Nazi Crimes: The Hunt For Adolf Eichmann
How the Holocaust's mastermind was brought to justice.
By all appearances, Adolf Eichmann was an ordinary man, civilized and articulate. But what hid behind this mundane facade was something deeply dark and sinister. He was responsible for acts of unprecedented cruelty and barbarism, yet even to the final moment felt no remorse.
The Fall of Germany
It was Christmas Eve of 1944. The Soviet Russians were closing in on Budapest. Within hours, the occupying German Army was trapped. Eichmann, a lieutenant colonel in the SS, managed to escape the city. He made an arduous journey back to Berlin, which was in ruins. He went to his office, where he began to destroy hundreds of incriminating documents. He was the chief administrator who organized the Nazis’ Holocaust.
In April 1945, as the Allies closed in on Berlin, Eichmann again fled the city. He rushed to see his family in Austria, warning his family to go into hiding. As the architect of tens of millions of innocent deaths, Eichmann had plenty of crimes to hide. He changed his name, and hoped to flee into obscurity. Seized by American troops, Eichmann was disguised as an ordinary Luftwaffe pilot. He spent months, in relative comfort, in an American prisoner-of-war camp.
By December, the first war crime trials were underway at Nuremberg. Up to this point, Eichmann had been hidden beyond recognition. But his cover was blown when, at the Nuremberg Trials, his deputy dropped his name for the first time. Eichmann, who had been such an unknown and unremarkable figure, was able to be hauled out from the shadows of iniquity.
Evasion from justice
With help from junior SS officials, Eichmann got his hands on forged papers and civilian clothes. In February 1946, he slipped out of his POW camp. He headed toward the British zone of occupied Germany. This is because Great Britain had already abandoned its de-Nazification programs. Eichmann was safe, at least for the time being. The man was intensively nervous, paralyzed by fears of being spotted or betrayed. Nevertheless, he stayed in Germany for another three or four years.
Although Eichmann had evaded the Allies, the survivors of the Holocaust were determined to punish their oppressors. They organized into informal bands of Nazi hunters. One of them was Simon Wiesenthal. Having spent five years in concentration camps, Simon was determined to bring the Nazis to justice. When Wiesenthal raided Eichmann’s house, the Nazi war criminal decided he must leave Europe.
Peron’s dictatorship
Eichmann fled the continent through Austria into Italy. Hundreds of fellow war criminals had used that same path. In Italy, fascist Catholic bishops organized a path of safety for the Nazis. With the help of the bishops, Eichmann secured a passage on a transatlantic ocean liner to Argentina. Argentina’s regime was led by Juan Domingo Peron, a fascist sympathizer and a Mussolini-style socialist. Coming to power in 1946, Peron oversaw massive public sector projects. He nationalized much of Argentina’s economy. He also provided shelter for Germany’s national socialists.
When Eichmann arrived in Buenos Aires, he found a place to stay. He secured for himself Argentine official papers, which falsely listed his name as Ricardo Klement. The Nazi criminal urged his wife and three children to join him in South America. He got a job for the Mercedes Benz factory, where he worked his way up the corporate bureaucracy. Eichmann and his family kept the company of other fugitive Nazis in Argentina, such as Joseph Mengele. As a doctor in Auschwitz, Mengele had performed horrific human experiments on Jewish children and other inmates. Eichmann and Mengele regularly met in cafes and bars. For the time being, Eichmann was safe. Or so he thought.
Devil in disguise
Eichmann’s son Klaus met a beautiful young German girl, named Sylvia Hermann. She was the daughter of a German Jew, who had fled Nazi persecution. When Sylvia told her father about her German boyfriend, her father began to investigate. So did Mossad, Israel’s secret service. Her father, Lothar Hermann, tipped off Mossad about Eichmann’s whereabouts in Argentina.
The state of Israel had been formed two years before Eichmann arrived in South America. For many Jews, it was a godsend. Hundreds of thousands of Holocaust survivors fled to Israel. Even after the war, Jews continued to be massacred in Poland in local pogroms. But Israel’s future was highly uncertain. Arab leaders, such as the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, had actively supported Hitler. The Mufti even organized Muslim units within the SS. After centuries of bloody anti-Semitic persecutions, Israel and its new government were determined to defend itself. Young men and women were recruited into the armed forces. Israel founded its own security service, which would soon gain international recognition. Mossad quickly gained a reputation as one of the world’s most ruthless and efficient intelligence agencies. Mossad spies did much more than spy; they kidnapped and assassinated their enemies. In 1960, an elite unit of Mossad agents was sent over to Argentina to retrieve the notorious Eichmann.
