Get Eichmann – Israel’s Hunt For A Nazi War Criminal - Part 3

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Hello and welcome to Conflicted, the history podcast where we talk about the struggles that shaped us, the tough questions that they pose, and why we should care about any of it.

Conflicted is a member of the Evergreen Podcasts Network; and as always, I’m your host, Zach Cornwell.

You are listening to the third and final installment of a three-part series on the pursuit, capture and trial of the Nazi war criminal, Adolf Eichmann.

If you haven’t listened to the previous episodes, I’d definitely recommend you do that before jumping into this one. But hey, if you prefer a more non-linear listening experience, you do you. That said, since it has been a few weeks since the last time we met up, I’d like to quickly recap the important beats of Part 2, so we can proceed confidently into this final stage/stretch of the story.

Last episode, we spent most of our time in Buenos Aires, following the Mossad capture team as they attempted to track down Adolf Eichmann, confirm his identity, abduct him, interrogate him, and extract him cleanly from Argentina.

Our main human viewpoint to the various ups and downs of this endeavor was an agent named Zvi Aharoni. Now most retellings of the Eichmann story – including the 2018 film Operation Finale - tend to focus on the memories of the agent who physically grabbed Eichmann from Garibaldi Street, the strongman and disguise expert, Peter Malkin. Malkin’s recollections are undoubtedly fascinating, but for the purposes of this series, I personally found Aharoni’s account a little more grounded and economical.

Because /In contrast to Peter Malkin, Zvi Aharoni was involved in virtually every stage of the operation from beginning to end. It was Aharoni who tracked Eichmann to Garibaldi Street and confirmed that he and “Ricardo Klement” were the same man. It was Aharoni who drove the getaway car on the night of the grab. And it was Aharoni who interrogated Eichmann in the Mossad safehouse and escorted him to the airport for the flight back to Israel.

After a heavily sedated Eichmann and his captors boarded the El Al plane to Tel Aviv, the rest of the Mossad team went to work cleaning up all traces of the operation. As Peter Malkin recalled: “Half a dozen cars had to be returned, the house put in order, hiding spaces dismantled, blankets removed from windows, and nail holes filled in. It took the five of us the better part of a day.”

Once Buenos Aires had been scrubbed of their operational footprint, the remaining Mossad agents quietly slipped out of Argentina by plane or train and returned to Israel along zig-zagging European routes. By June of 1960, everyone was home safe and sound. The Director of Mossad, Isser Harel, could breathe easy knowing that none of his agents had been caught, captured, or injured in any way. Aside from a few cases of jet lag, they were none the worse for wear.   Additionally, no Argentinian civilians or police had been hurt in the process. By all objective measures, the operation was a massive success.

But if Israel was expecting a round of applause from the international community for its abduction of Adolf Eichmann, they were sorely disappointed.

In this third and final episode of the story, we’re going to examine the political fallout from Mossad’s operation, which provoked condemnation across the world for its flagrant breach of Argentinian sovereignty. No one was shedding tears over a man like Eichmann, but such a brazen penetration of another’s country’s borders did not sit well with the big boys at the global lunch table, namely the United States of America. 

As the global outrage flared, the Israeli government thumbed its nose and turned its attention to organizing a trial for Adolf Eichmann. Charges were filed, a court date was set, and journalists from all over the world flocked like starlings to Jerusalem to cover what many

started calling the ‘trial of the century’.

If you recall, this story started in a courtroom; and in a fitting bit of symmetry, it ends in one too. So with that quick preamble out of the way, let’s jump back in and land this bird properly.

Welcome to Get Eichmann – Israel’s Hunt For a Nazi War Criminal – Part 3.

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THE LAWYER

It’s May 23^rd, 1960.

Less than 48 hours after Mossad put Adolf Eichmann on a plane to Israel.

We’re in the West German city of Cologne, at a table for two in a crowded restaurant. It’s about 1 o’clock in the afternoon – lunchtime – and the waiters are zipping between the tables like cars on the autobahn.

The air is thick with conversation, laughter, and the rich aromas of freshly-prepared food. Back in the kitchen, the line cooks are chopping and dicing and mincing. Onions sizzle in the pan and stews bubble in the pots. Just 15 years earlier, in the immediate aftermath of World War 2, West Germany’s idea of a decent meal was a hunk of stale bread and a cube of SPAM. But now, in the midst of a post-war economic boom, those days of apocalyptic scarcity are a distant memory.

From the kitchen, the waiters carry forth bowls of thick soup, bloody cuts of meat, and tall glasses of ice-cold beer, dripping with condensation. But amidst the symphony of smells, there is one sour note floating in the air. Eyes crinkle and noses wrinkle at the thick cloud of cigar smoke billowing from a small table in the back of the restaurant.

Sitting alone at this table, across from an empty chair, Attorney General Fritz Bauer gnaws anxiously at his cigar. To the consternation of the waiters circling him like vultures, Bauer’s menu remains folded, his wine glass untouched. Today, he has no appetite. Frankly, he is too nervous to eat. Looking down at indifferent face of his watch, Bauer’s frustration intensifies.

The chair across from him is empty. But it is not supposed to be empty. The contact from Mossad was supposed to meet him here, at 1 o’clock sharp and deliver an update on the status of the Eichmann Operation. And yet, the Mossad man is not here. For a precise, punctual mind like Fritz Bauer’s, that does not bode well.

It has been six months since Bauer sat across from Isser Harel in Tel Aviv and listened to the Mossad Chief’s promise to capture Adolf Eichmann. It’s been three months since Bauer handed over all of his files, every piece of documentation he had on Eichmann, to Harel’s agents. And it’s been two weeks since he’s heard anything at all. The last communication he received from Israel came on May 10^th, from the nation’s attorney general, Haim Cohen.

“I assure you this matter is being attended to intensely,” Cohen told him via telegram, “We expect to be able to report exact details shortly. Until then, we, and that includes you, have to be patient, and in the interest of the matter, I implore you to calmly wait for further information.”

The more time slipped by, the more nervous Bauer became. Maybe the operation had failed. Maybe the Mossad team been recalled, thwarted - or, god forbid – apprehended. If Harel’s agents were currently scratching marks into the walls of an Argentinian prison, how long would it be before they divulged where their information on Eichmann had come from? What would happen if Bauer’s name was exposed? But worse than any of that, what if Eichmann had escaped or disappeared? The thought of the SS officer vanishing forever coiled in Bauer’s stomach like a 3-foot centipede.

But then, on May 21^st, Bauer got a call from an Israeli contact in Cologne. “Meet me at a restaurant in the center of the city,” the contact said, “I may have some exciting news to share. 1 o’clock. Don’t be late.”

And wouldn’t you know it, Bauer thinks, as he sits alone at the table: Harel’s man is late. Of course he is. Typical. Five minutes go by. Then ten, then twenty, then thirty. Clearly something has changed; clearly, something is wrong. And just as Bauer begins steeling himself for a crushing disappointment – and a possible career change - a man bursts into the restaurant and makes a bee-line for the Attorney General’s table. His clothes are smeared with black grease, his face is red and sweaty. The Mossad man squeezes past the waiters and plops down into the chair across from Bauer.

He apologizes for being late. “Flat tire, you see.” He points to the grease on his shirt. “Had to change it.” Then, the Mossad agent’s face breaks into a huge, boyish grin. “We got him, Mr. Bauer. As of 7am this morning, Tel Aviv time, Adolf Eichmann is safely in custody and on Israeli soil.”

To the Mossad man’s complete shock, the 57-year-old attorney general leaps out of his chair, seizes him by the lapels, and plants a kiss on both his cheeks. To the other patrons at the restaurant, Bauer might’ve been a father embracing a wayward son, returned safe from some deadly war. When Fritz Bauer draws back his face, there are tears swimming in the old lawyer’s eyes. 

The Mossad man smiles. ““Director Harel wanted you to be the first person outside of Israel to know.”

And what happens now? Bauer was quick to ask. The Mossad man checks his watch.

“We’re announcing it in two hours.”

THE KNESSET

>>> 

2600 miles to the southeast, across the waves of the Mediterranean Sea, hundreds of Israelis began to crowd and cram into a small, three-story building in the center of Jerusalem.

In the modern day, this building is a museum – where visitors can purchase Ben-Gurion bobbleheads or socks with the face of Golda Meir – but in the summer of 1960, it was the home of the Knesset – the Israeli Parliament. On a normal day, the assembly’s 120 representatives shuffled into the cloistered hall, took their seats, and debated this motion or that motion – an infant democracy taking its first uncertain steps.

But May 23rd, 1960 was not a normal day.

That morning, the country’s Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, informed the press and the Knesset that he was going to make a very special announcement in parliament that day. The white-haired, 74-year-old Ben-Gurion had a flare for the dramatic, and the nation was very anxious to hear what their septuagenarian statesman had to say. By that afternoon, around the same time Fritz Bauer was getting his bill at the restaurant in Cologne, the Knesset building in Jerusalem was swarming with journalists, spectators, and curious onlookers.

When the clock struck 4pm, Ben-Gurion stood up from his seat and approached the microphone at the center of the hall. As Neal Bascomb writes:

Then Ben-Gurion stood at the podium, and the chamber hushed. In a solemn voice cracking with emotion, he announced, “I have to inform the Knesset that a short time ago one of the most notorious Nazi war criminals, Adolf Eichmann—who was responsible, together with the Nazi leaders, for what they called the ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question,’ that is, the extermination of six million of the Jews of Europe—was discovered by the Israeli Security Services. Adolf Eichmann is already under arrest in Israel and will shortly be placed on trial in Israel under the terms of the law for the trial of Nazis and their helpers.”

It only took 62 words in Hebrew, but the effect of Ben-Gurion’s announcement was seismic. In the Knesset, at the epicenter of the blast, the mood was almost incredulous. According to one journalist who witnessed the speech:

“When they had recovered from the staggering blow, a wave of agitation engulfed the hearers, agitation so deep, that its likes had never before been known in the Knesset.”

The Mossad agent Zvi Aharoni, watching from the gallery, had a similar recollection of the moment:

“There was a breathless silence in the chamber. I could not believe it; I was surprised and disappointed. What had I expected? Pandemonium? Thunderous applause? An ear-splitting scream from the delegates? It was obviously taking some time for the unexpected news to penetrate people’s heads. I recall individual shouts of surprise. Two or three reporters ran to the telephones.”

