Adolf Eichmann

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Lore & Background

Eichmann was born on 19 March 1906 in Solingen, Germany, the eldest of five children. His family moved to Linz, Austria, in 1914. After doing poorly in school, he briefly worked for his father's mining company and later as a travelling oil salesman beginning in 1927. He joined the Nazi Party and the SS in 1932. In 1933 he returned to Germany, where he joined the Sicherheitsdienst (SD). He was appointed head of the department responsible for Jewish affairs – especially emigration, which the Nazis encouraged through violence and economic pressure. After the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, Eichmann and his staff arranged for Jews to be concentrated in ghettos in major cities. He also drew up plans for a Jewish reservation, first at Nisko in southeast Poland and later in Madagascar, but neither of these plans was carried out.

Reader's Guide

Eichmann's significance lies in his central role in implementing the Final Solution. He attended the January 1942 Wannsee Conference, at which the implementation of the genocidal Final Solution to the Jewish Question was planned. Following this, he was tasked by SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich with facilitating and managing the logistics involved in the mass deportation of millions of Jews to Nazi ghettos and Nazi extermination camps. After Germany occupied Hungary in March 1944, Eichmann oversaw the deportation of much of the Jewish population. By the time the transports were stopped in July 1944, 437,000 of Hungary's 725,000 Jews had been deported. Most of the victims were sent to Auschwitz concentration camp, where about 75 per cent were murdered upon arrival. The trial was widely followed in the media and was later the subject of several books, including Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem, in which Arendt coined the phrase 'the banality of evil' to describe Eichmann. He was executed by hanging on 1 June 1962.

Did You Know?

• Eichmann attended the same high school in Linz, Austria, that Adolf Hitler had attended 17 years before.
• He learned a smattering of Hebrew and Yiddish while working in the SD's Jewish Department, gaining a reputation as a specialist in Zionist and Jewish matters.
• Dieter Wisliceny testified at Nuremberg that Eichmann 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.'
• Eichmann escaped from a US detention camp after Germany's defeat in 1945 and lived in a small village in Lower Saxony until 1950, when he moved to Argentina using false papers obtained with help from an organisation directed by Catholic bishop Alois Hudal.
• His trial in Jerusalem was the only civil execution in Israeli history.