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Grim Reminder

Europe remembers how Eichmann
trial and TV changed perceptions
of the Holocaust.

Toby Axelrod
Jewish Telegraphic Agency

Berlin

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T

he face, with its twisted
mouth, receding hairline and
dark-framed glasses, is famil-
iar around the world today.
But 50 years ago, when Adolf
Eichmann — former head of the Nazi
Department for Jewish Affairs — first
sat in a Jerusalem courtroom to face
war crimes charges, his visage was
known to very few.
Television changed that. For West
Germans, the impact was profound.
Twice a week, for four months, entire
families — and sometimes neighbors,
too — gathered
in living rooms to
watch the reports
from Jerusalem.
"There was a
lot of watching,
and it changed the
discussion about
the Holocaust,"
said philoso-
pher Bettina
Stangneth, whose
book Eichmann
vor Jerusalem
(Eichmann Faces
Jerusalem) is set
to be published in
Germany on April
18.
It wasn't as if
most Germans wanted to watch the
trial.
"But back then, there was not such
a big choice of programs," Stangneth
said. "They could not change the chan-
nel so easily."
Now, as historical institutes and
museums in Europe and elsewhere
look back at the pivotal trial that
began 50 years ago, on April 11, 1961,
media coverage of the event is a key
theme.
In Frankfurt, German TV reports
from 1961 will be shown at the Fritz-
Bauer Institute, which is hosting a
symposium on the Eichmann trial
this month. At Berlin's Topography of
Terror documentation center, video-

taped testimony by witnesses and by
Eichmann are part of a new exhibit.
In Paris, the Memorial de la Shoah is
dedicating a program to documentary
filmmaker Leo Hurwitz, who directed
the videotaping of the four-month
trial.
Back then, Israel was practically
a country without TV, said Ronny
Loewy, an expert on cinematogra-
phy of the Holocaust at Frankfurt's
German Film Institute. Israelis either
listened to a broadcast of the trial live
on the radio or attended a simulcast in
an auditorium near the court.
"Beside the United States, there was
no other country where they were
reporting to the same extent as in
Germany," Loewy said.
A survey showed that
95 percent of Germans
knew about the trial;
and 67 percent favored
a severe sentence,
according to the 1997
book Anti-Semitism
in Germany, The Post-
Nazi Epoch Since 1945
by German scholars
Werner Bergman and
Rainer Erb.
To get out the news
at the end of each court
day, two hours of clips
were flown to London
for dissemination to
European and U.S.
news programs, said
cinematographer Tom
Hurwitz, who was 14 when his father
was assigned to direct the taping.
In Germany, the clips were used to
produce biweekly, 20-minute reports
called "An Epoch on Trial."
These broadcasts, and other cover-
age by some 400 German journal-
ists in Israel, had a decisive impact,
according to Stangneth.
Until the trial, many Germans had
dismissed the few books about the
Holocaust as biased. Teachers largely
had avoided the subject.
Once the broadcasts of the
Eichmann trial began, however, they
could ignore it no longer. Young
Germans looked at the wartime gener-
ation differently. Dozens of new books

Millons of eyes
studied Eichmann
through TV sets,
trying to discern
in his word,
manner and
expessions signs
of remorse.

.

34 April 14 - 2011

Grim Reminder on page 36