Nazi Megastructures "Season - 4" (2/6) : Hitler's Railways of Death
For educational purposes
The rail networks most sinister function was to facilitate the Final Solution.
Hitler and the mastermind of the Holocaust, Himmler, used the vast rail network to transport Jews to concentration camps and to their death.
But the wider war effort was dwindling and in 1945 in Berlin, Hitler finally abandoned his beloved train and made a dash for his underground bunker - the place that would eventually become his tomb.
The rail networks most sinister function was to facilitate the Final Solution.
Hitler and the mastermind of the Holocaust, Himmler, used the vast rail network to transport Jews to concentration camps and to their death.
But the wider war effort was dwindling and in 1945 in Berlin, Hitler finally abandoned his beloved train and made a dash for his underground bunker - the place that would eventually become his tomb.
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LearningTranscript
00:00Hitler's railways, the backbone of the Third Reich.
00:06Without the railway system, Germany simply wouldn't be able to fight a war.
00:11A vital part of the war machine with a dark secret.
00:14Nobody can escape from it. Everybody's near a railway.
00:17It helped facilitate the worst atrocity in history.
00:21The trains then play this critical role in bringing Jews from all over Europe
00:25to these centralised killing locations.
00:28Six million Jews murdered by a regime evil to its core.
00:33This is where the trains would come in and this is where people would be unloaded.
00:38And those would be taken straight to the gas chambers.
00:45This is the story of Hitler's railways of death.
00:52The biggest construction project of World War II,
00:55ordered by Hitler to secure world domination.
01:00Now they survive as dark reminders of the Führer's fanatical military ambition.
01:07These are the secrets of the Nazi megastructures.
01:17The 6th of July, 1942.
01:20Head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, travels to Auschwitz concentration camp.
01:27He's ordered camp commander Rudolf Huss to expand the site,
01:31ready for the murder of Jews on an industrial scale.
01:36Offloading, separation of men and women, selection and disposal.
01:42He seems well organised, commandant, but you should be prepared to work even harder.
01:49Many more transports will be sent to Auschwitz in the future.
01:55To deliver prisoners to the camp, Himmler is reliant on the Nazis' vast rail network.
02:06Historian James Holland has travelled to Poland
02:09to understand the railway's role in the deaths of millions of people.
02:16It's one of the most chilling relics of the Second World War.
02:20The guardhouse of Auschwitz-Birkenau.
02:26Auschwitz is the largest of all the Nazis' concentration camps.
02:44Good grief.
02:51It's just huge.
02:59The scale of it is just... it's mind-blowing, really.
03:06Some eight villages were cleared for this camp.
03:09The main one was here, Birkenau, just completely razed.
03:13435 acres. It is absolutely monstrous.
03:26And there's the railway.
03:29This really was the end of the line.
03:32This was an extermination camp.
03:35This was built to murder people on a huge industrial scale.
03:40It's just... it's really hard to get your head around.
03:50Jews are transported here from all across Europe.
03:54Most arrive by rail.
03:57The only way you can run the entire concentration camp system,
04:02freeing prisoners in their vast numbers to these various camps,
04:07is by railway.
04:17The story of the concentration camps begins in the aftermath of the First World War.
04:23Defeat leaves Germany economically crippled and poverty is widespread.
04:30Hitler makes hate-fuelled speeches, blaming a Jewish conspiracy.
04:35Hitler has always been pathologically anti-Semitic.
04:39But why does he hate them?
04:41Well, he certainly focuses a lot of his anger and resentment
04:43at the failure of the First World War onto the Jews.
04:46And then he manipulates this politically, finding someone else to blame.
04:51And the focus of that blame are the Jews.
04:54Hitler vows revenge.
04:56The anti-Semitic message proves popular and Nazi Party membership swells.
05:01Former fertilizer salesman Heinrich Himmler joins in 1923
05:05and quickly rises through the ranks.
05:08Six years later, he becomes leader of the Nazi Party's paramilitary arm,
05:13the dreaded SS.
05:16Now the SS has a huge network of men and bureaucracy.
