All language subtitles for Hitlers.Gold.S01E04.1080p.WEB.h264-HONOR.EN

(dramatic music)

May 2nd, 1945,

the charred remains of the bodies of Adolf Hitler

and his wife, Eva Braun,

lie abandoned in a shallow grave

in the garden of the Reich's Chancellery.

The hated Nazi regime is at last vanquished.

But for the surviving victims of Nazism,

the search for their stolen belongings and property

had only just begun.

It was certainly one of the largest

mass robberies in history.

It was organized by the Nazi state

and they really tried to get everything that they could,

especially from the Jews.

So there you have Jewish property,

Jewish money all taken away,

and there are still people who are actually fighting

to get works of art that they own

back into their own ownership

and properties back into their own ownership.

It wasn't only stolen belongings

and property that was missing.

Many of the Nazi war criminals

also seemed to slip through the net.

There was an underground movement

that was set up in order to help high-profile Nazis escape.

Many of them went on to have normal lives after the war.

The sentences were in general, too lenient

and the pardons came too quickly.

Many of those who helped finance Hitler

or used slave labor during the war

would receive a mere slap on the wrist,

while millions of their victims are still seeking justice

and reparation even today.

If you really want to know where Nazi gold is,

just get on a plane to Zurich and it's under the streets.

(dramatic music)

Europe, 1945,

the mighty Reich of 1,000 years shrinks

under the steady advance of the allies on both fronts.

Behind enemy lines, allied bombings, and acts of sabotage

demoralize Germany's last remaining troops and civilians.

(ominous music)

Adolf Hitler's demented obsession with conquest

and domination has driven the whole nation into a nightmare.

There's an amazing sort of film

of an airplane going over Berlin,

just right at the end of the war.

And you see the desolation below.

It's like something from "Dante's Inferno."

So, really, Germany fought this war to rule the world,

but ended up at the end of the world

and what a terrible subterranean world it was.

People are homeless.

People are refugees, there are refugees going everywhere.

They're also troops retreating.

It's a very, very complicated, very messy,

very violent situation.

It's a time in which people can hide things if they want to.

But long before the final

desperate struggle for Berlin,

the Nazis have been taking steps to hide the wealth

they had stolen from their millions of victims.

On April 6th, 1945, US military policemen stopped two women

breaking curfew in the vicinity of the town of Merkers,

a mining region a couple of hours

northeast of Frankfurt in central Germany.

As both women are French and can't communicate,

the Americans decide to take them to their command post

to find a French speaking colleague.

At the command post, they discovered that one of the women

is pregnant and urgently needs to see a doctor.

They decide to take them into town.

On their way into Merkers,

as they pass by the Kaiseroda salt mine,

one of the women makes a surprising revelation

to the American servicemen.

And then, one of these women start saying,

"ah, in that mine over there,

there's this incredibly big amount of treasure."

And so, these three American soldiers,

they obviously report this to their superiors.

They go into the mine and it's like, Aladdin's cave.

Inside the mine, the US military would find

over 8,000 gold bars along with thousands of bags, boxes,

and crates containing currency, gold coins,

and other objects in the same metal, as well as silver,

platinum and priceless works of art.

Here, GI's uncovered a fabulous hoard of jewelry,

silver, currency, bullion and art treasures.

Much of it the accumulated loot of five years of war.

In the following months,

similar finds would be made all over Germany

and its occupied territories, especially looted art.

(light dramatic music)

Yet many assets would be hard to find as a result

of senior Nazis spiriting away stolen wealth

and treasure to so-called neutral countries

towards the end of the war.

There are other countries that the Nazis liked sending

their money to because they thought that might end up

being quite a good place to go and hide.

So, Argentina was an obvious place.

And another place that's often overlooked is Spain.

A lot of money went to Spain and went into

these big holding companies that essentially

were money laundering for the Nazis.

South America proved particularly welcoming

and hospitable to escaping Nazi war criminals.

In many instances, there were large German communities

that had been there since the 19th century.

So, it was a good place for them to blend in.

