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Karl Adolf Eichmann (March 19, 1906 – May 31, 1962), sometimes referred to as "the architect of the Holocaust", was a German Nazi and SS-Obersturmbannführer (Senior Storm Unit Leader, equivalent to Lieutenant Colonel). Because of his organizational talents and ideological reliability, he was charged by Obergruppenführer (General) Reinhard Heydrich with the task of facilitating and managing the logistics of mass deportation of Jews to ghettos and extermination camps in German occupied Eastern Europe. After the war, he fled to Argentina using a fraudulently obtained laissez-passer issued by the International Red Cross and lived there under a false identity working for Mercedes - Benz until 1960. He was captured by Israeli Mossad operatives in Argentina and abducted to Israel to face trial in an Israeli court on 15 criminal charges, including crimes against humanity and war crimes. He was found guilty and executed by hanging in 1962, and is the only person to have been executed in Israel on conviction by a civilian court. Adolf Eichmann was born to a Lutheran family in Solingen, Germany. His father was businessman and industrialist Adolf Karl Eichmann, his mother Maria née Schefferling. After his mother died in 1914, his family moved to Linz, Austria. During the First World War, Eichmann's father served in the Austro - Hungarian Army. At the war's conclusion, Eichmann's father returned to the family and had a company in Linz. Eichmann left high school — Realschule — without
having graduated and began training to become a mechanic, which he also
discontinued. In 1923 he started working in the mining company of his
father, from 1925 to 1927 he worked as a sales clerk for the Oberösterreichische Elektrobau AG and then until spring 1933 Eichmann worked as district agent for the Vacuum Oil Company AG, a subsidiary of Standard Oil. In July 1933 he moved back to Germany. Eichmann married Veronika Liebl (1909 – 1997) on March 21, 1935. The couple had four sons: Klaus Eichmann (b. 1936 in Berlin), Horst Adolf Eichmann (b. 1940 in Vienna), Dieter Helmut Eichmann (b. 1942 in Prague) and Ricardo Francisco Eichmann (b. 1955 in Buenos Aires). On the advice of family friend Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Eichmann joined the Austrian branch of the NSDAP — member number 889 895 — and of the Schutzstaffel (SS). He enlisted on April 1, 1932, as an SS-Anwärter (Candidate). He was accepted as a full SS member that November, appointed an SS-Mann (Man), and assigned the SS number 45326. For the next year, Eichmann was a member of the Allgemeine SS and served in a mustering formation operating from Salzburg.
In 1933 when the Nazis came to power, Eichmann returned to Germany and
submitted an application to join the active duty SS regiments. He was
accepted, and in November 1933, was promoted to Scharführer (Squad Leader) and assigned to the administrative staff of the Dachau concentration camp. By 1934, Eichmann requested transfer into the Sicherheitspolizei (Security
Police), which had, by that time, become a very powerful and feared
organization. Eichmann's transfer was granted in November 1934, and he
was assigned to the headquarters of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) in Berlin. In 1935, Eichmann was promoted to Hauptscharführer (Head Squad Leader) and later commissioned as an SS-Untersturmführer in 1937. In 1937, Eichmann was sent to the British Mandate of Palestine with his superior Herbert Hagen to assess the possibilities of massive Jewish emigration from Germany to Palestine. They landed in Haifa but could obtain only a transit visa so they went on to Cairo. There, they met Feival Polkes, an agent of the Haganah, who discussed with them the plans of the Zionists and tried to enlist their assistance in facilitating Jewish emigration from Europe. According to an answer Eichmann gave at his trial, he had also planned to meet Arab leaders in Palestine, but this never happened because entry to Palestine was refused by the British authorities. The British objected to a Jewish state in Palestine, so the idea of deporting all the European Jews to Palestine was abandoned. In 1938, Eichmann was assigned to Austria to help organize SS Security Forces in Vienna after the Anschluss of Austria moved into Germany. Through this effort, Eichmann was promoted to SS-Obersturmführer (1st Lieutenant) and, by the end of 1938, Eichmann had been selected by the SS leadership to form the Central Office for Jewish Emigration, charged with forcibly deporting and expelling Jews from Austria. At the start of World War II, Eichmann had been promoted to SS-Hauptsturmführer (captain)
and had made a name for himself with his Office for Jewish Emigration.
