PARDON PLEA BY NAZI WAR CRIMINAL ADOLF EICHMANN IS MADE PUBLIC
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.
In a 1962 letter handwritten in German that was made public for the first time on Wednesday, Eichmann asked the Israeli president, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, for a pardon, arguing: “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.”
Eichmann was a Nazi war criminal who’d overseen the lethal logistics of the Holocaust.
The letter, dated May 29, 1962, and other original documents from the Eichmann case, had been discovered by researchers in the office of the current president, Reuven Rivlin, only in the past few weeks, when they were digitizing files from the president’s archive.
Rivlin presented the documents during an event to commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day. “After considering the pardon requests made on behalf of Adolf Eichmann and after having reviewed all the material presented to me,” Ben-Zvi wrote to Israel’s justice minister, Dov Yosef, “I came to the conclusion that there is no justification in giving Adolf Eichmann a pardon or easing the sentence imposed on him.”
At midnight on June 1, 1962, two days after he wrote his request for mercy, Eichmann was executed by hanging.