Original subtitles

Himmler asked to see a shooting operation for himself.

On an inspection of the SS Operations Centre at Minsk in White Russia,

100 prisoners were selected from the compound for a demonstration.

Wolff, by now a general and Himmler's liaison officer

at Hitler's headquarters,

was one of the inspection party.

(speaking German)

(translator) As far as I can remember, it was at the end of August,

so a little more than two months after the Russian campaign began,

when Hitler ordered me to accompany Himmler to the occupied territory,

to Minsk in White Russia.

I did this, and during it,

contrary to all my expectations or any advance knowledge,

I was forced by Himmler to watch an execution.

He said, “You are fortunate enough to be in the very closest circle.”

“You're at all meals and so on. You're at the military planning meetings.”

“You must also learn what we have to expect from our troops.”

There an open grave had been dug

and they had to jump into this and lie face downwards,

and sometimes when one or two rows had already been shot,

they had to lie on top of the people who had already been shot

and then they were shot from the edge of the grave.

Himmler had never seen dead people before

and in his curiosity he stood right up at the edge of this open grave,

a sort of triangular hole,

and was looking in.

While he was looking in, Himmler had the deserved bad luck

that from one or other of the people who had been shot in the head

he got a splash of brains on his coat,

and I think it also splashed into his face,

and he went very green and pale.

He wasn't actually sick, but he was heaving, turned round and swayed

and then I had to jump forward and hold him steady

and then I led him away from the grave.

(Wolff speaking German)

(translator) After the shooting was over

Himmler gathered the shooting squad in a semi-circle around him

and standing up in his car,

so that he would be a little higher and be able to see the whole unit,

he made a speech.

He had seen for himself how hard the task

which they had to fulfil for Germany in the occupied areas was,

but however terrible it all might be, even for him as a mere spectator,

and how much worse it must be for them,

the people who had to carry it out, he could not see any way round it.

He must be hard and stand firm.

He could not relieve them of this duty. He could not spare them.

In the interests of the Reich, in this hopefully thousand-year Reich,

in its first decisive great war after the takeover of power,

they must do their duty, however hard it might seem.

He appealed to their sense of patriotism

and their readiness to make sacrifices.

Well, yes, and then he drove off.

And he left this… this police unit to sort out the future for themselves,

to see if and how far they could come to terms with this within themselves,

because for some it was a shock which lasted their whole lives.

(narrator) The strain of shooting defenceless people day after day

told even on specially trained SS men.

But they knew that if they disobeyed orders, they would be shot too.

So they anaesthetised themselves with drink

or adjusted, discovering a perverted pleasure in the work.

They took snapshots of themselves like hunters with their kill

and relaxed, enjoying high pay,

safety from the front and extended home leave.

So many photographs began to circulate

that orders were issued forbidding them

as a subversion of decency and discipline.

Himmler needed a cleaner, more impersonal way of killing people.

His mind went back to Hitler's euthanasia order.

Since 1939, 50,000 mental defectives and incurably insane had been killed,

purifying the race of weak genes.

The victims had been brought to the Hadamar Institute and similar places.

They had been disposed of in specially constructed gas chambers,

disguised as showers to allay their suspicions.

This system could be developed to deal with the Jews.

The eventual outcome

was the Auschwitz combined crematorium and gas chamber—

a processing unit designed to dispose of 2,000 bodies per 12-hour shift.

A tall chimney to provide draught for five three-door furnaces

supplied under contract by Topf and Company of Erfurt.

Their specification pointed to the ingenious use of the body fat as fuel.

Corpse cellar equipment,

metal fittings and gas-proof doors with rubber surround

and observation port of double 8mm glass, type 100/192,

was by German Armaments Incorporated.

Architect, Dr Heinz Kammler of the SS Economic and Administrative Office.

The killing agent was a commercial pesticide, Zyklon B,

supplied by the German Vermin Combating Corporation.

The cans contained pellets

which, shaken through a roof grille into the corpse cellar,

gave off hydrogen cyanide—

prussic acid gas.

Since the start of the war,

concentration camps modelled on the Dachau camp

had been built all over occupied Europe.

At the height of his power, Himmler controlled 20 full concentration camps

and 900 subsidiary labour camps.

They were part of his massive apparatus for subduing the conquered populations.

They were run by the SS and shrouded in secrecy and dread—

just what he needed for an efficient mass-murder programme.

In the east, close to where the largest concentrations of Jews already lived,

new camps were built and old ones enlarged

to become extermination plants.

Jews who were fit enough would be put to work before they died.

The camps were sited on railway routes.

The largest complex of all was built

in the industrial town of Osvencim—Auschwitz—

in the part of Poland incorporated into Germany,

chosen because it was on the main Cracow-to-Vienna railway line.

“Work sets you free.”

The old Dachau motto was posted above the gates.

The camp commandant was an SS major trained at Dachau, Rudolf Höss.

His father had intended him for the priesthood,

but he had become involved in the Nazi Party

and gravitated naturally to the SS.

Ordered by Himmler to create

“the greatest extermination centre of all time”, he asked no questions.

He simply moved his wife and family to Auschwitz and got on with the job.

3,000 SS men, mostly unfit for the front,

were posted in as guards and staff.

Himmler twice visited Auschwitz to push things on.

Höss complained of late delivery of materials

and the poor quality of the staff.

The problem was disagreement among the Nazis leadership about priorities.

Which came first, killing the Jews or winning the war?

The final solution was as big an undertaking as a major campaign.

The camp system had to be as self-supporting as possible.

Most of the labour was done by prisoners.

As to shortages of guards, Himmler told Höss briskly, “Use more dogs.”

What Himmler was most anxious to know about was the new killing plant.

There would be six crematorium buildings away from the main camps.

They would be concealed in woods

or screened from the inmate compounds by sapling trees.

But these also were behind schedule, dogged by late delivery of equipment.

However, Höss had carried out experiments with Zyklon B

in existing buildings

and had squads trained to burn bodies in open pits.

So although Himmler couldn't watch the new apparatus in operation,

he did watch a demonstration of the new killing method.

Höss noted that he seemed unmoved.

