Adolf Eichmann quotes - page 2

Adolf Eichmann was a high-ranking Nazi official, known as one of the major organizers of the Holocaust. As head of Jewish affairs in the Gestapo, he coordinated the logistics for the mass deportation of Jews to extermination camps. He was captured after World War II, tried in Israel, and executed for crimes against humanity. Here are 60 of his quotes:

After the speech he looked at us ironically and added softly: "Otherwise you would die". The words were icy but the tone like velvet, almost friendly.

Adolf Eichmann

I knew that in this 'promised land' of South America I had a few good friends, to whom I could say openly, freely and proudly that I am Adolf Eichmann, former SS Obersturmbannführer.

Adolf Eichmann

I have them completely in hand here, they dare not take a step without first consulting me.

Adolf Eichmann

After the [Wannsee] conference, Heydrich, Müller and myself sat cozily around the fireplace. We had drinks. We had brandy. We sang songs. After a while, we got up on chairs and drank a toast. Then we got up on the tables and went round and round. On the chairs. On the tables. Then we sat around peacefully, giving ourselves a rest after so many exhausting hours.

Adolf Eichmann

Whether they were bank directors or mental cases, the people who were loaded on those trains meant nothing to me. It was really none of my business.

Adolf Eichmann

It is hard, what I have told you, I know, and I will be condemned for being so hard in my phrasing, but I cannot tell you anything else, for it is the truth! Why should I deny it?

Adolf Eichmann

When I arrived at the place of the execution, the gunmen fired into a pit the size of several rooms. They fired from small submachine guns. As I arrived, I saw a Jewish woman and a small child in her arms in the pit. I wanted to pull out the child, but then a bullet smashed the skull of the child. My driver wiped brain particles from my leather coat.

Adolf Eichmann

Eichmann boasted about anything that seemed at all plausible to him: his genuinely close ties to the highest powers in Hungary; his somewhat indirect contact with the powers of the Third Reich; his access to everything from a "personal aircraft" to direct control of the gas chambers at Auschwitz. ... He threatened his victims with the prospect that after the "final victory," Hitler would make him "World Commissar of the Jews."

Adolf Eichmann

I was never an anti-Semite. ... My sensitive nature revolted at the sight of corpses and blood... I personally had nothing to do with this. My job was to observe and report on it.

Adolf Eichmann

I was here, there and everywhere, you never knew when I was going to show up. I was a traveler.... I was able to creep into every territory of our corner of Europe.

Adolf Eichmann

Nobody else was such a household name in Jewish political life at home and abroad in Europe as little old me.

Adolf Eichmann

I was sent to Treblinka, Minsk, Lemberg and Auschwitz. When I see the images before my eyes, it all comes back to me ... Corpses, corpses, corpses. Shot, gassed, decaying corpses. They seemed to pop out of the ground when a grave was opened. It was a delirium of blood. It was an inferno, a hell, and I felt I was going insane.

Adolf Eichmann

Eichmann... found all bureaucracy by definition tiresome. This was what staff were for. "These matters to do with bureaucracy," he explained to Sassen [in Argentina], "I just relied on my civil servants for them". He deployed these "living articles," like Ernst Moes and Fritz Wöhrn, as "bureaucratic brakes."

Adolf Eichmann

The men in my command had the kind of respect for me that prompted the Jews to effectively set me on a throne.

Adolf Eichmann

I hope that all of you will follow me.

Adolf Eichmann

I will simply not do penance.

Adolf Eichmann

Every department was trying to squeeze everything possible out of the Jews, to winkle it out by threatening them with the big bad Eichmann.

Adolf Eichmann

It was my job to catch our Jewish enemies like fish in a net and transport them to their final destination.

Adolf Eichmann

The language becomes entirely perverted where Eichmann turns metaphors on their heads, talking about expulsion and murder using gentle images of life. An institution for forced emigration was his "first child," where he was able to "be creative in my work." All the individual acts of robbery and expulsion that took place in Austria were committed to "provide [the country] with injections of Jewish solutions." Even exterminations and deportations were "born". This was why he felt so superfluous in Budapest, when he was forced to stop deporting people to Auschwitz: "As far as I know, I couldn't have done anything fruitful anymore" ... In Eichmann's language, he didn't send people to the death camps; the camps were "fed with material".

Adolf Eichmann

While we were working with the Jews to solve the Jewish question, the others used the Jews as a means to an end, to milk them for their own ends.... And this is why there are still a whole lot of Jews enjoying life today who ought to have been gassed.

Adolf Eichmann

They knew me wherever I went. Through the press, the name Eichmann had emerged as a symbol.... In any case, the word Jew ... was irreversibly linked with the word Eichmann. Much more power ... was attributed to me than I actually had.

Adolf Eichmann

The only good enemy of the Reich is a dead one. In particular I have to add, when I received an order, I always carried out this order with the executioner, and I am proud of that to this day.... If I had not done this, they would not have gone to the butcher.

Adolf Eichmann