Thinking about Hannah Arendt and Adolph Eichmann on Erev Rosh Hashanah

It’s been many, many years since I read “Eichmann in Jerusalem.” The two objectionable things that struck with me was (1) victim blaming/they marched unresisting to their deaths blah, blah (2) Eichmann as careerist in the genocide business, like an executive for General Motors, which misses the mark.

If I’m remembering this incorrectly, or misunderstanding Arendt, I am willing to be corrected on this.

Thank you for introducing me to this. I have been an occasional observer of the human condition and the human desire for belonging at any price but unaware of Arendt’s work.

The NYT article’s mention of picking on Arendt reminds me of when Allison Cutty, who has a slightly girlish voice, interviewed a certain historian for Chicago Public Radio, about his book arguing that Arendt’s characterization of Jews relied substantially on an antisemitic source. He explained his findings like they were a punchline, I think with even a hint of condescension. And then she asked why they were significant, and he (with a bit of indignation) repeated himself. So she rephrased the question: what does this change about how we see her work? He didn’t really have a response–like, we’re supposed to take the hint that this proves Arendt is BAD. And when she didn’t follow the cue, he just kind of got stuck & didn’t know what to do next.

I have noticed that ne0-Nazi types on the Internet are very fond of quoting or citing Arendt, not on Zionism, (at least that I recall), but on Jewish responsibility for historical anti-semitism.

Anyway, I don’t know who that certain historian was, but it sounds to me las though he just had a bit of trouble converting his book spontaneously into soundbites.

Anyways, here’s the first paragraph of the section on “Arendt’s sources” from something I just googled.

Arendt’s treatment of sources encapsulates the problematic aspects of the “Antisemitism”section that opens Origins of Totalitarianism. Steve Aschheim has aptly observed that Arendtemployed “a defiantly anti-apologetic form of Jewish history” in this text.Yet her theoreticalintentions often seem at odds with her evidentiary basis. A conspicuous failure of judgementregarding sources impairs her analysis; while her account has the great virtue of recognizing antisemitism as a historical phenomenon, arising out of specific social formations, not as anatural fact, the particular lineaments she traces frequently lead her investigation astray. Notleast among the reasons for these missteps is Arendt’s extended reliance on antisemitic sources.The problem is not that Arendt cites antisemitic material for her history of antisemitism; this isthe foundation of any historical account. But historians of antisemitism usually draw onantisemitic texts critically, as primary sources to illustrate what antisemites believed. Arendtcites antisemitic texts affirmatively, as secondary sources to support her interpretation of antisemitism. She endorses antisemitic analyses of Jewish history and adopts a number of their arguments as her own

http://www.academia.edu/3622432/Hannah_Arendts_Analysis_of_Antisemitism_in_The_Origins_of_Totalitarianism_A_Critical_Appraisal

which is why his strategy worked.” (Well, on Arendt, at least; Eichmann was hanged, after all.)

How did it “work” on Arendt? I thought the whole point was that banality is no excuse. One of the most effective parts of the book, I think , is where she shows that Goebbels deployed the same anti-thought techniques. In any case, her view may be easier to understand for those who take original sin seriously. (Presumably most of her audience did not fit into that category .)

“her unsympathetic accusations of complicity toward Jewish leaders who were in an impossible situation”

Refusing to collaborate is a difficult, even deadly, situation, but it is not an *impossible* situation, as Arendt specifically points out.

Kaveh:

While I’m awaiting the final judgment of the moderator… I don’t know who that historian was, but my guess is his main problem was quickly converting his book into sound-bites, and I’m also guessing he was not talking about Eichmann in Jerusalem but Origins of Totalitarianism, which I know has been criticized for taking anti-semitic sources at face value, and also interpreted as blaming Jews for antisemitism. Certainly a lot of antisemites interpret it that way.

Actually, just go ahead and leave my previous comment in moderation, Mr. Moderator Sir. I’ve decided I don’t especially like it anyway.

I like the part of “Eichmann” (page 154 in my copy) where the Nazis thought they were culturally closer to the Scandinavian nations and annoyed that only the more “subhuman barbarian hordes” of Ukraine, among others, were really all on board with Nazi anti-Semitism.

