Original subtitles

Klara Hitler seems to have been the one human being in

Hitler's life whom he unambiguously and deeply loved.

She became ill with cancer in 1907,

and he was absolutely stricken with grief when

she died towards the end of that year.

And she was being treated by a Jewish physician,

Dr. Bloch.

There's this myth that the fact that Dr. Bloch was Jewish

and that Hitler's mother died might have been the origin point

of Hitler's antisemitism, but that's pretty clearly,

complete nonsense.

Hitler actually maintained a certain reverence

for Dr. Bloch.

In 1938 Hitler recognized that Dr. Bloch was gonna be in

some danger and he actually intervened to arrange

Dr. Bloch's emigration to the United States.

Racism is always somewhat abstract and when confronted

with the actual human being, most people are going to react

on an individual basis as Hitler did with Dr. Bloch.

It's a paradox with people holding strongly racist attitudes.

When we're wondering where Hitler's

antisemitism comes from, we're not really just talking about

any old antisemitism.

I think what we're really asking though is where does this

antisemitism that would lead to the rise of the Nazis,

that would lead to the Holocaust;

that would lead to the persecution and death of millions of Jews;

where does that antisemitism come from?

I think Hitler tried to explain his antisemitism as

something that was necessary;

as something that really came from studied

evaluation of the situation.

From the beginning, Hitler is quite consistent about

the Jewish question;

Jews have to be removed from the face of the Earth.

Without Hitler, none of this would have happened.

.

I, I can still remember Hitler's voice.

It was unique.

The way he yelled and screamed at these mass meetings.

Of course, there wasn't television so

I didn't have a visual image of him.

But it was a bad word;

"Hitler," was a bad word.

The Wolf's Lair was Hitler's military command.

It's located deep in the woods,

on about 600 acres,

and there are hundreds of structures,

enormous concrete bunkers,

and it's well protected,

it's camouflaged.

Other than radio communications

there's not much contact with the outside world.

It was actually a pretty awful place, everybody hated it.

It was a forested location with terrible flies.

The accommodations were uncomfortable.

But it had become this huge complex with very complicated

security perimeters because Hitler was very paranoid.

Hitler spends three years or so living,

full time, in these headquarters.

And it was from this massive compound that Hitler and

the Nazi elite carried out much of the war.

Hitler and a lot of the top Germans, in 1941,

have a clear perception that the United States is moving

steadily towards war against them.

Hitler understands that the United States is gonna be a serious threat.

This comes as a shock to President Roosevelt

who did not know that these attacks were coming.

This is followed immediately by a Declaration of War on

the United States by Adolf Hitler.

This sense of himself dictated that he be

the one to declare war on the United States,

not the other way around.

This comes as a welcome distraction to the unexpectedly

slow progress of the war on the Eastern Front.

The war in Russia was not going well.

The German idea of invading the Soviet Union was,

this campaign will be over in nine to 12 weeks.

But it's not.

The Germans advance very quickly,

but it's not quickly enough.

Winter in Russia is famously difficult and

the German army was not prepared for a long winter.

On some level Hitler knows he's in trouble and

he's got senior officials telling him he's in trouble.

He knows he's running out of time to win.

The Sunday Express today says that...

As of December 1941,

Germany is facing the Soviet Union,

Great Britain and the United States.

How can Hitler respond to that?

There are two ways; the first is that,

"This proves what I have said all along, it's us against the world."

And what kind of a world is it?

It's a Jewish world.

And the second thing that Hitler then says is,

"In order for us to win the war...

The Jews must be destroyed."

What that meant becomes clear with the deployment

of Einsatzgruppen, mobile killing squads,

that actually followed in the footsteps of the German Army.

People were rounded up, beaten up,

they were brutalized,

taken to a killing site;

everybody could hear it, everybody could see it.

The killings were public;

there was nothing secret about the killings.

So, on the local level, everybody knows.

Hitler himself is very well informed of this.

He gets type written reports.

The Holocaust begins with these shooting pits and so,

by the end of 1941 roughly a million Jews have already been

murdered during the German invasion of the Soviet Union.

The Germans now understand that they have the methods and

they have the willingness to murder Jews on a mass scale.

