Original subtitles

This programme contains scenes which some viewers may find disturbing from the start

Eichmann came once a week.

The family had to withdraw, you know, from the living room, etc,

because they were going to have this conversation.

We would open the door and we would listen.

DISTANT CONVERSATION

My father recorded all that stuff.

FLY BUZZES

THEY LAUGH

My sister and I detested the figure.

The persona was so... weird.

Trouble. Always. Darkness.

Something about him that...

The child could detect something very negative, the child in me.

Nazis have always denied their role in the Holocaust.

After the war, many fled Europe,

including the architect of the Final Solution...

..Adolf Eichmann.

One of the last Nazi fugitives to arrive in Argentina,

Eichmann records a series of interviews

with Nazi journalist Willem Sassen,

admitting to his role in the Holocaust,

but after his capture by Israel,

Eichmann denies everything...

..hoping the tapes will never be heard during his trial in Jerusalem.

After years of mysterious disappearance,

the tapes are rediscovered.

Securing full access to the recordings for the first time,

The Devil's Confession reveals Eichmann detailing his crimes.

NEWS REPORTER: Well, I'm standing in front of the courtroom

where Eichmann is going to face his judges,

and as you see, there are a lot of people already very interested.

People are coming and waiting outside this courtroom.

Eichmann is in one of the rooms on the fourth floor, we think,

and as you see, it's very heavily guarded, the building.

I don't think there've ever been so many correspondents

and writers and observers on any story since the war,

not even the Nuremberg Trial.

This trial was of critical importance.

It was the beginning of the process of the emergence of the Holocaust

from the shadows of history.

Gideon Hausner was a commercial lawyer.

He was chosen to be Attorney General,

he comes into office,

and he is relentless to getting this story out.

Eichmann in many ways was the chief logistical officer

overseeing deportations of Jewish persons,

largely from Western Europe, to killing centres.

He does this with full awareness that the result of deporting

is that they're going to be killed.

Eichmann refused to accept any guilt on himself.

He was a civil servant.

The laws of Germany are as they are,

and he tried to detach himself completely

from the ideological dimension.

Eichmann continually insisted that he was simply following orders.

Eichmann's appearance in court and the crimes attributed to him

catch the attention of both the public and the press.

So who is the real Eichmann?

Is he simply a soldier obeying orders,

as he presents himself and the Israeli court?

Or is he the fervent Nazi that Hausner depicts?

The missing evidence from four years earlier in Buenos Aires,

as he boasts to his fellow Nazis, reveals the truth.

Mm.

Mm.

Mm.

In the recordings,

Eichmann criticises other Nazis captured by the Allies

who deny responsibility for their actions.

To understand Eichmann's rationale

for participating in these conversations,

it is necessary to examine his character and life after 1945.

Unable to disappear in Germany,

Eichmann secures forged identity papers

with plans to escape the country, but is caught by the Allies.

Eichmann was arrested by the Americans

and he was held in a prisoner of war camp.

The Americans had about three million

Nazis prisoners at that time,

so Eichmann was just one more among those many million.

He managed to forge an ID in the name of Otto Eckmann

while he was being held by the Americans,

so he was fairly safe at that moment.

No-one was looking for him

until his name came up in the Nuremberg trials.

Attention!

NEWSREEL: Judges from Britain, America, Russia

and France assemble in Nuremberg's courthouse.

The Nuremberg trial -

that is, the trial of the major Nazi war criminals that took place

between 1945 and 1946 -

this was the first international criminal trial in human history

dealing with spectacular crimes.

In the Nuremberg trials, his name was mentioned.

That appeared in the newspapers the next day.

The next day, he was gone.

He escaped from the American prisoner of war camp.

Being held by the Americans was much better than being held

by the Russians, so it was not difficult to escape

from the American prisoner of war camp.

Many Nazis did.

In Argentina, Eichmann tells Sassen the story of

the strange escape route he used to avoid capture.

