Nazi Death Squads (2009): Season 1, Episode 2 - Judenfrei - full transcript

Although they had recruited death-squad
reinforcements in July 1941...

an auxiliary force of 10,000
police officers and 33,000 locals...

the Einsatzgruppen still didn't have
enough personnel to wipe out all the Jews,

disappearing by hundreds of thousands.

Other SS units patrolled
the eastern lands,

carrying out the same task:

the Tilsit Kommando,
which had been terrorizing Poland,

the many SS brigades sent to the front,

the Fegelein cavalry division
in the Polesian marshes,

the Viking SS in Ukraine,

the Totenkopf units,
Reserve Police Battalion 101,



and the infamous brigade
of SS Storm Troopers,

made up of German ex-cons,
led by Oskar Dirlewanger,

an ambitious psychopath
and convicted child molester.

The Wehrmacht also lent a hand
to extermination Aktions.

In Serbia, an area of operations
not covered by the Einsatzgruppen,

the Germany army went to work
murdering Jews and partisans.

In a world where good and evil
were reversed,

where the duty of the police
was mass murder,

killing a Jew was quite acceptable.

Local people indulged occasionally,
on an individual basis,

to steal a few possessions
or settle old disputes.

Countries allied with Hitler,
like Romania under General Antonescu,

volunteered to exterminate their Jewish
populations without outside help.

Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria
have something in common,



concerning the policy

of ethnic cleansing of Jews
during World War I.

All three countries,

which destroyed or protected Jews
in different phases and rhythms,

started destroying, deporting,
or killing Jews

in provinces that were subject
to border disputes.

That's what happened in Romania.

In Bessarabia and Bukovina,

in those two regions,

and also in Iasi,
the capital of Romanian Moldavia,

mass exterminations of Jews

started immediately after war broke out.

Clear orders were given

to destroy the Jewish population

and prepare to deport any survivors.

Survivors were deported
to the eastern bank

of the Dniester, or Transnistria,
a region occupied by Romania,

under Romanian supervision,

between the Dniester and the Bug.

Sonia Palty,

who came from a middle-class
Jewish family in Bucharest,

was deported to various
Transnistrian concentration camps.

She survived the cruelest of them...

Bogdanovka, where the Jews were crowded
into pigsties before being murdered.

When we arrived at Bogdanovka,

they threw us into pigsties.

On the ground.

But we were glad

that there was no snow
on the ground around us.

It wasn't too cold.

It was above freezing.

It had been very cold before.

It just had a roof.

Everybody sat on the ground for
some time... how long, I don't know.

Four hours? Six? Eight?

Then people from the ghetto joined us,

the few survivors of a community
that had once numbered 67,000...

Jews from Bukovna, Bessarabia,

Odessa, Nikolayev...

They had all been killed the year before.

That means...

the crime started...

The crime was committed

by Romanian police

obeying orders from Modest Isopescu,

a colonel in the Romanian army,

and Aristide Padure,

a lawyer who was vice-governor
of the Golta region.

They had soldiers,

and every day they killed...

500 or 1,000 people...

1,500.

The ones they hadn't succeeded
in killing with machine guns

were put in these big barns,

which were then set on fire.

They burned people alive.

The people from the ghetto
came to see us.

One of them was Esther Gelbelman.

I was fourteen and a half.

She was a year older,
so she was fifteen and a half.

She saw that I was

about her age.

She took my hand and said,
"Come with me.

Come see where my mother
and brothers are."

I didn't understand what she was
trying to say.

So I went with her,
and in the terrible cold,

we walked all the way
to the Bug River.

She pointed and said,
"See the hands and feet

sticking out of the snow.

That grave contains a thousand,
many thousands, of Jews

killed by the Romanians."

I can't say that it was a shock.

I couldn't understand!

As we walked back home,

the pigsty where we were spending
the night, I mean...

she told me the story of how
she'd seen them kill her mother

and her 22-year-old brother.

She kept me company

for the month and a half
we stayed at Bogdanovka.

One day there, I was walking

across the barnyard,
because it had been a farm.

I stepped in some ashes.

She grabbed my jacket
and jerked me away, saying,

"Be careful!

That's my brothers and my friends.

They were burned her!"

I never forgot this.

