The Other Adolf
And Perhaps Just as Sinful
When someone says “Adolf”, most people think of the Chaplin-moustached Supreme Commander of the German Armed Forces who attempted to erase an entire ethnic group just because he thought they were a “race-tuberculosis of the peoples.”
But for historophiles, the name triggers into the mind another profile as well, that of a non-moustached, yet equally intolerant Anti-Semite, SS Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Eichmann.
Background
Popularly know as the “Architect of the Holocaust,” Eichmann was born in a Calvinist-Protestant family in Solingen, Germany.
He was said to be a quiet and moody child who kept to himself and spent most of his adulthood searching for a job that interested him. By his early 20s he had trained to be a mechanic, tried his hand at being a salesman but found his true calling only after he joined the National Socialist Party (NSS) in Austria.
At the NSS, his job at first was to provide protection to speakers at party rallies. However, his diligence and industriousness were duly noted and he was next appointed as an administrative staff member at the Dachau Concentration Camp. There, he spent most of his time understanding the Nazi sentiment and its principles and was so enamoured by it all that at one point he is known to have said “If they had told me that my own father was a traitor and I had to kill him, I’d have done it! ”
Post his stint at Dachau, he joined the Security section of the NSS in Berlin, known as the SD (Sicherheitsdienst) and was sent to Vienna in 1938 and to Prague in 1939, where his job was to formulate a way to ensure the expulsion of all Jews from Austria.
He performed this task with sadistic pleasure and within eight months, had ensured the expulsion of over 45,000 Jews from Austria. Those who had not been expelled yet were stripped of their land and possessions and were rendered homeless.
In 1939, after the Nazis invaded Poland, Eichmann’s new job was to have the Jews forcibly deported from Poland, and have Germans relocated in their place instead. The deported Jews were sent to “transit camps” in remote parts of Poland(chosen by Eichmann) from where they were further sent to desolate parts of Russia and left for the dead.
Eichmann’s ruthlessness and efficiency earned him several more promotions and by the end of 1939, he was given charge of all deportation camps in Poland.
Architect of the Holocaust
In 1942, the German policy of the Genocide of Jews (the Final Solution to the Jewish Question) was laid out at a meeting in Berlin and Eichmann’s role was to coordinate all the trains which would transport Jews and ensure their constant “supply” to concentration camps, which included camps in Auschwitz, Treblinka, Dachau, and about 160 more.
While Eichmann performed this task diligently, Nazi leaders were dissatisfied with the rate at which these mass murders were being committed. Thus, as a solution, Eichmann arranged for the enlargement of all the trains so that more Jews would be ferried out and eliminated faster. On these trains too, it was ensured that several thousands died because of the lack of food, water and unhygienic conditions.
At the camp, Eichmann had designed the gas chambers to be windowless and had them disguised as showers for the inmates, to avoid any chaos or panic. To further increase the “efficiency” of the murders, he had the relatively inefficient Carbon Monoxide Gas in the chambers replaced by a much more “effective” cyanide based insecticide, Zyklon-B.
The Capture
By the year 1945, Adolph Hitler had committed suicide, Nazi war criminals were being rounded up by the Allied forces, and Eichmann was on the run. He had disguised himself and changed his identity several times.
For the first few months he hid in Lower Saxony (Germany), where he worked as a Forester . Later, he moved to Italy where with the help of a Roman Catholic Bishop who was a Nazi sympathiser, he finally escaped to Argentina and under disguise worked in Mercedes Benz as a manager.
Meanwhile, at the ongoing trials of other Nazi Officials (Nuremberg War Tribunal or Nuremburg Trials) Eichmann’s name and role in the systematic extermination of the Jews had come up several times, and thus, by 1950, he was one of the most wanted Nazi war criminals.
Eichmann was finally caught with the help of Simon Wiesenthal, a former concentration camp inmate in 1960. Wiesenthal had received information regarding the location of Eichmann’s home in Buenos Aires, and passed it on to The Israeli Consulate in Vienna. Consequently the Israeli government sent a MOSSAD (Israeli secret service) team to capture Eichmann and smuggle him into Israel.
Eichmann’s trial began in Israel in 1961, where he was seated in a bulletproof booth throughout. For the first five months of the trial, Eichmann didn’t admit to his guilt and claimed that he was unaware of the atrocities meted out at the camp as he was a mere logistician for the Nazis.
However, once the concentration camp survivors began testifying in court, he accepted his role at the camps but tried his best to shake off responsibility for his actions. He said that he did everything because he was following orders from his superiors and Hitler himself, and that he had to “obey the rules of war and my flag”.
After about a year of trial, in 1962, Eichmann was convicted on 15 charges and was pitched as the prime orchestrator of the Nazi Bureaucratic Operations. He was hanged until death and his ashes were scattered in international waters.
Justice
While 22 Nazis were tried and prosecuted by Allies at Nuremberg after the War, Eichmann’s trial was unique as he became the only Nazi prosecuted by the testimony of the Jewish concentration camp survivors themselves.
Even though several Historical dramas and documentaries have been made about the Nazis and the atrocities meted out by them, most are unaware of Adolf Eichmann’s contribution towards increasing the inhumane conditions at the concentration camps. His claims of merely “following orders” are unable to conceal the zeal and keenness with which he set about annihilating millions of innocent people.
REFERENCES:
- https://www.ushmm.org/learn/timeline-of-events/before-1933/adolf-hitler-issues-comment-on-the-jewish-question
- Adolf Eichmann: The Architect of the Holocaust by Biographics on YouTube
- https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/holocaust-eichmann/
- https://www.annefrank.org/en/timeline/136/israel-kidnaps-adolf-eichmann-architect-of-the-holocaust/
