Thanks to a cooperative effort by several institutions, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum has made the audio recordings of the trials of 24 of the highest-ranking members of the Third Reich available online in their entirety. Held in Nuremberg from November 1945 to October 1946, the hearings themselves lasted for a total of 775 hours—documented on 1,942 gramophone discs that have now been digitized. Edward Rothstein writes:

[W]hat is heard, even now, seems remarkable: a rough first draft of judgment, beginning just five months after the war with Germany ended and unfolding over nearly a year as its arbiters strained to fit minimal forms of existing law to maximal forms of moral degradation.

Stalin expected Nuremberg to be a show trial, like those he staged to deadly effect between 1936 and 1938; he propelled their veterans into important Nuremberg roles. So the Soviet participants can seem disoriented by cross-examination and defense. And when they try to prevent the defendants from bringing up the Hitler-Stalin pact or Soviet atrocities, disputes can verge on farce (and then perhaps, given Stalin’s displeasure, become tragedy: one of the Soviet prosecutors was almost certainly murdered midtrial). The other Allies try to get it right, but often get bogged down in procedure, multilingual delays, and repetition.

It is only in listening to large swaths of this trial that I became able to finally give some credit to Hannah Arendt’s notion, developed after watching Adolf Eichmann’s Israeli trial, that he and his fellow Nazis embodied the “banality of evil.” She saw the banality as a reflection of Nazi evil itself, as if it were a kind of bourgeois malfeasance—dull men doing devilish work without thinking. But after being immersed in sections of these 775 hours of hearings, I think banality was more a reflection of what she was witnessing. A trial can make evil seem dull because it makes it ordinary, showing how it becomes fact, disclosing details, memories, documents (Nuremberg’s produced 269,093 pages). The judging of evil is often banal, but . . . evil in itself is not.

Established in 2012 and maintaining branches in Europe, North America, and Iran, the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Network claims its goal is merely to show “solidarity” for imprisoned Palestinians. The organization’s leader, however, has admitted to being a representative of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a notorious terrorist group whose most recent accomplishments include murdering a seventeen-year-old girl. As Arsen Ostrovsky and Patricia Teitelbaum point out, Samidoun is just one example of how the European Union allows Iran-backed terrorists to operate in its midst:

The PFLP is a proxy of the Iranian regime, which provides the terror group with money, training, and weapons. Samidoun . . . has a branch in Tehran. It has even held events there, under the pretext of “cultural activity,” to elicit support for operations in Europe. Its leader, Khaled Barakat, is a regular on Iran’s state [channel] PressTV, calling for violence and lauding Iran’s involvement in the region. It is utterly incomprehensible, therefore, that the EU has not yet designated Samidoun a terror group.

According to the Council of the European Union, groups and/or individuals can be added to the EU terror list on the basis of “proposals submitted by member states based on a decision by a competent authority of a member state or a third country.” In this regard, there is already a standing designation by Israel of Samidoun as a terror group and a decision of a German court finding Barakat to be a senior PFLP operative.

Given the irrefutable axis-of-terror between Samidoun, PFLP, and the Iranian regime, the EU has a duty to put Samidoun and senior Samidoun leaders on the EU terror list. It should do this not as some favor to Israel, but because otherwise it continues to turn a blind eye to a group that presents a clear and present security threat to the European Union and EU citizens.