Fourteen and a half!

A teenager.

Think for just a moment

what it was like for a girl...

a girl...

who had lived a happy life
up until then!

The Romanians were
exterminating their Jews

near territory assigned
to Einsatzgruppe D, led by Otto Ohlendorf,

which caused some friction between Nazi
and Romanian officials.

On both sides of the River Bug,
Romanians, Germans,

and Ukrainian thugs engaged
in mass murder actions,

sometimes as partners.

To destroy some of the 65,000 Jews
in Odessa, they used dynamite.

They also cooperated
in killing Roma people in 1942.

In the carts,

I saw children, women...

And they stopped there.

The Germans and Romanians
made a bridge,

a temporary one, with cables.

They stretched cables across the river,

laid down a plank
and herded 15 or 16 people onto it.

They were pulling it across the river.

The Gypsy women

who had babies in their arms

got onto this raft.

When they reached
the middle of the Bug,

they threw their infants into the river.

And then they jumped themselves.

Their men were standing
on our side of the river.

Brothers, fathers...

They were yelling.

They wanted to jump in the water

and rescue anyone they could.

But no.

The police had started firing.

This caused a scandal

that was unprecedented
in the history of World War II.

These 25,000 Gypsies
deported to Transnistria in 1942

had sons, husbands,

and other male kin

who were soldiers
in the Romanian Army,

defending Romania, weapon in hand.

When these soldiers were given
leave to go home

and see their families,
they found they'd been deported.

They went back and reported it
to their superiors

and were given leave
to go look for their families.

But they couldn't find them,
they'd been deported,

and sometimes killed.

The cases were unbelievable.

Children raped by Ukrainian police.

Cannibalism.

Romanian authorities finally
put an end to the operation,

simply because...

it created such bureaucratic snarls.

The Romanian people
see themselves as a humane people,

hospitable and kind.

And I can say to them,

"Yes, we did also find people
who were humane."

But the majority...

they were animals!

They didn't look at me and see

a girl...

who might have been their own daughter.

They saw me

as a dirty Jew

who had to die.

The Romanian people don't want to know

about the 400,000 Jews who were killed.

Four hundred thousand human beings.

It's not...

A person who commits a murder
goes to jail

for 20 or 25 years.

I saw so many people killed,
so many died in my arms...

I cannot bring myself,

even today...

I can't stop talking
about the ones I loved.

On the Ukrainian side
of the Dniester,

Otto Rasch's Einsatzgruppe C was assigned

to exterminate the Jews
of Kamenets-Podolsky.

Friedrich Jeckeln, the Higher SS
and Police Leader in Ukraine,

a cold-blooded killer aged 46,

was the organizer of the great massacre
of Jews of August 1941.

Jeckeln joined the SS early
and rose in rank.

First, he served as SS and police leader

in Western Germany.

His career was typical

of his generation of Nazis.

He could have earned a degree,

but his career

was reoriented, let's say,

by his political activism
and the Great Depression.

He studied business.

Nevertheless, he rapidly became
a professional politician.

He was elected to the Reichstag

and was employed by the SS
throughout his career.

He became a mass murderer in 1941.

True, his position predisposed him
to duties

of coordination and inspection

in armed SS formations
and the police.

He stands out for his great brutality

and organizational inventiveness

in these huge massacres.

Jeckeln was the vicious inventor

of "Sardinenpackung,"
or "sardine technique,"

later adopted
by a large number of death squads.

The victims are forced
to lie down, head to toe.

One layer of people is killed.

Then you have the next layer
lie on top of those corpses.

A technique remarkable
for its standardization

and its resemblance

to methods used to slaughter animals

on an industrial scale.

Jeckeln's goal was to have
every German on the Eastern Front

kill at least one Jew.

This was a three-pronged strategy:

it implicated all the soldiers
in the crime,

proved they had submitted to the orders
the Führer had given,

and spread the load
of responsibility more evenly.

He himself set the example

at the mass killings
he was assigned to supervise.

In Kamenets-Podolsky,
in late August of 1941,

five bomb craters were selected
as mass graves for the Jews of the city

and many others
who had been expelled from Hungary.

In all, 23,600 men, women, and children
were killed in three days

by the SS, the police,
and their Ukrainian auxiliaries.

