The Dying Days Of Hitler's Third Reich

You will have difficulty, as I have, to look into the faces of these defendants and believe that in this 20th century human beings could inflict such sufferings. The Nazis were very much concerned to purify and cleanse German society. What people like Hitler thought was that actually there were parts of the population that were like a cancer. And what you needed to do was to chop out that bit of the population. Persecution of the Jews was a continuous and deliberate policy. Anti-Semitism was promoted to divide and embitter the democratic peoples. The first half of 1945 is probably the darkest six months in Germany's history. Bulletin. Adolf Hitler is dead. He is dead and how he died the world little cares. For Hitler's death millions have prayed and millions are now thankful for justice. In the event of Hitler's death, the Third Reich obviously completely collapses because it's entirely built on the authority and charisma of one figure, Hitler himself of course. It's absolutely vital that Nazi war criminals should be brought to justice. 1920. Hitler began. He was considered just a joke then. A raving crackpot. 1933. Hitler made chancellor. The world hoped he would bring order. He brought catastrophe. The Hitler gang planned world conquest. Rudolph Hiss, now insane in England. Heinrich Himmler, mass murderer and gory. Hitler promised Germany the world. Germany listened but the world ignored the threat. This is as humanitarian but Hitler even then was planning war and the death of countless children. 1938. The Munich year. At Berchtesgaden there was appeasement. The sacrifice of Czechoslovakia, Poland, Norway, the European bloodbath. 1940. Hitler's greatest triumph. It was the fall of France. A dark day for the civilized world. The famous Hitler intuition had clicked till now but mad with power he made two mistakes. He did not invade England and he did invade Russia. There will be no monuments to Hitler but there are many monuments to Hitler. Millions of monuments. A dead child in London's blitz. The dead and the living dead wherever the monster's bloody fascist hand is struck. For civilization you hope for life when this man's ideas are dead. The holocaust. A crime that oversteps and shatters all legal systems. Stole the lives of so many innocent people. Men, women, children. Hitler had made his anti-semitic views public from the moment he reached total control of Germany. Legalized discrimination of the Jews in Germany began immediately after the Nazi seizure of power in January 1933. Laws were introduced to discriminate and dehumanize the Jews. Stripping them of their German citizenships. Anti-semitism was being taught to the population and everyone was too afraid to oppose it. We went in hiding from Holland. I've been born in Vienna and when the Nazis came there the population changed immediately. This was quite quite shocking and amazing. We had many non-Jewish friends and they all turned against us. So you know that was for me as a child something I couldn't understand at all. We were Jewish but not religious and you know this was I think I was nine at the time you know this was a big big shock for me. Violence and economic pressure were tactics used by the Nazi regime to encourage Jews to voluntarily leave the country. Between 1933 and 1945 the Nazis were very much concerned to purify and cleanse German society and they put into place a whole range of measures and laws in order to do this. What people like Hitler thought was that actually there were parts of the population that were like a cancer and what you needed to do was to chop out that bit of the population. Or there were bits of the population that were weak and caused disease within the population. So people who were say chronically alcoholic, people who had severe autism or even mild autism, people who had any form of degenerative disease or inherited disease had to be in some way got rid of. And so what you have is the rise of a kind of medicine that people today really wouldn't understand because we think that medicine is there to help the most helpless and people who are ill and who are sick. And yet what Nazi medicine wanted to do was to get the people who were sick or ill and either sterilize them so they could no longer reproduce and pass on what were seen as defective genes or there was an even more simple solution and that was simply to kill them. And as well as getting rid of these people who were diseased and were disease of population what the Nazis also wanted to do was to remove elements of the population they saw as being akin to a cancer. Now I'm talking of course about Jewish people, Gypsy people, Tinti Roma, I'm talking about homosexuals, I'm talking about anybody who the Nazis regarded as basically being malignant. And the solution was simply to chop them out. So we know that from as early as Hitler's writings in Mein Kampf that he was personally anti-semitic and what we see once the Third Reich comes into power is his personal anti-semitism translated into state policy. So from the very earliest days and months of the Third