The reverend, the justice and the mass murderer

The story of noted Christian Zionist Rev. William Hull.

By JERRY KLINGER
Rev. William Lovell Hull_58 (photo credit: www.mhs.mb.ca)
Rev. William Lovell Hull_58
(photo credit: www.mhs.mb.ca)
Tuesday, May 29, 1962 was “judgment day” for Adolf Eichmann. On his way into the courtroom to hear the verdict, assistant Israeli prosecutor Tzvi Terlo ran into his friend Rev. William Hull. Terlo could only smile at the irony.
“In all the world, you are the one Christian clergyman or priest who helped the Hagana create the state. Now, out of all the clergymen in the world, you are the one who is ministering to Eichmann.”
Hull recalls this episode in his book The Struggle for a Soul, which details his time as the chaplain appointed to provide spiritual counsel to convicted Nazi war criminal Adolph Eichmann after his trial in Jerusalem.
Given his unique role in Israel’s founding and his later engagement with Eichmann, Hull is a fascinating but largely overlooked Christian Zionist figure.
William L. Hull was born December 3, 1897 in Winnipeg, Canada. There, in his hometown, he became an ordained minister and married his high school sweetheart, Lillian Pachal. It was during a church service at Winnipeg’s Zion Apostolic Church that he received a “calling from God” to Mandatory Palestine.
The Hulls moved to Jerusalem in 1935 and opened a ministry in a small shop on the Street of the Prophets, on the edge of the eastern Arab sector. They mainly distributed Bibles.
Whether by coincidence or divine destiny, the Hulls were on hand to witness the creation of the modern State of Israel and greatly influenced the events surrounding its emergence on the world stage.
From the moment the Hulls arrived in Jerusalem, there was deep unrest and turmoil. Arabs were rioting over increased Jewish immigration. British authorities slammed the door of escape for imperiled European Jewry with the 1939 White Paper. World War II lapped up to the gates of Cairo. The Holocaust was exposed and Jewish survivors desperately sought to reach Palestine.
The British refused to let them in, appeasing the Arabs. This seething cauldron ignited into open hostilities in early 1948.
Britain’s global empire was crumbling, and its war-weary government wanted to be rid of the Palestine problem. Britain turned the struggle over to the fledgling United Nations.
In the spring of 1947, the UN Special Committee on Palestine was charged with visiting the land, consulting with local Arab and Jewish leaders and coming up with a recommendation for resolving the smoldering conflict.
The committee had representatives from Australia, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Guatemala, India, Iran, the Netherlands, Peru, Sweden, Uruguay and Yugoslavia.
Britain naturally assumed that, as a Commonwealth state, Canada would defend London’s interests. Canada reluctantly agreed to participate and appointed Supreme Court Justice Ivan C. Rand as its representative.
From the moment of UNSCOP’s arrival in Palestine, Britain tried to limit the committee’s access to the local population. Hull later wrote that “they were treated more as members of a murder-trial jury than as a commission sent to view the land and its problems.”
Hull was a fellow Canadian whose father was a lawyer who had known Rand personally. So he sought out the justice and arranged a dinner meeting away from prying British eyes. Hull would later write that “during the dinner [Rand] was full of questions, which I answered to the best of my ability and experience. He had already tasted something of the underhanded means used by the government to frustrate the work of the committee, and as a Britisher he was angry at the unsportsmanlike, un- British tactics used.”
Hull would only learn later that his firsthand insights into the tensions in Palestine had a huge impact on Justice Rand.
Four years later, Rand wrote that Hull’s observations were “a relief. He was a Canadian, a clergyman who for a number of years had been carrying on a mission in Jerusalem; who was, as I saw at once, a man of good will, well known to, and knowing, the many religious and racial groups in that amazing galaxy of rivalries and antagonisms. Whatever might be said of the soundness of his judgments, here, I thought, was one whom I could trust to express himself with honesty and frankness.
“Somewhat to my surprise, I listened to words of high admiration for the Jewish people, their standards of life and the tremendous work they had done since returning to their ancient homeland.
“This sympathetic attitude released within me a vague constraint of doubt, uncertainty and puzzlement which, I see now, the limited and one-sided acquaintance I had had to that time with the Palestine question had generated. The controversy at once appeared unclouded by irrelevancies and shadowy prejudices and became one for decision in the light of subtle appreciations and comprehensive understandings.”
Thereafter, Justice Rand became the “conscience” of the UNSCOP committee, persuading the majority of its members to vote in favor of the Partition Plan for a Jewish and an Arab state. He remained a friend of Israel for the rest of his life.
Fifteen years after Hull’s fateful dinner with Justice Rand, he was called upon by Israeli authorities to help another Christian.
Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi officer who orchestrated the genocide of six million Jews, had been captured in a secret Mossad operation in Argentina.
Smuggled into Israel, he had stood trial in Jerusalem, and Hull was asked to be Eichmann’s spiritual counselor before his execution. This role gave Hull unique access to a senior Nazi figure.
“We had the opportunity of asking him many questions for which the world wanted answers,” Hull later wrote.
In hopes of stirring some measure of contrition in Eichmann, Hull inquired about his family, his early life and church connections. It turned out that Eichmann was once a nominal Protestant, and as such Hull sensed an “imperative” that he “had a soul to be saved.”
Hull and his wife spent numerous counseling sessions with Eichmann. Letters were exchanged. They shared religious and philosophical insights.
Summarizing Eichmann’s personal faith, Hull noted, “He believes that there is a God. He believes that God is absolutely kind and loving. He believes that man is in a process of improvement. He believes that God is not a God of judgment and punishment, but only of love. He believes that God orders and regulates all things. He believes that death is a release of the soul.”
Hull failed to convince Eichmann to repent and confess salvation in Jesus. To the bitter end, Eichmann rejected the Bible as being nothing more than a creation of man.
Standing on the hangman’s scaffold, with Hull present, he refused a blindfold and called out “Long live Germany, Austria and Argentina.” Eichmann dropped sharply 10 feet to his death.
Hull stayed with the body as it was taken outside and cremated. As a final act, he escorted the ashes to Jaffa. The witnesses boarded an Israeli naval craft and carried the ashes six miles out, past Israeli territorial waters, and scattered Eichmann’s ashes onto the sea.
“The fact that Adolf Eichmann died denying any faith in Jesus Christ, any need of a mediator, was a tragedy, for no man on earth had greater need of a savior. But one faint ray of satisfaction emerges from the sordid picture: Adolf Eichmann’s almost public rejection of Jesus Christ completely disassociated him and his evil deeds from Christianity. As the man in charge of finding a solution to the so-called ‘Jewish Question,’ he was completely separated at that time from Christianity and the teachings of Jesus Christ.”
For most Jews, Eichmann was a Christian. I have come to understand that he was not!
Jerry Klinger is president of the Jewish American Society for Historic Preservation www.Jashp.org.