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8,000 Nazi
personnel served here.

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Auschwitz,

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the most comprehensively-designed
mass extermination concept

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in the history of mankind.

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- In 1944 came an order

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that we're going to be taking out

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from the ghetto, and,

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they started sending transport
to take us to Auschwitz.

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And when we arrived,

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men and boys separate a queue,

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women and children, another queue.

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And we moved forward and,

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then we came to three
high-ranking officers.

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Mengele was one of them.

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And they ask you your age,

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looked at you, how fit you are.

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I was 14 then.

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And 180 of the children after 182

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went to their death,

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to the gas chambers with other people.

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And then they gave us
the number on the arm.

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We lost our name from
that day onwards, B-7608.

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Every prisoner in Auschwitz had a number.

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The Auschwitz camp complex

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covered several miles

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and consisted of Auschwitz I,

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which was the prisoner of war camp

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and the administrative headquarters.

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Monowitz, or Auschwitz III,

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which provided a slave labor force

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for the giant IG Farben chemical factory.

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There were also dozens of sub camps.

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But the most notorious camp
of all was Auschwitz II,

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which became better known as Birkenau.

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The other purpose-built death camps were

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within Nazi-occupied Poland.

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But Auschwitz, although on
the soil of defeated Poland,

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was at the time within the borders

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of the greater German Reich.

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- This is one of the
most important pictures

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from the Auschwitz album.

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It shows the moment of the selection.

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The spot from this picture

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is right there behind us,
the ramp, the platform.

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This is one of the SS doctors,

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conducting the selection.

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In front of him, group
of men waiting for that,

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for the selection process.

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The one that stood in front of the doctor,

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somebody old, you can see
that, cane, white hair.

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People that are old, babies, handicapped,

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almost all were sent to the gas chambers,

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killed straight away.

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They were taken this way,

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and they walked to the end of the ramp.

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It's this road, down there,
at the end of the tracks.

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There were two gas chambers
and crematoria, two and three.

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From the selection place
down there to the end,

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it was 10-minutes walk only.

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- So, this is where most of
the 1.1 million people walked.

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- Yeah.

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- Every day, we see trains arriving

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and we knew on the left-hand side,

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all the people were walking,
they went to gas chamber.

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There were four gas chambers

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and four crematoriums,
day and night working.

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- These are the remains of the gas chamber

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and crematorium number two.

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They were underground, they
were all hidden, the rooms.

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Germans did on purpose, of course.

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There was thousands of
people select to die

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and they all had to strip.

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There were hangers on the
walls, there were benches,

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so they were told to leave
their stuff together.

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- A few hundred people went
into a gas chamber, and then,

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they shut the gate on the,
it was all underground, and,

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SS men, gas masked,

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put the gas in and within
about 15 minutes or 10 minutes,

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they were all dead.

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00:06:01,880 --> 00:06:03,336
- They were told that
they're gonna have showers.

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They could see even the
shower heads in that room.

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The shower heads, of course, were fake.

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That room was used as the gas chamber.

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To kill 2000 people,

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it used to take about 20 minutes,

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using for that, of course, the Zyklon B.

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Women, kids, men, in that one room

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that had only 210 square
meters of surface.

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People were like cattle squeezed together.

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It was a very painful death.

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They were vomiting, choking, suffocating.

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After they were killed,
after they were murdered,

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the gas chamber had to
be ventilated first.

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When this was done,

95
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the members of the
Sonderkommando had to go there.

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They were given orders
to clear the gas chamber.

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They had to take the bodies out.

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But the members of the Sonderkommando

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were not collaborating with the general.

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They were the prisoners of Auschwitz,

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forced to do that job.

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Among them, there were many Jews.

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So when they were sent
to the gas chambers,

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many of them have found
people that they knew.

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They have found bodies of their friends,

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cousins, sisters, brothers.

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They had to take their bodies
out to the crematorium.

108
00:07:05,720 --> 00:07:08,520
And then of course,
first, if they had found,

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they had to take off the
jewelry from the bodies,

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rings, necklaces, they had
to extract the gold teeth.

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They shaved the head
from the women's heads

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and then they started burning the corpses.

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It was like a factory.

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Well organized, very systematic
way of killing people.

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This is one of the ponds
for the human ashes, David.

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And the ponds like this one

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were also next to the other gas chambers.

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Next to the gas chamber number two,

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next to the gas chamber three.

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Not always they dump
the ashes to the ponds.

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Sometimes they just put
the ashes on the tracks

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00:07:52,880 --> 00:07:54,640
and dump them to the rivers.

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00:07:54,720 --> 00:07:58,520
Next to Auschwitz, we have two
big rivers, Sola and Vistula.

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- So here are the remains

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of literally tens of thousands of people.

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Yes, of course.

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- Eventually I was chosen
to work on agriculture,

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with two horses.

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For fertilizer, they used
to bring us sacks from the,

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gas chambers,

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burned the bones.

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And I used to put my hand in

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and threw it on the floor.

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I could feel the bones in my hand.

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- Around you, you see now the remains

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00:08:48,800 --> 00:08:52,640
of some of the warehouses
they called Canada.

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So this is where the jail was kept.

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Shoes, suitcases, thousands
of personal belongings

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the Jews were bringing
with them to the camp.

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So those things that were in
a good condition were sent

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00:09:06,080 --> 00:09:08,800
to Germany to the Reich
and they were reused.

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Random prisoners were
picked to do this job.

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- This part of Auschwitz-Birkenau
was called Canada,

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simply because the prisoners had heard

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that Canada was a nice place to live.

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- I came to Canada in, I
think it was April, 1944,

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just as this thing was built, in fact,

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all these huts were completely new.

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My hut was the first hut here.

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And so there were two huts

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because were a day shift
at the night shift,

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and there were 800 of us.

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So we were accommodated in these two huts.

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And down here were the men.

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The men's duty was to bring the stuff

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from the train to Canada.

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Let me just show you,

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'cause that's a useful thing to see.

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Here, you see people disembarking
from the train, okay?

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Some with the bundles, as you can see.

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So some people are carrying the bundles.

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So they were told to
leave everything behind.

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That luggage was brought by these men

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of the Canada commando,

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and that was then brought to Canada,

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where we did the sorting.

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- So most of the people coming in here

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will not have known what
was gonna happen to them.

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- People had no conception whatsoever.

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People walking into a building

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of the gas chamber had no idea

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that it was a gas chamber.

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It said to disinfection.

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He said, 'You're going to be disinfected.

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"Please put your clothes together,

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"bundle your shoes together
so they don't get lost."

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That's what these men of
the Canada were supposed

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to tell the people.

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And they had to tell them

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because the SS here were standing,

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waiting for them to say that.

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That's one of the Canada
group, sorting shoes.

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That shows you how many shoes they wear.

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That particular hut was full of shoes

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from the bottom to the ceiling.

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And that's the overflow of
the shoes that are outside.

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- So this must be 10,000,

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at least there...
- Thousands.

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And then, for years
and years after the war,

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there were Germans wearing...
- Yeah.

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00:11:21,160 --> 00:11:22,680
- Dead Jew's shoes.
- Absolutely.

192
00:11:22,760 --> 00:11:25,520
- Murdered Jew's shoes.
- Absolutely.

193
00:11:25,600 --> 00:11:29,400
When I was actually first
transferred to Canada,

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00:11:29,480 --> 00:11:34,080
one of the SS officers, I think
it was a man called Pallage,

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00:11:34,160 --> 00:11:37,760
he just made a very
short speech and he said,

196
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"Remember what you're
going to witness here.

197
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"And because you are witnesses,

198
00:11:44,440 --> 00:11:47,520
"you'll never be transferred
back to the main camp.

199
00:11:47,600 --> 00:11:50,280
"There's only one way out of here,

200
00:11:50,360 --> 00:11:52,440
"and that's through the chimney."

201
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So that, you can imagine, was a big shock.

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00:11:56,040 --> 00:11:57,720
That's how I got to Canada.

203
00:12:02,560 --> 00:12:03,880
- The ones that worked here,

204
00:12:03,960 --> 00:12:06,320
the prisoners sorting the belongings,

205
00:12:06,400 --> 00:12:10,360
were aware that just behind
the fence on the other side,

206
00:12:10,440 --> 00:12:12,200
the Germans were killing those people.

207
00:12:12,280 --> 00:12:14,760
The thousands of the
Jews were coming here,

208
00:12:14,840 --> 00:12:17,360
there were two other gas
chambers just behind the fence.

209
00:12:17,440 --> 00:12:19,480
And those that survived Auschwitz

210
00:12:19,560 --> 00:12:22,440
and worked here in the Canada warehouses,

211
00:12:22,520 --> 00:12:26,360
they remember that they have
seen people in the woods,

212
00:12:26,440 --> 00:12:29,680
down there waiting
before they were killed.

213
00:12:29,760 --> 00:12:31,920
This was a very organized,

214
00:12:32,000 --> 00:12:35,600
very systematic way of killing people,

215
00:12:35,680 --> 00:12:37,080
on the industrial scale.

216
00:12:40,520 --> 00:12:45,520
- There were three cordons of
assessment guarding Auschwitz.

217
00:12:45,680 --> 00:12:48,320
They actually volunteered for the job.

218
00:12:49,360 --> 00:12:50,480
They were very cruel.

219
00:12:51,360 --> 00:12:55,680
And then they went home
to see their families.

220
00:12:56,800 --> 00:13:00,040
They had a good time at
home, and had children.

221
00:13:01,480 --> 00:13:03,680
And then they came back to Auschwitz

222
00:13:03,760 --> 00:13:05,720
and did the same thing again.

223
00:13:10,200 --> 00:13:12,360
- In 1944, at the height

224
00:13:12,440 --> 00:13:15,120
of Auschwitz-Birkenau's mass murders,

225
00:13:15,200 --> 00:13:18,600
the Nazis compiled two
contrasting photo albums.

226
00:13:21,320 --> 00:13:24,320
One, of the new arrivals
at the death camp,

227
00:13:26,480 --> 00:13:29,400
the other of the holiday camp,

228
00:13:29,480 --> 00:13:31,760
for officers, guards, administrators,

229
00:13:31,840 --> 00:13:34,560
and other Auschwitz complex personnel

230
00:13:34,640 --> 00:13:37,280
to relax and enjoy themselves.

231
00:13:40,320 --> 00:13:41,640
In one album,

232
00:13:41,720 --> 00:13:44,360
most of the people
photographed would be murdered.

233
00:14:02,480 --> 00:14:04,080
In the other album,

234
00:14:04,160 --> 00:14:06,240
most of the people photographed

235
00:14:06,320 --> 00:14:08,240
would get away with those murders.

236
00:14:25,560 --> 00:14:30,320
By May, 1944, they were
killing 10,000 people a day.

237
00:14:30,400 --> 00:14:33,880
The Nazis murdered 1.1 million men, women,

238
00:14:33,960 --> 00:14:36,320
and children in the Auschwitz complex.

239
00:14:41,160 --> 00:14:44,920
Approximately 7,000 of
the butchers responsible,

240
00:14:45,000 --> 00:14:47,760
mainly SS, survived the war,

241
00:14:47,840 --> 00:14:52,840
yet only around 800 were ever
prosecuted for war crimes.

242
00:14:58,200 --> 00:15:00,360
Josef Mengele, arguably the world's

243
00:15:00,440 --> 00:15:04,560
most wanted Nazi war criminal,
targeted twins, Gypsies,

244
00:15:04,640 --> 00:15:06,760
and dwarfs in particular in Auschwitz.

245
00:15:08,000 --> 00:15:10,560
One of his many horrific experiments

246
00:15:10,640 --> 00:15:13,120
was injecting eyeballs with a dye

247
00:15:13,200 --> 00:15:14,800
to try to change the color.

248
00:15:27,720 --> 00:15:30,280
This memorial in Mengele's hometown reads,

249
00:15:31,520 --> 00:15:33,040
"No one can divorce himself

250
00:15:33,120 --> 00:15:34,720
"from the history of his people.

251
00:15:35,800 --> 00:15:39,520
"One should not and must
not let history rest

252
00:15:39,600 --> 00:15:42,040
"because otherwise it can rise again

253
00:15:42,120 --> 00:15:43,840
"and become part of the present."

254
00:15:47,280 --> 00:15:50,120
- Josef Mengele, the "Angel of Death,"

255
00:15:50,200 --> 00:15:51,800
was born and grew up here

256
00:15:51,880 --> 00:15:54,320
and his father was the largest employer.

257
00:15:55,240 --> 00:16:00,000
And in 1956 when he was
living in Argentina,

258
00:16:00,080 --> 00:16:03,120
he was able to go to the German embassy

259
00:16:03,200 --> 00:16:06,560
and get hold of a copy
of his birth certificate.

260
00:16:06,640 --> 00:16:11,320
And from that, he was able to
obtain an Argentinian passport

261
00:16:11,400 --> 00:16:13,480
in the name of Josef Mengele.

262
00:16:15,080 --> 00:16:17,840
And then allegedly, later that year,

263
00:16:17,920 --> 00:16:22,320
he flew to Switzerland and
met with his wife and son,

264
00:16:22,400 --> 00:16:25,320
and from there, sneaked
back here to Günzburg

265
00:16:25,400 --> 00:16:27,320
to see all his family and friends.

266
00:16:27,400 --> 00:16:31,280
And then in 1959, when his father died,

267
00:16:31,360 --> 00:16:34,160
he again came back here and was involved

268
00:16:34,240 --> 00:16:37,080
in the wake and the
funeral, and apparently,

269
00:16:37,160 --> 00:16:41,200
most of the town knew he was
here, all except the police.

270
00:16:41,280 --> 00:16:43,760
And even more extraordinarily,

271
00:16:43,840 --> 00:16:46,920
he actually stayed with some nuns.

272
00:16:53,720 --> 00:16:56,160
Mengele
avoided extradition requests

273
00:16:56,240 --> 00:16:58,080
by the West German government

274
00:16:58,160 --> 00:17:01,080
and escaped the Mossad
attempt to capture him.

275
00:17:01,160 --> 00:17:04,720
In 1979, he died, aged 67,

276
00:17:04,800 --> 00:17:08,960
after suffering a stroke
while swimming in Brazil.

277
00:17:10,520 --> 00:17:11,880
His skeleton is stored at the

278
00:17:11,960 --> 00:17:15,360
Sao Paulo Institute for Forensic Medicine,

279
00:17:15,440 --> 00:17:18,560
where it is used for medical experiments.

280
00:17:43,080 --> 00:17:46,600
- Six million Jews were
murdered in the Holocaust.

281
00:17:51,320 --> 00:17:52,440
It's hard to comprehend

282
00:17:52,520 --> 00:17:55,560
what six million people
actually looks like.

283
00:17:55,640 --> 00:17:58,800
I can only try to compare
it to my own understanding.

284
00:18:03,480 --> 00:18:07,000
I come from Yorkshire, which
is the UK's largest county.

285
00:18:08,200 --> 00:18:10,760
It takes two hours to
drive north to south,

286
00:18:11,840 --> 00:18:14,760
and two and a half hours
to drive east to west.

287
00:18:18,200 --> 00:18:22,880
There are over 1,100 cities,
towns, villages, and hamlets.

288
00:18:25,960 --> 00:18:29,360
Some, like adjoining
cities Leeds and Bradford,

289
00:18:29,440 --> 00:18:31,640
has 1.4 million living there.

290
00:18:33,720 --> 00:18:37,840
Sheffield has 600,000 inhabitants.

291
00:18:39,040 --> 00:18:41,400
In total, the population of Yorkshire

292
00:18:41,480 --> 00:18:44,520
is currently 5.4 million people.

293
00:18:47,800 --> 00:18:49,520
If the Nazis had exterminated

294
00:18:49,600 --> 00:18:51,800
the entire population of Yorkshire,

295
00:18:51,880 --> 00:18:54,080
what would the British
government have done?

296
00:18:57,680 --> 00:18:59,240
There are six million people living

297
00:18:59,320 --> 00:19:01,080
in the US State of Maryland.

298
00:19:01,960 --> 00:19:04,480
If they'd all been massacred by the Nazis,

299
00:19:04,560 --> 00:19:06,800
what would the American
government have done?

300
00:19:09,040 --> 00:19:10,520
What would the world have done

301
00:19:10,600 --> 00:19:13,520
if the almost six million
people living in Denmark

302
00:19:13,600 --> 00:19:15,480
had all been murdered by the Nazis?

303
00:19:20,480 --> 00:19:24,680
At school in the 1960s,
just 35 miles from here,

304
00:19:24,760 --> 00:19:26,560
we were told that we British

305
00:19:26,640 --> 00:19:28,760
could never have carried
out the Holocaust.

306
00:19:28,840 --> 00:19:31,640
We are civilized and above such things.

307
00:19:33,920 --> 00:19:36,120
On the 16th of March, 1190,

308
00:19:36,200 --> 00:19:39,800
following many weeks of
antisemitic riots, 150 Jews,

309
00:19:39,880 --> 00:19:42,640
the entire Jewish population of York,

310
00:19:42,720 --> 00:19:45,600
were massacred, many by their own hands,

311
00:19:45,680 --> 00:19:48,000
at a former castle on this site.

312
00:19:48,080 --> 00:19:49,680
Had more Jews lived here,

313
00:19:49,760 --> 00:19:52,080
they too would have been massacred.

314
00:19:52,160 --> 00:19:54,880
Regardless of the actual numbers involved,

315
00:19:54,960 --> 00:19:57,400
that was mass extermination.

316
00:19:59,160 --> 00:20:04,160
In 1290, Edward I expelled
all Jews from his kingdom

317
00:20:04,720 --> 00:20:09,720
and Jews were only permitted
to return 367 years later

318
00:20:10,040 --> 00:20:12,600
when Oliver Cromwell allowed them back.

319
00:20:14,880 --> 00:20:16,800
In the last 2000 years,

320
00:20:16,880 --> 00:20:18,480
at one time or another,

321
00:20:18,560 --> 00:20:20,480
in most European countries,

322
00:20:20,560 --> 00:20:23,720
the Jews have been
relentlessly persecuted.

323
00:20:35,120 --> 00:20:36,120
The government sent a few

324
00:20:36,200 --> 00:20:39,440
of us congressmen over to see those camps.

325
00:20:39,520 --> 00:20:41,280
And if there's anybody left who wonders

326
00:20:41,360 --> 00:20:43,440
if this war was worth fighting,

327
00:20:43,520 --> 00:20:45,960
well, I wish they could have been along.

328
00:20:47,600 --> 00:20:50,160
There it was, right in front of us,

329
00:20:50,240 --> 00:20:52,640
fascism and what it's bound to lead to,

330
00:20:52,720 --> 00:20:54,200
wherever it crops up.

331
00:20:57,000 --> 00:21:00,840
In Germany, it led to over
400 camps like the ones I saw.

332
00:21:02,200 --> 00:21:04,440
It was the worst thing
I ever saw in my life.

333
00:21:10,440 --> 00:21:13,560
- The shock of seeing

334
00:21:14,960 --> 00:21:17,360
can never be taken away,

335
00:21:18,480 --> 00:21:21,880
but is a fact that
publicly and officially,

336
00:21:21,960 --> 00:21:26,960
the Allies condemned what
we now call the Holocaust,

337
00:21:27,160 --> 00:21:30,240
and what they then just call
the extermination of the Jews,

338
00:21:30,320 --> 00:21:32,880
as early as the time of
the Battle of Stalingrad,

339
00:21:32,960 --> 00:21:35,560
in the winter of 1942.

340
00:21:35,640 --> 00:21:40,200
And the exiled refugee
governments in London

341
00:21:40,280 --> 00:21:43,200
brought up the first set of principles

342
00:21:43,280 --> 00:21:45,520
to punish the Nazis for war crimes.

343
00:21:45,600 --> 00:21:47,640
And the Soviet authorities have been

344
00:21:47,720 --> 00:21:51,600
publishing detailed
descriptions of Nazi crimes,

345
00:21:51,680 --> 00:21:54,400
including pogroms, as they called them,

346
00:21:54,480 --> 00:21:57,600
very early in the war,
and not just in the press,

347
00:21:57,680 --> 00:22:00,080
but in official statements.

348
00:22:00,160 --> 00:22:03,360
This Allied statement about
the extermination of the Jews

349
00:22:03,440 --> 00:22:05,280
was read out in the House of Commons

350
00:22:05,360 --> 00:22:07,560
and there was a memorial,

351
00:22:07,640 --> 00:22:10,040
a moment when Parliament stood in silence,

352
00:22:10,120 --> 00:22:12,360
which it never did, except
for the death of a king.

353
00:22:12,440 --> 00:22:14,000
It was a ceremonial moment.

354
00:22:14,080 --> 00:22:18,840
And this was broadcast on
some 20 languages on the BBC.

355
00:22:20,520 --> 00:22:23,680
I regret
to have to inform the House

356
00:22:23,760 --> 00:22:26,240
that reliable reports
have recently reached

357
00:22:26,320 --> 00:22:28,040
His Majesty's Government

358
00:22:28,120 --> 00:22:31,280
regarding the barbarous
and inhuman treatment

359
00:22:31,360 --> 00:22:34,680
to which Jews are being subjected
in German-occupied Europe.

360
00:22:37,040 --> 00:22:40,560
German authorities, not
content with denying

361
00:22:40,640 --> 00:22:43,240
to persons of Jewish race
in all the territories

362
00:22:43,320 --> 00:22:46,520
over which their barbarous
rule has been extended

363
00:22:46,600 --> 00:22:49,560
the most elementary human rights,

364
00:22:49,640 --> 00:22:54,040
are now carrying into effect
Hitler's oft repeated intention

365
00:22:54,120 --> 00:22:56,960
to exterminate the
Jewish people in Europe.

366
00:22:59,040 --> 00:23:01,440
From all the occupied countries,

367
00:23:01,520 --> 00:23:04,200
Jews are being transported in conditions

368
00:23:04,280 --> 00:23:08,360
of appalling horror and
brutality to Eastern Europe.

369
00:23:09,960 --> 00:23:14,400
The infirm are left to die
of exposure and starvation,

370
00:23:15,240 --> 00:23:19,160
or are deliberately
massacred in mass executions.

371
00:23:20,440 --> 00:23:23,640
The number of victims of these
bloody cruelties is reckoned

372
00:23:23,720 --> 00:23:25,960
in many hundreds of thousands

373
00:23:26,040 --> 00:23:29,800
of entirely innocent
men, women, and children.

374
00:23:35,240 --> 00:23:39,080
Just months after he
made that historic statement,

375
00:23:39,160 --> 00:23:40,880
Anthony Eden received a request

376
00:23:40,960 --> 00:23:42,400
from the Bulgarian authorities

377
00:23:42,480 --> 00:23:47,280
for help with moving 11,343 Jews

378
00:23:47,360 --> 00:23:50,000
from the newly-acquired
Bulgarian territories

379
00:23:50,080 --> 00:23:52,480
of Greece and Yugoslavia

380
00:23:52,560 --> 00:23:54,520
to British-controlled Palestine.

381
00:23:55,520 --> 00:23:57,320
He refused.

382
00:23:57,400 --> 00:24:00,600
Many of those Jews ended up instead

383
00:24:00,680 --> 00:24:03,360
in the Treblinka extermination camp.

384
00:24:04,960 --> 00:24:07,400
- United Nations War Crimes Commission

385
00:24:07,480 --> 00:24:10,200
started work at the end of 1943,

386
00:24:10,280 --> 00:24:11,640
at the height of the war,

387
00:24:11,720 --> 00:24:14,360
and began compiling dossiers of evidence

388
00:24:14,440 --> 00:24:18,200
against Nazi and Japanese war criminals.

389
00:24:18,280 --> 00:24:21,920
And then just after the Nazis' surrender,

390
00:24:22,000 --> 00:24:27,040
the four victorious powers
in Europe came together,

391
00:24:27,120 --> 00:24:29,080
not before time, many would say,

392
00:24:29,160 --> 00:24:32,440
and agreed on a legal process

393
00:24:32,520 --> 00:24:37,240
to try the Nazi leadership
for the crimes they committed.

394
00:24:37,320 --> 00:24:41,640
And this agreement, this charter
then was the legal document

395
00:24:41,720 --> 00:24:43,760
under which the top Nazis were brought

396
00:24:43,840 --> 00:24:45,360
to account at Nuremberg.

397
00:24:49,520 --> 00:24:53,120
Johann Robert
Riss was a Wehrmacht sergeant

398
00:24:53,200 --> 00:24:57,840
involved in the massacre of
approximately 184 civilians

399
00:24:57,920 --> 00:25:00,960
in a Tuscan town in 1944.

400
00:25:01,800 --> 00:25:04,160
Living in Bavaria after the war,

401
00:25:04,240 --> 00:25:08,240
in 2011, he was sentenced in absentia,

402
00:25:08,320 --> 00:25:11,880
by the military court in
Rome, to life imprisonment.

403
00:25:13,040 --> 00:25:15,600
Germany declined to extradite him.

404
00:25:16,920 --> 00:25:21,200
To date, he appears to be
at liberty and unpunished.

405
00:25:23,360 --> 00:25:25,400
- Churchill, Roosevelt,

406
00:25:25,480 --> 00:25:27,200
and after him, Truman,

407
00:25:27,280 --> 00:25:29,320
were all very supportive of trials.

408
00:25:29,400 --> 00:25:31,440
However, within governments,

409
00:25:31,520 --> 00:25:33,760
there was a certain amount of hostility.

410
00:25:33,840 --> 00:25:35,560
And we know from records

411
00:25:35,640 --> 00:25:38,440
that have been subsequently
unearthed and published

412
00:25:38,520 --> 00:25:40,480
that in Britain, for example,

413
00:25:40,560 --> 00:25:45,360
a number of senior civil
servants were opposed to trials.

414
00:25:45,440 --> 00:25:48,480
Some described it as victor's justice,

415
00:25:48,560 --> 00:25:51,120
others said it would be counterproductive

416
00:25:51,200 --> 00:25:53,520
and it would push Germany into the hands

417
00:25:53,600 --> 00:25:55,680
of a another would-be Hitler.

418
00:25:55,760 --> 00:25:59,560
And in the US, the objections
were slightly different.

419
00:25:59,640 --> 00:26:01,520
But there was certainly a pattern

420
00:26:01,600 --> 00:26:04,160
among a number of senior people

421
00:26:04,240 --> 00:26:06,720
within government to resist the trials.

422
00:26:06,800 --> 00:26:09,760
And it was only overcome
by the top leadership.

423
00:26:09,840 --> 00:26:13,200
- Henry Stimson managed the war effort

424
00:26:13,280 --> 00:26:16,160
for Franklin Roosevelt,
the Secretary of War.

425
00:26:16,240 --> 00:26:21,240
His own history on war crimes
goes back decades before

426
00:26:21,560 --> 00:26:26,040
when he was part of the American
team supporting the idea

427
00:26:26,120 --> 00:26:29,520
that a war was itself a crime.

428
00:26:29,600 --> 00:26:33,000
So he was very keen on
prosecuting the Nazis

429
00:26:33,080 --> 00:26:34,640
for crimes of aggression.

430
00:26:34,720 --> 00:26:38,400
But he was also, in another way,

431
00:26:38,480 --> 00:26:41,520
strongly opposed to the idea
of crimes against humanity.

432
00:26:41,600 --> 00:26:44,200
Because as Stimson told his staff,

433
00:26:44,280 --> 00:26:47,440
he didn't want to see America in the dock

434
00:26:47,520 --> 00:26:51,360
for the lynchings in the south of Blacks,

435
00:26:51,440 --> 00:26:54,440
because they had, as America supported,

436
00:26:54,520 --> 00:26:57,120
the idea that Germany could be prosecuted

437
00:26:57,200 --> 00:26:59,800
for what it had done to
its own citizens, the Jews.

438
00:26:59,880 --> 00:27:03,800
And this sense that you had
to preserve state sovereignty

439
00:27:03,880 --> 00:27:06,440
against outside's
interference was something

440
00:27:06,520 --> 00:27:08,480
that also he was very strong on.

441
00:27:08,560 --> 00:27:10,840
On the other hand, you
had Ambassador Pell,

442
00:27:10,920 --> 00:27:13,520
who is a real hero of these issues.

443
00:27:13,600 --> 00:27:18,520
He went public back in Washington
and created a huge fuss

444
00:27:18,600 --> 00:27:23,040
and forced the State
Department through the press

445
00:27:23,120 --> 00:27:26,760
to agree that German
crimes against German Jews

446
00:27:26,840 --> 00:27:28,680
should be regarded as a crime.

447
00:27:28,760 --> 00:27:31,360
And when Pell headed off to Europe,

448
00:27:31,440 --> 00:27:34,080
he penned a note to a friend saying,

449
00:27:34,160 --> 00:27:36,600
"We want to make sure
after this is all over

450
00:27:36,680 --> 00:27:40,160
"that the Gestapo officers
can't sit around in the village,

451
00:27:40,240 --> 00:27:42,600
"having a renaissance
and talking of the joys

452
00:27:42,680 --> 00:27:44,880
"of shooting Jews and looting France."

453
00:27:44,960 --> 00:27:47,400
And he says explicitly, "We must make sure

454
00:27:47,480 --> 00:27:50,560
"that the Nazis do not
get a romantic revival,

455
00:27:50,640 --> 00:27:53,040
"the way in which the Confederacy managed

456
00:27:53,120 --> 00:27:56,160
"to do in America after the Civil War."

457
00:27:56,240 --> 00:27:59,960
A very telling point to be
written in 1943, I think.

458
00:28:02,960 --> 00:28:04,280
As well as Nuremberg,

459
00:28:04,360 --> 00:28:06,600
there seemed to be so
many other trials focusing

460
00:28:06,680 --> 00:28:09,040
upon the murderous crimes of the Holocaust

461
00:28:09,120 --> 00:28:10,800
that it looked as if the Allies

462
00:28:10,880 --> 00:28:13,800
in both East and West
Germany were truly determined

463
00:28:13,880 --> 00:28:16,680
to achieve real justice
for all the victims

464
00:28:16,760 --> 00:28:17,760
of mass slaughter.

465
00:28:19,360 --> 00:28:21,720
But an estimation of the immense number

466
00:28:21,800 --> 00:28:24,000
of perpetrators compared to those

467
00:28:24,080 --> 00:28:26,480
who actually stood trial exposes

468
00:28:26,560 --> 00:28:29,040
the minuscule tip of an iceberg.

469
00:28:32,760 --> 00:28:36,000
- People hold up Nuremberg
as a shining light

470
00:28:36,080 --> 00:28:37,960
of justice, quite rightly.

471
00:28:38,040 --> 00:28:41,400
And on the other hand, you
get arguments, "Oh, well,

472
00:28:42,840 --> 00:28:44,440
"Let's be pragmatic.

