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Essay on adolph eichmann
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Philosopher Hannah Arendt is well known for her work on totalitarianism and
Jewish affairs of World War II. One of her career highlights presents, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A
Report on the Banality of Evil, covering events leading to the trial of Adolf Eichmann. The purpose of her work gives the audience the opportunity to analyze Eichmann’s role in the massacre of many individuals, but primarily the report focuses on all who contributed in the death of Jewish citizens. Throughout her report, she notates key factors that unfold the contributions and true character of Adolf Eichmann.
Eichmann, born on March 19,1906, grew up as a middle class citizen in Germany with a rough start at life, as he was unable to finish high school and vocational school
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From job to job he searched for the right opportunity to prevail. It wasn’t until he was introduced to N.S.D.A.P (Nazi Party) where he was most eager to rank up and earn a place in the higher circle. Growing up in a home of Christian worship, it was odd for Eichmann to express that he was a man of no faith and join a violent and anti-semitic party. Arendt distributes important facts in understanding Eichmann’s true character.
Eichmann now experienced with the N.S.D.A.P joins Security Services, with full knowledge of what his job entails. Competent in the Nazi Regime being openly totalitarian and criminal, he becomes expert in the matters of emmigration. Arendt analyzes his motives of having a conscience. Eichmann had knowledge that the process of emigration was codenamed for forced immigration of Jewish citizens, who were transitioned, tortured in a concentration camp, and murdered. Throughout Arendt’s coverage in trial, she notices how Eichmann contradicts his story. He indicates, being aware that he was a factor in the horrific slaughter of
Jews, but in contrast states he had no knowledge of the Jews final destination and was obedient
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in following orders. Eichmann does in fact help a small percentage of Jews transition
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Leading German historians such as Hans Mommsen coined nebulous phrases such as “cumulative radicalization” in order to describe a killing process that, like a Betriebsunfall (an industrial accident), seemed to have happened without anyone consciously willing it.” (Wilson, 2014) In following Arendt states how it seemed Germany lost its own conscience under the rule of Hitler. Of his legal framework, every order contrary in letter or spoken was by definition unlawful. Eichmann showed obedience to a man demanding the land's voice of conscience should be thou shalt kill.
In another perspective of Arendt’s report Malte Goebel states, “However,
Eichmann is just one man. His personality is stunning to the people who believe that monstrous deeds require a monstrous character. In fact, referring to this expression and the famous German love of restricting and ruling out everything, I would inappropriately say: Monstrous deeds require a monstrous bureaucracy. Eichmann was a simple man...” (Goebel, 1998) I would have to disagree on the terms that Eichmann had full knowledge of the death of the Jews and ultimately organized their transition in being murdered. Arendt points out key factors of
Michael Boehmcke Mrs. Vermillion AP Language and Composition 16 March 2018 The Search for A Killer In 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland, initiating World War II, as well as laying the ground work for what became known as the Final Solution to the Jewish Question, the German extermination of millions of European Jews. In The Nazi Hunters, Neal Bascomb describes the hunt after the war for Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi who oversaw the deliverance of the Jews to the extermination camps.
Six million Jews died during World War II by the Nazi army under Hitler who wanted to exterminate all Jews. In Night, Elie Wiesel, the author, recalls his horrifying journey through Auschwitz in the concentration camp. This memoir is based off of Elie’s first-hand experience in the camp as a fifteen year old boy from Sighet survives and lives to tell his story. The theme of this memoir is man's inhumanity to man. The cruel events that occurred to Elie and others during the Holocaust turned families and others against each other as they struggled to survive Hitler's and the Nazi Army’s inhumane treatment.
Adolf Eichmann was a high-ranking German officer who was one of a few top-ranking officials responsible for the "legal work" of the extermination of millions of Jews. He was a wanted Nazi war criminal because he escaped just before the end of World War II. He was not immediately captured and thus evaded the Nuremberg Trials as he fled to the country of Argentina where he attempted to fade into history. Israeli secret service agents somehow managed to track Eichmann down, kidnap him, and bring him back to Israel to face the consequences of his past. Throughout the trial, Eichmann's defense was simply that he was basically a puppet of Nazi Germany saying that he was "a tool in the hands of superior powers and authorities."
Goldhagen's book however, has the merit of opening up a new perspective on ways of viewing the Holocaust, and it is the first to raise crucial questions about the extent to which eliminationist anti-Semitism was present among the German population as a whole. Using extensive testimonies from the perpetrators themselves, it offers a chilling insight into the mental and cognitive structures of hundreds of Germans directly involved in the killing operations. Anti-Semitism plays a primary factor in the argument from Goldhagen, as it is within his belief that anti-Semitism "more or less governed the ideational life of civil society" in pre-Nazi Germany . Goldhagen stated that a
Murders inflicted upon the Jewish population during the Holocaust are often considered the largest mass murders of innocent people, that some have yet to accept as true. The mentality of the Jewish prisoners as well as the officers during the early 1940’s transformed from an ordinary way of thinking to an abnormal twisted headache. In the books Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi and Ordinary men by Christopher R. Browning we will examine the alterations that the Jewish prisoners as well as the police officers behaviors and qualities changed.
