3 Hours of Facts About the Collapse of Nazi Germany DD

Adolf Hitler is at the height of his power. He’s conquered Europe. For millions of Germans, he’s the greatest military and strategic genius of all time. Yet, the German people are about to discover that what they’ve been told is a tissue of lies. This is the story of how reality starts to break through the Nazis propaganda machine.

How Hitler commits the biggest military blunder of his career. And how hidden from sight, his leadership begins to fall apart. [Music] [Music] 18 months after the start of the war and Adolf Hitler appears to stride the world. He’s restored Germany to greatness. His people, once fearful of war, are now reassured it will all be over very soon.

[Applause] He’s seen as a great war leader who seems to be delivering all the victories without the significant suffering that people still remember from World War I. Behind him, the German people believe, stands a brilliant and united Nazi party leadership. But then that facade begins to crack. In the early summer of 1941, a lone German officer parachutes into a field in southern Scotland.

He’s quickly picked up by an amazed home guard and taken to London to be interrogated. [Music] At first, nobody believes his story. But then a remarkable tale emerges. The lone parachutist is none other than the deputy furer and Hitler’s oldest associate, Rudolph [Applause] Hess. Rudolfph Hess has been a leading figure in the Nazi party since the 1920s.

He’s been Hitler’s personal secretary throughout all of that period. So, here was a man who was a big part of the Nazi machine, very well known, very famous throughout Germany. The puzzle, what’s he doing alone in Britain? [Music] Hess is held in the Tower of London. As the interrogation continues, he tells British agents he’s come on a secret one-man mission to negotiate peace with Britain. The British are astonished.

there’s this sort of general sense of well what on earth is going on in the British establishment just appears increasingly as a sort of uh you know a lunatic mission but then a much more revealing story emerges. Hess’s private mission is not really about peace at all. His main concern is that amidst the jockeying for power inside the Nazi leadership, he’s losing his position as Hitler’s closest confidant and ally.

He imagined that if he could pull off this diplomatic coup, it would sort of restore his own image, his own importance in the Nazi hierarchy. It’s a crazy idea, but critically it’s the first public sign that the Nazi leadership, far from being united, is a sthing mass of rivalry and infighting. It revealed really there was something rotten at the top of the Nazi party.

[Applause] In Germany, Hitler learns of the secret mission in a letter left behind by Hess. He’s absolutely furious. He calls for his his aids and his agitants and and shouts and screams. This was perhaps the first time that a senior Nazi leader had broken ranks. It was a huge crisis and it’s probably the biggest embarrassment that Hitler and the party ever experienced.

Hessa betrayed party betrayed Hitler. the problem for Hitler. How to maintain the illusion of a united leadership when it clearly [Applause] isn’t. The task of spinning the story to the German public falls to Joseph Gerbles, Hitler’s propaganda minister. Gerbles is one of Hitler’s most trusted and able cronies.

If there’s a problem, Gerbles will be very good at fixing it. If there’s a problem, Gerbles will be very good at representing it. If there’s a problem, Gerbles will be the man to go to. Since the outbreak of war from his propaganda ministry in Berlin, Gerbles has exercised total control over the German media.

But this is a spin doctor’s nightmare. How to restore the image of a united Nazi leadership. Gerbal’s answer to present Hess as a one-off rotten apple. Gerbles dealt with the defection of Rudolph Hess by simply portraying him as a man who had lost his reason, who had gone mad. under the pressure of work and his commitments had um broken under the strain effectively.

It’s an answer many Germans find hard to accept and it certainly didn’t play very well uh with the German public who naturally would have asked well if the deputy furer is insane why is he still in his post. The Hess crisis passes, but for the first time, the image of Hitler’s leadership is exposed as seriously out of line with the reality.

That gap is about to get much bigger. [Music] In the summer of 1941, Hitler does what he’s always promised. He invades Russia. It’s something he’s vowed to do since the early days of the Munich beer halls. For the German furer, it’s the final showdown with his biggest enemy, communism. It was us or them. Either Nazism conquered Soviet bulcheism or sooner or later Stalin and the Soviet Union would conquer and exterminate the Germans.

[Music] As German troops storm across Russia, Hitler is also fulfilling something else he wrote about in mine camp 16 years earlier. He’s winning Laben’s realm, conquering territories occupied by what the Nazis regard as inferior races so that the German people should have extra living space. [Music] Space had to be found not in the west that was closed, but in the east, the Slav East, that area made up of human beings who were barely human and therefore deserve no special [Music] compassion. The German troops advance

further and faster through the Soviet Union than anybody imagines possible. Within weeks, they penetrate hundreds of miles into Soviet territory. The Red Army crumbles. They take over 1.5 million Soviet prisons of war. It looks like Hitler is going to win the war. Operation Barbarasa, as it’s known, seems to be an extraordinary success.

[Music] In Germany, there’s relief and jubilation. Hitler’s position as a great leader, briefly undermined by the Hessaf affair, is restored. To the German people, it looks as though the furer is delivering the short war he’s always promised. Communism will be defeated in weeks. And in the autumn of 1941, Hitler gives a speech.

He says, “Russia is destroyed and it will never rise again. He thinks he’s won the war. [Music] But then progress slows. The Russians start to fight back. [Music] The Soviet Union calls on its vast reserves of people, many millions more than the Germans. In private, Germany’s generals start to worry about the scale of the task in front of them.

There were stories of generals saying, “Christ, isn’t this country big?” in Germany. Russia was so vast that to cover it was a logistical problem that was very hard to overcome. Far from home, what most people can’t see is that the German war machine is stumbling. Hitler, the self-styled military genius, is about to encounter harsh reality.

[Music] At the German high command, Hitler’s generals plan their next move in the war against the Soviet Union. Many are now seriously alarmed by the task in front of [Music] them. But Hitler won’t listen. Instead, he calls them daily, demanding they keep pushing forward. [Music] Hitler never let his generals relax.

He called them and he would go through some of their timetabling and say go faster which is fine thing to say but you can’t make tanks and lries and personnel move at a speed other than what is allowed by the logistics of it. Hitler’s generals do what they can but then something happens over which they have no control.

[Music] The Russian winter sets in. Temperatures drop to -32 Fahrenheit. Outside Moscow, the ground freezes solid to a depth of 5 ft. You couldn’t urinate in the open air. Uh, fuel would freeze in machinery. Literally, the German war machine was just frozen. And it wasn’t just frozen, it was starving.

Probably the best you’re going to be able to get your hands on is raw horse flesh because you wouldn’t want to start cooking it because the smoke would leave your cellar and tell the Russians where you were. In the face of these appalling conditions, the German army outside Moscow is finally forced to beat a tactical [Music] retreat for Hitler.

It’s a serious setback. He’s promised the German people the Soviet Union will be conquered in 6 weeks. and died in. It’s now taken over 5 months. How can he keep his promise of a quick war when the reality is so different? [Music] Once again, Joseph Gerbal’s propaganda machine rolls into action. His solution simply to lie.

He launches a barrage of [Music] propaganda. News reels show German soldiers enjoying the snow and routing a Russian rabble. Gerbles made sure that stirring and exciting uh news reels were a regular component of the German cinema goers diet. He had propaganda companies in action literally with the frontline [Music] troops.

And he constantly urged his propaganda crews to get as far forward as [Music] possible to get the most exciting footage. Hitler, far from misjudging the war with the Soviet Union, is presented as a great military and strategic [Applause] [Music] genius. But is the propaganda barrage [Applause] working? Gerbles has a well-developed system for finding out.

He sends out spies to eavesdrop and record conversations. The news is all positive. There was a cinema in every German town, even in very small towns. And we know from internal opinion reports within Germany, that the population responded with enormous enthusiasm to these propaganda news reels. They could hardly believe the exciting dramatic scenes of German military success.

Gerbles was a lover of movies um and took part very much in casting a lot of films and Hitler was a big movie buff as well. So they very much felt that cinema was a great way of connecting with the German people. Gerbles has excelled himself. It’s a brilliant propaganda campaign. But then there’s a new and totally unexpected development.

Without warning, Japanese planes bomb the USPacific fleet at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. The following day, the US declares war on Japan. Since the unprovoked and dastardly attack, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese [Music] Empire for Hitler. It’s a critical moment. Japan is an ally.

Should he let the Japanese and Americans fight it out? Or should he side with his Japanese friends? It’s a momentous decision. Yet Hitler ponders it [Music] alone. The case against taking on America is [Music] obvious. America was an economic power, a kind of sleeping giant. and he knew that it had massive economic resources that if turned into military resources could ultimately affect his ability to win the Second World [Music] War.

Yet for Hitler, that’s only part of the picture. as he turns the situation over. In his mind, the case for supporting Japan is also strong. The two countries have an understanding to back one another. There’s a good chance Japanese forces will tie down America in the Pacific and prevent her supporting Britain on the Western Front. But above all, Hitler believes the Americans lack what the Germans have, the stomach for a fight.

Hitler viewed America with complete contempt, as a mongrel racial melting plot, which was full of Hispanics and Jews, uh, and was racially worthless. He thought the Americans were a feat, that they’d accept terms that would leave Germany in control of Europe and leave Japan in control of the Pacific. Finally, after only the briefest consultation, Hitler makes his decision.

[Applause] 4 days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, he addresses the German Parliament. Germany will declare war on America. What’s remarkable about that decision to go to war with America in 1941 is uh how easily it was made. Hitler didn’t seem to have pondered on it for too long. There’s a gasp from the assembled ranks, but they’re all Nazis.

And he explains that we could not wait for a development to overrun us. We have to take the initiative. America was seen as somewhere very far away, somewhere that couldn’t really hurt Germany uh too seriously. [Music] It’s a huge decision, yet Hitler has taken it almost unilaterally. It will go down in history as his biggest blunder.

German forces already bogged down in Russia now face the most powerful country in the world. Germany is about to be hit by a series of ferocious hammer blows that will shatter Hitler’s image as a great war leader and transform the [Music] [Music] war. In Germany, the impact of Hitler’s decision to go to war with America is felt almost immediately.

There’s a dawning realization that this is no longer going to be a short war. In private, there are bitter jokes. A candidate for the Vafan SS is asked, “Are you willing to sign on for the whole war?” “No,” he says. “Only the first 12 years.” In bars and restaurants, Gerbal spies listen to the gossip and detect a drop in public morale. It’s time for a new initiative.

[Music] In early December, in a speech to Nazi party regional officials, Hitler makes a new promise. He sees himself as the great military leader. This is the remarkable thing about the furer that it’s not just a domestic lead. He is the great Napoleon. He’s Frederick the Great. He’s Caesar.

Hitler argues that victory is at hand. It will still be a short war and it will be followed by a glorious future in which Germany will grow rich on the land and labor of the occupied territories of the East. He wants to be seen as the man who knows what best serves German interests militarily. And at first it looks as though Hitler’s prediction is coming [Music] true.

Spring on the Eastern front brings warmer weather. The German Sixth Army goes back on the offensive. [Music] The industrial city of Stalingrad is besieged. The Soviet defenders are coralled in a tiny strip of land along the river Vular. Tens of thousands face a brutal death. Stalingrad is the most brutal type of fighting. No one would be the same after Stalingrad.

Urban warfare is uniquely messy and Stalingrad was a uniquely messy form of that type of [Music] warfare. The Germans appear to have victory in their sights, but then the battle changes. [Music] In a brilliant series of flanking moves, the Russians smash through the German lines from the north and south. They meet to the west of the city, completely encircling the Germans.

[Music] Suddenly the tables are reversed. Around a quarter of a million German troops are cut off from their supply lines. The German forces soon run low on everything from ammunition to food. You had lice all over your clothes. uh you had to eat and drink the little food you could next to your comrades defecating right next to you because if you try to go out to go to the toilet, you’ll be shot at by a Russian sniper up on a roof.

The situation is untenable. The only thing that will save the Germans is a tactical retreat. [Music] Hitler by now has moved his headquarters to a huge complex of bunkers in eastern Poland. The Wolf’s Layer, as it’s known, is Hitler’s new base over 400 miles from the military command in Berlin.

Here, far from the sight of the German people, Hitler holds a crisis meeting. Most of his senior military leaders call for a strategic withdrawal. The alternative, an entire army will be wiped out. But Hitler takes another unilateral decision. The Germans will stand and fight to the last man. The furow wouldn’t sanction retreat. Good Nazis. The ve doesn’t retreat.

