| Adolf Eichmann | |
|---|---|
Adolf Eichmann in 1942 |
|
| Born | March 19, 1906 Solingen, German Empire |
| Died | May 31, 1962 (aged 56) Ramla, Israel |
| Allegiance | Nazi Germany |
| Service/branch | Schutzstaffel |
| Rank | Obersturmbannführer (Senior Storm Unit Leader), SS |
| Unit | RSHA |
| Battles/wars | World War II |
| Awards | War Merit Cross 1st Class with swords War Merit Cross 2nd Class with swords |
Adolf Otto Eichmann[1][2] (March 19, 1906 – May 31, 1962[3]) was a German Nazi and SS-Obersturmbannführer (Lieutenant Colonel) and one of the major organizers of the Holocaust. Because of his organizational talents and ideological reliability, Eichmann was charged by Obergruppenführer (General) Reinhard Heydrich with the task of facilitating and managing the logistics of mass deportation of Jews to ghettos and extermination camps in German-occupied Eastern Europe.
After the war, he fled to Argentina using a fraudulently obtained laissez-passer issued by the International Red Cross.[4][5] He lived in Argentina under a false identity, working for Mercedes-Benz until 1960. He was captured by Mossad operatives in Argentina and taken to Israel to face trial in an Israeli court on 15 criminal charges, including crimes against humanity and war crimes. He was found guilty and executed by hanging in 1962. He is the only person to have been executed in Israel on conviction by a civilian court.
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Adolf Eichmann was born to a Lutheran family in Solingen, Germany. His parents were businessman and industrialist Adolf Karl Eichmann and Maria née Schefferling.[6] After his mother died in 1914, his family moved to Linz, Austria. During the First World War, Eichmann's father served in the Austro-Hungarian Army. At the war's conclusion, Eichmann's father moved the family back to Linz where he operated a business. Eichmann left high school—Realschule—without having graduated and began training to become a mechanic, which he also discontinued.[7] In 1923, he started working in the mining company of his father. From 1925 to 1927 he worked as a sales clerk for the Oberösterreichische Elektrobau AG and then until spring 1933 Eichmann worked as district agent for the Vacuum Oil Company AG, a subsidiary of Standard Oil. During this time he was a member of the Jungfrontkämpfervereinigung, the youth section of Hermann Hiltl's right-wing veterans movement.[8] In July 1933 he moved back to Germany.[9]
Eichmann married Veronika Liebl (1909–1997) on March 21, 1935.[10] The couple had four sons: Klaus Eichmann (b. 1936 in Berlin), Horst Adolf Eichmann (b. 1940 in Vienna), Dieter Helmut Eichmann (b. 1942 in Prague) and Ricardo Francisco Eichmann (b. 1955 in Buenos Aires).
On the advice of family friend Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Eichmann joined the Austrian branch of the NSDAP—member number 889,895—and the Schutzstaffel (SS).[11] He enlisted on April 1, 1932, as an SS-Anwärter (Candidate). He was accepted as a full SS member that November, appointed an SS-Mann (Man), and assigned the SS number 45326.[12]
For the next year, Eichmann was a member of the Allgemeine SS (General SS) and served in a mustering formation operating from Salzburg. In 1933 when the Nazis came to power, Eichmann returned to Germany and submitted an application to join the active duty SS regiments. He was accepted, and in November 1933, was promoted to Scharführer (Squad Leader) and assigned to the administrative staff of Dachau concentration camp.
By 1934, Eichmann requested transfer into the Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service) of the SS, to escape the "monotony" of military training in SS-Standarte Deutschland at Dachau. Eichmann was accepted into the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) and assigned to the sub-office on "Freemasons" that was run by SS-Sturmbannführer (Major) Prof. Schwarz-Bostowitsch.[13] After a short time, Eichmann had a meeting in the Wilhelmstrasse with Leopold von Mildenstein, a fellow Austrian, and was invited to join Mildenstein's "Jews Section", or Section II/112, of the SD at its Berlin headquarters.[13] He later came to see this as his "big break".[14] Eichmann's transfer was granted in November 1934. In 1935, he was promoted to Hauptscharführer (Head Squad Leader) and later commissioned as an SS-Untersturmführer (Second Lieutenant) in 1937.
