Adolf Eichmann
(1906-1962)

Adolf Eichmann was born in Solingen on 19 March 1906.
Later the family (following the death of young Adolf's mother )moved to to Linz , Austria, where Eichmann spent his youth.As a boy, Eichmann was teased about his looks and dark complexion and was nicknamed "the little Jew" by classmates.

After failing to complete his engineering studies, Eichmann had various jobs like working briefly as an ordinary labourer in his father's small mining enterprise and then in the sales department of an Upper Austrian electrical construction company, Eichmann became a travelling salesman for the Vacuum Oil Company between 1927 and 1933.



On 1 April 1932 he joined the Austrian Nazi Party at the suggestion of his compatriot Ernst Kaltenbrunner. Having lost his job he sought employment across the border in Bavaria in July 1933, joining the exiled Austrian legion and undergoing fourteen months' military training.
In 1934 he served as an SS corporal at Dachau concentration camp.

In September 1934 he found an opening in Himmler's Security Service (SD) which provided him with an outlet for his bureaucratic talents.
Eichmann started out as a filing clerk cataloging information about Freemasons. By the beginning of 1935 he was the official responsible for 'Jewish questions' at the Berlin head office of the SD, specializing in the Zionist movement. He acquired a smattering of Hebrew and Yiddish, and briefly visited Palestine in 1937 to explore the possibilities of Jewish emigration from Nazi Germany to Palestine.British authorities, however, ordered him out of the country. As well he was appointed to head a newly created SD Scientific Museum of Jewish Affairs.

Appointed assistant to the SD leader of the SS main region, Danube, Eichmann's first big opportunity came after he was sent to Vienna by the Gestapo to prepare the ground for the Anschluss.

From August 1938 he was in charge of the "Office for Jewish Emigration" in Vienna set up by the SS as the sole Nazi agency authorized to issue exit permits for Jews from Austria, then Czechoslovakia and later the old German Reich. Eichmann's acquired expertise in "forced emigration"--in less than eighteen months approximately 150,000 Jews left Austria--and extortion was to prove an ideal training-ground for his later efficiency in "forced evacuation," i.e., the registering, assembly and deportation of Jews to extermination centres in the East. By March 1939 he was already handling forced deportations to Poland and, in October of the same year, he was appointed special adviser on the "evacuation" of Jews and Poles.

In December 1939 Eichmann was transferred to Amt IV (Gestapo) of the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA) where he took over Referat IV B4 dealing with Jewish affairs and evacuation. For the next six years Eichmann's office was the headquarters for the implementation of the 'Final Solution'; though it was not until the summer of 1941 that his 'resettlement' department began the task of creating death camps, developing gassing techniques and organizing the system of convoys that were to take European Jewry to their deaths.

In July 1940 Eichmann presented his Madagascar Plan proposing to deport European Jews to the island of Madagascar, off the coast of east Africa. The plan was never implemented.




It was in 1941 that Eichmann first visited Auschwitz and in November of the same year he was promoted to SS Lieutenant-Colonel. He had already begun to organize the mass deportation of Jews from Germany and Bohemia, in accordance with Hitler's order to make the Reich free of Jews as rapidly as possible.

On July 31, 1941 Heydrich was told by Göring to prepare "a general plan of the administrative material and financial measures necessary for carrying out the desired Final Solution of the Jewish question."


The Wannsee Conference of 20 January 1942 consolidated Eichmann's position as the "Jewish specialist" of the RSHA and Heydrich now formally entrusted him with implementing the "Final Solution." In this task Eichmann proved to be a model of bureaucratic industriousness and icy determination even though he had never been a fanatical anti-semite and always claimed that "personally" he had nothing against Jews. His zeal expressed itself in his constant complaints about obstacles in the fulfilment of death-camp quotas, his impatience with the existence of loopholes such as the free zone in Vichy France or the unco- operativeness of the Italians and other German allies in expediting their Jews.

"Europe would be combed of Jews from east to west," Heydrich bluntly stated.

Eichmann took a keen interest in Auschwitz from its founding and visited there on numerous occasions. He helped Höss select the site for the gas chambers, approved the use of Zyklon-B, and witnessed the extermination process.


