The Führer has given the order for physical extermination…
literally… I had heard these words for the first time.
I know that all too well.
LAWRENCE Eichmann is something of a logistical mastermind
and he does this with full awareness
that the result of deporting these Jewish persons
to these killing centers is that they're going to be killed.
Previously onThe Devil's Confession:
The Lost Eichmann's Tapes.
Israeli Attorney General Gideon Hausner
is determined to find the tapes
Willem Sassen recorded with Adolf Eichmann
to prove he is the architect
of the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question. "
Faced with the suspected interference
from the West German, Israeli, and US governments
in his attempts to secure the tapes,
Hausner manages to somehow
obtain transcripts of the recordings
that include notes from Eichmann.
But will the court allow them to be admitted into evidence?
GIDEON Efforts have been made to obtain the manuscript,
and indeed, it is now in our hands.
MAN All rise!
Adolf Eichmann. Adolf Eichmann.
The extended arm of Hitler's evil regime.
Nazis have always denied their role in the Holocaust.
It could not have been me,
because it was not my decision in such cases.
After the war, many fled Europe,
including the architect of the Final Solution-
Adolf Eichmann.
He's practically the last important Nazi
who arrived in Argentina after the war.
While hiding in Argentina,
Eichmann records a series of interviews
with Nazi journalist Willem Sassen,
admitting his role in the Holocaust.
Sassen came up with this crazy idea
that he would interview the mastermind of the Holocaust.
This is him boasting about what he did.
The tapes are rediscovered.
And now for the first time,
we'll hear Eichmann admitting his crimes,
a true Nazi confession.
All rise!
GIDEON Okay, so now take this text,
analyze it sentence by sentence
and tell us what is true and what is false.
Take a look at the section I marked,
"I wasn't an ordinary receiver of orders.
If I was, I would be stupid.
I was an idealist. "
Did you say that?
That's…
I must say, this is completely made-up nonsense.
Being an idealist has nothing to do with receiving or giving orders.
Eichmann denies that the transcripts are his words,
challenging Hausner to produce the original recordings.
ADOLF I just thought of something, Mr. Prosecutor.
You said that there are tapes.
One should try to get these tapes.
And it would prove if I said it or not.
Look, I can do my job without advice.
I ask that you tell me
if you said those things or not?
Eichmann plays full risk
and is 100% sure that the tapes will never be heard
because he knows what else is on these tapes.
Hausner must convince the court
of the validity of the transcripts
before they can be admitted into evidence.
We know that the tapes exist,
because they exist to this day.
Did the Israeli government know the tapes existed?
And so the mystery, the enduring mystery,
is why the people that had access to the tapes
didn't tell the prosecutors that those tapes existed.
As Hausner waits for a ruling on the transcripts' admission,
the trial continues in Jerusalem.
And the Attorney General pursues a new strategy
to prove that Eichmann is not just a simple bureaucrat,
but also a cold-blooded murderer himself.
After the middle of May 1944,
we were led to a villa
that later turned out to be the private residence of Adolf Eichmann.
I saw him when I was digging, I heard shouting.
Yes.
I saw Eichmann's driver walk over to one of the Jewish boys working with us,
I knew him as Shalamon,
and he yelled at him,
"You stole cherries off the tree,"
and I saw Eichmann standing on the upper balcony.
Then I saw the boy
being pushed into the warehouse and locked up there.
Then I heard horrible screams, pounding, beatings.
The screams went on for 10-15 minutes.
When I heard no more screams, the door opened,
and Eichmann emerged.
He left quickly and the boy's body was dragged out.
On some level, Hausner still found it
necessary to try to add:
"And yes, he killed someone with his own hands. "
In response to this question, I can only say
that I have never killed a human being,
that I have never beaten a human being to death,
and that I have never hit a human being.
LAWRENCE Eichmann only really becomes very agitated
in really rebutting that claim.
So he's really passionate about saying,
"I didn't kill anyone with my own hands. "
So I-I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt
that he didn't beat anyone to death with his own hands.
And ultimately, the judges did not accept that.
But that has nothing to do
with, again, the kind of nature
of bureaucratic responsibility,
which Hausner himself recognizes
as the key crime that he's responsible for.
MICHAEL Eichmann never shot anyone himself.
He only shot with his pen.