Eichmann had thought that if enough time went by,

his name would be forgotten

and he would be able to live a normal life in Germany.

The genocide of the Jewish people continues to preoccupy the world,

even in Germany,

where the public is slowly realising the magnitude of the Nazis' crimes.

WOMAN SOBS

Eichmann looks for a new hiding place

and decides to leave his family behind to take advantage of

the Nazis' well-known escape route to Argentina.

He gets a job as an assistant to an engineering crew in the Andes.

His life appears to be back on track.

But at some point, his luck seems to have taken a turn for the worse,

and he was left without any real job, and he started...

He had a laundry firm, he worked in a rabbit farm,

until, towards the end, he managed to work for a real company again,

which was for Mercedes-Benz.

Eichmann met Sassen at the ABC restaurant.

It was a German community restaurant in downtown Buenos Aires.

The waiters clicked their heels, like in military fashion,

and saluted the Nazis who went for lunch there.

Now, the question is, who is Willem Sassen?

And Willem Sassen, he's an absolutely Hollywood figure,

a Dutch journalist at the time of the war.

Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda,

sent him to the Russian front,

where Willem Sassen sent radio reports.

After the war, Willem Sassen was arrested in Holland,

for treason, of course, because he'd become an SS.

He managed to escape to Buenos Aires on this tiny ship

and set himself up as a journalist and as a publisher in Argentina,

publishing books for other Nazis who lived here.

The men meet occasionally until the mid-1950s,

when a series of ground-breaking books are published,

disclosing the original documents,

certificates and minutes that catalogued the Holocaust.

Sassen locates copies of the books and has them sent to Argentina.

Sassen came up with this crazy idea that he would interview

the mastermind of the Holocaust, and in Sassen's mind,

the idea was that Eichmann would prove

that Hitler had nothing to do with the extermination of the Jews.

Unfortunately for Sassen and his friends,

Eichmann insisted that of course Hitler knew!

HE CHUCKLES

This was kind of a public event where other Nazis went to -

very high-ranking Nazis.

There's 67 reels of tape.

A lot of the tapes were taped over.

At the time, when Sassen was conducting these interviews,

these audiotapes were somewhat expensive.

RECORDED SPEECH, TYPEWRITER KEYS CLACK

TYPEWRITER BELL DINGS

TYPING CONTINUES

This was the first time anyone had taken an interest in him,

in Eichmann - "Tell me what you did."

He is very happy anyone even wants to listen, so he blossoms,

he flourishes. He suddenly returns to his good old days,

the most beautiful time in his life, as he himself defined it,

and thereafter, he loses all the restrictions

he imposed on himself, and he went with it.

It is just striking that Sassen, for whatever reason...

..decided to continue taping Eichmann

even once he understood that Eichmann was not about to deny...

..the nature of the Holocaust and his role in it.

In the recordings, Eichmann describes his work

during the war, freely answering the questions asked by Sassen.

Four years later, in the Israeli court,

he sounds like a different man.

I was aware that he is following the old line

of many other Nazi criminals

who didn't have the courage to stand up in court

and admit their guilt.

So in order somehow to minimise the enormousness of their deed,

they were trying by small lies

to hide at least part of the most hideous deeds.

You see, actually, I was aware all the time

that there were two trials going on -

one in Jerusalem, where we were, trying Eichmann,

and the other in the world's public opinion,

with the proceedings televised throughout the world.

I was well aware of this,

that every word I say, every movement I make,

is recorded and commentated upon the next day in very many countries.

In the Eichmann trial,

I was working as assistant to the television director.

The trial had to be shown to the world.

The trouble was, there was no television in Israel.

That was the crazy thing.

So they had brought over a team from London

and they decided to film the trial with four cameras

that then went out all over the world.

Now, remember, we're talking 1961,

and there was very, very little information out at that stage,

so the purpose of the trial was to show the world,

"Look, six million Jews died. This is how it happened."

