TIME the Science of Good and Evil by The Editors of TIME

Author:The Editors of TIME [The Editors of TIME]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Liberty Street
Published: 2015-07-24T20:30:00+00:00

Five years after the Oklahoma City attack, a memorial was opened. The 9:01 represents the minute before the lethal blast.

‘The Banality of Evil’

An excerpt from journalist Hannah Arendt’s landmark book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, about the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the architects of the Holocaust, captures the evil not of the madman or the tyrant, but of the anonymous clerk, who learns to silence—and then suffocate—his conscience

Under the Nazi regime of World War II, Adolf Eichmann was charged with the mass murder of 6 million Jews.

Arendt covered the trial, and in these excerpts, she discusses first the 1942 Wannsee Conference, at which Nazi leaders planned the “Final Solution.” It was the first time Eichmann had mingled with so many “high personages,” but their rank was not all that struck him. (Arendt drew quotes from Eichmann from his memoir, the trial transcript and other sources.)

There was another reason that made the day of this conference unforgettable for Eichmann. Although he had been doing his best right along to help with the Final Solution, he had still harbored some doubts about “such a bloody solution through violence,” and these doubts had now been dispelled. “Here now, during this conference, the most prominent people had spoken, the Popes of the Third Reich.” Now he could see with his own eyes and hear with his own ears that not only Hitler . . . but the elite of the good old Civil Service were vying . . . for the honor of taking the lead in these “bloody” matters.

“At that moment, I sensed a kind of Pontius Pilate feeling, for I felt free of all guilt.” Who was he to judge? Who was he “to have [his] own thoughts in this matter”? Well, he was neither the first nor the last to be ruined by modesty.

What followed, as Eichmann recalled it, went more or less smoothly and soon became routine. He quickly became an expert in “forced evacuation.” In country after country, the Jews had to register, were forced to wear the yellow badge for easy identification, were assembled and deported, the various shipments being directed to one or another of the extermination centers in the East. . . . [W]hen a trainload of Jews arrived at a center, the strong among them were selected for work, often operating the extermination machinery, all others were immediately killed. As Eichmann told it, the most potent factor in the soothing of his own conscience was the simple fact that he could see no one, no one at all, who actually was against the Final Solution.

Eichmann, in contrast to other elements in the Nazi movement, had always been overawed by “good society,” and the politeness he often showed to German-speaking Jewish functionaries was to a large extent the result of his recognition that he was dealing with people who were socially his superiors. He was not at all, as one witness called him, a “Landsknechtnatur,” a mercenary. . . . What be fervently believed in up to the end was success, the chief standard of “good society” as be knew it.

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