Eichmann in Jerusalem

by

Hannah Arendt

The 1935 Nazi legislation that deprived Jews (and, later, also Romani and Black people) of citizenship and intermarriage rights in Germany. Unrelated to the Nuremberg Trials.

Nuremberg Laws Quotes in Eichmann in Jerusalem

The Eichmann in Jerusalem quotes below are all either spoken by Nuremberg Laws or refer to Nuremberg Laws. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
The Banality of Evil Theme Icon
).
Epilogue Quotes

In the eyes of the Jews, thinking exclusively in terms of their own history, the catastrophe that had befallen them under Hitler, in which a third of the people perished, appeared not as the most recent of crimes, the unprecedented crime of genocide, but, on the contrary, as the oldest crime they knew and remembered. This misunderstanding, almost inevitable if we consider not only the facts of Jewish history but also, and more important, the current Jewish historical self-understanding, is actually at the root of all the failures and shortcomings of the Jerusalem trial. None of the participants ever arrived at a clear understanding of the actual horror of Auschwitz, which is of a different nature from all the atrocities of the past, because it appeared to prosecution and judges alike as not much more than the most horrible pogrom in Jewish history. They therefore believed that a direct line existed from the early anti-Semitism of the Nazi Party to the Nuremberg Laws and from there to the expulsion of Jews from the Reich and, finally, to the gas chambers. Politically and legally, however, these were “crimes” different not only in degree of seriousness but in essence.

Related Characters: Adolf Eichmann, Gideon Hausner, David Ben-Gurion, Adolf Hitler
Page Number: 267
Explanation and Analysis:
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Nuremberg Laws Term Timeline in Eichmann in Jerusalem

The timeline below shows where the term Nuremberg Laws appears in Eichmann in Jerusalem. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 1: The House of Justice
Zionism and Nazism Theme Icon
...Jews and non-Jews cannot marry in Israel—which was one of the Nazi policies from the Nuremberg Laws denounced by the prosecution. And the trial is, at first, a grand show of Jewish... (full context)
Chapter 3: An Expert on the Jewish Question
The Banality of Evil Theme Icon
Justice and Legal Responsibility Theme Icon
...Jewish emigration was beginning. Anti-Jewish policy did not accelerate until Kristallnacht in 1938; the 1935 Nuremberg Laws “deprived the Jews of their political but not of their civil rights,” making them noncitizens... (full context)
Epilogue
Zionism and Nazism Theme Icon
...difference between the early forms of discrimination and the ultimate turn to mass murder. The Nuremberg Laws surely violated Jews’ due rights within Germany, but they were not yet a crime in... (full context)