Long-lost recordings of Eichmann confessing to the Final solution revealed

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Buenos Aires, 1957. Some three years before he was caught by the Mossad, one of the people responsible for executing the Nazis’ Final Solution to the Jewish question meets a few times with a Dutch journalist named Willem Sassen.

The senior Nazi figure who fled to Argentina and managed to avoid the Nuremberg Trials feels safe enough to sit in front of a tape recorder at Sassen’s home and to engage in a particularly long interview, in which he details his operations as head of the Gestapo’s Jewish department. Adolf Eichmann allows himself to talk about the significant role he played in the extermination of the Jews, to explain his work methods and to reveal the goals of the massacre the Nazi regime had planned.

Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann stands in his cell during his trial in Jerusalem, in 1961.
MILLI JOHN / Government Press Of

“Had we put 10.3 million Jews to death then I would be content and would say, ‘Good, we have destroyed the enemy,'” says Eichmann to Sassen in one of their meetings, his voice searing the reels of tape. “It is a difficult thing to say and I know I will be judged for it, but this is the truth.”

Eichmann is smug enough to cite numbers, provide information about the workings of the Nazi death machine, make vitriolic, antisemitic statements, and express pride in his contribution to crimes that shocked the world after they were exposed at the end of World War II.

He realizes there is no shortage of people who want to see him in court and paying for his deeds – but has no idea yet that in a few short years, he will appear in a glass booth before the Supreme Court in Jerusalem, at a trial that will be broadcast around the world, or that he will become the first and (so far) only person the Israeli justice system has sent to the gallows.

Some of the things said in the extraordinary interviews were revealed in an article published in Life Magazine in 1964, just months before the opening of that trial. But in the courtroom in Jerusalem, when chief prosecutor Gideon Hausner wanted to use the interviews with Sassen to unravel the Nazi criminal’s line of defense – he would claim that he was only carrying out orders – the court refused to admit the interview quotes as evidence.

Eichmann insisted that he was misquoted by Life and claimed that the full transcript of the interviews that Hausner had gotten his hands on was not accurate. The court told the prosecution that it must present the original tapes, but Hausner and the prosecution failed to do so. The location of the recordings remained unknown. In the end, Eichmann was convicted without them, but the world never heard in his own voice the truth about what happened within the heart of the Nazi extermination machine.

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For decades the tapes were considered lost until finally, most likely at the end of the 1990s, some of them were secretly obtained by a German archive. A total of 15 hours of recordings had been recovered from the 70 hours Sassen taped with Eichmann, but the anonymous owner of the materials who gave them to the archive refused for years to allow them to be publicized.

Apart from a few short excerpts heard in a German documentary film in 1998, and except for a few researchers who received authorization to listen to the recordings for research purposes only, the recordings were kept in complete obscurity. Only now, in the new Israeli film “The Devil’s Confession: The Lost Eichmann Tapes,” which will open the 2022 Docaviv International Documentary Film Festival in Tel Aviv, will it be possible to hear one of the main architects of the Final Solution explain in his own voice how a mechanism for genocide is constructed, how such a horrific program is executed, and what would have happened had the Nazis managed to reach the goals they set for themselves.

Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann during his trial in Jerusalem.
AP

On a dusty shelf in an Israeli archive, in 2014, the film’s director, Yariv Mozer, found a previously unknown interview with the late Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, and made it into a movie, “Ben-Gurion, Epilogue,” which won the Ophir Award (the Israeli Oscar) for best documentary three years later. Mozer, who is today 44, was determined to get his hands on the lost Eichmann interviews with Sassen.

He managed to locate the recordings, fought to receive authorization to use them for cinematic purposes, recruited investors interested in the documentary – one of the most expensive ever produced in Israel – and embarked on a period of ambitious, comprehensive research.