473
00:28:44,520 --> 00:28:46,880
"It's too difficult, it's too costly.

474
00:28:46,960 --> 00:28:49,520
"These people might become our friends."

475
00:28:49,600 --> 00:28:52,000
Well, I think what one should remember

476
00:28:52,080 --> 00:28:54,840
is the pragmatists almost succeeded

477
00:28:54,920 --> 00:28:57,560
in preventing Nuremberg
from ever happening.

478
00:29:09,640 --> 00:29:14,640
- On Thursday the 18th of
October, 1945 in Berlin,

479
00:29:16,960 --> 00:29:19,240
the indictment was lodged with a tribunal.

480
00:29:20,960 --> 00:29:25,000
And a copy of that indictment
in the German language

481
00:29:25,080 --> 00:29:27,600
has been furnished to each defendant

482
00:29:29,000 --> 00:29:32,280
and has been in his
possession more than 30 days.

483
00:29:34,560 --> 00:29:36,760
The defendants

484
00:29:36,840 --> 00:29:39,040
are to plead guilty

485
00:29:39,120 --> 00:29:44,120
or not guilty for the
charges against them.

486
00:29:44,720 --> 00:29:47,480
You must plead guilty or not guilty.

487
00:30:16,040 --> 00:30:18,440
- We're entering Courtroom 600.

488
00:30:22,280 --> 00:30:25,320
So this was the side
where the judges were.

489
00:30:26,520 --> 00:30:30,200
There were eight judges,
two of every country.

490
00:30:31,160 --> 00:30:33,600
Here's the place where
the translators sat.

491
00:30:34,440 --> 00:30:37,080
This is the place where
the defendants sat,

492
00:30:37,160 --> 00:30:40,400
and this is the place where
the defense councils were.

493
00:30:41,840 --> 00:30:43,680
And here where the tables

494
00:30:43,760 --> 00:30:46,680
where the prosecution teams had its place.

495
00:30:47,840 --> 00:30:50,400
The most basic Nuremberg principle is

496
00:30:50,480 --> 00:30:53,880
that such severe crimes
as these mass crimes,

497
00:30:53,960 --> 00:30:57,920
state crimes, crimes against
humanity, war crimes,

498
00:30:58,000 --> 00:30:59,880
must not be unpunished

499
00:30:59,960 --> 00:31:03,280
but must be tried before

500
00:31:03,360 --> 00:31:06,760
an international or a national court

501
00:31:07,920 --> 00:31:11,160
in order to document and
portray these crimes,

502
00:31:11,240 --> 00:31:13,840
but also, in order to satisfy

503
00:31:15,000 --> 00:31:18,480
the needs of the victims
for a certain punishment

504
00:31:18,560 --> 00:31:20,920
of those guilty of these crimes.

505
00:31:22,320 --> 00:31:24,000
There were 21 defendants.

506
00:31:24,080 --> 00:31:27,480
Originally there were 24,
but one killed itself.

507
00:31:27,560 --> 00:31:30,160
One, they could not find,
it was then later clear

508
00:31:30,240 --> 00:31:32,160
that he was also already dead.

509
00:31:32,240 --> 00:31:35,040
And one was not capable
to follow the trial

510
00:31:35,120 --> 00:31:37,120
because he was very ill.

511
00:31:37,200 --> 00:31:39,200
It is much, much more than a show trial,

512
00:31:39,920 --> 00:31:44,280
especially the International
Military Tribunal detailed,

513
00:31:44,360 --> 00:31:47,520
portrayed the crime
history of Nazi Germany

514
00:31:47,600 --> 00:31:49,120
for the first time.

515
00:31:49,200 --> 00:31:52,120
The tribunal collected evidences,

516
00:31:52,200 --> 00:31:55,480
documents that still are very important

517
00:31:55,560 --> 00:31:57,240
for the research that is done

518
00:31:57,320 --> 00:32:00,920
on the so-called Das Dritte
Reich, the Third Reich.

519
00:32:01,000 --> 00:32:06,000
And the guilt, the individual
guilt of the accused was very,

520
00:32:06,920 --> 00:32:09,920
very meticulously proven.

521
00:32:11,480 --> 00:32:14,000
When the first trial, 21 were tried,

522
00:32:14,080 --> 00:32:18,760
12 were sentenced to death,
and three were acquitted.

523
00:32:18,840 --> 00:32:21,600
And the others, they got long-term

524
00:32:21,680 --> 00:32:23,720
or even lifetime imprisonments.

525
00:32:23,800 --> 00:32:25,880
The idea behind the Nuremberg

526
00:32:27,360 --> 00:32:32,360
trials was to put to try
the major war criminals,

527
00:32:33,560 --> 00:32:37,920
not people who were on the lower hierarchy

528
00:32:38,000 --> 00:32:40,920
in the Nazi regime, but
those who were responsible

529
00:32:41,000 --> 00:32:43,200
for the organization, for the planning,

530
00:32:43,280 --> 00:32:47,240
and those who benefited most
from this criminal system.

531
00:32:50,560 --> 00:32:52,880
Feodor Fedorenko served

532
00:32:52,960 --> 00:32:55,880
at Treblinka extermination camp.

533
00:32:55,960 --> 00:32:58,720
He escaped to the USA in 1949

534
00:32:58,800 --> 00:33:01,040
and became an American citizen.

535
00:33:01,120 --> 00:33:02,640
He retired to Florida,

536
00:33:02,720 --> 00:33:07,280
with its large Jewish population, in 1973.

537
00:33:08,960 --> 00:33:12,240
In December, 1984, Fedorenko became

538
00:33:12,320 --> 00:33:15,960
the first Nazi war
criminal living in the USA

539
00:33:16,040 --> 00:33:18,960
to be deported to the Soviet Union.

540
00:33:19,040 --> 00:33:21,520
At his trial in 1986,

541
00:33:21,600 --> 00:33:23,720
he was found guilty of treason

542
00:33:23,800 --> 00:33:26,640
and taking part in mass executions.

543
00:33:26,720 --> 00:33:31,680
He was executed by firing
squad in 1987, aged 79.

544
00:33:45,280 --> 00:33:46,960
Even though this
filming is taking place

545
00:33:47,040 --> 00:33:49,040
75 years after the end of the war,

546
00:33:49,880 --> 00:33:53,000
I was surprised to have the
opportunity to speak to someone

547
00:33:53,080 --> 00:33:55,760
who'd actually prosecuted
the Nazis at Nuremberg.

548
00:33:58,960 --> 00:34:01,960
- You're now going to
hear the presentation

549
00:34:02,040 --> 00:34:03,600
by the prosecution.

550
00:34:03,680 --> 00:34:05,560
- It is with sorrow and with hope.

551
00:34:06,480 --> 00:34:08,400
- This was the tragic fulfillment

552
00:34:09,440 --> 00:34:13,440
of a program of intolerance and arrogance.

553
00:34:15,080 --> 00:34:18,440
Vengeance is not our goal, nor do...

554
00:34:18,520 --> 00:34:21,840
Benjamin Ferencz is
the last living participant

555
00:34:21,920 --> 00:34:25,600
to give an eyewitness testimony
of those historic trials.

556
00:34:26,640 --> 00:34:29,000
- The slaughter permitted
by these defendants

557
00:34:30,120 --> 00:34:33,600
was dictated, not by military necessity,

558
00:34:34,520 --> 00:34:37,920
but by that supreme
perversion of thoughtful,

559
00:34:38,000 --> 00:34:40,800
the Nazi theory of the master race.

560
00:34:42,320 --> 00:34:46,240
- The International Military
Tribunal was the only one

561
00:34:46,320 --> 00:34:50,280
where the four occupying
powers and successful powers,

562
00:34:50,360 --> 00:34:54,480
United States, Great Britain,
France, and Soviet Union,

563
00:34:54,560 --> 00:34:59,560
joined together in response to
promises which had been made

564
00:35:00,200 --> 00:35:02,840
by President Roosevelt and Mr. Churchill,

565
00:35:03,680 --> 00:35:07,400
that the criminals would
be brought to justice.

566
00:35:07,480 --> 00:35:09,960
And that attracted a
great deal of attention

567
00:35:10,040 --> 00:35:11,520
and great many reporters.

568
00:35:11,600 --> 00:35:14,400
When that trial was over,
the reporters went home.

569
00:35:14,480 --> 00:35:16,080
The United States had decided

570
00:35:16,160 --> 00:35:19,200
that it would conduct
another series of trials,

571
00:35:19,280 --> 00:35:21,480
it turned out to be 12 trials,

572
00:35:21,560 --> 00:35:24,440
in order to give a more
comprehensive picture

573
00:35:24,520 --> 00:35:27,080
of what had happened, not just a snapshot,

574
00:35:27,160 --> 00:35:30,480
which was the IMT trial itself,

575
00:35:30,560 --> 00:35:32,040
but to explain how it is

576
00:35:32,120 --> 00:35:34,280
that a civilized country like Germany

577
00:35:34,360 --> 00:35:38,080
could not only tolerate
this type of atrocity,

578
00:35:38,160 --> 00:35:40,360
which the Nazis were committing,

579
00:35:40,440 --> 00:35:42,320
but would accept it and support it.

580
00:35:43,560 --> 00:35:45,680
- Over and over again,

581
00:35:45,760 --> 00:35:49,520
Hitler asserted his belief
in the necessity of force

582
00:35:49,600 --> 00:35:52,200
as the means of solving
international problems.

583
00:35:52,280 --> 00:35:54,240
- Just as the international military trial

584
00:35:54,320 --> 00:35:57,760
was coming to an end, I
was invited, I would say,

585
00:35:57,840 --> 00:36:00,880
by the Pentagon to go back and join them

586
00:36:02,200 --> 00:36:04,480
for the trials which
the army was conducting,

587
00:36:04,560 --> 00:36:06,440
the military commission trials.

588
00:36:07,960 --> 00:36:09,800
I went over to see Telford Taylor.

589
00:36:09,880 --> 00:36:11,720
He had been asked by the president

590
00:36:11,800 --> 00:36:14,240
to set up 12 additional trials.

591
00:36:14,320 --> 00:36:18,120
And my first assignment
from Telford Taylor was,

592
00:36:18,200 --> 00:36:22,120
he said, "Look, we have
a number of suspects.

593
00:36:22,200 --> 00:36:24,080
"We are holding them in detention.

594
00:36:25,280 --> 00:36:27,920
"We need the evidence, because
if you have the suspect

595
00:36:28,000 --> 00:36:29,680
"and no evidence, you've got nothing.

596
00:36:29,760 --> 00:36:31,680
"And you've got the
evidence and no suspect,

597
00:36:31,760 --> 00:36:32,680
"you've got nothing.

598
00:36:32,760 --> 00:36:34,640
"So we've gotta match together,

599
00:36:35,480 --> 00:36:40,000
"proof of crime and the
criminal in custody.

600
00:36:40,080 --> 00:36:42,320
"And you provide the evidence for it,

601
00:36:42,400 --> 00:36:45,120
"that'll be your job, okay?"

602
00:36:45,200 --> 00:36:48,120
So I proceeded to Berlin to do that job.

603
00:36:48,200 --> 00:36:50,400
I had a staff of about 50 people,

604
00:36:50,480 --> 00:36:53,280
mostly former German refugees.

605
00:36:54,200 --> 00:36:56,880
Had to speak German perfectly, of course.

606
00:36:56,960 --> 00:36:59,040
And one day,

607
00:36:59,120 --> 00:37:02,200
one of my assistants walks in

608
00:37:02,280 --> 00:37:04,600
and he hands me a pile
of papers and he said,

609
00:37:04,680 --> 00:37:06,000
"Look what I found."

610
00:37:07,120 --> 00:37:09,160
And I looked at him.

611
00:37:09,240 --> 00:37:13,000
The title on it was

612
00:37:14,120 --> 00:37:16,920
In German is, "Situation Reports,"

613
00:37:17,000 --> 00:37:21,480
of a certain group
known as Einsatzgruppen.

614
00:37:21,560 --> 00:37:24,520
Their assignment was to murder.

615
00:37:24,600 --> 00:37:26,720
They never used the word "murder."

616
00:37:26,800 --> 00:37:30,240
To eliminate all Jews,

617
00:37:30,320 --> 00:37:32,360
men, women, and children,

618
00:37:32,440 --> 00:37:34,560
without pity or remorse,

619
00:37:35,440 --> 00:37:37,040
to just exterminate them

620
00:37:37,120 --> 00:37:39,560
as you would exterminate vermin.

621
00:37:39,640 --> 00:37:41,280
That was the assignment

622
00:37:41,360 --> 00:37:45,760
of the SS Einsatzgruppen action group

623
00:37:45,840 --> 00:37:49,440
and the four divisions
that they had within them.

624
00:37:49,520 --> 00:37:52,320
And that's the job they carried out.

625
00:37:52,400 --> 00:37:56,040
So I sat down with a
little adding machine,

626
00:37:56,120 --> 00:37:57,720
I began to add them up.

627
00:37:59,120 --> 00:38:01,360
When I reached a million people murdered,

628
00:38:02,880 --> 00:38:04,560
I said, "That's enough."

629
00:38:04,640 --> 00:38:07,800
I took a sample, I took
the next military plane

630
00:38:07,880 --> 00:38:10,960
from Berlin back to Nuremberg.

631
00:38:11,040 --> 00:38:13,480
I met then with Telford Taylor.

632
00:38:13,560 --> 00:38:17,520
I said, "General, we have
to put on a new trial."

633
00:38:17,600 --> 00:38:18,960
He said, "We can't.

634
00:38:19,040 --> 00:38:21,360
"We have already assigned all the lawyers.

635
00:38:21,440 --> 00:38:25,440
"The Pentagon has already
approved the budget.

636
00:38:25,520 --> 00:38:29,200
"They're not inclined to
allow any new trials to go on

637
00:38:29,280 --> 00:38:32,040
"and we just can't do it."

638
00:38:32,120 --> 00:38:35,280
Whereabout I blew my cool and I said,

639
00:38:35,360 --> 00:38:37,320
"You've gotta put these people on trial!

640
00:38:37,400 --> 00:38:39,560
"I have in my hand mass murder,

641
00:38:39,640 --> 00:38:42,080
"mass murder on an unparalleled scale.

642
00:38:43,480 --> 00:38:46,640
"We just can't let these people go."

643
00:38:46,720 --> 00:38:51,720
And so I guess he noticed
my desperation or something.

644
00:38:52,160 --> 00:38:53,360
He said, "Well, can you do it

645
00:38:53,440 --> 00:38:55,520
"in addition to your other work?"

646
00:38:55,600 --> 00:38:57,080
And I said, "Sure."

647
00:38:57,160 --> 00:38:59,120
He said, "Okay, you do it."

648
00:38:59,200 --> 00:39:02,800
And so I was appointed by him

649
00:39:02,880 --> 00:39:05,160
as the Chief Prosecutor

650
00:39:05,240 --> 00:39:08,760
and what was later known as
the Einsatzgruppen Trial.

651
00:39:08,840 --> 00:39:11,440
- Genocide, the extermination

652
00:39:11,520 --> 00:39:14,360
of whole categories of human beings,

653
00:39:15,560 --> 00:39:19,320
as a foremost instrument
of the Nazi doctrines.

654
00:39:19,400 --> 00:39:22,440
It is therefore holy
fitting for this court

655
00:39:22,520 --> 00:39:25,920
to hear these charges
of international crimes

656
00:39:26,000 --> 00:39:29,360
and to adjudge them in
the name of civilization.

657
00:39:29,440 --> 00:39:33,200
The charges we have brought
accuse the defendants

658
00:39:33,280 --> 00:39:36,040
of having committed
crimes against humanity.

659
00:39:37,880 --> 00:39:41,080
- I rested my case in two days.

660
00:39:41,160 --> 00:39:42,960
Quite remarkable.

661
00:39:43,040 --> 00:39:45,720
Very simple, because I said, "Look,

662
00:39:45,800 --> 00:39:49,880
"I have the evidence here,
top secret German evidence.

663
00:39:49,960 --> 00:39:53,280
"I have the defendant there
whose name is on this report.

664
00:39:53,360 --> 00:39:55,560
"He was the commander-in-chief there,

665
00:39:56,600 --> 00:39:59,640
"and this is the total
reports he sent in."

666
00:40:00,600 --> 00:40:04,000
When I asked Ohlendorf, for
example, with my lead defendant,

667
00:40:05,360 --> 00:40:10,320
"Do you acknowledge that your
unit killed 90,000 Jews?"

668
00:40:10,400 --> 00:40:12,200
He said, "No."

669
00:40:12,280 --> 00:40:13,480
I said, "What do you mean, no?

670
00:40:13,520 --> 00:40:14,880
"Is that your signature?"

671
00:40:14,960 --> 00:40:16,480
"Yes."

672
00:40:16,560 --> 00:40:17,400
"Is it 90,000?"

673
00:40:17,480 --> 00:40:18,240
"Yes."

674
00:40:18,320 --> 00:40:19,680
"So how do you say no?"

675
00:40:19,760 --> 00:40:24,200
"Well, some of the men used
to brag about the body count.

676
00:40:24,280 --> 00:40:25,856
"They wanted to show they killed even more

677
00:40:25,880 --> 00:40:27,840
"than they actually killed."

678
00:40:27,920 --> 00:40:30,400
So I said, "Well, would
you say it's 70,000,

679
00:40:30,480 --> 00:40:32,520
"80,000 would be more appropriate?"

680
00:40:32,600 --> 00:40:34,360
"Yeah, yeah, that could be."

681
00:40:37,640 --> 00:40:41,840
And this was Dr. Otto
Ohlendorf, well educated man.

682
00:40:41,920 --> 00:40:45,200
All of my defendants had either
doctor degrees or high rank.

683
00:40:45,280 --> 00:40:46,880
I selected very carefully.

684
00:40:48,000 --> 00:40:50,280
How do you
plead to this indictment?

685
00:40:50,360 --> 00:40:51,680
Guilty or not guilty?

686
00:41:00,200 --> 00:41:03,400
They put
forward as their defense

687
00:41:03,480 --> 00:41:05,720
that they were only obeying orders.

688
00:41:05,800 --> 00:41:10,320
Another one was that the
documents were fabricated.

689
00:41:10,400 --> 00:41:13,000
And then some of them even actually went

690
00:41:13,080 --> 00:41:16,320
as far as to say they weren't aware

691
00:41:16,400 --> 00:41:19,120
that these mass murders were taking place.

692
00:41:19,200 --> 00:41:22,480
- Well, let's take a all
those excuses one at a time.

693
00:41:22,560 --> 00:41:24,960
One, superior orders, right?

694
00:41:27,880 --> 00:41:30,360
Every German soldier had
to carry his own book,

695
00:41:30,440 --> 00:41:33,920
they call a little book
manual of his duties.

696
00:41:35,120 --> 00:41:38,640
I had some of 'em, it listed the duties.

697
00:41:38,720 --> 00:41:41,560
"You are to obey all legal orders."

698
00:41:41,640 --> 00:41:45,360
Legal orders, it didn't say all orders,

699
00:41:45,440 --> 00:41:47,720
including illegal orders.

700
00:41:47,800 --> 00:41:51,120
I asked a question, "Did
they think it was legal

701
00:41:51,200 --> 00:41:53,080
"to murder thousands of children?"

702
00:41:53,160 --> 00:41:55,680
By what stretch of the imagination could

703
00:41:55,760 --> 00:41:57,200
that possibly be legal?

704
00:41:57,280 --> 00:42:00,520
The next argument they came up with,

705
00:42:00,600 --> 00:42:02,560
we didn't do it, of course.

706
00:42:02,640 --> 00:42:05,640
Well, that was refuted by their evidence.

707
00:42:05,720 --> 00:42:09,000
These were secret reports
which they had signed

708
00:42:09,080 --> 00:42:10,440
and sent to their headquarters.

709
00:42:10,520 --> 00:42:12,400
They're not gonna lie
to their headquarters

710
00:42:12,480 --> 00:42:14,160
about what they did,

711
00:42:14,240 --> 00:42:16,760
and the headquarters consolidated them.

712
00:42:16,840 --> 00:42:20,000
The only mistake they made
there was I found the reports.

713
00:42:21,080 --> 00:42:24,400
And then they said, whatever
excuse did they give us?

714
00:42:25,680 --> 00:42:29,120
Well, the one of them, the
only time I really got annoyed

715
00:42:29,200 --> 00:42:33,400
in the courtroom was when
one of these mass murderers,

716
00:42:33,480 --> 00:42:38,360
whose reports I had, how
many Jews they had killed,

717
00:42:38,440 --> 00:42:41,160
he has the gall to say,

718
00:42:41,240 --> 00:42:42,320
"Jews are killed?

719
00:42:42,400 --> 00:42:45,720
"I heard it here in this
court for the first time."

720
00:42:45,800 --> 00:42:49,400
Oh man, I really just wanna jump over him,

721
00:42:49,480 --> 00:42:51,440
putting a bayonet through his ears.

722
00:42:51,520 --> 00:42:53,360
He'd put it through to the other end,

723
00:42:54,760 --> 00:42:56,520
to improve his hearing.

724
00:42:56,600 --> 00:42:59,280
But otherwise, they said,

725
00:42:59,360 --> 00:43:02,640
you mentioned, two colloquial argument,

726
00:43:02,720 --> 00:43:04,800
that everybody's feeling, "War is war.

727
00:43:04,880 --> 00:43:07,800
"We had to do this because
everybody was at war."

728
00:43:07,880 --> 00:43:11,200
They made that argument
in a very intelligent way.

729
00:43:11,280 --> 00:43:16,280
And it was done by the lead
defendant, Dr. Otto Ohlendorf.

730
00:43:16,640 --> 00:43:19,880
Handsome young man,
father of five children.

731
00:43:21,480 --> 00:43:25,280
He said, "We did this in self-defense."

732
00:43:25,360 --> 00:43:29,240
"Self-defense, nobody,
Germany was not attacked.

733
00:43:29,320 --> 00:43:31,960
"Germany didn't attack, by France,

734
00:43:32,040 --> 00:43:33,640
wasn't attacked by Holland, by Belgium,

735
00:43:33,720 --> 00:43:34,800
"by all the other country.

736
00:43:34,880 --> 00:43:37,240
"Where do you come off with self-defense?"

737
00:43:39,080 --> 00:43:42,040
"Well," he said, "Hitler let us know.

738
00:43:42,120 --> 00:43:43,520
"And he knew more than I did.

739
00:43:43,600 --> 00:43:47,400
I couldn't challenge him that
Russia planned to attack us.

740
00:43:47,480 --> 00:43:49,520
"Therefore it would be necessary for us

741
00:43:49,600 --> 00:43:53,040
"to preempt that and attack first.

742
00:43:53,120 --> 00:43:54,680
"And that's what we did.

743
00:43:54,760 --> 00:43:57,600
"And I have here expert
opinions from German lawyers

744
00:43:57,680 --> 00:44:02,400
"in big bunch of them, saying
preemptive self-defense

745
00:44:02,480 --> 00:44:04,960
"is permissible, it is not a crime.

746
00:44:05,040 --> 00:44:07,560
"And so, we were just

747
00:44:07,640 --> 00:44:10,960
"carrying out our patriotic duty wise."

748
00:44:11,040 --> 00:44:16,080
And I, of course, countered the arguments

749
00:44:16,160 --> 00:44:19,400
and the judges accepted my arguments,

750
00:44:19,480 --> 00:44:21,840
saying, "That's not a defense at all

751
00:44:21,920 --> 00:44:26,640
"because it's not required
by law to preempt anybody.

752
00:44:26,720 --> 00:44:31,720
"And it's a ridiculous and
dangerous policy to adapt it."

753
00:44:32,280 --> 00:44:35,360
- We shall establish,
beyond the realm of doubt,

754
00:44:36,440 --> 00:44:41,120
facts, which before the dark
decade of the Third Reich,

755
00:44:41,200 --> 00:44:43,440
would've seemed incredible.

756
00:44:44,360 --> 00:44:47,720
Courts will show that
the slaughter committed

757
00:44:47,800 --> 00:44:51,160
by these defendants was dictated

758
00:44:51,240 --> 00:44:53,640
not by military necessity,

759
00:44:54,560 --> 00:44:57,160
but by that supreme perversion of thought,

760
00:44:58,040 --> 00:45:01,080
the Nazi theory of the master race.

761
00:45:02,120 --> 00:45:05,200
- My opening sentence to the court was,

762
00:45:05,280 --> 00:45:08,000
"It is with sorrow and with hope

763
00:45:08,080 --> 00:45:11,960
"that we hear disclose mass
murder," et cetera, et cetera.

764
00:45:12,960 --> 00:45:16,840
It was a combination of
sorrow for the victims

765
00:45:16,920 --> 00:45:21,640
and hope that we would be
able to change it in future.

766
00:45:22,640 --> 00:45:26,360
That was my theme when I opened the trial.

767
00:45:26,440 --> 00:45:29,360
It was my theme when I closed the trial.

768
00:45:29,440 --> 00:45:32,040
My closing statement, I said,

769
00:45:33,800 --> 00:45:37,360
"The defendants in the dark
were the cruel executioners

770
00:45:37,440 --> 00:45:42,440
"whose terror wrote the
darkest page in human history.

771
00:45:43,520 --> 00:45:46,480
"Life was their toy, death was their tool.

772
00:45:53,360 --> 00:45:55,520
"If these men be immuned,

773
00:45:56,440 --> 00:45:58,480
"then law has lost its meaning,

774
00:45:58,560 --> 00:46:01,080
"and man must live in fear."

775
00:46:01,160 --> 00:46:02,760
That was my closing statement.

776
00:46:05,920 --> 00:46:08,520
- On 29 September, 137 days ago,

777
00:46:10,600 --> 00:46:12,440
the prosecution outlined the evidence

778
00:46:12,520 --> 00:46:13,720
in support of the indictment,

779
00:46:13,800 --> 00:46:16,680
which has been brought
against these defendants.

780
00:46:16,760 --> 00:46:18,760
On 30 September, 1947,

781
00:46:19,960 --> 00:46:23,560
136 days ago, the
prosecution rested this case.

782
00:46:25,400 --> 00:46:28,440
In view of the nature of
the crimes charged here

783
00:46:28,520 --> 00:46:31,400
and the conclusive documentary
proof and support thereof,

784
00:46:32,480 --> 00:46:34,640
the desperate nonsense which
you've encountered here

785
00:46:34,720 --> 00:46:37,160
during the 21 intervening weeks

786
00:46:37,240 --> 00:46:39,880
may jar the ear but it can
hardly surprise the lie.

787
00:46:41,160 --> 00:46:43,800
In summing up this case
after four and a half months,

788
00:46:43,880 --> 00:46:46,080
nearly a week for each defendant,

789
00:46:46,160 --> 00:46:49,880
the prosecution sees no
necessity for or benefit from

790
00:46:49,960 --> 00:46:53,520
a tedious rehearsal of
the details of the record.

791
00:46:54,400 --> 00:46:57,560
- Defendants came out from, one at a time,

792
00:46:57,640 --> 00:47:00,400
from the cellar down below.

793
00:47:00,480 --> 00:47:04,280
There was a little lift
going into the courthouse.

794
00:47:04,360 --> 00:47:09,240
The doors opened this way,
and they would step out.

795
00:47:09,320 --> 00:47:14,040
And the judge would say,

796
00:47:14,120 --> 00:47:16,880
"For the crimes of which
you all have been convicted,

797
00:47:16,960 --> 00:47:19,800
"this tribunal sentences
you death by hanging."

798
00:47:19,880 --> 00:47:21,840
Next one, "Death by hanging."

799
00:47:21,920 --> 00:47:23,320
"Death by hanging."

800
00:47:23,400 --> 00:47:25,760
I'm writing it down,
and they had 13 of them,

801
00:47:25,840 --> 00:47:28,720
and one after the other,
"Death by hanging."

802
00:47:30,760 --> 00:47:32,920
At the Einsatzgruppen trial,

803
00:47:33,000 --> 00:47:35,480
Martin Sandberger was sentenced

804
00:47:35,560 --> 00:47:38,800
to death by hanging for mass murder.

805
00:47:38,880 --> 00:47:41,880
His defense was that
he was only responsible

806
00:47:41,960 --> 00:47:45,360
for carrying out a
fraction of these killings,

807
00:47:45,440 --> 00:47:50,280
which he estimated to
be 300 to 350 people.

808
00:47:50,360 --> 00:47:53,400
In 1951, his sentence was reduced

809
00:47:53,480 --> 00:47:57,680
to life imprisonment due to
powerful friends intervening.

810
00:47:58,680 --> 00:48:02,160
However, he was released
seven years later.

811
00:48:03,080 --> 00:48:05,360
He died in 2010

812
00:48:05,440 --> 00:48:08,880
in a luxury nursing home, aged 98.

813
00:48:13,200 --> 00:48:14,640
- They're all equally guilty.

814
00:48:14,720 --> 00:48:18,240
Everyone was a mass
murderer or an accessory

815
00:48:18,320 --> 00:48:22,560
to mass murder, beyond any
doubt, any, no doubt whatsoever

816
00:48:22,640 --> 00:48:24,920
because every day it
was their daily bread.

817
00:48:25,000 --> 00:48:27,200
We had 3000 members of the Einsatzgruppen.

818
00:48:27,280 --> 00:48:30,320
I tried 22, 13 of 'em
were sentenced to death.

819
00:48:30,400 --> 00:48:34,920
They were all mass murderers
or accessories to mass murder.

820
00:48:35,000 --> 00:48:37,080
They limited the number
of defendants I could have

821
00:48:37,160 --> 00:48:40,160
to the 22 seats in the
dock, a ridiculous idea.

822
00:48:40,240 --> 00:48:42,400
Ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous,

823
00:48:42,480 --> 00:48:44,120
from point of view of justice.

824
00:48:44,200 --> 00:48:46,440
So you couldn't talk in terms of justice

825
00:48:46,520 --> 00:48:48,640
on these circumstances, I knew that.

826
00:48:48,720 --> 00:48:50,680
The crimes are so enormous

827
00:48:50,760 --> 00:48:52,440
because people thought they were doing

828
00:48:52,520 --> 00:48:54,800
the right thing for their country.

829
00:48:54,880 --> 00:48:58,840
And that danger still exists
and still persists today.

830
00:49:10,440 --> 00:49:12,360
- In the early 1990s,

831
00:49:12,440 --> 00:49:15,080
my parents were running a small

832
00:49:15,160 --> 00:49:16,280
conference retreat center

833
00:49:16,360 --> 00:49:19,560
in the farmhouse here for the church.

834
00:49:19,640 --> 00:49:22,800
And we were going to
create a small exhibition

835
00:49:22,880 --> 00:49:24,200
to say this is important.

