All language subtitles for Auschwitz 1 of 6 - Surprising Beginnings

This is the site of the largest mass murder
in the history of the world

Auschwitz.

1.1 million people died here.

More than the total British and American
losses in the whole of the Second World War.

This is the story of the evolution of Auschwitz
and the mentality of the perpetrators.

It's a history, based in part on documents

and plans only discovered since
the opening of archives in Eastern Europe,

and informed by interviews
with people who were there,

including former members of the SS.

And if you ask yourself if this is really
necessary you say to yourself,

"Yes, of course, we have been told that
these are our enemies and there is a war on."

But the horrors of Auschwitz
did not occur in isolation.

The camp evolved alongside the Nazi plan
for the conquest of Eastern Europe.

A war of destruction unlike
any other in modern times.

One in which innocent civilians were
murdered by special killing squads.

"The order said - they are to be shot."

"And for me, that was binding"

As the war developed
Nazi decision makers conceived

one of the most infamous
policies in all history.

What they called the 'Final Solution'
- the extermination of the Jews.

And at Auschwitz they journeyed
down the long

and crooked road to mass
murder to create this

the building which symbolised their crime
- a factory of death.

"They were, the people screaming
- all the people, you know

they didn't know what to do,

scratching the walls,
crying until the gas took effect.

If I close my eyes,
the only thing I see is standing up

women with children in,
in their hands, there. "

What follows is the surprising
story of the birth of Auschwitz,

and the Nazi policy of mass extermination.

With Auschwitz initially built
for an altogether

different purpose than
the gassing of the Jews.

And the Nazis evolving
their wider policy of killing in ways

that defy the popular myth of the SS as
robotic killers who simply acted under orders.

In the spring of 1940,

Captain Rudolf H�ss of
the SS journeyed through Poland

to take up the job of Commandant of
a new Nazi concentration camp.

H�ss was travelling to the outskirts of
the town of Auschwitz.

In the midst of territory snatched

by Hitler during his invasion of Poland
the previous year.

Here H�ss would create
this concentration camp.

The very first Auschwitz,

which was later known as
the Stammlager or Auschwitz 1.

But when H�ss first arrived
in April 1940 few of these buildings existed.

This infamous concentration camp began life as
a collection of dilapidated former

Polish army barracks set around
a huge horse breaking yard.

'The task wasn't easy.

In the shortest possible time,
I had to create a camp for 10,000 prisoners

using the existing complex of buildings
which were well constructed

but were completely run down
and swarming with vermin. '

And this first Auschwitz was built
not to hold Polish Jews

who were to be confined elsewhere in ghettos,
but chiefly Polish political prisoners,

anyone the Nazis considered
a threat to their occupation.

'True opponents of the state had
to be securely locked up.

Only the SS were capable of protecting

the National Socialist State
from all internal danger.

All other organisations lacked
the necessary toughness. '

The Nazi occupation of Poland was
to be brutal.

They wanted to make
the Poles a nation of slaves

and it was to help them achieve this aim

that the Nazis first
built places like Auschwitz,

modelled on concentration camps
they'd already established in Germany.

H�ss who had worked in concentration camps
since 1934 knew

that his task was to create a place
that would strike terror into the Poles.

But the gas chambers for which Auschwitz was
to become infamous were not yet conceived.

H�ss even adopted the cynical motto of Dachau
concentration camp in Germany

Arbeit Macht Frei - "Work makes you free"

and emblazoned
it on the new gates of Auschwitz.

The Polish prisoners now arriving

at the new camp were subject to
appalling treatment from the SS.

Over half the 23,000 Poles first sent to
Auschwitz were dead within twenty months.

Jerzy Bielecki was imprisoned in Auschwitz

because the Nazis suspected
he was in the Polish resistance.

Once there the SS sentenced
him to hanging torture,

a punishment favoured in
other concentration camps as well,

where the prisoner was made to carry

his full body weight on arms pulled back
into an unnatural position.

"He wanted to hang me on the hook,
he said stand up on your toes.

Finally he hooked me and then he kicked
the stool away without any warning.

