Posted April 11 2008
Justice Gabriel Bach: Eichmann Prosecutor
On April 10, 2008, Justice Gabriel Bach came to speak at Touro Law in Central Islip, New York. Who is he? He is a former Justice to the Israeli Supreme Court, and also was a prosecutor of Adolf Eichmann. Born in Germany in 1927, Justice Bach was educated in Berlin. In 1938, exactly two weeks before Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass), the Bach family moved to Holland. During the short time that his family lived in Holland, Hitler had planned to invade on seven separate occasions but postponed his plans due to weather, astrology and other reasons. He was later told by a non-Jewish friend that he was the only Jew out of his school in Holland that had survived. Justice Bach was admitted to the bar in 1950 in Lincoln’s Inn, England, and was appointed as the State-Attorney of Israel in 1969 after serving in the Israeli Army and working his way up the totem pole in the State-Attorney’s office for 16 years.
In May, 1960, Adolf Eichmann often referred to as the “architect of the Holocaust,” was the head of the Gestapo, and was in effect an accomplice to every single one of the eleven million murders during the Holocaust. After the Holocaust, he went into hiding, and was captured in Buenos Aires by the Israeli Mossad as part of a covert operation and was to be prosecuted in Jerusalem as a war criminal. Justice Bach was appointed to the position of the lead advisor to the police bureau. During the trial, said Justice Bach, Eichmann was kept in a glass box (shown below) at all times to ensure his safety. This man, being the orchestrator of the biggest atrocity of all time, was one who many in Israel, whether survivors or others, wanted dead. He had no sympathy, no emotions, nothing.
Justice Bach recounted many stories of the trial. Many of them were the same: different countries would send motions and requests to Eichmann regarding the Jews in their societies, such as the Fascists in Holland. A request was sent to Eichmann to not prosecute the twelve fascists that were extremely active in the party and had high positions as it would “demoralize the other party members.” Eichmann responded by stating that demoralizing or not, they were “pigs”; however, Eichmann would not deport them to Auschwitz for a few weeks, so as to accustom the rest of the fascist population in Holland to the deportations. Another was during the trial itself. Being a prosecutor, Justice Bach had reviewed the evidence many times, so during a video clip shown in court of Eichmann condemning the Jews to the gas chambers on one of his visits to Auschwitz, Justice Bach did not take his eyes off of Eichmann. He wanted to see the reaction the video would induce. At first, Justice Bach recounted, Eichmann sat stone-faced, just observing, then turned to the two guards in the glass box with him, spoke animatedly for a few minutes, then regained his expressionless stance. When Justice Bach inquired as to what the verbal exchange was, the guard told him that Eichmann was upset because he only wanted to be seen in his blue suit in court, as it made him look better, yet on that day, he was in his grey suit because he was being rushed. While everyone else in court was extremely emotional, Eichmann himself simply had no expression.
During the trial, Eichmann stated that the Holocaust was the “worst crime committed ever in history.” Justice Bach completely doubted this statement for a few reasons, one of which was because many of Eichmann’s records and correspondences were attained by the Mossad when he was brought in. In one of the letters, he was asked if he felt sorry about what happened. “Yes,” he wrote, “because I wasn’t hard enough or tough enough because this dirt, this evil has emerged as the state of Israel, and it should have never been.”
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