Original subtitles

ADOLF [in German]

LAWRENCE [in English]: 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.

[clangs]

NARRATOR: 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 [in German]

MAN [in German]

Adolf Eichmann.

NARRATOR [in English]: Nazis have always denied their role in the Holocaust.

[in German]

NARRATOR [in English]: After the war, many fled Europe,

including the architect of the Final Solution-

Adolf Eichmann.

LAWRENCE: He's practically the last important Nazi

who arrived in Argentina after the war.

NARRATOR: 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.

[light switch clicks on]

NARRATOR: The tapes are rediscovered.

And now for the first time,

we'll hear Eichmann admitting his crimes,

a true Nazi confession.

[in German]

GIDEON [in Hebrew]

[in German]

NARRATOR [in English]: Eichmann denies that the transcripts are his words,

challenging Hausner to produce the original recordings.

ADOLF [in German]

[in English] Eichmann plays full risk

and is 100% sure that the tapes will never be heard

because he knows what else is on these tapes.

NARRATOR: Hausner must convince the court

of the validity of the transcripts

before they can be admitted into evidence.

TIMOTHY: 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.

NARRATOR: 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.

[in Hebrew]

[in English] On some level, Hausner still found it

necessary to try to add:

"And yes, he killed someone with his own hands."

[in German]

LAWRENCE [in English]: 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 [in German]

NARRATOR [in English]: On the tapes, Eichmann refers to the same man,

the commander of the Auschwitz extermination camp,

Rudolf Hoöss, as a role model.

ADOLF [in German]

[in Hebrew]

NARRATOR [in English]: 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.

HANNA: 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 German]

[birds chirping]

HANNA [in English]: 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.

[bomb whistling]

[explosion]

HANNA: 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.

DEBORAH: Eichmann comes in

and he organizes

he deportation of Hungarian Jews.

ELEONORE: 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.

DEBORAH: He gets Hungarian railways,

the Hungarian militia, the Hungarian police.

NARRATOR: 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.

HANNA: The Eichmann system is first of all to use pressure

to help him organize deportations.

DEBORAH: 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 [in German]

EVA [in English]: 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.

-[chattering] -And then,

of course, they believed that they will work as a doctor in Germany.

Forced labor, but still work.

[indistinct chattering]

I never ever heard

about a letter to the mayor

or to the school director

asking, "What happened with my Jewish neighbors?"

ANDRAS: 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 [in German]

NARRATOR [in English]: 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 [in German]

HANNA [in English]: 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 [in German]

NARRATOR [in English]: To prove that Eichmann played a key role in Hungary,

Hausner calls witnesses to testify

that knew Eichmann during that time.

[in Hebrew]

RONI [in English]: Only once during the trial did someone from the gallery cry out:

"You, the Jewish leadership, you saved yourselves.

You ran away."

NARRATOR: 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.

RONI: 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 [in German]

NARRATOR [in English]: 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.

LAWRENCE: 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.

NARRATOR: 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 célèbre

in the first years of the State of Israel,

because it raised the question of dealing with the devil.

SUZANNE [in Hebrew]

[in English] We haven't yet heard, have we,

what happened to these Jews from Hungary?

NARRATOR: 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 [in Hebrew]

[in English] 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.

NARRATOR: 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. -[gunfire]

[ambulance in a distance]

Ten days later, he passed away.

[in Hebrew]

NARRATOR [in English]: 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 [in German]

NARRATOR [in English]: 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.

YUVAL: 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.

NARRATOR: 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 [in Hebrew]

NARRATOR [in English]: 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.

[gunshot]

NARRATOR: 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.

[tape whirring]

While the tapes are never heard during the trial,

Eichmann clearly says that Kasztner confronted him

regarding the fate of his fellow Jews.

ADOLF [in German]

BETTINA [in English]: 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.

NARRATOR: The disqualification of the Sassen transcripts

is a victory for the defense

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

TIMOTHY: 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.

NARRATOR: 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.

[in Hebrew]

Avraham Aviel.

DEBORAH [in English]: 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.

[in Hebrew]

NARRATOR [in English]: 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.

HANNA: 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.

[in Hebrew]

NARRATOR [in English]: 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.

[in Hebrew]

HANNA [in English]: In retrospect, Hausner was right.

In the collective memory,

the one testimony that was imprinted forcefully

was that testimony of Ka-Tsetnik.

ZVI [in Hebrew]

NARRATOR [in English]: Miki Goldman serves

as Hausner's assistant during the trial.

One survivor's testimony will stick with him forever.

[in German]

[gavel thuds]

DEBORAH [in English]: 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.

[in German]

GIDEON [in English] 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 [in German]

NARRATOR [in English]: At the conclusion of the witnesses' testimony,

Hausner confronts Eichmann

with irrefutable evidence

of the atrocities committed by the Nazis.

ALAN: 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 [in German]

NARRATOR [in English]: 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.

DEBORAH: 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

[stutters] the order from Himmler

to stop the deportations.

And still, there was this one transport

that Eichmann sent against Himmler's order to Auschwitz.

[chattering]

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.

[chattering]

GIDEON: 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.

HANNA: 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.

[in German]

NARRATOR [in English]: 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.

THEKLA: We got the tapes in 1999

from a newspaper in Switzerland.

We knew that this newspaper

bought these tapes from the family of Eichmann.

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

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

NARRATOR: 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 [in German]

[tape whirring]

TIMOTHY [in English]: 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,

[stutters] 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.

[in German]

GABRIEL [in German]

[in Hebrew]

MICHAEL [in German]

TAMI [in German]

[closing theme music playing]