Original subtitles

(wind whistles)

(speaking Yiddish)

(translator) Today I don't believe that there was such a thing.

I think it was a dream.

But with all that, I still see it all today, every detail,

as if it had happened today.

(speaking Yiddish)

(translator) Today I am sitting here and talking,

and I don't believe even today that this happened to me,

that I'm still able to sit here and talk about this subject,

despite the fact that the nightmares pursue me not for a day or two,

not for a year or two.

There are days when I keep looking back

to see if there isn't a guard or an SS man.

But despite this, I play the game of the normal person.

I don't know if I am normal.

I think that anyone who came out of a camp can't possibly be normal.

(man speaking Yiddish)

(translator) The things that happened to me took place 30 or 31 years ago.

It isn't easy to go back to that period.

(speaking Yiddish)

(translator) I'm doing this out of a sense of duty

and because of a vow that I'm honouring to that period,

and for those who cannot recount it

and surely wanted the world to know what happened.

(narrator) In this film,

individual witnesses trace their experience of Nazi racism.

Auschwitz is history.

Race prejudice still persists.

In 1918, men who had gone to the front

kindled with national pride

returned to a defeated, embittered Germany.

These had survived. Homecoming was cause for celebration.

Yet their heroism had been wasted, their victories squandered.

Someone must be to blame.

The Kaiser and the old aristocratic order?

Or the Communists and the threat of a new order

newly come to power in Russia?

Or, perhaps, the Jews?

Fear of them was as old as Christianity itself.

The Kaiser had been defeated.

Germany became for the first time a parliamentary democracy.

But the early years of the Weimar Republic were violent.

Communists worked to spread world revolution from Russia to Germany.

Loyalists acted to impose order by force.

Separatists were for breaking up the fragile unified German state.

For millions of Germans who wanted only order and stability,

the years after the First World War were a time of national humiliation,

economic misery, threats of violence, fears of Communism.

There was ruinous inflation.

People lost confidence in their money, in their rulers, in themselves.

“Nothing is anchored any longer,”

Adolf Hitler told his first audiences in Munich.

Hitler was attuned to German anxieties.

An Austrian who had fought with distinction in the German army,

he promised to replace chaos with unifying racial struggle.

Hitler called for the realisation of an old nationalist dream,

the union of all Germans in a great German state.

One Reich embracing all the German-speaking peoples.

Not only Austrians and East Prussians,

but Germans in the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia,

Germans in Poland, in Yugoslavia, Germans even in Russia.

Some German politicians feared, or said they feared,

that the nation would be swamped by Slavs to the east.

The Nazi Party demanded new territory there,

where a growing German population could settle.

And the Nazi programme called for the expulsion from Germany

of strangers, of immigrants.

“A visible enemy is what is needed,” said Hitler.

In Nazi publications, the Jew was projected as the villain

responsible for all Germany's troubles.

“If he hadn't existed, we would have had to invent him.”

Only one German in 100 was Jewish, 600,000 in all.

But the Nazis could build on centuries of Christian prejudice.

Shylock, Fagin were familiar figures.

Hitler would use the Jew as the single opponent

on whom everyone could focus his fear and discontent.

“Jews are not wanted here.”

The party ideologist, Alfred Rosenberg,

claimed that an international conspiracy of Jews, Communists and capitalists,

called the Elders of Zion, was bent on ruining the white races,

especially the Germans.

Most people dismissed such fantasies as examples of Nazi bad taste.

Jews in Eastern Europe were long used to being different,

to discrimination, persecution, pogrom.

They wore their own dress and spoke their own language, Yiddish.

In the West, in Holland or Czechoslovakia,

where these films were taken, later to be incorporated in Nazi propaganda,

it was easier to assimilate,

though perhaps not always possible to enter the local golf club.

For centuries, Jews had been of a different religion.

Now pseudoscience marked them as a separate race.

Nazi ideology perverted Darwin's theory of natural selection

to claim that Northern European, Aryan man was superior

but locked in a biological struggle for survival against lesser races,

Asiatics, blacks, Gypsies and Jews, the anti-race,

bacteria decomposing the bodies of the host nations in which they lived.

The person to be admired in the Nazi propaganda mirror

was the German peasant.

Peasant art, folk art, was uncorrupted,

the last pure survival of racial, tribal culture

before pollution by the industrial revolution.

(cheerful music)

Simple traditions reassured people who felt lost in anonymous cities

or confused by more modern customs.

(traditional music)

To the public, Hitler said,

“A reasonable anti-Semitism must lead to the expulsion of the Jews.”

And Jew hatred united the factions of the National Socialist Party.

The SA, the party storm troopers,

uniformed street bullies,

and the party's internal police, the SS.

In 1929, Hitler appointed an unassuming worker in the Munich party office,

an ex-laboratory assistant in a fertiliser firm,

as Reichsführer SS.

Heinrich Himmler.

When Himmler took over,

the SS were a 300-man subsection of the stormtroopers

whose job was to protect Hitler at public meetings.

Himmler was to develop them into a party elite,

responsible for the purity, morals and discipline of the entire movement.

They would take over from the SA as the most powerful force in the party.

(singing in German)

Throughout the 1920s, the Nazis remained a minor party in German politics.

Their ideas were not taken seriously.

But in 1929, the world's economies crashed.

For Germany, after years of ruinous inflation, it was a new disaster.

Six million were out of work.

More than 20 million lived off the dole.

People became ready to think that perhaps Herr Hitler was right,

Germany must be the victim of plots, of an international conspiracy.

The Nazis claimed to offer a new approach, a new hope of salvation.

Now millions were ready to respond to Hitler's emotional appeal,

a resurgence of German greatness based on ethnic pride,

loyalty to their race.

For people living in misery,

it was inspiring to be told that they were the master race

and the Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, black men were subspecies.

It appealed to the need to think better of yourself

by thinking worse of someone else.

Perhaps democracy had failed.

Perhaps it was only a matter of time

before an authoritarian government, Nazi or Communist, took over.

The respectable people who queued

to recover their savings from collapsing banks

would always be frightened of revolutionary Communists.

The middle classes, ruined by forces over which they had no control,

responded to Nazi promises,

an ordered society, national unity, an end to the class struggle.

No more chaos.

Order.

Karl Wolff came from a distinguished military family.

