MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Eichmann audios recorded in Argentina to be released

An Israeli documentary to be released shortly features voice recordings of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, who was captured by the Mossad in the early 1960s in San Fernando, north of Buenos Aires, Argentina, it was reported.

Eichmann was flown to Jerusalem in 1961 to stand trial and eventually be hanged for the atrocities he had committed. In 1957, he gave an interview to a Dutch Nazi journalist who had found out he was living in the South American country under the name Ricardo Klement. These tapes, however, were not used during his trial.

These audios were believed to have been lost but they had only remained buried for decades in a German archive. Now it is possible to hear one of the architects of the Final Solution in the documentary The Devil's Confessions: Eichmann's Last Records, by Yariv Mozer, which will open the Docaviv International Documentary Film Festival, in Tel Aviv.

“If we had murdered all 10.3 million Jews I would be happy and say, 'Well, we have destroyed the enemy,'” Eichmann told journalist Wilhelm Sassen during a series of meetings they had in 1957 in Argentina.

“It is a difficult thing to say and I know that you will be judged for this, but this is the truth”, adds Eichmann, who acknowledges detailed information about the Nazi extermination machinery, coupled with anti-Semitic statements and expressions of pride in the Third Reich.

Eichmann felt safe because he had managed to avoid prosecution at the Nuremberg Trials and escape to Argentina where no one, he thought, would look for him. Sassen was a member of the Waffen-SS and had also escaped to Argentina.

The long conversations with Eichmann took place at Sassen's house, sometimes in the presence of other people. Some 70 hours of conversation were recorded, of which only 17 were found in the archive that has since 1990 been open to researchers.

Mozer is the first to be granted permission to release fragments of the recordings to the general public. When the subject of the recordings was brought up during the Jerusalem trial, Eichmann argued he had been misinterpreted and asked for the originals to be reproduced, which the prosecution could not do.

Eichmann “repeated several times during the trial that he did not know about the extermination of Jews, but the recordings show that he was certainly one of its architects,” Mozer explained.

(Source: ANSA)