Deborah Lipstadt: The Eichmann Trial

you we gathered today during the time of the 50th anniversary of the Eichmann trial I'm sure there many people here who remember the trial remember the capture was something that galvanized the world in part it galvanized the world because of the way iPhone was found and brought to Jerusalem to stand trial and it galvanized the world subsequently for very I think more significant reasons so let me just start with a little bit about the capture some of you may remember that or know of it from various books and movies about it but um Adolph Eichmann who was not the architect of the final solution that the Israelis accused him of that but that was a mistake he was not the CEO but he was one of the COS of the final solution he was he didn't plan it but he carried it out he executed he put his stamp on portions of it in a very distinctive fashion um after the war he escaped with the help of the Vatican and the International Red Cross he escaped to Argentina where many were quite a few Nazi war criminals have gone and where there's an even larger German expat community and he lives there under the pseudonym Ricardo Klement after a few years there he sends for his wife and three sons they join him there is another child in Argentina and he's living working as a manager in a mercedes-benz plant after a couple of not very successful attempts at other kind of earning a living but he does get this job and probably the head of the plant knew exactly who he was people knew he was there the Argentinian police who knew he was there there were ports in the Argentine the police files of his presence a German expats knew he was there German Nazi war criminals he was knew he was there so he was not living such a unknown existence but at one point after his having been there a number of years towards the late 50s he is presence is discovered by someone who didn't know he was there there is a German half Jew man in Lothar Hermann who has come to Argentina Argentina in 39 shortly after Kristallnacht and makes a decision with his non-jewish wife to live as a non Jew to hide his Jewish identity they have one daughter Sylvie who does not know she's Jewish and they live as part of the German expat community he is half blind in part from a beating he took but when he was arrested by the Germans for his socialist activities before he fled Germany at one point Sylvie brings home her new boyfriend a young man named Nick Hockman though when the Eichmann boys come to Argentina with their mother they do not change their last name they know who this is their father but the official story is that it's their uncle and their father had died during the war now the name Eichmann was not generally known the way it is known today it was not known the way Himmler's name was known Heydrich name was known gorings name and of course adolf hitler's name was known so it's only when at some point during a visit to the home of Luther Luther Hartmann then of what with his with the daughter Sylvie that Nick Eichmann makes a statement to the effect that the German should have killed all the Jews when they had the chance and it was a failure to do that and Lothar Hermann is appalled by this but doesn't say anything they don't want to blow his own cover but he writes and so he just listens and makes note of it and is disturbed by it a while later he reads in the German language Argentinean newspaper that the Germans the West Germans are beginning to plan and prepare their first major war crimes trial initially in the 50s West Germany had no interest in really tracking down Nazis the government was riddled with former Nazis there were judges who had been judges in the Vimal republic judges in the Third Reich on our judges in post-war Germany the Foreign Office was riddled with people who had served under Ribbentrop etc so finally in the early 60s the Germans are beginning to plan for this trial and in one of the articles about the plans for this trial the name Adolf Eichmann is mentioned and Laughlin Herman remembers NIC Eichmann Adolf Eichmann he says I bet this is the son of and the article mentions that Adolf Eichmann has disappeared and no one knows what's happened to him so loud Armen puts two and two together and writes to the prosecutor who's mentioned in the article the German prosecutor man named Fritz Bower who's really one of the heroes of this story and Fritz Bower is intrigued by what Hermann writes as Herman to investigate further Hermann comes back with information linking Ricardo Klement to the identity of Adolf Eichmann he comes back also with some fantastic theories which aren't true but he does give further clues that link the two together and at that point Fritz Bower does something that's really quite amazing with the knowledge of the president of the state of Hesse so where he's located he instead of giving this information to the German Embassy in Argentina or to German official sources who by the way probably knew - was new Island was where he was some of them not all of all of the German government but there were certainly people within the German government who knew he turns to the Israelis because he says you know there are too many former Nazis who were going to give a warning if we they know we've uncovered his identity I'm going to the Israelis and he knows this because they had people had found where Mengele was and Mengele had been warned and disappeared and managed to live out his most of his life in south post war in South America so he was afraid I can be warned he goes to the Israelis and what may seem to us incomprehensible today the Israelis don't do anything they don't do anything because these are the head of Israeli security services is Sir Harry L makes a judgment he says we have two sets of enemies to face we can face those who were doing us wrong in the past who did us wrong in the past or we have an existential threat of enemies who want to destroy us now we have limited resource remember at this point the Israeli government is 11 years old Israel Israel is 11 12 years old and we're going to devote our attention to those who would like to destroy us today so Bauer gets annoyed passes on more information again very little happens a an Israeli operative who's in Argentina is ordered to go drive past the address that Bauer has given them through lothar home on about where Eichmann lives and they see this cinderblock ramshackled house no electricity no water and and the Israeli operative says this could not be the home of a Nazi who had access to to so much Jewish wealth and the the thing is allowed to lie dormant until Fritz Bauer comes to Israel on an