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The Nazi regime lasted from 1933 to 1945
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and was undoubtedly
one of the most horrific periods of history.
To begin to understand Hitler,
you've really gotta understand
that he was the most amazing demagogue.
The Nazi Party
and its immoral leader instilled one
of the most corrupt regimes
on the people of Germany and its invisible enemies.
However, Adolf Hitler was not working alone.
It's the SS men doing the,
not only the exterminations,
and are notorious for being
some of the most evil and deadly troops.
He had a circle of
some of the most barbaric and evil men alongside him
who helped make the atrocities possible.
If there were unpleasant things going on,
or policies that they didn't like,
then somehow that Hitler couldn't know about it,
that he wasn't associated with it,
it can't have been him.
If only the Fuhrer knew, this wouldn't be happening.
These are the Nazi fugitives.
Adolf Hitler was a German politician
and leader of the Nazi party.
He rose to power as the Chancellor of Germany in 1933,
and then as Fuhrer in 1934.
During his dictatorship from 1933 to 1945,
he initiated World War II in Europe
by invading Poland on the 1st of September, 1939.
- Extremist politics thrives on chaos, on poverty,
destitution, and want.
And what you see as a result of the Wall Street crash
and the slump, the late '20s, early '30s,
are all those things in this hideous cocktail
that an extremist like Hitler,
he's saying, I can solve this.
- Some of the important ways
in which he helped the party to develop
was through the initiation of a newspaper,
so a party newspaper called the "Volkischer Beobatcher,"
"The People's Observer."
- And also what Hitler is absolutely amazing at
is speech making.
And to begin to understand Hitler,
you've really gotta understand
that he was the most amazing demagogue.
He got on that stage this little man,
and he would sort of grow in stature.
He would sort of absolutely sort of, you know,
take over the entire beer hall with his presence.
- And he would shout and he'd get quiet,
and he would almost enter into a kind of trance.
And the audiences would be mesmerized by this.
And indeed they'd be mesmerized by it for decades.
And this is key to how Hitler gets into power,
because when he's on the stage,
he becomes another figure.
- On the 30th of January, 1933,
Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany,
but of a coalition government.
So there were just three Nazi posts
in that coalition government.
- It's very tempting to think that when Hitler,
you know, comes to power in early 1933,
that his grip on power is absolutely total.
In fact, you know, he has a very uneven, shaky start.
He's still quite worried about public opinion.
So what he does is a mixture of passing various laws
that give him more and more power,
like the Enabling Act that actually makes him,
you know, immensely powerful.
But also he takes advantage of various events,
like the Reichstag fire,
in which the German parliament building burns down.
Now, it's highly likely but never proven
whether the Nazis actually burnt it down themselves,
but certainly in a sense, it doesn't matter.
What happens is, is that Hitler and the Nazis
took advantage of the Reichstag burning down
to show that there was a Communist plot against
what the Nazis described
as still being a democratic government.
And it enabled them to seize more power,
you know, by emergency decree.
- Very quickly, he turned Germany into a one-party state.
So first of all, he made sure to eliminate
the influence and power of the German political left.
So the Socialist Party and the Communist Party,
for a start, were banned.
But over a short amount of time as well,
the Nazi Party was the only legal party too.
- Eventually, in January '33, he becomes chancellor.
Now, don't forget, chancellor in Germany,
and this still remains today,
is not, at the time, the head of state.
The head of state is the president.
So, it's the chancellor, though,
who has the real executive power.
In order to take as much power as he can,
he's also gonna have to make himself head of state.
And that really becomes an opportunity for him
when Hindenburg dies
and he's able to take on the role
of both president and chancellor
and kind of create this new role for himself.
And that is the role of Fuhrer,
the German word for leader.
That is a fascist term, be there no doubt.
This is a kind of new form of governance
that Germany now has.
Other parties are banned,
the only party allowed is the Nazi Party.
This has become a totalitarian state,
and Hitler can say to the German people,
you voted for it.
It's a con, and it's a con that worked.
With pagan pageantry,
the district leaders from all over Germany
swore personal allegiance to him,
hypnotized with the belief
that they were members of a master race.
This film will deal with act one of the Nazi bid
for world power,
the most fantastic play in all recorded history.
