About Executing Eichmann

On 15 December 1961 in Jerusalem Adolf Eichmann was sentenced to death for crimes against the Jewish people and against humanity While this judgment was met with consensus on a national level some spoke out against it On 29 May 1962 a group of Holocaust survivors and intellectuals including philosophers Hannah Arendt Hugo Bergmann Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem rejected an epilogue to the trial they believed was inappropriate and sent a petition to President Yitzhak BenZvi to demand Eichmanns death sentence be commuted By opposing Eichmanns execution they raised questions about the Holocaust and also defended the values of Judaism raising questions about Jewish morality for Israel and the nature of a Jewish State Historians philosophers and Israeli eyewitnesses set out the facts go over the philosophical arguments and return to a debate that while central to that era remains valid today and deserves to be revisited