The Eichmann trial, 1961

What happened

Adolf Eichmann was born in 1906 and joined the Nazi Party in 1932. ⁵ He ran the Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Vienna, which forced roughly 110,000 Austrian Jews out of the country in 1938 and 1939 and became the model for the same operation elsewhere. ⁵ By 1941 he was chief of section IV B 4 of the Reich Security Main Office, the desk responsible for transporting more than 1.5 million Jews to killing centers in occupied Poland and the Soviet Union. ⁵ Reinhard Heydrich chose him to prepare the materials for the Wannsee Conference. ⁵ Between April and July 1944, he and his staff deported roughly 440,000 Jews from Hungary. ⁵ After the war he reached Argentina and lived under the name Ricardo Klement. ⁵ He worked at a Mercedes-Benz factory and lived at 14 Garibaldi Street outside Buenos Aires. ¹

In 1957 the German prosecutor Fritz Bauer learned from Lothar Hermann that Eichmann was in Argentina and passed it to the Israeli Foreign Ministry official Walter Eytan, who alerted Mossad chief Isser Harel. ² On May 11, 1960, Mossad operatives took Eichmann off the street as he came home from work, in an operation that ran under ten minutes. ² They held him at a safe house for a week, then flew him out on an El Al flight on May 20 and 21, sedated, dressed in an airline uniform, traveling on forged documents. ² Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion announced the capture to the Knesset on May 23, 1960. ²

Argentina complained to the UN Security Council, which adopted Resolution 138 on June 23, 1960. ⁶ The resolution declared that acts affecting the sovereignty of a member state could endanger international peace and security if repeated, and asked Israel to make "appropriate reparation" under the UN Charter and international law. ⁶ The vote was 8 in favor, none against, with Poland and the Soviet Union abstaining. ⁶ Eichmann stayed in Israeli custody and went to trial there.

The trial opened on April 11, 1961, at the Beit Ha'am hall in Jerusalem, before three judges sitting as the district court. ² Eichmann faced 15 counts under Israel's 1950 Nazis and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law, among them crimes against the Jewish people and crimes against humanity. ¹ He sat through the proceedings in a glass booth built to protect him from assassination. ¹ Attorney General Gideon Hausner led the prosecution. Over fourteen weeks, more than 100 witnesses testified and more than 1,600 documents were entered, most of them bearing Eichmann's signature. ² His defense was that he had followed orders and administered a policy set above him.

The court convicted him on December 11 and 12, 1961, and sentenced him to death on December 15. ¹ The Supreme Court upheld the judgment on May 29, 1962. ² He was hanged at Ramle prison on June 1, 1962, the only time Israel has carried out a death sentence. ¹ His body was cremated and the ashes scattered at sea. ¹

Why it still matters

The trial was filmed in full by Capital Cities Broadcasting Corporation, an American television company, and the footage was flown to New York and shown on American evening news. ³ That is the part that changed things. Nuremberg had been a documents trial, with very little eyewitness testimony. ³ Jerusalem was built the other way around: survivors on a witness stand, describing what they had seen, in front of cameras. Hausner opened by telling the court that it fell to him "to be their mouthpiece," speaking for the murdered. ³ Zivia Lubetkin and Abba Kovner were among those who testified. ¹ On June 7, 1961, the writer Yehiel Dinur, who published under the name Ka-Tzetnik, collapsed on the stand. ³

Historians generally date the point at which the word "Holocaust" and the events behind it entered ordinary public consciousness to this trial. ¹ It also changed what survivors could expect if they spoke. ³ Before 1961, many had learned that people did not want the details. After 1961, testimony had a public form and a public audience, which is the ground that later oral history projects and museums were built on. We have separate pieces on the numbers themselves and on how denial works; this is the trial that made both subjects speakable.

Then there is the argument that has outlasted the verdict. Hannah Arendt covered the trial for The New Yorker, which published her essays in February and March 1963 before they became a book. ⁴ Her claim was that Eichmann was "quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous," and that the horror lay in the gap between the acts and the man: "the deeds were monstrous, but the doer ... was terrifyingly normal." ⁴ She called it the banality of evil. Her stronger point was about thoughtlessness, an absence of moral reflection rather than an absence of malice.

The case against her had two parts, and both deserve stating properly. The first is factual: the trial record showed a man who had built and run a deportation apparatus across a continent for years, whose signature was on more than 1,600 documents, and who by 1944 was personally directing operations in Hungary. ^{2 5} That is initiative, not paperwork drifting downhill. Later historians have pushed back on the thoughtlessness reading on exactly those grounds. ³ The second part was about a different section of her book, where she judged the Judenräte, the Jewish councils under occupation, for cooperating with the Germans, and wrote that "the role of the Jewish leaders in the destruction of their own people is undoubtedly the darkest chapter." ⁴ The reaction to that was severe. The Anti-Defamation League circulated a message urging rabbis to preach against her on Rosh Hashanah, and she received letters of praise and condemnation, including death threats. ⁴

Our view: Arendt was describing something real about how bureaucracies distribute murder among people who each do a small piece of it, and she was wrong about Eichmann in particular, who chose the work and pursued it. Both of those can be true, and the phrase has spent sixty years being quoted by people who have not read the sentence it comes from.

The words you'll hear

Section IV B 4. The office of the Reich Security Main Office that Eichmann headed from 1941, responsible for the transport of Jews to killing centers in occupied Poland and the Soviet Union. ⁵

The glass booth. The enclosure Eichmann sat in during the Jerusalem trial, built to protect him from assassination, and the image most people carry of the proceedings. ¹

Nazis and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law. The 1950 Israeli statute under which Eichmann was charged on 15 counts, including crimes against the Jewish people and crimes against humanity. ¹

Banality of evil. Hannah Arendt's phrase from her reporting on the trial, arguing that Eichmann was commonplace rather than demonic and that his crimes came from thoughtlessness. ⁴

Ka-Tzetnik. The pen name of Yehiel Dinur, the survivor and writer who collapsed while testifying on June 7, 1961. ³

Resolution 138. The UN Security Council resolution of June 23, 1960, adopted after Argentina's complaint that the transfer of Eichmann violated its sovereignty, which asked Israel to make appropriate reparation under the UN Charter. ⁶