New views of Arendt and Eichmann


October 19, 2014
Sarah Benton


Adolph Eichmann in his cell in Galami Prison in Israel as he awaits his trial. Getty Images

The Banality of Evil: The Demise of a Legend

Review by Richard Wolin,

Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer
By Bettina Stangneth, translated by Ruth Martin

Alfred A. Knopf, 608 pp., $35

Jewish Review of Books, Fall 2014

There have been few phrases that have proved as controversial as the famous subtitle Hannah Arendt chose to sum up her account of the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann. From the moment the articles that eventually comprised her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil were published in The New Yorker, the idea that the execution of the Nazis’ diabolical plans for an Endlösung to the “Jewish Question” could be considered “banal” offended many readers. In addition, Arendt took what seemed to be a gratuitous swipe at the conduct of the Jewish councils, which, operating under conditions of extreme duress, were forced to bargain with their Nazi overseers in the desperate hope of buying time, sacrificing some Jewish lives in the hope of saving others. Only with the benefit of hindsight do we realize that their efforts were largely futile. In her rush to judgment, Arendt made it seem as though it was the Jews themselves, rather than their Nazi persecutors, who were responsible for their own destruction. Thus, with a few careless rhetorical flourishes, she established an historical paradigm that managed simultaneously to downplay the executioners’ criminal liability, which she viewed as “banal” and bureaucratic, and to exaggerate the culpability of their Jewish victims.

Arendt’s astonishing conclusion that “Eichmann had no criminal motives,” and the account that underlay it, might have been construed as mere journalistic overstatement, but her status as a distinguished political theorist, together with the furious controversy her account engendered—Gershom Scholem famously accused her of lacking ahavat yisrael (love for her fellow Jews)—helped to create an aura of brave truth-telling that has surrounded Eichmann in Jerusalem ever since. This image of Eichmann in Jerusalem as an act of an intellectual bravado, with Arendt herself cast in the role of an imperiled heroine—a latter-day Joan of Arc, persecuted by an army of inferior male detractors—was canonized in the recent and widely praised German film by Margarethe von Trotta, Hannah Arendt.

It is certainly true that throughout the controversy Arendt comported herself as someone who was above the fray. Often she seemed to regard the Israelis she encountered in Jerusalem with as little esteem as she did Eichmann. She dismissed the chief prosecutor, Gideon Hausner, with breathtaking condescension as a “typical Galician Jew, very unsympathetic, boring, constantly making mistakes. Probably one of those people who don’t know any languages.” While covering the trial she wrote to her former mentor, the philosopher Karl Jaspers:

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.

Even setting aside the egregious racism and anti-Jewish animus, there is something very alarming about this passage. Any reader familiar with Arendt’s classic study The Origins of Totalitarianism knows that she described such mobs as the carriers of the totalitarian bacillus. Nor can there be any mistaking the import of her assertion that the Sephardic or Mizrahi policemen “would obey any order.” With this claim, Arendt insinuated that they were the “authoritarian personalities” and “desk murderers” of the future. Again and again, one sees how readily Arendt blurred the line between victims and executioners.

Arendt’s banality thesis helped to engender the so-called “functionalist” interpretation of the Holocaust, in which the role of obedient desk murderers and mindless functionaries assumed pride of place. Leading German historians such as Hans Mommsen coined nebulous phrases such as “cumulative radicalization” in order to describe a killing process that, like a Betriebsunfall (an industrial accident), seemed to have happened without anyone consciously willing it. But as the historian Ulrich Herbert has pointed out, at the time the functionalist account was also culturally convenient: “For a long time there was a reluctance to name names in research on National Socialism . . . [Consequently,] there was also massive resistance to studies about the perpetrators and their relationship to German society.” The upshot of this approach was that the Holocaust’s character as a crime conceived and masterminded by German anti-Semitic ideologues that was perpetrated against the Jews disappeared in favor of a series of conceptual abstractions—“modernity,” “bureaucracy,” “mass society”—in which the Jewish (or anti-Jewish) specificity of the events in question all but disappears.

Was Eichmann, or the evil he was instrumental in perpetrating, really banal? Remarkably, it seems that Arendt had already arrived at a definitive judgment of Eichmann’s character some four months before the trial even began. In another letter to Jaspers, written on December 2, 1960, she writes that the upcoming trial would offer her the opportunity “to study this walking disaster [i.e., Eichmann] face to face in all his bizarre vacuousness.” But, as Bettina Stangneth shows in her well-researched and path-breaking study Eichmann Before Jerusalem, Eichmann was, in fact, a consummate actor. “Eichmann,” she writes, “reinvented himself at every stage of his life, for each new audience and every new alarm.” He becomes “subordinate, superior officer, perpetrator, fugitive, exile, and defendant.”