When even Himmler became more "moderate" towards the end of the war, Eichmann ignored his 'no gassing' order, as long as he was covered by immediate superiors like Heinrich Muller and his old friend, Kaltenbrunner. Only in Budapest after March 1944 did the desk-murderer become a public personality, working in the open and playing a leading role in the massacre of Hungarian Jewry.

In March of 1944 Germany occupied its former satellite Hungary which had the last big Jewish population (725,000) in Europe. On that same day, Eichmann arrived with Gestapo "Special Section Commandos."

By mid May, deportations of Jews from Hungary to Auschwitz began. Eichmann then travelled to Auschwitz to personally oversee and speed up the extermination process. By the end of June, 381,661 persons - half of the Jews in Hungary - arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau, which went on to record its highest-ever daily numbers of persons gassed and burned.


In August 1944 the 'Grand Inquisitor' of European Jewry could report to Himmler that approximately four million Jews had died in the death camps and that another two million had been killed by mobile extermination units.

As the Soviet Army approached Budapest, Hungary, Himmler ordered Eichmann to cease deportations. However Eichmann ignored this and had another 50,000 Hungarian Jews rounded up and forced on an eight day death march to Austria.


Though arrested at the end of the war, Eichmann's name was not yet widely known and he was able to escape from an American internment camp in 1946 and flee to Argentina. He was eventually tracked down by Israeli secret agents on 2 May 1960, living under an assumed name in a suburb of Buenos Aires. Nine days later he was secretly abducted to Israel, to be publicly tried in Jerusalem. The trial, which aroused enormous international interest and some controversy, took place between 2 April and 14 August 1961.



During the four months of the trial over 100 witnesses testified against him. Eichmann took the stand and used the defense that he was just obeying orders. "Why me," he asked. "Why not the local policemen, thousands of them? They would have been shot if they had refused to round up the Jews for the death camps. Why not hang them for not wanting to be shot? Why me? Everybody killed the Jews."


On 2 December 1961 Eichmann was sentenced to death for crimes against the Jewish people and crimes against humanity. On 31 May 1962 he was executed in Ramleh prison.

A fellow Nazi reported Eichmann once said "he would leap laughing into the grave because the feeling that he had five million people on his conscience would be for him a source of extraordinary satisfaction."




http://history1900s.about.com/cs/eichmannadolf/

http://history1900s.about.com/cs/eichmannadolf/

http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/Holocaust/eichcap.html

http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/Hol.../eichmann.html

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The extermination of the Jews took special urgency in 1942 with the infamous Wannsee Conference. Adolf Eichmann assisted Reinhard Heydrich in organizing a conference which was held in the exclusive Wannsee suburb of Berlin. The conference would officially set forth the 'Final Solution to the Jewish Question.' Eichmann sent out the invitations, wrote the opening speech, and took down the minutes of the meeting. Altogether, 14 powerful Nazi bureaucrats gathered at villa No. 56/85 Am Grossen Wannsee for 90 minutes to discuss how they were going to kill 11 million Jews.

Eichmann Special Operation Unit. The Nazis respected the Hungarian fascist government under Admiral Nikolaus von Horthy, and Eichmann was to work with the cooperation of the Hungarians. Everything ran smoothly for Eichmann, in less than 2 months 434,351 were transported to Auschwitz. But his entire operation came to an end in July of 1944, when Admiral Horthy ordered an end to the deportations due to pressure he was receiving from the Vatican and neutral countries. Eichmann disobeyed Horthy's order and shipped 1500 more Jews in mid-July. In October of 1944, the Nazis overthrew the Horthy government. In that same month, Reichsfuhrer-SS Heinrich Himmler gave orders to Eichmann to stop the deportations of the Jews, and he ordered Auschwitz to be dismantled. Since he knew that the end of the war was near and the Russian armies were outside the borders of Hungary, he was hoping to save himself by negotiating a peace with the Allied forces. Eichmann, however, circumvented Himmler's orders and continued deporting the Jews. Since the railroads had been bombed, he began deporting them on foot. Thousands of people were being marched for 8 days from Hungary to Poland. Eichmann halted the foot marches on November 13th when SS-Colonel Kurt Becher threatened to report him to Himmler. On November 21st, Eichmann gave orders to start the foot marches again until Himmler ordered them to a halt again on November 26th. Despite repeatedly ignoring and violating orders from Heinrich Himmler to stop the deportations, Eichmann defended himself by claiming that Himmler's orders ran contrary to the wishes of Adolf Hitler and Eichmann was bound by his loyalty oath to follow Adolf Hitler.

