SCREENING AND DISCUSSION
“Nothing annoys me more than a person who later denies the things he has done.” – Adolf Eichmann
On April 11, 1961, Adolf Eichmann stepped into a glass box in a Jerusalem courtroom to face trial as the architect of the Holocaust. Having been kidnapped by the Mossad in Argentina a year earlier, he presented himself as an almost pathetic figure. Balding, with thick tortoiseshell glasses, an oversize boxy suit draping his body, he almost passively pleaded not guilty, painting himself as little more than a dutiful bureaucrat following the rules of the Nazi state, a mere cog in a killing machine rather than a mass murderer.
Attending the proceedings for The New Yorker, Hannah Arendt was so convinced by Eichmann’s performance that she described him with the now overused phrase “the banality of evil.”
But a newly discovered audio interview with Eichmann from 1957 shows just how misguided Arendt was: Eichmann's evil was clever, calculated and heartless. Sitting in his living room, drinking wine and smoking cigarettes during an interview with the Dutch Nazi journalist Willem Sassen, he cockily bragged, “Every fiber in me resists that we did something wrong. I must tell you honestly, had we killed 10.3 million Jews, then I would be satisfied and say, good, we have exterminated an enemy . . ."
Sixty-one years after Eichmann’s execution, the recordings of that interview have been interspersed with enactments of the gatherings around their taping, with archival footage and interviews with surviving participants at the trial for a new streaming series The Devil’s Confession: The Lost Eichmann Tapes, distributed by Menemsha Films.
Please join us for the New York premiere screening of this compelling series and a discussion with:
Yariv Mozer, the film’s director
Elie Honig, Legal Analyst, CNN and award-winning documentary filmmaker
Gavriel Rosenfeld, President of the Center for Jewish History in New York and Professor of History at Fairfield University
Moderated by Richard Salomon, VP, Executive Committee, Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center
In sponsorship with the Illinois Holocaust Museum