(Reviewer: Ralph Zulman, Vol. 66, #2, Rosh Hashanah 2011)
Deborah E. Lipstadt is the Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies at Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia. She is best known for her successful defence of a libel action brought against her by the Nazi sympathizer David Irving. Her books include History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory and Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust. 1939-1945 Holocaust, 1939-1945.
Lipstadt’s most recent book is The Eichmann Trial. It is relatively brief (237 pages) and concise compared to the monumental work by Gideon Hausner, who prosecuted Eichmann and whose 528-page Justice in Jerusalem: The Trial of Adolf Eichmann appeared in 1966.
The book is divided into five parts: an Introduction, ‘The Eichmann Trial’ (six chapters and a conclusion), Notes, a Chronology and Acknowledgments.
The introduction commences with a reference to a ghoulish and failed attempt to display in a permanent exhibition at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum tons of hair “harvested” from Jewish women at Auschwitz by the Nazis. This hair had been sold to factories that produced blankets and water-absorbent socks for U-boat crews.
Lipstadt recalls her childhood memories of the trial, including of a photograph on the front page of the New York Times showing Eichmann in a glass booth on the opening day of the trial.
During the trial Eichmann, wrote a memoir. After his execution, Prime Minister Ben-Gurion agreed, at the suggestion of prosecutor Hausner, to seal the manuscript in Israel’s National Archives. The memoir reveals a man who considered his Nazi leaders to be his “idols” and who was fully committed to their goals. He never showed any remorse for his deeds. Lipstadt makes the trenchant point that without antisemitism and centuries of persistent hatred of Jews, the Third Reich would have found it impossible to “mobilize hundreds of thousands of people to despise, scapegoat and ultimately participate in the murder of European Jewry”.
Of the Irving libel trial, the London Daily Telegraph declared in a lead editorial that it had “done for the new century what the Nuremberg tribunals or the Eichmann trial did for earlier generations.” In a number of important ways, though, the Irving trial in London and the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem were diametric opposites. The most obvious difference was that in Jerusalem, an actual a Nazi was the defendant whereas in London it was a Holocaust historian who was on trial. There was a more striking contrast. In Jerusalem, testimony by the victims constituted the central element of the prosecutor’s case. In the London case, survivors were not used as witnesses. Lipstadt was inundated with offers from survivors to testify, but their testimony was “eschewed for strategic reasons”.
The introductory chapter concludes as follows:
For the sake of her readers and herself, a historian must acknowledge their presence [past events] and try to ensure that they clarify, rather than cloud, her understanding. And so, with my own encounter with history, the law, the study of Holocaust, and raw anti-Semitism as a backdrop, I began to explore what happened in Jerusalem five decades earlier.
In the first chapter the author traces, in fascinating detail, how Eichmann’ whereabouts in Argentina were established. She is critical of Simon Wiesenthal, who unjustifiably claimed to have played a pivotal role in locating him. She goes so far as to accuse Wiesenthal, however well meaning, of being guilty of a “fraudulent effort” in his seeking “to elicit nonJewish interest in the Holocaust” through broadening the number of Nazi victims to include, in addition to the six million Jews, some five million non-Jews, even if this meant “falsifying history.” In her view, “Wiesenthal’s historical intervention obscures, if not denies, the true nature of the Holocaust” and his “invented equivalencies….rode roughshod over the history of Nazi policy during 1941-44.”
Lipstadt also dismisses, to a lesser degree, the role claimed by Tuvia Friedman in finding Eichmann. Ultimately, she attributes the latter accomplishment to “amateur sleuthing and dumb luck”, which she goes on to describe in detail, ending with the part played in his eventual capture in Buenos Aires by Mossad.
Unbeknown to the Israelis, Eichmann’s capture had not been the total success they assumed it to be. The Argentinian secret police were apparently aware of the operation and one wonders why they did not abort it. Lipstadt suggests that perhaps they were relieved that Eichmann “was being taken off their hands”.
A bizarre incident, described by Malkin, one of Eichmann’s captors, is mentioned. Malkin escorted
Eichmann to the toilet and waited outside. After a few minutes Eichmann called out, “Darf ich anfangen?” (“May I begin?”). Only when told that he could did he begin to move his bowels. Hearing of this, one of his interrogators, wondered if such a man could possibly have “decided the fate of millions of my people”.
