Original subtitles

They were, they thought, the Third Reich's racial elite.

Men superior to others.

Ready to do anything for the triumph of National-Socialism.

Men Hitler could count on to the death.

To apply their racial theories,

they were prepared to eliminate their adversaries,

to decimate the Jewish people,

to massacre civilian populations.

Over 70 years later, some of them are still living among us.

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This is the story of SS fanaticism,

bloodlust and terror...

Told from the inside.

Summer 1941.

Hitler has unleashed his troops on the Soviet Union.

In order to kill Jews, the Nazis had already formed special units...

the Einsatzgruppen...

detachments of killers made up of SS members,

police and locally recruited auxiliaries.

Here is one of their leaders, SS General Jeckeln.

He would be hanged by the Allies in 1946

for the murder of more than 100,000 people.

His method of execution... sardine packing.

He applied it here, in the Babi Yar ravine,

where he executed more than 30,000 Jews.

They were laid on top of one another and shot,

then buried in layers like sardines.

Men, women, children.

The paradox was that the SS didn't see themselves as criminals,

but as victims, soldiers defending themselves.

Oskar Groning, one of the last Auschwitz SS men still alive.

He believed at the time that it was the Jews

who had brought the world to wage war against Germany.

Executioners... victims...

Switching the roles authorised every crime.

Not every SS man took part

but many agreed with it.

In the view of SS chief Himmler,

those who killed Jews were carrying out indispensable work

for the survival of the country.

He wanted to attend a massacre and see for himself

hundreds of bodies piled up in a ditch.

He is said to have felt queasy

seeing the blood spurt from the bullet wounds.

But his demands for executions only increased.

Listen to his voice as he speaks to his generals.

To wipe out 11 million European Jews,

according to the SS's own calculations,

Himmler appointed a technocrat of crime...

SS member Reinhard Heydrich.

"The man with the iron heart" as Hitler called him.

The genocide, it's him.

A former officer expelled from the Navy, he ran the RSHA,

the Reich's central security office in charge of all state security.

One of his sons gave us his family films,

notably these holiday movies.

Married to an aristocrat from northern Germany

he embodies the ideal SS man...

a cold-blooded, athletic and efficient Nazi.

With his secret police force, he had files on millions of Germans,

notably the Jews, whom he divided into several racial groups...

100 percent Jewish, mixed blood, etc.

It was a formidable system

and the first step towards extermination.

STATELY MUSIC

For his services, Hitler made him head of Bohemia-Moravia.

You can see him here at home in Prague Castle,

the former residence of the Austro-Hungarian emperor.

A king surrounded by his court.

When she learned of his nomination, his wife Lina was overcome...

"I was submerged by a feeling of exaltation" she wrote.

"I said to myself I was no longer a mere mortal but a princess

"and that I was living in a fairy tale."

Throughout Europe, the new Nazi lords took over the finest homes.

Another castle was occupied in Krakow, Poland.

It was here that Hitler's former lawyer lived and worked...

Hans Frank, Poland's Governor-General.

In the north of Germany, we met his son, the writer Niklas Frank.

He remembers the SS who guarded him in Krakow during his childhood

as mediocre individuals.

He was not the only one... Many people benefited from the war.

These Waffen-SS soldiers, for example,

who crisscrossed Europe from one conquest to the next.

For them, it was like a great adventure.

As the Jewish people gradually disappeared,

the SS profited and dreamed.

Himmler had promised them the brightest of futures.

The Third Reich will last 1000 years, he tells them.

As Greece fought Rome,

as Rome conquered Carthage and Jerusalem,

so Germany will crush the Judeo-Bolshevik USSR.

It is the last war, he tells them,

so we may as well win it swiftly.

It will put an end to centuries of racial strife.

These are arguments that hit home.

The SS wanted to believe that in conquered Soviet land,

Himmler would give them vast agricultural holdings

where thousands of Slav workers would work for them, as slaves.

Like the Teutonic knights of old,

the new lords would defend German civilisation

against the barbarians.

And apparently not only for the German people.

From 1940, with the aim of founding a German empire,

he opened the doors of the SS

to the inhabitants of several defeated countries.

The Danes, the Norwegians, the Dutch...

they were all Germanic, said Himmler.

As the war continued,

the SS opened up also to the the French-speaking Belgians,

the French themselves and the Italians Latin peoples

to whom Himmler gave the hope of entering into the Nazi elite.

An illusion.

None of these non-Germanic, Latin or, here, Muslim Slav peoples

would ever actually belong to the Black Order.

Attracted by the wages and the family allowances,

they wore the uniform but were cannon-fodder...

"For every foreigner who dies" said the head of recruitment

"no German mother cries."

One of these Muslim volunteers met Himmler

who was more calculating than ever.

The Fuehrer's residence in Bavaria.

Here are the architects of the Final Solution...

Himmler, the cynic, in the company of Reinhard Heydrich,

his dark shadow.

Confidence on their faces.

