It has been said that revenge is a soup best served cold. Ah, but is there a difference between justice and revenge? It is also said that justice deferred is justice denied. But justice did not come for Adolph Eichmann for almost two decades after WWII ended in Germany. I was ten years old when the trial of Eichmann took place in Jerusalem, and no, I did not watch the trial, nor do I think did my father, who helped end the War in Germany. If you’re going to hold one man responsible for all those atrocities against Jews, Hitler was surely the man, but he took the coward’s way out, like so many leading Nazis. But many others fled to Argentina, and this is the story about the most famous one of those. The movie is quite rightly portrayed as a period piece, but the period is the early 60s, and so it is not a war movie. It is a post-war aftermath movie. Many will rightly say that Eichmann played enough of a role in the transporting of Jews to their deaths that he certainly deserved his fate. But my mind flashed to the peace and reconciliation meetings in South Africa after Apartheid, where there was actually a possibility of both confession, and even some forgiveness.
The movie is stark and dark, and the acting is excellent, especially by Ben Kingsley (one wonders what he was thinking playing this role after having played Gandhi!!!) who plays Eichmann, and Oscar Isaac who plays Peter Malkin, who brought Eichmann back from Argentina for trial in Israel. Eichmann had a son by his first wife named Klaus, who still lives in Argentina, and still says his father was unjustly hung in Israel. Here is an interesting bit from the Jewish Telegraph Agency from last December….
“The late Adolf Eichmann, hanged in Israel in 1962 after being convicted of crimes against humanity, went to his death believing that Hitler’s right-hand man, Martin Bormann, and other leading Nazis, were alive, according to Klaus Eichmann, Adolf’s son.
Klaus Eichmann made that statement in an interview in the magazine, Quick, published at Munich. He said his father believed that, among other leading Nazis still alive, was Heinrich Mueller, chief of the Gestapo.
The German Government has a $25,000 reward posted for the capture of Bormann, who is reportedly in hiding in South America. Klaus Eichmann himself lives in Argentina. He also told the magazine that his father was convicted “unjustly.” He said that, in Argentina, he had met “a whole raft” of former Nazis accused as war criminals.”
This movie is important, not least because Nazism, a particular form of racism, is on the rise again not only in Germany but in America and elsewhere as well. We must not forget the horrors that anti-Semitism perpetrated on 6 million Jews in the death camps in Europe. We must not forget the cry ‘Never Again!’. And we must not allow those who would inflame racial hatred to hold public office in the ‘land of immigrants’, better known as the land of the free and the home of the brave, otherwise history will keep repeating itself.
This movie is still in theaters, and you and your family should go see it, and discuss it. The moral issues in some ways are not complex, but in other ways they are. What really counts as justice in a case like this? You have just over 2 hours to figure that out whilst watching this gripping film.
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