Adolf Eichmann

Adolf Eichmann (1906-1962) was an SS-Obersturmbannfuhrer who organised the logistics of deportation of Jews during the Nazi Final Solution (Endlosung) following the Wannsee Conference of January 1942. He was considered an expert of the 'Jewish Question' by the Nazis having attempted to organise mass Jewish emigration to Palestine in 1937, and was appointed head of the 'Central Office for Jewish Emigration' in 1938. Later at the end of 1939, he was made head of the 'Reich Security Main Office Sub-Department IV-B4', which dealt with Jewish affairs. Eichmann was Secretary at the Wannsee Conference where the decision to kill all Jews in Nazi-controlled territories was made. He subsequently organised the deportation of Polish Jews to the death camps, and in 1944-45 organised the deportation of Hungarian Jews to the camps. In 1945 he was captured by Allied forces but passed himself off under a false identity; in 1946 he escaped and made his way to Argentina. There on 11 May 1960 he was captured by a team of Mossad (Israeli secret service) operatives and smuggled to Israel. He was tried for war crimes in Jerusalem, sentenced to death, and executed by hanging on 1 June 1962. His body was cremated and the ashes deposited in the Mediterranean Sea.

Eichmann is the only person to have been judicially executed in the history of the State of Israel, and one of only two to have been sentenced to death (the other being the supposed former SS camp guard 'Ivan the Terrible', John Demjanjuk, in 1988.