( Note to readers: Even by my own standards, this is a lengthy essay. Hannah Arendt is one of my favorite thinkers. The events of the last few months, since the general election in the US, led to me read and think again about Arendt’s views on democracy, totalitarianism, and the role of the individual in it. I apologize for the length, but I do hope, you will find the story and the subject interesting enough to pursue your own analysis of these ideas if you wish to. )
The eleventh of May 1960 was a pleasant fall evening in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The jacaranda flowers were beginning to bloom, and the air fragrant with the sweetness of the season. A Middle-aged man who called himself Ricardo Klement – bald, thin, a pointed nose, with a slight stoop, got down from the city bus at 14 Garibaldi Street to walk the rest of the distance to his home nearby. He was returning from work as usual from the nearby Mercedes Benz factory, and this bus trip and the walk back home was a routine he meticulously adhered to, no matter what. This particular day, he missed his usual bus and got into the next one, which got him to his destination half an hour late. It was already dark, and Garibaldi Street was empty. As Ricardo was pulling out his torchlight, a van silently sped past, and abruptly stopped a few meters ahead of him. The back door of the van opened, and a young man dressed in black jumped out and addressed Ricardo with these three Spanish words — the only ones the stranger knew in the language: “Un momentito, Señor.” meaning “one-moment señor”. Ricardo brief acknowledged with a nod, and before he could ask anything else, two more young men emerged from the darkness of the van, took hold of Ricardo, quickly slipped a black mask over his head amidst the muffled sounds of struggle emerging from the shocked victim, handcuffed and shoved him unceremoniously into the van. The van then disappeared into the night.
What happened that day in the darkness of the Buenos aires night was a kidnapping, an abduction by the Israeli intelligence — the Mossad, of one of the most wanted men for the crimes committed against the Jews during the Nazi German era. The man abducted, Ricardo Klement, was the assumed name of Adolf Eichmann – the feared bureaucrat in the Hitlerian hierarchy who orchestrated the ground-level logistical modalities of the “Jewish solution” of the Third Reich, which meant, literally, the annihilation of millions of jews. Though Eichmann was way down the command chain, and orders came from “above”, it was his meticulous planning and arrangement that led to the deportation of the jews in the right numbers and in cramped railways carriages to their final destination — the gas chambers at Auschwitz, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Dachau. Eichmann had mysteriously escaped capture after the allied forces ended the war in 1946 and had remained incognito for several years, moving from one country to another, disguising his true identity, and aided generously helped by Nazi sympathizers in Italy, before settling down in Argentina in 1950. His family followed him a few years later.
The Nuremberg trials held in 1946, just after the war, under the auspices of the USA, England, and France, was an international effort at making the Germans reckon for the wartime crimes. All the top Nazi officials, including the likes of Goebel, were brought to trial and justice swiftly served. However, the newly found state of Israel, established in 1948 was not satisfied. They wanted a big-time war criminal to be brought to trial on the soil of Jerusalem to mete out recompense for the atrocities done to the Jews. The killers of the Jews must be tried in the land of the Jews was the cry of the people of Palestine, and also the policy of Ben Gurion, the prime minister and the founding father of Israel. For years, the Israeli government had been hotly and clandestinely pursuing the Nazis who escaped capture after the war and scattered themselves across the globe in various disguises. They weren’t easy to spot, because most of them were simply undistinguishable in any manner — just as Eichmann was. At this distance, It is chilling to think that an ordinary man who had no capacity for anything deep or substantial, was involved in the massacre of millions. It was by sheer luck that Eichmann’s cover was revealed. A blind Jewish refugee’s daughter, Sylvia, living in Buenos Aires at that time and coincidentally dating Eichmann’s son, uncovered Eichmann’s Nazi identity and wrote to Germany about his whereabouts. Germany, by that time, had had enough of the wartime burdens, and as a national policy wished to sever completely of their Nazi past. Therefore, Judge Fritz Bauer, who got this information from Sylvia, quietly passed it on to Israel for them to act if they wanted to. This was the prized war criminal Israel was waiting for the last fifteen years. Bringing Eichmann to trial in Jerusalem would send a signal to the world, and could possibly attempt to assuage the inconsolable grief of those who had lost entire families in the purge. Israelis knew the international community would never consent, allow or encourage a war trial on Jewish soil, and the only way Israel could hold one was by surreptitiously kidnapping the man, and bringing him to the Jewish homeland, and persecuting him. The three men — captains in the Israeli intelligence service – who kidnapped Eichmann was stalking him for months, understanding his routine, his movements, before they finally took him. The stage was now set for a trial that would grab international attention and critique.
