Adolf Eichmann Quotes
I never did anything, great or small, without obtaining in advance express instructions from Adolf Hitler or any of my superiors.
Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Viking Press, 1963, p. 137.
Stevens was totally burned out and quit. His predecessor had also been burned out at the enormous scope of the task. TR had gone to Panama himself to boost morale—the first time a President had ever left the United States. He wanted a manager who would stick with the job. An army engineer, Colonel George Washington Goethals was appointed and he became a general when he finished the long incredible job. The famous graphic was when the President mounted and took the controls of one of the huge steam shovels on the canal.
In 1948 Japanese Emperor Hirohito convened the Japanese Diet. By tradition the Emperor would receive the bows and homage of the leaders of the upper and lower houses in a special audience room before the ceremony. Matsumoto did not so greet Hirohito provoking a scandal of sorts. However, in the past, Hirohito had been worshipped as a living God. When his subjects attended an audience, they would bow low and leave walking backwards or sideways so as never to insult the Emperor be showing him their backs. The court maneuver was known as the “crab walk.’ However, under the 1946 Constitution the Emperor had become a mortal, human “symbol” of the state. Matsumoto was purged from politics with the active assistance of the American Occupation authorities. No one was willing to take the new Constitution both literally and seriously.
In 1642 King Charles I asked the whereabouts of 5 members of Parliament whom he wanted arrested:
Kleinst, one of the guilty war criminals, is here quoted with the defense that most Nazi war criminals uses—namely that they were obeying orders. But international law makes no distinction between military and political orders, and it is the obligation of a soldier to refuse to obey an illegal military order and the orders he obeyed were illegal and contrary to International law—an order to kill babies and young children can never be legal for example.
At the height of the Watergate scandal, the president wanted special prosecutor Archibald Cox fired, because Cox was developing evidence against the president. The attorney general, Elliot Richardson, refused to fire Cox and resigned. The chief of staff then turned to the deputy attorney general, William Ruckelshaus, who also refused and resigned. Finally, the Solicitor General, next in line of authority, agreed to fire the special prosecutor. These events happened on a Saturday night and became known as the “Saturday Night Massacre”. This event persuaded most Americans that Nixon was guilty of felonies and was desperately trying to cover things up. Congress would include “obstruction of justice” in it’s list of crimes that they would have impeached Nixon for had he not resigned.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910
Otto Adolf Eichmann was a German-Austrian SS-Obersturmbannführer and one of the major organizers of the Holocaust—the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" in Nazi terminology. He was tasked by SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich with facilitating and managing the logistics involved in the mass deportation of Jews to ghettos and extermination camps in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe during World War II. Eichmann was captured by the Mossad in Argentina on 11 May 1960 and subsequently found guilty of war crimes in a widely publicised trial in Jerusalem, where he was executed by hanging in 1962.
