The man known to history as Adolf Eichmann
was born as Otto Adolf Eichmann on the 19th of March 1906 in the town of Solingen in the
region of North Rhine-Westphalia in north-western Germany. His father was Adolf Karl Eichmann, the head
of a Calvinist Protestant household and a book-keeper. As such the young Adolf was born into a middle
class, fairly typical German family in this region of the country, at the height of the
Second German Reich, the name given to Germany from its foundation in 1871, through to its
demise at the end of the First World War. His mother was Maria Eichmann, but her maiden
name was Schefferling. She would die in 1916, when Adolf was just
ten years of age, and as a consequence, much of his early life and teenage years were spent
with Marie Zawrzel as his stepmother, when Adolf’s father re-married shortly after
the death of his first wife. Adolf’s early years were marked by a fairly
nomadic existence. In 1913, seven years after his birth, Adolf’s
father had taken up a job in Austria, working for the Linz Tramway and Electrical Company,
though the family did not move to join him until 1914, in part owing to the outbreak
of the First World War across Europe that summer. And it was following this move that Adolf’s
biological mother died and Marie Zawrzel became his stepmother. Marie was a devout Protestant and Eichmann
would henceforth spend his teenage years in a deeply religious household. While in Austria, Eichmann attended Kaiser
Franz Joseph secondary school, where, along with a traditional education, he also learned
to play the violin and joined the school’s Wandervogel group. These were similar to modern-day scout groups,
in that they involved hiking and other activities in rural settings, but the Wandervogel movement,
which had emerged in Germany and Austria in the late nineteenth century, were considerably
more ideological, in that the Wandervogel movement was set up as a reaction, to what
was deemed to be, the overt industrialisation of Central Europe, and the abandonment of
traditional ‘German’ values. This activity might have been instrumental
in the development in Eichmann of a desire to create an idyllic, and allegedly pure ‘German’
culture in Central Europe, many years later. The young Eichmann was growing up in a region
and wider Central Europe which had experienced enormous tumult during the 1910s, which persisted
into the 1920s. From the late nineteenth century onwards,
the great European powers had been increasingly divided into two armed camps, one led by Britain,
France and Russia, and the other primarily composed of Germany and the Austro-Hungarian
Empire. In 1914, these tensions erupted into outright
war, although the First World War might also be said to have been driven by a wide range
of other issues, such as rampant nationalism and economic imbalances throughout the continent. This first global conflagration lasted four
years. Its most apocalyptic moments played out on
the Western Front and its trenches in northern France. And when it finally ended in 1918, when Eichmann
was on the cusp of his teenage years, Germany was the primary loser, and as Britain and
France imposed a very harsh set of peace terms, under the Treaty of Versailles, resentment
within Germany grew in the early 1920s about what had happened. This resentment was even leading to the emergence
of belligerent groups, which were willing to contemplate armed insurrection in countries
like Germany, none more so, than the National Socialist German Workers Party, or Nazi, Party,
which was led by Adolf Hitler and which attempted a coup in Bavaria in 1923. This atmosphere of political tension was the
one in which Eichmann would enter his early adult years. Having repeatedly proved himself to be a poor
student, Eichmann had not only left Kaiser Franz Joseph secondary school early, but also
several further schools, which he then entered, including some vocational schools. He was in favour of leaving and gladly elected
to join the burgeoning family business. In the mid-1920s, Adolf’s father had gone
into enterprise on his own and had set up the Untersberg Mining Company. The 1920s were a time of remarkable economic
growth throughout Europe and North America and the Eichmanns had entered business, in
the belief that they too could strike it rich. Now Eichmann joined his father there in 1924,
but the association with the family business would prove short-lived and by 1925, young
Adolf was working as a clerk at the offices of an Austrian radio company. He later moved on to work with the Vacuum
Oil Company in Austria, a major American oil company, which in 1931, while Eichmann was
still working there, would merge with Standard Oil, at one time the largest petroleum producer
in the world. Thus, throughout his early 20s, there is the
façade of Eichmann being a fairly banal figure, a German émigré to Austria working various
office jobs at major companies. Nevertheless, while this is the figure that
Eichmann’s employment history reveals, his private life and his political affiliations
throughout the late 1920s and early 1930s reveal something quite different. While working at the Vacuum Oil Company, the
young Eichmann had joined the youth wing of the Frontkämpfervereinigung, or Front Fighters’
Union as it was known, a right wing militia movement which had been established by Hermann
Hiltl, a former Austrian army officer who, like the leaders of the Nazi movement in Germany,
such as Adolf Hitler, himself a native Austrian, had become extremely disaffected by the terms
of the Treaty of Versailles which had brought the First World War to an end. Moreover, Hiltl’s movement was closely tied
to Hitler’s Nazi movement in Germany, in that they embraced both fascism and Pan-Germanism,
the idea that the German-speaking people of Central Europe and those that espoused German
culture should join together politically. The party also espoused the idea of acquiring
living-room or Lebensraum, as it was termed, in eastern Europe, for German people, by seizing
it from the Slavic peoples of the region. And perhaps most significantly the movement
was highly opposed to the presence of Europe’s Jews in Central Europe. This Anti-Semitic stance would come to profoundly
influence Eichmann’s political views. In 1933 the political atmosphere throughout
Central Europe changed considerably, in ways which had highly significant implications
for the continent. Early that year, Adolf Hitler was elected
Chancellor of Germany and the Nazis rose to power in the country. Although they had been a negligible political
grouping in Germany until the late 1920s, the Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression
which followed it, had profoundly impacted on the German economy, paving the way for