It wins by going forward. Very good idea. He believes in staying at your post and dying if you have to. But but you do not retreat. Absurd strategically, absurd militarily. To Hitler’s generals, this can only spell disaster. But one man sees an opportunity. Herman Guring has a reputation as a powerful and effective leader.

Herman Guring had been an able and brave first world war soldier, pilot, a genuinely won decorations. He understood war. He’d fought it. He’d been in it. Guring has been in the Nazi party since 1922. He had turned the brown shirts from a rabble into a formidable fighting force and he’d been injured in Hitler’s 1923 beer hall push.

As head of the Luftwaffer and Hitler’s anointed successor, he occupies imposing offices in the center of Berlin, not far from Hitler’s headquarters. [Music] Hitler had great faith, justifiable faith in going. His policies, his strategy seemed to be working. Build up the Luvafa into a mighty force which would provide the means of Blitzkrieg and would provide the means of attacking enemies.

His air force had proved decisive in the conquest of much of Europe. He proved a very able commander indeed. One of one of the greatest one would say of the Second World War. He’s a man Hitler has leared to [Music] respect. Well, yes. Guring now backs Hitler’s refusal to sanction a retreat from Stalingrad. He suggests instead the army can be reinforced by air drops using his luftwaffer.

Hitler enthusiastically embraces the idea. [Music] Yet Guring is not the man he once was, nor is his judgment. [Music] The man the German people believe is a mighty commander is in fact a drug addict. He’s now heavily dependent on morphine. It’s changed his behavior and clouded his mind. Herman Guring in his early career had been an intelligent and very capable man had drifted into indolence and uh apathy.

He’s also developed an all-consuming new [Music] interest. Looted artifacts from across Europe have been pouring into Germany. In every country the Nazis occupied, their armed forces were rapidly followed by teams tasked with a mission to bring back to Germany cultural artifacts. These ranged from literary manuscripts through to paintings and sculptures.

At the heart of this operation is Guring. [Music] Guring thought of himself as a connoisseur and a great expert in matters of art and culture, but he has an eye to the business. He wants money. He would draw up an order for the kind of paintings that he’d like to uh have brought to him at his country estate. The me me part of Guring is fascinating.

By 1942, he’s amassed a huge collection of stolen artworks. He has something like 1,200 um precious objects and paintings in his personal [Music] possession. Guring is not alone in his passion for self-enrichment. [Music] There’s hardly an official in Germany who doesn’t dabble in this great uh project. It’s on a massive scale, which is why it couldn’t be controlled because everybody had a skeleton in the cupboard.

Guring’s preoccupation with drugs and art mean he’s no longer an effective commander or a good judge of the military situation. His relief of Stalingrad is a disaster. He doesn’t have enough planes or fuel. The promised airdrop turns into a farce. The estimate that was given was that it would require something like 800 tons daily uh to keep those those soldiers supplied.

The reality was that they managed under 100 tons per day. A soldier writes home, “We live on one piece of bread between eight and a taste of warm water. [Music] The German position in Stalingrad becomes untenable. Finally, at the end of the month, the German commander defies Hitler and surrenders. Nearly 100,000 German soldiers are taken prisoner, including 24 generals.

[Music] When news reaches Hitler at the Wolf’s Layer, he’s appalled. It’s a catastrophe so large it will be impossible to hide from the German [Music] people. Once again, the man who has to break the news is Joseph Gerbles. He realizes this is going to require a new message. Out goes the idea of a quick victory.

In comes the idea of a uniquely German grit and heroism. The theme here, as in many other utterances from this time, is that true German heroism only comes to the four in the face of defeat and immense suffering. Gerbles spells out his new theme in a speech many regard as the high point of his career. [Music] Underneath a big banner saying total war, shortest war, Gerbles talks to an audience of 14,000 cheering and admiring fans.

[Music] It’s a an appeal to the morale of the people uh to in a sense shift gear from support for the war which was based initially on enthusiasm for the quick victory and the speed of the conquest and now shifts towards this idea of endurance and embracing suffering. And towards the end of the speech, he perates on these 10 rhetorical questions that demand ever increasingly loud yeses from the audience.

Do you want a total war? And they all shout, “Yes.” He then says, “Do you want a uh a total war that’s even more radical and brutal than you can possibly think of?” And they go, “Yes, of course we do. [Music] But Gerbles also has a second message. [Music] The talk of German heroism is underpinned by fear. Gerbles increasingly put before the German people a nightmare vision where they would be driven out of their historic their ancestral lands in the east.

Their women would be raped. their young people enslaved and deported to Siberia. They had no choice but to fight on. [Music] It’s a message most Germans are willing to go along with. But now for the first time there’s also open opposition. [Applause] In Munich, a group of students calling themselves the White Rose Group circulate anti-Nazi leaflets and dorb anti-Hitler graffiti.

They would go around universities throughout Germany putting up uh little posters saying things like Hitler mass murderer or simply the word freedom. It seemed a great example of how totalitarian the regime have become that even to post the word freedom up on a wall was considered against the state. The opposition is quickly snuffed out, but the German people are about to face another hammer blow.

For 18 months, American arms and troops have been pouring across the Atlantic. The most powerful industrial country in the world has gone on a war [Music] footing. What America can do is to turn its factories into places that can produce airplanes and tanks very very swiftly. Aircraft production source Car factories roll out thousands of tanks.

Typewriter factories convert to machine gun production. And the result is predictable. It’s absolutely catastrophic for the Germans. [Music] [Music] In the early summer of that year, American troops join British forces in routing the Germans in North Africa. A month later, the Western Allies cross the Mediterranean and invade Italy.

And that is a shock to many German military who say that this is where the war against the USA is now turning against German interests. The Americans, once dismissed by Hitler as a feat, are attacking his soft underbelly. Within weeks, the Italian fascist leader Bonito Mussolini is overthrown in a popular uprising.

Germany loses its most important European ally. Italy’s new leaders talk of surrender. Now at last the full folly of Hitler’s declaration of war on America is apparent. Hitler gets the news at the wolf’s lair. He’s horrified. Mussolini is one of his oldest and most faithful allies. Hitler was deeply disturbed by the failure of Mussolini.

He had a deep affection for Mussolini as a leader and some say some affection for him as a person in so far as he had [Music] feelings. The Furer orders German troops into Italy to hold back the advancing Allied forces. But this means spreading the German army very thinly. They’re being pushed back in Russia. They face the threat of a renewed Allied attack in the West.

And they’re trying to hold Italy and the Mediterranean coast. But then something happens that’s impossible to spin as anything but [Music] dreadful. Over the skies of Germany, Allied aircraft bomb the country’s cities day and night. The bombing of Germany became far more serious in early 1943. And from then on to the end of the war, it became an everpresent a nightly horror for German cities.

In August that year, Hamburg, one of Germany’s most important industrial cities, is devastated in a firestorm. At least 40,000 people die. Hitler responds with a highly significant shift in domestic policy. [Music] That summer, Hitler appoints Hinrich Himmler, the much feared head of the SS, Minister of the [Music] Interior.

Himmler is a fanatical Nazi, a man who likes to foster the image of a dashing fighter. He lives for the furer. He lives for the greatness of the German cause and everything subordinated to that. Frightening man, one of the most disturbing of all the Nazis. Himmler’s appointment is a clear sign Hitler can no longer rely on the goodwill of his people.

From now on, his position will depend on repression. But even now, most Germans have no idea just how awful their situation really is. Hidden from sight, the man they’ve put their faith in is in deep personal [Music] trouble. The Furer has withdrawn almost entirely to his bunker at the Wolf’s layer in East Poland. [Music] He’s simply unable to accept the reality of the situation.

The German people start to realize that they haven’t seen Hitler for a while. There are certain key events where Hitler would normally turn up to such as Heroes Day, a kind of memorial for those who had fallen. And that year, Hitler didn’t come. And that was very much noticed. [Music] He sits there every evening having his dinner surrounded by his secretaries increasingly because he doesn’t want to talk to his generals cuz they’ll only tell him bad news.

He’s not yet 55 years of age, but he seems to be a man who’s moving more slowly. He’s not the old Hitler that he was. He’s losing his energy. He goes for long walks with his dog. He became very stooped and he starts to tremble. Possibly what we think now Parkinson’s. Hitler is now almost entirely dependent on the company of just two people.

One is his girlfriend, Ava Brown. He phones Ava Brown every day, which thing he’d never done before, to get some solace from her conversation. [Music] The other is his personal doctor. Theodore Morell is administering large quantities of anti-depressants and homegrown narcotics. Not only are the drugs themselves pretty potent and noxious, there’s also an extraordinary amount of drugs.

For example, we have here one testoviron. He was on tempidorm, a barbiterate suppository. He was on sympathol. He was on quadronox, which is a seditive. He was on orchidrin, optoidon, which is a painkiller and analesic. He was on uh something called obstinol which was to help with acute and chronic constipation. Yet the German public remain utterly oblivious of the fact that Hitler is a shadow of his former self.

His position has always depended on success hiding the shocking reality of his regime. But now he’s losing the war. The German people will inevitably start waking up to the truth and some at last will fight back. Of all their evil actions, nothing defines the Nazis like the final solution. The murder of some 6 million Jews. [Music] But how did they get an entire nation to buy into the wholesale slaughter of an innocent race? They’re performing murder and terrible crimes, but at the same time trying to make it look as though it’s correct.

This is the story of how Hitler and the Nazis groomed the German people. He likened the Jews to a virus or a a wound that that won’t heal. Using all their darkest arts to make them complicit. We do have partners in crime here in the worst genocide in human [Music] [Music] history. [Music] Of one thing Hitler never makes any secret. He hates the Jews.

Recovering from his wounds at the end of the First World War, he blames left-wing Jewish politicians for surrendering, stabbing Germany in the back. In the 1920s depression, he rails against a Jewish conspiracy, the root of all evil from communism to corrupt financiers. this poisoning of the nation.

The German Jew is the enemy within. Is an enemy in in racial terms, in cultural terms, in national terms. The Jews greatest crime is that they pollute the pure genes of the Aryan master race. They must be eliminated. The nation is no longer willing to be sucked dry by these parasites. Everything he’d said since 1922 pointed towards the ultimate idea that you rid yourself of the Jews physically.

By 1941, he is master of everything. He has defeated France, captured Poland, and his army is advancing deep into the Soviet Union. Now he can begin on a lifetime’s ambition to create a pure German nation free of Jews. But how can he carry the German people with him? He has always been aware his anti-Jewish policy is an acutely sensitive issue for ordinary citizens.

In fact, during his first four years in power, Hitler barely mentions the Jews in public. And when he does move against them, it is slowly, step by step. They’re banned from certain professions. Then they lose their rights as citizens and their livelihoods. Thousands are driven to flee abroad.

During all of this, there are some objections. However, most Germans just stand and watch. But the actual killing, the elimination of all those who remain, their own neighbors, is still a step too far. He recognized in the German people there was this residual sense of decency which could be offended by horrific policies. But killing Jews is indecent.

It will take all the Nazis skill to sell this to the German people. It’s a task for Joseph Gerbles, the Nazis master of [Music] persuasion. Gerbles shares the furer’s loathing of the Jews and is determined to convince his fellow Germans. It was Gerbles who was responsible for selling the idea that the Jews were this kind of cancer or this plague at the heart of German society.

He realized that if you could control what people consumed, then you could control them. And he was one of the first people to realize that cinema is one of his favorite tools for manipulating public opinion. The film The Eternal Jew produced by Gerbal’s propaganda unit has a stark message. Wherever Jews settle, they behave like rats and parasites.

The film portrays the Jew as the eternal corruptor. Specifically, of course, in the sense of of Germanhood. The greatness of the German state will be destroyed if the enemy within, the eternal Jew, is allowed to go on performing his acts of destruction. But when the film is released, it’s a box office flop. It’s a lesson for the Nazis.

Persuading the German people to buy into this evil agenda is going to be a complex process. The danger lies in inflaming public opinion. And the risk of getting things wrong is already brutally clear. Since 1939, the Nazis have been carrying out a secret euthanasia campaign. It will become their dry run for how to commit mass murder without upsetting the German public.

