Original subtitles

This programme contains scenes which some viewers may find disturbing

TRANSLATION:

Adolf Eichmann evades capture by the Allies for 15 years,

fleeing to Argentina, where he records

an extensive interview with Nazi journalist Willem Sassen,

admitting to his role in the Holocaust.

Following Eichmann's capture in 1960,

Sassen hides the tapes before taking advantage of the media frenzy

to sell excerpts of Eichmann's interview to Life Magazine.

Despite the article's damning revelations

just before the trial,

Eichmann remains resolute in his denial.

Gideon Hausner, Israel's Attorney General,

is determined to find Sassen's taped interview

to prove Eichmann is the architect

of the Final Solution to the Jewish Question.

Nazis have always denied their role in the Holocaust.

One of the last Nazi fugitives to arrive in Argentina,

Eichmann records a detailed series of interviews

that runs to 67 reels of tape.

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.

The story of the Holocaust is, in fact,

the story of Eichmann's career.

After establishing methods to identify the Jews,

he is promoted and sent to Austria,

which was annexed by the German Reich,

and empowered with the task of ridding the country of Jews.

Eichmann arrives in Austria and, immediately,

he is establishing his old idea

of creating a central immigration bureau for the Jews.

He took over the Rothschild Palais, a famous place for Jews.

There, he creates a pattern, how to get rid of the Jews

and to force them to leave at least some of their property

to the Third Reich,

meaning an official robbery, plus deportation.

One of those Jews came to the trial, and testified at the trial

that you walked into the Rothschild Palais

with a business, with a home,

with bank accounts, with possessions.

And as you went from desk to desk, you gave up these things

and you came out at the end with permission to leave Austria.

The German hierarchy was so impressed by Eichmann's...

..the way Eichmann handled this that this sort of skyrocketed him

into this organisational task.

Within six months, after his arrival to Austria,

Eichmann succeeds to expel more Jews from Austria

than Germany has succeeded in all the five years

since Hitler's rise to power.

This really caught the eyes of the Fuhrer,

and soon enough, in November of 1938,

the Kristallnacht happened.

In January, Hitler will set up

a central authority for Jewish immigration in Germany.

Eichmann was one of the key characters

leading to the Final Solution as we know it.

Perhaps the most damning part of Eichmann's legacy

is his participation in the Wannsee Conference,

where the plan for the vicious extermination of all Jews in Europe

is meticulously laid out.

The conference is led by Eichmann's commander,

Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich Security Main Office.

We know that the men were invited here to have the talk

on the Final Solution of the Jewish Question,

as they put it in the invitation,

accompanied by breakfast.

Heil Hitler.

They had food, they had alcohol.

Eichmann refers to cognac.

It is a big operation.

Millions of Jews have to be transported to the place of death.

How do you organise it?

And here is the man who knows how to do it professionally.

Eichmann is something of a logistical mastermind,

and he wants to make sure that he's highly successful

in the deportations, and he does this with full awareness

that the result of deporting these Jewish persons

to these killing centres is that they're going to be killed.

There is a word that is used in this document,

and that is the word of "behandelt", "the treatment".

They would be suitably treated.

At that point of time, for most of the perpetrators,

to my knowledge, it's clearly understood as killing.

Eichmann writes the protocol of the conference

and sends it to the relevant offices.

Then he carries out the decisions of the conference,

being sure that this is

what the angel of history has asked him to do.

Adolf Eichmann visited Auschwitz many times.

He went there to inspect

and to be sure that his instructions are being carried out.

He even had some improvement suggestions!

We know this from the camp commander, Rudolf Hoss,

who welcomed him there each time.

If Hausner had had access to the tapes,

that he could have played the tapes in the trial,

then the next question he would have asked Eichmann was,

"Were you lying then or are you lying now?"

On the tapes, Eichmann clearly admits to the deceptive techniques

used by the Nazis to make the gas chambers

appear like innocent shower rooms.

Without access to the tapes, Hausner finds another way,

and drops a bombshell on the defence...

..shocking everyone in the courtroom

by introducing copies of the original transcripts

that Sassen has made of his interviews with Eichmann.

The transcripts of the tapes become available,

and not just the transcripts,

but the transcripts with corrections,

in Eichmann's handwriting.

Because Sassen had transcribed the tapes,

gave them to Eichmann and said,

"Go over them and see if there's anything wrong."

And you have your corrections, in his handwriting.

So this was first-hand evidence.

One of these copies reaches Gideon Hausner,

who never reveals how he obtained

the transcripts of the Sassen recordings.

But we do know that Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal is in touch

with Hausner during the trial,

and may have assisted in procuring the evidence.

Wiesenthal reveals that the transcripts

reach the Eichmann family in Linz.

You had Eichmann's handwritten notes.

You had 80-something pages, right,

so it was obviously that these were real.

We didn't need tapes to justify that they were real.

Eichmann denies that the transcripts are his words,

challenging Hausner to produce the original recordings.