During the actual filming of the trial...

Well, this was the main question - who is the real Adolf Eichmann?

What is he feeling?

Can we see anything in his face?

You know, I keep coming in for a close-up on him

to see what he's feeling.

In practice, he showed nothing.

Showing no feelings at all.

The speculation about Eichmann's character continues to this day.

Is he a committed Nazi or a simple bureaucrat carrying out orders?

Among the many journalists who cover the trial

is the famous writer and Holocaust survivor Hannah Arendt.

Arendt expects to find a killer...

..but sees a man whose appearance does not match

the crimes attributed to him.

She describes the moral gap between his bureaucratic demeanour

and the atrocities he committed with the term "the banality of evil".

I suppose there's a very interesting question we can ask,

which is whether Hannah Arendt would have changed her tune

if she had been able to hear those Sassen tapes.

On the tapes, Eichmann confirms his strong belief in the Nazi cause.

He admits he was not only a bureaucrat,

but also an idealist.

This was not done in hiding, in a secret cave

high up in the Andes or hidden away in the Amazonian jungle.

This was done in suburban Buenos Aires,

in the full view of all their neighbours.

In the tapes, you can hear Sassen's daughter playing in the background.

YOUNG GIRL SINGS

My sister and I were always singing. You know how that is...

..with children.

My mother would say, "Stop that singing!"

It was my weapon.

I used singing as a weapon,

because he interrupted our fun life, you know, with...

My father was really a lot of fun as a father.

But when the meetings happened,

my father was extracting information.

YOUNG SASKIA SINGS

He was a journalist, and he wanted to get at the story.

INTERVIEWER: How well did you know him?

Who? Eichmann.

I think I knew him completely.

What did you make of him?

Er... A tragical figure.

A tragical figure. Because he was really not...

It was not his business, in reality.

He would have liked to be a common soldier on the front.

That was his dream.

As time goes by, Eichmann's confidence increases,

and he brings his family to join him in Argentina.

German parents in Argentina came to the embassy

to register their children for their German citizenship, German passport,

and his children were registered under the name "Eichmann".

This myth that grew up that nobody knew he was there...

The German expats who were loyal Nazis knew he was there.

He met with them, he talked to them.

And the Argentine police, they knew he was there.

The thing that was true is that the people who knew he was there

did not care enough to go and get him.

NEWSREEL: Fritz Bauer survived Hitler's death camps

and is obsessed...

Even though the Allies stopped searching for Nazi fugitives,

individuals like the German Jewish lawyer Fritz Bauer

continue to try to bring escaped criminals to justice,

using information they receive from around the world.

If not for private individuals,

Adolf Eichmann never would have been captured in Buenos Aires -

first and foremost, Lothar Hermann,

a Holocaust survivor who happened to be Adolf Eichmann's neighbour.

Lothar Hermann, who was this survivor who came to Argentina,

had a daughter called Silvia,

and his daughter made friends with one of the Eichmann kids.

It was not unusual for German Jews

to make friends with German Nazi families,

because in the end, they were all Germans in Argentina.

Silvia knew that her friend was called Eichmann.

And Lothar Hermann, I can't say he was reading the newspaper,

because he was blind, but I think he was having the newspaper

read to him by his daughter, and Eichmann's name appeared,

and of course, Lothar Hermann realised,

"That must be the father of your friend."

So Lothar Hermann went and immediately wrote

to Bauer in Germany, saying that it's definitely him.

Bauer gave the information to the Israelis and nothing happened.

One has to remember that this is the late '50s,

and Israel is barely a third world country at that time.

I think the feeling was that,

"We have current enemies in the Arab lands, etc.

"Should we fight our current enemies,

"who stand possibly to destroy us now,

"or should we go to settle scores from before?"

Following a threat from Bauer to make his information public,

Ben-Gurion, Israel's first Prime Minister,

agrees to launch a secret mission to grab Eichmann.

