Original subtitles

To Germany, after defeat in the First World War,

came ruinous inflation, massive unemployment, political disorder.

By 1932, one man in three was out of work.

I remember at the bottom of our street every day were workers.

I mean, they weren't workers because they were out of work.

They'd go to the labour exchange and collect their unemployment pay.

And it was a gloomy, grey, forlorn army, you could almost say,

of people who went there each day and then came back again just as miserable

because they never found any work.

These are childhood impressions

that have stayed in my memory to this day,

that are still very real to me.

I think in 1930 or 1929,

I don't remember,

we went to Berlin and we took a taxi

and arrived at a shop or at another house

and a man, nice-looking but very poor-looking

opened the door of the taxi,

was very polite and helped my mother with the parcels and so on,

so she gave him two marks.

And he looked at it and said, "I think it's an error."

"You gave me two marks."

And she said, "No, it's fine. Keep it."

So he started... he wept

and said, "It's such an amount of money,

I really can't understand how you are able to give this to me."

"Now I can sleep and buy something to eat."

Every weekend, I remember very well,

the political marches took place in Hamburg

and the Nazis used to march through the communist districts.

The communists then answered

by coming into the other parts of the town

and there were fights and deaths, shootings, practically every weekend.

And so the political situation was, I think,

very much so that people wished for something,

some strong man who would clean up the place.

I think that was the beginning of...

"We've got to get out of what we're in."

"Anything is better than this situation we're in at the moment."

I heard about Hitler's coming to power in Berlin.

I was at that time in Berlin, studying in the university,

and in the morning of January 30

we got the news

and nobody went to the lectures any more.

People went out of the university and listened

and I bought newspapers and so on.

Well, I knew

that a new period of German history was just beginning

and, as I thought, a very dangerous period.

When Hitler was named Chancellor,

his followers were astonished by how smoothly it happened.

His Stormtroopers, the uniformed men of violence,

were expecting a bloody struggle,

not a polite invitation to form a government.

Now that Hitler was in office, they meant to revolutionise Germany.

February 10, 1933.

The new regime's first public rally was held in the Berlin Sportpalast.

National Socialists were a minority in the new cabinet.

The first speaker, Dr Goebbels, was not even in the government.

The National Socialist Movement will now show you

how you really should have done this.

Because in '33 many people did not know what would happen,

and there were some

who were very critical

but there was also a great number

who were quite hopeful

and expected that the new government would do something good.

So I would say a great majority hoped that it would become better

than it had been in the past.

This actually is one of the reasons why they came to power.

Adolf Hitler then spoke.

He was 43 years old, the youngest chancellor in German history.

In the audience, some of the 400,000 Stormtroopers,

brutal, ill-disciplined street fighters,

Jew-baiting, communist-hating,

scornful of the idle rich and the middle classes,

seething with anger against their enemies.

But Hitler had other supporters too.

I saw how, particularly in bourgeois circles,

particularly among the middle classes,

hope was placed on this man Hitler,

who had indeed promised to lead Germany to a new position of respect.

In short, he would deliver us from all the evils that had befallen us.

...in our living space and beyond the borders

and shout from our hearts:

No one knew how to end it or when to salute...

...but the rally was over.

It seemed to be the only hope at that time,

in the middle of a world which knew nothing but emergency decrees,

unemployment, despair.

February 23, 1933.

Berliners gathered to look at the ruins of the Parliament building,

the Reichstag,

mysteriously destroyed by fire the night before.

President Hindenburg came too.

The deed was part of a communist plot, Hitler claimed,

and issued an emergency decree to enable him to crush the communists.

Hindenburg countersigned it.

Hitler's reign of terror was legalised.

He could suppress newspapers, search without warrant,

imprison without trial

without accounting to anyone except Hindenburg.

No one protested much, not even non-Nazis in the cabinet.

March 21 . The state opening of Parliament, the first day of spring.

Hitler called it the Day of National Unity

and led a procession of men

whose hatred for each other had seemed irreconcilable:

Nazi atheists and Catholic conservatives,

ministers and revolutionaries.

