Adolf Eichmann Archives | SpecialOperations.com

Adolf Eichmann was a member of the Nazi Party, the SS, and the SD during Hitler’s reign of terror during the 1930s and 1940s. He was an SS-Obersturmbannführer (Lieutenant Colonel) and one of the major organizers of the Holocaust. He was tasked by SS-Obergruppenführer (Lieutenant General) Reinhard Heydrich with facilitating and managing the logistics involved in the mass deportation of Jews to ghettos and extermination camps in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe during World War II.

After the war, Eichmann escaped prosecution and fled to Argentina where he lived until 1960. There, he was discovered by members of the Israeli Mossad and arrested and smuggled out of the country to Israel where he stood trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity in 1961. He was found guilty and was hanged in an Israeli prison on May 30, 1962.

Eichmann was born in Solingen, Germany on March 19, 1906, and soon afterward moved to Austria. He was an indifferent student and never finished his studies. He drifted from job to job in the late 20s and early 1930s before he joined the Nazi Party and shortly after the SS.

In 1934, with the rank of SS-Scharführer (Sergeant) Eichmann joined the Security Service Main Office (Sicherheitsdienst (SD) working on surveillance of Jewish organizations. In 1937, he took an inspection trip to Palestine and Egypt for the purposes of facilitating a Zionist emigration of German Jews to Palestine.

He personally oversaw the forced emigration of Austrian Jews after Hitler took over. His system was deemed so “worthy” by the Nazi hierarchy that it was deemed a template for the Nazis to use elsewhere. Once Germany overtook Czechoslovakia, Eichmann oversaw the forced deportation of Jews in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and created a further Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Prague, on the pattern of his Viennese model.

Once World War II began Eichmann began to not only continue with the forced emigration of Jews from Germany and occupied territories, but the forced movement of Jews to the death camps. Eichmann during this time was responsible for the movement of nearly 1.5 million Jews to the death camps located in Poland and later parts of the occupied Soviet Union.

By the autumn of 1941, Eichmann had been promoted SS-Obersturmbannführer (Lieutenant Colonel) and the chief of Reich Security Office (RSHA) which, took part in the planning of the annihilation of the European Jews. Since Eichmann was to be in charge of transporting Jews from all over Europe to the death camps, RSHA chief Reinhard Heydrich asked Eichmann to prepare a presentation for the Wannsee Conference. At the conference, RSHA officials advised the appropriate government and Nazi Party agencies on the implementation of the “Final Solution” to what the Nazis called the “Jewish Question.” Eichmann also relayed these plans to his network of officials who would help him to carry out deportation efforts in German-occupied areas and in Germany’s Axis allies in the murder of the Jews.

Eichmann and his underlings organized the deportation of Jews from Slovakia, the Netherlands, France, and Belgium. In 1943 and 1944 they deported the Jews of Greece, northern Italy, and Hungary. It was in Hungary where Eichmann involved himself directly in the deportation of the Jews. From late April 1944, six weeks after Germany occupied Hungary, until early July, Eichmann and his aides deported some 440,000 Hungarian Jews. Of these 75-90 percent were murdered in the gas chambers immediately after arriving in the death camps.

At the end of World War II, Eichmann changed his name to “Otto Eckmann” and had forged papers as such to avoid detection. He was captured by the Americans but when they found out his true identity, he escaped and with the help of the Catholic Church eventually made his way to Argentina.

But Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal learned he along with the notorious Dr. Josef Mengele were in the South American country. The Israelis dispatched intelligence gathering teams from the Mossad and Shin Bet intelligence services and they confirmed Eichmann’s location. Under the supervision of Mossad agent Isser Harel, the Mossad kidnapped Eichmann and smuggled him out of Buenos Aires to Israel to stand trial. Harel’s tale was eventually written into a fine book on the capture, “The House on Garibaldi Street” which is highly recommended.

The Mossad knew his routine and planned on abducting him when he passed an open field near his home after getting off a bus in his town. As he approached the field, a Mossad agent spoke to him in Spanish but Eichmann sensed danger and quickly two other Mossad agents jumped him as a well and the three subdued him as the agents whisked him to a Mossad safe house where he was held for nine days until they snuck him out via a flight from Buenos Aires to Jerusalem via Dakar, Senegal.

