All language subtitles for The.Nazis.A.Warning.from.History.S01E02.Chaos.and.Consent.1080p.AV1.10bit-MeGusta

The Nazis were obsessed
with images of order.

In their museums,
exhibits like this "glass man"

showed how the perfect human body
was ordered
into one interlocking whole.

And through their parades
and pageants, they sought to show
how one individual human being

was but a part
of the ordered national community.

But in Germany, the Nazis
only created an illusion of order.

On January 30th, 1933,

Adolf Hitler
became Chancellor of Germany.

Chief among those
who rejoiced at the news

were the Nazi storm troopers,
the party's paramilitary wing,
led by Ernst Rohm.

ALL SING ROUSING ANTHEM

In '33, you thought it was
the beginning of a new German

wonderful period.

It was a true,
enthusiastic movement of the people,

except the people who were,
by their hearts, socialists

who were, from the beginning,

persecuted and had to emigrate
or were in concentration camps.

One knew of these camps. One said,
"The communists would have done
the same and this is a revolution."

The first to be imprisoned
in this revolution
were the Nazis' political opponents,

communists and socialists. They
were rounded up and thrown into
hastily-built concentration camps.

Hermann Goering boasted
that scores were being settled.

All in an atmosphere
of chaotic terror,

as one Nazi storm trooper admitted.

"Everyone is arresting everyone else,
avoiding official channels,

"threatening everyone else with
protective custody, with Dachau.
Every little streetcleaner

"feels he is responsible for matters
which he has never understood."

Amongst the first to suffer
was Josef Felder.

a Social Democrat MP.

He was sent to the newly-opened
Nazi concentration camp
outside Munich - Dachau.

Josef Felder
was released after 18 months.

The majority of those imprisoned
here in 1933 were released
after less than a year.

The regime here was brutal.

Beatings and psychological torture
were common. But extermination
camps were not yet born.

Concentration camps
were a tool of oppression,
not yet of systematic murder.

In 1933, to many Germans,

they were an acceptable part
of the Nazi revolution.

To be a French nobleman in the
Bastille was not so agreeable either.

So people said,
"Well, this is revolution."

A peaceful revolution,
but, partly, it IS a revolution.

And concentration camps... Everybody
said, "The English invented them
in South Africa with the Boers."

So, you know, eh...

People couldn't look ahead.

It was impossible for somebody
in '33 to look ahead to '45.

You can't.

It was only 12 years, but it seems
to be too much to look ahead...
for 12 years.

But Germans only had to look
fewer than 12 weeks
into Hitler's chancellorship

to see what the status of the Jews
would be in the new Nazi state.

On April 1st, 1933,

the Party organised a boycott
of all Jewish shops
which lasted one day.

The Nazis made the Jews scapegoats
for the loss of World War One
and much else besides.

In those early months
of the Nazi reign,

German Jews also fell victim
to the storm troopers' arbitrary
and violent attacks.

In 1933, the storm troopers came

and took my father away,

together with many other Jews
in Nuremberg.
They were taken to a sports stadium

where there was a lot of grass

and they were made to cut the grass
with their teeth,
by sort of eating the grass.

I found out afterwards.
My father never talked about it.

It was to humiliate them,

to show them that they were
the lowest of the low.

It was simply to make a gesture.

Nazi storm troopers made other
violent gestures. In 1933,

together with sympathetic students,
they organised the burning
of unsuitable books,

particularly
those by Jewish authors.

Rohm wanted his storm troopers
integrated into the regular German
army. The army was horrified.

Hitler sympathised
with the revolutionary zeal
of Rohm and his storm troopers.

But by the summer of 1934,
he knew that their power
had to be curbed,

and not just to please the army.

Rohm had made a more dangerous
enemy than the army leadership.

Heinrich Himmler, ambitious
for power himself, and still
technically working to Rohm,

plotted his downfall.
He concocted a story

that Rohm was plotting a coup
and Hitler believed him.

On June 30th, 1934,

while on holiday in Bavaria,
he was arrested.

Two days later, he was shot.

The army was glad to see the power
of the storm troopers moderated.

To show their gratitude,
they volunteered to swear
an oath of allegiance to Hitler,

who now, on President Hindenburg's
death, was not just Chancellor,
but head of state.

Somebody was reading and we had to
lift our arm, and, at the very end,

say, "That's my oath."

How seriously did you
and your colleagues take this oath?

VERY seriously.