Through this work Eichmann made several contacts in the Zionist movement, which he worked with to speed up Jewish emigration from the Third Reich. Eichmann returned to Berlin in 1939 after the formation of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Main Security Office). In December 1939, he was assigned to head RSHA Referat IV B4, the RSHA department which dealt with Jewish affairs and evacuation, where he reported to Heinrich Müller. In August 1940, he released his Reichssicherheitshauptamt: Madagaskar Projekt (Reich Main Security Office: Madagascar Project), a plan for forced Jewish deportation that never materialized. He was promoted to the rank of SS-Sturmbannführer (Major) in late 1940, and less than a year later to Obersturmbannführer (Lieutenant Colonel). Reinhard Heydrich disclosed to Eichmann in autumn 1941 that all the Jews in German controlled Europe were to be exterminated. In 1942, Heydrich ordered Eichmann to attend the Wannsee Conference as recording secretary, where Germany's anti-Semitic measures were set down into an official policy of genocide. Eichmann was given the position of Transportation Administrator of the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question", which put him in charge of all the trains that would carry Jews to the death camps in the territory of occupied Poland. In 1944, he was sent to Hungary after Germany had occupied that country prior to a Soviet invasion. Eichmann at first made an offer through Joel Brand (who was to act as an intermediary) to trade captive European Jews to the Western Allies in exchange for trucks and other goods (Blood for goods). When there was no positive response to this offer, Eichmann started deporting Jews, sending 430,000 Hungarians to their deaths in the gas chambers. By 1945, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler had
ordered Jewish extermination to be halted and evidence of the Final
Solution to be destroyed. Eichmann was appalled by Himmler's turnabout,
and continued his work in Hungary against official orders. Eichmann was
also working to avoid being called up in the last ditch German military
effort, since a year before he had been commissioned as a Reserve Untersturmführer in the Waffen-SS and was now being ordered to active combat duty. Eichmann
fled Hungary in 1945 as the Soviets entered, and he returned to
Austria, where he met up with his old friend Ernst Kaltenbrunner.
Kaltenbrunner, however, refused to associate with Eichmann since
Eichmann's duties as an extermination administrator had left him a
marked man by the Allies. At the end of World War II, Eichmann was captured by the U.S. Army,
who was not aware of Eichmann's true identity as he presented himself
as "Otto Eckmann." Early in 1946, he escaped from U.S. custody and hid
in Altensalzkoth, an obscure hamlet on the Lüneburg Heath, for a few years. In 1948 he obtained a landing permit for Argentina, but did not use it immediately. At the beginning of 1950, Eichmann went to Italy, where he posed as a refugee named Riccardo Klement. With the help of a Franciscan friar who had connections with Bishop Alois Hudal, who organized one of the first postwar escape routes for Axis personnel, Eichmann obtained an International Committee of the Red Cross humanitarian passport, issued in Geneva,
which he received in Italy, and an Argentine visa. Both of these issued
to "Ricardo Klement, technician." In early May 2007, this passport was
discovered in court archives in Argentina by a student doing research
on Eichmann's abduction. The passport has been handed to the Argentina
Holocaust Museum in Buenos Aires.
