Peter Z. Malkin

As I waited, I made note of the security outside the building as well. A ten-foot fence of steel mesh had been erected around the entire structure. Border policemen patrolled its roof and grounds, submachine guns at the ready. Even now, at lunch hour, the building was bathed in floodlights, making the temperature almost unbearable.

Within twenty minutes my shirt was soaked through; within forty-five my head was starting to pound. Up and down the line, people were complaining: What was going on here; when were they going to open the doors? Even the group of Yemeni schoolchildren, brought here by their teacher to witness history in the making, had grown listless.

The heat did little for my disposition.  History was the furthest thing from my mind; I had come only reluctantly, to honor a commitment. Now, as the minutes passed in that blast-furnace heat, I was more persuaded than ever that the errand was pointless. More than a year had passed. Surely Eichmann himself no longer remembered that exchange back in Buenos Aires.

Nor were my spirits much raised when the line at last began edging forward and I found myself obliged to enter a cubicle in the building lobby and submit to a rigorous body search: a reminder, as if any were  needed, that even on my native soil I was without identity or standing, the very nature of my work a state secret. Hell, if I'd wanted to KILL the sonofabitch, I'd have done it then!

All of which has a lot to do with why, another twenty minutes later, I was so surprised by my own excitement as an urgent murmur passed over the crowd. I strained forward in my seat, above the judges' bench and a little to the left. There he was, being led into his booth.

The sight was staggering. Though doctors had dismissed his lawyers' claim that he had suffered two heart attacks in the three months since the start of the trial (the condition was diagnosed as functional arrhythmia), neither they nor the photos had suggested the extent of the man's physical deterioration. Fifteen pounds lighter than when I had last seen him, his cheeks deep shadows and the blue suit made for him by an Israeli tailor limp on a narrow frame, his skin had gone a waxy yellow. Seeing him, it was easy to believe, as Eichmann's associate counsel had recently claimed, that the fifty-five-year-old defendant had become obsessed with a prediction made years before by an Argentine gypsy that he would not live past his fifty-seventh birthday.

And yet he didn't carry himself like a beaten man. Taking a seat at the desk within his cage, oblivious to the blue-uniformed policemen on either side (like all of Eichmann's guards of non-European origin), he immediately began organizing his papers into neat piles before him. As one observer had it, he was turning the glass booth into "a tiny island of fussy bureaucracy."

And, moments later, when he began to speak, I knew for certain he had not changed. Instantly it all came back with full force: the man's astonishing self-control, his sense of certainty, his maddening, almost unbelievable, moral obtuseness.

Eichmann was in the midst of his eighth day of cross-examination, and the subject before the court, carried over from the morning session, was responsibility for the eradication of a group of one hundred Jewish children. From Lidice, the Czech village obliterated in 1942 in reprisal for the assassination by partisans of Eichmann's immediate SS superior Reinhard Heydrich, the children were dispatched en masse to the gas chambers at Chelmo.

Yes, Eichmann allowed drily, rising in his booth to respond to the sharp question put to him by prosecutor Gideon Hausner, he recalled the events in question, at least the assassination. "But the affair of the children I do not remember." After all, he added, he occupied himself with questions of transport, not those of life and death.

Eichmann seemed to have been born knowing that bland makes for excellent protective coloring. Indeed, even at the height of his personal power, the months and years when he traversed Europe going about his grisly work with a zeal and relish that stunned even some of his most committed contemporaries, he had often taken refuge behind a bureaucratic cloak.

But Hausner, the Israeli attorney general, bored in. Citing prior testimony to the effect that Eichmann had personally marked the Lidice children for "special treatment"–a favorite Nazi euphemism for immediate extermination–he waved a letter written to the defendant at the time by a subordinate seeking confirmation of the order that they be sent forthwith to the death camp.

Eichmann sat for a long moment listening to the translation.

"Look here!" demanded Hausner, brandishing the letter. "Do you mean to say that Krumy [the subordinate] did not know who was competent to deal with this matter?"

In his booth Eichmann slowly rose to his feet. Though steady, he betrayed his anxiety by gnawing on his lower lip. "Maybe he wrote to another department, could not get a reply, and then wrote to me," he offered.

"But the children had nothing to do with the transport question! Why did Krumy contact you? Why YOU?"

Krumy's in prison in Germany," came back Eichmann evenly. "Ask him."

