People Indicted For War Crimes

"I was only carrying out the orders of the Zionists. They asked me to gather the Jews in a specific place in the world, using expulsion or murder. First, their target was Poland, then Madagascar, but in the end they chose the Middle East. If I am guilty of the so- called killing of 6 million Jews then the Zionist leaders are much guiltier than I am. This is because they wanted to silence the world under the pretext that if they had stayed in Germany they would have been killed. Because they don’t have a country they are forced to occupy other people’s land. And that is what they did."

"The people who met [Eichmann in hiding]... met a pleasant man who didn't drink or gamble, organized a fair distribution of rations, knew his way around the "red tape," was intelligent and polite, and paid his rent on time. This charming man with the slight Viennese accent clearly didn't have a provincial upbringing. "He was such a quiet, unassuming person. On warm summer evenings he often played his violin for us. He played Mozart, Schubert, Bach and Beethoven" ... his general technical knowledge meant he could fix broken equipment, and he was the only one in the area with a radio, on which he particularly liked to follow the news ... even the children loved him: he helped tutor them and gave them chocolate."

"Nearly four decades after being buried in Israel's state archives, a rambling manuscript by Adolf Eichmann, the chief transport technician behind the Nazi death machine, was finally released to the public yesterday, reeking of mendacity, self-interest, and delusion. Penned in jail as he awaited his execution, the man who dispatched hundreds of thousands of Jews to their deaths in the gas chambers ended his days trying to convince the world he was a mere Nazi underling, a lickspittle who was only obeying orders and who went to the gallows tortured by regret at having been dazzled and led astray by the Third Reich's leaders. … time and again, he absolves himself of responsibility for the Nazi regime's horrendous crimes, painting a picture of himself as a nature-loving, simple, practical figure, who was brought up (in Austria, though he was German-born) to believe in discipline. He casts himself as a man who could not understand why his superiors kept embroiling him in death, instead of giving him the desk job he so coveted and clamoured for. A man who was horrified to witness the gassing of Jews in a mobile execution van. A man who loved his family, who made friends before the war with Jews and dissidents. … Almost every chapter contains an explanation of how little authority that he — the head of the Gestapo section in Berlin whose job it was to locate, deport, and exterminate Jews — actually held."

"Eichmann continually managed to inveigle his Jewish negotiating partners into making concessions and cooperating, using nothing but their hope that by "negotiating" with him, they could prevent something worse from happening. How terrible their realization must have been that they were caught in a trap. On the transports, in the camps, and in direct sight of the apparatus of extermination, the Nazis' involuntary collaborators realized what they had been involved in. If they did not feel then, in this moment of realization, that they had fallen victim to a diabolical perpetrator, Satan in human form, then when? The terrible visions that emerged later of "Caligula" and "Grand Inquisitor Eichmann," the heartless monster, were rooted in these moments of unavoidable insight into the true aims of National Socialist anti-Jewish policies... "Eichmann" became the embodiment of this mechanism: it was the name the Jewish community representatives knew, and people trusted them. So the name walked abroad among the Nazis' victims, though the man himself was nowhere to be seen and was not immediately responsible for their suffering. This explains the memories of many Holocaust survivors of encounters with Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann, when in all likelihood they never met him... the victims were able to see Eichmann in every jackbooted Nazi or arrogant inspector who screamed at them only because "Eichmann" had become much more than just a person. The name was the symbol and the guarantor of the power that was crushing people, and it no longer mattered who actually embodied and exploited it. The threat inherent in that name went far beyond what a faceless, nameless bureaucracy could ever have achieved."

"Eichmann is 34 or 35 years old, a very active, adventurous man. He felt that this act against Jews was necessary and was fully convinced of its necessity and correctness, as I was."

"Eichmann became the "Nuremberg Ghost," ever present but impossible to lay hands on. His name haunted all the war crimes trials that followed."

"If we had fifty Eichmanns, we would have won the war."