Capture by Mossad
By 1960, Eichmann was still under Peron’s protection in Argentina. Mossad agents tracked the Nazi’s location to the outskirts of Buenos Aires. On May 11, Eichmann left his tiny house to catch the bus. It was a short walk from home. Waiting for their target, the Nazi was kidnapped and herded into the back of a car. He was gagged and bound.
Lacking the legal permission to extradite Eichmann, the Mossad agents had to smuggle him covertly out of Argentina. He was drugged and dressed as an airplane steward, and flown back to Israel. On May 23, Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, gleefully announced Eichmann’s capture. Eichmann was held in a secure police prison. In Argentina, anti-Semitic riots broke out. Argentina appealed to the UN for Eichmann’s return. But Israel refused to let him go. They were determined to exact justice.
The trial
Eichmann became the first Nazi official to be tried in Israel. For the first time, the Jewish public would see the evil man who orchestrated the slaughter of their people. It was the first such Nazi trial to be shown on TV. With Eichmann’s trial, the world would learn of Nazi Germany’s systematic butchering of millions of innocents just 15 years prior. It was a rude awakening.
The audience was shocked by Eichmann’s harmless appearance. He was balding, with thick glasses. There was nothing about his appearance that suggested violence and evil. Eichmann was clearly rattled by the trial. He knew that, if the charges were upheld, it was death for him. Gideon Hausner, Israel’s Attorney General, led the prosecution. Eichmann was accused of being the mastermind behind the Final Solution. Eichmann’s lawyers robustly defended him, insisting that he was an ordinary civil servant. He was just following orders. He did not do the killing, but he was in charge of the timetables and transportation related to the Holocaust. Eichmann claimed he was a cog in a machine, and an ordinary bureaucrat. But what is the truth? Who was this man?
The Nazi machine
Eichmann was born in 1906 in the German town of Solingen. His father was a bookkeeper, his mother a housewife. He came from a conventional middle-class upbringing. He showed no signs of his later anti-Semitism.
Eichmann, like countless other Germans, ended up in public service. Before WWI, Imperial Germany employed over a million people. The Prussian Ministry for Public Works was the world’s largest employer. Going back to the times of Frederick the Great, Germany had a long tradition of bureaucracy. This enabled the Nazis to easily climb up the ladder of German politics.
WWI left Germany crippled with debt. Soldiers and public officials were thrown out of work. They turned for help to the Nazis. The Nazis were the party of big government and robust state spending to revive Germany’s economy. They favored state regulation of almost every aspect of life. Under Nazi rule, state officials found themselves back to work. Central to the Nazis’ vision was obedience to the state. This was seen as the way to revive Germany’s greatness. Civil budgets boomed by factors of 20 or 30. Every day, public sector workers joined the Nazi Party. The numbers of the Nazis swelled in the millions. They were enormously popular.
But the Nazis struggled to gain support from Germany’s industrial workers. Like the socialists in Russia, the Nazis banned trade unions. Under Nazi rule, Germany was primarily composed of army veterans and the middle class public sector. The civil service was vital to the Nazi machine, because it was a machine through which they could exert their totalitarian power. Eichmann was just one among many people who climbed up the bureaucratic ranks of Nazi Germany’s government. He worked for the SD, an administrative branch of the SS, Hitler’s secret service.
Eichmann proved to be a devoted, overzealous bureaucrat. His loyalty won him lavish promotions and pay raises. This enabled him to rent his own apartment in Berlin, and marry his girlfriend Veronika. In 1934, he received an ambitious new task: to spy on the Jews. The German civil service was filled with anti-Semitism. They blamed money-loving capitalism on the Jews.
Hitler’s Reich
Hitler’s regime passed laws that forbade Jews from holding public office. They were stripped of citizenship. Jews were forbidden from marrying non-Jews. The Nazis believed they were constructing a new German race, purged of the Jews. Jews were required to wear a yellow star of David badge on their clothes at all times. This was done to make it easier to deport the Jews from German territory.
In 1938, Eichmann established an office of Jewish immigration in Vienna. Jews were stripped of their assets to pay for their own mass deportation. They were forced to leave behind their entire livelihoods. Within just eight months, the Nazi mastermind expelled 45,000 Jews from Austria. Desperate Jews fled to the US, Britain, and Palestine.
By January 1939, Hitler made preparations for a world war. For this, he blamed the Jews, and pledged their total destruction. Nazi Germany annexed Czechoslovakia, and invaded Poland. With war after war, more and more Jews fell into Nazi hands. Two and half million Jews were given over to Eichmann to be murdered.
