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Chapter 2 Eichmann On May 23, 1960, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion appeared before the Knesset, the Israeli Parliament, and announced: "It is my duty to inform you that a short time ago the security services apprehended one ofthe most infamous Nazi criminals, AdolfEichmann, who was responsible , together with the Nazi leadership, for what they called 'the "Final Solution" to theJewish problem'-in other words, the extermination of six million of Europe's Jews. Adolf Eichmann is already imprisoned in this country, and will soon be brought to trial in Israel under the Nazi and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law of 1950."1 Adolf Eichmann, widely reputed to be the superintendent ofNazi genocide, was captured in Buenos Aires, Argentina, by operatives of the Mossad, Israel's Central Bureau of Intelligence and Security. In a daring undercover operation, he was spirited out of Argentina and delivered to Israel to stand trial.2 Ben-Gurion's declaration marked the beginning of an eighteen-month legal process that culminated in theJerusalem District Court sentencing Adolf Eichmann to death on December 15, 1961. The Eichmann trial reinforced and refined the pattern set at Nuremberg . It was sprawling, slow-moving, and poorly focused. The trial ground on for ten months, heard more than 120 prosecution witnesses, and reviewed more than 1,400 voluminous exhibits. The Holocaust, rather than Eichmann's own crimes, set its agenda. Adolf Eichmann was treated not as a defendant charged with committing specific acts but as the embodiment of all those Nazi henchmen who had carried out the "Final Solution." In Israel, as at Nuremberg, the trial was adversarial in form but seriously unbalanced, with a keenly zealous and well-supported prosecution and quiescent, reactive defense counsel. It was conducted in a climate decidedly hostile to the defendant and for educational and political purposes far beyond his conviction. The process was shaped by rules ofprocedure that allowed the admission ofgreat bodies of tainted, irrelevant, and prejudicial evidence. To the Nuremberg legacy, the Eich- Eichmann 57 mann case added the new and poignant problem of a large number of victim witnesses. Atrocity evidence moved to the conscious center of the proceedings, and the testimony of survivors presented the court with a host of dilemmas. In the end, as at Nuremberg, the Eichmann prosecution was saved from grave error only by the intervention ofa fair-minded judge who kept the process from tipping over into oppression. The Interrogation The first step in the prosecutorial effort was Eichmann's interrogation by the Israeli police, which began on May 29, 1960, and was not concluded until january 1, 1961. In all, 275 hours of questioning was conducted and recorded on audiotape. The tape was transcribed into a 3,564-page document, and Eichmann reviewed, corrected, and initialed each page.3 The prisoner had no counsel and no protection against selfincrimination during the preponderance of the interrogation process. Why Eichmann spoke as extensively as he did under these circumstances of captivity and interrogation is not entirely clear. Gideon Hausner, the Israeli attorney general and lead prosecutor in the case, advanced a disturbing hypothesis in his book on the trial: "We had the impression that he believed his safety depended on keeping talking. When Superintendent [Avner] Less [the chief Israeli interrogator] would occasionally skip a day of interrogation, Eichmann would grow nervous and ask the guard for the reason. He was visibly relieved when the questioning was resumed."4 The circumstances of Eichmann's interrogation invite serious speculation that his statement was, at least to some degree, the product of coercion. The interrogation explored every phase of Eichmann's life and career: his youth, education, and early employment; his relationships with a score or more of prominent Nazis, including Ernst Kaltenbrunner , Heinrich Rimmler, Reinhard Heydrich, Heinrich Muller, and Rudolf Hoss; his career in the Nazi bureaucracy, from his first great "success"-organizing the forced emigration of Austrian jews-to such critical questions as his role in Section N B 4 of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), which was in charge ofJewish affairs for most of the Third Reich. The interrogation probed Eichmann's connections to the killing operations conducted at various Nazi death camps as well as those carried out by the infamous Einsatzgruppen, or mobile killing units, of the SS. It reviewed in painstaking detail hundreds of official Nazi documents from the period between 1933 and 1945, frequently relying on Eichmann to establish the genuineness ofmaterials otherwise impossible to authenticate,5 which could then be introduced...

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