Original subtitles

(tense music)

As soon as he seized power in January 1933,

Hitler used the law as a weapon to impose Nazi ideology.

Backed by several faithful lawyers who had supported him

from the very start,

he set about bringing the legal system to heal.

Police powers intensified while those of the judges declined.

It was a reversal of the rules of traditional law,

which recalled Fritz Lang's premonitions in his 1931 film, M.

At the heart of Hitler's tribunals,

lawyers and magistrates were the protagonists

in a relentless war to impose a new legal system

that conformed to the Nazis world-view.

Remarkable accounts bring this story to light,

such as that of Lilo Kuznitzky,

a Democrat lawyer,

who saw her dreams of freedom go up in smoke.

Werner Best,

a lawyer who had risen through the ranks of the SS

at lightning speed.

Johann Reichhart,

the Munich executioner who would make his fortune

from the assent of the Nazis

or Hans Litten, a barrister and sworn enemy of Hitler.

The trial of the alleged Reichstag arsonist

began on September 21st, 1933.

This show trial became a fiasco for the Nazis.

The Supreme Court acquitted four of the accused.

You could ask if this constituted a victory for the rule of law,

but it didn't.

Certainly, the Supreme Court was no longer involved

in political or media affairs,

but immediately afterwards,

a new court was created,

the Volksgerichtshof,

or People's Court.

There were two professional magistrates

and three non-magistrates.

Three Volksgenossen, as they are known,

three Comrade of the people, three Citizens.

In fact, they were members of the party,

members of the police, members of the Wehrmacht.

The idea behind that was that anyone could be a judge.

Why?

Because law is instinctive, something spontaneous in you,

a movement that leads you to do

what is best for you, your family, and your race,

spontaneously.

You didn't need to be a professional magistrate

to be a judge.

The Reichstag fire case was a revelation for the Nazis.

The old law, as written in the statute books, endured.

Three years previously, Fritz Lang's film, M,

had already predicted what the Nazis would try to do

once they were in power.

Circumventing an abstract law and replacing it with courts

where the people's common sense prevailed.

With the creation of the People's Court,

Hitler freed himself from the shackles of traditional justice.

But this was not enough.

He wanted absolute power.

The occasion presented itself in the spring of 1934.

The ageing Marshal von Hindenburg, the President of the Reich,

was dying.

Hitler wanted to get rid of Erwin Bumke,

the high magistrate

who was due to be interim leader,

and merge his powers as Chancellor with those of the President.

But in order to do this,

Hitler first had to reassure the elite and the army

who were concerned about the growing power of Ernst Röhm's SA

and its revolutionary ambitions.

So Hitler made his decision.

On the night of June 29, 1934,

Werner Best was ready.

He was in charge of the purge in Southern Germany.

He had made good progress since joining the SS

two and a half years before.

He was now a commander

and worked alongside Reinhard Heydrich,

Hitler's second in command.

Under his orders, he ran the SS intelligence service,

the SD.

He was put in charge of drawing up the list of those to be arrested.

There was a cross next to 28 of the names.

This meant they were to be summarily put to death.

One of them was Edgar Jung,

one of his friends and a former political companion in arms.

Werner Best would later write,

Sometimes it is necessary to sacrifice men and laws

in favour of higher ideals.

Around a thousand people were arrested in three days.

A further hundred were murdered.

On the morning of June 30th,

SA chief Ernst Röhm was arrested by Hitler himself.

He was transferred to Stadelheim Prison

and was shot in his cell on July the first.

Hitler would justify what had happened

to demonstrate that he was no mere thug,

but a true statesman.

He spoke in the Reichstag on the 13th of July, 1934,

describing the situation,

saying there was a plot,

the SA were plotting, and went on to say,

In hours of great danger,

I was the German people's Supreme Judge.

In other words, all of the acts of murder

carried out over those three days were legal acts.

He said this to the Reichstag on the 13th of July, 1934.

He had written it in a decree on the third of July, 1934.

It was a singular article

which set out that all acts

committed within the framework of state safeguarding operations

and the rule of law were legal.

The word employed was 'rechtens', meaning approved in law.

