Nazi Death Squads (2009): Season 1, Episode 4 - L'heure des comptes - full transcript

[in Lithuanian] Jews would come
and ask us for food.

Apparently, in the cement ditch,

they had Jewish workers
dig up bodies,

pile them up,

douse them with gasoline
and burn them.

Small groups came to our kitchen
with guards.

Regina Jablonska had a job
cooking for the Lithuanian killers

in Ponary Forest, just outside Vilnius.

She witnessed Operation 1005 activities,

as they emptied mass graves
which held almost 100,000 people.

She saw the ordeal of the Jews,
forced to dig up and burn the corpses.



[in Lithuanian]
Did you know what was going on?

Of course we did.

How did you guess?

They could have been doing
something else.

Something else? Like what?

They were living in the pits
and doing that job.

It smelled awful.

The flames lit up the sky.
People said Ponary was on fire.

What was happening was obvious.
People aren't stupid.

Wasn't it terrible work for these Jews?

Terrible.
Worse, they had to live in the pit.

We came to work one morning,
and my God, what a mess!

We wondered what had happened.

It turned out that the Jews
had escaped the night before.



The bodies they dug up
still had valuables on them.

Some still had gold teeth.

Others had rings.

The Jews collected the gold
and gave it to the Austrian guards.

They had also dug a tunnel.

They carried out the sand
in their pockets.

They bribed the guards
not to see the tunnel.

A survivor told the story.

I don't know how many
were caught and shot.

But only two managed to escape.

After, one of them came back
and told us everything.

This is a film made
by a young German soldier.

Home in Breslau after a year
on the Eastern Front,

he got some of his little sister's
cast-off toys,

imagined this scene, and filmed it.

In Byelorussia, Soviet prisoners of war
were assigned

to exhume the corpses and burn them.

[in German] They put phosphorous
on the pyres so they'd burn better.

All the bodies were burned.

Even the ashes were crushed,
so nobody would find anything.

That's why nothing was found.
It was top secret.

The whole area was cordoned off.
Nobody could get in or out.

We sat there
and guarded the prisoners.

The ones doing the work.

As workers,
they could move around freely.

In the evening,
at a certain time, work stopped.

They returned to their bunker
and had a good meal.

We used a little trick on them.

We told them, "You'll be freed."

They had to sign release papers.

Do you know
where they were taken next?

To the East?

No, to gas vans.

They were liquidated.

There was a Russian doctor
who said to me,

"We'll never be freed."

He spoke good German.
"We'll never be freed.

I'm sure of it.

Because with all that we know,

they'll never let us go."

They volunteered for this work.

If they hadn't,
they would have been dead.

When these volunteers
were about to be "freed,"

they signed release papers.

Then we made them take a bath
so at least they'd be clean.

Did they get in the vans willingly?

Yes, they had to go.

No one was freed.

1944.

German defeat was now a certainty.

Nevertheless, trainloads of European Jews
from Western Europe

were still chugging eastward.

Convoy 73, packed
with 878 men from Drancy, France,

was headed for Fort 9 at Kaunas.

Henri Zajdenwerger
is its only living survivor.

[in French] Our convoy was headed
for Auschwitz, but we didn't go there.

We never understood why.

On May 9, I was sent to Drancy,

and on the 15th, I left on convoy 73

which was unusual in that it was a convoy

composed only of men,
men and adolescents.

We got on the train...
cattle cars, of course.

We were crammed in there
for three days.

Conditions were dreadful.

And then we arrived at Kaunas.

We felt the train maneuvering,
going backwards and forwards.

They uncoupled some cars.

And quite randomly, I found myself

in the part of the train
that went on to Estonia.

All those who stayed in Kaunas
went on to Fort 9.

They were killed immediately.

In their cells at Fort 9,
the prisoners from France

left their mark on the wall

with whatever they could find.

We found traces of names.

"Paris," dates of departure...

There's one big graffito:
"We are 900 Frenchmen."

The part of the train I was in

went on to Tallinn,

arriving the next day.

May 18th or 19th, 1944.

I was assigned to a commando

which was working on this airfield.

Other people were assigned

to work in the forest.

In the morning, the commando
would go off to work in the forest

and would come back at night
with fewer people.

Because there were

deportees who'd been shot

in the forest.

They killed them in the forest

and put them in mass graves.

They must have needed our labor

to finish the runways at the airfield.

For some reason, I had the luck,

like all the others
with me in that commando,

to work on the airfield.

The collapse of the German armies

unleashed sheer chaos on Eastern Europe.

The SS and the SD adopted
a scorched-earth strategy,

leaving a trail of massacred civilians

and razed villages in their wake
as they retreated.

