Eichmann trial

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Adolf Eichmann during his trial in Jerusalem (May 1961)

The Eichmann trial is the term used to describe the legal proceedings against the former German SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann , in which the latter was held responsible for the murder of millions of Jews before the Jerusalem district court between April 11 and December 15, 1961 . The verdict was death by hanging .

The process attracted a great deal of international attention and is still controversial today. The utterances of Hannah Arendt , which have entered common parlance and who spoke of the “banality of evil” in her publication Eichmann in Jerusalem , are well known.

Eichmann's role in National Socialism

Handwritten CV (July 1937)

As a member of the NSDAP and the SS from 1932, of the Security Service (SD) from 1934, as head of the central offices for Jewish emigration in Vienna and Prague in 1938 and 1939, as well as head of the Reich Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Berlin and head of department for "Jewish Affairs" in the Reich Security Main Office (" Eichmannreferat ") (IV B 4) from 1940 Adolf Eichmann was during the entire Third Reich with the Aryanization , "forced emigration" and the expulsion of Jews, for example to Madagascar or Nisko , up to the scheduled deportations and the murder in concentration and Extermination camps familiar and involved in practical implementation across Europe. With his superiors Heinrich Himmler , Reinhard Heydrich , Ernst Kaltenbrunner and Heinrich Müller as well as other responsible persons, such as Hans Frank , Odilo Globocnik or Rudolf Höß , he is considered to be one of the key figures in the final solution to the Jewish question , which was not included in the Nuremberg trial against the main war criminals its systematic and regularity and was only negotiated as one charge among others.

Eichmann himself visited the Generalgouvernement , the Warsaw Ghetto and various camps, including the Auschwitz concentration camp , where he visited the gas chambers . On business trips to most of the areas occupied by the German Wehrmacht , he organized the transports to be carried out. He also took in January 1942 as a secretary at the Wannsee Conference in part, in about the " final solution " of the Jewish question was discussed. Eichmann organized two follow-up conferences in March and October 1942 , which took place in his presentation in Berlin. The language of his protocol, which later served as evidence for the prosecutor in Jerusalem , is exemplary of his belittling, bureaucratic style.

preparation

The German defender Robert Servatius (left front) with the Israeli attorney general Gideon Hausner (standing) during a meeting
US news about Eichmann's conviction in the first instance

After the end of the Second World War , Eichmann managed to escape along the so-called rat line to Argentina, where he lived with forged papers under the names Otto Henninger and Ricardo Clement. On May 11, 1960, he was arrested by Israeli agents in Buenos Aires and - since the extradition agreement between Israel and Argentina had not yet been ratified and Eichmann's escape was feared - he was kidnapped to Israel on May 22, 1960. The district judge in Haifa issued the arrest warrant for Eichmann on May 23, 1960. Avner Werner Less was entrusted with the management of the interrogations .

Eichmann's kidnapping led to diplomatic complications. In resolution 138 of June 23, 1960, the United Nations Security Council condemned Israel's actions as a violation of the sovereignty of Argentina and demanded redress, but recognized Eichmann's indictment in principle in the face of the crimes he was accused of. The then Israeli Foreign Minister Golda Meir had justified the exceptional violation of international law with the historically unprecedented crimes of Eichmann and the special interest in criminal prosecution. On August 3, 1960, Argentina and Israel unanimously declared the matter settled.

The federal government was not interested in extraditing Eichmann to the German judiciary. A request from the Hessian public prosecutor Fritz Bauer was just as unsuccessful as a request from Eichmann himself. Unofficially, an inter-ministerial working group agreed with the Israeli government on the interests of both sides with regard to the indictment and the conduct of the case.

On February 1, 1961, the notice of charge was served on the 54-year-old defendant, while copies of the police interrogation protocol of over 3,000 pages and 1,300, and later a total of 1,600 documents were handed over to the defense. At the end of the Second World War, the majority were files seized from the Foreign Office at that time , which had already been used by the prosecution in the Nuremberg trial of the main war criminals .

