PBS_Project Nazi_5of6_Himmler's Empire of Terror
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00:00May 1945, Germany is in ruins.
00:05The Nazis have been defeated.
00:08German soldiers are surrendering to the British Army
00:11to avoid capture by vengeful Russians.
00:15But the British know that Nazi criminals are hiding among them.
00:23They notice a short, middle-aged man wearing an eyepatch behaving suspiciously.
00:30His identity papers say he is Sergeant Heinrich Hitzinger.
00:35When they confront him, he makes an extraordinary revelation.
00:40He takes off his eyepatch, replaces it with spectacles
00:46and announces his real name.
00:51Heinrich Himmler.
00:54For the people who actually captured Himmler, he's almost as big as Hitler himself.
01:00He's one of the most famous, stroke infamous Nazis of them all.
01:06Himmler was totally committed to Hitler's plans for world domination.
01:12Himmler was someone Hitler always trusted.
01:16He knew that Himmler would always be loyal to him.
01:20He commanded the most evil organisation in history, the SS.
01:25It sent millions of people to their deaths.
01:29This is the man who has been in charge of the network of terror, the tentacles of terror.
01:37Starting as Hitler's bodyguard, Himmler grew the SS into a vast organisation,
01:43a model for a future Nazi state.
01:46A model for a future Nazi state.
01:49And he would stop at nothing to create it.
01:52The SS was a central pillar of the Nazi regime in the Third Reich.
01:57It was the most violent organisation.
02:00They carried out the mass crimes, they planned the mass crimes.
02:04Without the SS, the Holocaust couldn't have been carried out.
02:16THE HOLOCAUST
02:371923, Munich in southern Germany.
02:41Armed right-wing nationalists are making a dramatic attempt
02:45to seize power led by Adolf Hitler.
02:48One of them is Heinrich Himmler.
02:50He's carrying the Nazi flag at the head of Hitler's troops.
02:54This is the Beer Hall Putsch, the Nazis' first attempt to overthrow democracy.
03:01For Himmler, who fantasises about being a great military leader,
03:05it's the most exciting moment of his life.
03:09Himmler starts out as being a very minor figure indeed in the Third Reich.
03:13He's a very conservative, comfortable Bavarian family.
03:16For Himmler to be taking part in a street paramilitary putsch in 1923
03:21is a real quantum shift from anything he's done previously in his career.
03:25He missed out on being involved in the First World War because he was still in training.
03:29This is a real moment when he announces himself in the public sphere
03:32and starts to live up to some of these masculine fantasies of being a soldier.
03:36But the Nazis are stopped right here in front of an old war memorial by the police.
03:42Bullets fly. 16 of Hitler's men are killed.
03:47Himmler is no hero.
03:49He flees, dropping the flag on the ground where it's soaked in the blood of the Nazi dead.
03:56By chance, Himmler is linked to the Nazi Party's most sacred icon, the blood flag.
04:04Martyrdom was really the essence of a lot of what the Nazis were doing, their rituals.
04:11For example, the ritual of the blood flag at Nuremberg where Hitler carries the flag
04:16and he baptises every flag of the stormtroopers with the blood flag.
04:22So it's a kind of transmission of divine essence.
04:27Himmler's connection with the blood flag is a crucial factor in his rise to power.
04:34He joins the stormtroopers, the Nazi Party's paramilitaries.
04:39Their job is to take on Hitler's political enemies in the streets.
04:44Himmler joins in, but he's out of place among so many hardened brawlers.
04:50When Hitler creates a totally new force, he has a chance to make his mark.
04:55The SS roots are in 1923 when Hitler first forms a personal bodyguard to look after him when he's in public
05:01because his appearances are causing increasing agitation on the Munich scene.
05:05So it's from this moment that you start to see the trajectory of the SS that Himmler picks up with and accelerates.
05:12The new unit is simply called the Protection Squad, Schutzstaffel in German.
05:18The SS is born.
05:21Himmler exploits his connection with the blood flag to be accepted into the SS.
05:27What he lacks in military experience, he makes up with his natural organisational skills.
05:33In just four years, he pushes everyone else aside to become the leader of the SS.
05:40He does seem to have this genius for manipulating people, for administration, for organisation,
05:48and takes his opportunities when they come.
05:50But it is extraordinary how he rises up the ranks and how quickly he does,
05:56and how quickly he grips this whole regime within the regime.
06:02In his first two years as leader, Himmler expands the SS tenfold to 3,000 members.
06:09He found schools and training academies to indoctrinate new recruits with Nazi ideology,
06:15including extreme anti-Semitism.
06:18But despite his organisation's youth and rapid growth,
06:21Himmler portrays the SS as the spiritual descendants of medieval German warriors.
06:28The SS was able to create a myth around their organisation.
06:32They also considered themselves as an order, so rituals and symbols like daggers were very important.
06:39They very often had one element of the German or even Germanic past.
