(soldiers stomping) (speaking in foreign language)
(crowd reciting)
- [Narrator] Nuremberg,
where the Nazi mass meetings were held.
(crowd cheering) (speaking in foreign language)
- [Narrator] In 1945, in the city where Hitler
gathered immense and fanatical crowds,
the court held the greatest trial in history.
(gavel pounding) (speaking in foreign language)
- [Narrator] The Allied victors
judged the Third Reich's leading figures and officials.
- [Judge] Guilty of conspiracy and crimes against peace.
- [Narrator] Among the accused
were the Fuhrer's closest surviving collaborators.
- [Judge] Crimes against peace.
- [Narrator] But not only,
defendant number 27 wasn't a person.
It was an entire organization, the SS.
(dramatic music) - [Judge] War crimes
and crimes against humanity. - [Narrator] A state
within a state that reigned over
all the Reich's police with it's own army,
inside the Nazi regime.
- [Judge] Crimes against humanity.
- [Narrator] The judges found it guilty,
guilty of being a criminal association of 800,000 members.
- [Johann] (speaking in foreign language)
- [Interpreter For Johann] The SS represented
the very worst of Nazism, criminal extremity, violence,
implacability, and the absence of compassional pity.
(aircraft roaring)
(bomb blasting)
- [Narrator] War crimes, (ominous music)
human breeding programs, racist theory, extermination camps.
The SS was at the forefront every time.
How did it work, this monstrous organization
run by the shady Heinrich Himmler?
How were these members that called themselves the SS,
trained, selected, recruited?
What was the logic behind their murderous project?
- [Nicolas] (speaking in foreign language)
- [Interpreter For Nicolas] To do their worst, to kill Jews,
kill children, carry out genocide, organized genocide
was to sacrifice themselves, in the name of other Germans.
- [Narrator] From the oath of allegiance
on Munich's Odeonsplatz--
- [Crowd] (reciting in foreign language)
- [Narrator] To the prison cells at Dachau.
From the celebrations at Quedlinburg Cathedral,
to the death camp at Auschwitz.
From Bad Tolz Military Academy,
to the martyred village of Oradour-sur-Glane.
What was the mechanism that enabled the SS to turn
hundreds of thousands of ordinary men into barbarians?
(gun blasts) (ominous music)
Munich, 1925.
The extremist, Adolph Hitler
gathered a dozen of his supporters in a beer hall.
He had just been released from prison,
after a failed coup attempt.
He decided to create a guard unit.
It was a protection squadron.
In German, the Schutzstaffel represented by initials SS.
- [Johann] (speaking in foreign language)
- [Interpreter For Johann] The SS was a praetorian guard,
a political militia, a militia made up of activists
ready to risk their bodies, even their lives,
to protect the chief,
to protect the leader of the party, the Fuhrer.
- [Narrator] A militia for the leader, nothing more.
In the 1920's, the SS didn't amount to much.
The organization that counted was the SA,
the party's strike platoon.
They were called the brown shirts.
They were troops from the working classes
who fought in the streets against the communists
and who wanted to sweep Hitler to power.
The SA were battalions several thousand strong.
The SS was a militia of just a few dozen.
They stood out thanks to their black uniforms
and the death's head insignia,
in memory of a Cossack regiment in the First World War.
But in 1929, one man changed the destiny of the SS.
It's new leader, an agronomist named Heinrich Himmler,
bit by bit he would turn them into a state within the state.
When he took over, there were 280 SS.
Two years later, there were already over 15,000.
- [Johann] (speaking in foreign language)
- [Interpreter For Johann] Himmler was someone who had
very precise ideas and plans for this unit
that he saw as an elite,
a racial and intellectual elite, a vanguard.
- [Narrator] Himmler sought to transform this modest militia
into the elite of the German people.
His first objective was to attract a new type of recruit.
To achieve this aim, he gave the SS a new mission.
- [Johann] (speaking in foreign language)
- [Interpreter For Johann] Very rapidly, he created
what was called the Intelligence Service, the SD,
the SS's Intelligence Service,
which was to build up dossiers, files first of all,
on party members but also the party's enemies,
so as to control everyone.
And the creation of this SD at the heart of the SS,
of this Intelligence Service, totally changed the nature
of this militia because now they would recruit
intellectuals, young intellectuals,
young university graduates.
- [Nicolas] (speaking in foreign language)
- [Interpreter For Nicolas] By the beginning of 1933,
17% of the SS's members had a PhD, and that, if you like,
acted as a magnet, made it desirable for a certain number of
better educated Germans to join the SS.
In other words, broadly speaking, you had on the one hand
the SA commandos, the brown shirts, who were there to
punch communists in the street, and on the other, the SS
in their close fitting black uniforms, elitist and refined.
(dramatic music)
- [Narrator] Officially, to join this elite,
you had to satisfy draconian selection criteria.
The SS were to converge towards the ideal German
as defined by Hitler.
Between 25 and 35 years old,
at least five foot seven inches tall, long cranium,
blonde with blue eyes, no physical defects.
