JUDAICA - Wisdom In Torah

Eichmann, Adolf Otto
It was Eichmann who realized the potential of Theresienstadt
as a means of deceiving the world about the fate
of the Jews. He made it into a “model camp,” where the Red
Cross Committee was allowed to visit in order to counter the
reports of Nazi atrocities. The day after the Red Cross Committee’s
visit, one of the largest deportations was dispatched
to Auschwitz.
In Hungary, which was conquered by the Germans on
March 19, 1944, it was Eichmann himself who managed the deportations.
Using the great experience he had acquired, Eichmann
succeeded in sending off 437,402 Jews between May 15
and July 9, mostly to Auschwitz. More than 70% of them were
murdered shortly after arriving at the camp. This “success” was
made possible partly by the help the Nazis received from the
Hungarians. Yet, at the beginning of July, the leader of Hungary,
Miklos Horthy, ordered the cessation of this collaboration
under international pressure. Eichmann was among those
who fought most furiously to continue the deportations but
was unable to continue for several months. He renewed his
activities when the Hungarian Arrow Cross Fascists gained
control of Hungary in October 1944. With his return, execution
by gas in Auschwitz was stopped and he ordered marches
of Jews to Germany through Austria to help with the German
war industry. Around 76,000 Jews took part in these marches,
which were called “death marches.” In Hungary, Eichmann
met with various attempts to save the Jews. In Budapest, Raul
*Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat, was active together with
other representatives of neutral countries, against Eichmann’s
activities. Eichmann also played an important part in the famous
“blood-for-trucks negotiations.” In these, Joel *Brandt
of Budapest was sent to Istanbul with the offer to exchange
Jews for trucks and other goods that would be given to the
Germans. The plan was apparently an instance of German duplicity,
as was the involvement with Eichmann’s approval of
Wisliceny, a member of his department, in the “Europe Plan”
in 1943, in which Jews would be exchanged for dollars. Eichmann
worked to ruin two other plans in Bulgaria and Romania
but had to allow the release of some of the Sephardi Jews
from Greece and some Jews from the Land of Israel who had
been seized in Europe in exchange for Germans who had been
seized in the Land of Israel.
At the end of the war, Eichmann was captured, but managed
to escape. Like thousands of escaping Nazis, in 1950,
Eichmann used the “Rat Path” which led from Germany to
Argentina through Italy. He lived with his family in Buenos
Aires as Ricardo Klement and became a father to a third son.
In 1960, he was abducted by the Israeli Mossad and brought to
Israel. There his trial took place, in which he was found guilty
and condemned to death.
The Eichmann Trial
On May 23, 1960, the prime minister of Israel informed the
Knesset, the Israeli public, and the world, in a short announcement
of 62 words that Adolf Eichmann, who had been designated
one of the most important Nazis, was in Israel and
would stand trial for his part in the “Final Solution of the
Jewish Problem.”
The Eichmann Trial was one of the biggest media trials
of the 20th century and it made the name of Adolf Eichmann
a synonym for the essence of human evil and its sources.
It took Israel almost a year to prepare for the trial, which
began on April 19, 1961. The interrogation was carried out by a
special unit of the Israeli Police Force (Department 06). Eichmann
was charged with “Crimes against the Jewish People,”
“Crimes against Humanity,” “War Crimes,” and “Membership
in an Enemy Organization” (SD, SS, and Gestapo). All
of these were listed in Israel’s Nazi and Nazi Collaborators
Punishment Law (1950), on the basis of which Eichmann was
brought to trial.
The trial ended in August 1961. On December 15, 1961,
the verdict and sentence were read. Eichmann was convicted
and sentenced to death. Eichmann appealed to the Supreme
Court. A panel of five Supreme Court justices rejected his
appeal and confirmed the verdict and sentence. Eichmann
was executed by hanging on June 1, 1962, almost two years after
he was brought to Israel. It was the only death sentence
ever carried out by the State of Israel. Eichmann’s body was
cremated and his ashes were scattered outside the territorial
waters of Israel.
Eichmann’s trial revealed to the Jews and the world what
had happened to the Jews during World War II. Ben-Gurion
called the trial “The Nuremburg of the Jews” because during
the Nuremburg trials in Germany the Holocaust had been
sidelined, while this time it was at the heart of the matter. In
this, Ben-Gurion also wished to emphasize that in 1961, unlike
during the course of Jewish history in the Diaspora, the Jews
had a sovereign state, and as a result they could call to account
those who had injured them. Thus it was asserted that the State
of Israel represented all the Jewish people in the world.
The prosecutor at the trial was the attorney general,
Gideon *Hausner, who headed a prosecution team that numbered
five people. The defense attorney was Robert Servatius
of Germany, who had represented a number of German defendants
in the Nuremburg trials. His co-consul was Dieter
Wechtenbruch, an attorney from Munich. The panel of judges
consisted of judges at two levels. The president of the court
was a member of the Supreme Court, Moshe *Landau, and
alongside him sat two judges from district courts, Benjamin
Halevy and Yitzhak Raveh. The trial took place in front of an
audience in a hall in Jerusalem, while Eichmann sat in a bulletproof
glass enclosure. The beginning of the trial focused on
the motions of the defense attorney, who mainly challenged
the right of the court to try Eichmann. The defense attorney’s
main objection was that the judges, being Jews, could not
judge Eichmann impartially. If that was not enough, Eichmann
had been abducted from Argentina and brought to
Israel illegally, in violation of international law. Finally, the
defense attorney held that the law under which Eichmann was
charged was retroactive and extraterritorial, in that it related
to crimes committed before the State of Israel had existed and
250 ENCYCLOPAEDIA JUDAICA, Second Edition, Volume 6