Eichmann protested his innocence and used the well-worn “following orders” alibi which was discounted at the Nuremberg Trials. “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 said. “I was not a responsible leader, and as such do not feel myself guilty.”

Eichmann’s trial before a special tribunal of the Jerusalem District Court began on April 11, 1961. The legal basis of the charges against Eichmann was the 1950 Nazi and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law, 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 organization.

The Nazis were meticulous in their record keeping and this was part of the reason that so many Nazis were found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Eichmann was no exception to this rule. His own words were the most-damning toward his case when the prosecution brought forth a statement he made in 1945 that the Nazis had been responsible for over 5 million dead Jews. “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”

Any hope the defense had of receiving clemency from the Israeli courts were quickly extinguished over this statement. Eichmann tried to say that he was speaking about the Russians and enemies of the Reich but later admitted that he was speaking about the Jews.

The verdict was read on December 12, 1961. The judges declared him not guilty of personally killing anyone and not guilty of overseeing and controlling the activities of the Einsatzgruppen (SS Mobile Extermination Units). He was found responsible for the deplorable conditions on board the deportation trains on which the Jews were transported to the death camps. He was found guilty of crimes against humanity, war crimes, and crimes against not only the Jews but the Poles, Slovenes, and Gypsies. He was also found guilty of membership in three organizations that had been deemed criminal at the Nuremberg trials: the Gestapo, the SD, and the SS.

When considering the sentence, the judges concluded that Eichmann hadn’t been just following orders, but believed in the Nazi cause wholeheartedly and had been a key perpetrator of the genocide of the Jewish people. On 15 December 1961, Eichmann was sentenced to death by hanging.

Eichmann appealed his sentence but on May 31, 1962, the judges rejected his appeal. He was put to death several hours later around midnight on May 31-June 1, 1962.

His final words were about one would expect:

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.

After his death, his body was immediately cremated and his ashes were scattered in the Mediterranean outside of Israel’s territorial waters.

Photos: Wikipedia

In January 1942, the leaders of the Nazi Third Reich gathered in Wannsee, Germany, a suburb of Berlin to implement their plans and policies for what they termed the “Jewish Question.” The meeting was called and chaired by Reich Main Security Office SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich.

The Nazi’s plan, the “Final Solution” to the Jewish question was for the SS (Schutzstaffel) to oversee the obliteration of all of the Jews in Europe. Heydrich’s plan, where he laid out a proposal to force all of the Jews in Europe to Nazi-occupied Poland where they would be exterminated.

Discrimination Begins WIth Nazi Rise to Power:
As soon as Hitler and the Nazis came to power, the discrimination of the Jews began to take place. The Jews were gradually stripped of their rights as German citizens, their shops were vandalized and looted and they were encouraged to emigrate out of the country while leaving nearly all of their money and property of course.

Laws were passed to keep Jews from civil service careers. Then additional laws were enacted that would keep the Jews from practicing in any of the skilled professions such as doctors and lawyers, etc.

The in 1935, the Nazis passed the Nuremberg Laws which forbade Jews from marrying anyone of Germanic extraction. The Reich Citizenship Law stripped Jews of their German citizenship. Even those hardy souls who had lived through many of the pogroms that plagued Europe, this one is too much. As a result by 1939, more than half of Germany’s 500,000 Jews had emigrated to the United States, Britain, or Palestine.

With the invasion of Poland in 1939, the Nazis were putting their plans into action. Einsatzgruppen (Special Task Forces) began the hunting and killing of Jewish civilians. SS and regular Wehrmacht troops murdered civilians as well.

One the Germans invaded the Soviet Union, they quickly began rounding up and exterminating Jews as the Final Solution had been in effect for some time.

