Word: eichmann
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Room for Morality. Gideon Hausner was prosecutor for Israel in the Eichmann trial of 1961. In this powerful panorama of the courtroom scene, he prosecutes Eichmann still. The enormous Israeli effort that went into the preparation of the case against him, the painstaking attention to legal detail and justification, the wrenching attempt to be fair while partisan in judging and convicting the man-all of it is replayed in Hausner's tautly written pages. He admits his purpose plainly: neither the Jews nor the rest of the world should rest easily as long as the Nazi impulse still festers...
From the moment of his "arrest" in Argentina by the Israeli body snatchers until the gallows trap in Jerusalem was sprung on him, Eichmann displayed "no room for morality" in his makeup-at least none detectable to Hausner...
...Might was right; power was virtue; the greatest sin was weakness." To obey had been Eichmann's highest object. Hausner's epitaph is that Eichmann died "as he lived-a pagan, a polished, finished and unalloyed product of the Nazi system...
...remained for a seemingly minor incident in Jerusalem to illuminate the quality about Eichmann that Historian Hannah Arendt has characterized "the banality of evil." One day after a court session, Eichmann was shown a film: here were Jewish victims packed like cattle into trains; here were Nazi execution squads shooting down rows of naked men, women and children, who fell writhing into trenches that they themselves had dug; here were literally thousands of corpses being bulldozed into mass graves. Suddenly, in the darkened room, Prosecutor Hausner heard Eichmann stir. Hausner wondered if the ice-cold technician of the final solution...
...Eichmann had just noticed that some journalists were sitting near by. Had he been told the press would be present, he complained, he would have worn his blue suit instead of his slacks and sweater...