He lost his job as an officer when the Allies forced Germany

to reduce the size of her army.

In 1929 he was 29.

(speaking German)

(translator) Then, at the end of the '20s,

a former regimental and company comrade from my Life Guard regiment,

a Captain Julius Von Bernuth, came to Munich

and explained a great deal to me

about conditions under Communism and so on…

…and made it clear to me

that everything would lead to a great decision,

either for the far right, say National Socialism,

or the far left, Communism.

And he appealed to me.

“You volunteered very early for the war, didn't you?”

“So now, when there's a question of a political decision

which will affect your future and that of your family and your children,

then you too, you too must join the party,

even though you actually don't want to have anything to do with politics

or don't care for it.”

And that's how it happened, so that in 1931, I came to join the party.

At that time I only knew about the SA.

I had absolutely no idea of the existence of an SS.

In the reception hall, there was a large desk set up.

Behind it were sitting people

in party uniforms which weren't yet familiar to me,

and they asked me what I wanted.

And when I had told them and said that I wanted to join the SA,

the man in charge asked me, “Were you a soldier?”

I said, “Yes, indeed.”

“In the First World War?” “Yes, indeed.”

“Do you have awards for bravery?” “Yes, indeed.”

“What do you have?”

And then I said, “Iron Cross, first and second class,

and I served in the Hessian Life Guard Regiment.”

Then he said, “Well, if you've served with such a glorious regiment,

and as a soldier at the front too, then you don't belong in the SA at all.”

“But just as there was an elite guard in the Kaiser's time,

there's an elite guard now in the new movement which you wish to join.”

“And that, that is the SS. That would be much more right for you.”

“You should join the SS.”

(narrator) The SS that Karl Wolff joined was Nazism's black order of chivalry.

Motto: “My oath is loyalty”.

Insignia: the death's head.

Their black uniform symbolised their ideals:

severity, terror, the cult of the conquering superman.

In Mein Kampf, Hitler had written,

“As National Socialists, we see our programme in our flag.”

“In red, we see the social idea of the movement,

in white, the nationalistic idea,

in the swastika, the mission of the struggle for the victory of Aryan man

and, by the same token, the victory of the idea of creative work

which as such always has been and always will be anti-Semitic.”

(band plays march)

In January 1933,

President Von Hindenburg invited Hitler to form a government.

The Nazis celebrated in Berlin.

Hitler told his cronies that this was the beginning

of the greatest Germanic racial revolution in world history,

reversing the progress of the coloured races,

Mongols, Slavs, Jews, Gypsies and Bolsheviks.

Hitler was head of a frail coalition of the right.

Nazi ministers were totally inexperienced in government

and might have had their racial policies blocked by civil servants.

In practice, they found them eager to cooperate.

Interior Minister Göring outlined the new government's priorities.

*(translation) I shall make a clean sweep with an iron broom

and I shall throw out of office and high places

all those who, through red or black papist leanings,

try to suppress all national resurgence.

One particularly destructive force

is loose among the people of the Reich: Communism.

I have declared the strongest war on that.

All state instruments of power and the united strength…

(narrator) On February 27, the Reichstag, parliament,

was mysteriously destroyed in a fire.

It was the excuse Göring needed.

He brought in an emergency decree to combat the threat of revolution.

The SS and SA, now given police functions,

took into protective custody all subversive elements,

specifically Communists, anarchists, Social Democrats

and their active supporters.

The internment centres came to be called concentration camps.

Within weeks, they held 30,000 of Hitler's political opponents.

Hitler had himself voted emergency powers indefinitely.

(whistle)

(translation) Line up. Get ready.

(narrator) In April, the SS and SA led a national boycott

of Jewish businesses,

a propaganda exercise to unite the country

by focusing attention on the universal enemy.

A good Aryan German should demonstrate his essential Germanness

by acts against the Jews, the anti-race.

Within a week, laws appeared forcing out civil servants of non-Aryan stock.

The professions, doctors, lawyers, scientists and teachers,

also moved to exclude Jews.

50,000 Jews were driven to leave Germany.

But the demonstrations were not a total success.

They made some people sorry for the Jews.

Leaders of the half million Jews who still remained in Germany

formed an organisation to try to convince the Nazis

that they too were loyal Germans.

Sigmund Weltlinger, a stockbroker living in Berlin,

was an influential Jew.

(speaking German)

(translator) I, unfortunately, was not a prophet in this situation.

I had complete trust in my German compatriots

on the basis of long years of experience

dating from the years before the First World War.

I could not imagine that a people could change so much.

I didn't believe that there was any threat to me personally,

to my body or my life.

I thought, “I shall come through all this.”

I didn't run away from it.

(narrator) May 10, 1933. The SS, the SA, teachers and students

collected books judged “not in keeping with the national spirit”.

The works of Lenin, Freud, Heinrich Mann, Marx

were burned in a public act of cultural purification.

In the new state, intellect was suspect. It smacked of Jewishness.

What was needed was unthinking obedience.

“Intellect rots the character,” said Himmler.

Propaganda Minister Goebbels.

(speaking German)

(translation) The age of exaggerated Jewish intellectualism is over.

Through our German revolution,

we have cleared the path for the German way.

The future German will not only be a man of the book

but also a man of character.

(narrator) Behind the scenes,

the SS was becoming the most dreaded organ of the state.

In place of the casual brutality of the SA,

they introduced cold, calculated terror.

Hitler had said, “If propaganda has imbued a people with an idea,

the organisation can draw the consequences with a handful of men.”

The SS were to be that handful.

(translator) After the takeover of power,

Himmler asked me personally.

He said, “I need you. I want to build up this Knights' Order of the SS.”

“And for that I need an elite guard and I want to set up an active SS troop.”

“I myself unfortunately never fought on the front and wasn't an officer.”

“I must have somebody who was.”

“The army won't give me any of their qualified people,

largely out of jealousy.”

So I allowed myself to be persuaded

and thereby, if you like, I came by fate to the SS,

to be Himmler's adjutant.

And there I had a wonderful field of activity,

organising and leading, with nobody over me.

And through that, I had an unusually rapid rise through the ranks.

(fanfare)

(narrator) In power, the Nazis could employ all the resources of the media

to promote the racial rebirth they believed in.

Hitler said, “Anyone who understands National Socialism

only as a political movement knows virtually nothing about it.”

