Sixty-five years ago, on 11 April 1961, one of the most important trials of the 20th century began. The former Nazi administrator Adolf Eichmann was brought before a court in Jerusalem to face 15 counts of some of the gravest charges known to man. They included war crimes, crimes against the Jewish people, and crimes against humanity.

According to the chief prosecutor, Gideon Hausner, the hearing against Eichmann was not only the ‘trial of the century’, as some were calling it in the press, but perhaps the greatest trial in recorded history. ‘No other example in the history of nations calls for an indictment like the one being heard here’, he claimed in his opening speech. ‘Even the most bloodcurdling and grisly malefactions of Nero, Attila, and Ghengis Khan… pale beside the atrocities and terrors of the destruction that will be described in this court.’

Much of the world’s media came to witness the spectacle. The auditorium was filled with over 500 journalists from 40 different countries. Television cameras captured the proceedings and broadcast them on news programmes all around the world. The greatest interest, naturally, was in Israel itself. The TV cameras relayed the trial to a hall nearby so that large audiences of ordinary Israelis could watch it live. It was also broadcast live on Israeli radio, and many schools cancelled regular classes so that their students could listen along. For four months it became the central event in Israeli public life.

Unlike the Nuremberg Trials, which had relied mostly on documentary evidence, the prosecutors of the Eichmann trial decided early on that they were going to put the victims at the heart of the process. In the end, more than 120 witnesses took the stand to tell their personal stories. These men and women came from all walks of life, and from every part of Europe. They were instructed to describe what had happened to them in all of its sickening detail, including tales of atrocity, torture and sexual abuse.

One woman, Rivka Joselewska, told the story of how her entire village had been forced to strip and stand at the edge of a pit. They were then shot one by one. When it came to Rivka’s turn, she was holding her daughter in her arms. The executioner asked her who he should shoot first, her or her daughter. Since she did not answer, he shot the girl first, and then her. By some miracle, she survived beneath the piles of dead bodies and managed later to crawl her way out of the slippery pit.

Other witnesses spoke about how they had been beaten in the streets, urinated on, humiliated. One, a man named Yehiel De-Nur, became so distressed during his testimony, that he collapsed and had to be carried from the stand.

The effects of hearing all these stories, one after another, was quite traumatic. In 2016, I interviewed one of the lawyers at the trial, Gabriel Bach, who was Hausner’s second in command in the prosecution team. He confessed to me that he rarely slept well during the trial and often had nightmares. On one occasion, when one of his witnesses recounted the sight of his two-year-old daughter being taken off to the gas chambers at Auschwitz, it was Bach, not the witness, who found himself unable to continue.

Many of the journalists felt the same way. Haim Gouri, the soldier-poet who was covering the trial for the Israeli newspaper LaMerhav, confessed that he could not bear watching this procession of broken witnesses, and longed to leave the courtroom to spend his time instead with ‘handsome and strong people’ in the sunshine outside.

Some commentators were highly critical of what they considered to be a needlessly traumatic process. Among them was the philosopher Hannah Arendt, who wrote about the trial in a series of articles for the New Yorker. Arendt found the questioning of some of the witnesses unnecessarily cruel and doubted whether much of what they said had anything to do with Eichmann at all. The real reason for all these eyewitness testimonies, she claimed, was for propaganda purposes: it was, in effect, ‘a show trial’.

The prosecution justified their inclusion with the assertion that these witnesses showed the human reality of the Holocaust. Eichmann’s main defence was that he had never himself killed anyone: he was merely a bureaucrat, and had only been following the orders of his superiors. The prosecution needed to show that, while the defendant himself was only concerned with moving numbers from one column to another, like a kind of glorified accountant – ‘The Accountant of Death’, as Germany’s Der Stern magazine had memorably called him just a few months earlier – his actions had a very real, and horrific, effect on people’s lives.

At the centre of this painful spectacle sat Adolf Eichmann himself. According to those who were at the trial, he rarely showed any kind of emotion, even when he was defending himself. In contrast to the heart-rending stories of his accusers, his defence was dull, repetitive and predictable: ‘There is no blood on my hands’; ‘I never carried out executions’; ‘My guilt is only in my obedience, my dutiful service in time of war, my loyalty to the oath, to the flag…’

The most striking thing about him was how utterly normal he seemed. He wore a dark blue suit and horn-rimmed spectacles. He was balding, of medium height and build. According to Yehiel De-Nur, it was this very blandness that had caused him to faint on the witness stand. De-Nur had been expecting to confront some kind of demonic presence, but, instead, had found himself face-to-face with someone quite ordinary. ‘I am… exactly like he.’

Arendt was also struck by Eichmann’s terrifying normality. He spoke in endless clichés and seemed so unaware of the consequences of his actions that it was sometimes hard to take him seriously: ‘everybody could see that this man was not a “monster”, but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown’. In her characterisation, Eichmann epitomised the mindlessness of the Nazi hierarchy. She even coined a new phrase for it: ‘the banality of evil’.

