VOUXUB
The Canadian EnglfchJetiisK Weekly
GABDENVALE. QUEBEC AUGUST 11, 1961
No. 45
EICHMANN IS DESCRIBED BY BERLIN PASTOR, ONE Of 700 CLERGY AT DACHAU CAMP, AS OBSESSED WITH COLD REJECTION OF . -� ICE, DEVOID OF FEELINGS; WITH NO SPARK OF HUMANITY; FULL OF RABID, BOUNDLESS HATRED; OBLIVIOUS TO DEMANDS OF JUSTICE AND CONSCIENCE; IMPERVIOUS TO HIS
PLEAS FOR CLEMENCY TOWARD JEWS
During the trial of Adolf Eichmann, in Jerusalem, a German pastor testified that Adolf Eich-mann harbored a demonic hatred of Jews and was quite impervious to pleas for clemency. The witness, whose teeth had been knocked out by the Nazis at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, looked across the courtroom to the prisoner and spat out the word, "landsknecht." It means mercenary, a soldier without conscience.
The witness, the Rev. Dr. Hein-rich Karl Ernst Grueber, dean of St Mary's Evangelical Cathedral, of Berlin, said Eichmann's "rabid, boundless hatred" had puzzled him deeply, says the New York Times. Later, the witness said, he real-ized that Eichmann was obsessed, not with a burning hatred of Jews, but with a cold rejection of them, an utter lack of feeling about their fate.
Dean Grueber ended his testimony with a plea, that the Eichmann trial increase understanding between Israel and Germany and with a prayer that everyone, including the defendant, would "find forgiveness before God's throne."
Dean Grueber was the first German witness to take the stand. A ponderous man, with thinning white hair, and ayes that squint behind thick-lens glasses, the witness sought irtfr visible anguish to give a rational explanation for the phenomenon of attempted genocide in the Twentieth Century.
Holding his cupped hands before him as if he were trying to weigh good and evil, Dean Grueber told how he and other clergymen interned at Sachsenhausen had pondered the reasons for the Nazi insanity in Germany. <
"We could not find an answer," Dean Grueber said. "We saw it as a psychological problem, because after all, it was impossible that one could perpetrate crimes with such sadism, so much cruelty."
Dean Grueber stood up well under cross-examination. The audience broke into sympathetic laughter and applause in two demonstrations that were promptly squelched by the presiding judge, Justice Moshe Landau.
The witness said he had made several visits to Eichmann's office before he was sent to Sachsenhausen December 19, 1940. He said that in trying to intervene on behalf of persecuted Jews, he sometimes saw Eichmann and sometimes was received by an aide. But, he testified, he never once won even a slight concession.
"What was Eichmann's attitude?" asked Yaacov Baror, assistant prosecutor.
Dean Grueber spread his huge hands, squinted at the prisoner and said: "He made the impression � I hope the prisoner will not take it amiss � of being a block of ice, or a slab of marble, completely devoid of human feeling. He was a landsknecht"
Dean Grueber said he never got from Eichmann an affirmative reply to a request, writes Homer Bfrart, in the New York Times. "We would either get a definite 'No' or a noncommittal answer with an injunction to wait," he asserted.
The prosecutor asked whether Eichmann had ever mentioned orders from . above. -Eichmann's main defense is the contention that he was only a Gestapo officer who was obliged to carry out superiors' orders and that consequently ha had no responsibility for the murder of 6.000,000 Jews aa charged in the indictment
"He would anBWer in the first person," said the dean. "It was always 'I order' or 'I say this' � I do not recall his ever saying that he had to refer something to a higher authority."
Under cross-examination by the defense counsel, Dr. Robert Serva-tius, of West Germany, Dean Grueber denied that it was impossible for a landsknecht to say "I order" instead of giving a subordinate's usual reply, "I am acting according to instructions."
"I do not think that this type of landsknecht ceases to be a landBknecht even if he rises in rank, even if he reaches the highest rank in the hierarchy," retorted the dean, his face glowing. Dr. Servatius was unhappy with the dean's rather lengthy replies.
"An interesting psychological theory," he commented with sarcasm. "But my question was unanswered."