06:43You can see this with the names of many SS divisions.
06:47So Götz von Berlichingen, Frunzberg, Hohenstaufen were all personalities of medieval times.
06:54Were all personalities of medieval times or early modern German history.
07:00So each single SS member should consider himself like being part of an old long tradition dating back centuries.
07:11Himmler doesn't just want the SS to look superior, he wants them to be superior, racially superior.
07:19His SS men must prove that they are thoroughly Germanic,
07:22with no Jewish ancestors at least as far back as 1800, 1760 for officers.
07:32To encourage them to breed more Aryan supermen, Himmler invents a pseudo-pagan SS marriage ceremony.
07:39It's all part of his plan to make the SS the dominant elite of the future Nazi state.
07:46Himmler becomes one of the foremost ideologues in Nazi Germany.
07:49You can see the SS as being very much like an ideological cavalry of the Third Reich,
07:54perhaps some sort of priesthood, a possessor of the deeper secrets of the Nazi creed.
07:59Halfway as he believed in it, it's impossible to gauge, but he saw it as a very effective political tool.
08:04And he sees it as a way to make the SS seem more mysterious, more select,
08:10and a means of creating a common ethos amongst increasingly diverse elements of the SS.
08:16But standing in Himmler's way are the stormtroopers, the original Nazi paramilitaries.
08:22Its leader, Ernst Röhm, is a tough war veteran with medals and scars to prove it.
08:28He recruits millions of volunteers to fight the Nazi party's enemies.
08:33By 1933, the stormtroopers have become so powerful, even Hitler feels threatened by them.
08:39The relations between the Nazi party and the SA, the brown shirts or stormtroopers,
08:44were always a bit fraught because the stormtroopers are in a way more radical
08:50in terms of use of physical force than the Nazis.
08:53The stormtroopers are also more politically radical than most Nazi leaders.
08:59Its working-class members believe in the socialist part of National Socialism.
09:04They look forward to seizing the aristocracy's land,
09:07and Röhm boasts about turning his force into a people's army.
09:14Their leader, Ernst Röhm, is making a lot of noises about using the then 4 million strong brown shirts
09:21to replace the army, and the army generals say, no, you can't do this.
09:25In the past, Hitler depended on stormtrooper muscle to drive his political enemies off the streets.
09:31But in 1933, Hitler becomes Chancellor and wants to look more respectable.
09:37Röhm and his thugs threaten the establishment Hitler has just joined.
09:41They are becoming an embarrassment.
09:44The SA were really not disciplined at all.
09:47They were kind of layer buds who just got very, very drunk.
09:51People were terrified of them, in fact.
09:54They were armed semi-mutinous thugs.
09:58But for a time, this served Hitler's interest,
10:01and when it didn't serve Hitler's interest, he quite literally, of course, beheaded them.
10:07July 1934. Senior stormtroopers relax at an Alpine hotel.
10:14Early in the morning, SS men burst in and arrest Ernst Röhm in his bedroom,
10:19along with other stormtrooper leaders.
10:23Dazed and in shock, they are executed without trial.
10:27The organisation never recovers from this Night of the Long Knives.
10:32Its independence is over, and stormtrooper membership rapidly declines.
10:37Hitler wanted to get rid of the SA.
10:40The SS was seen as much more loyal,
10:44and Himmler saw the chance that his SS could fulfil the new central role
10:50within the Nazi party, within the Nazi regime.
10:54So this is why he supported the Night of the Long Knives.
11:09Himmler takes advantage of this power vacuum
11:12to infiltrate his own men throughout the German state.
11:18What he is able to do is say,
11:20look, you don't like those Prussian aristocrats, you don't like the army.
11:24This way, we can maintain control.
11:27We can be your own personal military.
11:30We can be your own personal security office, your intelligence office.
11:34We can have control of every part of the state,
11:37which means that you have control of every part of the state.
11:40He's attracted to Hitler, and he thinks, well, great, fantastic.
11:43Himmler now accelerates his plan to establish an SS state.
11:47He created the first Nazi security and intelligence organisation,
11:51the Sicherheitsdienst, or SD, in 1932.
11:55They spy on anyone seen as a threat.
11:58Communists, trade unionists, journalists,
12:01even Nazi party members are investigated.
12:05So, when Hitler takes power in 1933, the SD are ready.
12:10They already have lists of their political opponents
12:14who are arrested and sent to the first SS concentration camp, Dachau.
12:19Dachau is by far the most important of the early Nazi concentration camps
12:23because it's the first camp that's set up solely by the SS,
12:27and to an extent it's a model for the later SS camps in the 1930s.
12:32By the summer of 1933, up to 200,000 opponents of the Nazis,
12:37again, mainly on the left, had been put into concentration camps,
12:41beaten up, maltreated.
12:43Even the official figures show that 600 were killed.
12:46Prisoners who survive in Dachau are forced to work.
