Original subtitles

(ominous music)

(crowd cheers)

- [Narrator] Germany's so-called elite.

The Fuhrer's guard.

A black order.

The end result is a crime

the likes of which the world has never seen.

(ominous music continues)

British troops shortly before the gates of Hamburg.

The Hanseatic city is heavily scarred by bombs.

In Neuengamme concentration camp south of Hamburg,

tens of thousands of prisoners hope for their liberation.

SS men prepare for the evacuation of the camp.

20 Jewish children between 5 and 12 are also held here.

These photos were taken before their deportation by the SS.

In Neuengamme concentration camp,

the children are abused as test subjects

for medical experiments for months.

SS doctors research tuberculosis on them,

inoculate them with pathogens.

Every step of the experiments is meticulously documented.

- The SS does endure as the ultimate symbol of Nazi evil.

- [Narrator] Shortly before the Allies take Hamburg,

the SS clear the camp and remove traces.

The prisoners are also to leave.

- Hitler and the SS were very concerned

that they didn't fall into Allied hands

because they had been a witness

to the secrets of the system.

- [Narrator] The night of April 20th, 1945,

Hitler's birthday,

SS men lead the 20 children and adult carers

out of the concentration camp.

Their destination, a building on Bullenhuser Damm,

a concentration camp sub-camp in Eastern Hamburg.

In the cellar of the former school building,

an SS doctor injects the prisoners with morphine.

Then, the drugged children are hanged.

SS man Johann Frahm later confesses that he had, quote,

"hanged the children on the wall like pictures."

- The SS were so indoctrinated

that the concept of right and wrong

was turned on its head for them.

They actually believed so deeply in this racial concept

that all the crimes they committed

they believed they were doing for the good of Germany.

(ominous music)

- [Narrator] The SS.

Hitler's executioners in black.

What is the secret of their power?

(ominous music continues)

January 30th, 1933.

Hitler becomes Chancellor of the Reich.

A man who has loudly announced his intention

to destroy democracy

comes to power legally.

(Hitler speaking in foreign language)

(crowd cheers)

- [Narrator] Behind Hitler's rise

is the failure of German politics

and the violence of paramilitary associations

such as the Sturmabteilung, SA for short,

and the Schutzstaffel, the SS.

The SA, Hitler's Brownshirts,

Nazi poster boys and thug squad.

Responsible for marches, propaganda,

and beatings of political opponents,

primarily communists and social-democrats.

Bloody street fights between the SA and leftists

lead Germany to the brink of civil war in the early 1930s.

This benefits Hitler twice over.

- The Nazis were able, on the one hand,

to inflict a lot of violence on their adversaries,

but also, somewhat ironically,

to pose as the only party that was tough enough

to defend Germany from the threat of violence

from people like the communists.

- [Narrator] The SS is still part of the SA.

They can be recognized by their black caps

with the swastika and skull and crossbones.

Symbols that signal that they are violent and ready to kill.

The SS wants to be more than just a thug squad.

(man speaking in foreign language)

- [Translator] As the name Schutzstaffel says,

its purpose was to protect the party and the party organs

against their enemies.

- [Narrator] In Hamburg,

the young Otto Kumm witnesses attacks

on political opponents from 1931 onwards.

- [Translator] Policy meetings

were always disturbed by communists

and then we had to rush out there and beat them up.

Our group called Storm 5

had a truck parked in front of the door

which immediately drove us there

if something was going on somewhere,

and then we'd jump down and it was quiet in no time.

(ominous music)

- [Narrator] In the understanding of the SS men,

brawls are honorable operations.

- SS men were encouraged to be infatuated

with the ideals of soldiering,

of comradeship and toughness.

The reality was very different

and this looks a lot more like the politics of hooliganism

than it looks like the politics of soldiers.

- [Narrator] Nazi thugs have existed

since the founding of the party.

Nothing unusual in the Weimar Republic.

Paramilitary units are a legacy of the First World War.

At the end of 1918,

shortly after the flight of the emperor,

residents militias and the Freikorps are formed.

They were mainly formed of frontline soldiers

who wanted to fight against those

they believed were responsible for the defeat.

Jews, Marxists, revolutionaries.

By the mid 20s, numerous political combat units had emerged.

Nearly all of them present themselves

in a strictly military manner,

with flag, uniform, and parade march,

attractive for young men at the time.

- [Translator] This has to do with the fact

that the military already conveyed an enormous prestige

in the imperial era.

