"In all his activities the accused displayed indefatigable energy, verging on overeagerness towards advancing the Final Solution… He was not a puppet in the hands of others; his place was amongst those who pulled the strings... Even if we had found that the Accused acted out of blind obedience, as he argued, we would still have said that a man who took part in crimes of such magnitude as these over years must pay the maximum penalty known to the law, and he cannot rely on any order even in mitigation of his punishment. But we have found that the Accused acted out of an inner identification with the orders that he was given and out of a fierce will to achieve the criminal objective…" – Excerpts from the verdict and sentencing of Adolf Eichmann, December 1961.
The trial of Adolf Eichmann, who headed the Gestapo Department for Jewish Affairs known as IV B4, is an integral part of the consciousness of the Jewish people. One of the prevailing memories of the trial sessions in the Beit Ha'am community center in Jerusalem is the chilling testimonies of 121 Holocaust survivors.
But the criminal trial could not only rely on the survivors, only a few of whom actually saw Eichmann in person. Their testimonies were needed to highlight the unfathomable cruelty of the Nazis and the terrors of the Holocaust.
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