Eichmann trial

Trial of Adolf Eichmann
Adolf Eichmann (inside glass booth) is sentenced to death by the Supreme Court of Israel at the conclusion of the trial
Court	Jerusalem District court
Full case name	Criminal Case 40/61
Decided	December 11–12, 1961 (1961-12-11 – 1961-12-12) (verdict) December 15, 1961 (1961-12-15) (sentence)
Court membership
Judges sitting	Moshe Landoy (presiding) Benjamin Halevy Yitzhak Raveh

The Eichmann trial was the 1961 trial in Israel of major Holocaust perpetrator Adolf Eichmann who was kidnapped in Argentina by Israeli agents and brought to Israel to stand trial. Eichmann was a senior Nazi party member and served at the rank of Obersturmbenführer (Lieutenant-Colonel) in the SS, and was one of the people primarily responsible for the implementation of the Final Solution. He was responsible for the Nazis' train shipments from across Europe to the concentration camps, even managing the shipment to Hungary directly, where 564,000 Jews died. After World War II he fled to Argentina, living under the pseudonym "Ricardo Clement" until his capture in 1960 by Mossad.

The kidnapping of Eichmann was criticized by the United Nations, calling it a "violation of the sovereignty of a Member State". Israel and Argentina issued a joint statement on 3 August, after further negotiations, admitting the violation of Argentine sovereignty but agreeing to end the dispute. The Israeli court ruled that the circumstances of Eichmann's capture had no bearing on the legality of his trial. His trial, which opened on 11 April 1961, was televised and broadcast internationally, intended to educate about the crimes committed against Jews by Nazi Germany, which had been secondary to the Nuremberg trials which addressed other war crimes of the Nazi regime. Prosecutor and Attorney General Gideon Hausner also tried to challenge the portrayal of Jewish functionaries that had emerged in the earlier trials, showing them at worst as victims forced to carry out Nazi decrees while minimizing the "gray zone" of morally questionable behavior. Hausner later wrote that available archival documents "would have sufficed to get Eichmann sentenced ten times over"; nevertheless, he summoned more than 100 witnesses, most of whom had never met the defendant, for didactic purposes. Defense attorney Robert Servatius refused the offers of twelve survivors who agreed to testify for the defense, exposing what they considered immoral behavior by other Jews. Political philosopher Hannah Arendt reported on the trial in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. The book had enormous impact in popular culture, but its ideas have become increasingly controversial.

Eichmann was charged with fifteen counts of violating the Nazis and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law. His trial began on 11 April 1961 and was presided over by three judges: Moshe Landau, Benjamin Halevy, and Yitzhak Raveh. Convicted on all fifteen counts, Eichmann was sentenced to death. He appealed to the Supreme Court, which confirmed the convictions and the sentence. President Yitzhak Ben-Zvi rejected Eichmann's request to commute the sentence. In Israel's only judicial execution to date, Eichmann was hanged on 1 June 1962 at Ramla Prison.

Background

Eichmann in the yard at Ramla Prison in 1961

From 1933 to 1945, the Jews in Europe faced systematic persecution and genocide at the hands of the Nazis in Germany and their collaborators in the Holocaust. From 1941 to 1945, this persecution increased as part of the Final Solution, a plan to murder all of the Jews in Europe, which resulted in the death of some six million Jews.

Eichmann played a major part in the execution of the Holocaust. He fled to Argentina at the end of the Second World War, but was abducted by Israeli Mossad agents in 1960, and transported to Jerusalem to stand trial. Eichmann was held at a fortified police station in Yagur in northern Israel for nine months prior to his trial.

Preparations

The trial of Eichmann was held from 11 April to 15 August 1961 at Beit Ha'am, a community theatre temporarily reworked to serve as a courtroom capable of accommodating 750 observers.

