Wednesday, May 31, 2011
On May 31, 1962, the man Hitler put in charge of the Final Solution, Adolf Eichmann, is executed in Israel, being found guilty of crimes against the Jewish people, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. Eichmann was initially captured by the allied forces at the end of the war, but he escaped the internment camp and fled to Argentina on fraudulently procured papers from the Red Cross. Israeli intelligence finally caught up with Eichmann in 1960. He was living under the alias Ricardo Klement, working for Mercedes-Benz in Buenos Aires. Mossad agents captured him in an elaborate covert operation and smuggled him out of Argentina to stand trial in Israel. Eichmann is the only civil death sentence Israel has ever enacted.
Earlier this month, the most wanted Holocaust perpetrator still alive, former death camp guard John Demjanjuk, 91, was convicted in a German court of 27,900 counts of accessory to murder from his time at the Sobibor death camp in 1943. Since German law does not allow consecutive sentencing, Demjanjuk received a five-year prison term. Demjanjuk spent most of his post-war years in the United States, living as a car mechanic. In 1988, he was convicted by an Israeli court of being notorious Treblinka death camp guard "Ivan the Terrible" and was sentenced to death. The Israeli Supreme Court, however, overturned the decision in 1993 finding there was reasonable doubt that Demjanjuk was the notorious torturer. He returned to the United States until he was extradited to Germany after a lengthy legal process in 2009.
