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In May 1960, Adolf Eichmann was kidnapped in Buenos Aires by Mossad agents. He was responsible for the murder of millions of Jews. This is a story about Nazi hunters, justice, and a trial that shook the world.
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00:01In May 1960, a mass murderer is abducted on a street in Buenos Aires.
00:08The man is snatched by agents of the Israeli intelligence service Mossad.
00:13His name is Adolf Eichmann.
00:16He didn't kill his victims in person, but is nonetheless responsible for the murder of millions of Jews in the
00:23Holocaust.
00:25But how could 15 years pass after the end of World War II before his capture?
00:31And what happened next?
00:33A story about justice, Nazi hunters, a court trial that captured the world's attention, and an execution.
00:42The story made a legend of this woman.
00:45She recognized in Eichmann what she called the banality of evil.
00:49Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt followed the trial closely.
00:53She asked what constitutes evil and whether any of us could be in Eichmann.
01:00In Jerusalem in April 1961, a trial began that was watched by the world.
01:12Adolf Eichmann stands in Jerusalem in Jerusalem.
01:15In the view of the menorah of the old Jewish religion,
01:20the mass murder of Eichmann must have been sent to the death of almost 6 million unemployed people.
01:30The Israeli attorney general, Gideon Hausner, has charged Eichmann with crimes against humanity, war crimes, and crimes against the Jewish
01:39people.
01:40Hausner says, with me are 6 million accusers, but they cannot rise to their feet, for their ashes are piled
01:49up on the hills of Auschwitz.
01:51It's 15 years now, 15 years now, to bring this man to face judgment.
02:00Taking the witness stand are survivors of the Nazi extermination camps.
02:05The observers in the courtroom are stunned.
02:08It's the first time many of them have heard about the unfathomable atrocities committed by the Nazis in such unflinching
02:16detail, over hours, days, weeks, and months.
02:22In 1961, when the trial begins, the global public is there.
02:28That's well over 100 journalists, broadcasting, reports every evening on television all over the world about what happened in that
02:37courtroom.
02:39One of those journalists is writer and philosopher Hannah Arendt.
02:44She's on assignment for the New Yorker magazine and observes proceedings with a critical eye.
02:49The story is told in an award-winning film.
02:53Arendt fled men like Eichmann in her home country of Germany in 1941 and moved to New York.
03:00In 1961, she traveled to Israel to watch the trial against him with her own eyes.
03:06She wrote her best-known book about the trial and Eichmann.
03:19Who is this stiff and emotionless man on the witness stand? And what exactly are his crimes?
03:32Adolf Eichmann had had an unremarkable career before joining Hitler's notorious Schutzstaffel, the SS.
03:38There he planned the rail transports to Auschwitz and the industrialized murder of millions of people in gas chambers.
03:47He meticulously counted the dead, a bookkeeper of extermination.
03:51He was the architect of the so-called final solution.
03:57Philosopher Bettina Stangnett has written what has become a standard work on the mass murder, translated into more than ten
04:04languages.
04:05She looked deep into his past and his psyche.
04:09His career success is thanks to his talent as a fraudster.
04:14There's no training program to be a murderer of Jews, but Eichmann invented his profession, the specialist for Jews.
04:23Hanna Arendt saw in the high-ranking SS officer the prototype of a Nazi functionary, carrying out a bureaucratically administered
04:31mass murder, business-like and efficient.
04:37Berlin 1945. The Nazis have been defeated. Eichmann is able to hide, initially in Germany.
04:46In 1950 he flees to Argentina with the assistance of the Vatican under the alias Ricardo Clement.
04:53He travels with a forged passport, bearing the stamp of the Red Cross.
05:04Eichmann knew things wouldn't turn out well, that Hitler would not become the leader of the world, and he prepared
05:09his escape in good time.
05:12How did the mass murderer manage to pass as a normal citizen of Buenos Aires?
05:22As Ricardo Clement, Eichmann lived in Argentina as part of a network of fugitive Nazis.
05:28He led a quiet life as a rabbit breeder and land surveyor. And he even fathered a fourth son.
05:35He belonged to a generation that was stopped in its tracks. Eichmann was born in 1906 and was still relatively
05:43young in 1945 at the height of his powers.
05:46He saw himself as the center of the world, which was not entirely wrong at the time, and he wanted
05:51that feeling back. He also didn't feel that his war was over.
05:59Eichmann did return to the world stage, but not in the way he had imagined. His past was catching up.