Young men seek this prestige, seek this fascination,

but because of the disarmament provisions

in the Treaty of Versailles,

they no longer have the opportunity to join the military.

So they join these political

paramilitary fighting organizations.

- [Narrator] The Nazi Party, NSDAP,

is able to gather hundreds of thousands

of mostly young men

at the Reich Party Congress in Nuremberg in 1927.

SS and SA march in front of Hitler.

Among them, the 26-year-old Heinrich Himmler.

Two years later, he becomes head of the SS.

He is still a rather insignificant Nazi.

The SS remains subordinate to the SA.

Himmler is more of an assistant to the SA leadership,

as a party film clearly shows.

But the inconspicuous man wearing glasses has great goals.

The SS should be more than just party security.

It should be the Nazi elite.

The ideal image of the Nazi movement.

Nordic, tall, athletic.

Aryan, as it was called at the time.

That's exactly how SS men were supposed to be.

- The SS, which was recreated by Heinrich Himmler,

completely absorbed the racial ideology and policies

that Hitler had outlined in "Mein Kampf"

and in various other works of his.

- [Narrator] Himmler's admission criteria for the SS

consist of supposedly Aryan physical characteristics.

Every applicant must prove that he has no Jewish ancestors.

In 1932, Himmler establishes the SS Race Office,

later renamed the Race and Settlement Office

to examine applicants.

Otto Kumm does not quite meet the specifications.

Nevertheless, he's accepted.

(Otto speaking in foreign language)

- [Translator] They were all specially select men.

They were all tall.

I was actually much too small for the SS, even back then.

They made a big exception and took me in after all.

- [Narrator] Himmler sees the SS

as an association of Nordic men

as early as 1931.

Its goal is to keep the Nordic race pure.

In essence, this is directed against Jews and Slaves.

They are considered foreign, inferior, and dangerous.

Himmler's idea of the SS included not only deep racism

but also unconditional allegiance to Hitler.

A striking difference to their competitor.

As early as 1930,

the SA sometimes had different ideas

from the party leadership.

- The SS was going to be Hitler's tool

in the event of any conflict between the party and the SA.

We see this already in 1930

when a conflict between the SA and the party

is already breaking out into actual violence,

and it's the SS that is being deployed

to bring the SA back under control.

- [Narrator] It's the birth of the SS motto,

"My honor means loyalty."

Himmler had the medieval-sounding slogans

stamped on the belts of all SS uniforms from 1931 onwards.

- [Translator] The remarkable thing about this

is that the old army belt locks read "Guard with us,"

and the SS replaced that with "My honor means loyalty."

Or if we want to take it a little further,

"My honor means loyalty to Adolf Hitler."

This is also an attempt by Heinrich Himmler

to ultimately define the SS in relation to the SA

but also as a separate organization within the Nazi Party,

so to speak.

- [Narrator] Since 1929,

the world economic crisis has shaken Germany.

The political system loses support dramatically.

Nazis and communists dream of overthrowing the Republic.

- The German Communist Party

was dedicated to installing a Stalinist regime.

Little classes were terrified in Germany,

and so they voted for the Nazis.

They wanted order, they wanted the labor movement crushed,

they wanted some kind of stability.

- [Narrator] Hitler's following grows rapidly

and the SS profits.

When Himmler became head in 1929,

the SS had only about 1,000 members.

At the beginning of 1933,

there were already more than 52,000.

A shadow army about to leap.

(ominous music)

As the new Reich Chancellor,

Hitler pursues one goal above all.

He wants absolute power in the state.

Any means would do.

(Hitler exclaims in foreign language)

(crowd exclaims in foreign language)

- [Narrator] Nazis are hunting down opponents of the regime

throughout the whole country.

SA and SS men become auxiliary police officers.

Open terror in the cloak of legality.

The SS excelled in contempt for human beings.

When the Jewish lawyer Michael Siegel

tried to get the police to release a client in mid March,

he was beaten up by SS men

and chased through the center of Munich

with his trousers cut off, barefoot,

and with a cardboard sign around his neck.

Heinrich Himmler is now the Police Chief of Munich.

Political opponents are tortured at police headquarters

on Himmler's orders.

(ominous music)

(Himmler speaking in foreign language)

- [Narrator] Himmler had valuable knowledge at his disposal.

In 1931, he had set up a security service within the SS

for spying on opponents.

Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the so-called SD,

had lists drawn up with thousands of names.

Following Heydrich's lists,

opponents of the regime are now systematically imprisoned

without judicial review for an indefinite period.

The legal basis is provided by the Reichstag fire

at the end of February 1933,

which the Nazis declared to be a communist coup attempt.

- Hitler's government responded

by passing the famous Reichstag Fire Decree

which basically tore the heart out

of the constitution of Weimar,

crushed all individual rights.

It was the thing that really made possible

the concentration camps,

all of the abuse of human rights,

all of the barbarity of the Nazi regime

in the 12 years that followed.

- [Narrator] The ordinance is supposed to serve

the protection of the people and the state.

In reality, it enables legal terror.

(man speaking in foreign language)

- [Narrator] The result

is a bloody hunt throughout the country.

June 1933, in Berlin-Kopenick,

SS and SA men devastate flats.

They take away alleged evidence

and arrest supporters of the SPD and KPD parties.

Among them, the young communist Walter Pesler.

His girlfriend at the time, Emmy Mertens,

experiences the brutal despotism of the Nazis.

- [Translator] My boyfriend was arrested

at five o'clock in the morning,

and in the evening at nine o'clock he came back,

shaved, swastika burned in, hits on his head.

He was completely beaten up.

(ominous music)

- [Narrator] Like Walter Pesler,

hundreds of people are arrested and tortured

in Berlin-Kopenick in June 1933.

The situation gets out of control

when a social-democrat resists and shoots two SS men.

Afterwards, Nazis turn the district quarter in Kopenick

into a torture site.

The rampage in the district prison lasts for a week.

Kopenicker Blutwoche is what the victims later call it.

At least 24 supporters of the KPD and SPD

are murdered in these rooms.

In 1933, opponents of the regime

were arbitrarily imprisoned, abused,

and put on public display throughout Germany.

The first concentration camps

are built in the middle of the cities.

Nazi propaganda films,

such as this one from the Oranienburg concentration camp,

show the embellished image of a kind of educational camp.

Sport and discipline are supposed to shape Nazi opponents

into members of the new Volksgemeinschaft.

(man speaking in foreign language)

- [Translator] The story that the existence of the camps

was kept secret

was invented much later.

The Germans knew about the camps.

Not only that, the regime even made sure

the people knew about the camps

in order to scare them.

- [Narrator] In 1933,

dozens of early concentration camps like Oranienburg

are set up,

spread across the Reich.

Heinrich Himmler also has a camp built

on an empty industrial site in the north of Munich.

The Dachau concentration camp.

At the time, it was the only camp administered by the SS.

A kind of test laboratory

for the rise of Himmler and the SS.

Meanwhile, the much larger SA confidently stages itself

under its Chief of Staff, Ernst Rohm.

The men in brown celebrate the new Nazi regime.

(man speaking in foreign language)

- [Translator] From below you don't see it so clearly,

when you're marching,

vegetating in the undergrowth like that,

that there were power struggles going on out there.

We were drunk to be in power to begin with.

- [Narrator] Nuremberg, the so-called Reichsparteitag, 1933.

(crowd cheers)

At SA events, Rohm appears on equal footing with Hitler.

Himmler and the SS hardly play a role in public.

The SA are swelled into a kind of mass army,

also through the integration

of other right-wing military associations.

(ominous music)

From around 500,000 men in January 1933,

the SA grows to 4.5 million by summer 1934.

This makes Rohm's militia 45% times larger

than the Reichswehr, the official army,

with its 100,000 soldiers.

But already, at the end of 1933, the SA faces a problem.

- They've lost the regional function.

There are no longer any opponents to go and beat up

or opposing meetings to go and disrupt.

And so they start fighting amongst themselves,

they get drunk, they become more and more disorderly.

- [Narrator] Ernst Rohm has ambitious goals.

He wants to push the brown revolution further.

He's not interested in an alliance with the old elites.

The young law student Otto Gritschneder

witnesses him in Munich.

(Otto speaking in foreign language)

- [Translator] At the end of January in 1934,

I heard a speech from Rohm

in front of the Bavaria statue.

"I'd rather make a revolution than celebrate revolutions.

"The revolution's not over yet, it must go on."

- This is about the last thing Hitler wants to hear

and it's pretty much the last thing

the army high command wants to hear

because the army sees this as a real threat,

and to an extent it is,

because Rohm sees the SA as the nucleus

of a new in a sense more populist army.

