How could so many people support Hitler? - Joseph Lacey

by Panzer
In Jerusalem, on April 11th, 1961,
Adolf Eichmann stood trial for crimes against humanity.
Eichmann had been a Nazi official tasked with organizing the transport
of over 1.5 million European Jews to ghettos and concentration camps.
He was popularly described as an evil mastermind
who orchestrated atrocities from a cushy German office,
and many were eager to see the so-called “desk murderer” tried for his crimes.
But the squeamish man who took the stand seemed more like a dull bureaucrat
than a sadistic killer.
The disparity between Eichmann’s nature and his actions
was unsettling for many viewers,
but for philosopher Hannah Arendt,
this contradiction inspired a disturbing revelation.
Arendt was a German Jew who fled her homeland in 1933
after being briefly imprisoned by the German secret police.
As a refugee in France and then the United States,
she dedicated herself to understanding how the Nazi regime came to power,
and more specifically, how it inspired so many atrocities.
A common opinion at the time was that the Third Reich was a historical oddity;
a perfect storm of uniquely evil leaders
supported by German citizens looking for revenge
after their defeat in World War I.
But Arendt believed the true conditions behind this unprecedented rise
of totalitarianism weren’t specific to Germany.
Throughout the 1950s, Arendt developed a theory of the human condition
that divided life into three facets:
labor— in which we satisfy our material needs and desires;
work— in which we build the world’s physical and cultural infrastructure;
and action— in which we publicly articulate our values
to collectively shape the world around us.
It was this last facet, the life of action,
that Arendt believed was under attack,
both in Germany and many other industrialized societies.
She saw modernity as an age ruled by labor,
where individuals mainly appear in the social world
to produce and consume goods and services
rather than share ideas and shape communities.
Arendt believed this had fostered societies and ideologies
where individuals were seen only for their economic value,