Original subtitles

As a reporter who spent quite a bit of time in Hitler's Germany

and who wrote a diary which had the good fortune to be read widely

by a great many Americans,

I've been asked by the Army-Navy Screen Magazine

to talk about the film you're going to see.

As the war moves through its fifth year,

the United Nations drive hard against Nazi Germany

and carry the attack at last even to the Fatherland itself.

Every day, a German factory town is pounded to rubble.

A fury of propaganda exhorts the people to save themselves and the Nazi regime

from the hell into which Nazi schemes have plunged them.

But the trumpets of attack would shake Germany's very walls,

stir more sober workers to reflect uneasily

on the fate of the Germany that used to be.

At what time did you know that the war,

so far as achieving the objectives that you had in mind,

was a lost war?

It is extremely difficult to say.

At any rate, according to my conviction,

relatively late.

And there was no way to prevent the war going on

as long as Hitler was at the head of the German government, was there?

As long as Hitler was the Führer of the German people,

he alone decided whether the war was to go on.

In the second half of 1944, it has become clear

to any person with an ounce of reason

that Germany has been comprehensively defeated.

The D-Day landings had succeeded for the Western Allies,

and they are starting to sweep across France

and into Western Europe and Western Germany.

By the same token, the Soviets had launched a massive offensive,

and clearly, the Eastern Front for Germany is falling apart.

German cities are being bombed day and night.

The end is very clearly coming, and coming soon.

Hitler was absolutely convinced

right to the very end that he could win this war.

His whole ideology is based on a concept

of racial struggle,

a struggle for survival.

And for him, it was self-evident

that the Aryan race, the master race, was obviously going to win.

He believed, above all, in himself.

He vastly overestimated his own powers.

At the end of 1944,

Hitler is in the Wolfsschanze, the Wolf's Lair, isolated from everywhere.

The only people who were allowed in were just the top dignitaries,

who tell him what he wants to hear anyway.

Among them is Hermann Goering, still the second man in the Third Reich,

and he was very bombastic.

He'd make these dramatic declarations about what he was going to do.

Hitler gets more and more under the thrall of Heinrich Himmler,

this one person who he trusted more than anybody else.

Joseph Goebbels really talks about this idea

that in the horoscopes and in the stars,

some miraculous thing is going to happen.

"The Allies are going to break down,

and therefore, there will be some opportunity for us."

Towards the end of 1944,

Hitler made a decision to mount a last counteroffensive in the west.

He took large numbers of troops away from the Eastern Front,

against the advice of his senior generals,

and poured them into the west.

But, of course, the truth of the matter was that the German forces,

by this stage, were in a much weaker position

than those of the British and Americans.

German armies pushed rapidly forward.

They created a kind of bulge in the line,

which is why it's called the Battle of the Bulge.

But the Allies hold out more than the Germans had thought,

and the Germans are critically short of gasoline for their tanks,

and the German advance completely grinds to a halt.

The German tanks had run out of petrol

and, motionless, were sitting ducks,

not just for the Allied guns on the ground,

but for the Allied planes too.

Withdrawing a large number of troops from the east

meant, of course, weakening the Eastern Front

and enabling the Soviet Union, the Red Army,

to advance even more quickly.

On January 18, Soviet troops

began a rapid pursuit of the enemy,

which did not stop day or night.

At that same time,

the Germans are using desperately-needed trains

to transport not reinforcements to the front,

but Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz to be murdered.

Over 400,000 Hungarian Jews

were taken away to Auschwitz for extermination,

and there's no military purpose to this.

It's not going to help defeat the Red Army.

For the Nazis,

the extermination of the Jews is not a distraction from the war effort.

It is the war effort.

Once the Red Army crossed into German territory,

it was an utter bloodbath.

Red Army soldiers took out utterly brutal revenge

for the four years of war they had suffered.

They began to rape women on an extraordinary scale.

- You too? - Yeah.

They even abused my sister and mother in a bestial and animal way.

THE GERMAN NEWSREEL

The Soviet atrocities against German civilians

were played up very heavily in Goebbels' media

as a kind of warning that Germans should keep fighting,

because this kind of atrocity is what would happen when the Soviets got there.