First, they need willing accompllices. Pliable nurses and doctors are instructed to single out terminally ill and disabled children. The next step is to deceive the people who might object. Parents are told their loved ones are to be sent to care centers for special treatment. And finally, they need a method of killing, quiet and discreet.

They choose murder by lethal injection. Some 5,000 innocent children are killed. Their only crime to be sick or disabled. The truth is hidden by false death certificates blaming measles or pneumonia. It’s Hitler sort of kind of dipping his toe in the water with the German public to see what he can get away with.

Then the regime escalates the program, targeting tens of thousands of disabled adults in institutions across Germany. Ramping up the numbers involves more doctors and some voice doubts about the legality of the policy. It’s a problem that goes to the furer himself. And so Hitler wrote a note which he rarely did and signed saying to the people the chancel concerned with the medical profession that this was now a policy that could be followed legitimately for the German doctors.

It’s now official. They are obeying the furer’s orders. That’s what the new culture is, they say to themselves. That’s the environment. U that’s the classic road to hell. A secret department known as T4 is set up to mastermind the process. To kill so many quickly and quietly, they need new techniques. [Applause] What the men at T4 come up with is a shower room.

Except these pipes and showerheads don’t carry water. They deliver poisonous carbon monoxide gas. In many ways, the euthanasia program uh represents the absolute bestiality of the Nazi regime. Tens of thousands of Germany’s sick and disabled are murdered in this way. And it’s an extraordinary program because all those involved knew what was going on.

It’s not as if they were blinded. They accept that euthanasia is a legitimate policy. The killing of Germans by Germans is legitimate. [Music] But then the truth about the killing starts to leak out. Gradually, of course, the public living close to those institutions began to get an awareness that something unusual was going on. People start to worry other sick relatives might be the next victims.

The discussion starts here and there about will this be applied to our wounded soldiers? The Catholic Church picks up on the public fears and stands up to the regime. Famously, Bishop Fungalin gave a sermon in which he denounced this program. Um, not on the grounds that it is necessarily unethical to kill people, but on the grounds that these were Germans that were being killed.

He emphasized that these were our brethren, members of our families. The outcry becomes so strong Hitler is forced to make a rare public climb down officially halting his euthanasia campaign within [Music] Germany. The protest against euthanasia has taught the Nazis several lessons. First, if their racial policies threaten German families, public opinion won’t wear [Music] it.

Second, any further killing will have to be well hidden, far from Germany itself. And third, the furer must not be associated with anything disreputable. These lessons will define how the Nazis deal with the Jews. In particular, Hitler will never personally sign a compromising document. He didn’t want his own name associated with the worst extremities of the anti-Jewish program.

Two years into the war, Hitler is riding high on the success of his campaign against the Soviet Union. He is content to leave the handling of the Jewish question to his loyal henchmen. Officially, Reich Marshall Herman Guring, Hitler’s number two, is in charge of Jewish affairs. But in fact, it will be Hitler’s fanatical SS selected for their devotion to the Nazi cause who will deliver the final solution.

Their leader is Hinrich Himmler, a Nazi party member since the 1920s. He shares Hitler’s resolve to rid Germany of the [Music] Jews. and his right-hand man, SS General Reinhardt Hydrich, is even more terrifying. He found in his subordinate Reinhardt Heddrich absolutely the perfect man to carry out the destruction of a people. As head of the Nazi security forces, Reinhardt Hydrich is one of the most feared men in Germany.

If you gave Hitler a piece of paper and asked them to sketch out the perfect Nazi, I think he probably would have sketched out Reinard Hydrickch. He was tall. He was blonde. He was athletic. He is a man of many talents. A champion fencer, a fighter pilot, a skilled violinist. But above all, he is a fanatical Nazi. He had all the characteristics that made him the Aryan Superman.

Hydrickch really is the rising man of the Nazi racial killing machine. Since 1939, Hydrickch has been wreaking havoc in the conquered territories in the east. His secret death squads, the Inats Groupen, slaughter thousands of Polish Jews. Those who survive are rounded up into ghettos. Nearly 3 million await their fate in appalling conditions.

Then Hydrick’s SS thugs follow Germany’s armies into the Soviet Union, continuing their murderous campaign against the Jews. News of Hydrick’s massacres in the east begins to trickle back home to Germany. Dear Hana, last night 150 Jews were shot in this town. Men, women, and children all bumped off. Don’t worry about it.

It has to be done. But don’t tell anyone else. Many thousands of Germans now know what is happening out east, but they do nothing. It confirms what the Nazis learned from the euthanasia program. They can get away with killing Jews out of sight far from home. So this was something that was percolating outwards inside Nazi Germany.

It was sort of um you know the secret that would never dare to speak its name. As Hydrickch plots a far bigger attack on the Jews, he needs authority from above. He can’t get it from Hitler, who wants to keep his involvement secret. So, Hydrich turns to someone else, and prepares one of the most important documents in the story of the final solution.

He takes his secret letter to the home of Reich Marshall Hammond [Music] Guring, the man Hitler has officially put in charge of Nazi Jewish policy. What Hydrickch wants is Guring’s signature authorizing him to produce a plan for the Nazis intended final solution to the Jewish question.

This is the stamp of approval he needs. But it will be another 5 months before Hydrickch has his plan in place. Meanwhile, Hitler’s armies are pushing deeper and deeper into the Soviet Union. Far from the eyes of the German people, Hydrick’s killer squads are ramping up their slaughter of the Jews. They’re looking for the most efficient method for mass murder.

Still, just using [Music] bullets. Soon, Hydrick’s SS develop a sinister routine. The Jews are rounded up and taken to a remote execution site. The first arrivals are forced to dig a pit. What happens next is revealed in this amateur film shot in Latvia by a German soldier. A group of Jews is lined up in front of the mass grave and shot.

[Music] Then another group is brought in. Layer upon [Music] layer. The Nazis call it sardine packing. Here we see a massive escalation of the policy of extermination of the Jews going on. In effect, we have now a holocaust of Soviet Jews already taking place. The worst slaughter takes place in the Ukraine at the ravine known as Babi Ya. 33,000 are killed in just 2 days.

As Hydrickch ramps up the slaughter, he finds he doesn’t have enough of his racist SS thugs. He needs new recruits. There is some evidence that there was a bit more resistance to to taking part in the killings than than perhaps there would have been in the Inaccat script. But this was by and large overcome and it was done by by the use of for example alcohol uh given out freely uh to these people that would anistthetize them against the against the effects if you like of seeing large numbers of people killed in front of them.

But Hydrickch knows this mass killing is still taking its toll on his men. Most of these men rapidly became horribly troubled and disturbed. And it’s very largely this experience which pushes Himmler and Hydrickch to look for other ways of killing huge numbers of people. Back home, Hitler is still looking for a way to deal with the 200,000 Jews living in Germany.

Everybody knew Jews. They were part of German society. They were Germans. They had fought in the First World War. They had won iron crosses. So, Gerbal’s propaganda machine has to be mobilized to create a sense of difference, to set them apart from their pureb blood German neighbors. Stage one, give them a star.

A Jewish German and a non-Jewish German may not look that different, but what you can do is label them with a star. And it’s the yellow star is absolutely key to differentiating them, and it starts kind of staining them. Anyone above the age of six is obliged to wear the yellow Star of David. This is the real moment at which they really say to the people on the streets, “These people are different from everybody else. They’re not German.

They are Jewish. And the Jews are an unwanted race in our Third Reich.” Stage two is to make sure Germans do not socialize with Jews to keep them physically apart. Don’t be fooled into thinking, “Ah, he’s nice because I know him. He’s a Jew. They’re Jews.” and therefore they’re a threat. Gerbles keeps up a stream of propaganda carrying the insidious message that it’s not the Nazis who are turning on the Jews.

The Jews have brought this misery on themselves. For one of his slogans of the week, he uses a quote from Hitler. If the international Jewish financiers should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the victory of jewelry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.

It is a masterful piece of propaganda. It absolves the German people of any guilt. The Jews will be responsible for their own destruction. The single most disturbing thing that Gerbles achieved that was scapegoating. He was polluting the mind of a nation. Slowly but surely, the Nazis are grooming German citizens to accept the removal of the 200,000 Jews still living as their neighbors.

However, even now they are wary of inflaming domestic public opinion. The hardline is softened for public consumption so that people who are already been trained to be anti-Jewish are not pushed too far. The man in charge, SS General Reinhardt Hydrich, begins a campaign of deception. The official line is that the Jews are to be resettled in the east.

Now, Heddrich, of course, realizes what you can’t just say uh publicly is, “Right, we’re going to kill 6 million people tomorrow morning.” Um, you know, you you got to do a bit more subtly than that. Um, and you know, when you’re talking about evacuating people to the east, um, you’ve got to make it look as though they really are just being evacuated to the east.

So Hydrickch sets up a model camp at Terzianstat in the occupied Czech territory. News reels are released showing it as a safe place where German Jews can resettle and it was provided with facilities that many ordinary Germans didn’t have. Um swimming pools, complex of cinemas, massage areas. The idea being that although we’ve removed the Jew from our midst, we’re not making him suffer because we’re giving him a way of life, which is perfectly consistent with civilized [Music] standards.

It’s a cruel deceit. For most Jews, Tzian stat is really just a stop before they are sent on their way to the horrific ghettos in occupied Poland and around the Baltic. And that’s one of the kind of terrifying elements of the Nazi regime is they’re doing performing murder and terrible crimes, but at the same time trying to make it look as though it’s correct.

But Hydrick’s deportation of the German Jews creates a new problem. Out in the east, the ghettos are already crammed full because of the overcrowding. Local Nazi leaders in the occupied territories start to kill Jews to make space for the newcomers. This almost leads to a public relations disaster. In late 1941, a thousand German Jews are dispatched east to the model camp at Terzianstat.

And these aren’t just any Jews. Many of them are elderly war heroes, holders of the Iron Cross. Then there’s an error. They’re sent to a ghetto in Latvia where Jews are being massacred. But because of a mixup in the administration of it, they end up in Ria and most of them are shocked. It’s a catastrophic error.

If the news leaks out, the German people would be appalled. It’s a warning to Hydrich and SS Chief Hinrich Himmler. Killing German Jews needs their close control. By now, their plans for the SS to deliver the final solution are ready. [Applause] An elegant lakeside villa in the Berlin suburb of Vance is the venue for a top secret meeting. Highranking civil servants, the men who run the German state, Nazi party officials, and members of the Reich Security Forces assemble for one of the most notorious gatherings in history. In this quiet, palatial

atmosphere, all of the stakeholders who will decide the fate of European Jews are assembled. Awaiting them will be Adolf Ikeman, chief organizer of Jewish deportation. He is to become a key player in the Nazis final solution. Ikeman was a virolent anti-semite. He was a very uh passionate man in many ways. He was a drunkard.

He had affairs. He was a very committed Nazi. And he really felt that what he was doing was absolutely right. And he wasn’t just doing it because he was a a boring civil servant. He was doing it because he wanted to kill [Music] Jews. His role today is to keep the minutes of the meeting.

The mood is relaxed despite the sinister agenda. Ikeman’s superior Hydrickch is in the chair. [Music] First, Hydrickch makes it clear his authority comes from the very top via Guring, Hitler’s number two, and what he is putting forward is an SS run operation. What Hydrickch had to do was to establish that what he was doing or proposing at Vance was in fact the Furer’s policy.

The meeting is so sensitive, the only reference to the Nazis real plan is in the careful language of Ikeman’s minutes. The Jews already under German control will be put to work in the east. The majority will die. Those that survive will have to be dealt with appropriately. Dealt appropriately is code for what we know as the final solution.

The plan is to kill all of the 11 million Jews in Europe. It is [Music] genocide. This is a task too big for Hydrick’s death squads. It will require murder on an industrial scale. What Hydrickch brought to the table was an incredibly analytical mind, a very very cold, callous, evil way of thinking that could just regard genocide as a kind of uh challenge for a civil servant.

Hydrich needs the men around him to mobilize Germany’s resources and infrastructure. They will have to be involved in this crime. Van say is the coming together in administration terms of all the leading authorities concerned with transport with um gathering of the Jews with treatment of them when they the food supplies etc.

That’s got that’s a that’s a logistical problem that’s got to be resolved by logistical [Music] means to Hydrickch’s relief. There is no descent. In just over an hour, Hydrickch has the agreement he wants. The German state will be mobilized and the SS are in charge of the final solution. Now it’s just a question of practicalities.

