Historic Nazi war criminal trial now accessible online

Hundreds of thousands of documents from the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi war criminal and key architect of the Holocaust, are being made publicly accessible online by Israel’s national archives, as reported by AL-Monitor via AFP on January  27th.

This initiative coincides with International Holocaust Memorial Day, marking eight decades since the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp. According to a statement from the Israeli prime minister’s office, 380,000 pages of “chilling testimony, correspondence, lists and photographs” have been uploaded to Israel’s national archives’ website.

Eichmann, who escaped to Argentina and lived under a made-up identity following World War II, was apprehended by Israeli intelligence agents in 1960 following an extensive manhunt. He was secretly brought to Israel to face trial.

Convicted of implementing the Nazis’ “final solution”—the systematic plan to exterminate Jews—Eichmann was sentenced to death and executed by hanging in 1962 at the age of 56.

In a statement, the Israeli prime minister’s office described the trial documents as one of their “most interesting collections,” which contains “court files and correspondence between the State Attorney’s Office and (then-prime minister) David Ben-Gurion.”

Using optical character recognition (OCR) technology, the digitised documents are now searchable at an advanced level. Users can perform detailed searches using keywords, names, events, or dates, enabling Holocaust survivors’ families to uncover “the personal stories of their loved ones, at times in their own handwriting,” the statement added.

AL-Monitor via AFP