The Nazis: A Warning from History - The Road to Treblinka

[Music]

[Narrator] For thirteen months between July 1942 and August 1943

trains ran through the Polish countryside along this siding,

disgorging thousands of men, women and children in this clearing.

[wind blowing]

This use to be the SS barracks.

This the Undressing Room.

And this the route to the gas chambers,

known by the Nazis as the Path to Heaven.

This killing factory, one of six the Nazis built in Poland,

is near a tiny hamlet, who's name is still infamous today.

Treblinka

How could it happen?

How could such places ever come to exist?

[Sounds of fire]

[crowd noises]

The Warsaw Ghetto

In 1940 the Nazis imprisoned Polish Jews in ghettos like this.

A temporary measure whilst they decided

what the Jews' eventual fate should be.

The Nazis brutally persecuted the Jews.

They thought them racially inferior, but dangerous.

They believed there was a world-wide Jewish conspiracy

that would destroy Germany

and that Jews were carries of Bolshevism.

As a result, there had been some Nazi rhetoric

that all the Jews should be destroyed.

But even as late as 1940,

there were still no Nazi plans systematically to exterminate the Jews.

Up til now, the emphasis in Nazi planning had been expulsion.

The most bizarre plan was their proposed plan

in June 1940 by an official in the German Foreign Office, Franz Rademacher

To resettle the Jews on a tropical island,

under German police control.

[Rademacher's voice] In the peace treaty,

France must make the island of Madagascar

available for the solution of the Jewish question.

[Narrator] But the Madagascar Plan came to nothing.

For by the time these pictures were taken in the Spring of 1941,

Adolph Hitler had decided on a radical action that was to

alter the course of the war

and change the Nazi policy towards the Jews.

Hitler had decided as the fulfillment of his

great ideological dream to invade the Soviet Union.

[explosions]

[Narrator] The German operation, Barbarossa,

began on June the 22, 1941.

[German singing with explosions]

[Narrator] Ever since the 1920's,

the Nazis had been ideologically opposed to Communism.

So to them this was not just a normal war,

this was a crusade.

[German signing with explosions and gunfire]

[Narrator] Unlike the conflict in the west,

the German soldiers knew the war on the eastern front

was to be fought without rules.

[Narrator] As they entered Soviet held territory,

the Germans encountered hundreds of thousands eastern Jews.

Nazi propaganda made it plain what

the German public should think of them.

Hitler intended to colonize the captured territory in the east,

and eventually settle Germans there.

Special killing squads, einsatzgruppen,

were now ordered to cleanse the area of undesirables.

In charge of the einsatzgruppen was

one of Hitler's most ruthless subordinates, Reinhard Heydrich.

Thirty-seven year-old head of the Secutiry Police.

He issued this directive immediately after the invasion of the Soviet Union.

[Heydrich speaking] The following are to be executed

all officials of the Comintern,

officials of Senior and Middle rank,

and extremists in the party, the central committee,

and the provincial and district committees.

The People's Commissars, all Jews in the service of the party and the state.

No steps are to be taken to interfere with any purges

that may be initiated by an anti-communist or anti-Jewish elements

in the newly occupied territories.

On the contrary, these are to be secretly encouraged.

[Narrator} Heydrich was a cold, desk-bound murderer.

who prided himself on being a man of culture.

Heydrich was a talented musician

and held weekend parties for his friends in the SS castle of Wewelsburg.

[Narrator] Heydrich and his boss, head of the SS, Heinrch Himmler,

would together organize this quantum leap forward for Hitler.

The murder of selected Communists and Jews

as the army advanced eastward.

Hitler had always said the Jews were behind Communism.

The crusade in the east was to attempt to crush both.

Under Heydrich's command, were four einsatzgruppen, or killing squads.

Each with between 600 and 1,000 men.

And each was led by a educated German.

Einsatzgruppen A was led by Dr. Walther Stahlecker

He held a doctorate in law.

Einsatzgruppen B was led by Arthur Nebe

head of the German Criminal Police.

Einsatzgruppen C was led by Otto Rasch.

He held two academic doctorates.

One in law and one in political science.

So he was known as Dr. Dr. Rasch.

Einsatzgruppen D was led by Otto Ohlendorf

A gifted economist and the most intellectual of the Einsatzgruppen leaders.

Bloodiest of them all was Stahlecker's Einsatzgruppen A

which operated in the Baltic states.

[German singing]

Einsatzgruppen A followed the German army into Lithuania

in the early days of the invasion.

