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By describing the Nazi criminal, his acts and his mode of thinking in a language replete with metaphors of the most bizarre nature, they turn him into a one-dimensional incarnation of absolute evil. In this way the Nazi killer acquires the amalgamated characteristics of the bo- geyman, the demon and the lunatic. With the appearance of this pitch-black culprit, however, the possibility of identification and, thus, worldly judgement, vaporises into thin air.

Dick de Mildt, In the Name of the People

W

e have seen that the origins of extraordinary evil cannot be isolated in the extraordinary nature of the collective, the influence of an extraordinary ideology, psychopathology, or a common, ho- mogenous, extraordinary personality. We are then left with the most dis- comforting of all realities — ordinary, “normal” people committing acts of extraordinary evil. The notion of the “ordinariness” of those who commit extraordinary evil was first given life in the early 1960s when a noted po- litical philosopher posited an obedient, indifferent, and mundane personal- ity to explain the atrocities of the Holocaust. The philosopher’s name was Hannah Arendt, and her concept of the “banality of evil” would funda- mentally challenge our understanding of who commits extraordinary hu-

man evil.1

Hannah Arendt was one of about 37,000 German Jews who emigrated from Germany in 1933. She first went to France, where, with Youth Aliyah, she worked for the immigration of Jewish refugee children into Palestine. Interned during the war at Gurs, in Vichy France, she escaped, made her way to the United States in 1941, and secured U.S. citizenship in 1951. Arendt’s field of study was philosophy, and she counted among her mentors Rudolf Bultmann, Martin Heidegger, and Karl Jaspers. Over time, she be- came a prominent political philosopher and theoretician who focused much

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of her very productive academic life on the question of behavior in totali- tarian regimes.

In 1961, Arendt — then numbered among the most important intel- lectuals in the United States — was commissioned by the New Yorker mag- azine to cover the sensational trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Eich- mann was a major bureaucrat in the Final Solution. After serving as an SS corporal at Dachau concentration camp, he found a less monotonous posi- tion in the powerful SS security service. While there, Eichmann gradually became the acknowledged “Jewish specialist” of the Third Reich. With the takeover of Austria in 1938, he was sent to Vienna to promote Jewish em- igration. Eichmann developed a method of “forced emigration” that was financed by confiscation of Jewish property — simultaneously putting fear into the Jewish population and destroying their economic well-being. He was later named head of the Department for Jewish Affairs in the Gestapo (Department IV B 4), a position he would hold from 1941 to 1945. In that role, Eichmann was responsible for the implementation of Nazi policy to- ward the Jews in Germany and all occupied territories — including the de- portation of millions of Jews to concentration and extermination camps. By all accounts, he carried out his assigned duties with unyielding persis- tence, considerable ingenuity, and undying loyalty to the vision of the Final Solution.

Following the defeat of Nazi Germany, Eichmann was arrested and confined to an American internment camp. Because his name and role were not yet well known, however, Eichmann managed to escape and flee to Ar- gentina. Eventually abducted by Israeli intelligence agents in Argentina in May 1960, he was brought to Israel to stand trial. He was charged with fifteen counts of crimes against the Jewish people and against humanity, and of war crimes. Eichmann’s trial opened on April 11, 1961, and ended on August 14 of the same year. He was found guilty and sentenced to death (Israel allows the death penalty only for crimes of genocide). An ap- peal of his death sentence was rejected in May 1962. Eichmann was hanged in the Ramla prison on the night of May 31, 1962. His body was cremated and his ashes spread over the sea, outside the territorial waters of Israel.

While covering the legal and technical aspects of the Eichmann trial, Arendt also explored the wider themes inherent in the trial — the nature of justice, the behavior of Jewish leadership during the Nazi regime, and the nature of evil itself. In 1963, the five articles serialized in the New Yorker

were published, in revised and expanded form, as a book, Eichmann in

Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. The next year, a follow-up version

appeared that carried a postscript and reply to the heated controversy that followed Arendt’s original work.

