All language subtitles for The Lost Eichmann Tapes.s01e01.The Hunt

This programme contains scenes
which some viewers may find
disturbing from the start

Eichmann came once a week.

The family had to withdraw,
you know, from the living room, etc,

because they were going to
have this conversation.

We would open the door
and we would listen.

DISTANT CONVERSATION

My father recorded all that stuff.

FLY BUZZES

THEY LAUGH

My sister and I detested the figure.

The persona was so... weird.

Trouble. Always. Darkness.

Something about him that...

The child could detect something
very negative, the child in me.

Nazis have always denied
their role in the Holocaust.

After the war, many fled Europe,

including the architect
of the Final Solution...

..Adolf Eichmann.

One of the last Nazi fugitives
to arrive in Argentina,

Eichmann records
a series of interviews

with Nazi journalist Willem Sassen,

admitting to his role
in the Holocaust,

but after his capture by Israel,

Eichmann denies everything...

..hoping the tapes will never be
heard during his trial in Jerusalem.

After years of
mysterious disappearance,

the tapes are rediscovered.

Securing full access to
the recordings for the first time,

The Devil's Confession reveals
Eichmann detailing his crimes.

NEWS REPORTER: Well, I'm standing
in front of the courtroom

where Eichmann is
going to face his judges,

and as you see, there are a lot of
people already very interested.

People are coming and
waiting outside this courtroom.

Eichmann is in one of the rooms
on the fourth floor, we think,

and as you see, it's very heavily
guarded, the building.

I don't think there've ever been
so many correspondents

and writers and observers
on any story since the war,

not even the Nuremberg Trial.

This trial was
of critical importance.

It was the beginning of the process
of the emergence of the Holocaust

from the shadows of history.

Gideon Hausner was
a commercial lawyer.

He was chosen to be
Attorney General,

he comes into office,

and he is relentless
to getting this story out.

Eichmann in many ways
was the chief logistical officer

overseeing deportations
of Jewish persons,

largely from Western Europe,
to killing centres.

He does this with full awareness
that the result of deporting

is that they're going to be killed.

Eichmann refused to accept
any guilt on himself.

He was a civil servant.

The laws of Germany are as they are,

and he tried to
detach himself completely

from the ideological dimension.

Eichmann continually insisted that
he was simply following orders.

Eichmann's appearance in court
and the crimes attributed to him

catch the attention of
both the public and the press.

So who is the real Eichmann?

Is he simply a soldier
obeying orders,

as he presents himself
and the Israeli court?

Or is he the fervent Nazi
that Hausner depicts?

The missing evidence from
four years earlier in Buenos Aires,

as he boasts to his fellow Nazis,
reveals the truth.

Mm.

Mm.

Mm.

In the recordings,

Eichmann criticises other Nazis
captured by the Allies

who deny responsibility
for their actions.

To understand Eichmann's rationale

for participating
in these conversations,

it is necessary to examine
his character and life after 1945.

Unable to disappear in Germany,

Eichmann secures
forged identity papers

with plans to escape the country,
but is caught by the Allies.

Eichmann was arrested
by the Americans

and he was held
in a prisoner of war camp.

The Americans
had about three million

Nazis prisoners at that time,

so Eichmann was just one more
among those many million.

He managed to forge an ID
in the name of Otto Eckmann

while he was being held
by the Americans,

so he was fairly safe
at that moment.

No-one was looking for him

until his name came up
in the Nuremberg trials.

Attention!

NEWSREEL: Judges from Britain,
America, Russia

and France assemble
in Nuremberg's courthouse.

The Nuremberg trial -

that is, the trial of the major
Nazi war criminals that took place

between 1945 and 1946 -

this was the first international
criminal trial in human history

dealing with spectacular crimes.

In the Nuremberg trials,
his name was mentioned.

That appeared in the newspapers
the next day.

The next day, he was gone.

He escaped from the American
prisoner of war camp.

Being held by the Americans
was much better than being held

by the Russians, so it was not
difficult to escape

from the American
prisoner of war camp.

Many Nazis did.