the ascent of extremist political parties such as that of National Socialism. Eventually Hitler and his followers were able
to leverage the support of approximately 35% of German voters to acquire absolute power
throughout Germany. They would quickly turn the country into a
one-party dictatorship. And the offshoot of this in Austria, was efforts
by the Austrian government to crack down on movements within the country which were affiliated
with the Nazis in Germany. In 1932 Eichmann had joined the Austrian branch
of the Nazi Party, as well as the SS or Schutzstaffel, a paramilitary wing of the Nazi movement. But these would be banned in Austria just
months later, following the ascent of Hitler and his party to power to the north, the Austrian
government rightly fearing the implications of a foreign power having political branches
in their country. The banning of the Nazi movement in Austria
was significant for Eichmann’s next moves. In the weeks that followed the prohibition
of the Austrian Nazis, one of the leaders of the movement in the country, Andreas Bolek,
crossed over the border into Germany and began establishing a kind of Austrian Nazi Party
in exile, with operations being run from Munich and Passau. Eichmann now took part in this exodus and
was living in Passau by the autumn of 1933. Additionally, he was quickly in command of
a small team of SS members, operating from the Austrian border. Much of the work he was undertaking at this
early stage, involved the distribution of leaflets and other propaganda items. The goals of this were multiple. One was to rebuild the Nazi Party in Austria,
but others involved fostering closer ties between Germany and Austria, with the ultimate
goal of uniting the two countries and developing a similar political programme in both, one
which would create a powerful Pan-German state spanning Central Europe and free of the vestiges
of Bolshevism, socialism and the Jewish people. And this is all very telling, as later in
his life, Eichmann would claim he was not an ideological Nazi, but here in 1933, he
was willing to abandon his adopted homeland in Austria, to take up the Nazi cause in Germany. Curiously, while he was stationed in southern
Germany at this time, Eichmann was living near to Dachau Concentration Camp, which had
been opened near Munich on the 22nd of March 1933, as soon as the Nazis attained power,
for the holding of political prisoners. He would become intimately familiar with the
working of the concentration camps in the years that followed. However, he was quickly being moved to different
stations. In 1934 he was moved to a branch of the SS
called the SD or Sicherheitsdienst, the security service of the SS, the first director of which
was Reinhard Heydrich, a figure with whom Eichmann would become closely tied in the
years that followed. Heydrich was a brutal individual, one whom
Hitler would later claim had no heart. While originally at the SD, Eichmann was assigned
to study certain aspects of movements, such as those of the Freemasons, the masonic fraternity
which had spread widely, over Europe in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In this role Eichmann was charged with developing
exhaustive information on all masonic lodges and members throughout the country, work which
would highlight his bureaucratic efficiency at locating people and cataloguing their movements,
traits which would be central to his later activities during the war. Increasingly, though, in the mid-1930s, Eichmann
was being assigned to positions working on the Nazi state’s policies towards its Jewish
communities. One of the central tenets of National Socialism,
was its rabid antipathy towards the Jewish people, an Anti-Semitism which gave way to
palpable hatred in the pages of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, or My Struggle, a two-part diatribe
which he published in the 1920s as part biography, part political manifesto. The tangible oppression of Germany’s Jews
began, as soon as they attained power in 1933. Much of this was enshrined as the Nuremburg
Laws of 1935. These essentially removed the citizenship
of Germany’s Jews and introduced wide-sweeping laws against everything from Jews having sexual
relations with non-Jewish Germans, to banning German Jews from hiring non-Jews of certain
ages. The overall idea was to reduce German Jews
to a lower social and economic status within Nazi Germany. It would all culminate on the 9th of November
1938 when a huge wave of attacks against Jewish people and Jewish businesses were carried
out all over Germany. The Kristallnacht, or Night of the Broken
Glass as it has become known, resulted in the deaths of several hundred people and the
imposing of tens of millions of Reichsmarks of damage on Jewish businesses and properties. Eichmann was not central to Kristallnacht,
but he was highly critical of the emergence of another branch of the Nazi state’s Jewish
policy. At this early date in the rule of Hitler and
his followers, the Nazis were still reluctant to simply attack or murder Jews. And there was still a desire to adhere to
international law in this respect. But from quite early on, it was realised that
different methods could be used to remove German Jews from the country, particularly
forced or voluntary migration. Some of this could involve pressurising German
Jews through economic measures, to leave of their own volition, while others revolved
around the longstanding idea of European Jews finding a new region in the Middle East to
create their own state, where they could avoid the latent Anti-Semitic sentiment, which prevailed
not just in Germany, but virtually everywhere across the continent to varying degrees. And in particular, ever since the late nineteenth
century, many individuals had been viewing Palestine and the surrounding regions, the
traditional Biblical homeland of the Jewish people, as a place where a new state could
be established for Europe’s Jews. And now the Nazi state considered whether
they could encourage this movement through a mixture of coercion and incentives. Eichmann became central to these efforts. In 1937 he travelled to the Middle East, a
region which had come under the control of Britain and France, after the end of the First
World War and the collapse of the Ottoman Turkish Empire, which had previously ruled
there. Here he found a thriving Jewish community
in British mandated Palestine and the Nazi state’s efforts to encourage migration to
the region increased in the months that followed. This was in keeping with the Haavara Agreement,
an agreement which had been made with certain Jewish groups and the Nazi state in 1933,
