Tel Aviv — 60 years after Adolf Eichmann’s historic trial in Jerusalem, one of the Holocaust’s chief engineers, the new Israeli documentary series brought a dramatic coder: the bragging confession of Nazi war criminals. In his own voice.
The time of the old tape recording, which was rejected by Israeli prosecutors at the time of Eichmann’s trial, provided the basis for a series called “The Devil’s Confession: The Lost Eichmann Tape.” For the past month.
The tape was created by Nazi sympathizers in the Netherlands in 1957, then fell into the hands of various individuals and was eventually archived in the German government’s archives, and in 2020 was the Israeli co-creator of the series. KobiSitt is now the producer. Director Yariv Mozer — Permission to use the recording.
Eichmann went to the gallows, denying responsibility for the crime he was found guilty and claiming he was just an official who obeyed the order. He described himself as a small cog in the state equipment responsible for the train schedule, and his professed mediocrity gave rise to the theory of evil mediocrity of the philosopher Hannah Arendt.
The documentary series is studded with the cool words of Eichmann, who defends the Holocaust, in Buenos Aires, where the recording was made, recreating a gathering of Nazi sympathizers in 1957.
This series, which reveals Eichmann’s visceral and ideological anti-Semitism, his enthusiasm for hunting down Jews, and his role in the mechanics of genocide, brings to the masses the evidence lost from the trial for the first time.
Eichmann can be heard hitting a noisy fly around the room and describing it as having a “Jewish character”.
He told the interlocutor that he “did not care” whether the Jews he sent to Auschwitz were alive or dead. He denied knowledge of their destiny in court and said on tape: Those who are not suitable for working Jews must be sent in a final solution, a period of time “, meaning their physical destruction.
“If we killed 10.3 million Jews, I would be happy to say,’Okay, we destroyed our enemies.’ Then we will fulfill our mission. He would have mentioned all the Jews in Europe. “
“This is evidence for Holocaust denials and a way to see Eichmann’s identity,” said director Mozer, the author of the series and the grandson of the Holocaust survivors.
“With all humility, through the series, the younger generation will come to know the trials and ideologies behind the final solution,” he added.
This documentary was recently screened for intelligence commanders and officers. This demonstrates the importance of documentary in Israel.
Eichmann’s trial took place in 1961 after Mossad’s agents kidnapped him in Argentina and sent him to Israel. The shocking testimony of the survivors and the complete horror of the Holocaust were outlined in great detail for the Israelis and the rest of the world.
The court had a wealth of documents and testimony to support Eichmann’s conviction. The prosecution also obtained a copy of more than 700 pages of tape recorded in Buenos Aires and marked it up with Eichmann’s handwritten corrections.
However, Eichmann claimed that the transcript distorted his words. The Israeli Supreme Court did not accept them as evidence other than handwritten notes, and Eichmann challenged Prosecutor Gideon Hausner to make the original tape, believing that they were well hidden. Did.
In his account of the trial “Jerusalem’s Justice,” Hausner described how he tried to get the tape until the final day of Eichmann’s cross-examination. voice. “
Hausner wrote that the tape was offered for a huge amount of $ 20,000 at the time and was ready to approve the spending “in view of its historical significance.” However, the unidentified seller stipulated that he would not be taken to Israel until the trial was over, Hausner said.
The tape was created by Willem Sassen, a Dutch journalist, Nazi SS officer and propaganda during World War II. He and Eichmann, members of the Nazi fugitive group in Buenos Aires, embarked on a recording project aimed at publishing a book after Eichmann’s death. Members of the group gathered at Sassen’s house for hours each week, where they drank and smoked together.
And Eichmann spoke and spoke.
After Eichmann was captured by the Israelites, Sassen sold a copy to Life magazine. Life magazine has published a two-part excerpt summarized. Hausner described the version as “cosmetics.”
After Eichmann’s execution in 1962, the original tape was sold to a European publisher and eventually bought by the company that kept the tape in the German Federal Archives in Koblenz, hoping to remain anonymous. Academic research.
German philosopher and historian Bettina Stangnes is partly based on the 2011 book “Eichmann before Jerusalem”. German officials released just a few minutes of audio for public consumption over 20 years ago, “to prove it exists,” Mozer said.
Sit, the producer of the new documentary, made a film for Israeli television about Hausner 20 years ago. Since then, he said, the idea of getting Eichmann’s tape was worrisome to him. Like director Mozer, he is the Israeli grandson of the Holocaust survivors.
“I’m not afraid of memory. I’m afraid of oblivion,” Sit said of the Holocaust, adding that “we want to provide tools to bring memory to life” as the generation of survivors declines. ..
After watching the 2016 documentary “Bengurion, Epilogue”, I approached Mr. Mozer. This documentary revolves around a long-lost tape interview with the founding Prime Minister of Israel.
German authorities and tape owners have provided filmmakers with 15 hours of free access to surviving audio. (Sassen recorded for about 70 hours, but after transcribing many of the expensive reels, he taped them.) Mozer said the tape owners and archives would allow filmmakers access. Finally agreed with. Materials politely and responsibly.
The project has grown into a $ 2 million collaboration between Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Sipur, an Israeli company formerly known as Tadmor Entertainment. ToruCa Photo; and Kan11, Israeli Public Broadcasting.
A 108-minute version premiered as the opening film for the Docabib Film Festival in Tel Aviv this spring. A 180-minute television version aired in Israel in June in three episodes. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer is looking for a partner to license the series and air it around the world.
The conversation in Sassen’s living room is studded with archived footage and interviews with surviving participants in the trial. According to the filmmaker, the footage in the archive is colored because young people consider the black-and-white footage to be unrealistic as if it were from another planet.
Professor Dina Porat, chief historian of Yad Vashem, the official monument to the Holocaust in Israel, said he heard the Eichmann trial “from morning till night” on the radio as a 12th grader.
“The whole Israeli society was listening. The driver was listening. It was a national experience,” she said.
Professor Polat said the last major Holocaust-related case in Israel was probably the success of John Demyanjuk’s trial in the late 1980s and subsequent appeals to the Israeli Supreme Court.
“Every decade, different types of Israeli society are listening,” she said. “Young people today are not the same as they were in the last few decades.”
This documentary also examines the interests of Israeli and German leaders in expanding cooperation and how they influenced the proceedings.
David Ben-Gurion, then Prime Minister of Israel, helped many Jews with embarrassing details that might emerge about the former Nazis working at the German Prime Minister’s residence, but in collaboration with Eichmann. Rudolf Kathner, a accused Hungarian Jew.
Now listening to the tape, Eichmann’s clear confession has begun.
“It’s hard for me to tell you,” Eichmann says in the recording. But I can’t tell you anything else. That is the truth. Why do I have to deny it? “
“Nothing bothers me more than someone who later denies what I did,” he added.