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Eichmann trial in Jerusalem: the mass murderer in a glass case

2021-04-10T09:28:32.427Z


On April 11, 1961, the trial of the Holocaust organizer Adolf Eichmann began in Jerusalem. The procedure changed how the survivors were dealt with. Deputy Prosecutor Gabriel Bach recalls.


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The most famous symbol of the Eichmann trial is now in the Ghetto Fighters' House Museum in Israel.

The bulletproof glass case is now an exhibit.

Sixty years after the notorious Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann first entered it at the beginning of the trial.

The glass dock for the organizer of the Holocaust in one of the most spectacular trials of the 20th century.

He faced Eichmann as deputy attorney general: Gabriel Bach was 34 years old at the time.

Gabriel Bach, Deputy Attorney General:

When Eichmann came in he was taken to a glass cell and I was often asked why.

A glass cell to prevent him from being killed or wounded, from being hit.

Eichmann went into hiding after the end of the war.

He lived in Argentina under the name Ricardo Klement, worked at Daimler-Benz and lived with his family undisturbed in a suburb of Buenos Aires, on Garibaldistraße.

There, the Israeli secret service Mossad tracked him down in 1960, kidnapped him, interrogated him in a hiding place in Buenos Aires and then secretly brought him to Israel on a special flight operated by the Israeli airline El Al.

On May 22, 1960, Adolf Eichmann landed in Tel Aviv.

The news of his arrest electrified Israel and the world.

A special unit prepared the process, Police Office 06. Eichmann was the only inmate in a prison near Haifa.

The tape recordings of his interrogations lasted a total of 275 hours.

Tape excerpt from the interrogation of Adolf Eichmann:

... then to Auschwitz ... Auschwitz [thinking about it], then I was sent to Treblinka ...

Gabriel Bach was the legal advisor to Police Office 06 and was researching the autobiography of the former Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höß when he first met Eichmann.

Gabriel Bach, Deputy Attorney General:

I read this book 10 minutes before I saw Eichmann for the first time.

And there he wrote that they had many days where they killed 1,000 Jewish children a day.

He said.

Sometimes his knees trembled.

But then one day he was talking to a man, Adolf Eichmann.

And this Eichmann explained to him that it is mainly the children who have to be killed.

He says, because what's the logic of killing a generation of older people and then leaving the children alive?

Police officer Michael Goldmann-Gilead, himself an Auschwitz survivor, was also part of Police Office 06.

Michael Goldmann-Gilead, investigator in the police office 06:

When he came in and I said, 'Sit down,' and when he opened his mouth, I got the impression that these are the gates of a crematorium.

When I saw him for the first time, he was so ... I couldn't imagine that this man was the fifth above us Jews after Hitler.

The 40/61 criminal case took place in Jerusalem, in a theater with a stage and auditorium converted into a courtroom.

Today, the building is again governed by art and culture.

A historical place that has marked the turning point in coming to terms with the Shoah since 1961.

Sixteen years after the end of World War II, there was a Holocaust trial in Israel.

Gideon Hausner, Attorney General:

When I stand before you in this court, Judge of Israel, to indict Adolf Eichmann, I am not alone.

I have six million accusers.

But they cannot stand up and point an accusing finger at the man in the dock and scream, "I accuse!" Because their ashes are piled on the hills of Auschwitz and the fields of Treblinka, or have been washed into the rivers of Poland .

Their graves are scattered across the length and breadth of Europe.

Eichmann's defense tactics were simple.

He keeps repeating the tale of the insignificant official.

The chief logistician of the mass destruction tried to downplay his role.

Mosche Landau, presiding judge:

"Are you pleading guilty or not guilty?"

Adolf Eichmann, Nazi criminal:

"Not guilty as charged."

SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann was responsible for the deportation of millions of Jews to the concentration camps in the "Third Reich" as head of the "Judenreferat" in the Reich Security Main Office.

The coordinator for the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” repeatedly stated that he was only forced to carry out orders.

Adolf Eichmann, Nazi criminal:

Participation in the deportation - since this was a political order at the time, I believe that only those who are responsible for this political decision can feel guilt in the legal sense.

Because where there is no responsibility, there is ultimately no guilt.

Gabriel Bach, Deputy Public Prosecutor:

I examined all the documents connected with Eichmann.

And then I saw that every time it was a question of the Jewish personality or some Jewish family or an office - and he was asked not to deport people - there was always his answer: For reasons of principle, I have to prevent that.