While all this had been going on,

Heydrich, in his role as head of Himmler's security service,

had been told to plan how to get the Jews

from their homes to the gas chambers.

This was on top of his duties as Nazi boss of Czechoslovakia.

His task in the final solution

really depended on getting everyone to cooperate.

Police, Foreign Office, SS departments,

legal authorities controlling more than 12 countries would be involved

if the millions of Jews were to be removed in orderly rotation

and transported across Europe to arrive on schedule at killing centres.

In January 1942 Heydrich called a conference

of representatives of the various ministries involved

at Wannsee, near Berlin.

He had been put in charge, he told the meeting,

of preparations for the final solution of the Jewish problem in Europe.

All central agencies were to join together

to make parallel their lines of action.

He outlined the new plan.

Totals of Jews in each country had now been drawn up.

Europe would be systematically combed from west to east.

The cover to be used in all countries

was the Jews were being resettled for labour in the east.

The total to be dealt with was over 11 million.

The permanent administrator for the plan was Adolf Eichmann.

He kept the minutes.

Divergent views, Eichmann recorded, were soon reconciled.

Cognac was served.

(translation) Their homeland is Asia…

(narrator) A film, The Eternal Jew,

was distributed in every town in occupied Western Europe,

where Jews had so far been left relatively undisturbed.

Only one worry—

what if non-Jews took pity on their Jewish neighbours

and tried to stop them being deported? Propaganda could help.

(translation) …as well as Africa and the Far East.

Wherever rats appear they bring destruction.

They ruin human goods and food,

thus spreading diseases

like the plague, leprosy, typhoid, cholera, dysentery.

They are deceitful, cowardly and cruel and usually appear in big droves.

Amongst animals they represent the element

of malicious destruction underground,

no different from the Jews amongst people.

(narrator) The Eternal Jew portrayed the Eastern Jew as vermin,

as a dangerous parasite.

It was only his dress that made the assimilated Western Jew seem different.

(translation) …and now in Western European attire,

ready to sneak into Western civilisation.

Of course these Ghetto Jews don't know yet

how to comport themselves in clean European suits.

(narrator) In 1942 Jews in Western countries

were ordered to sew on an identifying yellow star.

The Nazis needed to mark the Jews out from their neighbours.

It would make non-Jews less likely to interfere when Jews were deported.

In Holland the Germans threatened six months' imprisonment

for any Jew not wearing the star within five days.

To speed things up, the Jewish Council agreed to issue stars themselves.

It was to become a familiar pattern.

Jewish Councils, trying to save their community from German threats,

themselves administered the Nazis' anti-Jewish measures.

The pressure was on to get Jews to come forward

for “resettlement and labour in the East”.

The Germans took hostages.

The Council had to see that the full quota reported for the transports.

In Denmark, resistance and people combined in rescue operations.

In Italy and Bulgaria officials prevaricated.

But almost everywhere there was too little concerted opposition

when Jews were made to report for deportation.

People either didn't care enough

or were effectively intimidated by Gestapo and SS.

“All roads lead to Westerbork,”

Eichmann's man in Amsterdam told the Jews he shoved onto transports.

Each country in Western Europe had a Westerbork—

a transit camp run on the same lines as the concentration camps.

The trains were met by FK— flying columns—

squads of inmates whose job was to sort out the luggage and unloading.

In Westerbork, as throughout the system,

the SS guarded, supervised, gave the orders,

but the inmates were made responsible for day-to-day routine.

Westerbork had a Jewish camp police force and its own Jewish Council.

Public-spirited Jews felt it better to take some responsibility

than leave everyone totally to the mercy of the SS.

In two and a half years, 100,000 people passed through Westerbork alone,

supervised by a minimum number of Germans.

New arrivals were entered in the central registry by Jewish clerks.

Then the labour office, also run by inmates, allotted them jobs.

It might be days or months before they were sent on

to “the new territories in the East”.

The principal work in Westerbork

was reclaiming the usable metal from exhausted electric batteries.

In spite of the conditions in the camps, people dreaded the day

when they would be separated from their families and moved.

They feared the unknown destination from which no one returned.

(woman) We stayed together for four weeks,

then my parents and youngest brother had to leave us on the transport.

I should have gone with them,

but it was not allowed, because I had roodvonk.

I don't know. Scarlet fever, I had that.

That was one of the dirty things of the Germans.

When you were sick you couldn't go to the gas chamber.

No, first you had to recover.

They gave you the illusion nothing happened,

because they don't send you on a transport when you're sick. I had to…

My brother, he came to say goodbye to me and I was thinking,

“For heaven's sake, he can't go, not in these poor clothes.”

He was small, you see.

I gave him one of my jackets

and I was thinking, “It's closing the other way around, but who cares?”

I gave him a pair of my boots.

And…

I looked at him when he walked away from the barrack, at his back,

and from the back he looked like me

and I was sure I'd never see him again.

I was sure.

(narrator) Departure day from Westerbork was Tuesday.

The camp leaders had to prepare a list of names

to meet the number the Germans required, usually about a thousand.

At 7am those selected for the transport formed up in silence,

under the supervision of the SS and FK.

If anyone was missing, 50 extra people were rounded up at random

and shoved onto the transport.

The journey would last up to a week or more.

To each cattle truck, some straw and one lavatory bucket.

At 11 o'clock sharp the whistle blew and the train pulled out.

There were no hitches, no strikes,

no sabotage or Allied bombing.

As Eichmann said, the trains ran like a dream.

All over Europe the SS and police rounded up the Jews.

People knew that the alternative to going quietly was brutal violence.

To be caught in hiding meant punishment

and also arrest and almost certain death for anyone who had helped.

Many Jews reasoned that it was better, more honourable,

to report quietly when their turn came.

At the Wannsee Conference

the representative of the governor general of Poland

had said that he had only one favour to ask—

that the Jewish question within his territory

be solved as rapidly as possible.

There were 2.5 million people in the Polish ghettos.

Rations were so small that people were starving.

The Jewish Council organised soup kitchens,

but thousands continued to die.

Naked corpses, their clothes taken by others to keep themselves warm,

lay in the streets waiting for the death cart's morning round.

Rations were lowered still further.

