The Accused

Outside the brand-new, four-story, limestone Municipal Cultural Center in Jerusalem, a 9-ft.-high wire-mesh security fence was being erected last week. Inside, work is progressing on a bulletproof glass and plastic cage in which Adolf Eichmann will sit when he goes on trial. The cage, declare the Israelis, is both to shield Eichmann from assassination by an enraged spectator and to prevent a sympathizer from slipping him a vial of poison such as allowed Hermann Goering to escape the hangman's noose during the Nuernberg War Crimes trials after World War II.

Ever since he was spirited out of Argentina nine months ago, Eichmann has been confined in a heavily guarded cell at an undisclosed location. He wears Israeli army-style khaki trousers, shirt and pullover and when not consulting with his lawyers, keeps busy boning up on standard works dealing with the Nazi persecution of the Jews. His German-born lawyers, Robert Servatius and Dieter Wechtenbruch, meet with him for six hours a day in a windowless room bisected by a glass wall. Lawyers and client have to communicate via earphones and microphones. The lawyers show Eichmann documents and letters from his wife by pressing them against the glass.

"Eichmann is eager to tell why things happened without regard to the outcome of the trial," says Lawyer Wechtenbruch. "He says he obeyed orders, and the defense should be able to prove this. He thinks of nothing all day but his defense.At night he thinks of transcendental things--what, I cannot disclose."

Every day Wechtenbruch and Servatius have been sifting through 4,000 pages of statements made by Eichmann to Israeli police and stacks of documents that the Israeli prosecution intends to use during the trial. Confronted with this enormous quantity of paperwork, they have asked for a postponement. The trial is now expected to begin in mid-April. In downtown Jerusalem, Ministry of Justice officials still labor late into the night to make their case even more airtight, as if determined to live up to Eichmann's own puzzling estimate: "The Jews must be a people of the first magnitude, for lawgivers have always been great."

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