The commander of Auschwitz
once asked him when he visited him
if perhaps the babies could be spared,
not be put
with their parents in the gas chambers.
Eichmann replied, and this appears in Rudolf Höss memoirs,
the children must be exterminated,
for they could grow up
and want to seek revenge on us.
That was Eichmann.
To the end.
On the tapes, Eichmann refers to the same man,
the commander of the Auschwitz extermination camp,
Rudolf Hoöss, as a role model.
ADOLF And this is what Höss did.
That's what he did.
I told you already, he was not
the brutal concentration camp commander
one imagines with the face of a bulldog,
he was a father to a load of children.
He had sympathy for human needs and worries.
He had orders that bound him.
Had I received the order
to gas Jews or shoot Jews,
I would have executed these orders.
Rudolf Höss,
in the statements you know…
- Yes, I met with Höss. - He was at your place in Budapest.
Yes, he visited me in Budapest.
To determine Auschwitz's capacity to absorb Hungarian Jews?
Even in Hungary, I was not giving orders, but receiving orders.
He had to address the higher ranks.
Hausner learns from the Sassen transcripts
that Eichmann met Hoöss in Budapest.
It is in Hungary where Eichmann commits
perhaps his most heinous crime-
the mass murder of Hungarian Jews towards the end of the war.
Actually, you could conduct a trial solely
around the Hungarian affair.
Doing so would be quite convincing
that the trial is a fair trial.
Nobody would say any criticism
about the handling of the trial and its outcome.
In Sassen's transcript, page 737,
you made a comparison between the various countries.
As for Holland, you said,
"It was a splendor how it was all rolling. "
As for Denmark, you said,"It was almost a scandal," or similar words.
And as for Hungary, you said,
"Hungary really offered us the Jews like in a fire sale!
Hungary was the only country
for which we couldn't work fast enough. "
HANNA Hungary was a relatively safe place for Jews
during Second World War until May of 1944.
In Hungary still lives the largest community,
untouched, about 800,000 Jews,
and they are convinced that they will come out of the war
completely unharmed.
The Soviet army was standing at the Hungarian border.
They were ready to cross the mountains into Hungary.
What is clear at that point
is that Germany is going to lose this war.
For the Hungarian Jews, there was so much hope.
Eichmann comes in
and he organizes
he deportation of Hungarian Jews.
The people he brought with him
were also all experienced deporters.
They had deported Jews from all over Europe,
and they knew how to do it.
And they also knew that the Hungarian government
would play along with them,
the marionettes.
He gets Hungarian railways,
the Hungarian militia, the Hungarian police.
Nazi law requires Jews
in all communities across the occupied territories
to form a Judenrat,
a Jewish council of local leaders.
Eichmann then sets about gaining the trust
of these Jewish community leaders
and puts pressure on them
to help with the deportations.
The Eichmann system is first of all to use pressure
to help him organize deportations.
When he arrives in Budapest,
he has a meeting with the leaders of the Hungarian Jewish community.
He says to them,
"You know, you have to wear the yellow star
and you have to pay for it yourself,
but if you do what I say,
everything will be okay. "
I met a woman,
she remembers her father coming home from the meeting
and saying to her mother,
"We can work with this man. "
WILLEM "On March 31st, 1944 the Judenrat
had a first discussion with Eichmann at the Majestic.
'You don't know who I am? I am a bloodhound',
Eichmann declared at that time. "
Yes, maybe I said that,
how shall I say, sarcastically, and…
with a combination of humor and sarcasm.
Just as I occasionally said
to the important Jews, when I met them,
when they arrived.
Something like, "Do you know where you are?
You are with the Tsar of the Jews, dear friend!"
This is how I wanted to address them
so they wouldn't have worries or concerns.
Because I am not the bloodhound that people accuse me of being.
EVA Most of these Jewish families from the countryside
believed that it could not happen with them.
They will be deported for work in Germany
and they prepared themselves also that way,
so if you see what they brought,
uh, these 50-kilogram packages,
for example, a doctor prepared himself as a doctor.
And then,
of course, they believed that they will work as a doctor in Germany.
Forced labor, but still work.
I never ever heard
about a letter to the mayor
or to the school director
asking, "What happened with my Jewish neighbors?"
