The Eichmann Show

A 90-minute BBC2 drama to mark the 70th anniversary of the end of WWII, this concerns the televising of the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, author of the 'final solution' which murdered up to 6 million, mostly Jewish, citizens considered undesirable by the Nazi state.  Eichmann had escaped at the end of the war and was only captured by Mossad and Shin Bet agents in Argentina in 1960, where he'd been living under the name of Ricardo Klement.  From there he was taken to Israel for trial in Jerusalem.

The decision to televise the trial, as this amply illustrates, wasn't taken lightly.  It was new technology and couldn't even be transmitted live, but was flown overseas in boxed reels for transmission in America and Europe.  The trial judges feared the cameras would be intrusive and distracting and weren't keen, forcing the technical team to build extra walls and ingenious hiding places for the cumbersome equipment.  Death threats were received by producer Milton Fruchtman (Martin Freeman) and his family, while for Leo Hurwitz (Anthony LaPaglia) this was yet another bump in a career path that had already seen him blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities Committee under Senator McCarthy.

For something with so much drama, however, this was rather flat viewing.  It seems to ask all the right questions: was there disproportionate significance in the trial of one man for genocide?  Was Israel the right nation to try him?  Would televising the trial lead to distortions in the chase for ratings (given that Yuri Gagarin was wandering in space and the Bay of Pigs was the scene of an invasion)?  Yet perhaps the distortions are here, in the numerous false alarms that scare Fruchtman and the tense and horrified faces of those watching and listening to the witnesses.  This is not to deny the significance of the trial, or its communication to a worldwide audience, but in the wake of the camps' liberation and the testimonies in the Nuremberg courts, this would have been adding detail to known history, some sixteen and more years after the events in question.  Now, when trials are frequently broadcast live or nearly so, it is a big leap of the imagination to comprehend what this meant to the average viewer.

It is also difficult, now as then, to consider the difficulties of televising the trial as anything other than a 'first world problem' alongside Eichmann's crimes and what they stood for.  Sidelights can be interesting, but treacherous for drama, as in the recent 'Lost Honour of Christopher Jefferies' which focused on the unpleasant experiences of a man accused of a horrible crime.  What was difficult for him was far worse not only for the victim, Joanna Yeates but, one imagines, for her family and friends too.  'The Eichmann Show' is well structured, with the production team questioning what the trial means for them and being reassured by the reaction of survivors who finally feel believed and understood, but the most powerful scenes, unsurprisingly, remain the archive footage from the camps.  For us, while well meant, this didn't quite bridge the gap between a worthy documentary and thrilling drama.