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to conform and obey to follow Agamemnon and Menelaus to reclaim lovely-haired Helen from Troy, just as German Nazi leaders are bound by their loyalty party oaths to participate in dire crimes against humanity to reclaim the past Romantic strivings and Classicism of beautiful golden-haired Margareta. Lieutenant Colonel Eichmann, one of the leading Holocaust party members, says how bound he is to obey his party oath,
“When I received an order, I obeyed. An oath is an oath. In the observance of that oath I was uncompromising. Today I’d never take an oath. No one could make me; no judge for instance, could make take a witness’ oath. I refuse: I refuse on moral grounds. Because I have learned by experience that if you let yourself be bound by an oath, you’ll have to take the consequences someday.”76
Eichmann, like the former suitors, confronts the dreadful consequences of abiding by oaths. To fulfil the Oath of Tyndareus, Menelaus and Agamemnon gather a large fleet at Aulis, sacrifice Iphigenia, sail to Troy, and embark, disrupting the lives of many households. Following a failed embassy, a broken truce, they are willing to go to whatever extremes, be they bellicose or holocaust. Nazi party officials, too, for Beautiful Lady Margareta’s sake must obey Hitler’s will to persecute, deport, exterminate Jews and undesirables, and war for her sake. Thus, lured by her eternal feminine ideological gaze, Nazi Germany earns its fatal label: Death
76 See Jochen von Lang and Claus Sibyll. Eichmann Interrogated: Transcripts from the Archives of the Israeli Police. Trans. Ralph Manheim. USA: New York, 1983. 198-9. Quoted in Jonathan Glover’s Humanity. A Moral History of the Twentieth Century. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. 336
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