- Hitler starts to build up his power by, you know,
trying to employ and find the right people
who are gonna listen to the beat of his drum and follow it.
And so there's a lot of very patient politicking
and a lot of persuasion, a lot of speech making,
you know, it's a very, very difficult rise to power.
But Hitler knows that it can't take place through force,
it has to take place from the ballot box and not the bullet.
Paul Joseph Goebbels
was a German Nazi politician
and Reich Minister of Propaganda
of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945.
He was one of Adolf Hitler's closest
and most devoted associates.
He was known for his skills in public speaking
and his deeply virulent antisemitism,
which was evident in his publicly-voiced views.
In May, 1933, Goebbels arranged
the burning of all un-German books
at the Opera House in Berlin,
indicating that the Nazis were taking control of everything.
He gained control of the media entirely,
controlling all aspects of the press,
radio, theaters, films, and television,
literature, music, and the fine arts.
Joseph Goebbels and his wife, Magda,
are seen as the perfect German family
to set an example for the German people.
- Joseph Goebbels joined the Nazi Party quite early on,
as did Hitler.
And he became very much involved in those early years
with helping the party to develop,
and in particular, with these techniques of propaganda,
and really getting these messages across
to the German nation.
Part of the way that he and Hitler did this
was to use very short slogans,
but to keep repeating them
so that everybody knew what the Nazi Party was about.
- He is married
to a very sort of striking woman called Magda.
Now, Magda has been married before
to a very wealthy German industrialist,
but she eventually gets divorced
and marries Joseph Goebbels,
who was a real Casanova actually,
even though he was short, club footed,
and not an attractive man,
you know, he had a lot of sexual conquests.
What you see in the marriage
of Joseph Goebbels and Magda is a three way, not in bed,
but emotionally between those two and Adolf Hitler,
because Adolf Hitler absolutely adored Magda Goebbels
and thought that she was the kind of perfect Nazi woman.
You know, and she was blonde
and she was, you know, sort of vivacious
and she was absolutely devoted to Hitler.
She absolutely adored him.
- Magda was very good for the Nazi Party.
And when Goebbels introduced her to Hitler,
Hitler got on very well with her
and sort of could see the advantages
and encouraged them to get married.
Part of the reason for that was
that she was very well bred and very refined and elegant.
She was the mother of the Reich,
because she had six children.
- Hitler liked the Goebbels's marriage
as a kind of domestic situation
he could drop in and out of.
He liked the security that involved children running around,
boats on lakes, you know, it felt normal.
And also, Hitler did not want to have any rumors
about his relationship with Magda Goebbels,
because there were rumors
that he had fathered some of the Goebbels' children,
and that had seen even a very senior Nazi sent
to a concentration camp for actually mentioning that.
- Hitler and Joseph Goebbels
had sort of grown through the ranks of the Nazi Party,
and sort of succeeded,
sort of made their rise to success together.
When Hitler came to power,
Goebbels was somehow overlooked for a cabinet position.
We said there were just three,
he didn't get any of them.
Nevertheless, after the Nazis took power,
that seizure of power,
he orchestrated a very big torchlight parade,
a kind of victory parade for the new movement.
He knew how to get the message across to the Germans.
So once he was the Minister of Propaganda,
first of all, there was censorship of the press,
but also not just controlling the press,
but he controlled all aspects of cultural life.
So that was art, architecture, literature, music.
Propaganda machine was very, very important
to the whole story that the Third Reich was telling,
and indeed, right up until the end.
And indeed even important,
once the tide of the war turned against Germany.
There was still this need to maintain the storyline,
to maintain what the Third Reich represented.
- So, you know, you have essentially Goebbels
heart of the Third Reich, propaganda minister,
getting word out there.
Magda Goebbels, his wife,
who is more devoted to Hitler than to him.
And then you've got Goebbels
who's probably more devoted to Hitler
than he is to his own wife.
And if you want to see the ultimate expression
of this twisted, bizarre, dark, horrific love, if you like,
it's the fact that they both kill themselves
to follow Hitler into the afterlife.
And they kill their own children in the bunker,
poison all six children,
because a world without Hitler
and a world without Nazism is no place for their kids.
That's how much they adored Hitler.
Heinrich Himmler was Reichsfuhrer
of the Schutzstaffel
and a leading member of the Nazi Party of Germany.
