The Eichmann Trial (3 page)

One other thing linked these two events. I leave it for last because it discomfited me throughout the trial and continues to do so to this day. Ben-Gurion justified holding the trial in Israel because he believed that Israel, as the Jewish state, had the right to speak in the name of those who had been killed as Jews. Hausner had begun his opening statement by asserting that standing by his side were six million victims. When survivors heard of my coming legal battle, they sent me notes, letters, and copies of their books. All came with a similar message: “This is my story. This is what happened to me and to my family. This is what David Irving and his cohorts wish to deny. This is the history you must protect. You must stand up for us.” I had never thought of what was facing me in such global and momentous terms. I saw myself as fighting a pseudo-historian who also engaged in overt racist and anti-Semitic expression. If I represented anyone, it was historians who wished to practice their craft and were willing to fight those who would abuse it for nefarious ends. However, as my trial approached, I found a larger meaning thrust upon it and upon me by survivors who were worried and frightened. I tried to reassure them that, even if I did not prevail, their history would be safe. They brushed aside my assurances. One survivor told me that he had attended a session of the Eichmann trial and hoped to come to mine. “Then the Nazi was in the dock. Now it is backwards.” Now I see, as I look back, that this perhaps was for them a moment that meant the Eichmann trial and all it represented was ongoing. That the English High Court would be the venue for a Holocaust denier to spew lies and fabrications about things that had happened to them and had obliterated their families and the life they once knew seemed surrealistic at best.

Ironically, at the same time that they were investing what was facing me with such personal import, I was also receiving a very different message from other sources, particularly intellectuals and scholars in the field. Holocaust denial, they insisted, was the equivalent of flat-earth theory and, as such, was worthy of nothing more than utter ridicule. I should not, these skeptics insisted, take Irving’s charges seriously. I was “silly,” one leading historian opined, to invest so much time, effort, and resources into fighting them. “Just ignore it” was his sage advice. Though I agreed with these scholars about the total absurdity of denial, I explained that if I followed their advice, Irving would win by default. Because the British justice system placed the burden of proof on me, my failure to fight would result in a ruling that I was indeed guilty of libeling David Irving by calling him a denier. Irving could then legitimately interpret such a ruling as having concluded that his version of the Holocaust—no plan to kill the Jews, no gas chambers, no Hitler involvement—was legitimate. “So what?” the historian continued. “No one will believe it anyway.” From my then budding awareness of the Internet, I knew he was wrong. There were many people who, though not fully accepting deniers’ claims, might wonder if there was not some justification to Irving’s positions.

Many British Jews did not want me to fight and pressured me to find some way “to settle this whole matter.” Irving, they were convinced, would “win,” irrespective of the outcome. “Even if he loses,” one told me, “he will wrest so much publicity from the matter that he will end up ahead.” Anthony Julius, my solicitor, the lawyer who prepared the case, developed the forensic strategy, and then turned it over to Richard Rampton to litigate in court, asked those who counseled me to settle what they thought my bottom line should be: Two million Jews? Three million? One death camp? Two or three? (Most dropped the matter at that point.) I juxtaposed these suggestions that I ignore the matter with the messages I was receiving from survivors. I could not look them in the eye and say, “When given the chance to stand up to this complete distortion of
your
history, I chose not to fight.” These skeptics’ arguments notwithstanding, I became convinced that I owed the survivors a full-fledged fight against those who would assault their history.

If I had any lingering doubts about my decision, they were erased for me on the first day of the trial. In front of a packed courtroom, Irving had spoken for three hours. Predicting a great victory for himself, he had repeatedly denied the Holocaust. I seethed with anger as I listened to the historical distortions and the anti-Semitism I found riddling his speech. When the session ended and we emerged from the courtroom, both of us were surrounded by reporters. He happily engaged them. I, however, was stymied. Because I was not giving testimony during the trial, my lawyers had asked me not to speak to the press. They did not want to antagonize the judge and give Irving room to say to him, “Lipstadt won’t give testimony in your courtroom, but she was speaking on the BBC last night.” I turned to my lawyer, who was standing next to me, and insisted that I should “give them something.” He stood his ground: “Say nothing.” As we debated the matter back and forth, an elderly woman worked her way through the crowd, approached me, touched me on the arm, and then rolled up the sleeve of her sweater. Pointing to the number tattooed on her arm, she said: “
You
are our witness.” I forgot about talking to the press.

