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THE MOVIE
Just 15 years after the end of World War II, the Holocaust was already
considered ancient history. Barely taught in high school or college courses, the
attempted extermination of the Jewish people had been largely forgotten outside of the still-young refuge of Israel. All that changed on May 11, 1960 when Adolf Eichmann, a former Nazi officer hiding in Argentina, was captured and whisked to Jerusalem to stand trial. Over the course of a nearly four-month proceeding, filmed in its entirety and broadcast worldwide on television, many learned for the first time about the extent and horror of Nazi atrocities. During Eichmann’s fiery cross-examination, a debate over disobedience to orders and the banality of evil began which continues to this day.
Told entirely through archival footage of the trial itself and contemporaneous news coverage, The Eichmann Trial documents one of the most shocking trials in history, and the birth of Holocaust awareness and education.
The Eichmann Trial premiered at the Miami Jewish Film Festival in 2023, and was released in Digital HD in 2024 by Virgil Films (‘Glen Campbell: I’ll Be Me’, 'Restrepo’).
THE TRIAL
Adolf Eichmann, a former Nazi officer, was discovered in hiding in Argentina by Mossad, Israel’s secret service, in the late 1950s. He was captured and taken back to Israel by Mossad agents in 1960. In 1961, he was put on trial before a specially-convened tribunal in a newly-constructed theater in Jerusalem.
The case immediately became one of the year’s biggest news stories, with hundreds of reporters from every major country descending upon Jerusalem to document the proceedings.
Three respected Israeli judges presided: Presiding Judge Moshe Landau, Benjamin Halevi and Yitzhak Raveh. Israeli Attorney General Gideon Hausner served as Chief Prosecutor, along with a team of Israeli lawyers assisting in the gathering of evidence and conducting direct examinations of witnesses. Most prominent among these were Gabriel Bach and Jonathan Bar-Or. German lawyer Robert Servatius, who had defended some of the defendants at the Nuremberg trials more than a decade before, was chosen by Eichmann’s family as Defense Counsel after no Israeli lawyer would agree to represent the ex-Nazi. Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, passed a special law allowing counsel from an outside country to represent the defendant in this particular instance.
Eichmann was charged with 15 counts under the Nazi and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law, a 1950 law of the State of Israel that specified the death penalty as a possible sentence. Although Israel had abolished the death penalty in 1954, the Supreme Court determined after a series of pre-trial motions that it was still applicable under this law.
The trial began in April and continued through August. After a lengthy recess for the judges’ deliberations, it resumed in December for Eichmann’s verdict and sentencing.
WATCH THE TRIAL
In conjunction with the release of The Eichmann Trial, a new YouTube channel will host the surviving recordings of the trial itself. This marks the most complete version of the trial recording ever assembled, and the first time that the footage has been made available to the public in chronological order, with English subtitles and a searchable transcript.
Interested audiences will now be able to easily locate key moments in the trial, watch the trial as it unfolded and better understand the significance of this historical event and its ramifications for today. The first nineteen sessions of the trial are available now, with additional sessions to be added weekly throughout 2024.
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