What were the critics so exercised about? A substantial number of crit- ics questioned her explanation of the why of the Holocaust. Arendt located the why in the nature of the bureaucratic mind — a world of operations without consequences, information without knowledge: in other words, mindless perpetrators doing what they are ordered to do and expected to do without being personally involved, committed, or aware of the terrifying destruction they are executing.

Arendt argued that what was frightening about Eichmann was not how unusual or how monstrous he was but, rather, how extremely ordinary he was. In his personal manner, he had little in common with the dramatic an- tisemitism or florid lust for killing of some other Nazi leaders. He was not evil personified. Neither was he a deranged Jew-killer. Half a dozen psy- chiatrists had certified him as “normal”—“more normal, at any rate, than I

am after having examined him,” one of them was reported to have said.2

Eichmann was, in Arendt’s view, a drab drone committed to industrious- ness and efficiency, a featureless functionary particularly steadfast in obey- ing and carrying out assigned duties and orders. “Except for an extraordi- nary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement,” Arendt wrote,

“he had no motives at all.”3 _{It was the discovery that there was nothing to}

discover that turned the Eichmann trial into such a shocking experience. The “banality” of Eichmann’s evil, his breathtaking human mediocrity, was what most struck Arendt — and infuriated her critics. Exactly what did Arendt mean by the “banality of evil”? The phrase did not appear in the

New Yorker articles. Notwithstanding its prominence in the subtitle, and

hints of the concept from the first chapter on, the phrase itself only ap- peared once in the book, at its very end: “It was as though in those last min- utes he was summing up the lesson that this long course in human wicked- ness had taught us — the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying

banality of evil [italics in original].”4 _{Arendt must have thought that the}

meaning of her phrase was obvious, since she did not define or explain it. Most, however, were — and still are — puzzled by the exact meaning of the “banality of evil.”

We can begin to unpack Arendt’s conception of the banality of evil by saying that it seems clear she did not mean several things. She did not mean

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that Eichmann’s evil was trite, hackneyed, or stale. She also did not mean that his evil was not immoral or grossly wrong. Nor did she use the word, as some critics charged, as a form of clever apologetics to make Eichmann into an everyday functionary — interchangeable with other unimportant people and their passive followers. Nor did she use it to mean that evil it- self was banal or to make the Holocaust just one more example of every- day evil in human history. Finally, she obviously did not use it to hide or re- veal any particular thesis or doctrine or as a precise theoretical explanation.

So what did Arendt mean by the “banality of evil”? By “banal,” she meant a strictly factual contrast with “diabolical,” “demonic,” or “evil in- stincts.” She meant to counter the prevailing tradition of thought — liter- ary, theological, and philosophical — about the phenomenon of evil and place it more squarely in “the ordinary.” Psychoanalyst Elisabeth Young- Bruehl affirms that, for Arendt, the term “banal” did not mean “commonly

occurring” but, rather, meant “commonplace” or “ordinary.”5 _{Peter Novick,}

professor of history at the University of Chicago, wove together Arendt’s remarks from other publications and lectures to argue that by “the banal- ity of evil” Arendt meant

the phenomenon of evil deeds, committed on a gigantic scale, which could not be traced to any particularity of wickedness, pathology, or ideological conviction in the doer, whose only personal distinction was a perhaps extraordinary shallow- ness. . . . However monstrous the deeds were, the doer was neither monstrous nor demonic. . . . [Evil] can spread over the whole world like a fungus and lay waste precisely because it is not rooted anywhere. . . . It was the most banal motives, not especially wicked ones (like sadism or the wish to humiliate or the will to power) which made Eichmann such a frightful evil-doer.6

Perhaps the greatest clarification, however, comes from the recognition that Arendt’s conception of “banality” was less a description of the nature of evil and more a description of the nature of the man who committed the evil. In other words, she applied the term “banal” not to the crimes them- selves but, rather, to the origins — the causes and motivations — behind the man who perpetrated them. For Arendt, the “ordinary” banality of Eich- mann’s evil was twofold. First, Eichmann’s evil was normal, prosaic, or mat- ter-of-fact within the disfigured reality of the Nazi worldview. Second, Eichmann’s evil was rationalized as good because it was obedient or because it served a larger purpose. Rather than a sadistic monster, Eichmann was a person strongly committed to personal fulfillment through a bureaucratic

career — not a raving ideologue animated by demonic antisemitism or a de- ranged madman, but simply an ambitious bureaucrat who did his duty and followed orders.