This accompanied me my whole life
till the very end.

I mean, oath is oath.

There's no doubt
that I can't break the oath,

otherwise I'm meant to commit
suicide if I plan something else.

This is very serious, the oath,
for a soldier.

With Rohm dead, Hitler appeared
to have restored order.

The revolution on the streets
had subsided, and, with his hold
on power secure,

Hitler would come here to relax...
in the mountains above
Berchetesgaden in southern Bavaria.

In 1938, a tea house was built
on top of the high Obersalzburg,

so that Hitler and his guests
could enjoy the view.

Hitler's own house was lower down
the slope, and a whole complex
grew up around it.

This was the official guest house.

But all that remains
of Hitler's own house is rubble,

the building demolished
to prevent it becoming a memorial

and quick-growing trees planted
to obscure the famous view.

When Hitler stayed here,
as well as when he was in Berlin,

the whole Nazi regime
revolved around him.

His personality determined the way
in which Germany was governed.

His was not the daily regime
of a workaholic.

Hitler was indolent - as those who
worked for him discovered.

He normally appeared
shortly before lunch,

quickly read the newspaper cuttings,
then had lunch.

When Hitler stayed
at the Obersalzburg, it was worse.

There, he never left his room
before 2pm, then went to lunch.

He spent most afternoons
taking a walk.
After dinner, there were films.

In the 12 years of his rule
in Germany, Hitler produced

the biggest confusion in government
that has ever existed
in a civilised state.

I've secured important decisions
from him without his ever asking
to see the relevant files.

He took the view that many things
sorted themselves out on their own,
if one did not interfere.

A very different picture of Hitler
was projected here,
at the vast complex of stadiums

built in Nuremberg
for the party's annual rally.

What the public saw of Hitler
in Nuremberg in the 1930s,

was a confident and strong leader
whose oratory promised a new,
dynamic and powerful Germany.

He was meant to be seen
as the all-powerful,

all-knowing leader,
who prevailed over a system
of total order.

But the contrast between image
and reality was quite a stark one

because, far from it being
a very orderly structure
of command,

in fact it was very disorganised.

It is a quite remarkable system,
if you can call it a system,

where there is
no collective government,

yet where the head of state doesn't
spend all his time dictating.

SUNG IN GERMAN:
"Happy Days Are Here Again"

Hitler and the Nazis
created a unique and peculiar
form of government.

Hitler was surrounded by acolytes
who knew that their future depended

on finding a way to please him.

They strove always to be near him,
accompanying him on whatever trips
took his fancy.

Though Hitler may have had little
interest in regular hours of work
or policy details,

he did have visions
of what he wanted for Germany.

As Hitler talked in an endless
monologue, ambitious Nazis
would listen to him closely.

Then, on their own initiative, they
tried to think of ways in which
his vision could become a reality.

They made up the detail policy
themselves and said they were
acting on the will of the Fuhrer.

From the first, Hitler openly said
he didn't have detailed policies.

But Hitler WAS open in saying what
he wanted FROM the German economy.

Chiefly, the weapons to build
a new German army. Rearmament
became his economic priority.

The Nazis
increased the army's budget so much
in their first year of power,

that the army wasn't able
to spend all of it.

The Nazis also promised
to rid Germany of unemployment.

And they did - mainly through
huge work creation schemes like
the Autobahn Building Programme.

But building
armaments and Autobahns

could only be a short-term solution
to Germany's economic problems.

It would take time for these
inflationary pressures to be felt.

For the moment, everything looked
rosy, especially when, in 1936,

Hitler ordered German troops
to re-enter the demilitarised
portion of Germany, the Rhineland.

Germans saw all this
as one more sign that their country
was regaining its self-respect.

The Nazis organised pageants
like Die Nacht der Amazonen -
The Night Of The Amazons -

held in Munich in the 1930s -

Celebrations in which only those
the Nazis considered racially pure

could participate.

But if you didn't fit the Nazi
image of the perfect German,
then life was very different.

Here, in Munich,
the same city where
The Night Of The Amazons was held,

the Nazis demolished one of the
biggest synagogues in Germany. They
wanted the space for a car park.

The Jews were systematically
excluded from German life. The 1935
Nuremberg Laws outlawed marriage

between Jews and other Germans
and declared that Jews
were not German citizens.

Other discrimination followed.

Wasn't it a problem for you
that you were working in a system

that allowed Jews to be pushed out
of their position,

to lose their wealth,
their property?

