A new drama on the execution of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann is heading to Jerusalem Film Festival, where it will make its Israeli debut this month. The Jerusalem Film Festival will take place July 21-31.
The Hebrew-language feature “June Zero,” which recently premiered in the Czech Republic, is set in the days leading up to Eichmann’s execution in Israel in May 1962. Its storyline follows three individuals — a 13-year-old boy who works at a factory that is commissioned to build a crematorium to incinerate Eichmann’s body; Eichmann’s chief prison guard during his trial, sentencing, and hanging; and a Holocaust survivor who, after assisting in the war criminal’s capture and trial, is undertaking his first trip back to Poland.
The film is directed by New York-based director Jake Paltrow, brother of Oscar-winning actress Gwyneth Paltrow. In online interviews, he has shared how he developed an interest in events surrounding Eichmann’s hanging after learning that authorities secretly commissioned a portable cremation oven to dispose of Eichmann’s body after his execution. The director, who has Polish Jewish ancestry, visited Israel in 2018 to interview people who were involved in building the oven. Israeli filmmaker Tom Shoval joined the film as a co-writer, and pushed for the feature to be shot locally and in Hebrew. It also filmed partially in Ukraine.
On the other hand, audio recordings of the architect of the Holocaust boasting about his role have been made public for the first time. This is all due to the persistence of the makers of another new documentary “The Devil’s Confession” – 60 years after his execution for crimes against humanity.
Eichmann is seen as the engineer of the Holocaust, and the driving force behind what Nazis termed “the Final Solution to the Jewish question.” He fled to Argentina after the war, was captured in May 1960 by Mossad agents, and put on trial in Israel: he was executed in 1962, aged 56
The interviews have finally been made public, with an Israeli documentary team using 15 hours of the audio after archives in Germany finally granted access. The audio recordings form part of the $3 million documentary “The Devil’s Confession,” which has gripped Israeli TV viewers. Many of those watching are relatives of the six million Jews estimated to have been exterminated during the Eichmann-created Holocaust, which killed 11 million in total.
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