Two days before he was hanged, Eichmann sent a letter to Israel’s president begging not to be executed
On June 1, 1962, Adolf Eichmann was hanged by the Israelis after a two-year trial. Eichmann was one of the leading Nazi organizers of the Holocaust. Reinhard Heydrich had placed him in charge of rounding up and shipping Jews to death camps in German-occupied Poland. Eichmann did his job so well that he is held largely responsible for the extermination of six million Jews.
Just recently found was a handwritten letter dated May 29, 1962, which Eichmann sent to Israeli President Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, in which he begged not to be executed. The letter in part read:
There is a need to draw a line between the leaders responsible and the people like me forced to serve as mere instruments in the hands of the leaders.
I was not a responsible leader, and as such do not feel myself guilty.
I am not able to recognize the court’s ruling as just, and I ask, Your Honor Mr. President, to exercise your right to grant pardons, and order that the death penalty not be carried out.
I’m sure Eichmann was asked many times how he felt about having played a leading role in the murder of six million Jews. I suspect he probably shrugged his shoulders and replied, “It was just a job.”
The ‘I was only following orders’ excuse rarely works and it did not work for Adolph Eichmann.
1 comment:
My father has a pretty decent set of books at home with US Army Signal Corp photographs taken in the camps immediately after they were liberated. They show people that were walking skeletons and dead bodies stacked like cordwood. As far as I am concerned everybody who worked in one of those hellholes should have been hung on general principle. Everybody who had anything administrative to do with them should have been hung twice.
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