I just felt Jesus Mary
oh my God the terrible pain.

My shoulders were breaking out
from the joints,

both arms were breaking out from the joints.

I'd been moaning and he just said shut up
you dog you deserve it, you have to suffer.

Appallingly violent as life was at Auschwitz,

the camp itself was not yet a major priority
in the Nazi scheme of things,

so much so that in those early days H�ss was
forced to go scrounging for basic supplies.

"Since I could expect no help from
the inspectorate of concentration camps,

I had to make do as best
I could and help myself.

I had to drive as far as 60 miles to
Zakopane and Rabka just to get some kettles.

I didn't even know where
I could get 100 metres of barbed wire,

so I just had to pilfer the badly
needed barbed wire. "

After a day of pilfering H�ss returned home to
a house on the edge of the concentration camp.

Here he lived as he thought a Nazi conqueror
should and treated the prisoners as his serfs.

'Every week and a half or so,

a junior officer from the guard company
would come and take me to his house

and I would cut H�ss's hair,

"kein Wort".

He wouldn't say a word to me and
I wouldn't say a word, because I was afraid.

'Weren't you ever tempted to stick
the scissors in his neck? '

It could have happened.

I had a razor in my hand I could have
grabbed him and slit his throat.

It could have happened.

But I'm a living, thinking being.

Do you know what would have happened?

My whole family would have been destroyed,
half of the camp would have been destroyed,

and in his place someone else would have come.

While H�ss lived in comfort
the prisoners struggled to survive.

Deprived of adequate sustenance
they evolved their own code of conduct,

and one of the worst crimes an inmate
could commit was to take another's food.

'What was done to get rid of such people?

They were liquidated.
The prisoners killed them at night.

They put a blanket over his face
and kept it there until he stopped breathing.

And no one would ask questions.

In the morning the block elder would report
- so many dead. Fair enough. '

And you didn't feel anything?
This was normal?

'Absolutely. It was completely normal.

Except for a kind of flash
- subconscious perhaps:

God, and still things such
as this are happening.

And still things such as this.

But these things couldn't be helped.

In other words, "don't think about it.
It's been and gone.

Now think about where to go to work,
to survive the following day,

just to survive the following day.

Watch your bread, so that no-one steals it,
so that you get to eat some breakfast.

Go to work and try to find a lighter job. "

This is what you were preoccupied with,
and this was a constant vigilance.

"Be vigilant. You have to survive."

Presiding over the horror of prison life

at Auschwitz in 1940 were H�ss
and around 300 members of the SS.

They held comradeship evenings for themselves

and their families to foster
a sense of solidarity.

But as H�ss reveals, it was a charade.

"Palitzsch, the roll call leader,
was the most cunning and slippery creature

I had ever got to know
and experience during my long

and diverse service in
various concentration camps.

He literally walked over bodies
to satisfy his hunger for power.

Fritzsch, the first camp officer,

was short-witted yet stubborn
and always quarrelsome,

even though he was trying to
present himself as a good comrade

and also talked a lot about comradeship
when he was off duty.

His behaviour was, in reality,
anything but comradely. "

H�ss' memoirs reveal him to be a hard-hearted,
petty-minded man,

always wanting to shift responsibility
for his mistakes onto others.

And in his own admission Auschwitz was,

from the first, a concentration camp
where great brutality was practised.

Despite this, during 1940 the camp

he ran was almost a backwater
in Nazi occupied Poland.

All that was about to change.

The crucial reason for the transformation of
Auschwitz was simple - its location.

The area around the camp was
rich in natural resources.

This part of Poland possessed
a plentiful supply of fresh water,

lime and most importantly of all
for what was to come, coal.

Within 20 miles of Auschwitz lay
a network of mines

with access to some of the richest
coal seams in Europe.

Towards the end of 1940,

these were just the resources
that scientists at IG Farben,

the giant German industrial conglomerate,
were looking for.

They'd been experimenting for years in
how to make synthetic rubber and fuel,

essential raw materials
for the German war effort.

Water, lime and coal were the most
important ingredients they needed.

