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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	11–12 December 1961 (1961-12-11 – 1961-12-12) (verdict) 15 December 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 Obersturmbannführer (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

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.

Eichmann's career as a Nazi

Eichmann was an officer in the Schutzstaffel (SS), and before and during the Second World War was head of Jewish affairs in the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA). He organized the identification and transportation of those to be sent to the concentration camps from Western Europe and the Balkans. During the Holocaust in Hungary he personally oversaw the deportation of 437,000 people to extermination camps in occupied Poland. Before the mass murder began, he headed the offices of forced Jewish emigration in Vienna, Prague and Berlin.

Escape from Germany to Argentina

Immediately after the Allied occupations of Germany and Austria, Eichmann was arrested by US soldiers. He kept his full identity hidden and was seen by them as harmless. In 1946 he escaped from Allied custody, and remained hidden in Germany until 1950. Eichmann was very careful when he hid in Germany. He did not even visit his family before he fled to Argentina.

Using a false name Eichmann traveled from Germany to Italy in the early 1950s, with the aid of Nazi sympathizer and monk Anton Weber. He got a humanitarian passport from the Red Cross in Geneva and an Argentine visa under the name "Ricardo Klement, technician." In 2007, his fake passport was discovered in court archives in Buenos Aires by a student investigating the abduction. Eichmann arrived in Buenos Aires in August 1950. On arrival he lodged at the German Juhrman boarding house in the suburb of Vicente Lopez. This boarding house was especially geared towards Nazi immigrants.

Manhunt in Europe

During World War II, Eichmann was relatively unknown outside of Germany. The Haganah, a Zionist paramilitary organization, interrogated refugees who came to Mandatory Palestine from Germany, Hungary and Poland, and by 1943 had formed a clear picture that Eichmann was a central figure in the execution of the Holocaust. Among the approximately 500 Nazis the group kept on a list of war criminals, Eichmann was high up. One of its members, Gideon Raphael, traveled to London after World War II with detailed information based on witness statements in Haifa to be used in the Nuremberg trials. Initially, the Allies knew little about Eichmann but eventually received information from survivors and emigrants. The search for Eichmann was confused by countless rumors and by the fact that an official named Ingo Eichmann also worked at the RSHA. After the war, it was speculated whether Eichmann, with his knowledge of the Hebrew language and Jewish life, had been pretending to be a surviving Jew from a camp, and had even emigrated to Palestine or Egypt.

Role of Dieter Wisliceny

Dieter Wisliceny, an SS officer and one of Eichmann's closest associates, was arrested by American forces in May 1945 near Lake Altaussee in Styria, Austria. In front of American occupational authorities, Wisliceny argued that Eichmann was alive and that he was too cowardly to take his own life, as he is said to have talked about towards the end of the Second World War. Wisliceny himself outlined a plan to track down Eichmann, among other things he himself would be at the head of a search of all POW camps to find Eichmann's associates. Next, Wisliceny wanted to track down his wife Veronika, or Vera for short, who he was sure knew where her husband had been hiding. While in prison in Bratislava, Wisliceny prepared over 20 densely-written pages detailing Eichmann, including physical details such as eye color, gold teeth and scars.

Wisliceny offered to track Eichmann down, but the authorities would not release him for that reason. Wisliceny made a list of places where he thought Eichmann could have been hiding. Agents from the Haganah interrogated Wisliceny in Bratislava about Eichmann, and received information including a list of women whom Wisliceny believed were prepared to hide Eichmann and a photograph of Eichmann with one of his former mistresses.

Roles of Haganah, Israel, and the United States

Haganah agents primarily operated under the guise of being German or Dutch Nazis who spoke good German. In this way a male agent gained access to Vera Eichmann and socialized with her while she lived in Bad Aussee. The agent got Vera a maid with fair hair and "Aryan" appearance; the maid was actually a Jewish female Haganah agent. Vera still maintained that Eichmann was dead and revealed nothing while the maid listened.

