- 2 days ago
Category
📺
TVTranscript
00:00Berlin, in the summer of 1940, welcomed victory beyond belief.
00:22The soldiers of the Third Reich came home after only a year of war.
00:27They had conquered France. Central and Northern Europe had fallen too.
00:33These crowds were delirious with exultation and relief.
00:39They turned to their Führer in a frenzy of gratitude.
00:44They had not fancied war. They had feared defeat.
00:59Now they thought the war was over and they rejoiced.
01:03The End
01:05The End
01:07The End
01:09The End
01:11The End
01:13The End
01:15The End
01:17The End
01:19The End
01:21The End
01:23The End
01:25The End
01:27The End
01:29The End
01:31The End
01:32The End
01:33The End
01:34The End
01:36The End
01:38The End
01:39The End
01:41The End
01:43The End
01:45The End
01:53The End
01:54The men came home.
02:07They were brown and fit, and only a few of them had died.
02:18I just went shopping when somebody told me,
02:21don't you hear the noise?
02:23And there, I saw this part of the army coming back just near,
02:28so I bought a bowl of cherries and ran there.
02:36We all were so glad.
02:39We heard so much of the First World War,
02:41with those dreadful battles and those many dead.
02:46I felt a sort of national pride we ended the war so quick.
02:53In cities untouched by war,
02:58the German people had hardly begun to give up the ways of peace.
03:02There was rationing, even shortages.
03:04But to make up for it,
03:05the regime preached enjoyment, luxury.
03:08While the British had declared frivolous things immoral,
03:25the Nazis tried to show that luxury still flourished.
03:29Promises were their propaganda,
03:31and those who ran the war effort came to believe their own promises.
03:34Only a few saw further.
03:36Just about August,
03:39it was ordered that a lot of production was stopped,
03:43or minimized, or things like that.
03:46And there was a kind of euphoria that the war was,
03:52so to say, over.
03:53I didn't believe in that at all.
03:56Now, I thought I knew the British,
03:59and I had the opinion that they would see this thing through,
04:04and that the United States would join war,
04:07and therefore every effort should be made
04:11to prepare for a long blockade.
04:18Hitler had no plans ready for a long struggle,
04:21no preparations for the total mobilization
04:24of all productive capacity.
04:26German industry had been geared to a blitzkrieg war.
04:29The regime still let the factories turn out peacetime goods.
04:37The workers, subjugated but not fully converted,
04:41watched the comings and goings of the Nazi princes without enthusiasm.
04:44Wanting to be loved, the Nazis gave and gave.
04:56For 1940, Propaganda Minister Dr. Goebbels was Father Christmas.
05:02He gave to children, he gave to mothers.
05:04Ladies with larger broods were invited to the film premiere of Mother Love,
05:19the regime's hymn to family and folk community.
05:21On their breasts, they wore the Nazi mother cross.
05:41The pram was the tank of the home front.
05:45The government hoped for a breakthrough on the birth rate.
05:49Happy babies, happy future mothers,
05:51and very specially, happy music, soused the nation.
06:01A big smile glued across the face of a people,
06:04still often dubious and nervous,
06:06was stretched even wider.
06:07Everybody must learn to enjoy the happy teamwork of Hitler's folk community.
06:30Radio was the instrument which the Nazis made their own from the beginning.
06:47Their foreign language broadcasts,
06:49technically marvelous but grotesquely unconvincing,
06:52reached greedily out to minds abroad.
06:54Today's official German war communique reads as follows.
07:01But listening to foreign radio was forbidden.
07:05Many, like the propaganda comics,
07:07Tran and Heller,
07:08argued the toss between getting a glimpse of the outside world
07:11and the risk of a jail sentence.
07:13Sogar Zuchthaus.
07:16Sogar Zuchthaus.
07:18Auch wenn es keiner merkt.
07:21Ob das einer merkt oder nicht merkt,
07:23das spielt doch gar keine Rolle.
07:24So was tut man als guter Deutscher nicht.
07:26Ja, aber man muss sich doch orientieren,
07:28was draußen vorgeht.
07:29Na natürlich.
07:30Die ausländischen Sender,
07:31die sagen die reine Wahrheit.
07:33Klar.
07:34Ja klar, du Döskopf.
07:36Hast du noch niemals etwas von dem Nachrichtensystem
07:38unserer Feinde gehört?
07:39Ja, aber...
07:40Nichts, aber dann müsstest du wissen,
07:42dass alles nur darauf abzielt,
07:43unsere Widerstandskraft zu schwächen.
07:45Herr J., ich bin doch alt genug,
07:48um unterscheiden zu können,
07:49was wahr ist und was nicht.
07:51Ach, gehen wir doch gleich.
07:53Nichts, Herr J.
07:57Wurde wegen Abhörens ausländischer Sender
07:59zu zweieinhalb Jahren Zuchthaus verurteilt.