Now they found that Auschwitz
was just the right place to site

their new factory in the East.

Heinrich Himmler,
Commander of the SS,

now visited Auschwitz
for the very first time.

He had heard the news

that IG Farben with its huge financial
resources was interested in coming to the area.

Himmler was accompanied
on his tour of inspection by H�ss,

the regional Nazi leader - the Gauleiter -,

and other senior members of the SS.

Himmler told them that he wanted
Auschwitz tripled in capacity

from 10,000 to 30,000 prisoners
- the camp would be a backwater no longer,

but the biggest concentration camp
in the Nazi state.

But as H�ss witnessed,

the local Nazi leader had problems
with Reichsf�hrer Himmler's plans.

"The Gauleiter raised objections
and the County President

tried to put a stop to the plan by pointing
to the unresolved drainage issue.

But the Reichsf�hrer would have none of it. "

Unsurprisingly, Himmler got his way.

A whole series of plans was drawn up
over the succeeding months and years,

detailing the grandeur, almost megalomania of
the new Nazi vision for Auschwitz.

Hidden for decades,
the detailed drawings surfaced only shortly

before the death of
the original German architect.

The Nazi dream was that the money
IG Farben were bringing to the area

would fund the creation of
a new town of Auschwitz,

a model German settlement in the East.

Ethnic Germans would now live here,

with those who currently lived in the town
thrown out of their homes and deported.

Plans were made for a gigantic Nazi party
headquarters and a host of other new buildings.

And nearby, down the Sola River,

the concentration camp
itself was to be transformed.

Prisoners would work as slave labour
at the IG Farben factory nearby,

the SS would sell IG Farben raw materials
and a huge new 'Kommandantur',

a central administrative building,
would be built.

A special apartment was even to be
constructed for Himmler himself.

Auschwitz was to be
his home away from home.

Plans were drawn up for suitable
furniture for the Reichsf�hrer.

From his sofa to his occasional table,
from his armchair to the hangings on the wall.

Himmler's vision for the new Auschwitz
was certainly grandiose.

But it was the epic plans that Adolf Hitler
was working on at the same time

which would transform Auschwitz in ways
that dwarfed anything Himmler had contemplated.

Hitler intended not just to reorganise
a concentration camp and a town,

but to reshape entire countries.

For, during the spring of 1941,

Hitler worked on plans to
invade the Soviet Union.

This decision would in turn act as the catalyst
for radical change in the function of Auschwitz.

Before the end of 1941 Hitler expected

German troops to be parading
through Moscow's Red Square.

The Nazis hated the Soviet Union.

It was the home of Communism -
an ideology they both feared and despised.

The Nazi's believed that it ought not to be
hard to defeat Stalin and his Red Army.

They were - in civilisation terms
- not as far on as the West.

You just have to imagine the following:

France - a civilised nation
with flushing toilets.

Russia - predominantly toilet behind the house.

In Berlin that Spring of 1941,

this view that the Soviet Union was peopled
with inferior human beings,

pervaded Nazi strategic thinking.

Nazi economic planners worked out

how the German army could be fed once
the invasion was launched.

And in the process they thought
it legitimate to plan mass starvation.

Every word spoken here is taken
from Nazi memoranda

and minutes of economic committees held just
before the war against the Soviet Union began.

So even before the war started,

the Nazis envisaged the extermination of
large sections of the Soviet population.

This was to be a war of annihilation.

In the weeks after their invasion
of the Soviet Union

the Germans took 3 million Soviet prisoners.

Within 9 months 2 million of them were dead,
many starved to death in German captivity.

Any Soviet political officers, or commissars,

found amongst the Red Army prisoners
on the front line were to be shot.

But some who slipped through were
sent to concentration camps

which is how Auschwitz first became
involved in the war in the East.

On this spot in July 1941,

Soviet prisoners were forced
to work in gravel pits.

From behind a nearby fence,
a Polish inmate of Auschwitz,

Jerzy Bielecki,
watched what happened to them.

'The Prisoner Overseers beat them mercilessly,
kicked them, clubbed them;

they would fall to the ground,
it was a macabre scene.

