Thousands of Israelis lined up today in front of the Beth Haam, where the sentence on Adolf Eichmann will be pronounced tomorrow morning, in the hope of securing entrance tickets to the final act of the Eichmann trial. The sentence will be announced in court at 9 o’clock in the morning, Israel time, which is 2 a.m. New York time.
Professor Martin Buber said today that if Eichmann is sentenced to death tomorrow he will appeal to President Ben-Zvi for a commutation of the sentence to life imprisonment. Professor Buber made the statement in denying a report in a Saarbrucken, West German, newspaper that he intended to seek a pardon for the former Gestapo colonel who was found guilty Tuesday of all 15 counts of an indictment fixing key responsibility on him for the Nazi wartime slaughter of 6,000,000 European Jews.
The philosopher said he was firmly opposed to capital punishment and that he applied that stand to the Eichmann case “in which there is no possible punishment to fit the crime, where the imagination cannot envisage a suitable penalty.”
The Israel Ministry of Justice was asked today to confiscate the manuscript of a book which Eichmann wrote during his 19 months’ incarceration in Israel while awaiting the trial that was held last summer. Eichmann has said his writings, which deal with the Jewish policy of the Nazi regime, will be published abroad. It was mentioned by his counsel, Dr. Robert Servatius, in his plea to the three-judge court yesterday for mercy for his client.
The request for confiscation was made by Rabbi Mordecai Nurock, a Member of Parliament, in the form of a question to the Justice Ministry to which a reply is expected next week. Rabbi Nurock contended that anything written by the Nazi during his Israeli imprisonment is the property of the state of Israel.
A similar request was made by Tuvia Friedman, of the Yad Vashem, documentation center on the Nazi holocaust, in a letter to Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. Mr. Friedman urged the Prime Minister to prevent such publication of the Eichmann book, the proceeds of which are reportedly to be used to cover his expenses of the trial and his expected appeal and the balance to Eichmann’s estate. Friedman contended that only the Israel Government had the right to the manuscript which should be published on the basis that all proceeds would go to help finance the wok of the Yad Vashem.
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