Himmler was considered one of the most powerful men
in Nazi Germany,
and a leading architect of the Holocaust.
Heinrich Himmler established his force
of elite bodyguards for Hitler, the SS.
Himmler established
the first Nazi concentration camp in Dachau,
indicating he had no issue bringing harm to Jews
as he considered them vermin within Germany.
- Himmler, like Hitler, looked like the very inverse
of the kind of Aryan, blonde, 6'5" tall superhuman.
You know, he was a very short man.
He has weak jawline, very ugly.
You know, he has pebble glasses,
former chicken farmer.
You know, he looked very, very unimpressive.
- Himmler had joined the Nazi Party in quite early years.
And I think that the important thing about what Himmler did
was that he established the SS.
And the SS started out as a very small group,
and, in fact, started out as Hitler's personal bodyguard.
Himmler extended his power very quickly and his power base.
So with the SS, a very small organization
that had started out as Hitler's bodyguard
suddenly became thousands strong.
By about 1936, he was in charge
of a very vast complex of the SS, the Gestapo,
which was the secret police, and the security police.
And what Himmler does from,
you know, almost from the beginning,
is to build the SS up into a state within a state.
Because by the height of Nazi power,
Himmler is in charge of an organization
that has a kind of civil side to it,
an administrative side to it,
which is huge and has fingers in so many pies.
And also the Waffen SS, the armed SS,
which is there, you know, to help fight the war.
And its troops are notorious
for being some of the most sort of,
kind of evil and deadly troops, you know,
as part of the war.
He became in charge
of the whole concentration camp system.
- He was responsible for the Holocaust
because, you know, it was the SS largely who carried it out.
And when he went to go and kind of witness a slaughter,
you know, some brains were splattered upon his coat
and it caused him to vomit.
You know, this is the man responsible for it,
and he can't cope with it.
I'm not saying it's desirable
that he should have coped with it,
but it just shows you
that he didn't actually have the personal appetite
for butchering people himself
and got other people to do it.
In many ways, he was a coward.
Hermann Wilhelm Goring was a German politician,
a military leader, and later a convicted war criminal
Goring was one of the most influential figures
in the Nazi party.
He was also framed in a scandal,
claiming he was attempting
to take over the Fuhrer's powers in the war's final days.
Goring wrote a letter to Hitler,
offering to relieve Hitler of his duties
and act in his place as he had believed the Fuhrer
was encircled and helpless in Berlin.
This was a reasonable act
as Hitler had named him the political heir.
Hitler issued a telegram to Goring
and told him he had committed high treason
and gave him the option to resign his office
in exchange for his life.
- Hermann Goring is a really key Nazi figure.
He's a big figure in every way,
because he also became enormously fat.
But you've gotta think of Goring and his kind of arc,
if you like.
So he goes from being a First World War fighter pilot hero
who's got the Pour le Merite medal,
which is the highest medal that can be won
by the German fighting man in the First World War.
You know, for the British,
it's like winning the Victoria Cross,
or for the Americans,
it's like winning the kind of Medal of Honor.
It's a hugely important award.
And so he's a venerated pilot,
very successful fighter pilot during the First World War.
And then when he falls in with the Nazis
in Munich in the 20s,
he's feeling that that's giving him
a kind of sense of purpose.
- Goring was quite an interesting character
because he had several different roles in the Third Reich.
And even before then,
if we think about his First World War record
as this sort of flying ace,
it meant that later on Hitler made him head
of the Luftwaffe, the German Air Force.
- The problem is,
is that he's on the famous Beer Hall Putsch in 1923,
and he gets shot and wounded.
And when he's recuperating from his wounds,
he's given morphine, heroin effectively.
And it's that that he becomes addicted to.
Goring is addicted to morphine all the way through
from the Beer Hall Putsch in '23, you know,
for another 23 years until he dies in 1946.
You know, it holds him back in many ways.
But he is a man who likes the finest things in life.
And so when the Nazis do come to power,
and that's partly thanks to the fact
that Goring is such a capable politician,
and because he comes from a pretty well-off background
and married to, you know, an aristocrat.
You know, he,
to some of the kind of old school German bigwigs,
looks like the decent face of Nazism
because he's kind of a war hero
and quite an old school figure.
