Beyond the international broadcast of the trial itself, the subsequent publication of a series of articles in the New Yorker and a book by the esteemed German-American thinker Hannah Arendt (Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil) had much to do with establishing this event in the public mind as the pre-eminent expression of justice for victims of the Holocaust (more so even than the war crimes trials at Nuremberg).

Still, for Arendt it was something of a two-edged sword. Her writing about the trial mixed rigorous academic analysis with vivid reportage and a penchant for dark irony. For a subject this fraught, hers was a toxic brew and despite the book’s obvious sublimity, reactions were sharply polarized. Still the underlying idea captured in the title (yet mentioned only rarely in the book – a measure of its genius) became a sort of totem for the Nazis’ coldly industrial mode of genocide.