At first it had seemed like an ordinary day in that Jerusalem court in mid-1961, during the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the logistical mastermind of the Jewish deportations in the Holocaust. Hannah Arendt, the German-Jewish philosopher attending the trial as a journalist, wrote later of "endless sessions" of witness testimony.

Much of it, she hinted sourly, was not especially relevant. But the witness Arendt heard that day, a former Jewish partisan, was a standout. In passing and to an astonished courtroom, he mentioned a German soldier, Anton Schmid, who — before his arrest and execution — had dedicated himself to assisting the Jewish Underground in Eastern Europe.

In her book "Eichmann in Jerusalem," Arendt wrote of the revelation this testimony brought upon her: how differently it might have all turned out, "if only more such stories could have been told". Yet, she added, it would benefit Germany, both for her standing abroad and also "for her sadly confused inner condition," if the few stories there were could be told.