Hannah Arendt and the ‘Banality of Evil’

The period from 1900 to the 1950s was, in terms of war and mortality, the most violent period of any in recorded human history. As a consequence of the First World War, 18 million people died. The Second World War brought about the deaths of 60 million. Then there was the great flu pandemic which swept the world in 1918, striking a population already weakened by war and famine—another 30 million dead. Political policies contributed directly to famine and mass mortality—under Lenin’s economic policies, 6 million starved to death in Russia, and under Stalin, more than 40 million died either of famine or as a direct result of brutal internment in the gulags. Any philosopher who lived through the political events of the first half of the twentieth century must have been profoundly influenced by them.

Hannah Arendt was born in Hanover, Germany, in 1906. Her family moved to Berlin, where her childhood was scarred by grief and terror. When she was only seven, her father died of dementia caused by syphilis. She witnessed battles between the Russian and German armies near their home. In 1922 she began studying classics and theology at Berlin University, but then moved to Marburg University, one of Germany’s oldest and most prestigious universities, where she met the academic Martin Heidegger.

Heidegger was and still is a leading figure in philosophy, but a deeply controversial one. Just after he completed his doctorate in philosophy, the First World War began and he served the last ten months of the war on the Western Front. In 1926 he published Being and Time, widely heralded as a seminal work in twentieth-century philosophy. When Arendt first heard he would be her lecturer, she recalled: “Little more than a name was known, but the name made its way through all of Germany like the rumour of a secret king.” Heidegger was married, but that did not prevent an intimate relationship flourishing between him and his student.

In May 1933, Heidegger joined the Nazi party, and as newly appointed university rector, he delivered his inaugural address on “The Self-Assertion of the German University”. That speech has often been interpreted as an expression of his support for Hitler’s regime. Later in the same year he left no room for doubt where his political sympathies lay, giving numerous speeches supporting the Nazi cause. In April 1934, however, Heidegger resigned from his office, and colleagues reported that he criticised Nazi policies. Now the machinery of totalitarianism turned against him. His freedom to publish and attend conferences was restricted, and he came under Gestapo surveillance. In 1944, he was sent to the Rhine to dig trenches. Yet despite this, he remained a member of the Nazi party until 1945 and, most damning of all, he never issued any public statement of regret for his Nazi sympathies.

In 1929 Arendt had married Günther Anders, a journalist and philosopher who was also a student of Heidegger’s. Arendt’s doctoral thesis was published in the same year, and she now aimed for an academic career. In 1932, anguished by reports that Heidegger was speaking at Nazi meetings, she wrote to him asking him to deny supporting the Nazi regime. He wrote back, making no effort to deny the reports, but simply reassuring her that he still loved her. Because Arendt was a Jew, she was denied a professorship at the university. Early in 1933, she co-operated with the German Zionist Organisation to publicise the human rights abuses happening in Nazi Germany. Arrested by the Gestapo and jailed, she managed to win the sympathy of a warden, who organised her release.

She moved to Paris, where she worked to assist other Jewish refugees. In 1937 she was stripped of her German citizenship, and she divorced her husband, although they would remain friends. In 1940 she married the German philosopher Heinrich Blücher. Blucher had been a member of the Communist Party of Germany until 1928, but he rejected Stalinism and left the party in protest. After the Nazi occupation of Paris, the French Vichy regime began deporting foreign Jews to internment camps in the south of the country. Arendt was sent to Camp Gurs, along with other Jews, French communists and other political dissidents. Luck was on Arendt’s side yet again—she was released after several weeks. As soon as the mass extermination of Jews began in Nazi-occupied territories, the Vichy government handed over all 5500 Jews in the Gurs camp to the Nazis. Most were sent to Auschwitz, where the vast majority died.

Reunited with her husband, Arendt left France for the United States, where she became a naturalised citizen. She and Heidegger were also reunited there, and according to some accounts, they resumed their affair. She went to great lengths to defend him against accusations that he had been a Nazi supporter. In Arendt’s mind, he had been naive in his initial support for the regime, but once he realised the threats posed by National Socialism, he quickly changed his views. Who was the naive person here? Most probably it was Arendt, and her close association with Heidegger tainted her reputation for many years.

Arendt’s academic career blossomed in the USA, and in 1959 she was appointed as the first female lecturer at Princeton University. She was elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1964. In 1975, the Danish government awarded Arendt its Sonning Prize for Contributions to European Civilisation, which no American and no woman before her had received. Later that year, she died after a heart attack in New York City, aged sixty-nine.

