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Eichmann in Jerusalem (Penguin Classics)

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A previous reviewer claims that Arendt's book shows the ambivalence of human nature, proving that in effect anybody could have done what Eichmann did. In fact, this is exactly the cynical point of view that Arendt opposes in this, and her other writings. Her argument here is a revision of her earlier position on 'radical evil' advanced in The Origins of Totalitarianism, a position which Heidegger claimed to find 'incomprehensible.' She argues here that banality and "sheer thoughtlessness" (akin to Heidegger's reflections on boredom) are in fact the root of Evil. To put it better, evil continues precisely because of its inherent rootlessness, its constitutive disregard of the world. Thus, the detachment of claims such as "Anybody could have done what Eichmann did" distort her intention. Evil, she insists, is not an inevitable aspect of human nature, but instead arises from an unwillingness to understand.

"It was sheer thoughtlessness that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of the period," political theorist Hannah Arendt observes of Adolf Eichmann, who was in charge of the logistics behind the mass deportations of Jews and other so-called asocials to ghettos and extermination camps during the 2nd World War. The face of evil, she suggests through her portrayal of the high-ranking SS bureaucrat at his trial in Jerusalem, is not necessarily that of a radically perverse pathological mastermind, but instead and more frightening still, can come in the form of a banal and unimpressive caricature of normalcy.

In his testimony, Eichmann characterizes himself as a blameless cog who was only following orders, and even goes on to cite instances where he tried to help certain Jews who were friends of his escape their inevitable fate. His tone is that of one regaling a run-of-the-mill human sympathy story of hard luck, and his telling is rife with contradiction, blanks in memory, and ridiculous cliché. According to Arendt, this "created considerable difficulty during the trial - less for Eichmann himself than for those who had come to prosecute him, to defend him, to judge him, and to report on him. For all this, it was essential that one take him seriously, and this was very hard to do, unless one sought the easiest way out of the dilemma between the unspeakable horror of the deeds and the undeniable ludicrousness of the man who perpetrated them, and declared him a clever, calculating liar - which he obviously was not."

Also relevant for its criticism of the shaky legal foundation upon which the trial was conducted (Eichmann was illegally abducted in Argentina, then was brought to Israel and prosecuted there using an outdated framework that was unable to properly address the problem of genocide as specifically carried out by the Nazis).

This book is very smart, very elegantly written. The questions it raises about ethics and preconceived notions of good and evil are universal and remain relevant to the times. If it were a person, I'd sleep with it on the first date.

I am delighted to see this classic back in print. Jewish author Hannah Arendt has provided a wealth of timeless information that goes far beyond the trial of the German war criminal Adolf Eichmann. This review is based on the original (1964) edition.

Arendt (p. 39) gives the readers a taste of the scale of the Kristallnacht (November 1938): 7,500 Jewish shop windows broken, all synagogues burned, and 20,000 Jewish men incarcerated in concentration camps. In common with many others who wrote during the first two decades after WWII, Arendt (p. 5, 11-12) addresses the issue of Jewish passivity in the face of death during the later roundups and transports to the death camps.

Arendt briefly discusses the fate of Jews of some individual European nations. She mentions the conniving of the Bulgarians (with, of course, the implied freedom to do so) performed in order to avoid sending their Jews to the death camps, and the fact that Finland, Germany's ally, was never seriously pressured to turn over her 2,000 Jews to be murdered (p. 170). Clearly, the latter part of the oft-repeated statement, "Not all of the victims of the Nazis were Jews, but all Jews were victims of the Nazis" is incorrect.

Throughout this work, Arendt gives various biographical details of Adolf Eichmann. For example, she mentions that he was a Gottglaubiger (p. 27), a Nazi term for those who had broken with Christianity, and which Eichmann maintained right up to the very moment of his hanging, having refused the solace and Bible reading of a Protestant minister (p. 252).

