On May 23, 1960, Haya Hirsch burst into the Tel Aviv apartment of her upstairs neighbors and shouted, “Can you believe that we caught him? Can you believe it?”
A key Nazi official and an architect of the Final Solution, Adolf Eichmann, had just been captured in Argentina and brought to Israel to stand trial for his role in Germany’s genocide against European Jewry during World War II. Hirsch had survived, but her husband and son were murdered. The Hirsches were from Hungary, where Eichmann personally arranged the deportation to Auschwitz and murder of nearly 600,000 Jews.
“I felt her excitement, that catching Eichmann was indescribable. She cried in my parents’ apartment. She didn’t even knock on the door. She just entered,” recalled Hanna Yablonka, who was 9 then and whose mother and father, natives of Czechoslovakia, had survived the Shoah (Holocaust). “It’s impossible to forget.”
Eichmann was responsible for arranging the arrests and deportations of millions of Jews to their deaths in concentration and extermination camps in Poland. On trial in mid-1961, he admitted his role but maintained that he was a powerless bureaucrat following orders. Eichmann was judged guilty on all 15 counts and executed in June 1962.
May 11, 2025, marks 65 years since Israel’s Mossad and Shin Bet security services captured Eichmann in Buenos Aires, where he lived under a pseudonym since 1950 after escaping from the Allies in the aftermath of the war. Nazi hunter Tuviah Friedman supplied the Israeli authorities with the information that Eichmann was likely hiding in Argentina. Friedman’s archive is in the National Library of Israel’s collection.
Professionally, Yablonka went on to research the period and write several books, including The State of Israel vs. Adolf Eichmann. She now is a professor emeritus of Jewish history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and the chief historian at the Ghetto Fighters House Museum.
Located in Israel’s Upper Galilee region, the museum exhibits hundreds of items relating to the Shoah. At least two of them — one tiny, one large — relate to the Eichmann trial.
One is a pair of a baby’s shoes, found in Poland near the end of World War II by a Shoah survivor, Adolf Abraham Berman, who presented it as evidence during his own testimony. The shoes are among the artifacts displayed for this spring’s 75th anniversary of the establishment of the museum’s archives. Both the museum and the kibbutz where it is housed, Lohamei Hagettaot, were founded by Jews who survived the genocide, including those who battled the Nazis. It’s thought to be the world’s first museum of the Shoah.
The other item is on permanent exhibit and is legendary as “the glass booth,” the bulletproof enclosure where Eichmann and the two Israeli policemen guarding him sat during the trial’s proceedings. The booth was donated to the museum by the police department in appreciation for the archives’ providing of key documents to assist in building the prosecution’s case against Eichmann.
Nearly all of the principals — the agents who tracked down and seized Eichmann, the police officers, judges, lawyers, and executioners — have passed away, as have most people who attended the trial in Jerusalem’s Beit Ha’Am, a building that still stands.
The case’s impacts on Israeli society were immediate and enduring. To Yablonka, “It did something to the DNA of this country.”
It was “a moment of grace” for Israelis following the trial, who learned “the essence of the Shoah” and what the Jews of Europe endured, said Yablonka, who also authored a book about Shoah survivors in Israel during the state’s early years.
Israelis realized “that the one-quarter of the population who were Shoah survivors weren’t just new immigrants, but that they must understand them in the context they brought,” said Yablonka. Israelis’ exposure to the facts of the Nazi occupation redefined heroism to include Jews’ daily struggle to survive in Europe, she said.
“This was a very important development. Jews had victims’ guilt: the ‘exile Jew.’ With Eichmann, it switched to the guilt of the murderer,” Yablonka said.
The trial also prompted the education system to teach about the Shoah and to arrange trips by Israeli high school classes to relevant sites in Poland.
On my recent visit to the museum to see the Eichmann-related items, an educator was speaking about the Shoah to a group of Israeli teens and adults. They were sitting opposite an electronic map of Europe, with hundreds of lights marking the locations of killing fields and camps — including local areas known as transit camps, where Jews were confined prior to being forcibly deported eastward by train.
When everyone left, Yaron Zur, the director of the museum’s digital and development department, pointed to the map’s array of lights.
Eichmann “locates the Jews and deports them. To build a case against Eichmann is to show how the system worked,” he explained. “I cannot imagine the Holocaust without him.”
Eichmann had participated in a summit near Berlin in January 1942 of top Nazi officials. At the meeting, which became known as the Wannsee Conference, the officials changed from a policy of forcing Jews to emigrate and shooting those who remained, to mass deportations and the systematic mass-murder in gas chambers.
Eichmann “created the shift,” Zur said.
Gazing at the glass booth, as we’d done upstairs moments earlier, “immediately puts me in a reflective [mood], a sense that as a human being, I have to ask important questions: How did Eichmann become Eichmann?” Zur said. “We need to humanize Eichmann, the Nazis, the SS. If you turn these people into monsters, there’s nothing to learn about them; they’re just an enigma. That’s something I’m aware of,” he added, echoing a point made famously by political scientist Hannah Arendt, who covered the trial in Jerusalem.
I considered the flip side of that perspective, something Zur had said when we sat next to the glass booth. In both conversations, Zur’s point was that Eichmann and his colleagues were regular people and not alien creatures — and that people are susceptible to hatred and power lust.
“You’d pass [Eichmann] on the street, and he looked like an ordinary guy,” Zur had said. “He was an ordinary guy.”
Editor-writer Hillel Kuttler can be reached at [email protected].
