In the summer of 1961, Adolf Eichmann, the former vacuum-cleaner salesman who rose through Nazi ranks to oversee the Third Reich's programme of mass killing of Jews, sat down in his Israeli prison cell to write his memoirs. Spread over more than 1,000 pages of orderly handwritten German text, they were designed to curry favour with the Israeli court which would, the following June, sentence him to be hanged.
Eichmann insisted he was not personally anti-Semitic, described the Holocaust as the greatest crime in history, and attempted to portray himself as an unwilling accomplice, a cog in the mighty Nazi wheel, "a playball of circumstances".
In the process of this effort at self-exculpation, however, Eichmann also described elements of the Nazi killing machine in clearheaded, personal detail. And it is because of those firsthand accounts of the Holocaust, as set down by the man who personally oversaw the transportation of European Jews to the concentration camps, that the memoirs have now taken on a new significance.
Almost 40 years after Israel consigned the Eichmann memoirs to its state archive, they were made available to the public yesterday. Most importantly, however, they were also made available to the defence team in a libel action being fought in London's Royal Courts of Justice, where Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt is being sued by the maverick British historian David Irving because she characterised him as a Holocaust denier in a 1994 book, Denying the Holocaust: the Growing Assault on Truth and Memory.
Mr Irving has in the past described the Auschwitz concentration camp as a kind of "Disneyland", insisting there were no Nazi "factories of death" for the mass killing of Jews. He claims that, far from six million dying, no more than a million Jews were killed in the war. With the release of the Eichmann memoirs, Mr Irving will be doing battle in court with the bureaucrat who ensured those factories of death were supplied with their helpless victims.
In his manuscript, which he titled "False Gods", for example, Eichmann recalls his own visit to Auschwitz in 1942 and how the camp commander described a process of killing Jews using sulphuric acid. "Round cotton wool filters were soaked with this poison and thrown into the rooms where the Jews were assembled. The poison was instantly fatal. He burned the corpses on an iron grill in the open air. He led me to a shallow ditch where a large number of corpses had just been burned."
In detailing such scenes, and indeed throughout the memoirs, Eichmann professes his own discomfort but consistently avoids admitting any personal responsibility for Nazi crimes.
As the Israeli state archivist, Mr Evyatar Friesel, noted yesterday, Eichmann gave an interview to a Dutch journalist years before Israeli secret agents captured him in Argentina in which his tone was utterly different. "In that interview," Mr Friesel said, "he spoke of how much he'd enjoyed destroying Jews, and what a pity it was that he hadn't destroyed them all. Of course (in those prison memoirs), he's lying."
Lying about his own role. But not about elements of the Nazi killing machine.