We must remember it
as the most shameful event in Hungarian history.
Such a united effort for that single purpose
to deport and transport
so many Hungarian
fellow citizens from this country.
GIDEON You told Sassen that Hungary was the only country
in which you weren't able to keep up with the rate of deportations.
That's what you said to Sassen, true?
No, that cannot be true.
Many things were written, as you said, Mr. Prosecutor, and this is not correct.
During the trial, Eichmann
adamantly denies responsibility
for the massacre of Hungary's Jews.
But on the tapes, Eichmann does not dispute his role
and admits that the deportations happened quickly.
WILLEM We have concluded that the deportations from…
Hungary, under the leadership of the master
were conducted in an exemplary manner.
Can one say that in 46 days all this happened?
It seems exaggerated.
Too fast?
Of course it happened fast.
But 46 days seems a bit exaggerated to me.
Maybe you are referring to 46 work days?
But not in 46 days,
meaning, a month and a half.
There were only whispers and rumors
about a place in Poland where terrible things are happening.
But the people who were deported to Auschwitz,
they all sent a postcard that said the same thing,
that they feel fine, that they're working, something like that.
These were uniform postcards that were sent to the relatives.
HANNA 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.
MARTIN Once we arrived in Auschwitz, we got an order to get out.
And I saw my wife. How did I recognize her?
My daughter was wearing a red coat
and that red dot was the sign
that she is there
and the dot became smaller and smaller.
I walked away and never saw her again.
When I heard that,
I fell silent. Why?
Because my daughter was two and a half years old
and shortly before that I bought her a red coat.
I couldn't get a word out of my mouth.
Even before we entered the barracks,
a command came down: all the boys to the soccer field.
Those days were the pinnacle of Auschwitz.
Within seven weeks, from May 16 to June 10,
438,000 Jews were brought to Auschwitz on 150 trains.
Four chimneys emitted flames and black smoke day and night.
When those didn't suffice, they dug pits and burned bodies to ashes.
It was horrible.
Some days the smoke did not rise into the sky,
but spread over the Auschwitz camp
and covered the camp with a black cloud.
To prove that Eichmann played a key role in Hungary,
Hausner calls witnesses to testify
that knew Eichmann during that time.
- Do you see the defendant here? - Yes.
Can you identify him?
In my memory, Herr Obersturmbannführer Eichmann.
is in uniform, in high boots,
standing with his legs spread and his hand on the gun in his belt,
shouting at me in a tone that was so characteristic of the "Master Race. "
But despite that, I know that this is him.
When did you find out what was being done to the Jews in Auschwitz?
I received letters once, and among them
was the report on Auschwitz.
It says
that to date, one million and 450 thousand
Jews have been killed.
Detailed, in France, numbers.
And the last sentence -
"And now we are preparing to receive the Jews of Hungary. "
Our leaders fed us sedatives in the ghettos so that we don't revolt!
Silence in the court.
I request silence once again and this is the last time!
Get this man out of here. I am stopping the session.
RONI Only once during the trial did someone from the gallery cry out:
"You, the Jewish leadership, you saved yourselves.
You ran away. "
The man crying out from the crowd during the testimony
is no accident.
He accuses Hungarian community leaders
of collaborating with the Nazis
and abandoning their people.
Gideon Hausner's great fear
was that the trial would be riddled
with accounts between the Jews and themselves.
There were Jews who collaborated with the Nazis.
There's no hiding that.
ADOLF You can imagine that with such people,
Storfer, Löwenherz, Eppstein,
that one Jewish lawyer Kasztner…
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.
The image of Kasztner hovers over Eichmann's trial.
Kasztner arranged for a train
of around 1,600 prominent Hungarian Jews,
including members of his own family,
to basically, um, go to Switzerland.
And one of the questions that, uh, arose
was whether Kasztner was a collaborator with the devil.
The devil in question is Eichmann.
After the war, Kastner 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 insisted 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 céIèbre
in the first years of the State of Israel,
because it raised the question of dealing with the devil.
SUZANNE My father told me,
"You'll hear a lot of bad things about your dad. "
I remember laughing, because he didn't know how much I already knew.
He was spit on. He couldn't get on a bus.
He couldn't buy a newspaper.
They actually spat in his face.
I got spit on too once.
