FIRE CRACKLES
DRAMATIC MUSIC PLAYS
- I am the Reverend TJ Stretch,
attached as Padre to the formation controlling this camp.
This morning, we buried over 5,000 bodies.
We don't know who they are.
Behind me, you can see a pit which will contain another 5,000.
All these deaths have been caused
because of a treatment meted out to these poor people
by their SS guards.
- Things they have committed, well,
nobody'd think they were human at all.
We actually know now
what has been going on in these camps.
Erm, I know, personally, what I'm fighting for.
- After the Second World War,
some of the worst war criminals in history go to ground.
- Hoping that, in the near future,
their fortunes will change
and they would be players again.
- Many change their names,
and the most-wanted flee to South America.
Others claim the Holocaust never happened,
or had nothing to do with them.
Told by historians and experts,
this is the story of the little-known people
searching for truth and justice.
- Trying to confront this man who is the murderer of her entire family.
It's a hostile environment.
- What kind of men are they? Are they mad?
They must be mad.
- The hunt for Nazi war criminals
is without any parallel, to my knowledge,
either before or since.
- It's a hunt taking place against the backdrop of a world
that wants to forget and move on.
- Justice for him was everything.
- I'm upset that he died without being in a cage.
- # Amen. #
- At the end of the war,
Germany was in pieces.
A smoking ruin, basically.
The German population was defeated -
psychologically, as well as militarily.
- The Allies now want to win the peace
and help Germany rebuild and move on.
But there's also the question -
how to deliver justice
for the terrible crimes that have been committed.
With what remains of Hitler's inner circle now in custody,
the Allied leaders meet outside the ruins of Berlin.
- At the end of the war, it was really a problem for the Allies
deciding what they're going to do once they've captured Nazi leaders.
They do find real differences.
Churchill doesn't really want a trial at all.
He's quite happy if they're, you know, identified and shot.
Stalin, on the Soviet side, wanted trial,
but it's really cos they want a show trial.
Just put them in the court and then shoot them.
It's really only the Americans
who want a conventional western-style trial.
- The Americans get their way
and preparations begin.
A special courtroom is built in Nuremberg.
- This is the very first time ever
that a government of an enemy state
has been put on trial at the end of a war.
It's a complete novelty.
- CLOCK TICKS
Hitler,
Himmler
and Goebbels have killed themselves.
But in the dock will be Goering,
Hitler's right-hand man...
CLOCK TICKS
..Albert Speer,
who, among other things,
oversaw the slave labour system that built the V2 rockets,
..and Ribbentrop,
Hitler's Foreign Minister.
In total, 22 of the highest ranking Nazis...
..who will face charges of war crimes,
crimes against the peace, conspiracy,
and crimes against humanity.
CLOCK TICKS, CEASES
- The whole purpose of the trial was to put up,
in front of public opinion,
the terrible things that the Hitler regime did.
And they want to tell the world so that the world remembers.
- JUSTICE ROBERT H JACKSON: - The wrongs which we seek to punish
have been so malignant and so devastating
that civilisation cannot tolerate their being ignored
because it cannot survive their being repeated.
- I think for a great many of those who had led the Third Reich,
they think they might be punished.
But the idea that you'll have a huge international tribunal
in which they're held before world opinion,
I think very few of them had any idea of that.
- The defendants are to plead guilty
or not guilty to the charges against them.
Hermann Wilhelm Goring.
- As the most senior surviving Nazi,
Goering is first to make his plea.
- Goring knows that everything that he's enjoyed,
the power he's had, everything is lost.
Now he's thinking to himself, you know, "What do I do?"
- TRANSLATION:
- He starts off trying to make a speech.
"Here I am, I'm going to tell you how it was
"and you've got to take me seriously."
- JUDGE: - The defendants are not entitled to make a statement.
You must plead guilty or not guilty.
- And of course he can't make a speech,
but he does make it clear
that he doesn't respect the trial or the indictment,
and that's really what he wants to get across.
- All of the other defendants follow suit.
No-one accepts responsibility for the crimes of the Third Reich.
It's clear that Allied prosecutors
have a battle to prove their guilt,
and through them,
the guilt of the regime they served.
Not all high-ranking Nazis have been captured.
The job of tracking them down
and finding evidence of their crimes
falls to Allied soldiers.
One of them is 32-year-old Captain Victor Cross.
Before the war, he worked in the leather trade in Northampton.
Now, he's head of a small field security section
in Allied-occupied Germany.
- A field security section...
..they're a bridge between
military intelligence and civil policing,
and they basically go Nazi-hunting.
The Germans were not stupid.
They knew the game was up.
A lot of records were destroyed.
- But evidence is mounting
of those crimes against humanity
that were committed at Nazi camps.
- Not just Belsen, Auschwitz, Sachsenhausen, Ravensbruck -
all these concentration camps,
whose names still resound
with a sinister ring, even today.
- Allied HQ give Cross a list of suspects to find...
..the worst of whom are implicated in the Nazi genocide.
But immediately, there's a problem.
The list has over 70,000 names.
- The task is daunting, without doubt.
The scale of the hunt
for Nazi war criminals
is without any parallel,
either before or since.
- On this list are men like Klaus Barbie...
..one of the Gestapo chiefs
who tortured and murdered the French Resistance.
He's escaped from Allied custody and changed his name.
Adolf Eichmann, the bureaucrat
who managed the implementation of the Final Solution,
is living under a new identity,
pretending to be a chicken farmer.
Josef Mengele, the doctor of Auschwitz
who conducted murderous and perverted experiments
on men, women and children.
He's plotting his escape to South America.
And Rudolf Hoss,
the commandant of Auschwitz...
..who personally perfected the devastating system of mass murder
at the largest Nazi death camp.
He's complicit in the murders of over 1 million people.
And it's about Hoss that Cross gets his first lead...
..as he finds out that Hoss's wife
has been recognised in a sugar factory nearby.
- You don't know what you're going to find...
..and so you have to be ready for whatever eventuality.
He could have a riot on his hands - who knows?
- BANGING
But what they don't find among the factory workers
is their target - Rudolf Hoss.
But the intelligence on Hoss's wife is good.
She's set up home above the factory.
There's no sign of Hoss here either.
But they do find shocking reminders of the family's Nazi past.
- The British find - first, they find jewellery
looted from Auschwitz prisoners
in Hedwig Hoss's squalid accommodation.
And they find the visitor book
of their house in Auschwitz.
This is a trophy she has kept with her.
Hedwig and the children lived together with Rudolf Hoss
during the Second World War at the Auschwitz camp.
She knows about the gas chambers,
she knows about the mass killings,
she is a convinced Nazi, she is a convinced anti-Semite.
She also believes in the idea of Nazi patriarchy...
..and she absolutely decides not to tell the British
about the whereabouts of her husband.
She therefore lies that he is dead.
- But Cross notices there's no photograph of her dead husband,
something he'd expect a widow to have.
- You are not convinced she's telling the truth,
you have noticed the absence
of a photograph of the husband and father,
and you think, "OK, OK, meine frau, we'll be back.
"We are patient, we'll be back."
- Hedwig Hoss knows full well her husband isn't dead.
She was with him just days before the total German surrender.
- In May 1945,
leading SS officials in charge of the concentration camps
fled to the pathetic last stronghold of the Third Reich
in Flensburg in Schleswig-Holstein.
Here, some of the worst perpetrators of Nazi crimes...
..here they are all together for the last time.
Heinrich Himmler, the Reich leader of the SS,
ordered senior SS officers
to shed the uniform and to go into hiding.
The SS uniform has been an insignia of power, of pride, of dominance.
For SS officers who have occupied these positions of huge power
and influence over the lives and deaths of millions of people,
the end of the Third Reich is like an apocalypse.
Now they are changing from the hunters into being hunted.
- Now, in an innocuous Navy uniform...
..Hoss joins the queue to be captured.
Following Germany's surrender,
seven-and-a-half million Armed Forces personnel
are held in British and American camps.
- The Third Reich, the SS,
his livelihood, his ideology,
have all crumbled.
For Hoss, there is only one thing now,
and that is himself, that is his own life.
- As well as a new uniform,
he's armed himself with fake identity papers...
..and his captors don't realise who they have.
Under his alias of Petty Officer Franz Lang,
Hoss is released
after just a few weeks.
- One of the most notorious mass murderers of the 20th century,
suddenly, he's a nobody with a false identity.
He probably thinks that he has got away with it.
Some war criminals simply slip through the net.
- Meanwhile, at Nuremberg,
the prosecution are beginning to build their case.
But behind the scenes,
there is a concern.
One of the 22 defendants
has killed himself.
It's the American prison interpreter, Gustave Gilbert,
who has to deal with the fallout.
- It's true then as it is now,
that a suicide in a prison is a disaster.
But it's a particular disaster in Nuremberg
because these defendants have got to come to trial.
It's very important that all these defendants are cross-examined,
get to give their own testimony, and are also seen to face justice.
The commandant is clearly determined
that nobody else escapes justice by suicide.
He asks Gustave Gilbert to actually form the kinds of relationships
with these defendants,
such that he will be able to pick up
whether people are making plans to kill themselves,
whether their mood is changing.
- Gilbert has a PhD in psychology,
and is given the job of prison psychologist
and put on the suicide watch.
- He was a young man at the beginning of his career
and this job is really serious.
He is serving the process of justice.
