The subject I would like to discuss this morning is "The Banality of Evil"
- and, specifically, the Banality of Evil as it applies to the person about whom it was invented: Adolf Eichmann.
Let's say a bit first about what the term is and what it means.
"Banality of Evil" was a term invented by Hannah Arendt, a German-born Jew who escaped the Nazis in 1940,
and became the first woman professor at Princeton University.
There is no doubt that Hannah Arendt
was one of the most brilliant human beings in the world in the entire 20th Century,
an extraordinarily erudite, scholarly, and brilliant woman,
who, when she was already a full professor, was sent by the New Yorker Magazine to Jerusalem in 1961
to cover the Eichmann trial here in Jerusalem.
At that time, she was already a very well-known author. She had written some serious and important books,
perhaps the most important being "The Origins of Totalitarianism".
So this was clearly no journalist being sent to cover an event.
The New Yorker picked the top person in the field they could find
and sent her to Jerusalem to cover the Eichmann Trial.
She wrote a series of reports about the Eichmann Trial,
which then appeared in a small book called "Eichmann in Jerusalem",
and the subtitle was "A Report on the Banality of Evil".
And "The Banality of Evil" has become, in the years since then, a tremendously powerful term,
to explain what the Nazis were doing.
And not only the Nazis, but to explain the ability of human beings to commit evil
in a way that sounds rational and almost familiar.
The heart of the thesis, according to Hannah Arendt, was that Eichmann,
whom she saw at court as a very bland, grey, nondescript, not particularly intelligent bureaucrat,
She read his appearance at the court in Jerusalem, and applied it to everything she previously knew.
She found him to be a very grey, unexciting person.
And the idea of the Banality of Evil was therefore that, given historical circumstances that are extraordinary,
normal people, who are not particularly ideologically motivated,
with nothing particularly monstrous about them, can become central cogs or important cogs
in a machine that is committing tremendous evil and tremendous suffering.
Not only can they become cogs, but even once they are doing it - and also thereafter -
they never fully realize what it is that they are doing.
And that, I think, is the heart of the matter. The heart of the thesis is:
These average, mediocre people, such as Eichmann, can become tremendous monsters
without knowing that they are monsters and without realizing what it is that they do.
And she uses those specific words: "He never realized what he was doing".
If he had any motivation, his motivation was to be promoted.
He wanted to have as good a career as possible. It was peer pressure.
Also, there are universal things that one can find anywhere, in any system,
and, therefore, part of the importance of this idea of the banality of evil is:
People are formulated by the circumstances they are in, and if the circumstances are unusually bad,
they will become unusually bad in their actions, without realizing it, without intending it,
without understanding what they are doing.
And if it can happen to mediocre people like Eichmann, it can happen to anybody.
To which it must be said: Hannah Arendt never said that anybody could become Eichmann.
And in her later years, in a number of public events, she reproached some of her audience,
saying: "I never said that. It's not that anybody could become Eichmann, but a lot of people could.
It was not hand-chosen people who carried out the mass murder of the Jews.
Rather, it was large numbers of people. They indeed had some preconditioning,
- but, as I said, it was mostly the banality of evil. Most of them were not obviously monsters".
Let's look now at Eichmann himself and see what he was doing
- not at court in Jerusalem in 1961,  when he was pleading for his life,
but, rather, in the 1940s, when he was a lieutenant-colonel in the SS
who had the power of life and death over mind-boggling number of people,
and was able to literally decide in matters that are way beyond the purview of a normal bureaucrat
in a normal system.
First of all, it must be said that Eichmann and his colleagues were anti-Semites.
Contrary to what Hannah Arendt would have liked us to believe,
they were anti-Semites long before they were SS officers.
Almost every single one of them became a member of the system in the late 1920s in some cases.
Most of them in the early 1930s, the last of them in the mid-1930s.
They entered the system because they wanted to be in that part of the system.
You did not become an SS officer without being committed to what the SS was about.
In the case of many of them - in the case of Eichmann there is not doubt about this -
they joined the SS, even before they were officers,
among other things, because the ferocious antisemitism of the SS and of the Nazis appealed to them.
Some of them were opportunistic members of his staff - say, there was a man named Bosshammer
who was not a member of the SS until after he finished college, tried to get a job as a lawyer and didn't succeed.
And then he joined the SS as a lawyer.
So you could say that somebody like that was perhaps more career-motivated than anything else,
but even there we know about people like Bosshammer himself personally, and people like him,
that in the late 1920s - early 1930s, while they were at university, they were very likely
to have been of an ideological bent that was very similar to what the Nazis were.
if they were not members of the Nazi party, it was simply because until the Nazi party came to power,
patrician people such as themselves regarded the Nazis as the plebeians.
They were masses of brownshirts, and they were violent, and nobody would want to join the Nazis,
even though the ideology was perfectly acceptable.
It was only when the Nazis came to power that people like this were drawn to the SS.
Even being drawn to the SS because the SS was the elitist part of the Nazi establishment.
Now, of course this idea of being evil in a banal way cannot seriously apply to murderers in the field.
