All language subtitles for BBC The Nazis A Warning from History S01 E05_track3_[ton]

This programme contains scenes which
some viewers may find disturbing

For 13 months,
between July 1942 and August 1943,

trains ran through the Polish
countryside along this siding,

disgorging thousands of men, women
and children in this clearing.

This used to be the SS barracks.

This, the undressing room.

And this, the route to the
gas chambers - known by the Nazis
as the path to heaven.

This killing factory, one of six
the Nazis built in Poland,

is near a tiny hamlet whose name
is still infamous today - Treblinka.

How could it happen? How could
such places ever come to exist?

The Warsaw Ghetto.
In 1940, the Nazis imprisoned
Polish Jews in ghettoes like this.

A temporary measure
whilst they decided

what the Jews' eventual fate
should be.

The Nazis brutally persecuted
the Jews. They thought them
racially inferior, but dangerous.

They believed that there was
a worldwide Jewish conspiracy

which would destroy Germany and
that the Jews carried Bolshevism.

As a result, there had been
some Nazi rhetoric saying that
all the Jews should be destroyed.

But even as late as 1940, there was
still no Nazi plan systematically
to exterminate the Jews.

Up to now,
the emphasis in Nazi planning

had been on expulsion.

The most bizarre plan was proposed
in June 1940 by an official
in the German Foreign Office -

to resettle the Jews on a tropical
island under German police control.

"In the peace treaty, France must
make Madagascar available for the
solution of the Jewish question."

But the Madagascar plan
came to nothing.

By the time these pictures
were taken in the spring of 1941,

Hitler had decided
on a radical action

that altered the course of the war
and changed the Nazi policy
towards the Jews.

Hitler had decided,

as the fulfilment
of his great ideological dream,
to invade the Soviet Union.

The German operation, Barbarossa,

began on June 22nd 1941.

Ever since the 1920s,

the Nazis had been
ideologically opposed to communism.

So, to them, this was not just
a normal war, this was a crusade.

Unlike the conflict in the West,
the German soldiers knew

that the war on the Eastern Front
was to be fought without rules.

Entering Soviet-held territory,
the Germans encountered hundreds
of thousands of Eastern Jews.

Nazi propaganda made it plain
what Germans should think of them.

Hitler intended to colonise
the captured territory in the East
and settle Germans there.

Special killing squads were ordered
to cleanse the area of undesirables.
In charge of the Einsatzgruppen

was one of Hitler's most ruthless
subordinates - Reinhard Heydrich,

37-year-old head
of the security police.

He issued this directive after
the invasion of the Soviet Union.

"The following are to be executed -
all officials of the Comintern,

"officials of senior and middle rank,
extremists in the Party
and committees,

"the people's commissars, Jews in
the service of the Party and state.

"No steps are to be taken against
anti-Communist or anti-Jewish purges
in the newly occupied territories.

"On the contrary, these are
to be secretly encouraged."

Heydrich was a cold, desk-bound
murderer who prided himself
on being a man of culture.

Heydrich was a talented musician

and held weekend parties
for his friends
in the SS castle of Wewelsburg.

Heydrich and his boss,
Heinrich Himmler,

would organise this quantum leap
forward for Hitler - the murder
of selected Communists and Jews

as the German army advanced
eastward. Hitler had always said
the Jews were behind communism.

The crusade in the East tried
to crush both.

Under Heydrich's command were four
Einsatzgruppen, or killing squads,

each with between 600 and 1,000 men.
Each was led by an educated German.

Einsatzgruppe A was led by
Walther Stahlecker, doctor of law.

Einsatzgruppe B was led by
Arthur Nebe,
head of German Criminal Police.

Einsatzgruppe C was led by
Otto Rasch.

He held two doctorates
in law and political science.
So he was known as Dr Dr Rasch.

Einsatzgruppe D was led by
Otto Ohlendorf,

a gifted economist and the most
intellectual of the squad leaders.

Bloodiest of them all was
Stahlecker's Einsatzgruppe A which
operated in the Baltic States.

Einsatzgruppe A followed
the German army into Lithuania

in the early days of the invasion.

