Original subtitles

Heil SA, Heil SS!

Heil!

When a political fanatic hijacked a civilized nation…

The public doesn't care about the truth.

…he set in motion the slaughter of millions.

They sat and discussed how you destroy people

on an industrial scale.

Could the Allies have prevented the inevitable Genocide?

The idea that we never really knew anything

until afterwards is false.

I came up a couple of times, very close,

to be killed in the gas chamber.

The discovery of the concentration camps

revealed the true evil behind the Nazi Empire.

Now, rarely-seen archive from around the world,

expertly restored and brought to life in full HD color,

tells the story of one of the most shocking events in World War II

as you've never seen it before.

Early April 1945,

and the war in Europe is coming to a head.

Soviet soldiers are advancing from the East

on the disintegrating German Empire.

On the Western front, the U.S. Third Army

under General George Patton is pushing through Central Weimar.

There's intense fighting happening,

and casualty rates in April 1945 are almost as high

as they were the previous summer during the Battle of Normandy.

On April the 11th, while moving past the town of Ettersberg,

the Sixth Armored Division is confronted by an unnerving sight:

A group of skeletal figures dressed in striped pajamas.

First thing you'd think is,

"Oh, these are POWS," but they don't look like that, do they?

They are basically telling the Americans, they're trying to tell them,

this is a horrible place, and you've gotta get there immediately.

We need you. And they keep saying,

"It's called Buchenwald… Buchenwald."

A group of four soldiers follow the men.

Though battle-hardened after months of fighting,

nothing would have prepared them for what they are about to see.

They had no idea what they had come across.

It was just a place of horrors.

It's absolutely shocking. People in terrible, terrible condition.

People near death, in a stage of emaciation.

The stench of the area is beyond belief.

The Americans are confronted with this and cannot believe their eyes.

Row upon row of barracks

house the starving bodies of 21,000 men and boys.

Jews, Russians, Gypsies, political prisoners.

All existing in squalor.

This is Buchenwald. A giant Nazi concentration camp.

For many, the American liberators have arrived too late.

Others are barely hanging on.

Many people were dying,

committing suicide in many cases.

Others didn't have enough to eat, and they died.

I mean, to live 700-800 calories… How long can you go on?

I never thought I would make it.

But Buchenwald will not be unique.

Across Germany, the Allies uncover camp upon camp

of dead and dying men, women and children.

Corpses piled up on trains…

crematoria brimming with charred remains,

and even gas chambers for mass extermination.

News of the barbaric discoveries shocked the world.

The question is asked: How could this happen?

It boggles the mind that a civilized cultured society

like Germany could inflict this kind of horror

on their fellow human beings.

How much did the Allied powers really know of the Nazi atrocities?

For Hitler, long known for his anti-Jewish sentiment,

had made his intentions perfectly clear just six years earlier.

The result will not be the planet's turn to Bolshevism

and therefore, the triumph of the Jews,

but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.

In an infamous speech in 1939,

Hitler made a terrifying prophecy, as it turned out,

that if war came, it wouldn't be a war that he'd started,

but that the Jews had started, and it wouldn't end with Germany's defeat;

it would end with the annihilation of the Jew.

At the time, the implication was not grasped as fully as it might have been.

And you think: Why didn't others see what he was saying?

The answer starts back in the decades before the war began.

In 1919, the abject humiliation of Germany

losing the first World War cut to the core.

The subsequent Treaty of Versailles

stripped her territories, forced disarmament,

and instituted crippling monetary reparations of $30 billion.

The country went into a great tailspin,

you might say, economically, militarily, socially.

There was all sorts of upheavals.

One young man left embittered by Germany's plight

was Adolf Hitler. Austrian by birth,

he had served in the Bavarian Army on the Western Front.

The shock to him, personally, when the nation that he'd adopted

proved incapable of winning the war against the Allies left him devastated.

He was angry about Germany's condition, passionately angry.

Hitler comes into contact with White Russians,

émigrés fleeing from Communist Russia.

And they brought with them this intense distaste:

hatred of what happened within Russia, which was,

in the eyes of the White émigrés, a Bolshevik Jewish plot,

where the political and the Judaic had come together.

At last, Hitler comprehends

how the brilliant Germany could have been brought to its knees.

Here is the explanation for our difficulties.

We've been betrayed by Jews.

Jews who brought about a revolution in Russia,

and want to do the same in Germany now.

We must get together as Germans,

as Germans, and reject all that threatens us.