Somebody who is engaged in immediate physical contact with Jews who are being rounded up and shot
or pushed into gas chambers.
There is no way that they cannot know what they are doing.
They hear the screams, they see the terror in the eyes. You cannot seriously apply the idea to people like them.
Some of Arendt's disciples and followers would try, but she certainly never meant that.
It can only work for the bureaucrats.
But let's look at the actions of the bureaucrats: Eichmann and the people around him.
The first thing you have to say about him is that,
although they were primarily bureaucrats who worked behind desks in offices,
most of them sooner or later, often repeatedly, did come into contact with living Jews
who were being persecuted and sent to their deaths.
In Berlin, they participated in rounding up the Jews of Berlin.
In France, in Holland, in Greece, in Slovakia - wherever it was -
they perhaps were not the people running the deportations,
but they were the formulators of how it was done,
and they did have to be there to make certain it was happening correctly.
And if it was not happening correctly, they had to figure out better ways of doing it.
So they were there.
So the first thing that has to be said is that Eichmann and his colleagues were first and foremost bureaucrats,
but they were also physically there, watching the Jews
perhaps not being murdered, but being deported, which was a terrifying thing for the Jews.
And you couldn't say that they didn't realize that this was evil,
that this was something that was very painful for the Jews.
That's the first thing. The second thing is that one of the things that Eichmann and his colleagues engaged in
was to convince other organizations that this was what needed to be done.
In Germany, this was no major problem.
But in places like Holland, and certainly France, Belgium, Greece, Slovakia, Italy,
all sorts of other places throughout Europe, they had to cajole the local bureaucrats
- the local police, first and foremost -
that rounding up the Jews and deporting them to a place from which they would never return was a good idea.
Sometimes, this was not hard to do, but often it was hard to do.
So, when we follow the documentation of Eichmann and his colleagues,
we see that there is an endless amount of time which is dedicating to convincing
- overcoming hurdles, let's put it like that -
convincing the French police that this is what needs to be done.
Convincing the French police that not only foreign Jews, but also French Jews, need to be deported,
and so on, and so forth,
The third thing that has to be said is that at least part of Eichmann's department
dealt with combating foreign propaganda.
The BBC was broadcasting into Europe. There were certain amounts of media from outside Europe,
and certain amounts of newspapers and public questioning within Europe,
where sometimes the public (Slovakia was a good case for this),
the public wanted to know what was happening to those Jews who were being deported.
And there was a certain amount of pushing back from the locals.
Sometimes lightly, and sometimes actually quite a persistent and determined pushback:
"taking our Jews and is the wrong thing"
- not necessarily because of any love for the Jews; often because "these are "our Jews" and "our property",
and "we don't want you to take them."
But there were all sort of reasons. Later in the war, there was the fear that,
since the Allies were going to win and the Germans were going to lose,
they (the Romanians, for instance) didn't want to be on the wrong side of history.
In the early part of the war, they had been fervently for deporting Jews,
but later on they became among the most obstinate objectors to this,
because they correctly realized that the Soviets were coming, and you don't want to be on the Nazi side.
So there were various reasons, and the point is that Eichmann and his men
had the job of combating this propaganda and convincing whenever it was possible -
in the case of the Slovakians,
it was possible to convince Slovak journalists to come and see that nothing untoward was happening.
And in the case of the BBC, they were trying to disseminate counter-propaganda.
So you cannot combat people who are saying that the Nazis are killing the Jews and this is a horrible thing,
You cannot combat that in an active way without knowing that there are a lot of people
who disagree with you.
And the reason that you are doing it is because you are committed to this policy.
And that, ultimately, is the most important thing:
that , in total contradiction to what Hannah Arendt said,
Eichmann personally, and the men around him, in order to go about their jobs over a period of years
- and they were doing this job for years -
in order to successfully round up the Jews, detach them from their society, and deport them to their deaths,
they had to surmount endless hurdles - bureaucratic hurdles, political hurdles, and other hurdles.
There were things slowing down the process, and their job was to speed up the process,
which means that they were fully conscious of what they were doing.
They were fully conscious of the fact that there were people objecting to them.
And the reason they were doing what they were doing - they said so themselves, among themselves often -
was that the Jew was the arch-enemy and the Jew had to be destroyed.
Finally. in the late stages of the war, there were even rare cases where the documentation shows
that even among Eichmann's closest colleagues, there were those among them, as defeat approached,
who expressed their apprehension of what would happen to them after the war,
because, as they said very clearly, "after what we have done to the Jews,
there will be no way that we can continue. The enemy - the Soviets or the Americans or whoever it would be -
there is no way that they will simply let us go back to living our lives.
In their eyes, we are horrendous criminals".
And so, this idea of the "Banality of Evil" - although it's a neat, clean idea -
is, as far I can see, not what the documentation of the time expresses.
The facts of the time were that Eichmann and his cohorts were anything but banal, mediocre bureaucrats.
They were people who were going out of their way,
surmounting any hurdle and circumventing any problem that arose, in order to murder as many Jews as possible.