The meek and unassuming Argentine rabbit breeder who took the witness stand in Jerusalem and described himself as “a small cog in Adolf Hitler’s extermination machine” bore no resemblance to the man who, as Specialist for Jewish Affairs of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), reported directly to Heinrich Himmler and had avidly sown terror and destruction throughout the lands of Central Europe. Nor did he resemble the man who, under the alias of Ricardo Klement, had been the toast of Argentina’s highly visible neo-Nazi community, the man who unabashedly signed photographs for fellow fugitives: “Adolf Eichmann, SS Obersturmbannführer (retired).” As Stangneth aptly observes, “Eichmann-in-Jerusalem was little more than a mask.” Eichmann gave the performance of his life, and Hannah Arendt was entirely taken in.

In Jerusalem, Eichmann fought to save his life, and, if possible, to clear his name for posterity. But another one of his central motivations was to throw a monkey wrench into the gears of the Israeli judicial apparatus, whose staff he regarded as his Jewish “persecutors.” During his proud years in the SS, combating the pernicious influence of World Jewry had been Eichmann’s raison d’être. With his artful performance on the witness stand in Jerusalem, Eichmann, ever the warrior, was, in effect, making his final stand. True to the SS creed of loyalty above all (“Mein Ehre heisst Treue”), he went down fighting.

It has long been known that the CIA had been privy to Eichmann’s whereabouts after the war. Hence it was with the CIA’s tacit approval that, in 1950, Eichmann, in order to avoid capture, successfully made use of the notorious “rat line” to South America. Only a few years ago, it came to light that the German Intelligence Services had also been well aware of Eichmann’s various activities prior to his flight to South America. German officials also refused to lift a finger, but, for slightly different reasons. Eichmann, it seemed, knew too much about prominent ex-Nazis who had recently been elevated to the status of “notables”—politicians, opinion leaders, and scholars—in the newly conceived Federal Republic. His apprehension, they believed, would have injured the emerging German democracy. As Stangneth remarks laconically, although the trappings of constitutional democracy had been freshly implanted on German soil, the problem was that “there were no new people to administer them.”

 Hannah Arendt c. 1960

One of the main reasons that Arendt’s banality of evil concept struck a nerve was that it played on widespread fears about the dehumanizing effects of “mass society.” When she wrote about Eichmann, the Nazi threat was past, but, in the war’s aftermath, an arguably greater menace had arisen, the threat of nuclear annihilation. This threat had been vividly driven home by the Cuban missile crisis, which took place the year before Arendt’s articles on the Eichmann trial were serialized in The New Yorker. It was tempting and superficially plausible to interpret both events as expressions of the same general phenomenon.

But to state a truism: Mass society can be dehumanizing without its denizens being mass murderers. In his magisterial study Nazi Germany and the Jews Saul Friedländer) describes the mentality of “redemptive anti-Semitism” that pervaded Nazi rule from its inception. What is needed to turn bureaucratic specialists into executioners is an ideological world view that underwrites racial supremacy and terror. This is the indispensable component that Nazism furnished and that, during the 1930s, reoriented Germany as a society hell-bent on military aggression, imperial expansion, and racial purification. One of the outstanding merits of Stangneth’s comprehensive account is that she shows that Eichmann was anything but a faceless cog in the machine. He fully subscribed to the ideological goals of the regime, including mass murder.

From the very beginning, Eichmann was a firm believer in the existence of a Jewish world conspiracy and thus fully partook of the murderous ethos so well described by Friedländer. In Eichmann’s view, the elimination of World Jewry, far from being a matter-of-fact, bureaucratic assignment, was a sacred duty. During one of Eichmann’s visits to Auschwitz, commandant Rudolf Höss confided that, upon seeing Jewish children herded into the gas chambers, his knees quivered, whereupon Eichmann rejoined that it was precisely the Jewish children who must be first sent into the gas chambers in order to ensure the wholesale elimination of the Jews as a race.

In a hastily contrived farewell speech to his subordinates at the end of the war, Eichmann declared that he would die happy, knowing that he was responsible for the deaths of millions of European Jews:

I will laugh when I leap into the grave because I have the feeling that I have killed 5,000,000 Jews. That gives me great satisfaction and gratification.

Twelve years later, in the course of the alcohol-infused colloquies with a group of fugitive Nazis in Buenos Aires whose transcripts are one of Stangneth’s key sources, he said: “To be frank with you, had we killed all of them, the thirteen million, I would be happy and say: ‘all right, we have destroyed an enemy.’”

