The Nuremberg trials, and the men who were never tried.

He was appointed. On January 30, 1933, President Paul von Hindenburg named Adolf Hitler chancellor of Germany. Under the constitution of 1919 the chancellor was chosen by the president, not the electorate. There was no national vote for the office. Hindenburg signed. That was the mechanism.

Weimar was built to be representative and turned out to be ungovernable. Seats went out proportionally, so a party with 0.8 percent of the vote took four of them. Article 48 let the president suspend named civil liberties and legislate without parliament, and Hindenburg was using it routinely from July 1930. Government without a parliamentary majority was normal in Germany before a Nazi held office in it. The far right had its grievance ready: territory lost at Versailles, an army capped at 100,000 men, and a lost war that Germany's own retired generals blamed on subversion at home.

In January 1920 the mark stood at 64.8 to the U.S. dollar. By November 1923 it stood at 4,200,000,000,000 to one. That same month Hitler and the Nazi Party tried to seize the Bavarian state government and march on Berlin. Munich police stopped the column in the city center on November 9.

Hitler was tried for high treason before the Munich People's Court from February 26 to April 1, 1924, and convicted. He got five years of Festungshaft, fortress confinement without hard labor, and a 200 gold mark fine. Five years was the statutory minimum, with probation held out after six further months. He was an Austrian citizen, and the law required deporting foreign nationals convicted of high treason. The court expressly declined. He walked out on December 20, 1924, having served about nine months, with the manuscript of a book.

Franz Eher Verlag published the first volume of Mein Kampf in 1925 and the second in 1926. The antisemitism and the plan to take living space in eastern Europe are in it, stated openly. Fewer than 230,000 copies sold by the end of 1932; more than 850,000 sold in 1933 alone. The intentions were on the record for eight years and nobody who could have acted treated them as disqualifying.

Registered unemployment rose from about 1.9 million in 1929 to about 5.6 million in 1932, peaking at 6,128,429 that February. The Nazi vote climbed with the collapse, then stopped while the collapse went on. Unemployment was still above five million in November 1932 and the vote fell 4.3 points, costing the party 34 seats and roughly two million votes. Hitler was appointed chancellor 85 days after that defeat.

It was arranged in private. Kurt von Schleicher resigned as chancellor on January 28, 1933, after Hindenburg refused to let him govern by decree. Franz von Papen brokered the deal and said that within two months they would have Hitler pushed so far into the corner that he would squeak. Alfred Hugenberg brought in the German National People's Party and later called it the greatest stupidity of his life. The cabinet sworn in on January 30 held two Nazis besides Hitler: Wilhelm Frick at the Interior Ministry, and Hermann Göring as minister without portfolio and acting Prussian Interior Minister, which handed the largest police force in Germany to the party. Everyone else was a conservative. Four days later Hitler had Hindenburg dissolve the Reichstag.

Endlösung der Judenfrage. Final Solution to the Jewish Question. It was the German government's own name for what it was doing, and what it was doing was the deliberate, systematic murder of the Jews of Europe.

The Nazis did not invent the phrase. It comes out of nineteenth-century antisemitic writing, where a solution to the Jewish question already covered everything from emigration to expulsion to biological elimination. Eugen Dühring used it in 1881. Johann Friedrich Heman published a book in 1897 called The Path to a Definitive Solution to the Jewish Question. Johann Chapoutot, who traces that lineage, attaches a warning to it: the vocabulary was 60 years old and had not produced Treblinka.

In documented Nazi use before mid-1941 the phrase meant a territorial solution. Move the Jews somewhere. Then it stopped meaning that.

For eight years the policy was to get Jews out. Yad Vashem describes the aim of those first years as removal from German soil, and the method was to make life in Germany unbearable enough that Jews would leave. In late 1939 Eichmann and Franz Stahlecker proposed pushing Jews into the Lublin district of occupied Poland, with a transit camp at Nisko. The first transport took 901 people out of Bohemia and Moravia on October 18, 1939. The camp closed in April 1940. Madagascar came next. That one was not a German idea; British, Dutch and Polish antisemites had been floating it since the First World War. It needed control of the sea, and Germany lost the Battle of Britain. In October 1941 emigration was banned for every Jew in German-controlled territory. Nisko was Eichmann's. Two years later Stahlecker commanded Einsatzgruppe A.