- [Narrator] Himmler uses this to betray his boss, Rohm.

He has the SS security service gather information

about an alleged SA coup plan.

Hitler's alarmed and makes a decision

that decisively favors Himmler's rise.

On June 30th, 1934,

Rohm and his close associates are arrested by SS men.

In the next few hours, the SS kills more than 100 people,

the entire SA leadership, including Ernst Rohm.

The SS become Hitler's executioners.

The newspapers declare the mass murder

as state self-defense against an alleged Rohm Putsch.

Hitler's shows his gratitude and upgrades the SS.

It becomes an independent organization outside the SA.

As Reichsfuhrer-SS,

Himmler's in future only subordinate to the Fuhrer.

The SS's power will grow steadily from now on

while the SA will lose its importance dramatically.

(Robert speaking in foreign language)

- [Translator] They stole the show on the political stage

because the SA had done the rough work

and then came those who played the fine guard.

- [Narrator] The disempowerment of the SA

underlines Hitler's total claim to power.

Himmler has learned his lesson.

He will never question Hitler's power for more than 10 years

and thus become the most powerful man behind the dictator.

(ominous music)

Himmler now has free reign

and begins to expand his black order

into a state within the state,

radical and efficient.

From 54,000 members in January 1933,

the SS grows to about 180,000 by 1936.

- [Translator] The SS is an organization

that brings together men

from all social classes of the German population

in the Third Reich.

It's never purely elitist in the sense of

only academics, only citizens, only the classic elite.

- [Narrator] Himmler chooses his elite

not according to education or profession,

but according to outward appearance and attitude.

Most of the new recruits are members

of the so-called General SS.

Men who collect for the Winter Relief organization

in their free time

all serve as cordons at public events.

In 1934, Hitler allows the SS

to set up its own armed units.

Himmler turns the previous special task forces

into militarily-trained troops at his disposal,

the nucleus of a future SS army, the Waffen-SS.

The grounds of the former Haupt-Kadetten-Anstalt in Berlin,

the most notorious of these troops has its barracks here.

The Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler.

(man speaking in foreign language)

- [Narrator] SS soldiers must be powerful,

ready to make sacrifices,

and ideologically completely in line with Hitler.

Soldiers at the disposal of the dictator.

Hitler expands the SS into a network of terror.

This includes the actual Schutzstaffel

with honorary members now called the General SS.

Next to it are the armed units,

the so-called Verfugungstruppe,

with full-time soldiers,

and the guards of the concentration camps,

the so-called Totenkopfverbande,

the skull units.

The Dachau concentration camp near Munich.

The only concentration camp of the first generation

to be run by the SS from the very beginning.

Himmler appoints Theodor Eicke as commandant in 1933.

- Himmler liked Eicke

because Eicke was a fanatical Nazi,

he was brutal, he was a good organizer,

and being Dachau commandant finally gives him a chance

to make something of his life.

- [Narrator] Eicke designs

a new camp organization for Dachau.

(ominous music)

From 1934 onwards,

Eicke trains special units as guard units,

the SS skull units.

Eicke develops camp rules

with harsh punishments for the prisoners.

"Work makes you free"

is the cynical slogan on the camp gate.

In reality, work is synonymous with torture and terror here.

In 1934, Himmler makes Eicke

Inspector of the concentration camps.

Following Dachau's example,

Eicke begins to restructure the camps in the Reich.

Many of the earliest camps, like Oranienburg, are closed.

As Concentration Camp Inspector,

Eicke controls six camps in the Reich in 1935.

All are administered like Dachau

and the inmates are tortured with the same punishments.

Dachau remains the SS's model concentration camp.

- Its key role was to be a school of violence

for concentration camp personnel

and it's very rare by the end of the 1930s

to find anybody in a senior position

in any concentration camp

that hasn't served some kind of apprenticeship in Dachau

and the Dachau School.

- [Narrator] In 1939,

Eicke will personally lead his concentration camp guards

into the war,

with moderate success.

As Commander of the Waffen-SS Totenkopf Division,

he's shut down with his plane

over the Eastern Front in 1943 and dies.

In the first years of the Nazi regime, however,

the SS offer thousands of people

unimagined opportunities for advancement.

Himmler's able to usurp more and more state tasks.

Hitler appoints him Chief of the German Police in 1936.

As the employer of all German police officers,

a 34-year-old Himmler has a central position of power

in the Nazi regime.

