Adolf Eichmann

One of the most feared and hated
Nazi leaders, Adolf Eichmann was responsible
for the deaths of millions of Jews during World War II.

Adolf Eichmann was born in Solingen on 19 March 1906. Later the family moved to Linz, Austria, where Adolf Eichmann spent his youth. A member of the Austrian Nazi party, he quickly rose through the ranks. 1938 he headed the Austrian office for Jewish emigration - his assignment was to murder all the Jews in Europe!

In Austria, Eichmann brought together all the bureaucratic agencies needed for Jewish expulsion. He did the same in Czechoslovakia. In December 1939 Eichmann was transferred to Amt IV dealing with Jewish affairs and evacuation, and for the next six years Adolf Eichmann's office was the headquarter for the implementation of the 'Final Solution'; after the Wannsee Conference gave the go-ahead.

Adolf Eichmann oversaw the Holocaust, the maltreatment, deportation to concentration camps, and murder especially by the use of gas chambers of millions of Jews, and .Eichmann's efficient organization rounded up and transported millions to their deaths at infamous camps such as Auschwitz, Chelmno, Treblinka, Sobibor and Belsec. But only in Budapest after March 1944 did the desk-murderer Adolf Eichmann become a public personality, working in the open and playing a leading role in the massacre of Hungarian Jewry.

In August 1944 the "Master of Death" could report to Himmler that approximately four million Jews had died in the death camps and that another two million had been killed by mobile extermination units.

The Holocaust was the systematic slaughter of not only 6 million Jews, the primary victims, but also 5 million others, approximately 11 million individuals wiped off the Earth by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. Not just 11 million deaths, but 11 million people whose lives were cut off because of racism and hate, all in a period of 11 years .

After the war, Adolf Eichmann escaped capture and the stage was set for one of the greatest manhunts in history. But Adolf Eichmann lived in Germany for five years before moving to Argentina where he would live under an alias for another ten years. Israeli agents finally captured him in 1960 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and he was brought to Israel.

May 23, Ben Gurion, the Prime Minister announced to a startled Knesset that Adolf Eichmann, the SS officer who master-minded Hitler's extermination of six million Jews,was in Israeli hands and was to be put on trial for his life. He described Eichmann as "one of the greatest of the Nazi war criminals".Reports in Israel spoke of a daring operation carried out by the Israeli intelligence service, Mossad, to seize Eichmann from Argentina where he had been living under an assumed identity.

Adolf Eichmann was tried for crimes against humanity. In the jailhouse writings, Eichmann, a former traveling salesman, tried to put distance between himself and the Nazi genocide, claiming he was just a bureaucrat. His only defense was that he was "on the lowest rung," that his "position was too insignificant," and he declared repeatedly, "I had to obey." And Eichmann showed no reaction to the horrors that were described in court.

On 2 December 1961 Eichmann was sentenced to death for crimes against the Jewish people and crimes against humanity. On May 31, 1962, the State of Israel carried out the only death sentence in its history on the man whose only defense was, "I was just following orders."

Adolf Hitler's SS Men
Hitler surrounded himself with a small clique of fanatical, ruthless henchmen - a violent group of outsiders who rose to power in the Third Reich and established political and economic institutions of legitimized terror.

These masterminds of death were found to be quite psychologically normal. They were men of fine standing, husbands who morning and night kissed their wives, fathers who tucked their children into bed.

But murders, brutalities, cruelties, tortures, atrocities, and other inhuman acts were an everyday occurrence.

The European Jews were the primary victims of the Nazis. In 1933 nine million Jews lived in the 21 countries of Europe that would be occupied by Germany during the war. By 1945 two out of every three European Jews had been killed.

But Jews were not the only group singled out for persecution by Hitler's Nazi regime. One-half million Gypsies, 250,000 mentally or physically disabled persons, and more than three million Soviet prisoners-of-war also fell victim to Nazi genocide. Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, Social Democrats, Communists, partisans, trade unionists, and Polish intelligentsia were also victims of the hate and aggression carried out by the Nazis.