Top Photo: Adolf Eichmann taking notes during his trial in Jerusalem, May 29, 1961. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

On December 15, 1961, an Israeli court in Jerusalem sentenced Adolf Eichmann to death for crimes against the Jewish people and crimes against humanity. The verdict followed a dramatic months-long trial in which Holocaust survivors gave powerful testimony about their experiences and Israeli prosecutors pushed for the conviction of the former SS officer who sent millions of Jews to their deaths during World War II.

When the war ended, Eichmann initially escaped justice by fleeing to Argentina, where he hid out for nearly a decade until he was kidnapped by Israeli intelligence operatives and taken to Israel for trial. His trial and execution drew international attention and intensified interest in the Nazi regime’s crimes against Jews during World War II. In the words of historian and Eichmann biographer David Cesarani, “The capture, trial, and execution of Adolf Eichmann were global media events that reminded millions of people about the war years. For the first time the story of what happened to the Jews of Europe was at the centre of the narrative.”1

Background and Early Years

Adolf Eichmann was born on March 19, 1906, to a middle-class family in Solingen in western Germany, and his early years were largely unremarkable. In 1913, his family moved to Linz, Austria. After performing poorly in school, Eichmann briefly worked for his father’s business before moving to Vienna to become a traveling salesman. Although some of his employers were Jewish, Cesarani writes that Eichmann “was socialized and politicized in an environment in which Jews were routinely denigrated.”2  

Eichmann joined the Nazi Party and then the SS, its paramilitary arm, in Austria in 1932, the year before Adolf Hitler came to power in Berlin. Returning to Germany in 1933, he transferred to the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the Nazi Party’s internal intelligence service, in which he rose rapidly over the next few years. A 1937 report from his superior recommending Eichmann for promotion described his character as “Reliable in his work, very conscientious, a good comrade,” his common sense as “Above Average,” his racial appearance as “Nordic Aryan,” and his politics as “a convinced National Socialist.” 3 

Eichmann and the Holocaust

Within the SD, Eichmann soon joined its Jewish Department, where his work involved deporting Jews out of the German Third Reich, which after the Anschluss of March 1938 included Austria.

Once World War II began in 1939 and German forces began killing large numbers of Jews in Poland and on the Eastern Front, Eichmann’s work shifted from facilitating Jewish emigration out of German-occupied territory and toward transporting Jews to concentration and death camps in Eastern Europe. This was part of a larger shift in Nazi policy in the wake of the invasion of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, when the rapid German military advance into Soviet territory brought some of Eastern Europe’s largest Jewish communities under Nazi control.

What began as large-scale killings by special units like the Einsatzgruppen and the regular German military (the so-called “Holocaust by bullets”) turned toward large-scale killing centers as the war progressed. A crucial moment in this shift came at the infamous Wannsee Conference in January 1942, where Eichmann was one of more than a dozen Nazi officials who gathered to work out the details of how they would coordinate murder on a massive scale. Despite what some later accounts would claim, Eichmann was not the originator of this genocidal policy, but his extensive experience expelling Jews from Nazi-occupied territory from 1938 to 1941 made him a key figure in its operation. By organizing the deportations of thousands of Jews at a time, Eichmann was a critical piece of the Nazi state apparatus that was determined to kill as many European Jews as it could. In the words of Cesarani, after January 1942, Eichmann became the “managing director of the greatest single genocide in history.”4 

Adolf Eichmann in SS uniform, 1942. Courtesy of USHMM

In this role, Eichmann was deeply involved in numerous deportation efforts across German-occupied Europe, including France, Italy, Belgium, and the Netherlands in the west and Slovakia in Eastern Europe. He was also a key figure in the 1944 deportation action in Hungary, one of the last large-scale German efforts to deport Jews to death camps. An ally of Hitler for most of the war, the Hungarian regime of Admiral Miklós Horthy had resisted German pressure to deal more harshly with his country’s Jewish population, but that changed when Hitler learned that some Hungarian officials were pursuing peace negotiations with the Allies.

