More than 60 years after the trial of Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann, and more than 80 years after the end of World War II and the Holocaust, many believed that antisemitism would already be dead. But it is more alive than ever, and Zevi Ghivelder, one of the only journalists who covered Eichmann’s trial in person who is still alive, is here to prove it.
A Jewish Brazilian journalist, Ghivelder had to beg his editor to allow him to cover the trial, as he was still a rookie with only two years of experience behind him. As one of the very few Jewish journalists at Manchete magazine, he asked so many times to be sent to Israel for the event that his boss finally agreed, he told The Jerusalem Report.
Watching history
On the verge of his 27th birthday, Ghivelder was the youngest of the 200 foreign correspondents covering Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem. The proceedings began on April 11, 1961, a day Ghivelder said he will “never forget.” His first memories of the trial sessions were of watching a German lawyer argue that Israel had no right to judge Eichmann, since the state had no formal jurisdiction to conduct the trial.
The Nazi criminal was born in Austria, served in the German army, committed his crimes in Germany, Hungary, Poland, and other European countries, and then fled to hide in Argentina, where he was arrested. One of the most extraordinary aspects of his trial was therefore the decision on how jurisdiction would be applied.
For the first, and, to this day, the last time, a criminal was judged according to the jurisdiction of his victims. Since they were mostly Jews, and Israel is the Jewish state, Jerusalem was chosen to be the stage of the trial.
Ghivelder covered the trial sessions for six weeks, coming to know every corner of the courtroom and every expression on Eichmann’s face. His conclusion was clear: there was no “only following orders” in the Nazi’s deeds, but rather an “intention, meticulous and systematic organization for the slaughter of Jews in Europe,” Ghivelder told the Report.
He highlighted something that not many people mention: Eichmann began attending to the “Jewish issue” in 1937, before the war started. That year, the Nazi criminal traveled to Israel, which at the time was still called Palestine, in order to see “what the Jewish people were doing there,” he said.
According to him, Eichmann was “well-versed in the Jewish subject,” Ghivelder explained to the Report, adding that the Nazi criminal used to be fascinated by the Jewish dynamic in Palestine. Because he knew every aspect of Jewish life, by the time he executed the Final Solution, Eichmann knew exactly how, when, and why he was acting. “There was no banality of evil, there was a perversity of evil,” Ghivelder said.
Ghivelder shared that, some time later during the trial, he came to know the officer who had arrested Eichmann in Argentina in 1960: Peter Zvi Malkin, of the Mossad. He noted that, after being arrested and brought to the car, Eichmann’s first sentence was “you’re from Israel, aren’t you,” proving that he knew the Jews were behind his arrest.
Regarding the interrogation, also conducted by Malkin, Ghivelder told the Report that the Mossad agent had shared with him that, while talking to Eichmann back in Argentina, he confessed to the Nazi criminal that his own sister and two nephews had been slaughtered in concentration camps during the Holocaust.
In response, Ghivelder recalls, Eichmann said to Malkin: “Ok, they died, but they were Jewish, after all,” he said, emphasizing that the Nazi leader truly believed that the Jewish people needed to die.
Ghivelder relayed to the Report one intriguing aspect of the press coverage of the trial in the 1960s. The trial began on April 11, so one would have expected it to appear on the front page of every newspaper on April 12. But that was not the case.
“It was placed on the third, even fourth page. Because the world editor’s choice was to place Gagarin’s trip to space, since it was the first ever mission to space.” Would that be a sign of antisemitism? Maybe, but we will never know, Ghivelder said.
Power of testimony
For him, the most touching moment was when the poet Abba Kovner shared his story with the public during one of the trial sessions. “He was one of the leaders of the Vilna ghetto uprising, and he told everyone about the story of the uprising. After he spoke, suddenly the world got to know that the Jews were not only passive regarding their slaughter during the Holocaust,” Ghivelder told the Report.
The Eichmann trial remains, to this day, engraved on Zevi Ghivelder’s heart and mind.
After watching, for the first time, dozens of harrowing stories told from the very mouths of Holocaust survivors who had seen death before their eyes just a few years earlier, the journalist learned a lesson: “the Holocaust survivors’ testimonies, in my opinion, demonstrated to what extent human beings can degrade themselves to commit such a crime. I would say it is almost impossible to imagine a human being reaching this level of human degradation and inhumanity.”■