Original subtitles

(dramatic music) (photos clacking)

(boots thudding) (soldiers cheering)

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

The Fuhrer's guard,

a black order.

(boots thudding)

The end result is a crime

the likes of which the world has never seen.

(moves to soft dramatic music)

(bright upbeat music)

An evening off in 1943,

relaxation from a strenuous job.

The workplace of these men and women

is called Sobibor, an extermination camp.

(photo clacking) (soft ominous music)

- [Interpreter] These were absolutely normal people,

not different in any way at all.

- [Narrator] Absolutely normal people,

their mission: mass murder.

(bright upbeat music)

- Photographs of the SS officers

who are running Auschwitz

tells a story of people

who seem to feel very relaxed,

having no moral qualms about what they were doing.

In that way, they're rather shocking pictures, I think.

(soft ominous music)

- It could seem as if this is a job like any other,

maybe more heroic and requiring more toughness.

But, nonetheless, certainly not one

that stigmatized you

as a brute or as a sadist.

- [Narrator] Thousands of Germans become murderers,

most of them without qualms.

Orders are orders,

a betrayal of humanity.

(dramatic music)

(boots thudding) (upbeat patriotic music)

In Hitler's Germany,

The SS is an attractive employer,

dashing, smart, elitist.

18-year-old Harry Seidel wants to be part of it too.

(Harry speaking in foreign language)

- [Interpreter] My sister raved about it.

"Wow, she said, "there were SS men there.

They're such good looking guys,

strong and hard working

and clean-looking wonderful uniforms.

You have to go there", she said.

So, stupidly, I enlisted.

(soft dramatic music)

- [Narrator] Harry Seidel joins the SS Death's Head Units,

the guards at the concentration camps,

a safe job, one that gets you admired.

- For the concentration camp guards

and people at the bottom,

these were usually people who had been unemployed

during the Great Depression,

or even earlier with the Great Inflation.

Families had lost their savings, their fortunes.

- [Interpreter] I don't think it was just unemployment,

just the search for a job.

Like with so many questions

about what motivated the SS men,

that was just one motive among many others.

They were uniformed. They were armed.

These were all attractive features.

And they had an extreme amount of power,

a degree of power over the prisoners

that is completely unimaginable to us today.

- [Narrator] By the end of the 1930s,

the power of the SS has been concentrated

into three branches,

The General SS, the Verfugungstruppe,

and the Death's Head Units.

The leader of the Death's Head Units is Theodor Eicke.

He has a criminal record,

no school leaving qualifications,

and has failed several times

in his attempts to become a policeman.

He sees his troop as the elite of the SS,

selected to guard the most dangerous enemies of the state.

- We know that Eicke wanted to recruit people

who were very young.

He preferred people under 20

that haven't had jobs and careers and families

so that, basically, the SS is their family.

- [Narrator] The death's head is their symbol.

The SS did not invent it.

Pirates and armies have used it for centuries,

intimidation and a demonstration of power.

But with the SS, the death's head and Germanic runes

take on new significance,

they stand for racial mania and mass murder.

(soft dramatic music)

- [Interpreter] It's also a way of identifying yourself.

"We are the toughest of the tough.

We are the ones who are really willing

to go very, very, very far."

And I think this martian aura

does something to the victims.

"We are dangerous and are perceived as dangerous."

- [Interpreter] That didn't bother us at all,

that we had a scull and crossbones up there

as a cockade on our cap.

We were proud of it.

I'm sorry. That's how it was.

- [Narrator] Were they simply naive?

In 1938, the Death's Head Units

numbered around 9,000 men.

(soft ominous music)

The Dachau concentration camp near Munich,

a model for all SS camps,

the school of violence praised by propaganda.

(man speaking in foreign language)

- Dachau has two main tasks,

the training of personnel,

and the torture of prisoners,

Communists, homosexuals,

Sinti and Roma, and Jews,

imprisoned and tortured simply because

they do not fit into the Nazi's worldview.

Death's Head Unit recruits

are specifically incited and encouraged

to inflict abuse and violence.

The aim of this is to break down inhibitions,

to eliminate compassion.