Additional evidence came from around 100 witnesses, most of whom were Holocaust survivors . Among them were, for example, the father of Herschel Grynszpan , representatives of the former Reich Association of Jews in Germany and members of the armed Jewish resistance such as the partisan leader Abba Kovner or Jitzhak Zuckerman , who was involved in the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto . For the defense, various testimony under oath were read out, such as those of Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski , Richard Baer , Kurt Becher , Theodor Horst Grell , Wilhelm Höttl , Walter Huppenkothen , Hans Jüttner , Herbert Kappler , Hermann Krumey , Max Merten , Franz Novak , Franz Alfred Six , Alfred Slawik , Eberhard von Thadden , Edmund Veesenmayer and Otto Winkelmann . These witnesses did not appear in person because they feared they would be prosecuted in Israel like Eichmann himself. The expert Gustave M. Gilbert was also heard.

The commentator on the Nuremberg race laws and head of the Federal Chancellery, Hans Globke , was not called as a witness, which in 1963 led to the Globke trial before the Supreme Court of the GDR .

On February 12, 1961, the defense refrained from conducting preliminary proceedings, so that the General Prosecutor's Office under Gideon Hausner brought charges against Adolf Eichmann in the Jerusalem District Court on February 21, 1961 (Attorney-General of the Government of Israel v. Eichmann, Criminal Case No. 40/61) . During the preliminary investigation, several injured parties applied to be admitted as joint plaintiffs to assert claims for damages. After concerns arose about their admission, the injured parties brought claims for damages in the civil courts in Haifa and Jerusalem, but the courts dismissed them in absentia for lack of sufficient grounds for the claim.

Legitimation of the process

Eichmann's indictment and conviction was based on the law on the punishment of Nazis and Nazi helpers, introduced by Justice Minister Pinchas Rosen , passed by the Knesset on August 1, 1950 and published on August 9, 1950 . This was based on the London Statute of 1945, which made it possible to carry out the Nuremberg Trials . In addition, it referred to the Israeli criminal code, the "Criminal Code Ordinance" (CCO) of 1936.

Already at the beginning of the process, but also during the appeal process, Eichmann's defense counsel raised objections that prevented the process. The 1950 Act could, because of a violation of the criminal law against retroactivity, give an Israeli court jurisdiction to try crimes that occurred before the establishment of Israel and outside its territory. The acts accused of Eichmann were also "acts of state" , that is sovereign acts of the German Reich, which are not subject to the jurisdiction of a foreign state under international law and for which Eichmann cannot be prosecuted personally in a foreign court. The defense attorney complained that the Israeli government had Eichmann abducted to Israel without the consent of Argentina and doubted that Jewish judges could show him the necessary impartiality .

The court rejected these objections in both instances and relied on the so-called principle of universal law . According to this, serious human rights violations such as genocide can also be punished by a court outside the actual scope of the offense - in this case the State of Israel. After the Nuremberg Trials had been conducted by the Allies on this basis , it was now up to Israel to carry out the trial of one of the main criminals of National Socialism .

A general prohibition of retroactivity is not recognized in international law. The crimes accused of Eichmann were incidentally such a serious violation of the universal principles of humanity that he could not have assumed that they were impunity. Likewise, crimes against humanity as supposed acts of sovereignty could not claim the protection of state sovereignty and thus impunity.

The fact that Eichmann had been brought from Argentina to Israel without his will did not constitute an obstacle to prosecution. According to the then valid legal opinion, a defendant could not invoke the fact that he had been abducted from one country in which he had resided to another country that wanted to prosecute him as a violation of his own, subjective right. Rather, this action was seen solely as a violation of the sovereignty of the country in which the detainee was staying. Only this could intervene in the country to which the arrested man had been abducted. So Argentina had done it by invoking the Security Council of the United Nations and the subsequent amicable settlement of the dispute with Israel. The principle of international law male captus bene detentus (wrongly caught, rightly imprisoned) was internationally recognized at the time, but is now being questioned.

