According to History, Eichmann had been captured by United States forces after World War II, but in 1946 he escaped from the prison camp where he was being held, which meant that Eichmann was not one of the Nazis put on trial before the Nuremberg International War Crimes Tribunal. After his escape, Eichmann traveled to the Middle East using a false identity, and by 1950 he surfaced in Argentina, the same part of the world to which other prominent Nazis had fled.
In 1957, Eichmann sat down with Dutch Nazi journalist Willem Sassen for a series of interviews. These interviews took place in Buenos Aires. According to The Daily Mail, there were around 70 hours of interviews, but only around 15 hours still exist today, as Sassen eventually taped over the rest of the interviews. The tapes were locked away until a documentary team was given access to them. They form the basis for the Israeli documentary film “The Devil’s Confession: The Lost Eichmann Tapes.” (The trailer is on YouTube.)
The same year that Eichmann was being interviewed by Sassen, a German prosecutor secretly informed the Mossad — Israel’s intelligence service — of Eichmann’s whereabouts. In 1960, Mossad agents kidnapped Eichmann, knowing that the odds of Argentina agreeing to extradite him were slim. They took him back to Israel, which led to his trial and execution.