05:23In terms of enacting Nazi ideology, it plays an absolute pivotal role.
05:33When the Nazis come to power in 1933, the persecution of German Jews begins.
05:40Anti-Semitism is absolutely a central part of Nazi ideology
05:44and in terms of believing in the Aryan super-race,
05:49in believing in Aryan supremacy, Himmler is one of the leading proponents.
05:55Anti-Jewish laws progressively exclude Jews from German society.
06:00Synagogues are destroyed and Jewish businesses are vandalised.
06:05Almost half of Germany's Jews flee to other European countries
06:09in the United States, but some 300,000 remain.
06:14On the 1st of September 1939, Germany invades Poland.
06:20Hitler commands the attack from his private train, America.
06:24This mobile command centre is equipped with everything he needs
06:28to stay in constant communication with his generals on the battlefront.
06:37Poland falls in just five weeks
06:40and now the Nazis control a Jewish population
06:43that's nearly seven times that of Germany's.
06:46This large number is one of the reasons Himmler orders
06:49that Polish Jews are to be treated more severely than the German Jews.
06:55In a sense, the Nazis are fighting two wars,
06:58one to take land and the other, an ideological one, against the Jews.
07:03Himmler wants to completely remove Jews from Polish society
07:07and his office drafts an order stating that they must be segregated
07:11in closed-off areas of towns and cities, called ghettos.
07:20The first measure is the concentration of the Jews
07:23from the country into the bigger towns.
07:27Very good.
07:29Make sure I'm kept up to date with the progress of these plans.
07:38The Nazis established ghettos near major railway connections.
07:43The main ones are in Warsaw, Lodz and Krakow.
07:49Between October 1939 and December 1940,
07:52almost all of Poland's two million Jews are sent to ghettos across the country.
07:59It's putting Jews into much more concentrated space,
08:02so in a very small part of the city, normally in very poor-quality housing,
08:06thrust into one room where the whole family is living together.
08:10Occupants are denied even the most basic human rights.
08:15The Germans can really limit foodstuffs coming into the ghetto,
08:18so one thing I think that would be really characteristic
08:21of any ghetto situation is hunger.
08:24It's not just that people are starving to death,
08:27but they're also dying from epidemics that are spreading around
08:30these really overcrowded conditions.
08:33But ghettos are only a temporary solution.
08:36As fighting across Europe intensifies,
08:39the Nazis come to see young, able-bodied Jews
08:42as potentially an important part of their war machine.
08:46As the Reich expands, you need occupying forces
08:50and, of course, you need to fight,
08:53which means you've got a shortage of labour in factories, in work projects.
09:00So where do you get that from?
09:02Well, you get it from prisoners of war, from forced labour,
09:06and all these people who are being forced to work against their will
09:11need camps, camps from which they cannot escape.
09:16The largest camps are built in locations with major rail links
09:20at Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen.
09:24By March 1942, there are 13 main concentration camps.
09:29Conditions are brutal, but they're not yet organised killing centres.
09:34Jews and other enemies of the Third Reich, including Poles, Soviets,
09:39Jehovah's Witnesses and homosexuals, are deported to the camps.
09:44What the railway network allows the Nazis to do
09:48is to expand their reach,
09:52to project power, to control.
09:57Now, the rail-connected camps are put to work for the Reich.
10:04In southern Poland, conflict archaeologist Tony Pollard
10:07is exploring Gross-Rosen concentration camp.
10:11By the end of the war, this is one of the Nazis' largest camps,
10:15bringing in prisoners from every corner of the Reich by railway.
10:19Arbeit macht frei. Work makes you free.
10:24The only way that work was going to make you free here was through death,
10:28because that's what the Nazis were doing, was working people to death.
10:42The camp is built here for one major reason,
10:45to provide slave labour for a massive granite quarry.
10:55There are still relics which give some idea
10:58of the industrial scale of the operation here.
11:01This looks like a cable car, but it's the system that was used
11:06to remove the rock from the quarry itself.
