The Eichmann Trial by Deborah E. Lipstadt, Schocken, 272pp.
By David Strom
SAN DIEGO — It has been fifty years since the Adolf Eichmann trial. Deborah Lipstadt, renowned historian and professor, has written a new account of the Eichmann trial. Eichmann was one of the world’s most notorious war criminals. He sat in an Israeli courtroom in a glass booth for a trial that would be among the first in history to be completely televised. The trial captured the attention of millions, unlike the Nuremberg Tribunals. It was first time many of the millions who followed the trial, including Israelis, learned the horrendous details of the Holocaust.
Since the end of World War II, Eichmann was a wanted and hunted fugitive from justice. The Israeli authorities pursued him, despite false clues and dead-ends in their search, hoping to bring him to justice before a legal court and the court of public opinion. Eichmann was in charge of transporting millions of European Jews to death camps. Adolf Eichmann did his job meticulously and with enthusiasm. He enjoyed his power over the lives of millions, and he did it willingly.
At different times in the search for Eichmann, different Nazi hunters reported him living in Egypt, northern Germany, Peru, and/or Argentina. Most of the leads went nowhere. But as fate would have it, a young woman named Sylvia Hermanns who was living in Argentina discovered the whereabouts of Eichmann. Her father Lothar Hermanns was a German-Jewish émigré from Nazi Germany, but Sylvie did not know about her own Jewish origin.
Sylvia Hermanns dated a young man whose last name was Eichmann, who was actually Eichmann’s son. Klaus Eichmann bragged about his “dead” father Adolf and his accomplishments during World War II while visiting in Sylvia and Lothar Hermanns’ home. Lothar was very suspicious and asked his daughter to find out where her boyfriend Klaus lived. Lothar passed the information on when he wrote the Mossad (the Israeli Secret Service). Time passed, but eventually Isser Harel, the head of the Mossad, sent someone to check out the information. The agent could not believe that the man he saw was Eichmann. He did not live in a fancy home. In fact, the man they suspected was Eichmann had no running water or electricity in his house. The agent told the head of the Mossad, it wasn’t Eichmann.
More time passed. The legally-blind Argentinean German-Jewish Hermanns wrote to Western Germany’s minister in charge of apprehending Holocaust criminals. The minister listened and contacted the Mossad. This time they did a through investigation and determined the man was in fact Adolf Eichmann. In 1960, a year before the Eichmann trial, Israeli agents abducted Eichmann and brought him to Jerusalem, Israel.
During the year prior to the trial, contradicting opinions swirled around the legality of Israel’s kidnapping of Eichmann. The Argentine government had Eichmann under surveillance and knew immediately of the kidnapping. They knew about the safe house where the Mossad agents held Eichmann, and they were aware of his “secretive” boarding of the El Al jet plane, but they chose not to intervene. Diplomatic relations between the governments of Argentina and Israel were strained, but eventually returned to normal.
Other important issues arose: Could a country that didn’t exist during the Holocaust try a person for committing crimes during the Holocaust? Shouldn’t Western Germany try him? Would Eichmann receive a fair trial in Israel, a majority Jewish State? Could the justices be fair and impartial, given the fact that they were all Jews?
The document heavy Nuremberg Trials took place before the Television era. Then many people were trying to get back and create a more normal world, a world at peace. They didn’t want to hear or learn about the atrocities of man. They wanted to escape to happier times. The Eichmann trial differed from the Nuremberg tribunal by calling survivors to the witness stand. This personalized the destructive and evil nature of the Holocaust for the millions around the world who watched the court happenings at the Eichmann Trial.
Gideon Hausner the Israeli prosecutor during the trial rose and addressed the court:
“As I stand before you, Shoftei Yisrael, Judges of Israel, to lead the prosecution of Adolf Eichmann, I do not stand alone. With me in this place And at this hour stand six million accusers. But they cannot rise to their feet and point an accusing finger towards the man who sits in the glass dock and cry: “J’accuse.” For their ashes were piled up in the hills of Auschwitz and in the fields of Treblinka, or washed away by the rivers of Poland; their graves scattered over the length and breadth of Europe. Their blood cries out, but their voices are not heard. Therefore it falls on me to be their spokesman and to unfold in their name the awesome indictment.”
