Original subtitles

Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!

Hitler and his Nazis swept to power

on a brutal racist platform.

Hitler and Goebbels actually truly believed that the Jews

and other groups were seen as lethal to the Aryan race and the Third Reich.

Hitler had said that the Jews were standing in the way

of racial purity and pure bloodline.

There was this curious new pseudoscientific

Nazi idea that the Aryan race, you know, was better built, handsomer,

smarter, purer, ethically better, morally better.

It was complete nonsense, but this becomes a big part of the Nazi state.

So the Nazis decided to fight two wars simultaneously,

one external and one within.

They didn't see killing these groups as a detraction from the war effort.

They saw it as fundamentally linked for certain groups to be exterminated

so that they were able to ideally realize this Aryan ideal.

But this additional ideological war would greatly

undermine the Nazis' ability to win World War II.

Ideology got in the way of good military sense.

Sieg heil! Sieg heil! Sieg heil!

Fighting on the grand scale across the vast Eastern Front,

past town after liberated town, through cities whose shattered masonry

is the cracking wall of Hitler's Reich itself.

On July the 23rd, 1944,

Red Army soldiers stormed the Polish city of Lublin,

overthrowing the Nazi occupiers.

On the outskirts of town, they confronted a vast building

with a towering chimney,

high walls covered in barbed wire, and an iron gate.

The soldiers couldn't comprehend what they were looking at.

Was it a prison?

Or with its smokestacks and barracks, was it a factory?

What the Soviet soldiers didn't know was that they had entered

a Nazi extermination camp,

a death camp for the mass genocide of Jews.

What they saw that day was so obscene

that it eclipsed anything they had seen before.

One soldier reported seeing shoes in the thousands, all sorted.

Men's, women's, and children's shoes piled high.

A mountain of ash was nearby, warm to the touch.

They opened the door to a gas chamber

and then a crematorium.

Most of the German SS guards had fled.

There were no signs of life, only death.

The Red Army had come across their first Nazi concentration camp,

Madjanek.

Three weeks later on August the 10th, 1944,

the first newspaper report on the camp was published.

Russian journalist Konstantin Simonov described

what he saw as a medieval concept of hell.

Stories followed in the international media.

W.H. Lawrence wrote in the New York Times,

"I have just seen the most terrible place on the face of the earth."

A world shocked beyond belief

sees the barbaric work of the dying Nazi beast.

As the extent of Hitler's atrocities slowly dawned

on a disbelieving world,

Nazi Germany's SS Officers continued on their genocidal mission.

As the Allies and the Red Army advanced,

what else would they discover?

What other atrocities were concealed behind enemy lines?

How many camps did the SS set up?

That is every kind of camp imaginable.

Labor camps, transit camps, also death camps,

42,500 camps. That shows that is an empire built on camps.

Hitler's tyrannical control over Nazi Germany had given him

and his party the opportunity

to act on a long-held hatred of the Jews and of communists.

Hitler had compared Jews to maggots in a rotting body.

And the Nazi propagandist, the spin doctor Joseph Goebbels,

saw them as nauseating, an object of disgust.

The Nazis had a term they used to describe human beings

who they believed didn't deserve to live:

Lebensunwertes Leben. Life unworthy of life.

The phrase was applied to those who were racially inferior,

sexually deviant,

as well as enemies of the state or mentally impaired.

What we saw in the context of Nazi Germany is that in the 1920s,

a lot of groups such as the Jews,

the Roma, the Sinta, Poles, Slavs, homosexuals, communists,

were all subjected to various different processes of dehumanization.

But what happened is that throughout the 1920sand '30s,

and into the '40s, those practices became more extreme.

And so the extermination of the Jews

in particular was seen as a necessity

in order to allow the Aryan Race and the Third Reich to flourish.

The eradication of Jews

was considered vital to the Nazi war effort

and the new Germanic world order they hoped to create.

The Nazis believed they descended from a master race

at the apex of the human species.

There was this curious new pseudoscientific,

you know, Nazi idea that the Aryan Race,

you know, was better built, handsomer,

smarter, purer, ethically better, morally better,

more self... I mean, it was complete nonsense, right?

But this becomes a big part of the Nazi state.

This superiority complex

would shape Germany's war against the world.

The genocide, the Holocaust, was just as important to the Nazis as the war effort.

They fundamentally at least presented in the propaganda that these groups

were irreconcilable to the flourishing of their effort and to the Third Reich.