Reassured by the radical purge of the SA,

the elite made no objection to this self-amnesty.

Better still,

members of the government who were not in the Nazi Party

also signed the July 3rd decree.

As for the judiciary,

frozen by the climate of terror

induced by the Night of the Long Knives,

they abstained from making any comment

about the Nazis' legislation of their own crimes.

And, barely three weeks later,

they pledged allegiance to the Führer

on the solemn monumental staircase of the Moabit Palace in Berlin,

the very place where three years earlier,

the barrister Hans Litten

had tried to charge Hitler with perjury.

And as if to nip any debate in the bud,

Carl Schmitt, the great thinker of German law,

immediately intervened to absolve Hitler in an article,

The Führer Upholds the Law.

The Führer protects what is good for the people,

so the Führer protects the law.

These are classic shortcuts to identity-based concrete thinking.

In early August 1934,

Hindenburg had just conveniently died,

and without anyone objecting,

Hitler combined the powers of Chancellor

and President of the Reich.

Now, he incarnated not only the law,

he was the people's Führer,

and incarnated absolute power.

In just 20 months,

he had managed to shut down all opposition

and eliminate his opponents.

He had muzzled the press and held the legal system on a leash.

Even the army had pledged allegiance to him.

It was a complete success,

a triumph of the will.

This was even the title that the film-maker,

Leni Riefenstahl, gave to her film,

dedicated to the glory of Hitler,

which she shot at the Nuremberg Conference in 1934.

There, in front of academy members,

Hans Frank celebrated the legal advances taking place.

Hitler's lawyers had done a good job,

none more so than Werner Best.

Not only had he worked in the legal field,

but he had demonstrated his efficiency

with the purge of the SA.

One need only look at his dazzling SS career

to get a measure of the esteem in which he was held by his chiefs.

In April 1933, he was a mere corporal.

One year later, he was a commander.

And the day after the Night of the Long Knives,

he was made a lieutenant colonel.

There was no doubt he would continue to rise in the hierarchy.

The executioner Johann Reichhart's life

also carried the smell of success.

He now operated in three regions and drove an Opel Blitz.

An Opel Blitz.

Two years before,

he would not have imagined being able to afford

a new van of such class.

And it was useful for work.

These vans could carry up to three tonnes,

so a Mannhardt guillotine was child's play.

The Opel allowed Reichhart to be punctual,

and he took great care in his work.

Since the People's Court had been formed,

meetings took place at the Ministry

to harmonise the methods of execution.

Johann Reichhart was keen to demonstrate the efficacy

of his chosen work tool.

There was a bureaucratic evaluation

of the advantages and disadvantages of the acts

compared to those of the guillotine.

Very precise statistics

seemed to show that execution with an axe

saved a few seconds compared to the guillotine.

It was also the argument that the axe was more Germanic,

that it was more authentic and patriotic,

and more German than executing someone with a mechanical device.

Note concerning the implementation

of the death penalty,

speed of execution by axe.

This allows a gain of 20 seconds

between the moment the condemned is handed to the executioner

and the moment when the head falls.

The lawyer, Roland Freisler, took part in this meeting,

and Freisler was a proponent of the virility of the axe.

The Nazis detested the values of the French Revolution

and the guillotine.

Nonetheless,

Hitler decided to make it the official method of execution,

putting an end to the debate.

The Führer was won over by the mechanical efficiency

of the machine.

An engineering company was immediately contracted

to mass-produce guillotines.

The Nazi administration, no strangers to cruelty,

assigned the final stage of assembly

to the inmates of Berlin's Tegel Prison.

The expert Johann Reichhart's future,

was looking promising.

For other Germans, however, dark clouds were gathering.

What had become of Hans Litten?

For all Lilo Kuznitzky's efforts

to find any trace of her former university colleague,

his name was not mentioned anywhere.

Since his arrest,

he had repeatedly been transferred

from one concentration camp to another.

Beaten and tortured,

he had become half deaf and had lost an eye.

His leg was paralysed,

and he needed sticks to walk.

In two years,

Lilo had watched the world she had dreamed of

since she was 20 disappear.

