Otto Adolf Eichmann, head of the "Eichmann Report" in the Main Security Office of the Reich, who was in charge of the organized persecution, expulsion and destruction of Jews in Nazi Germany, was found guilty of the murder of millions of people that Monday, December 11, 1961, in Jerusalem.
The bureaucratic abbreviation of his Berlin institution IV B4, in its technocratic indifference to what hid behind it, will remain a symbol of the cold management of the greatest crime in history.
How did Eichmann get to that dock? The career of a clerk who serves evil with loyalty and passion could not be guessed from the very beginning. No one is born a killer of millions.
Between Solingen and Linz
Adolf Eichmann was born in March 1906 in Solingen. Since 1938, the production of blades has been a trademark, and since 2012, Zolingen has had an official addition to its name - city of blades. Almost ninety percent of the German production of escaiges and knives originates from this city. But the city, which is located in a hilly area about forty kilometers north of Cologne, today does not really claim the fame of Adolf Eichmann's hometown.
Admittedly, little Adolf spent his childhood in Solingen, but in 1914, at the age of eight, he had to leave his hometown. Father Karl Adolf makes the decision to move the whole family - parents and six children - to Linz, Austria. After two years, his mother dies, his father remarries. Adolf Eichmann leaves the grammar school in Linz without passing the final exam. In that gymnasium, however, he met young men who would later be among the leading Austrian Nazis. It is interesting that Adolf Hitler also went to that school between 1900 and 1904.
He enrolled in a school for mechanics in Linz, but he didn't finish it either. He first got a job as an ordinary worker in the company where his father was a bookkeeper, and then he worked as a traveling salesman.
Eichmann becomes a Nazi
First, in 1927, he joined the Association of Frontline Fighters of German Austria, and in 1932, he joined the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) as well as the Schutzstafel (SS), the party militia. In June 1933, the Nazi party was banned in Austria. Adolf Eichmann moves to the German province of Bavaria, where he undergoes fourteen months of SS paramilitary training. He volunteers for service in Berlin. This is where his clerical career in the Nazi machine begins. At first he was an assistant clerk in the department in charge of Freemasons, then he was transferred to the department for Jews. This is where he is already involved in a spiral of crime because he is in charge of promoting the "emigration" of Jews from Germany, which is another name for expulsion. The first written trace of his ideology is the writing "On the Jewish Question" where he sees Jews as "eternal enemies of National Socialism". He sees in "popular anger", that is, in riots against Jews and pogroms such as became a part of German everyday life under Hitler, "a suitable means to deprive Jews of the feeling that they are safe". Eichmann proposes the systematic "Aryanization" of Jewish property - dispossession and exclusion from society, which after the war was assessed as "state robbery". Eichmann proposed a "central place" for the emigration of Jews to countries "where the Jews could not harm the Reich", countries whose cultural level was not high and where the expelled people could maintain themselves only by "work with a lot of self-denial". Eichmann believed that Palestine as well as some South American countries fit such criteria.
In "God's Vineyard"
At the invitation of Zionist officials, Eichmann even traveled to Palestine in 1937, where he visited the Carmel mountain range for several days - at the root of that name is a Hebrew word meaning "God's vineyard". Palestine was under the English mandate and the British police exiled Eichmann to Egypt. While walking through "God's vineyard", Eichmann could not have guessed that 25 years later he would end his life about 100 kilometers to the south, as one of the biggest criminals in the history of mankind.
The Anschluss - the annexation of Austria to the Third Reich in 1938 - was a gift of fate for Eichmann. He was given a leadership position in the SS for the "upper course of the Danube" and although he claimed the opposite at the trial, in the meantime it was proven that he commanded the units in Vienna that destroyed Jewish property and places of worship during the "Kristallnacht". He founded the "Main Office for Jewish Emigration" in Vienna with his collaborators. According to the same model, he organized an office in occupied Prague. In 1940, he took over the management of the affairs of the Reich Central Office for the Emigration of Jews in Berlin, in the institution where he began his career - in the Main Security Office of the Reich. There he could not repeat the "Vienna success" - in 18 months he expelled 150.000 Jews. Europe was at war, fewer and fewer countries were ready to receive Jews. Plans to expel the Jews to Madagascar failed and the deportation that had begun to Nisko in Poland was suspended.
Killing technocrat, lumberjack, Argentinian
However, Eichmann was given expanded powers in the report, which was intended to be the organizational brain of the deportation of Jews from Germany and the occupied territories.
Adolf Eichmann knew what he was doing. He was present at mass executions near Minsk, visited concentration camps in the making, and checked how dusehupkas - gas chambers on wheels - worked. At the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, where the decision on the "final solution of the Jewish question" was made, Adolf Eichmann was in charge of the protocol.