He boarded a ship heading for Argentina on July 14, 1950. For the next
10 years, he worked in several odd jobs in the Buenos Aires area — from
factory foreman, to junior water engineer and professional rabbit farmer. Eichmann also brought his family to Argentina. In June 2006, old CIA documents about Nazis and stay-behind networks dedicated to anti-communism were released. Among the 27,000 documents was a March 1958 memo from the German BND agency
to the CIA, which stated that Eichmann was reported to have lived in
Argentina since 1952 using the alias "Clemens". However, the CIA took
no action on this information, because Eichmann's arrest could
embarrass the US and Germany by turning public attention to the former
Nazis they had recruited after World War II. For example, the West German government, headed by Konrad Adenauer, was worried about what Eichmann might say, especially about the past of Hans Globke, Adenauer's national security adviser, who had worked with Eichmann in the Jewish Affairs department and helped draft the 1935 Nuremberg Laws. At the request of the West German government the CIA persuaded Life magazine to delete any reference to Globke from Eichmann's memoirs, which it had bought from his family. By
the time the CIA and the BND had this information, Israel had
temporarily given up looking for Eichmann in Argentina because they
could not discover his alias. Neither the CIA nor the US government as a whole at that time had a policy of pursuing Nazi war criminals. In addition to protecting Eichmann and Globke, the CIA also protected Reinhard Gehlen, who recruited hundreds of former German spies for the CIA. In 1948, Israel was established as a Jewish state. In 1949, its official intelligence agency, the Mossad,
was formed. One of the Mossad's principal assigned tasks was to hunt
down accused Nazi war criminals. Throughout the 1950s, many Jews and
other victims of the Holocaust also dedicated themselves to finding Eichmann and other notorious Nazis. Among them was the Jewish Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal.
In 1954, Wiesenthal received a postcard from an associate living in
Buenos Aires, saying Eichmann was in Argentina. The message read in
part: With this and other information collected by Wiesenthal, Israel had solid leads about Eichmann's whereabouts. However, Isser Harel, the head of the Mossad, later claimed in an unpublished manuscript that
Wiesenthal "'had no role whatsoever' in Eichmann's apprehension but in
fact had endangered the entire Eichmann operation and aborted the
planned capture of Auschwitz doctor Josef Mengele." Adolf Eichmann changed his name but never changed those of his wife and four children. It was this that led to his capture. Also
instrumental in exposing Eichmann's identity was Lothar Hermann. He was
a worker of Jewish descent who fled from Germany to Argentina following
his incarceration in the Dachau concentration camp,
where Eichmann had served as an administrator. By the 1950s, Hermann
had settled into life in Buenos Aires with his family. His daughter
Sylvia became acquainted with Eichmann's family and romantically
involved with Klaus, Eichmann's oldest son. Klaus made boastful remarks
about his father's life as a Nazi and direct responsibility for the
Holocaust. Hermann realized who Eichmann was in 1957 after reading a
newspaper report about German war criminals — of whom Eichmann was one. Soon
after, he sent Sylvia to the Eichmanns' home on a fact-finding mission.
She was met at the door by Eichmann himself. She asked for Klaus, and,
after learning that he was not home, asked whether she was speaking to
his father. Eichmann confirmed this fact. Hermann soon began a
correspondence with Fritz Bauer, chief prosecutor for the West German state of Hessen,
and provided details about Eichmann's person and life. He contacted
Israeli officials, who worked closely with Hermann over the next
several years to learn about Eichmann and to formulate a plan to
capture him. In
1959, the Mossad was informed that Eichmann was in Buenos Aires under
the name Ricardo Klement (Clement) and then began an effort to locate
his exact whereabouts. Through relentless surveillance, it was concluded that Ricardo Klement was, in fact, Adolf Eichmann. The Israeli government then approved a covert operation to capture Eichmann and bring him to Jerusalem for trial as a war criminal. It was to be a joint operation, carried out by the Mossad and Shin Bet,
the Israeli secret police. The Israelis continued their surveillance of
Eichmann through the first months of 1960 until it was judged safe to
take him down, even watching as he delivered flowers to his wife on
their 25th wedding anniversary on March 21. Eichmann was captured by a team of Mossad and Shin Bet agents in a suburb of Buenos Aires on May 11, 1960. The
Mossad agents had arrived in Buenos Aires in April 1960 after
Eichmann's identity was confirmed. After observing Eichmann for an
extensive period of time, a team of Mossad agents waited for him as he
arrived home from his work as foreman at a Mercedes Benz factory.