The result? A film that not only reveals Eichmann speaking in a way that one finds difficult to imagine him letting himself do, but also emphasizes the lies he told in the Jerusalem courtroom and draws a complex map of political interests and of meddling that went on secretly behind the scenes of the highly publicized trial, and perhaps prevented the Sassen recordings from being heard at it. Ben-Gurion, the controversial Kastner affair, the Mossad, the Shin Bet security service, Israel-Germany relations – all of these were in evidence, behind Hausner’s back, wielding influence over one of the most highly publicized trials in history, the film claims.

‘An active partner’

“The Devil’s Confession: Eichmann’s Lost Tapes” will be screened several times at Docaviv and also an expanded version will be aired as a three-part documentary series, under the same name, on Israeli public broadcaster Kan’s Channel 11, beginning June 7.

“Eichmann said several times during the trial that he didn’t know about the extermination of the Jews, but the recordings show that he most definitely did,” Mozer explains. “Hausner wanted to disprove the defense’s line that Eichmann was only carrying out orders. Had they obtained the recordings, he could have done so easily because they prove that Eichmann was not only an expression of the ‘banality of evil,’ as Hannah Arendt claims, but was an active partner in shaping the ideology that was at the foundation of the extermination of the Jews.

“It would be perhaps too big a compliment to label Eichmann the architect of the Final Solution,” the director continues, “because there were others before him – Heydrich, Himmler, M?ller – but he was the executor. Under his signature, at least two-and-a-half million Jews were sent to their deaths.”

Mozer says that he too grew up on the concept of the so-called banality of evil, which historian Arendt believed was embodied by Eichmann, and on “The Specialist,” a 1999 documentary directed by Israeli filmmaker Eyal Sivan that portrayed Eichmann as a petty bureaucrat whom the State of Israel had exploited to tell the world of the horrors of the Holocaust. But the work on this project made it clear to Mozer that the truth was far more complex.

“If Hannah Arendt had heard these recordings, she would most likely have understood that the truth about Eichmann was somewhere in the middle,” he says. “He wasn’t perhaps the greatest ideologue, but there is no doubt that he was far more than a functionary. The tapes show that Eichmann was fanatically devoted to his job and obsessive about achieving the most he could in his field; he was an ideologue and wasn’t just carrying out orders. I have no doubt that there were quite a few times when he manipulated the system to make it operate the way he wanted.”

Eli Gorenstein, left, plays Eichmann in the movie. Mozer asked German speaking actors to move their lips in synch with the original recording, playing in the background.
ETL Zion

The Dutch journalist, Sassen, was a Nazi and member of the Waffen-SS, and like Eichmann and a long list of other officials in the Third Reich, also fled to Argentina after the war and settled there. Sassen believed that the mass murder of Jews was a lie and that the world had fabricated the accusations against the German regime.

According to “The Devil’s Confession,” one of the reasons Sassen decided to interview Eichmann was to prove that Hitler didn’t even know about the planned extermination of the Jews. Once Eichmann had agreed to be interviewed, the two met every weekend over a period of about six months at Sassen’s home.

Sometimes it was only the two of them in the room; sometimes other people were listening to the conversation; and sometimes, in the recordings, Sassen’s daughters can be heard playing in the next room. The interviewee painted a picture that was very different from the one the journalist expected.

When you watch Mozer’s film and hear Eichmann’s actual words from the old recordings, his persona is completely different from the figure of the dull bureaucrat he tried to present to the world at the trial. It is difficult not to be shocked by his haughtiness when admitting his crimes and boasting of them, and not to be appalled by the sheer indifference he displays, in view of the fact that he was directly responsible for the deaths of millions, in complete contradiction to what he said during the trial.

In the interviews with Sassen, Eichmann admits that the Holocaust was carefully planned, and clarifies that he knew that many of the Jews that were sent at his directive to the camps were destined for extermination. He declares that he has no remorse about anything.

Israel Kastner. The Israeli establishment wanted to keep the affair involving him under wraps.

“I didn’t care about the Jews deported to Auschwitz, whether they lived or died. It was the Fuehrer’s order: Jews who were fit to work would work and those who weren’t would be sent to the Final Solution,” he says, in one recording. When Sassen asks him to clarify what that meant, if they were to be eliminated or exterminated, Eichmann retorts dryly: “If that’s what I said, then yes.”