After his abduction and kidnapping in 1960, an arrest warrant was issued against him. The investigation into his crimes lasted about nine months. As soon as he arrived in Israel, he was handed over to investigator and policeman Shmuel Roth. At the end of the investigation, an indictment was filed against him in the Jerusalem District Court. The indictment included 15 counts, some of which are described in more detail below, including crimes against the Jewish people, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and membership in organizations that had been declared criminal by the Nuremberg trials. The indictment also covered crimes committed against other groups such as mass deportations of Poles and Slovenians, and the murder of tens of thousands of Sinti and Romani people.

Charges

Counts 1–4 were for crimes against the Jewish people, counts 5–7 were for crimes against humanity against Jews,count 8 was for war crimes, based on Eichmann's role in the systematic persecution and murder of Jews during World War II, counts 9-12 for crimes against humanity against non-Jews,and counts 13–15 charged Eichmann with membership in enemy organizations.

Count	Charge	Notes	Verdict
1	Killing Jews	Via the systematic deportation of millions of Jews to the extermination camps beginning in August 1941	Guilty
2	Placing Jews in living conditions calculated to bring about their physical destruction by placing them in said camps
3	Causing serious bodily harm to Jews
4	Preventing births against Jews	With an order for forced abortions in Theresienstadt Ghetto
5	Forced emigration	From March 1938 to October 1941, including deportation of Jews in October 1939 during the Nisko Plan, and his role in the Final Solution
6	Persecuting Jews on national, religious, or political grounds
7	Plundering Jewish property en masse	Theft of property was not enumerated in the law as a crime against humanity (it was counted as a war crime), but the prosecution argued that it fit the criteria of "any other inhuman act committed against any civilian population" as stipulated in the law. Since Eichmann founded the Central Office for Jewish Emigration, which confiscated the property of deported Jews, and the court determined that the purpose of such confiscation was in part to instill terror and facilitate the deportation and murder of Jews, it found him guilty on this count.
8	War crimes	Based on Eichmann's role in the systematic persecution and murder of Jews during World War II
9	Mass deportations of Polish civilians
10	Mass deportation of Slovene civilians
11	Participation in the Romani Holocaust by the systematic forced deportation of Romani people	Although the court did not find evidence that Eichmann knew that the Romani victims were sent to extermination camps, it nevertheless found him guilty on that count.
12	Participation in the Lidice massacre	He was found guilty for deportation of part of the population of Lidice, but not the massacre itself.
13	Membership in an enemy organization	Member of the Schutzstaffeln der NSDAP (SS)	Only partially convicted due to the statute of limitations having expired for some (but not all) of his crimes
14	Membership in an enemy organization	Member of the Sicherheitsdienst des Reichführers SS (SD)
15	Membership in an enemy organization	Member of the Geheime Staatspolizei (Gestapo)

Eichmann was found guilty on all three counts because he was not only proven to be a member of these organizations but committed crimes as part of his role, namely those discussed above.

Trial

The trial. Gideon Hausner is standing, to his left is Robert Saravatsius. Eichmann is sitting in the glass box.

The trial was held in what was then known as Beit Ha'Am tabernacle (now known as the Gerard Behar Center) in Jerusalem. The prosecution was headed by Attorney General of Israel Gideon Hausner, and the defense consisted of the Nuremberg defense lawyer Robert Servatius. Interestingly, Israeli law at the time did not allow a foreign lawyer to represent a defendant in an Israeli court; an exception was made because no Israeli lawyer was willing to represent Eichmann.

The trial began on April 11, 1961. Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion stated in the Israeli press that the trial of Eichmann will be a remedy of the right to bring the Nazis to justice.

At the beginning of the trial, the prosecution reviewed Eichmann's crimes. Hausner has been quoted as saying in Hebrew:

In the place where I stand before you, Judges of Israel, to present the case against Adolf Eichmann, I do not stand alone. With me, at this moment, stand six million accusers. But they cannot rise to their feet, point an accusing finger towards the glass booth, and cry out towards the one sitting there – 'I accuse.' For their ashes are piled up on the hills of Auschwitz and the fields of Treblinka, washed away in the rivers of Poland, and their graves are scattered across Europe, from one end to the other. Their blood cries out, but their voices cannot be heard. Therefore, I will be their mouthpiece, and I will say on their behalf the terrible indictment.

