Eichmann's Shock

One of the chief organizers of the Holocaust, SS-Obersturmbannfuhrer Adolf Eichmann joined the Nazi Party in 1932 and became a member of the SS, carrying the card number 45,326. At the end of World War II, Colonel Eichmann boasted that he would 'leap laughing into his grave because the feeling that he had five, or six million people on his conscience gives him extraordinary satisfaction'. SS colonel Adolf Eichmann was a major perpetrator of Nazi crimes. But fifteen years after the war, during his trial in Jerusalem, Eichmann refused to admit guilt and showed no remorse for his role in the horrible atrocities committed by the Third Reich. He presented himself as an ordinary SS colonel, an obedient bureaucrat in uniform, just a small cog in the Third Reich. He put the blame for the crimes of the Reich on his superiors in the Nazi leadership. Trying to save his neck, Eichmann insisted that he was only following orders. At the court house in Israel, Eichmann sat in a bulletproof glass booth to protect him from assassination attempts. The political theorist Hannah Arendt, reporting for The New Yorker, was surprised to see Eichmann's ordinary appearance. He sat in his glass cell looking insignificant, a nonentity, showing no emotions, his monotonous voice impressing as much as a flat affect. And so, to her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt gave the subtitle: A Report on the Banality of Evil. During the judicial proceedings Eichmann displayed neither guilt nor hatred. He insisted that he bore no responsibility for the crimes of Nazi Germany because he followed orders and obeyed the laws of the state. Before the trial, Eichmann was interrogated for 275 hours by Captain Avner Less of the Israeli Police. Fluent in German and a former Berliner, Less emigrated in 1938 to British Mandatory Palestine. Still, Adolf Eichmann respected uniforms, including Israeli uniforms. When Captain Less informed him that his father was deported to Auschwitz by the SS colonel's own headquaters, Eichmann even tried to show a feeling of rapport. His eyes opened wide and he exclaimed: 'But that's horrible, Herr Hauptmann (Captain) ! That's horrible! ' I never met personally Adolf Eichmann but his 1944 visit in my native Hungary resulted in terrible consequences. In Operation Margarethe, on March 19,1944, Hitler's armies occupied Hungary. And a few days later Colonel Eichmann arrived in Budapest to implement what the Nazis euphemistically called 'the final solution'. With the help of the Hungarian authorities, in less than two months around 450,000 Jews from Hungary were deported, most of them to the death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau. As a child I spent a dreadful year in a slave labor lager near Vienna in Austria. I was liberated in the spring of 1945 by the Russians. After the war Eichmann managed to escape to Argentina. He lived in his house with his family in Buenos Aires at 14 Garibaldi Street. In the spring of 1960 a team of Shin Bet and Mossad agents captured him near his house and brought him to Israel to face justice in Jerusalem. The judges found Eichmann responsible for the deportation of Jews in the Holocaust, for crimes against humanity and war crimes, as well as crimes against Poles, Slovenes and Gypsies. He was sentenced to death and hanged.