Original subtitles

(SINISTER MUSIC PLAYS) (CHILDREN HEARD PLAYING FAINTLY)

These German children are in their garden reenacting a war

that they were far too young to have taken part in.

They were born in 1900 and the First World War had planted

in their hearts the bitter seed of grief and defeat.

Some of them would later become the driving force

of the Nazi party.

And to impose their vision of a renewed Germany,

they would attack the law and pervert its rules.

(ENGLISH SPOKEN OVER GERMAN)

"The law is a weapon that the Nazis turned to in order to take

Germany and its society by storm."

"A weapon for the self defense of the race.

That was the law for the Nazis."

"The individual disappeared as a subject of the law and was

replaced by the community of the people."

(ERUPTION OF CHEERS)

There are thousands of sounds, images and documents.

All the pieces of this puzzle must be assembled to see how law

and justice became the weapons of a crime.

At the heart of Hitler's courts, lawyers and magistrates would play

their part in a pitiless war to bring to heel the judicial system.

Some remarkable destinies shed light on this story.

Lilo Kuznitzky, a committed young lawyer

and pioneer in a profession which was until then reserved for men.

But also Werner Best, lawyer and Nazi.

Johann Reichardt, last in a famous line of Munich executioners.

And Hans Litten, Barrister, Democrat.

In 1931, one affair revealed to everyone that the law was

a vital issue for the Nazis.

(CLICKING OF FILM REEL)

From the Beginning of the 1920s, Adolf Hitler's Nazi party was

defying the courts and the institutions.

In the streets, their militia, the Stormtroopers or the SA

were beating up and murdering opponents

and communists in particular.

(STEADY MARCH DRUMMING)

They openly defied the young Weimar Republic.

Many of them were accused of acts of political violence

and sent for trial.

And over eight years the Nazi party were the object in almost

2,000 court cases.

But the trial that opened on 8 May 1931 stunned the whole of Germany.

For this time Hitler himself was summoned.

(CHEERS AND SHOUTING)

The leader of the extreme right in court.

Excitement gripped the streets of Berlin in the warm spring of 1931.

The instigator of this earthquake was a young barrister,

Hans Litten.

He was 27 and familiar with cases against the Nazis.

For this new trial he had decided to prove that Hitler was

a threat to the system.

Stormtroopers had fired at some communists in a Berlin dance hall.

A run of the mill case.

But this time Hans Litten was determined to make

life difficult for Hitler.

Eight months previously, Hitler had taken an oath before

the Tribunal of the Reich in Leipzig and he had sworn

to respect the law and never have recourse to violence.

For Litten, it was a simple calculation,

prove that Hitler, as head of the Party,

was responsible for the atrocities committed by the SA.

To everyone's astonishment, the young barrister issued

a summons against Hitler and called him as a Witness.

(INTRIGUING OMINOUS MUSIC PLAYS)

In room 664.

Hans Litten was ready.

He held a document signed by Joseph Goebbels,

head of propaganda and loyal to Hitler.

(ENGLISH IS SPOKEN OVER JOACHIM)

In this brochure, Nazi sozy Joseph Goebbels laid down

guidelines for militants on how they should behave.

It was written, "All we wish to do

is free Germany, nothing more.

If the people do not want to be freed, we do not care.

We will do it without their consent."

Further on, it says, "The will to be in power creates

the means needed for that power."

During the hearing, Hans Litten confronted

Hitler with his statements.

Hitler knew that he was cornered and it showed.

He finally had to distance himself from Goebbels, declaring,

that text has not been authorized by the Party.

In the end, he was yelling and screaming in the chamber.

What right did Litten have to dare ask him these questions?

He shouted that the party respected the law

and would always do so.

(BANGING GAVEL)

At 18.09, Hitler's court appearance ended.

Would the question of perjury be raised?

The verdict would come in 10 days.

But Hitler's rage had caused a scandal and he had

to be called to order.

In Germany, law courts are also temples, and Hitler

had just blasphemed.

Germany held its breath as it awaited the verdict.

And even more so did Lilo Kuznicki,

the young democratic lawyer.

She had followed the details of the trial

with her journalist brother.

Hans Litten was her friend at university and he was defending

the democracy that she believed in.

To learn more about Lilo, you have to go to the

Jewish Museum in Berlin.

