The Devil’s Confession: The Lost Eichmann Tapes

with Filmmaker Yariv Mozer

Hannah Arendt’s 1963 book, “The Banality of Evil,” is actually wrong. It portrayed the lie Eichmann told when he was on trial. He said that he was “just following orders.” Arendt got conned. Eichmann was a true believer in Hitler’s final solution and a committed Anti-Semite. Reality isn’t black and white, simple to understand, or a straightforward frame of “us versus them.” We often don’t have a robust picture of all the different interests, personalities, or backstories until much later, as facts are repeatedly examined and new evidence emerges. On this episode of Cult Conversations: The Influence Continuum, I spoke with accomplished Israeli filmmaker Yariv Mozer about his award-winning series The Devil’s Confession: The Lost Eichmann Tapes documenting senior Nazi SS officer Adolf Eichmann’s role as architect in the planning and implementation of the Holocaust’s Final Solution. We also discussed Mozer’s latest Paramount+ movie, We Will Dance Again, based on footage, facts, and stories from the October 7th, 2023, Nova Festival, in which Hamas militants suddenly attacked Israel.

In addition to being an Emmy Award winner for Outstanding Current Affairs Documentary and Television Academy Honors Winner in multiple categories, Mozer is a teacher at Tel Aviv University Tisch School of Film and Television and a Board Member of the Israeli Academy of Film and Television. He graduated with distinction from Tel Aviv University in 2004. He is a third-generation descendant of Holocaust survivors from his mother’s family, which he also noted as being an essential aspect of his story and identity.

Taped Interviews of Adolf Eichmann

“I’m always looking at my documentaries as seeking to deal with something connected to my identity. And my identity is multi-layered,” Yariv told me, “So I think that every documentary is connected somehow to the story of my family or the story of myself or my identity.” He said he wanted to understand better the version of Eichmann’s story where he had stated that he was “just following orders” in a 1961 trial. Eichmann was captured in hiding in Argentina and transported to stand trial in Israel, where he defended his actions by stating that the orders were from superiors and he was just following orders. Thus, he claimed that he was distanced from his actions during the Nazi Holocaust.

Yariv sought to study and bring to light a series of tapes in which Eichmann boasted openly and in-depth over a series of hours and hours about his role in the murder of Jews, and his involvement in the architecture of the Final Solution. The audio was made by Dutch collaborator and Nazi journalist Willem Sassen in 1957. The tapes and full transcripts were not included in Eichmann’s trial, and they were judged to be inadmissible, but they have come to light more fully in the succeeding decades. Only a small aspect of the conversation was allowed as evidence in the trial. “So, this is Eichmann, who sounds different from the one on trial in Jerusalem. And this captivated me,” Yariv noted.

We then talked about the consequences of the assumption that someone could be “just following orders” of cult leaders who are malignant narcissists. We discussed the pathological liars, sadistic leaders, those who are paranoid, threatening, and revengeful, such as Hitler. We also talked about Germans who did resist Hitler’s rise in Germany, despite harm to themselves or their families.

We raised the topic of other times in history where people resisted an authoritarian rise despite orders to do otherwise. I reminded listeners, like more than 5 million Americans demonstrated on No Kings Day around the country. Trump had a military parade for his birthday in Washington, D.C. It had a poor turnout of 8,500- 10,000 people, far from the 250,000 he claimed attended. But the military is not supposed to be partisan, but Trump wanted only his supporters there. They’re supposed to follow only the Constitution, right?

Current Stories of Turmoil and War

Yariv and I talked as he was under the continued threat of bombardment in Israel from Iranian missiles. “As we speak, I could get an alert on my phone instructing me to stay at home and be able to run to the shelter in just 10 minutes,” he said. We discussed the political situation in Israel at this time under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and what forces threatened current stability or peace. We discussed the complexity of tensions relating to Palestine and Iran in the region.

As with other countries in turmoil, Israel has an extensive history of complex decisions under extreme faction tensions, confrontations, and harms that it is currently coming to a head. We both agreed that it was impossible to understand what was happening in the region without thoroughly analyzing history and political motivations. Yariv noted that one of the reasons for his work on the film We Will Dance Again was to better understand the massacre of the Nova Music Festival by Hamas militants and the evidence surrounding it. It has just won an Emmy for Outstanding Current Affairs Documentary!

Yariv talked about studying the GoPro camera footage from the attackers’ cameras. “Hamas, which is a terror group, used GoPro cameras and activated them to capture those horrific moments in which they kill and terrorize and brutally capture and kill them, raped and kidnapped and everything, and they captured those moments and placed them on social media until they understood that it harms their image. And this is when they took off all these images,” he explained. Hamas initially posted these images to Facebook and other social media for all the world to see. Later, they began taking them down. However, many were preserved by individuals wanting to secure copies of the evidence of criminality.

Complex Narratives in Dangerous Times

As we were wrapping up our discussion, I invited Yariv to return to another show so that we could further discuss topics surrounding Israel and some of the complex relationships between countries in the region, like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, as well as the United States’ involvement in policy and actions. “We really need to think about a future we all want to be part of, which is planetary survival,” I noted. “Which, of course, the fossil fuel corporations and countries want just to keep power and make money, but they’re destroying our habitat, which is destroying their children and their grandchildren and their legacy out of short-sightedness.” Understanding these complex relationships between countries, hidden histories, financial interests, religious conflicts, and differences is a key to finding and preserving that future.

Resources:

Yariv Mozer Wikipedia

The Devil’s Confession: The Lost Eichmann Tapes

WE WILL DANCE AGAIN: SURVIVING OCTOBER 7TH Paramount Channel. It has just won an Emmy for Outstanding Current Affairs Documentary!

Surviving October 7^th: We will Dance Again BBC