06:10Germany's foreign intelligence service, the BND, had known for a long time that Eichmann was hiding out in Buenos Aires.
06:17But the German government did not want to find him and put him on trial. Here, too, old Nazi networks
06:23still had influence.
06:27Of course, people in Germany were very happy to not see these people again. They were afraid of their history.
06:34But one man in Germany did look for what he called the monster. Fritz Bauer, the attorney general for the
06:40state of Hesse.
06:42Fritz Bauer, as a real outsider in society, as a covertly homosexual man and a Jew who had returned after
06:49fleeing Germany,
06:50and as someone who came back and thought that we could now found a new federal republic and help shape
06:55it,
06:56realized there were reactionary forces and that nobody really wanted to get involved.
07:00Everyone knew that this cloak of silence had been laid over everything.
07:05But Bauer was hindered by his own country.
07:07They were looking for Eichmann.
07:09Unfortunately, I have nothing new to tell, Dr. Bauer.
07:12He can't do anything. He is completely isolated.
07:14Do you not appreciate him?
07:16A man believes Adolf Eichmann had discovered in Argentina.
07:23Obersturmbahnführer of the SS.
07:25What is the central figure?
07:27Deeply disappointed that no one in Germany will listen to him,
07:31Bauer turned to Mossad, the Israeli Intelligence Agency.
07:35He flew to Israel and handed over surveillance photos of Eichmann in Argentina.
07:41Israel then began preparing a military-style operation against its public enemy No. 1.
07:48Operation Finale began.
07:55Decades later, there is still a lot of interest in the Eichmann trials.
07:59The Potsdam Film Museum is hosting a traveling exhibition about the hunt for the mass murderer.
08:04His capture and trial.
08:07It shows that getting him on the stand was no easy feat.
08:13There was no extradition treaty between Argentina and Israel.
08:17Locating and capturing Eichmann came after a very long and complicated prelude.
08:22A lot of people knew that he was in Argentina.
08:27That included the US intelligence agency, the CIA.
08:31They knew where Eichmann was hiding, yet did nothing.
08:35Israel, on the other hand, dispatched a handful of Mossad agents to Buenos Aires.
08:40They spent several days observing his movements from a truck, noting his routine, particularly the time at which he returned
08:48home on Calle Garibaldi.
08:53Then, on the evening of May 11, 1960, the moment had come.
09:03Mossad agents wait for Eichmann in front of his house.
09:06He arrives later than usual.
09:11Then, one of the world's most wanted men is seized.
09:15As he comes down the street, one agent speaks to him.
09:19Then, several others overpower him and push him into a car.
09:30On his person, they find a comb, keys, a cigarette holder, and pocket knife.
09:36But no gun. Eichmann clearly felt safe.
09:39The agents then take him to a safe house in a car with a fake license plate.
09:44The agents, who all lost family members in the Holocaust, are now in the same room with the man responsible.
09:50Do you recognize the man in this picture?
09:51Yeah.
09:54I can't see him clearly.
09:58The man in this picture is you.
10:01SS number 45381.
10:04Am I correct?
10:08Again, your number was 45381.
10:13Your number was 45381.
10:1845381.
10:2045381.
10:25Adolf Eichmann is identified without any doubt.
10:34Enough facts of my fate.
10:38My name is Adolf Eichmann.
10:42They kept him hidden for 10 days.
10:45After all, he was an Argentinian citizen and no one could know.
10:50The problem for the Mossad agents was now getting Eichmann, their captive, to Israel.
10:57The agents solved the problem by claiming Eichmann was an Israeli El Al pilot and transported him away wearing taped
11:06up swimming goggles, highly questionable from a legal standpoint.
11:12This represented, without a doubt, a violation of international rights, in a context in which Nazi hunting was not a
11:22state or institutional matter, but was carried out by private individuals.
11:28Eichmann agreed to stand trial in Israel.
11:56Eichmann agreed to stand trial in Israel.
11:57But why?
12:01His trial would end up lasting more than eight months with 380,000 pages of files.
12:08The proceedings were followed by people in 38 countries, and the verdict was not in Eichmann's favor.
12:16For the first and only time, the paths of Nazi mass murderer Adolf Eichmann and Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt crossed.
12:25Two Germans representing opposing aspects of their country, boundless barbarism on the one side, and the power of reason and
12:34rational thought on the other.
