The Nazi Apprentice: Eichmann Sent Thousands of Jews to Palestine Before He Sent Millions to Death Camps

Adolf Eichmann on Trial in Jerusalem

In 1932, Adolf Eichmann was an unemployed Austrian who went to Germany to join the Nazi Party. He needed a job. 

He eventually found work in the Nazi effort to make Germany Judenrein, free of Jews. From the time Hitler took power in 1933 until he started World War II, the Nazis deported Jews from the Reich, mass murder was still in the future of the Nazi program. 

Eichmann had a gift for logistics, for organizing.  The Nazi effort to deport Jews in the 1930s was slow because those who wanted to get out had to get authorizations from many agencies.  Eichmann brought all of the organizations necessary into one large building and processed Jews for deportation in days instead of months.  

In that process, Eichmann took the property of the Jews: emptied their bank accounts and left them with just enough to get to their destination.  Thousands of those Eichmann processed got to British Palestine, some got to Spain and to other countries the Nazis never conquered.  Although they lost all of their possessions, the Jews Eichmann deported got away from the Holocaust. 

When the war began, deportation stopped.  For more than two years, Eichmann and his fellow Nazis who were deporting Jews waited for a decision about the fate of the Jews and their next mission. During this period millions of Jews were murdered singly and en masse by shooting, but the killings were mostly done where the Jews lived. No need for transportation.

In January 1942, the Nazis decided to kill all Jews within their territories.  The skills Eichmann had sharpened in organizing the deporting of Jews outside the Reich were used to transport Jews to Auschwitz and other death camps.   

Eichmann refined his methods until in 1944 in Budapest, with the cooperation of Jewish leaders, he deported nearly half a million Jews to their death in just three months.  

Eichmann was not a supervillain. He was a skilled organizer of transport and paperwork with years of experience.  When the Nazi policy was deportation, Eichmann got Jews out of Germany.  When the policy was mass murder, Eichmann filled train cars with victims. He was an amoral functionary who obeyed orders to the point of transporting three million Jews to Death Camps.  

When the war ended with Nazi defeat, Eichmann hid in Austria until the Rat Line organized by Catholic Bishop Alois Hudal got Eichmann to Argentina. The pro-Nazi Pope Pius XII was still in power as Nazis slid to South America. In Argentina, Eichmann bragged about his crimes. He was kidnapped by Israeli agents and put on trial on Jerusalem. 

Eichmann was executed for his crimes in Israel. 

I have read and reread Hannah Arendt's report on the Eichmann trial. She had many critics ofher work during her lifetime and still does fifty years later.  then as now, most ofher critics have not actually read her book.

I can recommend all of Hannah Arendt's books, which I did  in brief summaries here. Her book The Origins of Totalitarianism is the most important of her books in understanding the horror of the Holocaust.