And from that date on, the "six million Jews" - zealous journalists even spoke of 9 million - "men, women, old folk and children, exterminated in the gas chambers at Auschwitz" and other places, were once again served up every morning for breakfast the world over.

On the 11th of April, 1961, after a preliminary investigation that lasted no less than eleven months, the trial in question began at Jerusalem before an audience of journalists from every corner of the earth.

And on the 11th of December, the Tribunal rendered its judgement - the death penalty.

On Eichmann's personality, the conditions under which his trial developed, the arguments brought forward, the political context into which the facts invoked against him must be placed and the interpretations given them, the jurists, it seems, had much more to say than the historians, and for the following reasons.

1. Who is Adolf Eichmann?

Adolf Eichmann was born in March 19th, 1906, at Solingen (and not in Palestine in the German colony of Saron, as Mme. Nina Gourfinkel succeeded in making everyone believe). She wrote the preface to the book of Joél Brand, Un million de Juifs contre dix mille camions ('One million Jews for 10 thousand trucks') which holds an honourable position among the many historians born of Resistancism.

His father was Prokurist (legal representative) for the tram company of the city. In 1913 the family moved to Linz where, after having held the same job as at Solingen for a while, his father retired and opened up a business in electric appliances. But in 1913, the Eichmann family was made up of the father, the mother and only Adolf; of the five children it included (one of which was from the father's earlier marriage), the eldest was German and the other four Austrian. In the 1930s, under Chancellor Dolfuss, this had a certain importance because the eldest, considered a foreigner in Austria, could not find employment. Through his family's contact with Kaltenbrunner, then leader of Austrian National Socialism at Linz, he became a salaried member of the Party at Passau, in Germany, because such activities were specifically forbidden to him in Austria. Thus began the career of Adolf Eichmann.

Little by little, he climbed the ladder in the S.S., up to Obersturmbannführer (Lieutenant-Colonel) of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Central Office of the Reich Security Service) in which, from its inauguration in 1936, he had been attached to Office (or service) IV B 4 (Jewish affairs).

In order to assess his responsibility in the Jewish drama we have to see him in his rank in that service, and we must mention that the Reichssicherheitshauptamt was composed of seven sections, all of an executive character: in the fourth of these offices, in section B (there were two sections - A and B), Eichmann was head of the fourth sub-office. Over him in the hierarchy, there was a colonel Müller, head of all the sub-offices grouped under IV B, about whom nobody has ever talked (he later became a very high police functionary in East Germany).

Above Müller there was another colonel - Roth - head of the two sections A and B. Above Roth was Heydrich, head of all seven offices. Finally came the supreme head, Heinrich Himmler. When Heydrich was killed by the Czech Resistance at the beginning of June 1942, Kaltenbrunner took his place and, until the end of the war, that was the only important change that took place in the directorship of the R.S.H.A.

In the Reichssicherheitshauptamt, Lieutenant-Colonel Adolf Eichmann was therefore sixth in rank, and on the functionary level only of decisions taken at a much higher level than Himmler himself, since it was only in 1943 that Himmler was raised to the rank of minister.

In the machinery of Nazi power there were thousands and thousands of posts with this type of responsibility.

From March 1942 on, the date when the massive deportation of the Jews began, Office IV B 4, of which Eichmann was the head, got orders to devote itself to their transportation to concentration camps. In a similar way, the office of which Pohl was the head had the order to devote itself to the economic organisation of those camps, and another office was ordered to make investigations among the Jews and re-group them. But since all the steps to be taken concerning the Jews were decided at government level, Eichmann's only part was to carry out the orders and only to the extent that the order concerned him.

It was only in relation to these considerations that Eichmann's responsibility and guilt could be defined and, in all traditional societies, it is the personal drama of everyone to whom, under threat of severe condemnation, right of conscientious objection is denied. On this point the Jerusalem trial showed that from 1941 on, Eichmann experienced that drama in the same way that Professor Balachowsky of the Pasteur Institute at Paris did at Buchenwald - forced by Dr. Dingschüller to experiment on the deportees with vaccines, knowing perfectly well, as he has himself testified, that it amounted to assassination. I said in the same way because, if there is a difference, it is only one of motives. While the Lieutenant-Colonel, whose education was obviously rudimentary, explained his obedience to orders received in terms of obedience to State policy and love of country, the Professor, whose education could not be doubted, gave as his reason that he did not want "to disappear." That this difference materialised in the final analysis in the rope for one and honours for the other is the essence of the problem. If, as traditional ethics have it, it is true that in all this it was the motive that counted, one could then say that in this case the roles were badly allotted by justice.