Driven to politics, Hitler joins a fledgling group

called the National Socialists: The Nazi Party.

Here he finds a group of like-minded people.

It was a vehicle that he could use, he could shape,

he could mold, in his image,

and do the kind of things that he wanted to be done for Germany.

When worldwide Depression hits in 1929,

Germany's struggling economy is thrown into turmoil.

Hitler seizes the opportunity to galvanize support,

promising to create jobs, rebuild infrastructure,

and make the country self-sufficient.

The message was not centered on Antisemitism.

He knew that most Germans did not consider this to be a big issue.

Germans were far more concerned with the Versailles Treaty,

with the economic circumstances of Germany.

And by pushing his anti-Bolshevik agenda,

Hitler provides the people with a scapegoat

for all their problems.

The public willingly embraces his reasoning.

German people, as a whole,

were very much worried that Communism was going to take over.

And Hitler played upon this fear that the German people had.

Support for the Nazi Party soars.

Really, if you had to identify a theme for Hitler's election campaigns,

it would have been, "Let's make Germany great again."

Let's overturn the Versailles Treaty. Let's give people jobs,

let's get rid of these foreign elements that are poisoning our society.

Heil SA, Heil SS!

Heil!

In 1933, Hitler is swept to power

in a landslide electoral victory.

Almost immediately, he bans all other political parties.

Abroad, Jewish observers react with dismay.

His antisemitic record rings alarm bells.

In the U.S., civil rights activist, Samuel Untermeyer,

demands a boycott of German goods.

The only crime charged against the Jews is that they are Jews.

Shall the world stand idly by and take no steps

to prevent this reversion to the Dark Ages?

But the calls to action are not heeded.

In Germany, Hitler can finally take his anti-Bolshevik ideas

from campaign manifesto to government policy.

He begins a program of forcibly re-educating the undesirables of society,

placing them into concentration camps.

By putting them into these camps

and forcing them to perform good, hard work

and get a lot of fresh air and exercise, their attitudes would be turned around,

and ultimately they would become good German citizens again.

For most middle class and upper-class Germans

who saw Communism as a real threat,

this was a good way to take German society in hand.

But the message of intimidation is clear.

Concentration camps were an instrument

not only for the incarceration of political opponents,

but also, to terrorize and intimidate them.

This was a vital function of the early concentration camps

against political opponents. To keep them silent.

Heil!

- Sieg… - Heil!

With the death of President Hindenburg in 1934,

Hitler takes on the title of Fuhrer, or leader of Germany.

And from that point on, it was a dictatorship, pure and simple.

As Fuhrer, Hitler now amplifies another core belief,

one that has been part of Nazi philosophy from its earliest days.

That the German people are descended from a master race.

And so begins a project of racial profiling.

What he wants is to make Germany a racial state.

The Volk, the idea of the Germans being bonded together

through historical development,

excluded those who weren't Aryan, weren't German.

The concept of a superior race was not restricted to Germany.

The idea of white supremacy

was well-established in the European tradition,

notably in the justification for slavery in the United States.

In the 19th century, Eugenics Pseudoscience

took racial theory to a new level.

Blond-haired, blue-eyed,

Nordic-looking sort of people were the model that you were aiming for.

And Hitler added to it by saying,

well, we can rapidly breed out impure races and make a master race.

Rarely giving direct orders himself,

Hitler instead leaves it to his trusted lieutenants

to interpret and carry out his will.

Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, is one such devotee.

Heinrich Himmler wanted to control

how German society functioned, how people related to one another,

how they acted in their private lives, even.

Heinrich Himmler believed that he had a mission,

and the mission was to engage in the purification

of German culture and Aryan racial superiority.

Taking on responsibility for the camps in 1934,

he quickly expands their use to remove the racially inferior.

They looked at Slavs, they looked at Eastern Europeans

as "untermenschen." Sub-humans.

People who were simply not deserving

of the kinds of consideration that Aryans deserved.

Gypsies, homosexuals,

habitual criminals, drunks, the unemployed.

All of these people were targets of the camp system.

Much of the public accepts the new policy.

The regime pushed this as a positive development.

They were people that most Germans considered to be

at least somewhat a threat.

But it's Hitler's despised Jews

who are to be the prime targets of Nazi persecution.

In 1933, there are half a million Jews in Germany,

around 1% of the population.

Though generally assimilated into society,

prejudice is never far away.