12:50They build the camp itself and then produce everything it needs,
12:54from furniture to boots.
12:56Himmler soon realises that his captive workforce is a valuable asset.
13:01He takes a close interest in the creation and construction of Dachau,
13:05visiting it several times.
13:09Dachau becomes probably the SS's most important economic initiative
13:13in the 1930s.
13:15You have the concentration camp itself,
13:17you have enormous training barracks for concentration camp guards,
13:21and you have the prisoner labour.
13:23And here you see the first routes of deployment of prisoner labour
13:27for economic purposes that you would see flourish throughout the system.
13:31Prisoners are soon forced to turn out a range of goods
13:35for the commercial market.
13:37The SS even corners the bottled water market.
13:40The SS becomes more and more powerful.
13:43It takes on all kinds of different functions.
13:46It has a whole economic empire.
13:49Himmler, for example, was a freshwater fanatic.
13:52He didn't believe in alcohol,
13:54and the most popular German mineral water, called Apollinaris,
13:59became part of the SS's economic empire.
14:02I can never drink a glass of Apollinaris without thinking about this.
14:07As his business empire grows,
14:09Himmler also gains more and more influence.
14:13As his business empire grows,
14:15Himmler also gains power over state security.
14:19Hermann Goering creates his own secret state police
14:22from the political and intelligence sections of the Prussian police in 1933.
14:27Within a year, Himmler wins control of it.
14:31It's known as the Gestapo.
14:34Its headquarters on Prince Albert Street in Berlin becomes notorious.
14:39Today, a memorial stands in its place.
14:43In the 1930s, this building and the men who work here
14:47strike terror into all who oppose the Nazis.
14:59The Gestapo set up a prison here in the basement of the southern building.
15:04There were 38 single cells and a larger common cell.
15:08Here, people were held for the duration of their interrogation by the Gestapo.
15:16When someone was arrested by the Gestapo, he was brought here,
15:20and it was the Gestapo's aim to get them to talk as quickly as possible.
15:24During the interrogation, there would be brutal torture.
15:28Torture was always an integral part of the investigation.
15:32It was normal.
15:35So normal, in fact, that the work of the Gestapo
15:38was well known by the German public.
15:46When you think of the title of the Gestapo, the secret state police,
15:51you get the impression that it was an organization that worked in secret,
15:55identifying hidden enemies of the regime.
15:58And to some extent, they did that, of course.
16:01But the Gestapo was anything but a secret organization.
16:07They operated in the open. Their work was reported in the newspapers.
16:11So the people definitely knew the Gestapo existed and what its job was.
16:20In 1936, Hitler makes a fateful decision.
16:24He centralizes control of all the existing local and regional police forces under Himmler,
16:30hugely increasing his empire.
16:33Himmler soon not only controlled his own SS, but also the police.
16:39So police and SS did not merge.
16:42They were still two separate organizations, but all under one umbrella.
16:47German police, just like any other police service, it has its detectives,
16:51its plainclothes policemen, the criminal police.
16:54It has its ordinary day-to-day policemen who do traffic,
16:58who do home security, all sorts of safeguarding the welfare of the people.
17:02All that gets incorporated into the SS as well.
17:07Himmler now controls the regular uniformed police, armed paramilitary units,
17:12as well as thousands of detectives.
17:14They don't resist Himmler's takeover.
17:18The police forces were generally much more positive towards Nazism
17:24and their ideology than, for instance, the army.
17:27This also helped this process to integrate the police into the SS.
17:32The SS starts like this and it just goes...
17:36and until it's got its arms and tentacles into literally every single aspect of the Third Reich.
17:43The whole of Germany's security apparatus is now firmly under Himmler's control.
17:49The Nazis deploy all these state forces to implement their racial policies.
17:54Their aim is to purify the country.
17:59They proceeded to purge the German people from elements which they considered alien,
18:04such as Jews, homosexuals and so on.
18:09And the SS and their various sub-organisations like the security services, the Gestapo,
18:14played a crucial role in this.
18:17November 9th, 1938.
18:20Himmler orders the Gestapo and SD to orchestrate a nationwide attack on Jewish businesses and synagogues.
18:28His men destroy thousands of buildings and murder hundreds of Jews.
18:32They send 30,000 more to concentration camps.
18:36So many shop windows are broken that the attacks become known as the Night of Broken Glass, Kristallnacht.
18:43Many Germans find the violence shocking, but that didn't mean they sympathised with the Jews.
18:50The sight of smashed shops, of broken glass, of buildings being burnt,
18:55of disorder, of things getting out of control, disturbed a lot of people.
19:00But one has to distinguish between distaste for some of the public acts of anti-Semitic violence
19:09and being willing to look the other way, being indifferent to violence being done to the Jews.
19:19So even though Germans hate disorder, Himmler now knows they tolerate his persecution of the Jews.
