Nazi Death Squads (2009): Season 1, Episode 3 - Les bûchers - full transcript

The German advance
continues inexorably.

The imposing Bolshevik front
is breached and annihilated.

The German soldier has now
proved his eternal valor,

saving Europe from
Bolshevism, enemy of the world.

On June 22nd, 1941,

Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa,

shattering the Nazi-Soviet pact
signed in Berlin in 1939.

The ultimate goal of the invasion
of the USSR

was to empty Eastern Europe of Jews
and Communists,

to clean out a "living space,"
or Lebensraum,

for a Great Reich
destined to rule a thousand years.



This was not an ordinary war.

This was supposed to be a war
of annihilation.

And as it was planned by Hitler
since late 1940,

this was a war where the enemy

was not to be conquered
but destroyed, annihilated.

And that led to the appointment
of Himmler

as a special envoy for security measures
in the occupied territories.

The Einsatzgruppen, 3,000 strong,

were quickly trained in Pretzsch
and divided into four units,

corresponding to four parts
of the huge territory of the USSR.

They advanced in the wake
of the Wehrmacht.

Each Einsatzgruppe was attached
to one or more military units.

Einsatzgruppe A,
the Army Group North unit,

operated in the Baltic states,



annexed by Stalin the year before.

Einsatzgruppe B was to clean out
Byelorussia and Central Russia.

Einsatzgruppe C,
northern and central Ukraine,

and Einsatzgruppe D,
southern Ukraine.

Divided into four battalions called
Einsatzkommandos and Sonderkommandos,

the Einsatzgruppen...
literally "intervention groups"...

were assigned to track down
and execute the foes of Nazism,

in other words,
Jews and Communist partisans.

Their initial task was,

in terms of Himmler and the SS,

kind of preventive security.

Eliminate all potential enemies,
all potential dangers.

That’s a very broad mandate,

which means that the Einsatzgruppen
have lots of leeway

as to how far they would carry that.

When the documents are explicit,
they will talk about killing Jews

in state and party positions,

as well as communist leaders
and communist functionaries.

Elsewhere they talk about
potential enemies, saboteurs,

and using names
that are often applied to Jews,

as a kind of symbolic way.

So while there wasn’t,
as best we can tell,

an explicit mandate to carry out
a total and systematic extermination,

it was clear that they were going to be
aiming at all Jewish leadership,

at all Jews that had any connection
to the state and the party,

and that they were free to expand that
to any Jew

that was viewed as a potential
man of military age

who might be involved, or thought
possibly involved, in resistance.

Taken by surprise,
the Red Army sustained disastrous losses.

Wehrmacht troops
annihilated the Soviet defense,

taking hundreds of thousands
of prisoners of war.

The initial strategy
of the Einsatzgruppen,

shadowing the troops
and discreetly moving into the cities,

was to incite pogroms against the Jews,

identified as communists
in the Nazi imagination.

The ties between Jews and communism,

or bolshevism rather,

have been established early on,

as a consequence of World War I,
basically,

and they are not unique
to the German setting.

They were also developed
in other countries,

and in other historical circumstances.

But they really are crucial
to the understanding

of the ideological backdrop
to what happens

during Operation Barbarossa.

One has to understand that the Jew
is the key enemy

in the minds of Germans,
and particularly Nazis,

and it’s very difficult to draw
a line between the two, obviously.

The Jew is seen as the wire puller

behind all other enemy groups.

And these enemy groups comprise

from Catholicism via liberals
to bolshevists.

In the prisons of the cities
they conquered,

the Nazis found the remains
of nationalist leaders,

executed by the Soviet NKVD
before they fled.

The NKVD,
Lavrenty Beria's terrifying secret police,

were hated and feared in Ukraine
for having orchestrated the famine

which caused the death of five million
Ukrainians between 1922 and 1933.

Local nationalist movements,

to whom the Nazis promised independence
in exchange for their collaboration,

were hungry for revenge.

They think, of course, that they're
gonna earn their way

to greater national independence,

whether as Ukrainian or Lithuanian
or Latvian.