One kept lookout waiting for his bus to arrive, while two agents
pretended to be fixing a broken down car. An unconfirmed fourth rode on
the bus to make sure he would leave. Once Eichmann alighted and began
walking the short distance to his home, he was asked by the agent at
the car, Zvi Aharoni,
for a cigarette. When Eichmann reached in his pocket he was attacked by
the two agents by the car. Eichmann attempted to fight back, but team
member Peter Malkin, a Polish Jew,
knocked Eichmann unconscious with a strike to the back of the neck.
Eichmann was then bundled into the car and taken to the safe house.
During the drive there, the agents put an SS cap on Eichmann and
compared him to a photograph of Eichmann in Nazi uniform. There, he was tied to a chair, ungagged, and interrogated. It was concluded that Klement (Clement) was undoubtedly Eichmann. Eichmann was given a choice between instant death or trial in Israel. He chose
to stand trial. The agents kept him in a safe house until they judged
that he could be taken to Israel without being detected by Argentine
authorities. They then smuggled him out of Argentina on board an El Al Bristol Britannia flight from Argentina to Dakar and
then to Israel on May 21, 1960. Eichmann arrived heavily sedated, and
like the agents, disguised in the uniform of the El Al crew. There
was a backup plan in case the apprehension did not go as planned. If
the police happened to intervene, one of the agents was to handcuff
himself to Eichmann and make full explanations and disclosure. For
some time the Israeli government denied involvement in Eichmann's
capture, claiming that he had been taken by Jewish volunteers who
eagerly turned him over to Israeli authorities. Negotiations followed
between Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and Argentine president Arturo Frondizi, while the abduction was met from radical right sectors in Argentina with a violent wave of Antisemitism, carried on the streets by the Tacuara Nationalist Movement — including assaults, torture and bombings. Ben-Gurion then announced Eichmann's capture to the Knesset — Israel's parliament
— on May 23, receiving a standing ovation in return. Isser Harel, head
of the Mossad at the time of the operation, wrote the book The House on Garibaldi Street about Eichmann's capture. The book has since been made into a movie of the same name. Some years later, Peter Malkin, a member of the kidnapping team, wrote Eichmann in My Hands, which explores Eichmann's character and motivations, but its veracity has been attacked.
Isser Harel, Chief Executive of the Secret Services of Israel (1952 – 1963), who headed the successful capture of Eichmann in Buenos Aires in 1960, feels they almost apprehended Josef Mengele too.
As he claims to have told the co-pilot that transported Eichmann at the
time: "had it been possible to start the operation several weeks
earlier Mengele might also have been on the plane." When they checked
on the last known location for the "murderous doctor" in Argentina, he
had apparently moved on just two weeks earlier. In June 1960, after unsuccessful secret negotiations with Israel, Argentina requested an urgent meeting of the United Nations Security Council, to protest what Argentina regarded as the "violation of the sovereign rights of the Argentine Republic". 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". Eventually the Council passed Resolution 138,
which requested Israel "to make appropriate reparation", while stating
that "Eichmann should be brought to appropriate justice for the crimes
of which he is accused" and that "this resolution should in no way be
interpreted as condoning the odious crimes of which Eichmann is
accused." After
further negotiations, on August 3, Israel and Argentina agreed to end
their dispute with a joint statement that "the Governments of Israel
and the Republic of the Argentine, imbued with the wish to give effect
to the resolution of the Security Council of June 23, 1960, in which
the hope was expressed that the traditionally friendly relations
between the two countries will be advanced, have decided to regard as
closed the incident that arose out of the action taken by Israel
nationals which infringed fundamental rights of the State of Argentina." In
the subsequent trial and appeal, the Israeli courts avoided the issue
of the legality of Eichmann's capture, relying instead on legal
precedents that the circumstances of his capture had no bearing on the
legality of his trial. The Israeli Court also determined that because
"Argentina has condoned the violation of her sovereignty and has waived
her claims, including that for the return of the Appellant, any
violation of international law that may have been involved in this
incident has thus been remedied." Eichmann's
trial before an Israeli court in Jerusalem began on April 11, 1961. He
was indicted on 15 criminal charges, including crimes against humanity,
crimes against the Jewish people and membership in an outlawed
organization. In accordance with Israeli criminal procedure, the trial
was presided over by three judges: Moshe Landau, Benjamin Halevi and Yitzhak Raveh. The chief prosecutor was Gideon Hausner, the Israeli attorney general. The three judges sat high atop a plain dais. The trial was held at the Beit Ha'am — today known as the Gerard Behar Center — a new auditorium in downtown Jerusalem. Eichmann sat inside a bulletproof glass booth to protect him from victims' families. This image inspired the novel, stage play, and film The Man in the Glass Booth, although the plot of the drama has nothing to do with the actual events of the Eichmann trial. The legal basis of the charges against Eichmann was the 1950 "Nazi and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law". The
trial caused huge international controversy, as well as an
international sensation. The Israeli government allowed news programs
all over the world to broadcast the trial live with few restrictions.