(ECHOE OF CLANGING)

That's where her file is kept, in the silence of the Archives,

Row 2, Box 229.

Lilo's real name was Elizabeth.

She was the eldest daughter of Martin Kuznicki,

a doctor of Polish origin who was Jewish on his mother's side,

and Elisabeth Lilienkron, a Protestant from Denmark.

(ENGLISH SPOKEN OVER NATHALIE)

The family was certainly quite well known in Cologne.

Lilo had grown up in an educated and cultivated family.

After attending a Protestant school for girls,

she took her baccalaureate, which was fairly unusual.

She then decided to go on to university.

(SWING MUSIC PLAYS)

Like Hans Litten, Lilo belonged to the stratum

of young people that Weimar had fostered by encouraging many

of them to go to university so as to rebuild the elite

decimated by the Great War.

For Lilo, Weimar also meant women's right to vote

and like many other young women, she was emancipated.

Smoking sometimes wearing men's clothes, going out alone

and making love as she wanted.

Lilo was happy in this free and tolerant world.

She wanted it, she defended it.

That's why she wanted to be a lawyer.

She didn't merely study, she also got a doctorate.

And in 1927, she also obtained a first job at the regional

tribunal in Cologne, convinced that at the heart

of the democracy of the Weimar Republic she would

be able to fight for justice.

(SWING MUSIC CONTINUES)

It was this democracy she loved so much that the Nazis

were threatening.

And she understood the risks that Hans Litten was running.

From the start of the trial, he was pursued by the hatred

of militant Nazis and was no longer safe in the street.

(MUSIC STOPS)

Hitler himself, while waiting to know what

the political consequences of this affair would be,

had to face ridicule.

During his court appearance, a young photographer called

Leo Rosenthal took this photo.

Hastily taken, it is a little blurred,

but it captures Hitler's panic as he faced Litten.

He is stunned, dazed by the confrontation.

The photo immortalizes his collapse.

Hitler would never forget Hans Litten.

Especially as the day after the trial, the democratic press was

not slow to rub salt into the wound.

The press recounted Hitler's agony,

how for more than three hours,

Litten inflicted on him a pitiless interrogation,

how he put his finger on Hitler's contradictions one by one.

How Hitler got himself in a tangle, was furious,

lost his temper.

And yet the verdict finally delivered by the tribunal

was very lenient.

The front pages of the newspapers announced only very mild

punishments for the thugs of the SA.

And for Hitler, no further action.

The editorials considered it a political verdict that showed

the benevolence of the conservative judges

regarding the head of the Nazi party.

(SOMBRE MUSIC PLAYS)

Barely a few days after this resounding trial,

quite a different event gripped the public.

At the Ufa Palast cinema in Berlin,

the filmmaker Fritz Lang's new film

M the Cursed, often known simply as M, had its opening night.

In this film, an elusive killer is terrorizing a town.

As they discovered the plot, Berliner's got a strange feeling.

(ENGLISH SPOKEN OVER GERMAN)

Fritz Lang's M is basically a film that shows the Nazi counter

society, the underworld, the mob, crooks.

The criminals portrayed in the film

are clearly a metaphor for the Nazi organization,

which appears in the film as a criminal organization.

It shows the incompetence, mismanagement or inefficiency

of traditional institutions.

And it's also clearly a film

about the Nazi conception of the law,

which is debated at the end.

In the script.

The underworld and the common people capture the killer

and organize a secret trial.

This kangaroo court challenged the system.

It rejected official justice and imposed its own idea of law,

exactly the way the Nazis did in real life.

The film was an instant success and without doubt,

Fritz Lang savored it, remembering that the original

title was Killers in Our Midst.

Even though M the Cursed is a piece of cinema,

Fritz Lang's imagination was born of grim reality.

In the autumn of 1931, a new affair burst onto the scene

and once again the leader of the Nazi party was center stage.

A few months earlier, when Hitler was battling

with Hans Litten, a young overzealous Nazi militant

was drawing up plans for a coup d' etat in the event

of a communist threat.

His name was Werner Best and he was a very young

looking and brilliant lawyer.

And after his law thesis, he joined the NSDAP,

the Nazi party, with the number 341338.

