Then came Eichmann's last statement: His hopes for justice were disappointed; the court had not believed him, though he had always done his best to tell the truth. The court did not understand him: he had never been a Jew-hater, and he had never willed the murder of human beings. His guilt came from his obedience, and obedience is praised as a virtue. His virtue had been abused by the Nazi leaders. But he was not one of the ruling clique, he was a victim, and only the leaders deserved punishment. (He did not go quite as far as many of the other low-ranking war criminals, who complained bitterly that they had been told never to worry about “responsibilities,” and that they were now unable to call those responsible to account because these had “escaped and deserted” them—by committing suicide, or by having been hanged.) “I am not the monster I a made out to be,” Eichmann said. “I am the victim of a fallacy.” He did not use the word “scapegoat,” but he confirmed what Servatius had said: it was his “profound conviction that [he] must suffer for the acts of others.” After two more days, on Friday, December 15, 1961, at nine o'clock in the morning, the death sentence was pronounced.
Three months later, on March 22, 1962, review proceedings were opened before the Court of Appeal, Israel's Supreme Court, before five judges presided over by Itzhak Olshan. Mr. Hausner appeared again, with four assistants, for the prosecution, and Dr. Servatius, with none, for the defense. Counsel for the defense repeated all the old arguments against the competence of the Israeli court, and since all his efforts to persuade the West German government to start extradition proceedings had been in vain, he now demanded that Israel offer extradition. He had brought with him a new list of witnesses, but there was not a single one among them who could conceivably have produced anything resembling “new evidence.” He had included in the list Dr. Hans Globke, whom Eichmann had never seen in his life and of whom he had probably heard for the first time in Jerusalem, and, even more startling, Dr. Chaim Weizmann, who had been dead for ten years. The plaidoyer was an incredible hodgepodge, full of errors (in one instance, the defense offered as new evidence the French translation of a document that had already been submitted by the prosecution, in two other cases it had simply misread the documents, and so on), its carelessness contrasted vividly with the rather careful introduction of certain remarks that were bound to be offensive to the court: gassing was again a “medical matter”; a Jewish court had no right to sit in judgment over the fate of the children from Lidice, since they were not Jewish; Israeli legal procedure ran counter to Continental procedure—to which Eichmann, because of his national origin, was entitled—in that it required the defendant to provide the evidence for his defense, and this the accused had been unable to do because neither witnesses nor defense documents were available in Israel. In short, the trial had been unfair, the judgment unjust.
The proceedings before the Court of Appeal lasted only a week, after which the court adjourned for two months. On May 29, 1962, the second judgment was read—somewhat less voluminous than the first, but still fifty-one single-spaced legal-sized pages. It ostensibly confirmed the District Court on all points, and to make this confirmation the judges would not have needed two months and fifty-one pages. The judgment of the Court of Appeal was actually a revision of the judgment of the lower court, although it did not say so. In conspicuous contrast to the original judgment, it was now found that “the appellant had received no ‘superior orders’ at all. He was his own superior, and he gave all orders in matters that concerned Jewish affairs”; he had, moreover, “eclipsed in importance all his superiors, including Müller.” And, in reply to the obvious argument of the defense that the Jews would have been no better off had Eichmann never existed, the judges now stated that “the idea of the Final Solution would never have assumed the infernal forms of the flayed skin and tortured flesh of millions of Jews without the fanatical zeal and the unquenchable blood thirst of the appellant and his accomplices.” Israel's Supreme Court had not only accepted the arguments of the prosecution, it had adopted its very language.
The same day, May 29, Itzhak Ben-Zvi, President of Israel, received Eichmann's plea for mercy, four handwritten pages, made “upon instructions of my counsel,” together with letters from his wife and his family in Linz. The President also received hundreds of letters and telegrams from all over the world, pleading for clemency; outstanding among the senders were the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the representative body of Reform Judaism in this country, and a group of professors from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, headed by Martin Buber, who had been opposed to the trial from the start, and who now tried to persuade Ben-Gurion to intervene for clemency. Mr. Ben-Zvi rejected all pleas for mercy on May 31, two days after the Supreme Court had delivered its judgment, and a few hours later on that same day—it was a Thursday—shortly before midnight, Eichmann was hanged, his body was cremated, and the ashes were scattered in the Mediterranean outside Israeli waters.
The speed with which the death sentence was carried out was extraordinary, even if one takes into account that Thursday night was the last possible occasion before the following Mon-day, since Friday, Saturday, and Sunday are all religious holidays for one or another of the three denominations in the country. The execution took place less than two hours after Eichmann was informed of the rejection of his plea for mercy; there had not even been time for a last meal. The explanation may well be found in two last-minute attempts Dr. Servatius made to save his client—an application to a court in West Germany to force the government to demand Eichmann's extradition, even now, and a threat to invoke Article 25 of the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. Neither Dr. Servatius nor his assistant was in Israel when Eichmann's plea was rejected, and the Israeli government probably wanted to close the case, which had been going on for two years, before the defense could even apply for a stay in the date of execution.
The death sentence had been expected, and there was hardly anyone to quarrel with it; but things were altogether different when it was learned that the Israelis had carried it out. The protests were short-lived, but they were widespread and they were voiced by people of influence and prestige. The most common argument was that Eichmann's deeds defied the possibility of human punishment, that it was pointless to impose the death sentence for crimes of such magnitude—which, of course, was true, in a sense, except that it could not conceivably mean that he who had murdered millions should for this very reason escape punishment. On a considerably lower level, the death sentence was called “unimaginative,” and very imaginative alternatives were proposed forthwith—Eichmann “should have spent the rest of his life at hard labor in the arid stretches of the Negev, helping with his sweat to reclaim the Jewish homeland,” a punishment he would probably not have survived for more than a single day, to say nothing of the fact that in Israel the desert of the south is hardly looked upon as a penal colony; or, in Madison Avenue style, Israel should have reached “divine heights,” rising above “the understandable, legal, political, and even human considerations,” by calling together “all those who took part in the capture, trial, and sentencing to a public ceremony, with Eichmann there in shackles, and with television cameras and radio to decorate them as the heroes of the century.”