De Vita, Lorena. Eichmann Trial as a Warsaw Pact Concern?

From the moment Israel announced the capture and intention to try Eichmann, the GDR sought to work out its relationship to the murder of the European Jews. The party-state sought to insert itself into the center of the Jerusalem trial by providing evidence of Eichmann’s crimes and using the platform to denounce the Bonn/BRD government’s continuing affiliation with Eichmann’s accomplices. The Eichmann trial is thus a significant element of 1960s Cold War history in addition to Holocaust history. De Vita uses heavily Bundesarchiv collections (from GDR foreign ministry and Politburo) laid over records from the Bonn government (PA-AA) and Czechoslovakian and Hungarian materials. Together, these show the “party-state” preparations as emblematic of East Berlin’s Cold War response and demonstrate the limitations on East Berlin’s freedom of action and intense competition with Bonn.

Lorena De Vita, “The Eichmann Trial as a Warsaw Pact Concern? The View from East Berlin,” in Katharina Rauschenberger, Joachim von Puttkamer and Sybille Steinbacher (eds.), Investigating, Punishing, Agitating. Nazi Perpetrator Trials in the Eastern Bloc (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2023), 91-112.