File:Adolf Eichmann, 1942.jpg

SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann (1906–1962), head of Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA, Reich Security Central Office) Department IV B4 (Jewish affairs), who organized the deportation of Jews to the Auschwitz concentration camp in German-occupied Poland during the Holocaust. Taken in or around 1942, this appears to have been Eichmann's official RSHA ID photograph. Yad Vashem describes the image as "Eichmann, RSHA (Reich Central Security Office), 1942, Collection Archive, Yad Vashem Archives." See this version with a signature; the holes from the hole punch are visible.

The image shows Eichmann in his Obersturmbannführer (lieutenant colonel) uniform, with four silver pips and a stripe on the left collar. He became Obersturmbannführer on 9 November 1941.^[1]

David Cesarani writes: "The much used official photograph of the smiling young SS officer with filmstar looks who deported millions of Jews to the death camps seems to personify all the perpetrators of Nazi genocide. The ubiquity of this image is equalled by that of Eichmann at his trial in Jerusalem in 1961, sitting or standing inside a bulletproof glass booth".^[2]

It is not known where the photograph was taken. After the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, Eichmann travelled extensively, setting up offices in countries from which Jews were being deported. The birth of his children mirrored this movement: his first son was born in Berlin, Germany, in 1936; his second in Vienna, Austria, in 1940; and his third in Prague, Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic), in 1942, where he and his wife had rented a home since 1939 and which he regarded as his official residence. He would regularly return to Berlin.^[3] (His fourth son was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1955.)