Kidnapped and put on trial

At the age of 26, Eichmann joined the Nazi party and became a full member of the Schutzstaffel or SS, the Nazi elite military organization which, under Heinrich Himmler, was responsible for establishing and running the concentration/extermination camps in which millions of inmates died of malnutrition, shooting, systematic mass gassing, or brutal medical experiments. Eichmann became chief of the Gestapo’s Office for Jewish Emigration, and was ultimately responsible for the transport of Jews from all over Nazi-occupied Europe into the concentration camps, where an estimated six million Jews died as part of the Nazis’ ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question’.³ His principal concern was to maintain the killing capacity of the camps by providing a steady flow of victims. The chain of command in his office was Hitler, Himmler, Heydrich, Müller (Head of the Gestapo), Eichmann.

Kidnapped and put on trial

His principal concern was to maintain the killing capacity of the concentration camps by providing a steady flow of victims.

After WW2, Eichmann fled to Argentina, where he lived in Buenos Aeries as Ricardo Klement until May 1960. He was then kidnapped by Israeli Mossad [secret service] agents, who smuggled him back to Jerusalem on an El Al plane for trial as a war criminal. The Israeli court decided that the legality of Eichmann’s trial was not compromised by the illegality of his capture, as the latter was a political matter. He was indicted on 15 criminal charges, including crimes against humanity and crimes against the Jewish people,⁴ under Israel’s Nazis and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law 5710 of 1950.
A series of trials of the other major Nazi War criminals had taken place in the German city of Nuremberg from 1945 to 1949. These centred on war crimes and crimes against humanity and were conducted by the victorious Allies. However, ‘the trial of Adolf Eichmann was initiated and conducted by the Israeli nation and was a Jewish affair. It was the intention of Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion to make Eichmann’s trial a general indictment, not only of Nazi actions, but of anti-Semitism in general.’⁵ ‘Until the Eichmann trial, no other occasion [after Nuremberg] presented itself to communicate on a worldwide scale what the Nazis had done. … Thus the trial provided a unique opportunity to re-educate an older generation and to educate a newer one’, i.e. ‘those who were at the time too young to have been informed by these earlier events’.⁶

Defence arguments rejected

the dispatch of each train by the Accused to Auschwitz or to any other extermination site, carrying one thousand human beings, meant that the Accused was a direct accomplice in a thousand premeditated acts of murder

The contention by the defence that Eichmann could not get a fair trial in Israel was rejected because the case would be tried on the basis of the evidence brought before the court. According to the court, ‘Those who sit in judgment are professional judges, accustomed to weighing evidence; they are carrying out their task in full view of the public.’⁷
The objection that the legislation was retroactive was rejected on the basis that ‘the four major Allies, including America, had sat in judgment at Nuremberg and elsewhere under precisely such retroactive statutes’ and ‘there was no other way to put the culprits on trial’.⁸ The further contention that the acts were done before the creation of the State of Israel, outside its borders, and to people who were not citizens of Israel was rejected on the basis of the universal nature of the crime of genocide, the principle of universal jurisdiction, and the fact that there was no international tribunal with competent jurisdiction, as the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals had long ceased to exist. And ‘At the time of the trial there was no other country that claimed the right or assumed the duty to try Adolf Eichmann.’⁹

Image Wikipedia

Adolf Hitler believed he was promoting evolutionary progress by killing 6 million Jews.

At the trial, Eichmann’s main personal defence was that he was a subordinate lieutenant-colonel (Obersturmbannführer) and as such was only a ‘cog’ obeying ‘superior orders’, albeit zealously, because it was the will of Hitler. Hitler’s orders had possessed the force of law in the Third Reich, and so what had been done was an Act of State. (If the Germans had won he would have been decorated, not hanged.)
This prompted the presiding judge to state: ‘The objective of the crimes … was to obliterate an entire people from the face of the earth.’ … ‘the dispatch of each train by the Accused to Auschwitz or to any other extermination site, carrying one thousand human beings, meant that the Accused was a direct accomplice in a thousand premeditated acts of murder ’ … ‘the Accused acted out of an inner identification with the orders that he was given and out of a fierce will to achieve the criminal objective, and in our opinion it is irrelevant … how this identification and this will came about, and whether they were the outcome of the training which the Accused received under the regime which raised him, as his Counsel argues.’¹⁰
After 14 weeks of testimony, involving 1,543 documents and 100 prosecution witnesses (90 of whom were Nazi concentration camp survivors), Eichmann was found guilty on all charges by the three-judge panel, and sentenced to death by hanging. This was carried out shortly after midnight on May 31/June 1, 1962. His ashes were then speedily scattered over international waters of the Mediterranean Sea to ensure that he would have no final resting place that might serve as a future memorial.