Eichmann In Jerusalem: Hannah Arendt

Stanley Milgram, conducted a study focusing on the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience. According to the study Migram suggested “that obedience we naturally show authority figures can transform us into agents of terror” (Migram, 1974/1994, p. 214). Milgram experiment was developed for the justification of the act of genocide in World War II. Many of the accomplices in the Holocaust said they were following in order given by Adolf Eichmann. Obedience to superiors is built onto the history of civilized society, and no culture worthy of the name has existed without stressing the respect that is due to legitimate authority of the duties of those in command. Milgram study provides information that supports that

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.

An example of this is the depiction of the trials of the generals and those involved in the execution of the Dirty War during which Martin recalls “Hannah Arendt’s pronouncement...the perfect horror of her response, ‘the banality of evil’...” (212) These words, “the banality of evil,” express Arendt’s thesis that evils in history, particularly those of the Holocaust, were not solely caused by those who directly had a hand in them but also by those who stood by and allowed them to happen; those

Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem is a book about Adolf Eichmann who was a German

Hanna Arendt witnessed the end trial of Adolf Eichmann, who was part of the Nazi party. Overlaying the trial, Arendt used the phrase “the banality of evil”, a phrase that has been used quite frequently. On the other hand, Eichmann has been a poor student and an unsuccessful worker before joining the Nazi party. He was known for killing many Jews. However, Eichmann showed no evidence of being psychologically unstable or disturbed. He was so inclined and secure to be pinnacle of an organization that shipped millions of people of their death, but many people did not understand why. However, he did display neither guilt nor hatred, claiming he had no responsibility due to the fact he was clearly doing his job. Eichmann always wanted to be a part of a larger group and being something good at. Given that this was his opportunity to be recognized as a leader, he stood his ground and followed orders, which he ends up being recognized by Nazis as one of the best. His orders and selfishness were the cause of millions of lost lives.

Over the years following the Holocaust, people like Ervin Staub and Hannah Arendt have shared their different views on the idea of evil. Staub and Arendt both have very different ideas and concepts. Arendt’s concept, “the banality of evil” is a very controversial explanation, while Staub’s goes into more depth and his arguments on evil are more powerful. The causes of evil are accessible; not ultimately mysterious and we now can predict genocide. Both people share their explanations of National Socialist evil.

Hanna Arendt was a political philosopher and thinker whose writings and political views on a series of radical issues and topics were not only considered controversial but also undoubtedly left an impression in her attempt to repair a community scared by Hitler and his Nazi followers. Although her efforts were not on a physical nature, as she obviously could not mend the wounds of all those affected by the holocaust, but merely to right the wrong established by the Nazis by seeking justice – particularly from one man, Adolf Eichmann. Arendt, a reporter for The New Yorker, was sent to Jerusalem to cover the trail of Eichmann. While there, Arendt tackled the issues on collective responsibility, morals and ethics, and totalitarianism. Issues that only the brave would dare to address, only the brave could attempt to answer.

"When an individual wishes to stand in opposition to authority, he does best to find support for his position from others in his group. The mutual support provided by men for each other is the strongest bulwark we have against the excesses of authority." (Milgram, 1974) In 1963, the Yale psychologist Milgram had performed a very controversial experiment on the obedience of participants towards an authority’s orders. He had discovered that a very small marginal of participants could resist the demands of an authority figure. This experiment was about learning if people are evil or if they are evil because they are forced to be, this was being questioned because of the atrocities the Nazi’s were committing. The Nazi’s running the concentration camps claimed that they were not evil, they were just following orders, Milgram’s studies suggests that under a set of circumstances, the obedience we normally show authority figures can transform us into evil agents of terror.

Prisoners in concentration camps had a fairly routine schedule for their days’ activities. Every morning the inmates were woken up at 4 A.M. and had to make their straw bed, in a military manner, and then they must go to the sanitary facility with hundreds of prisoners all waiting for their turn. For breakfast, they were given approximately ten ounces of bread with, what the kapo called, coffee. Sometimes, if they were lucky, they were given some margarine or a thin slice of sausage. Periodically, when the kapos wanted to have some “fun,” they would throw the bread in the mud, or push the prisoner, while serving coffee. For morning roll call, all of the prisoners, even the one who died during the night, were lined up in rows of ten. The

