Paul Bauer from the novel All Quiet on the Western Front and Adolf Eichmann were both guilty of a lot, granted one character is a piece of historical fiction while the other is real, but how similar are they, really? Paul Bauer and other German soldiers committed atrocities upon the opposing armies during World War 1 such as the use chlorine gas. Adolf Eichmann is responsible for sending millions of Jewish people to what were essentially death camps, where some were worked to nigh death and others were killed outright, often times in gas chambers. Thus are they really all that different as both are responsible for massacring human lives, one simply did so on a battlefield and the other did so in an office. Both men were wrapped up in what seemed
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The greatest one is probably the fact they both seemed to enter their “line of work” in a similar fashion. Paul Bauer reminisces on how he, and his fellow class mates in high school, were almost conned into joining the war effort. He states “Yes, that’s the way they think, these hundred thousand Kantoreks! Iron Youth! Youth! We are none of us more than twenty years old. But young? That is long ago. We are old folk”(18, All Quiet on the Western Front). He says this because Kantorek is the high school teacher that convinced them to sign up for the war, convincing them that glory is what waited for them, that their country needed them. So they were “swallowed up” much like Eichmann was. In fact he even said that “it was like being swallowed up by the Party against all expectation and without previous decision. It happened too quickly and suddenly.”(31, Eichmann in Jerusalem). Eichmann was talking about how he came to join the Nazi party. He may have never expected to join it, much like Paul and his friends did not expect to be involved in World War 1, but both men were devoured by it without thinking the decision through. The government had an easy time luring them in, and once they were in they honestly could not
The greatest one is probably the fact they both seemed to enter their “line of work” in a similar fashion. Paul Bauer reminisces on how he, and his fellow class mates in high school, were almost conned into joining the war effort. He states “Yes, that’s the way they think, these hundred thousand Kantoreks! Iron Youth! Youth! We are none of us more than twenty years old. But young? That is long ago. We are old folk”(18, All Quiet on the Western Front). He says this because Kantorek is the high school teacher that convinced them to sign up for the war, convincing them that glory is what waited for them, that their country needed them. So they were “swallowed up” much like Eichmann was. In fact he even said that “it was like being swallowed up by the Party against all expectation and without previous decision. It happened too quickly and suddenly.”(31, Eichmann in Jerusalem). Eichmann was talking about how he came to join the Nazi party. He may have never expected to join it, much like Paul and his friends did not expect to be involved in World War 1, but both men were devoured by it without thinking the decision through. The government had an easy time luring them in, and once they were in they honestly could not