1 00:00:04,420 --> 00:00:06,660 In the Autumn of 1941, 2 00:00:06,820 --> 00:00:10,300 the Nazis were about to embark on the most crucial few months in the planning 3 00:00:10,460 --> 00:00:16,100 of what they called 'The Final Solution' - the extermination of the Jews. 4 00:00:17,220 --> 00:00:20,740 Here at Auschwitz concentration camp in South West Poland 5 00:00:20,900 --> 00:00:24,260 the Commandant Rudolf Höss would wrestle with the task of organizing 6 00:00:24,420 --> 00:00:30,980 the mass murder of innocent civilians, including - for the first time - women and children. 7 00:00:38,020 --> 00:00:39,620 In buildings like this at Auschwitz, 8 00:00:39,780 --> 00:00:45,780 Höss and his colleagues used their own initiative to devise new ways of killing. 9 00:00:48,700 --> 00:00:50,860 I could see everything that was going on 10 00:00:51,020 --> 00:00:54,340 as though it were laid out in the palm of my hand. 11 00:00:54,500 --> 00:00:57,580 An SS-man climbed onto the flat roof of the building, 12 00:00:57,740 --> 00:01:02,740 put on a gas mask, opened a hatch and dropped the powder in. 13 00:01:07,060 --> 00:01:12,500 This is the story of how during the Autumn of 1941 and the Spring of 1942 14 00:01:12,660 --> 00:01:18,500 the Nazis ventured into entirely new territory in the history of mass murder. 15 00:01:19,260 --> 00:01:24,180 Via a combination of orders from the top and initiatives from below, 16 00:01:24,340 --> 00:01:26,340 they set in motion a policy of destruction 17 00:01:26,500 --> 00:01:31,340 that would eventually touch almost every European nation. 18 00:01:56,500 --> 00:01:59,940 At Auschwitz concentration camp in October 1941 19 00:02:00,100 --> 00:02:03,860 a radical initiative was being implemented. 20 00:02:04,020 --> 00:02:07,260 The newly appointed Auschwitz construction chief, Karl Bischoff, 21 00:02:07,420 --> 00:02:12,780 and SS Architect Fritz Ertl were working on plans for a completely new camp 22 00:02:12,940 --> 00:02:17,380 to be situated a little more than a mile and a half north west of the existing one 23 00:02:17,540 --> 00:02:22,180 on the site of a village the Germans called Birkenau. 24 00:02:28,700 --> 00:02:34,940 This new camp was to be the size of a small town capable of holding a 100,000 people. 25 00:02:36,420 --> 00:02:41,220 Research conducted in the 1990's, based on the original German construction plans, 26 00:02:41,380 --> 00:02:44,020 reveals that from the first moment of its conception 27 00:02:44,180 --> 00:02:49,500 this camp was designed to house prisoners in appalling conditions. 28 00:02:50,220 --> 00:02:54,740 The Nazis had built suffering into the very plans. 29 00:02:58,860 --> 00:03:04,380 In a concentration camp in Germany this was the total space 3 inmates had to live in. 30 00:03:04,540 --> 00:03:11,020 Here at Auschwitz's new camp the original plan was to cram 9 prisoners into the same space. 31 00:03:11,180 --> 00:03:14,220 550 in every barrack. 32 00:03:15,940 --> 00:03:19,420 There was no running water, no proper flooring, 33 00:03:19,580 --> 00:03:21,940 and jamming so many people together in each hut meant 34 00:03:22,100 --> 00:03:26,780 that this was the perfect breeding ground for disease. 35 00:03:31,980 --> 00:03:34,700 But when the final calculations were made it was clear 36 00:03:34,860 --> 00:03:36,460 that even cramming the new prisoners together 37 00:03:36,620 --> 00:03:41,220 so tightly wasn't enough for the needs of the Nazis. 38 00:03:57,220 --> 00:04:01,140 So Bischoff decided to force even more prisoners into each barrack. 39 00:04:01,300 --> 00:04:04,220 The documents reveal that he made a handwritten change 40 00:04:04,380 --> 00:04:09,980 the figure 550 for each barrack was crossed out and replaced with 744. 41 00:04:11,500 --> 00:04:17,420 The SS were designing barracks not so much to house people as to destroy them. 42 00:04:21,580 --> 00:04:23,860 Surprisingly, the new camp they were designing 43 00:04:24,020 --> 00:04:28,540 at Auschwitz wasn't initially intended to take Jews at all, 44 00:04:28,700 --> 00:04:33,060 but people like these, Soviet prisoners of war. 45 00:04:34,140 --> 00:04:37,900 The Nazis considered them subhuman. 46 00:04:41,260 --> 00:04:46,140 During the war around 3 million of them died in German captivity of starvation, 47 00:04:46,300 --> 00:04:49,660 disease and physical abuse. 48 00:05:00,940 --> 00:05:03,260 In the autumn of 1941, 49 00:05:03,420 --> 00:05:08,100 10,000 Soviet prisoners of war arrived to begin the construction of the new camp 50 00:05:08,260 --> 00:05:11,300 Auschwitz-Birkenau. 51 00:05:13,900 --> 00:05:16,300 It was October, it was already snowing. 52 00:05:16,460 --> 00:05:18,940 I remember that it was snowing. 53 00:05:19,100 --> 00:05:22,780 They were unloaded at the railway ramp, at the goods station... 