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University Daily Kansan Tuesday, Jan. 9, 1962
Eichmann a Symbol
Adolph Eichmann has been sentenced to hang for "crimes against humanity, crimes against the Jewish people, a war crime, and membership in an illegal organization."
His trial was not that of a man, but that of a symbol—a symbol of the torture and persecution of the Jews during World War II.
THE THEORY BEHIND the trial was an "eye for an eye" to obliterate a memory of horror for the Jews.
Yet Eichmann's death sentence by an emotion-ridden court cannot possibly serve this function. Eichmann will become a martyr to all men who believe in due process of law.
He was seized in Argentina 16 years after the alleged commission of his crimes. He was tried in Israel by Israeli jurists, under a set of special Israeli laws enacted after his crimes. Four Germans, former members of the SS who were to testify in Eichmann's behalf, were forced to stay out of Israel under threat of arrest. Israeli laws against the SS also were enacted after the war.
THE PROSECUTOR, Gideon Hausner, attorney general of Israel, insisted that Eichmann could be tried in Israel because neither the West German government nor any other state had claimed the right.
The question of Israeli law providing punishment for crimes committed prior to the establishment of the state of Israel, outside its borders, and by and to persons who are not citizens of the state of Israel also was replied to by Hausner:
"Goodhart (an Oxford University professor who wrote about the Nuernberg Tribunal) showed that if judges may not judge their country's enemies, then no spy will ever be brought to justice," he said.
THE ARGUMENT THAT EICHMANN was illegally kidnapped was non-essential, said Hausner. He cited British, American, and French legal
precedents to the effect that a court is not concerned about the methods used to bring a defendant before it even if it involves kidnapping.
The crux of the purpose of the trial was perhaps given by Hausner in one of his speechesreplying to the defense argument that reparationshad been paid to Israel by West Germany, andthat this paid for its war crimes.
"I want to say with all the emphasis at my command that reparations are not atonement, their acceptance does not mean forgiveness nor obliteration of the facts in one's memory," Hausner said.
EICHMANN'S TRIAL to "obliterate a memory" barely kept up the pretense of a legal proceeding. From the start, mass emotionalism reigned.
Survivors of the German concentration camps, visibly scarred by their experiences, went before the court. Others testified about how they had watched tortures and mass burials. Hausner showed movies during the trial of Nazi atrocities.
Implicit in every bit of emotional testimony was the causal relationship set up by the prosecution that Eichmann was directly responsible. There was an assumption from the start that Eichmann was guilty. All that remained was to determine the extent of his guilt.
THE PROSECUTION CHARGED that Eichmann was the mastermind behind a plot to eliminate European Jewry. Eichmann, a lieutenant colonel in the German army, contended he was merely carrying out orders from above.
The trial ended with Eichmann's sentence "to hang by the neck until dead."
It is a harsh sentence, but Eichmann is "obliterating a memory." He will not die for his crimes, but the crimes of a nation. Would it not be absurd to give him anything but a death sentence? —Karl Koch
Eichmann: Lesson for Humanity
The Nuremberg tribunal on the war crimes of nazism found nobody to convict specifically for the most unspeakable crime of genocide — the Nazi extermination of six million Jews. Now the Israeli government has accomplished its grim purpose to fill that gap, by its own capture and trial of Adolf Eichmann.
THE CASE raised doubts and fears, shared even by many citizens and friends of Israel. These have generally subsided, or been allayed by the fairness and thoroughness of the trial and of the opportunity for defense.
Far from arousing new anti-Semitism, the trial won new admiration. Far from becoming a circus, it leaned the opposite way to the point of tedium. Far from inciting Israelis to hate Germans, they know best of all, now better than ever, how wrong and stupid it is to hate individual members of any people or race for belonging to it.
GENUINELY WORRISOME to the legal minded were Israel's abduction of Eichmann from Argentina and its unilateral proceeding against him under retroactive domestic law. But the moral right-
LITTLE MAN ON CAMPUS by Dick Bibler
ness of bringing him to such justice as there can be for such a crime as genocide is accepted. And the precedent of trying and punishing it is an historic one.
"DO IT OVER AGAIN---- I TOLD YOU I WOULD NOT ACCEPT A MESSY PAPER."
The four months' trial was the thing, Israel's avowed purpose was to document completely, while records and witnesses could still be had, just how monstrous and barbarous Hitler's pogrom was, to teach for all time its ghastly moral against all race hatred.
Another target was Germany's postwar generation, to make sure that they, too, gained full grasp of the enormities of nazism and German master racism. The effect here seems to have been all that could be hoped; West German government and press brought the trial story home in detail and open shame.
