The Eichmann Trial 1961

On the morning of 11 April 1961 a 1,500-seat cultural centre in central Jerusalem called the Beit Ha’am, hastily fitted out as a courtroom, opened its doors to the international press for the start of the trial of Adolf Eichmann. The defendant sat in a bulletproof glass booth on the small stage. He wore a dark suit and a tie. He listened through earphones to the proceedings, which ran in Hebrew, German, English, French and Yiddish through simultaneous interpretation. He was fifty-five years old. He had been seized in Argentina by Israeli intelligence agents on the evening of 11 May 1960 and brought secretly to Israel ten days later. He had been the head of the Reich Security Main Office’s Department IV B 4 from 1939 to 1945, the office responsible for the deportation of the Jews of Europe to the killing centres in occupied Poland. The case was the first major war crimes proceeding to be conducted in the country whose people had been the principal victims of the killing. It was the first to be heavily televised. It was the first in which survivors gave sustained testimony as the centrepiece of the prosecution’s case. It became, almost from its opening day, one of the founding events of postwar Holocaust memory.

The capture

The intelligence operation that brought Eichmann to Jerusalem had been running for thirteen years. Simon Wiesenthal in Vienna had begun the work in 1947 and had established by the early 1950s that Eichmann was alive in Argentina under the name Ricardo Klement. The German prosecutor Fritz Bauer in Frankfurt had received a tip in 1957 from a partly blind German émigré in Buenos Aires named Lothar Hermann, whose daughter had been dating a young man called Nicolas Eichmann who had openly mentioned that his father had been an SS officer. Bauer, distrusting the West German intelligence services, passed the tip to the Israeli ambassador. The Mossad, after additional verification, sent an operational team led by Rafi Eitan and Peter Malkin in early May 1960. They watched Eichmann for two weeks, seized him on the road outside his house in San Fernando on the evening of 11 May, hid him for nine days in a safe house, and flew him out of Argentina on an El Al charter aircraft as a sedated airline crew member.

The seizure violated Argentine sovereignty. Argentina complained to the United Nations Security Council, which on 23 June 1960 passed Resolution 138 noting the violation and asking that Israel make appropriate reparation. Israel apologised. Argentina, after a sustained period of diplomatic protest, accepted the apology. The trial proceeded.

The charges

The indictment, filed by the Attorney General Gideon Hausner on 21 February 1961, contained fifteen counts. Counts One to Four charged crimes against the Jewish people under the Nazis and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law of 1950, an Israeli statute that gave Israeli courts jurisdiction over crimes against the Jewish people committed during the war regardless of where they had occurred. Counts Five to Seven charged crimes against humanity. Counts Eight to Nine charged war crimes. Counts Ten to Twelve charged crimes against other peoples (Poles, Slovenes, Roma). Counts Thirteen to Fifteen charged membership in hostile organisations.

The substance of the charges was the deportation of approximately two and a half million Jews to the killing centres of Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibór, Bełżec, Chełmno and Majdanek between 1941 and 1944, and the killings on Soviet territory by the Einsatzgruppen with which Eichmann’s office had cooperated through the Reich Security Main Office. Eichmann’s role had been organisational rather than operational. He had not personally pulled triggers. He had organised the trains.

The opening

Hausner’s opening, delivered on 11 April 1961, was the most famous opening of any postwar trial. The first paragraph contained the lines that have been reprinted in dozens of anthologies:

When I stand before you here, judges of Israel, to lead the prosecution of Adolf Eichmann, I am not standing alone. With me are six million accusers. But they cannot rise to their feet and point an accusing finger towards him who sits in the dock and cry: I accuse. For their ashes are piled up on the hills of Auschwitz and the fields of Treblinka, and are strewn in the forests of Poland. Their graves are scattered throughout the length and breadth of Europe. Their blood cries out, but their voice is not heard. Therefore I will be their spokesman, and in their name I will unfold the awesome indictment.

The opening went on for fifty minutes. It set the historical context of European antisemitism going back two thousand years, the structure of the Nazi state, and the specific role of the defendant in the bureaucracy of murder. The chief judge, Moshe Landau, allowed it without objection. The opening’s broad scope established the trial’s character. The trial was not going to be a narrow proceeding on the specific acts of the defendant. It was going to be a public history of the killing of European Jewry, with Eichmann sitting in the booth as both defendant and prosecuting exhibit.