official visit and complaints to the Justice Minister that nothing has been done they call it Sahar L the head of security services who is used to only answering to David ben-gurion and they give him additional information not just the information that come from Lothar Hartmann but additional information linking Ricardo Klement Adolf Eichmann and making it very clear that this is the man that there's no question that this is the man who had played such a central role in such an important role in aspects of the final solution at that point her L goes to David ben-gurion and David ben-gurion makes what I was saying to a few people right before this lecture a exceptionally significant decision he could have said to her L you're sure this is Adolf Eichmann and her L would have said yes he said okay send couple guys down to Argentina and make him disappear make him end up in some ditch you know walking home one night just he disappears or he's found dead inexplicably and it'll be a warning a lesson to other German war criminals don't your heads shouldn't hunt rest so easy we know who you are we may not get you today we may not get you tomorrow but we will get you and it could easily have been done instead ben-gurion says to her l bring him here and we will put him on trial now it's significant on many respects just not only the fact that doesn't want to have him bumped off but that he knows that Argentina will not agree to his extradition he's living illegally in Argentina under an assumed name and Argentina is one of Israel's friends it's a supporter of Israel one of his few friends in our limited number of friends in South America but ben-gurion says bring him here so har al sets up this plan where a plane that is going to Argentina anyway to bring Abba Eban and a group of is a delegation of Israelis to Argentina for its celebration of its democracy an LR plane is going to stay there overnight and then fly back to Israel and it will take some new passengers mainly Eichmann and those who have captured him they engineer a capture of Eichmann actually we now know that this capture was witnessed by an Argentinean policeman who was trailing Eichmann because the portions of these of the Argentinian police knew who I wasn't had been following him so it's not such a perfect police action as we sometimes were led to think but the Israelis managed to get him out on the plane and the plane this plane flies further than that such a plane had ever flown before by the time it lands in Tel Aviv after refueling once it is is flying on fumes the plane lands in Tel Aviv and argument is taken to a prison in Akko and her L goes to tell ben-gurion that I can be a day no a famine is in our hands he's here etc and her L asked ben-gurion to wait a day or two to make the official announcement he says because we've left behind some Israeli operatives in Argentina were breaking down the safe house returning the rented cars covering up our tracks so they won't know it was the Israelis of course our L doesn't know that the Argentinians knew there was a group of Israelis there and have been aware of their actions and ben-gurion says well how many people know already that Aaron is in our hands and RL says we'll all the operatives and the people the ll staff the people who were on the plane the flight attendants the ben-hur l had insisted that allows chief mechanic be on the plane in case there was anything that went wrong that they wouldn't have to depend on an Argentinean or some other foreign mechanic etc and ben-gurion makes a decision with you know anything about Israeli society says if those many that many people know by tomorrow everybody will know I'm not going to wait to announce it and the next day he goes to the Knesset and it's during a regular budget debate the word has spread that the Prime Minister's coming with some sort of special announcement and in two sentences he said I've met has come very strange use of verbs look at the Hebrew it's equally strange Eichmann has come into the hands of Israel is the State of Israel and he will be Eichmann who was one of the architects of the final solutions come into the hands of Israel come into the hands a strange kind of description and he will be tried under the 1950 law that Israel the Knesset had passed against Nazis and their collaborators and it though it's a little bit of a digression it pays for a moment to say how come Israel passed the law in 1950 against you know the for the punishment of Nazis and their collaborators it wasn't exactly like Israel was expecting a bunch of Nazi war criminals to show up at the hot port in Haifa and say try us I mean what was this law all about well first of all it was to bring Israel into into Israeli law into coordination with law in a number of European countries but more really the real emphasis or the real impetus for it were survivors in Israel who would be on a bus in Tel Aviv or at the beach in Haifa or you know with the market in Bear Sheva wherever it was and would see someone and say that man was the capo in my barracks that man told on where a friend of mine was hiding or where I was hiding in order to save his family's skin so this was a really a way of finding a way to adjudicate people who were accused of being Jews who were accused of being collaborators not collaborators the wrong word but have been less than done what they should have or were felt to have acted untoward ly in during during the war but they also it also included a clause for punishing Nazi war criminals it also included the potential for the death see the only law in Israel that had that penalty so there was a law in existence for I went to be tried but there were other questions who was going to defend darlin where would the trial be that Israel had no courtroom that was large enough to accommodate the world's press which where the world was just totally intrigued by the capture of Eichmann who would sit in judgment now under normal circumstances and traditional legal Israeli circumstances the judge would have been the head of the Jerusalem district court a man named Benjamin Halevi the problem with Halevi was that a few years earlier he had been the judge in another famous trial in Israel called the Kastner trial where rudolf kastner israel Kastner was on trial for having been accused but he was actually he wasn't on trial I'm sorry that's entirely wrong he was suing or charging a Hungarian Jew who had said that Kastner had collaborated with Adolf Eichmann Kastner was one of those that I had been negotiated with about the ransoming of Hungarian Jews and without getting it long into that story but during that trial where Kastner sued this