Introduction
It was a nightmare that was so demonic and so terrifying, that there are no words to adequately describe its horrors. The Final Solution, which was Nazi terminology for the extermination of European Jews during the Second World War, was a plan for mass murder on a scale that was unprecedented in human history. Adolf Hitler, a virulent, psychotic racist, built factories for mass murder where people could be killed in a meticulous, orderly fashion.
A secondary goal of his plan was for the camps to turn a financial profit. This was accomplished by robbing the victims of virtually any material object in their possession when alive and again after death. Tons of gold were pried from the teeth of massacred Jews. Human hair was removed by the acre for use in commercial products. Twenty-four hours a day, three hundred sixty five days a year, the killing continued on an assembly line of death perfected by Nazi ingenuity. Some of these camps were capable of killing 10,000 people a day. Places with odd-sounding names like Auschwitz, Dachau, Belzec, Treblinka and Buchewald will be eternally synonymous with evil. Hitler wanted to breed a perfect race of Aryan beings who would rule the world for a thousand years. He wanted to do away with the infirm, the weak and the old. For a time, his Blitzkrieg armies seemed unbeatable, all-powerful and unstoppable. But in the end, he was defeated by a poverty stricken nation led by a man in a wheelchair.
This is the story of the architect of Hitler’s evil vision. He was German born, but raised in Austria, the cradle for many rabid anti-Semitics. He was a slender man of average build, noticeably bow-legged, with ordinary features that were undistinguished and easily forgotten. He liked to listen to the soaring compositions of Richard Wagner, played the violin and was addicted to sweet chocolate. There was truly nothing special about the man who looked like any other German. He was trained to be a construction engineer; not that he took an interest in the subject, but because his father thought it would be easy for his son. The course of study seemed simple, especially for a boy who could not finish high school. In every respect, as a young man, he was an underachiever, a disappointment to his family and seemed destined for a life of mediocrity and anonymity. Perhaps it was that fact, the knowledge to himself that he was a nobody, even to his parents, that probably helped make him what he was.
His name was Adolf Eichmann, the man who designed and maintained the satanic machinery of death that ultimately annihilated ten million innocent men, women and children.
It is impossible to underestimate the feelings of defeat, humiliation and subjugation felt by the German people after the close of World War I. Utterly defeated by their enemies and left defenseless by the insulting terms of the Versailles peace treaty, many Germans felt cheated by the outcome of the “war to end all wars.” The German hierarchy, who agreed to the terms of the treaty in 1919, were held in disdain, even hated, by the average citizen. Adolf Hitler, an ambitious political activist, referred to those who negotiated at Versailles as the “November Criminals,” and made frequent, degrading references to their betrayal in speeches and print. Hitler’s belief, that Germany’s honor was bargained away for the benefit of the victor nations, was one of the cornerstones of Nazi philosophy. The collective identity of the German people in the years after the war was one of deep shame and seething anger. In 1933, a New York Times report characterized the German people as “self-absorbed, isolated, sick for power and believe the world is their enemy.”
These conditions led directly to the meteoric rise of Adolf Hitler and his fallacious ideas of Germanic destiny. Born in Austria and a veteran of the great war, Hitler seized upon traditional beliefs of national pride and Aryan superiority to fuel his goals of imperialism and world domination. Though he rose steadily through the political maze of post-war Germany, his assumption to power was not accomplished without bloodshed, a lie he continued to promote to the outside world. Hitler was always quick to turn on friends and enemies alike and displayed this trait right up to the end of his life.
When he became the absolute ruler of Germany in 1932, Hitler continued his obsessive campaign of hatred against the Jews, Christians, Gypsies and other ethnic groups who were not of pure Nordic heritage. At first, Hitler wanted them expelled from Germany. Using fictitious criminal charges, he imprisoned thousands without a trial. He rounded up the people he found objectionable and shipped them off to “determent camps.” In the beginning, Jews were placed in these camps to remove them from society. But over time, the inmate population grew too large and unmanageable. Isolated killings became part of the job of the SS guards and were ignored by the chain of military command. In 1933, the first true concentration camp under the supervision of the Nazis was constructed near an abandoned munitions factory in a town called Dachau.
Surrounded by barbed wire and SS troops with machine guns, the site consisted of dozens of concrete huts that housed 2,000 detainees. By 1936, inmates were forced to construct barracks, workshops, kitchens, storehouses, cells and finally, crematoriums. Over the front gate hung the ominous sign, Arbeit Macht Frei, “labor brings liberty.” But the only liberty from Dachau was death. The first commandant of the camp was a man named Theodore Eicke, a former inmate in a lunatic asylum. Under Eicke, Dachau became a hell on earth. Mass executions, indiscriminate murders and barbaric tortures were just some of the horrors inflicted on its prisoners.
In January 1934, a young corporal in the SS was transferred from Berlin to Dachau for a new assignment. He was placed in charge of cataloguing articles seized from Jewish prisoners. Corporal Adolf Eichmann, 28, was a good Nazi, compliant, conscientious, mindful of the goals of the state and above all, obedient. “If they had told me that my own father was a traitor and I had to kill him,” Eichmann later said, “I’d have done it!” At Dachau, he would learn the fundamental principles of Hitler’s Aryan dreams and be exposed, for the first time, to the corrupted soul of Nazi ideology.
