Israel police announced today that Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann has chosen Robert Servatius, a Cologne attorney, to act as his defense counsel in his forthcoming trial in Jerusalem. Eichmann chose the Cologne attorney from a list of three lawyers offered him.
Servatius,, who defended many Nazi political leaders in the Nuremburg trials, was disclosed last week in Cologne to have offered his services for Eichmann’s defense in a letter to Pinhas Rosen, Israel’s Minister of Justice.
The Cologne attorney at that time refused to say who had engaged his services on Eichmann’s behalf, but he emphasized that he had not been commissioned by either a Government agency or by a public organization. He said he had offered to assume Eichmann’s defense “for purely legal reasons,” adding that “this is purely a question of protecting the rights of the individual. “
The Cologne attorney also said then that he had never been a member of the Nazi party. “I was a common soldier throughout the war,” he stated.
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