Original subtitles

This programme contains scenes which some viewers may find upsetting from the start

I am the Reverend TJ Stretch,

attached as Padre to the formation controlling this camp.

This morning, we buried over 5,000 bodies.

We don't know who they are.

Behind me, you can see a pit which will contain another 5,000.

All these deaths have been caused

because of a treatment meted out to these poor people

by their SS guards.

Things they have committed, well,

nobody'd think they were human at all.

We actually know now

what has been going on in these camps.

Erm, I know, personally, what I'm fighting for.

After the Second World War,

some of the worst war criminals in history go to ground.

Hoping that, in the near future,

their fortunes will change

and they would be players again.

Many change their names,

and the most-wanted flee to South America.

Others claim the Holocaust never happened,

or had nothing to do with them.

Told by historians and experts,

this is the story of the little-known people

searching for truth and justice.

Trying to confront this man who is the murderer of her entire family.

It's a hostile environment.

What kind of men are they? Are they mad?

They must be mad.

The hunt for Nazi war criminals

is without any parallel, to my knowledge,

either before or since.

It's a hunt taking place against the backdrop of a world

that wants to forget and move on.

Justice for him was everything.

I'm upset that he died without being in a cage.

# Amen. #

At the end of the war,

Germany was in pieces.

A smoking ruin, basically.

The German population was defeated -

psychologically, as well as militarily.

The Allies now want to win the peace

and help Germany rebuild and move on.

But there's also the question -

how to deliver justice

for the terrible crimes that have been committed.

With what remains of Hitler's inner circle now in custody,

the Allied leaders meet outside the ruins of Berlin.

At the end of the war, it was really a problem for the Allies

deciding what they're going to do once they've captured Nazi leaders.

They do find real differences.

Churchill doesn't really want a trial at all.

He's quite happy if they're, you know, identified and shot.

Stalin, on the Soviet side, wanted trial,

but it's really cos they want a show trial.

Just put them in the court and then shoot them.

It's really only the Americans

who want a conventional western-style trial.

The Americans get their way

and preparations begin.

A special courtroom is built in Nuremberg.

This is the very first time ever

that a government of an enemy state

has been put on trial at the end of a war.

It's a complete novelty.

Hitler,

Himmler

and Goebbels have killed themselves.

But in the dock will be Goering,

Hitler's right-hand man...

..Albert Speer,

who, among other things,

oversaw the slave labour system that built the V2 rockets,

..and Ribbentrop,

Hitler's Foreign Minister.

In total, 22 of the highest ranking Nazis...

..who will face charges of war crimes,

crimes against the peace, conspiracy,

and crimes against humanity.

The whole purpose of the trial was to put up,

in front of public opinion,

the terrible things that the Hitler regime did.

And they want to tell the world so that the world remembers.

The wrongs which we seek to punish

have been so malignant and so devastating

that civilisation cannot tolerate their being ignored

because it cannot survive their being repeated.

I think for a great many of those who had led the Third Reich,

they think they might be punished.

But the idea that you'll have a huge international tribunal

in which they're held before world opinion,

I think very few of them had any idea of that.

The defendants are to plead guilty

or not guilty to the charges against them.

Hermann Wilhelm Goring.

As the most senior surviving Nazi,

Goering is first to make his plea.

Goring knows that everything that he's enjoyed,

the power he's had, everything is lost.

Now he's thinking to himself, you know, "What do I do?"

He starts off trying to make a speech.

"Here I am, I'm going to tell you how it was

"and you've got to take me seriously."

The defendants are not entitled to make a statement.

You must plead guilty or not guilty.

And of course he can't make a speech,

but he does make it clear

that he doesn't respect the trial or the indictment,

and that's really what he wants to get across.

All of the other defendants follow suit.

No-one accepts responsibility for the crimes of the Third Reich.

It's clear that Allied prosecutors

have a battle to prove their guilt,

and through them,

the guilt of the regime they served.

Not all high-ranking Nazis have been captured.

The job of tracking them down

and finding evidence of their crimes

falls to Allied soldiers.

One of them is 32-year-old Captain Victor Cross.

