A new YouTube channel will host the complete surviving recordings of the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, an event that garnered worldwide media coverage and for the first time focused the world’s attention on the horrors of the Holocaust. This initiative presents the most comprehensive version of the trial recording ever compiled, offering the footage in chronological order with English subtitles and a searchable transcript for enhanced accessibility and understanding. Interested audiences will now be able to easily locate key moments in the trial, watch the proceedings as they unfolded and better understand the significance of this historical event and its ramifications for today. Seeing the exceptional close-ups and dramatic exchanges captured by director Leo Hurwitz and his crew brings you right into the courtroom in 1961. This newly-assembled record will serve as a valuable resource for researchers, scholars and a curious public for years to come.
The channel has been established in conjunction with today’s release of ‘The Eichmann Trial’, a feature-length documentary film that tells the story of the trial entirely though footage from the trial itself and contemporaneous news coverage. ‘The Eichmann Trial’ premiered at the 2023 Miami Jewish Film Festival and is available through major digital retailers including Amazon Prime Video and iTunes.
In the process of making the documentary, the filmmakers discovered that the trial footage had fallen into a state of complete disorganization. The trial itself had been recorded and re-recorded onto hundreds of videotapes, with any given tape comprising short segments of footage from as many as a half-dozen non-sequential days of the months-long trial. Hundreds of hours of trial footage were missing entirely. There was no index and no way to locate any particular section of the trial. Over the course of three months, the digitized footage was reorganized by trial session and painstakingly reassembled into the correct order in reference to a transcript of the full proceeding. In addition to the surviving trial tapes, material was brought in from 1961 news broadcasts and commemorative recordings to create the most complete audiovisual record of the trial ever assembled. Over the last several months, the process of manually subtitling each session in English was begun, with the first ten sessions available online today. The remaining sessions will follow in the coming months, with all the surviving trial material—over 200 hours’ worth—expected to be online by the end of 2024.
Among the events in the first ten sessions are:
- The reading of the 15-count indictment against Eichmann
- Legal arguments concerning the legality of Israel’s jurisdiction over the trial
- Eichmann’s ‘not guilty’ plea
- Attorney General Gideon Hausner’s opening statement
- The testimony of Avner Less, who interrogated Eichmann in prison
Each video’s description contains valuable information about the contents of the session, a link to a transcript including dialogue from footage that has not survived, and timecodes that can take the viewer instantly to key moments in the footage. Such moments in the initial uploaded material include:
- Sightings in the audience of Hannah Arendt, the German-Jewish philosopher who infamously coined the term ‘the banality of evil’ to describe Eichmann’s behavior on the stand
- Moments of unexpected humor and levity
- Controversial statements by the prosecution and defense
The Eichmann trial has re-entered the news recently with the revelation that Israel is assembling a case based on Eichmann’s trial against Hamas terrorists captured in the wake of the October 7th attack.
Most days of the trial featured a morning session and an afternoon session. On YouTube, the trial is presented by session.
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