Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt

First published: 1963

Type of work: Journalism; history

Principal personage:

• Adolf Eichmann, (1906-1962), Nazi officer who was in charge of transporting Jews to concentration camps

Overview

On May 11, 1960, Adolf Eichmann, who had been masquerading in Argentina as factory worker Ricardo Klement, was captured by Israeli agents and brought to Jerusalem for trial. During World War II, Eichmann, an obedient Nazi bureaucrat, had risen to Obersturmbannführer (a rank equivalent to lieutenant colonel) in the Schutzstaffel (SS), a branch of the state secret police, or Gestapo, headed by Heinrich Himmler. Eichmann became the “Jewish expert” of the branch known as the Head Office for Reich Security. In accordance with Adolf Hitler’s plan for a “final solution” for the Jewish people, Eichmann was put in charge of arranging the mass deportations to the killing centers, which were mainly in Poland. After Germany’s defeat in May, 1945, Eichmann was captured by the Americans but hid his true identity and, with the aid of Nazi sympathizers, eventually escaped to Argentina. For ten years, reunited with his family, he lived a quiet life until his capture.

When the news of Eichmann’s capture and forthcoming trial was broadcast, Hannah Arendt proposed herself as a trial reporter to William Shawn, editor of The New Yorker magazine. Shawn gladly accepted Arendt’s offer, as she had already earned a distinguished reputation as a political analyst through her work The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). Also, as a Jew and an early refugee from Nazi Germany (she had escaped in 1933), Arendt was uniquely qualified to cover the trial.

The trial began before the District Court of Jerusalem on April 11, 1961, and continued until August 14. The court announced its judgment on December 11, 1961, declaring Eichmann guilty of most of the crimes in the fifteen-count indictment (including “crimes against the Jewish people, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and memberships in hostile organizations”). He was condemned to death and, after the rejection of his legal appeals, was executed by hanging at midnight on May 31, 1962.

Hannah Arendt attended most of Eichmann’s district court sessions and then went home to New York, where she gathered her impressions of the defendant and formulated her analytic theses. The essential form of the book, according to Arendt, is that of “a trial report, and its main source is the transcript of the trial proceedings which was distributed to the press in Jerusalem.” Of the book’s fifteen chapters, the first few include descriptions of the Jerusalem courtroom, the judges, the prosecutor, and the defendant. The second chapter contains a perceptive brief biography of Eichmann, his “normality” (according to the Israeli psychiatric examiners), and his military loyalty. Eichmann had been a poor student and an unsuccessful worker. His last job (from which he was fired) before joining the Nazi Party and the SS in 1932 had been that of traveling salesman. “Already a failure in the eyes of his social class, of his family, and hence in his own eyes as well,” Eichmann could now “still make a career” in the Nazi bureaucracy. Thus, over the course of thirteen years, he rose eagerly from the status of unemployed nonentity to that of SS Obersturmbannführer.

Chapter 3 begins the detailing of how Eichmann became “an expert on the Jewish question.” He volunteered in 1934 for the Security Service of the SS and was put to work in the Information Department. After a few months, Eichmann began to work in the new section concerned exclusively with Jews. He then read Theodor Herzl’s Zionist classic Der Judenstaat (1896; The Jewish State, 1896), which earned for him an assignment as the official spy on German Zionist organizations. Consequently, by March, 1938, Eichmann was appointed organizer of the forced emigration of Jews from Austria. Unfortunately for the victimized Jews, however, entry into British-ruled Palestine was very difficult. In any case, with the beginning of World War II in September, 1939, emigration anywhere for significant numbers of Jews became impossible, so Eichmann began to look for new avenues of career advancement. The opportunity came when the primary responsibility of his office was shifted from forced emigration of the Jews to their deportation to concentration camps for forced labor and death.

By late 1941, the “final solution”—the killing of the Jews in the German-occupied areas—had begun, and Eichmann assumed significant responsibility for deportation of Jews to the extermination camps. He did it with the same diligence that he had previously used in trying to find a foreign country to which the Jews could emigrate. Such faint stirrings of conscience as Eichmann still possessed seemed to pertain only to German Jews and not to their more numerous coreligionists in the countries east of Germany.