He walked on the street, Garibaldi Street,

about 50 metres from his home.

And I walked on the other side.

We looked at each other, I saw fear in his eyes,

and I said, "Uno momentito..." I even didn't finish the question

and he retreated.

I jumped on him, fell into a ditch there.

He then started howling and screaming and shouting.

The three of them dragged him, still howling, into the car.

And the race was up.

During his interrogation by the Israeli police,

Eichmann claims that he was only following orders.

But in Sassen's living room,

Eichmann is aware that his words could incriminate him,

so he asks that the recordings never be heard during his lifetime.

When Eichmann was kidnapped, suddenly Sassen realised,

"Here I have a chance to make a large amount of money

"by selling this.

"And I'll finally be able to make some money out of this project

"that I spent so much time on."

And at the same time, he realised,

"If I do that, the other Nazis are going to kill me,"

cos he's being the worst traitor of all.

In the end, the opportunist won the battle

over the more cautious person inside him,

and he sold the story to Life Magazine in the United States.

Four months before the trial,

Life Magazine publishes sections of the recordings.

The confessions shock the world.

Never before had a Nazi officer admitted publicly

that the Holocaust was meticulously planned and carried out.

The publication of the Life Magazine interview was an astonishing moment

in the international community, to have Eichmann's words suddenly,

you know, splashed in front of Life Magazine,

which at the time was, you know,

one of the crucial magazines in the United States

and obviously also had kind of a world audience as well.

Life meant that this is important to America.

It shocked people. For many Jews,

it meant the world was, for the first time, really,

taking notice of what had happened.

Suddenly, the world was looking at the tragedy that had destroyed

one out of every three Jews alive on the face of the earth.

Americans realised that this man who was being tried is really a monster.

The article says there's tapes of this man talking about what he did,

telling the stories of what he did, describing what he did.

Everyone at least who has the least bit of interest in this topic,

"Where are these tapes?"

When Hausner read this interview, he immediately had to think,

"Oh, my God, there's a whole wealth of information out there

"that I don't yet have access to, and how do I get my hands on it?"

Sassen, he bought himself a fantastic car

with the money he made. He bought a Mercedes-Benz.

The Nazis who were still around in Argentina,

they moved against my father -

because my father betrayed, in their eyes.

When the Eichmann story blows into the public, I was 13.

My mother decides to leave. She couldn't take it.

And I suddenly was in charge of the household at 13.

And my sister was simply terrified.

Suddenly, there were, like, three or five people in my house

with big guns, and I don't know what they were,

Nazi affiliates, and...

SEVERAL MEN SHOUTING AT ONCE

I wasn't afraid, but it was another kind of experience that I had.

It was more like...closer to horror than to fear.

Among the intruders are the sons of Adolf Eichmann.

They demand to know why Sassen betrayed their father

and the location of the recordings.

Sassen denies knowing their whereabouts.

With so many people seeking the tapes,

Sassen knows he needs a safe hiding place

and gives them to an old ally before fleeing to Paraguay.

There was a former Luftwaffe officer who also escaped to Argentina

after the war, this man called Dieter Menge.

Maybe he made a deal with Sassen

to sell the tapes to somebody and they split the money.

You have to bear in mind, these are Nazi adventurers, ex-SS men.

These were people who had no problem with lying

and they had no problem with lying to each other.

Menge takes no risks

and buries the tapes on his property outside Buenos Aires.

Eichmann's taped recollections were self-incriminating,

and if accepted at the trial,

Eichmann admitted the charges against him.

Unable to obtain the damning evidence on the tapes,

Attorney General Hausner has to rely on the excerpts

published in Life Magazine.

You could say it simplifies some of the work of the prosecution,

in that it complicates any kind of defence

that Eichmann is going to mount,

because it sounds as if he is now acknowledging his participation

in this genocide,

and doing so without the remotest expression of regret.

