What Is Evil? An Analysis Through the Eyes of a German Jew

By N. Moreau

Evil. What a complex word. We like to think of ourselves as good people, never evil. We can do certain negative acts, even harm others on purpose, but that doesn’t immediately make us evil. To me, the word itself is already a serious accusation, and not something to be thrown around lightly. But in her book “Eichmann in Jerusalem”, Hannah Arendt boldly declares evil to be banal, trite, commonplace. It’s an oxymoronic statement: how is evil, profound immorality, true wickedness, something I would never diagnose anyone I have ever met in my life of being, banal? If anything, I would assume evil is rare. I have always thought of people as good and morally dutiful. But Arendt, a German Jew who lived in the 20th century, witnessed evil beyond mine and most of my contemporaries's comprehension.


Arendt was born in Hannover, Germany in 1906. She studied philosophy with Martin Heidegger, who later joined the Nazi party in 1933, the same year she was forced to flee Germany as a result of Hitler’s rise to power.


In 1951, she published 'The Origins of Totalitarianism' where she deeply analyses Nazi and Stalinist regimes. In this book, Hannah Arendt has an interesting quote on race and how colonisers saw the colonised; “They were, as if were, “natural” human beings who lacked the specifically human character, the specifically human reality, so that when European men massacred them they somehow were not aware that they had committed murder”.


Objectively, murder is wrong because you deprive an individual of their autonomy and right to life. But these colonisers probably didn’t feel empathy because they didn’t think to do so; to them, they weren’t killing individuals, they were doing what they must to expand their territory. Therefore, in their own lenses, they were not evil.


In 1963, she published Eichmann in Jerusalem: a report on the banality of evil based on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a high-ranking Nazi and one of the key organisers of the Holocaust.


In this book, Arendt defends that evil comes from thoughtlessness. It was compliance to commands that allowed otherwise rational and empathetic people to be swayed by totalitarian regimes. This lack of critical thought was most obvious when instead of “hello,” Germans under Nazi rule would greet each other with the Nazi salute. It became commonplace, used in everyday life, but also seen in events that one wouldn’t commonly think of as acutely political, such as weddings and funerals.


It's hard to understand how Hitler, a man most of us would consider truly evil, could have gained the support of so many. Everyone, including Eichmann, complied to this authority. For Arendt, the “trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal”. Was he under the Hitler spell, like so many Germans? Regardless, does any of that make Eichmann less guilty?


As expected, after his highly publicised trial in Jerusalem, Eichmann was found guilty and sentenced to death for his crimes against humanity. But I doubt that Eichmann thought of it this way whilst acting as a Nazi official. In fact, he even stated that he “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". Of course he didn’t, his role was the one of a coordinator. As head of the Department for Jewish Affairs in the Reich Main Security Office, he organized logistics, such as the transportation and implementation of the “Final Solution”. He wasn’t the one operating the gas chambers, but he was the one bringing Jews to it. Eichmann may have not been the main culprit, yet he was more than just complicit; he was by choice an accomplice of the holocaust, and so therefore the final verdict is justified.


In conclusion, Hannah Arendt’s analysis of evil, particularly through her concept of the "banality of evil," challenges traditional notions of what evil is. She highlights how it isn’t always malevolent intent that makes people evil by showing how ordinary individuals can become complicit in atrocities through thoughtless obedience to authority. Her exploration of Adolf Eichmann’s role in the Holocaust proves the dangers of moral disengagement in societies. Arendt’s work continues to be extremely relevant to modern times and it provokes critical reflection on the nature of evil, responsibility, and the importance of ethical judgment.