12:38April 1961. The trial takes place in a Jerusalem district court, closely followed by the population of Israel.
12:47Israeli Foreign Minister Golda Meir, who would later become Prime Minister, was among the observers.
12:53Only one camera team was allowed in the courtroom. The images went around the world.
12:59Eichmann sat behind bulletproof glass, ensuring he remained unharmed throughout the proceedings.
13:04Holocaust survivors who watched were shocked and outraged.
13:12For me, my dream at the moment was, as I was standing, to get my blood over, to have something
13:24to drink,
13:25because my death due to the high fever and pneumonia and typhus.
13:30To drink my own blood, that was my realization, what I was looking for.
13:39We used to uncover all the graves that were people killed during the last three years, grind the bones, pick
13:51out all the valuables in the ashes, like gold teeth, rings, and so on, separate them.
14:00After grinding the bones.
14:02After grinding the bones, we used to put out the ashes in the air, so they disappear, plant over the
14:08graves back, seed back plants, so nobody can recognize whenever it was their grave.
14:20And one of them said that they had pulled 50 Jews out of the bunker, and they were going to
14:26shoot them according to instructions.
14:28The commander of the SS people replied, these are fat Jews, all of them are good for soap.
14:36In that group, there was an old woman, and at a certain moment, an SS man set the dog against
14:48her.
14:48The dog jumped at her, bit her, clawed out, bit out a piece of flesh out of the lower part
14:56of her body, and brought that piece of flesh to his owner.
15:00This woman, out of fright, she screamed and jumped into the wagon on top of the other people.
15:09After the war, when Holocaust survivors moved to what was back then still Palestine, and told the Jews who were
15:15there what had happened to them in Europe, no one believed them.
15:19They then fell collectively silent.
15:23Only when these more than 100 witnesses testified at the Eichmann trial did people believe the Holocaust survivors.
15:34The trial set a process of collective remembering in motion. How did the spectators see Eichmann? As a demon? A
15:42monster?
15:44He was able to choose a position that he knew particularly well and that seemed particularly harmless.
15:50Namely that of the bureaucrat, the one who simply wrote numbers in a ledger.
15:54He made himself grey. That's exactly what he did. He made himself a grey mouse.
15:59It was done with a perfection that can be frightening.
16:04Eichmann altered his defence strategy. He presented himself as no more than a follower of orders with no hatred of
16:11Jews.
16:12He pleaded for clemency, but was unable to convince the court.
16:18Eichmann never repented. He believed in what he had done.
16:21And he didn't have the feeling that his war was over, so the issue wasn't over for him.
16:26He had not, as he had originally intended, killed more, 10 million Jews, or helped to do so.
16:33But there were still Jews in the world, so the problem wasn't solved yet.
16:41After finding Eichmann guilty on December 15, 1961, the court sentenced him to death by hanging.
16:49The sentence was carried out six months later. His body was cremated and his ashes scattered at sea.
16:55No grave, no mourning, no remembrance.
16:59The trial led to a completely new understanding of the Holocaust worldwide.
17:05But the question remains of what evil is, and what does it look like?
17:15The question was the topic of much discussion in the early 1960s.
17:19Hannah Arendt published her best-known book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, a report on the banality of evil.
17:26The term has made history.
17:29Arendt's goal was to understand how an unremarkable person like Eichmann could commit such monstrous deeds, devoid of feeling.
17:37The trouble with a Nazi criminal like Eichmann was that he insisted on renouncing all personal qualities,
17:46as if there was nobody left to be either punished or forgiven.
17:51He protested time and again, contrary to the prosecution's assertions, that he had never done anything out of his own
18:01initiative.
18:02That he had no intentions whatsoever, good or bad.
18:08That he had only obeyed orders.
18:14This typical Nazi plea makes it clear that the greatest evil in the world is the evil committed by nobodies.
18:25Evil committed by men without motive, without convictions, without wicked hearts or demonic wills.
18:32By human beings who refuse to be persons.
18:37And it is this phenomenon that I have called the banality of evil.
18:48The evil committed by apparent nobodies remained a lifelong topic of inquiry for Hannah Arendt.
18:55For us too, it remains a question to constantly ask and answer.
19:00What is evil and how do we resist it?
19:05What is evil?
19:05What is evil?
19:05What is evil?
19:08The evil committed by any cann Skillshare.
19:08No, the evil, the only evil restriction.
19:08To see why there is evil.
19:09You beosed.
19:09revolutionary.