- today
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00Down this road, on a summer day in 1944, the soldiers came.
00:20Nobody lives here now.
00:24They stayed only a few hours.
00:34When they had gone, a community which had lived for a thousand years was dead.
00:43This is Avedour-sur-Glane in France.
00:49The day the soldiers came, the people were gathered together.
00:54The men were taken to garages and barns.
00:58The women and children were led down this road, and they were driven into this church.
01:08Here, they heard the firing as their men were shot.
01:14Then they were killed too.
01:17A few weeks later, many of those who had done the killing were themselves dead in battle.
01:29They never rebuilt Avedour.
01:32Its ruins are a memorial.
01:37Its martyrdom stands for thousand upon thousand of other martyrdoms in Poland, in Russia, in Burma, in China, in a world at war.
01:50Avedour.
01:51Avedour.
01:52Avedour.
01:53Avedour.
01:54Avedour.
01:55Avedour.
01:56Used in Brpta.
01:57Avedour.
02:00Avedour.
02:01Avedour.
02:32Germany, 1933.
02:55A huge, blind excitement fills the streets.
03:02The National Socialists have come to power in a land tortured by unemployment, embittered
03:07by loss of territory, demoralized by political weakness.
03:12Perhaps this will be the new beginning.
03:14Most people think the Nazis are a little absurd here, too obsessive there.
03:25But perhaps the time for thinking is over.
03:28Adolf Hitler did not seize power.
03:36He was offered it just as his voting strength was declining.
03:40The politicians who made Hitler Chancellor argued, we are hiring him.
03:46Their figurehead was the ancient president von Hindenburg.
03:49The communists and socialists tried to take Hitler coolly.
03:57This wouldn't last, they said.
03:59Conservative anti-Nazis took comfort from the fact that their old war leader, Hindenburg,
04:04still head of state, was known to despise the vulgar little corporal.
04:08Æmode 982, Herr Reichspräsident von Hindenburg.
04:15So, fertig?
04:17No.
04:20No, no, no, it's fertig, then.
04:23with mock solemnity hitler and his lieutenants walked to the ceremonial opening of parliament
04:43the party's strength had been built up by revolutionary violence they had never imagined
04:48that they could take office legally when the old reich tag building was mysteriously gutted by
04:54fire hitler seized his chance to suspend all civil liberty his followers could hardly believe their luck
05:08the old hindenburg the symbol of apparent continuity presided as they turned office
05:13into power by acts of sham legality in march when the reich tag voted to allow hitler to govern
05:20without parliament hindenburg made no comment the legal chancellor marched irresistibly into the role
05:30of the legal dictator
05:43the new germany
05:51hitler proclaimed the new germany and meant it to last a thousand years
06:00the new germany began to round up its enemies
06:03communists socialists impertinent journalists even reichstag deputies
06:14at oranienburg concentration camp just north of berlin conditions were at first crude rather than brutal
06:20at this time the camps were run by the sturmabteilungen the sr they bullied more than they murdered
06:32from the first moment hitler unleashed his promised campaign against the jews
06:51the sr organized boycotts of jewish-owned shops
06:55the real point was to encourage the german people to think and act anti-semitic as a matter of cause
07:05the outside world was horrified but there were those including many german jews who thought the
07:11anti-jewish campaign the work of nazi extremists something her hitler would put a stop to when he felt more secure
07:18there was to be a cultural revolution too german culture would be purged of the jewish bolshevist
07:27the books flew into the fire many of those who flung them were students and teachers and as the sparks rose
07:50the intellectuals the intellectuals fled writers and scientists to give their talents to western europe
07:56and america
08:00a hundred years before the german jewish poet heiner whose books now went into the fire had warned
08:07where one burns books there one eventually burns people
08:12some of hitler's most earnest followers found new ways to show loyalty they married or got married
08:24all over again under a nazi ritual
08:38the nazis had mass support among the unemployed but less among the organized workers
08:46the left wing of the party wanted to start a workers movement inside the factories
08:50but hitler took a simpler course he granted the unions the mayday holiday they had always demanded
08:58next day he abolished the union
09:01nazi supporters were basically middle class shopkeepers ruined by the depression
09:07clerks who had lost their savings craftsmen squeezed out by mass production
09:12so
09:19these were hitler's worshippers
09:21To this army of those who had come down in the world belonged the small farmers, the
09:36peasants. Hitler had enlisted them during the Depression. Now he told them that their
09:42blood and their soil were Germany's treasure. He passed laws to give them safe possession
09:47of their fields and he gave them bread. The Treaty of Versailles in 1919 had bitten
10:10deep into Germany's frontiers. Alsace-Lorraine and the Saarland had been lost.