Eichmann managed to escape to Argentina,

Josef Mengele managed to escape through South America,

ending up in Brazil.

Klaus Barbie for instance, ends up in Bolivia,

and it wasn't just South America.

It was in many cases, the United States.

You've got to remember that Juan Peron and his wife,

they were fascists.

You know, they liked Nazis.

And I think that Argentina only declared war

on Nazi Germany about one month before the war ended

just to make it look as though they were on the right side.

So, that was a very cynical move.

Some of them, you know, there were a lot of other

sort of dictators around still.

Just because Hitler died doesn't mean that fascism died.

You have Salazar in Portugal, you have Franco in Spain,

you have very dictatorial regimes in the Middle East.

So, there's a lot of places around the world

where a Nazi is gonna feel at home

if he no longer is able to stay in Germany or Austria.

The fleeing Nazis would take several different

and secret escape routes,

which became known as the ratlines.

Invariably taking with them as much of their stolen loot

as they could carry.

(car engine rumbling)
(light dramatic music)

Some of them escape through Denmark,

some of them would escape through Spain,

but I think the one people know a lot about,

the one that's covered a lot is the kind of route

that went through Germany, through Austria, over the Alps,

over the Brenner Pass and then into the Alto Adige,

into Italy and towns like Bolzano and Merano.

And then, from there some of the escapers would get

false papers from priests.

And then they would make their way either to Rome

where they would get more false papers

or they would go to Genoa.

And then from Genoa, they get on a boat

with a Red Cross passport under a false name.

(eerie music)

At the end of the war,

the International Committee of the Red Cross issued

hundreds of thousands of safe conduct permits

for the survivors from concentration camps,

former POWs, deportees, forced laborers,

and other civilians who didn't have valid travel documents.

We now know that in many cases, Nazi criminals stole

and forged these documents to make their escape.

It has even been alleged that corrupt elements

in the Vatican conspired to redirect these Red Cross permits

to escaping Nazis.

A lot of Nazis were able to sort of slip

through the cracks and become other people.

Many of the Jews I interviewed who ended up going

to Buenos Aires said that they recognized

people from the Nazi camps on the boat

who were also refugees going to the same place.

We can't say that the Vatican helped as an organization.

There was no policy by the Pope to help Nazis escape,

but there were members of the Vatican

and priests and even a Bishop called Luigi Hudal,

who did actively help Nazis escape

by issuing them with documentation.

In the archives of the Santa Maria dell'Anima in Rome,

which is where Bishop Hudal lived and worked,

you have papers written to him by former Nazis saying,

"please, can you help?"

It has been said that many of these escaped

Nazis lived the rest of their lives protected and financed

by a secret organization known as

The Organization of the Former SS Members or ODESSA.

And that ODESSA was funded by much of the looted wealth

the Nazis had hidden and transferred abroad.

I spoke to a Nazi, a man called Erich Priebke

who ended up being incarcerated in Rome

until he died quite recently.

And I spoke to him about his escape to Argentina.

And he said to me, "listen, there was no ODESSA.

I rather wish there was one

because then I would have had some money."

You know, some of these Nazis arrived in Argentina,

they were quite poor.

Some of the Nazis were very rich.

So, that of course tells you that some of them

had the treasure and some of them just had nothing.

Yet, not all Nazis would manage to escape.

Many would soon face justice at Nuremberg,

including some of those who were involved

in the financing of Hitler's criminal empire.

But were all the right men on trial?

And how would the allies even begin to

prosecute such heinous crime or compensate its victims?

(ominous music)

(light dramatic music)

In May of 1945, the allies mistakenly freed

some Nazi political prisoners,

among them two notorious names in the Hitler money trail,

industrialist, Fritz Thyssen and Hjalmar Schacht,

the former head of the Reichsbank,

and the financial brain behind

Germany's military rearmament.

But it wouldn't be long before both were rearrested

and indicted for war crimes.

Nuremberg, November the 20th, 1945.

The eyes of the world are on one of the most publicized

and awaited trials in the history of mankind.

22 of the most prominent Nazi leaders would be judged

for crimes against humanity.