Arendt’s first major book was The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951 and still hailed as the most impressive scholarly work tracing the roots of Nazism and Stalinism. She does more than outline the steps towards tyranny—she presents a searing analysis of the nature of totalitarian rule and its effects upon human beings. Her work demonstrates clearly the way racism was embedded in European culture well before the end of the nineteenth century.

When it was released, her book was heavily criticised by the political Left on the grounds that it depicted Nazism and Stalinist Communism as equally tyrannical. Partly this criticism came about because the documentary records about the gulags, and Stalin’s reign of terror, had not fully been revealed to the world. It would take decades until the Russian policy of glasnost was embraced by Mikhail Gorbachev, and open discussion of political and social issues was tolerated.

Arendt also created some controversy with her conclusion that the Third Reich was not just waging a war against the Jews—it was waging a war against the Enlightenment, with its ideals of human rights. Just as George Orwell in his landmark book Nineteen Eighty-Four understood that tyranny always relies on terror to maintain itself, Arendt argued that the terror waged by the Nazis was designed to eradicate all ideologies opposing National Socialism.

Of all her books, however, none aroused as much controversy as Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, written in 1963. Adolf Eichmann was, after Himmler, the chief architect of the Final Solution. He had orchestrated or directly contributed to the murders of more than 6 million people. But Eichmann had escaped the Nuremberg trials, and indeed all trace of him had been lost in May 1945. Helped by an organisation assisting former Nazis to leave Europe, Eichmann escaped to Argentina. For years he lived happily there under an assumed identity, with the full protection of the Argentinian government. Eichmann had carefully destroyed all evidence of his former identity, even removing the tattoo all SS men had under their left armpit. With no fingerprints available, the Israeli investigators were forced to rely on blurred photographs taken of Eichmann before the war.

But then in 1960, following a number of leads on Eichmann’s son, the Israeli spy agency Mossad tracked him down. They seized him and held him in a safe house until arrangements could be made to fly him secretly out of the country. They sent one of their own agents to a local hospital, claiming that he had suffered brain damage from an accident. Over the next few days, the agent recovered from his fake injury, and told the hospital he was ready to fly back to Israel. The Mossad simply took the hospital certificate and substituted Eichmann’s name and photograph on the form. Eichmann was then carefully drugged by a Mossad doctor—enough to blur his senses but not enough to stop him walking to the plane with one agent supporting him on each side.

Amid great media fanfare his trial began. Arendt was there to document the early part of the events.

It could well be argued that the ultimate test of any moral theory is the Holocaust. But simply dismissing the Nazi leaders as pure evil does not explain their actions or the Holocaust. Like so many people, Arendt had expected to see a monster in the dock—someone who looked like the epitome of evil. Instead she observed a drab little bureaucrat—an ordinary looking man. Seeing him, Arendt coined the famous phrase “the banality of evil”.

The word banal means boring, ordinary or commonplace, and that simple phrase has been regularly employed by scholars. Social psychologist Roy Baumeister (in his 1999 book, Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty) argues that although for most people killing one human being is repulsive, killing millions can become routine:

The essential shock of banality is the disproportion between the person and the crime. The mind reels with the enormity of what this person has done, and so the mind expects to reel with the force of the perpetrator’s presence and personality. When it does not, it is surprised.

To comprehend the human capacity for violence, it may be helpful to consider Baumeister’s theory of the breakdown of self-control: “you do not have to give people reasons to be violent, because they already have plenty of reasons. All you have to do is take away their reason to restrain themselves.”

After observing the trial, Arendt concluded:

Justice insists on the importance of Adolf Eichmann, the man in the glass booth built for his protection: medium-sized, slender, middle-aged, with receding hair, ill-fitting teeth, and nearsighted eyes, who throughout the trial keeps craning his scraggy neck toward the bench (not once does he turn to face the audience), and who desperately tries to maintain his self-control—and mostly succeeds, despite a nervous tic, to which his mouth must have become subject long before this trial started. On trial are his deeds, not the sufferings of the Jews, not the German people or mankind, not even anti-Semitism and racism …

Half a dozen psychiatrists had certified Eichmann as “normal”. “More normal, at any rate, than I am after having examined him,” one of them was said to have exclaimed, while another had found that Eichmann’s whole psychological outlook, including his relationship with his wife and children, his mother and father, his brothers and sisters and friends, was “not only normal but most desirable”. And, finally, a minister who paid regular visits to him in prison after the Supreme Court had finished hearing his appeal reassured everybody by declaring that Eichmann was “a man with very positive ideas”. Behind the comedy of the soul experts lay the hard fact that Eichmann’s was obviously no case of moral insanity.