10:19East Prussia was cut off by the new Polish state. Silesia cut in two.
10:25Danzig, a League of Nations city.
10:28To every patriot Germany could not be free while Versailles stood.
10:37Hitler alone seemed the savior foretold by the monuments at the border.
10:43Never, German, forget what blind hate stole from thee.
10:49Wait for the hour that avenges the bleeding Frontier cry.
11:02Abroad, there were some who admired the way this new Germany stood up for herself.
11:08In America we've had many reports against your new government and in most cases this has caused
11:13hasty demonstrations everywhere. I can now say to you that the American people today realize
11:19that these stories are untrue and without foundation. I find that there's a new fresh vitality here
11:25in Germany under your great leader and Chancellor Adolf Hitler whom I'm a great admirer.
11:30The new Germany will live for you have the best centralized government in the world today.
11:37In fact, the new Germany was a bundle of different interests and grievances
11:42held together by the strap of the National Socialist Party.
11:45And the buckle of the strap was Hitler.
11:48...is the state geworden.
11:51...the costbarste Besitz auf dieser Welt aber ist das eigene Volk.
12:00Und für dieses Volk und um dieses Volk wollen wir ringen und wollen wir kämpfen
12:09und niemals nahmen und niemals ermüden und niemals verzagen und niemals verzweifeln.
12:20Es lebe unsere Bewildung! Es lebe unser deutsches Volk!
12:27Well, really it was the only party that promised to get us out of the hole.
12:32And their idea was principally that that would only be possible if we developed as a nation
12:44a team spirit, a solidarity and pulling all on the same rope instead of quarreling about
12:54pity differences of opinions in foreign politics and social politics and so on and so forth.
13:01What did he promise? Work and bread for the masses, for the millions of workers who were unemployed
13:12and hungry at that time. Nowadays in our prosperous society, work and bread doesn't mean anything anymore.
13:21But then it was an absolutely basic need and this promise, which wouldn't make any sense today,
13:28then it sounded like a promise of paradise.
13:35All this seemed ideal ground for a prophet to say, I will lead you to the promised land.
13:44I will deliver you from evil. Anyone who said that would be greeted with enthusiasm.
13:51Of course, there were people who said this is a false prophet. But who was to know whether they were right or not?
14:06At that time, no one did.
14:09Christmas 1933. One year of Hitler's Reich. Peace on earth. Good will towards men. The concentration camps were full. Parliament a rubber stamp.
14:20Political parties and trade unions abolished. The Jews out of the civil service. A free press strangled. Personal liberties destroyed.
14:35Germany lived under a permanent state of emergency.
14:50Adolf Hitler's state was all-powerful, even almighty.
15:05But he still felt threatened. He feared his old conservative rivals. He feared the army.
15:20And he feared those sections of his own party which were still revolutionary, like the leadership of the stormtroopers.
15:28The army, too, hated the S.R. Hitler saw how he could conciliate the generals and clear his own path.
15:40The head of the S.R. was one of his oldest comrades, Ernst Röhm.
15:47On June the 30th, 1934, Röhm was arrested and shot.
15:53His S.R. commanders and more than a hundred others dragged from their beds were shot, too.
16:02Murder exploded across Germany.
16:05The killers were the new force in Germany.
