Original subtitles

Berlin in the summer of 1940 welcomed victory beyond belief.

The soldiers of the Third Reich came home after only a year of war.

They had conquered France.

Central and northern Europe had fallen, too.

These crowds were delirious with exultation and relief.

They turned to their Führer in a frenzy of gratitude.

They had not fancied war. They had feared defeat.

Now they thought the war was over

and they rejoiced.

The men came home.

They were brown and fit and only a few of them had died.

I just went shopping

when somebody told me, "Don't you hear the noise?"

And there I saw this part of the army coming back just near us.

So I bought a bowl of cherries and ran there.

We all were so glad.

We heard so much of the First World War with those dreadful battles

and those many dead.

I felt a sort of national pride we ended the war so quick.

In cities untouched by war,

the German people had hardly begun to give up the ways of peace.

There was rationing, even shortages,

but to make up for it, the regime preached enjoyment, luxury.

While the British had declared frivolous things immoral,

the Nazis tried to show that luxury flourished.

Promises were their propaganda.

Those who ran the war effort came to believe their own promises.

Only a few saw further.

Just about August it was ordered

that a lot of production was stopped

or minimised or things like that.

And there was a kind of euphoria that the war was, so to say, over.

I didn't believe in that at all.

No, I thought I knew the British

and I had the opinion that they would see this thing through

and that the United States would join the war,

and therefore every effort should be made

to prepare for a long blockade.

Hitler had no plans for a long struggle,

no preparations for the total mobilisation of all productive capacity.

German industry had been geared to a blitzkrieg war.

The regime still let the factories turn out peacetime goods.

The workers, subjugated but not fully converted,

watched the comings and goings of the Nazi princes without enthusiasm.

Wanting to be loved, the Nazis gave and gave.

For 1940, propaganda minister Dr Goebbels was Father Christmas.

He gave to children. He gave to mothers.

In Berlin wurde der neue Film "Mutterliebe" uraufgefürht.

Auf Veranlassung von Reichsminister Dr. Goebbels

Iud die NSV 1.200 Trägerinnen...

Ladies with larger broods

were invited to the film premiere of Mother Love,

the regime's hymn to family and folk community.

Das heißt, er wird uns ja vom Himmel aus helfen, so gut er kann.

Er wird mit dem lieben Gott sprechen.

Und weil er so lustig ist und alle Engel lachen macht...

On their breasts they wore the Nazi Mother Cross.

The pram was the tank of the home front.

The government hoped for a breakthrough on the birth rate.

Happy babies, happy future mothers

and very specially happy music soused the nation.

The big smile glued across the face of the people,

still often dubious and nervous, was stretched even wider.

Everybody must learn to enjoy the happy teamwork of Hitler's folk community.

Vierzehn Uhr und eine Minute. Der Wehrmachtsbericht.

Radio was the instrument

which the Nazis made their own from the beginning.

Their foreign-language broadcasts,

technically marvellous but grotesquely unconvincing,

reached greedily out to minds abroad.

Today's official German war communiqué reads as follows.

But listening to foreign radio was forbidden.

Many, like the propaganda comics Tran and Helle,

argued the toss between getting a glimpse of the outside world

and the risk of a jail sentence.

If we listened to foreign radio, which we always did,

we turned it very low and we used to sit right up close against it.

And I remember one particular moment when my son,

who was a little schoolboy,

told me that he had a very funny story to tell me,

that his friend's mother also listened to the radio

with her ear right up against it the same as we did.

I suddenly realised that I could have her imprisoned

and she could have me imprisoned,

because these two children had been talking about it.

As well as geography and the rest,

Nazi schools were obliged to add a special subject.

Children were taught with pictures and measurements

the dimensions of a healthy Aryan race.

Official films prepared the Germans

for the consequences of keeping the race pure.

The mentally incurable, condemned as the bad seed,

went to experimental gas chambers.

But now, for once,

the Germans learnt what was going on and protested.

Bishop Galen of Münster attacked euthanasia from the pulpit.

For a time, the programme was stopped.

A controlled press avoided such misgivings.

Some newspapers were mere party sheets of hate and lies.

Some slipped criticism between the lines.

None of them satisfied a people which was still highly educated.

It was terribly frustrating

never to be allowed to say your opinion openly.

