Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil
A few weeks ago my mom called me and asked what I was up to. “At Starbucks reading,” I told her. “Oh,” she said. “What are you reading? Is it for pleasure?” “Yeah, for pleasure,” I said. “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.” You’re probably thinking what my mom was thinking: “We need to have a talk about what it means to read for pleasure.”
Hannah Arendt was a philosopher and political theorist born in Germany in 1906. Also a Jew, Arendt left Germany in 1933 and was stripped of her citizenship in 1937. In 1940 she was briefly a prisoner at the Gurs internment camp in France but managed to escape and in 1941 made her way to America. Her other notable writings include The Origins of Totalitarianism and The Human Condition, and she was also a visiting scholar at a number of prominent American universities. 
After she learned that former SS Officer Adolf Eichmann had been captured in Argentina, she asked The New Yorker if she could travel to Jerusalem and write about his trial for them. They agreed, perhaps not knowing what they were getting into. Arendt’s report was incredibly controversial and both The New Yorker and Arendt as an individual received a lot of backlash. As the title suggests, she presented Eichmann not as a truly malicious man, but as someone who, as he himself said, was just following orders, even though those orders included the transport of millions of people to their death. He wasn’t evil because he wanted to cleanse Germany, Europe, and eventually the world of all of the Jews. As far as we know, Eichmann never personally killed anyone, and actually said several times that he didn’t have any problem with the Jews. Eichmann was evil because he, like so many others, was complacent in the Final Solution. To say that he let it happen is, truthfully, a stretch. Eichmann wasn’t important enough to stop the Holocaust, at least not on his own. But he could’ve walked away, and he didn’t.
There has been a lot of talk lately about whether the practice of separating children from their parents and holding them in horrific conditions is like the Holocaust. In an article in The Atlantic, Deborah Lipstadt, a professor at Emory University and the author of History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier (which was later adapted for the 2016 movie Denial) says that it’s not. "The architects of the Trump administration’s family-separation policy are not emulating the Nazis, whose objective was murder. They are not engaged in genocide. They are, however, doing something indefensible and horrible in its own right. They are using children as bargaining chips and as commodities. We must keep our eyes on those horrors,” she said.
I have to say that I agree with her. It is horrendous that children are being separated from their parents, regardless of their legal status, but ICE, or Trump, or whoever you want to pin this on, is not out to kill. A lot of other people, though, are saying that even if this isn’t like the Holocaust as far as mass murder is concerned, it’s a lot like how it started. The Trump administration is often compared to Nazi Germany, and though I agree more with the New Yorker article that compares Trump to Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II, there was a moment in Eichmann in Jerusalem that really put everything in perspective for me.
“But if the Bordeaux incident was a farce, the second was the basis for one of the most horrible of the many hair-raising stories told at Jerusalem. This was the story of four thousand children, separated from their parents who were already on their way to Auschwitz. The children had been left behind at the French collection point, the concentration camp at Drancy, and July 10 Eichmann’s French representative, Hauptsturmführer Theodore Dannecker, phoned him to ask what was to be done with them. Eichmann took ten days to decide; then he called Dannecker back to tell him that “as soon as transports could again be dispatched to the General Government area [of Poland], transports of children could roll.”
That Arendt, who was herself a Jew who was interned in a concentration camp, and knew first hand the horrors of the camps and of antisemitism in general, said that this, the separation of children from their parents, was one of the most horrible stories she heard during the Eichmann trial, speaks volumes to the problem.
Though the Eichmann trial was in 1961 and the book was first published in 1963, Eichmann in Jerusalem remains relevant today. I realized that pretty quickly while reading it, and was proud of myself for coming to that conclusion when, days later, this article was published in The New York Times.
If you’ve never read Eichmann in Jerusalem, I suggest that you do. It’s not long, about 300 pages. It wasn’t a particularly fast read, partially because the subject matter was so dark and partially because some of the detail is, honestly, pretty boring. But I’m glad I read it. I learned a lot, and it made visiting the US Holocaust Memorial Museum the day after I finished it all the more poignant. Here are some of the many things that I underlined while reading. In the epilogue, Arendt closed with what she believed should have been said to Eichmann at the conclusion of his trial, and it’s how I’ll end too.
“For politics is not like the nursery; in politics obedience and support are the same. And just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations — as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world —- we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang.”
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