Nazi SS-Colonel Adolf Eichmann was found guilty of many of the most heinous crimes of World War Two and 20th century history on December 15th, 1961, in a district court in Jerusalem, Israel. He was subsequently put to death for his role in the deportation of Jewry across occupied Europe during the Holocaust, six months later at midnight on June 1st, 1962.
As a relative nobody, Eichmann successfully rose to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel in the Nazi regime, who coordinated the deportation of millions of Jews, from Poland to occupied parts of Russia in the north of Europe to Belgium and Hungary in central Europe. In Hungary, for instance, Adolf Eichmann personally made his presence felt by supervising the deportation of almost 500,000 Hungarian Jews.
The deep-seated anti-Semitic, Eichmann, found himself in US custody at the end of the war, but managed to escape in 1946. He fled to Argentina, which sparked a long drawn out manhunt that lasted 14 years. In 1960, his flight from justice in Argentina finally came to an end, when Israeli Security Service (Mossad) captured and abducted Eichmann outside Buenos Aires, and secretly brought him back to Israel.
The trial that took place following his abduction, aroused once more great international attention, bringing Nazi atrocities and his involved in the systematic extermination of Jewry to the world’s attention.
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Rearview Mirror 
Oddly enough I just watched the film Operation Finale about his capture and dove headlong into some reading around the matter. I’ve read a lot in general on this era in history and it the horrors of what man was capable of inflicting upon other men never fails to shock me. People have argued as to the validity of these trials but this was the first time that much of the world would hear of the real horrors of the holocaust from first hand witnesses and survivors
Did you know that today, a third of Europeans know little or nothing about the Holocaust. It is a disturbing trend.
I did and it is. If we don’t learn from history’s mistakes we’re doomed but as we move further away from these events the harder it will be to make people care. Will someone born in 2020, for example, care about events that took place in a war that finished 75 years before they were born?
How could they? That’s what I always ask myself when it comes to the Nazi war criminals! Thanks for the post!
How could they? through brain washing and the ability to be absolved from responsibility for their actions, i.e ‘Just doing their job’. A great insight into the darkest parts of human nature can be found in this amazing book. Robert Greene’s the Laws of Human Nature. In it he talks about the Nazis and also about the Communist revolution in China and how the mob mass rule created absolute blood shed and chaos. It always scares me to see how big groups of people can spiral out of control and the group or mob can just do what it wants and take no responsibility for their actions. The darkest side of the human nature…so terrifying. Here is the link if youre interested https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/317474/the-laws-of-human-nature-by-robert-greene/9780525428145