Banality in the Booth

Adolf Eichmann spent much of his trial inside a glass booth. The enclosure protected him from attack while allowing the judges, journalists, witnesses, and spectators to study him at close range. He sat behind bulletproof glass in a dark suit, wearing headphones, consulting papers, and occasionally bending toward counsel. The man accused of organizing the deportation of millions looked like someone who had been placed at the wrong desk in a government office. The appearance would become part of the historical argument.

Gideon Hausner refused to let Eichmann’s physical mediocrity determine the dimensions of the case. When the Israeli attorney general delivered his opening address on April 17, 1961, he said that six million accusers stood with him. They could not enter the witness box, identify the defendant, or describe what had happened after the trains arrived. Hausner therefore called survivors who testified about ghettos, shootings, deportations, camps, hiding, hunger, resistance, murdered children, and families erased almost completely from Europe. Many had never encountered Eichmann. Their evidence placed his department inside the catastrophe it had helped administer.

Hannah Arendt considered much of this testimony historically important and legally misplaced. A criminal court had jurisdiction over Eichmann, not over the Holocaust as a whole. The prosecution had to establish his conduct and responsibility under the charges before it. Hausner used that jurisdiction for a much larger public purpose. The trial taught the destruction of European Jewry to an Israeli population that had often received survivors with ignorance, suspicion, or the old vocabulary of passivity. It allowed survivors to speak under the authority of the state established three years after the war’s displaced Jews had begun arriving in Palestine. It also recast the Holocaust as a crime against the Jewish people after Nuremberg had treated Jewish annihilation within the broader prosecution of Nazi aggressive war and crimes against humanity.

Eichmann gave Hausner the defendant he required, though the history presented in the courtroom repeatedly exceeded the acts of the man sitting behind the glass. Arendt considered that excess a corruption of the court’s function. Hausner considered it part of the reason the trial had to occur in Jerusalem. Their dispute concerned evidence, jurisdiction, Jewish memory, Israeli sovereignty, survivor testimony, and the authority to decide what kind of history a criminal proceeding could contain.

“The banality of evil” later floated away from that dispute. It is now routinely presented as Arendt’s general theory that ordinary people commit atrocities through obedience, bureaucratic habit, or a failure to think. The phrase appears whenever an official looks insufficiently demonic, a cruel policy arrives on institutional letterhead, or another photograph of Hitler begins circulating online. It has become convenient enough to survive almost any application, which is usually what happens when a difficult historical proposition is converted into something that fits beneath an image.

Arendt’s initial observation concerned the grotesque disproportion between Eichmann’s crimes and the language he produced in court. He relied upon clichés, official formulations, professional vanity, poor memory, mangled Kant, and narrow descriptions of departmental competence. He presented himself as a diligent subordinate whose work had acquired murderous consequences elsewhere in the hierarchy. His speech made genocide sound like an administrative misunderstanding involving several ministries and an unfortunate quantity of rolling stock.

The complete surviving record makes that performance considerably easier to see. Before Israeli agents captured him in Argentina, Eichmann had spent years among former Nazis. During the conversations organized by Willem Sassen, he discussed the Final Solution with men who required no assurance that he had merely obeyed orders. He defended the cause, boasted about........

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