Nazis and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law

The statute combines offenses directed specifically against the Jewish people with offenses protecting civilian populations, prisoners of war, and other persecuted groups.[1] Its first section makes crimes against the Jewish people, crimes against humanity, and war crimes punishable by death, subject to the law’s provisions governing responsibility and mitigation.[1] Other sections address participation in hostile organizations, handing persecuted people over to Nazi authorities, extortion, and abuses committed in places of confinement.[1]

The law’s reach is both retroactive and extraterritorial: it authorizes Israeli proceedings for acts committed in enemy countries during periods preceding Israel’s establishment.[3] It also permits prosecution following a foreign trial for the same conduct, while requiring consideration of punishment already served abroad.[1] These features made it a vehicle for addressing crimes whose location and timing placed them outside the ordinary territorial framework of Israeli criminal law.[3]

The statute served purposes beyond punishment alone, including remembrance of Holocaust victims, education for future generations, and an expression of protest against Nazi crimes.[3] Its early application also addressed accusations circulating among survivors who encountered alleged collaborators after immigration to Israel.[4] The subsequent Eichmann proceedings brought the law into a worldwide discussion of accountability for Nazi atrocities and the Jewish state’s role in securing justice for their victims.[5]

Complaints from Holocaust survivors and other immigrants helped initiate the legislation: people arriving in Israel identified alleged Nazi collaborators and reported them to the police.[4] Lacking a suitable law under which to prosecute these allegations, the police approached the Ministry of Justice, which began drafting a measure.[4] The proposal received its first Knesset reading on March 27, 1950.[4]

The Knesset passed the law on August 1, 1950, and it was published on August 9.[1] A contemporary account recorded that passage was unanimous.[6] The published text bears the names of Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and Justice Minister Pinchas Rosen.[1] Its formal designation includes the Hebrew and civil years, 5710–1950.[1]

The legislative aims included retribution, protest, remembrance, education, participation in the wider postwar effort to prosecute Nazi crimes, and a response to accusations within the survivor community.[3] Rosen expressed its declaratory purpose in the words, “We shall not forget and we shall not forgive!”[3] Lawmakers also considered whether the legislation should address crimes against non-Jewish victims; the final text retained crimes against humanity alongside a distinct offense of crimes against the Jewish people.[4]

The question of Jewish functionaries occupied a significant place in the discussions, including the treatment of Jewish council members, Jewish police, camp block leaders, and kapos.[4][7] Some legislators favored treating equivalent acts alike regardless of whether the perpetrator was a Nazi or a Jewish functionary, while others emphasized coercion and the circumstances of people who were themselves victims.[4] The enacted statute did not establish a separate general category of liability for Jewish helpers, but it included a specific defense for persecuted defendants and provisions for mitigation.[4]

Expectations about who might actually appear before Israeli courts also shaped the legislation: lawmakers believed Nazi perpetrators were unlikely to arrive in Israel in the near future, whereas suspected Jewish collaborators were already present among immigrants.[7] In the 1950s and early 1960s, Israeli courts tried approximately 40 postwar immigrants, mostly from Eastern Europe, under the law, and a majority were convicted.[8]

The original statute imposed a twenty-year prosecution deadline for offenses other than those in section 1 and the specified murder offense in section 2(f).[1] A 1963 amendment repealed that deadline retroactively from the law’s enactment, removing the original distinction in limitation periods.[1]

Section 1 defines crimes against the Jewish people through specified acts committed with intent to destroy the Jewish people, wholly or partly.[1] The listed acts include killing Jews, causing serious bodily or mental harm, imposing conditions calculated to bring about physical destruction, preventing births, and forcibly transferring Jewish children to another national or religious group.[1] The definition also encompasses destroying or desecrating Jewish religious or cultural property or values and inciting hatred of Jews.[1]