Eventually, the agents located Eichmann's father who ran a shop in Linz, and asked him where his son was. The father insisted that his son was dead. Simon Wiesenthal, then a young architect, settled in Linz to keep an eye on Eichmann's father, shadowing his visitors. Wiesenthal made his way into the man's apartment and found a document summarizing Eichmann's life in his own handwriting.

In 1946, Haganah agents traveled to Austria to search for Eichmann's family. They found Eichmann's wife and brother in Bad Aussee and followed them to a secluded house. There, they killed a man they thought was Eichmann; after a few weeks it was clarified that the victim was not in fact Eichmann but another SS officer who had contributed to the Holocaust. Haganah agents then hatched a plan to kidnap Vera Eichmann and her sons in the hope that it would "smoke out" Eichmann, but this was rejected by Haganah headquarters. The hunt for Eichmann was then suspended when the Mandate for Palestine ended and the State of Israel was established in 1948. With the ensuing Arab-Israeli War, the hunt for Eichmann was nearly forgotten. Israeli authorities focused on domestic matters and withdrew many of their agents in Austria.

Yechiel Grienschpan, a Jewish leader at Lublin during World War II, organized a group of ten war comrades who hunted Eichmann down. The group searched in Europe, the Middle East and South America. After Grienschpan was killed in West Germany under unclear circumstances in 1948, the group disbanded.

Der Spiegel revealed in 2011 that Israel had already prepared the abduction from Austria in 1949. The background was a rumor that Eichmann was planning a visit to his wife in Bad Aussee. A group of Israeli commandos traveled to Salzburg, where a plane was ready with the aim of transporting Eichmann to Israel. The action was fruitless because Eichmann was in fact in northern Germany. Der Spiegel found the information archival material by the Gehlen Organization.

After the war, the Americans followed Eichmann's family in Altaussee and his parents in Linz. The hunt for Nazi-era criminals slowed as the Cold War intensified. In the early 1950s, the Counterintelligence Corps wrote in a memo on Eichmann that the prosecution of war criminals was no longer a priority task for the US.

Argentina under Juan Perón

From the 19th century, there was some emigration from the German-speaking part of Europe to Argentina. After World War I, many German-speaking Argentines became involved in a political debate about Heimat, 'homeland' and Deutschtum, 'Germanness'.

Argentina's strong economy prompted President Juan Perón to work for independence from the United States and to counter American dominance. Perón tried to approach fascist Francisco Franco in Spain as a future ally. Perón promoted immigration with the goal of so-called "racial improvements" by mixing the population with European immigrants.

It is estimated that between 200 and 800 Nazis fled to Argentina from the end of World War II until 1955. Perón believed that the country needed engineers and officers and it is unclear whether he welcomed Nazi criminals with will or whether he accepted them for purely practical reasons. According to Der Spiegel, old Nazis in the West German foreign service were often stationed in South America where the diplomats protected war criminals and other Nazis fleeing justice. After Perón's death, Argentina became less hospitable to former Nazis.

Eichmann's time in Argentina

Eichmann did not know any Spanish when he arrived in Argentina, but he quickly learned the language. Under his cover name he worked for a short time in Buenos Aires as a mechanic. He worked for a couple years at a waterworks in the province of Tucumán on the edge of the Rio Potrero. At work, he was known as an insignificant but respected and conscientious person.

Eichmann moved in October 1953 to Olivos, Buenos Aires. Compared to other German immigrants, Eichmann's career was not particularly outstanding. From 1953 to 1960, he held a series of different jobs that were barely sufficient to support himself and his family; at one time, he tried to set up a dry cleaner shop but failed, causing him to seek a job at the Orbis water heater factory instead. For a time he lived in the suburbs of La Plata, working as an Angora rabbit breeder. They lived modestly and had relatively little contact with the Nazi elite in Buenos Aires.

