Otto Adolf Eichmann (; German: [ˈʔɔtoː
ˈʔaːdɔlf ˈʔaɪ̯çman]; 19 March 1906
– 1 June 1962) was a German-Austrian Nazi
SS-Obersturmbannführer ("Senior Assault Unit
Leader") and one of the major organizers of
the Holocaust.
He was tasked by SS-Obergruppenführer ("Senior
Group Leader") 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.
He was captured by the Mossad in Argentina
on 11 May 1960 and subsequently found guilty
of war crimes in a widely publicised trial
in Jerusalem, Israel.
Eichmann was executed by hanging in 1962.
After an unremarkable school career, Eichmann
briefly worked for his father's mining company
in Austria, where the family had moved in
1914.
He worked as a travelling oil salesman beginning
in 1927, and joined both the Nazi Party and
the SS in 1932.
He returned to Germany in 1933, where he joined
the Sicherheitsdienst (SD; Security Service);
there he was appointed head of the department
responsible for Jewish affairs—especially
emigration, which the Nazis encouraged through
violence and economic pressure.
After the outbreak of the Second World War
in September 1939, Eichmann and his staff
arranged for Jews to be concentrated in ghettos
in major cities with the expectation that
they would be transported either farther east
or overseas.
He also drew up plans for a Jewish reservation,
first at Nisko in southeast Poland and later
in Madagascar, but neither of these plans
was ever carried out.
The Nazis began the invasion of the Soviet
Union in June 1941, and their Jewish policy
changed from emigration to extermination.
To co-ordinate planning for the genocide,
Heydrich, who was Eichmann's superior, hosted
the regime's administrative leaders at the
Wannsee Conference on 20 January 1942.
Eichmann collected information for him, attended
the conference, and prepared the minutes.
Eichmann and his staff became responsible
for Jewish deportations to extermination camps,
where the victims were gassed.
Germany invaded Hungary in March 1944, and
Eichmann oversaw the deportation of much of
the Jewish population.
Most of the victims were sent to Auschwitz
concentration camp, where about 75 per cent
were murdered upon arrival.
By the time that the transports were stopped
in July 1944, 437,000 of Hungary's 725,000
Jews had been killed.
Dieter Wisliceny testified at Nuremberg that
Eichmann told him he would "leap laughing
into the grave because the feeling that he
had five million people on his conscience
would be for him a source of extraordinary
satisfaction".After Germany's defeat in 1945,
Eichmann fled to Austria.
He lived there until 1950, when he moved to
Argentina using false papers.
Information collected by the Mossad, Israel's
intelligence agency, confirmed his location
in 1960.
A team of Mossad and Shin Bet agents captured
Eichmann and brought him to Israel to stand
trial on 15 criminal charges, including war
crimes, crimes against humanity, and crimes
against the Jewish people.
During the trial, he did not deny the Holocaust
or his role in organising it, but claimed
that he was simply following orders in a totalitarian
Führerprinzip system.
He was found guilty on all of the charges,
and was executed by hanging on 1 June 1962.
The trial was widely followed in the media
and was later the subject of several books,
including Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem,
in which Arendt coined the phrase "the banality
of evil" to describe Eichmann.
== Early life and education ==
Otto Adolf Eichmann, the eldest of five children,
was born in 1906 to a Calvinist Protestant
family in Solingen, Germany.
His parents were Adolf Karl Eichmann, a bookkeeper,
and Maria (née Schefferling), a housewife.
The elder Adolf moved to Linz, Austria in
1913 to take a position as commercial manager
for the Linz Tramway and Electrical Company,
and the rest of the family followed a year
later.
After the death of Maria in 1916, Eichmann's
father married Maria Zawrzel, a devout Protestant
with two sons.Eichmann attended the Kaiser
Franz Joseph Staatsoberrealschule (state secondary
school) in Linz, the same high school Adolf
Hitler had attended some 17 years before.
He played the violin and participated in sports
and clubs, including a Wandervogel woodcraft
and scouting group that included some older
boys who were members of various right-wing
militias.
His poor school performance resulted in his
father withdrawing him from the Realschule
and enrolling him in the Höhere Bundeslehranstalt
für Elektrotechnik, Maschinenbau und Hochbau
vocational college.
He left without attaining a degree and joined
his father's new enterprise, the Untersberg
Mining Company, where he worked for several
months.
From 1925 to 1927 he worked as a sales clerk
for the Oberösterreichische Elektrobau AG
radio company.
Next, between 1927 and early 1933, Eichmann
worked in Upper Austria and Salzburg as district
agent for the Vacuum Oil Company AG.During
this time, he joined the Jungfrontkämpfervereinigung,
the youth section of Hermann Hiltl's right-wing
veterans movement, and began reading newspapers
published by the Nazi Party (NSDAP).
