Visualizing Atrocity: Arendt, Evil, and the Optics of Thoughtlessness

1 Arendt and the Trial of Adolf Eichmann: Contextualizing the Debate

23 1 Arendt and the Trial of Adolf Eichmann Contextualizing the Debate Evil in its total banality: this is what Hannah Arendt claimed to have seen in the figure of Adolf Eichmann when she observed him in an Israeli court in 1961. Eichmann was considered a core member of the Nazi leadership and would have undoubtedly been tried at Nuremberg in 1946 alongside Göring, Speer, and Hess among others for war crimes had he not fled Europe following the collapse of Germany’s Third Reich. He was living in relative obscurity in Argentina when he was captured by the Israeli Secret Service and clandestinely returned to Jerusalem to stand trial for his central role in the genocide of European Jewry. Initially, at least, Eichmann was one of only a handful of officials in the Nazi SS whose sole job it was to implement or make operational the regime’s various political and physical solutions for what it identified as its Jewish problem. Among other things, this entailed organizing the forced emigration and so-called resettlement of Jewish communities throughout (eastern) Europe and later, as the war progressed, overseeing their transport first to the ghettos and then to the camps where, as it is known, large numbers were systematically killed. While Eichmann never denied his role in helping solve Germany’s Jewish problem—he claimed to have been an “expert” in Jewish affairs, a pro-Zionist no less, and an idealist—he stressed repeatedly that he harbored no ill-will towards the Jews and acted not from base motives but out of a sense of responsibility and duty and with an eye towards personal advancement. In his view, the annihilation of the Jews was “one of the greatest crimes in the history of humanity,” but a crime in which he did not participate directly. He had served the regime only as a midlevel bureaucrat on the margins of power, someone who sat at his desk and did his work, evacuating and deporting rather than killing. And although his account was not entirely accurate, Eichmann’s rendering of his Nazi past was, in Arendt’s view, nevertheless somewhere in the general vicinity of truth: “Technically and organizationally, Eichmann’s position was not very high; his post turned out to be such an important one only because the Jewish question, for purely ideological reasons, acquired a greater importance with every day and week and month of the war, until in the years of defeat—from 1943 on—it had grown to fantastic proportions.” Not surprisingly, the prosecution in Jerusalem advanced a somewhat different view of Eichmann’s position in the Nazi hierarchy and role in the genocide 24 Arendt and the Trial of Adolf Eichmann of European Jewry. Indeed, Gideon Hausner, Israel’s attorney general at the time and lead prosecutor in the case against Eichmann, maintained that it was Eichmann and Eichmann alone whose business had been the destruction of the Jewish people in its entirety. He had been the architect of Nazi terror against the Jews and, in Hausner’s words, “the central pillar of the whole wicked system ”—personally selecting the sites of the gas chambers, choosing the kind of poisoned gas that was to be used in these chambers, and specifying the number of people to be killed in them daily.1 And while Eichmann may have performed his “bloody craft” from the security of his desk in Berlin—in this Hausner echoed Arendt’s claim that Eichmann represented a new kind of criminal—in the end, the prosecution settled on constructing a somewhat more predictable, conventional, and politically more useful portrait of the former Nazi official. Sitting in a bulletproof glass enclosure—designed to protect the accused from possible attack while in court—Eichmann emerged from mounds of documents and weeks of oral testimony by survivors as a sadistic, demonic figure Figure 1.1. Eichmann in Court, 1961. Courtesy of Yad Vashem Photo Archive, Jerusalem, Israel. 25 Arendt and the Trial of Adolf Eichmann even while, it should be said, most of those who testified had no direct dealings with the man and were brought to the stand by the prosecution to humanize the larger historical picture of Nazi atrocity.2 In the view of the prosecution, he was a consummate liar and “savage sociopath whose abominations made the crimes of Genghis Khan, Attila, or Ivan the Terrible . . . pale in significance.”3 Where Arendt saw...