In the remote area of eastern Poland, there are huge swavthes of deep, dark forest. If you want to get rid of a people, that’s the place to do it. This is a place where people can just disappear. The SS already has a base here in the city of Lublin. They have rounded up thousands of Jews into labor camps and ghettos. They must now be discreetly killed.

Hydrickch has already been experimenting on the best way to do it. He’s brought in his top expert in mass murder. One of the most unpleasant of a very unpleasant bunch called Nazis was fellow called Christian Vert. Uh he’s involved in the Euthanasia program. He designs the death rooms. Uh and he uses his knowledge and experience to apply it to extermination of Jews.

And he was the one that said you can’t destroy Jews and peace meal as we did in the euthanasia program. We need thousand a day, 2,000 a day. See this as a major logistical problem. On his way to Lublin, Vert does some research. At the town of Helno, they are already experimenting on how to kill Polish Jews. First, they are led into a sealed chamber, unaware they are entering the back of a large truck.

Exhaust fumes are pumped in, and the victims soon die of carbon monoxide poisoning. But killing one truckload of 50 Jews at a time is not going to deliver the final solution. Vert’s orders are for mass murder hidden away in Poland’s dense forests. He needs a more efficient continuous process to kill the numbers required.

So at his first location near the remote village of Belzett, Vert installs a static combustion engine to pump exhaust fumes into large sealed gas chambers. Belzett becomes a blueprint for other secret death camps. So, and Trebinka with Helno. They form a lethal network of extermination. All carefully chosen because they are close to the railway lines.

The Nazis now carry out the first stage of their plan. They liquidate the ghettos. [Applause] Some 1 and a half million Jews are shipped to these camps, crammed into cattle trucks and goods wagons, brought in like cargo to be eliminated swiftly and out of sight. Unlike the vast concentration camps in Germany, which were prisons, these death factories take up just a small clearing.

These forests are places where evil happens. And the Nazis chose a spot that almost feels evil before what they did there took place. It is quite the most terrifying spot. And you, it’s not just terrifying because what we now know that happened there. It’s terrifying because it’s remote. It’s dark. It’s lonely. And it’s sort of a place that just gives you a sense of absolute [Music] hopelessness.

Hidden from German eyes, the rounding up of Polish Jews is a brutal [Music] affair. A very different challenge is how to round up German Jews and send them to the death camps. The man in charge of this problem is Hydrickch’s killer bureaucrat, Adolf Ikeman. He is the mastermind of the deportation program. The Holocaust, the destruction of the Jews, was a bureaucratic process.

And to run a bureaucratic process, you need bureaucrats. Adolf Ikeman is the archetypal bureaucrat. Functioning in administrative sense is the key to success of any policy. It’s got to be programmed. The issue facing Ikeman is how to get rid of these Jews without upsetting their neighbors, without ordinary Germans finding out what is really going on.

The answer is the familiar Nazi tactic. Deception. People are told that the Jews are being resettled, sent to a safe destination. At the railway stations, they won’t see any sinister cattle trucks. The Jews leave on comfortable passenger trains with tickets, food, and money for the journey. And this deception seems to work on Germans and Jews.

This is probably the most amazing part of the process that it seems to all go on in a kind of matter-of-act way. We don’t see any massive riots at the uh German collecting points. They do assemble thinking that, you know, resettlement in the east might actually be better than walking around a German street by now and being abused.

Their civil rights have been taken away. Their dignity had been taken away. Their property had been taken away. Many of them thought things might actually get better. They’d accepted they had no place in Germany. And maybe, hey, things in Poland could be no worse than what they are. The Jews will not discover the truth about their final destination until they are far from German soil.

The Nazis continue their deception to the bitter end. The commonant of Trebinka death camp orders the construction of a fake railway station complete with painted wooden clock. Its hands always fixed at 6:00, just enough to reassure the new arrivals. But this stop will be their last. Convinced they are to have a shower for health reasons, men and women are separated and remove their clothes.

Their hair and beards are shorn off. Then suddenly they are rushed into the tube. A narrow corridor lined with barbed wire. A dark chamber looms, but it is too late. The journey from train to death takes just 90 minutes. The Nazis are now operating such an efficient system. Nothing can stop [Music] it.

Not even when Reinhardt Hydrich, the chief architect of the final solution, falls victim to an assassination attempt. at his funeral, the biggest sort of Nazi uh showpiece funeral of the entire period. All the Nazis are there, and Hitler seems to even be shedding a few tears at losing this sort of right-hand superman. In Hydrickch’s honor, his boss, SS Chief Hinrich Himmler, names the death camp project Action Reinhardt and vows to step up the slaughter in Poland.

[Music] In the forests of eastern Poland, the Nazis are carrying out their final solution to the Jewish question. It is genocide. At the end of 1942, Adolf Ikeman, the Nazis killer bureaucrat, receives detailed reports from the secret Polish death camps. Over a million Jews have already been killed.

Hitler’s vision is being fulfilled. There was a time when the Jews in Germany laughed at my prophecies, but take my word for it. They will stop laughing everywhere. [Music] Following the Nazis master plan, the Jews are being worked to death or murdered [Music] outright. Out in Poland, the Nazis are less discreet in their killing. The Maidanuk concentration camp built on a hill in full view of the city of Lublin was originally intended to house Soviet prisoners of war.

Under SS control, it becomes another grim destination for tens of thousands of Polish Jews shipped in as forced laborers. Living in the most brutal conditions, many of them will die from sickness and exhaustion. As a key part of the Nazis final solution, the camp is equipped with facilities for extermination. Poisonous carbon monoxide is used in the gas chambers and a crerematorium is installed with ovens to burn thousands of bodies.

death camps, slave labor camps, extermination camps. It’s hard to define which is which at some point. All we know is people are dying. They’re dying through a number of ways. Starvation, some are being gassed, some are being systematically killed, some are being beaten to death. 200 miles to the west, one of the largest Polish work camps is transformed into the Nazis most notorious killing machine.

And it is here at Achvitz Burkanau that the mass murder of the final solution will reach a truly barbaric level. Alongside a vast industrial complex, Himmler orders the construction of gas chambers and crerematoria capable of slaughtering up to 6,000 people every day. And the Nazis now have a new technique for murder, a chemical designed to kill pests.

Cyclone B is a cyanidebased substance. In a warm, moist atmosphere, it turns from pellets into a highly toxic gas. The death cells were constructed with with either pipes into them at high level or holes in the roof through which the pellets could be dropped. The killer pesticide is soon being used by the Nazis on a massive scale.

They are moving here into absolutely new territory. Nobody in history has attempted to do something like this before. So they they they they are literally finding their way. Manufacturing Cyclone Boosts the profits of Germany’s chemical industry. The complicity of the great manufacturing chemical companies is obvious.

They later at Nuremberg and afterwards said, “We didn’t know what it’s being used for.” Why would you need Zyclon beyond that scale of production if it wasn’t against people by this stage? Many more Germans are becoming aware of what is happening to the Jews. There’s one amazing incident where a a freight train was going towards Avitz and one of the survivors said that he was in this freight train and he said that at one of the train stations at a German station somebody shouted, “We know where you’re going to the gas chambers.” So you can see that in these

little towns even people knew what was happening. So I imagine in that particular freight train then there was a certain amount of trepidation. To help finance his evil plans, Himmler turns the final solution into a commercial partnership between the SS and Germany’s corporate giants.

The SS make a fortune leasing out their Jewish prisoners, men, women, and children to work in IG Farbin’s factories. We can actually see that in the killing process, we do have partners in crime here, not just the Nazis, but also here a massive capitalist enterprise that enters into this project with the Nazis and actually finances it.

And it’s not just big business that’s implicated in genocide. Thousands of ordinary Germans are making their own contribution. So, you’ve got the train driver driving a train load of Jews across Europe. He knows what’s going on, but he’s not asking any questions. You’ve got the civil servant working in some small department in Berlin who’s probably responsible for supplying the cattle trucks for a certain shipment of Jews.

He’s just following orders. But what you’ve got are a lot of very small cogs, each of whom think, well, I’m not really taking part in this. I’m just doing a small thing. But when you put all those cogs together, then you’ve got a murder machine. But when you take it apart, each of those cogs can say, “It wasn’t me.

” With this complicity of silence, no German needs to speak openly about the final solution. No one needs to take responsibility. And all of this seems to happen with barely a flicker of protest back [Music] home. By 1943, Himmler is able to declare that Germany itself is almost udenrine due free. The only resistance comes in one celebrated event when the Nazis tried to deport a group of Jews married to German women.

famous occasion known as the Rosen Strasa affair where a number of Jewish men had been rounded up their non-Jewish wives came together and protested on mass outside Nazi officials houses and buildings. Such was their determination that threats to them to disperse went unheeded. When the protests become public, it causes real constonnation at the highest levels.

Even now, the Nazis are scared of admitting what is really going on. And the Nazi officials eventually came to the conclusion far better to give way than to try and face them down. And the husbands were allowed to go back to the wives. They even reprieve 35 Jews who had already been sent to Ashvitz. But the Rosen Strasa protest is an isolated occasion.

By now, the vast majority of Germans have other things to worry about. They are starting to lose the war, and their first concern is their own families. they were being, you know, bombed around the clock by the British and the Americans. They had huge food shortages. Um, their own children were dying in droves on the Eastern Front.

Um, so, you know, I think there was very little capacity within many people’s minds to actually really care about what was happening to some Jews. For Hinrich Himmler, the final solution represents a hideous triumph. A recording exists of his speech to a secret meeting of SS leaders. He is openly proud. This is a page of glory, never mentioned and never to be mentioned.

This admission that we can’t be acknowledged as heroes in the public eye is a sure sign that what they’ve done would be unacceptable. By now, they have killed some 4 million Jews since the start of the war. Another 2 million will be murdered before it is [Music] over. But the Germans must feel no guilt. Himmler shifts the blame onto the Jews.

They are responsible for their annihilation. We have the moral right. We had the duty to our people to do it. To kill this people who wanted to kill [Applause] [Music] us. And so the German people become complicit in one of the worst crimes in history. January 1945, endgame for Nazi Germany.

As the Allies advance on all sides, the 1,000-year Reich built on illusion and delusion is crumbling. [Music] What now for Adolf Hitler and the band of criminal conspirators around him? This is the story of how the Nazi regime keeps lying to the very end as it collapses into plots, power struggles, and madness.

But there is still time for one last great betrayal of the German people. [Music] [Music] [Music] On the 12th anniversary of the Nazi party coming to power, Adolf Hitler is preparing to address his people outside. Battle is [Music] raging. The Allies are penetrating Germany, the heart of the Third Reich. The Furer delivers one final rallying [Music] cry.

God the Almighty has made our nation. By defending its existence, we are defending his word. The fact that this defense is fraught with incalculable misery, suffering, and hardship makes us even more attached to this nation. The tone of defiance is the same as ever, but the war is nearly lost. They’re fighting a war on two, three fronts.

Uh they’re starved of any natural resources they previously had had. Only a complete fanatic such as Hitler would think there was still a chance. This will be the last time the German people hear their furer’s voice. What the public can’t see is that Hitler is a mere shadow of the man he once was. At just 55, he’s suffering from stomach disorders and twitching spasms.

An aged, gray wreck of a man increasingly dependent on a sinister quack, Dr. Theodore Morel. By the turn of the year, 44 45, he is a very sick man, Hitler. He’s stooped. He’s prematurely aged. He’s suffering from jaundice. He shakes uncontrollably. At times his whole whole body is shook.

Other times it’s simply the left side, the left arm. particularly he survives on a cocktail of drugs which his doctor Morel gives him. Despite his pitiful condition and the overwhelming military situation, he still clings to the belief he can win. Hitler is completely deluded by this point. I mean, he’s so out there. He’s clearly insane.

There’s absolutely no way that the German army depleted of proper weaponry uh machines and you know with a vastly reduced manpower is going to be able to basically turn back this inevitable collapse. Hitler is pinning his hopes on new miracle weapons. weapons like the Me262, the world’s first operational jet fighter capable of nearly 600 mph, and the V2 rocket, the first ballistic missile and the first man-made object to enter space.