http://www.thirdreichpages.org/eichmann2.htm

March 1944: March 18: Operation Margarethe: A special Einsatzkommando (SS officers Krumey, Dannecker, Nowak, Hunche, Wisliceny and Abromeit, under the command of Adolf Eichmann) ride in with the Panzer Lehr division to Budapest to implement the "Final Solution" on Hungary's Jews. Eichmann sets up shop at the Hotel Majestic in the Schawbenberg district of the city. Eichmann, HSSPF Otto Winkelmann and Dr. Veesemayer set up de facto control of the city.

March 22: Germans install a new Hungarian parliament with Dowe Zstojay as Prime Minister. A Dr. Endre, a "friend" of Eichmann's, becomes Secretary of State for Political (i.e. Jewish) Affairs

At the same time, Kurt Becher is assigned to be the SS-FHA representative in Budapest, responsible for procuring horses and horse equipment and supplies for the SS, Wehrmacht and Honvéd (Hungarian Army) Note that this is around the time of Operation Margarethe - the German plan to occupy Hungary as to keep it firmly in the Axis camp. Becher arrives in Budapest and he's got a tall order to find 20,000 horses for the SS! Becher and his staff are billeted in three houses owned by the Manfred Weiss family. He meets Dr. Ferenc Choren, a leading shareholder of the Hungarian conglomerate Manfred Weiss and a representative for the Weiss family. Manfred Weiss is a huge Hungarian corporation that manufactures trucks, foodstuffs and pins, among other holdings, which has recently seen 48% of its shares confiscated by the Honvéd government. Although Dr. Choren is Jewish, he & Becher get along well because of their shared passion for horses. Becher talks to Dr. Choren about getting the horses, and the Dr. suggests that he can help if the SS takes over the non-Jewish" shares of the company.

Under Eichmann's orders, 900,000 Hungarian Jews are driven into six zones of confinement.

April 1944: WAADAH member Rezso Kastner seeks out SS-Hauptstrumführer Wisliceny, a SD officer and member of Eichmann's Einsatzkommando, to make a deal: 4 million marks for allowing 600 Budapest Jews to escape to Palestine. The WAADAH pays the cash, but Wisliceny reneges on the deal.

Burned but undaunted, WAADAH then attempts to negotiate with SD officer Clages, who passes the proposal on to Himmler with the recommendation to trade Jews to get more war material for the Waffen-SS. Himmler orders Eichmann to contact WAADAH's Joel Brand.

April 25: Eichmann meets with Brand and demands 10,000 trucks, 2 million cases of soap, 200 tons of tea and 200 tons of coffee - and orders that Brand travel to Istanbul to meet with the World Jewish Organization to arrange the ransom. In return he promises the release of one million Jews "to the West." WAADAH agrees, but demands that Brand's arrival in Istanbul must coincide with the transfer of a "sample train" of 600-1,200 Jews to a neutral country.

May 1944: At some point in May, Joel Brand is introduced to SS-Standartenführer Kurt Becher.
May 17: Brand sets out for Istanbul; but Eichmann is already planning to sabotage the deal and proceed with the "Final Solution" in Hungary.

On the same day, Becher negotiates a deal with Dr. Franz Chorin. Chorin "sells" 51-55% of the company stock to the SS for permission to allow 48 members of the Weiss family (including Chorin) to escape for Portugal. In addition, the Weiss family agrees to pay 9 million marks and leave 9 family members in Budapest as hostages. Dr. Chorin asks that the Honvéd government not be notified of the deal until he and the Weiss family are out of Hungary.

Eichmann gets wind of the deal and is angry with Becher for interfering in his plans and how they represent Himmler getting "soft" on the "Jewish Question."

