Nazism/Holocaust: What did Hannah Arendt really mean by 'The Banality of Evil'

American Philosophical Association ^ | Thomas White

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Can one do evil without being evil? This was the puzzling question that the philosopher Hannah Arendt grappled with when she reported for The New Yorker in 1961 on the war crimes trial of Adolph Eichmann, the Nazi operative responsible for organising the transportation of millions of Jews and others to various concentration camps in support of the Nazi’s Final Solution.

Arendt found Eichmann an ordinary, rather bland, bureaucrat, who in her words, was ‘neither perverted nor sadistic’, but ‘terrifyingly normal’. He acted without any motive other than to diligently advance his career in the Nazi bureaucracy...

...Arendt dubbed these collective characteristics of Eichmann ‘the banality of evil’: he was not inherently evil, but merely shallow and clueless, a ‘joiner’, in the words of one contemporary interpreter of Arendt’s thesis: he was a man who drifted into the Nazi Party, in search of purpose and direction, not out of deep ideological belief.

Even 10 years after his trial in Israel, she wrote in 1971:

"I was struck by the manifest shallowness in the doer...The deeds were monstrous, but the doer...was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous."

The banality-of-evil thesis was a flashpoint for controversy. To Arendt’s critics, it seemed absolutely inexplicable that Eichmann could have played a key role in the Nazi genocide yet have no evil intentions.

In Eichmann Before Jerusalem (2014), the German historian Bettina Stangneth reveals another side to him... Drawing on audiotapes of interviews with Eichmann by the Nazi journalist William Sassen, Stangneth shows Eichmann as a self-avowed, aggressive Nazi ideologue strongly committed to Nazi beliefs, who showed no remorse or guilt for his role in the Final Solution – a radically evil Third Reich operative living inside the deceptively normal shell of a bland bureaucrat...

[Stepan12]

The Israeli who interrogated Eichmann said he was an organizational genius. Hannah Arendt at first condemned Israel grabbing Eichmann as a violation of international law. Later, she came up with a very trendy sentence.

Another exploit of this puffed up intellectual was when she heard that Zev Jabotinsky called for Jews to leave Europe before a horrific tragedy befell them (Jabotinsky saw the Holocaust a mile away), she called Jabotinsky a fascist. A reporter asked this greatest of intellectuals (cough) if she ever read anything of Zev Jabotinsky, Hannah Arendt admitted that she did not. I may be impressed with Rabbi Meir Kahane, zt'l, but not her.