To describe such a person as merely a man of “revolting stupidity” (von empörender Dummheit), as though his lack of intelligence somehow made his status as a genocidal murderer comprehensible, as Hannah Arendt did in the course of a 1964 interview, is perilously myopic. It was as though, by alluding to Eichmann’s purported intellectual failings, Arendt could make all other substantive questions and issues disappear. Perversely, the Jewish Specialist for the Reich Security Main Office ended up having the last laugh, hoodwinking Arendt into believing that he was little more than a bit player on a larger political stage. Yet, in the Jewish émigré press during the late 1930s (which Stangneth believes that Arendt had read), Eichmann had already been known as the “Tsar of the Jews” and was notorious for his brutality. But Arendt had her own intellectual agenda, and perhaps out of her misplaced loyalty to her former mentor and lover, Martin Heidegger, insisted on applying the Freiburg philosopher’s concept of “thoughtlessness” (Gedankenlosigkeit) to Eichmann. In doing so, she drastically underestimated the fanatical conviction that infused his actions.

By underestimating Eichmann’s intellect, Arendt also misjudged the magnitude of his criminality. Yet, as Stangneth demonstrates convincingly, in cities across the continent, Eichmann proved himself to be a persistent and effective negotiator, and when he failed to acquire what he demanded by way of negotiations, he was adept at using threats. Thus with a relatively small staff at his disposal, Eichmann systematically forced Jews out of their residences and into makeshift ghettos. As the Final Solution began, he arranged for their long-distance transport to the far reaches of provincial Poland, where the extermination camps lay in wait. As Raul Hilberg, on whose findings Arendt relied extensively, observed:

[Arendt] did not discern the pathways that Eichmann had found in the thicket of the German administrative machine for his unprecedented actions. She did not grasp the dimensions of his deed. There was no “banality” in this “evil.”

To amplify what she meant by the banality of evil, Arendt invoked the concept of “administrative murder,” which, in keeping with the robotic portrait she had painted of Eichmann, was another way of establishing the primacy of the functionary or desk murderer. But there had been nothing in the least “administrative” or “banal” about the barbaric mass shootings of the Einsatzgruppen—whose signature was the infamous Genickschuss (shot in the nape of the neck)—as led by the SS’s notorious “Death’s Head” brigades in the 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union. These deaths occurred prior to the January 1942 Wannsee Conference, in which the logistics of the Final Solution were outlined.

Eichmann’s organizational talents became especially vital and indispensable in the case of the deportation and extermination of 565,000 Hungarian Jews during the waning years of the war. The Hungarian situation was especially tricky. Even though the 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising had been successfully and brutally suppressed by the SS, it had exposed a weakness in the Nazi machinery of extermination. In addition, the RSHA had failed in its attempts to deport Denmark’s meager total of less than 8,000 Jews. Following D-Day, it had become clear that, from a German standpoint, the war was unwinnable. Thereafter, numerous individual Nazi potentates sought to scale back the Jewish deportations in the hope of receiving favorable treatment from the soon-to-be-victorious Allies. But as Stangneth shows, Eichmann would have none of it. In fall 1944, he went so far as to defy Himmler’s order to halt the Hungarian deportations. Moreover, he played an especially insidious role in overseeing the “death marches” of the remaining Hungarian Jews (some 400,000 had already been transported to Auschwitz), under conditions that were indescribably brutal.

As Germany’s military situation began to deteriorate, Eichmann showed himself especially adept at ensuring that the gears of the killing machine remained well oiled. To characterize Eichmann as a “desk murderer” in order to downplay his convictions as a devoted SS officer who reported directly to Reinhard Heydrich and Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller is seriously misleading. After all, the duties of office demanded that Eichmann regularly visit various killing sites.

In 1998, an immense transcript of Eichmann’s conversations with Dutch collaborator and Waffen SS officer Willem Sassen from the late 1950s in Argentina was mysteriously deposited in the German Federal Archive in Koblenz. In those conversations, Eichmann told Sassen “When I reached the conclusion that it was necessary to do to the Jews what we did, I worked with the fanaticism a man can expect from himself.” He seems to have had in mind Heinrich Himmler’s statement of the requirements of total ideological commitment within the SS at the very height of the extermination process:

These measures in the Reich cannot be carried out by a police force made up solely of bureaucrats. … A corps that had merely sworn an oath of allegiance would not have the necessary strength. These measures could be borne and executed only by an extreme organization of fanatic and deeply convinced National Socialists. The SS regards itself as such and declares itself as such, and therefore has taken the task upon itself.