The witnesses

The prosecution called 110 witnesses over thirty-three days. They were survivors of every part of the killing operation: Birkenau, Treblinka, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the death marches, the Hungarian deportations, the killing pits in Lithuania, the hiding places in Polish villages, the Theresienstadt ghetto, the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz. Some had given statements to investigators in 1945 and had not spoken about what they had seen since. They spoke now.

The most famous moment of the witness testimony came on 7 June 1961. The prosecution called the writer Yehiel De-Nur, who had been a prisoner at Auschwitz and who published under the pseudonym Ka-Tsetnik 135633, his prison number. De-Nur was asked by Hausner whether the world he had described in his novels was the world he had lived through. He attempted to answer. His voice broke. He fell forward onto the witness stand and slid to the floor. The court adjourned. He was carried from the courtroom on a stretcher and recovered in hospital, but did not return to give the rest of his testimony. The fainting was broadcast live on Israeli radio. It became one of the public images of the trial.

Other witnesses testified at length. Rivka Yoselewska, a Polish Jewish woman who had survived a mass shooting at Pinsk in August 1942 by being buried alive under the bodies of her family and digging her way out, described the killing pit, the column led to it, the children stripped before the firing detail, the moments before the shots, the silence afterwards, and her own crawl out of the pit. Her testimony, broadcast on Israeli radio, was reproduced in newspapers around the world. The Israeli sociologist Tom Segev has argued in The Seventh Million (1991) that the Yoselewska testimony, more than any other single piece of evidence, established for Israeli public opinion the scale of what had happened to European Jewry. Survivors had been a familiar presence in Israeli daily life since 1945; the public testimony of a single survivor in a courtroom, broadcast nationally, was something different.

Eichmann on the stand

Eichmann took the stand on 20 June 1961 and remained on it for thirty-three court days. His defence counsel was the German lawyer Robert Servatius, paid for by the Israeli government. Servatius’s defence was the orthodox superior orders defence in its purest form. Eichmann had been a small functionary. He had organised transport. He had taken an oath of obedience to the Führer. He had personally killed no one.

Hausner cross-examined him over several sessions. The exchange that has been most quoted came when Hausner read out passages from a recorded interview Eichmann had given in Argentina to the Dutch journalist Willem Sassen in 1957. The Sassen interviews had been recorded over several months as Eichmann had reminisced openly with a sympathetic former SS man for what he had assumed would be a private posthumous record. They contained, among other things, the sentence:

I will jump laughing into my grave because the feeling that I have five million human beings on my conscience will be for me a source of extraordinary satisfaction.

Hausner read out the passage and asked Eichmann whether he had said it. Eichmann acknowledged that the recording was his voice. He attempted to claim that the words had been an exaggeration produced by the demands of conversation with a journalist. Hausner asked him whether the killing of children had at any point caused him moral concern. Eichmann replied:

The orders had not been for me to question. I had taken an oath of obedience.

Hausner asked him whether he had at any point in his career raised any objection, however small, to any aspect of the killing. The transcript records a long pause. Eichmann eventually said that he had not. The cross-examination did not need to go further. The case was made on the documents and on Eichmann’s own admissions.

Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt covered the early sessions of the trial for the New Yorker. Her articles, published in five instalments in February and March 1963, were collected into the book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, published in May 1963. The book is one of the most-read and most-contested works on the Holocaust. Its central thesis was that Eichmann was not the demonic figure the prosecution had presented but a careerist whose moral imagination had collapsed under the weight of his bureaucratic competence. Arendt’s phrase the banality of evil entered general circulation immediately and has remained in use ever since. The book also criticised aspects of the conduct of the Jewish councils during the war, in pages that produced sustained controversy and a public quarrel with the philosopher Gershom Scholem.

The Arendt account has been challenged by subsequent scholarship. Bettina Stangneth’s Eichmann Before Jerusalem (2014), drawing on the Sassen tapes from Argentina that Arendt had not had access to, demonstrated that Eichmann had been actively and openly antisemitic in private throughout his postwar life and had presented the bureaucratic-functionary persona at the trial as a calculated defence strategy rather than as an accurate account of his own character. The wider doctrinal point Arendt was making, that the legal defence of obedience can be operationally accurate as a description of how a perpetrator experienced his own conduct while remaining legally and morally inadequate as a defence, has held. The trial was not a refutation of Arendt’s thesis. It was the occasion of it.

