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00:00Down this road, on a summer day in 1944, the soldiers came.
00:22Nobody lives here now.
00:30They stayed only a few hours.
00:34When they had gone, a community which had lived for a thousand years was dead.
00:43This is Auverdoux-sur-Glane in France.
00:48The day the soldiers came, the people were gathered together.
00:54The men were taken to garages and barns.
00:57The women and children were led down this road.
01:03And they were driven into this church.
01:08Here, they heard the firing as their men were shot.
01:14Then they were killed too.
01:16A few weeks later, many of those who had done the killing were themselves dead in battle.
01:25They never rebuilt Auverdoux.
01:32Its ruins are a memorial.
01:36Its martyrdom stands for thousand upon thousand of other martyrdoms in Poland, in Russia, in Burma, in China, in a world at war.
01:49The End
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.
03:44Their figurehead was the ancient president von Hindenburg.
03:53The 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.
04:08The commune 982, the Reichspräsident von Hindenburg.
04:14So, fertig?
04:17No.
04:21No, no, it's fertig.
04:22So, fertig, so...
04:27Hiya, hiya, hiya, hiya, hiya, hiya, hiya, hiya, hiya, hiya.
04:37With 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.
04:47They had never imagined that they could take office legally.
04:50When the old Reichstag building was mysteriously gutted by fire, Hitler seized his chance to suspend all civil liberties.
04:59His followers could hardly believe their luck.
05:08The old Hindenburg, the symbol of apparent continuity, presided as they turned office into power by acts of sham legality.
05:16In March, when the Reichstag voted to allow Hitler to govern without parliament, Hindenburg made no comment.
05:26The legal chancellor marched irresistibly into the role of the legal dictator.
05:46Hitler proclaimed the new Germany and meant it to last a thousand years.
05:57The new Germany began to round up its enemies.
06:02Communists, socialists, impertinent journalists, even Reichstag deputies.
06:09At Oranienburg concentration camp, just north of Berlin, conditions were at first crude rather than brutal.
06:19At this time, the camps were run by the Sturmabteilungen, the S.A.
06:30They bullied more than they murdered.
06:32From the first moment, Hitler unleashed his promised campaign against the Jews.
06:51The S.A. 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.
07:07But there were those, including many German Jews, who thought the anti-Jewish campaign the work of Nazi extremists,
07:14something Herr Hitler would put a stop to when he felt more secure.
07:21There was to be a cultural revolution, too.
07:24German culture would be purged of the Jewish Bolshevist taint.
07:28The books flew into the fire.
07:44Many of those who flung them were students and teachers.
07:48And as the sparks rose, the intellectuals fled.
07:51Writers and scientists to give their talents to Western Europe and America.
08:00A hundred years before, the German-Jewish poet Heiner, whose books now went into the fire, had warned,
08:08where one burns books, there one eventually burns people.
08:12Some of Hitler's most earnest followers found new ways to show loyalty.
08:23They married, or got married all over again, under a Nazi ritual.
08:26The Nazis had mass support among the unemployed, but less among the organised workers.
08:46The left wing of the party wanted to start a workers' movement inside the factories,
08:51but Hitler took a simpler course.
08:52He granted the unions the May Day holiday they had always demanded.
08:57Next day, he abolished the unions.
09:02Nazi supporters were basically middle class.
09:05Shopkeepers ruined by the depression.
09:08Clerks who had lost their savings.
09:10Craftsmen squeezed out by mass production.
09:12These were Hitler's worshippers.
09:21To this army of those who had come down in the world belonged the small farmers, the peasants.
09:36Hitler had enlisted them during the Depression.
09:40Now he told them that their blood and their soil were Germany's treasure.
09:45He passed laws to give them safe possession of their fields.
09:49And he gave them bread.
09:50The treaty of Versailles in 1919 had bitten deep into Germany's frontiers.
10:08Alsace-Lorraine and the Saarland had been lost.
10:19East Prussia was cut off by the new Polish state.
10:23Silesia cut in two.
10:24Danzig, a League of Nations city.
10:29To every patriot Germany could not be free while Versailles stood.
10:38Hitler alone seemed the savior foretold by the monuments at the border.
10:42Never, German, forget what blind hate stole from thee.
10:50Wait for the hour that avenges the bleeding frontier cry.