There would be no trouble getting volunteers for resettlement

when the schedule called for the ghettos to be cleared.

(translator) There was no strength left for suffering.

We couldn't continue like that.

Whatever it would be, we imagined that it couldn't be a worse place,

it couldn't be worse.

Everyone who volunteered, that is came of his own free will

to be sent out of the ghetto, wherever it might be,

got bread.

He also got a little margarine and drink and also some jam.

We decided to show up of our own free will.

(narrator) Lured by the promise of food,

people scrambled for the chance to get out.

They even paid their own railway fares.

From the Warsaw ghetto alone in ten weeks from July to October 1942,

310,000 people left.

They were loaded onto guarded, sealed trains,

up to 6,000 people to a trainload,

100 to a truck.

(man speaking Yiddish)

(translator) The minute we got in and they closed it on us with a bolt,

terrible cries began inside.

In Polish, Yiddish, German, pleading requests.

“There's no air and we're suffocating, suffocating, suffocating.”

It was a winding route with long stops

and unfortunately the train stopped, when it stopped,

very far from any source of water,

so that after about 24 hours there was not one drop of water.

Now, the children started to be thirsty.

People had to, so to say, perform the normal physiological functions

like voiding and things like that.

Now, the whole wagon became suddenly a mess.

There was a fight for the one and only bucket,

which was not allowed to be emptied.

The parents were suddenly obsessed by quietening down the children.

“Just through the journey. Somehow we'll survive the journey.”

“The children shouldn't suffer too much.”

“The old people shouldn't suffer too much.”

People stopped to be preoccupied either with the past or with the future,

but with surviving the journey.

Here suddenly you had a hell on wheels.

(man speaking Yiddish)

(translator) The first to faint were children, old men and women.

They all fell down like flies, exactly like flies.

Father was standing next to me.

All of a sudden I see that he is falling,

he's collapsed.

I cried, “Father, Father!”

He no longer heard me. He'd fainted.

He had fainted and I, with all my strength, as much strength as I had,

tried to lift him up and bring him to.

But I didn't succeed.

Then I found a piece of wood on the floor of the wagon.

I got up and began to beat people with the piece of wood.

It was a club or something.

I began to beat the people who were standing round me in the wagon

so that they'd make room for Father, so that Father could get up.

I didn't care about the suffering of others, their cries, their threats,

only that Father should get up so that I shouldn't be left alone.

(narrator) The trains were chartered from the state railways by the SS

and operated by ordinary railway men.

Auschwitz was a busy junction.

It handled normal goods, military and passenger trains

as well as the Jewish transports.

Willi Hilse was a clerk in the state railways,

a protected occupation which exempted him from military service.

In 1942 he was ordered to take over

as deputy manager of the goods depot at Auschwitz.

(speaking German)

(translator) As a result of the increasing traffic

the man in charge down there at the time

could no longer keep up with all the work that was involved.

He first of all asked me a question,

whether I knew that there was a concentration camp here.

I had to answer his question in the negative, because I had no idea.

Now, in the course of conversation he said to me,

“Now look in front of you, look behind you, look to your right, to your left.”

“You are standing in the middle of the concentration camp Auschwitz.”

Then I asked him a question,

because I noticed a sweetish smell about the place.

What was it?

And he gave me the answer,

“Those are the dead who are burned here in Auschwitz.”

(speaking German)

(translator) Whether they were ordinary trains or transports,

they all had to come through the station Auschwitz.

The trains were just uncoupled in Auschwitz. They got another engine.

Now they had to do some shunting through the station to a terminal point.

Then they came onto the points connecting with the branch line

to the extermination camp.

For a while I had the job of receiving the waybills.

The bills of freight went to an accounts department

in the German state railway so they could settle up with the Waffen SS.

These were the two things

by which we could immediately see that this was a horror train.

(narrator) The men could see and hear the passengers in the transports.

(speaking German)

(translator) The train was by the depot and I saw a young woman

was holding a small child in her arms and kept on crying out for water.

So I filled a jug with water, and as I had my uniform on

and was recognisable as a railway man, I went over

and was going to hand the woman the jug through the ventilation flap.

I hadn't even got to the wagon, I was standing on the next track,

but already an SS man came up to me and asked me what I wanted.

So I said to him I wanted to give the water to the woman and child.

His answer was, “If you don't get out of here immediately I'll shoot you.”

So I threw the jug of water at the SS man's feet

and said, “May the Lord God punish you for this!”

If we, as railway men in Auschwitz,

had undertaken anything at all against the Waffen SS or the camp,

then I can tell you now, 100 per cent certain,

that in no time at all we should have landed up in the camp ourselves.

(man speaking Polish)

(translator) I looked out through the lattice.

I pulled myself up and looked out.

All of a sudden I saw strange people standing there in strange clothes.

Their clothes were like pyjamas with stripes.

They were speaking in lots of different languages.

They shouted. They didn't speak, they shouted.

Among other languages they also shouted in Polish.

When I heard them speaking Polish I was happy.

I shouted through the lattice of the wagon—the wagon was still closed—

“Hello? Hello?” in Polish.

“Hello? Hello, sirs!”

“What is it here? What is it here?”

I remember that no one even paid any attention to me.

There were hundreds of thousands of people there.

But I noticed the whole time that they were laughing, those people.

I didn't know what they were, what that uniform was, what their job was.

I knew nothing.

(narrator) The strange people in striped uniform

were prisoners of the baggage squad.

They made sure there was no evidence of the previous transport

when the next one arrived.

At Auschwitz and the other camps,

Jewish prisoners were forced to work on every stage of the process.

Rudolf Vrba was put into one of these baggage squads.

I was in the squad of the prisoners who cleared up the mess

which remained when the people were liquidated.

It had to be spot clean.

The transports were sometimes coming and going at one- or two-hour intervals,

and the new transport was always coming to a spot-clean platform,

without any trace of there ever being transport before.

These transports were coming for two years to Auschwitz,

sometimes five a day, sometimes two a day,

sometimes one a day, sometimes a day without transport,

sometimes 16 a day,

and an average transport contained 3,000 people.

(speaking Yiddish)

(translator) The wagon was opened. They undid the bolt.

The moment it was open there was a gust of fresh air. It was good.