836
00:49:25,760 --> 00:49:28,200
These terrible atrocities were a product

837
00:49:28,280 --> 00:49:30,600
of European civilization.

838
00:49:30,680 --> 00:49:34,880
And we need to wake up and
understand how that came about.

839
00:49:36,920 --> 00:49:39,360
How does an event

840
00:49:39,440 --> 00:49:43,320
of the scale of the holocaust occur?

841
00:49:43,400 --> 00:49:47,840
And then 50 years later, it
wasn't even in our curriculum.

842
00:49:47,920 --> 00:49:49,600
We go through the British education system

843
00:49:49,680 --> 00:49:52,240
and learned nothing about it.

844
00:49:52,320 --> 00:49:54,920
And if we don't

845
00:49:55,840 --> 00:49:58,120
learn about that history,

846
00:49:58,200 --> 00:50:00,920
what chance do we have of learning from it

847
00:50:01,000 --> 00:50:03,520
and ensuring that these kind of

848
00:50:03,600 --> 00:50:06,200
human-made tragedies never happen again?

849
00:50:09,120 --> 00:50:13,280
And so that's the reason that
this memorial developed here

850
00:50:13,360 --> 00:50:16,400
in the Nottinghamshire countryside,
next to Sherwood Forest.

851
00:50:19,840 --> 00:50:21,840
- So I've got here a copy
of the London Agreement

852
00:50:21,920 --> 00:50:24,440
dated the 8th of August, 1945.

853
00:50:24,520 --> 00:50:27,560
And it's between the UK, the USA,

854
00:50:27,640 --> 00:50:29,920
the Provisional Government
of the French Republic,

855
00:50:30,000 --> 00:50:31,560
and the USSR.

856
00:50:31,640 --> 00:50:34,200
In article three it says,

857
00:50:34,280 --> 00:50:38,320
"The Signatories shall also
use their best endeavors

858
00:50:38,400 --> 00:50:41,640
"to make available for investigation

859
00:50:41,720 --> 00:50:45,720
"of the charges against
and the trial before

860
00:50:45,800 --> 00:50:48,840
"the International Military Tribunal

861
00:50:48,920 --> 00:50:52,280
"such of the major war
criminals as are not

862
00:50:52,360 --> 00:50:55,040
"in the territories of
any of the Signatories."

863
00:50:55,120 --> 00:50:56,920
Now this tells me two things.

864
00:50:57,000 --> 00:50:58,440
Now in the film industry,

865
00:50:58,520 --> 00:51:00,200
when you see in a contract,

866
00:51:00,280 --> 00:51:02,280
and somebody's written, "best endeavors,"

867
00:51:02,360 --> 00:51:05,800
you know that that person
has no intention whatsoever

868
00:51:05,880 --> 00:51:08,800
of carrying out the work
they say they're going to do.

869
00:51:08,880 --> 00:51:10,680
And the other point that worries me

870
00:51:10,760 --> 00:51:12,280
is "major war criminals."

871
00:51:12,360 --> 00:51:13,680
What is a major war criminal?

872
00:51:13,760 --> 00:51:15,160
Is somebody like a sergeant

873
00:51:15,240 --> 00:51:17,880
who's killed 150 people over two years,

874
00:51:17,960 --> 00:51:19,320
is he a major war criminal?

875
00:51:19,400 --> 00:51:23,400
Therefore, is this a get-out clause?

876
00:51:23,480 --> 00:51:26,040
- Absolutely, it's a get-out clause.

877
00:51:26,120 --> 00:51:29,880
The British government
certainly had experience

878
00:51:29,960 --> 00:51:33,560
of considering the cost and the scale

879
00:51:33,640 --> 00:51:37,440
of investigating and
prosecuting war criminals

880
00:51:37,520 --> 00:51:39,480
on this kind of scale.

881
00:51:39,560 --> 00:51:41,680
After the first World War,

882
00:51:41,760 --> 00:51:45,080
the British government
arrested 150 officers

883
00:51:45,160 --> 00:51:47,400
from the Ottoman Army who'd been involved

884
00:51:47,480 --> 00:51:50,640
in exterminating over a million Armenians

885
00:51:50,720 --> 00:51:54,560
in what we now refer to
as the Armenian genocide.

886
00:51:54,640 --> 00:51:57,720
And they detained them
on the island of Malta.

887
00:51:57,800 --> 00:52:02,520
And in 1921, released
them without prosecution.

888
00:52:02,600 --> 00:52:04,720
And in part, that was because

889
00:52:04,800 --> 00:52:07,720
there wasn't a legal framework.

890
00:52:07,800 --> 00:52:10,440
The idea of crimes against humanity,

891
00:52:10,520 --> 00:52:12,320
which was used to
describe the extermination

892
00:52:12,400 --> 00:52:14,920
of the Armenians, was
that, it was a concept.

893
00:52:15,000 --> 00:52:17,720
It wasn't embedded in international law.

894
00:52:18,840 --> 00:52:21,200
But the British understood at the time,

895
00:52:21,280 --> 00:52:22,920
even if they had the will

896
00:52:23,000 --> 00:52:25,800
to establish this in international law

897
00:52:25,880 --> 00:52:29,000
and create a tribunal to
prosecute these crimes,

898
00:52:29,880 --> 00:52:34,840
there was a massive cost of
investigating and prosecuting.

899
00:52:34,920 --> 00:52:36,720
And so they abandoned the whole idea

900
00:52:36,800 --> 00:52:39,480
and released the Ottoman officers.

901
00:52:39,560 --> 00:52:42,240
In fact, it was the release
of those Ottoman officers

902
00:52:42,320 --> 00:52:47,320
that set Raphael Lemkin,
the Jewish-Polish lawyer,

903
00:52:47,960 --> 00:52:51,880
of thinking about the
nature of these crimes.

904
00:52:51,960 --> 00:52:54,480
This was right back in 1921.

905
00:52:54,560 --> 00:52:55,920
Also in that same year,

906
00:52:56,000 --> 00:52:58,400
there'd been a trial of an Armenian

907
00:52:58,480 --> 00:53:00,200
called Soghomon Tehlirian.

908
00:53:00,280 --> 00:53:02,760
He was a survivor of
some of these atrocities

909
00:53:02,840 --> 00:53:04,440
in the first World War.

910
00:53:04,520 --> 00:53:08,880
And he had pursued and assassinated one

911
00:53:08,960 --> 00:53:12,280
of the architects of
the Armenian genocide.

912
00:53:13,720 --> 00:53:17,360
Raphael Lemkin was asking
himself the question,

913
00:53:17,440 --> 00:53:22,440
how is it that these 150
officers of the Ottoman Army

914
00:53:22,880 --> 00:53:26,160
are released without investigation

915
00:53:26,240 --> 00:53:28,160
or prosecution by the British

916
00:53:28,240 --> 00:53:30,040
when they are responsible possibly

917
00:53:30,120 --> 00:53:32,480
for the murder of a million people?

918
00:53:32,560 --> 00:53:36,760
And yet for a survivor of that genocide

919
00:53:36,840 --> 00:53:41,160
to assassinate one of those architects

920
00:53:41,240 --> 00:53:44,120
of that genocide is put
on trial for murder.

921
00:53:44,200 --> 00:53:48,360
So you murder a million,
you walk away free.

922
00:53:48,440 --> 00:53:50,040
You murder one person,

923
00:53:50,120 --> 00:53:51,400
and you're put on trial,

924
00:53:51,480 --> 00:53:54,680
even as a victim of that genocide.

925
00:53:59,960 --> 00:54:03,960
- In this valley, on the
22nd of August, 1939,

926
00:54:04,040 --> 00:54:06,920
just one week before the
Nazi invasion of Poland,

927
00:54:07,000 --> 00:54:09,360
Adolph Hitler gave a
speech to leading members

928
00:54:09,440 --> 00:54:11,240
of the German Army, Navy, and Air Force.

929
00:54:11,320 --> 00:54:13,560
And he starts with, "Our strength consists

930
00:54:13,640 --> 00:54:15,800
"in our speed and our brutality.

931
00:54:15,880 --> 00:54:17,880
"Genghis Khan led millions of women

932
00:54:17,960 --> 00:54:19,080
"and children to slaughter

933
00:54:19,160 --> 00:54:21,560
"with premeditation and a happy heart."

934
00:54:21,640 --> 00:54:23,960
He says that he doesn't care about

935
00:54:24,040 --> 00:54:26,200
what other European countries think,

936
00:54:26,280 --> 00:54:28,920
but any member of the German armed forces

937
00:54:29,000 --> 00:54:33,120
who criticize this will be
executed by firing squad.

938
00:54:33,200 --> 00:54:37,560
He urges them to send to
death without compassion men,

939
00:54:37,640 --> 00:54:41,520
women, and children of Polish derivation.

940
00:54:41,600 --> 00:54:45,640
He finishes, "Who, after all, speaks today

941
00:54:45,720 --> 00:54:49,200
"about the annihilation of the Armenians?"

942
00:54:53,360 --> 00:54:56,320
Untold millions of people
were murdered by the Nazis

943
00:54:56,400 --> 00:54:59,840
and their collaborators in 22 countries

944
00:54:59,920 --> 00:55:04,200
that were totally unrelated
to any normal casualty of war.

945
00:55:05,360 --> 00:55:08,000
Jews, Poles, Russian prisoners of war,

946
00:55:08,080 --> 00:55:10,560
Roma, the mentally and
physically handicapped,

947
00:55:10,640 --> 00:55:13,000
political and religious dissidents,

948
00:55:13,080 --> 00:55:16,200
homosexuals, and many more.

949
00:55:16,280 --> 00:55:19,200
And of the three quarters
to one million people

950
00:55:19,280 --> 00:55:22,960
who enthusiastically carried
out these barbaric crimes,

951
00:55:23,040 --> 00:55:26,960
99% of them were never prosecuted.

952
00:55:27,040 --> 00:55:28,720
They were never even looked for.

953
00:55:29,760 --> 00:55:33,320
The Allies, America, Britain,
France and the Soviet Union,

954
00:55:33,400 --> 00:55:36,160
all started their pursuit
of justice well enough.

955
00:55:37,040 --> 00:55:40,880
But for some reason, they simply stopped,

956
00:55:40,960 --> 00:55:44,160
deciding not to proceed any further.

957
00:55:46,480 --> 00:55:47,480
Why?

958
00:55:54,600 --> 00:55:56,520
- The American government
and perhaps the public

959
00:55:56,600 --> 00:55:58,480
were deeply divided.

960
00:55:58,560 --> 00:56:02,360
The State Department and in
public, Senator McCarthy,

961
00:56:02,440 --> 00:56:05,080
were adamantly opposed to
prosecuting the Germans.

962
00:56:05,160 --> 00:56:07,080
They came up with all sorts of excuses

963
00:56:08,000 --> 00:56:09,680
about the Germans who have been in jail,

964
00:56:09,760 --> 00:56:11,120
why they should be let out.

965
00:56:12,680 --> 00:56:16,760
So this process went on up
to the late '40s, but by '48,

966
00:56:16,840 --> 00:56:20,440
the State Department had
really lost patience.

967
00:56:20,520 --> 00:56:23,160
And with the looming Cold War,

968
00:56:23,240 --> 00:56:27,240
the idea was to rebuild Germany.

969
00:56:27,320 --> 00:56:30,480
And so you can argue, well,
maybe we need these scientists

970
00:56:30,560 --> 00:56:32,560
or these bankers or these industrialists

971
00:56:32,640 --> 00:56:33,960
or these skilled people

972
00:56:34,040 --> 00:56:36,320
to rebuild Germany against the communists.

973
00:56:36,400 --> 00:56:39,000
But the answer, the question, really,

974
00:56:39,080 --> 00:56:41,640
for the defenders of this
or for the apologists is

975
00:56:41,720 --> 00:56:43,480
why do you think you have

976
00:56:43,560 --> 00:56:46,080
to let out the death squad leaders?

977
00:56:46,160 --> 00:56:50,280
Why do you have to let out
the concentration camp guards?

978
00:56:50,360 --> 00:56:53,280
What do you need them for
in rebuilding Germany?

979
00:56:53,360 --> 00:56:56,840
And I think that is a
very unpleasant reality

980
00:56:56,920 --> 00:56:58,120
that people have to face up to

981
00:56:58,200 --> 00:57:01,640
when looking to Allied
policy in the later years.

982
00:57:02,440 --> 00:57:06,840
- In 1948, there is a notorious telegram

983
00:57:06,920 --> 00:57:09,960
which the Commonwealth Office

984
00:57:10,040 --> 00:57:13,720
sends to various commonwealth
countries advising them

985
00:57:13,800 --> 00:57:18,640
to stop any further new war crimes trials.

986
00:57:18,720 --> 00:57:21,480
And the reason that's given at the time is

987
00:57:21,560 --> 00:57:24,040
what's called political
developments in Germany,

988
00:57:24,120 --> 00:57:25,880
which was the government's code

989
00:57:25,960 --> 00:57:28,400
for the onset of the Cold War.

990
00:57:28,480 --> 00:57:31,560
And we know from subsequent evidence

991
00:57:31,640 --> 00:57:34,040
that the likes of Australia and Canada

992
00:57:34,120 --> 00:57:37,800
did indeed stop completely
for the next 40 years.

993
00:57:37,880 --> 00:57:40,400
Two years later, in 1950,

994
00:57:40,480 --> 00:57:43,840
the Foreign Office sends a note,

995
00:57:43,920 --> 00:57:46,240
and this time,

996
00:57:46,320 --> 00:57:49,000
as well as no new trials,

997
00:57:49,080 --> 00:57:52,480
they also say that they're
going to resist even

998
00:57:53,840 --> 00:57:56,160
any requests for deportations

999
00:57:56,240 --> 00:57:59,440
of alleged Nazi war
criminals to other countries.

1000
00:57:59,520 --> 00:58:02,680
And the reason they give is one of

1001
00:58:02,760 --> 00:58:05,880
what I would consider to
be staggering indifference.

1002
00:58:05,960 --> 00:58:08,640
They say, quote, "The wanted man

1003
00:58:08,720 --> 00:58:10,800
"will have been living peaceably

1004
00:58:10,880 --> 00:58:12,640
"in this country for many years.

1005
00:58:12,720 --> 00:58:15,360
"How can it be conducive
to the public good

1006
00:58:15,440 --> 00:58:17,640
"for him to be deported?"

1007
00:58:17,720 --> 00:58:19,320
So if you think about that for a moment,

1008
00:58:19,400 --> 00:58:23,600
what they're actually saying
is that there is no public good

1009
00:58:23,680 --> 00:58:25,960
in bringing a mass murderer to justice.

1010
00:58:26,760 --> 00:58:29,520
In 1987, the
Australian government

1011
00:58:29,600 --> 00:58:34,600
set up a special unit to
investigate 841 potential suspects.

1012
00:58:35,080 --> 00:58:37,680
It was shut down in 1992

1013
00:58:37,760 --> 00:58:41,120
without a single successful prosecution.

1014
00:58:41,200 --> 00:58:43,160
The Australian solution to the problem

1015
00:58:43,240 --> 00:58:46,440
of suspected Nazi war
criminals was allegedly

1016
00:58:46,520 --> 00:58:50,240
to extradite them and make
it someone else's problem.

1017
00:58:51,520 --> 00:58:55,360
It was suspected that well over 2000 Nazis

1018
00:58:55,440 --> 00:58:57,120
were living in Canada.

1019
00:58:57,200 --> 00:59:00,520
In 1994, the Supreme Court of Canada

1020
00:59:00,600 --> 00:59:03,480
made the Canadian War
Crimes Law unworkable

1021
00:59:03,560 --> 00:59:06,040
by a ruling in the case of Imre Finta

1022
00:59:06,120 --> 00:59:08,040
who'd been responsible for sending Jews

1023
00:59:08,120 --> 00:59:10,280
to Auschwitz and other camps.

1024
00:59:10,360 --> 00:59:12,480
The court stated that even

1025
00:59:12,560 --> 00:59:15,800
where the orders are manifestly unlawful,

1026
00:59:15,880 --> 00:59:19,000
the defense of obedience
to superior orders

1027
00:59:19,080 --> 00:59:20,840
will be available.

1028
00:59:23,240 --> 00:59:26,800
- The Nuremberg principles
basically is the principle

1029
00:59:26,880 --> 00:59:31,440
that crimes like these war
crimes or crimes against humanity

1030
00:59:31,520 --> 00:59:34,680
shall not be left unpunished.

1031
00:59:34,760 --> 00:59:35,776
This is the most important,

1032
00:59:35,800 --> 00:59:38,760
the core idea behind the
Nuremberg principles.

1033
00:59:38,840 --> 00:59:41,920
But it ended in 1949 with the founding

1034
00:59:42,000 --> 00:59:43,480
of the German Democratic Republic

1035
00:59:43,560 --> 00:59:47,160
and the founding of the
Federal Republic of Germany.

1036
00:59:47,240 --> 00:59:50,400
And from this moment
on, the situation became

1037
00:59:50,480 --> 00:59:54,360
that every accused who was involved

1038
00:59:54,440 --> 00:59:58,320
in a mass killing situation
like in a concentration camp

1039
00:59:58,400 --> 01:00:00,480
or in an extermination camp,

1040
01:00:01,440 --> 01:00:05,760
it was necessary to
prove very meticulously

1041
01:00:05,840 --> 01:00:09,400
that he willingly, that he decided

1042
01:00:09,480 --> 01:00:12,520
to do a crime.

1043
01:00:12,600 --> 01:00:16,040
So you could say that a lot
of the murderers got away

1044
01:00:16,120 --> 01:00:19,400
with what they've done
in the Second World War.

1045
01:00:29,440 --> 01:00:32,400
On the 24th of March, 1944,

1046
01:00:32,480 --> 01:00:35,880
German troops massacred 335 people

1047
01:00:35,960 --> 01:00:37,880
at the Ardeatine Caves in Rome.

1048
01:00:51,760 --> 01:00:54,520
On the 22nd of September, 1944,

1049
01:00:54,600 --> 01:00:57,600
shortly after Italy's liberation,

1050
01:00:57,680 --> 01:01:00,480
Pietro Caruso, an Italian citizen,

1051
01:01:00,560 --> 01:01:04,640
was executed for his part in these crimes.

1052
01:01:31,320 --> 01:01:33,720
SS Captain Erich Priebke,

1053
01:01:33,800 --> 01:01:36,480
awaiting trial for his
part in the massacre,

1054
01:01:36,560 --> 01:01:39,440
escaped by the Ratlines to Argentina

1055
01:01:39,520 --> 01:01:41,480
where he lived for 50 years.

1056
01:01:42,480 --> 01:01:44,760
The outrage following an interview he gave

1057
01:01:44,840 --> 01:01:49,000
on American television led to
him being extradited to Italy.

1058
01:01:51,200 --> 01:01:54,880
In 1996, he was tried
in the military court

1059
01:01:54,960 --> 01:01:57,000
and as he admitted his crimes,

1060
01:01:57,080 --> 01:01:59,400
was found guilty of complicity.

1061
01:01:59,480 --> 01:02:02,440
But the case was thrown out on the grounds

1062
01:02:02,520 --> 01:02:05,840
that the statute of
limitations had expired.

1063
01:02:07,120 --> 01:02:10,600
Despite many multiple
attempts by Italy and Germany

1064
01:02:10,680 --> 01:02:13,160
to have him properly incarcerated,

1065
01:02:13,240 --> 01:02:18,240
Priebke died in 2013, aged 100.

1066
01:02:20,600 --> 01:02:24,200
Argentina refused his request
to be buried next to his wife

1067
01:02:24,280 --> 01:02:27,480
and the Vatican issued
an unprecedented ban

1068
01:02:27,560 --> 01:02:30,720
in holding his funeral in
any Catholic church in Rome.

1069
01:02:31,920 --> 01:02:34,560
Germany also refused to take the body,

1070
01:02:34,640 --> 01:02:37,400
which was seized by Italian authorities

1071
01:02:37,480 --> 01:02:39,000
and disposed of secretly.

1072
01:02:54,200 --> 01:02:55,960
Most of the well known Nazis,

1073
01:02:56,040 --> 01:02:57,960
the generals, they were all caught,

1074
01:02:58,040 --> 01:02:59,800
weren't they, and prosecuted?

1075
01:02:59,880 --> 01:03:03,120
- No, big Nazis got away with it.

1076
01:03:03,200 --> 01:03:06,480
The Ratline out via the Vatican,

1077
01:03:06,560 --> 01:03:09,880
via Italy to South America
was very successful

1078
01:03:09,960 --> 01:03:10,976
in getting big people out.

1079
01:03:11,000 --> 01:03:12,960
The most notorious, obviously,

1080
01:03:13,040 --> 01:03:16,000
the one that everyone has
heard about is Josef Mengele,

1081
01:03:16,080 --> 01:03:18,680
who went to South America

1082
01:03:18,760 --> 01:03:21,480
and was never found and prosecuted.

1083
01:03:21,560 --> 01:03:25,280
But a lot of former Nazis and perpetrators

1084
01:03:25,360 --> 01:03:28,440
and people who were guilty
of all sorts of things

1085
01:03:28,520 --> 01:03:30,320
stayed within Germany,

1086
01:03:30,400 --> 01:03:32,280
many of them living under their own names,

1087
01:03:32,360 --> 01:03:34,880
not even bothering to
change their identity

1088
01:03:34,960 --> 01:03:37,680
and simply not being brought to court.

1089
01:03:37,760 --> 01:03:39,960
If you look at the statistics,

1090
01:03:40,040 --> 01:03:44,080
99% of people who killed
Jews were never brought

1091
01:03:44,160 --> 01:03:46,920
to court at all, 99%.

1092
01:03:47,000 --> 01:03:48,480
If you look at the sheer numbers

1093
01:03:48,560 --> 01:03:51,200
who were involved in
carrying out the killings,

1094
01:03:51,280 --> 01:03:53,560
we've got somewhere between
three quarters of million

1095
01:03:53,640 --> 01:03:56,080
and a million people actually involved

1096
01:03:56,160 --> 01:03:58,840
in killing Jewish civilians.

1097
01:03:58,920 --> 01:04:01,160
So when you actually
look at the statistics

1098
01:04:01,240 --> 01:04:06,160
of who was brought to
court, it's pretty pathetic.

1099
01:04:06,240 --> 01:04:10,080
The Allies immediately after
the war did a pretty good job.

1100
01:04:10,160 --> 01:04:14,200
They tried hard to bring
the principal perpetrators

1101
01:04:14,280 --> 01:04:17,600
to trial in the Nuremberg
International Military Tribunal

1102
01:04:17,680 --> 01:04:19,720
and the Allied successor trials.

1103
01:04:19,800 --> 01:04:22,680
But it really was the
emergence of the Cold War,

1104
01:04:22,760 --> 01:04:26,080
really from 1947-48 onwards
when the major splits

1105
01:04:26,160 --> 01:04:29,720
between the west and the
Soviet Union become evident.

1106
01:04:29,800 --> 01:04:32,760
And basically, the fight against communism

1107
01:04:32,840 --> 01:04:34,720
became more important for the Americans

1108
01:04:34,800 --> 01:04:38,040
and the West Germans than
trying to deal with Nazism.

1109
01:04:38,120 --> 01:04:40,000
So that's one thing, the Allied attempts

1110
01:04:40,080 --> 01:04:42,360
just petered out very quickly.

1111
01:04:42,440 --> 01:04:44,440
The other thing is, I think if you look

1112
01:04:44,520 --> 01:04:48,000
at the three Third Reich successor states,

1113
01:04:48,080 --> 01:04:50,880
West Germany, East Germany, Austria,

1114
01:04:50,960 --> 01:04:54,320
once they take over their own attempts

1115
01:04:54,400 --> 01:04:58,760
to bring former Nazis to trial,
the outcomes are variable,

1116
01:04:58,840 --> 01:05:01,200
but in every single one
of those three cases,

1117
01:05:01,280 --> 01:05:02,760
quite inadequate.

1118
01:05:02,840 --> 01:05:05,400
If you contrast East
Germany and West Germany,

1119
01:05:05,480 --> 01:05:08,760
East Germany instituted a communist state

1120
01:05:08,840 --> 01:05:11,080
that entailed a massive transformation

1121
01:05:11,160 --> 01:05:14,720
of personnel as well as a
transformation of structures.

1122
01:05:14,800 --> 01:05:17,000
So if you look at the
East German judiciary,

1123
01:05:17,080 --> 01:05:19,800
they trained up new judges, new lawyers,

1124
01:05:19,880 --> 01:05:23,760
new teachers, for example
as well, journalists,

1125
01:05:23,840 --> 01:05:24,960
all those professions.

1126
01:05:25,040 --> 01:05:28,680
There was a radical turnover
of personnel in East Germany.

1127
01:05:28,760 --> 01:05:32,200
In West Germany, there is
an incredible continuity.

1128
01:05:32,280 --> 01:05:37,360
The legal profession is deeply Nazified.

1129
01:05:37,440 --> 01:05:39,280
And in fact, by the late 1950s,

1130
01:05:39,360 --> 01:05:42,720
some people have argued that
there was a renazification

1131
01:05:42,800 --> 01:05:45,840
evermore former Nazis
in the legal profession.

1132
01:05:45,920 --> 01:05:48,480
So by the 1950s and '60s,

1133
01:05:48,560 --> 01:05:50,880
you have a lot of
judges, a lot of lawyers,

1134
01:05:50,960 --> 01:05:54,840
a lot of the police forces
actually quite sympathetic

1135
01:05:54,920 --> 01:05:57,640
to the defendants in court.

1136
01:05:57,720 --> 01:05:59,240
And you can see this in the case

1137
01:05:59,320 --> 01:06:01,160
of some judgements, for example.

1138
01:06:01,240 --> 01:06:03,720
You can see it in the
case of tip-offs given

1139
01:06:03,800 --> 01:06:06,920
to Nazi perpetrators that
they're about to be tried,

1140
01:06:07,000 --> 01:06:09,320
investigated, and they get
out of the country quickly

1141
01:06:09,400 --> 01:06:11,280
or they go underground in some way.

1142
01:06:11,360 --> 01:06:14,560
So there's a personnel
issue in West Germany.

1143
01:06:14,640 --> 01:06:17,760
But secondly, I think there's
a more structural issue,

1144
01:06:17,840 --> 01:06:20,160
which is to do with the choice

1145
01:06:20,240 --> 01:06:24,360
of using the ordinary criminal
law definition of murder

1146
01:06:24,440 --> 01:06:27,480
and not the wider Nuremberg principles.

1147
01:06:27,560 --> 01:06:32,280
And so even if you get a
totally anti-Nazi young lawyer,

1148
01:06:32,360 --> 01:06:36,000
that lawyer has to operate
within the confines

1149
01:06:36,080 --> 01:06:39,000
of the legal system and the definitions

1150
01:06:39,080 --> 01:06:41,520
as they are in the penal code.

1151
01:06:41,600 --> 01:06:46,200
And so what this means is
that it's simply inappropriate

1152
01:06:46,280 --> 01:06:49,080
to putting mass murder on trial.

1153
01:06:49,160 --> 01:06:53,640
State sponsored, initiated
state-ordained violence,

1154
01:06:53,720 --> 01:06:56,520
you cannot put that kind
of genocide on trial

1155
01:06:56,600 --> 01:06:58,920
under the ordinary definition

1156
01:06:59,000 --> 01:07:01,120
of individually-motivated murder.

1157
01:07:04,920 --> 01:07:07,760
Walter Rauff
designed the gas fans

1158
01:07:07,840 --> 01:07:11,000
that killed Jews,
communists, and the disabled.

1159
01:07:11,840 --> 01:07:13,096
Thought to have been responsible

1160
01:07:13,120 --> 01:07:15,480
for nearly 100,000 deaths,

1161
01:07:15,560 --> 01:07:19,320
he was arrested in 1945, but escaped.

1162
01:07:20,360 --> 01:07:23,200
Later, he worked for
the Syrian intelligence

1163
01:07:23,280 --> 01:07:26,880
and an early incarnation of
the Israeli Secret Service

1164
01:07:26,960 --> 01:07:29,080
who helped him escape to South America.

1165
01:07:30,320 --> 01:07:34,400
He died unpunished in
Chile in 1984, aged 77.

1166
01:07:49,360 --> 01:07:53,200
- After the war, 1946,

1167
01:07:53,280 --> 01:07:55,120
Central Europe, particularly around

1168
01:07:55,200 --> 01:07:57,320
the Allied zones of occupation,

1169
01:07:57,400 --> 01:08:00,960
they resemble a giant refugee camp.

1170
01:08:01,040 --> 01:08:03,200
So you have somewhere in the region

1171
01:08:03,280 --> 01:08:05,960
of two million individuals,

1172
01:08:06,040 --> 01:08:09,120
all of whom are trying to
register as displaced persons.

1173
01:08:09,200 --> 01:08:13,080
Now, to be a displaced person,
you get food and shelter.

1174
01:08:13,160 --> 01:08:16,200
And the only condition
that the Allies applied was

1175
01:08:16,280 --> 01:08:19,680
that you couldn't be a Nazi collaborator.

1176
01:08:19,760 --> 01:08:23,120
And in order to accept any individual,

1177
01:08:23,200 --> 01:08:24,880
they had to be screened.

1178
01:08:24,960 --> 01:08:27,840
Well, the British applied
almost no screening.

1179
01:08:27,920 --> 01:08:29,800
It was entirely perfunctory.

1180
01:08:29,880 --> 01:08:32,280
And there's also, in
many Allied countries,

1181
01:08:32,360 --> 01:08:37,160
particularly in France and in
the UK, a huge labor shortage.

1182
01:08:37,240 --> 01:08:41,040
So somewhere in the region
of 90,000 individuals

1183
01:08:41,120 --> 01:08:42,840
are brought over to the UK

1184
01:08:42,920 --> 01:08:47,040
to fill gaps in mainly manual jobs,

1185
01:08:47,120 --> 01:08:51,200
and most of them are Baltic,
Ukrainian, Polish nationals.

1186
01:08:52,120 --> 01:08:56,000
And then a further 90,000
are brought over under a

1187
01:08:56,080 --> 01:09:00,320
resettlement scheme for brave
Polish resistance fighters.

1188
01:09:01,400 --> 01:09:06,120
And of course, secreted
within both of these caters

1189
01:09:06,200 --> 01:09:09,840
are a number of individuals
who were responsible

1190
01:09:09,920 --> 01:09:12,960
for perpetrating crimes under the Nazis.