Crimes against humanity include murder, extermination, enslavement, starvation, and deportation of civilian populations, together with persecution or other inhumane acts against civilians on national, racial, religious, or political grounds.[1] War crimes include killing or mistreating civilians in occupied territory, forced labor or deportation, mistreatment or killing of prisoners of war or people at sea, killing hostages, looting, and unjustified destruction of towns or villages.[1]

For crimes against the Jewish people and crimes against humanity, section 1 concerns acts committed in an enemy country during the Nazi regime; for war crimes, it concerns acts committed in an enemy country during the Second World War.[1] The statute defines the Nazi-regime period as January 30, 1933, through May 8, 1945, and the war period as September 1, 1939, through August 14, 1945.[1] Its definition of enemy countries includes Germany under Nazi rule, other Axis states during their wars with the Allied powers, and territories under the actual authority of Germany or another Axis state during the specified periods.[1]

Beyond section 1, the statute incorporates specified offenses against persecuted people that would have been criminal under the applicable criminal code had they occurred in Israel.[1] These include sexual offenses, child stealing, manslaughter, murder, attempted murder, serious assault, kidnapping, robbery, extortion, and related acts, with punishment corresponding to the underlying domestic offense.[1] A persecuted person is defined by membership in a national, racial, religious, or political group persecuted by an enemy administration.[1]

Membership, office, or another role in an enemy organization carries a maximum seven-year prison term.[1] The definition includes organizations declared criminal by the International Military Tribunal and other organizations in enemy countries whose purposes included carrying out or assisting hostile-regime actions against persecuted people.[1] Handing a persecuted person over to an enemy administration carries up to ten years’ imprisonment, while obtaining a benefit through threats to surrender a persecuted person—or someone sheltering that person—carries up to seven years.[1]

Separate provisions address people serving in or supervising places of confinement who committed offenses against persecuted prisoners.[1] Covered conduct includes assault, failure to supply necessities, unlawful compulsory labor, and theft.[1] The law thus addresses both the large-scale crimes specified in section 1 and particular acts of abuse, exploitation, and betrayal.[1]

Only the attorney general or an authorized representative may institute proceedings under the law.[1] The general amnesty law does not apply to its offenses.[1] A court may depart from ordinary evidentiary rules when satisfied that doing so would assist in establishing the truth and achieving justice, but it must record its reasons.[1]

The statute provides a specific release from criminal responsibility for certain persecuted defendants acting under mortal danger or seeking to prevent worse consequences.[1] One branch concerns conduct undertaken to escape an immediate or threatened danger of death, provided the person did their best to avert its consequences; another concerns conduct that actually prevented more serious consequences.[1] These defenses do not apply to section 1 offenses or the specified murder offense in section 2(f).[1]

The law separately permits mitigating circumstances to affect sentence, including efforts to lessen the consequences of otherwise excusable conduct and actions intended to prevent more serious consequences.[1] Its provisions therefore distinguish a complete release from liability from circumstances relevant only to punishment.[1] This distinction was particularly relevant to proceedings involving defendants who had themselves been persecuted while exercising authority over other prisoners.[3]

An earlier foreign proceeding does not bar an Israeli trial for the same offense.[1] If a defendant was convicted abroad, however, the Israeli court must take the sentence already served into account when determining punishment.[1] Together with the law’s extraterritorial reach and special evidentiary rule, this provision forms part of its distinctive procedural framework for prosecuting Nazi-era conduct.[3]

Jacob Honigman was the first person tried in Israel under the law.[3] He had served as a kapo in the Graditz and Faulbrück camps in 1943–1944, and his indictment contained 24 counts, including crimes against humanity, war crimes, and murder.[3] On appeal, the Supreme Court acquitted him on two counts and reduced his sentence by two years, leaving a final term of six and a half years’ imprisonment.[3]

On January 4, 1952, a majority of the Tel Aviv District Court sentenced kapo Yehezkel Ingster to death for offenses including crimes against humanity.[3] The majority held that someone who was himself persecuted could nevertheless commit crimes against humanity through inhumane acts against fellow prisoners; the dissenting judge disagreed with the application of that offense.[3] On appeal, the Supreme Court substituted a two-year prison term, citing Ingster’s terminal illness, and he died shortly after beginning to serve it.[3]