In 1937, Eichmann was sent to the British Mandate of Palestine with his superior Herbert Hagen to assess the possibilities of massive Jewish emigration from Germany to Palestine. They landed in Haifa but could obtain only a transit visa so they went on to Cairo. There they met Feival Polkes, an agent of the Haganah, who discussed with them the plans of the Zionists and tried to enlist their assistance in facilitating Jewish emigration from Europe.[15] According to an answer Eichmann gave at his trial, he had also planned to meet Arab leaders in Palestine, but this never happened because entry to Palestine was refused by the British authorities.[15]
In 1938, Eichmann was assigned to Austria to help organize SS Security Forces in Vienna after the Anschluss of Austria with Germany. Through this effort, Eichmann was promoted to SS-Obersturmführer (First Lieutenant) and, by the end of 1938, Eichmann had been selected by the SS leadership to form the Central Office for Jewish Emigration, charged with forcibly deporting and expelling Jews from Austria.
At the start of World War II, Eichmann had been promoted to SS-Hauptsturmführer (Captain) and had made a name for himself with his Office for Jewish Emigration. Through this work Eichmann made several contacts in the Zionist movement, which he worked with to speed up Jewish emigration from the Third Reich.[16]
Eichmann returned to Berlin in 1939 after the formation of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Main Security Office, RSHA).[17] In December 1939, he was assigned to head RSHA Referat IV B4 (RSHA Sub-Department IV-B4), which dealt with Jewish affairs and evacuation, where he reported to Heinrich Müller.[18] In August 1940, he released his Reichssicherheitshauptamt: Madagaskar Projekt (Reich Main Security Office: Madagascar Project), a plan for forced Jewish deportation that never materialized.[19] He was promoted to the rank of SS-Sturmbannführer (Major) in late 1940, and less than a year later to Obersturmbannführer (Lieutenant Colonel).
Reinhard Heydrich disclosed to Eichmann in autumn 1941 that all the Jews in German-controlled Europe were to be murdered.[20] In 1942, Heydrich ordered Eichmann to attend the Wannsee Conference as recording secretary, where Germany's anti-Semitic measures were set down into an official policy of genocide. Eichmann was given the position of Transportation Administrator of the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question", which put him in charge of all the trains that would carry Jews to the death camps in the territory of occupied Poland.
In 1944, he was sent to Hungary after Germany had occupied that country prior to a Soviet invasion. Eichmann at first made an offer through Joel Brand (who was to act as an intermediary) to trade captive European Jews to the Western Allies for trucks and other goods (see Blood for goods). When there was no positive response to this offer, Eichmann started deporting Jews, sending 430,000 Hungarians to their deaths in the gas chambers.
By 1945, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler had ordered Jewish extermination to be halted and evidence of the Final Solution to be destroyed. Eichmann was appalled by Himmler's turnabout, and continued his work in Hungary against official orders. Eichmann was also working to avoid being called up in the last-ditch German military effort, since a year before he had been commissioned as a Reserve Untersturmführer in the Waffen-SS and was now being ordered to active combat duty.
In 1945, Eichmann fled Hungary as the Soviets entered. He returned to Austria, where he met up with his old friend Ernst Kaltenbrunner. Kaltenbrunner, however, refused to associate with Eichmann since Eichmann's duties as an extermination administrator had left him a marked man by the Allies.
At the end of World War II, Eichmann was captured by the U.S. Army, which was not aware of Eichmann's true identity as he presented himself as "Otto Eckmann." Early in 1946, he escaped from U.S. custody and hid in Altensalzkoth, an obscure hamlet on the Lüneburg Heath, for a few years. In 1948 he obtained a landing permit for Argentina, but did not use it immediately.[21]
At the beginning of 1950, Eichmann went to Italy, where he posed as a refugee named Riccardo Klement. With the help of a Franciscan friar who had connections to Bishop Alois Hudal, who organized one of the first postwar escape routes for Axis personnel, Eichmann obtained an International Committee of the Red Cross humanitarian passport, issued in Genoa, and an Argentine visa. Both of these issued to "Ricardo Klement, technician." However, Hannah Arendt claims that Eichmann was assisted in his escape by ODESSA, "a clandestine organization of SS veterans".[21] In May 2007, this passport was discovered in court archives in Argentina by a student doing research on Eichmann's capture.[22] Eichmann boarded a ship heading for Argentina on July 14, 1950. For the next 10 years, he worked in several odd jobs in the Buenos Aires area—from factory foreman, to junior water engineer and professional rabbit farmer. Eichmann also brought his family to Argentina.