Arendt briefly discusses Hitler's flouting of the Versailles treaty and his rise to power. While Jan T. Gross has asserted that there were Poles who praised Hitler in the 1930's, Arendt makes it clear that this was far from limited to Poland during that time: "...Hitler was admired everywhere as a great national statesman." (p. 37).

While most recent Holocaust materials focus on the real or imagined collaboration of locals in the sending of Jews to their deaths, Arendt is unsparing in her criticism of Jewish collaborators in this regard: "Without Jewish help in administrative and police work--the final roundup of Jews in Berlin was, as I have mentioned, done entirely by Jewish police--there would have been either complete chaos or an impossibly severe drain on German manpower. (p. 117). She adds that, because of this collaboration, only a few thousand Germans, most of whom furthermore only did office work, were able to send hundreds of thousands of Jews to their deaths (p. 117). Finally, Arendt concludes that: "Wherever Jews lived, there were recognized Jewish leaders, and this leadership, almost without exception, cooperated in one way or another, for one reason or another, with the Nazis. The whole truth was that if the Jewish people had been unorganized and leaderless, there would have been chaos and plenty of misery but the total number of victims would hardly have been between four and a half and six million. (According to Freudiger's calculations about half of them could have saved themselves if they had not followed the instructions of the Jewish councils..." (p. 125).

Arendt (p. 42, 118, etc.) elaborates on the actions of a Jew, Rudolf Kastner (Kasztner). He made a deal with Eichmann in which 1,684 Jews were allowed to go to Palestine in exchange for Kastner's silence before and during which 476,000 Hungarian Jews were sent to the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

Jan Tomasz Gross, who has gotten a great deal of publicity for his books (NEIGHBORS and FEAR), has stated that the 2-3 million Poles who died in the hands of the Germans were largely the collateral victims of military action. Arendt knows better: "...Eichmann knew that right behind the front lines all Russian functionaries ("Communists"), all Polish members of the professional classes, and all native Jews were being killed in mass shootings." (p. 95). "At no point, however, either in the proceedings or the judgment, did the Jerusalem trial mention even the possibility that extermination of whole ethnic groups--the Jews, or the Poles, or the Gypsies--might be more than a crime against the Jewish or the Polish or the Gypsy people, that the international order, and mankind in its entirety, might have been grievously hurt and endangered." (pp. 275-276). Arendt realizes the alternative future: "The measures against Eastern Jews were not only the result of anti-Semitism, they were part and parcel of an all-embracing demographic policy, in the course of which, had the Germans won the war, the Poles would have suffered the same fate as the Jews--genocide. This is no mere conjecture: the Poles in Germany were already being forced to wear a distinguishing badge in which the "P" replaced the Jewish star, and this, which we have seen, was always the first measure to be taken by the police in instituting the process of destruction)." (pp. 217-218).

Arendt praises the Danes for saving Jews during WWII and then, without mentioning the incomparably more difficult conditions under which Polish rescuers of Jews labored, nevertheless gives the Poles their due. After listing some individual examples of Polish assistance to Jews, Arendt adds the following: "One witness claimed that the Polish underground had supplied many Jews with weapons and had saved thousands of Jewish children by placing them with Polish families. The risks were prohibitive; there was the story of an entire Polish family who had been executed in the most brutal manner because they had adopted a six-year-old Jewish girl." (p. 231).

The story floating around in the zeitgeist about Eichmann in Jerusalem is that Hannah Arendt established how boring the Nazis were: that the men responsible for the destruction of millions were just paper pushers. This captures part of Arendt's book, but not nearly all of it. Overall, I think it's best to describe Eichmann in Jerusalem as a clear-eyed look at the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a study of guilt, and a dispassionate analysis of war-crimes trials. It's a tremendous book.

Many Jews may stop reading when Arendt seems to accuse them of collaborating with the Nazis. I know virtually nothing about how this book was received, but it wouldn't surprise me at all if it offended a lot of people. If the historical record is as clear as Arendt claims, however, then there's nothing to get upset about. Councils of Jewish Elders, says Arendt, were formed in every country that the Nazis took over; those Councils documented the assets of the Jews within their communities, dutifully went around collecting them, turned them over to the Nazis, and only later found themselves herded into cattle cars to Auschwitz. In the death camps, she says, Jews did much of the gruesome work, like removing gold teeth from gas-chamber victims.