He surrounds himself with inexperienced staff

like Reinhard Heydrich,

four years younger than Himmler and unconditionally loyal.

- [Translator] There are certainly men

like Reinhard Heydrich

who have a very great amount of power

and work very closely with Himmler.

But ultimately, at the top,

Heinrich Himmler is the person

who holds all the threads in his hands.

- [Narrator] The ideological training of the youth

is particularly important to the SS chief.

He wants to raise a generation

of ideologically solid warriors.

Ballenstedt in Saxony-Anhalt.

Above the town lies the building

of the former Nationalpolitische Erziehungsanstalten.

Napola for short.

Just one of the many Nazi boarding schools

but the only one to be rebuilt.

This is where the leadership elite

of the 1,000-year-old Reich

is to be educated.

On average, the boys are 10 years old

when they enter the Napola.

For admission, good grades are less important

than so-called Aryan ancestry.

At the end of their time at school

they have to pass the Abitur,

but along the way they are supposed to become strict Nazis.

Uwe Lamprecht, who attended a Napola, experienced this.

- [Translator] We had to learn to obey first of all,

with the ulterior motive.

Only those who've learned to obey can command.

- [Narrator] This is entirely in the spirit

of Heinrich Himmler.

From 1936, the SS took over the inspection of the Napolas

and thus the supervision of the curricula.

The schools differ in their additional offerings,

such as gliding here in Ballenstedt,

but the core is the same.

Children are to be educated to become obedient warriors,

with lots of sport, military drill,

and tests of courage.

(Uwe speaking in foreign language)

- [Translator] We were given the command jump.

There were two things.

First, I should have the courage to jump into the unknown.

But secondly, I should have the trust

in the person giving the order

who would not let me jump to my death.

Mind you, unless it was absolutely necessary.

- [Narrator] In the war,

thousands would follow the orders of their superiors

to their deaths.

Himmler wants his soldiers to fight

with particular courage and determination.

In many cases, this will lead to unnecessary bloodshed

and high casualties.

(man speaking in foreign language)

(ominous music)

- [Narrator] The Feldherrnhalle in Munich.

The Nazi regime turned it into a place of pilgrimage

for the commemoration of the dead

of the Hitler Putsch in 1923.

Since 1936, the recruits of the SS troops

are sworn in to Hitler here.

(triumphant music)

(man speaks in foreign language)

(crowd chants in foreign language)

(man speaks in foreign language)

(crowd chants in foreign language)

(man speaks in foreign language)

(crowd chants in foreign language)

- [Narrator] As a symbol of the commitment to Hitler,

the SS men receive an honor dagger.

Engraved is the SS motto, "My honor means loyalty."

Blind obedience allows men like Otto Kumm

to make a career in the Waffen-SS.

In 1944, he becomes commander

of the SS Mountain Division Prinz Eugen.

In the Balkans,

Kumm's division is involved in numerous war crimes.

(Kumm speaking in foreign language)

- [Translator] The complete trust in Hitler,

which was still so pronounced among us

that one knew this is where they put you

and this is where you have to stand,

even if it means you have to die.

There was no room for pardon.

- [Narrator] The delusion of heroic struggle,

kill and be killed for Hitler.

- The SS embodied the ideal

of what they believed to be the perfect man.

They were not in any way thinkers,

they were not allowed to be soft,

they were not allowed to have empathy.

They were supposed to embody the ideal killer male.

- [Narrator] In their self-image,

the men of the SS are the spearhead of the Nazi movement.

The leadership of a future greater Germanic Reich.

Elite of the Aryan race.

Himmler wants to spread this image of the SS

among the population.

In 1935, he founds the SS newspaper Das Schwarze Korps,

The Black Corps.

The newspaper is a colorful weekly

with big headlines and many photos, poems, and reports.

Daily politics are seldom found here.

Instead, SS image cultivation and world view.

The mix is well received even outside the SS.

Himmler's PR works.

The initial print run of 8,000 copies

is more than doubled by the end of 1935.

The following year it is already at 340,000.

At the outbreak of the war,

The Black Corps has a circulation of 750,000,

which remains stable despite rationing measures

during the war.

The SS propaganda sheet loves to celebrate role models

from its own ranks,

SS men who act as life-savers

in swimming or mountain accidents.

In addition, articles about top athletes

who belong to the SS,

like the skier Fidel Wagner.

He becomes an SS man in 1933.