The Wehrmacht had reached
the gates of Moscow,

allowing Hitler to believe that
the Soviet army was nearly defeated.

Meanwhile, Jeckeln was called upon
to supervise an Aktion

of even greater magnitude than
the massacre of Kamenets-Podolsky:

the annihilation of the Jews of Kiev.

Paul Blobel, chief of Sonderkommando 4A,

reached Kiev one day before
Einsatzgruppe C

and found the Ukrainian capital
ravaged by fire.

The fact that the NKVD
had used explosives

which set the city ablaze for several days

was seized as a pretext for the great
"Juden Aktion" which had been planned.

Babi Yar, an enormous gorge,

was located on the outskirts
of the capital.

It was the site chosen by Blobel
and Jeckeln

to serve as a mass grave
for the Jewish population of Kiev.

The two men were assisted in their task
by the German police

and squads of Ukrainian auxiliaries.

A Wehrmacht detachment was also present.

Signs were posted ordering the Jews
to assemble on Melnikov Street

on the morning of September 29, 1941,

the day of Yom Kippur,
the highest Jewish holy day.

The Jews believed
they were being resettled.

We saw it all.

It was awful.

Horrible.

A long line of people walking.

Children, old men...

women, young people...

All the men had been drafted.

They were away fighting.

Only old men, women,
and children remained.

An immense crowd of people,
impossible for me to count,

was brought here.

The line was endless.

So was the automatic rifle fire

and shots from a machine gun.

When we went to bed at home,

our heads were full of
the sound of shooting.

It's all impossible to forget.

Inna Evguenieva lived
at 1 Babi Yar Street.

Aged 13 in 1941,
she and her brothers and sister

saw the two days of massacre
from their attic window.

I could see everything.
The ravine was by my house.

We were as close to the ravine
as we are to that tree.

We saw it all.

They were led to the ravine's
sandy part,

then stripped naked.

For some reason,
they were also beaten.

They were made to lie down
and beaten with whips.

A rubber thing.

If someone refused to undress,

they'd shake him
and tear off his clothes.

They'd grab him and throw him
in the ravine.

I remember a group
of four or five girls

who absolutely refused to undress.

The Germans pulled on their clothing.

"Undress!" they shrieked.
And they refused.

They attacked the Germans.
We could hear.

The Germans cursed them
and shot them then and there,

fully dressed.

They died with their clothes on.

They were dragged to the ravine
and thrown in.

Others were docile.

They didn't protest.

I remember, that evening, the clothing

piled up.

Coats, little souvenirs.

It was all loaded into bins
and hauled away.

We could see the outlines
of the bodies.

At the end of the day,
they built a circular sand dike.

In its center, we could see
a black pool of blood and fat.

A lake of black liquid.

So many people had been killed...

The wounded bled.

You could see the blood
through the sand.

The thing that struck me then

was the excellent Ukrainian
spoken by the Germans.

When I went home,

I asked my grandmother why.

I understand all that they said.

The curses, the insults...

They were Ukrainians, that's why.

They were horrible.

Such cruelty is rare.

They took babies.

They didn't kill them.

They shook their blankets.

until the babies fell into the ravine.

It turns out people could be like that.

They were anti-Soviet.

Later, I saw a film saying they'd been
hurt and wanted revenge.

Revenge against children?

The women? They were innocent.

They weren't the guilty ones.

They took revenge
on these thousands of people.

100,000 or 150,000 people died here.

They could have settled the score
between themselves,

not by killing a peaceful people.

Today, if a person takes one life,
he is judged.

But for taking 150,000 lives,

which punishment should be found?

In two days,

Einsatzgruppe C and its auxiliaries
killed 33,771 people.

The few survivors were held
at Syrets concentration camp,

with a direct path to the ravine,

where killing continued
until the end of the war.

In the beginning, the killing was daily,
but six months later,

it was only twice a week.

There were specific days:
Tuesdays and Thursdays, or Fridays.

I don't remember which.
Thursdays or Fridays.

On those days,
we weren't allowed to walk here.

We had to go all the way around,
behind the concentration camp.

It wasn't that big.

Three rows of barbed wire.

When they made the fence,

the prisoners of war

and the concentration camp inmates
were forced to work very fast.

