What drives ordinary people to commit extraordinary evil? Can the most horrific acts stem from mundane motivations?
The groundbreaking book Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt challenges our understanding of evil. The book examines Adolf Eichmann, a key figure in the Holocaust, through a surprising lens. Arendt’s analysis reveals unexpected insights about the nature of evil itself.
Read on for an overview of this work that lays out Arendt’s controversial perspective on one of history’s most infamous criminals.
Overview of Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt
Adolf Eichmann—the Nazi official who arranged the transportation of Jews to their systematic deaths in concentration camps—is often considered a sadistic mastermind. But, according to German-American historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt, Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem reveals otherwise. In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt argues that Eichmann was an unremarkable evildoer whose atrocities reveal the banality of evil—evil driven not by sadism, but by mundane motives and aims.
(Shortform note: The phrase “the banality of evil” led to widespread debate following Eichmann in Jerusalem’s publication, as readers disagreed about how to interpret the phrase and whether its portrayal of evil was accurate. But, in a lecture ten years after publication, Arendt tried to clear the air—she explained that the “banality of evil” meant that evil deeds don’t always stem from sheer malice but rather from everyday foibles. In other words, she wasn’t offering a comprehensive account of evil but rather observing how evil can sometimes manifest.)
As one of the most influential thinkers and political theorists of the twentieth century, Arendt penned influential works such as The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and The Human Condition (1958) that examined the proper role of humans in society. Eichmann in Jerusalem continues in this vein by illustrating how the perverse society of Nazi Germany gave rise to a mundane sort of evil that pervaded everyday life.
We’ll begin by discussing the historical context of Eichmann’s case, highlighting his specific role in the Holocaust. Next, we’ll focus on Eichmann himself, examining his unremarkable upbringing, his alleged “expertise” regarding the Jewish people, and his mundane motivations for committing atrocities throughout the Holocaust. Finally, we’ll assess the trial against Eichmann and explore Arendt’s reasons for thinking that, although Eichmann was clearly guilty, the trial lacked legitimacy.
The Historical Context
Before delving into Eichmann’s character, we’ll examine his role in the Nazis’ proposed “solutions” to the Jewish question—that is, the antisemitic question concerning the ideal treatment of Jews in Europe, whom the Germans viewed as a problem to be solved. We’ll see how Eichmann became considered an expert on the Jewish question in the first solution (convincing Jews to emigrate), how he brainstormed many logistical aspects of the second solution (deporting Jews to foreign lands), and how he was responsible for the transportation of Jews in the Nazis’ Final Solution (the systematic murder of Jews in concentration camps).
Eichmann’s Role in the First Solution
Arendt writes that, from early 1933 until 1939, the Nazis worked on the first solution, which sought to convince the Jewish people to voluntarily relocate to Palestine. She reports that Eichmann played an essential advisory role as an alleged expert on Jewish emigration during this time.
According to Arendt, Eichmann’s role in the first solution began in 1932, when he joined the Schutzstaffel (SS), the Nazi Party’s primary paramilitary organization. By 1938, the Nazis recognized Eichmann as an authority on the Jewish question. He even communicated directly with Zionist Jews (those who wished to develop a Jewish state in the Jews’ ancestral homeland of Palestine) to develop an infrastructure for encouraging Jews to leave Germany voluntarily.
Arendt notes that, in 1938, Eichmann received a promotion to first lieutenant of the SS and was put in charge of the Jewish Center for Emigration in Vienna, where he was responsible for the emigration of around 100,000 Austrian Jews. But, after Germany successfully invaded Poland in September 1939, it suddenly gained over two million more Jews. When Eichmann became head of the Reich Center for Jewish Emigration in 1939, it became clear that convincing two million Jews to emigrate voluntarily wasn’t feasible.
Eichmann’s Role in the Second Solution
Following Germany’s 1939 invasion of Poland, the Nazis’ official approach to the Jewish question turned to the second solution, which involved forcibly deporting the Jewish people to a foreign land. According to Arendt, Eichmann helped brainstorm different means of implementing the second solution, though the Nazis eventually abandoned his ideas.
In late 1939, Germany announced plans to deport Jews to the General Government—the part of Poland that Germany hadn’t annexed. As part of this plan, Eichmann was tasked with organizing the deportation of thousands of Jews from annexed Poland and the Czech Republic. However, because Germany lacked the trains needed to enact this plan, it never came to fruition.
After the plan to deport Jews to the General Government failed, Eichmann instead became the architect of the so-called “Madagascar Project,” which sought to deport over four million European Jews to Madagascar (then colonized by the French). Arendt reports that Eichmann spent the majority of his time in 1940 trying to arrange the logistics needed to ship four million Jews nearly 8,000 nautical miles away.