The shock of Ben-Gurion’s announcement soon gave way to rapturous celebration. As Peter Malkin, the Mossad strongman, remembered:

“The reaction to the capture had far exceeded even my wildest imaginings; there was nothing less than an explosion of national pride. It dominated the headlines, the airwaves, casual conversations. Flags and banners were everywhere. We had struck back! ran the unspoken theme. For the first time since the days of the Old Testament, we had risen in righteous fury!”

Standing in the shadows of the gallery in the Knesset during Ben-Gurion’s proclamation, Mossad Chief Isser Harel and his star interrogator Zvi Aharoni exchanged a knowing, private glance.

Their names would not appear in any headlines; they would not sit for any magazine features or television interviews; but they could partake in the silent satisfaction of knowing that the biggest piece of news in the world was the direct result of their actions. The Eichmann job was over, but Mossad’s work was never done. There were, after all, so many other enemies to capture or kill or neutralize. Many of them significantly closer to home. And so, like smoke from a gunshot, the Mossad men dissolved/dispersed into the afternoon air.

CONTROVERSY

The reaction to Adolf Eichmann’s capture in Israel was predictably ecstatic, but across the rest of the world, in places like Washington and Moscow and London and especially Buenos Aires, the discourse was less congratulatory. Fifteen years Eichmann had been missing, and yet now, all of a sudden, he was being displayed in chains in the shiny-new homeland of his victims, conjured up as if by magic. It boggled the mind, beggared belief. As Peter Malkin described:

“The capture provoked an even more intense diplomatic fire storm than we had anticipated. The initial Israeli stance that, as a matter of national security, no details about the case would be made public had set off an astonishing round of speculation.

Press reports had the operation taking place everywhere from Germany to Kuwait. One Viennese paper reported that Eichmann had been brought to Israel on a submarine; a Cairo daily had information that he had been located by Communists in Iraq. The vaunted New York Times noted that “one of his many mistresses is reported to have put Israeli agents on his trail.”

However, within seventy-two hours of Ben-Gurion’s appearance before the Knesset, an Argentine afternoon daily, acting on sources within the Argentine government and military who had been aware of Eichmann’s presence in the country, authoritatively announced that he had been abducted in Buenos Aires.”

After years of rumors and conventional wisdom that Eichmann was hiding somewhere in the Middle East, the revelation that he’d been in South America the whole time came as quite a shock. Not a shock to everyone, though. There were some people who were not surprised at all by Eichmann’s true whereabouts. 

>> 

In Langley, Virginia, at the pristine offices of the CIA, starch-collared bureaucrats blanched at the news. The CIA had known since 1958 that Eichmann was hiding in Argentina, and they preferred that he stayed there, quiet and undiscovered and unproblematic. Adolf Eichmann knew things, you see, things that could compromise and embarrass certain important people in West Germany, America’s bulwark against the Soviet bloc. The CIA wanted the ghosts of the Holocaust to stay dead and buried, and Mossad had just upturned the soil. In the weeks that followed Ben-Gurion’s announcement, the phone lines between West Germany and Washington were clogged thick as drainage pipes. Nervous voices were asking other nervous voices just how much Eichmann knew, and about whom.

But the reaction to Eichmann’s capture burned hottest in Buenos Aires.

On the night of May 11^th, 1960, Ricardo Klement had never come home. Adolf’s wife, Vera, had panicked. She called the boys – Nick and Dieter. Eichmann’s sons searched the property at Garibaldi Street and found a smashed pair of glasses – their father’s glasses. The implication was obvious. He had been taken, by Jews most likely. Desperate to find their father, the Eichmann boys knocked on the doors of the men they had grown up with, the former SS officers and right-wing luminaries that populated German social circles in Buenos Aires. Sympathetic to their plight, the former Nazis had rallied the troops and sent out gangs across the city. But after days of searching, they came up empty-handed. Ricardo Klement was gone, and the men who had taken him were long gone too.

But that didn’t mean that others could not be punished. As one historian wrote:

“In Argentina, right-wing and fascist groups beat Jews, killed several, and threw improvised bombs at Jewish consulates, shops, and other buildings. The last known victim of these crimes was the Argentinian daughter of the owner of the safe house where the Mossad held Eichmann. […] Fascist thugs kidnapped Graciela Narcisa Sirota, then just 19 years old, after which they raped her, tortured her viciously, and branded her breasts with swastikas before tossing her, alive but in great pain, onto the street near the safe house.”

The Argentinian government’s official response was less violent, but certainly incendiary. As Deborah Lipstadt explains:

Argentina played the aggrieved party and demanded details. Israel responded with what has been described as one of the more undiplomatic notes in diplomatic history.

Mixing half-truths with fiction, it asserted that “volunteers” who happened to be Israelis had “established contact” with Eichmann and inquired whether he would come to Israel for trial. After he “spontaneously” agreed, they brought him to Israel and turned him over to the authorities. Israel had been “ignorant” of these details until Argentina demanded an explanation and an investigation was conducted. The nine-hundred-word note—a tome by diplomatic standards—also took a swipe at Argentina by observing that it was home to “numerous Nazis.”

Foreign diplomats dismissed the explanation as “flagrantly unbelievable.” Even the Israeli ambassador to Argentina described it as “bobe meises” (fiction). The far-fetched story and the reference to “many Nazis” intensified Argentina’s anger.

In response to Israel’s breach of its national sovereignty, the Argentinian government expelled the Israeli ambassador from Buenos Aires and demanded Eichmann’s immediate return, as well the swift prosecution of the individuals responsible for his abduction. The cherry on top of this diplomatic fusillade was an official resolution submitted to the UN Security Council, in which Argentina accused Israel of “creating an atmosphere of insecurity and mistrust incompatible with the preservation of international laws.” The resolution passed 8-0, with only the Soviet Union abstaining.

As the summer of 1960 dragged on, the diplomatic temperature continued to rise. Israel’s capture of Eichmann sparked a blistering international debate. Every column and op-ed from Spokane to Saigon spilled tears of ink over the agonizing ethics of it all.  As one Israeli journalist reflected:

“The world … did not think like we did.… What appears to us to be ‘historic justice’ looks to others like a semi-pathological legacy of a traumatic experience.”

Some newspapers lauded the Israelis, of course, believing that the capture of Eichmann was fundamentally a good thing, and that concerns about violations of international law were just pedantic handwringing. Others argued that this kind of vigilante justice undermined the very system of accountability that Israel was trying to establish. It was “jungle law”, complained The Washington Post in one editorial; and yet, a few weeks later, the Post wrote that Israel’s actions were the result of a “mighty spiritual yearning for some measure of redress.”

Other newspapers were less conflicted on the matter. The New York Times called the Eichmann operation not only “illegal” but “immoral”. The Christian Science Monitor opined that it was the result of the Jews “refusal to forgive”, or in the service of “advancement of Communist aims”. TIME magazine wrote that a Jewish reprisal against an Austrian war criminal living in Argentina was “inverse racism”.

And not to be left out of the fray, the Catholic Church, which had helped facilitate Eichmann’s escape to Argentina in the first place, also felt the need to weigh in. As the Argentinian Cardinal Antonio Caggiano told the press:

‘He came to our fatherland seeking forgiveness and oblivion. It doesn’t matter what his name is, Riccardo Klement or Adolf Eichmann, our obligation as Christians is to forgive him for what he’s done.’

>> 

Even Jewish organizations did not spare Israel from critique. The American Jewish Committee – an advocacy group based in the US - privately reached out to Israeli and made some polite suggestions about the impending trial. The AJC did not object to Israel’s right to capture Eichmann, but they did object to his trial being held in Israel. As Deborah Lipstadt writes:

“Though they (the AJC) did not doubt that Eichmann would get a fair trial, they feared that an Israeli trial would obscure the fact that Nazism was the enemy of mankind, and that Eichmann had committed “unspeakable crimes against humanity, not only against Jews.”

Echoing some of the very same arguments that Adolf Eichmann had made to Zvi Aharoni during his interrogation in Buenos Aires, the AJC insisted that the trial should be held in Germany, where the crimes had actually taken place. Or better yet, they suggested, let’s create an international tribunal, just like we did at Nuremberg in 1946. Surely that would satisfy all parties involved? After all, punishing an Austrian war criminal in Israel for crimes he committed against European Jews on behalf of Germany…would be like prosecuting an American thief in a South Korean court for robbing a Korean grocery store in Brooklyn. It didn’t make any sense. What right do you have, they were asking, to speak and act on behalf of all Jewish people everywhere?

Transporting an Austrian war criminal to Israel from Argentina to answer for crimes he committed in Germany against European Jews, would be like ….

As one writer put it:

“Israel claimed jurisdiction for a crime that had taken place on a different continent, before the state had been established, by a murderer nabbed from yet a third country.”

The Israeli Prime Minister Ben-Gurion did not agree with this perspective / see it that way. In fact, he viewed any criticism from fellow Jews as a kind of betrayal or an act of disloyalty, and he was quick to lash out at his American brethren; As he told the New York Times:

“Now I see it argued, by Jews among others, that Israel is legally entitled to try Eichmann but ethically should not do so because Eichmann’s crime, in its enormity, was against humanity and the conscience of humanity rather than against Jews as such. Only a Jew with an inferiority complex could say that.”

 “The Jewish state is the heir of the six million murdered,” he later wrote, “the only heir.”

Ben-Gurion intensified his statements in another forum:

“[…]The Judaism of Jews of the United States is losing all meaning and only a blind man can fail to see the day of its extinction.” Jews living outside of Israel face “the kiss of death and the slow … decline into the abyss of assimilation.” All Jews belong in Israel.”

But questions of “Jewish-ness” aside, the most common critique of Israel’s capture of Adolf Eichmann boiled down to the fact that they had infiltrated another country illegally to get him. But for Israeli leaders, those arguments didn’t hold much water, and they countered fiercely.

Illegal, you say? Adolf Eichmann’s escape from Europe was illegal. His forged passport and aliases were illegal. His entire existence is illegal. Why then, should his exit from Argentina be held to a different standard? In what reality could this have been achieved by ‘legal’ means? You all seem to be forgetting…We could’ve just killed him. We could’ve stabbed him or strangled him or injected him with poison. We could’ve crashed his car or bombed his house or put a bullet in his bald head on Garibaldi Street. But we didn’t.