My parents didn't know that I was beaten up and got stones hurled at me.
That I was tossed into a pit of lime and almost died.
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.
SUZZANE Father was sent to the Nuremberg Trials on behalf of the Jewish Agency
and the Israeli government. It's as simple as that.
I found all the documents related to the trip,
also the expenses he received.
And when he said so, they said he's lying.
It is clear that Ben-Gurion is denying this.
The leadership of the settlement would not protect people
who were involved in the murder of Jews in Europe.
It's unfathomable, it's unforgivable.
Kasztner feels abandoned by the Israeli government,
knowing they fear he will reveal the reason for his testimony.
On the night between March 3rd and 4th, when he returned to his home,
three assassins were waiting outside the building
and shot him.
Ten days later, he passed away.
He knew they were going to murder him.
He knew.
I came home from school
and he called me over
and there was an urgency in his voice,
as if to say, if he didn't tell me now,
he may never have the chance.
That I should always remember - he tried his best
to save as many Jews as possible.
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 the Hungarian Jews,
including companies like Manfred Weiss Steel,
which had 40,000 employees during the war.
And Eichmann mentions on the tapes.
WILLEM Was it Becher
who led the negotiations regarding the takeover
- of the Manfred Weiss enterprise? - Yes.
Followed the negotiations between Eichmann and Kasztner
and reported to Himmler about the progress?
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.
Ben-Gurion feared that at the Eichmann trial
people would discover what he had managed to hide.
He somehow managed to shift the blame
against him and the Zionist leadership
for what they did or didn't do, vis a vis the Nazis.
He feared that everything would be revealed with Eichmann
and he didn't want the Sassen interview.
Ben-Gurion is scarred from the Kasztner affair.
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
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 that there is no way to prove
that the transcripts are Eichmann's actual words.
JUDGE MOSHE We decide by a majority of opinions
to accept as evidence from the Sassen document
only things that were written in the defendant's handwriting.
In this ruling, we dismiss the Attorney General's petition.
The judges decide to disqualify
the 700 pages of the Sassen transcripts,
but makes 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.
Here my explanation begins to be within the realm of conspiracy.
Because if this document is given life,
it proves the accusations against Kasztner.
It proves the allegations against Kasztner.
It proves the allegations
against the Zionist movement in Hungary,
which is affiliated to the ruling party of the Israeli government.
The Mossad hides many things about the Eichmann affair to this day
and the Secret Service hides details about the Kasztner affair,
because if these things are discovered
even today, they will cause a storm.
The fuse hasn't yet been neutralized.
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 all mysteriously 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.
ADOLF I set up the Central Department for Jewish Emigration.
I couldn't fool these people,
I couldn't tell them, "Guys, I don't know anything. "
Or Kasztner, who told me
I should stop the annihilation machine.
He was so outrageous, he asked me directly
what was happening to the Jews, etc…
I can't say to him, "I don't know anything. "
BETTINA Eichmann was so proud of himself.
He was able to manipulate Kasztner and take advantage of him
so that Kasztner could not get a true picture of reality.
I believe that from this part of the tapes,
the tough situation Kasztner was in becomes much clearer
and appears in a different light.
You get a much fairer perspective of it.
The disqualification of the Sassen transcripts
is a victory for the defense
and a major blow to Attorney General Hausner's case against Eichmann.
Since Eichmann denied that those were his words,
even though his handwriting was on certain pages,
you had to have the tapes.
Naturally, Gideon Hausner would have given anything
to be able to play the Eichmann recordings in court.
And there was a rumor
that the trial took so long, because he always hoped for it.
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.
I call on Avraham Aviel.
Avraham Aviel. Avraham Aviel.
DEBORAH Today when you speak about survivors:
"Our honored survivors," "our treasured survivors,"
but then there was even a feeling, common enough,
that we know you must have stepped on someone to survive.
Put the kippah on your head,
your right hand on the Bible,
say: I swear to God
that my testimony in this trial
will be the truth, the whole truth and only the truth.
It was no pleasure saying that I came from the Holocaust.
Because there were bad opinions too,
that the Holocaust survivors are not decent people,
they endured such trials and tribulations,
they're not decent people,
so they hid it.
Tell us what happened on May 7, 1942.
- They came from Lida… - Who?