The party platform included the dissolution
of the Weimar Republic in Germany, rejection
of the terms of the Treaty of Versailles,
radical antisemitism, and anti-Bolshevism.
They promised a strong central government,
increased Lebensraum (living space) for Germanic
peoples, formation of a national community
based on race, and racial cleansing via the
active suppression of Jews, who would be stripped
of their citizenship and civil rights.
== Early career ==
On the advice of family friend and local Schutzstaffel
(SS; protection squadron) leader Ernst Kaltenbrunner,
Eichmann joined the Austrian branch of the
NSDAP on 1 April 1932, member number 889,895.
His membership in the SS was confirmed seven
months later (SS member number 45,326).
His regiment was SS-Standarte 37, responsible
for guarding the party headquarters in Linz
and protecting party speakers at rallies,
which would often become violent.
Eichmann pursued party activities in Linz
on weekends while continuing in his position
at Vacuum Oil in Salzburg.A few months after
the Nazi seizure of power in Germany in January
1933, Eichmann lost his job due to staffing
cutbacks at Vacuum Oil.
The Nazi Party was banned in Austria around
the same time.
These events were factors in Eichmann's decision
to return to Germany.Like many other National
Socialists fleeing Austria in the spring of
1933, Eichmann left for Passau, where he joined
Andreas Bolek at his headquarters.
After he attended a training programme at
the SS depot in Klosterlechfeld in August,
Eichmann returned to the Passau border in
September, where he was assigned to lead an
eight-man SS liaison team to guide Austrian
National Socialists into Germany and smuggle
propaganda material from there into Austria.
In late December, when this unit was dissolved,
Eichmann was promoted to SS-Scharführer (squad
leader, equivalent to corporal).
Eichmann's battalion of the Deutschland Regiment
was quartered at barracks next door to Dachau
concentration camp.By 1934, Eichmann requested
transfer to the Sicherheitsdienst (SD; Security
Service) of the SS, to escape the "monotony"
of military training and service at Dachau.
Eichmann was accepted into the SD and assigned
to the sub-office on Freemasons, organising
seized ritual objects for a proposed museum.
After about six months, Eichmann was invited
by Leopold von Mildenstein to join his Jewish
Department, Section II/112 of the SD, at its
Berlin headquarters.
Eichmann's transfer was granted in November
1934.
He later came to consider this as his big
break.
He was assigned to study and prepare reports
on the Zionist movement and various Jewish
organisations.
He even learned a smattering of Hebrew and
Yiddish, gaining a reputation as a specialist
in Zionist and Jewish matters.
On 21 March 1935 Eichmann married Veronika
(Vera) Liebl (1909–93).
The couple had four sons: Klaus (b. 1936 in
Berlin), Horst Adolf (b. 1940 in Vienna),
Dieter Helmut (b. 1942 in Prague) and Ricardo
Francisco (b. 1955 in Buenos Aires).
Eichmann was promoted to SS-Hauptscharführer
(head squad leader) in 1936 and was commissioned
as an SS-Untersturmführer (second lieutenant)
the following year.Nazi Germany used violence
and economic pressure to encourage Jews to
leave Germany of their own volition; around
250,000 of the country's 437,000 Jews emigrated
between 1933 and 1939.
Eichmann travelled to British Mandatory Palestine
with his superior Herbert Hagen in 1937 to
assess the possibility of Germany's Jews voluntarily
emigrating to that country, disembarking with
forged press credentials at Haifa, whence
they travelled to Cairo in Egypt.
There they met Feival Polkes, an agent of
the Haganah, with whom they were unable to
strike a deal.
Polkes suggested that more Jews should be
allowed to leave under the terms of the Haavara
Agreement, but Hagen refused, surmising that
a strong Jewish presence in Palestine might
lead to their founding an independent state,
which would run contrary to Reich policy.
Eichmann and Hagen attempted to return to
Palestine a few days later, but were denied
entry after the British authorities refused
them the required visas.
They prepared a report on their visit, which
was published in 1982.In 1938, Eichmann was
posted to Vienna to help organise Jewish emigration
from Austria, which had just been integrated
into the Reich through the Anschluss.
Jewish community organisations were placed
under supervision of the SD and tasked with
encouraging and facilitating Jewish emigration.
Funding came from money seized from other
Jewish people and organisations, as well as
donations from overseas, which were placed
under SD control.
Eichmann was promoted to SS-Obersturmführer
(first lieutenant) in July 1938, and appointed
to the Central Agency for Jewish Emigration
in Vienna, created in August.
By the time he left Vienna in May 1939, nearly
100,000 Jews had left Austria legally, and
many more had been smuggled out to Palestine
and elsewhere.