I had never in my life seen
anything like it.

Neither did I later on, even though I remained
in the camp for a long time after.

I saw an SS-man, a junior officer,

walking around the gravel pit with a pistol
in his hand... it was sadism.

"You dogs! You damned communists!
You pieces of shit!"

Horrible words like these.

And from time to time he would direct the pistol
downwards and shoot: pow... pow pow. '

It wasn�t just the Soviet prisoners of war
who were to suffer as the Nazis moved East;

it was the Soviet Jews as well.

The Nazis, hardened anti-Semites,
believed that the combination of Slavs,

Jews and Communism was particularly dangerous.

There were connections
between Jews and Bolsheviks,

there was sufficient evidence for the fact
that there were connections between the two.

The Nazis spouted any number of
similar prejudices about the Jews.

Even claiming there was an international
Jewish conspiracy against them

and that the Jews had somehow
lost Germany the 1st World War.

Their delusions knew no bounds.

From the moment the Germans first
invaded the Soviet Union,

Nazi special units operating
throughout the countryside

and towns had shot many male Jews
including Communists,

civic leaders and even
those just of military age.

They'd also encouraged locals to rise up
against the Jews as is happening here

in this rare footage
from the Ukraine in July 1941.

After a series of meetings between Hitler
and Himmler in the summer of 1941

there was an escalation in
the persecution of the Soviet Jews.

New units were committed
to special duties in the East,

among them the 1st SS Infantry Brigade.

In a typical action,

they approached the town of Ostrog
in the western part of the Ukraine

on August 4th 1941,

where over ten thousand Jews from
the surrounding area had been gathered together.

Among them were 11 year old
Vasyl Valdeman and his family.

They were now at risk.

The Nazi killing squads in the East
had now began to target

Jewish women and children as well as men.

We knew something
would be done to us here.

When we saw people hit
and driven along here with spades,

even small children realised
why people were carrying the spades.

One of the members of
the 1st SS Infantry Brigade

at the time was Hans Friedrich.

He claims not to recall exactly
which actions he took part in that summer,

but he does admit to participating in killings
like the one in Ostrog.

They were so utterly shocked and frightened,
you could do with them what you wanted.

Kids were crying, the sick were crying,
the elderly were praying to God.

Not on their knees but seated or lying down.

It was very tough to go through it all,
hearing all this wailing and crying.

Then they had everyone get up and said 'Go',
and as soon as people started moving,

they selected people for shooting,
for execution.

The selected Ukrainian Jews were taken out
to this spot and a pit was dug.

In scenes which were repeated
right across the areas

of the Soviet Union occupied
by the Nazis, men,

women and children were ordered to
strip and prepare to die.

Try to imagine there is a ditch, with people on
one side, and behind them soldiers.

That was us and we were shooting.

And those who were hit fell down
into the ditch.

Could you tell me what you were thinking
and feeling when you were shooting?

Nothing.

I only thought,

'Aim carefully'

so that you hit properly.

That was my thought.

This was your only thought?

During all that time you had
no feelings for the people,

the Jewish civilians that you shot?

No.

And why not?

Because my hatred towards
the Jews is too great.

And I admit my thinking on this point is unjust,
I admit this.

But what I experienced from my earliest youth
when I was living on a farm,

what the Jews were doing to us
- well that will never change.

That is my unshakeable conviction.

As he grew up in the 1930's in
an atmosphere of vicious anti-Semitism,

Hans Friedrich came to believe

that local Jewish traders had
cheated him and his family.

What in God's name did the people
you shot have to do

with those people who supposedly
treated you badly at home?

They simply belonged to the same group!

What else?
What else did they have to do with it?

Nothing, but to us they were Jews!

Though I was a small boy at that time,
I understood what Nazis were.

I had no idea before but afterwards
I was thinking all the time

what makes those people be so cruel,
what makes them beasts? '

The killings went on into the evening.

Vasyl Valdeman and his mother managed to escape
and hide in a nearby village.

But the SS killed his father,
grandfather and two uncles.

That's how it was - the first execution
- the most horrible one.

