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He complained regularly about death-camp quotas not being fulfilled, about the problems of getting all French Jews to the death camps, and about the intermittent failure of the Italians to cooperate. As late as 1944, he played a leading, and open, role in the killing of Hungarian Jews, and in August of that year he reported that four million Jews had died in the death camps and another two million at the hands of the Nazis' mobile extermination units in Eastern Europe. At no point did he show the least compunction over the planning, organization and execution of what became known as the Holocaust.

Adolf Eichmann#23

HistoryEthicsHolocaustBureaucracyLogistics

About this quote

What does it mean?
The quote details administrative focus on quotas and lack of remorse for killings.
In plain terms
The speaker focused on logistics of killing without showing regret.
What can you take from it?
Bureaucratic focus can hide moral reality.

Where it applies

  • organizational ethics
  • historical study
  • psychology

Putting it to work

  • analyze bureaucratic evil
  • study moral disengagement
  • review historical records

Questions to consider

  • How does language obscure harm?
  • Can efficiency replace empathy?

Another view

Administrative language often masks the human cost.

More from Adolf Eichmann

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  2. He is responsible because of the conspiracy and the plots for all that happened to the Jewish people - from the shores of the Arctic Ocean to the Aegean Sea, f…

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  3. This is a sane man, and a sane man is capable of unrepentant, unlimited, planned evil. He was the genius bureaucrat, he was the powerful frozen mind which dire…

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