Lithuanians were a Catholic people.
But, in 1939, Stalin's Communists
had invaded their country

and oppressed their traditions
and beliefs.

So when the Germans reached Kaunas,

Lithuania's second city,

they were welcomed as liberators.

Throughout Lithuania,
symbols of communism were destroyed.

To many of the Lithuanian
nationalists, just as to Nazis,
communism was linked to Judaism.

In Kaunas, locals rounded up
Jewish men, particularly those they
believed had Communist sympathies.

They turned on them in an act of
revenge of the type Heydrich asked
the Einsatzgruppen to encourage.

A German army photographer
witnessed what happened.

Once all the Jews had been
bludgeoned to death, one of
the killers climbed onto the bodies

with his accordion.

But it was the Nazis who played
the major role in organising

the rounding up of those
Heydrich had called to be executed.
In the Baltic States,

Einsatzgruppe A took Heydrich's
directive as the bare minimum

and soon began to arrest
ALL young Jewish men.

They were taken out of the towns
and shot.

That August, less than two months
after the German invasion,

Himmler visited Minsk,
one of a series
of morale-boosting visits he paid

to the Einsatzgruppen, the police
and other SS units in the East.

A crucial part of Himmler's
itinerary was not filmed
for this propaganda newsreel,

but it is mentioned
in Himmler's appointment book,

recently discovered
in Moscow archives.

The entry for the 15th August 1941
reads,

"Vormittags, before lunch, attend
execution of Jews and partisans

"just outside Minsk."

Among those who attended
the execution was Lieutenant Frentz,
a German cameraman.

Himmler witnessed a similar
Einsatzgruppen execution to this,

filmed in sand dunes in Latvia
in 1941.

Himmler now announced an extension
of the cleansing in the East.
Since the Nazis thought every Jew

was a Bolshevik, they now said that
every Jew was a military threat.

So women and children in the newly
conquered areas were to be killed.

Himmler later tried to justify
the killing of Jewish children

by saying the Nazis could not allow
a generation of avengers to grow up
as they'd cause problems in future.

But Himmler was worried
about his killers. Arthur Nebe,
head of Einsatzgruppe B,

told him that the psychological
effect of murdering at such close
quarters was affecting his men.

So Himmler looked for a more humane
method of killing - humane for
the executioners, not the victims.

The Nazis experimented with gas
as a means of killing

and filmed
some of their experiments.

Whilst the gassing experiments
continued,
the shooting carried on in the East.

The Einsatzgruppen meticulously
recorded their killings.

In that summer of 1941,
their records show the murders
drastically increasing -

coinciding with a increase in the
number of police units sent East.

The killing squads based in Kaunas
had killed 4,400 Jews in July 1941.

In August,
they killed more than 38,000,
including women and children.

Stahlecker, Einsatzgruppen A,
boasted that,

"New possibilities in the East
allow a complete clearing up
of the Jewish question."

In the Lithuanian village
of Butrimonys,

the consequences of this extension
in the killing were felt
on September the 9th 1941.

Before the arrival of the Germans,
the Jews here had been tolerated,

though many villagers had envied
them their supposed wealth.

But now, with the prospect of theft
and plunder, some locals were happy

to respond to the German order
to march the remaining Jews
along this road out of the town.

Riva Losanskaya and her mother
escaped, but the remaining Jews
were driven off the road

towards where these trees now grow.

Here, in scenes which were repeated
throughout the Einsatzgruppen area
of operation,

the Jews were ordered to undress.

Villagers had come to watch,

some out of curiosity,
others out of greed.

The killing here was carried out
by Lithuanian collaborators
acting under German orders.

The suffering is recorded in
the Einsatzgruppen killing book as,

"9th September 1941, Butrimonys.

"67 Jewish men, 370 Jewish women,

"303 Jewish children.

"A total of 740 Jews killed."

The same day in nearby Alytus,

the killing book records
1,279 Jews murdered.

The next day in Merkine - 854.

And in Varena - 831.

In the Baltic States,
more than 80% of the killing squads
were made up of locals

acting under German Einsatzgruppen
orders. Men like Petras Zelionka.