54 00:05:22,940 --> 00:05:27,940 They were exhausted, it was difficult for them even to move. 55 00:05:30,140 --> 00:05:35,460 It is hard to imagine a human being in rags, dirty, starved, sick. 56 00:05:38,020 --> 00:05:42,260 It was simply a caricature of a human being. ' 57 00:05:42,940 --> 00:05:46,180 Only a few hundred of the 10,000 Soviet Prisoners of War 58 00:05:46,340 --> 00:05:48,940 survived until the following spring. 59 00:05:49,100 --> 00:05:53,060 One of those who did was Pavel Stenkin. 60 00:05:57,740 --> 00:06:00,380 We knew our place, a grave. 61 00:06:00,540 --> 00:06:04,700 I'm alive now and in a minute I'm finished. 62 00:06:06,060 --> 00:06:07,340 This was a constant feeling. 63 00:06:07,500 --> 00:06:12,380 They could kill you any minute and you would not know why. 64 00:06:16,940 --> 00:06:18,380 'The way the Germans, 65 00:06:18,540 --> 00:06:23,540 the SS and the Overseers amongst the prisoners tormented the POWs... 66 00:06:23,700 --> 00:06:27,260 they didn't even beat us as hard. 67 00:06:27,420 --> 00:06:28,740 I don't know why, 68 00:06:28,900 --> 00:06:33,060 but if a Prisoner Overseer didn't kill 7 or 10 a day, 69 00:06:33,220 --> 00:06:35,420 he probably couldn't sleep. 70 00:06:35,580 --> 00:06:39,100 That's how we interpreted it.' 71 00:06:45,060 --> 00:06:50,420 People were dying from starvation, from diseases and from beatings. 72 00:06:51,460 --> 00:06:55,460 You'd go to bed and you were still alive 73 00:06:57,700 --> 00:07:01,060 by morning you were dead. 74 00:07:06,140 --> 00:07:08,820 Death, death, death. 75 00:07:08,980 --> 00:07:14,380 Death at night, death in the morning, death in the afternoon. Death. 76 00:07:15,220 --> 00:07:18,220 We lived with death. 77 00:07:20,180 --> 00:07:23,340 How could a human feel? 78 00:07:28,980 --> 00:07:33,540 The man in charge of all this suffering, Rudolf Höss, Commandant of Auschwitz, 79 00:07:33,700 --> 00:07:37,180 held routine meetings at 9 o'clock every Tuesday and Friday morning 80 00:07:37,340 --> 00:07:42,340 to discuss the running of the camp with his senior officers. 81 00:07:53,100 --> 00:07:56,380 From the study of Nazi documents recently discovered in Moscow, 82 00:07:56,540 --> 00:07:59,860 it's clear that the slow progress in the construction of the prisoner of war camp 83 00:08:00,020 --> 00:08:04,660 at Birkenau was of huge concern to the SS leadership. 84 00:08:12,780 --> 00:08:16,020 At this time, autumn 1941, 85 00:08:16,180 --> 00:08:21,660 Auschwitz had almost no involvement in the Nazis' anti Jewish actions. 86 00:08:24,580 --> 00:08:29,540 Instead Nazis elsewhere helped initiate the mass murder of the Jews 87 00:08:29,700 --> 00:08:34,340 like here in Hamburg, one of Germany's major ports. 88 00:08:44,140 --> 00:08:47,660 Hamburg's most prominent local Nazis was about to use the bombing of the city 89 00:08:47,820 --> 00:08:53,060 by the RAF to escalate the persecution of the Jews still further. 90 00:09:05,260 --> 00:09:08,940 The bombing in September 1941 left hundreds homeless, 91 00:09:09,100 --> 00:09:13,340 but Karl Kaufmann, the Gauleiter or Regional Leader of Hamburg, 92 00:09:13,500 --> 00:09:17,300 saw this as an opportunity to show his initiative. 93 00:09:17,460 --> 00:09:21,460 So he dictated a letter to Adolf Hitler. 94 00:09:43,620 --> 00:09:49,980 Requests like this one from Kaufmann coincided with Hitler's own prejudices and desires 95 00:09:53,140 --> 00:09:56,100 He had wanted to remove the Jews for years. 96 00:09:56,260 --> 00:09:59,300 Like many on the Nationalist Right he believed in the delusion 97 00:09:59,460 --> 00:10:02,740 that the Jews had lost Germany the 1st World War 98 00:10:02,900 --> 00:10:07,420 and that there was an international conspiracy of Jews against them. 99 00:10:07,580 --> 00:10:10,660 From the moment the Nazis came to power Hitler had ensured 100 00:10:10,820 --> 00:10:13,740 that the Jews of Germany were persecuted. 101 00:10:13,900 --> 00:10:18,940 They quickly became the scapegoats for all of Germany's ills. 102 00:10:22,740 --> 00:10:26,900 In the Autumn of 1941 Hitler agreed to the requests of Kaufmann 103 00:10:27,060 --> 00:10:31,380 and other senior Nazis to deport the German Jews. 104 00:10:31,540 --> 00:10:33,900 At the end of October the Jews of Hamburg 105 00:10:34,060 --> 00:10:36,660 Heard the news that they had been dreading. 106 00:10:36,820 --> 00:10:42,300 We received a registered letter 24 hours prior to report to a building 107 00:10:43,620 --> 00:10:49,700 near the railway station to bring 1 suitcase and you would be resettled in the East. 108 00:10:49,860 --> 00:10:52,820 That's all it said. 109 00:10:57,580 --> 00:11:01,300 In scenes that were eventually to be repeated right across Germany, 110 00:11:01,460 --> 00:11:03,220 the German Jews packed their belongings 111 00:11:03,380 --> 00:11:08,620 and prepared to leave in full view of their non Jewish neighbours 112 00:11:09,820 --> 00:11:12,580 It was even an ugly world and we looked away. 113 00:11:12,740 --> 00:11:17,900 It made us angry but more than that it made us terribly afraid, 114 00:11:18,260 --> 00:11:23,100 ah, we wished we could head back but we knew we couldn't. 115 00:11:26,660 --> 00:11:31,540 In the morning we were taken to trains, regular trains and ah, 116 00:11:31,700 --> 00:11:37,540 the trains were sealed from the outside and it was a train ride into nowhere. 