The Nazis had no intention of setting up
independent states,

but they don’t mind giving them
the illusion in that regard,

that along the line they'll get
some reward in that way.

The Eastern European lands
were pervaded

with age-old anti-Semitic traditions

rooted in Christian anti-Judaism,

economic or ethnic competition,

and the accusation that the Jews
were complicit with Soviet power.

Nationalist movements,

informed of the German offensive
before its launch,

organized anti-Jewish pogroms.

At the end of June 1941,

thousands of Jews were savagely murdered
in the streets of Vilnius, Riga, Kaunas,

and Lviv, known as Lemberg in German,
the capital of District Galicia.

The experience in these parts
of the Soviet Union since summer 1940,

with the Soviet occupation
were very negative

and to a large extent traumatic.

That formed a large and important backdrop
to the reactions of locals on the ground

towards this vacuum
that was suddenly ensuing

with the Soviet army retreating,

and resulted in anti-Jewish actions
being taken

and then clearly not suppressed
by the Germans.

The Einsatzgruppen were ordered
by Heydrich

to make use of anti-Jewish activities

that were instigated by locals.

In Kaunas, Lithuania,
in a carriage-house courtyard,

Jews were forced to use their bare hands

to clean up the manure left
by Soviet soldiers' horses.

Lithuanians armed with clubs,

wearing the white armband,
a nationalist emblem,

then battered the Jews to death.

In Kaunas, that was fenced-off,
Germans standing around

and what looked like Lithuanians beating
several hundred Jews to death

in a public performance that,
as some witnesses say,

involved women standing around

and having children sitting
on their shoulders,

some people making music while the Jews
were killed in a public square.

The German role in this incident

is that of an onlooker
and, in fact, that of a documenter.

There were Germans taking photographs.

And this is why this is such
a prominent case

because it's one of the rare instances
of documentary material

being available on these pogroms.

In a week or two,

several thousand people
had been killed in the Kaunas pogroms.

Einsatzgruppe C arrived in Lviv,
now in Ukraine, on June 27th.

A similar wave of violence was unleashed

against a Jewish community
numbering some 160,000.

The Nazis publicized the discovery
of Ukrainian corpses

in a fortress outside the city,

used as a prison by the NKVD,
sparking the pogroms.

The same compounds were then used

to execute and beat to death
hundreds of Jews.

My mother told me a friend

asked her to go to Brygidki Prison,

to the basement,

to look for the friend's husband.

They went down the stairs,
and when they opened the door,

they saw bodies piled up to the ceiling.

My mother's friend fainted

because of the awful stench.

Innocent victims
cruelly tortured and killed

by the Bolsheviks,

wielding knives, axes,
grenades, and machine guns.

Two or three days later,
I was in our courtyard.

I saw our landlord, Mr. Barzam.

Suddenly, two young men burst in.

One of them shoved him from behind.

Barzam fell down.

The other ran up and began beating him

with a chair.

The first struck a match
and lit his beard and sidelocks.

Barzam screamed.

Mama came out
and the men ran away.

You see, beatings of Jews
started immediately.

Homicidal Jewish scum,

who worked hand in hand with the GPU,

is given to German troops
by an outraged crowd to be punished.

Here is a dreadful sample
of Lemberg's Soviet faces.

Most of these looters and marauders
are Jews.

See the allies of Churchill
and his plutocratic clique!

In Ternopil,
a unit of the SS Viking division

joined forces with nationalist
Stepan Bandera's henchmen

to carry out similar massacres.

Members of the German Totenkopf,
or "Death's Head" SS,

took part in the killings directly
for the first time.

However, Einsatzgruppe commanders
were not convinced

that provoking these outbursts of violence
was an efficient strategy.

To this day in Kaunas 7,800 Jews have been
liquidated, partially through pogroms,

and partially through shootings
organized by Lithuanian commandos.

Report from Einsatzgruppen #24

The inhabitants of Lemberg eliminated
approximately 1,000 Jews in the GPU prison

that is currently occupied
by the Wehrmacht.

