What more could be asked for a Trial intended to warn the world against anti-Semitism than this opportunity to expose the exact link between the respectable anti-Semite and the concentration-camp brute? Not in Eichmann's anti-Semitism but in the anti-Semitism of the sober German man of affairs lay the potential warning of the Trial. No doubt many of the citizens of the Third Reich had conceived their anti-Semitism as an ``innocent'' dislike of Jews, as do others like them today. The Final Solution proved that the Jew-baiter of any variety exposes himself as being implicated in the criminality and madness of others. Ought not an edifying Trial have made every effort to demonstrate this once and for all by showing how representative types of ``mere'' anti-Semites were drawn step by step into the program of skull bashings and gassings? The Prosecutor in his opening remarks did refer to ``the germ of anti-Semitism'' among the Germans which Hitler ``stimulated and transformed.'' But if there was evidence at the Trial that aimed over Eichmann's head at his collaborators in the societies where he functioned, the press seems to have missed it.

Nor did the Trial devote much attention to exposing the usefulness of anti-Semitism to the Nazis, both in building their own power and in destroying that of rival organizations and states. Certainly, one of the best ways of warning the world against anti-Semitism is to demonstrate its workings as a dangerous weapon. Eichmann himself is a model of how the myth of the enemy Jew can be used to transform the ordinary man of present-day society into a menace to all his neighbors. Do patriots everywhere know enough about how the persecution of the Jews in Germany and later in the occupied countries contributed to terrorizing the populations, splitting apart individuals and groups, arousing the meanest and most dishonest impulses, pulverizing trust and personal dignity, and finally forcing people to follow their masters into the abyss by making them partners in unspeakable crimes? The career of Eichmann made the Trial a potential showcase for anti-Semitic demoralization: fearful of being mistaken for a Jew, he seeks protection in his Nazi uniform; clinging to the enemy Jew idea, he is forced to overcome habits of politeness and neighborliness; once in power he begins to give vent to a criminal opportunism that causes him to alternate between megalomania and envy of those above him. ``Is this the type of citizen you desire?'' the Trial should have asked the nations. But though this characterization in no way diminished Eichmann's guilt, the Prosecutor, more deeply involved in the tactics of a criminal case than a political one, would have none of it.