I myself was quite happy

when I was called up,

early 1940, to the army,

and that suddenly left behind

all the oppression I had every day.

Being a soldier, you don't read newspapers.

You don't listen to the radio.

You're not always under the stress of the propaganda

which was pointed at you every hour.

European war became world war in June 1941.

The Nazi leaders had secretly resolved that the conquest of Russia must come.

Reichsminister Dr. Goebbels verliest die Proklamation des Führers.

Deutsches Volk.

In diesem Augenblick vollzieht sich ein Aufmarsch, der...

For many, the attack on the Soviet Union

brought fear and bewilderment.

Of course I'd heard of certain preparations

but it was all... well, hushed up,

and till the last moment,

I didn't think that the war would come about.

For a long war,

Germany would need to have the south Russian oil fields for her own.

Russia had delivered a million tons of oil the previous year

under the Nazi-Soviet Pact, now flung away.

As a matter of fact

we had the greatest trade agreements with them that we ever had

and they delivered promptly,

and from an economic point of view everything seemed to be in order.

I personally had, through my men,

negotiations with them of putting up a synthetic fibre mill in Russia

and the treaty was signed on 15 June, 1941,

and the first ten million marks in gold

should be shipped on July 1, 1941.

The Germans drove eastwards over disintegrating Russian armies.

Victory looked like a matter of weeks, another blitzkrieg,

and morale at home revived.

Göring inspected what was now the German colony of Ukraine,

intended to be a serf region of agriculture.

Nazi experts on the Slavs hoped that this simple folk

with simple customs would enjoy this prospect.

Six months later, in the blinding snow before Moscow,

the Germans were stopped.

They lacked winter clothing

and the government appealed for furs and warm coats.

An den letzten Tagen der Sammlung drängen

drängen sich vor den Annahmestellen die Gebefreudigen,

um ihre Spenden abzuliefern.

Tut Ihnen das nicht leid? So einen schönen Pelz? Oh, ist das warm da drin.

No amount of rehearsed enthusiasm

could conceal that this was the Reich's first military reverse.

The minister of munitions and head of the war effort Fritz Todt

flew to inspect the construction work on the Eastern Front.

One of the men who should have been on the plane was Hitler's architect,

the producer of the Nuremberg rallies, Albert Speer.

I heard in the headquarters that Todt's plane crashed.

He was dead. And half an hour afterwards I was asked to come to Hitler

and to my great surprise he told me,

"You shall be his successor in all his offices."

Todt got the funeral of a National Socialist hero.

By now nearly 250,000 Germans had been killed on the battle fronts,

but Todt was the first of Hitler's close comrades to meet death in the war.

Hitler was shaken. The war had reached him personally.

Speer had already seen the chaotic, disconnected way

that Nazi war industry worked.

Transport, munitions - all had to be brought under a single control.

One of his first targets was the labour supply.

Nazi Germany had never mobilised its full workforce.

I tried to get the women in the war production machinery,

but it was opposed by Sauckel who was in charge of all the labour.

And the thing came to Göring and Göring flatly denied, too.

Then it came to the decision of Hitler,

and Hitler also said, "No, the women must be preserved."

"They have other tasks. They are for the family. They have to bear children

and it would spoil their health and their morale

if they are working in the factories."

But Ukrainian women were being imported as maids -

foreign conscripts for slave labour.

Under Speer, a great irony was fulfilled,

for Germany was becoming exactly what the Nazis said it would not become.

They had promised a return to the land, an end to great capitalism.

Instead, the armaments drive

was strengthening the vast industrial monopolies

and swelling the cities with German and foreign labour.

In two and a half years,

Speer multiplied armament production nearly four times.

80% of industry came under his control.

He brushed aside bureaucracies and worked through his own experts.

He had ideas and he put all his energy

behind these ideas

and put them through with very much success.

He didn't know how things

had been done in the past.

He hadn't anything to do with it,

so he didn't know what was impossible and what was possible,

and he succeeded sometimes in doing the impossible, too.

It is astounding for everybody

who didn't live in our authoritarian system

to hear that it was difficult to get through with orders.

But it was difficult

because Germany was divided into many districts, 32 districts.

At the head of every district was a Gauleiter.

He was strong political man and had absolute power in his district.

He was only subordinated to Hitler himself.

