Discussions began today on the finding of a suitable hall for the trial proceedings of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi war criminal who organized the annihilation of 6, 000, 000 Jews, who is now in the hands of the Israeli authorities. It was indicated that the: place where the Eichmann trial will be held will have a capacity of 600 persons.
Two well-known Arab lawyers in Israel were asked to serve as defense attorneys for Eichmann, but they categorically rejected the offer, it was reported here today. In the meantime. Minister of Justice Pinhas Rosen appealed to editors of Israeli newspapers to be reserved in publishing reports on the developments in the Eichmann case while the matter is awaiting court action.
The Israel Government press office officially denied last night a report which had appeared in The New York Times speculating that Israeli intelligence agents had slain members of the Eichmann family in effecting the capture of Eichmann. The Israelis denied that any members of the Eichmann family had been harmed, and described the report as a “dastardly conjecture” and a “baseless invention.”
Asher Ben Nathan, director general of the Israel Defense Ministry, disclosed in a statement today that the first clue to Eichmann’s whereabouts was found in 1946. During that year, Ben Nathan, who served in the underground and headed a special Haganah office in Austria in the immediate postwar years, said he met Dieter Wislicieny, who was associated with Eichmann in the extermination of Hungarian Jewry and who was later hanged by the Slovaks.
Wislicieny told Ben Nathan that he had a photo of Eichmann and that he knew an SS man, a non-commissioned officer named Weissell, who could bring them to a woman who was a close friend of Eichmann. Ben Nathan said this proved to be true. A Haganzh man found in her house the only known picture of Eichmann in civilian clothes, which was later used to identify him in the crackdown and capture.
(The Neues Oesterreich, a Vienna daily, asserted yesterday that Anna Hechl, 47, whom it described as Adolf Eichmann’s former girl friend, has disappeared from Linze. The newspaper said that it was the Hechl woman who had handed over to Israeli agents after the war the only known existing photograph of Eichmann. The newspaper said that Beatrix Krueger, whom it described as Eichrmann’s secretary, had also vanished. In recent years she had been employed as a tax counsellor.)
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