11:09And we've got a pulley system that would allow them to move out
11:13little railway wagons that they could then lower into the crater,
11:18and the workers at the bottom would then manually lift the rock,
11:23in some cases massive chunks of it, into these carriages,
11:27and then they'd be winched back up and put on a small-gauge railway,
11:31which would then ship the rock down to the main railway station.
11:36From the station, the granite is transported
11:39to the furthest corners of the Nazi empire.
11:43You get a totally different perspective of this place
11:47when you're down in the bottom of the quarry.
11:51And this void is representative of hundreds of thousands of tonnes
11:57of raw material that is taken out of here, ultimately by railway.
12:03And all of that material is then transported down here
12:09ultimately by railway.
12:11And all of that material is used by the Nazis
12:17to really construct their empire.
12:22What you have taken away from here
12:25are the building blocks of the Third Reich.
12:30Public buildings, bridges and roads are all constructed using the stone.
12:36Some of these are so big
12:38that there's no way you'd get them into those wagons for removal,
12:42so they would break them up,
12:44and that work would largely be done manually with picks and hammers.
12:48If that back-breaking work wasn't enough,
12:51you've also got to visualise SS guards
12:54surrounding the quarry, watching every move.
12:57And if you didn't pull your weight,
12:59if you didn't do a proper day's work as they saw it,
13:03the outcome could be fatal.
13:05And Gross Rosen, the camp here, was notorious for its hard regime.
13:11It's nightmarish.
13:13That's all I can say about it.
13:15It's an absolutely nightmarish landscape.
13:18Inhumane treatment by the Nazis
13:20means inmates often arrive in a poor physical state,
13:23and harsh conditions quickly take their toll.
13:27There's a sense that labour is a constant resource.
13:32It's entirely expendable.
13:34So there's no interest in keeping people alive forever.
13:38And so what you do is you starve people
13:41with incredibly limited rations of food,
13:43entirely inadequate for the sort of physical labour that people are doing.
13:47Average life expectancy at Gross Rosen could be as little as three weeks.
13:52But the railway keeps the camp running
13:54by delivering a constant supply of forced labour.
13:58We've got the movement of two commodities,
14:01and it's horrible to use the term commodity in relation to people,
14:05but that's exactly what the Nazis were dealing with here.
14:09As the war progresses, demand for raw materials
14:12and other war commodities increases.
14:15Gross Rosen is expanded on a massive scale.
14:18Eventually, there are nearly 100 sub-camps,
14:21with all the major hubs interconnected by railway.
14:24Camp capacity is up to 80,000 prisoners.
14:28Each camp has its own speciality, its own role to play,
14:32either in industry, creating munitions, armaments,
14:36or, like Gross Rosen, extracting raw materials.
14:40And all of them depend on the railways for movement.
14:45And the dark side of the railway system is the movement of people.
14:49The movement of concentration camp victims,
14:52people who are being moved so that they can work as slave labour.
14:56But the railway isn't only vital for moving slave labour to Nazi camps.
15:05In June 1941, Hitler declares war on the Soviet Union.
15:10By autumn, German forces are advancing east towards Moscow.
15:15The Nazi rail network now stretches deep into the Soviet Union.
15:19In total, it consists of 100,000 miles of track
15:23spread across 12 countries.
15:27The German railway system, as part of the German war machine,
15:32is absolutely essential.
15:36The railways are the only real way Germany can get supplies,
15:42freight, coal, arms, men, prisoners, Jews, from A to B.
15:48Without the German railways,
15:50Germany simply wouldn't be able to fight a war.
15:53But in the Soviet Union,
15:55the Nazi railway is about to face its biggest challenge yet.
16:01Deep in Russian territory,
16:03the Nazi army is dependent on men and weapons
16:06arriving from across the Third Reich by train.
16:13Tony Pollard has travelled to Gniezno Railyard in central Poland.
16:17This is incredible.
16:19Here, it's about loading and unloading the trains.
16:22The yard serves strategically important train lines
16:25heading towards the Soviet Union.
16:28Ammunition, troops, artillery, tanks,
16:32all would be loaded up here onto flat wagons
16:35because next stop that way is the Russian front.
16:38And that's exactly what this place was about,
16:40supplying the German front line.