So when my orders didn't please one of the Gauleiters,

possibly they weren't carried out.

Tank production showed how even Speer failed to get all of his way.

He could not slice through the competing hierarchies

in Hitler's chosen style of government.

There were too many types of tanks. Too few tanks in all.

Too many calibres of gun and different sizes of ammunition.

Hitler thought he was far superior to such problems

and what for others would have been discussions of weeks and weeks

for him was a decision of just a fraction of a minute.

Of course, there was a change, too.

One can never say that a man is always the same person,

and Hitler changed a lot from '42 to '43.

In '43 he was more and more convinced

that he didn't need any more advice of anybody

and he made the decisions by himself without listening.

Hitler spent more and more time at the Wolf's Lair,

his melancholy, remote encampment at Rastenburg

in the East Prussian forest.

Those around him were obsequious.

The better advisers lost touch.

Hitler's personal SS adjutant was Richard Schulze-Kossens.

Nearly all ministers were stationed at Berlin

and some of them had contact officers in the headquarters.

Only Ribbentrop, Himmler and sometimes Göring had their own headquarters,

not so far from our headquarters.

Speer was very often in the headquarters

because his ministry was very important for the war.

Only Bormann was always in the headquarters

where there was the only direct contact to Hitler.

Bormann, as the secretary, was the most powerful man -

more powerful, I think, than Hitler, because when the power was divided,

all those men who were in power had to go via him to Hitler.

Except me. I had direct access to Hitler.

There wasn't much cooperation.

The cooperation was in the lower levels of the smaller technocrats.

We didn't have anything like a cabinet.

Ministers met, if at all, very seldom

and didn't talk about very important matters -

so was my impression.

Every ministry worked for itself

and sometimes they got orders from Hitler, but very, very seldom.

Foreign visitors like Mannerheim, the Finnish leader,

could see that Hitler was living in a world of illusion.

He still trusted the reassurances of Göring, head of the Luftwaffe.

Göring, a few months later,

claimed that his aircraft could supply the Eastern Front

even when a whole army was cut off at Stalingrad.

Achtung, ich rufe noch einmal Stalingrad.

Hier Stalingrad. Hier ist die Front an der Wolga.

Achtung, die U-Bootfahrer im Atlantik.

Christmas 1942.

Achtung, Catania.

Hier ist die Mittelmeerfront und Afrika.

The man at Stalingrad

had come through on the radio link-up loud and clear,

but the brave words were faked in a Berlin studio.

For the last time the cathedral stood undamaged

as the Christmas fair took place in Berlin.

But Stalingrad was still cut off

and deep down the nation sensed what was to happen.

Dritter Februar.

Das Oberkommando der Wehrmacht gibt bekannt:

Der Kampf um Stalingrad ist zu Ende.

"The Battle of Stalingrad has come to an end."

For once the radio spoke the truth, and with some dignity.

91,000 survivors surrendered.

Only a few thousand ever saw Germany again.

I was not long in the headquarters

but I felt very significant the atmosphere on this day.

All people were depressed

and Hitler himself was very serious

and he started on his soup

without saying any word, and...

He was... He was very depressed.

The world realised

and the Germans realised that this was the turning point.

This was the tragedy which could not be hidden.

And Stalingrad did not come alone. A week before the city fell,

the Germans learned that the Allies would demand unconditional surrender.

There was, then, to be no mercy for the Germans.

Nazi and non-Nazi both lost some illusions

and drew a little closer together.

The escape hatches had been bolted.

This was to be a total war, fought to the finish.

The general feeling was, well, we can do nothing.

It doesn't matter what we do. We'd better stick it out.

Ausharren was the word, I remember, on everyone's lips.

There's no alternative. We've got to fight to the bitter end.

And this Goebbels used to the uttermost in his propaganda.

Two weeks after Stalingrad,

Goebbels brought a picked Nazi audience to a last mass frenzy.

It was his supreme moment, the proclaiming of total war

and the invoking of the nation's hidden power.

"Now, folk, rise up and storm, break loose."

They were the words of 1812,

of the national uprising against Napoleon.

They were empty now.

In 1943 it was better listening to music than to news.

It was total war and retreat on all fronts.

Total war meant that even German women must work.

It brought its own sour humour.

There was a slogan, "Do enjoy war. Peace will be dreadful."