“It is even more than religion. It is the will to create a new man.”

The SS would lead the way.

(Wolff speaking German)

(translator) For Himmler had set out to achieve a dream

and he was very influenced by it himself.

He would be the creator

of a new awakening of the Germanic race within the German people

which, because of the many lost wars in the Middle Ages,

had been overrun by many other strains from the East, the West and the South,

which had mingled with and clouded the blond Germanic ideal.

(fanfare)

(narrator) The dream, as set out in films like Blood and Soil,

was simple but seductive.

It idealised the unchanging values of the country,

of a natural life based on fresh air, good food and loyalty to the family.

It stressed the essential nobility of the blond Germanic peasant,

his blood as rich and fertile as the German soil he tilled.

BIRTHS DECLINE

In the cities, the birth rate was lower than it was in the country.

BIRTHS SURPLUS

And the city was stark, impersonal,

mechanised, cosmopolitan, dirty, defiled.

The Nazis couldn't check the drift from the land,

but they denounced cities as “centres of race chaos,

which suited the special characteristics of the Jews

and gave them a chance to push themselves forward.”

Party rallies always featured the true folk, the peasant.

Hitler had written, “A state which in this age of racial poisoning

dedicates itself to the care of its best racial elements

must someday become lord of the earth.”

(military music)

Nazism was political biology,

and films were made to demonstrate Darwin's laws of natural selection,

survival of the fittest.

(translation) Will one of the stag beetles really be killed in the fight?

More than likely. We need it for the film anyway.

We are forcing these beautiful animals into a life-and-death struggle.

They could both have carried on living peacefully.

But, my dear Miss Volkman,

one doesn't find a peaceful life anywhere in nature.

But, Professor, not everything eats everything else.

Well, perhaps not quite like that,

but they all live in a constant struggle in which the weakest is destroyed.

The sick bird falls prey to the cat.

Fights occur between the same species, and the weakest falls victim.

Then they have a proper racial policy.

In a sense, yes, although this selection happens more instinctively.

If an animal has lost direct contact with nature,

then this natural selection no longer takes place.

That is the problem with our domestic animals.

So the breeder has to take care that the species remains pure.

I have a few film clips to illustrate that as well.

Certain special characteristics can be passed on through generations.

(narrator) Horses, the film goes on to explain,

are bred for different purposes: for racing or for the plough.

Such ideas must be extended to humans too.

The struggle for survival demanded a pure-blooded, healthy youth.

Love between the races was unnatural.

Hitler said he aimed at

“the rebirth of the nation by the deliberate breeding of a new man”.

The SS were to begin this project.

(speaking German)

(translator) Well, by taking great pains

with measurements of height, the shape of the skull

and exact registration of colour of hair, colour of eyes,

and then in certain circumstances ears and chin,

and right down to all these sorts of things.

So that by selection and collecting together,

we could then wait for the development.

But only ever the positive racial thought:

how can one improve something, breed it.

Never with the thought, nobody ever spoke about it and it never occurred

that we arrogantly spoke of exterminating anybody

who didn't happen to have been born with a white skin

or who was culturally inferior to us or undesirable.

That was a frightfully degenerate development

which only came with the pressures of war,

with all the other degeneracy that war brings.

(military music)

(narrator) At Nuremberg, in September 1935, the Nazis announced racial laws.

The Reich Citizenship Act

and the Act for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour.

Göring declared the end of Jewish political rights.

Marriage or sex between Jews and nationals of German and allied blood

were both prohibited in the interest of “the survival of the German race”.

(translation) Marriages between Jews

and German nationals or people of generically related blood

are forbidden.

(cheering)

(narrator) Race was taught at school.

Nazi cartoons in school textbooks compared the strong, hard-working Aryan

with the soft, crooked Jew.

For young people, the party organised camps

to foster an active, outdoor spirit.

Youngsters from mean city streets

learned to be proud of healthy Aryan bodies.

Behind the horseplay lay Hitler's dream of a youth who

“bespeak the magnificence of the beast of prey,

purged of unnatural Christian tenderness”.

Himmler was said by those who knew him to be like a country schoolmaster.

He was moved just to see healthy blond children.

He set up foster homes for the illegitimate children of his men.

Later, when war began, he urged them in deep moral earnestness

to sire additional children outside marriage,

to increase the stock of good German blood.

In the new German state, everyone would look up to the SS.

(speaking German)

(translator) The SS was meant to be the guard of the movement

and the militant arm of the movement,

and as it was meant to be an elite, not only physically and racially,

but also in terms of accomplishment in character, it could only be a minority.

Among these basic requirements, to give you the ideal picture first,

was that they should be as blond and blue-eyed as possible.

So there needed to be a strict selection,

which had to be encouraged and watched over,

so that the SS, the chosen ones, couldn't marry whom they pleased

but should take equal-born women

from whom one could then gradually breed the old racially pure Teutons.

For instance, no SS man could get married at will.

He had to hand in his marriage form.

Then his future bride, his girl,

had to be examined by a doctor from the Race and Resettlement Head Office

to see if she was suitable,

and not until that had been done and he had permission could he get married.

(narrator) Himmler was the privileged executor

of the will and the decisions

of his Führer, Adolf Hitler, whom he idolised.

(speaking German)

(translator) And starting from Hitler's conception

that regarded Christianity

as a sort of sickness in the natural Germanic nature,

he considered it his duty not only to renew and improve

the Germanic race as far as possible

but also to renew and improve religion…

…and lead them back, step by step,

to a new sort of recognition of God and new forms of worship.

(speaking German)

(translator) Sometimes when our captain was giving a lecture

about weapons or something, he would suddenly remember and ask,

“Who has already left the Church?”

Then a whole lot of people stood up. I was quite shocked for a moment.

Then, “Who has still not left the Church?”

I stood up and looked round

and I saw that there were a few others as well and I was relieved.

It was better than…

I thought I might have been standing there all on my own.

And I said, “Captain, I can't leave the Church.”

“My brothers and sisters, my parents are all Catholic.”

“They would exclude me from the family if I were to do a thing like that.”

(narrator) To replace religion, Himmler looked to the Teuton past.

Germans dug into Nordic prehistory

to revive the spiritual and cultural heritage

of this, the greatest race on earth.

