On this date, 1 June 1962, Adolf Eichmann is
hanged in Israel. I will post information about this Nazi War Criminal from
Wikipedia and other links.
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Adolf Eichmann
[PHOTO SOURCE: https://www.flickr.com/photos/dr-michael-d-evans/8293170164]
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Adolf Eichmann
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Born
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Otto Adolf Eichmann
19 March 1906 Solingen, Rhine Province, Germany |
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Died
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1 June 1962 (aged 56)
Ramla, Israel |
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Cause of
death
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Execution by hanging
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Nationality
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German
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Other names
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Ricardo Klement
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Occupation
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SS-Obersturmbannführer (lieutenant colonel)
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Employer
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RSHA
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Organization
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Schutzstaffel
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Political
party
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National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP)
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Spouse(s)
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Veronika Liebl (m. 1935)
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Children
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Parent(s)
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Awards
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Otto Adolf Eichmann (pronounced [ˈɔto ˈaːdɔlf ˈaɪ̯çman]; 19 March
1906 – 1 June 1962) was a German Nazi
SS-Obersturmbannführer (lieutenant colonel) and one of the major
organisers of the Holocaust. Eichmann was charged by SS-Obergruppenführer (general/lieutenant
general) Reinhard Heydrich with facilitating and managing the logistics of mass
deportation of Jews
to ghettos and extermination camps in German-occupied Eastern
Europe during World War II. In 1960, he was captured in Argentina by
Mossad,
Israel's intelligence service. Following a widely publicised trial in Israel,
he was found guilty of war crimes and hanged in 1962.
After
an unremarkable school career, 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 the Nazi Party
and SS in 1932. After returning to Germany in 1933, he joined the Sicherheitsdienst
(SD; Security Service), where 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 World
War II in September 1939, Eichmann and his staff arranged for Jews to be
concentrated into ghettos in major cities with the expectation they would be
transported farther east or overseas. Eichmann drew up plans for a Jewish
reservation, first at Nisko in south-east Poland and later in Madagascar,
but neither of these plans were ever carried out.
As
the Nazis began the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, their
Jewish policy changed from emigration to extermination. To co-ordinate planning
for the genocide, Heydrich hosted the regime's administrative leaders at the
Wannsee Conference on 20 January 1942. Eichmann collected information for
Heydrich, 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 invaded Hungary in March 1944,
Eichmann oversaw the deportation of much of that country's Jewish population.
Most of the victims were sent to Auschwitz concentration camp, where 75 to 90
per cent were murdered upon arrival. By the time the transports were stopped in
July, 437,000 of Hungary's 725,000 Jews had been killed. Historian Richard
J. Evans estimates that between 5.5 and 6 million Jews were killed by
the Nazis. Eichmann said towards the end of the war that 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 fled to Austria. He lived there until 1950,
when he moved to Argentina using false papers. Information collected by the Mossad, Israel's
intelligence agency, confirmed Eichmann's 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. Found guilty on many of these charges, he was sentenced to
death by hanging and executed on 1 June 1962. The trial was widely followed in
the media and was later the subject of several books, including Hannah
Arendt's work Eichmann in Jerusalem, in which Arendt
coined the phrase "the banality of evil" to describe Eichmann.
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Adolf Eichmann Younger
1916
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| Adolf Eichmann |
Early
life and education
Otto
Adolf Eichmann, the eldest of five children, was born in 1906 to a Calvinist
Protestant family in Solingen, Germany. His parents were Adolf Karl Eichmann, a
bookkeeper, and Maria (née Schefferling), a housewife.[b]
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
(state secondary school) in Linz, the same high school Adolf
Hitler had attended some 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 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. Next, between 1927 and early 1933, Eichmann worked in Upper
Austria and Salzburg as district agent for the Vacuum Oil Company AG.
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 (NSDAP). The party platform included removal
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
(living space) 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.
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Copy
of Adolf Eichmann's appoint order as an SS officer
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Early
career
On
the advice of family friend and local Schutzstaffel (SS; protection squadron) leader Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Eichmann joined the Austrian
branch of the NSDAP, member number 889,895. He joined the Nazi Party on 1 April
1932, and his membership in the SS was confirmed seven months later (SS member
number 45,326). 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 on 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 National Socialists fleeing Austria in the spring of 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 (squad leader, equivalent to corporal).
Eichmann's battalion of the Deutschland Regiment was quartered at barracks next
door to Dachau concentration camp.
By
1934, Eichmann requested transfer to the Sicherheitsdienst
(SD; Security Service) 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. After about six months, Eichmann was invited by Leopold von Mildenstein to join his Jewish
Department, Section II/112 of the SD, at its Berlin
headquarters. [c]
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 (Vera) Liebl (1909–93). The couple had four sons:
Klaus (b. 1936 in Berlin), Horst Adolf (b. 1940 in Vienna), Dieter
Helmut (b. 1942 in Prague)
and Ricardo Francisco (b. 1955 in Buenos
Aires). Eichmann was promoted to SS-Hauptscharführer (head squad leader) in 1936 and
was commissioned as an SS-Untersturmführer (second lieutenant) the
following year.