So he's absolutely instrumental
in helping the Nazis get into power,
and he consolidates a lot of power
into his own pockets and hands, if you like.
So he's in charge of the Prussian police.
He's initially in charge of the Gestapo,
the secret state police.
He's in charge of the Four Year Plan,
which is an important economic imperative.
This is a man with a lot of power,
and he uses it to personally enrich himself.
When you look at pictures of Goring throughout the war,
you just see this body getting bigger, bigger and bigger,
and his uniforms getting more and more ostentatious.
And he had like millions of medals everywhere,
and the uniforms'd be like bright white
with gold all over them.
And he would have properties, amazing hunting lodges.
He loved hunting.
And whenever the Nazis conquered countries,
he'd be right at the front of it,
looting all the works of art, statues, paintings, jewelry,
you name it, that would all go into Goring's pocket.
He made himself almost impossibly rich.
And he also had vast appetites.
Not only for morphine,
but also for alcohol, for food, you know,
for all the finest things in life.
And, in fact, he became a victim of his own self-indulgence.
And when the Battle of Britain failed,
and when the German Air Force was shown to be,
you know, inferior to a smaller British Air Force,
he started, you know, to be laughed at behind his back.
You know, he became
this kind of drug-addled alcoholic whale of a man
who other Nazis would laugh at and not take seriously,
and saw him as an impediment.
By the end of the war, he's this joke figure.
And it's at Nuremberg when he's off the drugs,
when he loses weight,
his brain suddenly gets sharper again.
And of all the Nazis in the dock at Nuremberg,
he's the most impressive.
And that old flash of intelligence and brilliance
that's got him to the top of the Nazi tree
is shown once more.
And it's Goring who cheats the hangman
by committing suicide in his cell in 1946.
Does he get the last laugh? In some ways, he does.
Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Hoss
was a German Schutzstaffel functionary
during the Nazi era,
who was later convicted as a war criminal.
He was the longest serving commandant
of the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp.
He tested and implemented means
to accelerate Hitler's plan
to exterminate the Jewish population systematically
and introduced Zyklon B,
containing hydrogen cyanide used in the gas chambers.
Now, he was the commandant of Auschwitz.
And as a result, as, you know,
probably got about a million people, you know,
against his name, who he had murdered.
He typified the quiet
and bureaucratic mass murderer.
Very conscientious,
very determined to do his job and to do it well.
And, of course, without much thought for the victims.
So in terms of what he was doing at Auschwitz,
trying to make a very efficient machine
and trying to do his job well and properly.
His concern was not with the victims,
but just to make sure that the apparatus was working well.
So in this case,
to ensure that the gas chambers could operate efficiently.
He treated the mass murder that went on there
just as a kind of routine
and ordinary business as usual, really,
very much as a kind of ordinary procedure and process.
He took pride in being the first to use Zyklon B
as the gas used for the gassing of his victims.
And he was so efficient that, at Auschwitz,
2.5 million prisoners met their deaths.
So it's a massive death toll,
2.5 million deaths at Auschwitz.
He went into hiding at the end of the war
on the advice of Heinrich Himmler,
his ultimate boss in the SS.
And Hoss disguises himself
and hides amongst various German navy personnel.
He's eventually picked up by the British
who've actually interrogated his wife,
who's actually terrified
that she's gonna be tortured by the Brits
and she's basically spilled the beans.
So Hoss is brought to justice.
And there is this extraordinary image
of a British war crimes officer actually confronting Hoss,
who looks like this completely pathetic figure.
You know, looking absolutely terrified
while this sort of tall British Army officer
is just basically shouting at him.
And it shows, you know,
basically, this man who had power
of life and death over millions of people
is reduced to this pathetic figure.
Now, the British hand him over to the Poles.
And it's the Poles who actually bring him to justice,
and it's the Poles who hang him.
We had two SS doctors on duty at Auschwitz
to examine the incoming transports of prisoners.
Prisoners would be marched past one of the doctors
who would make spot decisions as they walked by.
Those who were fit for work were sent into the camp.
Others were sent immediately to the extermination plant.
Children of tender years were invariably exterminated
since by reasons of their youth, they were unable to work.
We endeavored to fool them into thinking
they were to go through a delousing process.
It took from 3 to 15 minutes to kill the people
in the death chamber,
depending upon climatic conditions.
