Israel releases Eichmann plea letter on Holocaust day

Israel made public on Wednesday a decades-old handwritten plea from Nazi war criminal AdolfEichmann for clemency for his role in the Holocaust, dated just two days before he was executed.

In the request, written after he was brought to Israel in 1960, then tried, convicted and sentenced to death, Eichmann says the Israeli court overstated his role in organising the logistics of Hitler's "Final Solution" which involved the extermination of six million Jews.

President Reuven Rivlin presented the previously unreleased letter, which was written to then president Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, at a ceremony to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

"There is a need to draw a line between the leaders responsible and the people like me forced to serve as mere instruments in the hands of the leaders," the presidency quoted Eichmann's letter as saying.

"I was not a responsible leader, and as such do not feel myself guilty," the German wrote.

"I am not able to recognise the court's ruling as just, and I ask, Your Honour Mr President, to exercise your right to grant pardons, and order that the death penalty not be carried out."

The letter was signed and dated: "Adolf Eichmann Jerusalem, May 29, 1962."

He was hanged around midnight on May 31.

Eichmann, one of the main organisers of the Holocaust, escaped from a prisoner-of-war camp after World War II and fled to Argentina in 1950, where he lived under a pseudonym until he was snatched by Mossad agents in Buenos Aires in May 1960 and smuggled to Israel.

The ability of the security services to bring him to justice was a source of pride for the Jewish state, and Rivlin referred to the trial as a momentous moment in Israel's history.

"In the first years after the Holocaust, the people in Israel were busy rebuilding and founding an independent state," he said.

"The renewed Israeli society was not in the mindset to or able to remember.

"The Eichmann trial broke the dam of silence. The ability of the young Jewish state to capture the Nazi murderer afforded a basic sense of security to the survivors of the Holocaust."

Dismissing Eichmann's claims to be just a bureaucrat, Rivlin said: "The people who suffered fromEichmann's weakness were not given a moment of grace."