride with his claim that he will gladly go to the gallows as a warning to all future antisemites, as well as the contradiction between this sentiment and the entire argument of his defense (that he should not be put to death). Eichmann, as Arendt observes, does not experience the dissonance between these evidently contradictory assertions but finds the aptness of his clichés themselves to be —from the perspective of his own inclination—satisfactory substitutes for moral or ethical evaluation. He has no concern about their contradiction. This, coupled with an inability to imagine the perspective others, is the individually psychological expression of what Arendt calls the banality of evil.^[15] Careerism without moral evaluation of the consequences of one’s work is the collective or social aspect of this banality of evil.

Zionist Critique

Jacob Robinson published And the Crooked Shall be Made Straight, the first full-length rebuttal of her book.^[19] Robinson presented himself as an expert in international law, not saying that he was an assistant to the prosecutor in the case.^[20] The book Judenrat by Isaiah Trunk, published in 1972, presents a history of the Zionist councils set up inside of the Nazi ghettoes whose discussion in Arendt's accounting of the historical background and context of Eichmann's crimes is the section of the work that especially caused offense and incited the furor of criticism against the cycle of articles collected in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem.^[38]

Historical Sources Supporting Arendt’s Characterization of Zionist Councils

Arendt had drawn much of the substance of her account of the Judenrat's complicity with Nazi schedules for liquidation from Raul Hilberg's Destruction of the European Jews, a work that is generally not mentioned or critiqued in the polemic attacks against her—presumably because it maintains a neutral historicist stance while recording events and does not attempt to synthesize any memorable moral or ethical evaluation of these events as Arendt did in her cycle of articles for the New Yorker.^[39] In fact, Eichmann in Jerusalem, according to Hugh Trevor-Roper, is so deeply indebted to Raul Hilberg's The Destruction of the European Jews, that Hilberg himself spoke of plagiarism.^[40][41][42] The Destruction of the European Jews was at that time, and—given that it is so heavily cited for essential data in all major historical standards on the subject published at a later date—arguably remains the best-in-class standard reference on the administratively designed and militantly executed extermination of European Jews in the Nazi holocaust during the Second World War.

Arendt’s Service to Zionist Organizations

Also worth noting (though rarely or only elusively mentioned by Arendt in the interest of her own self-defense) is the fact that Arendt had also been an employee of the Zionist World Congress and other Zionist organizations in various capacities, and that she worked during the war in finding placements for refugee children fleeing the Third Reich in Israel:^[43][44] though she draws a line between her own beliefs and the Zionist platform she speaks as an insider rather than as an outsider of the movement and its organizations within the diaspora, performing work for the benefit of these organizations during the time that she remained inside Germany after Hitler was appointed Chancellor,^[45] acting as a touchpoint and administrator in the diaspora, and on several occasions as a chaperone delivering children to the territory of Palestine (later Israel) itself during the war and recovering sacred libraries left tenantless by the Holocaust after the war in coordination with Gershom Scholem.^[43][44][46]

Arendt’s Assertions Taken Out of Context by Critics vs. The Full Text of Arendt’s Article & Her Argument

The inhuman and humanly-impossible-to-resist level of pressure to conform to regulation and commands from the Nazi hierarchy is addressed by Arendt in her articles—she mentions an anecdote citing a situation in which 430 people were tortured for weeks on end after an incidence of infraction as an exemplar of this extenuating circumstance, explanatory of a tendency toward obedience to authority.^[47][48] She also addresses the historical and multigenerational cultural acclimation to rule-following and legal-obedience as a defense mechanism that was a force-multiplier exploited by the Nazis. She even gives at least one, if not several, incidents where Eichmann appears—quite notably—to be an obviously antisemitic sadistic monster.^[49] However many of these qualifications appear in the first installment of the cycle whereas she coins the phrase "the banality of evil" in the last article of the series.^[50]

Distinction between Issues of Historical Fact & Tone of Delivery

As Arendt explained in an interview, there seemed to be two kinds objections amongst the challenges and critiques she received.^[51] She had been critiqued on questions of historical fact—these critiques were largely invalid, since she had mentioned the historically extenuating details which were appealed to by these critics in her reporting on the trial.^[52][53] But she had also been critiqued on tone—and this accusation, she says, she cannot and does not even want to refute.^[51]

ARENDT: Nowhere in my book did I accuse the Jewish people of not resisting. Someone else did. Mr. Haussner of the Israeli public prosecutor’s office. I called the questions he directed at the witnesses in Jerusalem: foolish and cruel…

GAUS: But some of the accusations against you are based on the tone in which the book is written.

