Original subtitles

On April 1st 1933,

Adolf Hitler's first official act to persecute Germany's Jews

is an attempt to sever them from all commercial life with a boycott.

What follows over the next 12 years is an organised, sustained cruelty,

unparalleled in human history.

It unfolds step by step.

When he first grasps the enormity of the evil,

Winston Churchill calls it "the crime without a name."

It becomes known as the Holocaust.

All wars change the world.

But none of them changed the world like the Second World War did.

Japan's on the march, Germany's on the march.

No one can imagine the nightmare they're about to unleash.

The most destructive war in human history.

Suddenly, the world is turned upside down.

And all hell is let loose.

The west is stunned by the speed of the advance.

You get the Allies led by the big three, Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin.

Men who are dealing with immensely complicated questions.

It's the biggest military operation of human history.

The Allies have to come together,

not just militarily but on an industrial scale,

it's a global perspective.

They have to fight in every climate

from the Arctic, to the jungles of the Pacific,

to the deserts of Africa and the depths of the ocean.

But there was no certainty of victory;

it was going to be a horrific bloodbath.

We see humans at their absolute worst,

how they treat other human beings.

And we see them at their absolute best,

willing to give their lives that others might live.

World War Two was a struggle in which there could be one victor

and one vanquished.

In early 1939, Germany has seized Austria.

Adolf Hitler, the Fuhrer,

wants to take even more land in Europe.

On January 30th,

Hitler tells the German Reichstag

that if war comes,

it will not be his fault.

The blame will lie with one people...

...the Jews.

Two months later, Hitler will take all of Czechoslovakia.

On September 1st,

he invades Poland and World War Two begins.

One of the things that's critical for us to understand

about the history of World War Two and history of the Holocaust

is that all of these things are inextricably linked together.

The ebb and flow of the war itself impacts the way

the Holocaust unfolds on the ground.

Antisemitism is central

to Hitler's and the Nazi party's philosophy,

which he clearly stated in his book Mein Kampf, or My Struggle.

Mein Kampf is a manifesto slash autobiography of the young Hitler.

It contains a rough sketch for the world,

as he would like it to be,

and an endless documentation of all the groups of people

he has grievances against.

Hitler reserves his greatest grievance for Germany's Jews.

He uses base metaphors to describe them,

playing on long-held antisemitic tropes.

He portrays them as exploiting or manipulating the German people.

In order to understand Hitler,

one has to understand the importance of race

that underlines every single thing that he does.

He believes that

the whole human race is divided into categories,

the Aryan race is at the top of that category,

the Jews are at the bottom.

Hitler is obsessed with Jews.

He's obsessed with Jews as an eternal enemy,

as impure racially, as non- German.

And he believes that Germany will fulfil its destiny

when its free of Jews.

In 1934, Hitler appoints himself the Fuhrer,

the leader of Germany.

And he will quickly turn his hatred of Jews into law.

In the fall of 1935, at a Nazi gathering in Nuremberg,

Hitler's deputy Hermann Goering unveils a sweeping set

of legal measures targeting the country's Jewish population.

Seig heil!

The laws prohibit marriage or sexual relations between Jews

and non-Jews,

and strip German Jews of their citizenship.

For Jews living in Germany,

the Nuremberg laws are a huge turning point.

It doesn't matter if you're not religious.

Identity is now biological.

It plants the seeds for saying Jews are a separate race

that are polluting Germany.

The Nazis intend to make life so difficult

for German and Austrian Jews that they will want to emigrate.

Around half of Germany's Jewish community of 500,000 go into exile.

In November 1938, the Nazis coordinate a brutal wave

of destruction and violence across Germany.

Jewish businesses are looted and burned.

Synagogues razed.

And homes left in ruin.

Jews are killed and raped.

The event is called in German "Kristallnacht",

"the Night of Broken Glass."

The windows of Jewish shopkeepers are smashed.

There's also incursions into their homes.

