and SS
-Obersturmbannführer
(equivalent to Lieutenant Colonel
in Wehrmacht
) and one of the major organizers of the Holocaust
. Because of his organizational talents and ideological reliability, Eichmann was charged by Obergruppenführer
(General) Reinhard Heydrich
with the task of facilitating and managing the logistics of mass deportation
of Jews to ghettos and extermination camps in German-occupied Eastern Europe
.
After the war
, he fled to Argentina
using a fraudulently obtained laissez-passer issued by the International Red Cross
.
To sum it all up, I must say that I regret nothing.
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.
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.
In einem kurzen Weilchen, meine Herren, sehen wir uns ohnehin alle wieder. Das ist das Los aller Menschen. Es lebe Deutschland. Es lebe Argentinien. Es lebe Österreich. … Ich werde sie nicht vergessen.
Obeying an order was the most important thing to me. It could be that is in the nature of the German.
From my childhood, obedience was something I could not get out of my system. When I entered the armed services at the age of 27, I found being obedient not a bit more difficult than it had been during my life to that point. It was unthinkable that I would not follow orders.