Bilder der Verbrecher

„Ein Spezialist“ by Eyal Sivan is a documentary assembled entirely from original footage of the 1961 Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. From around 500 hours of video, of which 350 hours survive today, it builds an absorbing portrait of the defendant Adolf Eichmann, accused of the mass deportation of people, mostly Jews, to the extermination camps. Guided by Hannah Arendt's notion of the „Banalität des Bösen“, the film shows Eichmann not as a monster but as an unremarkable bureaucrat hiding behind procedural rules. The screening is framed by a short introduction and a concluding discussion.