Eichmann, Bureaucracy and the Holocaust

Eichmann showed only disappointment that some survived, according to newly declassified files. Looking back on his role in organising the systematic slaughter of Jews, gipsies and other groups, he says: Recordings of Eichmann were made in the s while he was hiding in Argentina. They have come to light after the German news magazine Der Spiegel found them in 4, files on his case recently opened by Germany 's intelligence services. The tapes, made by a Dutch journalist who volunteered for the Waffen-SS during the war, revealed the notorious Nazi, then under the alias of Ricardo Klement, in a relaxed and candid mood as he enjoyed a few drinks in a Buenos Aires house.

During the war Eichmann had served as "transportation administrator" for the Final Solution, organising the mammoth task of sending Jews to various death camps. In the tapes, now in the German Federal Archive in Koblenz, Eichmann boasted he "was no ordinary recipient of orders" and that he "was part of the thinking process; an idealist". One thing Arendt certainly did not mean was that evil had become ordinary, or that Eichmann and his Nazi cohorts had committed an unexceptional crime.

Indeed, she thought the crime was exceptional, if not unprecedented, and that as a result it demanded a new approach to legal judgment itself. There were at least two challenges to legal judgment that she underscored, and then another to moral philosophy more generally.

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The first problem is that of legal intention. Did the courts have to prove that Eichmann intended to commit genocide in order to be convicted of the crime? Her argument was that Eichmann may well have lacked "intentions" insofar as he failed to think about the crime he was committing.

She did not think he acted without conscious activity, but she insisted that the term "thinking" had to be reserved for a more reflective mode of rationality. Arendt wondered whether a new kind of historical subject had become possible with national socialism , one in which humans implemented policy, but no longer had "intentions" in any usual sense. To have "intentions" in her view was to think reflectively about one's own action as a political being, whose own life and thinking is bound up with the life and thinking of others.

So, in this first instance, she feared that what had become "banal" was non-thinking itself. This fact was not banal at all, but unprecedented, shocking, and wrong. By writing about Eichmann, Arendt was trying to understand what was unprecedented in the Nazi genocide — not in order to establish the exceptional case for Israel, but in order to understand a crime against humanity, one that would acknowledge the destruction of Jews, Gypsies, gay people, communists, the disabled and the ill. Just as the failure to think was a failure to take into account the necessity and value that makes thinking possible, so the destruction and displacement of whole populations was an attack not only on those specific groups, but on humanity itself.

As a result, Arendt objected to a specific nation-state conducting a trial of Eichmann exclusively in the name of its own population. At this historical juncture, for Arendt, it became necessary to conceptualise and prepare for crimes against humanity, and this implied an obligation to devise new structures of international law.

1. Idzy, El Secreto de Benfit (Las Crónicas de Benfit nº 1) (Spanish Edition).
2. The Nazi Security Police and the Banality of Evil.
3. Nés à minuit Tome 2 Soupçons (French Edition).
4. Ethan Frome (Italian Edition).
5. In the Words of Nelson Mandela.

So if a crime against humanity had become in some sense "banal" it was precisely because it was committed in a daily way, systematically, without being adequately named and opposed. In a sense, by calling a crime against humanity "banal", she was trying to point to the way in which the crime had become for the criminals accepted, routinised, and implemented without moral revulsion and political indignation and resistance. If Arendt thought existing notions of legal intention and national criminal courts were inadequate to the task of grasping and adjudicating Nazi crimes, it was also because she thought that nazism performed an assault against thinking.

Adolf Eichmann

Her view at once aggrandised the place and role of philosophy in the adjudication of genocide and called for a new mode of political and legal reflection that she believed would safeguard both thinking and the rights of an open-ended plural global population to protection against destruction. What had become banal — and astonishingly so — was the failure to think.

Eichmann and his Bureaucrats: What Was Their Job and What Made Them Good At It?

Indeed, at one point the failure to think is precisely the name of the crime that Eichmann commits. We might think at first that this is a scandalous way to describe his horrendous crime, but for Arendt the consequence of non-thinking is genocidal, or certainly can be. Of course, the first reaction to such an apparently naive claim may be that Arendt overestimated the power of thinking or that she held on to a highly normative account of thinking that does not correspond to the various modes of reflection, self-muttering, and silent chatter that goes by that name.

As we move forward in our discussion of Antisemitism and Jewish Survival it is important to remember the implications of those two modern contributors to the Holocaust: Jews on selection ramp, Auschwitz Wikipedia Today, seventy years after the ovens of Auschwitz have cooled, punch card tabulating and gas chamber are primitive relics of the past. Supercomputers store every persons daily activities, provide a history from birth to death: IRS, internet use; even the public library all feed the maw, those supercomputers.

How much more efficient and complete a Holocaust of the future?

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A book not cited above, but I suspect will play a significant part in discussion of bureaucracy when I bring all this together in book form is, Architects of Annihilation: Auschwitz and the Logic of Destruction. As described on Amazon: Recent writings in this Series: The Final Solution, its Execution 2. The Final Solution, the Decision 3. Corporate America, camp inmates and slave labor Relevant to your professional network?

Please share on Linkedin Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this blog article are those of the author s and do not necessarily reflect the official position or viewpoint of The Jerusalem Post. David Turner Foundations of Holocaust: Eichmann, Bureaucracy and the depersonalization of annihilation. Share on Facebook Twitter Google Plus.



1. Atlas Drugged: Ayn Rand Be Damned!.
2. Keep Exploring Britannica!
3. About Hitler's Bureaucrats.
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5. Pegasus, tome 1 - Les terres oubliées (GRUND ROMANS) (French Edition).

Share on Facebook Share on Twitter. Be the first to know - Join our Facebook page. What could better represent the pinnacle of bureaucratic management than the information loop between computer and person? The study lasted far longer than the Third Reich, ending only in when a whistleblower went public. A bureaucracy is a social collective with memory. Bureaucracy is the machinery by which the state gets work done. Adolf Eichmann''s Red Cross—issued passport facilitating his escape, Wikipedia.