Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil Essay Questions

The author contends that Eichmann was not an evil man, but an ordinary one. How did this ordinariness contribute to his acts of evil during the Nazi regime?

Eichmann was a follower; a man who was not remarkable enough in any way whatsoever to become a leader, or a self-made man, and not innovative enough to be an entrepreneur; a man who had no creativity, but still had a yearning to stand out in some way. Eichmann was not the best at anything at all, except for being completely mundane and run-of-the-mill. At being ordinary, he was simply outstanding.

If he thought that what Hitler was creating and implementing was in any way wrong, he stayed silent, instead becoming the ultimate yes-man who was indispensable only because of his strict adherence to orders. Eichmann was not an intelligent or intellectual man either; he flunked high school and even failed technical college; he had to find a way to expertly follow orders because there is no way he could have directed any kind of plan or strategy himself. In Eichmann's view, his job was to obey orders. There was no reason for him to think about the rights and wrongs of this; there were no good orders or bad orders. He was a completely ordinary man who did not question anything. This is what the Arendt means by his ordinariness being his primary quality.

Arendt argues that Eichmann does not have many of the characteristics we normally associate with evilness. What is the difference between an ordinary man doing evil things, and a man who is truly evil?

This philosophical question is the crux of the argument put forward in the book. At the end of the day, one could even ask whether it matters; it is the nature of the evil that is perpetrated that is actually the important thing. After all, Eichmann may have been exceptionally dull, uninspiring, and ordinary, but he was not the only dull, uninspiring and ordinary man of his generation, and many did not jump with both feet into assisting Hitler in the Final Solution. Men of Eichmann's generation ran the whole spectrum, from absolute participation to absolute resistance, and the majority were in between: not participating, not turning in Jewish families who were hiding, but also not doing anything to help them or to stop Nazism. Eichmann did not just participate; he excelled at participating. The author suggests that he was not an evil man; but he was a man who did evil things.

To those on the receiving end of the evil that he did, the author's argument is not really one of philosophy, but one of semantics; if you are murdered by an ordinary man doing evil, are you any less dead than if you are murdered by an evil man? Of course not, and in some ways it is actually more heinous for a man who is not essentially evil to act in such an evil manner as Eichmann. Eichmann was the perpetrator of evil, and this really is no different to being a man who is evil at his core.

What are the strengths and weaknesses of the case laid out by the prosecution?

The major strength of the prosecutor's case against Eichmann is the obvious and indisputable fact that Eichmann knowingly sent people to their deaths. At the exact middle of Arendt's book, she notes this fact in passing, and notes right there that Eichmann deserves the death sentence. According to Eichmann's own testimony, he was fully aware of what the "Final Solution" entailed, even though he did not himself plan it, and he worked hard to facilitate it, even to the point of opposing the "moderate wing" of the S.S. who thought it might be politically expedient to keep the Jews as a bargaining chip during surrender negotiations with the Allies. No part of Eichmann's testimony ever contradicts his knowing complicity in the Holocaust.

At the same time, Arendt observes that many of the specific legal aspects of the prosecution's case involve attempting to prove that Eichmann himself designed the conditions at the camps, or that he committed murder himself, as in the case of a Jewish boy Hungary. Arendt feels strongly that these miss the larger problems posed by Eichmann himself. The attempt, as Arendt sees it, to exaggerate Eichmann's culpability obscures the fact that he lived in a society that worked to destroy the very distinction between legality and illegality. This hurts the prosecution's credibility, as does the fact that the trial is intended to serve a "pedagogical" function, giving voice to people who don't have a direct bearing on Eichmann's innocence or guilt.

Some critics felt that Arendt "exonerated" Eichmann. Do you agree with this assessment?

Arendt's charge of "banality" is clearly meant to be provocative, in the sense that to be banal is a social or aesthetic failing, rather than a moral one. Throughout the "Deportations" chapters, Arendt also expends a considerable amount of energy demonstrating that Eichmann in fact had little to do with determining what actually happened at the death camps, that he was not a vocal or truly committed anti-Semite, and that much of the policy concerning the so-called "Final Solution" was actually set by higher-ups. Arendt also paints, in considerable detail, the co-operation of Jewish (and non-Jewish) local authorities.

At the same time, Arendt feels comfortable doing so because Eichmann's culpability is never in question. She takes it as a given that he is guilty, that he deserves to die, and that he will die. The book ends with her pronouncing a death sentence onto Eichmann, describing him as someone who is beyond the pale of humanity. Her depiction of Eichmann as a mass murderer who has never actually committed murder can be construed as an attempt to get at the larger moral, legal, and political problems posed by Eichmann in an era of mass brutality against civilian and stateless populations. Twentieth-century evil, Arendt argues, consists of bureaucrats, careerists, people who perform menial tasks to facilitate enormous cruelty; twentieth-century evil is designed to implicate everyone, and thereby to shield each individual person from a sense of culpability.

Describe Arendt's treatment of Judaism and Jewish people.

Arendt's treatment and depiction of Jewish people in Eichmann in Jerusalem is complex and often contradictory. On the one hand, Arendt is firm, at a time when this was not a common position, in insisting that the Jewish people were the central victims of Nazism—as opposed to Communists, Social Democrats, union leaders, etc.) She chides Count Stauffenberg, who attempted to assassinate Hitler, for not doing so because of the Holocaust, but because of Hitler's poor military leadership.

At the same time, Arendt frequently draws distinctions between Western and Eastern Jews. She praises the judges, and especially the presiding judge, for being German-born, culturally educated, Westernized Jews; in doing so, she implicitly looks down on the Eastern Jewry who, because of their poverty and lack of connections to other countries, were unable to escape, and therefore made up the bulk of the victims of the Holocaust. She criticizes Israel for the similarity of the state's racial laws to those of the Nazis, for its violation of international law, and for the frequent hypocrisies in their invocation of the story of the Holocaust, using it to argue that Jewish people will never be safe without their own nation, but playing down the stories of Jewish helplessness and playing up Jewish heroism.