They decided it was time to end the chaos
generated by the pogroms

and streamline the killing procedure.

Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich
Central Security Office, or RSHA,

a huge, tentacular organization

with connections to police, investigation,
security, and repression,

received a letter from Goering
in late July 1941,

ordering him to proceed with preparations
for the execution

of the Final Solution
of the Jewish question

in the German sphere of influence.

These preparations included
registering Jews,

segregating them from society,
marking them,

crowding them into ghettos,
and forcing them to work as slaves.

The Einsatzgruppen emerged
from their relative anonymity

and made their presence known.

In the towns they crossed,
they left grim forests of gallows.

When a partisan, Jew, or Communist
was executed on a public square

in Kharkov or Odessa... here, in Minsk...

a morbidly cynical sign

was tied around his neck.

These Jews agitated
against the German Wehrmacht.

In the city of Lviv, the majority
of the population was Jewish.

The death commandos organized grotesque
processions and passion plays

leading up to the execution of the Jews.

The Jews were marched to the cemetery.

Behind the cemetery, there was
a place where they were shot.

The Nazis picked out one Jew
to play Tsar.

They tarred and feathered him
and put him on a throne.

It was a sort of armchair.

Four men carried him
on their shoulders,

and they led a long line of Jews
who sang...

People said, "They're going to be shot."

It was dreadful.

It's hard to believe
that it really happened.

The shootings were public.

Terrible deeds were done.

I saw it.

If I hadn't seen it myself,
I wouldn't believe it happened.

It was an absolute horror.

We're behind Janovski Cemetery.

It happened on a flat piece of ground,

which is secluded.

That's why the Germans chose it

for their dirty work.

The area you see,

20 or 30 meters away,

is where the Jews were shot.

When Mama and I used to visit
my father's grave,

Mama said they would be killing Jews.

We saw them from the hill.

I saw it all.

There was a big trench
with two logs across it.

They ordered the Jews to walk
on the logs.

A machine gun was set up
to shoot them.

Screaming and crying, they fell,

right, left, into the trench.

The eyewitnesses said

that some of the victims weren't dead,

only wounded in the arm or leg.

They tried to climb out and run away.

Maybe some succeeded.

Who can say?

I don't know.

A great tragedy happened here.

Many people were shot.

Not just Jews.
They might shoot anybody.

The Germans didn't split hairs.

Although Hitler had considered
resettling the German Jews

in a foreign country...
Madagascar, in particular...

he now definitively abandoned the plan,
opting for total extermination.

In the East, the Jews were stripped of all
their rights and officially ostracized.

The extermination of the Jewish people,

seen as revenge for Germany's humiliation
after her defeat in 1918,

had long been Hitler's wildest dream.

In 1939, before the Reichstag,
he had explicitly voiced it.

Today I shall make a prophecy.

If international Jewish financiers
inside and outside Europe

succeed in plunging the nations
into a new world war,

the result will not be
world Bolshevization,

and thus the victory of Jewry.

The result will be extermination
of the Jewish race in Europe!

Nonetheless,
he did not order the murder

of Jewish women and children...

in other words, to proceed
with the extermination of every Jew...

until July-August 1941.

Until then, only men old enough
to bear arms were shot.

Heinrich Himmler, the highest Nazi officer
in charge of the Final Solution,

disseminated the extermination order
in the field,

in visits to the Eastern Front,

where he met
with Einsatzgruppe commanders.

The death commandos were to take action
everywhere, simultaneously,

so the Jewish communities had no warning
and no time to escape their fate.

That really changes, I think,
in late July and early August.

That we know for instance,
the Pripyat marsh sweep

in the first two weeks of August,

Himmler says, “Kill all the Jews,
drive the women into the swamps."

So again a kind of vague exhortation that,
find some way to get rid of them all,

and some of the commanders
take that literally.

They tried to chase them into the swamps,

and it turns out that the swamps
aren't very deep.

Others simply understand,
they start to shoot women.

