Justice demands that the accused be prosecuted, defended and judged, and that all the other questions of seemingly greater import—of 'How could it happen?' and 'Why did it happen,' of 'Why the Jews' and 'Why the Germans,' of 'What was the role of other nations?' and 'What was the extent of co-responsibility on the side of the Allies?,' of 'How could the Jews through their own leaders cooperate in their own destruction?'—be left in abeyance.
Arendt's clever sentence structure models for the reader the main difficulties of the book. Arendt highlights the larger questions that she wants to tackle, asking how it was that the Holocaust happened, and who deserves blame for it—potentially unanswerable questions that are being broached in the courtroom at Eichmann's trial, where culpability must be demonstrated very concretely, and where proceedings must follow exacting legal procedures. The push and pull between the moral, political, and philosophical aspects of Eichmann's trial, and the legal problems these questions pose, is a recurring tension throughout the text.
As witness followed witness and horror was piled upon horror, [the people in the part of the trial open to the public] sat there and listened in public to stories they would hardly have been able to endure in private, when they would have had to face the storyteller. And the more 'the calamity of the Jewish people in this generation' unfolded and the more grandiose Mr. Hausner's rhetoric became, the paler and more ghostlike became the figure in the glass booth, and no finger-wagging: "And there sits the monster responsible for all of this," could shout him back to life.
Early on Arendt highlights the conflicting aspects of the trial. On the one hand, there is the gap between its ostensibly pedagogical function, intended to teach younger people about the horrors of the Holocaust, and the audience of survivors, fully aware of the atrocities, who have come to bear witness to the proceedings. On the other hand, there is the gap between the atrocities and Eichmann himself, who appears here pale, ghost-like, something much less than the monster that Gideon Hausner, the prosecutor, insists is sitting in the witness box. Eichmann's incommensurability with the horrors of his crimes is not only one of Eichmann's central themes, but one of its central problems.
The contrast between Israeli heroism and the submissive meekness with which the Jews went to their death—arriving on time at the transportation points, walking on their own feet to the places of execution, digging their own graves, undressing and making neat piles of their clothing and lying down side by side to be shot—seemed a fine point, and the prosecutor[...]was elaborating it for all it was worth. But the sad truth of the matter is that the point was ill-taken, for no non-Jewish group or people had behaved differently.
One of the central questions, and one of the most controversial aspects, of Eichmann in Jerusalem is Arendt's emphasis on the roles Jews played in their own destruction, actually organizing themselves for death. The examples listed above fit poorly with the Israeli government's twin narratives of Jewish strength and Jewish victimhood. Arendt wants to know how, indeed, this was possible. But here she stresses that she does not seek to blame the Jews, but rather to inquire how the Nazis were able to effect a complete and total moral collapse throughout all of Europe—since non-Jewish authorities not victimized by the Nazis also did nothing to resist the Holocaust.
Chancellor Adenauer had foreseen embarrassment and voiced his apprehension that the trial would "stir up again all the horrors" and produce a new wave of anti-German feeling throughout the world, as indeed it did. During the ten months that Israel needed to prepare the trial, Germany was busy bracing herself against its predictable results by showing an unprecedented zeal for searching out and prosecuting Nazi criminals within the country. But at no time did either the German authorities or any significant segment of public opinion demand Eichman's extradition.
Though much of Arendt's focus is on the way that Israel handled the Eichmann trial, she nonetheless situates the trial in the larger process of Germany's "denazification," which she denounces as a farce. She attacks Germany for its refusal to acknowledge Nazi crimes, and for its refusal to acknowledge just how many Eichmanns are still in police departments, judiciaries, and the government of West Germany.
The German text of the taped police examination[...]each page corrected and approved by Eichmann, constitutes a veritable gold mine for a psychologist—provided he is wise enough to understand that the horrible can be not only ludicrous but outright funny.
Many reviewers attacked Arendt for "exonerating" Eichmann, but in fact Arendt sees his evil and his absurdity as part and parcel with one another. Instead of the monster that Gideon Hausner insists is sitting in the witness box, Arendt sees an absurd man whose only goal in life is to keep up with the Joneses, even if the Joneses happen to be murderous criminals. Rather than grant Eichmann the power and greatness of a monster, Arendt cuts him down to size, looking down on him and laughing.
