The Banality Of Evil By Arendt Staub And Hannah Arendt

In history, humans have influenced ways to abuse each other in hateful ways. Because of hate, all miserable things that happen to people relates to mob mentality. Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel states, “The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference.” Throughout history, humanity has seen dignified people pursuing horrendous actions because these individuals got caught up in mob mentality.

“Was German ‘Eliminationist Anti-Semitism” Responsible for the Holocaust?” is a fascinating and somewhat discouraging debate that explores the question of whether German anti-Semitism, instilled within citizens outside of the Nazi Party, played a vast role in the extermination of Jews during the Holocaust . Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, author of “The Paradigm Challenged,” believes that it did; and argues quite convincingly that ordinary German citizens were duplicitous either by their actions or inactions due to the deep-seeded nature of anti-Semitic sentiment in the country. On the other hand, Christopher R. Browning, who has extensively researched the Holocaust, argues that the arguments of Goldhagen leaves out significant dynamics which were prevalent throughout most of Western and Eastern Europe during this period of history.

When looking through the history of humanity, an alarming pattern begins to emerge: the pattern of oppression. Since the beginning of civilization, humans have constantly sought to oppress one-another and establish superiority over another group of people. In the book Nights, Elie Wiesel details his petrifying experience of oppression in Nazi Concentration camps, perpetrated by the Nazi Regime and its collaborators. What happened to Wiesel and the rest of Europe’s Jews was a hate crime like the world had never seen before. But where exactly could so much “evil” come from?

Horror struck on January 30, 1933, when Germany assigned Adolf Hitler as their chancellor. Once Hitler had finally reached power he set out to complete one goal, create a Greater Germany free from the Jews (“The reasons for the Holocaust,” 2009). This tragedy is known today as, “The Holocaust,” that explains the terrors of our histories past. The face of the Holocaust, master of death, and leader of Germany; Adolf Hitler the most deceitful, powerful, well spoken, and intelligent person that acted as the key to this mass murder. According to a research study at the University of South Florida, nearly eleven million people were targeted and killed. This disaster is a genocide that was meant to ethnically cleanse Germany of the Jews. Although Jewish people were the main target they were not the only ones targeted; gypsies, African Americans, homosexuals, socialists, political enemies, communists, and the mentally disabled were killed (Simpson, 2012, p. 113). The word to describe this hatred for Jewish people is known as antisemitism. It was brought about when German philosophers denounced that “Jewish spirit is alien to Germandom” (“Antisemitism”) which states that a Jew is non-German. Many people notice the horrible things the Germans did, but most don’t truly understand why the Holocaust occurred. To truly understand the Holocaust, you must first know the Nazis motivations. Their motivations fell into two categories including cultural explanations that focused on ideology and

The investigation assesses the Nazi regime from 1933 – 1945 in regards to the totality of their actions. In order to evaluate the Nazi regime on whether or not they were more evil than other genocidal regimes, the investigation evaluates how the Nazis controlled their country. The investigation will start in the early years of the Nazi regime in how they set up their totalitarian government and how they expanded their control. Then the Holocaust will be looked at for how the Nazis treated those they were exterminating. Accounts from soldiers and Jewish people who lived through the Nazi control will be mostly used to evaluate if the Nazis were more evil than other genocidal regimes. Two of the sources used in this essay, “The Liberation of Dachau” by Chuck Ferree, and “Fate did not let me go” a letter by Valli Ollendorff are then evaluated for their origins, purposes, values and limitations.

In spite of the fact that it is a commonly known historical piece of the Holocaust, it’s authenticity has been questioned. Some conspiracies deny that it even happened at all. Through the analyzation of Hitler’s own violent anti-Semitism, powerful position, and ability to convey Nazi propaganda into action, one can see how he is the sole cause of the Holocaust.

