The Specialist

Painstakingly culled from some 350 hours of carefully restored videotape, Eyal Sivan's precis of the 1961 trial of former SS official Adolf Eichmann is an admirable feat of abbreviation: Sivan squeezes into two hours much of what took eight months to unfold in a Jerusalem courtroom, and presents the salient points of this troubling case with gripping concision. In 1960, Eichmann was kidnapped from Argentina by the Israeli Secret Service, and taken to Jerusalem to stand trial for his role in the Holocaust. Eichmann, a former salesman who eventually became an SS lieutenant-colonel, was thought of as a "specialist" on the transportation of the Reich's unwelcome Jewish...