Page 87 – LIFE

Adolf Eichmann in Israel: Portraits of a Nazi War Criminal

January 15, 2020December 1, 2014 by

In 1963, the political theorist Hannah Arendt added a chilling (and, ultimately, controversial because it is so often misunderstood) phrase to the international lexicon: “the banality of evil.” Arendt coined the provocative expression in her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, which in turn grew out of her reporting for the New Yorker on the trial of one of the principal Nazi officials behind the Holocaust, Adolf Eichmann.

In Arendt’s view, Eichmann was an at-once monstrous and pathetic creature who represented the apotheosis of the Third Reich’s unique obsession with mass slaughter on one hand, and rote, business-like documentation and organization on the other. Here was a man, after all, who entirely relied at trial on the now-infamous defense that he had merely “been following orders” when he organized the transport of Jews and other “undesirables” to Nazi death camps.

For Arendt, such reasoning was not evidence of pure, unmitigated evil, but instead showed that subsuming one’s humanity and decency in a system as murderous as the Third Reich’s was nothing more (or less) than an abandonment of morality in the face of something bigger. (Not, Arendt insisted, in the face of something better, or something more worthy of admiration but something bigger. Eichmann, after all, admitted that his ruthless efficiency in carrying out the “final solution” derived as much from a desire to further his career as from any profound ideological sympathy with the Reich’s stated aims of genocide-driven empire.)

Critics of Arendt’s “banality of evil” formulation, meanwhile, argue that her theory argued to its extreme could actually absolve war criminals of any crimes at all. “If someone like Eichmann is, in the end, just like everyone else,” the reasoning goes, “and we’re all potential Nazis, then how can we judge his innocence or his guilt?” The only problem with that proposition is that Arendt, in Eichmann in Jerusalem, preemptively scuttles it by pointing out that, while we might all be capable of Nazi-like savagery, the entire point of free will and living a moral life is that we choose whether or not to act savagely.

The potential for criminality is not the same as acting in a criminal way. Arendt’s critics often ignore or willfully blur that distinction.

Here, more than five decades after his May 1962 execution by hanging in Israel after a 14-week war-crimes trial, LIFE.com presents pictures of Eichmann in prison: raw, strangely intimate photographs by Gjon Mili chronicling the “arch war criminal” (as LIFE put it) engaged in the most quotidian of pursuits reading, writing, washing, eating all the while fully aware, as most of the world was fully aware, that what awaited him at the end of the trial was a noose.

But before Eichmann’s trial even began, the controversy around his capture and arrival in Israel was intense. He was snatched in May 1960 by “Israeli nationals” (translation: Mossad agents) from Argentina, where he’d been living as a fugitive for 16 years, and carted to Israel to answer for his role in the Holocaust before and during the Second World War. Eichmann’s kidnapping was criticized and is still criticized, by some, to this day as a violation of the sovereign rights of a member state of the United Nations. But when, after frenzied back-room negotiations, Israel and Argentina issued a joint statement in August 1960 laying the matter to rest, Eichmann’s fate was effectively sealed.

As LIFE reported to its readers in its April 14, 1961, issue, in which some of the pictures in this gallery first appeared:

Once in a while some great man becomes the symbol of the era in which he lived. Less often one man becomes the symbol of a quality of his era of its good or evil, its reason or madness. Such a man is Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi, a symbol of the hatred and unspeakable hideousness of Hitler’s Germany.

Here he is in this dramatic study the world’s first intimate look at a man who vanished 16 years ago and who for all those years was the hunted, almost faceless arch war criminal. As head of the Gestapo office for Jewish affairs, Eichmann had organized with ruthless efficiency transport systems which carried six million Jews to extermination centers. After the war the survivors of his “final solution” of “the Jewish question” sought him all over the world. They had little to go on but memories of the arrogant gaze, the polished Nazi boots. But they found him last May, in Argentina, where Israeli agents dramatically (and illegally) kidnapped him.

Unveiled, he had the tense look of a jackal at bay. Says Webster of jackals: “They are smaller, usually more yellowish, and much more cowardly than wolves, and sometimes hunt in packs at night.” Hunt with the pack is what Eichmann says he did, in his memoirs previously published in LIFE that is, he only “obeyed orders.” Now trapped, he appeared smaller and yellower than his legend. Stripped of the trappings of the brutal system he served, he had no strut.

This week he would go into a Jerusalem court with the eyes of the world on him to stand trial for crimes against the Jewish people and against humanity. The trial, which has been attacked on legal grounds both in and out of Israel, was partly for the benefit of young Israelis to whom his crimes are so many lines in a history book. But more was on trial than Eichmann the man. It was the whole Nazi generation which condoned, participated in or didn’t want to know about it.