man for libel Cashner lost and in the judgement the judge in that case Benjamin Halevi said about Kastner mehar at knife Scholl a certain he sold his soul to the devil so Israeli judicial official said we can't say to the world this is a fair trial if the chief judge in this trial is someone who's already said in the judgment about Eichmann has compared him to Satan to Satan it just not can't be done well halevi refused to stand aside so the kanessa went into action and passed a law saying that in a case with it's a cap potential capital case the chief judge must be a member of the Israeli High Court bench party Lyon so Moshe Lando became the chief judge Halevi was on the bench but as a as a in not in the chief judge position and judge Revere from the television court was the third judge but who was going to prosecute Ireland Israel had just gotten a new Attorney General a man who was a commercial lawyer from tel-aviv polish-born had come to Israel many years earlier who had no criminal law expense experience had very little courtroom experience his name was Gideon Hausner and everybody in the Israeli governmental and legal establishment hoped that Hausner would stand aside and let someone who had criminal legal courtroom experience handled the prosecution but how sir said no I am going to handle it but that also left the question of who was going to defend I Amin if Israel was going to present this case to the world as a case which was as a trial which was a fair just trial that this man got a fair trial um he had to have a good defense and Israel was very sensitive to this because after the capture there had been a world uproar about you know you can't just go into another country and kidnap a man and bring him to your country and put him on trial you just can't do those kind of things some people said how can Israel what standing does Israel have to to try this man it's created in 48 the crimes were done earlier the law under which he's going to be tried has passed in 1950 he should be tried in Germany should be tried by an international court of course Germany had no interest in conducting this trial the less than Konrad Adenauer wanted was for this trial to be in Germany because he didn't want to call attention to all the Nazis who were in the German government including is his chief of staff who was a man named Hans Claudia who had been a member of the Nazi Party and actually worked for the party worked in the Justice Ministry and had been involved in the Nuremberg Laws and various and sundry other laws so Germany was the least not the least bit interested in having this trial there it also didn't want the new Germany associated with Nazi Germany there was no International Criminal Court there was an International Court for cases between nations but there was no International Criminal Court for cases against an individual so there really was no other option to return them to Argentina which had let him live there very easily for all those years the Israeli said we're not you showed no interest in trying to find him no interest in tracking that had the Israelis known that the Argentinians know he was there and have done nothing about it they even would have been even less inclined to return him to art Tina so um one of the other criticisms that was made was that how could Jewish judges sit in fair judgement of a man who had been accused I was accused of conducting and playing a major role in killing off one-third of the Jewish population of course as Hannah Arendt who I'll talk about later pointed out no one raised this question after the war when the polls conducted trials or when the checks conducted trials and those two countries had suffered mightily at the hands of the Germans but when the Jews were conducting trial the question came up so it made it all the more important for Israel to make sure that Eichmann had a good defense attorney and was seen as getting a fair representation a number of Israeli lawyers step forward to defend him volunteering to defend him and it wasn't because of course they had any sympathy with what Eichmann had done but they felt that every person deserves a good defense Israeli authorities were highly disinclined to allow an Israeli to defend Eichmann because Kastner they knew what had happened to Kastner Cashner had been assassinated on the streets of Tel Aviv a few years earlier and they feared that the same thing could happen to a lawyer who was defending Ireland even if this lawyer made it abundantly clear that he had not an iota of sympathy for what Eichmann had done or agreement with what Eichmann had done there would be a failure in people's mind to be able to differentiate between the person defending the criminal and the acts of the criminal we have that today how much more so in a country populated by so many survivors people who had lost family you've lost all their family in the war etc so they knew they did not want an Israeli defending him but what did that leave they also didn't want to remember a former Nazi coming to Israel to defend them someone had been a member of the Nazi Party they just felt this would be unacceptable so it turns out that the Eichmann family really helped the Israelis out of this Jam by suggesting that that they wanted a man named dr. service to represent I have Minh and Cervantes who had not been a member of the Nazi Party but was a lawyer in Germany who had defended some of the defendants at the Nuremberg trial so they felt he had done a good job there and they would do he would do a good job for Adolf Ireland so for these he was acceptable to the Israelis so Cervantes was appointed but then came another problem who was going to pay cervantes cervantes wanted a fee of $30,000 which in 1961 dollars or amounts is quite substantial now under normal circumstances the german government would pay for the fees of a lawyer defending a german accused of crimes outside of germany that was the standard that was how germany operated that if you're a german citizen and you're accused of a crime outside of germany we will pay to defend you but as I said earlier at an hour's government and West Germany had no desire to be associated with I when I was seen as a really disgusting Nazi as a man with blood on his hands in a way that some of the others didn't have it as directly on their hands they all were equally guilty of terrible crimes but he was just seen as even more culpable so the Germans and the gist of the German said well I haven't fled Germany he fled under a pseudonym he lived under a pseudonym we'd been taught we wanted to put him on trial etc so we have no obligation to defend him or to pay for his defense