Banality of Evil and Adolf Eichmann Essay

In The Nazi Hunters: How a Team of Spies and Survivors Captured the World’s Most Notorious Nazi, Neal Bascomb writes about Adolf Eichmann: a Lieutenant Colonel of the Nazi Security Service, husband to Vera Eichmann, a father to four boys, responsible for the slaughter of five million Jews, and the most notorious Nazi who escaped after World War II. A total of eighteen chapters: Chapter one provides background information on Adolf Eichmann and carrying out the plan to get rid of all Jews and on Auschwitz survivor, Zeev Sapir, chapters two through seventeen describes the process and planning of capturing Eichmann by the Nazi Hunters, and chapter eighteen describe the trial of Eichmann.

The Eichmann trial reveals a lot about the strengths and limitations of the “the trial” to achieve justice in such cases. The reason of a trial is to render justice; even the ethical of underlying motives, as mentioned in the novel, “the making of a record of the Hitler regime which the withstand the test of history… Nuremburg Trials, can only detract the laws main business: to weigh the charges brought against the accused, to render judgement, and to mete out due punishment” (253). The judgement in the Eichmann case, whose first two sections had been written in respond to the better cause idea as it was changed into expanded both inside and outside the out room, could not have been clearer in this respect. As proven in the novel, it states

In her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt uses the life and trial of Adolf Eichmann to explore man's responsibility for evils committed under orders or as a result of the law. Due to the fact that she believed that Eichmann was neither anti-Semitic, nor a psychopath, Arendt was widely criticized for treating Eichmann too sympathetically. Still, her work on the Eichmann trial is among the most respected works on the issue to date.

Germany occupied 16 countries at this time. This made Eichmann one of the most powerful men in the Third Reich. His office was the headquarters for creating all ghettos, transportation , death camps, and killing techniques of the Jews [ (Wistrich) ]. At the beginning of World War II, many SS officials began murdering aristocracy, professionals, clergy, political commissars, suspected saboteurs, Jewish males and anyone deemed a security threat (The History Place). This marked the beginning of the senseless killing of European Jewry.

In The Perils of Obedience, Stanley Milgram introduces us to his experimental studies on the conflict between one’s own conscience and obedience to authority. From these experiments, Milgram discovered that a lot of people will obey a figure in authority; irrespective of the task given - even if it goes against their own moral belief and values. Milgram’s decision to conduct these experiments was to investigate the role of Adolf Eichmann (who played a major part in the Holocaust) and ascertain if his actions were based on the fact that he was just following orders; as most Germans accused of being guilty for war crimes commonly explained that they were only being obedient to persons in higher authority.

Synopsis – Hitler’s Willing Executioners is a work that may change our understanding of the Holocaust and of Germany during the Nazi period. Daniel Goldhagen has revisited a question that history has come to treat as settled, and his researches have led him to the inescapable conclusion that none of the established answers holds true. Drawing on materials either unexplored or neglected by previous scholars, Goldhagen presents new evidence to show that many beliefs about the killers are fallacies. They were not primarily SS men or Nazi Party members, but perfectly ordinary Germans from all walks of life, men who brutalized and murdered Jews both willingly and zealously. “They acted as they did because of

‘Is Eichmann a rotten, soiled and evil man, and were his motivations boring, mundane and obvious?’ Why did Eichmann kill so many Jews if he ‘supposedly’ no real hate or motivation to do it?

Hannah Arendt’s essay suggests she believes that the motives steered by Adolf Eichmann to commit monstrous acts, where “once banal to all human” ( Arendt, Cp). Eichmann was viewed as a demonic monster for his immoral and corrupted mind. Banal evil shares similarities with Radical evil, such that they can both result in extraordinary evil. Unlike radical evil, banal evil can be committed by ordinary people. Eichmann lacked the ability to reflect and he seemed to think in terms of clichés as his goal was to follow Hitler’s orders to undo God’s creation and complete his job successfully and

Lets take for example Hannah Arendt’s situation when she was listening in on Eichmann’s testimony and wrote her essay: Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. One thing Arendt certainly did not mean was that evil had become ordinary, or that Eichmann and his Nazi cohorts had committed an unexceptional crime. She thought the crime was exceptional, if not

The mocking tone of Hannah Arendt, which she was condemned for, encompasses not a lack of sympathy for the events but instead a commentary on the people that took part on the events. Such phrases as "but, God knows…", "must have been tempted not to…", and "which most people recognize…" demonstrate the mocking tone, that Arendt takes on for most of the book. As in the rest of the book she uses a mocking tone to display the stupidity of Eichmann, here she uses it to paint the perpetrators not as monsters but lesser beings. Mocking their decisions to follow the plans of the Third Reich, serves to emphasize the stupidity. On the contrary a somber tone criticizing the people and society, would portray these people as monsters.

Hannah Arendt is a German Jewish philosopher, born in 1906 and died in 1975. She studied philosophy with Martin Heidegger as Professor. Her works deal with the nature of power and political subjects such as democracy, authority, and totalitarianism. She flew away to France in 1933, when Adolf Hitler became Chancellor in Germany. She flew away from Europe to the United States after escaping from the concentration camp of Gurs. She became a Professor in New York city, in which she became an active member of the German Jewish community. In 1963, she was sent to Jerusalem to report on Eichmann’s trial by The New Yorker. Hannah Arendt’s thoughts on Eichmann’s trial were expected to be harsh, considering the philosopher’s roots. However, her

It is very disturbing or scary to me that Eichmann felt compelled to blindly follow orders, even though he new what he was doing was wrong, or that Eichmann did not know what he was doing was wrong because he was brainwashed to believe it was justified. As to blindly following orders, it calls into question what we are teaching. From an early age it is taught that part of respect for trusted authority figures, is to do as you are told. From childhood, children are taught to obey parents, grandparents, adult aunts and uncles, teachers, and all adult authority figures—children believe that although it may be okay to at times question an adult authority figure, it is not okay to walk away or refuse to do what they have been asked to do. As

conducting his research. After leaving the United States Army in 1947, Wiesenthal and other volunteers opened the Jewish Historical Documentation Centre, which assisted with the evidence for war crime trials. Yet, as the Cold War began, the association collapsed. All of the documents and research evidence were given away, except for one important document about Adolf Eichmann, who was the one that supervised the “Final Solution” technique during the war. Eichmann was never heard of after the war and he remained incognito. At last, in 1959, Germany informed that Eichmann was in Buenos Aires, and was found guilty for mass destruction of the Jews. This brought more and more successes to Wiesenthal. He later organized another Jewish Documentation Centre and hunted war criminals such as Karl Silberbauer, who arrested an innocent Jewish girl.

One of the oldest dilemmas in philosophy is also one of the greatest threats to Christian theology. The problem of evil simultaneously perplexes the world’s greatest minds and yet remains palpably close to the hearts of the most common people. If God is good, then why is there evil? The following essay describes the problem of evil in relation to God, examines Christian responses to the problem, and concludes the existence of God and the existence of evil are fully compatible.

While studying Nazi war criminals in the World War II, Hannah Arendt discovered that Adolf Eichmann, who was sentenced to death for devising egregious methods of massive Jews execution, was in fact a passive receptor of authoritative orders from the Nazi regime. She proclaimed the concept of “banality of evil”, noting that “There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking in itself is dangerous”. Such fickle and even potentially dangerous orientation of humanity is well demonstrated in An Essay on Man, where Alexander Pope illustrates the constantly errant and confused nature of human. Similarly, in Miguel Cervantes’s Don Quixote, the foolish protagonist Don Quixote shows how men often fail to notice absurdity and errors in certain actions. Here,