Adolf Eichmann hanged

On this day in 1962, the State of Israel hanged German official Adolf Eichmann, who had escaped from a prison camp in 1946 and spent some 14 years in hiding, for his part in the Nazi extermination of Jews during World War II.

He participated in the January 1942 Wannsee Conference, at which the implementation of the genocidal Final Solution to the Jewish Question was planned. Following this, he was tasked by SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich with facilitating and managing the logistics involved in the mass deportation of millions of Jews to Nazi ghettos and Nazi extermination camps across German-occupied Europe.

He was captured and detained by the Allies in 1945, but escaped and eventually settled in Argentina. In May 1960, he was abducted by Mossad, the national intelligence agency of Israel. Eichmann subsequently stood trial with the Supreme Court of Israel.