Adolf Eichmann awaited trial in Israel, 1961.

Gjon Mili/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Barbed wire his victims once knew confined Eichmann’s walks.

Gjon Mili/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Eichmann ate alone, but watched from outside. Most of the guards did not speak any German, and all were forbidden to talk with him.

Gjon Mili/ Life Pictures/Shutterstock

His daily bath was a make-do affair but part of the prison’s strict routine.

Gjon Mili/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A medical check after breakfast, watched by a guard, was part of Eichmann’s daily routine.

Gjon Mili/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Doing chores, Eichmann mopped the bathroom floor in his jail near Haifa.

Gjon Mili/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Eichmann draped shirts and underwear he had washed himself over bars of a window.

Gjon Mili/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Reading and writing were both permitted, and Eichmann concentrated on books about Nazi regime.

Gjon Mili/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Served by a guard, Eichmann cut breakfast margarine as matzo was put on his tray during Passover week, shortly before trial.

Gjon Mili/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Trying to talk during the daily outdoor exercise period, prisoner Eichmann met unshakeable silence from prison guards. He was allowed to walk outside for a half hour a day, when the weather was good.

Gjon Mili/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Adolf Eichmann awaited trial in Israel, 1961.

Gjon Mili/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Sitting around outdoors afforded plenty of time for Eichmann to think and to wonder.

Gjon Mili/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Adolf Eichmann in prison, 1961.

Gjon Mili/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

For almost a year while he awaited trial, he spoke to no one except Israeli police interrogators and his lawyers.

Gjon Mili/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

While Eichmann slept, an observer watched and the single electric bulb overhead burned all night.

Gjon Mili/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Adolf Eichmann awaited trial in Israel, 1961.

Gjon Mili/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Prohibition’s Last Call: Inside the Speakeasies of New York in 1933

December 8, 2019December 1, 2014 by

The Prohibition era in America, which lasted nearly 14 years and effectively banned the sale and production of booze in the United States, ended with the ratification of the 21st Amendment on Dec. 5, 1933. The time when Prohibition imperfectly reigned, meanwhile, has endured in the national consciousness and the pop-culture pantheon as a period of unparalleled violence, gangsterism and corruption.

These photos were made in a number of New York speakeasies by Margaret Bourke-White. Most famous for her work as a LIFE photographer along with Peter Stackpole, Thomas McAvoy and Alfred Eisenstaedt, she was one of the weekly’s original four staff photographers Bourke-White was for years an editor and photographer at FORTUNE; the pictures in this gallery were shot for that storied Time Inc. monthly, three years before LIFE began publishing.

Bourke-White’s photos ran in the June 1933 issue of FORTUNE, under the simple and evocative title, “Speakeasies of New York.” It also included some the below text in which the locations of these places were not, of course, specifically revealed.

The speakeasy [FORTUNE told its readers, betraying a bit of hauteur] has flowered successfully only in New York. In San Francisco it is dull and obscure; in Chicago, tough and noisy; in the South almost nonexistent. In most cities, drinking, like eating, is done at home or in the country club. In New York alone has the speakeasy become the instrument of a civilized social life, something between a pre-prohibition restaurant and a coeducational club. There are, therefore, in New York, speakeasies for every taste and purse. . . . The pictures on these pages present a fair cross-section of the reputable ones.

Liz Ronk, edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter at @LizabethRonk.

At the Hunt Club in the theatre district, you could find perhaps the best whiskey in town

Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

At luncheon half a dozen dogs ate amicably at their mistresses’ sides. This bar is chromium, rose and black.

Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

No speakeasy was as popular with off-duty aviators as this quiet place. Its proprietor was himself an expert pilot.

Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

In the heart of a business section Thomas kept this speakeasy on the second floor. Drinking would start at 8:30 A.M. when contractors tended to drop in for a glass or two of rye.

Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Champagne from right to left, on mantel: half nip, nip, pint, imperial pint, magnum, jeroboam, rehoboam, methuzelah, salmanazar, balthazar. This popular place had 29 waiters and eight chefs.

Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The social atmosphere crested the popularity of this speakeasy, which is full of gay chintz, red and white awnings, indirect lights. The barroom is gold and Victorian-green.

Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Inside a New York City speakeasy during Prohibition, 1933.

Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Crimea: Where War Photography Was Born

March 8, 2022November 30, 2014 by

With the great historical crossroads of Crimea and, indeed, all of Ukraine still dominating world headlines, LIFE.com takes a look back at another, long-ago conflict in the same area through a singular lens: namely, that of the very earliest war photography.