The judges had fulfilled their criminal procedural obligation to impartiality towards the defendant represented by a lawyer in all phases of the process before the world public.

accusation

After nine months of investigation, the 15 counts against Adolf Eichmann were brought to the competent district court in Jerusalem. The main accuser was the Attorney General Gideon Hausner .

The 15 counts can be divided into 4 categories:

  • Category 1: Crimes against the Jewish people:
    • Charge 1: causing the death of millions of Jews through extermination camps , Einsatzgruppen , labor camps , concentration and mass deportation .
    • Charge 2: Creation of living conditions for millions of Jews through which they were to be physically exterminated.
    • 3rd count: causing severe physical and mental harm to millions of Jews in Europe.
    • 4th Charge: Preparing Measures for the Sterilization of Jews to Prevent Births of Jews.
  • Category 2: Crimes against humanity :
    • 5th charge: causing the murder, extermination, enslavement and deportation of the Jewish population.
    • Charge 6: Persecution of Jews for national, racial, religious and political motives.
    • Count 7: carrying out the pillaging of Jews through inhumane measures, including robbery, coercion, terror and torture.
    • 9th charge: deportation of half a million members of the Polish civilian population from their places of residence with the intention of resettling Germans in their place.
    • 10th charge: deportation of 14,000 members of the Slovenian civilian population from their places of residence with the intention of resettling Germans in their place.
    • 11th charge: deportation of tens of thousands of Roma , as well as their rounding up, transport and murder in the extermination camps.
    • Charge 12: Deportation of around 100 civilian children from the village of Lidice in Czechoslovakia and their transport to Poland for the purpose of extermination.
  • Category 3: War crimes :
    • Charge 8: mistreatment, deportation and murder of Jews.

defense

The Cologne lawyer Robert Servatius , who had defended several defendants in the Nuremberg trials , took over the defense from June 1960 at the request of Eichmann's relatives. He was assisted by the young Munich lawyer Dieter Wechtenbruch. At the time of the trial, a law was passed giving foreign lawyers access to an Israeli court, since under procedural law only an Israeli national could represent a defendant in a court in Israel. Although Israeli lawyers offered themselves to defend Eichmann in the interests of the rule of law, this option was refrained from for two reasons: On the one hand, an Israeli defense lawyer would have run the risk of turning the Israeli public against him, and on top of that would have been suspected of defending the defense Case may not be adequately executed.

Eichmann himself defended himself again and again during the entire process on the grounds that he only acted on orders according to the so-called Führer principle and was therefore not guilty in the legal sense. He was also never directly involved in the murder or deportation of people, but merely passed on orders as a “cog in the system”. In a tape recording before his kidnapping from Argentina, however, he had expressed himself very differently to old Nazis: “I have no regrets. […] I am not cringing. ”In it he regretted not having sent 11 or 12 million Jews to the extermination camps. He therefore felt himself to be a failure in the National Socialist system. The audio documents and copies of the interviews conducted by Willem Sassen with Eichmann in Argentina were not admitted in their entirety as documentary evidence of the prosecution, but excerpts edited by Eichmann himself could be presented to him during cross-examination and thus introduced into the trial as part of his testimony.

Eichmann presented himself less as a staunch Nazi ideologist than as an inconspicuous representative of the “bureaucracy of murder” (according to Hannah Arendt in the English first edition of Eichmann in Jerusalem ); since the first Auschwitz trial from 1963 to 1965, the term desk perpetrator became common. Even if his grave guilt was undisputed, the inconspicuous Adolf Eichmann was little suited to explain the murder of 6 million Jews.