The SS learned the mysteries and myths of the Teuton past.

At Bad Tölz, a school was set up for SS officers,

a school of chivalry, training mind and body.

Tests of physical courage and obedience,

balancing grenades on their helmets until they went off,

being fired at on battle courses.

And porridge for breakfast,

prescribed by Himmler himself because he admired the way

it had developed English public schoolboys into empire builders.

The SS man was required to be a fearless athlete.

Himmler himself was sickly, something of a hypochondriac

and subject to headaches.

Nevertheless, it was in character that out of sight of the cameras

he forced himself through the SS sports tests.

Behind the emphasis on sport to develop courage and discipline

was Himmler's deputy, international fencer, Reinhard Heydrich.

Thrown out of the navy for womanising,

he had become head of the SS Security Department,

the Nazis' instrument of terror and murder.

(translation) I swear to you…

I swear to you…

(narrator) SS men swore total obedience to the Führer unto death.

Himmler administered the oath himself.

(translation) I swear…

I swear…

…obedience unto death.

(translator) They were inconspicuously brought round

to the idea of themselves as the Sons of Light,

that they stood in a fight against the powers of darkness.

In all ways, the SS was based on the example of the Jesuit order,

which had been founded as the elite guard of the Catholic Church

by Ignatius Loyola, with very strict and severe laws.

And Himmler had taken much from this,

the hierarchy, the strict selection and leadership and the punishments.

(narrator) “Arbeit macht frei”, “Work sets you free”,

on the gates of Dachau concentration camp.

As moral guardians of the Nazi system,

it was logical for the SS to run punishment centres.

At Dachau, guards were taught that any pity whatsoever

for enemies of the state was unworthy of an SS man.

There was no place for men with soft hearts.

It was not for nothing that their emblem was the death's head

and that they carried a loaded gun.

Prisoners were to be reduced to total subservience

by impersonal brutality, methodical cruelty.

Prisoners were not people, they were numbers,

and camps were essential to the Nazi system.

(speaking German)

(translator) They were necessary in the opinion of Himmler and Hitler,

one as the head of the state and the other as the head of the German police,

in order, temporarily, to eliminate criminal and asocial elements,

to sort them out into those who were incurable

and those who could be converted and therefore could be saved

for an active and positive task in the German folk community.

There weren't just criminals, common criminals,

but also political prisoners.

(narrator) Hitler had written,

“Terrorism is an effective political tool.”

“I shall not deprive myself of it

because these simple-minded bourgeois softies take offence.”

“People will think twice about opposing us

if they know what awaits them in the camps.”

Dachau was the model for all the camps,

the training school for the death's head units

which would one day supply the managers for the final solution.

Between 1934 and 1938, the camps never held less than 20,000 people.

Many died there.

(fanfare)

By 1938, the Nazis had been in power for five years.

A nationwide rally of youth to Landsberg Castle,

Nazi shrine because Hitler once briefly had been imprisoned there.

(singing in German)

(narrator) “Germany, holy word,

you will live without end, triumphing over time.”

(singing in German)

(narrator) Hitler had always spoken of a greater Germany,

an ethnic state uniting all German-speaking peoples.

The time had come to carry the torch of the Nazi racial community

beyond the confines of Germany itself.

Hitler's troops marched in quick succession into Austria

and the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia,

uniting two German-speaking communities into the greater German family.

(translation) …was smashed to pieces.

(narrator) Hitler told his childhood city, Linz,

that he had achieved an historic mission,

and Himmler's men, helped by local Nazis,

rounded up the opposition.

Encouraged by the SS, pent-up anti-Jewish fantasies were unleashed

in a violence worse than anything experienced so far in Germany.

Heydrich, like other Nazi zealots, was becoming impatient

because so little had been done to clear the Jews out.

So he rounded up 10,000 and dumped them over the Polish border.

In freezing weather, many died.

The son of one of them, Herschel Grynszpan,

attempted to kill the German ambassador in Paris.

Confused, he shot a junior member of the embassy staff, Ernst vom Rath.

Vom Rath was hailed as a martyr of the Jews and given a full state funeral,

attended by Hitler, amid the full glare of Nazi publicity,

while in secret plans were laid

for the intensification of the emigration of the Jews.

“The Jewish question is to be solved now, once and for all.”

Hitler had warned that the party was not to be seen to instigate

demonstrations against the Jews, but if there were spontaneous outbursts,

it would not be their business to prevent them.

On the night of 9 November, 1938,

thousands of Jewish shops were destroyed and windows broken.

Synagogues were burnt down all over Germany.

91 Jews were killed.

The Kristallnacht, the Night of Glass.

This spontaneous outburst was led by Heydrich's men.

Next morning, the SS marched 30,000 better-off Jews

to concentration camps.

(translator) We were all shoved together with clubs and blows

and had to stand in serried ranks and be counted and so on.

Because I'd been a serving soldier, I didn't find all that very difficult.

But others who didn't fall in, they were beaten automatically.

The camp commandant gave us a speech.

“You're not in a sanatorium here and if you try to escape,

then we shoot immediately, and our boys can shoot damned well.”

That was the first night.

And in the morning we saw long lines of human beings with grey faces

in drill suits, striped, and they flitted about like shadows,

but we never dreamt that in eight days,

we should look exactly the same as those columns.

And in the first ten days,

25 per cent of the people who'd been taken there had already died.

I got out because I was a war veteran.

War veterans were given an early release.

(narrator) The Jewish community had set up committees

to represent them with the Nazis.

Now Himmler's men took them over.

They were ordered to help speed up Jewish emigration

and to collect the heavy taxes imposed on the thousands

who now queued up to get out of Germany.

Released from the camp,

Sigmund Weltlinger went to work for the Jewish community in Berlin.

(speaking German)

(translator) It was a very, very difficult job.

I had 12 lawyers working with me

and a number of financial clerks from the Jewish community.

It was a difficult job in human terms, because I had to say to the people

who wanted to emigrate or who were to be moved out,

“Make a list of your property, declare your property,

we will give you a receipt for it and then you'll be transported out.”

They said, “But why should we declare it? Then we'll lose it.”

Then I explained to them that if Hitler stays, you lose it anyway.

(narrator) Hitler had said,

“A reasonable anti-Semitism must lead to the expulsion of the Jews.”