There was a new equality

among the boys drafted to the mines and factories.

The Hitler Youth was mobilised into production and eventually into battle.

The barriers between people crumbled as they had crumbled in the London Blitz.

People wanted to huddle together, to sing and forget.

By the morning, they might be dead.

By day the American bomber fleets ranged over the Reich.

At night came the British.

In the shelters the people waited for dawn

and wondered if their cities would still be there.

When we had the first bombs, we were shocked.

We saw all the sky lighted up from the fire.

It was an enormous and a dreadful sight.

We were very angry when we saw

that so many residential areas were destroyed.

There were so few men left

that everybody who had the strength was firefighting.

One by one the German cities were incinerated by firestorms.

Ten days' raids on Hamburg left 40,000 dead.

Goebbels noted, "The people in the west

are gradually beginning to lose courage."

"Hell like that is hard to bear."

I think that the bombing

hadn't the effect one would have thought.

It had the effect of bringing people together.

If you were all under the same bombs,

it didn't matter whether your neighbour was a Nazi

or what they were.

To avoid seeing the ruins,

Hitler's rare visits to Berlin were made by night.

And yet banners were ordered for his birthday.

They read, "Our walls have broken, but not our hearts."

Hitler lost more and more his sense of reality.

He never, never had the will

that he must see with his own eyes what the war was.

We had no information from outside

and so I had the feeling to live in a monastery,

in a concentration camp.

One of the generals once said, "I feel like a concentration camp."

"We are included

and we all use the same phrases."

"We are all thinking the same. We are all hearing the same."

"We are all led in our thoughts

and our feelings by Hitler."

We all were playing in a play, each his role

and he was the only one who knew the script.

He made us all do our play and speak our text.

Nobody else knew how it would end.

Neither Hitler nor Göring nor Himmler were seen in public. Only Goebbels.

Whenever there was a very heavy bombing,

Goebbels stood there on the marketplace and held his speeches

and tried to say ausharren.

I personally had respect,

because there was a sort of inspiring.

You were sort of in a trance.

A strained, exhausted nation could still lose itself in music.

The orchestras still gave what was great and true

in the tradition of German art.

In the galleries there was only the empty grimacing

of Nazi painting, Nazi sculpture.

True Aryan models simpered and scowled,

their features carefully designed to portray the victorious Nordic race.

Race was the empire of Himmler and the SS.

But now the SS was itself an empire.

Himmler, the ex-chicken-farmer,

ruled the death camps and the concentration camps.

The SS had its own schools and factories and courts.

It administered huge tracts of the occupied east.

It was the instrument of German dominion over Europe. It was even an army.

The generals had little control

over the hundreds of thousands of elite troops in the Waffen-SS.

Into the SS training schools were drawn Aryan-looking volunteers

from the occupied countries,

for the SS state was to be not merely German but European.

All had volunteered for active service in the Waffen-SS

because they regarded the fight against Bolshevism

as the most important task in Europe.

New was the point of European education

because we were of the opinion

that only an imaginary contrast

existed between the nations

who had the same or were from the same origin, yes.

For those of different race origin, there was no place.

For the Jews there was deportation to eastern ghettos

and then the gas chambers of the SS.

The official word was "resettlement".

Most Germans preferred to believe that it meant no more than that.

Hitler often mentioned that he is hating the Jews

and he gave many examples already in an early time when I was with him,

and I should have been warned that he is serious about it

because he proved to be serious about other things he predicted too.

One night, it must have been around midnight, the doorbell rang.

I opened it and in front of me

there stood a Jewish couple.

This was how I began to help persecuted Jews.

All of a sudden I'd entered into an invisible circle

of people who smuggled Jews about.

As soon as one hiding place had been detected,

they were quickly passed on.

They'd always move about at night.

That's how I came to belong to a group who had to put up Jews

when they were passed on like this.

I've never found out who it was who'd sent them to me in the first place.

Decent people, I'm sure.

The problems started with the feeding of the Jewish people.

They neither had food rationing cards nor did they have any money,

so we in our turn made use of friends

who exchanged their cigarette ration cards

for the odd potato or some bread.

One day a friend of ours who used to collect food cards for these Jews

came to me and she came with another woman

with dyed blonde hair.

I can see her sitting there now twisting her wedding ring

and telling me that it wouldn't be for long,

that she would help me in the house and her husband need never go out.