Until that point, the Jews that are being killed are

Jews in areas of Eastern Europe that Germany has concurred.

Jews living in Western Europe,

they're still not being targeted

by the Nazi extermination.

The decision to

exterminate the Jews of Europe

happen in the aftermath of the invasion of

the Soviet Union, prior to that.

The fantasy existed,

but the conditions for implementation did not.

But what happens in January, 1942,

is a coordination of the top levels of the Nazi Regime

in order to facilitate the killing of Jews throughout Europe.

The Wannsee Conference is an important moment for

putting together the elements of the final solution.

Eichmann, says, "Well, we're talking about

11 million Jews," so that's a pretty major undertaking.

They organize the construction of extermination camps,

which would include involving the entire system

of railroads so as to transport people across

the continent to sites where they would be killed.

There is no one document,

there is no one policy,

there is no one decision, not even the Wannsee Conference that

leads to the final solution.

It was series of radicalized policies that were made even

more radical by the war in the East.

There's a structure to this;

the reason for why this happened.

It is not simply that the war was brutal,

which it was, it is that there was a policy.

And the policy was declared by Hitler...

And it was a policy of extermination.

Hundreds of Jews were arrested that day,

from our neighborhood.

And then they came in trucks, loaded us on trucks and took us

to the railroad station.

And there was a long cattle car.

60/70 people into one wagon,

very crowded, crammed together.

Pretty horrible beginning of,

of the deportation.

We were deported on June 20, 1943 to Westerberg,

where most Jews landed before they were

deported to death camps.

To 1942 when the infrastructure and the planning

of gathering people up from

ghettos and transporting them by

trains to camps

becomes the norm.

It's into 1943 and 1944 where

the train rides are now longer.

They're from

the occupied Netherlands,

they're from Italy,

they're from Greece.

We came to the railroad station...

And they had packed us in box cars without food or water.

And we took off, not knowing where.

They brought us into Majdanek.

They told us to undress.

They put us into cold showers, and they took away everything.

If you had a child in your hands,

you went to the crematorium immediately.

And that's the last I saw of the family.

And they said, "You see that smoke?

Do you smell it?"

And they said, "That's gas chamber."

We didn't know nothing about it,

we never even heard of such a thing as gas chambers.

He said, "They're burning bodies."

But the minute they got into Treblinka and

they saw what's going there, dead bodies...

Everybody was screaming, screaming, crying.

The next day, they tattooed us.

My number was 88959.

That's 88841 and my brother had 8842.

2570...

Mine was 107984.

65360.

And my number was 8-5143.

The system of concentration camps

reached almost

unimaginable proportions.

And we know now

that there were at least

42,000 concentration camps,

sub-camps, satellite camps,

ghettos for Jews and

also formal death camps.

When you say, "The Jews taken to Auschwitz

were submitted to the final solution,"

what do you mean by that?

Birkenau had four gas chambers,

each of which could gas 2,000 people at a time.

Then the bodies would be taken to the crematoria and burnt and

the ashes would be then dumped into pits in the ground or used

for paving roads, or they would be buried in mass graves.

We have this image that somehow these death facilities

were sterile and separated from the rest of life,

we call them industrial.

The killing at these places was just as horrifying

as shooting over a mass grave.

The killing in these places involved bringing people into

this horrifying situation where they can see what was happening

to other people and where they realized that

they were going to die.

A girl want to run away, we didn't know who she was,

and they found her

and they hanged her.

And they let her hang in a windy day;

three days and three nights and we were afraid to look at it.

It's gonna happen to us if somebody will try to run away.

So nobody tried.

It all comes gradually step-by-step,

it becomes worse.

And then, you realize,

you are probably gonna be killed.

Adolf Hitler never visited any sites of atrocities,

and he didn't even visit German cities to show sympathy

and support for the German people.

Hitler absolutely did not want to face the real human cost of

what his war had brought.

We often look at the Holocaust and think of it as

something that we only understood after the war,

but this is, of course, not true.

The word, "Holocaust,"

didn't exist, but the thing was understood perfectly well

by the people who observed it.

Jews who are within its reach understood what was happening.

They knew that they were all going to be murdered.

Many people will say, "Why didn't you fight back?"

How do you fight machine guns and

sub-machine guns with your bare hands?