which would allow for the fluid migration of German Jews to Palestine. And as a result of this and the more brutal
developments within Germany, such as Kristallnacht and the Nuremburg Laws, some 250,000 of Germany’s
437,000 Jews emigrated from the country between the Nazis’ seizure of power in 1933 and
mid-1939. Meanwhile Eichmann, had also started a family
in the mid-1930s. On the 21st of March 1935 he married Veronika
or Vera Liebl. Four sons would follow in all, three while
still in Europe, Klaus in 1936, Horst Adolf in 1940 and Dieter in 1942. In addition, in 1937, Eichmann abandoned the
church, despite the religious fervour which his stepmother had brought to their home back
in Austria. In 1938 a further shift occurred for Eichmann. Germany had united with Austria in March 1938,
the so-called Anschluss or Union of Austria and Germany into a greater German state. And following this, Eichmann was re-posted
to the country which had been his adopted home for so much of his youth. Here he was charged with trying to encourage
and facilitate the migration of Jews from Austria, to elsewhere in Europe, Palestine
or anywhere else outside of Nazi-controlled territory. And bizarrely much of this work involved the
co-opting of local Jewish community groups and other organisations to facilitate this
work. Then, in August 1938, the Central Agency for
Jewish Emigration in Vienna was established, as a sub-department of the SD, in order to
oversee the voluntary or semi-forced emigration of Austrian Jews from the country. Eichmann was appointed to a senior position
within the new agency. It would prove extremely effective in its
task and so efficient were Eichmann and his colleagues in this Agency adjudged to be,
in the months that followed, that when similar policies were adopted in Western and Eastern
Europe in later years, nearly identical offices were set up which utilised very similar methods
as had been employed in Vienna, from 1938 onwards. While all of this was occurring, Europe was
drifting towards war, driven almost entirely by the Nazi regime within which Eichmann had
become a key figure. The terms of the Treaty of Versailles, which
had brought the First World War to an end, had dictated that Germany would be restricted
to a small military force going forward, but no sooner than the Nazi regime had come to
power in 1933, Hitler began rebuilding the German armed forces and air-force, known as
the Luftwaffe, under Hermann Goring. Following which, a major breach of the terms
of Versailles was seen, with the remilitarisation of the Rhineland, on the 7th of March 1936,
the area of western Germany neighbouring France and the Low Countries which was supposed to
remain demilitarised. Worse was to follow. As we have seen, in March 1938, the Nazi state
effectively annexed Austria into a greater Germany, while the following autumn Hitler’s
regime began applying pressure on the European powers for the country to be allowed to annex
the large part of Czechoslovakia known as the Sudetenland. Then by mid-1939, the appeasement of Germany
by Britain and France had succeeded only in forming Czechoslovakia and Hungary into puppet
regimes of Nazi Germany. Finally, when Germany invaded Poland on the
1st of September 1939, the two western powers declared war in response on the 3rd of September. The Second World War had commenced. No sooner had the war extended eastwards into
Poland and other occupied regions such as Czechoslovakia than the Nazi state’s policy
programme towards the Jews of these areas extended commensurately eastwards. Indeed the only difference was, that owing
to the concentration of Ashkenazic Jews in these areas, the scale of such oppressive
policies would have to be increased in line with Hitler and the Nazis’ policies. And Eichmann would prove central to these. After a brief posting in the Czech capital
Prague, he was re-assigned to Berlin where he was now placed in command of the Reichszentrale
für Jüdische Auswanderung, meaning the Reich Central Office for Jewish Emigration. Here Eichmann was subordinate to only one
individual, Heinrich Muller, the head of the Gestapo, the most brutal branch of the German
secret services. And there is no doubting that Eichmann was
appointed to this position at this time, because his intense Anti-Semitic fervour was realised. His assignments in the weeks and months that
followed emphasise this. For instance, he was placed in charge of specific
activities which involved oversight of the deportation of tens of thousands of Jews from
specific parts of newly conquered Eastern Europe, into either concentration camps or
Jewish ghettos, such as that which was established in Warsaw, the Polish capital, shortly after
the conquest of the country. A sign of his increasing prominence within
the Nazi state’s response to the Jewish question was seen in December 1939, when Eichmann
was appointed as Obersturmbannführer to head the Reich Security Head Office, Referat IV
B4, a sub-department of the SD, which was responsible for Jewish affairs, migration
and movement within the newly conquered territories in Eastern Europe. And here Eichmann was sub-ordinate only to
Reynard Heydrich within the SD, indicating his ever increasing seniority within the Nazi
regime when it came to Jewish policy. Then, in the two years that followed, he was
responsible for various Anti-Semitic programmes, including the so-called Germanisation of Poland,
the migration and ghettoization of Eastern Europe’s Jews. Eichmann would later claim that he was appalled
by some of the conditions he witnessed in Poland for the region’s Jews, but this can
be dismissed entirely. There is evidence that within weeks of his
arrival into office in late 1939, he was planning the deportation and ghettoization of over
a half a million Jews in Poland. Indeed Eichmann appears to have only been
limited in his actions by competing attempts by other high-ranking Nazis, to take credit
for severe Anti-Jewish policies in Eastern Europe. At this stage in the war, the Nazis primarily
intended to resettle Europe’s Jews elsewhere outside of the continent, certainly to somewhere
which would not form part of the German Reich. It was not envisaged, though, at this early
time in the war, that the Nazis would mass murder millions of the continent’s Jewish
people. There were numerous plans for re-settlement
and Eichmann was soon central to these. One of these early plans for re-settlement
of Europe’s Jews, which gained increasing currency in the early months of the war, was
what is typically known as the Madagascar Plan. This envisaged the relocating of most of Europe’s
Jews to Madagascar, the large island in the Indian Ocean off the coast of East Africa. As ludicrous and perverse as the idea sounds