"People knew exactly who was meant by "a repulsive, unpleasant fellow, you shake hands with him and you want to wash your hands afterward." Erring on the side of caution, Eichmann corrected this denunciation for his superiors: "I make sure I never shake hands with these Jews.""

"Mister death who signs papers then eats telegraphs simply: Shoot them then eats"

"He is responsible because of the conspiracy and the plots for all that happened to the Jewish people — from the shores of the Arctic Ocean to the Aegean Sea, from the Pyrenees to the Urals."

"This was no contented man in his fifties, reading for pleasure: the peaceable rabbit farmer was capable of throwing books against the wall and tearing them to pieces, filling them with aggressive marginalia, insults, and invective, and covering mountains of paper with his commentaries, writing like a man possessed. Pencils snapped under the force of his scribbling; his fighting spirit was unbroken. The ideological warrior had not been defeated ... His writing was not an attempt to comprehend his own actions; it arose from the fact that people were condemning the crimes he felt to be his life's work."

"In the Sassen tapes, Eichmann ... was not yet under the threat of the gallows, and he was not cautious. Here was Eichmann without any remorse, boasting and glorying in what he had done. Here Eichmann reveals himself as a passionate zealous man, happy to celebrate a weekend with his mistress at a Hungarian lake, slightly surprised to find that the killings and roundups in Hungary had gone so easily ... [The tapes] reveal an arrogant, boastful man, disdainful of his subordinates, totally indifferent to the fate of his victims and distant from his family. Capable of peacefully playing the violin at home, he is not above tearing up his wife’s bible and throwing it at her. He is a man cocooned in self-deception. Above all, he is a man passionate about his job and his mission ... Essentially a desk man, Eichmann fantasizes about himself in the [tapes] as a man of action and courage, deftly rewriting history in the process."

"He complained regularly about death-camp quotas not being fulfilled, about the problems of getting all French Jews to the death camps, and about the intermittent failure of the Italians to cooperate. As late as 1944, he played a leading, and open, role in the killing of Hungarian Jews, and in August of that year he reported that four million Jews had died in the death camps and another two million at the hands of the Nazis' mobile extermination units in Eastern Europe. At no point did he show the least compunction over the planning, organization and execution of what became known as the Holocaust."

"The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together, for it implied — as had been said at Nuremberg over and over again by the defendants and their counsels — that this new type of criminal, who is in actual fact hostis generis humani, commits his crimes under circumstances that make it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he is doing wrong."

"We knew who Eichmann was, even in Holland. We knew he was a man who used a lot of Yiddish and Hebrew expressions - and there was also a rumor he spoke Hebrew and was born in Sarona. This was very clear from the way he spoke. He was interested in our history, our background, our life in Holland. He asked very specific questions about synagogues, Zionist matters, certificates, our membership of youth movements. He told us we now had the right to go to the Theresienstadt ghetto, but if we said anything there about our experiences in Ravensbrück, or about anything we knew, 'then you will' - this was the phrase he used - 'be going up the chimney.'"

"With his characteristically ambiguous combination of praise, irony, and an eye for a slogan, Reinhard Heydrich called Eichmann his "little prime minister.""

"And just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations - as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world - we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang."

"Was Eichmann ever really the "man in the shadows"? Perhaps only during the short time he spent playing the SD commissar in a long leather coat, as feared and mysterious as a film noir villain. But by 1937 ... Eichmann became a symbol for anti-Jewish policy, exactly as he had planned. The symbol was perpetuated by other people's perception and by his own behavior, but it was also how he saw himself. The only difference in the postwar period was that he was elevated even further and held up as an isolated perpetrator ... thanks to his associates and accomplices' efforts to defend themselves."

"He was very upset that we had published something about him in that paper ... that he was ‘der Bluthund Eichmann’ (bloodhound Eichmann) - I am using the language [he] used at that time - ‘ Der Bluthund Eichmann,’ ‘blutunterlaufene Augen’ (blood-shot eyes), ‘ein neuer Feind,’ ‘Judenfeind’ (a new enemy, an enemy of the Jews). I don’t remember all the expressions, but they were very trenchant."