He could live in the cellar or wherever.

But Christabel Bielenberg's husband was away

and was involved in a plot to overthrow Hitler.

She consulted her trusted neighbour and friend Carl Langbehn,

another conspirator.

Langbehn told her compassionately but firmly

that the risks to herself and her family and to the conspiracy were too great.

I was astonished - overcome, really -

at the response that I got from my neighbour

who told me that under no circumstances whatsoever could I house these people,

that housing of Jews meant concentration camp

not only for myself but for my husband, possibly also for my children.

I can remember going through and out into the road

and out of the darkness came a voice - I knew there was somebody there -

came a voice saying:

"Frau Doktor... Frau Bielenberg,

haben Sie einen Schluss gefasst?"

which means, "Have you decided?"

And I simply couldn't say no.

I just said, "Well, I can't for longer than two days."

And I let him into the cellar.

They stayed for two days

and on the second day

or rather in the evening, they must have left

because in the morning she was gone,

the cellar was empty,

the little bed I'd put up all tidily arranged

and they had gone.

I knew later that they were caught

buying a ticket at a railway station

and were transported to Auschwitz.

And why I say this is the most painful and terrible story

for me to have to tell

is because after they left

I realised that Hitler had turned me into a murderer.

One day in '44,

Gauleiter Hanke came in my office and told me

that he was visiting a concentration camp in Upper Silesia

and warned me never to go in a concentration camp there

because horrible things would happen.

This together with other hints I got

should have made my decision

to go to Hitler immediately or to Himmler

and to ask them what is going on

and to take my own steps.

But I didn't do it and not doing it was, I think nowadays,

the biggest fault in my life.

We felt that people should know

what was going on,

and maybe typical is this little experience

which I had one day

standing in the line for vegetables or something like that.

I told my neighbours standing around me

that now they start to kill the Jews in the concentration camps,

that it is not true that they only are brought there

and can live there as they live here, as it was told them.

They are killed and they even make soap out of them.

I know that.

And they said, "Frau Bonhoeffer, if you don't stop telling such horror stories

you will end in a concentration camp too and nobody of us can help you."

"It's not true what you're telling."

"You shouldn't believe these things. You heard them from foreign broadcasts."

"They tell these things to make enemies against Germany."

I said, "No, that's not from broadcasts. I know that directly from first hand."

"You can be sure it is that way."

And coming home I told my husband in the evening

and he was not at all applauding to me - on the very contrary.

He said, "My dear, sorry to say,

but you are absolutely idiotic, what you are doing."

"Please understand,

a dictatorship is like a snake."

"if you put your foot on its tail,

as you do it, it will just bite you

and nobody will be helped."

"You have to strike the head."

Only the commanders of the army

could strike effectively at the head.

Others had struck bravely at the tail and perished.

In Munich, a few students around the Scholl brother and sister

had protested with leaflets and been slaughtered.

In Berlin a communist spy team

led by Harro Schulze-Boysen and the Harnacks had been crushed.

Communists, socialists, Christians, anonymous men and women

defied the dictator in tiny groups.

150,000 Germans suffered prison or worse for political resistance.

The plot against the snake's head was a federation.

There were conservatives like Goerdeler, aristocrats like Moltke,

churchmen like Bonhoeffer, diplomats like Trott.

Faced with defeat, many staff officers joined in.

All were slow to accept that to strike at the head

demanded the physical murder of Hitler.

But in 1944, there appeared a man for action -

Colonel Count Claus von Stauffenberg.

All the difference was brought in, of course,

when Stauffenberg came to Berlin.

He had lost his left eye,

his left hand,

or three fingers of his left hand,

and his right hand altogether.

Originally he was only the planner of the coup d'état,

but he had to report to Hitler's headquarters

and to attend conferences there.

This enabled him to get near to Hitler and then to make an attempt,

which he did on July 20, '44.

Suddenly there was a very alarming bang.

We heard voices crying for a doctor

and we saw some generals with bloodstained uniforms.

Then came one of the adjutants

and said, "There was a bomb explosion, but the Führer is not hurt."

"He's still alive."

We went towards Hitler's bunker

and we met him.

Maybe it was an hour after this explosion.

He looked funny

because his hair stood up like a brush

and his trousers were slit

in small stripes.