Now they were being terrorised out,

stripped of everything they owned before they left.

The operation was modelled on a system set up in Vienna

by one of Heydrich's officers,

SS Lieutenant Karl Adolf Eichmann.

Wilhelm Höttl was a young history graduate

who had joined the SS when the Nazis entered Austria.

(speaking German)

(translator) And I asked Eichmann, “The people want to leave anyway.”

“If, as part of your programme, you want to get rid of them,

why on earth do you make it so difficult for them?”

The setup meant that the individual Jew who wanted to emigrate from Austria

first of all tried to get a visa

and a confirmation from the finance ministry that he had no debts.

Then he needed a place on a ship

and permission to transport his furniture and so on.

Then I explained all this to Eichmann,

who was certainly a rather difficult man.

“That's the situation.”

“Why don't you lot make it easier for these people when they want to get out?”

“You want to get the Jews out. They want to leave of their own accord.”

And now this is the grotesque part when I tell you

that I was almost the founder of the Central Office for Jewish Emigration,

which was then set up in Vienna.

It was the first one ever.

They were hardly functioning at all in Germany, but it did in Vienna.

Eichmann organised it.

They requisitioned the famous ballet building belonging to Baron Rothschild,

and they actually did it as I had envisaged it.

There was a representative from the passport office,

a representative from the finance authorities,

a representative from the shipping offices and transport representatives.

And this man, this poor Jewish man who now wanted to emigrate,

could make the rounds in two hours

and could get everything settled and could get out.

(narrator) Altogether, about a million Jews wanted to “get out”. But where?

Countries were tightening up their entry quotas.

The British prime minister, Chamberlain, dared not admit in public

that he was letting in 500 a week, for fear of arousing British anti-Semitism.

Even the Archbishop of Canterbury had to choose his words carefully.

I'm asking you to think for a moment

of the men, women and children

who are being driven from their homes in Germany and Austria

by a cruel persecution.

Their only crime is the race to which they belong.

For this, their lives are being deliberately made intolerable for them.

Our own government and other governments must do their best

to search the open spaces of the earth to find some place

where, in large settlements,

these unhappy people can live in freedom and peace.

This is the purpose for which Lord Baldwin has made a national appeal.

This fund will give help impartially to all victims of persecution,

and, remember, among them are multitudes of Christians

as well as of Jews.

Give what you can to this fund.

I ask you all to take your own part in this great work of mercy.

(narrator) Palestine was the Jews' biblical home.

Since Hitler came to power, many Jews had already settled there.

The developed countries wouldn't take them in.

Their solution was to find some empty space

where the Jews could be settled with no embarrassment.

Perhaps Palestine under British control was the answer.

But the Arabs who already lived there objected.

The main case of the Arabs

is against the British government policy in Palestine,

a policy which if continued will surely have as a result

the replacement of the Arabs by the Jews.

(narrator) The Arabs backed their demands with terrorism.

In 1939, the British limited Jewish immigration to Palestine

to 10,000 a year.

Settling one million Jews at that rate would take 100 years.

(speaking German)

(narrator) The Reichstag, 30 January, 1939.

Hitler revealed that his policy towards the Jews

might go further than expulsion.

“If the Jewish international financiers inside and outside Europe

succeed in involving the nations in another world war,

the result will not be the victory of Judaism

but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.”

(cheering)

(narrator) For years, Nazi health experts had urged Hitler

to order the mercy killing of the insane and incurably sick.

But Hitler was afraid this might offend public opinion.

So the Reich health ministry sponsored a programme of propaganda films.

(translation) In nature, all weak creatures perish without exception.

In the last decades, we men have sinned terribly

against this law of natural selection.

We have not only preserved valueless life,

we have allowed it to breed and multiply.

(narrator) The film stopped short of openly advocating euthanasia,

but it stressed the waste of scarce resources and trained nurses

in caring for “parasites”.

There the matter had rested, pending war, when, as Hitler put it,

“the Church wouldn't be able to put up the expected resistance”.

Behind the scenes, the SS had recruited its own team of doctors

willing to practise Nazi principles of social biology.

Then in a hand-written note, backdated to 1 September, 1939,

Hitler authorised a start to “mercy killing”.

September 1, 1939. War against Poland.

Filmmakers were ordered to portray a united people eager for the struggle.

War too was presented as political biology.

“The unalterable law of the whole of life,

the prerequisite for the natural selection of the strong

and the precedent for the elimination of the weak.”

“A people that cannot assert itself must disappear

and another must take its place.”

The Poles were Slavs, an inferior breed.

Poland had all along been earmarked by Hitler for “living space in the East”.

But Nazi aggression provoked a second world war.

Britain and France came in on the side of Poland.

On 5 October, Hitler took the salute at the victory parade in Warsaw.

In Slav Poland, Nazi policy could be put into practice

unfettered by concern about public opinion.

(speaking Yiddish)

(translator) I remember that in front there was a German band playing.

For me it was very nice. I was happy. I even remember that I clapped.

(narrator) In Poland, Nazi bullies at last had the chance

to do what they liked.

And some Poles joined in.

The reign of terror lasted until the liberation.

Secret orders said that the men's animal spirits were not to be discouraged.

In Poland, Jews wore traditional beards and costumes.

Enthusiastic Nazis set about “cleaning them up”.

Long-nurtured hatreds found an outlet.

The authorities egged them on.

Terrorising one section of the population helped intimidate the rest.

(speaking Yiddish)

(translator) We ran out of food in the house.

And one day my mother, may her soul rest in peace,

asked me to go down to the bakery and stand there the whole night

in order to get a loaf of bread the next day,

so that there would be something to eat at home.

I got up in the middle of the night and went down to get into line.

When I arrived, there were already masses and masses of people

waiting in the line.

At dawn, a Pole who was of German origin

arrived with a rifle slung over his right shoulder,

a band with a swastika on his left arm.

He was presumably supposed to keep order,

so that everyone would receive bread.

Among us there were little children, non-Jews, Poles, running around.

They dragged that same Pole with the rifle over

and pointed at each and every person,

“That's a Jew. That's a Jew. That's a Jew.”

“Das Jude. Das Jude. Das Jude.”

So that these people would be taken out of line and not get bread.

My turn came.

I turned round and saw that the boy was a friend with whom I played.

I said to him in Polish, “What are you doing?”