We brought him back here, to Israel, so that the last few months of his miserable existence could serve as a reminder to what the world is fast forgetting. To what Israelis themselves are forgetting. You need a reason why we can do this? We have six million reasons why we can do this. The Americans and the Argentinians and the West Germans might be content to launder old Nazis into respectable positions; but here in Israel we do not employ Nazis, we hang them.

As Peter Malkin wrote:

“Notice had been served that no ex-Nazi was safe anywhere around the world. Now, fifteen years after the war, they cringed in fear of us.”

Well, despite all the diplomatic histrionics in the summer of 1960, one thing became abundantly clear: Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem would be one of the most high-profile and closely watched legal proceedings in history, and the pressure on Israel to prosecute him fairly would be extremely high. As Deborah Lipstadt writes:

“Given the extensive critique of its actions, Israel had to demonstrate that it could guarantee Eichmann a fair hearing.”

Like the Nuremberg prosecutors before them, they had to do this thing by the book, or else risk undermining their entire objective. 

The cornerstone of any fair trial of course, is the right to competent counsel. Despite all he had done, Eichmann deserved to be represented by a reputable lawyer who could articulate his defense in court – and at least give the appearance of a fair proceeding. But who in the world would ever agree to risk life, limb and reputation to represent Adolf Eichmann on the world stage? Who would agree to defend the indefensible?

Well, the courtroom, like nature, abhors a vacuum. And in the summer of 1960, a telephone rang in West Germany.

---- MUSIC BREAK ------

It’s October 9^th, 1960.

Five months after Adolf Eichmann was captured and brought to Israel.

We’re about 30 minutes outside of Haifa, a large port city on the Israeli coast. And here, rising above the hills and olive trees, carved like a black notch into the horizon, is a large prison complex. An old colonial fortress from the days of the British Mandate, now converted into a jail for the enemies of Israel, foreign and domestic alike. With its high walls, large observation towers, and reinforced concrete, this is the type of building that does not cater to curious visitors.

And yet, today, the prison complex does have a visitor.

In a swirl of dust and a rustle of gravel, a police car peels away from the gate, leaving its passenger to stand alone on the doorstep of this imposing prison. Sweating through his West German suit, yanking at his necktie to loosen its grip, Dr. Robert Servatius knocks on the door to the prison.

Dr. Servatius – that’s S-E-R-V-A-T-I-U-S – is an attorney. A defense attorney, to be specific. Not a very successful or prolific defense attorney. But when you’re accused murdering six million people, beggars can’t be choosers. Dr. Servatius is here today to meet for the first time with his new client, the world-famous war criminal Adolf Eichmann.

The doors to the prison shriek on their hinges and swing open like a maw, welcoming the 65-year-old lawyer inside. Escorted by sober-faced guards with pistols on their hips, Servatius is led deep into the labyrinthine prison complex. Normally, this fortress would be fully occupied – home to dozens and dozens of prisoners, if not more. But over the past several months, the prison has been emptied of its clientele to minimize the risks to its newest guest. In this massive panopticon, there is only one prisoner; and his name is Adolf Eichmann.

As he follows the guards toward Eichmann’s cell at the heart of the prison, Dr. Servatius grips his briefcase a little tighter. He shouldn’t be nervous, of course. He has no reason to be nervous. Eichmann, after all, is not the first Nazi war criminal he has defended in court. In fact, the SS Obersturmbannfuhrer will be his fourthclient to wear/sport the swastika armband.

Fifteen years earlier, at the famous Nuremberg Trials, Dr. Robert Servatius had served as defense counsel for Fritz Sauckel, the Third Reich’s primary organizer of slave labor. Servatius was a competent enough lawyer, but his honeyed words weren’t enough to save Sauckel from the noose. In the months that followed, Servatius also represented the SS physician Karl Brandt and the corporate profiteer Paul Pleiger. But yet again, Servatius failed to save his clients; Brandt got the rope, and Pleiger got 15 years in prison – although he only served two under West Germany’s lenient parole system.

What kind of person, you might wonder, willing agrees to represent Nazis in court? Who volunteers for that kind of hopeless legal battle?

Well, Dr. Robert Servatius was a German who possessed that all-important and remarkably rare qualification: He had never joined the Nazi party. During the glory days of the Third Reich, something about Hitler and his stiff-armed acolytes didn’t sit right with Servatius, so he avoided throwing his lot in with the National Socialists. He did, however, serve in the Wehrmacht (the German Army) as a Major in World War II. And when the war ended, Servatius  dusted off his law degree and offered to legally represent the Nazis at Nuremberg. When a reporter from the New York Times asked why, he responded:

"I went to Nuremberg because the situation interested me, and secondly because I thought I might contribute to seeing justice done.”

Well, the trials resulted in a different sort of justice than he had in mind. As the ropes stretched tight at Nuremberg, Servatius probably thought he was done defending Nazis for the foreseeable future.

But 15 years later, in the summer of 1960, he received a call from a Mr. Robert Eichmann, half-brother to the world-famous Adolf Eichmann. The Eichmann family was wondering if Dr. Servatius, with his specialty and experience in these kinds of cases, might be willing to represent Adolf at the forthcoming trial in Jerusalem? Dr. Servatius, who had a weakness for hopeless, high-profile cases, agreed.

For the Israeli authorities, Dr. Servatius was a satisfactory choice. Finding Eichmann a lawyer had been very difficult, and the West German attorney solved a number of procedural problems. As Deborah Lipstadt writes:

“Unless Eichmann had good legal representation, Israel could not affirm that this trial was just. Yet could an Israeli defend a man who had a distinct role in the murder of millions of his fellow Jews? Many Israeli lawyers thought they could not. It would be wrong, one Israeli observed, to appoint an attorney who preferred to be prosecutor. But some Israeli lawyers, in the interests of ensuring that the accused received a fair hearing, volunteered to take the task. Officials at the Ministry of Justice feared that Israeli lawyers who defended Eichmann would be placing themselves in danger. Israeli officials worried that someone, particularly a person who had lost family members, might find it exceptionally difficult to differentiate between the accused and the person defending him. Foreign lawyers also volunteered. Most, however, were either neo-Nazis, incompetent, or both.”

Thankfully for Eichmann, Robert Servatius was neither incompetent nor a Nazi. There was, however, the matter of payment. As Lipstadt continues:

“The Eichmann family claimed it could not afford Servatius’s fee, which was the equivalent of thirty thousand dollars. Generally West Germany paid the defense costs of its citizens who were tried for war crimes in foreign courts. This time it refused, ostensibly because Eichmann had fled Germany and hidden from prosecution. By so doing, Germany reasoned, he had renounced his right to call upon the country for assistance. In all likelihood, it also refused because it was anxious to keep this defendant at the longest arm’s length possible. A German subvention of Eichmann’s legal costs might have suggested that his homeland supported him. Facing an impasse, Israel agreed to pay Servatius’s fees.”

On October 9^th, 1960, Servatius arrived in Israel to meet his client face-to-face. As the prison guards led the lawyer to Eichmann’s cell, Servatius knew that he would not be dealing with an ideal client. Conventional wisdom dictates that when you are accused of a crime and apprehended by the police, it’s best to keep your mouth shut and wait for your lawyer. But unfortunately for Servatius,  / But to Servatius’s dismay, But to Servatius’ chagrin, Adolf Eichmann had been doing a lot of talking since he was captured.

In May of 1960, about a week after he was brought to Israel, the Israeli police had begun interrogating Eichmann. To their surprise, the former Lieutenant Colonel was extremely cooperative. Perhaps hoping to delay the inevitable or shift the blame, Eichmann was a fountain of words and information – much of it rambling and self-contradictory. As Bascomb writes:

Eichmann never believed that he would be given a trial. He expected that the Israelis would deliver the kind of justice that he remembered from his days in the Gestapo. In the second week of June, a guard interrupted the interrogation, explaining that he was to bring Eichmann to see the judge. As they blindfolded him, Eichmann staggered, his knees giving way, and he cried out to Less, “But, Captain! I haven’t told you everything yet!”

In short, Eichmann was a cop’s wet dream and a defense attorney’s worst nightmare. By the time Robert Servatius arrived at his client’s cell in early October, Eichmann had submitted to 410 hours of police interrogation. He had confided and divulged; lied and self-incriminated. And now, Dr. Servatius had to somehow pick up the pieces and salvage a cohesive defense strategy from this human trainwreck. As Jack Fairweather writes:

“After being mobbed by reporters at the airport, Servatius had been whisked away by the police to his hotel and then to Eichmann’s secret hilltop location. He’d been searched and brought into a large room divided by a glass wall with a telephone fixed to each side. Eichmann stood opposite him in light-colored trousers and a white shirt. Servatius held up a note, warning his client to be careful in what he said as the room was probably bugged.”

As he spoke to his client, it was plain to Servatius that Eichmann’s accommodations were not lavish. The former Nazi was held under a level of security that would’ve made Hannibal Lecter cry overkill. According to Deborah Lipstadt:

“Elaborate arrangements had been made to prevent Eichmann from harming himself, and others from harming him. One guard was assigned to watch him. Another guard watched the first guard, and a third watched the second. For added security, none of the guards had lost relatives in the Holocaust or even spoke German.”

Eichmann was not allowed to wear a belt or shoelaces, lest he try to hang himself. He was only allowed to shave with an electric trimmer, in case he tried to cut his wrists. The reason for all the precaution was obvious, according to the Israeli police:

"Mussolini (the Italian dictator) was liberated from a mountain prison that was impenetrable. At the Nuremberg Nazi trials, a journalist gave [Hermann] Göring a cyanide poison capsule hours before he was to be hanged. We don't want a dead Eichmann. We certainly don't want to give anyone the idea that Eichmann can somehow be snatched from our hands." 

Yes, by hook or by crook, Adolf Eichmann was going to trial. He was going to face a judge, witnesses, and in all probability, an executioner. And that is why, Dr. Servatius explained to his client, we need a good defense strategy. What we need to do is shift the perception and sand down your sharp edges. But to do that, Mr. Eichmann, I need you to be absolutely honest with me, at all times. About what you’ve done, what you’ve said, and what they can prove you’ve done and said. Do you understand?

On the other side of the glass partition, Eichmann nodded with a soldier’s obedience. / that he did.  