An anti Semite and ideologically close to the extreme right,

he belonged to the radical and nationalist youth that was

gradually taking over in the universities.

Once his studies were completed, this young militant became

an associate judge in his native region of Hesse.

After his day's work, in the solitude of his office,

he had drawn up a plan for a coup d' Etat.

In autumn 1931,

this document was leaked to the press under the title

the 'Boxheim Papers'.

It immediately caused a scandal.

A few days later, on the way to Munich

for the meeting, Werner Best was shaking in his boots.

He could think of nothing worse for for this first meeting

with Hitler, he knew he had to put his party in a very

delicate position, just before the elections.

Best was conducted into Hitler's office.

And when he was finally face to face with the Fuhrer,

nothing happened as he had imagined.

(ENGLISH TRANSLATION SPOKEN OVER)

For Hitler,

even if a tactical error had been committed,

Best conformed to most of the normative criteria

that befitted a state activist.

And that was exactly the kind of attitude that Hitler

hoped and prayed for.

And so, in fact, Hitler had to reprimand the young

National Socialist at the beginning, telling him,

listen, old boy, you could have saved us having that image.

But when it comes down to it, that's how you have to carry on.

Better still, while Best was struggling and some

members of the party demanded that he be thrown out,

Hitler came publicly to his rescue.

Surprising benevolence indeed, especially as everyone knew

Hitler's contempt for lawyers, as this phrase related

by his followers shows.

"It used to be actors they buried in the communal grave.

Nowadays they should bury lawyers there."

Hitler clearly had a social and intellectual complex

with regard to anyone who had an education and especially lawyers.

Basically, to loathe lawyers in Germany was rather equivalent

to rejecting or criticizing technocrats in France.

It's roughly the same.

Indeed, in his great moments of demagogy in his speeches

to workers, Hitler said "I am one of you".

(ERUPTION OF CHEERS)

Historically, lawyers and the law have always held an important

place in the German system.

There is a special place for the training of lawyers in Germany.

A unique training that also gives the opportunity to exceed

to the highest levels in politics, to the highest ranks

in the civil service. The law is one of the royal roots.

Lawyers therefore are among those elite people who are

never far from power.

So despite the contempt he felt for them,

Hitler understood very early on that he had to count

on that body of people.

The rising generation in the universities,

like Werner Best, were radical.

And despite the aversion they felt at first for the populism

of the Nazis, these young people gradually joined

and became the majority in the student bodies.

This nationalistic and anti Semitic

youth was an ideal hunting ground for the party of the Swastika.

At the end of the 1920s.

Those people were at the end of their studies

and faced a future of unemployment

with the crisis of 1929.

And that is when schemes for canvassing young doctors

appeared, notably young doctors of law to encourage them to join

the party.

Not only so that they would have

a status, a mission, a job, but better still

to open the possibility of an absolutely marvelous career.

When he joined the NSDAP, Werner Best was hoping to play

a role in politics.

And that was where the Boxheim affair ruined everything.

It even cost him his post as a judge.

But at the same time, Best had just had a crucial encounter.

The SS.

This was Hitler's bodyguard.

Hand picked Nazis, radical and committed to embody

the elite of the future Thousand Year Reich.

Their leader was Heinrich Himmler and he had spotted Werner Best.

So it was with a new number, 23377,

that Best put on his SS uniform.

The SS recruited three types of people.

The first type were lawyers,

second type managers and engineers,

and the third type specialists in social sciences.

Together they could combine political radicalism,

academic excellence and bureaucratic efficiency.

And at the same time

they recruited people who mostly made up

a functioning elite which enabled the SS to penetrate the state

institutions, either local or federal, of German society.

In the summer of 1932, the economic situation was not good.

One German in three was out of work.

Among them was Johann Reichardt.

He was the last in a line of executioners who had

formerly been wealthy.

Like many of his countrymen, he had now fallen on hard times.

There were relatively few executions under

the Weimar Republic,

so he had to find other ways to feed his family.

Thus he was for a time an innkeeper.

Then he sold religious pamphlets around the villages.

Then finally he went and settled in the Netherlands

to sell vegetables.

(ENGLISH SPOKEN OVER GERMAN)

When an execution was planned,

they sent him a telegram from Bavaria.

He then had to go to Munich to carry out his work

as an executioner.