Before the war, he worked in the leather trade in Northampton.

Now, he's head of a small field security section

in Allied-occupied Germany.

A field security section...

..they're a bridge between

military intelligence and civil policing,

and they basically go Nazi-hunting.

The Germans were not stupid.

They knew the game was up.

A lot of records were destroyed.

But evidence is mounting

of those crimes against humanity

that were committed at Nazi camps.

Not just Belsen, Auschwitz, Sachsenhausen, Ravensbruck -

all these concentration camps,

whose names still resound

with a sinister ring, even today.

Allied HQ give Cross a list of suspects to find...

..the worst of whom are implicated in the Nazi genocide.

But immediately, there's a problem.

The list has over 70,000 names.

The task is daunting, without doubt.

The scale of the hunt

for Nazi war criminals

is without any parallel,

either before or since.

On this list are men like Klaus Barbie...

..one of the Gestapo chiefs

who tortured and murdered the French Resistance.

He's escaped from Allied custody and changed his name.

Adolf Eichmann, the bureaucrat

who managed the implementation of the Final Solution,

is living under a new identity,

pretending to be a chicken farmer.

Josef Mengele, the doctor of Auschwitz

who conducted murderous and perverted experiments

on men, women and children.

He's plotting his escape to South America.

And Rudolf Hoss,

the commandant of Auschwitz...

..who personally perfected the devastating system of mass murder

at the largest Nazi death camp.

He's complicit in the murders of over 1 million people.

And it's about Hoss that Cross gets his first lead...

..as he finds out that Hoss's wife

has been recognised in a sugar factory nearby.

You don't know what you're going to find...

..and so you have to be ready for whatever eventuality.

He could have a riot on his hands - who knows?

But what they don't find among the factory workers

is their target - Rudolf Hoss.

But the intelligence on Hoss's wife is good.

She's set up home above the factory.

There's no sign of Hoss here either.

But they do find shocking reminders of the family's Nazi past.

The British find - first, they find jewellery

looted from Auschwitz prisoners

in Hedwig Hoss's squalid accommodation.

And they find the visitor book

of their house in Auschwitz.

This is a trophy she has kept with her.

Hedwig and the children lived together with Rudolf Hoss

during the Second World War at the Auschwitz camp.

She knows about the gas chambers,

she knows about the mass killings,

she is a convinced Nazi, she is a convinced anti-Semite.

She also believes in the idea of Nazi patriarchy...

..and she absolutely decides not to tell the British

about the whereabouts of her husband.

She therefore lies that he is dead.

But Cross notices there's no photograph of her dead husband,

something he'd expect a widow to have.

You are not convinced she's telling the truth,

you have noticed the absence

of a photograph of the husband and father,

and you think, "OK, OK, meine frau, we'll be back.

"We are patient, we'll be back."

Hedwig Hoss knows full well her husband isn't dead.

She was with him just days before the total German surrender.

In May 1945,

leading SS officials in charge of the concentration camps

fled to the pathetic last stronghold of the Third Reich

in Flensburg in Schleswig-Holstein.

Here, some of the worst perpetrators of Nazi crimes...

..here they are all together for the last time.

Heinrich Himmler, the Reich leader of the SS,

ordered senior SS officers

to shed the uniform and to go into hiding.

The SS uniform has been an insignia of power, of pride, of dominance.

For SS officers who have occupied these positions of huge power

and influence over the lives and deaths of millions of people,

the end of the Third Reich is like an apocalypse.

Now they are changing from the hunters into being hunted.

Now, in an innocuous Navy uniform...

..Hoss joins the queue to be captured.

Following Germany's surrender,

seven-and-a-half million Armed Forces personnel

are held in British and American camps.

The Third Reich, the SS,

his livelihood, his ideology,

have all crumbled.

For Hoss, there is only one thing now,

and that is himself, that is his own life.

As well as a new uniform,

he's armed himself with fake identity papers...

..and his captors don't realise who they have.

Under his alias of Petty Officer Franz Lang,

Hoss is released

after just a few weeks.

One of the most notorious mass murderers of the 20th century,

suddenly, he's a nobody with a false identity.

