All language subtitles for Auschwitz 2 of 6 - Orders and Initiatives

In the Autumn of 1941,

the Nazis were about to embark on the most
crucial few months in the planning

of what they called 'The Final Solution'
- the extermination of the Jews.

Here at Auschwitz concentration camp
in South West Poland

the Commandant Rudolf H�ss would wrestle
with the task of organizing

the mass murder of innocent civilians, including
- for the first time - women and children.

In buildings like this at Auschwitz,

H�ss and his colleagues used their own
initiative to devise new ways of killing.

I could see everything that was going on

as though it were laid out
in the palm of my hand.

An SS-man climbed onto the flat roof
of the building,

put on a gas mask, opened a hatch
and dropped the powder in.

This is the story of how during
the Autumn of 1941 and the Spring of 1942

the Nazis ventured into entirely new territory
in the history of mass murder.

Via a combination of orders from the top
and initiatives from below,

they set in motion a policy of destruction

that would eventually touch almost
every European nation.

At Auschwitz concentration camp
in October 1941

a radical initiative was being implemented.

The newly appointed Auschwitz
construction chief, Karl Bischoff,

and SS Architect Fritz Ertl were working
on plans for a completely new camp

to be situated a little more than a mile
and a half north west of the existing one

on the site of a village
the Germans called Birkenau.

This new camp was to be the size of a small town
capable of holding a 100,000 people.

Research conducted in the 1990's,
based on the original German construction plans,

reveals that from the first moment of
its conception

this camp was designed to house prisoners
in appalling conditions.

The Nazis had built suffering
into the very plans.

In a concentration camp in Germany this was
the total space 3 inmates had to live in.

Here at Auschwitz's new camp the original plan
was to cram 9 prisoners into the same space.

550 in every barrack.

There was no running water,
no proper flooring,

and jamming so many people together
in each hut meant

that this was the perfect
breeding ground for disease.

But when the final calculations were
made it was clear

that even cramming the new prisoners together

so tightly wasn't enough
for the needs of the Nazis.

So Bischoff decided to force even more
prisoners into each barrack.

The documents reveal that he made
a handwritten change

the figure 550 for each barrack
was crossed out and replaced with 744.

The SS were designing barracks not so much
to house people as to destroy them.

Surprisingly, the new camp they were designing

at Auschwitz wasn't initially intended
to take Jews at all,

but people like these,
Soviet prisoners of war.

The Nazis considered them subhuman.

During the war around 3 million of them died
in German captivity of starvation,

disease and physical abuse.

In the autumn of 1941,

10,000 Soviet prisoners of war arrived to begin
the construction of the new camp

Auschwitz-Birkenau.

It was October,
it was already snowing.

I remember that it was snowing.

They were unloaded at the railway ramp,
at the goods station...

They were exhausted,
it was difficult for them even to move.

It is hard to imagine a human being in rags,
dirty, starved, sick.

It was simply a caricature of a human being. '

Only a few hundred of
the 10,000 Soviet Prisoners of War

survived until the following spring.

One of those who did
was Pavel Stenkin.

We knew our place, a grave.

I'm alive now and in a minute I'm finished.

This was a constant feeling.

They could kill you any minute
and you would not know why.

'The way the Germans,

the SS and the Overseers amongst
the prisoners tormented the POWs...

they didn't even beat us as hard.

I don't know why,

but if a Prisoner Overseer
didn't kill 7 or 10 a day,

he probably couldn't sleep.

That's how we interpreted it.'

People were dying from starvation,
from diseases and from beatings.

You'd go to bed and you were still alive

by morning you were dead.

Death, death, death.

Death at night, death in the morning,
death in the afternoon. Death.

We lived with death.

How could a human feel?

The man in charge of all this suffering,
Rudolf H�ss, Commandant of Auschwitz,

held routine meetings at 9 o'clock
every Tuesday and Friday morning

to discuss the running of the camp
with his senior officers.

From the study of Nazi documents
recently discovered in Moscow,

it's clear that the slow progress in
the construction of the prisoner of war camp

at Birkenau was of huge concern
to the SS leadership.

At this time, autumn 1941,

Auschwitz had almost no involvement
in the Nazis' anti Jewish actions.

Instead Nazis elsewhere helped initiate
the mass murder of the Jews

like here in Hamburg,
one of Germany's major ports.

Hamburg's most prominent local Nazis was
about to use the bombing of the city

by the RAF to escalate the persecution of
the Jews still further.