In Bialystok, Himmler ordered
Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski,

Supreme Commander of the Police
and SS in Central Russia,

to kill more Jews.

His units obeyed immediately,
murdering a thousand people.

Next, Himmler went to Minsk,
in Byelorussia, on August 15th,

where he attended the killing of 100 Jews.

After each of his visits to the front,

the "Juden Aktion"...
the mass murders of Jews... intensified.

That's Fegelein.

Hermann Fegelein, Hitler's brother-in-law,
our commander.

In September 1940,
I was inducted in Warsaw.

I joined the cavalry, just forming.

In Warsaw, I had the luck to be
incorporated in the first brigade.

We were drilled ruthlessly.

The cavalry was on foot at the time.

The commander was Fegelein.

We went right into Russia
and advanced to Minsk.

We often dealt with snipers.

Russians, hiding in the forests.

And we stopped in Minsk.

It was early July 1941.

One day,

we were told of a big parade for Himmler.

He gave a speech.

He said great things awaited us

and we had to be fit for them,

but no one told us what that meant.

All he said in the speech was:

"You've been brave
and deserve a rest."

New recruits were arriving
to carry out tough missions.

The officers must have sworn to him
that we'd comb the swamps,

looking for Jews.

The regular army was not assigned
to those operations, not then.

Later, when the situation
had evolved in Russia,

I learned that even Wehrmacht units
searched out hidden Jews.

That sort of thing...

So that it's in this late period
of late July, early August,

that you begin to see this transition,
what I would call a retargeting,

a retargeting from selective mass murder
of potential security risks...

male Jews in leadership positions,
male Jews of military age...

to refocusing on women and children.

Starting in August,
we went into the swamps.

We stayed six weeks.

Then we came to a town
of 3,000 or 4,000 inhabitants.

We were ordered to capture Jews.

The militia told us where they were.

There were a few hundred.

But more were arriving by train
all the time.

We had to keep the Jews
from escaping.

Then they got to a quarry.

I remember, a big pit,
dug out of the rock.

It was clear that once they were
in the quarry,

the Jews couldn't flee.

It was surrounded by sheer cliffs.

It was a big hole in the hill
to quarry gravel, perhaps.

The cliffs were steep.

That's what I remember.
After all, it's been 60 years!

But my memory is clear.

That was where we were
to bring the Jews.

Did you suspect what was
about to happen?

No. At that point,
we didn't know what was brewing.

It was the start.
It went on through the war.

The Wehrmacht hunted Jews, too.

Even on the front!

So were these the "great things"
Himmler had referred to?

It certainly was.

Himmler knew we'd be sent
into the swamps.

The tank units were useless there.

The Einsatzgruppen were special units.

They were part of the SD,
or security forces.

Small squads, 40, 50 men.

They couldn't operate effectively
in the swamps.

Not enough men.

Who were these men?

Although the battalions of killers
were chiefly made up

of German police officers
from a lower-class background,

they were led by highly educated
young men,

career officers in the SS and SD.

In terms of the officers
of the Einsatzgruppen,

they seemed to have been
fairly carefully selected.

Many of them are intellectuals

that were in the Heydrich brain trust,
or think tank.

Of the...
I think, if I have my figures right...

of the 21 first commanders
of the Einsatzgruppen

and Einsatzkommandos
and Sonderkommandos,

I think it's 10 or 11 have PhDs.

Otto Rasch of the Einsatzgruppen C
was Doctor Doctor Otto Rasch,

to make sure that everybody knew
he had two PhDs.

So this was not a group of thugs.

Ohlendorf was, of course,
a noted economist.

Others had established their record

within the SS basically as part
of Heydrich's talented stable

of university-trained personnel.

And now they were to go out in the field
and prove themselves.

These men were...

legal experts, well-versed
in criminal and racial law.

And they were also zealous Nazis.

Most of the Gestapo cadres
were legal scholars.

There were also young graduates,

recruited between 1933 and 1937.

Linguists, historians, economists,
philosophers...

Men of letters.