In June 2006, old CIA documents about Nazis and stay-behind networks dedicated to anti-communism were released. Among the 27,000 documents was a March 1958 memo from the German BND agency to the CIA, which stated that Eichmann was reported to have lived in Argentina since 1952 using the alias "Clemens". The CIA took no action on this information, because Eichmann's arrest could embarrass the US and Germany by turning public attention to the former Nazis they had recruited after World War II.[23] For example, the West German government, headed by Konrad Adenauer, was worried about what Eichmann might say, especially about the past of Hans Globke, Adenauer's national security adviser, who had worked with Eichmann in the Jewish Affairs department and helped draft the 1935 Nuremberg Laws.[23][24][25]
At the request of the West German government the CIA persuaded Life magazine to delete any reference to Globke from Eichmann's memoirs, which it had bought from his family.[26] By the time the CIA and the BND had this information, Israel had temporarily given up looking for Eichmann in Argentina because they could not discover his alias.[26] In the 1950s, neither the CIA nor the US government as a whole had a policy of pursuing Nazi war criminals.[23] In addition to protecting Eichmann's and Globke's past, the CIA also protected Reinhard Gehlen,[27] who recruited hundreds of former German spies for the CIA.
In 1948, the State of Israel was established. In 1949, its official intelligence agency, Mossad, was formed. One of Mossad's principal assigned tasks was to hunt down accused Nazi war criminals. Throughout the 1950s, many Jews and other victims of the Holocaust also dedicated themselves to finding Eichmann and other notorious Nazis. Among them was the Jewish Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal. In 1954, Wiesenthal received a postcard from an associate living in Buenos Aires, saying Eichmann was in Argentina. The message read in part:
Ich sah jenes schmutzige Schwein Eichmann. ("I saw that filthy pig Eichmann.") Er wohnt in der Nähe von Buenos Aires und arbeitet für ein Wassergeschäft. ("He lives near Buenos Aires and works for a water company.")
With this and other information collected by Wiesenthal, Israel had solid leads about Eichmann's whereabouts. However, Isser Harel, the head of Mossad, later claimed in an unpublished manuscript that Wiesenthal "had no role whatsoever" in Eichmann's apprehension but in fact had endangered the entire Eichmann operation and aborted the planned capture of Auschwitz doctor Josef Mengele.[28]
Eichmann changed his name but never changed those of his wife and sons. It was this that led to his capture.[29]
Also instrumental in exposing Eichmann's identity was Lothar Hermann. He was a worker of Jewish descent who fled from Germany to Argentina following his incarceration in the Dachau concentration camp, where Eichmann had served at one time on the administrative staff. By the 1950s, Hermann had settled into life in Buenos Aires with his family. His daughter Sylvia became acquainted with Eichmann's family and romantically involved with Eichmann's son, Klaus Eichmann. Klaus made boastful remarks about his father's life as a Nazi and direct responsibility for the Holocaust. In 1957, Hermann realized who Eichmann was after reading a newspaper report about German war criminals—of whom Eichmann was one.[30]
Soon after, he sent Sylvia to the Eichmanns' home on a fact-finding mission. She was met at the door by Eichmann himself who identified himself as Klaus' uncle. Sylvia asked for Klaus, and, after learning that he was not home, sat down to wait and made small talk with the man. On Klaus' return home, he immediately took Sylvia to the bus stop, but upon leaving his home, he addressed Eichmann as 'Father'.[31] Hermann soon began a correspondence with Fritz Bauer, chief prosecutor for the West German state of Hessen, and provided details about Eichmann's person and life. Bauer contacted Israeli officials, who worked sporadically with Hermann over the next several years trying to discover if this was really Eichmann.[32]
In 1959, the Mossad was informed that Eichmann was in Buenos Aires under the name Ricardo Klement (Clement) and then began an effort to locate his exact whereabouts.[33] Through relentless surveillance, it was concluded that Ricardo Klement was, in fact, Adolf Eichmann. The Israeli government then approved a covert operation to capture Eichmann and bring him to Jerusalem for trial as a war criminal. It was to be a joint operation, carried out by the Mossad and Shin Bet, the Israel Security Agency. The Israelis continued their surveillance of Eichmann through the first months of 1960 until it was judged safe to take him.