The bombing in September 1941
left hundreds homeless,

but Karl Kaufmann, the Gauleiter
or Regional Leader of Hamburg,

saw this as an opportunity to show
his initiative.

So he dictated a letter to Adolf Hitler.

Requests like this one from Kaufmann coincided
with Hitler's own prejudices and desires

He had wanted to remove the Jews for years.

Like many on the Nationalist Right
he believed in the delusion

that the Jews had
lost Germany the 1st World War

and that there was an international
conspiracy of Jews against them.

From the moment the Nazis came to
power Hitler had ensured

that the Jews of Germany were persecuted.

They quickly became the scapegoats
for all of Germany's ills.

In the Autumn of 1941 Hitler agreed
to the requests of Kaufmann

and other senior Nazis to deport
the German Jews.

At the end of October the Jews of Hamburg

Heard the news that they had been dreading.

We received a registered letter 24 hours
prior to report to a building

near the railway station to bring 1 suitcase
and you would be resettled in the East.

That's all it said.

In scenes that were eventually to be repeated
right across Germany,

the German Jews packed their belongings

and prepared to leave in full view of
their non Jewish neighbours

It was even an ugly world
and we looked away.

It made us angry but more than
that it made us terribly afraid,

ah, we wished we could head back
but we knew we couldn't.

In the morning we were taken to trains,
regular trains and ah,

the trains were sealed from the outside
and it was a train ride into nowhere.

And we didn't know what to expect.

None of these German Jews was sent straight
from Hamburg to Auschwitz.

Instead, their first destination
was the Lodz Ghetto in Poland.

The Nazis had created ghettos all over Poland
to imprison the Polish Jews.

They hated these Jews even more than
the Jews from the West.

To the Nazis they were from the Slavic East
and so doubly dangerous.

This was the shocking new environment into
which the Hamburg Jews were now placed

as they arrived in Lodz on the morning of
the 26th of October 1941

There were 1150 people,

with the Jewish Ghetto police
walking us into the Ghetto.

It was a two hour walk.

We saw people within the Ghetto,

they looked ragged, they looked tired,
they looked drawn and they paid us no attention.

We saw an area that resembled a slum except
none of us had ever seen a slum

but we assumed this was it.

We couldn't understand why they looked
the way they did, not decently dressed,

we didn't know what kind of a place this was.

It just didn't make any sense at all.

Normally, the German Jews they look
at the Polish Jews from the top down

Because we were definitely a much
lower category than them.

And all of a sudden,

it hit them that they had they had come to
the time where they were the same

or maybe lower because they cannot
live in the conditions we did.

With the arrival of the German Jews the Lodz
ghetto became more overcrowded than ever

and the local Nazi authorities sought ways
of reducing the ghetto population.

Which is why, in the autumn of 1941,

Walter Burmeister of the SS drove his boss,
Herbert Lange, across Poland.

Burmeister later recalled what Lange had
told him about the purpose of the trip.

Herbert Lange had, until recently,

been employed in the Nazis' adult
Euthanasia Programme, murdering the disabled.

Lange drove to a small village called Chelmno.

Here, over the next few weeks,

he and his men would prepare
a special installation.

Its chief purpose:

to create space in the Lodz ghetto by killing
the Jews the Nazis thought unproductive.

By November 1941,

Chelmno was not the only such
centre under construction.

At Belzec in the East of Poland
another small camp was being built

so the Nazis could kill selected Jews
from the nearby Lublin area.

But the killing was
about to escalate still further

after dramatic events more than
7000 miles away.

On December the 7th 1941

the Japanese bombed American battleships
at Pearl Harbour.

As a result Germany - allies of the Japanese
- declared war on the United States.

And in a speech he gave days later,

Hitler made it clear just who he blamed
for the intensification of the war.

In private Hitler was now calling
for the Jews to be exterminated.

And one of the leading Nazis

who heard him speak of mass murder
lived here in Krakow in Poland.

On December 16th 1941,

just days after meeting with Hitler,

he spoke to a carefully selected
group of senior Army officers,

SS and local Nazi party administrators.

His name was Hans Frank and he was
the Nazi ruler of Eastern Poland.

At the time, his words were not supposed
to have been made public.

But a copy of his speech survived the war.

In January 1942 the first selections
were made for Jews

to be deported from the Lodz ghetto.

We did not want to leave or most people
in the Ghetto did not want to leave

because you figured the misery you knew would be
better than the misery you didn't know.