They didn't see killing these groups

as a detraction from the war effort.

They saw it as fundamentally linked for certain groups to be exterminated,

so that they were able to ideally realize this Aryan ideal.

We now know the extent of the horrors the Nazis committed.

But how did this evil shape the outcome of the war?

Hitler's messianic belief that the German people

were the master race

ruled the Nazi party's thinking when it came to war strategy.

In fact, Hitler's hatred of Jews and the Nazis' conviction

that the German people were superior to all others

would get in the way of Germany's war effort.

The desire to see an end

of the Jewish race in Europe,

it was a huge charge

on the German military machine,

the German administration,

and also on Germany psychologically,

to have to deal with these ideological issues

as well as fighting a military campaign.

Under Nazi ideology, friends became foes,

and foes need to be destroyed.

A god complex rarely ends well,

and for the Nazis, this delusion would ensure their defeat.

The master race would be crushed in World War II.

A coalition of governments

could be formed to satisfy all the major bodies.

With that in mind, wily politician Franz von Papen

convinced President von Hindenburg to choose Hitler as the new chancellor.

There is no clearer turning point in the course

of Germany's dark racial history

than on January the 30th, 1933,

the day Hitler seized power in a landslide victory.

As Chancellor, Hitler and the Third Reich could make good

on their obsession to purify Germany

of what they saw as the Jewish problem.

There was quite a bit of anti-Semitism in Germany in the 1920s as it was,

but as we rolled into the 1930s and into the 1940s,

the Jews in particular were described

as being parasitical onto the body politic of the Third Reich.

As Chancellor, Hitler summoned his spin doctor

Joseph Goebbels to develop a strategy

to act on their pathological hatred of Jews.

Goebbels, a master manipulator,

was key to the Nazis' success in glorifying the Reich.

Goebbels played an essential role

in projecting an image of the regime

and of Hitler,

not just to the German people, but worldwide.

And that was very modern for the day.

It showed great forward thinking on the part of the Nazi party.

And it made Goebbels an essential element

in whatever success the Nazi party had.

He designed the sieg heil

and the hand movements

in a way that would be quite intentionally exhausting.

So it meant that by the time audiences in these huge mass gatherings

at Nazi rallies had finished with their sieg heils,

it meant that they were more susceptible to propaganda

being spouted by Adolf Hitler and by Goebbels himself.

And Hitler knew they had to win hearts and minds.

The German people were suffering.

Their humiliation by the defeat of World War I,

the pain of an economic depression

where millions of Germans were out of work, had bitten.

Heil! Heil!

Goebbels and Hitler played on this desperation and offered hope.

They promoted Nazi Germany

as a growing, prosperous and proud nation.

But with only half a million Jews in Germany,

Goebbels knew the German public

would need to be convinced that the Jews

had been the source of their misery, the enemy within,

in order to fulfill Hitler's vision

for a racially pure Germany.

Hitler's particular genius was,

was to take this kind of latent suspicion of Jews,

particularly after there were big migrations of Jews

westward during World War I.

So there was some resentment of these...

Of these new Jewish immigrants there and Hitler inflames this.

He appeals to his working class

and sort of untere Mittelschicht,

lower petty bourgeois, lower middle class base,

and sort of riles them up against the Jews.

But what I think really allows him to launch

is the Wall Street crash,

the Depression that settles over Germany, the economic crisis,

the feeling of desperation felt by so many people,

the search for solutions,

and Hitler's identification of this scapegoat,

that if we deal with this scapegoat,

we're gonna have this kind of rebirth of German prosperity and greatness.

Hitler's mantra was that Germany's defeat in World War I

was because Germany was stabbed in the back by socialists,

and in particular, Jews.

When Hitler comes out with a message that says,

"We are the good people, we're the people of...

People of culture and learning."

And our real demise is very simple.

It's not political calculations. It's not that we didn't fight the war.

Well, it's not that we chose the wrong allies.

It's not that we didn't have access to resources.

It's the Jews.

It's the Jews at the end of the day.

And that subsequently is a theme,

not just in anti-Semitism,

but in how he styles subsequent enemies.

One of the first steps in this campaign

was a nationwide boycott of all Jewish businesses.

Propaganda Minister Goebbels

ordered SS troopers to be stationed

outside Jewish stores.

State sponsored anti-Semitic graffiti was painted on walls

and propaganda billboards were erected.

But it didn't wash with the German people.

