On this day in 1962, SS Colonel and chief architect of the Final Solution, Adolph Eichmann, was sentenced to death. The trial lasted over a year and was the first case of this magnitude to be internationally televised, showing the world the ramifications of the Holocaust. While the Nuremberg Trials followed a trial-by-history procedure, the Eichmann Trial followed a trial-by-witness procedure, with over 100 Holocaust survivors testifying against him. The trial began on April 11, 1961, and was heard by Judges Moshe Landau, Benjamin Halevy, and Yitzhak Raveh. Chief Prosecutor Gideon Hausner charged Eichmann with 15 counts, which detailed crimes against Jews, crimes against humanity against Jews, war crimes, and crimes against humanity against non-Jews, as well as serving memberships in criminal organizations. Eichmann was found guilty on all counts and sentenced to death. While he appealed the Israeli Supreme Court’s decision, it was denied with both the conviction and the sentence upheld. Israeli President Yitzhak Ben-Zvi denied Eichmann’s request for a reduced sentence, news he was informed of at 8:00 pm on May 31; Eichmann’s hanging had been scheduled for midnight that night at Ramla Prison, but due to a brief delay, the execution was carried out a few minutes afterward on June 1. His last words were, “Long live Germany. Long live Argentina. Long live Austria. These are the three countries with which I have been most connected and which I will not forget. I greet my wife, my family, and my friends. I am ready. We'll meet again soon, as is the fate of all men. I die believing in God.” However, in 2014, Israeli intelligence officer Rafi Eitan, who was present for Eichmann’s execution, said he heard Eichmann utter, “I hope that all of you will follow me.” Afterwards, his body was cremated and his ashes were scattered in Mediterranean waters outside Israel’s control by a patrol boat that belonged to the Israeli Navy. One of the people present at trial was Hannah Arendt, a noted philosopher and public intellectual who penned her observations in The New Yorker piece “Eichmann in Jerusalem”. The piece was republished and expanded as a book, written by Bettina Stangneth, called Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). ‘The Banality of Evil’ is the idea that Eichmann could enact evil without embodying it personally. Over 50 years later, while Arendt’s text remains widely read at the academic level, the theory has lost much of its credibility. Books like David Cesarani’s Becoming Eichmann: Rethinking the Life, Crimes, and Trial of a ‘Desk Murderer’ (2004) and Bettina Stangneth’s Eichmann Before Jerusalem (2014), have debunked theories that Eichmann was an apolitical actor, aligning himself with Nazi ideology, thus identifying him as an antisemite from the beginning.