No Eichmann Trial

Suppose Adolf Eichmann dies sometime in the 1950s in Argentine, before the Mossad can arrest him.

How would the lack of the Eichmann trial affect the understanding of the Holocaust? Would it delay public consciousness of the Holocaust?

How did the trial affect Israeli society? Would its absence cause any changes to Israel?

Hannah Arendt won't write Eichmann in Jerusalem. Will this affect the understanding of the men who carried out the final solution?

Would the Milgram experiment still occur?
 
It was already public knowledge the Holocaust had happened, so it might be better to ask if it would delay the scale of how easily people knew it.

My guess is that while some of your points may be butterflied, the next Nazi to get caught would have notoriety of Eichmann. For example, losing Eichmann might allow Israel to grab Mengele. So, you would probably have a lot of the same effects of the Eichmann trial with his trial.

It may be that instead of asking about banality, we are left asking how intellect and science could be so warped.
 
A 2000 excahnge from the London Review Of Books...

Norman Finkelstein:

Until the late Sixties, however, the Holocaust barely figured in the life of America, or of America’s Jews. As Peter Novick remarks, between the end of World War Tow and the late Sixties, only a handful of books and films touched on the subject. Jewish intellectuals paid it little attention. No monuments or tributes marked the event. On the contrary, major Jewish organisations opposed such a memorialisation.

Fear of alienating Gentiles by emphasising the distinctiveness of Jewish experience was always a problem for American (as well as European) Jews, and during the Second World War had inhibited efforts to rescue Jews in Europe. ‘Throughout the Fifties and well into the Sixties,’ Novick reports, the American Jewish Committee, Anti-Defamation League and other groups ‘worked on a variety of fronts’ to dispel the image of Jews as disloyal. The priority for these organisations was not to provide reminders of the Holocaust or to voice support for Israel but to support the US in the Cold War.

William Rubinstein:

In his review of The Holocaust in American Life, Norman Finkelstein (LRB, 6 January) claims that the upsurge in interest in the Holocaust began with the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. In fact, it began with the Eichmann trial of 1960-62 – this is a commonplace in accounts of the historiography of the Holocaust.

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