Lipstadt Trial Quotes & Sayings

In fact, this figure [five million "murdered" Gentiles] is too high if one is counting victims who were targeted exclusively for racial reasons, but too low if one counts the total number of victims the Nazi regime killed outside military operations.
(...)
Wiesenthal's aggrandizement of his role in the Eichmann capture is far less disturbing and historiographically significant than another of his inventions. In an attempt to elicit non-Jewish interest in the Holocaust, Wiesenthal decided to broaden the population of victims - even though it meant falsifying history. He began to speak of eleven million victims: six million Jews and five million non-Jews. Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer immediately recognized that this number made no historical sense. Who, Bauer wondered, constituted Wiesenthal's five million.

--The Eichmann Trial, page 8 — Deborah E. Lipstadt

Wiesenthal admitted to Bauer that he had invented a historical fantasy in order to give the Holocaust a more universal cast and to find a number which was almost as large as the Jewish death toll but not quite equal to it. When Elie Wiesel challenged Wiesenthal to provide some historical proof that five million non-Jews were murdered in the camps, Wiesenthal, rather than admit that he invented the five million number, accused Wiesel of 'Judeocentrism,' being concerned only about Jews.

-- The Eichmann Trial, page 9 — Deborah E. Lipstadt

our sins against God are far greater than anyone's sins against us. — Bruce Wayne Hebel

I believe people should live full lives and not settle for anything less. — Jack Canfield

She couldn't survey the wreck of the world with an air of casual unconcern. — Margaret Mitchell

On one occasion, when he was about to be taken from the interrogation room, he thought he was going to be shot. His knees buckled and he cried out in a pleading voice: "I have not told you everything yet".

-- The Eichmann Trial, page 44 — Deborah E. Lipstadt

Leon Wells told of Operation 1005, the group of Jewish prisoners assigned to eradicate the evidence by opening mass graves and exhuming, burning, and pulverizing the bodies.

-- The Eichmann Trial, page 87 — Deborah E. Lipstadt

Ultimately, Hausner's efforts regarding the murder were thwarted when questions posed by both Servatius and the judges proved that Avraham Gordon, whom Hausner called as the witness to the murder, could not have observed it.

-- The Eichmann Trial, page 99 — Deborah E. Lipstadt

The splendors of earth do not simply lie in their roles as human resources, supports of culture, or stimulators of experience. — Holmes Rolston III

Some find the overt anti-Semitism of Holocaust deniers the ranting of idiots who are best ignored. Others take these comments quite seriously and see a dire and existential threat to Jewish well-being. They see a Holocaust-denying president of a large country, one that is poised to have nuclear weapons, occupying the podium of a world forum that was founded in the wake of the Final Solution with a mandate to stop genocide. They hear him deny the Final Solution and threaten the existence of the Jewish state.

The Eichmann Trial, page XXVII — Deborah E. Lipstadt

Redistribution depends on three things, amnesia,meaning you don't remember the murderous paths of these beliefs. Envy, you hate the successful in the present and used, people who
have nothing to earn yet. — Jedediah Bila

The judges' primary objective was to conduct a scrupulously fair legal proceeding that would win the respect of the world. Hausner's goal was to tell the story of the Holocaust in all its detail, and in so doing, to capture the imagination not just of Israel's youth and world Jewry, but of the entire world .

-- The Eichmann Trial, page 121 — Deborah E. Lipstadt

Just that what happens today or next week or next year isn't necessarily the way things are always going to be. As soon as you settle into a routine, life throws you a curveball. Sometimes you hit it, sometimes you don't. — Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

I woke up one day and I was like, "I don't have anything to save for myself for the future." That's when I started archiving things. I take four or five things that are really key to each collection, and I restore them or, in some cases, remake parts of them, and archive them. — Jason Wu

[the car] backfired a lot. Loud enough that when I drove in the wrong part of town and it let loose with a gas fart, people actually ducked for cover. — Adrienne Wilder

No, Eichmann assured him, there was no specific talk of killing methods.

-- The Eichmann Trial, page 137 — Deborah E. Lipstadt

You learn different things through fiction. Historians are always making a plot about how certain things came to happen. Whereas a novelist looks at tiny little things and builds up a sort of map, like a painting, so that you see the shapes of things. — A.S. Byatt

Deniers build their pseudo-arguments on traditional anti-Semitic stereotypes and imagery. They contend that Jews created the myth of the Holocaust in order to bilk the Germans out of billions of dollars and ensure the establishment of Israel. Once again the devious Jews have harmed innocent multitudes - Germans and Palestinians in particular - for the sake of their own financial and political ends. To someone nurtured by the soil of anti-Semitism, this makes perfect sense.

-- The Eichmann Trial, page xx — Deborah E. Lipstadt

At one point Malkin and one of his colleagues took Eichmann to the toilet. They waited outside. After a few minutes, Eichmann called out to Malkin, 'Darf ich anfangen?' ('May I begin?') Only when told yes did he begin to move his bowels.

The Eichmann Trial, page 17 — Deborah E. Lipstadt

Long before Eichmann's capture, Auerbach had conducted research on Operation 1005, the large-scale secret campaign to destroy evidence of the Final Solution by digging up the mass graves, pulverizing the bodies in specially adapted cement-mixer apparatuses, and erasing all traces of the atrocities. She also found two people who had participated as slave laborers in this effort.

-- The Eichmann Trial, page 53 — Deborah E. Lipstadt