Adolf Eichmann dropped out of school at the age of fifteen, never finishing it. In search of the meaning of life, he joined the nascent Nazi party and in it found his goal - the extermination of millions of Jews in the death camps of war-torn Europe.
The Holocaust remains a larger-scale crime in the history of mankind - the systematic, pedantic, deliberate extermination of 6 million Jews and the murder of 6 million Russians, Poles, Gypsies and other "inferiors" who do not correspond to Adolf Hitler's perverted idea of a racially pure world ruled by him thugs.
The conquered peoples perished at the hands of unparalleled villains - drunken Lithuanian and Latvian Quislings, intoxicated by impunity of policemen, who in the Nazi-occupied eastern lands shot their own compatriots from machine guns; Nazi henchmen who let gas into the chambers of Auschwitz and Treblinka; hardened Berlin criminals who executed their victims in the basements of the main imperial security office (Gestapo) on Prince Albrechtstrasse, and other dregs of humanity.
Wherever these motley murderers come from and wherever they do their dirty work, they all bear equal responsibility for the crimes against humanity that were committed in those 12 years when Hitler was in power in Germany.
In the truest sense of the word, Eichmann's hands were never stained with blood. But it was in his monstrously perverted brain that the plan to exterminate millions of Jews was born.
The author of the criminal system
But it was necessary to have a cruel prudence, an infinitely perverted logic, which is devoid of any human feelings like love or kindness, in order to transfer the manic theory of the Holocaust from the depths of inhuman Nazi philosophy to practice and put it into practice. Adolf Eichmann had such abilities.
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He rightfully earned himself a place in Hell alongside the most brutal criminal villains who left their bloody mark in history. And although his uniform was never stained with blood, he never pulled the trigger himself, it would not be an exaggeration to say that Adolf Eichmann is the most sinister killer of all times and peoples.
It was Eichmann who forced the trains with suicide bombers on a clear schedule to head to the hell of concentration camps. He developed a system called "The Final Solution of the Jewish Question", he attracted human resources and organized the production of equipment to bring this diabolical system to life. At the end of the war, he was among those high-ranking Nazis who managed to escape and thereby escape justice.
Adolf Eichmann was born in 1902 in the German city of Solingen. He spent his childhood in Austria, because his job search brought his father, an accountant, to Linz.
Dad, Karl Eichmann, maintained an atmosphere of strictness, frugality and order in the family. And nevertheless the boy Adolf studied carelessly and preferred to spend time in idleness. He loved to talk with former campaigners of the Kaiser's army who fought on the fronts of the First World War, eagerly listening to their stories about battles and battles, their arguments that politicians, and not soldiers, were to blame for the defeat of Germany.
Later, when the shoots of Nazism began to flourish in both Germany and Austria, the young man readily sided with those who believed that Germany's defeat was the result of an international Jewish conspiracy.
By the age of 20, young Eichmann was working as a traveling agent for an oil company. But he was more and more overwhelmed by the desire to link his fate with the Hitlerite swastika. On April 1, 1932, he joined the Austrian Nazi Party.
Nazi recruit
When the economic depression in Europe and around the world intensified, Adolf Eichmann gave up his job altogether and went to an SS training camp near Dachau, 20 miles from Munich, next to a then little-known concentration camp.
There, Eichmann underwent an intensive training course, after which he had scars on his elbows and knees for life - the result of overcoming obstacles with barbed wire and broken glass. “During this year I got rid of any feeling of pain,” he boasted later. After completing the course, Eichmann voluntarily entered the SD - the SS security service. In 1935, by order of the chief of the SD, Heinrich Himmler, he created the so-called "Jewish Museum" - a department whose sole task was to collect information about Jewish business and real estate in Germany and Austria.
Adolf Eichmann, so talentless in school, turned out to be a surprisingly capable student when it came to the "mortal enemies of the Reich." He thoroughly studied Jewish traditions, religion, way of life and soon became an unrivaled expert in this area.
A taste of power
1938 - when Germany annexed Austria without a single shot, Eichmann first felt the taste of unlimited power over people. He became the head of the Office of Jewish Emigration in Vienna.
Skillfully combining cunning and cruelty, Adolf Eichmann sowed terror among the Jewish population of the ancient capital of the empire. The rabbis were thrown out of their houses into the streets and their heads shaved; synagogues were razed to the ground; shops and apartments belonging to Jews were looted clean. They took away everything they had acquired from the victims, shoved their passports with the mark "Yu" ("yude" - Jew) into their hands and ordered them to find a country that would accept them within two weeks. In case of failure, there was only one way before them - to the concentration camp.
In Vienna, the son of a modest accountant fully knew the luxurious life. He settled in a beautiful mansion, which had previously belonged to one of the members of the Rothschild banking dynasty, ate in the best restaurants, drank unique wines from old cellars and even got himself a beautiful mistress - just for the sake of prestige, although he had been married for three years.
1939 - Adolf Eichmann was among the few close associates of Reinhard Heydrich ("Heydrich's hanger", as he would later be called) and was promoted to captain. Heydrich was one of the elected senior officials of the SS, whom the Fuehrer entrusted with the task of the future "cleansing of Europe" of Jews and other undesirable elements.