I never would have brought a matter of Holocaust denial to a court, but once I had been forced to enter that arena I had no choice but to respond with all my abilities. Though I did not represent the survivors, I felt their presence in that courtroom. They filled the public gallery. They gave me lists of the names of their murdered relatives. And when I prevailed, they embraced me, laughed, and cried with me. Though I’d never intended to do so, I ended up fighting for them.

In a larger sense, these two choruses of voices—those of the victims for whom evil is still present and the fight is still in some sense ongoing; and those who believe the battle has been won and that anti-Semitic horrors are the province of either the past or the “crazies” who are better ignored—still constitute the foundation upon which we build our understanding of Eichmann, the judgment against him, and his sentencing. Although some look back and see a trial of momentous importance because it brought to justice one of the key players in the Final Solution, others dismiss both the trial and Eichmann himself as things of little importance. They charge that Israel aggrandized the matter for political ends. They dismiss Eichmann as simply a transportation “specialist” and fault Israel for using the trial for Zionist ends. They claim he was a bureaucratic “clown,” who really did not understand what he was doing. These differences of opinion about the Eichmann trial may well be metonyms for attitudes toward and perceptions of contemporary anti-Semitism. Some find the overt anti-Semitism of Holocaust deniers the ranting of idiots who are best ignored. Others take these comments quite seriously and see a dire and existential threat to Jewish well-being. They see a Holocaust-denying president of a large country, one that is poised to have nuclear weapons, occupying the podium of a world forum that was founded in the wake of the Final Solution with a mandate to stop genocide. They hear him deny the Final Solution and threaten the existence of the Jewish state. When they react strongly, they are cautioned by commentators and policy makers that they are overreacting or misunderstanding his charges. For them the issues that were adjudicated in Jerusalem are neither dead nor academic.

Historians often insist that they come to their research with a tabula rasa, that they judge each situation on its merits and do not let other matters shape their perceptions. In fact, no matter how much they may deny it, their personal experiences constitute facets on the prism through which their view of past events is refracted. For the sake of her readers and herself, a historian must acknowledge their presence and try to ensure that they clarify, rather than cloud, her understanding. And so, with my own encounter with history, the law, the study of the Holocaust, and raw anti-Semitism as a backdrop, I began to explore what happened in Jerusalem five decades earlier.

The Eichmann Trial

1

O
n the afternoon of May 23, 1960, members of Israel’s Knesset were gathered for what promised to be a run-of-the-mill budget debate. Then Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion rose, walked to the podium, and, speaking with what
The New York Times
described as “dramatic understatement,” began a two-sentence announcement that sent shock waves around the globe:

I have to inform the Knesset that a short time ago one of the great Nazi war criminals, Adolf Eichmann, the man responsible together with the Nazi leaders for what they called the Final Solution, which is the annihilation of six million European Jews, was discovered by the Israel security services. Adolf Eichmann is already under arrest in Israel and will be placed on trial shortly under the terms of the law for the trial of Nazis and their collaborators.
¹

Providing no further details, Ben-Gurion departed, leaving behind a stupefied parliament. After a few moments of silence—estimates differ radically—the room erupted. People wept, hugged, and marveled: Eichmann
b’yadenu
, Eichmann is in
our
hands. On the street, similar scenes ensued. People crowded around radios and newspaper kiosks seeking details. The historian Tom Segev compared the emotions that swept the country to what had happened twelve years earlier. “Israelis had not known, since the Declaration of Independence, so deep a sense of national unity.” Israel’s half-million survivors had a more alloyed response. Warsaw Ghetto fighter Yitzhak (Antek) Zuckerman voiced these contradictory emotions: “Joy and sadness have alighted upon us, entwined with each other.” This strange mix of emotions was exemplified by the verse from Psalm 94 which the editors of the profoundly secular newspaper
Maariv
chose to headline the story:
“El nekamot hofea,”
“The Mighty God to Whom Vengeance Belongs Has Appeared.”
²