They're kicking in the doors, they're dragging people out,

they're beating them up, to petrify the Jewish population.

Police or military were instructed not to wear their uniforms

when they went out to commit the violence on Kristallnacht

to make it look like it was more spontaneous than it actually was.

But it is a government-coordinated terrorist attack against Jews.

The morning after Kristallnacht,

the Nazis arrest 30,000 Jewish men

and march them off to concentration camps.

I think Kristallnacht is an inflection point

because it showed the Nazi government

that average Germans would be willing

to go along with the violence.

By the late 30s, Jews living within Germany and Austria

face persecution and intimidation.

Even worse dangers are on the horizon.

In early September 1939, German forces invade Poland.

In just a few weeks, the Poles are conquered.

Poland's three million Jews are now controlled by Hitler and the Nazis.

When the Nazis enter Poland,

they have no real, coherent strategy

about what they're going to do with Jews.

So they start to improvise pretty quickly.

And one of the things that emerges as part of this improvisation

is an idea about creating ghettos.

Within days of the German occupation,

many Polish Jews are forced into ghettos.

Jews are ordered to wear armbands

and are restricted on entering and leaving.

The decision is made in Warsaw to create a closed ghetto.

There is movement across the gates of guards and of Poles,

but not of the Jews themselves. They are locked into the ghetto,

and a wall is created to restrict Jewish movement.

It's a very visible signal of the racial segregation

of the city of Warsaw.

Over 100,000 Jews who lived in other parts of Warsaw

had to move into this area.

It was about 1.3 square miles, so it was tiny.

The circumstances of the ghettos actually create the perfect

breeding grounds for disease.

This is exacerbated by the fact that running water is limited

and sewage systems are not adequate,

especially with the size of the population.

Mendel Jakubowicz is 14 when his family is sent

to the ghetto in Ostrowiec, Southeast Poland.

He later writes:

"I remember that as a small boy I used to walk the ghetto streets,

and I could see people dying, people screaming.

There was no food, especially for the people that had no money."

The Jews fight to survive in the ghetto...

...and even look for opportunities to resist.

There were smugglers who would smuggle in food

and smuggle out people sometimes.

For forced labour, they would sometimes slow their work

or make sure that whatever they were told to do

would be broken by the time the Nazis get it.

There was all sorts of work that they were doing

to try to resist as long as possible.

For the first year of the war,

life in the ghetto is the cruel daily reality of Poland's Jews.

But Hitler is planning a new campaign.

And millions of people are about to descend into horror.

By mid-1941, Germany controls much of western Europe.

But Hitler's true goal is to create Lebensraum,

"living space" for the German people.

Which will be found in the east.

Hitler now realised that this was the ideal moment to begin

the secret planning of the invasion of Russia,

the great climax of his life's work,

the destruction of the entire Soviet Union.

Barbarossa.

For Operation Barbarossa, Hitler and his generals will deploy

three army groups and three million men...

...supported by thousands of tanks and aircraft across a vast front.

The German preparations for Barbarossa are on a scale

that's almost unimaginable.

This is going to be and remains the largest invasion in human history.

Hitler adds another mission to the plan.

He issues a directive stating in the invasion there will be

"special tasks."

In charge of these will be Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS.

If you want to know what Hitler's thinking,

look at what Himmler was doing.

Because Himmler was talking to and meeting Hitler

very, very frequently across these periods of time.

Himmler has been a member of the Nazi Party since 1923.

By all appearances,

Heinrich Himmler seems like an ordinary human being.

He was born to a good family, went to decent schools.

He hooks up with various kinds of occupations.

He's a chicken farmer, sells fertilizer for a time.

And like so many young men of his generation,

came under Hitler's spell.

Himmler's mobile death squads, the Einsatzgruppen,

will follow the advancing German army into Soviet territory.

They have orders to move into occupied communities

and kill anyone who threatens the operation.

The Einsatzgruppen will follow the Wehrmacht

in the Barbarossa campaign,

and their task is the long-term pacification of Soviet society.