Hausner must convince the court of the validity of the transcripts

before they can be admitted into evidence.

It is in Hungary where Eichmann commits

perhaps his most heinous crime -

the mass murder of Hungarian Jews towards the end of the war,

which he details in the Sassen transcripts.

Eichmann comes in and he organises

the deportation of Hungarian Jews.

He gets Hungarian railways, the Hungarian militia,

the Hungarian police.

Over 400,000 Jews are deported in the space of seven weeks,

most of whom - murdered in Auschwitz.

It's that killing that gives Auschwitz

its dubious distinction as the world's greatest killing field.

My own mother arrived in Auschwitz in September of 1944.

She didn't know - what is that place?

Where did she arrive to?

We have an album, the Auschwitz album,

which has pictures of one of the transports from Hungary.

You see people very well-dressed,

standing in a very idyllic forest, like on a lovely Sunday picnic.

They are standing in circles, they are sitting on the ground.

Some of them are laughing.

The gap between what you see in the pictures

and what you know that will happen in the next half an hour,

it is a completely classical illustration

of the way Eichmann cheated his victims to believe

that no harm will happen to them.

To prove that Eichmann played a key role in Hungary,

Hausner calls witnesses to testify

that knew Eichmann during that time.

VOICE BREAKS

MAN SHOUTS:

SHOUTING CONTINUES

The voice in the courtroom is not alone

in accusing the Hungarian community leaders

of abandoning their people to collaborate with the Nazis,

and Eichmann in particular.

On the tapes, Eichmann mentions various Jewish leaders.

Among them is Israel Kasztner, a Hungarian community leader

and representative of the Zionist movement

that will become the Israeli government.

The story of Kasztner and the accusations against him,

both during and after the war,

are so controversial that the mention of his name is

probably something Ben-Gurion and his government

would prefer to keep out of the Eichmann trial.

Kasztner arranged for a train

of around 1,600 prominent Hungarian Jews,

including members of his own family,

to basically go to Switzerland,

and one of the questions that arose was whether

Kasztner was a collaborator with the devil.

The devil in question is Eichmann.

After the war, Kasztner is accused by many Jewish survivors

of collaborating with the Nazis

to keep the nature of the deportations a secret,

in exchange for the freedom of those he managed to save.

There are Jews in Hungary, survivors, to this day,

and certainly their offspring,

who feel that Kasztner could have warned them and didn't.

Kasztner insists that he did warn, he did tell in the underground,

and that he did save more Jews than anybody else,

saved more Jews than Schindler.

And this had become a cause celebre

in the first years of the state of Israel,

because it raised the question of dealing with the devil.

JUDGE: We haven't yet heard,

have we, what happened to these Jews from Hungary?

Later, at the Nuremberg trials,

Kasztner testifies on behalf of accused Nazis.

When asked why he would do such a thing,

Kasztner astonishes everyone by admitting that he'd done so

at the request of the provisional Israeli government.

But many deny Kasztner's claims.

Kasztner feels abandoned by the Israeli government,

knowing they fear he will reveal the reason for his testimony.

SIRENS WAIL

Kasztner dies never revealing the reason

for his testimony in Nuremberg.

The secrets he knew about the Israeli government

are thought to be safe forever.

But just four years later,

the risk of the secrets being revealed returns

when the possibility of Sassen's tapes being heard in court emerges.

The tapes contain information

that connects to Kasztner's testimony in Nuremberg.

Eichmann discusses a Nazi officer named Kurt Becher,

who is one of the men that Kasztner testifies for at the trials.

Becher manages the assets seized from Hungarian Jews,

including companies like Manfred Weiss Steel,

which had 40,000 employees during the war,

and Eichmann mentions on the tapes.

Years later,

a possible reason for Kasztner's testimony at Nuremberg is revealed.

Declassified documents confirm that the young state of Israel

used funds that Kurt Becher seized from Jewish families

during the war, to obtain arms.

The Israeli leadership learns from the Life article

that Kasztner helps Eichmann to keep the Hungarian Jews

from resisting deportation in exchange for allowing

a few hundred Jews train passage to Switzerland.

And they fear what else might be revealed.

Hausner's request that the transcripts

of the Sassen interviews be admitted into evidence

once again creates a sense of concern

on the part of the Israeli government.

But Eichmann's lawyer, Servatius,

objects to their admittance

based on the fact there is no way to prove

that the transcripts are Eichmann's actual words.

The judges decide to disqualify

the 700 pages of the Sassen transcripts,

but make an exception for a few pages

where Eichmann's notes are clearly visible.

There was no way that Hausner could actually verify

the truthfulness of the transcripts themselves.

Now, he did not have the audiotapes.

Much surrounding Kasztner's death remains a mystery.

Three men with ties to a right-wing underground movement were arrested.

They claimed they acted alone.

Convicted of murder, they were sentenced to life in prison,

but in 1963, just a year after the Eichmann trial,

they were granted a full pardon and released from prison.

