Adolf Eichmann (19 March 1906 – 1 June 1962) was a Lieutenant-Colonel of the SS who was the mastermind of the mass deportation of Jews to Nazi concentration and extermination camps during the Holocaust. He escaped to Argentina after World War II, but Israel's Mossad kidnapped him, and he was hanged for war crimes in 1962.
Biography[]
Adolf Eichmann was born on 19 March 1906 in Solingen, Rhine Province, German Empire. He worked for his father's mining company in Austria after the family moved there in 1914, and in 1933 he joined Nazi Germany's Sicherheitsdienst (SD) intelligence agency. Eichmann was appointed head of the Jewish affairs department, and he originally envisioned deporting the Jews to southeastern Poland or Madagascar before the 1942 Wannsee Conference settled on the "Final Solution": the extermination of the Jews in the Holocaust. Eichmann and his staff were responsible for the deportation of Jews to concentration camps in Operation Reinhard under Reinhard Heydrich, and in March 1944 he saw the deportation of Hungary's Jewish population after Germany occupied the country. 6,000,000 Jews were exterminated during the Holocaust under Eichmann's watch, and he fled to Argentina after the end of World War II, avoiding being charged with war crimes. He pretended to have died in Austria, and he was reintroduced to his family in Argentina as "Uncle Ricardo", remarrying his wife. However, in 1960 Israel's Mossad agency tracked him down, and he was kidnapped and taken to Israel to stand trial for his war crimes. On 1 June 1962, he was executed by hanging for his savage crimes.