The passing years haven’t changed that much among Obama’s new friends in Kiev.

Christopher Browning, who’s a very bright guy, was quoted recently in the NYT saying that Arendt “had the right type but the wrong guy. There were all sorts of people like Eichmann was pretending to be”

That’s a really good point. As a student in Peter Longerich’s class I had to joint-review Goldhagen’s Willing Executioners and Browning’s Ordinary Men. The distinction was violently obvious; Browning is a genius.

Of course Lynndie England and the rest of the great folk from the 800th Military Police Brigade, US Army National Guard [tellingly, much the same kind of outfit as the 11th Reserve Police Battalion Browning studied], would give us all a live demonstration of Browning’s thesis about two years later.

” Her book is still the best short read I know to recommend to people for how the Nazis went about their program of genocide. ”

Is it still ? That’s not a rhetorical question, I’ve never read the book, but has ‘what we know’ changed so little over the past 4+ decades ? I was re-reading the relevant chapter in Mazower’s ‘Hitler’s Empire’ last night and wondering what books other people would recommend on ‘how the Nazis went about their program of genocide.’ ? (I hope that doesn’t read too flippant a question on my part)
Is ‘Bloodlands’ the best contemporary overview ? (Looking online there seems to be some relatively serious reservations from specialists, although some of that could be professional politics I dont know)

Everyone is always dragging Arendt down and impugning her motives:

http://existentialcomics.com/comic/32

I haven’t read Bloodlands, but Jacobin published a pretty heated polemic against it:

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/09/timothy-snyders-lies/

Huh, never looked at Proyect’s own post, which that guest post links to…

@29:

That is an incredibly stupid and factually error-ridden account of the matter, in these endless go-arounds. The “hands” comment comes from Karl Jaspers, not from W. Benjamin, who likely never had any personal contact with H. Nor did he ban Husserl, who was already retired and who’s privileges weren’t revoked. (The philosophical split between the two had already long occurred with the publication of SZ). Further 2/3 of the German Philosophical Association, i.e. the professional organization for philosophy professors, joined the Nazi Party at the same time that H. did. The only difference is that most of the others are no longer remembered as of any philosophical significance. And Arendt herself was well aware of the “problem” and remarked quite acerbically about it in her correspondance, specifically with her other mentor, Jaspers.

I didn’t know there was such a thing as a secular Muslim.

Secular Muslim obviously makes sense, as a shortcut to describe someone who grew up in a specific religious context though no longer believes/practices. I’d label myself secular Catholic, as a simplification.

anderson – thanks for the recomendations.

Well I found a tripod site that says it means believing but not practicing.

I don’t know who the secular priests think they’re fooling.

I believe I read Arendt’s book in 1998, when I lived in France during Maurice Papon’s trial. Another one to think about under the banality of evil angle.

The need to turn disagreement into vilification confuses me. I’m observing these historical arguments somewhat from the sidelines and don’t have to drop any of the respect I have for Arendt and her work should it turn out that not all of her assessment of Eichmann-the-person will stand.

From the NYT review, the bit about conscience and the morality of the Vaterland as well as the twisted bit of Kant reminds me of the book that I happened to recommend for people who want to know what Nazism looked like for average Germans: Ödön von Horváth’s 1938 novel Jugend ohne Gott (“Youth without God”, available in a current English translation).

To John Halasz,

I stand corrected on the hands quote, and if Jaspers could not have heard it, then I stand corrected on that too. Now, as I understand it, Arendt herself at one point was disturbed by the fact that Heidegger had signed a paper that, as Arendt put it, could have gotten Husserl killed. Is that correct or incorrect? More to the point, do you deny that Heidegger gave speeches in support of the Nazis? Do you deny that he played a role in the firing of Jewish academics from the universities? And do you deny that Hannah Arendt continued to support Heidegger and ignore his Nazi record after the war? If you don’t deny any of those things, then I don’t think that the specifics matter so much. I’m very puzzled by this statement of yours:

“2/3 of the German Philosophical Association, i.e. the professional organization for philosophy professors, joined the Nazi Party at the same time that H. did. The only difference is that most of the others are no longer remembered as of any philosophical significance.”