Hjalmar Schacht would sit among the accused for his role

both as president of the Reichsbank

from 1933 till January, 1939, as well as Nazi Minister

of Economic Affairs from 1934 till 1937.

(light dramatic music)

We realized at last that the allies

had some political objective in view,

which made them anxious to brand us as criminals

of the Hitler regime.

The trial of war criminals had already been planned.

And it was obviously essential for the purposes

of that trial that prominent economists

and businessman should be numbered among the accused.

(speaking foreign language)

Schacht would end up being acquitted

and instead it would be his successor

as president of the Reichsbank, Walther Funk,

who would be sentenced to life imprisonment for his role

in financing and facilitating Hitler's war plans.

During the trial, Hjalmar Schacht would have the chance

to meet again with the man who had first brought him

into the Nazi's highest circle, Hermann Goering.

By 1936, the men once friends, had become fierce rivals

after Hitler nominated Goering as the supervisor

of the second four year economic plan.

It was a rivalry that would end with Schacht's resignation

as Minister of Economic Affairs

and his dismissal as President of the Reichsbank.

By the end of the war, however, Goering like Schacht,

had fallen out of favor with the Fuhrer,

and had been abandoned to his drug addictions

and other accesses.

In the Nuremberg jail, Goering was weaned off the drugs

and reveled in his role as the most senior

Nazi leader in the doc.

Personally, I have always looked up on Goering

as the worst among the accused,

on account of his decent origin

and comfortable circumstances, but at the Nuremberg trial,

Goering displayed great courage,

both in his behavior and his half audible exclamations.

Goering's prominent role in the rearmament

of the Reich and his direct responsibility for the extortion

of Jewish owned factories and businesses

where thousands of inmates were worked to death,

ended with him being sentenced to hang.

But even he would escape proper justice,

since he took the coward's way out and committed suicide

with a cyanide capsule on the eve of his execution.

It was the final failure of Nuremberg.

(dramatic music)

My point of view on the Nuremberg trials

is that they tried to narrow it down as much as they could.

I mean, in the end, they sort of picked up

there were 22 major Nazis.

Well, there were more than 22 major Nazis.

I mean, there were 42 Gauleiters, for example.

And these Gauleiters were heavily involved

in filling up the concentration camps,

implementing the transfer of people

from Germany to the death camps.

Surely they should be put on trial.

No, they got off scot free.

As would several of Hitler's financiers,

including Gustav Krupp Von Bohlen,

the main arms manufacturer and the mastermind

of the Adolf Hitler Fund, that other industrialists

would use to make generous contributions

to the Nazi party and the Fuhrer himself.

The Krupps really were behind Hitler,

behind the rearmament, implicated in the Holocaust,

and all kinds of things like that.

So, it wasn't really all Gustav Krupp,

but a lot of people thought so,

and at the end of the war the Americans thought so,

and they were looking for him and trying to arrest him.

And all they got was this poor old senile fellow in bed.

Deemed unfit to attend trial,

the case against Gustav Krupp Von Bohlen und Halbach

would be dismissed.

Instead, his son, Alfried, who had conspired with the SS

to enslave conscripted workers to operate the Krupp's

wartime factories would be charged in his place.

(dramatic music)
(speaking foreign language)

From the 9th of December, 1946,

until the 13th of April, 1949,

the allies would carry out 12 subsequent trials at Nuremberg

where they would attempt to prosecute German industrialists

for their support of the Nazis.

But these too were deeply flawed.

(speaking foreign language)

Among the most noteworthy of these trials,

was that of Oswald Pohl,

the head of the SS Main Economic and Administrative Office,

which coordinated the running of the concentration camps,

the supply of slave labor and the looting

of victims' properties and businesses.

The court sentenced Pohl and three of his subordinates

to death, while another 11 would receive sentences

between 10 years and life.

But in the end, only Pohl would be executed.

The others would see their sentences commuted

or even in some cases canceled altogether.

Unlike the unfortunate Pohl,

who was hanged on June 7th, 1951.

He was one of the last people hanged as a result

of the Nuremberg trials.