I think Gilbert must feel the weight of history on his shoulders.
- So Gustave Gilbert is now in a unique psychological position.
A Jewish man from New York,
he has the opportunity to study the psyche of Hitler's inner circle.
He decides to conduct his own personal investigation.
JUDGE: - Prosecution for the United States will at this time
present a documentary film on concentration camps.
- Here is a way to make visible to the defendants,
and of course to the wider world,
the reality of the crimes against humanity
of which the prisoners are indicted.
"Here it is, this is what you did."
It's a change moment for Goring.
I think after that, he begins to realise what it is
that the Allies are going to pin on them.
- This film is very disturbing.
Gilbert is very concerned
that their suicide risk might go up with this evidence in full view.
- Number one on his watch
is Hermann Goring.
- With Hitler and Goebbels both dead,
there's no doubt that Goring really is the most important prisoner.
He was President of the German parliament.
He was Minister President of Prussia,
he was the Commander In Chief of the Air Force,
he was the Head of the Four-Year Plan and so on.
- Meeting a high-profile defendant
can be an occasion of tension.
For all of us who work in prisons,
there is a moment when you see this person
in a situation where the roles have completely reversed.
They are no longer the powerful ones.
There's this rather ordinary person just sitting there.
But I think for Gilbert,
the ordinariness slips away quite quickly,
because Goring doesn't hold back.
- After the film has been shown,
Gilbert visits him to see, really, what Goring's reaction is.
And Goring's reaction is, you know,
"They showed that awful film, it spoiled everything"...
..which is an extraordinary reaction.
You know, you really ought to be saying, "My God, this was terrible.
"How did we do that?"
It's the point at which Goring's already, I think,
begun to create a kind of psychological block.
I think Goring just blocked it out during the Third Reich, too.
- In reality, Goring cannot distance himself from it.
He authorised anti-Semitic policies...
..set up concentration camps in the '30s...
..and he was by Hitler's side during much of the genocide.
- From Gustave Gilbert's point of view,
this is a massive experiment,
this is about the minds of the Nazi high command.
But Gilbert has no manual.
He has to just go it alone as best he can,
with the tools of the day.
- He carries out psychological tests on Goring,
including ink blot and IQ tests
that he's adapted.
- I think what Gilbert wants to know is what the world wants to know -
are they mad?
They must be mad.
Or are they just people
who've done horrible things for horrible motives?
- Gilbert concludes that Goring is highly intelligent,
and he gets similar results for the other Nazi defendants.
- So, the question then remains is,
how do apparently ordinary men,
mentally normal men,
carry out this kind of level of cruelty and oppression and damage?
- November 1945,
and the German population
is only just beginning to come to terms with the truth.
Other public trials are taking place,
including that of the SS guards at Belsen.
These are former electricians,
hairdressers,
farmers' daughters,
who became torturers and murderers.
And during the trial,
one name keeps coming up over and over again -
Rudolf Hoss,
the commandant of Auschwitz.
Victor Cross and his men
are on the trail of the missing man.
- They are on the ground,
investigating, following leads,
talking to acquaintances.
It's painstaking work,
verging on police detective work.
It's not some streak of lightning from above.
- Cross believes that Hoss is still alive
and has likely heard from his wife that they're after him.
Time is ticking.
- You've got a very big target
with Rudolf Hoss.
This man was evil, what he did,
hundreds and thousands of human beings murdered.
Let's not dance around the bush, it's murder.
And you've got to keep going.
- But over six months have passed since Hoss went into hiding,
and Cross still doesn't know where to find him.
In Nuremberg,
the prosecution is still building its case,
with testimony from death camp survivors.
TRANSLATION:
- In February, a woman gives gruelling testimony in court
and it's horrifying.
- But even this evidence fails to break through to the Nazi leaders.
Each has a different response.
- Goring's very affected by it, he takes his headphones off,
he doesn't want to listen to it, doesn't want to confront it.
He talks to Gilbert,
he makes it clear that he's heard enough of this stuff,
he doesn't want to hear any more.
He is always trying to block out...
..erm, the sharp reality of the Third Reich.
- Up until this point,
Gilbert has been an observer,
studying their psychology.
But after hearing the witness testimony,
he confronts Goring,
and tries to make him acknowledge what he has done.
- Gilbert gets very angry with the defendants.
He clearly is maddened and distressed by what he's heard.
He wants them to accept responsibility and show remorse,
and they won't do it.
- Goring refuses to respond,
and goes on to complain that his room is too cold.
- My experience of working with people who've done horrible things
is that in order to carry out a horrible action,
in order to kill somebody else or be cruel to them,
you generally have to convince yourself
that you're doing something that's justifiable.
So you kind of tell a story of yourself that it's OK.
Goring, in his view, is that he was doing everything
that was required for the greater Germany to succeed and to triumph.
- Goring still claims
these horrors only took place on the peripheries of the regime.
He continues to deny the enormity of what happened.
- He's preparing for his defence.
He's still preparing to say,
"Terrible things that you've been showing have all been done
"by somebody else, a fraction of the Third Reich."
You know, "That is not the Third Reich."
- Across the prison corridor,
in the cell opposite,
another defendant is taking a very different approach...
..Albert Speer,
Hitler's architect who controlled slave labour camps
and personally oversaw the expansion of Auschwitz.
- Speer was deeply involved in the persecution of the Jews.
- PRODUCTION SLATE CLAPS
- He used concentration camp inmates
for war production,
so Speer knows exactly what is going on in these camps.
- CLOCK TICKS
But Speer was cunning.
He spent the last months of the war hiding evidence.
- When Speer pleads not guilty, he has a big advantage
because the prosecutors don't know
about his close cooperation with Himmler and the SS,
and there is a lack of documents about his crimes.
Speer's strategy is to deny all knowledge about atrocities,
and to claim that he just had been an architect and a technocrat.
- CLOCK TICKS
Speer is clever enough to realise
that denying everything won't be enough.
- He's anxious.
He's horrified by the prospect of being hanged.
- By March 1946,
the Allies are fracturing.
The Soviets are putting up the Iron Curtain,
dividing eastern Europe from the west.
And while Germany wants to move on from Nazism,
the crimes of the concentration camps
are only just beginning to be punished.
The whereabouts of Rudolf Hoss,
the commandant of Auschwitz,
are still unknown.
Captain Cross, of the Field Security Section,
decides to arrest his wife and eldest son.
- Clearly, their primary lead to Hoss was his wife.
For five days, she is asked the same question over and over -
"Where is your husband?"
And the reply is, over and over, "He is dead".
- Despite being separated from her children for five days,
she holds firm.
But Cross doesn't give up.
- "Whilst there is a possibility this woman is lying,
"we will try and break her."
- On the sixth day,
Cross ups the pressure.
His men have commandeered a train which now pulls up outside.
Cross tells Hedwig that unless she gives her husband up,
her son will be put on the train
and sent to Siberia.
- Maybe he gets a shot of adrenaline at this point.
- She's given Cross the name of a farm complex,
just 70 miles away.
- He would know those men inside out,
cos they've been together under stressful conditions,
and he will know...
..in particular, that the Jewish soldiers
will be thinking of the dreadful happenings in the camps.
They will all know what's at stake.
- BANGING
- Initially, Hoss thinks, "This is a burglary".
He feels so sure of himself,
he feels so confident that he's beyond reproach.
- DOOR THUDS OPEN
They check for a cyanide capsule
and find a mark of an SS soldier -
a blood group tattoo.
But Hoss maintains he's Franz Lang.
- Frau Hoss had given Cross the alias,
so when Hoss uses it, "Ah."
All falls into place. "We've got the right man."
Some of his soldiers turn to violence.
Cross maybe thinks, "Yes, this bastard needs to suffer,
"suffer here and now".
Does he let a handful of his soldiers
beat this man, possibly to death,
or does he step in?
- SOLDIER SPITS
- I think that many of the other officers' intervention
brought Cross up sharply
from indulging in illegal behaviour by his soldiers to,
"Right, this stops now."
- Cross doesn't yet realise how significant
his intervention will prove to be.
On the 18th of March 1946,
Hermann Goring takes the stand and faces cross-examination.
- After months and months,
he's got his chance, in front of the world, basically.
It's a chance for Goring, really, to put on record
a different view of the Third Reich
from the view that the prosecution has been presenting.
- JUDGE: - You...
..and others
cooperated in concentrating all authority in the German state
in the hands of the Fuhrer.
- TRANSLATION:
Finally able to make his case,
Goring turns the accusations
against him into a celebration
of the Nazi domination of Europe.
- At this point, Goring is still defending it,
he's still thinking that there was much about the Third Reich,
much about the Fuhrer, to be positive about.
And despite everything that's happened so far in the trial,
I think Goring is still hoping that
that's the message he can somehow get across.
He wants to defend the reputation of the Third Reich.
- But just as Goring smirks in the dock...
..at the same time,
Hoss is beginning to talk.
- Hoss no longer has to live under the alias of Franz Lang,
he can now openly say again who he is.
By talking about the number of prisoners he personally killed,
he is re-enacting his true self.
For Hoss, this is nothing to be ashamed of.
This is something, in his perverted mindset, to be proud of.
- Unbeknownst to Hermann Goring,
news of Hoss's confession reaches the American prosecution team.
CELL DOOR OPENS
- Hoss is suddenly told, "OK, you can have a haircut, you can shave.