16:43To begin with, supplies regularly reach the army.
16:47By December, the front line has advanced to within 18 miles of Moscow.
16:52This is the real business of war.
16:55And this goes on for well over half a mile.
16:59And during the war, this would have been an absolute hive of activity.
17:03As the German army advanced further east,
17:06the Nazis gained control of large swathes of the Russian population.
17:11As the Germans move into the Soviet Union,
17:13so they're confronted with not just thousands of Jews but millions of them.
17:17But that's the problem because the numbers are so vast
17:20and there's no longer the capacity to send them anywhere else.
17:23After the brutal treatment of Polish Jews in the ghettos,
17:27Nazi anti-Semitism escalates once again.
17:31This time, there's no intention of transporting Jews to ghettos.
17:36A lot of the mass executions of Jews are done
17:39by being dragged out of local villages, dragged out of local towns,
17:43corralled and herded to a pre-dug pit,
17:46and then they are literally shot in the back of the head and kicked in.
17:49Between June and December 1941,
17:52around half a million Jewish men, women and children are brutally murdered.
17:57Is genocide on this incredibly local scale, in a familiar place,
18:02in a forest that you might have gone to before the war?
18:06A place of picnic sites suddenly becomes a killing site.
18:10In August 1941, Himmler travels to the Soviet city of Minsk
18:15and witnesses a mass execution.
18:19Himmler is really sickened by it.
18:21He thinks it's disgusting and really appalling
18:24that his men should have to go through something quite so traumatic.
18:27And so he thinks there's got to be another way of doing things.
18:30In Germany, Nazi scientists experiment with gas
18:33as an alternative method of mass execution.
18:36Eventually, they settle on gas chambers,
18:39believing they will be more efficient and less traumatic for Nazi soldiers.
18:48On the Eastern Front, the campaign to take Moscow stalls.
18:53The army needs an average of 75 trains a day
18:56to keep it supplied with gas.
18:5875 trains a day to keep it supplied with men, food and ammunition.
19:02But it's receiving less than half that.
19:07There is just simply not enough locomotive,
19:10not enough carriages, freight carriages, wagons,
19:12to move this war material all around.
19:15After three months of heavy fighting
19:18and the loss of almost a quarter of a million German lives,
19:21the Nazis fail to take Moscow.
19:24Hitler blames those in charge of the railway.
19:28The point is with the Germans is that they think they're going to win in three months.
19:31And they don't.
19:33And everything has been geared up for that very rapid, quick victory.
19:37It's the first major setback of the war, and Hitler is furious.
19:42He sacks the head of the railway in the east
19:45and summons lifelong Nazi and rising star of the transportation ministry,
19:49Albert Gansenmüller, to Berlin.
19:52Dr Gansenmüller...
19:55Transportation to the east is in crisis.
19:58But Reichsminister Speer assures me
20:01you will take decisive measures to resolve the situation.
20:08I assure you I will not rest until the situation has been brought under control.
20:14We can get more rolling stock, speed up loading and unloading,
20:18and also overhaul the repair program.
20:22Excellent.
20:24I look forward to reports of your progress.
20:27Thank you, my Führer.
20:30As well as keeping the war machine in the east supplied,
20:33Gansenmüller is now also under pressure to provide Himmler
20:36with enough trains to transport prisoners to concentration camps.
20:43There's always a conflict within the railway system
20:47between the priority given to the movement of people
20:50and the priority given to the movement of the war effort.
20:53There was conflict with timetabling, with resources,
20:57with tracks, with rail stock.
21:05Danke. That will be all.
21:10Gansenmüller does all he can to satisfy Himmler's demands for more trains.
21:16A train carrying 5,000 Jews has run daily since the 22nd of July
21:21from Warsaw to Treblinka via Malenka.
21:24Furthermore, another train has run twice a week with 5,000 Jews
21:28from Czemysl to Belzec.
21:38While Gansenmüller sends tens of thousands of Jews
21:42While Gansenmüller sends tens of thousands of Jews to concentration camps,
21:46he also has another unique responsibility.