Reich there were many different measures, legal measures, taken against the Jews and also illegal measures as well. Just as he had promised in Mein Kampf, Hitler is treating the Jews in Germany as an internal enemy. So what you see are laws stripping Jews of their German citizenship. You see awful things like Jews not being allowed to go to swing pools because if a Jew swam in a public swing pool the water would have to be drained because the Jew had dirtied the water. So you can see that you've got this awful, awful both political and cultural exclusion of the Jewish community. The measures against Jewish people came up first slowly but then more dangerous. People disappeared and then in 1942 we went into hiding. Jews were not allowed to walk on the pavements, they had to walk in the gutters. Jews were not allowed to practice their professions. My father couldn't go to work anymore. At first we had to wear an armband, a white armband with a blue Star of David on it. They later changed it to a yellow star which we had to wear. All Jews in Europe had to wear it, one in the front, one in the back. If you walked out without it you could have been shot. When we get to 1938 we come to quite a key moment in the history of Nazi anti-Semitism. We come to the night of the 9th to 10th of November 1938 to a night known as Reichskristallnacht, Kristallnacht or the night of the broken glass. The Nazis just literally set fire to synagogues everywhere and they smash up Jewish shops and Jews are killed. Near on 100 people were killed in the course of the night and between 20 and 30,000 German Jews were taken to concentration camps. This absolutely horrific destruction, slaughter, violence carried out by the state against its own people. It showed the world what Hitler was. He was effectively a gangster and a murderer. After the night of the broken glass the situation for Germany's Jews just got worse and worse from then until the war and of course during the war as well. They were impoverished, they were made to pay a big atonement fine, money was taken from them in order to pay for this calamity that they'd allegedly brought upon themselves. Learning from the T4 program the idea of the total extermination of the Jewish race was developed further. On July 31st 1941 Hermann Goering gave written authorization to Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Reich Main Security Office, to prepare and submit a plan for a total solution to the Jewish question in territories under German control. Heydrich was one of those Nazis who truly even today makes one's blood run cold. You just have to look at the man to see his evil. He is a redoubtable leader, he's ruthless, he's absolutely merciless. It's Heydrich who chairs the infamous Wannsee conference outside Berlin in which the destruction of Europe's Jews is discussed as a kind of cold policy planning meeting but that is Heydrich to a T. Everything is done in an evilly, cruel, ruthless, unemotional way in which he can just plot the destruction of people. Eichmann famously, Adolf Eichmann, who's regarded as the architect of the Holocaust, was one of Heydrich's employees, you know, in department 4B4 of the SD. The purpose of the conference was to ensure cooperation of administrative leaders of various government departments in the implementation of the final solution of the Jewish question. Throughout the course of the meeting Heydrich outlined how European Jews would be rounded up and sent to extermination camps where they would be killed. The conference only lasted around 90 minutes. At the time of the conference Jews were already being murdered. In the Soviet Union a new extermination camp under construction at Belzec and other extermination camps were in the planning stages. Discover the past with exclusive military history documentaries and ad-free podcasts presented by world-renowned historians all on History Hit. Watch them on your smart TV or on the go with your mobile device. Download the app now to watch everything from the gripping story of the Band of Brothers to Operation Barbarossa and D-Day. Immerse yourself in the dramatic stories of this remarkable era by signing up via the link in the description. The decision to exterminate Jews had already been made. And that's exactly what happens in the gas chambers of Treblinka, Chelmno and Auschwitz and places like that. That is a form of racial sterilization. It is Nazi racial hygiene as it was called. It's a disgusting term for a horrific thing and that's what takes place. The conditions in which the Jews were subjected to were demoralizing, dehumanizing and entirely corrupt. My father even said you know we're just gonna work and go home. He thought it's not what happened. My father was taken to the gas chamber and my mother as well and I was left with my sister. Our heads were shaved, we went through cold communal showers and when we got out at the other end we got our concentration camp garb, the striped jackets and skirts. And when we looked at one another we were still the same group but we just looked so different that we couldn't recognize each