Is this “Everybody was doing it.” defense really supposed to justify Heidegger? You can’t really think that.

Finally, here is why I think that this is relevant. One of Arendt’s claims seems to be that a lack of critical thinking or thoughtfulness was one of the main causes of Nazi behavior. But Arendt’s own behavior suggests that critical thinking or thoughtfulness is easily overcome by other psychological forces. Arendt’s view sounds like an inheritance of the Enlightenment — if only we would use Reason, we would do better. But her own behavior suggests that Reason is too frail, and too easily undermined by other psychological forces to do the work that the Enlightenment, and Arendt wanted it to do.

I thought the Jacobin review of Snyder was a hatchet job- he seems to be saying that Snyder is a Nazi apologist. To quote Merian (speaking about Arendt a few comments up from this one) “The need to turn disagreement into vilification confuses me.”

Snyder specifically said that Hitler killed more than Stalin, but that doesn’t fit Lazare’s polemical needs, so he doesn’t mention that unless I missed it somewhere. He seems to be one of those intellectuals who gets all worked up over exactly why one must condemn this particular mass murderer much more harshly than this other one over there. Simple-minded folk like myself see that Hitler probably killed more civilians than Stalin (according to Snyder’s own writings) and planned to kill many many more if he’d won, so that’s good enough for me. But really, outside the context of WWII where one had to side with one or the other, why should anyone care whether one was the “moral equivalent” of the other? Are Hitler and Stalin running for President in 2016?

I do think that proyect link (on Bloodlands) was quite a bit more thoughtful.

The significant issue with Heidegger’s Nazism is not biographical or historical; it’s philosophical. Do his philosophical ideas justify and promote authoritarian, irrationalist politics? The guy is dead, after all, but his philosophy is not.

When I first encountered Heidegger’s writings back in the 60s, his relationship with Hitler and company was explained away by a story about an ivory-tower intellectual who didn’t understand the reality of what he was supporting. That struck me as a dodge at the time because I dimly recognized the political implications of what I was pondering in Being and Time. Fifty years later, the naive prof story has been largely replaced by the Evil Heidegger narrative. I’m not sure that’s an improvement—Heidegger really was a deplorable man in many respects—but even accurate biography is just gossip, a way of avoiding the scary prospect of engaging with ideas of proven virulence and seductiveness.

I did read Arendt, but so long ago it hardly counts. Timothy Snyder is a serious historian. One doesn’t have to agree with a historian to be greatly put off by their point of view / method/ axe to grind. I prefer Jan Gross and Omer Bartov.

Some years ago I read Michael R. Marrus, The Holocaust in History, 1987, which I thought was really excellent, though I now see he accepts the view attributed to Arendt, perhaps erroneously, that the Jews went too willingly to their deaths. At any rate, he argues against such a thesis, whoever actually held it. The fact is that virtually no one acted well during those times. Some groups of people still seem awfully reluctant to accept this.

@42:

The work you cite is, judging from reviews a hackish gossipy account without intellectual merit or substance. If you want a carefully balanced account of Heidegger’s Nazi involvement, you might consult Szafranski’s journalistic biography of him. (That author studied philosophy for his university degree, even studying for some time with Adorno at the end of his life, so he can be accounted well informed and not unduly sympathetic). A lot of the overblown and even slanderous accusations from the interminable controversy over H.’s Nazi involvement are corrected there. It was a 1 year rectorship, which he resigned in failure and about a 2 year active involvement, followed by gradual disillusionment. And it’s not a matter of “justifying” heidegger’s Nazism,- (why would anyone want to do that?),- but simply of setting it accurately in context.

Arendt, needless to say, had nothing to do with anti-semitism, and her student affair with H. long preceded the Nazis rise to power. She generally seems to have regarded H.’s Nazi involvement as dreadful stupidity on his part. (In private, that was H.s own excuse to his friends, just like Zara Leander’s, that he was a “political idiot”). YMMV but it might be unfortunate that one of the most seminal Philosopher’s of the mid-20th century and the founding figure of existential phenomenology and hermeneutics was self-seduced into supporting the Nazis rise to power, but there you have it.