Lastly, and most importantly, you had to prove you were of
so-called pure race with a family tree
traceable at least as far back as 1750.
In fact, joining the SS was much easier than they made out.
What really counted was being a Nazi activist.
The inflexible selection criteria was propaganda.
- [David] (speaking in foreign language)
- [Interpreter For David] The organization's membership
grew very quickly.
Of course, there was not, at that moment,
any army of doctor racialologists ready
with their double decimeter rulers to measure the skulls
of party activists who wanted to join the SS.
What mattered was not so much the reality of this
aberrant racial selection but rather the idea
that allowed the SS to present themselves as an elite,
to affirm within the Nazi party
that here was the racial elite of the German people.
- (speaking in foreign language)
- [Narrator] In January 1933, Adolph Hitler,
head of the Nazi party, was named chancellor of the Reich.
For his first speech, he put the SS, his new elite unit,
in front of the rostrum.
They were now a force of 50,000 men
totally devoted to their leader.
(crowd cheering)
(ominous music)
Munich's Odeonsplatz,
a symbolic place for the SS.
- [Hitler] (speaking in foreign language)
(crowd reciting)
- [Narrator] November 1933, 10 months after his nomination,
the Fuhrer initiated a new ritual.
Every 8th of November, on this square,
the SS would gather to swear an oath of allegiance.
- (speaking in foreign language)
(crowd reciting)
- [Narrator] A crucial stage in the indoctrination.
- [Rally Presenter] (speaking in foreign language)
(crowd reciting)
- [Nicolas] (speaking in foreign language)
- [Interpreter For Nicolas] What did it mean to join the SS?
Simply, first of all, this oath.
We swear fidelity to you, Adolph Hitler, to the death.
And this, to the death, was very important
because it founded, if you like, a sort of
radicality about entering into this organization
and an abandoning of your own individuality
to the extreme point of self sacrifice.
- [Rally Presenter] (speaking in foreign language)
- [Narrator] After this oath--
(crowd reciting)
- [Narrator] the SS member was no longer an individual.
He had to give way to the group
and accomplish its tasks with fanaticism.
- [Nicolas] (speaking in foreign language)
- [Interpreter For Nicolas] What, for us,
are the worst of human faults, fanaticism, anti-Semitism,
became for some Nazis, and obviously above all
for the elites that was the SS, qualities.
In the bureaucratic reports, the SS produced
so regularly about their leaders,
the first quality was, he's a true fanatic.
It was a quality.
(feet stomping)
- [Narrator] This fanaticism the SS would put to the test
on the 30th of June 1934.
Hitler had already turned Germany into a dictatorship,
but some of its former allies had become troublesome.
Ernst Rohm, for example,
the head of the SA, the brown shirts.
He was extremely popular,
a threat to the Fuhrer who wanted to get rid of him.
On the night of June 30th,
the SS assassinated Rohm and all the SA leaders.
The Germans had been warned, the SS was capable of anything.
Himmler had been given free reign.
With the SS, he was going to be able to dedicate himself
to his obsession, giving Germany a new destiny.
(dramatic music) (birds chirping)
In the Saxon countryside,
the quiet little town of Quedlinburg.
(birds chirping)
On July 2, 1936, an important guest
was welcomed at the cathedral.
Heinrich Himmler visited with SS officials.
He'd come to celebrate the 1,000th anniversary of the
death of Henry I, otherwise known as the Henry the Fowler,
a glorious ancestor who resisted the invasions
from the East.
By bowing down in front of the royal tomb,
Himmler wanted to impose a new German history.
The SS intended to prove that the German
had always been superior.
- [Johann] (speaking in foreign language)
- [Interpreter For Johann] From their point of view,
the Germans had created everything
that comprised our civilization.
Philosophy was thanks to them.
Mathematics was thanks to them.
The music of Johann Sebastian Bach was thanks to them.
They even went as far as to say that Plato and the Greeks
of the classical period were Germans
because they had created a marvelous civilization.
This race that was the very essence of distinction
was threatened by people who wanted to damage it.
And first of all, there was that other people
or that other race that claimed itself to be
the chosen people, which is to say the Jewish people,
or as they put it, the Jewish race.
And from their point of view,
there was a sort of clash of the titans,
a war of the giants that had structured the whole of history
for thousands of years between, on the one hand
the nasty, destructive, hate-filled Jews,
and on the other, Germans who were good, gentle,
and culturally creative, so good indeed that they were naive
and therefore victims of their own moral goodness.
(gentle music)
- [Narrator] All SS members were instructed
with this re-reading of history.
They studied it in evening classes.
This monthly leaflet, for example,
was written for SS officers.
It contained articles about glorious ancestors,
such as Prince Eugene of Savoy and illustrious Germans,
such as Richard Wagner, but also instructions
on how to be the perfect SS man.
It also taught how to combat your enemies,
and in particular, Christianity,
which was considered a monstrous creation of the Jews.
- [Johann] (speaking in foreign language)
- [Interpreter For Johann] Christianity, in their eyes,
was Judaism.
