Gideon Hausner

Gideon Hausner
Date of birth	26 September 1915
Place of birth	Lemberg, Austria-Hungary
Year of aliyah	1927
Date of death
Knessets	6, 7, 8, 9
Faction represented in Knesset
1965–1974	Independent Liberals
1977–1981	Independent Liberals
Ministerial roles
1974–1977	Minister without Portfolio
Other roles
1960–1963	Attorney General

Gideon Hausner (Hebrew: גדעון האוזנר‎, 26 September 1915 – 15 November 1990) was an Israeli jurist and politician. Between 1960 and 1963 he served as Attorney General, and was later elected to the Knesset and served in the cabinet.

Hausner is most widely known for heading the team of prosecutors at the war crimes trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961. Hausner is generally credited with exposing the Holocaust to the world in bold cross-examinations of Eichmann. His judicial skill also set the precedent that the defense "I was only following orders" is not valid if such orders are wholly criminal and illegal. The prosecution succeeded in proving Eichmann's guilt, and Eichmann was found guilty on all charges, including crimes against humanity and crimes against the Jewish people. He was sentenced to death.

Biography

Hausner was born in Lemberg, the then capital of the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, a province of Austria-Hungary, to Polish-Jewish economist and Zionist Bernard Hausner. He immigrated to Mandatory Palestine from Poland in 1927, when his father took the post of Economic Advisor to the Polish Government first in Haifa and later in Tel-Aviv. Hausner attended high school in Tel Aviv before studying philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and then law at the Jerusalem Law School.

He was a member of the Hagana, during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War he served in the Etzioni Brigade. After the conflict he worked as a military prosecutor, and then as president of the military court.

In 1960 he was appointed Attorney General, but resigned from the post in 1963 and pursued a career in politics. He was elected to the Knesset in 1965 as a member of the Independent Liberals, having previously been active in the Progressive Party (the Independent Liberals were a breakaway group of mostly Progressive Party members following the party's merger into Gahal). He was re-elected in 1969 and 1973, and resigned from the Knesset upon being appointed a Minister without Portfolio in 1974 as part of Golda Meir's cabinet. Re-elected in 1977 as the only member of the party, he lost his seat in the 1981 elections when the party failed to cross the electoral threshold.

He was also the chairman of the council of Yad Vashem.

External links

• Gideon Hausner on the Knesset website