Adolf Eichmann

Born in Solingen, Germany, in 1906, Adolf Eichmann was the son of a moderately successful Austrian businessman and industrialist. In 1914 his family moved to Linz, Austria. During World War I Eichmann's father was a soldier, and returned to the family business in Linz at the war's conclusion in 1918. His family moved to Germany in 1920. When he came of age in 1925 he briefly returned to Austria to study mechanical engineering, but eventually dropped out of college because he was a poor student. He followed in his father's footsteps and became a businessman, working as a traveling salesman, which brought him back to Germany in 1930. His first contact with the Nazi party was when he joined the Wandervogel movement, an anti-Semitic, Aryan-brotherhood type of organization popular with the less-educated segments of German society. In 1932 Eichmann again returned to Austria, where he formally joined the Austrian Nazi Party. On the advice of an old family friend, Ernst Kaltenbrunner--himself soon to become an important Nazi official--Eichmann also joined the Austrian branch of the SS, enlisting on April 1, 1932, and being accepted as a full member that November, assigned the SS number 45326. For the next year Eichmann was a member of the part-time Allgemeine-SS (General SS) with the rank of private, based in Salzburg. In 1933, when the Nazis came to power in Germany, Eichmann returned there and submitted an application to join the full-time SS. This was accepted and, in November of 1933, he was promoted to Scharführer (Sergeant) and assigned to the administrative staff of the Dachau concentration camp. By 1934 he had decided to make the SS his career and requested transfer into the SS-Security Police which had, by that time, become a powerful and much feared organization. His transfer was granted in November of 1934, and he was promoted to the rank of Oberscharführer (Staff Sergeant) and assigned to the headquarters of the Sicherheitdienst (SD) in Berlin. Eichmann became a model administrator in the SD and quickly became noticed by his superiors. In 1937 he was commissioned an SS-Second Lieutenant (Untersturmführer) and, one year later, sent back to Austria to help organize SS security forces in Vienna after the 1938 annexation of Austria into Germany. His efforts resulted in his being promoted to SS-First Lieutenant (Obersturmführer). At the end of 1938 Eichmann was selected by the SS leadership to form the Central Office for Jewish Emigration, which was set up to forcibly deport and expel Jews from Austria. By this time he had become a student of Judaism, finding the religion fascinating as he had, for several years, been harboring deep-seated anti-Semitic tendencies and a virulent hatred of the Jewish faith. At the start of the Second World War Eichmann was an SS-Captain (Hauptsturmführer) and had made a name for himself because of his operation of the Office for Jewish Emigration. He had even been sponsored by the SS Race and Settlement Office to take a trip to Palestine and study aspects of the Jewish homeland. Ironically, through this work, Eichmann made several contacts in the Zionist movement which he worked with to speed up Jewish emigration from the Reich. In 1939 his office was expanded to cover the entire German Reich, and in 1940 Eichmann was transferred from the SD to the Gestapo and promoted to SS-Major (SS-Sturmbannführer). By 1941 he had been promoted again, this time to the rank of Obersturmbannführer (Lieutenant Colonel), and was the commander of the Jewish Division of the Gestapo Religions Department in the Reich Central Security Office of the SS (the code for Eichmann's position was "RSHA/IV-B4"). In 1942 Eichmann was personally invited by Reinhard Heydrich to attend the Wannsee Conference, where Germany's anti-Jewish measures were developed into an official policy of extermination, which the Germans euphemistically called "The Final Solution to the Jewish Question". Eichmann was tasked as "Transportation Administrator", meaning he was in charge of all the trains that would carry Jews to the death camps in Poland. For the next two years he performed his duties with incredible zeal and efficiency, often times bragging that he had personally sent over five million Jews to their deaths by way of his trains. His work had been noticed and, in 1944, he was sent to Hungary after Germany had occupied that country to forestall a possible Soviet invasion. He at once went to work deporting Hungarian Jews, resulting in some 200,000 to 400,000 of them meeting their deaths in the Nazi gas chambers. By 1945, however, Eichmann's world--as was that of the Nazi regime he so loyally and faithfully served--was collapsing, and SS Reich Leader Heinrich Himmler had ordered that Jewish extermination be halted and all evidence of the "Final Solution" be destroyed. Eichmann blatantly defied Himmler's orders and continued his work in Hungary. He was also working to avoid being called up in the last-ditch German military effort, since a year before he had been commissioned a Reserve Lieutenant in the Waffen-SS and had been ordered to active combat duty. Eichmann fled Hungary as the Russians invaded and returned to Austria, where he met up with his old friend Kaltenbrunner. Kaltenbrunner, however, refused to associate with him, since Eichmann's duties as an extermination administrator had certainly branded him a marked man by the Allies, and Kaltenbrunner himself was in enough trouble because of his own activities. As World War II ended Eichmann went into hiding, being briefly captured by American troops but managing to escape by using a false name and claiming to be a demobilized German soldier. He was able to secure passage to South America and left Germany at the start of 1947. He settled in Buenos Aires, Argentina, under the name of Ricardo Clement and, for the next 15 years, worked in various odd jobs, from factory foreman to junior water engineer to professional rabbit farmer. He had also brought his family to Argentina and started a completely new life. Eichmann's days of safety in Argentina were numbered, however, because in 1960 the Israeli Mossad--the national intelligence service--had learned that he was in Argentina, and a plan was put in place to locate his exact whereabouts in order to capture him and spirit him back to Israel. When the Israelis finally located him, he was seized, smuggled out of the country to Israel and put on trial in April of 1961 (the Israelis didn't go through normal diplomatic channels because they believed that the Argentine government, which had long been accused of providing a safe haven for wanted Nazi war criminals, would refuse to turn him over). He was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity and sentenced to death. Adolf Eichmann was hanged on June 1, 1962, at the age of 56 and his ashes scattered at sea, so that no nation would serve as his final resting place.