On this day in 1906, a thoroughly unremarkable man was born to a middle-class family in Solingen in western Germany.  His early years garnered no mention in the local records beyond his birth, and when his family moved to Linz, Austria in 1913, his less than impressive school marks all but guaranteed that he would never achieve anything on his own merit.  As such, space was made for him in his father’s business before he moved to Vienna to become a traveling salesman. 

In 1932, he joined the Nazi Party and then the SS. Relocating to Germany in 1933, he transferred to the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the Nazi Party’s internal intelligence service, in which he rose rapidly over the next few years. A 1937 report from his superior recommending him for promotion described his character as “[r]eliable in his work, very conscientious, a good comrade,” his common sense as “[a]bove [a]verage,” his racial appearance as “Nordic Aryan,” and his politics as “a convinced National Socialist.”

Adolf Eichmann soon joined the SD’s “Jewish Department,” where he was put in charge of deporting Jews out of the Third Reich, which after the Anschluss of March 1938, included Austria.

Once the Second World War began in 1939, German forces began killing Jews in Poland and on the Eastern Front. Eichmann’s work thus shifted from facilitating Jewish emigration out of German-occupied territory to organizing the transport of  Jews to concentration and death camps.  Eichmann attended the infamous Wannsee Conference in January 1942, where he, along with more than a dozen other Nazi officials, worked out the details of murdering Europe’s Jews. 

After January 1942, Eichmann effectively became the managing director of the Shoah.

So it was with some irony that when Eichmann was apprehended and brought to trial, charged with fifteen counts: “together with others” of crimes against the Jewish people, crimes against humanity, and war crimes during the whole period of the Nazi regime and especially during the period of the Second World War, he pled: “Not guilty in the sense of the indictment."

Perhaps it was obvious that Eichmann knew he faced death if convicted, and thus he would say anything and everything to avoid that fate. But we know now that Eichmann would go on to claim that he was just following orders, that “[w]ith the killing of Jews I had nothing to do. I never killed a Jew, or a non-Jew, for that matter – I never killed any human being. I never gave an order to kill either a Jew or a non-Jew; I just did not do it.”

Over the next fourteen weeks, hundreds of witnesses took the stand.  For fourteen weeks the prosecution did its best to show what a unique and terrifying monster Eichmann was for his role in the “Final Solution.”  

Hannah Arendt, political theorist, philosopher and journalist, convinced The New Yorker magazine that she should travel to Israel to cover the trial in person. 

She was anxious to test her theories, developed in The Origins of Totalitarianism, and see how justice would be administered to the sort of man she had written about.  For her, it was also an opportunity to witness an agent of totalitarianism first hand.

Her subsequent 1963 report, based on her observations and transcripts, evolved into the book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.

At the time, two loud, boisterous readings of Eichmann in Jerusalem emerged, each functioning like banners around which both Jews and non-Jews rallied. 

One side read the “banality of evil” as a warning. We could all be Eichmann under the correct social and historical conditions. We all know what makes a good soldier. We all know how to follow orders.  Thus, we need to be on guard to prevent events like the Shoah from happening again.  We need to protect individual rights and freedoms. 

The other side took this reading as an offence.  The Shoah was a unique event in history. There was nothing banal about its evil. The Shoah was the culmination of centuries of European antisemitism, its logical conclusion.  Comparing it to other murderous events in history invites us to, in a way, “normalize” what the Nazis did when what they did was in no way normal.

As in debates that are often reduced to two sides, it overlooked some key points that Arendt made herself. Her famous statement that Eichmann ‘did not think’ was not to imply that he was a robot sitting at his desk, dispassionately sending hundreds of thousands of Jews to their deaths. Rather, Eichmann was unable to think from someone else’s perspective. Eichmann, Arendt argued, chose the path of evil but felt compelled to hide behind lies and clichés that gave him a semblance of virtue.  He convinced himself that he’d done a great thing, something historic for which he would be admired by future generations. Believing that, being motivated by that didn’t make Eichmann a monster or a robot. It made him a joiner.

This perhaps is the most potent lesson of all, especially now where populist demagogues, playing on the fears and emotions of “the people,” have ascended to positions of unprecedented power. 

Eichmann was a thoroughly unremarkable man whose evil did not manifest through malice but through thoughtlessness.  He suspended critical thinking and moral judgment, whether it was in service of an ideology or career advancement is irrelevant.

One can find the exceptionally cruel few in every dictatorship, but the regime’s existence depends on the exceptional compliance of many like Eichmann. 

As we navigate our own complex political landscapes, Arendt's analysis reminds us that our first moral obligation is to think – to question authority, to consider the humanity of others, and to accept personal responsibility for our actions.  This is our first line of defence against complicity in evil.

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