The selected Jews from Lodz were
taken here to Herbert Lange's

new improvised extermination
facility at Chelmno.

Jews from the immediate area had been the first
to die here a few weeks before.

The Nazis blew up the large house
which was the centre of the killing

operations in order to hide
evidence of their crime.

This is one of the few photos
that remain of the house itself.

But evidence gathered after the war allows
a picture to be constructed of

what the Nazis did here.

The Jews from Lodz were told to undress

they were then pushed down a corridor
in the basement of the house,

up a ramp and into a small windowless chamber.

Doors were then slammed behind them.

They'd been locked in the back of a van.

These vans had been invented two years earlier
to kill mentally ill people

by cramming them in the sealed rear cargo area
and then gassing them with carbon monoxide.

Now Lange and other Nazis used
their own initiative to adapt

this killing method to murder Jews.

They made gas vans central to the new
killing operations here at Chelmno. Lodz

There was a lot of screaming, how terribly
they screamed, it was impossible to bear.

We could hear the screams,
but we couldn't see the people.

They were loaded in and murdered there.
It was hell.

That's why we called these vans 'Hell Vans'.

When I saw it going,
I'd say, "The hell's going."

The vans carrying the bodies of the Jews
who had been gassed were driven 2 miles

through remote country roads to a nearby forest
and buried in a clearing.

Many of the Germans who worked here
at Chelmno believed

what they were doing was perfectly legal,

as the post war testimony of Kurt M�bius,
one of the SS Guards, reveals.

Motivated by such anti Semitic delusions,
the Germans created here at Chelmno

the first systematic process
for the mass gassing of the Jews.

But up to now local Nazi killing operations

like this didn't seem to be part of
a fully developed strategy.

That was to be resolved,

on 20th January 1942

at an infamous meeting on the banks of
the Wannsee on the outskirts of Berlin.

The meeting was called to co-ordinate
the extermination of the Jews,

the Nazis' so-called 'Final Solution'.

It was made plain to all of
the various government

and Nazi officials that attended that
the SS was firmly in control of the process.

Chaired by Reinhard Heydrich of the SS,
with Adolf Eichmann taking the minutes,

a crucial statement of
principle was declared at Wannsee.

All of the Jews under Nazi control were to die
- many of them worked to death.

In ghettos like Lodz,

the Nazis were pursuing the policy,
as Heydrich put it,

of eliminating a proportion of Jews through work
and then dealing with the rest appropriately.

The food was not enough to sustain life,

there was no milk, there was no meat,
there was no food, there was nothing.

A lot of Jews wanted to trade against
a pair of shoes or ah,

anything else that we had.

My mother traded a silk blouse
for some butter and bread.

In the ghetto everything was paid for.

You had to have somebody's
shoulders to stand on,

all protection which meant connections,
that's how life

our business was conducted.

You do me a favor I do you a favor.

You really couldn't trust anybody
because if I would tell a co-worker something,

she would use it for her advantage,
you had to be very careful.

There was a lot of back-stabbing
and you can understand why,

it was a matter of life and death.

But that was ghetto life, this is what,
what life had done to human beings,

whether they were the same
before the war I doubt it very much.

One of the most disturbing aspects of
how the Nazis ran the ghettos is the way

they forced the Jewish leadership
to make many life and death decisions.

Like how the inadequate supply of food
and jobs should be distributed.

Unlike the vast majority of
Jewish ghetto leaders,

the Chairman of
the Council of Elders in Lodz,

Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski,
exploited his position of power.

I had heard rumours and
I knew that he had a vile temper.

If he got angry he would
take his cane and hit you.

On occasion Rumkowski used
the deportations to remove those

who opposed him and he abused
his authority in other ways.

I was alone in the office
and he would pull up a chair

and we had a couple of conversations, he talked,
I would listen and he molested me.

I kept moving away and he kept moving closer
and it was a it was a frightening relationship.

Rumkowski took a lot of advantage of,
of the young of the young women.

They were 15,16,18,20
and quite good looking girls.

We were all in the in the dining room
outside there,

he just come, put a hand around her
and just walk out with her.

And that, I saw that,
not anybody told me that but I saw that.

Rumkowski sexually abused Lucille Eichengreen
for several months.

Only after the office where she worked
was closed did she escape his attentions.

I felt disgusted and I felt angry, I ah,

but if I would have run away
he would have had me deported,

I mean that was very clear.

The ghetto left a permanent mark.