[in Ukrainian] They were terrifying
when they were fleeing.

Truly frightening.

They weren't men but animals.

They'd go into any house

and take everything.

My grandmother's house
had a big front porch.

They came and sat on a bench.

Our grandma came out and said,

"Kamerad, what's that I see?"

Across the stream,
the village of Piski was burning.

The German looked at grandma
and said,

"Mutter, our kamerad
tossed his cigarette,

and the village caught fire!"

In the spring of 1944,

SS divisions operating in Eastern Europe
were sent to the Western Front.

In Italy, France, and Belgium,

units for whom violence and mass murder
were routine

brought along the methods
they had practiced on the Eastern Front.

In Tulle and Oradour-sur-Glane,
in France, the Das Reich Division,

which had participated in Einsatzgruppe B
extermination operations,

perpetrated the type of massacre
that was daily fare

in the Byelorussian hinterlands.

642 people were brutally murdered
and the village was burned to the ground.

And yet the Nazi extermination machine
continued, ineluctably.

The gas chambers and furnaces operated

until the final hours
before the German retreat.

Many of those who had not been gassed
perished during the "death marches."

Henri Zajdenwerger, then a prisoner
at Stutthof death camp,

survived this ordeal.

[in French] Those too weak to keep up

were killed.

They fell in the ditch,
and there they stayed.

I also recall...

My feet were wrapped
in big paper cement bags.

That's how I walked along.
And I ate snow.

I didn't want to think about
what would happen to me later.

I had blinkers.

And I...

I followed blindly without wondering
what might happen tomorrow.

I lived in the present moment.

I'd say, "I'm still alive right now.
That's the main thing."

I focused on the present.

In the Crimea,
Otto Ohlendorf’s Einsatzgruppe,

flanked by a militia of Tartar killers,

had exterminated the Jews
of Simferopol at Kilometer 11 –

over 10,000 people between
December 9 and 13, 1941.

Three years later, while the Germans
were beating a retreat,

a final Aktion was carried out
on March 13, 1944.

[in Ukrainian] I was born April 8, 1939,

to a family with a Jewish father
and a Ukrainian mother.

It was a loving family.
My parents had met at school.

They really loved each other.

There had been no objections
to the marriage,

on either side,
the Jewish or the Ukrainian.

It was a true marriage of love.

We lived well.

My Jewish grandparents
were named Kizilstein.

David Meyerowicz
and Rozalia Abramovna Kizilstein

were their names.

They died tragically
in December 1941 at Simferopol

when the Germans came.

After the murder of her father
and her Jewish grandparents,

Nina Lysitsina survived,
concealed by a priest.

When he was hanged by the Nazis
for rescuing Jews,

she hid in her grandparents' cellar.

Her false certificate of Aryan background
was no help

when she was denounced by a neighbor
in the last days of the German occupation.

April 13, 1944, in our apartment,
I was already ill.

I had tuberculosis
of the eyes and lungs.

I had a cough.

I was dying from the fever
and living in the cellar.

Our forces were already at Perekop
when a Gestapo man came.

Grandma was somewhere in the yard.

He caught me.

I was only five years old.

They took me away.

I was near a woman in black
holding a child.

Who was she?
How many people were lined up?

We'd driven there in a cart.

They had packed us in.

They were catching everyone:
political commissars, officers,

Jews, anyone.

They caught us and shot us.

Then my mind's a blank.

Wounded in the shoulder
and left for dead,

the little girl managed to crawl between
the corpses and climb out of the ditch.

I came to at night, in a pit.

I don't know how many hours
it took me to get out of the pit.

When I got out,
it must have been around 11 p.m.

It was night.

When they shot us, there was sun.

I went up to a house.
The dog didn't bark.

I tapped on a window
and they opened the door.

The Kurnessenkos have been
recognized as Righteous.

I was covered with human blood.

They immediately heated some water
and washed me.

They'd killed all the hens
and were leaving.

They knew the Germans
would burn the village

to get rid of witnesses to the massacre.

The Battle of Berlin
sounded the death knell of Nazism.

The Third Reich,
intended to last 1,000 years,

was crushed by Allied bombing.

On April 2nd, 1945,

a few weeks before he killed himself
in his bunker,

Hitler wrote,
"In a world where the moral order

is increasingly
contaminated by the Jewish poison,

a people immunized against it
will someday recover its superiority.

From this point of view,
eternal gratitude will be due

to National Socialism,

because I have exterminated the Jews
in Germany and Central Europe."

[call to order]

Even before the German surrender,

Nazi henchmen were seized
and brought to justice.

