Adolf Eichmann
Adolf Eichmann was a key figure in the implementation of the Holocaust, serving as a high-ranking official in Nazi Germany responsible for coordinating the deportation and extermination of Jews during World War II. Born in Linz, Austria, in 1906, he became involved in the Nazi Party in the early 1930s and quickly rose through the ranks of the SS. Eichmann's obsession with Jewish culture led him to play a significant role in orchestrating the mass emigration of Jews from Austria and later from other occupied territories, where he facilitated their deportation to concentration camps.
Eichmann was instrumental in the planning and execution of the "final solution," which involved the systematic extermination of the Jewish population. He helped organize the infamous Wannsee Conference, where Nazi leaders formalized their plans for genocide. Following the war, Eichmann managed to escape capture and lived in Argentina under a false identity until he was apprehended by Israeli agents in 1960, leading to a highly publicized trial in Israel.
At his trial, Eichmann claimed he was merely following orders, a defense that sparked widespread debate about individual moral responsibility in the face of systemic evil. Ultimately, he was convicted of crimes against humanity and executed in 1962. Eichmann's legacy serves as a cautionary tale about the dangers of bureaucratic compliance and the necessity of personal accountability in preventing atrocities.
Subject Terms
Adolf Eichmann
Nazi official in charge of Jewish affairs
- Born: March 19, 1906
- Birthplace: Solingen, Germany
- Died: May 31, 1962
- Place of death: Ramle Prison, near Tel Aviv, Israel
Major offenses: War crimes, namely deporting millions of Jews to extermination camps during the Holocaust
Active: 1939-1945
Locale: Europe
Sentence: Death by hanging
Early Life
Raised in a middle-class Protestant family in Linz, Austria, Adolf Eichmann attended and failed engineering school. He briefly worked as a laborer in his father’s mining company, in sales for an electrical construction company, and as a traveling salesman for the Vacuum Oil Company. In 1932 he joined the Austrian Nazi Party, and after he lost his job in 1933 he found work in Bavaria, Germany, with the Nazi-affiliated and exiled Austrian Legion. After fourteen months of military training, he joined the Schutzstaffel (SS) and served as a corporal at the Dachau concentration camp.
Becoming bored, he began work with Reinhard Heydrich’s Sicherheitsdienst (SD). As a filing clerk, Eichmann was assigned to collect information on German Jews. Obsessed with Jews and Jewish culture, he visited Jewish neighborhoods, attended Jewish meetings, learned about Zionism, and even studied Hebrew and Yiddish. His “specialty” was recognized by Hedrich and Heinrich Himmler, who appointed him to lead the SD Scientific Museum of Jewish Affairs in Berlin to investigate “solutions to the Jewish question.” Eichmann visited Palestine in 1937 to discuss with Arabs possible Jewish emigration from Nazi Germany to the Middle East, but British authorities ordered him out of the country.
Nazi Career
Sent to Vienna to prepare for the Anschluss, the annexation of Austria by Germany, Eichmann was put in charge of the Central Office for Jewish Emigration. In that role, he had sole authority to issue exit permits for Jews from Austria, Czechoslovakia, and the old German Reich. After extorting their wealth in exchange for safe passage, Eichmann had about 150,000 Jews rounded up and forced them to emigrate. Early in 1939, he began deporting Jews to Poland and by October was made the special adviser on evacuating Jews and Poles.
Transferred to a Gestapo division of the Reich Main Security Office in December, Eichmann took over the office for Jewish affairs and evacuation of Jews from Germany and all occupied countries. He thereby became one of the most powerful men in the Third Reich. His Madagascar Plan of 1940, which would have deported European Jews to the African island of Madagascar, was never realized, but the concentration of Jews continued.
