Otto Adolf Eichmann was a German-Austrian official of the Nazi Party, an officer of the Schutzstaffel (SS), and one of the major organisers of the Holocaust. He participated in the January 1942 Wannsee Conference, at which the implementation of the genocidal Final Solution to the Jewish Question was planned. Following this, he was tasked by SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich with facilitating and managing the logistics involved in the mass deportation of millions of Jews to Nazi ghettos and Nazi extermination camps across German-occupied Europe. He was captured and detained by the Allies in 1945, but escaped and eventually settled in Argentina. In May 1960, he was tracked down and apprehended by Israel's Mossad intelligence agency, and put on trial before the Supreme Court of Israel. The highly publicised Eichmann trial resulted in his conviction in Jerusalem, following which he was executed by hanging in 1962.
Eichmann in 1942
Adolf Eichmann's Lebenslauf (résumé) attached to his application for promotion from SS-Hauptscharführer to SS-Untersturmführer in 1937
Memorial to Holocaust victims at a bus stop near the site of Eichmann's office, Referat IV B4 (Office of Jewish Affairs) at Kurfürstenstraße 115/116, Berlin, now occupied by a hotel
Hungarian woman and children arrive at Auschwitz-Birkenau, May or June 1944 (photo from the Auschwitz Album).
The Wannsee Conference was a meeting of senior government officials of Nazi Germany and Schutzstaffel (SS) leaders, held in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee on 20 January 1942. The purpose of the conference, called by the director of the Reich Security Main Office SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, was to ensure the co-operation of administrative leaders of various government departments in the implementation of the Final Solution to the Jewish Question, whereby most of the Jews of German-occupied Europe would be deported to occupied Poland and murdered. Conference participants included representatives from several government ministries, including state secretaries from the Foreign Office, the justice, interior, and state ministries, and representatives from the SS. In the course of the meeting, Heydrich outlined how European Jews would be rounded up and sent to extermination camps in the General Government, where they would be killed.
The villa Am Großen Wannsee 56–58, where the Wannsee Conference was held, is now a memorial and museum.
1935 chart shows racial classifications under the Nuremberg Laws: German, Mischlinge, and Jew.
Letter from Heydrich to Martin Luther, Undersecretary at the Foreign Office, notifying him that the conference would be delayed.
The conference room at the Wannsee Conference House (2003).