He always arrived on time.

July 10th, 1932.

In the train that took him back to Munich, Johan Reichardt

was doing some thinking.

Since he had been living in the Netherlands,

it was only the second time he had been called on to officiate

as executioner.

This time it was a woman, a first for him.

After the execution, Reichardt went into town for a few

beers with his associates.

They confirmed that the atmosphere had changed since he left.

And as the elections drew near, it became more like

a climate of civil war.

So he was fairly relaxed about taking the train back to Holland.

There, his wife and three children were waiting for him in their

small Amsterdam flat.

Two weeks later, he learned the results of the elections.

With 37.3% of the votes, far ahead of the Social Democrats,

the Nazi party became the country's first party.

In Germany, the news was like a bombshell.

However, long months of negotiations were

needed before at last, on January 30, 1933,

Marshall Hindenburg agreed to appoint Hitler as Chancellor.

On this day, January 30, 1933, Lilo's father, Martin Kuznitzky,

read the news in the morning paper.

The appointment of Hitler to the post of Chancellor

foreshadowed dark days to come.

Nevertheless, the Kuznitzkys decided to go off on holiday

to the mountains.

After all, the democratic press recognized the legality

of the process that had brought Hitler to power.

And then, although he had to appoint Hitler,

old Marshal Hindenburg was still president of the country.

He was a hero of the Great War and his presence was comforting.

There were only three Nazis in the right wing coalition.

Yet the lawyer Wilhelm Frick became Home Secretary

and Goering was made Prime Minister of Prussia,

the biggest of the German regions.

These were key posts for controlling the police.

To contain the Nazis, Hindenburg named his ally,

the conservative Franz von Papen, as Vice Chancellor.

He was a political veteran and was supposed to keep

the situation under control.

But would he be up to it?

Some, like Lilo, were worried about

the trivialization of the Nazis discourse,

and Hitler traveled up and down the country

using his newfound legitimacy as a formidable megaphone.

(SHOUTING IN AGREEMENT)

(SOMBRE PIANO MUSIC)

After the fire in the Reichstag, Germany was in a state of shock.

The convenient arrest of a communist suspect allowed the

Nazis to wave the threat of a plot.

Immediately Hitler got Hindenburg to put a signature

to an exceptional measure.

In the morning of the fire in the Reichstag,

on 28th February 1933, an order was signed by Hindenburg.

An order for the protection of the people and the state,

conferring almost unlimited powers on the executive,

on the government, and, that's to say, on the police.

Straight away, the Nazis began a wave of arrests.

Hans Litten, the lawyer who had ridiculed Hitler a year and a half

earlier, was sound asleep when someone violently

hammered on his door.

Hitler had not forgotten him.

His name was among the first on the list.

He was taken immediately to Spandau Prison.

The arrest went on for several days.

Dozens of other notables soon joined Hans Litten behind bars.

Members of parliament, journalists,

intellectuals or writers,

most of them opposed to the Nazis.

Totally dumbfounded, Hans Litten watched the rules of

the legal system being sabotaged.

In other words, as from 28th of February 1933,

people in Germany were no longer in a state governed by the law.

There was no legal control.

You could be arrested, placed in custody

in a concentration camp without motive,

for an indeterminate time,

undefended and beyond the control of the judiciary.

Soon Hans Litten was transferred to a camp at Sonnenberg.

The guards at the camp were members of the SA

and wore the armbands of auxiliary police.

This proved that between the usual members of the judiciary

and the arbitrary Nazi policemen, any distinction was

suddenly blurred.

Werner Best, now legal consultant in the ss, was now one of those

given the task of establishing the legal framework for these arrests.

And thanks to him, as with the arrest of Hans Litten,

the police always turned up with an authoritative document,

the Schutzhaft.

(ENGLISH SPOKEN OVER GERMAN)

The Schutzhaft was a tool

invented before the Nazis came to power.

But Werner Best belonged to that amalgam of policeman/

lawyer/ SS militant that brought it up to date,

rewrote it and brought it into the legal

and administrative arsenal of the Third Reich.

We can see it in the letterhead Gerheimer Staatspolizei,

the state secret police.

It was a police decision, but the paper was mauve

because the color mauve was the color for legal decisions,

judicial decisions.

