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January 27, 2016, 6:04 pm timesofisrael.com
On Holocaust Day, Israel releases Eichmann’s plea to spare his life

Nazi bureaucrat, nabbed by Mossad for playing key organizing role in the Holocaust, wrote to Israeli president after trial that he was only following orders.

Israel made public on Wednesday a decades-old handwritten plea from Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann for clemency for his role in the Holocaust, dated just two days before he was executed.

In the request, written after he was brought to Israel in 1960, then tried, convicted and sentenced to death, Eichmann says the Israeli court overstated his role in organizing the logistics of Hitler’s “Final Solution” which involved the extermination of six million Jews.

President Reuven Rivlin presented the previously unreleased letter, which was written to then president Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, at a ceremony to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

“There is a need to draw a line between the leaders responsible and the people like me forced to serve as mere instruments in the hands of the leaders,” the presidency quoted Eichmann’s letter as saying.

“I was not a responsible leader, and as such do not feel myself guilty,” the German wrote. “I am not able to recognize the court’s ruling as just, and I ask, Your Honour Mr President, to exercise your right to grant pardons, and order that the death penalty not be carried out.” The letter was signed and dated: “Adolf Eichmann Jerusalem, May 29, 1962.”

He was hanged around midnight on May 31.

Eichmann, one of the main organizers of the Holocaust, escaped from a prisoner-of-war camp after World War II and fled to Argentina in 1950, where he lived under a pseudonym until he was snatched by Mossad agents in Buenos Aires in May 1960 and smuggled to Israel.

The ability of the security services to bring him to justice was a source of pride for the Jewish state, and Rivlin referred to the trial as a momentous moment in Israel’s history.

“In the first years after the Holocaust, the people in Israel were busy rebuilding and founding an independent state,” he said.

“The renewed Israeli society was not in the mindset to or able to remember.

“The Eichmann trial broke the dam of silence. The ability of the young Jewish state to capture the Nazi murderer afforded a basic sense of security to the survivors of the Holocaust.”

Dismissing Eichmann’s claims to be just a bureaucrat, Rivlin said: “The people who suffered from Eichmann’s weakness were not given a moment of grace.”

Israel and its allies have continued to use their resources across the globe to pursue those responsible for carrying out the Holocaust, even though the majority of perpetrators are now close to death.

On Tuesday, the Simon Wiesenthal Center — named after a famous Nazi hunter — produced a list of 10 alleged Nazis who could be prosecuted in 2016.

Of the 10, four have trial dates already slated in Germany this year. Among them is Helma Kissner, who served as a radio operator in the Auschwitz death camp for four months in July 1944.

Efraim Zuroff, Jerusalem director of the centre, said they would continue to chase every remaining perpetrator as “we owe it to the victims”.

“The passage of time in no way diminishes the guilt of the killers. Old age should not afford protection to people that committed such heinous crimes,” he told AFP.

“The trials send a powerful message about the significance of the Holocaust.”

As the number of World War II Nazis alive diminishes, Zuroff said they are also seeking to focus on historical accuracy — with strands of different societies in Europe keen to play down their role in the killings.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in a statement on Tuesday, warned that anti-Semitism was again growing in Europe.

“Even respected Western opinion leaders have become afflicted with hatred for the Jewish people and the Jewish state,” Netanyahu said, without giving names.

“The obsession with the Jews — the fixation on the Jewish state — defies any other rational explanation.”

 

Other documents presented at Wednesday’s commemoration, in the presence of Holocaust survivors, included requests for clemency from Eichmann’s wife Vera and his five brothers, along with Ben-Zvi’s letter to his justice minister rejecting the appeals.

Also in the collection, recently digitized by the presidential archives, are a transcript of Eichmann’s defense counsel’s Supreme Court appeal, the handwritten opinion of justice minister Dov Yosef, and a note by prosecutor Gideon Hausner for his opening address.

Israel marks its own Holocaust remembrance day, which this year will be held on May 4-5.

Below is the full text of Eichmann’s letter to Ben-Zvi in translation, provided by the Rivlin’s office in Jerusalem.

To:
Mr. President,

I add myself to the request of my defence counsel, and allow myself to state further the following matters.

In their judgement of me, the judges made a fundamental mistake in that they are not able to empathise with the time and situation in which I found myself during the war years. The mistake was caused by the fact that at the time of my judgement, I was presented with a number of documents which without being seen in connection with the general material of the orders, must give an incorrect picture.

It is not true that I was personally of such a high rank as to be able to persecute, or that I myself was a persecutor in the pursuit of the Jews, in the face of such an abundant rule it is clear the judges in their ruling ignored the fact that I never served in such a high position as required to be involved independently in such decisive responsibilities. Nor did I give any order in my own name, but only ever acted ‘by order of’.

Even had I been as the judges assessed the driving, zealous, force in the persecution of the Jews, such a thing would have been evident in my promotion and other awards. Yet I received no such advantages.

It is also incorrect that I was never influenced by human emotions.

Specifically under the impression of the unspeakable horrors which I witnessed, I immediately requested a transfer to a different post. Similarly, I revealed of my own will during the police investigation, horrors which had been till then unknown in order to help establish the undisputable truth.

I declare once again, as I did in the presence of the court: I detest as the greatest of crimes the horrors which were perpetrated against the Jews and think it right that the initiators of these terrible deeds will stand trial before the law now and in the future.

Notwithstanding there is a need to draw a line between the leaders responsible and the people like me forced to serve as mere instruments in the hands of the leaders. I was not a responsible leader, and as such do not feel myself guilty.

I am not able to recognise the court’s ruling as just, and I ask, Your Honour Mr. President, to exercise your right to grant pardons, and order that the death penalty not be carried out.

timesofisrael.com