Word: hausner
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Supreme Court, and on May 31, 1962, he was executed by hanging.) The apparent purpose of his memoir was to bolster his chances of a reprieve and to arouse public sympathy. Eichmann asked his defense attorney, Robert Servatius, to seek permission for its publication. The trial prosecutor, Gideon Hausner, refused; then Premier David Ben-Gurion ordered that the manuscript be suppressed for 15 years and placed in the state archives. Its existence was known to only a few people...
Portions of the memoir will be contained in an updated Hebrew edition of Hausner's 1966 book on the trial, Justice in Jerusalem, which will be published in Israel this March. Hausner, who is now chairman of the Yad Vashem memorial to Holocaust victims in Jerusalem, feels the entire manuscript should not be published on the grounds that it is rambling, repetitive and stuffed with what he calls the typical Nazi "jargon of violence." Besides, adds Israel's former Attorney General, "I felt that Eichmann had ample opportunity to make his defense during the trial...
Nonetheless, the excerpts that Hausner does include contain some interesting tidbits. Although Eichmann, prior to his arrest, had proudly professed his allegiance to Hitler, he warns in his memoir "against following idols, like the parched bones drying up in the desert." The warning was directed to both the next generation-"The youth of the world should unite. The adults failed"-and to women -"Maybe women should be entrusted with the responsibility for the world because they are led by emotion and not by intellect. Maybe they would do better than we did." Eichmann also discloses that he had been ordered...
...Hausner gives no credibility to Eichmann's prison denials. "I don't believe him when he says he is not antiSemitic. We have evidence of his own acts. And we have other private remarks of his in which he gives vent to his feeling that he would have been happy if all 11.3 million Jews had been exterminated...