Eichmann: Architect of the Holocaust

Meticulous to the point of being pedantic, deeply religious, and valued by those around him, but a little dull, Adolf Karl Eichmann was an accountant at an electrical engineering plant in Solingen, a town in the Rhineland famous for its steel production and processing. Among his other virtues, he was also an exceedingly prolific man. His family welcomed a total of eight children: seven boys and one girl. The eldest male offspring, born under the sign of Pisces on 19 March 1906, was given his father's first name, Adolf, as a sign of hope for his son's success in life. To be precise: Adolf Otto.

“I respected my father to the highest possible degree. For me, he was an absolute authority,” Adolf Otto Eichmann would confess many decades later.

Faith in absolute authority.

It is impossible not to see this as the central driving force in this man's reprehensible life. He would always and everywhere be admittedly guided by it. From the beginning to the very end. During the time when the Third Reich was victorious on all fronts and the Final Solution to the Jewish Question was being prepared, which was nothing less than a plan to murder more than ten million human beings. And likewise at the end of the Nazi era, when in Soviet-encircled Budapest he sought the liquidation of tens of thousands of local Jews and threw his murderous mantra in the face of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who was trying to save them: “The Führer has entrusted me with this cleansing mission, and I intend to carry it out under all circumstances.” He expressed himself even more starkly a few weeks before the end of the war: “I was fulfilling a historic task. The feeling of having five million Jews on my conscience fills me with such extraordinary satisfaction that I will go to hell content.”

But then, different times arrived.

So, sixteen years later, when the question of Eichmann's personal “journey to hell” was being addressed before an Israeli court, he declared: “You may laugh, but I believe in God, the Father, and the Holy Spirit. It was not my desire to kill people. But if I had to obey an order from a concentration camp commander to kill any number of Jews by gassing or shooting, I would not have hesitated for a minute to carry out that order.”

This is how Adolf Eichmann's life proceeded – from one order to the next.

Lined with the suffering and death of countless innocent people.