Nazi
Germany used violence and economic pressure to encourage Jews to leave
Germany of their own volition; 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 to that country, 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, but Hagen refused, surmising that a strong Jewish presence in
Palestine might lead to their founding an independent state, which would run
contrary to Reich policy. Eichmann and Hagen attempted to return to Palestine a
few days later, but were denied entry after the British authorities refused
them the required visas. They prepared a report on their visit, which 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 (first lieutenant) in July 1938,
and appointed to the Central Agency
for Jewish Emigration in Vienna, created in August. 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.
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Map of the
administrative areas of the General Government
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Second
World War
Transition
from emigration to deportation
Within
weeks of the invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939, Nazi
policy toward the Jews changed from voluntary emigration to forced deportation.
After discussions with Hitler in the preceding weeks, on 21 September SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, head of the SD, advised his staff that Jews were to be
collected into cities in Poland with good rail links to facilitate their
expulsion from territories controlled by Germany, starting with areas that had
been incorporated into the Reich. He announced plans to create a reservation in
the General Government (the portion of Poland not
incorporated into the Reich), where Jews and others deemed undesirable would
await further deportation. On 27 September 1939 the SD and Sicherheitspolizei (comprising the Gestapo and Kripo police
agencies) were combined into the new SS-Reichssicherheitshauptamt
(RSHA; Reich Main Security Office), which was placed under Heydrich's control.
After
a posting in Prague
to assist in setting up an emigration office there, Eichmann was transferred to
Berlin in
October 1939 to command the Central Office for Jewish Emigration for the entire
Reich under Heinrich Müller, head of the Gestapo. He
was immediately assigned to organise the deportation of 70,000 to 80,000 Jews
from Ostrava
district in Moravia
and Katowice
district in the recently annexed portion of Poland. On his own initiative,
Eichmann also laid plans to deport Jews from Vienna. Under the Nisko Plan,
Eichmann chose Nisko
as the location for a new transit camp where Jews would be temporarily housed
before being deported elsewhere. In the last week of October 1939, 4,700 Jews
were sent to the area by train and were essentially left to fend for themselves
in an open meadow with no water and little food. Barracks were planned but
never completed. Many of the deportees were driven by the SS into
Soviet-occupied territory and others were eventually placed in a nearby labour
camp. The operation soon was called off, partly because Hitler decided the
required trains were better used for military purposes for the time being.
Meanwhile, as part of Hitler's long-range resettlement plans, hundreds of
thousands of ethnic Germans were being transported into the annexed
territories, and ethnic Poles and Jews were being moved further east, particularly
into the General Government.
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Memorial at bus stop
to the site of Eichmann's former office, referat IV B4 (Office of Jewish
Affairs) on Kurfurstenstrasse 115, now occupied by a hotel.
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On
19 December 1939, Eichmann was assigned to head RSHA Referat IV B4 (RSHA
Sub-Department IV-B4), tasked with overseeing Jewish affairs and evacuation.
Heydrich announced Eichmann to be his "special expert", in charge of
arranging for all deportations into occupied Poland. The job entailed
co-ordinating with police agencies for the physical removal of the Jews,
dealing with their confiscated property, and arranging financing and transport.
Within a few days of his appointment, Eichmann formulated a plan to deport
600,000 Jews into the General Government. The plan was stymied by Hans Frank, governor-general of the occupied
territories, who was disinclined to accept the deportees as to do so would have
a negative impact on economic development and his ultimate goal of Germanisation
of the region. In his role as minister responsible for the Four
Year Plan, on 24 March 1940 Hermann Göring
forbade any further transports into the General Government unless cleared first
by himself or Frank. Transports continued, but at a much slower pace than
originally envisioned. From the start of the war until April 1941, around
63,000 Jews were transported into the General Government. On many of the trains
in this period, up to a third of the deportees died in transit. While Eichmann
claimed at his trial to be upset by the appalling conditions on the trains and
in the transit camps, his correspondence and documents of the period show that
his primary concern was to achieve the deportations economically and with
minimal disruption to Germany's ongoing military operations.
