Adolf Eichmann Quotes

It's all a question of imagination. Our responsibility begins with the power to imagine. It's just as Yeats said: "In dreams begin responsibility. Turn this on its head and you could say that where there's no power to imagine, no responsibility can arise." [...] Just like Adolf Eichmann caught up in the twisted dreams of a man named Hitler. - Oshima

Adolf Eichmann went to the gallows with great dignity. He had asked for a bottle of red wine and had drunk half of it. He refused the help of the Protestant minister the Reverend William Hull who offered to read the Bible with him: he had only two more hours to live and therefore no “time to waste.” He walked the fifty yards from his cell to the execution chamber calm and erect with his hands bound behind him. When the guards tied his ankles and knees he asked them to loosen the bonds so that he could stand straight. “I don’t need that ” he said when the black hood was offered him. He was in complete command of himself nay he was more: he was completely himself. Nothing could have demonstrated this more convincingly than the grotesque silliness of his last words. He began by stating emphatically that he was a Gottgläubiger to express in common Nazi fashion that he was no Christian and did not believe in life after death. He then proceeded: “After a short while gentlemen we shall all meet again. Such is the fate of all men. Long live Germany long live Argentina long live Austria. I shall not forget them.” In the face of death he had found the cliché used in funeral oratory. Under the gallows his memory played him the last trick he was “elated” and he forgot that this was his own funeral. It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us-the lesson of the fearsome word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.

For, obviously, things were not as simple as the framers of laws had imagined them to be, and if it was of small legal relevance, it was of great political interest to know how long it takes an average person to overcome his innate repugnance toward crime, and what exactly happens to him once he had reached that point. To this question, the case of Adolf Eichmann supplied an answer that could not have been clearer and more precise.

Justice insists on the importance of Adolf Eichmann... On trial are his deeds, not the sufferings of the Jews, not the German people or mankind, not even anti-Semitism and racism.

Now that I look back, I realize that a life predicated on being obedient and taking orders is a very comfortable life indeed. Living in such a way reduces to a minimum one's need to think.

The Jewish historian Hannah Arendt, in her book about the trial of Nazi administrator Adolf Eichmann, observes that in many cases the Nazi camps were run by ordinary bureaucrats: the evil was astonishing in its banality.

Have you ever read any Hannah Arendt?” I must look lost, because he explains further. “She’s a political theorist.” " Anyway, she wrote this book about the trial of a Nazi lieutenant named Adolf Eichmann in the 1960s. Arendt was a Jew who left Germany during Hitler’s reign, and during the trial this guy had to face up to all the atrocities he committed. Things only a monster could conceive of. However, he was examined by psychologists, and it was determined that he wasn’t a psychopath, that in fact he was entirely normal. This left Arendt to determine that perfectly ordinary, everyday people were capable of crimes normally associated with only the most depraved, wicked members of society. She called it the banality of evil.

We will bring Adolf Eichmann to Jerusalem,” Harel said, striking the table, “and perhaps the world will be reminded of its responsibilities. It will be recognized that, as a people, we never forgot. Our memory reaches back through recorded history. The memory book lies open, and the hand still writes.

To sum it all up, I must say that I regret nothing.

I will leap into my grave laughing because the feeling that I have five million human beings on my conscience is for me a source of extraordinary satisfaction.

Even when they’re so small you need a microscope to see em, it’s still murder. Because they’d be kids if you let em alone.’ ‘I guess that just about makes you Adolf Eichmann every time you jerk off,’ Faye said,

No one is Sighet suspected that our fate was already sealed. In Berlin we had been condemned, but we didn't know it. We didn't know that a man called Adolf Eichmann was already in Budapest weaving his black web, at the head of an elite, efficient detachment of thirty-five SS men, planning the operation that wold crown his career; or that all the necessary means for "dealing with" us were already at hand in a place called Birkenau.

I am a victum of an error of judgement

When I have suggested to my colleagues that we must take seriously Eichmann's repeated testimony to the effect that he learned from Heydrich in the fall of 1941 of Hitler's order for the physical destruction of the Jews, I have met with either embarrassed silence or open skepticism. How can I be so gullible? Don't I know that Eichmann's testimony is a useless conglomeration of faulty memories on the one hand and calculated lies for legal defense and self-justification on the other? From it we can learn nothing of value about what actually happened during the war, only about Eichmann's state of mind after the war. These are documents that reveal how Eichmann wished to be remembered, not what he did. -- Perpetrator Testimony: Another Look at Adolf Eichmann, pages 4-5

It's all a question of imagination. Our responsibility begins with the power to imagine. It's just as Yeats said: In dreams begin responsibility. Turn on this on its head and you could say that where there's no power to imagine, no responsibility can arise. Just as we see with Eichmann.