other. When we went to bed we weren't sure that we'll wake up in the morning. All of us were the same. And if you did wake up you couldn't be sure that you would still be alive in the evening. If you couldn't get off the bank you were finished. Yes I've been asked in the past whether I had any thoughts of what would we do after our liberation. It's an impossible question because in the camp our thoughts were just how to survive that day, how to stay out of trouble because the safest thing to do was to be anonymous, not to be noticed. If you did anything wrong that usually spelt trouble. An awful injustice imposed on the Jewish people. The murdering of Jews was regarded as such a simple task for the SS to undertake. These people are not human. They are not of the same importance as the Aryan bred Germans. We must feel no guilt in eliminating them from our world. All members of the Nazi party were required to play a part in the final solution as it was genocide on a mass scale therefore needed mass participation. These are places that are places of deep deep horror because you didn't go there to work you went there to die and you would arrive and within 30 minutes you'd be dead. Treblinka for example is no bigger if you visited than a football stadium the size of a football pitch and in that very small area around 850,000 men women and children were gassed and it's just the most horrific thought if you ever visit a place like that. Jews were slaughtered just by being shot next to vast pits which would then just be you know buried over and this was just the most horrific form of genocide. I mean gassing of course is horrific too but you know the idea that you would just shoot a baby in the head in front of its mother and then shoot the mother and this would be your day-in day-out job. It beggars belief that supposedly ordinary men in these SS police battalions could go around doing this kind of work but they did and it was eventually recognized by the Nazis that actually the kind of psychological toll it was having on those carrying out the murders was so great that they had to work out a nicer way to kill Jews i.e. through maybe lorries with gas going into them or maybe even gas chambers. So gas chambers are actually invented primarily to spare the sanity of the murderers. That's how twisted Nazi logic becomes. April 1945 the Third Reich crumbles. Years of terror under the ruthless dictatorship comes to an end and for the Nazis the race to escape Europe begins. Even during the Second World War it was realized by the Allies that it was absolutely vital that Nazi war criminals should be brought to justice. Nazis in full retreat from northern France. More headline news of Germans and headlong flight. Record-breaking air attack climaxing the total offensive to bring Hitler down. Germany under explosive pressures facing the grand crack up. Army crack up. Dead Nazis by the thousands along the roads of our mighty northern advance. Tank crack up. Mile after mile of wrecked Nazi equipment. Guns the Germans try to fool us with. Their dummies made of wood mounted on carts and we weren't fooled. After Ersatz food and Ersatz clothes it's Ersatz artillery giving these Canadians a front line land. After Hitler's birthday just days before his suicide Heimrich Himmler and Hermann Goering had fled Berlin. After learning of this information Hitler rewrote his last political will and testament to reflect his anger over their betrayal. Himmler had decided that he was no longer safe in Nazi Germany after his bargaining with the Allies didn't go as planned. He took aside some of his officers and told them to get out of Germany. Particularly Rudolf Herz his fellow commandant of Auschwitz who he warned to disguise himself as German Navy personnel in order to escape. Goering has spent months planning his life without the Fuhrer. After blowing up his own residence and moving all of his possessions illusion that he will be treated fairly by the Allies due to his previous heroic war career. Goering decides to plan together assuming two is better than one. Together they can negotiate an escape however after being overheard by Martin Bormann Hitler's shadow he knows his days are numbered. Himmler knows he will never shake the reputation as leader of the extermination camps and becomes increasingly paranoid that Hitler will become aware of his plans to bargain with the Allies in order to protect himself. It is every man for himself. The first half of 1945 is probably the darkest six months in Germany's history because it's being invaded by the Russians the red army from the east and you've got the other allies coming through from the west and it's it's the Russians who reach Berlin first and when they reach Berlin it's a city in rubble it's a city in flames it's a city in chaos it's a city in which squads of marauding loyal Nazis are going around hanging people who are not taking part in the resistance of the city it's a city in which you then got some Nazis committing suicide it is the most benighted appalling place you can imagine that this is a war brought about by Hitler and this