The Artist and the Monster: Two Stories and Six Million Jews

Adolph Eichmann – the Monster

It’s always more comfortable to imagine our monsters in some alien guise, on a scale so horrific that there’s no danger of confusing them with our own humankind. But think again. Isn’t it much deadlier to discover they are so well camouflaged as to appear downright ordinary? Such is the case with Adolph Eichmann, the man who was singlehandedly responsible for carrying out the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question” — the annihilation of 6,000,000 Jews and its success.

In director Michael Prazan’s 2011 documentary, The Trial of Adolph Eichmann from France, the flat gray tones from his camera footage of the 1961 trial fall like so many ashes over the eyes of the viewer. The vitality and robustness of color has no place here or anywhere else in the memories and surrounding story to be told. The most effective tool that Prazan uses to grab the viewer’s attention is the pacing. The interspersing of action shots of Eichmann’s capture, or a relevant interview judiciously tied to Eichmann’s crimes is a relief from the trial room itself.

The trial setting is the Beit Ha’am auditorium, now known as the Gerard Behar Center in downtown Jerusalem. The three judges sit on a high dais above the gathered prosecution and defense attorneys, witnesses, and the newsmen and women from around the globe. There will be a small array of witnesses to watch and a number of mise-en-scènes, such as the earlier kidnapping, newsreel coverage of David Ben-Gurion, the nation’s leader, and other trial participants — even the set-up of the TV studio prior to the trial itself — but the chief focus is on the thin, balding, 55-year-old man who looks more like an unassuming bank clerk than a butcher.

There’s no question that the power of this documentary for the viewer is in observing the accused. His long nose, jutting ears and pursed lips, the diminutive contour of his body, bear little resemblance to the Aryan blonde model so celebrated in a Third Reich documentary by Leni Riefenstahl. But as one of the onlookers admitted, for eight months of the trial he appeared so dispassionate, “his face became an icon for the German fascist machine.” Still, the giveaway to his own reaction to the event was an almost involuntary smirk, which started at the corner of his mouth and stayed put for several seconds during an interrogation.

Prazan shows us a director by the name of Leo Hurwitz who was hired to “create the technique of TV” with four cameras only. Perhaps it was those limitations that kept at least one of those cameras steady on Eichmann, and in the background, one of the guards outside the booth observing him with a steely-eyed expression that can only be seen to be believed. In this instance, pacing is irrelevant. It’s as if the director wanted us to do nothing but look — and wait — for the man in the booth to squirm. Today, the pacing would be inevitably quicker; the full spectrum of color available — not to mention commercial interruption — would give an almost glossy, false overlay to the proceedings.

Even in 1961, Ben-Gurion was against TV in the Israeli home, but made the trial an exception. Special equipment was designed, which led at trial’s end to 1,000 miles of videotape, and a viewership in 56 countries with TV and 36 countries that could view the proceedings in their local movie theatre.

Director Prazan is no stranger to his subject. He has dedicated his professional life to focusing on human atrocities. Living for several years in Japan, one of his first films focused on the Nanking Massacre. A recent film worth of note is Einsatzgruppen: The Death Brigade, which details the extermination of Eastern European Jews by bullets, a prelude to the later mass exterminations in Nazi death camps in occupied Poland.

In the present documentary, two trial moments are particularly chilling. In one, the witness has described the fate of orphans who are about to be deported and their disorientation. Afterwards, the rather large, square-shouldered man turns away from the stand and faints on the spot. In another instance, a witness describes the beating of a young boy 80 times; the boy later saying that the number of lashes was judged to be his own confusion between reality and fantasy, and that comment was the 81 blow for him. Then the witness points out a young man, Mickey Goldman, who sits at the trial, now as one of the prosecutors from Warsaw, his sleeve rolled up to show his camp number tattoo. It’s the same person. It’s worth noting that in the Nuremberg trials of 1946, no victim testimony was allowed.

Narrative descriptions of Eichmann’s capture in Buenos Aires and gritty dramatized footage depicting the event are almost as riveting. Going under the pseudonym of Ricardo Klement, he lived and worked in Argentina for 10 years before being kidnapped. He was drugged by the Mossad, an Israeli intelligence organization abroad, dressed as an employee of the El Al Airlines, and put aboard for his trial. The director has also objectively included man-on-the-street interviews with Berlin citizens and others at the time of the trial, who felt that the kidnapping was wrong and that Eichmann should have been tried in an international court.

It’s hard to believe that any court would not have meted out justice to the overwhelming evidence presented. Hermann Goering, a top Nazi during the Nuremberg trials, was quite clear on the matter of Eichmann’s guilt. Michael A. Musmanno, a U.S. naval officer and judge, questioned the defendants at that trial and said that Goering made it very clear that Eichmann was “the man to determine, in what order, in what countries, the Jews were to die.”

Eichmann was hanged shortly before midnight on May 31, 1962. According to David Cesarani, a leading Holocaust historian, he said the following: “Long live Germany. Long live Argentina. Long live Austria. These are the three countries with which I have been most connected and which I will not forget. I greet my wife, my family, and my friends. I am ready. We’ll meet again soon, as is the fate of all men. I die believing in God.”

The question is, does God believe in Eichmann?

Rating: 4 out of 4 stars