Lithuanians were a staunchly Catholic people,

but Stalin's Communist had invaded their country

and oppressed their traditions and their beliefs.

So when the Germans reached Kaunus, Lithuania's second city,

they were welcomed as liberators.

[German signing and cheering]

[Narrator] Throughout Lithuania symbols of Communism were destroyed, and not just symbols.

To many of the Lithuanian Nationalists just as to Nazis,

Communism was linked to Judaism.

In Kaunus, locals rounded up Jewish men

particularly those they believed had Communist sympathies.

They turned on them here.

In an act of revenge of the type that Heydrich

asked Einsatzgruppen to encourage.

A German army photographer witnessed what happened.

[Narrator] Once all the Jews had been bludgeoned to death,

one of the killers climbed on top of the bodies with his accordion.

{Accordion music}

{Narrator} But it was the Nazis who played the major role

in organizing the rounding up of those Heydrich called to be executed.

In the Baltic states, Einsatzgruppen A took

Heydrich's directive as the bare minimum

and soon began to arrest not just Jewish leaders

but all young Jewish men.

They were taken out of the towns and shot.

That August, less than two months after the German invasion,

Himmler visited Minsk, one of a series of morale boosting visits

he paid to the Einsatzgruppen, the police,

and other SS units in the east.

[Narrator} A crucial part of Himmler's itinerary was not filmed

for this propaganda newsreel, but it is mentioned

in Himmler's appointment book.

Recently discovered in the Moscow State Archive.

The entry for the 15th of August, 1941

during Himmler's visit to Minsk reads,

Vormittags before lunch attend execution

of Jews and Partisans just outside Minsk

Among those who attended the execution

was Lieutenant Frentz, a German cameraman.

[Narrator] Himmler witnessed a similar Einsatzgruppen execution to this.

Filmed in the sand dunes of Liepaja in Latvia in 1941.

[Narrator]Himmler now announced an extension of the cleansing in the east.

Since the Nazis thought that every single Jew

was a supporter of Bolshevism,

they now said that every single Jew was a military threat.

So women and children in the newly conquered territories

were to be killed as well.

Himmler later tried to justify the killing of Jewish children,

by saying the Nazis could not allow a generation of avengers to grow up

as they would cause problems in the future.

But Himmler was worried about his killers.

Arthur Nebe, commander of Einsatzgruppen B,

told him that the psychological effect of murdering

at such close quarters was clearly effecting some of his men.

So Himmler pressed on with experiments

to find a more humane method of killing.

Humane for the executioners, not the victims.

The Nazis experimented with gas as a means of killing

and filmed some of their experiments.

Whilst the gassing experiments continued,

the shooting carried on in the east.

The Einsatzgruppen meticulously recorded their killings.

In that summer of 1941,

their records show their murders drastically increasing

coinciding with a massive increase in the

number of police units sent to the east.

The killing squads based in Kaunus in Lithuania

had killed 4,400 Jews in July 1941.

In August, they killed more than 38,000.

Including women and children.

Stahlecker, the commander of Einsatzgruppen A, boasted that

new possibilities in the east allow a complete clearing

up of the Jewish question.

[Narrator} In the Lithuanian village of Butrimonys,

the consequences in this extension in the killing

were felt on September 9, 1941.

Before the arrival of the Germans,

the Jews of Butrimonys had been tolerated by their fellow Lithuanians.

Though many villagers had envied the Jews, their supposed wealth.

But now, with the prospect of theft and plunder,

some locals were happy to respond to the German order

to march their remaining Jews along this road out of the town.

[Narrator] Riva Losanskaya and her mother escaped,

but the remaining Jews were driven off the road

towards where this thicket of trees now grows.

Here, in scenes that were repeated throughout

the Einsatzgruppen area of operation, the Jews were ordered to undress.

[Narrator] Villagers had come to watch,

some out of curiosity, others out of greed.

[Narrator] The killing here was carried out by

Lithuanian collaborators, acting under German orders.

The suffering is recorded in the Einsatzgruppen killing book,

as the 9th of September, 1941, Butrimonys.

67 Jewish men, 370 Jewish women, 303 Jewish children

A total of 740 Jews killed.

The same day in nearby Alytus, the killing book records

1,279 Jews murdered.

The next day in Merkine, 854.

And in Varena, 831.

In the Baltic states, more than 80% of the killing squads

were made up of locals, acting under German Einsatzgruppen orders.

Men like, Petras Zelionka.

