‘If we had killed 10.3 million Jews, I would say with satisfaction, ‘Good, we destroyed an enemy,” Nazi SS Karl Adolf Eichmann said ‘Then we would have fulfilled our mission.’
Eichman is considered the mastermind behind the Holocaust. After World War II, he recorded a series of interviews in 1957 about his role in Nazi Germany. Thanks to two Israeli documentary makers, the tapes are now public.
According to the Daily Mail,
Karl Adolf Eichmann was born in Solingen, Germany in 1906 and lived a ‘rather ordinary’ life as a traveling salesman in Austria for an oil company before World War II, as described by the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Eichmann was the oldest of five children born to a Calvinist Protestant family and attended the same secondary school in Linz, Austria that Adolf Hitler attended 17 years before him, according to The Eichmann Trial by Deborah E. Lipstadt.
Eichmann lost his job with the Vacuum Oil Company AG during the worldwide Great Depression and joined the Nazi Party in April 1932, quickly becoming a member of the Schutzstaffel led by Heinrich Himmler – known as the SS.
By October 1934, Eichmann was stationed at the central office for the Sicherheitsdienst – the intelligence agency of the SS – in Berlin, where he dealt with Jewish affairs. He married his wife Veronika Liebl in 1935, with whom he had four sons.
Though Eichmann did not make policy, he was described as the ‘chief executioner’ of the Holocaust by Encyclopedia Britannica.
He was responsible for collecting information on the Jews in each area, organizing the seizure of their property, and arranging for and scheduling the horrific packed trains that took the Jews to their deaths.
Eichmann was captured by U.S. troops after the war but escaped from a prison camp in 1946 and lived in Germany under a fake name for many years until he made his way to Argentina – where he was ultimately captured by the Mossad.
Israeli Mossad agents arrested Eichmann in 1960 and brought him to Israel to be tried for his crimes.
During the trial, he taunted Prosecutor Hausner to produce tapes of him admitting his crimes, knowing that the recordings he made with Dutch Nazi sympathizer journalist Willem Sassen were safe. Eichmann was found guilty and hanged.
His hatred of the Jewish people is on full display in the tapes. He compares them to a fly, swatting the insect and saying it had a “Jewish Nature.”
The tapes were offered to Hausner but could not be sent to Israel until after Eichmann’s trial. Hausner did not end up purchasing the recordings. In time they were donated to the German archives to be used for academic research. Kobi Sitt, the producer, was able to access the Eichmann tapes and produce a documentary with never before heard audio.
In the last two years, film producer Kobi Sitt has been constantly preoccupied with the story of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, who was hanged in Israel on May 31, 1962, after being convicted of crimes against humanity. #Nazis | #Documentaryhttps://t.co/AX4wv96dqi
— The Jerusalem Post (@Jerusalem_Post) June 17, 2022
Sitt is a grandson of Holocaust survivors and had previously made a movie for Israeli television on Hausner 20 years ago.
He said, ‘I’m not afraid of the memory; I’m afraid of the forgetfulness,’
and wanted ‘to provide a tool to breathe life into the memory’ as the generation of survivors dies out.
Yariv Mozer directed the 108-minute film documentary and said their three-episode, 180-minute television series, were vital historical records.
‘This is proof against Holocaust deniers and a way to see the true face of Eichmann,’ Mozer told The New York Times.‘With all modesty, through the series, the young generations will get to know the trial and the ideology behind the Final Solution,’ he added.
The Devils Confession: The Lost Eichmann Tapes – Trailer from Joaquín Neira on Vimeo.
