Eichmann Defence Plea Attacked

Press, Volume CI, Issue 29783, 28 March 1962, Page 10

Eichmann Defence Plea Attacked

(N .Z.P.zl.- Reuter—Copyripht)

JERUSALEM, March 27. Adolf Eichmann won his war on the massacre of European Jewry as the Third Reich “crumbled into ruins,” the Israel Supreme Court was told yesterday.

In a scathing attack on the grounds for Eichmann’s appeal against the death sentence for mass murder of Jews, the AttorneyGeneral (Mr Gideon Hausner) claimed that the defence arguments were “designed to delay justice and the execution of the sentence.” Mr Hausner said that after the deaths of 2,500,000 Jews at Auschwitz “no wonder that at the end of the war Eichmann expressed his satisfaction. He, at 'least, had not lost.” It was Eichmann's name that was singled out as the guilty one at the Nuremberg war trials, said the AttorneyGeneral. The Nuremberg tribunal “decisively found Eichmann guilty of the mass murder of six million Jews.”

Mr Hausner, answering the defence objection to the “illegal abduction” of Eichmann from Argentina in May, 1960, said the manner in which he was brought to Israel was irrelevant to the question of the Court's right to try him. “He is a fugitive from justice in 1« countries. Every one of them has jurisdiction to try him, but no country more than Israel,” Mr Hausner said. Not a single other country had demanded the

right to bring Eichmann to justice—not even West Germany, whose justice he now requested.

"Unsurpassed Cruelty”

“We have . . . produced evidence of unsurpassed and unexampled cruelty,” such as the case of 8700 Jewish families in Hungary -whom Hitler was prepared to allow to emigrate to Palestine. “But Eichmann fought even this waiver of Hitler’s,” Mr Hausner went on. Eichmann was prepared “to get” these families, too, even contrary to the Fuehrer's orders. Quoting from the autobiography of Rudolf Hoess, the commandant of Auschwitz, Mr Hausner pointed dramatically at Eichmann in his bullet-proof glass dock, and read:

“It seems one cannot say anything about the extermination camps without mentioning the name of Eichmann. He was convinced he could obtain the biological extermination of European Jews, in such a way as to make it impossible for Jewry ever to recover from the blow.”