We began to throw out the corpses of the dead.

But all of a sudden there were voices.

“Juden, raus, raus, raus!”

“Schnell, schnell, schnell!”

“Quick, quick! Out, out, out!”

But I was afraid then for the first time.

You know why? There were flames until the sky ended.

A strange smell,

a smell I remember from home when my mother burns on Friday a chicken.

The SS knew how many transports were coming this day.

Now, when there was only one transport,

they knew they had got all the time.

It was much more interesting there than to sit in the barracks,

when they were in service and there was no free.

So they might grant to you the gentle technique with humour.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we are sorry for the inconvenience

which was caused by some idiot who organised this journey.”

“We had already one case like this. We are awfully sorry.”

“Look at this mess. How do they treat people?”

“Would you get out? Please don't get in touch with those criminals.”

“They are here only for taking your luggage,

and if you have got unmarked luggage

and you are afraid that it might get lost, just take it with you.”

“But if you have got names on it,

your labels on your luggage and so on, just don't worry.”

“We are keeping a good eye

that none of those criminals can take anything away,

and our German honesty,

about which I hope you have got no doubt,

is a guarantee that all your property will be given to you.”

“Now, the whole thing is to make the whole procedure…”

“Please don't make us any troubles, so that we can give you water

and allow the basic sanitary conditions

to be restored after this dismal journey,”

looking around the excrements and urine and blood around the wagon,

and pretending that they don't realise, quite,

but a sort of human understanding.

There's a lot of humour, you know,

and, “Please just come out.”

Well, the gentle technique or the brutal technique had one objective.

It was not a question of gentle technique or brutal technique.

It was a question that the people who arrived

had to arrive into the gas chamber as soon as possible

and without a hitch.

(narrator) The next step was to sort the arrivals out.

(translator) They lined up in two lines.

Multitudes of men and older children on one side

and women and small children on the other.

(narrator) The aim was to select who would be gassed immediately

and who would be kept for a while to work.

The selection was done by teams of SS doctors and medical orderlies.

The number who survived depended on how many people were needed

for the camp's labour battalions.

The doctors made a cursory check.

All those judged healthy enough for use for work they sent to one side.

The rest they sent to the other.

The arrivals, dazed from the hideous journey,

didn't understand what was going on.

In any case they were in no state to argue.

Any potential troublemaker was quickly taken out of sight and shot.

While most people were unaware what was happening,

some sensed that something was ominously wrong.

(woman) I was scared like a dog was scared in a burning house.

I simply… A very primitive scared feeling I had.

They said… I remember there was a man from Holland

and he said between his teeth, “No, no sick people, no sick people.”

(narrator) The sick, the old, the lame,

pregnant women, mothers and small children, they were sent to the left.

They had been chosen for gassing.

(speaking Yiddish)

(translator) I saw two people walking towards me speaking Polish.

I was very happy.

As far as I remember I ran out of the line, out of my line,

and walked over to one of them and said to him in Polish, “Hello, sir.”

“Tell me, what is it here? Where have I come to?”

His answer was that he broke out laughing.

He patted my shoulder and said to me in Polish,

“My son, my son, you have come to the heaven commando.”

That's how he said it, in Polish.

I didn't know what it was.

So he said to me, “Turn round. I'll show you something.”

I turned round.

He pointed to the far distance where the smoke was rising,

thick smoke, very far away.

He said to me, “See, see that smoke?”

“There's a chimney there and you will go out through that chimney.”

That's all. I wasn't particularly impressed by the things he told me,

because I thought… I felt sure he was kidding. A joke.

(narrator) A lorry took the people to wait their turn in the woods

outside the gas chamber.

They'd been told that before entering the camp

they had to be de-loused and take a shower.

They may have been reassured to see an ambulance standing there.

They couldn't know that it contained tins of Zyklon B.

SS Corporal Richard Böck was in the transport section at Auschwitz.

His friend Höblinger was a driver on the roster

for the ambulance that carried the tins of Zyklon B.

One evening Böck was taken to watch one of the actions.

(speaking German)

(translator) He parked his ambulance.

I sat in it pretending to be the co-driver.

Then they drove them all off in a lorry to bunker one,

and there were four big halls.

The halls didn't have any proper roof, just a sloping top.

We got out of the ambulance.

At first Höblinger didn't have anything to do.

Then we went into the hall and the so-called prisoners, the new arrivals,

had to get undressed.

Then the order came, “Prepare for disinfection.”

There were enormous piles of clothing in there.

There was a board running round so that the piles didn't all collapse.

The new arrivals, Dutch people,

they had to stand on top of this great heap of clothes and get undressed.

Lots of them hid their children under the clothes and covered them up.

Some stood with the clothes pulled up round their legs. It was very cold.

It was the beginning of winter.

Well, then they shouted, “Get ready!” and they all went out.

Then they had to run, naked,

approximately 20 yards from the hall across to bunker one.

There were two doors there standing open.

They went in. When a certain number had gone inside they shut the doors.

That happened about three times.

Every time Höblinger had to go out to his ambulance

and one of the SS leaders took out a sort of tin and climbed up the ladder.

Then at the top there was a round hole

and he opened a little iron door and held the tin there

and shook it and then he shut the little door again.

Then a fearful screaming started up.

Approximately, I would reckon after about ten minutes it slowly went quiet.

I said to Höblinger, “Can we get nearer when they take them out?”

So we went over a bit closer.

They opened the door. That was the prisoner squad who did that.

Then a blue haze came out,

and I looked in and I saw a pyramid.

They'd all climbed up on top of each other

until the last one stood on the very top, all one on top of the other.

It was a pointed heap. It all came up to a point.

Then the prisoners had to go in and tear it apart. I tell you, all tangled.

One had his arm down by another's foot and round it and back up again

and his fingers were sticking in someone else's eyes, so deep.

They were all so tangled.

They had to tug and pull very hard to disentangle all these people.

We went back to the hall and now it was the turn of the last lot to undress,

the ones who'd managed to hang back a bit all the time.

One woman said something meaning that it was cold, perhaps.

Then I did understand a word, that she wasn't used to this sort of thing,

and I thought, “Dear lady, I believe you're not used to this sort of thing.”

