The Eichmann Trial
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Date Reviewed: 29/10/2025
Elliot Levitt’s The Eichmann Trial is not merely a documentary; it is an immersion into a moment where justice, history, and morality converge with unflinching clarity. Constructed entirely from archival footage of the 1961 trial and contemporaneous news coverage, the film situates us at the epicentre of one of the twentieth century’s most consequential legal proceedings. For four months in Jerusalem, the world watched Adolf Eichmann — architect of the Holocaust’s final solution — confront the enormity of his crimes. Through Levitt’s meticulous editing, this history becomes immediate, tactile, and unbearably human.
The film opens with a thudding, almost corporeal musical pulse layered over black-and-white courtroom footage. Men in headphones — translators for an international tribunal — stand rigid, stacks of white paper crowding tables. Snippets of German dialogue punctuate the air: “Please state your full name.” Names reverberate with infamy: Wilhelm Keitel, Julius Streicher, Rudolph Hoess. The music swells like a heartbeat, echoing the horror behind each visage. The procedural rigor of post-war justice is set against the unimaginable scale of human suffering it seeks to adjudicate.
Levitt’s use of archival material is nothing short of masterful. We see Eichmann, slouched, distant, occasionally fiddling with a pen or blinking, yet ever the dispassionate bureaucrat. Witnesses recount the final solution with a stoicism that veils unfathomable grief. A film from a concentration camp is projected in the courtroom. Eichmann shifts in his seat, attempts to look away, yet never reveals true emotion. The silence punctuated only by the fluttering projector sound is almost unbearable. The camera lingers on the courtroom audience — judges with hands raised to their chins, journalists leaning forward, women wiping tears — making the viewer feel the weight of collective witness.
Levitt also situates the trial within a broader moral and historical context. Archival newsreels show Eichmann’s capture in Argentina, the flurry of reporters in Jerusalem, and interviews with Israeli officials. Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion frames the trial as a moral imperative: “The main thing is not to punish Eichmann…you want the young generation to know what happened, and the world shouldn’t forget it.” Journalists and historians weigh in, contemplating how ordinary men can become perpetrators of extraordinary evil. Roger Paret notes, “Deep down, we can be normal and still become an Eichmann,” underscoring the terrifying ordinariness of bureaucratic atrocity.
The courtroom exchanges are electrifying. Eichmann’s stony composure contrasts with the raw emotion of survivors and the relentless pursuit of truth by the prosecution. He insists repeatedly that he was merely following orders, claiming responsibility lies solely with political leaders. His rationalisations are chilling: forced Jewish emigration, he claims, was simply “the best way among many unpleasant possibilities,” yet he shows no real understanding of the human cost. Every gesture — a twitching mouth, fiddling hands, a distracted glance — communicates a man utterly devoid of ethical reflection. Levitt’s editing captures this with surgical precision, alternating close-ups of Eichmann with images of documents, maps, and photographs that bear silent witness to his crimes.
One of the most devastating moments arrives during Yehiel De-Nur’s testimony, when the film’s structure itself seems to fracture under the weight of memory. Through Levitt’s editing, we are no longer mere observers of the trial — we become unwilling witnesses, drawn into De-Nur’s inner landscape. His words — “the planet of Auschwitz” — conjure an otherworldly realm where humanity was stripped to bone and number, and Levitt visualises this with images that flicker like intrusions from the unconscious: prisoners’ hollow faces, striped pyjamas, dismembered bodies. The footage is fleeting, almost subliminal, but it lingers long after it disappears; you see it when you close your eyes. When De-Nur collapses on the stand, his body buckling under the weight of memory, the courtroom dissolves into a site of collective trauma — unbearable to witness, yet impossible to look away from. It’s a sequence that transcends testimony; it’s the cinematic embodiment of trauma, memory, and the limits of human endurance. Levitt’s decision to intercut these images is both ethically fraught and devastatingly effective — a sober reminder of how remembrance itself can wound.
Ultimately, The Eichmann Trial is a sober, exhaustive exploration of bureaucracy, obedience, and human cruelty. It is exhausting and overwhelming in its detail, yet meticulously constructed to sustain the narrative without ever trivialising the enormity of its subject. Eichmann emerges as a man simultaneously banal and monstrous, convinced of his own innocence even as the court assembles irrefutable evidence of his complicity in genocide. The film’s archival footage, audio interviews, and recreated news coverage combine to create an immersive, almost cinematic experience — one that is as intellectually rigorous as it is emotionally shattering.
Levitt’s work is an extraordinary achievement in historical documentation. The trial, with its 115 courtroom sessions, becomes a lens through which we confront obedience, evil, and responsibility. For anyone seeking a visceral, immersive, and morally intense account of the Holocaust and its aftermath, this film delivers. It is impossible to leave unchanged. As the credits roll over sombre piano and strings, we are left to reflect on the enormity of human cruelty — and the chilling normality of the man who orchestrated it.
Reviewed by Scarlet Thomas