How Arendt could believe that someone like Eichmann could thrive in an organization whose raison d’être was mass murder, shorn of the ideological zeal described by Himmler, is difficult to fathom. Yet, time and again, in defiance of all evidence to the contrary, she maintained that Eichmann could best be described as a mere “functionary.” “I don’t believe that ideology played much of a role,” Arendt repeatedly insisted, “to me that appears to be decisive.”

In this respect, Arendt’s findings dovetailed with ageneral trend in accounts of the Holocaust that downplayed the role of individual perpetrators in favor of the impersonal “structures” of modern society. But white-collar workers and “organization men” do not as a matter of course commit mass murder unless they are in the grip of an all-encompassing, exterminatory world view, such as the Nazi credo that SS officers were obligated to internalize. As Walter Laqueur noted during the late 1990s: Arendt’s “concept of the ‘banality of evil’ . . . made it possible to put the blame for the mass murder at the door of all kind of middle level bureaucrats. The evildoer disappears, or becomes so banal as to be hardly worthy of our attention, and is replaced by . . . underlings with a bookkeeper mentality.”

In seeking to downplay the German specificity of the Final Solution by universalizing it, Arendt also strove to safeguard the honor of the highly educated German cultural milieu from which she herself hailed. A similar impetus underlay Arendt’s contention, in her contribution to the Festschrift for Heidegger’s 80th birthday, that Nazism was merely a “gutter-born phenomenon” and had nothing to do with the spiritual (geistige) questions of culture. In light of what we now know about the extent of educated German support for the regime (not to speak of what we know about Heidegger, on which see my earlier essay “National Socialism, World Jewry, and the History of Being: Heidegger’s Black Notebooks” in this magazine) Arendt’s notion that Nazism has nothing to do with the “language of the humanities and the history of ideas” appears naïve.

In retrospect, Arendt’s application of Heidegger’s concept of “thoughtlessness” to Eichmann and his ilk seems to have been intended to absolve the German intellectual traditions. Even Arendt’s otherwise stalwart champion, Mary McCarthy, pointed out the crucial differences between the English word “thoughtlessness,” which suggests a boorish absent-mindedness, and the German Gedankenlosigkeit, which literally indicates an inability to think.

At the height of his danse macabre before the judicial tribunal in Jerusalem, Eichmann went so far as to characterize himself as a “Zionist,” on the basis of his negotiations during the 1930s with Jewish officials over the emigration of Viennese and Czech Jews. For her part, Arendt seemed to buy Eichmann’s self-serving self-description wholesale. Yet, as Stangneth shows, these forced emigrations organized by Eichmann were unfailingly sadistic and brutal. In retrospect, they were, in fact, a trial run for the Europe-wide Jewish deportations that culminated in the Final Solution. Thus under Eichmann’s supervision and under the cover of “emigration,” Jews were divested of their homes, their life savings, their possessions, their livelihood, and their citizenship in exchange for the uncertainties and ignominies of forced exile.

That Eichmann smugly viewed his indispensable role in the Final Solution as a crowning achievement was an opinion he expressed on numerous occasions. British historian David Cesarani aptly describes the RSHA Nazi’s Specialist for Jewish Affairs as acting “in the spirit of a fanatical anti-Semite who is locked in a world of fantasy,” a description that historian Christopher Browning recently seconded, noting that, “Eichmann embraced a worldview that was delusional and ‘phantasmagoric’ in its belief in a world Jewish conspiracy that was the implacable and life-threatening enemy of Germany.” When the regime imploded in May 1945, he became a warrior-without-a-cause.

As Stangneth shows, during his Argentine exile, Eichmann and his Nazi comrades harbored delusions of the Reich’s return. At the time, one of Eichmann’s pet literary projects was the drafting of an “open letter” to Konrad Adenauer that was intended to justify the National Socialist state and its aims. In Eichmann’s view, the Federal Republic should have stopped issuing apologies since it had nothing to be ashamed of. After all, during the war, Germany had been involved in a life-or-death struggle in which it had been necessary to employ all of the means at its disposal. As Eichmann was fond of saying: “Krieg ist Krieg”—war is war.

In Buenos Aires, the Sassen clique published a neo-Nazi journal, one of whose main aims was to burnish the reputation of the Third Reich in the face of “calumnious accusations” on the part of World Jewry. Foremost among those purported “calumnies” was the so-called “Auschwitz lie”: the “myth” that the Third Reich had been responsible for the deaths of six million Jews. It was for this reason that, in 1956, the former Dutch SS officer Willem Sassen conducted a series of interviews with Eichmann. After all, there could be no more convincing witness than Eichmann, who, from his perch at RSHA headquarters in Berlin, had dutifully and conscientiously organized the entire affair.