1191
01:09:14,520 --> 01:09:15,960
Just to give an indication as to

1192
01:09:16,040 --> 01:09:18,840
how little the British
authorities were bothered

1193
01:09:18,920 --> 01:09:20,160
about who was coming in,

1194
01:09:21,400 --> 01:09:23,200
there was a story that we heard

1195
01:09:23,280 --> 01:09:25,320
from Baroness Ryder of Warsaw,

1196
01:09:25,400 --> 01:09:28,040
or Sue Ryder of Sue Ryder
Homes, as she then was,

1197
01:09:28,120 --> 01:09:31,360
in 1946, she's a relief worker working

1198
01:09:31,440 --> 01:09:34,080
in a displaced person's camp.

1199
01:09:34,160 --> 01:09:37,760
And she's processing a number
of Baltic nationals through,

1200
01:09:37,840 --> 01:09:41,640
and she notices that they all have a scar

1201
01:09:41,720 --> 01:09:44,800
under their right armpit
in the same place.

1202
01:09:44,880 --> 01:09:47,520
And of course, what
she realizes is this is

1203
01:09:47,600 --> 01:09:50,600
where their SS tattoo had been

1204
01:09:50,680 --> 01:09:53,480
and where they all had it removed.

1205
01:09:53,560 --> 01:09:55,680
And she raises this and she's told

1206
01:09:55,760 --> 01:09:57,560
to effectively mind her business

1207
01:09:57,640 --> 01:10:00,000
and get on with the job of processing.

1208
01:10:00,080 --> 01:10:02,880
What action did
they take against them?

1209
01:10:02,960 --> 01:10:03,720
- I think one thing to remember is

1210
01:10:03,800 --> 01:10:08,640
that the UK government operated
from the late '40s onwards

1211
01:10:08,720 --> 01:10:11,600
for the next 40 years
under a perfect cover.

1212
01:10:11,680 --> 01:10:13,200
They didn't have to do anything

1213
01:10:13,280 --> 01:10:16,360
because there was no law in the UK

1214
01:10:16,440 --> 01:10:19,880
which would enable the
prosecution of these individuals.

1215
01:10:19,960 --> 01:10:21,840
So it was only in the '80s,

1216
01:10:21,920 --> 01:10:26,520
after a major parliamentary
fight over five years

1217
01:10:26,600 --> 01:10:29,160
that we actually got the War Crimes Act

1218
01:10:29,240 --> 01:10:32,120
in this country enacted in 1991.

1219
01:10:32,200 --> 01:10:33,536
- There's something I wanna talk about,

1220
01:10:33,560 --> 01:10:36,160
which I'm sure you know well.

1221
01:10:36,240 --> 01:10:37,720
These are two newspapers.

1222
01:10:37,800 --> 01:10:40,080
This is the Times, which I'll give to you.

1223
01:10:40,160 --> 01:10:41,640
And this is The Telegraph,

1224
01:10:41,720 --> 01:10:46,080
and it's dated Wednesday,
the 4th of March, 1987.

1225
01:10:46,160 --> 01:10:48,200
And they're talking
here in the editorials,

1226
01:10:48,280 --> 01:10:50,840
so there's nobody's name attached to it.

1227
01:10:50,920 --> 01:10:54,600
And it's discussing pressure
from various individuals

1228
01:10:54,680 --> 01:10:57,200
and bodies who are
asking and making demands

1229
01:10:57,280 --> 01:10:59,600
about the presence of, in Britain,

1230
01:10:59,680 --> 01:11:02,640
of 17 alleged former Nazis.

1231
01:11:02,720 --> 01:11:05,280
So there's this bit which
I find extraordinary.

1232
01:11:05,360 --> 01:11:07,440
It says, "Nazi hunting has become a new

1233
01:11:07,520 --> 01:11:09,920
"and frankly distasteful blood sport.

1234
01:11:10,000 --> 01:11:12,840
"It is no reflection of antisemitism

1235
01:11:12,920 --> 01:11:15,720
"or the indifference to past atrocities

1236
01:11:15,800 --> 01:11:18,600
"to feel an overwhelming
revulsion against the notion

1237
01:11:18,680 --> 01:11:21,920
"of further war crimes
trials almost half a century

1238
01:11:22,000 --> 01:11:24,560
"after the alleged horrors took place."

1239
01:11:24,640 --> 01:11:27,000
I can't actually believe
they're using that word,

1240
01:11:27,080 --> 01:11:28,080
"alleged horrors."

1241
01:11:28,160 --> 01:11:30,400
And this carries on and it says,

1242
01:11:30,480 --> 01:11:33,120
"There is a futility, a sterility

1243
01:11:33,200 --> 01:11:36,000
"about continuing a search for vengeance

1244
01:11:36,080 --> 01:11:39,520
"beyond the certain
limits of time and space."

1245
01:11:39,600 --> 01:11:42,720
And this sort of predisposes

1246
01:11:42,800 --> 01:11:46,280
that there should be a
time limit on justice.

1247
01:11:46,360 --> 01:11:48,160
- This is the Times the day before

1248
01:11:48,240 --> 01:11:50,280
the Telegraph article appeared.

1249
01:11:50,360 --> 01:11:54,600
And many of those who opposed any action

1250
01:11:54,680 --> 01:11:57,440
on Nazi war criminals in
this country at the time,

1251
01:11:57,520 --> 01:12:00,160
pitted what was described as

1252
01:12:00,240 --> 01:12:03,280
the Christian God of mercy,

1253
01:12:04,120 --> 01:12:06,040
the New Testament God of mercy

1254
01:12:06,120 --> 01:12:09,320
versus the Old Testament God of vengeance.

1255
01:12:09,400 --> 01:12:14,160
And it's hard to imagine this
appearing in the Times today,

1256
01:12:14,240 --> 01:12:16,880
but this was the late 1980s.

1257
01:12:16,960 --> 01:12:18,160
And this is just an extract

1258
01:12:18,240 --> 01:12:21,240
from the lead editorial
that day, which says,

1259
01:12:21,320 --> 01:12:23,280
"Britain is a Christian country.

1260
01:12:23,360 --> 01:12:26,440
"Its laws enshrine principles
of justice tempered

1261
01:12:26,520 --> 01:12:29,120
"with mercy, not vengeance."

1262
01:12:29,200 --> 01:12:31,800
The undertones of that
I think are very clear.

1263
01:12:31,880 --> 01:12:34,520
Sad to say, the reason why vengeance

1264
01:12:34,600 --> 01:12:36,880
and the idea of vengeance
was so powerful is

1265
01:12:36,960 --> 01:12:41,480
that it played into
ancient antisemitic tropes

1266
01:12:41,560 --> 01:12:45,960
that the Jews are only
out for an eye for an eye,

1267
01:12:46,040 --> 01:12:46,920
tooth for a tooth.

1268
01:12:47,000 --> 01:12:49,320
During the debate in the House of Lords,

1269
01:12:49,400 --> 01:12:53,040
a peer by the name of
Lady Saltoun of Abernathy,

1270
01:12:53,120 --> 01:12:57,840
who is also the chief of the
Fraser clan, stood up and said,

1271
01:12:57,920 --> 01:13:00,320
"How can it be justified

1272
01:13:00,400 --> 01:13:03,000
"to allow one group of aliens

1273
01:13:03,080 --> 01:13:07,240
"to pursue their vengeance
against another group of aliens

1274
01:13:07,320 --> 01:13:12,320
"for crimes committed 50 years
ago in a country far away?"

1275
01:13:13,360 --> 01:13:17,000
And I think more than anything
I've ever heard on this,

1276
01:13:17,080 --> 01:13:18,720
I think that summarizes the indifference

1277
01:13:18,800 --> 01:13:20,280
of many on this question.

1278
01:13:20,360 --> 01:13:23,920
Vengeance is a very different thing.

1279
01:13:24,000 --> 01:13:27,360
What did the Nazis and their
willing collaborators do?

1280
01:13:27,440 --> 01:13:29,920
They murdered, they committed genocide.

1281
01:13:30,000 --> 01:13:33,600
And to do the same is vengeance.

1282
01:13:33,680 --> 01:13:37,600
This is using the one
thing that the Nazis denied

1283
01:13:37,680 --> 01:13:41,000
to their victims, the
law and the right to law.

1284
01:13:41,080 --> 01:13:43,000
It's using the law

1285
01:13:43,080 --> 01:13:45,920
to give them a fair trial,

1286
01:13:47,120 --> 01:13:51,400
in a system which has got
high evidentiary rules,

1287
01:13:51,480 --> 01:13:54,360
to enable them to put
their very best defense

1288
01:13:54,440 --> 01:13:56,240
and to let justice take its course.

1289
01:13:59,080 --> 01:14:00,400
Anton Gecas took part

1290
01:14:00,480 --> 01:14:04,600
in executing up to 40,000 Jews
and Russian prisoners of war

1291
01:14:04,680 --> 01:14:08,840
in the Baltic states in
Belarus during 1941 to 1944

1292
01:14:09,760 --> 01:14:13,480
as a leftenant and the
12th police battalion

1293
01:14:13,560 --> 01:14:16,000
and was awarded the Iron Cross.

1294
01:14:17,080 --> 01:14:21,320
When he saw that Germany was
losing, he switched sides.

1295
01:14:22,400 --> 01:14:25,200
He lived in Scotland from 1947

1296
01:14:25,280 --> 01:14:27,400
and worked for the National Coal Board

1297
01:14:27,480 --> 01:14:29,560
and ran a popular bed and breakfast.

1298
01:14:30,600 --> 01:14:34,440
Despite the Lithuanian authorities
trying to extradite him,

1299
01:14:34,520 --> 01:14:39,240
he died in Edinburgh in
2001, unpunished, aged 85.

1300
01:14:40,760 --> 01:14:44,560
His neighbors in the
Scottish capital were Jewish.

1301
01:14:48,000 --> 01:14:50,240
- I was the director of the

1302
01:14:50,320 --> 01:14:55,320
All-Party Parliamentary War
Crimes Group from 1986 to 1991.

1303
01:14:55,480 --> 01:14:58,560
And the War Crimes Group
was a cross-party group

1304
01:14:58,640 --> 01:15:01,080
of members of parliament and peers

1305
01:15:01,160 --> 01:15:04,200
who were constituted, or
constituted themselves,

1306
01:15:04,280 --> 01:15:07,560
in order to pressure the government

1307
01:15:07,640 --> 01:15:09,920
to face up to its responsibility

1308
01:15:10,000 --> 01:15:12,960
for Britain not to be a
haven for Nazi war criminals,

1309
01:15:13,040 --> 01:15:14,880
that there was a case to answer

1310
01:15:14,960 --> 01:15:16,136
against the number of individuals,

1311
01:15:16,160 --> 01:15:18,000
that the law should be changed,

1312
01:15:18,080 --> 01:15:21,920
and that a unit should
be set up to investigate.

1313
01:15:22,000 --> 01:15:25,400
And following a fairly
bloody parliamentary battle,

1314
01:15:26,440 --> 01:15:28,840
an act, the War Crimes Act, 1991,

1315
01:15:28,920 --> 01:15:31,000
was passed to enable this to happen.

1316
01:15:31,960 --> 01:15:33,960
As to what happened afterwards,

1317
01:15:34,040 --> 01:15:37,200
in terms of actual
investigations and prosecutions,

1318
01:15:37,280 --> 01:15:40,520
what we do know is that at its height,

1319
01:15:40,600 --> 01:15:43,680
the Metropolitan Police's War Crimes Unit

1320
01:15:43,760 --> 01:15:47,800
had somewhere in the
region of 400 active cases.

1321
01:15:47,880 --> 01:15:50,880
But there was only one
successful prosecution.

1322
01:15:50,960 --> 01:15:52,600
There was only one prosecution.

1323
01:15:52,680 --> 01:15:57,120
And the reason that we're
here is that for many years,

1324
01:15:57,200 --> 01:16:00,920
this was home to Anthony Sawoniuk.

1325
01:16:01,000 --> 01:16:03,840
This is the Rouel Road
estate in Bermondsey.

1326
01:16:03,920 --> 01:16:05,960
He had managed to get himself here

1327
01:16:06,040 --> 01:16:08,320
as part of the Polish resettlement.

1328
01:16:08,400 --> 01:16:10,920
So he arrives in this country in '46

1329
01:16:11,000 --> 01:16:12,960
and he settles in Surrey,

1330
01:16:13,040 --> 01:16:15,120
and he does a number
of jobs over the years,

1331
01:16:15,200 --> 01:16:18,640
from hospital water to ending
up as a ticket collector

1332
01:16:18,720 --> 01:16:21,800
at London Bridge Station
and living in this estate.

1333
01:16:21,880 --> 01:16:25,440
He retired and got a very nice pension

1334
01:16:25,520 --> 01:16:28,440
on which he could live out
the remainder of his years.

1335
01:16:28,520 --> 01:16:31,040
- And how many people do
we know that he killed?

1336
01:16:33,200 --> 01:16:37,520
- He was convicted for killing 18 people.

1337
01:16:37,600 --> 01:16:40,400
At his trial, there was testimony

1338
01:16:40,480 --> 01:16:42,120
from an old school friend of his

1339
01:16:42,200 --> 01:16:46,720
who witnessed him murdering 15 women

1340
01:16:46,800 --> 01:16:48,480
who he'd ordered to undress,

1341
01:16:48,560 --> 01:16:50,240
spraying them with machine gun

1342
01:16:50,320 --> 01:16:52,520
and then pushing them into pits.

1343
01:16:53,480 --> 01:16:55,680
There is plenty of evidence,

1344
01:16:55,760 --> 01:16:57,600
but the evidence wasn't strong enough

1345
01:16:57,680 --> 01:16:59,880
on which to mount the charges

1346
01:16:59,960 --> 01:17:03,360
that he was involved in
many, many more murders.

1347
01:17:03,440 --> 01:17:06,480
The trial was successful,
he was found guilty,

1348
01:17:06,560 --> 01:17:09,480
he appealed, his appeal was thrown out,

1349
01:17:09,560 --> 01:17:14,240
and he ended his final days
in prison, dying in 2005.

1350
01:17:17,360 --> 01:17:20,280
- One month after
Anthony Sawoniuk was sent

1351
01:17:20,360 --> 01:17:21,600
to prison in Norwich,

1352
01:17:21,680 --> 01:17:24,240
the Metropolitan War
Crimes Unit was closed down

1353
01:17:24,320 --> 01:17:25,816
and all the information they'd gathered

1354
01:17:25,840 --> 01:17:28,120
over many years was put into boxes,

1355
01:17:28,200 --> 01:17:31,240
and then those were sealed
for, I think, 50 years.

1356
01:17:32,800 --> 01:17:34,680
My feeling is is that somebody

1357
01:17:34,760 --> 01:17:38,160
in the Crown Prosecution
Service or the government said,

1358
01:17:38,240 --> 01:17:42,360
"Look, we just spent 6.5
million prosecuting Sawoniuk.

1359
01:17:42,440 --> 01:17:46,960
"So if we were to spend the
money prosecuting 10, 20, 30,

1360
01:17:47,040 --> 01:17:50,160
"whatever it was, men, it's
going to be very expensive.

1361
01:17:50,240 --> 01:17:51,400
"And why should we do it?

1362
01:17:51,480 --> 01:17:55,320
"It all took place a long time
ago, a long way from here."

1363
01:17:55,400 --> 01:17:59,600
So they just buried the information

1364
01:17:59,680 --> 01:18:03,400
and thought that nobody
would kick up a fuss,

1365
01:18:03,480 --> 01:18:06,240
which as it turned out,
was exactly the case,

1366
01:18:06,320 --> 01:18:09,240
apart from a few people
in the Jewish community.

1367
01:18:09,320 --> 01:18:12,240
Therefore, if this was the case,

1368
01:18:12,320 --> 01:18:14,640
justice has a price tag.

1369
01:18:28,640 --> 01:18:31,200
Germany
calling, Germany calling.

1370
01:18:32,680 --> 01:18:36,960
I want to discuss with you some
topics of current interest.

1371
01:18:37,800 --> 01:18:42,120
Three weeks ago, Mr. Chamberlain
predicted the possibility

1372
01:18:42,200 --> 01:18:45,360
of warfare in Scandinavia.

1373
01:18:45,440 --> 01:18:49,520
Nobody in Britain paid any
great attention to his prophecy

1374
01:18:49,600 --> 01:18:52,000
as it lacked the note of novelty.

1375
01:18:52,080 --> 01:18:56,560
Four days ago, under the orders
of their supreme commander,

1376
01:18:56,640 --> 01:19:00,440
the German forces established
one of the greatest feats

1377
01:19:00,520 --> 01:19:03,640
and in the
annals of military history.

1378
01:19:08,360 --> 01:19:11,400
- This is the last resting
place of William Joyce,

1379
01:19:11,480 --> 01:19:13,680
better known as Lord Haw-Haw,

1380
01:19:13,760 --> 01:19:15,600
who broadcast Nazi propaganda

1381
01:19:15,680 --> 01:19:17,760
to the British people throughout the war.

1382
01:19:19,080 --> 01:19:21,880
Although a particularly
offensive anti-Semite,

1383
01:19:21,960 --> 01:19:25,800
he never actually killed
anyone nor incited murder.

1384
01:19:25,880 --> 01:19:28,800
Joyce had falsely obtained
a British passport

1385
01:19:28,880 --> 01:19:32,280
simply by lying and this
flimsy evidence was enough

1386
01:19:32,360 --> 01:19:34,760
to ensure that he stood trial for treason.

1387
01:19:35,840 --> 01:19:38,240
The trial judge directed the jury

1388
01:19:38,320 --> 01:19:40,880
that as a matter of law,
he was British enough

1389
01:19:40,960 --> 01:19:43,520
and they need not be concerned anymore.

1390
01:19:47,880 --> 01:19:52,320
He was executed on the
3rd of January, 1946.

1391
01:19:54,880 --> 01:19:57,720
Joyce, who broadcast
directly from Germany,

1392
01:19:57,800 --> 01:20:01,160
was actually an American
citizen born in Brooklyn,

1393
01:20:01,240 --> 01:20:04,120
and he grew up here in neutral Ireland.

1394
01:20:04,200 --> 01:20:06,880
This is his former school.

1395
01:20:08,560 --> 01:20:11,280
Therefore, how could he
possibly be prosecuted

1396
01:20:11,360 --> 01:20:14,680
for treason against the United Kingdom?

1397
01:20:30,840 --> 01:20:34,040
So the British government bend the rules

1398
01:20:34,120 --> 01:20:35,840
so they can hang a man for treason,

1399
01:20:35,920 --> 01:20:38,760
even though that man never
actually committed treason

1400
01:20:38,840 --> 01:20:42,840
because they say that was
justice and not vengeance.

1401
01:20:42,920 --> 01:20:45,200
However, for over 40 years,

1402
01:20:45,280 --> 01:20:47,960
almost 400 suspected Nazi war criminals,

1403
01:20:48,040 --> 01:20:50,960
many of them who had
committed multiple murders,

1404
01:20:51,040 --> 01:20:54,080
are not prosecuted
because that will be seen

1405
01:20:54,160 --> 01:20:56,880
to be vengeance and not justice.

1406
01:21:08,600 --> 01:21:10,960
Michael Karkoc
was a founding member

1407
01:21:11,040 --> 01:21:13,280
and a leftenant in the second company

1408
01:21:13,360 --> 01:21:16,520
of the Ukrainian Self-Defense Legion,

1409
01:21:16,600 --> 01:21:19,480
which he admitted in his
Ukrainian language memoir,

1410
01:21:19,560 --> 01:21:22,880
published in the USA in 1995.

1411
01:21:23,840 --> 01:21:27,600
He would later transfer to the Galician,

1412
01:21:27,680 --> 01:21:29,960
14th Waffen SS Division.

1413
01:21:31,120 --> 01:21:33,280
Both units carried out war crimes

1414
01:21:33,360 --> 01:21:36,200
against civilians in
the Ukraine and Poland,

1415
01:21:36,280 --> 01:21:39,800
including the 1944 Warsaw Uprising.

1416
01:21:42,280 --> 01:21:45,600
Karkoc escaped to the USA in 1950,

1417
01:21:45,680 --> 01:21:48,200
lying to American immigration officers.

1418
01:21:49,080 --> 01:21:51,240
In March, 2017,

1419
01:21:51,320 --> 01:21:53,200
the Polish government announced

1420
01:21:53,280 --> 01:21:56,480
that it would be seeking
the extradition of Karkoc.

1421
01:21:56,560 --> 01:21:59,400
However, he died before this happened

1422
01:21:59,480 --> 01:22:02,480
in Minnesota in 2019,

1423
01:22:02,560 --> 01:22:04,760
aged 100 years.

1424
01:22:12,800 --> 01:22:15,080
Karkoc's name
surfaced after decades

1425
01:22:15,160 --> 01:22:17,280
of forensic research carried out

1426
01:22:17,360 --> 01:22:20,200
by London-based retired
clinical pharmacologist,

1427
01:22:20,280 --> 01:22:22,000
Dr. Steve Ankier.

1428
01:22:23,240 --> 01:22:25,600
Some members of Karkoc's unit were among

1429
01:22:25,680 --> 01:22:28,520
the 400 suspected Nazi war criminals

1430
01:22:28,600 --> 01:22:30,320
that ended up living in the UK.

1431
01:22:31,840 --> 01:22:33,720
So I asked Stephen to show me where.

1432
01:22:35,720 --> 01:22:39,000
- We're in Oldham because
my research showed

1433
01:22:39,880 --> 01:22:40,880
two people who belonged

1434
01:22:40,960 --> 01:22:44,600
to the Ukrainian Self-Defense
Legion lived here,

1435
01:22:45,440 --> 01:22:47,880
who were originally,

1436
01:22:47,960 --> 01:22:51,160
I would guess, Ukrainian nationalists.

1437
01:22:51,240 --> 01:22:54,640
And they were against the Soviets

1438
01:22:54,720 --> 01:22:58,800
who had caused a major
famine in the early 1930s,

1439
01:22:58,880 --> 01:23:00,080
known as the Holodomor.

1440
01:23:01,400 --> 01:23:04,760
But then they joined the Germans

1441
01:23:04,840 --> 01:23:07,400
and eventually they were
turned into killers.

1442
01:23:09,040 --> 01:23:12,800
They were used to violently
pacify villages for the Nazis,

1443
01:23:13,640 --> 01:23:16,880
and there were at least
two of these killers

1444
01:23:16,960 --> 01:23:18,560
that lived in Oldham.

1445
01:23:19,800 --> 01:23:23,120
One of the killers was very
near to where we are now.

1446
01:23:23,200 --> 01:23:25,080
His name was Eurico Parra,

1447
01:23:26,280 --> 01:23:29,000
but my research showed that
that wasn't his real name.

1448
01:23:30,040 --> 01:23:33,960
His real name was Ivan
Petrovich Lachmanyuk.

1449
01:23:34,920 --> 01:23:37,280
And I discovered this by being in touch

1450
01:23:37,360 --> 01:23:39,760
with the Ukrainian Security Services.

1451
01:23:40,640 --> 01:23:42,920
They sent me a photograph

1452
01:23:43,000 --> 01:23:46,920
of Ivan Petrovich Lachmanyuk,

1453
01:23:47,960 --> 01:23:52,960
with the address of Eurico
Parra, which was very strange.

1454
01:23:54,440 --> 01:23:57,920
And then I found something else in Warsaw,

1455
01:23:58,000 --> 01:24:01,000
I visited the National
Remembrance Library there.

1456
01:24:01,840 --> 01:24:05,560
And I eventually dug up an arrest warrant,

1457
01:24:05,640 --> 01:24:09,480
which the Russians issued in 1970

1458
01:24:09,560 --> 01:24:13,200
for Ivan Petrovich Lachmanyuk

1459
01:24:13,280 --> 01:24:15,520
for machine-gunning villages

1460
01:24:15,600 --> 01:24:19,200
in the Volyn region of
present-day Ukraine,

1461
01:24:19,280 --> 01:24:21,960
under the command of Michael Karkoc,

1462
01:24:22,040 --> 01:24:23,520
and again on the arrest warrant,

1463
01:24:23,600 --> 01:24:25,680
the address for Eurico Parra.

1464
01:24:27,080 --> 01:24:31,840
- So you got all this information
together in a dossier.

1465
01:24:31,920 --> 01:24:33,120
What did you do with it?

1466
01:24:34,720 --> 01:24:36,520
- I gave it to New Scotland Yard.

1467
01:24:37,480 --> 01:24:40,800
Very unfortunate, and these things happen,

1468
01:24:41,960 --> 01:24:44,160
the day that I presented
it to them was one day

1469
01:24:44,240 --> 01:24:47,680
before he died in Oldham
in a nursing home.

1470
01:24:53,160 --> 01:24:54,480
Well, we're still in Oldham.

1471
01:24:54,560 --> 01:24:56,200
We're in the street where a man

1472
01:24:56,280 --> 01:24:58,920
called Dmytro Wiazewycz lived,

1473
01:24:59,000 --> 01:25:03,640
and he was under the direct
command of Michael Karkoc.

1474
01:25:03,720 --> 01:25:07,360
He was almost certainly
involved in the destruction

1475
01:25:07,440 --> 01:25:09,600
of villages in the Lublin area

1476
01:25:09,680 --> 01:25:13,920
and the murder of several
hundred villagers.

1477
01:25:14,920 --> 01:25:18,480
Dmytro Wiazewycz lived in this house.

1478
01:25:18,560 --> 01:25:21,000
- You actually got to meet this man, then?

1479
01:25:21,080 --> 01:25:24,640
- I didn't get to meet him,
I went to his front door.

1480
01:25:24,720 --> 01:25:27,200
My intention was to confront him

1481
01:25:27,280 --> 01:25:30,120
and ask him about his
career during the war,

1482
01:25:30,200 --> 01:25:31,760
whether he was involved in war crimes.

1483
01:25:31,840 --> 01:25:35,280
I had a lot of evidence, a lot
of rosters with his name on,

1484
01:25:35,360 --> 01:25:37,680
matching date of birth, place of birth,

1485
01:25:37,760 --> 01:25:41,200
with his naturalization certificate.

1486
01:25:41,280 --> 01:25:42,880
Unfortunately, at the time,

1487
01:25:42,960 --> 01:25:44,256
there was a carer there and he was,

1488
01:25:44,280 --> 01:25:46,440
I think, having some medical attention.

1489
01:25:46,520 --> 01:25:47,696
So we weren't allowed to go in,

1490
01:25:47,720 --> 01:25:49,560
but I could hear his voice inside.

1491
01:25:50,680 --> 01:25:53,080
And very, very soon afterwards, he died.

1492
01:25:53,160 --> 01:25:54,720
So that was the end of it.

1493
01:26:27,200 --> 01:26:30,280
- Up until 1290 when Edward
I kicked them all out,

1494
01:26:30,360 --> 01:26:34,120
Lincoln was the largest population of Jews

1495
01:26:34,200 --> 01:26:36,600
in the whole of the UK.

1496
01:26:36,680 --> 01:26:40,680
And it just strikes me as really odd

1497
01:26:40,760 --> 01:26:45,720
that a possible killer of
Jews chose to come here.

1498
01:26:46,400 --> 01:26:47,400
What's his name?

1499
01:26:48,320 --> 01:26:50,600
- My research showed that there was a man

1500
01:26:50,680 --> 01:26:54,240
called Mikhail Mankel,

1501
01:26:54,320 --> 01:26:57,400
and he was in the fourth company

1502
01:26:57,480 --> 01:27:00,400
of the Ukrainian Self-Defense Division.

1503
01:27:00,480 --> 01:27:01,800
And there was a massacre

1504
01:27:01,880 --> 01:27:06,680
in a place called Chłaniów and Władysławin

1505
01:27:06,760 --> 01:27:09,600
where 44 villagers were killed.

1506
01:27:09,680 --> 01:27:12,960
They threw grenades into burning houses.

1507
01:27:13,040 --> 01:27:16,200
Amongst the 44 killed were some children.

1508
01:27:16,280 --> 01:27:18,920
There are several rosters

1509
01:27:19,000 --> 01:27:22,880
of members of the Ukrainian
Self-Defense Legion,

1510
01:27:22,960 --> 01:27:27,800
which I uncovered, they show
where they were at the time,

1511
01:27:27,880 --> 01:27:31,320
the full name of the members
of the various companies,

1512
01:27:31,400 --> 01:27:33,920
the date of birth, and
also the place of birth

1513
01:27:34,000 --> 01:27:36,000
of members of the Legion.

1514
01:27:36,080 --> 01:27:38,400
And with that information,

1515
01:27:38,480 --> 01:27:42,400
I searched an online directory in the UK

1516
01:27:42,480 --> 01:27:45,560
and looked for the names of various people

1517
01:27:45,640 --> 01:27:50,200
and found several names which matched.

1518
01:27:50,280 --> 01:27:52,200
Like in the case of this
particular individual,

1519
01:27:52,280 --> 01:27:54,880
when I looked, he'd
actually been long dead.

1520
01:28:10,400 --> 01:28:12,760
We're in Keighley at
the moment in Yorkshire,

1521
01:28:12,840 --> 01:28:14,200
it's quite near Selby,

1522
01:28:15,040 --> 01:28:17,760
where there was a camp for these men

1523
01:28:17,840 --> 01:28:21,760
of the Ukrainian Self-Defense Legion.

1524
01:28:21,840 --> 01:28:25,640
And because of that, there are a number

1525
01:28:25,720 --> 01:28:30,720
of potential war crime
suspects in this area.

1526
01:28:30,880 --> 01:28:33,880
And the one that I
discovered here in Keighley

1527
01:28:33,960 --> 01:28:35,200
was called Ostap Kykawec.

1528
01:28:36,640 --> 01:28:38,440
He's dead now, but he did serve

1529
01:28:38,520 --> 01:28:43,520
in the fourth company of
the 31st Punitive Battalion.

1530
01:28:44,240 --> 01:28:46,280
And had he been alive,

1531
01:28:46,360 --> 01:28:48,480
then he would've been a very suitable case

1532
01:28:48,560 --> 01:28:50,600
to have been referred
to the War Crimes Unit

1533
01:28:50,680 --> 01:28:53,560
of the Metropolitan Police Service.

1534
01:28:59,000 --> 01:29:01,840
Here in Bradford, there
were another two suspects.

1535
01:29:01,920 --> 01:29:05,760
There was somebody called
Alexander Némirovsky,

1536
01:29:05,840 --> 01:29:09,160
who is recorded as having
been a machine-gunner

1537
01:29:09,240 --> 01:29:14,040
in the Warsaw Uprising,
working for the Nazis in 1944.

1538
01:29:15,440 --> 01:29:18,720
And then there was a
man called Ostap Jastrov

1539
01:29:19,760 --> 01:29:23,640
who was also known as Alexander Baranchuk

1540
01:29:23,720 --> 01:29:27,480
who had his photograph
taken with Michael Karkoc

1541
01:29:27,560 --> 01:29:31,240
during the war with some of
the other members of the unit.

