50 years ago today, Adolf Eich­mann, a key archi­tect of the Holo­caust, went on tri­al before an Israeli tri­bunal in Jerusalem. Dur­ing the war, Eich­mann served as the Trans­porta­tion Admin­is­tra­tor of the “Final Solu­tion to the Jew­ish Ques­tion,” mean­ing he coor­di­nat­ed all the trains that trans­port­ed Jews to their deaths in East Euro­pean exter­mi­na­tion camps. When the Nazis fell, Eich­mann fled to Argenti­na where he hoped to live out his days in com­fort­able anonymi­ty, work­ing as a fore­man for Mer­cedes Benz.

The Mossad spent most of the 1950s track­ing him down, then famous­ly got their man in May, 1960. Back in Israel, the philoso­pher Han­nah Arendt cov­ered the Eich­mann tri­al for The New York­er and lat­er reduced the essence of the for­mer SS colonel to a sim­ple phrase: “the banal­i­ty of evil.” Elab­o­rat­ing she said, “The deeds were mon­strous, but the doer—at least, the very effec­tive one now on trial—was quite ordi­nary, com­mon­place, and nei­ther mon­strous nor demon­ic.”

Tak­en from The Spiel­berg Jew­ish Film Archive, the footage above shows you the open­ing moments of the tri­al and tes­ti­mo­ny from Holo­caust sur­vivors. Eich­mann is there too, encased in glass, look­ing as banal as Arendt sug­gest­ed. After 14 weeks of tes­ti­mo­ny, Eich­mann was found guilty of 15 crim­i­nal counts, includ­ing crimes against human­i­ty, and he was hanged in May, 1962 – the only civ­il exe­cu­tion ever car­ried out by the state of Israel.

A new book by Emory his­to­ri­an Deb­o­rah Lip­stadt revis­its the tri­al with the ben­e­fit of some his­tor­i­cal dis­tance. In this video, Lip­stadt reminds us why the tri­al held such impor­tance for the inter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty.

On March 1, 1961, Pres­i­dent John F. Kennedy signed Exec­u­tive Order 10924, offi­cial­ly autho­riz­ing the estab­lish­ment of an “agency in the Depart­ment of State which shall be known as the Peace Corps.” Fifty years lat­er, that Agency has sent more than 200,000 vol­un­teers to over 93 coun­tries.

A note:  If you’ve ever won­dered about all those CIA-Peace Corps con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries, lis­ten to the Nation­al Archives’ fas­ci­nat­ing audio and tran­script of a con­ver­sa­tion between JFK and his broth­er-in-law R. Sar­gent Shriv­er, the Peace Corps’ first Direc­tor (and Maria Shriver’s grand­fa­ther), dis­cussing “pos­si­ble CIA pen­e­tra­tion” of the Agency.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

JFK Revis­it­ed on YouTube

The Eif­fel Tow­er, Notre Dame, the Lou­vre – these famous mon­u­ments draw mil­lions of tourists to Paris every year, to the part of the city that lives above ground. Few tourists get to the oth­er part of the city, the part that lives and breathes beneath the sur­face. This month, Nation­al Geo­graph­ic has ded­i­cat­ed its fea­ture arti­cle and pho­to gallery to sub­ter­ranean Paris, tak­ing you into the caves and cat­a­combs that twist and turn beneath the city streets. Pro­duced by NPR and Nation­al Geo­graph­ic, the video above fol­lows “cat­aphiles” who trav­el through the dark side of the City of Light.