Eichmann in Jerusalem

he ought to have known better. Hitler would not have cut a better figure under the circumstances. Out of power, most tyrants and serial murderers seem pathetic or ordinary, harmless, or even pitiful, as Saddam Hussein did coming out of his rathole with an unkempt beard. Was she perhaps, at this early stage, a victim of what might be called the Fallacy of Physiognomy?

The trial was supposed to show them what it meant to live among non-Jews, to convince them that only in Israel could a Jew be safe and live an honorable life.

This promise was not kept, nor could it have been kept in the form in which it was made.

hardly needed the great catastrophe in which one-third of their people perished to be convinced of the world's hostility

If these had been the only justifications for bringing Adolf Eichmann to the District Court of Jerusalem, the trial would have been a failure on most counts.

Dostoevski once mentions in his diaries that in Siberia, among scores of murderers, rapists, and burglars, he never met a single man who would admit that he had done wrong

Why not join the S.S.? And he had replied, Why not?

Clearly, this courtroom is not a bad place for the show trial David Ben-Gurion, Prime Minister of Israel, had in mind when he decided to have Eichmann kidnaped in Argentina and brought to the District Court of Jerusalem to stand trial for his role in the “final solution of the Jewish question.” And Ben-Gurion, rightly called the “architect of the state,” remains the invisible stage manager of the proceedings.

Open rebellion was of course unthinkable under the circumstances. On the other hand, why didn't the leaders of the Jewish councils refuse to accept the responsibilities assigned them by the Nazis? Insofar as they had moral authority, why didn't they advise the Jews to run for their lives or try to go underground? If there had been no Jewish organizations at all and no Judenräte, Arendt suggested, the deportation machine could not have run as smoothly as it did.

Eichmann's mediocrity and insipid character struck Arendt on her first day in court. Her initial reaction, expressed in letters to Jaspers, McCarthy, and Blücher, was impressionistic. He isn't even sinister, she wrote (Arendt used the common German term unheimlich, which can also be translated as “uncanny”). He was like a “ghost in a spiritualist sauce.” What was more, he had a cold and was sneezing inside his bullet-proof glass cage.