"We're taking off your handcuffs.
"Put on some cleaner clothes.
"We are going to take you to Nuremberg."
- After months in obscurity,
Hoss finds himself about to step on to the global stage...
..as a last-minute witness.
TRANSLATION:
His confession, read out for the court and the world to hear,
will ring out in history.
- "I commanded Auschwitz until 1 December '43
"and estimate that at least 2,500,000 victims
"were executed and exterminated there
"by gassing and burning."
You signed that affidavit voluntarily,
and the affidavit is true?
- Hoss is the first senior Nazi
who puts it on the record, "We did it".
- Hoss is the first to explain in detail
the processes of systemised mass murder used in the death camps -
the planning, the infrastructure, the policy.
- Goring, Speer and the other defendants
can no longer deny the truth,
that the flagship project of Nazi Germany
was the mass annihilation of the Jews of Europe.
- Gilbert is feeling, "This is it.
"You can't deceive yourself any more.
"This is irrefutable evidence from one of your own people
"about the nuts and bolts of what you did."
- It certainly does deflate Goring.
He says, "After this, there's nothing we can do".
From this point on, really,
Goring begins to decline.
It's finally the nail in the coffin
for anybody who thinks they can find a way of defending themselves.
- But one man is yet to take to the stand.
- Speer had time to rethink his strategy
and time to distinguish himself from all the others.
The Hoss statement makes it clear for Speer
that he has to condemn the regime as evil.
On the morning of his cross-examination,
Speer is well prepared.
For Speer, it's THE decisive moment of his life.
He knows exactly what he wants to say,
he knows exactly how he wants to present himself.
- JUDGE: - Name, please.
Will you repeat this oath after me?
I swear by God...
..that I will speak the pure truth...
..and will withhold nothing.
You may sit down.
- In court, Speer is lying all the time.
He shows sadness and horror.
Speer is an actor,
a successful actor.
- Speer has seen how denials alone have been met by the court,
and so he gambles on taking a different approach.
- Speer plays a clever game.
He takes a general responsibility for the regime,
but he denies any personal guilt.
Speer denies any knowledge of atrocities.
The only thing Speer admits to is
that he should have known...
..that he should've asked.
In reality, he knew.
- The tribunal will now adjourn.
- At the end of August 1946,
after nine gruelling months,
the hearing of evidence is at an end.
Rudolf Hoss is flown to Poland.
He has returned to the scene of his crimes,
and he will be put on trial.
And in Nuremberg,
the verdicts are in.
JUDGE: - Defendant Hermann Wilhelm Goring,
the International Military Tribunal
sentences you to death by hanging.
The record discloses no excuses for this man.
- MUSIC: Requiem in D Minor by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
- Tribunal finds that Speer is not guilty on counts one and two,
but IS guilty under counts three and four.
Defendant Albert Speer, the Tribunal sentences you to 20 years in prison.
- Speer got away with his involvement in Nazi crimes.
He definitely should have hanged.
But Speer was so clever in his appearance,
and they want to believe him
and they want to believe that there is a good Nazi,
a noble Nazi.
- It's a role he'll play for the rest of his life.
Gustave Gilbert has endured the harrowing year-long trial
alongside the defendants.
- Gustave Gilbert had to sit through
every single day of the Nuremberg trials,
and he's kind of burnt out.
And there's something about weariness and anger
with the defendants that is a bit overwhelming for him.
- After the sentencing,
Gilbert makes a request to go home.
It's denied.
He must see out the executions.
- He is expected to carry out orders
and he has to stay to do a distasteful task.
- Goring makes a request to the Tribunal
to be shot by firing squad and not hanged.
Goring is trying to say, "Can't you respect me for what I am?
"I was the Reichsmarschall of the Third Reich.
"I want to have a Reichsmarschall's end.
"I don't want to be strung up like a common criminal."
- It's Gilbert who's dispatched
to give the answer to Goring's final request.
- I wonder if it was felt that Gilbert was the best man for the job.
It's possible that he volunteers for the job.
He's not going to see Goring alive again, their dialogues are over.
I wonder whether he wants to tell Goring what he thinks of him.
- You know, Goring really wants Gilbert
to say something reassuring, perhaps.
He says, "What have you thought about my personality?"
and Gilbert is...is candid.
He says, "You're a moral coward,
"you stand aside from responsibility".
Goring is not pleased by this response.
Perhaps he realises there's a germ of truth
in what it is that Gilbert's saying to him.
He has spent much of the trial trying to evade the worst.
- Gilbert delivers the last blow...
..news that Goring's request for a firing squad has been denied.
- I wonder whether it was important
for Gilbert to have the last word
and to turn and walk away...
..leaving Goring under no illusions what Dr Gilbert thought about him.
But Goring had no intention
of letting other people have the last word.
- This must be the point at which Goring is beginning to consider
that there might be another way to evade the noose.
- The executions are due to take place in just two hours' time...
..but Goring's already dead.
He's managed to get hold of a cyanide capsule.
- Whether it was slipped in by a guard
or whether it was somehow hidden on his person doesn't really matter.
The point is that Goring decided
he's not going to be hanged like a common criminal,
he's going to kill himself.
- I suspect that Gilbert might feel
some kind of relief that Goring is dead,
he might feel anger that he's escaped the hanging.
But he might just feel glad that perhaps, finally,
this chapter of his life is coming to an end,
that however it's happened, it's happened.
- Goring may have evaded the Allies' penalty for his crimes...
..but he's emphatically failed
to keep his version of the Third Reich's legacy alive.
- By the end of the trial, what we have is a situation where
a extraordinary level of atrocity and genocide
has been exposed,
and the Third Reich will always be remembered
for the sheer scale of human damage.
- As he walks away from Nuremberg,
Gilbert's learnt that these are ordinarily intelligent men.
He's learnt that they have a capacity to deceive themselves,
and that you can use all kinds of nationalist discourse
to convince yourself that you're doing the right thing
when you're really doing the wrong thing.
- DOOR CLATTERS
- With the execution of Hoss,
with the execution of other leading Nazis,
full justice has not been served,
because the monstrosity of the Third Reich's crimes
was so heinous, it was so unprecedented,
that the process of reckoning with the Nazi past
will probably never be complete.
- MUSIC: Moonlight Sonata No 14 by Ludwig van Beethoven
The hunt continues.
- Eichmann knows that his options have run out.
- Klaus Barbie was master of life and death.
- All of a sudden, they're realising
that their star source is, in fact, a monster.
- Justice was denied.
After the Second World War,
some of the worst war criminals in history go to ground.
- Hoping that, in the near future,
their fortunes will change
and they would be players again.
- Many changed their names,
and the most-wanted flee to South America.
Others claim the Holocaust never happened,
or had nothing to do with them.
Told by historians and experts,
this is the story of the little-known people
searching for truth and justice.
- Trying to confront this man who is the murderer of her entire family.
It's a hostile environment.
- What kind of men are they? Are they mad?
They must be mad.
- The hunt for Nazi war criminals
is without any parallel,
to my knowledge, either before or since.
- It's a hunt taking place against the backdrop of a world
that wants to forget and move on.
- Justice, for him, was everything.
- I'm upset that he died without being in a cage.
- In 1945, Allied troops swept across Germany,
bringing an end to 12 years of Nazi rule.
With Hitler dead and his country in ruins,
the surviving Nazi top brass were put on trial in Nuremberg,
and there, held to account for their crimes.
- Men, women and children
murdered in cold blood.
What rights has any man to mercy
who has played a part, however indirectly,
in such a crime?
- But many wanted Nazis are still on the run.
Among them, 39-year-old Adolf Eichmann.
Eichmann led the notorious Jewish Affairs Department...
..working under SS Commander Heinrich Himmler,
the architect of the Final Solution.
Eichmann arranged the transportation
of millions of European Jews to death camps.
His role was so important,
he was repeatedly singled out at the Nuremberg trials.
TRANSLATION:
- Adolf Eichmann is one of the most terrifying Nazis.
Eichmann encapsulates the essence of Nazism -
a lethal cocktail between enormous personal ambition on the one hand,
and a murderous ideology on the other.
Eichmann organised, with meticulous bureaucratic coldness,
the murder of millions of Jews in Europe.
- Eichmann may be a wanted man,
but he won't be easy to find.
Over seven million German prisoners of war have been taken.
- This time, the Wehrmacht are really beaten.
The master race of men are stripped of their insignias,
de-loused, numbered.
- The Allies face a monumental task
in distinguishing common soldiers from war criminals...
..and Eichmann takes full advantage.
- All SS men have a tattoo,
so he burns that off because he wants to survive.
He is planning a future without his identity as an SS officer
because he knows that if caught, if put on trial,
he will almost certainly be executed.
- When Eichmann is arrested and put in a POW camp,
he manages to hide his true identity.
Then, with the help of former SS colleagues,
he obtains false papers.
Now known as Otto Henninger,
a forestry worker,
he manages to escape...
..and goes into hiding in the woods in northern Germany.
- Eichmann has a huge ego.
He genuinely believes that he is beyond reproach.
Eichmann even starts jotting down notes
about his work for the SS.
He starts collecting newspaper clippings about himself.
Eichmann is still a free man, living under the radar.
It's almost absurd.
Like so many other Nazi perpetrators,
he wants above all to avoid justice.