— Gideon Hausner, Attorney General of Israel

Jurisdiction

The defense disputed the court's authority to try Eichmann, based on the following four preliminary arguments:

• That the judges could not be objective in a trial where the crimes were committed against Jews, because the judges themselves were Jews.
• That the trial should not have been held since the accused had been kidnapped by Mossad from his home outside of Israel.
• That the law upon which the indictment was based, was from 1950 and was therefore late for acts committed during World War II due to the statute of limitations, and that it is unacceptable for criminal laws to be retroactive.
• That the offenses were committed outside of the State of Israel, which did not even exist at the time they were committed.

The court rejected all these claims and ruled thus:

• In connection with the claim regarding the lack of objectivity of the judges, being Jews, the court said: "... because indeed, when he sits on the throne of justice, the judge does not cease to be flesh and blood, possessing emotions and passions, but he is commanded by the law to conquer these emotions and passions, because if he does not, there would never be a competent judge to judge a criminal charge that arouses feelings of disgust, such as treason, murder or any other serious crime."
• In connection with Eichmann's kidnapping in Argentina and bringing him to Israel against his will, the court ruled that the authority of a court to judge a defendant depends solely on the essence of the penal clause contained in the indictment and its suitability to the acts attributed to the accused, and the court is not allowed to examine the way in which the accused was brought into the territory of the sovereign territory of the country where he was tried.
• In connection with the rule regarding the retroactive invalidity of criminal laws, the court said that it was a rule of justice that Eichmann needed to be punished for an act that was not actually illegal at the time it was committed due to the heinousness of his actions. The judges noted that this was an outlying case, however, and that defendants are normally not punished for acts that were legal at the time. In Eichmann's case, since the law regarding prosecuting Nazis in Israel didn't create new legal norms but rather made it possible for them to be brought to justice for their crimes, which everywhere in the world, including in Germany, they were or should have been aware of their illegality or heinousness at the time the crimes were committed. Due to the Nazis' lawlessness, the perpetrators of their crimes were not punished, however, justice demanded the establishment of a court before which the criminals could be brought to justice. The court also relied on public statements by the Allies during the war that after its end the Nazis would be prosecuted, and considered those statements to be sufficient warnings for the requirement under Israeli law that there can be no punishment for a crime unless there had been a prior warning that it was a crime.
• In connection with the argument that Israel did not exist as a country when the crimes were committed, the court rules that the plan to destroy the Jewish people was also aimed at the Jews who lived in the region of Palestine at the time. It added that even though the offenses were also committed outside of what would become Israeli territory, Eichmann was a modern "pirate" and thus established Israel's universal jurisdiction over him. Eichmann was presented as the enemy of the human race and therefore, like the pirates, every country is allowed to judge him and punish him according to international law.

Evidence and testimony

Main articles: Yehiel De-Nur § Testimony at Eichmann trial, and Jewish resistance in German-occupied Europe

The protocols of the trial, in the Israeli Supreme Court Library

After the preliminary allegations were dismissed, the defendant was required to answer to the charges, and he responded to each of the charges in German: "Im Sinne der Anklage - nicht schuldig" ("In the spirit of the indictment - not guilty").

The evidence consisted of more than 100 witnesses and 1,600 documents, some of which were signed by Eichmann himself. The witnesses for the prosecution were the survivors of the concentration camps and various occupation zones. Among the notable witnesses was writer Yehiel De-Nur (also known by his pen name Ka-Tzetnik 135633), who passed out on the witness stand on 7 June 1961.. In his opening statement he said:

I do not see myself as a writer who writes literature. This is a chronicle from the planet Auschwitz. I was there for about two years. The time there is not the same as it is here, on Earth. (…) And the inhabitants of this planet had no names. They had no parents and no children. They did not wear [clothes] the way they wear here. They were not born there and did not give birth... They did not live according to the laws of the world here and did not die. Their name was the number K. Tzetnik.