That world had been replaced by that of the Nazis,

a world where a woman had been put back in her rightful place,

taking care of cooking and domestic chores.

900,000 women had already been fired from public office.

Lilo no longer harboured any illusions

about her chances of continuing a career in law.

She was 31 years old

and was already sensing the imminent nightmare.

She knew the worst was still to come.

She had just found out that the 700 magistrates

who represented the cream of the legal system

had been summoned to a solemn ceremony

in the presence of Hitler,

behind the walls of the Berlin Opera.

On April second, 1935,

the Justice Minister, Franz Gaertner,

gleefully made a summary

of the synchronisation of the legal apparatus.

When he spoke of the renewal of German law,

the minister was referring to a new raft of legislation

announced at the latest Nuremberg conference.

Laws designed to regiment the lives of Germans

based on their racial origin.

And by their very presence,

the 700 magistrates had already acquiesced to these laws.

The main one

was called the law for the protection of German blood.

It enshrined not only the biologisation of politics,

but also the biologisation of the law.

It was a law that forbade the mixing of flesh

and the mixing of blood.

So it was a modification of the Civil Code

because it affected marriage

and the Penal Code because it sanctioned sexual relations.

The idea was

that different races are all separate zoological species,

and any intermingling produces a monster.

The Mischling, or literally mixture,

produces a monster.

A monster wherein the bad blood destroys the good.

If you were to breed a Jew with a non-Jewish German,

the Jewish wickedness and deviousness

would overcome German intelligence.

But then there had to be a way

to distinguish who was Jewish and who wasn't.

And there were doctors and scientists

who worked to try to identify the criteria of Jewishness.

There was no biological way to identify them,

but they tried everything.

Anthropometry of the ears, the skulls, the feet,

the muscle formation, the blood groups,

with no success.

So as lawyers,

they were then obliged to backtrack,

which is what led to this somewhat sheepish law

that looked towards cultural criteria.

What made a person Jewish?

Having Jewish grandparents

who belonged to a Jewish community

that attended the synagogue. Period.

Two years previously,

Lilo had been spared by the first purges,

but this new law banned her from the community of the people.

She had tainted Jewish blood from her father,

which made her a Mischling, a monster.

In October 1935,

a month after the law was published,

she was excluded from the legal profession.

In December,

her father, Martin Kuznitzky,

was banned from practising medicine.

Alongside these racial laws

came new texts, decrees, and articles

compiled by German lawyers in new legal tracks.

Germany's Jews, who were particularly targeted,

found their lives had become a hell.

State hospitals would not admit patients who were Jewish.

If they were officers in the army, they were expelled.

As students, they could no longer get a degree,

and before long, they were asked to declare their belongings.

It begs the question,

who were these rules aimed at?

They were written. They looked like laws or decrees.

They looked like regulations.

But who were they aimed at?

It was the total suppression of the subject of the law

for Jews.

And as for those in the wider community,

they only had rights within the framework of that community.

That meant that in everything they did,

even the most private,

trivial, and even intimate acts

of their sexual life,

their life,

they became a servant of the community.

It was now official.

Love was no longer enough.

Henceforth, blood would decide,

and the choice of a soulmate

would be first subjected to a medical examination.

There was an imperative of purity that even Arians had to respect.

Some, rather than risk being excluded from their community,

chose to divorce their spouse if they were Jewish.

The seismic effect of these racial laws

led to a new wave of emigration.

This is exactly what the Nazis had intended,

to encourage Jews to leave the countries

and to rid the German nation of their presence.

During the 1936 conference,

Werner Best defended the idea that the German police

were now the doctor of the German body politic.

The Nazis were so obsessed with biology

that they saw the German nation as a biological organism,

and the police officer or lawyer could act as its doctor.

If a body part was gangrenous, it had to be amputated.

A shame, the body part would suffer,

but it was better for the body as a whole.

So you can see the potential for legitimisation.

You were no longer considered violent or a criminal

if you hit someone or killed someone.

You were like a doctor,

removing a rotten tooth or amputating a gangrenous limb.