Nazi Stormtroopers detested the old regime,

yet they formed a guard of honour for the President.

Hindenburg hardly seemed to notice.

The Berlin Guard Regiment marched too, delighted to be part of the parade.

Then came reports that one person after another

who I knew had been in opposition

had been hauled off to a camp.

There was talk of places like Osthofen, concentration camps.

The Stormtroopers locked up their enemies,

communists, social democrats, liberals.

There was no secret about these camps.

At Oranienburg, near Berlin, they even had themselves filmed.

Line up. Get ready.

Morning.

They saw to it

that rumours about those concentration camps spread all over the nation

so that people were really frightened.

And on the other hand,

they had a very widespread sort of propaganda.

You know, with those two means, propaganda and terror,

a grip on the nation.

Right from the beginning,

after the arrests of Jews and communists and social democrats

early in '33,

people were so afraid of the Nazi terror

that they just didn't dare to talk, let alone to take action.

Perhaps we could still have had a general strike.

It was considered then.

But a general strike would have cost a lot of blood.

We mustn't forget that the majority was on the other side and was armed,

and most of the professional class and the working class, they weren't armed.

They would have had to use knives and forks or pitchforks

to defend themselves in a strike.

And the political people who stood against Hitler,

they didn't have the courage to risk

what would have turned out to be an enormous massacre.

The only demonstrations that cold, wet spring

were by those who supported the new regime.

The young party activists expected still more violent revolutionary acts.

Most of Hitler's older supporters yearned for stability and order.

Heil!

Hitler had to satisfy both.

When he... Hitler had come to power,

we all felt... the left-wing people

felt something had to be done

and they tried it in different ways.

I joined an illegal underground organisation

which called itself New Beginning.

And there was a friend of mine in Breslau,

a Jewish friend who now lives in London, by the way.

We formed a theory

and according to this theory

we said class struggle

is a basic law of history and social life.

So if the National Socialists are going to suppress

all organisations of class struggle,

for instance trade unions and left-wing parties,

this basic law would go on nevertheless,

and if class struggle had no means

of expressing itself by organisations,

it would take part within the Nazi organisations.

So we thought it possible

that parts of the party and parts of the SA

one day might turn

against the upper classes

and we thought it would be important

to observe that process and probably influence it, even.

And so that was the reason

that I joined a National Socialist organisation,

in this case the SS.

They never checked up about my political past.

But we had no real idea what a totalitarian organisation was.

The rank and file of the organisation hadn't anything to say at all.

There were no discussions,

there was no possibility of revolt or anything of the sort.

It was just as if you'd tried to do that in an army.

So I had joined the organisation

and it was all useless

and the following years I always tried to get out of it again,

but that was very difficult.

Then they began to call things by new names.

Suddenly one learned what an Aryan was.

At first I didn't know what that meant.

They are people, how can I say it, who are not of the Jewish race.

To tell the truth, I still don't quite know what an Aryan is.

And then I think the shops had to put on their doors

a sign that said "Aryan shop".

And if the sign wasn't there, this made it clear it was a Jewish shop.

Newly labelled Aryans were set against newly identified Jews.

Stormtroopers organised a boycott of Jewish businesses.

I'll tell you the experience of my husband's grandmother.

She was 90 years old on the day of the Jewish boycott,

which was April 1, 1933, I think.

She lived in the Bonhoeffer family but she cared for her breakfast herself

and so she had to do some shopping every day

and she went to her Jewish shop to buy some butter.

And in the door was standing an SA man with his gun,

and he asked her rather roughly,

"Have you just to buy at the Jew?"

And she took her stick and pushed him a little bit on his leg and said,

"I buy my butter where I buy my butter every day."

She was from south Germany and I want to tell it in German dialect

because it's so typical.

But she was 90 years old and so she could enter

and she bought her butter.

She was the single, the only customer that day.

Nobody dared. There was standing a man with a gun.

The men with the guns dealt with literature too.

In May 1933 Dr Goebbels decided to purge German letters

of all that was foreign, Jewish, un-German.

All over Germany students and Stormtroopers burnt books.