Contrary to expectations, Eichmann also was not a man without a con- science. As a matter of fact, it was his “good” conscience (though certainly not one that valued all of human life) that compelled him to follow what he felt to be his “duty” toward his superiors. In other words, his conscience worked “the other way around.” He had organized the killing not because he particularly hated Jews or because he had somehow been forced to do so. Rather, he did his job simply, and thoughtlessly, because he was a person “duty bound” to a social hierarchy committed to such extraordinary evil. The banality of his personality kept him from having compunction or even second thoughts about his “job.” Arendt wrote, “He would have had a bad conscience only if he had not done what he had been ordered to do — to ship millions of men, women and children to their death with great zeal

and meticulous care.”7 _{This is why Eichmann continually made it clear that}

he felt he did no wrong. He would not have felt the slightest remorse if the Nazis had won and he had been able to carry out the Final Solution.

Arendt reasoned that anyone could have filled Eichmann’s role and that his evil was “banal” precisely because insertion into a social hierarchy com- mitted to such evil made it normal and legitimate. This is why, in her view, Eichmann was not a madman. His deeds were monstrous, but Eichmann himself was thoroughly ordinary. In Arendt’s words: “The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly

and terrifyingly normal.”8

Arendt’s conception of evil was almost entirely new. As Stephen Miller has pointed out, before the Enlightenment, most literary, theological and philosophical thinking about the nature of evil rested on the assumption that evildoing is the product of strong passions — pride, ambition, envy, or

hatred.9 _{During the Enlightenment and well into the nineteenth century,}

Western thinkers began to suggest that evil grew less out of our dark pas- sions and more from unjust social conditions. This belief sounded a more hopeful note: it held out the possibility of eradicating evil through social and political transformations. The events of the Holocaust, though, shat- tered this more hopeful conception and cried out for a new conception of evil. For many, it appeared that Arendt had found one.

To be sure, there is debate over how applicable Arendt’s concept of the “banality of evil” is to Eichmann specifically. The eminent Holocaust his-

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torian Raul Hilberg, for one, believes that Arendt did not recognize the magnitude of what Eichmann had done in the Final Solution in organizing the mass deportations of Jews from all corners of occupied Europe to the Polish extermination camps. “She did not,” Hilberg wrote, “discern the pathways that Eichmann had found in the thicket of the German admin- istrative machine for his unprecedented actions. She did not grasp the di-

mensions of his deed. There was no ‘banality’ in this ‘evil.’ ”10 _Similarly,

Norman Podhoretz wrote that “no person of conscience could have partici- pated knowingly in mass murder: to believe otherwise is to learn nothing about the nature of conscience. . . . No banality of a man could have done so hugely evil a job so well; to believe otherwise is to learn nothing about

”11

the nature of evil.

On a more general level, Arendt’s “banality of evil” concept also may be subject to qualifications in describing the larger category of perpetrators of extraordinary evil. Though it may be more broadly applicable than the ho- mogenous vicious, sadistic, and antisocial “Nazi personality” or the sub- missively conventional “authoritarian personality,” it should be remem- bered that Arendt’s hypothesis of the obedient, indifferent, and mundane banal Nazi certainly does not apply to all Nazis. Such a sweeping judgment can lose the important distinctions, exceptions, qualifications, and nuances that are inherent in the complexity of understanding perpetrators of ex- traordinary evil.

