On the evening of 23 May 1960 David Ben-Gurion stood at the rostrum of the Knesset in Jerusalem and announced to the assembled members of the Israeli parliament, and through the press to the world, that Adolf Eichmann had been seized in Argentina and brought to Israel for trial. The announcement was the unveiling of an Israeli intelligence operation that had been in preparation for thirteen years and that had been operationally executed over the previous fortnight by a Mossad team led by Rafi Eitan. The political consequences of the announcement, on the Israeli domestic scene, were substantial and unexpected. The Israeli public, which had absorbed the killing of European Jewry as a series of private family losses since 1945 but had not faced it as a public history, found itself, over the next two years, watching the killing of European Jewry being made into public history through the operational mechanism of a criminal trial. The trial that opened on 11 April 1961 at the Beit Ha’am Cultural Centre in central Jerusalem produced, by 31 May 1962 when Eichmann was hanged at Ramla Prison, the most consequential single transformation of public Holocaust consciousness in any country at any time in the postwar period. The transformation was substantial in Israel. It was also substantial, in different ways, in the United States, in Western Europe, and in much of the wider world. The Eichmann trial was not, in the technical sense, the first postwar international war crimes proceeding. It was, by reasonable measure, the proceeding that produced the largest single shift in the public understanding of what the killing had been.
This page addresses the wider effects of the trial on Holocaust consciousness, complementing the page on the trial itself (The Eichmann Trial 1961, in the parent Trials section). The trial’s substantive proceedings, the operational structure of the prosecution, the conviction and the execution, are addressed there. The wider cultural and political consequences are addressed here.
Israeli consciousness before the trial
Israeli public consciousness of the killing of European Jewry, in the period 1945 to 1960, had been substantial in private but constrained in public. The Israeli population of approximately two million in 1960 included approximately 350,000 Holocaust survivors, who had arrived in waves principally between 1945 and 1948. The survivors had brought with them, into Israeli society, the direct experience of the killing. The experience had not, however, been adequately processed in Israeli public discourse. The dominant Israeli political culture of the 1950s, shaped by the Labour Zionist movement under Ben-Gurion and by the broader Zionist tradition that had founded the state, had emphasised the heroic resistance to Nazi rule (the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the Vilna partisans, the Auschwitz Sonderkommando revolt) more than the wider experience of the killing. The Israeli school curricula of the 1950s had given the heroic resistance substantial coverage; they had given the wider killing relatively little.
The political reasons for the asymmetry have been documented in detail by the Israeli historian Tom Segev in his 1993 book The Seventh Million. The principal reasons were three. The first was the Zionist movement’s foundational emphasis on Jewish action and Jewish self-determination, which had been operationally difficult to reconcile with the historical record of the killing. The second was the political need to integrate the surviving Holocaust population into the new state’s working political coalition, which had been operationally easier if the survivors’ experience was framed in heroic terms rather than in victim terms. The third was the wider political need to construct a unified Israeli national identity that could accommodate populations from substantially different backgrounds (the Israeli-born Sabra population, the European-survivor population, the Middle Eastern Jewish populations), which had been operationally easier through the heroic frame than through the victim frame.
The pre-Eichmann Israeli treatment of the killing had therefore been substantial in private (in family narratives, in survivor support networks, in the small but established Holocaust commemorative practices at kibbutz Lohamei HaGetaot and at Yad Vashem) but limited in public. The Eichmann trial broke the limitation. After the trial, the killing became a central element of Israeli public discourse, of Israeli school curricula, of Israeli political identity, and of Israeli national commemorative practice. The shift was substantial.
The trial and the survivors
The trial’s most consequential single procedural innovation was its use of survivor testimony as the centrepiece of the prosecution’s case. The Nuremberg proceedings of 1945 to 1949 had been built principally around documents; the prosecutors at Nuremberg had used survivor testimony sparingly. The Eichmann prosecution, under Attorney General Gideon Hausner, made the opposite choice. The prosecution called 110 witnesses over the thirty-three days of the witness phase. The witnesses were drawn from the full geographic range of the killing operations: from Birkenau, from Treblinka, from the Warsaw Ghetto, from the Vilna ghetto, from the Hungarian deportations of 1944, from the Lithuanian killing pits, from the hiding places in Polish villages.
The witnesses had not, in most cases, given formal testimony before. Some had been waiting fifteen years to give the testimony they gave at Beit Ha’am. The testimony was broadcast live on Israeli radio. It was reported in the Israeli press at length. It was reported in the international press. The cumulative effect, on Israeli public consciousness, was the construction in real time of the public narrative of the killing that had been substantially absent from Israeli public discourse for the previous fifteen years.
The most consequential single witness was the writer Yehiel De-Nur, who had been a prisoner at Auschwitz and who published under the pseudonym Ka-Tsetnik 135633. De-Nur testified on 7 June 1961. His testimony lasted only a few minutes. He attempted to describe the world he had lived in at Auschwitz. 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. The witness who had attempted to describe Auschwitz had been unable to complete the testimony. The image entered Israeli public memory as an iconographic moment of the trial. The image also produced, in Israeli public discourse, a sustained engagement with the question of why the testimony had been unable to be completed, and what that inability said about the experience the witness had been attempting to describe.