Many firsthand accounts from this period of the case tend to dwell on how, frankly, pathetic Eichmann looked in captivity. Stripped of his freedom and finery, withered by age and confinement, the former Lieutenant Colonel did not look like someone who had sent millions of people to their death, who had snipped bloodlines and cauterized generations. The police interrogator, Captain Avner Less, recalled that Eichmann was:

“thin, and balding, he looked utterly ordinary – not the sort of Nazi type you see in the movies: tall, blond, with piercing blue eyes and brutal features and … domineering arrogance.”

Eichmann may have failed to impress his captors, but he was not an idiot.

He knew that in a trial, optics are everything. The world would be expecting to see a proud, straight-backed SS officer, an unrepentant caricature of the evil they had come to associate with Nazi Germany. Eichmann would give them something entirely different, he would undermine their expectations and present himself as feckless cog in an immense machine. A pitiful bookkeeper who’d just been following orders from above, swept up in a thing he did not fully comprehend. He was just a loyal, unimaginative man who dealt in charts and tables and abstract paperwork, not gas chambers and ovens and barbed wire enclosures. As he wrote in his prison diary, with the knowledge that the police would read it, and that it was admissible as evidence:

“From my earliest childhood, obedience was something I could not get out of my system. I was an obedient boy. It was unthinkable that I would not follow orders. Looking back now, I realize that a life of obedience is a very comfortable life indeed. It reduces your need to think. I was not the master planner, I was not the initiator, I did not give orders. I will defend myself against these accusations.”

Historian Bettina Stangneth elaborates on this camouflage tactic:

By the time Eichmann unexpectedly found himself imprisoned by his archenemy, he had already decided which of the images of himself that were in circulation would be the most useful for his defense. He gave them the Cautious Bureaucrat; In this role, he was able to unite two things that he hoped might save him from the gallows: exclusive knowledge about the murder of the Jews, and his own innocence. He might even gain some room for putting across his personal insights. “I knew it, and yet I could not change anything.”5 The renowned specialist on “Jewish questions,” the interministerial coordinator of the extermination project, the man who celebrated its implementation with his superiors over a glass of cognac by the fire, transformed himself into a helpless minute taker with no power of his own. Even at the Wannsee Conference, he claimed to have been “sharpening pencils at the side table.”

But while Eichmann’s defense strategy was certainly creative, it was not very original. According to Jack Fairweather:

The defense Eichmann offered was the same used by almost every Nazi since Nuremberg: While he personally regretted the killings, he felt duty-bound to carry out his “harsh orders” because they had been mandated for “political reasons” by the Nazi leadership.”

Eichmann’s lawyer, Dr. Servatius, agreed with this strategy. Mainly because…it was the only strategy. The documentary evidence against Eichmann was overwhelming, damning and airtight. For the prosecution, this thing was going to be a layup – a simple formality before they cracked his neck on the gallows. Eichmann’s only hope was to cast a reasonable doubt on that evidence, to muddy the waters, confuse the conversation, and shift blame onto people who were dead and gone.

On the way back to his hotel in Haifa, sitting in the passenger seat of a police escort car, Robert Servatius felt relatively confident that they had a workable defense strategy. He could not save Eichmann from global condemnation. He couldn’t save him from a life in prison or a legacy of loathing, but maybe, if he did his job well, he could save him from a death sentence.

But what Servatius did not know, is that his client had not told him everything. Eichmann was holding something back. Something he had done in Argentina years ago; a grave mistake that would come back to haunt him and seal his fate.

LIFE AND DEATH

5700 miles away, beyond the beaches of Haifa and across the Atlantic Ocean, a different sort of drama was unfolding at the headquarters of LIFE magazine in Manhattan.

Occupying 15 floors of a midtown skyscraper, LIFE Magazine was a journalistic juggernaut known for its incisive reporting, wide-ranging social commentary, and colorful, dynamic photography. These days, LIFE magazine is long defunct - a distant memory of a simpler, more innocent media ecosystem; but back in the 50s and 60s– LIFE was huge, with tens of millions of readers all over the world.

And in 1960, the writers and editors and photographers in the Manhattan office had their hands full. There was, after all, so much going on in the world. So much to report on.

In July, John F. Kennedy accepted the Democratic nomination for President, vying against his Republican adversary, Richard Nixon. In the realm of foreign affairs, the Belgian Congo was gaining its independence after almost a century of colonial rule; and on the island of Cuba, Fidel Castro’s revolutionary government was beginning to send shivers up the spines of the CIA. And then there was entertainment – authors, music and movie stars. In 1960, the perfect cheekbones and pouty lips of Marilyn Monroe, Sofia Loren, and Marlon Brando all graced the Kodachrome covers of LIFE. 

But sometime that summer, LIFE magazine got a call they did not expect. The call came from Buenos Aires, Argentina, and the voice on the other end of the line claimed to be sitting on a journalistic gold mine. The scoop of the century.

The voice on the phone belonged to a man named Willem Sassen.

That’s S-A-S-S-E-N. Sassen.

To the shock and delight of the editors at LIFE magazine, Sassen claimed to be in possession of Adolf Eichmann’s memoirs. Yes, that Eichmann, Sassen said. The one currently sitting in a maximum-security cell in Israel.

Sassen went on to say that he had hours and hours of taped conversations and written transcripts in which the former SS Officer not only confessed to the crimes he was accused of, but reveled in them. If this Willem Sassen was to be believed, Adolf Eichmann had affirmed his own culpability in the Final Solution to paper and cassette sometime during his exile in Argentina. Any publication who could access and publish these transcripts would be providing invaluable perspective on the most important trial of the 20^th century. And for a price, Sassen was willing to part with his treasure trove.

Naturally, the editors at LIFE Magazine were asking themselves the very same question you’re probably asking right now. Who the hell/fuck is Willem Sassen?

>> 

As we discussed last episode, Adolf Eichmann was not the only Nazi hiding out in Argentina. There were dozens, if not hundreds, of former Nazis and collaborators who fled Europe for the more... “enlightened” biergartens of Buenos Aires. So far from home, craving like-minded company, these Nazis often traveled in the same circles, and met up socially. They traded war stories and poker chips; they bemoaned the fate of their Fuhrer and debated the wisdom of this or that military strategy. It was, in essence, Nazi group therapy.

Well, sometime in the mid 1950s, after he had settled and gotten comfortable in Buenos Aires, Adolf Eichmann – excuse me, “Ricardo Klement” – met a fellow traveler named Willem Sassen. Sassen was a Dutchman-turned-Deustchman; a Nazi sympathizer from the Netherlands who had forsaken his country and volunteered for the Waffen SS in 1941. A journalist by trade, Sassen worked as a frontline correspondent and propagandist for the Nazis through the end of the war. Branded as a collaborator by the Allies, Sassen fled to Argentina, where in 1956 or 1957, he met…Adolf Eichmann.

In these warm and friendly circles, there was no need to pretend or stand on ceremony. Eichmann was very clear about who he was from the outset, and at some point, a starstruck Sassen felt that it would be prudent to immortalize the words and recollections of the notorious Obersturmbannfuhrer. Eichmann was not just any washed-up Nazi, but the Jewish specialist whom Heinrich Himmler himself had referred to as “the master”. So - Willem Sassen offered to, as Eichmann put it: “record the story of my life”.

Unable to resist the opportunity to relive old glories and correct the various slanders of those jackals/swine at Nuremberg, Eichmann drained whiskey after whiskey and poured his heart into Sassen’s microphone. All in all, these conversations added up to something like 70 hours of audio tape. Diligent journalist that he was, Sassen transcribed the audio, and then had Eichmann approve the transcriptions. The ultimate goal was to publish a book or a memoir of some kind. A tome that would set the record straight, and allow Eichmann to respond to the allegations against him in a loud, clear voice –unwarped by unsympathetic purveyors. As Eichmann scribbled on a title page of one manuscript:

“The others spoke, now I want to speak!

But what Eichmann had to say, was not entirely/exactly what Willem Sassen had expected or hopes to find.

In the aftermath of the war, Sassen and many other ex-Nazis became obsessed with discrediting the oft-repeated claim that Nazi Germany had killed 6 million Jews. Basically, they just didn’t believe it. They simply did not believe it. They could not conceive of the magnitude of it. Sure, there had been occasional killings in the East. Some Jews had been shot or gassed or liquidated as military strategy necessitated. But that was just war! That was survival. The fantastical claim of six million dead went beyond their comprehension or credulity – surely it was just a vicious lie spread by the hacks at Nuremberg.

Willem Sassen hoped that by interviewing Eichmann, the one man alive who had the true details of what happened behind the scenes, he could discredit what many Fascists and Neo-Nazis saw as a slanderous exaggeration. With Eichmann’s help, he could correct the historical record, and rehabilitate the regime that they had fought and bled for. As Deborah Lipstadt writes:

“Sassen, a forerunner of current Holocaust deniers, wanted to exonerate Hitler and lower the toll of those murdered.”

Unfortunately, Adolf Eichmann, in his generous candor, confirmed everything that the Nuremberg prosecutors had established 12 years earlier. Eichmann bragged to his expatriate comrades in Buenos Aires: Oh, rest assured, guys, we did everything they said we did. We absolutely succeeded in killing six million Jews. You should’ve seen it. I was there, and it was a work of art. If I have any regrets, and I do not, it’s that we didn’t kill more of ‘em! In his conversations with Sassen, Eichmann actually apologized for not exterminating ALL of Europe’s Jews:

And you must understand when I say, if 10.3 million of these enemies had been killed, then we would have fulfilled our duty. (Pause for effect.) And because this did not happen, I will say to you that those who have not yet been born will have to undergo that suffering and adversity. Perhaps they will curse us. Alone, we few people cannot fight the Zeitgeist. We have done what we could.

Of course, I must say to you, human emotion also plays a role here. I too am not free of this, I too was defeated by the same weakness. I know this! I too am partly to blame for the fact that the real, complete elimination, […] or the conception that I had in mind, could not be carried out. I was an inadequate intellect and was placed in an office where in truth I could have done more, and should have done more.

“It is hard, what I have told you, I know, and I will be condemned for being so hard in my phrasing, but I cannot tell you anything else, for it is the truth! Why should I deny it?”

Sassen, writes Bettina Stangneth, had: “made himself a witness to this monstrous confession, confirming it once and for all.”