Although while standing trail the Nazi war criminal consistently denied that he knew he was taking part in the destruction of the Jewish race, in the Sassen interviews we hear him explicitly admit that he knew about the deceitful techniques the Nazis used to carry out the mass murder. He relates, for example, how an S.S. brigade commander told him that they would put “sprinklers in the showers that looked just like a showerhead” and then they would “bring in the idiots and throw inside hydrogen cyanide.”

Eichmann also doesn’t try to hide the fact that he despises Jews or his virulent antisemitism. For example, he describes how he escaped from a prison camp at the end of the war after his name was mentioned again and again at the Nuremberg trials. He explains his escape route in Germany with great precision, and relates how at a certain point he arrived at a location near Bergen-Belsen.

“The area stunk of garlic,” he tells Sassen, and the others in the room. “And who sold the garlic? The Jews. I was shocked by the thought that they were all supposed to be dead already. After all, they said they had all been sent to the ovens. And now who is standing in front of me, bargaining with me, the bastards.”

It appears that one of the reasons Eichmann spoke so openly with Sassen was that they had made a gentleman’s agreement whereby the SS-Obersturmbannf?hrer would provide Sassen with a glimpse of how the Nazi mechanisms worked, reveal the innards of the machine and the considerations that drove it – while the journalist, for his part, agreed not to publish the content of their conversations for as long as his interviewee was still alive.

‘Ben-Gurion was very scared that Hans Globke, Adenauer’s right-hand man would be mentioned in the trial,’ says Mozer.
Bundesarchiv, B 145 Bild-F015051

As someone who had seen a long list of Nazis face trial at Nuremberg and pay a heavy price for their deeds during the war, it was clear to Eichmann that the things he would say in the interviews could endanger him. “Everything here could serve as evidence against me,” he said at one stage. “It could happen when I die or disappear, and this is my request: Everything I say here should be used for research. But as long as I am alive, I don’t want it to happen. I have no desire to exit the shadows into the spotlight.”

However, the gentleman’s agreement struck by the two Nazis quickly crumbled. After Eichmann was captured by the Mossad, on May 11, 1960, the Dutch journalist realized he was holding a golden egg. He decided to sell the publication rights for his collection of tape recordings to Life Magazine and most likely received significant financial remuneration for it. The article, “Eichmann Tells His Own Damning Story,” was printed in the magazine’s November 28, 1960 edition. Eichmann, who by then was held in Israel, couldn’t do anything to prevent publication. All he could do was to deny in court the statements appearing there. But the truth, clear and simple, remained recorded on the tapes that are only now being publicized.

An incomparable experience

Mozer explains that Jacob “Kobi” Sitt, one of the producers of “The Devil’s Confession,” told him two-and-a-half years ago about the existence of the lost tapes and suggested that he try to track them down. Mozer brought a German researcher on board and they discovered that the recordings were located in a German archive.

They were told that many filmmakers had tried over the years to get their hands on the cassettes, but that the owner – who has remained anonymous – refused to authorize this. They would allow access to the recordings only for research purposes, Mozer was told. Later, when the German researcher was asked to undergo security clearance before being given access to the materials, to ensure that he was not a neo-Nazi who could make wrongful use of them, Mozer understood the sensitivity the archive attributed to the tapes.

Mozer: “For many years, nobody knew where the recordings were located. Sassen, it seems, gave them in the 1990s to the Eichmann family. I presume because he felt the need to make amends for his actions, for his supposed betrayal by giving the interviews to Life. The Eichmann family sold the recordings in the 1990s to a publisher in Switzerland. When the publisher went bankrupt, the materials were taken to the vault of another publisher in Switzerland and from there they were transferred to the German National Archives [in Koblenz] because they didn’t want to have any connection to them. The German archives wanted to make sure the recordings were original. When Sassen confirmed this before his death in 2001 they released a few minutes of the material to the media.”