19:26To consolidate his power further, he creates the Reich Security Head Office, or RSHA,
19:33basing it here at the Gestapo HQ in Berlin.
19:36The Nazis have now totally penetrated all the country's security forces.
19:43This was the centre of the SS and the police, the centre of Himmler's SS state.
19:49The most important thing about the Reich Security Head Office was that state institutions,
19:54namely the Gestapo and the criminal police, were brought together with a party organisation,
19:59the security service of the SS, the SD.
20:03And this is a typical characteristic of this apparatus of terror and also of the Nazi regime,
20:09this linking of party and state institutions.
20:15That's a kind of coordination of the entire security apparatus in Nazi Germany.
20:20And it does give them a great deal of power, which grows and grows during the war.
20:27Some historians have even said it was starting to swallow up the normal apparatus of the state.
20:35Gestapo offices across Germany become local command centres for Himmler's SS state.
20:41Nazi terror was now systematically applied from places like this, the regional Gestapo office in Cologne.
20:49On the one hand, there is this bureaucratic terror which took place in the offices.
20:56People were recorded, lists were written, people were summoned and interrogated.
21:02And when they were suspect in the eyes of the Gestapo, heavily tortured, sometimes in the offices.
21:10But most importantly, there were these cells.
21:13The cells were used very consciously for intimidation, especially in the mid-1930s.
21:19People were brought here without any judicial process, with no access to a lawyer.
21:25And then they were sitting in these cells and often did not even know what they were accused of.
21:32One community is particularly targeted by the Gestapo.
21:39The Nazis despise the Roma and Sinti, popularly known as Gypsies.
21:45They portray them as incorrigible thieves and vagrants.
21:50It was a very, very small minority of the population, really fractional percentage.
21:55And they had kind of kept themselves to themselves in their way of life.
21:59And it was a way of life that didn't fit very comfortably or very easily with the German settled population.
22:05It became very clear, actually quite early on, from 1934-35, from those kinds of years onwards,
22:11that the Nazis wanted a clean Germany without a sullied image.
22:15And that involved removing the Sinti and the Roma.
22:18And that was in many cities, Cologne and others.
22:21To satisfy Himmler's obsession with racial distinctions,
22:24all the physical details of Roma and Sinti families are measured and recorded
22:29before they are sent to concentration camps.
22:32The techniques first used during the rounding up and transportation of the Sinti and Roma
22:37will be perfected during the Holocaust,
22:40when millions of other racial undesirables will be exterminated.
22:44It's important to take into account that there was more than one genocide going on.
22:48So, the Nazi extermination of Europe's Jewish population, that was one genocide.
22:53At the same time, going on was the genocide of the Sinti and Roma.
22:57And they called it the Poraimos. That was their great devouring, their equivalent of the Shoah.
23:01So, of Gypsy victims, in total, a figure of around one million.
23:06So, one million of Roma and Sinti families.
23:10On August 31st, 1939, Polish troops strike at this German radio station in Gleiwitz.
23:16The attack is reported by German radio news and even the BBC.
23:20Hitler is furious and orders the invasion of Poland in retaliation.
23:29The attack is followed by a series of mass executions.
23:33Hitler is furious and orders the invasion of Poland in retaliation.
23:41But, of course, the Gleiwitz attack is a fake, part of an elaborate SS deception plan, Operation Himmler.
23:49The attackers are really German SD agents dressed as Poles.
23:54They seize control of the radio station, then broadcast a garbled anti-German message in Polish.
24:00Finally, the Nazi agents dump several bodies at the scene.
24:05Nazi propaganda claims these are the Polish attackers.
24:09The truth is much more sinister.
24:13Around a dozen prisoners from Sachsenhausen are murdered, dressed up in Polish uniforms,
24:18as evidence of a Polish border incursion and, therefore, justifying the declaration of war against Poland.
24:25Himmler has given Hitler the excuse he wants to launch his war in the East.
24:31The German army rolls across the border into Poland, a dramatic conquest ahead of them.
24:37Himmler wants his men to lead the way.
24:40His plan is to turn his secret policemen and concentration camp guards into an elite fighting force, the Waffen-SS.
24:49These entrance posts at Germany's National Archives hide a sinister reminder of its Nazi past.
24:56Beneath the concrete stand two huge statues of SS men.
25:01Because, 70 years ago, this was the barracks of Hitler's elite SS bodyguard, the Liebstandarte SS Adolf Hitler.
25:18They may look impressive, but these are far from being super soldiers.
25:28Nazi propaganda had always portrayed the Waffen-SS as an elite force.
25:33However, reality was quite different, particularly in the early days of the war.
25:39The SS was not very well equipped, their training standards were absolutely poor,
25:45and the quality of their officer's corps was also very low.
25:49Very often, SS officers were former army officers or NCOs who were seen as second class or third class,
25:57and there was no real perspective of a great career, so that's why they joined the SS.
26:02The Liebstandarte and two other SS regiments take part in the conquest of Poland.
