Demjanjuk Trial Was About Memory, Not a Man

In April 1961, an Israeli court in Jerusalem assembled to determine the responsibility of Adolf Eichmann, a former senior Nazi official, for the transportation of European Jews to concentration camps and death camps in the Third Reich, among other crimes. That the prosecution, 16 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, of a single if prominent Nazi official rivaled the Allies' expansive postwar tribunal in its moral drama was as much a testament to the conduct of the trial as to the identity of the plaintiff. Israeli prosecutors presented their case as a reckoning not just with Eichmann's crimes, but with the total legacy of the Holocaust as well. In an interview with an Israeli newspaper at the time of the trial, David Ben-Gurion said that the way the trial educated the public would be its most enduring contribution: “...Eichmann's personal fate is unimportant,” he said. “It is the unveiling of the entire extermination program against the Jews that matters.”