Some five or six minutes of the recordings were featured in the late-1990s German documentary series “Hitler’s Henchmen” in an episode titled “Eichmann: The Exterminator.” A 2010 German docudrama titled “Eichmanns Ende – Liebe, Verrat, Tod” told the story of the relationship between Eichmann and Sassen based, on a transcript of their conversations.

Newsmen and others attending trial of Adolf Eichmann, April 11, 1961 in Jerusalem enter small rooms for a search before being admitted to the courtroom.
Strump / AP

But Mozer was determined to gain full access to the tapes. As someone who, for his earlier film, “Ben Gurion: Epilogue,” had gone to all lengths to rescue an old, forgotten interview with Israel’s first prime minister and make it accessible to the public – it was clear to Mozer that being able to hear the original tapes, unmediated, and to listen to Eichmann saying those things in his own voice, would be an incomparable, intense experience.

The head of the German archive mediated between Mozer and the anonymous owner of the recordings. The Israeli director emphasized to the owner the historic importance of publicizing the recordings and explained that he intended to make a comparison between what Eichmann said in the interviews and what he said in the courtroom. Mozer stressed that there was now a golden opportunity to do this, to mark 60 years since the famous trial. Finally, he received authorized access to the tapes.

Israel’s Kan public broadcaster understood the importance of the film and decided to invest in it; surprisingly, some American investors also joined in the adventure. The triumphantly roaring lion of MGM Studios appears before its opening credits.

MGM (which was bought out last year by Amazon) was impressed by how Mozer had obtained the recordings and, with the mediation of Israel’s Tadmor Entertainment, decided to become a partner in the project. So, with an impressive budget estimated at around 8 million shekels (about $2.34 million) – with Mifal Hapayis, the Gesher Film Fund, and Israel’s New Fund for Cinema and Television also offering funding – the project got underway.

Mozer dived into the archival material from the Eichmann trial and spent many long hours in conversation with Holocaust researchers. He listened, with the help of a translator, to every remaining minute of Sassen’s recordings, and translated them to Hebrew, exactly as they appear in the German transcripts. As noted, a transcript made by Sassen while he was still in possession of the tapes had reached Hausner’s hands. (The mystery of how Hausner got hold of the 700-page transcript has yet to be solved.)

David Ben-Gurion, the first Prime Minister of Israel.
Fritz Cohen / GPO

Mozer gets excited when talking about the tapes. He recalls how he was stunned to discover that over the years not a single institution or Holocaust researcher had bothered to translate the transcripts into Hebrew.

“I was devastated that these recordings and transcripts existed, yet Israeli research had ignored them,” he says. “Very few researchers have dealt with this. (Historian) Gideon Greif wrote one article about it, and that’s it. How is this possible? This transcript is right under your nose in a state archive and the Yad Vashem Holocaust Authority has not translated it to this day.

Why? Because it was a Nazi talking? It is exactly because it is a Nazi that I want to read it. Okay, he was there in the company of other Nazis and perhaps he bragged a bit, but the truth is somewhere in the middle: between Eichmann in his trial and Eichmann in the interviews with Sassen. But I want to read about it. I want to know what happened there.

Now, I also know that Yad Vashem could have purchased the recordings at one point. Why did they refuse such a proposal? I just can’t understand it. There is a Nazi here who allows himself to admit – as no other Nazi admitted – what happened there and says he doesn’t regret anything. This is the eternal proof to shut up the Holocaust deniers. But despite this, it wasn’t in Israel and we hadn’t done anything with it to this day.”

Unlike with “Speer Goes to Hollywood,” the documentary by Vanessa Lappa that won the 2021 Ophir award and is also based on old recordings of a senior Nazi figure – Albert Speer, who was taped during initial work in 1971 on a Hollywood movie about his life that was never made – Mozer insisted on using the original Sassen recordings in his movie, despite their poor quality.