He said, "You see, fate has saved me for my mission."

"I am to do what I must do."

At the War Ministry in Berlin,

the plotting generals believed that Hitler was dead.

When I came to the headquarters, Stauffenberg was busy with telephoning

the various army commands, and Haeften informed me of what had happened,

how they'd thrown the bomb, and then he said, "Hitler's dead."

We did believe it because Stauffenberg then came in.

We had a short talk with him - he was much too busy to give details.

He said, "Hitler's dead. Leave everything alone."

"We'll see what can be done."

The man the plotters ordered to occupy the city was Major Otto Remer,

a fanatical soldier programmed to obey any superior order.

At first he obeyed the plotters, then Goebbels got hold of him.

Goebbels was really very pleased to see me. He was beaming.

He said, "Remer, what do you know about all this?"

"What's going on here? What orders have you got?"

I said, "Minister, I have come to you so that you can clarify the situation."

Goebbels replied, "They're trying to pull the wool over your eyes."

"Hitler's alive. I've just spoken to him."

I was so astonished that I said, "Please, let me speak to the Führer,"

and this was done.

On the other end of the line Hitler said, "Herr Remer, you see I am alive."

"I am Adolf Hitler. You recognise my voice."

"Now do you believe I'm alive?"

Now Remer was reprogrammed.

He marched back to the War Ministry and arrested everyone he found.

The plot collapsed. The wavering army returned to its oath.

Der Angeklagte von Witzleben.

Many of the plotters, after prison and torture,

were to face a ghastly sham trial

conducted by Roland Freisler, the star judge of Nazi Germany.

Their families were seized and their children sent to orphanages.

The luckier conspirators, among them Stauffenberg,

had been shot out of hand in the War Ministry courtyard.

Some attempted to explain their motives in court.

Count von Schwerin was an officer who had served in Poland.

The condemned were hanged slowly on meat hooks.

A film of their agony was made and shown later to Hitler.

But the plot left Hitler a frightened, damaged man.

The repression after 20 July broke the power of the aristocracy

and of the Prussian tradition forever.

But there was no ruling class to take their place.

To Hitler, all generals now seemed suspect.

Only Goebbels, Bormann and Himmler could get close to him.

Slowly but steadily he became weak.

The doctors went in and out and he became totally apathetic.

Not interested in anything.

It was a very critical situation on the West Front

and on the East Front, too.

And some days it was like Hitler didn't exist.

He was deteriorating suddenly in his health,

but I wouldn't go so far as to say

that he was no more responsible for what he was doing.

In some ways he was...

I have the experience of a prisoner of 20 years.

In some ways he was behaving like a prisoner.

Through the devastation the Germans somehow kept going.

Down ruined streets, the workers made their way to ruined factories

where a few machines could still be made to turn.

Life retreated to the cellars.

People learned that eight bombs fell in a row and then you were safe.

They learned to live a day at a time.

It was really dreadful to endure it.

We were so tired.

You were always in a hurry.

All the railways were destroyed and the lorries had no petrol.

We had rations from the beginning

and step by step it was worse and worse.

Germany itself was near the end of its tether.

Seven million foreign forced labourers were not enough.

Everything - oil, metal, food - was running out.

Everything from clothes to planes was patched and made to serve again.

Men, too.

The war cripples were recycled for the factories.

The brain-damaged soldiers were taught to speak again.

Nun wollen wir einmal das hauchen.

Was ist das für ein Laut?

A.

Hauchen wir das A, dann heißt es?

Ha.

Nun werde ich Ihnen dieses Buch hier zeigen.

Was sollen wir hauchen?

Ha, ha, ha.

- Schnell hintereinander. - Ha, ha, ha.

Now the enemy was approaching the very frontiers of the Reich.

The Volkssturm, the home guard

of the elderly, the underaged and the unfit, was sworn in.

Männer des Berliner Volkssturms, ihr habt soeben...

They listened with closed faces to oratory from Goebbels

about fighting to the bitter end.

..wehrbereiter und wehrentschlossener Männer verfügt,

die den festen und unerschütterlichen Willen haben...

The Volkssturm trudged out through that same Brandenburg Gate

which had seen the soldiers march back from Paris four years before.

They went towards the Russians,

keeping their thoughts to themselves.