Word: memoire
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Well before he died in January at 81, the court's crusty, most independent Ioner and liberal completed a long memoir of the nearly 37 years he had spent on the bench. Early reports are that the forthcoming book, which is due from Random House this fall, shows that Douglas was bold in setting down his often acid-etched opinions of the court and his colleagues. A former law clerk of Douglas' who has seen the early drafts describes some of the Justice's comments about his brethren as "incredibly nasty. They read like something that Alice...
...Jewish problem" even insisted that he was not antiSemitic. Eichmann had made that claim somewhat obliquely in court and more directly in a lengthy "confession" to a German journalist that was published by LIFE in 1960. He repeated that disavowal in a little-known, long suppressed personal memoir that is now coming to light. Declared Eichmann: "The Holocaust was the greatest crime in history. I was never taken in by the mysticism of Nazi ideology. My views never matched the official line. I could never identify with the objectives of national socialism. I always had doubts...
...contained in a rambling account of his life that Eichmann wrote in prison while awaiting the results of an appeal of his conviction. (The appeal was rejected by Israel's 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...
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who is now chairman of the Yad Vashem memorial to Holocaust victims in Jerusalem, feels the entire manuscript should not be published on the grounds that it is rambling, repetitive and stuffed with what he calls the typical Nazi "jargon of violence."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...