Criminal Case 40 61 The Trial Of Adolf Eichmann

In his coverage of the Eichmann Trial, Harry Mulisch offers a portrayal of the process, of the man, and of the implications of the efficiency of evil.

Includes, as an Appendix, a full text of the Indictment, translated from the Hebrew. The horror trial of the 20th century has been that of Adolf Eichmann, Obersturmbannführer of Germany’s death camps—the man who, between 1939-1945, in one way or another, caused the killing of six million men, women, and children. Out of mountains of courtroom evidence, both live and documentary, Pearlman renders a relevant, reliable account of the drama. The whole story is here: from the capture in Argentina, to the world-famed image of the twitching man in the glass-enclosed dock as he listened to the sagas of the ghetto fighters, the confrontation of the accused and witnesses who came back as if from the dead, the indictment enunciated by Hausner, and the defense arguments of Servatius. And lastly the words of Eichmann himself: “I received orders and I executed orders.” A gripping read.

Easy to read and scrupulously accurate.

The problem of prosecuting individuals complicit in the Nazi regime's "Final Solution" is almost insurmountably complex and has produced ever less satisfying results as time has passed. In Crimes of the Holocaust, Stephan Landsman provides detailed analysis of the International Military Tribunal prosecution at Nuremberg in 1945, the Eichmann trial in Israel in 1961, the 1986 Demanjuk trial in Israel, and the 1990 prosecution of Imre Finta in Canada. Landsman presents each case and elaborates the difficulties inherent in achieving both a fair trial and a measure of justice in the aftermath of heinous crimes. In the face of few historical and legal precedents for such war crime prosecutions, each legal action relies on the framework of its predecessors. However, this only compounds the problematic issues arising from the Nuremberg proceedings. Meticulously combing volumes of testimony and documentary information about each case, Landsman offers judicious and critical assessments of the proceedings. He levels pointed criticism at numerous elements of this relatively recent judicial invention, sparing neither judges nor counsel and remaining keenly aware of the human implications. Deftly weaving legal analysis with cultural context, Landsman offers the first rigorous examination of these problematic proceedings and proposes guideposts for contemporary tribunals. Crimes of the Holocaust is an authoritative account of the Gordian knot of genocide prosecution in the world courts, which will persist as a confounding issue as we are faced with a trial of Saddam Hussein. This volume will be compelling reading for legal scholars as well as laypersons interested in these cases and the issues they address.

***NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD FINALIST (2012)*** Part of the Jewish Encounter series The capture of SS Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Eichmann by Israeli agents in Argentina in May of 1960 and his subsequent trial in Jerusalem by an Israeli court electrified the world. The public debate it sparked on where, how, and by whom Nazi war criminals should be brought to justice, and the international media coverage of the trial itself, was a watershed moment in how the civilized world in general and Holocaust survivors in particular found the means to deal with the legacy of genocide on a scale that had never been seen before. Award-winning historian Deborah E. Lipstadt gives us an overview of the trial and analyzes the dramatic effect that the survivors’ courtroom testimony—which was itself not without controversy—had on a world that had until then regularly commemorated the Holocaust but never fully understood what the millions who died and the hundreds of thousands who managed to survive had actually experienced. As the world continues to confront the ongoing reality of genocide and ponder the fate of those who survive it, this trial of the century, which has become a touchstone for judicial proceedings throughout the world, 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.

The man-hunt for Eichmann lasted fifteen years, ending in 1960 when Israeli agents discovered him working for a water-supply company in Argentina. Since the Argentine Government would not agree to his extradition, Eichmann was abducted and taken under arrest to Israel. The Defence argued that the method of Eichmann's capture invalidated the judicial proceedings and further that the Court was incompetent to try a man for crimes committed against the Jewish people and contrary to the Jewish law, before the State of Israel had been created. Eichmann's trial is a two-fold drama : the detailed relation of the most catastrophic events in the last century, which resulted in the murder of six million Jews, and the tragedy of a man who thought obedience to an order exonerated him from the responsibility for unbelievable crimes.