We knew when the people were dead
because their screaming stopped.
We usually waited about one half hour
before we opened the doors and removed the bodies.
After the bodies were removed,
our special commanders took off the rings
and extracted the gold from the teeth of the corpses.
He was brought before a Polish military tribunal.
And he was found guilty, and he was executed in April, 1947.
Was taken back to Auschwitz
to outside the house where he and his family had lived,
and he was executed there.
He was executed there at the place where he had lived,
and at the place where he had sent millions of people to die
during his time as commandant at Auschwitz.
Otto Adolf Eichmann
was a German-Austrian SS-Obersturmbannfuhrer
and one of the major organizers of the Holocaust,
the "Final Solution to the Jewish question,"
in Nazi terminology,
Eichmann quickly became known
as the world's most wanted Nazi.
Branded the architect of the Final Solution
to exterminate Jews.
He was seen as the mastermind
behind the network of death camps
that resulted in the murder
of approximately 6 million people.
He orchestrated the identification,
assembly, and transportation of European Jews
to Auschwitz, Treblinka, and other death camps in Poland.
Adolf Eichmann was in charge
of the Office for Jewish Emigration in Vienna, first of all.
So he kind of, sort of rose to a prominent position
after the Anschluss in 1938.
And essentially he was responsible
for the forced removal or relocation of first Vienna's
and then the rest of Austria's Jews.
And then, of course, for the forced removal
of all of the European Jews who were under Nazi rule
as the years went on.
Eichmann today is an incredibly notorious name,
and we all today know him to be the man he was.
You know, he's famously and notoriously called
the architect of the Final Solution.
What he was,
was in charge of a department
of the Reich Security Main Office,
and it was called Department IV-B4.
It was part of the Gestapo, the secret state police.
And his job was to basically wage war against the Jews.
And it was Eichmann's job
was to help facilitate the destruction of the Jewish people.
He was responsible for registering, assembling,
and then transporting the Jews
from different assembly points to the death camps in Poland.
In December, 1939,
he sort of took on a more important or kind of bigger role
within the Gestapo as head
of the Jewish Office of the Reich Main Security Office.
And so, again, the main point of that role really
was to orchestrate and carry out the removal
of all of the European Jews to the death camps in Poland.
He was effectively the guy,
didn't come up with the policy,
but he was the guy who zealously implemented it.
And he knew that if he was captured,
he would face the noose.
Eichmann was arrested at the end of the war,
but his name wasn't very well known at that stage.
He managed to escape
from an American internment camp in 1946.
He decided to call himself Eckmann,
and then he managed to, you know,
go into hiding for quite a few years in Germany on farms.
And he tried to sort of recreate his life
as a kind of, you know, humble son of the soil, if you like.
But actually by the late 1940s,
he realizes that things are getting a bit hot.
He suspects that war crimes units may be after him.
And what he does is that he eventually flees to Argentina,
where he tries to create a new life.
Eventually, in 1960, the Israeli Secret Services,
after quite a lot of detective work,
managed to find him.
And then came into place an operation
really to smuggle him out of Argentina
and to bring him to Israel in order to stand trial.
- Behind this fence,
the pages of history are being turned back
to one of the most terrible chapters of our time.
Adolf Eichmann faces probably the most appalling list
of charges ever to be leveled against a single human being.
But if Eichmann's is the name on the charge sheet,
the Israelis have made very clear
who they think is really in the dock.
In the building where Eichmann is being tried,
the Israelis are trying
to place before the conscience of the world
the full facts of how the Nazis in Germany tried, literally,
to exterminate millions of the Jewish people in Europe.
Now, to us, the Nazi persecution is 15 years or more away,
but to the people living here,
it's still a sharp memory.
The children playing in the warm spring sunshine,
the older people going about their everyday lives,
many of them had relatives who died in Hitler's gas ovens.
And even here in Israel, they found no peaceful haven.
Just over a mile up the road from here,
there's a barbed wire fence and sentries stand guard.
This is the border across which Israel looks
to an implacably hostile Arab neighbor.
To the people of Israel,
persecution, personified by Eichmann,
is still a living danger.
For now in this city of Jerusalem,
which itself is no stranger to history,
let us look back at the moment
when this historic trial began.
