The Bureaucrat

Meticulously taking notes with a black ballpoint pen, underlining in red important document fragments, Adolf Eichmann but for his glass cage might have been a minor court bureaucrat during the first eight weeks of his trial. As witness after witness rose to recount the Nazi crimes against the Jews, the green-backed files and notebooks in the cage grew higher and higher. At night in his cell, Eichmann pored over his files until his eyes watered with weariness. Last week, when he took the stand for the first time in his own defense, Eichmann was ready to the point of bursting.

His fingers strummed the table in front of him. He fidgeted, waved his pen. He leaped to attention to be sworn in, then stopped the court in its tracks by refusing to take his oath on the New Testament. "I'm not bound by any faith,'' he said. Presiding Judge Moshe Landau conferred with the other two judges, permitted Eichmann to swear on thin air.

The Long Count. Testifying seated in his cage, Eichmann fired his words out in an endless, tumbling torrent. Asked to give the date he returned to Prague from Berlin, Eichmann responded with a 250-word answer. After a spectacular, 225-word sentence whose meaning, perhaps intentionally, escaped everyone in the court, both Judge Landau and Defense Attorney Robert Servatius warned Eichmann to speak to the point. "I know the German verb comes at the end of the sentence," said Landau, "but we are having to wait too long for the verb."

Eichmann's point quickly became evident, and he repeated it so often in such bureaucratese that some of the spectators literally fell asleep: he had been "only a small cog" with no real authority in the Nazi machine. "I could not anticipate. I could not influence. My status was too modest," he said. "I was only dealing with train timetables and technical aspects of evacuation transports." In this small role, rationalized Eichmann, he actually helped the Jews: "It cannot be denied that this orderliness was to some extent to the benefit of the people who were deported, if one might be allowed to use the word." But faced with the emigration job, Eichmann told the court, he realized he could help the Jews by forcibly "facilitating" the work of the Zionists. "The real solution would be for the Jews to have a state of their own," he said. In this spirit, he claimed, he helped ship Jews out of Nazi Europe, tried to set up Madagascar as a Jewish haven. "I wanted Jews to have solid ground under their feet."

Barbed Wire? Even embittered Israelis were forced to admit that Eichmann was a good witness, however garrulous and diffuse. He claimed that as a timetable technician he at first had no idea that the ultimate destinations of the trains were death camps. He drew angry snorts of laughter when he testified that he could not understand why he was asked to supply barbed wire, "which was in short supply," for every carload of deported Jews. But on one point, the enlargement of his department's responsibility to include confiscation of Jewish property and cancellation of Jewish citizenship, Eichmann was more knowledgeable. It was the result "of the initiative of the division in the Interior Ministry under Hering and Globke." The pointed mention of Dr. Hans Globke, now West Germany's Cabinet Secretary and one of Chancellor Adenauer's closest advisers, was a blatant effort to bolster his argument that he was the little man being picked on, while the really big Nazis went free.

Globke served in the Interior Ministry during the Nazi regime, had indeed helped rewrite the laws to deprive Jews of citizenship. But he never joined the Nazi Party. Berlin's Cardinal von Preysing testified after the war that Globke had in fact been placed in his job by the German Catholic hierarchy as a kind of spy and agent for the resistance movement. Globke's defenders have always claimed that he rewrote the laws as loosely as possible to aid the Jews, and Adenauer promptly blasted Eichmann's charges last week as inaccurate.

His Own Counsel. Eichmann was so eager that he often gave Servatius directions, prodding his counsel to ask him questions. On one occasion Eichmann was so wrapped up in his notes and papers that Judge Landau coldly had to remind him to stand when addressed by the court. Eichmann's face flushed with momentary anger as he looked up; then, realizing where he was, he jumped up apologizing.

But at week's end Eichmann's verbal prancing was wearing a little thin. After an Eichmann foray into the minutiae of the Nazi bureaucracy's workings, Judge Landau snapped: "You were not requested to give lectures. Asked a specific question, give a specific reply."

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