You had, at the heart of the SS,
a whole battery of courses on points of ideology,
courses on history and biology,
which taught you that the Evangelization of Germany
was priests who were in fact rabbis
who'd come to modify Germany's original culture
to introduce the idea of sin and who came to promote values
that were totally inimical to life.
- [David] (speaking in foreign language)
- [Interpreter For David] Humanism, universalism, SS members
learned during their training that that was all nonsense.
According to the SS ideologs,
that was nothing but sentimental pity.
- [Johann] (speaking in foreign language)
- [Interpreter For Johann] Christianity, as a culture,
which is to say Judeo-Christianity, had to disappear,
had to eradicated and extracted from German culture
so that the Germans could return to what they were
at the outset, which is to say
blonde beasts in a state of nature.
(birds chirping)
- [Narrator] But to say that the Germans
were at the origins of civilization was not enough.
It needed to be proven.
This was one of the SS's first missions.
The Externsteine is a rock formation
deep inside the Saxon forest.
It served as a hermitage during the Middle Ages
and maybe more than that.
It was, in any case, Himmler's opinion
that this was an ancient Saxon place of worship.
Hoping to find here a trace of the glorious ancestors,
he ordered the SS to carry out an archeological dig.
- [Johann] (speaking in foreign language)
- [Interpreter For Johann] Himmler and the SS
sent archeologists all over Germany to try to find,
in the earth of Germania, the irrefutable proof of
German excellence, craftsmanship, art, and intelligence.
- [Narrator] Himmler didn't stop at Germany's frontiers.
He also dispatched an expedition to Tibet to find the traces
of the first Aryans and another in search of the Holy Grail.
The results were very disappointing,
but this research allowed the propaganda services
to hammer home the message
that Germans were the descendants of a superior race,
and the Nazis were their new representatives,
even if that meant taking a few liberties with reality,
as in this advertisement for Hugo Boss,
who made the SS's uniforms.
Hitler and Goering were transfigured.
- [Paula] (speaking in foreign language)
- [Interpreter For Paula] This Hugo Boss advertisement
showed a sort of idolization of Hitler
who appeared tall with light brown hair.
He was standing next to Goering
who was far slimmer than he was in reality.
That didn't mean the public didn't seem this.
Of course, everybody knew Hitler wasn't so tall,
that he wasn't blonde,
and didn't conform to the Aryan ideal.
On the other hand, there was the stimulation of the desire,
the desire to be like an Aryan.
(dramatic music)
- [Narrator] But for the SS,
defining the ideal did not suffice.
Himmler was preparing his troops
for a much more sinister mission.
In 1936, the SS leader got a promotion.
He was put in charge of all of Germany's police,
even the Gestapo, the formidable political police
created by Goering, fell into the hands of the SS.
This former activist group
was becoming a gigantic force of repression.
- [Nicolas] (speaking in foreign language)
- [Interpreter For Nicolas] 1936 was the moment
Himmler really stated to organize the entire SS
and the police and merge the two institutions.
He would merge an elite core of political activists
with their ideology and the political program
ready to be put into practice with a police force
that should have been an apolitical state institution.
A terrible result was being prepared.
The police was not an instrument that was totally innocent,
and by taking it over, as he did in '36, Himmler was
going to be able to sculpt himself a murder weapon.
(dramatic music)
- [Narrator] With the police under its orders,
the SS was able to launch a new mission, the parasite hunt,
those who harmed, so said Nazi ideology, the German race.
The first to be targeted were the disabled.
Propaganda films described them as useless less-than-humans
who had to be gotten rid of.
- [Johann] (speaking in foreign language)
- [Interpreter For Johann] They would be sterilized,
and it was the SS who oversaw the program,
and then, in a second phase from 1939,
in the context of the war, people with what were considered
hereditary illnesses were killed in a euthanasia program
called T4, which lead to the deaths of 200,000 people
in the years up to 1945.
(dramatic music)
- [Narrator] The main enemies, the most dangerous
from Nazi's point of view, were of course the Jews,
but this posed a problem for the SS.
Unlike the disabled, the Jews were difficult to identify.
- [Nicolas] (speaking in foreign language)
- [Interpreter For Nicolas] In all other regimes
that have been founded on race,
such as apartheid in South Africa
or the segregation policies in the United States,
there was always what was called a color line
that enabled the separation, so to speak,
of the white dominant people you want to build up
from the people that you could easily physically recognize
who were the dominated people.
In Germany, that was not the case.
Why not?
And this is why anti-Semitism
is an extremely complex form of racism.
Neither the Nazis nor anyone else
could tell the Jews apart, by their physical appearance.
You don't have that sort of so-called ethnic racism
based on direct recognition.
(ominous music)
- [Narrator] Although the propaganda
did its best to pretend otherwise.
In newspapers and even in schools,
you could study so-called Jewish features.
Jews were described as the absolute antithesis
of the Aryan model, small, fat, dark eyes, hooked nose.
Nazi doctors used color charts to try to
validate their theories,
by checking Jewish children's hair and eye color.