11:03Abroad, there were some who admired the way this new Germany stood up for herself.
11:09In America, we've had many reports against your new government.
11:12And in most cases, this has caused hasty demonstrations everywhere.
11:17I can now say to you that the American people today realize that these stories are untrue and without foundation.
11:23I find that there's a new, fresh vitality here in Germany under your great leader and Chancellor Adolf Hitler, whom I'm a great admirer.
11:32The new Germany will live, for you have the best centralized government in the world today.
11:39In fact, the new Germany was a bundle of different interests and grievances held together by the strap of the National Socialist Party.
11:46And the buckle of the strap was Hitler.
11:48...is the state geworden.
11:50...the costbarste Besitz of this world, but it is the own people.
12:00And for this people, and for this people, and for this people, we will ring and we will fight.
12:09And will fight, again, and will fight it.
12:21And we will shit over the plante, and never complain, never
12:25Well really it was the only party that promised to get us out of the hole and their idea was principally that that would only be possible if we developed as a nation a team spirit, a solidarity and pulling all on the same rope instead of quarreling about pity differences
12:54of 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 and hungry at that time.
13:14Nowadays 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, then it sounded like a promise of paradise.
13:36All this seemed ideal ground for a prophet to say, I will lead you to the promised land. I 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 is to know whether they were right or not? At that time no one did.
14:08Christmas 1933. One year of Hitler's Reich. Peace on earth. Good will towards men. The concentration camps were full. Parliament a rubber stamp. Political parties and trade unions abolished.
14:35The Jews out of the civil service. The Jews out of the civil service. The free press strangled. Personal liberties destroyed.
14:42Germany lived under a permanent state of emergency.
14:50Adolf Hitler's state. Adolf Hitler's state was all-powerful, even all-mighty.
15:13But he still felt threatened. He feared his old conservative rivals. He feared the army. And 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.
15:39The head of the S.R. was one of his oldest comrades, Ernst Röhm. On June the 30th, 1934, Röhm was arrested and shot. His S.R. commanders and more than a hundred others dragged from their beds were shot too.
15:58The murder exploded across Germany. The killers were the new force in Germany. The S.S. Hitler's bodyguard, which now became his personal instrument of terror.
16:17Goering gave a press conference at the propaganda ministry. Goebbels 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.
16:34Goehring had that press conference for the foreign press. Before that, the telephones had been cut off to all foreign countries.
16:43Goehring came striding in and said, well, I know you boys always like to have a story. He used the English word. I've got a story for you, all right.
16:56Goehring came striding in and described how that previous night and that morning, he and Hitler had acted against dissident forces, both of the right and of the left.
17:12He said that Rome had been told that Rome had been shot, that a second revolution had been quashed.
17:19He also made a rather obscure reference to General von Schleicher, who had preceded Hitler as German Chancellor.
17:30Then he left the Rome, came back again in a few seconds and said, it'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 anything to court. They 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.
18:26And 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.
18:47While the old man was still breathing, Hitler had abolished the office of President, proclaiming himself Fuhrer and Chancellor, Head of State and Governor.
19:01And before his corpse was laid to rest, Hitler usurped his command over the army.
19:13The armed forces paraded to swear a new oath.
19:17Where 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, this holy oath, that I, the leader of the German Reich and the people, Adolf Hitler,
19:47Adolf Hitler!
19:51For German officers, an oath was almost physically real.
19:59Hitler had trapped them.
20:01Now they could not disobey him without disobeying the fatherland.
20:06I pray to God, Adolf Hitler! Adolf Hitler! Adolf Hitler! Adolf Hitler! Adolf Hitler!
20:24Hitler kept up the pace.
20:29That same month, the Germans had to go again to the polls to approve his assumption of state and government powers.
20:36By now, the machinery of ballot management by threat, propaganda, forgery and fraud was functioning excellently.
20:43Hitler had a 90 percent yeah.
20:54Four million still voted nine.
20:59Hitler proclaimed, for the next thousand years, there will be no other revolution in Germany.
21:05The Nazis preached the doctrine of folk community, of learning to be Germans one of another.
21:18Winter 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.
21:29Goering displayed himself.
21:34A war hero, a man who laughed and enjoyed life.
21:38A moderating force in the party was believed.