The trial began with various witnesses, including many Holocaust
survivors, who testified against Eichmann and his role in transporting
victims to the extermination camps. One key witness for the prosecution
was an American judge named Michael A. Musmanno, who was a U.S. naval officer in 1945. Musmanno had questioned the Nuremberg defendants and would later go on to become a Justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. He testified that the late Hermann Göring"made it very clear that Eichmann was the man to determine, in what order, in what countries, the Jews were to die." When the prosecution rested, Eichmann's defense lawyers, Robert Servatius and Dieter Wechtenbruch, opened up the defense by explaining why they did not cross-examine any
of the prosecution witnesses. Eichmann, speaking in his own defense,
said that he did not dispute the facts of what happened during the
Holocaust. During the whole trial, Eichmann insisted that he was only "following orders" — the same Nuremberg Defense used by some of the Nazi war criminals during the 1945 – 1946 Nuremberg Trials. He explicitly declared that he had abdicated his conscience in order to follow the Führerprinzip.
Eichmann claimed that he was merely a "transmitter" with very little
power. He testified that: "I never did anything, great or small,
without obtaining in advance express instructions from Adolf Hitler or any of my superiors." During
cross-examination, prosecutor Hausner asked Eichmann if he considered
himself guilty of the murder of millions of Jews. Eichmann replied:
"Legally not, but in the human sense ... yes, for I am guilty of having
deported them". When Hausner produced as evidence a quote by Eichmann
in 1945 stating: "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 countered the
claim saying that he was referring only to "enemies of the Reich". Witnesses for the defense, all of them former high-ranking Nazis, were promised immunity and safe conduct from their German and Austrian homes to testify in Jerusalem on Eichmann's behalf. All of them refused to travel to Israel, but they sent the court depositions. None of the depositions supported Eichmann's "following orders"
defense. One deposition was from Otto Winkelmann, a former senior SS
police leader in Budapest in 1944. His memo stated that "(Eichmann) had the nature of a subaltern, which means a fellow who uses his power recklessly, without moral
restraints. He would certainly overstep his authority if he thought he
was acting in the spirit of his commander [Adolf Hitler]". Franz Six, a former SS brigadier general in the German secret service, who was assigned the supervision of the occupation of the United Kingdom had Operation Sea Lion been
successful, said in his deposition that Eichmann was an absolute
believer in National Socialism and would act to the most extreme of the
party doctrine, and that Eichmann had greater power than other
department chiefs. After
14 weeks of testimony with more than 1,500 documents, 100 prosecution
witnesses (90 of whom were Nazi concentration camp survivors) and
dozens of defense depositions delivered by diplomatic couriers from 16
different countries, the Eichmann trial ended on August 14. At that
point, the judges began deliberations in seclusion. On December 11, the
three judges announced their verdict: Eichmann was convicted on all
counts. Eichmann had said to the court that he expected the death
penalty. On December 15, the court imposed a death sentence. Eichmann appealed the
verdict, mostly relying on legal arguments about Israel's jurisdiction
and the legality of the laws under which he was charged. He also
claimed that he was protected by the principle of "Acts of State" and
repeated his "following orders" defense. On
May 29, 1962 Israel's Supreme Court, sitting as a Court of Criminal
Appeal, rejected the appeal and upheld the District Court's judgment on
all counts. In rejecting his appeal again claiming that he was only
"following orders", the court stated that, "Eichmann received no
superior orders at all. He was his own superior and he gave all orders
in matters that concerned Jewish affairs ... the so-called Final
Solution would never have assumed the infernal forms of the flayed skin
and tortured flesh of millions of Jews without the fanatical zeal and