The Crimean War of the 1850s, after all, was arguably where the genre was born, with British photographers like Roger Fenton (1819 – 1869) and James Robertson (1813 – 1888), the Italian-British Felice Beato (1832 – 1909) and the Austro-Hungarian Carol Szathmari (1812 – 1887) making what most historians consider the very first photographs of a major military conflict. Their pictures might lack the often-brutal drama of modern war photography, but they nevertheless serve as compelling documentation of the look and, in a sense, the logistics of mid-19th century warfare. Within a few years, Mathew Brady, Alexander Gardner and others would document the American Civil War more thoroughly and graphically than Fenton, Robertson, Beato or any others managed in Crimea — a clear indication of how rapidly photography took hold as a critical method of reportage.

Incidentally, some readers might recall Errol Morris’ epic three-part Opinionator column in the New York Times several years ago, when the filmmaker and essayist delved deep into two particular Roger Fenton photos from the Crimean War. If you’re not familiar with it, read the whole thing. It’s astonishing. Here’s one of the Fenton photos Morris examined — with his customarily obsessive, wry and deeply intelligent eye.

Crimean War c. 1855

Mansell Collection The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Brando Takes Broadway: LIFE on the Set of ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ in 1947

December 9, 2020November 30, 2014 by

Along with Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night and a few other notable modern works, Tennessee Williams’ 1947 masterpiece, A Streetcar Named Desire, helped shape the look and feel of American drama for decades to come. But nothing that occurred during the play’s original Broadway run eclipsed the emergence of a young Marlon Brando as a major creative force and a star to be reckoned with. Decades after the original Broadway premiere on Dec. 3, 1947, LIFE.com presents photos — some of which never ran in the magazine — taken during rehearsals by photographer Eliot Elisofon.

Directed by Elia Kazan and starring Brando, Jessica Tandy, Kim Hunter and Karl Malden, the 1947 production remains a touchstone in American drama, winning both the Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics’ Circle award for the year’s best play, as well as a Best Actress Tony for Tandy for her seminal performance as the unstable, alcoholic, melodramatic Southern belle, Blanche DuBois. Despite all the accolades it earned, however, the 24-year Brando’s galvanizing turn as Stanley Kowalski — in both the play and in Kazan’s 1951 film adaptation — was what really seared the production into the pop-culture consciousness.

Gritty, sensual, violent and bleak, Williams’ great play remains one of a handful of utterly indispensable 20th-century American dramatic works, while the sensual ferocity of Brando’s Stanley can still shock, seven decades after he first unleashed the character on a rapt theatergoing public.

A Streetcar Named Desire 1947

Kim Hunter (left), Marlon Brando, Karl Malden and others in rehearsal for the original production of ‘A Streetcar Named Desire.’ (Eliot Elisofon / The LIFE Picture Collection)

Jessica Tandy as Blanche Dubois in Tennessee Williams’ “A Streetcar Named Desire,” 1947.

Eliot Elisofon /The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Marlon Brando and Kim Hunter in “A Streetcar Named Desire,” 1947.

Eliot Elisofon / The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A Streetcar Named Desire 1947

Eliot Elisofon The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Tennessee Williams on the set of Streetcar Named Desire

Eliot Elisofon The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

‘Walter Mitty’ and the LIFE Magazine Covers That Never Were

January 15, 2020November 30, 2014 by

“The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” James Thurber’s classic 1939 short story, is a tribute to the sometimes unsettling power of the human imagination. It’s also very, very funny.

The most recent movie adaptation of the Mitty story, from 2013, starred Ben Stiller in the titular role as the archetypal nebbish who retreats into an intensely vivid fantasy world in times of stress. (The first film version of Mitty, starring Danny Kaye, was released in 1947.) In this rendition of the tale, Stiller plays a photo editor at LIFE magazine—still publishing, thanks to the magic of the movies—and much of the film is set in the meticulously recreated offices of the storied weekly. In those offices, meanwhile, hang poster-sized versions of LIFE magazine covers through the years.

The covers are stirring and iconic—and, for the most part, they’re fake.

Or rather, the majority of the LIFE covers one sees in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty were never covers at all. The pictures on the covers in this gallery, for example—the launch of Apollo 11; Jayne Mansfield luxuriating in a swimming pool; a theater audience watching the first-ever 3-D feature-length film—are, indisputably, classic LIFE images. But none of them ever graced the cover of LIFE magazine.