Eichmann on trial. In the foreground, defence counsel, Robert Servatius		Adolf Eichmann		Prosecution lawyer Gideon Hausner

2. The Trial itself

With regard to moral as well as international law, Adolf Eichmann found himself as a defendant before an Israeli tribunal under conditions which were as wrong to one as to the other. No one has more clearly established that than M. Raymond de Geouffre de la Pradelle in an article published in Le Figaro on June 9th, 1960.

It is best to let him speak for himself; if my competence in the matter could easily be questioned, it would be very difficult to dispute his.

This is what M. Raymond de Geouffre de la Pradelle says, all other considerations aside, on the question of guilt:

The proceedings carried on right after the end of the war by the Allies were based on the London agreement of August 8th, 1945, and the Moscow declaration of October 30th, 1943, to which the London agreement expressly refers. The principle laid down is that of the return of war criminals to the country in which their crimes were committed. In addition to that, the London statute of August 8th, 1945, created an international military tribunal to try criminals whose crimes were without definite geographical localisation...

This London statute was promulgated by the Allies after they had received, May 8th, 1945, from the head of the Reich government, Grand Admiral Doenitz, through the unconditional surrender, the mandate of German sovereignty...

There is no international text given that gives the State of Israel the right to judge a foreign national to whom crimes against humanity are imputed, or war crimes, when these crimes were committed in a foreign country. Furthermore, at the time when these crimes were committed, there could be no question of victims of Israelite nationality because the State of Israel did not exist.

The State of Israel is sovereign. Within the limits of its territory Israel may, if it wishes, by special law, give itself whatever jurisdictional right it chooses. But this right violates the general principles of law, and of the international rule of competence established for crimes having an essentially international character, since having been carried out in Germany at a time when German law considered them licit, they are crimes only with regard to international law.

And M. Raymond Geouffre de la Pradelle concludes that the only lawful procedure would have been a demand on Argentina for extradition by Germany, who alone was qualified to make such a demand.

It could not be better put. But Argentina had given Eichmann the right of asylum, probably the reason why, as any other country in similar circumstances would act, Germany did not demand his extradition. Is France today asking for the extradition from Spain of many French citizens considered by her to be criminals and to whom Spain has granted asylum? Even Napoleon III did not ask for the extradition of Victor Hugo from Britain.

Still, France did not go on to kidnapping in France or in Argentina. The only example historically comparable with Eichmann's kidnapping, is that of the Duke d'Enghien by Napoleon I, and neither Law nor History has forgiven him for it.

The reader will excuse me if, instead of invoking moral principles which are always debatable, I have preferred to cite the texts. Although they are colder, they lend the Eichmann trial the character of a Moscow trial; and if grounds for guilt could be stated against Eichmann, they have disappeared in the face of the unpardonable circumstances of his kidnapping and, in the eyes of posterity, the person who was condemned is more likely to be considered a victim than an executioner.

Posterity is all the more likely to come to this conclusion because Eichmann's defence was not able to cite in court all the witnesses for the defence that it would have liked to; for example, all the Germans living at liberty and in harmony with international law and the laws of their country, were threatened with arrest for suspicion of guilt of crimes leading to a death sentence, if they so much as set foot on the soil of Israel. Under such circumstances, Eichmann was not judged, he was assassinated.
 

3. The Accusation and its Political Meaning

The prosecution was considerably weakened by its central motif: the six million European Jews mass-exterminated in gas chambers. It can never be repeated often enough that this figure was given only by the press and the witnesses; as we know, the indictment drawn up by M. Gideon Haussner confined itself to saying "millions", and that is the first step of admission in this obvious imposture.

After the war, in an atmosphere of mental confusion and general disorder, it was easy to have that argument accepted. Today many more documents have been made public which were not known during the Nuremberg trial, and these documents tend to prove that although Jewish nationals were odiously attacked and persecuted by the Hitlerian regime, it is not possible that there were 6 million victims.