Six million Jewish men, women and children were murdered. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum states it in those words. The figure is not copied out of a German ledger, because no single Nazi document accounts for every death. It is built from hundreds of thousands of pages of German records set against prewar and postwar demographic data.

Nazi Germany operated five killing centers: Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka and Auschwitz-Birkenau. People were killed there with poison gas, in sealed chambers or in vans. The Museum places approximately 2.7 million of the Jewish dead in the killing centers, about 2 million in mass shootings, between 800,000 and 1,000,000 in ghettos and camps, and at least 250,000 in other acts of violence.

Independent calculations land between five and six million, and the spread is a question of where the accounting stops, not of whether the murders happened. Yad Vashem says so without softening it: "There is no precise figure for the number of Jews killed in the Shoah," and "Most research confirms that the number of victims was between five and six million." The lowest calculation is also the oldest. Raul Hilberg's Destruction of the European Jews first appeared in 1961, and he came to 5.1 million. Yad Vashem groups it with the demographer Jacob Leschinsky's 5.95 million as early work. Israel Gutman and Robert Rozett, in Yad Vashem's Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, give 5.59 to 5.86 million against a prewar Jewish population of 9,797,000 in the countries affected, and their table leaves some territories out. A study headed by Wolfgang Benz gives 5.29 million to 6 million.

The figures rest on prewar censuses compared with postwar censuses and population estimates, read against the German records made at the time: the daily reports of the killing units, the deportation lists. Borders moved before, during and after the war, and Yad Vashem notes that this alone makes the victims hard to enumerate country by country. Move the boundary and the total moves with it.

Yad Vashem also records where the number in ordinary use came from. "The figure commonly used is six million quoted by Adolf Eichmann, a senior SS official." Eichmann ran the deportations. Six million is the number he gave.

There is a fourth line of evidence, and it is a list of names. Yad Vashem has spent seven decades recovering them one at a time, about 2.8 million from Pages of Testimony. As of November 11, 2025 the count stood at five million. An estimated one million names are still unknown, and many will never be recovered. Five million of the six million have a name.

The Final Solution meant the Jews. Yad Vashem keeps that category separate because only the Jews were marked for annihilation in their entirety. The Germans killed other people in enormous numbers under other headings, each with its own reason and its own figure.

Historians estimate that the Germans and their allies killed at least 250,000 European Roma, and some put the full toll near 500,000. Yad Vashem gives 200,000 to over 500,000. The range is that wide because nobody knows how many Roma lived in Europe before the war and because the killings were recorded late. About 23,000 Roma and Sinti were deported to Auschwitz and about 21,000 died there, most of them murdered when the SS liquidated the compound on August 2, 1944.

Some 5.7 million Soviet soldiers fell into German hands. By the end of the war 3.3 million of them, about 57 percent, were dead from starvation, exposure, disease and shooting. From the middle of July 1941 those prisoners were screened for "politically and racially intolerable elements," a category that took in every Jew among them. A decree of September 8, 1941 declared that the use of arms against Soviet prisoners was as a rule to be regarded as legal.

The Germans killed between 1.8 and 1.9 million non-Jewish Polish civilians. In the spring of 1940 the AB-Aktion went after the Poles the occupiers classed as a leadership class, shooting thousands of teachers, priests and other intellectuals. More than 310,000 Serb civilians were killed.

The gassing started with disabled people. T4's own accounting recorded 70,273 institutionalized disabled patients killed at six gassing facilities between January 1940 and August 1941, and the Museum puts the program's toll in all its phases at 250,000 to 300,000. Most of the German staff at Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka came out of that program.

Jehovah's Witnesses were persecuted for what they refused to do, which was swear allegiance to the state or carry a weapon for it. At least 3,000 were sent to concentration camps, about 1,000 German Witnesses died in camps and prisons along with 400 from other countries, and at least 273 were sentenced to death by military courts and executed for refusing to serve. Under Paragraph 175 the police made roughly 100,000 arrests of men for homosexuality, about 53,400 of which ended in conviction, and between 5,000 and 15,000 men were sent to concentration camps as homosexual offenders.