this is a war that Hitler has fought for too long and he's fighting it to the death and he's fighting it to the death of the people who he supposedly loves and he no longer loves them by the end of the war and he says that basically the German people don't deserve him the German people don't deserve Germany and everybody should fight to the death because basically you know they don't deserve to be alive because they failed him. Classic narcissistic thinking. The world is for him and he's not there for the world. Adolf Hitler is dead. Bulletin. Adolf Hitler is dead. He is dead and how he died the world little cares. For Hitler's death millions have prayed and millions are now thankful for justice. A cowardly ending for the man who led Germany into the second world war. He shoots himself in the head 28 feet below the Hitler's last days in the in the Führerbunker under the right chancellery in the center of Berlin are a kind of terrible end of a Shakespearean tragedy as the thunder of Russian artillery all around them and they're deep deep inside this sort of concrete underground fortress. Everybody's sort of kind of going mad and especially Hitler who then gets married to his long-term girlfriend in this sort of kind of bizarre ceremony and then just a few days later Hitler on the 30th of April 1945 decides to take his own life and Eva Brown is going to do the same thing with him. And so he goes into his little living room with his new bride. Nice way to spend your honeymoon and and they they they poison and shoot themselves. Their bodies are then removed by some loyal SS men and they are taken out uh in what passes now for a garden in the right chance room because it's just a kind of pockmarked hellhole of artillery shells and and there they are their bodies are burnt. Less than 24 hours pass. Panic sets in. In the course of the next few days the remaining senior members of the Nazi establishment begin to flee Berlin. Nazi officials begin to scramble around what remains of Berlin. They only have one directive. Evade capture at all costs. They know that the repercussions for their actions will be incomprehensible. The allies are closing in. Senior Nazis begin to sweat. The Fuhrer can no longer protect them. In the event of Hitler's death the Third Reich obviously completely collapses because it's entirely built on the authority and charisma of one figure. Hitler himself of course. So you know what is your zealous Nazi gonna do? Well he's got various options. One option is to follow the same path as Hitler and think a world without Hitler and a world without Nazism is not a world worth living in. So you blow yourself up with a hand grenade along with your wife and kids as one of them did. How charming. Or you maybe shoot yourself or you poison yourself you end your own life. Or they think I'm going to escape. They know that the allies are going to be after them. Many fanatical members of the SS especially know that they've committed war crimes. They may deny to themselves that these things are actually crimes but they know that if you you know slaughter people on the battlefield after they surrendered or if you decide that what you want to do is to gas a million Jews to death then that might be seen as criminal amongst reasonable thinking people. So what they do a lot of these Nazi figures they decide they need to go into Now what they can't do is just get on a plane and go to Buenos Aires or Damascus. You know they have to sort of disguise their identities. They have to sort of you know blend in with the refugees. They have to blend in with the normal German soldiers you know marching in these great columns you know retreating. So you know it's a very confused very muddled time and a lot of senior Nazis and not so senior Nazis try to blend in. Joseph Goebbels cannot live his life without Hitler in power. Along with his wife they poison their children in the fear bunker and then take their own lives. Joseph Goebbels is the Nazi propaganda minister. So he's in charge of cinema, books, the nascent TV industry. He's in charge of all the methods of communication. And so he's in charge of getting the Nazi message out effectively. And now he is married to a very striking blonde woman called Magda. Now Magda has been married before to a very wealthy German industrialist but she eventually gets divorced and marries Joseph Goebbels who was a real Casanova actually. Even though he was short club-footed and not an attractive man you know he had a lot of sexual conquests and Magda was one of them. But actually what you see in the marriage of Joseph Goebbels and Magda is a three-way not in bed but emotionally between those two and Adolf Hitler. Because Adolf Hitler absolutely adored Magda Goebbels and thought that she was the kind of perfect Nazi woman. And she was blonde and she was you know sort of vivacious and she was absolutely devoted to Hitler. She absolutely adored him. Essentially they were in love with each other but also she also loved Goebbels and wanted to have children. She'd already had some children and a child from her first marriage but she