Summary
Chapter 1: The House of Justice
Arendt begins her study of Adolf Eichmann’s trial with a description of the courthouse. Eichmann stands before three judges. Because the trial is in Israel, the entire proceedings must be translated in real time (“simulcast”) on headphones. The French is very good, the English is bearable, and the German is terrible. Arendt notes the lack of cultural influence exercised by German Jews in Israel, despite the outsized role they played in putting together the Zionist movement.
Eichmann sits in a glass booth. The rest of the courtroom is occupied by his lawyer, the prosecutor, and four assistant attorneys for the prosecution. Arendt also expresses admiration for the three judges, especially Moshe Landau, the presiding judge. She observes that all three were born and educated in Germany.
Arendt credits Landau with keeping the trial from becoming a show trial, despite the obvious theatricality of the proceedings. Arendt believes that David Ben-Gurion, the prime minister of Israel, had a show trial in mind when he had Eichmann “kidnapped” from Argentina. He wanted to put Nazism and the suffering of the Jewish people themselves on trial. He also wants the larger, abstract philosophical questions of the Holocaust front and center: “How could this happen?” Gideon Hausner, the prosecutor, fulfills this desire by making theatrical statements and giving press conferences. But Landau makes sure the proceedings are fair and keep to legal protocol.
Arendt also notes that the trial itself differs from the Nuremberg trials for the Nazi high command following the war. Here, Eichmann is not being tried for “war crimes.” The Holocaust is on trial, and only the Holocaust. The prosecution’s main case consists of proving that Adolf Eichmann was the highest ranking Nazi whose sole responsibility was the extermination of the Jews.
The purpose of the trial is to teach the world about the Holocaust, and also to show that Jews, once victims, can now dispense their own justice. Hausner repeatedly claims that only a Jewish state can stand trial over Eichmann. Arendt observes that in many ways Israel’s ethnic nationalism, which until very recently prohibited intermarriage between Jewish and non-Jewish citizens, directly echoes the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 that Hausner repeatedly condemns.
Despite these grandiose claims, Arendt writes that public interest is rapidly diminishing. The trial was supposed to teach young Jews, and non-European Jews, that the only true safety for Jewish people is to have their own state—that living among non-Jews will inevitably end as Nazi Germany did. In fact, the crowd is filled with elderly European “survivors” who already know of “the horrors.” For this reason, Arendt finds Hausner’s grandstanding incongruous and offensive.
Arendt observes that testimony after testimony describing the deportations and the death camps has the effect of undercutting the theatrical elements of the trial. This trial is strange, Arendt argues, because it focuses on victims; trials, whether real or show, usually focus on the perpetrator. They seek to establish what he did and punish him for it. Arendt writes that the endless survivor testimony makes the trial feel rudderless, and swallows Eichmann up the more so, because his defense lawyer, Dr. Servatius, refuses to challenge any of the testimony for the prosecution.
If the trial is meant to be a show trial, it has failed, Arendt argues. If it is meant to show Jewish people and the world the horrors of anti-Semitism, then its point is redundant. Hitler has (at least temporarily) discredited anti-Semitism, and it’s no mystery to most Jewish people what happened to six million people of their faith.
If the goal is to “create Jewish consciousness,” then the very legal structures of the trial stress repeatedly that Israel is a nation among nations, entitled to its national rights because it is just one people among peoples, thereby eroding the distinction between “Jew” and “Gentile” that has been so central to Jewish consciousness for millennia.
If the goal is to show Jewish strength, then that is undermined by the repeated stories of Jews showing no resistance to Nazi eradication. Arendt observes that it is easy enough to see why the Jews did not resist: Nazism worked to eradicate the humanity of its victims before they were killed, so that they felt they deserved to be killed. All resistance to this dehumanization was met with brutal reprisal.
Arendt also regards skeptically the goal of the trial to show the Arab world’s complicity with Nazism. She feels that this has always been obvious, whereas the prosecution wears kid gloves when it comes to West Germany. West Germany pays millions of dollars of aid to Israel, and their diplomatic relationship is good. Consequently, no one points out just how many former Nazis still work in West Germany’s government.