His wife and sons came to Argentina in 1952. In 1955 Vera Eichmann registered under the maiden name of Liebl, but began a new life as Catalina Klement. They moved to a small rented house on the outskirts of Olivos. In 1959 Eichmann bought a plot of land in Calle Garibaldi in the suburb of Bancalari near San Fernando de la Buena Vista where Eichmann built a house. The house was on one level and had exceptionally thick walls and only a few windows. He found a better-paying job at Mercedes-Benz, where he started as a clerk and worked his way up to a management job.

One of the agents who captured Eichmann later said that Mossad knew of Josef Mengele's whereabouts, but let him go because it could jeopardize Eichmann's arrest. Der Spiegel estimates that there were probably several hundred people in Buenos Aires who knew that Klement was really Eichmann.

Manhunt

Vera Eichmann disappeared in the 1950s, but Israeli agents knew her passport had expired so she had to go to Vienna to get it renewed. Austrian authorities tipped off the agents when she appeared at the passport office in Vienna. She was then shadowed continuously. In 1959, Vera was back in Austria to renew her passport, from where Eichmann was tracked down by the Haganah. The Israeli agents were sure that she renewed her passport only so she could travel to where her husband was; she was loyal to him even though she knew about his many mistresses. When she bought a ticket to Buenos Aires, it strengthened their assumption that he was there, and three Israeli agents traveled on the same flight. Upon reaching Buenos Aires, she went straight to a house in San Fernando where she embraced him. It was only then that the agents were sure they had the right man.

In the 1950s, several Holocaust survivors had devoted their lives to searching for those responsible who had escaped the trials at Nuremberg. In 1953, Simon Wiesenthal tracked down Eichmann from his residence in Vienna. In 1954, he got a postcard from a Buenos Aires collaborator which said the following:

Imagine who I have seen here, twice already, and an acquaintance of mine even spoke to him. I saw that miserable pig Eichmann. He lives near Buenos Aires and works for a waterworks.

At the same time, Mossad had tracked him down in addition to Josef Mengele, a former doctor and SS officer who conducted heinous and gruesome experiments on concentration camp prisoners, in Argentina. Mossad's director at the time, Isser Harel, claimed in 1991 that Wiesenthal's work did not contribute to Eichmann's arrest but rather jeopardized it and also prevented a planned arrest of Mengele. Historian Deborah Lipstadt wrote in 2011 that Wiesenthal played no direct role in the hunt for Eichmann. Tuviah Friedman, who had been hunting Eichmann since the end of the war, began organizing the Institute for the Documentation of War Crimes in Israel. In 1959, Friedman received a tip from the West German Ministry of Justice that Eichmann was in Kuwait, a country where the Israeli government was unwilling to spend resources organizing a manhunt. Upon finding this out, Friedman then told the story to an Israeli newspaper, which caused a sensation when the story was published, causing David Ben Gurion to prioritize the case. The newspaper report led to Friedman receiving many tips as to Eichmann's whereabouts.

Towards the end of the decade, US and British intelligence no longer had the task of hunting down and prosecuting Nazis, having handed it over to the Germans.

Role of the Hermann family

Eichman told his four sons not to talk about politics, but his eldest, Klaus, did not heed his father's word. In 1956, he became a friend or lover of the 16-year-old Sylvia Hermann. She was a beautiful daughter of Lothar Hermann, a German immigrant of Jewish origin who had been interred at Dachau (where Eichmann had served) for his socialist activities. In 1938 he fled to Argentina, and in the 1950s he settled in Buenos Aires with his family. The Hermann family appeared as non-Jewish German immigrants. Klaus often visited Sylvia's home, and one day they got to talking about the fate of the Jews during the Second World War. Klaus said that his father was a Nazi and an officer in the Wehrmacht, and said that his father would have preferred it if the Germans had completed the extermination of Jews. Sylvia never visited Eichmann's residence and was unaware he used the surname Klement. The Hermann family moved to Coronel Suárez, several hours away from Buenos Aires, and lost contact with the Eichmanns.

