The Eichmann Trial Reconsidered

The Eichmann Trial Reconsidered explores the legacy and consequences of the trial of Adolf Eichmann.

The Eichmann Trial Reconsidered brings together leading authorities in a transnational, international, and supranational study of Adolf Eichmann, who was captured by the Israelis in Argentina and tried in Jerusalem in 1961. The essays in this important new collection span the disciplines of history, film studies, political science, sociology, psychology, and law. Contributing scholars adopt a wide historical lens, pushing outwards in time and space to examine the historical and legal influence that Adolf Eichmann and his trial held for Israel, West Germany, and the Middle East. In addition to taking up the question of what drove Eichmann, contributors explore the motivation of prosecutors, lawyers, diplomats, and neighbouring countries before, during, and after the trial ended. The Eichmann Trial Reconsidered puts Eichmann at the centre of an exploration of German versus Israeli jurisprudence, national Israeli identities and politics, and the conflict between German, Israeli, and Arab states.

***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.

Cover -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Arendt in Jerusalem: The Eichmann Trial, the Banality of Evil, and the Meaning of Justice Fifty Years On -- 1 Judging the Past: The Eichmann Trial -- 2 Eichmann in Jerusalem: Conscience, Normality, and the "Rule of Narrative" -- 3 Banality, Again -- 4 Eichmann on the Stand: Self-Recognition and the Problem of Truth -- 5 Arendt's Conservatism and the Eichmann Judgment -- 6 Eichmann's Victims, Holocaust Historiography, and Victim Testimony -- 7 Truth and Judgment in Arendt's Writing -- 8 Arendt, German Law, and the Crime of Atrocity -- 9 Whose Trial? Adolf Eichmann's or Hannah Arendt's? The Eichmann Controversy Revisited -- Contributors -- Index

Examines four trials held in Israel in which government authorities sought to advance a political agenda through criminal prosecution. Far from being "show trials", these hearings greatly transformed popular consciousness in Israel and were instrumental in the democratization of Israeli society. Pp. 17-82 deal with the Kasztner trial (1954-58) and pp. 83-165 with the Eichmann trial (1960-62). The Kasztner trial, and particularly the final judgment of Justice Shimon Agranat of the Israeli Supreme Court, shattered the simplistic juxtaposition prevalent in Israeli consciousness of heroic resistance and the path of betrayal, in this case negotiation with the enemy. The Eichmann trial shattered this conception even more and for the first time gave voice to the victims of the Holocaust rather than to the resistants. Dwells on the criticism voiced by Hannah Arendt and Natan Alterman, who challenged the conceptions of the Kasztner and Eichmann trials respectively - Arendt in support of the resistance-betrayal dichotomy and Alterman against it. The other two trials discussed are those of the Israeli soldiers who perpetrated the Kufr Qassem massacre (1956) and of Yigal Amir who assassinated PM Yitzhak Rabin in 1995.

Über die NS-Prozesse in Osteuropa in den 1960er Jahren und den Stellenwert des Holocaust darin. Etwa 15 Jahre nach Kriegsende kam es in vielen Staaten des Ostblocks zu einer zweiten Welle von Gerichtsverfahren gegen NS-Verbrecher, die anderen Logiken folgte als die Prozesse unmittelbar nach Kriegsende. Auf dem Höhepunkt des Kalten Krieges in den 1960er Jahren verpflichteten die Prozesse einerseits zu einer Zusammenarbeit zwischen Ost und West, andererseits waren sie bestimmt durch die Abwehrhaltung gegenüber dem jeweiligen Gegner im Systemkonflikt. Innerhalb des Ostblocks sollte durch ein abgestimmtes Vorgehen auf der internationalen Bühne Einigkeit demonstriert werden, gleichzeitig führten nationale Interessen zu je eigenen Wegen in der Strafverfolgung. Die in diesem Band zusammengetragenen Aufsätze widmen sich der Geschichte der Strafprozesse zu nationalsozialistischen Verbrechen in Ungarn, der DDR, Polen, der Tschechoslowakei und der Sowjetunion nach der "Tauwetterphase" und fragen nach den Voraussetzungen und Eigenheiten dieser Verfahren. Welche Regeln galten für die Prozesse? Welche Ziele verfolgten sie? Und nicht zuletzt: Welchen Stellenwert hatte der Holocaust bei der Aufklärung der Verbrechen? Der Band erscheint vollständig in englischer Sprache. __________ On the Nazi trials in Eastern Europe in the 1960s and the place of the Holocaust in them. About 15 years after the end of the war, a second wave of trials against Nazi criminals occurred in many Eastern Bloc states, which followed a different logic than the ones immediately after the war. At the height of the Cold War in the 1960s, the trials on the one hand obliged cooperation between East and West, on the other hand they were determined by the defensive attitude towards the respective opponent in the system conflict. Within the Eastern bloc, unity was to be demonstrated through a coordinated approach on the international stage, while at the same time national interests led to their own paths in criminal prosecution. The essays collected in this volume are devoted to the history of criminal trials on National Socialist crimes in Hungary, the GDR, Poland, Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union after the "thaw" and ask about the preconditions and peculiarities of these proceedings. What rules applied to the trials? What goals did they pursue? And last but not least: What significance did the Holocaust have in the clarification of the crimes?

Rethinking the concepts of "witnessing" and "witness" is highly relevant to the study of war crimes, mass murder and genocide. Through multiple readings, the volume shows the meanings and functions of witnessing in a political and historical context marked by the emergence of multiculturalism. The ultimate goal is the exploration of divergent and intersectional positions of the witness and witnessing as both concrete and hermeneutical categories. As a result, the mechanisms of social, political, and psychological oppression, murder and genocide will become tangible and understandable with greater precision and finesse.

This book draws on a range of key archives and oral testimonies to provide the first systematic and historical study of the origins, context, development, frustrations, inner contradictions, and legacies of the Columbus Centre. The Columbus Centre, a remarkable though largely forgotten research institute, was established at the University of Sussex in 1966, triggered by claims of a dearth of academic research about Nazism and the Holocaust. Its basic stated aim was to bring together psychoanalysis and history for a scholarly investigation of discrimination, mass violence, and the preconditions of genocide in the past and the present. The Nazi crimes were studied along with other instances of prejudice and mass violence, such as sixteenth- and seventeenth-century witch-hunts, South African apartheid, the persecution of the Roma people, and race relations in the United States and modern-day Britain. The book seeks to place the Columbus Centre in the historiography of mass violence by analysing the Centre’s works through four historiographical prisms or power relations in which they were produced: psychoanalysis, class, race, and gender. This interdisciplinary volume is a valuable text for scholars and students of historiography, psychoanalysis, genocide and violence, and postwar Europe, and for professionals within the field of psychology.