Further, his motives were also banal: ordinary, trite and intrinsically non-criminal. He was ready to do anything to advance his career in the Nazi bureaucratic grades. One of the most astonishing things about him was that anti-Semitism was not his foremost motive. Arendt chose to believe Eichmann when he claimed not to harbor “ill feelings against his victims.” (Arendt) Nonetheless, a lack of motive did not inhibit his fearsome efficiency, insomuch as the murder of the Jews called for planning and the carrying out of the whole administration, state and party. The other side of banality refers to the activities that produced such evil. These activities were not murderous in themselves. Merely office work such as organizing transport, deciding how many Jews should be deported Eichmann knew that the Jews were to be killed, and how they were to be killed. Yet Arendt’s emphasis was that “he [Eichmann]…never realized what he was doing.” (Arendt). Namely, he did not connect his activities to their eventual consequences. Arendt identifies such a lack of imagination and the inability to adopt another’s viewpoint as “a curious, quite authentic inability to think”

Term Paper: A Life on Trial: What Motivated Adolf Eichmann and How Have Future Generations Understood Him?

Abstract: In this term paper, I will be focussing on the contradictory reviews on Hannah Arendt’s interpretation of The Eichmann Trial. With information from her book as well as commentary from other authors specifically David Cesarani and Deborah E. Lipstadt, I will be focussing on arguments in relation to Eichmann’s war crimes and the role he played in the mass-murder of European Jewry.

Adolf Eichmann as a man was considered to be mediocre. The importance of understanding who he was as a person is much more than his anti-semitic values. He was raised in northern Austria, in a middle-class household where casual anti-semitism was nothing out of the ordinary. In 1920 Austria, Eichmann considered Jews to be acquaintances. He was employed by Jews as an Oil and Kerosene salesman. He had Jewish relatives through marriage. Arendt specifically analyses that Anti-semitism was not the root cause for Eichmann joining the Nazi Party in 1932. She stresses the reason that he was a joiner. Cesarani delves deeper into Eichmann’s personal connections and issues more, he rationalised that Eichmann admired the Nazi’s position regarding the Treaty of Versailles. But he also agreed with Arendt’s opinion that anti-semitism was not the reason that led Eichmann into the Nazi Party. 

“Although she was wonderfully perceptive about the structure and working of the Third Reich and Eichmann’s

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

As seen in the following scenes right in the beginning when Hannah Arendt was at the table with her old friend Kurt Blumenfeld just after Eichmann’s had expressed he had no part with the murder of Jews. Many Jewish people around them start expressing anger toward some of Hannah Arendt’s statements. As the camera moves around the table some Jews are stating that Eichmann is lying and Arendt disagrees , Even Blumenfeld believes that Arendt is falling in Eichmann’s trap. This scene starts to show the radical thinking of Arendt. Later on in the movie after Arendt has wrote the the article for the New Yorker , the hatred toward her from many jews exploded. This is expressed strongly in the scene where the porter gives Arendt a letter “on behalf

"The sort of person that Eichmann appeared to be did not square either with the deeds for which he was being tried or with the traditional preconceptions about the kind of person who does evil" (Geddes). Throughout the trial, Arendt is conflicted by what she wants to seen when she analyzes Eichmann, and struggles greatly when she finds he does not embody the crude and inhumane thoughts she associated with the history of the Holocaust. It is this absence of the profound hatred of Jews, along with the normalcy he possesses, that creates the emblematic role of banal evil for Adolf Eichmann.

Hannah Arendt has been widely recognized as both one of the most major thinkers and top political philosophers of the 20th century. Arendt was born on October 14, 1906 in Hanover, Germany as the only child of a middle-class Jewish-German family. She grew up in Königsberg, In 1913, her father passed away and her mother persuaded her into strong academic studies, and it is quite evident she did well in motivating her as Arendt’s academic background is quite large. In 1933, Arendt was arrested for having gathered information regarding the Nazi army and anti-semitism. Afterward, Hannah Arendt, being a Jew in a city under nazi regime,was forced to flee the country and began a new life in Paris, France. She began working with Youth Aliyah, which was an organization that primarily helped rescue Jewish children from most of eastern Europe. In 1940, she married a philosophy professor named Heinrich Blücher and and soon became interned at Camp Grus, and escaped before the Germans arrived, once again on foot as a fugitive with her husband. Due to the German invasion of France the couple alongside Arendt’s mother fled France and flew over to Portugal using illegally issued visas.