Anyone who hesitates is branded a coward.

- I believe that comradeship and esprit de corps

played a very central role for the Death's Head Units.

It was this being violent together

and doing things together

that actually far exceeded the realm of the norm.

I'd see things like that

as defining features of Eicke's school of violence.

(soft dramatic music)

- [Narrator] Following the example of Dachau,

the regime sets up more camps.

In early 1939, 60,000 Germans are subjected

to arbitrary violence.

The men in the Death's Head Units are trained

at Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen.

Harry Seidel is commanded to go to Sachsenhausen.

He has no reservations about it.

(Harry speaking in foreign language)

- [Interpreter] Orders are orders,

and they hammered that into us so much

that we didn't think anything of it at first.

We carried them out.

So I don't wan to complain.

I was satisfied. I liked being an SS man.

(dramatic music)

- [Narrator] The many minor offenders

make the major crime possible in the first place.

(ominous music)

(cannons booming)

1939, Germany invades Poland.

(man speaking in foreign language)

(airplane engines roaring)

- [Narrator] In the conquered territories,

the Wehrmacht and the SS begin to hunt people down,

civil servants, professors, teachers, priests,

and above all, Jews.

Within half a year, more than 100,000 Polish citizens

are murdered or deported to camps.

- The system changed again in the war

as the camps became a source of labor,

either very cheap or slave labor,

forced labor, at any rate,

when inmates were supplied to run factories,

particularly of course, munitions factories.

(ominous music)

- [Narrator] New camps are built.

A web of injustice extends

across Hitler's growing empire.

By the end of the war,

there will be over 1,000 main and sub camps.

The largest camp is originally an artillery barracks

west of Krakow, Auschwitz.

(ominous music continues)

(Heinrich speaking in foreign language)

- [Narrator] This part of Auschwitz,

referred to as the Stammlager,

or main camp by the SS,

is not initially designed for mass murder.

Polish prisoners of war, intellectuals,

and Nazi opponents are held here,

tortured and subjected to forced labor.

Thousands die.

Spring 1941, Germany prepares for the war

against the Soviet Union.

The regime is already planning Germanic dominion

of the East.

- As the planning for the invasion

of the Soviet Union began,

it was realized that of course, once again,

Germany was going to receive a large population

of Jews, particularly if they were successful,

if they were successful quickly.

And so the idea of actually dealing

with this large population started to ferment

in the minds of the top Nazis.

(dramatic music) (airplane engines roars)

- [Narrator] June 22nd, 1941,

the attack on the Soviet Union, Operation Barbarossa.

The war that Hitler always wanted,

Teutons versus Bolshevists.

(cannons booming)

Behind the front, the hunt for Jews begins again.

The Nazi news reel comments gloatingly:

(man speaking in foreign language)

- Racial mania and hate slogans

are having an effect.

During the first six months of the war,

Einsatzgruppen of the SS and police battalions

murder more than one million people.

The perpetrators, who give orders,

secure the areas, and carry out the shootings,

are often ordinary Germans

who want to further their careers.

- Certainly, the officer corps

was fairly carefully selected.

And many people were angling

to get assignments there

because this was going to be the great chance

to earn your spurs, gain promotion,

by action in the East.

And the rank and file are very diverse.

And some of them were, in fact, career SS people.

Others are just very young,

first time out of cadet school.

Some are just Order Police

that didn't have SS membership

but are put into an SS unit nonetheless.

So I guess we could just say that,

for the Einsatzgruppen,

the officers are pretty carefully selected.

The rank and file is pretty random.

- [Narrator] SS man Harry Seidel is transferred

from Sachsenhausen concentration camp

to Einsatzgruppen C in Russia.

Seidel was present at the massacre in Babi Yar Gorge

at the end of September, 1941.

He says that he himself did not shoot.

- [Interpreter] I just saw the SD men

walking past these criminals with cigar boxes or plates

and calling out to them to hand over

all their gold and silver, watches, and jewelry.

(soft dramatic music)

- [Narrator] More than 30,000 Jewish men,

women, and children are murdered by Einsatzgruppen C

in just two days.