This is obviously sensitive stuff. Arendt's style is to deliver it as honestly and forthrightly as possible. Her style, indeed, is tightly bound to her subject. She writes of Eichmann,

[H]e apologized, saying, "Officialese . . . is my only language." But the point here is that officialese became his language because he was genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché ... To be sure, the judges were right when they finally told the accused that all he had said was "empty talk" -- except that they thought the emptiness was feigned ...

She says elsewhere in Eichmann that the man's inability to speak was a symptom of his inability to think. It is her duty, then, to view Eichmann's trial with the clearest eye and sharpest mind possible.

Readers may recall the backstory here: the Israelis kidnapped Eichmann from Argentina in 1960, tried him in Israel, and hanged him in 1962. The trial sought to paint Eichmann as one of the masterminds behind the Holocaust and the vilest sort of monster. Arendt retorts that he was, at best, a high-level functionary, and indeed a paper pusher, and that everyone at the trial could see immediately that this was the case. He never killed anyone, and indeed it seems pretty clear that the merest sight of blood would make the man queasy.

None of this lets Eichmann off the hook, though, which is exactly the point: there's a world of difference between passers-by, who allowed the European Jews to be destroyed, and the Eichmanns who filed away the forms to send them to their destruction.

Granted, then, that Eichmann deserved to pay in a way that the silent millions did not, why was Israel the proper forum for his punishment? Arendt is skeptical that it was. Eichmann's crime was a crime against humanity, and he should have been punished the same way that other Nazis were punished at Nuremberg. At the same time, no other nation had stepped up to try Eichmann, and Argentina was refusing to turn over the Nazis within its borders, so Israel may have had no choice. Arendt, and the court's decision itself, approvingly quote Grotius's line: "punishment is necessary `to defend the honor or authority of him who was hurt by the offence so that the failure to punish may not cause his degradation.'"

Israel seemed to believe that it had the right to try Eichmann because of his crimes against the Jews, which makes me wonder: does Israel automatically grant itself the right to try crimes against Jews even today? Suppose some other country tried to kill all the Jews within its borders now; would Israel grant itself the right to try the leaders of that country?

Arendt says that Israel's trial of Eichmann was much less about Eichmann and much more about the history of anti-Semitism from the time of Pharaoh all the way up to the Germans. There is an element of farce in all of this, and I think it's fair to say that Arendt took offense: a crime as serious as Eichmann's deserves a serious trial, rather than a circus. Fortunately the legal decision that came down at the trial's conclusion was a model of seriousness.

Even with Eichmann swinging from the gallows, there's still the matter of Europe's guilt. Arendt, as ever, is only as brutal as she needs to be here: the nations of Europe stand guilty of allowing the slaughter to happen. The French, for instance, allowed foreign Jews within French borders to be shipped off to Germany, but put their foot down when the Nazis demanded French Jews. Their refusal to export their own Jews points out another matter: when nations said no to the Nazis, the Nazis often backed down. They were by no means an immovable wall of violence. The evil that European nations allowed to happen is all the more inexcusable when we know that there were exceptions.

At the heart of all of this is the basic principle, which Arendt summarizes so well:

There remains, however, one fundamental problem, which was implicitly present in all these postwar trials and which must be mentioned here because it touches upon one of the central moral questions of all time, namely upon the nature and function of human judgment. What we have demanded in these trials, where the defendants had committed "legal" crimes, is that human beings be capable of telling right from wrong even when all they have to guide them is their own judgment, which, moreover, happens to be completely at odds with what they must regard as the unanimous opinion of all those around them.

This moral question, and the denunciation that necessarily follows it, doesn't go away even if the Nazis mercilessly destroyed those who refused to follow their orders. We wish for a clear voice calling out from the maelstrom. Arendt's is that voice.