Chapter Two deals with the details of getting Eichmann out of Argentina to Israel. In Chapter Three, the practical matters relating to the trial are recounted. These included the choice of the prosecutor. Hausner, who eventually took on this position, had recently become Attorney General. He was an accomplished commercial lawyer but one lacking experience in criminal law or courtroom protocol, and many Israelis hoped that he would appoint a prosecutor with the necessary experience in this regard. Instead, he insisted on taking the job himself.
The choice of the judge to preside over the trial had to be dealt with. According to Israeli law the choice should have been in the hands of Benjamin Halevi, president of the Jerusalem District Court where the trial was to be held. He had, however, presided in 1954 over the trial of Israel Kaszner a Hungarian Jew who had negotiated with Eichmann to exchange Jews for trucks and who had sold places to Jews on a train to enable them to reach safety. Despite urgings, Halevi refused to step down. A compromise was reached. The Knesset stepped in with a law providing that in capital cases, a High Court Judge should preside to be joined by two District-Court Judges. This allowed Halevi to participate, but not preside in the trial. Judge Moshe Landau was named as the presiding judge. Halevi nominated himself and Judge Yitzhak Raveh as the other two members of the tribunal. All three were German Jews who had received their law degrees in Europe prior to immigrating to Palestine.
The choice of the venue for the trial had to be decided upon. Jerusalem’s court rooms were small, shabby, and not equipped with press quarters. Teddy Kollek, then head of Ben-Gurion’s office, was charged with finding an appropriate venue, and selected Beit Ha’am a cultural centre then under construction. Its theater was transformed into a courtroom, “replete with a glass booth for the defendant and compartments for hidden television cameras.”
Meanwhile, another drama was occurring near Haifa in the Yagar Prison. This large complex had become a holding place for one man – Eichmann. Several guards were assigned to watch over Eichmann and to prevent him from attempting to harm himself. A mound of documents was assembled, including the record of the entire Nuremberg proceedings. Relevant documentation was also obtained from various countries. However, the USSR and Britain refused to provide the documents requested from them.
Eichmann’s chief interrogator was Captain Avner Less, a German Jew who had immigrated to Palestine in 1938 at the age of 22. To his surprise, and that of his police colleagues, Eichmann spoke freely, inundating them with details about the Final Solution.
The remaining issue was the most important of all. What would the scope be of the crimes that Eichmann was to be charged with? Rachel Auerbach of Yad Vashem assisted Hausner and placed considerable material at his disposal, inter alia statements from survivors. However, Hausner and Auerbach had a problem in that Eichman did not play a role in all aspects of the Final Solution. Nonetheless, the indictment which Hausner eventually issued took exactly that approach. It charged Eichmann with the “implementation” of the Final Solution, committing acts of “extermination” on Jews in Poland at death camps, murdering Jews in the USSR with the
Einsatzgruppen, imposing sterilization and abortions on Jews, forcing Jews to live in conditions that were “likely to bring about their physical destruction”, creating mechanisms to plunder Jewish property and causing the death of thousands of Jews in forced-labour camps, ghettos and transit camps. He was also charged with dispatching tens of thousands of Gypsies to be murdered. At Nuremberg, the murder of the Jews had been an example of crimes against humanity. Here it was the centerpiece.
The prosecution proposed to call a number of witnesses who had no connection with Eichmann. Some legal experts considered their testimony highly prejudicial and legally irrelevant.
The trial proper is dealt with in Chapter Four. It commenced on 11 April 1961. The new cultural centre was packed for the occasion, with over 700 people filling the room. Newspapers world-wide carried news of the event. American television networks broadcast special telecasts. There were more reporters in Jerusalem than had gone to Nuremberg. The Israeli authorities distributed daily bulletins in English, French and German on the trial. Numerous journalists from Yiddish newspapers challenged the Israelis for not making the bulletins available in Yiddish which, they reminded them, was the language of Eichmann’s victims.
The Presiding Judge, without any introductory remarks, read the indictment to the accused in Hebrew. Over the coming months additional languages, including German, Yiddish, Hungarian and English, were used in the courtroom.
Eichmann’s lawyer, Robert Servatius, rose to challenge the proceedings on various grounds among them the judges themselves. He argued that as Jews they were incapable of remaining impartial in a case that involved the Final Solution. Hausner rebutted the objections drawing on international legal principles, as well as examples of American and British case law and the United Nations that stipulated that Eichmann should be tried in Israel. He ruled that Israel was not doing anything contrary to the will of free nations.
Finally on the fourth day, after the court had first been called to order, the judges rejected Servatius’ objections. Hausner then completed his opening address which he had begun earlier. He invoked, inter alia, the biblical story of Cain and Abel as well as Emile Zola’s remarks about the French army’s antisemitic treatment of Captain Alfred Dreyfus.
