Adolf Eichmann
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Adolf Eichmann
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Many of these Eichmann quotes are jawdropping. They are all enlightenting.
Eichmann not only considered himself sane,
he considered himself a devout Christian.
A Devout Meditation in Memory of Adolf Eichmann
Trappist Monk, Fr. Thomas Merton
Adolf Eichmann (1906-1962) was head of
the "Department for Jewish Affairs" in the Gestapo from 1941 to 1945
and was chief of operations in the deportation of three million Jews to
extermination camps. He was tried for his crimes against humanity in
1961.
During the court proceedings, Eichmann was declared
to be sane.
Every military resister, when applying
for conscientious objector status, is given psychiatric interviews to detect
their state of mind. It is presumed that they are at least suffering from
some form of post-traumatic stress disorder, if not completely crazy not to
want to pursue the art of killing. And yet, a General can tell us that
shooting people can be a "hoot" (see here)
and we are reminded of his patriotic service to his country, no examination
required. He is "well-adjusted".
The following is a meditation from Thomas Merton on the meaning of sanity in our modern world.
"One
of the most disturbing facts that came out in the Eichmann trial was that a
psychiatrist examined him and pronounced him perfectly sane. I do not doubt it
all, and that is precisely why I find it disturbing.
If
all the Nazis had been psychotics, as some of their leaders probably were,
their appalling cruelty would have been in some sense easier to understand.
It
is much worse to consider this calm, "well-balanced," unperturbed
official conscientiously going about his desk work, his administrative job
which happened to be the supervision of mass murder. He was thoughtful,
orderly, unimaginative. He had a profound respect for system, for law and
order. He was obedient, loyal, a faithful officer of a great state. He served
his government very well.
He
was not bothered much by guilt. I have not heard that he developed any
psychosomatic illnesses. Apparently he slept well. He had a good appetite, or
so it seems. True, when he visited Auschwitz, the Camp Commandant, Hoess,
in a spirit of sly deviltry, tried to tease the big boss and scare him with
some of the sights, Eichmann was disturbed, yes. He was disturbed. Even Himmler
had been disturbed, and had gone weak at the knees. Perhaps, in the same way,
the general manager of a big steel mill might be disturbed if an accident took
place while he happened to be somewhere in the plant. But of course what
happened at Auschwitz was not an accident: just the routine unpleasantness of
the daily task. One must shoulder the burden of daily monotonous work for the Fatherland.
Yes, one must suffer discomfort and even nausea from unpleasant sights and
sounds. It all comes under the heading of duty, self-sacrifice, and obedience.
Eichmann was devoted to duty. and proud of his job.
The
sanity of Eichmann is disturbing. We equate sanity with a sense of justice,
with humaneness, with prudence, with the capacity to love and understand other
people. We rely on the sane people of the world to preserve it from barbarism,
madness, destruction. And now it begins to dawn on us that it is precisely the
sane ones who are the most dangerous.
It is
the sane ones, the well-adapted ones, who can without qualms and without nausea
aim the missile, and press the buttons that will initiate the great festival of
destruction that they, the sane ones, have prepared.
What makes us so sure,
after all, that the danger comes from a psychotic getting into a position to
fire the first shot in a nuclear war?
Psychotics will he suspect. The sane ones
will keep them far from the button.
No one suspects the sane, and the sane ones
will have perfectly good reasons, logical, well-adjusted reasons, for firing
the shot. They will he obeying sane orders that have come sanely down the chain
of command. And because of their sanity they will have no qualms at all. When
the missiles take off, then, it will be no mistake.
We can no longer assume
that because a man is "sane" he is therefore in his "right
mind." The whole concept of sanity in a society where spiritual values
have lost their meaning is itself meaningless. A man can be "sane" in
the limited sense that he is not impeded by disordered emotions from acting in
a cool, orderly tier, according to the needs and dictates of the social
situation in which he finds himself. He can be perfectly "adjusted."
God knows, perhaps such people can be perfectly adjusted even in hell itself.
And
so I ask myself: what is the meaning of a concept of sanity that excludes love,
considers it irrelevant, and destroys our capacity to love other human beings,
to respond to their needs and their sufferings, to recognize them also as
persons, to apprehend their pain as one's own? Evidently this is not necessary
for "sanity" at all. It is a religious notion, a spiritual notion, a
Christian notion What business have we to equate "sanity" with
"Christianity"? None at all, obviously.
