Eichmann Trial at Beit Ha’am in Jerusalem, Israel, 1961 (Government Press Office)
The footage from the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann is chilling and intense. While working on an immersive, multi-channel film for the new exhibition, Operation Finale: The Capture & Trial of Adolf Eichmann (Feb. 19 – June 12, 2016), our incredible media team assembled a selection of segments of archival footage that offer a taste of what transpired in the courtroom daily over the course of three months. As I watched Eichmann settle into the bulletproof glass booth meant to protect him, I thought about how improbable it was that this man who had fled to the other end of the earth would find himself on trial, staring at the Israeli national symbol proudly hanging above the judges’ bench. After all, the State of Israel wasn’t even a country at the time Eichmann committed his crimes.
The trial, orchestrated to lay bare the entirety of the Holocaust for the world to understand, is a striking mix of intense emotion on the part of witnesses, audience and prosecution and dispassion on Eichmann’s part. Shown on three screens simultaneously in Operation Finale, visitors see witness testimony, prosecution and audience reaction, with Eichmann’s visage looming all the while. His inability to internalize the terrifying and heart-wrenching experiences being recounted is made tangible by his frequent twitches and brushing of his sleeves, as if he is physically trying to keep the torrent of humanity on display at bay. Watching the footage now, I am struck by Eichmann’s seeming ordinariness and how someone so unremarkable came to wield power within the machine of such a senseless failure of humankind.
As one of the first global media events—it was televised and broadcast on the radio throughout the world—the trial revealed the horrors the Nazis had wrought on the Jewish people. Like other major world news events, many vividly remember watching the trial, consuming as much of it as they could. I can only imagine what it would have been like to listen to survivor’s testimonies in real time. Even today after watching rough cuts of the film we created for the exhibition numerous times, I can’t help but get choked up every time I see the anguish on the faces of witnesses and the affect their stories have on the prosecution and the audience.
When the death sentence was handed down—the first and last in Israel’s history to-date—there was relief and disappointment. A key perpetrator of the deaths of millions would no longer walk the earth. But as assistant prosecutor and interrogator Mickey Goldman stated, “We could only hang him once. We couldn’t hang him six million times.”
