According to Abel, Eichmann must have thought about Nazism politically since he thought about Zionism. But Eichmann’s “thought” was a parody of the idea of thinking. Had Mein Kampf been his “Bible,” he might have pressed a flower in it. His Zionist “studies” had a function; they made him an expert, at least in the circles he moved in. They made him “stand out” from his co-workers—the life-object of all mediocrities. As a specialist in Jewish emigration, he was perfectly fitted, when the time came, to arrange Jewish emigration to the next world, to Abraham’s bosom. Among his fellow-bureaucrats, he might have passed highest in a vocational aptitude test for the new job. A sadist, monster, or demon would not have qualified for the position; these “undesirables” had their place in the Nazi system as jailers and editors of periodicals, but a man with Eichmann’s responsibilities could not be a Beast of Belsen or a Julius Streicher. The fact that Eichmann was squeamish, could not bear the sight of blood, was even an “idealist” permitted precisely that distancing from reality that facilitated the administrative task—a distancing that reflected the physical and psychic space between the collective will of the German people in the homeland and its execution in the east. If Eichmann seems to have been cordial, rather than the block of ice described by one witness, this was good public relations, for one of his duties was to allay the suspicions of the Jews and other foreigners he came in contact with, so that they too would be distanced from reality.

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.

On the other hand, contrary to what Abel says, Miss Arendt never presents him as a “dutiful clerk”; his work was important, indeed crucial, in the Nazi scheme, and he could feel that he, as an individual, was making a significant contribution to the Fuehrer’s task. He may or may not have conceived of himself as irreplaceable; if he did this was one of his delusions—a delusion no doubt shared by other Nazi functionaries, each of whom, on the lower levels, was replaceable while all of them together were not. Eichmann was free to quit his desk and his “great responsibilities” at any time, as Miss Arendt shows; no one forced him to do this particular work. Yet his staying on the job and the zeal he brought to it do not prove that he liked killing Jews, even at a distance. He liked being a functionary and “necessary,” and if this entailed a certain amount of self-sacrifice he liked it even more, for he saw it in the preliminary terms Kant laid down in formulating the categorical imperative: that a virtuous action is one done against inclination. That an act done against inclination is therefore virtuous was Eichmann’s mistaken understanding or perhaps his rationalization. As Miss Arendt sums up in a terrible flash of insight, “Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it—the quality of temptation.” In this passage, it seems to me, rereading her book, Miss Arendt’s scorn and contempt for Eichmann were mingled with a kind of pained, wry-mouthed pity. Eichmann at this time—it was at the end of the war—was pressing for the continuation of the extermination policy, in obedience to the supreme “law” of the Fuehrer’s will, long after many of his colleagues and superiors had seen the end coming and were seeking to save their skins by “saving” Jews. What she pities in Eichmann (if I do not misread her) is the extent to which he could go on doing evil when all careerist motives had disappeared and against his personal desires—to have stopped the transports to Auschwitz, in his blinkered view, would have been to yield to a temptation. If Abel wants a dramatic parallel for Eichmann, he ought to open his Ibsen. There he can find “idealists” as pernickety, as literal-minded, and nearly as dangerous to humanity. Like the simpletons in Ibsen who talk of the “demands of the ideal,” Eichmann was a fool, and what is pitiable in the Eichmann Miss Arendt sees is his foolish consistency, the way in which his inner mechanism, his “soul,” continued to tick like some trusty middle-class alarm clock, unaware that it had become an infernal machine and listening only to the sound of its own reliability, signifying that everything was normal.

I freely confess that it gave me joy and I too heard a paean in it—not a hate-paean to totalitarianism but a paean of transcendence, heavenly music

No Gentile who was an adult in the years of the Final Solution can read Eichmann in Jerusalem without some remorse and self-questioning. American Jews, far from the scene then and now, may feel certain misgivings too, reading the book, especially the richer ones who paid large sums of money to the Nazis for the ransom of their relatives and did not concern themselves too greatly with the fate of “ordinary” Jews. Miss Arendt’s harshness on this point may seem to them unkind and inappropriate in what they still think of as a time of mourning; it is like somebody who criticizes at a funeral. But the question is whether those who merely grieve for their fellow-beings show more compassion than those who in retrospect seek remedies, since to seek remedies implies a continuing concern that what happened shall never happen again. The State of Israel promises that to Jews, politically, by offering them a homeland, an army, and a foreign policy. “You are safe now,” it tells them. Miss Arendt is not interested in the safety of Jews but in the safety of humanity. Trying to learn from history, she is thinking ahead on behalf of other “superfluous” people who may be the next “Jews” on someone’s list for “resettlement in the east.” Yet the official Israeli lesson supposedly taught by the trial—the need for a strong national state—is at very sharp variance with any parable for the Gentiles, i.e., not only non-Jews but all the tribes and the peoples.

As a sample of moral fineness on the part of Miss Arendt’s critics, I offer the following sentence from Abel’s piece: “If a man holds a gun at the head of another and forces him to kill his friend, the man with the gun will be aesthetically less ugly than the one who out of fear of death has killed his friend and perhaps did not even save his own life.” Forces him to kill his friend? Nobody by possession of a weapon can force a man to kill anybody; that is his own decision. If somebody points a gun at you and says “Kill your friend or I will kill you,” he is tempting you to kill your friend. That is all.