Book: The banality of evil. Eichmann in Jerusalem

Conscience as such in Germany clearly had disappeared, and so completely, that the people about her, and almost did not remember and could not even imagine that the outside world does not share this awesome "new order German values."

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.

When all was ready, and the conveyor is earned quickly and smoothly, Eichmann "invited" to inspect its Jewish functionaries from Berlin. They were amazed: "It was like a bakery like the one where the mill is connected with bakery. The building is a Jew who has at least some property - a factory, a shop or a Bank account, he moves through the building from counter to counter, from office to office and out of the building without money, without rights, but with the passport, with the presentation which he said: "You must leave the country within two weeks. Otherwise, you will be sent to a concentration camp".

It all happened very quickly and suddenly. He had neither the time nor the desire to obtain full information, he didn't even know the party program and never read "Mein Kampf". Just Kaltenbrunner said, "why don't you join the SS?", and he said, "Really, why not join?" Here's how it all happened - simply and without hesitation.

The best man was brought before the criminal courts of Germany after the war. For 6280 gassing women and children, he was sentenced to six and a half years in prison.

Evil in the Third Reich has lost the sign by which most people recognize it - it has ceased to be a temptation. Many Germans and many Nazis may have been tempted not to kill, not to Rob, not to allow their neighbors to go to certain death (and the fact that the end point of transports of Jews was death, knew all, though not all knew the horrifying details), and thus not to become accomplices in the crime, which took advantage of it. But the Lord knows, they have learned to resist the temptation.

... former prisoner of Buchenwald, David Rousset has described what we now know happened in all concentration camps: "the Triumph of the SS required that the tortured victim was permitted to take himself to the gallows, without showing any protest that the victim renounced himself, forgot about me, so it has lost its identity. And it was done not just out of pure sadism, the SS were needed, that the victim admitted defeat. The SS understood that the system, which is able to destroy the victim before she ascends to the scaffold... is the best of all possible systems, designed to keep in slavery a people. In slavery. In submission. And there is no worse spectacle than this procession of human beings, obediently, like puppets, walking to death" (LesJours de notre mart, 1947).

The problem with Eichmann was precisely that people like him were many, and many were neither perverted nor sadistic, they were and are terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and our legal norms of morality, this normality was more terrifying than all the atrocities put together, because it meant - as constantly repeated in the Nuremberg defendants and their counsels - that this new type of criminal is in fact an "enemy of humanity" commits his crimes under circumstances such that he is virtually unable to know or feel what goes wrong.