Adolf Eichmann was described yesterday by an Israeli psychiatrist, who interviewed and tested the Nazi in an Israeli prison, as a man who killed Jews because he “hated life,” it was reported here today from Madrid.
Dr. I.S. Kulcsar, director of the psychiatry department of the Tel Hashomer General Hospital, offered that analysis in a paper on “The Psychopathology of Adolf Eichmann, presented in Madrid at the World Congress of Psychiatry. The paper was the first public presentation of the findings of 21 hours of interviews and tests of Eichmann between January and March, 1961. Eichmann was hanged in 1962 after he was convicted by an Israeli court for his part in the slaughter of European Jewry.
The psychiatrist said that Eichmann killed impersonally, in a bureaucratic way. He said the Nazi practiced a “dehumanized sadism” and called Eichmann “an extreme example of the depoliticized destructor in our time.” He said his research showed Eichmann to be of “average intelligence” but a man who was “lifeless, mechanical, formalized and dehumanized.” He quoted the Nazi as telling him that “all my life I felt fear but I did not know of what.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
