Was Adolf Eichmann a Mediocrity, or a Monster?

In 1960, the Mossad identified Adolf Eichmann—the SS official charged with overseeing the extermination of the Jews, who was then living under an assumed identity in Argentina—kidnapped him, and brought him to Jerusalem to stand trial for his crimes. The philosopher Hannah Arendt, herself a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, covered the trial for the New Yorker, and the series of essays she produced became Eichmann in Jerusalem, which remains one of the most influential books on the Holocaust. Reviewing the book in Commentary in 1963, Norman Podhoretz dissected its central argument that Eichmann was the exemplar of what Arendt called “the banality of evil”—not a monster, but a faceless bureaucrat. Podhoretz’s conclusions, now supported by extensive historical evidence that has come to light in the past two decades, is worth considering as the film Operation Finale puts Eichmann on the silver screen.