Other witnesses produced testimony that was substantively more complete. Rivka Yoselewska, the Polish Jewish woman who had survived a mass shooting at Pinsk by being buried alive under the bodies of her family and digging her way out, gave a sustained testimony that has been reproduced in dozens of subsequent textbooks. Abba Kovner, the former Vilna partisan and one of the founding figures of the Bricha movement, gave a testimony that placed the killing in its wider European context. The cumulative effect of the 110 witnesses was the public construction, over thirty-three court days, of the substantive narrative of the killing of European Jewry.
The international press coverage
The trial was the most extensively covered international news event of 1961. The Beit Ha’am had been fitted out specifically for the international press: the cultural centre had been converted into a courtroom with seating for 1,500 spectators, simultaneous interpretation in five languages, dedicated press galleries, and broadcasting facilities. Approximately 750 international journalists were accredited to cover the trial. The major Western newspapers, news magazines, and television networks all sent senior correspondents. The trial was broadcast in nightly television summaries in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, West Germany, Italy, and elsewhere.
The cumulative effect of the international coverage was substantial. Public knowledge of the killing of European Jewry had been substantial but somewhat narrowly distributed in the Western public discourse of the 1950s. The historiographical literature had been substantial: Léon Poliakov’s Bréviaire de la haine (1951), Gerald Reitlinger’s The Final Solution (1953), and Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews (1961, published immediately after the trial began) had established the substantial documentary record. The popular literature had been more limited: Anne Frank’s diary had been substantially read, Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man had been published in 1947 in Italian and 1959 in English to limited reception, John Hersey’s The Wall (1950) had reached substantial American readership. The popular historical and cinematic treatments had been generally limited. The Eichmann trial coverage produced a substantial shift. The killing of European Jewry, after the trial, became part of the working public knowledge of the Western middle-class reading public in a way it had not been before.
Hannah Arendt
The most influential single intellectual response to the trial was the New Yorker correspondent Hannah Arendt’s articles, published in five instalments in February and March 1963 and collected into the book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, published in May 1963. Arendt had attended the early sessions of the trial but had returned to New York during the witness phase and had completed her articles substantially from the trial transcripts and from secondary sources. The articles produced a sustained intellectual controversy that has continued, in modified forms, for the subsequent six decades.
The principal substantive thesis of Arendt’s account was the proposition that Eichmann was not a demonic figure but a careerist whose moral imagination had collapsed under the weight of his bureaucratic competence. The phrase she coined for the proposition, “the banality of evil”, entered general circulation immediately and has remained in use ever since. The thesis was, on the documented record now available, substantively contested: 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 articles also produced sustained controversy in Jewish communities, principally on the basis of Arendt’s criticisms of the conduct of the wartime Jewish Councils. Arendt argued that the Jewish Council leadership in occupied Europe had, in its operational cooperation with the German deportation authorities, made the killing more efficient than it would otherwise have been. The argument produced sustained public quarrel with the philosopher Gershom Scholem, with the Jewish Theological Seminary professor Mordecai Kaplan, and with various members of the Jewish historical profession. The quarrel was substantial enough that Arendt’s relationships with several of her principal Jewish-intellectual contemporaries did not recover during her lifetime.
The cultural response
The trial produced, in the years after it, a sustained cultural and historiographical engagement with the killing of European Jewry. The principal works that emerged from the trial-shaped cultural moment included:
Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews (published October 1961, six months after the trial opened) was the foundational scholarly history of the killing. The book had been completed before the trial and was published independently of it, but its commercial reception was substantially shaped by the trial’s wider effects. The book sold modestly on its first publication, was substantially re-issued in 1985 in a revised edition, and has remained the principal scholarly work on the subject.
Lucy S. Dawidowicz’s The War Against the Jews 1933 to 1945 (1975) was the principal popular American historical treatment. The book emerged from the historiographical context that the trial had created and was substantially shaped by the public interest in the killing that the trial had produced.
The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial of December 1963 to August 1965, prosecuted by Fritz Bauer in West Germany, was the largest single postwar West German prosecution. It had been substantially enabled by the public attention that the Eichmann trial had produced and by the operational pressure that the Eichmann trial had generated for further prosecutions. The Frankfurt trial produced 17 convictions of senior Auschwitz figures and was the foundation of the substantial subsequent West German engagement with the killing.
The various film treatments produced in the period 1965 to 1985 included Stanley Kramer’s Judgment at Nuremberg (1961, released during the Eichmann trial period and substantially shaped by it), Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker (1964, the first major Hollywood film with a Holocaust survivor protagonist), Marvin J. Chomsky’s Holocaust (1978, the four-part American television miniseries that produced the introduction of the term “Holocaust” into general American usage), and Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985, the nine-and-a-half-hour French documentary that has become the foundational cinematic work on the killing).