Julius Siegel was tried in Tel Aviv in 1953.[9] His wartime roles included service on the Będzin Judenrat, mobilizing Jews for forced labor, acting as a Jewish elder in German labor camps, and clerical work in Auschwitz.[9] The court encountered difficulty applying the newly enacted law and sentenced him to ten days’ imprisonment for beating a witness.[9]

The trial of Hirsch Barenblat concerned the former head of the Jewish police in the Będzin ghetto.[3] The Tel Aviv District Court convicted him on five counts, including delivering a persecuted person to an enemy administration and assault in a place of confinement, and sentenced him to five years’ imprisonment.[3] The Supreme Court acquitted him of every count.[3] The Ministry of Justice account notes that the judgment has been regarded as a turning point in assessments of Jews prosecuted as collaborators.[3]

On May 23, 1960, Ben-Gurion announced Eichmann’s capture and identified the 1950 law as the basis for his forthcoming trial.[5] Before being secretly flown to Israel, Eichmann signed a document consenting to stand trial there.[5] Ben-Gurion defended the proceedings as “our historical duty toward the six million of our brethren who were murdered.”[5]

Israel Police established Bureau 06 to investigate Eichmann, working with the State Attorney’s Office.[10] His interrogation extended over approximately 275 hours during nine months and produced 3,564 typewritten pages.[10] The trial opened in Jerusalem on April 11, 1961, before a special panel comprising Supreme Court Justice Moshe Landau, Tel Aviv District Court President Yitzhak Raveh, and Jerusalem District Court President Binyamin Halevi.[2]

The indictment contained 15 counts, including crimes against the Jewish people, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and membership in criminal organizations.[11] Eichmann was the first non-Jewish defendant tried under the law.[12] The charges also encompassed crimes against non-Jewish groups; the Supreme Court later referred to Poles, Slovenes, Czechs, and Roma among the victims.[13]

The proceedings lasted 14 weeks and featured more than 100 witnesses.[2] Survivor testimony occupied a central place, and the trial was among the first proceedings of its kind to be televised.[14][15] Eichmann portrayed himself in testimony as “merely a little cog in the machinery.”[14] The court instead treated the Final Solution as a process involving different agents at different stages and attributed responsibility to him as a principal agent.[11]

In defining responsibility, the court declined to rely on the conspiracy doctrine used at Nuremberg, regarding it as capable of blurring the distinction between principal offenders and accessories too broadly.[11] It also rejected obedience to superior orders as a defense by applying the doctrine of manifest illegality.[11] The panel convicted Eichmann on all 15 counts and imposed the death penalty on December 15, 1961.[2][11]

The Supreme Court upheld the conviction, and Eichmann was executed in 1962.[10][11] The proceedings became an early post-Nuremberg trial of a high-level Nazi war criminal in which universal jurisdiction, genocide, and survivor testimony were prominent.[15] Their public impact included greater attention to Holocaust experiences and encouragement for survivors to speak about what they had endured.[14]

John Demjanjuk was indicted in Israel in 1986 for alleged offenses at Treblinka in 1942 and 1943.[16] The indictment invoked crimes against the Jewish people under section 1A1, crimes against humanity under section 1A2, war crimes under section 1A3, and crimes against persecuted persons under section 2F together with section 300 of the Penal Code.[16] The published legal citation identified the statute in volume 4 of Laws of the State of Israel, pages 154–158.[16]

The Jerusalem District Court rejected Demjanjuk’s mistaken-identity defense, convicted him on all counts, and sentenced him to death in April 1988.[16] His appeal was still pending in September 1989.[16] In 1993, the Supreme Court acquitted him because the evidence did not establish beyond reasonable doubt that he was Treblinka’s “Ivan the Terrible.”[13] Both his prosecution and Eichmann’s proceeded under the 1950 statute rather than Israel’s separate Crime of Genocide (Prevention and Punishment) Law.[13]

