The Nazis: A Warning from History (1997): Season 1, Episode 6 - The Nazis: A Warning from History - full transcript

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This programme contains some scenes
which some viewers may find upsetting.

Italy was the birthplace of Fascism,

So an alliance between the Fascist government in Rome
and the Nazi government in Berlin seemed natural.

But on the 19th of July, 1943,

the unthinkable happened -
Rome was bombed.

By 1943, nearly 200,000 Italian
soldiers were dead or missing.

The Italian alliance with Nazi Germany
had resulted in nothing but disaster.

During the four years of war,
more or less, you know,

Italy was practically
half destroyed.

Everybody understood
that the war was lost.

And, of course, everybody was thinking that
Italy had to get out and not stay with Mussolini.



On the night
of the 24th of July, 1943,

the Fascist Grand Council met and expressed
its lack of confidence in Mussolini.

They voted that the king should
gain control of the armed forces.

Benito Mussolini
had been the first Fascist dictator,

his success an inspiration to the Nazis.
But now the Italians had had enough.

The king summoned Mussolini
to a meeting at the Villa Savoia

on the 25th of July, 1943.

Mussolini was told
he was dismissed as Prime Minister.

He walked down the hall out
of the king's villa at 5.20pm.

As soon as he set foot
outside the front door,

Mussolini was arrested by the
Italian police and taken to prison.

The Italians were jubilant.
Now they were free of Mussolini

and soon changed sides
to be with the winners.

The new Italian government
first surrendered,



and then, in October, 1943, declared
war on its former ally, Nazi Germany.

Not very honourable, certainly,

whenever you... you...

..betray a friend, an ally.

It's not very noble,
But it happens. It happens.

We are more realistic sometimes
than the Germans are, no?

Being more realistic, we are not
faithful to the present chief and so on.

I don't say it's a noble thing,

but it is... it is our character.

If the Italians were capable
of removing Mussolini in 1943,

why couldn't the Germans
remove Hitler?

Why were the Germans
fighting to the end?

The first task facing anyone who sought to
remove Hitler was gaining access to him -

and that was not easy.

For most of the war, Hitler hid
himself here at the Wolf's Lair,

in what was then German East
Prussia, protected by minefields,

barbed wire
and his loyal SS bodyguard.

Discussions with his generals
dominated his time here.

Deep into the war, the Fuhrer had still not
lost his ability to dominate those around him.

At that time,

I respected him.

I mean...

He impressed me.

He made me tense. Whenever I was near him, I
was prepared in every respect to watch out.

But the flair Hitler had
was unusual.

He could... Somebody who was
almost ready for suicide,

he could revive him and make him
feel that he should carry the flag

and die in battle. Very strange.

But by the end of 1943, it was clear
that Germany was losing the war.

In November, 1942, the area of territory
controlled by the Nazis and their European allies

had reached its peak.

Now, just over a year later, Soviet forces
were making huge advances in the East.

The British and Americans were
fighting their way up through Italy

and Allied forces were gathering in
Britain for D-day - the invasion of France.

But it was in the war in the East that the
Germans were suffering their greatest losses.

Four million German troops
faced over six million Soviets.

Hitler had said this would be a
different war, a war of annihilation.

The nature of this war was to be a crucial
reason why the Germans fought to the end,

for, in the East, the Nazis thought
they were fighting sub-humans.

Behind German lines, partisans
resisted the Nazi occupation

and were summarily executed
wherever they were found.

This partisan war

gave the Nazis an easy excuse simply to hang
and shoot anyone they didn't like the look of.

German forces,
unlike their Italian allies,

committed countless atrocities
in the East.

This massacre of Polish prisoners in Lublin
was carried out by the SS in July 1944.

But not only the SS and the security
police killing squads committed atrocities.

Many Wehrmacht units, too, were
deeply implicated in the barbarism.

This war of annihilation made it
harder for some to remove Hitler,

the man ultimately responsible
for all the killings.

