Hunting Eichmann (46 page)

The trial was launched. Following the direction and aim of David Ben-Gurion, it was as much about laying bare the Nazi program to exterminate the Jews as it was about prosecuting a single man. For the next fifty-six days, Hausner unfolded his case against Eichmann, placing him at the nexus of the Holocaust. He presented Eichmann with the Avner Less interrogations, captured German documents, statements from his former collaborators such as Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss, pages from the Sassen interviews, and witness testimony. Throughout the prosecution, Eichmann remained composed and alert. Every time he entered his booth before a session, he wiped his desk and chair with a handkerchief, then arranged his papers about him as if he were preparing for a day at the office. Usually, he kept his eyes focused on the prosecutor. Occasionally, though, his head would jerk to the left, seemingly involuntarily, or he would draw in his cheeks to the point where the skin was tight against the bones of his face. "In moments like these," one witness recounted, "he is somewhat like the Eichmann we would like to see: an inexplicably merciless face, sending a shiver up my spine."

On May 28, Zeev Sapir was called to the witness stand. While making his way into the chamber, Sapir looked at Eichmann and felt an overwhelming rush of pride and elation at seeing the enemy of his people sitting between two Israeli guards. After one of the judges swore him in, the young assistant prosecutor Gabriel Bach began his questions. The first were easy: name, town of birth, date the Germans arrived. Then he was asked about the clearing of Dobradovo.

"How many Jews were you in your village?" Bach asked.

"One hundred and three souls, including children of all ages," Sapir responded. He continued to speak, as the memories of what had been lost there came back to him.

Bach then inquired about when Sapir had heard that an important SS officer was expected in Munkács. Sapir described the roll call and the man named Eichmann coming into the ghetto at the head of a party of German and Hungarian officers.

"You see the accused here. Can you identify him as the man whom you saw then?"

Sapir stared again at Eichmann, who was sitting in his booth, eyes averted, scribbling something in his notebook. The name was the same, but the man across from Sapir was missing the uniform, the weapon, and the aura of power. What was more, seventeen years had passed. "It is hard to compare," Sapir said. "He's different from what he was, but there is some resemblance that I can see in him." The witness then recounted the horrors that had awaited him after Eichmann had departed the camp. The memories were still fresh and raw.

Sapir told the courtroom that he never saw his parents or his younger brothers and sister again after the selection process at Auschwitz. He almost broke down when he remembered the ages of the little ones: eleven, eight, six, and three. The courtroom was silent as he recounted his march from the coal mines and then the SS officer Lausmann preparing to massacre those who could not continue: "A pot was brought into the room, and we all thought that there was food in it. But he took us, one by one, bent each down into the pot and shot him in the back of the neck."

Sapir was having trouble standing upright on the witness stand. A clerk brought him a chair. He sat down uneasily and held his bowed head in his hands. He did not touch the glass of water offered to him. The prosecutor offered to waive the question about how he had ultimately escaped, but Sapir wanted to tell his story. He had earned the right. He wanted to tell them that he had been forced to eat frozen potatoes to survive and about the indiscriminate shootings in the forest. Judge Landau allowed it. When he had finished speaking, Sapir raised his sleeve and showed the courtroom his Auschwitz tattoo: A3800.

At that time, it was impossible to know what role his testimony would play in the trial's outcome, but the important thing for him was that the facts of what he had experienced because of Eichmann were now known. Indeed, given the exhaustive coverage of the trial in the newspapers and on radio and television, Sapir's story, like every other aspect of the trial, became known across the globe.

Several of the agents whose successful operation had made the trial possible came to see Eichmann in his glass booth. Most didn't bother with more than one session; they were busy with other operations. It was enough to know that they had succeeded in bringing him to justice.

Once Hausner finished presenting his case, the defense took over, claiming that the Nazi state had been responsible for the crimes. Eichmann had merely followed orders, and his role in the atrocities had been limited and carried out without any particular willingness on his part. In fact, Servatius argued, Eichmann had actually wanted to save the Jews by promoting their emigration. At last Eichmann spoke in his own defense.

