1. Adolf Eichmann participated in the January 1942 Wannsee Conference, at which the implementation of the genocidal Final Solution to the Jewish Question was planned.
86 Facts About Adolf Eichmann
1. 2.
Adolf Eichmann was captured and detained by the Allies in 1945, but escaped and eventually settled in Argentina.
3.
The highly publicised Eichmann trial resulted in his conviction in Jerusalem, following which he was executed by hanging in 1962.
4.
Adolf Eichmann worked as a travelling oil salesman beginning in 1927, and joined both the Nazi Party and the SS in 1932.
5.
Adolf Eichmann drew up plans for a Jewish reservation, first at Nisko in southeast Poland and later in Madagascar, but neither of these plans were carried out.
6.
Adolf Eichmann collected information for him, attended the conference, and prepared the minutes.
7.
Adolf Eichmann ended up in a small village in Lower Saxony, where he lived until 1950 when he moved to Argentina using false papers he obtained with help from an organisation directed by Catholic bishop Alois Hudal.
8.
Adolf Eichmann was found guilty on all of the charges, and was executed by hanging on 1 June 1962.
9.
Otto Adolf Eichmann, the eldest of five children, was born in 1906 to a Calvinist family in Solingen, Germany.
10.
Adolf Eichmann's parents were Adolf Karl Eichmann, a bookkeeper, and Maria, a housewife.
11.
The elder Adolf Eichmann 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.
12.
Eichmann attended the Kaiser Franz Joseph Staatsoberrealschule in Linz, the same high school Adolf Hitler had attended 17 years before.
13.
Adolf Eichmann 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.
14.
Adolf Eichmann left without attaining a degree and joined his father's new enterprise, the Untersberg Mining Company, where he worked for several months.
15.
Between 1927 and early 1933, Adolf Eichmann worked in Upper Austria and Salzburg as district agent for the Vacuum Oil Company.
16.
Adolf Eichmann's regiment was SS-Standarte 37, responsible for guarding the party headquarters in Linz and protecting party speakers at rallies, which would often become violent.
17.
Adolf Eichmann pursued party activities in Linz at weekends while continuing in his position at Vacuum Oil in Salzburg.
18.
Adolf Eichmann was accepted into the SD and assigned to the sub-office on Freemasons, organising seized ritual objects for a proposed museum and creating a card index of German Freemasons and Masonic organisations.
19.
Adolf Eichmann prepared an anti-Masonic exhibition, which proved to be extremely popular.
20.
Adolf Eichmann later came to consider this as his big break.
21.
Adolf Eichmann was assigned to study and prepare reports on the Zionist movement and various Jewish organisations.
22.
Adolf Eichmann even learned a smattering of Hebrew and Yiddish, gaining a reputation as a specialist in Zionist and Jewish matters.
23.
On 21 March 1935 Adolf Eichmann married Veronika Liebl.
24.
Adolf Eichmann was promoted to SS-Hauptscharfuhrer in 1936 and was commissioned as an SS-Untersturmfuhrer the following year.
25.
Adolf Eichmann travelled to British Mandatory Palestine with his superior Herbert Hagen in 1937 to assess the possibility of Germany's Jews voluntarily emigrating there, disembarking with forged press credentials at Haifa, whence they travelled to Cairo in Egypt.
26.
In 1938, Adolf Eichmann was posted to Vienna to help organise Jewish emigration from Austria, which had just been integrated into the Reich through the Anschluss.
27.
Adolf Eichmann announced plans to create a reservation in the General Government, where Jews and others deemed undesirable would await further deportation.
28.
Adolf Eichmann 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.
29.
On his own initiative, Adolf Eichmann laid plans to deport Jews from Vienna.
30.
Under the Nisko Plan, Adolf Eichmann chose Nisko as the location for a new transit camp where Jews would be temporarily housed before being deported elsewhere.
31.
On 19 December 1939, Adolf Eichmann was assigned to head RSHA Referat IV B4, tasked with overseeing Jewish affairs and evacuation.
32.
Heydrich announced Adolf Eichmann to be his "special expert", in charge of arranging for all deportations into occupied Poland.
33.
On 15 August 1940, Adolf Eichmann released a memorandum titled Reichssicherheitshauptamt: Madagaskar Projekt, calling for the resettlement to Madagascar of a million Jews per year for four years.
34.
Adolf Eichmann was one of the officials who received regular detailed reports of their activities.
35.
Around this time, Adolf Eichmann was promoted to SS-Obersturmbannfuhrer, the highest rank he was granted.
36.
In preparation for the conference, Adolf Eichmann drafted for Heydrich a list of the numbers of Jews in various European countries and prepared statistics on emigration.
37.
Adolf Eichmann attended the conference, oversaw the stenographer who took the minutes, and prepared the official distributed record of the meeting.
38.
Adolf Eichmann did not make policy, but acted in an operational capacity.
39.
Adolf 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.
40.
Adolf Eichmann's 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.
41.
Adolf 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.
42.
Adolf Eichmann initially visited them weekly, but as time went on, his visits tapered off to once a month.
43.
Adolf Eichmann arrived the same day, and was joined by top members of his staff and five or six hundred members of the SD, SS, and SiPo.
44.
Adolf 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.
45.
In June 1944 Adolf 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.
46.