In Jerusalem,
the trial of Adolf Eichmann begins,
reviving memories of the Nazi horrors
of the Second World War.
Entering the bulletproof prisoners box is the man charged
with the annihilation of millions of Jews
in Nazi death camps.
Searching problems of conscience
and of international law will be raised by this trial,
one of the most stirring of modern times.
Eichmann himself is impassive
as the three judges who will decide his fate enter.
Now, after 15 years in hiding
and one year after his sensational abduction from Argentina,
Adolf Eichmann is indicted on 15 counts
of crimes against the Jewish people
and crimes against humanity.
The accused, together with the others,
during a period of 1939 to 1945,
caused the killing of millions of Jews in his capacity
as the person responsible for the execution
of the Nazi plan for the physical extermination of the Jews,
known as the Final Solution of the Jewish problem.
Eichmann's attorney, Dr. Robert Servatius,
opens by denying the legality of the trial
and questions the jurisdiction obtained
by Eichmann's forcible capture.
Dr. Servatius further suggests that Eichmann be tried
by a neutral or international tribunal.
Israeli attorney general, Gideon Hausner,
the chief prosecutor replies,
"That no one except the state of Israel
has sought to bring Eichmann to justice."
And cites the Nuremberg war crimes trials
as precedent for this trial.
Throughout, Eichmann remains icy calm,
his fate, at last, in the scales of justice.
The trial, which opened in April, 1961,
was very controversial.
But it also, of course, attracted a great deal
of international attention as well.
When he was questioned,
he claimed that he was only following orders.
He claimed not to be responsible for any of the executions,
and said he was just involved in transportation.
So, again, that's the kind of line used
about following orders
and not really admitting responsibility
for the Final Solution.
Yes.
With regard to the Jews,
my only obligations were those concerned with emigration.
And this transpires from the official designation
of the department,
which was called Emigration and Evacuation.
Emigration, that applied to the Jews,
while evacuation, that concerned the sphere of jurisdiction
of the Reichskommissar
for strengthening the basis of the German nation,
a post to which Himmler was then appointed.
And this concerned the evacuation
of the newly annexed areas in the East,
which were annexed to the Reich.
And as Hitler and Himmler had ordered at that time,
these areas had to be evacuated of Jews
and other foreign nationalities.
And my connection with this
was strictly from the point of view of timetables
and technical transport problems.
I do not remember it in detail, Your Honor.
I do not remember the circumstances of this conversation,
but I do know that these gentlemen were standing together
or sitting together
and were discussing this subject quite bluntly,
quite differently from the language
which I had to use later in the record.
During the conversation,
they minced no words about it at all.
I might say, furthermore, Your Honor,
that I would not have remembered this
unless I had later remember
that I told myself, look here,
I told myself,
even this guy, Stuckart,
who was known as one of these uncles
who was a great stickler for legalities,
he too uses language
which is not at all in accordance
with the spirit of paragraphs of the law.
This incident remained engraved in my memory
and recalls the entire subject to my mind.
Eichmann was sentenced to death in December, 1961,
and he was executed in May, 1962.
Rudolf Walter Richard Hess
was a German politician
and a leading member of the Nazi Party in Nazi Germany.
Appointed Deputy Fuhrer to Adolf Hitler in 1933,
Hess served in that position until 1941
when he flew solo to Scotland
in an attempt to negotiate peace with the United Kingdom
during World War II.
Rudolph Hess noticed that the Fuhrer was preoccupied
and decided to take matters into his own hands.
He decided to end the continuing military struggle
between Germany and the Allies using a peace pact.
He secretly flies solo over Britain
and lands in Scotland by parachute,
hoping to speak
with one of the highly-placed British figures.
He intended to offer respect
for the integrity of the British Empire,
for Germany to have a free hand in Europe
and the return of German colonies.
Of course, as soon as he was found out to be a Nazi,
he was arrested and treated as a prisoner of war,
held in a British prison until the war's end.
Once Hitler hears of his plan and capture in Britain,
he declares Hess has committed treason
and the Nazis reject him.
- Rudolph Hess was a very troubled man in many ways,
and you only have to look at his somewhat uneven expressions
whenever he's captured on film.
He's got these very sort of thick brows,
and he looks like he's puzzling about the world in general.
