Hannah Arendt. The banality of evil. Eichmann in Jerusalem (№ 348867)

In his journals Dostoevsky wrote about that in Siberia, among the vast multitudes of murderers, rapists and burglars, he never met any, allowed to admit to himself that he has done evil. <...> German society, consisting of eighty million people, so it was protected from reality and facts by the same means, the same self-deception, lies and stupidity that have become the essence of his, Eichmann's, mentality. <...> But the practice of self-deception was to the extent of the comprehensive, almost turned into a moral prerequisite for survival, that even now, eighteen years after the fall of the Nazi regime, when most of the specific details of his lies already forgotten, sometimes it's hard not to think that hypocrisy has become an integral part of the German national character.