London lawyers request Eichmann journals for Holocaust denial suit; A-G wants to cooperate

London lawyers request
Eichmann journals for Holocaust denial suit; A-G wants to cooperate

By Dalia Shehori
Ha’aretz Correspondent

Attorney
General Elyakim Rubinstein will hold an urgent meeting today to discuss a request from defense lawyers in a
Holocaust denial defamation suit in London. The lawyers have asked the State of Israel to supply copies of writings by
Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann months before his
1962 execution in Israel.

The defamation trial has been brought by controversial British historian David
Irving against Deborah Lipstadt, a scholar in modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University who branded Irving a “dangerous spokesman in the service of
Holocaust deniers.” Irving is suing Lipstadt, and Penguin
Books publishers who released her volume
“Denying the Holocaust: the Growing
Assault on Truth and Memory.”

Irving alleges that
Lipstadt’s book caused irreparable harm to his reputation as a historian, causing him considerable financial damage.

Irving denies that millions of Jews were systematically murdered by the Nazis. He claims that Hitler didn’t know about the genocide until the final stages of the Second
World War.

Lipstadt’s defense attorney, Richard Rempton, asked
Rubinstein last week for a copy of Eichmann’s journal entries. These are documents written by Eichmann while imprisoned in Israel, waiting for the verdict in his trial. The documents have been kept at Israel’s state archives.

Transcript copies of the Eichmann diaries are near completion; and should a decision be reached today during the attorney general’s consultations to assent to the requests forwarded by Lipstadt’s defense, a transcript will be dispatched urgently to London.

Legal sources estimated last
night that Rubinstein is inclined to agree to Lipstadt’s
request, as the attorney general attributes cardinal
importance to the struggle against Holocaust denial.
While serving in the past as Cabinet Secretary,
Rubinstein chaired a public forum which kept track of
anti-Semitism around the globe.

According to the sources, Rubinstein regards the Eichmann document request as an opportunity to play a constructive part in effort to combat Holocaust denial. In recent weeks world Jewish organizations have been critical of Israel’s silence during the Irving defamation trial.

The discussion today will apparently involve authorities with whom Rubinstein has consulted in the past in connection with the Eichmann documents. These include Prof. Avatar
Friesal (from the state archives), Holocaust scholar
Prof. Yehuda Bauer, former Supreme Court President
Moshe Landau, retired Supreme Court judge Gabriel
Bach (who worked with the prosecution during the
Eichmann trial), and others.

The Eichmann journals divide into three parts. Eichmann devotes the first section to self-defense, distancing himself from the final solution. In the second section, entitled the “false idols,” Eichmann perorates about responsibility for the murder of Jews, concluding that the
Nazi regime is to blame, writing that “ultra-nationalism is the largest catastrophe known to all peoples.” The third, short section involves “philosophical reflections.”

Former Supreme Court Justice Bach, who read the Eichmann documents in their entirety, says that they include no special, or new, material. He says that the journals do not deny the Holocaust. They are, according to Bach, an attempt on Eichmann’s part to mitigate the onus of the charges made against him. Bach adds that Eichmann made a similar effort while on the stand in the trial, so the written journals do not convey any new evidence.

Fragments from the documents were published in the past in a book by Gideon Hausner.

Related documents on this website:

• Eichmann
  index

including therein:

• Adolf Eichmann “snatches
  a victory from the grave”
• The Eichmann
  memoirs as published by Die
  Welt Aug 2000 in full [in
  German]
• Dr Moshe Kam says Israeli
  holocaust researchers claim that they are ‘too busy’ to
  publish the Eichmann memoirs
  raises doubts about their professionalism and
  ethics
• Reference (erroneous) to Eichmann in
  the article on Ukraine in Universal
  Jewish Encyclopedia on 1943
  (vol 10, p.

  339)

• Introduction
  by David Irving (in German)
  drafted for his planned edition of Adolf Eichmann’s
  [1956-8] memoirs, donated to him in Argentina,
  1991

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