Fifty years ago, the trial of Adolf Eichmann started, in Israel, ending with his execution a year later for crimes against humanity. Hannah Arendt, covering the event for The New Yorker, coined her so-famous expression "the banality of evil" to describe Eichmann's mannerisms and appearance and the shallowness of his opinions and view of life. I've always thought it an entirely accurate description, not only of Eichmann, but of an entire class of people: the lower-level assistant managers, the assistant administrators, the petty careerists of any office. Bureaucracy's bottom feeders, any one of whom could be persuaded to help administer the same bureaucratic horror as Eichmann did, without a twinge of conscience, behind the twin buffers of ambition and survival. After all, Eichmann was an ambitious and loyal servant of the SS first and last, and the way to get ahead in the SS, as in any rigid organization, was to obey orders--actually, to one-up one's superiors while seeming not to do so, to ensure they took the credit for one's own ideas. In Eichmann's case, the ideas involved coordinating the train timetables of the Greater German Reich in order to facilitate the extermination of millions of human beings. Somehow the industrial quality of this procedure enabled men such as Eichmann--mediocre in all respects except in their desire to get ahead--to see themselves as executives, not executioners; after all, no daggers were wielded, no chalices poisoned, there was no face-to-face contact. It was all done with modern efficiency, behind the scenes. And, as his fellow bureaucrat-killer Stalin pointed out, a single death may be a tragedy, but a million are a statistic. So after awhile, as the statistics mounted into the millions, the reality of mass murder was banalized to its lowest common denominator: the timetable.