At the important conference about the logistics of the “final solution” held in Wannsee, a suburb of Berlin, in January, 1942, Eichmann noted that none of his superiors, among the most prominent people in the Third Reich, had any hesitancy in embracing the policy of mass killing. At his trial he stated, “At that moment, I sensed a kind of Pontius Pilate feeling, for I felt free of all guilt.” Buttressed by the approval of his social and military superiors, Eichmann became a master of the technique of appointing Jewish councils to fulfill his own ultimately murderous—but well-disguised—purposes. Thus, through deception and bureaucratic skill, he was often able to create a sense of administrative order out of the human chaos of forced deportation.

Helpful to Eichmann, according to his own testimony, was his version of the moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant, an eighteenth century German philosopher. Kant had maintained that a person should act as if the principle of his action were to become a universal law of nature. Eichmann seemed to follow a distortion of Kant’s universalizing principle: “Act in such a way that the Führer, if he knew your action, would approve it.” Eichmann clung tenaciously to this principle, even when the war was clearly lost and Heinrich Himmler had decided to put an end to the “final solution” in the vain hope of negotiating a postwar and post-Hitler position.

Chapters 9 through 13 detail the process of the “final solution” in the various German-occupied areas. Generally, the fate of the Jews in each country depended on the attitudes of the local populations toward them.

In the final chapters, Arendt notes the disparity between the small resources of the defendant and the vast resources of the prosecution (a condition that had also existed, she notes, at the original Nazi war crimes trials in Nuremberg, Germany). She doubts the relevance and accuracy of many of the statements made by the prosecution’s witnesses, sixteen or more years after the fact. Although not disagreeing with the death sentence, Arendt suggests that an international tribunal would have been a more appropriate courtroom, given that genocide is a “crime against humanity.”

Because the book began as a report on Eichmann’s trial written for The New Yorker, it includes, in that magazine’s characteristic style, detailed descriptions—in this case, of the physical appearance and legal rituals of the “House of Justice” in Jerusalem. It also includes an analysis of Eichmann’s statements, the strategies of the prosecution and defense, and the final judgment. The book provides background descriptions of the Nazi bureaucracy involved in the “final solution,” the part Eichmann played in it, and much of the sad history of the deportation and extermination of the European Jews. These details are explicated not only for their historical and legal relevance but also as a basis for Arendt’s analytic propositions.

The intellectual heart of Arendt’s thesis can be found in her subtitle, A Report on the Banality of Evil. Her portrayal of Eichmann after his capture is contrary to the popular opinion of him as a fanatical, sadistic anti-Semite. Rather, she analyzes his character as that of a bureaucratic careerist, a “banal” mediocrity, content to function as an advancing cog in an orderly totalitarian system. Tracing Eichmann’s undistinguished career prior to becoming a Nazi and contrasting it to the heightened self-esteem he felt in his newly achieved status, Arendt states that Eichmann “might still have preferred . . . to be hanged as Obersturmbannführer . . . rather than living out his life quietly and normally as a traveling salesman.”

Court psychiatrists had certified Eichmann as “normal,” thus the central societal problem, according to Arendt, is that so many are like Eichmann: “terribly and terrifyingly normal.” Such average people cannot be expected to recognize that they are, in fact, doing wrong in circumstances where their actions, clearly conforming to the prevailing social norms, gain general social approval and career advancement. Only Germany’s losing of the war, Arendt believes, seemed to provoke in a few people any admissions of guilty conscience.

A second thesis developed by Arendt—even more inflammatory to many of her readers—was that the victims had cooperated in the destruction of their own communities and of themselves. Eichmann and his staff typically appointed Jewish councils from among the leaders of the occupied Jewish communities. The Nazis then held the councils responsible for maintaining order in the newly created ghettos, distributing rations and work assignments, compiling lists of Jewish property (for easy confiscation), and—especially—identifying the required number of Jews for deportation and “resettlement” to the concentration camps (destinations usually unknown to the leaders of the councils). According to Arendt:

Wherever Jews lived, there were recognized Jewish leaders, and this leadership, almost without exception, cooperated . . . 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.

Depressed by her own analysis, Arendt notes, “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.”

Many of the reviews of Eichmann in Jerusalem were actually polemics directed against Arendt’s style, her analytic tone and Olympian detachment from the dreadful events, her focus on the “aesthetics” rather than the moral depravity of Eichmann, and her obvious anti-Zionism. The most strident attacks focused on Arendt’s two major theses: the routinely “banal” dullness of Eichmann’s character and the collaborationist role of the Jewish leadership in occupied Europe. The varied positive and negative responses—often directed on a very personal level—were especially evident in the pages of Partisan Review, an influential intellectual quarterly.