Once it became possible to even discuss the figure and it was agreed by everyone in the world that the figure was considerably exaggerated, then it was possible to talk about how it was done. For example, we know today that there were no gas chambers at Buchenwald, or at Bergen-Belsen, or Dachau, or Mauthausen. Caught in the act of lying concerning gas chambers in these camps, witnesses who had pretended to have seen them functioning were naturally not believed when they talked about the gas chambers at Auschwitz, which is perfectly natural. Their credibility declined even further when they contradicted each other; if one could be believed, the other could not. Faced with these contradictions, what is public opinion to do except to dismiss both parties and to charge them with having fabricated the story?

If, on the other hand, from the number of prosecution witnesses still alive, one turns out occasionally to be of no more worth than those whom he is accusing - one of their accomplices or a former member of the Intelligence Service etc. - public opinion sees only added grounds for its disapproval.

Such was the case of von dem Bach-Zalewski, Obergruppenführer General of the Waffen S.S., and head of one of the famous Einsatzgruppen (something like commandos) in pursuit of partisans and Jews on the Eastern front. Thanks to him we learned about the activity of these marginal units, and of a speech given "at the beginning of 1941" at Weselberg (without any more detail), in which the Reichsführer S.S. was supposed to have said that "the aim of the campaign in the East is to reduce the Slav population by 30,000,000." But no one else has ever heard of this speech and no written text of it has ever been produced (Nuremberg hearing of January 1st, 1946, Volume IV, p. 500). On January 16th, 1961, this von dem Bach-Zalewski was arrested for "a political assassination committed in cold blood" on July 2nd, 1934, and for acts of cruelty in which he was involved "during the crushing of the Warsaw uprising of 1944 and during the struggle against partisans in the Russian campaign, as well as the execution of Polish hostages at Sosnovitz-Dendzin." (Newspapers, January 17th, 1961 dispatch of the A.F.P.) And on February 11th of the same year he was condemned to 4½ years in prison, which shows that since Nuremberg justice has become singularly indulgent.

And that was the case again when, on January 25th, 1961, the British magazine Weekend came out with a photograph on its cover of Hoettl, with the following caption:

The SPY STORY that's stranger than fiction

He was a friend of Nazi leaders

His real boss was a British secret service man

That was how it was learned that the principal witness for the establishment of six million as the number of Jews exterminated by Nazism was an agent of the Intelligence Service (!!).

It is well to make it clear that this figure of 6 million depends on two testimonies only: that of Hoettl and that of Wizliceny.

This is the statement of the first:

"In August 1944," said Obersturmbannführer Dr. Wilhelm Hoettl, head of the bureau connected with section IV of the Reich Central Security Office,

S.S. Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann, whom I had known since 1938, had a conversation with me in my apartment in Budapest... He knew that he was considered a war criminal by the United Nations because he had the lives of thousands of Jews on his conscience. I asked him how many, and he answered that although the number was a great secret he would tell me because, from the information he had, he had arrived at this conclusion: in the various extermination camps about 4 million Jews had been gassed and 2 million killed in another way.

(Taken from the Report on the Nuremberg Tribunal, Volume XXXIII, p. 85-87.) And the second:

He [Eichmann] said that he would jump into his grave laughing because the thought of having 5 million persons on his conscience would be a source of extraordinary satisfaction to him.

(op. cit.) Of these two testimonies, M. Poliakov himself says, "One could certainly raise the objection that a figure so imperfectly supported must be considered suspect." (Revue d`Histoire de la seconde guerre mondiale, October 1956).

Nobody made him say so! We also know that one of these two witnesses was an Intelligence Service agent. And the other, who had seen Himmler's signature on an extermination order, put himself at the disposition of the law in order to trap Eichmann and seek mercy for himself, but was hanged, despite his cooperation, for having been Eichmann's accomplice.

Concerning the political context in which the Trial should be placed, it is well to note that M. Raymond de Geouffre de la Pradelle was not the only one to protest against the kidnapping of Eichmann and to deny competence to the judges of Jerusalem. Even in Israeli circles there were eddies of feeling before the opening of the trial, and there still are, after the sentencing of the accused.