Video: 'Adolf Eichmann | Nazi Hunters | S1E02'

(Friday, June 1, 1962, a few minutes past midnight Israel Standard Time) — Adolf Eichmann, a German-Austrian SS-Obersturmbannführer and one of the major organizers of The Holocaust, the so-called “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” in Nazi terminology, was hanged at a prison in Ramla, Israel, early this morning.

The hanging, scheduled for midnight at the end of May 31, 1962, was slightly delayed and thus took place a few minutes past midnight on June 1.

Eichmann was tasked by SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich with facilitating and managing the logistics involved in the mass deportation of millions of Jews to ghettos and extermination camps in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe during World War II.

Video: 'The capture and trial of Adolf Eichmann'

He was captured by Mossad agents in Argentina on May 11, 1960, and subsequently found guilty of 15 criminal charges, including war crimes, crimes against humanity, and crimes against the Jewish people, in a widely publicized trial in Jerusalem, following which he was sentenced to death.

Eichmann’s defense team appealed the verdict to the Israeli Supreme Court. Immediately after the Supreme Court rejected the appeal on May 29, 1962, Eichmann petitioned Israeli President Yitzhak Ben-Zvi for clemency. At 8:00 p.m. on May 31, Eichmann was informed that the appeal for presidential clemency had been denied.

Eichmann was hanged at a prison in Ramla hours later. The hanging, scheduled for midnight at the end of 31 May, was slightly delayed and thus took place a few minutes past midnight on 1 June 1962. The execution was attended by a small group of officials, four journalists, and the Canadian clergyman William Lovell Hull, who had been Eichmann’s spiritual counselor while in prison.

Within hours Eichmann’s body had been cremated, and his ashes scattered in the Mediterranean Sea, outside Israeli territorial waters, by an Israeli Navy patrol boat.