In 1942, the Nazis controlled a large part of Europe

and were putting into practice their racial theories.

They believed they would soon defeat the USSR.

They knew, however, that their death machine

would not be sufficient to complete the extermination.

And that some of their men were disgusted

by the tasks they were being asked to perform.

Behind the lines,

the Waffen-SS were now fighting against Stalin's partisans,

soldiers in civilian clothing who, according to the Nazi propaganda,

failed to respect the laws of war.

You could never tell whether it was a partisan or not.

You think you are in a quiet position.

And suddenly, there is all hell got loose.

The partisans' gunmen were shooting right, left and centre.

An ordinary Jew, to go and kill him? No, I didn't.

I can stick well, it is over there

I can stick my hand on the Bible and swear to it. I didn't.

I had no occasion...

I was lucky that I didn't have to.

If you had been ordered to do that, would you have done it?

Now, you ask me... I think I would.

Because an officer ordered me to do.

And an order is to be obeyed.

Even shooting civilians, children, or women, with no weapon?

Oh, no. No.

Not that.

In 1942,

there were still some ten million European Jews left to kill,

according to Heydrich's calculations.

After several experiments,

the SS leaders believed they'd found the solution.

How to kill far more people while sparing their troops.

Death camps.

This amateur footage shot by SS guards

shows the inside of the Posen camp, one of the first in occupied Poland.

Interning undesirables as in the 1930s

was no longer enough.

They were to be killed.

In the greatest secrecy, the SS tested toxic gas.

In a specially built gas chamber hidden behind these outer walls,

they had already eliminated 400 mentally ill prisoners by 1939.

Gassing was a gentler form of death, they said.

Particularly for the killers.

And so the SS now used this technique

to re-launch their killing machine,

targeting all European Jews.

In a few months, Himmler's men set up a new network of death.

A sophisticated, sinister web on a vast scale...

from the Atlantic coast to the plains of Poland,

they ferried their victims to the camps

where they were exterminated.

Europe was a prison.

It became a morgue... antiseptic and efficient.

See how calm these SS men are.

They have partially delegated everyday tasks

to deportees themselves...

and are content just to survey events and keep their hands clean.

Unsullied, distant, superior.

And more cynical than ever.

Most would be sent to the slaughterhouse.

Notably to Auschwitz.

These photos, taken by an SS guard,

show the arrival of prisoners and their sorting by SS doctors.

On one side are the young and healthy who will work.

On the other, those who will be killed in the coming hours.

Once they were designated, the SS guards avoided them.

They merely supervised the killing process,

dropping toxic gas canisters into the gas chamber via a hatch.

Then other prisoners removed and burnt the bodies in ovens.

What did the Auschwitz SS guards feel?

How could they live amid such slaughter?

We sought to meet some of them

recently targeted by the German judiciary.

The only ones willing to speak about Auschwitz are the Waffen-SS

who weren't even there, and who don't believe it happened.

Inadmissible insults to the victims.

A denial of reality,

despite the countless proofs of genocide

committed against those the Nazis judged undesirable.

Here, for example, with the deportation of Dresden's Jews.

Almost all would die in Auschwitz.

An unbearable truth for most SS veterans.

It ruins the dreams of their youth.

Herta Bothe could not deny the existence of the camps.

She worked in several before moving to Bergen-Belsen.

Most of the SS guards in the camps experienced a feeling of power.

Many were delighted to be appointed there.

The camps were a safe haven,

the staff were not risking their lives

and Himmler had made sure they'd be comfortable.

Like here, at the Reichsof camp, 120 miles from Auschwitz.

The Auschwitz camp itself was much sought-after.

It was here, to this 470-acre complex,

that Oskar Groning was sent as an accountant in 1942.

They even had a rural leisure resort, 20 miles from the camp.

Oskar Groning was, he claims, disgusted by the massacres

and asked for a transfer to the front two years after his arrival.

Although he too has retained some fond memories

of his times at the camp...

The men and women of the SS, who behaved like monsters,

were human beings.

And there lies the problem.

July 20, 1944.

The beginning of the end.

This time, their idol was almost eliminated.

At a senior staff meeting, Hitler's bunker was blown apart by a bomb.

A Wehrmacht officer from Germany's old elite was behind the attack.

Hitler was only slightly wounded, but everyone was deeply affected.

The Third Reich, supposed to last 1000 years,

was under threat.

The Normandy landings are now a month old.

In the East, in the West...

everywhere the Germans are retreating.

To try to shore up their crumbling frontlines,

Hitler scales up the deployment of the Waffen-SS...

the "frontline firemen", as they call them.

The SS know they have everything to lose.

Since the 1930s, they've staked everything on Hitler.

If he falls, they fall with him.

"Better kill 1000 Russians too many than one too few"

their leaders on the Eastern Front told them.

Confronted with a similar insurrection in France,

they applied the same terror

to dissuade the population from supporting the Resistance.