21:50He must oversee the Führer's fantastical plans
21:54for a completely new mega-railway,
21:57a transport network fit for the German master race.
22:04July 1942.
22:06The Nazi rail network is running at full capacity,
22:09supplying the German army and transporting Jews to concentration camps.
22:16Head of the railways, Albert Gansenmüller,
22:18has also been tasked by Hitler with building a completely new mega-railway,
22:23running on an ultra-wide three-metre track.
22:28Excellent.
22:30This will be a transport structure worthy of the Reich.
22:35An increase in track width to three metres
22:40and double-decker coaches
22:43will improve our train system enormously.
22:49But increasing track width all across the Reich
22:52will require hundreds of miles of new lines
22:55and building completely new trains.
22:59It is a truly visionary concept, mein Führer.
23:02However, it requires the construction of new vehicles.
23:07But if we were to double or triple the number of standard gauge lines,
23:10this would enable the use of already existing stock and infrastructure.
23:16The existing gauge is obsolete and completely unsuitable for mass movement.
23:20Naturally, mein Führer.
23:26Gansenmüller reluctantly agrees to Hitler's outlandish plan,
23:30even though, if it goes ahead,
23:32the scheme will drain resources from the railway,
23:35just as prisoner transports to camps are increasing.
23:41In early 1942, the Nazis begin to ramp up their project
23:45to eradicate Europe's Jews.
23:47They call it the Final Solution.
23:51This is where they acknowledge for the first time
23:54they are going to set up extermination camps
23:57and mass-execute vast numbers of Jews
24:00and other unwanted peoples of Europe.
24:03Head of the SS Heinrich Himmler
24:05summons Auschwitz camp commander Rudolf Hoess to Berlin
24:09to inform him of the horrific plan.
24:12Herr Kommandant Hoess, please have a seat.
24:17I have asked you to make the journey here from Poland
24:20to tell you something of the utmost importance.
24:23The Führer has ordered the Final Solution of the Jewish question.
24:27We, the SS, have to carry out this order.
24:31I have therefore chosen Auschwitz for this purpose.
24:35I hope I can count on your cooperation and assistance in this matter?
24:40Selbstverständlich, Herr Reichsführer.
24:48James Holland is investigating
24:50why Auschwitz is so central to Himmler's plans.
24:58Just behind me is Auschwitz town station
25:01and this is the track that led to the camps.
25:04But what's really interesting is over there,
25:07that's the main line that leads south to Vienna and north to Krakow.
25:11And that's really important when you're thinking about the sighting of the camps
25:15because one of the major reasons was because of its proximity
25:19to a major rail network
25:21as well as the fact that it was sort of off the beaten track
25:24and away from prying eyes.
25:26And this is the really important point
25:28because without the railway system,
25:31the extermination camps couldn't have existed
25:34because it's the railways and only the railways
25:37that can deliver the prisoners to them.
25:42In preparation for the Final Solution, Auschwitz is expanded.
25:47A new site is selected 1.5 miles from the Auschwitz main camp.
25:52It's called Auschwitz-Birkenau.
25:56Camp capacity will increase to over 100,000.
26:00And at the western edge of the site,
26:02two farmhouses are turned into gas chambers.
26:06So genocide becomes this much more centralised killing experience.
26:10Then transport networks become massively important
26:14and the trains then play this critical role
26:17in bringing Jews from all over Europe to these centralised killing locations.
26:22For the Nazis, all rail lines will lead to Auschwitz.
26:26In 1942, nearly 200,000 Jews from ten countries are transported to the camp.
26:36This is one of the boxcars that was used to transport
26:39so many of the victims that were brought here.
26:41For most of the prisoners, the journey will be their last.
26:47Here I am, unlocking this.
26:51And, of course, this is exactly how it would have been
26:55during those horrific transports.
27:05The weight of it, the kind of...
27:08It's sort of forbidding and heavy.
27:16You know, this is a freight car.
27:18It's not designed for carrying humans,
27:21and yet you would have had 70,
27:24sometimes even more than 100 people crammed in here.
27:29Sometimes women were having to clutch the child to their arms
27:34because there was simply no space to put them on the ground.