ARENDT: Well, that’s a different matter. I can’t say anything against that and I don’t want to. If it’s the thought that one can only write about these things solemnly…Look there are a lot of people who take offense. And I can understand that…That is, I can still laugh. And I really thought that Eichmann was a clown. And I’ll tell you this, I read his police interrogation, 3600 pages, very very carefully. And I don’t know how many times I laughed out loud!  Now, this reaction offended people. I cannot help that. But I do know one thing—I’d probably still laugh three minutes before certain death. And they say that is the tone. The tone is largely ironic. That’s absolutely true. The tone is really the person in this case. So when people reproach me with accusing the Jewish people, that is a malicious propaganda lie and nothing else. The tone, however, is an objection against me personally. I can’t help that.^[51]

GAUS: You’re prepared to bear that?

ARENDT: Oh, gladly. I can’t tell people,'You misunderstand me and in my heart is really this or that.' That’s ridiculous.

Gershom Scholem’s denunciation on the basis insufficient of “Ahavat Israel”

In a public letter her friend and longtime colleague, Gershom Scholem, accused her of insufficiently displaying her love for the people of Israel in a phrase (Ahavat Israel) which indicates the love and respect of Jewish people (not just in Israel) as if this love were circumscribed by nationalist allegiance (by implication of the term ‘Israel’ denoting Judaism in context of the charge) .^[46] In her response, amongst the points she makes to Scholem, was that she bears love for individual persons, not for peoples.^[46] The concept of peoples as a whole, she respects—“I always knew that I belonged to the Jewish people [from early youth] before I belonged to the German people” and that her personal considerations for or against Judaism were not relevant to this fact of being a Jew—but, she says, her friends and people that she loved tended to be both German (re: not Jewish according to the terms of her description) and also Jewish.^[46] She describes the condition of nascent statelessness as her origin, and exile as her home. She loved thoughtful people whom she knew and happened to be intimate with, she explains, regardless of their ethnic affiliation.^[46]

Critical race theory

In her articles, Arendt also made use of H.G. Adler's book Theresienstadt 1941-1945:The Face of a Coerced Community (Cambridge University Press. 2017), which she had read in manuscript. Adler took her to task on her view of Eichmann in his keynote essay "What does Hannah Arendt know about Eichmann and the Final Solution?" (Allgemeine Wochenzeitung der Juden in Deutschland. 20 November 1964).^[54] Adler’s objections to Arendt are later taken up in a book-length study by a scholar named Cesarini in the 21st century.

In his 2006 book, Becoming Eichmann: Rethinking the Life, Crimes and Trial of a "Desk Murderer", Holocaust researcher David Cesarani questioned Arendt's portrait of Eichmann on several grounds. According to his findings, Arendt attended only part of the trial, witnessing Eichmann's testimony for "at most four days" and based her writings mostly on recordings and the trial transcript. Cesarani feels that this may have skewed her opinion of him, since it was in the parts of the trial that she missed that the more forceful aspects of his character appeared.^[55] Cesarani also suggested that Eichmann was in fact highly anti-Semitic and that these feelings were important motivators of his actions. Thus, he alleges that Arendt's opinion that his motives were "banal" and non-ideological and that he had abdicated his autonomy of choice by obeying Hitler's orders without question may stand on weak foundations.^[56] This is a recurrent criticism of Arendt, though nowhere in her work does Arendt deny that Eichmann was an anti-Semite, and she also did not say that Eichmann was "simply" following orders, but rather had internalized the rationalities of the Nazi regime.^[57]

