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could least escape, the task of understanding the criminal whom they had
come to judge." As might be imagined, this only rubbed salt into a
wound-one that still has not healed nor even abated.
Arendt placed her finger on the soft underbelly of the trial, not only
of Eichmann but of his likeness: to single out on the one hand the most
monstrous of perverted sadists, and yet claim that he was intrinsically little
else than a cog in the Nazi war machine, a figure representing the entire
Nazi movement and anti-Semitism at large. While this might have passed
with a disturbing nod, many were outraged by Arendt's further claim that
it was only the physical extermination of the Jewish people that was a
crime against humanity, and that only this, rather than the anti-Semitism
of the murderers, was subject to punishment. But again, the issue was
joined between Arendt and her critics, since there was a subtle denial of
the uniqueness of the Holocaust in the long history of human savagery.
Arendt's careful outline of how the decision was made at the Wannsee
Conference to exterminate the Jews, to make Europe
Judenrein
or Jew–
Free, is chilling and numbing.
It
is among the best writing she was able to
muster. And
if
there were strange elements, such as linking Eichmann to
the Kantian precept of obedience to the law and a moral obligation, the
actual savagery and fury of the Nazis and their more than willing helpers
among the occupied nations can hardly fail to elicit a powerful response in
readers even now.
An
element arousing additional anger was a subtle equation of the vic–
tims with the victimizer. The participation of Jews in all sorts of Jewish
Councils and Zionist emissaries (exempt from the normal victimization)
in bad bargaining and at times even in bad faith, efforts to save Jewish souls
by trafficking in monetary and commodity bribes to the Nazis, while not
condemned by Arendt, are dealt with in less than sympathetic terms. That
transport lists to concentration camps were often put together by Jews who
sent many to their deaths and preserved the lives of some, has been well
documented. But in Arendt's hands, such acts of complicity only deepen
the notion of "banality" as a common feature of the tormentors and the
tormented.
One can say that Arendt's book is a landmark in the psychology of the
Holocaust.
Eichmann in Jerusalem
provides a foundation that makes possible
a political psychology of Nazism far beyond earlier works-even of her
own efforts to study the nature of totalitarian power and mass movements.
If
Eichmann in Jerusalem
was found even by such admirers as Stephen
Spender as "brilliant and disturbing," and by Hans Morgenthau as "trou–
bling our consciences," it is because the psychological profile makes the
Holocaust not a special event but a common human failing of civility and
decency, induced by either an absence of or a breakdown in governance as