The biggest blaze was in Berlin, in front of the opera house.

Hitler's own book, Mein Kampf,

revealed all any loyal German ought to know

about literature, politics or culture.

Munich. Here National Socialism began.

And here the Nazis built their House of German Art

to display the great works National Socialism would inspire.

As the cornerstone was laid,

the orchestra played Richard Wagner's hymn to the purity of German art.

Then the procession.

The Nazis liked to think of themselves not as destroyers,

but as preservers of all that was best in Germany's past.

Their parades and pageants were meant to teach Germans a history lesson

and to entertain.

Every September the National Socialists came to Nuremberg

for their annual party rally.

This was their first since taking office.

Visitors from abroad came to join them for a week of celebration.

Speeches, marches, military displays,

each day devoted to a different branch of the National Socialist family.

It was a vicious, quarrelsome family.

The Stormtroopers, commanded by Ernst Röhm,

were the most awkward and menacing.

There were now three million of them.

Against Hitler's wishes they wanted to take over the job of the army,

to replace the reactionary professionals

with their own fierce revolutionary volunteers.

Göring and Goebbels loathed each other.

They could scarcely bear to be seen together in public.

No one was supposed to know of this tension beneath the surface.

The face the party presented to the world

was united, powerful, monolithic.

Adolf Hitler had been in power just eight months.

Everything he had done or would do, he said, had only one aim:

to restore the nation to greatness,

to serve and to glorify the German people.

The National Socialist Party...

Spring 1934.

A Hitler Youth camp in a park right in the centre of Berlin.

Parents' day.

Joining Nazi youth organisations wasn't compulsory yet,

but children who belonged to the League of German Girls

or the Hitler Youth

were made to feel part of the exciting new Germany.

Organised sports, organised games.

Even organised horseplay.

As children we couldn't understand each other.

We were against each other

just because our parents had different political views.

And suddenly we were brought together through the Hitler Youth.

There we sang together, went hiking,

we made things for kindergartens and old people.

We made things at Christmas time.

And suddenly everything was a community.

This hiking, night hiking,

wearing uniforms, singing songs,

for the children, that wasn't anything political, and they gladly joined in.

Sieg heil! Sieg heil! Sieg heil!

Three and a half million German children

already belonged to the Hitler Youth in 1934.

Hitler gloated, "When an enemy of mine says, 'I will not join you, '

I reply calmly, 'But your child has joined us already."'

"'Who are you? You will pass on."'

"'Your children are in our camp already

and soon they will know nothing else except our new community."'

It was a time...

You could almost describe it

as a springtime, a time of hope,

with good resolutions to improve everything,

to revive the economy.

A new feeling, a people's community.

The people's community.

The Nazis talked about it,

their parades and marches celebrated it relentlessly.

All Germans together.

Economically nothing changed much.

The unemployed were still there.

But there was hope that unemployment was going to disappear.

He accomplished things which no one thought possible,

and in a fairly short time.

So all these people

who had been vegetating without hope, without any future,

it was now clearly shown to them.

"Your life does have some meaning and you have something to do."

"You can support your family again,

not by social security but by your own work."

And in the schools and in sport, everywhere they wanted

to bring out a community spirit.

And for the most part they succeeded.

And one could see people are enjoying themselves, it's getting better.

A feeling of relief and also of hope was widespread, I would say,

in '33 and into '34.

Relief and hope.

And fun and games.

And political murder.

Ernst Röhm had been Hitler's loyal comrade and friend,

but his Stormtroopers were challenging the army

and Röhm was challenging Hitler's authority.

Hitler has him murdered at the end of June.

The men who murdered Röhm

belonged to a tiny elite force within the Stormtroopers themselves, the SS.

June 30, '34

was a very, very important day

because it became obvious

that this government, as a government, started to become a murderer.

You remember that they shot a great number of people

without any bringing them to court.

They just killed them.

And not only direct enemies of Hitler in that moment,

not only Röhm, the head of the SA,

but also other people who they felt were unpleasant.

And they just did it at the same time.