21:42Josef Goebbels, the little propaganda minister, whom the back street called poison dwarf.
21:49His sharpness was feared, but respected.
21:52The deputy furrier, Rudolf Hess, a puzzling figure to the crowds.
22:04The Nazi way of ruling was to be remote, but to seem not to be.
22:10All classes were encouraged to relish the same meal.
22:14The soldier, the boss, the worker, the banker.
22:17The 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.
22:40But they reaped the credit, speeding recovery with an enormous public works program for the unemployed.
22:48Other nations where mass unemployment persisted, watched Germany with envy.
22:53And now a minute, my ladies and gentlemen.
22:58A little bit to your general education.
23:01It were working and employees.
23:04End January 1933.
23:0611,55 million.
23:09End January 1936.
23:1215,70 million.
23:15And this has all been achieved.
23:17More need not to know today.
23:19The workless built the Autobahns.
23:27The first motorways in the world, binding a still provincial Germany together.
23:32The Autobahns were not least for private pleasure, in the fascist notion of strength through joy.
23:38And 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 Fuhrer's new Berlin.
23:50The ship was formed by France.
23:51In His home.
23:53In His home.
23:54The opening Bible.
23:56The volub tag lo such as saying.
23:58In his strongconfidence.
24:00During this Antonio separation, the past nineteA17.
24:03Everything was bought more than you.
24:05Even the .
24:07The Egypt would.
24:08Home to the others.
24:09The lid So, theiji.
24:13These were members of faith and beauty, which was eldest sister to the League of German
24:30Maidens, which was the girls' equivalent of the Hitler Youth, and so on.
24:36All young people learned party songs, drilled and danced, and belonged.
24:53Each year, the farmers and their wives gathered at the Bucheberg 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.
25:14The leader was late.
25:24The leader was late.
25:30The leader was late.
25:36The leader was late.
25:58Then 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 to touch him.
26:07Deliberately, women were placed in the front rows.
26:11When he went up the mountain, I couldn't understand how it was possible that people could shout so much.
26:21Yet when he came towards our group, I too came under his spell and shouted Heil, just like everyone else.
26:31But then, when he was really close, greeting people to his left and right, shaking their hand and exchanging a few words, and he also shook my hand, I suddenly noticed that everybody in his immediate presence was completely silent.
26:53For the first ten minutes, he wasn't a good speaker, he just began warming up and finding the words.
27:03But then, he turned out to be a terribly good speaker, you know, he just, I don't know the words in English, emaciored his public.
27:19And the whole atmosphere grew more and more hysterical.
27:29He was interrupted nearly after every phrase by big applause and women began screaming.
27:41It was like a mass religious ceremony.
27:50And, well, I listened to his speech and I feel that more and more excited atmosphere in the hall.
28:02And for some seconds, again and again, I had a feeling, what a pity that I can't share that belief 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.
28:29But still, I feel it must be wonderful just to jump into that bubbling pot and be a member of all those who are believers.
28:47One lady in our village, she went to Berlin to a birthday reception for Adolf Hitler and she came back and told us the Fuhrer shook hands with me.
29:14And 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.
29:44These pictures are from the home movies of Eva Braun, the discreet young woman who stayed with him till his death.
29:51To the Berghof for tea and tactics came the elect, some a little ill at ease, some genuinely intimate.
30:00Adolf Hitler's home movies of Eva Braun, the discreet young woman who stayed with him till his death.
30:02Adolf Hitler's home movies of Eva Braun, the discreet young woman who stayed with him till his death.
30:07Adolf Hitler's home movies of Eva Braun, the discreet young woman who stayed with him till his death.
30:15Adolf Hitler's home movies of Eva Braun is a perfect śsignal man who stayed with him till his death.
30:32Even in private, Hitler had to correspond to the image sold to the public, Adolf with
30:50dogs, Adolf with a magnifying glass, Adolf with friends, out for a walk, like a good
31:15Bavarian bourgeois on a Sunday. In this closed circle, Eva Brown posed herself as the girl
31:29who was natural, healthy, joyfully physical.
31:36Adolf Hitler's Lieblingsblume ist das Schlichte, jeder weiß.
31:47Adolf Hitler's Lieblingsblume ist das Schlichte, jeder weiß.