- [Interpreter] We considered all of that necessary.

They were Jews, Bolsheviks.

They could only be shot.

- [Narrator] Sand is poured over the corpses.

The SS is worried about the perpetrators.

- We know that some people are saying the Einsatzgruppen,

where they were shooting human beings

at point blank range day after day, had breakdowns.

They anesthetized themselves with alcohol.

And Himmler recognized that.

- [Interpreter] Shooting is something

that's very time consuming, and above all,

psychologically stressful for one's own men.

So you feel sorry for the perpetrators

who have to do such hard work

firing their guns and always having

to shoot women and children.

That means that something else is needed here,

something that's easier to tolerate so to speak,

and that also works faster.

(dramatic music)

(soft dramatic music)

- [Narrator] Killing had to become easier.

Another camp is built in Auschwitz

from October 1941 onwards, Birkenau,

a harmless-sounding name, and murderous deception.

(man speaking in foreign language)

- [Narrator] Auschwitz-Birkenau

is an extermination and labor camp.

10,000 prisoners have to build it.

9,000 of them die from hunger, cold, and epidemics.

(soft ominous music)

Auschwitz is steadily expanded.

In the center, Birkenau,

with a ramp and the gas chambers.

Those who serve here do not have to go to the front.

(Hermann speaking in foreign language)

- [Interpreter] The SS leaders, also in Auschwitz,

were also relatively young people

who rose in the ranks very quickly

because their superior held a high opinion of them.

That way, they could advance their careers

and quickly gain higher positions.

(soft ominous music)

- Hermann Langbein, a communist from Vienna,

the SS makes him a so-called functional prisoner

as a typist for the camp doctor.

This affords him in an insight into the camp hierarchy.

(Hermann speaking in foreign language)

- [Interpreter] They promoted the little guys

if they were good at beating prisons.

They gave them special leave

if they did what was expected of them,

that was the evil system behind it all.

- [Narrator] Hitler wants to deport all Jews

from the Reich by the end of 1941.

163,000 people are affected.

They are dragged from their homes in broad daylight.

(soft somber music)

As a rule, there are no protests from their neighbors.

- [Interpreter] So it's absolutely clear

that the non-Jewish population in Germany

witnesses these deportations.

The question is to what extent

the German population then knows

what will happen to these Germans.

Of course, in autumn '41, early '42,

we cannot yet assume that they knew

that this meant immediate extermination.

And in fact, at that time,

these deportations did not yet

signify immediate extermination.

- [Narrator] The destination of the deportation

are ghettos in the east,

Theresienstadt, Lodz, Warsaw.

(soft somber music)

Hundreds of thousands have to live here

under inhumane conditions.

In the Warsaw Ghetto alone,

up to 450,000 Jewish men, women, and children.

Thousands die of hunger and epidemics.

In 1942, the second stage of deportation begins

from the ghettos to the death camps.

(moves to soft ominous music)

Who gave the order for the Holocaust and when exactly

has not yet been clarified.

The only certainty is that the decision

was made in 1941, possibly in several stages.

Was there a verbal order from Hitler?

Or did a radicalization within the SS,

demanded by him, lead to mass murder?

The main perpetrators know what they are doing

and do not want to leave any traces.

- We don't have a written order from Hitler,

but this doesn't mean that he did not give the order.

This was his way of doing things.

He didn't necessarily write things down

and then hand them over on pieces of paper.

And anyway, one of the fundamental precepts

of the Final Solution is its secrecy.

The Holocaust is to be carried out in secret.

- [Narrator] Hitler sets the objective.

His accomplices have to carry it out,

above all, the SS.

The dictator himself never visits a concentration camp.

(soft ominous music)

In cattle wagons, the prisoners arrive at Auschwitz.

- [Interpreter] The train was not quite at a standstill

when the carriage doors were ripped open

and people started screaming, "Rouse, rouse, rouse.

leave luggage in the carriage."

Then we jumped out.

Men were ordered to come out on the right,

women with children on the left,

women without children, further out the left.

(soft somber music)

- [Narrator] At the Auschwitz ramp,

SS doctors separate the arrivals.