German soldiers are running into an enemy

who occupies cities and villages with a bestiality that is hardly found...

COMBAT ZONE!

...in human history.

PROTECT OUR WOMEN AND CHILDREN FROM THE RED BEASTS

Of course, it sent waves of panic

amongst the people of Germany.

Hitler would always argue, however bad the situation was,

he wasn't going to capitulate.

And not only that,

he expected all the population to stay with him in that.

Not to give up, not to relent, not to give in.

Will you repeat this oath after me? I swear by God

that I will speak the pure truth

and will withhold and add nothing.

You may sit.

From January 1945 onward, a terrible chapter began:

the last phase of the war

and the realization

that Hitler had identified the fate of the German people with his own.

Albert Speer is the armaments minister in 1945.

He was anti-Semitic, he was racist,

and he was very subservient to Hitler.

He knows by the beginning of 1945 that...

the war is... is over.

Speer was confident enough

of his own personal relationship with Hitler

that he thought he could tell him how it really was.

The key thing, as always in this regime,

would be, "How would Hitler respond?"

Hitler's reaction to Albert Speer's memo

is one of fury, anger, and effectively disbelief.

Hitler then said

that pessimistic statements of the nature of those contained in my memorandum

would in future be considered as high treason and punished accordingly.

Anyone who disobeyed would be shot without regard for position or rank,

and his family would be arrested.

The horrid fate that is now taking shape in the east

of thousands in the villages and marketplaces,

in the country, in the cities,

will be warded off in the end and mastered by us,

with the utmost exertion and despite all setbacks and hard trials.

I expect every able-bodied to otherwise handicapped

to work to their last strength.

By this point in the war,

a little over five million German soldiers had been killed in combat.

And Germany really was running out of military-age young men.

They called up a Volkssturm, a people's militia.

Men of the Berlin Volkssturm...

Volkssturm means...

Volk is "the people," and sturm is "storm."

Germany had millions of men

ready and determined to fight...

It comes across as a very strong word,

you know, "the Volkssturm."

...who have the firm and unshakable will

never to capitulate.

But in fact, in reality, is very pathetic.

It's the recruitment of very young boys

and very old men to fight against the Red Army.

Volkssturm soldiers of Berlin,

raise your hand in unity and repeat after me.

"I swear this holy oath

that to the leader of the Greater German Reich,

Adolf Hitler,

I will be unconditionally loyal."

I will be unconditionally loyal.

Something that really characterizes Hitler

is that he does not seem to be able to understand basic human empathy

or basic human compassion for the human beings

that he's pushing around like ants on an anthill or something.

And so to understand Hitler and to understand his endgame,

one has to understand that actually, ultimately, he doesn't care

about the human beings that he's playing with.

Because of the ongoing bombardment of Berlin,

Hitler is forced to leave his living quarters

in the Reich Chancellery

and move into this elaborate underground bunker complex.

It's dark.

It's gloomy.

It's claustrophobic.

This bunker was a place where Hitler was increasingly isolated,

far more than he had been for the rest of the war,

and where he became increasingly distrustful

of those around him.

Traudl Junge was a young woman from Bavaria

who had served as Hitler's secretary for several years by this point.

And it's interesting to read the memoirs of Traudl Junge,

who's in the bunker loyally typing Hitler's orders.

We are all leaded in our thoughts

and our feelings by Hitler.

We all were playing in a play, each his role,

and he was the only one who knew the script.

He made us all do our play and speak our text.

Nobody else knew how it would end.

He very seldom went out.

And it's remarkable, in World War II,

that he refused to visit bombed-out families.

He could not abide

the sight of the destruction that he had ultimately wrought.

Well, you can't be a dictator in personal charge of your armed forces

at a time when they're being beaten back on every front

without suffering serious symptoms of stress.

He had developed a tremor in his arm, in his hand,

that had become uncontrollable.

He began showing symptoms of Parkinson's disease.

He is taking a strange, elaborate cocktail

of medications and drugs.

Slowly but steadily, he became weak.

The doctors went in and out, and he became totally apathetic.

The one scenario that he's really clinging to early in 1945

is that somehow or another, there will be a break

between the Western powers and the Soviet Union,

and this will bring some kind of salvation to him and to Germany.