At Oradour,

the Das Reich Division assassinated 642 people.

SS soldier Guhr was six miles away at the time, he says.

Certain Waffen-SS soldiers from the Das Reich Division

were forcibly enrolled...

nothing like the others who were volunteers.

From the Alsace border region, they were born French

but the Nazis saw them as German.

They were called the 'Malgre-nous' - 'Against our will'.

In 1944, as the army withdrew,

they discovered from the inside

the pitiless methods of the Black Order.

Born and bred on Nazism,

these SS men couldn't imagine their Fuehrer's demise.

Or their own.

Their leaders warned them...

German civilisation will disappear

if the Jews and the communists prevail.

To replace Heydrich, executed in Prague by the Czech resistance,

Himmler appointed another SS officer, Kaltenbrunner.

And the reign of terror continued unabated.

For some time now, reality had no longer concerned them.

At the end of 1944, their demise was certain,

but they hung on nevertheless.

Hitler had promised miracle weapons...

devastating rockets that would turn the tide of the war.

The V2s caused havoc in England, but nothing actually changed.

Himmler continued to send reinforcements to the front.

EXPLOSION

January 1945.

Himmler, who wanted to erase all traces of the genocide,

ordered that Auschwitz be evacuated.

An amateur film shot by a member of the Czech resistance from his window

shows the last train leaving the camp bound for Germany.

On board the open cars, in temperatures of minus-5 Fahrenheit,

are SS guards and their prisoners,

thousands of Jewish deportees who have escaped the gas chambers.

It was in liberating the camps

that the Allies discovered the massacre committed by the SS.

Six million Jewish victims.

Hundreds of thousands of prisoners assassinated.

Homosexuals... priests...

gypsies... disabled people.

Only some of the 40,000 SS guards were arrested and identified.

These men who thought they were superior to others

looked very ordinary.

Some were disguised as prisoners, in striped uniforms,

in an attempt to pass unnoticed.

Most of them were identified by the blood-group tattoo under their arms,

stamped when they first joined the SS.

A mark they could never wash off,

even if they cut and re-stitched their skin.

Among them were 3000 female camp guards

including Herta Bothe.

For two days, the Allies made them bury their victims.

Interviewed over 50 years after the events,

Herta Bothe had not one word to say

about the dead prisoners in the camps.

She believes she was the victim.

They had been the new lords.

They had become pariahs.

Until the bitter end, most of them continued to fight on the front,

or what was left of it.

Living the legend, remaining pure.

I was relieved, because I was still alive!

May 8, 1945.

Germany surrenders.

The SS were moved into prisoner-of-war camps

where they would spend months, even years.

Disguised as a police sergeant,

their leader, Himmler, hid among the crowd.

After several weeks of wandering, he was arrested by the Allies

and committed suicide with a cyanide capsule.

Some of them were sentenced to death by the Allied courts.

Like these Waffen-SS soldiers,

accused of executing American prisoners in 1944.

Convinced they were right,

they refuse to listen to their sentences to the end.

"The justice of conquerors" they say.

Because the atrocities committed by the Allies -

the bombings of Japanese and German cities - went unpunished.

That the Germans were all punished

is a myth maintained by all the veterans.

Apart from a few leaders,

most of the SS slipped through the net.

As if only one man should really pay the price.

A good SS member must be able to wipe out even his close family

if they rebel against Adolf Hitler's ideas.

So said their generals.

Spring, 1945.

The last pictures of the SS.

"Achtung!" this man mocks.

They're American soldiers, disguised as SS.

For them, the Black Order has become the butt of jokes.

'Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring' by Bach plays

For Germany, one of the cradles of humanism and European culture,

the discovery of the extent of Nazi crimes was traumatising.

"I'm ashamed to be a German"

wrote one Munich citizen on May 28, 1945

on the ruins of the Feldherrnhalle

the place where the SS had once sworn their allegiance.

But how to get out of the cult?

Eberhard Heder, a captain in the Wiking Division,

abandoned his racist convictions

and pursued a career in the army of the Federal Republic of Germany.

Ekkehard Guhr, a member of the SS's Das Reich Division

who dreamed of chivalry

became a pastor.

Egon Kuhn became a trade unionist, speaking tirelessly

of the brainwashing he had received in his youth.

But they were exceptions.

Many of them would remain incorrigible and nostalgic,

often joining Waffen-SS veterans associations

which still exist today.

Like Manfred Diener.

Or Kurt Barkhausen,

whose speeches are still used by extremist networks.

Herbert von Mildenburg set up businesses in South America

while maintaining relations with several notorious revisionists.

In the midst of the Cold War, Werner Volkner,

after having spent several years in a prisoner-of-war camp,

joined the British army.

To finish the job against the Russians, he said.

It wasn't until 2015

that the former Auschwitz accountant, SS Sergeant Groning

was tried by the German courts.

He was sentenced to four years in prison

for complicity in the murder of 300,000 Jews.

Pending appeal...

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