The Eichmann Trial

Written by Deborah Erika Lipstadt

Narrated by Walter Dixon

The capture of SS Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Eichmann by Israeli agents in Argentina in May of 1960 and his subsequent trial in Jerusalem by an Israeli court electrified the world. The public debate it sparked on where, how, and by whom Nazi war criminals should be brought to justice, and the international media coverage of the trial itself, was a watershed moment in how the civilized world in general and Holocaust survivors in particular found the means to deal with the legacy of genocide on a scale that had never been seen before.

Award-winning historian Deborah E. Lipstadt gives us an overview of the trial and analyzes the dramatic effect that the survivors' courtroom testimony-which was itself not without controversy-had on a world that had until then regularly commemorated the Holocaust but never fully understood what the millions who died and the hundreds of thousands who managed to survive had actually experienced.

As the world continues to confront the ongoing reality of genocide and ponder the fate of those who survive it, this trial of the century, which has become a touchstone for judicial proceedings throughout the world, offers a legal, moral, and political framework for coming to terms with unfathomable evil. Lipstadt infuses a gripping narrative with historical perspective and contemporary urgency.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ascent Audio
• Release date: Mar 14, 2011
• ISBN: 9781596597792

Reviews for The Eichmann Trial

[dono421846 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A competently constructed account of an important cultural and legal episode. Aiming for a popular audience, it will bring to the attention of a new audience the significance of the Eichmann trial, and the events that preceded it. For that reason, however, it fails to consider many of the crucial controversies -- concerning both the questions that arose at the time, and the ramifications of those events for today -- in sufficient depth, at times reading more like a gripping novel or a script for an episode of Law and Order. The definitive historical account remains to be written. Readers may find problematic many of the positions she asserts, especially when they are unnecessary to her more important arguments. She is by no means an impartial chronicler, and her personal beliefs at times blind her to some of the more complex implications of the events she reports. For example, having explained that much of the debate concerned whether Eichmann was a clerk or a master engineer of the Final Solution, she tells of one witness's explanation: One judged asked whether her committee -- one of the Jewish Councils who helped organize the local population for better deportation -- "had considered assassinating Eichmann. Implicit in his question was the accusation that those at the top, the leaders who knew precisely what faced their fellow Jews, had failed to take actions that might have stopped the process. Brand seemed flummoxed by Halevi's question. She recognized, as he seemed not to, that such action would probably not have materially changed matters. 'Let us assume...one of us shoots him. What would we achieve by that?'" This witness appears to be supporting Eichmann's claim that he was but a "cog" in a bigger machine over which he had no control, a reading Lipstadt does not pause to consider. The reason, of course, is that were she to allow that possibility, then the question being asked makes perfect sense, and the Jewish collaborators liable to be held responsible for their support of Eichmann's hideous project. Yet as her characterization suggests -- "she recognized, as he seemed not to" -- this was a possibility that she had ruled out a priori. One quickly senses that there is something going on here that is not history, but something much closer to apologia.Similarly facile is her treatment of the arguments that Israel had no authority to kidnap and try Eichmann: he was a German, forcibly taken from Argentina, accused of murdering people who were not citizens of Israel. She recognizes the claims, but turns them aside with but little discussion of the major points of international law that are being asserted. Even if the concerns were satisfactorily resolved at the time -- and her description shows this not to have been uniformly the case -- as an historian she should have considered the kind of precedent such action has set for contemporary society, wherein one country feels justified in violating the sovereignty of another in order to pursue its own ends, without first even attempting to achieve the extradition through legal means. In this case Israel advanced a "the ends justified the means" argument, which can be extraordinarily problematic in any context, much less in a world as volatile as ours today. The cause of the rule of law is rarely advanced by nonlawful actions.Finally, I find personally disappointing Lipstadt's support of the characterization of the Holocaust not as a unfathomable atrocity of which Jews were the primary victims, but rather as an episode whose victims were *exclusively* Jews. This is one of the disagreements over which she castigates Hannah Arendt, who favored the former perspective that the Holocaust was a crime against humanity, inflicted on the Jews. In contrast, as Lipstadt reports with apparent approval, all other civilian populations targeted by the Nazis were only "ancillary items". Such callous diminishment of the sufferings of others, merely because they were not Jewish, seems unfortunate, and certainly undermines her overt claims to wish to teach the evils of such blindness to the shared humanity of us all. In the end, if you wish a description about some facts about the Holocaust, this is a fine place to begin; if, however, you seek a more subtle understanding of the Holocaust, continue to read Arendt.

