It was an astonishing, cold-blooded confession by Adolf Eichmann, found in hours of tapes in which he detailed his part in the hideous Final Solution.
Now the long-lost recordings are at the heart of a new documentary on the Nazi “architect of the Holocaust”, who was tried by a Jerusalem court and hanged 60 years ago this month.
Made by Yariv Mozer, The Devil’s Confession — to be screened in three episodes on Israel’s Kan TV in June — sheds valuable new light on Eichmann and the events surrounding his trial.
It draws upon the tapes recorded in 1957 in Buenos Aires by a Dutch Nazi journalist Willem Sassen.
Documentary maker Yariv Mozer (Photo by Hanan Assor courtesy of HAARETZ)
Mozer, 44, told the JC how he first learned of the existence of the recordings two years ago, from the man who became the film’s producer, Jacob (Kobi) Sitt. Both Sassen and Eichmann were living in Argentina after the war. Both were wanted men: Sassen had been an SS officer as well as a journalist.
Sassen did not believe the facts about the extent of the Holocaust. But Eichmann, in more than 70 hours of conversation, had no qualms about boasting of the killings and describing what he had set in motion.
And this is the core of Mozer’s film: that four years later, in a Jerusalem courtroom full of Holocaust survivors, he consistently lied, presenting himself as a low-grade clerk who “was only obeying orders”, in direct contradiction to what he told Sassen.
In the documentary, Alan Rosenthal recounts being a member of the TV production sent from London to film the trial (Israel had no television industry in 1961). His job was to focus the camera on Eichmann in his bulletproof glass box. He says: “We could see that he seemed to be smiling.”
As the camera moved in for a close-up on the usually blank-faced Eichmann, his facial muscles shifted as he watched bodies being shovelled into a mass grave, perhaps to exult in what was being done to the Jews.
Yariv Mozer directing a reconstruction scene for his film (Itiel Zion Eichmann)
Once Mozer got wind of the existence of the tapes in Germany’s National Archives in Koblenz, he set out to persuade the owners that he would handle the material responsibly. As well as Kan TV and Israeli production company Sipur, he also had the backing of MGM, which is distributing the series along with Tadmor Entertainment.
Mozer was given full access to the recordings, but out of the original 70 hours, just 15 survived; tapes were expensive and Sassen often recorded over previous interviews. However, there was a transcript of every session.
“Sassen promised Eichmann in Buenos Aires that he would not use the material until he died.
But when Eichmann was kidnapped, Sassen understood that he had something in his hands. So he contacted Life magazine in America, and they published an article a few months before the trial in Jerusalem. Imagine, Eichmann himself bragging about the Final Solution and what he did.”
Israeli Attorney-General Gideon Hausner, who led the prosecution, was unable to obtain the tapes. There was the Life article, but Eichmann repeatedly denied the words in it were his.
Yet Hausner surprised Eichmann and his lawyer by producing 700 pages of transcript of the interviews. The papers had been stored in the office of Eichmann’s brother Robert, in the Austrian city of Linz. Mozer believes Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal broke in and stole them to give to the Israeli prosecutor. Only those pages that bore Eichmann’s handwritten notes were admitted in evidence by the judges.
Mozer says: “To be able to produce the tapes would have allowed Hausner to break Eichmann’s line of defence, but he never managed to do that.” Regardless, Eichmann was found guilty and in 1962 executed, his ashes scattered far out to sea.
The documentary uses advanced technology to colourise footage of the trial, further bringing to life the horrified faces of the witnesses, the women in smart hats, the men looking down at their arms tatooed with their concentration camp numbers.
Mozer, whose grandparents were Holocaust survivors, insisted on the colourisation. “People went to the gas chambers in their own clothes and with red or blonde hair and blue eyes,” he says. “And they were shot on green grass, surrounded by trees. We needed to show that.”
He still wonders why Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Authority, never tried to buy the Sassen tapes or make copies of them in Hebrew or English.
His film tackles what is still a hot potato: did David Ben-Gurion’s government tried to block the release of the tapes? There was the suspicion that Eichmann had spoken about Hans Globke, a German civil servant.
Although he wrote the Nuremberg race laws, after the war he became the right-hand man of West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer— who was helping to fund Israel’s nuclear reactor in Dimona, which nothing could be allowed to imperil.
Plus there was the case of Rudolf Kasztner, a Hungarian Jew who negotiated with Eichmann for the release of 1,600 Jews, including members of his own family, towards the end of the war.
Accused of collaborating with the Nazis, he was assassinated in Israel in 1957.
Eichmann talks at length on the tapes about his discussions with the Jewish leader. Mozer believes the recordings go a long way to exonerate Kasztner from the charge of betrayal. “It’s clear that Eichmann used Kasztner, and that he wasn’t in a position to negotiate on an equal footing,” he says.
Today, Kasztner’s grand-daughter, Merav Michaeli, the Labor Party leader, is still weighing up whether to ask the Mossad to open its archives on Kasztner.
As many of us did, Mozer grew up with Hannah Arendt’s famous report of the trial, and her conclusion that Eichmann represented “the banality of evil”.
It’s a notion Mozer now rejects. He believes Eichmann spent the entire trial hiding his true self, which he exposed on the tapes.
“Had we put 10.3 million Jews to death, then I would be content and would say, good, we have destroyed the enemy,” Eichmann says on the tapes. “It is a difficult thing to say and I know I will be judged for it, but this is the truth.”
Mozer concludes: “Suddenly, we have proof of the real face of Adolf Eichmann.”