But the SS, itself, realized that it wasn't very convincing,
so Jews were attributed diabolical powers.
- [Paula] (speaking in foreign language)
- [Interpreter For Paula] There were two levels.
There was a level where a lot of stress was put on images
of typical Jews with big noses, dark eyes, and so on,
and then there was the masquerade
as the Nazis called it, by the Jew.
So the Jew was someone who could be masked
and mix with the population without them knowing.
That's where the Jew became problematic for the Aryan,
according to Nazi ideology because he was sometimes masked.
You couldn't immediately see that he had characteristics
that were not compatible with the Aryan man.
(dramatic music)
- [Narrator] Confronted with what it presented
as a formidable enemy, the SS invented
a new sort of anti-Semitism, as cold as it was radical.
It's members were trained to act methodically
without feeling.
- [Nicolas] (speaking in foreign language)
- [Interpreter For Nicolas] What the SS sought were
rational definitions, biological definitions,
and therefore, a treatment of this question that was,
if you like, without hatred, and it was actually stated.
Himmler said it, hatred.
Look, it's terrible what it reveals about
the anti-Semitism of party activists because to hate Jews,
in such a passionate way, is, in the mind of the SS member,
to care too much about them.
The required solution needs to be extremely rational, cold.
And that is really an SS invention
and explains a lot in the genocide that would follow.
(dramatic music) (crowd shouting)
- [Narrator] For the time being, there was no question
of genocide, just getting rid of the Jews,
to harass them by all means possible
so that they would leave Germany.
(crowd shouting)
In the 1930's, discrimination followed discrimination.
Shops were closed, people were forbidden from working
in certain professions, from going to the cinema
or to a restaurant, to sit on certain benches.
Jews were forced into ghettos and to wear the yellow star.
But these solutions weren't going fast enough.
The SS was preparing more radical methods.
(birds chirping)
A few kilometers from Munich,
in a former munitions factory, the Dachau camp.
(ominous music)
A work camp, said the Nazis.
The formula displayed at the entrance of the camp,
work makes you free.
This enclosed space was, in fact,
a private SS hunting ground.
(door squeaking)
As soon as the camp opened in 1933,
Himmler obtained control of it.
He frequently visited what was presented as a model prison
for political opponents.
In fact, it was already a little hell.
The SS leader wanted to make Dachau
into an experimentation center for his policy of repression,
a template for the camps to come.
To work towards that aim,
he recruited a new type of SS member, very young men,
maximum 22 years old with little education.
They were taught to become violent and pitiless.
As this inmate's drawing recounts, prisoners were greeted
on their arrival in the camp with 25 blows from a cosh,
a way of breaking all resistance
but also of hardening the guards.
- [Elissa] (speaking in foreign language)
- [Interpreter For Elissa] Sharing a crime,
however you look at it, brings people together.
He therefore forced the SS to witness
the meting out of corporal punishment,
to deal it out themselves or to watch,
and in that way, he created veritable rights of passage,
initiation rights that were very, very important
formative experiences inside the SS.
- [Johann] (speaking in foreign language)
- [Interpreter For Johann] There was a term and an adjective
that were repeated like a mantra, so to speak, in the SS.
It was hart, hard.
Mann musst hart sein, you have to be hard.
Hard first of all towards yourself, towards what the SS
called your inner bastard, den innerer schweinehund,
which is to say the weak, sensitive man.
Weak because he had been weakened by Christianity,
which is to say by Judeo-Christianity.
He'd been taught pity, compassion, gentleness,
all sorts of anti-natural feelings.
He had to be silenced, this sensitive man,
this inner bastard, in order to be hard
with the enemies of the German race.
(dramatic music)
- [Narrator] Inside the camp, the prisoners crammed
into the dormitories were reduced to the status of cattle.
Any reason was good enough to torture them in their dungeon.
Under the cover of the rules, it was a reign of lawlessness.
Outside the camp, even inside the Nazi regime,
some were worried by the terror that reigned at Dachau,
but no protest was possible.
Himmler made sure the camp was a place controlled by the SS
and hermetically sealed.
- [Elissa] (speaking in foreign language)
- [Interpreter For Elissa] No state official
was allowed to enter.
No member of the judiciary, no police man, no one
was allowed to investigate or penetrate this closed space.
That protected the SS because obviously
the judiciary couldn't accuse them of murder.
It was at that moment that the concentration camp system
became a world, you could say a world apart.
(dramatic music)
- [Narrator] By 1936, the template was in place.
The SS opened five other camps like Dachau
in German territory.
Political opponents were joined by undesirables,
Jews, gypsies, beggars, homosexuals.
Several thousand people were imprisoned and tortured
with complete impunity.
Three years away from the World War,
the SS expanded its web.
(dramatic music)
On August 31, 1939, Nazi troops invaded Poland.
Hitler presented the operation
as retaliation for an aggression.
The Poles he claimed,
had attacked a radio transmitter inside German territory.
In fact, it was an SS mockup operation
ordered by the Fuhrer.