There was always a fringe in Germany susceptible to anti-Semitic propaganda

on the basis that the Jews control international capital.

The Jews control business, the Jews control the media,

the Jews manipulate our politics.

But, you know, intelligent Germans didn't fall for this.

And, you know, there were so many Jews

that were embedded in the German government,

the German civil service, the German military had fought bravely

in World War I, been decorated for valor.

So I'd say most Germans were not anti-Semitic at all.

Many walked straight into the Jewish grocers and stores.

Goebbels' plan was a flop.

The people were not on board.

It was going to take more than a boycott

to turn a country of civilized people into terrorists.

Goebbels tried another tack.

He would use the power of the media

to broadcast Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda.

He seized control of all German radio stations

and nationalized all German media.

Goebbels' plan was to broadcast Nazi propaganda

into every home and on every street in Germany.

The spin was that the Jews have too much influence.

They run the banks,

the institutions that have too much power.

Joseph Goebbels really pushed hard to have radios

be very cheaply available so that all German households

could have access to them,

but then meticulously monitored

the types of news that were presented on those radio broadcasts.

At the same time,

the Nazis' SS Leader and chief of police,

Heinrich Himmler, established Dachau,

the party's first concentration camp.

Initially set up to incarcerate enemies of the state,

SS Leader Himmler

created his first prototype

for the Nazis' extermination camps.

The camp would be dwarfed by what was to come.

Himmler was one of Hitler's

most trusted allies.

Being in control of the national administration

was a huge responsibility

and provided him with a huge power base.

Also having responsibility for the SS,

if you like, the party's own political military force,

gave him the ability to project his own power

throughout Germany and also onto the battlefield.

The SS is not just running an extermination program.

They're not just the terror organization of the Nazi Party,

they have a whole economic empire that they are building

and that they're going to be raising more and more Waffen-SS

and arming those men through their own private industry.

The Nazi Party accelerated their policy of control

over the lives of Germany's Jewish population.

The Reich limited the number of Jews allowed in public schools.

Nazis burned all books The Reich deemed as un-German.

People with physical and mental disabilities were sterilized.

The September 1935 Nuremberg rally

became a chance to enshrine in law

the persecution of Jewish people.

The so-called Rally of Freedom

was a massive Nazi propaganda event.

Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels

delivered a savage and malicious attack

on the Jewish people.

He declared the Jews enemies of the state

and the assembled Nazis responded with enthusiasm.

Heil! Heil! Heil!

Hitler then authorized new legislation to be drafted,

a legal framework for the Nazi anti-Semitism.

The new laws were called the Nuremberg Race Laws.

The Nuremberg Laws

defined a Jew not by a religious faith in Judaism,

but by blood.

The Nazis determined

that anyone with three grandparents that were Jewish

could be classified as a Jew.

And as a Jew,

they were stripped of German citizenship,

marriage was forbidden between Jews and other Germans,

and they were denied access to an education.

With Goebbels, the spin master,

the wheels were now in motion.

The Nazis were building a racial state.

Hitler and Goebbels actually truly believed that

the Jews and other groups were seen as

lethal to the Aryan race or the Third Reich.

But Hitler had said that the Jews

were standing in the way of racial purity and pure bloodlines.

By late 1938,

the attitudes of ordinary Germans

towards their Jewish neighbors had shifted.

Nazi propaganda and fear was cutting through.

What once had been considered radical measures,

like boycotting Jewish stores,

was now part of everyday life.

On November the 7th, 1938,

a 17-year-old Polish student, Herschel Grynszpan,

fatally shot Ernst von Rath,

the third secretary of the German Embassy in Paris.

When the young Jew was arrested, sobbing,

he told the French police that being a Jew was not a crime,

and he had the right to live and exist on Earth,

and not be chased like an animal.

When news of the diplomat's death reached Goebbels,

his reaction was clear.

The German Jews would have to pay,

and pay they did.

The Nazi race war had begun.

Jews have no other service other than competition.

I mean, the whole idea of Nazism is built

on this social Darwinist conception

of competition in the natural world.

But Hitler is adapting that to the human world

and seeing races, such as he understands races,

to be in competition,

and the antithesis of the Aryan is the Jew,

and therefore the Aryan must fight the Jew.

Two nights later,

on November the 9th, 1938,

the sound of glass shattering

was heard throughout Germany.

Broken glass littered the streets

after the vandalism and destruction

of Jewish-owned businesses, synagogues, and homes.