ONE TARGET WAS ISRAEL'S own postwar generation, who had not themselves been human cattle in Hitler's grisly stockyards. It suited the national purpose of a Jewish state to paint the picture raw to its own people, and it took the machinery of law to impress belief in the unbelievable.
But the target was all humanity, too, and not only to assuage Israeli distress that the world, even other Jewry, had seemed too readily to forget how near to the surface of human nature savagery lies. The crime was against humanity itself, and nobody anywhere can quite wash from his hands the stain of it. Even Eichmann's own plea, that a man can find himself a cog in a machine of madness and power lust, his conscience chained and helpless, warns all men everywhere.
THE TRIAL HAVING served these purposes, what happens to Eichmann himself is supremely unimportant to any such purpose.
—From the Milwaukee Journal
Short Ones
Marriage is popular because it combines the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity.-George Bernard Shaw
The Book World
By Mark Dull
By Mark Dull Kansas City graduate student
DRAGON'S TEETH, by Upton Sinclair. Permabook, December, 1961, publication date. First Viking Press printing published January, 1942. 75 cents.
I know they (books) are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous dragons teeth; and being sown up and down may chance to spring up armed men. And yet on the other hand unless wariness be used, as good almost kill a man as kill a good book; who kills a man kills a reasonable creature; but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye...
From John Milton's "Areopagitica"
Upton Sinclair, writing about that explosive era you will remember depicted in Robert Sherwood's drama "Idiot's Delight," has re-created in "Dragon's Teeth" a great panoramic spectacle of the tragic and infamous beginnings of Adolph Hitler's Third Reich.
IT IS THE THIRD VOLUME in the story of Lanny Budd, millionaire playboy with a "pink" complexion ("World's End," 1940; "Between Two Worlds," 1941). Lanny Budd is the mouthpiece and conscience of social justice and is working hard at developing some backbone for the cause.
It is a revealing portrait of the master propagandist Joseph Goering, of Hermann Goebbels, the master executive with an insatiable vanity, and of the Austrian house painter whose father was an illegitimate Schicklegreuber, ADOLPH HITLER.
You might have searched all Europe and not found a more commonplace-appearing man; this Fuhrer of the Fatherland had everything it took to make mediocrity... he might have been a grocery assistant or traveling salesman for a hair tonic. He took no exercise, and his figure was soft, his shoulders narrow and hips wide like a woman's. The exponent of Aryan purity was a mongrel if ever there was one; he had straight stick dark hair and wore one lock of it long and Lanny had done when a boy.
Dragon's Teeth is also a very readable history—from 1930 to 1934 of—
NAZI GERMANY.
SINCLAIR'S OWN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, written into much of this work, is tempered with the condition of the world following the depression and gives a strong argument for an economic system based on
So Lanny, the compromiser, trying to soothe the young people, and persuade them that they could go on eating their food in the Berlin palace without being choked. Including himself, here were five persons condemned to dwell in marble halls—and outside were five millions, yes, five hundred millions, looking upon them as the most to be envied of all mortals: Five dwellers begging to be kicked out of their marble halls, and for some strange reason unable to persuade the envious millions to act! More than a century ago a poet, himself a child of privilege, had called upon them to rise like lions after slumber in unvanguishable number; but still the many slept and the few ruled, and the chains which were like dew retained the weight of lead!
SOCIALISM.
POSSIBLY MANY MODERN STUDENTS are not very well acquainted with this writer who in 1942 was the most-read American author. There were in 1942,722 translations of his books in 47 languages, and in 39 countries."Dragon's Teeth," which many critics feel is his best work, is his 63rd book.
Upton Beall Sinclair was born in Baltimore in 1878 of an unsuccessful branch of an old, wealthy, and powerful family, the son of a liquor salesman who was overly fond of his product.
He worked his way through college writing hack novels for pulp magazines.
A zealous socialist from the time he was 20, most of the money he earned from his successful novels has been invested in socialist experiments and publishing his works, which other publishers could not be interested in.
IN 1934 HE RAN FOR GOVERNOR of California on the Democratic ticket with an "End Poverty In California" platform. Determined opposition and unlimited resources of the business interests barely stayed his election.
His books are classified as propaganda tracts and economic reports. His "The Jungle," published in 1906 after an investigation of Meat packing methods were improved following publication of his him one of the best known muckraking journalists of that era. Meat packing methods were improved following publication of his book but the lot of the workers was unchanged for many years. As he said, he aimed at people's hearts and hit their stomachs.