== Second World War ==
=== 
Transition from emigration to deportation
===
Within weeks of the invasion of Poland on
1 September 1939, Nazi policy toward the Jews
changed from voluntary emigration to forced
deportation.
After discussions with Hitler in the preceding
weeks, on 21 September SS-Obergruppenführer
Reinhard Heydrich, head of the SD, advised
his staff that Jews were to be collected into
cities in Poland with good rail links to facilitate
their expulsion from territories controlled
by Germany, starting with areas that had been
incorporated into the Reich.
He announced plans to create a reservation
in the General Government (the portion of
Poland not incorporated into the Reich), where
Jews and others deemed undesirable would await
further deportation.
On 27 September 1939 the SD and Sicherheitspolizei
(comprising the Gestapo and Kripo police agencies)
were combined into the new SS-Reichssicherheitshauptamt
(RSHA; Reich Main Security Office), which
was placed under Heydrich's control.After
a posting in Prague to assist in setting up
an emigration office there, Eichmann was transferred
to Berlin in October 1939 to command the Central
Office for Jewish Emigration for the entire
Reich under Heinrich Müller, head of the
Gestapo.
He was immediately assigned to organise the
deportation of 70,000 to 80,000 Jews from
Ostrava district in Moravia and Katowice district
in the recently annexed portion of Poland.
On his own initiative, Eichmann also laid
plans to deport Jews from Vienna.
Under the Nisko Plan, Eichmann chose Nisko
as the location for a new transit camp where
Jews would be temporarily housed before being
deported elsewhere.
In the last week of October 1939, 4,700 Jews
were sent to the area by train and were essentially
left to fend for themselves in an open meadow
with no water and little food.
Barracks were planned but never completed.
Many of the deportees were driven by the SS
into Soviet-occupied territory and others
were eventually placed in a nearby labour
camp.
The operation soon was called off, partly
because Hitler decided the required trains
were better used for military purposes for
the time being.
Meanwhile, as part of Hitler's long-range
resettlement plans, hundreds of thousands
of ethnic Germans were being transported into
the annexed territories, and ethnic Poles
and Jews were being moved further east, particularly
into the General Government.
On 19 December 1939, Eichmann was assigned
to head RSHA Referat IV B4 (RSHA Sub-Department
IV-B4), tasked with overseeing Jewish affairs
and evacuation.
Heydrich announced Eichmann to be his "special
expert", in charge of arranging for all deportations
into occupied Poland.
The job entailed co-ordinating with police
agencies for the physical removal of the Jews,
dealing with their confiscated property, and
arranging financing and transport.
Within a few days of his appointment, Eichmann
formulated a plan to deport 600,000 Jews into
the General Government.
The plan was stymied by Hans Frank, governor-general
of the occupied territories, who was disinclined
to accept the deportees as to do so would
have a negative impact on economic development
and his ultimate goal of Germanisation of
the region.
In his role as minister responsible for the
Four Year Plan, on 24 March 1940 Hermann Göring
forbade any further transports into the General
Government unless cleared first by himself
or Frank.
Transports continued, but at a much slower
pace than originally envisioned.
From the start of the war until April 1941,
around 63,000 Jews were transported into the
General Government.
On many of the trains in this period, up to
a third of the deportees died in transit.
While Eichmann claimed at his trial to be
upset by the appalling conditions on the trains
and in the transit camps, his correspondence
and documents of the period show that his
primary concern was to achieve the deportations
economically and with minimal disruption to
Germany's ongoing military operations.Jews
were concentrated into ghettos in major cities
with the expectation that at some point they
would be transported further east or even
overseas.
Horrendous conditions in the ghettos—severe
overcrowding, poor sanitation, and a lack
of food—resulted in a high death rate.
On 15 August 1940, Eichmann released a memorandum
titled Reichssicherheitshauptamt: Madagaskar
Projekt (Reich Main Security Office: Madagascar
Project), calling for the resettlement to
Madagascar of a million Jews per year for
four years.
When Germany failed to defeat the Royal Air
Force in the Battle of Britain, the invasion
of Britain was postponed indefinitely.
As Britain still controlled the Atlantic and
her merchant fleet would not be at Germany's
disposal for use in evacuations, planning
for the Madagascar proposal stalled.
Hitler continued to mention the Plan until
February 1942, when the idea was permanently
shelved.
=== Wannsee Conference ===
From the start of the invasion of the Soviet
Union in June 1941, Einsatzgruppen (task forces)
followed the army into conquered areas and
rounded up and killed Jews, Comintern officials,
and ranking members of the Communist Party.
Eichmann was one of the officials who received
regular detailed reports of their activities.
On 31 July, Göring gave Heydrich written
authorisation to prepare and submit a plan
for a "total solution of the Jewish question"
in all territories under German control and
to co-ordinate the participation of all involved
government organisations.
