Adolf Eichmann and The Banality of Evil

Podcast Transcript

When you think of evil, characters like Hannibal Lecter, the Joker, and Michael Myers probably come to mind.

But what is evil really? Evil can take different forms: sadistic and brutal, but it can also be boring and normalized.

During the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, political philosopher Hannah Arendt reported on the trial for the New Yorker Magazine. Her journalism became incredibly controversial due to her account of Eichmann, viewing him as “banal,” “normal,” and a “clown.”

Learn more about the “banality of evil,” what it means, and how it can be used to interpret Nazi Germany on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

A few years ago, I did an episode on the Nuremberg Personality Tests.

To quickly summarize, many of the perpetrators of the Holocaust were captured and tried in the city of Nuremberg, in a tribunal which was run by the Allies.

During these trials, they conducted various clinical tests to assess their competency to stand trial. And the results were surprising.

The Public perception of the Nazis post World War II was that they were monsters, because how else could you rationalize systematically murdering millions of people?

The results of the tests showed something different: Top Nazi Officials were not sadistic monsters; they were actually painfully average.

Needless to say, these results proved highly controversial.

I bring this up because it is highly relevant to the subjects of this episode, Adolf Eichmann and Hannah Arendt.

Adolf Eichmann was born in 1906 to a middle-class Austrian Family.

He was not a particularly bright student, and his initial career was that of a traveling salesman. In 1932, he was looking for a new job and joined the Nazi party and the SS, which was the Nazi paramilitary service responsible for carrying out many of the policies of the Third Reich.

It returned to Germany from Austria in 1933 and joined the SD, which was the Nazi intelligence service.

His duties here were mainly surveillance of the Jewish Organizations. Eichmann specifically worked with Zionist groups to inspect Palestine and promote emigration to the Middle East and out of the Third Reich.

During this time, Eichmann became known as the Nazi Jewish expert, becoming educated on Zionism while picking up the languages of Hebrew and Yiddish.

In 1938, he was promoted to the head of a subsection known as IV-B-4, which was part of the Reich Security Office. This office organized the Central Office for Jewish Emigration, which “facilitated” the forced emigration of Austrian Jews.

Eichmann has stated that the years from 1938 to 1941 were the happiest times of his life.

This fulfillment in his work, he claimed, changed with the enactment of the “Final Solution.”

In January 1942, he was present at the Wannsee Conference, which was the conference where the top Nazi Officials decided to implement the Final Solution. At this conference, Eichmann recorded information for his superior, Reinhard Heydrich, and prepared the minutes.

Eichmann left the meeting with a new position. Instead of forced emigration, Eichmann and his team would be responsible for the deportation of Jews to concentration camps.

Eichmann didn’t rank exceptionally high in the Nazi system; his role was important, but he was not a key decision maker. He had many people above him in the hierarchy who gave him orders, nonetheless his position was crucial to the events which unfolded during the Holocaust.

His role was essentially to make sure the trains to the death camps were full and make sure everyone was in the right place to be killed efficiently.

Eichmann never took part in the physical killings; he was strictly a bureaucrat, but his actions resulted in the deportation of over 1.5 million Jews, many of whom would die in Concentration camps.

Eichmann performed his duties diligently until Germany’s defeat. It was then that he, along with some other prominent Nazis, fled to South America.

The flight of Nazis to South America after the war is a subject I’ve covered in a previous episode.

Eichmann specifically fled to Argentina, living under the alias Ricardo Klement.

Israeli intelligence eventually found Eichmann, and agents kidnapped him and flew him back to Israel for a trial on his crimes committed during the Holocaust.

Eichmann was put on trial in 1961. It was the only trial of a Nazi ever held in Israel.

And that brings us to Hannah Arendt.

Arendt was born in Hanover, Germany, to a Jewish family in 1906. She was a brilliant student, studying philosophy and gaining her doctorate at twenty-two.

Arendt left Germany when Hitler came into power, moving to France and later the United States. In the US, she worked at multiple universities.

She was sent by the New Yorker Magazine to cover the Eichmann trial. Her perception of the trial was written in a book titled Eichmann in Jerusalem, and this work was immediately vilified due to her perception of Eichmann.

Unlike the prosecution and much of the public, she found Eichmann to be banal and ordinary, not a sadistic monster.

I should note that Arendt was vilified for more than her opinions of Eichmann. She also criticized Jewish leadership during the Holocaust, which some believed was betraying her own people.

However, over time, Arendt’s perspective grew in popularity. She primarily worked from Eichmann’s testimony, using it to help understand his psychology.

One example of this was when Eichmann was asked to describe his reaction to the Final Solution plan.

He was not naive to the Final Solution; he had taken a tour of the Death Camps in the East before the Wannsee Conference had even occurred, as killings had been taking place in the East the year before the Final Solution was implemented.

At the time, Eichmann was not convinced of the need for death camps, as he had not thought that a “violent solution to the Jewish Question” would be used.

