Lessons From The Holocaust Webquest - The Trial of Adolf Eichman
| The Trial of Adolf Eichman |
| The Charges |
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Eichmann was charged under a 1950 Israeli law enacted to punish Nazis and their collaborators. He was charged on 15 counts: Charge 1: He was ultimately responsible for the murder of millions of Jews. Charge 2: He placed these Jews, before they were murdered, in living conditions designed to kill them. Charge 3: He caused them grave physical and mental harm. Charge 4: He took actions which resulted in the sterilization of Jews and otherwise prevented childbirth. Charge 5: He caused the enslavement, starvation, and deportation of millions of Jews. Charge 6: He caused general persecution of Jews based on national, racial, religious and political grounds. Charge 7: He spoiled Jewish property by inhuman measures involving compulsion, robbery, terrorism and violence. Charge 8: That all of the above were punishable war crimes. Charge 9: He deported a half-million Poles. Charge 10: He deported 14,000 Slovenes. Charge 11: He deported tens of thousands of gypsies. Charge 12: He deported and murdered 100 Czech children from the village of Lidice. The final three charges involved membership in organizations which were judged to be criminal by the Nuremberg Trials: the S.D., Gestapo, and S.S. The first 12 counts of the indictment each carried the death penalty as the maximum punishment. |
| The Court |
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The three-judge panel trying the case consisted of Justice Moshe Landau, Dr. Benjamin Halevy, and Dr. Yitzhak Raveh. Justice Landau was a member of the Israeli Supreme Court. He was born in Poland and educated in London, Dr. Halevy was the president of the Jerusalem District Court and a graduate of Berlin University. Dr. Raveh was a member of the Tel Aviv District Court and had emigrated from Germany in 1933, when Jews there first began to feel threats to their physical security from the government. All of the judges were fluent in German. |
| The Prosecution team |
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The team charged with handling the prosecution of the case was headed by Israel Attorney General Gideon Hausner. Hausner came to Israel from his native Poland in 1927. He had served as a military prosecutor during Israel’s War of Independence, and later was President of the military Court. He had been appointed Attorney General just a few weeks. Assisting him was a team of attorneys which included Dr. Jacob Robinson, who was an assistant to the Chief prosecutor at the Nuremburg Tribunal, Gabriel Bach, a native of Germany who was educated in Britain, and Jacob Baror, the German-born District Attorney of Tel Aviv whose descendents were Orthodox rabbis. Zvi Terlo, an Assistant State Attorney, also assisted the effort. |
| The Eichmann defense |
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Although several prominent U.S. Law firms volunteered to represent Eichmann, he asked Dr. Robert Servatius to represent him. Servatius was a well-known German lawyer from Cologne who had been a defense counselor at the Nuremberg Trials. But Eichmann could not afford him, so Israel agreed to pay his fee (of $30,000) and the sixty-three-year-old lawyer arrived in October of 1960 to talk with his client for the first time. He had to have a strategy that would counter the well-laid plans of the Israeli prosecutors. Dr. Servatius was assisted by Dieter Wechtenbruch, a young attorney from Munich. |
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Prosecution Strategy |
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The basic strategy of the prosecution was to – 1. argue that under the doctrine advanced by the defense, Hitler alone would be solely responsible for these crimes, and Hitler would be immune as a head of state. 2. give a human side to the horror by having survivor testimony. 3. use Eichmann’s own words to belie the fact that he was a disinterested bureaucrat only carrying out orders, but rather was passionate in his obsession with killing Jews. 4. use incriminating testimony from his colleagues at the Nuremberg Trials, the contents of thousands of documents, many of which were signed by Eichmann, and the Sassen interviews. |
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Defense Strategy |