The Generalplan Ost (General Plan for the
East) called for deporting the population
of occupied Eastern Europe and the Soviet
Union to Siberia, for use as slave labour
or to be murdered.Eichmann stated at his later
interrogations that Heydrich told him in mid-September
that Hitler had ordered that all Jews in German-controlled
Europe were to be killed.
The initial plan was to implement Generalplan
Ost after the conquest of the Soviet Union.
However, with the entry of the United States
into the war in December and the German failure
in the Battle of Moscow, Hitler decided that
the Jews of Europe were to be exterminated
immediately rather than after the war, which
now had no end in sight.
Around this time, Eichmann was promoted to
SS-Obersturmbannführer (lieutenant colonel),
the highest rank he achieved.To co-ordinate
planning for the proposed genocide, Heydrich
hosted the Wannsee Conference, which brought
together administrative leaders of the Nazi
regime on 20 January 1942.
In preparation for the conference, Eichmann
drafted for Heydrich a list of the numbers
of Jews in various European countries and
prepared statistics on emigration.
Eichmann attended the conference, oversaw
the stenographer who took the minutes, and
prepared the official distributed record of
the meeting.
In his covering letter, Heydrich specified
that Eichmann would act as his liaison with
the departments involved.
Under Eichmann's supervision, large-scale
deportations began almost immediately to extermination
camps at Bełżec, Sobibor, Treblinka and
elsewhere.
The genocide was code-named Operation Reinhard
in honour of Heydrich, who died in Prague
in early June from wounds suffered in an assassination
attempt.
Kaltenbrunner succeeded him as head of the
RSHA.Eichmann did not make policy, but acted
in an operational capacity.
Specific deportation orders came from Reichsführer-SS
Heinrich Himmler.
Eichmann's office was responsible for collecting
information on the Jews in each area, organising
the seizure of their property, and arranging
for and scheduling trains.
His department was in constant contact with
the Foreign Office, as Jews of conquered nations
such as France could not as easily be stripped
of their possessions and deported to their
deaths.
Eichmann held regular meetings in his Berlin
offices with his department members working
in the field and travelled extensively to
visit concentration camps and ghettos.
His wife, who disliked Berlin, resided in
Prague with the children.
Eichmann initially visited them weekly, but
as time went on, his visits tapered off to
once a month.
=== Hungary ===
Germany invaded Hungary on 19 March 1944.
Eichmann arrived the same day, and was soon
joined by top members of his staff and five
or six hundred members of the SD, SS, and
Sicherheitspolizei (SiPo; security police).
Hitler's appointment of a Hungarian government
more amenable to the Nazis meant that the
Hungarian Jews, who had remained essentially
unharmed until that point, would now be deported
to Auschwitz concentration camp to serve as
forced labour or be gassed.
Eichmann toured northeastern Hungary in the
last week of April and visited Auschwitz in
May to assess the preparations.
During the Nuremberg Trials, Rudolf Höss,
commandant of the Auschwitz concentration
camp, testified that Himmler had told Höss
to receive all operational instructions for
the implementation of the Final Solution from
Eichmann.
Round-ups began on 16 April, and from 14 May,
four trains of 3,000 Jews per day left Hungary
and travelled to the camp at Auschwitz II-Birkenau,
arriving along a newly built spur line that
terminated a few hundred metres away from
the gas chambers.
Between 10–25 per cent of the people on
each train were chosen as forced labourers;
the rest were killed within hours of arrival.
Under international pressure, the Hungarian
government halted deportations on 6 July 1944,
by which time over 437,000 of Hungary's 725,000
Jews had died.
In spite of the orders to stop, Eichmann personally
made arrangements for additional trains of
victims to be sent to Auschwitz on 17 and
19 July.In a series of meetings beginning
on 25 April, Eichmann met with Joel Brand,
a Hungarian Jew and member of the Relief and
Rescue Committee (RRC).
Eichmann later testified that Berlin had authorised
him to allow emigration of a million Jews
in exchange for 10,000 trucks equipped to
handle the wintry conditions on the Eastern
Front.
Nothing came of the proposal, as the Western
Allies refused to consider the offer.
In June 1944 Eichmann was involved in negotiations
with Rudolf Kasztner that resulted in the
rescue of 1,684 people, who were sent by train
to safety in Switzerland in exchange for three
suitcases full of diamonds, gold, cash, and
securities.Eichmann, resentful that Kurt Becher
and others were becoming involved in Jewish
emigration matters, and angered by Himmler's
suspension of deportations to the death camps,
requested reassignment in July.
At the end of August he was assigned to head
a commando squad to assist in the evacuation
of 10,000 ethnic Germans trapped on the Hungarian
border with Romania in the path of the advancing
Red Army.
