Adolf Eichmann

Adolf Eichmann (born March 19, 1906, Solingen, Germany—died May 31, 1962, Tel Aviv, Israel) was a German high official who was hanged by the State of Israel for his part in the Holocaust, the Nazi extermination of Jews during World War II.

During World War I, Eichmann’s family moved from Germany to Linz, Austria. His pre-Nazi life was rather ordinary. He worked as a traveling salesman in Oberösterreich (Upper Austria) for an oil company but lost his job during the Great Depression.

Eichmann joined the Nazi Party in April 1932 in Linz and rose through the party hierarchy. In November 1932 he became a member of Heinrich Himmler’s SS, the Nazi paramilitary corps, and, on leaving Linz in 1933, he joined the terrorist school of the Austrian Legion at Lechfeld, Germany. From January to October 1934 he was attached to an SS unit at Dachau and then was appointed to the SS Sicherheitsdienst (“Security Service”) central office in Berlin, where he worked in the section that dealt with Jewish affairs. He advanced steadily within the SS and was sent to Vienna after the annexation of Austria (March 1938) to rid the city of Jews. One year later, with a similar mission, he was sent to Prague. When in 1939 Himmler formed the Reich Security Central Office, Eichmann was transferred to its section on Jewish affairs in Berlin.

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In January 1942, at a lakefront villa in the Wannsee district of Berlin, a conference of Nazi high officials was convened to organize the logistics of what the Nazis called the “final solution to the Jewish question.” Eichmann was to coordinate the details; thus, although it was not yet generally known that the “final solution” was mass execution, Eichmann had in effect been named chief executioner. Thereupon he organized the identification, assembly, and transportation of Jews from all over occupied Europe to their final destinations at Auschwitz and other extermination camps in German-occupied Poland.

Following the war, U.S. troops captured Eichmann, but in 1946 he escaped from a prison camp. After living in Germany under a false identity for several years, Eichmann made his way via Austria and Italy to Argentina, where he settled in 1958. He was arrested by Israeli secret service agents near Buenos Aires, Argentina, on May 11, 1960; nine days later they smuggled him out of the country and took him to Israel. After settling the controversy that arose over this Israeli violation of Argentine law, the Israeli government arranged his trial before a special three-judge court in Jerusalem. Eichmann’s trial was controversial from the beginning. The trial—before Jewish judges by a Jewish state that did not exist until three years after the Holocaust—gave rise to accusations of ex post facto justice. Some called for an international tribunal to try Eichmann, and others wanted him tried in Germany, but Israel was insistent. At stake was not only justice but also honour, as well as an opportunity to educate a new generation about the Holocaust.

Under questioning, Eichmann claimed not to be an anti-Semite. He stated that he disagreed with the vulgar anti-Semitism of Julius Streicher and others who contributed to the periodical Der Stürmer. Describing an earlier trip to Haifa, he said that he was more interested in the Jews than the Arabs. He said that he subscribed to Jewish periodicals and had bought the Encyclopedia Judaica. Moreover, he claimed to have read Theodor Herzl’s The Jewish State but said that he had never read Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf thoroughly or closely and that he had never read the anti-Semitic tract Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.

Eichmann portrayed himself as an obedient bureaucrat who merely carried out his assigned duties. As for the charges against him, Eichmann maintained that he had not violated any law and that he was “the kind of man who cannot tell a lie.” Denying responsibility for the mass killings, he said, “I couldn’t help myself; I had orders, but I had nothing to do with that business.” He was evasive in describing his role in the extermination unit and claimed that he was responsible only for transport. “I never claimed not to know about the liquidation,” he testified. “I only said that Bureau IV B4 [Eichmann’s office] had nothing to do with it.”

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Eichmann even professed personal discomfort at hearing about the workings of a gassing installation: “I was horrified. My nerves aren’t strong enough. I can’t listen to such things—such things, without their affecting me." Of his observation of a gassing van in operation at Chelmno, he said, “I didn’t look inside; I couldn’t. Couldn’t! What I saw and heard was enough. The screaming and…I was much too shaken and so on.” He averred that he had continued to oversee the deportation of victims but that he sought to keep his distance from the actual killing.

Eichmann was not the first Nazi defendant to argue obedience and adherence to the law. While he denied his ultimate responsibility, he seemed proud of his effectiveness in establishing efficient procedures to deport millions of victims. However, Eichmann did more than merely follow orders in coordinating an operation of this scale. He was a resourceful and proactive manager who relied on a variety of strategies and tactics to secure scarce cattle cars and other equipment used to deport Jews at a time when equipment shortages threatened the German war effort. He repeatedly devised innovative solutions to overcome obstacles.

His trial lasted from April 11 to December 15, 1961, and Eichmann was sentenced to death, the only death sentence ever imposed by an Israeli court. Eichmann was hanged on May 31, 1962, and his ashes were scattered at sea.

While Eichmann’s trial was itself controversial, an even greater controversy followed the trial. Hannah Arendt, a German-born Jewish American political philosopher, covered the trial for The New Yorker. Later published as Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, her articles’ portrayal of Eichmann as banal rather than demonic provoked a storm of debate that lasted for almost a decade.