LEGAL DOUBTS & PRACTICAL FEARS

THE issues raised by the trial of Adolf Eichmann reverberated. Granted that Eichmann was guilty ("the biggest of the murderers," West Germany's Chancellor Konrad Adenauer called him last week), was his propaganda show trial a good thing?

Some laymen wondered about the rights and wrongs of trying a man kidnaped from a foreign land, trying him for crimes committed in still another land, crimes that took place even before Israel was a state.

Curiously, a number of lawyers outside Israel are less disturbed by these questions--at least on legal grounds. No court, they say, need be concerned with how a defendant is brought before it but only with giving the accused a fair trial. In 1883, a U.S. citizen named Ker was traced to Peru, where he had fled to escape being tried for embezzlement. A U.S. agent kidnaped Ker at gunpoint, brought him back to the U.S., where he was tried and convicted. Peru might conceivably have a grievance against the U.S.. ruled the U.S. Supreme Court, but the defendant had none. To those who question Israel's basic right to try Eichmann at all, Israelis say that the U.S. Supreme Court, among others, has ruled that war criminals, like pirates, may be punished by any sovereign state no matter where or when the crimes had been committed.

Accomplices & Guilt. Legality was only part of the worrying. West Germany displays visible distress at the prospect of another raking up of Nazi atrocities. Sighed Konrad Adenauer: "There's nothing to do but wait and see--and try to live through it." West Berlin's Evangelical Bishop Otto Dibelius, who has himself been accused of anti-Semitism during the Hitler era--declared in a radio address: "The whole world will say, 'That is the way Germans are.' We will not be able to answer, It was only a handful of Germans who in their insanity forgot all the commandments of God.' The German people cannot exonerate themselves from the guilt of the mass murderer and his accomplices."

The West German TV network last week carried a 65-minute Eichmann documentary that pulled no punches, showing everything from naked men and women being pushed into a gas chamber to a sequence of hundreds of victims literally running into a long trench and then being shot dead by SS men. Cried a 24-year-old German girl: "What are we supposed to say? Must we proclaim forever that we are guilty? What more is there to say of such horror?"

To the foreign correspondents in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, the Israeli mood seemed strangely contradictory. They saw pride that Jews captured Eichmann, that his three judges are Jews, and that he will be tried according to the laws of a sovereign Jewish state. They also got some inkling of how deep Israeli emotions ran when the trial was interrupted for a day to allow Israeli to celebrate the Day of the Holocaust, commemorating Naziism's victims. A heavily draped casket, containing ashes of Jews incinerated in 21 Nazi death camps, was interred in a dimly lit crypt on the boulder-strewn Hill of Remembrance outside Jerusalem. A 77-year-old rabbi, who had lost his wife and seven children, cried: "May the Almighty God avenge the blood of our martyrs!" Of Eichmann, the rabbi said: "In that dock beside him are the entire nation of murderers and also other nations that failed to come to the rescue of the victims."

Death & Complexes. Among some Israelis there was fear of the "somber remembrances" the case will awaken, and the explosive bitterness of some Jews against other Jews they accuse of having worked with the Nazis to save their own skins. Some of the men and women who suffered most are among the least vengeful. One survivor of Auschwitz said: "Those of us who have seen what happened in the gas chambers want nothing to do with bringing death to a single human being--not even Eichmann."

Israel's Premier David Ben-Gurion, who vowed in 1945 that Eichmann would be brought to Jewish justice, insists the trial is important so that "the facts should be known and remembered by the youth of Israel who have grown up after the holocaust." But some of the young, tough sabras (native-born Israelis), who have already fought and won two wars against the surrounding Arab states, reject what they call the "inferiority complex" of their elders. "We are Israelis first and Jews second," said one sabra, unfeelingly. "It's hard for us to feel kinship for those sheep who walked unprotestingly to the gas chambers."

And how, ask many Israelis, can Eichmann be punished? Not even the most savage tortures of the medieval dungeons would be adequate for a man responsible for the death of millions. The danger even existed that too long a trial might even set off a kind of sympathy for a man who deserved no sympathy. There were some who wished that the Israeli agents who caught up with Eichmann in Argentina last May had taken their own quick revenge. Or suppose they had returned him to Germany, and made the German courts come to their own verdict, with the whole world looking on?

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