There are only two categories,

slave labor until death, or the gas chamber.

- It wasn't Hitler, Goering, Goebbels, Himmler,

or whatever their names were,

who took me away and beat me.

No, it was the cobbler, the neighbor,

the milkman, the postman.

They'd been given a uniform, an arm band,

and a cap with a death's head on top.

And they were the master race.

(soft ominous music)

- [Narrator] The SS men at Auschwitz

know exactly what happens to the people

who get out of the wagons at the ramp.

How can they live with it?

- [Interpreter] We are the chosen ones.

We are allowed to do this,

even if it's difficult.

We're saving the German people

from the hereditary enemy.

(soft dramatic music)

- [Narrator] Hans Munch performs human experiments

as an SS doctor in Auschwitz.

After the war, he's acquitted,

mainly because he says he did not take part in selections.

Whether this is true can never be clarified.

(soft somber music)

Anita Lasker, a Jewish girl from Breslau,

arrives at Birkenau at the age of 18.

- [Interpreter] I was lucky again that I didn't go

straight to the gas chamber.

- [Narrator] After her arrival,

her hair is cut by other prisoners.

- [Interpreter] And I told them I played the cello.

"Fantastic," she says.

"There's an orchestra here,

an ensemble that really needs a cello."

I'm told to wait right there.

I was already naked with my hair shaved off.

And I stood there waiting, for what I didn't know.

She ran off quickly to call the conductor of the orchestra

saying, "Someone has arrived who can play the cello."

Suddenly I became very important, you know?

- [Narrator] The orchestra in Auschwitz

has a special function for the SS.

- [Interpreter] Our job was to be at the camp gate

every morning and every evening to play marches,

because you may know that Birkenau and Auschwitz

were surrounded by factories,

I.G. Farben in Buna, and so on.

And the prisoners from Birkenau and Auschwitz

and surrounding camps marched off to work there,

and we played marches.

Everything has to be neat and tidy, after all, doesn't it?

(lively orchestra music)

(moves to discordant orchestra music)

(moves to soft ominous music)

It was the same in the morning and in the evening.

And we knew very well that, as long as they wanted us,

we wouldn't go to the gas chamber.

(soft ominous music)

- [Narrator] Germany's war economy

is growing increasingly weaker.

Prisoners are needed as laborers.

The SS turns Auschwitz into an industrial site.

- Well, from very early on in the history of Auschwitz,

it was decided to build a huge factory complex,

at Monowitz close by,

which would manufacture or seek to manufacture Buna,

that is synthetic rubber,

because the supply problem for the Germans

was enormous in World War II.

- [Narrator] In Monowitz, Auschwitz III,

prisoners work for the chemical company I.G. Farben.

SS Chief Himmler personally looks after

the investors from German industry.

The fact that the deaths of thousands

of forced laborers have been factored in

does not bother the business partners in the least.

(dramatic music)

Two mass murderers who get along well together,

SS Chief Himmler and Odilo Globocnik.

Globocnik is an Austrian,

a fanatical anti-Semite, a career Nazi,

and for a time, Gauleiter of Vienna.

After the invasion of Poland,

Himmler appoints him SS and police leader

in the Lublin District.

- [Interpreter] Odilo Globocnik is a kind

of model pupil of Heinrich Himmler,

always coming up with new and ever more radical ideas

about what could be done.

Today, he would be called a doer.

These are the men you need

if you want to organize a mass murder, a genocide.

(soft ominous music)

- [Narrator] In July, 1941, Globocnik has a special camp

set up in Trawniki, near Lublin.

On the site of an old sugar factory,

Soviet prisoners of war are trained

for service in the concentration camps,

auxiliaries for the Holocaust.

Officially, they are volunteers.

- [Interpreter] This volunteering for work

is often simply a question of survival,

as in, "Do I want something to eat the next day

or should I starve?"

That's when people reported to the Trawniki

and that was Odilo Globocnik private group.

He used them for everything he needed them for,

as additional guards and extra personnel.