A lot of faith is put into so-called kind of miracle weapons such as V2 rockets, but these aren’t game changers. the these are weapons that are going to cause some harm, but they’re not going to cause the allies uh to withdraw from the fight. The jet fighters are produced too late in too few numbers and have no impact against the numerically superior Allied air forces.

And as German forces retreat, rocket launch sites are captured, preventing them from posing any further threat. For the people in his intimate circle, it is nearing decision time. Men like Hairman Guring, the Furer’s long-annointed successor, who had been with him since almost the beginning. For Hinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, the driving force behind the Holocaust, and Joseph Gerbles, his propaganda chief.

Do they stay and go down with the man they’d all sworn to serve or do they abandon him and make their own plans? It’s like rats deserting a sinking ship. All of the military people want to give up. Most of the cronies around Hitler, with one or two exceptions, goals being the most prominent, think the game is up as well.

And so really this is sort of waiting for the end. Joseph Gerbles decides to stand by his furer. He was the chief architect of the tactic that has enabled the Nazis to fool so many Germans for so long. The trick of making the Nazis look outwardly respectable and noble while hiding the criminal reality. Gerbles is perhaps the most intellectual of the Nazis, but he was a man who could be very sharp in terms of his sense of realism.

Oddly, he sacrifices this sense of realism for his love for the furer. The furer can do no wrong. Despite the hopeless situation, bombed out cities, food shortages, and fears of the advancing Russian Red Army, Gerbles throws all his energy into one final illusion. His most lavish propaganda piece to date. The best way to look at the mentality of Gables at this stage is to look at the premiere of a film called Coberg.

And this is a period drama about the Napoleonic wars and a brave defense against the Napoleonic army by Prussian defending forces. And he makes this really the big blockbuster of the year where all these people are fighting this sort of hopeless task and at the last minute they turn it round and they defeat Napoleon. The parallels are obvious.

German resistance against the odds. Gerbles is creating an alternative reality. If he can’t win the war, then he will win at least the movie. He even pulled troops from the Eastern Front to act as extras. He clearly felt that these soldiers were as usefully deployed, if not more usefully deployed, working for a film like this temporarily, as actually fighting on the front.

So, it’s a real testimony. The financing, the uh lavish production of the film, the diversion of resources into its imagined huge propaganda value. The film finally opens on January 30th, 1945 in a temporary cinema under constant threat of air raids and screens until the fall of Berlin in May 1945. almost no one sees it.

I think that really sums up the kind of strange world that Gorbles and Hitler occupied at this particular stage. They are the only people who think a film can make any difference to what’s going on and that film doesn’t even get distributed around Germany. But in his own strange way, Gerbles is remaining true to his principles.

He is unwavering in his loyalty. But for others like Himmler and Gurring, as Germany collapses, they see chances to feather their own [Music] nests. As the relentless Allied advance continues, there can be no doubt that the days of the thousand-year Reich are numbered. Town after town surrenders. For them, the bombing is over.

There’s no question that defeat is looming. I mean, this is really, you know, Vagnner’s got a damarong writ large. You know, here we have a regime that came to power saying that we’ll create a thousand-year Reich and now within 12 short years, it’s on the edge of catastrophe. [Music] By February 1945, 196 Russian divisions are attempting to encircle the capital, Berlin.

It’s not quite every man for himself, but a lot of people are thinking this is obviously ending. It’s ending soon. It’s ending badly. And you know, Christmas 45 is not going to be a Nazi Christmas. For the circle around the increasingly deluded Hitler, it’s time to start making plans for the future. What will become of them when the war is over? This is a criminal regime from top to bottom.

[Music] Everyone in some way is tainted by this regime and infected by this regime. And there are few in the Nazi elite who think they are going to escape justice here. They know that unless they try and cover up what’s happened and pretend that they were only taking orders from Hitler and they didn’t want to do it.

Then they are going to head for the hangman’s noose. Hinrich Himmler, even by Nazi standards, is a monster. A former chicken farmer, he is a man of petty jealousies and a rabid anti-semite. He has been at the heart of all the darkest Nazi activities. He is the man who has organized the sterilization of the congenitally feeble in the early part of the Third Reich.

He’s organized the euthanasia of of incurably ill and psychiatrically uh disabled people. Uh he’s then been central to the extermination of the Jews. By 1945, his worst crime, the Holocaust, has become public knowledge. Himmler is personally responsible for the systematic state sponsored murder of over 6 million people.

And he knows that unless he does something to turn his personal situation round, he will be at the top of any list of war criminals when the war is over. He’s seen in some ways as worse than Hitler. The horrors of the camps are being realized and they were Himmler’s own particular province. [Music] He constructed and controlled a vast network of facilities across the Reich designed to concentrate, hold, and kill Jews on an industrial scale.

Everyone is thinking, you know, the the day of reckoning is coming. They know that the Allies are going to put them on trial for what has happened. They’ve said it long enough. There will be a war trial and you criminals will be brought to book. From January 1945, Himmler tries to hide the evidence.

the facilities used for for extermination, the gas chambers at Avitz, for example, are all blown up so that they’re not necessarily immediately recognizable for what they are. As the Russians advance through the occupied territories, Himmler forcibly marches the few surviving prisoners from the death camps in Poland to concentration camps in Germany.

But this time, it is not just about covering his tracks. He thinks he’s developed a cunning plan. The reason for the evacuation is is not so much a cover up. It’s to maintain control over the Jewish prisoners so that Himmler still has this bargaining [Music] chip. Secretly, he’s planning to use the remaining Jews as a means of negotiating a deal for his own survival.

He’s even hoping to make money from it. discreetly he puts the word out that he’s open for business. A number of approaches were made to Himmler, testing the water to see whether he was prepared to release Jews from the concentration camp system in return for for money, military material and so on.

Probably the best known of these was from a former president of the Swiss Confederation, Jeanari Musi, uh who had known Himmler um previously from anti-communist activities. Himmler makes Muzi an offer. He will free some of the Jews he holds in concentration camps in return for 20 million Swiss Franks to be paid by Jewish sources in the US.

It’s a measure of the callousness of Himmler that he would use Jewish lives in order to strike some sort of bargain to save, you know, whatever skin he could. This is a man who’d been killing Jews for quite a few years now in their millions and now he’s, you know, negotiating with a few thousand here and there to get what he wants.

It’s just disgusting. Incredibly, Himmler even believes this might be the start of a process that could end with the Allies installing him as the future leader of Germany. So what Himra is hoping to get from this is a reputation in the West as somebody who is prepared to do a deal and somebody who might be worth dealing with into the future.

This is a high-risk strategy for Himmler. Going behind Hitler’s back to make money in return for releasing Jews goes against everything Hitler stands for. It contradicts every notion there’d been since 1922 that the enemy was the Jew, the enemy was international jury and it could never be compromised with. It’s a total destruction of the basic belief.

It would it would destroy Nazism. [Music] Incredibly, the first train load of 1,700 Jews actually makes it to Switzerland. Himmler had been promised a deposit of $250,000. But at this point, news of the plan leaks out, and Himmler has to call the deal off. But it won’t be the last time he tries to make a deal behind the Furer’s back.

As Himmler plots, the military situation continues to deteriorate. Too late to successfully mount any form of serious counterattack or proper defense from the front. Hitler becomes cut off, spending more and more time in his Berlin bunker. The Red Army has marched all across Europe and is now at the very edge of Germany as well.

Everything is going to come home to Hitler in that bunker. Someone once said rather aptly that Hitler had a bunker obsession. He had bunkers on western front. He had a number on the eastern front. He has this idea that the bunker is a salvation. If you hide in the ground, things will get better on top eventually.

[Music] Above ground, Berlin is no longer safe. In their heaviest raid of the war, 1,500 American bombers dropped 2,000 tons of bombs on the Reich capital. The Chancellory area is badly hit, causing extensive destruction and knocking out the water, electricity, heating, and telephone lines. For Gerbles, this is another opportunity.

Exaggerating the numbers killed here and in other aerial raids, including the infamous Allied bombing of Dresden, he tries to foster a greater sense of public spirit and unity. But by now, no one cares. Life in Berlin for ordinary people in the final months of the war becomes extraordinarily difficult. The sheer business of survival of getting food or basic hygiene becomes so overwhelming that the strategy for survival is all that people can think about at this time.

Although dying in their thousands on a daily basis, the German people are unaware that the man to whom they have pledged allegiance, the Furer, is even now preparing to betray them one last time. The Nero decree is this remarkable decision on the part of a very sick man, sick physically and mentally, that if Germany can’t come through the war through its own efforts, it must be allowed to be destroyed.

Hitler’s Nero decree orders the wholesale destruction of German infrastructure to prevent its use by the encroaching allies. This isn’t simply to deprive the allies of resources. It’s to say German did not deserve to survive. It’s the idea of going down in flames. If defeat is unavoidable, then everything must be destroyed.

The allies must be left nothing. This action will destroy all hope of the German people having any kind of decent life after he has gone. Hitler feels really that the German people have let him down and that they deserve as part of this outcome of the social Darwinian struggle uh deserve to die and be sacrificed to the greater forces of history.

By now, beyond the bunker, the Third Reich is little more than a few isolated pockets in Northern Europe, northern Italy, and Germany itself. The rest is under occupation and beyond Hitler’s reach. The situation in March and April 1945 in many ways is completely chaotic. There isn’t a coherent national picture anymore.

People take very little notice at this stage of what goes on in the bunker of what Hitler might be [Music] thinking. Hiding out of sight of his people in his Berlin bunker, Hitler is still clinging to his delusions. After miracle weapons, he has a new fantasy. the allies will split. There had been for some time in Germany a belief that the allies could not hold that the unnatural alliance between the west and the east between the Soviet and the United States for example, it was so unnatural politically that it wouldn’t

hold. On the 12th of April 1945, Hitler believes he has got his miracle. US President Franklin D. Roosevelt dies. Roosevelt himself had done much to smooth the uneasy union between Stalin and the West and had held the alliance together. It was an unnatural, unholy alliance, you might say, between capitalist West and Soviet communist East.

For how long would it hold? And the the Nazi desperate notion is if the Allies split them, there is hope for us. But it comes to nothing. The alliance holds. The Western Allies give up on the race to Berlin as it will fall under the Russian sphere of influence after the war. And they shel their political differences until the unconditional surrender of Germany is achieved. The Red Army is closing in.

On Hitler’s 56th birthday, Russian longrange artillery starts bombarding Berlin city center. It’s now just a matter of time. There’s a very interesting relationship between Hitler and Gerbles in the last months of the war. Gerbles spoke to him about the need to try to find a diplomatic solution to the war, but at the end he had to concede that uh he he he couldn’t change Hitler’s set determination to continue the war militarily to the bitter end and if necessary to defeat as the Red Army advances on Berlin prepar Preparations are being

made for Hitler’s 56th birthday. On previous occasions, this has been a monumental event, a public occasion. Hitler’s birthday has been one of celebration, a time for gay, a time for fun. As far as the Nazis are engaged in fun, of course, the world has changed. Germany is heading for defeat. And everybody, including Hitler, knows this.

by his birthday. [Music] Rising late around 11:00 a.m. to the sound of heavy artillery shelling, the Furer’s birthday celebrations are a mournful affair, despite the presence of his long-term companion, Ava Brawn. There’s some attempt at jollity. It’s all terribly artificial and there’s a deep sense of gloom that hovers over the whole proceedings.

But a cake is made for him. He plays with literally plays with soldiers, little toy soldiers that he he loved. This bizarre occasion will turn out to be the last great gathering of the Nazi elite. The birthday party is kind of a tragic scene. It’s a bit like sort of, you know, people camping around the oxygen tent of um a father they don’t really like, but they all might get something from his will.

As part of the celebrations, Gerbles sets up a photo opportunity, persuading Hitler to leave the bunker and inspect a group of decorated Hitler youth. It will be his last public appearance. But so powerful is his grip on the nation that even now the illusion remains in place. Young boys are prepared to die for him in the hopeless defense of Berlin.

They line up this sad lineup of young men and he goes along the line this stoop figure and pulling at the cheeks some of the lads and patting on the cheeks and saying you’re you’re a great hero of Germany. Um it’s almost bad theater. Perhaps it is bad theater. He must have known the cause was loss but he chats to the he speaks to them as if they were the heroes of the future as if there’s some hope for them.

