| Summary: | Across a number of letters written in late 1946, Hannah Arendt challenged Karl Jaspers’s decision to refer to Nazi policy as a crime. ‘It may well be essential to hang [Hermann] Göring’, Arendt conceded, ‘but it is totally inadequate’. Even when counselled by her friend not to instil the architects of the ‘Final Solution’ with an inhuman stature that would raise them beyond the reach of the law, Arendt still struggled (many years before Eichmann stood trial in Jerusalem), to see the banality in this order of evil .‘There is a difference’, she reminded Jaspers, ‘between a man who sets out to murder his old aunt and people who without considering the economic usefulness of their actions […] built factories to produce corpses’ (qtd p. 23). The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg (where Göring was sentenced to death), chose to keep something of this difference alive by including charges of ‘crimes against humanity’ and ‘crimes against the peace’ in its indictment. Those ‘major’ war criminals hanged at Nuremberg may have received the same sentence as a man who had murdered his aunt, but they did so for very different reasons. Such distinctions were not, however, as apparent in all trials relating to National Socialist atrocities: a fact that lies at the heart of Victoria Stewart’s ambitious new book.
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