Lothar Hermann learned who Eichmann was a few years later and began correspondence with Fritz Bauer, the chief prosecutor in the West German state of Hesse. Bauer sent Hermann a description of Eichmann and asked for more details. Sylvia and Lothar Hermann traveled to Buenos Aires, where Eichmann himself opened the door when Sylvia knocked. Hermann also contacted Israeli officials (hoping they were more interested than the West Germans) who worked closely with Hermann to plan an arrest. Bauer secretly tipped off Mossad about Eichmann's whereabouts and had a meeting with agent Eric Cohn in November 1957. Bauer feared that the West German authorities would take no action against Eichmann. In 1958, Mossad sent an agent who quickly concluded that a prominent Nazi could not live in the Olivos area, and the agency eventually lost interest. In December 1959, Hermann contacted Tuvia Friedman, the head of the Nazi Crime Documentation Center in Haifa, who had announced a large bounty on Eichmann. Hermann promised Friedman the name and other exact details about Eichmann. After a renewed call for information on Hermann, Mossad took interest again in early 1960.

In 1972, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir made sure Hermann received the promised bounty.

Role of West Germany

West German authorities had little interest in tracking down Eichmann. Der Spiegel revealed in 2011 that it was politicians and the judiciary, not German intelligence, that stood in the way of Eichmann's arrest in Argentina. The American authorities handed the case over to the West German authorities. When a German court issued an arrest warrant, the Bundeskriminalamt failed to call for Eichmann through Interpol. The German Federal Intelligence Service had agents in Argentina. German intelligence kept an eye on this environment with a view to protecting West Germany from Nazi influence, but they did little concretely.

The Germans had the same information as the CIA (Eichmann's cover name was misspelled as Clemens) and knew that Eberhard Fritsch knew Eichmann's whereabouts. An intelligence report from June 1952 stated that Eichmann was living in Argentina under the misspelled name. According to the documents, the CIA knew that Eichmann had been in Argentina since 1952. In 1953, Wiesenthal received a tip about Eichmann in Argentina and alerted German, American and Israeli intelligence. The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV, Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz) knew of Eichmann's cover name and his connections with Fritsch.

The West German government, led by Konrad Adenauer, was concerned about what Eichmann could tell about Adenauer's former national security adviser Hans Globke, who was instrumental in drafting the Nuremberg Laws in 1935.

Der Spiegel discussed in 2011 whether the German intelligence failed in their search for Eichmann. The BND did not consider it its task to track down ex-Nazis. West German prosecutors only started investigating a case if a report had been submitted, which Eichmann and many former Nazis took advantage of. When a Holocaust survivor wrote to the prosecution in Berlin in 1952, the case was put aside because Eichmann could not be found. When Vera Eichmann left Austria, the travel documents were issued by the Soviet occupying power. When in 1954 she applied for passports at the embassy in Buenos Aires for her two eldest sons, no one responded. In West Germany, an arrest warrant for Eichmann was issued in 1956 and the Bundeskriminalamt (the federal criminal police in Germany) refused to send the case to Interpol on the grounds that Interpol had no scope to investigate political crimes. In 1958 the BfV asked the embassy for assistance in the search for Klement/Eichmann and the embassy replied that they had not succeeded in finding this person who was unlikely to be in Argentina and who was probably in the Middle East. BfV subsequently dropped the case. Der Spiegel writes that the embassy is well known to the German community in Buenos Aires, including Sassen. Der Spiegel concludes that the BND did not protect Eichmann, while the embassy's role is unclear.

Role of the United States

In 2006, 27,000 pages of classified information were made public by the Central Intelligence Agency. The documents show that in March 1958 (or earlier) the CIA had detailed knowledge of Eichmann's whereabouts. The CIA chose not to inform Israel of this, to protect high-ranking politicians in what was then West Germany or because it could potentially harm Western interests in the Cold War. The CIA also wanted no attention about Nazis that they themselves recruited after the Second World War. At the same time, Mossad had temporarily given up its search for Eichmann in Argentina, because they did not know his cover name. The US and the CIA did not have the policy of pursuing war criminals. The CIA also protected General Reinhard Gehlen, who recruited hundreds of former Nazis as CIA agents.

