Eichmann, (Karl) Adolf (1906–1962)

Austrian Nazi. As an SS official during Hitler's regime 1933–45, he was responsible for atrocities against Jews and others, including the implementation of genocide. He managed to escape at the fall of Germany in 1945, but was discovered in Argentina in 1960, abducted by Israeli agents, tried in Israel in 1961 for war crimes, and executed.

He was in charge of the Gestapo department controlling the Jewish population of all German-occupied territory. He organized the mass deportation of Jews from Germany and Bohemia to concentration camps in Poland in 1941. He was given the task of organizing the Final Solution to the ‘Jewish problem’ at the Wannsee Conference in 1942 and set up extermination camps, specifying the design of the gas chambers and crematoria.