Early February, and final plans at Yalta.

Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin drafting the victory blueprints.

In February 1945,

at Yalta in Crimea,

the Allies meet.

This is yet another demonstration of the solidity of the Grand Alliance,

one that Hitler still doesn't believe in.

The Big Three achieve realistic agreement.

The Nazi criminals will be punished.

At Yalta, let us face the fact,

they decided on a hard keep for Germany.

Hard, but not unjust.

A promise to bring all German war criminals

to just and swift punishment.

This is one reason why Hitler was all-or-nothing.

He was not going to be subject to the humiliation of capture

and possibly trial.

And after Yalta, action in the West.

The consequence for Germany and Germans

of Hitler's determination to fight to the end

is that the end of the war is utterly catastrophic for Germans,

far more than it would've needed to be.

Allied planes rain destruction on Germany.

Half a million German civilians were killed in the bombing raids,

and they were killed overwhelmingly in the later stage of the war.

By late in the war,

the scale of the bomber fleets has grown so large

that the bombers can deliver raids of incredible destructive power.

And one of the cities most infamously targeted

is the city of Dresden,

which was a beautiful baroque city with gorgeous artworks and so on,

one of the gems of Central Europe.

It's full of refugees.

It doesn't really have much of an industrial capacity.

There, of course, are some factories there.

This bombing didn't focus primarily on military targets,

but on creating terror

in order to bring about the end of the war.

The raid created something that was known as a firestorm.

This meant there were so many fires,

they joined together and became absolutely superheated

and sucked in the air from the rest of the city.

Some people who tried to walk along, they got pulled in by the fire.

They all of a sudden disappeared right in front of you.

Such a draft in a firestorm like that. It's a most horrible thing.

You have to save yourself, or try to get as far away from the fire,

because the draft pulls you in.

Something like 25,000 people were killed over these two days.

There was no time to... dig individual graves.

We had to make big mass graves.

The fire is burning so hot

that it can suck the air out of bomb shelters,

so many people died by being asphyxiated in their bomb shelter.

It was just... You couldn't believe that this was a whole person.

I saw sometimes two people close together

who maybe in despair had... and was one tiny little figure.

In March 1945,

Speer, who's become even more concerned

with the potential fate of the German people now,

goes to Hitler and says,

"We have to work together to somehow find a way out of this

so that we can preserve the last vestiges of Germany,

of the German people."

Hitler made declarations to me:

There was no need to take into consideration

the basics which the people would need to live even a primitive existence.

On the contrary, it would be better

to destroy these things ourselves,

because this nation will have proved to be the weaker one,

and the future belongs solely to the stronger eastern nation.

Hitler believed that history,

life indeed, was all about the struggle

for the survival of the fittest between races,

and so they didn't deserve to survive anyway.

As they pull back, they destroy.

Hitler has ordered a senseless policy

that the earth be scorched without regard to military value.

The German people remained loyal to Adolf Hitler

until the end.

He betrayed them with intent.

He tried to throw them definitely into the abyss.

Eva Braun, who was Hitler's long-term partner, in effect,

came back to be with Hitler at the end.

They had a very long relationship,

but Hitler always made a point of keeping her secret.

He always portrayed himself

as somebody who had sacrificed his private life for Germany.

He had expressly forbidden her ever to be in Berlin with him

and wanted her to stay in Bavaria.

But she, against his wishes, came because she was so loyal to him.

Hitler tried to seem angry, but he wasn't successful.

He was obviously so happy that she was there,

that nobody tried to... to send her back.

She did this of her own volition.

She wanted to share his ultimate fate.

By the later stages of the war,

the concentration camps were increasingly in the path

of the encroaching Allies.

Therefore, they were evacuated by the Germans.

They said we have to go because the Russians are close here.

So they didn't want us to be liberated by the Russians.

The SS gathered the inmates together and marched them away from the fighting.

Then we walked for six weeks.

We didn't know what was happening, where we were going.

At night, they let us rest on a field outside.

It was cold there.

And in the morning, we saw several people dead from the cold.

We started to march in snow up to the knees,

and the soldiers and the German Shepherds were on the side and behind us,

and they said if somebody cannot keep up with marching,

they are going to be shot here in the gutter.