to modern ears, this was not an entirely new scheme when the Nazi High Command started
giving it sustained consideration in 1940. It had first been proposed as far back as
1878, when the German Orientalist, Paul de Lagarde, first wrote about it. And it had resurfaced many times in the decades
that followed, sometimes with the active involvement of Jewish groups, who wanted to explore the
feasibility of establishing the large island as a new homeland, where they could escape
the rabid Anti-Semitism and pogroms of Europe. As recently as 1937, the idea was under consideration
by the Polish government in association with the French. When the Madagascar Plan came under discussion
by the Nazis in 1940, Eichmann was central to considerations surrounding it. Indeed, he was in fact probably the single
most important figure within the Third Reich in this respect. On the 15th of August 1940, he presented a
memorandum to the Nazi high command, entitled Reichssicherheitshauptamt: Madagaskar Projekt,
meaning the Reich Security Main Office: Madagascar Project. The plan seemed feasible to Eichmann at this
time. Western Europe had just been conquered and
with Germany and Italy making rapid advances in North Africa and the Middle East, it was
believed that the Suez Canal would soon be captured, in turn opening the sea routes for
German passage to the Indian Ocean and Madagascar. Accordingly Eichmann called for the deportation
of one million Jews from Europe every year for four years. Following this, some debate ensued, as to
how exactly the island would subsequently be governed. Eichmann believed that the island should effectively
be a prison state, which would be run by the SS, though others such as Franz Rademacher,
a senior official in the Foreign Ministry argued that the Jews should be self-governing,
though the island should be cut off from contact with the wider outside world. These dystopian deliberations continued throughout
the autumn and winter of 1940 and into 1941. And yet it is important to remember that,
whatever the debate on the details might have been, a consensus was largely reached by 1941
that the Madagascar Plan would be the method of solving the co-called ‘Jewish Question’. And resort to it was only foiled by events
within the wider war. Britain could not be made to surrender in
1941 and then progress in North Africa stalled, blocking the Nazis from acquiring access to
the Suez Canal. Similarly, the Battle of the Atlantic also
entered in a stalemate. This was significant, as it had been intended
to use Britain’s merchant navy to undertake the transport of Europe’s Jews to the African
island, once the country was defeated. So, with these reverses, it increasingly became
implausible that the Madagascar Project could actually be implemented. This would prove fateful for the Jews of Europe. As Eichmann’s Madagascar Plan was effectively
shelved, the highest officials within the Nazi state increasingly began considering
more severe ways of addressing the ‘Jewish Question’. Such debates were underway throughout 1941,
as the Germans were making rapid advances into Soviet Russia and in the process, conquering
lands with hundreds of thousands of Jewish residents. It is generally understood that these deliberations
peaked and reached a conclusion at a conference, which was held in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee
on the 20th of January 1942. The Wannsee Conference was organised by Reinhard
Heydrich as the director of the SS’s security apparatus. Authorisation had been given to Heydrich to
organise such an event the previous autumn, when the Nazis were looking like they might
possibly win the war with a successful campaign against Soviet Russia. During that same movement, German army units
had committed widespread atrocities against Eastern European Jews and other groups. Then, in a hubristic fashion, believing the
war would end in victory, the administration called the conference at Wannsee, in order
to determine on a ‘Final Solution’ to the Jewish question. Chillingly, there was an added political imperative
to do so at the time, as the Nazis perceived it, the administration having determined,
that here were far too many people in Europe for the Nazis to feed. There were also plans in place at the time,
to simply starve thirty million of the Nazis’ new subjects in Eastern Europe to death, when
the region was brought fully under Nazi control. This was the context in which the conference,
that would initiate the Holocaust of Europe’s Jewish people, emerged. Eichmann’s role in the Wannsee Conference
was very considerable. In the weeks leading up to the conference,
he drafted a series of talking points and points for deliberation for Heydrich to use
during the conference. These included details which can only have
been prepared by somebody with a keen awareness of what would follow. For instance, the memorandum contained lists
of the numbers of Jews in each European country, as well as details of how extensive the level
of emigration and re-settlement from each of these regions had been in recent years. Such a memo can only have had one purpose,
to demonstrate exactly how long any policy of forced or voluntary emigration would take,
to remove the Jewish people from Europe. Moreover, while Heydrich chaired the Wannsee
Conference and acted as its visible overseer, Eichmann essentially ran it from behind the
scenes, organising many different aspects, as well as overseeing the taking of minutes
and preparing documents for it and dealing with its aftermath. In so doing, he inadvertently provided a record
of his own complicity in the development of the Final Solution at Wannsee in January 1942. Though there can be no doubt that Hitler and
the upper echelons of the Nazi administration were ultimately responsible for the Holocaust,
figures such as Heydrich and Eichmann were absolutely central to it, in their own quite
significant ways. Eichmann’s central role in the Final Solution
and the Holocaust of Europe’s Jews which followed, continued following the Wannsee
Conference. The Final Solution called for the deportation
of millions of Jews to several dozen concentration camps or death camps throughout Central and
Eastern Europe, places whose names, such as Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka and Sobibor,
have become by-words for the horrors of twentieth-century fascism. Moreover, the programme of deportations was
known as Operation Reinhard after Heydrich, but his second in command during these proceedings,
was effectively Eichmann who acted as the main liaison between the various offices of
the SS, the SD and the other departments, which were involved in the deportations. Once they had arrived at these camps the Final