An account in the Jewish Review of Books emphasizes the identification evidence, including a Trawniki identification card and survivor testimony, and describes questions about the card’s authenticity and the defendant’s identity.[17] It recounts survivor Eliahu Rosenberg approaching Demjanjuk after asking that he remove his glasses, then identifying him as Ivan the Terrible; the defense countered with Rosenberg’s 1947 testimony that Ivan had been killed during a 1943 uprising.[17]

The same account describes a later German case based on evidence placing Demjanjuk at Sobibor rather than Treblinka, reporting a conviction as an accessory to 27,900 murders and the subsequent vacating of the charges because he died during the appeal process.[17] That later proceeding was distinct from the Israeli prosecution and acquittal under the 1950 law.[13][17]

The Eichmann judgments connected universal accountability for international crimes with Israel’s particular relationship to the Jewish victims.[11][18] The District Court articulated “two cumulative sources” for its right to punish: a universal source and a specific or national source associated with the Jewish people as the target and victim of most of the crimes.[18] The Supreme Court’s reasoning also invoked universal jurisdiction for crimes committed outside Israel before the state existed, and the ruling later served as a precedent for national courts addressing crimes against humanity committed abroad.[11]

The Supreme Court’s jurisdictional reasoning treated the universality principle as central: international criminal acts were offenses that every nation had a duty to prosecute.[19] The appellate reasoning drew on the 1907 Hague Regulations, the Lotus case, and the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal judgment adopted by the United Nations General Assembly.[19] A Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs analysis additionally emphasizes passive personality—the victims’ Jewish identity and their representation by the Jewish state—and dates the Supreme Court judgment to May 29, 1962.[20]

The law also linked criminal proceedings to public remembrance and education, aims expressed during its drafting.[3] Eichmann’s capture and trial brought Holocaust awareness and the pursuit of justice for Nazi atrocities onto the world agenda, while televised testimony made survivors’ experiences accessible to a broad audience.[5][14] The law has also been presented as an example of Israel’s support for using international law to address crimes against the international community.[21]

The documentary record of its most prominent prosecution became more widely accessible in 2008, when Eichmann trial materials were placed online.[10] The Hebrew publication comprised six volumes covering the trial and District Court judgment, appeal proceedings and judgment, preliminary defense arguments, translated testimony from abroad, an index, and Eichmann’s original police statement with a Hebrew outline.[10] The online collection also included 1,500 documents submitted to the court.[10]

Eichmann challenged retroactive punishment and Israel’s jurisdiction over crimes committed abroad before its establishment; the courts rejected those arguments and upheld his conviction.[11] His seizure in Argentina also drew international objections, and contemporary debate extended to venue, judicial impartiality, fair trial, and execution, although the trial is now widely regarded as fair.[5][15] Hannah Arendt favored an international court rather than an Israeli trial.[22]

The treatment of Jewish functionaries raised a different question: how to judge criminal conduct committed by people subjected to Nazi persecution and coercion.[4] Contemporary positions ranged from insistence on equal liability for equivalent acts to greater emphasis on the defendants’ victimization.[4] Israel Bar-Yehuda took a strongly punitive position toward Judenrat members, even arguing that Warsaw council chairman Adam Czerniaków would have faced trial had he survived.[7]

Historical interpretations have also differed over the proceedings’ framing: a study of Siegel argues that his portrayal as a voluntary collaborator insufficiently accounted for his simultaneous victimization and the loss of his family in Auschwitz.[9] A review of Deborah Lipstadt’s study contrasts the prosecution’s focus on crimes against the Jewish people with Arendt’s interest in explaining totalitarian participation, and reports Lipstadt’s preference for a crimes-against-humanity conviction while supporting Eichmann’s death sentence.[23]