The crowds cheered the SS on.

This event was called Kristallnacht,

the Night of Broken Glass.

By the following morning,

7,000 Jewish businesses were destroyed.

More than 900 synagogues damaged.

Ninety-one Jews were dead

and thousands more injured or disappeared.

The Nazis deported around 30,000 Jewish men

to concentration camps.

The Nazis' grand plan to rid Germany

of its Jewish population

was a step closer to being realized.

The Second World War

gave the Nazis an opportunity

to act on their racist vision.

The mass extermination of the Jewish people

would be carried out in the chaos of war.

But how the Nazis managed the Jewish problem,

as they referred to it,

would contribute significantly to Germany's downfall.

On January the 30th, 1939,

seven months before World War II was declared,

Hitler made a speech at the Reichstag,

revealing how far the Nazis were prepared to go

to purge Germany of their Jewish population.

Hitler wasn't predicting the future

under the cover of a war he would bring about.

He was planning the extermination

of the Jewish race in Europe.

The New York Times

published excerpts of Hitler's speech

but did not include his passage

on the annihilation of the Jewish race.

How could the international press pay so little attention

to Hitler's naked threat to wipe out the Jews?

The alarm bells should have been ringing.

But the Allies

couldn't comprehend the depth of Hitler's madness.

And on September the 1st, 1939,

Germany invaded Poland.

As a result, the Allies declared war on Germany.

Germany invades Poland and the Free City of Danzig.

World War II had begun.

...had transformed into the roar of gunfire.

Germany's assault on Poland was a bloodbath.

The German army took Poland in less than five weeks.

The Nazis immediately identified

and rounded up Poland's Jews.

Many were killed or transported to Warsaw,

Poland's largest city.

Around 30 percent of Warsaw's entire population

was crammed into a ghetto.

Four hundred thousand Jews

were forced into a 1.3-square-mile block.

In Germany, anti-Semitism was rife.

The tabloid newspaper, Der Sturmer,

writes that "The Jewish people

ought to be exterminated root and branch.

Then the plague of pests

would have disappeared in Poland at one stroke."

A curfew is imposed on Germany's Jewish population.

They are forbidden to be on the streets

after-00 p.m. in winter and-00 p.m. in summer.

Somewhere in Germany, probably...

On the battlefront,

having skirmished indecisively with the British,

Hitler's next major target was Russia.

On June the 22nd, 1941,

Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa.

It was one of the largest military operations in human history,

with over three million German soldiers

in three different offensives

marching towards the Soviet Union.

He doesn't refer to it as the Soviet Union.

It becomes Jewish Bolshevism.

With the Russian Revolution installing a Bolshevik government,

it seemed that this is already the beginnings

of a state that is not just opposed to Germany

because of strategic interests,

but that exists largely to destroy Germany.

But the majority of the Soviet population was Slavic,

a detail Hitler dismissed.

To Hitler, anyone not Aryan,

not a member of the master race,

was immediately inferior.

Most of the Soviet population is not Jewish,

but they are Slavs.

And that already puts them lower on this racialized pecking order,

and allows Germans to think less of them.

And once you've dehumanized them,

you see how much easier it is to treat them very poorly.

"We have only to kick in the door

and the whole rotten thing will come down."

He believed the German army would crush the inferior Russians.

And now we see the German armies,

more than three million men,

mobilizing for the great showdown against Jewish Bolshevism.

But Hitler underestimated the challenges ahead.

Russia was a vast country,

with subzero winters,

terrain unfit for tanks.

Russia had the strategic advantage.

By 1941,

Germany was also fighting the Allies

in the West and the Mediterranean.

Against the advice of his military strategists,

Hitler insisted on the Russia offensive,

confident Germany would overwhelm Russia

in a matter of months.

What is national socialist military thinking?

The national socialist way allows you to go further

in what is possible because that's the language of the time.

And if you're not allowed to voice critical views,

then it allows you to think that the impossible is possible.

Germany was unprepared

and not equipped for the Russian offensive.

The snow-covered truth about...

The German army had no winter clothing.

Miles of roadside ditches full of frozen Nazis...

Many soldiers died of pneumonia.

And as the battle progressed,

the German army suffered massive casualties.

Hitler's deluded belief in Germany's racial superiority

over Russian Slavs cost his army dearly.

He underestimated his enemy.

For these men,

the goose step has become a slow march to defeat.