It was completely different

because you were saving the entire body,

the social body, the racial body.

It was thanks to Himmler's SS

that the police became the guarantors

of the social body's good health.

Himmler said it publicly,

Yes, we break the law,

and we break it vigorously,

but we do it to uphold the true law.

That's why Werner Best, now in charge of recruitment,

had no trouble convincing Himmler and Heydrich

of the necessity of favouring lawyers.

Himmler and Heydrich were two fine organisational minds.

Imperatives drove them, on the one hand,

to accept to put at the head of these organisations a lawyer

who was convinced of the excellence of lawyers

in organisational positions,

i.e. Best,

and on the other hand,

a number of theorists

who stood out for both their academic excellence

and for their radical ideology.

People like Reinhard Höhn like William Spengler,

people like Franz Six,

the tentacles of the SS Octopus were everywhere.

For example, more and more often,

there was a Minister in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs,

the Ministry that was supposed to represent Germany,

wearing an SS uniform.

In that same year, 1936, the SS entered the Law Academy.

It was represented by Werner Best,

who was presiding over the Police Law Commission.

He was close to power

but remained discrete as he was in the secret police.

This is the only contemporary footage of him

in the Ministry of the Interior, next to Reinhard Heydrich,

second in command to Himmler.

Himmler, a man on the rise.

These images bear witness of the growing power

that the SS had accrued since the Night of the Long Knives.

And in the ensuing years,

the men in the uniforms bearing the Death's Head

would have an influence on changes in the law.

On February 10th, 1936,

came the enactment of a law written by Best

that increased the powers of the Prussian Gestapo

and reinforced the Schutzhaft.

On June 17th, 1936,

Himmler was appointed chief of all police,

and set about centralising them.

On July first, 1937,

Reinhard Heydrich signed a decree prepared by Werner Best

that legalised the use of torture during interrogations.

In August 1938,

Jews who did not have a Jewish first name

were forced to add Israel

or Sara to their identification documents.

From 1938 onwards,

the Nazis decided

that they wanted the Jews to leave Germany.

But they could no longer do so voluntarily,

and so would have to be forced to leave.

It was enforced through violence,

such as on the 9th of November 1938,

which was badly dubbed Kristallnacht,

but also by setting up,

as they did in Vienna from March 1938,

what we might call centres

for the promotion of Jewish emigration

that was put in place by Eichmann.

During the two terrible days of Kristallnacht,

no one had knocked on Lilo's door,

and she was again spared the worst.

For good reason,

the name Kuznitzky no longer appeared on the door.

Lilo was saved by marriage certificate.

Three months earlier,

on July 27th, 1938,

she had married Erich Gloeden, a Berlin architect.

It was her husband's good German name

that saved Lilo during the Kristallnacht arrest.

Although Gloeden was not her husband's real name,

he was really called Loevy,

a Mischling,

a mixture in the eyes of the Nazis, like Lilo.

But very early on, at his father's behest,

Erich had been adopted by an Arian friend,

Bernhard Gloeden.

This cover-up was designed to make it easier for him to assimilate

and protect his career.

This is very important

because it's a 1918 adoption certificate.

The people concerned would henceforth bear the name Gloeden,

with no mention of their original surname.

Yes, it was important to not use both names.

This is a wedding photo from 1938.

And this is a wonderful picture of him.

He was the second son of Siegfried Loevy,

who ran a large factory.

Actually, it was the biggest Bronze foundry in Berlin.

In 1916, during World War I,

they were given the job of affixing a motto

in a font created by Peter Behrens

on the Reichsteig building.

Dem deutschen Volke to the German people.

Up until 1938,

the Loevy business's reputation

protected it from the Nazis control while

while in the mid-1930s,

almost two-thirds of Jewish-owned businesses

had been confiscated.

The day after Kristallnacht, November 12, 1938,

a decree regarding the eradication of Jews from German economic life

made this plunder official and precipitated their ruin.

If they chose to leave the country,

the racket continued.

Anyone wanting to definitively cross the border

had to pay a departure tax.

Other Germans

who deserve to belong to the community of the people

could enjoy the Nazi's largesse,

such as at Christmas 1938.