- Eichmann is just one of thousands of wanted Nazis who remain at large...
..but the hunt is on to find them.
At the end of the war,
the Allied victors had divided Germany
into four separate administrative zones.
In the American-occupied zone,
the Counter Intelligence Corp - the CIC -
are tasked with finding Nazis on the run.
- The primary directive of the CIC
is to root out any vestiges of the Nazis
and to bring those people to justice,
holding them accountable
for the crimes and atrocities they've committed,
making sure the Nazis don't rise again.
- Former US infantryman Robert Taylor
has been transferred into the CIC
to help track down wanted war criminals.
- Robert Taylor really has no background in intelligence.
He had done some small-town journalism work.
He's not really prepared for this pretty significant role.
In my experience,
there's all kinds of moral ambiguities,
psychologically and emotionally,
that are entailed in the world of espionage.
But Robert Taylor is kind of thrust into this situation
with very little training.
It's a lot.
- In 1947,
the case of Nazi secret police chief Klaus Barbie
lands on Taylor's desk.
Posted with the Gestapo to southern France during the war,
Barbie became known as the Butcher of Lyon.
His job was to track down suspected communists
and members of the French Resistance.
- Not every Nazi perpetrator
was a born sadist and torturer...
..but Klaus Barbie certainly was.
He was master of life and death.
You know, he could wave his hand
and decide if somebody was to live or was to die.
As head of the Gestapo in Lyon,
Klaus Barbie enjoyed torturing,
mistreating, causing pain.
He had a whole range of techniques -
electroshocks, boiling water, cutting people.
Even after 1945,
he does not show any remorse, he doesn't show any regret.
He still admires Hitler, the Nazi regime.
- Despite Hitler's defeat,
Barbie is looking for a way to keep Nazism alive.
He's being helped by a group of wanted SS officers.
- The CIC become aware, through their informants,
that Barbie has a network of former SS personnel,
and it's operating within the American Zone.
This is precisely what the Americans
and what the CIC have been afraid of.
- Klaus Barbie and his group are on the run -
stealing, blackmailing,
but also procuring weapons.
They are plotting resistance against Allied occupation,
hoping that, in the near future,
their fortunes will change
and they would be players again.
- Robert Taylor and the CIC know immediately
that they have to gather intelligence on this network
and they have to be able to quash it.
The CIC plan this highly-coordinated swoop
to flush out all these former Nazis and capture them.
They're going to unknown houses,
knocking on doors,
and they don't know what awaits them on the other side.
It's a dangerous situation,
and failure is not an option.
- DOOR BANGS OPEN
MEN SHOUT
The Americans seize 70 Nazi suspects.
- This network is crushed...
..but at the same time, a key leader escapes...
..and that leader is Klaus Barbie.
- Klaus Barbie has just barely avoided arrest.
He's on his own, he has no place to go.
His greatest fear
is getting caught and being executed for his crimes,
and that is a real possibility.
- Then, events in the wider world
take an ominous turn.
Since the end of the war,
relations between the Western Allies and Russia have deteriorated rapidly.
In Washington, President Truman tells Congress
that the world faces a new ideological battle.
"Communism", he says, "is now the greatest threat".
- At the present moment,
nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life.
One way of life is based upon the will of the majority.
The second way of life relies upon terror and oppression,
and the suppression of personal freedom.
- CHEERING
Joseph Stalin now controls much of Eastern Europe...
..and the Americans fear his vast armies
could take over the Western world.
Battle lines are drawn for what's being called the Cold War.
- Now, in the early Cold War years, things are changing very quickly.
It's not so much arresting Nazis and bringing them to justice,
but fighting the communists.
- PHONE RINGS
- By 1947, the geopolitical landscape has shifted quite a bit,
and so has the mandate and the mindset of the CIC.
Robert Taylor's thinking, "What is the threat on the horizon?"
Not, "What is yesterday's threat?
"What is today and tomorrow's threat?"
Incredibly, the Nazis are not
a top intelligence priority for the Americans at this time.
- As the West's attention shifts to containing communism,
the CIC take their eye off wanted Nazis
like Klaus Barbie.
- He's lucky.
He runs into a former comrade, Kurt Merk,
who was stationed with him in France.
They couldn't believe the coincidence to run into each other.
And then, of course, they talk about the good old times.
Merk is clearly doing well for himself,
he's well-dressed and looking good and is in good spirits,
and Klaus Barbie is not.
- Former German intelligence officer Kurt Merk
tells Barbie he may be able to help him.
Merk arranges to meet an unlikely contact...
..the CIC's Robert Taylor.
Taylor has been paying Merk to track down suspected communists.
Now, Merk tells Taylor
he's found someone of even greater value -
an old friend from France, Klaus Barbie.
- When you're an intelligence officer on the ground,
your mandate is to collect the best intelligence you can.
So, Robert Taylor's not looking at Klaus Barbie
as a former Nazi on our wanted list.
He's looking at Klaus Barbie as a potential asset.
- Taylor could have Barbie arrested
and tried for his crimes...
..but instead, using Merk as an intermediary,
he invites the Butcher of Lyon to join them for lunch.
- For Klaus Barbie, it must be nerve-racking,
very, very stressful.
Ultimately, he's risking a lot.
But a life of this kind,
always on the run,
is not sustainable.
- Taylor's there to make an assessment of Barbie, to figure out,
does this person have what we call placement and access?
Which is the placement and the ability to access information
that the US Government might want.
- Barbie is a wanted war criminal,
so one would expect that this meeting
would have the form of an interrogation,
but it's actually not.
It's more of a conversation.
- It always begins with rapport, and that might surprise people.
They don't just get down to business.
So some time would've been spent just making small talk,
maybe about Barbie's family or his kids,
and Taylor giving a little information about himself.
And that always happens before they get down to brass tacks.
- Taylor makes the fervent Nazi an extraordinary offer...
..to work as a US agent,
hunting communists in return for his freedom.
- Taylor writes his thoughts after the meeting,
and he was impressed by Barbie as, quote,
"An honest man, both intellectually and personally.
"Absolutely without nerves or fear.
"He is strongly anti-communist and a Nazi idealist
"who believes that he and his beliefs were betrayed by the Nazis in power."
Hearing that seems quite shocking.
But, in the game of intelligence and espionage,
it's not unprecedented that the enemy's enemy becomes my friend.
So the CIC is probably not doing a lot of soul-searching.
These kind of cases happen all the time.
- Once he gets the offer from the CIC,
it's pretty much a no-brainer for him.
- CHILD GIGGLES
- This gives Barbie the opportunity
to have a normal life with his family again,
finally, after years of separation...
..constantly on the run and in hiding.
- The Americans find Barbie a new home
and offer him a generous monthly salary.
- Klaus Barbie's back in the game, he's fighting communists again.
- Within two years of Barbie's recruitment,
Germany becomes a front line in the deepening Cold War.
In 1949,
the four Allied occupied zones
are reshaped into two new countries -
a democratic West Germany
and a Soviet-controlled East.
NEWSREEL: - East zone Germans stage a so-called spontaneous demonstration.
On the Nazis' old stamping ground, Unter den Linden,
Berliners see a show that rivals Hitler's best.
- In East Berlin,
the Russians mark the birth of a new nation
with a choreographed parade.
For Klaus Barbie,
the looming communist threat
means more guaranteed work.
But his fellow war criminal,
SS Officer Adolf Eichmann,
has no role to play in this new world.
His crimes are so well-known by now,
that no side will touch him.
Eichmann remains in hiding,
still living in the remote West German countryside
as Otto Henninger.
- Eichmann experienced a huge fall from power.
He starts working on a chicken farm.
How pathetic does that sound,
one of the chief architects of the Holocaust
working on a chicken farm?
Eichmann's situation has become untenable for him.
So he starts planning a future outside of Germany.
- Eichmann intends to cross the border into neighbouring Austria,
where he hopes to find help from Nazi sympathisers.
Before he leaves West Germany,
he burns all his papers and cuttings,
erasing his trail.
- He's fed up with the idea that he has to live under the radar,
he wants to live under his real identity
and he wants to tell everyone in the world
what great achievements he has made during the Second World War.
He still believes that he has done nothing wrong.
- But what Eichmann doesn't know
is there's one man who refuses to forget his crimes.
Lawyer Fritz Bauer is a German-born Jew.
He spent time in a concentration camp in the '30s,
before fleeing to neutral Sweden.
Now, in 1949,
Bauer's returning home on a very personal mission.
- Fritz Bauer wants to confront German society with its past.
There was a fire burning in him.
The downfall of the Nazis was not a magic cure to anti-Semitism.
Being Jewish makes him an outsider.
He is likely to ask some uncomfortable questions...
..which nobody wants to hear.
- Fritz Bauer wants former Nazis like Eichmann
to be held accountable for their crimes,
but he's going to have to act alone.
When he looks around him,
he sees that more than half of the judges he works alongside
were themselves members of the Nazi Party.
- Fritz Bauer once said,
"As soon as I'm out of my office, I'm in enemy territory,"
and that literally referred to the building he was in.
The spirit of the Nazis was still very present.
- TRANSLATION:
- Nobody cares to talk about the things they did,
and he's angry, he's angry that many people
don't seem to want to learn any lessons from the past.
What message are you sending to the survivors,
the few survivors that are coming back to Germany,
like Fritz Bauer?
The message to them is, "You still don't count,
"we still don't care for you."