It wasn't the last one.

There were three more large executions after

that with 2000 to 3000 people shot
at every one of them.

More people were executed afterwards
in smaller scale ones

and this is how the Jewish community of
Ostrog was annihilated. '

At the same time as the mass shootings of
Jews in the Soviet Union,

there was also an escalation in the killing of
Auschwitz prisoners.

For the first time inmates of Auschwitz were
to be killed by gassing.

But not in the way for which the camp was
eventually to become notorious.

H�ss received news that doctors
from the so called

Adult Euthanasia Programme
would visit the camp.

They were looking for those prisoners
who could no longer work.

Members of the Nazis'
Adult Euthanasia Programme

had up to now been targeting the mentally
and physically disabled.

A section of the population who had long been
demonised by Nazi propaganda.

In 1939, Hitler had authorised a scheme by

which severely disabled children
could be murdered.

Then once the war began, this killing was
extended to disabled adults as well.

The selection was straightforward.

A doctor would examine a report
on the patient and then

if he thought they were suitable candidates
for the scheme,

he would mark the form with a red cross.

Two other doctors separately marked
identical forms

and a majority vote decided
the patient's fate.

The doctors met neither each other,
nor the patient, before reaching their verdict.

Those selected to die were taken to special
institutions inside Germany like this one,

the Sonnenstein Clinic near Dresden.

There were six centres like this
spread throughout Germany.

And in them, a new method of killing
had been devised using a subterfuge

that would eventually be adopted at Auschwitz.

The disabled were told
they were going to have a shower.

They were taken into a room from
which hung pipes and showerheads.

But the pipes were not connected to water.

They led out through the walls to
bottles of carbon monoxide gas.

Once the room was sealed, the carbon monoxide
was turned on and the patients murdered.

Around 70,000 disabled people had been killed
in this way by the summer of 1941.

Himmler wanted the Adult Euthanasia Scheme
to be extended to concentration camps,

which is why a special unit
came to Auschwitz that summer.

'During an evening roll call,

we were told that all the sick among us
could go away for treatment...

that they could leave to be cured,
and that they were to sign up.

Of course, it was said that they would be
going for treatment.

And, in the camp,
some people believed it... '

So the first Auschwitz prisoners to be gassed
were not killed in the camp

but transported to gas chambers in Germany.

And they were selected not
because they were Jews

but because they could no longer work.

There were 575 people and they walked
like some kind of funeral procession,

because some walked, others were carried
on stretchers - a kind of melancholy march.

And the inmates standing nearby were saying
farewell to their relatives and friends.

All of them were worn out prisoners.

There were no healthy people among them.

Male nurses carried some on stretchers.

It was terribly macabre.
It was a procession of spectres.

Two weeks after the sick were
taken from Auschwitz,

Heinrich Himmler visited the Soviet Union.

A visit that was to be of great significance
in the development

of the Nazis' Extermination Programme.

The discovery in the 1990's of
Himmler's appointment diary

for this crucial period allows
his precise movements to be tracked.

He drove to the outskirts of Minsk
and on the morning of Friday,

August 15th 1941, he watched an execution of
Jews and alleged partisans.

The sight must have been similar
to this execution,

filmed around the same time on the sand-dunes
of Liepaja in Latvia.

After the shooting, SS General Erich von dem
Bach-Zelewski told Himmler

there was a problem with the SS killers.

Bach-Zelewski knew that all over
the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941

the Nazis and their collaborators were
murdering women

and children at close range
and in cold blood.

Himmler realised he had to find
a better way of killing

better for the murderers, not their victims.

Which is why SS Lieutenant Dr. Albert Widmann
of the Technical Institute

of the Criminal Police travelled
into Eastern Europe.

Widmann and his colleagues had been
involved in the experiments

which had led to the use of bottled
carbon monoxide to kill the disabled.

But he knew that it would be expensive and
difficult to send canisters of carbon monoxide

all the way to the new killing
locations far from Germany.

So he had to find a new way forward.

Which is why he drove into
the Soviet Union followed

by a truck carrying boxes of high explosive.