In other words, the issue was deliberately

obfuscated and a legitimized form was given to a purely police

decision by making it seem to be a judicial decision.

So there was no control by a judge.

There was no longer any respect for basic freedoms.

The Nazis were to cross another decisive line.

Only three weeks after having put an end to fundamental rights

and individual liberties.

There reigned a climate of intimidation, backed

by the massive presence of the SA.

When, on March 23, the first meeting of the new

parliament was held.

Supported by the new exceptional measures,

Hitler commanded the MPs to accord him full powers.

The next morning, on March 24, the law was passed by 444 votes to 94.

From then on, Hitler governed alone,

without having touched the constitution.

He had set up a dictatorship.

But what community was Frick referring to?

And who among the German people could still claim to belong to it?

You could only be in the community

if you were of the German race, of German blood.

The essential corollary of community in the Nazi sense.

There are other types of community, race, obviously.

And it was also being in what the Nazis came to call

the Furher's gefolgschaft.

The gefolgschaft was that group that followed the Fuhrer,

the chief, with unconditional obedience,

with an absolute loyalty.

(CHEERS AND SHOUTS)

(SHOUTING IN GERMAN)

(CROWD CHANTING IN GERMAN)

(SOMBRE PIANO MUSIC)

It's hard to imagine today, this invisible, dangerous frontier.

Colleagues and neighbors who were familiar to them,

the friends they openly confided in.

Never again would the Germans be able to look at them

in the same way.

In the Berlin Jewish Museum

you can find evidence of the day when

Lilo Kuznetsky discovered that she was on the wrong side

of that invisible line.

On the morning of April 3rd, the police came to the family home.

As it happened, she was not there.

And it was Martin Kuznitzky,

Lilo's father, who opened the door.

(ENGLISH TRANSLATION SPOKEN)

The policeman said, I want your daughter's passport.

Martin Kuznitzky was busy

and paid little attention to the policeman.

The policeman made this a pretext for lodging a complaint

for defamation.

He was being somewhat overzealous.

1M13033 was the number of the file

that Inspector Young immediately opened against Martin Kuznitzky

for some obscure motive.

The only thing that could possibly explain that

was that Elizabeth or Lilo Kuznitzky

was probably politically committed

and consequently was in the sights of the authorities

and therefore the police.

As from 30th of January 1933, there was a policy that the Nazis

called the Gleichschaltung that could be translated

by bringing to heel, but which means indexing,

synchronizing, putting to one side, in short, centralization,

rationalization, purgation.

And as it happened, the legal world was rapidly purged

by the law of 7th of April 1933.

This was a law that affected the civil service

and which stipulated that all friends of the National Union

government, thus people on the left were excluded from

the civil service.

Moreover, the Jews had an exemption,

starting with war veterans, but that was soon done away with.

The associations of solicitors and of lawyers followed very

swiftly with, without being consulted.

Or with the friendly suggestion that they should take

notice of this law.

In other words, that what applied to the civil service would also

apply to lawyers, solicitors, etc.

And therefore there would be a host

of professional bans laid down, sometimes violently,

since at the Judiciary Tribunal of Berlin, SA troops had burst in

and violently thrown out the judges

and the lawyers they considered

to be on the left or Jewish, or worse still, both.

Altogether, there were thousands of lawyers, solicitors

and magistrates who were sacked or forbidden to practice.

In Prussia, Goering alone, since he was now prime minister,

dismissed 28% of top civil servants.

Other victims of the purge were university professors of law.

Carl Schmitt, then considered to be the greatest legal mind,

approved.

And on May 1st he joined the Nazi party.

As for Lilo, a lawyer from a half Jewish family and political

activist, she became a target.

But she wasn't yet caught up in the purge.

And unlike the 38,000 people who were already leaving Germany,

she stayed in the country.

Fritz Lang chose to leave with the first wave of emigrants.

And though he chose exile,

he saw the dark institutions of his

film, M the Cursed, become reality.

(OMINOUS MUSIC PLAYS)

In just a few months, an avalanche of laws and decrees

descended on Germany.

The Nazi plan was taking shape and Hitler did not act alone.

After Goering, who was extending his powers

after Frick at the Interior Ministry,

other loyal followers saw their powers increase.

