Secret Eichmann Recordings Capture an Evil Anything but Banal

“If we had killed 10.3 million Jews I would say with satisfaction, ‘Good, we destroyed an enemy.’ Then we would have fulfilled our mission. And thus, to my regret, it was not to be.”An Obersturmbannführer of the Third Reich, the chief of the Gestapo’s Jewish Division, and an architect of the Final Solution, Adolf Eichmann said those words. The philosopher Hannah Arendt, who while she covered Eichmann’s trial coined the phrase “banality of evil” with Eichmann as its archetype, never heard them. That phrase was so central as to migrate to the title of her book, “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.” Her observation, from 1963, that “the man in the glass booth was nicht einmal unheimlich — not even sinister,” has come to stand for the notion that evil is often not flamboyant or demonic, but prosaic and bureaucratic. While in Jerusalem for his trial on behalf of the New Yorker, Arendt found Eichmann “neither perverted nor sadistic,” but rather “terrifyingly normal.” She would later write of him that “the deeds were monstrous, but the doer — at least the very effective one now on trial — was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous.”Now, recordings of Eichmann himself that have freshly come to light offer a rebuttal to the diagnosis of banality from the man who inspired it. A new film, “The Devil’s Confession: The Lost Eichmann Tapes,” directed by Yariv Mozer, had its premiere at the Docaviv International Film Festival in May, and dubs Eichmann’s voice over actors to bring to life a man responsible for so much death. The film is a vehicle for recorded conversations between Eichmann and a Dutch journalist and Nazi collaborator, Willem Sassen. The year is 1957 and the place is Argentina, where Eichmann fled after the war and lived under an assumed name, Ricardo Klement. He was captured by the Mossad in 1960 and brought to Jerusalem for trial and execution.Before he faced justice at the hands of the young Jewish state, Eichmann reflected on the war. He told Sassen, “I regret nothing. I have no desire to say that we did something wrong,” before going on to express regret for not completing the work of extermination. Over 70 hours, Eichmann and Sassen discussed the war against the Jews with such startling bluntness that another Nazi, gathered around Eichmann and Sessen, remarked, “It can’t be done, it can’t be.” Eichmann confessed, “It is a difficult thing to say and I know I will be judged for it, but this is the truth.” He told Sassen not to share the recordings until after his death. Haaretz reported that portions of the contents of the tapes were published in a 1964 Life magazine article titled, “I Transported Them to the Butcher.”Transcripts of tapes improbably made their way to the lead prosecutor in Eichmann’s trial, Gideon Hauser. However, the court ruled the vast majority of them inadmissible as evidence, and Eichmann denied their authenticity. To this day, he is the only person to receive capital punishment in Israel. For years, the originals were believed lost, but at the end of the last century a portion of them was obtained by a German archive. Mr. Mozer mounted an extensive effort to obtain the tapes, and now Eichmann’s voice, in all of its macabre banality, once again provides an audio for atrocity.

Secret Eichmann Recordings Capture an Evil Anything but Banal

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