I'd like, I'd like them to tell me how this can be when

you're surrounded by hundreds of storm troopers with

heavy weapons and you stand there naked!

The fight should have started before when the world knew,

from 1932 on that antisemitism became very,

very strong and it, it...

Ultimately, they must have known,

or should have known, what will happen.

Nobody came to our aid, nobody helped the Jews.

They were like the articles,

but they were on the, on the back pages.

Nobody made a headline out of it.

So, you know, and people were skeptical.

If somebody would come and tell you,

"They're taking little kids to the gas chambers,"

would you believe that?

What he started was not him simply doing it.

There were millions of people involved,

not those who were killed;

those who made it possible.

People who became involved in a vast genocide or undertaking.

What we know about Hitler is that there would not have

been a Holocaust without him.

And yet, we don't see his hand on these major policy decisions

about how to carry it out.

Hitler had charged Heinrich Himmler for

carrying out this operation.

And Himmler did it, without question.

GÖRTEMAKER: Heinrich Himmler is

a very powerful man.

He commands the SS, the police in Germany,

and he is a fanatic follower of Hitler,

a total fanatic.

Himmler convenes a meeting of about 200 SS officers

in the Polish town of Posen.

Himmler, knowing that this is already late 1943 and that

anybody with eyes in their head knows that Germany is

losing the war, and knows that what they have been involved in

is a horrendous crime.

They don't have the word genocide yet,

but they know that they murdered millions of people.

Himmler is trying to distribute responsibility.

He's telling those people, "We are all in it together."

He is painting a picture that is horrifying precisely

because he tries to make genocide into a glorious act.

There is one reference to Hitler in the speech,

which is the crucial reference.

He said, "We were told to do it.

And we did it as best we could."

Heil!

Sieg! Heil!

So many of these horrible decisions that led to

the utter disregard for human life,

came in very small ways.

By all kinds of bureaucrats and police officers and

housewives agreeing to go along.

A whole society can become involved,

with very little resistance.

The relationship of Hitler with his military commanders

during World War II is one of the most complicated and

fascinating stories of his whole regime.

He didn't trust them, and he had a propensity to

insert himself in tactical decisions.

The problem for Hitler, when it came to his generals,

was that he demanded the impossible;

Complete, total unquestioning loyalty but also,

high levels of competence.

Hitler and his generals knew that in order to continue

the war effort they needed to capture the resources in

the southern part of the Soviet Union.

Stalingrad, as a city named after Stalin, was...

.

Highly symbolically important to both sides.

Stalingrad, without question,

is one of the single most important turning points

of the entire war.

It takes place over five months and

the fight goes through the dead of winter.

It is an extraordinarily hard fight for both sides.

The German effort is collapsing and

Hitler is refusing to listen to his generals, mainly,

Friedrich Von Paulus, the Commander of the 6th Army.

Hitler told Paulus not to surrender,

at any cost, and to allow the entire army to be destroyed

before he gave up the fight.

Paulus disregarded the order and surrendered in order to

save the lives of the troops.

The Russian say Von Paulus gave orders that

no Red Army prisoners were to be taken.

Now he's a prisoner himself.

And he forbade Germans to surrender.

Now he himself surrenders, with his army.

For Hitler this is more proof of the incompetence and

perfidy and treachery of his leading generals.

For Germany, when the defeat was announced,

it had a tremendously negative effect on German public opinion.

Stalingrad made it obvious to everyone,

the lightning speed successes of

the early war years had come to an end.

For Hitler, I think that marks the point where...

He kinda loses it.

He felt betrayed, by his own race,

by his own German nation.

For a small group of military officers,

Stalingrad is really the turning point in pushing them to

take the ultimate step,

and that is; the assassination of Hitler.

After the complete defeat at Stalingrad,

it's clear that if you want to continue the war,

if you're not about to see reality and say,

"We cannot win this, we have to somehow negotiate

our way out of it,"

which is not Hitler's state of mind,

then you have to demand everything from the German people...

To the death!

The Allied invasion of Europe from

the west is launched.

D-Day, the second front, 4,000 ships and thousands of

smaller vessels are involved in the enterprise.

A great Allied cooperative effect,

which sets forth to seal the fate of Germany.

