The five-man Supreme Court panel hearing Adolf Eichmann’s appeal from his sentence of death by hanging adjourned today until tomorrow morning after hearing prosecutor Gideon Hausner complete most of his rebuttal of the Nazi’s case for reconsideration of the death sentence.
The Attorney General, who said he would need only about 30 minutes tomorrow to complete his rebuttal, reconstructed today the grisly history of Eichmann’s activities in each Nazi-occupied country to prove he was the central figure in the machinery that brought about the Nazi wartime slaughter of 6,000,000 European Jewish men, women and children.
The prosecutor recounted the record, as spelled out in four months of Eichmann’s trial last summer, to show his obsession with executing the Nazi’s “final solution” of the Jewish “problem”–their extinction.
The Attorney General also contended that Israel had the right to try persons for offenses considered crimes universally and not only for crimes against Jews. This was his rebuttal to a defense contention that Eichmann could not be tried in Israel for Nazi Germany’s crimes against Poles, Slovenes, Gypsies and other victims.
COURT PERMITS EICHMANN’S LAWYER TO REPLY ON THURSDAY
The defense counsel, Dr. Robert Servatius, asked that he be allowed to reply Thursday to give him time to pursue the trial manuscript and to confer with the former Gestapo colonel. The court gave permission.
Earlier during the fourth day of the hearing, the prosecutor said that despite Eichmann’s orders to his staff, in the final days of the collapsing Nazi regime, to burn all documents of his Gestapo bureau, enough documents “drenched with Jewish blood had been left to implicate him. He said there was ample documentary evidence to demonstrate that Eichmann had gone far beyond his apparent assignment as a transport officer in the Nazi genocide program.
Drawing from a mass of exhibits produced by the prosecution for the trial, the prosecutor demolished the defense arguments that Eichmann had handled his job entirely as a bureaucrat and with “objectivity.” The prosecutor cited an occasion when the Nazi Foreign Ministry intervened against the deportation of an inventor named Abraham Weuss because of a valuable invention he had developed which was taken by the Nazis.
According to the documentation, Eichmann, as head of the Bureau for Jewish Affairs in the Gestapo, had asserted that since the process had already been registered, there was no reason for any further “personal interest” in the inventor and that therefore the “usual procedure”–shipment to a death camp–should be adopted.
The prosecutor also referred to a statement by Hermann Goering, made to the American can Judge Michael Musmano at the Nuremberg war crimes trials, that Eichmann was “omnipotent” in all Jewish affairs.
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