What was eichmann guilty of

First, the universal character of the crimes in question, which are grave offences against the law of nations itself and, in the absence of an international court, grant jurisdiction to any domestic court para. Second, the specific character of the crimes, which was the extermination of the Jewish people, provides the necessary linking point between the Accused and the newly-founded State of Israel, a State established and recognised as the State of the Jews para. The crimes committed by the Accused concern the vital interests of the State, thus it has a right to punish the Accused pursuant to the protective principle para.

This jurisdiction is not negated by the manner in which the Accused was brought before the Court. It is an established rule of law that a person standing trial for an offence against the laws of a State may not oppose his being tried by reason of the illegality of his arrest or the means by which he was brought to the jurisdiction of the court para. This rule applies equally in cases where the accused is relying on violations of international, rather than domestic, law para.

Under Section 8 of the Punishment Law, the defence of superior orders contained in Section 19 b of the Criminal Code Ordinance of is not available in case of offences enumerated by the afore-mentioned Law but may be taken into account as a factor at sentencing para. Israel, Criminal Code Ordinance of IV, p. Index of page Summary Procedural history Related developments Legally relevant facts Core legal questions Specific legal rules and provisions Court's holding and analysis Further analysis Instruments cited Related cases Additional materials Social media links.

Attorney General v. Jerusalem, December 15, The charges against Eichmann were numerous. After the Wannsee Conference January , Eichmann coordinated deportations of Jews from Germany and elsewhere in western, southern, and northern Europe to killing centers through his representatives Alois Brunner, Theodor Dannecker, Rolf Guenther, and Dieter Wisliceny and others in the Gestapo. Eichmann made deportation plans down to the last detail.

Working with other German agencies, he determined how the property of deported Jews would be seized and made certain that his office would benefit from the confiscated assets. He also arranged for the deportation of tens of thousands of Roma Gypsies.

Like almost everybody else in Israel, he believed that only a Jewish court could render justice to Jews, and that it was the business of Jews to sit in judgment on their enemies. If the audience was to be the world and the play was to be the huge panorama of Jewish suffering, the reality was falling short of expectations and failing to accomplish its purpose. The journalists remained faithful for no more than two weeks, and then the audience changed drastically. It was now supposed to consist of Israelis, and, specifically, of those who were too young to know the story or, as in the case of Oriental Jews, had never been told it.

The trial was supposed to show them what it meant to live among non-Jews, to convince them that only in Israel could a Jew be safe and live an honorable life. As witness followed witness and horror was piled upon horror, they sat there and listened in public to stories they would hardly have been able to endure in private, when they would have had to face the storyteller.

It was precisely the play aspect of the trial that collapsed under the weight of the hair-raising atrocities. A trial resembles a play in that both focus on the doer, not on the victim.

A show trial, to be effective, needs even more urgently than an ordinary trial a limited and well-defined outline of what the doer did, and how. In the center of a trial can only be the one who did—in this respect, he is like the hero in the play—and if he suffers, he must suffer for what he has done, not for what he has caused others to suffer. Servatius as everybody invariably addressed him was a bit bolder when it came to the submission of documents, and the most impressive of his rare interventions occurred when the prosecution introduced as evidence the diaries of Hans Frank, wartime Governor General of Poland and one of the major war criminals hanged at Nuremberg.

Servatius said. The name Adolf Eichmann is not mentioned in all those twenty-nine volumes. Thank you, no more questions. These lessons to be drawn from an identical show were meant to be different for the different recipients.

Ben-Gurion had outlined them before the trial started, in a number of articles that were designed to explain why Israel had kidnapped the accused. We want them to know the most tragic facts in our history. If these had been the only justifications for bringing Adolf Eichmann to the District Court of Jerusalem, the trial would have been a failure on most counts.