Hundreds of people were shot in the gutter.

They took the prisoners

on these death marches to other concentration camps.

One of the camps which was used as one of these collecting centers

was Belsen, or Bergen-Belsen, in northern Germany.

Once we walked into that camp,

we saw bodies and bodies piled up.

We figured, "This is it."

"If we are not going to get liberated right away,

we are going to end up just like that."

And we didn't have no food.

We didn't have food for six weeks, nothing.

As time went on,

corpses were piling up faster than they could be burned,

so that every morning we would look out, and there'd be this huge pile of corpses.

It's just to... to die, the place, nothing.

They... That was the purpose,

but not with killing, just slowly to die.

And in this situation, the British army arrived.

Such was the speed of the Allied advance

that the guards were taken before they had time to flee.

Liberated prisoners could not control their emotion.

The commandant, he stands up.

He took one of those, uh, loudspeakers and announced,

"We are from the British army. We came in to liberate you,

and, uh, you are free!"

That word, you are "free," you know?

This was something like we're getting a new life.

You know, you could see people, we thought they were dead!

We could see a smile on their faces when they heard that word, "free."

The famous British reporter Richard Dimbleby was on the scene

and described exactly what he saw.

I find it hard to describe adequately

the horrible things that I've seen and heard,

but here, unadorned, are the facts.

It is one of the first occasions in which the true horror of Nazism

became apparent to the world.

I'd passed through the barrier

and found myself in the world of a nightmare.

Dead bodies, some of them in decay,

lay strewn about the road and along the rutted tracks.

The dead and the dying lay close together.

They were crawling with lice and smeared with filth.

One woman, distraught to the point of madness,

flung herself at a British soldier.

She begged him to give her some milk for the tiny baby she held in her arms.

And when the soldier opened the bundle of rags to look at the child,

he found it had been dead for days.

Knowledge and information about the camp system

has already been made public,

but it's one thing to know about it on paper,

and to perhaps think it's wartime propaganda,

or to actually understand, "No, this was an integral part

of the Nazi system of violence."

The things in this camp are beyond describing.

When you actually see them for yourselves, you know what you're fighting for here.

Pictures in the paper cannot describe it at all.

The revelations burst upon me like a thunderbolt

and left me numb for several days.

My mind, my imagination, unable to cope with their enormity.

It had been too horrendous for ordinary mortals to grasp.

I myself had been skeptical, despite all my years in Nazi Germany.

As bad as my grandfather knew this regime was,

it was far worse than he knew.

He beat himself up somewhat

about having not done enough.

Looking back, I have to admit a terrible failure on my part.

I should have done much more than I did to get the facts of this terrible genocide

and then report it.

We interrupt this program

to bring you a special news bulletin.

President Roosevelt is dead.

When Franklin Delano Roosevelt died,

Hitler and Goebbels thought this was a kind of sign or omen

that the war would end victoriously, but they didn't think it for very long.

The final battle for Berlin begins in the middle of April 1945.

From the start of the Berlin operation,

the enemy offered extremely stubborn resistance.

The Germans felt absolute fear and terror of the Red Army.

They knew that the Soviets were intent on revenge.

It was said Hitler commanded them

to fight the last person,

to the last bullet.

German civilians were living in basements,

often with no inhabitable apartments or housing above them.

When the Germans would sometimes find

some of these people hiding in cellars,

these people were taken out by the Germans,

by their own side, and killed,

hung on lampposts with signs saying, "I am a traitor."

It's a system of the degradation of human life.

I HAVE MADE A PACT WITH THE BOLSHEVIKS!

The last known filmed footage of Adolf Hitler

is taken when he emerges briefly from the bunker

to greet a group of Hitler Youth.

At his headquarters, the Führer receives

the Reich Youth Leader Axmann

with a delegation of 20 Hitler boys

who have proved particularly effective in defending their homeland

and were awarded the Iron Cross for this.

These were kids.

These are boys in their early-to mid-teens.

I've often managed to deliver bazookas and provisions

into the main battle line.

I have delivered under fire on wagons or carts.

It's pathetic, it's tragic for all those young people,

many of whom will still lose their lives in this fight.

April 20th happened to be Hitler's birthday.

He was 56.

