Skip to content
quotesby

About this quote

What does it mean?
The speaker claims moral absolution by defining their actions as obedience to duty.
In plain terms
I did not feel bad because I was just doing my job.
What can you take from it?
Duty does not automatically justify actions.

Where it applies

  • authority
  • moral decisions
  • accountability

Putting it to work

  • examine duties critically
  • take moral responsibility

Questions to consider

  • When does duty fail as an excuse?
  • What is the limit of obedience?

Another view

Appealing to duty ignores personal moral agency.

More from Franz Stangl

  1. He was a Dragoner (one of the imperial elite regiments). Our lives were run on regimental lines. I was scared to death of him.

    Permalink to quote #5

  2. Cargo. They were cargo. I think it started the day I first saw the Totenlager in Treblinka. I remember Wirth standing there, next to the pits full of blue-blac…

    Permalink to quote #4

  3. No, no, no. This was the system. Wirth had invented it. It worked. And because it worked, it was irreversible.

    Permalink to quote #3

Related quotes

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

    Adolf EichmannAdolf Eichmann quote #9

  2. When in the summer of 1941 he (Hitler) gave me the order to prepare installations at Auschwitz where mass exterminations could take place, and personally to ca…

    Rudolf HossRudolf Hoss quote #1

  3. Any community's arm of force - military, police, security - needs people in it who can do necessary evil, and yet not be made evil by it. To do only the necess…

    Lois McMaster BujoldLois McMaster Bujold quote #6