The Eichmann Trial (7 page)

Long before the court was called to order, it was evident that, in addition to Adolf Eichmann’s crimes, many other issues would be in the docket.

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srael needed to consider far more than the anxieties of American Jews in preparing the trial. There remained essential practical issues that needed to be resolved. Who would judge, prosecute, and defend Eichmann? These constituted far more than just administrative hurdles. Given the extensive critique of its actions, Israel had to demonstrate that it could guarantee Eichmann a fair hearing.

Gideon Hausner, an accomplished commercial lawyer with no expertise in criminal law or courtroom procedure, had recently become attorney general. Though many Israelis hoped he would appoint an experienced prosecutor, he insisted on taking the job. Finding a defense attorney was far trickier. Unless Eichmann had good legal representation, Israel could not affirm that this trial was just. Yet could an Israeli defend a man who had a distinct role in the murder of millions of his fellow Jews? Many Israeli lawyers thought they could not. It would be wrong, one Israeli observed, to appoint an attorney who preferred to be prosecutor. But some Israeli lawyers, in the interests of ensuring that the accused received a fair hearing, volunteered to take the task. Officials at the Ministry of Justice feared that Israeli lawyers who defended Eichmann would be placing themselves in danger. Israeli officials worried that someone, particularly a person who had lost family members, might find it exceptionally difficult to differentiate between the accused and the person defending him. Foreign lawyers also volunteered. Most, however, were either neo-Nazis, incompetent, or both. Matters seemed to be at a standstill until the Eichmann family recommended Robert Servatius, who had been a defense attorney at Nuremberg but had never joined the Nazi Party. Servatius was not a member of the Israeli bar and could not therefore participate in a legal proceeding. The Knesset resolved this by passing a law authorizing a lawyer who was not a member of the Israeli bar to participate in a capital trial. Then the Eichmann family claimed it could not afford Servatius’s fee, which was the equivalent of thirty thousand dollars. Generally West Germany paid the defense costs of its citizens who were tried for war crimes in foreign courts. This time it refused, ostensibly because Eichmann had fled Germany and hidden from prosecution. By so doing, Germany reasoned, he had renounced his right to call upon the country for assistance. In all likelihood, it also refused because it was anxious to keep this defendant at the longest arm’s length possible. A German subvention of Eichmann’s legal costs might have suggested that his homeland supported him. Facing an impasse, Israel agreed to pay Servatius’s fees.

That left the choice of the judicial tribunal to preside over the trial. According to Israeli law, the selection of judges should have been in the hands of Benjamin Halevi, the president of the Jerusalem district court, since that was where the trial would be held. Halevi, however, had presided in 1954 at the trial of Israel Kasztner, the Hungarian Jew who had negotiated with Eichmann to exchange Jews for trucks. This 1944 negotiation, known as “blood for goods,” resulted in the release of a trainful of seventeen hundred Jews. Some of its passengers were Kasztner’s relatives or wealthy Jews who had paid handsomely to secure a place on the train. Others were orphans, Satmar Hasidim, or people chosen by Hungarian authorities. Kasztner had also managed to have a large group of Jews sent to a labor camp, rather than Auschwitz, thereby saving many of them. After the war, some Hungarian Jews condemned Kasztner as an opportunist who had saved his family and lived a privileged life under the Nazis, but failed to alert Hungarian Jews to their fate. They charged that he knew what awaited those who boarded the trains to Auschwitz. Others, particularly those who had been on the Kasztner train, considered him a hero who
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tried to alert Hungarian Jews and who managed to save more Jews than anyone else, including the much-lauded Oskar Schindler. After the war, he came to Israel, affiliated with the leading political party, Mapai, served as a government spokesman, and lived a relatively modest life. Then an elderly eccentric pamphleteer set his sights on him. Malchiel Gruenwald, a Hungarian Jew who immigrated to Palestine in 1938, regularly issued mimeographed diatribes attacking Israeli leaders, primarily those associated with Ben-Gurion and Mapai. In one of these sheets he described Kasztner as the “vicarious murderer” of five hundred thousand Hungarian Jews, including the fifty-eight members of his immediate family. He also condemned the Zionist leadership in the Yishuv, the pre-state Palestinian Jewish community, for failing to rescue Jews during the war. The government sued Gruenwald for libeling one of its employees. Gruenwald hired Shmuel Tamir, who during that period had been a member of the Irgun, Menachem Begin’s resistance group. Ben-Gurion and Begin were and remained arch enemies. Despite the fact that Gruenwald was the defendant, Tamir deftly turned the tables by claiming that Kasztner and the Jewish Councils, which were created by the Nazis to administer Jewish life in the ghettos, were guilty of collaboration. He also attacked Ben-Gurion and his associates who constituted the Zionist leadership in Palestine, accusing them of failing to rescue Hungarian Jewry. It became not a libel trial, but a trial of the victims. Rather than explicate what had happened during the Holocaust and give the public a sense of the overwhelming odds Jews had faced, the trial and Halevi’s judgment were condemnations of the victims, or at least one segment of them, for failing to save their fellow Jews. In essence, it reinforced a long-standing Israeli perception that Holocaust survivors had done something untoward in order to preserve their lives. Judge Halevi promoted that view when his judgment exonerated Gruenwald and declared that Kasztner, by negotiating with Eichmann, had “sold his soul to the devil.” Halevi’s decision was eventually reversed by the Supreme Court, but not before Kasztner was assassinated outside his Tel Aviv home.