No document has been found in which Hitler orders the murder of the Jews of Europe, and historians do not agree on when the decision was taken. Richard Breitman argues for a fundamental decision in early 1941. Philippe Burrin puts the turn in September of that year, Christopher Browning in October, Christian Gerlach in December, after the United States entered the war. Peter Longerich holds that the process was not concluded until the spring or summer of 1942, that hunting for one decision is the wrong exercise, and that Nisko and Madagascar were never an alternative to mass death but a slower form of it. That last is a minority reading. The Museum's encyclopedia says instead that those schemes were simply too hard to carry out. It declines to name a decision date at all.

The disagreement took its present shape in the 1990s, when regional archives in the former Soviet Union, Poland and East Germany opened and produced a flood of local evidence and no smoking gun.

The record is thin because it was made thin. The perpetrators destroyed most of it on purpose, and the pages that survived were written in camouflage. The Wannsee protocol of January 20, 1942 records that evacuation of the Jews to the East has now taken the place of emigration. Evacuation to the East meant Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka.

Germany invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. From the beginning of operational planning, German military and police authorities intended a war of annihilation against the Soviet state and its citizens, and particularly against Jews.

On June 6, 16 days before the invasion, the Armed Forces High Command issued the Guidelines for the Treatment of Political Commissars. Captured Soviet political officers were to be separated out and shot on principle. It was rescinded in May 1942, once field commanders reported it was stiffening Soviet resistance.

Four battalion-sized units, lettered A through D, followed the army in. A crossed Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia toward Leningrad. B went east from Warsaw through Belorussia toward Smolensk. C started near Krakow and crossed Ukraine toward Kyiv. D worked the south. All four reported to the Reich Security Main Office in Berlin, and together they numbered about 3,000 men. Order Police battalions, Waffen-SS units, Wehrmacht units and local auxiliaries carried out massacres too.

No master plan for killing all Jews existed before the invasion. The first Lithuanian killings were begun by local German SS and police officers; Stahlecker, Heydrich and Himmler were told afterward and agreed afterward. At first the units shot Jewish men of military age. By August 1941 they were killing whole communities regardless of age or sex, first on a mass scale in Lithuania.

On September 29 and 30, 1941, on the eve of Yom Kippur, Sonderkommando 4a of Einsatzgruppe C, under SS-Standartenführer Paul Blobel, with German police units and local auxiliaries, shot the Jews of Kyiv in small groups at a ravine called Babyn Yar. The count is 33,771. It is that precise because the killers counted, and reported the count to Einsatzgruppen headquarters in Berlin. The number exists because the men who did it wanted Berlin to know how much they had done.

SS-Standartenführer Karl Jäger commanded Einsatzkommando 3, which covered most of Lithuania. On December 1, 1941 he wrote up what his men had done: place by place, date by date, more than a hundred massacres in five months, men, women and children counted in separate columns. "I can confirm today," he wrote, "that Einsatzkommando 3 has achieved the goal of solving the Jewish problem in Lithuania." He called mass execution "an organizational question."

The grand total at the foot of the report, 137,346, does not survive checking. Antonia Tejeda Barros recounted the line items and published the result in Historiografias in 2025: they come to 137,448, of whom 135,392 were Jews. Jürgen Matthäus, writing for the Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2005 and counting through February 1942, gives 138,272 executed. Roughly 137,000 killings in five months in one country.

A month after Jäger typed his report, about 150 young people crowded into a kitchen at 2 Strashun Street in the Vilna ghetto and heard a page read aloud in Hebrew and Yiddish. Abba Kovner had written it. He was 23, and an art student until the German invasion stopped his studies.

Couriers carried it out of Vilna to the ghettos of Poland, Lithuania and Belorussia. Most of them were women.

One third of all Jewish victims of the Holocaust were killed by shooting. What ended the shooting phase where it ended was not conscience. The German sources record complaints that shooting was inefficient, hard to keep secret and wasteful of ammunition needed at the front, and that it was affecting the shooters. Gassing, Nazi authorities argued, was more humane for the perpetrators. The victims are not in that sentence.

Gas vans were paneled trucks with the exhaust piped into a sealed rear compartment, in use by autumn 1941. In December the SS opened Chelmno, the first camp to which Jews were brought in order to be gassed. The first transport arrived on December 7, 1941. Everyone on it was murdered the next day. The shooting never stopped.

Page 6 of the Protocol is a table. A country on the left, a number of Jews on the right, and beneath the last line the words Zusammen: über 11.000.000. Together: over 11,000,000. Heydrich had opened by telling the room that authority over the final solution rested with Himmler "regardless of geographical boundaries." The table is what that phrase meant in practice.