The trial of Eichmann began nearly a year later in the summer of 1961, before a special tribunal of the Jerusalem district court. It was the first Nazi trial to be televised for a global audience. Until then, the war crimes were only known by the written word, and media reports. The world hadn’t directly heard from, or seen an actual Nazi commander in flesh and blood held accountable for their crimes. The Nuremberg trials in 1946 were held within a secluded and secured castle, and much too quickly for anyone to take notice, but this one was deliberately staged to be different. Israel wanted the world to see and hear what Nazi Germany had done to their people, and also prove a point that Israel as a country may be young, but its people are old and wise and quite capable of handling justice on their own terms.
The world media congregated at Jerusalem to report the trial first-hand. Newspapers and television media sent their best reporters for this job, after all, this may be the only time the general public will see the crimes through the eyes of the victims themselves. So when the New Yorker received a letter from Hannah Arendt, the famous philosopher and political thinker, that she wished to travel to Jerusalem to cover the Eichmann trial for the magazine, and publish a book perhaps later on — the editorial board was euphoric and equally concerned as well. There was never a doubt about Arendt’s credentials. Her magnum opus “The origins of Totalitarianism” published in 1951, had become a classic, exploring threadbare the social and political foundations of authoritarian regimes in Western civilization. Arendt herself was a Jew who escaped Nazism, and fled to the US, and would remain stateless for fifteen years before being granted citizenship in the USA. She was a tenured and acclaimed professor at several American universities, and widely considered one of the top thinkers of the West. The editorial board at the New Yorker was a little hesitant because she was a Jew, and feared ( given the high quality of journalism in the New Yorker magazine) that her reporting may not be objective enough. Despite these reservations, Hannah Arendt was given permission to cover the trial.
For Arendt, the trial was a homecoming and an opportunity to understand Eichmann’s point of view. She was a philosopher first, a writer next; therefore, her aim in attending the trial was to see first-hand the responses of Eichmann and observe his personality. She was curious to see what kind of man could systematically send nearly five million Jews to the gas chambers. Was Eichmann a monster? Was he an anti-semite? Did he believe in Nazi propaganda? Was he going to defend himself by blaming someone else? Was he going to provide a rationale for his actions? What exactly, motivated the man to perform his gruesome charter with impunity? The philosophical temper of Arendt was looking for deeper answers to these questions, and not the sensational details of a staged and televised trial on the victims’ soil. In Arendt’s view, Eichmann should be tried for his war crimes only, and not for his anti-semitism. She knew Israel craved to bring the world’s attention to the fact, that everyone in the Nazi machinery was anti-jew, and they should be tried for that alone, and not anything else. Arendt wanted to see for herself whether Eichmann was even capable of holding anti-semitic views, and if not, what pushed him to do what he did.
