Adolf Eichmann: The Extermination Of Hungarian Jews

The horrifying acts of Adolf Eichmann for which he was on trial in Jerusalem make him one of the worst criminals of the 20th century. He was the mastermind behind the mass deportations of Jews from their home countries to the ghettos or extermination camps , as well as a German SS lieutenant who managed to escape to Argentina after the end of the Second World War. There he was captured illegally by Mossad agents and brought to Jerusalem for trial. He was charged with nearly fifteen crimes, including war crimes, crimes against humanity, crimes against the Jewish people and of membership in a criminal organisation. People perceived him (and still do) as a monstrous beast who felt no remorse whatsoever for his deeds and even dared to claim he

Together, they negotiated an agreement that Eichmann would allow the departure of a few thousand Jews to Palestine in exchange for silence about the mass extermination of Hungarian Jews. So it seems like Eichmann’s idea was a sort of hierarchy of the Zionist Jews, who were in his own words ‘the best biological material’, and Eastern European Jews, whom he did not care for. In fact, Arendt states that he was bothered by the way Jews were treated; and not the idea of murder, but the idea of German Jews being murdered. Eichmann was not the only one who shared this view; many other Nazis did as well. This sort of conscience which rebelled (if at all) only against the murder of people who came from their own culture is even more disturbing, since it divides people not simply by race, but by their cultural and spiritual achievements – as if the people from the Eastern countries were less human not simply because they were Jews or communists, but because they were without a culture. The politeness with which he acted toward German-speaking Jewish functionaries was to a large extent the result of his recognition of people who were socially superior to him. He believed up to the end in success – the standard of ‘good society’ as he knew it. His last words on Hitler were that he may have been wrong all the time, but his success proved to Eichmann that he should subordinate himself to Hitler. Eichmann’s conscience was set at rest when the ‘good society’ everywhere reacted as he did, or at least seemed to react as he did. He did not need to block his conscience, because his conscience spoke with a ‘respectable voice’, with the voice of the society around him. He even believed he lived his life according to Kant’s moral philosophy and offered a definition of the categorical imperative: “the principle of my will must always be such that it can become the principle of general laws”. The problem which Arendt