Protected from attack in a box made of bulletproof glass, the defendant ultimately admitted that the murder of the Jews was one of the most serious crimes in human history, for which he was in no way responsible. He repeatedly emphasized that he only acted on orders. Had he been asked to commit murders himself, he would have followed orders.

judgment

The main proceedings in the trial against Adolf Eichmann began on April 11, 1961 in the House of the People ( Hebrew בית העם Beit Ha'am ) (now 11 Gerard Behar Center Bezalel Street) in the center of Jerusalem. The presiding judge was Moshe Landau , the assessors were Benjamin Halevi and Yitzhak Raveh . There was no jury . On August 14, 1961, the court adjourned, announcing that it would not deliver its verdict before November 1961. Its reading began on December 11, 1961 and ended on December 15, 1961, the 121st day of the meeting, with the execution of the death penalty .

According to the result of the taking of evidence, not least due to the testimony of former Eichmann employees such as Dieter Wisliceny or the written declaration compiled by Josef Löwenherz for the trial, Eichmann played a leading role in the planning, organization, execution and monitoring of the Holocaust , not only during the deportation and murder of the Hungarian Jews in 1944 by the Eichmann special command . This also emerged from a large number of documents received, such as meeting minutes, official correspondence, deportation orders signed by Eichmann or statistics on transports arranged by Eichmann ( Korherr report ), with which he had been cross-examined by Attorney General Hausner. In addition, Eichmann was seriously incriminated by the statements of Hermann Göring , Ernst Kaltenbrunner , Hans Frank and Joachim von Ribbentrop in the Nuremberg trial of the main war criminals . After that, Eichmann, as a close confidante of Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich, was the driving force behind the final solution to the Jewish question , which he wanted to settle “as quickly as possible”.

Eichmann is credited with the massive killing by poison gas ( Zyklon B ) in the extermination camps . In June 1942, his deputy, Rolf Günther , commissioned Kurt Gerstein with the procurement of 100 kg of hydrogen cyanide. The fact that this was intended for the killing of people was subject to the highest level of secrecy at the time as a secret imperial matter.

The conviction and sentence were based both on Eichmann's unbroken and his own so called anti-Judaism and its functions and its actual powers as Head of Unit for "Jewish Affairs" in the Reich Security Main Office, which his official rank as Lieutenant Colonel and the formal allocation plans went far. He could not allege that he had acted on higher orders ( emergency order ), since he did not feel a conflict of conscience in convincing the court, but not only made the orders given to him his own and always carried them out out of inner conviction, but also his own Had assumed authority.

After Eichmann and his lawyer on 17 December revision to the Israeli Supreme Court had lodged (Adolf Eichmann v. The Attorney General, Criminal Appeal No. 336/61) , the sentence was the District Court on 29 May 1962, the five-member panel of judges, chaired of the then court president Yitzchak Olshan confirmed after six sessions. Also on May 29, Eichmann sent a pardon to Israeli President Yitzchak Ben Zwi , in which he reaffirmed that a line had to be drawn “between the responsible leaders and the people who, like me, merely had to be an instrument of leadership. I was not a responsible leader and so I do not feel guilty ”. In addition, Eichmann's defense lawyer Robert Servatius , his wife Vera, his siblings Robert, Emil Rudolf, Otto and Friedrich Eichmann and Irmgard Müllner, as well as the Jewish religious scholar Martin Buber , asked not to carry out the death sentence. However, Ben Zwi refused all requests for clemency. Eichmann was hanged on the night of June 1, 1962 .

Besides John Demjanjuk, Adolf Eichmann was the only National Socialist ever brought to trial in Israel and the only accused ever sentenced to death and executed by the Israeli judiciary. Israeli law does not provide for the death penalty for crimes other than crimes against the Jewish people , crimes against humanity, and war crimes . Eichmann's body was cremated and the ashes scattered outside Israeli territorial waters in the Mediterranean Sea to prevent his grave from becoming a memorial.

reception

At home and abroad

The trial against Eichmann attracted international attention and was followed with great interest by the media around the world, especially in Germany and Israel, as it first raised public awareness of the scheduled killing of European Jews . According to the responsible film producer Milton Fruchtman, up to 38 countries and 80% of the viewers possible at the time were watching the process. As a result, were in the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials and Majdanek process of the extermination camps at Auschwitz and former in Germany guards Majdanek indicted. The Nazi past also became a topic in German and Israeli school lessons and initiated intensive scientific research. The Eichmann trial and similar procedures are intended to be a reminder of the systematic mass murder up to the present day and counteract the repression and denial of the Holocaust .