In some respects, the lessons were superfluous, and in others they were positively misleading. Not only has their conviction of the eternal and ubiquitous nature of anti-Semitism been the most potent ideological factor in the Zionist involvement since the Dreyfus Affair; it must also have been the cause of the otherwise inexplicable readiness of the German-Jewish community to negotiate with the Nazi authorities during the early stages of the regime.

This conviction produced a fatal inability to distinguish between friend and foe; the German Jews underestimated their enemies because they somehow thought that all Gentiles were alike. But the sad truth of the matter is that the point was ill taken, for no non-Jewish group or non-Jewish people had behaved differently. And it is not for nothing. It is not gratuitously, out of sheer sadism, that the S. They know that the system which succeeds in destroying its victim before he mounts the scaffold.

In submission. Nothing is more terrible than these processions of human beings going like dummies to their death. Four hundred and thirty Jews were arrested in reprisal, and they were literally tortured to death, being sent first to Buchenwald and then to the Austrian camp of Mauthausen.

Month after month, they died a thousand deaths, and every single one of them would have envied his brethren in Auschwitz had he known about them. There exist many things considerably worse than death, and the S. In this respect, perhaps even more significantly than in others, the deliberate attempt in Jerusalem to tell only the Jewish side of the story distorted the truth, even the Jewish truth. The glory of the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto and the heroism of the few others who fought back lay precisely in their having refused the comparatively easy death that the Nazis offered them—before the firing squad or in the gas chamber.

Along with other departmental heads, he had once been introduced to the Mufti during a reception at an S. Documents produced by the prosecution showed that the Mufti had been in close contact with the German Foreign Office and with Himmler, but this was nothing new. Hence, the relationship between the two countries, and particularly the personal relationship between Ben-Gurion and Adenauer, has been quite good, and if, as an aftermath of the trial, some deputies in the Knesset, the Israeli Parliament, succeeded in imposing certain restraints on the cultural-exchange program with West Germany, this certainly was not hoped for, or even foreseen, by Ben-Gurion.

The results were amazing. Although evidence against these five had been published in Germany years before, in books and magazine articles, not one of them had found it necessary to live under an assumed name. For the first time since the close of the war, German newspapers were full of stories about trials of Nazi criminals—all of them mass murderers—and the reluctance of the local courts to prosecute these crimes still showed itself in the fantastically lenient sentences meted out to those convicted.

Thus, Dr. Hunsche, who was personally responsible for a last-minute deportation of some twelve hundred Hungarian Jews, of whom at least six hundred were killed, received a sentence of five years of hard labor; Dr. Otto Bradfisch, of the Einsatzgruppen , the mobile killing units of the S. Among the new arrests were people of great prominence under the Nazis, most of whom had already been denazified by the German courts.

One was S. He still awaits trial. Occasional harsh sentences were even less reassuring, for they were meted out to offenders like Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, a former S.

Neither indictment mentioned that Bach-Zelewski had been anti-partisan chief on the Russian front or that he had participated in the Jewish massacres at Minsk and Mogilev, in White Russia. And is it possible that what was an unusually harsh sentence for a German postwar court was arrived at because Bach-Zelewski was among the very few Nazi leaders who had tried to protect Jews from the Einsatzgruppen, suffered a nervous breakdown after the mass killings, and testified for the prosecution in Nuremberg?

He was also the only such leader who in had denounced himself publicly for mass murder, but he was never prosecuted for it.

It has been estimated that of the eleven thousand five hundred judges in the Bundesrepublik , five thousand were active in the courts under the Hitler regime. The former Higher S. He was accused of participation in, and partial responsibility for, the murder of forty thousand Jews in Poland. After more than six weeks of detailed testimony, the prosecutor demanded the maximum penalty—a life sentence, to be served at hard labor. And the court sentenced him to four years, two and a half of which he had already served while waiting in jail.