One girl with beautiful black hair, a beautiful girl,

she was crouching there and didn't want to get undressed.

An SS man came and said, “I suppose you don't want to get undressed.”

She tossed her hair back and laughed a little.

He went away and came back with two prisoners

and they literally tore her clothes off her,

then they each grabbed an arm and they dragged her across to bunker one

and pushed her in there.

Then the prisoners had to check where small children had been hidden.

They pulled them out, opened the doors quickly again

and boof, they threw all the children in and slammed the doors.

“I'm going to be sick,” I said. “Oh, my,” I said,

“Karl, I've never seen anything like it in my life. It's absolutely terrible.”

Imagine, when they threw the children in, how the people inside screamed,

because then they realised what was happening.

I said, “Karl, can we leave soon? I can't stand it any more.”

He said, “Yes, I feel like that too, but I must stay

until they have collected all the empty tins

and put them in the ambulance. I have to take them back.”

Höblinger said he didn't like doing this duty at all and he didn't enjoy it.

But he preferred being in the transport section

to being in the guard company.

“But,” he said, “you do get used to anything in time.”

(narrator) Those selected to work before gassing

were reprieved on average only three months,

the normal survival time in Auschwitz.

They too were made to undress and hand over their clothes and belongings.

Then they were taken into a shower—a real one.

They were de-loused, their heads shaved

and numbers tattooed on their arms.

(speaking Yiddish)

(translator) They tattooed the number. There was no longer Shmuel Gogol.

There was only a number: 81491.

The end. I changed into a number.

(speaking Yiddish)

(translator) From that moment on I became a number.

I no longer had a name or a surname.

I became B. B8095.

That's how I was known. They told me if my number is called out,

“Know that it is you.”

They marked us. They gave us a mark in our arm, that was what they did.

I remember that I was thinking… I was trying to get the blood away,

and that was the reason… I took a little ink away,

and that's the reason it's a little… not too good to see.

(narrator) Men and women were separated and issued with uniforms.

Auschwitz had three main camps and 30 subsidiary labour camps.

Up to 100,000 slave labourers, Poles as well as Jews,

worked in them till they died.

Crammed 300 to a block,

fed only a few ounces of coarse bread and thin gruel,

first they had to learn to fight for their own survival.

I saw for the first time real hunger,

because when they gave bread,

the other prisoners, who were a long time already there,

were like lions.

It was an unwritten law. If you are caught red-handed

stealing another prisoner's bread,

he's entitled to kill you on the spot.

Many times he can't kill you on the spot,

but it was considered murder.

It was murder, actually,

because the bread which was issued

was the minimum necessary for survival.

Who didn't have the bread, his chances for survival

were diminished grossly for the next day.

So there was, you know, there was no court,

accusations, lawyers and so on.

The case was usually clear.

Usually the case was that one chap was holding on to his jacket

and the other chap was pulling on it,

and the one chap said, shouted, “He's stealing my bread,”

and that was it.

People from midnight jumped out from their beds

and in no time there was a dead body.

(speaking Polish)

(translator) The worst moments were when one of the trusties boasted

that with one blow he could knock out a man's brains.

It was a dreadful moment.

A second of silence and then the order fell,

“Put your heads out of the bunks.”

And then the thought, “Will he take a liking my head?”

A moment later on the timbers,

blood, fragments of brain.

And again we immediately fell into deep sleep.

For after all, we,

we could go to sleep.

(narrator) Prisoners slept four and more to a bunk

in huts that had originally been designed for horses.

They were of less consequence than animals

their bodies to be used for the diversion of guards

or as raw material for the benefit of the state.

Some were used exactly like laboratory animals.

To test the effects of high-altitude flying they were put in a simulator,

starved of oxygen and put through extremes of decompression.

Himmler boasted his doctors were not “inhibited by Christian prejudices”.

To find out about survival for aircrews shot down in the sea,

they immersed prisoners in freezing water until they were past reviving.

Gypsies were used to test the results of drinking sea water.

Jews were used for testing the mass sterilisation techniques

needed by the Nazis

if they were to keep down the population of subject races.

At the same time they did tests on twins.

Himmler hoped that increasing the number of twin births to German women

was a way of making good the loss of pure racial stock caused by the war.

Doctors also analysed the skull and brains of Jews, Gypsies and Slavs

to try to find physical support for Nazi race theory.

What was left after the people were liquidated wasn't wasted either.

Bones could be ground down for fertiliser,

artificial limbs and spectacle lenses recycled, gold teeth melted down

and human hair packed in bales, used in protective clothing.

Morning and evening, prisoners were made to stand for hours

while the SS checked that they were all there.

During the day they worked in factories or as construction gangs.

Auschwitz was continually expanding.

They built armament factories and a synthetic rubber plant.

Their work was not organised for productivity,

but to inflict the greatest suffering on the prisoners.

They were made to work at the double, propelled by whips.

In the heavy labour gangs, prisoners were dead after only a few days

from exhaustion and beatings.

The camp was supposed to be self-supporting.

At any one time up to 8,000 prisoners were engaged on maintenance.

To survive for any length of time a prisoner had to get a good indoor job,

in the workshops, offices or best, the kitchens.

For this you needed more than luck. You needed a useful skill

or influence with the prisoners who worked in the job allocation office.

A whole subterranean inmate lifestyle developed, based on barter.

(speaking Yiddish)

(translator) I saw a mouth organ in the hands of another prisoner.

I asked him for it. He of course didn't want to give it to me.

He himself didn't play, so he said,

“OK, I can make an agreement with you, buy it.”

The purchase was of course for bread.

He wanted three weeks' ration and I agreed to two weeks' bread ration

and he gave me the mouth organ.

Apart from the regular work they set up an orchestra

and I was put into the orchestra.

(narrator) They had to play at roll calls and public hangings.

Sometimes on Sundays they gave concerts of the accepted German classics.

Miraculously people still managed to play their own music in secret,

to hold services, even to sing.

(speaking Yiddish)

(translator) In the camp we sang all kinds of songs. It's interesting.

Dutch, Greek,

Hungarian, Czech,

Yiddish.

