Tag Archives: Adolph Eichmann

Adolph Eichmann deemed psychologically normal

Courtesy: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

“Prior to his trial for war crimes, the master engineer of Nazi genocide SS Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Eichmann was certified as ‘normal’ by several psychiatrists–‘more normal, at any rate than I am,’ one of them was said to have exclaimed according to Hannah Arendt’s classic account. ‘Another,’ Arendt reported ‘had found that Eichmann’s whole psychological outlook, including his relationship with his wife and children, his mother and father, his brothers and sisters and friends, was ‘not only normal but most desirable.'”

Hannah Arendt, “Eichmann in Jerusalem–i,” New Yorker, February 16, 1963 quoted in The Myth of Normal by Gabor Maté