“…Arendt’s account of evil was developed as she observed the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the major architects of the Nazi genocide of the Jews. Devoid of any hint of satanic greatness, the balding, nearsighted bureaucrat on the stand in Jerusalem looked more like an accountant than anything else. He wasn’t driven by personal hatred or pleasure in cruelty. He was punctilious in refusing to profit from stolen goods and had done nothing but what was expected of him after joining the SS in 1932. The one time he observed a gas chamber in action, he swore that it made him sick. Dostoyevsky’s sniveling devil comes closest to portraying the man chiefly responsible for organizing the Final Solution. Not malevolence but thoughtlessness was behind Eichmann’s deeds.
He merely, wrote Arendt, did not realize what he was doing. This last claim was false, as the German philosopher Bettina Stangneth proved in her 2011 book Eichmann Before Jerusalem. Unlike Arendt, Stangneth had access to recordings made in 1956 in Argentina. In a series of lectures Eichmann told other exiled Nazis the truth about what they had hitherto called “The Auschwitz Lie.” Protocols of every meeting were made, corrected, and signed by Eichmann himself. At those meetings he resisted every suggestion that he’d been the sort of mindless civil servant he performed at his trial, and he said his only regret was his failure to murder all 11 million Jews in Europe. So much for the claim that he didn’t know what he was doing; Arendt, like many, had been fooled by the role he played in hopes of escaping the gallows. But her fundamental point remains: Evil acts are seldom committed by monsters. All they require is an ordinary person who abandons integrity.
Arendt’s radical claims still stand, in principle, though not for the man Adolf Eichmann...”
— Call It Evil: Understanding the Trump Era by Susan Neiman https://a.co/0eBKZJoK
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