When German troops entered Hungary in March 1944 and installed a pro-Nazi regime, Eichmann and a team from the SS organized the deportation of more than 400,000 Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz; of that number, more 300,000 people were murdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau.5 

Hungarian Jews arrive at Auschwitz; Courtesy of USHMM

Escape and hiding out in South America

As the Nazi regime collapsed in the spring of 1945, Eichmann, like many other Nazi officials, sought to conceal his real identity and his role in Nazi atrocities. He was captured by the American military in May and held for months under an assumed name, but fearing it was only a matter of time before his identity was discovered, he escaped in 1946 and went into hiding.

In 1950, Eichmann first fled to Italy, then crossed the Atlantic to Argentina. Like many other mid- and low-level Nazis, Eichmann traveled to South America via a series of escape routes or “rat lines” organized by sympathizers in well-known organizations, including the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the Catholic Church, and some Western intelligence agencies. In the context of the developing Cold War, these individuals looked past the escapees’ horrific crimes and instead focused instead on their anticommunist credentials.6  

After several months, Eichmann secretly contacted his family in Germany and asked them to join him. In Argentina, he settled into life in hiding under the alias Ricardo Klement, but Eichmann continued to associate with other former Nazis who were also hiding out in Argentina. At one point in the late 1950s, he even recorded hours of interviews with Willem Sassen, a former member of the SS who had escaped to Argentina before Eichmann, for a future book recounting his role in the Final Solution. In these interviews Eichmann expressed deep-seated antisemitism and satisfaction with his work during the Holocaust.    

Discovery and Capture

Despite Eichmann’s best efforts, his name came up in the Nuremberg war crimes trials, where one of his former comrades described in full his role in the Hungarian deportations. But prosecutors seeking to find him had little information to go on, and as the Nuremberg trials wound down and the Cold War heated up, interest in tracking down Nazi war criminals diminished.

German prosecutor Fritz Bauer was an exception to this trend. Born into a German Jewish family, he had trained as a lawyer and practiced law but was imprisoned by the Nazis; he later immigrated to Denmark and then escaped to Sweden. Returning to Germany after the war, Bauer became attorney general for the state of Hesse, where he was a rare German prosecutor who still prioritized going after Nazi war criminals. When Bauer learned of Eichmann’s whereabouts from a former Nazi prisoner who was also living in Argentina, he feared that his own government would not do anything to pursue Eichmann. Taking matters into his own hands, he passed that information on to Isser Harel, director of the Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence service.

It took several years, but Israeli intelligence eventually confirmed that the man who called himself Ricardo Klement was in fact Adolf Eichmann. In April 1960, a team of Israeli intelligence agents arrived in Buenos Aires and conducted weeks of surveillance to confirm that Eichmann’s identity and to learn his daily routine. On the evening May 11, operatives seized Eichmann and held him secretly for three days, during which he admitted to his real identity and agreed to sign a statement declaring himself willing to face trial in Israel.7  On May 22, a plane carrying Eichmann landed in Israel; the next day, Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion announced that Eichmann was in custody and would stand trial for his role in the Holocaust.

‘We wanted a trial, and we got one’

For months between his arrival in Israel and the start of the trial on April 11, 1961, Israeli investigators interrogated Eichmann. Conducted largely by Israeli police Captain Avner Less, the interviews lasted for many hours and produced a transcript of more than 3,000 pages. During those conversations, Eichmann acknowledged his role in transporting Jews to camps but denied that he had anything to do with their deaths: “I had nothing to do with killing Jews. I’ve never killed a Jew. And I’ve never ordered anyone to kill a Jew.”8   Israeli prosecutors spent the next few months challenging those claims.

Eichmann’s defense team was led by Robert Servatius, a German lawyer who had taken part in the Nuremberg trials as defense counsel for several Nazi officials. Before the prosecution even began to make its case, Servatius tried to challenge the legality of the whole trial, charging that Israeli and Jewish judges could not be impartial and called instead for an international trial for his client. When the three Israeli judges, all German-born Jews trained in the German legal system, rejected that argument, Servatius spent the rest of the trial arguing that Eichmann had only played a small part in the crimes of the Nazi regime and that he should not be tried for their entirety.

