Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

“In Arendt's reconstruction of "what exactly happened to Eichmann" there were three key ingredients. First, he never heard a word of questioning much less political debate among his peers or superiors.

Second, he received a clarifying idea, a "truth", from the SS head Heinrich Himmler. Mass killings, Himmler said, were a heroic task requiring great courage, loyalty to the Führer and ability to bear the suffering involved in being an executioner. A state executioner is a hero, tough, loyal and brave.

Third, Eichmann adopted a "different personal attitude" (in his own words). He became inured to seeing dead people all around him: "We did not care if we died today or only tomorrow."

Having redefined executioners as heroic sufferers and having stifled his empathy for human suffering, including his own, Eichmann was numb enough to follow his new conscience.

True villains and true psychopaths are, fortunately, rather rare; but, in the right circumstances, becoming unfeelingly obedient and inhuman in this way can become a common condition. When political life atrophies and debate and questioning cease, while thoughtful moral experience is blocked internally, the resulting capacity for evil can spread like an epidemic. Before she went to Jerusalem, Arendt had feared that thoughtlessness – “the headless recklessness or hopeless confusion or complacent repetition of ‘truths’ which have become trivial and empty”, as she described it in The Human Condition (1958) – had become “among the outstanding characteristics of our time”.

 Elisabeth Young-Bruehl