On 24 December 1944, Adolf Eichmann fled Budapest just before the Soviets encircled the capital.
47.
Adolf Eichmann returned to Berlin, where he arranged for the incriminating records of Department IV-B4 to be burned.
48.
Adolf Eichmann escaped from a work detail at Cham, Germany, when he realised that his identity had been discovered.
49.
Adolf Eichmann obtained new identity papers with the name of Otto Heninger and relocated frequently over the next several months, moving ultimately to the Luneburg Heath.
50.
Adolf Eichmann initially found work in the forestry industry and later leased a small plot of land in Altensalzkoth, where he lived until 1950.
51.
In 1948, Adolf Eichmann obtained a landing permit for Argentina and false identification under the name Ricardo Klement through an organisation directed by Bishop Alois Hudal, an Austrian cleric and Nazi sympathiser then residing in Italy.
52.
Adolf Eichmann travelled across Europe, staying in a series of monasteries that had been set up as safe houses.
53.
Adolf Eichmann departed from Genoa by ship on 17 June 1950 and arrived in Buenos Aires on 14 July.
54.
Adolf Eichmann initially lived in Tucuman Province, where he worked for a government contractor.
55.
Adolf Eichmann sent for his family in 1952, and they moved to Buenos Aires.
56.
Adolf Eichmann held a series of low-paying jobs until finding employment at Mercedes-Benz, where he rose to department head.
57.
Adolf Eichmann was extensively interviewed for four months beginning in late 1956 by Nazi expatriate journalist Willem Sassen with the intention of producing a biography.
58.
The Sassen tapes form the basis of the documentary series The Devil's Confession: The Lost Adolf Eichmann Tapes screened on Israeli television in 2022.
59.
The documentary, directed by Yariv Mozer and produced by Kobi Sitt, featured extracts of Adolf Eichmann speaking in German.
60.
In 1953, Wiesenthal learned from a letter shown to him that Adolf Eichmann had been seen in Buenos Aires, and he passed that information to the Israeli consulate in Vienna in 1954.
61.
Adolf Eichmann's father died in 1960, prompting Wiesenthal to make arrangements for private detectives to surreptitiously photograph members of the family.
62.
In 1956, Hermann's daughter, Sylvia, began dating a man named Klaus Adolf Eichmann who boasted about his father's Nazi exploits.
63.
The plan was nearly abandoned on the designated day when Adolf Eichmann was not on the bus he usually took home, but he got off another bus about half an hour later.
64.
Adolf Eichmann was frightened and tried to leave, but two more Mossad men came to Malkin's aid.
65.
Adolf Eichmann was taken to one of several Mossad safe houses that had been set up by the team.
66.
Adolf Eichmann was held there for nine days, during which time his identity was confirmed.
67.
Adolf Eichmann hoped to bring Mengele back to Israel on the same flight.
68.
The Israeli court ruled that the circumstances of Adolf Eichmann's capture had no bearing on the legality of his trial.
69.
US Central Intelligence Agency documents declassified in 2006 show that the capture of Adolf Eichmann caused alarm at the CIA and West German Bundesnachrichtendienst.
70.
Special investigator Eli Rosenbaum cites an unreliable 1958 CIA source that said Adolf Eichmann was born in Israel, had lived in Argentina until 1952 under the alias "Clemens," and was living in Jerusalem.
71.
Adolf Eichmann was taken to a fortified police station at Yagur in Israel, where he spent nine months.
72.
Less noted that Adolf Eichmann did not seem to realise the enormity of his crimes and showed no remorse.
73.
Adolf Eichmann's 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.
74.
The legal basis of the charges against Adolf Eichmann was the 1950 Nazi and Nazi Collaborators 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.
75.
Adolf Eichmann sat inside a bulletproof glass booth to protect him from assassination attempts.
76.
Adolf Eichmann asserted that the decisions had been made not by him, but by Muller, Heydrich, Himmler, and ultimately Hitler.
77.
Adolf Eichmann admitted to not liking the Jews and viewing them as adversaries, but stated that he never thought their annihilation was justified.
78.
When Hausner produced evidence that Adolf 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", Adolf Eichmann said he meant "enemies of the Reich" such as the Soviets.
79.
Adolf Eichmann was convicted on 15 counts of crimes against humanity, war crimes, crimes against the Jewish people, and membership in a criminal organisation.
80.
Adolf Eichmann was deemed responsible for the dreadful conditions on board the deportation trains and for obtaining Jews to fill those trains.
81.
Adolf Eichmann was found guilty of membership in three organisations that had been declared criminal at the Nuremberg trials: the Gestapo, the SD, and the SS.
82.
When considering the sentence, the judges concluded that Adolf Eichmann had not merely been following orders, but believed in the Nazi cause wholeheartedly and had been a key perpetrator of the genocide.
83.
On 15 December 1961, Adolf Eichmann was sentenced to death by hanging.
84.
The cabinet decided to recommend to President Ben-Zvi that Adolf Eichmann not be granted clemency, and Ben-Zvi rejected the clemency petition.
85.
Adolf Eichmann was hanged at a prison in Ramla hours later.
86.
Historians such as Christopher Browning, Deborah Lipstadt, Yaacov Lozowick, and David Cesarani reached a similar conclusion: that Adolf Eichmann was not the unthinking bureaucratic functionary that Arendt believed him to be.