"It was perfectly clear to me that this order spelled the death of millions of people. I said to Eichmann, 'God grant that our enemies never have the opportunity of doing the same to the German people', in reply to which Eichmann told me not to be sentimental; it was an order of the Fuhrer's and would have to be carried out."

"Eichmann was in every respect a painstaking bureaucrat. He at once recorded in the files every discussion he ever had with any of his superiors. He always told me that the most important thing was to be covered at all times by one's superiors. He shunned all personal responsibility and took care to shelter behind his superiors - in this case Mueller and Kaltenbrunner - and inveigle them into accepting liability for his actions."

"Eichmann was personally a cowardly man, who was at great pains to protect himself from responsibility… He was amoral and completely ice cold in his attitude."

"The story [that Eichmann was born in Palestine and spoke Hebrew] is a common thread winding through the public's perception of Eichmann ... in 1944 Eichmann used it offensively in Hungary to underpin his authority. Wisliceny used it to make the Jewish community afraid of his commander, who knew everything, could read everything, and - a masterstroke of caricature - looked so Jewish himself that he could move undetected among the Jews at any time. This terrifying scenario made such a lasting impression that after the war, people were frightened Eichmann might secretly have gone to Palestine, posing as a Jew, and could be hiding there among the survivors."

"By about the start of 1940, we knew that if a senior German functionary or an officer arrived, it was best to stay hidden, and not show your face on the street... People were saying you should have no contact with them, because there was one among them who was born in a German colony in Palestine, and spoke Yiddish and Hebrew, and was familiar with all the Jewish customs."

"We were naked when we stood in front of Adolf Eichmann and his helpers during selection on arrival at Auschwitz. Can you imagine how we felt, especially a woman, in front of them? ... He stood there with a dog and a thick leather horsewhip that was very thin at the end, which he pointed left or right. He took my mother to the other side. I cannot say I was brave. Perhaps it was inexperience, but I begged him, saying, "Please, she is the only person left in my life. I won't have anyone anymore." He struck me on the face with his whip so much that I swelled up like a balloon and could barely see through puffy eyes. He put me with my mother and that meant going to the crematorium."

"I was arrested on the street [in Vienna], brought to the Seitenstettengasse synagogue where I saw a group that was destroying everything ... with hammers, with axes, they broke the cult objects. And the one who was directing all this, it was specifically Mr. Eichmann... He was there, he was directing the operation... It was the SS ... they were in feldgrau [army gray], not in black. It was the first time that the SS weren't in black ... [Eichmann] was there with a crowbar. He smashed the cult objects to pieces ... Eichmann personally. But later, he ... invented a story ... that he went there to protect the building and the offices."

"His behavior, too, was godlike: he was master of arresting and then releasing people, of banning institutions and then allowing them to resume. He initiated and censored a Jewish newspaper and eventually even got to decide who could access the Jewish community's bank accounts."

"Jewish survivors also described the terror that Eichmann inspired: 'And then came Eichmann, like a young god; he was very good-looking, tall, dark, radiant in those days. The pictures of him today [at his trial in 1961] bear no resemblance to how he used to be.' In Vienna, he did not convey the image as he did in the trial in Jerusalem of the subordinate and banal official described by Hannah Arendt ... Eyewitnesses in 1938-9 speak of his anti-Semitic and imperious demeanour. He refused 'for ideological reasons' to shake hands with Jewish representatives or even Zionist emissaries. He berated, threatened and taunted the Jews. While he had still been a subordinate figure in Berlin in 1937, he took the initiative in Vienna to manage the terror and the persecution. He enjoyed his new work ... people could be jailed or deported to concentration camps at his command."

"Incognito investigation was one of the tasks that Eichmann most relished, and he remembered it fondly decades later. He visited Jewish organizations, making contacts who thought him liberal-minded and eager to learn ... [but] between coffeehouse chats, memos, lectures, and evening conferences with his colleagues, he was meticulously keeping denunciation files and writing anti-Semitic propaganda, making arrests, and carrying out joint interrogations with the Gestapo."