Widmann reported to Artur Nebe,
commander of one of the killing squads,

at his headquarters
in the Lenin House in Minsk.

'The bunker had totally collapsed,
there was total silence.

Body parts were scattered on the ground
and hanging in the trees.

And the next day we collected the body parts
and threw them back into the bunker.

Those parts that were too high
in the trees were just left there. '

After this horror,
Widmann and his SS colleagues tried

another method of mass murder
- this one suggested by

what had happened to Artur Nebe of
the SS earlier on in the year.

Nebe had driven home drunk
from a party in Berlin

and passed out in his garage
with the car engine still running.

As a result the carbon monoxide from
the exhaust gasses had nearly killed him.

Learning from Nebe's experience,

Widmann and his colleagues now conducted
experiments in the Soviet Union, like this one.

This film is believed to show patients
from a Soviet hospital being locked in a room

which was connected to the exhaust pipes
of a car and a lorry.

The Nazis had now developed a cheaper method
of killing people with carbon monoxide than

that previously used
in the adult euthanasia scheme.

Around the same time as these gassing
experiments were being conducted in the East,

the authorities at Auschwitz were innovating
new ways of murder as well.

Whilst H�ss was away from the camp,
his deputy Karl Fritzsch had a radical idea,

one of the most significant
in the history of Auschwitz.

With the SS in the camp still
relying on shooting to kill

Soviet prisoners unable to work,
maybe, he thought,

another method of killing lay right
in front of him.

In Auschwitz, clothes infected with lice

and other insects were disinfected
with crystallised prussic acid,

mass produced under the trade name

Zyklon B.

Gas! Gas!

Once released from their sealed container,

Zyklon B crystals dissolved in the air
to create a lethal gas.

Fritzsch chose Block 11 in Auschwitz to
conduct his first experiment with Zyklon B.

This was the most feared location in the camp.

A prison within a prison.

The place where the SS sent inmates to be
punished - interrogated, tortured, even executed.

In Block 11 were standing cells where prisoners
would be crammed together

scarcely even able to breathe and starvation
cells where inmates would be locked up,

deprived of food and left until they died.

Everyone in Auschwitz knew of
the reputation of Block 11.

'I personally was afraid of
walking past Block 11.

Personally, I was afraid.

Although it was closed off,
I was really scared to walk past there.

Whether it was the avenue when
I was walking there, or what... I was afraid.

Block 11 meant death. '

On a day in late August
or early September 1941,

Fritzsch ordered that the basement of Block 11
be prepared for the use of Zyklon B.

Doors and windows were sealed
- the whole block locked down.

'Our attention was drawn
- many of my colleagues saw this

by SS men running around with gas masks.

The windows of the bunker had been
covered up with sand,

and in the bunker

the cells of the bunker, in the cellar
- Soviet prisoners of war were assembled.

And it turned out the following day
that the SS

actually, it was Palitzsch in particular
who attracted attention

because he was running around like crazy.

It turned out that the gas hadn't worked
properly and that many of the prisoners,

the people, were still alive.

So they increased the dosage,
added more crystals and finished the job. '

'The prisoners dragged it all away on
carts known as Rollwagons.

They took them to the crematorium,
because the crematorium was already being used,

you could see smoke from the chimney...
So it was... an open secret.

How does a person feel?

One becomes indifferent
in the midst of all that.

Today it's your turn,
tomorrow it will be mine.'

Once H�ss came back to the camp,
he learnt about the experiment.

'When I returned, Fritzsch reported to me
about how he had used the gas.

He used it again to kill the next
transport of Russian prisoners of war. '

As H�ss returned home to his wife
and four children in his house

on the edge of the camp, he felt pleased.

'I must admit that this gassing had
a calming effect on me,

I was always horrified of executions
by firing squads.

Now, I was relieved to think
that we would be spared all these bloodbaths. '

H�ss was wrong.

He was about to oversee
an even greater bloodbath.

By building a camp here on this patch
of swampy ground a mile

and a half away from the town
of Auschwitz at a place

the Poles called Brzezinka
and the Germans Birkenau.