What Arendt meant by “thinking” isn’t simply upholding Kantian Enlightment or traditional rationalism and humanism. In later work, she would cite Platonic dialogues, which go round and round and never seem to arrive at at any firm conclusion, (because philosophical thinking is at bottom aporetic). But such thinking seemed to her to be crucial preparation for forming judgments, (as opposed to producing or certifying knowledge), rather than blindly adapting to the given world.

Getting back to the OP, I think it’s fair to say that Arendt constructed the Eichmann she wanted, rather than portraying the actual man in fully empirical terms, though it was based on observation of the actual trial. But her construction did capture an considerable aspect of the man. After all what distinguishes the “Final Solution” from other such events was the efficiency and precision of the operation, a kind of “rationality”. (Solzhenitsyn similarly remarked on the “rational” procedures of the Nazis, in contrast to the sheer adventitiousness of the Soviets). But what I’ve never understood is the claim made by her denouncers that the infamous observation on “the banality of evil” contradicted her earlier discussion of “radical evil”. Her definition of “radical evil” was that it was rooted in the “ability” to regard all of human life, including one’s own, as sheerly superfluous. I fail to see any contradiction between the two.

One possible, indirect commonality. Though it strikes me as a long shot:

Heidegger saw himself as continuing the work of the Greeks in a way. Going back to them. His use of Aletheia being a prime example. And the Nazis sometimes saw themselves as heir to the Greeks. Which was strange. The original Aryans were more likely from parts of present day India and Persia, not Greece.

Gordon Barnes @49: “What interests me is this. Hannah Arendt paints a picture of Nazis and their supporters as people who didn’t think enough. They did not reason enough. They were thoughtless.”

I don’t have Arendt’s text in front of me, so I’m loath to affirm that this is not the argument she makes, but from my memory and just from pointing to the Gedankenlosigkeit (glossed as thoughtlessness) as a characteristic trait of the bureaucratic Nazi killer it doesn’t follow that if people just thought more it would have prevented Nazism. I also very much doubt that this trait or quality is incompatible with being an academic, or even an academic philosopher.

Mde,

Thanks. Will do.

On the questions of German Nationalism. Nietzsche was thought by some to have set the ground for Nazism with his thought — fooled as they were by his sister’s later manipulations and her very real fascistic connections. But there are far too many instances in his writings just skewering the idea of that nationalism. At times it seemed, in fact, that he detested the Germanic. As mentioned, I didn’t bump into Heidegger on that subject at all, so must have missed all the clues, etc. etc. His philosophical work usually struck me as above political and ideological storms.

Knut Hamsun is another curious case for me. When I read his four great novels, Hunger, Pan, Mysteries and Victoria, I was at a loss for connections to the Nazis.

Strange bedfellows, etc.

@59,

Can’t remember where I read it first, or who said it. But, a rough paraphrase:

The Kantian prohibition against lying (a perfect duty) would yield this:

You’re hiding Jews, keeping them safe from the Nazis. The Gestapo knocks on your door and asks if you are hiding Jews. You tell them you are. They push you aside and ask you if you’re hiding them in the basement. Again, you tell them yes. The Gestapo agents capture them and send them to their deaths.

I think most people would lie in that case, Kant be damned, etc. They would choose his imperfect duty for that instead.

Jim Harrison @61,

Are you saying that Heidegger acknowledges the essential “being with” nature of Dasein? Or that he was opposed to the idea and chose the solitary instead?

I’m still not following you as to why Heidegger’s philosophical work would somehow lead to his embrace of Nazism. Though the unsaid is kinda horrific. The part about the (Wagnerian) apocalypse. His authentic confrontation with death and the anxiety of that confrontation being a sort of call for bringing it on? That would give a completely different reading for his wanting to prepare a place for the holy, for a new god, a la Holderlin . . . .as well.

Interesting.