"I was a hospital nurse in Berlin where we had many visits from the SS, including Adolf Eichmann. He was young, good-looking, sleek, spotless, arrogant, and a smoker. While he was in the room, we had to stand up. He thought it was great merely to harass the Jews. We didn't know at that stage that he was in charge of the entire Jewish section [of the Gestapo]. He was constantly around our necks. That was his job."

"Before a subpoenaed gathering of all notable representatives of Judaism in Vienna, Eichmann flaunted his black SS uniform, his riding crop, and his knowledge of Judaism and Zionism. [Jewish historian] Adolf Böhm ... learned that Eichmann was one of his most avid readers, who knew whole pages of [his book] from memory. Böhm realized that the SS was going to use the knowledge he had painstaking gathered as ... a weapon against the Jews."

"Those who urge an alliance with Assad cite the example of Joseph Stalin, the Soviet despot who became an ally of Western democracies against Nazi Germany. I never liked historical comparisons and like this one even less. To start with, the Western democracies did not choose Stalin as an ally; he was thrusted upon them by the turn of events. When the Second World War started Stalin was an ally of Hitler thanks to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The Soviet Union actively participated in the opening phase of the war by invading Poland from the east as the Germans came in from the West. Before that, Stalin had rendered Hitler a big service by eliminating 22 000 of Polish army officers in The Katyn massacre. Between September 1939 and June 1941, when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, Stalin was an objective ally of Hitler. Stalin switched sides when he had no choice if he wanted to save his skin. The situation in Syria today is different. There is no alliance of democracies which, thanks to Obama’s enigmatic behavior, lack any strategy in the Middle East. Unlike Stalin, Assad has not switched sides if only because there is no side to switch to. Assad regards ISIS as a tactical ally against other armed opposition groups. This is why Russia is now focusing its air strikes against non-ISIS armed groups opposed to Assad. More importantly, Assad has none of the things that Stalin had to offer the Allies. To start with Stalin could offer the vast expanse of territory controlled by the Soviet Union and capable of swallowing countless German divisions without belching. Field Marshal von Paulus’ one-million man invasion force was but a drop in the ocean of the Soviet landmass. In contrast, Assad has no territorial depth to offer. According to the Iranian General Hossein Hamadani, who was killed in Aleppo, Assad is in nominal control of around 20 percent of the country. Stalin also had an endless supply of cannon fodder, able to ship in millions from the depths of the Urals, Central Asia and Siberia. In contrast, Assad has publicly declared he is running out of soldiers, relying on Hezbollah cannon fodder sent to him by Tehran. If Assad has managed to hang on to part of Syria, it is partly because he has an air force while his opponents do not. But even that advantage has been subject to the law of diminishing returns. Four years of bombing defenseless villages and towns has not changed the balance of power in Assad’s favor. This may be why his Russian backers decided to come and do the bombing themselves. Before, the planes were Russian, the pilots Syrian. Now both planes and pilots are Russian, underlining Assad’s increasing irrelevance. Stalin’s other card, which Assad lacks, consisted of the USSR’s immense natural resources, especially the Azerbaijan oilfields which made sure the Soviet tanks could continue to roll without running out of petrol. Assad in contrast has lost control of Syria’s oilfields and is forced to buy supplies from ISIS or smugglers operating from Turkey. There are other differences between Stalin then and Assad now. Adulated as “the Father of the Nation” Stalin had the last word on all issues. Assad is not in that position. In fact, again according to the late Hamadani in his last interview published by Iranian media, what is left of the Syrian Ba’athist regime is run by a star chamber of shadowy characters who regard Assad as nothing but a figurehead."

"In Assadʹs prisons, thereʹs no such thing as a pampered prisoner."

"Bashar al-Assad′s regime is by no means secular; it is sectarian. When it comes to Muslim-majority countries, many people in the West tend to adopt what I call Huntingtonian secularism, defining secularism in an oversimplified culturalist way as something that is basically against Islam."