He probably thinks that he has got away with it.

Some war criminals simply slip through the net.

Meanwhile, at Nuremberg,

the prosecution are beginning to build their case.

But behind the scenes,

there is a concern.

One of the 22 defendants

has killed himself.

It's the American prison interpreter, Gustave Gilbert,

who has to deal with the fallout.

It's true then as it is now,

that a suicide in a prison is a disaster.

But it's a particular disaster in Nuremberg

because these defendants have got to come to trial.

It's very important that all these defendants are cross-examined,

get to give their own testimony, and are also seen to face justice.

The commandant is clearly determined

that nobody else escapes justice by suicide.

He asks Gustave Gilbert to actually form the kinds of relationships

with these defendants,

such that he will be able to pick up

whether people are making plans to kill themselves,

whether their mood is changing.

Gilbert has a PhD in psychology,

and is given the job of prison psychologist

and put on the suicide watch.

He was a young man at the beginning of his career

and this job is really serious.

He is serving the process of justice.

I think Gilbert must feel the weight of history on his shoulders.

So Gustave Gilbert is now in a unique psychological position.

A Jewish man from New York,

he has the opportunity to study the psyche of Hitler's inner circle.

He decides to conduct his own personal investigation.

Prosecution for the United States will at this time

present a documentary film on concentration camps.

Here is a way to make visible to the defendants,

and of course to the wider world,

the reality of the crimes against humanity

of which the prisoners are indicted.

"Here it is, this is what you did."

It's a change moment for Goring.

I think after that, he begins to realise what it is

that the Allies are going to pin on them.

This film is very disturbing.

Gilbert is very concerned

that their suicide risk might go up with this evidence in full view.

Number one on his watch

is Hermann Goring.

With Hitler and Goebbels both dead,

there's no doubt that Goring really is the most important prisoner.

He was President of the German parliament.

He was Minister President of Prussia,

he was the Commander In Chief of the Air Force,

he was the Head of the Four-Year Plan and so on.

Meeting a high-profile defendant

can be an occasion of tension.

For all of us who work in prisons,

there is a moment when you see this person

in a situation where the roles have completely reversed.

They are no longer the powerful ones.

There's this rather ordinary person just sitting there.

But I think for Gilbert,

the ordinariness slips away quite quickly,

because Goring doesn't hold back.

After the film has been shown,

Gilbert visits him to see, really, what Goring's reaction is.

And Goring's reaction is, you know,

"They showed that awful film, it spoiled everything"...

..which is an extraordinary reaction.

You know, you really ought to be saying, "My God, this was terrible.

"How did we do that?"

It's the point at which Goring's already, I think,

begun to create a kind of psychological block.

I think Goring just blocked it out during the Third Reich, too.

In reality, Goring cannot distance himself from it.

He authorised anti-Semitic policies...

..set up concentration camps in the '30s...

..and he was by Hitler's side during much of the genocide.

From Gustave Gilbert's point of view,

this is a massive experiment,

this is about the minds of the Nazi high command.

But Gilbert has no manual.

He has to just go it alone as best he can,

with the tools of the day.

He carries out psychological tests on Goring,

including ink blot and IQ tests

that he's adapted.

I think what Gilbert wants to know is what the world wants to know -

are they mad?

They must be mad.

Or are they just people

who've done horrible things for horrible motives?

Gilbert concludes that Goring is highly intelligent,

and he gets similar results for the other Nazi defendants.

So, the question then remains is,

how do apparently ordinary men,

mentally normal men,

carry out this kind of level of cruelty and oppression and damage?

November 1945,

and the German population

is only just beginning to come to terms with the truth.

Other public trials are taking place,

including that of the SS guards at Belsen.

These are former electricians,

hairdressers,

farmers' daughters,

who became torturers and murderers.

And during the trial,

one name keeps coming up over and over again -

Rudolf Hoss,

the commandant of Auschwitz.

Victor Cross and his men

are on the trail of the missing man.

They are on the ground,

investigating, following leads,

talking to acquaintances.

It's painstaking work,

verging on police detective work.

It's not some streak of lightning from above.

