Britain and the Jews of Europe 1939-1945 by Bernard Wasserstein
Oxford University Press, for the Institute of Jewish Affairs,
389 pp., $17.95 In a well-known work on the Eichmann trial
Hannah Arendt perversely floated the notion of the banality of
evil. What seems to lie behind this idea is that Eichmann was no
more than a dim little man whose crimes were simply a byproduct
of the daily official routine to which it was his duty as a
bureaucrat to attend. But bureaucrats are also human beings, and
part of what makes a human being is the capacity to make
choices, and specifically moral ones. Contrary to Miss Arendt’s
glib phrase, choices of this kind can never be banal. If they
were, we would not, every time we hear or read about the Nazi
treatment of the Jews, feel intimately and profoundly
devastated. The horror which Nazi actions will continue to
inspire arises in part from our inability to fathom, and fully
account for, their monstrousness. The malice which, without the
shadow of a provocation, and for no s