Oddly enough, after that, the allies went over

to a policy more of pardon and toleration.

So, not many of the SS officers really

are punished after the war.

The first industrialist to receive an exclusive

trial was the coal and steel magnate, Friedrich Flick.

On April the 19th, 1947, he was indicted on war crimes

and crimes against humanity for the widespread use

of slave labor in his mines and factories,

along with the theft of resources

and plants in occupied territories.

(dramatic music)

And last but not least,

the financing of the NSDAP and the SS.

He would be sentenced to just seven years in prison.

The second major industrial trial held

from the 27th of August, 1947 until July 30th, 1948,

would it be against IG Farben,

the major chemical cartel that was the Nazi's partner

in crime, supplying the German war machine

with synthetic gasoline and rubber

and the infamous pesticide Zyklon B,

that would be used to slaughter millions of Jews.

(speaking foreign language)

Of the 24 accused IG Farben executives,

11 would be acquitted while the others

would receive sentences ranging from eight years

to only 18 months.

This for developing and supplying products and chemicals

used to slaughter millions.

The verdicts of industrialists,

like the verdicts of the SS officers in general

who ran the camps and these industries were too lenient.

I think that there were very few people in industry roundup.

The industrialist trial was a complete farce

in the sense that they let off all of the directors

of these big companies on the basis that they were

taking orders and before you knew it,

all the major companies of the Nazi period

become the major companies in Germany

in the post-war period.

(ominous music)

(dramatic music)

The Nuremberg trials would not be

the only occasion on which Nazis

would face prosecution for their crimes.

All over the country and in the former occupied territories,

civilian courts would try several former Nazis

and collaborators in a process that became known

as denazification.

Like Nuremberg, however, denazification did little

more than scratch the surface

of the deep seated Nazi infrastructure.

(speaking foreign language)

When we take into account the process

of denazification and the consequences for the partners

and financiers of Adolf Hitler,

we find a number of curious cases of leniency.

Max Amann, for example, the man who ran

the publishing empire that made Hitler

one of the wealthiest men in the world,

would be sentenced to 10 years of forced labor.

He would be released after just five.

Hitler's personal photographer, Heinrich Hoffman,

whose photos earned the Fuhrer millions in royalties

and who would make a fortune for himself

by trading looted art, would be sentenced to

only four years in prison.

(light dramatic music)

Outrageous when you think about it.

And the number of sort of people who met justice

wasn't great and they said the denazification program was,

they called it a Persil certificate.

'Cause what you did was you got three people to say,

yes, you had a Nazi, but you had three or four people

who thought you were okay.

And they signed it at the bottom.

They called it the Persil certificate

because Persil was a soap powder

that said it washed whiter than white.

So, with this you could sort of whitewash

your past in that way.

Hoffman became a poster boy for the cynicism

and inefficiency with which denazification was carried out

by the post-war German authorities.

Shortly before he passed away peacefully at the age of 72,

he would recover a considerable part

of his stolen art collection.

Something similar would occur with many industrialists

and businessmen who supported and financed the Nazi regime.

(speaking foreign language)

On September 11th, 1949,

US President Harry S. Truman appointed John J. McLoy

as the new American High Commissioner for Occupied Germany.

McLoy would proceed with a program of mass amnesty

for several former Nazi war criminals,

whose sentences were either commuted or canceled,

including almost all of the industrialists

tried at Nuremberg.
(light dramatic music)

(speaking foreign language)

The most prolific and loyal of all

the Hitlerite industrialists, Friedrich Flick,

was a free man by 1950.

He would not only recover all his former enterprises

located in West Germany, but would also invest in several

developing companies and become the largest

shareholder at Daimler-Benz.

He ended up as probably the richest man in West Germany,

leaving an empire of 330 companies,

with a turnover of eight billion Deutschmarks

after his death in 1972.

(light eerie music)

Alfried Krupp would be pardoned in 1951,

and also recovered part of his forfeited industries.

He regained his personal fortune,

reinstating his family's industrial empire

and even established a foundation named after him,

which included on its supervisory board,

banker Hermann Josef Abs.