It was even called Operation Himmler.
- [Christian] (speaking in foreign language)
- [Interpreter For Christian] In August 1939,
Hitler was determined to finish with Poland,
and Himmler gave the task to the SD and Gestapo chief
to mount an operation that would be an act of provocation.
They picked some seasoned SS members,
made them into a group, took some Polish uniforms,
pretended to attack a border radio post with a speaker
that was supposed to transmit
a message of provocation, in Polish.
- [Narrator] Several inmates, from a neighboring camp,
were dressed as Poles and killed near the transmitter,
to make the attack more credible.
Hitler had his pretext for unleashing war.
(dramatic music)
In response to the invasion of Poland,
France and Great Britain declared war on Germany.
(gun blasts)
The SS had just started the Second World War,
and it was going to participate directly.
- Fire.
(artillery blasts)
(birds chirping)
- [Narrator] In a Munich suburb, the Bad Tolz barracks
had been built by Dachau prisoners.
(dramatic music)
This is where SS officers were trained before going off
to war because the SS also had its own army.
For several years, Himmler had been preparing
this new branch of his organization,
which was destined to become its biggest, the Waffen-SS.
- [Christian] (speaking in foreign language)
- [Interpreter For Christian] The Waffen were soldiers,
combat troops who wore uniforms
but who were considered to be political soldiers.
That meant that you joined the SS
as an act of political militancy.
You were not, in theory, a conscript.
- [David] (speaking in foreign language)
- [Interpreter For David] There was,
from the SS point of view, the will to create an army
of political soldiers, who, even more than
the regular German Army, would fight pitilessly
while following the precepts of Nazi ideology.
(dramatic music)
- [Narrator] The Waffen-SS was thrown into battle
alongside the Wehrmacht, the regular army.
It took part in the invasion of Belgium and France.
Contrary to the Nazi propaganda claims,
the beginnings were not very glorious.
The SS were not soldiers, first and foremost.
They fought with their fanaticism
and suffered heavy casualties.
(bomb whining) (bomb blasting)
(political Nazi music)
To compensate for their losses in battle,
the SS were obliged to complete another mission,
a mission that Himmler considered to be
as important as fighting.
The SS had to procreate.
- [Johann] (speaking in foreign language)
- [Interpreter For Johann] The SS were a biological elite,
from Himmler's point of view.
They'd been selected and must be procreators.
They had to have children.
They had to produce biological material.
(dramatic music)
- [Narrator] From the beginning,
Himmler imposed pronatalist rules on the SS.
SS men had to marry women who were also considered
racially pure and procreate as quickly as possible.
- [Elissa] (speaking in foreign language)
- [Interpreter For Elissa] Himmler followed the marriages
very closely and the divorces, in fact,
and he would actually say very clearly
that a childless marriage was a worthless marriage
for society, in general, and for the SS, even more so.
- [David] (speaking in foreign language)
- [Interpreter For David] If they didn't contribute
to the German people's biological regeneration,
then, in theory, they could be subject to sanctions
of a financial sort, in particular.
There was a contribution, a sort of fine
that you were supposed to pay
if, after a certain number of years,
you hadn't had a sufficient number of children.
- [Elissa] (speaking in foreign language)
- [Interpreter For Elissa] So according to Himmler,
the aim was that every SS marriage
provide at least four children.
(gentle music)
- [Narrator] But the SS found it hard to live up
to this ambition.
When war broke out,
Himmler's objectives were far from being reached.
- [David] (speaking in foreign language)
- [Interpreter For David] In fact, by the end of the 1930's,
so after almost 10 years of applying these criteria,
only 40% of SS men were married.
So, in fact, a large number of them were single.
As for the numbers of children per family,
it was about one child,
so the SS were typical of the German population generally.
They did not conform as willingly as might be expected,
to the organization's constraints.
(dramatic music)
- [Narrator] So the SS leader
made an extraordinary decision.
In October 1939, a few months after
the beginning of the war, he signed a procreation order
inciting SS men to have extramarital affairs.
- [Elissa] (speaking in foreign language)
- [Interpreter For Elissa] He encouraged soldiers
and members of the armed police and of course the SS
to make children with German women outside of marriage.
- [Johann] (speaking in foreign language)
- [Interpreter For Johann] So we were back with the idea
that monogamy, only having one wife
and only having children with one wife,
had been imposed by the Catholic priests,
which is to say by the Jews, in order to dry up the race.
Himmler took the opposite stance, telling SS members,
you have the duty to make children everywhere,
all the time, wherever you can.
It was understood that he meant even outside the couple.
(dramatic music)
(artillery blasts)
- [Narrator] On June 22, 1941, Hitler entered a new phase.
After the invasion of Poland, he attacked the U.S.S.R.
He launched the great Nazi project,
spreading to the East, lebensraum, Germany's living space.
According the Nazi doctrine, these concurred lands
had to be cleaned of the sub-humans who lived in them,
so as to be replace by authentic Germans.
To concur this living space,
the SS would once more show their fanaticism.
