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4 Lethal Cogs It is ironic that the virtues of loyalty, discipline, and self-sacri¤ce that we value so highly in the individual are the very properties that create destructive organizational engines of war and bind men to malevolent systems of authority. —Stanley Milgram1 The Holocaust was murder, to be sure. But it was thorough, comprehensive, and exhaustive murder. To commit a Holocaust, bureaucracy must replace the mob; routinized behavior must supplant rage. —Gerald Markle2 When you think of the long and gloomy history of man, you will ¤nd more hideous crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have ever been committed in the name of rebellion. —C. P. Snow3 On the night of May 11, 1960, in a run-down suburb of Buenos Aires, Argentina , a man was kidnapped just steps away from his house. As he walked home from work in the dark, two men approached from the opposite direction, grabbed him, and threw him into a waiting car that quickly sped away. The kidnappers were Israeli security agents, and the abductee was Adolf Eichmann, one of the most wanted of Nazi war criminals.4 During the war, Eichmann, an of¤cer in the Reich’s Security Main Of¤ce (RSHA), had been responsible for deporting Poles and Jews. Through his of¤ce the policies of ¤rst deporting the Jews, then concentrating them in ghettos, and ultimately transporting them to the extermination camps were coordinated. After his capture, Eichmann was secretly held in a safe house for several days, and then smuggled back to Israel on an El Al ®ight, where he stood trial for his role in the perpetration of the Holocaust. He was indicted on four counts of crimes against the Jewish people, seven counts of crimes against humanity, one count of war crimes, and three counts of serving in criminal organizations: the SS, the SD, and the Gestapo.5 In his defense at his trial, Eichmann argued that he had no responsibility for the execution of the Jews since he personally had never killed a Jew, nor did he give any orders to kill anybody.6 He asserted that the department he ran was responsible only for relocating people and organizing the trains and other transport for those relocations. As for the death camps that were the destination of many of those trains, according to Eichmann,those were someone else’s responsibility . This defense illustrates well the bureaucratic mentality that allows ordinary people to participate in extraordinary crimes. By focusing only on their actions in a narrow sense, and avoiding explicit awareness that their efforts contributed to the larger scheme of extermination, bureaucrats performed their jobs without considering the true consequences of their actions. Eichmann’s argument, however, was not accepted by the court and eventually he was found guilty and executed by hanging on May 31, 1962. In his ¤nal plea to the court Eichmann stated that he was innocent of the charges brought against him because I never had the power and the responsibility of a giver of orders. I never carried out killings, as Höss did. If I had received the order to carry out these killings, I would not have escaped by using a trumped up pretext; during my interrogation I already stated: Since because of the compulsion exerted by an order there was no way out, I would have put a bullet through my brain in order to solve the con®ict between conscience and duty.7 Eichmann was unable or unwilling to acknowledge his personal responsibility for the Holocaust. In fact, he claimed that he would have killed himself rather than participate and kill Jews: truly an amazing claim from a man who conscientiously implemented genocidal ideologies in practices designed to murder millions. In point of fact, Eichmann was a skillful bureaucrat who overcame with initiative and resourcefulness many obstacles to carrying out the Holocaust . While at one level he was a committed racist and Nazi, at another Adolf Eichmann exempli¤es the archetypical bureaucratic participant in genocide who, while far removed from the actual act of murder, is nonetheless complicit in the crime of genocide. The evidence indicates that Eichmann was motivated as much by careerist opportunism as by his ideological beliefs.8 Eichmann’s role was critical in mobilizing the resources of the Reich to assist in the Holocaust. In this sense the Holocaust is not unique, since in all examples of genocide organizations and bureaucracies play essential roles in planning and...

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