World: LEGAL DOUBTS & PRACTICAL FEARS

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THE issues raised by the trial of Adolf Eichmann reverberated. Granted that Eichmann was guilty ("the biggest of the murderers," West Germany's Chancellor Konrad Adenauer called him last week), was his propaganda show trial a good thing?

Some laymen wondered about the rights and wrongs of trying a man kidnaped from a foreign land, trying him for crimes committed in still another land, crimes that took place even before Israel was a state.

Curiously, a number of lawyers outside Israel are less disturbed by these questions—at least on legal grounds. No court, they say, need be concerned with how a defendant is brought before it but only with giving the accused a fair trial. In 1883, a U.S. citizen named Ker was traced to Peru, where he had fled to escape being tried for embezzlement. A U.S. agent kidnaped Ker at gunpoint, brought him back to the U.S., where he was tried and convicted. Peru might conceivably have a grievance against the U.S.. ruled the U.S. Supreme Court, but the defendant had none. To those who question Israel's basic right to try Eichmann at all, Israelis say that the U.S. Supreme Court, among others, has ruled that war criminals, like pirates, may be punished by any sovereign state no matter where or when the crimes had been committed.

Accomplices & Guilt. Legality was only part of the worrying. West Germany displays visible distress at the prospect of another raking up of Nazi atrocities. Sighed Konrad Adenauer: "There's nothing to do but wait and see—and try to live through it." West Berlin's Evangelical Bishop Otto Dibelius, who has himself been accused of anti-Semitism during the Hitler era—declared in a radio address: "The whole world will say, 'That is the way Germans are.' We will not be able to answer, It was only a handful of Germans who in their insanity forgot all the commandments of God.' The German people cannot exonerate themselves from the guilt of the mass murderer and his accomplices."

The West German TV network last week carried a 65-minute Eichmann documentary that pulled no punches, showing everything from naked men and women being pushed into a gas chamber to a sequence of hundreds of victims literally running into a long trench and then being shot dead by SS men. Cried a 24-year-old German girl: "What are we supposed to say? Must we proclaim forever that we are guilty? What more is there to say of such horror?"