None of this was surprising, of course. Through almost three months of eyewitness testimony, some of it so gruesome as to challenge the very capacity for comprehension, the government had painstakingly described the Nazis' highly organized systems of terror and barbarity and then tied specific acts directly to the commands of the defendant. The world had learned that it was Eichmann who had commissioned the design of the first gas chambers; Eichmann who had instituted the campaign of deceit to encourage the victims' compliance, denying them their dignity even as they were led to the slaughter; Eichmann who, in his single-minded pursuit of the National Socialist agenda, dispatched to the ovens even those Jews whom his superiors were ready to spare. In fact, it was Eichmann who even at the very end, when others were looking to save their skins, ignored explicit orders from the top that the liquidation be halted. This was a man who, on hearing a conscience-stricken subordinate exclaim, "God grant that our enemies never have a chance to do the same to the German people!" replied with cool contempt, "Don't be sentimental . . ."

Nor was there anything unexpected in Eichmann's line of defense. It was the standard one, that he had only been following orders, an argument which, carried to its logical conclusion, would hold that no one in the Third Reich besides Adolf Hitler was guilty of anything at all; indeed, that the very concept of personal responsibility had no meaning.

Still, watching now, there was something disturbing in the way Hausner was going after him. Striding the courtroom in his black robes like a balding, bespectacled bat, now raging, now full of mocking contempt, incessantly waving an accusing finger or pounding a fist, exasperated by even the legitimate objections of Eichmann's attorney, the rotund Dr. Robert Servatius, this was a man out to enhance his reputation. Did the fact that we had been victims give us license to be less than just?

Indeed, not content to convict Eichmann of the unspeakable crimes for which he bore clear responsibility, Hausner had also set out to make the case, with little documentary evidence, that in 1944 he had killed with his own hands a Jewish boy caught stealing a piece of fruit on the grounds of his Budapest residence. It was, as anyone familiar with Eichmann knew (and the three justices would eventually conclude), a charge that strained credulity. Certainly the man murdered without mercy or conscience, but only at a distance. Like SS chief Heinrich Himmler, he was sickened by the sight of blood.

But in the portrayal of Eichmann merely as a bloodthirsty executioner, truth was being done an even more fundamental disservice. It was far more complex than that and, in a real sense, more chilling. For even as he sat in that booth, he truly did not understand that he had done wrong.

The fact is that Eichmann believed himself a man of honor. Yes, he was cruel when he had to be, and remorseless–this he admitted–but never indiscriminately so. Even now, listening with equanimity to accusations of mass murder, he bridled at any suggestion that he had been anything other than "correct" in his one-to-one dealings with the Jewish leaders he had so masterfully used to his horrifying ends.

To him, this was the heart of the matter. The content of his beliefs, the acts themselves, were secondary. 

Just a couple of weeks earlier, flipping through the papers, I had been keenly reminded of this side of the man. His own version of his capture had just appeared for the first time in a London tabloid, and according to the account I read, he had gone out of his way to compliment those of us who had carried it out, terming the operation "an elegant job," handled "impeccably and with precision." Immediately I recognized this as a gesture aimed at me.

In fact, characteristically, Eichmann didn't have a clue. He knew little more of what had gone on behind the scenes than those in the Israeli popular press who for a year had been touting us as heroes, or those abroad who imagined us some Israeli version of grim, faceless men in trenchcoats. The bringing of Eichmann to justice had been, in the end, less a model of crisp, military precision than a seat-of-the-pants adventure.

Above all, what Eichmann himself could not grasp–given who he was, would never have been capable of understanding–was that we had regarded the operation as a task of almost biblical moral weight. And that some of us had been transformed by it.

Though as a Jew I myself had come to age with the understanding of how readily those untethered by conscience can turn into monsters, always before it had been theoretical. I was among those many who, in the wake of the Holocaust, had come to see the very gentleness of spirit and abhorrence of injustice that for centuries had helped sustain us as a people as naive, impractical, the mentality of oppression. Moreover, like so many whose lives had been ravaged by loss, I had grown accustomed to keeping certain thoughts and feelings at bay. Emotionally incomplete, perhaps, but at least far from pain, I was one of those people reflexively uncomfortable at the thought of earnestness, let alone self-examination.

But my brush with Eichmann had started to change all that. In the guise of professional responsibility I had been forced to face myself. Long an accomplished agent, I was at last becoming a complete human being.

Now, in the courtroom, I watched closely as, head bowed, listening to the translation, the defendant formed the answer to another question. Only this time, when he raised his eyes, happened to glance in my direction.

He abruptly stopped, registering surprise, then a kind of bewilderment. For a long moment our eyes remained locked.

"Accused!" shouted Hausner into the stillness. "You are required to answer the question!"

Eichmann turned toward him and began speaking.

I listened a moment longer, then rose and headed for the exit. I had seen who I came to see, the only soul in that vast, historic assemblage who had the slightest idea of who I was.