Justice Gabriel Bach relives his prosecution of Adolf Eichmann
Bach was a lawyer in the State Prosecutor’s office when the chief architect of Adolf Hitler’s “Final Solution” to exterminate Europe’s Jews was seized by Israeli secret agents in Argentina. And a year later — 60 years ago this month — as the Eichmann trial got underway and Israelis finally confronted the enormity of the atrocities buried deep in survivors’ souls for over 15 years, it was Gavriel Bach who took center stage.
The 94-year-old retired Supreme Court justice remembers the phone call from Israeli Justice Minister Pinchas Rosen soon after Eichmann’s capture. Rosen asked that the German-born Bach serve as deputy prosecutor in the case under attorney general Gideon Hausner, but had another request as well — that he be in charge of the entire pre-trial investigation. And there was something else too: For the coming months, Bach would serve as the liaison between the arch-murderer and the outside.
Around the world, millions waited for the trial with bated breath. The staggering agony of the Holocaust, which survivors until then were reluctant to speak about, especially in Israel where “non-heroic” survivors (those who weren’t partisans or didn’t participate in resistance operations) were treated with scorn and derision — suddenly exploded with unfathomable pain. The long, tortuous trial period during the summer of 1961 was perhaps the first psychological attempt for Israeli society, as a collective, to process the horror.
Bach, who agreed to take the mission, was a natural choice. He was fluent in German and had already proven himself as a top-notch jurist in several high-profile cases over the previous decade, including the famous Kastner trial of the 1950s, in which government employee and former Hungarian community leader Rudolf Kastner was accused of being a Nazi collaborator and judged for having “sold his soul to the devil.”
Create a free account to keep reading.
