Hannah Arendt was a German-American historian, philosopher, and political writer who had fled to America from Hitler’s Germany in 1941 after being imprisoned by the Gestapo. She attended the six weeks of the five month trial of Adolph Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1960.  Her reports were published in their entirety in “The New Yorker” in February, 1963, nine months after Eichmann was hanged, and it created a firestorm of controversy.  Detractors claimed she had trivialized the evil and murderous intent of Eichmann who had been a mid-level SS officer charged with the logistics of the Final Solution, i.e. he planned and coordinated the mass deportations of Jews to their murders from the eastern territories taken by the Wehrmacht.   They also claimed that Arendt had ‘blamed the victims’ in her attacks on Jewish leaders who had cooperated and collaborated with the Nazis to the extent of choosing those to be deported and furnishing the Reich with inventories of their properties and possessions.  Even now, 62 years after its publication, “Eichmann in Jerusalem” remains controversial though Arendt expressed regret for some of her language in the book before her death in 1975.

Eichmann was kidnapped by Mossad agents in Argentina and brought back to Israel to stand trial for his crimes against humanity and against the Jewish people.  Instead of encountering a monster capable of orchestrating the murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent people, Arendt found “a bourgeois sales clerk who found a meaningful role for himself and a sense of importance in the Nazi movement. She noted that his addiction to clichés and use of bureaucratic morality clouded his ability to question his actions, “to think”. This led her to set out her most debated dictum: “the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us – the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.” By stating that Eichmann did not think, she did not imply lack of conscious awareness of his actions, but by “thinking” she implied reflective rationality, that was lacking.”

The book represents extensive scholarship on Arendt’s part as she delved into the details of how Hitler focused on the Final Solution of producing a Jew-free Europe while his military and territorial ambitions gradually disintegrated in the face of Allied victories.  It’s not easy reading, especially the specifics of the killing squads in Ukraine and Russia as the German army moved east towards their eventual defeat at Leningard,  but it’s an invaluable resource for those interested in the step by step evolution of Hitler’s mad ideation and how a nation of 80 million was mobilized to carry it out.

Arendt’s criticism of the Jewish leaders who collaborted with the Germans with the goal of minimizing suffering was also severely attacked after the book’s publication.

More than 60 years later, Arendt’s scholarly work has stood the test of time and is no longer felt to be a book written by a self-hating Jew.  Rather, it’s an important contribution to the Holocaust literature.