Who was Karl Adolf Eichmann? He headed the Gestapo Department IV B4 for Jewish affairs, he saw himself as a self- proclaimed Jewish specialist.  He was the one who was responsible to keep the trains rolling from all over Europe to the Death Camps.

Eichmann’s family background was that his mother died when he was ten.  His father remarried.  His best friend growing up was Harry Selbar, a Jew.  He came from a middle class family growing up in Linz, Austria.  AS a child because of his looks and dark complexion he was nicknamed “the little Jew.”

After his schooling he worked various jobs being a laborer, a sales Jewish culture.  He held such positions as the head of the central official of Jewish immigration before being appointed to the head of Gestapo Section IV B4 of the Reich Main security office. 

Eichman began to be interested in politics in April 1932, when he joined the Austrian Nazi Party. . In September 1934 he was revisited into the Schutzstaffel (SS) where he became the Nazi authority on Jewish affairs.  In 1934 Adolf Hitler appointed Eichmann Chief of the Reich central office for Jewish Immigration.

With an iron hand he set up a plan to deport the Jews using an assembly line in which he stripped them of their property, bank accountants, jobs, apartments-given a passport.  Without a visa they would be sent immediately to Dachau.

Eichman told the Jews that survived the journey to the camps, “There are no apartments and no houses, if you build your homes you will have a roof over your head.”

In July 1942, Eichman joined by others, attended the Wannsee Conference where they discussed what to do with the large number of Jews in the camps.  It was decided to exterminate them.  Eichman was placed in charged of what was known as the “Final Solution”.

For a while Eichman took personal charge of the Auschwitz Camp to see the Final Solution in operation.  He told one of his officers that; “I’ll die happily with the certainty of having killed almost six million Jews.”

Eichman supervised special German units called Einsatzguppen.  These special units followed behind advancing troops.  Under orders from Eichman, these units hunted down the Jews and killed them.  The main objective of these units was to kill Jews and rob them of their property.  It is estimated that this special unit killed 1.4 million Jews.

By the end of the war Eichman started destroying all the documents he could find which implicated him in the mass murder of these human beings (Jews).

In February 1945, Eichman escaped from Germany, and changed his name to Ricardo Klement.  He worked for a water company in Argentina.  He did this for fifteen years before he was captured in 1960.  He was then moved to Israel to stand trial for war crimes against the Jews.  Found guilty of those crimes he was executed on May 31, 1962.

In conclusion, and to answer the question posed in this paper, Who was Adolf Eichmann?  The only description that I can think of is he was a cold calculated killer that was able to practice killing as an officer in the (SS).  He was given the power because of his position with the Nazis.  He left at his legacy for his children around six million dead Jews.  He went to his grave denying that he acted on his own but, instead of under the orders of Adolf Hitler.  Some called him a monster, but he was, plainly a man who knew exactly what he was doing to other human beings.

Jeremy Foxhoven

7^th Social Studies

Rossville Jr. High

Holocaust Project

Spring 2003

Bibliography