rather so at that point Israel would said we will pick up the bill so Israel ended up paying for Eichmann's defense so everything is in place in terms of the players now you need a place for the trial at that point in Israel the court houses those of you know Israel now it's a much more funky nicer area but the Russian compound which is right at the foot of Raqqa via foe at that point was where the where the courts were and it was the court rooms were small and modest and very rather am shocked so Israel knew it couldn't that no courtroom there could accommodate the number of reporters are already talking about coming to the trial so it shows it is a ben-gurion assigned a young man who worked in his office who happened to have been born in Vienna and the company's row many years earlier and who had worked for him for quite a while to find a place to hold the trial this gentleman whose name was Teddy Kollek uh goes on to be the legendary mayor of Jerusalem for many many years looks around Jerusalem and finds a cultural center that is in the process of being built and he goes to the contractor and he says look we're going to need this in exactly a year Oh for holding a trial will it be ready the contractor says yes and miracle of miracles if you having anything built anywhere but especially in Israel it's actually ready on time and the trial is head held in its theatres the so you have your judges you have your defense of your prosecution you have your place now comes the matter of the indictment and Hausner decides that in contrast to nuremberg now in nuremberg the and there have been many trials in nuremberg but in the trials in nuremberg the crimes against humanity were first of all not the main thing with which the defendants were acute of which the defendants were accused a and B even though crimes against humanity did occupy a centerpiece the crimes against the Jews were one of a subset of many different crimes against humanity at that point the world hadn't really realized to come to grasp how the crimes against the Jews were of a different nature than the crime the other crimes against humanity as terrible as they were and is unforgivable as they were and as horrifying as they were that the Germans had committed number one number two moving away just from the indictment at Nuremberg the main evidence had been documents in fact our earliest histories of the Holocaust such as Raul hilberg Magisterial work on the destruction of European Jewry are based on the documents that are introduced in Nuremberg there had been very few survivors to give testimony virtually none whew and in fact justice Jackson you know America's prosecutor at Nuremberg is a member of the Supreme Court can you imagine today a situation where remember the Supreme Court would take a year's leave to go and engage in another project well this is how important it was considered with Truman appoints justice Jackson he goes he takes a year off and he is in Germany and he serves as America's prosecutor in Germany in fact I was just reading an article on Jackson put out by the Jackson Institute there is very serious speculation and our arguments amongst scholars of the Supreme Court in Jackson scholars that his by his going to Germany and conducting these trials and insisting on their importance and being away from Washington he really gave up his opportunity to be chief justice that he might have had a very good chance of being chief justice if he hadn't done this so you can understand his commitment to this he together with the other prosecutors had decided that these defendants would be convicted not on the basis of witness statements but on the basis of documents in many cases documents which they had written documents which they had signed which would convict them of what they did so the voice of the witness is missing when Hausner comes now to prepare the trial and prepare the indictment he decides he's going to make this different he writes that Nuremberg had failed to capture the imagination of the world of the horrors of what happened and it also rendered the crimes against the Jews into a sidebar into a secondary if not tertiary element of importance he was going to put the crimes against the Jews centerpiece he was not going to ignore the other crimes that he accused Iran of having committed but the crimes against the Jewish people the destruction of the Jewish people would be the centerpiece and and this is the crucial element together with ben-gurion s decision not to say just bumped this guy off but this is the other crucial element he is going to tell the story of the final solution from its initial moments to its final moments through the first person singular ie the voice of the survivor now there's a mistaken impression amongst many people and Queen many Israelis that up until the Eichmann trial survivors had never spoken about what happened to them there had been never any talk of the Holocaust that's a mistake it's an impression but it's a mistaken impression there many survivors had spoken some had already written some had lectured some that people paid attention in Israel there was the debate over the 1950 law against Nazi and their collaborators which I just mentioned there was a debate there's always debate but there was debate over the establishment of Yad Vashem what should it be a researcher memory place etc etc there was the Cashner trial that was the murder of Kastner there had been lots and lots of discussion of the Shoah but the difference was that the world never paid attention never gave heed the way it did during the Eichmann trial when these people stood up there and one after another in succession of witnesses cost 100 witnesses the survivors told their story a number of things became clear first of all one of the things that became clear not just to the Israelis in the audience but to many people was that these people had been victims of what happened not because of some inherent flaw in who they were not because they were weak not because they were axilla core Diaspar Jews who didn't know how to fight back that as one Israeli wrote paraphrasing what she wrote there but for Fortune goai that it was more a matter of geographic and chronological destiny where you happen to be and when you happen to be there that you too could have been a victim and when I read that and as I became came to that conclusion I was reminded something that Professor shallow Friedlander teaches at UCLA wrote in his book the years of extermination which won the Pulitzer Prize a number of years ago when he writes in the very getting of that book that one of the striking things about the Holocaust is that