After saying the above, he fainted and gave no further testimony.

Other witnesses included ghetto rebels like Zivia Lubetkin, Yitzhak Zuckerman, and Abba Kovner. None of the witnesses except for De-Nur had any actual contact with Eichmann; their testimonies illustrated the horrors of the Holocaust and also had the side effect of instilling awareness of the Holocaust among the public. There were other witnesses who met with Eichmann trying to save Jews, including an anti-Nazi German priest who tried to save converts from Eichmann. A number of witnesses also appeared who interviewed the heads of the Nazi German government and the SS after the war; among them was Jewish psychologist Gustave Gilbert, who had conversations with Nazis such as Hermann Göring and Rudolph Hess during the Nuremberg trials. He testified that Göring and Hess as well as other senior-level Nazis said Eichmann was the main person responsible for the extermination of the Jews.

Nazi defense witnesses who refused to come to Israel for fear of being prosecuted testified before Allied-controlled German courts according to questions sent by the Israeli court.

Verdict

The prosecution showed Eichmann's active part in the deportation and extermination of Jews all over Europe, holding them in inhumane conditions and systematically murdering them with the aim of genocide. The defense, instead of trying to disprove the events, attempted to minimize Eichmann's involvement in these cases. They argued that Eichmann only obeyed the orders of the Nazi government and could not, as a low-ranking official, violate them, that the main culprit in the events of the Holocaust was the German government and not Eichmann. These claims were, of course, rejected by the judges, who determined that it was in fact possible to refuse immoral orders and even withdraw from the Nazi apparatus, echoing a similar decision made at Nuremberg. Eichmann, they ruled, was not allowed to carry out orders to kill even if he was only an obedient official.

It was determined that the prosecution had successfully proven Eichmann's central role in the extermination mechanism. Eichmann had wide powers; he himself initiated and encouraged some of the forced divorce actions because of his love for Hitler and anti-Semitic doctrine. He did not refuse to kill one single Jew even when asked to do so and even did not stop his activities when he received an order to do so from his superiors towards the end of the war.

Eichmann was even ready to act against the decision of Hitler himself, when he believed that otherwise the Jews might not be saved. This was proven by a telegram sent by the German ambassador in Budapest in 1944, Edmund Veesenmayer, who informed German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop of the details of an agreement made between Hitler and Hungarian leader Miklós Horthy. Hungary, who fought alongside the Nazis and fascist Italy, believed that the war was lost and sought a peace treaty. Hitler tried to prevent this and met with Horthy; the latter agreed to stay in the Axis Powers on several conditions, one of which was that 3,000 Jewish families would be granted permission to leave Budapest for Switzerland. Hitler agreed to this. Veesenmayer then informed von Ribbentrop that Eichmann was very upset at said agreement, so Eichmann ordered that the deportation of the Jews from Budapest should be carried out from then on at such a rate that, until the necessary visas for Switzerland were arranged, 3,000 Jewish families will remain in the Hungarian capital.

Despite the fact that Eichmann was not the most senior Nazi in the extermination process, and that others stood higher up in the chain of command, the judges determined that this did not detract from Eichmann's role in, and responsibility for, the Holocaust.

During the trial there was a problem with the non-existence of forensic proof of Eichmann's part in the murder of Jews. Eichmann claimed throughout the trial that he was only the head of a department in a long chain of command that handled sending Jews by train to the extermination camps. For some time there was no proof that would contradict Eichmann's claim. Simon Wiesenthal discovered that there is a transcript of tapes in which Eichmann recounts his memories of being in Argentina, where he fled after the war. The winning proof of Eichmann's guilt were his handwritten notes in certain places in the transcript.

The verdict contained hundreds of pages and was read in its entirety for three days straight, from December 11-13, 1961, at the Jerusalem District Court. In the verdict, Eichmann was either partially or fully convicted on all 15 counts; he was partially acquitted of sections 13-15 of the indictment, for membership in hostile organizations in the period ending in May 1940, due to the statute of limitations.