June 1944: Eichmann proceeds with his demonic efficiency
June 7: Zones 1 & 2 pronounced "Jew-free;" 289,357 Hungarian Jews killed
June 17: Zone 3 cleared; 50,805 Jews murdered
June 25: Pope Pius XII sends Hungarian leader Horthy a letter expressing concern regarding the treatment of Hungarian Jews.
June 30: Zone 4 cleared; 41,499 Jews murdered; on the same day, the "sample train" leaves Budapest with 1,684 Jews who have each paid a $1,000 ransom to flee. Eichmann orders the train diverted to Bergen-Belsen, and tells the WAADAH that the Jews on the train will be sent to Auschwitz and killed unless Joel Brand returns with an agreement with the World Jewish Organization. WAADAH's Kastner & Bliss turn to SS officer Becher for assistance; he rebuffs their pleas to intervene, but he does go to visit Himmler about the deal.

July 1944 July 26: SD officer Clages tells the WAADAH that Himmler has ordered the deportation of Hungarian Jews to cease. Himmler agrees to the immediate release of 500 Jews, but stipulates that Becher will have to negotiate the release of the remainder with representatives of the "Jewish-American Aid Organization" (a.k.a. the American Joint Distribution Committee) in Switzerland. Himmler believes that these negotiations will give him access to the highest channels of the US Government and thus open the possibility of negotiating a separate peace with the western Allies. WAADAH desperately plays along with Himmler fantasies, claiming that they have access to US President Roosevelt.

August 1944: Aug 21: Becher meets with Swiss banker Saly Mayer, who refuses to negotiate the "trucks for Jews" scheme unless Himmler first ends the murder operations against Jews and releases the remainder of Jews from the sample train. Interestingly, Becher doesn't tell Himmler about this impasse:
"...Whether Becher was genuinely concerned for the fate of the Jews or whether he himself believed in the possibility of a separate peace once Hitler had gone, the fact remains that he played WAADAH's game."

Sept 1944: US President Roosevelt sends US Quaker Roswell D. MacClellan to Switzerland to participate in the SS-Distribution Committee talks.
Sept 16: Hungarian leader Horthy orders the arrest of leading Arrow Cross men who have been intimidating Hungarian government officials and terrorizing Jews.
Sept 30: Himmler tells WAADAH that he has ordered the "actions" at Auschwitz stopped.
October 1944: Oct 8: Gestapo arrest Hungarian General Szibard Bakay in retaliation for Horthy's clampdown on the Arrow Cross movement.
Oct 15-16: "Coup at Castle Hill" - German forces successfully stage a coup against Hungarian leader Admiral Horthy and install a pro-fascist government. Horthy is interned at Castle Hirschberg at Waldheim, Germany; his son is sent to Dachau KZ. Meanwhile, Himmler removes Eichmann from Hungary, and orders that the remainder of the "sample train" can proceed to freedom without ransom.
Oct 16: SS and Arrow Cross troops take over the Budapest radio station; that night Arrow Cross gangs start a pogrom against Jews in the city, shooting them and dumping the bodies into the Danube from the Ketting and Margarethe bridges.

November 1944: Nov 5: SS officer Becher meets MacClellan at Zurich, which is technically a violation of the Teheran Agreement. The talks produce no agreements.

mid-late month: Becher, driving back from Switzerland to Hungary, sees firsthand the evidence of "Eichmann's Standarte" - Jews ages 10-65 forced marched from Hungary to Austria without shelter or food. Becher tells HSSPF Winkelmann and SS-Obergruppenführer & General Hans Jüttner (of the SS-FHA) about the situation. Winkelmann and Becher send an angry cable to Himmler, who orders the force marches stopped.
December 1944: The remainder of the Jews from the "sample train" arrive in Switzerland. Eichmann escapes from Budapest just in time before Red Army troops surround the city.*

Becher, Eichmann and Himmler met in Triberg, where Becher accuses Eichmann of circumventing Himmler's orders to negotiate the release of Jews for with the WAADAH and the Allies. Himmler supposedly screams at Eichmann: "IF UNTIL NOW YOU HAVE EXTERMINATED JEWS, FROM NOW ON, IF I ORDER YOU, AS I DO NOW, YOU MUST BE A FOSTERER OF JEWS!!!! I WOULD REMIND YOU THAT IN 1933 IT WAS I WHO SET UP THE HEAD OFFICE FOR REICH SECURITY, AND NOT GRUPPENFÜHRER MULLER OR YOURSELF, AND THAT I AM IN COMMAND!!!!"

By this point, the damage has already been done.

http://www.wssob.com/horse.html

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