The prosecution presented many documents to show the guilt of the accused Eichmann, but the survivors’ testimonies, though gruesome at times, made the Holocaust atrocities understandable to all. Lipstandt describes how their testimony gave a context and a reality to what many people could not believe possible: “There was a march of survivors, I would say approximately 100 survivors, who came into the witness box and told the story of what happened to them. And people watched them and listened to them and heard them in a way they hadn’t heard them before,”
Hearing the voices and the real life accounts of survivors was one aspect of the trial that haunted the audience of spectators. Another was seeing Eichmann. This man, who most Israelis considered one of the greatest murderers of all time, appeared to be so normal and ordinary.
“People were amazed because he looked much more like a bureaucrat, like a pencil pusher, [with] thick black glasses, an ill-fitting suit, a man who laid out all his papers and his pens and kept polishing his glasses with a nervous tick,” Lipstadt reflects the question in the minds of those who saw the accused from behind his protective glass shield in the courtroom. Could this really be the human being responsible for the destruction of millions?
Lipstadt effectively makes the argument that Eichmann’s testimony illustrated not only that he was guilty, but also how “enthusiastic” he was about carrying out his orders. Eichmann claimed he was “just following orders” but the documents and testimony of some survivors clearly showed that he did not always follow the orders of his superiors. “There would be times when he would get a communiqué from the German Foreign Ministry saying the Italians have contacted them and there’s a Jew in Vilna, or a Jew someplace else in a ghetto who’s married to an Italian Catholic … and Eichmann would quickly rush to get the man deported, sent to Auschwitz or hidden away so that he couldn’t be turned over to the Foreign Ministry and maybe escape. He went after every individual Jew he could find.”
However, despite his tenacity and obsession with tracking down Jews, Eichmann helped some of his own Jewish relatives to escape deportation to the death camps.
Even the testimony from Eichmann’s exile in Argentina helped the court gain a complete picture of his cruelty. Eichmann became friendly with a Dutch Nazi writer. They would meet regularly at an Argentinean German Pub to drink and talk. Eichmann told the Dutch Nazi that he had only one major regret: He hadn’t killed all the Jews of Europe.
During his trial, Eichmann showed his cowardliness by never admitting his guilt in the mass destruction of European Jewry and thousands of others. Deborah Lipstadt was one of the first to read the last papers that Eichmann wrote while he was a captive in Israel. She tells us in her compelling book how Eichmann never showed a bit of remorse, even during his trial. To her it clearly demonstrated that he was a willing participant in the death of European Jewry, not “just following orders.”
The judges found Eichmann guilty. “In the final paragraph of their decision, they addressed Eichmann’s character rather than his deeds. He had not offered “truthful evidence, in spite of his repeated declarations that… his only desire was to reveal the truth…. His entire testimony was nothing but one consistent attempt to deny the truth and to conceal his share of responsibility.”
Even after Eichmann was found guilty, the question remained as to whether or not to sentence him to death. No one in Israel had ever received such a punishment. So when one of the judges stood up at the end of the trial and said “By Israeli law we are not required to impose the death sentence,” But the judge continued, “We are not required, we may impose it, and we chose to do so because you are deserving of the death sentence.” (Emphasis added.) The trial was also a reminder that the Holocaust’s victims had names, faces and histories. Eichmann was hanged and then cremated, with his ashes thrown into the sea.
Recently Osama Bin Laden, who orchestrated the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon in 2011, was killed. Millions of Americans cheered his death. Because he died without a trial, has the world been deprived of a sense of closure and justice? If he had been captured and put on trial in the United States, what might have been his defense? “I just gave the orders”. Although those who cause the death of thousands or millions of their fellow human beings may never receive what humanity considers a full and just punishment for their crimes, the Eichmann trial is an example of the value to the world to refuting the defense of “just following orders.”
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Strom is professor emeritus of education at San Diego State University. He may be contacted at david.strom@sdjewishworld.com
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