Eichmann in Jerusalem reports on the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961. Eichmann, who was a high-ranking member of the S.S., was charged with crimes against humanity, by organizing the deportation and transportation of Jewish people to the Nazi death camps. He was tried by the state of Israel, who forcefully extradited him from Argentina, where he had been in hiding. In the first part of the book, Arendt explains the stakes for the prosecution. They want to show the atrocities that the Jewish people have suffered, in order to demonstrate to the Jewish people that they need their own state to truly be safe; they want the story of the Holocaust to become public; and they want to give victims the opportunity to face their murderer and tell their stories. The defense, meanwhile, wants to show that Eichmann was only doing what was legally required of him, and had no especial anti-Semitic feelings.
Arendt portrays Eichmann as "banal," a person without an original thought in his head, who can only speak in garbled cliches, and whose only worry is for his career. She argues that most of the prosecution's case is moot, since Eichmann clearly did not act on his own initiative, and would have done anything to further his own career. She argues that the entire purpose of Nazism was to destroy the effective distinction between legal and illegal, moral and immoral; in effect, it had produced a nation of Eichmanns. She describes how the ideology of Nazism quickly advanced from barring Jews from public professions, to dispossessing and deporting them, to murdering them, and how Eichmann went along with these jumps in ideology without questioning them. He saw it as his "duty." In this, Arendt observes that he is perverting the Kantian notion of the categorical imperative (always act in such a way that your actions could be the basis of a universal law), which Eichmann claims has been his guiding moral philosophy.
Finally, Arendt describes the deportation and murder of the Jews, proceeding by geographic region. In this, Arendt often stresses the role that local Jewish authorities played in rounding up Jews and making sure that they went to the trains peacefully. She also shows how local national authorities (with a few exceptions, like Italy and Denmark) participated eagerly and willingly in the round-ups. What she wishes to show is that the Nazis were able to effect a complete and total moral collapse in European life, with the use of terror, war, and their ever-escalating ideology. She closes by observing that resistance is always possible, so long as people are able to preserve the core of private existence that makes moral judgment possible, and by pronouncing a death sentence on Eichmann, publicly declaring that his crimes have put him beyond the pale of humanity.