He was a very sort of troubled man,
and he was devoted to Hitler from the very early days.
And it was Hess who was in Landsberg Prison
after the failed Beer Hall Putsch in 1923.
And it was Hess who was by kind of Hitler's side,
you know, all the way through those sort of,
kind of very dark years.
You know, as Hitler gained more power,
Hitler is loyal to Hess because Hess has been loyal to him,
and he makes him Deputy Fuhrer.
But it's clear that as the Nazi Party has come to power
and its popularity and its ability
to draw on talent has increased,
it's basically shown up Hess
to be the kind of real second or third rater
that he actually is.
He's not really a very impressive figure.
You know, what does he offer, you know,
the Nazi regime who are out control?
He doesn't have any great personal charisma
that's gonna draw people in.
He doesn't really have any particular kind
of administrative skills.
You know, what he is, is just loyal.
He's kind of totally out of his depth
by the time Hitler comes into power.
His usefulness is no longer there,
and he's really, basically very much sidelined
by the outbreak of war.
And it makes him very sort of desperate to, you know,
curry favor with Hitler.
And so he carries out this absolutely extraordinary mission.
Takes off from a Messerschmitt 110 in Augsburg,
and flies to Scotland, obviously,
where he parachutes out to land
on the land of the Duke of Hamilton,
who he thinks is a friend of his.
And he says, you know, I'm here to basically,
you know, forge a peace deal. That, you know, if, you know,
you allow Nazi Germany to have a free hand in Europe,
we'll allow the British Empire
and British colonies a free hand,
and for Britain to maintain her influence
all over the world.
And of course, this is just complete nonsense.
You know, Churchill, by this stage, is in no, you know,
mood to start listening
to what is clearly a semi-deranged individual.
And, indeed, he just remains in prison,
you know, locked up until the end of the war.
And then he's put on trial at Nuremberg.
And by then, he's gone mad.
He seems very kind of withdrawn, troubled.
And he is sentenced at Nuremberg,
but he's not sentenced to death.
And he actually lives in Spandau Prison
until his death many decades later
as this very kind of cryptic, enigmatic figure.
Josef Mengele,
also known as the Angel of Death,
was a German Schutzstaffel, SS, officer
and physician during World War II.
He is mainly remembered
for his actions at the Auschwitz concentration camp,
where he performed deadly experiments on prisoners.
He was a member of the team of doctors
who selected victims to be killed in the gas chambers
and was one of the doctors who administered the gas.
A doctor, nicknamed the Angel of Death,
conducted macabre experiments on the prisoners
at the Auschwitz death camp.
He started as an SS officer,
was sent at the start of World War II to the Eastern Front,
to repel the Soviets and received an Iron Cross
for his bravery.
After being wounded and cleared unfit for active duty,
he was assigned to Auschwitz
and used prisoners as guinea pigs,
particularly women, twins, and the disabled,
and tortured and killed children
with his medical experiments.
After being wounded and cleared unfit for active duty,
he was assigned to Auschwitz
and used prisoners as guinea pigs,
particularly women, twins, and people with disabilities
and tortured and killed children
with his medical experiments.
It was Mengele's job to be one of those
who selected which prisoners
were to go straight to the gas chambers
when they arrived by train at Auschwitz,
and which prisoners should be allowed to go and work
for a few months until they worked themselves,
or for a few weeks,
until they worked themselves to death.
But what he also did with his medical hat on
was to experiment on twins.
He was absolutely fascinated by twins
from a kind of anthropological level, from a medical level.
And what medics like with twins is
that you have two people who are identical,
and you can compare and contrast
what happens to them medically.
Now, ethically, you can't, you know,
in most normal societies, introduce one twin
to some disease and the other one not to receive it,
and then to see how they do.
You could do that in Auschwitz
because Mengele had all these live human guinea pigs.
But medical experiments took place
at a number of the concentration camps across Germany,
including Dachau, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen,
Natzweiler, and Ravensbruck.
- We arrived to Auschwitz
and there was some Jewish people came up the train.
He said to us, whatever we do, don't say that we are sick.
And we stand in the line.
And Mengele was sitting there,
Dr. Mengele they called him.
And left, right, you know?
They announced every young woman
should take the baby,
give the children to the elderly, to the mothers,
to the elderly people.
