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In-Person & Virtual Event
Thursday, April 20 |
6:30 PM | Free
In sponsorship with:
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“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,
archival footage and interviews with surviving participants at the trial for
a new streaming series The
Devil’s Confession: The Lost Eichmann Tapes.
Please join us for a screening of this compelling series and a discussion
with:
Yariz 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, Professor of History and Director of the Judaic
Studies Program at Fairfield University
Moderated by Richard
Salomon, VP,
Executive Committee, Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center
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