Jews
were concentrated into ghettos in major cities with the
expectation that at some point they would be transported further east or even
overseas. Horrendous conditions in the ghettos—severe overcrowding, poor
sanitation, and a lack of food—resulted in a high death rate. On 15 August
1940, Eichmann released a memorandum titled Reichssicherheitshauptamt:
Madagaskar Projekt (Reich Main Security Office: Madagascar
Project), calling for the resettlement to Madagascar
of a million Jews per year for four years. When Germany failed to defeat the Royal
Air Force in the Battle of Britain, the invasion of Britain was
postponed indefinitely. As Britain still controlled the Atlantic and her
merchant fleet would not be at Germany's disposal for use in evacuations,
planning for the Madagascar proposal stalled. Hitler continued to mention the
Plan until February 1942, when the idea was permanently shelved.
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Manor in
Berlin-Wannsee, Germany - also known as the House of the Wannsee Conference
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Wannsee
Conference
Main article: Wannsee Conference
From
the start of the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Einsatzgruppen (task forces) followed the army
into conquered areas and rounded up and killed Jews, Comintern
officials, and ranking members of the Communist Party. Eichmann was one of the
officials who received regular detailed reports of their activities. On 31
July, Göring gave Heydrich written authorisation to prepare and submit a plan
for a "total solution of the Jewish question" in all territories
under German control and to co-ordinate the participation of all involved
government organisations. The Generalplan
Ost (General Plan for the East) called for deporting the population of
occupied Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union to Siberia, for use
as slave labour or to be murdered.
Eichmann
stated at his later interrogations that Heydrich told him in mid-September that
Hitler had ordered that all Jews in German-controlled Europe were to be killed.[d]
The initial plan was to implement Generalplan Ost after the conquest of
the Soviet Union. However, with the entry of the United States into the war in
December and the German failure in the Battle
of Moscow, Hitler decided that the Jews of Europe were to be exterminated
immediately rather than after the war, which now had no end in sight. Around
this time, Eichmann was promoted to SS-Obersturmbannführer (lieutenant colonel), the
highest rank he achieved.
To
co-ordinate planning for the proposed genocide, Heydrich hosted the Wannsee Conference, which brought together
administrative leaders of the Nazi regime on 20 January 1942. In preparation
for the conference, Eichmann drafted for Heydrich a list of the numbers of Jews
in various European countries and prepared statistics on emigration. Eichmann
attended the conference, oversaw the stenographer who took the minutes, and
prepared the official distributed record of the meeting. In his covering
letter, Heydrich specified that Eichmann would act as his liaison with the
departments involved. Under Eichmann's supervision, large-scale deportations
began almost immediately to extermination camps at Bełżec, Sobibor, Treblinka
and elsewhere. The genocide was code-named Operation Reinhard in honour of Heydrich, who died in Prague in early June from
wounds suffered in an assassination attempt. Kaltenbrunner succeeded him as
head of the RSHA.
Eichmann
did not make policy, but acted in an operational capacity. Specific deportation
orders came from Himmler. Eichmann's office
was responsible for collecting information on the Jews in each area, organising
the seizure of their property, and arranging for and scheduling trains. His
department was in constant contact with the Foreign Office, as Jews of
conquered nations such as France could not as easily be stripped of their
possessions and deported to their deaths. Eichmann held regular meetings in his
Berlin offices with his department members working in the field and travelled
extensively to visit concentration camps and ghettos. His wife, who disliked
Berlin, resided in Prague with the children. Eichmann initially visited them
weekly, but as time went on his visits tapered off to once a month.
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Woman with
children in German death camp Auschwitz in Poland during Second World War.
Documentary photos of the crimes of Eichmann, murderer of the Jews. Eichmann
and his officers were responsible for the murder of most of the jewish
population in the ghettos of the territory of Czechoslovakia, and for the
transport of countless Jewish men, women and children of different
nationalities to the extermination camps, for example Auschwitz-Birkenau. The
documentary photos are part of the pictures from SSer Bernhard Walter (from
Nordböhmen) and were admitted by Eichman. Facist criminals like Eichman did not
even halt for the elderly and the children. Here, children and an old woman on
the way to the death barracks of Auschwitz-Birkenau.
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Hungary
Main
articles: Hungary in World War II and History of the Jews in Hungary
Germany
invaded Hungary on 19 March 1944. Eichmann
arrived the same day, and was soon joined by top members of his staff and five
or six hundred members of the SD, SS, and Sicherheitspolizei (SiPo; security police).
Hitler's appointment of a Hungarian government more amenable to the Nazis meant
that the Hungarian Jews, who had remained essentially unharmed until that
point, would now be deported to Auschwitz to serve as forced labour or be
gassed. Eichmann toured northeastern Hungary in the last week of April and
visited Auschwitz in May to assess the preparations. Round-ups began on 16
April, and from 14 May, four trains of 3,000 Jews per day left Hungary and
travelled to the camp at Auschwitz II-Birkenau, arriving along a newly built
spur line that terminated a few hundred metres away from the gas chambers. Only
between 10 and 25 per cent of the people on each train were chosen as forced
labourers; the rest were killed within hours of arrival. Under international
pressure, the Hungarian government halted deportations on 6 July 1944, by which
time over 437,000 of Hungary's 725,000 Jews had died. In spite of the orders to
stop, Eichmann personally made arrangements for additional trains of victims to
be sent to Auschwitz on 17 and 19 July.