They are, above all, targeting what they believe are

the two key facets of the Soviet social system:

Commissars or Communist political leaders.

Then they particularly single out Jews.

The conflict now was being raised to a new level

of ideological and racial warfare.

The annihilation of certain groups was encouraged,

sanctioned, and ordered. And this is a dark step.

The world is darkening visibly as this- as this operation begins.

In June 1941, the Wehrmacht smashes through Soviet defences

and makes rapid advances across the front.

There are over five million Jews in the Soviet Union.

The Jewish communities in the Soviet Union

were very different from those in many parts of Eastern Europe,

like Poland and Romania.

They weren't generally communities of orthodox Jews

with ringlets and black hats.

Jews in the Soviet Union were assimilated

within the general population.

In the wake of the German army,

the Einsatzgruppen begin their special task.

Einsatzgruppen didn't know enough about who was Jewish.

So locals would volunteer or be seized in order to give them

exactly the information they wanted.

There are groups within Eastern Europe of people

who are already very anti-Semitic

and will voluntarily sign up to be auxiliaries

and help these units.

An Einsatzgruppen usually would round up the Jewish population,

they'd then assemble in a central location

where they're guarded and then marched in groups to a killing site.

They would be taken to a place of execution on the edge of the town.

They would be very often forced to dig pits for their own bodies.

And then they would be shot into these pits.

Sometimes they used wooded areas or forests,

and sometimes these executions were remarkably public.

They're bringing Jews to a killing site,

often in family groups,

forcing them to undress...

...and then making them lie down on the bodies of people

that have already been murdered, to wait to be shot themselves.

This is grown men, standing, aiming at another human being.

It could be a man. It could be a woman.

It could be a baby. And firing a gun at them.

And it's happening on a huge scale,

over a huge territory.

Einsatzgruppen killed nearly half a million Jews

in the Soviet Union in the first six months of Operation Barbarossa.

Just incredible numbers of human beings murdered

by shooting over and over and over again.

There's a close relationship between

the actual military campaign, Operation Barbarossa,

and the Holocaust.

The Holocaust really begins the moment they cross the border

into the Soviet Union.

The war enabled the entire Soviet Union to be treated

as a killing zone.

It meant that the lifting of norms of civilised behaviour,

the lifting of norms of warfare, all restraints were removed.

The killing of Jews is reported back to Berlin every day.

Senior Nazis discuss the next stages of Hitler's plan.

Hitler's deputy Herman Goering writes to Reinhard Heydrich,

the SS official responsible for executing Nazi plans

for the Jewish population.

Reinhard Heydrich is one of the key figures in the SS.

He's distinctly Aryan in his visage.

He has icy cold blue eyes,

and his face registered almost no emotion.

In late July 1941,

Goering sends an official communique to Heydrich.

He asks him to promptly submit an

"overall plan for the execution of the intended final solution

of the Jewish question."

This is essentially the order authorising Heydrich

to begin preparations for the final solution

of the Jewish question in Europe.

They're going to remove them from the world by murdering them.

As the German army advances across the Soviet Union,

the Wehrmacht works with units liquidating communists and Jews,

the SS and, particularly, the Einsatzgruppen.

In August, SS leader Heinrich Himmler visits Minsk

in Nazi-occupied Belorussia.

Himmler maintains a really close watch on what the Einsatzgruppen

are doing, because ultimately, they're his responsibility.

So he travels a lot around the Eastern Front.

Himmler realises that the shootings are taking

an emotional toll on his men.

It's difficult no matter who you are,

to wake up in the morning and to shoot people all day long

and then to try to go to bed at night and know that

the next morning you're going to wake up and do it all over again.

A massacre of 100 people is set up for him so that he can see

how difficult it is to actually watch the killing of human beings.

Because Himmler has never had to do this before.

He's never really seen death first hand.

He reacts very badly to the sight of bodies being murdered

in front of him.