Previously, from 1933 onwards,

there'd been massive national celebrations on Hitler's birthday.

But the birthday in 1945 is very different.

Everybody shook Hitler's hand and wished him the best, and it was...

It was all very depressed.

It was not a... a happy birthday.

After the rather muted birthday celebrations

for Hitler in the bunker,

many of the people left

and found cars or planes to take themselves out of Berlin.

SS leader Heinrich Himmler,

one of Hitler's most loyal supporters and officials,

tried to convince Hitler to leave the bunker.

And then Himmler himself gets out of Berlin.

Unlike every other high-level party official,

the Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels not only moves into the bunker,

he will bring his wife and their six children.

The children found it exciting and liked to be in Uncle Hitler's bunker.

They didn't know what fate they were expecting there.

And so an historic milestone in this world war

has been reached and passed.

The American First Army and the Russians

have joined in the heart of Germany near Leipzig,

cutting the Reich in two.

On the 25th of April 1945,

a momentous moment happens

when the Red Army meets the Western forces at Torgau.

Now here is William L. Shirer,

former CBS correspondent in Germany,

where the Allied armies have met.

The Americans met the Russians on the banks of the great river, the Elbe.

This is the day so many of us feared so long

might never come.

In Berlin, in the early days of the war,

it seemed that nothing would stop the terrific fighting machine

which Hitler had built up.

Even when first Russia and then America came into the war,

it was hard to believe that their two armies

would ever meet in the heart of Germany.

Now, it's just a matter of time

as to when the rest of the forces are gonna come together

and extinguish any last remnants of Hitler's forces.

There's a sense in the bunker, things are brewing towards a storm,

and the storm really breaks on the 22nd of April,

when Hitler launches into a tirade against some of his military commanders,

which is extreme even by Hitler's standards,

and Hitler indicates that he thinks the war is lost.

And there was a moment of absolute silence,

and we stood, like, shocked.

Because of this tirade,

Hermann Goering and Heinrich Himmler draw certain lessons from this.

They both think that that's, in effect, Hitler indicating

that he's done and he's going to abdicate,

and both of them start taking steps on that basis.

Goering writes a telegram to Hitler,

saying, "Look, I'm very happy to take over as Führer for you."

It is a colossal betrayal in his eyes.

Heinrich Himmler has been called by Hitler his "true Heinrich."

He's the one steadfast figure who's always gonna stand with Hitler,

and Hitler truly believes this until... almost to the end.

But what does Himmler do?

As the Nazi hierarchy falls apart,

Himmler is said to be trying hard

to arrange surrender terms for what is left of the German army.

The BBC broadcasts the fact

that Himmler has been trying to negotiate with the Western Allies.

In their conversations, Himmler is reported

to have told Bernadotte that Hitler is a dying man,

and he wouldn't live more than 48 hours after Germany's capitulation.

Some observers here interpret that to mean Himmler intends to have Hitler killed.

Hitler gets wind of it in the bunker and then goes ballistic.

Hitler was very upset

because he held Himmler for his most faithful paladin,

and the most reliable one,

and now he saw that also he had tried to betray him.

On April 29th,

Hitler dictates two important documents

to his secretary Traudl Junge.

He dictated me, at first, his private will,

and afterwards, his, um, political testimony.

I expected that I would be the first and the only one

who is going to know the explanation

and declaration

why the war had come to this end,

and why Hitler couldn't stop.

And why the development and why the catastrophe.

I thought, "Now, I will come see the moment of the truth."

But he used nothing new.

He... he came out with his old phrases.

He repeated his accusations,

his revenge,

swearing to the enemy

and to the Jewish capitalistic system.

Hitler, in his testament,

says that the struggle against world Jewry has to continue.

Him thinking, "No,

we still have to continue fighting them, we have not finished the job,"

is something that tells you...

...a great deal about the mind of this man.

Hitler, having been a soldier,

believes that the only dignified death for a soldier is to die by bullet,

but he's also aware of the fact that Eva Braun has to die,

and she's going to die by cyanide,

because this is more of a ladylike way of dying.

Once this decision to commit suicide had taken shape,

Hitler decided to test out the poison.

Hitler has a favorite dog called Blondi,

and he... he really loves this dog.