Cross believes that Hoss is still alive

and has likely heard from his wife that they're after him.

Time is ticking.

You've got a very big target

with Rudolf Hoss.

This man was evil, what he did,

hundreds and thousands of human beings murdered.

Let's not dance around the bush, it's murder.

And you've got to keep going.

But over six months have passed since Hoss went into hiding,

and Cross still doesn't know where to find him.

In Nuremberg,

the prosecution is still building its case,

with testimony from death camp survivors.

In February, a woman gives gruelling testimony in court

and it's horrifying.

But even this evidence fails to break through to the Nazi leaders.

Each has a different response.

Goring's very affected by it, he takes his headphones off,

he doesn't want to listen to it, doesn't want to confront it.

He talks to Gilbert,

he makes it clear that he's heard enough of this stuff,

he doesn't want to hear any more.

He is always trying to block out...

..erm, the sharp reality of the Third Reich.

Up until this point,

Gilbert has been an observer,

studying their psychology.

But after hearing the witness testimony,

he confronts Goring,

and tries to make him acknowledge what he has done.

Gilbert gets very angry with the defendants.

He clearly is maddened and distressed by what he's heard.

He wants them to accept responsibility and show remorse,

and they won't do it.

Goring refuses to respond,

and goes on to complain that his room is too cold.

My experience of working with people who've done horrible things

is that in order to carry out a horrible action,

in order to kill somebody else or be cruel to them,

you generally have to convince yourself

that you're doing something that's justifiable.

So you kind of tell a story of yourself that it's OK.

Goring, in his view, is that he was doing everything

that was required for the greater Germany to succeed and to triumph.

Goring still claims

these horrors only took place on the peripheries of the regime.

He continues to deny the enormity of what happened.

He's preparing for his defence.

He's still preparing to say,

"Terrible things that you've been showing have all been done

"by somebody else, a fraction of the Third Reich."

You know, "That is not the Third Reich."

Across the prison corridor,

in the cell opposite,

another defendant is taking a very different approach...

..Albert Speer,

Hitler's architect who controlled slave labour camps

and personally oversaw the expansion of Auschwitz.

Speer was deeply involved in the persecution of the Jews.

He used concentration camp inmates

for war production,

so Speer knows exactly what is going on in these camps.

But Speer was cunning.

He spent the last months of the war hiding evidence.

When Speer pleads not guilty, he has a big advantage

because the prosecutors don't know

about his close cooperation with Himmler and the SS,

and there is a lack of documents about his crimes.

Speer's strategy is to deny all knowledge about atrocities,

and to claim that he just had been an architect and a technocrat.

Speer is clever enough to realise

that denying everything won't be enough.

He's anxious.

He's horrified by the prospect of being hanged.

By March 1946,

the Allies are fracturing.

The Soviets are putting up the Iron Curtain,

dividing eastern Europe from the west.

And while Germany wants to move on from Nazism,

the crimes of the concentration camps

are only just beginning to be punished.

The whereabouts of Rudolf Hoss,

the commandant of Auschwitz,

are still unknown.

Captain Cross, of the Field Security Section,

decides to arrest his wife and eldest son.

Clearly, their primary lead to Hoss was his wife.

For five days, she is asked the same question over and over -

"Where is your husband?"

And the reply is, over and over, "He is dead".

Despite being separated from her children for five days,

she holds firm.

But Cross doesn't give up.

"Whilst there is a possibility this woman is lying,

"we will try and break her."

On the sixth day,

Cross ups the pressure.

His men have commandeered a train which now pulls up outside.

Cross tells Hedwig that unless she gives her husband up,

her son will be put on the train

and sent to Siberia.

Maybe he gets a shot of adrenaline at this point.

She's given Cross the name of a farm complex,

just 70 miles away.

He would know those men inside out,

cos they've been together under stressful conditions,

and he will know...

..in particular, that the Jewish soldiers

will be thinking of the dreadful happenings in the camps.

They will all know what's at stake.

Initially, Hoss thinks, "This is a burglary".

He feels so sure of himself,

he feels so confident that he's beyond reproach.

