Sunday Times 2
The capture and trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann
It was not only Adolf Eichmann on trial, but the whole Nazi system was in the dock.
SS Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Eichmann fled Germany at the tail end of the Second World war, and for more than 15 years remained in Buenos Aires, Argentina after having had plastic surgery done to change his face.
Adolf Eichmann at the trial in Jerusalem
He, who was the architect of the Final Solution to exterminate six million Jews, fled from the Third Reich by means of a secret escape line, which took him via Austria to a monastery in Italy. He assumed the name “Ricardo Klement”. Under this name he obtained an Argentine visa and continued to live in Buenos Aires. His wife and children joined him in 1952. He worked for Mercedes Benz, receiving a handsome salary.
There was one man in Israel, Simon Wiesenthal, who made it his life’s mission to hound these Nazi war criminals. He was lucky to survive having lost several members of his family in the holocaust. He spent years tracking these war criminals and was finally recognised by the new State of Israel as doing yeoman service to the cause.
This is what our Government should be doing, to track down the LTTE war criminals and those who gave “material support”, to commit mass murder of innocent Sinhala, Tamil and Muslim people during the 30 years of terror, unleashed by the blood thirsty Prabhakaran and his cohorts. The LTTE rump is still floating around abroad, bribing some western politicians, to restart another killing spree in Sri Lanka. It is most desirable that the Government set up a separate ministry to track down these murderers and traitors to bring them to trial. There are various ministries for insignificant subjects such as Botanical Gardens, but no ministry or a separate department to monitor the new threat to the country from them.
On May 23, 1960, Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben Gurion electrified the world by declaring that the architect of the Final Solution was captured at last, and was smuggled out of Argentina and brought to Israel to stand his trial for the murder of millions of Jews.
Eichmann was tracked down by the Israeli Secret Service and kept for a while under clandestine observation till he was positively identified.
Thereafter he was captured at a bus stop in Argentina on his way home from work and bundled into a car by a 4-man snatch team. Fearing that the alternative was instant death, Eichmann opted to confess to his identity on the basis that he would be made to stand trial. Since Israel did not have an Extradition Act with Argentina, the only option was to smuggle him out and be taken to Israel. It was argued that the smuggling out of Eichmann was a breach of International Law. The question arose as to whether he could be guaranteed a fair trial from a nation born from the ashes of the holocaust.
The trial itself was on trial! For these reasons the whole affair had to be conducted with meticulous correctitude. Eichmann was afforded every facility, including his own defence lawyers from West Germany. Some 700 foreign correspondents were accommodated, together with many internationally known lawyers and historians. Eichmann in the dock looked appallingly self confident, like the war criminals at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal. They were such brutal killers, not to be shaken by a mere trial.
He was charged on 15 counts. The Attorney General of Israel Gideon Hausner opened for the prosecution with the words, “as I stand here before you, Judges of Israel, to lead the prosecution of Adolf Eichmann, I do not stand alone. With me in this place at this hour stand six million accusers. But they cannot rise to their feet and point an accusing finger towards the man who sits in the glass dock and cry, “I accuse”. For their ashes are piled up in the hills of Aushwitz, and in the fields of Treblinka, or washed away by the rivers of Poland”.
One of the witnesses, Rivka Yoselenska from Eastern Poland, described how one of the dreaded “einsatzgruppen” (the extermination squads) had descended on the Jewish Quarter of her town in 1941. They were surrounded by SS men who with whips herded them like animals into the town square, where they were kept overnight without food and water. The next morning, exhausted by terror and fatigue, they were marched out and commanded to undress by a huge pit. They were lined up, shot in the back of the head and kicked into the pit. She saw her mother, grandmother, sister and six-year-old daughter murdered, before her eyes. She with minor injuries fell into the pit, and pretended that she was dead. Her evidence was corroborated when they dug up this pit and unearthed hundreds of rotting remains.
Eichmann joined the Nazi party in 1932, at the age of 26, as an SS officer. He quickly made a name for himself as a specialist in Jewish affairs. He taught himself Hebrew and Yiddish. Attached to the Viennese Gestapo, Eichmann initiated a scheme for the mass emigration of Jews from Austria. Throughout the war he headed the Jewish Department. He was not a man who could plead like others before him that he did not know about the Final Solution. Instead he adopted the alternative line that he was only obeying orders. He had said, “Why waste bullets for the Jews when there is a cheaper thing called gas”. His intention of extermination was proved beyond all reasonable doubt.
Eichmann was no mere cog in the machinery of annihilation. He was the dynamo. Tirelessly he scoured Europe for Jews for deportation, appearing now in France, now in Czechoslovakia, now in Belgium, to accelerate and encourage the Purge. He was a cold blooded and calculating murderer, and showed himself to be completely obsessed with the idea of destroying every single Jew he could lay hands on. Even the loathsome Ernst Kaltenbrunner hanged for War Crimes at Nuremberg, relented. But not Adolf Eichmann.
Truck loads of Jews packed like sardines were dispatched to Auschwitz. Eichmann defied Hitler’s orders, protesting that Jews are important biological material, many of them veteran Zionists whose emigration to Palestine is most undesirable.
Adolf Eichmann was found guilty by an Israeli Court and sentenced to death. His Appeal too, failed. On the night of May 31, 1962, he was taken from his cell and hanged. His last words were, “I had to obey the rules of war and my flag”. Thereafter he was cremated and his ashes were thrown to the sea, well beyond the Israeli three mile limit.