The CIA compiled extensive documentation of the Nazis in South America, including Eberhard Fritsch, Hans-Ulrich Rudel and Otto Skorzeny. Eichmann was not an American citizen, he had not killed American citizens or committed crimes on American territory and was therefore not of interest to American justice in the eyes of the US. The three Western Allies had left it to the Federal Republic (West Germany) to prosecute Nazis and the United States would limit itself to supporting a possible West German demand for extradition. West Germany and Argentina did not have an extradition agreement, and Argentina was very slow in following up on West German extradition demands so that many Nazis easily escaped.

Abduction

Preparation

When Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion learned that Eichmann was probably in Argentina, he commissioned the Mossad intelligence service to look for him. Mossad leader Isser Harel put together a group that would secretly capture Eichmann and bring him to Israel. Ten people were put to the task, including a disguise expert, a doctor, a document forger, a melee specialist and Harel himself. One of the agents was a survivor of Auschwitz where his parents were sent to the gas chamber. "We have not only the right, but also a moral duty to bring this man to justice We are embarking on a historic journey. It goes without saying that this is no ordinary task. We must arrest the man who has the blood of our people on his hands," said Harel.

The operation was top secret: Israel's embassy in Buenos Aires knew nothing and the mission was a violation of several UN conventions. For example, Argentina had to issue an extradition order before Eichmann could be taken out of the country. Using false passports, Mossad agents traveled to Buenos Aires in early 1960, and began an intensive and more than three-month long surveillance of Eichmann.

The agents rented eight cars, as well as seven houses and apartments, which served as hiding places. One of the houses was isolated and served as headquarters. A few days after his arrival, this villa was transformed into a small fort with an alarm system and a cell where Eichmann was to be held captive until his departure for Israel. A female Mossad agent stayed in the house the whole time disguised as a maid; her role was to cook for the group, keep the house clean and give the outside world the impression that a perfectly normal family lived there.

The agents tracked down Eichmann's residence at Calle Garibaldi 14. On March 19, 1960, an agent drove slowly past the house, and at 2 p.m. he saw a man in his 50s with a high forehead and glasses who was about to carry in the laundry. After Eichmann was definitely identified, he was constantly shadowed by Israeli agents: there was always an agent on the same bus, always an agent in the same cafe, and there was always an agent keeping watch from an apartment across the street from Eichmann's house. He was also regularly photographed. The agents were constantly replaced so that Eichmann would not become suspicious. The agents charted Eichmann's habits; where he worked, when he showed up, when he went home for the day, and which bus he took to and from work. Eichmann seemed like a loving and completely normal family man, and lived according to completely fixed routines. He got off the bus every night at 7:40 p.m., then walked along a deserted road to his house.

The agents assumed it would be easy to capture Eichmann, and that the main problem would be getting him out of Argentina and transported to Israel.

Implementation

The plan was first to transport Eichmann out of the country by plane in connection with Argentina's national day, when Israeli diplomats were invited for an official visit. They were due to arrive on 19 May, and the plan was to return the plane on 20 May – without the diplomats, but with Eichmann on board. With the approval of the government of Israel, he was nevertheless captured on May 11, 1960.

When Eichmann got off the bus in the evening, the agents had been feigning a breakdown. One of them signaled to Eichmann with the only Spanish phrase they knew: un momentito, señor, 'one moment, sir'. Then the agents took him by force into a waiting car. During questioning, he immediately acknowledged his true identity. While held prisoner in a penthouse in Buenos Aires, he wrote a declaration that he voluntarily joined Israel. The agent that had originally gotten Eichmann's attention, Peter Malkin, later said that Eichmann was a normal-looking person who did not look like he had killed millions of Jews despite having organized it. Another agent, team leader Rafi Eitan, told the BBC in 2011 that Eichmann was "completely average" in terms of physical description. The day after his kidnapping, his then-employer, Mercedes-Benz, without officially knowing what had happened to him, removed Eichmann from their pension rolls.

