NOTICE: The following
article is written by the author itself and not by me, I am not trying to
violate their copyright. I will give some information on them. I chose this as
the article on the death penalty of the week, as Adolf Eichmann was executed by
hanging in Israel on this date, 31 May 1962.
PAGE TITLE: http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/
ARTICLE
TITLE:
The case of Adolf Eichmann shows that the death penalty can be just
DATE: Thursday 7 April
2011
AUTHOR: Francis Philips
AUTHOR INFORMATION:
The case of Adolf Eichmann shows that the death penalty can be just
His
crimes were of the gravest nature; his life was an affront to the families of
those who died in the Holocaust
By Francis Phillips on Thursday, 7
April 2011
|
Turning
on the car radio yesterday, I chanced on the end of a Radio 4 programme – the
sort that makes you park the car and carry on listening. It was broadcaster
Gavin Esler in Jerusalem, examining “the legacy of Adolf Eichmann” on the 50th
anniversary of his trial and execution. Everyone who followed that trial will
recall the kidnapping of Eichmann by Mossad agents from Buenos Aires in 1961,
as a result of a tip-off from agents of Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal. They will
remember the book about Eichmann’s trial by Hannah Arendt, in which she coined
the phrase “the banality of evil”. They will visualise the black and white
newspaper photographs of a bespectacled, balding, elderly man in the dock of
the courtroom – the man who had been the chief organiser of the deportation of
millions of Jews to the death camps in Poland. They will have pondered
Eichmann’s main defence: “I was simply carrying out orders.”
I
tuned in as the three judges in the Israeli court sentenced him to death by
hanging for crimes against the Jewish people; crimes against humanity; and war
crimes. Those like me who followed the news at the time thought the verdict a
foregone conclusion – not unlike the verdicts at the Nuremberg Trials, which
Eichmann had successfully evaded by escaping to South America. The sentence was
carried out on May 30 1962. It was followed by cremation, with the ashes
scattered in the sea outside Israel’s territorial waters.
Why
am I writing all this? Because it made me ponder the whole question (yet again)
of the morality of capital punishment. Many Catholics think that capital
punishment is now forbidden by the Church. Certainly the late pope, John Paul
II, in his public statements about it, seemed to indicate that civilised
countries should now have recourse to other means of punishment. Other people
condemn capital punishment under a general pro-life banner which lumps together
the adult guilty, like Eichmann, and the unborn who are innocent.
Personally,
I make a distinction between these two categories. Guilt does require some form
of punishment and justice must be seen to be done – whereas abortion is always
the death of the innocent. Just checking the Catechism of the Catholic Church,
I see that on page 488, paragraph 2266, it states: “Preserving the common good
of society requires rendering the aggressor unable to inflict harm. For this
reason the traditional teaching of the Church has acknowledged as well-founded
the right and duty of legitimate public authority to punish malefactors by
means of penalties commensurate with the gravity of the crime, not excluding,
in cases of extreme gravity, the death penalty…”
Writing
as a Christian, I am sympathetic to the Israeli trial and execution of this
man, proved beyond doubt to have organised mass murder. In the radio programme,
Esler interviewed Michael Goldman-Gilad, survivor of Auschwitz and the Israeli
police interrogator of Eichmann during his trial. Now in his 80s, Goldman-Gilad
said, “We hanged one person; we couldn’t hang him six million times”, thus
recognising the symbolic aspect of the trial and execution. He did not sound
vengeful, simply adding “I felt relieved” after it was all over.
As
I see it, Eichmann’s continued life was a challenge to Israel’s collective
memory of suffering; it was an affront to the families of those for whose death
he had responsibility, families who wanted justice; his crimes were of the
gravest nature. The death penalty was, in this case, appropriate.
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