Eichmann was captured by a team of Mossad and Shin Bet agents in a suburb of Buenos Aires on May 11, 1960.[34] The Mossad agents had arrived in Buenos Aires in April 1960 after Eichmann's identity was confirmed. After observing Eichmann extensively, a team of Mossad agents waited for him as he arrived home from his work as foreman at a Mercedes Benz factory.
The Mossad developed a strategy (practised in their hideout) that they would ambush Eichmann when he was walking from the bus stop to his house at 14 Garibaldi St (now 4261 Garibaldi Street) in San Fernando, Buenos Aires, an industrial community 20 km north of the center of Buenos Aires. A backup car was involved, should their primary transportation break down. The Israelis also had forged license plates attached to their car. It was crucial that Eichmann couldn't be tipped off; otherwise he might vanish again.
The plan was almost abandoned when Eichmann was not present on the bus he usually took home. Tension rose when many passers-by inquired of the disguised Mossad agent who pretended to be fixing their broken down vehicle. Finally, almost a half hour later, Eichmann got off a bus. A Mossad agent engaged him, asking him in Spanish if he had a moment. Eichmann was frightened and attempted to leave while blinded by Mossad headlights. Two Mossad men wrestled him to the ground and he was brought to the car. Eichmann told his captors later that as soon as they told him to keep quiet, he knew he had been captured by Israelis.
Then the Mossad agents ran into a police checkpoint and managed to evade the police when they checked their license plates. He was then brought to the Mossad safe house. There, he was tied to a chair, ungagged, and interrogated. It was concluded that Klement (Clement) was undoubtedly Eichmann.[33] Eichmann was given a choice between instant death or trial in Israel. He chose to stand trial. The agents kept him in a safe house until they judged that he could be taken to Israel without being detected by Argentine authorities.
Eichmann was drugged to make him appear drunk and dressed as a flight attendant. They smuggled Eichmann out of Argentina on board an El Al Bristol Britannia flight from Argentina to Dakar and then to Israel on May 21, 1960. Eichmann arrived heavily sedated, and like the agents, disguised in the uniform of the El Al crew.[35]
There had been a backup plan in case the apprehension did not go as planned. If the police happened to intervene, one of the agents was to handcuff himself to Eichmann and make full explanations and disclosure.
For some time the Israeli government denied involvement in Eichmann's capture, claiming that he had been taken by Jewish volunteers who eagerly turned him over to Israeli authorities. Negotiations followed between Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and Argentine president Arturo Frondizi, while the abduction was met from radical right sectors in Argentina with a violent wave of antisemitism, carried on the streets by the Tacuara Nationalist Movement—including assaults, torture and bombings.[36]
Ben-Gurion then announced Eichmann's capture to the Knesset—Israel's parliament—on May 23, receiving a standing ovation in return. Isser Harel, head of the Mossad at the time of the operation, wrote the book The House on Garibaldi Street about Eichmann's capture, which was made into the 1979 American television movie of the same name.[37]
When Eichmann was brought to Israel for trial, the Israeli police officer Avner Less, was Eichmann's interrogator. Extracts from Less's interrogation of Eichmann have been published in the book Eichmann Interrogated (ISBN 0-88619-017-7).