117 00:11:39,140 --> 00:11:42,860 And we didn't know what to expect. 118 00:11:47,620 --> 00:11:53,140 None of these German Jews was sent straight from Hamburg to Auschwitz. 119 00:11:55,100 --> 00:12:00,260 Instead, their first destination was the Lodz Ghetto in Poland. 120 00:12:03,020 --> 00:12:08,740 The Nazis had created ghettos all over Poland to imprison the Polish Jews. 121 00:12:11,700 --> 00:12:15,500 They hated these Jews even more than the Jews from the West. 122 00:12:15,660 --> 00:12:21,060 To the Nazis they were from the Slavic East and so doubly dangerous. 123 00:12:26,340 --> 00:12:31,540 This was the shocking new environment into which the Hamburg Jews were now placed 124 00:12:31,700 --> 00:12:36,980 as they arrived in Lodz on the morning of the 26th of October 1941 125 00:12:39,340 --> 00:12:41,620 There were 1150 people, 126 00:12:41,780 --> 00:12:46,420 with the Jewish Ghetto police walking us into the Ghetto. 127 00:12:46,580 --> 00:12:49,740 It was a two hour walk. 128 00:12:49,900 --> 00:12:52,380 We saw people within the Ghetto, 129 00:12:52,540 --> 00:12:58,900 they looked ragged, they looked tired, they looked drawn and they paid us no attention. 130 00:13:02,300 --> 00:13:08,060 We saw an area that resembled a slum except none of us had ever seen a slum 131 00:13:09,540 --> 00:13:12,900 but we assumed this was it. 132 00:13:15,780 --> 00:13:21,660 We couldn't understand why they looked the way they did, not decently dressed, 133 00:13:22,780 --> 00:13:25,900 we didn't know what kind of a place this was. 134 00:13:26,060 --> 00:13:29,900 It just didn't make any sense at all. 135 00:13:32,340 --> 00:13:37,940 Normally, the German Jews they look at the Polish Jews from the top down 136 00:13:39,500 --> 00:13:44,460 Because we were definitely a much lower category than them. 137 00:13:45,140 --> 00:13:47,340 And all of a sudden, 138 00:13:47,500 --> 00:13:50,820 it hit them that they had they had come to the time where they were the same 139 00:13:50,980 --> 00:13:56,220 or maybe lower because they cannot live in the conditions we did. 140 00:14:01,900 --> 00:14:06,980 With the arrival of the German Jews the Lodz ghetto became more overcrowded than ever 141 00:14:07,140 --> 00:14:12,540 and the local Nazi authorities sought ways of reducing the ghetto population. 142 00:14:12,700 --> 00:14:15,140 Which is why, in the autumn of 1941, 143 00:14:15,300 --> 00:14:20,940 Walter Burmeister of the SS drove his boss, Herbert Lange, across Poland. 144 00:14:21,980 --> 00:14:27,980 Burmeister later recalled what Lange had told him about the purpose of the trip. 145 00:14:50,180 --> 00:14:51,860 Herbert Lange had, until recently, 146 00:14:52,020 --> 00:14:57,980 been employed in the Nazis' adult Euthanasia Programme, murdering the disabled. 147 00:15:02,740 --> 00:15:06,060 Lange drove to a small village called Chelmno. 148 00:15:06,220 --> 00:15:08,260 Here, over the next few weeks, 149 00:15:08,420 --> 00:15:12,180 he and his men would prepare a special installation. 150 00:15:12,340 --> 00:15:13,820 Its chief purpose: 151 00:15:13,980 --> 00:15:20,260 to create space in the Lodz ghetto by killing the Jews the Nazis thought unproductive. 152 00:15:22,340 --> 00:15:23,580 By November 1941, 153 00:15:23,740 --> 00:15:28,540 Chelmno was not the only such centre under construction. 154 00:15:29,660 --> 00:15:33,420 At Belzec in the East of Poland another small camp was being built 155 00:15:33,580 --> 00:15:37,580 so the Nazis could kill selected Jews from the nearby Lublin area. 156 00:15:37,740 --> 00:15:40,380 But the killing was about to escalate still further 157 00:15:40,540 --> 00:15:44,940 after dramatic events more than 7000 miles away. 158 00:15:45,380 --> 00:15:47,500 On December the 7th 1941 159 00:15:47,660 --> 00:15:52,380 the Japanese bombed American battleships at Pearl Harbour. 160 00:15:52,540 --> 00:15:58,580 As a result Germany - allies of the Japanese - declared war on the United States. 161 00:15:59,140 --> 00:16:01,420 And in a speech he gave days later, 162 00:16:01,580 --> 00:16:07,340 Hitler made it clear just who he blamed for the intensification of the war. 163 00:16:22,380 --> 00:16:27,500 In private Hitler was now calling for the Jews to be exterminated. 164 00:16:27,660 --> 00:16:28,420 And one of the leading Nazis 165 00:16:28,580 --> 00:16:33,860 who heard him speak of mass murder lived here in Krakow in Poland. 166 00:16:35,020 --> 00:16:37,340 On December 16th 1941, 167 00:16:37,500 --> 00:16:39,820 just days after meeting with Hitler, 168 00:16:39,980 --> 00:16:43,460 he spoke to a carefully selected group of senior Army officers, 169 00:16:43,620 --> 00:16:47,580 SS and local Nazi party administrators. 