Without Lifting A Finger

Throughout the trial, Eichmann tried to clarify, mostly without success, this second point in his plea of “not guilty in the sense of the indictment.” The indictment implied not only that he had acted on purpose, which he did not deny, but out of base motives and in full knowledge of the criminal nature of his deeds. As for the base motives, he was perfectly sure that he was not what he called an innerer Schweinehund, a dirty bastard in the depths of his heart; and as for his conscience, he remembered perfectly well that he would have had a bad conscience only if he had not done what he had been ordered to do—to ship millions of men, women, and children to their death with great zeal and the most meticulous care. This, admittedly, was hard to take. Half a dozen psychiatrists had certified him as “normal”—“More normal, at any rate, than I am after having examined him,” one of them was said to have exclaimed, while another had found that his whole psychological outlook, his attitude ...

Phrase coined by Arendt re Eichmann. * Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil In her reporting of the 1961 Adolf Eichmann trial for The New Yorker , which evolved into Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), she coined the phrase "the banality of evil " to describe Eichmann. She raised the question of whether evil is radical or simply a function of thoughtlessness, a tendency of ordinary people to obey orders and conform to mass opinion without a critical evaluation of the consequences of their actions and inaction. She was sharply critical of the way the trial was conducted in Israel . She also was critical of the way that some Jewish leaders, notably M. C. Rumkowski , acted during the Holocaust . This caused a considerable controversy and even animosity toward Arendt in the Jewish community. Her friend Gershom Scholem , a major scholar of Jewish mysticism , broke off relations with her. Arendt was criticized by many Jewish p...