The regular army was followed into the concurred zones,
by the Einsatzgruppen, the SS task forces.
The mission of these death squads was to eliminate
all opponents, as well as people who were
considered inferiors, starting with the Jews.
They executed men by firing squad,
raised villages, burned down synagogues.
- [Christian] (speaking in foreign language)
- [Interpreter For Christian] There were 3,000 members
of the Einsatzgruppen in the Soviet Union between
the 22nd of June '41 and let's say Christmas 1941,
which is to say six months.
They killed 550,000 people.
If you do that math,
to be one of the Einsatzgruppen shooters in the U.S.S.R.
meant killing a man every day for six months.
Each one of them has, on average,
180 people on their conscience.
That is for the first year of the war,
not counting the rest.
(dramatic music)
- [Narrator] Summer 1941,
a new peak was reached on the scale of crime.
Berlin requested that women and children be killed too.
Even for the fanatical SS,
this task would be hard to carry out, and Himmler knew it.
- [Johann] (speaking in foreign language)
- [Interpreter For Johann] It was clear to him,
as it was clear for the other SS officials
that it was not easy to kill and that if it was easy to kill
then that would be a sign of moral degeneration.
Killing should be done not for pleasure nor out of vice.
Killing was a moral duty.
- [Christian] (speaking in foreign language)
- [Interpreter For Christian] There was violence
that had become the norm, that had normalized.
It was very intense.
It was monstrous what these people did,
but killing children was nevertheless put within the limits
of this normalized violence.
It was disgusting.
They didn't want to do.
They didn't think it was good to do it,
but well, for them, they had to do it.
There was a certain necessity about it.
- [Johann] (speaking in foreign language)
- [Interpreter For Johann] There was a whole
and very effective argument to justify that.
This perversion of the moral argument had it
that the moral good was not to spare
the four-year-old child standing on the edge of the pit.
That would be cowardly.
It would be cowardly towards our race, towards our country,
towards our own children because the four-year-old child
in front of the pit wasn't a charming little child.
He was a Jew who, when he grew up,
would come and kill your own children,
therefore the higher morality
is to force yourself to kill this child
because you are conscious of the danger he represented.
(soldiers stomping)
- [Narrator] This barbarous logic reached its climax
in October 1941, when the Einsatzgruppen
attacked the city of Kiev.
(ominous music)
Another massacre,
but this one would be the most monstrous of all.
- [Christian] (speaking in foreign language)
- [Interpreter For Christian] It started on
the 28th of September 1941,
with posters put up all over the place that gave the order,
on pain of death, to Jewish citizens,
to gather for deportation, in a certain area.
They were then brought, on the morning of
the 29th of September 1941,
to the Ravine of the Grandmother, Babi Yar,
at the exit to the town.
- [Narrator] Most of the Jewish families
responded to the call.
They came with their luggage,
convinced they were going to be evacuated.
They were asked to undress and to lie down on the ground.
- [Christian] (speaking in foreign language)
- [Interpreter For Christian] At that moment,
those units put into place what would remain
the most gigantic genocidal massacre
of the Second World War, with the killing of 33,771 people,
men, women, and children, over two days.
(gentle music)
- [Narrator] The first bodies were covered with earth,
then they started again.
The killing went on hour after hour.
The SS took shifts to kill families
as if they were working on an assembly line.
- [Christian] (speaking in foreign language)
- [Interpreter For Christian] At Babi Yar,
it was the shooters with their rifles who forced people
to lie down before shooting them with a bullet in the head,
but they were using war weapons
that caused considerable bodily damage.
The heads exploded, so there was a confrontation
with extreme violence.
(ominous music)
- [Narrator] In total during the war,
one and a half million people were assassinated
in mass shootings.
(children laughing)
While men were engaged in the mass execution
of Jewish children, Himmler was still looking for ways
to accelerate the multiplication of pure-race Germans,
those who would, in the future,
live in the new living space liberated in the East.
He wanted to avoid abortions that could deprive the Reich
of future SS member. (babies crying)
- [Elissa] (speaking in foreign language)
- [Interpreter For Elissa] He made maternity wards available
where SS men's fiances
could go and give birth at their ease.
By SS fiances, I mean fiances who were going to be married
but also mistresses with whom SS members
had had extramarital affairs.
- [Johann] (speaking in foreign language)
- [Interpreter For Johann] The moral fault
was not that a young and beautiful German
would procreate outside of marriage.
Marriage was a Christian,
which is to say Jewish, institution.
The true moral fault was not to have children,
therefore, if the racially pure woman fell pregnant
and had children, the SS was duty bound to look after her
and make sure she gave birth
in the best possible conditions.
(gentle music) (babies crying)
- [Narrator] The SS created Germany's first nurseries,
before the war.
With the extension of the conflict,
they opened more of them around Europe.
These nurseries included foreigners,
women considered racially pure
who had had relations with SS members.
But it wasn't enough for Himmler to breed children,
he also stole them.
