Reviews of Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963) and related work

• Adaptation: Hannah Arendt (2012)

Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963)

Hannah Arendt (writer).

Read in 2025.

I read the book version in a 2006 edition, with a foreword by Amos Elon.

In Arendt’s telling, Eichmann’s prosecutor argued falsely that he had carried out the Holocaust without receiving any orders to do so. Eichmann did have orders and, more interestingly, the idea that he did not have them had been planted by Nazis. In the intense blameshifting at the Nuremberg Trials, immediately after the war, other perpetrators of the Holocaust had made up the idea that it was all Eichmann’s fault. The Israelis who kidnapped the man in 1960 and brought him to trial, including Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, believed or pretended to believe lies told about Eichmann by Nazis. Arendt does not examine this point, but it seems obvious to me that the prosecutor in Jerusalem and the Nazis at Nuremberg had one thing in common: Both found it convenient to employ a conventional and untenable idea of evil as a driving malevolent force, which is next door to metaphysical evil.

The main reason to read this book, 80 years after WW2, is as a milestone in the history of the interpretation of the Holocaust. Arendt explicitly denies, in her own postscript, that the book is “a theoretical treatise on the nature of evil”. She’s right, but the book was controversial in its time—and influential long after—because it does touch on the nature of evil, not in the banal metaphysical sense, but in the sense of people doing stuff that I don’t like.

Leaning on Raul Hilberg, Arendt does good work laying out the real history of the genocide being ordered and carried out. She does this partly to disprove the prosecutor’s myth, but with a clear eye to the enormity of Eichmann’s crimes and the importance of contemporary moral challenges to them. If there are only two things Arendt approves of in an otherwise scathing book, it’s Denmark’s firm and simple defence of the Jews, and the trio of Eichmann’s judges, who do at least labour to get the facts straight. Arendt also does interesting work analyzing the pitfalls of justice around genocide, but her perspective is so traditional that she namedrops Hugo Grotius for its foundation.

The best thing about the book is its portrait of Eichmann as “a mass murderer who had never killed”. He’s a pathetic figure, but not in the manner of Third Reich propaganda dismissing its enemies as pathetic. Arendt calls him, and other perpetrators like him, “normal”. This is the moral challenge she makes to the reader. Eichmann was an ordinary bureaucrat. He was not on drugs, not cruel, not crazy, and not sadistic. The most unusual thing about him is that he had perhaps a little less imagination than the average man. He wanted to be promoted, so he did what he was told and aimed to impress. He was not dumb enough to blame everything he did on his superiors when it all went south. This is a man who brought up a tilted version of Kant’s moral imperative in his defence, and he probably meant it, but he wasn’t in the dark triad of narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. He wasn’t frightened of his superiors, but he was clearly disturbed and disgusted by the violence against Jews that he witnessed. Arendt goes out of her way to show that in the first weeks of the industrial genocide, Eichmann resisted his orders, even sending some Jews to the wrong camp to save their lives. The author concludes that Eichmann “had a conscience, and his conscience functioned in the expected way for about four weeks, whereupon it began to function the other way around.”

Arendt is unsentimental, but the extreme horrors that Eichmann perpetrated are not dulled by the man’s own dullness. There is one particularly illuminating story of Kommerzialrat Berthold Storfer, who worked with Eichmann to deport Jews to their death. Storfer was himself Jewish. Perhaps he doubted that he, as a Judas goat, would be spared. The official story is that he made preparations to run, and failed. At Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss wrote to Eichmann, who went to the death camp to see Storfer, his former co-worker fallen on hard times. In his own telling, Eichmann greeted the man with the phrase “Well, my dear old friend [Ja, mein lieber guter Storfer], we certainly got it! What rotten luck!” Unable to feel real empathy by this point, Eichmann—a free man—uses these stock phrases to commiserate with a prisoner in Auschwitz, surrounded by prisoners that Eichmann sent to Auschwitz. What Storfer gets out of the exchange is permission to leave the work gangs for lighter duty. Eichmann concludes his account:

Whereupon he was very pleased, and we shook hands, and then he was given the broom and sat down on his bench. It was a great inner joy to me that I could at least see the man with whom I had worked for so many long years, and that we could speak with each other.

Arendt thinks this surpasses Surrealist invention. I don’t know about that, but I think Eichmann’s account is basically honest. His glibness and obliviousness in the scene with Storfer are credible. His obtuse self-pity is later contextualized by Arendt as a trick that Himmler had come up with. The trick was to thwart empathy by transferring the perpetrator’s thoughts away from the great suffering of his victim to his own lesser suffering: To become absorbed in the feeling of being unlucky and having to carry out the emotional labour of murder with its double burden of secrecy. There is an eerie jūdō to this trick that reminds me of Hans Scharff’s technique as an interrogator. It also reminds me of the Orwellian “language rules” (Sprachregelungen) that made it so easy for Eichmann to lie and deflect. This book is not a study in the crass psychological manipulations of the Nazis, but it makes a good case for why those manipulations succeeded without a grander evil to drive them.

Arendt accused Ben-Gurion of running a show trial. Ben-Gurion framed the Holocaust as a predictable step in the long persecution of the Jewish people in particular. A few years later, historiographers of a revised Sonderweg theory proposed to explain that entrenched antisemitism and authoritarian tendencies peculiar to German culture could explain the Holocaust. Arendt doesn’t have much time for such cultural explanations going either way. Like Philip Zimbardo ten years later, and like Christopher Browning thirty years later, Arendt was more interested in basic humanity and its compatibility with atrocity under certain social conditions.

You can get away with a lot if you put normal people in a position where they don’t need to spell out what they are doing or think about why they are doing it. That is especially true when they’re doing what they want for themselves, while other people pay the price. Arendt is not particularly prescient about what this lesson would mean for Israel itself, but when she sets the scene for the trial, she says this about race laws in the country:

Israeli citizens, religious and nonreligious, seem agreed upon the desirability of having a law which prohibits intermarriage, and it is chiefly for this reason—as Israeli officials outside the courtroom were willing to admit—that they are also agreed upon the undesirability of a written constitution in which such a law would embarrassingly have to be spelled out.

Fast forward to the same country withholding humanitarian aid from Gaza at the time of my own reading this book. Arendt’s conclusions on “the demands of justice” and obscurantism in the old trial are not nit-picks. To prevent further genocide, it is important to maintain intellectual rigour and honesty like she did. The book has some minor structural flaws, and Amos Elon did a good job explaining how Arendt caused unnecessary irritation, but the author’s mind was keen. Eichmann in Jerusalem is a fine example of a public intellectual working to get people to think.

References here: Inneboende ondska, Lucifer’s Hammer (1977), Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (1992), “Prophet Motive” (1995).

text non-fiction

‣ Hannah Arendt (2012)

Seen in 2013.

Arendt’s conclusion, that simply “thinking” is going to cut it, is dumbed down from the book. As a simpler story of intellectual integrity, this version is still very good.

moving picture adaptation fiction