The sad song, which was very much loved by other people as well,

not only Jews, for after all, we all suffered there, all of us,

this was really My Yiddishe Momme.

(♪ “My Yiddishe Momme”)

(narrator) Those who could take no more committed suicide

by running onto the electrified barbed wire that surrounded the compounds.

Others went to the prisoner clerks

and asked to have their names put on the list for the gas chambers.

The SS regularly weeded out

people too weak or ill for further use as labour.

Wandra Marossanyi worked in the camp labour office.

She shared a billet with other roll call clerks.

It was their job to copy the names of prisoners selected for gassing.

(speaking Polish)

(translator) The selection was carried out by the whole camp team

and the roll call clerk, a Slovak woman, assisted.

She wrote down the numbers. In the evening—she lived in our barrack—

there were processions of people to see her.

“Save my mother, sister, cousin, friend and so on.”

She tried, in a human way, according to age

and their ability to survive the camp, to change over these people.

But it was a difficult decision, to send one person to the gas chamber

and to save someone else.

So at that moment, guided only by instinct—

it might have appeared cruel—

we saved those who stood a chance of surviving

and not emotionally because someone was the daughter of someone's mother.

I remember a case when the senior prisoner from barrack 25

helped her own mother onto the lorry to take her to the gas chamber,

for she had no chance of saving her.

Moshe Sonnenshein was a rabbi's son

who was very deeply educated in religious belief,

into the belief that there are things in this world

which are beyond the understanding and will of God.

I remember when we passed 10,000 naked women in a frosty morning,

who were already sorted out, you see, and put on the lorries.

They knew, they were all prisoners already,

and they knew they are now going to the gas chamber, and they were quiet.

Somehow people were accustomed to living in the moment,

with the knowledge that death will come.

But when the motor started,

you know, this noise created a panic among the women.

A terrible noise went up from those lorries, you see,

the death cry of thousands of young women

who were already reduced to skeletons,

and their futile attempts, which they knew by any logic couldn't succeed,

to jump out from the lorries which took them to the gas chambers

which were only perhaps less than a mile away,

and which were already stoked and the…

…fire was coming out from the chimneys.

This meant everything was prepared.

This was the moment when he spoke to his God.

“God, show them your power.”

“This is against you.”

And nothing happened.

Then he said, “There is no God.”

(narrator) The vast majority of the people consumed in the crematoria

were new arrivals.

Exhausted though they were after their journey,

might they have tried to interrupt the process

if they knew what was about to happen to them?

(translator) We wondered whether to tell them where they were going.

The Slovak woman in particular wondered about this,

if they should raise a revolt or something.

After discussions we came to the conclusion that this would not help,

as these people were in no fit state to oppose their fate.

They had to go where they were going

and it was better that they went uninformed.

If somebody went there and said,

“Look, you are going to be gassed,” or something,

the idea of a mother being told by a gangster,

after this terrible journey, that her children are going to be gassed,

was an utterly outrageous idea in her mind,

because after all that she suffered,

here comes a gangster who wants to increase her suffering.

So she is tempted to go immediately to the next officer

and say, “This man says, sir, that my children are going to be gassed.”

And he says, “Madam, do you think we are barbarians?”

(speaking Yiddish)

(translator) We used to say, “Where is the whole world?”

“Where's the United States? Where's Russia?”

“Where are all those countries that could do something to help?”

“Do they know what's happening here in the extermination camps at all?”

(narrator) People did know what was going on.

An industrial complex of camps containing up to 100,000 people,

built on the outskirts of an existing town, cannot be a secret.

In wet weather the odour of burnt human flesh

hung like a pall over the whole area.

Passengers going through the station crowded to look

at the bright lights and blazing chimneys.

Rumours were carried all over Germany.

But what could ordinary people do, even if they cared?

A few, the brave ones, hid Jews.

But even they couldn't overthrow the system. Anyhow, there was a war on.

People had enough problems without worrying about the Jews.

Then what about the Allies who were fighting Nazi tyranny?

Lord Avon, then Anthony Eden,

was foreign secretary in Churchill's cabinet.

There had been only too much evidence of persecution of the Jews

before the war began in Hitlerite Germany.

Then as the war progressed

some horrifying reports began to come out.

At first it was very difficult, naturally, to assess their accuracy

and they were so horrible that it was hard to believe they could be true.

However, by 1942, certainly the latter half of 1942,

the evidence was so extensive one could hardly fail to give it credit.

As a result of that we did get in touch with other governments,

with the United States in particular, and the Russians,

to exchange such information as we'd got and to discuss what we could do.

We decided that one of the things we must do was make a joint statement

in each of our capitals at the same time,

declaring what our information was

and what this horror was that was being perpetrated,

and also making plain our detestation of it

and our determination that those responsible for it

should be punished when the war was over.

And that we got agreement upon after some negotiation,

and it was near the end of 1942

when I made this statement in the House of Commons

with, I must say, a dramatic effect far exceeding anything that I'd expected.

(narrator) But the people in the extermination camps needed action,

now, before it was too late.

The resistance group in Auschwitz couldn't wait until the end of the war.

They got out a letter asking for a camera and film to be smuggled in.

If the Allies knew the full extent of the horror, they must act.

In the Sobibor and Treblinka extermination camps

resistance groups had organised uprisings,

but most prisoners had been killed before they could escape.

The Auschwitz group aimed to wait,

keeping as many people alive in the camp as possible,

until the Allies could help their escape.

From a doorway a prisoner working on building maintenance

managed to take pictures of a squad burning bodies in open pits

in the woods close to one of the smaller gas chambers.

With his camera under his coat,

he tried to take snaps through a buttonhole

of women entering a gas chamber.

He shot mostly trees and sky, but careful processing of one corner

shows naked women walking toward what they believed to be a shower.

Resistance groups appealed over and over again

for air raids on railways, camps and gas chambers.

Now, a difficulty about Auschwitz amongst others

was it was very long range so far as we were concerned,

and certainly until the later stages of the war I should imagine out of range,

certainly for anything in the nature of accurate bombing.

I think there are some Jewish organisations who feel to this day

that it would have been good if we could have bombed Auschwitz.

I don't really know how it could have helped anybody,

even if we could've done it.