26:08Himmler believes they are more than ready to carry the SS emblem onto the battlefield,
26:13but appearances are deceptive.
26:16They look more efficient than they are.
26:19They're the first people to have camouflage, which Himmler immediately patents,
26:22but just having the kit doesn't make you a soldier.
26:26The problem with the kind of militarized units of the SS, which then later becomes the Waffen-SS,
26:31is that their whole organization, their whole leadership,
26:35is based around people who simply don't have the experience of that leadership.
26:41So what you don't get is good military tactical and operational leadership,
26:47and that has really shown up in terms of their lack of military training, lack of military prowess,
26:53and they have to learn the hard way through bitter experience before they become pretty efficient.
27:01Normal army generals and officers got really fed up with them
27:06because they would storm into the enemy without any thought for themselves
27:10and would be moaned down in huge numbers,
27:12whereas the conventionally trained military men were saying,
27:16hold back, let's have some tactics here.
27:19So in many ways they weren't that effective.
27:22They were just too fired up, really, to engage in military offensives in a rational way.
27:32In just over five weeks, the German military crushes Polish resistance.
27:37The SS do not distinguish themselves on the battlefield,
27:40but they do massacre hundreds of Jewish civilians behind the lines to Himmler's satisfaction.
27:46Then Gestapo agents and SD men draw up lists of prominent Polish leaders who must be arrested and executed.
27:54The job is given to five so-called action groups, or Einsatzgruppen.
28:00The Einsatzgruppen are drawn from various parts of Himmler's organization.
28:04So you have some SD men, you have concentration camp guards on secondment, you have some policemen,
28:10and they're essentially involved in operations against the Polish elite, against the intelligentsia,
28:15so against clerics, against army officers, and increasingly also against Jews,
28:20who are perceived always by the Nazis to be implicitly a kind of malevolent opposition leadership.
28:27The 3,000 men of the Einsatzgruppen murder more than 60,000 Poles by the end of 1939.
28:35Then they force Poland's Jews into improvised ghettos all over the country.
28:40Thousands die in the brutal roundup. Many more will die of malnutrition and disease in the years to come.
28:47The SS are moving ever closer to their final solution.
28:53But Himmler craves an even greater military role.
28:57So he convinces Hitler to allow him to increase the number of his combat troops.
29:02When the Blitzkrieg is unleashed on Western Europe in May 1940, three full SS divisions are ready to take part.
29:11One is the Totenkopf, or Death's Head Division, formed from former concentration camp guards.
29:18On the 26th of May 1940, they capture 96 British soldiers in the French village of La Paradis and massacre them.
29:28That is part of the SS culture. When you are a camp guard at Dachau, for example, you are used to treating your enemies like dirt.
29:37These are people to be despised, to be spat on, kicked, beaten, executed if they step out of line.
29:44As far as the commander of La Paradis, for example, was concerned, those British men had it stepped out of line.
29:50So, therefore, he lines them up against a wall and shoots them.
29:54The massacre is not a one-off.
29:57Two days later, members of the Liebstandarte SS Division murder another 80 British soldiers.
30:04Yet, far from being condemned, these men win high praise from Hitler, who tells them,
30:09Henceforth, it will be your privilege to lead every German attack.
30:14He is already planning an assault on the regime he hates above all others, the Soviet Union.
30:22Hitler believes the ruthlessness of Himmler's combat units will be vital for his campaign.
30:29Hitler believed very much in the power of the will.
30:33And so, therefore, you had to be aggressive, and if the enemy was going to overwhelm you,
30:39if you were strong enough, if your willpower was great enough, you could beat them back.
30:44What distinguished the Waffen-SS was, above all, their fanaticism.
30:48They were highly ideological. The kind of training they went through was very brutal, very political kind of training.
30:55Waffen-SS units were generally much more likely to commit atrocities than ordinary Wehrmacht units.
31:02This was partly, at least partly, due to indoctrination, or to be more precise, one element of indoctrination in Nazi ideology.
31:11I would call it a cult of toughness.
31:14So you have to be tough against yourself, but also you have to be tough against the enemy.
31:19You always see the world in black and white.
31:22So those who are not for you are against you, and you can treat them ruthlessly, or you have to treat them ruthlessly.
31:31June 22nd, 1941. The all-out attack on the Soviet Union begins.
31:37By now, the Waffen-SS has expanded to six divisions.
31:41One or two of them are attached to each of the three invading army groups.
31:46Their tenacity in defense and ferocity in attack finally earns them a reputation as elite forces.
31:55Four of the core divisions of the SS, the Leibstandarte, Das Reich, Totenkopf and Wiking,
32:01all became motorized divisions and later armored divisions.
32:05This meant they could be used as a mobile reserve.
32:09So every time in a time of crisis on the Eastern Front,
32:13Waffen-SS divisions were rushed in or were sent in in order to solve the crisis.