32:12Up at the Berghof, there were jovial, friendly bodyguards and colder ones. Heinrich Himmler,
32:21Lord of the SS, came with Heydrich, his terrible, handsome lieutenant.
32:34On formal occasions, the SS guard turned out. They were the reality of the great tyranny
32:40centered in distant Berlin, their hands soon to be red with the blood of millions. For
32:47that reality, Hitler would leave his chintzed chair, his tea parties and his mistress. The
32:55car was waiting at the foot of the steps.
33:09If Germany was to be strong again, Germany must re-arm. The people frightened by war had
33:16to become once more familiar with arms, to touch them, to play at soldiers.
33:45Germany had to train pilots. Versailles forbade Germany an air force, so the League for Air
33:52Sports used gliders to train men still officially civilians for the future Luftwaffe.
33:58And the army began to swell beyond the limits set by Versailles from the moment Hitler became Chancellor. In secret, it
34:10trebled its strength in two years.
34:13And the army began to be strong again.
34:27Any foreign military attaché could see what was happening. But the world did nothing decisive and in March 1935, Germany announced conscription, a peacetime army of half a million men.
34:39the new tanks came out into the open.
34:46The new tanks came out into the open.
34:58The first Luftwaffe squadrons flew past.
35:10The new German Navy was underway.
35:16Hitler kept Europe bewildered.
35:22Proclaiming Versailles extinct, he proposed a limit on armaments.
35:28Britain, the first democracy to make a pact with the Nazis, signed a naval agreement.
35:34Hitler was reassured.
35:36It might be safe to start tampering with the hated frontiers.
35:40One part of Versailles had already been undone.
35:44In 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.
35:58Next door the Rhineland remained the demilitarized zone.
36:10Beyond dispute this was part of Germany, but to recover it would directly challenge the Allies, and above all, France.
36:16The troops rode over the Rhine bridges at dawn on March 7th, 1936.
36:24Secretly, the commanders were ready to bolt back across the river if France showed any sign of fight.
36:30But there was none.
36:32The Rhineland city of Cologne and all Germany went wild with relief and delight.
36:40A part of German honor had been recovered.
36:42Hitler had taken a chance and won.
36:46Two years later, Austria, Hitler's birthplace, lay ripe for the taking.
36:54Austrian Nazis were rioting for Anschluss, union with Germany.
37:00To 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.
37:20Austria became a province.
37:22Germany's neighbors, appalled, uncertain, unprepared, once again did nothing.
37:36Czechoslovakia 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.
37:59But though Czechoslovakia was ready to fight, Britain and France gave way.
38:05At Munich in September 1938, Chamberlain for Britain, Italy's Mussolini, Deladier for France,
38:15signed 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.
38:43At home, the German generals who opposed Hitler, hoping that a rebuff over Czechoslovakia would fatally injure his prestige, gave up their plots in despair.
38:55Hitler sat with his troops in the field and planned ahead.
39:19The Sudeten land was easily digested.
39:25The next course could be taken fast.
39:29The shrunken Czech lands and Slovakia lay helpless before him.
39:35He struck on March the 15th, 1939.
39:39The German troops reached Prague the same day.
39:45There was no resistance.
39:47The last democracy in Central Europe was wiped out.
39:53The Czechs would never trust the West again.
39:59The West trusted Hitler no more and realized at last that only force would stop him.
40:11Berlin, more cheers, more worship.
40:23Yet 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.
40:57For these crowds, it seemed that Hitler's statesmanship could never fail.
41:03Others 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.
41:15Should 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.
41:58That was part, perhaps, of the way Hitler managed these things.
42:06It came on us rather drip by drip, rather like an anaesthetic, one could almost say.
42:13And it was only when a specific thing that he did hit you personally that you actually realised what was going on.
42:28In 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.
42:43He 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.
42:58And when he left, he said, asked me, did I still want him to look after my children?
43:05And 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'd started in Hamburg, was going to, he was going to be dismissed.
43:18And 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 organised a reprisal.
43:37Synagogues were burned and Jewish shops looted all over Germany.
43:43On that crystal night, named for the smashed glass sparkling in the gutters, thousands of Jews were thrown into concentration camp.
43:56Do 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.
44:22But the others who didn't fall in properly, they were beaten right away.