For those around Hitler, for all the show of unity, it is now time to act. If Germany was going to survive after the Second World War in any way, shape, or form, the army had to survive. And if the army survived, they needed a potential leader. Outwardly, Hairman Guring, deputy leader of the party, remains loyal to his furer.

He had been with Hitler from the very beginning. He had led the brown shirts, fought in the attempted coup in 1923, built up and led the Nazis air force. He is also a morphine addict. But increasingly he has been marginalized. Garing falls out of favor because of what happens in the war itself. The Luwaffer doesn’t perform very well.

Where were all these fighter planes that he’d promised? where were all these massive bombers that he’d promised? So, it seemed as though he hadn’t delivered in so many areas, and that’s why he started to sink down the hierarchy. Nonetheless, he is still officially Hitler’s nominated successor, and he believes when the furer is gone, he can cut a deal.

I think Garing believes that the allies are as sort of flexible as he is. Politicians who can be negotiated with. He thinks of these people as people who’ve changed their mind before. Why won’t they change their mind again? Maybe this unconditional surrender is negotiable. Even before the party is over, Guring is packing his bags.

After a few vague words and a handshake, he leaves the birthday celebrations and heads for Beckus Garden in the Bavarian Alps, safer and closer to the American lines. After swearing an oath of loyalty, Hinrich Himmler also leaves the party. I don’t think anyone really understood at that point that Hitler was just going to stay in Berlin and go down in flames.

So Himmler has to maintain the facade that he is loyal, that he’s still working for the cause, although clearly by then he decided that that it was all over. Himmler is in fact pursuing a new angle of negotiation. He has made contact with the vice president of the Swedish Red Cross, Count Faulk Bernardot, and is secretly maneuvering to increase his power and take over.

What Bernard dot is looking for is the release of Scandinavian, Western European Jewish prisoners from the concentration camp system. Negotiations, including several face-to-face meetings between Himmler and Bernardot, take place over the next few weeks, really leading up until the end of April 1945.

His plan is to position himself as the reasonable Nazi, the person who the allies can do business with. He sees only one way out, and that is a negotiated settlement with himself possibly as the chief negotiator. and therefore the leader of the reformed Germany that will emerge. It’s a measure of the kind of pie in the sky attitude that some of these Nazis have towards the war u that both Himler and Guring feel that there’s some sense in kind of cutting a deal with the allies or even kind of taking over the rapidly disintegrating German state.

[Music] As for Hitler, he is now left in his bunker, completely unaware of the plans being made by his loyal followers. With him are only Gerbles and Martin Borman, his private secretary, a long-standing Nazi thug who has quietly been ingratiating himself with the [Music] Furer. As the war around Berlin continues to rage, discipline in the bunker starts to break down.

The scenes within the bunker underneath the chancere are a vision out of hell really. It’s crowded. It’s sweaty. It’s hot. People are are kind of disobeying Hitler by kind of smoking rather a lot. There’s a lot of drunkenness. And it’s a kind of microcosm for the whole kind of madness of what the Third Reich’s been about. Living in a bizarre fantasy, Hitler appoints, promotes, and relieves generals at whim.

And he lays ludicrous plans for a final decisive victory to be led by General Steiner, a former SS [Music] commander. He puts his faith in two armies, which didn’t exist by this time, but he believes they do. that between them they will form some sort of pinser movement enclosing themselves around Berlin breaking the Soviet grip and preventing the allies coming from the west.

It’s a total delusion by this time but he believes in it. But just 2 days after his birthday, Berlin’s inner circle of defenses are breached. The Soviet forces almost encircle the city. Worse still, without sufficient resources, Steiner is unable to launch his attack. News reaches the bunker. He’s told by his generals that the game is completely up.

Berlin cannot be defended and the Red Army will be in the bunker within 24 hours. And it’s then he goes very quiet for some minutes and then has this huge outburst of anger. He expresses his detestation for the the generals who’ led him into this position. For the men who’ve let him down, men who won’t die in the cause, prefer to give up and withdraw.

He rants and he raves about how the generals let him down throughout the war and how now all the people are deserting this sinking ship. [Music] Critically, he also says that everyone might as well go home. He has no further orders. Everyone present takes this as his abdication. Hitler is no longer the furer. [Music] But no one tells the people of Germany in the streets above the bunker what’s left of the population.

Young boys and old men have been called up to continue the increasingly desperate defense of Berlin. There are very strict furous orders not to surrender to fight literally to the last man. And that is of course in many ways what does happen in Berlin where there is streetto- street fighting. Even today if you walk through Berlin you can still see bullet holes on many of the buildings from those final days of the war.

In Ber’s garden news of Hitler’s breakdown reaches Guring. He assumes Hitler is now unwilling or incapable of leading the party. The Hitler that he used to know in the early part of the Munich period no longer exists. This is an empty shell of a man. So on the basis of the long-standing succession law, this means he can take over.

He sends a telegram to Hitler saying, “Look, the game is up. you are trapped in Berlin. For the sake of the uh German Reich, give me a party officers as your deputy to take over as fura and I’ll do my best to negotiate our way to the end of this [Music] war. But back in Berlin, Guring’s telegrams into the wrong hands. It’s intercepted by Martin Borman who then takes this telegram in sort of Uriah Heap mode, presents it to him and says, “Look, he’s plotting against you.

We have not finished the war. There’s still a chance even now that things can be turned around.” Hitler can’t believe it. Extraordinarily, with the war all but lost, Borman now sees an opportunity for his own advancement and his chance to take over the Reich. With Guring out of the way, he can win promotion.

So, he convinces Hitler of Guring’s treachery and persuades the Furer to arrest and eject him from the party. This is all the more ridiculous because just 3 days after Hitler’s critical outburst towards his generals, Russian forces link up, completing their ring around the city. An hour later, Russian and US forces meet up, splitting the Reich in half.

[Music] Himmler also hears the news of the Furer’s supposed abdication and through Bernardot writes a letter to the Western Allies. Himmler puts his cards on the table with Bernardot that uh it’s all over. He now styles himself the provisional leader of Germany and is hoping for peace with the British and Americans and an alliance against the Soviets.

Himmler saw possibility that you know as the man in control of the SS and the police that he could he could maintain stability within Germany. He could prevent a sort of meltdown. He still saw himself as an important man. That’s the key to it. Uh and that that he had influence within Germany.

But in Stockholm, the letter is leaked to the international press. The negotiations are immediately broken off. The fallout for Himmler of this peace offer emerging is that he is immediately dismissed from all of his posts uh within the German government. The full extent of Himmler’s betrayal is revealed to Hitler. I think it was a big personal blow for Hitler.

He had assumed that of all the members of the Nazi hierarchy, Himmler was the one who was least likely to betray him. [Music] Alone and with no more options, he writes his last will and testament. Despite Himmler and Gurring, the head of the navy, Admiral Dernitz, is appointed Reich president. Gerbles and Borman are rewarded for their loyalty.

Gerbles becomes chancellor, effectively prime minister, and Borman is made head of the Nazi party. Though of course, there is no Reich to be prime minister of and no Nazi party worth [Music] leading. Hitler’s final act is to marry his long-standing partner, Ava Brawn. As if things couldn’t get more kind of Shakespearean and tragic in the bunker, you’ve then got this farical marriage ceremony that takes place between Hitler and his long-term girlfriend Eva Brawn, who had actually been largely hidden from view from the German public. It’s

obviously a kind of sock to Eva Brawn, something he’d always promised that he would give her his hand in marriage. It’s her bonus. I think someone called it the marriage. It’s it’s his way of saying to her, you have honored your position as my associate. I’m prepared to make you my wife. Something I’ve always denied myself because I I was married to [Music] Germany.

He gives her a kiss in front of his acolytes. He’s never done that before. [Music] The next day we see that he has a final meal with his secretaries. He thanks them as well. He moves away. There’s a tearful sort of interchange. Shortly after 300 p.m., Hitler and new wife Ava withdraw to his private apartment in the bunker. He hands her a cyanide capsule.

The decision has been made. They will end their lives together. She takes the poison. And he shoots himself with his waler PPK. It’s a brutal, nasty end. Uh, and entirely fitting, frankly. [Music] Adolf Hitler is dead by his own hand. Betrayed by his most favored henchmen, the regime is in its death throws.

But even so, the German people are told one last lie. Fura headquarters reports that our Fura Adolf Hitler fell this afternoon in his command post in the chancellory whilst fighting against Bocheism to his last breath. The final Nazi lie is the fact that Hitler has gone down fighting in the streets of Berlin.

Of course, it’s completely untrue. The news of Hitler’s death doesn’t necessarily come as the big shock that we might imagine it to have been today. People in the final months of the war have become so preoccupied with the business of day-to-day survival that ideology in visit the person of Hitler have really taken a bit of a back seat.

Their famous stories that refugees from the east are arriving in Lubac and in Hamburg and being greeted by Red Cross helpers with the sentence Hitler’s dead. Would you like some hot soup? And the second half of that sentence was infinitely more important than the first. [Music] Meanwhile, the Nazi government descends into far.

Besides Hitler’s appointed leader, Admiral Dernitz, Himmler, Guring, and Gerbles are all independently trying to negotiate peace deals. In Berlin, Gerbles is officially the Chancellor of Germany. At the 11th hour, he tries and fails to negotiate an arrangement with Marshall Zhukov, the leader of the Russian forces. Gerbles’s last overure to Zhukov has the sense of a last desperate throw of the dice.

One, I think, without any hope of seeing anything come from it either. The Russians reject his approach. For Gerbles, it is now truly over. I think all the way through Gobles’s career, he’s been so loyal to Hitler. He sees him as some kind of demigod. He’s been his kind of promoter, his spin doctor, his propagandist. So he looks forward to a Germany without Hitler and without the Nazi party with absolute horror.

He doesn’t want to live in this society. Gerbles and his wife Magda now commit a terrible crime. They poison their own children. The willingness of a woman to destroy her own family because national socialism had failed. That shows the inhumanity and absurdity of Nazism. In its death throws, it took down six innocent children. Even the lives of the innocent are to be sacrificed.

That there is no humanity you can turn to. Once Nazism has failed with their children dead, they kill [Music] themselves. As for Himmler, his attempt to negotiate a deal via contacts in Sweden has also collapsed. With no role left to play and cut loose from the party, he tries to lose himself within the hordes of PS, but is spotted at a British army checkpoint.

Himmler is taken off for interrogation, and during the course of this, he takes his little round glasses out, puts them on his face, and says, “Hinrich Himmler.” And they realize they’ve caught the big fish. An empty brass cyanide case is found which initiates a full body search. As the doctor goes for his mouth to hold it open, Himler bit him, stepped back, took the capsule out of his uh tooth where it had been concealed, bit down on it.

In an attempt to flush the cyanide from his body, doctors repeatedly force him to vomit. There’s too much poison in his system and he dies in agony on the floor of um the British Army interrogation cell wearing an old British Army shirt and nothing else. In Bavaria, with his main rivals out of the way, Gurring, the great survivor and pretender, makes his move.

It all going down. The whole thing’s going to pieces, but you know, I’ll I think if I get in a room with people, I can survive this. And I think that exemplifies his personality. He felt he was one of life survivors that with his big personality would get him through. Having drafted a letter to the Supreme Allied Commander, General Dwight D.

Eisenhower, he surrenders to the Americans in a blaze of media publicity. Guring expects to be treated with all the courtesy of a head of state. There are some people in this world who they’ve got an inner confidence in themselves, you know, and and he’s one of them. Even his arrest is something of a triumph, isn’t it, for this man. And it goes back to this idea of himself as a survivor.

He is going to somehow extricate himself from all of this mayhem. He’s going to sit around drinking schnaps with the Allied generals and he’s going to say to them, “Well, you know, all of this wasn’t my responsibility, not me.” But Eisenhower won’t see him, and now he’s just another prisoner of war. [Music] In Berlin, there is just one man left.

Martin Borman, the official head of the Nazi party. Leaving the chancel, he makes a run for it, but is caught up in the fighting and killed. And so the thousand-year Reich and its criminal leaders meet their fate. On May 7th, 1945, Germany finally surrenders unconditionally. 1945, Germany is defeated. Now the awful reality of what Adolf Hitler and his cronies have been up to is

revealed. Germany has been mind captured and committed the most heinous crimes in history. The allies are adamant that this must never happen again. This is the story of the struggle to denazify Germany. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] Advancing through Germany, Allied forces make a gruesome discovery.