The people they were sent to rescue refused
to leave, so instead the soldiers helped evacuate
members of a German field hospital trapped
close to the front.
For this Eichmann was awarded the Iron Cross,
Second Class.
Throughout October and November, Eichmann
arranged for tens of thousands of Jewish victims
to be forced to march, in appalling conditions,
from Budapest to Vienna, a distance of 210
kilometres (130 mi).On 24 December 1944, Eichmann
fled Budapest just before the Soviets completed
their encirclement of the capital.
He returned to Berlin, where he arranged for
the incriminating records of Department IV-B4
to be burned.
Along with many other SS officers who fled
in the closing months of the war, Eichmann
and his family were living in relative safety
in Austria when the war in Europe ended on
8 May 1945.
== After the Second World War ==
At the end of the war, Eichmann was captured
by the US and spent time in several camps
for SS officers using forged papers that identified
him as "Otto Eckmann".
He escaped from a work detail at Cham, Germany
when he realised that his actual identity
had been discovered.
He obtained new identity papers with the name
of "Otto Heninger" and relocated frequently
over the next several months, moving ultimately
to the Lüneburg Heath.
He initially got work in the forestry industry
and later leased a small plot of land in Altensalzkoth,
where he lived until 1950.
Meanwhile, former commandant of Auschwitz
Rudolf Höss and others gave damning evidence
about Eichmann at the Nuremberg trials of
major war criminals starting in 1946.In 1948,
Eichmann obtained a landing permit for Argentina
and false identification under the name of
"Ricardo Klement" through an organisation
directed by Bishop Alois Hudal, an Austrian
cleric then residing in Italy with known Nazi
sympathies.
These documents enabled him to obtain an International
Committee of the Red Cross humanitarian passport
and the remaining entry permits in 1950 that
would allow emigration to Argentina.
He travelled across Europe, staying in a series
of monasteries that had been set up as safe
houses.
He departed from Genoa by ship on 17 June
1950 and arrived in Buenos Aires on 14 July.Eichmann
initially lived in Tucumán Province, where
he worked for a government contractor.
He sent for his family in 1952, and they moved
to Buenos Aires.
He held a series of low-paying jobs until
finding employment at Mercedes-Benz, where
he rose to department head.
The family built a house at 14 Garibaldi Street
(now 6061 Garibaldi Street) and moved in during
1960.
He was extensively interviewed for four months
beginning in late 1956 by Nazi expatriate
journalist Willem Sassen with the intention
of producing a biography.
Eichmann produced tapes, transcripts, and
handwritten notes.
The memoirs were later used as the basis for
a series of articles that appeared in Life
and Stern magazines in late 1960.
== Capture ==
Several survivors of the Holocaust dedicated
themselves to finding Eichmann and other Nazis,
and among them was Jewish Nazi hunter Simon
Wiesenthal.
Wiesenthal learned from a letter shown to
him in 1953 that Eichmann had been seen in
Buenos Aires, and he passed along that information
to the Israeli consulate in Vienna in 1954.
Eichmann's father died in 1960, and Wiesenthal
made arrangements for private detectives to
surreptitiously photograph members of the
family; Eichmann's brother Otto was said to
bear a strong family resemblance and there
were no current photos of the fugitive.
He provided these photographs to Mossad agents
on 18 February.Lothar Hermann was also instrumental
in exposing Eichmann's identity; he was a
half-Jewish German who had emigrated to Argentina
in 1938.
His daughter Sylvia began dating a man named
Klaus Eichmann in 1956 who boasted about his
father's Nazi exploits, and Hermann alerted
Fritz Bauer, prosecutor-general of the state
of Hesse in West Germany.
He then sent his daughter on a fact-finding
mission; she was met at the door by Eichmann
himself, who said that he was Klaus's uncle.
Klaus arrived not long after, however, and
addressed Eichmann as "Father".
In 1957, Bauer passed along the information
in person to Mossad director Isser Harel,
who assigned operatives to undertake surveillance,
but no concrete evidence was initially found.Harel
dispatched Shin Bet chief interrogator Zvi
Aharoni to Buenos Aires on 1 March 1960, and
he was able to confirm the identity of the
fugitive after several weeks of investigation.
Argentina had a history of turning down extradition
requests for Nazi criminals, so rather than
filing a possibly futile request for extradition,
Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion made
the decision that Eichmann should be captured
and brought to Israel for trial.
Harel arrived in May 1960 to oversee the capture.
Mossad operative Rafi Eitan was named leader
of the eight-man team, most of whom were Shin
Bet agents.
The team captured Eichmann on 11 May 1960
near his home on Garibaldi Street in San Fernando,
Buenos Aires, an industrial community 20 kilometres
(12 mi) north of the centre of Buenos Aires.
