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Gabriel Bach was an Israeli lawyer and former deputy prosecutor in the trial of Nazi criminal Adolf Eichmann (archive image)
Photo: MENAHEM KAHANA / AFP
The deputy chief prosecutor of Nazi criminal Adolf Eichmann is dead. The lawyer Gabriel Bach, who comes from Halberstadt, died on Friday at the age of 94, as several Israeli media reported.
The cause of death was unclear at first.
The trial initiated by Bach and other lawyers against Eichmann - the organizer of the mass murder of millions of European Jews - began in April 1961 in Jerusalem.
The year before, Israeli agents had kidnapped Adolf Hitler's "carrier of death" from Argentina.
Eichmann was one of the main people responsible for the deportation of European Jews to the death camps.
Eichmann was found guilty of crimes against humanity, crimes against the Jewish people and war crimes and executed in 1962.
"If anyone deserved death, it was him," Bach said in a 2017 interview with the Holocaust memorial organization International March of the Living.
The trial caused a sensation around the world and is regarded as the trigger for coming to terms with the crimes of the National Socialists.
Raised in Berlin, escaped from Nazi Germany in 1938
During his lifetime, Bach praised the consistent criminal prosecution of Nazi-era criminals in present-day Germany.
The bearer of the Federal Cross of Merit also campaigned for a rapprochement between Israel and his German homeland.
He grew up in Berlin and fled Nazi Germany with his family in 1938.
In 1940 Bach came to what was then Palestine.
He later studied law in London, worked in the public prosecutor's office from 1953 and was a judge at the Supreme Court in Israel from 1982 to 1997.
According to his own statements, the lawyer Bach had been a big fan of FC Schalke 04 since his childhood. The team once surprised him during one of his visits to Germany and gave Bach fan shirts with his name as a gift.
The 94-year-old leaves behind his wife Ruth, children and grandchildren.
tfb/AP/dpa