32:20But just as in Poland, combat divisions are not the only SS units which invade.
32:26Once again, Einsatzgruppen are formed to implement the Nazis' brutal racial policy.
32:34It is these police battalions which are providing most of the Einsatzgruppen,
32:38which are action squads designed to follow up behind the armed forces,
32:42before the ground forces, and execute people.
32:45That is their job. Round up Jews, Slavs, anyone they don't like, the intelligentsia of Poland,
32:49kick them into pits, shoot them in the back of the head, all that kind of stuff.
32:53That is being carried out by the ordinary police. But they are part of the SS.
32:59Very quickly, the Einsatzgruppen escalates from shooting males to also executing women and children,
33:05if they happen to be Jewish.
33:07So you have a kind of a self-radicalization, it seems, within the Einsatzgruppen very early on.
33:12And here we can see quite clearly a holocaust by bullet.
33:15Shortly after the invasion begins, Himmler makes a special trip to the Eastern Front.
33:20He wants to find out how effectively the Einsatzgruppen are carrying out the mass killings he has ordered.
33:26But he is deeply disturbed by what he sees.
33:31Himmler, in August 1941, witnesses one of these mass executions and is really upset by it.
33:37He doesn't like seeing all this blood and horror.
33:39And he thinks, those poor men having to carry out those executions, it must be very traumatic.
33:43We've got to find a better way of doing this.
33:45There must be a more humane way so that my guys, my boys, don't get traumatized by this.
33:51The concern is not at all with the victims.
33:53It is entirely with the people who are having to do this traumatic mass executions.
33:57This is raw, brutalized personal killing on a nightmarish scale.
34:03October 13th, 1941.
34:05Himmler orders the construction of a totally new SS institution, purpose-built death camps.
34:14First Belzec, soon followed by Treblinka and Sobibor.
34:19They are specifically designed to murder thousands of Jews in poison gas chambers as soon as they arrive.
34:27In January 1942, the decision is taken to exterminate all of Europe's Jews.
34:35More camps are needed.
34:38Chelmno, Auschwitz and Majdanek.
34:43Three million people are thought to have been murdered at these six camps alone.
34:52Over the gates of many camps is fixed the slogan, Arbeit macht frei, work will set you free.
35:00For those executed immediately at the death camps, it is a vicious lie.
35:07But some prisoners are selected for work.
35:11Himmler plans to turn even some of the death camps into profitable ventures
35:15by exploiting a growing German crisis, a massive shortage of workers.
35:22This does happen at a time when most male German labor is being called up to the Wehrmacht.
35:27Based on the idea that the SS controls a vast number of prisoners,
35:30it would be a good idea to extract more labor from them before they actually perish.
35:36The SS gets involved in the business of the exploitation of labor.
35:42The concentration camps become effectively labor exchanges.
35:46I mean, they are hiring out their prisoners on the cheap.
35:51The employers and the major German companies who are doing this don't have to pay very much
35:57and they're able to make use of hundreds of thousands of slave laborers.
36:01Every concentration camp forges close ties with local industries.
36:07From 1942 to 1943, you get a very large number of satellite camps
36:11which gather around the concentration camps and generally based at firms or particular resources
36:17where the prisoners can be put to work on a much wider scale.
36:20And here you'll find almost all the major German companies have some kind of involvement in a satellite camp.
36:26IG Farben, its plant at Auschwitz, is the most notorious example of that.
36:31But there are other companies, Siemens had a factory there as well.
36:35And so IG Farben basically has its own private concentration camp
36:41that is run by the SS, is outsourced to the SS.
36:46IG Farben, the largest chemical company in the world at the time,
36:51employs thousands of Auschwitz prisoners to build and operate a synthetic rubber plant.
36:56And it is not alone.
37:00This is very much emblematic of a wider attitude of German commerce and business
37:04towards prisoner labor as a resource to be used.
37:07So there's a resource here that companies can say,
37:11we should use because if we don't, somebody else will.
37:14And we have a responsibility to contribute towards the German war effort.
37:17And we have a responsibility to contribute towards the German war effort
37:20and to protect the profits of our shareholders.
37:23The Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp perfectly demonstrates the brutal SS business model.
37:30Prisoners were first sent here from Dachau in 1938 to work in the granite quarry.
37:36But Mauthausen rapidly expands to become one of the Nazis' largest labor camp networks,
37:42with nearly 100 sub-camps spread across Austria and southern Germany.
37:47Stone from the quarry is first used to construct the camp.
37:51Once completed, the SS starts selling stone on the open market, making a big profit.
37:58The SS did have its own empire, economic empire, especially in the East.
38:01And that was focused on a combination of producing certain types of things,
38:08craft goods, stonemasonry, all sorts of things like that.
38:11So they were producing these goods, but they were also using up the humans in the process of that.
38:17And this idea of killing people through work is something that is developed in the SS.