16:08The S.S. Hitler's bodyguard, which now became his personal instrument of terror.
16:14Goering gave a press conference at the propaganda ministry.
16:21Goebbels was the minister of propaganda, but Goebbels had wisely stayed with Hitler at that time because Goehring hated his guts.
16:29He might have taken the opportunity to bump him off if he'd been in Berlin.
16:33Goehring had that press conference for the foreign press.
16:38Before that, the telephones had been cut off to all foreign countries.
16:43Goehring came striding in and said,
16:46Well, I know you boys always like to have a story.
16:51He used the English word.
16:53I've got a story for you all right.
16:56And described how that previous night and that morning, he and Hitler had acted against dissident forces, both of the right and of the left.
17:12That Rome had been shot, that a second revolution had been quashed.
17:19And he also made a rather obscure reference to General von Schleicher, who had preceded Hitler as German Chancellor.
17:30Then he left Rome, came back again in a few seconds and said,
17:35It's been suggested to me that I didn't make myself quite clear about General von Schleicher.
17:40General von Schleicher was shot dead this morning while resisting arrest.
17:44The 30s of June 1934 was a very, very important day because it became obvious that this government, as a government, started to become a murder.
17:59You remember that they shot a great number of people without any bringing them to court.
18:07They just killed them.
18:09And not only direct enemies of Hitler in that moment, not only Rome, the head of the SR, but also other people who they felt were unpleasant.
18:27And they just did it at the same time.
18:38That summer, another rival disappeared.
18:44President Hindenburg died in his bed on August the 2nd.
18:48While the old man was still breathing, Hitler had abolished the office of President, proclaiming himself Fuhrer and Chancellor, Head of State and Governor.
19:03And before his corpse was laid to rest, Hitler usurped his command over the army.
19:14The armed forces paraded to swear a new oath, where once they had sworn loyalty to the Constitution, now they pledged themselves to Hitler, personally, by name.
19:25I pray to God, this holy oath, that I will the leader of the German Reich and the people, Adolf Hitler.
19:50For German officers, an oath was almost physically real.
19:55Hitler had trapped them.
20:00Now they could not disobey him without disobeying the fatherland.
20:05I pray.
20:06I pray.
20:07I pray.
20:08I pray.
20:09I pray.
20:10I pray.
20:11I pray.
20:12I pray.
20:13I pray.
20:14I pray.
20:15Adolf Hitler.
20:16Adolf Hitler.
20:17Adolf Hitler.
20:18Adolf Hitler.
20:19Adolf Hitler.
20:20Adolf Hitler.
20:21Adolf Hitler.
20:22Adolf Hitler.
20:23Adolf Hitler.
20:24Adolf Hitler.
20:25Hitler kept up the pace.
20:30That same month the Germans had to go again to the polls
20:33to approve his assumption of state and government powers.
20:37By now the machinery of ballot management by threat, propaganda, forgery and fraud
20:42was functioning excellently.
20:50Hitler had a 90% Ja.
20:54Four million still voted nine.
20:59Hitler proclaimed for the next thousand years
21:03there will be no other revolution in Germany.
21:11The Nazis preached the doctrine of folk community,
21:15of learning to be Germans one of another.
21:19Winter help, the main street collection for charity, was one symbol.
21:23And the leaders of the party, for the benefit of the cameras, showed themselves as folk comrades too.
21:32Goering displayed himself.
21:34A war hero, a man who laughed and enjoyed life.
21:38A moderating force in the party was believed.
21:41Josef Goebbels, the little propaganda minister, whom the back street called poison dwarf.
21:49His sharpness was feared, but respected.
21:53The deputy leader, Rudolf Hess, a puzzling figure to the crowds.
22:04The Nazi way of ruling was to be remote, but to seem not to be.
22:09All classes were encouraged to relish the same meal.
22:14The soldier, the boss, the worker, the banker.
22:18The party believed in community, but the industrialists stayed rich.
22:24They had financed the Nazis when they seemed likely to win.