The Germans came,
in battle uniform,
armed with automatic weapons.
My mother…
said, "Children…
say a prayer.
We will die as Jews. "
I didn't want to cry, I wanted them to hear the testimony.
I took a breath to continue the testimony,
I took a second…
Gunfire rang out
and they fell into the pit.
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 Hausner put such a heavy pressure on him
that his resistance broke.
What is the reason you use the literary name Ka-Tsetnik, Mr. De-Nur?
He took his pen name, Ka-Tsetnik,
from the initials for the German word for "concentration camp"
and the number that was tattooed
on each prisoner's arm by the Nazis.
Their name was
the number Ka-Tsetnik.
I see them…
they are looking at me…
- I see them… - Please sit, Mr…
I remember…
- No, Mr. De-Nur, listen to the prosecutor. - Then…
Just a minute, listen to me, no, Mr. De-Nur.
Quiet, quiet, quiet!
HANNA In retrospect, Hausner was right.
In the collective memory,
the one testimony that was imprinted forcefully
was that testimony of Ka-Tsetnik.
ZVI Yechiel De-Nur, Ka-Tsetnik, fell unconscious.
The audience in the courtroom stood up in astonishment
and cleared a path for the stretcher bearers
on which the witness lay and was taken to the hospital.
My role was then the news coordinator of the Voice of Israel.
Ka-Tsetnik's testimony was, in my opinion the most dramatic
of the witness testimonies.
Not only as a result of the Eichmann trial did
more people become familiar with the Holocaust,
they became familiar with the Holocaust of every single survivor,
every survivor had a Holocaust of their own,
I had my own Holocaust.
People learned about that from the testimonies.
It was possible to rely only on documents
but…
this would not have become the Holocaust trial.
Miki Goldman serves
as Hausner's assistant during the trial.
One survivor's testimony will stick with him forever.
He hit one boy 80 times
with a stick.
Do you see in court the boy that was hit 80 times?
Everyone started to look to all around
to see where the boy was sitting.
It's the officer sitting next to Mr. Hausner.
I was unable to move.
It's a story I'm not eager to tell.
Once I told it to a man and his wife
and he said to her: these people suffered so much
that at times they mix truth with fantasy.
Then and there I decided
that no one would hear that story from me anymore.
It was the 81st blow that I received.
DEBORAH 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.
We walked towards the pit. I turned my head.
He asked me who to shoot first.
I did not answer anything.
I felt my daughter being torn away from me.
I heard her last cry and how she was shot.
GIDEON These people, these tongue-tied people,
they'll never be again the same as they were before
Hitler came there and before the roof caved in on them.
Uh, there is something traumatic
in their make-up which will never be good again.
AMOS My father wanted there to be a trial of testimonies,
look what a visionary he was.
We have hardly any survivors.
- Is that it? Can we get started? - Please.
Can this light…?
Yes, that's it.
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.
This was the first time you could see who's Eichmann,
what he felt like.
ADOLF I had recurring encounters with the dead
and I always had the same feeling.
I still remember seeing the ones that were burnt, I told you already,
my knees shook.
Do you know what I said?
You will laugh.
"I believe in God, the Father almighty, the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary,
died under Pontius Pilate," and so on and so on
"resurrected from the dead…" and so on,
to stop my knees from shaking.
Otherwise, I would have felt embarrassed.
As a Obersturmbannführer Colonel in uniform,
wearing a thick leather coat,
with ranks on my shoulders, saying, "I feel nauseous. "
Finally, Gideon Hausner
provides one last crucial piece of evidence.
Towards the end of the war,
Eichmann commits perhaps his most devilish crime,
as it becomes clear that Germany is going to lose the war.
REPORTER It is certainly great news
when we heard that the 7th British armored 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 among 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,
being a 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.
I'm showing you a section from the Sassen document
that has many corrections in your handwriting.
Look at the segment in parentheses in red pencil.
Page 282.
You said the following,
"And now, in conclusion, I must tell you,
I regret nothing.
I am unwilling to regret.
I must tell you honestly,
had we put 10 million Jews to death,
then I would say with satisfaction,
'good, we have exterminated an enemy'."
That's what you said.
No, I didn't say that.
I definitely didn't say that.
…and now I want to tell you… to conclude…
all these recordings:
I regret nothing.