In his opening statement, the chief prosecutor, Israel’s attorney general Gideon Hauser, told the court that he did not stand before them to accuse Eichmann on his own, but was joined by six million additional prosecutors—Jewish victims who had been killed at places like Auschwitz and Treblinka, whose “blood cries to heaven, but their voice cannot be heard.” “Thus it falls to me,” he continued, “to be their mouthpiece and to deliver the heinous accusation in their name.”9

One of the most important and notable aspects of the Eichmann trial was the prominent role of Holocaust survivors who testified against the former Nazi officer and gave firsthand accounts of the horrors they endured. This was a major departure from the earlier war crimes trials at Nuremberg where eyewitness testimony had played a much smaller role. According to the historian Lawrence Douglas, this was a deliberate choice: “documents were used to establish a tight criminal case against the accused, but it was the words of the survivors that provided the dramatic focus of the trial and that built a bridge to the ‘world of ashes.’”10

The survivors’ testimony was especially powerful because the trial was recorded, and clips were broadcast on the evening news around the world; in what was a first for many, viewers heard directly from the victims of the Holocaust. On June 7, 1961, one survivor, a writer named Yehiel Dinur, became so distressed during his testimony when shown the striped uniform of an Auschwitz inmate that he fainted and had to be carried out of the courtroom; it was later revealed that he had suffered a stroke.11 

Witness Yehiel De-Nur Katzetnik testifies during the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Courtesy of USHMM

In addition to their testimony describing the horrors of Nazi actions, eyewitnesses also recounted instances where European Jews were humiliated by German forces and their allies and instead of resisting or fighting back meekly accepted their treatment. This posed a serious problem for the Israeli government, which portrayed Israel as a Jewish state defined by military strength surrounded by enemies on all sides.

Early in the trial, the Israeli poet and journalist Haim Gouri, who covered the entire trial for an Israeli newspaper, described listening to one such survivor, Morris Fleischmann, describe being forced to scrub a sidewalk outside the Metropole Hotel in Vienna: “I did not want to see him, and I did not want to hear him. I would have preferred to go today to the military parade at the stadium, to see Jews at their strongest and most beautiful. But with an uncanny force, this Morris Fleischmann grabbed hold of us by the scruff of our necks, as if to say, ‘Sit still and hear me out.’”12

Before the Eichmann trial, Israeli Holocaust survivors were reluctant to speak publicly about their experiences, but the trial began to change that. As Gouri concluded, “We shall have to listen to all the witnesses, every last one, in the days and weeks and months to come. There will be no escape and no reprieve. We wanted a trial, and we got one.”13  

That process continued long after the trial ended. Israeli journalist and historian Tom Segev wrote years later, “The trial of Adolf Eichmann served as therapy for the nation, starting a process of identification with the tragedy of the victims and survivors, a process that continues to this day.” 14 

The trial received enormous media attention. Filmed in total by the Capitol Cities Broadcasting Corporation, an American television company, footage from the courtroom was flown across the Atlantic to New York, where it was broadcast on American evening news programs.15  The trial drew hundreds of observers from around the world to the courtroom in Jerusalem, including such notable figures as Telford Taylor, formerly the chief American prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials.

While many observers celebrated Israel’s efforts to punish a perpetrator of the Holocaust who had escaped justice, others criticized the trial. American Jewish writer Harold Rosenberg accepted that the trial was an opportunity to tell the story of what happened to the Jews of Europe during the Holocaust but regretted that the trial elevated Eichmann the person. Writing in Commentary magazine, he warned that while Eichmann’s life was in danger from the court’s ultimate sentence, the very same trial had given him “the opportunity to become one of the most memorable figures of this century.”16

Perhaps the most famous (and infamous) account of the Eichmann trial was Hannah Arendt’s book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, which began as a series of articles published in The New Yorker magazine in February and March 1963. Born into a Jewish family in Hanover, Germany, in 1906, the same year as Eichmann, Arendt trained as a philosopher at the University of Heidelberg under Karl Jaspers; when Hitler came to power, she fled Germany for France. After the Germans conquered France, she escaped to the United States in 1941. In 1951, she published The Origins of Totalitarianism, a major work of political theory that investigated the intellectual roots of Stalinism and Nazism.  

