'Personally, I have nothing against Jews,' claimed Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi 'desk-murderer', responsible for organising the destruction of European Jewry between 1936 and 1945. This is the same Eichmann who said: 'I will jump into my grave laughing, because the fact that I have the death of five million Jews on my conscience gives me extraordinary satisfaction.'
This year marks 50 years since Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem. The trial was reported for the New Yorker by political philosopher and journalist Hannah Arendt.
When her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil was published two years later, it precipitated a veritable 'civil war' among intellectuals across the world. Most of the disapprobation arose from her comments on the lack of resistance on the part of the Jewish leadership, as well as what some saw as the 'sympathetic' portrayal of Eichmann as 'victim'.
The book has its flaws, but Arendt's insights into the nature of evil remain compelling. Her thesis is relatively straightforward: that what made Eichmann truly 'monstrous' was his banality. Far from being an evil, plotting megalomaniac, he was in fact an unthinking, pathetically limited individual; a 'clown' who was full of vacuous clichés with no capacity for real thought or moral judgement.
What is genuinely unsettling about Arendt's character assessment is that the reader can identify with Eichmann. How horrible that a man who committed such crimes was an 'ordinary' human being. Eichmann had simply followed orders and did what he was expected to do — the ultimate obedient servant of the totalitarian regime.
In doing what the regime demanded, he uncoupled himself from his moral compass. This allowed him to commit the most heinous crimes with neither malice nor guilt. It was not that he didn't have a conscience; as Arendt observes, human beings in Nazi Germany did not have to 'close their ears to the voice of conscience', because their conscience spoke with the 'respectable voice' of society.
Eichmann's conscience became so distorted that he was capable of committing deplorable crimes while convincing himself he was acting in a noble and virtuous manner. He said at his trial that he would have shot his own father if he was ordered to.
And 'as for his conscience', writes Arendt, 'he remembered perfectly well that