Eichmann’s arrest did, however, prod West Germany to finally make efforts to locate members of the Nazi High Command and bring them to justice, many of them hiding in plain sight in flourishing public careers—so long as their previous reluctance to do so did not come up at the trials. The Israeli trial carefully avoids these issues.
Chapter 2: The Accused
Having sketched out the aims of the trial, and the difficulties in achieving them, Arendt proceeds to sketch in Adolf Eichmann, drawing on the pre-trial statement he gave to the Israeli police. Eichmann is a high-ranking member of the S.S., or Schutzstaffel, whose job was to arrange for the deportation of Jewish people to death camps. Eichmann stands trial for fifteen counts of “crimes against humanity,” which, following a 1950 Israeli law, is punishable by death. Eichmann pleads not guilty “in the sense of the indictment.” No one ever asks him to clarify this statement.
The defense broadly alludes to the difficulty of righting historical wrongs in a courtroom, since everything Eichmann did was technically legal—had the Nazis won the war, he would have been decorated—but does not dig into this position.
Eichmann’s own position is different from that of the defense’s lawyers. He claims never to have killed anyone. Eichmann never gave an order to kill anyone, and the prosecution will fail to prove that he had. Eichmann believes he is guilty of “aiding and abetting” the murder of the Jews.
There is debate about one instance in 1941 in Yugoslavia, when Eichmann is believed to have proposed the shooting of Jewish males held in camps as retribution for the bitter partisan warfare against the Nazis there. But this decision had already been made by the military. Arendt notes that Eichmann invariably defends himself through elaborate and unlikely explanations.
If the charge had been accessory to murder, would Eichmann have pleaded guilty? Maybe—though he would have qualified that everything that he did was completely legal at the time, and that the penalty for non-compliance would have been death.
The further clarification that Eichmann would have insisted on was that he did not act out of “base motives.” He felt no inner guilt about what he had done. He would only have felt guilty for not doing his duty, i.e. shipping millions of people to their death. Eichmann claims not to be an anti-Semite, and the psychologists who examined him found that he was “normal.” (“More normal than I am after having examined him,” one psychiatrist says.)
Arendt believes Eichmann. The problem, she claims, is that the Third Reich totally redefined what it meant to act “normally.” Only outsiders and exceptions in the Third Reich were fully cognizant of the moral horror of what they were doing, and saw it as a crime—only the abnormal were normal.
Arendt proceeds to a biographical sketch of Eichmann. Eichmann was born in the Rhineland, a prosperous region known for its precision cutlery. From his youth, Eichmann failed to distinguish himself, doing poorly in high school. Eichmann admits this only to his Israeli examiner, contradicting his official statements to the Nazis. He also failed to finish vocational school, and worked for a time as a vacuum cleaner salesman.
During his time as a salesman in Linz, in Austria, Eichmann had an affair with a Jewish woman—something he mentions to demonstrate his lack of personal hatred for Jews. Then, in 1933, the same year Hitler takes power in Germany, he was transferred to Salzburg, a change he didn’t like, and in April of that year, a friend, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, who would later become the chief of the Head Office for Reich Security, enthusiastically described the opportunities for career advancement offered by the S.S., the paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party.
Throughout, Arendt notes the typically lower-middle-class perspectives that Eichmann offers on his own life: the importance placed on career and advancement; the sense of shame attached to a comedown in social status; the emphasis on membership as a sign of status. Eichmann appeared to have no knowledge of or special inclination towards the political philosophy of Nazism. He joined the S.S. for careerist reasons—because it was a prestigious organization.
Arendt notes, however, that the S.S.’s enormous sense of historical mission would also have been attractive to Eichmann, an opportunity for this “loser” to finally be a “winner.” Bored in the S.S., which was a military organization, he soon joined the S.S’s security service under Heinrich Himmler.
Chapter 3: An Expert on the Jewish Question
The job of the S.D (Sicherheitsdienst) was a largely bureaucratic one—its job was to create supremacy for itself by spying on the other branches and reporting disloyalty to the Führer. It would eventually merge with the Gestapo, or the secret police. Eichmann claims to have joined this organization by accident, having hoped to join the Reich Security Service, which he knew of because it had flashy military parades. Changing departments, he had to start all over again at the bottom. His first job was to report on Freemasonry, which he found boring, and was soon transferred to the section on Jews.
