Adolf Eichmann

Adolf Eichmann ran the department of the Reich Security Main Office that organised the deportation of Jews to the extermination camps, and was hanged in Israel in 1962 after a trial that changed how the Holocaust was publicly understood. He was an unsuccessful travelling salesman before joining the Austrian SS in 1932, and made his career in the emigration offices in Vienna and Prague, where the business was forcing Jews out of the Reich after stripping them of their property. He attended the Wannsee Conference in January 1942 as its secretary and drafted the minutes, which survive because one copy was missed in the destruction of records. His section, IV B 4, did not decide policy and did not kill anyone directly; it arranged the timetables, the rolling stock and the co-operation of local authorities, which is what made the killing continental in scale. He went to Budapest personally in 1944 and organised the deportation of some four hundred thousand Hungarian Jews in under two months, the fastest such operation of the war. He escaped through a monastery route to Argentina in 1950 and lived near Buenos Aires as Ricardo Klement, working for Mercedes-Benz, until Mossad seized him in 1960 and flew him to Israel, an abduction Argentina protested at the United Nations. The trial was televised and built around survivor testimony rather than documents, which was a deliberate choice by the prosecutor Gideon Hausner and is the reason it entered public memory as it did. Hannah Arendt covered it for the New Yorker and produced the phrase about the banality of evil, an argument that has been contested ever since by historians who point to his own boastful recorded remarks in Argentina. He is the only person ever executed by civil sentence in Israel. His name is attached to a bureaucratic category of perpetrator that did not exist in law before 1945. The Jerusalem court rejected the superior-orders defence outright.

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