- [Narrator] The Trawniki are faced with the choice

of being accessories to murder

or starving to death as prisoners.

It is from this barracks in Lublin

that Globocnik organizes the murder

of the Polish Jews.

Aktion Reinhardt,

named after assassinated SS General Reinhard Heydrich.

The crime scenes are Treblinka,

Sobibor, and Belzec.

- [Interpreter] There is no forced labor.

There is no industry like I.G. Farben,

which produces something and then says it needs workers.

Instead, it's absolutely clear

that anyone who goes to a camp like Belzec,

Sobibor, or Treblinka only goes there

because they're going to be murdered.

(soft ominous music)

- [Narrator] Sobibor, the gas chambers

are located beside the railway platform.

The victims are told they will be resettled.

Only a few dozen SS men

and Trawniki helpers run the camp.

They murder more than 200,000 people.

- When we came in Sobibor,

they picked me out to work,

but not my brother.

- [Narrator] Chaim Engel, then 26,

has to help dispose of the victim's belongings.

He never sees his brother again.

(dog barking)

- My main work was do all the separating clothes

and working with that.

And when I separated the clothes,

I found later my brother's clothes

and pictures from our family.

- [Narrator] Chaim Engel's brother has to undress

with the others immediately after arrival,

ostensibly to take a shower.

They are then murdered in the gas chamber

with engine exhaust.

- [Interpreter] This is a concept that, of course,

cannot be surpassed in terms of radicalism,

because it actually makes it clear

that this is all about extermination.

I once described that as the core of the Holocaust.

That's what the camps were there for.

(soft somber music)

- [Narrator] Sobibor, today a memorial.

Only the outlines of the camp are still visible.

The SS blew up and leveled the buildings

and the fence to remove traces.

Deputy Camp Commandant Johann Niemann

takes photographs in Sobibor.

His pictures only show the everyday life

of the perpetrators, no victims.

(Stefan speaking in foreign language)

- [Interpreter] The Germans who come there

are actually simple men.

Very few of them actually have a high school diploma.

They are people who are just part of the teams.

They don't somehow stand out

by being pathological Jew haters, and mass murderers.

With some of these perpetrators,

there is real sadism, and with others,

there's simply the attitude of,

"Well, if he doesn't obey, then I'll shoot him

or I'll beat him with the whip

because it doesn't matter anyway

whether I kill him now,

or whether he's gassed 10 minutes later.

What's the problem?"

And they sort of grow into these activities

until they become normal for them.

- [Narrator] Only very few traces remain of the victims.

Everyday objects are found during excavations,

hastily packed for the alleged resettlement.

The SS robs the murdered victims,

taking everything that they can turn into money.

(soft somber music)

The majority of the victims of Aktion Reinhardt

come from the Polish Ghettos.

Images from the Warsaw Ghetto.

Every day, people die here.

Every day, trains travel to the death camps.

April 1943, the Ghetto Uprising.

With courage born of despair,

Jewish fighters defend themselves

against German terror for weeks on end.

Eventually the SS quell the uprising,

destroy the ghetto, and murder all of its inhabitants.

- It meant that the Jews who knew

that they were going to die

had made the decision to die fighting,

to die with a gun in their hand,

rather than just meekly going to the trains

and that would lead them to Treblinka.

It was an enormous kind of symbol

for people, actually, all over Europe,

all over the world.

- [Narrator] Treblinka, the youngest

of the three extermination camps of Aktion Reinhardt.

Here too there are no selections.

Everyone who arrives is murdered immediately.

Only a few dozen Jewish men are left alive.

They have to take the bodies

out of the gas chambers and burn them.

- [Interpreter] The removal of corpses

is something that is done entirely by the prisoners

and the Germans stay completely out of it.

Firstly, because the psychological strain is unbearable.

Secondly, it is simply the heaviest physical work.

And thirdly, of course, it is also incredibly dirty work.

(dramatic music)

- [Narrator] August 2nd, 1943, explosions at Treblinka.

The Jewish forced laborers attack the SS.

About 200 of them managed to escape.

Almost all are recaptured and killed.

The SS operates Treblinka for another three weeks.

