As to the position of the defendant, the court could rely upon the detailed statement he had made to the Israeli police examiner, supplemented by many handwritten notes he had handed in during the eleven months needed for the preparation of the trial. No doubt was ever raised that these were voluntary statements; most of them had not even been elicited by questions. Eichmann had been confronted with sixteen hundred documents, some of which, it turned out, he must have seen before, because they had been shown to him in Argentina during his interview with Sassen, which Mr. Hausner with some justification called a “dress rehearsal.” But he had started working on them seriously only in Jerusalem, and when he was put on the stand, it soon became apparent that he had not wasted his time: now he knew how to read documents, something he had not known during the police examination, and he could do it better than his lawyer. Eichmann's testimony in court turned out to be the most important evidence in the case. His counsel put him on the stand on June 20, during the seventy-fifth session, and interrogated him almost uninterruptedly for fourteen sessions, until July 7. That same day, during the eighty-eighth session, the cross-ex-amination by the prosecution began, and it lasted for another seventeen sessions, up to the twentieth of July. There were a few incidents: Eichmann once threatened to “confess everything” Moscow style, and he once complained that he had been “grilled until the steak was done,” but he was usually quite calm and he was not serious when he threatened that he would refuse to answer any more questions. He told Judge Halevi how “pleased [he was] at this opportunity to sift the truth from the untruths that had been unloaded upon [him] for fifteen years,” and how proud of being the subject of a cross-examination that lasted longer than any known before. After a short re-examination by his lawyer, which took less than a session, he was examined by the three judges, and they got more out of him in two and a half short sessions than the prosecution had been able to elicit in seventeen.
Eichmann was on the stand from June 20 to July 24, or a total of thirty-three and a half sessions. Almost twice as many sessions, sixty-two out of a total of a hundred and twenty-one, were spent on a hundred prosecution witnesses who, country after country, told their tales of horrors. Their testimony lasted from April 24 to June 12, the entire intervening time being taken up with the submission of documents, most of which the Attorney General read into the record of the court's proceedings, which was handed out to the press each day. All but a mere handful of the witnesses were Israeli citizens, and they had been picked from hundreds and hundreds of applicants. (Ninety of them were survivors in the strict sense of the word, they had survived the war in one form or another of Nazi captivity.) How much wiser it would have been to resist these pressures altogether (it was done up to a point, for none of the potential witnesses mentioned in Minister of Death, written by Quentin Reynolds on the basis of material provided by two Israeli journalists, and published in 1960, was ever called to the stand) and to seek out those who had not volunteered! As though to prove the point, the prosecution called upon a writer, well known on both sides of the Atlantic under the name of K-Zetnik—a slang word for a concentration-camp inmate—as the author of several books on Auschwitz that dealt with brothels, homosexuals, and other “human interest stories.” He started off, as he had done at many of his public appearances, with an explanation of his adopted not a “pen-name,” he said. “I must carry this name as long as the world will not awaken after the crucifying of the nation… as humanity has risen after the crucifixion of one man.” He continued with a little excursion into astrology: the star “influencing our fate in the same way as the star of ashes at Auschwitz is there facing our planet, radiating toward our planet.” And when he had arrived at “the unnatural power above Nature” which had sustained him thus far, and now, for the first time, paused to catch his breath, even Mr. Hausner felt that something had to be done about this “testimony,” and, very timidly, very politely, interrupted: “Could I perhaps put a few questions to you if you will consent?” Whereupon the presiding judge saw his chance as welclass="underline" “Mr. Dinoor, please, please, listen to Mr. Hausner and to me.” In response, the disappointed witness, probably deeply wounded, fainted and answered no more questions.