In Argentina, Eichmann
tells Sassen the story of

the strange escape route
he used to avoid capture.

Eichmann had thought that
if enough time went by,

his name would be forgotten

and he would be able to live
a normal life in Germany.

The genocide of the Jewish people
continues to preoccupy the world,

even in Germany,

where the public is slowly realising
the magnitude of the Nazis' crimes.

WOMAN SOBS

Eichmann looks for
a new hiding place

and decides to leave his family
behind to take advantage of

the Nazis' well-known escape route
to Argentina.

He gets a job as an assistant to
an engineering crew in the Andes.

His life appears
to be back on track.

But at some point, his luck seems
to have taken a turn for the worse,

and he was left without
any real job, and he started...

He had a laundry firm,
he worked in a rabbit farm,

until, towards the end, he managed
to work for a real company again,

which was for Mercedes-Benz.

Eichmann met Sassen
at the ABC restaurant.

It was a German community restaurant
in downtown Buenos Aires.

The waiters clicked their heels,
like in military fashion,

and saluted the Nazis
who went for lunch there.

Now, the question is,
who is Willem Sassen?

And Willem Sassen,
he's an absolutely Hollywood figure,

a Dutch journalist
at the time of the war.

Goebbels, the Nazi minister
of propaganda,

sent him to the Russian front,

where Willem Sassen
sent radio reports.

After the war, Willem Sassen
was arrested in Holland,

for treason, of course,
because he'd become an SS.

He managed to escape to Buenos Aires
on this tiny ship

and set himself up as a journalist
and as a publisher in Argentina,

publishing books for other Nazis
who lived here.

The men meet occasionally
until the mid-1950s,

when a series of
ground-breaking books are published,

disclosing the original documents,

certificates and minutes
that catalogued the Holocaust.

Sassen locates copies of the books
and has them sent to Argentina.

Sassen came up with this crazy idea
that he would interview

the mastermind of the Holocaust,
and in Sassen's mind,

the idea was that
Eichmann would prove

that Hitler had nothing to do with
the extermination of the Jews.

Unfortunately for Sassen
and his friends,

Eichmann insisted that
of course Hitler knew!

HE CHUCKLES

This was kind of a public event
where other Nazis went to -

very high-ranking Nazis.

There's 67 reels of tape.

A lot of the tapes were taped over.

At the time, when Sassen was
conducting these interviews,

these audiotapes
were somewhat expensive.

RECORDED SPEECH,
TYPEWRITER KEYS CLACK

TYPEWRITER BELL DINGS

TYPING CONTINUES

This was the first time
anyone had taken an interest in him,

in Eichmann -
"Tell me what you did."

He is very happy anyone even
wants to listen, so he blossoms,

he flourishes. He suddenly
returns to his good old days,

the most beautiful time in his life,
as he himself defined it,

and thereafter,
he loses all the restrictions

he imposed on himself,
and he went with it.

It is just striking that Sassen,
for whatever reason...

..decided to continue
taping Eichmann

even once he understood that
Eichmann was not about to deny...

..the nature of the Holocaust
and his role in it.

In the recordings,
Eichmann describes his work

during the war, freely answering
the questions asked by Sassen.

Four years later,
in the Israeli court,

he sounds like a different man.

I was aware that
he is following the old line

of many other Nazi criminals

who didn't have the courage
to stand up in court

and admit their guilt.

So in order somehow to minimise
the enormousness of their deed,

they were trying by small lies

to hide at least part of
the most hideous deeds.

You see, actually,
I was aware all the time

that there were two trials
going on -

one in Jerusalem,
where we were, trying Eichmann,

and the other
in the world's public opinion,

with the proceedings televised
throughout the world.

I was well aware of this,

that every word I say,
every movement I make,

is recorded and commentated upon
the next day in very many countries.

In the Eichmann trial,

I was working as assistant
to the television director.

The trial had to be
shown to the world.

The trouble was, there was
no television in Israel.

That was the crazy thing.

So they had brought over
a team from London

and they decided to film the trial
with four cameras

that then went out
all over the world.

