“All the “cogs” in the court turn into criminals – that is, into people”
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On December 15, 1961, the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the high-ranking official responsible for setting in motion the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” in Nazi Germany, ended with a death sentence in Jerusalem. The process was followed by the philosopher Hannah Arendt, who wrote a series of articles about him for The New Yorker magazine and later revised them into the book The Banality of Evil: Eichmann in Jerusalem, in which she tried to answer the question of who was responsible for the genocide unleashed by Nazi Germany, and how officials turn into criminals. We re-read the book and chose the main places.
one
The most convincing lie that the entire German people swallowed was the slogan: “The battle for the fate of the German nation.”
2
There were three elements in this slogan that facilitated self-deception: he assumed, firstly, that the war was not a war at all, secondly, that fate, fate, and not Germany itself, had unleashed it, and, thirdly, it was a matter of life or death for the Germans, who must completely destroy their enemies, otherwise the enemies will completely destroy themselves.
3
In his diaries, Dostoevsky wrote that in Siberia, among the huge number of murderers, rapists and robbers, he never met a single one who allowed himself to admit to himself that he had done evil. <...> German society, which consisted of 80 million people, was protected from reality and facts by the same self-deception, lies and stupidity.
four
None of the numerous “language norms” had a more decisive influence on the mentality of the killers than the replacement of the word “kill” with the phrase “guarantee a merciful death.”
5
Just as the law in all civilized countries assumes that although a person’s natural desires and inclinations may sometimes impel him to murder, the voice of conscience still says to everyone and everyone: “Thou shalt not kill,” the law of Hitler’s country required that the voice of conscience say: “Kill.”
6
Evil in the Third Reich has lost the sign by which most people recognize it – it has ceased to be a temptation.
7
Many Germans, and many Nazis, may have been tempted not to kill, not to rob, not to let their neighbors go to certain death and thereby become complicit in crime. But—Lord knows, they’ve learned to resist temptation.
eight
In the brains of these people, turned into murderers, only the thought was stuck that they were participating in something historical, grandiose, unparalleled (“a great task that has to be solved only once every two thousand years”) and therefore difficult to accomplish.
9
Instead of saying: “What terrible things I do to people!”, the killer could exclaim: “What terrible things I have to see in the performance of my duty, what a heavy task that fell on my shoulders!”
ten
Conscience as such in Germany has obviously disappeared somewhere, and so completely without a trace that people almost did not remember about it – and could not even imagine that the outside world does not share this amazing “new order of German values”.
eleven
Eichmann repeated word for word the same clichéd phrases. <...>. And the longer you listened to him, the more it became clear that his inability to express his thought is directly related to his inability to think, namely, the inability to assess the situation from a different point of view.
12
As for conscience, Eichmann remembered that he would be acting against his conscience if he did not do what he was ordered to do: send millions of men, women and children to their death with the utmost diligence.
13
The defendants put on a hideous performance, shifting the responsibility on each other – but at the same time, not one of them laid the blame on Hitler!
fourteen
Eichmann’s unconscious distortions are consistent with what he himself called “Kant for the Poor”. In this popular usage, all that remains of the Kantian spirit is the demand that man must not only obey the law, but must go further and identify his will with the moral norm behind the law, the source of the law itself. In Kant’s philosophy this source was practical reason; in Eichmann’s common usage it was the will of the Fuhrer.
fifteen
It was the turn of Eichmann’s last word. His hopes for justice were not justified, the court did not believe him, although he did everything to tell the truth. <...> His guilt came from his obedience, and obedience was always considered a virtue. His dignity was abused by the Nazi leaders.
16
The essence of a totalitarian state and, perhaps, the nature of any bureaucracy is to make officials out of people, mere cogs in the administrative machine and thus dehumanize them.
17
The defense argued that Eichmann was just a “tiny cog” in the “final solution” mechanism. The accusation proved that Eichmann was the real mover of this mechanism. But the cog theory is legally completely meaningless, and it doesn’t matter what order of magnitude is assigned to the “cog” named Eichmann.
eighteen
In the verdict, the court indicated that such a crime could only be committed by a gigantic bureaucracy using government resources. But it still remains a crime, which means that all the cogs of the mechanism, no matter how insignificant they may be, in court immediately turn into criminals – that is, into people.
19
If the defendant is justified by the fact that he acted not as a person, but as a simple official whose functions could be performed by someone else, this is the same as if another criminal pointed to the statistics of crimes and claimed that what he did , statistically expected even without him, and therefore the fact that it was he who committed the crime is pure coincidence.
twenty
From a political point of view, the lesson is that in conditions of terror, the majority resigns – But not all. Just as the lesson of the countries that were in close proximity to the “Final Solution” is that it really “could happen” in most countries, but didn’t happen everywhere.
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