Solution essentially dictated, that most of the Jewish arrivals would be executed in gas
chambers. And this usually happened within hours of
first reaching a camp. The image we have of people being detained
for long periods of time, at places such as Treblinka is a rarefied one, and it was only
individuals who could be used as slave labour or who were useful in some other capacity,
who were able to survive long past their arrival at the Nazi death camps. Between 1942 and 1944 Eichmann was one of
the principle figures in organising the deportations to the camps. He was, for instance, charged with overseeing
the recording of the numbers of Jews in each area to be deported, as well as seizing whatever
remaining property they had, which was then confiscated by a Nazi administration which
was increasingly starved of resources as the war dragged on interminably. It was this role as an organiser, a bureaucrat
who did not control or develop policy, but who was mainly dealing with the implementation
of it, which would later allow Eichmann to present himself as nothing more than a bureaucrat,
one who was just as caught up in the machinery of the Nazi state, as any other individual. For instance, during this period one of the
tasks he was charged with, was organising the train schedule for the trains which transported
Europe’s Jews, from regions such as the Warsaw Ghetto to the death camps. On the surface of it, the organising of a
train schedule, if viewed in and of itself, is a rather banal activity, one which could
be viewed as harmless if the individual doing it was unaware of where the trains were going,
but there is no doubt that Eichmann knew precisely what the broader implications of his actions
were, for those who were being forced onto those same trains. A clearer example of his complicity in the
Third Reich’s crimes can be seen in 1944. Early that year, in response to secret overtures
from the Hungarian government to the Allies to negotiate a peace, Hitler ordered an invasion
of Hungary in March 1944. The country was quickly placed under direct
German administration and Eichmann was dispatched immediately to the region. During its period of self-government Hungary’s
Jews had remained largely unharmed by the Nazi state, but now under full German occupation,
the country’s three-quarters of a million Jews were in peril. In the six months that followed, Eichmann
was personally responsible for overseeing the Holocaust in Hungary. Throughout the summer of 1944, he organised
trains carrying as many as 3,000 Jews per day to Auschwitz, to be executed. And by the time the deportations were curtailed
in the late summer, over 400,000 Hungarian Jews had been killed. Even when orders were received to cease the
deportations, Eichmann overruled this and continued for some time. Other crimes included a forced death march
of tens of thousands of Jews from Budapest to Vienna, in the early winter of 1944, a
movement which Eichmann oversaw. And so, there can be no doubting his absolutely
central role to the Hungarian atrocities. There is other damning evidence of Eichmann’s
role in the Holocaust and his zealous participation in the same, from the final weeks of the conflict. In the final months of the engagement, as
the Russians advanced into Central Europe and the Anglophone Allies crossed the Rhineland,
orders were received to cease the deportation of Hungary’s Jews to the extermination camps. Many of the camp commanders and notable figures
within the Reich, fully aware of the repercussions which would now lie ahead, for what had been
done, were attempting to reduce the accusations which could be made against them. Eichmann, though, ignored these orders, and
in the areas under his command, the deportation of Jews to the camps continued in the final
months of the war. And then, in the very last days of the war,
when he was in Berlin, Eichmann is believed to have declared before a group of individuals,
that he considered the murder of five million of Europe’s Jewish community, to be a supposed
accomplishment of the war and one which he was actually proud to have played a part in. Given all of this, it is difficult to place
any credence on his later arguments that he was simply an administrator following out
the orders of his senior commanders. The end result of the Holocaust, which Eichmann
was central to orchestrating, was one of the bloodiest crimes ever committed. In the space of just over three years, between
the taking of the decision to implement the Final Solution in early 1942, to the final
weeks of the war in 1945, approximately six million of Europe’s Jews were murdered,
some of them in pogroms and massacres, but most by being deported to notorious death-camps
such as Auschwitz-Birkenau, where they were usually gassed to death within hours of arriving. Those who survived beyond this, were generally
used as slave labour, often until they were worked to death. As a result, in history, the Holocaust of
Europe’s Jews holds a singular position. While some events, such as the man-made famine
which incurred from Chairman Mao’s Great Leap Forward in China of the late 1950s and
early 1960s, resulted in significantly more loss of life, perhaps as much as sixty million
people in the case of the Great Leap Forward, much of this mortality was not pre-meditated. The Holocaust is unique for the planned, clinical
and barbaric manner in which it was decided upon, organised and executed. Adolf Eichmann was central to all three aspects;
the planning, the organisation and the execution of it. However, the crimes of Eichmann, Heydrich,
Hitler, Himmler and those many others who were responsible for orchestrating the Holocaust,
would not remain hidden for long. Even as the Final Solution was first being
implemented in 1942, the course of the war in Europe and further afield was shifting. After a series of stunning victories throughout
Europe between 1939 and 1941, the German war machine finally stalled in the snows of Russia
in the winter of 1941. And that same winter, the United States entered
the war directly on the Allies side, after an unprovoked attack on their Pacific Fleet
at Pearl Harbour in Hawaii. Then, during the course of 1942, the North
Africa campaign was effectively won by the Allies and Italian and German forces were
pushed out of Libya and Tunisia, opening the way for an Allied invasion of southern Italy,
through the island of Sicily in the summer of 1943. A last do-or-die struggle on the Eastern Front
was fought at the city of Stalingrad in the autumn and winter of 1942, but when the Russians
were victorious here, they began inexorably pushing the Germans back westwards and were