Heavily edited parts of the interrogation, now available freely and in full from the Israeli archives, have been incorporated in the 2007 film Eichmann, dramatizing Eichmann's interrogation, and downplaying his role in the Holocaust and admission to his planning and determination to complete his planned task.[38]
Some years later, Peter Malkin, a member of the kidnapping team, wrote Eichmann in My Hands, which explores Eichmann's character and motivations, but its veracity has been questioned.
In June 1960, after unsuccessful secret negotiations with Israel, Argentina requested an urgent meeting of the United Nations Security Council, to protest what Argentina regarded as the "violation of the sovereign rights of the Argentine Republic".[39] In the ensuing debate, Israeli representative Golda Meir claimed that the abductors were not Israeli agents but private individuals and so the incident was only an "isolated violation of Argentine law".[39] Eventually the Council passed Resolution 138, which requested Israel "to make appropriate reparation", while stating that "Eichmann should be brought to appropriate justice for the crimes of which he is accused" and that "this resolution should in no way be interpreted as condoning the odious crimes of which Eichmann is accused."[40]
After further negotiations, on August 3, Israel and Argentina agreed to end their dispute with a joint statement that "the Governments of Israel and the Republic of the Argentine, imbued with the wish to give effect to the resolution of the Security Council of June 23, 1960, in which the hope was expressed that the traditionally friendly relations between the two countries will be advanced, have decided to regard as closed the incident that arose out of the action taken by Israel nationals which infringed fundamental rights of the State of Argentina."[41]
In the subsequent trial and appeal, the Israeli courts avoided the issue of the legality of Eichmann's capture, relying instead on legal precedents that the circumstances of his capture had no bearing on the legality of his trial. The Israeli Court also determined that because "Argentina has condoned the violation of her sovereignty and has waived her claims, including that for the return of the Appellant, any violation of international law that may have been involved in this incident has thus been remedied."[42]
Isser Harel, Chief Executive of the Secret Services of Israel (1952–1963), who headed the successful capture of Eichmann in Buenos Aires in 1960, feels they almost apprehended Josef Mengele. As he claims to have told the co-pilot that transported Eichmann at the time: "had it been possible to start the operation several weeks earlier Mengele might also have been on the plane." When they checked on the last known location for the "murderous doctor" in Argentina, he had apparently moved on just two weeks earlier.[43]
Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem before the Jerusalem District Court began on April 11, 1961. He was indicted on 15 criminal charges, including crimes against humanity, war crimes, crimes against the Jewish people, and membership in an outlawed organization. In accordance with Israeli criminal procedure, the trial was presided over by three judges: Moshe Landau, Benjamin Halevy and Yitzhak Raveh. The chief prosecutor was Gideon Hausner, the Israeli Attorney General.[44] The three judges sat high atop a plain dais. The trial was held at the Beit Ha'am—today known as the Gerard Behar Center—an auditorium in downtown Jerusalem. Eichmann sat inside a bulletproof glass booth to protect him from victims' families. This image inspired the novel, stage play, and film The Man in the Glass Booth, although the plot of the drama has nothing to do with the actual events of the Eichmann trial.
The legal basis of the charges against Eichmann was the 1950 "Nazi and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law".[45]
The trial caused huge international controversy, as well as an international sensation. The Israeli government allowed news programs all over the world to broadcast the trial live with few restrictions. The trial began with various witnesses, including many Holocaust survivors, who testified against Eichmann and his role in transporting victims to the extermination camps. One key witness for the prosecution was an American judge named Michael A. Musmanno, who was a U.S. naval officer in 1945. Musmanno had questioned the Nuremberg defendants and would later go on to become a Justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. He testified that the late Hermann Göring "made it very clear that Eichmann was the man to determine, in what order, in what countries, the Jews were to die."
When the prosecution rested, Eichmann's defense lawyers, Robert Servatius and Dieter Wechtenbruch, opened up the defense by explaining why they did not cross-examine any of the prosecution witnesses. Eichmann, speaking in his own defense, said that he did not dispute the facts of what happened during the Holocaust. During the whole trial, Eichmann insisted that he was only "following orders"—the same Nuremberg Defense used by some of the Nazi war criminals during the 1945–1946 Nuremberg Trials. He explicitly declared that he had abdicated his conscience in order to follow the Führerprinzip. Eichmann claimed that he was merely a "transmitter" with very little power. He testified that: "I never did anything, great or small, without obtaining in advance express instructions from Adolf Hitler or any of my superiors."