He noticed Eichmann's brilliant success in transforming Vienna from a city "free for Jews" to a city "free of Jews," and realized that this would make an excellent journeyman. In a recommendation addressed to Himmler, Heydrich wrote that Adolf Eichmann is capable of "leading the entire Jewish movement." By that time, Eichmann had already developed his own concept of a practical solution to the Jewish question. He called it "The Final Solution."
Death factory
When the war began, Poland was one of the first to be trampled. And the atrocities began. A significant part of the Polish population is Jews, and the first centers of their extermination appeared there. These centers were not originally concentration camps. They were created as enterprises for the extermination of people by hundreds of thousands.
The new administration under the leadership of Eichmann, which received the short designation "ID-IV" (in SS circles, it was simply called "Eichmann's department"), the first thing to do was to create a ghetto in the largest Polish cities - Warsaw and Lodz. According to the idea of Adolf Eichmann, disease and famine in these accursed places were to contribute to the extermination of the Jews in order to save ammunition so expensive for the Reich.
Eichmann took personal control of experiments with mobile "gas chambers" when Jews were herded into a closed truck and killed with exhaust gases. He also came up with the idea of creating a death camp in the south, in Auschwitz-Birkenau, which became Armageddon for the Jews.
1941 - when Hitler invaded the USSR, before Eichmann, already a lieutenant colonel, a huge field of activity opened up in the field of destroying "inferior races". The "gas chambers" turned out to be ineffective here. Mass executions of Jews and Slavs took a lot of time and required material costs. In addition, as it turned out, this procedure had a bad effect on the psyche of the performers.
Adolf Eichmann obtained from his superiors the use of more effective methods of murder, in which the hair, gold teeth, fat deposits of the victims could be used after their death. He used the "Cyclone-B" gas, which was used to kill 10,000 people a day in Auschwitz. For this, gas chambers equipped for baths were used. Eichmann accurately counted the number of those killed, displaying next to the figures of the benefits received. He also scrupulously accounted for every bar of soap made from the melted fat of people killed in concentration camps.
Possessed
1942 - in a villa in a cozy Berlin suburb of Wannsee, which previously belonged to a wealthy Jewish family, the Nazis entered into a final and irrevocable alliance with the devil. There was only one item on the agenda: "The Final Solution of the Jewish Question in Europe." Adolf Eichmann was also at this meeting.
The "Third Reich" carried out the largest, most mass murder of people in the history of mankind. The extermination of Jews throughout Europe, their extermination in death camps, so much so that at first it did not arouse suspicion either among the victims themselves or in neutral countries, was masterfully organized. Eichmann roamed Europe, requisitioning the trains needed for military needs, in order to send more and more "enemies of the Reich" to the gas chambers and furnaces.
Since the times of the generals of the Middle Ages, who destroyed European peoples with fire and sword, such devilish power has not been concentrated in the hands of one person. More pragmatic SS officers believed that the extermination of the Jews was a secondary matter, and the main task was to win the war. But not Eichmann. He persistently demanded new vehicles for his victims, new contingents of guards for concentration camps, new tanks of deadly gas for cells.
1944 - when the Allied forces were approaching the borders of Germany, Adolf Eichmann paid special attention to Hungary. This country had the status of an ally of Germany, and 800,000 Hungarian Jews remained relatively safe for the time being. Eichmann took this fact as a personal insult. He went to Budapest to personally arrange for them to be sent to concentration camps. From mid-May to July 1944, 437,000 Hungarian Jews were loaded into wagons and sent to their death. As Eichmann later said, this was one of the most joyful periods of his life.
A unique feature of Eichmann was a sincere belief in the righteousness of his cause. He considered himself a loyal servant of Nazi ideas, who, like a member of the monastic order, devoted his life without reserve to fulfilling the mission entrusted to him.
The years have left an imprint on both his appearance and his behavior. This was not the same riotous Eichmann, who boastfully rolled through the streets of Vienna in the posh Rothschild limousine, making the unfortunate rabbis terrified. By the end of the war, he had lost weight, looked tired and gloomy, but his eyes were constantly burning with fanatical fire. He despised everyone who tried to hide what was done in the name of National Socialism.
But the collapse, the possibility of which Eichmann never wanted to admit, was approaching inexorably. After intensive Allied bombing, most of the railways in Europe were destroyed. The death camps in Poland were liberated or completely destroyed.
1944, October - Eichmann was forced to leave Budapest with hundreds of thousands of refugees. Returning to burning Berlin, he reported to Himmler that, according to his calculations, 4 million Jews were exterminated in death camps and another 2 million were killed at the hands of punitive detachments operating in Russia.
Eichmann was glad that he had achieved so much. The only thing that bothered him was that much of the work was still pending.
As one historian has noted, he drenched his soul in blood.
Time to pay the bills
In the chaos of the last days of the Third Reich, Eichmann disappeared. In April 1945, together with a group of similar fanatics, he went to the mountainous regions of the Austrian Tyrol, where he intended to put together a detachment for partisan struggle against the Allied occupation forces.
