By: Steven Heller | April 15, 2010
Hannah Arendt coined the term “banality of evil” in the 1963 book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, to characterize the bureaucrats and “ordinary people” who carried out the Holocaust. I recently came across a collection of mug shots of members of the infamous German SS Einsatzgruppen killing squads. These pictures were taken by U.S. Army photographers on behalf of the Office of Chief of Counsel for War Crimes (OCCWC) during Nuremberg Trial IX (Einsatzgruppen Trial / Einsatzgruppen-Prozess). Look at these faces closely: Each a mass murderer who was just following orders.