On forward patrol, American soldiers of the US Third Army come across a site that defies description. They found emaciated prisoners. They found disease. They found starvation. This was a huge shock to see this. But what stuck in the memory, of course, were the corpses. It is estimated that as many as 56,000 people died in the Bookenval concentration camp.

in some of the worst conditions imaginable. It was the second largest concentration camp on German [Music] soil. Some 900 children were were liberated at Wukanval. Many of them in an absolutely terrible condition. Many of them died shortly afterwards. to put children, some so young as three or four, in these camps and allow them to starve because they were useless eaters, as the SS put it.

That was a level of inhumity that I think shocked many of the allies in a manner they simply could not come to terms [Music] with. The news is passed up the chain of command right to the top. Eight days later, the highest ranking American generals in Europe, Eisenhower, Patton, and Bradley visit the camp. When the camps were opened up, there was an intense feeling of anger that people like Eisenhower very strongly expressed.

We must make these people suffer. We must punish them for what they’ve done. In the eyes of Supreme Commander Eisenhower and of the world, this kind of torture and beating practiced on the prisoners is a crime. He became determined that the world should know about these crimes. He became determined that they should be broadcast.

Throughout Germany, the scene of death repeats itself in concentration camps along the path of the Allied advance. Films were made, photographs were taken, and as far as Eisenhower was concerned, it was a crime that the world was never to be allowed to forget, and the Germans never to be allowed to forget. This film shows the first time ordinary Germans are made to confront the horrific reality of what their beloved regime has been up to.

But even worse than the concentration camps in Germany are the extermination camps like Ashvitz and Maiden in Poland, liberated by the Russians. The discovery of a network of these camps provides solid evidence of the systematic wholesale industrial murder of millions of people by gassing and extreme work under starvation conditions.

The allies realize the Nazis are an enemy the like of which has never been seen before. They haven’t been fighting against any old nation here. They’ve been fighting against a gangster regime that kills Jewish people. And they can see just the depth of humanity to which this regime has sunk. As the scale of the atrocities becomes apparent, it reveals the number of people that must have been involved.

It seems that almost every German is implicated. You’ve got the train driver driving a train load of Jews across Europe. He knows what’s going on, but he’s not asking any questions. You’ve got the civil servant working in some small department in Berlin who’s probably responsible for supplying the cattle trucks.

You’ve got obviously the kind of bigwigs making these decisions. But when you put all those cogs together, then you’ve got a murder machine. This sophisticated organization illustrates one of the Nazi regime’s most insidious skills, making it easy for individuals to be part of this killing machine without feeling personally implicated, even if it was happening on their doorstep.

they were sort of turning a blind eye to it. So either they were ignoring it and ignoring all the rumors that were obviously going about or they knew about it and they were lying about what they knew about. Either way, it’s a kind of morally bankrupt position. [Music] The extent of the crime is so great that the Allies realize that they need to change the mindset of the entire German people.

The allies think long and hard about what’s appropriate and what’s fair and what’s just. At the end of the Second World War, this has been a a regime that has gone out consciously to exterminate whole populations. Millions of people have died. enormous areas have been destroyed. And so the sense is this needs something special.

This needs something new. The allies need to undo years of Nazi indoctrination and prove to the German people that everything they have believed in and been acting on is wrong. The allies decide that they need to adopt a program of denification. They need to re-educate the German people. This is a huge challenge and will take time.

The country is under military occupation governed by regional commanders with differing agendas. A uniform nationwide approach is needed. The Allies decide to implement a three-point [Music] plan. First, they abolish the Nazi party. Crowds gather in the marketplace to hear Allied orders, to read the Allied proclamations disbanding the Nazi party, Nazi laws and institutions.

Secondly, they need to identify its criminal members. Finally, they need to bring its leaders to justice. But this is harder than it seems. Adolf Hitler, the criminal mastermind behind the Third Reich, is dead. Joseph Gerbles, his propaganda minister, also commits suicide, as does Heinrich Himmler, the man responsible for the Holocaust.

But they have captured Hairman Gurring. He had been with Hitler from the very beginning. He had led the Brown Shirts, fought in the attempted coup in 1923, and built up and led the Nazis air force. Here is a man known throughout the world as being Hitler’s number two. He’s been involved in everything. The Gestapo, the final solution, everywhere.

His finger is in every single pie. Here is the man that they can hold up as one of the chief perpetrators of the whole war crimes machine of the Third [Music] Reich. Following the official German surrender, the Allies quickly round up other senior figures in the regime. They found representatives of the armed forces. So Kitle Yodel who are the senior generals Ditz who had been in charge of the yubot and then had been briefly chancellor after Hitler’s suicide.

Share the armament’s minister who had drafted in millions of uh people from all over Europe to serve as slave laborers in Nazi Germany. They decide to prove to the German people once and for all that their leaders are no more than criminals. The Allies decide on an unprecedented step to put them on trial for war crimes. [Music] By the summer of 1945, the Allies are in full control of defeated Germany.

Now they can begin the process of making sure atrocities like the Holocaust never happen again. The German mindset must be cleansed. They need to prove to the public that the Nazi leadership they so trusted and believed in are no more than a common criminal conspiracy. It was no longer sufficient for these individuals to say we were following the orders of the state.

The allies wanted to demonstrate that these actions, these decisions were not merely political actions, but actions that had crossed a line into illegality. In London during June 1945, the world’s first international tribunal drafts an entire new set of laws. These laws define the crimes the Nazis have committed.

There were four crimes. Crimes against peace, which is waging illegal war. War crimes, breaking the rules on methods and means of warfare, the hate conventions. War crimes includes shooting prisoners of war. But there is worse. Crimes against humanity, terrible atrocities against individuals. and conspiracy.

Essentially, membership of criminal organizations like the SS participation in those organizations, participation in the regime became a criminal act. What better place to show the world how evil the Nazi regime is than in its propaganda homeland, Nuremberg. Nuremberg had been the site of the great Nazi party rallies in the 1930s and was where the infamous laws on German citizenship had been passed.

In its favor, Nuremberg also has a surviving building suitable enough to house the proceedings. Prelude to the Neuremberg trials, the courtroom is being made ready. the tribunal before which top ranking Nazis will appear for the war criminal trial. The scarred palace of justice with a bit of renovation is an ideal location.

This courtroom is temporarily expanded to provide a gallery for 350 representatives of the world’s press and seating for 400 members of the public. This will be the venue for the trial of the century. prisoners. Early in the morning, 6 months after the end of the war, Hairman Guring and the other defendants are ushered from their cells into the floodlit courtroom.

Taking the western legal approach, it will be up to the prosecution to prove the individual defendants guilty of the charges beyond all reasonable doubt. Britain’s Lord Justice Lawrence addresses the defendants to plead guilty or not guilty to the charges against him. Not guilty. The proceedings soon become bogged down.

Establishing guilt, especially linking witnesses to the final solution, proves surprisingly difficult. Perhaps I ought to just remind the tribunal that in the in the course of the trial, the prosecutors ran into all sorts of difficulties. The individual defendants were able to claim that these documents didn’t bear their signatures, that they didn’t relate to the particular branch of the administration they had worked with.

And in some cases, the defendants knew that context rather better than the prosecutors. [Music] But I I trust the court is not unaware uh that outside of this courtroom. After 4 months, the prosecution finally rests and Guring takes the stand. Off the drugs, slim down and fit, he is a skilled and formidable adversary. the responsibility implicit.

He’s cross-examined by Robert Jackson and for Robert Jackson it goes disastrously wrong. Uh it turns out that Guring is a formidable individual with a remarkable memory. Guring the showman is in his element. He was the star of the trial. Every newspaper reporter uh who was there mentions this in the dispatchers how he keeps shaking his head, taking off his headphones, laughing at every moment when he thinks they’re they’re saying something ridiculous.

And SS grouper Hydrickch, we’re right about that, aren’t we? Herman Guring rang rings around Robert Jackson. All right. Guring was more on top of the facts about the Nazis. Guring was able uh to point to the paradoxes of British and American actions which appeared to be uh unlawful and Jackson made no progress with him at all.

He tries to influence the other defendants to keep on following this line and to say this course has no legitimacy. Let’s stick to that line. And he does get through to many of them and that one of the purposes here of the defendant Garing things aren’t going to plan for the allies. Guring in particular is skilled at fighting the prosecution.

His clever challenges and bold statements hold the courtroom’s wrapped attention. But it can’t last. Eventually, the allies nail him. Their trump card is the testimony obtained from the camp commandant of Ashvitz whilst in prison. He then tells the court all about the complicity of Garing in the final solution, which of course maps out the uh slave labor and the killing process of the Jews in Europe.

Guring’s codefendants are all cross-examined before the defense rests in June 1946. The evidence was so overwhelming and so comprehensively proved on the basis of documents and witness testimony uh a and images and video footage um that I think there wasn’t a hope in hell that uh the major perpetrators uh were going to get off.

What remained was what the sentence would be. At 300 p.m. in private, away from the glare of the cameras and public, the defendants are returned from the cells to the court to hear the verdicts. As the highest ranking remaining Nazi, Guring is sentenced to death. Chief of operations staff General Yodel and his boss General Keitel are also condemned to death along with foreign minister von Ribbentrop.

For others it’s a prison sentence. Admiral Dernitz Hitler’s official successor gets 10 years. Armament Minister Spear gets 20. and former deputy furer Rudolph Hess gets life imprisonment. The message to the German public is clear. The people who had led them and who they died for are no more than common [Music] criminals.

But Guring has no intention of making it easy for the Allies. With his fate sealed, he faces two final decisions. how and when he will [Music] die. He’s faced with the guilty verdict. He knows he’s going to be executed. He even tries to negotiate his form of execution. He says that as a military man, he should face a firing squad and not be hung.

But the allies insist he be hanged. Just 2 hours before he is due to be executed, Guring is brought his personal effects. Amongst his toiletries is a jar of hair cream. It seems that hidden within it was a capsule of potassium cyanide. At 10 minutes to 11, the last of the Nazi leaders takes his own life.

He escapes the hangman right at the 11th hour, right to the very end. He’s a survivor and he leaves the earth on his own terms. Even so, phase one of dennazification is successfully completed. The Nazi leadership have been dealt with. But now the Allies face a much bigger problem. How do you denify 70 million [Music] [Music] Germans following the execution of the Nazi leadership? The Allies face a massive task, the denazification of the German people themselves.

The point about Nazism is is that it overtook every facet of life. So it was almost impossible to avoid in some way being associated with [Music] Nazism. Only now does the truly insidious nature of Nazism become clear. It pervades all aspects of life from birth through marriage and into death. It even dictated what you ate for dinner on Sunday.

[Music] this regime that have uh have held on to this society whose tentacles have gone right through almost every organization uh every community uh of influence people’s almost every aspect of people’s lives. This has to be removed from German society for Europe to move forward.

As the scale of the Holocaust becomes apparent, the wholesale murder of 6 million Jews, it reveals the full extent to which everyone in Germany is implicated. One war crimes investigator actually told me we were unprepared for the sheer volume of criminality that we encountered. And there were so many people who had committed just in inverted commas one or two murders.

I mean, you’re looking in at around a 100,000 people you’ve got to track down. So, that’s a major challenge. An obvious place to look is within the military, but that also presents a problem. By the end of the war, 5 million German soldiers are PSWs held in temporary camps in appalling conditions across Europe, waiting to be processed.

Prisoners are interviewed, the interviews are analyzed, and a check is maintained on the trends of German morale. Right through 1945, particularly through the summer of 1945, there is a process of vetting going on. And in all of the Allied prisoner of war camps, there was an attempt to screen these millions of people and to sift out from amongst them those who were potentially war criminals and should be subject to some kind of legal process.

Even capture cannot shake the arrogant faith in the Nazi creed that’s been bred in them from childhood. You’ve had this criminal mentality that’s overtaken a nation and you need to eradicate it. And what you can’t do is allow the idea of Nazism to be involved in public life at [Music] all.

Eradicating every aspect of Nazism is a mammoth task. The visible signs are the easiest to remove. The swastika is banned and symbolic eagle imagery is destroyed. But breaking down the Nazi mentality is much harder. There are 8 million members of the Nazi party. 10% of the population with millions more enrolled in affiliated organizations. One of the problems of dennazification is is that just if you’re a member of the Nazi party, it doesn’t automatically make you a Nazi with a capital N.