In 1943, the town of Kharkov,
freed by the Soviets,

held the first trial of the Nazi killers
and their collaborators.

Such courts became common
all over Eastern Europe.

On Soviet territory, the trials were held
at a frenetic pace

in the decades after the war.

[in Ukrainian] They didn't undress us
because it was already dark.

They took us to the edge
of the ravine.

We could hardly stand.

They started to shoot.

I closed my eyes and clenched my fists.

I tensed my muscles

and let myself fall in the pit.

After what seemed like forever,

I landed on some bodies.

Some were only wounded.

Later, the shooting stopped.

And I heard Germans climb down
into the ravine

to shoot the ones
who were suffocating.

They had flashlights to see
who was still alive.

I kept lying there.

I stayed as still as I could
so they wouldn't spot me.

I thought my end had come.

I waited in silence.

They began covering
the bodies with soil.

I was covered in soil
and felt I was suffocating.

I was afraid to move.

I only had a few gulps of air
to go before suffocating.

I'd have preferred being shot

to dying of suffocation.

I started to move.
I didn't realize it was so dark.

I freed my left hand.

I got my breath back
and brushed away the soil.

After having taken a few breaths,

using what strength remained,

I got out from under the earth.

It was now night time,
but it was dangerous to move

because the Germans were lighting
the pit from above.

They were still shooting
the wounded and could have hit me.

So I had to be very careful.

I managed to crawl
to the walls of the ravine,

and with a superhuman effort,
I hoisted myself out.

[man in Latvian]
In Riga, at the Officers' Hall,

on January 26,

the trial of atrocities committed by
the German fascist invaders began.

Defendant Friedrich Jeckeln,
SS Obergruppenführer,

and General-in-Chief
of the SS Army and Police...

[survivor in Latvian]
Obviously this trial

did not comply

with international law.

It was a war tribunal.

The verdict and outcome
were known in advance.

The trial was a formality.

That said...

we weren't expecting a real trial.

What further evidence did we need?

Everyone knew he was
behind the massacres at Rumbula

as well as Babi Yar.

In the southern Ukraine
and southern Russia, he had organized

the most massive and efficient
massacres of Jews.

The truck drove up to the gallows.

Two soldiers boosted up
the condemned man

and put his head in the noose.

Jeckeln's last movement
was to wiggle his head around

to prolong his life for a few instants.

[announcer]
The public applauds the sentence.

These fascist murderers
have killed thousands

of the sons and daughters of our nation.

They've covered our homeland
with forests of gallows.

Now is the time for the executioners
to hang.

The death knell
of their vile acts has sounded.

May the brown fascist plague
be forever eradicated.

May it never more be a threat
to freedom-loving Soviet peoples.

He wanted to live!

His conduct at the trial
attested to his will to live.

He even filed a plea for amnesty.
It should be published.

He wanted to live, "to make amends."

But he had hundreds of thousands
of lives to pay for.

I don't see how he could have done it.

To me,

the fact that Jeckeln
wrote to the Soviet Supreme Court

to plead for his life

was Nazism's
greatest ideological failure.

[man] About 2,300 youths
were made harmless in a similar way.

And from the last...

In Western Europe,

Nazi criminals were judged
at the Nuremberg trials.

After he had condemned Goering
and the top leaders of the regime,

Benjamin Ferencz,
the young American prosecutor

who found the Einsatzgruppen reports
in Berlin,

convinced the tribunal to add a trial

dedicated to the crimes of
the death commandos on the Eastern Front.

It opened on September 15, 1947.

...to hear these charges
of international crimes

and to adjudge them
in the name of civilization.

We had the list.

I knew who they were.

We captured their roster.

We immediately sent the information out
to all of the POW camps.

"Anybody who's on this list,
please report to headquarters."

Some of the men
we already had in custody

for the international
military tribunal trial.

Though we had about 10 million
Nazi party files that we captured,

we just selected a few sample cases
to prove to the world beyond doubt

what had happened

and to hold accountable
a few of the leaders

who were responsible
for those crimes.

Most of them had doctor degrees.
Many of them were lawyers.

Some of them...
one of them in particular...

had two doctor degrees:
Doctor Doctor Rasch.

I had a special affection
to put him on trial.

His lawyer came to see me.

He was, of course, indicted for that crime
without reference to Babi Yar.

We just knew it was an area
of Kiev from his report.

His lawyer came to see me.

And he said, "We have to drop the case
against Rasch."

And I said, "Why?"

He said, "Because he's sick.
He can't stand trial."

I said, "What does he have?"
He said, "He has Parkinson's disease."