Group B is where the table stops being an inventory. England, 330,000. Ireland, 4,000. Sweden, 8,000. Switzerland, 18,000. Spain, 6,000. Turkey, European portion, 55,500. In January 1942 the Reich held none of those countries and was at war with one of them. Two lines in Group B are given to the single digit while every other entry is rounded off: Ukraine 2,994,684 and White Russia excluding Bialystok 446,484. The Estonia line is not a number at all. It reads judenfrei, free of Jews, entered as a status already achieved.

The document then concedes that its own count is short. "The number of Jews given here for foreign countries includes, however, only those Jews who still adhere to the Jewish faith, since some countries still do not have a definition of the term 'Jew' according to racial principles." Eleven million was a floor. It was what the drafters could reach using somebody else's definition of who counted as a Jew.

The words they used

The Protocol never uses a German word for killing. Three phrases carry the whole operation, quoted here from the official English translation the memorial published in 2024.

Deportation is "evacuation of the Jews to the East," which replaced emigration as stated policy "with appropriate prior authorisation from the Führer." The older Avalon Project translation makes that approval conditional and still to come; the German supports the memorial's reading, which bears on whether Hitler had authorized the program before January 20. The Avalon text also awards Martin Luther of the Foreign Office a doctorate he never held, where the German gives him no title at all.

Death by forced labor is a road-building project. "In large labour columns, separated by sex, the Jews capable of working will be dispatched to these regions to build roads. In the process, a large portion will undoubtedly drop out through natural reduction."

And for anyone still alive at the end of that: "Those who ultimately should possibly get by will have to be given suitable treatment," on the reasoning that survivors of such a process are a natural selection and, if released, would become the seed of a Jewish revival.

Men organizing road construction do not need a euphemism for what happens to the workers.

Four governments signed an agreement in London on August 8, 1945: the United States, the Provisional Government of the French Republic, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union. It established an International Military Tribunal to try the major war criminals of the European Axis, and the Charter annexed to it is where the law was written. The Tribunal's permanent seat was Berlin. The Charter named Nuremberg for the first trial only, and that first trial was the only one the four powers ever held together.

The city was chosen twice over. The Palace of Justice had survived the bombing largely intact, the only facility left standing extensive enough for a proceeding this size, with 20 courtrooms and a prison for 1,200 attached to the building. That was the practical reason. The other was Nuremberg itself, where the party had held its rallies and where the race laws were proclaimed in 1935. The Allies wanted that repudiated in the same city.

The indictment ran to four counts. Conspiracy. Crimes against peace. War crimes. Crimes against humanity. Prosecutors lodged it in Berlin on October 18, 1945, against 24 men and six organizations. Robert H. Jackson signed for the United States, Francois de Menthon for France, Hartley Shawcross for Britain, R. A. Rudenko for the Soviet Union.

War crimes were old law. The Hague Convention of 1907 and the Geneva Convention of 1929 already covered them, and that individuals could be punished for breaking them was, in the Tribunal's words, "too well settled to admit of argument." Count Four was the new one. The phrase crimes against humanity had been used before, by the Allies in 1915, about the massacres of Armenians. It had never been something a court could convict on. Article 6(c) of the Charter made it one.

Defense counsel attacked exactly there. Nullum crimen sine lege, nulla poena sine lege: no punishment of crime without a pre-existing law. No sovereign power had made aggressive war a crime when the acts were committed, they argued, no statute had defined it, no penalty had been fixed for it and no court had existed to try it. It was a serious objection.

The Tribunal answered in two moves. It held that it did not strictly need to reach the question at all, since "the law of the Charter is decisive, and binding upon the Tribunal." Then it answered anyway. The maxim, the judgment says, "is not a limitation of sovereignty, but is in general a principle of justice," and an attacker who defies treaties knows he is doing wrong. The Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 had already bound 63 nations, Germany among them, to renounce war. Bound by the Charter first, defending it second.

Only 21 of the 24 men named in the indictment ever sat in the dock. Robert Ley, head of the German Labor Front, hanged himself in his cell on October 25, 1945, 26 days before the trial opened, not on its eve. On November 15 the Tribunal severed the arms manufacturer Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach on medical evidence of senile softening of the brain. On November 17 it ordered Martin Bormann tried in his absence under Article 12, because he could not be found. That left 22 men tried and 21 in the room. The trial ran 216 days across 403 open sessions, not the 218 days reference works repeat; Jackson's own report gives 216.