The events which have become to be known as The Holocaust have caused much debate and dispute among historians. Central to this varied dispute is the intentions and motives of the perpetrators, with a wide range of theories as to why such horrific events took place. The publication of Jonah Goldhagen’s controversial but bestselling book “Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust” in many ways saw the reigniting of the debate and a flurry of scholarly and public interest. Central to Goldhagen’s disputed argument is the presentation of the perpetrators of the Holocaust as ordinary Germans who largely, willingly took part in the atrocities because of deeply held and violently strong anti-Semitic beliefs. This in many ways challenged earlier works like Christopher Browning’s “Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland” which arguably gives a more complex explanation for the motives of the perpetrators placing the emphasis on circumstance and pressure to conform. These differing opinions on why the perpetrators did what they did during the Holocaust have led to them being presented in very different ways by each historian. To contrast this I have chosen to focus on the portrayal of one event both books focus on in detail; the mass shooting of around 1,500 Jews that took place in Jozefow, Poland on July 13th 1942 (Browning:2001:225). This example clearly highlights the way each historian presents the perpetrators in different ways through; the use of language, imagery, stylistic devices and quotations, as a way of backing up their own argument. To do this I will focus on how various aspects of the massacre are portrayed and the way in which this affects the presentation of the per...
“The Holocaust is the most investigated crime in history, as has often been pointed out in response to deniers. Eichmann may be that crime’s most investigated criminal” (Sells, Michael A.). Adolf Eichmann was one of the head Nazis. He had a lot of authority in enacting what Hitler had told the Nazis to do. He was just about as responsible as Hitler was for killing all of those innocent
“He was not stupid. It was sheer thoughtlessness — something by no means identical with stupidity — that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period. And if this is ‘banal’ and even funny, if with the best will in the world one cannot extract any diabolical or demonic profundity from Eichmann, this is still far from calling it commonplace [Eichmann in Jerusalem 287-288). This quote was among, writer of “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” Hannah Arendt’s challenging passages that can be found in the book and offers a quite startling judgment of Eichmann. Jew, refugee from Nazi Germany, and distinguished writer of The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt proposed herself to be Eichmann's trial reporter to take a closer
The thoughtlessness in which Eichmann embodied in the courtroom, along with the normalcy he possesses, aids in the development of the enigmatic structure of the trial. Arendt's battle to find middle-ground between the idea of Eichmann as a common man attempting to fulfill objectives and his connection to the Nazi regime is what defies original theories on evil. The guilt Eichmann carries is clearly much larger than the man himself, especially one so simplistic and thoughtless. Therefore, the evil presented in Eichma...
Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night, is an account about his experience through concentration camps and death marches during WWII. In 1944, fifteen year old Wiesel was one of the many Jews forced onto cattle cars and sent to death and labor camps. Their personal rights were taken from them, as they were treated like animals. Millions of men, women, children, Jews, homosexuals, Gypsies, disabled people, and Slavic people had to face the horrors the Nazi’s had planned for them. Many people witnessed and lived through beatings, murders, and humiliations. Throughout the memoir, Wiesel demonstrates how oppression and dehumanization can affect one’s identity by describing the actions of the Nazis and how it changed the Jewish
Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah. Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. New York: Vintage, 1997. Print.
That doubt plagued Wiesel, causing him to abandon his faith and walk away from it. However, that nameless “neighbor” he encountered not only walked away, but followed a different path, a path where the man intending to slaughter the Jewish people was the sole figure he believed in.
“ Hitler used propaganda and manufacturing enemies such as Jews and five million other people to prepare the country for war.” (Jewish Virtual Library), This piece of evidence shows Hitler’s attempt of genocide toward the Jewish race a...
History always finds a way of repeating itself. A Tale of Two Cities, depicts the French Revolution and the citizens living through it. Many citizens go along with the leaders want, in order to avoid being executed, this is taking part in mob mentality because although they might not be doing what they want, they are doing what everybody else is doing, so they can fit in. Some people can participate in something so vulgar even when they do not mean to. In “Top 10 Instances of Mob Mentality”, author S.Grant says that, “Looking back on Nazi Germany, it’s difficult to comprehend how ordinary people acted so ruthless and inhumane. Even if you assume the average German citizen didn’t know what was happening in the concentration camps, there were still 24,000 members in the “Death’s Head Unit,” a special section of the Schutzstaffel (SS) that was in charge of the concentration camps. These Death’s Head
During the Holocaust, around six million Jews were murdered due to Hitler’s plan to rid Germany of “heterogeneous people” in Germany, as stated in the novel, Life and Death in the Third Reich by Peter Fritzsche. Shortly following a period of suffering, Hitler began leading Germany in 1930 to start the period of his rule, the Third Reich. Over time, his power and support from the country increased until he had full control over his people. Starting from saying “Heil Hitler!” the people of the German empire were cleverly forced into following Hitler through terror and threat. He had a group of leaders, the SS, who were Nazis that willingly took any task given, including the mass murder of millions of Jews due to his belief that they were enemies to Germany. German citizens were talked into participating or believing in the most extreme of things, like violent pogroms, deportations, attacks, and executions. Through the novel’s perspicacity of the Third Reich, readers can see how Hitler’s reign was a controversial time period summed up by courage, extremity, and most important of all, loyalty.