Eichmann in Jerusalem

Eichmann's own account of himself was, in a way, the heart of the matter. He presented his life as a series of postings and duties. He had joined the SS, found a niche in Jewish emigration and later deportation, and applied himself to it with the diligence of a man who wanted to be good at his work. He invoked, at one point, the philosopher Immanuel Kant — claiming to have lived by the categorical imperative, by which he seemed to mean that he had done his duty as the state defined it.

Arendt took this seriously enough to dismantle it. Kant's moral law asks a person to test their conduct against a universal principle they could will for everyone; Eichmann had replaced that inner judgment with obedience to the Führer's will. He had, she noted, followed orders even at the end, when Himmler himself ordered the killing stopped — because stopping was not, to Eichmann, a real order. His conscience worked, but it had been recalibrated to run on the rules of a criminal state.

The phrase appears almost quietly, at the very end of the book. Watching Eichmann walk to the gallows in May 1962, mouthing funeral oratory clichés to the last, Arendt wrote that it was as though those final minutes summed up the lesson of the whole affair — the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil. She did not develop it into a theory in the book itself. It was a description of what she had seen, offered almost as an afterthought, and it detonated.

What she meant was not that the crimes were banal. She was insistent, then and afterward, that the deeds were monstrous beyond measure. What was banal was the doer. The evil of the Holocaust had been carried out, in large part, by people who were not themselves monstrous — people with no particular depth of wickedness, who did unspeakable things while thinking mostly about their careers, their standing, their duty. The horror was not that a demon had done it, but that a man like Eichmann had.

If Eichmann was ordinary, the unsettling implication is that the capacity he displayed is not rare. Arendt was not saying that everyone is a potential murderer, nor that circumstances excuse the guilty. She was saying something more precise and more disquieting: that the wall between decent conduct and complicity in atrocity may not be built of some special moral fiber, but of the ongoing, unglamorous work of actually thinking about what one is doing. When that work stops, the rest can follow.

This is why she kept returning, in her later years, to the activity of thinking itself. Eichmann's failure, as she came to see it, was not a failure of intelligence or information — he knew perfectly well where the trains went. It was a failure to hold an inner conversation, to ask whether he could live with himself as the kind of person who did this. The thoughtless person, she suggested, is peculiarly available to evil, because evil offered from above meets no internal resistance.

Eichmann was hanged shortly after midnight on June 1, 1962, and his ashes were scattered at sea beyond Israeli waters. Arendt's report on his trial appeared the following year and immediately drew fire — not chiefly for the phrase itself, but for a related argument in the book, where she criticized the wartime Jewish Councils for their role in the deportations. To many readers that seemed to shift blame onto the victims, and old friends broke with her over it. The controversy was bitter, personal, and long.