A few hundred newsmen in the small Jerusalem
courtroom, and millions of televiewers outside, last week stared at a
man in a glass cage. What they had expected was the embodiment of evil,
a monster accused of having participated in the murder of 6,000,000
innocent men, women and children. What they saw was a thin, balding man of 55 who looked more like a bank
clerk than a butcher: a thin mouth between protruding ears, a long,
narrow nose, deep set blue eyes, a high, often wrinkled brow. He looked
puny beside two burly,, blue clad Israeli policemen. When he stood, he
resembled a stork more than a soldier. When he made a gesture, it was not one of heroic defiance: he was merely
getting out a handkerchief to blow his nose. The monster had a cold. Eichmann insists he is not a mass mur derer as charged by Prosecutor
Gideon Hausner. He describes himself as “a man of average character,
with good qualities and many faults.” He plays the violin. He adds: “At
heart, I am a very sensitive man. I simply cannot look at any suffering
without trembling.” Though German-born, Adolf Eichmann was raised in Austria, in Linz, the
postcard prettiness of which was darkened during the '20s by the
breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after World War I. Adolf's
father lost his job as a factory manager; young Adolf had to quit
college to get a job as a salesman. Like other middle-class youths with
a grievance, Adolf Eichmann turned fascist. In Germany on business
trips, he thrilled to the sight of brown-shirted Storm Troopers
marching beneath swastika banners, and listened avidly to the Munich
ravings of another product of Linz, Adolf Hitler. In 1932, when he was
26, Eichmann made the final step: he joined the Nazi Party, which was
then illegal in Austria. It cost him his job, and one day the police
knocked at his door. Adolf went out the back window and kept going
until he was across the German border, where he enrolled in the SS
Austrian Legion being readied for the coming invasion of Austria. He did everything by the book—and the book was Mein Kampf. Before
marrying Veronika Liebl and producing sons for Hitler's future armies,
he first asked permission to marry of his superiors, and had the SS run
a check on Veronika's “racial background.” Secret Knowledge. Like any smart organization man. Eichmann realized he
must develop a specialty to compensate for his lack of leadership
qualities. His rather routine work of compiling dossiers on “subversive
elements” suggested a convenient subject—the Jews, who were the pet
phobia of der Fŭhrer himself. Eichmann began reading Jewish history
and religion, made an effort to learn Yiddish and Hebrew. He dazzled
his colleagues—whose hatred of Jews was only equaled by their
ignorance about them—with speeches on such abstruse subjects as the
factional differences between two small Zionist groups—Poale-Zion and
Zeire-Zion.
