The Eichmann and Sassen interview
In 1957 Adolf Eichmann taped months of conversations in Buenos Aires with Willem Sassen. The typed transcript runs to 714 sheets, kept at Yad Vashem as four files, 85 to 88. Each sheet is shown beside its English, with the German a click away. Every sheet's English was verified against the scan. Questions are left unnamed unless the sheet or the tape gives the speaker. Check the scan before quoting.
Where this comes from
- Holding
- Yad Vashem Archives, Jacob Robinson Collection O.65, files 85 to 88
- Scan pages
- 714 across 4 archival files
- Reviewed English
- 714 of 714 scans, with English and speaker assignments verified against the scan
- Speaker turns in the word-for-word layer
- 5880 turns on 705 sheets; 8 sheets with words but no confirmed speaker; 1 sheet without a transcription
- Flagged passages
- 1216 on all four files, grouped by knowledge, orders, office, intent, numbers, and denial. These groups can be wrong. They stay hidden until you turn them on.
How this transcript was made and what a court made of it
The Sassen typescript was made from taped conversations in Buenos Aires (p. 249). Three typists using three typewriters produced it, and Willem Sassen told them they could shorten faulty or overlong sentences but weren't to change the words (pp. 248 to 249).
Stangneth compared surviving tapes with the sheets and found a direct transcription, with cuts and typist intrusions but no deliberate falsification (p. 249). Eichmann read most of the typescript in Argentina and added changes and comments through the final tape; the Israel copy had his handwritten changes for tapes 6, 7, 9 through 26, 31 through 39, and 48 through 67 (pp. 249 and 539).
On June 12, 1961, the prosecution and defense agreed that only pages Eichmann had changed or written by hand could be used. The 796-page typescript was reduced to marginal notes on 83 pages plus another 83 handwritten pages, and the closing address couldn't be quoted (p. 394).
In 1960 Life ran a few extracts from the interview typescript and small parts of the handwritten pages under the headline “Eichmann Tells His Own Damning Story” (p. 382). The magazine's copy had 600 transcript pages and a few copied pages of handwriting, not the complete set (p. 539).
The Israel copy stopped with the address on tape 67 (p. 393). On tape 68, after he read Poliakov, Eichmann backed away from the form of that address; tape 68 wasn't in the copy shown here (pp. 307 to 308).
A 1961 police index failed to separate speakers and treated Alvensleben's words on tape 56 as Eichmann's. The error passed into the 1963 Munich indictment of Karl Wolff (pp. 398 to 399).
Browse by topic 54 sections
The four files
Each file has a separate page with the scan, German transcription and English translation side by side: file 85, file 86, file 87, file 88.
People and words 145 entries
Hover, focus, or tap an underlined word in Reviewed English for a short explanation. The full glossary adds background, the way the speakers use each item, scan passages, related entries, and references.
Open the full glossary- Party, state, and military 11
- SS and police 16
- Offices and codes 11
- Ranks and titles 21
- People and initials 16
- Places and occupied regions 13
- Camps and ghettos 14
- Laws, plans, and events 8
- Persecution and deportation 17
- Movements and foreign bodies 9
- Money, equipment, and technical short forms 7
- Unsettled readings 2