Ordinary men have the capacity to commit extraordinary crimes and on April 11, 1961, Adolf Eichmann an ordinary looking man faced trial for the murder of five million Jews. Adolf Eichmann served in the Nazi party as their expert on Jewish matters. During the Nuremberg trials that took place years before Eichmann’s trial, many witnesses testified to the control Eichmann had over the implementation of the final solution. SS Captain Wisliceny worked under Eichmann in Hungary in 1944 and he proclaimed that Eichmann said, “he would jump into his grave laughing, because of the feeling that he had five million people on his conscience, gave him extraordinary satisfaction’” (48). Also, Eichmann worked with the members of Jewish councils, and they claimed in earlier trials that he had a direct hand in the “Jewish Question” (49). With a heavy list of witness accounts and facts to proof that Eichmann committed the crimes, he did not face his day in court till many years later and that appeared to be fine with most Before the 1960s, survivor remained silent about their experiences during the Holocaust. Over a hundred witnesses came forward and the attorney general selected about 50 out of the hundred’s of survivors to tell their stories. Hausner, the attorney general handpicked witnesses that had traumatic stories in an attempt to bring sympathy to survivors and rally the nation behind a Zionist agenda. A New York Times journalist Hannah Arendt noted the trial seemed biased and meant to fit a Zionist agenda. Arendt noted that most of the survivors new very little about Eichmann but they did survive some of the most gruesome conditions during the Holocaust. It was obvious Hausner had conducted the trial in a manner in which he switched the view of the trial from Eichmann to the holocaust survivors, in order to meet the government’s political
At a time of loss, the German people needed a reason to rebuild their spirits. The Jews became a national target even though Hitler’s theory could not be proven. Even as a Jew, he accused the Jews people for Germany’s defeat in order to rally the people against a group of people Hitler despised. The story-telling of the Jews’ wickedness distracts the Germans from realizing the terror Holocaust. Millions of Jewish people died because Hitler said they caused the downfall of Germany. Innocent lives were taken. The death of millions mark the rise of Hitler. He sets the stage for the largest massacre in
Adolf Eichmann was a German Nazi SS-Obersturmbannführer. He was in charge of arranging the mass deportations of Jews to the extermination camps. After his capture, Nazi war criminal, Eichmann was taken to trial for the mass murders of the Jews. The attorney general in charge of the case signed a bill of indictment against Eichmann on 15 counts, including crimes against the Jewish people as well as crimes against humanity. The Nazi trials provoked international interest, which led to world news. Arendt attended the majority of Eichmann's district court sessions where she recorded what she witnessed and later formed her own testimonials.
In January of 1933, Adolf Hitler was sworn in as chancellor of Germany. At the time Hitler assumed power, the German government was suffering due to the Great Depression caused by World War 1. Hitler, a man who had spent the entirety of his political career denouncing and attempting to destroy the German Republic, was now the leader of said Republic. Hitler was widely supported by his Nazi party. Hitler was very vocal in letting his displeasures be known and his people believed his repeated promises to get rid of the Treaty of Versailles and enlarge the army. All of his promises were made in order to bring back Germany's former glory. However, almost immediately upon becoming the Chancellor of Germany, Hitler began taking legal actions against Germany's Jewish population.
Eichmann was a simple man that thought of himself as always being the law-abiding citizen. Eichmann stated in court that he had always tried to abide by Immanuel Kant's categorical imperative (Arendt,135). Arendt argues that Eichmann had essentially taken the wrong lesson from Kant. Kant’s moral philosophy is so closely bound up with man’s faculty of judgment, which rules out blind obedience. Knowing this, we learn that Eichmann could not have just been going along with the Nazis without knowing anything that was going on or the consequences. Eichmann had not recognized the ‘golden rule’ and principle of reciprocity implicit in the categorical imperative, but had only understood the concept of one man's actions coinciding with general law. Eichmann attempted to follow the spirit of the laws he carried out, as if the legislator himself would approve. In Kant's formulation of the categorical imperative, the legislator is the moral self and all men are legislators. In other words, we are all taking on the roll of the leader. In Eichmann's formulation, the legislator was Hitler. Eichmann claimed this changed when he was charged with carrying out the Final Solution, at which point Arendt claims "he had ceased to live according to Kantian principles, that he had known it, and that he had consoled himself with the thoughts that he no longer 'was master of ...
The Milgram experiment was designed and performed by Yale University social psychologist Stanley Milgram in 1961. Milgram created this experiment predominately to determine what would have motivated Germans to so readily conform to the demands put forth by the Nazi party. Milgram wished to answer his question, “Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?” (McLeod). At the time of these experiments, debates about the Nuremberg trials, particularly the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the major perpetrators in the Holocaust, were still ongoing. At these trials, many Nazi party officials and military officers were put on trial for committing “crimes against humanity.” Although some defendants pleaded guilty, others claimed that they were innocent and only following orders that were given to them by a higher authority, Adolf Hitler. In the end, twelve of the defendants were sentenced to death, three to life in prison, four to approximately fifteen year prison terms, and three were acquitted (“The Nuremberg Trials”)....
