Dictionary of Genocide - D Ank Unlimited

Eichmann was then tasked with coordinating responsibilities regarding the round-up
of Jews and their transportation to the various Vernichtungslagers (death camps). He personally
took charge of the Hungarian deportations in 1944. After the war he, like many
others, went into hiding and was able to make his way to Buenos Aires, Argentina,
where he lived with his family and worked as a factory worker under the name Ricardo
Klement. In 1960 he was captured by Israeli Security Service agents and taken to Israel
for trial for “crimes against the Jewish people” (the only crime for which the punishment
is death in Israeli law). Found guilty in 1961, he was hanged, his body cremated, and his
ashes scattered at sea.
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. The title of a book published
in 1963 by the German-Jewish political scientist philosopher Hannah Arendt.
Prior to being published as a book, the report was published as a series of magazine articles
in the New Yorker, the latter of which had sent Arendt to Jerusalem in 1961 to cover
the trial. Argumentative and controversial, Arendt contended, as indicated by the subtitle,
that Eichmann himself was merely a banal (read “normal”) cog in the bureaucratic
machinery of National Socialism, whose own careerist orientation, coupled with his
strict sense of following the orders of his superiors, led him to continually refine and perfect
the “machinery of death”—and thus, was not necessarily one who was truly antisemitic.
Her more negative assessments, however, were reserved for the various leadership
groups in the Jewish communities under Nazi domination which attempted to help their
people survive, but ultimately failed to do so. These leadership groups, she argued, placed
self-serving, competing interests above the actual saving of Jewish lives. Had the opposite
been more characteristic, she maintained, the actual number of deaths would have been
less. Her book generated intense debate in Israel, among survivors worldwide, and helped
generate a serious, scholarly reevaluation of the Nazi period of rule and those most
involved, including Jews.
Eichmann Trial. Spirited out of Argentina in 1960, Adolf Eichmann was brought to
Israel by Security Service agents to stand trial for “crimes against the Jewish people,”
which carried with it the possibility of the death penalty. The trial began in April 1961
in the District Court in Jerusalem, under the jurisdiction of a three-judge panel headed by
Israeli Supreme Court justice Moshe Landau (b. 1912). The chief prosecutor was Israel’s
attorney general Gideon Hausner. Eichmann’s defense attorney was the German lawyer
Dr. Robert Servatius (n.d.), who had previously defended a number of the Nazi elites at
the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, Germany, 1945–1946.
The Eichmann trial lasted four months. More than one hundred witnesses were called
to testify, and more than fifteen hundred documents became part of the court record.
While not directly addressing the evidence presented, the defense argued that the trial
itself was illegal because the State of Israel itself did not exist during the period of World
War II, that the judges themselves as Jews and Israelis were prejudiced, that Eichmann
himself was illegally kidnapped out of Argentina, that he was merely “following orders”
(a plea rejected at Nuremberg), and the Israeli law charging him with his crimes was itself
ex post facto. All these criticisms were rejected by the judges. Found guilty in December,
both his appeal of the judges’ decision and his plea for clemency were turned down. He
was executed by hanging in June 1961, his body cremated, and his ashes scattered at sea.
Eicke, Theodor (1892–1943). Nazi police leader, commander of the Death’s Head
(Totenkopf) Division of the SS, and the prime mover behind the development of the Nazi
EICKE, THEODOR
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