He takes a cyanide capsule and puts it in Blondi's mouth

and forces Blondi's jaws closed.

And the dog dies an agonizing death.

And so he knew that the poison was effective.

It's often said that Hitler loved animals more than he loved people,

but this showed, I think, how absolutely ruthless he was.

In Italy, the Milan radio says

Benito Mussolini and other fascist leaders

have been executed by Italian patriots.

On the 29th of April, word reached the bunker

that Benito Mussolini and his mistress had been killed.

Mussolini and his mistress are displayed,

hung up at a gasoline station.

Hitler did not want that to happen to himself.

So he dictates that his body and Eva Braun's body are to be burned.

On the night of April 28th and 29th,

Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun are married in what must be one of the strangest,

most bizarre wedding ceremonies ever held.

It seemed to be this kind of demented idea of honor

that they get married.

Hitler will make sure that she goes down in history

as the great man's wife,

rather than just somebody he's had an affair with over the years.

I had to congratulate Eva Braun,

and I was a little, um... a little shy about what to say.

And I shake hand to hand,

she said, "Oh, you can say Mrs. Hitler to me now."

And I did.

There was a wedding breakfast afterwards,

but very quickly, it deteriorated into a feeling of gloom and doom.

His face was already dead. It was like a mask.

He looked at me, but I had the feeling he looked through me.

In the final moments, he takes a few minutes to say goodbye.

He also gave them the cyanide capsule each,

as encouraging them to commit suicide.

Eva Braun was determined to be a beautiful corpse.

And so she bit on a cyanide capsule

and took her life in that way.

There's some matters of debate

as to whether or not Hitler also took cyanide,

just to make doubly sure that... that this would work.

We know that he shot himself.

Hitler shot himself in the temple,

which he considers to be a sort of honorable soldier's death.

In accordance with Hitler's very careful instructions,

SS men take the bodies upstairs, up to the aboveground area.

They have gathered together as much gasoline as they can find.

Gasoline is very scarce in Berlin now at this point,

but they've gotten together what they can.

Gasoline is sprayed over the bodies, and they are set on fire,

and they are burned right then and there in the garden of the Chancellery.

If you consider that there came most appalling reports

from the East Front,

what the Russians had done to the German population,

especially to the German women.

We was very, very fearful,

and we intended not to fall in the hands of the enemy.

In the aftermath of Hitler's and Eva Braun's suicide,

Joseph Goebbels and his wife Magda

also decide to take their lives.

Not only that, the lives of their six young children too.

Magda stated to someone close to her that these children had to die

because there could be no future without Hitler and the regime for them.

They took the lives of their six young children

before committing suicide themselves.

All sorts of the top Nazis are also committing suicide.

Heinrich Himmler commits suicide,

but only once he's been arrested by the British,

because he fears what's going to come next.

And there are others as well,

who simply cannot stand the idea of a world without Hitler.

CBS World News now brings you further details

on the reported death of Adolf Hitler.

We take you to San Francisco. William L. Shirer reporting.

So Hitler is dead, or so they say, and destroyed

like his country that he tried to make the master of the world,

and... and ended only by destroying.

This is a day that I have been waiting for for many a year.

My own personal fate brought me into, uh, some contact with a man

who I think will go down in history

as, uh, the evil genius of our time.

With Hitler gone, the way is really clear for Germany to surrender.

In a brief talk following the historic ceremony,

General Jodl says, in part,

"With this signature, the German people and the German armed forces

are, for better or worse, delivered into the victors' hands."

"In this hour, I can only express hope

that the victor will treat them with generosity."

This marks the end of the war in Europe,

and Europe erupts in celebration.

I wonder if all of us celebrating the end of the war tonight,

and outside this studio in New York...

You can still hear the shouting in the streets.

...I wonder if we've forgotten or will soon forget

how hopeless the battle seemed for so long to our side.

I happened to be in Berlin the day, September 1st '39,

the German part of the war started.

The Germans seemed so strong then,

that a lonely American on the streets of Berlin that day

wondered whether the forces of democracy, of decency,

would ever rally in time.

Now, one's thoughts turn to the future,

to put our minds and our hearts to work on a better world,

one in which, above all, there should be no more wars.

Europe is in absolute ruins.