44:28And the most terrible thing was when somebody grabbed hold of a big strong man.
44:36He said, don't grab me.
44:38What?
44:39I shouldn't grab you?
44:41And he hit him.
44:43And this man was immediately overpowered by three people, SS people.
44:52A block was brought.
44:54He was tied down to it and the camp commander said, the Jew Israel or the Jew Idzik, I can't
45:02remember exactly now, is sentenced to 25 lashes.
45:08Then a huge man came, an SS man with a huge horse whip and started to beat him.
45:17The 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.
45:38I can't remember.
45:40The man was dragged away.
45:42We never saw him again.
45:47Of course, in the 38th, 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 Huber.
46:01When he went in the morning after the day of the Kristallnacht, Reichskristallnacht,
46:07Kristallnacht, or how you say, he went by train to his office downtown.
46:13And between the stations of Savigliplatz and Zoological Garden, there is the Jewish synagogue.
46:19And he saw that it was burning.
46:22And he murmured, Kulturschande.
46:26That is an insult for cultured shame to our culture.
46:31Well, right away, a gentleman in front of him turned his revere and showed his Parteiabzeichen,
46:39party badge, and took out his papers that he was a man of the Gestapo.
46:46And he had to show his papers, to give 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.
47:30The Führer drives through Berlin, under the Brandenburg Gate and down the Sieger's Alley, the Avenue of Victories.
47:37The Army lining his route has increased seven-fold 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.
48:39Hitler is ready to overrule them.
48:46The word in every diplomatic conversation that summer was Danzig, the Free City, with its mixed German-Polish population, had been separated from Germany and made the response to Germany.
48:50The League of Nations commissioner.
48:51The League of Nations commissioner.
48:52The League of Nations commissioner.
48:53The League of Nations commissioner.
48:54The League of Nations commissioner.
48:55Danzig and East Prussia.
48:56The League of Nations commissioner.
48:57The League of Nations commissioner.
48:58The League of Nations commissioner.
49:02Danzig and East Prussia were now sundered from the Reich by a strip of Polish territory, the Corridor.
49:09Hitler was demanding the return of the Corridor.
49:10Hitler was demanding the return of Danzig and free access to East Prussia across the Corridor.
49:14Poland refused.
49:15In March 1939, Britain and France guaranteed her frontiers.
49:16In August, the League of Nations commissioner.
49:17The 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.
49:44In August, Britain promised to fight if Poland was attacked.
49:51Once again, myths about the persecution of a German minority were used to build up a case for armed intervention.
49:58German refugees told piteous tales of Polish brutality.
50:03Then 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.
50:18His plan was to wipe Poland off the map.
50:21But this might mean war with Soviet Russia.
50:24And he was not ready for that.
50:26His foreign minister, Ribbentrop, flew to Moscow on August the 23rd to sign the Nazi Soviet Pact.
50:33Poland's fate was sealed.
50:36The new alliance stunned the unsuspecting voice.
50:48Germany gloated.
50:52The Pact-Abschluss had the opposition politicians strongly pointed out.
50:59Foreign Minister Loch Halifax explained.
51:01You will have read the report about the agreement reached between Russia and Germany, which has surprised the world.
51:10And the life of all nations depends in the last resort of the mutual respect for one another's rights.
51:18And reasonable confidence that they can each live their life in their own way, I would honestly help.
51:24Very true, Mr Halifax. Auch das deutsche Volk will sein Leben auf seine eigene Art leben können.
51:37The German newsreels tried to show Britain distracted, still uncertain.
51:43Ministerpräsident Chamberlain verlässt Downing Street.
51:45Die englische Diplomatie entfaltet eine fieberhafte Tätigkeit, das Unrecht von Versailles zu verewigen.
52:01One young German left England for home.
52:06I had a girlfriend whom I wanted to marry and I said to myself, well I'll dare go home.
52:14When I came to Cologne, I read the first German newspapers and I knew at once there was great danger of a war.
52:30Now, the tone of the German press was absolutely hysterical.
52:36And I thought, what a fool I was.
52:42I had just gone home in that moment.
52:48All over Europe, the reservists got their telegrams.
52:53In the last hours of peace, the soldiers put on uniform with a tired grin.
52:59THE END
53:11THE END
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