The car with Eichmann escaped unnoticed through airport security. Eichmann was dressed in the uniform of the airline El Al (Israel's flag carrier) and drunk. One member of the flight crew remained in Buenos Aires so that the number of crew members would match. The Mossad agents gave the impression that Eichmann had been out drinking. After a layover in Dakar on the west coast of Africa, Eichmann arrived in Israel on May 22.

The Israeli government initially denied involvement in the abduction, claiming he had been taken by Jewish volunteers. On May 23, 1960, Ben Gurion announced in the Knesset that Eichmann had been captured with the government's blessing and described Eichmann as the greatest criminal of all time. He promised that the mass murderer would soon be brought to justice. Ben Gurion's announcement was followed by long and intense applause.

Diplomatic conflict

Argentina's UN ambassador Mario Amadeo demanded reparations from Israel after Eichmann's kidnapping. At the request of the Argentinian government, the Israeli government sent a diplomatic note (note verbiale) in which they regretted any violation of Argentine sovereignty and argued that Eichmann joined Israel of his own accord. David Ben Gurion apologized in a separate letter to Argentine President Arturo Frondizi. Argentina was thankful for the apology but believed that Eichmann had to be returned to Argentina and that the agents had to be extradited there to face charges. Argentina reported the case to the United Nations Security Council, which sought a compromise to avoid an escalation of the dispute. Amadeo argued that the abduction would set a dangerous precedent if it remained unpunished and that there could be no exceptions to a nation's sovereignty.

Israeli Foreign Minister Golda Meir argued in her response that the abduction of Eichmann was a limited violation of Argentine law. According to Meir, the violation had to be seen in relation to the uniqueness of Eichmann's crimes and in relation to the motives of the people who carried out the abduction. Meir insisted that the Security Council had no jurisdiction, because the abduction was carried out by private individuals, not the State of Israel. Meir maintained that Eichmann was in fact staying illegally in Argentina under Argentine law.

The Soviet Union and Poland argued that Argentina had not fulfilled its obligations after the Nuremberg trials and under UN resolutions to prosecute or extradite Eichmann. On June 23, 1960, the Security Council unanimously passed a resolution ordering Israel to compensate Argentina for the violation. The Soviet Union and Poland abstained from voting for fear that Israel would have to return Eichmann to Argentina, where he would probably evade prosecution. Israel's ambassador to Argentina was expelled. Later in the summer the countries exchanged new ambassadors and agreed that the matter was closed.

In 2011, Deborah Lipstadt revealed that the Argentine authorities knew about the abduction operation and allowed Mossad to carry out the operation unimpeded, but that the government officially protested for political reasons.

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.

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 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. 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 11 April 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

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 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 Rudolf 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 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 11–13 December 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 13 December, 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 15 December. 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; Eichmann's was handwritten. Eichmann said that he believed that the judges who oversaw his trial "made a fundamental mistake in that they are not able to empathise with the time and situation in which I found myself during the war years." He also added regarding his crimes: "I detest as the greatest of crimes the horrors which were perpetrated against the Jews and think it right that the initiators of these terrible deeds will stand trial before the law now and in the future... I was not a responsible leader, and as such do not feel myself guilty."

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 31 May and 1 June. 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.

Shalom Nagar, the prison guard who was chosen to hang Eichmann, said that he did not volunteer for the task and had nightmares about it for years afterwards. He was selected as a personal guard for Eichmann while Eichmann was awaiting his execution. His duties included making sure Eichmann's food was not poisoned. In interviews he explained that after the deed was done, he was ordered to load the corpse into an oven for cremation, but his hands were shaking and he needed help walking. For an indeterminate time afterwards he suffered from PTSD and nightmares surrounding the hanging. He later became religious and moved to the West Bank settlement of Kiryat Arba. He died on December 1, 2024.

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 Adenauer and 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

• Joel Brand
• Corpse-like obedience
• Rezső Kasztner
• Law of Due Obedience
• Nuremberg principles
• 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.
• Superior orders

References

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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)

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• Adolf Eichmann
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