Recording the Eichmann interviews
Witness History
BBC
4.5 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 1 June 2026
⏱️ 11 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In the 1950s, Dutch journalist Willem Sassen recorded hours of interview with the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann about his involvement in the Holocaust, before his capture in Argentina by Israeli agents.
Willem's daughter Saskia Sassen tells Louise Hidalgo about the tapes, her memories of their secret visitor and the night the Israelis snatched Eichmann off the streets of Buenos Aires.
This programme was first broadcast in 2015.
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(Photo: Nazi war criminal Adolph Eichmann during his trial. Credit: GPO via Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, music, radio podcasts. |
| 0:07.2 | Things just swirling around my head. |
| 0:09.6 | Am I really the product of this? |
| 0:12.1 | Astonishing secrets uncovered by at-home DNA tests. |
| 0:17.0 | Little did I know what more was to come. |
| 0:19.5 | I'm Jenny Clemen, and in the new series of The Gift, we'll hear more stories emerging out of the ever-expanding global DNA database. They did know that I was different. You had kids together. Yeah. Then you met. Then we met. The Gift. Listen on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:43.6 | Hello and welcome to witness history. |
| 0:46.3 | This is the podcast that looks back at a key moment in history that's helped to shape our world. |
| 0:51.4 | Episodes come out every weekday and are just nine minutes long. Make sure you |
| 0:55.9 | never miss an episode by hitting subscribe and turning on your push notifications. Louise Hidalgo is taking |
| 1:02.5 | you back to June 1960 when Argentina and Israel were at loggerheads over the kidnap of one of the |
| 1:09.8 | most wanted war criminals of the Second World War, |
| 1:13.0 | a man who'd been at the centre of the Nazi's extermination of the Jews, Adolf Eichmann. |
| 1:19.3 | Throughout the 1950s, Adolf Eichmann had been living in Argentina under an assumed name |
| 1:24.2 | when Israeli agents found and abducted him and smuggled him to Israel. |
| 1:28.9 | Argentina was outraged of what it saw as a violation of its sovereignty, but Israel was triumphant. |
| 1:38.8 | The man who'd been called the face of the Holocaust would stand trial in Israel. |
| 1:47.5 | The Israeli Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, told an astonished world. |
| 1:56.6 | Eichmann had been walking home from work in Buenos Aires when a small team of agents from the Israeli Secret Service Mossad |
| 2:03.6 | snatched him off the street and bundled him into a car. |
| 2:06.6 | It would be 12 days before Eichmann's family and associates in Argentina |
| 2:10.6 | knew what had happened to him. |
... |
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