50 years ago, on April 11, 1961, when Adolf Eichmann — former head of the Nazi Department for Jewish Affairs — first sat in a Jerusalem courtroom to face war crimes charges, after he was captured by the Mossad in a very dramatic operation, his visage was known to very few.
Television changed that. For West Germans, the impact was profound. Twice a week, for four months, entire families — and sometimes neighbors, too — gathered in living rooms to watch the reports from Jerusalem. “There was a lot of watching, and it changed the discussion about the Holocaust,” said philosopher Bettina Stangneth, whose book “Eichmann vor Jerusalem” (“Eichmann Faces Jerusalem”) was set to be published in Germany on April 18.
In Frankfurt, German TV reports from 1961 will be shown at the Fritz-Bauer Institute, which is hosting a symposium on the Eichmann trial this month. At Berlin’s Topography of Terror documentation center, videotaped testimony by witnesses and by Eichmann are part of a new exhibit. In Paris, the Memorial de la Shoah is dedicating a program to documentary filmmaker Leo Hurwitz, who directed the videotaping of the four-month trial.
Until the trial, many Germans had dismissed the few books about the Holocaust as biased. Teachers largely had avoided the subject. Once the broadcasts of the Eichmann trial began, however, they could ignore it no longer. Young Germans looked at the wartime generation differently. Dozens of new books about the Holocaust were written.
The story of how Eichmann was brought to justice seemed made for TV. He escaped an American POW camp in Germany after the war, got help from the Catholic Church to flee to Argentina, and lived there for years under the pseudonym Ricardo Klement. Recently it was revealed that German intelligence officials knew of Eichmann’s location as early as 1952.
The Eichmann trial was full of drama, drawing the world’s attention to the perpetrator and to his victims. Eichmann faced 15 criminal charges, including crimes against humanity and war crimes. Many millions of eyes studied Eichmann through TV sets, trying in vain to discern signs of remorse in his word, manner, and expressions.
The guilty verdict was pronounced in December 1961, and Eichmann was hanged on May 31, 1962 — the only judicial execution ever carried out in Israel. Eichmann’s ashes were scattered in the Mediterranean Sea. Even once Eichmann was gone, the impact of the trial and its coverage continued. With so many German journalists in Israel, reports about life in the young Jewish state abounded. An era of exchange began.
The trial also helped Germany come closer to confronting itself. Soon afterward, in December 1963, Germany launched its famous Frankfurt Auschwitz trial, which lasted through the summer of 1965 and lay out the brutality of former neighbors and relatives for all to see.
SOURCE: New Jersey Jewish Standard
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