And he turns green, and he almost throws up.

Himmler returns to Berlin to help design ways to execute

mass killings that are more efficient.

On the Soviet front, the killing continues.

Babi Yar is a ravine just outside Kiev, in Ukraine.

In September 1941,

over 33,000 Jewish men, women and children are marched here.

Across two days, they're all shot.

And then buried in a mass grave.

The Nazis had already developed a method of mass murder.

At the start of the war,

Hitler authorised the killing of patients with disabilities...

...a euthanasia programme known as T4.

The T4 programme,

which is code named after Tiergarten Strasse number four,

which is the building in Berlin that was the headquarters,

was the programme to murder with carbon monoxide,

physically and mentally disabled Germans,

because they were deemed to be drains on the state.

The T4 programme runs for two years,

before it's officially halted in August 1941.

What you then have is a group of men with a particular set of skills;

the use of gas to murder people,

the transportation and logistics of that,

the hiding of the evidence of that operation.

And these people are then available to be used in another operation.

The first extermination centre, where Jews are sent to be gassed,

is at Chelmno, located in German-occupied Poland.

The victims in the Chelmno centre are Jews from the ghetto

of the Polish city of Lodz and the Romani,

who the Nazis also regard as an inferior race.

On December 8th, 1941,

the first Jews are killed using gas vans.

They are vans where the Nazis could pipe carbon monoxide

into the back of the bed of the truck.

Szlama Ber Winer is a Jew from Central Poland

who is deported to Chelmno.

Szlama witnesses the death of his family in gas vans.

He writes about this in a letter.

"The leader of the guard detail was a high-ranking SS man,

an absolute sadist and murderer.

He ordered that eight men were to open the doors of the lorry.

The smell of gas that met us was overpowering.

Out of my family of about 60 people, I was the only remaining survivor.

I was left alone in this world now."

The war against the Jews is about to take an ominous turn,

as the Nazis build additional killing centres

and devise new methods to destroy a people.

December 1941.

A villa overlooking Lake Wannsee in Berlin is the location

for a gathering of officials

representing different parts of the Nazi regime.

The organiser of the conference is Reinhard Heydrich.

The topic is the Jewish question.

But the conference is postponed.

The conference at Wannsee was initially scheduled

on the 9th of December, but it had to be postponed because,

of course, on the 7th December 1941,

the Japanese launched a massive attack on Pearl Harbor.

Three days after the attack at Pearl Harbor,

Adolf Hitler declares war on the United States.

Hitler has long predicted a world war,

and now he has brought it about.

In a speech, he accuses the Jews of manipulating

the American President, Franklin D. Roosevelt.

At a briefing on December 12th,

Hitler summons Nazi Party leaders.

In his diary,

Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels writes what is discussed.

"The Fuhrer is determined to make a clean sweep."

"The world war is here;

the destruction of Jewry must be the inevitable consequence."

On January 20th, 1942,

Nazi officials arrived at Lake Wannsee

for Heydrich's rescheduled conference.

The SS officers are in their full formal uniforms.

They're being served cognac and canapes.

It looks like a very civilized gathering.

But, of course, what's being discussed at the Wannsee conference

is anything but civilized.

The Wannsee conference is a coordination meeting.

It is not a meeting to decide

whether or not to kill the Jews of Europe.

It's a meeting to determine how that's going to take place

and what the responsibilities are of all of the bureaucratic elements

of the Nazi state in achieving this goal.

At the conference, Heydrich lists the number of Jews

to be exterminated by the "Final Solution."

The list includes the Jews of the Soviet Union and eastern Europe.

The Jews in France, the Netherlands, Belgium and Scandinavian countries.

It also includes Jews in countries fighting alongside Germany

such as Italy, Romania and Hungary.

Even Jews in undefeated Great Britain and neutral Ireland

are included.

Grand total: over 11 million.

The Nazis now have a plan to implement the Holocaust.