However, Arendt contends that in fact, the Madagascar Project was an obvious sham while higher-ups in the Nazi Party began planning for the extermination of the Jewish people. Every fact about the project pointed to its impossibility: The British Navy remained in control of the Atlantic Ocean; Madagascar couldn’t house four million new people; and it wasn’t feasible to attain the boats needed to ship four million people across the world in the middle of a war. Germany ultimately shuttered the Madagascar Project in 1942.
Eichmann’s Role in the Final Solution
As Arendt relates, some eight weeks after Germany’s 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union, Eichmann learned that Hitler had formally announced the start of the Final Solution—the systematic murder of the Jewish people. She writes that Eichmann was primarily responsible for the transportation of Jews to and from concentration camps.
Arendt points out that when Eichmann was later put on trial, neither the prosecution nor the defense questioned the facts about Eichmann’s role in implementing the “Final Solution” between early 1942 and 1943. Both sides acknowledged that Eichmann handled the logistics of gathering information about Jews in various ghettos and arranged for their regular transportation via train to concentration camps. Further, Eichmann admitted that he repeatedly visited these camps, including Auschwitz, where commanders showed him the shooting and gassing mechanisms used to murder Jews. In other words, he was fully aware that his trains were sending Jews to their deaths.
The Perpetrator
Although we’ve seen that Eichmann undeniably committed atrocious crimes during the Holocaust, Arendt contends that he was nevertheless an unremarkable evildoer. We’ll examine Eichmann’s early life, which was rife with failure, as well as how he fortuitously stumbled into the role of “expert” on the Jewish question within the Nazi Party. We’ll also discuss how his evil actions were driven by mundane motivations: the desire for success, a sense of duty, and social conformity.
Eichmann’s Unremarkable Early Life
While many historians deem Eichmann one of the “masterminds” behind the Holocaust, Arendt instead argues that Eichmann was a failure for most of his life before joining the Nazi party.
According to Arendt, Eichmann showed no signs of giftedness in childhood. For example, of his five siblings, he was the only one who couldn’t complete high school in his small German hometown, Solingen. After failing to graduate from high school, Eichmann also failed to graduate from the vocational school he was placed in.
Following his struggles in vocational school and a brief stint working for his father’s mining company, Eichmann earned a bland job as a traveling salesman for an oil company in 1927. According to Arendt, this was likely the closest Eichmann came to success: Although he wasn’t a high earner, he made a steady income amidst economic hardship in Germany and Austria. However, even this modicum of success was short-lived, as Eichmann was laid off—though he never framed it that way—in 1933.
Eichmann’s Unfounded “Expertise” on the Jewish Question
While Eichmann’s job as a salesperson ended in failure, his time in the SS ultimately led him to be considered an expert on the Jewish question. However, Arendt writes that his self-proclaimed expertise on Jews was mostly a sham, as Eichmann lacked any formal education about the Jews and had only a smattering of informal education.
First, Arendt points out that, following Eichmann’s transfer in 1934 to the Jewish division of the SS’s intelligence agency, he was forced to read the Zionist book Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State), which convinced him of the merits of Zionism. But, according to Eichmann, this book was the main source of his “expertise” about the Jewish people, and it’s hard to believe that true expertise could stem primarily from a single book.
Second, Arendt writes that Eichmann didn’t seem to understand the other source that allegedly contributed to his expertise—Adolf Böhm’s A History of Zionism. Though Eichmann frequently sang its praises at trial, he often mixed it up with Der Judenstaat. For this reason, Arendt suggests that Eichmann’s role as the “expert” on the Jewish question wasn’t earned through his keen insight and erudition, but rather through a series of fortuitous promotions that landed him in a job beyond his skill level.
Eichmann’s Motivations for His Role in the Holocaust
Having shown that Eichmann wasn’t the evil genius that many portrayed him as, Arendt rebuts the popular view that he participated in the Holocaust because he was a sadistic monster. On the contrary, Arendt argues that Eichmann committed evil acts in the Holocaust for strikingly mundane reasons: He wanted to seem successful, felt obligated to fulfill his duty, and succumbed to social conformity that led him to abandon morality.
Motivation #1: Desire for Success
According to Arendt, one of the primary drivers of Eichmann’s evil acts was his desire to succeed within the Nazi Party. Eichmann made this clear in several interviews in which he frequently lamented his inability to join the highest echelon of Nazi members (such as Hitler, Himmler, and Müller), even attempting to garner sympathy from his interrogators. Further, Arendt points out that evidence from the trial shows that when Eichmann rose to an executive position as head of Jewish Emigration in 1939, this taste of power led him to begin exclusively pursuing more powerful positions.