The Germans would have done far better

in their invasion of the Soviet Union

had they not entered that space

with all of these racial ideas.

If they had entered as a liberating force rather than a crusading conquering force,

but Hitler would never consider any of these options.

Hitler failed to recognized

that the Russian people could have been an asset.

Instead,

the Germans made them a foe.

Ideology got in the way of good military sense.

We've got to remember that when the Germans

invaded the Soviet Union,

particularly the Ukraine in 1941,

that part of the Soviet Nation

hated Joseph Stalin.

But what Hitler did, rather than turning them

towards the German nation,

perhaps even getting that part of the Soviet Union

to fight on the Germans' behalf,

was actually to take them prisoner,

to put them into concentration camps

and eventually to execute them.

And therefore,

more broadly we see that ideology

had a great impact upon the number of resources,

human resources,

and eventually industrial resources

that the Germans could put into the battlefield.

At every turn, Nazi ideology,

the belief in the Aryan master human,

stood in the way of Germany ever winning a war.

In September,

four months after the Russian invasion,

the Nazis began killing Jews in the Soviet Union.

Hitler sent in SS mobile killing squads,

the Einsatzgruppen,

tasked with exterminating entire Jewish communities.

As the German army advanced,

the SS would follow,

rounding up the Jewish populations in villages and towns.

One particular slaughter

in Babi Yar near Kiev

would later be described as the largest single massacre

in the history of the Holocaust.

SS officers rounded up men,

women, and children.

They made them dig huge burial pits,

and then one by one,

SS soldiers shot them.

Almost 34,000 men, women, and children

were slaughtered over two days.

Some SS officers struggled,

affected by their role in the massacre.

News of the soldiers' torment reached Himmler,

who sought another solution

to exterminate the growing number of Jewish prisoners.

There was rampant PTSD

among many of the soldiers who were charged

with committing these egregious crimes

and mass shootings that ultimately ended in mass graves.

And so the establishment of the concentration camps

and the death camps was a way to further disassociate

how close many of the Nazi soldiers were to the actual killing of the Jews.

A plan was developed to eliminate all European Jews.

On January the 20th, 1942,

Nazi Chief of the Secret Police Reinhard Heydrich

met with high-ranking Nazi officials at Wannsee in Berlin.

Under discussion was the most efficient way

to exterminate the 11 million Jews in Europe.

They talk about, "Look, we've got to deal with the Jewish problem."

What is the Jewish problem? Well, the Jewish problem arises

from the fact that the Germans have invaded Poland

and the USSR,

where eight million of Europe's eleven million Jews reside.

So by invading Poland and the USSR,

Hitler has raked this massive population of Jews

into the German embrace.

What can you do with them?

Suddenly I've annexed 11 million Jews.

So the next step is, well, we're gonna kill them all.

Codenamed the Final Solution,

the Nazis would construct extermination camps

with fixed gas chambers

to murder on an industrial scale.

Himmler's henchmen

developed an arm's length cost-effective method

of mass murder...

that could kill thousands of people in minutes.

In Poland, six extermination or death camps were established.

By now, news of the atrocities in Poland

was reaching the West.

In December 1942,

the British House of Commons

condemns the massacre of Jews.

During a broadcast on the BBC,

British foreign minister Anthony Eden attacks Germany,

describing their cold-blooded extermination

of Jews as bestial.

Parliament held a one-minute silence

for the victims of the Nazi Holocaust,

a tribute usually reserved for deaths in the Royal Family.

While the Nazis' ideological war on Jews is costing them on the battlefront,

it's also galvanizing the Allies.

For the Allies,

any peace agreement is now off the table.

It has become a hand-to-hand struggle

between good and evil.

In Poland, the killing continues.

Hitler is pouring vast resources into the extermination camps.

It's difficult to put a number

on the personnel that were required

to handle the hundreds of thousands

of prisoners from the Eastern Front.

And of course, the extermination camps,

the Holocaust required the building of great sites.

They needed security personnel, there needed to be administration.

The Nazis are running parallel campaigns,

one a massive military operation,

and the other an ideological campaign

to ensure their master race.

This was unsustainable.

The irony for the Germans

thinking that they were kind of cementing

and solidifying the Nazi state by purging the Jews

was that purging the Jews almost ensured the destruction of the Nazi State.

Why? Well, I mean, consider for... That in March of 1942,

80 percent of the victims of the Holocaust were still alive.