His answer was, “I'm not your friend. You're a Jew. I don't know you.”

That same German with the swastika armband was standing in front of me.

I saw that he was a neighbour of ours.

I spoke to him in Polish. He answered in German.

He said, “I don't know Polish. I don't know you.”

Then he forcefully took me out of the line

where I was waiting for bread and slapped me.

I broke into tears, because I didn't know what had happened.

My world had collapsed.

My mother had asked me to stand in line so as to get some bread

and a strange thing happens.

The friend with whom I play and also the German,

two people who I've known for so many years, suddenly turn on me.

They don't want to know me. They deny knowing me and hit me.

They don't let me eat. I thought to myself, “What will I bring home?”

This was in fact the first time

that somebody made me feel that I was different from other people,

that I wasn't like all the Christian boys, the boys with whom I played.

(narrator) Hans Frank, an old Party comrade of Hitler's,

was sent to take over Poland.

He told his staff,

“The Pole must feel that we are not building him a legal state.”

“For him there is only one duty: to work and behave himself.”

“Once the war is won, mincemeat can be made of them.”

In many places, Frank put members of the local German community, Volksdeutsch,

in charge of the suppression.

A Pole had only to be denounced as a former officer,

lawyer, politician, priest, to earn summary execution.

There would be no potential leaders.

Slavs were only fit to be slaves.

The smallest hint of opposition or non-cooperation

meant reprisals against the whole community.

In spite of this bloody terror, some Poles did resist,

risking their lives to protect others, including Jews.

German action squads led by SS men

toured the country carrying out public executions by the thousand.

Himmler told his men that this was the type of task

for which he had originally created the SS.

“It is much easier to fight like a soldier

than to suppress an obstructive population of low cultural level.”

“But we must stay hard. It is our responsibility to God.”

Poland was divided into three.

In return for not intervening when Hitler attacked,

the Russians had been allowed to take the east.

The west, bordering Germany, was incorporated into the Reich.

It would be settled by Germans.

To make room for them, Poles would be shifted into what was left,

the area ruled by Hans Frank.

This was the first practical step

towards redrawing the map of Europe on racial lines.

The forced migration dragged on for years.

People of German blood were helped to move into the German section.

To make room for them, over a million Poles were uprooted

and pushed east into Hans Frank's domain.

Thousands died.

The re-Germanisation programme

was handled by Himmler's SS Race and Resettlement Office.

(Wolff speaking German)

(translator) This re-Germanisation

was, of course, an extremely difficult undertaking

and was carried out by special commissions

who tried to evaluate the people racially,

since one couldn't evaluate people's political convictions,

whether someone in his heart of hearts is still pro-Polish.

We said, “It's pointless burdening ourselves with Poles.”

“We must examine them.”

So one of the leaders at the Race and Resettlement Office was allocated,

who tested the people there.

Then, according to the result of the test,

they were divided into categories.

(narrator) To the Nazis, the Poles were inferior.

Polish Jews, all three million of them,

were subhumanity and to be treated as such.

They were ordered to wear an identifying star.

Wearing the star, Jews were immediately recognisable.

Forbidden to travel without permission,

Polish Jews were subject to curfew, to harassment.

They could be seized at any time without warning and put to forced labour.

The official line was that Jews were to blame for starting the war.

So now they were filmed for the German newsreels

being made to clear up the mess.

(speaking Yiddish)

(translator) The Germans forbade the Jews to enter the shops

which were under German ownership, Volksdeutsch, ethnic Germans.

They ordered them to take off their hats in front of every German.

In fact, all Jewish life was just cut off, stopped.

(narrator) “A reasonable anti-Semitism must lead to the expulsion of the Jew.”

All along Hitler had promised to purify the Reich.

It was decided that this could now be done.

Jews would be moved to reservations in Poland.

Notices went up.

All Jews in Poland, plus a million from the greater Reich,

were to be moved into designated areas.

(translator) We took a small cart.

I, together with Father, made a small cart and we began to move.

Thousands and thousands, tens of thousands of people were walking,

taking their belongings with them,

some on their heads, some on their backs, some on their shoulders.

There were children, old people, babies,

all of them like the exile of the peoples, the exile from Egypt.

But it was interesting also to see the Aryan side, the Poles, the Christians,

how they were watching.

Some of them, lots of them, clapped their hands,

for they were happy about it.

“Now we'll buy their flats. We'll take over. We'll have it good.”

“All the furniture that the Jews leave, we'll have everything.”

(narrator) Soon Frank's area of Poland was so overcrowded with Jews

that he complained to Hitler.

The deportations must stop. He could not handle any more Jews.

Hitler agreed. An alternative solution must be found.

Suddenly events in the war invited the re-examination of an old solution.

In the summer of 1940, Hitler had attacked Western Europe.

If this campaign ended the war, then it might again be possible

to solve the Jewish question by emigration overseas.

Officials examining the problem favoured sending them to Madagascar,

an island off the coast of Africa, a French possession.

(singing in German)

(narrator) That summer, as the army and SS swept through Western Europe,

bureaucrats of the Jewish Emigration Office completed their detailed plan.

Millions of Jews were to be packed onto a disease-ridden island,

from which the only exit is death.

But it was not to be.

Although by the end of July, the Nazis controlled Western Europe

as far as the English Channel, the war didn't end.

The Jews couldn't be shipped overseas.

Instead, the SS had six more countries to subdue.

But in the west, the approach would have to be different.

Most of the people came from Nordic or Germanic stock too.

They set about registering everyone and issuing identity cards.

The Dutch, for instance, according to Nazi theory,

came from the best racial stock.

They must be prepared for full brotherhood with the Germans.

But amongst the population there must be hundreds of thousands of Jews,

though just how many and who they were they had no idea.

Here Jews were well integrated into the community,

spoke the same language, wore the same clothes.

For all their theories, the Nazis had no simple scientific test

to tell them who had Jewish blood and who had not.

They devised an innocent-sounding way of finding out.

You had to fill in a form,

and one passage was if you had any Jewish grandparents.

No, I had none, so I said no.

Then you went home and didn't realise

that you helped cornering the Jews and making them vulnerable

and bringing them in a position

where they could later on be transported and gassed.

You didn't realise.

After a year of being politicised a little bit better,

you got more hesitations on what such a declaration really meant.