170 00:16:51,780 --> 00:16:57,180 His name was Hans Frank and he was the Nazi ruler of Eastern Poland. 171 00:16:58,100 --> 00:17:01,620 At the time, his words were not supposed to have been made public. 172 00:17:01,780 --> 00:17:05,900 But a copy of his speech survived the war. 173 00:17:49,220 --> 00:17:53,420 In January 1942 the first selections were made for Jews 174 00:17:53,580 --> 00:17:57,380 to be deported from the Lodz ghetto. 175 00:17:59,500 --> 00:18:05,100 We did not want to leave or most people in the Ghetto did not want to leave 176 00:18:05,260 --> 00:18:11,660 because you figured the misery you knew would be better than the misery you didn't know. 177 00:18:13,820 --> 00:18:16,820 The selected Jews from Lodz were taken here to Herbert Lange's 178 00:18:16,980 --> 00:18:21,420 new improvised extermination facility at Chelmno. 179 00:18:24,420 --> 00:18:30,380 Jews from the immediate area had been the first to die here a few weeks before. 180 00:18:33,580 --> 00:18:36,540 The Nazis blew up the large house which was the centre of the killing 181 00:18:36,700 --> 00:18:41,300 operations in order to hide evidence of their crime. 182 00:18:41,980 --> 00:18:46,580 This is one of the few photos that remain of the house itself. 183 00:18:46,740 --> 00:18:49,660 But evidence gathered after the war allows a picture to be constructed of 184 00:18:49,820 --> 00:18:53,020 what the Nazis did here. 185 00:18:54,060 --> 00:18:56,460 The Jews from Lodz were told to undress 186 00:18:56,620 --> 00:18:59,660 they were then pushed down a corridor in the basement of the house, 187 00:18:59,820 --> 00:19:04,060 up a ramp and into a small windowless chamber. 188 00:19:04,220 --> 00:19:07,700 Doors were then slammed behind them. 189 00:19:07,860 --> 00:19:11,860 They'd been locked in the back of a van. 190 00:19:17,260 --> 00:19:21,620 These vans had been invented two years earlier to kill mentally ill people 191 00:19:21,780 --> 00:19:28,180 by cramming them in the sealed rear cargo area and then gassing them with carbon monoxide. 192 00:19:28,340 --> 00:19:31,460 Now Lange and other Nazis used their own initiative to adapt 193 00:19:31,620 --> 00:19:34,300 this killing method to murder Jews. 194 00:19:34,460 --> 00:19:40,380 They made gas vans central to the new killing operations here at Chelmno. Lodz 195 00:19:41,820 --> 00:19:48,020 There was a lot of screaming, how terribly they screamed, it was impossible to bear. 196 00:19:49,420 --> 00:19:52,780 We could hear the screams, but we couldn't see the people. 197 00:19:52,940 --> 00:19:57,420 They were loaded in and murdered there. It was hell. 198 00:19:57,580 --> 00:20:01,780 That's why we called these vans 'Hell Vans'. 199 00:20:04,140 --> 00:20:08,580 When I saw it going, I'd say, "The hell's going." 200 00:20:10,660 --> 00:20:14,420 The vans carrying the bodies of the Jews who had been gassed were driven 2 miles 201 00:20:14,580 --> 00:20:20,220 through remote country roads to a nearby forest and buried in a clearing. 202 00:20:23,180 --> 00:20:25,580 Many of the Germans who worked here at Chelmno believed 203 00:20:25,740 --> 00:20:28,180 what they were doing was perfectly legal, 204 00:20:28,340 --> 00:20:33,940 as the post war testimony of Kurt Möbius, one of the SS Guards, reveals. 205 00:21:11,020 --> 00:21:16,420 Motivated by such anti Semitic delusions, the Germans created here at Chelmno 206 00:21:16,580 --> 00:21:21,660 the first systematic process for the mass gassing of the Jews. 207 00:21:22,260 --> 00:21:24,340 But up to now local Nazi killing operations 208 00:21:24,500 --> 00:21:29,660 like this didn't seem to be part of a fully developed strategy. 209 00:21:34,740 --> 00:21:36,020 That was to be resolved, 210 00:21:36,180 --> 00:21:39,020 on 20th January 1942 211 00:21:39,180 --> 00:21:45,100 at an infamous meeting on the banks of the Wannsee on the outskirts of Berlin. 212 00:21:49,980 --> 00:21:53,820 The meeting was called to co-ordinate the extermination of the Jews, 213 00:21:53,980 --> 00:21:57,900 the Nazis' so-called 'Final Solution'. 214 00:22:06,540 --> 00:22:08,780 It was made plain to all of the various government 215 00:22:08,940 --> 00:22:15,020 and Nazi officials that attended that the SS was firmly in control of the process. 216 00:22:20,140 --> 00:22:26,100 Chaired by Reinhard Heydrich of the SS, with Adolf Eichmann taking the minutes, 217 00:22:26,540 --> 00:22:29,940 a crucial statement of principle was declared at Wannsee. 218 00:22:30,100 --> 00:22:36,020 All of the Jews under Nazi control were to die - many of them worked to death. 219 00:23:03,180 --> 00:23:04,900 In ghettos like Lodz, 220 00:23:05,060 --> 00:23:08,660 the Nazis were pursuing the policy, as Heydrich put it, 221 00:23:08,820 --> 00:23:15,540 of eliminating a proportion of Jews through work and then dealing with the rest appropriately. 