They check for a cyanide capsule

and find a mark of an SS soldier -

a blood group tattoo.

But Hoss maintains he's Franz Lang.

Frau Hoss had given Cross the alias,

so when Hoss uses it, "Ah."

All falls into place. "We've got the right man."

Some of his soldiers turn to violence.

Cross maybe thinks, "Yes, this bastard needs to suffer,

"suffer here and now".

Does he let a handful of his soldiers

beat this man, possibly to death,

or does he step in?

I think that many of the other officers' intervention

brought Cross up sharply

from indulging in illegal behaviour by his soldiers to,

"Right, this stops now."

Cross doesn't yet realise how significant

his intervention will prove to be.

On the 18th of March 1946,

Hermann Goring takes the stand and faces cross-examination.

After months and months,

he's got his chance, in front of the world, basically.

It's a chance for Goring, really, to put on record

a different view of the Third Reich

from the view that the prosecution has been presenting.

You...

..and others

cooperated in concentrating all authority in the German state

in the hands of the Fuhrer.

Finally able to make his case,

Goring turns the accusations

against him into a celebration

of the Nazi domination of Europe.

At this point, Goring is still defending it,

he's still thinking that there was much about the Third Reich,

much about the Fuhrer, to be positive about.

And despite everything that's happened so far in the trial,

I think Goring is still hoping that

that's the message he can somehow get across.

He wants to defend the reputation of the Third Reich.

But just as Goring smirks in the dock...

..at the same time,

Hoss is beginning to talk.

Hoss no longer has to live under the alias of Franz Lang,

he can now openly say again who he is.

By talking about the number of prisoners he personally killed,

he is re-enacting his true self.

For Hoss, this is nothing to be ashamed of.

This is something, in his perverted mindset, to be proud of.

Unbeknownst to Hermann Goring,

news of Hoss's confession reaches the American prosecution team.

Hoss is suddenly told, "OK, you can have a haircut, you can shave.

"We're taking off your handcuffs.

"Put on some cleaner clothes.

"We are going to take you to Nuremberg."

After months in obscurity,

Hoss finds himself about to step on to the global stage...

..as a last-minute witness.

His confession, read out for the court and the world to hear,

will ring out in history.

"I commanded Auschwitz until 1 December '43

"and estimate that at least 2,500,000 victims

"were executed and exterminated there

"by gassing and burning."

You signed that affidavit voluntarily,

and the affidavit is true?

Hoss is the first senior Nazi

who puts it on the record, "We did it".

Hoss is the first to explain in detail

the processes of systemised mass murder used in the death camps -

the planning, the infrastructure, the policy.

Goring, Speer and the other defendants

can no longer deny the truth,

that the flagship project of Nazi Germany

was the mass annihilation of the Jews of Europe.

Gilbert is feeling, "This is it.

"You can't deceive yourself any more.

"This is irrefutable evidence from one of your own people

"about the nuts and bolts of what you did."

It certainly does deflate Goring.

He says, "After this, there's nothing we can do".

From this point on, really,

Goring begins to decline.

It's finally the nail in the coffin

for anybody who thinks they can find a way of defending themselves.

But one man is yet to take to the stand.

Speer had time to rethink his strategy

and time to distinguish himself from all the others.

The Hoss statement makes it clear for Speer

that he has to condemn the regime as evil.

On the morning of his cross-examination,

Speer is well prepared.

For Speer, it's THE decisive moment of his life.

He knows exactly what he wants to say,

he knows exactly how he wants to present himself.

Name, please.

Will you repeat this oath after me?

I swear by God...

..that I will speak the pure truth...

..and will withhold nothing.

You may sit down.

In court, Speer is lying all the time.

He shows sadness and horror.

Speer is an actor,

a successful actor.

Speer has seen how denials alone have been met by the court,

and so he gambles on taking a different approach.

Speer plays a clever game.

He takes a general responsibility for the regime,

but he denies any personal guilt.

Speer denies any knowledge of atrocities.

The only thing Speer admits to is

that he should have known...

..that he should've asked.

In reality, he knew.

The tribunal will now adjourn.

At the end of August 1946,

after nine gruelling months,

the hearing of evidence is at an end.