38:25Mauthausen is far from being a normal business.
38:28Every block of granite is chiseled from the quarry by hand.
38:32Then the inmates are forced by the SS to carry them up the stairway of death.
38:38For the sick and starving prisoners, carrying stone blocks up 186 steps is effectively a death sentence.
38:48But the SS policy of exterminating racial enemies through work
38:53conflicts with its other top priority, making money.
38:58And so there's an attempt to transform, to some extent, the camp's culture of death,
39:03basically make the prisoners live longer and produce more.
39:06But it's very difficult to actually effect any kind of meaningful change
39:10because the cultures of the camps are wired very much towards killing rather than preserving prisoners.
39:15They're too punitive, really, to extract labour in any kind of rational sense.
39:20Yes, it's a concentration camp, not a death camp. There aren't gas chambers there.
39:24But the people there are as sure going to die as the people being led straight to the gas chambers.
39:30It's just a stay of execution.
39:31The whole point is to just get these people in, work them to death, and then go and have a bunch in.
39:35So you've got this constant cycle of prisoners and slave labour coming in and doing your work for you.
39:40Mauthausen becomes notorious for its appallingly high death rate,
39:45so its labour force has to be constantly replenished.
39:49Political opponents of the Nazis are brought here from across Europe,
39:52including many resistance fighters and even thousands of Italian soldiers.
39:59When Italy was defeated and surrendered in the summer of 1943,
40:04the entire Italian army was cast off to Germany to man the factories,
40:08where they had a very hard time because German workers resented them.
40:11They thought they'd let the side down by surrendering.
40:14They're using these people, treating them like absolute filth,
40:18grinding them into the dust, so much so that it's actually called the bone grinder.
40:24Himmler inspects Mauthausen during 1941, its most productive phase.
40:30Trading with 45 major companies, it is one of the Nazis' most lucrative concentration camps.
40:37In 1944, it generates more than 11 million Reichsmarks, equivalent to about $140 million today.
40:46But the human cost is also enormous.
40:49300,000 prisoners die in the process.
40:54What's particularly chilling about the whole thing is the application of modern management techniques
41:01as time goes on to more effectively exploit people until they die,
41:07so that you get more production out of them by using these modern management techniques,
41:12but the assurance of death in the end or of wearing people out completely is there as well.
41:20By 1945, Himmler's SS business empire controls 500 firms.
41:26Its slave labourers are now a common sight all over the Reich,
41:30but they are not enough to supply Germany's ever more desperate need for workers.
41:35So millions of other people are shipped to Germany from the occupied territories to become forced labourers.
41:43Forced labour becomes increasingly necessary for a regime
41:47which is sending literally millions of men into their deaths on the Eastern Front.
41:52And so the more men need replacing in the factories and on the fields of Germany,
41:58the more labourers are forced to come in.
42:02So there's 7 million foreign workers in Germany by 1944.
42:06Seventy years ago, this was part of GBI Camp 7576.
42:14These barrack buildings housed up to 2,000 forced workers.
42:19The camp is in the middle of a residential area,
42:23so the primitive living conditions and harsh treatment of the inmates would have been obvious to local Germans.
42:30And this is just one of 3,000 camps that housed forced labourers in Berlin alone.
42:38Virtually the whole of the economy by 1944 becomes dependent upon labour
42:45which has been brought to Germany with various degrees of coercion.
42:50To some extent these people have been enticed by promises of decent conditions and decent incomes.
42:59To some extent people are just rounded up off the streets and hauled away into the country.
43:04And as I say, by the later stages of the war, this is what kept the German war economy going.
43:11At Gestapo headquarters in Cologne, the cell walls bear the names of forced workers from all over Europe.
43:18They are imprisoned for many offences from illegal sexual relationships
43:23to more serious charges such as sedition or even sabotage.
43:32As the war went on, the situation got worse and worse.
43:36The cells were getting fuller and fuller.
43:39They were no longer imprisoned in ones or twos, but five, six, ten in a cell.
43:45We know from an inscription which a Frenchman left behind
43:49that once there were even 30 people locked up together.
43:58This building became infamous among local people.
44:02You would hear about the prisoners who were locked up here.
44:05You were afraid of these Gestapo men.
44:08You were worried that you would be picked up and maybe never come back again.
44:13That was very intimidating.
44:21Then we have reports of people who passed by in the streets outside
44:26who could hear screaming coming from the cells.
44:30In the last months of the war, those still living in the surrounding houses
44:36could look into the courtyard and actually see prisoners being executed.
44:45In the final months of the war, the Reich Security Head Office
44:49allowed local Gestapo officers to execute non-German prisoners.
44:54The Reich Security Head Office allowed local Gestapo officers
44:58to execute non-Germans without needing permission from Berlin first.
45:03After this, hundreds of foreign workers were executed here.
45:07With the power of life or death over millions of civilians,
45:11the SS has reached the peak of its power.