This was the second time Eichmann had been captured. Immediately after the war, the Allies had apprehended and interned him in a POW camp. Using a pseudonym, he hid his identity. Then a number of Nuremberg defendants connected him to the Final Solution. They testified about his unrelenting quest to murder as many Jews as he could and his pivotal role in the annihilation process. Assuming that he was now on the Allies’ radar screen, Eichmann feared that they would soon uncover his true identity, or that another prisoner, in an attempt to curry favor with his captors, would expose him. With help from other former SS officers who were POWs, he escaped and headed to a remote area of Germany, where a lumber company provided work and shelter for many war criminals. When the company went bankrupt, he decided to leave for Argentina, where other Third Reich officials had found a warm welcome. Their wartime résumés did not impede their entry into the country. With the help of Catholic officials who had the imprimatur of high—if not the very highest—Vatican offices, Eichmann obtained a Red Cross passport and, using the pseudonym Ricardo Klement, made his way to Buenos Aires.
³

Eichmann’s escape was facilitated by the fact that at this time no one who had the requisite resources or legal authority was interested in finding him. After the Nuremberg tribunals, the Allies, worried about the Cold War, lost their ardor for hunting Nazis and alienating their new ally, West Germany. Israel, fearing annihilation by the Arabs, focused on protecting live Jews, not avenging dead ones. Germany’s chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, whose government was riddled with former Nazis, had declared the hunt for war criminals over.

Eichmann’s whereabouts would probably have remained a mystery but for a combination of amateur sleuthing and dumb luck. Two of the names most prominently associated with locating him had little to do with the operation, whereas those who played a pivotal role have largely been forgotten. The Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal and, to a lesser degree, Tuvia Friedman have claimed and been given credit over the years for finding Eichmann. In fact, though they may have been responsible for finding other murderers, they contributed relatively little to this capture. These two men were among a small group of survivors who believed that the Nazi war criminals had to be tracked down and punished. They devoted their lives to this effort, chasing down Nazis when most other agencies had lost interest. Wiesenthal has claimed that his information led to Eichmann’s “capture, conviction, and execution.”
⁴
In his memoirs he described how he thwarted Vera Eichmann’s attempt in 1947 to have her husband declared dead, ostensibly so that she could be eligible for a widow’s pension. He claimed to have discovered that the person who supposedly witnessed Eichmann’s death was Vera’s brother-in-law and informed the occupation authorities of this fact. They immediately rejected her petition. Wiesenthal touted this as the most important step in the hunt, because a death declaration would have ended efforts to find him. (Who looks for a dead man?) Actually, it is highly unlikely that the Israelis who eventually apprehended Eichmann would have been waylaid by a death certificate obtained by his family. More important, however, Wiesenthal’s claims conflict with what he said at the time. In a January 1960 letter to the Israeli ambassador in Vienna regarding this incident, Wiesenthal explicitly stated that the petition was rejected “at the instigation of the authorities” and made no mention of his supposed role. In another letter to the ambassador, written around the same time, Wiesenthal noted: “Mrs. Eichmann has a sister in Prague, whose husband is a government official. Name to follow.” In other words, he did not seem to know the family’s name, yet he subsequently claimed to have exposed their efforts to have Eichmann declared dead.
⁵

In 1952, Vera and her sons disappeared overnight, leaving all their possessions behind. No one—neighbors, teachers, or officials—apparently knew they were leaving. Her relatives claimed she had left to remarry. This “dead of night” departure convinced Wiesenthal that Vera had reunited with Eichmann. He thought, however, that they were somewhere in northern Germany. Wiesenthal’s suspicions were aroused again when he saw a death notice for Eichmann’s mother listing Vera Eichmann as a mourner. Why would a remarried widow use the name of her former husband? All these were important indications that Eichmann was still alive, but they were not what led to his capture. One important lead did come into Wiesenthal’s hands early in the 1950s. Baron Mast, a fellow Austrian stamp-collector, told Wiesenthal that Eichmann was in Argentina. Six months later, Wiesenthal passed the information on to the World Jewish Congress, who gave it to the CIA. No one followed up. The Israelis, whom Wiesenthal also informed, failed to follow up.
⁶
Had any of these groups acted, Eichmann might have been found and Wiesenthal would have deserved the credit. Wiesenthal’s claim to have found Eichmann is further weakened by his letter to the Israeli ambassador to Austria written on September 23, 1959, about six months before Eichmann’s capture. In it he suggested that Eichmann could be found in northern Germany. The lesser-known but no less indefatigable sleuth Tuvia Friedman also spent great energy and resources in trying to track down Eichmann. After the capture, he claimed to have provided the Israeli government with the crucial information on his whereabouts. He did give them Eichmann’s address in Argentina, but by the time he did so, Israeli officials already knew of Eichmann’s whereabouts and were making plans for his capture.
⁷