Yet along the way, Sassen and company encountered a stumbling block. On the one hand, Eichmann being Eichmann, he was more than willing to relive in minute detail his halcyon days in Division IV B of the Reich Security Main Office. The problem was that the destruction of European Jewry had been Eichmann’s proudest achievement.

By the end of the taping sessions, the mismatch between Sassen’s revisionist goals and Eichmann’s compulsive braggadocio reached absurd proportions. The misunderstanding culminated in a raucous 1957 meeting at which Eichmann felt compelled to provide a final statement to all assembled of his mature ideological world view. Here are three salient passages from Eichmann’s final declaration to Sassen and company:

I must throw all caution to the wind and tell you that, before my Volk goes to ruin and bites the dust, the whole world should go to ruin and bite the dust—my Volk, only thereafter!

I say to you honestly as we conclude our sessions, I was the “conscientious bureaucrat,” I was that indeed. But I would hereby like to expand on the idea of the “conscientious bureaucrat,” perhaps to my discredit. Within the soul of this conscientious bureaucrat lay a fanatical warrior for the freedom of the race from which I stem . . . I was manifestly a conscientious bureaucrat, but one who was driven by inspiration: what my Volk requires and my Volk demands is for me a holy commandment and a holy law. Jawohl!

But now let me tell you, since we are almost at the end of this entire outburst [Platzen] . . . : I regret nothing! I will never crawl my way to the cross! . . . That is something I cannot do . . . because my inner self bridles at the thought that we did something wrong. No, I say to you quite honestly, had we killed 10.3 million Jews out of the 10.3 million we had in our sights, I would be quite satisfied, and would say that we annihilated an enemy . . . We would have fulfilled our mission, for our race and our Volk and for the freedom of nations, had we exterminated the cleverest spirit among the spirited peoples alive today. For that is what I told [Julius] Streicher, and what I have always preached: we are fighting against an opponent who, as a result of thousands of years of practice and experience, is cleverer than we are . . .

These are the words not of a “desk murderer” but of a convinced Nazi. They represent a toxic admixture of crude social Darwinism, malicious half-truths, and ideological distortions. The highest reality is that of the volk. Weak peoples perish. The strong survive. All pretensions of international law to the contrary, it is the survival of the fittest that determines the “law of peoples.” Since, as with all of life, the goal of nations is self-preservation, it is permissible to utilize all the means at one’s disposal to attain this end. Any volk that ignores this imperative is doomed to extinction. Universal morality—Biblical injunctions (“Thou shalt not kill,” “Love thy neighbor as thyself”), Kant’s categorical imperative, democratic pretensions to universal equality—must be emphatically rejected insofar as such effete considerations expose a people to anti-völkisch precepts and constraints that threaten to sap its lifeblood, its will to survive. To cite Nietzsche, whose influence Eichmann at various points acknowledged, moral considerations that transcend a volk’s drive to self-preservation are symptomatic of a “slave morality.” If nature has decreed that life is in essence a fight to the death for racial supremacy, what sense does it make to buck this trend?

In Eichmann’s view, one of the reasons why the Jews, those consummate cosmopolitans, are so dangerous is that, as a people without roots, they subsist and persevere entirely at the expense of other peoples. For this reason, they are the sworn racial enemy of the Germans as well as of all peoples. Hence, the National Socialist Vernichtungskrieg (war of annihilation) against the Jews was, on racial grounds, entirely justified.

Insofar as they are impervious to reason and reality, such mythological world views are self-perpetuating. The clan of believers has a vested interest in maintaining the illusion that the world view is entirely coherent and functional, since there is really no fallback position. Nazi ideology was an all-enveloping proposition. It only collapsed when, at the war’s end, the major German cities lay in ruins and Germany had become, following Hitler’s suicide, a führerlose Gesellschaft: a society without a leader. It is therefore difficult to understand how, shortly after the trial, Arendt, speaking of Eichmann’s actions and conduct, could assert, “I don’t think that ideology played any role.” A decade earlier, the chapters on “Ideology” and “Race” had been among Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism’s genuine strong points.