Sentence

After the verdict was read on December 13, the prosecution, defense attorneys, and even Eichmann himself argued for what type of punishment should be given. Eichmann once again asserted that he should be given a lesser punishment because he believed that responsibility for the Holocaust should be placed on the political echelon surrounding the Nazis.

The death sentence was read as part of the verdict on December 15. Before the sentence was read, Eichmann was given the right to speak to the court once again: "I see that my hope for justice has been disappointed... I did not want to kill... My fault is only my obedience... I did not persecute Jews out of lust and desire. The government did that... I would ask Now the forgiveness of the Jewish people and I would confess that I am ashamed to remember what was done to him, but in view of the reasons for the verdict this may only be interpreted as hypocrisy... I have to bear what fate has thrown at me. Eichmann appealed his sentence, which was upheld in 1962 by the Israeli Supreme Court.

Eichmann, his wife, five brothers, and twenty Israeli intellectuals sent amnesty requests to Israeli President Yitzhak Ben-Zvi. The government convened to discuss the sentence's execution. Gideon Hausner spoke of the ministers' hearts and said that "we owe the execution of the sentence to the many Holocaust survivors."

Ben-Zvi refused amnesty, so Eichmann was executed in what is now called Ayalon Prison on the night between May 31 and June 1. Before his hanging, he asked for and received a bottle of white wine and rejected the offer of Canadian priest William Hale to say a last prayer before his death. A handful of journalists were present at his hanging. Before hanging, Eichmann exclaimed: "Long live Germany! Long live Argentina! Long live Austria! I will never forget you!". His body was cremated and his ashes scattered in the sea outside of Israeli territorial waters.

Consequences and impact

Israeli and international media covered the trial extensively, especially the first stages and the final verdict. Globally, the trial was noted as an event that was meant to achieve historical justice, where the victim judges their executioner. However, there were people who argued that, at least from a legal standpoint, the State of Israel had no right to try Eichmann, and that he should have been tried before a neutral or international court.

Attendance at the trial was subject to a ticketing system due to the trial's popularity. People waited at the courthouse steps for an entrance ticket for hours. The tickets for the first week of trial sold out even before the court opened. A closed-circuit camera was placed in the court which broadcast the hearings to a nearby abbey, which was also full of spectators. In particular, the testimonies of the Holocaust survivors made a profound impact on the Israeli public and many turned to the radio to hear the live testimony, or else they read it in the newspaper. Until then, a large part of Holocaust survivors preferred not to discuss the horrors of their past, and as a result, there was a relative lack of information as to what exactly had happened to them. The trial brought to consciousness the survivors as individuals through their personal stories and is considered one of the first factors that brought about a change Holocaust remembrance. It became evident that heroism was not only found in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising or in active fighting against the Nazis, but additionally among many other groups who struggled to survive and be saved. The accusation, "Why did you go like sheep to the slaughter?" which had been raised in the past, began to fade, and for many, a sense of shared fate with the survivors emerged, as well as feelings of collective guilt for the insufficiently considerate treatment they received from native-born Israelis. An example of this was written by Israeli poet Nathan Alterman under the title 'Klester-Hapanim' in the Davar newspaper in 1961:

We all knew that there were people among us who came from that other world. We encountered them every day on the street, in offices, in stores, at the market, at meetings... But it seems that only during the course of this terrible trial, as more and more witnesses took the stand, did the survivors join our consciousness with a clear recognition... that they are an inseparable part of the character and image of the living nation to which we belong.

— Nathan Alterman, Davar, June 9, 1961, page 2

Criticism

Hannah Arendt

A wide academic debate, which was only slightly mentioned in Israel at the time but gained much publicity over the years, arose around the harsh criticism of the German-American Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem. Her argument was directed against the conduct of the trial, which she claimed was intended to amplify Israeli militarism and demonstrate the power of the present Jewish state in contrast to the evil force and indifferent world that Holocaust victims had experienced in the past. Arendt coined the term "the banality of evil." In her view, the organizers of the trial did not sufficiently consider the responsibility of the German bureaucracy for the Holocaust and the banality that totalitarian regimes can impose on the value of human life. She believed Eichmann was portrayed in the trial as a monster, although he was an average man who became a murderer due to his inability to distinguish between right and wrong, within the system he was part of.

