The Eichmann Trial

Award-winning historian Deborah Lipstadt gives us a com-pelling reassessment of the groundbreaking trial that has become a touchstone for judicial proceedings throughout the world in which victims of genocide confront its perpetrators.

The capture of SS Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Eich-mann by Israeli agents in Argentina in May of 1960 and his subsequent trial in Tel Aviv by an Israeli court electrified the world. The public debate it sparked on where, how, and by whom Nazi war criminals should be brought to justice, and the international media cov-erage of the trial itself, is recognized as a watershed moment in how the civilized world in general and Ho-locaust survivors in particular found the means to deal with the legacy of genocide on a scale that had never been seen before.

In The Eichmann Trial, award-winning historian Deborah Lipstadt gives us an overview of the trial and analyzes the dramatic effect that the testimony of sur-vivors in a court of law--which was itself not without controversy--had on a world that had until then regu-larly commemorated the Holocaust but never fully understood the millions who died and the hundreds of thousands who managed to survive.

As the world continues to confront the ongoing reality of genocide and ponder the fate of those who survive it, this trial of the century offers a legal, moral, and political framework for coming to terms with unfathomable evil and with those who perpe-trate it. In The Eichmann Trial, Lipstadt infuses a gripping narrative with historical perspective and con-temporary urgency.

From the Hardcover edition.

The National Jewish Book Award-winning author of History on Trial presents a reassessment of the groundbreaking 1960 trial of Nazi SS Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Eichmann by an Israeli court while exploring the controversial processes it introduced and its reflection of world views on genocide.

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Deborah E. Lipstadt is Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies at Emory University. She is the author of History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving (a National Jewish Book Award winner); Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory; and Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust, 1933–1945. She lives in Atlanta.

Introduction — The Eichmann trial — Chronology.