After the war ended,
the Soviets sent Petras Zelionka
to a Siberian Gulag.

His former comrades, against whom
he gave evidence, were executed.

That autumn of 1941,
whilst Petras Zelionka
and his comrades carried on killing,

Hitler directed the war in the East

from the Wolf's Lair,
his headquarters
in a forest in East Prussia.

Hitler's talk was of annihilation.
In September 1941,

he said Leningrad should vanish
from the surface of the Earth.
In this atmosphere of blood lust,

he was also privately expressing
his undying hatred of the Jews.

"That race of criminals has
on its conscience
the two million dead of World War I

"and now, already,
hundreds of thousands more."

To his staff at his headquarters,
Hitler talked of taking revenge
against the Jews.

But even before America entered
the war, Hitler showed no mercy
to the Jews in the East.

Now he was about to show no mercy
to the Jews
in the rest of the Nazi empire.

In September 1941, two new measures
showed that German Jews were under
increased threat.

Hitler agreed to an order which
said that German Jews must, for the
first time, wear the yellow star.

A secret order from Himmler said
that Hitler had authorised that,

from autumn, all Jews from Germany,
Austria and the occupied Czech
lands should be transported East.

350 miles west of Hitler's
headquarters, Berliners relaxed
by the capital's lakes.

So far, they had heard only
good news from the war in the East.

But that autumn, there was
one new sign on the streets

that showed life was changing...

at least for some of the capital's
population - the Jews were marked.

There's nothing to say. It's bad.

It's bad you have a sign on you.

Nobody would have thought
that I was a Jew, but this...

We had to wear it.

The hate grew up.

We felt it.

The Germans always said, "The Jews
are not Germans," and I said,
"I am a German of Jewish faith."

And for them, I am not a German,

but I AM a German.

In winter 1941, with the war
bogged down in the mud of the East,

the Nazis knew there would be no
easy victory over the Soviet Union.

There was a new enemy to deal with,

for after Germany's ally Japan
attacked Pearl Harbor in December,

Germany declared war
on the United States.

Hitler had meetings with Nazi

leaders that December to discuss

the consequences for the Nazi cause,

and the fate of the Jews
was also discussed.

A new piece of evidence
from Himmler's diary shows
that on the 18th December 1941,

Hitler met with Himmler
and the topic was the Judenfrage -
the Jewish question.

The entry is written in Himmler's
own hand. Also, cryptically, is...

"to be exterminated as partisans".

Though we can't know exactly,

it's probably camouflage language
to justify the murder of the Jews
in the East to the German army.

But the diary entry clearly links
Hitler with the killings.

In January 1942, a conference
was called here at the Wannsee
on the outskirts of Berlin.

By now, Hitler had authorised that
all Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe
should be deported to their deaths

and the meeting here
worked out the details.

The discussion was chaired
by Reinhard Heydrich,

who months earlier had been asked
to compile a plan for the "final
solution" to the Jewish problem.

The Wannsee conference minutes
were taken by Heydrich's specialist
in Jewish matters - Adolf Eichmann.

The minutes are deliberately
euphemistic and the talk is still
of the "evacuation" of the Jews.

But we know that this was code
for extermination

because Hans Frank, the Nazi
who ran part of occupied Poland,

told his senior officials what the
Wannsee conference was really about.

"What will happen to the Jews?

"Do you imagine they'll be settled
in villages in the East? People say,
'Why bother? Liquidate them.' "

Now deportations were occurring
all over Germany.

The forced eviction
of these Jews in Dresden
was filmed by an amateur cameraman.

This was the final act in a series
of incremental persecutions which
the Jews of Germany had suffered.

First, they had been denied

Reich citizenship,

then the right to a state education,

then had their property confiscated.

Now the Jews were told they were
to be sent east to work camps.

More Jews were deported from Berlin
than any other German city - 55,000,

many of them from the freight
station here at Putlitzstrasse.

We were trucked there.

The truck was empty.

The people were conducted
immediately inside the car.

And then...
in the moment they went in,

they had a package
of four slices of bread,

given from the community,
the Jewish community.

It was an atmosphere of...fear,

an atmosphere of big fear.