Adolf Eichmann was born on March 19, 1906, in the town of Solingen, Germany, a community noted for its production of specialized knives and surgical instruments. He had five brothers but, despite his crowded upbringing, Adolf was withdrawn and lonely. As a student, he did poorly in school and never aspired to achieve better grades. His father decided to move the family to Austria while Adolf was still a child. There, in a village called Linz, Adolf continued his difficult journey through school. Because he had a dark complexion and distinctive facial features, Adolf’s schoolmates often teased him by calling him, “Der kleine Jude!” (the little Jew). Author Quentin Reynolds writes in The Minister of Death (1960): “Neglected by his parents, shunned by his classmates, he developed into a problem child whose moods were never understood by his family or his teachers.”
But later, Adolf managed to graduate from a vocational school with a certificate in construction engineering. Afterwards, he obtained a job as a salesman with an Austrian oil company. As a traveling representative, Eichmann often met clients in bars and taverns. He was a frequent sight in the clubs along his route and developed a life-long pastime of heavy and habitual drinking.
In 1932, Eichmann joined the National Socialist Party (NSP) Though he had no genuine interest in politics, Eichmann became totally immersed in the salacious dreams of A Thousand-Year Reich. In Hannah Arendt’s book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, the author wrote, “He had no time and less desire to be properly informed, he did not even know the party program, he never read Mein Kampf.” But N.S. P. offered Eichmann a chance at becoming somebody and Eichmann, more than anything else, wanted to be someone important. He became serial number 4536 of the Storm Troopers (SS), the dreaded military arm of Hitler’s Nazi Party, and dedicated himself to advancement. Since it would be better for his career if he were married, Eichmann asked authorization to take a wife. It was customary for SS members to request permission for marriage to ensure they wed into the proper racial background. According to the letter found in his dossier years later and published in The Minister of Death, Eichmann wrote, “I, Adolf Eichmann, herewith request permission to marry Miss Veronika Liebel and attach herewith the necessary documents. I refer these documents for analysis by the Institute to reaffirm the purity of race.” After a physical exam of the intended bride, permission was granted and Eichmann married Veronika in 1935.
Eichmann, ever the underachiever, sought always to please his superiors. He was quickly promoted to corporal and, when he learned that Heinrech Himmler had started a new branch of the SS called the Security Service, he applied for a transfer. In 1935, Eichmann was placed within the section that dealt with the Jews and began to research the so-called “Jewish Question.” He read everything he could find on the Jewish people.
“I did not greet this assignment with apathy,” he wrote in his memoirs, “I was fascinated with it.” He studied the historical background of the Zionist movement and took courses on the Hebrew language, which he was never able to master. Soon he became an “expert” on German-Jewish affairs and others in the SS went to him for advice on the issue. He even visited Palestine and returned to Germany with an enhanced reputation as the one Nazi who truly understood the Jewish people.
He knew that Hitler’s position, behind closed doors, was that all Jews had to leave Germany and the occupied territories. But first, all property belonging to the Jewish people had to be confiscated. This was a pattern that was repeated over and over in the following years. Before anything could be done to the Jews, all of their property, including money, jewels, land, virtually any material possession whatsoever, even shoes, had to be seized by the Nazi bureaucrats. This theft was supervised, recorded and accomplished with profound efficiency by Eichmann’s dedicated staff. For the first time in his life, Eichmann had real power and he used it ruthlessly.
The whirlwinds of death came slowly at first. Its beginnings were planted years before in the supple minds of an angry public. While the anti-Semites in Germany were many, the plan for the extermination of European Jewry was not formulated overnight. Those in charge of the Nazi juggernaut had to be convinced that the isolation of Jews was a good thing and a desirable goal of the state. As early as 1931, a Nazi pamphlet that was widely circulated in Germany suggested that all Jews be sent in exile to the island nation of Madagascar. “This,” the author wrote, “would afford the possibility of control and minimize the danger of infection of Aryans with all those physical and spiritual diseases the Jews are known to transmit.”
Though Hitler had written about the “Jewish problem” extensively and his hatred was well known, he was reluctant to announce in public his true ambitions: the total extermination of Jews throughout the world. Germany had been bombarded by the myth of Aryan superiority for decades. Many believed that Hitler could achieve a Thousand Year Reich, free from the stain of alleged racial impurities. By 1933, the Nazi party in Germany took their first official step against the Jewish population. From that year forward, no Jews could work in Civil Service positions. Those that were already in such employment were removed from their posts.
Newspapers were filled with stories about Jews who were not really part of the motherland and how they took an oath to religion rather than Germany. Rumors of every sort that defiled the Jewish people were published and accepted as fact. In the rural areas of Germany, work camps were quietly set up to deal with the most rebellious of the Jews. They were sent there for “rehabilitation” and “indoctrination.” Hundreds of people disappeared from their homes, their workplaces, from the city streets, never to be seen or heard from again. No one could complain because there wasn’t anyone to complain to. If a family member showed up at a state-run agency inquiring about their loved ones, he or she would simply vanish. This calculated method of disenfranchisement continued for years, causing thousands to flee Germany by any means possible.
