The trial of Adolf Eichmann opened in Jerusalem
On this day · 11 April 1961
On April 11, 1961, a glass booth in Jerusalem held the SS officer who organized the Holocaust's deportations—and an audience of millions watched.
On April 11, 1961, Adolf Eichmann went on trial before a special three-judge tribunal of the Jerusalem District Court, eight months after Israeli agents had seized him from a suburb of Buenos Aires. Attorney General Gideon Hausner charged him on 15 counts, including crimes against the Jewish people and crimes against humanity, for his central role in organizing the deportation of millions to ghettos and death camps.
The proceedings, held at a converted community theater, were among the first to be filmed and broadcast widely. Eichmann sat inside a bulletproof glass booth, claiming he had merely followed orders—a defense the court rejected.
More than 100 survivors testified, turning the trial into a public reckoning with the Holocaust.
Found guilty in December 1961, Eichmann was sentenced to death and hanged in 1962, the only civil execution ever carried out in Israel. The trial reshaped how the world confronted, and remembered, Nazi genocide.
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