27:38They would be in here for two days, three days, four days.
27:42It's just barbaric. It's inhuman.
27:49The only toilet facility on board is a wooden bucket.
27:55One of the things that people remember as they talk about these journeys
27:58is they remember the stench.
28:00And for many people this is a moment of terrible shame
28:03because for the first time they're sitting on a bucket in front of people.
28:09And the bucket quickly overflows,
28:12and so the train car gets filled with human waste.
28:17With barely any food or water, conditions are too much for some.
28:22People are starting to die within these cars,
28:24and so what people do is they find themselves living amongst the dead.
28:27The corpses become a seat to sit on,
28:30and people describe these as these terrible journeys,
28:33as the most unbelievable kinds of journeys.
28:36For those who survive the journey,
28:38the final stop is the unloading ram at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
28:43This is where the trains would come in,
28:45and this is where people would be unloaded,
28:47and the selection process taking place.
28:50A selection of those who were going to be slave labour,
28:53and who would have a little bit more life,
28:56and those would be taken straight to the gas chambers and executed.
29:00Families are separated without warning.
29:03Often it's the men who are marked out as slave labour,
29:06and women and children who are sent straight to the gas chambers.
29:10It doesn't take a huge leap of the imagination
29:13to picture the long line of wagons
29:16and the thousands of frightened men, women and children,
29:20being bundled off,
29:22guards shouting orders at them, pushing them around.
29:27It's a terrible place, really.
29:30MUSIC
29:39For vast numbers, the majority of Jews who were sent to Auschwitz,
29:43this is the terminus, this is the end of the line.
29:46The gas chambers are the end of the line.
29:49For a small percentage,
29:51Auschwitz is the entry into a whole new set of rail lines,
29:55which then ship them across the European continent
29:58as part of the vast slave labour system.
30:00But for Hitler, the railways aren't moving prisoners quickly enough.
30:05He summons Himmler to the Wolfsler headquarters in northern Poland.
30:11All measures necessary for a final solution must be taken.
30:20Adequate provision must be made.
30:24Transports to the camps in the east have been limited
30:29by the number of trains made available.
30:34I will have my office contact the State Secretary for Transport
30:38to see how the matter can be resolved.
30:41The Nazi rail network must now carry out
30:44one of the largest movements of people in history.
30:48July 1942.
30:51Albert Gansenmüller is transporting Jews to killing centres as fast as he can.
30:56But it's not enough for Heinrich Himmler.
31:00Himmler has ordered almost two million Polish Jews
31:03be sent from the ghettos to the gas chambers.
31:08PHONE RINGS
31:12Dr Gansenmüller. SS Reichsführer Himmler speaking.
31:17Herr Reichsführer, I wasn't expecting your call.
31:20Look, quite simply, we need more trains.
31:23They are essential if our plans are to be carried out to the full.
31:26Transport must be increased.
31:28Ja, Herr Reichsführer.
31:31PHONE RINGS
31:33By May 1942, Himmler's SS has six killing centres in operation,
31:38all in the strictest secrecy.
31:41Helmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek and Auschwitz.
31:49At Auschwitz, historian James Holland finds evidence
31:52of how the Nazis further increased their killing capacity.
32:00This extra line here veers off straight into the heart of Auschwitz-Birkenau.
32:06It was built quite late on in the war, in the early part of 1944,
32:09and it was built for one purpose and one purpose only,
32:12and that was the Nazis' last great round-up of European Jews.
32:16Some 430,000 mostly women and children were brought here
32:21in May, June and July 1944.
32:24They were in a hurry to finish this terrible job they'd begun.
32:31Extending the line through the gatehouse and into the centre of the camp
32:36means trains can get much closer to the gas chambers and unload faster.
32:46Where I'm walking now is quite literally the end of the line,
32:50and the reason that's the case is because either side of me are the gas chambers.
32:56In total, five gassing facilities are used to process the new arrivals.
33:04Prisoners are told they must shower
33:07and are taken to an underground undressing room
33:10before being sent into the adjacent gas chambers.
33:16Zyklon B gas is poured through vents in the roof.
