I will recount the genocide against Jewry, as it occurred, and describe my thinking both yesterday and today about this. For not only the fields of death did I have to see with my own eyes, the battle fields where life itself died, I saw much worse.

"I saw how, by a few words, through a single, abrupt order of one individual, whom the regime empowered, fields of annihilation were created. I saw the eeriness of the death machinery; wheel turning on wheel, like the mechanisms of a watch.

"And I saw those who maintained the machinery, who kept it going. I saw them, as they rewound the mechanism; and I watched the second hand, as it rushed through the seconds; rushing like lives towards death. The greatest and most monumental dance of death of all time. This I saw."

The passage, in blue ink in an even hand, was written by Adolf Eichmann on September 6th, 1961, as the Nazi officer who masterminded the destruction of Europe's Jews awaited sentencing in an Israeli court on crimes against humanity.

Eight months later Eichmann was hanged and his ashes scattered over the Mediterranean. His memoirs, which he intended as the basis of a book to be entitled False Gods, were lodged in a locked safe in the Israeli state archives. And there they lay, all but forgotten, until yesterday when the archives handed out a limited number of copies of the manuscript on computer disk.

Despite misgivings about the surfacing of so self-serving an account of the Nazi Holocaust by one of its main perpetrators, the Justice Ministry felt moved to intervene in a libel trial now under way in London. Lawyers for Penguin Books and an American academic, Prof Deborah Lipstadt of Emory University, had requested the document for their defence in a libel case, brought by the writer David Irving and currently being fought in a London court.

The memoir is a rambling and often repetitive account of Eichmann's life and the Nazi killing machine. Replete with philosophical meanderings and references to the Fatherland, duty and service, it stretches to some 1,300 pages. While he does not flinch from using the German word for genocide, Volkermord, he never admits his own guilt or betrays any sign of remorse. Instead, he portrays himself as a man caught up by powers beyond his control.

Written in longhand, and in outmoded script in a series of A4-sized notebooks that have barely yellowed with time, the manuscript is divided into chapters and includes footnotes. Each page contains Eichmann's signature along the left margin, the final "n" of his surname trailing into oblivion.

It also contains Eichmann's last will and testament with elaborate instructions for the disposal of his remains. Eichmann wanted to be cremated along the Danube, at Linz, and his ashes divided into seven piles; one to be put into his parents' grave in Linz, one to be buried in his garden in Argentina, and one each to go to his wife and four sons.

He adds: "Death is no worse than birth, and a thousand times a thousand lives await us after ours." He dates the passage August 15th, 1961, and notes that it is the 30th anniversary of his engagement to his wife, Vera.

Throughout the memoir, which begins with Eichmann's birth at Solingen, Germany, in 1906, there are references to his family life. It describes his childhood, and years as a young man, trips to the mountains and beer parlours, and flowers for his girlfriends; an idyll interrupted when the "False God" of National Socialism beckoned in 1931.

Eichmann was entranced by the symbols of the Fatherland, and the promise of renewal. "I served the gods with my whole being and faith. There was nothing I wouldn't do for them," he writes. Much later the memoir describes in detail the system of ghettoes, cattle trains and death camps that Eichmann devised for the slaughter of the Jews.

"In January '42 I was given orders by Muller to drive to Posen and give him a report on the killing of Jews. Before that, I had read some secret circulations [memos] of shooting of Jews in the East. But it was not real for me, I couldn't imagine it.

"What I got to see now was horror personified, nothing like last autumn in Lublin. I saw naked Jewish men and women entering an omnibus without windows. The doors closed and the motors started. The exhaust gases did not escape on the outside, they were directed inside.

"A doctor in a white coat pointed out a little spy-hole in the driver's window and asked me to watch through it, but I couldn't. Everything seemed unreal. I couldn't stop the killing in any case. I would not have been able to, physically."

And in his foreword, which was appended to his memoir, he admits that the Nazi ideology was responsible for "the greatest crime committed in the history of humanity". But throughout the diary, details of Eichmann's personality constantly intrude.

He talks about coffee houses, and the difficulty of negotiating highly polished floors in heavy boots. He describes his irritation with desk duty, and with initially being assigned to the wrong corps of the SS, and the strange ceremony at which he was inducted into the Nazis' elite unit. During the oath-taking, he describes seeing a human skeleton in a coffin. "Strange, I thought, very strange, all of it, but perhaps this corpse was housed in a museum."

The manuscript's value to scholars lies in such details, along with Eichmann's later descriptions of the horror he created.

"You have a human being, there is no doubt, you do not have a monster," says Evytar Friesel, Israel's state archivist. "You have a man, living and talking like a human being who is beginning to recognise he is part of a terrible crime, but is saying: `What could I do?' "

On that crucial point all the scholars who have seen the memoirs agree: it is utterly self-serving. Eichmann repeatedly describes himself as one in a team of horses, driven by a relentless coachman. "Regarding his own role, he lied through his teeth," says Prof Yehuda Bauer, director of research at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial museum in Jerusalem.

It is perhaps Eichmann's efforts to minimise his personal guilt in the annihilation of the Jews that guided the decision of David BenGurion, the Israeli prime minister at the time of his trial, to order the memoirs to vanish into a locked safe at the state archives.

Although Ben-Gurion wanted Eichmann's prosecution to be highly public - it was the world's first televised trial - there was concern that the memoir would confuse the truths established there.

And so the manuscript lay in the state archives, stacked up in manila envelopes and a medium-sized cardboard box. The Israeli authorities were reminded of the existence of the memoirs last August, when Dieter Eichmann, one of his four sons, approached the attorney general and requested the manuscript. After much deliberation, the Israeli justice ministry decided to hand it over. But for the urgency of Lipstadt's case, the process would have taken months.

Holocaust scholars would also have preferred the text to have appeared in edited form, so that Eichmann's assertions that he was powerless to stop the killing would not have gone unchallenged. But as the copyright of the memoirs rests with Eichmann's survivors, that option was not legally possible. Now, with its reappearance, among the striking aspects of the memoir - excluding of course the mendacity in his denial of his own guilt - is its sheer vanity.

In his foreword, Eichmann frets about his abilities as a writer, fearing that his explanation of the horrors that he orchestrated may be "empty and superficial", and that his writing style would be more suitable to humorous, light-hearted stories.

He stipulates that he would like his version of the Nazi horrors to be bound in dove grey, or pearl, with a simple typeface on the cover, and dictates the inscriptions to be made on the copies to be given to his four sons: "This is the way it was."

He does not want the work to be published under a pseudonym and, although he must have known he could be hanged for his crimes, he asks to be consulted in case future editors deviate from his two suggested titles: False Gods, or a Greek maxim meaning Know Thyself.

Eichmann turns to the classics again for the quotation to be placed on the frontspiece of his memoir, suggesting a passage from Plato's cave parable: "And he would consider his shadow world as true, but the real world as an illusion."

Above all, Eichmann seems to be writing from a sense of mission. Although the text was never admitted as evidence during his appeal, it seems clear that he wanted to set out his version of the hell he helped to create.

"Because I saw hell, death and the devil, because I had to witness the insanity of annihilation, because I was reined in as one of the many horses and could not break out either to the right or the left because of the will of the coachman and his orders, I feel called to, and I have the desire to recount here and to give account of that which transpired."