As one of the chairman of the Deutsche Bank during the war,

Abs was responsible for the Aryanization

of formerly Jewish owned businesses.

He would never be prosecuted for his crimes

and even retained this chairmanship

of some of these companies after the war.

But the greatest scandal was that some of those convicted

in the IG Farben trial would also receive pardons

from McLoy's high commission.

In 1950, both Karl Krauch,

the Chairman of the Supervisory Board of IG Farben,

and Fritz Ter Meer, one of the brains behind the creation

of the industrial complex at Auschwitz,

had their sentences substantially reduced.

The following year, it was the turn of Auschwitz

plant managers, Otto Ambros and Walter Durrfeld

to be pardoned and immediately released

from their eight year prison sentences.

Like Flick and Krupp, nearly all IG Farben war criminals

would return into the post-war German business world

and hold important positions in several corporations

and banking institutions.

And I think it is one of the terrible aspects

of the post-war period that because we were so keen

to revive West Germany economically,

we turned a blind eye to a lot of these people

who ran these businesses, who were very much implicated

with Hitler's regime.

They were implicated, as we know, with forced labor as well.

German-based American subsidiaries,

Opel GM, and Ford Werke were also among those

that used slave labor during the war.

Despite their claims of not having control

of their German subsidiaries, both American corporations

would do their utmost to try to get their hands

on profits earned in Germany during that period.

So, Ford and General Motors both have a huge problem

on their hands at the end of the second world war.

They have these profits that have piled up in Opel

and in the Ford Werke plant in Germany.

The other problem they face is that the German Mark

has now a disproportionately poor exchange rate

against the US dollar.

And so, how can they possibly take these profits back

to the US politically or even economically?

This question drags on for years.

In the 1950s, both Ford and General Motors

do try to repatriate their profits

and do so successfully in some cases,

but they take a huge cut rate.

As well as banking the wartime profits,

both companies would also claim compensation for war damage

sustained at their slave labor staffed factories in Germany.

In the ultimate act of cynicism, however,

both Ford and General Motors asked the US government

to compensate them for the wartime damage

to their factories in the Third Reich.

This is a move that is almost unbelievable.

These are companies asking for compensation that the allies

have inflicted on their companies in the Third Reich.

And General Motors is actually successful.

The US government pays them more than $30 million

in compensation for damage to the Opel factory effectively.

Ford asked for the same thing,

but us government of the 1960s,

20 years after the end of the war is much less generous.

Only gives Ford a little bit over

a million dollars in compensation.

Although the allies let German industrialists

and financiers off the hook, they were rather more efficient

at tracing the vast wealth and national assets

stolen by the Nazis.

At the end of the war, the Western powers secret

intelligence services launched a scheme aimed at seizing

stolen Nazi loot from neutral countries

called Operation Safe Haven.

Operation Safe Haven was an undercover operation

sort of spearheaded by the United States

Office of Strategic Services,

which was the precursor to the CIA.

And it was to crack down on all of this money laundering

around the world that the Nazis were doing.

Through operation Safe Haven,

the allies would recover a significant part of the assets

stolen by the Reich,

and would further develop a program of restitution,

controlled by the Tripartite Gold Commission.

The Tripartite Gold Commission was set up to redistribute,

to give back the gold that the Nazis had stolen.

But once countries went into the Soviet sphere,

there was somewhat punished because the gold

didn't go back to them.

So, in some cases you had the tripartite gold going back

to some of these countries in the 1990s

because of the geopolitics involved.

There was a campaign early on to take 10%

of the industrial capacity of Germany and send it

to the Soviet Union as reparations.

That was how reparations were conceived as a matter,

not to deliver money to individuals,

but to deliver money between States.

Besides gold, the next most commonly looted

commodity in Nazi occupied Europe was art.

The allied army set up special staffs during the war,

which had the task of securing separate cultural assets

from the occupied States of Europe.

Registering and then re-registering them with the help

of the deprived museums and individuals.

(speaking foreign language)

Now, of course, because it was hidden by Nazis

and then maybe recovered later,

we don't know how much disappeared,

but what we know is that there are a lot of works of art

in museums, in galleries all over Europe,

that just have an empty space

where a work of art used to hang.