The possibility that the presiding judge in Eichmann’s trial would be someone who had already declared him
Satan
worried many people. The proceedings might appear to be tainted from the outset. Many jurists and politicians, including the chief justice of the High Court of Justice, implored Halevi to step aside. Halevi refused, on the grounds that the opposition against him was rooted not in his statements about Eichmann, but in the government leaders’ fears that he might allow the trial to become a forum for renewed criticism of their behavior during the war.
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Once again the Knesset stepped in with a compromise law that stipulated that in capital cases a High Court judge should preside. That judge would be joined by two district-court judges, both of whom would be appointed by the president of the district court in which the trial was to be held. This allowed Halevi to participate but not to preside. High Court Judge Moshe Landau was named presiding judge. Halevi named himself and Judge Yitzhak Raveh as the two other members of the tribunal. All three were German Jews who had received their law degrees in Europe prior to immigrating to Palestine. Despite the controversy surrounding their appointment, they would win almost universal acclaim, even from the trial’s severest critics.

Finally, there was the venue. Jerusalem’s courtrooms were small, shabby, and not equipped with press quarters. Teddy Kollek, head of Ben-Gurion’s office, was charged with finding an appropriate place for a trial that was sure to attract an international audience. He selected Beit Ha’am, a cultural center under construction whose name meant, appropriately enough, “House of the People.” Its theater was transformed into a courtroom, replete with a glass booth for the defendant and compartments for hidden television cameras. Miraculously, its construction was completed in time.

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eanwhile, another drama was occurring near Haifa in Yagur Prison. This large complex had become a holding place for one man. Elaborate arrangements had been made to prevent Eichmann from harming himself, and others from harming him. One guard was assigned to watch him. Another guard watched the first guard, and a third watched the second. For added security, none of the guards had lost relatives in the Holocaust or even spoke German. At the same time, a far more onerous job was being conducted by Bureau 06, a special police unit created to do the investigation upon which the indictment would be based. Relying on the few existing books on the Holocaust and a mound of documents, including the entire Nuremberg proceedings, they researched the Final Solution. In order to assemble the details of Eichmann’s activities, they also requested pertinent documents from an array of European countries. Virtually all countries, including those behind the Iron Curtain, were forthcoming. The two exceptions were the USSR, which did not even reply to Israel’s request, and Britain, which adamantly refused to release information on its part in the trucks-for-lives negotiations. Britain had played a direct role when it arrested Joel Brand, the Hungarian Jewish leader who had been negotiating with Eichmann. Eichmann dispatched him to the Middle East where he was to negotiate with the British. British officials, convinced that he was a German spy, arrested him.
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Bureau 06’s chief inspector, Avner Less, a German Jew who had immigrated in 1938, at age twenty-two, was Eichmann’s interrogator. He and his police colleagues anticipated that Eichmann might refuse to cooperate, something he was legally entitled to do. To their surprise, he spoke freely. He inundated them with details about the Final Solution. One morning he arrived with a written statement declaring himself “prepared, unreservedly, to say everything I know of events.” He offered a confession of sorts: “I do not ask for mercy because I am not entitled to it.… I would even be prepared to hang myself in public as a deterrent example for anti-Semites of all the countries on earth.” Despite this acknowledgment of his actions, he refused to acknowledge personal guilt. He told Less that he was just a “little cog” and “exclusively a carrier out of orders.” He was not guilty, he insisted, because his superiors ordered him to do terrible things. Then, at Nuremberg, they implicated him in order to try to save themselves. If he was guilty of anything, it was of being too loyal. Bemoaning his fate, he complained that he was facing a trial while “those who planned, decided, directed, and ordered the thing have escaped responsibility.”

