December 15 - Nazi Adolf Eichmann's Death Penalty

This Day in History: 15 December 2019

 

15 December 1961

 

58 years ago, today, Nazi Adolf Eichmann, an officer who helped to organise the Holocaust, was sentenced to death for war crimes in Israel. Eichmann joined the Nazi's elite organisation in November 1932, and his responsibilities in Nazi Germany included policing, intelligence, and the enforcement of Germany's dictator's, Adolf Hitler, anti-Semitic policies. His first mission that involved Jews was in Vienna, in 1938, when he was given the task to eradicate them from the city, where he set up a Jewish deportment centre, and carried out a similar mission in Prague. In 1942, at the Wannsee Conference, Eichmann and other top Nazi officials began to plan for a "final solution of the Jewish question", in the form of the Holocaust, where three to four million Jews died.

 

After the Second World War, Eichmann was captured by US troops, but escaped before facing trial. He travelled under a different identity, and arrived in Argentina in 1950, where many Nazi war criminals also were hiding. He was safe until 1957, when a German prosecutor secretly informed Israel about Eichmann's whereabouts, and the Israel intelligence service, Mossad, was subsequently deployed in Argentina, and more agents were brought in during the festivities held for the 150^th anniversary of the revolution against Spain. On May 20, Eichmann was flown out of Argentina after being snatched out of the street by Mossad operatives, and his trial began in April the next year, in Jerusalem, and was also the first televised trial in history.

 

Eichmann faced 15 charges, which included crimes against humanity, crimes against the Jewish, and war crimes. His excuse was that he was just following orders but was still found guilty on all accounts on this day and was sentenced to death. On May 31, 1962, he was hanged, and his body was cremated, and his ashes thrown into the sea. Toward the end of World War Two, Eichmann had uttered "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". Despite claiming he would leap while laughing into his grave, he was instead cremated, executed, and hanged: karma.

 

Want to find out more on Adolf Eichmann's trial? Read Hannah Arendt's, a political theorist who was at the trial, book, 'Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil' for more details. Or, visithttps://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/eichmann-trial for more information on the trial instead.