222 00:23:25,580 --> 00:23:29,580 The food was not enough to sustain life, 223 00:23:29,900 --> 00:23:35,660 there was no milk, there was no meat, there was no food, there was nothing. 224 00:23:43,740 --> 00:23:48,740 A lot of Jews wanted to trade against a pair of shoes or ah, 225 00:23:50,900 --> 00:23:52,940 anything else that we had. 226 00:23:53,100 --> 00:23:57,940 My mother traded a silk blouse for some butter and bread. 227 00:24:03,380 --> 00:24:07,300 In the ghetto everything was paid for. 228 00:24:10,660 --> 00:24:14,740 You had to have somebody's shoulders to stand on, 229 00:24:14,900 --> 00:24:19,660 all protection which meant connections, that's how life 230 00:24:20,820 --> 00:24:23,140 our business was conducted. 231 00:24:23,300 --> 00:24:27,060 You do me a favor I do you a favor. 232 00:24:36,660 --> 00:24:42,660 You really couldn't trust anybody because if I would tell a co-worker something, 233 00:24:44,500 --> 00:24:49,380 she would use it for her advantage, you had to be very careful. 234 00:24:49,540 --> 00:24:53,380 There was a lot of back-stabbing and you can understand why, 235 00:24:53,540 --> 00:24:57,220 it was a matter of life and death. 236 00:25:01,460 --> 00:25:07,220 But that was ghetto life, this is what, what life had done to human beings, 237 00:25:09,100 --> 00:25:14,260 whether they were the same before the war I doubt it very much. 238 00:25:17,260 --> 00:25:20,780 One of the most disturbing aspects of how the Nazis ran the ghettos is the way 239 00:25:20,940 --> 00:25:25,580 they forced the Jewish leadership to make many life and death decisions. 240 00:25:25,740 --> 00:25:31,220 Like how the inadequate supply of food and jobs should be distributed. 241 00:25:42,620 --> 00:25:45,380 Unlike the vast majority of Jewish ghetto leaders, 242 00:25:45,540 --> 00:25:47,500 the Chairman of the Council of Elders in Lodz, 243 00:25:47,660 --> 00:25:52,620 Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, exploited his position of power. 244 00:25:54,700 --> 00:25:59,540 I had heard rumours and I knew that he had a vile temper. 245 00:26:00,740 --> 00:26:05,300 If he got angry he would take his cane and hit you. 246 00:26:05,580 --> 00:26:08,740 On occasion Rumkowski used the deportations to remove those 247 00:26:08,900 --> 00:26:13,820 who opposed him and he abused his authority in other ways. 248 00:26:15,060 --> 00:26:19,780 I was alone in the office and he would pull up a chair 249 00:26:20,180 --> 00:26:26,340 and we had a couple of conversations, he talked, I would listen and he molested me. 250 00:26:29,740 --> 00:26:36,340 I kept moving away and he kept moving closer and it was a it was a frightening relationship. 251 00:26:44,340 --> 00:26:49,860 Rumkowski took a lot of advantage of, of the young of the young women. 252 00:26:50,540 --> 00:26:55,220 They were 15,16,18,20 and quite good looking girls. 253 00:26:58,100 --> 00:27:01,380 We were all in the in the dining room outside there, 254 00:27:01,540 --> 00:27:06,700 he just come, put a hand around her and just walk out with her. 255 00:27:08,180 --> 00:27:13,260 And that, I saw that, not anybody told me that but I saw that. 256 00:27:17,500 --> 00:27:22,140 Rumkowski sexually abused Lucille Eichengreen for several months. 257 00:27:22,300 --> 00:27:27,900 Only after the office where she worked was closed did she escape his attentions. 258 00:27:28,060 --> 00:27:31,180 I felt disgusted and I felt angry, I ah, 259 00:27:31,340 --> 00:27:36,300 but if I would have run away he would have had me deported, 260 00:27:37,100 --> 00:27:40,460 I mean that was very clear. 261 00:27:44,300 --> 00:27:47,940 The ghetto left a permanent mark. 262 00:27:49,380 --> 00:27:55,180 It showed humanity at its best and at its worst, it made me what I am today. 263 00:27:59,380 --> 00:28:03,740 We all sustained damage em, during those years. 264 00:28:09,140 --> 00:28:11,580 Eventually when the ghetto was liquidated, 265 00:28:11,740 --> 00:28:17,460 Rumkowski and his family suffered the same fate as 200,000 other Lodz ghetto Jews 266 00:28:17,620 --> 00:28:21,340 they were murdered by the Nazis. 267 00:28:26,940 --> 00:28:28,340 In early 1942, 268 00:28:28,500 --> 00:28:31,460 Auschwitz, unlike Chelmno and the Lodz ghetto, 269 00:28:31,620 --> 00:28:36,580 was only playing a minor part in the Nazis' Final Solution. 270 00:28:49,540 --> 00:28:51,540 Since September 1941 271 00:28:51,700 --> 00:28:55,460 Höss and his colleagues had been experimenting with the use of Zyklon B 272 00:28:55,620 --> 00:28:58,700 prussic acid to kill Soviet Prisoners of War 273 00:28:58,860 --> 00:29:04,420 and the sick in the crematorium of the camp just yards from his office. 274 00:29:18,140 --> 00:29:22,860 Next to the ovens of the crematorium was the mortuary. 275 00:29:23,620 --> 00:29:27,820 The SS used it as an improvised gas chamber. 