Biography

SS-Obersturmbannfuehrer Karl Adolf Eichmann (1906-1962) was head of the Department for Jewish Affairs in the Gestapo from 1941 to 1945 and was chief of operations in the deportation of three million Jews to extermination camps.

He joined the Austrian Nazi party in 1932 and later became a member of the SS. In 1934 he served as an SS corporal in the Dachau concentration camp. That same year he joined the SD and attracted the attention of Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich. By 1935 Eichmann was already working in the Jewish section, where he was investigating possible "solutions to the Jewish question." He was even sent to Palestine to discuss the viability of large scale immigration to the Middle East with Arab leaders. British authorities, however, forced him to leave.

With the takeover of Austria in March 1938, Eichmann was sent to Vienna to promote Jewish emigration. He set up the Zentralstelle fuer juedische Auswanderung [Center for Jewish Emigration], which was so successful that similar offices were soon established in Prague and Berlin.

In 1939 Eichmann returned to Berlin, where he assumed the directorship of Section IV B4, Jewish affairs and evacuation, in the Reich Security Main Office. It was Eichmann who organized the Wannsee Conference of January 1942, which focused on issues related to the "final solution of the Jewish question." From this point Eichmann assumed the leading role in the deportation of European Jews to the death camps, as well as in the plunder of their property.

At the end of the war, Eichmann was arrested and confined to an American internment camp, but he was able to escape unrecognized. He fled to Argentina and lived under the assumed name of Ricardo Klement for ten years until Israeli Mossad agents abducted him in 1960 to stand trial in Jerusalem. The controversial and highly publicized trial lasted from April 2 to August 14, 1961. Eichmann was sentenced to death and executed in Ramleh Prison on May 31, 1962

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Eichmann on trial

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