It showed humanity at its best and at its worst,
it made me what I am today.

We all sustained damage em, during those years.

Eventually when the ghetto was liquidated,

Rumkowski and his family suffered the same fate
as 200,000 other Lodz ghetto Jews

they were murdered by the Nazis.

In early 1942,

Auschwitz, unlike Chelmno and the Lodz ghetto,

was only playing a minor part in
the Nazis' Final Solution.

Since September 1941

H�ss and his colleagues had been experimenting
with the use of Zyklon B

prussic acid to kill
Soviet Prisoners of War

and the sick in the crematorium of
the camp just yards from his office.

Next to the ovens of the crematorium
was the mortuary.

The SS used it as
an improvised gas chamber.

A small number of Jews
from the local area selected

as unfit to work had also been killed here,

beginning in the autumn of 1941,

but it was soon clear to H�ss
and his SS colleagues

that this was not an ideal location
to commit mass murder,

as Polish political prisoner
Jozef Paczynski, witnessed.

I went into the attic of that building,
I stood on a crate or something,

I lifted a roof tile and I could see everything
that was going on right there in front of me.

'And they were very polite
with those people, very polite.

"Undress, pack your things here,
this here, that there...".

And then an SS- man climbed
onto the flat roof of the building.

He put on a gas mask,
opened a hatch and dropped the powder in.

When he did this, in spite of the fact
that these walls were very thick,

you could hear a great scream from within,
despite the thick walls.

This took place at lunch time,
in the daytime.

In order to stifle the screaming,

they had two motorcycles standing
on the pavement near the crematorium,

engines revved up as far as they could go,
to stifle the screams.

To cover up the yelling they had
these engines going but they failed.

They gave it a try but it didn't work.

The screaming lasted for 15 or 20 minutes;

it became weaker and weaker,
then it went quiet.

These horrors were only the beginning.

During the Spring of 1942

Jews from outside Poland were deported
to Auschwitz for the very first time.

They came from one of the Nazis'
closest allies.

And the story of how these Jews came to be on
trains to Auschwitz is one of the most shocking

and surprising in the history
of the Nazis' "Final Solution."

The people on these trains were from Slovakia
- many from the capital, Bratislava.

Slovakia was a new country.

Created only in 1939

and the majority of the Slovaks were
now fiercely nationalistic.

The President, Jozef Tiso,
was a Catholic priest

And the Prime Minister,
Vojtech Tuka, was also deeply religious.

They had implemented a series of
anti-Semitic measures

chiefly born of religious
and cultural intolerance.

And at the forefront of tormenting the Jewish
population were the nationalist Hlinka guard.

A Jew would never go to work.

None of them work;
they only wanted to have an easy life.

Our people were happy to receive their stores.

We called it aryanising them.

And that's how they become rich.

Before the war Slovakia had a thriving
Jewish community of around 90,000

now they were under direct threat.

When the Nazis asked for forced labourers,

the Slovakian authorities offered up
20,000 Jews - and their families.

But early in 1942,

conflict arose between
the Germans and the Slovaks.

The Nazis, lacking the necessary
extermination capacity,

at first didn't want to accept anyone
who couldn't work.

In early 1942

a meeting was arranged
at the Foreign Ministry in Bratislava

to try and resolve the dispute.

SS Captain Dieter Wisliceny arrived
to meet with Prime Minister Tuka

and a Slovakian Official Dr Koso.

After the war, both Wisliceny and Koso
gave evidence of what was discussed here.

Back in Berlin, a deal was brokered.

As this document proves,
the Slovakian Foreign Ministry

agreed to pay the Nazis 500 Reichsmark
for each Jew deported.

The Slovaks thus offered to pay the Nazis
to take their Jews away.

For most of the Slovakian Jews,

their journey began with imprisonment
at a holding camp

like this one outside Bratislava.

Once in these camps,

the Slovakian Jews were under the total
control of the Hlinka Guards.

Some of those soldiers were really stupid.

For example, they deliberately crapped there
so we had to clean up that with our hands

They called us Jewish whores,
they kicked us, they behaved really badly.

They also told us
'We will teach you Jews how to work.'

But poor women were used to work.

Later when the Jews were coming to the camps,
we used to take their belongings and clothes.

The deputy commander came and said to
us to go and choose from the clothes.

I took some clothes, others did as well.

Then I took 3 pairs of shoes.
Everyone took what he could.

I wrapped it all with a rope
and brought it back home.