I said, "What's Parkinson's disease?"

He said, "He's shaking all the time."

I said, "If I killed that many people,
I'd be shaking, too."

He died.

I don't know in which direction he moved,
but, uh...

I think it was a just result.

Immediate justice.

Blobel was his chief, a general, SS.

But Blobel, by the time
he got around to it, after Stalingrad,

and they thought, "Hey, there may be
a day of reckoning,"

he tried to conceal the evidence
of his crimes

by digging them up and blowing them up
so there would be no evidence available.

It didn't help him.

[man] How do you plead to this indictment,
guilty or not guilty?

[interpreter] Not guilty.

[man] You may be seated.

Judge Speight will now question
the following defendant.

And then, for the ridiculous reason,

we limited the number of defendants
to 24...

in fact, two of them dropped out,
one for death and one for suicide.

We had 22.

And the reason it was limited
for 22 or 24,

out of 3,000 mass murderers,

was we didn't have any more seats
in the courtroom.

The psychological profile was probably
very much the same,

but the argumentation in the courtroom
was different.

Some of them lied outrageously.

Outrageously.

[speaking German]

Which meant,

"I hear now for the first time
that Jews were killed."

Some said, "We were only
obeying superior orders."

This was standard.
Others said, "I wasn't there."

I could play one against the other,

and the evidence given in court
was mostly a pack of lies.

But the mentality was all the same.

These were loyal German Nazi fanatics

who believed in what they were doing,

who thought what they were doing
was right.

The best explanation for the justification
for what they did

was given by Otto Ohlendorf.

Ohlendorf was an intelligent man.
Dr. Otto Ohlendorf.

Father of five children.

General in the SS

and a fairly honest man.

He explained why he did this.

And it's important to know the mentality
of mass murderers.

If you want to stop mass murderers,
you must know what motivates them.

How do their minds work?

And Ohlendorf was the perfect man
to explain that to me,

and I drew it out of him,
the judges drew it out of him as well.

[in German] From June 1941
until Heydrich's death in June 1942,

I led Einsatzgruppen D and was
deputy chief of security police

and the 11th Army Intelligence Service.

[man] To which army was Group D attached?

Group D was not attached
to an Army corps,

but directly attributed
to the 11th Army.

[man] Where did Group D operate?

Group D operated
in the southern Ukraine.

And he said,
"We did it in self-defense."

I said, "What do you mean, self-defense?
Nobody attacked Germany.

Germany attacked Poland, Russia, France,
Belgium, Holland, Sweden, Norway.

Where is your self-defense?"

"Aha," he said, "but I knew, we knew,
that the Soviet Union

intended to attack us, and therefore
we had to attack them first

to preempt an attack against us."

And why did you kill all the Jews?

"Well, everybody knows the Jews
were sympathetic to the Bolsheviks.

And so you had to kill them, too."

And why did you kill all the children?

"Well, if we eliminated the parents,
the children would grow up

and they would be enemies
of the Reich as well,

so we were interested
in the long-term security of our country

and therefore
we had to kill the children, too."

As if to say, it's perfectly logical
to kill thousands of little children.

Otto Ohlendorf states
that his estimate of the number killed

by the Einsatzgruppe D
during the time that he was in charge

was 90,000.

And he comes to that conclusion
from the reports.

And that is what I understand
he says today.

[man] Correct.

[in German] I do not agree
with this answer, Your Honor.

For this reason: as I said,

it may have reported that
90,000 people had been killed,

but I cannot confirm that
90,000 really were killed,

still less that they were killed
by the Einsatzgruppe,

because the Einsatzgruppe,
or rather the Einsatzkommandos,

also reported external events.

Therefore, I can only repeat,

that 90,000 were reported.

Ohlendorf was a good example
of the type of man who would do that.

And he explained that he would have
done it again, he would do it again.

He believed that the Fuhrer knew more
than he did,

and if it was necessary
for the protection of Germany,

he would do it again.

And he was the father of five children.

And because he was honest,
I thought, well,

I didn't want him to have the feeling
that my personal intervention

was vengeance as a Jew

and glorifying, you know, getting even

with this Major General in the SS
who killed 90,000 Jews.

I thought, well, he's a human being.
He's got a family.

He's got five children.

Maybe he wants me to take
some message to his wife

or something like that.

So I went down to the death house,
which is right below the courtroom.

There's a little lift goes down
and there are the various cells.

And they brought him out in a little cell
with a heavy glass in between.

A few holes in it.

And I said, "Hey, Ohlendorf..."
I spoke to him in German.

Uh, he has been sentenced to death.

