April 11, 2021, marks a significant date in the history of the Jewish people and the State of Israel: the 60th anniversary of the opening of Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem on April 11, 1961. It coincided with the young Jewish state’s bat/bar mitzvah year of national independence. These two contrasting events represented a microcosm of modern Jewish history.
An obersturmbannführer, or lieutenant colonel, in the dreaded Nazi SS, Eichmann was the chief logistical officer in charge of the mass murder of more than six million Jews during the Shoah (the Hebrew term for the Holocaust). He escaped from an Allied prison camp after World War II and fled to Argentina, where he assumed a new name and identity.
As a result, he was not among the top Nazi war criminals that the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and France placed on trial during the famous Nuremberg war crimes tribunal in 1945.
For 15 years, Eichmann’s whereabouts remained elusive, and although he was called the major architect of the ”Final Solution” (the bland Nazi term for the mass murder of the Jewish people), he lived openly with his family near Buenos Aires and worked in a local Mercedes-Benz factory.
An obersturmbannführer, or lieutenant colonel, in the dreaded Nazi SS, Eichmann was the chief logistical officer in charge of the mass murder of more than six million Jews during the Shoah (the Hebrew term for the Holocaust). He escaped from an Allied prison camp after World War II and fled to Argentina, where he assumed a new name and identity.
As a result, he was not among the top Nazi war criminals that the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and France placed on trial during the famous Nuremberg war crimes tribunal in 1945.
For 15 years, Eichmann’s whereabouts remained elusive, and although he was called the major architect of the ”Final Solution” (the bland Nazi term for the mass murder of the Jewish people), he lived openly with his family near Buenos Aires and worked in a local Mercedes-Benz factory.
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