The worst error is to imagine
that a Christian must try to be "sane" like everybody else, that we
belong in our kind of society. That we must be "realistic" about it.
We must develop a sane Christianity: and there have been plenty of sane
Christians in the past. Torture is nothing new, is it?
We ought to be able to
rationalize a little brainwashing, and genocide, and find a place for nuclear
war, or at least for napalm bombs, in our moral theology. Certainly some of us
are doing our best along those lines already. There are hopes! Even Christians
can shake off their sentimental prejudices about charity, and become sane like
Eichmann. They can even cling to a certain set of Christian formulas, and fit
them into a Totalist Ideology. Let them talk about justice, charity, love, and
the rest. These words have not stopped some sane men from acting very sanely
and cleverly in the past....
No,
Eichmann was sane. The generals and fighters on both sides, in World War II,
the ones who carried out the total destruction of entire cities, these were the
sane ones.
Those who have invented and developed atomic bombs, thermonuclear
bombs, missiles; who have planned the strategy of the next war; who have
evaluated the various possibilities of using bacterial and chemical agents:
these are not the crazy people, they are the sane people. The ones who coolly
estimate how many millions of victims can he considered expendable in a nuclear
war, I presume they do all right with the Rorschach ink blots too.
On the other
hand, you will probably find that the pacifists and the ban-the-bomb people
are, quite seriously, just as we read in Time, a little crazy. I am beginning
to realize that "sanity" is no longer a value or an end in itself.
The "sanity" of modern man is about as useful to him as the huge bulk
and muscles of the dinosaur.
If he were a little less sane, a little more
doubtful, a little more aware of his absurdities and contradictions, perhaps
there might be a possibility of his survival. But if he is sane, too sane ...
perhaps we must say that in a society like ours the worst insanity is to be
totally without anxiety, totally "sane.""
from Raids on the Unspeakable by
Thomas Merton
Copyrighted in 1966. Published by Burns and Oates
"The terrible thing about our time is precisely the ease with which theories can be put into practice. The more perfect, the more idealistic the theories, the more dreadful is their realization. We are at last beginning to rediscover what perhaps men knew better in very ancient times, in primitive times before utopias were thought of: that liberty is bound up with imperfection, and that limitations, imperfections, errors are not only unavoidable but also salutary. The best is not the ideal. Where what is theoretically best is imposed on everyone as the norm, then there is no longer any room even to be good. The best, imposed as a norm, becomes evil.”
During the court proceedings, Eichmann was declared to be sane.
Every military resister, when applying for conscientious objector status, is given psychiatric interviews to detect their state of mind. It is presumed that they are at least suffering from some form of post-traumatic stress disorder, if not completely crazy not to want to pursue the art of killing. And yet, a General can tell us that shooting people can be a "hoot" (see here) and we are reminded of his patriotic service to his country, no examination required. He is "well-adjusted".
The following is a meditation from Thomas Merton on the meaning of sanity in our modern world.
"One of the most disturbing facts that came out in the Eichmann trial was that a psychiatrist examined him and pronounced him perfectly sane. I do not doubt it all, and that is precisely why I find it disturbing.
If all the Nazis had been psychotics, as some of their leaders probably were, their appalling cruelty would have been in some sense easier to understand.
It is much worse to consider this calm, "well-balanced," unperturbed official conscientiously going about his desk work, his administrative job which happened to be the supervision of mass murder. He was thoughtful, orderly, unimaginative. He had a profound respect for system, for law and order. He was obedient, loyal, a faithful officer of a great state. He served his government very well.
He was not bothered much by guilt. I have not heard that he developed any psychosomatic illnesses. Apparently he slept well. He had a good appetite, or so it seems. True, when he visited Auschwitz, the Camp Commandant, Hoess, in a spirit of sly deviltry, tried to tease the big boss and scare him with some of the sights, Eichmann was disturbed, yes. He was disturbed. Even Himmler had been disturbed, and had gone weak at the knees. Perhaps, in the same way, the general manager of a big steel mill might be disturbed if an accident took place while he happened to be somewhere in the plant. But of course what happened at Auschwitz was not an accident: just the routine unpleasantness of the daily task. One must shoulder the burden of daily monotonous work for the Fatherland. Yes, one must suffer discomfort and even nausea from unpleasant sights and sounds. It all comes under the heading of duty, self-sacrifice, and obedience.
Eichmann was devoted to duty. and proud of his job.
