Original subtitles

In the 1920s, Adolf Hitler promoted the idea

of Lebensraum - living space.

The German population was, he said,

too great in every sense to be confined within its present borders.

And he knew that Germany could spread in only one direction.

We National Socialists are ceasing the endless German movement

to the south and west, and levelling our gaze at the land in the east.

That war to seize the land in the east was a war of unfathomable cost.

It was...

By the first week of October 1941,

Stalin had learned from Richard Sorge,

the reliable Soviet spy in Tokyo,

that there would be no Japanese move against the USSR

until, at the earliest, the following spring.

TRANSLATION:

On October 18th, Richard Sorge was arrested,

tortured then executed.

The day after his arrest, Stalin declared a state of siege in Moscow.

And an order of the day said...

Moscow will be defended to the last.

On October 26th 1941,

three partisans were publicly hanged

in front of 14 Oktyabrskaya Street, Minsk -

then, and now, the address of the yeast factory.

The girl - the sign says,

"We are the partisans who have shot at German soldiers." -

is Maria "Masha" Bruskina.

Working as a volunteer nurse in the POW camp,

she plotted escapes.

Informed on by a prisoner,

she was the first to be hanged.

She was 17.

Next hanged was Volodia Shcherbatsevich.

He was 16 years old.

Last hanged was Kiril Trus.

It was understandable for the people that to survive in this situation

is very, very difficult for them.

When they saw the people that were hanging on the streets

just because German soldiers were killed,

they captured hundreds of the people and exterminated them.

Romanian and German troops entered Odessa in mid-October.

A time-delayed Soviet mine blew up the military headquarters,

and reprisals were ordered.

Shortly afterwards, the mayor of Odessa

wrote a letter to the Romanian leader, Ion Antonescu.

I awoke in the morning to a frightful sight.

In all the main streets and at the intersections,

groups of four or five people were hanging.

It was only the start.

Shortly afterwards, the mass murder of Odessa's Jews began.

Half were locked into four warehouses,

three of which were then set on fire.

The fourth was destroyed by artillery.

A week later, on the main battlefront,

General Eduard Wagner wrote...

We're convinced we'll shortly finish off Moscow.

But just one day later, Colonel General Erich Hoepner complained...

The roads have become quagmires.

Everything has come to a halt.

They didn't know what to do.

As a result, they had to adapt themselves

to each new phase of the war, and it was pretty difficult.

On November 7th, the day that Roosevelt extended Lend-Lease

to the Soviet Union,

Stalin, who had not left his capital,

stood in a show of bravado atop the mausoleum in Red Square

to review his troops and encourage them

in their defence of "Holy Russia".

The mausoleum did not contain its most precious relic,

Lenin's embalmed body having been taken east for safety.

In front of Moscow, half a million men and women were digging trenches

and unrolling 300km of barbed wire.

And Lavrentiy Beria - feared and apparently fearful -

head of Stalin's secret police asked...

How are we going to defend Moscow?

We have absolutely nothing at all.

We have been overwhelmed.

Stalin saw things differently.

If they want a war of extermination, they shall have one.

TRANSLATION:

On the anniversary of the Bierkeller Putsch,

a farce that had been recast as a revolution,

Hitler told those reminiscing with him...

We are deciding the fate of Europe for the next thousand years.

Only stupid, forcibly proletarianised subhumans remain.

Above them, there is a great organisation of Jewish commissars.

TRANSLATION:

On the day of Hitler's speech,

12,000 Jews were slaughtered near the village of Tuchinki,

to make room for the Austrian, Czech and German Jews

who were being loaded onto trains.

TRANSLATION:

In evidence at Nurnberg, SS General Otto Ohlendorf,

commander of Einsatzgruppen D, explained...

I never permitted the shooting by individuals,

but ordered that several of the men should shoot at the same time

in order to avoid direct personal responsibility.

Found guilty of war crimes, Ohlendorf was hanged in 1951.

Of course, Wehrmacht assisted SS groups, Einsatzgruppen,

in extermination of Jews.