In November 1938, an organized outbreak of violence against the Jewish people in Germany began. Using an assassination of a Nazi official in Paris by a Jewish teenager as an excuse, brown-shirted storm troopers gathered in village squares denouncing the Jews in hate-filled speeches. This was the start of the Night of Broken Glass, Kristallnacht, in which Nazi thugs attacked Jews across the country. More than 8,000 Jewish-owned businesses were ransacked and burned. Synagogues were burned to the ground in an orgy of hatred. Libraries and bookstores were looted and their books thrown into huge bonfires. Even cemeteries were destroyed. Ironically, the average German citizen was not outraged at the violence against the Jews, but were disgusted at the lack of order and control displayed by the brown shirts. Kristallnacht was not limited to the destruction of property. Some 20,000 Jewish men were dispatched to concentration camps such as Buchenwald and Dachau. Most were never seen again. Under the direction of Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, and with the full cooperation and knowledge of Adolf Hitler himself, the state sanctioned process of killing the Jews had officially begun.
By 1939, Germany, steered by the iron hand of Adolf Hitler, completed the process of Anschluss, the annexation of Austria. That same year, Eichmann received a promotion to Lieutenant and was assigned to the city of Vienna. He was made head of the Center for Emigration of Austrian Jews whose job was to force the Jewish population to leave Austria. It didn’t matter if they were legal citizens, if they were doctors, lawyers, government officials, rich or poor. They all had to leave and it was to be done immediately. Eichmann would enact procedures that would successfully meet that end. “I found Jewish life in Austria completely disorganized,” Eichmann wrote in his memoirs, “most Jewish organizations had already been closed down by the police and their leaders under arrest.”
Putting into operation his plan to strip Jews of nearly all their physical possessions before they could be allowed to leave, Eichmann forced 45,000 people out of Austria in the first eight months. By the end of the year, over 150,000 Jews had disappeared. Most fled the country with barely the clothes on their backs. Others were exiled to death camps. “By the time of my transfer,” Eichmann later said with pride, “the figure came to 224,000 or 234,000.” His methods for seizing the wealth of the Jews and then banishing them to other lands or a slot in a death camp, was an impressive success. When the war broke out in September 1939 as the Nazis invaded Poland, Eichmann was brought back to Berlin where he became head of the notorious Section IV B 4 of the Gestapo. It was the office that would handle the master plan for the extermination of millions.
Eichmann deported Jewish people from all the occupied territories and dumped them into Poland. From Austria, Holland, the Baltics, France and Yugoslavia, hundreds of thousands of impoverished Jews and Gypsies were “resettled” in Poland. The Warsaw ghetto became a killing ground of spectacular ferocity. The Nazi tormentors sealed off the area, built walls and strung barbed wire around the Jewish section. No food or water was allowed inside. Tens of thousands starved to death. Thousands more were shot or gassed in mobile execution chambers. Precise Gestapo records show that 316,322 Jews were removed from the city and “liquidated,” the Nazi euphemism for murder. But to the incredible suffering in the Warsaw ghetto, Eichmann was indifferent. “Jewry was grateful for the chance I gave it to learn community life at the ghetto,” he wrote years later, “It made an excellent school for the future in Israel basically most Jews feel well and happy in their ghetto life.”
Soon, more methodical methods of killing had to be found. Huge gas chambers were constructed at Auschwitz, Dachau and Treblinka. Eichmann made his trains larger and more efficient. He crammed thousands of captives into cattle cars without food or water and transported them en masse to the death camps. During each trip, hundreds of prisoners died on the trains before they reached their destination. “I did not know that because I was not responsible,” Eichmann said later, “but I did hear and read about that.” By 1941, the extermination of the Jews became the official policy of the Nazi state. Before that time, Eichmann was primarily concerned with the deportation and transportation of Jews to the 164 concentration camps in Eastern Europe. Now that the course was clearly defined, he could concentrate on killing them, a procedure that would require all of his organizational skills as well as a fanatical devotion to Adolf Hitler.
As the person in charge of the Jewish “problem” in the conquered territories, Adolf Eichmann faced many challenges. Deporting millions of people against their will to other countries was not easy. Most countries would not accept hundreds of thousands of refugees. And since they arrived penniless after first being robbed by Nazi thieves, they would need public assistance when they arrived. It proved more expeditious simply to kill them. In the coming years, as the policy of mass murder slowly became a reality, deportation was tantamount to a death sentence.
Eichmann soon turned his talents to improve the killing efficiency of the Nazi camps. Any pretense of what the Nazis were doing disappeared when it became obvious that the thousands shipped to Auschwitz each week were being murdered and dumped into mass graves. People were gassed in vast, windowless rooms, disguised as community showers. Thousands more were burned in concrete crematoriums, built specifically for that purpose.