Every fiber of my being resists
to say that…
we did something wrong. No.
I must tell you honestly,
had we killed 10.3 million Jews,
then, I would be satisfied.
And would say,
good… we have exterminated an enemy.
Then we would have fulfilled our task.
But since it is not the case….
I still have some brief questions here…
It's harsh what I am telling you, I know it…
and I will be judged.
If I'm… so harsh in my wording.
But I can't tell you anything other than… That's the truth.
Why should I deny it?
Right?
No, I didn't say that.
I definitely didn't say that.
This has been patched together out of…
It's a combination of imagination and truth.
That is not my question.
The question is if the transcript is right?
I can't give a detailed and precise answer to that,
because I was under the influence of alcohol
and I don't know if I was under the influence of alcohol in this moment.
Under the influence of alcohol or not,
did you say those things or not?
I don't remember.
If you want to continue making a fool of yourself, go ahead.
Excuse me?
If you want to keep making a fool of yourself, then go ahead.
I don't want to make a fool of myself, I'm just saying that I don't know
and I have only one thing…
I officially ask to have the recordings.
Hausner later wrote in his book,
Justice In Jerusalem,
"I wanted to get the Sassen tapes
to bring Eichmann's defense
to a complete standstill.
Then he could hardly have been able to deny his own voice. "
Hausner also mentions in the book
that an anonymous source
offered him the opportunity to purchase the recordings,
with 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 didn't they 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
hit the most sensitive part in the semi-secret relations
between Israel and Germany,
or, if you like, between Ben-Gurion and Adenauer.
Adenauer had a meeting
with the director of the Israel Mission in Germany.
And he said something scandalous:
If Israel agrees that we stop these trials
and don't start chasing after Nazis all over the world,
I will promote the diplomatic relations.
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 recordings.
Just before his death,
he gives the tapes to the Eichmann family,
likely in an attempt to, in some way,
make up for his betraying his fellow Nazi comrade.
Around the same time,
Sassen is secretly filmed by an Argentinian filmmaker
and asked about his sessions with Eichmann.
MAN And he came to you to write his memories?
Yes.
We can give this book a title: "Accountant of Death"
And… "Accountant of Death. "
Yes, you have not killed anyone. I know.
You have been an accountant.
And… That was something, those sessions…
Now, are we finally done with this recording?
No, actually not, I have a few more pages of questions,
but we can do this quickly.
We're not done with the book?
That's why I just gave my little concluding talk.
That hardly matters.
But what do you say about these things,
which so spontaneously came from my heart?
- What do you say, Comrade Sassen? - I'm quite intrigued.
Intrigued?
Yes, very important.
TIMOTHY 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,
it's hopeful,
which means that there's hope that big lies can be exploded.
Perpetrators of such crimes
should never feel comfortable
that they can get away with them.
They might have been sure in 1959,
but after 1960,
they could never quite sleep as soundly and that was a good thing.
This court sentences Adolf Eichmann to death.
GABRIEL That man, Eichmann, whose sole purpose was to destroy the Jewish people,
had to stand trial in an Israeli court
with the symbol of the State of Israel on the wall behind the judges,
for me, that is an unforgettable moment.
It's something that provided us with extraordinary satisfaction.
It was six months after the liberation.
You see this shirt?
A Jewish U.S. Army officer who liberated us said,
"Come, boy, the war is over for you,
come, let me dress you nicely. "
This is the shirt. I've kept it with me until this day.
"I shall not die, but live, and declare the works of the Lord,
the Lord hath chastened me sore; but He hath not given me over unto death. "
And you will be able to tell future generations
that you heard about Auschwitz firsthand.
The fact that the Jewish people arose and are able to judge their murderers,
we are a nation that cannot be trampled on.
MICHAEL The first time I visited Auschwitz,
in the same barracks I had been in Birkenau then,
I put on Tefillin and prayed.
The human revenge is five children,
12 grandchildren, two great-grandchildren, a wonderful wife.
That's my personal revenge, but there is no revenge,
it is consolation.
TAMI He didn't leave the Holocaust
and the Holocaust didn't leave him, not for a single day.
And I think that… it wouldn't be farfetched to say
that it also brought him closer to his end,
because his soul was scorched opposite that glass booth.
He really turned into a different person.