Adolf Eichmann arrived in Israel on the El Al charter aircraft Britannia from Buenos Aires on the evening of 22 May 1960, hooded, drugged, dressed in an El Al crew uniform, and accompanied by his Mossad escort team. The aircraft landed at Lod Airport (now Ben Gurion International) outside Tel Aviv. He was driven directly to a small farm at Yagur, in the Jezreel Valley, that the Israeli intelligence services had taken over as a temporary holding facility. The following morning, after Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion’s announcement to the Knesset on 23 May, Eichmann was transferred to a more permanent custody at the Iyyar Camp, a former British military police facility outside Haifa. He was held there for the next twelve months under the closest security regime ever applied to a single individual in Israeli history. The team that took custody of him from the Mossad was a unit of the Israeli National Police. The unit had been formed specifically for the case. Its formal designation was Bureau 06 (Heb. Lishka 06). Its task was to prepare, document, organise, and present the prosecution case against Eichmann at the trial that was scheduled to open the following spring.
The Mossad had carried out the operation that brought Eichmann to Israel. Bureau 06 was the unit that turned the prisoner into a defendant. The work it conducted between June 1960 and April 1961 produced approximately 1,600 documentary exhibits, 110 witness statements, and the most thorough single body of evidence on the operations of the Reich Security Main Office’s Department IV B 4 ever assembled. The bureau worked under the direction of an Israeli police officer named Avner Less, a German-born Jew who had emigrated to Palestine in 1938 and had served in the British army during the war. Less was forty-four years old. He had no previous experience of war crimes interrogation. He had taught himself the relevant German bureaucratic vocabulary, the structure of the SS personnel system, and the workings of the deportation administration over the period of his preparation. He spoke fluent German with Eichmann throughout the interrogations. The transcripts he produced, running to approximately 3,500 pages, are the primary documentary source on Eichmann’s understanding of his own role in the killing of European Jewry.
Why a special unit
The Israeli police had no ordinary unit equipped to handle the Eichmann case. The case required, simultaneously, the management of a high-security custody, the conduct of extensive forensic interrogation in German, the assembly of documentary evidence from archives across multiple countries, the location and interview of survivor witnesses, and the legal preparation of an indictment under the Nazis and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law of 1950. The work was far beyond the capacity of any standard police bureau. Bureau 06 was therefore established as a special unit, drawing personnel from the regular police, the Israeli intelligence services, and from outside experts including German-language specialists, professional historians, and Holocaust survivors who had relevant knowledge of the operations the case would address.
The bureau’s offices were located in a converted school building in the Jerusalem neighbourhood of Schneller, on the same site where the British army had held its postwar headquarters in the city. The unit had a permanent staff of approximately thirty officers and a rotating staff of researchers and translators that brought the working complement to approximately seventy. The bureau operated for fifteen months, from May 1960 through the trial proceedings of 1961. It was wound down in mid-1961 after the trial moved into the verdict and sentencing phase.
The interrogations
Less began the formal interrogations of Eichmann on 29 May 1960, six days after the arrival in Israel. The interrogations continued, with breaks, until December 1960, totalling approximately 275 hours of recorded conversation across approximately 75 sessions. Less had Eichmann seated across a small table in a soundproofed room at the Iyyar Camp. Eichmann was permitted to smoke. He was permitted to take notes. He had access to standard reference works on the Reich Security Main Office structure and on the deportation operations he was being asked about. The interrogations were conducted in German. They were recorded on magnetic tape and were also transcribed in real time by a stenographer in an adjoining room.
The transcripts were produced as a working document for the prosecution. They were not made public until after the trial. The full set was eventually published in 1982, twenty years after Eichmann’s execution, under the title Eichmann Interrogated: Transcripts from the Archives of the Israeli Police, edited by Jochen von Lang, with an introduction by Avner Less. The transcripts are the most thorough single record of an SS officer’s account of his own work that exists. They run to approximately 3,500 pages and cover Eichmann’s career from his recruitment by the SS in 1934 through to the closing weeks of the war.
The methodological approach Less developed has been studied by subsequent professional interrogators. He never raised his voice. He did not threaten or pressure the prisoner. He came to each session with extensive preparation: typically a single document or a small set of related documents that he wished to discuss with Eichmann, with the relevant sections marked. He would hand the document to Eichmann, ask him to read it, and then ask him to comment on what he saw. The technique produced, over the months of conversation, a substantial body of evidence in Eichmann’s own voice. The technique also produced what has been called the Less effect: Eichmann, encouraged by Less’s professional manner and by the absence of any apparent threat, tended to talk too much. He provided detail that the prosecution had not asked for. He explained organisational structures the prosecution had not pieced together. He filled in gaps in the documentary record that Less had identified in his preparation.
The interrogations produced the substance of Eichmann’s defence. Eichmann had decided early to pursue the superior orders defence and to present himself as a small bureaucratic functionary whose work had been the management of train timetables. The defence, sustained at length in the interrogations, was the same defence he would maintain at the trial. It was not a successful defence. The interrogation transcripts, taken together with the documentary evidence the bureau had assembled, made it impossible to maintain that Eichmann had been a small functionary. He had been the senior administrator of an extensive organisation. The documents demonstrated his operational responsibility at multiple levels of detail.