33:20Once it's taken its deadly effect,
33:23the bodies are moved to the adjoining crematorium.
33:32In total, Auschwitz can now dispose
33:35of more than 4,500 bodies in a day.
33:39Auschwitz-Birkenau is this kind of perfecting
33:42of this kind of warped system of enacting mass genocide,
33:46and it's the place where you can operate the gas chambers
33:50day and night with clinical efficiency.
33:53A world away from the horror of the gas chambers,
33:57Hitler focuses on his plan for a glorious new mega-railway.
34:02Hitler's designers draw up 47 different schemes for new locomotives.
34:09Excellent work.
34:12A project of this size
34:15would, of course, be a great engineering challenge.
34:21A 20 feet wide and almost 23 feet tall,
34:26this diesel-electric locomotive dwarfs every other train
34:30on the Nazi railways.
34:33Pulling ten huge carriages
34:36and carrying nearly 2,000 passengers in unrestrained luxury,
34:40it'll be the biggest passenger train ever built.
34:44It even has its own 200-seat cinema.
34:47Hitler has always been highly detached from reality,
34:50but he just gets worse as the war progresses,
34:53and it's clearly absolutely absurd
34:55that on the one hand he's orchestrating the Holocaust
34:58and on the other is dreaming of some mega-railway,
35:02particularly one that he simply does not have the resources to build.
35:08By late 1944, the tide of war turns.
35:13East of the Vistula River in northern Poland,
35:16the Nazis are in a fighting retreat against a resurgent Red Army,
35:21and the concentration camps are now under threat of being discovered.
35:25Tony Pollard is looking for evidence of a railway bridge
35:29the Nazis hoped would help them in the fight against the Soviet advance.
35:33We're on the west bank of the Vistula,
35:36about a quarter of a mile away from the river,
35:40and I've just spotted what looks like part of the bridge construction.
35:46Oh, yes.
35:50Very clear.
35:53Looking out from here, I'm right on line with the bridge
35:57and I can see the piers in the river.
36:00The river from this angle doesn't look that wide.
36:03The 1,500-foot-wide Vistula is a major obstacle
36:06for getting supplies to the Nazi army.
36:14Getting a rail link across this river is vital to the Germans.
36:18It's the only way they can get enough men and supplies to the Eastern Front.
36:22This is key, and as part of that megastructure,
36:25that massive rail link, this bridge is one of the vital components.
36:311,500 special railway troops
36:34begin construction of a railway bridge in August 1944.
36:40You can see the construction technique.
36:43They've sunk these steel girders down into the riverbed,
36:47and inside of that space they've poured concrete,
36:50and you can see the steel reinforcing rods coming through the concrete.
36:55The Soviet army continues to make rapid gains,
36:58pushing the German army back towards the river.
37:01The next stop on the western side is Berlin,
37:04and Hitler himself says the Vistula must be held.
37:08But by the time we get to the end of January, the situation's hopeless.
37:12The Russians are breathing right down their necks.
37:18And on the 27th of January,
37:20the fateful decision is made to blow the bridge.
37:24It must have been heartbreaking for the engineers,
37:27but you can see the evidence of that blast here.
37:30It's peeled away that steel. Look at that.
37:34After blowing the railway bridge,
37:36the German army attempts to defend the river.
37:41But by February 1945, Russian troops cross the Vistula.
37:46The Vistula isn't just a physical barrier, it's also a symbol.
37:50And once it's crossed by the Russians,
37:53it's quite clear that the endgame is approaching.
37:56And as the Soviet army drives the Nazis from Eastern Europe,
38:00the horror of the killing centres will be revealed to the world.
38:08The Soviet army is now sweeping across Europe.
38:11As the Nazis retreat, they begin to empty the concentration camps
38:16in an attempt to cover up their crimes.
38:20What you find is the kind of concentration camp system
38:23is almost being dismantled and is being put into motion.
38:26It's kind of on the move.
38:28Prisoners from Auschwitz-Birkenau are being marched out of the camp.
38:32Or you also get this moment where whole camps, they hit the rails.