wanted to have more children. And so she and Goebbels get married as a way of both of them to get close to Hitler. So Hitler goes and visits the Goebbels couple uninvited. Will spend entire evenings with him until the small hours chatting away. Magda loves that attention. Hitler loves that attention from Magda and Goebbels is of course jealous but he also loves the fact that he's got the Führer in his living room. You know so he's right at the heart of power. Goebbels is not at that stage, the early stages, as important a figure as someone like Hermann Goering. But Goebbels becomes more important because of this weird kind of Nazi love triangle if you like. And Goebbels gets very very jealous of his wife's relationship with Hitler. And Hitler really does dote on Magda Goebbels. And you know as a sort of kind of mark of how much the couple both love Hitler, they name their six children all with the letter H. You know in homage to Hitler. You know it just shows you how kind of Heinrich Himmler knows he's at the top of the list. He knows he won't get away with what he's done. The blood has stained his hands. Heinrich Himmler is one of the most pivotal figures in the Third Reich and he's most famous for being the head of the SS. Now that is the Nazi elite armed force, not part of the army. It's originally called the Schutzstaffel, the protection squad, that's just there to protect Himmler. And what Himmler does from you know right from the beginning is to build the SS up into a state within a state. Because by the height of Nazi power, Himmler is in charge of an organization that has a kind of civil side to it, an administrative side to it, which is huge and has fingers in so many pies. And also the Waffen-SS, the armed SS, which is there you know to help fight the war. And its troops are notorious for being some of the most sort of kind of evil and deadly troops you know as part of the war. And what the SS also runs is the whole concentration camp network. So it's the SS men doing the not only exterminations but they're also the ones who are appropriating wealth from the Jews and all the other slaves being used and appropriating all the stuff that they own and also selling this workforce to big German industries who are paying for its use. All that is going to the pockets of the SS. So the SS becomes incredibly rich as an organization. And it's also run by police forces, you name it, it's the state within the state. And the man at the top of it is Heinrich Himmler. Himmler, like Hitler, looked like the very inverse of the kind of Aryan blonde six foot five tall superhuman. You know he was a very short man, he has a weak jawline, a bit ugly, he's a pebble glasses, former chicken farmer. You know he looked very very unimpressive. He was also very obsessed with mysticism. You know he liked his kind of runes and his magic and cultism. So he was really drawn to a lot of mumbo jumbo if you like. Hitler didn't have that much time for it but it was Himmler who tried to create this whole idea of the SS as almost like King Arthur's court. And he had this castle called Bevelsburg which he had as a room to celebrate the kind of holiness of the SS. The whole thing is kind of bonkers and insane. But actually Himmler, beyond all that nonsense, is a really really smart operator. It's him who gathers so much power and so much wealth of the SS. He had a lot of sort of psychosomatic problems. I mean he was not a well man in many ways but also what he was also was a man who had lots of affairs. You know he used his time away from home to carry out affairs you know with quite a few people. You don't really want to get too deeply into the brains of your Nazi bigwig like Himmler because it's not a nice place to be. And also he was responsible for the holocaust because you know it was the SS largely who carried it out. And when he went to go and kind of witness a slaughter some brains were splattered upon his coat and it caused him to vomit. This is the man responsible for it and he can't cope with it. I'm not saying it's desirable that he should have coped with it but it just shows you that he didn't actually have the personal appetite for butchering people himself and got other people to do it. In many ways he was a coward. The allies are closing in and the odds of a successful escape are diminishing day by day. Allied soldiers know who to look for. Their time is up. Hermann Goering was considered Hitler's successor by the allies and therefore was target number one. The U.S. Army are catching up entering Berlin with a firm plan to capture as many Nazi officials as they can. Their aim? To bring them before a court on trial for the atrocities they helped make possible. In 1943 there was a thing called the Moscow Declaration that announced that all these criminals would be chase quotes to the utmost ends of the earth and brought to justice. Now this was to achieve two things. First to tell any Nazi war criminal we're on to you. You're not going to get away with what you're doing because we're going to win this war and then we're going to come and find you and then we're going