Biography: Was the phrase 'the banality of evil' applied wrongly to Adolf Eichmann?
Hannah Arendt's observation about the trial in Israel of the war criminal, Adolf Eichmann - that he represented the "banality of evil" - is one of the most quoted clichés of the 20th century. And unlike most clichés, as the author of this splendid history shows, there is absolutely no truth in it whatsoever. Evil is no more or less banal than any other human quality, but there was nothing remotely banal about Adolf Eichmann, or the Third Reich.
Yet Arendt's philosophising upon the trial's implications for human nature, and how people behave within a totalitarian dictatorship, has informed the thinking of generations of students of the 20th century. She was in fact utterly wrong - primarily in her historical understanding of the structure of the Third Reich, and then necessarily wrong in her assessments of how it operated.
Contrary to what she - and many historians - asserted, unlike Stalin's Third Reich, the Third Reich was not a single totalitarian system, imposing the will of a single man. Hitler's Germany was an anarchy of rival organisations, competing for resources, prestige and manpower. In many senses it was utterly dysfunctional. It had, for example, three different and competing armies, answering to completely different military leaderships. Instead of simplification and standardisation - one of the keys to Allied victory - the Germans opted for the logistical nightmare of diversity. There were, for example, more than 90 different versions (hence 90 sets of manuals and 90 sets of screwdrivers for ground-crews) of the Messerschmitt 109. Nine might have won the war.
The main reason why the Reich was so terrifyingly successful was that it coincided with the greatest flowering of German genius ever seen. It is a matter of the direst speculation what the outcome might have been had the German war effort been directed with a political talent that matched its technological and military prowess.
Arendt's central preoccupation - and her fundamental error - was that Eichmann was an obedient cipher of the Reich. What therefore fascinated her about him was what did not exist: his submission to some greater will. As it happened, there was no submission. Hitler's ambition to destroy the Jewish population of Europe accorded precisely with his, and how he did it was largely his business. He attended to the task with a diabolical skill, ingenuity and energy. Eichmann was far from banal; he was quite brilliant.
He was thricefold eminent: the first time was as the mastermind of the industrialised Final Solution, the second as the man in the Glass Booth, whose trial in Israel in 1961 reminded a forgetful world that the central crime of the Third Reich wasn't conquest but genocide, and the third, posthumously, as a ventriloquist's dummy to Arendt's often baseless theories. It was this last aspect which causes much agony and anger amongst world Jewry, for her central thesis was that anti-Semitism was only incidental to the Holocaust, in which Eichmann was a colourless functionary.
He wasn't: he was a true believer. Thanks to Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Iraq, we know rather more about genocide than she did, but nonetheless the evidence was there from the Third Reich, from the Soviet Union and the Ottoman Empire. And though Arendt was right to consider that the Holocaust had universal applications, the defining characteristic of such a catastrophe is that at some level, either through leadership (Germany) or lynch-mob (Rwanda), killers have to have passion. In other words, genocide doesn't just happen.
On the other hand - and I suspect I part company with the author here - Arendt was right to propose that the Holocaust wasn't the culmination and inevitable conclusion of centuries of Jew-hatred. That argument is simply post hoc, propter hoc. It required the specific and malignant genius of Hitler to mutate the deeply unpleasant virus of anti-Semitism into the rampaging and terminal cancer of the Holocaust.
Without Adolf Eichmann, would there have been genocide of Europe's Jews? Unquestionably, but probably a different one. Once Hitler and his crew came to power, they were always going to kill Jews, and from the earliest days of the conquest of Poland, Jews were singled out for a special fate. After the invasion of the Soviet Union, there could be no doubt about what that fate was, regardless of Eichmann's activities. Field Marshal Reichenau's orders to Army Group Centre in October 1941 authorising "special" treatment to Jews were duplicated to Army Group South by Gen von Manstein (later the post-war adviser to the new West German Army). Within days, German soldiers had murdered tens of thousands of Jews.
For the men of the SS and the regular German army, killing Jews was one of the messy aspects of soldiering amongst the Asian hordes. Few enjoyed doing it, but it had to be done; and done it was, which is why those who argue about how many died in Auschwitz are missing the point. Even if Auschwitz were a myth, genocide was done anyway by the armies of the Third Reich.
But what was a grubby duty to a Feldwebel of the Werhmacht or an Oberscharführer of the SS was in Eichmann's eyes a sacred mission.
He was driven by hatred of Jews, and this hatred was liberated from all inhibition by the freedom conferred by Hitler's abominable Reich. As later genocides have shown, Eichmann really was, as this excellent, ground-breaking book testifies, a man of our time.
Eichmann: His Life and Crimes By David Cesarani William Heinemann, 458pp. £20
Kevin Myers is an author and an Irish Times journalist