“He entered the glass booth at 8:55 am Without warning. He just walked in and sat down. Tall, lean; dark suit, meticulously ironed white shirt, tie. Two policemen standing by his side. That's all"*.
On April 11, 1961, the Israeli journalist Haïm Gouri attends the opening of the trial of Adolf Eichmann in the district court of Jerusalem.
Like the rest of the world, his eyes are on this Nazi criminal on trial for his participation in the Final Solution that sent six million Jews to their deaths during World War II.
For the first time, this 55-year-old man, a former SS colonel, appears in the courtroom behind this "glass cage", built to defend him against any possible attack.
A year earlier, on May 13, 1960, Adolf Eichmann was kidnapped in Argentina by agents of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, after a long hunt.
For fifteen years, yet actively sought after, this Nazi official had escaped justice, benefiting from complicity and posing as a certain Ricardo Klement.
Thanks to the obstinacy of the German prosecutor Fritz Bauer, he was finally spotted in Buenos Aires, kidnapped, then transported to Israel.
FOR HISTORY.
"The biggest and the strangest trial in history".
On April 11, 1961, the Western world had its eyes fixed on Jerusalem where the trial of Adolf Eichmann, responsible for the logistics of the "final solution" began, a year after his capture in Buenos Aires.
pic.twitter.com/WjWTpDhqYS
- Ina.fr (@Inafr_officiel) April 11, 2021
"The Nuremberg of the Jewish People"
After spending 316 days in solitary confinement in a specially equipped prison in the north of the Hebrew state, he must finally answer for his actions.
The charges against him are numerous.
After the Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942, during which the Final Solution was put in place, Adolf Eichmann coordinated the deportations of Jews from Germany and Western, Southern and Eastern Europe, to the killing camps.
He drew up the deportation plans down to the smallest detail.
Working with other German organizations, it also manages the confiscation of the deportees' property.
From 1942 to 1944, Adolf Eichmann thus became "the chief administrator of the greatest genocide in history", according to the formula of his biographer David Cesarani.
A photo taken in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp showing Nazi criminal Adolf Eichmann (second from right) smiling as German officers cut the hair of a Jewish internee.
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In Jerusalem in 1961, it was the first time since the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in 1946 that a prominent Nazi cadre found himself before judges.
It is also the first time that one of them has been tried in Israel.
"It is a particular trial", notes the historian Annette Wieviorka, author of "Eichmann, from the hunt to the trial" (ArchiPoche).
“The then Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion wanted to make it the Nuremberg of the Jewish people. The genocide had been mentioned a lot in Nuremberg, but it was then only one of the elements of the Nazi criminality. Eichmann trial, he is at the center ".
Fifteen years after the end of the conflict, historiography on this period is still in its infancy.
In Israel, it is still silence and embarrassment that reign over the evocation of the Shoah.
The survivors arouse little compassion.
"There was a kind of suspicion towards those who survived, as if they had done so at the cost of immoral things. They were even nicknamed 'soaps' because at that time it was believed that the Nazis had made them out of them. fat from the cremation of bodies. Which was wrong, "describes this Holocaust specialist.
The advent of the witness
Now is the time to hear from the survivors.
"The trial was designed to give the Israelis first, then the world, a lesson in history", summarizes Annette Wieviorka.
Faced with Adolf Eichmann, 111 witnesses succeed one another over the four months and three days of the trial.
The accounts of the victims mark the hearings, like that of the Belorussian Rivka Yosselevska, who describes how she escaped an execution by Einsatzgruppen, the mobile squadrons responsible for executing the Jews.
She says that her eight-year-old daughter Martha asked her before being taken away by her tormentors: "Mum, why did you put on my Sunday clothes, since they are taking us to kill us? ? ".
Martha is shot first.
Wounded in the head, Rivka managed to get out of the pit.
A survivor of the Chelmno camp in Poland also describes how he was forced to dig graves after the Jews were gassed: "I had been working there for several days already (...) when all the people from the town where I arrived arrived. was living. (…) My wife and my two children were there. (…) I lay down next to the bodies of my wife and children and wanted to be killed. One of the SS approached. about me and said to me: 'You still have strength, you can continue to work' ".
A Yehiel De-Nur camp survivor, Auschwitz survivor, shows off his prison clothes during the Eichmann trial on June 9, 1961, in Jerusalem.
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For Annette Wieviorka, this freedom of speech during the Eichmann trial marks "the advent of the witness": "We consider that the witness is both the bearer of history and agent of memory. While the survivors of the camps and ghettos were rather despised, they regain a moral dimension. It rehabilitates them and it really inscribes the Shoah in the Israeli genetic code ".
"It wasn't just a cog"
Behind his glass cage, headphones on his ears with the translation, Adolf Eichmann remains impassive.
If he admits to having been "involved in terrible things", he takes refuge behind the orders received.
"The only people responsible are my bosses, my only fault was my obedience," he repeats.
His defense is simple.
This son of an accountant, without a diploma, commercial in the industry until he joined the SS in 1932, seeks to show himself as a simple performer.
Sixty years later, this image of a "bureaucrat of death" has taken hold.
"It shows a certain naivety on the part of everyone. We think that a great criminal can be seen and there we end up with a small man with glasses in a suit in his glass cage who has a twitch in his mouth ", analyzes Annette Wieviorka.
"But make no mistake, he is a man of incredible pugnacity. He really fights head to foot to try to escape death. In the end, he adopts the defense strategy found in this type of criminal: 'I obeyed the orders, it was not me, I could not do otherwise' ".
In her book, "Eichmann in Jerusalem", the philosopher Hannah Arendt concludes that the SS colonel showed neither anti-Semitism nor psychic disorders, acting only for a career.
According to her, he is the personification of the "banality of evil".
For the historian Annette Wieviorka, this theory is a real mistake: "Hannah Arendt was wrong about his personality. At the time, nothing was known about him. Since many books have shown that he was not only an office criminal, but that he was genuinely anti-Semitic. He also showed initiative in organizing the Final Solution. "
"The banality of evil is valid for the drivers of buses, of trains, for those who make the files, but not for Eichmann, it was not only a simple cog," she insists.
Adolf Eichmann behind his "glass cage" listens to his lawyer Robert Servatius, at the opening of his trial, April 11, 1961. AFP - -
Seven months after the opening of the trial, on December 11, 1961, the tribunal met to deliver its verdict.
In front of a full house, President Moshe Landau underlines that "Adolf Eichmann was guilty of terrifying crimes, different from all crimes against individuals and that it was in fact the extermination of an entire people" .
"For many years, he applied these orders with enthusiasm", also specifies the court.
Four days later, he was sentenced to death.
The lawyer of the condemned, Robert Servatius, appealed but it was rejected, on May 29, 1962, by the Supreme Court.
Adolf Eichmann was hanged on the night of May 31, 1962 and then cremated.
His ashes are scattered outside the territorial waters of Israel.
"Its fate is similar to that of those condemned to death at Nuremberg", underlines Annette Wieviorka.
"The bodies must not leave any traces".
* Haïm Gouri, "The Glass Cage", Albin Michel, 1964
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