Simon Wiesenthal, who somehow survived over four years in concentration camps and later went on to become one of the world’s most famous Nazi hunters, once said, “There were a million ways of death, starting with starvation, disease, decay, fever, incineration, sadism and summary execution.” The Nazi task forces were no better. Called Einsatzgruppen, these mobile killing teams savaged the civilian population in occupied territories, virtually killing at will. Author and Holocaust survivor, Zvi Aharoni writes in Operation Eichmann that, “during the second half of 1941, the four mobile Einsatzgruppen of the SS, numbering 3000 men, butchered approximately 500,000 human beings, most of them Jews.”
In one notorious incident in France in late 1942, Eichmann ordered a round up of Jewish citizens in the city of Paris. After two days, 7,000 Jews, including 4,051 children were held inside the Velodrome d’Hiver. Eichmann wanted to ship them all to the concentration camps, but the Paris government strongly protested. For five days, negotiations continued while the huge crowd, without water or food suffered terribly. Dozens died, some went insane. On the sixth day, all the parents were removed and shipped away on Eichmann’s trains. A few days later, Eichmann ordered the 4,051 children into boxcars and sent them to the gas chambers at Auschwitz. But in his mind, Eichmann bore no responsibility for their murders. “Once a shipment was delivered to the designated stations,” he said years later to the Israeli police, “…my powers ceased.”
Later, when he actually visited the camps, Eichmann saw the results of his planning for the first time. “I did visit Auschwitz repeatedly. It had an unpleasant smell,” he wrote of his experiences there. Eichmann took notice of the inefficiency of the methods used to kill the prisoners. It required too much effort and the production of the carbon monoxide gas needed for the job was not cost effective. During the Nuremberg trial years later, the former commandant of Auschwitz said, “We did not come to a decision on the matter. Eichmann was going to inquire about a gas that would be easy to use and would not require any special installations and then report back to me.” Eichmann eventually implemented the use of a poison gas called Zyklon B. This action later became the basis for the first of 15 criminal charges against him at his trial.
“I remember clearly the first time he (Commandant Hoess) guided me around the camp,” Eichmann said in his memoirs, “…at the end he took me to a grave where the corpses of gassed Jews lay piled on a strong iron grill. Hoess’s men poured some inflammable liquid over them and set them on fire… I can still see that mountain of corpses in front of me.”
Adolf Hitler’s twisted mirage of a Thousand Year Reich ended under American firepower. In April 1945, Hitler, along with his mistress Eva Braun, and some of his most faithful followers, committed suicide in the depths of an underground bunker in Berlin. His body was dragged outside and burned by Nazi soldiers, determined not to let his remains fall into Allied hands.
In the meantime, members of the Nazi hierarchy in Germany ran for their lives. They knew that justice would be swift and final if they were captured. Many, like Eichmann, fled into the mountains of Austria. Others shed their uniforms and attempted to blend in with the civilian population. “I was living in a sort of a state of shock,” Eichmann said later, “When everything did finally collapse, I lost my zest for life. Many others also experienced the same thing at the time, they had fought, worked, worried and feared for the Reich and now it was collapsing. The will to live was no longer there!”
But as the advancing Allies came closer and closer, Eichmann decided to run. In May 1945, as he was making his way north through the city of Ulm, Eichmann and other Nazis ran into a patrol of American soldiers. They were taken prisoner and held as POWs. When interrogated, Eichmann said his name was Adolf Barth, a corporal in the German army. He kept this identity for several months, later upping his rank to a lieutenant to receive better treatment. But Eichmann was worried. As the post-war situation stabilized, more attention was paid to the Nazi POWs. The Americans suspected that high-ranking war criminals were already POWs and more intensive efforts were being made to find them. In early 1946, Eichmann escaped from the prison camp and headed deeper into north Germany.
Under the name of Otto Heninger, Eichmann settled in the city of Everson. With the help of Nazi sympathizers, some of who knew his true identity, he lived on the outskirts of the city posing as a farmer and raising chickens. He made a little money and began to plan his escape from Germany. By then, the Nuremberg trials had ended. Dozens of his former colleagues were sentenced to death for their war crimes, which were now fully exposed to the world. The name Adolf Eichmann was mentioned over and over again at the trials. Defendants Herman Goering and Auschwitz Commandant Rudolf Hoess spoke highly of Eichmann’s dedication to the Fuehrer. They praised his talents for organization and his ability to get things done for the Reich. But above all, the other Nazi killers admired Eichmann’s enthusiasm for getting rid of the Jews. “I first met Eichmann about four weeks after receiving the order (to kill Jews),” said Commandant Hoess at Nuremberg, “he came to Auschwitz to discuss details with me on the carrying out of the order… I was to receive all further instructions from him.”
The secret was out. Eichmann became a hunted man.
After Germany lost the war, the Nazi war lords fled Berlin to points unknown. They became fugitives who, if caught, would surely face the firing squad or the hangman’s rope. Many did. Because they could not live in the open, these criminals, like Eichmann, had to depend on the help of friends and sympathizers. These contacts became part of a secret underground, financed by German businessmen who had profited by the war. They would assist any Nazi fugitive in their efforts to escape Allied justice. They called themselves ODESSA (Organisation der SS Angehorigen: Organization of Former SS Men). Though its existence has never been conclusively proven, there must have been some sort of apparatus in place that assisted Nazi fugitives. Author Zvi Aharoni writes in Operation Eichmann, “no one has been able to explain convincingly who was behind ODESSA, how the organization to help fugitives was structured and who was funding it.”