Gabriel Bach, who disagreed with much of what Arendt wrote in her reports, agreed with her on this point: Eichmann was certainly banal. One of the stories he told me was about what happened when he showed Eichmann a documentary film during the trial, depicting the horrific conditions in Auschwitz. Since Bach himself had already seen the film, he watched Eichmann’s face to see how he would react. At one point Eichmann suddenly turned to his warden and started speaking excitedly. Hoping that he might at last be showing some signs of human conscience, Bach approached the warden at the end of the day to ask what exactly had upset the defendant. ‘He said that Eichmann was angry because he had been told that he’d only ever be taken to the court room wearing his dark blue suit. But today they had brought him to the court in his grey suit.’ He hadn’t been bothered by the film at all.

Eichmann’s trial finally came to an end on 14 August 1961. After four months of deliberation by the judges, he was found guilty on all counts and sentenced to death. He was executed on 1 June 1962, just a few minutes after midnight. The consequences of the trial would last for decades afterwards.

To begin with, there was the manner in which Eichmann was brought to trial in the first place. After the Second World War, many senior Nazis had evaded justice for years by escaping to Argentina and living under assumed names. Eichmann was one of the unlucky ones: he had been located, kidnapped and extracted by a team of Israeli secret agents. This kidnap operation was incredibly daring, but it was also a blatant breach of the international rules-based system. Argentina complained vociferously at the violation of its sovereignty, and the United Nations Security Council reprimanded Israel and demanded that it make ‘appropriate reparation’. Israel ignored them both.

In the months that followed there was a worldwide debate about where and how Eichmann would be brought to justice. Many commentators in the press suggested that he should be tried in West Germany, which had been the scene of so many of his crimes. The president of the American Jewish Committee, Joseph M. Proskauer, questioned Israel’s right to speak for all Jews: he wanted Eichmann to appear before an international court. Israel’s most prominent philosopher, Martin Buber, was also extremely uncomfortable about the case taking place in Jerusalem. ‘I do not think that the victim should be the judge as well,’ he said.

Israel’s prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, brushed all of these concerns aside. In a lengthy interview for the New York Times in December 1960, he declared that Israel was the rightful heir of the six million who were murdered in Europe, and that ‘for reasons of historic justice’, Eichmann’s trial should take place in Jerusalem: ‘Israel does not need the moral protection of an international court. Only antisemites or Jews with an inferiority complex would say that it does.’

The political events that surrounded this trial were therefore part of a process that has seen Israel increasingly isolated on the international stage. In the decades since, the international community has repeatedly criticised Israel for its actions, and Israel has continued to ignore them. At the turn of the 21st century, when the long-awaited International Criminal Court was finally created, Israel refused to become a member.

The trial itself was also a great driver of social and cultural change, both in Israel and beyond. There was some truth to Arendt’s accusation that it was a show trial. Ben-Gurion himself made it clear from the start that the pursuit of justice was only one part of the proceedings – equally important was the way that they would shine a light on Jewish suffering: ‘It is not an individual that is in the dock at this historic trial, and not the Nazi regime alone, but antisemitism throughout history.’

If Ben-Gurion was building a nation, then his use of the Eichmann trial to that end was clearly quite successful. According to historian Tom Segev, Israel in the 1950s was a very divided society: Israeli-born Sabras and Sephardi Jews from North Africa and Iraq had very different ideas of what it meant to be Jewish from those who had flooded into the country from Europe after the war. ‘The trial of Adolf Eichmann served as therapy for the nation,’ wrote Segev in his 1993 book, The Seventh Million. By demonstrating the full extent of the European horror, it elicited the sympathy of the entire nation and was an important step towards binding the different communities together as one. This success, however, came at a price. Where before the dominant narratives in Israeli public life had been centred on heroism, now they became centred on victimhood. The Holocaust has remained the central point of Israeli identity ever since.

Germany, too, was deeply affected by the Eichmann trial. Before 1961, most ordinary Germans had been in a state of denial about the role they had played during the Holocaust. According to historian Frank Trentmann, if there was any one moment that signalled a change in West German society, the Eichmann trial was probably it. ‘It was true that West Germans continued to be primarily concerned with themselves, not with the victims and their suffering,’ he wrote in his 2023 history, Out of the Darkness. ‘Still, in terms of confronting their own past, this change in sensibility was a big step forward.’

Even at a global level there was a shift in thinking. After the Eichmann trial, wrote American historian Peter Novick, ‘American Jews lost a good deal of their inhibitions about discussing the Holocaust’. Suddenly the European genocide became a normal topic not only for memoirs and documentaries, but for TV shows and Hollywood movies.

A similar shift took place in Europe. Primo Levi’s If This Is A Man was first published directly after the war and sold fewer than 2,000 copies; after the Eichmann trial it was republished all over Europe, and sold in the hundreds of thousands. Here, too, the 1960s and 1970s gave rise to a memory boom. Hundreds of memoirs, novels, plays, films and documentaries about the Holocaust began to appear. From the 1980s onwards, museums dedicated to the Holocaust were opened in almost every country. Today, there are Holocaust memorials in every major European city, and many cities in Asia, Australia and Latin America, too.

The Eichmann trial was one of the main events that helped to drive these social and cultural changes. By putting the Holocaust onto the front pages across the world, it was this event that first opened the floodgates. The world has never quite been the same since.