But the first impression is your age, your address,

grandparents from Jewish origin?

No. OK.

See, it is so…

It was a process, step by step,

the process of infiltration of this Nazism in the society was there.

(narrator) When the identity cards were issued,

the Jews found theirs were stamped with a J, Jude, Jew.

Terrible. That's the first time they marked you.

You had the identity card, you had to carry it with you,

and so special was about a J in it.

And then you felt for the first time the difference.

You were marked because anybody could ask for the card

and… and then the J was in it.

It was the first really alarming signal we got in our house.

(narrator) In Poland, in September 1940, the Jews were uprooted again.

Deportation overseas was now impossible.

Hans Frank was told to prepare for another big influx.

He ordered that all Jews would have to be concentrated,

packed into closed ghettos.

In each Polish city, a dilapidated area was turned into a Jewish compound.

Frank protested to Hitler that this could only be a transitional measure.

He had no more room.

There must be a final solution of the Jewish problem

based on the expectation that they must disappear.

Walling off even one square mile of a city like Warsaw was not easy.

Tram routes, for instance, could not be diverted.

They continued to run through middle of the ghetto,

with a bridge built over for the Jews to cross by.

In Warsaw, an area which had housed 25,000 people now held half a million.

(translator) There were only two water pits in the ghetto.

The ghetto was small.

When they brought us into the ghetto,

they put three families with children into one room.

In one room, three families with children.

We never slept.

(narrator) When Frank took over in Poland,

he had ordered the Jews to elect their own councils.

Jewish community leaders hoped that by serving on the councils

they might mitigate the worst effects of German rule.

They would transmit German instructions and organise a supply of labour.

In return they would be allowed to arrange relief work,

distribute rations, reopen hospitals.

But the Germans made them personally responsible

for seeing that Nazi orders were carried out.

Well-intentioned men found themselves trapped.

They had become the authority running the ghetto on behalf of the Nazis.

The councils recruited a Jewish police force.

They were to supervise sanitary arrangements, enforce price control.

But in time they too found they had to work direct to the Germans.

(man speaking Yiddish)

(translator) As Father had a higher education,

he tried for and got a post in the police force.

Soon he was put through a course

and became an officer in the Jewish police force.

Not long had passed, just a month or five weeks,

and Father realised what his job in fact was

as an officer in the Jewish police force.

He couldn't accept it.

He'd previously innocently thought that it was a matter of enforcing order,

keeping order in the good and pure sense of the thing.

But he saw that life in the ghetto was the life of animals, an animal life,

and his job was reduced to the oppression of the people.

This is why he handed in his resignation.

(narrator) The death penalty was introduced

for the most trivial offences.

Anyone found outside the walls of the ghetto was hanged,

while the rest were paraded to watch.

Ghetto rations were less than prison rations,

the food condemned as “unfit for human consumption”.

Starving children begged, risked their lives to smuggle in anything to eat.

It says something about the mentality of the Nazis

that they filmed the life of the ghettos in such detail,

partly for the record,

mostly for propaganda, to kill sympathy for the Jews.

With the right commentary and skilled editing,

the films would show the Jews as lazy, mercenary, evil,

naturally dirty and disease-ridden,

to be isolated for others' good.

“Jews, lice, typhus” was the slogan.

The films were never completed.

Perhaps someone realised they might have the opposite effect

to what was intended.

(speaking Yiddish)

(translator) I remember that my younger sister, Adela,

always asked my mother for something to eat.

She always said, “Bread, bread, bread.” And Mother had nothing to give her.

I somehow understood the situation and accepted it,

but my sister was three years younger, she was eight years old.

She didn't want to accept this because she didn't understand it.

She always shouted, “Bread, bread, bread, food!” and there was none.

(narrator) After one year, one person in ten in the ghettos

was dead of disease and starvation.

But Hans Frank still insisted that ghettos were a transitional measure.

He still demanded a final solution. The Jews must disappear.

June 22 1941.

Hitler attacked Russia.

This was the political and biological showdown

that Nazi philosophy decreed was inevitable.

The struggle to determine the future course of world history.

“The fight will be very different from the fight in the west,”

Hitler warned his generals.

The rapid advance of the first few weeks and the millions of Russian prisoners

all seemed to confirm the Nazi claim

that the Communist system was corrupt and ready for collapse,

that the German fighting man really was superior to the subhuman Slav.

Himmler told his SS officers, “This is an annihilation war,

waged by Germany as the seed core of the Teutonic race

against the subhuman enemies of the entire world.”

“We are more valuable than the others who surpass us in numbers.”

“We are more valuable because our blood enables us

to invent more than others, to lead people better than others.”

“It is here in the East that the decision lies.”

“Here must the Russian enemy,

this people numbering 200 million, be destroyed,

and one by one, they must be made to bleed to death.”

Rosenberg, a leading Nazi race theorist,

was appointed by Hitler Minister of the Occupied Eastern Territories.

The plan, to break up the Soviet Union

into separate racial reserves controlled by Germans.

(newsreel in German) …Alfred Rosenberg in the Eastern Territories.

Rosenberg was welcomed in Riga by the Gau Leader of the Eastern Territories.

(narrator) The occupied Eastern Territories

were to be treated as colonies,

settled not only by Germans, but by Dutchmen, Scandinavians

and, after the war, by the British.

These settlers would exploit the natives as cheap, subject labour.

Slav families had no rights.

They could be separated, moved, put to work, as the Germans chose.

Their children would not be educated.

The most they would need to know was the meaning of the traffic signs,

the name of the capital of the Reich and a few words in German.

They were to be kept in subjection by a ruthless resettlement policy,

their rations reduced to below subsistence level.

Hitler said he would undo “centuries of mistaken humanitarianism”.

On construction projects, in factories, on the farms,

Slavs were to be serfs in a new feudal system.

The SS would be the new Teutonic Knights.

After the war they would rule the new empire from armed forts,

in Himmler's vision, drinking the milk of the wild mare of the Steppes,

siring pure-blooded children.

The Nazis felt no need to treat

the millions of Russian prisoners as human beings.

Penned into makeshift compounds like animals,

it was a matter of indifference if they died.

To Hitler, the war against the Soviet Union

was a racial and ideological struggle to the death.

In Russia there were millions of Jews.

