The Eichmann Trial Reconsidered ed. by Rebecca Wittmann

Reviewed by: The Eichmann Trial Reconsidered ed. by Rebecca Wittmann Thomas Kühne The Eichmann Trial Reconsidered. Edited by Rebecca Wittmann. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021. Pp. x + 272. Cloth $75.00. ISBN 9781487508494. "Historians of all confessions and many other people will study the trial down to the last detail for fifty years or more. And as you will see, it will be interpreted according to the Zeitgeist in one way or another," wrote Adolf Eichmann in June 1961 to Robert Servatius, the lawyer who represented him at his trial in Jerusalem (48). Eichmann was right, and he would have also been right if he had extended his prognosis to the interest of future generations in his own persona. For decades, Eichmann's personality and the motives that drove him to plan, organize, and administer the "Final Solution" have been debated in the light of Hannah Arendt's famous formula of the "banality of evil." Thanks to the detailed and nuanced biographical inquiries of David Cesarani, Bettina Stangneth, and others, we now know that Eichmann was not simply a bureaucrat without conscious who followed orders as bureaucrats usually do but a committed anti-Semite who was eager to make Nazi Europe judenrein. This does not mean that Arendt's concept was useless or wrong. Instead, as James Waller points out in the first chapter of this volume, Arendt did address insights into the mindsets of Holocaust perpetrators that inspired social scientists for decades. Given the scholarly consensus on Eichmann's personality, Rebecca Wittmann's volume focuses on the trial and its legacy. Two chapters of the book focus on Eichmann's mendacities in Jerusalem. Fabien Théofilakis utilizes the hitherto neglected notes Eichmann produced in Jerusalem to advise his lawyer and to prepare his own statements in court. These notes confirm that Eichmann sophisticatedly created the image of an obedient subject and zealous bureaucrat to obfuscate his initiatives during the Holocaust, a trap that Arendt walked into. More specifically, Michael Berkowitz refutes Eichmann's claim in Jerusalem that he had been a Zionist, expressing strong disdain for Slavoj Žižek's allegation of mutual interests of Nazis and Zionists in the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine—an indeed abstruse example of the consequences of Eichmann's Jerusalem fabrications. The second section of the book analyzes judicial innovations and shortfalls of the trial. Ruth Bettina Birn offers a sharp critique of the trials' pedagogical and political [End Page 596] purposes, and shows in detail how it misunderstood or distorted Eichmann's responsibilities and eventually "did not do justice to history" (136). While these concerns are legitimate, some readers may doubt whether they do justice to the immense challenge Jews all over the world including in Israel faced at a time when the specific Jewish suffering from Nazi terror was still widely hidden behind generic concepts such as war crime and crimes against humanity which the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg had established. By contrast, Laura Jockusch highlights the frustration of the World Jewish Congress as well as of Jewish survivors in the DP camps about the disregard of Jewish voices in Nuremberg. Leora Bilsky contributes a revised version of a previously published assessment of the indeed highly innovative admission to the courtroom of eyewitnesses to genocide. The third section of the book asks for geopolitical repercussions of the trial. Boaz Cohen questions the idea that only the Eichmann trial initiated the type of Holocaust consciousness and memorialization in Israel that we are used to now. Instead, the trial took up discourses that had shaped Israel from its beginnings on, as Cohen shows by pointing to the Knesset's Holocaust legislation; the Israeli-German diplomatic relations; the 1950s trials against alleged Jewish Nazi collaborators and the Kastner affair; the debates surrounding Yad Vashem; scholarly research on the Holocaust and early efforts to collect victims' testimonies; and not least public and private activities and communications of Holocaust survivors. The Israeli-German political relations are the subject of two chapters, one by Dominique Trimbur and the other by Roni Stauber. Both contend that the trial did not mix up the relations between the country of the perpetrators and the one...

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