22:27And now they're submitted to Nazi direction without too much distaste.
22:32Business was picking up fast.
22:37The economy was reviving when the Nazis came to power.
22:41But they reaped the credit, speeding recovery with an enormous public works program for the unemployed.
22:47Other nations, where mass unemployment persisted, watched Germany would then be.
22:54And now a moment, ladies and gentlemen.
22:58Something to your general education.
23:01It was working and employees.
23:04End January 1933.
23:0611,55 million.
23:10End January 1936.
23:1215,70 million.
23:14And that's what the driver did.
23:17You don't need to know more about today.
23:24The workless built the autobahns.
23:28The first motorways in the world, binding still provincial Germany together.
23:34The autobahns were not least for private pleasure in the fascist notion of strength through joy.
23:39And they were presented less as a transport system than as a triumph of national will.
23:46Linked with other prestige projects, like the design for the Führer's new Berlin.
23:51The French is called the Führer's new Berlin.
23:54The music is called The Führer's new Berlin.
23:59The Führer's new Berlin
24:00The Führer's new Berlin
24:05Vol anmut und Gesundheit, gläubig und ihrer großen Pflichten und Aufgaben bewusst,
24:06These were members of faith and beauty, which was elder sister to the League of German Maidens,
24:31which was the girls' equivalent of the Hitler Youth, and so on.
24:35All young people learned party songs, drilled and danced, and belonged.
24:53Each year, the farmers and their wives gathered at the Buchebell to meet their Führer at harvest time.
25:00In 1936, those who stood and waited for the leader numbered one million.
25:10The leader was late. He always arrived late. Built up tension.
25:33Then he came, letting the excitement spill over.
26:01As he marched through to the rostrum, the masses were allowed to see him close and even
26:06to touch him.
26:08Deliberately, women were placed in the front rows.
26:14When he went up the mountain, I couldn't understand how it was possible that people
26:19could shout so much.
26:23Yet when he came towards our group, I too came under his spell and shouted Heil, just
26:30like everyone else.
26:33But then, when he was really close, greeting people to his left and right, shaking their
26:39hand and exchanging a few words, and he also shook my hand, I suddenly noticed that everybody
26:47in his immediate presence was completely silent.
26:52For the first ten minutes, he wasn't a good speaker.
26:58He just began warming up and finding the words.
27:04But then he turned out to be a terribly good speaker.
27:10He just, I don't know the words in English, emassered his public.
27:19And the whole atmosphere grew more and more hysterical.
27:29He was interrupted nearly after every phrase by big applause.
27:37And women began screaming.
27:41It was like a mass religious ceremony.
27:51And, well, I listened to his speech.
27:56And I feel that more and more excited atmosphere in the hall.
28:03And for some seconds, again and again, I had a feeling, what a pity that I can't share that
28:13belief of all those thousands of people, that I am alone, that I am contrary to all that.
28:21It was very funny.
28:22I thought, well, he is talking all the nonsense I know, the nonsense he always talked to, but
28:30still, I feel it must be wonderful just to jump into that bubbling pot and be a member of
28:43a member of all those who are believers.
29:02One lady in our village, she went to Berlin to a birthday reception for Adolf Hitler.
29:10And she came back and told us, the Fuhrer shook hands with me.
29:15And from this time on, she was like a scent in our village.
29:19Hitler's home life took place on a ledge in Bavaria, at Berchtesgaden.
29:41These pictures are from the home movies of Eva Braun, the discreet young woman who stayed with him till his death.
29:48To the Berghof for tea and tactics came the elect, some a little ill at ease, some genuinely intimate.
30:00The
30:23Is that the only one who knows?
30:42Even in private, Hitler had to correspond to the image sold to the public.
30:49Adolf with children.
30:51Adolf with dogs.
30:55Adolf with a magnifying glass.
31:06Adolf with friends.
31:13Out for a walk, like a good Bavarian bourgeois on a Sunday.
31:21In this closed circle, Eva Brown posed herself as the girl who was natural, healthy, joyfully physical.
