When Nazi Adolf Eichmann stood trial for war crimes 50 years ago, it helped to unify the young state of Israel by allowing Jewish people to talk openly about the Holocaust. For Jews,” the Israeli historian Tom Segev said, “there were always two Adolfs.”
Adolf Hitler had killed himself in the ruins of his Berlin bunker but the other Adolf, SS Lt Colonel Adolf Eichmann, was what Segev called “the face of the Holocaust”.
Fifty years ago this week, shortly before 9 o’clock in the morning of 11 April 1961, the “second Adolf” faced justice in a makeshift Israeli courtroom in Jerusalem.