1542
01:29:31,320 --> 01:29:32,400
- And they're both dead.

1543
01:29:32,480 --> 01:29:34,080
- They're both dead.

1544
01:29:34,160 --> 01:29:35,720
That's very unfortunate

1545
01:29:35,800 --> 01:29:38,440
because they were both very good suspects

1546
01:29:38,520 --> 01:29:41,440
for the War Crimes Unit
to have a further look at

1547
01:29:41,520 --> 01:29:45,920
and hopefully some justice would've come.

1548
01:29:46,000 --> 01:29:50,440
But unfortunately, it's another
example of justice denied

1549
01:29:50,520 --> 01:29:54,600
and two people potentially
having got away with murder.

1550
01:30:02,160 --> 01:30:06,120
- Stephen did very detailed
research over many decades,

1551
01:30:06,200 --> 01:30:10,400
and he threw up a lot of
suspected war criminals,

1552
01:30:10,480 --> 01:30:13,080
all of them men, no women at all.

1553
01:30:13,160 --> 01:30:16,760
All over the UK and Birmingham, and Leeds,

1554
01:30:16,840 --> 01:30:20,280
and Middlesbrough, Derby,
Bolton, Wolverhampton,

1555
01:30:20,360 --> 01:30:24,160
Halifax, Kings Lynn,
Rugby, Camden in London.

1556
01:30:24,240 --> 01:30:27,160
Stephen though is an amateur.

1557
01:30:27,240 --> 01:30:28,960
He did hand over all his information

1558
01:30:29,040 --> 01:30:31,640
to the Metropolitan War Crimes Unit.

1559
01:30:31,720 --> 01:30:33,640
But the unit was closed down.

1560
01:30:35,120 --> 01:30:38,640
This has all come about
because the powers that be,

1561
01:30:38,720 --> 01:30:40,160
for whatever reason,

1562
01:30:40,240 --> 01:30:42,200
when they should have investigated this

1563
01:30:42,280 --> 01:30:44,640
in the '40s and '50s, they didn't.

1564
01:30:44,720 --> 01:30:49,080
And now what we have is
a very shameful chapter

1565
01:30:49,160 --> 01:30:50,840
in British criminal history.

1566
01:30:56,840 --> 01:30:59,160
After the war, the narrative defense

1567
01:30:59,240 --> 01:31:01,160
that many countries adopted was

1568
01:31:01,240 --> 01:31:04,320
that they were forced into
their actions against the Jews

1569
01:31:04,400 --> 01:31:08,480
because they were an invaded
country and they had no choice.

1570
01:31:10,160 --> 01:31:11,960
Although Bulgaria had Jews deported

1571
01:31:12,040 --> 01:31:15,400
from the newly-occupied
Yugoslav and Greek territories,

1572
01:31:15,480 --> 01:31:17,440
they stopped short of delivering

1573
01:31:17,520 --> 01:31:19,400
their own Jews to the Nazis,

1574
01:31:19,480 --> 01:31:22,640
saving the lives of 48,000 people.

1575
01:31:25,200 --> 01:31:29,320
Courageous Danish citizens
managed to evacuate 7,220

1576
01:31:30,720 --> 01:31:33,360
of Denmark's 7,800 Jews

1577
01:31:33,440 --> 01:31:35,360
to neutral Sweden by boat.

1578
01:31:36,720 --> 01:31:39,960
Albania, 80% Muslim,

1579
01:31:40,040 --> 01:31:41,800
was the only occupied country

1580
01:31:41,880 --> 01:31:45,640
where almost no Jews
died or were handed over.

1581
01:31:45,720 --> 01:31:48,840
And the Albanians
heroically protected Jews

1582
01:31:48,920 --> 01:31:51,920
who sought refuge in their
country during the war.

1583
01:31:53,480 --> 01:31:56,160
These were the few exceptions.

1584
01:31:57,440 --> 01:31:59,440
The minutes from a Slovak German meeting

1585
01:31:59,520 --> 01:32:02,920
on the 29th of April, 1942 state,

1586
01:32:03,000 --> 01:32:05,960
"For every Jew of Slovak citizenship

1587
01:32:06,040 --> 01:32:08,600
"transferred into the Reich's territory,

1588
01:32:08,680 --> 01:32:10,880
"the German government
will be paid an amount

1589
01:32:10,960 --> 01:32:13,360
"of 500 Reichsmarks."

1590
01:32:15,680 --> 01:32:18,680
The death camps were the only
German territory they visited.

1591
01:32:25,400 --> 01:32:28,440
- One way to think about the Nazi system

1592
01:32:28,520 --> 01:32:31,160
is that to all intents and purposes,

1593
01:32:31,240 --> 01:32:33,840
it was a morality-free zone.

1594
01:32:33,920 --> 01:32:37,680
We are used, in the West,
to seeing our legal systems

1595
01:32:37,760 --> 01:32:40,400
as being built very much on the template

1596
01:32:40,480 --> 01:32:42,240
of the 10 Commandments.

1597
01:32:42,320 --> 01:32:45,920
So we're used to seeing laws such as,

1598
01:32:46,000 --> 01:32:47,040
"Thou shalt not steal.

1599
01:32:47,120 --> 01:32:49,200
"Thou shalt not bare false witness.

1600
01:32:49,280 --> 01:32:50,520
"Thou shalt not murder."

1601
01:32:50,600 --> 01:32:52,320
We're very familiar with these concepts.

1602
01:32:52,400 --> 01:32:56,160
And what the Nazis did is
they upended all of that,

1603
01:32:56,240 --> 01:32:59,960
and they said it's okay to
steal, it's okay to lie,

1604
01:33:00,040 --> 01:33:01,760
and it's fine to murder.

1605
01:33:01,840 --> 01:33:04,280
And they legislated for all of that.

1606
01:33:04,360 --> 01:33:06,800
So they reversed the 10 Commandments.

1607
01:33:06,880 --> 01:33:10,200
They gave their victims
no recourse to law.

1608
01:33:10,280 --> 01:33:12,440
There was no due process.

1609
01:33:12,520 --> 01:33:14,960
And that's why it's so important that

1610
01:33:15,040 --> 01:33:20,080
when we look at how we
approach Nazi war criminals,

1611
01:33:20,160 --> 01:33:24,120
we apply to them the
justice and the rule of law

1612
01:33:24,200 --> 01:33:26,480
that they denied to their victims.

1613
01:33:29,680 --> 01:33:32,480
Herberts Cukurs,
"The Butcher of Riga,"

1614
01:33:32,560 --> 01:33:35,720
was a pre-war aviator and national hero

1615
01:33:35,800 --> 01:33:38,520
who directly participated
in the mass murder

1616
01:33:38,600 --> 01:33:41,640
of over 30,000 Latvian Jews.

1617
01:33:41,720 --> 01:33:44,280
In one instance, in 1941,

1618
01:33:44,360 --> 01:33:46,640
he ordered an elderly Jewish man

1619
01:33:46,720 --> 01:33:48,880
to rape a young Jewish woman.

1620
01:33:48,960 --> 01:33:51,120
And any prisoners who looked away

1621
01:33:51,200 --> 01:33:53,840
were personally beaten to death by Cukurs.

1622
01:33:55,120 --> 01:33:57,480
He escaped to Brazil after the war

1623
01:33:57,560 --> 01:34:00,960
where the Soviets tried
unsuccessfully to extradite him.

1624
01:34:01,800 --> 01:34:05,040
He was assassinated by
Israeli Mossad agents

1625
01:34:05,120 --> 01:34:09,080
in Uruguay in 1965, aged 64.

1626
01:34:10,040 --> 01:34:13,080
In Latvia today, there
are those who insist

1627
01:34:13,160 --> 01:34:15,080
that he was totally innocent

1628
01:34:15,160 --> 01:34:17,360
despite the great many
eyewitness statements

1629
01:34:17,440 --> 01:34:19,120
about his crimes.

1630
01:34:19,200 --> 01:34:21,520
For them, he is still a hero.

1631
01:34:22,400 --> 01:34:27,040
A musical about him
premiered in Liepaja in 2014.

1632
01:34:35,920 --> 01:34:38,360
What do you know
about your grandmother?

1633
01:34:38,440 --> 01:34:40,800
- Her name was Ilse, Ilse Cohn.

1634
01:34:40,880 --> 01:34:42,760
She had just one child, my mother.

1635
01:34:43,880 --> 01:34:46,320
Her husband had died in
1938 of a heart attack.

1636
01:34:46,400 --> 01:34:47,696
So there was just the two of them left

1637
01:34:47,720 --> 01:34:48,800
as the war approached.

1638
01:34:49,800 --> 01:34:51,440
My mother got out, she got a visa

1639
01:34:51,520 --> 01:34:54,480
as a domestic servant to come to Britain.

1640
01:34:54,560 --> 01:34:56,760
But her mother, my grandmother, couldn't

1641
01:34:56,840 --> 01:35:00,320
because she was considered
to be too old, she was 42.

1642
01:35:00,400 --> 01:35:01,720
So she stayed behind.

1643
01:35:03,520 --> 01:35:05,160
So I'll read you what it says.

1644
01:35:05,240 --> 01:35:06,600
"This is the place where Nazis

1645
01:35:06,680 --> 01:35:10,400
"and their assistants
killed more than 30,000 Jews

1646
01:35:10,480 --> 01:35:13,520
"from Lithuania and other
European countries."

1647
01:35:13,600 --> 01:35:14,480
And among the people

1648
01:35:14,560 --> 01:35:17,040
from other European countries killed here

1649
01:35:17,120 --> 01:35:19,440
was my grandmother who was
brought here from Germany

1650
01:35:19,520 --> 01:35:21,160
from her hometown of Breslau.

1651
01:35:22,280 --> 01:35:25,400
The Nazis had invaded here
only a few months previously,

1652
01:35:25,480 --> 01:35:27,600
and this was one of their killing fields.

1653
01:35:27,680 --> 01:35:31,680
My grandmother was one of
the very first German Jews

1654
01:35:31,760 --> 01:35:35,280
to be deported, to be
killed on a site like this,

1655
01:35:35,360 --> 01:35:39,320
on that one day 2000 people
were killed here on this site.

1656
01:35:48,760 --> 01:35:50,880
This is one of the burial pits.

1657
01:35:50,960 --> 01:35:52,560
This is where the bodies fell.

1658
01:35:54,120 --> 01:35:56,920
And then in 1943-44,

1659
01:35:57,000 --> 01:35:59,520
they dug them all up again and burnt them

1660
01:35:59,600 --> 01:36:02,240
because the Nazis wanted
to get rid of the evidence.

1661
01:36:02,320 --> 01:36:05,640
And you just look at the
size of a pit like this.

1662
01:36:06,560 --> 01:36:08,720
It defies the imagination.

1663
01:36:15,040 --> 01:36:17,520
They you are, says it all, four words.

1664
01:36:17,600 --> 01:36:22,600
"The way of death," English,
Hebrew, Russian, Lithuanian.

1665
01:36:30,280 --> 01:36:31,920
This is an extraordinary document.

1666
01:36:32,000 --> 01:36:35,200
This is a report that
was written by the man

1667
01:36:35,280 --> 01:36:37,280
who was in command of
the killing squads here,

1668
01:36:37,360 --> 01:36:39,640
a man called Colonel Karl Jãger.

1669
01:36:39,720 --> 01:36:42,560
And it's one of the very
few documents that survived

1670
01:36:42,640 --> 01:36:46,080
that actually spells
out in clinical detail

1671
01:36:46,160 --> 01:36:48,640
who was killed when, every day.

1672
01:36:48,720 --> 01:36:50,760
How many Jewish men,
how many Jewish women,

1673
01:36:50,840 --> 01:36:52,800
how many Jewish children were killed.

1674
01:36:52,880 --> 01:36:53,960
And he actually says,

1675
01:36:54,040 --> 01:36:57,360
"This is a complete tabulation
of executions carried out

1676
01:36:57,440 --> 01:36:59,480
"in the Einsatzkommando 3 zone

1677
01:36:59,560 --> 01:37:02,520
"up to the 1st of December, 1941."

1678
01:37:02,600 --> 01:37:05,520
And he specifies, "These
executions were carried out

1679
01:37:05,600 --> 01:37:08,240
"by Lithuanian partisans
on my instructions

1680
01:37:08,320 --> 01:37:10,640
"and under my command."

1681
01:37:10,720 --> 01:37:13,360
Let me just show you this one page here.

1682
01:37:13,440 --> 01:37:15,960
29th of November, 1941.

1683
01:37:16,040 --> 01:37:18,160
693 Jewish men,

1684
01:37:18,240 --> 01:37:21,360
1,155 Jewish women,

1685
01:37:21,440 --> 01:37:26,120
152 children from Vienna and Breslau

1686
01:37:26,200 --> 01:37:28,120
killed on this one day.

1687
01:37:28,200 --> 01:37:31,360
And of course one of the 1100
women was my grandmother.

1688
01:37:33,680 --> 01:37:38,680
You go back a month earlier,
29th of October, 9,200 people,

1689
01:37:40,040 --> 01:37:43,120
here on this site of one day.

1690
01:37:43,200 --> 01:37:46,160
These were Jews from the ghetto in Kaunas

1691
01:37:46,240 --> 01:37:48,320
who were marched up here and shot.

1692
01:37:48,400 --> 01:37:50,720
And of those 9,200, look at this.

1693
01:37:50,800 --> 01:37:54,560
4,273 were children.

1694
01:37:55,760 --> 01:38:00,760
Children who were shot here
at the Ninth Fort in Kaunas.

1695
01:38:01,160 --> 01:38:03,280
And you go to the end of this report

1696
01:38:03,360 --> 01:38:05,960
and he tots up the total.

1697
01:38:06,040 --> 01:38:08,240
And the grand total, here it is, 137,346

1698
01:38:14,160 --> 01:38:15,480
in less than five months.

1699
01:38:22,040 --> 01:38:24,360
Well, this is a really
rather appalling place,

1700
01:38:24,440 --> 01:38:27,600
Paneriai Forest, where tens of thousands

1701
01:38:27,680 --> 01:38:32,440
of people were massacred
between 1941 and 1944.

1702
01:38:33,080 --> 01:38:36,720
The have a memorial stone
here in Lithuanian Hebrew,

1703
01:38:36,800 --> 01:38:38,800
Russian inscriptions.

1704
01:38:38,880 --> 01:38:39,640
But what's interesting is

1705
01:38:39,720 --> 01:38:43,760
that the original Soviet
narrative was that the people

1706
01:38:43,840 --> 01:38:47,440
who were slaughtered here
were Soviet citizens.

1707
01:38:47,520 --> 01:38:50,480
So it's quite interesting
how history gets rewritten

1708
01:38:50,560 --> 01:38:52,160
over a period of time.

1709
01:38:52,240 --> 01:38:54,000
What this says is that originally,

1710
01:38:54,080 --> 01:38:56,880
this memorial simply paid tribute

1711
01:38:56,960 --> 01:38:59,120
to the 100,000 Soviet people

1712
01:38:59,200 --> 01:39:01,920
who were slaughtered here in the forest.

1713
01:39:02,000 --> 01:39:04,720
Then in 1989, on the initiative,

1714
01:39:04,800 --> 01:39:08,040
it says of the Lithuanian
Jewish community,

1715
01:39:08,120 --> 01:39:10,920
one of these granite stones was inserted

1716
01:39:11,000 --> 01:39:13,360
to make it clear that 70,000

1717
01:39:13,440 --> 01:39:15,480
of the people killed here were Jews.

1718
01:39:15,560 --> 01:39:18,800
And then again, in 2004,
another change was made.

1719
01:39:18,880 --> 01:39:22,280
The phrase "Soviet
citizens" was covered up

1720
01:39:22,360 --> 01:39:24,680
with a new plaque, just replacing it

1721
01:39:24,760 --> 01:39:29,160
by saying 100,000 people were killed here.

1722
01:39:29,240 --> 01:39:31,360
This is one of the burial pits

1723
01:39:31,440 --> 01:39:34,040
into which they threw the bodies

1724
01:39:34,120 --> 01:39:36,880
of all the people who were killed here.

1725
01:39:39,360 --> 01:39:40,800
"For the Germans,

1726
01:39:40,880 --> 01:39:44,880
"300 Jews are 300 enemies of humanity.

1727
01:39:44,960 --> 01:39:47,160
"For the Lithuanians,

1728
01:39:47,240 --> 01:39:52,240
"300 Jews are 300 pairs of
shoes, trousers, and clothes."

1729
01:39:53,320 --> 01:39:57,160
Kazimierz Sakowicz,
journalist and witness.

1730
01:39:59,760 --> 01:40:00,960
- The numbers are so huge,

1731
01:40:01,040 --> 01:40:03,160
it's so difficult to
come to terms with it,

1732
01:40:03,240 --> 01:40:05,360
to imagine that these were real people.

1733
01:40:05,440 --> 01:40:08,400
What makes this place so special is

1734
01:40:08,480 --> 01:40:09,840
that there are photographs

1735
01:40:09,920 --> 01:40:12,960
of what happened here on the dunes,

1736
01:40:13,040 --> 01:40:15,800
on the edge of these huge
ditches that had been dug.

1737
01:40:16,680 --> 01:40:19,280
So their bodies just fell
straight into the ditches.

1738
01:40:20,520 --> 01:40:22,480
German officers took the photographs,

1739
01:40:22,560 --> 01:40:26,840
presumably as some kind
of grotesque souvenir,

1740
01:40:26,920 --> 01:40:28,200
and then at the end of the war,

1741
01:40:28,280 --> 01:40:30,600
they fell into the hands
of Russian authorities

1742
01:40:30,680 --> 01:40:31,976
and they were handed over and used

1743
01:40:32,000 --> 01:40:35,040
in evidence at the
Nuremberg war crimes trials.

1744
01:40:37,280 --> 01:40:39,120
These are the photographs
that were taken here,

1745
01:40:39,200 --> 01:40:41,760
right here on the beach in December, 1941.

1746
01:40:41,840 --> 01:40:44,440
And you can see the people huddling

1747
01:40:44,520 --> 01:40:46,920
under the guard of the German officers.

1748
01:40:47,000 --> 01:40:48,536
- Yeah, and you can see how cold it is,

1749
01:40:48,560 --> 01:40:50,096
look at their thick coats.
- Absolutely,

1750
01:40:50,120 --> 01:40:51,600
this was December.

1751
01:40:51,680 --> 01:40:53,600
And has anybody
been identified from them?

1752
01:40:53,680 --> 01:40:56,120
- Yeah, some of them have
actually been identified by name.

1753
01:40:56,200 --> 01:40:57,360
I mean, you can see the faces

1754
01:40:57,440 --> 01:41:00,280
and that's what makes it so real.

1755
01:41:14,480 --> 01:41:15,960
And then you look,

1756
01:41:16,040 --> 01:41:18,080
they were made to take
their clothes off, taking...

1757
01:41:18,160 --> 01:41:18,960
- And look at all the guards.

1758
01:41:19,040 --> 01:41:19,800
- Look at all the guards, yeah.

1759
01:41:19,880 --> 01:41:21,440
- There's lots, why are there so many?

1760
01:41:21,520 --> 01:41:22,936
- Do you know, some of
them came here actually

1761
01:41:22,960 --> 01:41:25,880
to watch what's called execution tourism.

1762
01:41:25,960 --> 01:41:27,600
I mean it's obscene,

1763
01:41:27,680 --> 01:41:29,680
fit like sort of public executions today

1764
01:41:29,760 --> 01:41:32,040
in Iran or in Saudi Arabia.

1765
01:41:32,120 --> 01:41:35,120
- He's got a, some kind
of a list of people.

1766
01:41:35,200 --> 01:41:37,760
- Yes, exactly, exactly, a list of people.

1767
01:41:39,080 --> 01:41:42,960
And worse and worse, worse and worse.

1768
01:41:43,040 --> 01:41:46,200
- So in this one, all
of them are very young.

1769
01:41:46,280 --> 01:41:48,720
She's 17 or 18.
- In her teens, yeah, yeah.

1770
01:41:48,800 --> 01:41:50,880
- They're totally naked,
and they're running.

1771
01:41:50,960 --> 01:41:52,720
You can see she's running, she's running.

1772
01:41:52,800 --> 01:41:54,160
It's like they're doing it

1773
01:41:54,240 --> 01:41:56,640
for some extraordinary titillation...

1774
01:41:56,720 --> 01:41:58,616
- That they are being made
to humiliate themselves.

1775
01:41:58,640 --> 01:41:59,960
- Of the people who killed them.

1776
01:42:00,040 --> 01:42:00,800
- Exactly.
- I mean they,

1777
01:42:00,880 --> 01:42:02,336
because they're all young,
they're getting off on it.

1778
01:42:02,360 --> 01:42:04,520
And then, and then
they're gonna kill them.

1779
01:42:04,600 --> 01:42:05,720
- Totally obscene.

1780
01:42:07,320 --> 01:42:08,320
And then,

1781
01:42:09,480 --> 01:42:12,360
this is literally moments
before they're shot.

1782
01:42:12,440 --> 01:42:14,560
- So let's have a look at this, this is,

1783
01:42:14,640 --> 01:42:15,480
so there's that edge, so...
- They're looking out

1784
01:42:15,560 --> 01:42:17,040
over the sea, aren't they?

1785
01:42:17,120 --> 01:42:19,080
Almost exactly on this spot, I thought.

1786
01:42:20,160 --> 01:42:20,920
- So what's the next...

1787
01:42:21,000 --> 01:42:23,600
- And then the next, oh,
it's, and this, I mean...

1788
01:42:23,680 --> 01:42:25,136
- Oh, God, that's them dead.
- Do you know what's

1789
01:42:25,160 --> 01:42:26,160
happening here?

1790
01:42:26,240 --> 01:42:28,400
This is a guy who walks along

1791
01:42:28,480 --> 01:42:29,680
and he kicks the bodies,

1792
01:42:29,760 --> 01:42:32,360
those who hadn't fallen at
the moment of their death.

1793
01:42:32,440 --> 01:42:34,440
He goes on, he's called the kicker.

1794
01:42:34,520 --> 01:42:35,560
- The kicker.
- The kicker.

1795
01:42:39,600 --> 01:42:40,640
There are hundreds.

1796
01:42:40,720 --> 01:42:42,480
- Exactly.
- They're all...

1797
01:42:42,560 --> 01:42:44,680
- Under our feet.
- Buried here.

1798
01:42:51,680 --> 01:42:54,960
Over 200,000 Jews were killed
in the Baltic countries

1799
01:42:55,040 --> 01:42:58,480
of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia.

1800
01:42:58,560 --> 01:43:01,480
In each country, the
Einsatzgruppen were helped

1801
01:43:01,560 --> 01:43:03,480
by willing local citizens.

1802
01:43:07,160 --> 01:43:10,200
Almost all of those who
enthusiastically played

1803
01:43:10,280 --> 01:43:13,280
their murderous part
were never prosecuted.

1804
01:43:14,960 --> 01:43:17,920
They were never even questioned.

1805
01:43:40,040 --> 01:43:41,360
In 1945,

1806
01:43:41,440 --> 01:43:43,680
after killing Robin Lustig's grandmother

1807
01:43:43,760 --> 01:43:48,480
and the other 137,000 Jews in Lithuania,

1808
01:43:48,560 --> 01:43:52,840
former SS Officer Karl Jãger
returned to live in Germany.

1809
01:43:53,720 --> 01:43:56,720
All the time, he used his real name.

1810
01:43:57,560 --> 01:44:00,960
He was eventually arrested in March, 1959

1811
01:44:01,040 --> 01:44:03,440
after 14 years of freedom.

1812
01:44:18,040 --> 01:44:21,960
- One of the earliest cases
of the Central Office,

1813
01:44:22,040 --> 01:44:24,440
The Central Office had been established

1814
01:44:24,520 --> 01:44:27,800
on December 1st, 1958

1815
01:44:27,880 --> 01:44:30,840
and the 14th case

1816
01:44:30,920 --> 01:44:34,960
is the case against Karl Jãger.

1817
01:44:35,040 --> 01:44:37,400
That's one of our index cards.

1818
01:44:37,480 --> 01:44:41,280
You can see he was responsible

1819
01:44:41,360 --> 01:44:44,720
for the Einsatzkommando 3

1820
01:44:44,800 --> 01:44:49,000
within the task force A in Lithuania.

1821
01:44:49,080 --> 01:44:52,680
And what you can see here is the evidence

1822
01:44:52,760 --> 01:44:57,520
against his deeds with Jews killed.

1823
01:44:57,600 --> 01:45:01,800
And what you can see is
that he was in prison

1824
01:45:01,880 --> 01:45:04,320
and then he committed suicide

1825
01:45:04,400 --> 01:45:08,480
by hanging himself in
the night in June, 1959.

1826
01:45:10,600 --> 01:45:15,600
We have seen that a lot of
Nazi criminals, war criminals,

1827
01:45:16,160 --> 01:45:20,920
have committed suicide just
to avoid being convicted.

1828
01:45:34,920 --> 01:45:38,040
All these boxes,
how many boxes in total?

1829
01:45:38,120 --> 01:45:41,320
- It's about 50,000.

1830
01:45:42,320 --> 01:45:47,320
And altogether, it's dealing
with this criminal past,

1831
01:45:47,520 --> 01:45:50,440
what has been done, what was not possible,

1832
01:45:50,520 --> 01:45:55,520
what has been overlooked
over political constraints

1833
01:45:55,800 --> 01:45:58,520
in investigating these crimes.

1834
01:45:58,600 --> 01:46:01,600
All that is here in these boxes.

1835
01:46:01,680 --> 01:46:05,280
And all together, we have here 7,600 cases

1836
01:46:05,360 --> 01:46:08,360
since 1958, here in this room.

1837
01:46:10,760 --> 01:46:12,640
This is the Central Office

1838
01:46:12,720 --> 01:46:15,800
for the Investigation of
National Socialist Crimes

1839
01:46:15,880 --> 01:46:19,160
and our task is to prepare cases

1840
01:46:19,240 --> 01:46:23,720
before German public
prosecutors' offices and courts

1841
01:46:23,800 --> 01:46:27,080
when it comes to murders
committed by Nazi criminals.

1842
01:46:28,160 --> 01:46:29,720
In the mid of the '50s,

1843
01:46:29,800 --> 01:46:32,800
there was a trial in the city of Ulm,

1844
01:46:32,880 --> 01:46:36,520
which is really nearby
here from Ludwigsburg,

1845
01:46:36,600 --> 01:46:39,200
as Einsatzgruppen trial.

1846
01:46:39,280 --> 01:46:44,240
And this trial made two
things obvious for the public.

1847
01:46:44,320 --> 01:46:47,880
There are still a lot of
crimes not yet investigated

1848
01:46:47,960 --> 01:46:52,080
or properly investigated
by German authorities.

1849
01:46:52,160 --> 01:46:54,720
And we need a central institution.

1850
01:46:54,800 --> 01:46:58,160
We can't leave it to
the public prosecutors

1851
01:46:58,240 --> 01:47:01,280
or courts that are only responsible

1852
01:47:01,360 --> 01:47:04,520
for crimes committed in their area

1853
01:47:04,600 --> 01:47:06,920
or for defendants living there.

1854
01:47:07,000 --> 01:47:12,000
So this procedural system
was not fit for mass crimes

1855
01:47:12,440 --> 01:47:15,760
that had been committed
outside of Western Germany.

1856
01:47:18,200 --> 01:47:22,840
The idea is to deal with all
national socialist crimes

1857
01:47:22,920 --> 01:47:27,240
that had been committed
in Europe or North Africa.

1858
01:47:27,320 --> 01:47:30,000
So where German troops had been,

1859
01:47:30,080 --> 01:47:31,840
that's the scene of the crime.

1860
01:47:31,920 --> 01:47:34,200
And then the next step is to look

1861
01:47:34,280 --> 01:47:37,920
where are the people
responsible for these crimes?

1862
01:47:38,000 --> 01:47:39,640
And of course, after the war,

1863
01:47:39,720 --> 01:47:44,720
they were not only in Germany,
but all over the world.

1864
01:47:45,040 --> 01:47:48,120
And so we took steps to make sure

1865
01:47:48,200 --> 01:47:51,400
to find the whereabouts of these people.

1866
01:47:53,480 --> 01:47:55,560
The Ludwigsburg
office was involved

1867
01:47:55,640 --> 01:47:59,560
with the 16-month Sobibor trial in 1965.

1868
01:48:00,680 --> 01:48:03,520
Alfred Ittner was sentenced
to just four years

1869
01:48:03,600 --> 01:48:05,040
for participating in the murder

1870
01:48:05,120 --> 01:48:07,880
of approximately 68,000 Jews.

1871
01:48:10,400 --> 01:48:13,080
Erich Fuchs was sentenced to four years

1872
01:48:13,160 --> 01:48:17,320
for participating in the
murder of at least 79,000 Jews.

1873
01:48:19,320 --> 01:48:22,120
Franz Wolf was sentenced to eight years

1874
01:48:22,200 --> 01:48:24,000
for participating in the mass murder

1875
01:48:24,080 --> 01:48:26,600
of at least 39,000 Jews.

1876
01:48:29,040 --> 01:48:31,040
Six other defendants charged

1877
01:48:31,120 --> 01:48:34,520
with the same crimes were acquitted.

1878
01:48:37,880 --> 01:48:39,560
- A lot of evidence, of course,

1879
01:48:39,640 --> 01:48:41,440
was not accessible for us

1880
01:48:41,520 --> 01:48:44,440
because most of the crime scenes were

1881
01:48:44,520 --> 01:48:49,520
behind the Iron Curtain and
a lot of documents had fallen

1882
01:48:50,000 --> 01:48:53,120
in the hands of the Red
Army and were now in Moscow

1883
01:48:53,200 --> 01:48:55,400
or in Minsk and other cities,

1884
01:48:55,480 --> 01:48:59,720
and during the Cold
War, really hard to get.

1885
01:48:59,800 --> 01:49:00,720
Also in the beginning,

1886
01:49:00,800 --> 01:49:02,400
there were a lot of difficulties

1887
01:49:02,480 --> 01:49:07,200
in recruiting adequate personnel
for the Central Office.

1888
01:49:07,280 --> 01:49:10,920
And adequate means people
that are really fit

1889
01:49:11,000 --> 01:49:13,560
and eager to deal with these crimes.

1890
01:49:13,640 --> 01:49:15,920
And it's true that in the beginning,

1891
01:49:16,000 --> 01:49:19,680
lots of public prosecutors,

1892
01:49:19,760 --> 01:49:23,560
police officers, and even judges in office

1893
01:49:23,640 --> 01:49:26,880
in the Federal Republic had been

1894
01:49:26,960 --> 01:49:30,640
in the same office already
during the Third Reich.