throughout the European continent not one cultural institution not one religious institution not one educational institution I want scholarly institution rose up in defense of what was happening to the door in opposition to what was happening to the Jews so that when you want to know why these why what happen to the victims of the Holocaust happened don't look at them look at the world around them look at the sea of hostility in which they found themselves that's what you should see and that became very very clear during the course of the trial Hausner I did something very strange during the trial at a number of points he turned to survivors and he asked them something which caused a lot of people to be very angry because I'm they misunderstood what he was asking he asked them basically why didn't you resist why didn't you fight back now some people understood Hauser's a question as a sort of typical Sabra perspective particularly generation of Sabra well for Sabra born after the war after the Holocaust you know that we would never let this to happen to us why didn't you fight back we would have fought and back fought back I don't think that's why Hausner was asking I think Hausner and going over the Nuremberg documents in meeting with all these survivors in talking to them had come to realize this this terrible fact of yo that there was nothing wrong with these people but for the where they were and when they were there I mean he wanted to show that to the world and at one point um he asked it of a history of two people I want to talk about those two people one was a man named Yakov Guerra fine and Yakov Guerra fine told how his mother had pushed him from the train that was taken that was deporting them to a death camp and he managed to make his way back to the croc Afghan and he saw how bad things were in the ghetto he managed to escape from the krokov ghetto and go to plush off the labor camp that many of you know from Schindler's List and when he realized how bad things were in plaster off he escaped from plush off and he made his way across Slovakia Romania and Hungary eventually reaching Palestine so a very brave man and house near he's on the train he's on the stand and he's telling the story and Hauser says to him why did you board the train why didn't you know in other words almost accusing him why were you so silliest unaware - and get on this train and house and girl fine answers this was in 1943 after so many years we didn't have the strength to resist anymore we wanted to die more quickly so hazard so why did you jump he said when we saw that the train was going in the direction of Bell's edge to death camp some spark was kindled within people who wanted to save themselves he he was he was on the defensive and right if then shortly after girl flying test testified a Tel Aviv magistrate a man named Moshe by ski came into the stand and Moshe basically very respected Tel Aviv magistrate and the judges say to him you may sit if you like he said no no I prefer to stand obviously a man of the court who felt that the court such as especially a court such as this deserve the respect of a witness testifying standing up and for a quite a while he testifies not in full sentences but in full paragraphs when you read his testimony it's articulate it's it's polished it's put together and then he starts to tell the story of fifteen thousand people in a labor camp and a young boy was brought out a young child who was going to be hanged for having committed some wrong and the child was lifted up to the gallows but the rope broke and but basically recalled in his testimony he says he was again lifted onto a high chair which was placed under the rope the child began to beg for mercy but an order was given to hang him a second time and just then as he's telling this story Hausner pounces and he says fifteen thousand people a few hundred guards why didn't you attack why didn't you revolt and suddenly this articulate witness this full paragraph testifier standing store tall and sandy straight you can see the pictures of him and the photos of him the films of him testifying is leaving sentences on finish speaking in phrases even in the court stenographic record their ellipsis to show that he's not speaking in full sentences and he goes on to say this was already in the third year of the war nevertheless there was still hope maybe we possibly maybe we would survive and then he says goes on to say I cannot describe this terror inspiring fear nearby a bias basically says was a Polish camp there were a thousand poles 100 meters beyond the camp they had a place to go to their homes I don't recall one instance of escape on the part of the poles but where could any of us Jews go we were wearing clothes which were dyed yellow with stripes in the center of our hair there was a kind of swath 4 centimeters in width so they'd be noticeable anywhere they went and let's suppose 15,000 people within the camp even succeeded without arms to us to go beyond the boundaries where could they go and after the testimony by ski confronted Hauser and said why didn't you warn me why didn't you tell me that you were going to ask this question and Hauser said he wanted a spontaneous reaction he wanted an unrehearsed answer he described by skis testimony as the most convincing piece of human truth I have ever heard on the subject that the only way to get people to understand the terrible situation which the victims found themselves was not to give them a chance to give a rehearsed answer but to speak from the gut and I have to say personally when I read by skis testimony I stopped and I took it to the photocopy machine and copied it and I put it into my file in which I carry my lectures back and forth to my course on the history of the Holocaust because I knew that at some point some student is going to ask me and they fight back and and you would give them this kind of answer and you know who reinforced the difficulty of Jews fighting back the impossibility of Jews fighting back it came from with the point shortly if the basically testified when the resistance fighters testified one by one whether it was a bokov nur weather was Sevilla Louboutins ooh Carmen who she was part of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising whether it was her husband who was also part of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising each one of them said don't ask why there was so little revolt asked how was it possible that there was any revolt at all epoch owner said to have a revolt you need a National Authority you need someone to call for a revolt you need someone to organize it who was going to organize it in