The four months that Sassen spent interviewing Eichmann in 1957 did not result in a book. At least not one that either of them was interested in publishing.  So ultimately, these literary aspirations fizzled. Both men grew bored of the endeavor and each other, and Sassen shelved the tapes for a rainy day. To the Dutchman’s surprise, the rainy day in question eventually did arrive on May 11^th, 1960 – when the Mossad team abducted Eichmann from his home at the edges of a thunderstorm. Two weeks later, Eichmann reappeared at the center of a media firestorm in Israel. By that time, he was the highest-ranking Nazi alive. As Bettina Stangneth writes:

“All his superiors were dead, and Eichmann’s knowledge was unparalleled.”

All of a sudden, those tapes sitting in Sassen’s closet were not just valuable, they were priceless. Willem Sassen, writes Bettina Stangneth, had “a good nose for a fast buck.”

The enterprising Dutchman moved fast to capitalize on his good fortune. Shortly after Eichmann’s arrival in Israel, Sassen contacted the offices of LIFE magazine in New York and told them that he was willing to provide them with the innermost thoughts of the world’s most notorious living Nazi. For a reasonable fee of course. As Stangneth elaborates:

“He (Sassen) invited a representative from Life to Buenos Aires and pressured Vera Eichmann into signing a contract with the U.S. magazine on June 5th.  Eichmann’s wife signed as her husband’s legal representative, and Sassen signed as her adviser and the “compiler” of the manuscripts. Publication was to take place only after the trial, and Life was given the right to sell the material—although not, under any circumstances, to Israel. Sassen would hand over “150 handwritten pages and 600 pages of typescript,” in return for $15,000 and a $5,000 fee for Sassen. Sassen may have received a larger sum of money on the side, without Vera Eichmann’s knowledge.”

LIFE magazine, cynically aware that a former Nazi journalist living in Argentina had no real legal leverage over them, decided to ignore the stipulation that they could not publish until after Eichmann’s trial. By the third week in November of ‘60, the first of two articles in a series was ready to go to press. Naturally, this development came as quite a shock to Eichmann’s defense attorney, Robert Servatius. In their consultations, Eichmann had not told the lawyer anything about these taped conversations with Sassen. As Bettina Stangneth explains:

Servatius learned of the publication on November 25 and tried in vain to take action against it. Life published a few powerful extracts from the interview transcript, and small parts of the handwritten texts, under the headline: “Eichmann Tells His Own Damning Story.” Each issue featured a phrase of Eichmann’s to great effect: “I transported them … to the butcher” (November 28, 1960) and “To sum it all up, I regret nothing” (December 5, 1960). Everyone connected with the case reacted with shock, albeit in their own ways. Sassen, taken completely by surprise, lamented to Vera Eichmann: “Take a look at what LIFE has done to me.”

“Servatius went into a fairly serious panic and spoke in dramatic terms of “catastrophic consequences” for the defense. At a press conference, he said he would renounce his brief if the texts turned out to be real; he believed they had been counterfeited.45 When Eichmann was confronted with a translation of the Life articles, he had an attack of nerves and suffered a mental breakdown. The doctor whose care he was under quoted him as saying “I am finished. I am broken.” Servatius made the fastest recovery and, in the initial aftermath of the Life pieces, started taking a systematic approach to the Argentina Papers, determined to discover what danger really lurked within them.”

For Eichmann’s case, these articles were a disaster. And Servatius was certain that the quotes in them, as well as things that had not been published, would be used by the prosecution in Eichmann’s upcoming trial. All the lawyer could do was study his client’s words backwards and forwards and try to cobble together some defense against them.

Needless to say, the spotlight on events in Israel was brighter and hotter than ever.

---- MUSIC BREAK ----

[AUDIO]  “In Jerusalem, capital of Israel, the narrow streets lead to the top of a hill facing Mount Zion. Here, for the past 4.5 weeks, a court has been sitting in a hastily completed building. Surrounded by a high wire fence and guarded by day and by night, a man has been on trial for his life. The man – Adolf Eichmann. His judges – the judges of Israel. ..”

It’s April 11^th, 1961.

The first day of the trial of Adolf Eichmann.

We’re in Jerusalem, in a government building called the Beit Ha’am  [Bayt, Ha-Awm}- “House of the People”.  This four-story building is not technically a courthouse; it is actually a cultural center, intended to host lectures, educational programs and speaking arrangements. But it has been chosen as the venue for the Eichmann trial, because it is the only building in Jerusalem big enough to accommodate all the spectators, journalists and legal staff.

In the main hall, an audience of 750 people has crammed itself into row after row of uncomfortable chairs, many of them wearing translation headsets so they can understand the Hebrew language that the majority of the proceedings will be conducted in. Shifting in their seats, clutching note pads and ballpoint pens, they whisper, mumble and itch their noses. But for all their fidgeting, one thing in the hall occupies their attention. Drawn like metal shavings to a magnet, their eyes are glued to a large glass booth, positioned at the front of the hall.

The glass is bulletproof, strong enough to stop a vengeful shot from a pistol, or a burst from a Kalashnikov. Right now, at 8:55 am, the booth is empty. But in a few moments, this man-sized terrarium will be occupied by a person who many people would love to put a few bullets into – the defendant: Adolf Eichmann. Like impatient visitors at a zoo, waiting for the endangered animal to appear in its enclosure, the audience cannot take their eyes off the empty booth.

And somewhere in this gallery, perched in one of the 750 seats, is a 54-year-old woman named Hannah Arendt. That’s A-R-E-N-D-T [Arendt]. Hannah is a journalist, among other things, and the credentials badge she flashed to gain entry to this building says that she is here on behalf of The New Yorker magazine.

For those listeners who might be unfamiliar, Hannah Arendt was a very famous writer, historian and political philosopher in the mid-to-late 20^th century. Jewish by blood, German by birth and American by temperament, Arendt was considered one of the leading lights of the post-war academic class. To her and her admirers, intellectual was not an adjective; it was a noun.

In the modern day, Arendt is remembered for many things, but her greatest claim to fame is her controversial coverage of the Adolf Eichmann Trial in 1961. In the five articles she wrote about it for The New Yorker – later published as a book – Arendt coined a famous phrase that some of you have probably heard before.

“The banality of evil.”

It is the idea that in the real world, evil is very rarely represented by overtly wicked figures with red eyes and sharp teeth and cackling laughs. To the contrary, evil is often drab, ordinary, and dull as dishwater. As the Israeli journalist Amos Elon explained in his foreword to Arendt’ book:

“Evil, as [Hannah Arendt] saw it, need not be committed only by demonic monsters but—with disastrous effect—by morons and imbeciles as well.”

“She insisted that only good had any depth. Good can be radical; evil can never be radical, it can only be extreme, for it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension…yet, and this is its horror!-it can spread like a fungus over the surface of the earth and lay waste the entire world. Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there.

That is the banality of evil.”

At the time, this was a provocative and original concept. Later in her career, Arendt disowned the phrase in the face of academic pushback, but her brief time in Jerusalem was what sparked this singular notion. And the green shoots of that influential idea, sprouted at 9am on April 11^th, 1961, when Adolf Eichmann was first escorted into the courtroom.

That morning, a door creaked open, and 1500 eyeballs swiveled toward the source of the noise. Shuffling forward in a plain blue suit, with a whisp of hair covering his shiny scalp, was the man they had traveled all this way to see. The subject of so many rumors and nightmares. The SS Lieutenant Colonel who had shipped millions of Jews to their deaths as if he were ordering office supplies.

As the guards escorted Adolf Eichmann to the bulletproof booth and sealed him inside with a chair and a microphone, many people in the audience, Hannah Arendt included, were frankly a bit disappointed. They had expected a crisp, cold-hearted SS officer, striding defiantly in a squeaking black leather coat. But Adolf Eichmann did not look like a monster. He didn’t even look like a soldier. He just looked like a normal person. Like someone’s frail uncle or the guy who bags your groceries. This unnerving ordinariness left a deep impression upon the audience. One journalist marveled that Eichmann looked “no different from other humans.”

Another saw fit to mention that he even seemed a little “Jewish-looking.”

A man named Simon Wiesenthal, an independent Nazi hunter who had been tracking Eichmann for years could not believe his eyes; he saw a “weak, colorless, shabby fellow in a glass cell; there was nothing demonic about him. He looked like an accountant who was afraid to ask for a rise in salary.”

A West German bureaucrat thought he looked like a “harmless civil servant who is on trial because some mistakes have accumulated in his books of figures, or who is to be questioned here as to why the building permits are taking so long.”

From her seat in the gallery, Hannah Arendt jotted down her own observations:

“Adolf Eichmann, the man in the glass booth built for his protection: medium-sized, slender, middle-aged, with receding hair, ill-fitting teeth, and nearsighted eyes, who throughout the trial keeps craning his scraggy neck toward the bench (not once does he face the audience), and who desperately and for the most part successfully maintains his self-control despite the nervous tic to which his mouth must have become subject long before this trial started.”

Their expectations deflated, the audience settled into a heavy, suffocating quiet – accompanied by the white noise of scribbling pens and shuffling papers. Then, with a sharp crack of a gavel, the trial began.

The first order of business was laying out the charges, the specific crimes that the Israeli court had brought to bear. It took an entire hour for the presiding judge, Moshe Landau, to list out the details of indictment:

“First count. Nature of Offence: Crime against the Jewish People. Particulars of the Offence: (a) The Accused, during the period from 1939 to 1945, together with others, caused the deaths of millions of Jews as the persons who were responsible for the implementation of the plan of the Nazis for the physical extermination of the Jews, a plan known by its title ‘The Final Solution of the Jewish Question.’”

“Landau’s words were like drips of water against a stone,” writes Neal Bascomb, “fifteen counts, numerous charges within each. Eichmann had uprooted whole populations. He had assembled Jews in ghettos and deported them en masse. He had committed mass murder at the extermination camps of Auschwitz, Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Majdanek. He had enslaved Jews in forced labor camps and had denied their rights as human beings. He had inflicted inhuman torture and suffering. He had plundered the property of Jews through robbery, terror, and torture. He had been directly involved in the deaths of one hundred children in Lidice, Poland. He had operated across Europe as well as in the Soviet Union and the Baltic countries Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia—always, always, with the intention of “destroying the Jewish People.”