Almost all the Nazi Party hierarchy

knew and approved
of the criminal killings.

There was another reason why the Nazi leadership
found it hard to conspire against Hitler.

From the beginning, Hitler had encouraged
personal emnity to grow among his favourites,

often by appointing two people to more or less
the same job and then watching as they fought.

The result was a leadership in which almost
everybody hated and distrusted everyone else.

Goering disliked Speer, Ribbentrop,
Goebbels and Bormann.

Goebbels had little time for either
Goering, Ribbentrop or Bormann.

Ribbentrop couldn't stand any of
these leading Nazis and vice versa.

The Nazi leadership was riven by dislike as they
fought each other for Hitler's praise and favour.

That left the military leadership.
But they, too, had agreed

to the killing of the Communist commissars in the
East and felt bound by their oath to the Fuhrer.

A conspiracy was only possible
under conditions of great secrecy.

Finally, almost a year after Mussolini's
overthrow, one senior officer DID come forward.

On the 20th of July, 1944,

in the most famous attempt
on the Fuhrer's life,

Claus von Stauffenberg
tried to kill Hitler.

Stauffenberg was the only one
who said, "I am prepared to do it."

But my opinion was

that it could only succeed

if the man who tried to kill him
killed himself at the same moment.

The way the Palestinians
do it now in Israel, you see?

Self-sacrifice or kamikaze.

Stauffenberg left a bomb
in his briefcase

in the conference room
on this spot at the Wolf's Lair

then hurried away to Berlin.
At 12.42pm...

on the 20th of July, 1944,
the bomb exploded during a briefing.

Karl Boehm-Tettelbach
was in his office nearby.

Suddenly my colleague came and said, "Did you
hear that?" Suddenly there was a big bomb.

He said, "Did you hear that?" Four or five
minutes later, we saw the SS in battle uniform

surrounding our barracks.

I said, "Isn't that funny?"

The bomb destroyed the conference room. But the
force of the blast was dispersed by the wooden walls,

and Hitler escaped
with only minor injuries.

Now the search was on
for those responsible.

But by no means every German
officer had supported the plot.

Nobody approached me because
they knew that I wouldn't break my oath.

They knew from the beginning that I would
stick. Luckily nobody would approach me

because I was air force
and the air force was not involved.

If you had been approached,

what would you have said?

To Stauffenberg? I would have said, "I am going
to report to Hitler that you want to kill him."

Ja.

I had no other choice.

If I had stayed quiet, they would put me down
in a little notebook and I would be shot.

All my comrades who were all shot,
they didn't speak.

Stauffenberg couldn't speak, Mertz couldn't
speak, and Haeften. They were shot immediately.

The other ones whom I worked with,
they were later on condemned to death,

but they didn't give away my name.

I owe my life to them.

Even under torture,
they didn't give away the names.

In the early hours of the 21st of July, Hitler
spoke on the radio to the German people.

Hitler visited the officers
who had been injured in the blast.

The propaganda newsreel

expressed joy
at the Fuhrer's survival

and hatred for those who had tried to kill
him, feelings that were shared by many.

The roots of Hitler's popularity,

carefully nurtured by Goebbels over
the previous 11 years, went deep.

Letters home from the frontline reveal what many
soldiers felt about the assassination attempt.

Though these letters were censored,

there was no need for the soldiers to refer to
Stauffenberg and the plot unless they wanted to.

"..There's a deep disgust
about this crime..."

"..The honour of the officers corps
has come under attack..."

"..a sad chapter
in German history..."

Hitler ordered the armed forces
be drawn deeper into the Nazi fold.

Propaganda images
of this perfect Nazi world

showing the young members
of the master race

helping out around the farm,
hid another truth.

Unlike Italy,
Germany had become a racist state.

The German economy relied, not so much on the
work of these young boys of the Hitler Youth,

as on the sweat and toil of forced labour from
the "inferior races" of the conquered territories.