Surely this was a great injustice.

How did you feel about that?

Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda
hugely exaggerated the number
of Jews who were in professions.

The Nazis never gave the reason
why German Jews were concentrated

in certain walks of life -

that the Jews had been banned from
other careers for hundreds of years.

Thousands emigrated from Germany
during the '30s. They realised they

would not be safe during Nazi rule.

Those who remained
always risked the attentions
of the Secret State Police -

the infamous Gestapo.

In the town of Wurzburg lies a clue
to just how the Gestapo operated
under the Nazis.

Almost all Gestapo files were burnt
by the Nazis as the Allies
came into Germany,

but in Wurzburg, American soldiers
prevented their destruction.

Only recently
have the files been studied,

and a surprising picture emerges
of how the Gestapo functioned.

There were only 28 SS officials

for the entire Wurzburg region

of nearly a million people.

I think the Gestapo
could not have operated

without the co-operation

of the citizens of Germany.

By that I mean it would have been
structurally impossible
for them to do so.

There were not enough
Gestapo officials to go around.

Between 80-90% of the crimes
that were reported to the Gestapo
came from ordinary citizens.

The main job for the Gestapo

was sorting out the denunciations.

This seems to have been
their preoccupation.

The citizens of a town
like Wurzburg didn't so much
have to fear the Gestapo,

as what their neighbours might TELL
the Gestapo. Every German
was at risk from denunciation.

A woman who lived in this house on
the outskirts of Wurzburg in 1938

came to the Gestapo's notice when
she was denounced by a relative.

She was called Ilse Sonia Totzke,
and her Gestapo file
lies in the Wurzburg archive.

After years of Gestapo harassment,
she was sent to Ravensbruk
Concentration Camp, where she died.

Her crime was simple -
she didn't fit in.

She avoided her neighbours
and had Jewish friends.

She is put under very general
surveillance, not by the Gestapo,

but by the Gestapo asking
her neighbours to keep an eye on her.

What happens is that
one neighbour after another,
for one reason or another,

comes forward with information,
all adding up to one thing.

She may be just too unconventional
for her own good.

What this does
is that - small town mentality -
people keep after her...

they keep noticing her...

and it's fuelled again and again
by yet another denunciation.

The denunciations in her file
contain mostly gossip about her.

That she is acting suspiciously
and has shady friends, but little

amounts to evidence against her.

One denunciation
hints that she may be a lesbian.

"Miss Totzke does not seem
to have normal predispositions."
Typed in red,

it is signed only "Heil Hitler."

One denunciation is signed by a
20-year-old neighbour, Resi Kraus.

"Since March, 1938,

"Ilse Sonia Totzke
is a resident next door to us.

"She rarely has visitors.

"Now and then, a woman
of about 36 years old comes,
and she is of Jewish appearance...

"I would like to mention
that Miss Totzke never responds
to the German greeting, Heil Hitler.

"To my mind, Miss Totzke
is behaving suspiciously."

We used to think that
the population was manipulated
and brainwashed from above.

Now what we're beginning to see,

by looking at the social history
of the kind one sees in these
Gestapo dossiers,

is that the system is manipulated
from below by lots of people
for all kinds of reasons,

some of them selfish,
some of them - fewer - idealistic.

We now get a dramatically different
picture of what the system was like.

Ordinary Germans could influence
the Gestapo through denunciations.

But no major policy

could ever be successfully
instituted unless Hitler blessed it.

So for members of the Nazi elite,
the search was always on for
a new way of pleasing their Fuhrer.

One way
was to feed his anti-Semitism.

Joseph Goebbels, propaganda
minister and hater of Jews,

sought to do just that. He boasted
that the Nazis had managed
to exclude Jews from cultural life.

In the autumn of 1938, Goebbels
saw a chance to please Hitler more
when he heard

that German diplomat Ernst von Rath,
had been assassinated in Paris

by a young Jew, Hirschel Grynszpan,
angry at his family's treatment.

The Nazi elite
were in Munich for the anniversary
of the Beer Hall Putsch.

Goebbels asked Hitler's permission
to let loose the storm troopers

in an act of vengeance against
Germany's innocent Jews. He agreed.
And so began Kristallnacht -

the night of broken glass.

In the early hours of the morning,

they broke the front door down
and started to smash the place up.

Hoards of storm troopers.

We had two lots.

One lot smashed things up and left,
and then the second lot arrived.

