Thursday, October 16, 2008

Chess and Eichmann


 Adolf Eichmann in SS Uniform. Credit: The holocaust research project,  http://tinyurl.com/7zl6jy


From Sa'chmat: Yarchon Israeli le'Shachmat, year 1 no. 2 (July 1962), p. 2:

'The government's legal counselor, Gideon Hausner [also the prosecutor in Adolf Eichmann's trial -- A.P.] said in a press conference that Eichmann, when in prison in Israel, received about 20 chess problems, "all of which, for some reason, ended in stalemate." The mystery was solved by our Argentinean master, Moshe Czerniak: "stalemate" in Spanish is ahogado, meaning "strangled"'.

2 comments:

  1. For more on Eichmann and chess:
    Chess Notes by Edward Winter (http://www.chesshistory.com/winter/winter50.html) describes Eichmann's games against Heinrich Mueller.
    Eichmann the chessplayer also features in the novel "Shadow Without a Name" by Ignacio Padilla.

    Richard Reich,MD

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  2. Thanks! Also, the novel "A Draw with Death" features a Nazi commandant who is, in effect, Eichmann.

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