He was a commonplace type, a government employee, obedient and zealous of his duties. His job was to deport thousands of people to concentration camps during the Second World War. His name: Adolf Eichman. He is the subject of this documentary that retells the trial of the Nazi criminal in Jerusalem in 1961 and that for the first time shows a higher échelon SS officer talking about his "work".

     Eichman is a man of fifty, of medium height and with a strange nervous tic. From 1941 until 1945, he was responsible for deporting Jews to concentration camps, a task that he describes in a manner that is oppressively bureaucratic and precise. During all of the trial, he remains sitting inside a glass "cage", surrounded by piles of documents on which he makes annotations and which he consults. He does the best he can to show his conflicts between professional duty and moral conscience, but coldly adds that no one can accuse him of having done a "job badly done".

     The contrast between the monstrosity in Eichman's crimes and the mediocrity of the accused in itself results in a frightening portrait of a commonplace person, but with unlimited powers. A film carried out through 350 hours of scenes recorded by Leo Hurwitz during the Eichman trial.