During cross-examination, prosecutor Hausner asked Eichmann if he considered himself guilty of the murder of millions of Jews. Eichmann replied: "Legally not, but in the human sense ... yes, for I am guilty of having deported them". When Hausner produced as evidence a quote by Eichmann in 1945 stating: "I will leap into my grave laughing because the feeling that I have five million human beings on my conscience is for me a source of extraordinary satisfaction." Eichmann countered the claim saying that he was referring only to "enemies of the Reich".[46]
Witnesses for the defense, all of them former high-ranking Nazis, were promised immunity and safe conduct from their German and Austrian homes to testify in Jerusalem on Eichmann's behalf. All of them refused to travel to Israel, but they sent the court depositions. However, almost none of the depositions supported Eichmann's "following orders" defense. One deposition was from Otto Winkelmann, a former senior SS police leader in Budapest in 1944. His memo stated that "(Eichmann) had the nature of a subaltern, which means a fellow who uses his power recklessly, without moral restraints. He would certainly overstep his authority if he thought he was acting in the spirit of his commander [Adolf Hitler]". Franz Six, a former SS brigadier general in the German security service, who was assigned the supervision of the occupation of the United Kingdom had Operation Sea Lion been successful, said in his deposition that Eichmann was an absolute believer in National Socialism and would act to the most extreme of the party doctrine, and that Eichmann had greater power than other department chiefs.
After 14 weeks of testimony with more than 1,500 documents, 100 prosecution witnesses (90 of whom were Nazi concentration camp survivors) and dozens of defense depositions delivered by diplomatic couriers from 16 different countries, the Eichmann trial ended on August 14.[47] At that point, the judges began deliberations in seclusion. On December 11, the three judges announced their verdict: Eichmann was convicted on all counts. Eichmann had said to the court that he expected the death penalty.[48] On December 15, the court imposed a death sentence. Eichmann appealed the verdict, mostly relying on legal arguments about Israel's jurisdiction and the legality of the laws under which he was charged. He also claimed that he was protected by the principle of "Acts of State" and repeated his "following orders" defense.
On May 29, 1962 Israel's Supreme Court, sitting as a Court of Criminal Appeal, rejected the appeal and upheld the District Court's judgment on all counts. In rejecting his appeal again claiming that he was only "following orders", the court stated that, "Eichmann received no superior orders at all. He was his own superior and he gave all orders in matters that concerned Jewish affairs ... the so-called Final Solution would never have assumed the infernal forms of the flayed skin and tortured flesh of millions of Jews without the fanatical zeal and the unquenchable blood thirst of the appellant and his associates." A large number of prominent persons sent requests for clemency.[49] On May 31, Israeli President Yitzhak Ben-Zvi turned down Eichmann's petition for mercy.[50] On the telegram that Eichmann's wife, Vera, sent in support of the clemency, Ben-Zvi added in his handwriting a passage from the First Book of Samuel: "As your sword bereaved women, so will your mother be bereaved among women." (1 Samuel 15:33, Samuel's words to Agag, king of the Amalekites).[51][52]
In 1999, 128 minutes of the original video recordings made during court sessions of the Eichmann trial were released to cinemas and later to home video under the title Un spécialiste (The Specialist in the US).[53] The title is related to Eichmann's wartime reputation as a "specialist" in logistics regarding the expatriation, expropriation, and deportation of Jewish people.
In 2011 Yad Vashem has uploaded the entire trial to YouTube (link).