 Richard Wolin

If ever there was a “trial of the 20th century,” the Eichmann trial was it. In Europe and North America, the meaning of the trial, and thus to a great extent the Holocaust itself, was filtered through the lens of Arendt’s popular account and the contentious debate that it spawned. Her provocative subtitle, the “banality of evil,” helped establish the so-called “functionalist” interpretation of the Holocaust, in which the role of obedient desk murderers and mindless functionaries assumed pride of place, producing a Holocaust strangely divested of anti-Semitism. The reductio ad absurdum of this approach may have finally come during the controversy over Daniel Goldhagen’s book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. In the course of this debate, in the 1990s, Hans Mommsen, by then the recognized dean of German Third Reich scholars, said, “I don’t think the perpetrators were really clear in their own minds about what they were doing when they were engaged in killing Jews.” Mommsen’s avowal was widely viewed as an index of how far out of touch professional historians were with the German public’s need for clarity and for an honest accounting of a previous generation’s horrific transgressions. In retrospect, Arendt’s stress on the perpetrators’ lack of animosity toward the Jews harmonized with the post-war German political agenda of parrying questions of historical responsibility. Although Arendt did not necessarily share this agenda, her correspondence reveals how sensitive she was to the tendency to equate “Germans” with “Nazis.”

Although Arendt’s interpretive approach, as well as the functionalist paradigm in general, identified a set of important socio-historical concerns, it also downplayed the uniqueness of the Shoah by inserting it within an overarching narrative that highlighted the dangers of “modernity,” “mass society,” “atomization,” and so on. The Holocaust came to symbolize the risks of the transition from traditional society to the modern administrative state. But in the end this German Sociology 101 “from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft” approach failed to explain the historical uniqueness of the radical evil that was Nazi Germany. Here, one of the unexplained paradoxes and ironies was that in The Origins of Totalitarianism the figure of radical evil occupied pride of place in Arendt’s interpretive scheme. In fact, she concluded the book’s Preface by declaring: “if it is true that in the final stages of totalitarianism an absolute evil appears (absolute because it can no longer be deduced from humanly comprehensible motives), it is also true that without it we might never have known the truly radical nature of Evil.”

As Bettina Stangneth reminds us repeatedly in Eichmann Before Jerusalem, when Hannah Arendt traveled to Jerusalem to cover the Eichmann trial, part of the baggage she carried was a fixed set of socio-historical predispositions and prejudgments. Nowhere was this problem more evident than in her attempt to understand Eichmann’s conduct in terms of the misguided figure of the “banality of evil.” What should have been clear then and should certainly be clear now is that if the Holocaust was banal, then it was not evil. And if it was evil—as it indubitably was—then it was not banal.

Richard Wolin is Distinguished Professor of History and Political Science at the CUNY Graduate Center. He is the author of many books, including Heidegger’s Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse (Princeton University Press).


Who’s On Trial, Eichmann or Arendt?

By Seyla Benhabib, NY Times
September 21, 2014

 Seyla Benhabib

 

[Truncated]
[D]iscussion of the original 2011 German edition of Stangneth’s book centered on the circle of neo-Nazi sympathizers in Argentina and their hopes to influence postwar German politics, and on Stangneth’s claim that German governments had resisted bringing Eichmann to trial there, American commentators on the English edition have mainly ignored those issues, choosing instead to turn the trial of Adolf Eichmann into the trial of Hannah Arendt.

The Emory University historian Deborah E. Lipstadt told The Times this month that Stangneth “shatters” Arendt’s portrait of Eichmann. In The Jewish Review of Books, the intellectual historian Richard Wolin writes: “Arendt had her own intellectual agenda, and perhaps out of her misplaced loyalty to her former mentor and lover, Martin Heidegger, insisted on applying the Freiburg philosopher’s concept of ‘thoughtlessness’ (Gedankenlosigkeit) to Eichmann. In doing so, she drastically underestimated the fanatical conviction that infused his actions.”

This sort of dismissal of Arendt’s work — essentially a rejection of the “banality of evil” argument — is by no means new, but it does not hold up when one truly understands the meaning of her phrase. Couldn’t Eichmann have been a fanatical Nazi and banal? What precisely did Arendt mean then when she wrote that Eichmann “was not stupid. It was sheer thoughtlessness — something by no means identical with stupidity — that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period.”? Arendt certainly did not think that ordinary human beings were all potential Eichmanns; nor did she diminish the crime Eichmann committed against the Jewish people. In fact, she accused him of “crimes against humanity,” and approved his death sentence, with which many, including the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, disagreed.

