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."