1895
01:49:32,360 --> 01:49:34,920
- In 1958, the Ludwigsburg Institute meant

1896
01:49:35,000 --> 01:49:39,360
that you could do
federally-coordinated investigations

1897
01:49:39,440 --> 01:49:43,600
of Nazi crimes, and
that assisted massively

1898
01:49:43,680 --> 01:49:47,640
in acquiring evidence and
coordinating investigations

1899
01:49:47,720 --> 01:49:49,560
and spreading the net much wider.

1900
01:49:49,640 --> 01:49:51,480
But it only had a fairly small staff.

1901
01:49:51,560 --> 01:49:53,720
So even that was relatively limited.

1902
01:49:54,880 --> 01:49:58,080
But the other thing that
changed in the late 1950s,

1903
01:49:58,160 --> 01:50:02,320
early 1960s, was the
significance of the Cold War.

1904
01:50:02,400 --> 01:50:04,840
Now there is this real competition

1905
01:50:04,920 --> 01:50:07,080
between East Germany and West Germany,

1906
01:50:07,160 --> 01:50:09,560
a competition between the two regimes

1907
01:50:09,640 --> 01:50:13,480
and East Germany, as part
of this new Cold War era,

1908
01:50:13,560 --> 01:50:16,200
starts criticizing West Germany

1909
01:50:16,280 --> 01:50:19,120
for having former Nazis in high places,

1910
01:50:19,200 --> 01:50:21,360
pointing to those big Nazis

1911
01:50:21,440 --> 01:50:23,640
who are in Adenauer's own government.

1912
01:50:23,720 --> 01:50:27,160
So the first federal
chancellor of West Germany,

1913
01:50:27,240 --> 01:50:31,040
Konrad Adenauer, included
in his government people

1914
01:50:31,120 --> 01:50:34,800
who had played a significant
role under Nazism.

1915
01:50:34,880 --> 01:50:37,960
Hans Globke, his chief
aide in his chancellery,

1916
01:50:38,040 --> 01:50:40,480
was the guy who had written
the official commentary

1917
01:50:40,560 --> 01:50:42,840
on the Nuremberg laws for Hitler.

1918
01:50:42,920 --> 01:50:44,560
Theodor Oberlãnder,

1919
01:50:44,640 --> 01:50:46,400
who was his minister for refugees

1920
01:50:46,480 --> 01:50:48,360
and expellees from Eastern Europe,

1921
01:50:48,440 --> 01:50:50,576
knew all about Eastern Europe
because they'd been out there

1922
01:50:50,600 --> 01:50:53,600
in the war alongside the Einsatzgruppen,

1923
01:50:53,680 --> 01:50:55,200
alongside the killing squads,

1924
01:50:55,280 --> 01:50:59,040
trying to deal with
racial reconfigurations

1925
01:50:59,120 --> 01:51:00,960
during the Holocaust.

1926
01:51:01,040 --> 01:51:03,960
So East Germany starts pointing the finger

1927
01:51:04,040 --> 01:51:06,000
at people in high places in West Germany.

1928
01:51:06,080 --> 01:51:08,400
This is embarrassing for West Germany.

1929
01:51:08,480 --> 01:51:10,800
So they want to show that actually,

1930
01:51:10,880 --> 01:51:14,720
they are genuinely dealing
with the Nazi past.

1931
01:51:14,800 --> 01:51:17,360
However, I think it's really crucial here

1932
01:51:17,440 --> 01:51:21,720
to say it's not West Germany
putting Nazis on trial.

1933
01:51:21,800 --> 01:51:25,080
It's a few key individuals.

1934
01:51:25,160 --> 01:51:27,760
Very significant here is Fritz Bauer,

1935
01:51:27,840 --> 01:51:30,600
the attorney general
of the land of Hessen,

1936
01:51:30,680 --> 01:51:33,400
who is socialist and Jewish,

1937
01:51:33,480 --> 01:51:35,200
and had to go into exile

1938
01:51:35,280 --> 01:51:37,720
to save his own life
during the Third Reich.

1939
01:51:37,800 --> 01:51:41,960
He comes back and he's determined
to prosecute former Nazis.

1940
01:51:42,040 --> 01:51:44,480
But I think it's very,
very important to point out

1941
01:51:44,560 --> 01:51:48,040
that he did this against
incredible opposition

1942
01:51:48,120 --> 01:51:50,040
in high places, in the government,

1943
01:51:50,120 --> 01:51:53,120
in the political and elite circles.

1944
01:51:53,200 --> 01:51:55,280
And it was Fritz Bauer who was determined

1945
01:51:55,360 --> 01:51:57,000
to put Auschwitz on trial.

1946
01:51:57,080 --> 01:51:59,440
And it was Fritz Bauer
who gave the tip-off

1947
01:51:59,520 --> 01:52:02,600
to Mossad about Eichmann's whereabouts,

1948
01:52:02,680 --> 01:52:06,720
so that it would be the
Mossad who kidnapped Eichmann

1949
01:52:06,800 --> 01:52:09,840
and took him to Jerusalem to
put him on trial in Israel

1950
01:52:09,920 --> 01:52:12,840
because Fritz Bauer said if
Eichmann came back to Germany,

1951
01:52:12,920 --> 01:52:15,200
he would not get the kind of trial

1952
01:52:15,280 --> 01:52:17,800
and conviction that he deserved.

1953
01:52:22,360 --> 01:52:24,520
Adolf Eichmann
was a key executioner

1954
01:52:24,600 --> 01:52:28,080
of the Nazis extermination program.

1955
01:52:28,160 --> 01:52:32,440
After the war, he escaped to
Argentina via the Ratlines,

1956
01:52:32,520 --> 01:52:36,840
finding work as a department
head with Mercedes-Benz,

1957
01:52:36,920 --> 01:52:40,920
a company that, with the use
of 40,000 slave laborers,

1958
01:52:41,000 --> 01:52:43,440
had become rich under the Nazis.

1959
01:52:45,280 --> 01:52:48,640
He was tracked
down in 1960 by Mossad agents

1960
01:52:48,720 --> 01:52:50,720
and taken to Jerusalem for trial.

1961
01:52:51,960 --> 01:52:56,640
His defense of only following
orders was rejected.

1962
01:52:56,720 --> 01:53:00,560
He was found guilty and executed in 1962.

1963
01:53:08,400 --> 01:53:10,600
- Eichmann should be here.

1964
01:53:12,760 --> 01:53:15,160
Eichmann.

1965
01:53:15,240 --> 01:53:16,880
- So many people.

1966
01:53:16,960 --> 01:53:18,280
- Yeah, we have more than

1967
01:53:18,360 --> 01:53:22,200
720,000 names here.

1968
01:53:22,280 --> 01:53:24,680
- 720,000 names.

1969
01:53:24,760 --> 01:53:27,320
- But not only defendant suspects,

1970
01:53:27,400 --> 01:53:32,400
but also witnesses that
are mentioned in the files.

1971
01:53:33,160 --> 01:53:35,640
That's really important
in order to make sure

1972
01:53:35,720 --> 01:53:40,720
that to put it to back
at the exact same spot.

1973
01:53:40,960 --> 01:53:43,920
An index card would look like

1974
01:53:45,000 --> 01:53:47,680
that, we have information concerning

1975
01:53:48,840 --> 01:53:52,280
the person, name, date of birth,

1976
01:53:52,360 --> 01:53:56,160
his rank as SS-Obersturmbannführer.

1977
01:53:57,320 --> 01:54:00,280
We had here the information
that he was arrested

1978
01:54:00,360 --> 01:54:04,760
by Israel agents in Argentina in 1960,

1979
01:54:06,640 --> 01:54:11,640
than the result of the trial in Israel.

1980
01:54:11,960 --> 01:54:13,680
- In the case with the Israelis,

1981
01:54:13,760 --> 01:54:17,400
because they snatched him
in a very controversial way,

1982
01:54:18,800 --> 01:54:22,440
did you help them, in any
case, preparing their evidence,

1983
01:54:22,520 --> 01:54:25,480
or did you step back and leave it to them?

1984
01:54:25,560 --> 01:54:30,000
- The exchange of evidence
or legal assistance

1985
01:54:30,080 --> 01:54:33,800
was between the Public
Prosecutor's Office in Frankfurt,

1986
01:54:33,880 --> 01:54:36,360
Fritz Bauer, and Israel.

1987
01:54:36,440 --> 01:54:40,520
What we did was to send
an observer to the trial

1988
01:54:40,600 --> 01:54:43,240
in order to make sure that evidence

1989
01:54:43,320 --> 01:54:47,920
that is presented to the
court could find its way

1990
01:54:48,000 --> 01:54:50,480
in our investigations here.

1991
01:54:50,560 --> 01:54:52,880
And it's really valuable up to today,

1992
01:54:52,960 --> 01:54:54,440
not when it comes to Eichmann,

1993
01:54:54,520 --> 01:54:59,520
but when we look into
concentration camp cases today,

1994
01:54:59,720 --> 01:55:03,160
of course, we use the information

1995
01:55:03,240 --> 01:55:06,160
that have been established
here or before courts

1996
01:55:06,240 --> 01:55:10,080
in the '60s and '70s when it
comes to the crime itself.

1997
01:55:10,160 --> 01:55:12,120
What has happened in that camp,

1998
01:55:12,200 --> 01:55:14,640
how was the organization working,

1999
01:55:14,720 --> 01:55:16,240
who was responsible for what?

2000
01:55:22,400 --> 01:55:26,840
In German law, there's
no crime against humanity.

2001
01:55:26,920 --> 01:55:27,920
Why is that?

2002
01:55:28,840 --> 01:55:31,920
- Well, the notion,
crime against humanity,

2003
01:55:32,000 --> 01:55:33,880
from a legal point of view,

2004
01:55:33,960 --> 01:55:38,160
was invented in August, 1945

2005
01:55:39,120 --> 01:55:41,960
for the Nuremberg trial.

2006
01:55:42,040 --> 01:55:43,920
And there was a lot of reluctance

2007
01:55:44,000 --> 01:55:48,360
in Western Germany with that trial,

2008
01:55:49,880 --> 01:55:53,400
because of a lot of arguments.

2009
01:55:53,480 --> 01:55:56,520
A political argument was victor's justice,

2010
01:55:56,600 --> 01:55:58,800
the winners of the war,

2011
01:55:58,880 --> 01:56:01,840
only dealing with the crimes committed

2012
01:56:01,920 --> 01:56:04,320
by those who had lost the war.

2013
01:56:04,400 --> 01:56:06,440
And there's a legal argument.

2014
01:56:06,520 --> 01:56:08,360
Since the provisions

2015
01:56:09,320 --> 01:56:13,000
were made in August, 1945,

2016
01:56:13,880 --> 01:56:18,200
after the crime had been
committed until May '45,

2017
01:56:19,520 --> 01:56:23,240
that these provisions are

2018
01:56:23,320 --> 01:56:25,440
not legally correct

2019
01:56:25,520 --> 01:56:28,800
because they were applied retroactively.

2020
01:56:28,880 --> 01:56:32,520
And there's a common principle,
nulla poena sine lege,

2021
01:56:32,600 --> 01:56:35,040
that you should not apply criminal law

2022
01:56:35,120 --> 01:56:37,720
retroactively to the act.

2023
01:56:37,800 --> 01:56:42,840
So the German approach
was, "Let's take the code,

2024
01:56:42,920 --> 01:56:45,680
"the law that was applicable

2025
01:56:45,760 --> 01:56:49,880
"during the crimes up to May, 1945."

2026
01:56:51,400 --> 01:56:54,240
And in that code, we only find notions

2027
01:56:54,320 --> 01:56:57,600
like manslaughter or murder.

2028
01:56:57,680 --> 01:56:59,280
But we do not find notions

2029
01:56:59,360 --> 01:57:02,640
like crimes against humanity or genocide.

2030
01:57:02,720 --> 01:57:06,920
We have to prove a certain contribution

2031
01:57:07,000 --> 01:57:09,720
to a specific killing in order

2032
01:57:09,800 --> 01:57:14,040
to establish individual
responsibility or guilt.

2033
01:57:16,480 --> 01:57:19,160
- In 1979, the Americans created

2034
01:57:19,240 --> 01:57:21,480
the US Department of Justice Office

2035
01:57:21,560 --> 01:57:23,280
of Special Investigations,

2036
01:57:23,360 --> 01:57:26,040
headed for many years by Eli Rosenbaum

2037
01:57:26,120 --> 01:57:28,600
to track down Nazis in America.

2038
01:57:30,440 --> 01:57:32,760
In other countries, this
work was carried out

2039
01:57:32,840 --> 01:57:35,560
by individuals like Serge
and Beate Klarsfeld,

2040
01:57:35,640 --> 01:57:39,440
and most famous of all, Simon Wiesenthal.

2041
01:57:43,200 --> 01:57:45,960
Hermine Braunsteiner
was a German SS guard

2042
01:57:46,040 --> 01:57:49,080
who served at Ravensbrück and Majdanek.

2043
01:57:49,160 --> 01:57:50,440
She hanged some women

2044
01:57:50,520 --> 01:57:52,400
and others she killed with her whip.

2045
01:57:53,480 --> 01:57:54,800
She was imprisoned in Austria

2046
01:57:54,880 --> 01:57:56,880
for her activities in Ravensbrück,

2047
01:57:56,960 --> 01:57:59,360
but served just three years.

2048
01:58:00,200 --> 01:58:04,600
She went to the USA in 1959
and became an American citizen.

2049
01:58:05,720 --> 01:58:10,120
Simon Wiesenthal tracked
her down and in 1973,

2050
01:58:10,200 --> 01:58:13,280
she became the first Nazi
war criminal extradited

2051
01:58:13,360 --> 01:58:15,640
from the USA to West Germany.

2052
01:58:16,840 --> 01:58:19,280
Following a long complex trial,

2053
01:58:19,360 --> 01:58:23,440
she was sentenced in
1981 to life imprisonment

2054
01:58:23,520 --> 01:58:27,040
and died in 1999, aged 79.

2055
01:58:29,120 --> 01:58:32,800
- When you look at the West German cases

2056
01:58:32,880 --> 01:58:35,880
for most of the latter
half of the 20th century,

2057
01:58:35,960 --> 01:58:37,800
what's important is finding out

2058
01:58:37,880 --> 01:58:41,800
what the subjective intention
of the perpetrator was.

2059
01:58:41,880 --> 01:58:45,600
You generally needed
eyewitness testimony to say,

2060
01:58:45,680 --> 01:58:48,760
"I saw this man acting
with excess brutality,

2061
01:58:48,840 --> 01:58:53,760
"sadistic intent," or, "he was
very viciously anti-Semitic."

2062
01:58:53,840 --> 01:58:55,760
And to have eyewitness testimony,

2063
01:58:55,840 --> 01:58:58,040
you had to bring survivors to court.

2064
01:58:58,120 --> 01:59:01,120
And many of the survivors
who had the courage

2065
01:59:01,200 --> 01:59:04,200
to appear in court then
found they were mocked,

2066
01:59:04,280 --> 01:59:05,960
humiliated, vilified.

2067
01:59:06,040 --> 01:59:08,560
They had to face up to
their former tormentors

2068
01:59:08,640 --> 01:59:10,480
and then see their tormentors go free

2069
01:59:10,560 --> 01:59:12,520
or come away with lenient sentences.

2070
01:59:12,600 --> 01:59:14,760
Whereas they had just
had to relive everything

2071
01:59:14,840 --> 01:59:17,520
and then had been humiliated and told

2072
01:59:17,600 --> 01:59:18,976
that they were not telling the truth,

2073
01:59:19,000 --> 01:59:20,576
that they didn't have accurate memories,

2074
01:59:20,600 --> 01:59:22,720
that they couldn't say
the date or the time.

2075
01:59:22,800 --> 01:59:26,160
And so this dependence

2076
01:59:26,240 --> 01:59:29,040
on proving subjective intent,

2077
01:59:29,120 --> 01:59:30,920
if you murder efficiently,

2078
01:59:31,000 --> 01:59:34,480
means perpetrators get away
with murder, they really do.

2079
01:59:34,560 --> 01:59:39,120
It is not murder to put 300,000
people into the gas chambers

2080
01:59:39,200 --> 01:59:42,480
if you didn't actually
individually intend to brutally

2081
01:59:42,560 --> 01:59:45,320
and sadistically murder
a single individual.

2082
01:59:48,840 --> 01:59:50,920
How many people
have you investigated

2083
01:59:51,000 --> 01:59:54,720
and how many have been
prosecuted or convicted?

2084
01:59:54,800 --> 01:59:56,840
- The Central Office has led

2085
01:59:56,920 --> 02:00:00,840
7,600 investigations here

2086
02:00:00,920 --> 02:00:03,840
dealing with such complexes.

2087
02:00:03,920 --> 02:00:08,600
In that time, we had more
than 120,000 defendants

2088
02:00:08,680 --> 02:00:12,160
in Western Germany
whose cases were linked,

2089
02:00:12,240 --> 02:00:15,560
more or less, to the Central Office.

2090
02:00:15,640 --> 02:00:17,360
When it comes to convictions,

2091
02:00:17,440 --> 02:00:19,880
we have less than 7,000

2092
02:00:21,560 --> 02:00:23,640
at the end, in all

2093
02:00:24,520 --> 02:00:27,280
courts in Western Germany after the war.

2094
02:00:27,360 --> 02:00:30,400
So you see, there were a lot of effort

2095
02:00:30,480 --> 02:00:33,080
when it comes to investigations,
looking into people.

2096
02:00:33,160 --> 02:00:36,520
But when it comes to
the results as verdicts,

2097
02:00:36,600 --> 02:00:38,600
we have less than 7,000.

2098
02:00:41,840 --> 02:00:44,760
After the war,
one of Auschwitz's most brutal

2099
02:00:44,840 --> 02:00:48,040
and sadistic guards, Gottfried Weise,

2100
02:00:48,120 --> 02:00:51,000
worked as a construction
manager in Germany

2101
02:00:51,080 --> 02:00:55,120
under his own name, untroubled
by his past war crimes.

2102
02:00:56,560 --> 02:00:58,640
- Gottfried Weise was free,

2103
02:00:58,720 --> 02:01:03,760
living in his own town of
Solingen, for 40 years.

2104
02:01:04,720 --> 02:01:07,240
He'd been apparently denazified,

2105
02:01:07,320 --> 02:01:11,160
which meant he had to fill
in a form, which he did.

2106
02:01:11,240 --> 02:01:15,960
He filled in a form and
gave his service record,

2107
02:01:16,040 --> 02:01:21,040
but he left out his time in Auschwitz.

2108
02:01:21,880 --> 02:01:24,000
So it was never found out.

2109
02:01:24,080 --> 02:01:25,960
And that it was very
difficult to find him.

2110
02:01:26,040 --> 02:01:30,360
And it took 40 years for
him to be apprehended.

2111
02:01:30,440 --> 02:01:32,440
But it was a prolonged
trial, don't forget,

2112
02:01:32,520 --> 02:01:34,960
because there were 60 witnesses

2113
02:01:35,040 --> 02:01:36,880
and they all came from all over the world.

2114
02:01:36,960 --> 02:01:40,920
And in parts, the court
went to meet the witnesses.

2115
02:01:41,000 --> 02:01:44,160
So it was a really lengthy procedure.

2116
02:01:44,240 --> 02:01:48,840
Eventually, he was actually
charged with six murders

2117
02:01:48,920 --> 02:01:51,360
and convicted of five

2118
02:01:52,680 --> 02:01:54,640
specific murders, these were,

2119
02:01:54,720 --> 02:01:58,000
where people were actually
there at that point,

2120
02:01:58,080 --> 02:02:01,080
and managed to have a time scale

2121
02:02:01,160 --> 02:02:02,840
and a date when it happened.

2122
02:02:02,920 --> 02:02:04,440
And that was quite difficult.

2123
02:02:07,560 --> 02:02:10,400
I was cross-examined

2124
02:02:10,480 --> 02:02:12,960
for the defense and for the prosecution

2125
02:02:13,040 --> 02:02:15,760
on two days for seven hours.

2126
02:02:15,840 --> 02:02:19,360
Seven hours I was interrogated.

2127
02:02:20,240 --> 02:02:23,960
In a most minute detail.

2128
02:02:24,040 --> 02:02:25,720
For instance, they wanted to know

2129
02:02:25,800 --> 02:02:27,720
the construction of the hut.

2130
02:02:27,800 --> 02:02:32,120
"Were the planks this way
or were they that way?"

2131
02:02:33,320 --> 02:02:35,360
This man was on bail

2132
02:02:36,560 --> 02:02:38,640
all the time during this trial.

2133
02:02:38,720 --> 02:02:40,640
He was allowed to live at home.

2134
02:02:40,720 --> 02:02:44,040
I think he was on house
arrest or something like that.

2135
02:02:44,120 --> 02:02:47,560
And then came the point of the verdict.

2136
02:02:47,640 --> 02:02:52,600
And as they called him for
the verdict, he disappeared.

2137
02:02:55,040 --> 02:02:56,560
Just like that.

2138
02:02:56,640 --> 02:03:00,840
And Interpol was searching
all over Europe for him.

2139
02:03:00,920 --> 02:03:03,960
And as fate would have it,

2140
02:03:04,040 --> 02:03:07,240
he fled to Switzerland,

2141
02:03:07,320 --> 02:03:10,760
and had a stroke while he was there

2142
02:03:10,840 --> 02:03:12,520
and was brought to the hospital

2143
02:03:12,600 --> 02:03:16,640
and his identity was
obviously found at that point.

2144
02:03:16,720 --> 02:03:18,720
And then Interpol and the police came

2145
02:03:18,800 --> 02:03:20,920
and brought him back to prison.

2146
02:03:24,520 --> 02:03:25,880
- I was born in Western Ukraine,

2147
02:03:25,960 --> 02:03:29,120
in a town called Volodymyr-Volynskyi,

2148
02:03:29,200 --> 02:03:30,360
But in actual fact,

2149
02:03:30,440 --> 02:03:32,040
the Jewish people called it Ludmire

2150
02:03:32,120 --> 02:03:33,840
because it was such a Jewish town.

2151
02:03:33,920 --> 02:03:38,880
The majority of the people
in the town itself were Jews.

2152
02:03:40,680 --> 02:03:44,120
The Germans came into our town in 1942,

2153
02:03:44,200 --> 02:03:47,600
and then we had to leave our house.

2154
02:03:48,440 --> 02:03:51,440
And we were all ushered into a ghetto.

2155
02:03:51,520 --> 02:03:52,680
We lived in the ghetto.

2156
02:03:54,240 --> 02:03:56,680
There were 30 people from
the whole town that survived,

2157
02:03:56,760 --> 02:03:58,720
nine children, 30 people.

2158
02:03:58,800 --> 02:04:00,880
So 30 people
out of how many were...

2159
02:04:00,960 --> 02:04:02,760
- 25,000.

2160
02:04:02,840 --> 02:04:04,200
Yeah, they didn't take them

2161
02:04:04,280 --> 02:04:06,240
to concentration camps, they didn't.

2162
02:04:07,360 --> 02:04:08,560
In actual fact,

2163
02:04:09,520 --> 02:04:12,120
they took people away to

2164
02:04:13,040 --> 02:04:14,560
dig trenches.

2165
02:04:18,360 --> 02:04:20,600
And these trenches, they killed people.

2166
02:04:22,520 --> 02:04:24,720
They just lay down,

2167
02:04:24,800 --> 02:04:26,600
a layer of people, machine gun,

2168
02:04:26,680 --> 02:04:28,040
and layer of people, machine gun,

2169
02:04:28,120 --> 02:04:30,560
and layer people, machine gun.

2170
02:04:33,280 --> 02:04:35,160
His name was Westerheide

2171
02:04:35,240 --> 02:04:38,560
and Westerheide was in
charge of our ghetto.

2172
02:04:38,640 --> 02:04:42,480
Anna Altvater was Westerheide's secretary

2173
02:04:42,560 --> 02:04:44,560
and they both were murderers.

2174
02:04:44,640 --> 02:04:48,920
I mean they were
responsible for 25,000 Jews.

2175
02:04:49,000 --> 02:04:50,536
Anna Altvater would come in the ghetto,

2176
02:04:50,560 --> 02:04:52,960
and if there was a newly-born baby,

2177
02:04:53,040 --> 02:04:54,040
she would turn it

2178
02:04:55,960 --> 02:04:57,680
upside-down and tear it in pieces

2179
02:04:57,760 --> 02:04:59,960
and throw it in the gutter.

2180
02:05:00,040 --> 02:05:04,360
And she came back to Germany
and she was working...

2181
02:05:09,080 --> 02:05:12,000
For the council in charge of youths.

2182
02:05:12,080 --> 02:05:13,880
Can you imagine?

2183
02:05:13,960 --> 02:05:17,320
And Westerheide, he was living somewhere

2184
02:05:17,400 --> 02:05:19,040
on the Swiss border.

2185
02:05:20,480 --> 02:05:23,160
And there was a court case,

2186
02:05:23,240 --> 02:05:24,960
first, I think, in Bielefeld,

2187
02:05:25,040 --> 02:05:27,640
and then I went with my
mother the second time,

2188
02:05:27,720 --> 02:05:29,280
it was in Dortmund.

2189
02:05:29,360 --> 02:05:33,480
The questions that the judges were asking

2190
02:05:33,560 --> 02:05:34,720
were absolutely ridiculous.

2191
02:05:34,800 --> 02:05:37,680
"What time of the day was
it when he was shooting?"

2192
02:05:37,760 --> 02:05:41,600
"What time did," I mean,
we didn't have a watch.

2193
02:05:41,680 --> 02:05:45,680
The problem was the judges
were sympathetic to them.

2194
02:05:45,760 --> 02:05:47,040
And what was the verdict, then?

2195
02:05:47,120 --> 02:05:48,840
Not guilty.

2196
02:05:48,920 --> 02:05:51,440
Nothing happened to
them, lack of evidence.

2197
02:05:51,520 --> 02:05:53,520
And how many
people gave evidence?

2198
02:05:53,600 --> 02:05:55,456
- There weren't many because
there weren't many people.

2199
02:05:55,480 --> 02:05:56,240
But your mother gave evidence.

2200
02:05:56,320 --> 02:05:58,160
- Oh yes, because my mother was to the end

2201
02:05:58,240 --> 02:06:02,480
and she spoke German and Polish
and all these languages now.

2202
02:06:04,760 --> 02:06:06,720
But what is interesting,

2203
02:06:06,800 --> 02:06:10,320
about a few months or years so earlier,

2204
02:06:10,400 --> 02:06:12,520
there was the first trial,

2205
02:06:12,600 --> 02:06:14,280
which was in Bielefeld,

2206
02:06:15,680 --> 02:06:18,160
and, I think it's Bielefeld,
I can't remember exactly name.

2207
02:06:18,240 --> 02:06:19,336
And I went to see the judge.

2208
02:06:19,360 --> 02:06:23,520
It was a youngish sort of
German guy, and I said to him,

2209
02:06:23,600 --> 02:06:26,400
"How could you let this man

2210
02:06:26,480 --> 02:06:28,680
"that had so much blood on his hand,

2211
02:06:28,760 --> 02:06:30,120
"how could you let him out

2212
02:06:30,200 --> 02:06:35,200
"and say that he's free and not guilty?"

2213
02:06:35,440 --> 02:06:37,240
So you know what, he turned round,

2214
02:06:37,320 --> 02:06:39,960
this is still, I remember, at that time,

2215
02:06:40,040 --> 02:06:42,320
that killing Jews was legal.

2216
02:06:44,880 --> 02:06:47,000
So that was
it, that, and do you know

2217
02:06:47,080 --> 02:06:49,200
what happened to the two of them?

2218
02:06:49,280 --> 02:06:51,400
- No, they went back to their home

2219
02:06:51,480 --> 02:06:53,720
and lived their life.

2220
02:06:53,800 --> 02:06:57,160
And probably, they would start another

2221
02:06:57,240 --> 02:06:59,160
holocaust if they could.

2222
02:07:02,360 --> 02:07:04,640
Johanna Altvater once entered

2223
02:07:04,720 --> 02:07:07,360
a small hospital full of sick children.

2224
02:07:07,440 --> 02:07:10,080
For no reason, she just
started throwing them

2225
02:07:10,160 --> 02:07:12,120
from a third-story window,

2226
02:07:12,200 --> 02:07:15,520
killing some and severely injuring others.

2227
02:07:15,600 --> 02:07:20,160
In both trials, in 1978 and again in 1982,

2228
02:07:20,240 --> 02:07:24,600
her defense was that she
was only a secretary.

2229
02:07:24,680 --> 02:07:26,960
She was acquitted both times.

2230
02:07:27,040 --> 02:07:31,920
She died in 2003, one week
before her 85th birthday.

2231
02:07:40,640 --> 02:07:44,560
- This is a memorial for the
Czechoslovak Paratroopers

2232
02:07:44,640 --> 02:07:48,000
who were responsible for
the Operation Anthropoid.

2233
02:07:56,360 --> 02:07:59,400
On May 27th, 1942,

2234
02:07:59,480 --> 02:08:02,640
Reinhard Heydrich, who
was Hitler's favorite,

2235
02:08:02,720 --> 02:08:05,280
he was one of the
highest-ranking Nazis officers

2236
02:08:05,360 --> 02:08:09,040
and one of the architects
of the Final Solution.

2237
02:08:10,000 --> 02:08:12,600
He was severely injured right here

2238
02:08:12,680 --> 02:08:15,560
in a botched assassination attempt.

2239
02:08:19,400 --> 02:08:20,920
Heydrich didn't die on the spot.

2240
02:08:21,000 --> 02:08:24,560
He died a week later
of sepsis on June 4th.

2241
02:08:42,920 --> 02:08:44,760
- Right now we are
standing in a really quiet

2242
02:08:44,840 --> 02:08:47,320
and peaceful place where

2243
02:08:47,400 --> 02:08:52,360
77 years ago stood a
village, village of Lidice.

2244
02:08:52,880 --> 02:08:57,280
And this village was razed
to the ground by Nazis

2245
02:08:57,360 --> 02:09:00,760
like a revenge for
Czechoslovakian soldiers

2246
02:09:00,840 --> 02:09:05,000
assassinating Reinhard
Heydrich in May, 1942.

2247
02:09:06,400 --> 02:09:09,960
The Gestapo needed to punish someone.

2248
02:09:10,040 --> 02:09:13,680
So on the ninth of the June,

2249
02:09:13,760 --> 02:09:16,680
the day of the Heydrich's
funeral in Berlin,

2250
02:09:16,760 --> 02:09:18,880
the German police came to Lidice.