The verdict and the execution

The judgment of 11 and 12 December 1961 ran to fifty-six thousand words. It was read out over three days by the three-judge panel, Moshe Landau presiding, Benjamin Halevi and Yitzhak Raveh on either side. It found Eichmann guilty on all fifteen counts. It rejected the defences of superior orders, of jurisdictional incompetence, of the ex post facto application of the 1950 law. Eichmann was sentenced to death on 15 December 1961. The Israeli Supreme Court upheld the conviction on 29 May 1962.

Eichmann was hanged at Ramla Prison on the night of 31 May to 1 June 1962, the only judicial execution ever carried out by the State of Israel. His body was cremated and the ashes scattered at sea outside Israeli territorial waters by an Israeli police launch in the early hours of 1 June. His final words, recorded by the prison rabbi, were:

Long live Germany. Long live Argentina. Long live Austria. These are the three countries with which I have been most connected and which I will not forget. I greet my wife, my family, and my friends. I am ready. We will all meet again. So is the fate of all men. I have lived believing in God and I die believing in God.

The hanging was conducted by an Israeli prison officer who had been a Holocaust survivor. The ashes were scattered outside Israeli waters specifically so that Eichmann would have no grave on Israeli soil and so that no future site of pilgrimage could be established. Hausner, the prison commandant and the Mossad chief Isser Harel were present at the execution.

The trial’s effects

The Eichmann trial did three things that the Nuremberg proceedings had not done. The first was to establish in court the doctrine of universal jurisdiction over crimes against humanity. The court accepted jurisdiction over a man whose crimes had been committed elsewhere, against people who had not been Israeli citizens, before the State of Israel had existed. The doctrine has been applied in dozens of subsequent international war crimes proceedings, particularly by Spanish, Belgian, French, German and British courts.

The second was to put survivor testimony at the centre of public Holocaust memory. The Nuremberg prosecutions had been built around documents. The Eichmann prosecution was built around survivors. The 110 witnesses who testified at Beit Ha’am, broadcast nationally on Israeli radio and reported around the world, established a model of public Holocaust memory that has shaped every subsequent commemorative practice from Yad Vashem to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to the Shoah Foundation testimonies recorded by Steven Spielberg from 1994.

The third was to produce a popular reckoning, in Israel and elsewhere, with the facts of the killing. The Israeli public had absorbed the killing of European Jewry as a series of private family losses since 1945; it had not faced it as a public history. The trial forced the public history. It also forced, in the years that followed, a wider European reckoning. Fritz Bauer’s Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial of 1963 to 1965 followed almost directly. The popular Holocaust historiography of Hilberg, Bauer, Friedländer and Browning emerged through the 1960s and 1970s in part because the Eichmann trial had created the public for it.

The trial was not without its critics. Hannah Arendt’s procedural objections, that the trial had exceeded the strict scope of its indictment, have been litigated ever since. The decision to use survivor testimony has been criticised on the grounds that it had risked turning the proceeding into a historical pageant. The argument has reasonable points on both sides. What the trial did not have a critic on, and has not had a serious critic on since, was the conviction. Eichmann had organised the deportations. He had known what he was doing. He had been a competent bureaucrat of mass murder. The court found that he had had moral choice and had made the wrong one. The world has not, in sixty-five years, produced a serious argument against that finding.

See also

Sources

  • The State of Israel, The Trial of Adolf Eichmann: Record of Proceedings in the District Court of Jerusalem, 9 vols, Trust for the Publication of the Proceedings of the Eichmann Trial, 1992 to 1995
  • Gideon Hausner, Justice in Jerusalem, Harper and Row, 1966
  • Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Viking, 1963
  • Bettina Stangneth, Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer, Knopf, 2014
  • Deborah Lipstadt, The Eichmann Trial, Schocken, 2011
  • Lawrence Douglas, The Memory of Judgment: Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust, Yale University Press, 2001
  • Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust, Hill and Wang, 1993
  • Neal Bascomb, Hunting Eichmann, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009
  • Isser Harel, The House on Garibaldi Street, Viking, 1975