Israel national archive opens online access to 380,000 pages of Eichmann trial documents

Israel’s national archives announced Monday they were granting public access online to hundreds of thousands of documents from the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, one of the main organizers of the Holocaust.

Timed to coincide with International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which marks 80 years since the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp, the national archives uploaded 380,000 pages of “chilling testimony, correspondence, lists and photographs” to their website, the Prime Minister’s Office said in a statement.

Eichmann, who fled to Argentina and lived there under a fake identity after World War II, was captured by Israeli spies in 1960 after a years-long manhunt and clandestinely taken to Israel to stand trial.

He was found guilty of masterminding the implementation of the “final solution,” the Nazis’ plan to exterminate Jews, and was executed by hanging in 1962, aged 56.

The statement called the Eichmann trial papers one of the archives’ “most interesting collections,” including “court files and correspondence between the State Attorney’s Office and (then-prime minister) David Ben-Gurion.”

The text of the scanned documents can be searched thanks to optical character recognition (OCR) technology, allowing users to perform advanced searches using keywords, names, events, and dates, said the statement from the Prime Minister’s Office, which houses the archives. That will allow Holocaust survivors’ families to find “the personal stories of their loved ones, at times in their own handwriting,” it said.

Among the testimonies in the collection is that of Israeli Holocaust survivor writer Yehiel Dinur, who spent two years in Auschwitz and met Eichmann face to face.

Dinur was called to testify at the trial and famously collapsed after making an opening statement about what he described as the other-worldly horrors of Auschwitz.

Before the trial, Dinur was among those interviewed by Israel Police’s Bureau 06, a special unit tasked with gathering evidence and testimonies from survivors.

Though Dinur did not return to the courtroom to give further evidence, his statements to police are among those that can be found in the online archive.

During the Holocaust, the Nazis murdered six million Jewish people, mostly from Europe, including around a million at Auschwitz where they were gassed to death, or died of starvation or disease.