the ghetto we were multiple people with different languages in different cultures we could all be communicated one with the other where were we going to get arms say what a miracle it was that there was a revolt and you heard this over and over again from the resistance fighters and it clearly had a very strong impression on many of the reporters sitting there including many Israelis there were other moments very very powerful moments and for me some of the most powerful moments were the individual stories martin foldy a Hungarian Jew stands up to testify and he writes in Hungarian that the murder of Hungarian Jews comes tragically tragically at the very end of the war the Russians were on their way through Romania to Hungary there they were there not far that far away it's clear that Germany has lost the war and yet in April 1944 right at this time beginning of May rather the first week in May we're marking the anniversary 1944 Adolf Eichmann organizes the deportation of Hungarian Jews and then the next approximately seven weeks close to half a million Hungarian Jews will be killed the the ovens at that cremate the bodies at Auschwitz break down from the working overtime to cremate their bodies and one of the Hungarian Jews who manages survived to survivor Martin foldy does testimony about what happened and he describes the arrival at Auschwitz and he says he's put on one line he doesn't know that's the line for survivors and on the other line his wife and children are put in they're led away and he doesn't know of course at that point that they're being led away to the gas chamber but he said and I watched them as they walked into the distance and Houser says to him well how did you know that was your wife and children how could you in the class how could you keep track of them he said because my little girl was about three years old was wearing a red coat and I could watch the red coat that red coat of course will be reprised many years later by Steven Spielberg in a different setting in the krokov ghetto but that same red coat will make its appearance and then there's another person stands up to testify about the deportation of French children and he describes going because the children are deported set in certain cases separately from the parents and he goes to describes with the children visiting where the children are being held he knows the parents have been deported to Auschwitz and are probably dead at this point and that the children will soon be in the same situation but he tries to give them some comfort and he describes meeting one young boy look at about six or seven he said who once they must have come from a from a very comfortable home because he's wearing a little sailor suit he said which is ragged but you can tell had once been good quality he is one shoe on and one he has lost one shoe and in his hand he's clutching a biscuit and they asked him the the visitor asked him where what's the biscuit for says when I see mommy it's for my bit from for her and they asked him what is what are your parents do and he says that he goes to the office and mommy plays piano so he comes and he's but he's very optimistic when I see my mother I'm going to give her this biscuit and then one of the visitors just at one point just in a spontaneous gesture strokes the little boy's face and he bursts into tears it's that heartbreaking it reminds you as much of this trial did that while genocide happens to large numbers of people it also happens to one by one by one to individuals whether it's the Holocaust or any other act of genocide there were strange moments of uplift when people expected of course the resistance fighters to provide that moment of uplift it didn't come but what did it did come at one point when a man named Melchior gave testimony his father had been Chief Rabbi of Denmark and you remember the day the Jews and Denmark had been warned probably by someone from within the German ranks of the Germans that the deportations were going to come Russia shauna night and the rabbi warns the Jews who come to the shul don't go home tonight go and find shelter somewhere else well the son who by the way who's whose son has been in the Israeli government rabbi Melchior some of you may know of him um knows that his father's going to make that announcement that night and he and his family are preparing to flee and on that day he goes to the library to read the university to return some books I would say that's an aggravated sense of responsibility on the day you're preparing to be deported tell you you're going to go to flee or turning library books but he describes going to the University and says in the space of Tyson I wasn't the university more than 10 minutes but in that 10 minutes two different groups of students students he didn't know personally but he knew by sight approached him and said separately we know who you are this is how to get in touch with us if there's anything we can do you must be in touch with us at once and it describes how Denmark was never more united in those days didn't matter whether it was men or women businesspeople cab drivers fishermen it that everyone rich poor were united in helping these Jews escape across the water to Sweden and Haim Gouri who was a reporter covering the trial and wrote color pieces sort of for devar one of the leading news but then one of the leading newspapers in Israel described that Melchior is testimony and then wrote about the fact that sitting in front of him a woman was weeping during the testimony so an Melchior finished he turned to the woman he said are you all and she said yes I only cry when people are nice to me and here was one of those moments of a story of people being one of the few moments in the trial of people being taken care of what about Hannah Arendt I devote a whole chapter towards the end of the book but Hannah Arendt's as professor have suggested in his very generous introduction has been linked to this trial in a way that she has become she's become more important than a commandment she is essentially it's an intellectual of course it not just because she's intellectual but what she has to say and the debate she generates does make her more important than I heard she's a professor she's a German Jew who has left Germany in 33 shortly after the Nazis come to power she's afraid she's going to be arrested for her work with the Zionists she goes to Paris she works with youth alia bringing some children to Palestine and then when the Nazis come to Germany she's briefly incarcerated and then she manages to come to this country under a special program we have for scholars etc she comes to this country first