The Road to Treblinka Nazis: A Warning from History

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

For 13 months, between July 1942 and August 1943,

trains ran through the Polish countryside along this siding,

disgorging thousands of men, women and children in this clearing.

This used to be the SS barracks.

This, the undressing room.

And this, the route to the gas chambers - known by the Nazis as the path to heaven.

This killing factory, one of six the Nazis built in Poland,

is near a tiny hamlet whose name is still infamous today - Treblinka.

How could it happen? How could such places ever come to exist?

The Warsaw Ghetto. In 1940, the Nazis imprisoned Polish Jews in ghettoes like this.

A temporary measure whilst they decided

what the Jews' eventual fate should be.

The Nazis brutally persecuted the Jews. They thought them racially inferior, but dangerous.

They believed that there was a worldwide Jewish conspiracy

which would destroy Germany and that the Jews carried Bolshevism.

As a result, there had been some Nazi rhetoric saying that all the Jews should be destroyed.

But even as late as 1940, there was still no Nazi plan systematically to exterminate the Jews.

Up to now, the emphasis in Nazi planning

had been on expulsion.

The most bizarre plan was proposed in June 1940 by an official in the German Foreign Office -

to resettle the Jews on a tropical island under German police control.

"In the peace treaty, France must make Madagascar available for the solution of the Jewish question."

But the Madagascar plan came to nothing.

By the time these pictures were taken in the spring of 1941,

Hitler had decided on a radical action

that altered the course of the war and changed the Nazi policy towards the Jews.

Hitler had decided,

as the fulfilment of his great ideological dream, to invade the Soviet Union.

The German operation, Barbarossa,

began on June 22nd 1941.

Ever since the 1920s,

the Nazis had been ideologically opposed to communism.

So, to them, this was not just a normal war, this was a crusade.

Unlike the conflict in the West, the German soldiers knew

that the war on the Eastern Front was to be fought without rules.

Entering Soviet-held territory, the Germans encountered hundreds of thousands of Eastern Jews.

Nazi propaganda made it plain what Germans should think of them.

Hitler intended to colonise the captured territory in the East and settle Germans there.

Special killing squads were ordered to cleanse the area of undesirables. In charge of the Einsatzgruppen

was one of Hitler's most ruthless subordinates - Reinhard Heydrich,

37-year-old head of the security police.

He issued this directive after the invasion of the Soviet Union.

"The following are to be executed - all officials of the Comintern,

"officials of senior and middle rank, extremists in the Party and committees,

"the people's commissars, Jews in the service of the Party and state.

"No steps are to be taken against anti-Communist or anti-Jewish purges in the newly occupied territories.

"On the contrary, these are to be secretly encouraged."

Heydrich was a cold, desk-bound murderer who prided himself on being a man of culture.

Heydrich was a talented musician

and held weekend parties for his friends in the SS castle of Wewelsburg.

Heydrich and his boss, Heinrich Himmler,

would organise this quantum leap forward for Hitler - the murder of selected Communists and Jews

as the German army advanced eastward. Hitler had always said the Jews were behind communism.

The crusade in the East tried to crush both.

Under Heydrich's command were four Einsatzgruppen, or killing squads,

each with between 600 and 1,000 men. Each was led by an educated German.

Einsatzgruppe A was led by Walther Stahlecker, doctor of law.

Einsatzgruppe B was led by Arthur Nebe, head of German Criminal Police.

Einsatzgruppe C was led by Otto Rasch.

He held two doctorates in law and political science. So he was known as Dr Dr Rasch.

Einsatzgruppe D was led by Otto Ohlendorf,

a gifted economist and the most intellectual of the squad leaders.

Bloodiest of them all was Stahlecker's Einsatzgruppe A which operated in the Baltic States.

Einsatzgruppe A followed the German army into Lithuania

in the early days of the invasion.

Lithuanians were a Catholic people. But, in 1939, Stalin's Communists had invaded their country

and oppressed their traditions and beliefs.