Dr. Grueber drew laughter and a brief forbidden handclap when he suggested that the defense counsel clarify his questions because "I am an old man, not a
food hunting dog, and I do not ind the scent easily."
Dr. Servatius dropped this line of questioning and challenged the dean on his "Mock of ice" description of Eiehmann. If he had found Eichmann bo cold, Dr. Servatius asked, why had not the dean tried to warm him up with some moral preachment?
Dean Grueber said preaching would no more have penetrated Eichmann's brain, than "water on a poodle." He recalled that one day he had arrived tired at Eichmann's office in Kurfuersten-strasse and that somehow "the accused had had a good day and perhaps a day of goodwill."
Dean Grueber said he had heard rumors that Eichmann had been brought up in a Templar's settlement in Palestine, says the New York Times. So he asked if Eichmann knew the road from Jerusalem to Jericho. Eichmann, who had spent only a few hours on Palestine soil before he was brought to Israel as a prisoner last May, nodded. The pastor went on:
"On that road there was once a Jew felled by robbers. And the man who helped that Jew7 was a non-Jew. The God whom I worship tells me, 'Go and do thou likewise.' "
"That answer will do," said Dr. Servatius wearily.
After the luncheon recess, the defense attorney read long excerpts from an Evangelical Church
eaper of the Nineteen  Thirties ailing Hitler's anti-Jewish measures.
"Would not Eichmann, reading this in a church paper be convinced he was on the right path?" Dr. Servatius inquired. "I did not know that the accused drew his moral maxims from the Berlin evangelistic paper," said the dean acidly.
There was another handicap amid laughter. Justice Landau sent policemen running to the offending aisle, but no culprit was found.
Dr. Servatius, the nape of his neck turning enmson. tried again. He asked whether the dean had read "The Third Reich And Its Thinkers," which, he said, had quoted, scholars, professors, and men of liberal professions as having said Hitler was "acting proper\j and correctly."
If these learned men could be misled, Dr.  Servatius suggested,
certainly a smaller man, a man like Adolf Eichmann, would be tripped up by Hitler.
Dean Grueber replied calmly that academic status offered no defense against succumbing to Hit-lerism. It was rather the possession of good sense, he said.
"I can say that in the Third Reich I found small men in lowly positions who had this healthy sense," he said.
Dean Grueber recalled that during the first deportation of Jews from Stettin in 1940 the commanding general was appalled at the resulting misery and sent an aide to the dean's office urging him to "do something."
"I could not resist telling the aide that if I had been the general commanding Stettin, not a single railway car would have left for the East with Jews," Dean Grueber said.
The dean said that at that time he was beginning to be regarded as a pest by the Gestapo, says the New York Times. He was warned that his activities were running counter to the national interest, but, he said, he replied defiantly that he would continue to help the Jews. He was getting clandestine assistance from various officials, he testified.
Two Gestapo officers, he said, used to bellow "swine" at him in the corridors and then, in the confines of their office, show him impending orders so he could alert Jews. One of these, he said, was Vom Rath, father of the third secretary of the German Embassy in Paris, who was assassinated by Herschel Grynszpan.
He said Vom Rath had got into the secret police because high Gestapo officials reasoned that the killing of his son would make him a trusted hater of Jews. "But this was not the case," said the dean. "For this man helped us secretly on many occasions.
Dean Grueber caused some surprise when he asked permission to withhold the name of the other helpful Gestapo agent. The Israeli tribunal was clearly puzzled. Judge Benjamin Halevi finally demanded to know why anyone in West Germany should now be embarrassed by the exposure of wartime decency to Jews.
Dean Grueber replied that the publicity would only draw "slander and threats" to the person involved. He said he had "a whole file of abusive letters" he had received when the news that he would go to Israel to testify against Eichmann was published in West Germany.
Dean Grueber, describing his treatment at Sachsenhausen, testified: "My teeth were knocked out and I suffered a heart attack, but this was a fraction of what my Jewish friends suffered."
The pastor recalled a cold night when drunken S.S. men ordered Jews out of their huts dressed only in nightshirts and forced them
to roll in the snow, says the New York Times. Some of the Jews died of pneumonia, he said.