Secret German documents made available in 2011 to the German periodical Der Spiegel indicate that the Adenauer government was in a panic after the arrest of Eichmann. There was fear that a trial would highlight a number of former high level government officials who had served the Nazis, particularly Hans Globke who was the Chancellery Chief of Staff and a close advisor to Chancellor Adenauer. An agent from the German Intelligence Service, Rolf Vogel, was sent to the trial in the guise of a reporter for the German newspaper, Deutsche Zeitung. Vogel worked closely with the Israeli prosecutors, making sure that there would be no implication of Globke and other former Nazis. He even arranged a meeting with David Ben-Gurion, the Israeli Prime Minister where he expressed the German concern. Vogel came away with the impression that the names of people like Globke would not be raised at the trial. At the same time, negotiations for a large arms purchase by Israel from the FRG were taking place. In the event, no mention was made during the trial nor were there any reference which were made public from the interrogations of Eichmann to former Nazi German officials. In 1962, military aid worth some 240 million DM was approved by the German government.[54]
Eichmann was hanged shortly before midnight on May 31, 1962, at a prison in Ramla, Israel. This remains the only civil execution ever carried out in Israel, which has a general policy of not enforcing the death penalty. Eichmann allegedly refused a last meal, preferring instead a bottle of Carmel, a dry red Israeli wine, consuming about half the bottle. He also refused to don the traditional black hood for his execution.
There is some dispute over Eichmann's last words. One account states that these were:
Long live Germany. Long live Austria. Long live Argentina. These are the countries with which I have been most closely associated and I shall not forget them. I had to obey the rules of war and my flag. I am ready.[55]
According to David Cesarani, a leading Holocaust historian and Research Professor in History of the Royal Holloway, University of London, Eichmann is quoted thus:
Long live Germany. Long live Argentina. Long live Austria. These are the three countries with which I have been most connected and which I will not forget. I greet my wife, my family, and my friends. I am ready. We'll meet again soon, as is the fate of all men. I die believing in God.[56]
Shortly after the execution, Eichmann's body was cremated in a specially designed furnace, and a stretcher on tracks was used to place the body into it. The next morning, June 1, his ashes were scattered at sea over the Mediterranean, beyond the territorial waters of Israel by an Israeli Navy patrol boat. This was to ensure that there could be no future memorial and that no country would serve as his final resting place.[57]
Political theorist Hannah Arendt, a Jew who fled Germany after Hitler's rise to power, reported on Eichmann's trial for The New Yorker. In Eichmann in Jerusalem, a book formed by this reporting, Arendt details the conclusion of several Israeli psychiatrists that Eichmann was "normal." She called him the embodiment of the "Banality of Evil", as he appeared at his trial to have an ordinary and common personality, displaying neither guilt nor hatred. She suggested that this most strikingly discredits the idea that the Nazi criminals were manifestly psychopathic and different from ordinary people. Eichmann himself said he joined the SS not because he agreed with its ethos, but to build a career.[58]
Stanley Milgram interpreted Arendt's work as stating that even the most ordinary of people can commit horrendous crimes if placed in certain situations and given certain incentives. He wrote: "I must conclude that Arendt's conception of the banality of evil comes closer to the truth than one might dare imagine."[59] However, Arendt did not suggest that Eichmann was normal or that any person placed in his situation would have done as he did. According to her account, Eichmann had abdicated his will to make moral choices, and thus his autonomy.[60] Eichmann claimed he was just following orders, and that he was therefore respecting the duties of a "bureaucrat". Arendt thus argued that he had essentially forsaken the conditions of morality, autonomy and the ability to question orders (see Führerprinzip).
In Becoming Eichmann, David Cesarani claimed that Eichmann was in fact extremely anti-Semitic, and that these feelings were important motivators of his genocidal actions.[61]
In tapes recorded in the 1950s, that have recently been made available by the German Federal Archive in Koblenz, Eichmann was recorded as stating he "was no ordinary recipient of orders" and that he "was part of the thinking process; an idealist". The tapes are reported to contradict Eichmann's defence during his 1961 Jerusalem trial for crimes against humanity that he was only "following orders".[62]
Eichmann's son, Ricardo, who was born after World War II, says he harbours no resentment toward Israel for executing his father. He explained that his father's lack of remorse caused "difficult emotions" for the Eichmann family, and that he was unable to grasp his father's "following orders" argument to excuse his actions.[63] Ricardo is now a professor of archaeology at the German Archaeological Institute.[64]
In the 2001 film Conspiracy, Adolf Eichmann was portrayed by actor Stanley Tucci.
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