[iddrazin · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is an easy to read, must-read history that everyone should know. It is arguably the best non-fiction book of 2011. Its author, Emory University Professor Deborah E. Lipstadt, wrote another award-winning history book about one of her own experiences. She made the front pages of many world newspapers when an English anti-Semite and holocaust denier sued her in an English court because of her remarks about his attitude. She tells the story of this trial, what prompted it, how it was defended, the reactions on all sides, and how she won, in her Introduction to this almost novel-like history of the Eichmann trial. The story of the Eichmann case has been written before, including by the well-known Hannah Arendt, who erroneously describes Eichmann for the most part as a foolish, colorless, servile civil servant who did poorly in school and followed the Nazi State laws slavishly. But she tells the story the best. She reveals much more than previous writers. She reveals many related facts, including how Simon Wiesenthal, the famed Nazi hunter, misrepresented the number of non-Jews killed by Hitler to further his agenda, how the Israeli Mossad had opportunities to capture Eichmann but did not pursue them, how Eichmann was discovered by amateurish sleuthing and dumb luck by the daughter of a half-Jewish Argentinean man who was dating Eichmann’s son, and how the initial overwhelming reaction in the United States to Eichmann’s capture, including by many Jews, criticized Israel. But much more than that, she reveals the testimony pro and con Eichmann and analyses it.Lipstadt tells how Eichmann escaped the allied prison after being captured, worked for awhile in upper Germany, and then dashed off to Argentina under an assumed name, lived in a run-down shack, and worked in a Mercedes-Benz assembly plant. Argentina never offered him asylum because he entered the country under an assumed name. When captured, Eichmann acted submissive. He admitted his identity. When he went to the bathroom on the plane, the Israeli captors waited outside the toilet. “After a few minutes, Eichmann called out to Malkin [his captor], ‘Darf ich anfangen? (‘May I begin?’) Only when told yes did he begin to move his bowels.” But this submissiveness, Lipstadt discloses, was deceptive, because Eichmann was clever, as shown by the testimony of many people who encountered him and by some of the slips he made during his own testimony. He was “proactive, energetic, and a creative master of deception.”When his superior officers “ordered him to deport one trainload of Jews, he pushed for two. Ordered to end deportations on a certain date, he fought to extend the deadline. Ordered to deport Jews from one region, he included those of another.”She describes the concerns, litigation style, and effectiveness of the prosecutor, the problems faced by Eichmann’s defense counselor, the prejudices and involvements of the three judges who adjudicated the case, and the tearful testimony of witnesses. The prosecutor brought about a hundred holocaust survivors to describe the horrors they experienced. She is careful to identify mistakes by these people as well as the positive aspects, and their contribution to history.In regard to Hannah Arendt, a Jew born in Germany and former lover of a famed Nazi, she details and explains her errors, distortions, anti-Zionism, anti-Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion, borderline anti-Semitism (“which side of the border is unclear”), unfair criticisms of Jews, including Holocaust survivors, conclusions based on insufficient evidence, and her misunderstanding of Eichmann’s intellect when contrary to clear evidence, in writings and the testimony of people he encountered, she saw him as a mere banal clerk. Remarkably deceptive is Arendt’s claim that she was present throughout the trial when she was only in attendance for a very short time. She ends her book with a forty page even-handed description of the erroneous depictions by Hannah Arendt in her articles and book about the trial, writings that were very popular, writings that misled her readers. She follows this analysis with a fifteen page discussion on the affects of the trial on Americans, Israelis, and the rest of the world. She also includes eighteen pages of notes and nine pages outlining the chronology of events.

[schmerguls · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I read the author's Denying History on Dec 1, 2005 and Hannah Arendt's book on the Eichmann trial on 18 Nov 1989. This volume spends some time taking issue with Arendt on various points, and says that Arendt during the trial went on vacation for a time. She blames Arendt for criticizing the Jews who did not resist the Nazis more vigorously than they did. While Lipstadt is totally anti-Eichmann she shows the Jewish judges were fair, and defends not having non-Jewish judges hear the case. And she shows how important the trial was to Holocaust history. A worthwhile book.