Sadie Blackshear Unit 3 Assignment 1

Hannah Arendt — Banality of Evil

• Immensity of Eichmann’s crimes and the ordinariness of the man.
• Insisted he was a Zionist and seek understanding from his Jewish interrogators in Israel but was responsible for transporting millions
• Fervent, relentless dedication to the Nazi movement.
• Eichmann feared “to live a leaderless and difficult individual life,” in which “I would receive no directives from anybody.”
• He found in the Nazi movement a sense of importance.
• Desire to prove himself meaningful rendered him unable to think clearly
• https://hac.bard.edu/about/hannaharendt

Banal definition?

• “very ordinary and containing nothing that is interesting or important”
• https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/definition/english/banal

Criticism

• Psychologises – that is, avoids – the issue of evil as evil by defining it in the limited context of Eichmann’s humdrum existence
• “Absurd digression” from his evil deeds
• Historical errors; memoir is permeated with expressions of Nazi ideology, he accepted and espoused the idea of racial purity
• Why Eichmann attempted to destroy evidence of their war crimes if he was unaware 
• https://scroll.in/article/937128/why-hannah-arendts-famous-banality-of-evil-thesis-stands-the-risk-of-being-proved-banal-itself

Hannah Arendt — The Origins of Totalitarianism

• Culminates in a vivid account of the system of concentration and death camps that Arendt believed defined totalitarian rule
• Set of fundamental questions about how tyranny can arise and the dangerous forms of inhumanity to which it can lead
• Origins of totalitarianism, not explaining its “causes”
• Freedom is fragile, and when sensationalist demagogues speak, and others start following them, it is wise to pay attention
• “Grotesque disparity between cause and effect”
• Central condition of the rise of totalitarianism was a crisis in the functioning and the legitimacy of party politics and of parliamentary government
• https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/12/17/how-hannah-arendts-classic-work/

Adolf Eichmann

• Traveling salesman, lost job in depression
• Joined Nazi party April 1932 & rose in the hierarchy
• Joined the terrorist school of the Austrian Legion at Lechfeld, Germany
• Dealt with “Jewish Affairs” in the Security Service (???)
• Eichmann was to coordinate the details; thus, although it was not yet generally known that the “final solution” was mass execution, Eichmann had in effect been named chief executioner
• Organized the identification, assembly, and transportation of Jews from all over occupied Europe to their death sites
• Became POW to US, but escaped and fled to Argentina
• Israeli troops captured him in Argentina & smuggled him out of the country for trial (extradition is illegal)
• Ex post facto justice?
• He had continued to oversee the deportation of victims but that he sought to keep his distance from the actual killing (supposedly) after hearing the screams
• Manager who relied on a variety of strategies and tactics to secure scarce cattle cars and other equipment used to deport Jews at a time when equipment shortages threatened the German war effort. He repeatedly devised innovative solutions to overcome obstacles; more than “following orders”
• https://www.britannica.com/biography/Adolf-Eichmann