You couldn't bomb with that accuracy.

It certainly would have killed a lot of the people in Auschwitz.

Then, of course, it was in enemy territory, in German territory,

and if as a result of our bombing we'd cut communications, say,

and some people had got out although others had been killed,

they would've been in hostile country. Where could they go?

Was there any real hope that they could have escaped?

I hardly can think so.

At any rate we decided against it, and we didn't, as far as I remember,

we didn't even ask Bomber Harris to consider the project.

(narrator) When it was discovered

that there were armaments factories near Auschwitz, a raid was mounted.

It was not a great success.

The railway routes were still not bombed.

One comes back to what after all was the main thing we could do—

to win the war, not disperse our effort more than we absolutely had to.

Only by winning the war

could we hope to save the lives of any unfortunate Jews

who were still survivors from the terrible, unforgivable treatment

to which they were subjected.

(narrator) What about the Jews' own leaders,

the Jewish Councils who selected the people for the transports?

Some resisted.

Some committed suicide.

Some kept on cooperating.

Siegmund Weltlinger worked for the Jewish Council in Berlin

until the last big round-up there in 1943.

Then he went into hiding.

(speaking German)

(translator) If they had not done it,

the Gestapo would've picked up people like a rat catcher and sent them away.

Things would not have been so ordered.

This way they knew about it a few days beforehand,

could settle up their affairs, take the bare necessities with them

and could, as far as they were able, also escape or go underground.

We negotiated continuously,

but it wasn't really negotiation, it was an acceptance of orders.

We were told 500 for the next transport.

Then we could select 500 from our lists.

We got many postcards at first, which were censored, of course.

They all had to write, “Things are going well,

we have work here and the surroundings are pleasant.”

Some of us believed this.

(narrator) The Nazis used all sorts of tricks to reinforce the story

of resettlement in the East.

As late as 1944 they completed a film

called Hitler Has Given the Jews a City.

It was intended to check the rumours about extermination camps

and to satisfy the increasing curiosity

of bodies like the International Red Cross.

(♪ “Pastoral Symphony”—Beethoven)

By the time the film was released, most of the people seen in it

were dead in the gas chambers at Auschwitz.

But this purported to be life in Theresienstadt,

the camp for privileged Jews—

those who had fought for Germany in the First World War,

people of influence, elderly Jews

and members of the Jewish Councils.

As long as Jewish Councils could believe

the resettlement areas were like this, they would encourage people

to turn up for the transports without causing trouble.

(speaking German)

(translator) We said, “Here it is not good either.”

“All sorts of things are happening to you here.”

“There you will not have an easy life, but you can work, you will be fed.”

“They are beautiful territories, above all, Theresienstadt.”

To the old people who were being sent to Theresienstadt I said,

“It was formerly a first-class spa. Fantastic surroundings.”

One old lady said to me, “For all my money which I am handing over,

will I at least get a room with central heating?”

I said, “If they have central heating there, you will certainly get it.”

(narrator) People justifying their own lack of action

have said that the Jews who went docilely to the gas chambers

gassed themselves.

But what could they do?

Friendless in Nazi-occupied Europe,

they boarded the train hoping for the best.

At Auschwitz, it was too late.

To resist they had to be armed, organised, led.

If they were to fight it had to be before the journey,

on their home ground.

The most outstanding act of Jewish resistance was in the Warsaw ghetto.

When early in 1943,

the Nazis tried to deport the 60,000 people who remained there,

the ghetto fought back.

They had heard the stories about extermination and believed them.

SS Major General Stroop ordered photographs to be taken

as his men burned the Jews out building by building.

Armed only with a few pistols and homemade grenades,

they had opposed the Germans for five weeks.

As they were marched away, Stroop completed his report for Himmler.

“We succeeded in catching 56,065 Jews,

whose extermination can be proved.”

The National Committee for Jewish Resistance in Poland said,

“In the final moment before their destruction

the last survivors of the Jewish people in Poland

appealed to the whole world for help.”

“They were not heard.”

“May this last voice from the abyss reach the ears of all humanity.”

By 1944 the largest single untouched pocket of Jews

was the 700,000 in Hungary.

Hitler had complained more than once

that nothing had been done about liquidating them.

So when German troops took over the country in March,

despite the fact the Nazi war machine was at full stretch

and Germany in danger of losing the war,

plans to remove Hungarian Jews got high priority.

By this time everyone knew what “resettlement” meant.

Crowds of Jews besieged the Swiss legation in Budapest

in the forlorn hope they might be able to get out of the country.

Jewish leaders negotiated with the SS, buying time

in the hope that the advancing Russian armies might rescue them.

At the same time, to keep the Germans sweet,

they continued to instruct people to report in an orderly way for the trains.

Again requests to the Allies to bomb the railways were ignored.

Transport after transport rolled smoothly towards Auschwitz.

With the war going against them, the Nazis knew they had to hurry.

Auschwitz had been made ready to handle the Hungarian Jews extra fast.

The railway line had been extended into the camp

almost to the crematoria themselves.

Pits had been dug to burn the bodies the furnaces couldn't handle.

Dov Paisokowic, a Jewish butcher's son,

was on one of the Hungarian transports in 1944.

(speaking Yiddish)

(translator) We arrived at Auschwitz in the morning.

I don't remember the exact day.

They chose 250 of the strongest from the thousand who were there,

those with sufficient strength for work.

250 men were chosen.

Among the 250 were my father and I.

We were given all sorts of work tools and we were taken out of the camp.

The camp had electrified wire around it.

Outside the camp there were SS with dogs and machine guns.

They took us to crematoria three and four.

150 of us were left there. I didn't know then that it was a crematorium.

It was inside a forest.

We didn't see anything.

We didn't yet know that such a thing existed in the world.

Several minutes later Hauptscharführer Hamol arrived.

He was the head of all the crematoria.

He received us very nicely.

He said, “Here you'll have enough to eat,

but you'll have to work very hard.”

The doors suddenly opened to the gas chambers.

People, naked people, started falling out.

We were all frightened.

No one dared to ask what it all was.

We were immediately taken to the other side of this house.

There we saw hell on this earth.