They were digging holes
and driving posts as fast as they could.

They ran around with rags
in their mouths.

It made them gag.

I remember that rag in their mouths.

After the Jews, they assembled
the Gypsies and shot them, too.

Men bonded by mass murder
engaged in other violent pursuits...

sadism, rape, shooting the children
of Bjelaja Zerkow for sport

or burying them alive in this cemetery
in Kamenets-Podolsky.

Eastern Europe was the laboratory

for endless experimentation
in how to kill.

In this abandoned mine pit,

the entire Jewish population
of Dounaevetskaya was buried alive.

Cyanide poisoning, sterilization,

extermination of the newborn
in the Lviv ghetto clinic:

the victims were spared no horror.

Partly to spare the executioners
the psychological trauma

of participating in extermination actions,

and partly because they were consuming
so much alcohol,

the use of poison gas prevailed
as an alternative to point-blank murder.

Arthur Nebe, commander
of Einsatzgruppe B in Byelorussia,

had pioneered the use of the gas chamber
in the T4 program,

eliminating people with disabilities.

This was suspended in 1941
due to public outcry in Germany.

Some 70,000 patients
in public hospitals had been killed.

In Konin, trials with pits, where victims
had been boiled alive for two hours

as their executioners looked on,
had been disappointing.

Another system, more hermetic
and discreet, had been developed:

vans were designed to gas victims
with carbon monoxide.

Starting in December 1941,

a gas van was issued to each
Einsatzkommando.

Arthur Nebe immediately used
the apparatus in the Minsk region.

Altogether there were more than 20
gas vans

deployed along the Soviet border.

In Minsk the killing starts
in early fall 1941

and go all the way through 1942
and even 1943

and involved the killing
not only of Jews in the area

but also partisans
who were captured by the Germans

and also particularly deportees,

so that means Jews deported
from western Europe or Germany

that arrived in this area were brought
to a site and then gassed by these vans.

The gas that was used was
the carbon monoxide

coming out of the exhaust of the trucks.

So the exhaust was connected with a pipe,
a flexible pipe, to the interior,

the compartment of the truck.

The people would be herded in there
and compacted to maximum capacity,

which would speed up the process, or was
at least designed to speed up the process.

Again, not often did it work as planned,

and that would lead to a delay in the time
that people get killed,

which would add to the torture involved.

Now, will you tell the tribunal

who furnished these vans
to the Einsatzgruppe?

The gas vans were not
Einsatzgruppen equipment.

They were issued to the Gruppe
with their own staff.

The builder of the vans
was the officer in charge.

They were issued to the Einsatzgruppen

by Reich Central Security Office.

I was told that the commandos
didn't like to use the gas vans.

Uh, why not?

Because the burial
of the people who died in the vans

was too difficult a task.

Extermination centers were set up,

prisons where the victims were subjected
to hard labor before being killed.

The Ninth Fort in Kaunas,
Kaiserwald in Riga, and Yanovska in Lviv.

The frequent riots
were ruthlessly quelled.

Leon Wells, whose family was wiped out,

miraculously survived Yanovska,

after having been forced to dig
his own grave.

When we got to the sands,

we found that there was
no grave prepared for us.

We got undressed,
again registered every name

so to know for sure that nobody
disappeared on the marching road.

Everybody got a shovel
and we started to dig our own grave.

When the grave was finished,

they started to read
from these registration lists

and by two walked down the grave,

had to lay down side by side
with their faces down and were shot.

The next two had to cover a little sand
over the first two

and lay down in the other direction,
line by line, and were shot again,

and so it went ahead.

My dream at the moment was,
as I was standing,

to get my blood out,
to have something to drink,

because of my thirst due to the high fever
in pneumonia and typhus.

To drink my own blood,
that was my realization,

what I was looking forward to.

When nearby was a bigger group working
on the building of this camp,

building barracks, and I disappeared
between these people.

It seems that he, the SS man, was afraid

that he lost me for his superiors, too.

Because according to the law, anybody
that was already once at the sands

can never return anymore
to the concentration camp.

To get out from the concentration camp
at this time,

to escape from the concentration camp,
was no problem at all.

One could escape easily.

The only thing that was a problem
was that, if one escaped,

they shot ten people from your brigade

and they brought all your family
and relatives

and hanged them in the streets.