Ostensibly with the help of ODESSA, Eichmann left north Germany and began to make his way south. He took a route that many fleeing Nazis utilized at that time, avoiding the large cities and staying with clergy for short periods of time. Eichmann would travel by night and sleep during the day. He roomed in Catholic monasteries and convents with the full cooperation of clergy who were eager to help former men of the military. During the period immediately after the war, Nazis of every rank, particularly those in the higher echelons of power, were hidden away under the protective umbrella of the Catholic Church.
In early 1948, Eichmann arrived in Italy and made his way to Rome. He remained in the safe hands of the Franciscan monks while supporters prepared forged papers and a new identity. Soon, Eichmann assumed the name Ricardo Klement with a full set of papers, including a passport. In the meantime, Eichmann’s wife appeared in a German court and attempted to have her husband declared dead, a move designed to end efforts for his capture. But Simon Wiesenthal managed to show the court that her statements were lies, designed to throw off his pursuers.
When Eichmann learned that the Israelis were hot on his trail, he left the safe house in Rome and again, with the help of ODESSA, traveled to Syria. In Damascus, he posed as an importer of small arms for Arab interests. He had business dealings with Poland, Switzerland, Germany and Czechoslovakia. For two years, while Israeli assassination squads combed Italy and Sicily for Nazi killers, Eichmann allegedly lived and worked in Damascus as an arms dealer. During this time, he and his wife Veronika (Vera) communicated and made plans for the future.
In early 1950, Eichmann left Syria on a business trip to Genoa. He secretly returned to Rome where he quickly made additional travel arrangements. In June, he left Rome aboard the ship Giovanna C. On July 14, 1950, the most wanted man in the world arrived in Buenos Aires, Argentina and began a new life.
When Eichmann arrived in the city of Buenos Aires, he wore dark sunglasses, a large mustache and a winter coat pulled tightly about his neck. He was greeted at the airport by former SS friends who spirited him away from the bustling facility. Ricardo Klement was taken to Tucaman, approximately 600 miles from Buenos Aires, where he was given a job under the auspices and safety of other fugitive Nazis. For the next two years, he worked for the water company as a supervisor and received several promotions for his good performance. But Eichmann grew restless. His wife, along with his three children, was still in Austria. Despite the danger involved, Eichmann contacted her and through a series of letters, arranged for her to relocate to Argentina. On July 28, 1952, Vera Eichmann and the children Klaus, 16, Horst Adolph, 13, and Dieter, 10, arrived in Buenos Aires.
The reunited family lived on a spacious farm in the Tucaman region, which was not heavily populated. Among the dense forests and rolling hills of northern Argentina, the Eichmanns felt a comforting solitude, which they had never experienced before. The children began to ride horses and attended the local schools. Eichmann made enough money to support them in an adequate fashion. In this glorious wilderness, which was far removed from the universal devastation in Germany, they lived together as a family once again. The children learned Spanish and fished the rivers for food. They made friends with neighbors, many of whom were German. Tucaman was home to hundreds of former SS men hiding from justice. No one asked any questions, for they all shared the same fears and suspicions. Eventually, Vera Eichmann changed her name to Catalina Klement and obtained a national identity card. For all practical purposes, on paper at least, they became the Klement family.
But despite the relative safety of the Argentine wilderness, Eichmann still felt threatened. He knew the Israelis were still searching for him and would never relent until he was caught. He lived in constant fear of discovery. Over the next few years, Eichmann began to move from place to place, from job to job, never staying too long in one location. One Argentinean official later told the press, “He changed jobs, he changed names. But wherever he went, he was in constant fear of being killed…he grew gaunt, nervous and bald.” In 1956, concerned about his place in history and what his children would think when they discovered their father was a mass murderer, he began to write his memoirs. “I have slowly wearied of living as an anonymous wanderer between the worlds,” he wrote, “I was nothing but a loyal, methodical, correct and diligent member of the SS…inspired by nothing but ideal emotions for the Fatherland to which I had the honor to belong.”
But back in Austria, in his hometown of Linz, Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal was also restless. Though he knew Eichmann was still alive, his exact location was unknown. In 1954, Wiesenthal visited a friend who, like himself, was a stamp collector. While the friends spoke, the man said that he recently received a letter from an acquaintance who had moved to Buenos Aires, where ironically, there was also a very large Jewish community. When Wiesenthal read the letter, he nearly choked from the excitement. “I saw that dirty pig Eichmann,” the man wrote, “He lives near Buenos Aires and works for a water company.” Wiesenthal passed the information along to the Israelis.
Since the end of the war, the Israelis had collected every scrap of information about Nazi fugitives who fled to all corners of the earth. After Eichmann’s name was prominently mentioned at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials in 1946, the Mossad (Israel’s Secret Service) paid special attention to his case. They knew that the immediate family of Adolf Eichmann had suddenly disappeared from their home in Linz, Austria. Rumors indicated they had left on a trip to South America, perhaps Brazil. The Israelis knew there were many countries in that region of the world who welcomed Nazi fugitives. However, suspicion soon settled on Argentina and the city of Buenos Aires.