The various memorial and educational institutions that emerged in the post-Eichmann period included Yad Vashem (which had been founded in 1953 but became operationally substantial only in the post-Eichmann period), the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (chartered in 1980, opened in 1993), the Imperial War Museum’s Holocaust Exhibition in London (opened 2000), the various Holocaust education programmes adopted by Western European and North American school systems, and the Holocaust commemorative practices that have been adopted by most Western liberal democracies as elements of their public culture.
The German response
The trial’s effects on West German public consciousness were substantial. The West German public of the 1950s had not engaged systematically with the killing of European Jewry; the postwar West German political culture had been shaped by the policy of integration of former Nazis into the new democratic system, which had operationally required some level of public silence on the conduct of the wartime regime. The Eichmann trial broke the silence. The West German press coverage was substantial. The West German political class found itself, after the trial, in a position in which sustained public engagement with the killing had become unavoidable.
The principal subsequent West German developments included: the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial of 1963 to 1965; the establishment of the Central Office for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes at Ludwigsburg, which had been founded in 1958 but became operationally substantial in the post-Eichmann period; the various Düsseldorf, Hamburg, and Stuttgart prosecutions of the late 1960s and 1970s; the public debate over the West German statute of limitations for war crimes, which produced the 1979 abolition of any statute of limitations for genocide and crimes against humanity; the German engagement with the question of restitution and compensation, which produced substantial bilateral arrangements with Israel and with the surviving Jewish communities of Western Europe; and the wider integration of the killing into West German public discourse, which has continued in modified forms in unified Germany since 1990.
The wider international consequences
The trial’s effects on the wider international consciousness of the killing were substantial. The principal international consequences included:
The transformation of the term “Holocaust” from a relatively obscure term in academic discourse into the standard English-language designation for the killing of European Jewry. The term had been in occasional use before 1961 but had not been the standard designation; the standard term in the immediate postwar period had been “the Final Solution” (the German regime’s own term) or various phrases such as “the Nazi atrocities” or “the European Jewish catastrophe”. The Eichmann trial period and the cultural products that emerged from it (particularly the 1978 Holocaust miniseries) produced the standardisation of “Holocaust” as the principal English-language term.
The development of Holocaust education as a substantial element of school curricula in Western liberal democracies. The pre-1961 school treatment of the killing had been generally minimal in most Western states. The post-Eichmann period produced the progressive integration of the killing into school curricula in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, West Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, the Scandinavian states, Canada, Australia, and elsewhere. The current substantial school treatment of the killing in these states is a development of the post-Eichmann period.
The development of Holocaust commemoration as a substantial element of public culture. The pre-1961 commemoration of the killing had been substantial in private and in Jewish-community contexts but had not been a feature of mainstream public culture in most Western states. The post-Eichmann period produced the progressive establishment of national Holocaust memorial days, public commemorative observances, and dedicated memorial institutions. The current substantial public commemorative practice in these states is a development of the post-Eichmann period.
The development of the international human rights movement as a substantial political force in the postwar period. The pre-1961 human rights movement had been substantial but had not had the operational political weight that it acquired in the post-Eichmann decades. The Eichmann trial coverage produced, on the documented record of subsequent political mobilisation, a substantial expansion of the public constituency for the international human rights movement. The various international human rights non-governmental organisations that emerged or expanded in the 1960s and 1970s (Amnesty International, the International Commission of Jurists, Human Rights Watch, and others) have all been substantially shaped by the post-Eichmann political environment.
What the trial produced
The Eichmann trial produced, in operational terms, the most consequential single transformation of public Holocaust consciousness in the postwar period. The transformation was substantial in Israel, in West Germany, in the United States, in Western Europe, and in the wider Western world. The transformation was, in its operational character, the conversion of the killing of European Jewry from a relatively narrowly distributed body of private knowledge into a substantial element of mainstream Western public culture.
The wider lesson of the trial is the lesson of the role of legal proceedings in the construction of public memory. The trial had not been intended as a memorial proceeding. It had been a criminal proceeding, conducted under the Israeli Nazis and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law of 1950, with the specific objective of obtaining a conviction of the named defendant on the named charges. The trial produced the conviction. It also produced, by the operational mechanics of the proceeding (the use of survivor testimony, the international press coverage, the cultural products that emerged in its wake), a substantial transformation of the public memory of the events the trial had been about. The transformation was not, in the strict sense, the trial’s intended product. The transformation was, however, substantial in its consequences and durable in its effects.
The transformation has now substantially settled into a stable element of mainstream Western public culture. The killing of European Jewry is now a substantial element of Western school curricula, of Western public commemorative practice, of Western cultural production, and of Western political discourse. The trial that produced the transformation has become, in its own right, a foundational moment in the history of postwar public memory. The 110 witnesses who testified at Beit Ha’am in 1961 and 1962 were the principal architects of the public memory that has resulted. The trial gave them the platform they had not previously had. They used the platform. The public memory was the consequence.
See also
- Adolf Eichmann
- The Eichmann Trial 1961
- Raul Hilberg
- Hannah Arendt
- Yad Vashem Jerusalem
- Deborah Lipstadt
Sources
- Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust, Hill and Wang, 1993
- 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
- Annette Wieviorka, The Era of the Witness, Cornell University Press, 2006
- Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, Houghton Mifflin, 1999
- 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