So how do we explain Eichmann and his colleagues? Arendt explores the notion that evil may be a function of thoughtlessness, a tendency of ordinary people to obey orders given by a superior authority, and to conform to mass opinion without a critical evaluation of the consequences of their actions and inactions. This theory has been widely applied to the passivity of many of the German people, who knew full well what was happening in the camps, but took no action. As early as 1935, the citizens of Munich were aware of the Dachau concentration camp sixteen kilometres away. A popular jingle of the time went: “Lieber Herr Gott, mach mich stumm, Das ich nicht nach Dachau komm” which translates as, “Dear Lord God, make me dumb [silent], That I may not to Dachau come.”

Arendt said of Eichmann:

Whether he wrote his memoirs in Argentina or in Jerusalem, whether he talked to the police examiner or to the court, what he said was always the same, expressed in the same words. The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think; that is, to think from the standpoint of somebody else. No communication with him was possible, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words of others, or even the presence of others, and hence against reality as such.

 By means of this self-defence, this rigorous shielding against the reality of one’s actions, murderers like Eichmann were able to carry on their work and sustain what to all of us would seem a perfectly normal life. The Auschwitz camp commandment Rudolf Hoess was a happily married practising Catholic with five children. From the bedroom window of his lavish villa, he could see the chimney stacks of Auschwitz. He even wrote poetry about the beauty of the countryside there. Like Eichmann, he was obsessed with efficiency and order. Early experiments with gassing the Jews by using carbon monoxide were inefficient, so the Nazis turned to the cyanide gas Zyklon B. Hoess recalled:

The gassing was carried out in the detention cells of Block 11. Protected by a gas mask, I watched the killing myself. In the crowded cells, death came instantaneously the moment the Zyklon B was thrown in. A short, almost smothered cry, and it was all over … I must even admit that this gassing set my mind at rest, for the mass extermination of the Jews was to start soon, and at that time neither Eichmann nor I was certain as to how these mass killings were to be carried out. It would be by gas, but we did not know which gas and how it was to be used. Now we had the gas, and we had established a procedure.

 Reflect upon those last words of his—the procedure was established. By focusing on the procedure, reality is kept at bay.

Another protection mechanism is the linguistic dehumanisation of the victims. Franz Stangl, commandant of Treblinka death camp, referred constantly to the prisoners being “processed” in the gas chambers as “cargo”. Throughout seventy hours of recorded interviews in prison, he skilfully deflected any personal moral responsibility for his actions, or the notion that he had “choices”. Instead of admitting to the suffering of the victims, he lamented the toll his work inflicted on his own health. In Into That Darkness (1974), Gitta Sereny illustrates the process of “gradualisation” whereby a perpetrator, having committed a few individual acts of atrocity, then finds it easier to embark on increasingly violent acts involving greater numbers of victims. Again, Stangl is a prime example. Having worked in the notorious T4 euthanasia program, whereby the mentally ill, handicapped and ethnic “undesirables” were gassed, Stangl moved seamlessly to take command of Treblinka, where he worked energetically to “refine the system”.

There were other factors at work, however, that Arendt did not come to grips with. Sereny pays attention to the unique methods used by the Nazis in carrying out genocide. The killings were preceded by processes carefully designed to humiliate and dehumanise the victims—the train journeys where prisoners had no access to food, water or toilets; the whipping of prisoners and use of dogs to terrify them; the public undressing, the shaving and internal examination of women prisoners, and the naked run to the “showers”. When asked why the Jews needed to be exterminated, Stangl steadfastly maintained that it was to access their money.

If that was the case, asked Sereny, “Why, if they were going to kill them anyway, what was the point of all the humiliation, why the cruelty?”

Stangl replied: “To condition those who actually had to carry out the policies; to make it possible for them to do what they did.”

That conditioning was an essential part of the training. The right sort of “conditioning”, whereby prisoners were reduced to shells of humanity, to tattooed numbers, assisted perpetrators in justifying their actions by seeing their victims as less than human. Himmler described the camp inmates in this way: “the offal of criminals and freaks, for the most part, slave-like souls … The people are taught to wash themselves twice daily, and to use the toothbrush, with which most of them have been unfamiliar. Hardly another nation would be as humane as we are.” The most appalling part of this quote is that final sentence.