Israeli agents were dispatched to Buenos Aires to gather more intelligence. Since they did so without the approval or knowledge of the Argentinean government, they had to be doubly careful. For weeks they watched suspected addresses and followed other men known to be Nazi outlaws. But none were Eichmann. Agents were aware that Eichmann was using the name Ricardo Klement. Through Jewish informants, Israeli agents located Klement living with his family in the San Fernando section. Over the next several days, they kept the house under surveillance hoping for an opportunity to see Klement and perhaps identify him as Adolf Eichmann. First they saw Vera Eichmann on several occasions and each of the four children. Finally, on March 19, 1960, Israeli Secret Service agent Zvi Aharoni saw Eichmann walking in front of his home. “I saw him about two o’clock in the afternoon,” Aharoni wrote in Operation Eichmann, “…I saw a man of medium size and build, about fifty years old, with a high forehead and partially bald, collecting the washing.” Aharoni felt certain it was Eichmann.
But the proof would not come until three days later. While agents kept the suspect under constant surveillance, they saw the same man go to a local store and buy a bouquet of flowers. Then the man boarded a bus and headed home. He walked down the street where he lived carrying the bouquet as agents secreted themselves nearby. When he arrived home at 16 Garibaldi Street, the agents saw his children dressed for a special occasion. The man handed the flowers to his wife at the door. Israeli agents could barely contain their excitement. That day, March 21, 1960, was Adolf Eichmann’s 25th wedding anniversary.
The killer of six million had been found.
An advance team of Mossad agents arrived in Argentina on April 24, 1960. Their mission was to watch the Klement household and study the movements of its occupants. They noticed that Eichmann took the same route home from his job each day. He boarded a bus somewhere near his job and exited the bus approximately two blocks from his residence on Garibaldi Street. If they were to abduct Eichmann, agents had to confront him between the bus and his home. And whatever action they decided upon, it had to be done quickly and without fanfare, for Argentina was not made aware that Israeli agents were in the country. The government was not even told that one of the most sought after war criminals in the world had been located. It was simply too risky to share that information.
On May 11, the Mossad agents surrounded the Garibaldi location surreptitiously. Eichmann usually exited the bus from his job about 7:35 p.m. Two Mossad agents pretended to be fixing an automobile that was parked several yards from the bus stop. Others loitered in the area waiting for the precise moment. Two buses passed without Eichmann being on either one. By 8:00 p.m., he still had not appeared. The Mossad team decided to wait for one more bus. At five minutes past eight, another one arrived. This time, Eichmann stepped off the bus and proceeded to walk down Garibaldi Street.
Within moments, two agents jumped on top of the suspect, who immediately fell to the ground screaming. A car raced up next to the men and other agents hopped out of the vehicle. They dragged a terrified Eichmann into the rear of the car and slammed the doors shut. The vehicle sped off in a cloud of dust and smoke. Back on Garibaldi Street, the Mossad agents began to wander away as if nothing had happened. The abduction had taken 60 seconds from when they first saw the target exit the bus. Inside the car, they gagged and blindfolded Eichmann. They tied his legs and arms and told him if he weren’t quiet, he would be shot immediately. The man replied in a calm German voice, “I have already accepted my fate.”
Eichmann was taken to a safe house just outside Buenos Aires where he was stripped naked and examined. Underneath his left armpit, agents found the telltale sign of the SS: a tattoo that had been partially removed. All SS men during the Nazi era were required to get this tattoo as a form of identification. When asked to supply his name, he replied, “Ich bin Adolf Eichmann!” (I am Adolf Eichmann!)
Eichmann remained hidden away in the safe house until final arrangements could be made to smuggle him out of Argentina. He was given intravenous drugs to keep him complacent and cooperative. Mossad agents then took him to the Buenos Aires airport where he was carried on board an El Al flight to Spain. Every second of the operation was critical, for discovery by the Argentinean police meant certain prison and worse, freedom for Eichmann. “Every minute seemed to last an hour,” wrote Zvi Aharoni, “We were tense and indescribably nervous…all sorts of horrific thoughts quite naturally went through our minds!” But just after midnight on May 21, 1960, the prop plane lifted off the runway and headed out toward the Atlantic.
Two days later, during a meeting of the Knesset, Israel’s Congress, David Ben Gurion, the Prime Minister and founder of Israel, made a stunning and totally unexpected announcement to the world. “I have to inform the Knesset,” he began, “that some time ago Israeli security forces found one of the greatest Nazi criminals, Adolf Eichmann, who together with other Nazi leaders, is responsible for…the extermination of six million European Jews. Adolf Eichmann is already in this country under arrest and will shortly be brought to trial here under the law.” Across the world, newspapers printed huge headlines, “Eichmann Captured!” Jews everywhere rejoiced that the most important Nazi fugitive, responsible for millions of deaths, had finally been apprehended after 15 years of freedom.
