Hanna Yablonka, The State of Israel vs. Adolf Eichmann, translated from the Hebrew by Ora Cummings with David Herman (New York: Schocken Books, 2004) pp. 336, $26.00.
The decade of the sixties is now the subject of history. In Israel, the two most important events of the sixties have now been subjected to serious historical study. The translation of Hana Yablonka's book now makes the study of the Eichmann trial available to English readers much as Michael Oren's did with his history of the Six Day War.
Any treatment of Jewish understanding of the Holocaust in the sixties begins with the Eichmann trial, which was a turning point in our knowledge of the Holocaust, both in Israel and in the United States and the culmination of a brief but intense period that had brought the Holocaust – or some semblance of it – to the cinema with the Diary of Anne Frank and Judgment at Nuremberg and then to television with nightly broadcasts of the reports from Jerusalem. It was brought forth the Shoah to the world not as a sub-chapter of World War II, but as a historical event in which the fate of the Jews loomed central.
How the thousands of journalists who have the trial would have envied the sources now available to a Ben Gurion University historian Hanna Yablonka who has written a concise, comprehensive, fascinating and masterful history.
Yablonka examined David Ben Gurion's diaries, the notes of Attorney General Gideon Hausner and his correspondence with the government and their responses to him. She interviewed Ben Gurion's inner circle and the policemen who interrogated Eichmann – though it was a “historic trial” no historians interviewed Eichmann. Yablonka met with witnesses who gave testimony and the historians who prepared evidence for the trials. She has access to their contemporaneous notes and to their reflections decades later. When the principles were not available for time had taken its toll, she interviewed wives and children, examined correspondence and files, getting as close as she can to the trial. Her use of source material is balanced, her understanding deft and her perspective global.
She interviewed the surviving Judges Moshe Landau and Benjamin Halevi and is unstinting in her praise of their work, which prevented the trial from descending into a show trial, maintained the dignity of the Court and the integrity of the judicial process. She is less charitable to others.
Some of her revelations would have been shattering four decades ago. They would have resulted in front page headlines, perhaps even street demonstrations and United Nations' Security Council meetings. Yablonka confirms the worse suspicions of some of Israel's critics that indeed there was no separation between the executive and the judiciary. Hausner communicated directly with the Prime Minister and the Justice Minister. Ben Gurion saw an advance copy of Hausner famous opening speech and wisely suggested that Adolf Hitler name be spoken before Adolf Eichmann.
The Judiciary and the Executive were deeply suspicious of Judge Benjamin Halevi because of his involvement with the infamous Kastner case where he judged the Zionist leader of Hungary of getting into bed with the devil [specifically with Eichmann]. His decision was reversed on appeal; so too, his language. Halevi resisted pressure to step aside so special legislation was passed to see that he not be the presiding Judge. The government feared that the Eichmann trial could also be manipulated into a trial of the victims and not their perpetrator, of Zionist leadership and not the German on trial.
Unlike the Nuremberg trial, which insisted on a trial by documents, the Eichmann trial was based on witnesses. Yet, those who met with Eichmann early in his career in Vienna were too favorable. His behavior was then correct. No so, those who met with him in 1944 in Budapest. Yablonka evaluates the major witnesses both for the effectiveness and the nature of their testimony, and indeed her report on the dissent regarding the testimony of famed Columbia University Jewish Historian Salo Baron comports with my own recollections of his performance at the trial and my own experience with the great master at the end of his distinguished career. It reminds the reader that there is a vast difference between intellectual demeanor and courtroom effectiveness. It was a lesson that Raul Hilberg was to learn at the Ernst Zundel trial on Holocaust denial in Toronto in the mid-Eightes.
It is remarkable how small a role Hannah Arendt's work Eichmann in Jerusalem plays in Yablonka's work. Arendt's concept of the banality of evil is flawed, fundamentally flawed. While the evildoer may be banal – ordinary and routine – and far from the superhuman embodiment of evil that Israel prosecutors portrayed Eichmann to be, the evil that he and his Nazi colleagues perpetrated was anything but banal as the testimony of survivors made that vivid throughout the trial.
Several of her many insights are worthy of special note:
The Israeli establishment – Establishment with a capital letter is the way that Yablonska writes the term – was ill prepared for the trial. They were pressured by a German informant to capture Eichmann, they let a local blind man do the initial investigation in Argentine before they assigned an Israeli police official. The legal system was ill equipped to handle the trial. Laws had to be passed. Little work was done in the Educational Ministry in preparation. In 1961 Israel lacked the intellectual infrastructure of Holocaust historians capable on making an impression on the world or the political leadership had little faith in their own historians. Yad Vashem was helpful only in minor ways and the much smaller museum at Lochamei Haghettot played a much more significant role. Attorney General Gideon Hausner was trying his first criminal case yet the never harbored a moments doubt that a historian could ascertain regarding his readiness for the task. His predecessor Haim Cohen, a far more distinguished jurist, a far more nimble mind, had chosen a Supreme Court appointment over the opportunity to try the Eichmann case. Ben Gurion expressed anxiety about the appointment, but politics being what they were; there was little that he could do about it. Michael Oren demonstrated the same ill-preparedness regarding the Six Day War.
Politicians interfered with the trial again and again. Ben Gurion was insistent that German Chancellor Konrad Adenhauer be protected, that his right-hand man, a former high ranking Nazi official, Hans Gloebke, be kept out of the trial and that Hausner speak of Nazi Germany and not Germany. Golda Meir, then Foreign Minister, wanted the Mufti of Jerusalem front and center even if he was peripheral to the guilt or innocence of Eichmann. She wanted Nazi racist ideology included for it might impress African states, then a major interest of Israeli Foreign Policy.
Nevertheless, Israel muddled through and the trial worked to portray the Holocaust to a new generation, to integrate Sepharadim into the primordial 20th century Ashkenazic Jewry and above all to establish a unique status for survivors within Israeli society.
The trial, Yablonka concludes, was essential to the creation of Holocaust consciousness in Israel and to the dynamic integration of Holocaust survivors into Israel, where the national catastrophe of the Shoah had overwhelmed the individual experience of its survivors. It marked Israel's coming of age in its Bar Mitzvah year of independence and only an Israel that had come of age could embrace the atrocity that befell the Jewish people in exile that were at the root of its being.
The State of Israel vs. Adolf Eichmann is an important book about a formative event at the core of Israel's national existence. It is so well written that it is a quick and not ponderous read. Only afterwards is the reader fully impressed with how significant the topic and how diligent the researcher and how skilled the writer and translators.