Goebbels at the Propaganda Ministry,

Rohm at the head of the SA, Himmler in charge of the SS

and the Bavarian police.

To comfort public opinion and the political class.

The conservative Franz Gürtner was left in his post as

Minister of Justice.

But in Hitler's wake came a number of Nazis who had been loyal

from the very beginning.

In particular, Hans Frank, Hitler's former lawyer,

and Roland Freisler, Secretary of State in Prussia and

one of the most radical ideologues.

For them, above all, Freisler, the law and justice were weapons

to be used in the internal war against the enemies of the German

nation and the German race.

If the law is a weapon, you need soldiers.

Roland Freisler called them the armored divisions of the law,

a warlike term that mainly applied

to the young generation of lawyers.

Hundreds of law students about to get their degrees,

took the trains to Jüterbog, 90 kilometers south of Berlin.

There, in a camp where they would spend eight weeks,

these future lawyers and public prosecutors underwent a physical

and ideological retraining, all under the supervision

of Roland Freisler.

Community, camaraderie, indoctrination begins

with the repetition of these ideas.

In a book that he would soon write in Exile,

the young lawyer Sebastian Haffner recounts the effects

of this brainwashing.

"If several weeks in Jüterbog turned us into a brainless sludge,

it was the work of camaraderie.

Camaraderie annihilates the

feeling of personal responsibility.

That's what ideological education really was."

"By agreeing to take part in the game they were playing

with us, we were turning ourselves automatically into, if not Nazis,

at least into a material the Nazis could use."

(SINISTER MUSIC PLAYS)

The armored divisions of the law.

Unlike Sebastian Haffner, most of these young people quite

frivolously agree to become the spearhead.

For most of them belong to a radical generation coming

out of the universities.

(SINGING JOYFULLY)

So swastikas and patriotic songs replaced the togas in books

of legal proceedings.

In this archive film,

they have just symbolically condemned

and hanged a representation of a paragraph symbol,

a sacrilege that was both a bit of fun and heavy with meaning.

(ENGLISH TRANSLATION SPOKEN OVER INTERVIEWEES)

In Germany, the laws are more often subdivided into paragraphs

and less into articles, as they do in France.

So when you target the paragraph, you are targeting the way

in which the laws are subdivided and therefore the formal

conception of the law.

Before 1933, in Germany, we had a system of liberal law,

as in the whole of Europe and the West.

That is where everything stems from the individual.

Everything starts with the dignity of the individual,

his freedoms and the protecting of his dignity and freedoms.

With the Nazis, this concept was reversed and it

was decided that henceforward, the basis of law was no longer

the individual, but the community of the people.

Symbolically, to produce a paragraph wasn't

enough to radically and durably reverse practices.

It was necessary to discipline and control the legal professions

created by the Nazis and presided over by Hans Frank.

The Academy of Law would take care of it.

In 1933, Hans Frank was brought into the government

as Commissioner of the Reich

for bringing into line both the legal establishment

and judicial associations.

That was the first thing.

Another factor, perhaps, was the presidency of the

Academy for German Law.

Hans Frank would preside over this academy from 1933 to 1942.

To all appearances, it was a standard law academy.

Its brief was to train lawyers, support judicial publications,

prepare legal bills.

But all these functions of a law academy, and in this case

the Academy for German Law, took on a special meaning,

since it required specifically bringing into line and breathing

life into a new ideology.

Within the academy there were eminent law professors like

Carl Schmitt, philosophers such as

Martin Heidegger, future magistrates and lawyers,

and of course, Roland Freisler.

There were also people with no judicial qualifications,

appointed just out of political expediency.

Industrialists or well known personalities.

Hans Frank, as president, decided to set the example.

On the ground, Magistrates saw a part of their prerogatives

brought into question.

Some of them openly complained.

In the personal file of prosecutor Reuters,

there are dozens of notes that this conservative civil servant

had addressed to the government minister denouncing

the interference of the state secret police,

the Gestapo, in many cases.

Procedures, illegal interrogations,

repeated irregularities for offenses of a political nature,

non transmission of information to the public prosecutor's office,

and even sometimes the disappearance of proof.

In concrete terms, a defendant can be transferred

before a repressive penal tribunal and find him or herself

at the end of the proceedings, acquitted and walk

out of the court.