And this, I suppose, was easy to realise

because it was actually written in the newspapers,

so everybody could have read it.

And it was said in the newspaper that the government had to shoot them

because it was an emergency case.

But quite obviously it's very difficult to understand

if they are all taken as prisoners.

Where's the emergency case for the government?

The SS formed the guard of honour

when Hitler came to the Reichstag two weeks later

to explain why he had ordered them to kill.

The Stormtroopers had plotted to overthrow the government.

The plot had been crushed. Order had been restored.

Loyal Germans had nothing more to fear.

The army had not protested

although generals had been murdered too.

They saw the Stormtroopers, their hated rivals, destroyed,

and Hitler himself had done the work for them.

In August, the army's protector and patron in the Nazi state,

Field Marshal von Hindenburg, died,

and with him the only authority in the state above Hitler.

Hitler immediately proclaimed himself president in Hindenburg's place.

While the whole nation mourned, the army had to swear a new oath,

not to the constitution but to Adolf Hitler personally.

I swear by God.

I swear by God.

I swear by God.

I swear by God.

Adolf Hitler.

Adolf Hitler.

Adolf Hitler.

Adolf Hitler.

Adolf Hitler.

Wehrmacht Day at the 1934 party rally only a month later.

The army on display to its new masters.

Baffled by politics,

the soldiers returned to perfecting their professional techniques.

The decision to introduce conscription in March 1935 was taken without them.

The Minister of Defence, General von Blomberg, merely endorsed it.

The generals were delighted that their army,

limited by international agreement to 100,000 men,

was going to grow.

Von Blomberg blandly echoed Hitler's claim

that this would be a contribution to the peace of Europe.

The old generals,

the old regimental banners were paraded once again,

but this army belonged not to the professional soldiers but to Hitler.

Hitler tried to make the churches his too.

Nun, bishop and SS man alike

would have a place in the Nazi Christian community

led by Nazi men of God.

Concert-goers were preached at too,

by the Minister for Propaganda and Ethnic Enlightenment.

♪ Hallelujah

Christian form and Nazi substance.

The marriage of Hermann Göring to Emmy Sonnemann,

the greatest social event of 1935.

Hitler was best man.

Nuremberg, 1935. Hitler Youth Day.

Radio loudspeakers on the streets and in their homes

brought the sounds and excitement of the rallies

to the people who couldn't be there.

We'd heard somewhere,

perhaps it was on the radio,

that the Rhineland

was going to be remilitarised.

The thing was that after the Versailles Treaty

there was a demilitarised zone of 30km on the right bank of the Rhine.

No soldiers could be garrisoned there

and I don't even think they could set foot there.

Now, some time after conscription had been reintroduced,

Hitler suddenly announced

that the Rhineland was going to be remilitarised.

The troops began to move in.

Some friends and I were around.

We didn't have much else to do so we went out into the street

where we thought they'd have to come past.

We knew they had to come from the east

because the Rhine was towards the west.

The units which marched across the Rhine bridges that day

were among Germany's best, but there were very few of them

and they had no heavy weapons.

Yet the troops were under orders to fight if they met resistance.

The question was,

well, what are the Allies going to do about this?

And, well, they did nothing.

And we were relieved.

We'd made another step forward and it worked.

Another step forward towards sovereignty.

Sovereignty over our own country.

Hitler thought it to be useful to have an election afterwards.

It wasn't at all necessary for the regime,

it was just one form of propaganda,

indoctrinating the people and giving him an opportunity

to make speeches in all big places.

As a member of the SS

we had always the task

to look after security, you know.

So there was, I think, a dozen of young men.

I had to go behind a big curtain,

a black, big curtain

and we had, the other young men too, had made little holes in the curtain

and we looked through from the dark into the hall.

Hitler wasn't very far from me,

about ten metres, I think,

and for a while I thought, "That would be an occasion to shoot him."

"I am in the dark and I would have the time,

and if I had a machine gun or something like that."

But I had none

and of course I should have lost my life afterwards, that was quite clear.

