Collective Responsibility and Individual Guilt

Arendt's brief discussion of the Jewish Councils — the communal leadership bodies that the Nazis compelled to assist in the organisation of deportations — provoked the fiercest criticism. She did not exculpate them; she asked what it meant that they cooperated. Her point was not to blame but to insist that cooperation in one's own destruction requires explanation, and that the explanation implicates the structural conditions the Nazis created.

Arendt insists on a sharp distinction between political responsibility and individual moral guilt. Political responsibility is collective and can attach to communities even for acts committed by members who held power before others were born. Moral guilt is individual and requires personal agency. Germans of subsequent generations bear political responsibility for the Nazi period; only those who acted bear moral guilt.

The Eichmann trial, for all its legitimacy, strained the categories of criminal law: the crimes it addressed were not individual acts but crimes committed against an entire people, requiring new juridical concepts to capture what had actually happened. Arendt supports the verdict but argues that the court understood it imperfectly — as individual criminal liability rather than as a new category of crime against humanity.

Arendt's essay "Collective Responsibility" (1968) develops the distinction between political responsibility and moral guilt more systematically than the earlier Eichmann report.