Sergio Minerbi - The Eichmann Trial Diary: A Chronicle of the Holocaust

Table of Contents

Hitlers Table Talk: 19411944
In Stalins Secret Service
Hitler and Mussolini: The Secret Meetings
The Jews in Fascist Italy: A History
The Man Behind the Rosenbergs
Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History
Diary 19371943 (Galeazzo Ciano)
Secret Affairs: FDR, Cordell Hull, and Sumner Welles
Hitler and His Generals: Military Conferences 19421945
Stalin and the Jews: The Red Book
The Secret Front: Nazi Political Espionage
Fighting the Nazis: French Intelligence and Counterintelligence
A Death in Washington: Walter G. Krivitsky and the Stalin Terror
The Battle of the Casbah: Terrorism and Counterterrorism Algeria 19551957
Hitlers Second Book: The Unpublished Sequel to Mein Kampf
At Napoleons Side in Russia: The Classic Eyewitness Account
The Atlantic Wall: Hitlers Defenses for D-Day
Double Lives: Stalin, Willi Mnzenberg and the Seduction of the Intellectuals
France and the Nazi Threat: The Collapse of French Diplomacy 19321939
Mussolini: The Secrets of His Death
Mortal Crimes: Soviet Penetration of the Manhattan Project
Top Nazi: Karl WolffThe Man Between Hitler and Himmler
Empire on the Adriatic: Mussolinis Conquest of Yugoslavia
The Origins of the War of 1914 (3-volume set)
Hitlers Foreign Policy, 19331939The Road to World War II
The Origins of Fascist Ideology 19181925
Max Corvo: OSS Italy 19421945
Hitlers Contract: The Secret History of the Italian Edition of Mein Kampf
Secret Intelligence and the Holocaust
Israel at High Noon
Balkan Inferno: Betrayal, War, and Intervention, 19902005
Calculated Risk
The Murder of Maxim Gorky
The Kravchenko Case: One Mans War On Stalin
The Nazi Party, 1919-1945: A Complete History
Closing the Books: Jewish Insurance Claims from the Holocaust
Encyclopedia of Cold War Espionage, Spies, and Secret Operations
The Cicero Spy Affair
NOC. Non-Official Cover. British Secret Operations
The First Iraq War: Britains Mesopotamian Campaign, 19141918
Becoming Winston Churchill
Hitlers Intelligence Chief: Walter Schellenberg
Salazar: A Political Biography
Nazi Palestine
The Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb
Target Hitler

Fifty years have passed since the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the SS officer who was in charge of every detail in the implementation of the infamous Holocaust that Adolf Hitler had decided against the Jewish people in Europe. Interest in this case, however, from every point of view, appears to be growing, all over the world, from year to year. The persecution of the Jews had also been mentioned in a number of well-known cases, like the Nuremberg Trials, but in those proceedings the Holocaust perpetrated against the Jewish people was always only a marginal point, or was only partially mentioned and described. The Eichmann trial, on the other hand, covered these terrible happenings from every angle, because the defendant was in charge of the department of the Gestapo dealing with Jewish matters throughout the Second World War.

The reports in this book, covering the daily proceedings of highly important pieces of evidence and developments during the trial, held in Jerusalem, Israel, in 1961, were written and prepared by Dr. Sergio Itzhak Minerbi, who attended each daily court session.

Dr. Minerbi was born in Italy and arrived in what was then Palestine in 1947; he became the local correspondent of Italian national radio, R.A.I., in 1960. He happened to be in Rome when the president of Argentina, Arturo Frondizi, announced the kidnapping of Adolf Eichmann, who was taken from Argentina to Israel. On the same day the author signed a contract with the Italian publishing house Longanesi for a book about the trial that would follow Eichmanns capture.

During the trial Dr. Minerbi covered all the proceedings for Italian radio and television, and two years later those daily reports were published in Italian in a book called La Belva in gabbia (The Caged Beast) which was the code used by the Mossad to inform Prime Minister David Ben Gurion that Eichmann had been captured. This book is the English translation of the original Italian publication.

The daily description given by Dr. Minerbi, covers the most important and devastating pieces of evidence, Eichmanns reactions, the special remarks made by the judges, the discussions in court, the legal, moral and factual problems in the case. It all makes for fascinating reading, and is bound to impress the reader far more than the formal court record of the proceedings or any updated analysis of this historical trial.

Gabriel Bach
former State Attorney of Israel
and former Justice of the Israeli Supreme Court

Adolf Eichmann was one of the leading officials involved in implementing the Nazi policy to kill the Jews during the Second World War.

According to the Nazi terminology used at the time, the policy was known as the final solution to the Jewish problem. Adolf Hitler, the founder and leader of the Nazi movement, clearly stated his anti-Semitism in his book Mein Kampf (My Struggle) and began enacting his views as soon as he became the German Chancellor on January 30, 1933. After having promulgated a number of anti-Jewish laws, on the evening of November 9, 1938, using as an excuse the murder of a German diplomat, Ernst von Rath, in Paris, the SS burned synagogues and other Jewish buildings, destroyed six thousand Jewish-owned stores and murdered at least 100 Jews, while thousands more were arrested and sent to concentration camps. The avowed purpose was to eliminate the Jews from the German economy, expel Jewish pupils from the schools, and enforce compulsory emigration from Germany. Acting on Hitlers orders, Hermann Gring demanded that the Jewish Question be coordinated and resolved one way or another. The Zentralstelle fr die jdische Auswanderung (Central Agency for Jewish Emigration) was set up in January 1939. In the course of a meeting that took place one month later and chaired by Reinhard Heydrich, all issues pertaining to the Jews were placed under the jurisdiction of the German police.

Heinrich Mller, the head of the Gestapo, was appointed chief of the main office and he in turn appointed Adolf Eichmann, who was then transferred from the SD to the political police. This office was known as RSHA Amt IV; Eichmann was also the head of the Emigration and Evacuation Department (IV B 4), which was later renamed Jewish Issues and Evacuation. In that capacity Eichmann organized the forced emigration that a few months later became a euphemism for deportation to the death camps. In September 1939, at the beginning of the Second World War, Adolf Hitler made the decision to kill the Jews of Poland.

At the end of the war Eichmann fled from Germany and went into hiding in Argentina, using a false identity; he was identified and captured by the Mossad on May 11, 1960, then taken to Israel. In the course of his trial, which opened in Jerusalem on April 11, 1961, he could have chosen to either voice some regret as a man who understood the enormity of the crimes that had been perpetrated or he could play the role of the arrogant SS lieutenant colonel who would express his displeasure at having been unable to complete his murderous mission. Instead, perhaps to strengthen his own defense, he decided to claim having only played a minor role as someone who only acted