Dr Robert Servatius is chosen by the family to defend Eichmann,

and in the interest of holding a fair trial,

the Israeli government agrees to pay his salary.

He's a well-known lawyer in Germany after defending Nazi war criminals

at the Nuremberg trials.

HE SPEAKS IN GERMAN

Without the tapes, the court's decision

on whether or not to admit the Life Magazine article

into evidence will be crucial to proving Eichmann's guilt.

Sassen was not about to cooperate with the Israelis.

The contract that he signed with Life Magazine

permitted Life to supply some of the materials

to some other media organisations,

but specifically barred Life Magazine

from sharing anything with the Israelis.

So it raises the question of,

"How do you get hold of this material?"

This is a document showing that the assistant editor of Life Magazine

gave the CIA an advance copy of the text of their article on Eichmann.

What interests Americans is the propaganda value

of what Eichmann is saying in Life Magazine.

They were worried about how the East Germans

and the Soviets would use this.

It wasn't simply the trial of the century.

It was the trial of the century at the height of the Cold War.

The East Germans saw this as an opportunity

to remind the world that, "Yeah, there's only one Eichmann,

"but that doesn't mean there's only one bad Nazi left

"who deserves justice," and some of them worked for Konrad Adenauer.

Konrad Adenauer is the first Chancellor of West Germany

after World War II and is charged with leading his country

from the post-war chaos into the modern era.

The person with perhaps the most to lose

if the tapes are heard during Eichmann's trial

is Adenauer's right-hand man Hans Globke,

who oversaw the plan for the enforcement of

the Nuremberg Race Laws, later carried out by Eichmann.

And we know that as a lawyer-bureaucrat

in the Nazi system, he helped draft the Nuremberg Laws,

which established the legal basis

for discrimination against German Jews.

Eichmann's connections to Globke and other former Nazi officials

in the new West German government could be exposed

if Sassen's recordings are played in court.

Hausner knows that this is against the interests

of the West German government and his own government.

Despite strong opposition,

protests and riots led by Holocaust survivors,

Prime Minister Ben-Gurion is negotiating with West Germany

to support Israel.

The story of the Eichmann affair from the Israeli perspective

is a nostalgic, heroic, a very romantic story -

how David demanded justice from the already defeated Goliath.

But this is nothing but shadow-boxing,

a smokescreen that concealed the true story,

and the true story is the Israeli-German nuclear project.

Once a decision is made that Israel will launch a nuclear project,

there are things that have to be done.

It demands certain technology, certain materials,

and first and foremost, a lot, a lot of money,

money that the newly established state of Israel doesn't have.

Very quickly, David Ben-Gurion and Shimon Peres,

his political partner,

realise that the way to continue with the nuclear project

is by partnering with De Gaulle's France

and Adenauer's Germany.

Adenauer and Strauss, his Defence Minister,

put a gun on the table, so to say -

"You want us to continue funding the nuclear project,

"so do not mention the name Hans Globke at the trial."

Ben-Gurion was well aware of Globke's part

in phrasing the Nuremberg Laws,

and yet he has to take care of the state he's responsible for, Israel.

Whilst aware of the pressure Ben-Gurion is under,

Hausner continues to assert his independence

but also make some concessions.

A couple of days before the trial,

Hausner gives Ben-Gurion the text of his opening speech.

And Ben-Gurion makes very few comments about it,

but just the only thing he asks is that

wherever Hausner refers to Germany, he refer to Nazi Germany.

Ben-Gurion knew Israel needed arms,

Israel needed financial support of Germany.

He may have hated doing it, but he was a practical man.

As the Berlin Wall is being built and sides taken in the Cold War,

fears continue to grow that the vital evidence

in the Eichmann recordings will undermine national interests.

Gideon Hausner, Israel's Attorney General,

focuses on obtaining the transcripts used by the Life Magazine article,

the smoking gun that will prove Eichmann's guilt to the world.