Evil: The Crime against Humanity
by Jerome Kohn, Director, Hannah Arendt Center, New School University

Hannah Arendt at the University of Chicago, undated. Courtesy of the Hannah Arendt Trust.

In 1963 Hannah Arendt said that she had "been thinking for many years, or, to be specific, for thirty years, about the nature of evil." (see Grafton document in Eichmann file) It had been thirty years since the Reichstag, the German parliament, was burned in Berlin, an event followed immediately by the Nazis' illegal arrests of thousands of communists and others who opposed them. Though innocent of any crime, those arrested were taken to concentration camps or the cellars of the recently organized Gestapo and subjected to what Arendt called "monstrous" treatment. With his political opposition effectively forestalled, Hitler could establish as a matter of policy the Jew-hatred that in his case was obvious to anyone who read Mein Kampf (My Struggle), the diatribe he dictated in prison and published in 1925. Which is to say that with the consolidation of Nazi power anti-Semitism ceased to be a social prejudice and became political: Germany was to be made judenrein, "purified" by first demoting Jews to the status of second class citizens, then by ridding them of their citizenship altogether, deporting them, and, finally, killing them. From that moment on Arendt said she "felt responsible." But responsible for what? She meant that she, unlike many others, could no longer be "simply a bystander" but must in her own voice and person respond to the criminality rampant in her native land. "If one is attacked as a Jew," she said, "one must defend oneself as a Jew. Not as a German, not as a world-citizen, not as an upholder of the Rights of Man."

The year was 1933. Within a few months Arendt was arrested, briefly detained for her work with a Zionist organization, and, when the opportunity presented itself, left Germany abruptly. After her stay in France and upon arriving in America in 1941, she wrote more than fifty articles for the German-Jewish weekly Der Aufbau addressing the plight and duty of Jews during World War II.¹ Arendt first heard about Auschwitz in 1943, but with Germany's defeat in 1945 incontrovertible evidence of the existence of Nazi "factories" of extermination came to light, and at that time information concerning slave labor installations in the Soviet Gulag also gradually emerged. Struck by the structural similarity of those institutions Arendt turned her attention to the function of concentration camps under totalitarian rule. Her analysis has to be read to be fully appreciated and only a few indications of its power and originality, and fewer of its subtlety, can be given here. (see The Origins of Totalitarianism, chapter 12, "Totalitarianism in Power"; "Concluding Remarks" from the first edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism; "Social Science Techniques and the Study of Concentration Camps"; "Die Menschen und der Terror" ["Mankind and Terror"])

The camps haunted Arendt's writing until Stalin's death in 1953. Then, after she published The Human Condition in 1958, a theoretical study of the three activities of active life (labor, work, and action) and their career in the modern age, and embarked on an analysis of the American, French, and Russian Revolutions, the camps reappeared on the horizon of her thought when she attended the trial of Adolf Eichmann (the chief coordinator of the transportation of Jews to the death camps) in Israel in 1961. In one way or another the Nazi camps played a major role in the controversy that followed the publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil in 1963, and, although she ceased to write directly about them after 1966, it is fair to say that what she called the "overpowering reality" of totalitarian concentration camps lay behind her preoccupation with the problem of evil, a concern that lasted until the end of her life.