31:33Adolf Hitler's Lieblingsblume ist das schlichte Federweiß.
31:47Adolf Hitler's Lieblingsblume ist das schlichte Federweiß.
32:00Adolf Hitler's Lieblingsblume ist das schlichte Federweiß.
32:13After the Berghof, there were jovial, friendly bodyguards and colder ones.
32:20Heinrich Himmler, Lord of the SS, came with Heydrich, his terrible, handsome lieutenant.
32:27On formal occasions, the SS guard turned out.
32:38They were the reality of the great tyranny centered in distant Berlin, their hands soon to be red with the blood of millions.
32:46For that reality, Hitler would leave his chintched chair, his tea parties, and his mistress.
32:55The car was waiting at the foot of the steps.
32:57If Germany was to be strong again, Germany must re-armed.
33:13The people frightened by war had to become once more familiar with arms.
33:19To touch them, to play at soldiers.
33:46Germany had to train pilots.
33:48Versailles forbade Germany an air force, so the League for Air Sports used gliders to train men still officially civilians for the future Luftwaffe.
34:03And the army began to swell beyond the limits set by Versailles from the moment Hitler became chancellor.
34:09In secret, it trebled its strength in two years.
34:13The Viking army began to use in the army to put the troops on the coast.
34:20National army had to keep my feet men to the coast.
34:24The German army was killed.
34:26The foreign military attached could see what was happening.
34:29But the world did nothing decisive and in March 1935, Germany announced conscription, a peace-time army of half a million men.
34:39half a million men.
34:46The new tanks came out into the open.
34:59The first Luftwaffe squadrons flew past.
35:09The new German Navy was underway.
35:21Hitler kept Europe bewildered.
35:24Proclaiming Versailles extinct, he proposed a limit on armaments.
35:30Britain, the first democracy to make a pact with the Nazis, signed a naval agreement.
35:35Hitler was reassured.
35:37It might be safe to start tampering with the hated Frenchers.
35:42One part of Versailles had already been undone.
35:45In January 1935, the territory of the Tsar, the little coal mining region which had been German before 1918, voted overwhelmingly and under international supervision to return to Germany.
36:03Next door, the Rhineland remained a demilitarized zone.
36:10Beyond dispute, this was part of Germany, but to recover it would directly challenge the Allies, and above all, France.
36:18The troops rode over the Rhine bridges at dawn on March the 7th, 1936.
36:25Secretly, the commanders were ready to bolt back across the river if France showed any sign of fight.
36:31But there was none.
36:35The Rhineland city of Cologne and all Germany went wild with relief and delight.
36:41A part of German honor had been recovered.
36:44Hitler had taken a chance and won.
36:48Two years later, Austria, Hitler's birthplace, lay ripe for the taking.
36:54Austrian Nazis were rioting for Anschluss, a union with Germany.
36:59To prevent a plebiscite on independence, Hitler marched in.
37:12The German troops were greeted by hysterical crowds.
37:15Vienna suffered a jubating terror which even Germany had not yet seen.
37:19Austria became a province.
37:22Germany's neighbors, appalled, uncertain, unprepared, once again did nothing.
37:27Czechoslovakia was no lost German province but an independent nation, allied to Britain, France and the Soviet Union.
37:45Within its northern border lived the Sudeten Germans.
37:49Hitler incited this minority, which had never been part of Germany, to demand union with the Reich.
37:55Europe prepared for war.
37:58But though Czechoslovakia was ready to fight, Britain and France gave way.
38:04France gave way.
38:05At Munich in September 1938, Chamberlain for Britain, Italy's Mussolini, Deladier for France, signed with Hitler the treaty which stripped Czechoslovakia of the Sudeten land and left her broken and abandoned.
38:23The Germans crossed the border, welcomed as liberators by the Sudeten population.
38:42At home, the German generals who opposed Hitler, hoping that a rebuff over Czechoslovakia would fatally injure his prestige, gave up their plots in despair.