At the end of the war, he was separated from his family, in Austria he falsely presented himself as an air force officer, then he ended up in Allied captivity. There, the SS helped him escape and recommended him to their people in the north of Germany, where he settled on a church property as a woodcutter with false documents. In 1950, he moved to Italy and through the famous "rat canals" he went to Argentina with the help of the Catholic Church. Soon his family joined him. His fourth son was born in Argentina. Adoilf Eichmann got a job as an electrician in the Mercedes factory. Under the name Riccardo Klement, he led a petty-bourgeois life. He socialized with his peers.
The West German secret service knew where Eichmann was hiding for years. But Nazi cadres served in the new state apparatus, so the German government feared that Eichmann might be an unpleasant defendant who would testify about people who had "ironed" their resumes.
How was Eichmann arrested?
German Attorney General Fritz Bauer did not accept the passivity of the state. As soon as he found out where Eichmann was, he reported it to the competent institutions in Israel. He pressed further - noting that there was a risk of escape.
In May 1960, Israeli agents captured Adolf Eichmann. There was no agreement between Israel and Argentina under which Eichmann could be extradited to Israel. Eichmann was secretly taken out of the country and brought to trial in Israel. On the one hand, it was a diplomatic problem between Tel Aviv and Buenos Aires, but also a world sensation.
The process changed the perception of the Holocaust and disturbed many consciences, dormant at the beginning of the post-war decade of the "economic miracle" in West Germany's young democracy. Between April and December 1961, the media in SR Germany reported on the trial every day. Eichmann looked average, even pitiful compared to the crime in which he played an important role.
Eichmann spent eight months behind bulletproof glass in Jerusalem, listening to the testimony of hundreds of witnesses, supported by thousands of pages of documents. He repeated that he was only following orders. And when his lawyer filed an appeal against the death sentence, which was pronounced a few days after the verdict that he was guilty, in that appeal Eichmann declared: "I was not a responsible leader, and therefore I do not feel guilty."
"The Banality of Evil"
One of the most famous controversies arose after German-Jewish-American philosopher Hannah Arendt published her book "Eichmann in Jerusalem: An Account of the Banality of Evil." Hannah Arendt attended part of the trial in Jerusalem and was struck by the absence of atrocity in Eichmann's appearance. She concluded that a person by character does not have to be extremely evil, that he does not have to be a pathological case or an ideological fanatic - to commit endless evil.
Hannah Arendt was ironic, sharp. Together with her mentor Karl Jaspers, she warned that in the case of systematic destruction of people, it is not a "crime against humanity", but a "crime against humanity".
In interviews during his life in Argentina, Eichmann expressed regret that he was not more effective in organizing the murders and claimed for himself: "I was not a normal recipient of orders, then I would have been a schmuck, but I participated with my own thinking, I was an idealist."
Hannah Arendt had no insight into those statements, which were published much later. She did, however, study the protocols of the trial in which Eichmann complained that he could not bear blood even when someone was cut with a knife, and that he was sick of visiting the death camps. He called the Nazi extermination of the Jews "the greatest capital crime in the history of mankind." He left an opinion about nationalism that today's defenders of human rights would not be ashamed of: "Today it is clear to me that any nationalism in its extreme form leads to drastic egoism, and radicalism is not far from there." He probably wanted to convince the judges, that his only motive was - conscientious execution of tasks.
Hannah Arendt seems to have believed him that he had no will of his own. The judges didn't. 60 years ago, they established that he was guilty and that his guilt consisted, among other things, in the conscious intention to destroy the Jewish people, not only in the will to serve the leader.
In the sixth decade of the last century, the theses of Hannah Arendt caused almost three years of fierce controversy. The German edition of her book was signed in 1964 by the head of the respected Piper publishing house, Hans Resner. Hannah Arendt did not learn until the end of her life that he was also a high-ranking Nazi until 1945. This would probably only strengthen the belief in the correctness of the thesis that evil does not appear in demonic guises, as we may wish, because then it is easy to recognize. Evil can be clean-shaven, well-mannered, polite, average. Part of the everyday, banal environment. And that is the most terrible thing about him.
Anyway, Otto Adolf Eichmann, the most famous representative of the "banality of evil", the perpetrator of mass crimes of terrifying proportions, which he organized at his writing desk, was hanged on the night between May 31 and June 1, 1962 in the Israeli city of Ramla, barely a hundred kilometers from the place where in 1937 he walked in the mountains whose name is the Hebrew word "God's vineyard".
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