Day in and Day out, Jewish prosecutors piled on to Eichmann with evidence, eye-witness accounts, and survivor testimonies — many of them turning hysterical and fainting in the courtroom. Sitting in the glass cage, Eichmann responded with monosyllables to most questions. He repeatedly said he had no deep-felt ideologies or beliefs, and that he was a cog in the huge wheel, merely carrying out orders in a social structure where choice to act was non-existent. As Arendt listened and watch this puny man stutter and squirm in his seat, she realized with increasing clarity that while Eichmann should pay for what he did, he did not, in the least look like a man with the gumption and courage required to commit those horrendous crimes. He was a passive, unintelligent, less than an average individual with no capacity to think clearly and reflectively. He was a common man, asked to do a job in a regime that broached no resistance. It didn’t matter what Eichmann believed in or did not believe in. In a totalitarian regime, evil takes the form of innocence, and every action is justified because it is an order coming from outside and above, and therefore to be followed without deviation and thinking. Arendt called this phenomenon “the banality of evil” — a very chilling phrase, which means that evil itself had lost its novelty and acted through very ordinary means. In her dispatches, she wrote that Eichmann did not act out of anti-Semitism, but just out of a sense of duty, an order to be executed. Was Eichmann cognizant of the implications of his actions? Yes, he was, again, only to the extent that he carried out policies handed over to him, and he did not have to care about the implementation of those policies that led to serious life and death consequences for others. Was there remorse? No. when an action is performed without passing through the lens of individual reasoning, then no moral remorse attaches to the act. The reason soldiers on the battlefield often don’t feel remorse about killing another is because they don’t have to reason about it. The reasoning is done for them from the top, the soldiers merely believe, obey, and kill. But those soldiers who are sensitive and start thinking about their acts, post their tenure in the military, end up with PTSD and other syndromes. Anyway, in short, what Arendt witnessed was a very strange phenomenon that can occur in any body-politic where men and women lose their ability to think, reason and act, and instead, choose to blindly obey orders. What happened on Capitol Hill in the US on the 6th of Jan 2020 is also an illustration of this point.
The dispatches from Hannah Arendt, published in the New Yorker outraged the Jews both in Israel and America and surprised the rest of the world with her analysis of the Eichmann trial. Within the Jews, there was a sense she was betraying her own tribe by acquitting Eichmann of anti-semitism. Many of her colleagues alienated themselves from her, without trying to understand the reason for her point of view. It seemed that the agony and the hurt of the Jewish Holocaust ran too deep to be rationalized. The new Yorker stood its ground and published Arendt’s essays without much editing. They understood that by sending Arendt to cover the trial, they had given her the freedom to weigh what she saw and heard on her own terms, and write about it. There was no point sending a philosopher to cover a global event, and not be prepared to hear original opinions. Arendt’s essays were published as a book with the haunting, and not very surprising title “The banality of evil”, and the book is is widely considered one of her finest works of incisive thinking and bold conclusions.
During the last few months, I re-read both the “origins of totalitarianism” ( which is a very heavy read) and the “Banality of Evil “. It is amazing how books and ideas evolve with age and wisdom. Arendt’s thinking is still relevant to our modern times, and she touches a very raw nerve about man’s place in a political system — especially those systems that clothe themselves with all good intentions and pursue diametrically opposite goals. In the last few years, we have that even countries like the USA, where democratic institutions have traditionally remained strong and stable despite rude shocks and rumblings, can be shaken. All it takes is one leader who can flame the embers of primeval and dormant instincts, to quickly change the tide, and open the gates for a majority to abandon reason, and act at the bidding of a demagogic leader. Of the two books, I recommend Arendt’s The Banality of evil. In many ways, this is an important book for our times.
For those interested in Eichmann’s arrest and the subsequent trial, I recommend two movies: “operation finale” and the “Eichmann show”. They should be available either on prime or Netflix. To understand Hannah Arendt’s role in the trials, and the personality of the great philosopher herself, there is no better film than that of the German filmmaker Margarethe von Trotta’s ” Hannah Arendt” in which the brilliant German actor Barbara Sukowa plays the role of Arendt. You may not find this movie on the normal streaming channels, I am not sure, but if you can lay your hands on it anywhere else, it is a must-see. Barbara Sukowa brings a profound understanding of the philosopher to her magnificent performance on screen.
God bless…
yours in mortality,
Bala