Given his clipped, military tone, one might have expected straightforward answers, but Eichmann spoke in long-winded, elliptical passages whose beginnings were often bewilderingly contradicted by their endings. His arguments seemed to make perfect sense to him, however, as did his long excursions into the intricacies of the Nazi hierarchy, full of indecipherable SS jargon. The translators had a burdensome task in relaying his statements. As for his guilt as an accomplice in the murder of millions, he explained:

From the point of view of human guilt, a question which I have to judge in a much graver manner, because in this respect I must sit in judgment with myself—in this respect I must admit that I have played my part, though under orders. From the legal point of view, as a recipient of orders, I had no choice but to carry [them] out. How far the fact that I had to carry out part of the deportations and that the Jews who were thus deported found their death, how far I am legally guilty is a question which, in my opinion, should be left until the question of responsibility has been examined.

Eichmann rarely backed down over the next fifty hours of cross-examination, even when caught in a skein of his own lies. The Sassen tapes proved damning, particularly in terms of demonstrating Eichmann's willingness and vigor in executing his duties against the Jews. He won many of the exchanges, most of them when Hausner attempted to overreach by implicating Eichmann in every facet of the Jewish genocide. To the chagrin of the Adenauer government, Eichmann reminded the attorney general that Hans Globke had also played a role, but because Globke was never called to testify, this mention had little impact.

Throughout the cross-examination, Eichmann was a formidable presence, unmoved by the attorney general's many attempts, some ill-advised, to force him into an admission of legal guilt. Still, Eichmann could not elude the weight of evidence against him, particularly that related to his actions in Hungary.

After closing statements on August 14, the judges adjourned the trial. Four months later, they returned with their verdict. Eichmann was found guilty on all counts of the indictment, but he was acquitted on several individual charges within these counts. As Eichmann listened to the judges read their 211-page judgment, he slowly lost control of himself. His face twitched, and he looked frantically from side to side.

At the end of the second day, Eichmann gave a statement, repeating many of the arguments he had used in his defense. On Friday, December 15, 1961, Judge Landau asked Eichmann to rise and delivered the sentence:

For the dispatch of each train by the Accused to Auschwitz, or to any other extermination site, carrying one thousand human beings, meant that the Accused was a direct accomplice in one thousand premeditated acts of murder ... Even if we had found that the Accused acted out of blind obedience, as he argued, we would still have said that a man who took part in crimes of such magnitude as these over years must pay the maximum penalty known to the law ... But we have found that the Accused acted out of an inner identification with the orders that he was given and out of a fierce will to achieve the criminal objective ... This Court sentences Adolf Eichmann to death.

It was the first—and to this day only—sentence of death by an Israeli court.

Eichmann was motionless, his lips drawn together as if he was forcing himself to suppress even the slightest reaction. His throat and the collar of his shirt were soaked with sweat. Eight minutes after the session began, the bailiff called, "All rise!" and the judges filed out. The trial was over.

Eichmann appealed the judgment, and hearings were held in March 1962. While he waited for the decision in Ramleh prison, the heavily guarded garrison outside Jerusalem where he had been kept throughout both sets of proceedings, he penned his second autobiography. This was his third attempt to tell his story. The Sassen interviews had been his first; a memoir he wrote while at Camp Iyar between interrogation sessions with Avner Less had been his second. Each time, his aim had been to justify his role in the Holocaust and to place his actions in what he saw as the best possible light: three documents created more for himself than for anyone else.

Eichmann began to meet with the Reverend William Hull, a Canadian Protest ant missionary in Jerusalem. On his own initiative, Hull petitioned the Israelis to allow him to act as Eichmann's spiritual counsel. At first Eichmann refused, but Hull persisted, and eventually the two met in Eichmann's prison cell for the first of thirteen sessions. Hull wanted to save the soul of the Nazi war criminal by having him repent his sins, confess to his past deeds, and confirm that "the Lord Jesus Christ was his Savior," a tall task given that Eichmann had spent the past seventeen years convincing himself exactly why he did not need to seek forgiveness for what he had done.