The problem with seeing Heidegger in Kantian terms–I honestly don’t know how this was supposed to be done, and my understanding is that Heidegger was radically new, comes out of historicism, and so on–is that he’s also reacting against deracinated reason, which sounds a lot like Kant, but which was associated with Jewishness. The Frankfurt School, and William Barrett, get around this, I think–it’s not ahistorical reason we oppose, but instrumental or mechanistic versions of reason (Barrett seems kind of weird in associating this with Wittgenstein)–though I’m no expert on this. It seems to me Arendt assumes the reaction against ahistorical reason and doesn’t reject the association of it with Jewishness, which is part of the squeamishness with what she wrote.

Plume–on Aryan Greeks–I believe the idea is that the Attic Greeks, and those in Homer, were supposed to be Aryan conquerors from the north.

Thanks, Bianca,

I had forgotten about the theory of the various waves entering Greece from the north. Some mythographers (like Robert Graves) have attributed the supplanting of the (indigenous) Mother Goddess cults by father gods, such as Zeus, as an allegory for those different invasions. Marriages between gods and goddesses (Hieros Gamos) are like a rapprochement between the old and new ways, the indigenous peoples and the Aryan invaders from the north. He (and others like him) may go to that well too often, but it is at least grist for poetic mills.

“But Existentialism was also key for Camus and Sartre, both anti-Fascists, with Camus fighting the Nazis directly …”

Existentialism, in my limited understanding, shares a problem with atheism: it tells you much, much more about what not to believe in than to offer much positive advice. I see no reason offhand why a Nazi, a Communist, and a liberal can’t walk into a bar oops, meant to say, “be existentialists.”

… in formal logic, ad hominem argument is a fallacy. A syllogism, like a mathematical theorem is valid, or it isn’t, regardless of who puts it forward. But, as DD pointed out ages ago, the exclusion of ad hominem arguments in ordinary informal reasoning amounts to giving known liars the benefit of the doubt.

In formal logic, it doesn’t matte whether somebody is a known liar. Their argument is valid, or it is not valid. This is not something people can lie about and still be upright formal logicians.

People can lie about things like “I saw it with my own eyes”. They can lie about their experience. But if they lie to you about logic and you believe them, it’s “fool me once, shame on me”.

If Frege’s mastery of logic was consistent with his holding deeply irrational beliefs, then at the very least, that suggests something about the limits of logic. No?

Yes, certainly. Logic only considers how well you draw conclusions from your initial assumptions. It can’t do anything about the initial assumptions themselves, except that if you have some that are inconsistent among themselves it can point that out.

#72

“But, as DD pointed out ages ago, the exclusion of ad hominem arguments in ordinary informal reasoning amounts to giving known liars the benefit of the doubt.”

DD is pigshit.

Imagine how impoverished our discussions would be if we could not use ad hominem….

“Lazare’s critique of Snyder echoes with a whole lotta critiques of Snyder for the same thing. Here’s a link to a site with a list of links.http://defendinghistory.com/east-european-nationalist-abuse-of-timothy-snyders-bloodlands”

That part didn’t impress me–any person’s writings can be used or misused by racists. Snyder might be wrong in thinking that Stalin’s crimes were somehow linked to those of the Nazis–it doesn’t mean he’s guilty if anti-semites latch onto his work.

“Snyder’s reportage on Ukraine makes me suspect that Lazare is on to something: Snyder employs the cover up technique to hide the far right’s participation in Maidan and certainly in the events that have happened in that country, and he does this repeatedly and consciously.”

Now that accusation might be accurate, but I’m not knowledgeable enough to judge it. But the fact (if it is a fact) that Snyder might be misrepresenting current events doesn’t make him guilty of doing the same thing in his writings on the 30’s and 40’s. At best it might make it more likely, but the fact is that Snyder has not concealed the fact that (in his accounting) Hitler killed more civilians and if he’d won, would have killed tens of millions more. Which is a funny thing to do if he’s a closet rightwing apologist.

geo,

To be clear, what I wrote wasn’t a précis of Heidegger, just a comment on one angle or two. For example from what I wrote you’d never guess that the description of human existence in Being and Time has been very influential among theorists of artificial intelligence. That, as they say, is another story.