Without the assistance of local collaborators,

it would be impossible to identify and to exterminate

such a huge number of people.

TRANSLATION:

On the day of the slaughter at Tuchinki,

the encirclement of Leningrad was completed.

There are no matches in the city.

The piped water supply came to an end long ago.

Toilets cannot be flushed.

There's no fuel and so no electricity.

Leningrad has refused to surrender -

not knowing that to endure was their only option.

Hitler's directive of September 29th 1941 stated,

"Requests to be allowed to surrender will be rejected."

There is not enough strength left in the living to bury the dead.

As Leningrad starved,

local party leaders enjoyed cakes and chocolates.

Evidence of these delights was filed as precision engineering

and concealed until after the fall of communism.

TRANSLATION:

On November 12th, the temperature on the Moscow front

dropped to minus 12 degrees Celsius.

Just 50% of the Ostheer had gloves and only 5% had winter boots.

We pulled the boots off the old men and women on the streets.

if ours were wanting.

On November 15th, the ground froze,

enabling the German advance on Moscow to resume.

Although Zhukov's defenders took 20 times as many casualties

as the Germans, they held.

The slogan under which a detachment of the 316th Rifle Division

fought to the death at the village of Dubosekovo is remembered

as the stuff of legend, and as giant-sized memorial figures.

There is nowhere to retreat. Moscow is behind us.

On the day that Rostov fell,

Von Manstein's order of the day commanded...

The Jewish Bolshevik system must be eradicated once and for all.

He told his men of the 11th Army that the German soldier...

..marches forth as a carrier of a racial conception.

It wasn't a small minority of their massed soldiers

who took part in war crimes or atrocities.

There are still lots of people who think,

"OK, the Wehrmacht weren't angels, but they weren't like the SS,"

or we're only talking about a fraction of the 18 million men

who served in the Wehrmacht during the Second World War.

I don't think that's an accurate representation of the picture.

In late November, Von Manstein branded the release of food

to prisoners of war...

Wrong-headed humanity.

Von Bock, commanding Army Group Centre,

had a different message for Berlin.

Temperatures had fallen to minus 45 degrees Celsius

and his tanks would not start.

Behind the defensive line, assembling for a counterblow,

were Soviet infantry and cavalry divisions -

of whose existence the Germans were unaware.

On December 5th, 88 Red Army divisions

went into action on an 800km front from Kalinin to Yelets.

The Russians are pursuing us closely.

We must expect misfortunes to occur.

By the 16th, Guderian's 2nd Panzer Group was being pushed back

by Golikov's 10th Army.

The German 9th Army had been forced back

and Hitler's blitzkrieg was in tatters.

After the battle near Moscow,

the blitzkrieg destroyed it all.

And this plan was not realised. And Hitler changed his strategy.

Now it is impossible for us to lose this war.

The Fuhrer was reacting to the news of Pearl Harbor,

four days after which - perhaps in an act of sheer swagger -

he declared war on the USA.

The day after the declaration of war,

there was a meeting at the Reich Chancellery.

According to Goebbels' diary, Hitler said...

The world war is here.

The destruction of Judaism must be the necessary consequence.

Hans Frank, head of the general government area of Poland,

was at the meeting.

His report to senior leaders confirms that Hitler told them...

As for the Jews, I will be quite blunt with you.

They will have to be finished off, one way or another.

In November, 23,500 Jews were shot in Rovno.

Those not slated for destruction were regarded as

no better than "beasts of burden".

Of the conquered territory, Hitler said...

It is of use to us only as a reservoir of labour.

An order abolished all school levels above grade four,

consistent with the thoughts of Heinrich Himmler,

who had been very specific about the education

Polish children should receive.

"They should be taught to count to 500

"and how to write their own names."

On December 13th, the 6th Panzer Division

reported that it had only 350 riflemen and no tanks.

On the 16th, 7th Panzer was down to 200 men,

ten vehicles and no heavy tanks.

And 3rd Panzergruppe reported...