Stangneth’s book, although far more respectful of Arendt’s work than her detractors are, does not address these questions or throw much light on their philosophical context. She does present new evidence about Eichmann’s persona and thinking, based mainly on the so-called “Argentina Papers,” which took nearly 20 years to emerge completely. In 1957 Willem S. Sassen, a Dutch journalist and Nazi collaborator who had become a German citizen, conducted interviews with Eichmann, who believed that they would be a basis for a book of his own to be called “Others Have Spoken, Now I Will Speak.”The Argentina Papers included over 1,000 typed pages of conversation (whose original tape recordings emerged only in 1998), and 500 pages of handwritten commentary, some by Eichmann and some by Sassen. Some of this material would subsequently appear in Life magazine in a notorious expose of Eichmann by Sassen.

Arendt knew that “Eichmann had made copious notes for the interview, which was tape-recorded and then rewritten by Sassen with considerable embellishments.” She also knew that although some of the notes were admitted to the trial as evidence, “the statement as a whole was not.” Israel’s state prosecutor, Gideon Hausner, had a bad photographic copy of 713 typed and 83 handwritten pages, but Eichmann and his lawyer convinced the court that most of it was inadmissible, supposedly because the recorded statements were uttered under the influence of alcohol and with Sassen’s encouragement to Eichmann to make sensationalist pronouncements which the latter intended to use for publicity purposes.

Would full access to this material have led Arendt to change her assessment that Eichmann was banal and “thoughtless”? Not if one understands and uses German as she did, and not if one understands the philosophical contexts within which she meant precisely what she said.

The Argentine Papers do give us new insights into the intensity of Eichmann’s anti-Semitic worldview, insights that Arendt could not have had access to. Stangneth cites a statement by Eichmann’s former friend and colleague, Dieter Wisliceny in the Nuremberg trials: “[Eichmann] said: He would jump laughing into the grave because the feeling that he had five million people on his conscience would please him extraordinarily.”

Commenting on Eichmann’s claim that he was “neither a murderer nor a mass murderer,” Stangneth writes that his “’inner morality is not an idea of justice, a universal moral category, or even a kind of introspection…. Eichmann was not demanding a common human law, which could also apply to him, because he, too, was human. He was actually demanding recognition for a National Socialist dogma, according to which each people (Volk) has a right to defend itself by any means necessary, the German people most of all.” Stangneth explains that for Eichmann “Conscience was simply the ‘morality of the Fatherland that dwells within’ a person, which Eichmann also termed ‘the voice of the blood.’ ”

This recalls the famous exchange during Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem between Judge Yitzhak Raveh and the defendant about Kant’s moral philosophy, which Arendt cites in “Eichmann in Jerusalem.” She quotes Eichmann saying, “I meant by my remark about Kant that the principle of my will must always be such that it can become the principle of general laws.” But Arendt notes that Eichmann’s meaning perverts Kant’s Categorical Imperative: Whereas “In Kant’s philosophy the source, that source was practical reason, in Eichmann’s household use of him, it was the will of the Führer.”

So when Arendt uses the phrase “the inability to think” to characterize Eichmann’s reduction of conscience to a “voice of blood” and of the categorical imperative to the command of the Führer, she is taking as given the Kantian terminology, in which “to think” means to think for oneself and to think consistently, but also from the standpoint of everyone else. The Categorical Imperative in one of its formulations says, “Act in such a way that the principle of your actions can be a universal law for all.” Eichmann neither thought for himself nor from a universal standpoint in any Kantian sense, and Arendt returned to the relationship between thinking and moral action in several of her essays after “Eichmann in Jerusalem.” It was Kant — not Heidegger, as Wolin alleges — who was foremost on her mind.

In a farewell message to sympathizers in Argentina, Eichmann dropped “all his misgivings” and admitted himself to be a “cautious bureaucrat,” but one who was “attended by a fanatical warrior, fighting for the freedom of my blood, which is my birthright.” Eichmann concludes: “And the cautious bureaucrat, which of course I was, this is what I had been, also guided and inspired me: what benefits my people is a sacred order and sacred law for me.”

It is this strange mixture of bravado and cruelty, of patriotic idealism and the shallowness of racialist thinking that Arendt sensed because she was so well attuned to Eichmann’s misuse of the German language and to his idiosyncratic deployment of concepts like the Categorical Imperative. As Stangneth puts it, “Hannah Arendt, whose linguistic and conceptual sensibilities had been honed on classical German literature, wrote that Eichmann’s language was a roller coaster of thoughtless horror, cynicism, whining self-pity, unintentional comedy and incredible human wretchedness.”

