Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil Book

It is hard to know what to say about this book. The subtitle is pretty well right: the banality of evil. Eichmann comes across as a complete fool, utterly lacking in any ability to see things from the perspective of the other. As Arendt says at one point, the idea that he could sit chatting to a German Jew about how unfair it was that he never received a promotion for his work in exterminating the Jews pretty much sums up the man.

It seems Eichmann felt he was doing his best not only for his masters, but also for the Jews too. This was the part I found most surprising. He knew the Jews were being exterminated, that this was more or less inevitable, and so given this inevitability the 'moral' thing to do was to make the whole process as clean and 'painless' as possible. I kept thinking of Bauman talking about the holocaust as a huge exercise in 'hygiene'. There really is no part of this that doesn't quickly sink into a horrible kind of absurdity.

The problem with the holocaust is the sheer scale of it makes trying to hold it in your head comparable to trying to understand the universe, you can feel yourself sinking into insanity. And it is not just the whole 'so many!' problem, although, obviously, it is that as well, but mingled with that is the remarkable level of planning involved, to which Eichmann was clearly dedicated and hardworking to a fault. The problem this book raises isn't the reassuring 'you would need to be a monster' - because how much better the world would be if that were true. It isn't even the 'we would all be Eichmann if placed in similar circumstances'. That, in fact, simply and demonstrably isn't the case. We have endless examples of people who actively chose not to be Eichmann, people who knowingly paid for not being Eichmann with their lives, and did so as an active choice. The thing that this book makes terribly clear is that simple bureaucratic processes can be used to remarkable effect in normalising the unthinkable - in fact, you can commit genocide on an unprecedented scale if you have people worrying about train timetables and the supply of gas rather than where the trains will go and what the gas is for. There was an insanely horrible part of this where she says that many Germans would have preferred suicide to defeat, and that some may well have felt those damn Jews had used up all of the gas. The world really can be endlessly perverse in the most unspeakable of ways.

A particularly interesting part of the book was the discussion of why the Nazis dealt with the Zionists. All Jews were bad, but at least the Zionists had some sense of national feeling. I'd never thought of the monstrous consistency that might lie at the heart of nationalism.

And yet, this book left me feeling terribly uneasy. Once Eichmann was in Israel it was clear he was going to die - for as much as Israel may not have wanted this to be seen as a show trial, clearly this was a story with only one possible ending. The concern I had was that this guy really couldn't be called a 'mastermind' in any sense that doesn't inspire the bitterest of ironic laughs. He was, in some ways, proof that the Nazis recognising that to promote him beyond where he was would only result in an exemplar case of the Peter Principle. He was highly effective at organising logistics, but his motivation was not genocide or hatred of the Jews - I dread to say it, but that would at least make sense. Instead he was just some guy pitifully obsessed with following orders in the hope of getting a promotion, seeking to impress his superiors and completely obsessed with efficiency. I certainly cannot bring myself to be sorry for his fate, but then neither can I feel the world is all that much better without him. He was a fool, a terrifying fool doing his job.

And that fact is the most terrifying of all about this book, I fear.