As the US and Britain began to refuse the refugees, Eichmann had to find a new way of getting rid of the Jews. He decided to set up a Jewish homeland in Madagascar. Hitler approved the idea. In June 1940, the Nazi regime announced it would ship off a million Jews to the African island within the year. But the Atlantic Ocean was controlled by the British Navy. The plan was impossible, so the Nazis decided to herd the Jews into segregated ghettos. Eichmann meticulously gathered the details of every Jew living in Nazi-occupied territory.
Nazi officials forcibly removed the Jews from their homes, beating them in the streets. Terrified Jews were herded like animals into tiny, sealed-off areas. As many as 30 Jews were saddled into a single room. Each room received only starvation rations of just 250 calories a day. No medical supplies were allowed. Tens of thousands died of starvation and disease. All of this was orchestrated by Eichmann. Even with this cruelty, the Nazis were unsatisfied in their murderous rage. They came up with a new, more sinister plan.
The Final Solution
Himmler and Hitler decided to completely eradicate the Jews. Under Himmler, SD officials butchered all enemies of the Nazi regime wherever they could be found. This included Jews, communists, Freemasons, and any other political dissenters. By the end of the war, more than two million civilians were shot in cold blood. The Nazis shot so many people, that their hands were blistered on their trigger fingers.
Eichmann was sent to Poland, where he contemplated more efficient ways to exterminate the Jews. One company experimented with the use of carbon monoxide from car exhaust tailpipes to poison the victims. Eichmann attended a mass gas execution in operation. The Nazi leadership saw poison gas as too slow. They wanted something even more brutal.
On January 20, 1942, a meeting was held in Berlin. At the Wannsee Conference, the German leaders made their decision to completely and systematically massacre Europe’s Jews. Eichmann drew up a list of every Jew in Europe to be exterminated. It was 11 million names.
Concentration camps would be repurposed and expanded into extermination camps. Death camps opened up across Germany. Twelve engineering firms were hired for the job. Under Eichmann’s supervision, Germany’s civil service planned the mass deportation of the Jews into death camps. Such horrors had no effect on the psychopathic Eichmann, who treated the murders with the aloof efficiency of a mundane desk job. Before this point, the firing squads were the culprits. Now, it was the entire German civil service.
Nazi Germany’s socialist state rejected the Anglo-American idea of individual rights and responsibilities. Clerks, accountants, doctors, and scientists were all subordinate to the omnipotent Nazi state, as the German government enacted the deaths of millions. The Holocaust was industrial murder, which could only be executed with the cooperation of diverse segments within German society.
Caught on tape
At Eichmann’s trial, the Nazi leader’s lawyers thought they could sway the case in their favor. Eichmann was just one among many members of Germany’s civil service. But Eichmann’s guilt would be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt by one thing: taped admissions.
Back in Argentina, where he was protected by Peron’s regime and in the midst of fellow fascists, Eichmann had arrogantly and brazenly admitted his crimes to a Dutch journalist named Willem Sassen, a Nazi expatriate who planned to write a biography of Eichmann. On these incriminating tapes, Eichmann boldly boasted of organizing the murders of thousands of Jews in Budapest. He arranged for half a million Jews to be sent to Auschwitz. He managed to nearly eradicate Hungary’s Jewish population. On the death marches, Jews died of hunger and exposure. Those who lagged were shot. Those who reached the camps would be butchered there. Many women were raped repeatedly by countless Nazi soldiers. Pregnant mothers were killed immediately. Others were the victims of human experimentation. Newborn babies were gassed, shot, hanged, and starved. Young children were experimented on in labs. These ghastly, gruesome crimes included the likes of amputating limbs and castration.
In the tapes, Eichmann admitted to visiting Treblinka to witness the operation of the gas chambers. He watched hundreds of Jews—men, women, children, even babies—stripped naked and gassed to death before his very eyes. He watched on impassively as the victims died in agony, choking to death on cyanic acid. Eichmann had claimed he was just a harmless administrator, and he certainly looked the part. In reality, the devious death-dealer was overseeing the entire operation. He knew exactly how brutal the policies were.
The Sassen tapes were the point of no return for Eichmann. It was proven indisputably: he had been the executive administrator of the Holocaust. He did so, all with a callous, boastful, joking attitude. The tapes revealed that he showed not an iota of remorse, but gleefully recounted all of the details of his atrocities. The truth came out: Germany’s civil service had been instrumental in the Nazi atrocities. They were not passive by any means. The members of the Party were following orders, but because they genuinely believed in Nazism.
As the tapes played in court, Eichmann’s face became expressionless. He appeared as white and lifeless as a ghostly apparition. He gave his final statement, insisting to the end that he was only following the orders of his superiors. But the tapes definitely proved it was a bold-faced lie. Eichmann was found guilty and, on June 1, 1962, he was hanged for his crimes against humanity.