Jackson made his choice before the trial opened. He would not build the case on what survivors said. He would build it on what the Germans had written down about themselves, and he told the Tribunal why on November 21, 1945, the trial's second day. "We will not ask you to convict these men on the testimony of their foes. There is no count in the Indictment that cannot be proved by books and records." They had a habit of putting everything on paper, he said, and enough vanity to be photographed doing it. "We will show you their own films. You will see their own conduct and hear their own voices." The reason was credibility. A conviction resting on the defendants' own memoranda cannot be waved away later as something the winners invented.

Making good on that took a screening operation. More than 100,000 captured German documents were read through.

In its judgment the Tribunal endorsed the method in one sentence: the case against the defendants rested "in large measure on documents of their own making, the authenticity of which has not been challenged except in one or two cases." A week after the verdict Jackson wrote to President Truman and said what he thought the record was for. The aggressions, persecutions and atrocities had been documented from German sources "with such authenticity and in such detail that there can be no responsible denial of these crimes in the future."

On the afternoon of November 29, 1945 the lights went down. Thomas Dodd, prosecuting for the United States, offered a film called "Nazi Concentration Camps" and entered it as Document 2430-PS, Exhibit USA-79. Dodd told the Tribunal it was not the whole proof of anything, only a film that showed "in a brief and unforgettable form an explanation of what the words 'concentration camp' imply." Defense counsel had been offered a private screening two evenings earlier. Eight of them came. Dr. Dix said he would not come unless he was forced to.

The transcript records no reaction. Between "[The film was then shown.]" and the adjournment there is nothing at all. Every detail people repeat about that hour, Schacht turning away, Frank in tears, Hess saying he did not believe it, comes from the prison psychologist Gustave Gilbert's notebooks and from press dispatches. USHMM puts it more carefully: when the lights came up in the Palace of Justice, all assembled sat in silence.

Documents were not the whole case. The prosecution called 33 witnesses to give evidence orally against individual defendants, and some of them had been inside the thing being described. The poet Abraham Sutzkever testified on the morning of February 27, 1946, having spent two years in a ghetto before joining the partisans in Lithuania. That afternoon Samuel Rajzman was sworn in by Geoffrey Lawrence and began speaking in Russian. He had been an accountant in an export firm, then a prisoner at Treblinka, and he had taken part in the revolt there.

A Spanish prisoner named Francisco Boix took the stand on January 29, 1946. Boix had worked in the identification service at Mauthausen, the office where the SS photographed its own work. He developed the negatives, he kept them, and he got them out of the camp. At Nuremberg he testified about Mauthausen and Gusen and about the photographs, and he identified Albert Speer in one of them. Pictures the SS took to record what it was doing were used against the men who ordered them taken.

Twenty-two men were tried by the International Military Tribunal, twenty-one of them physically in the room. One camp alone, Auschwitz, had a garrison of some 8,000 to 8,200 SS men and about 200 female guards. The arithmetic never worked.

What came next was not a second international trial. Between December 1946 and April 1949 the United States ran twelve more proceedings in the same building, under Allied Control Council Law No. 10, enacted for occupied Germany on December 20, 1945. The judges were American. The prosecutors were American. All thirteen are called the Nuremberg trials. The four-power court met once.

Brigadier General Telford Taylor, chief of counsel for war crimes, ran them. The United States indicted 185 people and 177 of them stood trial. The tribunals imposed 24 death sentences, 20 life sentences and 98 other prison terms, and acquitted 35.

The cases were built around professions. Case 1 was the doctors. It opened on December 9, 1946 against 23 physicians and medical administrators, ran almost 140 days, heard 85 witnesses and took in nearly 1,500 documents. Sixteen were convicted. Seven were sentenced to death and hanged on June 2, 1948.

The judgment carried a section headed Permissible Medical Experiments, ten numbered principles handed down in August 1947. The first of them opens: "The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential." That section is the Nuremberg Code, and it still governs how human experimentation is supposed to be done. Its legal force was never well established. It is a court's statement of principle rather than a treaty.

