A Political Philosopher's Analysis of Nazi Totalitarianism

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal-Pioneer

It has now been half a century since the political philosopher Hannah Arendt, a refugee from Nazi Germany who became a distinguished American academic, published Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.

It was based on the New Yorker articles she wrote while covering the trial of Adolph Eichmann, one of the architects of Hitler’s genocide.

He had been captured by Israeli agents in Argentina in 1960. He was found guilty of crimes against humanity, crimes against the Jewish people, war crimes, and membership in an outlawed organization, and was executed in 1962.

The book, published in 1963, has been the subject of heated controversy ever since. Arendt, who died in 1975, and who has herself been the subject of many books since, was accused of a lack of sympathy for the victims of the Holocaust, as well as of portraying Eichmann as a bureaucrat who simply followed orders, rather than a vicious anti-Semite.

Arendt’s views on Nazism as a major failing of European civilization can be found in seminal works written prior to Eichmann in Jerusalem, including The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951; The Human Condition, which came out in 1958; and the 1961collection Between Past and Future: Six Exercises in Political Thought.

Arendt saw the curse of totalitarianism emerging out of mass movements, which trampled historical traditions, and were dismissive of private property and limited government.

The group, be it one of class, ethnicity, or religion, destroys, as she wrote in The Human Condition, “the paradoxical plurality of unique beings,” eventually eliminating the realm of freedom. Under Nazism, a homogenous society of “blood and soil” supplants individual difference.       

In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt asserted that this loss of individual identity creates a totalitarian society in which “each individual knows that he lives or dies for the preservation of the species,” and leads to the “volkish” community of “race” envisaged by Hitler. It also creates the “mass man” – people such as Eichmann and SS commander Heinrich Himmler – for whom traditional morality becomes meaningless.

The primitive and “biological” category of race, rather than nation, becomes the principle of the body politic, contended Arendt, and bureaucracy becomes the means of rule. From this tribalism comes the grotesque theory of “the superman whose natural destiny it is to rule the world.”

For the Nazis, terror and mass murder become necessary, she stated, since the forces of “nature” and “history” must not be impeded in the course of the implementation of the ideal civilization, the so-called “Thousand Year Reich.”

No relativist, Arendt, in Between Past and Future, observed that the totalitarian impulse had introduced a “radical evil” in the world, one that constituted a break in the history of civilization. If there was no empirical reality, but rather the propagation of ideological claims that could be totally mad, this meant “quite literally that everything is possible not only in the realm of ideas but in the field of reality itself.”

Crimes such as the Holocaust were therefore so immense, she maintained, that they could not be judged by normal moral standards, and the murderers, too, were unprecedented in human history.

A true political conservative, Arendt cautioned that authority should always imply “an obedience in which men retain their freedom.” It remains prudent to always heed this advice.