The agents had arrived in April and observed
his routine for many days, noting that he
arrived home from work by bus at about the
same time every evening.
They planned to seize him when he was walking
beside an open field from the bus stop to
his house.
The plan was almost abandoned on the designated
day when Eichmann was not on the bus that
he usually took home, but he got off another
bus about half an hour later.
Mossad agent Peter Malkin engaged him, asking
him in Spanish if he had a moment.
Eichmann was frightened and attempted to leave,
but two more Mossad men came to Malkin's aid.
The three wrestled Eichmann to the ground
and, after a struggle, moved him to a car
where they hid him on the floor under a blanket.Eichmann
was taken to one of several Mossad safe houses
that had been set up by the team.
He was held there for nine days, during which
time his identity was double-checked and confirmed.
During these days, Harel tried to locate Josef
Mengele, the notorious Nazi doctor from Auschwitz,
as the Mossad had information that he was
also living in Buenos Aires.
He was hoping to bring Mengele back to Israel
on the same flight.
However, Mengele had already left his last
known residence in the city, and Harel was
unable to get any leads on where he had gone,
so the plans for his capture had to be abandoned.
Eitan told Haaretz in 2008 that they intentionally
made the decision not to pursue Mengele, reasoning
that to do so might jeopardise the Eichmann
operation.Near midnight on 20 May, Eichmann
was sedated by an Israeli doctor on the Mossad
team and dressed as a flight attendant.
He was smuggled out of Argentina aboard the
same El Al Bristol Britannia aircraft that
had carried Israel's delegation a few days
earlier to the official 150th anniversary
celebration of Argentina's independence from
Spain.
There was a tense delay at the airport while
the flight plan was approved, then the plane
took off for Israel, stopping in Dakar, Senegal
to refuel.
They arrived in Israel on 22 May, and Ben-Gurion
announced Eichmann's capture to the Knesset
the following afternoon.
In Argentina, the news of the abduction was
met with a violent wave of antisemitism carried
out by far-right elements, including the Tacuara
Nationalist Movement.Argentina requested an
urgent meeting of the United Nations Security
Council in June 1960, after unsuccessful negotiations
with Israel, as they regarded the capture
as a violation of their sovereign rights.
In the ensuing debate, 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".
On 23 June, the Council passed Resolution
138 which agreed that Argentine sovereignty
had been violated and requested that Israel
should make reparations.
Israel and Argentina issued a joint statement
on 3 August, after further negotiations, admitting
the violation of Argentinian sovereignty but
agreeing to end the dispute.
The Israeli court determined that the circumstances
of his capture had no bearing on the legality
of his trial.US Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA) documents declassified in 2006 show
that the capture of Eichmann caused alarm
at the CIA and West German Bundesnachrichtendienst
(BND).
Both organisations had known for at least
two years that Eichmann was hiding in Argentina,
but they did not act because it did not serve
their interests in the Cold War to do so.
Both were concerned about what Eichmann might
say in his testimony about West German national
security advisor Hans Globke, who had coauthored
several antisemitic Nazi laws, including the
Nuremberg Laws.
The documents also revealed that both agencies
had used some of Eichmann's former Nazi colleagues
to spy on European Communist countries.
== Trial ==
Eichmann was taken to a fortified police station
at Yagur in Israel, where he spent nine months.
The Israelis were unwilling to take him to
trial based solely on the evidence in documents
and witness testimony, so the prisoner was
subject to daily interrogations, the transcripts
of which totalled over 3,500 pages.
The interrogator was Chief Inspector Avner
Less of the national police.
Using documents provided primarily by Yad
Vashem and Nazi hunter Tuviah Friedman, Less
was often able to determine when Eichmann
was lying or being evasive.
When additional information was brought forward
that forced Eichmann into admitting what he
had done, Eichmann would insist he had no
authority in the Nazi hierarchy and was only
following orders.
Inspector Less noted that Eichmann did not
seem to realise the enormity of his crimes
and showed no remorse.
His pardon plea, released in 2016, did not
contradict this: "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 wrote.
"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 11
April 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 organisation.
The trial was presided over by three judges:
Moshe Landau, Benjamin Halevy and Yitzhak
Raveh.
The chief prosecutor was Israeli Attorney
General Gideon Hausner, assisted by Deputy
Attorney General Gabriel Bach and Tel Aviv
District Attorney Yaakov Bar-Or.
The defence team consisted of German lawyer
Robert Servatius, legal assistant Dieter Wechtenbruch,
and Eichmann himself.
As foreign lawyers had no right of audience
before Israeli courts at the time of Eichmann's
capture, Israeli law was modified to allow
those facing capital charges to be represented
by a non-Israeli lawyer.
