Original subtitles

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 Höss 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,

Höss 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 Höss, 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 Möbius, 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

Höss 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 Höss 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 Höss 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.

Höss 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 Höss 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.

Höss 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 Höss 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, Höss 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

Höss 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

Höss 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.