in Poland by late 1944. At the same time, the western Allies opened
a third front in Western Europe in France, in the summer of 1944. From this point, the Third Reich’s days
were numbered. It was now only a matter of time, before the
full extent of the atrocities committed by the Nazi regime across Europe, became known
to the wider world. While the British, US, Canadians and other
allies advanced towards the Rhineland and the Russians advanced into eastern Germany
in the winter of 1944 to 1945, the thoughts of many officials and commanders of camps
and offices involved in the Holocaust, inevitably turned to trying to cover up and conceal what
they had done. Consequently, in many instances, commanders
began destroying records or even attempting to disguise what had happened at the death
camps, particularly some of the small camps. Eichmann himself fled from Budapest to Berlin,
in late December 1944, shortly before the Soviets captured the Hungarian capital. When he arrived at the capital of the doomed
Reich, he immediately began overseeing the destruction of massive amounts of documentation
relating to the offices he had overseen in the past years, particularly those associated
with the Final Solution along with his role in it. However, in Eichmann’s case, this was something
of a futile endeavour. While some Nazi commanders might have been
able to disguise their role in the Holocaust through such destruction of records, there
could never have been a successful cover-up of Eichmann’s role. The final days of the Third Reich came in
the late spring of 1945, as the Russians encircled Berlin and the British and US came barrelling
through western and central Germany. Many of the German high command would remain
in Berlin, notably Hitler, who killed himself on the 30th of April in his Reich Chancellery
bunker, and Joseph Goebbels, his appointed successor, who then also committed suicide
the following day. With the Third Reich conquered and the leader
of the Nazi regime dead, Germany surrendered a week later, and the 8th of May officially
became known as Victory in Europe Day. By this time, Eichmann had already fled from
Berlin and was living with his family in the relative safety of Vienna, the Allies generally
having ignored Austria, until after the war. However, he was subsequently captured in Vienna,
but his real identity was covered up, by his use of forged papers which identified him
as Otto Eckmann. Overall, this was a chaotic time for the Allies,
as they attempted to sort through tens of thousands of individuals, to identify who
exactly was responsible for the Nazis’ going to war in the first place and for the atrocities
which had occurred in the death camps. Eichmann was eventually identified, but word
of this reached him before action was taken and he escaped from a labour detail in Germany
in 1946, the beginning of a long life of subterfuge. His first years in hiding were spent in Germany,
moving regularly between various parts of rural western and southern Germany under assumed
names. And throughout this time he would have been
acutely aware of the Allied war crimes tribunals, which were being held at the city of Nuremburg,
to prosecute the highest-ranking surviving members of the Nazi regime, notably Hermann
Goring, Rudolf Hess, Hans Frank and Albert Speer. Central to these proceedings, was an evaluation
of the complicity of these individuals in the Holocaust, something which Speer, essentially
an architect and engineer, was able to defend himself against. However, an individual such as Hans Frank,
who had overseen the General Government of Poland during the war, and had been responsible
not just for the Warsaw Ghetto, but also the subsequent deportations to the camps, could
never exonerate himself. He, like many others, was found guilty and
hanged in late 1946. And a similar fate awaited Eichmann if he
was ever captured. Unsurprisingly then, we see him flee from
Germany in the late 1940s, first to Italy and then from there to Buenos Aires in Argentina,
where he arrived in the summer of 1950 and began living under the assumed named of Ricardo
Klement. He would escape detection for another ten
years. Yet Eichmann would not escape justice forever
and his capture eventually came at the hands of Mossad. Mossad, which literally means ‘The Institute’,
from a wider Hebrew term for ‘The Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations’,
had been formed on the 13th of December 1949, shortly after the declaration of the Israeli
state. It was established as an umbrella organisation,
to manage a variety of different security and intelligence departments within the nascent
state of Israel. While today its operations have been expanded
to cover a very wide range of activities, one of its central missions in its early years,
was to gather intelligence on members of the Nazi regime who had managed to escape justice
in the mid-1940s. In the 1950s and into the early 1960s, much
of this work focused on South America and in particular Argentina, a country which had
a large community of individuals of German descent and where many members of the Nazi
regime had eventually fled in the aftermath of the war. It was as part of this work, that Eichmann
would finally be hunted down fifteen years after the end of the war, based to a considerable
extent on investigations undertaken by the famed Nazi hunter, Simon Wiesenthal. The mission to capture Eichmann involved five
Mossad agents, led by Shimon Ben Aharon. They entered Argentina undercover, in early
1960, where they received information about Eichmann’s whereabouts and the fact that
he was living under the name of Ricardo Klement. They also had information concerning the whereabouts
of Josef Mengele, a German SS doctor who had carried out horrific experiments at Auschwitz
during the war and who was living himself in Argentina in the late 1950s. The plan was to capture both Eichmann and
Mengele and bring them to justice. Information about Eichmann’s whereabouts
had been passed to Mossad by Wiesenthal, who had located Eichmann’s family home in Buenos
Aires, on Garibaldi Street in the city. It was near here that Mossad captured Eichmann,
on the 11th of May 1960, having observed the house and his actions for several days. As he approached his house, three of the Mossad
agents bundled him into a car and took him to a safe house. Conversely, the mission to capture Mengele
was less successful, as he had already received intelligence about his possible apprehension
and had fled to Brazil. Despite several extradition requests, he would
escape justice for the remainder of his life, right up to his death in 1979. Mossad were acting outside of their jurisdiction
in Argentina and without permission from the Argentine government. Accordingly, they kept a low profile for several