2251
02:09:20,120 --> 02:09:22,880
173 men were shot,

2252
02:09:26,600 --> 02:09:29,240
the women were taken to Ravensbrück

2253
02:09:29,320 --> 02:09:31,400
concentration camp near Berlin,

2254
02:09:32,480 --> 02:09:36,520
and most of the children were
taken to Chełmno in Poland,

2255
02:09:36,600 --> 02:09:38,960
and these children were gassed.

2256
02:09:40,960 --> 02:09:42,840
After the murder of Lidice men,

2257
02:09:44,000 --> 02:09:46,480
the Nazis put explosives

2258
02:09:46,560 --> 02:09:48,440
and everything was razed to the ground

2259
02:09:48,520 --> 02:09:52,200
and nothing was supposed to stay here.

2260
02:09:52,280 --> 02:09:57,280
They wanted to release the
Lidice from maps, from history.

2261
02:09:58,680 --> 02:10:01,080
It was their propaganda
because they wanted

2262
02:10:01,160 --> 02:10:03,720
to show whole world what happened

2263
02:10:03,800 --> 02:10:07,120
if someone tried to attack Third Reich.

2264
02:10:09,600 --> 02:10:12,080
The people here didn't know

2265
02:10:12,160 --> 02:10:14,640
about the Czechoslovak soldiers.

2266
02:10:16,600 --> 02:10:19,360
This village was absolutely innocent.

2267
02:10:21,800 --> 02:10:25,800
After the war, from 500 people of Lidice,

2268
02:10:25,880 --> 02:10:30,880
only 143 women came back to Lidice

2269
02:10:31,160 --> 02:10:34,040
and only 17 children came back.

2270
02:10:40,720 --> 02:10:42,440
- This is a Baroque church,

2271
02:10:42,520 --> 02:10:45,920
it's called Cyril and Methodius Church,

2272
02:10:46,960 --> 02:10:50,520
and this is the place where
the Czechoslovak Paratroopers,

2273
02:10:50,600 --> 02:10:54,120
who were responsible for
the Operation Anthropoid,

2274
02:10:54,200 --> 02:10:55,720
this is where they were hiding.

2275
02:10:56,760 --> 02:10:59,040
Nazis performed a large investigation

2276
02:10:59,120 --> 02:11:00,880
after the assassination,

2277
02:11:00,960 --> 02:11:05,960
and they discovered them
here on June 18, 1942.

2278
02:11:06,400 --> 02:11:09,400
And it was like a six-hours gun fight.

2279
02:11:11,360 --> 02:11:14,800
Those Czechoslovak paratroopers
who were not shot by Nazis,

2280
02:11:14,880 --> 02:11:16,320
they committed suicide.

2281
02:11:16,400 --> 02:11:20,040
And the only one who could
have survived was Jan Kubiš,

2282
02:11:20,120 --> 02:11:23,560
but he bled out and died in
a hospital later that day.

2283
02:11:51,400 --> 02:11:54,400
Another village,
Ležáky, did have a connection

2284
02:11:54,480 --> 02:11:57,400
to the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich,

2285
02:11:57,480 --> 02:12:01,760
as it was used as a hiding
place for the paratroopers.

2286
02:12:01,840 --> 02:12:03,720
Apart from two children,

2287
02:12:03,800 --> 02:12:05,440
every inhabitant was murdered

2288
02:12:07,080 --> 02:12:10,000
and the entire hamlet
was razed to the ground.

2289
02:12:14,960 --> 02:12:16,256
So were all those who carried out

2290
02:12:16,280 --> 02:12:18,880
the murders captured and punished?

2291
02:12:18,960 --> 02:12:20,200
- No, of course not.

2292
02:12:20,280 --> 02:12:24,480
The most important of
them got their trials

2293
02:12:24,560 --> 02:12:28,560
and was executed, but some of them didn't.

2294
02:12:28,640 --> 02:12:30,720
For example, Max Rostock,

2295
02:12:30,800 --> 02:12:34,880
he was a chief of in Kladno.

2296
02:12:34,960 --> 02:12:39,120
He was sent to the death in 1951,

2297
02:12:39,200 --> 02:12:41,240
but communist president of Czechoslovakia,

2298
02:12:41,320 --> 02:12:46,240
Antonín Zápotocký, decided
not to execute him,

2299
02:12:46,320 --> 02:12:49,360
and he changed his punishment

2300
02:12:50,720 --> 02:12:53,480
to stay in prison till
the end of his life.

2301
02:12:53,560 --> 02:12:56,600
But in 1958,

2302
02:12:56,680 --> 02:13:01,080
the communist regime
decided to hire Max Rostock

2303
02:13:01,160 --> 02:13:03,920
to Czechoslovak intelligence service

2304
02:13:04,000 --> 02:13:08,880
because he was a experienced
secret agent, German.

2305
02:13:08,960 --> 02:13:13,240
So they hired him and sent
him to the West Germany.

2306
02:13:13,320 --> 02:13:15,440
His life was really long

2307
02:13:15,520 --> 02:13:18,120
because he died by age in 1986,

2308
02:13:19,480 --> 02:13:20,560
somewhere in Germany.

2309
02:13:24,920 --> 02:13:26,680
After Heydrich's death,

2310
02:13:26,760 --> 02:13:28,720
Dr. Herta Oberheuser tried

2311
02:13:28,800 --> 02:13:31,760
to recreate sepsis in healthy people,

2312
02:13:31,840 --> 02:13:34,440
cutting them open without anesthetic,

2313
02:13:34,520 --> 02:13:37,760
then rubbing wood dirt or
saw dust into the wounds.

2314
02:13:41,080 --> 02:13:44,160
Following the 10-month
Nuremberg Doctors' Trial,

2315
02:13:44,240 --> 02:13:47,960
Oberheuser was sentenced
to 20 years imprisonment.

2316
02:13:48,040 --> 02:13:53,000
She served just five years for
killing countless children.

2317
02:13:54,160 --> 02:13:56,400
On release, she started practicing

2318
02:13:56,480 --> 02:13:58,680
as a family doctor in Germany,

2319
02:13:58,760 --> 02:14:01,040
and only after considerable pressure

2320
02:14:01,120 --> 02:14:03,240
was her license revoked.

2321
02:14:03,320 --> 02:14:06,280
She died in 1978, aged 66.

2322
02:14:26,480 --> 02:14:29,160
- Oradour-sur-Glane
was one of two villages

2323
02:14:29,240 --> 02:14:32,280
where SS Gruppenführer Heinz Lammerding

2324
02:14:32,360 --> 02:14:34,920
ordered the murders of all the inhabitants

2325
02:14:35,000 --> 02:14:37,280
and razed the village to the ground.

2326
02:14:49,880 --> 02:14:52,840
Heinz Barth was the only
SS officer to stand trial

2327
02:14:52,920 --> 02:14:54,840
for the massacre that took place here.

2328
02:14:55,720 --> 02:14:59,000
In 1983, he was imprisoned in East Germany

2329
02:14:59,080 --> 02:15:02,280
for his part in murdering
hundreds of French citizens.

2330
02:15:02,360 --> 02:15:05,040
He was also at the Ležáky massacre,

2331
02:15:05,120 --> 02:15:07,240
yet just 15 years later,

2332
02:15:07,320 --> 02:15:10,120
he was released with a full war pension.

2333
02:15:10,200 --> 02:15:13,480
In 2007, he died, aged 86.

2334
02:15:21,720 --> 02:15:26,760
This is the picturesque town
of Bad Tölz where in 1971,

2335
02:15:26,840 --> 02:15:30,840
at the age of 65, Heinz
Lammerding died a wealthy man.

2336
02:15:32,520 --> 02:15:36,680
In 1953, a French court
had found him guilty

2337
02:15:36,760 --> 02:15:41,760
in absentia of the murder
of 750 French citizens.

2338
02:15:42,720 --> 02:15:46,880
The West German government did
absolutely nothing about it.

2339
02:15:47,840 --> 02:15:52,840
His funeral was said to be a
jolly affair of SS comrades.

2340
02:15:59,080 --> 02:16:03,240
- The Western ally put a
provision in the treaty

2341
02:16:03,320 --> 02:16:07,440
with the new Federal Republic
of Germany in the '50s

2342
02:16:07,520 --> 02:16:12,320
that West Germany was not
allowed to reopen cases

2343
02:16:12,400 --> 02:16:17,040
that had already been
finalized by the Allied.

2344
02:16:17,120 --> 02:16:20,760
So the idea was, "Don't touch our cases,"

2345
02:16:20,840 --> 02:16:24,480
because they feared a less-severe sentence

2346
02:16:24,560 --> 02:16:27,720
when Germany would reopen these cases.

2347
02:16:27,800 --> 02:16:31,400
But then when it comes to
the verdicts in absentia

2348
02:16:31,480 --> 02:16:33,800
in France and in Italy,

2349
02:16:33,880 --> 02:16:37,680
that led to the almost paradox situation

2350
02:16:37,760 --> 02:16:41,840
that then Germany said, "Yeah,
we can't reopen the case.

2351
02:16:41,920 --> 02:16:45,800
"We are not allowed to
because you, France,

2352
02:16:45,880 --> 02:16:48,920
"have already dealt with the case."

2353
02:16:49,000 --> 02:16:53,080
So the reasoning just backfired.

2354
02:16:53,160 --> 02:16:57,920
Instead of keeping the verdict,

2355
02:16:58,000 --> 02:17:00,600
you got nothing from the point of view

2356
02:17:00,680 --> 02:17:02,840
of the French government.

2357
02:17:02,920 --> 02:17:04,680
And Germany then refused

2358
02:17:04,760 --> 02:17:08,440
to just take the verdict in absentia

2359
02:17:08,520 --> 02:17:11,720
and put him into jail because we think

2360
02:17:11,800 --> 02:17:14,880
that you need a trial with the defendant,

2361
02:17:14,960 --> 02:17:17,520
the accused present before the court.

2362
02:17:18,800 --> 02:17:21,080
So he got away with murder.

2363
02:17:21,160 --> 02:17:22,880
- The result of that situation,

2364
02:17:22,960 --> 02:17:26,360
especially with a verdicts
in absentia in France,

2365
02:17:26,440 --> 02:17:31,080
was that for a long time,
there was no verdict at all.

2366
02:17:31,160 --> 02:17:33,200
The French was just in paper

2367
02:17:33,280 --> 02:17:36,160
and in Germany, there was no procedure.

2368
02:17:36,240 --> 02:17:40,280
And the situation only
changed in the mid of the '70s

2369
02:17:40,360 --> 02:17:42,480
when a special agreement was made

2370
02:17:42,560 --> 02:17:44,480
between France and Germany

2371
02:17:44,560 --> 02:17:48,080
that allowed Germany to reopen the cases.

2372
02:17:50,840 --> 02:17:54,000
Alois Brunner,
Eichmann's assistant,

2373
02:17:54,080 --> 02:17:57,360
was responsible for
sending 100,000 to ghettos

2374
02:17:57,440 --> 02:17:59,120
and concentration camps.

2375
02:18:00,120 --> 02:18:03,240
Condemned to death in absentia in France,

2376
02:18:03,320 --> 02:18:06,320
he fled West Germany in 1954

2377
02:18:06,400 --> 02:18:08,640
to a eventual residence in Syria.

2378
02:18:09,680 --> 02:18:13,000
Unrepentant, he received a generous salary

2379
02:18:13,080 --> 02:18:15,200
from the ruling Barth party

2380
02:18:15,280 --> 02:18:18,320
for his professional advice on torture.

2381
02:18:19,440 --> 02:18:24,440
He died in either 2001,
aged 89 or 2010, aged 98.

2382
02:18:25,280 --> 02:18:28,600
Either way, he lived a longer
life than all his victims.

2383
02:18:51,160 --> 02:18:55,160
- This is Salztorgasse, Salt Gate Street,

2384
02:18:55,240 --> 02:18:58,960
and this was the back
entrance of the huge building

2385
02:18:59,040 --> 02:19:01,560
of the former Gestapo headquarters.

2386
02:19:01,640 --> 02:19:04,680
It was installed here because this was

2387
02:19:04,760 --> 02:19:07,400
a big hotel, a Jewish hotel.

2388
02:19:07,480 --> 02:19:11,160
And in 1938, this was
seized by the Gestapo

2389
02:19:11,240 --> 02:19:13,800
and made the headquarters.

2390
02:19:13,880 --> 02:19:15,800
It had been completely destroyed

2391
02:19:15,880 --> 02:19:18,280
during the Second World War.

2392
02:19:18,360 --> 02:19:23,040
In the 1950s, it had been
rebuilt as a condominium.

2393
02:19:23,120 --> 02:19:25,400
And this was the back
entrance where the victims,

2394
02:19:25,480 --> 02:19:30,360
where the prisoners were
brought to be questioned there.

2395
02:19:30,680 --> 02:19:34,720
And people who bought apartments here,

2396
02:19:34,800 --> 02:19:39,800
they contributed to establish
that memorial site here.

2397
02:19:40,760 --> 02:19:45,760
And when Simon Wiesenthal
looked for a new office,

2398
02:19:46,360 --> 02:19:47,560
he said, "Why not here

2399
02:19:47,640 --> 02:19:49,600
"in the former building of Gestapo?"

2400
02:19:49,680 --> 02:19:51,840
And this was exactly here.

2401
02:19:51,920 --> 02:19:55,080
So you have still the white plaque here.

2402
02:19:55,160 --> 02:20:00,160
Here was written, "Documentation
center of the Association

2403
02:20:01,440 --> 02:20:05,680
"of Jewish-persecuted
people of Nazi time."

2404
02:20:05,760 --> 02:20:07,920
So he specifically chose it

2405
02:20:08,000 --> 02:20:09,720
because it was a Gestapo headquarters.

2406
02:20:09,800 --> 02:20:11,720
- I am sure of it because,

2407
02:20:11,800 --> 02:20:16,320
yeah, it has a symbolic
worth to do that work

2408
02:20:17,200 --> 02:20:19,480
on that place where the Gestapo

2409
02:20:19,560 --> 02:20:22,520
did its ugly work before, yeah.

2410
02:20:28,440 --> 02:20:31,440
Gustav Wagner,
nicknamed "The Beast,"

2411
02:20:31,520 --> 02:20:33,120
was the first deputy commander

2412
02:20:33,200 --> 02:20:36,720
of Sobibor extermination camp in Poland.

2413
02:20:36,800 --> 02:20:39,080
He ran the selection process

2414
02:20:39,160 --> 02:20:41,760
that led to slave labor or death,

2415
02:20:41,840 --> 02:20:45,640
where 200 to 250,000 Jews were murdered.

2416
02:20:46,520 --> 02:20:50,000
Sentenced to death in
absentia, he escaped to Brazil.

2417
02:20:50,920 --> 02:20:52,280
After his exposure,

2418
02:20:52,360 --> 02:20:55,920
several extradition
requests were rejected.

2419
02:20:56,000 --> 02:20:58,320
In 1980, aged 69,

2420
02:20:58,400 --> 02:21:01,760
he was found dead with
a knife in his chest.

2421
02:21:01,840 --> 02:21:05,800
His attorney said that
he had committed suicide.

2422
02:21:24,280 --> 02:21:25,920
- The DOW, in German,

2423
02:21:26,000 --> 02:21:29,720
Dokumentationsarchiv des
österreichischen Widerstandes,

2424
02:21:29,800 --> 02:21:33,440
Documentation Center
of Austrian Resistance,

2425
02:21:33,520 --> 02:21:36,000
is an institution which was founded

2426
02:21:36,080 --> 02:21:38,600
to document resistance in Austria

2427
02:21:38,680 --> 02:21:41,400
at the time when everybody
spoke only of the soldiers

2428
02:21:41,480 --> 02:21:44,880
of the Second World War in the 1960s.

2429
02:21:44,960 --> 02:21:47,840
But meanwhile, it has become one

2430
02:21:47,920 --> 02:21:50,880
of the leading institution
for the whole period,

2431
02:21:50,960 --> 02:21:53,520
especially for Holocaust
research in Austria.

2432
02:21:53,600 --> 02:21:58,000
And our big, biggest, most
important project started

2433
02:21:58,080 --> 02:22:01,720
in the 1990s to compile a database

2434
02:22:01,800 --> 02:22:04,280
of all Austrian Holocaust victims.

2435
02:22:05,280 --> 02:22:08,240
Simon Wiesenthal was, in my opinion,

2436
02:22:08,320 --> 02:22:12,080
the most important person with respect

2437
02:22:12,160 --> 02:22:15,000
to the prosecution

2438
02:22:15,080 --> 02:22:18,400
of former Nazi criminals in Austria,

2439
02:22:18,480 --> 02:22:22,880
because he pushed the Austrian
judiciary to do its work.

2440
02:22:23,920 --> 02:22:26,320
He was a Polish Jew of Eastern Poland,

2441
02:22:26,400 --> 02:22:30,840
and he was a survivor of
many concentration camps.

2442
02:22:30,920 --> 02:22:36,040
But his career in the Nazi
concentration camps ended

2443
02:22:36,760 --> 02:22:40,160
on Austrian soil, it was in Mauthausen.

2444
02:22:40,240 --> 02:22:42,960
And already during the last weeks

2445
02:22:43,040 --> 02:22:46,440
of the existence of
the concentration camp,

2446
02:22:47,680 --> 02:22:52,680
he started to collect evidence
against the perpetrators.

2447
02:22:53,120 --> 02:22:56,400
And when the Americans liberated us,

2448
02:22:56,480 --> 02:23:00,120
the concentration camp,
he followed them to Linz,

2449
02:23:00,200 --> 02:23:02,280
Linz is very near to Mauthausen,

2450
02:23:02,360 --> 02:23:07,120
and established his own bureau
of collecting of evidence

2451
02:23:07,200 --> 02:23:11,000
to help the American judicial authorities

2452
02:23:11,080 --> 02:23:13,680
institute proceedings
against those criminals,

2453
02:23:13,760 --> 02:23:16,280
and to prepare the court cases,

2454
02:23:16,360 --> 02:23:17,920
both in Nuremberg and in Dachau.

2455
02:23:18,000 --> 02:23:20,280
In the former Dachau,
the concentration camp,

2456
02:23:20,360 --> 02:23:24,120
American law officers prepared

2457
02:23:24,200 --> 02:23:27,480
some trials against the
perpetrators of Mauthausen.

2458
02:23:27,560 --> 02:23:30,120
And there, Simon Wiesenthal was one

2459
02:23:30,200 --> 02:23:33,480
of the most important
persons to collect evidence.

2460
02:23:33,560 --> 02:23:35,160
And immediately after the war,

2461
02:23:35,240 --> 02:23:37,880
you had more trials in Austria than,

2462
02:23:37,960 --> 02:23:39,480
for instance, in Germany.

2463
02:23:40,520 --> 02:23:42,160
And in that time,

2464
02:23:42,240 --> 02:23:46,080
some six or 7,000 out of them were

2465
02:23:46,160 --> 02:23:49,120
of cases of murder,

2466
02:23:49,200 --> 02:23:53,760
assault and battery, and...

2467
02:23:53,840 --> 02:23:58,040
Robbery, Aryanization,
and theft and all that.

2468
02:23:58,120 --> 02:24:00,720
And we had 43 death sentences,

2469
02:24:00,800 --> 02:24:04,480
29 sentences with life imprisonment,

2470
02:24:04,560 --> 02:24:07,680
and around 300 or so sentences

2471
02:24:07,760 --> 02:24:11,320
in the upper range
between 10 and 20 years.

2472
02:24:11,400 --> 02:24:15,800
But immediately after the last Ally troops

2473
02:24:15,880 --> 02:24:18,120
had left Austria in 1955,

2474
02:24:18,200 --> 02:24:20,880
started this period

2475
02:24:20,960 --> 02:24:24,440
where we had only a very few

2476
02:24:25,400 --> 02:24:27,000
amount of trials.

2477
02:24:27,080 --> 02:24:32,080
And Simon Wiesenthal played
a very, very important role

2478
02:24:32,680 --> 02:24:36,000
to bring forward some
of the most important

2479
02:24:36,080 --> 02:24:38,720
of those few Austrian trials.

2480
02:24:38,800 --> 02:24:42,600
Not only because he
pushed forward some cases

2481
02:24:42,680 --> 02:24:46,840
and brought it to public
attention, and also...

2482
02:24:48,360 --> 02:24:51,520
Forced Austrian judiciary to do something.

2483
02:24:51,600 --> 02:24:53,880
But when, as soon as

2484
02:24:54,920 --> 02:24:58,200
the court case started before the court,

2485
02:24:58,280 --> 02:25:01,560
you had the main trial and there,

2486
02:25:02,880 --> 02:25:05,400
witnesses were summoned.

2487
02:25:05,480 --> 02:25:08,200
And you had to prepare the witnesses.

2488
02:25:08,280 --> 02:25:10,200
You had, first, you had to find them,

2489
02:25:10,280 --> 02:25:12,240
there, he played a very important role.

2490
02:25:12,320 --> 02:25:14,360
And then you had to prepare them.

2491
02:25:15,480 --> 02:25:17,520
Austrian authorities were not interested

2492
02:25:17,600 --> 02:25:21,000
in what those people

2493
02:25:21,080 --> 02:25:24,960
had lived through in the Nazi time.

2494
02:25:25,040 --> 02:25:26,840
And how they could protect them

2495
02:25:26,920 --> 02:25:28,840
and how they could help
them to deal with that?

2496
02:25:28,920 --> 02:25:33,760
It's not that easy to go inside a building

2497
02:25:34,760 --> 02:25:37,560
where you have people who have uniforms

2498
02:25:37,640 --> 02:25:41,040
who are not that different
from the old Nazi uniforms,

2499
02:25:41,120 --> 02:25:44,640
and then to be a witness there

2500
02:25:44,720 --> 02:25:47,400
and to say what happened and to remember.

2501
02:25:47,480 --> 02:25:49,320
And Wiesenthal was the only person

2502
02:25:49,400 --> 02:25:50,880
who helped those people.

2503
02:25:50,960 --> 02:25:55,000
But half of those trials
ended with a guilty verdict.

2504
02:25:55,080 --> 02:25:58,800
And most of those guilty
verdicts were very, very lenient.

2505
02:25:58,880 --> 02:26:03,360
And this contributed to the meaning

2506
02:26:03,440 --> 02:26:05,800
that Austria is really
a kind of safe haven.

2507
02:26:08,000 --> 02:26:11,760
Franz Murer
was an Austrian SS officer

2508
02:26:11,840 --> 02:26:16,840
who, from 1941 to '43,
served in Vilnius, Lithuania,

2509
02:26:17,000 --> 02:26:21,240
which was often referred to as
the "Jerusalem of the North."

2510
02:26:21,320 --> 02:26:24,280
This capital city had a Jewish population

2511
02:26:24,360 --> 02:26:27,520
of around 80,000 before the war,

2512
02:26:27,600 --> 02:26:30,760
but just 250 afterwards.

2513
02:26:32,280 --> 02:26:37,280
Murer was found guilty in 1948
of murdering Soviet citizens

2514
02:26:38,000 --> 02:26:40,000
and sentenced first to death,

2515
02:26:40,080 --> 02:26:44,880
but then commuted to 25
years hard labor in the USSR.

2516
02:26:46,520 --> 02:26:49,320
He was released in 1955

2517
02:26:49,400 --> 02:26:52,040
as part of the Austrian State Treaty,

2518
02:26:52,120 --> 02:26:53,560
and returned to Vienna.

2519
02:26:54,720 --> 02:26:57,280
Because of the work of Simon Wiesenthal,

2520
02:26:57,360 --> 02:27:01,680
he was arrested and prosecuted
again in 1963 in Austria.

2521
02:27:02,680 --> 02:27:06,600
The one-week trial ended
with Murer's acquittal.

2522
02:27:06,680 --> 02:27:10,480
He died in 1994, aged 81.

2523
02:27:13,000 --> 02:27:14,880
- The Austrian courts
were quite extraordinary.

2524
02:27:14,960 --> 02:27:19,200
After 1955, they brought
virtually no one to trial.

2525
02:27:19,280 --> 02:27:22,560
They brought a couple of
dozen cases in Austria.

2526
02:27:22,640 --> 02:27:24,320
But it was getting embarrassing

2527
02:27:24,400 --> 02:27:27,240
because juries would
acquit known murderers,

2528
02:27:27,320 --> 02:27:30,040
like Franz Murer, the
"Butcher of Vilnius."

2529
02:27:30,120 --> 02:27:32,960
And because it was getting embarrassing

2530
02:27:33,040 --> 02:27:34,600
that there were these acquittals

2531
02:27:34,680 --> 02:27:36,600
and that perpetrators were greeted

2532
02:27:36,680 --> 02:27:38,360
with flowers and applause,

2533
02:27:38,440 --> 02:27:41,120
and their mates were just cheering them

2534
02:27:41,200 --> 02:27:42,720
when they were acquitted,

2535
02:27:42,800 --> 02:27:45,920
by the mid 1970s, it
seemed simpler in Austria

2536
02:27:46,000 --> 02:27:48,680
not to bring anyone to trial at all.

2537
02:27:52,040 --> 02:27:53,520
Certainly in my country,

2538
02:27:53,600 --> 02:27:56,760
there's the feeling that for a long time,

2539
02:27:56,840 --> 02:27:59,280
Austria had a narrative of,

2540
02:27:59,360 --> 02:28:01,720
"We were victims of the Nazis too.

2541
02:28:02,880 --> 02:28:05,160
"The Germans invaded Austria."

2542
02:28:05,240 --> 02:28:07,320
- Yeah, that's absolutely true.

2543
02:28:07,400 --> 02:28:09,320
That's absolutely true.

2544
02:28:09,400 --> 02:28:11,520
It was, the Austrians were invited

2545
02:28:11,600 --> 02:28:13,760
to have that narrative by the Allies.

2546
02:28:13,840 --> 02:28:15,600
The Allies had their conference,

2547
02:28:15,680 --> 02:28:17,960
the three Allies, in Moscow

2548
02:28:19,240 --> 02:28:22,840
in late 1943, and there,
they made some declarations

2549
02:28:22,920 --> 02:28:26,960
about Nazi atrocities, about
how to deal with Italy,

2550
02:28:27,040 --> 02:28:28,560
and how to deal with Austria.

2551
02:28:28,640 --> 02:28:30,600
And in that declaration of Austria,

2552
02:28:30,680 --> 02:28:33,160
they said, "Austria as a state,

2553
02:28:33,240 --> 02:28:36,360
"was the first victim of

2554
02:28:36,440 --> 02:28:40,600
"Hitler's aggression policy,"
which is absolutely true.

2555
02:28:40,680 --> 02:28:45,840
But it says nothing about
the role of the Austrians

2556
02:28:45,920 --> 02:28:49,200
in the annexation process in 1938.

2557
02:28:49,280 --> 02:28:52,520
But you had in that
declaration of Austria,

2558
02:28:52,600 --> 02:28:54,920
you had one very important sentence.

2559
02:28:55,000 --> 02:28:59,640
"Austria has a responsibility though

2560
02:28:59,720 --> 02:29:04,720
"for her participation in
Hitler's war of aggression."

2561
02:29:04,920 --> 02:29:09,640
But this declaration was
repeated again and again,

2562
02:29:09,720 --> 02:29:12,120
but only the first part
of the declaration,

2563
02:29:12,200 --> 02:29:15,760
and Austria declared herself as a victim.

2564
02:29:15,840 --> 02:29:17,000
This was very practical.

2565
02:29:17,080 --> 02:29:18,720
They could hide behind the Germans.

2566
02:29:18,800 --> 02:29:20,520
The Germans were the perpetrates,

2567
02:29:20,600 --> 02:29:22,400
and the Austrians were the victims.

2568
02:29:22,480 --> 02:29:27,120
And the government held
this official position,

2569
02:29:27,200 --> 02:29:29,320
"We are victims."

2570
02:29:29,400 --> 02:29:33,400
But in the beginning of 1937,

2571
02:29:33,480 --> 02:29:34,720
the claimed that the Nazi party

2572
02:29:34,800 --> 02:29:38,800
in Austria had around 70,000 members.

2573
02:29:39,960 --> 02:29:42,240
Austria was a country of
six million inhabitants

2574
02:29:42,320 --> 02:29:43,080
at that time.

2575
02:29:43,160 --> 02:29:48,160
But after the annexation of March, 1938,

2576
02:29:49,080 --> 02:29:52,600
tens of thousands wanted
to join the Nazi party.

2577
02:29:52,680 --> 02:29:57,720
And in Austria, you had more
than half a million members

2578
02:29:57,800 --> 02:30:00,200
of the Nazi party after the annexation.

2579
02:30:00,280 --> 02:30:02,560
And in addition to all that,

2580
02:30:02,640 --> 02:30:05,280
you had the pogrom on
the streets of Vienna.

2581
02:30:05,360 --> 02:30:07,360
And this was not the Germans,

2582
02:30:07,440 --> 02:30:09,920
it was the Viennese anti-Semites.

2583
02:30:10,760 --> 02:30:13,800
They felt, "Now it's possible.

2584
02:30:13,880 --> 02:30:17,760
"There will be impunity for
that, we could do that."

2585
02:30:17,840 --> 02:30:20,600
They could beat and call their names

2586
02:30:20,680 --> 02:30:24,040
and humiliate our Jewish neighbors.

2587
02:30:24,120 --> 02:30:26,720
It started before the first

2588
02:30:26,800 --> 02:30:28,920
German soldier arrived in Vienna.

2589
02:30:29,000 --> 02:30:33,920
And it was not Hitler, it
was the Viennese themselves,

2590
02:30:34,000 --> 02:30:37,320
what they were doing against
their Jewish neighbors.

2591
02:30:37,400 --> 02:30:42,400
But yeah, it lasted really
until the middle of the 1980s

2592
02:30:43,600 --> 02:30:47,040
that the Austrian public
realized what had happened.

2593
02:30:47,120 --> 02:30:50,960
And this had to do with the

2594
02:30:51,920 --> 02:30:54,480
candidate of Kurt Waldheim

2595
02:30:54,560 --> 02:30:57,840
who was Secretary General
of the United Nations.

2596
02:30:57,920 --> 02:31:00,440
And this really was the beginning

2597
02:31:00,520 --> 02:31:02,760
of a completely new approach

2598
02:31:02,840 --> 02:31:05,120
towards the Nazi time in Austria.

2599
02:31:07,040 --> 02:31:10,800
- For pretty much the
entire decade of the 1970s,

2600
02:31:10,880 --> 02:31:13,760
Kurt Waldheim was the Secretary General

2601
02:31:13,840 --> 02:31:14,920
of the United Nations,

2602
02:31:15,000 --> 02:31:18,720
the Chief Humanitarian
Officer for the world.