When the exhaustive list had reached its terminus, Eichmann’s lawyer, Robert Servatius, rose to challenge the trial’s legitimacy. Glasses slipping down his sweaty nose, Servatius made his objections. As Deborah Lipstadt explains:

He contended that the court lacked jurisdiction, because these crimes were committed prior to Israel’s existence, on foreign soil, and against people who had no connection to Israel. How, then, could this court claim jurisdiction? Even if the court did claim jurisdiction, which Servatius knew they certainly would, a number of elements rendered the proceedings inherently unfair if not illegal. First of all, Eichmann had been abducted. Furthermore, because of the 1950 law, colleagues from the SS whom Eichmann might wish to call as defense witnesses could not enter Israel without facing arrest. If a witness could not call upon those who might support his position, how, Servatius legitimately wondered, could the trial be fair? Finally, using an argument that was almost guaranteed not to sit well with the judges who would have to decide whether it was a fair objection, Servatius challenged the judges themselves. He argued that, as Jews, they were incapable of remaining impartial in a case that dealt with the Final Solution.

These objections were not favorably received, and quickly dismissed. Next, the defendant was asked how he pleaded to the crimes and indictments he was accused of. On every count, all fifteen, Eichmann rose and responded:

            [AUDIO] 2:31

“In the spirit of the indictment, not guilty”

This was the exact phrasing that Hermann Goering and other high-ranking Nazis had used at Nuremberg 15 years earlier. It conveyed disdain for the accusations, and the people making them. As Deborah Lipstadt writes:

“In essence, Eichmann was proclaiming that, despite having possibly committed a wrongdoing, he bore no guilt because he was following orders.”

With another slam of the gavel, the trial lurched forward. Eichmann’s plea had been entered – “not guilty” – and now the burden fell on the prosecution to present their case and prove that he was. Draped in a billowing black robe, Israel’s attorney general and lead prosecutor, Gideon Hausner, cleared his throat and rose to address the court. That’s H-A-U-S-N-E-R, Hausner. In an opening speech that he had written, rewritten and no doubt rehearsed many times, Hausner set the tone:

“When I stand before you here, Judges of Israel, to lead the Prosecution of Adolf Eichmann, I am not standing alone. With me are six million accusers. But they cannot rise to their feet and point an accusing finger towards him who sits in the dock and cry: “I accuse.” For their ashes are piled up on the hills of Auschwitz and the fields of Treblinka and are strewn in the forests of Poland. Their graves are scattered throughout the length and breadth of Europe. Their blood cries out, but their voice is not heard. Therefore I will be their spokesman.”

From her seat in the gallery, chewing her pencil, Hannah Arendt raised an eyebrow. Hausner clearly had a penchant for the theatrical. He was as fiery and passionate as Eichmann was bland and unimpressive. His black ropes swirling, Hausner continued and raised his voice:

“It is not an individual that is in the dock at this historic trial, and not the Nazi regime alone, but anti-Semitism throughout history.”

“Hausner declared that Eichmann was a link in the long chain of anti-Semites who wished to destroy the Jewish people,” writes Deborah Lipstadt, “He was the scion of Pharaoh (Egypt), Haman (Shushan/Iran), and Chmielnicki (Poland), all of whom had the same objective for the people of Israel: “to destroy, to slay, and to cause to perish.”

For many in the gallery, this was a rousing and convincing argument. It reinforced the idea that since their expulsion from Judea, Jewish people had been victims of one catastrophe after another. Flung across the diaspora to suffer at the hands of prejudiced majorities. But for Hannah Arendt, Hausner’s evocation of semi-mythical rulers from thousands of years ago was “cheap rhetoric and bad history.” 

On a personal level, Arendt was certainly sympathetic to the perspective. A Jew herself, she had been imprisoned by the Gestapo in 1933; In 1941, she escaped to France and then America.

But she could not shake the feeling that Gideon Hausner was straying from his brief. This trial was not about biblical Pharaohs or ancient despots. It wasn’t about Hitler or antisemitism or even the Nazi party . This was about Adolf Eichmann and what he specifically had done. To stray beyond that narrow mandate was to risk the legitimacy of the entire exercise.

The trial had barely begun, and already the prosecution was in danger of overextending its argument.

30 feet away, from his seat in the bulletproof glass box, Adolf Eichmann’s eyes flicked around the chamber. What a production these Israelites have put on, he thought. The cameras, the microphones, the audience of scribbling journalists. A whole ‘nother Nuremberg, - just for me. But the difference between the Nuremberg Trials and the Eichmann Trial was made very clear from the outset. As one historian put it:

“At Nuremberg, the murder of the Jews had been an example of crimes against humanity. Here it would be the centerpiece.”

>>>>>>> 

After Hausner finished his opening address, he arrayed the extensive body of evidence before the court. As Bascomb writes:

“For the next fifty-six days, Hausner unfolded his case against Eichmann, placing him at the nexus of the Holocaust. He presented Eichmann with the interrogations by Israeli police, captured German documents, [and] statements from his former collaborators such as Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss.{Hearse}”

But some of the most damning documentary evidence came in the form of the so-called Sassen Interviews, the transcripts of the conversations between Eichmann and Willem Sassen in Argentina that had been published in LIFE magazine the previous Fall. 

>>> 

Eichmann’s lawyer, Robert Servatius, fought tooth and nail to keep the documents out of the trial, claiming that they were just meaningless, drunken conversations between bitter old soldiers. “Tavern gossip”, Eichmann called it.

Even more frustrating for the prosecution, was that they did not have access to the actual tape recordings themselves, the original audio from which the transcriptions were derived. Only Willem Sassen knew where those tapes were, and for now, he wasn’t telling. As a result, only 83 of the 796 transcription pages were admitted into evidence. But even those meagre pages were devastating to Eichmann’s case. As Lipstadt writes:

“Among the pages in Hausner’s possession were those with Eichmann’s handwritten corrections and edits of the tape transcripts. This would end up constituting some of the most incriminating evidence.”

In one of those transcriptions, Eichmann described one of the first times he personally witnessed the large-scale murder of Jews.

When I rode out the next morning they had already started, so I could see only the finish. Although I was wearing a leather coat which reached almost to my ankles, it was very cold. I watched the last group of Jews undress, down to their shirts. They walked the last 100 tor 200 yards—they were not driven—then they jumped into the pit. It was impressive to see them all jumping into the pit without offering any resistance whatsoever. Then the men of the squad banged away into the pit with their rifles and machine pistols.

Why did that scene linger so long in my memory? Perhaps because I had children myself. And there were children in that pit. I saw a woman hold a child of a year or two into the air, pleading. At that moment all I wanted to say was, “Don’t shoot, hand over the child….” Then the child was hit.

I was so close that later I found bits of brains splattered on my long leather coat. My driver helped me remove them. Then we returned to Berlin. …

Whatever misgivings or twinges of empathy Eichmann might’ve experienced while being splashed with the blood and brains of innocent children, he smothered those feelings and committed wholeheartedly to the task he had been given. As he said in the Sassen transcripts:

“But to sum it all up, I must say that I regret nothing.  Adolf Hitler may have been wrong all down the line, but one thing is beyond dispute: the man was able to work his way up from lance corporal in the German army to Führer of a people of almost 80 million. I never met him personally, but his success alone proves to me that I should subordinate myself to this man. He was somehow so supremely capable that the people recognized him. And so with that justification I recognized him joyfully, and I still defend him.” 

The Sassen transcripts were more than enough to seal Eichmann’s fate, but the Prosecution was still not done. For Israeli Attorney General Gideon Hausner, and his boss, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, Eichmann’s trial was meant to serve a larger, grander purpose.

“Hausner wanted the trial to capture the imagination of Israelis, and give them a personal sense of what had happened,” writes Lipstadt, “In order to do this, he would rely on those who had witnessed the events. They would fill the historical canvas with their own stories and make the victims and their experiences the trial’s focus.

This decision on his {Hausner’s] part would be controversial from a jurisprudential perspective, and monumental from a historical perspective. The prosecution would call a series of witnesses who had no connection with Eichmann. Some legal experts considered their testimony highly prejudicial and legally irrelevant. Much of it was based on hearsay, if not outright gossip. Yet their presence would transform the trial from an important war-crimes trial into an event that would have enduring significance. It would give a voice to the victims that they had not had before and would compel the world to listen to the story of the Final Solution in a way that it never had before.

[…] Hausner did not need their testimony to prove Eichmann guilty—the myriad of documents he planned to introduce would have sufficed. But the witnesses would tell the story in an unprecedentedly concentrated fashion. Some had told their stories before, to family, friends, and in public settings. But this time, rather than recollecting, they would be testifying, in the full meaning of the word. Both the retelling and the size and profile of those who would be listening would be entirely different. Never before had they told their stories in front of such a broad international audience.”

“The trial spared no details,” writes Daniel Gordis, “Witnesses described watching women, men, and children murdered in cold blood. One witness described how her child was shot as she held him in her arms. Another described a horrific scene in which thousands of French children, separated from their parents and without any adult supervision, were herded into dank, squalid rooms: “It was not uncommon for them to awake during the night screaming for their parents. Some were too young to know their own names.” the children were deported—“struggling and screaming—to Auschwitz, where they were murdered and incinerated.”

“Just as world Jewry had huddled around radios in November 1947 to follow the vote on partition at the UN’s General Assembly, Israelis were now glued to their radios, transfixed by the stories and horrors, “continues Gordis. “Implicitly, the testimony of the witnesses gave the thousands of Israeli survivors “permission” to begin speaking about their experiences. That had not always been the case.

Given the Israeli focus on the “new Jew” who could defend himself, these survivors with tattooed numbers on their arms, who seemed psychically and physically broken, had represented precisely the Jews that Israelis wanted to forget and to transcend. They often unfavorably compared Holocaust victims to the new, powerful Jews of the Yishuv who dislodged the British and fought off the Arabs with strength and military might. Tellingly, “[t]hose killed in the Holocaust were said to have ‘perished,’ while Jews who died fighting in Palestine had ‘fallen.’”

“Native Israelis, who had vanquished five armies in 1948, did not comprehend why Jews who so vastly outnumbered their captors did not do the same,” writes Lipstadt, “Hausner wanted them to understand why the two situations could not be compared.”

