8 Adolf Eichmann Quotes on Psychology

Adolf Eichmann quotes on psychology

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

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.

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.

10. From my childhood, obedience was something I could not get out of my system. When I entered the armed services at the age of 27, I found being obedient not a bit more difficult than it had been during my life to that point. It was unthinkable that I would not follow orders.

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.

12. I was sent to Treblinka, Minsk, Lemberg and Auschwitz. When I see the images before my eyes, it all comes back to me ... Corpses, corpses, corpses. Shot, gassed, decaying corpses. They seemed to pop out of the ground when a grave was opened. It was a delirium of blood. It was an inferno, a hell, and I felt I was going insane.

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.

26. Eichmann is thirty-four or thirty-five years old, a very active, adventurous man. He felt that this act against Jews was necessary and was fully convinced of its necessity and correctness, as I was.