The conditioning process was much more complex and nuanced than Stangl could grasp. Elements of secrecy were embedded in the mass killings. Concentration camps were frequently hidden in forests, and attempts made to conceal the corpses. Records were destroyed. Was this indicative of a sense of shame in the perpetrators? In January 1943 Himmler personally issued detailed instructions for carrying out executions in the concentration camps:

The execution is not to be photographed or filmed … The legality of the execution is to be explained to the men, and they are to be influenced in such a way as to suffer no ill effect in their character or mental attitude … Hanging is to be done by prisoners … The responsible SS leaders are to see to it that, while we have to be hard and cannot tolerate softness, no brutality is to be allowed either. 

Eichmann gave this description of socialising after the infamous Wannsee Conference, where senior Nazi officials and Hitler finalised details of the Final Solution:

I remember that at the end of the Wannsee Conference, Heydrich, Muller and my humble self settled down comfortably by the fireplace, and that then for the first time I saw Heydrich smoke a cigarette and I was thinking: today Heydrich is smoking, something I have not seen before. And he drinks cognac, since I had not seen Heydrich take any alcoholic drink in years. After this Wannsee Conference we were sitting together peacefully, and not in order to talk shop, but in order to relax after the long hours of strain.

Arendt stresses the fact that Eichmann was not, in fact, very intelligent. Unable to complete high school or vocational training, he got his first job as a salesman by using family connections. Partly because of his low intellect, Eichmann was a persistent “joiner”, constantly joining organisations in order to define himself. He had belonged to the YMCA and various other German youth groups. Then he found his niche, in the Waffen SS. Rising through the ranks, and gaining a position of such power, was an enormous boost to Eichmann’s ego. He revealed that, after the war, he was deeply depressed because “it then dawned on him that thenceforward he would have to live without being a member of something or other”.

The violence unleashed by Nazis like Eichmann was also facilitated by a complex and highly efficient bureaucracy. Arendt’s essay On Violence distinguishes between violence and power. Although theorists of both the Left and Right regard violence as an extreme manifestation of power, Arendt regards the two concepts as antithetical. Power, she says, arises from the collective will and does not need violence to achieve any of its goals, since voluntary compliance takes its place. But as governments start losing their legitimacy, as Hitler’s government clearly did after cancelling elections, violence becomes an artificial means toward the same end and is, therefore, found only in the absence of power. Bureaucracies then become the ideal breeding grounds for violence.

Today there are few better examples of this phenomenon than Putin’s Russia. Under an absolute dictator, the rule of law is suspended, and judges become puppets of the ruler. Like Hitler, Putin has systematically murdered his opponents and critics: journalists such as Anna Politkovskaya, human rights lawyers such as Stanislav Markelov, dissident KGB agents such as Alexander Litvinenko, along with countless businessmen and oligarchs. The methods are selected to create maximum fear: falling out of hotel windows; being shot at point-blank range near one’s home; poisoning with tea laced with polonium-210 or the nerve agent Novichok; and most dramatically, being shot out of the sky—the fate met by Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin. As Simon Sebag-Montefiore points out:

Extreme vigilance is the essential mood of tyranny, which must inhabit that condition not just first because it is indeed in danger of overthrow and surrounded by enemies but also because it requires its people to be fearful and isolated, therefore conditioned for extreme solutions.

Does Putin and his rule qualify as evil? He has not yet ordered the murders of millions, as Hitler did; but in the light of Russia’s descent into “carnivorous chaos”, hearing Putin raise the threat of nuclear strikes as an appropriate policy tool, and witnessing the invasion of Ukraine, that term seems appropriate.

We should not conclude from the example of Eichmann or Stangl that most ordinary people will commit terrible crimes under certain circumstances. Arendt maintains that even under totalitarian regimes, individuals have a moral choice. “Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think”, but the action taken is still an individual one. She points out:

Under conditions of terror most people will comply but some people will not, just as the lesson of the countries to which the Final Solution was proposed is that “it could happen” in most places but it did not happen everywhere. Humanly speaking, no more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation.