During the planning of the Russian campaign,

he had come to a fateful decision.

Pressure for a final solution continued.

The Jews had to be got rid of.

Use the cover of war to kill them.

(speaking German)

(translator) We found a round figure of three million Jews in Poland.

And then immediately after that came the Russian campaign

and we found another five million Jews in Russia.

How on earth could we manage to emigrate this eight million

by using long and tiresome official methods

if we could not, as was planned, somehow or other after the war,

organise a general mass protected and organised emigration to Madagascar?

We had conquered France, after all,

and we could have compensated France adequately

from our other colonial possessions, so we could have used Madagascar.

The island was big enough to accommodate such a number of Jews.

But in the war we were cut off.

We had no other choice.

(narrator) Himmler agreed. The logical solution was to kill the Jews.

Hitler gave him carefully worded orders.

He was to carry out certain special tasks

stemming from the necessity finally to settle the conflict

between two opposing political systems.

Himmler ordered the SS to set up action squads, Einsatzgruppen,

trained in mass shooting techniques.

(gunshot)

They could kill up to 100,000 a month.

Himmler's deputy, Heydrich, briefed them personally.

“Judaism in the East was the source of Bolshevism

and must therefore be wiped out.”

The justification was that they were stamping out fanatical Communists,

the cover that they were engaged in anti-partisan operations.

The killing had to be kept secret.

The Nazis knew that in spite of the years of racial education,

their people wouldn't see the biological necessity

to kill unarmed men, women and children.

Rivka Yosilevska was in the ghetto at Pinsk in the Ukraine.

A murder squad arrived there in October 1942.

(speaking Ukrainian)

(translator) We went out into the yard.

We heard noises, people speaking very loudly.

There were many Germans in the ghetto, many Germans.

“What is going on? What can it be?”

Everyone thought that they're probably going to take us to work, all of us.

I took some things and dressed my daughter.

She was five years old. I dressed her in her good dress.

She said, “Mummy, why are you dressing me in that dress?”

“Why, it's a Sabbath dress. Don't put it on me.”

“I don't want to put on the Sabbath dress.”

Two lorries arrived and they opened the gate.

They told us to get on the lorries, we should get on the lorries.

Those who were strong enough climbed on the lorry.

Those who hadn't the strength were thrown like geese on the lorry.

The lorry was filled. Then a second lorry came.

Again this was filled and then they went on their way.

We lived at the end of the ghetto and so were left last.

We were one of the last.

We arrived at the spot.

What a horrible picture.

What my eyes saw.

The two lorries, the people who had already arrived, were all naked.

There was an order to undress,

to get off the lorries and leave the clothes there, to go to the side.

There they lined them up in fours, and that's how they would kill.

This was on a hill, just a hill, and the people fell.

When I arrived on the spot, I wanted to see what was happening.

I stood on the hill and saw that it was time, this was our end.

They're shooting. People are already lying dead.

My daughter was in my arms the whole time.

I found the strength to carry her.

She was so close to me that I couldn't undress.

She wouldn't let me. She said, “Let's run away. They're killing us.”

“Why should we stand here?”

She pushed me back. Back she pushed me.

“Why do people stand here and not run away? Why do they stand?”

I couldn't really speak.

I think I told her, “Where are we going to run to?”

Some people did try to escape, but they didn't let them.

There were many Germans guarding us. There were many Germans.

Not only Germans, they even got the non-Jews from the towns together

to make sure that we shouldn't escape.

They were like a sort of police force.

OK, we undressed. There was no alternative.

My father didn't want to undress.

He was beaten terribly until he fell down with his clothes on.

They started taking his clothes off by force.

My mother started shouting.

We started begging him to take off his clothes so that he wouldn't be beaten.

In the end they tore his clothes off.

Because of him they beat us all,

as he'd been stubborn and refused to take off his clothes.

This is how it went till our turn came.

We were about 500 people.

Our turn came.

I came up and saw with my own eyes how my father went off,

how my mother is shot, how my sisters are shot.

My sister was very pretty, absolutely beautiful.

The German looked into her eyes and she pleaded with him to let her go.

“Don't kill me. Just let me live.”

Nothing helped. She was shot.

Then I, with my daughter in my arms, came up.

He told me to put her down.

I wanted to, but she wouldn't let me.

She hid her head so as not to see what was being done with her.

I remember he took her by force, stood her up.

He shot or didn't shoot.

I neither saw nor heard.

Then he shot me. I stood there and heard a shot.

Didn't touch me.

Then again a shot.

I fell.

He shot everyone here, from behind.

He didn't shoot everyone together.

Each German killed a person in turn from behind, here.

I fell. I'm finished.

I am lying in the pit and I feel that I do feel something.

I didn't believe, I couldn't believe that I'm alive.

I thought I was dead and that a dead person could feel something.

But it wasn't like that.

A few minutes later I felt I was being stifled, that everything felt heavy.

I was suffocating.

Maybe I can help myself somehow.

Maybe I can lift something, an arm or a leg. But how?

There were corpses in piles on top of me, and more and more all the time.

But when a person feels that he is suffocating and wants to help himself,

I started twisting around.

There were many people there who were probably injured

and they also helped me to get up.

So it was easier for me to get up.

I felt that I could lift an arm, that I could rise a little.

I started twisting in this direction and in that and tried not to suffocate,

as I was lying in a pit of blood, a pit full of blood.

This is how I lay the whole night, under corpses. I couldn't get out.

When morning came, the corpses had settled.

It was easier for me to lift myself up a little.

I found some strength inside me.

I didn't know where I found the strength to get out.

I knew nothing. I began to crawl on all fours.

(narrator) Rivka Yosilevska managed to crawl away from the pit.

A peasant found her, nursed her wounds.

She spent the rest of the war in hiding.

The shootings deprived the Germans of labour.

Many of the Jews rounded up were skilled workers

who could be used in armament factories.

There was a conflict of aims.

Government officials concerned with war production

argued that the needs of the war effort must come first.

Even the Einsatz groups reported that sometimes

“It is not always possible in the present situation

of acute labour shortage

to avoid sparing the lives of Jewish manual workers temporarily.”

Himmler said yes to the use of Jews as labour,

but only if it would not interfere with the progress of the final solution.

The overriding priority was to use the opportunity provided by the war

to get rid of the Jews once and for all.