None of the participants ever arrived at a clear understanding of the actual horror of Auschwitz, which is of a different nature from all the atrocities of the past, because it appeared to prosecution alike as not much more than the most horrible pogrom in Jewish history.
hannah Arendtquotes
1906 - 1975
Having witnessed the horrors of the Nazi regime first hand, German-born American philosopher, Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), is known not only for her great contributions to political theory, but also her undaunted and daring spirit.
After earning her Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Heidelberg, Arendt uncovered antisemitism propaganda within the Nazi Party and spoke against it. A Jew herself, Arendt was arrested and jailed by the Gestapo. Incredibly, she escaped and fled to Paris in 1933, only to be later taken to a Nazi concentration camp. She escaped again and made her way to New York.
She became a naturalized U.S. citizen a decade later, and published her famous book, The Origins of Totalitarianism. Tracing the rise of antisemitism, racism and imperialism in the West, this book firmly established Arendt as a philosopher. Previously, she worked as a journalist and editor, but with the succession of more publications she found her way as a lecturer and professor at numerous universities.
The Human Condition, a critique of the modern world using Classical ideologies, is considered her philosophical masterwork, while The Life of the Mind is a provocative analysis of the relationship between will and freedom.
Her distinguished writing won her both acclaim and criticism. Most controversial was her book on the trial of Nazi war criminal, Adolf Eichmann (Eichmann in Jerusalem: The Banality of Evil), where she claimed he was more “thoughtless” than evil. Despite this, her original and provocative views remain the basis for many modern political theories.
Of these, only the last, the crime against humanity, was new and unprecedented. Aggressive warfare is at least as old as recorded history, and while it has been denounced as “criminal” many times before, it has never been recognized as such in any formal sense.
There is hardly a better way to avoid discussion than by releasing an argument from the control of the present and by saying that only the future will reveal its merits.
And just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations – as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world – we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang.
There are more than a few people, especially among the cultural élite, who still publicly regret the fact that Germany sent Einstein packing, without realizing that it was a much greater crime to kill little Hans Cohn from around the corner, even though he was no genius.
Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it—the quality of temptation.
The only antidote to the irreversibility of history is the faculty of forgiveness.
The net effect of this language system was not to keep these people ignorant of what they were doing, but to prevent them from equating it with their old, “normal” knowledge of murder and lies. Eichmann’s great susceptibility to catch words and stock phrases, combined with his incapacity for ordinary speech, made him, of course, an ideal subject for “language rules.
It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lessons that this long course in human wickedness had taught us – the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.
Since the peace treaties of 1919 and 1920, the refugees and the stateless have attached themselves like a curse to all the newly established states on earth which were created in the image of the nation-state.