By Maung Zarni
A book review of an influential report on Eichmann’s trial by Hannah Arendt – slightly older than me – published in Jan. 1963. I came out of my mother’s womb 60 days after the review was printed in the NYRB.
I used to have a copy of the book itself. I moved at least 15 times to about 6 countries in 36 years. In one of the moves I must have lost some books – including a hard copy of my PhD thesis and Arendt’s classic.
I don’t think I read Death in Jerusalem cover to cover. But “the banality of evil” continues to be highly contested – its meaning or applicability is far from being settled among those of us who take words seriously.
One of my late teachers at Wisconsin, Bob Koehl was typically keen to point out how adept (and deceptive) his own subjects of study – the SS – were: liquidation, administrative custody, and a whole cluster of euphemisms that concealed their most criminal deeds.
I saw one of the most infamous documents in history – the Final Solution – on display in a dimly lit glass showcase in the Jewish History Museum at the old Warsaw Ghetto. A copy really.
An English translation of a particular way of killing the Jews stays with me: “natural or environmental factors” will do their jobs as well, or something to that effect.
I look at the USA, ICE, Trump, Musk, Patel etc. And I look at Israel in Gaza and Palestine.
Chillingly, I feel that the Trump gang and Israel are far more evil than the Nazis or individuals like Himmler or Heydrich or Eichman.
The Nazis felt a need to conceal their real intent and euphemisize their crimes or cover their tracks (like burning documents and blowing up crematorium) or making light of their fear and loathing of the European Jews in their statements to the American psychologists at the Nuremberg (in the case of Goering, for instance).
After I spoke on the Rohingya genocide at the online bi-annual conference hosted by Auschwitz during the Covid lockdown, I flew to the museum in order to explore ways to promote genocide awareness and use the museum’s darkly iconic standing as an instrument for prevention of more genocide. (Well, the Museum issued a statement supporting Israel’s right to defend a week after October 7 – so much for my grossly misplaced hope or expectations for these Holocaust memorial sites and museums globally. That’s a story for another day. The Polish museum administrators at Auschwitz too live in their own “zone of interest”, no doubt).
At the museum, the deputy archivist gave me a one-on-one talk on how Auschwitz does the documentation. He said the Nazis destroyed 90+ % of their documentary evidence.
In sharp contrast, both the Trump Inc. American Nazis and Bibi-Gvir-Smotrich Jewish Nazis don’t feel a need to conceal anything.
That’s why the Jewish American political commentator Katie Halper publicly called Israel and Zionism the greatest threats to the Jewish people around the world.
Watch her here:
https://www.instagram.com/
I am cutting and pasting the full text of this review below.
Warmly,
Zarni
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“The picture Hannah Arendt paints is extremely depressing with respect to the past, and very alarming for the future. She points out that there is now a historic precedent for genocide, and given the conditions likely soon to confront governments as the result of the population explosion, it is only too possible that excuses will be found to follow the Nazi precedent, covering it over, of course, with the methods of a less primitive bureaucracy, with subtler euphemisms, officialese and new language rules.”
“Eichmann’s mind was ruined by miseducation before it was distorted by politics. And even supposing that a man like Eichmann can get into a powerful position, should not one expect that in a civilized country Eichmann’s clichés, his “language rules,” his evasions and euphemisms would have made him ludicrous to an educated public? Perhaps the greatest delusion of the Germans about themselves is that they are a cultivated, educated people. But then, when it comes to resisting the “language rules” used by politicians (the existence of the H-bomb has created a whole new vocabulary of evasions), who is today resisting?”
“Miss Arendt’s underlying theme is the corruption of individual or personal values by grandiose, perverted social aims which see people not as individuals but as the object of statistical calculations, as disposable, even interchangeable, social units.”
The most deeply distressing pages in this book—pages which will doubtless give rise to the most bitter recriminations—are those in which Miss Arendt discusses the cooperation of the Jewish Councils and of certain Zionist leaders or representatives with the Nazis. Within the context of war and of Nazi corruption, the interests of the officials representing Nazis and Jews could appear to merge and become at some points the same. The one part of Eichmann’s story which he never abandoned in the trial was that in Vienna in 1938 when he had been in charge of “forced emigration” (i.e. expelling the Jews from Austria), “he and his men and the Jews were all ‘pulling together’…. The Jews ‘desired’ to emigrate and he, Eichmann, was there to help them, because it so happened that at the same time the Nazi authorities had expressed the desire to see their Reich judenrein.” So the Jewish leaders would meet Eichmann in a cordial atmosphere (he even shook hands with them, and seemed in his behavior “perfectly correct”) to arrange, sometimes, for the emigration of the “best Jews” to Palestine. The aims of the Jews and the Nazis coincided at a time when both sides could agree that there were “good Jews” who qualified for salvation, “bad” ones who could be disregarded.
The New York Review
Death in Jerusalem
Stephen Spender
June 1, 1963 issue