In
a series of meetings beginning on 25 April, Eichmann met with Joel Brand,
a Hungarian Jew and member of the Relief and Rescue Committee (RRC). Eichmann
later testified that Berlin had authorised him to allow emigration of a million
Jews in exchange for 10,000 trucks equipped to handle the wintry conditions on
the Eastern Front. Nothing came of the
proposal, as the Western Allies refused to consider the offer. In
June 1944 Eichmann was involved in negotiations with Rudolf
Kasztner that resulted in the rescue of 1,684 people, who were sent
by train to safety in Switzerland in exchange for three suitcases full of
diamonds, gold, cash, and securities.
Eichmann,
resentful that Kurt Becher and others were becoming involved in Jewish
emigration matters, and angered by Himmler's suspension of deportations to the
death camps, requested reassignment in July. At the end of August he was assigned
to head a commando squad to assist in the evacuation of 10,000 ethnic Germans
trapped on the Hungarian border with Romania in the path of the advancing Red Army.
The people they were sent to rescue refused to leave, so instead the soldiers
helped evacuate members of a German field hospital trapped close to the front.
For this Eichmann was awarded the Iron Cross,
Second Class. Throughout October and November, Eichmann arranged for tens of
thousands of Jewish victims to travel by forced marches in appalling conditions
from Budapest to Vienna, a distance of 210 kilometres (130 mi).
On
24 December 1944, Eichmann fled Budapest just before the Soviets completed
their encirclement of the capital. He returned to Berlin, where he arranged for
the incriminating records of Department IV-B4 to be burned. Along with many
other SS officers who fled in the closing months of the war, Eichmann and his
family were living in relative safety in Austria when the war in Europe ended
on 8 May 1945.
Historian Richard J. Evans estimates that 5.5 to 6 million
Jews, representing two-thirds of the Jewish population of Europe, were
exterminated by the Nazi regime.
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I will leap into my
grave laughing because the feeling that I have five million human beings on my
conscience is for me a source of extraordinary satisfaction.
[PHOTO SOURCE: http://www.azquotes.com/quote/684054]
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After the Second World War
At
the end of the Second World War, Eichmann was captured by the Americans and
spent time in several camps for SS officers using forged papers that identified
him as "Otto Eckmann". He escaped from a work detail at Cham
when he realised that his actual identity had been discovered. He obtained new
identity papers with the name of "Otto Heninger" and relocated
frequently over the next several months. Moving to the Lüneburg
Heath, he initially got work in the forestry industry and later leased a
small plot of land in Altensalzkoth, where he lived until 1950. Meanwhile, at
the Nuremberg trials of major war criminals starting
in 1946, damning evidence about Eichmann's activities was given by former
commandant of Auschwitz Rudolf Höss and
others.
In
1948 Eichmann obtained a landing permit for Argentina and false identification
under the name of "Ricardo Klement" through an organisation directed
by Bishop Alois Hudal, an Austrian cleric
then residing in Italy with known Nazi sympathies. These documents enabled him
in 1950 to obtain an International Committee of the
Red Cross humanitarian passport and the remaining entry permits that would
allow emigration to Argentina. [e]
He travelled across Europe, staying in a series of monasteries that had been
set up as safe
houses. Departing via ship from Genoa on 17 June
1950, he arrived in Buenos Aires on 14 July.
Eichmann
initially lived in Tucumán Province, where he worked for a government
contractor. He sent for his family in 1952, and they moved to Buenos Aires.
Eichmann held a series of low-paying jobs until finding employment at Mercedes-Benz,
where he rose to department head. The family built a house at 14 Garibaldi
Street (now 6061 Garibaldi Street) and moved in during 1960.
For
four months beginning in late 1956, Eichmann was extensively interviewed by
Nazi expatriate journalist Willem Sassen with the intention of producing a
biography. Tapes, transcripts, and handwritten notes by Eichmann were produced.
The memoirs were later used as the basis for a series of articles that appeared
in Life and Der Stern
magazines in late 1960.
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The Red Cross identity
document Adolf Eichmann used to enter Argentine under the fake name Ricardo
Klement in 1950, issued by the Italian delegation of the Red Cross in Genova,
Italy. (14 July 1950)
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Capture in Argentina
Several
Jews and other survivors of the
Holocaust dedicated themselves to finding Eichmann and other Nazis. Among
them was the Jewish Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal. Wiesenthal learned from a letter shown to him in 1953 that
Eichmann had been seen in Buenos Aires, and he passed along that information to
the Israeli consulate in Vienna in 1954. When Eichmann's father died in 1960,
Wiesenthal made arrangements for private detectives to surreptitiously
photograph members of the family, as Eichmann's brother Otto was said to bear a
strong family resemblance and there were no current photos of the fugitive. He
provided these photographs to Mossad agents on 18 February.
