One of the most brutal of the Nazi officers who controlled Germany in the 1930s and 1940s, Karl Adolf Eichmann nearly escaped prosecution. It took 15 years after the end of World War II to find him, but Israeli secret service agents finally located him in Argentina and arrested him. As chief of the Gestapo's "Office for Jewish Emigration" from its inception, Eichmann was responsible for moving Jews from all over Nazi-occupied Europe to the concentration camps where an estimated six million died.
Born in the German town of Solingen in 1906, Eichmann moved with his family to Linz, Austria (coincidentally, Hitler's home town) during World War I. He became interested in the then-secret National Socialist (Nazi) Party and actually joined early in 1932. Within six months he had joined the elite group known as the Schutzstaffel, or the SS, and a year later he was attached briefly to the Austrian Legion, a group of Nazis camped in Bavaria on the Austrian border. This group was to march into Austria and overtake the country should Hitler give the order. (Hitler was later able to take control of Austria without needing physical force.)
In 1934, Eichmann was back in Germany, moving up in the SS ranks. He was attached to the SS unit that dealt with Jewish affairs. At that time, no one had any idea that the Jews were to be systematically murdered as part of what was called the Final Solution. By the time Eichmann was named head of the Office for Jewish Emigration in March of 1938, he was clearly among the group of individuals who did know, and he accepted his new responsibilities with no apparent pangs of conscience. William L. Shirer, the correspondent who chronicled Hitler's Germany in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, noted that Eichmann reportedly told one of his staff that his role in the murder of so many innocent people troubled him so little that he expected to go to his grave laughing.
Beginning with the city of Vienna, which had gone from being capital of Austria to one of several administrative centers when Germany took over the country, Eichmann worked, ostensibly, to clear out all the Jews and "resettle" them. The Jews were sent to concentration camps, such as Auschwitz, Dachau, and Buchenwald. There, many people were executed, often brutally; those who survived often died of exhaustion or starvation as they toiled at hard labor. People of other religions and creeds were imprisoned and murdered as well, but for the Jews the Nazis designed a means of systematic extermination.
Eichmann was responsible for the logistics. He continued his gruesome work until the end of World War II, when Allied forces marched into Germany. He was captured by U.S. soldiers and placed in a prison camp pending his trial as a war criminal. In 1946, however, Eichmann managed to escape, and for the next 14 years he was able to stay under cover despite numerous Israeli attempts to capture him. Apparently he spent some time traveling through the Middle East; in 1958 he moved to Argentina, where he planned to live out his days. (Argentina and several other countries in South America were havens for Nazis; there were no extradition agreements with Israel, and in any case Israel was half way around the world.)
Although he thought he was safe, Eichmann was high on Israel's war criminals list. On May 11, 1960, members of the Israeli Secret Service found him near Buenos Aires. He was smuggled out of Argentina on May 20 and brought to Israel to stand trial. The smuggling was a controversial move since Eichmann was essentially kidnapped, but given his status as a war criminal, any controversy was quickly set aside.
Eichmann got better treatment at the hands of the Israelis than the Jews he sent to death got from him or his fellow officers. His trial lasted from April 11 to December 15, 1961. Although he tried to defend himself, the scope of his crimes and his unrepentant attitude were too horrible for anyone to give him much sympathy or support. A three-judge panel heard the case and at the conclusion they found him guilty. They sentenced him to death. Eichmann mounted the gallows in Tel Aviv and was hanged in May 31, 1962.
This is the complete article, containing 712 words
(approx. 2 pages at 300 words per page).
