born Oct. 14, 1906, Hannover, Ger.
died Dec. 4, 1975, New York, N.Y., U.S.
German-born U.S. political theorist.
She obtained her doctorate from the University of Heidelberg. Forced to flee the Nazis in 1933, she became a social worker in Paris and then fled again, to New York, in 1941. Her major work, Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), traced totalitarianism to 19th-century anti-Semitism, imperialism, and the disintegration of the traditional nation-state. She taught at the University of Chicago (1963–67) and thereafter at the New School for Social Research. Her controversial Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) suggested that Adolf Eichmann , the SS leader who was chiefly responsible for the extermination of the Jews, was a banal figure rather than a demonic one.