Nevertheless, there can be no doubt that the Eichmann trial had its deepest and most far-reaching consequences in Germany. The attitude of the German people toward their own past, which all experts on the German question had puzzled over for fifteen years, could hardly have been more clearly demonstrated: they themselves did not care much about it one way or the other, and did not particularly mind the presence of murderers at large in the country, since none of these particular murderers were likely to commit murder now, of their own free will; however, if world opinion—or, rather, what the Germans call das Ausland , collecting all countries outside Germany into a singular noun—became obstinate and demanded that these people be punished, they were perfectly willing to oblige, at least up to a point.

During the ten months that Israel needed to prepare the trial, Germany was busy bracing herself against its predictable results by showing an unprecedented zeal for searching out and prosecuting Nazi criminals within the country. The official objection of the Adenauer government that such a move was not possible because there existed no extradition treaty between Israel and West Germany is not valid; it meant only that Israel could not have been forced to extradite.

Fritz Bauer, Attorney General of Hessen, applied to the federal government in Bonn to start extradition proceedings. But Mr. His application was not only refused by Bonn, it was hardly noticed and remained totally unsupported.

Another argument against extradition, offered by the observers the West German government sent to Jerusalem, was that Germany had abolished capital punishment and hence was unable to mete out the sentence Eichmann deserved. In view of the leniency shown by German courts to Nazi murderers, it was difficult not to suspect that this objection was made in bad faith.

Surely, the greatest political hazard of an Eichmann trial in Germany would have been that a German court might not have given him the maximum penalty under German law.

Another aspect of the matter was at once more delicate and more relevant to the political situation in Germany. It was one thing to ferret out mass murderers and other criminals from their hiding places, and it was another thing to find them prominent and active in the public realm—to encounter innumerable men in the federal and state administrations whose careers had bloomed under the Hitler regime.

To be sure, if the Adenauer administration had been too sensitive in employing officials with a compromising Nazi past, there might have been no administration at all.

For the truth is, of course, the exact opposite of what Dr. But although the prosecution went as far afield as to put witness after witness on the stand who testified to things that, while gruesome and true enough, had only the slightest connection, or none, with the deeds of the accused, it carefully avoided touching upon this highly explosive matter—upon the almost ubiquitous complicity, stretching far beyond the ranks of the Party membership.

Still, one case of complicity was brought to the attention of the court—that of Dr. Still, former Ministry Official and present Undersecretary of State Globke doubtless had more right than the former Mufti of Jerusalem to figure in the history of what the Jews had actually suffered at the hands of the Nazis. And it was history that, as far as the prosecution was concerned, stood at the center of the trial.

A few sessions later, after Salo W. Beyond the understanding of a human being? Servatius, following the philosophy of history expounded by the prosecutor, had put History in the place of the Elders of Zion. I never killed a Jew, or, for that matter, I never killed a non-Jew—I never killed any human being. I never gave an order to kill a Jew nor an order to kill a non-Jew; I just did not do it. Thus, he repeated over and over a statement that he had first made in the so-called Sassen documents—an interview that he had given in in Argentina to the Dutch journalist Willem S.

Sassen, a former S. The German Army had occupied the Serbian part of Yugoslavia six months earlier, and had been plagued by partisan warfare ever since. At length, the military authorities had decided to solve two problems at a stroke by shooting a hundred Jews and Gypsies as hostages for every dead German soldier.

Eichmann was informed, since it was a matter of deportation, and this was precisely his job. This was an Army affair, obviously, since only males were involved.

In Serbia, the implementation of the Final Solution started about six months later, when women and children were rounded up and disposed of in mobile gas vans. During cross-examination, Eichmann, characteristically, chose the most complicated and least likely explanation: Rademacher had needed the support of the Head Office for Reich Security for his own stand on the matter, and had therefore forged the document.

Would Eichmann, then, have pleaded guilty if he had been indicted as an accessory to murder? Perhaps, but with certain important qualifications. Even under considerable pressure from his lawyer, Eichmann did not change this position. Witness, in the negotiations with your superiors, did you express any pity for the Jews and did you say there was room to help them?