The Germans had succeeded in taking France,

as well as Holland, Denmark, Norway, and so on,

which meant that they suddenly had control over

other massive populations of Jews.

The fact that basically the whole of Europe outside Britain

was now part of Hitler's Nazi empire,

gave a feeling that things could be done

which had never been done before.

Across all of Europe,

a whole people are targeted for annihilation.

Following the Wannsee Conference,

the Nazis are working on the construction of killing centres,

where people, most of them Jewish, will be sent to die.

The majority are from eastern Europe and Soviet territory.

The Nazis also begin to target the Jews of western Europe.

The Holocaust begins as an Eastern phenomenon.

But soon it extends to every single corner of German controlled Europe.

Amsterdam in the Netherlands and France and Italy

and as far north as Scandinavia,

Jews are being shipped to these various new establishments

in the East and murdered.

In the spring of 1942, Himmler visits Amsterdam

to address a police battalion specially trained to round up

and deport the city's Jewish population.

A few weeks after his visit, one Jewish father, Otto Frank,

decides his family must go into hiding.

His daughter Anne writes in her diary:

"Our many Jewish friends and acquaintances are being taken away

in droves.

Escape is almost impossible."

In France, many Jews who fled Germany earlier

now find themselves threatened,

along with the country's large French Jewish population.

Helene Berr, a young French Jewish woman, writes:

"A wave of terror has been gripping everybody else as well

these past few days.

It appears that the SS have taken command in France

and that terror must follow."

Over the next months,

Jewish families are deported by German forces

and their collaborators.

They are informed they are being resettled in Eastern Europe

and told to bring belongings and valuables with them.

Instead, they are being sent to the new Nazi extermination centres.

They are crammed into airless, lightless, railway cars

and transported hundreds of miles without food or water.

Modern bureaucracies and trains enabled the movement of people

across Europe in huge numbers,

which had really never been seen before.

There are four major extermination centres.

Chelmno, Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec.

There are two additional extermination centres,

which also serve as forced labour camps,

Majdanek, and Auschwitz.

All of these centres are located in Poland.

In the centres, the Nazis design methods to kill as many people

in as short a time as possible, including using diesel engines.

The Nazis pumped carbon monoxide from these engines

into the chambers themselves. It killed a lot of people.

But that doesn't necessarily mean that they were as kind of efficient

in that process as is somehow supposed.

These were very crude places.

They were very improvisational places,

and they were spaces of extraordinary

and appalling suffering.

At Auschwitz,

the Nazis use a pesticide called "Zyklon B".

Zyklon B is a cyanide derivative

originally for exterminating vermin, for killing rodents in your house.

It's a blue crystal.

You open the can, and it emits a poison gas.

They also begin construction on an extension to Auschwitz,

in the neighbouring village of Birkenau.

The site is solely dedicated to extermination

and has several gas chambers.

When Jews arrive at Auschwitz-Birkenau

they are sorted into two groups:

those who are determined fit for forced labour,

and those who are not.

Mendel Jakubowicz is deported from a Polish Ghetto to Auschwitz,

he describes his arrival.

"The SS people were walking up and down.

I stood at attention on my toes.

Finally, after a while, I was chosen to the right,

some of my friends to the left."

Mendel is selected to join a work battalion.

His family is sent to the gas chamber.

The people who had been brought into the gas chambers

would be separated into men and women and children.

They'd all be herded into this room.

They told them that they were going there to be showered.

They would be given fabric ties, to tie their shoes together

under the ruse that it'd be easier to find their pair afterwards.

The Nazis want to cram as many people into the gas chambers

as possible because that generates this environment of high heat

and humidity, which creates the hydrogen cyanide gas.

The scenes that followed after that defy imagination.

Quite often you would find families or loved ones

that were clutching each other so tightly

that it was impossible to pull their arms apart from each other.

The victims are cremated.

A perpetual pall of death hangs over the area.

It was generally the case that people sent to death camps

were murdered within about 45 minutes to 2 hours of arrival.