There were people joining the Nazi party simply because if they weren’t in the party, they couldn’t keep their jobs and therefore, you know, they would be out of work and their children and families would suffer. Anybody who’s been in any position of leadership or authority for the last decade and a half is going to in some way have some sort of uh tainting with Nazism.

The allies initially decree that all party members be removed and excluded from public office and positions of power, but this proves impractical. It’s a very complicated, difficult thing to do because Nazism had gone so deep in German society that if you literally remove all people who had any link with the Nazi regime, you’re going to be left with almost nobody, you know, maybe a few bus doctors or railway clerks or people whose jobs were completely unpolitical.

With so many people involved in every aspect of the Nazi regime, the Allies decide to focus their attention on locating and pursuing the most committed Nazis. People working in the public services, in education, in the police, the judiciary were required to fill in a questionnaire, a lengthy questionnaire, upwards of 80 questions.

which effectively probed their political history. By Christmas 1945, 500,000 forms have been processed at a rate of 10,000 a day. But with 7 million still to assess, the task will take another 2 years. And even then, only a small proportion are prosecuted. on trial or awaiting trial before special German courts are some 2 million indicted Nazis.

Penalties for the guilty range from long terms at hard labor for the worst offenders to fines for those less culpable. But what many people don’t realize is that many of the most serious perpetrators are being allowed to slip through the net and get away with it deliberately. As denazification progresses, the Allies discover they have more important issues to deal with.

It becomes increasingly apparent that Nazis are yesterday’s enemy. There’s a new enemy to the east. And if you’re a Russian, you got a new enemy to the West. [Music] This is the start of the Cold War. An escalation of political and military tension that would set the allies against each other and take the world back to the brink of war.

I mean, the Cold War pretty much starts, you could argue, on the 9th of May 45, the day after the collapse. So whilst the official public policy might be to hunt down Nazis, secretly the West takes a leaf out of the Nazi handbook and pursues a very different agenda in private. They actually seek them out and protect them. I think that there’s a large amount of cynicism that you can attach to the behavior of the Americans and the British and indeed the Soviets in the wake of the collapse.

Yes, they want to find war criminals, but at the same time, you are taking over a country which has got a lot of very important people who are extremely wellqualified to help you with your projects back at home. There’s no clearer example than in the case of the German rocket scientists. The extraordinary rocket program that the Germans developed from the mid-30s onwards is led by a young aristocrat, a man called Venavon Brown.

And he has the science and the leadership powers to uh drive a community of very brilliant scientists really into the future into the next generation of science. Veron Brown’s weapons, the V1 flying bomb and V2 rocket, had terrified London, killing over 15,000 civilians and damaging up to 20,000 houses a day at the height of the campaign.

His V2 is capable of more than five times the speed of sound. Once launched, there are no effective counter measures. This technology is far in advance of anything the Allies have. In 1942, one of their rockets is even the first man-made artifact to reach space. A landmark moment for mankind. Rockets are the future. Rockets are the future militarily as well as in terms of of space exploration.

And a man of von Brown’s qualifications, expertise, and success could not be dismissed lightly. And the Americans want [Music] him. The problem is that by anyone’s standards, von Brown and his fellow rocket scientists are committed Nazis and are clearly guilty of crimes against humanity. von Brown who had a very black record in terms of his morality.

His factories, his armaments, production areas were based upon slave labor. Some of the most appalling stories of suffering occur in those camps where those enforced labors are held. the amount of people who died in the factories and camps that are associated with von brawn probably numbers greater than the people who were killed by some of the rockets he made.

So you know this is a very morally iffy area. Despite the awful atrocities he has committed the Americans decide they need him. In this climate of escalating tension between the superpowers, the Americans start breaking the rules. 765 top scientists and engineers from Hitler’s military research programs are whisked away to America without undergoing any process of dennazification.

This is part of the top secret operation paperclip. And so a cover or partial curtain is drawn over some the background of some of those arrested. If they can be of use to the allies individually, then the d-nazification policy won’t be followed through 100%. But there are complications. Officially, US law prohibits any Nazis from entering America, and President Truman himself has expressly forbidden proven Nazis to be recruited.

To get around the slightly embarrassing fact that a lot of the scientists have got a link with the Nazi party, the American intelligence agencies actually just just rewrite their pasts. They they they bleach out their Nazi associations, give them sort of new sets of papers. I mean, it’s really quite scandalous looking back on it what’s done.

There was a cover up lies, we have to say, so that the true reality of what some of these Nazis had done would not be revealed. With his record wiped clean, Verer von Brown becomes something of a celebrity in America. This is a model of the US Army’s Redstone guided missile. Initially, he works for the US Army before becoming director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center.

Veron Brown is, if you like, the acceptable face of Nazism. He’s a man whose scientific achievements probably outweigh, certainly in the eyes eyes of the West, his sort of Nazi association. But the rocket scientists aren’t the only type of Nazi the Americans recruit. At a higher, more secret level, they also make illegal deals with the very worst kinds of Nazi, those who are actually responsible for murder and genocide.

At the end of the war, the West is committed to eradicating Nazism and hunting down all war criminals. But the advent of the Cold War and mounting tensions between East and West starts to shift the focus of the Allies. There was never a total commitment to denazification. Perhaps there should have been in moral terms, but there wasn’t.

And the politics tells us why. The Soviet and the West are at loggerheads. Germany becomes the front line in this new conflict between East and West. The division of Germany is agreed upon. Troops of the United States, Britain, and France are to occupy the western portion of the country. The Soviet Union the eastern portion. These zones, separately controlled by the Allies, create a hot bed of intrigue and espionage, fueling an atmosphere of [Music] suspicion.

The Soviet zone encircles Berlin, which itself becomes a divided city, creating far-reaching problems for the occupying troops. The West has a has a problem in the post-war period. It wants to create new political communities uh that must be anti-fascist, that must not have any taints with Nazi ideology in Germany. But they also of course want leaders who are going to be anti-communist.

The rapid transformation of Stalin from Uncle Joe to the red Soviet menace leaves the Western Allies scrambling for intelligence on their new enemy. We genuinely felt that the Soviet Union represented a threat to our existence. And ultimately, you’re going to use whoever you can to gain information about the new enemy.

The US needs help to tackle this new enemy. But who can they turn to? The only people who have got knowledge of how the communists operate, who’ve got a determined anti-communist position, are the old Nazis, who are the only people who have the authority and the knowledge to counter um the Soviet communist position. The Nazis long-standing hatred of communism had led them to gather data files on the Red Army.

They know how the communists operate. What is more, they are used to tracking down and infiltrating Soviet intelligence cells. They’ve been doing it for 15 years and already have agents in place to spy for them. They’ve got a picture of Soviet politics and uh Soviet um decision-m that a lot of people in in in Britain and America just just don’t have.

That’s a sort of big area of ignorance in the west. To acquire this vital new intelligence, the Americans need to recruit from the very worst Nazi agencies. They need people from the Gestapo and SS. Amongst those they recruit is former Gestapo officer Klaus Barbie. Barbie was a career Nazi with a brutal streak.

As a boy, he had joined the Hitler youth. Barbie’s Nazi career then flourished. Firstly, he joined Hitler’s elite SS, perfect specimens of the master race, handpicked for their hatred of Jews and extreme fanaticism. before moving into the Gestapo, the Nazis dreaded secret police. If you wanted to think of the classic kind of comic book pantomime Gustavo officer, Claus Barbie’s going to fit the bill.

He ended up um performing absolutely foul acts of brutality on men, women, and children in the names of trying to extract information. At just 29, Barbie is a brutal, sadistic killer who laughs whilst personally torturing and murdering prisoners. In France, he became known as the butcher of Leyon, actively participating in the worst crime of all, the Holocaust.

This is a absolute primmaacy war criminal. Historians estimate that Barbie was directly responsible for the deaths of up to 14,000 people, including the deportation to Ashvitz of 44 Jewish orphans. [Music] But Klaus Barbie has also been specially trained in counter espionage, skills he’s honed, amongst others on the Russians.

These same skills in infiltrating communist networks make him and others like him hugely attractive to the Americans. You know, the world changes very, very quickly. And what someone like Claus Barbie is very good at doing is recognizing that the tables have turned. Despite being near the top of the list of wanted war criminals, when Barbie is finally caught, he is amongst a small group allowed to cut a deal with the Americans.

He’s the sort of the ugly face of the Nazi regime, but he knows things and he has information and he has contacts that are of use to the west. So without anybody wanting to shout this from the rooftops, um he becomes one of those people who the British and then the American intelligence services use as a way in to the Soviet networks uh in in Germany.

For the Americans at this stage, the ends justify the means. Barbie provides a link between the CIA and his old networks. And the Americans are very pleased with the information he’s feeding them. He is an opportunist. He will go wherever the cash is and whoever is going to save his skin. [Music] But in June 1949, the truth comes out.

The man the French had sentenced to death for war crimes is working for the Americans. By 1950, the writing’s on the wall uh for Barbie’s usefulness as an agent, and it’s proving very embarrassing to the Americans to have someone who’s committed some pretty best and heinous acts on their payroll. But rather than hand him over to be tried for war crimes, US intelligence opts for a conspiracy plan straight out of the Nazi handbook.

What the Americans decide to do is they think what they will send him down what has now become called the rat line. Operation Rat Line is an Americanrun escape route set up to get rid of embarrassing employees. After being given a new passport and new name by the US, Barbie becomes Klouse Alman. The escape lines ran basically through Germany, Austria, and across the Alps into Italy and then normally out through a port like Genoa.

[Music] Within weeks of leaving Germany, he was on board a ship with $5,000 in his pocket. Destination, South America. It will be 32 years before he is seen in the West again. But in South America, under his new identity, he gets new blood on his hands. He is one of these people who thrives in dictatorships and all the way through the 50s and 60s and 70s he manages to work with various horrible corrupt regimes.

I mean, you know, if there’s something shifting going on in Latin America in the 60s and 70s, you can pretty much bet your bottom dollar that Klaus Barbie’s involved in it somewhere. He actually makes himself really quite wealthy. Although cases like Barbie are few and far between, as the years pass, the zeal to pursue Nazis begins to fail.

Dennazification is officially ended in 1951. Disgusted at how reluctant the authorities have become, increasingly it is down to individuals to take matters into their own hands. These are the Nazi hunters. The Nazi hunters are an extraordinary and curious phenomenon. These were people who had themselves suffered individually at the hands of the Nazis.

There there’s therefore a sense of personal mission, a mission of justice as much uh as of retribution. It devolved to people like Simon Whisin, independent people who tried to hunt down Nazis using limited resources. And really, that just shows you how little there was of a Nazi hunting mentality amongst the Allies.

It was sort of let’s forget about it, don’t mention the war. These documents show that Gekkis was not only a member of a police battalion which carried out the liquidation of Jews, but for individuals, the fight continues. Statements of eyewitnesses. Former Nazis are meticulously tracked down even as far a field as South America.

A lot of people are aware of the fact that Klaus Alman is indeed Klaus Barbie. And uh among them are these couple of Nazi hunters called Serge and Biata Clausfeld. And it’s Barta Clausfeld who decides to go to South America and you know herangs the Bolivians that they’ve got Klaus Barbie in their [Music] borders.

Thanks to the efforts of the Classfelts, Barbie is sensationally returned to France where he is convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. [Music] He dies in the same Leyon prison where he committed so many vile acts in the 1940s. Although never simple and at times morally questionable, dennazification wasn’t a sham. It did succeed.

Its best testament is to look at what Germany is like today. [Music] Nazism has not been a significant political force in Germany since 1945. There’s been a sort of massive change in the way that Germany deals with the Third Reich. They are now facing up to their past with the building of the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin.

The opening up of all these concentration camps as memorial sites, poignant memorial sites. Germany has in fact embraced uh democracy and pluralism and uh individual freedoms with uh a degree of uh zest and commitment which puts other countries to shame. Ultimately denazification did succeed in Germany. Those that had been mind captured had their eyes opened.

The Nazis had used lies and deceit at a time of economic crisis to seduce ordinary people into committing heinous crimes. By seizing power, a small group of criminals were ultimately responsible for the death of over 40 million people. This remains a warning to us all. [Music] Heat. Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat.