The Man in the Cage

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 Fuhrer 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.

Eichmann's imaginative lies and maneuverings paid off in 1938, when Hitler occupied Austria. Eichmann flew to Vienna in the same plane with the top men in the SS, acidulous Heinrich Himmler and blond, willowy Reinhardt ("The Hangman") Heydrich, and was given the task of getting rid of the Austrian Jews but keeping their possessions. In dealing with Jewish leaders, Eichmann delighted in playing the role of unpredictable tyrant. One day, he would be soft-spoken and agreeable, even delaying a transport of Jews so that it would not start on Yom Kippur; the next, he would scream hysterically and emphasize his points by slamming the desk with his swagger stick. When war began, Eichmann was head of the SS bureau called IV A 4 b--in Teutonic officialese, IV stood for the Gestapo, A for Internal Affairs, 4 for religion, and b for Jews. Until war's end, all Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe were to be his responsibility.

On the job, he exemplified the characteristic that Germans call Kadaverge-horsam, i.e., the unquestioning obedience that enables even a corpse to do what it is told. If he had refused to obey Hitler, says Eichmann with an unaccustomed ring of truth, "I would have been not only a scoundrel but a despicable pig!" This, in effect, will be the argument of Eichmann's defense attorney, West Germany's Dr. Robert Servatius.

The Madagascar Plan. Then Poland fell, and there were another 3,000,000 Jews to dispose of. Eichmann lost himself in an elaborate and totally impractical plan to resettle 4,000,000 Jews under a Nazi overlord on the island of Madagascar, off the east coast of Africa. Says a laconic observer: "The year Eichmann wasted on the Madagascar scheme was the most harmless he ever spent." In 1941, when the Nazis invaded Russia, the Madagascar scheme--and all other "soft" solutions of the Jewish question--went out the window. At the Wannsee conference in Berlin, Eichmann and 14 other Nazi chiefs heard Hitler's orders to apply the Final Solution of the Jewish Problem--death. To Eichmann, an order was an order.

Grasping Hand. Eichmann's first contribution was the organization of special SS Einsatzgruppen, who followed the Panzer columns as they rolled deep into the Soviet Union and machine-gunned all Jews they could lay hands on. The SS method for distinguishing between Jew and Gentile was quite simple: any Russian who "looked Jewish" was summarily shot.

Specialist Eichmann traveled to Minsk with Reichsfuhrer Himmler to study the situation. The SS demonstrated its skills for its visitors by slaughtering 400 Jews. Eichmann seemed unbothered, but Himmler nearly fainted. He even tried to save one young Jew because he was blond and seemed Aryan, but Himmler's shouts were drowned in the rattle of ma chine guns. Later, Himmler was to show more aplomb at massacres, but now he ordered a search for a more "humane method."

Eichmann undertook the job. At Lublin, he personally tested a closed truck that carried Jews to the burial pits and killed them en route by monoxide fumes. The prisoners screamed for minutes on end, and Eichmann, peeping through a window in the cab, saw "a grasping hand." He wrote later: "I wanted to get off. 'Don't worry,' said the driver, 'we are almost finished.' " At Auschwitz, always his favorite camp, Eichmann was impressed by the use of Cyclon B gas, which was first tried on 600 Russian prisoners of war. He ordered the building of gas chambers and crematoriums sufficient to "handle" 9,000 prisoners a day.

Then Eichmann scoured the Continent for Jews, who were jammed into cattle cars and sent east to Auschwitz, Belsen, Treblinka, Buchenwald. Majdanek, Sobibor. In his fanatic dedication, he seemed to have no interest in the fact that Germany was fighting a war. The army high command protested Eichmann's seizure of trains that were needed to rush supplies to the Russian front. The economic ministers howled that Eichmann was grabbing highly skilled Jews off the assembly lines of slave factories important to the war effort. Pale-eyed Rudolf Hoess. commandant of Auschwitz, begged Eichmann to ease up because he was receiving more human "freight" than he could conveniently kill. At Majdanek. the tall, tapering crematorium chimneys belched flame day and night until "a light dust lay over the whole city" of Lublin. At Auschwitz, even Eichmann noted that the smell of burning flesh "was not very pleasant.'' On May 29, 1942. Czech partisans hurled a grenade at Eichmann's boss. Reinhardt Heydrich, near Lidice. His spine was severed, and it took him six days to die. In revenge, all the men of Lidice were killed on the spot. Eichmann sent the 302 women and children of Lidice to the death camps.