A woman in the gallery sobbed loudly as the dean called Sachsenhausen "worse than Dante's Inferno because in this particular hell no one could complain, no one could weep."
"If a man was shot and killed," he said, "it was nothing, but if a spade was missing a report had to be made."
Asked about medical experiments at Dachau, in Upper Bavaria, where he was later transferred, Dean Grueber said many of his friends were used as guinea pigs. They were given air-bubble injections, infected with disease, or put under a glass bell and subjected to air pressures, he said.
Another witness, Mrs. Charlotte Salzberger, a native of Frankfurt who now lives in Israel, said Eichmann warned her in March, 1945. against disclosing what she had learned about Nazi death camps in the East.
Mrs. Salzberger said that she and five other women were summoned into Eichmann's presence at' Theresienstadt, the show place concentration camp in what is now Cseehoslovakia, says the New J&fcfc. Times. The women'had recently been transferred from Rav-ensbrueck, Germany.
In Eichmann's eyes were surprise and interest and perhaps even acceptance, says the New York Herald Tribune, as the strong-visaged clergyman intoned to the tribunal judges and then, swinging his head toward Eichmann, to the defendant:
"I beg to be understood if what I have said has been said a little strictly and if I have spoken out here openly. I hope that this love and this forgiveness will encompass everybody, everywhere, including  the   accused.   And   that
there will be loving forgiveness before the throne of God.
The sixty-nine-year-old clergyman, whose teeth were beaten out of hia head in one of the three concentration camps into which he had been thrown for helping the German Jews, did most certainly speak openly against Eichmann and his Nazi collaborators, but his words of charity, coming at the end of a short address he had made to the judges, were taken by all in the court in a spirit of impressive solemnity.
For this man, Dr. Heinrich Karl Ernst Grueber, dean of the Evangelical Grossen Maria Cathedral of West Berlin, was an imposing figure. He gave his testimony fearlessly, even though he was threatened in West Germany for making the trip to Israel.
He was a rock of Gibraltar sitting there in the witness stand in neat, clerical black. He has a broad, generous mouth that looks like it could take an SS (Nazi Elite Guard) club squarely on the teeth without flinching.
Dean Grueber related the story of how he and a number of Christian co-workers around Germany were openly doing, an organised work of trytaff. to jfeelp the Jews escape (rem th**Ni�;�#mplion, says the New York< Herald Tribune.
He told in detail of the organization he had set up in Berlin in co-operation with Jewish leaders there, and how this brought him into frequent contact with Eichmann, the expert on the Jews, whose office was in Berlin.
During a stiff cross-examination by Dr. Robert Servatius, the defense counsel, the dean admitted he had not appealed in so many words to Eichmann's feelings in those days.
"I always maintained that deeds are   much   more   effective   than
words," he explained, "and if the accused did not come to the right way of thinking after I had attempted to help people, I believed that words would have been useless."
Dean Grueber's characterization of Eichmann, though searing in its failure to detect a spark of humanity in the man, nevertheless was offered by the witness with charity.
"The impression he made on me � and I hope the accused will not take it amiss if I say so � I didn't come here out of hatred or guided by feelings of vengeances� the impression he made on me was that of a block of ice or marble, completely devoid of human feelings," the clergyman testified.
"He was a landsknecht (mer-menary), as it were. In our eyes there is a difference between a landsknecht and a soldier. A landsknecht, the moment he puts on his uniform, becomes oblivious to the demands of justice and his own conscience."
Dean Grueber said that later, in a concentration camp, he came to see this in action all around him. and he also came to understand it. But he never quite explained iust how it was he came to see into the Eichmann type of mind* though he did say thefltowrtteTii tract on the subject once, reports Robert S. Bird, in the New York Herald Tribune. He continued:
"At that time we couldn't understand how a human being, how Eichmann and his ilk could possibly behave the way they did. We saw in them a psychological problem, because after all it is quite, impossible that one could perpetrate crimes with so much sadism, so much cruelty."
The witness said that it became a major problem for him and his associates, and the Jews he was
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