The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else. No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such.
Arendt attributes Eichmann's "evil" not to vicious brutality or hatred of Jewish people, but simply to his inability or his refusal think for himself. He speaks in cliches because cliches have been approved by others as true. He seeks status because status is important in the eyes of others. This passage is particularly important because Arendt here defines thought, which usually appears negatively throughout Eichmann in Jerusalem. Thought is the ability to use one's imagination in order to place oneself in the shoes of others.
Had this been an ordinary trial, with the normal tug of war between prosecution and defense to bring out the facts and do justice to both sides, it would be possible to switch now to the version of the defense and find out whether there was not more to Eichmann's grotesque account of his activities in Vienna that meets the eye, and whether his distortions of reality could not really be ascribed to more than the mendacity of an individual. [...] Hence, no report on the Eichmann case, perhaps as distinguished from the Eichmann trial, could be complete without paying some attention to certain facts that are well enough known but that Dr. Servatius chose to ignore.
One of the narrative difficulties of writing about Eichmann is that he does such a terrible job of defending himself. So while, typically, the narrative of a trial cuts back and forth between the cases of the prosecution and the defense, giving each side's version of the relevant points, here there is only the prosecution's side. Eichmann's own side is extremely garbled, and he makes absolutely no effort to defend himself against anything said by the prosecution, even when the testimony is not materially relevant to the trial. Arendt tries to reconstruct how Eichmann might have defended himself (note that doing this constitutes "thinking" on Arendt's definition—precisely what Eichmann himself cannot do), and thereby push back against the prosecution's complete control of the narrative at the trial.
"In this household use, all that is left of Kant's spirit is the demand that a man do more than obey the law, that he go beyond the mere call of obedience and identify his will with the principle behind the law—the source from which the law sprang. In Kant's philosophy, that source was practical reason; in Eichmann's household use of him, it was the will of the Führer."
Eichmann makes the shocking claim that he has always lived his life according to the "categorical imperative," invoking one of the central moral tenets of a leading figure of the German Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant—namely, that one act in such a way that one's will could be the basis of a universal law. Arendt seeks to defend Kant and the Enlightenment against philosophers who claim that his emphasis on the law and obedience led to the icy rationalism of the Final Solution. She is interested in the way that Eichmann quotes Kant to puff himself up. For Eichmann, it was not enough simply to follow the laws as they were written, but to try to discern the principle driving them and completely identify himself with that principle—in this case, Hitler himself.
"For the lesson of such stories [like that of Sergeant Schmidt's resistance to the Holocaust] is simple and within everybody's grasp. Politically speaking, it is that under 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 rejects many of the Jewish stories of "heroism" as propaganda staged by the Israeli government. The one story she embraces is that of a German sergeant who helped Jews by giving them forged papers and helping them escape Poland. He was eventually caught and executed. Arendt argues that the story of the Holocaust shows that the victory of totalitarianism is never total. So long as someone, somewhere, resists, the horrors will be remembered, and humanity—which Arendt understands as the capacity for private moral judgment—can continue. Nazism's goal of completely eradicating this last zone of private thought is doomed to failure.
"Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that it was nothing more than misfortune that made you a willing instrument in the organization of mass murder; there still remains the fact that you have carried out, and therefore actively supported, a policy of mass murder. For politics is not like the nursery; in politics obedience and support are the same. And just as you 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 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."
Arendt rejects many of the Israeli prosecution's arguments against Eichmann, and chides them for not understanding the legal and moral problems posed by genocide. but she nonetheless closes her book by condemning Eichmann to death. Arendt closes with recourse to Biblical guilt—Eichmann lived in a time and place when to obey was to be guilty, like the citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah. Eichmann's superiors violated the moral order of the world. They took it upon themselves to wipe a race off the planet. For that reason, no human beings can ever be expected to want to share the earth with them. They must be killed to restore the moral balance.