Nazis

the world’s greatest murdering machine ‘a job,’ is something that I cannot understand.

this miserable creature, this once evil bureaucratic butcher

Little by little, new details about atrocities committed against Jews kept making their way into the annex. Some were doubted, others confirmed, but they still did not provide a coherent picture. On the last day of March 1944 Anne wrote again about the atrocities Jews had to fear. In concise, detached language she reports the unimaginable extent of the National Socialist madness. “Hungary is occupied by German troops. There are still 1 million Jews there, so they too will have had it now!” (March 31, 1944; ver. C). Within two months, Adolf Eichmann had half a million Hungarian Jews deported to Auschwitz. Almost all of them died in the gas chambers.

The main obstacle, though, was the toxic brew of bureaucratic infighting, institutional confusion, last-minute changes of plan, and clashing objectives that stultified almost every major initiative undertaken by the Nazi state. Initially, Himmler and the RKFDV—aided by two lieutenants, Reinhard Heydrich and Adolf Eichmann

This same complex but well-oiled machinery went into high gear during 1948 when Perón’s Nazi rescue group began working in Europe, principally out of Berne and Genoa. In a period of under two months that year, Immigration files similar to Stojadinovic’s were opened for four notorious SS officers: Adolf Eichmann, Josef Mengele, Josef Schwammberger and Erich Priebke. They arrived on separate ocean liners many months apart, but the paperwork for their journeys began together – in the case of Mengele and Priebke, simultaneously, as we have seen.

An Austrian national who was said to be obsessed with Jews, Bishop Hudal moved about Rome throughout the war in a chauffeured car that flew the flag of Greater Germany. Two and a half years after the Allied victory, he hosted a Christmas party attended by hundreds of Nazi war criminals living in Rome under his protection. With Hudal’s help, many would find sanctuary in South America. Adolf Eichmann received assistance from Bishop Hudal, as did Franz Stangl, the commandant of the Treblinka extermination camp. All with the knowledge and tacit support of Pope Pius XII, who believed such monsters to be a valuable asset in the global fight against Soviet communism.

The various Eichmann testimonies are truly staggering in their total volume. But how, if at all, can they be used? Even more than most memoirs, the Eichmann testimonies, both before and after capture, are consciously calculated attempts at self-representation, self-justification, and legal defense. It must be said as emphatically perpetrator testimony as possible that, at the core of these testimonies, there are three monstrous falsehoods that are central to his whole enterprise. -- Perpetrator Testimony: Another Look at Adolf Eichmann, pages 8-9.

The Nursing Home This Sunday, I paid a visit to a nursing home and noticed the empty bed in the room adjacent to my mom's. Crisp sheets stood proxy for where her elderly neighbor lay, an unshaven man or a woman with whiskers, I forget which, when I visited last ~ it couldn't have been a month, two at the most. The empty bed's corners were meticulously tucked in, like an army recruit's at boot camp, bleached of any possible embarrassment. After countless episodes of CSI, I cannot hear the word 'bleach' without thinking of incriminating evidence linking a victim to a killer. You must admit an empty bed at a nursing home is creepy; every empty room seems a trap, every lackadaisical nurse an accessory to murder, every administrator a potential Adolf Eichmann facilitating a program of geriatric genocide... Shit, I forgot to validate my parking. "Mom, I'll be right back," I say, with a smile, closing the room with the empty bed, bleaching my head of any possible embarrassment.

Cuando supe que Adolf Eichmann murió con la palabra "Argentina" en su boca, cuando me enteré del mensaje de "amor eterno" que, en el umbral del más allá, había enviado a mi país, confieso que sentí vergüenza.

Reading them reinforced the hope that I would be one of the team who would be sent to Buenos Aires to capture this inhuman architect of death.

As I sat there I could not believe that this boring, average-looking man with his receding hairline and large glasses – a man who looked like thousands of petty clerks the world over – had been directly responsible for the deaths of six million of my fellow Jews.

A bureacrat armed with a computer is the unacknowledged legislator of our age, and a terrible burden to bear. We cannot dismiss the possibility that, if Adolf Eichmann had been able to say that it was not he but a battary of computers that directed the Jews to the appropriate crematoria, he may never have been asked to answer for his actions.

One of the major organizers of the Holocaust – Adolf Eichmann – was found in Argentina. He was kidnapped by Mossad agents and taken to Israel where he was tried in Jerusalem in 1961 and sentenced to death.

A perfectly obedient superintelligence whose goals automatically align with those of its human owner would be like Nazi SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann on steroids: lacking moral compass or inhibitions of its own, it would with ruthless efficiency implement its owner’s goals, whatever they may be.

Between 1956 and 1961 more than 35,000 Moroccan Jews left clandestinely for Israel under the auspices of the Mossad. In 1960, the same year that he masterminded the capture of Adolf Eichmann in Argentina, Isser Harel, travelled to Morocco as a tourist. His visit there convinced him that manyJews wished to leave, and he appointed Alex Gatmon to be in charge of the Mossad operations in Morocco, under Ephraim Ronel in Paris.

With his “winged words,” as his diligent administrator of death, Adolf Eichmann, put it, Himmler transformed his men’s gruesome work into a grand and secret mission that only the SS elite were capable of fulfilling. “The order to solve the Jewish question, this was the most frightening an organization could ever receive,” Himmler told the leaders of his killing teams. He knew how to appeal to his men’s sense of valor and vanity, telling them, “To have stuck it out and, apart from exceptions caused by human weakness, to have remained decent, that is what has made us hard. This is a page of glory in our history which has never been written and is never to be written.

