He claimed that as a timetable technician he at first had no idea that the ultimate destinations of the trains were death camps. “I wanted Jews to have solid ground under their feet.”Įven embittered Israelis were forced to admit that Eichmann was a good witness, however garrulous and diffuse. In this spirit, he claimed, he helped ship Jews out of Nazi Europe, tried to set up Madagascar as a Jewish haven. “The real solution would be for the Jews to have a state of their own,” he said. “I was only dealing with train timetables and technical aspects of evacuation transports.” In this small role, rationalized Eichmann, he actually helped the Jews: “It cannot be denied that this orderliness was to some extent to the benefit of the people who were deported, if one might be allowed to use the word.” But faced with the emigration job, Eichmann told the court, he realized he could help the Jews by forcibly “facilitating” the work of the Zionists. When Eichmann took the stand in late June, here’s how TIME covered his appearance:Įichmann’s point quickly became evident, and he repeated it so often in such bureaucratese that some of the spectators literally fell asleep: he had been “only a small cog” with no real authority in the Nazi machine. When he stood, he resembled a stork more than a soldier.”Įichmann tried to make the case that he had “never killed anybody” or given an order for a killing, and was only, as he put it, “loyal, obedient and happy to be of service to my fatherland.” Such service, however, included moments such as the infamous instance in which he attempted to “sell” a million Jewish lives in exchange for 10,000 trucks, and another in which he insisted that if he had to kill himself at the end of the war he would “leap into my grave happy because we will at least have wiped out Europe’s Jews.” Counter to Eichmann’s argument ran hours upon hours of testimony from the prosecutor and the many witnesses he called, as well as affidavits from former Nazis who said Eichmann had in fact been a decision-maker of consequence. He looked puny beside two burly, blue-clad Israeli policemen. According to TIME’s account, this is what they saw: “a thin, balding man of 55 who looked more like a bank clerk than a butcher: a thin mouth between protruding ears, a long, narrow nose, deep set blue eyes, a high, often wrinkled brow. His guilt would not be determined by establishing the facts, but by establishing the meaning of that idea.Īn estimated 500 journalists from around the world headed to Jerusalem to cover the trial.
“A lot of the controversy was face-saving, particularly from the German and Argentinian point of view.”įew, if any, argued that there was any actual question of what Eichmann had done he was known to have been an architect of the Nazi genocide and was even once reported to have said that he gained “extraordinary satisfaction” from knowing that he had millions of death on his conscience. “I don’t think the controversy lingered,” says Neal Bascomb, author of Hunting Eichmann: How a Band of Survivors and a Young Spy Agency Chased Down the World’s Most Notorious Nazi. Many, however, remembered what Eichmann had done and decided his crimes outweighed the concerns. Some felt it was most important to present the facts of what he did to the world, and preserve them for the historical record. Some felt the most important thing was to serve Eichmann himself with justice, or something approaching justice, recognizing that no punishment could be harsh enough. Some felt that the nation might be justified in trying Eichmann, but should not get into the business of executions.
Some felt that the importance of the still-new nation of Israel being a beacon of adherence to international law meant the precedent for such a trial was too shaky to rely on. Some observers felt that Eichmann should be tried in Germany, if anywhere, or by an international body. As TIME reported immediately after the capture, the idea that Eichmann would stand trial in Israel was controversial, as “diplomats and editorialists around the world asked about the legality of kidnapping a man from one country to stand trial in a second for crimes committed in a third,” and Argentina dealt with a situation under which its “sovereignty was infringed and laws against abduction were flouted.”