"Throughout 2011 and 2012, Assad steadily lost his grip on large parts of the country. In Washington and European capitals, presidents and prime ministers believed his days were numbered. But they had underestimated the dictator with no conscience. He was the true heir of his father. He would make no concessions; his approach was “Assad, or we burn the country.” And he would do just that. The Syrian uprising and the subsequent brutal war have been characterized from many perspectives. Most cite big geopolitical events for saving Assad, like President Obama’s reluctance to intervene as he had done in Libya, or his backing down from a promise to punish Assad for using chemical weapons against his people in 2013. But the longer the outside world allowed Assad to kill, torture, and imprison with impunity, the more the revolution fractured. The Syrian battle for freedom was in a race against the inexorable radicalization and militarization of any revolution that drags on too long. As rage and despair built up, the revolutionaries picked up arms, rebel factions formed and splintered. The revolution was also in a race against those who saw an opportunity in the chaos—two very different groups of men in black, bearing different flags, enemies in fact, had been scouting the terrain. They weren’t even Syrians."

"That was how his country was branded by the dictator: Souriyya al-Assad, the Syria of Assad, as though it were private property. Drilled into children’s heads at school, written on the walls and on banners hanging from bridges, the phrase made clear there was no escaping the Assads, father and son. Then came 2011 and the Arab uprisings. Timid yearnings for freedom became a flood of people on the streets of Syria demanding the fall of the dictator. Millions took to the street. Yassin glimpsed the contours of a more hopeful future. So how could it be that when he returned to his hometown of Raqqa, in the summer of 2013, he found himself at the epicenter of a conflict not his own, looking over the ruins of his life, having been robbed of his soul, his love, his family. Yassin and millions of Syrians were rebelling against tyranny, but their country found itself caught between the spiritual heirs of Ibn Abdelwahhab and the upholders of Khomeini’s legacy; between the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)."

"A day will come when international justice will give its verdict on Bashar al-Assad who is massacring his people."

"Bashar al-Assad is a criminal, he will have to be tried and answer for his crimes before international court."

"if instead of supporting Bashar Assad's tyrannical regime we protect the Syrian people from ISIS – then Turkey, Russia, America, and Iran can unite and decide that democracy should be established in Syria and that Assad must go."

"In essence, I see the Syria war as a wrong one. If we had any sense, and if the Qods Force had not had excessive aspirations, Bashar Assad would have been toppled in 2011 because of the Arab Spring, and his dictatorial, oppressive Ba'thist regime would have fallen. We could have maintained good ties with those who would have replaced him in a democratic manner. That way, Iran's resources would not have been wasted in Syria."

"He is not going to lead the programme of change in Syria now. He has shown he is not capable of reform. His position is untenable. There is no process of change that leaves him intact."

"...President Assad, who is resorting to brutal military force against his own people and who is responsible for the situation, has lost all legitimacy and can no longer claim to lead the country. We call on him to face the reality of the complete rejection of his regime by the Syrian people and to step aside in the best interests of Syria and the unity of its people."

"We have consistently said that President Assad must lead a democratic transition or get out of the way. He has not led. For the sake of the Syrian people, the time has come for President Assad to step aside."

"The future of Syria must be determined by its people, but President Bashar al-Assad is standing in their way. His calls for dialogue and reform have rung hollow while he is imprisoning, torturing and slaughtering his own people."

"When the refugees realize that their return is conditioned on coordination with Bashar al-Assad's regime, they won't return, because Bashar al-Assad himself was behind their displacement."

"If Bashar has the interest of his country, he would step down, but he would also create an ability to reach out and start a new phase of Syrian political life."

"If only he could stay in Moscow longer, to give the people of Syria some relief. In fact, he should stay there so the transition can begin."

"He is a man who wages state terror. It is he who killed nearly one million people."

"History will mark these leaders as the leaders who feed on blood."

"Bashar Assad should see the tragic ends of the ones who declared war against their own people."