The estimate is that 60 million people

were killed in the Second World War,

and the great majority of them were civilians.

But for those who are living, even trying to find food, find shelter,

is an enormous task.

In shattered Europe,

the face of victory looks very like the face of defeat.

At the same time, punishing Nazi perpetrators

was one of their highest priorities.

Rudolf Hess, third-ranking Nazi

before his spectacular flight to Britain, is held for trial.

Field Marshal Hermann Goering loses his sidearms and all his arrogance

when captured by the American army.

Thousands of suspected war criminals escaped Germany.

Many were found after months of intensive search.

But the Allies did quickly catch some of the highest-ranking Nazis.

Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop,

he was arrested in the home of his mistress.

And here, Vice Chancellor von Papen,

who was found in his hunting lodge.

Some of the key Nazi leaders then who are brought in and put on trial

are people like Hermann Goering, Rudolf Hess, Hans Frank,

Joachim von Ribbentrop,

Albert Speer,

Alfred Rosenberg, and other Nazi leaders.

And so, 1945 becomes the year

not only of the Nazis' military defeat,

but of their public trial.

I went to Nuremberg to see Hitler's henchmen in the dock.

Justice, for once, had caught up with the perpetrators

of some of the most cold-blooded and massive crimes men had ever committed.

I had not believed,

in the despairing years I labored in Berlin,

that I would ever see it.

The Nazis had produced and saved so much documentary evidence

of their own war crimes and crimes against humanity,

and those documents became absolutely critical

to the prosecution's case.

In these papers,

the Nazis convicted themselves of the most heinous crimes,

though they were given every opportunity to defend themselves.

I believe that I can face my responsibility

with a clear conscience.

At the end of the trial,

the defendants get to say their last words.

Love of country and people was the only decisive factor

in all my actions.

They claim that we all attended secret conferences

in order to plan a war of aggression.

Besides that, we are supposed to have ordered the alleged murder

of 12 million people.

I know my conscience to be completely free from any such guilt.

They're constantly trying to say,

"Oh, Hitler was the one who was in charge of all the decisions."

Hitler and the collapse of his system

have brought a time of tremendous suffering

upon the German people.

Albert Speer tries to portray himself

as effectively an innocent victim of Hitler's charisma.

The German people will despise and condemn Hitler

as the author of its misfortune.

Joachim von Ribbentrop,

Hitler's foreign minister,

uses the opportunity to challenge the legitimacy of the tribunal.

What we intended was to look after our elementary necessities of life,

in the same way that England looked after her own interests

in order to make one-fifth of the world subject to her,

and the same way the United States took an entire continent,

and Russia took the largest inland territory of the world

under the hegemony.

Hans Frank,

Hitler's Governor-General of occupied Poland,

admits to some sort of general feeling of guilt.

We did not suspect

that our turning away from God

could have such disastrous, deadly consequences.

...even as he denies any responsibility.

At that time, we could not have known

that so much loyalty

on the part of the German people could have been so badly directed by us.

Hermann Goering is absolutely unrepentant.

I stand up for the things that I have done.

He's full of denials...

I have never

decreed the murder of a single individual at any time.

...full of bluster...

And neither did I decree any other atrocities

or tolerate them.

...and absolutely defiant.

The Prosecution uses the fact

that I was the second man of the State

as proof that I must have known

everything that happened.

But it does not present any documentary or other convincing proof

that I knew about certain things, much less desired them.

None of the defendants have shown any real contrition.

I am happy to know

that I have done my duty to my people,

as a loyal follower of my Führer.

Mr. President and members of the tribunal...

After nearly a year-long trial,

Jackson, in his closing argument,

really reiterates that the Germans, in their own words,

have admitted to a vast array of criminal actions.

The documents show they agreed on policies and on methods,

and all working aggressively for the expansion of Germany

by force of arms.

The Nazi movement will be of evil memory in history

because of its persecution of the Jews,

the most far-flung and terrible racial persecution of all time.

We now have before us

the flimsy excuses and the paltry evasions of the defendants.

The chief villain on whom blame is placed is Hitler.

He is the man at whom nearly every defendant

has pointed an accusing finger.

What these men have overlooked is

that Adolf Hitler's acts are their acts.