In March of '43, 80 percent of the victims of the Holocaust are dead.

So, this '42 to '43 is a killing spree.

A large fraction

of Germany's precious resources needed for this multi-front war

are diverted into collecting Jews from all around Europe,

transporting them to ghettos,

then transporting them again to death camps,

then killing them, then disposing of the bodies

and it's sort of... I mean, it's a huge diversion

of logistical resources for the Final Solution.

And what's happening in this period?

Operation Torch in North Africa,

the Battle of Stalingrad on the... On the Eastern Front.

The Allied invasion of Sicily and Italy.

All requiring massive infusions of reinforcements,

materiel, ammunition,

none of which the Germans can afford

because of these big diversions made for the Holocaust.

Germany was now suffering immense casualties

at the hands of the Allies.

The Nazis' ideology denied Germany a great resource

in manpower and expertise.

There is no question

that targeting the Jewish population is harming the German war economy

from the fact that a lot of Jews have very good education.

They have technical skills, they have professional skills.

Those could have been utilized for the war effort.

I mean, there are a lot of German Jews

who are wondering, "Why am I being targeted?

Because I served in the First World War.

I won medals for Germany.

And I am a good German."

They would perhaps in a different world have served the German army

and forwarded its aims, as absurd as that might sound

given its national socialism.

But Hitler begins this process and pursues it

even to the point of economic self-harm.

In 1933,

Jews made up only one percent of the population,

but they accounted for almost a third of the country's Nobel Prize winners.

Jewish, German, and Hungarian scientists,

including Albert Einstein,

had fled to the West fearing Nazi persecution.

Twelve thousand to France,

twelve hundred to Spain,

three thousand to Czechoslovakia,

six thousand to America, twenty-three thousand to Palestine.

Some refugees made crucial contributions

to the Manhattan Project in America,

the team that built the atomic bomb.

The Third Reich drove their best and brightest

into the open arms of the Allies.

By 1945,

the Allies were on the final road to victory.

As the Allies advanced through Poland and Germany,

news of the horror of the Holocaust spread across the world.

The liberating Allies encountered camp after camp.

Heartbreaking and shocking scenes

of unbelievable depravity confronted the Allies.

Emaciated,

barely alive prisoners,

others dead,

mass graves,

gas and torture chambers.

Testimony of what the survivors had endured

was unimaginable.

Their discovery had a galvanizing effect in the final battles.

The Allies now approach the enemy

with a renewed conviction.

Once the Holocaust was recognized,

ensured that the Allies,

um, would fight Germany

to a point of unconditional surrender,

but knowledge of it came at a very important time.

It was really necessary to ensure

that the moral justification for the war,

the reason why they were fighting

was reinvigorated and re-emphasized.

The horrors that certainly the western Allies saw

once they had crossed the German border and the Polish border

was something that was an extra motivating factor at a particularly difficult time.

In April 1945,

General Eisenhower,

American Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces,

and his battle-hardened Lieutenant General Patton

toured Ohrdurf camp in Poland.

According to one witness,

General Patton dashed behind a shed and vomited,

he was so sickened by what he saw.

Eisenhower later said it was indescribable horror,

overwhelming evidence of cruelty

and mass murder.

And in Berlin, the perpetrator of this cruelty,

Adolf Hitler, the ideologue,

who had determined his master race should rule Europe,

had retreated to his bunker,

protected from the Red Army's advance.

Facing certain defeat,

Hitler maintained his delusional war on the Jews,

ordering the SS to continue their slaughter

into the final hours of the war.

It was as if the military war against the Allies was merely a sideshow.

The Allies continue to liberate camp after camp,

death camps, labor camps,

work camps,

42,500 camps in total.

And as bombs dropped from above,

Hitler, determined never to surrender,

committed suicide in his underground bunker

on the 30th of April.

A week later on May the 7th, 1945,

Germany surrendered.

History's deadliest war was over.

The surrender of Hitler's defeated soldiers

ended Nazi rule in Europe.

To this day,

World War II casts a dark shadow over history.

Hitler's savage racial war killed around six million Jews,

two thirds of Europe's entire Jewish population.

Millions of soldiers, political prisoners,

gypsies, homosexuals,

disabled people and civilians were killed across occupied Europe.

Nazi spin meister Joseph Goebbels

has been much quoted since his death by suicide in 1945.

He once said, "We shall go down in history

as the greatest statesmen of all time

or the greatest criminals."

He was right about the latter.