Banality of Evil and Adolf Eichmann Essay

‘Is Eichmann a rotten, soiled and evil man, and were his motivations boring, mundane and obvious?’ Why did Eichmann kill so many Jews if he ‘supposedly’ no real hate or motivation to do it?

Adolf Eichmann was a remorseless perpetrator who conducted the death of an innumerable amount of Jewish people. The information provided in quote one explains what unethical actions Eichmann pursued. Eichmann did his part during the Holocaust by going to different locations in order to massacre them. “Eichmann played his central role in the deportation of over 1.5 million Jews from all over Europe killing centers and killings cities in occupied Poland and in parts of the occupied Soviet Union” (“Adolf Eichmann” ushmm.org.) This quotation from Eichmann’s biography explains what he did to the Jews while serving as a Nazi soldier. He went to the extent of hunting them in different locations like wild animals. Eichmann was aware of his wrong doings, yet he still pursued with all of the Jews’ execution. Therefore, he is nonetheless a

In The Perils of Obedience, Stanley Milgram introduces us to his experimental studies on the conflict between one’s own conscience and obedience to authority. From these experiments, Milgram discovered that a lot of people will obey a figure in authority; irrespective of the task given - even if it goes against their own moral belief and values. Milgram’s decision to conduct these experiments was to investigate the role of Adolf Eichmann (who played a major part in the Holocaust) and ascertain if his actions were based on the fact that he was just following orders; as most Germans accused of being guilty for war crimes commonly explained that they were only being obedient to persons in higher authority.

This book takes place sometime during the 1960s after the Second World War. Some Germans would rather forget it ever happened than acknowledge the disgraceful events that took place during World War II “Adolf Eichmann's trial began on April 11, 1961 in Jerusalem, Israel. Eichmann was

In The Nazi Hunters: How a Team of Spies and Survivors Captured the World’s Most Notorious Nazi, Neal Bascomb writes about Adolf Eichmann: a Lieutenant Colonel of the Nazi Security Service, husband to Vera Eichmann, a father to four boys, responsible for the slaughter of five million Jews, and the most notorious Nazi who escaped after World War II. A total of eighteen chapters: Chapter one provides background information on Adolf Eichmann and carrying out the plan to get rid of all Jews and on Auschwitz survivor, Zeev Sapir, chapters two through seventeen describes the process and planning of capturing Eichmann by the Nazi Hunters, and chapter eighteen describe the trial of Eichmann.

One of the oldest dilemmas in philosophy is also one of the greatest threats to Christian theology. The problem of evil simultaneously perplexes the world’s greatest minds and yet remains palpably close to the hearts of the most common people. If God is good, then why is there evil? The following essay describes the problem of evil in relation to God, examines Christian responses to the problem, and concludes the existence of God and the existence of evil are fully compatible.

Synopsis – Hitler’s Willing Executioners is a work that may change our understanding of the Holocaust and of Germany during the Nazi period. Daniel Goldhagen has revisited a question that history has come to treat as settled, and his researches have led him to the inescapable conclusion that none of the established answers holds true. Drawing on materials either unexplored or neglected by previous scholars, Goldhagen presents new evidence to show that many beliefs about the killers are fallacies. They were not primarily SS men or Nazi Party members, but perfectly ordinary Germans from all walks of life, men who brutalized and murdered Jews both willingly and zealously. “They acted as they did because of

The Eichmann trial reveals a lot about the strengths and limitations of the “the trial” to achieve justice in such cases. The reason of a trial is to render justice; even the ethical of underlying motives, as mentioned in the novel, “the making of a record of the Hitler regime which the withstand the test of history… Nuremburg Trials, can only detract the laws main business: to weigh the charges brought against the accused, to render judgement, and to mete out due punishment” (253). The judgement in the Eichmann case, whose first two sections had been written in respond to the better cause idea as it was changed into expanded both inside and outside the out room, could not have been clearer in this respect. As proven in the novel, it states