In the book Ordinary Men, Christopher Browning tackles the question of why German citizens engaged in nefarious behavior that led to the deaths of millions of Jewish and other minorities throughout Europe. The question of what drove Germans to commit acts of genocide has been investigated by numerous historians, but unfortunately, no overarching answer for the crimes has yet been decided upon. However, certain theories are more popular than others. Daniel Goldhagen in his book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, has expounded that the nature of the German culture before the Second World War was deeply embedded in anti-Semitic fervor, which in turn, acted as the catalyst for the events that would unfold into the Holocaust. It is at this

A common misconception about the Holocaust is that the world was naïve of the atrocities happening under the Nazi’s rule. The horrors of the Holocaust were not left undocumented. Unfortunately, many saw these malicious acts as insignificant to the global population; people only start sympathizing when the hindrance affects them. Hitler, with the help of his many allies, achieved to murder millions of innocent men, women, and children. After spending this semester studying the Holocaust, I have realized that the Nazis’ greatest ally was neither an individual nor a country; Hitler’s greatest ally was indifference.

Thesis: A key concept to understanding Hannah Arendt’s “Total Domination” is the essence of terror and the importance of concentration camps in maintaining the Nazi totalitarian state.

Functionalism versus intentionalism is an ongoing historical debate about the origins of the Holocaust. The two questions that the debate centers around on are; was there a master plan by Adolf Hitler for the holocaust? The intentionalist argument is that there was a ‘master plan’, while functionalist’s ague that there was not. The second question is whether the initiative for the Holocaust and the Final Solution come from Adolf Hitler himself, or from lower ranks in the Third Reich. Both side agree that Hitler was the supreme leader, and was responsible for encouraging the anti-Semitism during the Holocaust, but intentionalists believe that the initiative for the final solution came from above, while functionalists argue that it came from the lower ranks within the bureaucracy.

In a society like that, no one is respected and everyone is treated like they don 't have a significance to be alive. Everyone must act and think the same because the corrupt society believes that in a group a single person does not matter. In our society we let each other shine by our differences and by that we grow stronger. When everyone is the same, a group will never get stronger or weaker.

Good people can cause severe harm if their motives are influenced by the values shared in a public corporation or are a result of manipulation controlled by the law. Bob Henderson’s ability to satisfy his interests to obtain success by dismissing social responsibility and contributing to the rise in obesity is wrong. Hannah Arendt founded the theory “The banality evil’ through analyzing Adolf Eichmann’s case during the time of the Holocaust. Eichmann and Henderson share similarities of both being ordinary men who influenced large scale harm. The intent of this essay will be to compare and contrast the perception of evil and discuss at which point radical evil may be mistaken for banal evil.

Hannah Arendt found herself at the centre of great controversy following her publication of ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem’ (Arendt, 1963) released one year after the end of the Eichmann trials. These trials resulted in the execution of Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi found guilty of committing various offenses during the Second World War, namely war crimes and crimes against humanity. Eichmann’s role in the transportation and organisation of Jewish people, which resulted in countless deaths, whilst seemingly evil to most, appeared to Arendt as proof of the banal nature of evil. She saw Eichmann as someone who was not an anti sematic, or even as someone who delighted in murder, but as an unthinking individual who followed orders as efficiently as possible with

In this account of Post-Holocaust publication, Berel Lang presents thoroughly researched information that rebuts some of the common moral, historical and theological claims of the events that took place during this period. The content and the events and ideas discussed in this book are focused on the possibility of this historical event with all the sadism and evil that it brings to mind is able to define a post holocaust, with those who survived the event as well as historical scholars' of the era introducing new ways of the reconstruction of the events that took place as well as their ramifications. In addition, the holocaust appears to be an historical event taken advantage of by people from various perspectives for various reasons other than that of that of using it as a cautionary benchmark to deter reoccurrence of such an event ever again. This is a fact the author struggles with throughout the book and one that works in his favor by bestowing a moral authority over his scholarly reflections.

In “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” Hannah Arendt analyzes Adolph Eichmann while he is on trial in Jerusalem for the crimes that he committed while being a Lieutenant Colonel in the SS during the Nazi Regime. In the book Arendt talks about how Eichmann’s actions were “banal” in the sense that he seemed to be an ordinary person who just committed acts that were evil. Italian-Jewish Writer Primo Levi, a Holocaust Survivor, states that SS officers like Eichmann lived in their own self-deception that made them believe that their actions were caused by just following their orders in the SS. In this paper, I will analyze the views that both Arendt and Levi had about the Eichmann trial and then compare and state the differences of their views. I will then explain the reasons why both Hannah Arendt’s and Primo Levi’s analysis of Adolph Eichmann that show that the actions that he committed were all truly evil actions.