The Cold War in the Courtroom: Friedrich Karl Kaul in Jerusalem

Abstract

This paper will trace Friedrich Karl Kaul’s journey from East Berlin to Jerusalem for the Eichmann Trial, and back. What were the ‘few things’ he ‘organise[d]’ while in Israel? What did he aim to achieve by going to Jerusalem? What can his efforts to take part to the Eichmann trial tell us about broader historical issues? This paper will attempt to answer these questions, touching upon matters including: the relevance of the legacy of the Nazi past to the specifically German-German Cold War; individual agency in the GDR; the evolution of East German propaganda (and its, by 1960, global ambitions); and the East German room for manoeuvre vis-à-vis other Socialist countries, including the Soviet superpower. For Kaul’s moves were significant beyond the GDR: they sparked alarm in West Germany; interest and suspicion in Israel; and concern in the United States – and well as in the Soviet Bloc. Based on sources from East and West Germany, CIA memoranda and Israeli documents, this paper positions Kaul’s engagement with the trial as part of a transnational history of the (cultural) Cold War