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Eichmann's actions differ from those of a soldier in a 'just war'. By his own admission he was aware that most of those transported to the camps faced immediate death, and freely acknowledged his responsibility where the actions of his department were concerned (trial session 95-1). Some sense of responsibility, and thus some sense of guilt, surely remained, and in any case the chain of command perspective per se cannot explain why Eichmann continued to work with efficiency and professionalism despite his misgivings. Accordingly, we need to understand why it was that although "the chain of command, the bureaucratic system of which one was a part … appeared to absolve the individual of all responsibility", it became so important "to do one's duty with skill and efficiency" (Landau, 1992, p.185).
     

T his discussion of war, orders and responsibility raises the point that the progressive bureaucratisation of murder "has placed a steadily increasing distance between the perpetrators and the consequences of their decisions and actions" (ibid, p.9). The hierarchy and chain of command common to the bureaucratic form, representative of a functional division of labour, serves to isolate the individual from the end product, which, being the result of an aggregation of separate processes (i.e. a production process) is itself seen to be 'responsible' for its creation. Representing only minor parts of the whole - mere cogs in the machine - individuals tend to reify the production process and be fetishised by it, thereby failing to see the extent to which their actions are relevant or vital to the entire process (Bauman, 1989, pp.98-102). The result is that officials may demonstrate extreme concern with their own actions and those of their department, yet be singularly unable to associate them with the end result, of which they form an integral part. In practical terms, this translates into accepting responsibility only for one's own actions and creates the impression that one's responsibility ends where another's jurisdiction begins, which is something that may explain Eichmann's almost total inability or unwillingness to associate his actions with criminality or immorality (see below).
     
    Here, then, we are dealing not just with spatial distance between action and consequence but the effects of an enormous annihilation process, involving almost all sections of the German administrative and military machine. Eichmann, based predominantly in Berlin, managed to reconcile his actions with the knowledge that at least some Jews would be used for labour, that he was not responsible for the selection process and that he was not responsible for gassing the Jews. In this way he found it possible to deny his culpability, for apparently "in the absence of responsibility, there can in the end be no guilt" (trial session 88-2). This may explain why deaths in the freight cars en route to the death camps "became a minor administrative detail not worth bothering about" (Hilberg, 1961, p.547), because the deportations themselves were the responsibility of the Order Police, whereas Eichmann was responsible only for organising them (Life Magazine). In this abstract sense Eichmann was correct: he was charged with oversight of a specific jurisdictional area and responsible only for organising transportation schedules and rounding-up his 'passengers', actions which carry no criminal connotation per se . Consequently, Eichmann's personal awareness of the fate of his passengers provided no spur to disobey: as horrific as they were the exterminations and death camps were not of his design or doing, not part of his 'jurisdiction', being instead the thankless task of the "unhappy man"* (trial session 95-5).
     
    * This was Eichmann's response to the prosecution's question: "In your eyes, was someone who was involved with the extermination of the Jews a criminal?" Eichmann's reply elicited gasps from those present: "He was an unhappy man".
     
    Yet in all this