Large piles of dead people and people dragging these dead to a long pit,

about 30 metres in length and 10 metres in width.

There was a huge fire there made with trees.

On the other side fat was being taken out of this pit with a bucket.

We had to begin working immediately.

We had been used to paying our full respects to the dead.

It was a little difficult for us.

Four people would take hold of one dead person,

but the SS came and said, “No, each one of you will take one.”

He showed us how with a simple walking stick.

One was to take it under the chin,

to put the stick on the neck and to drag him to the pit

as one would drag a rag or a piece of wood.

At the pit there were other people who pushed the dead into the pit.

This had to go quickly.

There were those of us who threw themselves, jumped into the pit, alive.

It seemed they thought it better to be burned

instead of working at such a job.

After a week they suddenly took me one night to crematorium one.

I didn't know that there was also a crematorium one.

The conditions in crematorium one were better.

There were places to sleep there, near the ovens.

It was also bigger there.

The whole job was more mechanical.

The gas chamber was very large.

All around there were water installations, as if for showers.

Everyone crowded around these showers.

They still didn't know.

Some who did refused to believe that they were going to be gassed there.

They would put about 2,000, 2,500 people in there.

If there wasn't enough room

the small children would be thrown on top of the people's heads.

They would put them in so tightly, one on top of the other,

that even a needle wouldn't have fallen down

but would have remained on top of the people.

The door would be hermetically sealed.

Above the ground, from above, they would put in two to three tins of Zyklon B.

This was always done by an SS man.

There was always a doctor present at the time of the poisoning.

There was a doctor present.

The doctor would decide when the door could be opened

and the poisonous gases removed from the room.

He would look through a hole in the door

and would see whether there was any movement or shouts.

According to this he would decide.

There were those who started to pray.

Most of the Jews there were Orthodox.

They didn't believe that such a thing could be.

They were willing to die in the name of God,

but revolt was impossible there.

We even told them, “Do something. You're going to die.”

But they didn't believe it.

There were all sorts of reactions from all sorts of people.

There were disabled people. They would take out their war service cards,

showing that they had fought in the First World War,

with all kinds of distinctions and medals which they had from that time.

They shouted, “What's this? We fought for Germany.”

“Now they're going to burn us, kill us? This is impossible.”

“We protest against such a thing!”

But everyone just laughed at them.

They didn't take it seriously, these SS men.

They laughed at the whole thing.

There were invalids whom I helped to undress as they couldn't do it alone.

There were many of us who helped.

I would talk to these people.

There were cases where I saw acquaintances.

My heart wouldn't let me walk over to them to let them recognise me.

No one who hasn't undergone such a thing

can imagine what the will to live is, what a moment of life is.

Every person, without exception, is capable of doing the worst thing

just to live another minute.

Many women miscarried during the poisoning. People hit each other.

People scratched with their nails. There were fingernail marks on people.

Everyone wanted to survive, but it was impossible there.

When the doors opened they took out the poisoned air with an electric fan.

Within a quarter of an hour, it was clear of all poison

and we went in to take out all the corpses.

We took them up by lifts to the ovens.

Near the ovens, upstairs,

there was a man who removed gold teeth and false teeth.

They would shave the women's hair

and look for all sorts of valuables in the most intimate places,

especially on the women.

In the oven it took 15 minutes to burn them.

Only a few ashes were left from all these corpses.

(cheering)

(narrator) On 24 July, 1944,

the Russians liberated Lublin in Eastern Poland.

Just outside the city they found Majdanek concentration camp.

The SS had tried to kill all the inmates

and destroy all trace of the extermination plant.

But a Polish resistance group seized the camp

before they could complete their work.

The gas chambers, disguised as bath and disinfection rooms,

were captured intact.

The crematoria, still strewn with smoking human ashes,

were only slightly damaged.

Close by they found cabbage fields

strewn with human bone-meal fertiliser.

Auschwitz was now less than 170 miles away,

but still the Russians did nothing about bombing it.

Its ovens were busier than ever.

(speaking Yiddish)

(translator) There were two shifts at work

from six in the morning to six at night.

I was present when they brought the Gypsies for burning, for gassing.

It was a terrible sight.

There were cries to the sky.

The cries in the bunker,

in the crematorium, in the gas chamber,

were horrible.

I still wonder today

how God didn't hear these cries.

It's a wonder to me that he didn't hear such a thing.

They were horrible,

the cries to the sky.

(narrator) But now it was ending. The Germans were retreating on all fronts,

trying to destroy the evidence as they went.

The Russians reached Auschwitz on 26 January, 1945.

They found just 2,819 people,

too old or sick to be moved,

people the SS thought would die anyway.

Everyone else had been hurriedly marched back into Germany.

Among the survivors there was a group of children, mostly twins,

pathetic survivors of Himmler's experiments on fertility.

They found store rooms piled high

with things the SS hadn't had time to send back to Germany.

In April 1945

the British and Americans overran the camps in Western Germany.

Of the millions of people who'd been in concentration camps all over Europe,

the Allies arrived in time to save only the last 500,000.

Tens of thousands of these would soon be dead too

of the effects of hunger and disease.

We will never know precisely how many people

the SS and their supporters murdered.

Quarter of a million Gypsies.

Three million Poles.

Over five million Jews and millions more Slavs.

At least 14 million human beings done to death

as a direct result of a racial theory.

Auschwitz has been left as the Russians found it,

a decaying memorial to its victims.

Nobody really knows how many died here.

A million?

Perhaps twice that.

The camp, half destroyed,

the ruined crematoria hurriedly blown up by the SS

and the open hole, once a gas chamber

into which 2,500 were crammed at a time,

all these remain as they were in 1945.

The woods behind the camp

where so many waited their turn to go to the gas chamber are undisturbed,

in deference to their memory.

This land was once a marsh.

But then the SS used it to dump their ashes.

Touch the ground almost anywhere here, as far as the eye can see,

and the hand comes up covered in a fine loam of human bone meal.

The loam goes down to a depth of ten feet.

The ruins of Auschwitz are more than a memorial.

As long as there is political intolerance,

religious bigotry, racial prejudice,

they are a warning, a warning that we all have a responsibility

to see that no one builds another Auschwitz.