So when the Germans reached Kaunas,

Lithuania's second city,

they were welcomed as liberators.

Throughout Lithuania, symbols of communism were destroyed.

To many of the Lithuanian nationalists, just as to Nazis, communism was linked to Judaism.

In Kaunas, locals rounded up Jewish men, particularly those they believed had Communist sympathies.

They turned on them in an act of revenge of the type Heydrich asked the Einsatzgruppen to encourage.

A German army photographer witnessed what happened.

Once all the Jews had been bludgeoned to death, one of the killers climbed onto the bodies

with his accordion.

But it was the Nazis who played the major role in organising

the rounding up of those Heydrich had called to be executed. In the Baltic States,

Einsatzgruppe A took Heydrich's directive as the bare minimum

and soon began to arrest ALL young Jewish men.

They were taken out of the towns and shot.

That August, less than two months after the German invasion,

Himmler visited Minsk, one of a series of morale-boosting visits he paid

to the Einsatzgruppen, the police and other SS units in the East.

A crucial part of Himmler's itinerary was not filmed for this propaganda newsreel,

but it is mentioned in Himmler's appointment book,

recently discovered in Moscow archives.

The entry for the 15th August 1941 reads,

"Vormittags, before lunch, attend execution of Jews and partisans

"just outside Minsk."

Among those who attended the execution was Lieutenant Frentz, a German cameraman.

Himmler witnessed a similar Einsatzgruppen execution to this,

filmed in sand dunes in Latvia in 1941.

Himmler now announced an extension of the cleansing in the East. Since the Nazis thought every Jew

was a Bolshevik, they now said that every Jew was a military threat.

So women and children in the newly conquered areas were to be killed.

Himmler later tried to justify the killing of Jewish children

by saying the Nazis could not allow a generation of avengers to grow up as they'd cause problems in future.

But Himmler was worried about his killers. Arthur Nebe, head of Einsatzgruppe B,

told him that the psychological effect of murdering at such close quarters was affecting his men.

So Himmler looked for a more humane method of killing - humane for the executioners, not the victims.

The Nazis experimented with gas as a means of killing

and filmed some of their experiments.

Whilst the gassing experiments continued, the shooting carried on in the East.

The Einsatzgruppen meticulously recorded their killings.

In that summer of 1941, their records show the murders drastically increasing -

coinciding with a increase in the number of police units sent East.

The killing squads based in Kaunas had killed 4,400 Jews in July 1941.

In August, they killed more than 38,000, including women and children.

Stahlecker, Einsatzgruppen A, boasted that,

"New possibilities in the East allow a complete clearing up of the Jewish question."

In the Lithuanian village of Butrimonys,

the consequences of this extension in the killing were felt on September the 9th 1941.

Before the arrival of the Germans, the Jews here had been tolerated,

though many villagers had envied them their supposed wealth.

But now, with the prospect of theft and plunder, some locals were happy

to respond to the German order to march the remaining Jews along this road out of the town.

Riva Losanskaya and her mother escaped, but the remaining Jews were driven off the road

towards where these trees now grow.

Here, in scenes which were repeated throughout the Einsatzgruppen area of operation,

the Jews were ordered to undress.

Villagers had come to watch,

some out of curiosity, others out of greed.

The killing here was carried out by Lithuanian collaborators acting under German orders.

The suffering is recorded in the Einsatzgruppen killing book as,

"9th September 1941, Butrimonys.

"67 Jewish men, 370 Jewish women,

"303 Jewish children.

"A total of 740 Jews killed."

The same day in nearby Alytus,

the killing book records 1,279 Jews murdered.

The next day in Merkine - 854.

And in Varena - 831.

In the Baltic States, more than 80% of the killing squads were made up of locals

acting under German Einsatzgruppen orders. Men like Petras Zelionka.

After the war ended, the Soviets sent Petras Zelionka to a Siberian Gulag.