days after capturing Eichmann, during which time, they confirmed his identity. Having done so, they proceeded to smuggle
Eichmann out of the country, by drugging him and taking him on board a commercial air flight
dressed as a flight attendant. They finally arrived in Israel on the 22nd
of May, eleven days after Eichmann’s initial capture. There, the prime minister, David Ben-Gurion,
announced to the world, that one of the most notorious surviving Nazi war criminals had
finally been captured. Incredibly, though, this was not met with
the universal approval that one might have expected. The Argentine government, which for years
had turned a blind eye to its country being used as a refuge for Nazi war criminals in
hiding, objected to a violation of its sovereign territory because of Mossad having carried
out an illegal operation there, while several western countries, including the US and the
UK, were concerned about what Eichmann might say in his trial, about former members of
the Nazi regime who had been re-purposed after the war, to work for the western powers in
the burgeoning Cold War with Soviet Russia. Eichmann’s trial commenced on the 11th of
April 1961 and would last for nearly eight months, eventually terminating on the 15th
of December 1961. He was interrogated daily and surviving documentation
from the time, was cross-compared scrupulously with Eichmann’s own statements, in order
to be able to determine when he was lying and when he was telling the truth. Then, during his interrogation, Eichmann adamantly
proclaimed that he was not an anti-Semite. For instance, he claimed to have never read
Hitler’s rabidly anti-Semitic Mein Kampf, or other key anti-Jewish texts, such as the
Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, while he stated that he disagreed with many of the
anti-Semitic pieces which appeared in Nazi publications and periodicals such as Der Sturmer. Conversely, he claimed to have been a regular
reader of Jewish works and to have an interest and appreciation for Jewish culture itself,
noting that he had once been a subscriber to the Jewish periodical called the Encyclopaedia
Judaica, as well as having read Theodor Herzl’s The Jewish State, a work promoting the creation
of a Jewish state for European Jewry. Thus, one bizarre aspect of one of the architects
of the entire Final Solution, was to proclaim at his trial, that he had actually been a
supporter of Jewish culture in Europe. Eichmann sought to portray himself as simply
an obedient bureaucrat who was following orders, which had been handed down to him by his superiors. He denied he was responsible for any of the
mass killings and oversight of the deportations to the death camps. He further stated, that he had orders and
had to follow them, in a totalitarian state where one did not live long if one failed
to carry out those very same orders. Moreover, he noted that while he might have
been aware of the killings which were occurring at the camps, his role concerned the transport
of Europe’s Jews in certain areas under his control to other areas. And he even claimed to have been personally
uncomfortable at how the gas chambers worked when he was made aware of them, stating “I
was horrified. My nerves aren’t strong enough. I can’t listen to such things – such things
without their affecting me.” Then on one occasion when questioned on his
presence at a mass killing at one camp, he admitted to having been at the camp in question,
but testified that he had not looked in the chamber, that he had heard the screams and
that it so horrified him that he could not look at what was occurring. Thereafter he claimed to have tried to avoid
ever having to visit the camps themselves, while he admitted to his continuing role in
organising transport to the camps. Eichmann’s baseless arguments and pleading
of his innocence, earned him short shrift. Against his own arguments, the prosecution
was able to cite hundreds of documents which directly implicated Eichmann in the development
of the Final Solution and the mass deportation of Europe’s Jews to the extermination camps. Over a hundred witnesses, many of whom had
met or seen Eichmann during the war, were called to testify and the written depositions
of several Nazis who were in jail in Germany, were also presented to attest to his central
role in the development of the Final Solution and the organisation and implementation of
the Holocaust. But despite all of this, Eichmann continued
to argue his innocence, stating that he had simply carried out orders to implement a policy
which had been devised by others. He steadfastly refused to admit his guilt
and any expressions of remorse extended only to him claiming he was troubled by what had
happened, but did not believe he was ultimately responsible. His prosecutors were not convinced. On the 12th of December 1961 he was sentenced
to death by hanging, the first and only time the death penalty has ever been applied in
a case within the state of Israel. Eichmann did not accept the verdict without
resistance. The case was appealed to the Israeli Supreme
Court, the Beit HaMishpat HaElyon. And the five senior judges who made up the
Supreme Court bench, were presented with an argument which sought to avoid re-debating
the exact specifics of Eichmann’s life and crimes, but rather attempted to argue that
the German official’s trial was invalid, as Israel had no jurisdiction to try him on
the charges when and where it did. It is a telling indication of how limp Eichmann’s
defence of his past conduct was, that his team was forced to rely on such a legal technicality,
as their only means of being able to dispute the case. However, the Supreme Court was roundly unconvinced
of the legal basis for this claim and when the appeal was heard in late March 1962, it
was quickly dismissed. Then last ditch efforts by Eichmann to avoid
his fate, included an appeal to be extradited to West Germany, where he would most likely
serve out a life sentence, or for a grant of clemency, which would commute the death
sentence from the Israeli President Yitzhak Ben-Zvi. Yet none of these efforts succeeded and it
was reaffirmed in late May 1962 that Eichmann would be executed. Eichmann’s wife Vera was allowed to fly
to Israel to see him for the last time towards the end of April 1962. His execution was carried out on the 1st of
June, just hours after he learned, that the last appeals for clemency had been denied. Eichmann was hanged at Ramla Prison in the
small town of Ramla in Central Israel. And only a small group of attendees was allowed
to be there, including a group of officials and some journalists who could report on the