While the tapes are never heard during the trial,

Eichmann clearly says that Kasztner confronted him

regarding the fate of his fellow Jews.

The disqualification of the Sassen transcripts

is a victory for the defence

and a major blow to Attorney General Hausner's case against Eichmann.

Unable to locate the tapes or use the majority of the transcripts

to prove Eichmann's guilt,

Hausner summons the survivors of the Holocaust

to confront Eichmann with the horrors his crimes inflicted.

The author Yehiel De-Nur, known by his pen name Ka-Tsetnik,

writes books influenced by his time as a prisoner

in the Auschwitz death camp.

He told me that he did not want to testify.

He was not sleeping, he couldn't eat,

and Kasztner put such a heavy pressure on him

that his resistance broke.

He took his pen name, Ka-Tsetnik,

from the initials for the German word for concentration camp

and the number tattooed on each prisoner's arm by the Nazis.

DE-NUR CRIES OUT: Ah!

Argh!

In retrospect, Hausner was right.

In their collective memory,

the one testimony that was imprinted forcefully

was that testimony of Ka-Tsetnik.

TONE BEEPS

Miki Goldmann serves as Hausner's assistant during the trial.

One survivor's testimony will stick with him forever.

CLAMOUR

I think there was a tendency, certainly amongst Israelis,

to see survivors as the ghetto Jews.

They called them sabonim, "the soaps".

The people who were supposed to be made into soap.

So in other words, "They're not like us.

"There was something fatally flawed about them

"that they ALLOWED this to happen to them."

These people, these tongue-tied people,

they'll never be again the same they were before Hitler came there

and before the roof caved in on them.

There is something traumatic in their make-up

which will never be good again.

At the conclusion of the witnesses' testimony,

Hausner confronts Eichmann with irrefutable evidence

of the atrocities committed by the Nazis.

All the lights were off in the courtroom,

and documentary pictures,

or news pictures, were being projected on the wall.

Bodies being bulldozed into a death pit. Awful.

But we had one camera on Eichmann.

And it looked as if he was laughing.

As if it was the first time you could see - who was Eichmann,

what he felt like.

Towards the end of the war,

even when it is clear Germany is going to lose,

Eichmann's murderous intent is unrelenting.

NEWSREEL: It was certainly great news

when we heard that the 7th British Armoured Division,

the Desert Rats, is in action in France,

and the Germans don't like it.

They know to their cost what it is to come in contact with them.

There was a vision amongst some leading Nazis, Himmler among them,

that there would emerge some kind of Nazi Germany without Hitler.

And there came the order from Himmler to stop the deportations.

And still, there was this one transport that Eichmann sent

against Himmler's order to Auschwitz.

He could say whatever he wanted.

You're being, you know, small wheel in a big engine,

and obeying orders.

At this point, he went against orders,

and he killed 2,000 people.

His insane fanaticism in Hungary,

where he even went behind the back of his great superior,

Heinrich Himmler. He made moves he was not allowed to do,

just to finally accomplish

one achievement written on his own name, Adolf Eichmann.

Without the tapes, the biggest challenge Hausner faced

was to break Eichmann, during the cross-examination

to admit that he was a key person in the execution of the Final Solution.

Hausner failed.

Eichmann did not break through the cross-examination.

Hausner later wrote in his book Justice In Jerusalem,

"I wanted to get the Sassen tapes

"to bring Eichmann's defence to a complete standstill.

"Then he could hardly have been able to deny his own voice."

Hausner also wrote that an anonymous source

offered to sell him the recordings on one condition -

that he could not play them in the courtroom during the trial.

Hausner refuses,

and the Sassen recordings are never played at the Eichmann trial.

Why those tapes didn't appear

and make it possible to introduce, as a confession,

Eichmann's own words,

why they didn't appear at the trial...

The answer to that question has great moral consequences.

If there is one thing that is very clear today,

it's that the abduction of Eichmann is the most sensitive part

in the semi-secret relations between Israel and Germany -

or, if you like, between Ben-Gurion and Adenauer.

We got the tapes in 1999 from a newspaper in Switzerland.

We knew that this newspaper bought these tapes

from the family of Eichmann.

Can you tell us who is the owner of the tapes?

We have signed that we won't tell who the owner is.

Sassen always knew the value of the Eichmann interview.

Just before his death, perhaps to make amends to his fellow Nazi,

he gives the tapes to the Eichmann family.

Around the same time,

Sassen is secretly filmed by an Argentinian film-maker

and asked about his sessions with Eichmann.

We are very fortunate that, due to Sassen's delusions

and Eichmann's vanity, we have an incontrovertible confession

from the architect of the Holocaust.

So the tapes, the legacy of the tapes,

is...it's hopeful,

which means that there is hope that big lies can be exploded.

Perpetrators of such crimes

should never feel comfortable that they can get away with it.

They might have been sure in 1959, but after 1960,

they could never quite sleep as soundly,

and that was a good thing.