But when Arendt spoke of anti-semitism—in relation to whether or not Eichmann was an anti-semite, himself—she was summarizing Eichmann's own account of himself in the transcripts.^[58] Perhaps she considered it so obvious that he was an objectively antisemitic, that she felt no need to underline the point and she notes this in her interview with Fest.^[52]

Arendt had, after all, written the first major manual in the literature of antisemitism outside the propaganda materials produced by the antisemitic parties themselves—a fact that she nevers mentions in the interviews.^[59][60] She does not mention this and nowhere does she claim ownership of the term or its definition. She considers the necessity of pointing out Eichmann’s antisemitism or of proving rhetorically that there is a dissonance between Eichmann's claims and what he understands (or fails to understand) subjectively in his testimony to be histrionic and unnecessary.^[61]

It is the psychic dissonance—the fact that Eichmann is apparently so lacking in self-reflective capacity, and so much more motivated by his instinctual careerism than by his hatred of Jews—that Arendt wishes to highlight in the article.^[61] She appears to make the mistake of focusing on a difficult point of interest that produced a new clarification of the problem of antisemitism under the Third Reich, rather than of reciting by rote what all the more-than-adequately-informed readers of her article in The New Yorker already knew from headlines and news bulletins spanning the past forty years at the time she was writing.

Cesarani, after Adler and others, suggests that Arendt's own prejudices influenced the opinions she expressed during the trial. He argues that like many Jews of German origin, she held Ostjuden (Jews from Eastern Europe) in great disdain.

Cesarani's suggestion may or may not be refuted by the fact that Arendt once instigated a class rebellion against her gymnasium instructor in defense of several Ostjuden refugees from Silesia who were being abused by him repeatedly, and was expelled from her preparatory school as a consequence.^[62][63] The suggestion that Arendt held Ostjuden in contempt also may or may not be refuted by the fact that Hannah Arendt was, herself, a borderline an Ostjuden relative to most of her Jewish and gentile German acquaintances, having grown up in Konigsberg, Silesia: a region that was cut off from Germany and isolated in a part of Poland by the time she was twelve years old—the city of Konigsberg is now Kaliningrad, an exclave in the territory of Russia after boundaries were redrawn following the end of the Second World War and thus had been Russia for over a decade by the time she wrote the article.^[63]

This alleged racist sentiment, according to Cesarani, led Arendt to attack the conduct and efficacy of the chief prosecutor, Gideon Hausner, who was of Galician Jewish origin—as opposed, presumably, to what he actually said or did during the trial. According to Cesarani, in a letter to the noted German philosopher Karl Jaspers she stated that Hausner was "a typical Galician Jew... constantly making mistakes. Probably one of those people who doesn't know any language."^[64] Whether or not one of the mistakes that Hausner made, and which Arendt highlights in her treatment of the trial, was accusing the Jews of the ghetto of never resisting their deportation--"a foolish and cruel" assertion as Arendt called it ^[51]—is not explored by Cesarani as he considers this possible motivation for Arendt's tone.

When Cesarani says that some of Arendt’s opinions of Jews of Middle Eastern origin verged on racism; he notes a letter in which she described the Israeli crowds to Karl Jaspers: "My first impression: On top, the judges, the best of German Jewry. Below them, the prosecuting attorneys, Galicians, but still Europeans. Everything is organized by a police force that gives me the creeps, speaks only Hebrew, and looks Arabic. Some downright brutal types among them. They would obey any order. And outside the doors, the Oriental mob, as if one were in Istanbul or some other half-Asiatic country. In addition, and very visible in Jerusalem, the peies [sidelocks] and caftan Jews, who make life impossible for all reasonable people here."^[65]

Whether or not Arendt's concern about the aspect of institutional Zionism in Israel has any affinity with the forms of identitarian-style authoritarianism that influenced institutional cooperation between Zionism and Nazism, as Arendt points out in her report Eichmann in Jerusalem very explicitly,^[66][67] temper her reservations about the comportment of Israeli justice in the framing and procedure of the Eichmann case is not considered as a dimension of Arendt's thinking or her description in Cesarani's analysis of the issue.^[64]