Money for Blood. After the attack on Heydrich. Eichmann himself began to get jumpy. Bodyguards surrounded him wherever he went. He drank heavily and developed a tic in his right eye. Some of his staff, sickened by their jobs, asked to be sent to the Russian front.

Never, cried Eichmann. "We're all in the same boat, and no one is entitled to leave it."

His last big job was the elimination of Hungary's Jews. While the Nazi armies stumbled backward in defeat, Eichmann arrived in Budapest to command the roundup. He conceived another farfetched idea, on a par with the Madagascar scheme. Summoning Jewish Leader Joel Brand, Eichmann said: "I'm prepared to sell you 1,000,000 Jews: blood for money, money for blood. Whom do you want to save? Men who can beget children? Women who can bear them? Old people? Children? Sit down and tell me."

In return, he wanted the Allies to supply 10,000 winterized trucks, which he promised would be used only against the Russians. Nothing came of the plan, and Hungary's Jews were shipped to the gas chambers. With the Reich visibly collapsing. Heinrich Himmler thought he might save himself by using the remaining Jews as hostages. He ordered the killing stopped. For once. Eichmann refused to obey an order. He sent word to Commandant Hoess: "No one will walk out of Auschwitz. There is only one way they will leave--through the smokestacks."

Abandoned Mistress. The Russians closed in on Budapest, and it became obvious that Germany's capitulation was only a matter of weeks. Eichmann's response was to step up his shipments to the slaughterhouses. "We must hurry," he said. Then he decamped, leaving behind him his aristocratic mistress, Baroness Ingrid von Ihme. He assured other SS men he would commit suicide, that he would "leap into my grave happy because we will at least have wiped out Europe's Jews."

But when the end came, Eichmann meekly surrendered to U.S. troops, wearing the uniform of a Luftwaffe corporal and calling himself Adolf Earth. When questioning began to get intensive, he escaped from the P.W. camp and hid out as a lumberjack in northern Germany. The mysterious attraction Eichmann held for some women smoothed the way: unanimously, they found him polite, considerate, and filled with a romantic melancholy. After three years' concealment, he made contact with the still existent Nazi underground and was smuggled through Switzerland to Italy. There, posing as an anti-Communist refugee, he got a Red Cross D.P. travel document and sailed for Argentina.

How had Eichmann slipped through everyone's hands? Partly, it was his very physical greyness, his ability in any room or group to fade into the background. Besides, he had learned all the bureaucratic tricks. "The important thing," he assured an aide, "is to be covered by your superiors at all times." In his years in power, after every conference with his bosses, Eichmann made full notes of all that was said. He was meticulous in memos to indicate just who had ordered him to do what. Orders that might prove damaging, he sent out over the name of a superior or inferior. When an SS man in Yugoslavia wired that he had 8,000 Jews but no transport to send them to the death camps, the reply came back, "Eichmann proposes shooting," but it was signed by one Rademacher--it would be Eichmann's word against his.

As a result, his name barely appears in the 190 pages of the Nuernberg trial judgment. Only after the trial, during the painstaking sifting of the voluminous Nazi archives, did it become clear how Eichmann, as chief of Bureau IV A 4 b, had had total charge of rounding up all Jews in Nazi-held Europe. It was 14 more years before Israeli agents found their man in Argentina and spirited him to Jerusalem, where he stood last week in a glass cage for all to see.

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