Heidegger hardly owns the patent on the idea that something is missing from civil society and its values, in fact that way of I put the issue could almost be a translation of Hegel on the topic. Hegel famously argued that participation in the life of the state represented a higher expression of human nature than ordinary civilian life. If polities are no more than arrangements to further material prosperity, if the state or nation doesn’t represent something higher, it really is hard to see how I can be reasonably called upon to sacrifice my life for my country since the material advantages my country might promise me aren’t as valuable to me as my life. On this accounting, the Congressional Medal of Honor would more properly be called the Stupidity Ribbon. (N.B. I’m not endorsing this line of thought, just reporting it. I don’t think it’s that easy to dismiss, however, and note that the issue of what really matters in the wake of the Death of God and the emergence of the democratic welfare state surfaces in many places. You can’t just blame it on Heidegger. Francis Fukuyama addressed the topic in his End of History, for example. )

geo @ 78:

I suppose that Heidegger could respond that your question is merely “ontic”, not “ontological”, (which is his version of the empirical/transcendental split). But, by the same token, Heidegger’s own Nazi commitments, however one assesses its content, motivation or duration, would also be “merely” ontic.

J. Harrison was somewhat off in attributing SZ to Nietzsche. The window dressing of the book is extensively borrowed from Kierkegaard. (Nietzsche would be extensively dealt with in his later work and retrospectively he would claim him as the lodestar of his thinking, but it’s not so prominent in SZ. Though N.’s prospect of “European nihilism” is clearly a present animating concern, leading to Adorno’s quip that attempts to “overcome” nihilism are always worse than the “thing” itself).

The authentic resoluteness that is supposed to arise from Sein-zum-Tod, (in which all worldly meaning is lost in the angst of realizing one’s potential and inevitable nothingness and thus in realizing that one is only the sheer potentiality that one finitely projects), is a limit condition. Go back to Aristotle, whose ethics involve an inter-nesting of means/ends relations: but where to such deliberations come to and end? For Aristotle, the limit condition would be theoretical contemplation of the divinized order of the cosmos. But such a notion of a pre-existent teleological metaphysical order is precisely what is lost to, impossible for, the modernized historical world. Hence such a limit condition can only be found in the recognition of the through-and-through finitude of human existence, both individually and collectively. In seizing hold of one’s authenticity in Sein-zum-Tod, one rises above one’s immersion in the world qua self-interested egotism and adaptive conformism, and comes to face the question of “ultimate” ends, in a manner akin to traditional notions of “disinterestedness”, which itself is no longer possible in the thoroughly technologized and instrumentalized world, which modern forms of theory themselves increasingly just subserve. But one likewise can’t take refuge in any pre-existent “necessity” somehow inscribed in the “foundations” of the world, and one can only retrieve any basis in tradition by interpretively transforming it. “Der Grund ist ein Abgrund”. IOW human existence is a thrown project and whatever “ultimate” ends are chosen are always projectively constructed and solely a human responsibility. At the same time, Heidegger is emphatically clear that authenticity is only a modification within a more basic inauthenticity, such that the two almost inevitably can switch places and must always be retrieved anew. The matter is “tragic”.

OTOH as Max Horkheimer replied to a woman who claimed that at least Heidegger had placed us squarely before death, Gen. Ludendorff did it better.

“Snyder employs the cover up technique to hide the far right’s participation in Maidan ”

People on the left in the Anglo-Saxon world like to go on about “Neo-Nazis” in Ukraine. Yet the European far right – Le Pen, Orban, the Austrian FPÖ, the AfD – are all enthusiastic Putin supporters, and all enamored with his homophobia, promotion of virulent nationalism, hatred of democracy and cultural outsiders, and distrust of economic liberalism. Not that there aren’t nasty anti-semites and nationalists on the Ukrainian side, but I can certainly understand why Snyder considers Maidan folks to be the more progressive side.

Fascinating interchange, this. Echoes of vanitas vanitatum, et omnia vanitas, and of the Vedantic Maya in Heidegger, it seems, although certainly not in Ludendorff. (Anyone who wears a spear on his hat — or a chicken, like his boss the Kaiser — is hardly aware of his own insignificance in the larger scheme of things.)

The wonderful thing about philosophy from my perspective is its kaleidoscopic quality — the colorful, and seemingly endless permutations of what goes around comes around.

