Adolf Eichmann Biography

(born March 19, 1906, Solingen, Germany—died May 31, 1962, Tel Aviv, Israel) 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.

In January 1942, at Wannsee, near 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 Poland.

Following the war, U.S. troops captured Eichmann, but in 1946 he escaped from a prison camp. After dodging in and out of the Middle East for several years, Eichmann settled in Argentina 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.