They all came from the same social class

and were the same age.

Most of them were born
between 1900 and 1915.

They were young,

quite young for the duties
incumbent on them as officers

in the Gestapo and SD

and the Einsatzgruppen.

They only gradually convinced themselves

the extermination was necessary.

Then, they led their men

further in the killing spirit,
convincing them

to kill men...

They called them security threats:
"troublemakers," partisans,"

"conspirators," "bloodsuckers."

These categorizations

enabled the officers to justify,
to themselves,

shooting grown men.

Next, when the order came

in August 1941

to kill women and children...

They switch from total-war,
us-or-them rhetoric,

to a utopian one: "They must be killed
to fulfill our dream,"

when Einsatzgruppen officers
addressed their men,

who did the task.

It's not surprising that men of letters
were selected.

As experts in rhetoric,

they were the most apt
to be eloquent enough

to convince men
who weren't born killers

to kill women and children.

As they had in occupied Poland,

where the first Einsatzgruppe Kommandos
had operated in 1939,

the Nazis assembled the Jewish
population in designated areas.

In every town, ghettos were created.

These confined enclaves were plagued
with disease and malnutrition.

They gradually became overcrowded
reservations of Jews,

ready to be exterminated.

Vilnius, long known as
"the Jerusalem of Lithuania,"

a center of Ashkenaz and Yiddish culture,
was the home of some 80,000 Jews.

The first ghetto, barely visible today,

was created on September 6th, 1941.

A committee drawn from the Jewish
community by the SS, the Judenrat,

was forced to supervise ghetto life.

The first thing they did
was register all the Jews.

All the Jews. Every family.

They had to register regularly.

They were ordered to give up their gold.

The Germans used their valuables
for the war.

Then all of them had to sew
Stars of David on their coats.

The word "Jew" was written
on their back.

They weren't allowed to use
the sidewalk, or enter shops.

They had to do hard labor.

That was how they were humiliated.

Of course, they had no rights.
They couldn't leave.

They were kept in the ghetto.

A few escapees told of beatings,
lootings and so on.

They had to give up all their belongings:
rings, gold teeth...

Even gold fillings.

Who did this to them?

Who? The Germans!

The Lithuanians working for them.
And Russian and Ukrainian traitors.

All the rotten people
who enjoyed humiliating others!

Eight kilometers south of Vilnius,

a former Soviet fuel depot
in Ponary Forest

was chosen by Walter Stahlecker's
Einsatzkommando 9

as an extermination center.

It featured 20 storage pits,

ready to swallow the entire Jewish
population of the Lithuanian capital.

The first great "Aktion"...

the euphemism used by the Nazis
to designate mass killings...

took place on August 31st, 1941.

2,019 women, 864 men,

and 817 children

were battered by armed men
drunk on alcohol and hatred,

forced to strip, and then shot.

On September 12th, another 3,434 Jews

were massacred in Ponary Forest.

When I was 10,
I used to carry our milk to town.

If you met a Jew on the sidewalk,
you knew by the armband, the star,

or the word "Jude."

That means "Jew" in Hebrew, doesn't it?

Anyway, if you saw a Jew,
even if you weren't a German,

you could push him off the sidewalk,
into the street.

And people did it.

Unlike the partisans, the Jews
had to strip before they were killed.

Halina Jankovska, whose father,
a railway gateman,

salvaged and sold the clothing
cast off by the Jews,

still lives in Ponary Forest.

They shot Jews.
We saw everything.

We watched from there.

Once, this guy, Sinkewicz,

picked up clothes.

He got caught by the Lithuanians...

the killers.

They killed him, too, like a Jew.

Schilnikas was in charge here.

Once, a child was playing
in the sand by the pit.

Schilnikas whipped out his gun
and killed him.

A tiny little child.

In the Baltic countries,
the Einsatzgruppen had no trouble

hiring killers from nationalist
and police ranks.

The Lithuanians and Latvians
did the shooting.

The SD and SS men simply organized
and supervised the mass executions.

The largest batch of Jews
they killed was 10,000.

