As indicated in my post of August 21, I am giving a very short course, specifically on this site, on the classics of leadership literature. (See the post for how “classic” is defined.)
The posts will be drawn from my edited collection, Leadership: Essential Selections on Power, Authority, and Influence (McGraw-Hill, 2010). While here I can provide only short bursts of texts, my hope is they prompt you to dig deeper.
The selections are grouped into three parts. Part I comprises classics About Leadership. Part II is a compilation of Literature as Leadership. And Part III consists of selections by Leaders in Action. Leaders who have used words – written, oral, or both – as instruments of leadership.
Today’s leadership literacy classic is the last entry in Part I of the book, About Leadership. The author’s name might be familiar as a philosopher, specifically for her work on totalitarianism which remains still of paramount importance. But Hannah Arendt’s most famous book, certainly the one that was her most controversial, was about notorious Nazi war criminal, Adolf Eichmann.
Arendt’s study of Eichmann relates to the work I referenced last, on obedience to authority, by Stanley Milgram. The work of both Milgram and Arendt was influenced by what happened in Nazi Germany and across most of Europe during the Second World War. Both moreover sought to answer some of the same questions: How do good people become bad people? How do bad people become evil people? And what if anything can be done to prevent an event such as the Holocaust?
The focus of their attention was however different. Milgram homed in on followers generally. And Arendt focused on one man specifically, who, moreover, was both a leader and a follower simultaneously. Specifically, the man who was the subject of Arendt’s book was not the leader, Adolf Hitler, but Eichmann, one of Hitler’s top deputies. As a top Nazi bureaucrat Eichmann certainly was without question a leader. But when it came to defending himself against charges of war crimes, he claimed, with some justification, that he was only following orders.
Eichmann was one of the main organizers and implementers of the Final Solution, the Nazis’ attempt to annihilate all of Europe’s Jews. In the immediate postwar period, however, he managed to escape detention by the Allies and to flee eventually to Argentina. Eichmann was recaptured only in 1960 when he was finally tracked down by the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, brought to Jerusalem to stand trial in an Israeli courtroom, and ultimately hung for his war crimes.
It was the trial to which Arendt was witness that motivated her to write the book from which I quote here. Her conclusion was that Eichmann was ,in the end, no more than “banal.” That he was an ordinary man in an extraordinary situation. That he was not so much malevolent as callow, not so much a rabid anti-Semite as without any ideology at all. As Arendt described Eichmann, one of the most notorious of all Nazi war criminals, he was “genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché.”
The idea that evil could be banal was what got her into trouble. Arendt’s readers found it painful to read, and difficult to believe, that an atrocity on the scale of the Holocaust could possibly be the responsibility of someone who was not much different from you and me.
Arendt never answered the question of how what came to pass came to pass. She could not. Like everything else written about the Holocaust, whatever her answer it was only in part.
- From Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963)
And just as the law in civilized countries assumes that the voice of conscience tells everybody “Thou shalt not kill,” even though man’s natural desires and inclinations may at times be murderous, so the law of Hitler’s land demanded that the voice of conscience tell everybody, “Thou shalt kill.”
Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it – the quality of temptation. Many Germans and many Nazis, probably the overwhelming majority of them, must have been tempted not to murder. Not to rob, not to let their neighbors go off to their doom… and not to become accomplices in all these crimes by benefiting from them. But, God knows, they had learned how to resist temptation.