Differences of opinion in the international and Israeli press were caused by the fact that the trial took place in a converted theater (Beit Ha'am, means something like community house) and its unusual staging, for example Eichmann's accommodation in a glass case and hidden behind towels Cameras that - in contrast to what was customary up to then - let the audience follow the events in the hall live. The editorial selection of the scenes broadcast internationally was also carried out by a single US film company, Capital Cities Broadcasting Corporation.

The images and sound recordings of the Eichmann trial became icons of the Holocaust. Many documentaries made use of the zooms, sections and perspectives chosen by the film team at the time. The Eichmann trial, its quotes and pictures heralded a turning point in the West German view of the past. It led to renewed interest and the end of the repression that had prevailed in West Germany up to that point in relation to the extermination of the Jews.

As the only court draftsman , Miron Sima was approved by the court, whose pictures and drawings from this trial achieved world fame.

The judgment of the Israeli Supreme Court was groundbreaking for the further development of international criminal law because of its detailed legal justification . In most of the United Nations member states, national courts are now competent to prosecute genocide , war crimes , crimes against humanity and torture , even if the act was committed by foreign nationals and abroad. The national courts handle far more cases than the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Very few national proceedings, however, end with a conviction. An example of this is the criminal case against the former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet .

Hannah Arendt

In her book Eichmann in Jerusalem , the Jewish political scientist Hannah Arendt reports on the trial against Eichmann.

Her publication in 1963 was best known for her assessments of Eichmann himself, whom she describes, albeit as the “greatest criminal of his time”, as a “buffoon”. She coined the term “banality of evil”, which her book also bears as a subtitle. The biggest misunderstanding of the book is the interpretation that Arendt saw Eichmann merely as a recipient of orders. Arendt describes Eichmann as an active person, as someone who drove forward the extermination of European Jews with great zeal and ingenuity. He organized and drove forward, supported by his "ideology of objectivity", always following the supposed "law of the Führer". In this respect, like most of the National Socialists, he was a perfectly average person, from which many readers drew the conclusion that every person is ready to commit such atrocities in appropriate situations , which Arendt denied. Deputy Prosecutor Gabriel Bach accuses Arendt of having misrepresented facts from the trial. She ignored the fact that “Eichmann betrayed Hitler's order to murder even more Jews”.

Her publications met with rejection not only in the Jewish world. The book and the 1965 series of lectures on Evil are still part of the international discussion on the trial.

