All language subtitles for World at War e30 The Final Solution; Part 1.en

(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.