The creation of the extermination camps is Hitler's final solution

to the Jewish question.

An industrial scale system to mass murder human beings

in their thousands every day.

Just the pinnacle of evil.

This is murder on an industrial scale,

but each death is uniquely suffered.

In the summer of 1942,

Himmler visits the extermination centre at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

He watches enslaved prisoners working in a chemical plant.

And sees train cars of Jews arriving to be murdered.

Himmler later attends a dinner party,

where he explains that the Nazis have murdered two million Jews

and will continue to do so.

His boasts make their way to a Western intelligence agent,

who passes the information to a German exile

living in neutral Switzerland - Gerhard Riegner.

Gerhard Riegner, who worked for the World Jewish Congress,

learns from a German businessman that the Nazis have a plan.

They are trying to round up, deport and murder

the remaining Jewish communities of Europe.

Shocked by what he hears,

Reigner attempts to get this information to Rabbi Stephen Wise.

Rabbi Stephen Wise is the head of the World Jewish Congress

and maybe the most influential American rabbi

and maybe one of the most influential American Jews

at the time.

He has a relationship with President Roosevelt.

Reigner's message gets to the U.S. State Department,

but officials treat it like a war rumour and don't pass it on.

The State Department refuses to send this information to Rabbi Wise.

They call it an "unreliable war rumour"

and they bury it.

"Why are we going to get people riled up about this

if it's just probably a war rumour?

There's no way that the Nazis are actually doing this."

And so, they shelve it.

But Reigner persists,

he reaches a British member of Parliament,

who contacts Rabbi Wise by telegram.

The U.S. State Department now investigates the report.

But the Roosevelt administration is not ready to take it public.

They had a feeling that American soldiers would not agree to fight,

if they believed that they were being asked to fight

for the rescue of European Jews.

We're fighting for these ideas of democracy and idealism;

we're not fighting for the Jews.

After their investigation,

the State Department allows Rabbi Wise to share the information

about the mass murder of the Jews.

The news spreads around the globe, and Jewish communities react.

The world is beginning to learn the truth.

At the beginning of December, there's a Day of Mourning,

not just in the United States, not just in Britain,

but internationally.

There are vigils.

There are ceremonies and services in synagogues

across the Western Hemisphere.

And then finally on December 17th,

the Allied governments issue what is called

the Allied Declaration on Atrocities.

And they are condemning in very strong language

what the Nazis and their collaborators are doing;

they're using phrases like "cold blooded extermination"

and "bloody atrocities."

Roosevelt particularly is very concerned

and Churchill is appalled as well.

He says that the best thing that we can do to help Europe's Jews

is to win this war as quickly as possible.

And we need to divert all of our resources in service

of doing just that.

They knew that these mass killings were happening.

I don't think they could imagine quite the scale

of the infrastructure that the Nazis had devoted to this.

I think that the leaders had not quite grasped the extent of it.

In 1933,

Hitler's perverse vision was to expel the Jews from Germany.

By 1942, he is on the verge of exterminating the entire

Jewish population of Europe.

After two years in hiding,

Anne Frank and her sister are discovered

by Dutch police officers and sent to a Nazi extermination centre.

They eventually die of typhus, just weeks before the end of the War.

Helene Berr is deported from Paris to Auschwitz

and then to Bergen-Belsen,

where she also dies from typhus in April 1945.

Szlama Ber Winer writes a report about the gas vans at Chelmno...

...hoping to bring the truth to the world.

But he is found by the Nazis and deported to Belzec,

where he is murdered in the gas chambers.

Mendel Jakubowicz survives Auschwitz

and moves to the United States after the War.

He changes his name to Mike Jacobs

and founds a scrap metal business in Dallas, Texas.

The Holocaust, the Shoah, will continue until Nazi Germany

is defeated and the Third Reich is completely destroyed.

In 1942, the Allies gather their forces for a massive assault

on the Wehrmacht in North Africa.

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