Now, remember, we're talking 1961,

and there was very, very little
information out at that stage,

so the purpose of the trial
was to show the world,

"Look, six million Jews died.
This is how it happened."

During the actual filming
of the trial...

Well, this was the main question -
who is the real Adolf Eichmann?

What is he feeling?

Can we see anything in his face?

You know, I keep coming in
for a close-up on him

to see what he's feeling.

In practice, he showed nothing.

Showing no feelings at all.

The speculation about Eichmann's
character continues to this day.

Is he a committed Nazi or a simple
bureaucrat carrying out orders?

Among the many journalists
who cover the trial

is the famous writer and
Holocaust survivor Hannah Arendt.

Arendt expects to find a killer...

..but sees a man whose appearance
does not match

the crimes attributed to him.

She describes the moral gap
between his bureaucratic demeanour

and the atrocities he committed with
the term "the banality of evil".

I suppose there's a very interesting
question we can ask,

which is whether Hannah Arendt
would have changed her tune

if she had been able
to hear those Sassen tapes.

On the tapes, Eichmann confirms
his strong belief in the Nazi cause.

He admits he was
not only a bureaucrat,

but also an idealist.

This was not done in hiding,
in a secret cave

high up in the Andes or
hidden away in the Amazonian jungle.

This was done
in suburban Buenos Aires,

in the full view of
all their neighbours.

In the tapes, you can hear Sassen's
daughter playing in the background.

YOUNG GIRL SINGS

My sister and I were always singing.
You know how that is...

..with children.

My mother would say,
"Stop that singing!"

It was my weapon.

I used singing as a weapon,

because he interrupted
our fun life, you know, with...

My father was really
a lot of fun as a father.

But when the meetings happened,

my father was
extracting information.

YOUNG SASKIA SINGS

He was a journalist,
and he wanted to get at the story.

INTERVIEWER: How well
did you know him?

Who? Eichmann.

I think I knew him completely.

What did you make of him?

Er... A tragical figure.

A tragical figure.
Because he was really not...

It was not his business, in reality.

He would have liked to be
a common soldier on the front.

That was his dream.

As time goes by,
Eichmann's confidence increases,

and he brings his family
to join him in Argentina.

German parents in Argentina
came to the embassy

to register their children for their
German citizenship, German passport,

and his children were registered
under the name "Eichmann".

This myth that grew up
that nobody knew he was there...

The German expats who were
loyal Nazis knew he was there.

He met with them, he talked to them.

And the Argentine police,
they knew he was there.

The thing that was true is that
the people who knew he was there

did not care enough
to go and get him.

NEWSREEL: Fritz Bauer survived
Hitler's death camps

and is obsessed...

Even though the Allies stopped
searching for Nazi fugitives,

individuals like
the German Jewish lawyer Fritz Bauer

continue to try to bring
escaped criminals to justice,

using information they receive
from around the world.

If not for private individuals,

Adolf Eichmann never would have been
captured in Buenos Aires -

first and foremost, Lothar Hermann,

a Holocaust survivor who happened
to be Adolf Eichmann's neighbour.

Lothar Hermann, who was
this survivor who came to Argentina,

had a daughter called Silvia,

and his daughter made friends with
one of the Eichmann kids.

It was not unusual for German Jews

to make friends with
German Nazi families,

because in the end,
they were all Germans in Argentina.

Silvia knew that her friend
was called Eichmann.

And Lothar Hermann, I can't say
he was reading the newspaper,

because he was blind, but I think
he was having the newspaper

read to him by his daughter,
and Eichmann's name appeared,

and of course,
Lothar Hermann realised,

"That must be the father
of your friend."

So Lothar Hermann went
and immediately wrote

to Bauer in Germany,
saying that it's definitely him.

Bauer gave the information to
the Israelis and nothing happened.

One has to remember that
this is the late '50s,

and Israel is barely
a third world country at that time.

I think the feeling was that,

"We have current enemies
in the Arab lands, etc.

"Should we fight
our current enemies,

"who stand possibly
to destroy us now,

"or should we go to settle
scores from before?"

Following a threat from Bauer
to make his information public,

Ben-Gurion, Israel's first
Prime Minister,

agrees to launch a secret mission
to grab Eichmann.