We both knew he was a dead man.

Uh, "Is there anything I can do for you?"

And, uh...

It was a human gesture.

I didn't think in terms of clemency.

It was just a human gesture.

I thought he might say,

"Well, tell my wife, my children
I love them, I'm sorry," something.

He said, "The Jews in America
will suffer for this."

He was threatening me.

I said, "Goodbye, Mr. Ohlendorf"
in English.

I turned around and walked away.

The next time I saw Ohlendorf
was on a photograph of him

dropping in the gallows

and lying there dead in a coffin.

Those were the only words I ever exchanged
with Ohlendorf

or with any of the defendants.

The only words I ever wanted to exchange.

Of the 24 Einsatzgruppe
officers judged at Nuremberg,

two were sentenced to jail for life,
six to shorter terms,

and 14 to death by hanging.

Only four of them were actually executed.

The ten other death sentences
were commuted to life imprisonment.

And in 1958,
all the prisoners were freed.

[in French] Why were the death sentences
commuted?

They were commuted

because, starting in 1947-'48,
the Americans

were well aware

of their need
for a strong, stable West Germany,

firmly allied with the West,

in the face of the looming Cold War.

But German opinion was very touchy

on the question of justice
and trials by victors.

There was a strong resemblance

between public perceptions
of the ends of the two World Wars.

War criminals had been tried
in Leipzig

after World War I.

German opinion was strongly affected
by conservative trends.

They saw these Nuremberg Trials
as victor-run trials,

trials that were just going to be
about German culpability.

The Americans sought to avoid
a 1918-style end-of-war.

As a result, their policy
on enforcing the sentences

was extremely liberal, indeed.

Sandberger, for example,
had his death sentence

commuted to life imprisonment,
then five years.

He was freed in 1954, I think.

Instead of hanging,
he served six years.

Nothing happened
to the thousands of shooters.

Nothing happened to commanders
that we didn't have in custody.

Because, as a practical matter,

if we didn't have them,
we couldn't stay on in Germany

and continue to search for them.

Years later, the Germans,
as the result of some provocation...

I won't go into the detail...

set up its Zentrale Stelle,
or central office,

for the prosecution of Nazi criminals.

And I knew the people who were in charge
of that, and they were good people.

And they got dossiers of all
of these Einsatzgruppen files that we had.

We turned our files over to them and also
to the state prosecution authorities,

and they began a number of prosecutions.

Later, the lower-ranking officers

were tracked down, questioned,
and sometimes indicted.

But it's not surprising

that relatively few investigations
led to trials.

The Germans
made the fundamental choice

to reduce the prosecutors' scope

by setting a statute of limitations.

The only charges were murder
and complicity in murder.

German law had no definition of crimes
against humanity until later,

so they could not be charged.

[man speaking German]

Most of the thousands
of German killers returned to jobs

with the police, their pre-war occupation.

Men who had operated at the heart
of the Nazi death squads

could be found directing traffic,
investigating crimes,

or writing reports in the offices
of the West German Interior Ministry,

after the war.

They were never bothered.

Sixty-five years after the perpetration of
the crimes against humanity on their soil,

two decades after the collapse
of the Soviet empire,

the countries of Eastern Europe
seem to have come back to life.

The devastation left by World War II,
then the Soviet dictatorship,

have nonetheless left indelible traces.

The killers and their collaborators
have done their time at the gulag –

at least, those who were sent there.

[in German] I swear by God

that I will fight Bolshevism

until my last breath!

Freed only recently from Communism,

the Eastern European countries
needed to regain their national pride,

identified with nationalist movements
for whom Russia was the first enemy.

Some of these nationalists
were the murderers

who helped commit the genocide
in the first years of the war.

Today, the Galicia SS
lie in sparkling new mausoleums,

while most of the mass graves
where thousands of Jews were murdered

are in a state of total neglect.

This gathering in modern-day Lviv
honors both the UPA,

a Ukrainian nationalist militia,

and the Galicia SS,

both of which lent armed thugs
to the pogroms of June 1941.

Lithuania has no intention of trying
its elderly citizens

for crimes against humanity.

The implosion of Soviet power

has led to such lawlessness
and humiliation in Russia

that neo-Nazi groups have sprung up.

They randomly seize and kill people
from ethnic minorities,

using methods similar
to those of the Einsatzgruppen.

But the Jewish communities who lived
for centuries on the Ukrainian plains,

in the Baltic cities,
and in the Byelorussian countryside,

their Yiddish culture, rich and lively

until the cataclysm of June 1941,

all the farmers, tailors, factory workers,
and poets...

they have disappeared forever.