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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."