All language subtitles for greatest.events.of.world.war.ii.in.hd.colour.s01e09.1080p.web.x264-stout-eng

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