44 pages • 1 hour read
Hannah ArendtEichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1963A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “The House of Justice”
Arendt introduces readers to the courtroom by describing the inhabitants of the room’s four tiers: the three judges—Moshe Landau, Benjamin Halevy, and Yitzhak Raveh—on the top tier; the translators on the tier below them; “the glass booth of the accused and the witness box” on the next tier; and, on the bottom tier, the prosecutor, Attorney General Gideon Hausner, with four attorneys, and the counsel for the defense, Robert Servatius, with one assistant (3).
While the design of the auditorium lends itself in similarities to that of a theater, Arendt states that the judges, particularly Judge Landau, do their “very best” to keep the trial from turning into a “show trial,” which Arendt presumes is precisely what “David Ben-Gurion, Prime Minister of Israel, had in mind when he decided to have Eichmann kidnap[p]ed in Argentina and brought to the District Court of Jerusalem to stand trial for his role in the ‘final solution of the Jewish question’” (4-5).
Although Ben-Gurion does not attend any portion of the trial, he and the rest of the Israeli government is represented through the voice of Attorney General Hausner, head of the prosecution team. Arendt writes that even though “the trial never became a play […] the show Ben-Gurion had had in mind to begin with did take place” (9). According to Arendt, Ben-Gurion wants certain lessons to be conveyed “to Jews and Gentiles, to Israelis and Arabs, in short, to the whole world,” namely that it was not only Nazi Germany who “was responsible for the destruction of six million Jews” (9). Eichmann’s trial, to Arendt, is less an opportunity to present new evidence or to try all German offices in their role of the Holocaust but rather to merit the doings of one man and how those individual choices lead to the murder of millions, and then to sentence him accordingly.
Chapter 2 Summary: “The Accused”
On May 11, 1960, Eichmann is captured in Buenos Aires and eleven months later, on April 11, 1961, he stands accused on fifteen counts: “‘together with others he had committed crimes against the Jewish people, crimes against humanity, and war crimes during the whole period of the Nazi regime and especially during the period of the Second World War” (21). His lawyer, Servatius, argues that under the Nazi laws that existed at the time, his client has done nothing wrong, and that the accused crimes are “acts of state,” so Eichmann could not have ignored his “duty to obey” (21). Eichmann differs with his own defense in that he believes the indictment for murder is wrong. He claims that “he could be accused only of ‘aiding and abetting’ the annihilation of the Jews” (22), not for killing them. Eichmann further disagrees with the implications of conscience and motive in the charges leveled against him. He never denies having acted on purpose but claims that he acted only out of duty rather than any malice toward the Jews, and that his conscience could only have been bad “if he had not done what he had been ordered to [d]o” (25).
Eichmann had worked for several years as a traveling salesman for a vacuum oil company, but when he is transferred to another city against his will, he decides to join the National Socialist Party and enters the S.S. in April of 1932. Having never read Mein Kampf before or become familiar with any details of the Party’s program, Eichmann does not join as a matter of conviction but rather as an opportunity to advance:
From a humdrum life without significance and consequence the wind had blown him into History, as he understood it, namely, into a Movement that always kept moving and in which somebody like him […] could start from scratch and still make a career (33).
Eichmann goes on to apply for a post in Heinrich Himmler’s Security Service Sicherheitsdienst (S.D.) in 1934 and is granted the position.
Chapter 3 Summary: “An Expert on the Jewish Question”
When Eichmann joins the S.D. in 1934, it is only in its second year of service. Designed by Himmler to spy on Party members and then headed by Reinhardt Heydrich, the organization becomes the “information and research center for the Secret State Police, or Gestapo” (36). Eichmann thinks he is joining the Reich Security Service, and since “nobody set [him] right,” he reluctantly takes a lower position in the Information Department and begins to work his way up the organizational ladder (36).
Eichmann’s mistake bears some weight on his trial because the question becomes, did he volunteer for his job, or was he drafted? After a few months filing information about Freemasonry, Eichmann is assigned to a department concerning the Jews, which is “the real beginning of the career which was to end in the Jerusalem court” (37). Beginning in 1933, the Nazi regime employs strategies to render the Jews stateless, excluding them from holding both civil positions and public office, thus creating a “complete separation from the rest of the population […] in a matter of weeks or months” (39).
By 1939, Eichmann receives his first assignment in Vienna: to force “all Jews, regardless of their desires and regardless of their citizenship” to emigrate (43). Eichmann excels in his position due to his organizational skills and his ability to negotiate with the Jewish functionaries. Within eighteen months, Austria expels one hundred and fifty thousand Jews (44). Eichmann views the orchestration of these forced emigrations as “pulling together” with the Jewish functionaries so that he could “help them” fulfill their “desire” to emigrate (48). It is Eichmann’s remembrance of these turns in his career that create “considerable difficulty” for the court, challenging those prosecuting, defending, and judging him to establish his conscience or intent (54).
Chapters 1-3 Analysis
In her opening three chapters, Arendt sets the stage, and the tone, for the duration of the trial and its inevitable outcome, preparing readers to analyze not only the character of one individual, Eichmann, but the character of the war and all its players. From the start, Arendt admits that no one man can be punishable for the deaths of millions of Jews, but it is important for this trial, in her opinion, to identify the specific actions of the individual that were made possible by the actions of the whole, and then stress the need for Eichmann to be punished accordingly. Since the statute of limitations wiped out all offenses other than first-degree murder by May of 1960, “fantastically lenient sentences” had been “meted out to the accused” (15). Several “members of the so-called Eichmann Commando” had been living openly, enjoying gainful employment, some even holding office, despite the fact that “evidence against them had been published in Germany years before, in books and magazine articles, [yet] not one of them had found it necessary to live under an assumed name” (14).
Arendt’s technique of bringing to the reader’s attention these extenuating circumstances challenges them to judge Eichmann as well as his surrounding influences on additional evidence not necessarily provided in the court proceedings. Arendt interjects Eichmann’s testimony with parenthetical clarifications or directly opposing information so that Eichmann is never permitted to stand on his own words, leaving readers with handfuls of information to arrive at their own conclusions, however influenced by Arendt’s sometimes sarcastic tone. Arendt tows the line between the need for Eichmann to be held accountable for his individual actions and questioning how much Eichmann could have been capable of doing on his own, given his lack of malicious motivation. Regardless of intent, Eichmann, through organization and negotiation, becomes “an expert on the Jewish question” (36) when he successfully expels nearly one hundred and fifty thousand Jews from Austria. His first assignment of many, Arendt’s emphasis on Eichmann’s organizational skills and ability to negotiate show that Eichmann’s success comes from rather ordinary abilities, a feature almost disappointing when the expectation is a terror-inspiring monster.
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