I’m not old enough to have been around at the time of the trial in Jerusalem of Adolf Eichmann the Nazi functionary who sent millions of Jews and others to their deaths in the death camps that the Nazis had scattered across Europe. I merely live in the shadow of that trial. I know from my own readings of modern history that there was a time before the Eichmann trial and a time after it which was different. It can be argued that the Eichmann trial had major effects. It changed how the Holocaust is spoken about with the post Eichmann trial accounts and documentation focusing more on individual testimony than just bald and horrific numbers. It set in motion a massive wave of research, remembrance and education and gave space for survivors to tell their stories.

The Eichmann trial showed us that ‘desk murderers’ exist and that you don’t have to be the person who pulls the trigger of a gun or who plunges the knife or whatever to be a killer, you just need to be the person as Eichmann was, someone who ran the logistics of mass murder. Eichmann was the logistics guy, the man who ensured the smooth running of the machinery of murder that the Germans had set up. He identified, categorised and transported millions of people for murder. Eichmann should scare us all no matter who we are because if a cultured, skilled and educated nation as Germany was when Hitler came to power can produce a desk murderer like Eichmann then so could any other nation even my own given the right circumstances, incentives, permissions and ideology. I look around at my own nation and I see public servants who are enthusiastic about promoting absurdities and wonder if those who promote these absurdities might also be willing, if told to do so, to commit atrocities with the stroke of a pen?

I thought that everything that could be written about the Eichmann trial had already been written. This trial and Eichmann’s crimes have been copiously documented and discussed for decades. I thought there was nothing new that could come out but I was wrong.

The German news outlet Suddeutsche Zeitung has a brilliant article that they’ve put up which sheds a whole new light on the Eichmann trial. It appears according to this paper that a West German intelligence agency had a mole in the court in the form of Eichmann’s junior defence counsel. This mole was specifically tasked with keeping some names in West Germany out of the trial. Of great interest to the German security services was keeping out of the trial and out of the public eye a man who was Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s State Secretary but who had an ‘interesting’ past as the man who helped to write the official legal commentary on how to apply the Nuremberg racial laws.

Briefly, the West German government manipulated Eichmann’s defence in order to keep quiet the knowledge that someone who had played his own part in the Final Solution by writing the guidelines on how to exclude Germany’s Jews from public life, was occupying a high position in the West German government. The whole story should be seen of course in the context of the Cold War which was at an exceptionally paranoid state at the time with West Germany needing key people to stand up to Communism even though those people might be tainted sometimes heavily with the crimes of the Nazis. When Konrad Adenauer said that there ‘were no remnants of National Socialism in German society’ he was not being honest, there were people with a lot to hide very high up in German politics and business and very close to Germany’s post War Chancellor.

The piece from Suddeutsche Zeitung is a truly magnificent piece of investigative journalism. They’ve read the books, gone through archives and interviewed those with knowledge of this twist in the Eichmann trial story. It’s a long piece but well worth reading.

Here’s the link

https://archive.ph/Fdur2