Childhood & Early Life
Adolf Eichmann was born in Solingen in the Rhine Province of Germany on March 19, 1905. His father, Adolf Karl Eichmann, was a bookkeeper and his mother, Maria Schefferling, was a housewife.
He was the eldest of his parent’s five children.
In 1914 his family moved to Linz, Austria, where his father had joined the ‘Linz Tramway and Electrical Company’ as a Commercial Manager one year earlier.
He attended the ‘Kaiser Franz Joseph Staatsoberrealschule’ or state secondary school in Linz. This was the same school which Adolf Hitler had attended 17 years before.
His father withdrew him from the ‘Realschule’ because of his poor performance and enrolled him at a vocational college, ‘Hohere Bundeslehranstalt fur Elektrotechnik, Maschinebau und Hochbau’.
He left this college without getting a degree.
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Career
After leaving the vocational college without completing the course, he worked for some months in his father’s mining company, ‘Untersberg Mining Company’.
From 1925 to 1927 he worked at the ‘Oberosterreichische Elektrobau AG’ as a sales clerk.
He joined the youth wing of the right-wing veteran’s movement ‘Jungfrontkampfervereinigung’ in Austria in early 1927.
During the period 1927-1933 he worked as a district agent in the Salzburg district of Upper Austria for the ‘Vacuum Oil Company’.
On April 1, 1932 he joined the Nazi Party and seven months later joined the SS. He carried on with the party activities in Linz on weekends while working for the oil company at Salzburg at the same time.
He returned to Germany in 1933 when the Nazi party came to power.
In August, 1933 he received training at the SS depot in Klosterlechfeld and was sent to the Passau border as the head of a eight-man team of SS men to help Austrian National Socialists enter Germany to smuggle material for propaganda into Austria.
In December 1933 his unit was disbanded and he was promoted to SS-Scharfuhrer which was equivalent to a corporal or squad leader. His battalion, which was part of the Deutschland Regiment, was posted near the concentration camp at Dachau.
He joined Himmler’s Security Service the ‘Sicherheitsdienst’ or the SD in 1934. This department dealt with encouraging or forcing the Jews to hand over their properties and wealth to other Germans and emigrate from Germany to other countries.
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In 1936 he was promoted to the rank of squad leader or SS-Hauptscharfuhrer equivalent to a sergeant and then to the rank of SS-Untersturmfuhrer equivalent to a second lieutenant in 1937.
In 1938 he travelled to Egypt to strike a deal for the emigration of Jews to that country which did not materialize.
He was posted at an office in Vienna, Austria to help organize Jewish emigration which started its operations from August 20, 1938.
With the start of the Second World War in September 1939, Eichmann arranged for the Jews to be sent to ghettos in many major cities from where they were to be transported to reservations located in the East such as Poland and Madagascar.
He moved from the SD to the Gestapo in 1939 and became the head of section IV D4 (Clearing Activities) of the RSHA in 1940 and then head of section IV B4 (Jewish Affairs) in March 1941.
In 1940 he deported almost 7,000 Baden and Saarpfalz Jews to France.
He became an SS-Obersturmbannfuhrer or Lieutenant Colonel during the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941.
After the Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942, Eichmann was given the prime responsibility of deporting the Jews to extermination camps where they were to be killed in the gas chambers as part of the ‘Final Solution’.
When Germany invaded Hungary in March 1944, he supervised the deportation of almost 437,000 Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz and other concentration camps for extermination.
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He was captured by the Allies when Germany was defeated in 1945, but escaped to Austria in 1946.
He lived in Austria up to 1950 after which he fled to Argentina and took shelter there under a false identity.
In 1960 the Israeli intelligence service finally arrested and brought him to Israel to stand trial on fifteen charges including crimes against the Jewish people and humanity.
He was sentenced to death by hanging after he was found guilty of the charges.
