In 1960, on hearing of Adolf Eichmann's capture and plans for his trial, Hannah Arendt contacted The New Yorker and offered to travel to Israel to cover it when it opened on 11 April 1961.
Arendt was anxious to test her theories, developed in 'The Origins of Totalitarianism', and see how justice would be administered to the sort of man she had written about.
In her subsequent 1963 report, based on her observations and transcripts, and which evolved into the book 'Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil’ Arendt coined the phrase "the banality of evil" to describe the Eichmann phenomenon. She, like others, was struck by his very ordinariness and the demeanour he exhibited of a small, slightly balding, bland bureaucrat, in contrast to the horrific crimes he stood accused of. He was, she wrote, "terribly and terrifyingly normal.” She examined the question of whether evil is radical or simply a function of thoughtlessness, a tendency of ordinary people to obey orders and conform to mass opinion without a critical evaluation of the consequences of their actions. (Taken from Wikipedia)