A few weeks later, Time magazine published a detailed account of Eichmann’s kidnapping. The article confirmed Argentina’s suspicions that Israel had violated her sovereignty by sending secret agents within its borders. Its ambassadors demanded that Israel be punished for this transgression. Argentina’s Prime Minster said his country delivers its “most formal protest for this illicit act committed in violation of one of the most fundamental rights of the Argentine state.” Israel apologized to Argentina but refused to return Eichmann. Prime Minister BenGurion later said, “This man, Eichmann, was the one directly responsible for…the final solution…six million of our people were massacred…on a gigantic and unprecedented scale throughout Europe…I am certain that only a very few persons in the world would fail to understand the profound motivation and supreme moral justification of the details of his capture.” Argentina was not satisfied and appeared before the United Nations accusing Israel of violating the U.N. Charter. But not everyone in Argentina was unsympathetic. According to author Quentin Reynolds, one member of the Argentine Parliament made a speech in which he said, “Of course, we non-Jewish Argentineans cannot understand it. Our children were not thrown into the flames, our graybeards were not buried alive, the bodies of our sons and daughters were not made into soap!” The political tension continued for several weeks but in the end, Argentina and Israel patched up their differences.
The path was cleared for a trial in the holy city of Jerusalem.
The Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, which took place from 1945 to 1949, convicted many of the Nazi murderers and brought a sense of justice for the dead. But in 1960, a new generation was emerging and the world needed to know of the incredible atrocities committed by Hitler, Eichmann, and the rest of the high German command. Israeli prosecutors had amassed millions of pages of damning proof, much of it consisting of the Nazi’s own precise records during the war. In 1945 as the Allies closed in on Berlin, Nazi administrators worked feverishly to destroy the incriminating accounts that detailed every terrible step of the Final Solution. But they couldn’t destroy it all. American and British troops seized mountains of paperwork that would stand forever as documentary proof of the sadistic madness of the Nazi regime.
During the spring of 1960, hundreds of media personnel, reporters, observers and television crews from dozens of countries descended upon Israel for the opening of Eichmann’s trial. It was agreed upon that the proceedings would be broadcast live, providing viewers with one of history’s first televised criminal trials. Eichmann was placed inside a bulletproof glass cage where he was given a pitcher of water and paper and pencil to take notes. Wiesenthal described him as “a weak, colorless, shabby fellow…he wore a cheap, dark suit and presented the picture of an empty, two dimensional cardboard figure.”
On April 11, 1961, the first day of the trial in Jerusalem, the clerk of the court read off the 15 charges against Adolf Eichmann. He was accused of crimes against humanity which consisted of the murder of untold millions in the death camps, the introduction of the poison gas known as Zyklon B, of being the author of plans that murdered 80,000 in Lithuania, 30,000 in Latvia, 45,000 in Byelorussia, 75,000 in the Ukraine and 33,000 in the city of Kiev. As Eichmann sat stoically inside a bullet proof glass cage in the courtroom, the court accused Eichmann of giving the orders to send hundreds of thousands to Auschwitz, causing the inhuman suffering inside the Warsaw ghetto in 1939 and 1940, the slaughter of 500,000 Hungarian Jews in just 8 months in 1944, enslaving millions across eastern Europe in forced labor camps, performing forced abortions on pregnant women, forced sterilization of thousands of Jewish men in Germany and finally of being the person in command of the entire Nazi bureaucratic structure that brought starvation, ruin and death to millions of people before and during the Second World War.
piled up in a store room
For the next four months, survivors of the Nazi horrors marched bravely to the witness stand. In gut-wrenching testimony that often had spectators weeping with grief, they described in graphic terms the barbaric cruelty of the Nazi reign of death. Day after day, the sickening story of the mass murder of millions was told to a world who heard, for the first time, eyewitness accounts of what it was like to be in hell. Gassings, beatings, random killings of thousands, ovens for humans, tortures, unspeakable medical experiments and the destruction of entire towns and villages were just some of the atrocities committed by the Nazis. And at the head of this murderous rampage was the man in the glass booth, at times fearful, indignant, embarrassed, proud and not at all guilt-ridden. He looked more like a clerk, a bookkeeper, a cashier in a grocery store. He didn’t look like his earlier photographs in which he proudly wore a Nazi uniform and a strange smirk on his face. But all the witnesses knew the name: Adolf Eichmann, the Chief of Section IV B 4 of the Gestapo, the Nazis’ man in charge of the fictitious “Jewish Problem,” the monster who masqueraded as a human being.
On June 20, 1961, Adolf Eichmann, 55, took the stand in his own defense. Across the world, millions watched as this timid-looking man finally emerged from the glass booth. Eichmann was determined to present his perspective on the Nazi era for posterity. Though by 1960, the war had been over for 15 years, he remained devoted to the ideas and principles expounded by Adolf Hitler and his beloved Nazi Party. Eichmann’s attorney, a German lawyer named Dr. Robert Servatius, led his witness through the early years of the Nazi’s rise to power. Though Eichmann had a good memory, he was selective on what he could remember on cross-examination.