Wagner's portrayed in The Black Corps

when he takes part in the 1936 Winter Olympics.

- [Translator] Sport has a very, very high value in the SS.

But sport and athletes are also something

with which the SS can distinguish itself

in this National Socialist state.

- [Narrator] Focusing on physical performance

makes the SS attractive

for men like Hermann Fegelein.

Fegelein has no profession but he's a good sport rider.

His parents have a riding in Munich-Kurim.

There he comes into contact with men of the equestrian SS.

The Black Order promises advancement, power, and prestige.

Fegelein joins the SS at the end of 1932

and becomes a member of an SS equestrian squadron in Munich.

With no training and limited skills

as an organizer, speaker, or leader,

it is his success as an equestrian alone

that favors his position with the Reichsfuhrer-SS.

At the beginning of World War II,

Himmler entrusts Fegelein with a delicate special task.

- Fegelein was put in charge of the Cavalry Unit

which actually was only in existence as such

for more or less a year,

but he was very important

in the initial attack in Barbarossa in the Soviet Union.

And again, because he was SS,

these people were used almost exclusively

for the mass murder of civilians.

(ominous music)

- [Narrator] As commander of the SS Reiterstandarte,

Fegelein is responsible for massacres of Jews in Belarus.

He had around 40,000 men, women, and children murdered

by the end of 1941.

After that, Fegelein continues his career.

Himmler transfers him to the Fuhrer's headquarters

as liaison officer for the Waffen-SS,

and thus into Hitler's immediate vicinity.

- [Translator] After all,

National Socialism is not primarily a bureaucratic system

but a movement built on personal ties, personal networks.

- [Narrator] Personal contacts

which Fegelein uses skillfully.

First and foremost, Himmler,

who protects his SS rider

despite notoriously heavy drinking

and a tendency towards corruption.

In 1944, Fegelein marries Eva Braun's sister.

This finally secured him a permanent place

in Hitler's inner circle.

Shortly before the end of the war,

Fegelein is arrested in Berlin

drunk and with a large sum of foreign cash.

Hitler has him shot for desertion.

A typical case.

Most SS leaders are by no means as disciplined and virtuous

in the Nazi sense

as Himmler's propaganda claims.

The population has no idea of this.

The image of the elite troops in black

is lavishly cultivated,

not least through effective publicity at major events,

such as the Reich Party Congresses.

Himmler's dazzle even caught on

with his political opponents.

In 1936, the reports of the exile executive of the SPD,

which were based on Social Democratic informants

in the Reich, stated.

- [Reader] "The SS is a truly select group.

"There are many idealists in it

"who take their service seriously

"and honestly believe in their mission.

"Pride in the uniform lives in everyone."

- [Narrator] A facade behind which

the crime of the century is planned.

(ominous music)

Since 1933, the Nazi regime has also been active

in the economy with propaganda effect.

The construction of motorways and the Volkswagen

are regarded as National Socialist prestige projects.

The SS is also involved in the German economy.

Himmler has the Nordland publishing house founded.

It disseminates Nazi literature in the interests of the SS.

The publishing house was soon followed by a factory.

SS men founded the Allach porcelain manufactory

near Munich in 1936.

Their program includes porcelain and ceramic objects

of art and tableware.

(ominous music continues)

- [Translator] These early enterprises

are usually not commercial enterprises

in the sense that they're supposed to make profit,

but they're supposed to fulfill certain ideological tasks.

- [Narrator] The factory quickly developed

into Himmler's hobby horse.

He had the figure of an SS flag-bearer removed from sale.

It is now only given exclusively to selected SS leaders.

Himmler also gives Hitler SS porcelain figurines

for his birthday.

And of course the dictator himself

becomes an art object from Allach.

New models of the porcelain factory

are presented to the public in advertising shows

and promoted by the SS newspaper The Black Corps.

Gifts from Allach are popular

with Germans loyal to the Nazis,

for example, as precious gifts for members of the SS,

or, as a private film of communion celebration shows,

fine celebration chandeliers on the festive table.

The porcelain factory is completely taken over by the SS

at the beginning of the war.

In future, Allach products are also manufactured

in concentration camps by concentration camp prisoners.

Commercial enterprises are developed in all German camps.

Concentration camp prisoners produce furniture and utensils

such as cupboards in the workshops.

From 1936 onwards,

the SS also began to sell

the labor of concentration camp prisoners

to commercial enterprises.

