- We're all familiar with the number
of Jews killed in the Holocaust.
Six million.
But did you ever wonder how many
of the Nazis were brought to justice?
The number's actually disturbingly small.
Some estimates ranged from 5 to 10 percent
and some even say way less.
But, thankfully, some of them were caught
and brought to justice.
Their capture raised many questions:
What does evil look like when it's dressed
in ordinary clothes?
How does the world come to terms with those responsible
for rounding up, deporting, and exterminating
millions of innocent people?
Let's take a look at the kidnapping, trial and execution
of one of the flat out worst men in history, Adolf Eichmann.
(upbeat music)
Adolf Eichmann was known as the architect
of the Holocaust and the Final Solution,
the mass extermination of six million Jews
during World War Two,
one of the most horrifying experiences in world history.
The guy had major problems.
I mean, what kind of person actually says as Eichmann did,
"I will leap into my grave laughing
"because having five million human beings on my conscience
"is a source of extraordinary satisfaction."
Well, maybe it's what you'd expect from a Nazi
who was buddies with Hitler.
Eichmann's capture and death sentence
is one of the most famous and satisfying stories
of vengeance against the Nazis
with the Jews bringing one of the most
significant Holocaust perpetrators to justice,
but let's back up a little.
In 1945 after the end of World War Two,
the world and especially the Jewish people,
faced a lot of tricky questions:
How do you respond to genocide on that major of a scale?
How do you hold those responsible accountable?
What are the ethics in bringing them down?
And how do you go about exacting justice?
Eichmann's trial raised all these questions and more.
Before he was tried in Jerusalem in 1961,
many knew about the extent of the Nazi's nefariousness,
but few who experienced it firsthand
were comfortable speaking about it publicly.
All of that changed after the trial,
the first trial in the world to be fully televised,
when the world learned the full extent
of what the Jews went through.
Eichmann, easily the second worst Adolf to ever live,
rose through the SS ranks to become lieutenant colonel,
and one of Hitler's top deputies.
He had several bureaucratic positions in his Nazi career,
but where he really shined was
in organizing the logistics of deporting mass numbers
of Jews throughout Europe to the Nazi's death camps.
He quickly made a name for himself
as a master administrator through planning
and implementing the Final Solution to the Jewish Question.
After World War Two ended,
Eichmann fled to Argentina,
a noted safe haven for Nazis,
where he lived in relative quiet,
under the fake name, Ricardo Klement,
until the late 1950s.
His kids, however,
kept their infamous last name,
which is one of the bits of information used
to track down the former SS Colonel.
What followed was a top secret mission
called Operation Finale,
now a major motion picture.
The capture went down like this.
Eichmann was on his way home from his job
at a Mercedes-Benz workshop,
when a man approached him smiling and waving.
The man, an undercover Mossad agent,
asked Eichmann in Spanish if he had a moment to chat.
Eichmann grew suspicious and tried to run away,
but before he could,
other agents swarmed him and shoved him into a car.
They took him into a safe house,
and after being asked his identify several times,
he finally admitted he was Adolf Eichmann,
and asked for a glass of wine.
Nothing quite says archvillain,
like asking for a glass of wine
while admitting to the murder of six million people.
They wanted him to stand trial in Jerusalem,
but it took a week to get him
to sign an agreement to fly to Israel,
rather than stand trial in Argentina,
which is kinda crazy that the Israelis wouldn't proceed
without Eichmann's consent.
So, they had the right man and his consent to travel,
but Israeli leaders were in a tough position.
Argentina had a long history
of turning down extradition requests
for Nazi war criminals hiding in its borders.
So, not wanting to lose their great white whale,
the Mossad decided to smuggle him out.
The agents drugged the Nazi
and dressed him in El Al uniform,
Israel's national airline,
and snuck him onto a plane pretending that Eichmann
was just a flight attendant who needed
to catch up on his Zs.
Smuggling Eichmann out was a great call by the Mossad
because sheltering thousands of Nazi fugitives
wasn't the only questionable step Argentina took.
After Eichmann's capture became public,
anti-Semitic incidents in the South-American country,
jumped off the charts
and the country's leadership
expelled Israel's ambassador as payback.
What gives, Argentina?
Why expel diplomats instead of mass murderers?
It made sense for Israel to not ask permission.
Eichmann's capture gave rise to many fiery debates,
like, is it flouting international law for one country
to smuggle an accused criminal out of another country
as a way of getting around thorny extradition laws?
Can a country decide that a criminal
should stand trial on their soil
when his crime and arrest occurred in a different country?
The American Jewish Committee was outraged
by Israel's decision to try Eichmann in Jerusalem,
arguing that the war criminal
had perpetrated horrors against Jews and non-Jews alike,
and not even specifically against the State of Israel,
which didn't exist at the time.
They believed an international tribunal in Germany
was more fitting.
But David Ben-Gurion,
Israel's first prime minister,
strongly disagreed,
calling the decision to try Eichmann in Jerusalem,
"Our historical duty toward the six million
"of our brethren who were murdered."
Many nations were appalled by Israel's decision.
The United Nations Security Council passed a resolution
against Israel, surprise,
stating that Israel violated Argentina's sovereignty.
Israel's actions were condemned
by the United States, Britain, France, China,
and the Soviet Union.
