The Killing Compartments Quotes

“Hazy popular notions must be absolutized (the targeted people are not just “worse,” they are “totally evil”); essentialized (no matter what the targeted people say or do, it is what they are, their immutable essence, that sets them apart as especially detestable); and generalized (each and every one of them is odious; there are no exceptions). Once the killers begin their work, they act out sentiments and convictions that are widespread among the regime’s people.”
― Abram de Swaan, The Killing Compartments: The Mentality of Mass Murder

“and that they should learn to judge for themselves and heed their individual conscience.10 Arendt depicts Eichmann as a pompous idiot, “genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché.” Poking fun at his malapropisms, she observes with dead precision, “His inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else.”11 Eichmann, whose efforts to expel, deport, and exterminate millions exceeded even the orders he received, who continued to the very last moment when even Heinrich Himmler had changed course, who said he despised colleagues who just followed orders, was the least apt example of an average bureaucrat, of just another number in the huge equation of the Nazi state.12 Eichmann was totally devoted to Hitler and National Socialism, fanatically ambitious”
― Abram de Swaan, The Killing Compartments: The Mentality of Mass Murder

“perpetrators of the Holocaust constituted a small minority among the accused Nazis. After 1948, in the German Federal Republic, they were not prosecuted in sizable numbers until the 1960s. Even so, out of the (roughly estimated) one hundred thousand perpetrators involved in the mass killings of Jews, only some seven hundred were tried and five hundred convicted by”
― Abram de Swaan, The Killing Compartments: The Mentality of Mass Murder

“Mass annihilation, mass extermination, and mass murder are in most respects broader terms than genocide, which was coined for purposes of international law. The UN Convention on Genocide of 1948 was meant to encourage early intervention by outside powers in order to prevent or stop mass killings and to bring the”
― Abram de Swaan, The Killing Compartments: The Mentality of Mass Murder

“Or are they perhaps different from most other people, at least in some respects and to a certain degree? Looking back, I think these questions have been with me most of my life, as they are with everyone for whom the Shoah was the formative event.”
― Abram de Swaan, The Killing Compartments: The Mentality of Mass Murder