Then, the camp is razed to the ground

to cover up all traces

of the mass murder here as well.

- The uprising in Treblinka was significant

because the Aktion Reinhardt

was coming to an end anyway.

Treblinka was running out of people

to murder, effectively.

And this was one of the reasons

that Aktion Reinhardt fell to pieces.

But the Germans were also very edgy

and worried about the fact

that there had been an uprising in Treblinka

and that a number of people had escaped.

First of all, they'd be able

to tell the world about what they'd seen.

- [Narrator] A little later,

Sobibor is also due to be shut down.

Death looms for the forced laborers

who are still captive there.

- There were plans to make some uprising in the camp,

but there was not courage

to do the thing,

till one day, a transport came

with Russian prisoners of war.

And they picked out about 30 of them

to work in the camp.

And it happened to be one of them

was our captain in the Russian army.

And when when he came out

and we told him what is going on here,

he wants to run away the first day.

(dramatic music)

- [Narrator] October 14th, 1943,

under the leadership of a Jewish Red Army soldier,

the prisoners begin their uprising.

Chaim Engel and his later wife, Zelma,

also a prisoner at Sobibor, join in.

- My wife brought me a knife,

a kitchen knife, a regular kitchen knife.

I jumped him with the knife, and I said,

"That's for my father, for my brother,

for all the Jews that you kill," that's all.

- Finally, he came out, and he was full with blood.

So I tried to clean him a little bit.

I thought, "Oh, we run away.

I'd better see that he's clean."

I had no idea what was going on,

where we would go, what we would do.

I had no idea, I know only one thing,

we have to run and run and run and run and run

so much as possible.

- [Narrator] 12 SS men are killed.

The insurgents shoot their way out

with captured weapons.

200 flee into the forest.

More than 40 survive the end of the war.

- [Interpreter] The prisoners who did not manage

to escape were shot by the SS.

The SS decided that continuing

to operate the camp made no sense.

This was now the second uprising they'd had here.

In the General Government,

all the Jews had been murdered.

So they really didn't have any more work to do.

They had Auschwitz now. It was fully functional.

- Mission accomplished.

- [Narrator] In October, 1943.

The Aktion Reinhardt comes to an end.

Within 21 months,

at least 1.8 million people are murdered

in Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka,

almost one third of all those killed in the Holocaust,

more than an Auschwitz.

The perpetrators keep meticulous records.

(soft ominous music)

- [Interpreter] The economic profit

of Aktion Reinhardt was actually incredibly small.

There was a complete liquidation.

Everything was collected, everything was sold,

and Globocnik then drew up a balance sheet.

And he came up with the sum of 178 million Reichsmarks.

Of course, the costs for personnel,

for the construction of the extermination camps,

for the trains of the Reichsbahn,

which don't run for free,

all had to be deducted from that.

That meant that, in the end,

less than 50 million of the 178 million remained.

The Jews were not murdered

for the purpose of robbing them.

The robbery took place incidentally

in order to cover costs.

So we cannot speak of murder with intent to rob.

It wasn't that.

(dramatic music)

(soft ominous music)

- [Narrator] Trains with victims

arrive at Auschwitz almost daily.

Here too the SS forces prisoners

into so-called Sonderkommandos.

They have to take the corpses

out of the gas chambers and burn them.

Photos taken in secret

reveal the work of one of these Sonderkommandos.

- [Interpreter] You sat there and you waited.

Maybe you'll still be alive tomorrow,

but probably not.

And while we were playing waltzes,

people were being burned.

We were playing, and there was smoke coming out.

That was Auschwitz.

- [Narrator] For the SS personnel at Auschwitz,

mass murder becomes routine.

The diary entries of SS Dr. Johann Paul Kremer

offer rare insights into the everyday life

of the perpetrators.

"September 20th, 1942,

listened to the concert of the prisoners' band

this Sunday afternoon from 3:00 to 6:00 PM

in glorious sunshine.

Kapellmeister, conductor of the Warsaw Stage Opera.

80 musicians. Roast pork for lunch.

October 18th, 1942,

attended the 11th Special Operation

in cold and wet weather this Sunday morning.