Also
instrumental in exposing Eichmann's identity was Lothar Hermann, a German
half-Jew who had emigrated to Argentina in 1938. When in 1956 Hermann's daughter
Sylvia began dating a man named Klaus Eichmann who boasted about his father's
Nazi exploits, Hermann alerted Fritz
Bauer, prosecutor-general of the state of Hesse in West
Germany. Sylvia, sent on a fact-finding mission, was met at the door by
Eichmann himself, who said he was Klaus's uncle. Informed that Klaus was not
home, she sat down to wait. When Klaus returned, he addressed Eichmann as
'Father'. In 1957 Bauer passed along the information in person to Mossad
director Isser
Harel, who assigned operatives to undertake surveillance, but no concrete
evidence was initially found. On 1 March 1960 Harel dispatched to Buenos Aires
the Shin Bet
chief interrogator Zvi Aharoni, who over the course of weeks of
investigation was able to confirm the identity of the fugitive. As Argentina
had a history of turning down extradition requests for Nazi criminals, Israeli
Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion made the decision that Eichmann
should be captured rather than extradited, and brought to Israel for trial.
Harel himself arrived in person in May 1960 to oversee the capture. Mossad
operative Rafi
Eitan was named leader of the eight-man team, most of whom were Shin Bet
agents.
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Teleprinter used to
send telegrams between Israel and embassies overseas
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The
team captured Eichmann near his home on Garibaldi Street in San Fernando, Buenos Aires, an
industrial community 20 kilometres (12 mi) north of the centre of Buenos Aires
on 11 May 1960. The agents had arrived in Buenos Aires in April 1960 after
Eichmann's identity was confirmed. After observing the suspect's routine for
many days, they determined that he arrived home by bus from work at around the
same time every evening. They planned to seize him when he was walking beside
an open field from the bus stop to his house. The plan was almost abandoned on
the designated day when Eichmann was not present on the bus he usually took
home. Finally, almost half an hour late, Eichmann got off a bus. Mossad agent Peter
Malkin engaged him, asking him in Spanish
if he had a moment. Frightened, Eichmann attempted to leave, but two more
Mossad men came to Malkin's aid; the three wrestled Eichmann to the ground and,
after a struggle, conducted him to a car where they hid him on the floor under
a blanket.
Eichmann
was taken to one of several Mossad safe houses that had been set up by the
team. He was held there for nine days, during which time his identity was
double-checked and confirmed. During these days, Harel tried to locate Josef Mengele, the notorious Nazi doctor from Auschwitz concentration camp, as the
Mossad had information that he was also living in Buenos Aires. He was hoping
to bring Mengele back to Israel on the same flight. Mengele had already left
his last known residence in the city, and Harel was unable to get any leads on
where he had gone, so the plans for his capture had to be abandoned.
Near
midnight on 20 May, Eichmann was sedated by an Israeli doctor on the Mossad
team and dressed as a flight attendant. He was smuggled out of Argentina aboard
the same El Al Bristol
Britannia aircraft that had a few days earlier carried Israel's delegation
to the official 150th anniversary celebration of Argentina's independence from
Spain. After a tense delay at the airport getting the flight plan approved, the
plane took off for Israel, stopping over in Dakar, Senegal, to
refuel. They arrived in Israel on 22 May, and Ben-Gurion announced Eichmann's
capture to the Knesset—Israel's
parliament—the following afternoon. In Argentina, the abduction was met with a
violent wave of antisemitism carried out by far-right sectors, including the Tacuara Nationalist Movement.
In
June 1960, after unsuccessful negotiations with Israel, Argentina requested an
urgent meeting of the United Nations Security Council to
protest, as they regarded the capture as a violation of their sovereign rights.
In the ensuing debate, the Israeli representative Golda Meir
claimed that the abductors were not Israeli agents but private individuals and
so the incident was only an "isolated violation of Argentine law". On
23 June the Council passed Resolution 138,
which agreed that Argentine sovereignty had been violated and requested that
Israel should make reparations. After further negotiations, on 3 August, Israel
and Argentina issued a joint statement admitting the violation of Argentinian
sovereignty but agreeing to end the dispute. In Eichmann's trial and subsequent
appeal, the Israeli court determined that the circumstances of his capture had
no bearing on the legality of his trial.
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
documents declassified in 2006 show that the capture of Eichmann caused alarm
at the CIA and West German Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND). Both
organizations had known for at least two years where Eichmann was hiding, but
did not act, because it did not serve their interests in the Cold War to
do so. Both were concerned about what Eichmann might say in his testimony about
West German national security advisor Hans
Globke, who had coauthored several antisemitic Nazi laws (including the Nuremberg Laws). The documents also revealed that
both agencies had used some of Eichmann's former Nazi colleagues to spy on
European communist countries.