So, there are still people today I am convinced

who will buy and sell art stolen by the Nazis in secret.

Make no mistake, this is a criminal activity,

but I have no doubt that there are some very bad people

around who still trade Nazi stolen goods.

But it would be the individual victims

of Nazism who would encounter the greatest obstacles

in recovering their rightful assets

and possessions in the post-war period.

(ominous music)

(light dramatic music)

Many historians and researchers have tried to estimate

the value of the stolen goods, property, and possessions

during the Nazi's 12 year reign of terror.

While some of it has been recovered,

there is still a lot that is missing,

leading to several conspiracy theories, treasure hunting,

and the ongoing search for the lost Nazi gold.

Typically, we hear about stories of gold found underneath

a lake called Lake Toplitz,

and there's never really been any gold found there.

Then there was talk about a train full of gold

underneath a Polish mountain.

Again, that's never really ever been shown to be true.

I think there's a lot of nonsense written about Nazi gold

and people talk, you know, it's something for a thriller

or a movie, but I suspect yes,

there must be some gold that was hidden.

And I suspect that if that's going to be anywhere,

it's underneath the streets of Zurich or Geneva.

It's gonna be in a Swiss bank.

There is little doubt that neutral Switzerland

played a massive role in looting of art and personal wealth

during the second world war.

The secrecy of the Swiss banking system allowed

the Nazi regime to launder much of the gold and currency

pillage from their victims.

On March 8th, 1945, the Allies and the Swiss had reached

an agreement to cut off trade

and freeze German assets in the country.

Promising to return any identifiable gold

to its rightful owners.

But there was a problem in identifying

whom the rightful owners were since the Nazis had done

everything possible to cover their tracks

and prevent its identification.

It's another way that the Nazis had sort

of protected themselves.

I mean, they re-smelted all of the gold

and they put German markings on the gold.

So, nobody really knew whose gold was whose gold.

At the end of the war when their heirs went

to try to reclaim those assets and the banks asked them

for death certificate proving

that the beneficial owners had died,

the answer often was well Auschwitz and Dachau

didn't give us death certificates.

So, there was no way to prove a death.

And the Swiss bankers just said, "well, I'm sorry then.

There's nothing we can do for you."

Claimants and relatives of the millions

who had perished in the Nazi death camps

had a hard time trying to put pressure on Swiss banks

to release information about their war time holdings.

Especially since the Swiss use the onset

of Cold War hostilities to put the brakes

on much of the restitution process.

So, we've got all these properties that actually belong

to other people and yet they were never repatriated back.

Again, why?

Part of this Cold War psychosis.

Oh, we can't bring up this issue at this time.

So there you have Jewish property, Jewish money,

all taken away in that period.

I mean, it's a scandal and it's a scandal

that wasn't actually redressed.

It wasn't redressed in the post-war period.

Only after the Berlin wall came down in 1989,

would millions of documents related to World War II

be declassified in both the East and the West,

bringing new light to the involvement

of banking institutions and worldwide corporations

on the Hitler money trail.

(Berlin citizens cheering)

It was only later in the Clinton era that there was a push

for reparations payments from individual industries

to individual former victims who had been living

as survivors for the last 20, 30 years, right?

More by the time the '90s rolled around.

That kind of marked a new phase.

The documents show that the Swiss claim of neutrality

in World War II was pure nonsense.

The documents also show that these shipments

were carried out by trucks that had the insignias

of Switzerland stamped on them.

In other words, they actually used Swish transport.

That the gold bars were identified clearly

as coming from Germany.

These US congressional hearings

served as the basis for several lawsuits

brought by victims of Nazism who are still

seeking justice and restitution.

Organizations like the World Jewish Congress

and the World Jewish Agency would take up their cause.

(light dramatic music)
(crowd applauding)

There is no reason in the world why one dollar,

one shekel, one sterling, one franc will be there

in the safes and the accounts of banks

in a time that it does not belong to them.

