Gideon Hausner; Prosecutor of War Criminal Eichmann

Gideon Hausner, who prosecuted Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann as Israeli attorney general, has died. He was 75.

He had been hospitalized for the past three months in Jerusalem, where he died Thursday. His family declined to give the cause of death.

Hausner became a world figure during the 1961-62 trial, which ended with Eichmann’s conviction and hanging for his role in murdering millions of Jews.

“When I stand here before you, judges of Israel . . . I am not standing alone,” Hausner said in his opening address to the Jerusalem court.

“With me are 6 million accusers, but they cannot rise to their feet and point an accusing finger . . . for their ashes are piled up on the hills of Auschwitz, and in the fields of Treblinka, and are strewn in the forests of Poland.”

Hausner was born in Lvov, then part of Poland, and emigrated to Palestine in 1927.

He became attorney general of the Jewish state in 1960, the year Eichmann was kidnaped by Israeli agents and brought to Israel from Argentina for trial.

Hausner later became chairman of Yad Vashem, the national monument and documentation center of the Nazi Holocaust.

In 1965, he went into politics for the Independent Liberals, a small centrist party, and served four terms in Parliament. He was a minister in the Cabinet of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin for three years.

He is survived by his wife, a daughter and a son.