A reading from The 60s: The Story of a Decade (The New Yorker) – HANNAH ARENDT on anti-Semitism & lessons gleaned from the trial of Adolf Eichmann 
by Bill Jones

Earlier this week, I published a blog post featuring a passage from a James Baldwin essay taken from the book, The 60s: The Story of a Decade, published in 2016. All essays in the book were published in The New Yorker magazine during the 1960s.

In that post, I promised further blog posts based on other essays in the book. Here’s the first entry in fulfillment of that promise: Eichmann in Jerusalem, by Hannah Arendt, published in the February 15, 1963, issue of The New Yorker, in which she shares her observations of the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Eichmann had been a major figure in executing Adolf Hitler’s orders, culminating in the murder of six million Jewish people in the Holocaust. In 1960, he was captured in Argentina by Israeli agents and brought to Israel to stand trial. He was charged with fifteen counts of violating the Nazis and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law. At the conclusion of a publicly televised trial (I remember watching portions of it, as a 10-year-old boy, with my parents) – lasting from April 11 to August 15, 1961 – that captured the attention of people around the world, Eichmann was convicted on all fifteen counts. He was hanged on June 1, 1962.

Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) was a political historian and philosopher. She was born in Germany to a Jewish family. In 1933, she was arrested by the Gestapo for conducting research into anti-Semitism. When she was released, she fled Germany and was ultimately stripped of her German citizenship in 1937. In 1941, after Germany invaded France, she was detained by the French as an alien but escaped and was able to flee to the United States, where she settled in New York. By 1950, she had become an American citizen. In 1951, she published her first book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, which established her reputation as a major political thinker and writer.

In 1961, she covered the Eichmann trial for The New Yorker, and in 1963 she published her report in a book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. This essay is excerpted from her book. As with the previous Baldwin post, I am sharing only a brief portion of Arendt’s essay here. (Bolding is my own.)

Thanks to Hitler, anti-Semitism has been discredited, perhaps not forever, but certainly for the time being, and this is not because the Jews have become more popular all of a sudden, but because not only [Israeli Prime Minister David] Ben – Gurion but most people have ‘realized that in our day the gas chamber and the soap factory are what anti-Semitism may lead to.’ Equally superfluous was the lesson to the Jews in the Diaspora, who hardly needed a great catastrophe in which a third of their people perished to be convinced of the world’s hostility. Not only has their conviction of the eternal and ubiquitous nature of anti-Semitism been the most potent ideological factor in the Zionist involvement since the Dreyfus Affair; it must also have been the cause of the otherwise inexplicable readiness of the German-Jewish community to negotiate with the Nazi authorities during the early stages of the regime. This conviction produced a fatal inability to distinguish between friend and foe; the German Jews underestimated their enemies, because they somehow thought that all Gentiles were alike.

“The contrast between Israeli heroism and the submissive weakness with which Jews went to their death – arriving on time at the transportation points, walking under their own power to the places of execution, digging their own graves, undressing and making neat piles of their clothing, and lying down side-by-side to be shot – seemed a telling point, and the prosecutor, asking witness after witness, ‘Why did you not protest?,’ ‘Why did you board the train?,’ ‘Fifteen thousand people were standing there and hundreds of guards facing you – why didn’t you revolt and charge and attack these guards?,’ harped on it for all it was worth. But the sad truth of the matter is that the point was ill taken, for no non-Jewish group or non-Jewish people had behaved differently. Sixteen years ago, while still under the direct impact of the events, a former French inmate of Buchenwald, David Rousset, described, in Les Jours de Notre Mort, the logic that obtained in all concentration camps: ‘The triumph of the S.S. demands that the tortured victim allow himself to be led to the noose without protesting, that he renounce and abandon himself to the point of ceasing to affirm his identity. And it is not for nothing. It is not gratuitously, out of sheer sadism, that the S.S. men desire his defeat. They know that the system which succeeds in destroying its victim before he mounts the scaffold . . . is incomparably the best for keeping a whole people in slavery. In submission. Nothing is more terrible than these processions of human beings going like dummies to their death.’ The court received no answer to this cruel and silly question, but one could easily have found an answer had he permitted his imagination to dwell for a few minutes on the fate of those Dutch Jews who in 1941, in the old Jewish quarter of Amsterdam, dared to attack a German security police detachment. Four hundred and thirty Jews were arrested in reprisal, and they were literally tortured to death, being sent first to Buchenwald and then to the Austrian camp of Mauthausen. Month after month, they died a thousand deaths, and every single one of them would have envied his brethren in Auschwitz had he known about them. There exist many things considerably worse than death, and the S.S. saw to it that none of them was ever very far from the mind and imagination of their victims.

“. . . it was history that, as far as the prosecution was concerned, stood at the center of the trial. ‘It is not an individual that is in the dock at this historic trial, and not the Nazi regime alone,’ Ben-Gurion said, ‘but anti-Semitism throughout history.’ The tone set by Ben-Gurion was faithfully followed by [prosecuting attorney and Israeli Attorney General Gideon] Hausner. He began his opening address (which lasted through three sessions) with Pharaoh in Egypt and Haman’s decree ‘to destroy, to slay, and to cause them (the Jews) to perish.’ He then proceeded to quote from Ezekiel‘s words ‘And when I passed by thee, and saw thee polluted in thine own blood, I said unto thee: “In thy blood, live!,”’ explaining that they must be understood as ‘the imperative that has confronted this nation ever since its first appearance on the stage of history.’ It was bad history and cheap rhetoric; worse, it was clearly at cross-purposes with putting Eichmann on trial at all, since it suggested that perhaps he was only an innocent executor of some mysteriously foreordained destiny, or even, for that matter, of anti-Semitism, which had been necessary to blaze the trail of ‘the bloodstained road traveled by this people’ to fulfill its destiny. . . .

“Despite the intentions of Ben–Gurion and the efforts of the prosecution, there remained an individual in the dock, a person of flesh and blood, and even if Ben–Gurion, as he claimed, did not ‘care what verdict is delivered against Eichmann,’ it was undeniably the sole task of the Jerusalem court to deliver one.”