He walked on the street,
Garibaldi Street,

about 50 metres from his home.

And I walked on the other side.

We looked at each other,
I saw fear in his eyes,

and I said, "Uno momentito..."
I even didn't finish the question

and he retreated.

I jumped on him,
fell into a ditch there.

He then started howling
and screaming and shouting.

The three of them dragged him,
still howling, into the car.

And the race was up.

During his interrogation
by the Israeli police,

Eichmann claims that he was
only following orders.

But in Sassen's living room,

Eichmann is aware that his words
could incriminate him,

so he asks that the recordings
never be heard during his lifetime.

When Eichmann was kidnapped,
suddenly Sassen realised,

"Here I have a chance to make
a large amount of money

"by selling this.

"And I'll finally be able to make
some money out of this project

"that I spent so much time on."

And at the same time, he realised,

"If I do that, the other Nazis
are going to kill me,"

cos he's being the worst traitor
of all.

In the end,
the opportunist won the battle

over the more cautious person
inside him,

and he sold the story to
Life Magazine in the United States.

Four months before the trial,

Life Magazine publishes
sections of the recordings.

The confessions shock the world.

Never before had a Nazi officer
admitted publicly

that the Holocaust was meticulously
planned and carried out.

The publication of the Life Magazine
interview was an astonishing moment

in the international community,
to have Eichmann's words suddenly,

you know, splashed
in front of Life Magazine,

which at the time was, you know,

one of the crucial magazines
in the United States

and obviously also had kind of
a world audience as well.

Life meant that
this is important to America.

It shocked people. For many Jews,

it meant the world was,
for the first time, really,

taking notice of what had happened.

Suddenly, the world was looking at
the tragedy that had destroyed

one out of every three Jews alive
on the face of the earth.

Americans realised that this man who
was being tried is really a monster.

The article says there's tapes of
this man talking about what he did,

telling the stories of what he did,
describing what he did.

Everyone at least who has the least
bit of interest in this topic,

"Where are these tapes?"

When Hausner read this interview,
he immediately had to think,

"Oh, my God, there's a whole
wealth of information out there

"that I don't yet have access to,
and how do I get my hands on it?"

Sassen, he bought himself
a fantastic car

with the money he made.
He bought a Mercedes-Benz.

The Nazis who were
still around in Argentina,

they moved against my father -

because my father betrayed,
in their eyes.

When the Eichmann story
blows into the public, I was 13.

My mother decides to leave.
She couldn't take it.

And I suddenly was
in charge of the household at 13.

And my sister was simply terrified.

Suddenly, there were, like,
three or five people in my house

with big guns,
and I don't know what they were,

Nazi affiliates, and...

SEVERAL MEN SHOUTING AT ONCE

I wasn't afraid, but it was another
kind of experience that I had.

It was more like...closer to horror
than to fear.

Among the intruders
are the sons of Adolf Eichmann.

They demand to know why Sassen
betrayed their father

and the location of the recordings.

Sassen denies
knowing their whereabouts.

With so many people
seeking the tapes,

Sassen knows he needs
a safe hiding place

and gives them to an old ally
before fleeing to Paraguay.

There was a former Luftwaffe officer
who also escaped to Argentina

after the war, this man
called Dieter Menge.

Maybe he made a deal with Sassen

to sell the tapes to somebody
and they split the money.

You have to bear in mind, these are
Nazi adventurers, ex-SS men.

These were people who had
no problem with lying

and they had no problem
with lying to each other.

Menge takes no risks

and buries the tapes on his property
outside Buenos Aires.

Eichmann's taped recollections
were self-incriminating,

and if accepted at the trial,

Eichmann admitted the charges
against him.

Unable to obtain the damning
evidence on the tapes,

Attorney General Hausner
has to rely on the excerpts

published in Life Magazine.

You could say it simplifies
some of the work of the prosecution,

in that it complicates
any kind of defence

that Eichmann is going to mount,

because it sounds as if he is now
acknowledging his participation

in this genocide,

and doing so without
the remotest expression of regret.