Reporting on the Eichmann trial for The New Yorker, Arendt concluded that Eichmann’s motives were not ideological at all; on the contrary, Eichmann, while not a stupid man, lacked imagination and that “[i]t was sheer thoughtlessness—something by no means identical with stupidity—that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period.”17  Critics at the time and since have heavily criticized Arendt’s thesis, which came to be known as “the banality of evil” argument. Later historians have challenged Arendt’s characterization of Eichmann as not motivated by ideology, pointing to his persistent antisemitism throughout his life.

As the trial neared its end, Gouri detected a sense of exhaustion with the proceedings, writing on September 10, 1961, “The deeper you go into this trial, the more it seemed to you that it would never end, for the subject was endless, and the murdered, the murderers, and the passive onlookers were all involved.”18

Verdict and Sentencing

The prosecution and defense rested their cases in August 1961, and the court took several months to make its decision. Over the course of two days, December 11–12, the court revealed its verdict: Eichmann was guilty of crimes against the Jewish people and crimes against humanity. Three days later, on December 15, the judges sentenced him to death by hanging. Despite appeals from his defense team and calls for his sentence to be reduced to life in prison, Eichmann was executed just after midnight on June 1, 1962.

Legacy

The Eichmann trial had an enormous impact outside of Israel, including in the United States, which was home to the largest population of Jews outside of Israel. According to the historian Peter Novick, it helped give coherence to the events that Americans know as “the Holocaust”; in his book The Holocaust in American Life, he wrote that the Eichmann trial “was the first time that what we now call the Holocaust was presented to the American public as an entity in its own right, distinct from Nazi barbarism in general.”19

• 1

  David Cesarani, Becoming Eichmann: Rethinking the Life, Crimes, and Trial of a “Desk Murderer” (Essex, UK: De Capo Press, 2004), 325. 

• 2

  Cesarani, 32. 

• 3

  Cesarani, 36. 

• 4

  Cesarani, 117. 

• 5

  Figures from “The Holocaust in Hungary,” Holocaust Encyclopedia, USHMM, last updated January 24, 2025. (URL: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-holocaust-in-hungary). Accessed 2/5/25. 

• 6

  Gerald Steinacher, Nazis on the Run: How Hitler’s Henchmen Fled Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 

• 7

  Cesarani, 232. 

• 8

  Eichmann Interrogated: Transcripts from the Archives of the Israeli Police (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1983), 101-102. 

• 9

  “Eichmann Trial -- Sessions 6, 7 and 8 -- Eichmann pleads not guilty,” April 17, 1961, Jerusalem, Israel, Adolf Eichmann Trial Collection, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) Digital Collections. (URL: https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn1001024). Accessed 2/5/25. 

• 10

  Lawrence Douglas, The Memory of Judgment: Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 104-105. 

• 11

  “Eichmann Trial -- Sessions 68 and 69 -- Testimonies of Y. Dinur, Y. Bakon, A. Oppenheimer, A. Beilin,” June 7, 1961, Jerusalem, Israel, Adolf Eichmann Trial Collection, USHMM Digital Collections. (URL: https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn1001698). Accessed 2/2/25. 

• 12

  Haim Gouri, Facing the Glass Booth: The Jerusalem Trial of Adolf Eichmann (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004), 31. 

• 13

  Gouri, 33. 

• 14

  Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust (New York: Hill & Wang, 1993), 11. 

• 15

  Cesarani, 254. 

• 16

  Harold Rosenberg, “The Trial and Eichmann,” Commentary, November 1, 1961, pp. 377. 

• 17

  Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Penguin Books, 2006), 287-288. 

• 18

  Gouri, 272. 

• 19

  Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999), 133.