German Constitutional Court won't release intelligence files on Eichmann

The German Constitutional Court has rejected a request from the daily Bild to have the Federal Intelligence Service (BND) publish its complete file on Adolf Eichmann, one of the architects of the Holocaust. The publisher of Germany’s most-read newspaper reported the rejection on 25 July and said it was considering filing suit with the European Court of Human Rights to gain access to the file.  

The Central Jewish Council in Germany has criticized the Constitutional Court’s decision. Eichmann, a Nazi officer, fled to Argentina after the end of WWII, where he hid under another name.  

In 1960 he was kidnapped by the Israeli secret services and was convicted and executed in Israel two years later. Bild recently discovered that the German intelligence service, the BND, knew Eichmann’s false name and place of residency eight years before the Israelis captured him.  

The German daily asked the court to release the entire file kept by the BND on Eichmann. The Office of the Chancellor, which oversees the BND, told the court that publishing Eichmann’s file in full could endanger German state interests.

The Constitutional Court subsequently rejected the request. "I find this decision very regrettable. It has prevented achieving the necessary transparency [in the Eichmann case]," said Dieter Graumann, chair of the Central Jewish Council.  

"An unpleasant feeling remains that the public is being denied important information and that something is being swept under the carpet – it doesn’t matter what it is. This is so unreasonable as to be harmful," Graumann said.

Eichmann became a member of Hitler’s NSDAP in 1932 and began to take an interest in the "Jewish question" as a member of the SS two years later. After the occupation of Austria in 1938 he was sent to Vienna, where he established the Central Office for Jewish Emigration, and one year later he was behind the foundation of a similar office in Prague.  

He began organizing the arrests and gradually also the transfers of Jewish people to concentration camps. Eichmann also played a significant role in organizing the conference at Wannsee in January 1942, the main aim of which was to coordinate the "Final Solution to the Jewish question".    

The height of Eichmann’s activity was the deportation in 1944 of 440 000 Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz. Eichmann told the court in Israel that he was innocent, insisting that he had merely followed Hiter’s orders.  

The court did not believe his version of events and sentenced him to death in December 1961. Eichmann’s appeal of the sentence failed, as did his request for clemency, and he was executed in May 1962.