the unquenchable blood thirst of the appellant and his associates." A
large number of prominent persons sent requests for clemency. On May 31, Israeli President Yitzhak Ben-Zvi turned down Eichmann's petition for mercy. On the telegram that Eichmann's wife, Vera, sent in support of the clemency, Ben-Zvi added in his handwriting a passage from the First Book of Samuel: "As your sword bereaved women, so will your mother be bereaved among women." (1 Samuel 15:33, Samuel's words to Agag, king of the Amalekites). In
1999, 128 minutes of the original video recordings made during court
sessions of the Eichmann trial were released to cinemas and later to
home video under the title Un spécialiste (The Specialist in the US), whereas
the title related to Eichmann's wartime reputation as a "specialist" in
his field of all the logistics regarding expatriation, expropriation,
and deportation of Jewish people. Eichmann was hanged a few minutes before midnight on May 31, 1962, at a prison in Ramla,
Israel. This remains the only civil execution ever carried out in
Israel, which has a general policy of not enforcing the death penalty.
Eichmann allegedly refused a last meal, preferring instead a bottle of Carmel, a dry red Israeli wine, consuming about half the bottle. He also refused to don the traditional black hood for his execution. There
is some dispute over Eichmann's last words. One account states that
these were, "Long live Germany. Long live Austria. Long live Argentina.
These are the countries with which I have been most closely associated
and I shall not forget them. I had to obey the rules of war and my
flag. I am ready." According to David Cesarani, a leading Holocaust historian and Research Professor in History of the Royal Holloway, University of London, Eichmann is quoted thus: 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. Shortly after the execution, Eichmann's body was cremated in
a specially designed furnace. The furnace was so hot that no one dared
to go near it, and a stretcher on tracks was used to place the body
into it. The next morning, June 1, his ashes were scattered at sea over
the Mediterranean, beyond the territorial waters of Israel by an Israeli Navy patrol
boat. This was to ensure that there could be no future memorial and
that no country would serve as his final resting place. 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,
a book formed by this reporting, Arendt concluded that, aside from a
desire for improving his career, Eichmann showed no trace of an antisemitic personality or of any psychological damage to his character. She called him the embodiment of the "Banality of Evil",
as he appeared at his trial to have an ordinary and common personality,
displaying neither guilt nor hatred. She suggested that this most
strikingly discredits the idea that the Nazi criminals were manifestly psychopathic and
different from ordinary people. Eichmann himself said he joined the SS
not because he agreed or disagreed with its ethos, but because he
needed to build a career. Stanley Milgram interpreted
Arendt's work as stating that even the most ordinary of people can
commit horrendous crimes if placed in certain situations and given
certain incentives. He wrote: "I must conclude that Arendt's conception
of the banality of evil comes closer to the truth than one might dare
imagine." However,
Arendt did not suggest that Eichmann was normal or that any person
placed in his situation would have done as he did. According to her
account, Eichmann had abdicated his will to make moral choices, and thus his autonomy. Eichmann
claimed he was just following orders, and that he was therefore
respecting the duties of a "bureaucrat". Arendt thus argued that he had
essentially forsaken the conditions of morality, autonomy and the
ability to question orders (Führerprinzip). In Becoming Eichmann, David Cesarani claimed
that Eichmann was in fact extremely anti-Semitic, and that these
feelings were important motivators of his genocidal actions. Eichmann's
son, Ricardo, who was born after World War II, has condemned his
father's actions and says he harbours no resentment toward Israel for
executing his father. In the 2001 film Conspiracy, Adolf Eichmann was portrayed by actor Stanley Tucci. |