When Adolf Hitler first came to power in pre-WWII Germany, all of Germany was ready for a new Fuhrer to lead them into success and overcome the recent depression. Among his supporters was Adolf Eichmann, who began as just another German citizen, but transformed into something even he could not have imagined. “On trial are his deeds, not the sufferings of the Jews, not the German people or mankind, not even anti-Semitism and racism” (Arendt 5). Eichmann was tried for crimes against humanity, but before deciding for oneself whether he was guilty of this charge, we must question whether he was acting out of service to his country or out of his own self-interest. After reading deeper into the results and proceedings of the trial, it is only logical for one to conclude that although he may have joined forces with the Nazi party as a patriot, his motives for continuing to assist in carrying out genocide on an unimaginable scale was largely self-interest.

In her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt uses the life and trial of Adolf Eichmann to explore man's responsibility for evils committed under orders or as a result of the law. Due to the fact that she believed that Eichmann was neither anti-Semitic, nor a psychopath, Arendt was widely criticized for treating Eichmann too sympathetically. Still, her work on the Eichmann trial is among the most respected works on the issue to date.

conducting his research. After leaving the United States Army in 1947, Wiesenthal and other volunteers opened the Jewish Historical Documentation Centre, which assisted with the evidence for war crime trials. Yet, as the Cold War began, the association collapsed. All of the documents and research evidence were given away, except for one important document about Adolf Eichmann, who was the one that supervised the “Final Solution” technique during the war. Eichmann was never heard of after the war and he remained incognito. At last, in 1959, Germany informed that Eichmann was in Buenos Aires, and was found guilty for mass destruction of the Jews. This brought more and more successes to Wiesenthal. He later organized another Jewish Documentation Centre and hunted war criminals such as Karl Silberbauer, who arrested an innocent Jewish girl.

Hannah Arendt’s essay suggests she believes that the motives steered by Adolf Eichmann to commit monstrous acts, where “once banal to all human” ( Arendt, Cp). Eichmann was viewed as a demonic monster for his immoral and corrupted mind. Banal evil shares similarities with Radical evil, such that they can both result in extraordinary evil. Unlike radical evil, banal evil can be committed by ordinary people. Eichmann lacked the ability to reflect and he seemed to think in terms of clichés as his goal was to follow Hitler’s orders to undo God’s creation and complete his job successfully and

Hannah Arendt is a German Jewish philosopher, born in 1906 and died in 1975. She studied philosophy with Martin Heidegger as Professor. Her works deal with the nature of power and political subjects such as democracy, authority, and totalitarianism. She flew away to France in 1933, when Adolf Hitler became Chancellor in Germany. She flew away from Europe to the United States after escaping from the concentration camp of Gurs. She became a Professor in New York city, in which she became an active member of the German Jewish community. In 1963, she was sent to Jerusalem to report on Eichmann’s trial by The New Yorker. Hannah Arendt’s thoughts on Eichmann’s trial were expected to be harsh, considering the philosopher’s roots. However, her

I’ll first talk about Hannah Arendt’s analysis of the Adolph Eichmann and also talk about how his motives for committing the crimes were a “banality of evil”. Viewing the trial first hand, Arendt bases her analysis of Eichmann of the criminal charges that he is indicted on, his motives for the crimes, and how he tried to defend himself during the trial. The way that Arendt perceives Eichmann is by the fact that he was aware of the seriousness of the crimes that he committed at the trial, but he did not have the "evil" motives that would usually be seen in the type of heinous

Eichmann’s faith on certain ideals and the resultant blind pursuit for the realization of such ideals caused the loss of Eichmann’s conscientious self and confused an ordinary man to be one of the most well-known lunatics in human history. Case of Eichmann and previous explorations of possible modern connections show values of Pope and Cervantes’s insights, of how they remain applicable and valid after all these years. Pope was right: we are indeed the “riddle of the world”