Rudolf Hoss is flown to Poland.

He has returned to the scene of his crimes,

and he will be put on trial.

And in Nuremberg,

the verdicts are in.

Defendant Hermann Wilhelm Goring,

the International Military Tribunal

sentences you to death by hanging.

The record discloses no excuses for this man.

Requiem in D Minor by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Tribunal finds that Speer is not guilty on counts one and two,

but IS guilty under counts three and four.

Defendant Albert Speer, the Tribunal sentences you to 20 years in prison.

Speer got away with his involvement in Nazi crimes.

He definitely should have hanged.

But Speer was so clever in his appearance,

and they want to believe him

and they want to believe that there is a good Nazi,

a noble Nazi.

It's a role he'll play for the rest of his life.

Gustave Gilbert has endured the harrowing year-long trial

alongside the defendants.

Gustave Gilbert had to sit through

every single day of the Nuremberg trials,

and he's kind of burnt out.

And there's something about weariness and anger

with the defendants that is a bit overwhelming for him.

After the sentencing,

Gilbert makes a request to go home.

It's denied.

He must see out the executions.

He is expected to carry out orders

and he has to stay to do a distasteful task.

Goring makes a request to the Tribunal

to be shot by firing squad and not hanged.

Goring is trying to say, "Can't you respect me for what I am?

"I was the Reichsmarschall of the Third Reich.

"I want to have a Reichsmarschall's end.

"I don't want to be strung up like a common criminal."

It's Gilbert who's dispatched

to give the answer to Goring's final request.

I wonder if it was felt that Gilbert was the best man for the job.

It's possible that he volunteers for the job.

He's not going to see Goring alive again, their dialogues are over.

I wonder whether he wants to tell Goring what he thinks of him.

You know, Goring really wants Gilbert

to say something reassuring, perhaps.

He says, "What have you thought about my personality?"

and Gilbert is...is candid.

He says, "You're a moral coward,

"you stand aside from responsibility".

Goring is not pleased by this response.

Perhaps he realises there's a germ of truth

in what it is that Gilbert's saying to him.

He has spent much of the trial trying to evade the worst.

Gilbert delivers the last blow...

..news that Goring's request for a firing squad has been denied.

I wonder whether it was important

for Gilbert to have the last word

and to turn and walk away...

..leaving Goring under no illusions what Dr Gilbert thought about him.

But Goring had no intention

of letting other people have the last word.

This must be the point at which Goring is beginning to consider

that there might be another way to evade the noose.

The executions are due to take place in just two hours' time...

..but Goring's already dead.

He's managed to get hold of a cyanide capsule.

Whether it was slipped in by a guard

or whether it was somehow hidden on his person doesn't really matter.

The point is that Goring decided

he's not going to be hanged like a common criminal,

he's going to kill himself.

I suspect that Gilbert might feel

some kind of relief that Goring is dead,

he might feel anger that he's escaped the hanging.

But he might just feel glad that perhaps, finally,

this chapter of his life is coming to an end,

that however it's happened, it's happened.

Goring may have evaded the Allies' penalty for his crimes...

..but he's emphatically failed

to keep his version of the Third Reich's legacy alive.

By the end of the trial, what we have is a situation where

a extraordinary level of atrocity and genocide

has been exposed,

and the Third Reich will always be remembered

for the sheer scale of human damage.

As he walks away from Nuremberg,

Gilbert's learnt that these are ordinarily intelligent men.

He's learnt that they have a capacity to deceive themselves,

and that you can use all kinds of nationalist discourse

to convince yourself that you're doing the right thing

when you're really doing the wrong thing.

With the execution of Hoss,

with the execution of other leading Nazis,

full justice has not been served,

because the monstrosity of the Third Reich's crimes

was so heinous, it was so unprecedented,

that the process of reckoning with the Nazi past

will probably never be complete.

Moonlight Sonata No 14 by Ludwig van Beethoven

The hunt continues.

Eichmann knows that his options have run out.

Klaus Barbie was master of life and death.

All of a sudden, they're realising

that their star source is, in fact, a monster.

Justice was denied.