to come and bring you to justice. And also the people in the occupied territories could see the Moscow Declaration and go good the allies are going to do something about this and it means that these people may commit fewer criminal acts against us if they're worried that when the war's over the allies are going to come and get them. The international manhunt begins. Nazi officials knew that they were wanted dead or alive. The allied forces Britain, France, the United States, and Russia all came to the agreement that they wanted to prosecute any living Nazi party officials for the crime they had committed. The four allied countries all had different justice systems and decided that rather than try each man four times they should come up with an agreement on how they would run the trials. The London charter for the Nuremberg trials held in August 1945 saw the allied countries agree on a trial and tribunal court system in which each country would have a judge present. The Nuremberg trials represented a very important moment an unprecedented moment and a way for the allied powers really to bring to justice some of those key Nazi leaders as representatives of key Nazi organizations who had carried out such unspeakably cruel acts of war crimes crimes against humanity and crimes against the peace and the allies chose Nuremberg as quite a fitting place I think because Nuremberg first of all as the second largest city in Bavaria was kind of at the heartland of the sort of rise to power of the Nazis but also it was the place where the Nazi race laws the Nuremberg laws were promulgated in 1935 as well it was maybe the predominant reason that it was where the Nazi party held its annual party rallies so Nuremberg's a very very focal point of the regime and I think that they hoped that by holding the international military tribunal and other trials that followed there that it would be a place where they could bring some kind of closure to the Nazi regime and to its atrocities this international military tribunal which we now today call the Nuremberg trials took place at the palace of justice in Nuremberg largely because it was relatively unbombed and unscathed but also it was very symbolic and from about 1945-46 to 49 there were several trials that took place at Nuremberg but the one that most people associate is the international military tribunal of around 20 top Nazi figures and that was to show the world that actually there could be some justice meted out not just by one country but all the allies the French the Russians the Americans and the British it was very radical at the time there had never been an international criminal court like it and so this was a kind of coming together of a lot of different legal systems a lot of different political systems what it was saying to the world was listen these people who commit war crimes these people who commit genocide these people who commit crimes against humanity they are never ever going to get away with it ever again the prisoners are kept under day and night surveillance by united states armed guards they are fed like ordinary criminals and as Robert H Jackson chief American prosecutor completes his case plans move ahead through this tunnel the Nazis will be taken to the courtroom now being rebuilt for the trial in mid-November the indictment represents the first time four different nations and systems of justice have been welded to try war criminals it also condemns the whole Nazi party for crimes against humanity justice catches up with the monsters of fascism the trial was set to put the horrors of the Nazi regime on display for the world to see their terror and corruption had been exposed to the world and now they were going to pay the persecution of the Jews was a continuous and deliberate policy it was a policy directed against other nations as well as against the Jews themselves anti-Semitism was promoted to divide and embitter the democratic peoples and to soften their resistance to Nazi aggression you will have difficulty as I have to look into the faces of these defendants and believe that in this 20th century human beings could inflict such sufferings as will be proved here on their own countrymen as well as upon so called inferior enemies they decided on three major charges that the Nazi officials would face and that they would each be allowed a defending counsel if these men are the first war leaders of a defeated nation to be prosecuted in the name of the law they are also the first to be given a chance to plead for their lives in the name of the law the international military tribunal formed by the allies was given the task of trying 24 of the most important political and military leaders of the third reich the purpose to bring Nazi criminals to justice bringing peace of mind to the survivors and for the victims families so the trial was a rational and civilized response to the irrationality and the brutality of the Nazi regime with plans to broadcast live this trial would go down in history one of the most symbolic executions of justice world would not tolerate such hate crimes ever again