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For two months, he sat watching and listening. Now as the prosecution rested its case, Eichmann had to prepare for his one chance for survival, taking the stand to defend himself. It was impossible for Eichmann to deny his role in killing Europe’s Jews. Eichmann and Servatius adopted the defense strategy that had been used at Nuremberg. Since he could not disavow the crimes, he disavowed the responsibility for them. He was just following orders. Eichmann’s defense was designed to let the S.S. Officer fade from the stand and replace him with the benevolent bureaucrat, a man whose actions had been misrepresented by the prosecution. He even went so far as to claim that his early actions during the period of forced emigration had been for the benefit of the Jews. The basic strategy of the defense was to – 1. not cross-examine survivors of the concentration camps who testified. 2. concentrate on the issues of the trial. 3. avoid engaging in purposefully delaying tactics. 4. contest the trial’s legality. 5. contest the judges’ ability to be impartial. 6. assert that the Nazi Punishment Law was invalid because it was extraterritorial and ex post facto (i.e. enacted after an action was committed which may have been perfectly legal at the time it occurred). 7. advance that Eichmann was not a part of the leadership which made decisions, but that he only carried them out. 8. contend that he was unable to resist carrying out these orders. 9. declare that on occasion, he took actions which stopped persecution and extermination of Jews. 10. assert that he was present at key meetings not because he was part of the leadership conspiring to commit war crimes, but because it was his department’s duty to take the minutes of these meetings. 11. declare that the court did not have jurisdiction because Eichmann had been abducted from Argentina, and that only Argentina (or, perhaps, Germany since Eichmann claimed citizenship status as a German) had jurisdiction to bring charges against Eichmann. 12. contend that Israel did not even exist when the alleged crimes occurred, so the Israeli Court had no jurisdiction. |
| The Trial as a Media Event |
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An American Television Company (Capital Cities Broadcasting Corporation) made the unprecedented request to videotape the entire trial. Its request was granted by the court a month prior to the start of the trial, over the objections of Eichmann’s attorney, The trial of Adolf Eichmann would be the first trial ever televised. Most TV networks covered the trial In detail. Tapes were flown daily from Jerusalem to The United States. The American Broadcasting Company (ABC ) presented one-hour weekly summaries on 60 of Its stations, and half-hour summaries were presented on its NY affiliate five days each week. Hundreds of journalists from all over the world arrived in Israel to cover the trial. |
| The Trial Begins |
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A community theater in Jerusalem was converted into a 750-seat courtroom big enough to accommodate the large numbers of spectators and journalists expected to attend. The Israelis built a bulletproof glass booth to protect Eichmann. The booth would become the trial’s most enduring symbol. The authorities wanted to take no chances with the safety of their notorious suspect. When the day of the trial arrived, Monday, April 11, 1961, security inside and outside the courthouse was very tight. Under Israeli law, the case would be decided not by a jury but by three judges–presiding judge Moshe Landau of the Israeli supreme court, Judge Benjamin Halevy of the Jerusalem District Court, and Judge Yitzhak Raveh of the Tel-Aviv District Court. All three were educated in Germany and had emigrated to Palestine as young men before the war. They would hear the accused in his own language. There would be no chance of a translator making a critical mistake. |
| The effect of the trial on survivors |
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During the trial, nearly 10,000 letters were sent to the Attorney General’s office. The contents of most were wracked with pent-up emotion. Over 5,000 of these letters came from Israelis, many of them children who could not understand why millions of Jews of the Holocaust let themselves be victimized without fighting back.
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The verdict and sentence |
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For four months, the trial of Adolf Eichmann had dominated Israeli life. For most people, Eichmann’s guilt was never in doubt. the real question was, how to punish one man who had caused the deaths of millions. Although the world had known about Nazi war crimes, it was not until the Eichmann trial that most people became aware of the Holocaust. for a large section of the Israeli public, almost nothing was known about the holocaust previously. On December 11, 1961, after a four-month recess, the three judges returned to their bench with a verdict. It had been a year and a half since Eichmann’s capture. And 16 years since the liberation of the death camps. And, finally it was time for Eichmann to be judged. Eichmann was found guilty of all 15 counts against him, responsible, the court said, for millions of deaths. the particulars of his rank and his job did not excuse his actions. and, for the last time, he spoke to the court. And so ended the trial of the man in the glass booth.
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