Adolf Eichmann
Otto Adolf Eichmann was a German-Austrian official of the Nazi Party, an officer of the Schutzstaffel, a convicted war criminal, and one of the major organisers of the Holocaust. He participated in the January 1942 Wannsee Conference, at which the implementation of the genocidal Final Solution to the Jewish Question was planned. Following this, he was tasked by SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich with facilitating and managing the logistics involved in the mass deportation of millions of Jews to Nazi ghettos and Nazi extermination camps across German-occupied Europe. He was captured and detained by the Allies in 1945, but escaped and eventually settled in Argentina. In May 1960, he was tracked down and apprehended by Israel's Mossad intelligence agency, and put on trial before the Supreme Court of Israel. The highly publicised Eichmann trial resulted in his conviction in Jerusalem, following which he was executed by hanging in 1962.
After doing poorly in school, Eichmann briefly worked for his father's mining company in Austria, where the family had moved in 1914. He worked as a travelling oil salesman beginning in 1927, and joined both the Nazi Party and the SS in 1932. He returned to Germany in 1933, where he joined the Sicherheitsdienst ; there he was appointed head of the department responsible for Jewish affairs – especially emigration, which the Nazis encouraged through violence and economic pressure. After the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, Eichmann and his staff arranged for Jews to be concentrated in ghettos in major cities with the expectation that they would be transported either farther east or overseas. He also drew up plans for a Jewish reservation, first at Nisko in southeast Poland and later in Madagascar, but neither of these plans were carried out.
The Nazis began the invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, and their Jewish policy changed from internment or coerced emigration to extermination. To coordinate planning for the genocide, Eichmann's superior Reinhard Heydrich hosted the regime's administrative leaders at the Wannsee Conference on 20 January 1942. Eichmann collected information for him, attended the conference, and prepared the minutes. Eichmann and his staff became responsible for Jewish deportations to extermination camps, where the victims were gassed. After Germany occupied Hungary in March 1944, Eichmann oversaw the deportation of much of the Jewish population. By the time the transports were stopped in July 1944, 437,000 of Hungary's 725,000 Jews had been deported. Most of the victims were sent to Auschwitz concentration camp, where about 75 per cent were murdered upon arrival. Dieter Wisliceny testified at Nuremberg that Eichmann told him he would "leap laughing into the grave because the feeling that he had five million people on his conscience would be for him a source of extraordinary satisfaction".
After Germany's defeat in 1945, Eichmann was captured by US forces, but he escaped from a detention camp and moved around Germany to avoid recapture. He ended up in a small village in Lower Saxony, where he lived until 1950 when he moved to Argentina using false papers he obtained with help from an organisation directed by Catholic bishop Alois Hudal. Information collected by Mossad, Israel's intelligence agency, confirmed his location in 1960. A team of Mossad and Shin Bet agents captured Eichmann and brought him to Israel to stand trial on 15 criminal charges, including war crimes, crimes against humanity, and crimes against the Jewish people. During the trial, he did not deny the Holocaust or his role in organising it, but said he was simply following orders in a totalitarian Führerprinzip system. He was found guilty on all of the charges, and was executed by hanging on 1 June 1962. The trial was widely followed in the media and was later the subject of several books, including Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem, in which Arendt coined the phrase "the banality of evil" to describe Eichmann.
Early life and education
Eichmann, the eldest of five children, was born in 1906 to a Calvinist family in Solingen, Germany. His parents were Adolf Karl Eichmann, a bookkeeper, and Maria, a housewife. The elder Adolf moved to Linz, Austria, in 1913 to take a position as commercial manager for the Linz Tramway and Electrical Company, and the rest of the family followed a year later. After the death of Maria in 1916, Eichmann's father married Maria Zawrzel, a devout Protestant with two sons.Eichmann attended the Kaiser Franz Joseph Staatsoberrealschule in Linz, the same high school Adolf Hitler had attended 17 years before. He played the violin and participated in sports and clubs, including a Wandervogel woodcraft and scouting group that included some older boys who were members of various right-wing militias. His poor school performance resulted in his father's withdrawing him from the Realschule and enrolling him in the Höhere Bundeslehranstalt für Elektrotechnik, Maschinenbau und Hochbau vocational college. He left without attaining a degree and joined his father's new enterprise, the Untersberg Mining Company, where he worked for several months. From 1925 to 1927, he worked as a sales clerk for the Oberösterreichische Elektrobau AG radio company. Between 1927 and early 1933, Eichmann worked in Upper Austria and Salzburg as district agent for the Vacuum Oil Company.