Antisemitism was the norm. A fear, a suspicion,

that, in some way, there's a presence within Germany,

a people within Germany, who aren't really German.

The Nazis aim to take advantage

of this underlying racial prejudice.

Jews had influence. That was Hitler's lie.

They run the banks, they run the finance houses.

They're lawyers, they're doctors. The key professions, key institutions,

are Jewish-dominated.

Hitler had written about his hatred of the Jews extensively

in his 1925 book, Mein Kampf.

For him, there is only one solution.

They couldn't be allowed

to be part of the citizenship of the State,

because they were naturally enemies.

He often used the very grim analogies of the bacillus in the body politic:

the germ that's going to corrupt. You have to wipe it out, cut it out.

But the Nazi regime realizes

the call for all-out war on the Jews would be unpopular.

The public needs to be persuaded.

Most Germans didn't know any Jews.

For those who did, they tended to think my Jews,

my friends, they're different. They should be treated differently.

Hitler appoints politician and master manipulator

Joseph Goebbels as head of the Propaganda Ministry.

His mission: to portray the Jews as "other,"

and engineer public opinion to the Nazi's favor.

Propaganda was central

to how the Nazis persuaded Germans

of the rightness of Nazi policies,

and Joseph Goebbels was a real expert at this.

He had a natural talent at it.

You couldn't publish anything in Germany,

you couldn't say it on the radio

if it didn't meet with Goebbels's approval.

His strategy is simple and bold.

He was an expert in what he called "the big lie."

And this idea of the big lie was

that the public doesn't care about the truth.

What they want to hear is something that is simple,

that seems to solve their problems,

and you say it again, and again, and again.

Doesn't matter if it corresponds to the facts or not.

You just keep saying it,

and sooner or later, people will start to believe it.

He cleverly uses the new media of radio and film

to spread his message.

…no different than the Jews among humans.

There was a program that people were sold,

radios at a very low cost that could only get one station.

It was the state-controlled radio station,

and so, the propaganda stream never ended.

The message: The Jews have too much power.

Joseph Goebbels was able to say

the Germans are suffering because the Jews are doing so well.

To the Jewish population, the actions are alarming.

They hold positions within government,

teach at universities, run businesses.

Up until that point,

Jews had become more and more assimilated into German society,

tending to see themselves as Germans first and foremost,

and Jews sort of second.

Almost immediately after taking power,

Goebbels helps organize a one-day boycott of Jewish shops.

The action marked the start of a systematic campaign of discrimination.

Students organized mass book burnings.

Works by foreign and Jewish authors are destroyed to purify German culture.

Persecution of the Jews within Nazi Germany

is a cumulative affair. Step by step,

the Jew is made to feel more and more isolated.

The Nuremberg Race Law is a critical stage.

It is at the 1935 Nazi Party rally at Nuremberg

that Hitler introduces legislation to protect Aryan bloodlines.

One law forbids marriages between Jews and Germans.

The other critically defines

who qualifies as a true German, and who does not.

They made it possible then to persecute in a very direct way.

Because you're defining your enemy.

You're saying these categories make someone a Jew,

and the Jew is the enemy, and the Jew is to be guarded against.

And, therefore, all families can now be examined,

and we can see just how deep the corruption has gone.

The policy of ethnic purification

is now enshrined in German law.

The Nuremberg race laws of 1935

made Jews in Germany into second-rate human beings.

Many hoped that the harassment would stop after these laws were put into power.

It was a faint hope.

Things only deteriorate for the Jews.

Over the next two years, there were additional laws

that further restricted the rights of the Jews.

They're forbidden to have pets, they're forbidden to have radios,

they're forbidden to have cars. You know, gradually,

there are more and more restrictions put upon them.

The policy is all part of an Aryanization drive

to purge society of Jewish influence.

The German people do little to intervene.

Some even benefit from the measures.

Every time a Jew was dismissed from a position,

in, say, a school or a legal firm or a publishing house,

a job was available to a non-Jewish German Aryan.

And that is highly attractive. You can swallow your feelings

about Jews being ill-treated if your career prospects

are going to be so much improved.

Although news of Jewish persecution spreads abroad,

it seldom makes it into the popular press.

And when it does, the public don't trust the reports.

During World War I, Germans had been falsely accused

of mutilating Belgian children in news stories.

People said, well, this is just anti-German propaganda

like we got in World War I. It turned out not to be true,

that the Germans really weren't doing the bad things

to Belgian children then. So, why should we believe this?

