A new exhibition recently opened in Berlin to mark 50 years since Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann went on trial in Israel after being kidnapped in Argentina by Mossad agents.

The temporary exhibition in the Topography of Terror museum explores Eichmann's activities as one of the main organisers of Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler's attempt to wipe out Europe's Jewish population in World War II.

It uses film footage from the trial in Jerusalem, which began on April 11, 1961, including testimony by Holocaust survivors and Eichmann's rambling attempts to portray himself as just a "small cog" merely following orders.

The trial was also a worldwide media event and the exhibition, which runs to September 18, also touches on newspaper coverage from around the world, including in East and West Germany and Israel.

The court sentenced Eichmann to death in December 1961, upheld on appeal in the Israeli Supreme Court on May 29, 1962. An appeal for clemency was rejected two days later and he was hanged at midnight.

"I will never forget the first moments of the trial," Gabriel Bach, 84, one of the prosecutors in the trial, said in Berlin.

"If you had asked me to choose one person to have face trial, I undoubtedly would have chosen Eichmann. He was the man who organized every single part and stage of the Holocaust."