ABSTRACT
The forthcoming trial of a man who in the public eye was responsible for organizing and overseeing the extermination of European Jewry was raising expectations both in a country in which a quarter of its population, around half a million, were Holocaust survivors, and outside its borders. “The Eichmann trial will tell us as other historians have tried, that anti-Semitism was not a byproduct of National Socialism, as the record of the Nuremberg trials might indicate,” wrote Harry Golden, whereas Ben Gurion himself considered the trial an indispensable opportunity to ensure “that our youth remember what happened to the Jewish people.”2 Some authors like Victor Golanz were troubled with such an approach: “I think of Ben-Gurion with the greatest respect, but his reasons for bringing Eichmann to trial show a fundamental misconception. (. . .) He wants young Jewry to know beyond question what their people have suffered. Dear God, don’t they not know already? (. . .) To show the whole world that what ‘anti-Semitism through history’ could result in (. . .) increasing, rather than diminishing anti-Semitism.”3 Ben Gurion thought just the opposite. In another interview
on the eve of the trial, he stated that “the world should be faced with the potentials of anti-Semitism. (. . .) Eichmann’s personal fate is unimportant. It is the unveiling of the entire extermination program against the Jews that matters.”4 In his view, this quintessential example of bringing history to trial was supposed to repeat the Nuremberg judicial memory-making venture, but also to revise much of it by stressing the uniqueness of the Holocaust as the crime of crimes of the Nazi regime. Eichmann stood accused under the Nazi and Nazi Collaborator Punishment Law, which incorporated the wording of the Nuremberg Charter, but specifically emphasized crimes against Jewish people among crimes against humanity, war crimes, and other offenses stipulated by the law.5