Motivation #2: Obligation to Fulfill His Duty
Arent relates that beyond his desire to rise up the ranks, Eichmann was also driven by a sense of duty to follow orders. She explains that in the legal system of the Third Reich, anything that Hitler commanded became law. Consequently, in Eichmann’s testimony, he consistently maintained that he would never have disobeyed an order because such orders were laws and he felt obligated not to break them. Even when the prosecution cited examples of Nazi Party members who’d disobeyed orders and refused to partake in the horrors of the Holocaust, Eichmann steadfastly claimed that such disobedience was dishonorable.
Motivation #3: Social Conformity
Arendt reports that the final motivating factor for Eichmann was the fact that seemingly nobody was objecting to the Holocaust. Per Eichmann’s own testimony, during the 1942 Wannsee Conference in which the higher Nazi officials began planning the Final Solution, he “sensed a kind of Pontius Pilate feeling”—the sight of “great” Nazi leaders embracing the Final Solution wiped away any of his scruples. Indeed, Eichmann reportedly felt that he had no right to judge if these leaders were in agreement.
However, Arendt reports that the historical evidence reveals a more nuanced account than Eichmann recalls. In September 1941, when Eichmann was first ordered to begin deporting Jews to concentration camps where they’d immediately be killed, he disobeyed—instead, he sent them to a ghetto in Lódz, Poland, where they’d be temporarily safe from harm. But Arendt notes that this resistance was short-lived; after four weeks, Eichmann began deporting Jews to concentration camps as ordered, hastening their deaths. Thus, she concludes that Eichmann’s conscience functioned normally for about one month, after which he fully acquiesced to the Nazi plan.
The Trial
Having delved into the nature of Eichmann’s character, Arendt then focuses on the trial itself. We’ll examine her reasons for thinking that the trial—although it delivered the correct verdict—was in many respects illegitimate. We’ll also explore her assessment of Eichmann’s final words.
The Illegitimacy of the Trial
Although Arendt spares no sympathy for Eichmann, whom she believes was blatantly guilty of the charges against him, she clarifies that the trial against him was deeply flawed. According to Arendt, Eichmann’s trial was primarily an attempt to educate the world about Jewish suffering in the Holocaust, rather than a dispassionate attempt to determine Eichmann’s guilt or innocence.
First, she points out that this view of the trial shouldn’t be controversial, since Israel’s then-Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion openly expressed his hopes for the trial—namely, to underscore how the Jewish suffering in the Holocaust fit into a larger narrative of Jewish oppression throughout history, and to show the ruthlessness of Israel’s enemies. Consequently, the prosecution in Eichmann’s trial called over 100 Jewish Holocaust survivors to the stand to recount their experiences, even though their testimonies didn’t specifically shed light on Eichmann’s guilt or innocence.
Arendt maintains that although Eichmann was indeed guilty, the trial nonetheless fell short of the standards of justice. She contends that because this trial was largely for show, it heavily favored the prosecution from the beginning. To illustrate, she points to several handicaps imposed on the defense. For instance, the defense wasn’t allowed to call witnesses to the stand or to cross-examine many of the prosecution’s witnesses. Moreover, the court didn’t supply the defense with any researchers to pore over the endless documents cited by the prosecution, meaning the defense couldn’t adequately prepare for the trial.
The Verdict and Execution
Arendt reports that in December 1961—eight months after the trial began—the judges passed down the verdict: Eichmann was guilty of crimes against the Jewish people. Specifically, he was found guilty on four counts:
- Causing the deaths of millions of Jews
- Placing Jews in inhospitable conditions on the trains
- Causing bodily harm to millions of Jews
- Banning pregnancies and coercing abortions among Jewish women in one of the Jewish ghettos
Arendt explains that in finding Eichmann guilty, the judges argued that he didn’t satisfy either of the legal exemptions listed in the Nazis and Nazi Collaborators Law of 1950. First, he wouldn’t have been legally responsible for his actions if he had acted under pain of immediate death (when someone takes action to avoid being killed). But this condition wasn’t satisfied: Members of killing squads could leave their posts or request a transfer without much penalty, and the Nuremberg trials of Nazi leaders found no cases where someone was killed for leaving the SS.
Second, Eichmann would’ve been legally exempt from responsibility if he’d done his “best to reduce the gravity of the offense,” such as by intentionally creating an inefficient train system to hamper the Nazi’s genocidal efforts. However, Arendt points out that per Eichmann’s own admission, this wasn’t the case—on the contrary, Eichmann consistently bragged about working hard to fulfill his oath to the Nazis and obey orders from higher-ups.
Following an unsuccessful appeal in May 1962, Eichmann was hanged days later. According to Arendt, his last words were striking for how bland and uninspired they were: “After a short while, gentlemen, we shall all meet again. Such is the fate of all men. Long live Germany, long live Argentina, long live Austria. I shall not forget them.” Arendt argues that these tepid last words reinforce what was obvious throughout the trial—Eichmann’s evil nature was startlingly unremarkable and mundane, highlighting the banality of evil.