literature

For Hannah Arendt see also the references in the article Eichmann in Jerusalem

Movies

Web links

Commons : Eichmann process  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ SC Res. 138 (1960), June 23, 1960
  2. ↑ Klaus Wiegrefe : The curse of the evil deed. The fear of Adolf Eichmann. In: Der Spiegel , April 11, 2011.
  3. ^ Willi Winkler : Holocaust Trial: Adolf Eichmann. When Adenauer panicked In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , March 29, 2011.
  4. ↑ Anna Oehmichen: Male Captus - Bene detentus. From Eichmann to El Masri . (PDF) Lecture from June 28, 2008. Accessed March 9, 2015.
  5. ↑ Michael Pawlik: Deportation case. The inherent logic of law. FAZ.net of October 26, 2009. Accessed March 8, 2015.
  6. ↑ Eichmann Supreme Court Judgment. 50 Years on, its Significance today. (PDF) Amnesty International Publications, 2012 (English), accessed February 15, 2015.
  7. ↑ Lisa Hauff: The judges in the Eichmann trial. In: Werner Renz (Ed.): Interests around Eichmann. Israeli justice, German law enforcement and old comradeships. Frankfurt a. M. 2012, ISBN 978-3-593-39750-4 , pp. 119-146, here pp. 120 and 125.
  8. ↑ Werner Renz: NS crimes and justice. An introduction . In: Werner Renz (Ed.): Interests around Eichmann. Israeli justice, German law enforcement and old comradeships . Campus, Frankfurt a. M. 2012, p. 27 f.
  9. ↑ Gabriel Bach - The Prosecutor and the Eichmann Trial . ( Memento from August 10, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Documentation, ARD, January 27, 2010.
  10. ↑ Recording of the 88th day of negotiations (from minute 33:49). YouTube.
  11. ↑ Recording of the 105th day of the negotiation, decision No. 95 at the beginning. YouTube.
  12. ↑ Christoph Jahr: The perpetrators behind the perpetrators. The term "desk clerk" and the strange career he's had . In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung of January 17, 2017, p. 36 ( online ).
  13. ↑ Judgment of the Jerusalem District Court Criminal Case No. 40/61 ( Memento of the original from February 19, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; English) Accessed February 19, 2015. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.trial-ch.org
  14. ↑ Guide to the Papers of Joseph Löwenherz (1884-1960) , 1938-1960, AR 25055 / MF 546, Processed by Renate Evers. Leo Baeck Institute - Center for Jewish History
  15. ↑ Judgment of the Supreme Court of May 29, 1962. ( Memento of the original of February 19, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; English) Accessed February 19, 2015. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.trial-ch.org
  16. ↑ Holocaust Remembrance Day: Israel publishes Eichmann's petition for clemency . Spiegel Online . January 27, 2016. Retrieved January 27, 2016.
  17. ^ Thomas Rosenhagen: Digital copies of the original documents. Accessed on November 28, 2016.
  18. ^ Christian Böhme, Lissy Kaufmann, Claudia von Salzen: Adolf Eichmann - Document of Denial Die Zeit , January 28, 2016.
  19. ↑ Peter Krause: The Eichmann trial in the German press. Campus Verlag, Frankfurt a. M. 2002, p. 73 f.
  20. ↑ Anja Kurths: The meaning of the Shoah in Israeli society. Federal Agency for Civic Education , March 28, 2008. Retrieved February 18, 2015.
  21. ↑ Nazi crimes: Former SS man charged with complicity in murder in 170,000 cases . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , February 16, 2015. Retrieved February 17, 2015.
  22. ^ Gabriel Bach: The trial against Adolf Eichmann . ( Memento of the original from February 13, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF) Federal Ministry of Justice: The Rosenburg . 2nd symposium. The responsibility of lawyers in the processing process . Lectures given on February 5, 2013 in the jury court room of the Nuremberg-Fürth Regional Court, p. 23 ff. Accessed on February 13, 2015. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.bmjv.de
  23. ↑ Detailed recordings of the Eichmann trial on YouTube, made available by Yad Vashem , 2011
  24. ↑ Miron Sima: In view of the sad symbol: portrait of a court, drawings from the Eichmann trial . Israel Universities Press, Jerusalem 1969.
  25. ↑ Eichmann Supreme Court Judgment. 50 Years on, its Significance today. (PDF) Amnesty International Publications, 2012 (English). Retrieved February 15, 2015.
  26. ↑ after Julia Schulze Wessel: Ideologie der Sachlichkeit. Hannah Arendt's political theory of anti-Semitism . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt a. M. 2006, ISBN 978-3-518-29396-6 . The argument is the theme of the entire book.
  27. ↑ Ron Ulrich: Gabriel Bach: "He was so obsessed that he even disregarded Hitler." In: Die Zeit . April 11, 2019, ISSN  0044-2070 ( zeit.de [accessed April 17, 2019]).