Eichmann In Jerusalem - Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia
The banality of evil
Arendt's book introduced the expression and concept "the banality of evil."[1] Her thesis is that the great evils in history generally, and the Holocaust in particular, were not executed by fanatics or sociopaths, but by ordinary people who accepted the premises of their state and therefore participated with the view that their actions were normal. In his 2010 history of the Second World War, Moral Combat, British historian Michael Burleigh calls the expression a "cliche" and gives many documented examples of gratuitous acts of cruelty by those involved in the Holocaust, including Eichmann.