Ghastly scenes with three women begging for dear life.

- [Interpreter] And, ultimately,

these criminals are human beings too.

They're never 100% perpetrators.

And that, of course, means that they somehow

have to have a private life after doing their work.

And this discrepancy is basically the normality

of the Holocaust.

- [Narrator] Torturing prisoners during the day,

listening to classical music after work.

SS Dr. Josef Mengele, for instance,

loves the romantic sounds of Robert Schumann.

- [Interpreter] Someone like Mengele knew that Schumann

had written a place called "Traumerei."

That means he wasn't a complete idiot.

And he came into the block. That could always happen.

And he wanted to hear the "Traumerei" by Schumann

and it was in my repertoire.

"So Anita, play 'Traumerei.'"

I remember playing it as fast as I could

so that he'd leave again.

(soft somber music)

- [Narrator] Female prisoners like Anita Lasker

are guarded by SS women.

Like the men, they also want to impress

their superiors by being tough.

Some are notorious for their brutality,

Maria Mandel from Austria, for example,

the head guard at Auschwitz.

- [Interpreter] I remember one thing about Maria Mandel,

who was a very good looking woman, by the way,

when a transport arrived

that was supposed to go to the gas chamber,

and women with babies go

to gas chambers anyway, don't they?

(Anita speaking in foreign language)

- [Interpreter] She fell in love with a little child

and took this child and walked around for days

with that pretty little child.

And one day, she sent the child to the gas chamber.

That was Maria Mandel.

Don't ask me to explain what kind of a brain

such a woman had, I don't know.

- I don't know.

(soft ominous music)

- [Narrator] The female guards

are not officially members of the SS,

but employees in the so-called SS-Gefolge.

They are a total of about 3,500

female concentration camp guards.

- [Interpreter] They were almost worse than the men.

Yes, you know, that was at a time

when women didn't have as many rights

as they have today.

Imagine a simple woman from some village

being given boots, a uniform,

a revolver, a dog.

Suddenly, she's somebody.

I'd say the women were almost worse than the men.

- [Narrator] Furstenberg, Brandenburg,

just under 100 kilometers north of Berlin.

On the outskirts of the small town,

the SS maintains the Ravensbruck concentration camp,

the largest camp for women only.

(soft dramatic music)

At Ravensbruck, female SS guards

are trained for service in other camps.

- They saw this as a regular job.

This was a normal way to be spending their lives.

They felt superior when they were out and about

in the town in Furstenberg.

They walked with a sort of, you know,

a skip in their step.

A lot of the locals saw them

and were now frightened of them

'cause they used to walk around in their uniforms

and go into the shops, and so on.

So they had felt a sense of power

and a sense of superiority.

It attracted people who like that kind of environment

and it attracted people who had sadistic tendencies,

without any doubt.

(soft dramatic music)

(man speaking in foreign language)

- [Narrator] In the world of SS Chief Himmler,

no mercy is shown to female prison.

The SS women at Ravensbruck

prefer to torture their victims in the cell block,

the so-called bunker.

- In the bunker, they had one permission from Himmler

to beat prisoners with what was called the prugelstrafe,

where they laid them on a kind of horse-type structure.

And he women were made to lean forward onto this structure.

And there were guards,

and prisoners themselves

were ordered to beat the women

for a certain number of thrashes.

Again, Himmler had himself laid down the rules

in many cases for this,

specifically how many thrashes were allowed.

- [Narrator] Located only a few kilometers

from the Ravensbruck concentration camp

is the SS clinic Hohenlychen.

The head doctor here is called Karl Gebhardt.

(man speaking in foreign language)

- [Narrator] Gebhardt is a childhood friend

and the personal physician of Heinrich Himmler.

The two men trust each other.

Two illegitimate children of Himmler

are born at Gebhardt's maternity ward in Hohenlychen.

- He saw himself as a very grand,

you know, some of these Nazi doctors

had huge status within the system

and were very arrogant.

They had a lot of power

and they were given a lot of status.

And so his clinic was very famous.

