Quotes About Adolf Eichmann

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.