JUDAICA - Wisdom In Torah

Eichmann, Adolf Otto
Eichmann was born in Solingen, Germany, to Adolf Karl,
an accountant, and Maria, a housewife, both of whom were
devout Protestants. When Eichmann was seven years old, the
family moved to the city of Linz, Austria, a mostly Catholic
city. In 1916, Eichmann’s mother died and, shortly thereafter,
his father remarried.
Eichmann’s childhood was a usual bourgeois one, very
different from the commonly accepted image of what is
thought to be the childhood of Nazi war criminals, as if they
had usually experienced traumas in childhood and were on
the fringes of society. No social rejections can be found in
his childhood nor any outstanding expressions of hatred of
Jews.
Eichmann’s achievements as a student were low, and at
age 19, he became a traveling salesman for the Vacuum Oil
Company in Upper Austria. In 1933, he was promoted to the
Salzburg area, but in the same year was fired because of staff
downsizing in the company. His joining the ranks of the Nazi
Party of Austria was the result of several factors. The general
context was that Eichmann had grown up in an Austria where
there was a long history of anti-Jewish movements and public
discourse full of Jewish stereotypes. Eichmann was surrounded
by an atmosphere and environment within which
Jews were thought, as a matter of course, to be despised, foreign,
and suspect as to their loyalty, as well as different in their
religion and culture. Jews and non-Jews belonged to different
societies. That is, there was a background of antisemitism,
but not outright and aggressive. As to the street, there was a
desire to eradicate the shame of Versailles and that, too, was
thought to have been caused by the Jews. The strengthening
of the National Socialist Party in Austria during the 1932 local
elections gave it, besides strength, an increasing size and
public respectability. To all this was added personal background.
It was Ernst Kaltenbrunner, who later became the
commander of the Head Office of the Security of the Reich,
an acquaintance of the Eichmann family, who suggested to
Eichmann that he join the ranks of the party and the SS. On
April 1, 1932, Eichmann became a member of the Nazi Party.
His number was 899895. Seven months later, he also swore allegiance
to the SS, which at the time, numbered about 2,000
members in all of Austria.
The strengthening of the Nazi Party in Austria after 1933
resulted in its persecution by the government, and this, in addition
to the fact that Eichmann was unemployed, caused him
to immigrate to Germany in August 1933. Once in Germany,
he received military training in one of the SS camps. In 1934,
Eichmann served as a colonel in the Austrian unit of the SS
in the concentration camp at Dachau. At the end of the year,
he volunteered for the SD, the Secret Service, and was transferred
to Berlin. This was extremely important because in a
few years the SD became the driving force of the implementation
of Jewish policies in Nazi Germany and an influence on
the determiners of that policy.
Initially, Eichmann’s main job in the SD was in Intelligence.
At the beginning, he dealt with the Freemasons; later
he gradually became an expert in the subjects of Judaism, Jews,
Jewish organizations, Zionism, Herzl, and Jewish immigration.
In appreciation of his efforts and achievements in the
field of Jewish policy, he was promoted to Untersturmfuhrer
(second lieutenant) in January 1938.
Now he had real standing and prestige. In the same year,
he was requested by *Heydrich to prepare a memorandum
about the international effort to encourage Jewish emigration
from Europe. This was the beginning of a great advancement
in Eichmann’s career. This matter dealt with the future of
the Jews in Austria, which had been annexed to the German
Reich in March 1938. The SD made Eichmann responsible for
the Jewish Emigration Office and, for the first time, he had
real power. He had enactment authority in the security force
and dictatorial authority over the helpless Jews. The summit
of his achievements was the establishment of the Main Office
of Jewish Emigration. The success of this office hinged
on four factors: the ambitions of the SD and the despair of
the Jews, together with the great effort of Eichmann to implement
the emigration according to the SD doctrine, along
with Eichmann’s burning desire to achieve promotion. Moreover,
in Vienna, Eichmann added a new twist to emigration
by having the Jews themselves finance it and enlisting their
cooperation, an action which was a precedent for the formation
of the Judenrat.
Despite Eichmann’s contentions that his efforts to encourage
Jewish emigration were in the spirit of Zionism, the
reality was that forced emigration was the realization of Nazi
policy and that by forced, brutally implemented emigration
the Nazis also got hold of Jewish possessions. Eichmann
bragged that within a year of the annexation of Austria, about
100,000 Jews had emigrated from Austria legally and a few
thousand Jews to Palestine illegally, and in total by November
1941, 128,000 Jews had left Austria. Eichmann’s achievement
was quickly rewarded by his promotion to Obersturmfuhrer
(first lieutenant). Eichmann’s activities in Vienna became the
model for policy that was enacted in Germany beginning in
January 1939, when the Main Office of Emigration within
the Reich was established. Heydrich was appointed commander
and Heinrich Mueller was appointed his second in
command.
A few weeks later, Czechoslovakia was conquered and
Eichmann was asked to come to Prague to establish an additional
emigration center. At this point, Eichmann had formed
a staff from the Austrian Nazis, which included Frantz Novak,
Anton Burger, Karl Rohm, and Alois Brunner as well as the
Gunther brothers. Fritz Gunther was to be his deputy. Theodor
Dannecker and Dieter Wisliceny were also among the group.
These were to be at the heart of activities in the years to come.
To Bohemia and Moravia, which became a German Protectorate,
Eichmann took Brunner and Hans Gunther.
All of Eichmann’s activities seemed to be quite efficient
until September 1939, when Germany invaded Poland and
World War II began. At this point, Eichmann’s command
changed radically.
248 ENCYCLOPAEDIA JUDAICA, Second Edition, Volume 6