Otto Adolf Eichmann was a German Nazi SS-Obersturmbannführer (lieutenant colonel) and one of the major organizers of the Holocaust.
Background
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.
Education
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.
Career
The resentment in Germany and Austria after defeat in World War I twisted an already inflamed nationalism, fed a lie that Germany had been "stabbed in the back" by the Jews.
In 1919, amidst this new wave of anti-Semitism, the 13-year-old Eichmann was named in a newspaper as a member of a gang of youths who had tormented a Jewish classmate. Eichmann kept a precise record of each gang member's turn in beating up the victim (who died 20 years later in a death camp).
In the 1920s Eichmann drifted. He studied electrical engineering without success until his father decided that he should become an apprentice in an electrical appliance company, but his father wasn't satisfied with his son's progress there either. In 1928 Eichmann became a travelling salesman for an oil company through the help of Jewish relatives of his stepmother. He enjoyed his independence and his sporty car and became a joiner. As a member of the youth section of the Austro-German Veterans' Organization, he marched through the streets of Linz challenging the social democrats and cheering German nationalism. In 1932 the fanatical young Ernst Kaltenbrunner recruited Eichmann for the Austrian Nazi party and the SS. The Nazis promised that Austria would become part of a powerful German nation-state, and being a member of the SS gave Eichmann the chance to act superior after years of feeling inferior. Kaltenbrunner's father and Eichmann's father had been friends; their sons would make careers together in the SS. Kaltenbrunner became chief of the Security Service of the SS, second to Heinrich Himmler (and was hung as a war criminal in 1946).
When the Austrian government banned the Nazi Party in 1933, Eichmann, who did not have a job at the time, moved to Nazi Germany and joined the SS "Austrian Legion in exile. " After a year he transferred to the Security Service where he found a niche for himself as an "expert" on Jewish affairs. He learned about Zionism and even briefly visited Palestine. When Austria was annexed by the Third Reich in 1938 Eichmann efficiently organized the expulsion of 45, 000 Austrian Jews, first stripping them of their possessions. He became known in SS circles as the expert on forced emigration. When Germany invaded Poland, Hitler decided to exterminate the Polish Jews, and Eichmann's organizing ability turned towards mass murder. In the summer of 1941 he was among the first to be told of the "Final Solution, " and on January 20, 1942, he was one of 15 who attended the Wannsee Conference where the formal pact was drawn between the political leadership and the bureaucracy to send European Jewry to the death camps. Jews were forced to wear the yellow star of David for easy identification; they were assembled for easy transport to their doom. Eichmann's principal concern was to maintain the killing capacity of the camps by maintaining a steady flow of victims. All the principles of civilization were turned on their head. First into the gas chambers were children, mothers, and the old. About 25 percent of each train load, the strongest men and women, were spared for slave labor. Very many died of starvation, sickness, and overwork. In 1944 Eichmann reported to Himmler that some four million Jews were killed in the camps and some two million more had been shot or killed by mobile units.
Eichmann was a bureaucratic mass murderer; he avoided the extermination sites and shielded himself from his acts through a bureaucratic language that deadened his conscience. Eichmann was limited, compartmentalized in mind and spirit. "Officialese is my only language, " he said at his trial. Eichmann exemplified the terrifying discrepancy between the unparalleled and monstrous crime and the colorless official who carried out the evil. He viewed his victims as objects to be transported to their deaths as if they were nuts and bolts, and in 1944 he unsuccessfully sought to trade the lives of one million Jews for 10, 000 trucks.
At the end of the war Eichmann was rounded up, but he managed to disguise his identity and escaped detection. ODESSA, the secret SS organization, arranged his flight to Argentina in 1952. Under the alias of Ricardo Klement, Eichmann created a new identity as the unassuming employee of the Mercedes-Benz car factory in Buenos Aires. His wife and two sons joined him.
On May 13, 1960, Adolf Eichmann was seized by Israeli agents in Argentina and smuggled back to Jerusalem to stand trial for his role in the murder of one-third of Europe's Jewish people during World War II. The Eichmann trial of April through August 1961 gained worldwide attention as the most important trial of Nazi criminality since the Nuremberg trial of 1945-1946. For the first time a Jewish court convened in judgment upon a former persecutor.
On December 15, 1961, the Israeli court sentenced Eichmann to hang. His last words on June 1, 1962, were that he would not forget Austria, Germany, and Argentina. He was 56; his corpse was cremated, and his ashes scattered over the sea.
Achievements
Adolf Eichmann was a German high official who was hanged by the State of Israel for his part in the Holocaust, the Nazi extermination of Jews during World War II.
The trial was widely followed in the media and was later the subject of several books, including Hannah Arendt's work Eichmann in Jerusalem, in which Arendt coined the phrase "the banality of evil" to describe Eichmann.
In 2015 the filming of the trial by producer Milton Fruchtman and blacklisted TV director Leo Hurwitz was the subject of the UK television film The Eichmann Show, featuring Martin Freeman and Anthony LaPaglia. The film intercuts dramatic scenes with historical footage from the trial.
"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. "
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
Hannah 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. Arendt also wrote that "this case was built on what the Jews had suffered, not on what Eichmann had done. "
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 (de) 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.
Connections
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).
Ricardo, his son, is now a professor of archaeology at the German Archaeological Institute.
