Adolf Eichmann is the iconic extreme of the government bureaucrat. Not that any of us will hopefully ever be given orders like the ones he was given, but his simply following orders makes anyone question his or her own simply following orders.
There’s a lot more about government ethics that can be learned from Adolf Eichmann, I found from reading Hannah Arendt’s book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). When one sees acts that are often done without any thought, that seem so normal, done in a different, frightening context, these acts look grotesque, and we can start to question what we take as normal and natural.
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