Some American Jews even fear drawing attention to the injustice.

The Jewish owners of the New York Times felt

there might be an antisemitic backlash against American Jews

if it seemed like the New York Times was beating the drum

for "let's do something to save the Jews of Europe."

In truth, Antisemitism is growing across the globe.

European countries like Italy and Poland

have anti-Jewish restrictions.

Britain is facing its own fascist movement

inciting hatred against Jews.

In the U.S., discrimination is never far away.

Jews often weren't permitted

to be in the same class as other students

or to attend golf clubs or hotels.

Not as bad as the treatment of African Americans,

but nevertheless a real and endemic and legalized prejudice

within American society at this time.

The United States State Department, for example,

was filled with anti-Semites

that made sure that we did not even fulfill the quotas

that we, by law, could have filled

in accepting people from Central Europe.

In late 1938, a group of 900 Jewish refugees

flee to Cuba on the German transatlantic liner,

the SS St. Louis.

The passengers had bought Cuban visas.

When they got to Cuba, there were demonstrations against them,

and they were turned away.

Desperately looking for sanctuary,

the Captain sails to the U.S., the promised land of the free.

And so the ship sailed on to Miami,

but the State Department said no, you can't offload anybody here.

Some people committed suicide by jumping overboard.

Forced to return to Germany,

many of the passengers end up as victims of concentration camps.

About 150 of the passengers ended up dying in the Holocaust

when the Nazis overran Western Europe.

Within Germany, few in the Jewish community

protest against government discrimination,

because for them, this is nothing new.

Jews have been dealing with antisemitism for centuries.

For most of that time in most places,

there were limits on how bad things could get.

And this knowledge of their history

affected how they reacted to the steps that the Nazis took.

Many thought, "It'll blow over.

It's bad at the moment, but it's a passing phase."

But instead, the persecution escalates

as the seeds of Goebbels's malignant propaganda come to fruition.

In late 1938, the assassination of a German diplomat

by a Polish Jew in Paris

gives the Nazis a pretext

for triggering direct violence against the Jewish community.

On the night of November the ninth,

thousands of Nazi Brownshirts go on the rampage.

They smashed Jewish shop windows, they looted the contents,

they broke into people's homes and trashed them.

They beat people up, they raped women.

The police have been instructed to watch on without intervening.

People gathered in the streets and more or less cheered

or didn't cheer as the synagogues burned down.

In the event now known as Kristallnacht,

the night of the broken glass, over 100 Jews are killed.

It couldn't have happened, Kristallnacht,

had there not been that gradual wearing away of the idea

of the Jew as acceptable, as respectable.

The Jew was now get-at-able; He was vulnerable.

With the horrors of Kristallnacht,

the Jewish persecution finally makes front-page news abroad.

Reaction around the world

to what the Nazis were doing to the Jews was pretty loud.

There were large protests in New York City, for example,

there was a gathering in Madison Square Garden.

There was a limit to what people were willing to do,

there was a limit to what they could do.

Though Roosevelt's administration expresses great concern,

both the U.S. and Europe fundamentally do nothing.

They refuse to impose economic sanctions, or open their doors to fleeing Jews.

German Jews now realize that Hitler's goal

had always been to force them out.

But the Nazis make it very difficult to leave,

imposing hefty emigration taxes.

The Nazi operation was national-level gangsterism.

They wanted to seize Jewish property,

to enrich themselves and their supporters.

And so, certainly for much of the pre-war period,

if you could pay up and give all your property over,

then you were able to get out.

And those who do escape often find themselves

penniless and stateless.

This was the middle of the Great Depression.

Other countries didn't want to accept a bunch of people

who weren't gonna be able to support themselves, who were gonna come in

and perhaps take jobs away from people who were already there.

Life then was very hard for Jews in these countries.

They often were deprived of working rights,

and actually a few even went back to Germany.

But fundamentally, it is anti-Jewish sentiment

that drives European attitudes.

A lot of people just didn't want Jews coming into the country at all.

And this was true throughout Europe.

In the aftermath of Kristallnacht,

30,000 Jewish men are rounded up

and sent to concentration camps.

Ten thousand of those end up in Buchenwald in Central Germany.

Originally built in 1937

as a place of hard labor for political prisoners,

the camp primarily houses men and boys.

There was a lot of sort of pointless work.

You know, carry these rocks over to the other side of the compound,

okay, carry them back. Dig a hole, fill it in.

