The trial of Adolf Eichmann, who is accused of crimes against the Jewish people and against humanity in the annihilation of 6,000,000 Jews in Europe, concluded today — about four months since it opened, on April 11, Presiding Justice Moshe Landau, in adjourning the court, indicated that the verdict will be issued in November.
The trial ended following a summation of the defense by Dr. Robert Servatius, Eichmann’s attorney. In his summation, the West German attorney argued that Eichmann had committed no crime against the Jewish people, because there was no Jewish people at the time Eichmann headed the Gestapo’s department for Jewish affairs. “The Jewish people,” he said, “did not exist before the establishment of Israel, hence no crime against the Jewish people as such could have been committed. This situation cannot be changed by any legal fiction. Legally, it isn’t even clear what the term ‘Jewish people’ means.”
His argument provoked consternation in the crowded courtroom and the public had to be quieted by the stern police guards. Dr. Servatius, in advancing this argument, was referring, in this context, to the first count of the 15-point indictment under which Eichmann is facing the three-man panel of judges. The first count, in the defense lawyer conceded, is the principal charge among the fifteen enumerated in the indictment. It charges that “the accused, in the period between 1936 and 1945, committed acts constituting a crime against the Jewish people in that, together with others, he caused the killing of millions of Jews.”
The fact that Nazi leaders, on trial during the Nuremberg War Crimes proceedings, had accused Eichmann of committing crimes against Jews, said Dr. Servatius, means only that the Nuremberg defendants had succeeded in “misleading” the international military tribunal trying them. If the prosecution’s arguments about Eichmann’s responsibility were to be accepted, the attorney insisted, “this would provoke joy and satisfaction among the Jew-haters of the world.”
“If what the prosecution says is correct,” he continued with sarcasm, “then all the Nazis still being hunted can come out of hiding. According to the prosecution’s version of Eichmann’s role, there did not exist any murder order by the Fuehrer. It was not Goering or the great Paladins who were guilty – only Adolf Eichmann. The Jew-hater Himmler did not have to commit suicide, and Martin Bormann (Hitler’s deputy) can now emerge from hiding. The great guilty one has been found– Adolf Eichmann.”
EICHMANN’S LAWYER SEEKS TO DEMOLISH THE PROSECUTION CHARGES
At the opening of this morning’s court session, Dr. Servatius started by asking the court;s permission to submit a list of legal precedents concerning the laws of conspiracy. Then, reading from notes in front of him, he tackled the indictment, beginning with Count No. 15 and working backward to the first count which charges “a crime against the Jewish people.”
One by one, he attempted to demolish each of the counts in the indictment. Not one of the counts had been proven, he contended. The prosecution, he said, had not submitted proof of the criminal character of the Nazi Party or of the SS. The German Reich’s political machinery, he contended, had misused these organizations. Collective punishment for membership in the Nazi organization or the SS, he insisted, is “inconsistent with international law.”
According to Dr. Servatius, the prosecution had failed to establish the last two counts in the indictment, which charged Eichmann with crime by belonging to the SS and the Gestapo. While those counts hold the SS and the Gestapo to have been illegal by the judgment of the Nuremberg War Crimes tribunal, Dr. Servatius declared the illegality was based only on a law adopted by Israel’s Parliament.
The attorney challenged Israel’s right to try Eichmann on counts 9 to 12, which dealt with war crimes committed through deportations, the uprooting of populations in Poland and Slovakia, the murder of Gypsies, and the killing of the children of Lidice, Czechoslovakia. “Israel” he said, “did not exist when these acts were committed. Furthermore, they were not committed on territory later to become Israel.”
Dr. Servatius went on to Count No. 8, which charges crimes by Eichmann in causing “the ill-treatment, deportation and murder of Jewish inhabitants of the states occupied by Germany and other Axis states.” These, he insisted, cannot be considered war crimes because such crimes can be charged only to countries warring against each other, and there was no war between Israel and Germany, he argued.
A count involving criminality relating to the confiscation of Jewish property, he said, cannot be considered, as charged, a crime against humanity, because such acts come under the heading of loot or theft even if committed. Israel’s parliamentary enactment calling these acts criminal, he said, are contrary to international law which limits crimes against humanity to murder, enslavement and deportations. He held that the prosecution had not proved that Eichmann himself had appropriated funds or enriched himself from the located properties.
‘EICHMANN SIMPLY ACTED UNDER ORDERS,’ DEFENSE ATTORNEY ARGUES
In the early days of the Nazi regime, Dr. Servatius declared, Eichmann tried actively to help the Jews of Germany. When wartime orders tightened the Nazi actions affecting the Jews, he held, Eichmann simply acted under such orders. If crimes were committed, he insisted, higher authorities were to blame. Eichmann was not the man assigned by Hitler to implement the orders for the physical annihilation of the Jews, he said, declaring: “There is nothing to prove that Hitler assigned the job of extermination to Eichmann.”
Eichmann’s job, as seen by Dr. Servatius, was only to “take care of any hitches that developed in the transport of Jews,” and “he did so.” “The instructions came from Hitler for the strengthening of the ethnic structure of the German nation,” he said. “The accused received orders to perform all duties in the field of transport. The prosecution has not submitted any proof that crimes against humanity were committed in the course of these transports.”
According to Dr. Servatius, Eichmann was not an accomplice in the murder of Jews, he had nothing to do with transferring to Germany gold teeth and hair taken from murdered Jews, he had no hand in the Nazi program for the sterilization of Jews.
After completing his rejection of each of the 15 points in the indictment, Dr. Servatius entered upon an analysis of the testimony by the prosecution, both through eyewitness survivors of the holocaust and through documents which, Dr. Servatius said, had been “dug up out of the debris of the Third Riech.” The latter documents, he held, are “inadmissible” as valid testimony, because the Nazis who wrote those documents “had their own worries and their interests to safeguard,” and Eichmann was “eminently suitable as a scapegoat.”
As for the death camp survivors who had appeared as witnesses, the defense counsel said, he had refrained from cross-examining them “because their suffering was too sacred for me to attack.” However, he contended, he could have “easily exposed contradictions, and could have easily proved that they had testified of things that could not have happened.” It was “human nature,” he held, “to embellish things and to complement fact.”
Dr. Servatius tackled vigorously his claim that Eichmann could not be held punishable for carrying out orders by superiors. That Eichmann was only a small man in the Nazi apparatus, he held, is proven by the fact that he had received no promotion after 1941. Eichmann only carried out orders, the defense lawyer emphasized, and “even under the Israeli criminal code, a person acting on superior orders bears no responsibility for a crime.” Eichmann had to carry out orders without questioning the commands, he said.
Concluding his long plea, Dr. Servatius told the court: “This court can only determine what happened, and serve as a warning to history. We do not request forgiveness and forgetfulness, but rather thought and truth. A distance must be created between the individual and the collective. A return must be made to self-restraint and humanity. Let there be a judgment which will transcend the Eichmann case — a Solomonic judgment, which will show to the nations of the world the wisdom of the Jewish people. This will correct the flaw of the abduction, and would serve peace.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
