Adolf Eichmann, c. 1941

Adolf Eichmann

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Adolf Eichmann was a man of conviction. From the early 1930s, Eichmann was one of the main figures involved in setting in place the policies persecuting Jews – men, women and children, and their expulsion from Germany. To achieve these ends, he repeatedly circumvented the official hierarchies. Yet rather than this leading to disciplinary procedures, it tended to grow both his personal power and influence as well as that of the Reich Security Main Office. In Vienna in 1938 – after Austria’s annexation – he already made his name as an expert for expelling the Jewish population, simply forcing them out of the country. In autumn 1939, he organised the deportations of Austrian, Czech and Polish Jewish men, women and children to eastern Poland where there were plans to establish a so-called ‘Jewish reservation’. In 1940, in the Reich Security Main Office under Reinhard Heydrich, Eichmann was appointed as head of a large department responsible for deportations and expropriation. As the Director of this Section, sometimes called the ‘Department of Jewish Affairs’, Eichmann had an almost unique insight into the real numbers of deportations and murders. Through a mix of bureaucratic methods and threats, he kept other authorities in check in order to accelerate the persecution and murder of the Jews.

At the instruction of Heydrich, Eichmann prepared the meeting’s protocol, shown opposite. Later, Eichmann once referred to the results of the meeting summarised in the protocol as ‘an expansion of absolute power’.