Eichmann Son Says Execution Just

Adolf Eichmann’s youngest son, breaking the family’s silence, said Monday that he is relieved that his father was hanged for being an architect of the Holocaust.

“What would I do with him” if he were still alive, Ricardo Eichmann said in an interview. “Tell him to go to hell? Offer him refuge?”

The 40-year-old Eichmann also said he believed the execution of his father in Israel in 1962 was justified.

As chief of the Gestapo’s Jewish section, Adolf Eichmann oversaw the Nazis’ deportation and murder of millions of Jews during World War II.

After the war, Eichmann escaped to South America but was kidnapped by Israeli agents in 1960 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He was convicted of crimes against humanity.

Ricardo Eichmann was 5 when his father was arrested. But he knew only that his father disappeared and his mother, Veronika, moved the family back to Germany. She refused to tell Ricardo what his father had done.

He declined to discuss the reactions or current lives of his three older brothers.

Eichmann, who teaches Middle Eastern archaeology at the University of Tubingen in southern Germany, said he became aware of his father’s role only when he reached his early teens, mainly by reading books.