In an Israeli cabinet meeting shortly after
Eichmann's capture, Justice Minister Pinchas
Rosen stated "I think that it will be impossible
to find an Israeli lawyer, a Jew or an Arab,
who will agree to defend him", and thus a
foreign lawyer would be necessary.The Israeli
government arranged for the trial to have
prominent media coverage.
Capital Cities Broadcasting Corporation of
the United States obtained exclusive rights
to videotape the proceedings for television
broadcast.
Many major newspapers from all over the globe
sent reporters and published front-page coverage
of the story.
The trial was held at the Beit Ha'am (today
known as the Gerard Behar Center), an auditorium
in central Jerusalem.
Eichmann sat inside a bulletproof glass booth
to protect him from assassination attempts.
The building was modified to allow journalists
to watch the trial on closed-circuit television,
and 750 seats were available in the auditorium
itself.
Videotape was flown daily to the United States
for broadcast the following day.The prosecution
case was presented over the course of 56 days,
involving hundreds of documents and 112 witnesses
(many of them Holocaust survivors).
Hausner's intention was to not only demonstrate
Eichmann's guilt but to present material about
the entire Holocaust, thus producing a comprehensive
record.
Hausner's opening address began, "It is not
an individual that is in the dock at this
historic trial and not the Nazi regime alone,
but anti-Semitism throughout history."
Defence attorney Servatius repeatedly tried
to curb the presentation of material not directly
related to Eichmann, and was mostly successful.
In addition to wartime documents, material
presented as evidence included tapes and transcripts
from Eichmann's interrogation and Sassen's
interviews in Argentina.
In the case of the Sassen interviews, only
Eichmann's hand-written notes were admitted
into evidence.
Some of the evidence submitted by the prosecution
took the form of depositions made by leading
Nazis.
The defence demanded that the men should be
brought to Israel so that the defence's right
to cross-examination would not be abrogated.
But Hausner, in his role as Attorney General,
declared that he would be obliged to have
any war criminals who entered Israel arrested.
The prosecution proved that Eichmann had visited
places where exterminations had taken place,
including Chełmno extermination camp, Auschwitz,
and Minsk (where he witnessed a mass shooting
of Jews), and therefore was aware that the
deportees were being killed.The defence next
engaged in a lengthy direct examination of
Eichmann.
Observers such as Moshe Pearlman and Hannah
Arendt have remarked on Eichmann's ordinariness
in appearance and flat affect.
In his testimony throughout the trial, Eichmann
insisted he had no choice but to follow orders,
as he was bound by an oath of loyalty to Hitler—the
same superior orders defence used by some
defendants in the 1945–1946 Nuremberg trials.
Eichmann asserted that the decisions had been
made not by him, but by Müller, Heydrich,
Himmler, and ultimately Hitler.
Servatius also proposed that decisions of
the Nazi government were acts of state and
therefore not subject to normal judicial proceedings.
Regarding the Wannsee Conference, Eichmann
stated that he felt a sense of satisfaction
and relief at its conclusion.
As a clear decision to exterminate had been
made by his superiors, the matter was out
of his hands; he felt absolved of any guilt.
On the last day of the examination, he stated
that he was guilty of arranging the transports,
but he did not feel guilty for the consequences.Throughout
his cross-examination, prosecutor Hausner
attempted to get Eichmann to admit he was
personally guilty, but no such confession
was forthcoming.
Eichmann admitted to not liking the Jews and
viewing them as adversaries, but stated that
he never thought their annihilation was justified.
When Hausner produced evidence that Eichmann
had stated in 1945 that "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 said he meant "enemies of the Reich"
such as the Soviets.
During later examination by the judges, he
admitted he meant the Jews, and said the remark
was an accurate reflection of his opinion
at the time.The trial adjourned on 14 August,
and the verdict was read on 12 December.
Eichmann was convicted on 15 counts of crimes
against humanity, war crimes, crimes against
the Jewish people, and membership in a criminal
organisation.
The judges declared him not guilty of personally
killing anyone and not guilty of overseeing
and controlling the activities of the Einsatzgruppen.
He was deemed responsible for the dreadful
conditions on board the deportation trains
and for obtaining Jews to fill those trains.
In addition to being found guilty of crimes
against Jews, he was convicted for crimes
against Poles, Slovenes and Gypsies.
He was found guilty of membership in three
organisations that had been declared criminal
at the Nuremberg trials: the Gestapo, the
SD, and the SS.
When considering the sentence, the judges
concluded that Eichmann had not merely been
following orders, but believed in the Nazi
cause wholeheartedly and had been a key perpetrator
of the genocide.
On 15 December 1961, Eichmann was sentenced
to death by hanging.