The Coast Guard, the Navy,

the Air Forces land hundred of thousands of British

Canadians and Yanks on Hitler's doorstep within a few days!

This was one of the greatest intelligence successes

for the Western Allies of the entire war,

because the Germans never found out

where the Allies were going to land.

The situation is really looking very,

very bad for Hitler by July, 1944.

We know that there were somewhere around 40 people

who plotted to assassinate Hitler,

from the time he became Chancellor to the end of the war.

Hitler had the most extraordinary luck.

He survived attempt after attempt that

he just shouldn't have survived.

It's pretty clear to most Germans in powerful positions

that they're going to lose the war.

And this is really important for the Anti-Hitler Resistance

in particular, the officers who become

the core of the Valkyrie Plot.

The men in the actual planning are in the Military;

they are very conservative.

They're mostly people who had been in support of Hitler.

A key figure is Claus Von Stauffenberg.

Stauffenberg was a very energetic,

gung-ho man who brought the burst of energy

that the plot needed.

On the 20 July, 1944,

Stauffenberg is briefing Hitler...

He goes into the meeting room with a bomb in a briefcase.

What Hitler's top generals were going to do was

initiate Operation Valkyrie.

They were going to kill Hitler,

using a bomb under the big oak table

where Hitler studies maps in the Wolf's Lair.

Stauffenberg had left the briefcase right by Hitler,

but somebody seems to have sort of push it behind a,

a heavy table leg.

And so when the bomb went off,

the heavy table leg also contained some of the blast.

Stauffenberg and his accomplice did manage to escape

the Wolf's Lair, barely.

And they got on a waiting airplane that

took them back to Berlin.

Hitler is not dead.

They failed.

Hitler was wounded; his eardrums were burst,

he had splinters in his leg and his hair was singed.

His arm was swollen...

But he was very much alive.

There is a ferocious response from Hitler.

Stauffenberg and some of his close associates were

immediately shot at the Military Headquarters in Berlin.

He ordered about 5,000 arrests.

Many of these people were put on trial,

many were tortured, many were executed.

When Hitler got an idea of the full scale of the resistance,

he was very deeply shocked.

This only fueled his tendency to paranoia.

Toward the very end, the accumulating psychological

pressure most certainly had a deleterious effect on him

physical and psychologically.

By this time Hitler's really in terrible shape.

It has been speculated that he had Parkinson's disease.

Some have speculated that he was in a tertiary stage of syphilis.

He shook, he had tremors.

He had long been taking an exotic concoction of medicines

that were administered by his doctor, Theodor Morell.

Doctor Morell was not afraid to experiment with quaky

and untested remedies and some of these

seemed to make Hitler feel better.

So Hitler developed a, a certain affection for Morell.

In fact Morell was feeding him all kinds of,

of terrible things, including methamphetamine.

And these drugs were, no doubt,

starting to have a pretty bad effect on him by 1944.

All of this starts to mount.

The casualties are mounting, the despair is mounting,

food is starting to get shorter and shorter.

It was an absolute terrible time for ordinary Germans.

And the destruction on German cities was massive.

There was a logic of destruction built into that war

that had to end with fast destruction of everyone.

I think there were a lot of unanswered questions

about why he did what he did.

The reason we're so fascinated by him is that

he seems to be telling us something different from

what we thought about human nature.

We didn't think any human being was capable of

killing six million people, 50 million if you wanna count

the war that he started.

And there is always that concern in history that

violence on an unimaginable level we want to understand but,

perhaps not too much.

At the same time, it's also very problematic to just simply say,

"That was a different time.

Hitler was evil as were all of those who followed him."

It doesn't allow us to look at ourselves and

the potentials that we might face in the future.

We were hiding away.

And everybody hoped that there will come a day

that we will be liberated,

and you only lived with one thought in mind;

to live one day longer than Hitler.

In the bunker at the end Hitler probably understood that

there was no way out.

GÖRTEMAKER: Hitler's last army was the children of Berlin.

He pinches one of their cheeks and he sends them to die.

When I entered the camp I had peered into hell.

If we want to conceive a world where these crimes against

humanity do not happen anymore,

we have to talk about Hitler and of the Holocaust.

Captioned by Cotter Media Group.