Just Following Orders

“All I did was follow the orders of my superior,” Adolf Eichmann famously said at his eight-month trial in Jerusalem, which began in April 1961. “There can be no guilt when there is no responsibility; orders and obedience are the basis of all organized states.

“Because the head of the state at the time issued an order to exterminate Jews, I had to obey,” said the man who orchestrated the systemic deportation and murder of six million Jews. “Orders are orders!”

Thanks to the creative ingenuity of David Serero, “The Trial of Eichmann” has been brought to the stage for the first time, premiering at the Center for Jewish History in New York City. Born in Paris to a Moroccan Jewish family, Serero wrote, directed, produced, and stars in the play as Gideon Hausner, the Israeli prosecutor tasked with bringing Eichmann to justice. It took Serero about four years to go through all the testimonies and transcripts and to transcribe the sessions, which were thousands of pages long. 

The play is based on Israel’s capture and trial of Eichmann, known as the Holocaust’s architect. He was kidnapped by Mossad agents in Argentina and brought to the Jewish state in 1960. Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion engineered the trial to educate the nation about what took place during Nazi Germany’s genocide of six million Jews. Through victims’ testimonies, the trial enabled survivors to speak for the first time about what they saw and experienced. 

Of the more than 100 survivors called to the stand, about a dozen had personally witnessed Eichmann’s activities.

“How do you heal a broken nation?” asks Hausner in the play. “You give them a voice.” 

For Serero, the false moral distinction that Eichmann was trying to make helps us to examine the depths of human evil. “I thought this trial needed to be transmitted to the new generations to understand how evil was created.” Indeed, Hausner points out multiple examples showing that it was far more than “just following orders” for Eichmann. In a 1956 interview with a Dutch journalist, Eichmann said: “No matter what, you must kill all the Jewish children. What is the point of killing a generation and leaving their kids alive?” The death marches of 1944-45 were also apparently Eichmann’s idea.

The fact that the play premiered nine months after the worst atrocity since the Shoah was of course completely unexpected. Since we know that the trial itself helped Israelis process the Shoah, I asked Serero if he thought the play could help Jews process what’s happening right now. “It resonates, sadly, to see that history is repeating itself,” he told me. “It resonates with everyone, as we would think the world was done with the idea of murdering Jews.”

“It resonates, sadly, to see that history is repeating itself. It resonates with everyone, as we would think the world was done with the idea of murdering Jews.” – David Serero

“I can’t imagine all the people who worked so hard for this trial who could have foreseen what would happen on Oct. 7. I hope this trial will educate young audiences about the importance of previous generations’ sacrifices so that we can understand freedom and that Jews will always have a place to go.”

The play also shows what Israel, as a young state, was at the time. “They could have killed Eichmann back in Argentina, but instead, they chose to bring him to justice and allow the Holocaust survivors to speak for the first time to a worldwide audience,” said Serero.

And of course in watching the play, one can’t help but make comparisons. The first that came to mind for me: Hamas and their Islamist compatriots don’t argue that they’re “just following orders.” They murder, rape, and behead with glee, filming their conquests.

But as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pointed out before Congress, blind obedience is now the province of leftists — to the point of seeing good as evil, and evil as good. And the evil leftists applaud and indulge in gets deeper every day. Not surprisingly, Holocaust denial and minimization is now as much of a fixture on the far left as it is on the far right.

The production ends with Serero performing Israel’s national anthem, “Hatikva,” alongside footage of Israelis listening to the trial in 1961.

“The trial was justice for humanity,” said Serero. “It shows that no matter what kinds of crimes you commit, you will be held accountable for them. And no matter what, freedom will always triumph.”

Karen Lehrman Bloch Bloch is editor in chief of White Rose Magazine.