Eichmann’s self-immunizing mixture of antisemitic clichés, his antiquated idiom of German patriotism and the craving for the warrior’s honor and dignity, led Arendt to conclude that Eichmann could not “think” — not because he was incapable of rational intelligence but because he could not think for himself beyond clichés. He was banal precisely because he was a fanatical anti-Semite, not despite it.

Although Arendt was wrong about the depth of Eichmann’s antisemitism, she was not wrong about these crucial aspects of his persona and mentality. She saw in him an all-too familiar syndrome of rigid self-righteousness; extreme defensiveness fueled by exaggerated metaphysical and world-historical theories; fervent patriotism based on the “purity” of one’s people; paranoid projections about the power of Jews and envy of them for their achievements in science, literature and philosophy; and contempt for Jews’ supposed deviousness, cowardice and pretensions to be the “chosen people.” This syndrome was banal in that it was widespread among National Socialists.

But by coining the phrase “the banality of evil” and by declining to ascribe Eichmann’s deeds to the demonic or monstrous nature of the doer, Arendt knew that she was going against a tradition of Western thought that sees evil in terms of ultimate sinfulness, depravity and corruption. Emphasizing the fanaticism of Eichmann’s anti-Semitism cannot discredit her challenge to a tradition of philosophical thinking; it only avoids coming honestly to terms with it.

Seyla Benhabib is a professor of political science and philosophy at Yale University. She is the author of several books, including “The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt” and, most recently, “Dignity in Adversity: Human Rights in Troubled Times,” and the editor of “Politics in Dark Times: Encounters with Hannah Arendt.”


Notes and links

The Wolin / Benhabib exchange

The first two are posted above.
Third, Thoughtlessness Revisited: A Response to Seyla Benhabib, Richard Wolin, Jewish Review of Books, September 2014

Fourth, Richard Wolin on Arendt’s “Banality of Evil” Thesis, Seyla Benhabib, JRB, October 14, 2014

Last, Arendt, Banality, and Benhabib: A Final Rejoinder, Richard Wolin, JRB,October 14, 2014

*Nazi Germany and the Jews
Volume 1: The Years of Persecution 1933-1939
By Saul Friedländer. Harper Collins, 1997

Volume2: The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945
By Saul Friedländer. Harper Collins, 2007

Adolf Eichmann kidnapped in Argentina

By Richard Cavendish | Published in History Today Volume: 60 Issue: 5 2010
Richard Cavendish describes how Adolf Eichmann was captured in Argentina on May 11th, 1960.

It was Eichmann who inspired Hannah Arendt’s phrase ‘the banality of evil’. A career civil servant in Nazi Germany, he was put in charge of administering the ‘Final Solution’ and organised the seizure of Jews from all over Europe and their transportation to the concentration camps to be killed. Other observers also thought he brought to the job the same bureaucratic, unemotional, form-filling attention to detail that he would have given to road maintenance, say, or food rationing. That view of him has inevitably been challenged and his biographer David Cesarani remarked that ‘Each generation has seen what it wanted to see in Eichmann.’

Captured at the war’s end by American troops who did not know who he was – he was calling himself Otto Eckmann – Eichmann escaped in 1946 to skulk about under aliases, until in 1950 he managed to get himself and his family to what he thought would be sanctuary in Argentina. By 1960, however, the Israeli secret service agency Mossad had tracked him to Buenos Aires, where he was working as a foreman at the Mercedes-Benz factory and calling himself Ricardo Klement.

On a Wednesday evening in May, a small team of Mossad agents waited anxiously around an apparently broken-down Buick limousine near Eichmann’s house at 14 Garibaldi Street for him to arrive back from work on his usual bus. He was late, but when he walked past, the agents seized him, muffled his shrieks, pushed him into the back seat of the car and drove him to a house they had rented a few days before, where he was questioned and admitted his true identity. He was kept there until on May 20th, heavily sedated and disguised with his grey hair dyed and a false moustache, he was taken aboard an El Al plane to Dakar in Senegal and from there to Israel. On May 23rd the Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion announced Eichmann’s capture to stupefaction in the Knesset.

Eichmann’s trial before three judges in Jerusalem began in April 1961 and created a sensation all over the world. Calm and tidy, neatly arranging and rearranging his papers, he sat inside a bulletproof glass booth while testimony was given against him by witnesses who had survived the Holocaust. His defence was essentially that he had always only followed orders from his superiors in what was then the legitimate German government.

The trial ended in August, but it was December before the judges delivered their verdict of guilty and a death sentence. Eichmann was hanged in the Ramleh prison at midnight on May 31st, 1962. He was 56 years old. The body was immediately cremated and the ashes were taken to Jaffa and scattered at sea outside Israeli waters.

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