The sanity of Eichmann is disturbing. We equate sanity with a sense of justice, with humaneness, with prudence, with the capacity to love and understand other people. We rely on the sane people of the world to preserve it from barbarism, madness, destruction. And now it begins to dawn on us that it is precisely the sane ones who are the most dangerous.
It is the sane ones, the well-adapted ones, who can without qualms and without nausea aim the missile, and press the buttons that will initiate the great festival of destruction that they, the sane ones, have prepared.
What makes us so sure, after all, that the danger comes from a psychotic getting into a position to fire the first shot in a nuclear war?
Psychotics will he suspect. The sane ones will keep them far from the button.
No one suspects the sane, and the sane ones will have perfectly good reasons, logical, well-adjusted reasons, for firing the shot. They will he obeying sane orders that have come sanely down the chain of command. And because of their sanity they will have no qualms at all. When the missiles take off, then, it will be no mistake.
We can no longer assume that because a man is "sane" he is therefore in his "right mind." The whole concept of sanity in a society where spiritual values have lost their meaning is itself meaningless. A man can be "sane" in the limited sense that he is not impeded by disordered emotions from acting in a cool, orderly tier, according to the needs and dictates of the social situation in which he finds himself. He can be perfectly "adjusted."
God knows, perhaps such people can be perfectly adjusted even in hell itself.
And so I ask myself: what is the meaning of a concept of sanity that excludes love, considers it irrelevant, and destroys our capacity to love other human beings, to respond to their needs and their sufferings, to recognize them also as persons, to apprehend their pain as one's own? Evidently this is not necessary for "sanity" at all. It is a religious notion, a spiritual notion, a Christian notion What business have we to equate "sanity" with "Christianity"? None at all, obviously.
The worst error is to imagine that a Christian must try to be "sane" like everybody else, that we belong in our kind of society. That we must be "realistic" about it. We must develop a sane Christianity: and there have been plenty of sane Christians in the past. Torture is nothing new, is it?
We ought to be able to rationalize a little brainwashing, and genocide, and find a place for nuclear war, or at least for napalm bombs, in our moral theology. Certainly some of us are doing our best along those lines already. There are hopes! Even Christians can shake off their sentimental prejudices about charity, and become sane like Eichmann. They can even cling to a certain set of Christian formulas, and fit them into a Totalist Ideology. Let them talk about justice, charity, love, and the rest. These words have not stopped some sane men from acting very sanely and cleverly in the past....
No, Eichmann was sane. The generals and fighters on both sides, in World War II, the ones who carried out the total destruction of entire cities, these were the sane ones.
Those who have invented and developed atomic bombs, thermonuclear bombs, missiles; who have planned the strategy of the next war; who have evaluated the various possibilities of using bacterial and chemical agents: these are not the crazy people, they are the sane people. The ones who coolly estimate how many millions of victims can he considered expendable in a nuclear war, I presume they do all right with the Rorschach ink blots too.
On the other hand, you will probably find that the pacifists and the ban-the-bomb people are, quite seriously, just as we read in Time, a little crazy. I am beginning to realize that "sanity" is no longer a value or an end in itself. The "sanity" of modern man is about as useful to him as the huge bulk and muscles of the dinosaur.
If he were a little less sane, a little more doubtful, a little more aware of his absurdities and contradictions, perhaps there might be a possibility of his survival. But if he is sane, too sane ... perhaps we must say that in a society like ours the worst insanity is to be totally without anxiety, totally "sane.""
from Raids on the Unspeakable by Thomas Merton
Copyrighted in 1966. Published by Burns and Oates
"The terrible thing about our time is precisely the ease with which theories can be put into practice. The more perfect, the more idealistic the theories, the more dreadful is their realization. We are at last beginning to rediscover what perhaps men knew better in very ancient times, in primitive times before utopias were thought of: that liberty is bound up with imperfection, and that limitations, imperfections, errors are not only unavoidable but also salutary. The best is not the ideal. Where what is theoretically best is imposed on everyone as the norm, then there is no longer any room even to be good. The best, imposed as a norm, becomes evil.”
"Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander,” by Trappist monk, Father Thomas Merton
Eichmann On Trial At Nuremberg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Trials
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Trials
Alan: Is there a decisive difference between "vested political
authorities made me do it", and "vested religious authorities made me
do it," or even "God made me do it?"
If Abraham were to kill his son today, should there be criminal
penalty?
And if not, why not?
And what of proof?
Obama’s 2006 Speech on Faith and Politics: Abraham Prepares To Kill And Immolate His Son
“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.”
Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt
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