FROM THE ARCHIVES:ADOLPH EICHMANN, the logistical manager of the Holocaust, was seized by Israeli agents in Buenos Aires in 1960 and brought to Israel to stand trial the following year. Among the evidence heard was extracts from 77 tape recordings of his interrogation by the Israelis, as summarised in this agency report.
Adolph Eichmann, in a tape-recorded statement played back dramatically in Jerusalem Court yesterday, said that he was ready to atone for his role in the mass killings of Jews. “Perhaps I ought to hang myself in public,” he declared.
The 55-year-old former SS officer sat silently and impassively, thin lips clamped together, as his own muffled voice came wafting across the hushed courtroom, telling “everything I know” about the Nazis’ death-camp programme
He was more emotional when he discussed [on the tapes] the day in the summer of 1941 when he heard of Hitler’s extermination order for the first time. Such a “brutal solution”, he said, had never occurred to him: “I felt as though all the air had been pumped out of my body.”
He claimed he was in “lower ranks” than those who drew up the extermination policy and ordered the killings. But “I cannot claim I had clean hands. I cannot claim mercy, because I am not deserving of it. Perhaps I ought to hang myself in public so that the anti-Semites of the world should have the terrible character of these events emphasised to them. Perhaps I should write a book as a deterrent to all young people and others on Earth not to act [sic] in this way, and then I shall have completed my duty in this world.”
Eichmann talked about his rounds of the death camps, which he said he was “ordered” to visit, and his sleepless nights. At Lublin, Poland, he saw Jews gassed in death vans and “I had to avert my eyes – there was screaming and shrieking inside. I am not a tough man to the extent that such a thing will leave me without a reaction,” he told his interrogators. “If I see a bleeding wound today I cannot look at it. I could not be a physician.”
Then came “the most horrifying sight I ever saw in my life”. This was when the victims of the Lublin gassing were “thrown into the ditch as if they were animals” and their teeth extracted for the gold. “I was washed up . . . it was quite enough for me,” he said.
At Lvov, Russia, he said he did not want to see the executions, but the local Nazi commander told him the place where they were taking place was on his way out of the city. “There was a kind of fountain of blood spurting from the ground. I had never seen such a thing before.”
But at Lvov, Eichmann took time off from the shootings to study the local railway station, which reminded him of the period of the Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz-Joseph and “drove away the terrible thoughts”. He had heard “so many nice things about it”, he said, explaining: “The relatives of my stepmother were of a certain social standing.”
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