- [Johann] (speaking in foreign language)
- [Interpreter For Johann] In one of his speeches,
Himmler used a very surprising formula, which was,
we are going to steal German blood wherever it can be found
because in the history of the German race,
there had been two migrations.
Himmler said there was German blood, German pockets,
pockets of German blood in the Slav zones,
in the Jewish zones, etc.
They had to go and find this blood
and bring it back, re-Germanize it.
(ominous music) (children laughing)
- [Narrator] In the territories of occupied-Poland,
in Ukraine, in Russia,
the SS searched the kindergartens and school playgrounds.
Those with blonde hair and blue eyes were rounded up
and put into orphanages or given to SS foster families.
Some 200,000 children were kidnapped in this way
and grew up without knowing their real parents.
(birds chirping) (ominous music)
A few kilometers from Krakow, Auschwitz camp in Poland.
It was one of the new camps installed by the SS,
in the concurred zone.
On July 17, 1942, Himmler went to Auschwitz
on a secret mission.
He came to observe a new means of execution.
With the introduction in a closed room of Zyklon B,
a gas used to disinfect the camp, he witnessed the killing
of 449 Dutch Jews, in a matter of minutes.
Himmler left the camp quite pleased.
These SS men had just started to put
the final solution into practice.
The principle had already been agreed for some months.
The Fuhrer wanted to find a solution that was more radical
than deportation, to put an end to those
he called Germany's racial enemies.
The mass shootings were not killing fast enough
and many of those doing the shooting
were troubled by the monstrousness of their mission.
- [Johann] (speaking in foreign language)
- [Interpreter For Johann] What had been observed
on the ground in the experience of the mobile units
carrying out the massacres in the East from June 1941,
was that it was very hard to kill
and that being face to face with your victim
lead to psychological damage for the killers,
for the executioners.
(dramatic music)
- [Narrator] It was, therefore, both out of
a sort of morbid concern to improve efficiency
and to spare the executioners
that the gas chambers were installed.
At Auschwitz, a second camp was built, Birkenau,
which would enable the transformation
from a concentration camp to extermination camp.
- [Johann] (speaking in foreign language)
- [Interpreter For Johann] They thought up
what they called killing centers.
In other words, places where you bring people,
where you concentrate a population that has to be killed
and killed according to a certain procedure,
one that would spare the executioners as much as possible
by splitting the job into separate tasks.
(ominous music)
- [Narrator] The deportees arrived by trainload
in the middle of the camp.
They were then separated,
those who would be killed straight away
and those who would be worked to exhaustion.
The new arrivals were stripped of all their belongings,
which were saved and methodically sorted.
Suitcases,
shoes,
glasses.
Each task was carried out by different groups of SS members
in order to make the massacre easier, for the assassins.
- [Johann] (speaking in foreign language)
- [Interpreter For Johann] There were those
who got people out of the trains,
those who then took them to have their head shaved
and to be stripped, those who closed the doors,
those who put on gas masks, opened the hatches,
and poured in the poison, the ZyKlon B.
Splitting the job into separate tasks
permitted a sort of diluting of responsibility,
which spared the executioners because killing face to face
is a source of moral discomfort.
(dramatic music)
- [Narrator] Meanwhile, for the SS, life went on.
A stone's throw from the gas chambers,
leisure activities were organized for them.
Himmler insisted that care be taken to keep up moral.
The massacre of thousands of people
had to be just another job.
- [Elissa] (speaking in foreign language)
- [Interpreter For Elissa] All the camps were situated
outside towns, in the countryside, so you could go hiking,
visit your fiance, receive letters, take snapshots, etc.
In fact, SS members went to the cinema,
lead a life that was more or less normal during the war,
and I would say even that it was more or less comfortable
and that they didn't suffer from the shortages.
They were always well fed
and were a long way from the bombardments.
(gentle music)
- [Narrator] Unlike the Nazi's other crimes,
what happened in the extermination camps
was to remain as secret as possible.
Himmler thought public opinion was not yet ready
to understand what they were doing,
as the detainees came from all over Europe.
- [Nicolas] (speaking in foreign language)
- [Interpreter For Nicolas] Killing Soviet Jews
with mobile death squads where everyone saw
they were dragging dozens and dozens or thousands of Jews,
in the case of Babi Yar, to pits and executing them.
Everyone knew that was happening.
But for the Nazis, that didn't matter very much.
These were Soviet Jews in Soviet territory.
The fact that the news spread wasn't that important.
On the other hand, the policy that sought to
spread this extermination to all European Jews,
including therefore assimilated Jews,
Jews in positions of power in some countries,
French Jews, Dutch Jews, here, a much strong taboo
was transgressed and there was much more concern
about public opinion, including German public opinion.
- [Elissa] (speaking in foreign language)
- [Interpreter For Elissa] And the SS would always
be careful to destroy all traces of the murder,
so, in fact, that's why the cremation units were so large,
almost as large as the death squads in the gas chambers
because once the detainees had been killed,
the bodies had to be disposed of straight away.
They had to be burnt, so as not to leave any trace
of those murders, what today we would call a genocide.