In 1935, Germany broke the Treaty of Versailles and began rearming itself. It soon plotted to reoccupy the Rhineland, a Western zone of Germany that had passed back and forth between Germany and France since the time of Napoleon. This time was the peak of Hitler’s international popularity. He was regarded as a master statesman who had restored Germany to stability after the political and economic unrest of the Weimar Republic (1919-1933). The Reich’s attacks against its enemies were not yet directed specifically against Jews. They were also directed at Communists, Social Democrats, and left-wing intellectuals.
Admittedly, some of Hitler’s first actions were against Jewish people, barring them from all government jobs and public positions, as well as the entertainment industry. Jews were periodically pressured to sell their property at low prices. But because these actions were sporadic, many Jews were able to convince themselves that the anti-Semitism of the Nazi party was just rhetoric. (Eichmann himself shared this view.) Arendt observes that the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, which the prosecution spends much time decrying, only put into official code what was already a fact in Germany—Jews were not yet robbed of their position as members of the state, which legal step was necessary for them to be murdered with impunity.
These early years held out false hope for Jewish people that if they simply kept to themselves, they wouldn’t be bothered. Many local Jewish authorities felt that their goal should be to create regularized, bearable conditions for themselves within the German state. Eichmann claims that, as a member of the S.D., he thought that it would be his job to work out precisely such conditions.
He read the major works of Zionist thinkers like Theodor Herzl, and tried (and failed) to learn Yiddish and Hebrew. He speaks approvingly of “idealistic” Jews—as opposed to “assimilationists,” who wanted to join German society, and “Orthodox Jews,” who lived entirely in their own world.
In 1938, Eichmann was reassigned to Vienna, where now his task was “forced expulsion.” Regardless of the Jews’ desires, they were to be forced to leave Germany. Eichmann reflects on this period as the happiest and most productive of his life. The goal of the office was to extract money, property, and foreign currency from Jews who wanted to emigrate, especially wealthy ones.
Eichmann sought out practical input from Jewish leaders, many of whom had already been imprisoned, and struck on the idea of housing all of the necessary offices, including the Ministry of Finance, a tax office, the police, the Jewish leaders, in one building, so that a person could come in with their financial papers and leave with a passport, stripped of their savings and property.
Eichmann reflects proudly on his collaboration with Jewish leaders on this system. At times during the end of the war, he was given to boasting about how many Jewish people he has killed, or how he had invented the ghetto system. Arendt notes the pride that Eichmann takes in his system of bureaucratic dispossession. She also notes that Eichmann believes that he has treated the Jews he worked with humanely, by “pulling together” with them to make this system work smoothly.
Reading through the transcript of Eichmann’s examination, Arendt notes his inability to speak clearly. He frequently mangles clichéd sayings, resulting in numerous grimly funny moments during his examination by the Israeli police. At one point during the trial, Eichmann admits that “officialese” is the only language he has been able to speak well. During his imprisonment, he is given a copy of Lolita to pass the time, which he returns with disgust.
Arendt argues that Eichmann’s inability to speak is symptomatic of his greater inability to think. That failure, in turn, makes it impossible for Eichmann to place himself in others’ shoes. Though he is being questioned by a Jewish officer, for example, Eichmann openly expresses his frustrations at his lack of career advancement in the S.S.
Eichmann earnestly believes that his is a hard-luck story. He cheerfully recounts being able to help a local Jewish leader in a concentration camp by asking the commandant to lessen the Jewish man’s work detail. Eichmann’s request was granted, though the man was shot six months later.
Arendt reflects on these complete lack of self-awareness on Eichmann’s part. Is this self-deception? Stupidity? She points out that collaboration with Nazism has simply robbed him the ability to think. In order to advance himself he slavishly followed the ideology that Nazism had substituted for actual thought, even though this ideology was loaded with internal contradictions.
