Adolf Eichmann

Biography

Otto Adolf Eichmann was born in Solingen in 1906 and grew up in Linz, Austria. After leaving school he worked briefly for his father's mining company and from 1927 as a travelling salesman for the Vacuum Oil Company. He joined the Nazi Party and the SS in 1932, moved to Germany the next year and entered the Sicherheitsdienst, where he became head of the office dealing with Jewish affairs and forced emigration, and after the annexation of Austria in 1938 he helped run the Central Agency for Jewish Emigration in Vienna.

In December 1939 he was put in charge of section IV B4 of the Reich Security Main Office. He drafted plans for Jewish reservations at Nisko and on Madagascar, and in January 1942 he attended the Wannsee Conference, gathering information for Reinhard Heydrich and writing its minutes. His office then organised the deportation of Jews from across occupied Europe to ghettos and extermination camps. After Germany occupied Hungary in 1944 he went to Budapest to oversee the deportation of some 437,000 Hungarian Jews, most of them to Auschwitz.

Captured by American forces in 1945, he escaped and in 1950 reached Argentina on false papers. Mossad agents abducted him near Buenos Aires in May 1960 and brought him to Israel, where a special tribunal of the Jerusalem District Court tried him in 1961. He argued that he had only followed orders, was convicted on all fifteen counts, including crimes against the Jewish people, and was hanged on 1 June 1962.