The precedent of centuries in which Sharia law in symbiosis with a system of Sultanic law which was intended as a helpful complement to the enforcement of Sharia, under the authoritarian system of the Ottomans in Palestine prior to Israeli independence, the relative youth of Israeli constitutionalism (officially 13 years old at the time of the trial, though older if the prosecution of Arab and of Israeli murderers in clashes over the past decades is countenanced—revealing either a pattern of preference for Israelis in penalties or a substantively skewed finding of homicidal aggression amongst Arab attackers and of justifiable self-defense amongst Israelis responding to assaults), or the similarity of archaic violence of tenor between Sharia and ultraorthodox Jewish law, might have been relevant to Arendt’s reservations about the gestalt of forces surrounding the trial, has been dismissed without mention by Cesarini. Arendt’s considerations in sizing up the potential character of ensuing legal proceedings in her letter to Jaspers come before she has witnessed or otherwise read the trial transcripts in an exhaustive survey of the proceedings. Cesarini does not mention or acknowledge the voluble praise that Arendt pays to the actual judicial proceedings in her widely published and broadly disseminated reporting on the case (as distinct from her equally voluble criticism of the prosecuting attorney), nor does Caesarini consider her final analysis of the Israeli justice system (which is largely complimentary) in the pages of her book on the subject as possibly more important indications of her opinions and inclinations than the fears that she expressed prior to the main phase of her attendance and review of the trial, which were expressed in a private letter, published posthumously by Jaspers estate.

Cesarani's book was itself criticized. In a review that appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Barry Gewen argued that Cesarani's hostility stemmed from his book standing "in the shadow of one of the great books of the last half-century", and that Cesarani's suggestion that both Arendt and Eichmann had much in common in their backgrounds, making it easier for her to look down on the proceedings, "reveals a writer in control neither of his material nor of himself."^[68]

Arendt also received criticism in the form of responses to her article. One instance of this came mere weeks after the publication of her articles in the form of an article entitled "Man With an Unspotted Conscience". This work was written by witness for the prosecution Michael A. Musmanno. He argued that Arendt fell prey to her own preconceived notions that rendered her work ahistorical. He also directly criticized her for ignoring the facts offered at the trial in stating that "the disparity between what Miss Arendt states, and what the ascertained facts are, occurs with such a disturbing frequency in her book that it can hardly be accepted as an authoritative historical work." He further condemned Arendt and her work for her prejudices against Hauser and Ben-Gurion depicted in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Musmanno argued that Arendt revealed "so frequently her own prejudices" that it could not stand as an accurate work.^[69] These early responsa are much in line with the Cesarini argument outlined above in their character and in the specifics of their charges against Arendt.

Radical Evil & The Banality of Evil

By the 21st century, Arendt has been the subject of further and more encompassing criticism from authors Bettina Stangneth and Deborah Lipstadt. Stangneth argues in her work, Eichmann Before Jerusalem, that Eichmann was, in fact, an insidious antisemite—a point which, again, Arendt never denied but which was denied by Eichmann in his defense.^[70] She utilized the Sassen Papers and accounts of Eichmann while in Argentina to prove that he was proud of his position as a powerful Nazi and the murders that this allowed him to commit. While she acknowledges that the Sassen Papers were not disclosed in the lifetime of Arendt, she argues that the evidence was there at the trial to prove that Eichmann was an antisemitic murderer and that Arendt simply ignored this.^[71]

Insofar as Lipstadt and Stangneth believe that Hannah Arendt ignores the fact Eichmann is an antisemitic murderer,^[71] readers of all the authors involved in this controversy—of Stangneth, Lipstadt and Arendt taken together—might be forgiven for wondering whether or not Stangneth or Lipstadt read the book,^[72] or the cycle of articles for the New Yorker which later appear under the heading Eichmann In Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt rather than a scattered sampling of isolated passages taken out of context. Arendt pays attention to a theme of the prosecution—in the context of the trial—where the physical murder of any Jewish individual committed by Eichmann with his own hands is investigated (and may later have been proven to the satisfaction of historians) but is not proven beyond a shadow of a doubt in the context of the trial in Jerusalem. She attends to this, according to her own prose in the first article of the cycle,^[73] since it was an issue of material concern and focus during the proceedings of the trial.^[72] However, in her summation in the final article, she holds him guilty and supports the death sentence decisively in her final statement.^[50]