she works for shocking books the same publisher published my book and then eventually she gets a job she publishes the origins of totalitarianism a seminal work and she gets a job she becomes the first woman to be a full professor at Princeton teaches at the University of Chicago for quite a few years when the trial is and when the capture was announced and the trial is announced that it will take place a year after the capture first she goes to the commentary magazine and asked them to send her to Jerusalem to cover it and commentary doesn't or can't can't afford it whatever and she goes to The New Yorker and the New Yorker is very interested in their doing it and says they will send her to Jerusalem she is there she's not there for the whole trial she misses some of the most important moments of the trial when iseman is on the stand being cross-examined by Gideon Hausner but she writes her articles for The New Yorker and then publishes them in a book called Eichmann in Jerusalem on the banality of evil it's a subtitle some people now only know the subtitle and not the main title of the book um and in it she says some very horrible and cruel things she talks about the Jewish councils and the ghettos and describes them as being like collaborators the people in the ghettos face two enemies they face the enemy of the Nazis and they face the enemy of the Jews the Jewish councils she talks about the Jews failure to resist how the Jews very obediently went to the ditches and where they were going to be shot and folded their clothing and laid them there and then stood up there to be shocked without resisting now in the next paragraph she says but nobody else resisted either but by the time you got to that sentence you sort of it's been lost in the in the in the cruel way she's described the Jews she talks about rebel ao Beck a reformed rabbi the leader of the Germany Jewish the reform movement and prominent Berlin rabbi who had many chances to escape Germany many many chances and turned them down because he did not want to leave his flock when he goes to Theresia not to terrorism he's taken to the camp in Terezin he knows that the Jews being deported from there are being deported to their death in Auschwitz he doesn't warn people he says because he didn't want to make their last days even worse their last moments on the train even worse than they otherwise were she talks about him as the Jewish Fuhrer um and in fact in saying that she's plagiarizing a comment that a Nazi had said without attributing it to a Nazi so she said some horrible things on the other hand she also has some amazing insights one of her insights was just find that she writes that this trial the importance of this trial she writes about the importance of this trial for the first time since the years 70 when Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans Jews were able to sit in judgments on crimes committed against their own people for the first time they did not need to appeal to others for protection and justice or fall back upon the compromised phraseology of the rights of man rights which has no one better than they news no one knew better than they were claimed only by people who were too weak to defend their rights and enforce their own laws so for the first time what's the importance Israel for the first time since the Second Temple Jews could sit in judgment of non Jews who had done them wrong it's a very powerful statement or another powerful observation she makes um which she talks about a per Kovner one of the resistance fighters testimony and she hates his testimony because it's not testimonies to speech it's giving an oratory so poet he's given a very passion speech during the trial but during his his impassioned speech for one moment he tells the story of a german sergeant named Anton Schmidt I'm touched read one of the true heroes his job was going to the forest and find German soldiers who had been separated from their units and reunite them with their units and in that capacity had freedom to move about he surprised he supplied the resistance fighters in villain of which our coven was the leader with arms with uniforms with material with a ammunition and he wouldn't take any money for it so when I become who's telling the story honey I read this transfixed then she writes a hush settled over the courtroom It was as if the crowd had spontaneously decided to observe the usual two minutes of silence in honor of the man named Anton Schmidt and in those two minutes which were like a sudden burst of light in the midst of impenetrable unfathomable darkness a single thought stood out clearly irrefutable beyond question how utterly different everything would be today in this courtroom in Israel in Germany and in all of Europe and perhaps in all the other countries of the world if only more such stories could have been told and in that she's capturing the essence of what the show I was about but what a shallow Friedlander was saying am i quoted earlier that there were so few Antone Schmidt's to stand up to take a chance to defend these people that that in essence is the tragedy and she goes on to say when she's writing about the Danes or the Bulgarians who also saved many Jews she said that what their what their actions demonstrated that when faced with Nazi like terror most people will comply but then she goes on putting her comments in italics some people will not the final solution she goes on to say could have happened in most places but once again it did not happen everywhere so she's pinpointing Germany her own country in the German people for their failure to stop what it becomes the Holocaust so at the same time that she says cruel and terrible things she finds a certain insights into the trial which I think are extremely important what then can we say about this trial in in toto I think that it has its importance a number of things that are extremely important about it first and foremost as I've said earlier and I want to emphasize because I think it's a crucial element it's the first time not that survivors speak in such a concerted fashion but the first time the lit world listens in such a concerted fashion it begins the try it begins the process by which you end up in your community with a magnificent exhibition exhibition installation of the lives of survivors of people talking about what happened to them it's not the trial alone that does it the six-day war has a tremendous impact the the survivors get older as people get older they don't in their 20s they're not writing their memoirs that when they get to the 50s and 60s are more likely to write there are many things that play a role