Then when we came in the line, you know, Mengele,
he said, in German he talked to us, if we are healthy,
we are sick, or something is hurting us.
He talk so nice, so soft, you know, things.
- In my case, never ever talked to me.
He talked about me.
He talked at me.
You have to realize,
Mengele did not treat us as human beings.
We were just his treasured experiment subjects.
We would stand by our bunk beds
with our hands behind our back
like little soldiers for Mengele's inspection.
There was two,
we had three supervisors in our barrack, Blockalteste.
And one of them would stand at the front and say,
"Mengele is coming."
And everybody would just,
it's like some kind of a horror was entering.
He would come very elegantly with his hands behind his back.
He had a stick in his hand.
He would hit it sometime against his riding boots
and start counting.
He always had at least six people with him.
Many times, as many as 8 or 10.
It was a big entourage.
He had power of life and death over,
you know, hundreds of thousands of people.
And he committed the most vile experiments,
on twins and all sorts of other people.
And so he knew at the end of the war
that he would have to go into hiding,
because there would be people who had survived Auschwitz
who would be giving testimony about his savagery
and his barbarism.
And what he does, like so many other Nazi figures,
he disappears to a farm.
And where he ends up working,
you know, along with sort of normal farm laborers,
but it's clear he's a much more intellectual figure
than those around him.
They all know that he's, you know, got something to hide.
And also what Mengele has is a very wealthy background
because the Mengele family produced farm machinery
in Southern Germany for decades.
And so, effectively, the family were millionaires.
And so when Mengele decides to hotfoot it
to Argentina in 1949,
he's got the backing of a family fortune
to really help smooth his way over there.
What's really chilling about Mengele is that,
throughout the rest of his life,
he always would justify what he had done in Auschwitz.
He had always thought he had done the morally correct thing.
He would see his work on the selection ramps for starters,
saying to people, you know,
well, you're gonna live and you're gonna die.
You know, we see that as sending people to their deaths.
Mengele saw that as sending people to their continued life
because he had this attitude
that everybody there was gonna die anyway.
So in fact, he was, you know, kind of delaying their deaths.
He was being the nice guy.
You know, that's absurd.
And he also would say that the experiments he did
were for the good of humanity,
that this was,
an essential role of medicine was to experiment on people.
It was ultimately beneficial.
You know, he would come up with all sorts of
kind of pseudo-academic kind of verbiage
to kind of justify what he had done.
It took a long time for the German people
to really come to terms
with what had been done in their name.
I think a lot of German people throughout the war
had had more than an inkling,
but I don't think they knew the extent
of the savagery of what went on,
you know, behind those miles upon miles of barbed wire,
and inside those huts,
and inside those chambers of death, effectively.
And I think that when it was finally revealed to them,
and when, you know, justice started being done,
I think any reasonable German started realizing
that actually, yes,
there should be some form of retribution.
But I think also there was also a feeling,
not just in Germany, but also amongst the Allies,
that you couldn't spend decade upon decade
carrying out tens of thousands of man hunts
for all these people.
What Nuremberg represents
to so many of these Nazis is a real reckoning
that they never thought they were gonna receive.
Maybe some of the smarter ones in the dying days of the war
thought maybe, uh-oh.
But actually the whole idea of the Reich was not meant
to be a 12-year Reich.
It was supposed to be a Thousand-Year Reich.
And in fact, that what was gonna happen
is that people were gonna be treating them as demigods,
and statues would be erected
and buildings enshrined to them,
you know, for hundreds of years,
not actually hanging from some grubby rope
in the prison courtyard in Nuremberg,
which is what happened to them.
So they went from kind of being demigods
to criminal lowlife very quickly.
The Nuremberg trials represented a very important,
unprecedented moment and a way for the Allied powers really
to bring to justice some of those key Nazi leaders
as representatives of key Nazi organizations
who had carried out
such unspeakably cruel acts of war crimes,
crimes against humanity, and crimes against the peace.
It was very radical at the time.
There had never been
an international criminal court like it.
And so this was a kind of coming together
of a lot of different legal systems,
a lot of different political systems.
But what it was saying to the world was, listen,
these people who commit war crimes,
these people who commit genocide,
these people who commit crimes against humanity,
they are never ever going to get away with it ever again.