And, well, I listened to his speech

and I felt that more and more excited atmosphere in the hall

and for some seconds again and again I had a feeling,

"What a pity that I can't share that belief

of all those thousands of people,

that I am alone, that I am contrary to all that."

It was very funny.

I thought, "He's talking all the nonsense I know he always talks."

But still I felt it must be wonderful

just to jump into that bubbling pot

and be a member of all those who are believers

and who are very happy at that moment.

Those who were believers had a great deal to be happy about.

Three years of National Socialism had transformed Germany.

No longer weak and despised,

but dynamic and deserving everyone's respect.

I herewith declare open the Berlin Games

in celebration of the 11th Olympic Games

according to the new calculation of times.

At these Olympic Games in Berlin in 1936,

Hitler showed off his new Germany.

The world came to see.

It was so magnificent, the Olympic Games. It was...

Today one could say

it was a huge deception by Herr Goebbels.

There were no anti-Jewish measures to be seen anywhere.

And I came as a modest Austrian student.

I was a bit of an athlete myself.

And I sat in the American sector for three weeks,

or however long it lasted.

Now, if you could have seen how enthusiastic those Americans were.

And there sat Hitler in the box of honour

and it didn't occur to me to question any of it.

The sporting nations, the young people.

And I too, I was a young man then, I was 21 years old,

so I was unbelievably excited by the whole thing.

You must see that.

German athletes won 33 gold medals,

more than anyone else.

Nazis claimed victory for their sport and for their way of life.

Germans looked forward to repeating their triumphs at the next Games

in four years' time.

In 1940.

The Nazis loved to organise festivals.

This was the annual harvest festival for the peasants,

the folk Hitler called the backbone of the nation.

A million people might come, camping out, sleeping rough,

in order to be there on the day.

These great meetings brought comradeship and colour

and a chance to see the Führer.

I came from a farming family

and we were all so enthusiastic

because since Hitler had taken power,

he'd done so much for the farmers.

Before that, things were going very badly for people on the land.

Farmers were heavily in debt

and many farms had been auctioned off.

Now suddenly we could breathe again

and we had some reward for our work.

The Arbeitsdienst, the national labour service.

Less a serious attempt to fight unemployment

than a way of moulding Germans into good, soldierly citizens.

This labour service aimed to bring together the rich and the poor

so that the privileged people and people from the simplest backgrounds

could come to know each other by working together,

to learn at first-hand the meaning of Hitler's precepts.

The community interest before self-interest. Work is capital.

Everyone was liable for service in the labour corps.

Mothers and sweethearts kissed the boys goodbye

as if they were going off to war.

The labour service was a model for the national community.

Hard labour, rough fellowship.

Women cheerfully serving the menfolk.

Dedication, sacrifice, comradeship.

A people's community.

The German people were not expected to work forever without reward.

Hitler wanted every German to have a car,

to drive on the new super-highways being built by their labour.

The people's community in the people's car. The Volkswagen.

Hitler helped to design it himself.

These were the prototypes.

The real ones wouldn't be ready for delivery until 1940.

Thousands were sold on the instalment plan.

Berlin, September 1937.

The largest city on the European continent.

The first day of school in Germany's capital.

The teachers were National Socialists now.

The schools were run according to the Führerprinzip,

the leadership principle,

just like the country.

There were natural leaders, the teachers,

and natural followers, the children.

Don't question, copy down.

Don't be different.

All the unpleasant jobs in school, in the classes,

had of course to be done by the children

whose parents wouldn't support Hitler.

For instance my son had to pick up all the rubbish in the school yard

during the breaks, for years, it seemed.

Things like that went on all the time.

But of course there were many teachers

who, after the takeover of power,

tried to behave as if they'd been National Socialists all their lives

in order to keep their jobs,

but who still maintained an inner resistance

and didn't treat the children too badly.

But gradually they faded out.

Some were pensioned off

and others were dismissed when it was discovered

that they weren't enthusiastic enough, or they were transferred.

Educational priorities got completely turned around.

The most important subjects were now German history and physical training.

In the people's community

there was no getting away from sports and games and happy outdoor play.

The official slogan was "Strength through joy".