Work that was simply meant to demean, to exhaust,

sometimes to the point of death.

The whole idea of Buchenwald

was to break the spirit of people who were sent there.

Right across Germany,

Jews start to be incarcerated en masse.

For a lot of Jews, this did seem like the last straw.

Now they realized that this was not just a matter of,

well, I can't have a radio. This is now a matter of

they're going to be increasingly violent until we leave, and we have to leave.

Emboldened by the lack of international condemnation,

Hitler pushes on with his plans for a great German nation:

expansion.

The Nazis wanted to gain Lebensraum.

They wanted to gain living space

so that Germany could be self-sufficient in terms of food,

so that the German race again could prosper

and ultimately take over the world.

If the master race is to reign supreme,

it needs space for Aryan farmers.

They would move into areas currently occupied by the inferior races:

The Slavs and the Poles and the Russians.

And that would be perfectly legitimate,

because a superior race has the right to suppress an inferior one.

Just as the good bacteria will destroy the bad bacteria.

On the 1st of September 1939,

Hitler invades Poland.

Europe is at war.

With the rest of the world distracted by Germany's aggression,

the Nazis quietly target another group of undesirables.

The physically and mentally ill.

Under the Aktion T4 Program,

Hitler orders doctors to grant "mercy deaths"

to those deemed incurably sick.

Six asylums are outfitted with specially constructed gas chambers.

Here, chemically-manufactured poisons are used to kill patients.

But while the Nazis rid themselves of one problem,

newly-captured territories present them with another:

an excess of Jews.

They start rounding them up, isolating them in ghettos.

The Nazis knew that they wanted to control the Jews,

but they weren't yet sure what they were going to do with them.

Alex Moskovic is 13 years old

when he, his two brothers, and parents,

find themselves targeted in Czechoslovakia.

The family was Orthodox. We lived in this small town,

and I didn't know too much about the rest of the world.

All of a sudden, police came and put us on trucks,

and they put us into a brick factory.

And that was our place in the ghetto in that town,

and we were surrounded by Hungarian Police.

Conditions inside the ghettos are miserable.

Many people die from disease, starvation, or are simply shot.

There was very little food, there was a great deal of overcrowding,

so people were forced into small areas,

usually in the poorest parts of these towns or cities.

From the ghettos,

the inhabitants are transferred to the camps,

where conditions are even worse.

Inmates are worked till they drop, beaten and whipped.

Those considered of no use are shot or hanged.

The camps attract sadists.

One of the most notorious was Ilse Koch,

wife of the SS Commandant at Buchenwald.

It's said that if the saw somebody with an interesting tattoo,

she would tell the guard to write down that prisoner's number.

The next day, he would disappear,

he would be killed, and have his skin removed

and tanned and made into some household object.

A small industry flourishes at Buchenwald

providing these gruesome items.

Throughout the SS world, orders would come in

and say I'd like to have a book cover of human skin,

or some house slippers, lamp shade, or whatever it happened to be.

By mid-1941,

the Third Reich has now occupied most of mainland Europe.

To accommodate the ever-growing number of prisoners,

the SS set up thousands of slave labor camps.

Throughout Nazi society in Germany at the time,

there was a slave labor system. And I think people don't realize that.

Local factories and businesses

benefit from the free labor.

The slaves who came to do the work were clearly

in extremely poor health, badly dressed, maltreated.

The idea that people didn't know until afterwards is simply a fiction.

On June 22nd, 1941,

Hitler launches operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union.

The invasion marks a major turning point in the Nazi racial cleansing campaign.

Prior to June '41, Hitler's army treated enemy soldiers

in accordance with international laws and expectations.

But Operation Barbarossa marked a break here.

Nazi High Command authorizes a significant change

to the rules of engagement.

This war is going to be different from all wars.

The enemy in the East is a different enemy

who has to be treated different. He fights viciously,

he fights savagely, he's Asiatic, he is cruel.

And so we have to be prepared for that,

and we have to be similarly cruel toward that enemy.

Hitler is finally in a position

to attack the reviled Jewish Communist foe

he denounced in Mein Kampf.

He believed that by attacking the Soviet Union,

he'd be attacking the heart of Communism/Judaism.

And hence his ruthless determination to kill all the Soviet Jews.

Antisemitic aggression escalates,

as head of the SS, Himmler, deploys special paramilitary groups

to follow the advancing German forces.

The Einsatzgruppen were made up primarily

of SS and police personnel.

