Sixty years ago today Adolf Eichmann was rewarded for his efforts to exterminate the Jews of Europe.
One of the primary organizers of the Holocaust, Eichmann oversaw the mass deportation of hundreds of thousands of Jews in Nazi-occupied territories to the death camps.
After the defeat of Nazi Germany, Eichmann escaped to Argentina, where he lived until 1960. That year he was captured by agents from Mossad and deported to Israel to face trial. His widely publicized trial concluded in 1962; he was found guilty of war crimes and executed by hanging.
During his trial author Hannah Arendt used the term "banality of evil" to describe Eichmann, who once said he would "leap laughing into the grave because the feeling that he had five million people on his conscience would be for him a source of extraordinary satisfaction."
A peach of a guy.
He managed to escape justice for quite a while.
After Germany's defeat in 1945, Eichmann was captured by US forces, but escaped from a detention camp and moved around Germany to avoid re-capture. He ended up in a small village in Lower Saxony, where he lived until 1950, when he moved to Argentina using false papers he obtained with help from an organisation directed by Catholic bishop Alois Hudal. Information collected by the Mossad, Israel's intelligence agency, confirmed his location in 1960. A team of Mossad and Shin Bet agents captured Eichmann and brought him to Israel to stand trial on 15 criminal charges, including war crimes, crimes against humanity, and crimes against the Jewish people. During the trial, he did not deny the Holocaust or his role in organising it, but said he was simply following orders in a totalitarian Führerprinzip system. He was found guilty on all of the charges, and was executed by hanging on 1 June 1962.[c] The trial was widely followed in the media and was later the subject of several books, including Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem, in which Arendt coined the phrase "the banality of evil" to describe Eichmann.[6]
He did get sympathy from the usual suspects.
In Argentina, news of the abduction was met with a violent wave of antisemitism carried out by far-right elements, including the Tacuara Nationalist Movement.[143] Argentina requested an urgent meeting of the United Nations Security Council in June 1960 after unsuccessful negotiations with Israel, as they regarded the capture to be a violation of their sovereign rights.[144] In the ensuing debate, Israeli representative (and later prime minister) Golda Meir claimed that the abductors were not Israeli agents but private individuals, meaning that the incident was only an "isolated violation of Argentine law."[144] On 23 June, the Council passed Resolution 138, which agreed that Argentine sovereignty had been violated and requested that Israel should make reparations.[145] Israel and Argentina issued a joint statement on 3 August, after further negotiations, admitting the violation of Argentinian sovereignty but agreeing to end the dispute.[146] The Israeli court ruled that the circumstances of Eichmann's capture had no bearing on the legality of his trial.[147]
The U. S. government was not blameless either.
US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) documents declassified in 2006 show that the capture of Eichmann caused alarm at the CIA and West German Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND). Both organisations had known for at least two years that Eichmann was hiding in Argentina, but they did not act because it did not serve their interests in the Cold War. Both were concerned about what Eichmann might say in his testimony about West German national security advisor Hans Globke, who had coauthored several antisemitic Nazi laws, including the Nuremberg Laws. The documents also revealed that both agencies had used some of Eichmann's former Nazi colleagues to spy on European communist countries.[148]
Let’s hope the January 6th committee is thorough.
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I’m at the voter reg booth again tonight so the bar’s open.