The line stretched all the way
to Dobraja Rada.

They had to bring in
more "horse-slaughterers" to help.

Why "horse-slaughterers"?

They slaughtered people!

That's what my mother called them.
We did, too.

"Horse-slaughterers."

It's a butchery word
for those who kill horses.

But once she used the word, it stuck.

We called them "horse-slaughterers"
from then on.

Only in our family.

A parallel economy emerged,
generated by the scale of the massacres.

The Jews' possessions were sold.

There were job opportunities
in the service sector.

Just out of high school, Regina Jablonska
was hired as a cook in Ponary Forest,

preparing meals
for the Lithuanian killers.

Every day,
a dozen of the gunners,

Lithuanians, came to lunch.

We were wondering,
"What kind of job is this?"

Once, this Lithuanian strutted in,
in his uniform.

He had rings on his fingers.

He said, "It's dull today.
There's nobody to shoot."

I didn't see the shootings.

I just heard the screams.

If they were firing during lunch,

when the wind came from the west,

it carried these cries.

Very faintly, from far away.

And gunfire, over and over.

From the window of these houses,
we'd see the car drive up.

A German with eyeglasses named Weiss

sat up front with the driver.

He opened the door
and took them out,

herded them along,
and then we heard shots.

Everyone knew what was going on.

The Jews didn't know
they were about to die.

The graves were already dug,
by the other Jews.

The Germans wanted to avoid panic.

They were brought up, ordered to lie down,
and machine-gunned.

Others came to bury them,
and were killed in turn.

They killed them in rows.

Here in Ponary,

when the bodies were unearthed
after the war,

it was discovered that they were
stacked like logs.

When he was 11 years old,

Anatoli Lipinski played the accordion
for the Ponary killers every day.

They gave him a little money,
which helped his parents survive.

The killers were always boasting,
especially when drunk:

"Look what I got from the bodies,"
one would say.

And he'd take a handful
of gold watches out of his pocket

The other would reply,
"Well, I've got plenty of rings."

Another would show a little bag
of gold teeth he'd ripped out.

From the jaws of the corpses
that had been shot.

Or maybe from the living.
I'm not sure, I wasn't there.

They showed each other
their loot, joking, boasting...

"I saw a Jew-girl, a teenager,
with a cute ass.

So I raped her."

How did I feel around them?
My soul didn't like them.

But if I hadn't gone, they'd have hurt
my parents, so I went.

They made me play...

They sat there laughing.

They treated me well.
They fed me and even gave me candy!

Once, one of them brought me
a pair of shoes.

I was practically barefoot.

He'd taken the shoes off a body.

While this was going on,

Soviet POWs
continued to pile up in the camps.

The Germans, not bound
by the Geneva Conventions,

which the Soviets had refused to sign,

decided to liquidate them instead
of continuing to feed them.

The Einsatzkommandos did away
with 600,000.

The others were killed by the process used
on the Hereros of Namibia.

They were starved to death.

In 1904, in his ephemeral African colony,

Kaiser Wilhelm's officers
had massacred the rebel Herero tribe.

General Lothar von Trotha's men kept
the insurgents surrounded in the desert,

cutting off all their supply lines.

Of an overall population
of 80,000 people,

between 45,000 and 60,000 died
of thirst and hunger.

One can draw an analogy here

between other instances
of genocidal measures

as administered by the Germans
in their brief colonial episode,

and the Herero uprising
is clearly an analogy that comes to mind

and only works so far because clearly
you have other aspects involved here.

Most importantly the image of the enemy.

The Red Army soldiers
were not seen as comrades.

This is what Hitler said very explicitly.

Early on they were seen
as bolshevists, as Asians,

people who were
of the wrong racial background,

who were not humans.

In fact, one of the propaganda brochures

produced by Himmler
was called the "Untermenschen."

So sub-humans, and that was the label
attached to the Red Army soldiers.

By the end of 1941,
two million Soviet prisoners had perished.

To escape the gulag, the few survivors
volunteered to join the units of killers.