Nuremberg Remembered Biography: Adolf Eichmann

Adolf Eichmann was born in 1906 near Cologne, Germany, to a middle-class Protestant family. After his mother died, his family relocated to Linz, Austria. After graduating high school, Eichmann tried a number of jobs and was not successful in any of them. At the age of 26, he joined the Nazi Austrian Party; two years later he joined the SS (group of Nazi soldiers that protected the Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler) as a corporal at Dachau concentration camp. Soon thereafter he began working for Heinrich Heydrich, the head of the SD, or the Security Service of the SS. Initially Eichmann was put in charge of investigating Freemasons. Then he was given the task of investigating possible solutions to the Jewish question.

After the Anschluss (the annexation of Austria into Germany by the Nazis in 1938), Eichmann headed the Central Office for Jewish Emigration. In 1939 he returned to Berlin, where he took charge of the IVB4 office, a section of Reich Main Security designated to implement the Nazi policies toward the Jews in Germany and Nazi-occupied territories.

During the war years, Eichmann worked on the Einsatzgruppen policies designed to eliminate Jews in occupied areas. He witnessed several of the Einsatzgruppen actions. He and his colleagues decided that the use of mobile gas vans would be a more efficient manner of eliminating Jews.

In January 1942 Eichmann helped coordinate the Wannsee Conference, where the Nazi leadership spelled out their plans to murder the Jews of Europe. . Henceforth, Jews were to be deported to permanent death camps in Poland and gassed in permanent facilities rather than by mobile gas vans. Eichmann was in charge of the transport trains, taking Jews to their final destinations. Now, Obersturmbannfuhrer (a high-ranking major in the SS), Eichmann was the chief administrator of the "final solution."

Following the surrender of Germany to the Allied forces in May 1945, Eichmann spent some time in an American internment camp but managed to escape. He then made his way to Argentina, where he lived for several years under an alias until the Mossad (Israeli organization for intelligence and special operations) located and arrested him in 1960.

Avner Less of the Israeli police interrogated Eichmann for hours in 1960. Throughout the interrogation Eichmann insisted that he was a loyal bureaucrat who did what he was told and did not initiate policies of the "final solution." The following selection from the interrogations offers a glimpse into Eichmann's defense and character.

Eichmann: Her Hauptmann, Bureau IVB4 never received extermination orders. Never! Its work was transportation and nothing else, subject of course to certain conditions. For instance, it could never send out an order to Paris or The Hague or Brussels saying, "Load a thousand people into a train." There were always guidelines to be followed. The evacuating authority had to know what was being done and what people were involved. Naturally, Bureau IVB4-this I must admit-had to pass on this information in accordance with others from above...

-Adolf Eichmann, quoted in Eichmann Interrogated: Transcripts from the Archives of the Israeli Police (1984), 123-24.

For more information on Adolf Eichmann, see Facing History and Ourselves: Holocaust and Human Behavior, "Eichmann in Jerusalem," (Brookline: Facing History and Ourselves National Foundation, Inc., 1994), 455.