Discipline is breaking down.

More and more soldiers are heading west on foot without weapons.

Hitler's response was to issue the order to hold out -

the Haltebefehl. But with no confidence in the ability of either

to carry out the order, he dismissed Brauchitsch and Von Bock

and formally assumed command of the army.

This is very much Hitler's army,

and we shouldn't overstate the extent to which

German generals set themselves up in opposition to Hitler.

That is the story that they present very often in their memoirs

and in their post-war descriptions of what happened.

And some of those are true. Sometimes there is disagreement.

There is far more agreement, time and again.

Operation Barbarossa planned on conquering an area

20 times greater than the land occupied in western Europe,

with only 10% more men and 30% more tanks.

This project was designed by Hitler

as a part of his great future world order.

Now, in the beginning of the 21st century,

we see that Hitler was very near to the victory.

He could win this war.

And, of course, the history of the world

would be completely, completely different.

In six months, the Germans advanced

1,120km on a 2,500km front,

and captured or killed not less than five million Soviet troops.

They had overrun 40% of the Soviet population,

taken half of the USSR's iron and steel capacity

and its richest food-producing region,

but they had not won the war.

Gunther Von Kluge replaced Von Bock in command of Army Group Centre

on December 18th.

On the 20th,

Joseph Goebbels broadcast an appeal for winter clothes.

And on the 26th, confronting Fuhrer orders

that seemed to come from an alternative reality,

Von Kluge said...

The Fuhrer will have to come down from cloud-cuckoo-land.

Before the end of 1941,

the first of the purpose-built extermination camps

was under construction at Belzec.

It began to operate in March 1942 and by mid-April

had killed 45,000 Jews from the area around Lublin and Lviv.

Like other extermination camps,

it relied on carbon monoxide from diesel engines.

Victims were crammed into shower rooms, gassed -

an eyewitness reported the screams went on for up to 15 minutes -

until the doors were opened.

Belzec operated until the end of 1942...

..its death toll not definitively known.

Either a little more or a little less than half a million

is the best estimate.

Chiefly Polish Jews, but Romani and Sinti as well.

In the Germans' plans,

the Jewish population should be...

Their own population should be killed, exterminated, 100%.

By January 9th, nearly 4,500 Roma

had been gassed and buried in surrounding forests.

Jews must disappear from the face of the Earth.

The Roma to be exterminated also.

TRANSLATION:

Overlooking a lake in Berlin, 15 men -

eight of whom had doctorates - were sipping cognac.

The orderlies kept serving cognac

and it got to the stage of alcoholic influence.

TRANSLATION:

The meeting at 56 to 58 Am Grossen Wansee,

known at the time as the Conference of State Secretaries,

was called by Reinhard Heydrich. It lasted about 90 minutes.

For its proceedings, we rely on the minutes kept,

and frequently reworked, by Adolf Eichmann.

At the beginning of the meeting, the chief of the security police

and the SD, SS Lieutenant General Heydrick,

reported his appointment by the Reichsmarschall Goring

to serve as commissioner for the preparation

of the Final Solution of the European Jewish problem.

In the course of this Final Solution,

approximately 11 million Jews are involved.

11 million being an estimate of Europe's total Jewish population.

The Reich would extend its programme to Jews wherever they were.

But what was the plan?

Under proper direction, the Jews should,

in the course of the Final Solution,

be brought to the east in a suitable way for use as labour,

in which task a great part will fall out through natural diminution.

The remnants must be regarded as the germ cell

of a new Jewish development.

The Holocaust would achieve perhaps 65% of Wannsee's target.

Upon arrival here, there were about 25,000 Jews.

The Judenaktion has greatly ameliorated the housing problem

and also rid us of 10,000 unnecessary mouths to feed.

On February 1st, Veker, one of the underground newspapers

circulating inside the Warsaw Ghetto carried...

Dreadful reports about the brutal annihilation

by the crazed Hitlerites of the remaining Jewish settlements.

We often think about the ghettos

as this group of uniformed prisoners.