To wander through Berlin

is to walk in the wake of history

and to meet ghosts.

Hans Litten's traces led to one of the worst German camps,

Dachau,

which is where he ended up in 1938.

His ill-treatment continued

because as well as being pursued by Hitler's hatred,

he was born to a Jewish family.

A few days after he arrived,

he managed to get a clandestine message out to his family.

Because of the diffusion of awful news

about the Dachau concentration camp by Jews living abroad,

we have been isolated here

and have been forbidden to write until further notice.

His mother, Irmgard Litten,

would later describe her son's ordeal from England,

where she took refuge to carry on her son's struggle.

May I ask you to tell Movietone of your own experience?

I am the mother of Hans Litten, a young lawyer in Berlin

who devoted all his time and strength

to defending working people and anti-fascists.

He personally cross-examined Hitler in a murder trial,

and Hitler committed perjury.

He never forgave my son.

After five years

in one concentration camp after the other,

five years of most brutal torture,

my son died.

How is it, Frau Litten?

Hans Litten's cause of death

was officially recorded as suicide by hanging.

As Fritz Lang had symbolically predicted in his film, M,

the darkness and its menacing shadows seemed to be winning.

(whistling)

And Nazi law was also triumphant in the courts

over the law of those they had sworn to rid themselves of.

The shadow of the guillotined loomed over the courthouses,

as did that of the executioner,

Johann Reichhart.

Successive legal reforms

had radicalised the penal justice system.

An infraction of racial law,

a stolen car,

anything that constituted a betrayal

of communal interest of the people

could mean death.

Conscientious, perfectionist,

Johann Reichhart kept his diaries up to date meticulously,

and his letters to the Ministry

relentlessly suggested ways to fine-tune methods of execution.

In 1938, five years after he returned to Germany,

executions had increased tenfold.

In 1939, the number of death sentences has doubled again.

The Nazis recruited new executioners,

and new execution centres appeared on the map.

Reichhart's field of operations expanded.

His workload increased,

but he had no idea what awaited him.

At the end of the summer of '39,

the course of history suddenly accelerated.

On September first,

Nazi Germany declared war on Poland.

This was the first act in a conflict

that for six years would ravage Europe and become global.

(explosion)

(air raid siren)

Under cover of this cataclysm,

the Nazis would deal three further death blows to law and justice.

Three dates definitively marked the descent into Hell

of the Courts and German Magistrature.

On September first, the very day he invaded Poland,

Hitler launched Operation T4..

Hitler had always dreamed

of exterminating mentally ill people

because they tainted the purity of the German race.

And he used the cover of war

to begin a process known as Aktion T4.

That was euthanasia of the mentally ill.

What he was doing

with the approval of his Chancellor, Philipp Bouhler,

and his personal Dr. Karl Brandt,

was authorising the killing of some of the inmates

in asylums, mental hospitals, and other care homes.

And he had calculated that one in 10,000 people had to die.

Hitler refused to enact a law,

and he signed a document

that used a completely disingenuous argument,

which was a Gnadentod or "mercy killing".

It was the only document Hitler signed

which granted them the mercy of death.

So they went to fetch the infirm, a job entrusted to the SS.

They took post office vehicles

with closed blinds and took them away.

Where to?

The T4 centres.

There were six in Germany,

which housed the first gas chambers,

and the families would be sent an urn.

The T4 operation,

which obviously was supposed to be secret,

could simply not be.

Seventy-thousand victims in two years was too significant.

These were members of German families being murdered.

So there was outrage in the media, politically,

but also legally, with complaints made.

And the Secretary of State at the Justice Ministry,

Schlegelberger,

met the chief prosecutors

to decide how to proceed

and asked the various German prosecutors

to not carry on with it.

Secretary of State, Franz Schlegelberger,

presided over a meeting

of the 80 most senior magistrates in Germany.

Note-taking was forbidden.

However, one of those present did make notes in his journal.

Thanks to this historic evidence,

we know today that they were all fully informed

of the conditions of this mass extermination.