There were babies, there were
little children and they cried,

and the mothers said,
"Behave well. Don't cry."

We couldn't think.

We couldn't think.

There were Germans who helped Jews.
Some even hid them.

Most acted as Erwine Massuthe did,
as he saw the deportations
at Putlitzstrasse across the street.

The fate of these Jews
was supposed to be a secret -

just how BIG a secret, switchboard
operator Alfons Schulz learnt

when a colleague overheard
a top-secret conversation at the
Fuhrer's headquarters in May 1942.

Hitler wanted the Jews annihilated
and he wanted it kept a secret,

but it couldn't be kept a secret
from everybody.

Gunther Ruschin was on a train east
when he learned his intended fate
from an unexpected source.

In Frankfurt an der Oder
the train stopped at the station,

and then we shouted, "Please,
give us some water. We are thirsty."

And we heard, crying back,

"You damn Jews!
Didn't they kill you yet?"

The workers at the station...

..in Frankfurt,

if THEY knew, because they said,
"Didn't they kill you yet?"...

..the population must have known it,

or must have imagined what would
happen or what they were doing to us.

CHORAL SINGING

Nazi propagandists certainly didn't
want the German public to dwell
on the possible fate of the Jews.

In the winter of 1942, as
the Jewish deportations continued,

THIS was the image of Germany
that Goebbels preferred to sell.

SINGING CONTINUES

It is impossible to tell exactly
how many ordinary Germans knew what
was really happening to the Jews,

but while this film was being shown
in German cinemas, December 1942,

a Nazi secret intelligence report
records disquiet among some Germans
in the south of the country.

"One major cause of unease
among those attached to the Church,

"is based on news from Russia in
which shooting and extermination
of the Jews is spoken about.

"The news frequently leaves
great anxiety, care and worry
in those sections of the population.

"According to opinion in rural areas
it's not certain we will win the war,

"and if the Jews return to Germany,
they will exact dreadful revenge
upon us."

By the time this secret report
was written at the end of 1942,

Nazi gas experiments
had led to the creation
of extermination centres at...

And it wasn't just German Jews
who were sent to the new camps.

Now the Nazis had developed

an efficient means to kill the Jews,

they were to be eliminated all over
occupied Europe - from Holland
to Greece, and France to Poland.

Other groups the Nazis considered
a threat were also to suffer -

most prominently, Europe's Gypsies.

From all over Europe, trains
converged on Nazi-occupied Poland
and its extermination centres.

Here, Bulgarian Jews
are transported to Treblinka.

In this remote spot,
about 750,000 people were murdered,

though we can never know
exactly how many died.

But, because a handful escaped, we
CAN know what the camp looked like.

This drawing was done by one of
the escapees, Samuel Willenberg.

It shows how complex the killing
machine had become since the early
Einsatzgruppen shootings.

Treblinka station was designed
to look as normal as possible, with
train timetables and a waiting room.

New arrivals would be led
to the undressing barracks

and they'd be told they were
at a hygiene stop and must
take a shower to be disinfected.

A connecting path led from
the undressing barracks through two
high fences to the gas chambers.

If any arrivals said they were sick,

the Nazis directed them

to the hospital.

Samuel Willenberg is one of fewer
than 70 known Treblinka survivors.

More than 99% of those who arrived
here were murdered, the majority
within three hours of arriving.

The Nazis didn't just kill -

they stole.

Once the victims had been murdered,

their clothes and valuables
were sorted and the plunder
sent back to Germany.

In 1943, their murderous work
completed, the Nazis tried
to eliminate all trace of the camp,

but not because they were ashamed
of their crimes.

That same year, 1943,
Himmler spoke to his SS colleagues
about the extermination of the Jews.

"We know what it means when 100, 500,
or 1,000 corpses are piled together.

"To endure this, and, at the same
time, ignoring some moments of human
weakness, to have remained decent,

"this is what has made us tough.

"It is one of the most glorious
chapters in our history which
has not and may never be written."

But the crimes of the Nazis
would be discovered, because by now
they were losing the war.

In the East the Nazis saw the enemy
they feared the most, the Russians,
doing the impossible and winning.