Agreed, m-ski, at least for practical purposes. Right now, getting to democracy is challenge enough. Still, I do think visions of the exquisite life that’s possible if we do get there — visions like Bellamy’s Looking Backward, Morris’s News from Nowhere, Wilde’s The Soul of Man Under Socialism — can be very good for our morale.

@83 Here’s a relevant piece by a Ukrainian anti-fascist (or, in your terminology, ‘pro-Putin’) activist:
http://truth-out.org/speakout/item/25650-ukraine-the-collapse-of-the-liberal-left

Eichmann was not simply portrayed as an ambitious careerist who would do anything to get ahead, he was a “true believer” in Nazi ideology until the end. The banality line referred to Eichmann’s intellectual laziness and endless usage of cliches. I wonder how many people who reference this book have actually read it? I came away with a far different picture of the man than as a “mid-level manager on the rise.” I was confused why my take away from the novel had been different from others. Roger Berkowitz comments on the phenomenon in the New York Times:

The problem with this conclusion is that Arendt never wrote that Eichmann simply followed orders. She never portrayed him, in Cesarani’s words, as a “dull-witted clerk or a robotic bureaucrat.” Indeed she rejected the idea that Eichmann was simply following orders. She emphasized that Eichmann took enormous pride in his initiative in deporting Jews and also in his willingness to disobey orders to do so, especially Himmler’s clear orders — offered in 1944 in the hope of leniency amid impending defeat — to “take good care of the Jews, act as their nursemaid.” In direct disobedience, Eichmann organized death marches of Hungarian Jews; as Arendt writes, he “sabotaged” Himmler’s orders. As the war ground to an end, as Arendt saw, Eichmann, against Himmler, remained loyal to Hitler’s idea of the Nazi movement and did “his best to make the Final Solution final.”

…

The widespread misperception that Arendt saw Eichmann as merely following orders emerged largely from a conflation of her conclusions with those of Stanley Milgram, the Yale psychologist who conducted a series of controversial experiments in the early 1960s.

77 Lazare’s article is very large. To dismiss it as a hatchet job is away of avoiding the argument he is making. Let’s just go to two points.
One has to do with the Soviet partisans. Snyder has a wholly insane view, I think, of partisan warfare against the Nazis. It is that the partisans stirred up the Nazis to atrocities – so I guess the partisans should have gone back to their fields, eh? This is insane in terms of Nazi policy – it wasn’t like the Nazis weren’t going to commit atrocities if only the guerrillas hadn’t made them so mad! – and it is insane to say that the Soviets didn’t care about the human cost of partisan warfare, how it made the Nazis inflict pain on the innocent. Given that the Soviet Union was fighting for its life, yeah, I think that is right. In Snyder’s view, perhaps the allies should have sent an engraved RSVP note to the Nazis before landing on Normandy.
This is of course not simply a dead historical issue. By blaming the Soviet partisans, Snyder is giving ammunition to those who want to reinsert old Nazi collaborators as heros. As Lazare points out, and as has been too little reported, the revisionists in Lithuania are trying to prosecute holocaust survivors for war crimes – because they joined the partisans. Here’s a link about this process from 2008, although it still goes on.
http://website.thejc.com/home.aspx?AId=60542&ATypeId=1&search=true2&srchstr=Margolis&srchtxt=0&srchhead=1&srchauthor=0&srchsandp=0&scsrch=0

Second, Snyder’s weird attitude towards Polish antisemitism. Lazare quotes a sort of symbolic rewriting that keys Snyder’s whole defense: -[he] says of the Polish peasants viewing passing trainloads of Jewish deportees that “[t]he gesture of a finger across the throat, remembered with loathing by a few Jewish survivors, was meant to communicate to the Jews that they were going to die — though not necessarily that the Poles wished this upon them” Sure, and Southern whites who took pictures of themselves with the victims of lynchings weren’t necessarily opposed to civil rights. With this in mind, Snyder, as Lazare shows, produces a highly obfuscating view of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which the Polish resistance refused to help in any major way – they contributed a few pistols. Read the passages from Snyder and Lazare’s comments. I think Lazare is absolutely right about this. Just as I think Snyder is right that the Soviets let the Warsaw uprising later go on without intervening in order to weaken the Poles.