On This Day: Trial against Adolf Eichmann opens after the Holocaust architect is captured

APRIL 11, 1961: Holocaust mastermind Adolf Eichmann went on trial in Jerusalem on this day in 1961 – a year after being captured by Israeli spies in Argentina.

The SS officer, who was in charge of implementing the Nazi’s ‘Final Solution’ plan to exterminate the Jews of Europe, had been the most senior Nazi still on the run.

The trial of Eichmann, who sent most of the six million Holocaust victims to their deaths on board cattle trains, became one of the most sensational events in history.

People around the world imagined they would catch a glimpse of cold, unrepentant evil as they watched the opening hearing, captured in this British Pathé newsreel.

Yet Eichmann, who stood in the dock behind bulletproof glass, cut rather a pathetic figure as charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity were read out.

Gone were the smug expression, forbidding SS uniform and cap bearing a sinister silver skull.

Instead, aged 55, he was bald, thin and gaunt, and wore a plain suit and thick-rimmed glasses as he meekly denied the charges and claimed he was ‘just following orders’.

Yet the trial in 1961 provided cathartic to traumatised people - with hundreds of Holocaust survivors taking the stand and revealing their ordeals for the first time.

The audacious capture of the most prominent Nazi fugitive bolstered the reputations of both Mossad and Simon Wiesenthal, a Jewish Nazi hunter who first learned of Eichmann’s whereabouts.

After the war ended, Eichmann escaped American captivity and fled to Argentina in 1950, taking on the name Ricardo Klement.

[On This Day: Holocaust mastermind Adolf Eichmann captured in Argentina]

There he kept out of sight until 1957, when his eldest son Klaus began dating a girl whose father was a Jewish Holocaust victim from Germany.

Mossad located the family house in Buenos Aires and on May 11, 1960, a seven-man team seized him as he got off a bus returning from work at a Mercedes Benz factory.

Agent Zvi Malkin jumped on him, put his gloved hand inside Eichmann's mouth to ensure he wasn’t concealing a cyanide pill, and bundled him off to a safe house.

Nine days later he was drugged, dressed in an El Al uniform, seated in first class and passed off as a crew member who was ill as he was flown to Israel.

Yet, despite the propaganda coup that the trial represented, historians criticised its rigour due to prosecutors failing to ask Eichmann about Zionist collaborators.

Among negotiations the SS Obersturmbahnführer had was a ‘blood for goods’ deal Rudolf Kastner used to help Jews flee Hungary.

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It was in this eastern European country where Eichmann, who was praised by Nazi chiefs for efficiency, wrought the swiftest destruction of a national Jewish population.

Having killed almost all of Poland’s three million Jews, the SS – with Germany by now losing the war - turned with rapid desperation to Hungary in May 1944.

A total of 437,000 were killed in just three months at Auschwitz - making up 40% of the death camp’s victims – before the slaughter stopped in August.

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In this short space of time, 70% of Hungary’s pre-war Jewish population of 650,000 was wiped out.

And Eichman, who visited Auchwitz several times to witness its gas chambers killing up to 20,000 people per day, was at the heart of this unrivalled mass murder.