The documentary work
The bureau’s documentary section, run under the direction of the Israeli police officer Mikhael Goldman-Gilad (himself an Auschwitz survivor), assembled approximately 1,600 documentary exhibits over the eleven months between Eichmann’s arrival and the opening of the trial. The exhibits were drawn from American, British, French, West German, Israeli, Dutch, Belgian, Czech, Polish, Hungarian, Yugoslav, and Greek archival sources. The material included Eichmann’s own correspondence, the deportation orders he had signed, the telex traffic between his office and the relevant SS commands across occupied Europe, the railway billing records, the inter-departmental memoranda, the records of the Wannsee Conference, and the postwar interrogation transcripts of his subordinates. The documentary section had to obtain, translate, authenticate, and prepare the exhibits for use at the trial. The work was carried out under sustained time pressure.
The most consequential single body of documents was the Wannsee Protocol and the supporting telex traffic between Eichmann’s office and the deportation regions. These materials had been recovered from the Foreign Office archives by Robert Kempner of the Subsequent Nuremberg Proceedings prosecution team in 1947 and had been on file at the United States National Archives since 1949. The bureau obtained certified copies through the United States State Department. The documents had not previously been used in any single trial; the prosecution at the Eichmann case introduced them as the central documentary base for the conspiracy and the operational counts.
The witness work
The bureau’s witness section, run under the direction of the Israeli police officer Yaakov Bar-Or, located and interviewed approximately 850 potential witnesses over the eleven-month preparation period. The interviews were conducted across Israel, the United States, Western Europe, and Eastern Europe. The bureau settled on 110 witnesses for the trial itself, drawn from the larger pool. The selection was made on the basis of geographic coverage of the killing operations, the witnesses’ ability to give testimony in court without breaking down, and the relevance of their testimony to the specific charges in the indictment.
The bureau prepared each witness for testimony through a series of preparatory interviews. The work was substantial. Many of the witnesses had never given formal testimony before. They had to be helped to prepare a clear narrative of what they had seen, to anticipate hostile cross-examination, and to manage the emotional difficulty of the work. Several witnesses required extensive preparation; some required medical and psychological support during the trial itself. The bureau employed two psychologists on permanent staff for the duration.
The case files
The bureau’s working product, by the time the trial opened on 11 April 1961, was a set of case files covering each of the fifteen counts in the indictment. The files were the working document on which Attorney General Gideon Hausner and his deputies built the trial presentation. They contained, for each count, the documentary exhibits relevant to the count, the witness statements relevant to the count, the cross-references to the interrogation transcripts, the legal authorities on which the prosecution would rely, and the anticipated defence arguments and the prosecution’s prepared response to each. The files have been preserved in the Israeli State Archives in Jerusalem and have been made progressively accessible to researchers from the 1990s onwards.
What Bureau 06 produced
The bureau’s work produced two things that have outlasted the trial itself. The first was the documentary record on which the trial was built. The materials assembled over the eleven months of preparation are, by some measures, the most thorough single archive on the deportation operations of the Final Solution that exists. They have been used by every professional historian working on the Holocaust since the trial. The Hilberg, Bauer, Friedländer, and Browning historiographies all draw on the bureau’s materials.
The second was the demonstration that a national police force could mount, with sufficient preparation and adequate resources, the prosecution of a major war crimes case under conditions that produced a verdict broadly accepted by the international legal community. The Eichmann trial was conducted under sustained criticism from various quarters, including procedural objections from Hannah Arendt and others. The Bureau 06 documentary work was not, however, the target of the criticism. The bureau’s evidentiary work was on the documented record. It produced the conviction. It also produced, in the form of the interrogation transcripts, one of the most extensive perpetrator self-accounts in the Holocaust archive.
Avner Less retired from the Israeli police shortly after the trial concluded and emigrated to West Germany in 1969, where he lived for the remainder of his life. He died in Friedrichshafen in 1987 at the age of seventy-one. His professional papers, including his original handwritten notes from the interrogations, are at Yad Vashem. The bureau’s archive is at the Israeli State Archives. Bureau 06 itself was wound down in mid-1961. Most of its personnel returned to ordinary police work. Some went on to senior positions in Israeli law enforcement. The unit had no successor and no continuing existence. Its product is its legacy.
See also
- Adolf Eichmann
- The Wannsee Conference and the Final Solution
- The Eichmann Trial 1961
- Yad Vashem Jerusalem
- Deborah Lipstadt
- Hannah Arendt
Sources
- Jochen von Lang, ed, Eichmann Interrogated: Transcripts from the Archives of the Israeli Police, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983
- Avner W. Less and Robert Servatius, files of the Eichmann interrogation, Yad Vashem and Israeli State Archives
- 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
- Isser Harel, The House on Garibaldi Street, Viking, 1975
- Neal Bascomb, Hunting Eichmann: How a Band of Survivors and a Young Spy Agency Chased Down the World’s Most Notorious Nazi, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009
- Bettina Stangneth, Eichmann Before Jerusalem, Knopf, 2014
- Deborah Lipstadt, The Eichmann Trial, Schocken, 2011
- Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust, Hill and Wang, 1993