Morality Under Totalitarianism

After World War II, people related to Holocaust, crimes against humanity, and hidden

manipulation within the Nazi system, went through a long trial process that disclosed the real

face of Hitler’s plan. Jewish question that most German citizens convincingly supported led

to millions starving, suffering, losing everything, and dying. One of the misconceptions that

appeared was an obvious sharing of the same goal and principles among German soldiers and

others executing orders from their bosses. Nevertheless, a political philosopher who

experienced the effects of the Holocaust herself, Hannah Arendt, came up with a theory

explaining such an outburst of criminal acts during the war. Instead of arguing for the radical

evil theory she mentioned in her work, The Origins of Totalitarianism, she creates a term

banal evil that embraces an entire population’s mindset created under totalitarianism. After

witnessing Adolf Eichmann’s trial, Arendt pinpointed the main contradiction that others

condemned due to the complex nature of the process. Eichmann was an officer of Adolf

Hitler’s parliamentary organization called the Schutzstaffel and, eventually, he became one of

the key figures in the organization of the Holocaust. The evil that people created out of him

did not align with the words and behavior that Arendt observed during the trial, rather he

seemed simply like an ordinary man fulfilling his duties that turned out as one of the greatest

crimes in history. The dilemma between his wickedness and innocence according to the Nazi

law, blind rule-following, and neutral attitude toward Jews, created a challenge for a cliché

mindset about Nazi Germans. Eichmann in Jerusalem centers around Hannah Arendt’s main

arguments describing this phenomenon and sets up a question on morality among society

members under totalitarianism. Therefore, the problem this essay attempts to solve is whether

it is possible to still keep people accountable and humane while simultaneously living under a

totalitarian system.

To establish the first argument, it is inevitable to define life under totalitarianism and the
conditions that keep it alive. A totalitarian system is able to exist because of people as much

as it holds complete power over their lives. It heavily relies on their response, obedience, and

promotion of the government’s ideology. One of his statements about Eichmann on a trial

was the occupation that directed him toward what the accusation was about afterward. As

Arendt quotes, “With the killing of Jews I had nothing to do. I never killed a Jew, or a non-

Jew, for that matter —I never killed any human being. I never gave the order to kill either a

Jew or a non-Jew; I just did not do it,” (3) A powerful statement during the trial made an

impact on the audience; more so on Arendt: a detail that symbolically separated him from the

rest of Nazi group. An excuse Eichmann tried to use as his defense did not seem effective

enough: too many Jews lost their lives. As Arendt adds at the beginning of her work, “... on

the grounds that under the then existing Nazi legal system, he had not done anything wrong,

that what he was accused of were not crimes but “acts of state.” (3) Nevertheless, it

demonstrated something ordinary about him and his speeches, that he convinced himself in

his completely legal deeds and the evil that led him to trial was from a non-Nazi German

perspective. So the Eichmann that Arendt describes, the banal wrongdoer, does not fit any of

the categories of conventionally considered criminals, as he had no wrong intentions and was

not negligent. That proves the point that most of the evil crimes committed during the war did

not come from evil. Indeed, the very source was people that let the leaders of the totalitarian

system, such as Hitler and his supporters, invade their minds with their controversial

ideology.

The next argument is in the trial itself: Eichmann was the guilty one because of his choices to

climb the bureaucratic ladder. His thoughtless and blind following represents the entire

country, however, it was he who agreed to fulfill the orders. If people did reflect on their

actions because of their preserved thinking and judging abilities, could it potentially lead to a

better future? One of the main reasons for the evil was a collapse of morality due to all the
chaos brought by the new political system and the war. Depending on their position within

society, people had to switch off the feeling of responsibility except the ambition and desire

to climb the ladder of bureaucracy. An example of such a situation that caused controversy

over Arendt's paper was The greatest “idealist” Eichmann ever encountered among the Jews,

Dr. Rudolf Kastner, with whom he negotiated during the Jewish deportations from Hungary

and with whom he came to an agreement that he, Eichmann, would permit the “illegal”

departure of a few thousand Jews to Palestine (the trains were in fact guarded by German

police) in exchange for “quiet and order” in the camps from which hundreds of thousands

were shipped to Auschwitz. (21) Even one of the oppressed and executed Jews could not

resist control and, thus, became one of the engines in the Holocaust machine because of his

personal desires. While critics of Hannah Arendt's work harshly condemned her for victim

blaming, they denied the truth of thoughtless evil that even members of marginalized

communities were capable of doing. That is the reason why it is not possible to keep people

accountable for their actions in extreme conditions of dictatorial regime.

To sum up, under the totalitarian system, individuals forget evil acts as they are being

committed. This kind of evil, according to Hannah Arendt, is banal evil, not carried out

carelessly but without thinking and remorse – without considering the morality or any human

dignity that everyone has since birth. By the end of Adolf Eichmann’s trial, it was obvious

that “Eichmann, it will be remembered, had steadfastly insisted that he was guilty only of

“aiding and abetting” in the commission of the crimes with which he was charged, that he

himself had never committed an overt act”. (59) Since resistance is useless, so is thinking and

reflecting on reality and the aftermath of committed crimes. Totalitarianism cannot flourish

with independent thinkers that contemplate whether they commit good and helpful deeds, or

their actions are evil and destructive. This regime requires people to forget about moral

values existing in other nation-states or before the establishment of totalitarianism in this

particular country. Thus, when people start choosing between good and evil, the entire system

will cease to exist, since it comes from one authority and not millions of individuals with

their personal ideas. The two cannot coexist simultaneously.

Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Penguin Books,

1964.