The Puppet's Guilt

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."

Despite the overwhelming evidence against Eichmann, he remained concrete in his defense of himself. He played off his responsibility as something he was merely told to do and that he "condemn[s] and regret[s] the act of extermination of the Jews." A far cry in a distant world, falling on dead ears.

While the basic argument will be "well no one held a gun to your head, Mr. Eichmann," this is most likely not true. Nazi Germany was known for its ruthless and aggressive leadership, immediately eliminating those vehemently opposed and simply passing it off as "treason." Even if Eichmann truly did not want to sign each of these orders, he still did so out of fear for his own life. But is that justified? What makes him think that his life is far more valued than any single Jew? This in and of itself proves that Eichmann was, at the very least, a selfish man.

Eichmann voluntarily signed order after order to terminate the lives of tens of thousands of Jews with ease and without objection - and yet in his short time from capture to death in 1960-62, he tried to give the sense that he never wanted to do it all along! A member of an organization is representative of that organization as a whole. It's not like the hints of genocide, terror ruling, and dictatorship weren't ominously present from the beginning, anyway. Adolf Eichmann acts as if he just obliviously became a part of a terror party and was just under as much persecution as anyone else to do whatever that respective governing body said.