It was horrible... to take a young
boy, a child, from the family,

put him into forced labours
and being beaten...

He awoke me at 5am.

I had to go to the work
in the barn and the stable.

Polish the horses, he had two
horses and, I believe, six cows, pigs...

And then after I had done all this,

to go to the fields
to work in the fields -

it was spring -
to prepare everything.

Well, I never cried as much
as at that time.

Last... I would say last months
of my childhood passed this way.

By August, 1944, there were more than 7½
million forced labourers in the New Germany.

1,700,000 of them were Poles.

The half million slave workers from
the concentration camps, mostly Jews,

suffered even more
than the Polish forced labourers.

At least 35,000 of them worked here at
the chemical plant of IG Farben in Silesia.

The name of the camp these workers
lived in has become infamous.

Auschwitz.

But there were two types of camp at Auschwitz.
The concentration camps for the slave workers...

and the extermination camp with its gas chambers.
New arrivals were selected to go to one or the other.

Arriving at Auschwitz,
we were separated.

I remember the selection.

"What are you?
What's your profession?"

"I am mechanic."

To the right.

"What are you?" "I am a doctor."

"You must learn to work."

He hit him.

And so on.

Women with children and men with chidren,
to the left, and the others to the right.

And I was thinking,

the fool that I was,

they were going into a family camp.

In the gas chambers.

And... we were taken by a truck...
it was two o'clock in the morning,

and...

we came into the camp.

This was the camp
of the IG Farben.

And the people there said, "You
are now in a concentration camp.

"To go out from here...

"through the chimney."

Selection for the work camp normally meant
only a temporary postponement of death.

One Nazi doctor estimated that life
expectancy for the labourers was three months.

We went to work...

in lines of five men in groups.

I always tried to be
in the middle.

Not to be hit from the SS.
And it helped.

I am not a man who says,

"I must do something.
Some sabotage or something." No.

I wanted to stay alive.

I wanted to live...

and to see Germany destroyed.

The Nazi system destroyed.

The majority may not have known
of the realities of Auschwitz.

But EVERY German knew that their
country had become a racist state.

The Nazis said that every true German was a
superior being, something this propaganda film,

made in 1944,
was designed to illustrate.

But this belief
that they were superior

made it harder for Germans to
accept that they were losing the war.

Perhaps, the Nazis thought,
they were having trouble winning

because there weren't enough
superior beings in their army.

So they tried to recruite racially
acceptable foreigners into the Waffen SS.

400,000 foreigners
joined the Waffen SS

and fought alongside the Germans,
many motivated by one reason.

Jacques Leroy was badly injured
in battle and lost an eye and an arm.

A few weeks later, he begged to be
allowed to rejoin his regiment.

The SS agreed
and he carried on fighting.

It wasn't just on the front line
the Germans were losing the war.

In the last phase of the war,
Allied bombing of Germany increased.

In the last 15 months of the war, 350,000
Germans died as a result of the bombing raids -

three times more than in the previous
three years of the war put together.

The British bomber were called
by the Germans at that time,

under the influence of Goebbels,

"Churchill's Mordbuben."

And they hated them.

And...

it was no fun to become...

if you made out of the bomber
and came down on the ground,

never you know what will happen.

Germans may have hated the bombing,
but it did not break their will.

Men like Wolf Falck believed the
Allies would not stop the bombing

until Germany was destroyed
as an industrial power.

When it was decided to destroy
Germany, we have nothing to lose.

We have nothing to lose, and so we fought for
our people, for our country, to protect them.

There was another, more powerful reason, to keep
fighting - a dread of the advancing Soviet forces.

Both sides had committed atrocities against
each other in this war of annihilation.

But now the supposed sub-humans
were forcing the Germany army to retreat.

NEWSREEL:

Not only the propaganda newsreels
tried to put the retreat in the best light,

so did the Nazi guidance officers attached
to each unit. Men like Walter Fernau.

Also exhorting the Germans
to continue fighting

was the Nazi Propaganda Minister,
Joseph Goebbels.