- TRANSLATION:
Fritz Bauer's crusade to hunt Nazis
earns him few friends.
- He receives a huge amount of mail,
full of hate, full of outrage.
People saying, "Go back to where you belong."
To some degree, it emboldens him,
it shows him he's going in the right direction
and he is hitting on the right notes.
And on the other hand, it means he has to be very careful.
- While Fritz Bauer begins his campaign for justice,
US agent Klaus Barbie is feeling untouchable.
- The Cold War is heating up,
and so, in a very short period of time,
he had a large number of sources
informing Americans about communist activities.
He gives them names and addresses and contact information,
so his American handlers are happy with him.
- But then, Barbie's reputation as the Butcher of Lyon
catches up with him.
The French want to question him about the torture and murder in 1943
of their wartime Resistance hero, Jean Moulin.
- Everybody talks about Jean Moulin
as a national hero in France, as an icon.
Every child knows about him,
and Klaus Barbie is one of the people
who murdered their national hero.
- When the French authorities demand to interrogate Barbie,
the Americans have no choice but to give him up for questioning.
But the CIC do so on their own terms.
- Barbie sees that the American officer clearly has his back
and is shielding him.
He was kind of looking down on the French
and belittling them almost, like, "What do you want?
"I work for the Americans, right, you cannot touch me."
- With the CIC's help,
Barbie is off the hook - again.
- One of the reasons I got out of intelligence is because
I think it's very easy
to lose sight of your own moral parameters
and for your moral compass to go quite askew,
without you even realising it, before it's too late.
And I think in this case,
what is appalling is that the CIC is putting the interests
and safety of Klaus Barbie
above any kind of measure of retribution or justice
for Barbie's victims.
- The list of crimes of Klaus Barbie is very long.
He's probably most notorious for the deportation of 44 Jewish children
from an orphanage near Lyon.
The youngest child was four years old and the oldest 17.
Those children were arrested on his order
and then murdered in Auschwitz.
- When a French newspaper breaks a story
about Barbie's criminal past...
..the Americans are forced to act.
- This puts the CIC in an extremely uncomfortable position,
because all of a sudden, they're realising
that their star source is in fact a monster.
It's at this point where I think we can safely say
that the CIC is operating way outside of its moral parameters.
- PHONE RINGS
- They decide that
the best thing to do is to make Barbie disappear.
- In March 1951,
CIC agents accompany Barbie and his young family
onto a train heading to Italy.
- It's not an option just to kill him off,
and if we go killing our foreign agents
or turning them over to the authorities,
nobody's ever going to come work for us in the future.
- Armed with false papers,
Klaus Barbie and his family
travel along a secret escape route - the Ratline -
used to smuggle wanted Nazis out of danger.
Using the Ratline,
they travel out of Germany,
through the Austrian Alps
to the Mediterranean port of Genoa.
In Genoa, the CIC put Barbie in touch
with a Vatican priest called Father Draganovic.
They pay him to secure a safe passage for Barbie
out of Europe altogether.
- Draganovic is a hard-core fascist and anti-communist.
In his headquarters, he has war criminals who are hiding as priests.
They're using code names,
they're using secret hideouts.
It all sounds very much like a James Bond movie,
but it was real.
- Draganovic tells Barbie he's already helped many wanted war criminals
flee to South America...
..in the hope that the Nazis may one day return and rise again.
- Draganovic is not an exception.
There are many Catholic priests like him helping a whole wave of Nazis
to leave the continent and start a new life overseas.
- BOAT HORN BLOWS
Three weeks later,
Barbie and his family arrive safely at the end of the Ratline,
7,000 miles away
in the Argentinian capital, Buenos Aires.
In South America,
even the most notorious Nazis can find refuge,
as sympathetic right-wing dictators turn a blind eye to their crimes.
- Klaus Barbie is not the only one.
Thousands of Nazi perpetrators were able to escape through the Ratline.
There is something really wrong here,
that justice was denied,
and the victims deserve justice.
- As Barbie makes his escape,
in the German town of Landsberg,
thousands of protesters demand clemency
for Nazi war criminals held in the local prison.
21 death sentences are overturned
and many other Nazi prisoners are released early,
including members of an SS extermination squad.
NEWSREEL: - Convicted at Nuremberg, they now walk out free men,
granted a reprieve.
They are greeted like heroes.
- The war has only been over for six years,
but already, attitudes to Nazi crimes are relaxing.
- In the 1950s,
Germany is a country that is starting to prosper.
- People are very happy to look to the future,
and they don't really feel a need to look in the past.
People are willing to forget and to forgive themselves.
- Lawyer Fritz Bauer pushes back against this collective amnesia.
He's still determined to bring Nazi Adolf Eichmann to justice.
In 1957,
he receives a letter from the Nazi safe haven of Argentina.
But this letter isn't full of the usual violent threats.
- Fritz Bauer had, for a number of years,
been trying to find out where Adolf Eichmann had escaped to
and where he was living.
But when he opens the letter,
he's surprised to find a message
from a German Jew living in Argentina,
called Lothar Hermann,
who tells him that Adolf Eichmann
is living under a false name in Argentina
with his wife and his children.
To Fritz Bauer,
this was incredibly valuable information.
And it's served to him on a platter.
- Bauer is reluctant to share his tip-off with his colleagues.
He still can't trust anyone working around him.
- Fritz Bauer realises
there are too many people in the police, in the prosecution,
who would want to tip off Eichmann and to allow him to escape.
Who could he turn to?
So, it's only Fritz Bauer
who is interested in catching Adolf Eichmann
and putting him on trial.
In this situation, he takes matters into his own hands
to seek contact with the Israelis.
- MUSIC: Zo Ahava by A Uzan & Philippe Guez
In 1959,
Bauer travels to the newly created state of Israel.
There, he makes contact with Isser Harel,
the chief of Mossad,
the Israeli intelligence agency.
- Catching a Nazi, it's not a priority in the Mossad.
The priority for the Mossad
is to find information
about the Arab states that surround Israel
and that want to destroy the young country.
- Fritz Bauer's very disappointed with Mossad.
It turns out they're very hesitant and very careful.
It's kind of reverse of what one would expect -
this elderly German man with a tie and suit
and these young Israeli secret agents,
and he's the one who's telling them to be more aggressive.
- To persuade Mossad to take on the case,
Bauer gives Harel an ultimatum -
if Mossad doesn't act,
he'll go to the press,
and then their chance to catch Eichmann by surprise will be lost.
- His gamble is successful.
The head of Mossad promises to give it a shot,
and to see whether they can catch Eichmann.
- PHONE RINGS
With his government's backing,
Harel agrees to bring Eichmann back to Israel to stand trial.
But he knows the scale of the challenge.
There is no extradition treaty between Israel and Argentina,
so Eichmann must be kidnapped and secretly smuggled back alive,
without the Argentinian authorities finding out.
- This is a very rare and very important operation.
To smuggle him alive to Israel is very, very complicated.
Isser Harel needs to think about all the small details.
There is plan A, there is plan B, there is plan C.
There is no place for failure here.
24/7, he's dreaming about it.
But the big failure can be that this is the wrong guy.
- Isser Harel sends Mossad agents to Buenos Aires.
They confirm Eichmann is living there,
under the pseudonym Riccardo Klement,
and he's working in a Mercedes car factory.
GOESCHEL: - The Mossad agents start observing Eichmann,
they start following him to and from work,
and his family home.
Eichmann is living with impunity.
He is not afraid of anything.
- CAMERA CLICKS
- He even allows people to take his photograph.
- CAMERA CLICKS
- He really feels safe from Allied prosecution.
- CAMERA CLICKS
Wednesday evening, 7:30.
Adolf Eichmann is on his way home by bus.
Parked near his usual stop
are four Mossad agents,
pretending their car has broken down.
Their chief, Isser Harel,
waits in a nearby cafe.
AVRAHAM: - He don't have any connection with them -
no telephone, nothing.
He just need to wait and pray.
Even if you are not religious, you need to pray sometimes.
One of the agents approaches him and say, "Momentito, senor."
It means, "Excuse me."
This is a very dangerous moment in the operation
because his wife and kids at home,
and it was isolated area, very quiet,
so if you scream, they can hear you.
- Surprisingly, Eichmann doesn't try to fight back.
He is resigned to his fate.
He is now a prisoner of the Israeli Government.
Eichmann knows that his options have run out.
- Isser Harel was shocked when he saw Adolf Eichmann.
He ask himself, "This is Adolf Eichmann,
"the Nazi, the head of the Jewish Department,
"the one that was the architect of the killing machine?"
This short guy,
this grey man,
this miserable runt.
- As Mossad secretly fly Eichmann back to Israel to stand trial,
lawyer Fritz Bauer meets an Israeli diplomat in Frankfurt.
- The first thing that the contact says is, "We've got him."
Fritz Bauer finds out before the world finds out.
He has this sweet moment of triumph.
- But Bauer's part in the operation can never be known.
By aiding and abetting the Israelis to kidnap a German national...
..Bauer's broken the law.
- Fritz Bauer had the courage to put his career at risk,
maybe even his personal freedom.
He had the courage to say no,
courage not to go along with everybody else,
not to choose the comfortable road.
But he has to take this secret into his grave.
He will never be able to receive applause openly,
and others will take the credit.
