I guess you could argue for any of them, but it sort of sounds like out of all the correct answers, the 15th is the “most correct.”
Let’s review here.
The OP flatly states/asks
Here we have two statements.
- Sachar says, according to the OP, that Eichmann was sentenced on Dec. 15th. This is absolutely true, by all contemporary cites I can find. If you can find something else, post it.
Wikipedia says, according to their cite/site and link, that he was sentenced on December 2. This is, IMHO, just another example of sloppy work over at Wikipedia, an ongoing work-in-progress. Don’t take what you read there as gospel. They mean well, but they are shoddy. Please take the time to send them a correction.
This would seem to satisfy the OP.
From every news source that I can call up on historic databases, NOTHING happened on December 2. If you can give me a contemporary cite, please do.
pravnik said
Just give me a cite. If it was made public, why did all major world newpapers hold back on the story until Dec. 11th?
The chronology in David Cesarani’s recent Eichmann (Heinemann, 2004) more or less agrees with pravnik, though there are some differences.
Cesarani says nothing about the 2nd explicitly, though he does note (p308) that “two weeks before the judges recalled the court, the prosecution and the defence were put on notice.” I interprete this to mean that they were informed that a verdict had been reached, so that they were ready to be in court (Servatius, the main defence lawyer, had returned to Germany and had to get back, for instance), but not what the verdict was.
The court reassembled on the morning of the 11th. Due to the unusual length of the judgement, the judges made an exception out of consideration to the defendent and began with an announcement of what the verdict was, rather than waiting to the end. They then began reading the judgement, continuing into the evening.
They recommenced on the morning of the 12th, finishing the judgement in the afternoon. The verdict is formally pronounced and the court adjourned.
The 13th is taken up with the prosecution asking for the death penalty and Eichmann’s statement to the court. The presiding judge then announces that the sentencing will be on the 15th. (Cesarani gets this wrong on p314, stating that sentencing was “the following day”, but the court didn’t sit on the Thursday - see the judge’s remark after Eichmann’s statement in the transcript.
Correct it yourself. Anyone can edit that page.
Well, like I said, I couldn’t swear to it; I was going from fuzzy memory and extrapolating on that point. If December 2 has any relevance, and I’m not claiming that it does, then I’m saying that’s most likely the date the judgment was signed and the parties were put on notice that a judgment had been reached. The lack of widespread coverage could only be explained by the not yet widespread practice of stealing court documents and putting them up on “the Smoking Gun.”
Nonetheless, I admit that’s just speculation on my part until I find some proof of it. The official date of the judgment in the appeal is December 12 and not the 2nd, so it’s likely that the first digit just got dropped off at some point and repeated.
I’ve been round and round on this. There is a process. It’s not as simple as it seems.
Not really. I just fixed it. Took two seconds.
Check back tomorrow. Someone will have erased your post.
If that happened to you it might have been because you were editing a topic with a controversial edit history where they hadn’t nailed down all the details yet.
Sometimes pages get frozen while discussions ensue, and sometimes well-meaning but ill-informed people “correct” your correction, in which case you can politely put your citations on the talk page and change it back, hoping that you convinced him. Rarely, especially controversial topics will end up in edit-wars, whereupon they’ll be locked while an arbitration process that resembles bureaucracy of the most heinous variety ensues.
In any case, the Eichman article doesn’t appear to have a very active edit history, and the date of the sentencing doesn’t appear to be a major source of contention. So I think the change will stick.
I’m a Wikipedia contributor, but I wouldn’t use it for primary source research. Not yet, anyway. It still has a long way to go before it can be universally considered as a valid resource.
I’m a frustrated user of wikipedia. Derleth, I believe, is also a contributor over there, and has chastised me before about my views of wiki.
Thanks for your input. Perhaps the day will come when it’s the source that I will quote, but not now.