This time,

by turning a blind eye to the murders of 70,000 disabled people,

the German judiciary became complicit.

The country was at war, and to argue was tantamount to treason.

The Nazis knew they could now do away with due process.

In December 1939,

Hitler officially abandoned the new law codification project

that Hans Frank was supposed to direct.

Nazi law would now be applied with no recourse to any text.

On June 22nd, 1941,

after having defeated France and conquered part of Europe,

Nazi Germany attacked Russia.

In the summer of that year,

the Einsatzgruppen,

whose creation Werner Best had been part of,

began eliminating Jews behind the lines by bullets.

In September 1941,

it became mandatory for Jews to wear the yellow star.

On January 20th, 1942,

during the Wannsee conference presided over by Heydrich,

the SS informed the ministries

of the implementation of the final solution.

December 12th, 1942,

the Führer issued a decree

that merged the Nazi Party with the German state.

January 1943,

the British and American Air Forces

began bombing raids on German cities.

February second, 1943,

after the bloody battle of Stalingrad and the USSR,

German troops were forced to surrender for the first time.

From 1943 onwards,

the regime's attitude

towards the power it had over the German population

became radicalised.

This was due to two factors.

The Nazis war had become the Germans war

because the fatherland was under threat.

And it was also due to the appearance

of very courageous forms of resistance.

The White Rose movement, for instance.

The fate that waited those people was dreadful.

The resistance fighter Sophie Scholl's

last words to her cellmate were,

What does my death matter

if by our acts thousands are warned or alerted?

The 21-year-old emblematic figure of the White Rose Movement

was led to the guillotine with her brother

and one of their friends.

On February 22nd, 1943,

the last thing they saw in their short lives

was the face of the executioner, Johann Reichhart.

The following day, Reichhart was already in Vienna, Austria.

20 people were to be beheaded that day.

This was now routine.

His bonuses meant he was earning more money than he ever had.

But the pace had become frenetic.

Johann Reichhart's future was now linked to Roland Freisler's.

The radical lawyer who had been nominated

as head of the Volksgerichtshof

launched a merciless war against the enemy within.

A single word out of place could mean a ticket to the scaffold.

Helmuth Hubener, 17 years old,

executed for listening to a foreign radio station.

Erna Wazinski

was executed for going to find food in a ruined building.

Leo Katzenberger, a Jew,

was executed by Reichhart for supposed racial defilement.

Thousands and thousands of people died

on the Nazi executioner's guillotine.

And we don't really know if these figures are reliable,

because they also executed people

who were handed over to them by the Gestapo,

and those people's names were not recorded.

By the end of 1943, there were 22 execution centres.

Between the 7th and 12th of September,

250 people were executed at Plötzensee Prison in Berlin,

an unprecedented number.

On the last night,

allied bombs caused a power cut,

so the executioners completed their work by candlelight.

How can you explain this remarkable rise in intensity?

It was articulating the context and experience of the war

on one hand,

and a radical ideology on the other.

The war the Nazis were experiencing

made them more radical,

and the war carried out by the Nazis

made the war more radical,

meaning that each fed off the other.

Lilo Gloeden

knew that the turmoil would soon catch up with her and her husband.

Eric's family had lost everything and had been persecuted.

On February 22nd,

Erich's cousin, Ernst Loevy, was sent to Auschwitz

and sent to the gas chamber as soon as he got off the train.

So Lilo and her husband decided to join the resistance.

For several months,

they had been using fake documents

to hide Jews hunted by the Gestapo.

They were living dangerously, and Lilo knew it.

Several people died,

but Hitler miraculously survived.

The fate of the authors of the plot

would be commensurate with his wrath.

Himmler decided to aid the police enquiries

and clamp down on any plots

by introducing what he called Sippenhaftung,

the Sippe's or family's responsibility,

which meant the whole family would be incarcerated.

Such people were traitors to their very core.

These people had tainted blood.

That was the expression he used.

And this tainted blood had to be eradicated to the last drop.

In other words,

it wasn't just the person who had taken part in the plot,

who would be arrested and put to death.

The whole family had to die.