Every single coin which belongs to the Jews,

should go back to the individual Jews and the Jewish people.

Pressed by Jewish organizations

in the United States and Israel,

the Swiss authorities would at last announced a commission

to research and reveal their banking activities

during the Nazi period.

We want now to get the truth and we want to deal with it.

And if we have to, lift the bank secrecy

for these cases for five years, we'll do it.

They not only put out copious lists of all of the heirless

assets they had in their banks

and they invited people from around the world to apply.

But in addition to that, they set up a fund that was like

over a billion dollars in order to help

victims of the Nazis.

Other countries all over the world

would follow suit and set up their own commissions

to research their involvement with Hitler and his regime.

Leading to the opening of a new question.

What about the slave and forced workers that were exploited

by the Nazi regime and its partners?

What compensation would they receive?

In 1999, German Chancellor, Gerhard Schroder,

announced the creation of a new compensation fund

for victims of slave labor.

Among the signatory companies were Krupp

and IG Farben successors, BASF, Hoechst and Bayer.

Only a very small amount of compensation was paid

in the initial years after the war, right up to the 1990s.

A few Jewish slave laborers to get some compensation

and countries like France and Belgium did pay

some compensation to their own people

who had been deported to Germany.

But because of the Iron Curtain where most

of the Eastern forced laborers were sort of cut off

from Western Europe, it's only in the 1990s

that this really became an issue

as Holocaust restitution resurfaced again.

And then it was decided again, partly because of pressure

that the German government and German companies

did pay a one-off compensation payment to all Eastern

forced and slave laborers.

The American companies whose German

subsidiaries benefited from the use of slave labor

would also be forced to face some of their victims

and make reparations.

So, Ford and General Motors in the 1990s

begin facing lawsuits from the slave laborers

that have largely helped accumulate those profits

during the Third Reich.

There's actually lawsuits filed in the United States

on a class action basis against those companies,

and American courts say they simply don't have jurisdiction

over what took place during the Third Reich.

As a result of that legal reckoning

or the opening up of that legal case,

both Ford and General Motors put together compensation funds

to try to help the victims of slave labor in that sense.

I think there's still an open question to some extent

as to whether those efforts have been sufficient,

but certainly there's a recognition

that something needs to be done.

Today, many archives are still waiting

to be declassified, lost treasures and works of art

are still being discovered,

and thousands of bank accounts either owned

by victims of Hitler's criminal regime

or by the Nazis themselves remain unclaimed.

We are still very much dealing with the legacy

of the Third Reich and the second world war.

The victims of Nazism have not nearly received

the justice that they can.

It is critically important that historians,

journalists and other researchers continue to track down

the paper trails to find out where this money went,

what profits might still be accumulating in bank accounts

based upon the events of the Third Reich,

and how justice can continue to be done

even in the 21st century.

I think it's best to call it an attempt at justice.

It wasn't complete, it was not satisfactory,

but the fact that they made the attempt

set important precedents.

And I think this is what we will really remember about it,

that it's not acceptable that these kind of crimes

are committed without some effort of compensation

and restitution and justice.

He was a lousy student, a failed artist,

homeless for many years and embittered army corporal

who through a tragic quirk of fate was able to lie,

cheat and barter his way to power,

before unleashing murder and misery on millions.

But he didn't do it alone.

Behind him, there were many who financed his rise to power

and willingly profited from the business of war.

The plundering of a whole continent, the forced labor,

and the deaths of millions of innocents.

Adolf Hitler took the coward's way out,

but many of those who helped him in the largest robbery

in history have never been held to account.

I think it's impossible to give an estimation

of how much the Nazis stole.

I mean, what are you including in that figure?

Are you including the gold that they stole

from occupied countries, all of the assets that they stole

from Swiss banks, the properties that they stole,

the businesses that they stole,

the art that they looted.

The list goes on and on and on.

It was a terrible theft that people

are still trying to figure out.

Does it make people feel better or worse

that it wasn't even that profitable and they did it anyway?

If you can understand that, you can understand Third Reich.

If you think it was only about profit,

you will never understand the Third Reich.

(suspenseful music)

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