We think of the ghettos as concentration camps,

as this group of people, often very large group,

as if this Warsaw Ghetto was sort of uniformed suffering

who are just waiting to die and will finally die

because they're taken to death camps.

But it was an extremely complex society,

very much reflecting what was happening before the war.

When Edward Leichner was moved into the ghetto, he saw...

Leszno Street led straight to hell.

Market stalls selling cheap, shoddy merchandise.

Street traders, peddlers with all their wares on their back,

pavements dotted with hundreds - even thousands - of beggars.

People who were forcefully resettled into Warsaw,

from some other Jewish communities outside Warsaw,

who are not allowed to take anything with them,

who arrive in Warsaw with no help, with nothing on them,

with no food, and they go and are moved into

so-called refugee ponds, which are places where refugees are housed

and which are basically places of dying.

In January 1941, the death toll in the Warsaw Ghetto had been 898.

In January 1942, it was 5,123.

When deportations started, there was little doubting

the fate that awaited those packed onto trains,

but those in useful employment were exempt.

Adam Czerniakow, head of the Warsaw Ghetto Jewish Council, wrote of...

A great rush to start new workshops. A sewing machine can save a life.

Czerniakow is a man coming from pre-war intelligentsia.

He's not necessarily part of what we would consider

to be Jewish masses, and he was seen by many people in the ghetto

as alienated from the community. He decided to stay.

That was a conscious decision of him.

By September, the ghetto was producing

millions of items of clothing for the German military.

There had been murders, there had been pogroms,

people were killed, people were displaced,

but never on the scale of the Third Reich.

Who would have thought?

Who would have thought that this was going to happen?

Maybe if we go along, we'll get over it as we have in the past.

But things were not as in the past.

Czerniakow was ordered to assemble

6,000 people every day for deportation.

On July 23rd, he left a note.

I am powerless.

My heart trembles in sorrow and compassion.

My act will prove to everyone what is the right thing to do.

Then he closed his office door and bit down on a cyanide pill.

I think it comes clear from his diary that he's constantly thinking

of, "Where do we draw the line?

"Where is the line that we should not pass?"

And in his case, it's very clear -

the line was when he was asked to sign the deportation.

He said that he will not sacrifice Jewish children -

he's not going to sign it.

The Germans announced that from July 29th,

those who reported voluntarily to the assembly place,

the Umschlagplatz, for resettlement

would receive 3kg of bread and 1kg of marmalade.

Some believed them...

Our landlord and landlady went. They took their pots and pans.

They waved goodbye and promised to write when they arrived in the east.

..most did not.

In his diary, Abraham Lewin wrote...

The turmoil and terror is appalling.

Mothers lose their children. A weak old woman is carried.

The tragedies cannot be captured in words.

When Abraham Lewin's wife was taken, he wrote...

Eclipse of the sun. Universal blackness.

My Luba was taken away.

TRANSLATION:

In a story full of violence, terror

and the hatred that people can have for strangers,

someone like Janusz Korczak tells a different story.

Doctor, author, educator,

Korczak was the director of an orphanage in the ghetto.

Such was his fame that he was many times offered

the opportunity to escape. He declined.

In the first week of August 1942,

German soldiers ringed the orphanage.

We all stood and watched the Germans surround the house.

Rows of children began to walk out.

There were tiny tots, and each carried a little bundle.

Korczak reassured his almost 200 charges -

the youngest, two or three,

the oldest, 13.

According to Wladyslaw Szpilman,

the pianist on whom Roman Polanski's film is based...

He told the orphans they'd be going out into the country

and they came out two by two, nicely dressed and in a good mood.

At the Umschlagplatz, Korczak was again given the opportunity

to step away, but he would not leave

the dozen members of his staff or his children.

They travelled together all the way to the gas chambers at Treblinka.

The children's home is empty now.

My life has been difficult, but interesting.

In my younger days, I asked God for precisely that.

That is Janusz Korczak's story.

And there were other Janusz Korczaks.

People who have a work permit, people who work in the area,

people who work in hospital, people who are able to save themselves.

