Anyone ever see "Conspiracy?

I'm Neumann, Director, Office of the Four-Year Plan.

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Director, Office of the Four-Year Plan.

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He must have just gotten promoted because he was very proud to say that to everyone he met at that conference.

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Most accounts of Eichmann and his personality actually indicate the complete opposite. Hannah Arendt illustrated this in her work on the Eichmann trial. I think simplifying these characters as "evil" without critical analysis of their personal characteristics is extremely lazy and inaccurate.

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Shirer, in "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" claims that Eichmann, just before the collapse of Nazi Germany, said that "he would leap laughing into the grave because the feeling that he had five million people on his conscience would be for him a source of extraordinary satisfaction."

Characterize that however you choose. I choose to call it evil. And I feel fairly certain that those five million people would agree.

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Shirer, in "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" claims that Eichmann, just before the collapse of Nazi Germany, said that "he would leap laughing into the grave because the feeling that he had five million people on his conscience would be for him a source of extraordinary satisfaction."

Characterize that however you choose. I choose to call it evil. And I feel fairly certain that those five million people would agree.

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This is all predicated on William Shirer. His book is neither academic nor remotely objective. Shirer likewise asserts as established fact that the Reichstag fire was staged by the Nazi leadership. Most historians acknowledge that this is most certainly not an established truth whatsoever. I personally don't put much stock into Shirer's work. There are much better researched, credible, and even-tempered works on the Third Reich available today.

Eichmann had relationships with leaders in world Jewish organizations before and during the war. I've read numerous accounts of them denying the notion of him being classified as "evil personified" or one dimensional depictions of his character. He read and was familiar with Herzl's Judenstaat long before the war and embraced the relocation of Jews from Germany as suggested in Herzl's work.

That's different than meaning he was glad he was responsible for 5 million deaths because he liked killing and thought death was badass.

If an American soldier said "I'd gladly kill millions of America's enemies" we wouldn't characterize that as evil but rather we'd see it as boastfully super-patriotic, which Eichmann was.