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| Adolf Eichmann the son of Adolf Karl Eichmann and Marie nee Schefferling was born in 1906 in Solingen, Germany. His family moved to Austria when he was eight. He spent his youth in Linz, Austria, which had also been Hitler's home town. His mother died when he was ten. He had one sister and five brothers. He told an interviewer that his best childhood friend, Harry Selbar, was Jewish. As a boy, Eichmann was teased about his looks and complexion and was nicknamed ''the little Jew'' by classmates. He was a poor student and dropped out of High School to become a traveling Sales man with a Vacum cleaner company between 1927-1933.He later took a job with an American oil company. | |
| On the 1 of April 1932 Eichmann joined the Austrian Nazi, Party, after undergoing fourteen months' military training Eichmann joined the exiled Austrian legion in July 1933. From 1934-1937 he worked for the security Service (SD). Eichmann's first big opportunity came after he was sent to Vienna by the Gestapo to prepare the ground for the Anschlass, when he was Appointed. In August 1938 he was in charge of the office for Jewish Emigration. In March 1939 he was handling forced deportations to Poland. In October 1939 he was appointed special adviser on the ''evacuation'' of Jews and Poles. In December 1939 Eichmann was transferred to Reich Main security office (RSHA). For the next six years Eichmann's office was the headquarters for the implementation of the ''Final Solution''. In the summer of 1941 his department began creating death camps, developing gassing techniques and organizing the system of convoys that were to take European Jews to their deaths. | |
| It was in 1941 and November of the same year that he was promoted to SS Lieutenant-Colonel. He had begun to organize the Mass deportation of Jews from Germany already, the Bohemia, in accordance with Hitler’s order to make the Reich free of Jews as rapidly as possible. Eichmann’s position as the “Jewish specialist” was consolidated in January of 1942. Implementation of the “Final Solution” was a model of bureaucratic industriousness. Eichmann claimed he had nothing against Jews. Eichmann ignored Himmlers order of “no gassing”. The desk-murderer became a public personality after March 1944. In August 1944 approximately four million Jews had died in death camps and two million had been killed by mobile extermination units. Eichmann was arrested at the end of the war. In 1946 he escaped from an American internment camp and went to Argentina. Israeli secret agents tracked him down on May 2, 1960. December 2, 1961 Eichmann was sentenced to death for crimes against humanity. On May 31, 1962 he was executed in Ramleh prison. World War II began in September of 1939 when Germany attacked Poland, Europe’s largest Jewish population. Eichmann gave German troops orders to kill Jews which might be a security threat. Eichmann denied that he suggested ghettoization as a method to kill large numbers of Jews. In October 1939 was when Eichmann started Jews, Poles, and Gypsies. Thousands of people in these ghettos died of starvation and disease. If they survived they were deported to labor concentration or death camps. Not very many survived. Eichmann hoped that the ghettos would deplete the Jewish population quickly and naturally. There was no medicine permitted in the ghettos. In 1940 Henryk Ross photographed the brutal conditions there. The photos were taken by Ross and others. They painted of ghetto life. There were one hundred and sixty thousand people there that were packed into a smaller area than three square miles. When Eichmann forced another twenty thousand in to Lodz, Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June of 1941. There was some special German units called Einsatzgruppen. The units called Einsatzgruppen were followed immediately behind the advancing troops. Under the orders from Eichmann the units hunted down the Jews and killed them. Eichmann was the supervisor of these units. The main and principal objective of the Einsatzgruppen was to kill the Jews and rob them from their property. The estimated about 1.4 million Jews were murdered by the Einsutzgruppen. All of their reports about their activities went to Eichmann. In October 1941 there was a decision that was made to use a poison to kill the Jews. Auschwitz was a camp in Poland that was chosen to test the new method and by the end of 1941 zyclon B gas was found to be a faster method than carbon monoxide poisoning. It is generally believed that the number of Jews that died in the Holocaust was six million. Five million of the others also perished as a result of Nazi atrocities. | |
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On a frigid winter evening in 1960, Israeli secret agent Peter Z. Malkin
tracked Adolf Hitler outside the Nazi war criminals home in Buenos
Aires, Argentina, then helped colleagues hustle Eichmann into a waiting
car. Two weeks later, Eichmann, Adolf Hitler’s chief architect
of the Holocaust, sat in an Israeli prison cell, awaiting his trial for
war crimes and his eventual hanging in 1962. “I am not the
monster that I am made out to be. I am the victim as an error of
judgment. I was assaulted in Buenos Aires, tied to a bed for a
week, and then drugged by injections in my arms and brought to the
airport in Buenos Aires, form there I was flown from Argentina.
This can quite obviously only be explained by the fact that I was
considered to be the person who was responsible for everything.”
In 1950 Eichmann along with 3 others went to Austria and then Italy.
In Genoa a monk gave Eichmann a passport with the name Ricardo Klement
obtains and Argentina Visa and goes to Buenos Aires. In April 1952
Eichmann obtains his false identity documents. He is now Ricardo
Klement a German national born in Bolzana, Italy. He is a mechanic
employed as a labor organizer by the Capri construction, measurements,
and water works company, which sheltered many ex-Nazis after the war.
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| Kiri Kraus
Rossville Jr. High - 7th Grade 2002 Holocaust Projects |
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