38:35It's almost like concentration camps end up being
38:38these kind of mobile, train-bound units.
38:41But as the Nazi railway empire shrinks,
38:45there's nowhere for the trains to go.
38:47You have this kind of moment right at the end of the war
38:50where Jews are literally just going round and round in circles in these trains.
38:53For some Jewish prisoners, their moment of liberation
38:56is not in a kind of classic concentration camp,
38:59it's actually in a train car where their guards melt away
39:02as the Allies approach.
39:05On 27th January 1945,
39:08Soviet troops liberate Auschwitz concentration camp.
39:12The liberators find evidence of mass killings that shocks the world.
39:19And despite nearly 60,000 prisoners being covertly moved,
39:23they still discover nearly 7,000 ill and dying.
39:29In all, over one million people are murdered at Auschwitz.
39:35When liberators enter into camps,
39:38I think it's a sense of almost not quite fathoming
39:42how this could have happened
39:44within the European continent in the 20th century.
39:48It's kind of this unimaginable scene that greets people's eyes.
39:53The war in Europe is entering its final phase.
39:56The Luftwaffe have lost control of the skies.
40:00And supply trains are now exposed to attack from the air.
40:05Marshalling yards have been blown up,
40:07train tracks have been blown, bridges have been blown.
40:10It's the German railways that are supplying food,
40:13supplying arms, ammunition, freight, whatever you like.
40:18They're supplying pretty much everything.
40:21And the moment the railways can't deliver that,
40:24that's when Germany starts to implode.
40:27All the retreating Nazis can do is try and slow down the Allied advance.
40:32Across the Empire,
40:34the rail wolf tears up hundreds of miles of Reichsbahn track.
40:41It falls to Albert Ganzenmüller
40:43to inform Hitler the railways are no longer functioning.
40:47Heil, mein Führer!
40:51Mein Führer!
40:53With deepest regret, I have to inform you
40:55that the Reichsbahn can no longer guarantee movement.
40:59We must continue towards a breakthrough.
41:03They must make the trains run again.
41:06See to it.
41:09Ganzenmüller is powerless to carry out Hitler's orders.
41:15In January 1945, Hitler takes his final train journey
41:19from the Wolf's Lair to Berlin,
41:22where once his personal train was a symbol of power,
41:26now it's a place of retreat in a ruined capital city.
41:30The once mighty capital was now a wreck of broken buildings,
41:36of rubble, of carnage.
41:39You know, there was barely a tree left standing,
41:42there was barely a building that hadn't been damaged in some way.
41:46Deep inside his bunker,
41:48Hitler descends into a world of paranoia and denial.
41:52Shutting himself off from the outside world,
41:55as the Allies close in on Berlin.
42:00Yet in March 1945,
42:02he still clings to his plans of a glorious future for Germany
42:07and its railway.
42:11But Hitler's once mighty railway is now bombed out of operation.
42:16And on April 30, 1945,
42:19the Führer finally concedes defeat and commits suicide.
42:25One month later,
42:27British intelligence officers capture Himmler trying to escape.
42:31They find false papers in the name of Heinrich Hitzinger.
42:35But before he can be interrogated,
42:37the head of the SS commits suicide by biting a cyanide pill.
42:43Railwayman Gansenmüller escapes to Argentina.
42:46It isn't until the 1970s that he's arrested and charged with war crimes.
42:51But soon after his trial begins, Gansenmüller suffers a heart attack.
42:55He recovers and lives to 91,
42:58but the case against him is never heard.
43:01One of the things about the Holocaust
43:03is that it's more than just the working of one or two men.
43:07It's the mobilisation of the entire state to enact genocide.
43:13In all, the Nazis kill six million Jews.
43:18At the end of the war, the Nazis tried to cover up their appalling crimes
43:22by burning most of their records.
43:24However, the records of the train movements of people still exist.
43:32The train records, along with papers found at the camps,
43:35indicate that most of the prisoners murdered at the killing centres
43:39arrived there by train.
43:42These documents provided investigators with evidence
43:45that the Nazis' biggest megastructure
43:48played a crucial role in the worst atrocity in history.