Dr Robert Servatius is chosen
by the family to defend Eichmann,

and in the interest of
holding a fair trial,

the Israeli government
agrees to pay his salary.

He's a well-known lawyer in Germany
after defending Nazi war criminals

at the Nuremberg trials.

HE SPEAKS IN GERMAN

Without the tapes,
the court's decision

on whether or not to admit
the Life Magazine article

into evidence will be crucial
to proving Eichmann's guilt.

Sassen was not about to cooperate
with the Israelis.

The contract that he signed
with Life Magazine

permitted Life to supply
some of the materials

to some other media organisations,

but specifically barred
Life Magazine

from sharing anything
with the Israelis.

So it raises the question of,

"How do you get hold of
this material?"

This is a document showing that the
assistant editor of Life Magazine

gave the CIA an advance copy of the
text of their article on Eichmann.

What interests Americans
is the propaganda value

of what Eichmann is saying
in Life Magazine.

They were worried about
how the East Germans

and the Soviets would use this.

It wasn't simply
the trial of the century.

It was the trial of the century
at the height of the Cold War.

The East Germans saw this
as an opportunity

to remind the world that,
"Yeah, there's only one Eichmann,

"but that doesn't mean
there's only one bad Nazi left

"who deserves justice," and some of
them worked for Konrad Adenauer.

Konrad Adenauer is the first
Chancellor of West Germany

after World War II and is charged
with leading his country

from the post-war chaos
into the modern era.

The person with perhaps
the most to lose

if the tapes are heard
during Eichmann's trial

is Adenauer's right-hand man
Hans Globke,

who oversaw the plan
for the enforcement of

the Nuremberg Race Laws,
later carried out by Eichmann.

And we know that
as a lawyer-bureaucrat

in the Nazi system,
he helped draft the Nuremberg Laws,

which established the legal basis

for discrimination
against German Jews.

Eichmann's connections to Globke
and other former Nazi officials

in the new West German government
could be exposed

if Sassen's recordings
are played in court.

Hausner knows that this is
against the interests

of the West German government
and his own government.

Despite strong opposition,

protests and riots led by
Holocaust survivors,

Prime Minister Ben-Gurion
is negotiating with West Germany

to support Israel.

The story of the Eichmann affair
from the Israeli perspective

is a nostalgic, heroic,
a very romantic story -

how David demanded justice from
the already defeated Goliath.

But this is nothing
but shadow-boxing,

a smokescreen that concealed
the true story,

and the true story is
the Israeli-German nuclear project.

Once a decision is made that Israel
will launch a nuclear project,

there are things
that have to be done.

It demands certain technology,
certain materials,

and first and foremost,
a lot, a lot of money,

money that the newly established
state of Israel doesn't have.

Very quickly, David Ben-Gurion
and Shimon Peres,

his political partner,

realise that the way to continue
with the nuclear project

is by partnering with
De Gaulle's France

and Adenauer's Germany.

Adenauer and Strauss,
his Defence Minister,

put a gun on the table, so to say -

"You want us to continue
funding the nuclear project,

"so do not mention the name
Hans Globke at the trial."

Ben-Gurion was well aware
of Globke's part

in phrasing the Nuremberg Laws,

and yet he has to take care of the
state he's responsible for, Israel.

Whilst aware of the pressure
Ben-Gurion is under,

Hausner continues
to assert his independence

but also make some concessions.

A couple of days before the trial,

Hausner gives Ben-Gurion
the text of his opening speech.

And Ben-Gurion makes
very few comments about it,

but just the only thing
he asks is that

wherever Hausner refers to Germany,
he refer to Nazi Germany.

Ben-Gurion knew Israel needed arms,

Israel needed financial support
of Germany.

He may have hated doing it,
but he was a practical man.

As the Berlin Wall is being built
and sides taken in the Cold War,

fears continue to grow that
the vital evidence

in the Eichmann recordings
will undermine national interests.

Gideon Hausner,
Israel's Attorney General,

focuses on obtaining the transcripts
used by the Life Magazine article,

the smoking gun that will prove
Eichmann's guilt to the world.