Gideon Hausner

On the morning of 11 April 1961 a forty-six-year-old Israeli lawyer named Gideon Hausner stood up in the Beit Ha’am cultural centre in Jerusalem, faced a bulletproof glass booth in which Adolf Eichmann sat impassive, and opened the prosecution case for the State of Israel. The opening was the most famous opening in the history of any postwar trial. It has been reprinted in dozens of anthologies, quoted in every subsequent international war crimes proceeding involving genocide, and committed to memory by generations of Israeli law students. Hausner spoke for fifty minutes. He held the courtroom completely still. He set the moral terms on which the trial would be conducted, and the historical terms on which the killing of European Jewry would, for the first time in any courtroom, be presented from the side of the murdered.

Hausner had been appointed Attorney General of the State of Israel in October 1960, four months after the Mossad had seized Eichmann in Argentina and brought him to Jerusalem. The decision to lead the prosecution himself, rather than to delegate to a senior deputy, was Hausner’s own. He had no prior experience of war crimes prosecution. He had built his reputation at the Israeli Bar on commercial and constitutional cases. The Eichmann brief came to him as the first major political assignment of his appointment. He took it because the case mattered to him personally. His own family had come from Lwów, in what had been Galicia. Branches of it had been killed in the Holocaust.

The opening

The opening Hausner delivered on 11 April 1961 began with the lines that have been the most quoted of any postwar courtroom opening:

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, building the historical context of European antisemitism going back two thousand years and culminating in the specific role of the defendant in the bureaucracy of murder:

It will fall to my lot to give voice to the indictment of the murdered. The judgment will be yours.

Hausner had structured the case around testimony rather than around documents. The decision was deliberate and was not without controversy. Hannah Arendt, who attended much of the trial as a correspondent for the New Yorker, criticised it sharply in her articles and her subsequent book Eichmann in Jerusalem. Arendt argued that the trial should have been confined to the specific charges against Eichmann under the Nazis and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law of 1950 and that Hausner had instead used the trial as a platform for a wider history of the Holocaust that exceeded the charges. Hausner, in his own subsequent memoir Justice in Jerusalem (1966), defended the choice. He argued that the trial was the first opportunity in fifteen years for survivors to give their testimony in a court of law in front of one of the men who had organised the killing, that this was a moral obligation that took precedence over the narrower rules of evidence Arendt would have preferred, and that the surrounding historical context was necessary for the bench to understand the specific charges. The argument has been litigated by historians for sixty years. It is unresolved. Hausner’s choice produced what is now the founding archive of survivor testimony as part of public Holocaust memory.

The witnesses

The prosecution called 110 witnesses over thirty-three days. They were survivors of every part of the killing operation. They had come from Birkenau, from Treblinka, from the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, from the death marches, from the Hungarian deportations, from the killing pits in Lithuania, from hiding in Polish villages, from the Theresienstadt ghetto, from the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz. Some of them had given statements to investigators in 1945 and had not spoken about what they had seen since. They spoke now. The court adjourned several times for witnesses who broke down on the stand. The most famous of them, the writer Yehiel De-Nur, who published under the name Ka-Tsetnik 135633, fainted on the stand on 7 June 1961 after being asked whether the world he had described in his novels was the world he had lived through. He was carried from the courtroom on a stretcher. The fainting was broadcast on Israeli radio. It became one of the public images of the trial.

Hausner cross-examined Eichmann himself in a series of sessions over the second half of the trial. The cross-examination was less dramatic than the opening or the witness testimony. Eichmann, in the booth, presented himself as a small functionary who had carried out orders, a competent transport official whose personal feelings about Jews were not the issue. Hausner attempted, repeatedly, to get him to take responsibility for the killing as such; Eichmann repeatedly retreated to the structure of orders and superiors. Hausner read out the Wannsee Protocol, of which Eichmann had been the recording secretary, and asked him whether he had understood at the time what was being decided. Eichmann replied:

I understood, but I had no doubts about the legality of the orders. I had taken an oath of obedience.

Hausner asked him whether the killing of children had at any point caused him moral concern. Eichmann replied that the orders had not been his to question. Hausner read out a recorded interview Eichmann had given in Argentina to the Dutch journalist Willem Sassen in 1957, in which Eichmann had said that he would jump laughing into his grave because the feeling that he had five million Jews on his conscience was for him a source of extraordinary satisfaction. Eichmann acknowledged the recording. He attempted to claim that the words had been an exaggeration produced by the demands of the conversation. The court did not believe him. It did not have to.

The verdict

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. It found Eichmann guilty on all fifteen counts, including crimes against the Jewish people, crimes against humanity, war crimes and membership in a hostile organisation. The court 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. Hausner was present at the execution.

Afterwards

Hausner served as Attorney General until 1963. He entered Israeli politics, served as a Knesset member for the Independent Liberal Party from 1965 to 1981, and held the cabinet portfolio of Minister Without Portfolio from 1974 to 1977 in the Yitzhak Rabin government. He chaired the Yad Vashem Council from 1969 until his death in 1990. His memoir Justice in Jerusalem (1966) is the principal account of the trial from the prosecution side and is still in print.

The opening he delivered on 11 April 1961 has been argued about, criticised, defended and reprinted for sixty-five years. Its rhetorical move, the prosecutor speaking on behalf of the murdered as though they were physically present in the courtroom, has been imitated in subsequent international war crimes proceedings, including by the prosecution at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Whether it should have been delivered, given Arendt’s procedural objections, is a question with reasonable arguments on both sides. That it was delivered, in that courtroom, with Eichmann sitting in the bulletproof booth listening through earphones, was the moment when the survivors of the killing of European Jewry stood, for the first time, as the prosecuting party in a court of law. They have not stepped back from that position since.

See also

Sources

  • Gideon Hausner, Justice in Jerusalem, Harper and Row, 1966
  • 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
  • Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Viking, 1963
  • 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
  • Bettina Stangneth, Eichmann Before Jerusalem, Knopf, 2014