And these units followed the armies and rounded up Jews,

took them outside of their villages to places that had been prepared,

or in some cases forced them to dig their own graves and shot them.

Entire Jewish settlements, now not just the men,

but the women and children and the elderly

were killed to the last person.

Chillingly, several SS officers

even filmed the atrocities as war mementos.

There's a lot of German photographs

of shootings, hangings,

that Germans were proud of

and showed to each other and sometimes even sent home.

At Babi Yar,

a ravine just outside of Kiev in the Ukraine,

the Einsatzgruppen murder nearly 34,000 Jews

in the space of two days.

It is one of the single largest massacres of World War II.

The slaughter is so horrific that the executions

are beginning to exert a toll on the officers involved.

Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS,

started to hear that psychological effects were severe,

there was a great deal of alcoholism breaking out.

So he started looking for another solution.

To stop his troops suffering,

Himmler introduces the use of mobile gas vans.

The killing process is becoming industrialized.

They would pack people into the back of the truck

and the exhaust from the truck would go into that compartment

and suffocate the people or kill them with carbon monoxide poisoning.

But the vans prove too time-consuming.

In order to exterminate more efficiently…

…the Nazis turn to technology developed under their Aktion T4 Program.

At a point in 1941,

a number of technicians from the T4 Program

actually go to Eastern Europe

and coordinate with the SS on how gassing can work.

There were experiments that were being made with gas chambers.

And within 10 or 15 minutes,

hundreds or thousands of people could be killed.

And that was the method that was determined as the most efficient.

But it's events in early 1942 that prove key

in accelerating the deployment of this new mass extermination method.

The crushing defeat of the German army at the Battle of Moscow

throws Nazi invincibility into doubt.

This was a moment of real panic in the Nazi leadership,

because they feared that they would lose the war.

And the response was, well, the Jews caused this war,

and now, they must pay the price,

because we've just lost 165,000 men

and they must pay the price for that, wrote Goebbels in his diary that winter.

The gas chambers offer a way to take vengeance

and rid Germany of the Jewish problem.

On January 20th, 1942,

15 high-ranking Nazi officials meet at the Wannsee Villa in Berlin.

On the agenda: the implementation of the Final Solution.

This idea of destroying 11 million Jews

starts at Wannsee Conference where they thought, "What's the problem?"

The Jews. The Jews of Europe, occupied Europe.

How many are they? Eleven million.

We've got to wipe them out within as short a space as we can.

It was at that meeting that it was decided

that these gas chambers would be the best way

to accomplish this very ghastly goal.

The question now is how to scale up the process.

They sat and discussed

how you destroy people on an industrial scale.

How do the trains run? How do we get the timetables to tally?

- What supplies do we need? - And now we have a new scale

of killing that we see: industrial killing.

From across Europe, hundreds of thousands of Jews

are sent to be gassed in six purpose-built killing centers.

All are based in the East of Poland.

The Nazis were on sight and therefore, in a way, more protected

because the German people were far away,

and that made it easier for them to give in to their cruel intentions,

as harsh as it sounds.

Alex and his family were put on a train

heading to the largest extermination center, Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Once we arrived in Birkenau,

I was separated from my father and my elder brother.

My younger brother, I had no idea where he was.

My mother wasn't there anymore.

I left her on the platform

and I had no idea what happened to her.

Alex never sees his mother or younger brother again.

Hundreds of thousands of others are sent straight to the gas chambers.

Ultimately in the extermination centers,

almost 2.8 million people were killed.

Most of them Jews, but also Roma and Sinti,

some of the disabled, some Soviet prisoners of war.

Those deemed of use

are tattooed with a number and put to work.

Alex is forced to haul the garbage carts.

But it's not just rubbish he will have to dispose of.

One day, he is approached by the leader of a women's barrack.

She has a desperate situation.

One of the newer women that came there…

was pregnant.

Bad news.

If the Germans would have found out that she was pregnant,

they would have killed her immediately.

So, she says to me, she's gonna give birth,

and once she gives birth,

we're gonna take the baby…

and we'll have to choke the baby…

to make the mother live.

Figure, the mother has to live,

and then we'll give the baby to you in a sack and you put it in a wagon.

And when you go to the dump…

you bury it.

So, we came back, and we took the baby to the burial place.

We dug a hole and took the baby very quietly

and put the baby in there and covered it.

If someone dies, you have to say a prayer, Kaddish, right?

We said the Kaddish. It wasn't easy.

