THE CAPTURE AND TRIAL OF ADOLF EICHMANN

by Moshe Pearlman ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 15, 1963

The horror trial of the century has been that of Adolf Eichmann, Obersturm-ann-fuehrer of Germany's death camps, the man who, in one way or another, with others or without, during the period 1939-1945 caused the killing of six million men, women, and children, known in Nazi terminology as ""the final solution of the Jewish problem"". It is a tale to shame and to shock. Out of mountains of courtroom evidence, both live and documentary, Pearlman has rendered the most relevant, reliable account of the drama yet offered. It is a work of massive reportage, scrupulously factual, admirably underplayed. The whole story is here: from the capture in Argentina to the world-famed image of the twitching man in the glass enclosed dock as he listened to the sagas of the ghetto fighters, the confrontation of the accused and witnesses who came back as if from the dead, the indictment enunciated by Hausner and the defense arguments of Servatius. And lastly the words of Eichmann himself: ""I received orders and I executed orders"", followed by his assays into Kant, his outlining of figures, train capacities and timetables, the whole paraphernalia of a white collar butcher. Thus Eichmann the public man, his crimes, his era.. But the personal hell of the Third Reich, how and why it turned him and his colleagues into beasts, goes unexplored and unanswered, and without that entrance into the darkness as in the works of Hannah Arendt, Mann and Sartre, the holocaust then becomes, in retrospect, merely a chiller diller. Taken on its own journalistic level, this is a definitive record, a devastating ""memento"".

Pub Date: July 15, 1963

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1963

Categories: NONFICTION