His former comrades, against whom he gave evidence, were executed.

That autumn of 1941, whilst Petras Zelionka and his comrades carried on killing,

Hitler directed the war in the East

from the Wolf's Lair, his headquarters in a forest in East Prussia.

Hitler's talk was of annihilation. In September 1941,

he said Leningrad should vanish from the surface of the Earth. In this atmosphere of blood lust,

he was also privately expressing his undying hatred of the Jews.

"That race of criminals has on its conscience the two million dead of World War I

"and now, already, hundreds of thousands more."

To his staff at his headquarters, Hitler talked of taking revenge against the Jews.

But even before America entered the war, Hitler showed no mercy to the Jews in the East.

Now he was about to show no mercy to the Jews in the rest of the Nazi empire.

In September 1941, two new measures showed that German Jews were under increased threat.

Hitler agreed to an order which said that German Jews must, for the first time, wear the yellow star.

A secret order from Himmler said that Hitler had authorised that,

from autumn, all Jews from Germany, Austria and the occupied Czech lands should be transported East.

350 miles west of Hitler's headquarters, Berliners relaxed by the capital's lakes.

So far, they had heard only good news from the war in the East.

But that autumn, there was one new sign on the streets

that showed life was changing...

at least for some of the capital's population - the Jews were marked.

There's nothing to say. It's bad.

It's bad you have a sign on you.

Nobody would have thought that I was a Jew, but this...

We had to wear it.

The hate grew up.

We felt it.

The Germans always said, "The Jews are not Germans," and I said, "I am a German of Jewish faith."

And for them, I am not a German,

but I AM a German.

In winter 1941, with the war bogged down in the mud of the East,

the Nazis knew there would be no easy victory over the Soviet Union.

There was a new enemy to deal with,

for after Germany's ally Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in December,

Germany declared war on the United States.

Hitler had meetings with Nazi leaders that December to discuss the consequences for the Nazi cause,

and the fate of the Jews was also discussed.

A new piece of evidence from Himmler's diary shows that on the 18th December 1941,

Hitler met with Himmler and the topic was the Judenfrage - the Jewish question.

The entry is written in Himmler's own hand. Also, cryptically, is...

"to be exterminated as partisans".

Though we can't know exactly,

it's probably camouflage language to justify the murder of the Jews in the East to the German army.

But the diary entry clearly links Hitler with the killings.

In January 1942, a conference was called here at the Wannsee on the outskirts of Berlin.

By now, Hitler had authorised that all Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe should be deported to their deaths

and the meeting here worked out the details.

The discussion was chaired by Reinhard Heydrich,

who months earlier had been asked to compile a plan for the "final solution" to the Jewish problem.

The Wannsee conference minutes were taken by Heydrich's specialist in Jewish matters - Adolf Eichmann.

The minutes are deliberately euphemistic and the talk is still of the "evacuation" of the Jews.

But we know that this was code for extermination

because Hans Frank, the Nazi who ran part of occupied Poland,

told his senior officials what the Wannsee conference was really about.

"What will happen to the Jews?

"Do you imagine they'll be settled in villages in the East? People say, 'Why bother? Liquidate them.' "

Now deportations were occurring all over Germany.

The forced eviction of these Jews in Dresden was filmed by an amateur cameraman.

This was the final act in a series of incremental persecutions which the Jews of Germany had suffered.

First, they had been denied Reich citizenship, then the right to a state education,

then had their property confiscated.

Now the Jews were told they were to be sent east to work camps.

More Jews were deported from Berlin than any other German city - 55,000,

many of them from the freight station here at Putlitzstrasse.

We were trucked there.

The truck was empty.

The people were conducted immediately inside the car.

And then... in the moment they went in,

they had a package of four slices of bread,

given from the community, the Jewish community.

It was an atmosphere of...fear,

an atmosphere of big fear.

There were babies, there were little children and they cried,

and the mothers said, "Behave well. Don't cry."