When asked about the mass deportations, he pleaded for understanding. “Today, I am unable to express an opinion…and I do not wish either to deny it or to consider it as a fact,” he said to the court, “I no longer remember these details. If I might look at a document which relates to this, perhaps I can give some details about it.” He tried to avoid responsibility for the billions stolen from the victims of the Third Reich. “What to do with property?” Eichmann asked the court, “I do not know about that. I do, however, know that after laws came into force…property was seized by the heads of the District Finance Administration…At the time I was not particularly familiar with details of the legal aspects of property.” When the judge inquired if Eichmann was directly responsible, the defendant replied, “Of course, since I dealt with it, that is quite clearly correct.”
For days at a time, the prosecution went over the damning evidence of the gassing of prisoners. Eichmann at first tried to evade responsibility for the killings. “Your honor, these are matters which I myself cannot work out,” he said, “First, I was not at all responsible for such matters…there would have been records to that effect. After all, the fact of the gassings extended over a considerable period and was not limited to just one month…I no longer remember. I have lost all contact with that time. I have a very vague recollection of some gas business…Someone must have spoken about one way or the other about it, because otherwise I would not have known about it.” Later, Eichmann was forced to admit that he knew precisely what was being done at Auschwitz. “I went there some five or six times, I am not sure of the exact number,’ he told the court. However, faced with captured documents from his own office, Section IV B4, Eichmann finally admitted culpability. When asked if the deportation of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz was a matter for his department, Eichmann replied, “In the framework of my competence in Hungary, yes.”
Concerning the ghettos where millions died at the hands of the Nazis, Eichmann’s explanation followed a similar pattern. First he would deny any involvement. Then he would say that he was only following orders that he was helpless to disobey. Finally, when he was confronted with proof, Eichmann would admit his role. When asked about the inmates of the enclosed ghettos, he said that their fate was decided by him. “Yes, that is correct,” he told the judge, “I have just said that. Because when it came to the eastern territories, I was responsible for in accordance with orders, was drawing up the timetables, the guidelines…then the Jews had to be transported to the concentration camp.”
Though hundreds died on trains during each trip to the camps, Eichmann said, “The first dead bodies of Jews which I saw, were something I could not grasp…my knees began to tremble…the sight was completely new, I found it unbelievable…then I must confess, death really lost its horror for me. That is how things are, because the more you have to take in these fantastic and apocalyptic images, the less novel and shocking one finds it.”
were common
The verdict came on December 15, 1961. Eichmann was found guilty on all 15 charges. “In the judgment we described the crimes in which the accused took part,” the court said, “They are of unparalleled horror in their nature and scope. The objective of the crimes against the Jewish people…was to obliterate an entire people from the face of the earth…this court sentences Adolf Eichmann to death for crimes against humanity.”
On the morning of May 31, 1962, Eichmann languished in his cell waiting for a decision on his appeal to Israel President Ben-Zvi. All during that day, the president had received hundreds of telegrams and requests for mercy for the Nazi killer. Some people believed that to execute Eichmann would be solely an act of revenge for Israel. President Ben-Zvi disagreed. He issued a brief statement to the press, in which he decided “not to exercise his prerogative to pardon or reduce sentence in the case of Adolf Eichmann.” The Israeli Supreme Court, which Eichmann relied on to commute his sentence, was more blunt: “We know only too well how utterly inadequate this death sentence is as compared to the millions of deaths in the most diverse ways inflicted on his victims.”
At approximately 7 p.m., Eichmann was served his last meal, which consisted of peas, olives, bread and tea. A bottle of Israeli wine was brought to him of which he drank half. He told a Protestant minister who waited with him, “Tell my wife to take it calmly, I have peace in my heart.” Fifty yards away, workers made the final preparations on the gallows, the first ever built in the nation of Israel. Eichmann chatted with the minister until the guards finally arrived.
The prisoner was removed from his cell and escorted the short distance to the hangman’s rope. His ankles and knees were tied together. His hands were bound behind his back. When guards attempted to place a black hood over his head, he said, “I don’t need that.” He stood erect and never flinched. “After a short while, we shall all meet again,” he said, “Such is the fate of all men. Long live Germany, long live Argentina, long live Austria! I shall not forget them!” The noose was slipped around his neck and tightened. “Ready!” one of the guards said loudly. Seconds later, the trap door was sprung and Eichmann fell to his death.
Israel issued a short statement afterwards. “Adolf Eichmann was executed by hanging today in accordance with the sentence of death passed by the Jerusalem District Court on December 15, 1961…the body was examined by a government physician and pronounced life to be extinct at 23:58 hours.” One hour later, Eichmann’s remains were cremated. That same morning, at 3:45 a.m., his ashes were taken on a police boat out to the Mediterranean Sea and scattered into its dark waters.
“But to sum it all up,” wrote Eichmann in his memoirs, “I must say that I regret nothing…Hitler was somehow so supremely capable that the people recognized him. And so with that…I recognize him joyfully and I still defend him. I will not humble myself or repent in any way…No, I must say truthfully that if we had killed all the 10 million Jews that statisticians originally listed in 1933, I would say, ‘Good, we have destroyed an enemy.'”
The majority of the Nazi killers who escaped from Germany after the war have never been found. It is believed that most lived out their remaining years in various countries in South America.
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