276 00:29:29,380 --> 00:29:31,420 A small number of Jews from the local area selected 277 00:29:31,580 --> 00:29:33,940 as unfit to work had also been killed here, 278 00:29:34,100 --> 00:29:37,700 beginning in the autumn of 1941, 279 00:29:38,260 --> 00:29:41,340 but it was soon clear to Höss and his SS colleagues 280 00:29:41,500 --> 00:29:46,260 that this was not an ideal location to commit mass murder, 281 00:29:46,420 --> 00:29:51,220 as Polish political prisoner Jozef Paczynski, witnessed. 282 00:29:53,980 --> 00:29:59,060 I went into the attic of that building, I stood on a crate or something, 283 00:29:59,220 --> 00:30:05,860 I lifted a roof tile and I could see everything that was going on right there in front of me. 284 00:30:07,700 --> 00:30:11,420 'And they were very polite with those people, very polite. 285 00:30:11,580 --> 00:30:16,540 "Undress, pack your things here, this here, that there...". 286 00:30:19,300 --> 00:30:23,660 And then an SS- man climbed onto the flat roof of the building. 287 00:30:23,820 --> 00:30:28,980 He put on a gas mask, opened a hatch and dropped the powder in. 288 00:30:39,300 --> 00:30:43,900 When he did this, in spite of the fact that these walls were very thick, 289 00:30:44,060 --> 00:30:49,180 you could hear a great scream from within, despite the thick walls. 290 00:30:49,340 --> 00:30:53,540 This took place at lunch time, in the daytime. 291 00:30:53,700 --> 00:30:55,620 In order to stifle the screaming, 292 00:30:55,780 --> 00:31:00,540 they had two motorcycles standing on the pavement near the crematorium, 293 00:31:00,700 --> 00:31:05,940 engines revved up as far as they could go, to stifle the screams. 294 00:31:07,540 --> 00:31:12,780 To cover up the yelling they had these engines going but they failed. 295 00:31:12,940 --> 00:31:16,860 They gave it a try but it didn't work. 296 00:31:18,460 --> 00:31:22,540 The screaming lasted for 15 or 20 minutes; 297 00:31:23,300 --> 00:31:27,700 it became weaker and weaker, then it went quiet. 298 00:31:34,140 --> 00:31:38,060 These horrors were only the beginning. 299 00:31:43,820 --> 00:31:45,380 During the Spring of 1942 300 00:31:45,540 --> 00:31:51,340 Jews from outside Poland were deported to Auschwitz for the very first time. 301 00:31:52,460 --> 00:31:56,860 They came from one of the Nazis' closest allies. 302 00:31:59,460 --> 00:32:04,180 And the story of how these Jews came to be on trains to Auschwitz is one of the most shocking 303 00:32:04,340 --> 00:32:09,380 and surprising in the history of the Nazis' "Final Solution." 304 00:32:16,940 --> 00:32:23,020 The people on these trains were from Slovakia - many from the capital, Bratislava. 305 00:32:24,660 --> 00:32:27,140 Slovakia was a new country. 306 00:32:27,300 --> 00:32:29,580 Created only in 1939 307 00:32:29,740 --> 00:32:34,940 and the majority of the Slovaks were now fiercely nationalistic. 308 00:33:14,420 --> 00:33:18,020 The President, Jozef Tiso, was a Catholic priest 309 00:33:18,180 --> 00:33:23,260 And the Prime Minister, Vojtech Tuka, was also deeply religious. 310 00:33:23,420 --> 00:33:25,780 They had implemented a series of anti-Semitic measures 311 00:33:25,940 --> 00:33:30,500 chiefly born of religious and cultural intolerance. 312 00:33:32,260 --> 00:33:38,820 And at the forefront of tormenting the Jewish population were the nationalist Hlinka guard. 313 00:33:41,820 --> 00:33:43,620 A Jew would never go to work. 314 00:33:43,780 --> 00:33:48,620 None of them work; they only wanted to have an easy life. 315 00:33:55,660 --> 00:33:58,780 Our people were happy to receive their stores. 316 00:33:58,940 --> 00:34:01,540 We called it aryanising them. 317 00:34:01,700 --> 00:34:05,300 And that's how they become rich. 318 00:34:08,060 --> 00:34:13,660 Before the war Slovakia had a thriving Jewish community of around 90,000 319 00:34:14,180 --> 00:34:17,100 now they were under direct threat. 320 00:34:17,260 --> 00:34:20,060 When the Nazis asked for forced labourers, 321 00:34:20,220 --> 00:34:25,740 the Slovakian authorities offered up 20,000 Jews - and their families. 322 00:34:29,660 --> 00:34:31,020 But early in 1942, 323 00:34:31,180 --> 00:34:34,460 conflict arose between the Germans and the Slovaks. 324 00:34:34,620 --> 00:34:38,620 The Nazis, lacking the necessary extermination capacity, 325 00:34:38,780 --> 00:34:43,580 at first didn't want to accept anyone who couldn't work. 326 00:34:45,380 --> 00:34:46,420 In early 1942 327 00:34:46,580 --> 00:34:49,620 a meeting was arranged at the Foreign Ministry in Bratislava 328 00:34:49,780 --> 00:34:53,340 to try and resolve the dispute. 329 00:35:01,180 --> 00:35:05,740 SS Captain Dieter Wisliceny arrived to meet with Prime Minister Tuka 330 00:35:05,900 --> 00:35:09,540 and a Slovakian Official Dr Koso. 331 00:35:12,260 --> 00:35:18,260 After the war, both Wisliceny and Koso gave evidence of what was discussed here. 332 00:36:29,500 --> 00:36:33,020 Back in Berlin, a deal was brokered. 