I apologise for the flippant tone of my title, but this phrase of Arendt's seems to sum up the entire, absurd and sickening conundrum presented by Eichmann. Arendt is not, by and large, a humorous or entertaining writer, but she is a clear and thoughtful one, and such flippancy is not the norm. What she seems to have established, and the paradox is so absurd as to defy belief, is that Eichmann, a senior figure in the realisation of the Final Solution, was not an anti-Semite at all but a "Mitläufer". He accepted his association with anti-Semites in the tone indicated, but seemed not to think much of them and to have some respect for Jews. The image that emerges appears to be not that of a pack of ringleaders but that of a herd of murderous but rather dim sheep, where even the shepherd bleats and runs off the cliff.

This starts as an absurdity when you first encounter it, and then as you proceed through the book the sheer terror of the possibility that it is true soaks into your bones. The possibility must occur to the sceptical reader that Eichmann was merely trying to present a positive face to the court that was sure to hang him. Eichmann, frankly, doesn't sound that bright. In fact, he sounds like a fool. Arendt asserts, and I think convinces, that Eichmann simply lacks the intellectual gifts to dissemble effectively. When he is not remembering something that impinges on his own career advancement - apparently his central obsession - his memory appears to be confused and his errors not consistently tending to his own exoneration.

I accept Arendt's account, partly because she is so convincing a thinker but partly because it tends to resolve a paradox that I have been dealing with for years - that the most advanced civilisation in Europe could have bent its hand to the Shoah and annihilated one of its own most advanced and civilised minorities. Eichmann was not a monster, so a nation of monsters is apparently not necessary. Eichmann was normal, "Or at least, more normal than I am after examining him," according to one psychologist. He seems to have been a good boss, and kind to his subordinates. He loved his family. He had enough self-knowledge to doubt his own role and accept his own arrest and execution, going to the gallows with dignity. His moral responses to the violence of the Holocaust started off normal - and remained that way for about six weeks.

After that - and here's the resolution - the normal became inverted. Proper organisation of death transports, the observance of orders and the tidy identification and packaging of Jews became the "good" thing to do, and in the atmosphere of a totalitarian state and the conformance of all around one I am not sure that many of us would do otherwise. Hence my terror. Being a good guy is no defense. The banal become evil when the law itself is morally "illegal"; even the good become evil. This could happen anywhere, at any time. Staggeringly, the urge to conform and be a "good German" even seems to have extended to prominent Jews, who played a role in the "Judenräte" which facilitated the orderly deportation and murder of their fellows. This observation, however - and again I accept Arendt's case - seems to have got her into hot water with US Jews, who largely responded with a storm of vitriol and in effect excommunicated her. I hope that this generation sees her and this book more kindly, because I think she is correct and this book is important.

A few other oddities evaporate when one sees things Arendt's way, such as that the methodology of the Final Solution was designed to reduce distress for its perpetrators and that even the victims quietly cooperated.

Arendt deals with the character of Eichmann, the nature of evil, the paradox of the cooperation of Germans and (German) Jews alike, the possible irregularities of the trial - Eichmann broke no law that existed in his nation at the time, had been kidnapped and could legitimately have been demanded by German courts, which have according to Arendt been depressingly "understanding" when dealing with Holocaust figures - and the course of the Shoah in Germany and outside. Her account of the course of the Holocaust elsewhere throws a more positive light on parts of Europe than I have tended to see in the past. There is real hope in her accounts of Bulgaria, Italy, Holland and especially Denmark, where even German officers exposed to moral normality began to sabotage orders and most of the Jews made it to Sweden alive. On the other hand, there is that depressing banality of evil and a clear signature of European, Christian anti-Semitism which confirms my impression that Nazism merely extended and exploited a traditional Christian agenda, changing it from theological to racial. In Romania, spontaneous pogroms of such brutality took place that - further absurdity on the way - the SS intervened to save Jews from butchery. (Gassing being presumably more humane. How can one read this and remain normal?)

