The Eichmann Trial

Historian Dr. Deborah E. Lipstadt’s monograph, The Eichmann Trial (2011), covers the sensational 1961 trial of Adolph Eichmann – the same one that Hannah Arendt famously wrote about in her Eichmann in Jerusalem – and its subsequent significance as a major determinant of the way the Holocaust is spoken of and thought about today. Lipstadt has been the Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, United States, since 1993. Then-President Bill Clinton appointed her to the United States Holocaust Memorial Council in 1994; she served two terms there. Lipstadt is also well known for a libel suit that was brought against her in 1996 by author David Irving for characterizing Irving as an inveterate Holocaust denier in her book Denying the Holocaust. Lipstadt and her publisher, Penguin Books, won the case; the ruling was notable in that Mr. Justice Gray, who presided over the case (which took place in Britain) produced a 349-page report refuting Irving's writings and detailing his misrepresentation of the history of World War II and the persecution of Europe's Jews.

Adolph Eichmann was Nazi Germany's top logistics official, given responsibility by SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich for overseeing the movement of Eastern Europe's Jews into ghettos, and later, death camps during World War II. Eichmann was captured in Argentina by Israel's infamous intelligence agency, the Mossad, on May 11, 1960, on behalf of the Jewish people. The run-up to this capture is where Lipstadt begins her monograph. According to Lipstadt, the Mossad, after infiltrating Argentina and kidnapping Eichmann, drugged and costumed him to smuggle him past Argentine authorities unnoticed. This brash – and by Lipstadt's account rather clumsily executed – move did not endear Israel to the international community, however. As Lipstadt details, Argentina demanded repatriation and was supported in this position by the United States. Indeed, even the American Jewish Committee disagreed with Israel's actions, asking Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion to turn Eichmann over to an International or German tribunal, rather than prosecute him themselves. Ben-Gurion openly flouted this request; he did not give Eichmann back, and the former Nazi officer's subsequent trial in Jerusalem was widely publicized and contentious. Eichmann was convicted of war crimes and hung in 1962.

One of the major figures in The Eichmann Trial was Israeli Attorney General Gideon Hausner, who prosecuted Eichmann's case. Hausner was infamously portrayed by Arendt as an over-the-top and demagogic politician less concerned with trying Eichmann fairly than making him an example. Lipstadt presents a more nuanced view, conceding Hausner's theatrics and emotionalism, but insisting on the value of his tactic to center the testimonies of Holocaust survivors. This, Lipstadt argues, profoundly influenced the way Israeli Jews thought of themselves vis-à-vis the European Jews that had been persecuted by the Nazis, forcing them to reevaluate former suspicions that the European Jews hadn't fought back hard enough. Instead, survivor testimony made clear that the sheer and calculated force the Nazis had brought to bear upon the Jews had made resistance futile.



After describing Eichmann's trial, Lipstadt shifts her gaze to analyze its aftermath, requiring her to confront the polemical Arendt directly. Lipstadt assesses Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem, which has long dominated discussion of the trial, in measured terms. She largely agrees with Arendt on the banality of evil – the idea that one can do evil things without being inherently evil – but doesn't accept Arendt's characterization of Eichmann as shallow and clueless. She contests that Arendt had formulated her position on Eichmann in advance, subsequently ignoring the extent to which the evidence suggests he was, in fact, active in plotting the Jewish genocide.

Lipstadt also describes how prior to Eichmann's trial, the United States had no Holocaust museums. It was the Eichmann trial, Lipstadt argues, that fundamentally changed the way America, and the world at large, views and commemorates the Holocaust today due to Hausner's decision to foreground the testimony of Holocaust survivors – the first time they had been given such a platform.

The Eichmann Trial has been much praised for bringing nuance and context to a moment in history that is undeniably important but difficult today to separate from the account of its first and most polarizing commentator, philosopher Hannah Arendt. Lipstadt disentangles Eichmann's story from Arendt's personal reactions, without downplaying the power and influence of those reactions. Lipstadt, writing much later in time than Arendt, also takes into consideration how the trial has rippled through time, affecting the way the Holocaust is studied and spoken about today. It seems that this is, in fact, Lipstadt's ultimate goal: to underscore how subsequent historical discourse conditions the understanding of the events it presents, often with spurious claims to objectivity.