333 00:36:33,180 --> 00:36:36,580 As this document proves, the Slovakian Foreign Ministry 334 00:36:36,740 --> 00:36:41,780 agreed to pay the Nazis 500 Reichsmark for each Jew deported. 335 00:36:43,140 --> 00:36:48,420 The Slovaks thus offered to pay the Nazis to take their Jews away. 336 00:36:52,580 --> 00:36:54,700 For most of the Slovakian Jews, 337 00:36:54,860 --> 00:36:57,860 their journey began with imprisonment at a holding camp 338 00:36:58,020 --> 00:37:01,660 like this one outside Bratislava. 339 00:37:05,140 --> 00:37:06,660 Once in these camps, 340 00:37:06,820 --> 00:37:12,260 the Slovakian Jews were under the total control of the Hlinka Guards. 341 00:37:14,380 --> 00:37:16,860 Some of those soldiers were really stupid. 342 00:37:17,020 --> 00:37:23,340 For example, they deliberately crapped there so we had to clean up that with our hands 343 00:37:24,260 --> 00:37:28,820 They called us Jewish whores, they kicked us, they behaved really badly. 344 00:37:28,980 --> 00:37:31,820 They also told us 'We will teach you Jews how to work.' 345 00:37:31,980 --> 00:37:35,620 But poor women were used to work. 346 00:37:41,340 --> 00:37:47,900 Later when the Jews were coming to the camps, we used to take their belongings and clothes. 347 00:37:54,100 --> 00:37:59,860 The deputy commander came and said to us to go and choose from the clothes. 348 00:38:04,100 --> 00:38:08,100 I took some clothes, others did as well. 349 00:38:10,940 --> 00:38:15,340 Then I took 3 pairs of shoes. Everyone took what he could. 350 00:38:15,500 --> 00:38:20,180 I wrapped it all with a rope and brought it back home. 351 00:38:24,580 --> 00:38:28,460 We, the guards, were doing quite well. 352 00:38:31,020 --> 00:38:34,460 Within months of the start of the deportations, Michal Kaba? 353 00:38:34,620 --> 00:38:39,300 became aware of the likely fate of the Slovakian Jews. 354 00:38:40,420 --> 00:38:43,780 How could you personally participate in the deportation knowing 355 00:38:43,940 --> 00:38:47,980 those people were certainly going to die? 356 00:38:50,220 --> 00:38:53,380 What could I have done? 357 00:38:53,820 --> 00:38:57,060 I was thinking both ways. 358 00:38:57,620 --> 00:39:02,580 I thought it will be peace and quiet here, you deserved it. 359 00:39:09,180 --> 00:39:14,620 But on the other hand, there were innocent people among them as well. 360 00:39:14,940 --> 00:39:18,180 I was thinking both ways. 361 00:39:23,860 --> 00:39:29,140 The deportation of Jewish families from Slovakia began in April 1942 362 00:39:29,300 --> 00:39:32,900 and lasted for the next 7 months 363 00:39:35,580 --> 00:39:40,780 altogether around 60,000 Jews were handed over to the Germans. 364 00:39:51,860 --> 00:39:56,220 150 miles away at his house just outside Auschwitz concentration camp, 365 00:39:56,380 --> 00:39:58,980 where he lived with his wife and 4 children, 366 00:39:59,140 --> 00:40:03,500 Rudolf Höss awaited the arrival of the Slovaks. 367 00:40:04,220 --> 00:40:07,180 The plans for the new camp at Birkenau had changed; 368 00:40:07,340 --> 00:40:12,860 Soviet Prisoners of War were to be sent as forced labourers elsewhere. 369 00:40:13,020 --> 00:40:18,220 Höss now knew that Jews were central to the future of Auschwitz. 370 00:40:20,900 --> 00:40:23,940 And it was here in a remote corner of the site at Birkenau, 371 00:40:24,100 --> 00:40:26,180 2 miles away from the main camp, 372 00:40:26,340 --> 00:40:32,900 that Höss and other members of the SS had found a location for new make-shift gas chambers. 373 00:40:33,740 --> 00:40:37,020 In this field stood a Polish cottage which would come to be known 374 00:40:37,180 --> 00:40:40,980 as the Little Red House or Bunker 1. 375 00:40:43,500 --> 00:40:49,900 Höss and his SS comrades saw this as a step forward in the killing process at Auschwitz. 376 00:40:50,940 --> 00:40:55,220 Two separate gas chambers were quickly improvised by bricking up the windows 377 00:40:55,380 --> 00:40:59,380 and door and creating two new entrances. 378 00:41:01,300 --> 00:41:03,980 Unlike in the crematorium in the main camp, 379 00:41:04,140 --> 00:41:08,620 people could be murdered here in relative secrecy. 380 00:41:09,860 --> 00:41:15,300 In this shabby cottage tens of thousands of people would be murdered. 381 00:41:15,660 --> 00:41:18,100 The manner of killing remained the same. 382 00:41:18,260 --> 00:41:22,540 Jews would be told they were to take a shower, they would be locked in the room, 383 00:41:22,700 --> 00:41:26,980 and Zyklon B thrown in through a hatch in the wall. 384 00:41:27,140 --> 00:41:30,380 Within weeks, the Nazis had converted another nearby cottage 385 00:41:30,540 --> 00:41:34,940 the Little White House - in just the same way. 386 00:41:43,780 --> 00:41:48,260 Slovakian Jews arrived at the railway stop 2 miles from the gas chambers 387 00:41:48,420 --> 00:41:53,260 on the 29th April 1942 - and faced 'selection' by the SS. 388 00:42:01,180 --> 00:42:07,340 This was the first of hundreds of SS selections to be held over the next 30 months. 