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Adolf Hitler may have
been wrong all down the line, but one thing is beyond dispute: the man was able
to work his way up from lance corporal in the German Army to Führer of a people
of almost 80 million. ... His success alone proved that I should subordinate
myself to this man.
[PHOTO SOURCE: http://www.azquotes.com/quote/1105735]
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Adolf Eichmann is
flanked by guards in the Jerusalem courtroom where he was tried for war crimes
(AP Photo)
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Trial
Eichmann
was taken to a fortified police station at Yagur in Israel,
where he spent nine months. The Israelis were unwilling to take him to trial
based solely on the evidence in documents and witness testimony, so the
prisoner was subject to daily interrogations, the transcripts of which totalled
over 3,500 pages. The interrogator was Chief Inspector Avner Less
of the national police. Using documents provided primarily by Yad Vashem
and Nazi hunter Tuviah Friedman, Less was often able to determine
when Eichmann was lying or being evasive. When additional information was
brought forward that forced Eichmann into admitting what he had done, Eichmann
would insist he had not had any authority in the Nazi hierarchy and had only
been following orders. Inspector Less noted that Eichmann did not seem to
realise the enormity of his crimes and showed no remorse. His pardon plea,
released in 2016, did not contradict this: "There
is a need to draw a line between the leaders responsible and the people like me
forced to serve as mere instruments in the hands of the leaders",
Eichmann wrote. "I was not a responsible leader,
and as such do not feel myself guilty."
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Adolf Eichman's trial
judges (left to right) Benjamin Halevi, Moshe Landau, and Yitzhak Raveh
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Eichmann's
trial before the Jerusalem District Court began on 11 April 1961. The legal
basis of the charges against Eichmann was the 1950 Nazi and Nazi Collaborators
(Punishment) Law, [f]
under which he was indicted on 15 criminal charges, including crimes against
humanity, war crimes, crimes against the Jewish people, and membership in a
criminal organisation. [g]
The trial was presided over by three judges: Moshe
Landau, Benjamin Halevy and Yitzhak
Raveh. The chief prosecutor was Israeli Attorney General Gideon
Hausner, assisted by Gabriel Bach of the Department of Justice and Tel Aviv
District Attorney Yaakov Bar-Or. The defence team consisted of German
lawyer Robert Servatius, legal assistant Dieter
Wechtenbruch, and Eichmann himself.
The
Israeli government arranged for the trial to have prominent media coverage. Capital Cities Broadcasting Corporation
of the United States obtained exclusive rights to videotape
the proceedings for television broadcast. Many major newspapers from all over
the globe sent reporters and published front-page coverage of the story. The
trial was held at the Beit Ha'am (today known as the Gerard Behar Center), an auditorium in central
Jerusalem. Eichmann sat inside a bulletproof
glass booth to protect him from assassination attempts. The building was
modified to allow journalists to watch the trial on closed-circuit television,
and 750 seats were available in the auditorium itself. Israelis had the
opportunity to watch live television broadcasts of the proceedings, and
videotape was flown daily to the United States for broadcast the following day.
The
prosecution case was presented over the course of 56 days, involving hundreds
of documents and 112 witnesses (many of them Holocaust survivors). Hausner's
intention was to not only demonstrate Eichmann's guilt but to present material
about the entire Holocaust, thus producing a comprehensive record. Hausner's
opening address began, "It is not an individual that is in the dock at
this historic trial and not the Nazi regime alone, but anti-Semitism throughout
history." Defence attorney Servatius repeatedly tried to curb the
presentation of material not directly related to Eichmann, and was mostly
successful. In addition to wartime documents, material presented as evidence
included tapes and transcripts from Eichmann's interrogation and Sassen's
interviews in Argentina. In the case of the Sassen interviews, only Eichmann's
hand-written notes were admitted into evidence.
Some
of the evidence submitted by the prosecution took the form of depositions made by leading Nazis. The defence
demanded that the men should be brought to Israel so that the defence's right
to cross-examination would not be abrogated. But Hausner, in his role as
Attorney General, declared that he would be obliged to arrest any war criminals
who entered Israel. The prosecution proved that Eichmann had visited places
where exterminations had taken place, including Chełmno extermination camp, Auschwitz,
and Minsk (where
he witnessed a mass shooting of Jews), and therefore was aware that the
deportees were being killed.
When
the prosecution rested, the defence opened its case with a motion to dismiss
based on the trial itself being illegal. Servatius challenged Eichmann's
kidnapping and the basis for the Israeli law under which he had been indicted.