It was used to treat top SS men,

but also people coming in from the front

who needed his expert surgery.

But he was absolutely part of the Nazi system.

- [Narrator] After the assassination

of SS General Reinhardt Heydrich in 1942,

Himmler sends his personal physician to Prague

telling him to save Heydrich's life.

The patient has undergone emergency surgery,

and seems to be out of danger.

But then, Heydrich dies of blood poisoning.

Penicillin might have saved him,

but only the allies have that.

The Germans only have sulfonamide.

But Gebhardt doesn't administer any to Heydrich.

(soft ominous music)

In the Ravensbruck concentration camp,

Carl Gebhardt conducts experiments with sulfonamide.

He cuts prisoners' calves

and sows cloth or wooden splinters

into the wounds to cause inflammation,

human experimentation.

Several prisoners die.

- The bottom line was that they really didn't prove

very much at all with these sulfonamide injections.

But they didn't stop there,

because what you have a very strong sense of

when you read and you learn

about the Nazi medical experimentation

is you see this experimentation

for experimentation's sake.

They get a hunger for it.

- [Narrator] Photos taken secretly

by prisoners at Ravensbruck.

The mutilated leg of Maria Kusmierczuk,

a victim of Gebhardt's experiments.

She survives the war and later testifies against him.

(soft dramatic music)

(soft dramatic music) (bomb booming)

1944, the war is lost.

Hitler's enemies are advancing towards Germany

from the east and west.

The SS want to eliminate the traces of their crimes.

Thousands of exhausted prisoners from the remaining camps

are driven on the so-called death marches

into the interior of the Reich.

Those who cannot go any further are shot.

The destination of many death marches

is the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen.

Epidemics and malnutrition

claim thousands of lives there.

Anita Lasker is transferred here

from Auschwitz at the end of 1944.

- [Interpreter] There was also a rumor going around

that they were going to blow up the camps

to destroy all the evidence, and so forth.

We really did sit there waiting, waiting,

waiting for the end.

And, suddenly, we hear this announcement,

yes, that the English are standing

in front of the main gate.

- We really thought we were dreaming.

(soft somber music)

- [Narrator] April 15th, 1945,

the liberation of Bergen-Belsen.

One day later, Anita Lasker reports

on the Holocaust in the BBC's German program.

- [Interpreter] The Auschwitz prisoners,

the few who remained, all fear that the world

will not believe what happened there.

There, living, healthy people

were thrown alive into the fire.

- [Narrator] Unlike in most of the camps,

the SS guards in Bergen-Belsen have not cleared out.

Now they have to recover their victims.

(soft dramatic music)

An estimated 100,000 Germans

participated in the Holocaust as perpetrators.

Not even a tenth of them are held accountable.

Some escape their responsibility by committing suicide,

like Odilo Globocnik, head of Aktion Reinhardt.

SS Dr. Karl Gebhardt is captured by the allies

while on the run and is put on trial.

- [Judge] Military Tribunal One sentences you,

Karl Gebhardt, to death by hanging.

And may God have mercy on your soul.

- [Narrator] The head guard at Auschwitz,

Maria Mandel, is also sentenced to death.

- I think they were aware

that other people outside of Germany

would consider what they were doing as wrong.

But, in a sense, what the Nazis had been able to do

was to create a kind of world of moral inversion

where one's moral duty was only to fellow Germans

and everyone else was outside the world

of moral obligation

so that morality is turned upside down.

- [Interpreter] You don't need fanatical

and pathological mass murderers

or highly ideological Nazis.

It also works with other perpetrators.

(Stefan speaking in foreign language)

- [Interpreter] Other types of people can be transformed

into mass murderers in just the same way.

That's actually what I find

so terrifying about the Holocaust,

that it actually works with normal people,

that a whole society looks the other way,

or even thinks it's good,

that everyone benefits from it,

that no one has any problem with it.

That's actually the true lesson

from the Holocaust for me.s

(soft somber music)

- [Narrator] More than 90%

of the SS perpetrators go unpunished.

Even after the war,

many of them remain unaware of their own guilt.

"Orders are orders."

Never again.

(soft dramatic music)