But they go because their children are going,

because their wife is going, because their parents are going.

At the start of 1942, a manpower shortage

was almost the greatest threat to Germany's ability

to continue the war. The man responsible for obtaining labour

was the Gauleiter of Thuringiwa, Fritz Sauckel,

whom Goebbels called...

The dullest of the dull.

In 1942, it became clear that without forced labour,

they would not be able to win this war.

The labour of all the prisoners of war.

Not of this sort of prisoners of war. Only about 100,000.

So this prisoners of war were used as forced labour.

Bribes and inducements to work in the Reich

at first met with success.

I am calling on the young people of Kyiv

to go to work in beautiful Germany.

Doing practical work in Germany,

you will learn skills and, together with the cultured German people,

use your energies and abilities for combating Bolshevism.

In mid-January, around 1,500 young volunteers left Kyiv by train,

to the accompaniment of a brass band.

TRANSLATION:

But news of what actually awaited volunteers spread rapidly.

In June 1942, 4,030 volunteered.

By August, the number was 425.

And in September, just five.

And they were the last five.

In the Kamianets-Podilskyi region, they said,

"Down with Hitler, the liberator. Long live Stalin, the oppressor."

And one joke asked,

"What was Stalin enabled to achieve in 20 years

"that Hitler managed in just one? He made us like Soviet rule."

Even those who believed in Germans as liberators

later on became, you know, lovers of Soviet power.

Fritz Sauckel's target made coercion necessary.

A notice issued by the chief of the Protection Police Force

of Kyiv's Bogdanovskii district commanded...

You must turn up with your own tools

at the Bogdanovskii District Police Station,

38 Pushkin Street.

Failing to do so, you will be put to death under the wartime laws.

By late 1943, everyone born in 1926 and 1927

was marked for deportation to the Reich.

A Ukrainian peasant wrote...

They are now catching humans like the dog catchers used to catch dogs.

So they started to force them.

Usually, Germans organised so-called "rounds-up".

They just rounded up on the streets.

They blocked street from both sides.

And they arrested all these people

and sent them to Third Reich as slave workers.

TRANSLATION:

We have millions of eastern Europeans - some six millions -

who were deported to Germany,

which, of course, for the individuals was a catastrophe.

By the millions, forced labourers were at work

in the occupied territories and in Germany.

It was reported that at roll call,

SS guards punched pressed workers in the face.

Those who remained standing were considered fit for work,

where they were distinguished by a patch on their clothing

bearing the word "ost".

Ostarbeiter - worker from the East.

Resentment was unsurprising.

Forced recruitment was said to be the greatest spur

to partisan activity,

which from early 1942 grew in impact and organisation.

TRANSLATION:

The partisan movement is gaining the upper hand.

By March 16th, Goebbels,

in his diary, was obliged to concede that...

The partisans are conducting a well-organized guerrilla war.

I mean, imagine, you live with this every day.

And then you never know whether that woman who is smiling

is a friendly one or maybe she's an enemy.

What about those people? What about those men? And so on.

So, the psychological impact

was probably greater than immediate detrimental impact.

Operations were mounted to counter the partisan threat.

The first sweep, Operation Bamberg in March, cost seven German lives

and the lives of several thousand peasants.

At the end of April, a central staff for partisan warfare

was formed in Moscow.

In July, Himmler, into whose hands the war against the partisans

would be placed, instructed that the word "partisan"

was to be replaced by the word "bandit".

Fighting against partisans for the Germans always means,

"Well, if we find a gun or two in a village, then we consider

"the village to be a partisan village

"and we'll burn the village and we'll kill all the people."

So in Belarus, we have several hundred villages

who are completely destroyed,

and we have in Belarus more than a million non-Jewish inhabitants

who are actually killed as casualties of the partisan war.

In early 1942, almost three quarters of those who would perish

in the Holocaust were still alive.

11 months later, the same proportion was dead.

Such numbers demanded industrial methods

and the four extermination camps in the Lublin district were the answer.

