The Eichmann Trial Fifty Years On

Extract

On 11 May 1960, a team of Israeli intelligence operatives captured Adolf Eichmann in a suburb of Buenos Aires. Eichmann, former head of the Jewish Department in the Reich Security Main Office, was taken to Israel to stand trial for his role in the Holocaust, accused of crimes against the Jewish people and against humanity. His trial opened in Jerusalem on 11 April 1961. It proved to be a watershed moment in postwar history, helping to raise global awareness of the Nazi genocide of the Jews, demonstrate Israel's willingness to assert itself on a global stage, and, for the first time since the Nuremberg trials, put the question of justice for Nazi atrocities back on the world stage. The following decades saw continued efforts to institutionalize international jurisdiction over mass atrocities, efforts that finally came to fruition in 1998 with founding of the permanent International Criminal Court. Yet alongside the ICC, national, mixed and ad hoc tribunals continue to operate, making it particularly complex to judge the relationship between the Eichmann trial and subsequent developments. At the same time, the Eichmann trial was not only an important legal moment in postwar history, it also contributed significantly to shaping the historiographical and psychological understanding of Nazi genocide. For popular audiences in particular, Eichmann continues to figure as an archetypical Holocaust perpetrator. On this fiftieth anniversary of the opening of Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem, German History has asked five leading legal historians to reflect on some of the trial's historical and legal legacies. They are Leora Bilsky (Tel Aviv), Donald Bloxham (Edinburgh), Lawrence Douglas (Amherst), Annette Weinke (Jena) and Devin Pendas (Boston College). The questions were posed by the editors.