- TRANSLATION:
CAMERA CLICKS
NEWSREEL: - Here in Israel, Adolf Eichmann faces
probably the most appalling list of charges
ever to be levelled against a single human being.
The Israelis are trying to place before the conscience of the world
the full facts of how the Nazis tried literally to exterminate
millions of the Jewish people in Europe.
- The Eichmann trial is televised across the globe.
This is the first time a major Nazi war criminal
is put on trial by the state of Israel.
That is a huge moment.
Eichmann knows he will face justice.
- NEWSREEL: - The accused, together with others,
during the period 1939 to 1945,
caused the killing of millions of Jews
in his capacity as the person responsible
for the execution of the Nazi plan
for the physical extermination of the Jews,
known as the Final Solution of the Jewish problem.
- The list of charges against Eichmann is so long,
it takes the judges over an hour to read them out.
TRANSLATION:
GOESCHEL: - Eichmann claims that he is innocent.
He presents himself as a bureaucrat
who simply followed orders.
But over and over again,
he cannot hide his real identity.
- Israel, at the time,
is suffering from an inability
to speak about the unspeakable crimes.
And when finally Eichmann is put on trial in Jerusalem,
the victims have their voices heard,
people see that they're not alone,
see that they can get respect and understanding and empathy
for what they went through.
There's a great value in having a trial as a therapeutic moment,
as a cathartic moment.
- Two months into the trial,
the court is shown footage of the Holocaust...
..including the silent images shot by the Nazis themselves
in the Netherlands in 1944,
of trains taking men, women and children
to Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp.
A system of genocide
overseen by Eichmann himself.
MAN SPEAKS FRENCH
NEWSREEL: - This is Patrick Smith
calling Radio Newsreel from Jerusalem.
- Eight months after he first entered the court,
Eichmann prepares for judgment.
- Eichmann heard his verdict, standing stiffly to attention.
"The court convicts you of crimes against the Jewish people,
"crimes against humanity and of war crimes."
- Eichmann is found guilty on all counts.
He's sentenced to death.
Before his execution,
the Israeli authorities give Eichmann
the chance to meet a priest.
The priest asks Eichmann whether he repents.
Eichmann says, "No."
And then he is led to the gallows.
- NEWSREEL: - Eichmann was brought to justice and sentenced and executed
by survivors of the very people he sought to exterminate.
"He saw the backs of our dead," writes one paper.
"He met us face-to-face."
- His father isn't dead.
He was accused of these terrible crimes.
- This destroys her world, the way she has seen it until that moment.
- For Klaus Barbie,
one of his worst fears is now coming true.
- Speer wants to dominate the interpretation of the Third Reich.
APPLAUSE
West Germany is now a prosperous democracy.
Kurt Kiesinger is the Chancellor.
He is speaking at his party's annual conference.
But 29-year-old Beate Klarsfeld
has discovered a dark secret about Kiesinger...
..and she wants to tell the world.
- When she finally obtains a press card
and is standing in the main hall pressing a notebook to her body,
pretending she's a journalist,
she is extremely nervous, extremely tense.
She knows how risky this is.
She approaches Kiesinger from behind...
..and she slaps him into the face, shouting, "Nazi! Nazi!"
- Kiesinger is one of many former Nazis
who have returned to positions of power in Germany.
- The fact that a former Nazi
can become Head of State of Western Germany
is absolutely inacceptable and scandalous to Beate.
She's doing this to wake up the German population.
It's a warning sign that the younger people
are not accepting this any more.
- MUSIC: Lacrimosa from Mozart's Requiem in D minor
After the Second World War,
some of the worst war criminals in history go to ground.
- Hoping that in the near future, their fortunes will change
and they would be players again.
- Many change their names.
And the most wanted flee to South America.
Others claim the Holocaust never happened
or had nothing to do with them.
Told by historians and experts,
this is the story of the little-known people
searching for truth and justice.
- Trying to confront this man who is the murderer of her entire family.
It's a hostile environment.
- What kind of men are they? Are they mad?
They must be mad.
- The hunt for Nazi war criminals is without any parallel,
to my knowledge, either before or since.
- It's a hunt taking place against the backdrop of a world
that wants to forget and move on.
- Justice for him was everything.
- I'm upset that he died without being in a cage.
- By the 1960s, the Second World War is a distant memory.
Official Nazi hunting ended over a decade ago.
But there are a handful of people still determined
to bring the thousands of Nazi war criminals still at large to justice.
They've tracked down an anonymous Nazi bureaucrat - Adolf Eichmann...
..the man who organised the Final Solution.
- Adolf Eichmann faces the most appalling list of charges
ever to be levelled against a single human being.
- Eichmann is found guilty and executed.
As news of his fate spreads...
..it sends a signal to the murderers and torturers
who have been leading ordinary lives ever since.
They might not be safe after all.
One of them is Josef Mengele...
..former SS officer and physician at the largest Nazi death camp,
Auschwitz-Birkenau.
- He wasn't somebody in World War II that anybody who was at the top
of the Third Reich would have ever heard of.
The only people that knew him were the survivors of Auschwitz.
For them, he was the most important highest ranking Nazi of them all.
And he thought that he could, in Auschwitz,
use the people who were being sent there to die
as experiments to advance the cause
of this sort of Nazi racial science and eugenics
that had just exploded since the time Hitler came to power in '33.
And why is it that Mengele stands out?
Not just because he did so much, but because of who he did it on.
He did it on children.
Most of his experiment victims were twins.
One twin is the control, one twin is the experiment.
Over a period of time, he does a series of experiments.
Some of them involved trying to turn eyes into blue eyes.
There's a wall of eyes,
a wall of eyes that are pinned to a bulletin board.
His barbarity becomes more unchained and worse the longer he's there.
- For over a decade, Mengele has been living
in the right-wing military dictatorships
of Argentina and Paraguay,
where thousands of former Nazis escaped to after the war.
- Going to the finest cafes in Buenos Aires,
hanging out with architects, talking about German music,
taking skiing vacations in Bariloche up in the mountains.
The kidnapping of Eichmann, his trial and his execution
puts into Mengele the foundations for paranoia.
For the first time since the end of World War II,
the man who was responsible for sending hundreds of thousands
to their death, and experimented on thousands of children
in ways that are absolutely gruesome and horrendous, is afraid.
- Mengele feels he has no option but to flee his comfortable city life.
- Being in the phone book, having a medical supply business -
poof, out, finished.
Now you're the fugitive.
- Back in Germany, there could be a more serious threat to Mengele
from within his own family.
His son, Rolf, has been growing up unaware of his father's existence.
- So, Rolf Mengele in 1960, 16 years of age,
is a pretty typical 16-year-old.
He's not burdened by any sense of history,
or family legacy, or World War II.
He believes his own father died a war hero on the Eastern front.
That's all he needs to know.
- Now Rolf's 16,
his family decide it's time to come clean about his father.
- He is called in and what he learns...
..in a discussion with his family,
from the people that he trusts the most,
the people that he views as having raised him,
is that they have had this terrible lie about his life.
His father isn't dead.
He's still alive.
He's not in Germany, he's in South America.
And not only was he alive,
he was accused of these terrible crimes in the war.
You want to turn an adolescent's world upside down?
Have it be Rolf Mengele.
- As the children of the Third Reich come of age,
many start to ask questions about their country's past.
21-year-old Beate Kunzel has just moved from Berlin
to start a new life in Paris.
- It's a beautiful city, so different from the monotony of Berlin.
When Beate arrives in Paris,
she feels a huge sense of liberation and relief.
- Beate soon falls in love with a young Parisian
called Serge Klarsfeld.
- Serge tells Beate that he's Jewish
and that his father was deported to Auschwitz and murdered there.
He's the one who tells her for the first time
about the extermination of Jewish people.
And that turns her world upside down.
Beate is shocked, she's surprised, she's moved,
but her first reaction is to hold back.
She has rarely heard a good word about the Jews
and she was told to be suspicious of Jewish people.
- Beate was just six years old when the war ended.
- Beate remembers that time full of confusion,
full of despair, bitterness, hunger, poverty.
She played in the ruins of Berlin,
but she didn't really understand what happened during the Nazi years.
Nobody talked about the extermination of the Jewish people.
If she would have asked questions,
she probably wouldn't have gotten any responses.
The more Serge tells her about the brutal reality of Nazism,
and the more she understands what had happened
to millions of Jews during that time,
it destroys her world the way she has seen it until that moment.
Learning from Serge and his tragic family story
changes the way Beate thinks about being German and about Germany.
I feel very close to Beate in a sense that when I, as a German,
got married to my Jewish husband, Pascal,
and learned about his tragic family story,
it shaped my way of how I feel of being German
and it made me a German of conscience and awareness.
- Five years later, Beate is married to Serge.
Haunted by the fact that it was her people who murdered his father,
she wants to right the wrongs of her country's past.
- Beate's story is a classic coming-of-age story.
As soon as she breaks free and chooses her own way,
she wakes up, she can blossom,
and she discovers who she really is and what she is capable of doing.
She finds, in those years, her true calling,
pursuing justice on behalf of millions of victims
of the Holocaust.
She doesn't really have much time on her hands,
but still every minute she and Serge have,
they dedicate to collect and compile all the information
of former Nazis and victims they can.
Considering where her life begins...
..her transformation is even more remarkable.
- Beate focuses on Nazis who were active in occupied France
when Serge's father was deported to Auschwitz.
