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December 15, 1961. In Jerusalem, Nazi Adolf Eichmann was sentenced to death

The lightning operation lasted only a few seconds

Dec 15, 2024 03:13 78

On December 15, 1961, after a trial in Jerusalem, Nazi Adolf Eichmann was sentenced to death. He was one of the main organizers of the Holocaust in the Third Reich.

Adolf Eichmann, the eldest of five children, was born on March 19, 1906, into a Calvinist Protestant family in Solingen, Germany. His father was an accountant and his mother was a housewife.

On the recommendation of a family friend and local SS member Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Eichmann joined the Austrian branch of the Nazi Party on April 1, 1932. His SS membership was confirmed seven months later.

His regiment was SS-Standarte 37, responsible for guarding the party headquarters in Linz and protecting party speakers at rallies, which often turned violent. Eichmann engaged in party activities in Linz on weekends while continuing to work for the oil company in Salzburg.

A few months after Hitler came to power in Germany in January 1933, Eichmann lost his job due to company layoffs. At the time, the Nazi Party was banned in Austria. These events were factors in Eichmann's decision to move to Germany.

Gradually, Eichmann rose in the Nazi hierarchy, and his superior Reinhard Heydrich even called him a "special expert" who coordinated work with police services for the physical "elimination" of Jews, as well as the disposition of their confiscated property.

As an SS officer, Karl Adolf Eichmann, head of the Gestapo's Jewish Affairs Department from 1941 to 1945, oversaw the deportation of millions of Jews to extermination camps.

At the end of the war, Eichmann was arrested and imprisoned in an American prisoner of war camp, from which he escaped before being recognized. He escaped to Argentina, where he lived for ten years under the name Ricardo Clemente, then in 1960 was kidnapped by Israeli Mossad agents and put on trial in Jerusalem.

The clues accidentally lead to Eichmann

All this changed only in 1958, when Lothar Hermann, one of the Holocaust survivors, accidentally recognized Eichmann in Buenos Aires, recalls "Deutsche Welle". He informed his friend Fritz Bauer, a prosecutor in Germany, who in turn passed the information on to the Israeli secret service Mossad. From there, they initially doubted that the person Ricardo Clement was actually the mass murderer Adolf Eichmann, but after various checks they were convinced that it was indeed him.

In Buenos Aires, the former SS Obersturmbannführer Eichmann lived a very modest, even poor, life, apparently so as not to arouse suspicion about his origins. He worked at a Mercedes-Benz factory. It was discovered that he had connections with his old Nazi comrades who had also fled to Argentina.

After his capture, Eichmann admitted that the entire time he was in Argentina, he was afraid of precisely this - that the Israelis would discover and capture him. Ruling circles in the post-war Federal Republic of Germany apparently knew for many years before Eichmann's abduction that the criminal was hiding in Argentina, but did nothing. At that time, there were a number of former Nazi criminals in important leadership positions in the Federal Republic of Germany, and the government in Bonn feared that Eichmann might betray them publicly if he was captured.

Israel decides to act anyway

Therefore, the then German Prosecutor General Fritz Bauer, encountering open resistance in the search for Eichmann, turned for assistance not to the German investigation, but to Israel. They were also hesitant there at first, but Bauer continued to exert pressure until he managed to convince the Israelis that Eichmann could hide.

This led to the sensational Mossad operation in Argentina, after which Eichmann was secretly transferred to Israel. The trial against him ended with a death sentence, which was carried out on June 1, 1962.

The lightning operation lasted only a few seconds. The captured Ricardo Clement, under whose name the former SS Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann operated, offered no resistance. The year was 1960. The Israeli secret services discovered the whereabouts of the criminal Eichmann after initially appearing to show no interest in him for a long time.

In the spring of 1953, Simon Wiesenthal, one of the most active hunters of former Nazi criminals, noted the following: “The Israelis are not interested in Eichmann, they are busy with the battle for survival they are waging against the Arabs. And the Americans are not interested - they are busy with the Cold War against the Soviet Union.“