Another conundrum that arises is how to deal with a genocidaire who is only giving orders. Eichmann basically just transported people. His hand was on no trigger. In fact, quite often the disposal procedure was run by the very victims themselves, so the only hands on triggers were those of the dead. Who, in such a case, do you prosecute? (My answer to this is deplorably anti-intellectual - "Eichmann". The Israelis and more widely the the Nürnberg trials arrived at the correct and the only conceivable resolution.)

Another reason for controversy over this book may be that Arendt undermined Ben-Gurion's narrative of the Shoah as merely the culmination of millennia of anti-Semitism predating Christianity itself. If it did, I am not sure that I agree; anti-Semitism was quite definitely behind the Shoah. It could hardly be otherwise. What Arendt establishes is that it did not suffice, and that its absence was no defense.

A generation and more has passed since this book's publication. I hope that it will now be viewed more coolly and more positively, as it is a work of unique historical and philosophical value. Tens of thousands of pages of transcripts from the trial are held in Israeli national archives, providing a record of this rare captive specimen of a genocidaire, but Arendt's is a unique intellectual voice, speaking in the accent of a German Jew but not bending to the nationalist narrative of the Israel of her day. She speaks coolly, and I think correctly.

The evil are not remarkable. The evil are you and I in another place and time.

Totalitarian organizations and regimes cannot survive without collaboration and omission from common people. I'm over 40 and it was only with this book, that I just finished a few weeks ago, that I begin to have a grasp of what really happened in Germany and Europe in the Holocaust.
It is very easy to demonize a few historic personages (like Hitler, Goebbels, Eichmann etc.) in Hollywood movies and the mainstream media, but it takes the kind of courage and competence Hannah Arendt showed in her book to make us reflect about the small "Holocausts" that may be happening today and very close to us because of our lack of political action.
What makes her pages, written decades ago, so important today is the unveiling of the obscure paths that go from intolerance as a diffuse element in every society to the centerpiece of a state politic.
Still revolutionary after all these years.
Still deserving to be read, analyzed and commented, specially by the youth.

For Hannah Arendt, Adolf Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem was deeply unsatisfying and morally perturbing. For Arendt, there was no doubt that Eichmann was guilty, and that he deserved the death penalty. But for her the question was who ought to have been on trial, and who ought to have been the judge and jury.

For Israeli prosecutors to condemn Eichmann as the chief architect of the Holocaust and to condemn him to death for orchestrating the mass slaughter of Jews was for Arendt to completely miss the point. Eichmann was just a mere functionary in the Nazi regime, a man who in his own words was just good at following orders, and whose virtues were his organizational ability (he was in charge of transporting Jews) and his obedience. As anyone who saw Eichmann in the flesh could testify, he was more a weak and pathetic and stupid man than he was a psychopath. He was obsessed with success, and thought highly of Hitler because Hitler had gone from a lance corporal to the fuhrer. In many ways, Eichmann was more indicative of the Nazi regime than anyone else. Even the SS ferreted out psychopaths as dangerous elements, and the Nazi regime prided itself on its organizational efficiency in carrying out orders. In this way, and the real horror here, the Nazi regime was typical of many twentieth century mass society bureaucracies. And in their bureaucratic tunnel vision, the Nazis were not intent on just eliminating all Jews -- they wanted to eliminate everyone who didn't fit their limited definition of Aryanism. In this way, the Nazis were committing a crime against all humanity, destroying all that was normal and sane and just in society. (Eichmann as a man who obeyed and thus supported a regime that was intent on murderously practicing its intolerance couldn't complain when society deemed his presence on the earth no longer tolerable.) But if that is the case then Eichmann should have been tried for crimes against humanity, and condemned to death by an international tribunal.

Eichmann claimed that obedience was a virtue, but as Arendt points out if the law and the state are both criminal, then the only virtue is disobedience. And if enough good people disobey the law and the state cannot operate. She points to countless examples, primarily in the Scandavinian countries, where by refusing to participate many individuals made the Holocaust impossible to implement in their home countries. Eichmann may not have killed anyone, but his obedience was enough to condemn him because it was the obedience of banal individuals like him that made the Nazi regime function.