“When we were selecting photos for the LIFE covers in Walter Mitty,” said Jeff Mann, the production designer on the film, “we focused on pictures that would serve the story we were telling, but that would also capture the diversity of what LIFE covered in its prime. We worked really, really hard to select photos that were novel, naïve in the best possible way and that featured significant twentieth-century people, places and events.”

In the end, Mann said, he and his team and Stiller, who is a photography aficionado, felt that the photos they chose to use as covers, from the literally millions of pictures in LIFE’s archive, had to somehow “convey the influence of LIFE magazine, while at the same time helping to move our story along. It was a fabulous problem, and one we had a lot of fun working to solve.”

Here, then, are a number of LIFE covers that never were—including several that, in light of how wonderful they look—perhaps should have been covers, after all.

LIFE magazine cover created for the movie, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.

LIFE Logo and Images © Meredith Corporation.

‘The Luckiest Generation’: Teenagers in the ’50s

December 7, 2019November 29, 2014 by

If there’s one thing humans like to do, it’s label ourselves and one another. Sometimes those labels, applied to vast numbers of people, are obviously laudatory (The Greatest Generation). Sometimes they’re pitying (The Lost Generation). Sometimes they’re duly withering (The Me Generation). And sometimes, at least in the moment, they’re just plain accurate.

In June 1954, LIFE magazine published an article titled “The Luckiest Generation” that, revisited decades later, feels like an almost perfect snapshot of a certain segment of American society at a particular moment in the nation’s history. We’ll let LIFE set the scene:

The morning traffic and parking problems became so critical at the Carlsbad, N.M., high school that school authorities in 1953 were finally forced to a solution: they set aside a special parking area for students only. In Carlsbad, as everywhere else, teenagers are not only driving new cars to school but in many cases are buying them out of their own earnings. These are the children who at birth were called “Depression babies.” They have grown up to become, materially at least, America’s luckiest generation.

Young people 16 to 20 are the beneficiaries of the very economic collapse that brought chaos almost a generation ago. The Depression tumbled the nation’s birth rate to an all-time low in 1933, and today’s teenage group is proportionately a smaller part of the total population than in more than 70 years. Since there are fewer of them, each in the most prosperous time in U.S. history gets a bigger piece of the nation’s economic pie than any previous generation ever got. This means they can almost have their pick of the jobs that are around. . . . To them working has a double attraction: the pay is good and, since their parents are earning more too, they are often able to keep the money for themselves.

A few things to point out here. First, and most disheartening, is the racial makeup of the “teenage group” that LIFE focused on, at least pictorially, in that 1954 article: there are no people of color.

Second, the nature of the boon of the improbable and unprecedented good fortune that befell these kids is not that they’re spoiled rotten, or that every possible creature comfort has been handed to them. Instead, it’s that they have the opportunity to work at virtually any job they choose. “They are often able to keep the money” that they earn.

So, yes, they were lucky and compared to countless generations of youth who came before, all over the world, white working- and middle-class teens in 1950s America were, for the most part, incredibly lucky. But unlike the entitled creatures that most of us would count as the “luckiest” (and the most obnoxious) among us these days, the teens profiled in LIFE in 1954 don’t look or feel especially coddled.

They look secure. They look confident. They look, in some elemental way, independent. They’re learning, day by day, what it means to make one’s way in the world.

In that sense, maybe they were the luckiest generation, after all.

Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com Follow her on Twitter at @LizabethRonk.

In an aura of fun and well-being, students danced at weekly Sock Hops in a Carlsbad high school gyn. The music was provided by a 12-piece student band.

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Cars of Carlsbad High students in their parking lot.

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

An electrician, Jack Harris, 16, still in school, picked up good pay doing part-time repair jobs.

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A young sales girl holding up a blouse to a store customer.

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A young investor, David Lenske, 17, having bought four shares of A.T.&T., talked with a banker.

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Luckiest Generation: 1950s Teenagers

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Luckiest Generation

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The prosperous pay-off of after-school jobs brought Mike Sweeney and Harold Riley (right) with Pat Marsh (left) and Nita Wheeler, all 17, to Carlsbad’s Red Barn restaurant, a favorite party spot.

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Young couples at a formal dance dreamily swaying on the crowded floor of a ballroom lit by a chandelier.

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Luckiest Generation

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Pay in trade was taken by Margaret High, 17, who worked in a music store and spent her salary on records.

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Rada Alexander, 19, a bookkeeper, earned $200 a month in a job she got with an auto firm after graduation.

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Jere Reid Jr., 17, who bred chinchillas, held one valued at $3,000.

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Sonny Thayer, 19, packed for a hunting trip.

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

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