How should criminal law come to grips with the banality of evil – the phenomenon of a normal person who is unable to tell right from wrong, and who commits grave crimes under circumstances that make it hard for him to know or feel that he is doing wrong? Those circumstances include not only the enthusiasm of Eichmann’s superiors” to “In Eichmann’s case, those circumstances include not only the enthusiasm of his superiors for the Final Solution but also the very nature of Nazi legality, which the chapter analyzes through Ernst Fraenkel’s concept of the “dual state,” where the law in books forbids murder but the dictator’s will supersedes the law in books without repealing it. The problem that preoccupies Arendt is that under these circumstances Eichmann and his ilk lack the subjective mens rea that “civilized jurisprudence” demands to justify punishment. At times she flirts with the idea that unforgivable crimes cannot be punished; the criminals can only be “eliminated.” The chapter argues that this is a mistake. That leaves the question of how to justify punishing criminals who lack subjective mens rea. The chapter concludes with a proposal that thoughtlessness, abdication of judgment, and culpable credulousness are a sufficient mens rea – and thus that the solution to Arendt’s problem is the banality of evil itself.