“The Holocaust is the most investigated crime in history, as has often been pointed out in response to deniers. Eichmann may be that crime’s most investigated criminal” (Sells, Michael A.). Adolf Eichmann was one of the head Nazis. He had a lot of authority in enacting what Hitler had told the Nazis to do. He was just about as responsible as Hitler was for killing all of those innocent
Throughout the Nuremburg trials there were 8 judges. Only 24 Nazis were indicted for war crimes. Out of those 24 only 22 were tried. 1 of the 24 was not included due to his mental/ physical status and his son committed suicide before the trials. Approximately 200 Nazis were tried for various reasons including murder, maltreatment, abduction, enslavement, and robbery. Due to these charges most got off easily and did not have much of a punishment. During the trials survivors of the Holocaust stood in front of the court to share their stories and testify against the defense. Almost all of these stories were very emotional and had several of the people in the court rooms in tears. Because not everyone spoke the same language so they had translators that you could wear to hear someone translate it from one language to the other. Sometimes, with a couple of the stories people would take their headphones off so they didn’t have to hear any more of the gruesome story. There were 12 trials in total with the major trials being the Justice trial, Einsat trial, and the Poctors trial. Only 12 Nazis were sentenced to death through the entirety of the trials.
Following World War II, war trials convicted the criminals of their crimes. There were hundreds of trials that took place to punish the Nazi criminals. According to UnitedStatesHolocaustMemorialMuseum.org, “On December 17, 1942, the leaders of the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union issued the first joint declaration officially noting the mass murder of European Jews and resolving to prosecute those responsible for crimes against civilian populations.” The United Nations War Crimes Commission would be in charge of the trials. These trials took place all over Europe.Many of them were in Germany and were held by the country that was occupying Germany after the war. According to UnitedStatesHolocaustMemorialMuseum.org, “The IMT defined crimes against humanity as “murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation.” Most of the trials were with lower-level officials, and most of the first information we knew about concentration camps came from evidence and eyewitness accounts from these trials. Some of the specific trials were the Nuremberg trials, the Doctors trials, and the Auschwitz trials.
The main focus of the post war testimony of Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Hoess, Commandant at Auschwitz from May 1940 until December, 1943, is the mass extermination of Jews during World War II. His signed affidavit had a profound impact at the Post-War trials of Major War Criminals held at Nuremburg from November 14, 1945 to October 1, 1946. His testimony is a primary source that details and describes his personal account of the timeline, who ordered Auschwitz to become a death camp, and the means used to execute and exterminate millions of Jews. Obtained while tortured nearly to death under British custody, the authenticity and reliability of this document is questioned due to arguable inconsistencies that exist. However, the events sworn to in his testimony have been recounted and corroborated by witnesses and thousands of survivors.
The thoughtlessness in which Eichmann embodied in the courtroom, along with the normalcy he possesses, aids in the development of the enigmatic structure of the trial. Arendt's battle to find middle-ground between the idea of Eichmann as a common man attempting to fulfill objectives and his connection to the Nazi regime is what defies original theories on evil. The guilt Eichmann carries is clearly much larger than the man himself, especially one so simplistic and thoughtless. Therefore, the evil presented in Eichma...
“The four chief prosecutors of the International Military Tribunal (IMT)—Robert H. Jackson (United States), Francois de Menthon (France), Roman A. Rudenko (Soviet Union), and Sir Hartley Shawcross (Great Britain)—hand down indictments against 24 leading Nazi officials,” (“The Nuremberg Trials”). Alongside the judges stood A prosecutorial staff of over 600 Americans plus additional hundreds from the other three powers assembled and began interviewing potential witnesses and identifying documents from among the 100,000 captured for the prosecution case,” (Doug Linder). This was a time in history that really brought together the great nations and made them what they are
The Rosenberg trial's outcome was largely influenced by the political state at the time. The evidence held by the government wasn't much, but due to a combination of fear and political turmoil the evidence was more than enough to make their guilty verdict.
In 1933, the Chancellor of Germany, Adolf Hitler alongside the defendants consisting of a bracket of Nazi officials, doctors and lawyers, military officers, and German industrialists, were impeached for crimes against mortality and human nature. The Nuremberg trials brought Nazi criminals to their justice (Harvard University, Nuremberg Trials Project). The Nazi superior, Adolf Hitler, had committed suicide and was never conducted in these trials. The legal rationale of the cases at the time, were contentious. These trials were known as the benchmark of the creation of a permanent international court, and are today recognized as the catalyst of later instances of genocide and other crimes against humanity. Due to the effects of the trials, it is accurate to say that the sickening persecutions of the trials lack the characteristics of civility and democracy.
The Nuremberg Laws originated at a rally held by the NAZI Party in Nuremberg on September 15, 1935. The laws, which were divided into seven sections, were designed by Adolf Hitler himself (Britannica). The majority of the laws took effect in 1935, but every law was active by 1938 (USHMM). The purpose of the Nuremberg Laws was to take away the rights of the Jewish people living in NAZI Germany and to further promote the cause of the party, which was to blame Germany’s troubles on the Jews (Owlnet). Along with this, the Nuremberg Laws also were a source of propaganda for the regime.
The Nuremberg trials were a series of military tribunals that took place from November 20, 1954 to October 1, 1946. They were most notable for the prosecution of prominent members of the political, military, and economic leadership of Nazi Germany. Nazi Germany was responsible for the Holocaust, a program of genocide that consisted of “the deliberate annihilation of approximately 6 million European Jews before and during WWII” (Seltzer 512). As Telford Taylor, the Chief Counsel for War Crimes, wrote in 1949, “Nuremberg has been both hailed as a milestone in the evolution of international law and morality, and condemned as a wreaking of vengeance by the perversion of justice.” The legacy these trials leave behind is complex, and begs us to question our humanity and the laws that define our society. What was discovered in Nuremberg proves to be a chilling reminder of what the human mind is capable of and the weakness of the human psyche. Even the most seemingly normal person can be corrupted and manipulated by their thirst for power or their obedience to the status quo.