[Narrator] After the war ended, Soviets sent

Petras Zelionka to a Siberian gulag.

His former comrades, against whom he gave evidence, were executed.

[Narrator] That Autumn of 1941,

while Petras Zelionka and his comrades carried on killing,

Hitler directed the war in the east from here at the Wolf's Liar,

his headquarters in a forest near Rastenburg in east Prussia.

Hitler's talk was of annihilation.

In September of 1941, he said that Linengrad

should vanish from the surface of the earth.

And in this atmosphere of blood lust and destruction,

He was also privately expressing his undying hatred of the Jews.

[Hitler speaking] That race of criminals has on its conscience,

the two million dead of World War 1.

And now, already, hundreds of thousands more.

{Narrator} To his staff at his headquarters,

Hitler talked of taking revenge against the Jews.

[Narrator] But even before America entered the war,

Hitler showed no mercy to the Jews in the east.

And now he was about to show no mercy

to the Jews in the rest of the Nazi empire.

In September 1941, two new measures showed that

German Jews were under increased threat.

Hitler agreed to an order that said that

German Jews must for the first time wear the yellow star.

And a secret order from Himmler said that

Hitler had authorized that beginning that Autumn,

all Jews from Germany, Austria, and the occupied Czech lands

should be transported east.

[Happy Music]

350 miles to the west of Hitler's headquarters,

Berliners relaxed by the capital's lakes.

So far they had heard only good news from the war in the east.

[Narrator] But that autumn, there was one new sign on the streets

that showed life was changing,

at least for some of the capital's population.

Now the Jews were marked.

[Gunther Ruschin] There's nothing to say.

it's bad, it's bad you are signed.

You have a sign on you.

Nobody would have thinked I am a Jew.

But this, we had to wear it.

The hate grew up.

We felt it.

The Germans always said, the Jews are not Germans.

And I said that I am a German of Jewish faith.

And for them, I am not a German, but I am a German.

[Narrator] As autumn turned to winter in 1941,

and the war bogged down in the mud of the east.

The Nazis knew there would be no easy victory over the Soviet Union.

And there was a new enemy to content with,

for after Germany's ally, Japan,

attacked Pearl Harbor in December,

Germany declared war on the United States.

Hitler had a series of meetings with Nazi leaders

that December to discuss the consequences of all this for the Nazi cause.

And the fate of the Jews was also discussed.

A new piece of evidence from Himmler's appointment diary,

shows that on the 18th of December, 1941,

Hitler met with Himmler and the topic was

the Judenfrage - The Jewish Question

The entry is written in Himmler's own hand.

Himmler writes cryptically alongside,

"to be exterminated as partisans"

We can't know exactly what this means.

It's likely that this is camouflage language to justify

the murder of the Jews in the east to the German army.

But the diary entry clearly links Hitler with the killings.

[Narrator] In January 1942, a conference was called here,

at the Wannsee on the outskirts of Berlin.

By now, Hitler had authorized that all Jews

in Nazi occupied Europe should be deported to their deaths.

And the meeting here was called to work out the details.

The discussion was chaired by Henrich Heydrich,

who several months earlier had been asked to compile

a plan for The Final Solution to the Jewish problem.

The minutes of the Wannsee Conference were

taken by Heydrich's specialist in Jewish matters, Adolph Eichmann.

The minutes were deliberately euphemistic

and the talk is still of the evacuation of the Jews.

But we kno this was code for extermination,

because Hans Frank, the Nazi who ran part of occupied Poland,

told his Senior officials what the Wannsee Conference was really about.

{Hans Frank speaking} What will happen to the Jews?

Do you imagine they will actually be settled in villages in the east?

People said to us in Berlin,

"Why should we go to all this trouble?"

"Liquidate them yourselves."

{Narrator} Now deportations were occurring all over Germany.

The forced eviction of these Jews in Dresden,

was filmed by an amateur cameraman.

This was the final act in a whole series of incremental persecutions

which the Jews of Germany had suffered.

First they had been denied Reich citizenship,

then the right to a state education,

then they had had their property confiscated.

Now the Jews were told they were to be sent east to work camps.

[Narrator] More Jews were deported from Berlin

than any other German city, 55,000.

Many of them from the freight station here at Putlitzbrücke.

[Gunther Hosheen] We were trucked there.The truck was emptied.

And the people were compacted immediately inside the car.

And then, in the moment they went in

they had the package of four slices of bread

given from the community, from the Jewish community.

It was an atmosphere of fear.

An atmosphere of big fear.