Deborah Lipstadt contends in her book The Eichmann Trial that Arendt was too distracted by her own views of totalitarianism to objectively judge Eichmann. She refers to Arendt's own work on totalitarianism, The Origins of Totalitarianism, as a basis for Arendt's seeking to validate her own work by using Eichmann as an example. Lipstadt further contends that Arendt "wanted the trial to explicate how these societies succeeded in getting others to do their atrocious biddings" and so framed her analysis in a way which would agree with this pursuit.”^[41]

Lipstadt alleges, then, that Hannah Arendt’s research for Origins of Totalitarianism—the first-ever attempt to take on the task of rendering a systematic and comprehensive account of the Holocaust (not yet named as such, and referred to only elliptically in insinuating references to ‘what happened to the Jews under Hitler’ etc.) of the exterminating persecutions as an overall complex going beyond the testimony of a few individuals about singular camps within the larger constellation of the killing apparatus, a larger constellation that had only been alluded to in the earlier testimonies and not described in detail (since details were hard to come by, and extraordinarily painful to interrogate amongst the minority of victims who had survived), also apart from the transcripts of the Soviet Black Books (which were censored and not widely distributed until later decades) and the protocols of the Nuremberg trials (largely inaccessible to the public not professionally employed as researchers or federal attorneys)—may have influenced her thinking on the subject.

Lipstadt further insinuates by her objection to self-reference toward the Origins book that Hannah Arendt’s own experience as a Jewish citizen of Weimar Germany and the Third Reich (which is registered throughout the book without autobiographical attribution because her experience was in many respects a common experience of Jews in the Third Reich, re: many others had been there with her with whom she was still in contact, and so did not belong to her alone) may have influenced her thinking on the subject. Further: Arendt’s experience as a person who was arrested and held by the Gestapo for work as a Zionist agent researching and reporting on propaganda internal to Hitler’s regime, and her experience as an inmate of an internment camp—where she helped to organize a mass breakout from the camp as it was being converted to a depot to deport Jews to ghettoes in the east where they would wait to be shipped to concentration camps after the Fall of France^[74][75] (not referred to in any of her books because it was an exceptional incident and not a commonly experienced scenario)—in addition to her research as an authoritative scholar on the subject over the critical decades when the persecution and genocide was being carried out, may have influenced her later thinking about the subject of the Nazi Holocaust.

That may well be case.

Here, however, Lipstadt glosses over the fact that the very aspect of Eichmann in Jerusalem that is being criticized by her own critique of Arendt (as well as by other critiques in the same genre of assaults on Arendt’s reputation) is the foregrounding of the banality of evil in Eichmann in Jerusalem as opposed to the ‘Radical Evil’ which she had spoken of in her book on the Origins of Totalitarianism. Additionally: Arendt’s the complicity of Zionist councils with the Nazis in preparing and coordinating the populations of the ghettoes for deportation to the camps is framed as dubious provocation rather than as reporting on historical fact. The issues that Lipstadt and others have taken exception to in Arendt’s Eichmann report, in other words, are precisely those elements not yet explicitly recorded in the Origins book. Arendt’s critics allege, on the one hand, that she should have stuck with her interpretation in Origins, and on the other hand, they insinuate she should have ignored this earlier material so that the Israeli prosecutor’s tenor could be absorbed impartially without contaminating references or reliance on earlier experiences and research. Arendt’s treatment of radical evil in the Origins book (both essential and contaminating of a fair impartial view of the Israeli judiciary, according to Arendt’s critics) is summarized in an abbreviated form on several occasions by many prestigious scholars (Steiner, for example),^[76] of whom Terry Eagleton is only one, when he writes the following precis:

There is a kind of evil which is mysterious because its motive seems not to be to destroy specific beings for specific reasons, but to negate being as such. [...] Hannah Arendt speculates that the Holocaust was not so much a question of killing human beings for human reasons, as of seeking to annihilate the concept of the human as such. This sort of evil is a Satanic parody of the divine, finding in the act of destruction the sort of orgasmic release which one can imagine God finding in the act of creation. It is evil as nihilism —a cackle of mocking laughter at the whole solemnly farcical assumption that anything merely human could ever matter. In its vulgarly knowing way, it delights in unmasking human value as a pretentious sham. It is a raging vindictive fury at existence as such. It is the evil of the Nazi death camps rather than of a hired assassin, or even of a massacre carried out for some political end. It is not the same kind of evil as most terrorism, which is malign but which has a point.^[77]

As Arendt explains in several interviews, her introduction of the "banality of evil" as a phrase was not intended as a propositional truth—rather she coined the phrase without aforethought of its being or meaning anything beyond a merely descriptive flourish of what she had witnessed and discovered through her research as a witness present at the trial who also read the complete the transcripts of the trial.:^[78][79][80] thus it was her critics who stabilize the notion of the 'Banality of Evil' into a static proposition about which the question of its truth or falsity may be asked, not (in terms of self-conscious intention) by Hannah Arendt herself.^[78][79][80]

Arendt states that she does not intend to retract the charge that Nazism introduces a radical form of evil into the world^[44]—a charge that does not depend on her opinion or her earlier discussions of this matter in the Origins of Totalitarianism—as she noted. The truth of this radical evil is well-known, as she explains at great length and amidst many conversational detours thrown at her by her interviewers in her conversations with journalists in the aftermath of the controversy.^[78][79][80] In Eichmann in Jerusalem, she focuses (according to her own testimony in interviews),^[78][79][80] on a particular dimension or trait of this larger horizon of evil: the careerism and lack of self-reflection of officers in the Nazi hierarchy as a major element of radical evil, perhaps (or perhaps not) exceeding their sadism or bloodlust in the range of scaled damage that proceeds from the system they collectively created and unleashed.^[81]

A comparison of Klaus Barbie and Adolph Eichmann, for example, will reveal who was more notably and obviously a sadist, who was more of a careerist and who was responsible, as an officer and as an administrator, for the larger number of deaths between the two.

As is made evident by her continuing commentary and journalism during this period, she does not—either explicitly or implicitly—intend to retract the charge of radical evil but to turn the mirror in order to examine whether or not such radical evil is likely to recur under the post-war global order.^[82] She finds that it is likely,^[83][84] but not inevitable.^[85]

Arendt has also been praised for being among the first to point out that intellectuals, such as Eichmann and other leaders of the Einsatzgruppen, were in fact more accepted in the Third Reich despite Nazi Germany's persistent use of anti-intellectual propaganda.^[7] During a 2013 review of historian Christian Ingrao's book Believe and Destroy, which pointed out that Hitler was more accepting of intellectuals with German ancestry and that at least 80 German intellectuals assisted his "SS War Machine,"^[7][86] Los Angeles Review of Books journalist Jan Mieszkowski praised Arendt for being "well aware that there was a place for the thinking man in the Third Reich."^[7] Several trenchant political commentators and historians of the Trump Era rely heavily on Arendt's conceptions—including the tendencies that she outlines in Eichmann in Jerusalem—to underscore their arguments in a continuuing vocation of resistance to the encroachments of racism and totalitarianism.^{[87][88][89][90]} Her many vociferous critics, seen in this light, appear to offer low-hanging fruit to those who would,"unmask[...] human value as a pretentious sham."^[77] However, as we have seen from this review of the literature, they are not without their challengers and she is not without her defenders.

See also

• Books portal

• Little Eichmanns
• Moral disengagement
• Milgram experiment (obedience to authority, 1961)
• Stanford prison experiment (Zimbardo, 1972)
• Superior orders