The Meeting By the Lake in Wannsee:
The conference was attended by fifteen of the Nazi’s top leaders or the deputies of those leaders. The attendees besides Heydrich were:
Gauleiter Dr. Alfred Mayer (Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories)
Reichsamtleiter Dr. Georg Leibbrandt (ditto)
Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart (Reich Ministry for the Interior)
Dr. Erich Neumann (Head of the Four Years Plan Office)
Dr. Roland Freisler (Reich Ministry of Justice)
Dr. Josef Bühler (Director General of the Generalgouvernement)
Dr. Martin Luther (Foreign Office)
SS-Oberführer Gerhard Klopfer (NSDAP Chancellery)
Ministerialdirektor Friedrich Wilhelm Kritzinger (Reich Chancellery)
SS-Gruppenführer Otto Hofmann (Race and Settlement Main Office)
SS-Gruppenführer Heinrich Müller (Reich Main Security Office/Gestapo)
SS-Obersturmbannf Adolf Eichmann (Reich Main Security Office)
SS-Oberführer Dr.Karl Eberhard Schöngarth (Commander SD / SIPO Krakow)
SS-Sturmbannführer Dr. Rudolf Lange (Commander SD Latvia)

The purpose of the meeting Heydrich said was to discuss the plan of the Final Solution to the Jewish Question and would entail rounding up all of the Jews of Europe. It was decided that the SS under Heinrich Himmler were to be in charge of the operation to exterminate the Jews of Europe. The Jews would be transported eastward to Poland and organized into large labor gangs. Work and living conditions would be extremely brutal, with little food, so that they could kill large numbers by natural reduction. Any survivors would be treated accordingly. Treated accordingly was the alternative term for extermination.

As would be later noted during the Nuremberg War Crime Trials, not one of the 15 men there would object to the planned extermination of an entire race of people. A bigger bone of contention among the Nazis attending the conference was, how to define what exactly makes one Jewish? Himmler, always a believer in quack-science, foolishly hoped that a simple blood test could be developed that could differentiate between Jews and non-Jews. When that proved useless, the Nazis decided to go back two generations. If there was a Jewish grandparent in the last two generations, then that person was a Jew. But in their ardor to destroy the race, it ended up simply being if a Nazi party member thought you were a Jew, you were.

The minutes of the meeting never mentioned extermination but just a few months later, gas chambers were being introduced into the six Nazi death camps in Poland, Belzec, Birkenau, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka. This did not bother the attendees at all, once again because in their minds, Jews were Untermensch or subhuman.

A copy of the minutes survived the War and was furnished at the Nuremberg trials. In one of the paragraphs it broke down how the approximate 5 million Jews of the USSR were employed:

The breakdown of Jews residing in the European part of the USSR according to trades was approximate as follows:

    Agriculture                                       9.1 %
    Urban workers                                    14.8 %
    In trade                                         20.0 %
    Employed by the state                            23.4 %
    In private occupations such as
    medical profession, press, theater, etc.         32. 7%
Under proper guidance, in the course of the final solution the Jews are to be allocated for appropriate labor in the East. Able-bodied Jews, separated according to sex, will be taken in large work columns to these areas for work on roads, in the course of which action doubtless a large portion will be eliminated by natural causes.

The possible final remnant will, since it will undoubtedly consist of the most resistant portion, have to be treated accordingly, because it is the product of natural selection and would, if released, act as a the seed of a new Jewish revival (see the experience of history.)

In the course of the practical execution of the final solution, Europe will be combed through from west to east. Germany proper, including the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, will have to be handled first due to the housing problem and additional social and political necessities.

The evacuated Jews will first be sent, group by group, to so-called transit ghettos, from which they will be transported to the East.

The entire meeting lasted only 90 minutes. Heydrich instructed Eichmann to sanitize the minutes, (protocols in German) to sanitize them as nothing too explicit was to be put in there. All of the attendees were given a copy of the minutes after they were carefully scrutinized by Heydrich. At the end of the war, most of the copies were burned as the Nazis tried to cover their tracks in the last days of the Reich.

Heydrich was quite pleased with the meeting. No one opposed his absolute rule over the Jewish question and in fact, rather than oppose him, many at the conference pledged their support to him on the matter.

But for the Jews of Germany and the rest of Europe, the nightmare of the Holocaust was only going to get worse.

Photos: Wikipedia

Adolf Eichmann

On This Date in 1962, Nazi War Criminal Adolf Eichmann Hanged in Israel

Wannsee Conference Outlines Nazi Plans for the “Jewish Question”