Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

Arendt's report on the 1961 trial in Jerusalem of Adolf Eichmann, the SS officer who organised the deportation of Jews to the death camps, first published as a series in The New Yorker. Watching him in court, Arendt found not a demonic monster but a careerist who spoke in clichés and official jargon and seemed unable to think from anyone else's standpoint. She called this the banality of evil: great crimes committed by people who are thoughtless rather than deeply wicked. The book also examines the legal basis of the trial, the abduction of Eichmann from Argentina, the concept of crimes against humanity, and the role of the Jewish councils in the deportations, a section that provoked bitter controversy. Later historians, drawing on documents unavailable to her, have argued that Eichmann was a more committed antisemite than she thought, so the phrase and its application remain contested.

Its question, how ordinary people become instruments of atrocity and what thinking has to do with conscience, is one of the most important in moral philosophy since the war.