When a handful of inmates manage to escape the camps,

they take news of the killings to the Allies.

A great deal of information about the extermination of the Jews

started to come through.

There were statements by the Soviet Government,

Polish Government in London published a whole dossier

detailing almost village by village the Nazi atrocities.

In December 1942,

representatives of 16 Allied Governments meet in London.

They issue a declaration condemning the Extermination.

The British House of Commons stood in silence,

which only ever happened otherwise at the death of the Monarch.

So, this was a very powerful symbol that was being sent about the recognition

that the Jews over Europe were being exterminated.

So, the idea that we never really knew anything

and we never really said anything until afterwards is false.

The declaration is broadcast on the BBC

in nearly 20 languages.

The world knows, so why is nothing done to help?

Well, the short answer was, as Franklin Roosevelt said,

we're trying to win the war. But at this point,

the Nazi tanks of Rommel are 150 miles from Cairo.

The Middle East oil is expected to fall to the Nazis.

The survival of Western civilization was at stake.

Winning the war was the absolute priority,

and that was the way to save what Jews would be left.

Two years go by before a turn in the war

brings hope to millions of prisoners.

On the sixth of June 1944, the Allies land at Normandy.

In the East, the Soviets are now pushing back the German forces.

Germany is in retreat.

On the 23rd of July, the Red Army reaches Majdanek

extermination camp in Poland.

It is here that the Soviets find the first evidence of industrial murder:

Piles of charred corpses next to crematoria ovens,

three large gas chambers

and 553 cans of Ziklon B poison.

Russian filmmaker Roman Karman documents the scene.

He was overwhelmed by what he had seen.

Ashes from the dead bodies was actually used as fertilizer

to actually grow this enormously beautiful cabbage

on the fields of Majdanek. And so the camera zooms in on the cabbage.

The Germans had collected the plundered belongings

of the murdered Jews: Glasses, suitcases, even human hair.

In the Soviet Union,

the horrific discoveries are reported extensively.

But the claims are so shocking that Western media

are simply not convinced they are genuine.

Those images did not circulate

to Western viewers at the time.

In fact, when Alexander Werth,

who was the correspondent for the BBC in Moscow

sent a report to the BBC in London in August 1944,

the editors refused to publish it,

believing this to be a Soviet propaganda hoax.

By January 1945,

the Soviets are advancing on other camps.

The Nazis start removing inmates.

Thousands are forced onto death marches, including Alex Moskovic.

People that fall are grouped on the side, and somebody went over there

and shot 'em and left them there on the road.

And the people that could walk kept walking.

Lucky to survive the march,

Alex faces another harrowing ordeal

when he is packed onto a train heading west to Buchenwald.

First couple of days, it was crowded.

At least we were able to keep warm.

But the second and third day, people start to die.

For over 20 days,

survivors are forced to keep the dead on the train

so that the Nazis can account for every Jew.

Bodies, all they cared about is bodies.

At Buchenwald, the situation has become so dire

that some inmates resort to desperate measures.

The worst thing I saw…

someone eating a human being.

Wow… unbelievable.

His father and older brother now dead,

Alex finds himself alone,

along with thousands of other children.

The goal of the SS was they were going to die

along with the adults who were in the camp.

By now, U.S. troops have advanced into Central Germany.

At Ohrdruf on April the fourth, 1945,

American forces make their first horrifying discovery.

An abandoned slave labor camp.

They were astonished by what they saw.

There were piles of corpses and a few starving,

smelly survivors who could barely raise their hands

to greet the American arrivals.

About a kilometer outside of the camp,

the SS guards had summarily dumped between 2,000 and 3,000 bodies

in various shallow graves and ditches and forest areas.

Finally, the Allies see with their own eyes

the atrocities the Soviets have been reporting for the past year.

The commander of the American Unit

called back to headquarters and he said, you won't believe what I've found here.

Get people here as quickly as you can.

With the Americans just 26 miles away,

the SS at Buchenwald immediately start clearing the camp.

But the inmates, realizing freedom is finally within their grasp,

rise up and resist.

Prisoners aren't just sitting around waiting.

And so you see this enormous pressure,

the prisoners trying to kind of resist this,

because they know evacuation probably means death.

On April 11th,

the starving prisoners seize control of the camp.

Weapons were handed out,

inmates rushed the main gate.

Many of the guards ran away.

We were able to open up the front gate

and, when the Americans arrived,

that gate was open to them,

so they just walked right through it.