>>> 

The stories from more than 100 witnesses and Holocaust survivors were undeniably powerful, but some people in attendance in were uneasy with their inclusion in the trial. Most notably, the presiding judge himself, Moshe Landau. Some of these witnesses had no connection to Eichmann or his operations whatsoever, and were clearly included to illicit an emotional response from the audience and the judges. Judge Landau, annoyed by this needless overkill, chided Prosecutor Hausner, saying that much of this was “not relevant” and accused the Attorney General of “staying far from the subject of this trial.”

As Deborah Lipstadt continues:

“Hausner transformed Eichmann from the low-level bureaucrat who played an exceptionally significant role in the Final Solution into the man at the heart of the operation, which he was not.

[….] Pushing past the evidence, he accused Eichmann of things for which he was not responsible. He painted the Holocaust as a well-organized top-down bureaucratic endeavor, though it had been a far more incremental and sometimes even haphazard operation. Hausner made the man in the glass booth look more mythic than real. Returning to a theme he had articulated in his opening talk, he linked the two Adolfs, Hitler and Eichmann. This turned Eichmann into a caricature, diminished the culpability of Himmler, Müller, Heydrich, and many others, and put the onus on one man. Unable to bring these higher-ranking Nazis to court, Hausner placed their guilt on Eichmann. It may have served Hausner’s short-term rhetorical goal, but it did not serve the cause of history.

Nevertheless, the Hausner’s arguments and the mountain of witness testimony had their desired effect. By the time the prosecution had finished presenting the full scope of its evidence, Eichmann could practically feel the rope burns on his neck. But still, the man in the box would have his chance to speak.

It was time for Adolf Eichmann to take the stand.

---- MUSIC BREAK -----

It’s the winter of 1949.

12 years before Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem.

We’re in a forest, just outside the tiny logging town of Eversen, in northern Germany. For as far as the eye can see, there is nothing but tall, tall trees. In some places, the trunks are clustered together so tightly, you cannot even see the sky. But the most striking thing about this forest is how quiet it is. Out here, away from honking cars and clanging bells and shuffling, murmuring crowds, a man can truly be alone with his thoughts. Of course, not everyone wants to be alone with their thoughts. For some people, being alone with one’s thoughts can be a very frightening thing.

On this chilly day in the German wilderness, the immense and suffocating silence is broken by the chopping of axes and shouts of “timber!”. A German logging crew is hard at work, transforming mother nature into raw material, on trunk at a time. Sending woodchips flying into the air, the lumberjacks hack and chop until the trees give way and tumble lifeless to the ground.

Wiping sweat from his forehead, massaging the hard callouses on his palms, Adolf Eichmann sits down on a stump for a smoke break. For almost five years now, he has been living here in Eversen, chopping trees and raising chickens as harmless Otto Henninger. It’s a peaceful life, he must admit. Peaceful, but boring. If Heaven and Hell exist, then this must be Purgatory. Chopping down trees in the middle of nowhere.

Of course, “nowhere” is relative. One person’s nowhere is the center of someone else’s universe. Not far from here, nine years after the death of Christ, fifteen thousand Romans were massacred by a barbarian army in the Battle of the Teutoberg Forest. Three entire legions, snuffed out in a few days of horrific fighting. And still, in 1949, after all this time, no one knows exactly where the battle took place. Occasionally some researcher will find a bone or a coin, the rusty fragment of a sword or a helmet, but in some ways it as if 15,000 people just disappeared. Absorbed into the forest. Without the written accounts from Roman sources, you could never prove they existed at all.

From his seat on the stump, Eichmann rolls a cigarette and strikes a match. What, he wonders, will they say about me? 2000 years from now? In the far-flung future, what kinds of adjectives will they use to describe Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Eichmann?

“Loyal”, perhaps? Ruthless? Diligent? Cruel? Organized?

Eichmann’s eyes drift toward a stack of logs nearby. Stripped of their branches, naked without their bark, and piled high in neat little rows. If you look closely, you can see the concentric circles inside their dead trunks, the tree rings that mark the passing of each year, generations upon generations, unceremoniously ended by the blade of an axe.

Suddenly, a new adjective might’ve popped into Eichmann’s mind.

“Effective.”

As the logging crew continues its work, the rhythmic thwacking of the axe becomes the banging of a gavel, and Eichmann’s mind is pulled from this pleasant memory into the present day. He is no longer in Germany; he is in a glass box, in a courtroom in Jerusalem. 800 people are staring at him, and in that horrible silence, Dr. Robert Servatius repeats his question, in case his client did not hear.

On June 20^th, 1961, Adolf Eichmann took the stand in his trial in Jerusalem. From inside his translucent cage, he attempted to rationalize his actions, to defend his point of view, to make them all understand. After the avalanche of evidence, the transcripts, the tapes, the witness statements and innumerable documents, Eichmann had no hope of disproving or disputing the facts of what he had done. But maybe, with a little luck, he could soften the blow of his judgement. As Deborah Lipstadt writes:

“During an eight-day recess, he and Servatius had carefully mapped their strategy. Rather than ignore the incriminating evidence Hausner had introduced, they would attack it head-on and attempt to explain it away.”

> 

In his examination of his client, Robert Servatius asked Eichmann to elaborate on the role he played in the Final Solution. The SS officer responded with what the Mossad agent Peter Malkin, observing from the gallery, called  “astonishing self-control, his sense of certainty, his maddening, almost unbelievable, moral obtuseness.”

Clearing his throat and shuffling his papers, as if preparing for a budget meeting, Eichmann lifted his chin and insisted that although his actions had resulted in the death of millions, he bore nor legal responsibility:

“I must admit that I have played my part, though under orders. From the legal point of view, as a recipient of orders, I had no choice but to carry [them] out.”

Eichmann went further, declaring that, like the Jews themselves, he was a victim of history. He was a “tool in the hands of stronger powers and stronger forces, and of an inexorable fate.”

The former Obersturmbannfuhrer desperately explained that anything he had done, he had not done of his own free will or volition, or any personal, deep-seated malice toward Jews.

“I never saw in the Jew my personal enemy; I never had an unfortunate experience in regard to Jews.”

He was “simply an observer”. The Final Solution was not his idea, after all. It was Hitler’s and Himmler’s and Goebbels’ and Goering’s! He was just a little fish, following the movements of the school. A “small cog”. He was just doing what they told him to do. As he professed:

“I made absolutely sure to get instructions from my chief on even the most minor matters.”

This argument was as unoriginal as it was unconvincing. It had not worked for the defendants at Nuremberg. And it would not work in Jerusalem either. As Pater Malkin observed:

“There was nothing unexpected in Eichmann’s line of defense. It was the standard one, that he had only been following orders, an argument which, carried to its logical conclusion, would hold that no one in the Third Reich besides Adolf Hitler was guilty of anything at all; indeed, that the very concept of personal responsibility had no meaning.”

As the situation slipped through his fingers, Eichmann’s testimony grew more rambling and tedious and non-sensical. He took shelter in a labyrinth of procedural language, citing old SS by-laws and bureaucratic minutia. When confronted with hard evidence, he claimed he could not remember the details or that the documents had been forged or altered by other Nazis seeking to tarnish his reputation. At one point, the presiding Judge, Moshe Landau, reprimanded him:

“You were not asked to give a general lecture.… You were asked a specific question. You must give specific answers.… Do you understand?”

As the examination and cross-examination dragged on, Eichmann’s responses seemed increasingly tone-deaf and bizarre. His face twitching in obvious distress, he claimed that he had actually been trying to help Jews in Europe. Citing one example from his time in Austria, he insisted that by stripping of them of their possessions and livelihoods, by forcing them to emigrate, he was actually saving them from a much grislier fate in the camps. In fact, he had been a very vocal proponent of the Madagascar Plan, the scheme to deport every Jew in Europe to a faraway island off the African coast.

When he finished this explanation, Eichmann heard a sound through the thick glass of his cage. It was laughter. The audience in the gallery was laughing at him.

Like a piece of fruit rotting on the shelf, Eichmann withered before the court. By the time his cross-examination concluded in late July, his defense had collapsed into a mishmash of contradictory, self-incriminating posturing. He was, for all intents and purposes, a broken man.

As Mossad agent Peter Malkin observed:

“The sight was staggering. Though doctors had dismissed his lawyers’ claim that he had suffered two heart attacks in the three months since the start of the trial (the condition was diagnosed as functional arrhythmia), neither they nor the photos had suggested the extent of the man’s physical deterioration. Fifteen pounds lighter than when I had last seen him, his cheeks deep shadows and the blue suit made for him by an Israeli tailor limp on a narrow frame, his skin had gone a waxy yellow.”

From her own seat in the gallery, the journalist Hannah Arendt was also struck by how feeble and pathetic Eichmann appeared. Not only physically, but in intellectually. In his clumsy answers and elliptical logic, Arendt saw a man who was too loyal and unimaginative to resist directives to commit a genocide. This was no criminal mastermind or a demon in human skin, Arendt suggested, just a boring bureaucrat with no vision of his own. As Amos Elon writes:

“Arendt concluded that Eichmann’s inability to speak coherently in court was connected with his incapacity to think, or to think from another person’s point of view. His shallowness was by no means identical with stupidity. He personified neither hatred or madness nor an insatiable thirst for blood, but something far worse, the faceless nature of Nazi evil itself, within a closed system run by pathological gangsters, aimed at dismantling the human personality of its victims. The Nazis had succeeded in turning the legal order on its head, making the wrong and the malevolent the foundation of a new “righteousness.” In the Third Reich evil lost its distinctive characteristic by which most people had until then recognized it. The Nazis redefined it as a civil norm. Conventional goodness became a mere temptation which most Germans were fast learning to resist. Within this upside-down world Eichmann seemed not to have been aware of having done evil.”

After weeks of observing him, the only word Arendt could think of for it was…. “banal”. Eichmann wasn’t terrifying, he was just “terrifyingly normal.” When she published her famous series of articles on the Eichmann Trial the following year, she subtitled it: “The Banality of Evil.” As Arendt recalled:

I was struck by the manifest shallowness in Eichmann, which made it impossible to trace the uncontestable evil of his deeds to any deeper level of roots or motives. The deeds were monstrous, but the doer – at least the very effective one now on trial – was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous.”

A fundamental question was clearly haunting Arendt: Are people like Adolf Eichmann inherently evil, deep in their DNA? Or do the systems and incentives around them give them permission to become evil?