We couldn't think.

We couldn't think.

There were Germans who helped Jews. Some even hid them.

Most acted as Erwine Massuthe did, as he saw the deportations at Putlitzstrasse across the street.

The fate of these Jews was supposed to be a secret -

just how BIG a secret, switchboard operator Alfons Schulz learnt

when a colleague overheard a top-secret conversation at the Fuhrer's headquarters in May 1942.

Hitler wanted the Jews annihilated and he wanted it kept a secret,

but it couldn't be kept a secret from everybody.

Gunther Ruschin was on a train east when he learned his intended fate from an unexpected source.

In Frankfurt an der Oder the train stopped at the station,

and then we shouted, "Please, give us some water. We are thirsty."

And we heard, crying back,

"You damn Jews! Didn't they kill you yet?"

The workers at the station...

..in Frankfurt,

if THEY knew, because they said, "Didn't they kill you yet?"...

..the population must have known it,

or must have imagined what would happen or what they were doing to us.

CHORAL SINGING

Nazi propagandists certainly didn't want the German public to dwell on the possible fate of the Jews.

In the winter of 1942, as the Jewish deportations continued,

THIS was the image of Germany that Goebbels preferred to sell.

SINGING CONTINUES

It is impossible to tell exactly how many ordinary Germans knew what was really happening to the Jews,

but while this film was being shown in German cinemas, December 1942,

a Nazi secret intelligence report records disquiet among some Germans in the south of the country.

"One major cause of unease among those attached to the Church,

"is based on news from Russia in which shooting and extermination of the Jews is spoken about.

"The news frequently leaves great anxiety, care and worry in those sections of the population.

"According to opinion in rural areas it's not certain we will win the war,

"and if the Jews return to Germany, they will exact dreadful revenge upon us."

By the time this secret report was written at the end of 1942,

Nazi gas experiments had led to the creation of extermination centres at...

And it wasn't just German Jews who were sent to the new camps.

Now the Nazis had developed an efficient means to kill the Jews,

they were to be eliminated all over occupied Europe - from Holland to Greece, and France to Poland.

Other groups the Nazis considered a threat were also to suffer -

most prominently, Europe's Gypsies.

From all over Europe, trains converged on Nazi-occupied Poland and its extermination centres.

Here, Bulgarian Jews are transported to Treblinka.

In this remote spot, about 750,000 people were murdered,

though we can never know exactly how many died.

But, because a handful escaped, we CAN know what the camp looked like.

This drawing was done by one of the escapees, Samuel Willenberg.

It shows how complex the killing machine had become since the early Einsatzgruppen shootings.

Treblinka station was designed to look as normal as possible, with train timetables and a waiting room.

New arrivals would be led to the undressing barracks

and they'd be told they were at a hygiene stop and must take a shower to be disinfected.

A connecting path led from the undressing barracks through two high fences to the gas chambers.

If any arrivals said they were sick, the Nazis directed them to the hospital.

Samuel Willenberg is one of fewer than 70 known Treblinka survivors.

More than 99% of those who arrived here were murdered, the majority within three hours of arriving.

The Nazis didn't just kill -

they stole.

Once the victims had been murdered,

their clothes and valuables were sorted and the plunder sent back to Germany.

In 1943, their murderous work completed, the Nazis tried to eliminate all trace of the camp,

but not because they were ashamed of their crimes.

That same year, 1943, Himmler spoke to his SS colleagues about the extermination of the Jews.

"We know what it means when 100, 500, or 1,000 corpses are piled together.

"To endure this, and, at the same time, ignoring some moments of human weakness, to have remained decent,

"this is what has made us tough.

"It is one of the most glorious chapters in our history which has not and may never be written."

But the crimes of the Nazis would be discovered, because by now they were losing the war.

In the East the Nazis saw the enemy they feared the most, the Russians, doing the impossible and winning.

Subtitles by Mary Easton and Keir Murray, BBC Scotland - 1997