During this time, he joined the Jungfrontkämpfervereinigung, the youth section of Hermann Hiltl's right-wing veterans' movement, and began reading newspapers published by the Nazi Party. The party platform included the dissolution of the Weimar Republic in Germany, rejection of the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, radical antisemitism, and anti-Bolshevism. They promised a strong central government, increased Lebensraum for Germanic peoples, formation of a national community based on race, and racial cleansing via the active suppression of Jews, who would be stripped of their citizenship and civil rights.
Early career
On the advice of family friend and local SS leader Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Eichmann joined the Austrian branch of the Nazi Party on 1 April 1932, member number 889,895. His membership in the SS was confirmed seven months later. His regiment was SS-Standarte 37, responsible for guarding the party headquarters in Linz and protecting party speakers at rallies, which would often become violent. Eichmann pursued party activities in Linz at weekends while continuing in his position at Vacuum Oil in Salzburg.A few months after the Nazi seizure of power in Germany in January 1933, Eichmann lost his job due to staffing cutbacks at Vacuum Oil. The Nazi Party was banned in Austria around the same time. These events were factors in Eichmann's decision to return to Germany.
Like many other Nazis fleeing Austria in early 1933, Eichmann left for Passau, where he joined Andreas Bolek at his headquarters. After he attended a training programme at the SS depot in Klosterlechfeld in August, Eichmann returned to the Passau border in September, where he was assigned to lead an eight-man SS liaison team to guide Austrian National Socialists into Germany and smuggle propaganda material from there into Austria. In late December, when this unit was dissolved, Eichmann was promoted to SS-Scharführer. Eichmann's battalion of the Deutschland Regiment was quartered at barracks next to Dachau concentration camp.
By 1934, Eichmann requested transfer to the Sicherheitsdienst of the SS, to escape the "monotony" of military training and service at Dachau. Eichmann was accepted into the SD and assigned to the sub-office on Freemasons, organising seized ritual objects for a proposed museum and creating a card index of German Freemasons and Masonic organisations. He prepared an anti-Masonic exhibition, which proved to be extremely popular. Visitors included Hermann Göring, Heinrich Himmler, Kaltenbrunner, and Baron Leopold von Mildenstein. Mildenstein invited Eichmann to join his Jewish Department, Section II/112 of the SD, at its Berlin headquarters. Eichmann's transfer was granted in November 1934. He later came to consider this as his big break. He was assigned to study and prepare reports on the Zionist movement and various Jewish organisations. He even learned a smattering of Hebrew and Yiddish, gaining a reputation as a specialist in Zionist and Jewish matters. On 21 March 1935, Eichmann married Veronika Liebl. The couple had four sons: Klaus, Horst Adolf, Dieter Helmut and Ricardo Francisco. Eichmann was promoted to SS-Hauptscharführer in 1936 and was commissioned as an SS-Untersturmführer the following year. Eichmann left the church in 1937.
Initially, Nazi Germany used violence and economic pressure to coerce Jews to leave Germany; around 250,000 of the country's 437,000 Jews emigrated between 1933 and 1939. Eichmann travelled to British Mandatory Palestine with his superior Herbert Hagen in 1937 to assess the possibility of Germany's Jews voluntarily emigrating there, disembarking with forged press credentials at Haifa, whence they travelled to Cairo in Egypt. There they met Feival Polkes, an agent of the Haganah, with whom they were unable to strike a deal. Polkes suggested that more Jews should be allowed to leave under the terms of the Haavara Agreement, each being allowed to take £1000 with them so that they would qualify for entry to Palestine under a less restricted form of immigration. The suggestion was dismissed, Hagen giving two reasons in his report: a strong Jewish presence in Palestine might lead to their founding an independent state, which would run contrary to Reich policy; it was also against Reich policy to allow the free transfer of "Jewish capital". Eichmann and Hagen attempted to return to Palestine a few days later, but were denied entry when the British authorities refused them the required visas. Their report on their visit was published in 1982.
In 1938, Eichmann was posted to Vienna to help organise Jewish emigration from Austria, which had just been integrated into the Reich through the Anschluss. Jewish community organisations were placed under supervision of the SD and tasked with encouraging and facilitating Jewish emigration. Funding came from money seized from other Jewish people and organisations, as well as donations from overseas, which were placed under SD control. Eichmann was promoted to SS-Obersturmführer in July 1938, and appointed to the Central Agency for Jewish Emigration in Vienna, created in August in a room in the former Palais Albert Rothschild at Prinz-Eugen-Straße 20–22. By the time he left Vienna in May 1939, nearly 100,000 Jews had left Austria legally, and many more had been smuggled out to Palestine and elsewhere.