Case 3 was the judges. It opened on March 5, 1947 against 16 men from the Reich justice ministry and from the People's and Special Courts. The charge was judicial murder: destroying law in Germany, then using the emptied forms of legal process for persecution, enslavement and extermination. Ten were convicted, four acquitted. Four got life; six got five to ten years.

Case 6 was IG Farben, the chemical combine that manufactured and supplied Zyklon B through its Degesch holding and ran a slave-labor plant at Auschwitz-Monowitz. Of the 23 executives tried, ten were acquitted outright. The thirteen convicted got one and a half to eight years, time already served included. Eight years was the most anyone got.

Case 10 was Krupp. Twelve officials were tried, judgment came on July 31, 1948, one was acquitted, and the other eleven got two to twelve years. In almost every instance those sentences were commuted to time served. Case 11, the Ministries Case, records how that happened: on January 31, 1951 the United States High Commissioner for Germany reduced eight of its sentences to shorter terms or to time already served.

Adolf Eichmann was an SS lieutenant colonel who ran a desk. From March 1941 he directed Department IV B 4 of the Reich Security Main Office, the Jewish Affairs desk, and his section organized the deportation of more than 1.5 million Jews to the killing centers. Between late April and early July 1944 he and his staff deported some 440,000 Hungarian Jews, the fastest such operation of the Holocaust. He was never a defendant at Nuremberg and set no policy at the level of the men who were. He scheduled the trains.

He was in American custody when the war ended and escaped in 1946. On June 1, 1950 he applied at the Red Cross delegation in Genoa and was handed a travel document the same day, his fingerprint on it in red ink. The Argentine visa followed on June 14.

Mossad operatives seized him near his home on Garibaldi Street on May 11, 1960. An El Al Britannia flew him out on the night of May 20 and he reached Israel on May 22. Argentina held a seat on the UN Security Council and used it.

The trial opened on April 11, 1961 at Beit Ha'am, a Jerusalem community center fitted out as a courtroom. Moshe Landau presided, with Benjamin Halevi and Yitzhak Raveh. Attorney General Gideon Hausner indicted him on 15 counts. Robert Servatius, who had worked at Nuremberg, defended him at Israel's expense.

At Nuremberg on November 21, 1945, Robert Jackson had told the tribunal he would not ask it to convict on the testimony of the defendants' foes, because every count could be proved out of German records. Hausner had 1,600 documents, many bearing Eichmann's signature, and said outright that the archives alone would have convicted him. He called survivors anyway. Yad Vashem's Hanna Yablonka counts 110 Jewish witnesses for the prosecution.

On June 7, 1961, in Session 68, Hausner called the writer Yehiel De-Nur, who had been inside Auschwitz about two years and published his books under the name Ka-Tzetnik rather than his own. Hausner asked him why. He said it was not a pen name.

He collapsed before the first prepared question and never went back on the stand. It was on television.

Yablonka found the unflattering half too. The witnesses dominated the public record and stayed almost entirely out of the court's reasoning.

The court convicted him on December 11 and 12, 1961 of crimes against the Jewish people, crimes against humanity, war crimes and membership in a criminal organization, then sentenced him to death on December 15. The Supreme Court affirmed on May 29, 1962 and President Yitzhak Ben-Zvi refused clemency. He was hanged at Ramla prison at midnight between May 31 and June 1, 1962, cremated, his ashes scattered beyond Israeli waters. It is the only execution the State of Israel has ever carried out.

Hannah Arendt covered the trial for The New Yorker in five articles from February 16, 1963, and turned them into Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Her argument was about thoughtlessness, an absence of thinking that let a man do monstrous things. The phrase is now used as a general account of who commits mass murder.

The scholarship went the other way. David Cesarani argued in 2004 for careerist ambition and learned habituation, Deborah Lipstadt in 2011 for a convinced Nazi and antisemite committed to genocide. Bettina Stangneth, working from the tapes Eichmann recorded in Argentina in 1956 and 1957 with the Dutch former SS man Willem Sassen, argued that the mild official in the booth was a performance and that in Buenos Aires he had talked like a believer. The Sassen transcripts were in evidence in Jerusalem.

The Hannah Arendt Center supplies the limit. Transcripts of those tapes existed before the trial and Arendt read many of them. What Stangneth recovered was the audio, not the content. She reached her conclusion with most of that material in front of her.