This Nazi fit of legal rage

fulfilled the prophecy of Fritz Lang's film, M,

and they obliterated what little remained of law and justice.

The trial began in August 1944, and lasted seven months.

One hundred civilians and military men involved in the plot

appeared before the Volksgerichtshof,

led by Roland Freisler,

who flayed them with insults.

On November 27th,

a rather frail Lilo Gloeden, clad in a grey suit,

stood before Roland Freisler.

Alongside in her dock were her mother and her husband, Erich.

Lilo knew they were doomed.

One of the conspirators, General Lindemann,

was hiding in their home.

According to witnesses,

Lilo challenged Freisler with legal arguments.

One last time, for honour's sake.

♪ ♪

Three days later, at 5:30 PM, on November 30th, 1944,

Lilo's mother was guillotined at Plötzensee Prison.

At 5:32, Lilo died beneath the blade,

two minutes before her husband.

She was 40 years old.

On February 3, 1945,

the trial was drawing to a close,

but an air raid siren interrupted proceedings.

Roland Freisler was reluctant to suspend the trial.

Obsessively, he gathered his files before fleeing.

15,000 feet above him at the controls of a B-17,

was Robert Rosenthal,

a young lawyer from New York who had enlisted as a pilot.

Things were not going well for him.

One of his wings was on fire.

But Robert was determined, and he was Jewish.

Two good reasons to hold his course

and to drop his bombs on the Nazi capital.

At exactly 11:37, he activated the bomb bay.

Not much was found of Roland Freisler,

one of the most sinister figures in Nazi justice,

in the ruins of the Volksgerichtshof.

Three months later,

Berlin was nothing more than a wasteland

in the hands of the Red Army.

On May eighth, 1945, the third Reich capitulated.

Hitler and Goebbels had committed suicide.

Himmler would soon do the same.

And all that the Russians found in the Plötzensee Prison

was an empty room where the guillotine still stood.

In Munich,

which had just been entered by American tanks,

there was no trace of Johann Reichhart.

On November 20th, 1945,

a series of trials began in Nuremberg.

Dozens of Nazi officials appeared

before an international military tribunal.

This was also the epilogue of a fight to the death

between two visions of the law.

For the first time in history,

politicians were on trial for crimes against humanity.

This could be seen as a turning point in history

because Hans Frank, for one,

was prosecuted and sentenced to death for war crimes

and crimes against humanity.

And this charge of crimes against humanity

was used for the first time at Nuremberg.

So Nuremberg was the birthplace

of international criminal justice,

a justice with a universal vocation.

The complete opposite of what the Nazis advocated,

international criminal justice,

which was the forbearer

of the current international criminal court.

So in that sense, there is a symbolic victory for the law.

The privilege

of opening the first trial in history

for crimes against the peace of the world

imposes a grave responsibility.

Dozens of Nazis appeared in the dock over eight months.

Heading the bill of the accused

were the architects of the perversion of law.

Hans Frank, sentenced to death.

Wilhelm Frick, sentenced to death.

Göring, sentenced to death,

committed suicide before he could be executed.

Werner Best was tried in Denmark,

where he had been sent as the Reich's representative.

Condemned to death by Danish court,

he spent only six years in prison.

Later judged medically unfit to stand another trial,

he would eventually die in his bed at the age of 86.

In the wake of the Nuremberg trials,

the Allies executed a long list of Nazis,

but they did not have enough manpower

to carry out the hangings.

In an incredibly ironic twist of fate,

a familiar silhouette appeared behind those condemned.

Johann Reichhart.

He had finally been caught by the Allies in 1946

and narrowly evaded punishment,

thanks to his expertise as an executioner.

By executing his former Paymasters one by one,

he made history as the most prolific executioner of all time,

with a macabre record of 3,165 legal victims.

Following the trials came the denazification of Germany.

But the shadows of Nazism would loom for many more years.

Using the pretext that they had acted in good faith

in applying the laws in force at the time,

the magistrates who operated during the Nazi era

were exonerated by the new German Federal Republic

10 years after the war.

This decree,

issued by the new Constitutional Court,

remains in the memory under the name of judicial privilege.