Debate on Eichmann Memoirs Rages

By DINA KRAFT
Associated Press Writer

JERUSALEM (AP) -- Still another party is weighing in on what to do with the jailhouse memoirs of executed Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann.

Lawyer Amos Hausner, whose father prosecuted Eichmann in a dramatic trial in Israel nearly four decades ago, said Sunday he opposed efforts to release the memoirs and would do whatever he could to see they remain under wraps.

Repeating the same line of argument his father Gideon Hausner used to convince then-Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion in 1962 to keep Eichmann's 1,300 page manuscript locked up in Israel's state archives, the younger Hausner said it would be dangerous to publish what he called a war criminal's lies.

"There cannot be two versions about something as horrible as the Holocaust," Hausner said. However, he did not specify what legal steps he might take to try to keep the manuscript secret.

In the lengthy, densely written text, Eichmann distances himself from blame for the genocide of European Jewry, saying he was merely a midlevel official following orders.

Eichmann, who was hanged in Jerusalem in 1962 for directing the Nazi attempt to kill all the Jews of Europe during World War II, wrote the memoir from his jail cell in Israel during the trial.

The Justice Ministry said last week that it was considering the request by Holocaust researchers to release the manuscript and that a decision was expected soon.

Eichmann was kidnapped by Israeli agents in 1960 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and brought to Israel in 1961.