TV BOSS ORDEAL TO FILM NAZI TRIAL Man who told world about the Holocaust

FOR Adolf Eichmann, architect of Hitler’s Final Solution, it was to be the final reckoning.

For Milton Fruchtman, a U. S. TV producer, the Nazi henchman’s 1961 trial in Jerusalem was the chance to hold up for the first time the Third Reich’s full evil.

Eichmann, it showed, organised the systematic genocide of six million Jews during the Second World War. He had them hunted out, scheduled their trains to the camps then organised the killing.

American Fruchtman cajoled Israel into letting him broadcast the trial, had to use cameras hidden by chickenwire and then endured death threats for doing the job.

Now the remarkable story is to be told in a BBC film, The Eichmann Show, starring Sherlock and The Hobbit star Martin Freeman as the filmmaker.

Martin, 43, has said: “This is where the Holocaust really became the Holocaust.”

The programme will show how Fruchtman, now 88, had a man armed with three grenades and a revolver outside his office during the shoot. Two days into the trial a phone call tried to warn him off.

Fruchtman, who lives in New York, said: “A gruff voice, with a heavy German accent, said: ‘Hello. Are you the head of the recording of the trial.’ I said ‘Yes.’

“The voice said: ‘You must stop now, or we will take action, and it will not be pleasant.’ The voice was cut off.”

He received weekly letters warning of “severe action” if his team continued.

Eichmann had gone on the run after the war but was captured in Buenos Aires, Argentina, by Israeli intelligence and taken to stand trial.

Mercy

The harrowing case over 57 days showed the reality of Nazi death camps.

All the while, day after day, dad of two Fruchtman and his team transmitted pictures of Eichmann’s cold gaze behind bullet-proof glass to 37 countries.

One cameraman who lost his family in the Holocaust passed out hearing the story of a woman on top of a mass grave being repeatedly shot at.

A Polish man gave testimony of a Nazi chasing a woman carrying a baby.

He said: “He caught the woman, pointed his pistol at her and the baby. The woman pleaded for mercy – that she be shot first and leave the baby alive.

“From behind the fence Polish people raised their hands, ready to catch the baby. She was about to hand the baby over the fence.

“The Nazi grabbed the baby from her arms, shot the woman twice and took the baby in his hands. He tore the baby as one would tear a rag.”

The world watched as mid-tolower level officials from the death camps were brought to justice and victims, whose stories had been dismissed as too horrific to be true, were believed.

One such was Jewish artist Yehuda Bacon, 85, who was imprisoned in Auschwitz when just 14 and lost all his family in the Holocaust.

He had worked at the camp’s crematorium and recalled that: “Sometimes we took the ashes of human beings from the crematorium to put on the frozen paths.”

He said: “Before the trial people who heard my