[1] Eichmann was a senior Nazi party member and served at the rank of Obersturmbannführer (Lieutenant-Colonel) in the SS, and was one of the people primarily responsible for the implementation of the Final Solution.
Israel and Argentina issued a joint statement on 3 August, after further negotiations, admitting the violation of Argentine sovereignty but agreeing to end the dispute.
[3] Prosecutor and Attorney General Gideon Hausner also tried to challenge the portrayal of Jewish functionaries that had emerged in the earlier trials, showing them at worst as victims forced to carry out Nazi decrees while minimizing the "gray zone" of morally questionable behavior.
[4] Hausner later wrote that available archival documents "would have sufficed to get Eichmann sentenced ten times over"; nevertheless, he summoned more than 100 witnesses, most of whom had never met the defendant, for didactic purposes.
The Haganah, a Zionist paramilitary organization, interrogated refugees who came to Mandatory Palestine from Germany, Hungary and Poland, and by 1943 had formed a clear picture that Eichmann was a central figure in the execution of the Holocaust.
One of its members, Gideon Raphael, traveled to London after World War II with detailed information based on witness statements in Haifa to be used in the Nuremberg trials.
[15][22] After the war, it was speculated whether Eichmann, with his knowledge of the Hebrew language and Jewish life, had been pretending to be a surviving Jew from a camp, and had even emigrated to Palestine or Egypt.
In front of American occupational authorities, Wisliceny argued that Eichmann was alive and that he was too cowardly to take his own life, as he is said to have talked about towards the end of the Second World War.
[26][21][27] Perón believed that the country needed engineers and officers and it is unclear whether he welcomed Nazi criminals with will or whether he accepted them for purely practical reasons.
He lives near Buenos Aires and works for a waterworks.At the same time, Mossad had tracked him down in addition to Josef Mengele, a former doctor and SS officer who conducted heinous and gruesome experiments on concentration camp prisoners, in Argentina.
In 1959, Friedman received a tip from the West German Ministry of Justice that Eichmann was in Kuwait, a country where the Israeli government was unwilling to spend resources organizing a manhunt.
[29][37] Lothar Hermann learned who Eichmann was a few years later and began correspondence with Fritz Bauer, the chief prosecutor in the West German state of Hesse.
[37][21][38] In December 1959, Hermann contacted Tuvia Friedman, the head of the Nazi Crime Documentation Center in Haifa, who had announced a large bounty on Eichmann.
The CIA chose not to inform Israel of this, to protect high-ranking politicians in what was then West Germany or because it could potentially harm Western interests in the Cold War.
[15] The plan was first to transport Eichmann out of the country by plane in connection with Argentina's national day, when Israeli diplomats were invited for an official visit.
[45] The Soviet Union and Poland argued that Argentina had not fulfilled its obligations after the Nuremberg trials and under UN resolutions to prosecute or extradite Eichmann.
[53] The trial of Eichmann was held from 11 April to 15 August 1961 at Beit Ha'am, a community theatre temporarily reworked to serve as a courtroom capable of accommodating 750 observers.
The indictment also covered crimes committed against other groups such as mass deportations of Poles and Slovenians, and the murder of tens of thousands of Sinti and Romani people.
[64][65] The prosecution showed Eichmann's active part in the deportation and extermination of Jews all over Europe, holding them in inhumane conditions and systematically murdering them with the aim of genocide.
These claims were rejected by the judges, who determined that it was in fact possible to refuse immoral orders and even withdraw from the Nazi apparatus, echoing a similar decision made at Nuremberg.
Hitler tried to prevent this and met with Horthy; the latter agreed to stay in the Axis Powers on several conditions, one of which was that 3,000 Jewish families would be granted permission to leave Budapest for Switzerland.
Eichmann said that he believed that the judges who oversaw his trial "made a fundamental mistake in that they are not able to empathise with the time and situation in which I found myself during the war years."
Before his hanging, he asked for and received a bottle of white wine and rejected the offer of Canadian priest William Hale to say a last prayer before his death.
which had been raised in the past, began to fade, and for many, a sense of shared fate with the survivors emerged, as well as feelings of collective guilt for the insufficiently considerate treatment they received from native-born Israelis.
But it seems that only during the course of this terrible trial, as more and more witnesses took the stand, did the survivors join our consciousness with a clear recognition... that they are an inseparable part of the character and image of the living nation to which we belong.A wide academic debate, which was only slightly mentioned in Israel at the time but gained much publicity over the years, arose around the harsh criticism of the German-American Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem.
Her argument was directed against the conduct of the trial, which she claimed was intended to amplify Israeli militarism and demonstrate the power of the present Jewish state in contrast to the evil force and indifferent world that Holocaust victims had experienced in the past.
In her view, the organizers of the trial did not sufficiently consider the responsibility of the German bureaucracy for the Holocaust and the banality that totalitarian regimes can impose on the value of human life.
She believed Eichmann was portrayed in the trial as a monster, although he was an average man who became a murderer due to his inability to distinguish between right and wrong, within the system he was part of.
Jewish thinkers like Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem argued against Arendt, asserting that the trial justified the testimonies being heard and that those who carried out the Holocaust were people like Eichmann and his collaborators.
In a book published in 2014, researcher Bettina Stangneth challenged the facts underlying Arendt's approach, arguing that Eichmann "was a pathological anti-Semite and a fanatical Nazi, who viewed his central role in the persecution and murder of millions of Jews as the fulfillment of his life's ambition.