So, at this time still, most of us...

had family in the city.

In November 1941,
Friedrich Jeckeln,

the butcher of Babi Yar
and Kamenets-Podolsky,

was assigned to the Baltic countries.

He immediately went to Riga
to liquidate the ghetto.

Jeckeln and Stahlecker,
of Einsatzgruppe A,

chose Rumbula Forest, bordering the city,
as their killing field.

At work,
we saw Soviet POWs.

Often, we worked together.

We were building railroads.

Or unloaded ships in the harbor.

We were forbidden to speak to them,

but we would do it anyway.

They told us,
"We're digging graves for you."

The news spread quickly in the ghetto.

We said,

"The POWs don't understand
the graves are for them!"

They warned us,
but we couldn't believe it.

Jeckeln had already elaborated the plan.

He had calculated that it took
an hour to kill 1,000 people.

To bring them in, have them undress,

funnel them through this corridor
called a "schlauch."

People had to run between two lines
of police, who were clubbing them.

And at the end was a big pit,
dug for them.

Can a person believe that killers
will force their victims

to lie down

on the still-warm, bloody corpses
of others?

Face down, with killers
walking on their backs,

shooting them dead,
one after another?

Try to imagine the scene.

"Apocalyptic" may be too weak a term.

The Arajs commando took orders
directly from the German SD.

It was a Latvian SD division.

The Germans used them, of course,

but they weren't the main gunners.

They only shot the people
who tried to escape,

or who resisted
going through the schlauch.

After the first extermination action
in Ludzas Street,

there were piles of corpses,
many were children

and elderly people.

On November 30th, in the evening,

they said that anyone who volunteered
to haul them away

would be permitted to visit
his family in the big ghetto.

A friend from school,

Juze Goldberg, and I volunteered.

My parents and sister
were still in the ghetto.

It was already dusk.

Night falls quickly
on the 30th of November.

Some people had carts;
others, big sleighs.

We were given children's sleds
and tied two together

to carry the bodies.

It would have been hard to carry
adults on them.

They weren't big enough,
but we picked up kids' bodies.

They were wearing
several layers of clothing.

And the blood wasn't always visible
because of the layers.

The children's eyes were wide open.

They seemed to look straight at you.

There were orders from Himmler

that he wanted drastically
to reduce the number of Jews,

and so in Riga, of course,
there was a notorious Rumbula massacre,

two massacres.

And in the middle of December,
it was the turn of Liepaja.

They had killed a little less

than half of the Jews by November.

And then they rounded up
another 2,700 or so in December

and shot them also.

And that left about a thousand.

And after some further killings,

there were 800 left
that went in the ghetto.

And this time in December
it was also my turn.

Edward Anders was caught
on Skede Beach

the day the Jews of Liepaja
were liquidated.

Thanks to the courage of Latvian friends
and that of his mother,

who bribed a Nazi officer to give him
a false certificate of Aryan descent,

he escaped death.

They had three execution squads:

one German, two Latvian.

One of the Latvians
was in the Latvian SD unit.

The other one were just ordinary police

that had been ordered to escort the Jews
to this place, Schtit.

But then when they arrived there,
their lieutenant told them,

"You'll have to shoot."

So they had rifles and then
they counted out groups of ten Jews,

and there were 20 marksmen.

Each of them had to,
each of the victims got two bullets.

And then there came the next group.

It was all quite efficiently organized.

And there exists a dozen pictures
of those executions,

which a German SS man had photographed

and a Jew working in the security police
as an electrician...

noticed that roll of film
in this SS man’s room

when he was supposed to do
some electrical work there.

And so he quickly arranged to have
the film copied and then put it back.

And then he hid these pictures.

And after the war, when Liepaja
was occupied by the Red Army,

he immediately contacted
the Russian counterintelligence, SMERSH,

and told them, "We have pictures
showing the executions,"

and they were flown to Moscow the next day
and they were used in war crimes trials.

The first picture shows a number
of Latvian policemen.

The one on the left wears a fur hat.

It's a cold day and unfortunately

most of the Jewish victims
had to undress before being shot.

So the policemen, at least,
were comfortable.

He’s guarding a number
of Jewish women.

