On This Day: Adolf Eichmann Found Guilty of War Crimes

Eichmann, who joined the Austrian Nazi Party in 1932, immersed himself in nearly all aspects of Jewish history and culture after being assigned to the Jewish section of the SS security service in 1934.

In 1938, he was sent to Vienna to set up a Central Office for Jewish Emigration. He returned to Berlin the next year, and by 1942 was made responsible for the implementation of all issues related to the Nazis’ Final Solution, the genocidal plan that resulted in the deaths of about six million Jews in what became known as the Holocaust.

After the war, Eichmann was arrested by the Americans, but escaped and fled to Argentina, living under the name of Ricardo Klement for 10 years.

Israel learned of his whereabouts—information already known to the Central Intelligence Agency, but kept secret for many years—and he was abducted in Buenos Aires in 1960 by Israeli intelligence agents and taken to Jerusalem.

After listening to 1,350,000 words of testimony, the presiding judge, one of three who heard the case, delivered the simple, direct verdict: “The court finds you guilty.” For the next 17 hours, Time magazine reported, the judges explained why, in an opinion that ran to about 100,000 words.

Following a trial that lasted four months, he was found guilty on 15 counts and hanged on May 31, 1962.

In his response to the prosecution, Eichmann was generally evasive, selectively saying under cross-examination that he could not remember the events of so long ago. But when confronted with direct evidence of what he had done, he had to admit responsibility. The Court TV site explains many other aspects of Eichmann’s role, including Chapter 15, in which Eichmann, in his memoirs, says, “I regret nothing.”

The Nizkor Project, with the cooperation of the Israel State Archives, has collected transcripts of the trial proceedings, including testimony taken outside Israel, the text of the judgment and Eichmann’s appeal.

Time magazine reported that the Israeli philosopher Martin Buber did not believe society had the right to carry out a death sentence, an act that would only serve to “nurture another antichrist myth.” His plea to Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion was rejected, with great public support. Buber died in 1965.

Extracts from a diary that Eichmann kept while in an Israeli prison were released in Germany in 1999. “Throughout his outpourings,” The Guardian reported, “he builds upon a well-worn theme: that he was a cog in a greater machine and was only following orders.”

Eichmann, born near Cologne in 1906, spent much of his youth in Linz, Austria, Adolf Hitler’s hometown. The site History Place says that as a boy Eichmann “was teased for his looks and dark complexion and was nicknamed ‘the little Jew’ by classmates.”

The BBC page “Genocide Under the Nazis” combines a detailed profile of Eichmann with background information on the Holocaust and links to many other events of World War II.

The Central Intelligence Agency covered up the fact that it had known that Eichmann was living in Argentina under an assumed name, fearing that such information would embarrass German officials who had ties to other Nazis. The CIA’s documents admitting to the cover-up were released in 2006, and made headlines in the Israeli daily Haaretz.

The CIA was told by West Germany that Eichmann was living in Argentina, but did not share the information with Israel, which had been searching for him for years, the historian Timothy Naftali told The New York Times.

In 2005, the CIA said it had been surprised by Israel’s capture of Eichmann and did not know of his whereabouts before then, an assertion it contradicted just a year later. The CIA's 2005 file was posted by the National Security Archive at George Washington University.