Nowhere do we find a single instance

where any one of these defendants stood up against the rest

and said, "This thing is wrong."

Hitler did not carry all responsibility to the grave with him.

All the guilt is not wrapped in Himmler's shroud.

It was these dead men

whom these living chose to be their partners.

And the crimes that they did together, they must pay for one by one.

After the closings, the tribunal will break for about a month,

where the judges will deliberate on the judgment and the verdicts.

God knows that, as one of the few persons at Nuremberg

who had seen Hitler and his henchmen in Berlin deliberately start the war,

I felt that it was a crime

and that the perpetrators should be held responsible.

But this was, I realized, an emotional reaction.

Justice had to be more than that.

Ten months, the International Military Tribunal sat.

It carefully studied the countless evidence.

It attentively listened to the numerous witnesses,

and after mature deliberation,

the judges pronounced their verdict.

The tribunal finds that von Papen is not guilty under this indictment.

Three of the defendants were in fact acquitted.

Schacht is not guilty on this indictment.

Which does say something about the legitimacy of the exercise.

Defendant Albert Speer.

The Western judges are somewhat sympathetic to Speer.

It must be recognized that he was one of the few men

who had the courage to tell Hitler that the war was lost,

at considerable personal risk.

He ends up with a 20-year prison sentence

instead of death by hanging.

None knew better than Hess

how determined Hitler was to realize his ambitions.

Rudolf Hess, he's found guilty on some of the charges.

On the counts of the indictment on which you have been convicted,

the tribunal sentences you to imprisonment for life.

Altogether, there were 22 defendants, 21 in the courtroom,

with one of the defendants tried in absentia.

And of the defendants, 19 are convicted.

Ribbentrop's defense is that Hitler made all the important decisions.

The tribunal does not consider this explanation to be true.

Of the 19 who are convicted, 12 are sentenced to death.

Defendant Hermann Wilhelm Goering,

his own admissions are more than sufficiently wide

to be conclusive of his guilt.

His guilt is unique in its enormity.

The record discloses no excuses for this man.

On the counts of the indictment on which you have been convicted,

the International Military Tribunal sentences you to death by hanging.

So ended the labors of the tribunal of the nation,

the tribunal of history,

the sword of justice descended on the heads of the warmongers.

Hermann Goering, though, somehow managed to cheat the hangman.

Being hung like a common criminal,

he feels is beneath the dignity of a man of his stature.

He smuggled a cyanide capsule himself into his cell,

and so right in that very last moment,

he bit down on that cyanide capsule.

Goering chooses to die by his own hand.

The other ten wait for the gallows.

Goering,

Ribbentrop,

Keitel,

Kaltenbrunner,

Rosenberg,

Frank,

Frick,

Streicher,

Seyss-Inquart,

Sauckel,

Jodl,

and Martin Bormann

have been sentenced by the International Military Tribunal

to die on the gallows.

Humanity, I had a feeling,

was relieved and grateful at the news from Nuremberg.

There was, after all, some sort of rough justice in our world.

When you saw people, civilians who were bombed out

or worse, who had been hounded in the concentration camps,

still intact as human beings with a will to go on,

with a faith still in themselves and their fellow man and their God,

it filled you with a certain pride.

Trials continued,

but at the same time as trials of war criminals are ongoing,

the Cold War is starting, and so US policy starts to shift.

Nazis who were useful either in science or technology

were invited to come to the US

because their usefulness was more important

than the sort of moral reckoning.

And so all kinds of people who had taken part in this murderous regime

were never punished.

When you write history,

you let the reader draw the conclusions,

but I must say

that I couldn't help but thinking of conditions in our own country.

The divisions, the tremendous intolerance of people for each other.

The world we live in now, right now,

is a world that seems to have forgotten

many of the lessons of what happened in Nazi Germany.

Seeing the rise of authoritarianism, of anti-Semitism...

JUDAISM IS A CRIME

My grandfather made sure to tell us what happened in Nazi Germany

could happen here.

And you have to be vigilant and fight against it as much as you can.

You cannot be complacent.

Living in a totalitarian land

taught me to value highly and rather fiercely

the very things that dictators denied.

Tolerance, respect for others,

and above all, the freedom of the human spirit.