One of the worst of them is former SS officer Klaus Barbie.
In 1942, aged 29,
he became a Nazi Secret Police Chief in Southern France.
He was known as the Butcher of Lyon
because of his reputation for extreme cruelty.
- He was responsible for the arrest
of thousands of Jews hiding in France
and resistance fighters, torturing them, killing them.
He seems to have taken great joy out of causing pain to his victims.
- But Barbie is most notorious for sending 44 French children
to their deaths at Auschwitz.
After the war, to avoid capture,
he secretly worked as an informant for American intelligence,
as the Cold War began to escalate.
Then, in 1951,
his reputation as a torturer and murderer caught up with him
and he was forced to flee Europe via the Nazi Ratline for Bolivia.
He's been living here for 15 years under the alias Klaus Altmann.
- He has a network of Nazi comrades he can rely on.
He can be very social, he can be very charming.
Having beers, talking about Germany, Europe, the good old times,
is something that he enjoys to do.
But while doing that, he also doesn't hold back sometimes
of his views.
He makes pretty clear he still admires Hitler,
the Nazi regime, that he is an anti-Semite, he hates the Jews.
- It's not just fellow Germans that Barbie's in cahoots with.
His anti-Communist views and knowledge of torture techniques
make him useful to the right-wing military dictatorship
here in Bolivia.
- He's back into the game in Bolivia in the 1960s.
He was very much attracted to their ideology...
..the world of the military, spies and terrorism
and intelligence and double agents and coup d'etats.
All of that reminded him of the past years of his life
where he had the most power and had this career.
He could have stayed away, but he didn't.
- Beate gathers evidence about Barbie's crimes.
She lobbies the French government
to help her track him down and bring him to justice.
Beate's challenge is that in the 1960s,
the German economy is booming.
People's lives are on the up,
so the last thing on their minds is bringing old Nazis to justice.
- In those years, Beate is the moral conscience of Europe.
She has this internal conviction.
In that way, she is absolutely unique.
Some older Germans think she is just very annoying,
a young woman who was a child during the war,
who doesn't know much, who just makes a lot of noise.
But she is relentless and she's unstoppable.
- And Beate is right to be concerned.
One high-ranking Nazi is about to be released
from a 20-year prison sentence.
At one minute to midnight, Albert Speer,
Hitler's once close friend and Armaments Minister,
appears in a top-of-the-range Mercedes.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
- Yeah.
A pop star, a rock star is leaving prison.
- Speer escaped the noose at Nuremberg
after playing a clever game in court.
- Speer was deeply involved in the persecution of the Jews.
In close cooperation with Himmler,
he prepared the deportation of Berlin Jews to concentration camps.
He definitely should have hanged.
He's happy that he has survived Spandau
and that, now, he can look into the future.
- Now, I am no linguist, you see,
but I can tell you that I am quite glad to be outside here.
Ja, danke schon.
- Speer sees an opportunity to capitalise on his celebrity status.
Whilst in prison, he's been writing his memoirs.
Shortly after his release, he has lunch with a publisher.
- He knows that the public is eager to hear from him,
what he has to say about Hitler, because he was so close.
And the difference between him
and the other members of Hitler's inner circle
is that he is ready to talk.
He wants to dominate the interpretation of the Third Reich.
- Speer has every reason to think he will regain his former status.
Against a backdrop of collective amnesia in West Germany,
former Nazis are doing very well for themselves.
In the 1960s, they make up over half the country's lawyers and judges,
a third of Members of Parliament and half of all civil servants.
Right at the top of the tree
is the new German Chancellor, Kurt Kiesinger,
a former high-ranking Nazi
who disseminated anti-Semitic propaganda.
Any hope of changing this old world order
now rests with a new generation.
In 1968, students around the world protest against state militaries,
bureaucracy and civil injustice.
Young people everywhere
are challenging the status quo of their parents.
For young Germans, this is more complicated than for most,
particularly if you are Rolf Mengele.
- You could be in the new German generation and move forward
and be worried about the issues that were driving students' movements.
But if your father was a wanted war criminal,
that was hanging in the back of your mind constantly during this period.
So, to be Mengele's son
was the worst possible child to be of a Nazi, in Rolf's view.
And he carried that with him.
Then it became more of an anchor around his neck.
- Josef Mengele is now living in rural isolation in Brazil,
oblivious to the new ideas taking hold in the wider world.
- He's now stuck pretty much on this farm.
He doesn't go into town, he doesn't go shopping,
he doesn't decide to meet other people.
When he does venture a little bit away from the farmhouse,
he makes sure that he has this pack of stray dogs with him.
This was a period in which he had had his world pulled out from under him,
afraid he was going to be caught, executed and humiliated.
- Feeling isolated, Mengele decides to reach out to his son.
- I believe that Rolf would have preferred
that his father did not write to him.
I believe that Rolf would have been quite relieved
if he got the news, somebody said, "Your father's dead."
- The letters force Rolf to confront the real possibility
of turning his father in.
- His father is on the run longer than any other,
and he knows his father's alive and where he is
and is in communication with him.
Rolf must resolve for himself this moral quandary -
"What did my father do?", and how much responsibility he had.
He can't find that out by writing letters to him.
He must travel to South America and confront his father.
- Three years after his release from prison,
Speer's much-awaited memoir - Inside the Third Reich -
is published.
As the surviving member of Hitler's close inner circle,
this could be his chance to tell the truth about the Nazi regime.
- Speer depicts Hitler as the big, huge, god-like Fuhrer...
..and all others are kind of manipulated.
Speer appears in his memoirs as a victim, a victim of Hitler,
who just wanted to be an architect, who was innocent,
a young, ambitious man who - by chance -
met the dictator.
- Rather than speaking truthfully for the sake of history,
Speer speaks for the sake of himself.
It's the same strategy he used to save himself from execution
at the Nuremberg trials 25 years ago.
- Speer plays a clever game.
In his memoirs, Speer appears as a witness.
He is not a perpetrator.
He admits a general responsibility for the regime,
but he denies any personal guilt
for the atrocities committed by the Nazis.
He knows perfectly well that he's lying.
- Speer makes countless public appearances.
- I thought that you are prepared to admit that you knew about Auschwitz.
- Well, erm... - You didn't pursue your enquiries
to discover the dimensions of what was happening. - No, no...
- But surely you knew about Auschwitz and...
- No, that's not, it's not... I didn't write that.
You know that the Final Solution was a secret
and it was a secret to me too.
- There are still many, many problems,
many problems of trying to comprehend, trying to understand.
I wouldn't want to say, for myself,
that you cleared up all of those problems today.
- Well, to me, nowadays, it's incomprehensible too.
But I was thinking as a specialist and not thinking as a human being.
And it was so specialised in my job as an architect, as I was,
that I forgot that humanity is the most important part of life.
- But is your life a tranquil life now?
Or are you haunted by recollections all the time?
- I think I got rid of what happened by writing this book.
This happens often and I'm not haunted at all.
- His legend works because he eases the conscience of the Germans.
He provides an exonerating story - an alibi -
for all Germans.
"If Speer had not known,
"how could we have known about the atrocities?"
Speer is their symbol, they believe him.
His book is their Bible.
- Inside the Third Reich becomes an instant bestseller...
..and within a year, Speer has earned
almost a million Deutschmarks in royalties.
He becomes a wealthy man again.
MAN SPEAKS GERMAN
On the other side of the world,
another prominent Nazi is about to hit the headlines.
THEY SPEAK GERMAN
Beate Klarsfeld has tracked down a Klaus Altmann living in La Paz,
whom she strongly suspects is Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyon.
UNTRANSLATED
After being approached by a journalist,
Altmann is now giving an interview.
- Maybe he was so convinced of himself
that giving an interview to kind of push forward,
go into counterattack and telling the world,
"No, you're wrong, I'm telling you honestly here,
"I'm not hiding, I'm not this person, I'm not Klaus Barbie."
Maybe he was under the illusion that this strategy would work.
And so the French journalist starts asking questions
and they continue their conversation in German.
But then a very clever trick by the French journalist is
in the middle of the German conversation,
he asked Altmann - Barbie - a question in French.
And Altmann - Barbie -
understands the question perfectly well and responds.
It is not proof,
but it is an indication that this Altmann is lying.
- This is sensational.
Showing that he understands French means that this is Klaus Barbie,
this is not Klaus Altmann.
This is the Butcher of Lyon,
one of the most horrible, atrocious war criminals.
And now she knows where he is,
and she knows also that she needs to use this momentum
to get as much international publicity as she can,
to increase the pressure on both the Bolivian
and the French governments to extradite him,
so that he can finally be tried and brought to justice.
- Days later, Beate flies to La Paz.
Accompanying her is Ita Halaunbrenner.
Barbie murdered her husband during the war...
..and her two young daughters were among the 44 children
Barbie sent to die at Auschwitz.
- Bringing one of Barbie's victims to Bolivia
and let her tell her own life story
and the tremendous, horrible losses she suffered under Barbie is...
It's the most effective thing she can do.
Let the victim talk.
Going to Bolivia is very risky.
It's a hostile environment.
This country is a right-wing military dictatorship.
But, of course, Beate being Beate, she does whatever she wants.
She is not scared by that.
- Unsurprisingly, Barbie refuses to meet Beate and Ita,
so they chain themselves to a bench outside his office.