In November, 1944,
he addressed the Volkssturm,

the German equivalent
of the Home Guard.

About six million men
were in the Volkssturm,

mostly those who had been thought
too old or too young for military service.

They were told they were the last
bastion against the approaching Bolsheviks.

The majority of the Italians had only been
fighting against the British and the Americans.

Nazi propaganda said the Russians
were an entirely different enemy,

sentiments echoed by Hitler the last time he ever
broadcast to the German people on 30th January, 1945.

It wasn't just fear of the Russians
that kept the Germans fighting.

It was fear of other Germans.
In the last months of the war,

Nazi oppression against German
civilians increased dramatically.

In the town of Zellingen by the river Main,
a local farmer discovered what happened

if you dared to criticise
the local Nazis.

On March the 25th, 1945, the local Volkssturm
paraded in front of the parish church.

They were exhorted to continue
the struggle to fight to the end.

One of the men who had sniggered

lived on the edge
of the parade ground.

His name was Karl Weiglein,

a local farmer with a reputation
as something of a hothead.

He was less than pleased

when, two days later, local Nazis
blew up the bridge over the Main,

to prevent it being used
by the approaching Allies.

Weiglein remarked that the men who
blew up the bridge should be hanged.

The remark was overheard and Weiglein
was arrested. A court martial was called,

and Walter Fernau was told by his
commanding officer to act as prosecutor.

The court martial was held
in a house near the parade ground.

A trumped-up charge of sabotage was added to the
case against Weiglein, and, after a brief hearing,

as the hangman's noose was prepared,

Walter Fernau
made a final submission.

Karl Weiglein was taken
round the corner to a nearby tree.

There, his head was put in a noose

as his wife watched
from their house a few feet away.

A neighbour heard
what happened next.

Karl Weiglein was just one of thousands
of victims of these flying court martials.

For his part in Weiglein's death,

Walter Fernau later served
six years in prison.

The ruins of Berlin
now became Hitler's final bolt hole

as the Soviet army advanced west.

Even Goebbels' propaganda could not
now conceal the reality -

Hitler had become a physical wreck.

Yet, even then, Hitler remained
the undisputed leader of Germany.

The Italians had turned to their king
when they'd grown sick of Mussolini,

but in Germany,
Hitler held all the levers of power

as head of state and chancellor.

The price the Germans paid because
Hitler remained their leader

became heavier
each day the war continued.

Hitler had told his generals
to act brutally.

The advancing Soviet troops showed
they too had learnt this Nazi lesson.

On the very last day
of Hitler's life,

April the 30th, 1945,

Soviet troops moved into
the East German town of Demmin

and destroyed it.

The Germans were reaping the consequences of
the suffering their army had sown in the East.

Waltraud Reski was eleven
when the Soviet soldiers came.

She saw what the Russians did to the women
of the town, including her own mother.

Sooner than endure
the Soviet occupation,

more than 900 people in Demmin
commited suicide.

Hundreds drowned themselves here

in the rivers
which surround the town.

It was Hitler and the Nazis who had
brought this suffering on Germany.

Now the Fuhrer too
was to take his own life,

but only when Soviet troops
were yards away from him.

He shot himself

shortly before half past three

on the afternoon of 30th April,
1945.

Nazism had been destroyed

but at a terrible cost.

There were many reasons the Germans,
unlike the Italians, had fought to the end,

crucially, an inability
to rid themselves of Hitler

and a fear
of the approaching Soviet forces,

people they had been taught
to believe were scarcely human.

Hitler had said that when he died,

he would leave a great
and strong Germany behind him.

He left a very different legacy -

new knowledge of what human beings
are capable of.

The German-born philospher, Karl Jaspers, himself
persecuted by the Nazis, wrote after the war,

"That which has happened
is a warning.

"To forget it, is guilt.

"It was possible for this to happen,

"and it remains possible for it
to happen again at any minute."