We, the guards, were doing quite well.

Within months of the start of
the deportations, Michal Kaba?

became aware of the likely
fate of the Slovakian Jews.

How could you personally participate
in the deportation knowing

those people were certainly going to die?

What could I have done?

I was thinking both ways.

I thought it will be peace and quiet here,
you deserved it.

But on the other hand,
there were innocent people among them as well.

I was thinking both ways.

The deportation of Jewish families
from Slovakia began in April 1942

and lasted for the next 7 months

altogether around 60,000
Jews were handed over to the Germans.

150 miles away at his house just outside
Auschwitz concentration camp,

where he lived with his wife and 4 children,

Rudolf H�ss awaited
the arrival of the Slovaks.

The plans for the new camp
at Birkenau had changed;

Soviet Prisoners of War were to be sent
as forced labourers elsewhere.

H�ss now knew that Jews were central
to the future of Auschwitz.

And it was here in a remote corner
of the site at Birkenau,

2 miles away from the main camp,

that H�ss and other members of the SS had found
a location for new make-shift gas chambers.

In this field stood a Polish cottage
which would come to be known

as the Little Red House or Bunker 1.

H�ss and his SS comrades saw this as a step
forward in the killing process at Auschwitz.

Two separate gas chambers were quickly
improvised by bricking up the windows

and door and creating two new entrances.

Unlike in the crematorium in the main camp,

people could be murdered here
in relative secrecy.

In this shabby cottage tens of thousands
of people would be murdered.

The manner of killing remained the same.

Jews would be told they were to take a shower,
they would be locked in the room,

and Zyklon B thrown in through
a hatch in the wall.

Within weeks, the Nazis had converted
another nearby cottage

the Little White House
- in just the same way.

Slovakian Jews arrived at the railway stop
2 miles from the gas chambers

on the 29th April 1942 -
and faced 'selection' by the SS.

This was the first of hundreds of SS selections
to be held over the next 30 months.

When they opened the train carriages
and forced us out,

they shouted at us immediately.

They were screaming in German.

They were SS men who were dealing with us.

We had to stand in line,
men had to step out first,

then women with children,
and then old people.

I looked at my father, here,
and I saw a sad look on his face.

This is my last memory of him.

The Slovakian Jews selected to die were
taken up past the newly built

buildings of Birkenau and
towards the isolated

gas chambers of the Little Red House
and Little White House.

When we were returning from work
we saw people being brought over.

They waited there the whole day.

They sat there, they still had food from home
and SS men were around them with dogs.

They didn't know what was
going to happen to them.

After the war while he awaited trial,

Rudolf H�ss wrote about the process of murder
in the converted cottages in the Spring of 1942

'it was most important
that the whole business of arriving

and undressing should take place in
an atmosphere of the greatest possible calm.

Small children usually cried

because of the strangeness of being undressed
in this way but when their mothers

or members of the Jewish Sonderkommando
comforted them,

they became calm and entered
the gas chambers playing

or joking with one another
and carrying their toys.

Hundreds of men and women
in the full bloom of life walked

all unsuspecting to their death
in the gas chambers

under the blossom-laden
fruit trees of the orchard.

This picture of death in the midst of
life remains with me to this day.

I looked upon them as enemies of our people.

The reasons behind the Extermination Programme
seemed to me right. '

After the gassing,
H�ss and the SS made other Jewish prisoners

load the bodies onto trucks and wheel them down
a makeshift railway line towards giant pits.

Otto Pressburger was one of the prisoners
forced to dispose of the bodies.

We were digging holes and in the beginning
we really didn't know what they were for,

it was only when the holes were deep enough
that we started to throw the bodies into them.

It was appalling.

New bodies were lying here every morning
and we had to bury them.

When summer came everything started to rot.

It was terrible, the majority of the people
working here were from my home city of Trnava,

I knew all of them and every day
there were less and less of them.

They must still be buried
around here somewhere.

My brother and my father are
buried here as well, you know.

By the Summer of 1942

H�ss and his colleagues at Auschwitz had
discovered how to murder thousands

But their improvised methods of killing
could not keep pace

with the demands of their masters who,
in pursuit of the Nazis'

"Final Solution",
dreamt of eliminating many millions.

During the next few months

H�ss and his colleagues would overcome
all obstacles and create buildings like this,

where murder could be committed
on a massive scale.

And as they did so,
the Nazis also began to scour

the whole of Europe for ever more people
to bring here and kill.