=== Appeals and execution ===
Eichmann's defence team appealed the verdict
to the Israeli Supreme Court.
The appeal was heard by a five-judge Supreme
Court panel consisting of Supreme Court President
Yitzhak Olshan, who presided over the hearings,
and judges Shimon Agranat, Moshe Zilberg,
Yoel Zussman, and Alfred Witkon.
The defence team mostly relied on legal arguments
about Israel's jurisdiction and the legality
of the laws under which Eichmann was charged.
Appeal hearings took place between 22 and
29 March 1962.
Eichmann's wife Vera flew to Israel and saw
him for the last time at the end of April.
On 29 May, the Supreme Court rejected the
appeal and upheld the District Court's judgement
on all counts.
Eichmann immediately petitioned Israeli President
Yitzhak Ben-Zvi for clemency.
The content of his letter and other trial
documents were made public on 27 January 2016.
In addition, Servatius submitted a request
for clemency to Ben-Zvi and petitioned for
a stay of execution pending his planned appeals
for extradition to the West German government.
Eichmann's wife and brothers also wrote to
Ben-Zvi requesting clemency.
Prominent people such as Hugo Bergmann, Pearl
S. Buck, Martin Buber, and Ernst Simon spoke
up on his behalf.
Ben-Gurion called a special cabinet meeting
to resolve the issue.
The cabinet decided not to recommend to President
Ben-Zvi that Eichmann be granted clemency,
and Ben-Zvi rejected the clemency petition.
At 8:00 p.m. on 31 May, Eichmann was informed
that his final appeal had been denied.Eichmann
was hanged at a prison in Ramla hours later.
The hanging, scheduled for midnight at the
end of 31 May, was slightly delayed and thus
took place a few minutes past 12:00 a.m. on
1 June 1962.
The execution was attended by a small group
of officials, four journalists and the Canadian
clergyman William Lovell Hull, who had been
his spiritual counselor while in prison.
His last words were reported to be
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.
Rafi Eitan, who accompanied Eichmann to the
hanging, claimed in 2014 to have heard him
later mumble "I hope that all of you will
follow me", making those his final words.Within
hours Eichmann's body had been cremated, and
his ashes scattered in the Mediterranean Sea,
outside Israeli territorial waters, by an
Israeli Navy patrol boat.
=== Aftermath ===
The trial and the surrounding media coverage
sparked renewed interest in wartime events,
and the resulting increase in publication
of memoirs and scholarly works helped raise
public awareness of the Holocaust.
The trial received widespread coverage by
the press in West Germany, and many schools
added material studying the issues to their
curricula.
In Israel, the testimony of witnesses at the
trial led to a deeper understanding of the
impact of the Holocaust on survivors, especially
among younger citizens who had never suffered
state-sponsored oppression.The use of "Eichmann"
as an archetype stems from Hannah Arendt's
notion of the "banality of evil".
Arendt, a political theorist who reported
on Eichmann's trial for The New Yorker, described
Eichmann in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem
as the embodiment of the "banality of evil",
as she thought he appeared to have an ordinary
personality, displaying neither guilt nor
hatred.
In his 1988 book Justice, Not Vengeance, Wiesenthal
said: "The world now understands the concept
of 'desk murderer'.
We know that one doesn't need to be fanatical,
sadistic, or mentally ill to murder millions;
that it is enough to be a loyal follower eager
to do one's duty."
The term "little Eichmanns" became a pejorative
term for bureaucrats charged with indirectly
and systematically harming others.In her 2011
book Eichmann Before Jerusalem, based largely
on the Sassen interviews and Eichmann's notes
made while in exile, Bettina Stangneth argues
instead that Eichmann was an ideologically
motivated antisemite and lifelong committed
Nazi who intentionally built a persona as
a faceless bureaucrat for presentation at
the trial.
Prominent historians such as Christopher Browning,
Deborah Lipstadt, Yaacov Lozowick, and David
Cesarani reached a similar conclusion, that
Eichmann was not the unthinking bureaucratic
functionary that Arendt believed him to be.Eichmann's
youngest son Ricardo says he is not resentful
toward Israel for executing his father.
He does not agree that his father's "following
orders" argument excuses his actions and notes
how his father's lack of remorse caused "difficult
emotions" for the Eichmann family.
Ricardo is now a professor of archaeology
at the German Archaeological Institute.The
filming of the trial by producer Milton Fruchtman
and blacklisted television director Leo Hurwitz
was the subject of the 2015 UK television
film The Eichmann Show, featuring Martin Freeman
and Anthony LaPaglia.
The film intercuts dramatic scenes with historical
footage from the trial.
== See also ==
Desk murderer
Glossary of Nazi Germany
List of Nazi Party leaders and officials
List of people who disappeared
List of SS personnel
"Little Eichmanns