38:57Hitler sat with his troops in the field and planned ahead.
39:16Hitler sat with his troops in the field and planned ahead.
39:23The Sudeten land was easily digested.
39:26The next course could be taken fast.
39:29Hitler sat with his troops in the field.
39:32Hitler sat with his troops in the field.
39:33The German troops reached Prague the same day.
39:46There was no resistance.
39:48The last democracy in central Europe was wiped out.
39:58The Czechs would never trust the West again.
40:01The West trusted Hitler no more and realized at last that only force would stop him.
40:18Berlin?
40:19Berlin?
40:20More cheers?
40:21More worship?
40:22Yet, what was in the minds of those who cheer?
40:27Very few wanted wars of conquest or hoped like Hitler for a German Empire from the Urals to the Atlantic.
40:35Most thought they were taking back what had been robbed from them and restoring, not destroying, the order and unity of Europe.
40:45For these crowds, it seemed that Hitler's statesmanship could never fail.
41:04Others who stayed at home that night feared a war was coming which might destroy Germany itself.
41:09But now they saw no hope for a rising against Hitler.
41:13They were left with the moral question.
41:16Should one resist a tyranny without hope of success?
41:20Well, I think it's difficult, first of all, to make up your mind that you should do something against a government.
41:32This is very rare, first of all.
41:36Secondly, if it is extremely dangerous as it is in a dictatorship, it's even more complicated because everybody likes his own life.
41:49I think everything that came to us when we were living in Germany came very gradually.
41:59That was part perhaps of the way Hitler managed these things.
42:06It came on us rather drip by drip, rather like an anesthetic, one could almost say.
42:13And it was only when a specific thing that he did hit you personally that you actually realized that what was going on.
42:27In my particular case, I think I could say that it hit me personally when the Jewish doctor of my children, whom I'd always had, came.
42:42He was a very busy man, but he seemed to be getting, having always more time to spare.
42:48And I remember one night, he came and spent the night looking after my very sick child.
42:55And in the morning, the child was better, and when he left, he said, asked me, did I still want him to look after my children?
43:06And I was tired, and I said, well, for goodness sakes, why not?
43:09And he told me that his clinic, his children's clinic, which he had started in Hamburg, was going to, he was going to be dismissed,
43:19and that he'd had threatening letters that if he laid his hands on Aryan children, he was in trouble.
43:28In November 1938, a Jew shot a German diplomat in Paris.
43:34The Nazi leaders organized a reprisal.
43:37Synagogues were burned, and Jewish shops looted all over Germany.
43:44On that crystal night, named for the smashed glass sparkling in the gutters,
43:49thousands of Jews were thrown into concentration camps.
43:53Do you want to know how the night was?
44:04If you want to know, I will tell you.
44:07We were all shoved together, beaten and punched, and made to stand in ranks, and be counted, and so on.
44:18Because I'd been a soldier, I didn't find that so very difficult.
44:23But the others, who didn't fall in properly, they were beaten right away.
44:30And the most terrible thing was, when somebody grabbed hold of a big strong man, he said,
44:37Don't grab me.
44:39What? I shouldn't grab you?
44:42And he hit him.
44:47And this man was immediately overpowered by three people.
44:50SS people.
44:53A block was brought.
44:54He was tied down to it, and the camp commander said,
44:59The Jew Israel, or the Jew Idzik, I can't remember exactly now, is sentenced to 25 lashes.
45:10Then a huge man came.
45:12An SS man with a huge horse whip and started to beat him.
45:16The man just groaned a bit at first, but then he shouted, Stop! Stop!
45:24The commander said, What do you mean, stop?
45:27We'll start all over again, from the beginning.
45:31But after three more lashes, the blood was spurting.
45:34Then he stopped, and salt was rubbed into the wounds, or pepper, I can't remember.
45:40The man was dragged away.
45:42We never saw him again.
45:45Of course, in 1938, when the synagogues were burning, everybody knew what was going on.
