This quote was from one of the most fascinating books which I ever read in my life, Eichmann in My Hands by Peter Z. Malkin and Harry Stein. Malkin was one of the first agents recruited by MOSSAD, the elite service unit of the infant State of Israel back in the 1950s. He was there for the initial intelligence on Eichmann and the agent who actually grabbed him on May 11, 1960 and was part of the team who questioned him and arranged his flight out of Argentina some three weeks later.
Having done his job, Malkin devotes a mere six short paragraphs in his final 24th chapter to Eichmann's trial and execution. But the mentality of a key operative in a brutal regime gets considerably more attention.
Credit is due to Stein, as the story teller and Malkin as the chief actor and professional for painting a more complete picture of Eichmann than may be available in any other book.
Other than his close association with one of the most brutal chapters in human history, Eichmann comes across as an almost sympathetic character, a devoted family man, even a nice man, who was just doing a distasteful job which higher ups required him to do, albeit with efficiency and brutality than most of us with a basic intact conscience could ever possibly muster.
Some of our federal employees responding to the recent government shut-down who have followed orders to place barriers in front of the World War II monument to prevent (so far, thankfully, in vain) aged veterans in wheelchairs and with walkers to see that dignified outdoor display will resent the comparison to the Eichmann mentality by saying they never killed anyone, but the mentality of just mindlessly following order is the same. Some, who have recently evicted an elderly Nevada couple from their home, have already taken the "just following orders" excuse a step further.
At the very least, we should expect them to behave like most of the civil servants of Italy did when ordered to cooperate with their German allies and gather their local Jewish populations to feed Hitler and Eichmann's brutal death machines. Few did more than go through the motions of cooperation while conveniently losing or misplacing records to the extent that these intended victims, for the most part, could not even be located. They were apologetic. They pretended to cooperate. They even said the right things to the regime to protect themselves. But, in the end, the Italian Jews had the best survival rate in all of Nazi occupied Europe except for only the Scandinavian countries where the regime was careful to avoid enraging the local populace because they harbored illusions of a Nordic alliance.