He argued that if the trial were to continue, it should transfer its
jurisdiction to West Germany. The prosecution countered by stating that the United
Nations had endorsed Israel's actions, and that both West Germany and
Argentina had agreed that the charges against him were legitimate. The defence
motion was subsequently dismissed.
The
defence next engaged in a lengthy direct examination of Eichmann. Observers such
as Moshe
Pearlman and Hannah Arendt have remarked on Eichmann's
ordinariness in appearance and flat affect. In his testimony throughout the
trial, Eichmann insisted he had no choice but to follow orders, as he was bound
by an oath
of loyalty—the same superior orders
defence used by some defendants in the 1945–1946 Nuremberg trials. Eichmann
asserted that the decisions had been made not by him, but by Müller, Heydrich,
Himmler, and ultimately Hitler. Servatius also proposed that decisions of the
Nazi government were acts of state and therefore not subject to
normal judicial proceedings. Regarding the Wannsee Conference, Eichmann stated
that he felt a sense of satisfaction and relief at its conclusion. As a clear
decision to exterminate had been made by his superiors, the matter was out of
his hands; he felt absolved of any guilt.
On the last day of the examination, he stated that he was guilty of arranging
the transports, but he did not feel guilty for the consequences.
Throughout
his cross-examination, prosecutor Hausner attempted to get Eichmann to admit he
was personally guilty, but no such confession was forthcoming. Eichmann
admitted to not liking the Jews and viewing them as adversaries, but stated
that he never thought their annihilation was justified. When Hausner produced
evidence that Eichmann had stated in 1945 that "I will leap into my grave
laughing because the feeling that I have five million human beings on my
conscience is for me a source of extraordinary satisfaction", Eichmann
said he meant "enemies of the Reich" such as the Soviets. During
later examination by the judges, he admitted he meant the Jews, and said the
remark was an accurate reflection of his opinion at the time.
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Adolf Eichmann at
trial in Jerusalem 1961
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The
trial adjourned on 14 August, and the verdict was read on 12 December. The
judges declared him not guilty of personally killing anyone and not guilty of
overseeing and controlling the activities of the Einsatzgruppen. He was
deemed responsible for the dreadful conditions on board the deportation trains
and for obtaining Jews to fill those trains.[176]
He was found guilty of crimes against humanity, war crimes, and crimes against
Poles, Slovenes
and Gypsies.
He was also found guilty of membership in three organisations that had been deemed
criminal at the Nuremberg trials: the Gestapo, the SD, and the SS. [g]
When considering the sentence, the judges concluded that Eichmann had not merely
been following orders, but believed in the Nazi cause wholeheartedly and had
been a key perpetrator of the genocide. On 15 December 1961, Eichmann was
sentenced to death.
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Adolf Eichmann in the
yard of Ayalon Prison in Israel, 1961
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Appeals
and execution
Servatius
appealed the verdict, mostly relying on legal arguments about Israel's
jurisdiction and the legality of the laws under which Eichmann was charged.
Appeal hearings took place between 22 and 29 March 1962. Eichmann's wife Vera
flew to Israel and saw him for the last time at the end of April. On 29 May, the
Israeli Supreme Court rejected the appeal
and upheld the District Court's judgement on all counts. Eichmann immediately
petitioned Israeli President Yitzhak Ben-Zvi
for clemency.
The content of his letter to the President pleading for pardon and other
original court documents of the trial were made public on 27 January 2016.
Prominent people such as Hugo Bergmann, Pearl Buck,
Martin
Buber, and Ernst Simon spoke up on his behalf. Ben-Gurion called a
special cabinet meeting to resolve the issue. The cabinet decided not to
recommend to President Ben-Zvi to grant clemency to Eichmann. As a result,
Ben-Zvi rejected the appeal to commute Eichmann's sentence. At 8:00 PM on 31
May, Eichmann was informed that his final appeal had been declined. His last meal
was the usual prison fare of cheese, bread, olives, and tea, along with a half
bottle of wine.
Eichmann
was hanged at
a prison in Ramla
hours later—the hanging, scheduled for midnight at the end of 31 May, was
slightly delayed and thus took place a few minutes into 1 June 1962. The
execution was attended by a small group of officials, four journalists and the
Canadian clergyman William Lovell Hull, who had been his spiritual
counselor while in prison. His last words were:
Long live Germany. Long live Argentina. Long live Austria. These are the three countries with which I have been most connected and which I will not forget. I greet my wife, my family and my friends. I am ready. We'll meet again soon, as is the fate of all men. I die believing in God.
Within
hours Eichmann's body had been cremated, and his ashes scattered in the Mediterranean
Sea, outside of Israeli territorial waters by an Israeli
Navy patrol boat.
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Adolf Eichmann was unrepentant till the end.
