7 Adolf Eichmann Quotes on Ethics

Adolf Eichmann quotes on ethics

3. Whether they were bank directors or mental cases, the people who were loaded on those trains meant nothing to me. It was really none of my business.

4. I was never an anti-Semite. ... My sensitive nature revolted at the sight of corpses and blood... I personally had nothing to do with this. My job was to observe and report on it.

6. Hatten wir 10,3 Millionen Juden getotet, dann ware ich befriedigt und wurde sagen, gut, wir haben einen Feind vernichtet. ... Ich war kein normaler Befehlsempfanger, dann ware ich ein Trottel gewesen, sondern ich habe mitgedacht, ich war ein Idealist gewesen.

9. Obeying an order was the most important thing to me. It could be that is in the nature of the German.

11. 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 own need to think.

22. The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together, for it implied - as had been said at Nuremberg over and over again by the defendants and their counsels - that this new type of criminal, who is in actual fact hostis generis humani, commits his crimes under circumstances that make it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he is doing wrong.

23. 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.