TELEPHONE RINGS
- Klaus Barbie is used to spies and intelligence
and blackmail and double agents and betrayal.
And then he is confronting now
an opponent which totally don't fit the bill.
They are morally upright people.
They're standing for a good cause. They have no hidden agenda.
It must have been very confusing to him.
- When Beate is asked what those chains mean,
she says, "Those are the chains that link Bolivia to Nazism."
The police arrive, confiscate the signs,
but that doesn't stop Beate and Ita.
They remain on the bench, calling for Barbie's extradition.
- Beate realises her attempts to capture Barbie are futile
when a government official tells her Bolivia is a protected asylum
and those who take refuge there are sacrosanct.
Within days, Beate is arrested and deported back to France.
The Butcher of Lyon is safe for now.
But the publicity generated around Beate's visit
has exposed his crimes to the world
and he decides he needs to retaliate.
Mirna Murillo is one of the journalists
who reported on Barbie's crimes in the wake of Beate's visit.
- So, listening to her testimony, it almost feels like time travelling.
Nothing has changed.
We are back into Lyon at the Gestapo headquarters.
You know, Klaus Barbie sneaking in and looking at her...
..it almost seems like he wants to send out a signal,
that he is in charge, that he can pull this off,
that this can happen to anyone who tries to get after him.
- Rolf Mengele has finally decided to travel to South America
to confront his father, Josef Mengele,
about the crimes he committed at Auschwitz.
- What he hopes he will hear is his father to say,
"Auschwitz, that was really a terrible place.
"I hated it. I never wanted to be there, but I had to.
"I couldn't leave.
"And I've been tortured by it and I wake up at nights
"and it's a nightmare for me and I don't know what to do."
Rolf's approach is not to be confrontational at the start.
Josef is the one who takes the issue of Auschwitz.
At first, he says, "I was ordered to do that.
"They were my orders. I didn't invent Auschwitz."
Yes, he's just a functionary, he's a cog in the big machine.
Rolf lets that go on for quite a while
before he then turns the tables
into becoming the cross-examining attorney and pushing his father.
Then, "If you felt like that, why didn't you do this?
"Why didn't you turn yourself in?
"Why don't you go ahead and tell the world what happened?"
And at that moment, there is a breaking point.
The real ideologue comes out, the real Nazi comes out,
the real eugenics scientist who thought that he was at the forefront
of engineering a master race -
"Those children, who are now adults, who describe the experiments
"and for which I am wanted would have been dead
"if I hadn't pulled them aside and saved their lives."
And in his warped vision of the world,
he should be thanked for that.
He is captured in this World War II nationalist,
socialist ideology and medical quackery about superior races
and he cannot come out of it, because to do so would be to shatter
his carefully thought of defence as to why he's not a monster.
He's not going to admit it in front of his son,
he can't come close to admitting it.
And Rolf understands that.
It's clear as a bell.
He's learned all he needs to know
about his unrepentant, war criminal father.
- Rolf is now key to facilitating the wheels of justice.
- What is most important after the visit
is what Rolf decides not to do.
I'd like Rolf to storm out of the house and get on a plane
and fly back to Germany and say, "You are a criminal",
and call up the police.
Of course that's what I would like. But he doesn't do that.
He now knows that if his father is put on trial,
it's a disaster for the family,
because his father is not going to say, "I'm sorry, I plead guilty,"
and it's going to be humiliating and personally destructive
for anybody connected to Josef Mengele.
I absolutely criticise him.
You had a duty to the victims.
He could have done things differently.
- In 1978, after decades of denial about the crimes of the Nazis,
a big budget TV drama series, The Holocaust,
is broadcast in the US and a year later in Germany.
- Holocaust research started really seriously out in the 1960s.
It started with academics at universities.
But that didn't reach a wider audience at first.
- When the Holocaust television series runs,
it is as if a light switch turns on in Germany
and in other countries about the crimes of World War II.
This television event brings it home into everybody's living room.
They were able to see it, they talked about it, it's high rated.
- The Holocaust mini-series changed how the Germans viewed themselves.
The series is like a mirror.
For many of them,
this is the first time - even if it is fictitious -
to see what happened in the gas chambers
and in the concentration camps.
It is a unique way of showing Germans
what they inflicted on Jewish people.
- CHANTING
In this era of public awakening about Germany's dark past,
Josef Mengele features in popular culture as the ultimate bogeyman.
- He now becomes the focus of all of the attention of Nazi hunters.
He becomes the Angel of Death, the fugitive still missing.
In 1976, there was a movie, Marathon Man,
based upon a character that looks like Mengele.
The year after that, there's a movie made,
Boys from Brazil, in which he's named.
- But his son Rolf continues to stay silent
about his father's whereabouts.
Then Rolf gets a visit from one of his father's contacts.
Josef Mengele has drowned after suffering a stroke
while swimming off the coast of Brazil.
- When Rolf first got the news about his father's death in 1979,
it was a tremendous relief -
because Josef Mengele, his father, was an obligation,
was a burden that he had to think about in the back of his mind.
Much better that resolution than a trial.
He's then faced with a much lower bar to pass the moral,
you know, test of doing the right thing -
stop the hunt for his father,
so that the people who were his victims at Auschwitz
don't keep looking for this ghost.
If he wasn't going to turn him in,
which would have been the dream scenario,
then at the very least to have told us he was dead.
- It's not until six years later,
when the New York Times breaks a story
that Mengele's remains have been discovered in Brazil,
that the hunt for the Angel of Death comes to an end.
- I'm upset that he died without being in a cage.
Having Mengele, who had blood on his hands,
who was in the heart of the Final Solution at Auschwitz,
testifying in a trial
would have been remarkably important for history.
We're robbed of that. He got away.
- Closer to home, Albert Speer is being interviewed
about his architecture for a BBC documentary.
- Hitler's hobby was architecture, and it was difficult to change his,
erm, his designs...
..without offending him.
- At the end of his life,
Speer still likes to be a celebrity and he does interviews.
But at the same time,
Speer is annoyed by talking always about the past.
He wants to have a present again.
He flees Germany, he flees his own myth.
Speer has a relationship with a German woman living in London.
When he's in England, he's kind of unknown.
After the interview, he met his girlfriend in a hotel in London
and he suffered a stroke and he died on that same day.
He prolonged the war and he was responsible for millions of deaths.
He is a perpetrator, but at the same time, he got away with everything.
Speer's legacy is not his architecture...
..but his Nazi past.
- Beate Klarsfeld now has to find the Nazis still out there
before it's too late.
After almost two decades of struggling for justice,
Beate and her husband, Serge,
are among the most prolific Nazi hunters in the world.
- The Klarsfelds are well known throughout Europe
for their very interesting home movies.
- It was very easy to find Herbert Hagen,
and Beate jumped immediately to the car and I told him,
"Are you the same Mr Hagen
"who was one of the highest leaders of the Gestapo in France?"
- As a result of their direct action,
former SS officer Herbert Hagen is brought to trial for his role
in the deportation of 73,000 Jews to Auschwitz...
..as is another of their targets, Kurt Lischka...
..who they had even attempted to kidnap in the 1970s.
And Chancellor Kurt Kiesinger is voted out of power
a year after Beate revealed his Nazi past with a slap.
But the Nazi at the top of Beate's case file, Klaus Barbie,
continues to elude her...
..until the 1980s.
CHANTING
In Bolivia, a new left-leaning
democratically elected government takes power.
CHANTING
- The new government declares to come to a conclusion
and to deal with Klaus Altmann, Klaus Barbie.
He cannot rely on the political establishment
and the protection any more of the military
that he could rely on for so many years now.
The new government, from his point of view, is the enemy.
And also, the times have changed. We're now in the '80s.
The world understands much more what happened,
the nature of the Nazi regime, the nature of its crimes
and also the role of Klaus Barbie in it.
So, it does not look very good for him.
His days in Bolivia are numbered.
- WOMAN SPEAKS GERMAN
- Beate knows now this is her moment,
this is the time she's been waiting for for over ten years,
and she immediately jumps into action.
She knows she only has a very small window of opportunity,
maybe just a few days.
She simultaneously negotiates with the Bolivian government
and the French government.
Her biggest priority now is to make sure
that if he gets extradited that he's not being sent to Germany,
where the sentence could be much less than in France.
This could be potentially the biggest victory
of her lifelong fight.
- Under Bolivian law, Barbie can only be arrested
and extradited for a crime he's committed in Bolivia.
But the authorities are already one step ahead.
They discover that Barbie has an unpaid business debt.
On the 4th of February 1983,
the Butcher of Lyon is finally forced
to leave his South American safe haven.
- One of his first fears...
..is now coming true -
that he is being handed over to the French.
He wanted to avoid this by all means possible.
To be forced to return to the scene of the crime,
this is the worst possible outcome.
He is not the strong, self-confident Klaus Barbie
that can survive everything.
He is really a broken man from that point on
and his will seems to be broken.
I think this is the surrender that he avoided in May 1945.
This is his personal surrender.
- On arrival in France,
Barbie is taken to Montluc jail in Lyon,
where he personally tortured so many of his victims 40 years ago.
Here he remains until his trial.
- She is the engine behind all this.
There can't be any justice for the murder of 6 million people,
but what those trials can bring is some redemption to the many victims.
She also knows this is just a milestone and her fight continues
as long as others are still free and unpunished.