All German government agencies were to cooperate with the SS in this plan; it was to be the “final solution of the Jewish problem in Europe.”10 Heydrich’s assistant, Adolf Eichmann, estimated that there were approximately 11 million Jews to be “cleaned up” in this fashion;

But for a good while the CIA interpreted that law to exclude disclosure of the fact that its payroll included five associates of Adolf Eichmann, who planned Hitler’s extermination of six million Jews.

Still, many Nazis managed to conceal their identities and escape to Europe or South America. Some were never found. Others, like Adolf Eichmann, were pursued by Mossad, the Israeli secret service. Mossad eventually found Eichmann living in South America. They captured him and brought him to Israel, where he was tried and hanged at Ramleh Prison in 1962.

Today, Americans, if they remember the Shah at all, are likely to associate him with massive human rights violations and state-sanctioned repression. … The Shah became a hate figure for many people. When President Jimmy Carter grudgingly allowed the deposed monarch to enter the United States in 1979 for cancer surgery, his own ambassador to the United Nations, Andrew Young, complained that it was like ‘protecting Adolf Eichmann.’ By comparison, Young described Khomeini as ‘a saint'.

That’s what Hannah Arendt called the “banality of evil”. She was talking about Adolf Eichmann, an unremarkable bureaucrat whose day at the office involved organising the transportation of Jews from Budapest to Auschwitz. Evil’s very ordinary; it’s close to us all the time, just as goodness is. It’s a dangerous illusion to preen ourselves up on our feelings of superiority

Law does not tell me what my duty is, it merely tells me that I should accomplish my duty, and so leaves the space open for empty voluntarism (whatever I decide to be my duty is my duty). However, far from being a limitation, this very feature brings us to the core of Kantian ethical autonomy: it is not possible to derive the concrete norms I have to follow in my specific situation from the moral Law itself - which means that the subject herself has to assume responsibility of translating the abstract injunction of the moral Law into a series of concrete obligations. The full acceptance of this paradox compels us to reject any reference to duty as an excuse: 'I know this is heavy and can be painful, but what can I do, this is my duty...' Kant's ethics of unconditional duty is often taken as justifying such an attitude - no wonder Adolf Eichmann himself referred to Kantian ethics when he tried to justify his role in planning and executing the Holocaust: he was just doing his duty and obeying the Fuhrer's orders. However, the aim of Kant's emphasis on the subject's full moral autonomy and responsibility is precisely to prevent any such manoeuvre of displacing the blame onto some figure of the big Other.

Gus came to a wrenching realization: his father was indeed a Nazi. It was difficult to fathom, but impossible to deny. The realization tore at him. He still found it too hard to believe that his father, a dispassionate man who had never said an anti-Semitic word and married a half-Jewish woman, was driven by pure Aryan ideology and genocidal rage. Instead, Gus came to view his father as a shrewd, amoral opportunist. Whether he was chasing German gold in Palestine, closing a business deal in America, or writing strategy memos for Adolf Eichmann, his father would see an opportunity and run to it. He seemed driven only by personal success. Morality was never a concern.

The outermost reach of fascist radicalization was the Nazi murder of the Jews. No mere prose can do justice to the Holocaust, but the most convincing accounts have two qualities. For one, they take into account not only Hitler’s obsessive hatred of Jews but also the thousands of subordinates whose participation in the increasingly harsh actions against them that made the mechanism function. Without them, Hitler’s murderous fantasy would have remained only a fantasy. The other quality is the recognition that the Holocaust developed step by step, from lesser acts to more heinous ones. Most scholars accept today that the Nazi assault upon the Jews developed incrementally. It grew neither entirely out of the disorderly local violence of a popular pogrom, nor entirely from the imposition from above of a murderous state policy. Both impulses ratcheted each other up in an ascending spiral, in a way appropriate to a “dual state.” Local eruptions of vigilantism by party militants were encouraged by the language of Nazi leaders and the climate of toleration for violence they established. The Nazi state, in turn, kept channeling the undisciplined initiatives of party militants into official policies applied in an orderly fashion. The first phase was segregation: marking the internal enemies, setting them apart from the nation, and suppressing their rights as citizens. . . .Segregation reached its climax with the marking of the Jewish population. First in occupied Poland in late 1939 and then in the Reich in August 1941, all Jews had to wear a yellow Star of David sewn to the chest of their external garments. By this time, the next phase—expulsion—had already begun. The policy of expulsion germinated in the mixture of challenge and opportunity presented by the annexation of Austria in March 1938. This increased the number of Jews in the Reich, and, at the same time, gave the Nazis more freedom to deal harshly with them. The SS officer Adolf Eichmann worked out in Vienna the system whereby wealthy Jews, terrorized by Nazi thugs, would pay well for exit permits, generating funds that could be applied to the expulsion of the others.