There were babies, there were little children,

and they cried and the mother said

"Behave well, don't cry"

We couldn't think, we couldn't think.

{Narrator} There were Germans who helped Jews.

Some even hid them.

The majority acted as Erwin Massuthe did,

as he saw the deportations at Putlitzbrucke across the street.

[Narrator] The fate of these Jews was suppose to be a secret.

Just how big a secret switchboard operator, Alfons Schulz,

learned when a colleague overheard a top secret conversation

at the Fuhrer's headquarters, in May 1942.

[Narrator] Hitler wanted the Jews annihilated

and he wanted it kept a secret,

but it couldn't be kept a secret from everybody.

As the train carrying Gunther Hosheen traveled east,

he learned his intended fate from an unexpected source.

The Frankfort border, the train stopped at the station.

And then we shouted, "Please give us some water. We are thirsty."

And we heard crying back,

"You damn Jews! Didn't they kill you yet?"

The workers at the station in Frankfort,

if they knew, of course they told,

didn't they kill you yet?

The population must have known it

or must have imagined what will happen

or what they are doing us.

[Narrator] Nazi propagandists certainly didn't want

the German public to dwell on the possible fate of the Jews.

In the Winter of 1942, as the deportations continued,

this was the propaganda image of Germany

that Goebbels preferred to sell to the general public.

{German singing}

It is impossible to tell exactly how many

ordinary Germans knew what was really happening to the Jews.

But the same month this propaganda film was shown

in German cinemas, December 1942,

a Nazi secret intelligence report records disquiet

among some Germans in the south of the country.

[Male voice] One of the strongest causes of unease

among those attached to the church and the rural population,

is that at the present time based on news from Russia,

in which shooting and extermination of the Jews is spoken about.

The news frequently leaves great anxiety,

care, and worry among those sections of the population.

According to widely help opinion in the rural population,

it is not at all certain that we will win the war,

and if the Jews return to Germany,

they will exact dreadful revenge upon us.

[Narrator] By the time this secret report was written at the end of 1942,

the Nazi's successful experiments with gas

had led to the creation of special extermination centers.

at Auschwitz, Belzec, Chelmno, Sobibor, Majdanek, and Treblinka.

[sad music]

[Narrator] And it wasn't just German Jews

who were sent to the new camps.

Now that the Nazis had developed an efficient means to kill the Jews

they wanted to eliminate them everywhere in occupied Europe.

From Holland to Greece, and France to Poland.

[Narrator] Other groups the Nazis considered a threat were also to suffer.

Most prominently, Europe's gypsies.

Trains converged on Nazi occupied Poland

and its extermination centers.

This film shows Jews from Bulgarian occupied territory

being transported to Treblinka.

{Narrator} In this remote spot, about three-quarters of a million people were murdered,

though we can never know exactly how many died.

But because a handful managed to escape,

we can know what the camp looked like.

This drawing was done by one of the escapees, Samuel Willenberg

and it shows how sophisticated the Nazi killing machine had become

since the early days of the Einsatzgruppen shootings in the east.

Treblinka stations was designed to look as normal as possible

with train timetables and a waiting room.

New arrivals would be driven through to the undressing barracks,

and they were told they were at a hygiene stop

and must take a quick shower to be disinfected

before continuing their onward journey.

[Narrator] A connecting path led from the undressing barracks

through two high fences to the gas chambers.

[Narrator] If any of the arrivals said they were sick,

then the Nazis directed them to Treblinka's special hospital.

[Narrator] Samuel Willenberg is one of fewer than 70 known survives from Treblinka.

More than 99% of those who arrived here were murdered.

The vast majority within three hours of arriving.

[Narrator] The Nazis didn't just kill, they stole.

Once the victims had been murdered,

their clothes and valuables were sorted

and the plunder sent back to Germany.

In 1943, their murderous work completed,

the Nazis tried to eliminate all traces of the camp.

But not because they were ashamed of their crimes.

That same year, 1943, Himmler spoke to his

SS colleagues about the extermination of the Jews.

[Himmler speaking] We know what it means when 100 corpses are piled together.

When 500 are piled together, or when 1,000 are piled together.

To endure this and at the same time,

ignoring some moments of human weakness,

to have remained decent, this is what has made us tough.

It is one of the most glorious chapters in our history,

which has not, and may never be written.

[Narrator] But the crimes of the Nazis would be discovered,

because by now they were losing the war.

In the east, the Nazis saw the enemy they feared the most,

the Russians, doing the impossible and winning.

{music}