When MGM representatives told him they wanted to use a dramatic reconstruction of the conversations during the film, in other words – that actors would play Sassen and Eichmann and others in scenes where the authentic recordings are heard – the director realized he would have to carry out the complex job of reverse dubbing. To do so he recruited German-speaking actors (Eli Gorenstein plays Eichmann; Roy Miller plays Sassen) and told them to move their lips in synch with the original recording, playing in the background.

Another artistic decision taken by Mozer illustrates the different attitudes of the Israeli and American producers. He decided to color all the original archival footage used in his film, including photographs from the Eichmann trial that are seared into our collective consciousness in black and white.

The Americans didn’t have a problem with this, but Kan was concerned, Mozer notes: “They said, ‘You can’t do that because these are materials that have become sacred in black and white,’ but I insisted. I explained that the Holocaust happened in color, and so did the trial.

Black and white was only a technical issue, a derivative of reality (i.e., of the technology available) during that era. In contrast, I want to bring all this alive for the young generation. After all, people sat outside the gas chambers in their best clothes as (historian) Hannah Jablonka describes in the film; they went into the gas chambers with red hair and blue eyes. If today I have the technological ability to show this, then I want to do that.”

At first, the Israeli broadcaster was concerned by the American demand to use actors and to bring Eichmann alive, Mozer adds, but eventually it agreed to this as well. For his part, he is not afraid of adopting any technology that will help him bring the events portrayed in the film to life.

Tami Raveh holding a portrait of her father, Gideon Hausner, showing his opening statement as chief prosecutor in the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem.
Erez Kaganovitz

At a certain stage, he admits, he even thought about using deep fake technology (technology based on artificial intelligence that enables production of fake video clips) to bring Eichmann to life in front of the viewers’ eyes. “We did some experiments with this but we discovered that the technology is still in its infancy. If it was more advanced, I would have used a deep fake and brought him to life, to make it even clearer that it is him,” the director says.

No more Nazi hunts

One of the most interesting parts of the documentary is when Mozer, by means of conversations with researchers and the documents he collected, reveals the various entities that were meddling behind the scenes during the Eichmann trial. Israeli historian Adam Raz, for example, claims Mozer’s movie that the trial was “no more than a smokescreen to mask the real story: the Israeli-German nuclear project, which required a lot more money than the young state possessed.”

Through interviews with experts from various fields. Mozer paints a picture according to which then-Prime Minister Ben-Gurion tried to convince prosecutor Hausner not to mention affairs that could embarrass Germany (for instance, the Nazi past of then-Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s deputy Hans Globke) so as not to sabotage cooperation between the countries. “The implication of Ben-Gurion’s decision to use German money for the nuclear project was to stop with these trials, to stop hunting Nazis. That was the agreement between the sides,” Mozer notes.

The Israeli establishment also wanted to keep the affair involving Rudolf Israel Kastner under wraps (the reference is to the 1957 murder of Hungarian-born Kastner, who had been convicted of collaborating with the Nazis). On this matter as well, it seemed that senior officials preferred that the interview with Sassen didn’t reach the Jerusalem courtroom in order not to open up painful wounds.

According to Mozer’s film, Israeli security services could have got their hands on the Sassen recordings and thus helped the prosecution in the trial, but that didn’t happen due to political considerations.

The Israeli government didn’t want anything to sabotage its nuclear project and at the same time, it had a clear interest that Kastner – whom Eichmann mentions in the Sassen conversations – not be mentioned in the trial. The powers-that-be also didn’t want the reason Kastner testified on behalf of a Nazi at the Nuremberg trials to be discussed, or for the involvement of the Israeli establishment in these affairs to be revealed. The prosecution was forced to drop the idea of using the Sassen recordings.

Hausner is indeed etched in Israelis’ consciousness as the representative of six million accusers, as someone who is determined to tell the world about the Holocaust and to ensure that one of its executors pay a heavy price for his deeds. However, when one understands what actually happened behind the scenes of the Eichmann trial, Mozer says, it becomes clear that the chief prosecutor was a far more complex figure.

