The trial of Adolf Eichmann 50 years ago in Jerusalem “transformed Jewish life and society as much as it passed judgment on a murderer,” historian Deborah Lipstadt writes in “The Eichmann Trial.”
“In the general world, it changed our perception of the victims of genocide,” adds Lipstadt, a professor of modern Jewish history and Holocaust studies at Emory University in Atlanta.
Lipstadt gained fame in 2000 when she stood trial for alleged libel after calling British historian David Irving the world’s leading Holocaust denier in a book that still deserves attention, “Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory.”
In Britain, the defendant has the burden of proof, which she and her lawyers supplied so successfully that the court’s 300-page judgment lambasted Irving and pretty much ended his career.
In her new book, Lipstadt insightfully revisits and reevaluates the Eichmann trial, which she writes differed from Nuremberg, where “victors sat in judgment. Now, the victims’ representative would sit in judgment.”
She looks beyond the courtroom to a basic disagreement: Whether, as some envisioned, the trial should have been limited to Eichmann’s misdeeds, and to testimony from those who’d had direct contact with him; or, as she writes the prosecution sought, to expand the trial “into an event that would have enduring significance.”
She calls the latter course of action jurisprudentially controversial “but monumental from a historical perspective.”
Prosecutor Gideon Hausner managed to call 100 Holocaust survivors as witnesses even though few had contact with Eichmann during the Shoah. They transformed the Holocaust from a 20-year-old distant, perhaps abstract event into personal tragedies to which people worldwide could relate.
Lipstadt provides an orderly overview: Eichmann’s capture; mixed world and Jewish reaction; choosing venue and judges; Eichmann’s biography and Nazi roles; determining the crimes with which he’d be charged; and the trial.
“Israel had to demonstrate that it could guarantee Eichmann a fair hearing,” Lipstadt writes. The many clashes between Hausner and the judges dispelled “any notion that this was a ‘show trial.’”
Against Eichmann’s claim that he was but a “tiny cog” in the system of mass murder, she writes Hausner’s line was that of “an overwhelmed Jewish population poised against an Eichmann-devised transportation system fully committed to ensnaring every Jew.” Eichmann’s peak was in Hungary in 1944: 437,000 Jews sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the remaining 255,000 saved by the arrival of the Soviet Army.
The story didn’t end with Eichmann’s hanging, nor does Lipstadt. A 39-page chapter both condemns and defends the work of Hannah Arendt, whose famous book, “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil,” shaped many opinions.
“To many people, Arendt was a more central character in the Eichmann story than Eichmann himself,” Lipstadt writes. Arendt’s depiction of Jews as assenting to their own slaughter, and Eichmann as just a “desk-level bureaucrat who showed little initiative” and no “fanatical anti-Semitism,” contradicts evidence and accounts by Jews who negotiated for their lives face-to-face with him.
“He was no clerk,” Lipstadt concludes. “This was a well-read man who accepted and espoused the idea of racial purity.”
Lipstadt writes that Arendt “was absent for much of the trial.” Still, “she correctly deduced that there was something entirely unprecedented about this crime: Germany wanted to wipe out an entire people, leave no witnesses, and cover up the evidence.”
In the end, Lipstadt gives the credit to Hausner. His “determination that this trial would be founded on the human story of the victims’ suffering … still stands as the trial’s most significant legacy.”
“The Eichmann Trial” by Deborah E. Lipstadt (237 pages, Schocken, $24.95)