Three elderly ladies
were living on the first floor.
One was dragged out and beaten...

for no reason except she probably
got in the way of someone.

I was knocked about...

and finally ended up
in the cellar...

which was where the kitchens were.

I was being knocked about.
When I came back, I went upstairs,

and found my father dying.

Dead.

I tried...

as far as I could...
artificial respiration.

I don't think I was very good at it.
In any case,

it was too late for me.

I was absolutely in shock.
It was beyond my comprehension.

I didn't know the people,
they didn't know me. They had no
grudge against me. They were just...

people who would come to do whatever
they thought they should do.

More than 800 Jews
are known to have lost their lives
as a result of Kristallnacht,

and as many as 1,000 synagogues
were destroyed.

What was the reaction
of the non-Jews you knew, when they
heard of your circumstances?

Did anyone come up to you to say
what they felt about it? No.

In fact...

..the people passing
the next morning, ordinary Germans,
threw stones at the windows.

Nobody expressed any sympathy? No.

In the aftermath of Kristallnacht,
Hitler's popularity
did not seem to suffer.

As he never spoke about it in
public, it was possible to believe,

for those Germans who wanted to,
that the responsibility lay
with the hot-headed storm troopers.

The love affair between Hitler
and his followers continued.

MALE SINGER:

In 1938, a new chancellory
was built, symbolising
the power and order of Nazi rule.

But inside its walls,

Hitler was still pursuing methods
which could only result
in administrative chaos.

The Grand Reich Chancellory
was a hive of political in-fighting.

Rivals with ill-defined jobs fought
each other for Hitler's favour.

Hitler's working life was organised
by FIVE private offices.

The office of the Reich Chancellory,
under Hans Heinrich Lammers.

The office of Hitler's Personal
Adjutant, under Wilhelm Bruckner.

The office of the Presidential
Chancellory under Otto Meissner.

On the second floor, the office
of the Chancellory of the Fuhrer,

under Philip Buhler.

And the office
representing the Fuhrer's Deputy,
under Martin Bormann.

All of these different offices
claimed to represent Hitler.

A large portion of their time
was spent fighting each other.

One of the more vicious
power battles
was over access to the mail,

to the thousands of letters
that arrived each week
addressed only to "Mein Fuhrer"

and which begged favours
or blessings from Hitler.

There were trivial letters
asking if church bells
could be named after Hitler

and serious ones
from individual Jews, pleading
that they were special cases

and should be exempt
from the discriminatory laws.

Access to this mail
meant access to Hitler
and a chance to form Nazi policy.

Philip Buhler, an ambitious Nazi,

managed to gain control of the mail

and exploit it to his benefit.

In late 1938 or early 1939,

one chance letter which
Buhler's office showed to Hitler,
had a devastating effect.

It was from the father
of a mentally disabled child

who asked the Fuhrer's permission
to have the child killed.
Hitler agreed.

He had already ordered
the sterilisation of the disabled.

This one letter was to be
the catalyst to their murder.

Buhler was to devise secret policy
for killing disabled children

within days of their birth.

This form had to be filled in
when a disabled baby was born.

Three doctors read the form.

If they thought the baby
should be killed,
they each marked it with a cross.

Within months, it was no longer
just babies who could be killed,
but disabled children, too.

Gerda Bernhardt's brother,
Manfred, was one of more than
5,000 children who were to suffer.

Manfred had been mentally disabled
since birth.

But Aplerbeck was one of the Nazi's
special children's units.

By now, two years after
the policy had begun,

doctors in these homes had stopped
filling in Buhler's form.
In a typical example

of how policies could spiral away,

staff here, on their own, selected
the children they wanted to kill.

The official record of deaths
at Aplerbeck

lists Manfred Bernhardt
as dying of measles on June 3rd.

In the same week,
eleven other children died.

Manfred Bernhardt was murdered
because he was not wanted
in the Nazis' perfect state.

The catalyst that caused his death
was a chance letter to Hitler
on a subject close to his heart,

brought to his attention
by an ambitious Nazi.

Any idea in this system

could, with the combination
of a leader who spoke in visions,

and enthusiastic supporters
anxious to please,

grow radically to an extreme
almost in an instant.

This was the way Germany was ruled
in the 1930s.

Now the world was about to suffer
the consequences

of the radical way decisions
were taken in this Hitler state.

Ceefax Subtitles by Janice Hamilton
BBC Scotland, 1997