2603
02:31:18,800 --> 02:31:20,400
And as he's sitting there

2604
02:31:20,480 --> 02:31:23,520
in his United Nations
building in New York,

2605
02:31:23,600 --> 02:31:25,080
in the very same building,

2606
02:31:25,160 --> 02:31:28,400
stored somewhere in the
basement is a folder,

2607
02:31:28,480 --> 02:31:32,120
also compiled by his organization
some 40 years earlier,

2608
02:31:32,200 --> 02:31:36,160
which has his name and
accuses him of murder.

2609
02:31:36,240 --> 02:31:40,760
Waldheim stepped down from
his position in the early '80s

2610
02:31:40,840 --> 02:31:43,440
when there was a furor

2611
02:31:43,520 --> 02:31:46,440
when all these allegations
were finally revealed.

2612
02:31:46,520 --> 02:31:51,480
He was nevertheless selected
as president of Austria,

2613
02:31:51,560 --> 02:31:55,560
his homeland, and the
United States decided

2614
02:31:55,640 --> 02:31:58,560
to conduct its own very
extensive investigation

2615
02:31:58,640 --> 02:32:00,040
into the charges.

2616
02:32:00,120 --> 02:32:01,760
And they discovered that there was a case

2617
02:32:01,800 --> 02:32:04,360
to answer on a number of camps,

2618
02:32:04,440 --> 02:32:07,200
including the fact that Waldheim

2619
02:32:07,280 --> 02:32:11,000
had surrendered many individuals to the SS

2620
02:32:11,080 --> 02:32:12,640
to become slave laborers,

2621
02:32:12,720 --> 02:32:15,360
and had also been materially involved

2622
02:32:15,440 --> 02:32:20,120
in the deportations of
hundreds of civilians,

2623
02:32:20,200 --> 02:32:23,240
especially Jews, from Greece and Bosnia,

2624
02:32:23,320 --> 02:32:26,600
who ended up in concentration
and death camps.

2625
02:32:26,680 --> 02:32:30,640
And as a result of this,
the US decided to bar him

2626
02:32:30,720 --> 02:32:33,240
from entry onto its territories,

2627
02:32:33,320 --> 02:32:35,280
which means that Kurt Waldheim

2628
02:32:35,360 --> 02:32:39,480
became the very first
serving head of state

2629
02:32:39,560 --> 02:32:43,040
to be put by the US on their
immigration watch list.

2630
02:33:03,880 --> 02:33:05,880
This is where Hitler was born.

2631
02:33:18,200 --> 02:33:19,720
So we know there were lots of charges

2632
02:33:19,800 --> 02:33:21,240
brought against lots of people.

2633
02:33:21,320 --> 02:33:24,360
I mean, presumably, somebody
brought charges against Hitler.

2634
02:33:24,440 --> 02:33:27,120
- Well, there was a quite a taboo against

2635
02:33:27,200 --> 02:33:28,720
prosecuting head of state.

2636
02:33:29,960 --> 02:33:33,200
But what should be very
interesting to modern lawyers is

2637
02:33:33,280 --> 02:33:38,320
that in fact, yes, at the time
of the Battle of the Bulge,

2638
02:33:38,400 --> 02:33:41,720
December, 1944, the Czech,

2639
02:33:41,800 --> 02:33:45,400
the Slovak government
brought very lengthy dossiers

2640
02:33:45,480 --> 02:33:47,920
in two sets of charges against Hitler.

2641
02:33:48,000 --> 02:33:50,760
And the 16 countries,
including the British,

2642
02:33:50,840 --> 02:33:54,080
and the Americans approved these charges.

2643
02:33:54,160 --> 02:33:56,720
And it isn't known that
Hitler, when he died,

2644
02:33:56,800 --> 02:33:58,920
was in fact an indicted war criminal

2645
02:33:59,000 --> 02:34:02,360
by the Czechoslovaks, with
the support of the Allies.

2646
02:34:09,080 --> 02:34:12,880
- This is where Hitler died,
and like Göring, Goebbels,

2647
02:34:12,960 --> 02:34:16,320
Himmler, Bormann, and
many other leading Nazis,

2648
02:34:16,400 --> 02:34:18,840
he was ultimately a coward

2649
02:34:18,920 --> 02:34:22,280
who took his own life
rather than face justice.

2650
02:34:38,960 --> 02:34:41,240
- This is the Topography of Terror.

2651
02:34:41,320 --> 02:34:46,200
It was the former site of the
Reichssicherheitshauptamt,

2652
02:34:46,280 --> 02:34:49,360
the Main Security Office of the Reich,

2653
02:34:49,440 --> 02:34:51,240
which was where Heinrich Himmler,

2654
02:34:51,320 --> 02:34:54,600
Reinhard Heydrich, and
others had the center

2655
02:34:54,680 --> 02:34:57,440
of physical oppression, the SS,

2656
02:34:57,520 --> 02:35:01,000
the SD, which was the
security service of the SS,

2657
02:35:01,080 --> 02:35:03,880
the Gestapo, the police forces,

2658
02:35:03,960 --> 02:35:05,720
all the people who were involved

2659
02:35:05,800 --> 02:35:08,920
in the reign of terror
through physical force.

2660
02:35:09,000 --> 02:35:13,320
It was in the late 1980s that
they started to dig here.

2661
02:35:13,400 --> 02:35:16,040
It had been used, it's hard
up against the former wall

2662
02:35:16,120 --> 02:35:17,800
between East and West Berlin.

2663
02:35:17,880 --> 02:35:20,040
And it was just no man's
land, really, being used

2664
02:35:20,120 --> 02:35:24,360
as a driving practice area
or off-street driving.

2665
02:35:24,440 --> 02:35:26,616
And then they decided they
were gonna dig the foundations

2666
02:35:26,640 --> 02:35:29,120
for building a block and
discovered here the walls

2667
02:35:29,200 --> 02:35:31,800
of the former Gestapo cellars,

2668
02:35:31,880 --> 02:35:35,040
places where people had been
held, had been tortured.

2669
02:35:36,600 --> 02:35:39,480
This kind of memorialization
looking at perpetrators

2670
02:35:39,560 --> 02:35:43,560
is really from only from
the late 1980s onwards.

2671
02:35:43,640 --> 02:35:45,960
And there is a resistance to facing up

2672
02:35:46,040 --> 02:35:47,960
to who'd done it, basically.

2673
02:35:56,920 --> 02:35:59,520
So this is the Tiergarten, Großer,

2674
02:35:59,600 --> 02:36:02,400
for the site which gave its name

2675
02:36:02,480 --> 02:36:05,160
to the so-called T4 Euthanasia Program

2676
02:36:05,240 --> 02:36:07,440
because it was the central headquarters

2677
02:36:07,520 --> 02:36:10,320
which coordinated a program
of killing the mentally

2678
02:36:10,400 --> 02:36:13,320
and physically disabled across the Reich,

2679
02:36:13,400 --> 02:36:15,680
initially from 1939 to '41

2680
02:36:15,760 --> 02:36:18,840
in six main sanatoria institutes

2681
02:36:18,920 --> 02:36:22,760
where they installed gas chambers
specifically to kill them.

2682
02:36:22,840 --> 02:36:25,680
Then unofficially, for the rest
of the war across the Reich,

2683
02:36:25,760 --> 02:36:27,760
in care homes and hospitals,

2684
02:36:27,840 --> 02:36:30,960
killing patients by use of overdoses

2685
02:36:31,040 --> 02:36:35,200
of poisonous powders or simply starvation.

2686
02:36:35,280 --> 02:36:38,160
One guy, Fran Müller, in a Munich clinic,

2687
02:36:38,240 --> 02:36:40,200
was so proud of his hunger wards

2688
02:36:40,280 --> 02:36:41,600
that he actually took a bunch

2689
02:36:41,680 --> 02:36:43,200
of students around and showed them.

2690
02:36:43,280 --> 02:36:45,240
He picked up a baby by the skin hanging

2691
02:36:45,320 --> 02:36:47,080
off the back of its neck and said, "Look,

2692
02:36:47,160 --> 02:36:51,120
"I give this one another two
or three days before it dies."

2693
02:36:51,200 --> 02:36:55,400
So in one case, a guy
called Alfred Loy argued

2694
02:36:55,480 --> 02:36:57,280
that if he had not stayed in post

2695
02:36:57,360 --> 02:37:00,920
and killed only 80 to 100 children,

2696
02:37:01,000 --> 02:37:06,000
then a worse Nazi, a more
fanatic Nazi would've killed 180.

2697
02:37:06,160 --> 02:37:08,760
So he got away with murder too.

2698
02:37:08,840 --> 02:37:10,080
In another case,

2699
02:37:10,160 --> 02:37:14,640
a guy called Horst Schumann
managed to fake symptoms

2700
02:37:14,720 --> 02:37:17,640
so that he appeared
too ill to stand trial.

2701
02:37:17,720 --> 02:37:20,000
He swallowed blood and
then made himself vomit

2702
02:37:20,080 --> 02:37:21,680
on the way to the courtroom,

2703
02:37:21,760 --> 02:37:24,480
and thus the blood-fleck
vomit made it look

2704
02:37:24,560 --> 02:37:27,840
like he was genuinely
too ill to stand trial.

2705
02:37:27,920 --> 02:37:31,080
In other cases, people used legal defenses

2706
02:37:31,160 --> 02:37:33,120
like, "Never knew I was
doing anything wrong,"

2707
02:37:33,200 --> 02:37:34,400
"didn't know it was criminal,"

2708
02:37:34,440 --> 02:37:37,600
even though it was explicitly
a criminal act at the time.

2709
02:37:43,160 --> 02:37:46,800
This is the memorial to the
homosexual victims of Nazis

2710
02:37:46,880 --> 02:37:49,960
And the number of victims
was not enormous compared

2711
02:37:50,040 --> 02:37:52,680
to the six million murdered Jews.

2712
02:37:52,760 --> 02:37:56,720
It was maybe 10 to 15,000 gay men died

2713
02:37:56,800 --> 02:38:00,760
as a result of imprisonment,
maltreatment by the Nazis.

2714
02:38:00,840 --> 02:38:03,360
But the problem after the war was

2715
02:38:03,440 --> 02:38:05,880
that homosexuality was still the subject

2716
02:38:05,960 --> 02:38:07,640
of criminal proceedings,

2717
02:38:07,720 --> 02:38:09,520
for a quarter of a century after the war

2718
02:38:09,600 --> 02:38:12,520
in East Germany, in West
Germany, in Austria.

2719
02:38:12,600 --> 02:38:14,360
And you get a man like Heinz Hager,

2720
02:38:14,440 --> 02:38:17,520
that's a pseudonym for
an Austrian who was gay,

2721
02:38:17,600 --> 02:38:20,800
who was arrested when his
love affair was found,

2722
02:38:20,880 --> 02:38:23,360
he was sent to Flossenbürg,
the concentration camp.

2723
02:38:23,440 --> 02:38:26,480
He was liberated at the end
of the war, he went home.

2724
02:38:26,560 --> 02:38:30,480
The very same bureaucrat
sitting in the same office

2725
02:38:30,560 --> 02:38:33,400
as who'd sent him to
Flossenbürg under Nazism,

2726
02:38:33,480 --> 02:38:36,080
is still sitting there
and says, "Sorry, mate,

2727
02:38:36,160 --> 02:38:38,760
"you've still got two years
to run on your sentence.

2728
02:38:38,840 --> 02:38:41,000
"You have to spend two years in prison now

2729
02:38:41,080 --> 02:38:42,800
"to finish your sentence."

2730
02:38:49,800 --> 02:38:53,160
This is the memorial to the
Roma and Sinti, the Gypsies

2731
02:38:53,240 --> 02:38:57,280
and it was only opened in
2012, so, really belatedly.

2732
02:38:57,360 --> 02:39:00,240
And this particular
group is only recognized

2733
02:39:00,320 --> 02:39:02,480
as a group of victims
of national socialism,

2734
02:39:02,560 --> 02:39:05,840
very, very belatedly
after incredible pressure

2735
02:39:05,920 --> 02:39:09,160
from the Sinti community
from the 1980s onwards.

2736
02:39:14,360 --> 02:39:16,480
- These brass squares we see

2737
02:39:16,560 --> 02:39:18,760
kind of everywhere,
really, what do they mean?

2738
02:39:18,840 --> 02:39:22,320
- They're called Stolpersteine,
"stumbling stones,"

2739
02:39:22,400 --> 02:39:24,960
and they have the names and the life dates

2740
02:39:25,040 --> 02:39:27,960
of individuals generally
set outside the last place

2741
02:39:28,040 --> 02:39:30,840
where they voluntarily lived
before they were arrested,

2742
02:39:30,920 --> 02:39:33,520
deported, taken to their deaths.

2743
02:39:33,600 --> 02:39:36,600
And so they're a kind of
individual form of remembrance,

2744
02:39:36,680 --> 02:39:39,400
giving a name back to a person in a place

2745
02:39:39,480 --> 02:39:40,760
where they had lived.

2746
02:39:40,840 --> 02:39:43,760
And they raise the question,
what were the people thinking

2747
02:39:43,840 --> 02:39:45,840
who looked out of the windows opposite,

2748
02:39:45,920 --> 02:39:48,000
who watched them being thrown into trucks

2749
02:39:48,080 --> 02:39:50,240
and taken away for deportation?

2750
02:39:50,320 --> 02:39:53,760
So I find them a very effective
form of memorialization.

2751
02:40:02,280 --> 02:40:05,040
This is the memorial to the
murdered Jews of Europe,

2752
02:40:05,120 --> 02:40:08,320
a massive memorial on what
had been no man's land

2753
02:40:08,400 --> 02:40:12,360
between East and West Berlin
at the time of division.

2754
02:40:12,440 --> 02:40:15,680
After unification, it's right in the heart

2755
02:40:15,760 --> 02:40:18,280
of Germany's new capital city, Berlin.

2756
02:40:18,360 --> 02:40:20,560
It's right up close to
the Brandenburg Gate,

2757
02:40:20,640 --> 02:40:23,400
the Reichstag, but it's yet again,

2758
02:40:23,480 --> 02:40:26,800
Germany getting this great reputation

2759
02:40:26,880 --> 02:40:28,200
for facing up to the past,

2760
02:40:28,280 --> 02:40:33,280
a fantastically strong reputation
by belated remembrance.

2761
02:40:34,040 --> 02:40:38,440
And yet at the time they could
have brought Nazis to court,

2762
02:40:38,520 --> 02:40:41,840
could have brought the perpetrators
to account, they didn't.

2763
02:40:41,920 --> 02:40:44,320
So it's part of that double story,

2764
02:40:44,400 --> 02:40:46,280
remembrance of victims,

2765
02:40:46,360 --> 02:40:49,680
but not really bringing
those who were guilty

2766
02:40:49,760 --> 02:40:53,400
to account when they could
have done decades before.

2767
02:41:04,560 --> 02:41:07,400
- War crimes are acts and omissions

2768
02:41:07,480 --> 02:41:10,520
in violation of the
laws and customs of war.

2769
02:41:11,880 --> 02:41:16,320
The crime against humanity
is not so delimited.

2770
02:41:16,400 --> 02:41:18,480
It is fundamentally different

2771
02:41:18,560 --> 02:41:20,520
from the mere war crime

2772
02:41:20,600 --> 02:41:24,040
in that it embraces systematic violations

2773
02:41:24,120 --> 02:41:28,480
of fundamental human rights,
committed at any time,

2774
02:41:28,560 --> 02:41:30,480
against the nationals of any nation.

2775
02:41:31,680 --> 02:41:33,680
They may occur during peace or in war.

2776
02:41:38,920 --> 02:41:40,600
- I was born in Nuremberg, Germany,

2777
02:41:40,680 --> 02:41:44,240
and so I've grown up with hearing
about this my entire life.

2778
02:41:44,320 --> 02:41:46,760
My own sense is that justice,

2779
02:41:46,840 --> 02:41:49,240
in terms of retributive justice

2780
02:41:49,320 --> 02:41:52,240
and in terms of
restitution to the victims,

2781
02:41:52,320 --> 02:41:55,600
is never going to be what
we hope that it would be.

2782
02:41:55,680 --> 02:41:58,040
And of course, avoiding the slaughter,

2783
02:41:58,120 --> 02:42:01,080
avoiding the atrocities is
the most important thing

2784
02:42:01,160 --> 02:42:04,840
we can do as a matter of
justice for the victims.

2785
02:42:04,920 --> 02:42:07,760
Hopefully, assuring that
there are not further

2786
02:42:07,840 --> 02:42:10,760
similar atrocities and further victims.

2787
02:42:10,840 --> 02:42:12,960
It's impossible for me to say whether

2788
02:42:13,040 --> 02:42:16,720
what was done after the war
was satisfactory justice.

2789
02:42:16,800 --> 02:42:18,560
But I note this,

2790
02:42:18,640 --> 02:42:21,600
if we look back to the
Treaty of Westphalia,

2791
02:42:21,680 --> 02:42:23,760
upon which the entire European Nation

2792
02:42:23,840 --> 02:42:25,320
state system was founded,

2793
02:42:25,400 --> 02:42:28,720
it's a huge amnesty treaty,
if you go back and read it.

2794
02:42:28,800 --> 02:42:31,200
And we've seen even at Nuremberg,

2795
02:42:31,280 --> 02:42:33,600
not with the International
Military Tribunal,

2796
02:42:33,680 --> 02:42:37,040
but with all of the 12 subsequent
proceedings at Nuremberg,

2797
02:42:37,120 --> 02:42:41,880
by 1958, every one of the
convicted criminals was released

2798
02:42:41,960 --> 02:42:45,120
by the United States
back into German society

2799
02:42:45,200 --> 02:42:46,520
as part of a deal that was cut

2800
02:42:46,600 --> 02:42:48,440
with Konrad Adenauer's government

2801
02:42:48,520 --> 02:42:50,880
to reconstitute the
divisions of the German army

2802
02:42:50,960 --> 02:42:53,920
as a bulwark against Soviet expansion.

2803
02:42:54,000 --> 02:42:55,840
Where is the justice in that?

2804
02:43:00,640 --> 02:43:02,640
- Simon Wiesenthal always told

2805
02:43:04,440 --> 02:43:06,360
us young historians,

2806
02:43:06,440 --> 02:43:10,480
there was only one real
winner in the Cold War,

2807
02:43:10,560 --> 02:43:12,800
and this was the old Nazis.

2808
02:43:15,920 --> 02:43:19,280
- There's 5.4 million
people living in Yorkshire.

2809
02:43:19,360 --> 02:43:22,920
If the Nazis had killed the
entire population of Yorkshire,

2810
02:43:23,000 --> 02:43:24,736
what would the British
government have done then?

2811
02:43:24,760 --> 02:43:27,120
- Of course, the British
government would've pursued

2812
02:43:27,200 --> 02:43:29,880
every last criminal to
their last dying day.

2813
02:43:31,000 --> 02:43:35,400
But the Jews weren't that important.

2814
02:43:35,480 --> 02:43:37,080
They weren't important enough

2815
02:43:37,160 --> 02:43:39,760
for the British government
and the other Allies

2816
02:43:39,840 --> 02:43:43,920
to have that same level of political will

2817
02:43:44,000 --> 02:43:48,120
to ensure that justice was

2818
02:43:48,200 --> 02:43:50,680
done and pursued, and that we never let up

2819
02:43:50,760 --> 02:43:53,520
on these most unbelievable crimes.

2820
02:43:55,520 --> 02:43:59,200
- Do you think any Holocaust
survivor has actually forgiven

2821
02:43:59,280 --> 02:44:01,400
the Nazis for what they did?

2822
02:44:01,480 --> 02:44:05,400
- No, I've never met
one Holocaust survivor

2823
02:44:05,480 --> 02:44:08,360
who forgiven the Nazis,
what they did, never.

2824
02:44:09,280 --> 02:44:12,200
I will never forgive
them as long as I live.

2825
02:44:13,640 --> 02:44:16,200
I lost 80 people, cousins, uncles,

2826
02:44:17,080 --> 02:44:18,880
parents, everybody,

2827
02:44:20,200 --> 02:44:21,200
from my family.

2828
02:44:22,400 --> 02:44:24,400
Is this justice?

2829
02:44:24,480 --> 02:44:25,480
- I've never

2830
02:44:26,600 --> 02:44:28,440
personally met a survivor

2831
02:44:29,320 --> 02:44:33,320
who has felt that justice has been done.

2832
02:44:34,800 --> 02:44:38,400
And I often think of

2833
02:44:38,480 --> 02:44:40,920
the words of Joseph Roth,

2834
02:44:41,000 --> 02:44:45,640
who was writing about another
tragedy at another time,

2835
02:44:45,720 --> 02:44:47,360
and this is what he wrote.

2836
02:44:48,040 --> 02:44:50,600
"When a catastrophe occurs,

2837
02:44:50,680 --> 02:44:53,880
"people at hand are
shocked into helpfulness.

2838
02:44:53,960 --> 02:44:58,360
"It seems that people expect
catastrophes to be brief,

2839
02:44:58,440 --> 02:45:02,720
"but chronic catastrophes are
so unpalatable to neighbors

2840
02:45:02,800 --> 02:45:05,080
"that they gradually
become indifferent to them

2841
02:45:05,160 --> 02:45:08,760
"and their victims, if
not downright impatient.

2842
02:45:08,840 --> 02:45:11,280
"The sense of order, regularity,

2843
02:45:11,360 --> 02:45:14,280
and due process is so ingrained in people

2844
02:45:14,360 --> 02:45:17,960
"that they're only willing
to entertain the opposite,

2845
02:45:18,040 --> 02:45:22,560
"emergency, madness, chaos, confusion,

2846
02:45:22,640 --> 02:45:24,600
"for a brief period.

2847
02:45:24,680 --> 02:45:27,200
"Once the emergency becomes protracted,

2848
02:45:27,280 --> 02:45:29,560
"helping hands return to pockets

2849
02:45:29,640 --> 02:45:32,280
"and the fires of compassion cool down."

2850
02:45:33,320 --> 02:45:36,160
And I think Roth really understands

2851
02:45:36,240 --> 02:45:38,160
and sets us all a challenge,

2852
02:45:38,240 --> 02:45:42,360
which is to be alive to
the suffering of others

2853
02:45:42,440 --> 02:45:44,800
and to care what happens about others

2854
02:45:44,880 --> 02:45:46,320
and not to be indifferent.

2855
02:45:52,400 --> 02:45:56,280
- Nowadays, we have to
deal with Holocaust denial.

2856
02:45:56,360 --> 02:45:57,480
We don't, thank goodness,

2857
02:45:57,560 --> 02:46:00,040
have to deal with Holocaust triumphalism.

2858
02:46:01,200 --> 02:46:03,080
So this is a great achievement,

2859
02:46:03,160 --> 02:46:06,080
that people deny the Holocaust,
they don't triumph it,

2860
02:46:06,160 --> 02:46:08,440
and you know, as sickening
that that might be.

2861
02:46:15,800 --> 02:46:19,280
- There were roughly
3000 Einsatzgruppen men

2862
02:46:19,360 --> 02:46:21,040
who were responsible for killing

2863
02:46:21,120 --> 02:46:22,600
one and a half million Jews,

2864
02:46:22,680 --> 02:46:25,800
yet only 200 were ever prosecuted, why?

2865
02:46:26,800 --> 02:46:27,960
- Oh, so many reasons.

2866
02:46:28,040 --> 02:46:31,440
Some of them good reasons,
some of them bad reasons.

2867
02:46:31,520 --> 02:46:32,840
The bad reasons,

2868
02:46:33,680 --> 02:46:34,720
because people didn't want

2869
02:46:34,760 --> 02:46:37,120
to confront the reality
of what had happened.

2870
02:46:37,200 --> 02:46:38,760
It was too awful.

2871
02:46:38,840 --> 02:46:40,800
It was much easier just to look ahead,

2872
02:46:40,880 --> 02:46:44,360
to look to the future
and not to look back.

2873
02:46:44,440 --> 02:46:47,040
Too many husbands, fathers, sons,

2874
02:46:47,120 --> 02:46:49,200
brothers had been involved.

2875
02:46:49,280 --> 02:46:50,880
A lot of the people responsible

2876
02:46:50,960 --> 02:46:53,560
for the killing were not German.

2877
02:46:53,640 --> 02:46:57,400
They were local people in the
Baltic states and elsewhere,

2878
02:46:57,480 --> 02:46:59,880
and it was very hard
for people to confront.

2879
02:46:59,960 --> 02:47:02,960
The good reasons, or the
less bad reasons, I suppose,

2880
02:47:03,880 --> 02:47:05,760
Europe was in a shocking state

2881
02:47:05,840 --> 02:47:07,136
at the end of the Second World War.

2882
02:47:07,160 --> 02:47:09,840
There were hundreds of thousands
of people without homes,

2883
02:47:09,920 --> 02:47:13,360
the displaced, who had
to be found new homes.

2884
02:47:13,440 --> 02:47:15,840
Borders were being redrawn.

2885
02:47:15,920 --> 02:47:17,480
The Cold War was beginning.

2886
02:47:17,560 --> 02:47:21,920
The Soviet Union was exerting its power.

2887
02:47:22,000 --> 02:47:25,600
Prosecuting those
responsible for the horrors

2888
02:47:25,680 --> 02:47:28,920
just didn't seem a priority at the time.

2889
02:47:29,000 --> 02:47:31,680
Justice wasn't done, plainly.

2890
02:47:31,760 --> 02:47:34,280
Justice often, it seems to me,

2891
02:47:34,360 --> 02:47:38,760
is regarded as a luxury
that people can't afford.

2892
02:47:38,840 --> 02:47:40,640
Mass murder

2893
02:47:41,680 --> 02:47:43,560
goes unpunished.

2894
02:48:23,920 --> 02:48:28,200
- It certainly is difficult
to quantify the effect today

2895
02:48:28,280 --> 02:48:30,200
on the Nuremberg trials.

2896
02:48:30,280 --> 02:48:33,800
I think the question as to
what was the intended effect

2897
02:48:33,880 --> 02:48:35,800
is a very important one

2898
02:48:35,880 --> 02:48:38,400
that is still very much
being wrestled with.

2899
02:48:38,480 --> 02:48:41,040
You will probably be
aware that at Nuremberg,

2900
02:48:41,120 --> 02:48:43,560
the defendants were tried for war crimes

2901
02:48:43,640 --> 02:48:45,440
and for crimes against humanity,

2902
02:48:45,520 --> 02:48:48,160
and in the eyes of some, most importantly,

2903
02:48:48,240 --> 02:48:51,120
crimes against peace, the
waging of aggressive war,

2904
02:48:51,200 --> 02:48:56,040
which Nuremberg branded as the
supreme international crime.

2905
02:48:56,120 --> 02:48:59,240
And the statements of Robert Jackson,

2906
02:48:59,320 --> 02:49:01,320
the American chief prosecutor,

2907
02:49:01,400 --> 02:49:03,480
were very, very compelling about

2908
02:49:03,560 --> 02:49:06,720
why the court was trying
the Nazi high command

2909
02:49:06,800 --> 02:49:08,960
for the crime of aggression.

2910
02:49:09,040 --> 02:49:10,096
He said, among other things,

2911
02:49:10,120 --> 02:49:13,160
that, "the common sense of mankind demands

2912
02:49:13,240 --> 02:49:16,240
"that law shall not
stop with the punishment

2913
02:49:16,320 --> 02:49:18,720
"of petty crimes by little people.

2914
02:49:18,800 --> 02:49:21,360
"It must also reach men

2915
02:49:21,440 --> 02:49:23,640
"who possess themselves of great power

2916
02:49:23,720 --> 02:49:26,600
"and make deliberate
and concerted use of it

2917
02:49:26,680 --> 02:49:30,840
"to set in motion evils
which leave no home

2918
02:49:30,920 --> 02:49:32,520
"in the world untouched."

2919
02:49:32,600 --> 02:49:36,720
The ultimate step in
avoiding periodic wars,

2920
02:49:36,800 --> 02:49:38,280
in which Robert Jackson said

2921
02:49:38,360 --> 02:49:41,600
are inevitable in a lawless world,

2922
02:49:41,680 --> 02:49:44,480
is to hold statesmen

2923
02:49:44,560 --> 02:49:46,120
accountable to law.

2924
02:49:46,200 --> 02:49:47,640
And he went on to say,

2925
02:49:47,720 --> 02:49:50,520
"Let me make clear that this law,"

2926
02:49:50,600 --> 02:49:54,360
which is now first being applied
against German aggressors,

2927
02:49:54,440 --> 02:49:56,640
"if it is to mean anything,

2928
02:49:56,720 --> 02:50:00,920
"must be applied in the
future against all nations."

2929
02:50:01,000 --> 02:50:02,320
And then he went on to say,

2930
02:50:02,400 --> 02:50:07,320
"including those who sit
here now in judgment."

2931
02:50:07,400 --> 02:50:10,760
So this is the true legacy
of Nuremberg pointing away

2932
02:50:10,840 --> 02:50:13,920
to a world where world leaders should know

2933
02:50:14,000 --> 02:50:16,160
that they will be held accountable.

2934
02:50:41,840 --> 02:50:44,720
The millions
murdered by the Nazis

2935
02:50:44,800 --> 02:50:48,880
and their collaborators will
soon reach their second death

2936
02:50:50,120 --> 02:50:53,040
where everyone who knew
them has also died.

2937
02:51:07,160 --> 02:51:08,760
Almost all of those murdered

2938
02:51:08,840 --> 02:51:12,760
became victims for a second time.

2939
02:51:14,760 --> 02:51:18,360
But this was not perpetrated
by people intent on evil acts,

2940
02:51:18,440 --> 02:51:21,240
but by the victors, the good guys,

2941
02:51:21,320 --> 02:51:24,000
who turned away and got
on with other things

2942
02:51:24,080 --> 02:51:27,240
and did not do everything in their power

2943
02:51:27,320 --> 02:51:30,320
to bring about justice
for all those murdered.

2944
02:51:40,120 --> 02:51:43,960
Their killers really did
get away with murder.

2945
02:51:55,880 --> 02:51:58,720
Throughout the three years that
I've been making this film,

2946
02:51:58,800 --> 02:52:00,280
I've often found myself wondering

2947
02:52:00,360 --> 02:52:03,360
if the warlords in Rwanda, or Bosnia,

2948
02:52:03,440 --> 02:52:07,080
Syria, Cambodia, Zaire, Darfur,

2949
02:52:07,160 --> 02:52:10,600
Indonesia, Myanmar, Russia,

2950
02:52:10,680 --> 02:52:14,320
did they paraphrase the
infamous Hitler speech,

2951
02:52:14,400 --> 02:52:16,480
"Who still speaks today

2952
02:52:16,560 --> 02:52:19,720
"about the justice for the Jews?"