Belzec was followed by Sobibor.

Treblinka was the last camp

to be operational.

Odilo Globocnik, who is the local SS and police commander

in the Lublin district, and he says,

"Well, I mean, I want to kill my Jews in my jurisdiction.

"And that's why I will set up some extermination camps."

To Himmler, who appointed him,

Odilo Globocnik, SS Gruppenfuhrer of the Lublin district, was...

A man made like no other

for the task of the colonisation of the East.

Joseph Goebbels' diary entry of March 27th 1942

makes clear that the measures being used at the camps

were well known in Berlin.

There are not many Jews left.

Rather barbaric methods, not to be described here more precisely.

About 60% of them have been liquidated

and about 40% taken for forced labour.

The Fuhrer is the moving spirit of this radical solution,

both in word and deed.

Ordinary people were not necessarily able to put the different pieces

of the jigsaw puzzle together, and certainly weren't aware

of the details and the scope of the operation.

They just had other things to worry about.

"Is my house going to be bombed tonight?

"Will I have enough to eat next week?

"Will I see my uncle or my brother or my son or my husband,

"who was been on The Eastern Front for the last two years?"

The fate of the Jews simply was irrelevant to them,

to the vast majority of ordinary people - let's be honest.

A special section for Romani -

the Zigeunerlager, or "gypsy camp" - was set up in Auschwitz.

Its inmates particularly attracted the attention

of the malevolent Dr Josef Mengele.

Vera Alexander was a Jewish inmate at Auschwitz,

who looked after 50 sets of Romani twins.

I remember one set of twins in particular,

Guido and Ina, aged about four.

One day, Mengele took them away.

When they returned, they were in a terrible state.

They had been sewn together, back-to-back, like Siamese twins.

They screamed day and night.

Then their parents - I remember the mother's name was Stella -

managed to get some morphine

and they killed the children in order to end their suffering.

The genocide of Romani people -

they know it as Porajmos, "the devouring" -

was not formally recognised until 1982.

Rudolf Hoss, before he could go home to domestic bliss, tells us...

I had to watch coldly as mothers with laughing or crying children

went to the gas chambers,

which were furnished with showers and water pipes

and gave a realistic impression of a bathhouse.

With the Zyklon used at Auschwitz costing five Reichsmark a kilo,

murder worked out at less than one cent a head.

You know, all of the other things that follow

can only really be understood

once you appreciate the identity that was being crafted,

and people were embracing and internalising,

of what it meant to be German.

In terms of trying to explain why large numbers of people -

educated, moral German citizens -

were willing to be indifferent around these events,

we need to start to look at, well, what was being crafted

in terms of the identity of what it meant to be German?

Auschwitz - Oswiecim in Polish - misrepresents the disaster.

The camp, with its famous gateway,

has become a symbol signifying six million victims.

But the Holocaust was not that.

The Holocaust was six million murders.

TRANSLATION:

In March 1942,

the Russian front had advanced by an average of almost 200km.

The German response would be their second summer offensive,

outlined on April 5th

in Hitler Directive Number 41, for Operation Blue.

Finally to destroy any remaining military power of the Soviets.

How do you achieve in 1942, with less resources,

what you didn't achieve in 1941?

And Hitler's solution is economic -

seizing raw materials in the southern part of Russia.

Look at the distances that Operation Blue is going to have to traverse.

It is 500km from the starting point in the eastern Ukraine,

all the way to Stalingrad.

On May 12th 1942,

three Soviet infantry armies attacked towards Kharkov,

into the face of the Ostheers' two strongest formations,

and came to a standstill when the Germans launched their response.

In his memoirs, Georgi Zhukov took to task

those who sought to excuse Soviet mistakes.

The embellishment of history is a sad attempt

to paint over failure.

By late May, the battle of Kharkov was over.

Soviet forces had suffered an overwhelming defeat

in which at least 18 Red Army divisions had been destroyed

and a gap in the line opened,

through which the German 6th Army could advance...towards Stalingrad.

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