White Crow, The
by Donald Freed

“Forty-nine years ago next Monday a certain Ricardo Klement, living obscurely in Buenos Aires, was identified by a group of Nazi-hunters as the man responsible for arranging the transport of millions of European Jews to the death camps.

His true name was Adolf Eichmann.

He was smuggled out of the country—illegally, but only diplomatic pedants protested—and in Jerusalem he was tried, found guilty of crimes hitherto thought unimaginable, hanged, cremated and his ashes dropped into the sea.

It is all too easy to call such men evil and leave it at that, but so many questions then remain unanswered, including the fundamental one of “How did this person come to commit such crimes?” Donald Freed’s gripping drama, subtitled “Eichmann in Jerusalem”, presents us with an attempt to understand.

…The trial is still months ahead; what Freed shows us is an exploration of his state of mind by a Dr Baum….

Some people, Freed argues, will always defend their crimes by playing the obeying-orders card, which gives Eichmann’s statement— “I am guilty only in the eyes of God” —an unnervingly contemporary ring.”

-Jeremy Kingston, The Times