Generally, the critics noted that Arendt accepts Eichmann’s own projection of himself at the trial as a dutiful, law-abiding nonentity. She fails to imagine that same person as he had been when he committed his crimes—in uniform and in power. She sees him only as a “little man” transformed by a totalitarian system into an organizer of the “final solution.” (Arendt’s supporters believed that she had achieved an insight into the omnipotence of the totalitarian state over the average person.) In fact, Arendt is so certain of Eichmann’s essential “banality” that when he is quoted as having told his men during the last days of the war, “I will jump into my grave laughing, because the fact that I have the death of five million Jews . . . on my conscience gives me extraordinary satisfaction,” she attributes it merely to the lower-class vice of braggadocio rather than to any factual or legal reality.

Arendt’s depiction of the Jewish councils as being treasonously destructive of the Jewish communities came under the most bitter attack. Critics noted that, among other historical omissions, Arendt does not address the killing of Jews in Russia. There, contrary to her thesis, Jewish councils were not appointed by the Nazis; mass killings were, nevertheless, carried out on the spot by firing squads. In addition, critics noted how few political and moral alternatives were really available to the Jewish leaders, how rational it seemed at first to cooperate, for the “civilized” Germans were not thought to be so illogical as to destroy a desperately needed labor force. (Mass resistance, after all, was impossible without outside support.) Reliable accounts exist of certain members of the councils who, having been informed of the destinations of the deportees, either committed suicide or refused to assist the Nazis further and were immediately killed.

Critics of Arendt’s book also noted how the leaders of the Jewish councils begged the Allies to bomb the trains so that the deportees might have an opportunity to escape. Furthermore, they stressed that the most determinative factor in the saving or killing of the Jews was the attitude of the local population and the availability of a sanctuary—not the existence of a Jewish council. The death camps, for example, were established in Eastern Europe in the midst of hostile anti-Semitic populations, while virtually all the Jews of occupied Denmark were saved by the local citizens who ferried them in fishing boats to neutral Sweden.

The Eichmann trial, although conducted in Israel in the absence of any appropriate international tribunal, was actually a successor to the Nuremberg Trials, which had been organized during the years immediately following World War II. Eichmann had fled from judgment and so had not been available at Nuremberg. Sixteen years after the war’s slaughter had ended, Arendt felt able to give a nonpartisan analysis of the procedures in Jerusalem and of the defendant’s character and his crimes. She points out the Jerusalem court’s failure, as well as that of the Nuremberg court, to resolve three fundamental issues: “the problem of impaired justice in the court of the victors; a valid definition of the ’crime against humanity’; and a clear recognition of the new criminal who commits this crime.”

Arendt’s “new criminal” is, as noted earlier, a “normal” individual who commits “administrative massacres” (the rationalized murder of entire populations) under circumstances that make it “impossible for him to know or to feel that he is doing wrong.” This controversial insight is a direct application of Arendt’s view of the state’s power to shape the individual, expressed in her earlier The Origins of Totalitarianism. That is, in Arendt’s view, the Nazi genocide was not another chapter in the dismal history of anti-Semitism but rather a new kind of crime, an early chapter in the history of modern totalitarianism—“a system in which all men have become equally superfluous.” The “banal, superfluous, average, normal” Eichmann was thus an efficient instrument for the Nazi totalitarian system.

Arendt’s universalist views conflict with Zionism, a form of Jewish nationalism, so she is skeptical (unfairly so, according to her critics) of the validity of an Israeli (or any separate nation’s) court’s judgment of this new sort of crime committed by the modern totalitarian state, a “crime against humanity.” Arendt’s greatest contribution in Eichmann in Jerusalem lies in her demonstration of how a normal person can be brought, through a conditioned sense of duty, to serve the radically evil purposes of a totalitarian state.

Sources for Further Study

Aschheim, Steven E., ed. Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.

Bernstein, Richard J. Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question. Malden, Mass.: Polity Press, 1996.

Birmingham, Peg. Hannah Arendt and Human Rights: The Predicament of Common Responsibility. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006.

Hull, Margaret Betz. The Hidden Philosophy of Hannah Arendt. New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2002.

Lang, Anthony F., Jr., and John Williams, eds. Hannah Arendt and International Relations: Readings Across the Lines. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

Linn, Ruth. Escaping Auschwitz: A Culture of Forgetting. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004.

May, Derwent. Hannah Arendt. New York: Penguin Books, 1986.

Whitfield, Stephen J. Into the Dark: Hannah Arendt and Totalitarianism. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980.

Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth. Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World. 2d ed. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004.