(gentle music)
- Fire. (artillery blasts)
(dramatic music)
- [Narrator] At the beginning of 1943,
the war was at its turning point.
The German Army lost the Battle Stalingrad.
This defeat reinforced SS power
because it started to look like the last resort.
The military branches of the SS, the Waffen-SS,
was continuing to grow in size.
It's numbers doubled in a year,
to reach half a million fighters.
To facilitate recruitment,
the famous selection criteria were quietly softened.
The minimum height, five foot seven at the start of the war
was lowered to five foot two and a half for some units.
Himmler had had an idea.
Confronted with the Wehrmacht's failures,
he dreamed of making the SS into a complete substitute army.
June 1944, Operation Overlord.
The Americans landed in Normandy.
For the German Army, this new front was a catastrophe.
Himmler sent Waffen-SS divisions
to fill the gaps in the regular army's lines.
Among them were some of the most radical,
such as the Das Reich Waffen-SS division,
which had already distinguished itself on the Eastern Front.
(dramatic music)
Oradour-sur-Glane,
a French village 20 kilometers from Limoges.
On June 10, 1944,
members of the Das Reich division surrounded the village.
It was an operation intended to put a stop
to the acts of sabotage carried out by the resistance.
The inhabitants were ordered to gather
in the village square.
The men were taken away in small groups and shot in barns.
Meanwhile, the women and children
gathered in the church were burnt alive.
642 dead, a village wiped off the map.
This crime was seen as a symbol of SS barbarity,
but it was nothing compared with the assassinations
carried out in the East.
- [Christian] (speaking in foreign language)
- [Interpreter For Christian] Belorussia was 317 times
Oradour, 317 times.
Oradour every other day for four years,
so there's no sense in seeing Oradour as an exception.
The Nazis took the decision
and racial determinism took over.
In the East, people were barbarians,
who had to be kept in line, so all sorts of strategies
of coercion and aggression were used
against the civilian population.
Other decisions had been taken in the West,
but as soon as Operation Overlord happened,
bringing back war to this part of Europe,
the Nazis allowed a certain limited number
of civilian massacres.
These had, what you might call a semiotic function,
a function of communication.
They said, be careful, don't move,
otherwise we'll do that all the time.
At Oradour, it was all about terror and intimidation.
(ominous music)
(military cadence)
- [Narrator] Caught between the Russian front
and the American landing, the German Army withdrew.
The generals knew the end was near.
On July 20, 1944, Hitler escaped an assassination attempt.
Senior members of the German Army
were involved in the plot to kill him.
This was the opportunity Himmler had been waiting for.
The Fuhrer, who had lost confidence in the Wehrmacht,
made him head of the replacement army.
The former agronomist had become the most powerful man
in the Reich, after Hitler, but it was too late.
In April 1945, the Soviets entered Berlin.
Hitler killed himself in his bunker.
Himmler was arrested after attempting to flee
and committed suicide by biting a cyanide capsule.
It was the end of the war, the end of the SS empire.
The horrors of Nazism were displayed for all to see.
Thousands of SS members took their own lives.
Most of the others would remain caught
inside their criminal logic.
- [Johann] (speaking in foreign language)
- [Interpreter For Johann] These people took
full responsibility for what they had done.
Guilty they asked.
Guilty of what?
We saved Europe from Bolshevism.
We saved Europe from Stalin.
We cleaned Europe of those Jews
who wanted to undermine Western and European civilization.
Instead of dragging us into the mud and making us
stand trial, you should be raising statues in our honor
and giving us medals.
Today it's absolutely insane, from our point of view,
and absolutely unbearable when you know
what these people did, when you know the atrocity
and intensity of the crimes they committed,
but these people considered themselves white knights.
They never admitted to their guilt,
not in the sense that they said they hadn't done anything,
that they were innocent, no.
They said, we did these things.
We killed, but we were justified in doing what we did.
(dramatic music)
- [Narrator] At the Nuremberg trials,
this fanaticism had its uses.
The SS crimes were a perfect pretext for lifting
all responsibility from the rest of Germany.
As soon as the war ended, numerous generals were quick
to say they hadn't known about the extermination camps,
which had been under complete SS control.
- [Johann] (speaking in foreign language)
- [Interpreter For Johann] It was very convenient
for the civilian administration and the army, after the war,
to let the SS take the blame for all Nazi crimes.
The SS wasn't alone.
- [Nicolas] (speaking in foreign language)
- [Interpreter For Nicolas] Nowadays we know that,
on the ground, no party was guiltless of crime,
neither the Wehrmacht, the regular police,
the secret police, SS members, nor local populations.
All took part in a policy of death.
(dramatic music)
- [Narrator] You can not reduce Nazi horror to the SS,
nevertheless, this organization was Nazism's sharpest point.
It spread its ideology through the whole of German society.
Loyal to the oath of its leader, Heinrich Himmler,
it was indeed a terrifying vanguard, a vanguard of crime
for the construction of the most barbaric of regimes.
(explosion blasts)
(dramatic music)