At the precise moment this was happening, another global event that would have an impact on the gas chamber began to unfold. It started after Israeli intelligence agents located a murderer they had been pursuing for years. The suspect, who was living in Buenos Aires, Argentina, under the name Ricardo Klement, was actually the fugitive Nazi war criminal SS-Obersturmbannführer Karl Adolf Eichmann, fifty-four, who had been head of the Department for Jewish Affairs in the Gestapo from 1941 to 1945 and chief of operations in the deportation of three million Jews to extermination camps. A key figure in implementing Hitler’s Final Solution, Eichmann, known to the Jews as the “Angel of Death,” had supervised the creation and operation of the death camps. After the war Eichmann had managed to escape and eventually made his way to South America. He had destroyed all evidence of his former identity as best as he could, even cutting away the SS tattoo he carried under his left armpit. But once the Mossad obtained proof of his true identity, on May 11, 1960, they kidnapped him and took him to Jerusalem for extensive interrogation and trial. Word of Eichmann’s arrest was announced to the world on May 23.
An Israeli tribunal heard extensive testimony about his slaughter of Jews in Nazi death camps, and Eichmann himself acknowledged his moral guilt but maintained that his role was minor.48 The evidence against him included extensive testimony by survivors and a Russian film from Auschwitz showing a gas chamber that looked from the outside like an ordinary brick warehouse.49 The trial, which received worldwide news coverage, was controversial in some quarters, primarily because Eichmann had been illegally seized in violation of international law years after the last of the Nuremberg criminals had been pardoned. On December 13, 1961, the former Nazi was sentenced to death, and following the rejection of an appeal to the Supreme Court for clemency, he was executed by hanging close to midnight on May 31, 1962.
The Eichmann case revived attention on the Nazis’ use of the gas chamber against the Jews. It also raised haunting questions about the nature of culpability for crimes against humanity and how to punish such crimes. In anticipation of the verdict, the noted British historian, H. R. Trevor-Roper published an essay entitled “Eichmann Is Not Unique,” in which he argued that the human capacity to commit horrible crimes, including genocide, was much more widespread than generally acknowledged. “Seen historically and in perspective,” he wrote, “anti-Semitism is only the most obvious expression of a more general social and psychological phenomenon. That is why it may easily be stirred into life again.” In Europe the Final Solution had applied to Jews and Gypsies, but members of other groups and classes had also been targeted for elimination. For Americans, warnings such as Trevor-Roper’s carried other implications, especially given the nation’s historical treatment of blacks and Native Americans as well.50
Writer Hannah Arendt covered the trial for The New Yorker and later expanded her articles into a best-selling book, Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), in which she explored “the banality of evil.” In it she argued that rather than representing evil incarnate, as many sought to depict him, Eichmann was actually just an average man, a petty bureaucrat interested only in advancing his career. His evil actions stemmed from the seductive power of the totalitarian state and an unthinking adherence to the Nazi cause. His only defense during the trial was, “I was just following orders.”51
Interestingly, some social commentators of the period who were arguing for capital punishment took to invoking the image of Eichmann as a criminal, which he certainly was. Yet abolitionists attacking the gas chamber might just as readily have cited him as an example of an executioner, for he was that, too.
For intellectuals, perhaps the most influential statement of the period about the death penalty was the essay “Reflections on the Guillotine,” written by Nobel Prize–winning author Albert Camus in 1957. Camus was a leading voice against totalitarianism and a critic of capital punishment on philosophical grounds. 52
At the same time as the Chessman execution and Eichmann’s arrest, Americans were also flocking to read or watch, among other works, Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl (1947 book, 1955 play, 1959 movie), depicting the life of a Jewish teenager in hiding from the Nazis before she was ultimately caught and sent to her death; Exodus, by Leon Uris (1958 book, 1960 movie), about the founding of Israel; Judgment at Nuremberg (1959 television play, 1961 movie), about ethical issues raised by the war crimes trials; and William L. Shirer’s best seller The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960), regarding the history of the Nazi regime.
The image of the gas chamber hung over all of them: humanizing and ennobling the victims, exposing the executioners and holding them accountable, and detailing the rise and fall of fascism that had engulfed the world. While the American gas chamber and cyanide executions of Chessman and others were not mentioned in any of them, and Chessman’s works specifically avoided mentioning the Nazis, they all inhabited the same arena and raised many of the same issues. Thoughts about one infected thinking about the other.
Historian Peter Novick has argued in The Holocaust in American Life (1999) that the American concept of “the Holocaust” gradually gained ground in the public awareness during the 1960s. Until then, many American Jews did not tend to stress the special quality of Jewish suffering. This was because it might have drawn attention to the fact that many Eastern Jews were sympathetic to Communism when International Communism was such a bogeyman to most Americans. What caused the situation to change, in Novick’s view, was the television coverage of Eichmann’s show trial in 1961. He suggests that to meet the need for an English word to translate the Hebrew “Shoah” (catastrophe, destruction), the word holocaust emerged as the preferred term, and it has been used ever since. The Holocaust did not become capitalized, he says, until after the Six Day War of 1967, when Jews again presented themselves as being threatened with extinction.53
The powerful image of the Holocaust affected not only Jews. It also intensified the guilt experienced by prison staff who participated in the executions. As one San Quentin veteran of the period later explained, “You know, in Hitler’s Germany, the Nazis killed people who were simply nuisances: the mental defectives, the Gypsies, and mentally ill people. They were killed not because they committed a crime, but because they were inconvenient for a society to have around. Now we have a lot of people in this society who are nuisances, who are inconvenient, and I would be afraid that a society that became too comfortable with killing people would extend that charter, so to speak, to dispose of other groups.”54