"I have no bad conscience"
About this Quote
No bad conscience is how Alois Brunner summed up his feelings about his role in the machinery of Nazi persecution. A trusted aide to Adolf Eichmann, Brunner helped organize the deportation of tens of thousands of Jews from Austria, Slovakia, Greece, and France, including as commandant of the Drancy transit camp near Paris. After 1945 he fled prosecution and found refuge in Syria, reportedly serving the regime there, and lived out his life unrepentant despite convictions in absentia and repeated efforts to bring him to justice.
The claim of having no bad conscience asserts moral cleanliness in the face of crimes dependent on individual initiative and bureaucratic zeal. It signals the classic strategies of perpetrator self-justification: the appeal to duty and legality, the deflection of responsibility up and down the chain of command, and the dehumanization that makes victims into abstractions. Conscience is not absent so much as reprogrammed, subordinated to ideology and institutional goals. When the state names persecution as necessity, obedience dresses up as virtue. The sentence attempts to reverse the moral burden, casting remorse as unnecessary or even irrational.
Hannah Arendt wrote of the banality of evil to describe how ordinary administrative routines can facilitate atrocity. Brunner complicates that picture. He was not merely a cog; testimonies and records show initiative, efficiency, and a chilling pride in results. The absence of remorse here is not a blank but an assertion of a different moral universe, one that rewards cruelty as competence and counts human beings on a ledger.
That stance also exposes why justice and memory matter. If a perpetrator can claim to feel nothing, society must feel more, not less: to maintain standards that do not bend to orders, to preserve names against numbers, and to refuse the bureaucratic euphemisms that sanitize violence. The sentence stands as a warning about how conscience can be silenced, and how vigilant moral judgment must remain audible.
The claim of having no bad conscience asserts moral cleanliness in the face of crimes dependent on individual initiative and bureaucratic zeal. It signals the classic strategies of perpetrator self-justification: the appeal to duty and legality, the deflection of responsibility up and down the chain of command, and the dehumanization that makes victims into abstractions. Conscience is not absent so much as reprogrammed, subordinated to ideology and institutional goals. When the state names persecution as necessity, obedience dresses up as virtue. The sentence attempts to reverse the moral burden, casting remorse as unnecessary or even irrational.
Hannah Arendt wrote of the banality of evil to describe how ordinary administrative routines can facilitate atrocity. Brunner complicates that picture. He was not merely a cog; testimonies and records show initiative, efficiency, and a chilling pride in results. The absence of remorse here is not a blank but an assertion of a different moral universe, one that rewards cruelty as competence and counts human beings on a ledger.
That stance also exposes why justice and memory matter. If a perpetrator can claim to feel nothing, society must feel more, not less: to maintain standards that do not bend to orders, to preserve names against numbers, and to refuse the bureaucratic euphemisms that sanitize violence. The sentence stands as a warning about how conscience can be silenced, and how vigilant moral judgment must remain audible.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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