Eichmann joined in these discussions with his usual seriousness of purpose. He explained to Hull that he believed in God but that his study of other religions, as well as of Nietzsche and Kant in his "search for peace through truth," had turned him away from organized religion. He believed in a pantheistic God, one found in nature and in all things. Hull convinced Eichmann to renew his study of the Bible (he refused to read the Old Testament because it was "Jewish fables"), but beyond this, the minister had no success apart from engaging Eichmann in conversation. Eichmann did not fear God's judgment: "There is no Hell," he declared. What was more, he refused to confess: "I have not sinned. I am clear with God. I did not do it. I did nothing wrong. I have no regrets." Hull pressed him on this, but Eichmann was rigid in his self-made faith.

On May 29, 1962, Eichmann's appeal was denied. He flushed with anger when the five-judge panel restated the reason for the guilty verdict. Later that same day, he pleaded for clemency to the Israeli president. Two days after that, at 7:00
P.M.,
the commissioner of prisons, Arye Nir, who had overseen Eichmann's incarceration for two years, advised his prisoner that this plea had also been denied. Eichmann had run out of options, and Nir crisply informed him that he would be hanged at midnight.

Eichmann requested a bottle of white wine, cigarettes, and a paper and pen. Seated at the desk in his cell, the always present guard nearby, he wrote a final letter to his wife and sons. Then he shaved, dressed in brown slacks and a shirt, and brushed his teeth.

By 11:20
P.M.,
when Rev. Hull arrived, Eichmann had drunk half the bottle of wine, had smoked his cigarettes, and was unnervingly calm.

"Why are you sad?" Eichmann asked the minister. "I am not sad."

They spent twenty minutes together, but any final-hour repentance from Eichmann was not forthcoming. "I have peace in my heart. In fact, I am astonished that I have such peace ... Death is but the release of the soul."

Two guards and the commandant entered the cell. Before they bound his hands behind his back, Eichmann asked for a moment to pray. He retreated to a corner for a minute and then announced, "I am ready."

Accompanied by Hull, Eichmann was escorted down the prison corridor. He walked the fifty yards briskly, and Nir had to order the guards to slow down. The group entered the makeshift execution chamber through a hole that had been knocked through one of the walls. Formerly, the third-floor room had been the guards' quarters. A wooden platform had been built over a hole cut in the floor. A rope hung from an iron frame. Bureau 06 chief inspector Michael Goldmann and Rafi Eitan, who had come to see Eichmann to his end, were waiting for them as witnesses to the execution. Over the past few months, Eitan had interrogated Eichmann several times at Camp Iyar about how the SS had been organized and operated.

The guards placed Eichmann on the platform and tied his legs together. He stared at Eitan and said sharply, "I hope, very much, that it will be your turn soon after mine."

A white hood was brought out, but he refused it. He looked at the four journalists selected to witness the execution as they scribbled on their pads. A coiled rope, lined with leather to prevent abrasions, was placed over his head.

"Long live Germany," Eichmann declared. "Long live Argentina. Long live Austria ... I had to obey the laws of war and my flag. I am ready."

Two guards moved behind the curtain of blankets that shielded the trapdoor's release mechanism from the prisoner. The contraption had been rigged in a way that only one of the two buttons actually opened the platform's flaps.

Eichmann smiled thinly and called out, "Gentlemen, we shall meet again soon, so is the fate of all men. I have believed in God all my life, and I die believing in God."

It was exactly midnight. The commandant yelled, "Ready!"

Eichmann half-closed his eyes, looking down at the trapdoor underneath his feet. His face was ashen.

"Action!"

The two guards hit their buttons, and the platform opened with a clang. Eichmann fell ten feet into the room below without a sound. The rope went straight, snapped, and then swayed back and forth.

Goldmann peered through the hole in the floor and said that Eichmann was not moving. A doctor entered the second-floor chamber, inspected Eichmann, and formally declared that he was dead.