Existing comment:
1961 EICHMANN TRIAL
The Eichmann Trial, which was held in Jerusalem in 1961, attracted world-wide attention. Adolf Eichmann was a former SS Obersturmbannführer and as such was responsible for the expulsion, deportation and thus murder of European Jews. After going underground in Buenos Aires for years, he was abducted and taken to Israel by Mossad, the Israeli secret service, and put on trial there.
Not least, this trial changed the image of Nazi perpetrators. Initially, after 1945, the SS and the Gestapo had been identified as the main groups of perpetrators who had been involved in the extermination of the Jews, emphasising the image of the lower-class criminal murderer and thug. The Eichmann trial gave rise to the image of the "perpetrator behind his desk" from the bourgeois elite. Now the Holocaust appeared to be an industrialised mass extermination process ("death factories") in which the individual disappears in the faceless apparatus of the extermination machine. Only in the 1990s did research on the perpetrators detach itself from these images, once again placing the focus more strongly on perpetrators' individual actions and motivations. |