What satisfaction would it have given Abel and others if Miss Arendt had accepted the word “monster” from the prosecutor’s lips? Calling someone a monster does not make him more guilty; it makes him less so by classing him with beasts and devils (“a person of inhuman and horrible cruelty or wickedness,” OED, Sense 4). Such an unnatural being is more horrible to contemplate than an Eichmann—that is, aesthetically worse—but morally an Ilse Koch was surely less culpable than Eichmann since she seems to have had no trace of human feeling and therefore was impassible to conscience. Abel quotes a saying of Kierkegaard on Judas, which shows Judas as comical, and he seems to think this bears out his argument, since Judas, according to him, was a monster. But Judas was not a monster, though his act was monstrous; he was a man, the twelfth part of humanity, and his sin was that he could betray for thirty pieces of silver, like any common informer. Jesus was uncommon, not Judas. And Judas, unlike a monster, knew that he had sinned and went and hanged himself with a halter. Eichmann too knew himself to be guilty somehow, somewhere (“before God,” as he put it), though he kept this knowledge in a separate pocket of his mind, far from the actual trial, and was helped in this by the prosecutor, who by charging him with acts of cruelty he did not commit allowed him to feel innocent. What is horrible in Eichmann is his ordinariness, including the prompt ability to feel innocent when you are charged with a crime you did not commit though you did something infinitely worse, like a person who is accused of murder and robbery and feels put upon because it was not he who stole the victim’s watch—he “only” committed the murder.