Israel's President Reuven Rivlin is to make public on Wednesday previously unreleased documents including a handwritten request for clemency from Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, AFP reports.
Rivlin's office said in a statement that the request to then president Yitzhak Ben-Zvi would be presented at a ceremony at Rivlin's official Jerusalem residence to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
In the petition, written after he was brought to Israel in 1960, then tried, convicted and sentenced to death the following year, Eichmann says that the Israeli court overstated his role in organizing the logistics of Hitler's "Final Solution" which involved the extermination of six million Jews.
"There is a need to draw a line between the leaders responsible and the people like me forced to serve as mere instruments in the hands of the leaders," Rivlin's office quotes the letter as saying.