[PHOTO SOURCE: http://izquotes.com/quote/56299]
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Impact
The
trial and the surrounding media coverage sparked renewed interest in wartime
events, and the resulting increase in publication of memoirs and scholarly
works helped raise public awareness of the Holocaust. The trial received
widespread coverage by the press in West Germany, and many schools added
material studying the issues to their curriculum. In Israel, the testimony of
witnesses at the trial led to a deeper understanding of the impact of the
Holocaust on survivors, especially among younger citizens who had never
suffered state-sponsored oppression.
Political
theorist Hannah Arendt, a Jew who fled Germany after Hitler's
rise to power, reported on Eichmann's trial for The
New Yorker. In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt calls
Eichmann the embodiment of the "banality of evil", as he appeared to
have an ordinary and normal personality, displaying neither guilt nor hatred.
In his 1988 book Justice, Not Vengeance, Wiesenthal said: "The
world now understands the concept of 'desk murderer'. We know that one doesn't
need to be fanatical, sadistic, or mentally ill to murder millions; that it is
enough to be a loyal follower eager to do one's duty." In her 2011 book Eichmann Before Jerusalem, based
largely on the Sassen interviews and Eichmann's notes made while in exile, Bettina Stangneth posits that Eichmann was proud of his wartime
accomplishments, remained a committed Nazi throughout his life, and
intentionally built a persona as a faceless bureaucrat for presentation at the
trial.
Eichmann's
youngest son Ricardo says he is not resentful toward Israel for executing his father. He does not agree that his father's "following orders"
argument excuses his actions and notes how his father's lack of remorse caused
"difficult emotions" for the Eichmann family. Ricardo is now a
professor of archaeology at the German Archaeological Institute.
In
2015 the filming of the trial by producer Milton Fruchtman and blacklisted TV
director Leo
Hurwitz was the subject of the UK television film The
Eichmann Show, featuring Martin
Freeman and Anthony LaPaglia. The film intercuts dramatic
scenes with historical footage from the trial.
"The world now understands the concept of 'desk murderer'. We know that one doesn't need to be fanatical, sadistic, or mentally ill to murder millions; that it is enough to be a loyal follower eager to do one's duty."[Justice, Not Vengeance, 1988]
Summary of SS career
- SS number: 45,326
- Nazi Party number: 899,895
- Primary positions: Sub-Department IV-B4 (Gestapo), RSHA
- Waffen-SS service: SS-Untersturmführer der Reserve (9 November 1944)
Dates of rank
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Nazi awards and decorations
- Anschluss Medal
- Honour Chevron for the Old Guard
- Iron Cross, Second Class (1944)
- SA Sports Badge (in Bronze)
- SS Honour Ring
- SS Julleuchter
- SS Civil Badge; SS Zivilabzeichen (SS-Z.A. #6,375)
- War Merit Cross (1st & 2nd Classes with Swords)
See also
- Glossary of Nazi Germany
- List of Nazi Party leaders and officials
- List of SS personnel
- The Man in the Glass Booth, a novel and play by Robert Shaw, inspired by the Eichmann trial, later adapted into a film
Notes
The execution, prepared to take place at
midnight at the end of 31 May, was slightly delayed; Eichmann thus died a few
minutes into 1 June.[2]
Some authors maintain that his father's name was Karl
Adolf, for example Stangneth
2014, p. ix.
In September 1939, this department was renamed Section
IV B4 of the SS-Reichssicherheitshauptamt
(RSHA; Reich Main Security Office).
German historian Christian Gerlach and others have claimed that
Hitler did not approve the policy of extermination until mid-December 1941. Gerlach
1998, p. 785. This date is not universally accepted, but it seems
likely that a decision was made at around this time. On 18 December, Himmler
met with Hitler and noted in his appointment book "Jewish question – to
be exterminated as partisans". Browning
2004, p. 410. On 19 December, Wilhelm
Stuckart, State Secretary at the Interior Ministry, told one of his
officials: "The proceedings against the evacuated Jews are based on a
decision from the highest authority. You must come to terms with it." Browning
2004, p. 405.
In May 2007, a student doing research on Eichmann's
capture discovered the passport in court archives in Argentina. BBC 2007.
The passport is now in the possession of the Argentina Holocaust Museum in
Buenos Aires. See Fundacion
Memoria Del Holocausto.
This law had previously been used to prosecute about 30
people, all but one of them Jewish Holocaust survivors, who were alleged to
have been Nazi collaborators. See Ben-Naftali
& Tuval 2006.
Eichmann was a member of three of the organisations that
had been declared criminal at the Nuremberg
Trials: the SS, the SD, and the Gestapo. Arendt
1994, p. 246.
8.
After the Night of the Long Knives, the SS
revamped its rank structure and adopted new titles. Eichmann's actual rank
did not change, but the title of his rank was renamed from Oberscharführer
to Scharführer in July 1934.
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