The Eichmann Trial (review)

The trial of Adolf Eichmann has always attracted the attention of students of the Holocaust, and for obvious reasons. As an officer in the Reich Security Main Office, Eichmann played an important role in carrying out the forced emigration of Austria's Jews; he also participated in making plans for Poland's Jews in the months after the start of the war, drafted the minutes of the notorious Wannsee conference, and organized—and at times personally supervised—the deportation of Jews from many parts of Europe to their deaths. His capture and secret transfer to Israel and his subsequent trial, conviction, and execution there received extensive media coverage. Questions arose about the legality of his kidnapping in Argentina and the fairness of the trial. Hannah Arendt's coverage of the trial, expanded into her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, generated controversy sufficient to keep the spotlight on the trial from dimming. Indeed, as I write this review, Boston's Huntington Theatre Company is staging a new play, Captors, retelling the story of Eichmann's capture by Israeli agents.¹

Deborah Lipstadt has produced a valuable addition to the literature on the trial. She devotes chapters to Eichmann's capture; the questions of legal jurisdiction; Eichmann's interrogation and the strategy of the prosecutor, Israeli Attorney General Gideon Hausner; the prosecution's presentation of its case and its use of oral testimony from more than 100 survivors; Eichmann's defense; the cross-examination by Hausner and the judges; and the outcome of the trial. She also devotes a chapter to a critique of Arendt's book. Lipstadt has based her study on the interrogation and trial transcripts, Gideon Hausner's account of the trial, and important secondary literature, including recent books by David Cesarani and Hanna Yablonka.²

What distinguishes this book and makes it highly engaging is how deeply personal Eichmann's trial became for the author. David Irving sued Lipstadt and her publisher, Penguin Books, in Britain for libel (she had accused him of Holocaust denial). During the preparations for the trial, she was provided with a copy of Eichmann's long-sealed memoir. As she read it, she began to link Irving's denial of denial, Eichmann's denial of responsibility, the unacknowledged antisemitism of both men, and the importance of oral testimony in a trial setting. Lipstadt's reflections on these links appear throughout the work. Moreover, the book is dedicated to Stephen T. Johns, the guard murdered at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on June 10, 2009. Lipstadt considers Johns a victim of Holocaust denial.

Lipstadt argues that Hausner's assertion that the court could speak on behalf of all Jewish victims of Nazism, combined with his tactic of using the trial to present a broad picture of the Holocaust beyond Eichmann's part in it, generated a widespread public discussion. In this way the trial created a lasting role for survivors as an essential source for understanding the Holocaust, and forced scholars to search beyond German documentation. The prosecution's case, Lipstadt notes, was only partly valid. Eichmann was in fact proved to have been an enthusiastic, well-informed perpetrator, rather than a banal bureaucrat blindly following orders, but he was not the primary architect of the Holocaust.³ Here Hausner was mistaken. Notably, one of the witnesses called by Hausner was Michael Musmanno, an American who had served as a judge at the Nuremberg Einsatzgruppen trial. Musmanno erroneously credited Eichmann with having been a chief originator of the overall Final Solution and of the details of its implementation, such as the creation of the Einsatzgruppen in 1941 and the idea of placing Jews in vans and killing them with exhaust fumes.⁴ In any case, Eichmann was justly convicted for those actions that could be proved. Eichmann's defense—that he was not an antisemite; that he tried to help rather than harm the Jews; that he was just following orders; that he...