389 00:42:09,540 --> 00:42:11,820 When they opened the train carriages and forced us out, 390 00:42:11,980 --> 00:42:13,900 they shouted at us immediately. 391 00:42:14,060 --> 00:42:16,540 They were screaming in German. 392 00:42:16,700 --> 00:42:20,820 They were SS men who were dealing with us. 393 00:42:24,660 --> 00:42:27,980 We had to stand in line, men had to step out first, 394 00:42:28,140 --> 00:42:32,420 then women with children, and then old people. 395 00:42:38,420 --> 00:42:43,500 I looked at my father, here, and I saw a sad look on his face. 396 00:42:43,660 --> 00:42:47,140 This is my last memory of him. 397 00:42:51,100 --> 00:42:54,300 The Slovakian Jews selected to die were taken up past the newly built 398 00:42:54,460 --> 00:42:57,340 buildings of Birkenau and towards the isolated 399 00:42:57,500 --> 00:43:02,500 gas chambers of the Little Red House and Little White House. 400 00:43:03,980 --> 00:43:07,900 When we were returning from work we saw people being brought over. 401 00:43:08,060 --> 00:43:10,300 They waited there the whole day. 402 00:43:10,460 --> 00:43:16,660 They sat there, they still had food from home and SS men were around them with dogs. 403 00:43:16,940 --> 00:43:21,420 They didn't know what was going to happen to them. 404 00:43:21,980 --> 00:43:24,700 After the war while he awaited trial, 405 00:43:24,860 --> 00:43:31,500 Rudolf Höss wrote about the process of murder in the converted cottages in the Spring of 1942 406 00:43:32,020 --> 00:43:34,660 'it was most important that the whole business of arriving 407 00:43:34,820 --> 00:43:40,820 and undressing should take place in an atmosphere of the greatest possible calm. 408 00:43:41,740 --> 00:43:43,420 Small children usually cried 409 00:43:43,580 --> 00:43:47,180 because of the strangeness of being undressed in this way but when their mothers 410 00:43:47,340 --> 00:43:50,500 or members of the Jewish Sonderkommando comforted them, 411 00:43:50,660 --> 00:43:54,460 they became calm and entered the gas chambers playing 412 00:43:54,620 --> 00:43:59,180 or joking with one another and carrying their toys. 413 00:43:59,820 --> 00:44:03,300 Hundreds of men and women in the full bloom of life walked 414 00:44:03,460 --> 00:44:06,780 all unsuspecting to their death in the gas chambers 415 00:44:06,940 --> 00:44:11,500 under the blossom-laden fruit trees of the orchard. 416 00:44:14,420 --> 00:44:19,980 This picture of death in the midst of life remains with me to this day. 417 00:44:20,340 --> 00:44:23,620 I looked upon them as enemies of our people. 418 00:44:23,780 --> 00:44:29,140 The reasons behind the Extermination Programme seemed to me right. ' 419 00:44:34,420 --> 00:44:38,020 After the gassing, Höss and the SS made other Jewish prisoners 420 00:44:38,180 --> 00:44:44,780 load the bodies onto trucks and wheel them down a makeshift railway line towards giant pits. 421 00:44:51,700 --> 00:44:57,420 Otto Pressburger was one of the prisoners forced to dispose of the bodies. 422 00:45:02,220 --> 00:45:08,060 We were digging holes and in the beginning we really didn't know what they were for, 423 00:45:08,220 --> 00:45:14,740 it was only when the holes were deep enough that we started to throw the bodies into them. 424 00:45:18,020 --> 00:45:19,500 It was appalling. 425 00:45:19,660 --> 00:45:24,900 New bodies were lying here every morning and we had to bury them. 426 00:45:30,140 --> 00:45:34,300 When summer came everything started to rot. 427 00:45:34,780 --> 00:45:43,900 It was terrible, the majority of the people working here were from my home city of Trnava, 428 00:45:44,660 --> 00:45:49,580 I knew all of them and every day there were less and less of them. 429 00:45:49,740 --> 00:45:54,140 They must still be buried around here somewhere. 430 00:45:55,500 --> 00:46:00,460 My brother and my father are buried here as well, you know. 431 00:46:07,180 --> 00:46:08,660 By the Summer of 1942 432 00:46:08,820 --> 00:46:14,580 Höss and his colleagues at Auschwitz had discovered how to murder thousands 433 00:46:18,340 --> 00:46:20,900 But their improvised methods of killing could not keep pace 434 00:46:21,060 --> 00:46:24,740 with the demands of their masters who, in pursuit of the Nazis' 435 00:46:24,900 --> 00:46:29,580 "Final Solution", dreamt of eliminating many millions. 436 00:46:40,740 --> 00:46:42,260 During the next few months 437 00:46:42,420 --> 00:46:48,620 Höss and his colleagues would overcome all obstacles and create buildings like this, 438 00:46:49,220 --> 00:46:53,780 where murder could be committed on a massive scale. 439 00:46:59,540 --> 00:47:03,060 And as they did so, the Nazis also began to scour 440 00:47:03,220 --> 00:47:08,420 the whole of Europe for ever more people to bring here and kill.