As it turns out, however, the awkward truth of the banality of Eich- mann’s evil is much more accurate and broadly applicable than we would hope. It had been apparent in the courtrooms at Nuremberg, and it had sur- faced again and again in the subsequent German postwar trials against other perpetrators of Nazi genocidal policies. Recent research by historian Dick de Mildt, for example, meticulously reviewed the cases of 129 Ger- man citizens put on trial in the late 1940s and early 1950s before West German courts on suspicion of involvement in the mass murder policies of Nazi Germany. The trial sentences analyzed by de Mildt concerned two re- lated aspects of the Nazi genocidal program — the “Euthanasia” Aktion, or mercy killing program, primarily directed against the inhabitants of Ger- many’s mental institutions and Aktion Reinhard, the extermination of Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland and one of the largest murder campaigns of the Final Solution.

De Mildt concluded that, by and large, the background profiles of the men and women who were involved in either one — or both — of these mass murder campaigns evidenced the same banality of evil that Arendt

used to characterize Eichmann. They were not idealists or killers of convic- tion. Rather, they were killers by circumstance and opportunity. “Instead of matching the image of the paranoiac ideological warriors so often invoked when describing the fieldworkers of Nazi genocide,” de Mildt writes, “their background profile far more closely matches that of rather ordinary citizens with a well-developed calculating instinct for their private interests. . . . The key word which springs to mind when reviewing the criminal biogra- phies of the ‘Euthanasia’ and Aktion Reinhard hangmen is not ‘idealism’ but

‘opportunism.’ ”12

More recently, the “ordinariness” of the perpetrators of the Holocaust has been yet again confirmed by an exhibition on the history of the Wehrmacht. The Wehrmacht — referring to the regular German armed forces, comprising the land army, navy, and air force — was the institution where all German men did their military service. About 20 million men were in service during World War II, of which roughly 13 million fought or served “in the East” at one point or another. The exhibition, created by the Institute for Social Research in Hamburg, Germany, and titled The Ger-

man Army and Genocide: Crimes against War Prisoners, Jews, and Other Civil- ians, 1941 to 1944, opened to a storm of public interest in Hamburg in

March 1995. As of July 1999, the exhibition had drawn approximately 860,000 visitors in many of Germany’s and Austria’s leading cities.

The exhibition also had become a center of national controversy, even resulting in a debate in the German Bundestag, the national parliament, in Bonn on March 13, 1997. The controversy centered on the legend of the “unsullied Wehrmacht.” Prior to the exhibition, the German Wehrmacht was generally presented to the German public, and to the world, as a skilled, professional, military organization that had little in common with the twisted ideological worldview and criminality of the Nazi regime. They were the relatively “heroic” organization least contaminated by the barbaric Nazis and most representative of the ordinary German. For decades, it had been a national taboo in Germany to seriously question the role of the Wehrmacht in the Nazi regime.

The Hamburg exhibition was the first public display of documents and photographs culled from German archives, and especially the heretofore in- accessible archives of the former Soviet Union and other East European countries formerly under communist domination, concerning the criminal conduct of the Wehrmacht in the East during World War II. It made clear that the Wehrmacht had come under the influence of the Nazi regime from early on and was a major tool in the implementation of Nazi policies until

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the end of the war. On display were scores of documents and haunting am- ateur photographs that testified to the Wehrmacht’s direct and systematic involvement in the criminal atrocities perpetrated during the war in the East. The extraordinary evil perpetrated in the East could no longer be confined to specialists from the elite death squads of the SS or to physicians who executed ruthless experiments on prisoners. The exhibition made clear what much of the German public had long suspected but refused to ac- knowledge: troops of the Wehrmacht were directly involved in the geno- cide of the Jews and widespread crimes against enemy soldiers and the civilian population, acting both on orders by their superiors and also, in some instances, on their own initiative.

On display in the exhibition are descriptions of events, the documen- tation of orders, and letters from soldiers. Most captivating, though, are the

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