Captain Less, who spent more time in direct exchange with Eichmann than practically anyone else, including possibly Eichmann’s attorney, Servatius, had the same initial reaction to Eichmann as had the men who had grabbed him in Argentina. Instead of encountering “the sort of Nazi type you see in the movies: tall, blond, with piercing blue eyes and brutal features and … domineering arrogance,” he found a “thin, balding man … [who] looked utterly ordinary” and who trembled incessantly during the early stages of the interrogation. Less surmised that Eichmann feared receiving the treatment he had meted out. One morning guards arrived to take him from the interrogation room. Anticipating that he was about to be shot—he was, in fact, being brought to a judge so his detention order could be renewed—his knees buckled and he cried out “in a pleading voice”: “But Herr Hauptmann [Captain], I haven’t told you everything yet.” Less, however, soon discovered that this ordinary-looking man with nervous tics was capable of “cold sophistication and cunning.” According to Israeli protocol, Less was supposed to interrogate, not cross-examine, Eichmann. Nonetheless, their exchanges often became an evidentiary duel. On those occasions, Less found Eichmann “sardonic, even aggressive.” He would “lie until defeated by documentary proof.” At that point, unable to claim he had not performed an incriminating act, he would insist that he had just been following orders. Less also discovered that, whenever Eichmann vigorously protested something was
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true, it probably was. Eichmann, who endured this extended cross-examination without the benefit of legal counsel, was at a severe legal disadvantage. Less, on the other hand, had an entire police bureau and prosecutorial team backing him up. They carefully prepared the questions in order to elicit the most information from him and to catch any of his lies. This same imbalance would continue through the trial when Servatius and one assistant, who was often in Europe interrogating witnesses, faced the prosecution’s substantial legal team.
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Eichmann began by describing his “sunny” childhood to Less. Born in 1906 in the Rhineland to middle-class parents, he moved to Austria with his family, where his father had a less than successful career as an entrepreneur. His stepmother, a deeply religious woman, conducted daily family Bible readings. In one of those enduring historical ironies, Eichmann attended the same high school as Hitler, though Eichmann never spoke of the school’s impact on him. Eichmann became friendly with a Jewish student and remained in contact with him even after he joined the Nazi Party. Probably hoping to convince Less he was not a dyed-in-the-wool anti-Semite, Eichmann boasted how they would stroll together in Linz despite the Nazi Party emblem he sported on his lapel. A lackluster student, Eichmann left school and took a series of dead-end jobs until he saw an employment notice from the Vacuum Oil Company. His stepmother had a relative, “Onkel Fritz,” who, as a friend of “Herr Weiss,” the owner, arranged for Eichmann to be interviewed for the job. At the interview he was told by Herr Popper, the senior executive conducting the interview, that normally he would be considered, at age twenty-two, too young for the job. Nonetheless, he was being hired “at the request” of Weiss. Both Weiss and Popper were Jewish. Onkel Fritz had Jewish relatives by marriage. As David Cesarani observes, this demonstrates how the Eichmann family did not allow any anti-Semitic sentiments it might harbor to prevent it from reaching out to Jews who could be helpful. Eichmann succeeded at his job. His responsibilities entailed ensuring the on-time shipping, transportation, and delivery of petroleum products. He supervised the building of gas stations where none had existed before. Eventually these organizational skills would stand him in very good stead.
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