45:56I remember that my brother-in-law, the husband of my sister, Lene, was Georg Hobe,
46:01when he went in the morning after the day of the Kristallnacht, Reichskristallnacht,
46:07or how you say it, he went by train to his office downtown, and between the stations of Saviglieplatz and Zoological Garden, there is the Jewish synagogue.
46:20And he saw that it was burning, and he murmured, Kulturschande, that is an insult for culture, shame to our culture.
46:31Well, right away, a gentleman in front of him turned his river and showed his party badge, and took out his papers that he was a man of the Gestapo.
46:46And he had to show his address, and was ordered to come to the party office next morning, 9 o'clock.
46:57April 1939, the Wehrmacht prepares to celebrate Hitler's 50th birthday.
47:14They hope for the usual Führer weather, a fine day.
47:31The Führer drives through Berlin, under the Brandenburg Gate, and down the Sieger's Alley, the Avenue of Victories.
47:44The army lining his route has increased sevenfold in just four years.
48:02Among the Wehrmacht's 51 divisions, the new Panzer units, the instrument of Blitzkrieg.
48:20In spite of appearances, the High Command is by no means sure that this army is fit for war, yet.
48:41Hitler is ready to overrule them.
48:44The word in every diplomatic conversation that summer was Danzig, the free city with its mixed German-Polish population,
49:13had been separated from Germany and made the responsibility of a League of Nations commissioner.
49:22Danzig and East Prussia were now sundered from the Reich by a strip of Polish territory, the Corridor.
49:30Hitler was demanding the return of Danzig and free access to East Prussia across the corridor.
49:37Poland refused.
49:39In March 1939, Britain and France guaranteed her frontiers.
49:43In August, Britain promised to fight if Poland was attacked.
49:50Once again, myths about the persecution of a German minority were used to build up a case for armed intervention.
49:57German refugees told piteous tales of Polish brutality.
50:04Then I took my children and went with wine and went with my children to the border.
50:10Nazi propaganda filmed them greedily for the cinema newsreels throughout July and August.
50:15Hitler's plan was to wipe Poland off the map.
50:22But this might mean war with Soviet Russia, and he was not ready for that.
50:27His foreign minister, Ribbentrop, flew to Moscow on August the 23rd to sign the Nazi-Soviet pact.
50:33Poland's fate was sealed.
50:41The new alliance stunned the unsuspecting waste.
50:50Germany gloated.
50:51The new alliance was partially treated by the political parties.
50:58The foreign minister, Lord Halifax, explained that...
51:02You will have read the report about the agreement reached between Russia and Germany, which has surprised the world.
51:10The life of all nations depends in the last resort of mutual respect for one another's rights.
51:16And reasonable confidence that they can each live their life in their own way.
51:23I would earnestly help.
51:25The German newsreels tried to show Britain distracted, still uncertain.
51:41Minister-Präsident Chamberlain verlässt Downing Street.
51:44Minister-Präsident Chamberlain verlässt Downing Street.
51:54The English diplomatie entfaltet a fever-hafte tätigkeit,
51:56das Unrecht von Versailles zu verewigen.
52:00One young German left England for home.
52:03I had a girlfriend whom I wanted to marry, and I said to myself,
52:11Well, I'll dare go home.
52:15When I came to Cologne, I read the first German newspapers.
52:21And I knew at once there was great danger of a war.
52:31Now, the tone of the German press was absolutely hysterical.
52:38And I thought what a fool I was.
52:43I had just gone home in that moment.
52:46All over Europe, the reservists got their telegrams.
52:52In the last hours of peace, the soldiers put on uniform with a tired grin.
52:59It's nothing I should be reminded of?
53:02But I'm why the soldiers put on with a pagan,
53:04and I thought I'd be afraid of it that...
53:08...as I didn't know.
53:09Thank you for the murder of the Germanimento.
53:13And I thought I had a friend.
53:15In the last hours of a night,
Recommended
57:15
|
Up next
53:52
48:31
50:30
49:18
51:17
0:46
2:11
2:55