These countries were mainly afraid
that if Israel faced no consequences
after snatching a fugitive from a foreign land,
other countries might do the same,
which could eat away at international peace,
something no one wanted in the years immediately
after the Second World War.
But for others, Jews, Israelis,
the capture of Eichmann
by the twelve-year-old country of Israel
was worthy of celebration.
As one of Eichmann's biographers put it,
"The purpose of catching Eichmann
"was clear from the beginning-
"one, to remind the world what the Germans did to the Jews,
"and two, to remind Israeli youth
"why the State of Israel needed to exist."
The capture, trial, and execution of Eichmann
showed the world and the Jewish people,
that Jewish blood is not cheap,
and that while Jewish people had no autonomy
for nearly two thousand years,
they were now capable of taking matters into their own hands
and were only dependent on themselves for protection.
No longer would the Jews be led like sheep to the slaughter;
far from it in fact.
Now, they could seek out and track down their wrongdoers
wherever they were across the globe,
and make them face the consequences of their actions.
Eichmann's trial began in April of 1961.
More than a hundred Holocaust survivors gave testimonies,
and hundreds of documents were presented as evidence.
They painted Eichmann as the main architect
of the Holocaust,
a diligent worker who facilitated and managed
the incredibly tricky logistics involved
in the mass deportation of Jews
to ghettos, concentration camps, and their eventual deaths.
The photos of Eichmann in the courtroom
showed a small, balding man
with blocky glasses wearing large headphones over his ears
to translate the Hebrew.
He looked slight and almost subservient.
Hannah Arendt, the Jewish-German writer and philosopher,
who was covering the trial for the New Yorker,
wrote that his answers to the prosecution's questions
painted an unrepentant man,
who was unwilling to accept responsibility
for his role as a main destroyer of European Jewry.
"Why me?" Eichmann asked.
"Why not the local policemen,
"thousands of them?
"Everybody killed the Jews.
"Why me?"
Arendt coined the famous term,
the banality of evil,
to describe her impression of Eichmann.
She described a bland bureaucrat,
who claimed he was merely following orders
from his higher ups and who,
in her words,
was "neither perverted nor sadistic,
"but in fact thoughtless and terrifyingly normal."
This was an incredibly controversial take at the time.
She described something that disturbed many people.
How could Eichmann,
who was being called the face of evil
in newspapers around the world,
be as bad as all that
when he looked like a middle-aged man
who probably fed pigeons in the park,
and who claimed he was just doing his job,
like everyone else?
Arendt wondered if Eichmann was evil in his core
or just an ordinary guy who got swept up
in a wave of fast-moving Fascism
and discovered he was good at designing processes
to destroy the Führer's enemies?
In other words,
Arendt wondered if one could do evil
without being evil?
Now, Arendt had her detractors,
including the American writer, Norman Podhoretz,
who argued that only a vicious anti-Semite,
could join the Nazi party and especially the SS.
Podhoretz faulted Arendt for what he viewed
as her downplaying of Eichmann's bone-deep wickedness.
He wrote,
"To believe otherwise is to learn nothing
"about the nature of anti-Semitism.
"No banality of a man could have done
"so hugely evil a job so well."
He came up with his own phrase in response
to Arendt's famous, banality of evil,
calling the intellectual gymnastics she underwent
to come to her conclusion,
the perversity of brilliance.
Basically, it was this idea
that brilliant people can use their mental acuity
to explain away nearly anything,
including absolute evil.
In December 1961,
Eichmann was found guilty of crimes against humanity,
crimes against the Jewish people,
and war crimes.
There was a debate among some of the Israeli leaders
about Eichmann's fate.
The majority of Knesset pushed execution,
which is fascinating by the way,
since capital punishment
is practically unheard of in Israel,
but a few held out,
arguing that life in prison was more humane.
Adolf Eichmann,
one of the main architects of the Holocaust
was hanged in front of a dozen people
in a prison just outside of Jerusalem
on June 1st, 1962.
One of the positive results to come out
of the Eichmann trial,
aside from bringing a despicable war criminal to justice,
was that it removed some of the stigma and shame
many Holocaust survivors felt,
inspiring thousands of survivors who had gone
through the atrocities,
to speak openly and freely,
following in the footsteps of the dozens of witnesses
who gave testimony in Jerusalem.
The Eichmann trial raised a good number of questions,
far more than we have answers to.
Some of these include Arendt's question,
about the true nature of evil,
is it something that appears villainous
and larger than life,
like the photos and testimonies about Eichmann
as an SS leader,
or is it quieter and more mundane,
like the meek Eichmann who appeared at his trial.
Who was ultimately responsible for the murder
of six million Jews?
Should Israel have had the right to capture Eichmann
or was his abduction abroad a step too far?
And to what extent can Nazi hunters go
to bring their targets to justice?
But, at the end of the day,
even if the Eichmann trial did raise a lot
of unanswerable questions,
there are some things about which we can be sure.
It changed the way the world viewed the Holocaust.
It brought the experiences
of the survivors to center stage
and exposed the many evils visited upon the Jews
and the other victims of Hitler's grand plan.
It established Israel, a country in its adolescence,
as unwilling to lie down
when it had the opportunity to hold murderers accountable,
and it confirmed the Jewish people
as the architects of their own fate,
acting in their own best interests,
regardless of how the rest of the world might view them.
And it brought a small sliver of justice
to the millions of victims
and thousands of survivors of the Holocaust.
Thanks for watching.
(energetic music)