"Eichmann in Jerusalem" is a prophecy, more than just a report. More than anyone else in her time, Hannah Arendt grasped the dark forces that a combination of bureaucratism, technology, and ancient human intolerance could unleash in the world. What is to stop another bureaucracy from using technology to effortlessly and painlessly murder all those under a certain IQ?, Hannah Arendt asks. And when that were to happen, how would we interpret and condemn such an action? Could the Eichmann trial serve as a precedent and as a warning? Unfortunately, because of the way it was handled or mishandled, it cannot.

Arendt's analysis of the "banality of evil" characterized by Adolf Eichmann is a chilling look into how evil can be systematized, how it can be seemingly bureaucratic, and how normal people can be turned into monsters through law.

This is a great book for anyone interested in World War 2, the Holocaust, political philosophy, or getting really really depressed.

I had long wanted to read Hannah Arendt's (1906 -- 1975) study of the Eichmann trial, "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil" and was prompted at last to do so when I found the book on sale at my local library. As I read, the controversial nature of Arendt's book was brought home to me. I decided I needed to read Arendt in tandem with a recent study of the trial, "The Eichmann Trial" (2011) by historian Deborah Lipstadt. The Eichmann Trial (Jewish Encounters) Lipstadt devotes a lengthy chapter to analyzing Arendt's book. Lipstadt, perhaps with the passage of time, sees the trial and its significance differently than does Arendt. Her treatment of Arendt is critical but balanced. She offers many of the criticisms of Arendt's book that were made when the book was published but finds a good deal to praise in Arendt's account. Although Arendt's and Lipstadt's book take opposing positions in many respects, this is not at all unusual in serious historical study. There is much to be learned from both books. They are better read, I believe, as complementary, rather than as opposed. For all its flaws and datedness, Arendt's book remains tough minded, provocative, and deeply thoughtful. Even for readers who disagree with Arendt or who become angry with her, the book is worth reading and pondering.

Arendt was a political philosopher who received an extraordinary education in pre WW II Germany. Her teachers included the philosophers Martin Heidegger (with whom she had an affair) and Karl Jaspers. Arendt immigrated to the United States in 1941 and soon became a famous public intellectual.

On May 11,1960, Adolph Eichmann was captured by Israeli operatives in Argentina and brought back to Israel to stand trial for his activities in the Holocaust. The capture and kidnapping of Eichmann resulted in substantial international controversy as did the trial itself. Eichmann's trial began in April, 1961, with the accused sitting in a bullet-proof glass both which became famous in itself. The trial was held before three distinguished Israeli Judges, each of whom had received their legal training in Germany. The chief prosecutor was Israeli Attorney General Gideon Hausner. Eichmann was defended by counsel of his choice, Robert Servatius, who had also been a lawyer for Nurenberg defendants. After a lengthy trial, in which Eichmann testified and was cross-examined in great detail, the court found Eichmann guilty and sentenced him to death in December, 1961. The Israeli Supreme Court rejected Eichmann's appeal on May 29, 1962; and Eichmann was hanged two days later on May 31, 1962. Arendt covered the trial for "The New Yorker". Critics point out that she was not present for the entire trial. Her book is based not only on observation of the trial but upon Arendt's reading of the transcripts, affidavits and other materials, including Eichmann extensive pretrial statements, that Israel's government made available to the media at the time as well as upon additional sources.

With all the criticism the book received at the time, Arendt's account of the trial was careful. The book is difficult to read and, in spite of her protestations to the contrary, is as much a work of political philosophy as it is a journalistic account of a trial. Arendt criticized the kidnapping of Eichmann and the manner in which prosecutor Hausner conducted the trial. She praised the Israeli judges and their approach to the case. It is sometimes overlooked that Arendt found that the Israelis were in the right in kidnapping Eichmann and in trying him before an Israeli court. Arendt found that Eichmann amply deserved the sentence of death, and she approved of the Israelis carrying the sentence out expeditiously in the face of widespread arguments for commutation.