Salvation has come at last for the few who have escaped death.

I felt that I wouldn't see that day ever.

Surviving a situation like that,

that's almost impossible.

Everybody who was there

said it was the greatest day of their lives.

In many cases, they said this is the day I began my life.

I'm delivered.

I couldn't believe it to be able to go home

and hope that someone in my family would still be alive.

But that is not to be.

Out of 41 members of his family,

Alex is the only one to survive.

The barbarities uncovered in the camps are so unbelievable

that Allied Commanders insist on seeing the evidence for themselves.

On April 12th, Generals Eisenhower,

Patton and Bradley visit Ohrdruf.

Patton was so grossed out by what he saw

that he went behind a building and threw up,

and Eisenhower and Bradley just turned white with shock and horror.

Determined to make the world aware

of what the Nazis were doing,

General Eisenhower sends for the press.

And he said, "I want them to document what we've found here,

because maybe in the future somebody will deny it happened.

And our boys may not know what they're fighting for,

but now they'll know what they're fighting against."

People across Germany claim shock and ignorance

at what was happening on their own doorstep.

At Buchenwald, General Patton forces a thousand locals

to tour the camp and confront the horrors within.

It's very difficult to know how they could not have known.

And we think of the death camps and the chimneys, the black smoke.

And there were bits of flesh that would land on people, like soot.

What about the smells? They didn't see the trucks coming in

or leaving and whatever? Nah.

And they reacted like dummies that did not know

what was happening, and that's not true.

They knew.

Between 1933 and 1945,

there were a recorded 44,000 slave labor sites,

concentration camps, and ghettos.

When images from the liberations hit the international press,

the outrage reverberates across the globe.

Seeing in detail

what the Nazis had really got up to in their camps

provided a deep shock to publics internationally.

How could this possibly happen?

Humanity should have been beyond such barbarities.

The shadow cast by the Nazi regime

reminds us that even civilized society

can descend into depravity all too easily.

My feeling is that there is something in the human condition

that allows people at times to pick out people who are different,

to see them as a threat, and to exterminate them.

And because there was a certain core of people in Germany

who were willing to carry out this mass atrocity, this mass murder,

it happened.

The murderous rampage that the Nazis unleashed

killed six million Jews

and a further 11 million civilians and POWs.

To a British Military Tribunal at Nuremberg

has brought a sordid assortment of Nazi war criminals.

Thanks to far-sighted evidence-gathering work

started in 1943 by the UN War Crimes Commission,

36,000 charges are brought against Nazi criminals.

But despite the evidence of genocide, the antisemitic elements

within the U.S. government do their best to block proceedings.

The State Department had never wanted a war crimes process,

and right-wing political figures, such as Joe McCarthy,

did everything they could to smear American prosecutors

and then, by 1948, with the Cold War looming,

American Intelligence Officials had the archive

of all these 36,000 indictments made secret at the United Nations.

So that even countries that were trying to organize prosecutions

couldn't access their own files at the UN.

Many Nazis find their sentences commuted

or charges dropped.

They return to ordinary life, never facing justice for their crimes.

The justification offered is the rising Soviet threat.

The way in which anti-Communism

was used to rehabilitate Nazis is, I think, quite shocking.

While you might say we needed scientists or industrialists

to help rebuild Germany, quite why do we need death squad leaders

and concentration camp and death camp guards

for rebuilding Germany and rebuilding democracy?

These are the last people you would want.

With many European countries desperate for American aid,

the U.S. is able to pressure them to abandon trials.

This even happens in the United Kingdom.

In 1948, the Labor Government stopped the trials.

And even where they had Gestapo men in custody awaiting trial,

they were just allowed to walk free.

And the note on the file was something of the kind of,

well, we have to bury the past and move on.

In the years following the Holocaust,

the rallying cry becomes "never again."

It shouldn't have come to this.

Yet, it happened.

And a lot of us let it happen.

But there is always the worry

that humanity has not learned from the past.

One of the things that becomes plain

is how effective propaganda can be,

especially when it plays on prejudices that already exist within society.

And, unfortunately, we're seeing that again today.

We're seeing the same lies about the Jews

being propagated by right wing groups more and more openly.

Even some governments

are starting to encourage these kinds of statements.

It's a constant fight,

it's something we have to be on the alert for.

Not because it affects just the Jews, but it affects all of us.

Re-sync & redact: BLU DUAINE blu.duaine@protonmail.com