Consequently, Eichmann can only speak in clichés, and seems to have no sense of what he has done. This poses a serious problem for the prosecution, whose case hinges on establishing that Eichmann was knowingly motivated to murder by personal prejudice.
Analysis
The first three chapters of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem are likely the most difficult, and at the same time the best-known, parts of the book. They perform the important functions of introducing the reader to the Eichmann trial, describing the practical strategies of the major figures involved—including the judges, the prosecution, the defense, and the state of Israel, as well as Eichmann himself.
At the same time, this portion of the book lays out the larger political and philosophical problems that interest Arendt. To put it briefly: how could any person knowingly be responsible for the murders of millions of people? What would justice look like for this person, or for the Jewish people themselves? Arendt’s provisional answers were enormously controversial, and remain controversial to this day.
Arendt elaborates on her famed notion of the “banality of evil,” a phrase used only in the book’s subtitle, in her biographical sketch of Eichmann. Eichmann was initially responsible for the expulsion of Jews from Germany, and eventually for organizing their transport to concentration camps. Though not an architect of the Nazi ideology, he is responsible for the deaths of millions of people.
Far from a monster, or a dyed-in-the-wool anti-Semite convinced that Jews must be killed to save the German nation, however, Eichmann as Arendt paints him is a dope, a fool, a nobody, a careerist bureaucrat who joined the most brutal wing of the Nazi party for the sole reason that he thought it would offer better professional prospects than a drinking club.
Eichmann is “banal,” then, in the sense of being ordinary to a fault. The prosecution wants to show that Eichmann’s whole career path was one of murderous intent, filled with hatred for Jews. Arendt, by contrast, wants to show that Eichmann’s true crime is the failure to think, a failure made manifest by his frequent use of garbled clichés.
This argument was, and remains, enormously controversial. Many Jewish critics, particular those at Commentary or the New Republic, felt that Arendt had “exonerated” Eichmann. In the last decade or so, numerous books have been published arguing that Eichmann was, in fact, a true believer in the Nazi cause.
This is, of course, a difficult question for the reader to adjudicate. But for our purposes, it might do to note that Arendt by no means “exonerates” Eichmann; as early as the beginning she stresses the horrors that he has committed, the evil that hangs over his person, and never for a moment doubts his guilt. Banal evil is still evil, after all.
But Arendt’s highly polemical treatment of Eichmann makes it clear that she has her eye on something bigger. Even if Eichmann were a deeply committed anti-Semite, we would still have to reckon with the millions of “banal” people who went along with his murderous project: secretaries, stenographers, lawyers, judges, mayors, chiefs of police, railroad officials, and so on. Arendt believes that the question of why and how this was possible is the central political problem of the twentieth century, whose history is marked by wide-scale calamity carried out primarily against civilian populations.
The same Jewish critics noted that the moral outrage Eichmann is spared is visited on Israel instead. In later sections, we will return to the role played by the Jewish councils and to the differences between the Eastern and Western experience of the Holocaust. But it is worth noting early on that Arendt has a complex attitude towards Judaism and Jewish people. Herself a Jewish refugee from Nazism, Arendt clearly sympathizes with westernized, cultured, cosmopolitan Jews. She mentions, for example, that the judges “are good men,” by which she seems to mean that they were all born and educated in Germany.
She also notes that Israel’s own marriage codes are no less racist than those of Nazi Germany’s, and bluntly uses the word “kidnapped” to describe the process by which Israel removed Eichmann from Argentina. She sees the trial as a show trial designed to play up irresponsible myths about the Jewish people that have little to do with the real legal and political issues at hand. These charges have led many Jewish commentators to call Hannah Arendt a “self-loathing Jew.”
It is worth noting, though, that few countries involved in the trial come off well. Beside her remarks on Israel, Arendt notes the Arab world’s ready support of Nazism. Her harshest condemnations, however, are saved for West Germany, and its reluctance to bring criminals like Eichmann to justice, for fear that the trials would “stir up” bad feelings. The shocking evil of Nazism makes it easy for other countries to sweep aside their own misdeeds. Arendt rejects the historically-absolute character of Nazism. If evil is “banal,” then we are all at risk of succumbing to it.