Mozer: “I think that Hausner was also an establishment man. He was partner to secret, internal hearings. For example, about the wiretapping of conversations between Eichmann and Robert Servatius (his lawyer), which was completely illegal. The Shin Bet listened to them. But despite that Hausner told Servatius, ‘Don’t worry. We’re not listening to your conversations.’ So, on the one hand, as a prosecutor, he really wanted the evidence (i.e., the Sassen recordings), but on the other, he was also part of the establishment. He was, after all, someone who had previously been attorney general.”

You claim in your film that the Israeli establishment prevented the recordings from being heard at the Eichmann trial, primarily to defend Israel-Germany relations and to prevent the Kastner affair from resurfacing.

Nazi war criminal Adolph Eichmann, who lived in Argentina after WW2 until he was captured by Israel, in his bullet- proof cell during his trial in Bet Ha’am, Jerusalem, 1961
John Milli / GPO

“Correct. That is my interpretation. I have no proof of anybody that will come and say explicitly, ‘Ben-Gurion gave the order that the tapes won’t be in the trial.’ But that is my conclusion, based on a very large number of documents and cross-referencing between researchers.”

Is it responsible to present such speculation in a film that can determine historical attitudes among so many viewers?

“Look, in the TV series as well, I present this only as a hypothesis. We are very careful. But everything we say is based on facts. Everything. And the fact that Ben-Gurion was very scared that Hans Globke, Adenauer’s right-hand man would be mentioned in the trial, is a fact. Quite a few historians who worked with me on the project admit that history is very much a matter of interpretation.

“As a documentary producer, I would declare that I am not bringing the truth as it is because there is no such thing. What I am doing is presenting the truth as I observe it. And the evidence and the picture of reality as it was in those years and the hints that I find in documents and what happened, and what happened behind the scenes – all of that is there. And so in a way that makes it very difficult to come and say to me that I’m wrong.

“I’m not wrong, but I don’t have overwhelming proof only because the Mossad and Shin Bet don’t open their archives. I asked to receive recordings of the conversations between Servatius and Eichmann, who, among other things, spoke about the Sassen interviews, but unfortunately, they didn’t agree to even check whether they have those recordings. It was the same situation with regard to the recordings of the Sassen interviews.”

What exactly did you ask for from the Mossad and Shin Bet archives and how did they respond?

“I asked for everything connected to the Sassen tapes. I wanted to understand how the transcript was obtained. Did they know about the existence of the recordings, did they manage to get hold of them? What they sent me in response was a few documents about the Eichmann kidnapping. The Mossad told me, ‘We are not getting into it, We don’t open our archives.’ They sent me to the Israel State Archives. State archivist Ruti Avramovitz made every possible effort but the secret services won’t do that. Haaretz correspondent Ofer Aderet brought up in the past the state’s refusal to reveal documents connected to the Kastner murder.

“One day, I spoke with Transportation Minister Merav Michaeli (Kastner’s granddaughter) and she told me that she was deliberating over whether to sit with the head of the Shin Bet and tell him: “Open the archives, it’s time for us to know the truth.’ This affair still hangs over the state. I don’t see the issue with opening the archives. What will we find out? Whatever it is, we are strong enough to deal with our history.

“In any event, until the State of Israel, the Shin Bet and the Mossad [who claim that they do not have the actual tapes – N.A.] don’t open up their archives just like the CIA does, we will not be able to know the full truth. I hope that this film and this series will prod the State of Israel finally to decide to open the archives of the secret services. We are one of the only countries in the world that does not provide access to archives concerning World War II, even though it is clear that these years shaped the character of this country.”

A spokesman for the Prime Minister’s Office, speaking on behalf of the Mossad, told Haaretz: “Over the years, the Mossad has revealed all the details regarding Eichmann that can be revealed. The information is made accessible to the public through the Israel State Archives, the ANU Museum of the Jewish People in Tel Aviv and Yad Vashem.”