Adolf Eichmann was born on March 19, 1906 to a middle class Austrian family. He attended the same high school that Hitler had attended 17 years earlier. In 1932, the joined the Nazi Party and soon found himself to be a member of the S.S. working for Reinhard Heydrich. His job became the deportation of Jews to camps. He did this efficiently and rose in the Nazi hierarchy. He knew that the deportees were going to forced labor or death in the camps. He was also involved in the Einsatzgruppen who executed Jews in Russia. When the war ended, he was captured by the Americans, but he had false identity papers that made them think he was a small fry. He was moved from prison camp to prison camp and when he felt his captors were on to him, he escaped from a work detail. He got a new identity and moved around doing various jobs. In 1950, he emigrated to Argentina, which was notorious for giving refuge to Nazis, like Josef Mengele. Eichmann’s family joined him in 1952. The new country of Israel was determined to bring war criminals like Eichmann to justice. Elie Wiesenthal took a special interest in locating Eichmann, who was the biggest Nazi to have escaped. But the trail was cold, until a break came in 1956. Lothar Hermann’s daughter was dating a young man who bragged about his father’s involvement in the Holocaust. One day she met his father and was able to identify him as Eichmann. It took a few years for Hermann’s information to get action, but in 1956, Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion ordered the capture of Eichmann and his return to Israel for trial. A group of Mossad agents staked out his home and traced his daily movements. On May 11, 1960 he was abducted as he walked home from a bus ride from his place of employment. He was put in a safe house and on May 20, he was drugged and put on a plane for Israel. On April 11, 1961 he was put on trial in a glass, bullet proof booth. It was the first televised trial in history. 112 witnesses were called, many of them were Holocaust survivors. Eichmann’s defense was the common “I was just following orders”, which the Nuremberg Trials had determined was not an excuse for war crimes. He was convicted on all 15 counts of crimes against humanity, war crimes, crimes against the Jewish people, and belonging to criminal organizations (the S.S., Gestapo, and the S.D.). On June 1, 1961 he was hanged, cremated, and his ashes were scattered.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Eichmann
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/eichmann-captured
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