Beginning in Poland, which had the largest Jewish population in Europe, Heydrich and Eichmann implemented the forcible roundup of Jews into ghettos and labor camps, resulting in countless deaths through overcrowding, disease, and starvation. Complying with Adolf Hitler’s earlier orders that the German Reich be cleansed of Jews, Eichmann had already been organizing mass deportations of Jews from Germany and Bohemia to the East. With the purported claim by Heydrich that Hitler had ordered the physical extermination of the Jews, the definition of “cleansing” changed for Eichmann from organizing mass deportations to orchestrating mass murders.
Eichmann supervised the mass murder of Jews by SS Einsatz groups in occupied areas of the Soviet Union, where more than 300,000 Jews were gathered up, taken to secluded locations, lined up at open pits, shot, and buried. He personally inspected these mass executions but was ordered by Himmler, for reasons of efficiency and secrecy, to devise alternative methods of killing. Jews were then packed into trucks used as mobile gas units, killed by carbon monoxide, and buried. This method was also considered too messy, too inefficient, and too public. Thus, in late 1941 Hermann Göring told Heydrich to prepare for the “final solution” to the Jewish question.
On January 20, 1942, Eichmann helped Heydrich organize the Wannsee Conference near Berlin, where they and other Nazi leaders planned the extermination of the entire Jewish population. Eichmann was authorized by Heydrich to implement the “final solution” by coordinating the deportation of Jews from all over Europe to the gas chambers at Sobibor, Chelmno, Treblinka, and Auschwitz-Birkenau. He took special interest in Auschwitz and visited that site several times, even helping Rudolf Höss select the location of the gas chambers, approving the use of Zyklon-B, and personally witnessing the extermination processes.
While Germany occupied Hungary in 1944, Eichmann and the Gestapo “Special Section Commandos” organized the ghettoization and deportation of Hungary’s 750,000 Jews to Auschwitz. Eichmann personally expedited the process, resulting in more than 380,000 Jews “exterminated” at Auschwitz-Birkenau. At the end of 1944, Himmler ordered deportations to cease, but Eichmann ignored the order, rounded up an additional 50,000 Hungarian Jews, and forced them to march for eight days into Austria.
Legal Action and Outcome
Eichmann was captured after World War II but escaped from an American internment camp in 1946 and in 1950 fled to Argentina with the help of the SS underground. He lived near Buenos Aires for ten years under an assumed name, Ricardo Klement, but was eventually tracked down by Israeli Mossad secret agents, captured, and secretly smuggled out of Argentina to Israel. Once in Israel, Eichmann was brought to trial. When he addressed the court he used the defense that he was just obeying orders and that everyone was killing the Jews. On December 2, 1961, Eichmann was sentenced to death for crimes against the Jewish people and against humanity and on May 31, 1962, was executed by hanging.
Impact
Understanding Adolf Eichmann’s actions helps define the historical specificity of the Holocaust and genocide in general, which has come to include factors such as the role of systematic bureaucratization in genocides and the necessity to examine the limits of national sovereignties. Notions such as those that reveal that evil can become banal and part of one’s routine job function have alerted world society to the ongoing dangers of totalitarianism and extreme ideologies. It is no longer acceptable, post-Eichmann, to do one’s bureaucratic duty without greater awareness of the demands of personal and social responsibilities.
Bibliography
Aharoni, Zvi. Operation Eichmann: The Truth About the Pursuit, Capture, and Trial. Translated by Helmut Bögler. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1997. Firsthand account of Eichmann’s capture and interrogation in Argentina in 1960 by an Israeli Mossad agent.
Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Viking Press, 1963. Arendt’s account of the trial of Eichmann, which first appeared as a series of articles in The New Yorker in 1963. It deals with the trial itself, depicting Eichmann as a dutiful participant in the expulsion, concentration, and killing of Jews by German authorities.
Cesarani, David. Eichmann: His Life and Times. New York: Vintage Books, 2005. This thoroughly researched biography contests Arendt’s thesis of the banality of Eichmann. A key argument is that Eichmann’s training in ethnic cleansing in Poland in 1939-1940 prepared him to become a willing and efficient perpetrator of genocide.