Don't Look

While Adolf Eichmann sat listening attentively in his glass cage, a tape recording of his police interrogation filled the silent room.

He had not really tried to look, said Eichmann's dry, pedantic voice. There was Litzmannstadt, where Jews were gassed in a closed truck: "All the time, I was trying to avert my gaze from what was going on. It was quite enough for me what I saw. The screaming and shrieking!" When the truck stopped at an open pit, "the corpses were hurled into the ditch. I also saw how teeth were being extracted. I entered my car and I did not want to look at this heinous act of turpitude."

Next, Eichmann's averted but all-seeing eye was at Minsk, where a huge ditch was filled with living Jews: "They were shooting into the pit, and I saw a woman, her hands seemed tied behind her back, and then my knees went weak and I went away." But not far, for he was soon watching another mass execution near by. "There was a trench-already filled, and there was a kind of spring of blood gushing from the earth, and this, too, I had never seen before. I had had enough and went back to Berlin."

But he returned, to Auschwitz, to Treblinka, when "the operation was in full swing. I was not near enough to see what was going on but, nevertheless, I saw the bridges, and on the bridges, I saw a file of naked Jews entering a big hall to be gassed."

Dealer in Skulls. Accused of responsibility in the millions of deaths, Eichmann protested, "I have never killed a Jew or a non-Jew--I have never killed anybody." In the tones of a triumphant bureaucrat, he swore that he had never given an order for any killing: "And I know that no one can produce a document to show that I have ever done such a thing."

Had he anything to do with building up a collection of skeletons intended to prove the racial "inferiority" of Jews? Eichmann answered stiffly: "I am not a dealer in skulls of the dead." What then was he? Eichmann's eager reply: "I was only a subordinate in the SS, loyal, obedient and happy to be of service to my fatherland. I fulfilled my duty with a clear conscience and a believing heart." But what was duty? Eichmann again had a ready answer: obedience. "I was always used to discipline, from my childhood until 1945," he explained, "discipline that required my unreserved, unconditional obedience." With pride, he added: "If somebody told me, 'Your father is a traitor,' and I was ordered to kill him, I would have done so without hesitation."

He freely offered thumbnail descriptions of his old Nazi comrades. His top boss, Heinrich Himmler, was the kind of man who demanded only that "I click my heels and say ja." Next came Reinhardt ("The Hangman") Heydrich, who had "a well-known failing--a personal failing. He was known for his preening and self-worship." Savagery flashed but once, in his description of Dieter Wisliceny, who had once been Eichmann's best friend and whose name he gave to his second son. But Wisliceny, before being executed, had accused Eichmann of guilt in the mass murders. Eichmann declared that "in holy anger" he had described Wisliceny as a "swine" and an "arse with ears!"

Locked Fingers. Eichmann's tape-recorded voice droned on for two days, ranging from the ridiculous ("I did not hate Jews. I was never an anti-Semite") to the tragicomic, as when he declared that the ideal of a Jewish national homeland in Palestine "interested me, probably because of my romantic side, my love of nature, of the mountains and forests."

Israeli Prosecutor Gideon Hausner delivered an eleven-hour statement, grimly reciting the long calendar of murder. "When I stand before you, judges of Israel," cried thin, balding Hausner, "I do not want to stand alone. Here with me at this moment stand 6,000,000 prosecutors." Muffled sobbing came from the spectators. Some were so overcome that they had to rush from the court.

Eichmann only listened, sometimes locking and interlocking his long fingers, or tilting his head in an odd, three-quarter inclination of strict attention. Occasionally, a muscle twitched in his thin neck. Once, Hausner said sarcastically that "if the swastika flag were again to be raised with shouts of 'Sieg heil I', if there were again to resound the hysterical screams of the Fuehrer, if again the high-tension barbed wires of the extermination centers were set up--Adolf Eichmann would rise, salute and go back to his work of oppression and butchery." Eichmann drew together his thin lips and stared with stony disapproval at the prosecutor.

Many men have vainly speculated on what sort of punishment could conceivably fit the enormity of Eichmann's crime. Yet it remained last week for Eichmann himself to come up with a suggestion that no one else had thought of. As the court sat awed and uneasy, Eichmann's musing, tape-recorded voice declared: "I am prepared to atone personally for the terrible things that occurred. I cannot plead mercy because I am not deserving of it. Perhaps I ought to hang myself in public in order that all the anti-Semites in the world should have the dreadful character of these events emphasized to them."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.