Hannah Arendt dismissed his speech as “cheap rhetoric and bad history”, but others were transfixed. The Israeli writer Haim Gouri saw the lawyer who had tried everyone’s patience with endless legal precedents as being transformed into “a great figure of lamentation” while the Washington Post described Hausner’s opening address as a “mighty chronicle” that held the packed courtroom in the grip of compulsive attention”. Notwithstanding this praise, there was no doubt that Hausner got much of the history wrong. Eichmann, although he played a key role in the Final Solution, did not control it. However some elements of Hausner’s depiction of him were quite accurate.
Hausner had prepared a list of more than one hundred survivors who were to be called as witnesses. Most of them had no direct link with Eichmann. In addition, there was a most damning source of evidence against Eichmann, namely a history of the Final Solution in which he sought to exonerate Hitler which he himself had written while in Buenos Aires.
The first witness called was Police Inspector Less. He told how Eichmann had described preparations that had been made for gassing Jews and how civilians with pliers moved among Jews pulling gold-filled teeth. The next witness was the renowned historian Salo W Baron of Columbia University. He provided a “dizzying array of facts and figures” about European Jewish life that had been destroyed. Eichmann’s career as a Jewish “specialist” was then tracked through various witnesses. A procession of the further witnesses, including survivors, is then described in harrowing detail in the next 78 pages of this chapter (pp69147).
In Chapter Six, the author deals trenchantly with the comments and criticisms of Hannah Arendt, who she describes as “the product of a highly acculturated upper-class German Jewish family in which she claimed that the word ’Jew’ was never spoken”. Lipstadt contends that “One cannot and should not draw a direct line from Arendt’s view of the Eichmann trial to those who berate Jews for making too much of contemporary anti-Semitism”.
Lipstadt concludes the book by stating that the trial’s impact extends far beyond Eichmann “and his nefarious deeds”. The trial and the debate that followed “inaugurated a slow process whereby the topic of the Holocaust became a matter of concern not only to the Jewish community but to a larger and broader realm of people”. She recounts meeting a Rwandan survivor who told her that he wanted to tell his story so that people could listen to him and other survivors. Future generations who were not there must remember and those who were there must tell them about what happened.
There are detailed notes on each chapter of the book. The Chronology starts with the birth of Eichmann on 19 March 1906 in Solingen, Germany, and ends with a reference to the International Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, in which two Bosnian Serbs were found guilty of committing genocide in Srebrenica in 1995 and sentenced to life imprisonment.
In reading this riveting book, I could not help being struck by a contrast. This lay in the way Israel handled Eichmann as compared to how America dealt with Osama bin Laden. After capturing Eichmann, Israel transported him to Jerusalem. There, he stood trial from 11 April 1961 for some eight months, was found guilty and sentenced to death on 15 December 1961. An appeal was rejected by Israel’s High Court on 29 May 1962. He was executed at midnight at Ramle Prison on 31 May 1962. In the case of Bin Laden, American operatives (the Seals) captured him in Pakistan on 2 May 2011 and summarily executed him there. Surely Eichmann, who was indirectly responsible for the murder of six million European Jews was no less a criminal than Bin Laden who was indirectly guilty of the murder of 3 000 people in New York. Did Israel behave correctly by putting Eichmann on trial, finding him guilty, sentencing him to death and only then executing him rather than summarily executing him when he was captured as occurred in the case of bin Laden? I leave it to the reader to ponder the answer to this thorny question.
As pointed out on the dust jacket of the book, the trial “has become a touchstone for judicial proceedings throughout the world” and “offers a legal moral and political framework for coming to terms with unfathomable evil. Lipstadt infuses a gripping narrative with historical perspective and contemporary urgency”.
Franklin Foer, in his review of the book in the New York Times wrote:
Lipstadt has done a great service by untethering the [Eichman] trial from Hannah Arendt’s polarizing presence, recovering the event as a gripping legal drama, as well as a hinge moment in Israel’s history and in the world’s delayed awakening to the magnitude of the Holocaust … Her conclusions about Eichmann in Jerusalem are rendered calmly and with devastating fairness.
I cannot put the matter better.
The Eichmann Trial by Deborah E. Lipstadt, Schoken Nextbook. Schoken Books, 2011, 237pp
Judge Ralph Zulman is a former justice of the Appeal Court of South Africa and a senior office bearer of many years standing on the SA Jewish Board of Deputies. He is a frequent contributor to and long-serving member of the editorial board of Jewish Affairs.