Young people enjoyed their own bodies and each other's.

Ordinary folk comrades had ordinary pleasures.

Dr Goebbels enjoyed the dancers at the Scala theatre.

The army enjoyed showing off its equipment too.

In 1937 visitors like Mussolini were interested and impressed.

But the German generals were uneasy.

Their cautious plans for expansion had been swamped

by Hitler's eagerness to rearm.

Their weapons were only prototypes, their conscripts not yet trained.

The Duke and Duchess of Windsor came to visit the new Germany.

Nazis preached unity and equality,

that no folk comrade was better than any other,

yet they fawned on visiting celebrities.

The ex-king of England at a concert for workers.

Factory hands obliged to drink deep at the spring of German art.

Enthralled, perhaps, or just sullenly present?

Workers at concerts, managing directors at trestle tables.

This was the picture Nazis liked to show

of the people's community in action.

Once a month everyone eating the same simple lentil broth,

giving the money they save

to the great Nazi-run charity, the Winter Help.

Housewives too, rich and poor,

sacrifice their time for the people's community.

The Winter Help campaigns were launched by Hitler himself.

No one was too grand to rattle the tin cup.

The contributions weren't compulsory,

but towns and even offices published lists of those who refused to give.

The money was supposed to go to needy folk comrades.

In fact it went to impoverished Stormtroopers,

party favourites, greedy Nazi bosses.

The people gave and gave.

Their leaders amassed great fortunes and indulged their private lives.

Adolf Hitler had his private life far away from Berlin.

♪ Adolf Hitler's favourite flower

♪ Is the simple Edelweiss

Germans knew that Hitler had a mountain retreat in Bavaria.

There he relaxed in private with friends.

♪ Travel, song, across the land

♪ Pass from mouth to mouth

♪ Carry a piece of the German soul

♪ Around the whole world

♪ Announce it in hearts everywhere

♪ To laud and praise the Führer

♪ Adolf Hitler's favourite flower

♪ Is the simple Edelweiss

♪ Adolf Hitler's favourite flower

♪ Is the simple Edelweiss

Hitler had a mistress, Eva Braun,

who sometimes brought her family and friends to visit.

Party cronies were invited too.

Life at Berchtesgaden was informal, domestic.

♪ Is the simple Edelweiss

Brutal politics were never far away.

These were the masters of the SS, Hitler's bodyguard,

embodiment of the terror which sustained the Third Reich.

Hitler had great political ambitions

and the greatest of these, he said,

was to make all Germans in Europe part of his Reich.

He started with the country whose borders began

only a few miles from his mountain retreat.

Austria was where Hitler was born.

Its people spoke German but it was an independent state.

In March 1938 Hitler bullied the Austrian government

into accepting Anschluss, total union with Nazi Germany.

When Hitler came to Vienna

there was a sort of mass hysteria.

People in such ecstasy, hundreds of thousands of people.

And Hitler stood there up on the Imperial Palace and said, "Here I am."

I'm not sure of his exact words.

"The greatest achievement of my life,

the uniting of my homeland, Austria, with the Greater German Reich."

That was really overwhelming.

No one standing there at that moment

gave a thought to the thousands of poor people.

After all, there weren't so many yet who were going under.

I'm not saying, as others do, that I was against it from the start.

Not at all. I was really in favour, 100 per cent.

There was an enthusiasm like nothing else.

It didn't matter whether this man was an Austrian or a German,

we didn't make the distinction any more.

It was just one people, eh?

And one race, if you see what I mean.

April 1933.

Hitler returned to Berlin from his triumph in Vienna.

His fellow Germans wept tears of ethnic joy

at Austria's union with the Reich.

Hitler called it the greatest thing a German chancellor had ever done.

But he was not satisfied.

There were other Germans outside the fold,

other folk comrades to be brought home to the Reich.

September 1933.

Prime ministers from Britain and France came to Munich

to appease Hitler's ethnic appetite.

They agreed that he could take over the Sudetenland,

German-speaking Czechoslovakia.

These may have been Czech citizens,

but Germany was where their hearts lay.

Now they too were part of the people's community.