same, to an international media which had been gripped by Eichmann’s case for two
years. Eichmann had readopted his Christianity in
later life and his execution was also attended by a minister by the name of William Lovell
Hull. According to his most substantial recent biographer,
David Caesarini, Eichmann’s final words were, “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.” Then the Israeli state, anxious to ensure
that any grave of Eichmann’s would not become a macabre shrine or point of interest, decided
to have his body cremated shortly afterwards and discreetly scattered his ashes in the
Mediterranean Sea. Eichmann’s trial and death subsequently
became the focus of much debate, in large part owing to the appearance in 1963, just
over a year after the conclusion of the trial, of a book by the German-born political theorist
and philosopher, Hannah Arendt. Born to a Jewish family herself, and only
having escaped to the United States in 1941, Arendt wrote about the trial for the New Yorker. This was subsequently published as Eichmann
in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Arendt’s work was highly controversial,
in large part because she criticised the manner in which the trial was conducted by the Israeli
state, as a show trial, but above all because of her depiction of Eichmann as a banal demonstration
of how evil manifests itself. Arendt was struck by his ordinariness, a small
balding and seemingly completely unimaginative bureaucrat. What Arendt wanted to convey most clearly
was the idea that, great evil can be carried out simply by a disinterested bureaucrat,
seemingly without much thought at all. But this interpretation soon came in for criticism
and created a stir in the years that followed. Most notably the Lithuanian born jurist and
writer Jacob Robinson attempted a point-by-point refutation of Arendt’s arguments, entitled
And the Crooked Shall be Made Straight: The Eichmann Trial, the Jewish Catastrophe and
Hanna Arendt’s Narrative. In considering Nazi Germany we cannot ignore
Adolf Eichmann, although he is generally deemed to be a less ubiquitous figure within the
regime in the historical record, than individuals such as Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels or Hermann
Goring. Yet Eichmann was one of the most central figures
in the murder of the Jewish people by the Nazi regime. As one of the highest ranking officials within
the security services, his role in the gradual development of the Nazi regime’s barbaric
response to the so-called ‘Jewish Question’, was as significant as any other individual
who was responsible for the Holocaust. As a highly organised bureaucrat, who had
proved himself capable of recording vast amount of data about groups and people across Europe,
Eichmann’s skills in this respect were noted by the Nazi high command and he was involved
in organising plans to deport the Jews of Central and Western Europe into ghettos in
eastern Europe. This later gave way to an absolutely central
role in the development of the so-called Madagascar Project, the Nazi scheme to deport millions
of European Jews to the African island, where they would live in a kind of giant open-air
prison. Eichmann wrote the core memo on this plan
and had clearly become central to managing the ‘Jewish Question’ by 1940. This soon gave way to even greater complicity
in the Nazis’ war crimes. He was central to the devising of the ‘Final
Solution’ and helped organise the Wannsee Conference, at which it was adopted as German
policy in January 1942. Thereafter he played a key organisational
role in the transporting of millions of Europe’s Jews to extermination and concentration camps
throughout central and eastern Europe, where they were usually killed by gassing within
hours of their arrival. There is no doubting Eichmann’s central
role in this and he has been referred to by some historians as a “managing director”,
of the most bloody genocide ever to occur in human history. And the clearest sign of his centrality to
the Holocaust occurred in Hungary in 1944, where in the space of just six months, between
the early spring and early autumn of that year, he led the Nazis’ programme of extermination,
which saw over half of the country’s 750,000 Jews executed in the camps and through other
instruments, like forced death marches. Eichmann showed little or no remorse for any
of these occurrences later on. What is quite unusual, given Eichmann’s
role in the Holocaust, is that he was not considered to be a key target when the Allies
conquered Germany in 1945 and as the leaders of the Nazi regime were being hunted down. As a result, while he was originally captured
in the immediate aftermath of the war, he was not identified properly or guarded well
enough and managed to escape. Indeed, when one of the American lawyers received
a document about Eichmann during the Nuremburg Trials which followed, he made a note querying
who Eichmann was, a peculiar ignorance about one of the most central figures in the atrocities
which the regime had committed. However, this relative anonymity, was certainly
dispelled in the years that followed. After spending years on the run and in hiding,
in Europe and South American, Eichmann was eventually hunted down by the Israeli secret
services, fifteen years after the war and was brought to trial in Jerusalem in 1961. His subsequent trial, conviction and execution,
generated widespread international media attention and resulted in Eichmann’s trial and death
being one of the most debated of any member of the Nazi regime and of those responsible
for the Holocaust. At his trial he sought to portray himself
as a passionless administrator, one who simply carried out his orders and was not an actual
formulator or director of Nazi state policy. This self-vindicatory account of himself,
was the basis of Hannah Arendt’s famous description of Eichmann as typifying the banality
of evil, the manner in which great crimes can be committed by an individual, who believes
themselves to simply be following orders. But, while Arendt’s description has influenced
many interpretations of Eichmann it is hard to accept it as an accurate one. Adolf Eichmann was involved in the evolution
of the ‘Final Solution’ at every stage and was one of the most significant figures
therein. Whatever, his arguments at his trial, Adolf
Eichmann was undoubtedly one of the central architects of the Holocaust. What do you think of Adolf Eichmann? Was he one of the more evil masterminds of
the entire Third Reich or is there any credibility to his argument during his trial, that he
was simply a bureaucrat who was obeying orders? Please let us know in the comment section,
and in the meantime, thank you very much for watching.
