Everyone with a personal or group tragedy to relate had to be given his day in court as in some vast collective dirge. For almost two months, the defendant and the world heard from individuals escaped from the grave about fathers and mothers, graybeards, adolescents, babies, starved, beaten to death, strangled, machine-gunned, gassed, burned. One who had been a boy in Auschwitz had to tell how children had been selected by height for the gas chambers. The gruesome humor of the Nazis was not forgotten -- the gas chamber with a sign on it with the name of a Jewish foundation and bearing a copper Star of David -- nor the gratuitous sadism of SS officers. Public relations strategists everywhere, watching the reaction of the German press, the liberal press, the lunatic fringe press, listening to their neighbors, studying interviews with men and women on the street, cried out: Too much, too much -- the mind of the audience is becoming dulled, the horrors are losing their effect. And still another witness, one who had crawled out from under a heap of corpses, had to tell how the victims had been forced to lay themselves head to foot one on top of the other before being shot.

Most of this testimony may have been legally admissible as bearing on the corpus delicti of the total Nazi crime but seemed subject to question when not tied to the part in it of the defendant's Department of Jewish Affairs. Counsel for the defense, however, shrewdly allowing himself to be swept by the current of dreadful recollections, rarely raised an objection. Would not the emotional catharsis eventually brought on by this awfulness have a calming, if not exhausting, effect likely to improve his client's chances? Those who feared ``emotionalism'' at the Trial showed less understanding than Dr. Servatius of the route by which man achieves the distance necessary for fairness toward enemies. Interruptions came largely from the bench, which numerous times rebuked the Attorney General for letting his witnesses run on, though it, too, made no serious effort to choke off the flow.