The daughter-in-law of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann withdrawn her candidacy for mayor in the northeastern village of Garupa in Argentina. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

JNS.org – Carmen Bretin Lindemann, a daughter-in-law of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, has withdrawn her candidacy for mayor in the northeastern village of Garupa in Argentina, in the wake of comments she made defending Eichmann’s actions during the Nazi era on television.

In a television interview on the TN news channel on Wednesday, Bretin Lindemann said that the “history that you know is not the real one, the version that you know from movies and books is written by the Jews, and all the world accepts that history.”

“He wasn’t a bad person, he obeyed orders and did not personally kill anyone,” she said, referring to Eichmann as “grandpa.”

In the wake of her televised comments, Bretin Lindemann received heavy criticism. Delegación de Asociaciones Israelitas Argentinas (DAIA), the umbrella organization of Argentina’s Jewish community, issued a statement condemning her for “denying the extermination during the Shoah and vindication of Nazism,” according to the Jerusalem Post.

Subsequently, Bretin Lindemann announced on Thursday that she is leaving the mayoral race. “In order to not hurt my fellow party members in the alliance my immediate resignation is necessary. I want to assure the public that I don’t and never did support the Nazis,” she said.

Adolf Eichmann—one of the main masterminds of the Holocaust, particularly when it came to the logistics of transporting Jews to extermination camps—was tried and convicted in Israel for crimes against humanity and was executed in 1962.

In a recording that Eichmann made while in hiding in Argentina in the 1950s, he said, “I will gladly jump into my grave in the knowledge that 5 million enemies of the Reich have already died like animals.”