At the Reich Party Congress in 1936,

Hitler announces the Four-Year Plan.

Germany is to be fit for war by 1940.

As a result, roads and bridges are built,

steelworks are constructed,

factories are converted to armaments production.

The demand for labor increases.

The SS offers its concentration camp prisoners

as work slaves on a grand scale.

Germany's industry takes advantage.

There are hardly any moral concerns.

This new orientation affects the entire camp system.

Some concentration camps are closed,

others are rebuilt at strategic points.

From 1936 onwards, the SS had six main camps,

including Dachau as a training center.

In addition, from 1938 onwards,

the SS began to set up large-scale enterprises itself,

starting in the booming construction industry.

Neuengamme near Hamburg.

Here, the SS buys an old brickyard, including clay pits,

and has a modern clincker factory built,

the showpiece factory of the SS.

(man shouting in foreign language)

- [Narrator] Built by concentration camp prisoners.

On the site, the prisoners also have to work

in the clay pits.

Clay is the raw material for the red clincker bricks,

bricks that are also used to build the SS factory hall.

The bricks for the Hamburg area

are fired in large kilns.

Thousands of the force laborers employed here perish.

(ominous music)

Himmler had a concentration camp

built next to the brick works in 1940.

The Neuengamme concentration camp.

All German concentration camps

are now primarily centers of forced labor.

The SS decides which companies will benefit.

- [Translator] Because how these prisoners are used

in which companies or facilities,

that's where the SS administration

plays a very, very important and influential role.

- [Narrator] During the war,

the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office

rules over a gigantic economic network

with around 60 individual SS companies,

including the Nordland publishing house

and the Allach porcelain factory,

stoneworks and the Neuengamme clincker works.

Even mineral water producers are among them.

In 1942, the office also took over the administration

of all concentration camps.

By this time, the concentration camps have long since ceased

to serve merely as punishment camps for political opponents

and money printing machines for the SS.

They are instruments of a delusional racial policy.

Himmler orders the SS men

to deport Jews from all over Europe

to the camps in occupied Poland.

In the Auschwitz concentration camp alone,

more than a million people are forced into hard labor

or murdered in gas chambers.

The bureaucracy of the Holocaust,

the exploitation and plundering of the Jews

is controlled by the SS administration.

- [Translator] The so-called

Main Economic Administration Office

was the center of administrative organization

for the looted goods of the deported Jews.

- [Narrator] Mass murder, robbery, and exploitation,

that is the real core of the SS,

the core of Himmler's supposed elite force.

(ominous music)

On the night of November 10th, 1938,

the synagogues in the Reich burned.

The prelude to an unprecedented crime, the Holocaust.

In the November Pogrom,

Jews are abused, humiliated, and murdered by SS men too.

- They just thought this was

absolutely their duty, their right,

and that they were fulfilling what they considered to be

the natural order of things,

the sort of natural racial hierarchy of the world.

- [Narrator] In their self-image,

the SS men are members of a Nordic elite and born to rule.

(man speaking in foreign language)

- [Translator] But we were all Aryans,

that was a very important point.

That as Aryans we felt superior to other races,

especially, of course, to the Jewish race,

but also to the Slavic peoples.

- [Narrator] An ideology that unites.

- That ideology in a sense

sets up the world of good guys and bad guys,

of the people who are within your circle of moral obligation

and who are the people outside that circle.

- [Narrator] With the invasion of Poland in September 1939,

theories become deeds.

In the occupied territories,

the SS, with the support of the Wehrmacht,

begins its murder campaigns.

Himmler has plans draw up for the Germanization

of a large part of Poland.

Thousands are resettled, imprisoned, killed.

The goal for the SS men seems clear.

(man speaking in foreign language)

- [Translator] To save Europe from communism.

To cleanse Europe from the Jews

because they were the precursors of communism.

People said this without ever having met a Jew in person.

Without ever considering the fate

that was awaiting the Jews.

- [Narrator] Jurgen Girgensohn grows up under the swastika.

He was 18 when he volunteered for the Waffen-SS in 1942.

The military arm of the SS has borne this name since 1940.

Units of the Waffen-SS fight and murder

on the frontlines of the attack on the Soviet Union.

In a short time,

the German troops are able to advance further East.

Millions of Soviet Jews come under German rule

and are systematically murdered.

The Eastern campaign was planned

as a war of extermination from the very beginning.

Behind the front,

as in the Polish campaign,

the SS men are on the hunt for human beings.