In the 70 years since the Eichmann Trial, many scholars have pushed back on Arendt’s appraisal of Adolf Eichmann. In describing him as “banal”, she was – in a way - falling for Eichmann’s own schtick. Downplaying his robust participation in the Final Solution was a tactic, an attempt to save himself from the noose. To paraphrase the Mossad agent Peter Malkin, Eichmann’s calculated blandness in Jerusalem was just camouflage. During the war, Eichmann had reveled in his power; he enjoyed his work, found purpose and identity in it. In Argentina, he boasted about what he had done, and how well he had done it. This was a proud specialist with “no regrets”.

Eichmann may not have been very articulate or well-spoken during his cross-examination in Jerusalem, but he was not stupid. As Deborah Lipstadt writes:

He was no clerk. This was a well-read man who accepted and espoused the idea of racial purity.

As Eichmann himself said in the infamous Sassen Tapes:

“I do a job if I can understand the need for it or the meaning of it, and if I enjoy doing it. [Then] time will just fly by, and that is how it was with the Jews.”

In August of 1961, the defense and the prosecution delivered their closing arguments, bringing the trial proceedings to an end. And with that, Eichmann’s fate rested with the judges. On December 12^th of that year, they unveiled their verdict to the world.

[AUDIO] “The story that had a grim preface in the horror of Nazi concentration camps comes to an equally grim end in Israel, as Adolf Eichmann is sentenced for his crimes against humanity. Defense attorney Robert Servatius will automatically appeal but this is the end for Eichmann, who was seized in Buenos Aires in 1960 and spirited to Israel. The three judges started to study the evidence when the four-month trial ended in August, and found Eichmann guilt on 15 counts of the indictment.”

As Eichmann stood rigid and twitching in his glass box, the Israeli court declared that he was guilty on fifteen counts of crimes against humanity and the Jewish people. The judges delivered their verdict in Hebrew, and the words came crackling over Eichmann’s headset, translated into German.

In truth, there had been very little suspense as to whether Eichmann would be found guilty or not. The evidence against him was overwhelming. What people really wanted to know was what his sentence would be. Would he get the death penalty or life in prison? At Nuremberg, more than a few Nazis had received long prison sentences, rather than being sent to the gallows. As Deborah Lipstadt writes:

“When the court reconvened to pass sentence, Judge Landau’s opening words offered Eichmann some hope. He noted that the Israeli Penal Code gave courts the option to impose any penalty up to but not exceeding the penalty prescribed by law. Therefore, despite having found him guilty, the court was not obligated to impose death, even though the law under which he was being tried provided for capital punishment. Landau seemed to suggest that they might have decided to spare Eichmann’s life. But this was not the case. Death, though not mandatory, Landau continued, was warranted. With a “deep feeling of the burden of responsibility,” the judges chose to impose it. They were the first judges in Israel’s history to do so.”

Dr. Robert Servatius, faced with yet another client destined for the long drop, appealed the decision immediately. While most of the world rejoiced in the decision to hang Eichmann, appeals for clemency came from some surprising corridors. A small group of Israel’s leading scholars, secular and religious alike, begged Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion to commute the sentence and spare Eichmann’s life. It would be a gesture of magnanimity, they said, a demonstration of Israel’s capacity not only to punish, but to forgive. As one academic begged Ben-Gurion, citing a Talmudic scholar:

“What the Torah teaches us is this: none but God can command us to destroy a man.”

Most Israelis felt differently. As one publication put it:

“A pardon for Eichmann? No! Six million times no!”

Ultimately, Adolf Eichmann’s appeal for clemency was rejected, and the date for his execution was set for May 31^st, 1962.

Around the world, many felt satisfied with the Israeli court’s decision, but the sighs of relief were especially deep in the pine-paneled halls of the West German government.

There were many ex-Nazis in US-backed regime who had traveled in the same circles as Eichmann during the war. Men who had done some very unsavory things in the service of Hitler’s Third Reich. The Obersturmbannfuhrer, with all his connections and insider knowledge, could have aired their dirty laundry to the world, even accidentally. But to their great relief, Eichmann had kept his mouth shut when it mattered. And now, thanks to the Israelis, his secrets would die with him. In the drawing rooms of the West German capitol of Bonn, many a former Nazi toasted champagne to Eichmann’s imminent demise.

For his part, Adolf Eichmann had little to do for the next six months but reflect on his life and wait to die. He did find the time, however, to write a farewell letter to his wife back in South America:

“Vera, think of it this way: what would have happened if one of the many bombs had got me during the war? This way, Fate gave us all those extra years. We must be grateful to him for that.”

On May 31^st, 1962, Eichmann was led to an improvised chamber in the upper floors of an Israeli prison. The application of the death penalty was so rare in Israel during this period that the state had no pre-existing gallows platform. So, they tied a noose, looped it over an iron bar, and cut a hole in the floor so that the prisoner would drop far enough to cleanly snap his neck. As his hands were tied behind his back, and his legs bound together, Eichmann recognized one of the men in the room.

It was Rafi Eitan, the leader of the Mossad capture team in Buenos Aires. Although Eichmann had not seen Eitan’s face in Argentina, the Mossad operative had aided in the police’s interrogation of Eichmann during his first few months in Israel. Eichmann knew the man’s face and the role he had played in his capture, and hated him for it. As the rope was looped around his neck, Eichmann cast a cold glare and said, according to Eitan:

“I hope, very much, that it will be your turn soon after mine.”

A few moments later, the guards pressed the button that released the trap door over the whole in the floor. A witness in the room, Rudolf Justermeier, remembered:

“The click of the suddenly opening trapdoor on which Adolf Eichmann had been standing was the only sound we then heard. Within a fraction of a second, the body of the man who had just been standing upright before us had disappeared. The opening which had swallowed him up yawned darkly. Below us, one story down, the body hung from a swaying rope.”

Adolf Eichmann’s body was not buried. To place him in the ground was to erect a monument of sorts, a pilgrimage site for fascists, antisemites and neo-Nazis around the world to venerate and travel to. Instead, the Israelis cremated him in an improvised oven. As Deborah Lipstadt writes:

“According to Rafi Eitan, they used a thirty-inch pipe approximately three meters long with burners on both sides, “something like flamethrowers that ran on gas.” The hangman was assigned the task of pushing his body into the oven. He was so nervous that he could not keep his hands from shaking and twice knocked the body off the gurney instead of into the crematory. Ultimately, Eichmann’s ashes were scattered in the sea.”

The political and historical significance of Adolf Eichmann’s trial was felt almost immediately. As Deborah Lipstadt writes:

“Even though the Holocaust had been remembered and commemorated, never before had it received such consistent attention. […]”

As a result of the trial, the story of the Holocaust, though it had previously been told, discussed, and commemorated, was heard anew, in a profoundly different way, and not just in Israel but in many parts of the Jewish and non-Jewish world. The telling may not have been entirely new, but the hearing was.”

Lipstady also notes that the trial led to:

“…the adoption of the term “Holocaust.” It had already been used before the trial, including in the official translation of the Israeli Declaration of Independence. However, it was cemented into the lexicon of the non-Hebrew-speaking population when the court translators used it throughout the trial. The trial did not just give a universally accepted name to an event, but greatly accelerated the growth of a field of study. In the wake of the trial, scholars already immersed in researching the Final Solution found a growing audience for their work. More scholars began to explore the topic, thereby accelerating the development of what today we call Holocaust and genocide studies.

[…]  The trial reinforced the notion that there is universal jurisdiction over genocide. Even though legal scholars differ over whether Israel was justified in trying Eichmann, there is now a virtual consensus among democratic states that genocidal killers cannot take refuge behind claims of obedience to superior orders.”

That legal precedent was used to great effect by a certain old friend of ours in West Germany. The cigar-chomping, bulldog Attorney General, Fritz Bauer.

From his smoke-filled office in Frankfurt, Fritz Bauer had followed every twist and turn of the Eichmann trial. He could never publicly reveal the vital role he had played in the SS war criminal’s capture, but he did receive a letter from Israel’s previous attorney general, Haim Cohen, which read:

“I hardly need tell you—and in any case I can’t write it down in a letter—how indebted I am to you, not just in terms of gratitude, but also bearing in mind our shared goal and success.”

In the aftermath of Eichmann’s conviction, Bauer was empowered to pursue criminals that he did fall within his jurisdiction.

“The trial,” writes Lipstadt, “was partially responsible for convincing the German government to reverse its opposition to extending the statute of limitations, thereby enabling additional war criminals to be prosecuted.”

In the years that followed, Fritz Bauer intensified his efforts to prosecute other Nazi war criminals, no matter how protected or highly-placed. In 1963, in a landmark trial, he assembled 359 witnesses in Frankfurt and indicted 25 officials from the infamous Auschwitz concentration camp, propelling the Holocaust even further into the global imagination and cementing its legacy forever into the German psyche. Although Bauer was frustrated with the relatively lenient sentences the defendants received, he remains famous today for his dogged pursuit of the Third Reich’s worst criminals.

Only when Bauer died in July of 1968, did the Israelis finally reveal his crucial role in the capture of Adolf Eichmann. They waited, writes Ronen Steinke, “until the truth could no longer harm him.”

For Isser Harel and the Mossad intelligence agency, the Eichmann operation had been an unmitigated success, a colossal boost to their global reputation and a boon for their operational funding. In the years to come, for better or worse, it reinforced the notion among Israelis that clandestine action was their greatest and most effective weapon. To get results, they concluded, sometimes you have to get your hands dirty. The world will never be gentle with us, they said, so we need not be gentle with them.

But even among Mossad agents, the Eichmann affair offered some haunting and disconcerting lessons. The SS Lieutenant Colonel had helped murder millions of people. He had literally felt their blood splash on his coat. And yet, even at the end, he regretted nothing. He knew, deep in his bones, that he had done the right thing. For him, the Final Solution was not murder, it was just war.

And the cold depth of that conviction left a lasting impression on Peter Malkin, the Mossad agent who had wrestled Eichmann to the ground on Garibaldi Street in the spring of 1960. As Malkin reflected soberly:

“The operation […] remains a source of enormous pride. But, too, where once I would have returned from such a mission feeling only pride, the lessons I had learned during this one were troubling and complex. Foremost among them was that self-certainty born of strength alone is extraordinarily dangerous; that, to wield power without a clear set of governing ideals is always to risk becoming what one claims to despise.”

This has been Conflicted. Thanks for listening.

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