Every Jew has to be deported.

Eichmann followed the films about the Nazi atrocities that the public prosecutor's office showed as evidence without expression.

But the central role in the court was not played by the films, but by the testimony of more than a hundred witnesses.

Leslie Gordon, witness:

We were together.

My father, 58, my mother, she was 43. My brother, who was 22.

I was 21, my sister was 19, my brother was 16. Another brother was 14. My sister was eight and my little brother was five.

We tried to stick together and walk on the streets, just as the "brave" SS had told us.

"Who of all these family members stayed alive?"

Just myself.

Gabriel Bach, Deputy Public Prosecutor

There was a man: Nachum Hoch.

He was one of a thousand children in the gas chamber and he was the only one left alive.

He describes how the other children stood there and sang songs.

And then you took out 50 to do another thing.

But then they were sent back, and in the end it turned out that of these thousand children he is the only one who stayed alive.

The trial was broadcast worldwide on television and radio.

Today the Eichmann Trial has its own YouTube channel, a co-production of the Israeli State Archives and the Yad Vashem Memorial.

You can watch hours of the process on video.

The witness Yehiel Dinur survived Auschwitz.

He tried to testify, but collapsed unconscious.

There were many harrowing moments during the testimony, the portrayals of the terrible details of the Holocaust that were beyond the imagination.

Vera Alexander, witness:

“Do you remember the infamous Dr.

Mengele? "

I've only seen one experiment.

"What did you see?"

There were two children, twins, children of Roma and Sinti, whom one day he took away from the block I was in, that was the Roma and Sinti camp.

A few days later he brought them back, sewn together, the veins in their hands sewn together - and their backs.

Presiding judge: "I did not understand."

Attorney General: "He sewed them together."

Presiding judge: "The veins sewn together?"

Yes.

"Did he turn them into Siamese twins?"

He sewed the children's hands together.

Gabriel Bach, Deputy Public Prosecutor:

There was the tragic story of Martin Földi.

There he described how he got to Auschwitz.

With his wife, daughter and son.

- And then they said the woman should turn left, his daughter to the left, and he was told - to the right.

- The son had already left a little, and then the chairman of the SS said: "Run to your mother."

And then the witness said he doesn't know what happened to his son, whether the son found his wife or not.

He says I didn't see him anymore and I didn't see my wife either.

But my little daughter, she was two and a half years old and she had a red coat.

I saw her go away from afar, and I saw this red coat, this red dot that got smaller and smaller until it disappeared.

And so my whole family disappeared from my life.

- And I heard that for the first time.

And I had just bought my daughter a red coat, and she was two and a half years old, and I was completely speechless.

Suddenly I couldn't get any sound out and it was a few minutes before I could continue.

Many of the statements shocked the audience, often victims of the Holocaust themselves.

Some simply couldn't stand Eichmann's belittling lies any longer.

The viewer of the Eichmann trial calls out:

Dog, bloodhound

The process led to a change in awareness in Israel and the Jewish world, changed the way in which the survivors of the Holocaust were dealt with, and gave them a voice.

That was not so before.

Martin Auerbach, psychotherapist and clinical director of AMCHA / Israel:

I know this from

the stories I hear and

stories from the survivors.

They said that my family members also began to ask me: You survived.

How was it?

What is hidden, what in the ghetto, what in the concentration camp and so on.

In other words, many of them did not really conceal their own past, but they did not tell it about spontaneously.

And then suddenly they had the opportunity to tell it.

On December 15, 1961, the Eichmann trial ended with the death sentence.

A pardon was later denied.

Gabriel Bach, Deputy Public Prosecutor:

I was of the opinion that the death penalty is a punishment that should not be imposed often, but that genocide or crimes against humanity, the death penalty is appropriate.

And that the death penalty is appropriate.

On the night of June 1, 1962, Eichmann was hanged in Ramla Prison.

Michael Goldmann-Gilead was one of the few witnesses to the first and, to date, last execution in Israeli history.

Michael Goldmann-Gilead, witness of the execution of Eichmann:

I didn't have a feeling in that moment.

No feeling of revenge.

Nothing at all.

Nothing at all.

I wondered to myself why I was standing there - without feeling.

That was just a judgment on one.

You couldn't hang it six million times.

It was just that justice won in that moment, nothing more.

Source: spiegel

All news articles on 2021-04-10

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