In one reassuring section of her book, Arendt cites the uplifting example of Denmark: 

It was not just that the people of Denmark refused to assist in implementing the Final Solution, as the peoples of so many other conquered nations had been persuaded to do (or had been eager to do)—but also, that when the Reich cracked down and decided to do the job itself it found that its own personnel in Denmark had been infected by this and were unable to overcome their human aversion with the appropriate ruthlessness, as their peers in more co-operative areas had.

As a Jew, and someone who herself narrowly escaped being sent to Auschwitz, Arendt might be expected to be totally sympathetic to the Jewish cause. But she was a philosopher, and too analytical to be swayed by emotion. She criticised the way Eichmann’s trial was conducted in Israel, and even pointed out that, although morally justified, Eichmann’s kidnapping in Argentina by Mossad agents and secret transport to Israel was theoretically an illegal act. But she really aroused Jewish anger when she claimed that far fewer Jews would have died if the Jewish councils (the so-called Judenrate) had not collaborated to various degrees with Nazis like Eichmann. Even anarchy and noncooperation, she said, would have been preferable. Her attitude prompted heavy criticism from prominent Jewish figures.

I would also argue that, in concentrating so much on the perpetrators of the Holocaust, Arendt failed to pay sufficient attention to the suffering of the victims. The end result is a disturbing level of detachment throughout her work. Elhanan Yakira (Post-Zionism, Post-Holocaust, 2009) confirms this view:

This emphasis on the machinery of the killing reflects her own existentialist critique of modernity defined as bureaucracy plus technology. At stake are the deeds of the perpetrators, not the sufferings of the victims. Thus she delays any substantive discussion of witness testimonies until the next to last chapter, selects only a few examples and subjects most of them to dismissive comments. Arendt thereby overlooked the truly innovative aspect of the Jerusalem trial, the turn toward victim experience, a development that sharply distinguished the Eichmann hearings from Nuremberg.

Such was the public criticism that none of her works was translated into Hebrew until 1999. Yet Arendt left the reader in no doubt as to her attitude to Eichmann, and even her agreement with the death penalty imposed by the Israeli court:

Just as you [Eichmann] supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations—as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world—we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang. 

Throughout all her writing, Arendt remains a stern defender of the rule of law. She is a passionate advocate of fundamental human rights—not just the right to life, liberty and freedom of expression, but also the right to action and to opinion. She criticises any form of political community based on tribal ties and customs, as well as those based on religious, ethnic or racial identity. A civil society based upon the rule of law enables each citizen to develop the capacities for judgment and for bringing about positive change. In this regard she resembles and indeed draws upon Plato, and his concept of a “good” society. She stresses the importance of individual agency—the necessity of thinking through one’s actions in a coherent ethical framework.

There are two further matters I wish to address. Arendt lived and wrote before the rise of modern radical Islamic movements. The 9/11 bombings in New York, the emergence of ISIS, Al Qaeda and Hezbollah, and most recently, the Hamas attacks on Israel, prompt us to reconsider how we categorise the perpetrators of such atrocities. These actions are motivated by religious extremism, as well as hatred and envy of the West, especially of the Jews. Although it is true that most people do not consciously decide they will commit evil acts, religious extremism drives many to commit acts of pure evil.

That word may startle some readers. Evil? Let me explain. At a deep psychic level, many Nazis perceived that what they did was morally abhorrent. Moved by this intuitive sense of shame, they constantly tried to cover up their atrocities: by destroying many of the concentration camps (such as Treblinka), by hiding the camps, by undertaking mass killings in forests, and by destroying records. They built “fake camps” to show visiting Red Cross delegates that prisoners were well fed and humanely treated. Furthermore, even at their worst, the Nazis never believed that God would reward their actions with a place in Paradise.

Hamas and their Muslim terrorist brothers believe exactly that. Rather than try to hide their atrocities, they celebrate and publicise them to the world. They videotape the beheading of innocent civilians, rejoice in the beheading of babies and the torture and murder of women. These demonic ideologues are confident that Allah will reward these actions in an Islamic Heaven.

How does the West respond? Secularism lacks the language to describe such atrocities. With Christianity’s decline as the dominant cultural narrative in the West, we are brow-beaten by an atheistic Left which has not only lost its moral compass, but also lost the words necessary to grasp these horrors. If the worst words you have in your vocabulary to describe bad behaviour are coloniser, bigot, Islamophobe, racist and the like, how do you categorise Hamas terrorists and their actions? I believe that Arendt would agree that words like banal have no place here.

The only word possible is evil.

Dr Jillian Brannock, a former university academic, is now a freelance writer and radio presenter.