This, to be sure, was an exception, but if it was an exception that proved the rule of normality, it did not prove the rule of simplicity or of ability to tell a story, let alone of the rare capacity for distinguishing between things that had happened to the storyteller more than sixteen, and sometimes twenty, years ago, and what he had read and heard and imagined in the meantime. These difficulties could not be helped, but they were not improved by the predilection of the prosecution for witnesses of some prominence, many of whom had published books about their experiences, and who now told what they had previously written, or what they had told and retold many times. The procession started, in a futile attempt to proceed according to chronological order, with eight witnesses from Germany, all of them sober enough, but they were not “survivors”; they had been high-ranking Jewish officials in Germany and were now prominent in Israeli public life, and they had all left Germany prior to the outbreak of war. They were followed by five witnesses from Prague and then by just one witness from Austria, on which country the prosecution had submitted the valuable reports of the late Dr. Löwenherz, written during and shortly after the end of the war. There appeared one witness each from France, Holland, Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg, Italy, Greece, and Soviet Russia; two from Yugoslavia; three each from Rumania and Slovakia; and thirteen from Hungary. But the bulk of the witnesses, fifty-three, came from Poland and Lithuania, where Eichmann's competence and authority had been almost nil. (Belgium and Bulgaria were the only countries not covered by witnesses.) These were all ‘background witnesses,’ and so were the sixteen men and women who told the court about Auschwitz (ten) and Treblinka (four), about Chelmno and Majdanek. It was different with those who testified on Theresienstadt, the old-age ghetto on Reich territory, the only camp in which Eichmann's power had indeed been considerable; there were four witnesses for Theresienstadt and one for the exchange camp at Bergen-Belsen.
At the end of this procession, “the right of the witnesses to be irrelevant,” as Yad Vashem, summing up the testimony in its Bulletin, phrased it, was so firmly established that it was a mere formality when Mr. Hausner, during the seventy-third session, asked permission of the court “to complete his picture,” and Judge Landau, who some fifty sessions before had protested so strenuously against this “picture painting,” agreed immediately to the appearance of a former member of the Jewish Brigade, the fighting force of Palestine Jews that had been attached to the British Eighth Army during the war. This last witness for the prosecution, Mr. Aharon Hoter-Yishai, now an Israeli lawyer, had been assigned the task of coordinating all efforts to search for Jewish survivors in Europe, under the auspices of Aliyah Beth, the organization responsible for arranging for illegal immigration into Palestine. The surviving Jews were dispersed among some eight million displaced persons from all over Europe, a floating mass of humanity that the Allies wanted to repatriate as quickly as possible. The danger was that the Jews, too, would be returned to their former homes. Mr. Hoter-Yishai told how he and his comrades were greeted when they presented themselves as members of “the Jewish fighting nation,” and how it “was sufficient to draw a Star of David on a sheet in ink and pin it to a broomstick” to shake these people out of the dangerous apathy of near-starvation. He also told how some of them “had wandered home from the D.P. camps,” only to come back to another camp, for “home” was, for instance, a small Polish town where of six thousand former Jewish inhabitants fifteen had survived, and where four of these survivors had been murdered upon their return by the Poles. He described finally how he and the others had tried to forestall the repatriation attempts of the Allies and how they frequently arrived too late: “In Theresienstadt, there were thirty-two thousand survivors. After a few weeks we found only four thousand. About twenty-eight thousand had returned, or been returned. Those four thousand whom we found there—of them, of course, not one person returned to his place of origin, because in the meantime the road was pointed out to them”—that is, the road to what was then Palestine and was soon to become Israel. This testimony perhaps smacked more strongly of propaganda than anything heard previously, and the presentation of the facts was indeed misleading. In November, 1944, after the last shipment had left Theresienstadt for Auschwitz, there were only about ten thousand of the original inmates left. In February, 1945, there arrived another six to eight thousand people, the Jewish partners of mixed marriages, whom the Nazis shipped to Theresienstadt at a moment when the whole German transportation system was already in a state of collapse. All the others—roughly fifteen thousand—had poured in in open freight cars or on foot in April, 1945, after the camp had been taken over by the Red Cross. These were survivors of Auschwitz, members of the labor gangs, and they were chiefly from Poland and Hungary. When the Russians liberated the camp—on May 9, 1945—many Czech Jews, who had been in Theresienstadt since the beginning, left the camp immediately and started home; they were in their own country. When the quarantine ordered by the Russians because of the epidemics was lifted, the majority left on its own initiative. So that the remnant found by the Palestine emissaries probably consisted of people who could not return or be returned for various reasons—the ill, the aged, single lonely survivors of families who did not know where to turn. And yet Mr. Hoter-Yishai told the simple truth: those who had survived the ghettos and the camps, who had come out alive from the nightmare of absolute helplessness and abandonment—as though the whole world was a jungle and they its prey—had only one wish, to go where they would never see a non-Jew again. They needed the emissaries of the Jewish people in Palestine in order to learn that they could come, legally or illegally, by hook or by crook, and that they would be welcome; they did not need them in order to be convinced.