other survivors speaking out gives the impetus to get others to write about it but much of it begins with the Iowa trial another thing that the Eichmann trial does is that is particularly but not only in Israel it shows as I said earlier that there's not that this didn't happen to these people because of some genetic mistake or that they were genetically incapable of fighting back but but that the world didn't listen the world didn't come forward no one helped them the woman who wept I'm when people are nice to me because so few people as a survivor she knew in this history had been nice to her it put the field of Holocaust Studies on the map it generated more attention to the field of Holocaust Studies and most and I think above all going back again to my a point about the survivors that after this trial and through to today you never have a genocide trial war crimes trial whether you're talking about the Holocaust were they talking about the former Yugoslavia whether you're talking about Rwanda where they talking about Congo without the first person singular the person saying this is my story this is what happened to me and and saying it quite clearly and quite passionately the judges of course decided in the end that I Minh should was guilty there was a little question about that what was the question was what would be the sentence that would he they give out him the death sentence and there had been a ruling in the Israeli High Court a number of years before this trial that any sentence that was stipulated in a law did not mean that if the person was give guilty if so facto that sentence had to be applied but that sentence was the most that could be applied so if they say if the law said if someone does X Y & Z it should be guilty of getting 20 years that the judge was not obligated to give 20 years but that was the 20 years was the maximum so this 1915 law of course is one of the few laws in Israel only wasn't it law in Israel that has a death penalty clause and the judges they deliberate for from August to December when they come to announce their statement are their decision and they're going to tell I open the bottom line before they go through the long explanation that Moshe Landau whose magnificent judge determines that he is going to tell I've been right at the beginning what they've decided and they say we abide by the interpretation of the law that just because it says the death penalty must be applied we don't believe it has to be applied and many people at that moment think comin has escaped the death penalty and then after a pause he says but we feel it should be applied here because you deserve to have it applied so in other words they're making it very clear we're not applying it because we feel we have no choice that's our obligation we apply it because that's the decision we have reached and of course Ackman is the only man in Israel's history ever to be sentenced and had two people were sentenced to death Eichmann and doomy on yoke and the non yoke of course had his sentence overturned by the High Court so Allen is the only person to be sentenced and had that sentence carried out to this to this day and even about the sentence the carrying out of the death sentence there was a great debate there were many people professors at Hebrew University including Martin Buber Gershom Scholem Yuko Bergman a philosophy professor and and people who were witnesses at the trial a artist Yaakov becan and others who against the death penalty they felt that against the death penalty in prison let him put in principle let him sit in jail let him rot in jail though historians who said we can get more information from him ben-gurion was not persuaded by these arguments he said Ackman had many many sessions on the in the stand to tell his story we know everything he has to say and and it's not my place to forgive him to offer him mercy and so there was no commutation of the sentence and he was hung he was cremated in Israel Israel had no cremation facilities that had a sort of jerry-rigged to have drums of oil and use that as a cremation thing and then his ashes were taken out too deep into the Mediterranean and sprinkled there so that his burial place would not become a pilgrimage for neo-nazis it it created this trial created an audience to listen to the facts of genocide particularly this genocide but not only this genocide in a new and different fashion and it put the face of genocide as I've said before but I really want to end by emphasizing this on the individual suffering that when we talk about genocide of course we're talking about multitudes who were killed but those multitudes are made up of one by one by one and that's what this trial emphasized I'd like to close with the incident that happened to me a number of years ago I read from the end of my book a number of years ago I was invited to a conference at Yad Vashem while there I met a group of young Rwandan s-- who had asked the odd version to train them and how to conduct oral testimony with trauma victims they wanted to ensure that the history of the genocide that had decimated their country and their families would be preserved yet Vashem eager to make them comfortable arranged for them to have dinner on their first night in Jerusalem with french-speaking Holocaust survivors by the end of the dinner the two groups of survivors had bonded so strongly that the elderly survivors took the young Rwandan under their wings invited them to their homes introduce them to their families and began to build personal relations one afternoon i sat with some of the Rwandan Zout side of Yad Vashem looking out over the Judean Hills they told me of their experience during the Rwandan genocide and their meeting with Holocaust survivors one young man whose entire family had been murdered said to me I want to tell my story and help my fellow Rwanda survivors tell theirs just like the Holocaust survivors I want people to listen to me as they listen to them despite the inherent contradiction in his next statement I completely understood what he meant and recognized the passion with which he said it I had heard it many times before from Holocaust survivors future generations those who were not there must remember what happened and we who were there the Rwandan went on to say must tell them this may be the most enduring legacy of what occurred in Jerusalem in 1961 thank you very much you you

Channel: University of California Television (UCTV)

Views: 34,897

Rating: 3.3402491 out of 5

Keywords: Deborah Lipstadt, genocide, Eichmann Trial

Id: 5LZ9Gen6GHs

Length: 58min 41sec (3521 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 07 2011