Bearing no malice,
Eichmann joined
the S.S.
Trainloads
of Jews
rode to
their deaths.
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Author Notes
In 1962 Adolph Eichmann, a leader in the S.S. who was responsible for planning the transportation of Jews from Poland and Hungary to the death camps where they were exterminated as part of the Nazi Final Solution, was executed in Israel. He had been in hiding in Argentina for years before he was tracked down and brought to justice. At his trial, everyone in the prosecution noted that he was not an anti-Semitic man filled with hate. He stated point blank that he had joined the S.S. as a career move, and nobody ever disputed that. I was eleven years old and followed the news of his capture and trial with rapt attention. This is how I learned about the Holocaust and its horrors as we did not study this in grade school. I remember then wondering how a man could have possibly done such horrendous things.
In 1963, scholar Hannah Arendt wrote a book called Eichmann in Jerusalem: the Banality of Evil. She discussed how over the centuries many people have, like Eichmann, participated in evil not because they were devils in disguise, filled with hatred, but because they accepted the evil that was going on as normal and used it to further their own personal agendas. Eichmann simply wanted to advance in his career - it appears he just felt nothing about all those hundreds of thousands of families packed into the trains he arranged to transport them to their deaths.
I am writing about this on June 1st because he was executed just before midnight on May 31, 1962 and on June 1, the Israelis scattered his ashes out at sea so that he would never have a country he could call his final resting place.
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