He actually showed some initial defiance of the violence, rerouting a deportation train to a ghetto where the killings hadn’t started yet. However, during the trial, he emphasized that this wasn’t disobeying orders as he had a choice of destination and he simply chose not to send them to death.

He said he was later convinced of the killings after the Wannsee Conference. After watching other top officials approve of and offer contributions at the conference, any doubts he may have had would’ve stifled.

By the end of the war, Eichmann was carrying out deportations to the concentration camps against direct orders, deporting Hungarian Jews despite the war basically being over.

Hannah Arendt wanted to see why this flipped. How did he begin, disgusted by the killing centers, and then send people to their deaths against orders?

She believed this flip occurred within a month.

He was initially uncomfortable with sending away German Jews, not those located in the East. He had Jewish relatives, he worked and cooperated with Jewish colleagues, and viewed some of them as his friends.

He only had a problem with the killings when they personally impacted him.

Arendt viewed Eichmann as thoughtless and lacking an understanding of other people’s perspectives. His motivation was not to be sadistic or take pleasure in the killings, but rather to perform his job.

She believed that Eichmann had a conscience, as shown by his initial reluctance to deport people to death camps, but his desire to be obedient to his leaders and to do his job overwhelmed his sense of morality.

Arendt viewed him as a new, different type of killer, one that was not understood in the trial.

This new type of criminal was one that, under normal circumstances, would not be considered evil and would act just like you or me.

The problem was that he was considered normal working in an evil system.

For this, Arendt viewed Eichmann as not guilty of the charges brought against him in the trial.

Was he guilty according to Arendt? Yes. Did he deserve to be given the death penalty, according to Arendt? Yes. But was he guilty of the crimes as accused in the indictment? According to Arent……No.

Arendt then used her perceptions of Eichmann to attempt to understand the perpetrators of the Holocaust.

She believed that most of the perpetrators were normal, not some exceptional evil.

Nazi Germany created a completely different social climate that instituted a new set of values within society.

Up became down, right became wrong. Killing became a duty, and empathy became a weakness. The crime was universal, and Arendt believed that the moral collapse was in all of German society.

For Arendt, Eichmann displayed “…the fearsome, word-and-thought defying banality of evil.”

When looking at Adolf Eichmann, you see a normal man who committed heinous atrocities. The problem in Nazi Germany was that so many others were just like Eichmann. They, too, were not sadistic or perverted but normal.

And for Arendt, that normalcy is what was terrifying.

Criminals like Eichmann commit crimes because they are incapable of knowing right from wrong, and because of this, events like the Holocaust could happen again.

So, why was this perception of Eichmann so controversial?

For many people, The Banality of Evil trivialized the events of the Holocaust because they believed that it offered an excuse for the perpetrators.

Again, this was only 15 years after World War II ended, so the wounds of the Holocaust on the world were still fresh in the memories of those who participated in the trial. The purpose of the trial was to condemn and punish the perpetrators, and to seek some sort of retribution, not to understand their actions.

Additionally, it goes against society’s characterization of evil, which tends to view morality as black and white.

Evil is viewed as insane, intelligent, and sadistic. It paints the perception of evil as exceptional, not normal. It creates a point of contrast for the heroic figures who fight evil.

In the trial, any of Eichmann’s perceived ordinariness was interpreted as a disguise, and any of his explanations for his actions during the Holocaust were considered a lie.

She was not sympathetic towards Eichmann, nor did she believe everything he said, but she didn’t think that his ordinariness was false.

She did not deny that Eichmann committed the deportations, that he was willing to carry out his duty, or that he could have backed out and left his bureaucratic job,

For the amount of death he caused, he deserved to die.

For evil to become banal, certain conditions must be met: a society that legitimizes killing, perpetrators who act without selfish motives and genuinely believe their actions are not morally wrong, and the acceptance of this new, corrupt social reality where evil is perceived as an obligation.

Sadism is not required, but what is required is a willing obedience to commit evil acts.

Hannah Arendt revealed a troubling truth of human nature. Evil does not need to be blatant and in your face, but can be found in the capabilities of an average person. That is what makes the banality of evil so terrifying, as anyone can be susceptible to the moral flipping of society.

The Executive Producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The Associate Producers are Austin Oetken and Cameron Kieffer.

Research and writing for this episode were provided by Olivia Ashe.

Today’s review comes from listener Zip1 over on Apple Podcasts in the United States. They write.

Incredible podcast

I’m now part of the Completionist Club. I have always been interested in history, but this gives the perfect amount for a day, and I am always learning. I love the random things that aren’t normal knowledge. Thank you.

Thanks, Zip! Welcome to the Completionist Club. I’m sure by now you have already visited your local chapter where you have been given your key and members jacket.

As always, if you leave a review on any major podcast app, Facebook or Discord, you too can have it read on the show.