And the Gestapo might grab him, saying,

"Yes, all right, but we've got other things against you."

In any case, you're outside the community.

In this pitiless war against the enemies of the community,

the independence of judges was under threat everywhere.

In the Cologne tribunal where she worked, Lilo Kuznitzky

saw it every day.

To reach the ideal of justice for the community of the people

that they dreamed of, the Nazis had set out

to defeat the judicial system.

Whether it was birthright, citizenship, health,

heredity or politics.

Special tribunals were created to sanction new offenses

defined by Nazi dogma.

Every time there was a problem, they created a law

and then a tribunal.

So there are tribunals in every field.

And especially there was an interesting tribunal

which concerned the handing down of hereditary farms,

because there are two German key, blood and land.

Blut und Boden.

The German peasant was, in Nazi minds, the essence

of National Socialism.

So what was important was that great properties

should be passed down.

If someone were Jewish, he had no right to own land.

If someone were enough of a congenital idiot,

he had no right to own land. And so on.

Every possible exclusion was invented to preserve the purity

of the race, so to speak.

It was land tenure that brought honor to German soil.

Special tribunals, Gestapo and the police became

the instruments of this bringing into line that the Nazis called

synchronization and nothing must stop it, even if it meant getting

around traditional justice.

It was a vast movement that also transformed the life

of executioner Johann Reichardt.

In June 1933, after two years in Holland,

he came back and settled in Munich with his family.

He had just been offered a long term contract.

It was beyond his wildest dreams.

The Reichards could once again enjoy the Munich summer

and swimming in the canal.

A carefree happiness they had almost forgotten.

An income of 3,000 marks a month, a small fortune.

All things were possible again thanks to this contract.

Saxony, which had no executioner, also sought his services.

Reichardt lived again.

And around him the nation too seemed to be reborn.

The Nazis announced a plan to boost the economy.

Like many Germans in the summer of 1933, Johann Reichardt went

along with the incredible succession of changes

happening in every field.

The press had already announced several months earlier,

the creation by Goering of the Gestapo.

Order was the priority everywhere.

stormtroopers paraded in every town.

In two years, the SA expanded from 100,000 to 450,000 men.

Those among them appointed as police auxiliaries were now armed.

They were an instrument which made their chief, Ernst Rohm,

Hitler's former brother in arms, an inescapably powerful man.

On July 14th, the NSDAP, the Nazi party,

became the only party allowed.

During the summer of 1933, Adolf Hitler and Ernst Rohm

could enjoy their victory.

After 10 years of political struggle, the seeds they had

planted had at last germinated.

Germany was ready to follow.

And in eight months most Germans

had accepted without batting an eyelid,

dozens of laws and decrees that had already fundamentally

changed the country.

For the Nazis, there remained one last symbolic step to complete

the redisciplining of the country.

On September 21st, 1933, nine months after the Reichstag

fire, began the trial of those suspected of starting the blaze.

Goebbels propaganda minister saw an interesting opportunity

to turn it into a media platform.

The great political trial that would stand in judgment over

the plotters, communists, against the state system.

It was a show trial.

The trial was broadcast live on radio.

So it had to be a great moment, a great shop window

of Nazi propaganda.

Except that the trial was held according to the rules

and the defense could exercise its rights.

As it happened, Dimitrov, one of the accused,

using his right of defense,

called two ministers to the bar as witnesses,

Goebbels and Goering.

During his eight months in custody,

Dimitrov had prepared his defense

and had scrupulously studied the German penal code.

Goering found himself in such difficulty that Dimitrov managed

to make him lose his temper.

(ANGRY SHOUTING)

Feeling himself ridiculed,

Goering had the radio broadcast of the trial stopped.

But from their enforced exile, anti Nazi German journalists

loved every minute of it.

(GOERING SHOUTING)

This collage by the famous press artist John Hartfield

summed up the fiasco.

Only Van der Lubbe was found guilty,

while Dimitrov and the others were acquitted.

For the Nazis, not only was the Reichstag fire

trial a crushing defeat, it showed that the bringing

to heal had not gone to plan.

The old law system still stood up against their vision of the world.

But Hitler and his lawyers had not said their last word.

And as a reaction to the defeat they had just suffered,

they would soon put in place a formidable strategy and new laws

that were even more implacable.