I hadn't thought of National Socialism

in ideas of foreign policy before

and I got quite a surprise

that things developed in Austria and Sudetenland,

but I was very pleased about it.

In November 1933

Nazis organised a wave of anti-Semitic terror.

Synagogues were burnt.

Shops were smashed and looted.

This was the Kristallnacht, the night of glittering broken glass.

Officially the consequence of the people's spontaneous anger

against the Jews.

On my way to work, I was an apprentice learning my father's trade,

well, I could see some fires burning.

I can see myself in my mind's eye

standing in front of the synagogue which had been burnt.

Maybe some of my workmates were with me, I'm not really sure.

Anyway, I see this man coming out.

"You know him, he lives in our building."

It was an SA man and he was saying,

"That thing just won't burn right."

And so of course it was quite clear

that what we read afterwards,

that this was the spontaneous anger of the people at work,

wasn't true at all.

It was the SA at work.

And it must have been clear to everyone at that point

that something very wrong was going on,

but the means to oppose it really did not exist.

Well, in my view this whole Jewish question was stirred up by Goebbels.

At that time I was with my wife in Munich.

In the morning as I got to the office,

I saw that the windows had been smashed in and I said,

"This really is too much. Why do they do such things?"

"It really isn't necessary. We'll have to pay for it all."

That's what I said.

You see, I think, as far as the Jewish problems went,

that they should in any case have been removed from official positions.

The civil servants and so on, but otherwise...

And then there was that plan to send them to...

What do you call that French island? Madagascar. You know.

But then nothing came of it.

That would have been the right thing to do,

to resettle the people over there.

I had nothing to do with the Jews and so on in that way, not the slightest.

I condemned it, you know.

I didn't agree with it because it wasn't right, you know.

But this scoundrel Goebbels, it was his doing.

The Führer didn't agree with it either, you know,

but he couldn't do anything, he had to go along with Goebbels.

In practical terms that's how it was.

I remember that my brother-in-law,

the husband of my sister Lena,

when he went in the morning after the Reichskristallnacht,

Crystal Night or how you say,

he went by train to his office downtown

and between the stations of Savignyplatz and Zoological Garden

there is the Jewish synagogue

and he saw that it was burning.

And he murmured, "Kulturschande."

That is, "Insult to our culture." "Shame to our culture."

Well, right away a gentleman in front of him turned his Revers

and showed his Parteiabzeichen - party badge, ja?

And took out his papers that he was a man of the Gestapo.

And he had to show his papers, to give his address

and was ordered to come to the party office next morning, nine o'clock.

When my brother-in-law came home in the evening,

he told my sister what had happened and she said,

"Couldn't you keep your mouth? What will happen now?"

"They will take you in a concentration camp and we will be rid of you."

All of us were very excited

and next morning he had to go to the party

and he was investigated about what he had meant

and he tried to sich herausreden...

I don't know how...

Herausreden, to talk himself out of it.

And the result was that his punishment was

that he had to arrange and to distribute

the ration cards for the area,

beginning of each month,

for years, until the end of the war.

That was in '38, yes?

So each end of the month

the family had to arrange the cards for heavy working people,

for men, for women, for children, for little children

and all these special cards.

They had to arrange at home

and then he had to go, he had to go alone to do it,

he was not permitted to have the help of his children.

He had to do it alone. For years.

They observed him and he couldn't risk arranging any help for him.

That was the way they broke the back of the people.

March 1939.

Hitler sent his troops into Prague,

capital of what remained of Czechoslovakia.

He blotted the nation from the map.

It became a German protectorate.

The Wehrmacht was in a foreign country, unasked, unwanted.

For the first time in a generation Germans were invaders,

their troops an occupying force.

Not a shot had been fired.

We were in a rather optimistic view after the first six years

because everything succeeded as we thought it should succeed

and there was no war when we entered the Rhineland,

there was no war when we entered Austria,

there was no war when we entered Sudetenland,

so there was hardly a reason

why war should come upon us.

A bold leader. A unified nation.

A Germany at peace in a peaceful Europe.

jure