45:14It has an enormous industrial empire and almost a million men under arms.
45:20But to get the Waffen-SS up to this size,
45:24Himmler's previous insistence on Aryan purity has been abandoned.
45:29Himmler is very dependent on taking what the army won't take
45:33or using people who have already served their spell in the army
45:36and bringing them into the SS.
45:38And he has to trawl through Europe,
45:40finding ever more spuriously plausible Falkish Germans
45:43in order to bring them into the Waffen-SS.
45:46The SS now recruited people who they considered racially inferior to them
45:50and they formed their special SS units, be it Ukrainians,
45:54be it even French, be it Muslims from the Balkans and so on.
46:00However, with the exception perhaps of the Estonians
46:03and to a certain degree of the Latvians,
46:06these SS units always underperformed,
46:09so they can definitely not be seen as military elite.
46:13When the British and Americans land in Normandy in June 1944,
46:18they smash the SS panzer divisions.
46:21As the Waffen-SS collapses, Himmler's empire crumbles.
46:27As a Waffen-SS soldier, being tough against you meant you do not surrender.
46:32So it was explicitly forbidden for SS soldiers to surrender.
46:36In reality, they often did, of course.
46:39But Hitler still has faith in Himmler.
46:42In January 1945, he gives him what he has craved all his life,
46:47a major military command.
46:49He's put in charge of an army group
46:51with orders to hold back the Soviet advance on Berlin.
46:55But Himmler proves to be no better a soldier than many of his SS troops.
47:00Himmler's fall from grace starts when he takes command
47:03of the army group Vistula in 1945
47:07and performs disastrously,
47:09even given the adverse conditions which he's facing on the Eastern Front.
47:14Breaks down with hypochondriac stomach complaints,
47:17has to go off to a sanatorium to convalesce.
47:20His grip on the empire is gone.
47:23Totally out of his depth,
47:25Hitler dismisses him from his army command after less than two months.
47:29After more than 20 years,
47:32the bonds of loyalty between the two most senior Nazis are starting to break.
47:37Himmler's track record in the final months of the Third Reich
47:41really showed his character for what it was,
47:43grasping, insincere, treacherous and evasive.
47:47Here you find the empty, brittle hollowness of Himmler
47:50and his insincerity,
47:52and it comes somewhere to the bankruptcy of the whole SS ideology.
47:57As the Red Army closes on Berlin,
48:00some SS men prepare for its final defence,
48:03even though they are not German.
48:06They include Frenchmen from the SS Charlemagne Division,
48:09alongside recruits from Scandinavia, the Low Countries and Baltic states.
48:15But their leader will not be with them.
48:18Incredibly, Himmler has started secret negotiations with the Allies
48:23behind Hitler's back.
48:26Hitler is enraged.
48:28He strips Himmler of all of his titles,
48:31expels him from the Nazi Party and orders his arrest.
48:35Himmler tries to escape.
48:37This is very cowardly behaviour he reveals from negotiations with the Allies
48:42right through to his final few days where he wanders into British captivity,
48:46dressed, as one of his subordinates said,
48:48like a character from a bad detective novel.
48:53Disguised as Sergeant Heinrich Hitzinger,
48:56Himmler is finally stopped at an improvised checkpoint
48:59by a group of Soviet forced labourers.
49:02They hand him over to the British Army.
49:04When he arrives at an interrogation camp,
49:07Himmler finally admits his true identity.
49:11So for the people who actually catch him,
49:14before their eyes is this rather pathetic-looking man
49:18with no chin and a kind of rather feeble moustache and myopia.
49:26You're thinking, really? Is this him?
49:29Is this the great Heinrich Himmler,
49:31the man who's had so much power in his hands and he's reduced to this?
49:37While being examined by an Army doctor,
49:40Himmler bites on a cyanide capsule.
49:43There's a desperate struggle to remove the poison
49:46but within minutes Himmler is dead.
49:49He has cheated justice to the disappointment
49:52of both victims and fellow perpetrators.
49:55A lot of the SS men felt betrayed
49:57that Himmler didn't actually go before the dock in Nuremberg
50:00and account for the organisation.
50:02So Hitler's already dead and now Himmler's gone as well,
50:05so their spokesmen have vanished.
50:07As the concentration camps are liberated,
50:10Himmler's horrific legacy emerges.
50:13The Nazis forced their victims into more than 40,000 camps and ghettos.
50:18Between 15 and 20 million people were imprisoned or killed in them.
50:24The SS was the central pillar of the Third Reich and the Nazi regime.
50:29It was the most violent organisation.
50:33It was the brain and the tool for all the mass crimes.
50:37Or in other words, without the SS,
50:40the Holocaust couldn't have had happened.
50:43Heinrich Himmler's body was buried in an unmarked grave
50:47somewhere in northern Germany.
50:49All trace of it has been lost.
50:52His millions of victims, however, should never be forgotten.