# Little Eichmanns

"Little Eichmanns" is a term used to describe people whose actions, while on an individual scale may seem relatively harmless even to themselves, taken collectively create destructive and immoral systems in which they are actually complicit. The name comes from Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi bureaucrat who helped to orchestrate the Holocaust, but claimed that he did so without feeling anything about his actions, merely following the orders given to him.
The use of "Eichmann" as an archetype stems from Hannah Arendt's notion of the "banality of evil". According to Arendt in her 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem, Eichmann relied on propaganda rather than thinking for himself, and carried out Nazi goals mostly to advance his career, appearing at his trial to have an ordinary and common personality while displaying neither guilt nor hatred. She suggested that this most strikingly discredits the idea that the Nazi war criminals were manifestly psychopathic and fundamentally different from ordinary people.
The idea that Eichmann – or, indeed, the majority of Nazis or those working in such regimes – actually fit this concept has been criticized by those who contend that Eichmann and the majority of Nazis were in fact deeply ideological and extremely antisemitic, with Eichmann, in particular, having been fixated on and obsessed with the Jews from a young age. German political scientist Clemens Heni [de] goes so far as to say the phrase "belittles the Holocaust".
Barbara Mann wrote that the term was perhaps best known for its use by anarcho-primitivist writer John Zerzan in his essay Whose Unabomber? written in 1995, although it was already common in the 1960s, as various prior examples are known. It gained prominence in American political culture several years after the September 11 attacks, when a controversy ensued over the 2003 book On the Justice of Roosting Chickens, republishing a similarly titled essay Ward Churchill wrote shortly after the attacks. In the essay, Churchill used the phrase to describe technocrats working at the World Trade Center:
   If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I'd really be interested in hearing about it.

## In popular culture

On the Harry Potter book series, the character of Dolores Umbridge has been compared to a Little Eichmann. Umbridge is portrayed as a power-hungry bureaucrat of the Ministry of Magic, introduced on Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix as taking part on the cover-up of the return of Lord Voldemort and as the authoritarian High Inquisitor of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, taking over the school's management of behalf of the Ministry. Umbridge has been described and received as an antagonist with different motivations from the series' main villains, Lord Voldemort and the Death Eaters, as she is mainly concerned with public order and the rule of the Ministry of Magic, no matter how draconian and arbitrary it is, which is summed up by her quote "I will have order". Much like the Little Eichmanns' role in Nazi Germany, Umbridge's actions on the Ministry's bureaucracy take part on government brutality and tyranny on Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, in which after the takeover of the Ministry by the Death Eaters, she leads the persecution and imprisonment of Muggle-born wizards as part of the Ministry's pure-blood supremacist agenda, which has been compared to Nazi Germany's racial and anti-Semitic politics of Aryan supremacy brought forth by the Nuremberg laws.