JERUSALEM — After he was convicted and sentenced to death in Israel for his role in the annihilation of millions of Jews by Nazi Germany, Adolf Eichmann pleaded for his own life.
“There is a need to draw a line between the leaders responsible and the people like me forced to serve as mere instruments in the hands of the leaders,” pleaded Eichmann — the Nazi war criminal who oversaw the lethal logistics of the Holocaust — in a letter dated May 29, 1962, the day that Israel’s Supreme Court rejected his appeal.
Eichmann asked the Israeli president, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, for a pardon, arguing, “I was not a responsible leader, and as such do not feel myself guilty.”
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Sign upThe letter, handwritten by Eichmann in German, and other original documents from the case, were made public for the first time on Wednesday by Israel’s current president, Reuven Rivlin, during an event to commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The documents had been discovered by researchers only in the last few weeks, when they were digitizing files from the president’s archive.