Among other things, Arendt is criticized for applying the term "banal" to Eichmann. He appeared to her and to others as a mediocrity interested in his own career and in carrying out his orders rather than as a rabid Nazi and anti-Semite. She emphasized as do many modern writers the pervasive character of evil in WW II Germany and the lack of resistance. Documents that were not available to Arendt suggest to some historians that she overstated Eichmann's "banality", and that he was a far more committed Nazi and vicious anti-Semite than she realized. Arendt was also criticized for emphasizing the lack of resistance of the Jewish victims and the alleged cooperation of the Jewish leaders with Eichmann in carrying out the transports to the camps. Her manner of presentation was thought to be insensitive and ahistorical. Arendt attempted, with some plausibility, to respond to these criticisms. I don't think Arendt was as insensitive or as mistaken as her strongest critics suggest. There is still, as Lipstadt acknowledges, a great deal of historical discussion about the means in which the Holocaust was carried out. Arendt's tone, however, was that of a detached academic, and it sometimes became provocative and unduly combatative.

The main issues raised with Arendt's book seem to me her understanding of the purpose of the trial and her view of the nature of the Holocaust and of Eichmann's crimes. The prosecutor, Hausner, wanted to use the trial to educate the world further about the nature of the Holocaust. He put on the stand 100 witnesses, most of whom were Holocaust survivors. Many of these witnesses offered testimony that had little to do with Eichmann or that was unreliable. The Israeli court frequently grew impatient with Hausner and criticised his conduct of the trial, describing it as "picture painting." For Arendt, the trial was a legal proceeding that should have been focused on a single question, the actions of the accused and his guilt or innocence of the charges. She found overwhelming evidence to convict Eichmann. In this, the Israeli court at the time agreed with her. Many more recent scholars, including Lipstadt praise Hausner's approach to the trial.

Arendt saw Eichmann's guilt as a "crime against humanity" directed against the Jewish people against the background of a long history of anti-Semitism. Her approach tended towards universalism. Lipstadt and Hausner, in contrast, see the Holocaust as the final and direct result of centuries of anti-Semitism and violence. She, of course, does not deny the universal character of the Holocaust. The different approaches are important but matters of emphasis. It is here that I think that Arendt and Lipstadt may both be right.

Arendt's book remains worth reading as a historical document and for the views, sometimes ingraciously expressed, about the nature of law, government, evil, and personal responsibility.

Robin Friedman

The trial of prominent Nazi Eichmann is interspersed with his personal history (he was the quintessential "loser") and goes deeply into the historical background. This book raises moral and political questions such as: what happens when the evildoer is not a vengeful or crazed lunatic but simply a petty bureaucrat "following orders"? Eichmann doesn't seem to have any personal hatred toward Jews but he fit into a system geared for just that. Was his trial justly conducted? (he was kidnapped and brought to be tried in Jerusalem by an Israeli court.) Arendt is critical and at times mocking of the show trial, but one thing is clear to her: "he must hang." The critics of her day often saw her as a self-hating Jew or Nazi sympathizer, which she's not. This book gives a lot, particularly in factual background, the common assumptions people had about what a war criminal should look and behave like, and the underlying difficulty in accepting evil that is committed, in the end, due to a lack in intelligence and imagination. These are real insights, and Arendt actually has an amazing ability to step outside and question incongruities within the accepted framework of the case. I'm torn between whether her polemical style sharpens her account (and makes her seem credible, since few are spared from irony) or makes the reader focus on the wrong thing. I don't know, because Arendt's sensitivity to ironies and paradoxes is the key to the whole book, and if at times playing the role of critic comes a trifle too easily (for example, towards the judges, non-German Jews, the new Israeli state) and to me it sometimes does, I think she gets a reprieve. Overall, a book worth reading.