The so-called Einsatzgruppen-SS.

On December 1st, 1941,

the commander of an Einsatzgruppen in Lithuania

draws up a balance sheet.

Karl Jager proudly reports to Berlin.

In only four months,

Einsatzkommando 3 has killed over 137,000 Jews

in 71 towns and villages in Lithuania.

Jager boasts, he can state that the goal

of solving the Jewish problem for Lithuania

has been achieved.

There are no more Jews in Lithuania.

- "The Jager Report" is a list of 137,000 people

meticulously documented in every detail.

How many women were murdered, how many children,

how many people who were handicapped.

Here you are actually talking about

the physical murder of innocent civilians,

innocent human beings who've done nothing to anybody

to warrant these measures against them.

- [Narrator] The reality of the Holocaust in 1941.

Himmler's murderers in the SS Einsatzgruppen

often come from the SD and Gestapo.

Many are civil servants, policemen who volunteered.

- One step after another

makes the previously impossible acceptable

and this is how we arrive in December 41

at the decision to kill all of the Jews of Europe

during the war.

- [Narrator] In the German Reich,

all Jews have to wear the yellow star since September 1941.

A short time later,

the first ones are deported to the East.

The perpetrators call this

the Final Solution of the Jewish Question.

The SS is responsible for carrying it out.

(man speaking in foreign language)

- [Narrator] In organizing the genocide,

the SS drew on experience from the so-called

Aktion T4 of 1941,

the first systematic mass murder by the Nazis.

The victims are mainly disabled people.

Their murder is explained

with catch-words such as "useless eaters"

and "purification of the people's body."

One of the first victims is Elfriede Lohse-Wachtler.

The painter was one of the avant-garde artists

of the Weimar Republic.

With severe financial worries,

she suffers a nervous breakdown when she's barely 30

and is admitted to the Sanatorium and Nursing Home

in Arnsdorf near Dresden.

The doctors diagnose her with schizophrenia.

With this diagnosis,

Lohse-Wachtler was forcibly sterilized

against her will in 1935.

The artist resigned.

Defamed by the Nazi regime as degenerate art,

her works are confiscated from Hamburg museums

and destroyed in 1937.

As a chronically-ill patient who's unable to work,

she falls into the pattern of the so-called Aktion T4.

On July 31st, 1940,

buses stop in front of the asylum at Arnsdorf

for the fourth time.

This time they also pick up Elfriede Lohse-Wachtler.

Believing they are being transferred to another institution,

the patients are taken away in buses with tinted windows.

Their destination is

the Pirna-Sonnenstein Sanatorium and Nursing Home.

Presumably, the artist is murdered on the same day

in a gas chamber in the cellar.

Together with thousands of others.

From 1940 onwards,

the SS carries out murders in six institutions

throughout the Reich.

A total of 70,000 people fall victim to Aktion T4.

But then Hitler officially terminates the campaign

after protests from affected families

and Catholic clergymen.

The dictator himself had signed the document

giving doctors permission for the so-called mercy killing,

a cynical paraphrase of the campaign.

The only preserved murder order with Hitler's signature.

- [Translator] Since the implementation of this order

also repeatedly provoked queries and critical inquiries,

Hitler actually quite obviously avoided issuing

an unambiguous murder order in the case of the Jews.

What we have here

are clear recognizable encouragements

above all in the direction of Himmler and Heydrich.

- [Narrator] Himmler and Heydrich know what Hitler wants.

They become the main perpetrators of the Holocaust.

The personnel of Aktion T4 are given the task

of organizing large-scale murder in gas chambers.

Many campaign veterans are deployed

in the extermination camps that are built in the East

from 1942 onwards.

Murder factories for the criminal delusion

of the struggle of the races.

For 20 years, Hitler's spoken again and again

about the end of the Jewish people.

Himmler gives him the instrument

to realize the inconceivable, the SS.

It murders conscientiously and efficiently.

Many only realize the dimension of the crime after the war.

- [Translator] A basic feeling

is still a certain basic feeling of guilt,

of complicity in the disaster.

- [Narrator] Only after six years of war

do Germany's opponents succeed in putting a stop

to the barbarism.

The SS murdered and fought to the end fanatically, blindly.

Himmler's Black Order wants to build a new world.

A world that would in truth be hell on earth.

The end of humanity.

But this nightmare,

the SS commits crimes the likes of which

history has never seen.

(ominous music)