Educational Media Reviews Online

In April, 1960, in the city of Jerusalem, Adolf Eichmann, a former Gestapo colonel, stood trial for accused war crimes. Eichmann had been in charge of transporting Polish and Soviet captives to the death camps. He also oversaw the segregation of Polish Jews to the ghettos. This trial held great symbolic importance: the nation of Israel put a Nazi on trial.

A New York Jewish journalist, Hannah Arendt, saw the trials and began to question the nature of evil and what would drive men to such destructive ends. In 1961, she wrote the controvercial and seminal book The Origins of Totalitarianism. She stated that evil is not an inborn fault in human nature. Rather, the proliferation of evil depends more on what she called the "banality of evil" or apathy and acquiesence in the face of aggressive, violent evil. She strangely pointed out that Eichmann was "only following orders" from violently evil superiors and he was only an administrator. He was, however, guilty of this banality, this "capacity not to think." Arendt even went on to blame the Jewish leaders of the time who cooperated with the murder of Polish and Soviet prisoners. She stated that everyone had a relationship with the evil that took place and the line between victim and victimizer is less of a line and more of a large gray area.

Recommended for subject specialists interested in the history of the Holocaust and for philosophy or ethics professors who want their students to contemplate the nature of evil and blame.