Jewish thinkers like Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem argued against Arendt, asserting that the trial justified the testimonies being heard and that those who carried out the Holocaust were people like Eichmann and his collaborators. According to them, the claim of overall societal responsibility ignores individual accountability, and focusing on their actions is essential even if their environment condoned them. In a book published in 2014, researcher Bettina Stangneth challenged the facts underlying Arendt's approach, arguing that Eichmann "was a pathological anti-Semite and a fanatical Nazi, who viewed his central role in the persecution and murder of millions of Jews as the fulfillment of his life's ambition."

During the trial, the controversy was mentioned slightly in the Israeli press but much less compared to the Jewish-American press. Haaretz published two excerpts from Arendt's book, and condemnations were also published by Scholem, Hausner and American judge Michael Musmanno, as well as a critical article against Arendt in Yad Vashem's publication.

Yeshayahu Leibowitz

Many years after the trial, Israeli polymath Yeshayahu Leibowitz said:

The entire Eichmann trial was a total failure. Eichmann was indeed just a small and insignificant cog in the larger system. I think it was conspiracy between [West German Chancellor Konrad] Adenauer and [Prime Minister] Ben-Gurion to absolve the German people. In return, they paid us billions... (Eichmann) is the product of two thousand years of Christian history, the whole meaning of which is the destruction of Judaism... He essentially carried out humanity's will toward the Jewish people!

— Yeshayahu Leibowitz

See also

• Corpse-like obedience
• In 2024, David Serero adapted the Trial of Eichmann as a theater play at the Center for Jewish History, New York, also playing the part of Gideon Hausner.

References

Bibliography

• Bazyler, Michael; Scheppach, Julia (2012). "The Strange and Curious History of the Law Used to Prosecute Adolf Eichmann". Loyola of Los Angeles International and Comparative Law Review. 34 (3): 417–461. ISSN 0277-5417.
• Cesarani, David (2005). Eichmann: His Life and Crimes. London, England: Vintage. ISBN 978-0-09-944844-0. OCLC 224240952.
• Green, L.C. (1962). "Legal issues of the Eichmann trial". Tulane Law Review. 37: 641–683. Retrieved 25 November 2013.
• Porat, Dan (2019). Bitter Reckoning: Israel Tries Holocaust Survivors as Nazi Collaborators. Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-24313-2.

Further reading

• Arendt, Hannah (2006). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Penguin Books. ISBN 978-0-14-303988-4.
• Lipstadt, Deborah E. (2011). The Eichmann Trial. New York: Schocken Books. ISBN 978-0-8052-4260-7.
• Segev, Tom (1993). The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust. New York: Hill and Wang. ISBN 978-0-8090-8563-7.
• Wittmann, Rebecca, ed. (2021). Eichmann Trial Reconsidered. University of Toronto Press. ISBN 978-1-4875-0849-4.
• Yablonka, Hanna (2004). The State of Israel vs. Adolf Eichmann. New York: Schocken Books. ISBN 978-0-8052-4187-7.

External links

• The Trial of Adolf Eichmann: Record of Proceedings
• The Eichmann Trial, Session no. 46 on YouTube
• "With Me Are Six Million Accusers" an online site marking the 50th anniversary of the Eichmann Trial
• "The Eichmann Trial: 50 Years After": selected documents from the Israel State Archives
• "Eichmann Prosecutor Interview: A Conversation with Justice Gabriel Bach, Senior Prosecutor in the Adolf Eichmann Trial" by Frank Tuerkheimer, Professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School
• "Adolf Eichmann in Israel: Portraits of a Nazi War Criminal", life.time.com
• The Devil's Confession: The Lost Eichmann Tapes—Official Web site of a documentary film (in English and Hebrew)