Fighting to the End Nazis: A Warning from History

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

Italy was the birthplace of Fascism,

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

But on the 19th of July, 1943,

the unthinkable happened - Rome was bombed.

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

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

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

Italy was practically half destroyed.

Everybody understood that the war was lost.

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

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

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

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

Benito Mussolini had been the first Fascist dictator,

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

The king summoned Mussolini to a meeting at the Villa Savoia

on the 25th of July, 1943.

Mussolini was told he was dismissed as Prime Minister.

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

As soon as he set foot outside the front door,

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

The Italians were jubilant. Now they were free of Mussolini

and soon changed sides to be with the winners.

The new Italian government first surrendered,

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

Not very honourable, certainly,

whenever you...you...

..betray a friend, an ally.

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

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

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

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

but it is...it is our character.

If the Italians were capable of removing Mussolini in 1943,

why couldn't the Germans remove Hitler?

Why were the Germans fighting to the end?

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

and that was not easy.

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

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

barbed wire and his loyal SS bodyguard.

Discussions with his generals dominated his time here.

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

At that time,

I respected him.

I mean...

He impressed me.

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

But the flair Hitler had was unusual.

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

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

and die in battle. Very strange.

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

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

had reached its peak.

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

The British and Americans were fighting their way up through Italy

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

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

Four million German troops faced over six million Soviets.

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

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

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

Behind German lines, partisans resisted the Nazi occupation

and were summarily executed wherever they were found.

This partisan war

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

German forces, unlike their Italian allies,

committed countless atrocities in the East.

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

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

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

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

the man ultimately responsible for all the killings.

Almost all the Nazi Party hierarchy

knew and approved of the criminal killings.

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

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

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

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

Goering disliked Speer, Ribbentrop, Goebbels and Bormann.

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

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

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

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

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

A conspiracy was only possible under conditions of great secrecy.

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

On the 20th of July, 1944,

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

Claus von Stauffenberg tried to kill Hitler.

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

But my opinion was

that it could only succeed

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

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

Self-sacrifice or kamikaze.

Stauffenberg left a bomb in his briefcase

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

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

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

Karl Boehm-Tettelbach was in his office nearby.

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

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

surrounding our barracks.

I said, "Isn't that funny?"

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

and Hitler escaped with only minor injuries.

Now the search was on for those responsible.

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

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

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

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

If you had been approached,

what would you have said?

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

Ja.

I had no other choice.

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

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

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

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

but they didn't give away my name.

I owe my life to them.

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

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

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

The propaganda newsreel

expressed joy at the Fuhrer's survival

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

The roots of Hitler's popularity,

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

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

Though these letters were censored,

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

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

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

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

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

Propaganda images of this perfect Nazi world

showing the young members of the master race

helping out around the farm, hid another truth.

Unlike Italy, Germany had become a racist state.

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

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

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

put him into forced labours and being beaten...

He awoke me at 5am.

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

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

And then after I had done all this,

to go to the fields to work in the fields -

it was spring - to prepare everything.

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

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

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

1,700,000 of them were Poles.

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

suffered even more than the Polish forced labourers.

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

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

Auschwitz.

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

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

Arriving at Auschwitz, we were separated.

I remember the selection.

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

"I am mechanic."

To the right.

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

"You must learn to work."

He hit him.

And so on.

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

And I was thinking,

the fool that I was,

they were going into a family camp.

In the gas chambers.

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

and...

we came into the camp.

This was the camp of the IG Farben.

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

"To go out from here...

"through the chimney."

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

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

We went to work...

in lines of five men in groups.

I always tried to be in the middle.

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

I am not a man who says,

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

I wanted to stay alive.

I wanted to live...

and to see Germany destroyed.

The Nazi system destroyed.

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

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

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

made in 1944, was designed to illustrate.

But this belief that they were superior

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

Perhaps, the Nazis thought, they were having trouble winning

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

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

400,000 foreigners joined the Waffen SS

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

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

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

The SS agreed and he carried on fighting.

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

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

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

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

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

under the influence of Goebbels,

"Churchill's Mordbuben."

And they hated them.

And...

it was no fun to become...

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

never you know what will happen.

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

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

until Germany was destroyed as an industrial power.

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

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

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

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

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

NEWSREEL:

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

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

Also exhorting the Germans to continue fighting

was the Nazi Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels.

In November, 1944, he addressed the Volkssturm,

the German equivalent of the Home Guard.

About six million men were in the Volkssturm,

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

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

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

Nazi propaganda said the Russians were an entirely different enemy,

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

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

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

Nazi oppression against German civilians increased dramatically.

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

if you dared to criticise the local Nazis.

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

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

One of the men who had sniggered

lived on the edge of the parade ground.

His name was Karl Weiglein,

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

He was less than pleased

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

to prevent it being used by the approaching Allies.

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

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

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

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

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

as the hangman's noose was prepared,

Walter Fernau made a final submission.

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

There, his head was put in a noose

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

A neighbour heard what happened next.

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

For his part in Weiglein's death,

Walter Fernau later served six years in prison.

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

as the Soviet army advanced west.

Even Goebbels' propaganda could not now conceal the reality -

Hitler had become a physical wreck.

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

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

but in Germany, Hitler held all the levers of power

as head of state and chancellor.

The price the Germans paid because Hitler remained their leader

became heavier each day the war continued.

Hitler had told his generals to act brutally.

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

On the very last day of Hitler's life,

April the 30th, 1945,

Soviet troops moved into the East German town of Demmin

and destroyed it.

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

Waltraud Reski was eleven when the Soviet soldiers came.

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

Sooner than endure the Soviet occupation,

more than 900 people in Demmin commited suicide.

Hundreds drowned themselves here

in the rivers which surround the town.

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

Now the Fuhrer too was to take his own life,

but only when Soviet troops were yards away from him.

He shot himself

shortly before half past three

on the afternoon of 30th April, 1945.

Nazism had been destroyed

but at a terrible cost.

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

crucially, an inability to rid themselves of Hitler

and a fear of the approaching Soviet forces,

people they had been taught to believe were scarcely human.

Hitler had said that when he died,

he would leave a great and strong Germany behind him.

He left a very different legacy -

new knowledge of what human beings are capable of.

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

"That which has happened is a warning.

"To forget it, is guilt.

"It was possible for this to happen,

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

Subtitles on 888 by Janice Hamilton and Judith Simpson BBC Scotland 1997