Adolf Eichmann

Otto Adolf Eichmann (March 19, 1906 –  June 1, 1962) is a German-Austrian SS-Obersturmbannführer and one of the major organizers of the Holocaust, referred to as the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" in Nazi terminology.

He is tasked by SS-Obergruppenführer 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 the Second World War.

Eichmann is captured by the Mossad in Argentina on May 11, 1960 and subsequently found guilty of war crimes in a widely publicized trial in Jerusalem, where he is executed by hanging in 1962.

After an unremarkable school career, Eichmann briefly works for his father's mining company in Austria, where the family had moved in 1914.

He works as a traveling oil salesman beginning in 1927, and joins both the Nazi Party and the SS in 1932.

He returns to Germany in 1933, where he joins the Sicherheitsdienst (SD, "Security Service"); here he is appointed head of the department responsible for Jewish affairs—especially emigration, which the Nazis encourage through violence and economic pressure.

After the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, Eichmann and his staff arrange for Jews to be concentrated in ghettos in major cities with the expectation that they will be transported either farther east or overseas.

He also draws up plans for a Jewish reservation, first at Nisko in southeast Poland and later in Madagascar, but neither of these plans are ever carried out.

The Nazis begin the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, and their Jewish policy changes from emigration to extermination.

To co-ordinate planning for the genocide, Heydrich, who is Eichmann's superior, hosts the regime's administrative leaders at the Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942.

Eichmann collects information for him, attends the conference, and prepares the minutes.

Eichmann and his staff become responsible for Jewish deportations to extermination camps, where the victims are gassed.

Germany invades Hungary in March 1944, and Eichmann oversees the deportation of much of the Jewish population. 

of the victims are sent to Auschwitz concentration camp, where about seventy-five per cent are murdered upon arrival.

By the time that the transports are stopped in July 1944, 437,000 of Hungary's 725,000 Jews have been killed.

Dieter Wisliceny testifies at Nuremberg that Eichmann had 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 is captured by US forces, but escapes from a detention camp and moves around Germany to avoid re-capture.

He ends up in a small village in Lower Saxony, where he lives until 1950, when he moves to Argentina using false papers he obtained with help from an organization directed by Catholic bishop Alois Hudal.

Information collected by the Mossad, Israel's intelligence agency, confirms his location in 1960.

A team of Mossad and Shin Bet agents capture Eichmann and bring him to Israel to stand trial on fifteen criminal charges, including war crimes, crimes against humanity, and crimes against the Jewish people.

During the trial, he does not deny the Holocaust or his role in organizing it, but claims that he was simply following orders in a totalitarian Führerprinzip system. He was found guilty on all of the charges, and is executed by hanging on June 1, 1962.

The trial is widely followed in the media and will later be the subject of several books, including Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem, in which Arendt coins the phrase "the banality of evil" to describe Eichmann.

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