Israel releases Eichmann letter

Israel made public yesterday a decades-old handwritten plea from Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann for clemency for his role in the Holocaust, dated just two days before he was executed.

In the request, written after he was brought to Israel in 1960, then tried, convicted and sentenced to death, Eichmann says the Israeli court overstated his role in organising the logistics of Hitler's "Final Solution" which involved the extermination of six million Jews.

President Reuven Rivlin presented the previously unreleased letter, which was written to then president Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, at a ceremony to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day.\

"I was not a responsible leader, and as such do not feel myself guilty," the German wrote. "I am not able to recognise the court's ruling as just, and I ask, Your Honour Mr President, to exercise your right to grant pardons, and order that the death penalty not be carried out."

The letter was signed and dated: "Adolf Eichmann Jerusalem, May 29, 1962." He was hanged around midnight on May 31.

Eichmann, one of the main organisers of the Holocaust, escaped from a prisoner-of-war camp after WWII and fled to Argentina in 1950. He was snatched by Mossad agents in May 1960 and smuggled to Israel.