They’re all wearing yellow stars
on their chest and their backs.

And you can see that they are sitting
there quietly.

None of them are tearing their hair out
or crying or anything.

They’re very stoic.

And at the front right,
there’s a German military car,

sitting on the background here.

So it’s clear that the Germans
were involved.

They supervised the whole operation.

The rule seems to have been

that young women
had to undress completely.

Older women and children and old men
could keep, at least, their underwear on.

The outer clothes were taken for reuse
by other people.

And here is a scene where
a number of Jewish girls,

with one exception,
they're all stark naked.

They're running past the gauntlet
of Latvian policemen.

There were some executions
in the countryside

where some orgies took place

and girls were raped and so on,

but nothing of the sort seems
to have happened this time.

But, as far as I know,

they really wanted only to look
at these naked girls.

There's a group of three to the left.

The one in the middle is being held
by her neighbors.

We can see that her head is quite low.

She seems to be close to fainting.

The others are holding her,

probably to prevent her from falling over.

Here we see the Epstein family.

Emma Epstein is on the far left.

She is bent down.
She is dressed in white.

But you can see her head and her arm.

And next to her is
her 18-year-old daughter, Mia,

who already had been forced
to undress completely,

and is trying to cover herself
as much as possible.

And her younger brother
is undressing himself,

standing in front of her.

And in the background, one sees
a number of Latvian policemen,

quite a few of them.

I think this Epstein family
is a particularly sad example

of what happened
to the local Jews.

The husband of Emma Epstein,
Haim Epstein, was a banker,

was arrested by the Russians
in early 1941.

He was in some gulag camp

and he died about four or five months
after his family did.

Of course, he didn't know
that they were all dead.

This picture shows a group,
including several children,

with the sea in the background.

There's a boy in a dark shirt
leading the group.

He's looking to the right
and he's grimacing.

He seems to be upset at what he's seeing.

Right behind him is a little girl
who is not going forward.

She's turned around
and holding onto her mother,

who's apparently trying to calm her down.

Behind them is a young boy
who's not looking to the right.

And finally, the next one is a woman
who's also not looking to the right.

And she has a little baby on her shoulder.

The baby's putting its head
on the mother's shoulder.

Not a care in the world.

Doesn't know it's going to be killed
in the next couple of minutes or so.

What they were seeing is shown
in the next picture.

There were ten women lined up
on the far side of the ditch

ready to be shot by the execution squad
standing on the other side of the ditch,

which was about eight meters wide.

The third woman from the left
seems to be quite upset,

and she's leaning against
the woman next to her,

knowing that the last seconds
of her life have come.

They're all facing the sea,
which, of course, all of them loved.

This was one of the nice things
about Liepaja, the beach.

And, in a way, it may have been
reassuring to them

that the last sight they got of this earth
was the sea.

So that was the picture that the young boy
in the dark shirt saw.

He sees women standing at the ditch
ready to be shot.

And in the next picture,
it's the turn of the boy in the dark shirt

and the rest of the group.

Now they're standing, lined up there.

There are quite a few bodies
that have fallen into the ditch.

The ditch was about 3 meters deep,

so there were quite a few layers
of bodies.

And in the far right, one can see
there is a man with some object,

which turns out to be a rifle.

He is pushing the bodies lying
on the edge of the ditch

down into the ditch.

And the little girl that you saw before
that was facing her mother,

she's again standing next to the mother.

The rule at these executions was

that when children
were old enough to stand,

they were treated like adults.

Each of them got two bullets.

But if a child couldn't stand,
if it was too small,

then the mother was supposed
to hold it up high

and one bullet went to the child,
one to the mother.

This picture was taken probably
a few seconds after the previous one.

The Jews have now been shot.

The boy in the dark shirt
is lying on the ledge

and is about to be
pushed down into the ditch.

One can also see there is a small flag
between the policeman and the bodies.

They would generally move this flag

to tell the victims where they were
supposed to stand.

It was all well thought out
and organized.

In December '41,
after six months of massacre,

the Baltic Jews were wiped out.

In a series of reports
tinged with macabre sarcasm,

Karl Jäger, the Nazi officer
in charge of Einsatzkommando 3,

informed his superiors
that the Baltic lands

were now "Judenfrei"... free of Jews.