Big Eichmann
I want to show you how little Ward Churchill knows about Adolph Eichmann.
His ignorance is revealed in the now-notorious essay (see quote in previous post), and in an AP interview he gave after the storm broke. There, Churchill said he did not mean to say the World Trade Center "technocrats" were Nazis but were, like Eichmann, bureaucrats who participated in an immoral system: "He did not necessarily agree with the goals of the Nazis with regard to the Jews, but he performed his functions brilliantly."
Eichmann was not a civilian, "of a sort." He served as an SS corporal at Dachau concentration camp. He wanted something more exciting, so he took a job in Heydrich's SD, the powerful SS security service. Eventually he held the rank of lieutenant colonel (Obersturmbannführer).
Eichmann was not "ignorant." He was assigned to the Jewish section, which collected information on prominent Jews. He immersed himself in the job, studied Jewish culture, attended Jewish events, visited ghettos, and even learned to read some Hebrew and speak Yiddish.
Eichmann was not some passive participant in someone else's system. He designed the systems and ran them. After the Nazis annexed Austria, Eichmann was sent to Vienna where he set up the Central Office for Jewish Emigration. Its sole purpose was to allow wealthy Jews to leave the country, in exchange for all their wealth. It became the model for such offices in the Reich before the war.
In 1939, he was called back to Berlin and put in charge of a special Gestapo section with the mission of implementing Nazi policies toward Jews. This was his job for the remainder of the war.
As the Germans rolled up victories over Poland and in the USSR, they became rulers of millions of Jews. Eichmann was told, so he testified, that they were to be exterminated. He went to work with a will.
The desultory massacres by firing squad and mass burning had killed tens of thousands. By experiment, he evolved an efficient system of genocide -- a word invented to describe what Eichmann created -- that killed millions.
He wasn't a cog in the machine. He was the engine.
Auschwitz was not something he was "ignorant" of, either. It was his pet project. He visited there many times, and helped select the site for the gas chambers. He approved the use of Zyklon-B, and he witnessed it at work.
In March 1944, when the Hungarian Jewish population (725,000) fell under German control, Eichmann rolled up his sleeves and went to work harder than ever. By mid May, he was moving them to Auschwitz. Again, Eichmann personally oversaw and the extermination process at Auschwitz.
If Churchill has any evidence that Eichmann "did not necessarily agree with" the goals of the Nazis, I'd like to know what it is. By the end of 1944, the Allies were closing in, and some of the top Nazis began to have second thoughts about how all this was going to look after the fall of the Reich. Himmler ordered Eichmann to stop deportations. Eichmann ignored this and had another 50,000 Hungarian Jews rounded up and forced on an eight-day death march to Austria.
Let that soak in. Himmler -- Himmler! -- told him to stop killing Jews. Ordered him to stop. And he kept right on, pushing dying women and children at gunpoint into the snows and mountains, to wear them to death.
You could say a lot of things about someone who does that. "Did not necessarily agree with" is not one that comes readily to mind.
Eichmann did not work in a steel and glass tower, "out of sight, mind and smelling distance" from the stench of death. Eichmann visited the east to see this at work. He watched a mass killing in Minsk, and saw the results of one in Lvov. During his trial after the war, Eichmann described the scene. The execution ditch had been covered over with dirt, but blood was gushing out of the ground "like a geyser" due to pressure from the bodily gasses of the dead.
Eichmann knew exactly what he was doing, knew the results of his actions and policies. He thought he was doing good for the world. There was no ideology gap between his view of things and Hitler's. He woke up every day from 1941 to 1945 and thought about how to be more effective at creating piles of corpses.
So how are those dead WTC employees like him?
His ignorance is revealed in the now-notorious essay (see quote in previous post), and in an AP interview he gave after the storm broke. There, Churchill said he did not mean to say the World Trade Center "technocrats" were Nazis but were, like Eichmann, bureaucrats who participated in an immoral system: "He did not necessarily agree with the goals of the Nazis with regard to the Jews, but he performed his functions brilliantly."
Eichmann was not a civilian, "of a sort." He served as an SS corporal at Dachau concentration camp. He wanted something more exciting, so he took a job in Heydrich's SD, the powerful SS security service. Eventually he held the rank of lieutenant colonel (Obersturmbannführer).
Eichmann was not "ignorant." He was assigned to the Jewish section, which collected information on prominent Jews. He immersed himself in the job, studied Jewish culture, attended Jewish events, visited ghettos, and even learned to read some Hebrew and speak Yiddish.
Eichmann was not some passive participant in someone else's system. He designed the systems and ran them. After the Nazis annexed Austria, Eichmann was sent to Vienna where he set up the Central Office for Jewish Emigration. Its sole purpose was to allow wealthy Jews to leave the country, in exchange for all their wealth. It became the model for such offices in the Reich before the war.
In 1939, he was called back to Berlin and put in charge of a special Gestapo section with the mission of implementing Nazi policies toward Jews. This was his job for the remainder of the war.
As the Germans rolled up victories over Poland and in the USSR, they became rulers of millions of Jews. Eichmann was told, so he testified, that they were to be exterminated. He went to work with a will.
The desultory massacres by firing squad and mass burning had killed tens of thousands. By experiment, he evolved an efficient system of genocide -- a word invented to describe what Eichmann created -- that killed millions.
In January 1942 Eichmann helped Heydrich organize the Wannsee Conference in Berlin during which Heydrich and Eichmann along with 15 Nazi bureaucrats planned the extermination of the entire Jewish population of Europe and the Soviet Union, estimated at 11 million persons.
He wasn't a cog in the machine. He was the engine.
Auschwitz was not something he was "ignorant" of, either. It was his pet project. He visited there many times, and helped select the site for the gas chambers. He approved the use of Zyklon-B, and he witnessed it at work.
In March 1944, when the Hungarian Jewish population (725,000) fell under German control, Eichmann rolled up his sleeves and went to work harder than ever. By mid May, he was moving them to Auschwitz. Again, Eichmann personally oversaw and the extermination process at Auschwitz.
If Churchill has any evidence that Eichmann "did not necessarily agree with" the goals of the Nazis, I'd like to know what it is. By the end of 1944, the Allies were closing in, and some of the top Nazis began to have second thoughts about how all this was going to look after the fall of the Reich. Himmler ordered Eichmann to stop deportations. Eichmann ignored this and had another 50,000 Hungarian Jews rounded up and forced on an eight-day death march to Austria.
Let that soak in. Himmler -- Himmler! -- told him to stop killing Jews. Ordered him to stop. And he kept right on, pushing dying women and children at gunpoint into the snows and mountains, to wear them to death.
You could say a lot of things about someone who does that. "Did not necessarily agree with" is not one that comes readily to mind.
Eichmann did not work in a steel and glass tower, "out of sight, mind and smelling distance" from the stench of death. Eichmann visited the east to see this at work. He watched a mass killing in Minsk, and saw the results of one in Lvov. During his trial after the war, Eichmann described the scene. The execution ditch had been covered over with dirt, but blood was gushing out of the ground "like a geyser" due to pressure from the bodily gasses of the dead.
Eichmann knew exactly what he was doing, knew the results of his actions and policies. He thought he was doing good for the world. There was no ideology gap between his view of things and Hitler's. He woke up every day from 1941 to 1945 and thought about how to be more effective at creating piles of corpses.
So how are those dead WTC employees like him?