But on the very day that the group reached the mountains, Eichmann's companions demanded that he leave them. His reputation, his black fame, as they say, ran ahead of him. The army officers, realizing that the collapse had come, did not at all want to be smeared with the same black paint. So Eichmann, with weapons and a small supply of food, had to retire along a forest path, accompanied by an adjutant. They got lost in the turmoil that gripped Germany then.
A reward was assigned for the head of Adolf Eichmann. Ten former prisoners of the death camp in Poland created a special group, the sole purpose of which was to catch Eichmann and bring him to justice. Meanwhile, Eichmann, along with his adjutant, was able to make his way through the whole of Bavaria, disguised as a corporal of the Luftwaffe.
Eichmann was twice in the hands of the Americans. The first time they blithely assigned him to look after the car wash, and he fled to Munich. Caught a second time, Eichmann claimed to have served as a lieutenant in SS combat units.
In the Oberdachstätten camp in Silesia, Eichmann led a fairly tolerable existence. However, it soon began to receive reports of the establishment in Nuremberg of a tribunal for the trial of war criminals. These messages were full of the words: "Eichmann", "villain", "organizer of mass murders." Realizing that his identification was only a matter of time, Eichmann frantically began to look for the possibility of another escape. He succeeded in January 1946, when he worked in a team of road repairmen. He settled in the remote town of Celle, where he lived under the name of Otto Heniger for 4 years.
Eichmann understood that he could not stay in Germany: by 1950, the name Eichmann and the concept of "extermination of the Jews" had merged into one. With the help of ODESSA, an underground organization of former SS men, he obtained fake documents and went to South America, where he hid for many years under the protection of old associates. His wife, Vera Eichmann, and both of their sons arrived in Argentina in 1952, also with false documents.
Eichmann had no remorse, no remorse over what he had done during the reign of the Third Reich.
Retribution
In 1957, a blind Jew who lived in the suburbs of Buenos Aires became very interested in a man named Ricardo Clement.
The fact is that the old man's daughter was dating a young man who called himself Nicholas Eichmann. In a conversation with her, he said that his father's name was not Ricardo Clement at all, but Adolf Eichmann. This name, of course, didn't mean anything to the girl. But to her blind father, it sounded like thunder on a clear day.
Soon, this information fell on the desk of Nesser Harel, the founder of the Israeli secret service Mossad. Harel was able to obtain permission from David Ben-Gurion, the leader of the young Jewish state, to personally lead the operation to capture Eichmann and bring him to justice.
1958 - A group of selected Israeli agents secretly arrived in Buenos Aires, but the Clement family left two months earlier.
Only in December 1959, one of the Mossad agents managed to find out that Nicholas Eichmann works here, in the city, in a motorcycle repair shop. The agent tracked him down and traced his way back to a house in the bleak suburb of San Fernando.
An Israeli surveillance team immediately took Clement's house under a hood. For several months, detectives watched a balding man with glasses, a minor employee of the local Mercedes-Benz branch. However, they did not have complete confidence that it was Eichmann.
1960, March 24 - this man came home with a huge bouquet of flowers. Israeli agents were in seventh heaven with joy: the check showed that this date was the birthday of Eichmann's wife. Like any exemplary husband, he decided to present her with flowers on this occasion.
At eight o'clock in the evening on May 2, 1960, Adolf Eichmann fell into the hands of the avenging angels from the Mossad. They tied him up, put him in the back seat of the car and took him to a place prepared in advance.
First, the Israelis checked the armpits of the captured person in search of a tattooed number that was assigned to any member of the upper echelon of the SS. There was no tattoo, but there was a crimson scar in its place.
Ricardo Clement did not resent or protest. He calmly looked at his captors and declared in pure German: "I am Adolf Eichmann."
Ten days later, he was already on board an El-Al aircraft bound for Israel. He was taken out of Argentina, drugged and dressed in a pilot's uniform. The plane has not yet “touched the landing strip in Tel Aviv, and Ben-Gurion has already announced in the Knesset that Eichmann has been arrested and will be put on trial in Israel for war crimes.
If at least someone expected to see a bloodthirsty monster with terrifying fangs on the dock, then he was endlessly disappointed. Before the court appeared the most banal embodiment of villainy in the guise of a bald, crooked little man, placed in a cell with bulletproof glass.
At the trial, which lasted from April 11 to August 14, 1961, there was no remorse, no enmity, no sorrow on the part of Eichmann. Adolf Eichmann argued that he did not understand why the Jewish people hated him: after all, he simply followed orders. Responsibility for the extermination of Jews, in his opinion, should be borne by someone else.
1961, December 1 - Eichmann was sentenced to death. 1962, May 31 - He rejected the appeal of a Protestant priest to him to repent, and he was taken to death row. Climbing the scaffold, he said: “Long live Germany! Long live Argentina! Long live Austria! All my life is connected with these three countries, and I will never forget them. I welcome my wife, family and friends. I was obliged to obey the rules of war and served my banner. I'm ready.
Adolf Eichmann was burned ashes of this monster were scattered over the sea. Not a single prayer has been read in his memory on earth.