08:03If we listened to foreign radio,
08:06which we always did,
08:08we turned it very low
08:10and we used to sit right up close against it.
08:14And I remember one particular moment
08:16when my son,
08:19who was a little schoolboy,
08:22told me that he had a very funny story
08:27to tell me,
08:27that his friend's mother
08:29also listened to the radio
08:31with her ear right up against it,
08:33the same as we did.
08:35And I suddenly realized
08:36that I could have her imprisoned,
08:38she could have me imprisoned,
08:39because these two children
08:40had been talking about it.
08:46As well as geography and the rest,
08:48Nazi schools were obliged
08:49to add a special subject.
08:51Children were taught,
08:52with pictures and measurements,
08:54the dimensions of a healthy Aryan race.
08:58Official films prepared the Germans
09:00for the consequences
09:01of keeping the race pure.
09:03The mentally incurable,
09:04condemned as the bad seed,
09:07went to experimental gas chambers.
09:09The German people
09:12knows the whole amount of evil
09:15It does not know the grumbling mind of jene Häuser, in which thousands of lulling Schwachsinnige
09:24are being trained and being trained and being treated deeper than every creature.
09:32But we have given these people the opportunity in their children their lives to be divided and
09:39to divide.
09:41Whoever saw such beings, he will probably not be able to believe that the prohibition of
09:49such beings would not be human.
09:55But now for once, the Germans learned what was going on and protested.
10:00Bishop Garland of Münster attacked euthanasia from the pulpit.
10:04For a time, the program was stopped.
10:08A controlled press avoided such misgivings.
10:12Some newspapers were mere party sheets of hate and lies.
10:16Some slipped criticism between the lines.
10:19None of them satisfied a people which were still highly educated.
10:24It was terribly frustrating never to be allowed to say your opinion openly.
10:32I myself was quite happy when I was called up early 1940 to the army.
10:40And that suddenly left behind all the oppression I had every day.
10:46Being a soldier, you don't read newspapers.
10:50You don't listen to the radio.
10:52You're not always under the stress of the propaganda which was pointed at you every hour.
11:00European war became world war in June 1941.
11:10The Nazi leaders had secretly resolved that the conquest of Russia must count.
11:14Reisminister Dr. Goebbels verliess the proclamation des Führers.
11:26For many, the attack of the Soviet Union brought fear and bewilderment.
11:32Of course I had heard of certain preparations but it was all well hushed up and till the last moment
11:48I didn't think that the war would come about.
11:51For a long war, Germany would need to have the South Russian oil fields for her own.
12:01Russia had delivered a million tons of oil the previous year under the Nazi Soviet Pact.
12:06Now flung away.
12:08As a matter of fact, we had the greatest trade agreements for them that we ever had.
12:13And they delivered promptly and from an economic point of view everything seemed to be in order.
12:23I personally had through my men negotiations with them of putting up a synthetic fiber mill in Russia.
12:36And the treaty was signed on the 15th of June 1941.
12:43And the first 10 million marks in gold should be shipped on July 1st of 1941.
12:59The Germans drove eastwards over disintegrating Russian armies.
13:03Victory looked like a matter of weeks, another blitzkrieg.
13:11The morale at home revived.
13:25Goering inspected what was now the German colony of Ukraine, intended to be a surf region of agriculture.
13:32Nazi experts on the Slavs hoped that this simple folk with simple customs would enjoy this prospect.
13:40Six months later, in the blinding snow before Moscow, the Germans were stopped.
13:46They lacked winter clothing and the government appealed for furs and warm coats.
13:59At the last days of the gathering, they were forced to deliver their expenses.
14:06No amount of rehearsed enthusiasm could conceal that this was the Reich's first military reverse.
14:16The minister of munitions and head of the war effort, Fritz Toth, flew to inspect the construction work on the Eastern Front.
14:32One of the men who should have been on the plane was Hitler's court architect, the producer of the Nuremberg rallies, Albert Speer.
14:41I heard in the headquarters that Todd's plane crashed.
14:47He was dead and half an hour afterwards, I was asked to come to Hitler.
14:53And to my great surprise, he told me, you shall be his successor in all his offices.
14:59Todd got the funeral of a National Socialist hero.
15:06By now, nearly a quarter of a million Germans had been killed on the battlefronts.
15:14But Todd was the first of Hitler's close comrades to meet death in the war.
15:32Hitler was shaken. The war had reached him personally.
15:36Speer began to rehabilitate.
15:45Speer had already seen the chaotic, disconnected way that Nazi war industry were.
15:54Transport, munitions, all had to be brought under a single control.
15:59One of its first targets was the labor supply.
16:09Nazi Germany had never mobilized its full work force.
16:13They tried to get the women in the war production machinery, but it was opposed by Saugel,
16:20who was in charge of all the labor.
16:23This thing came to Göring, and Göring flatly denied too, that it came to the decision of Hitler,
16:29and Hitler also said, no, the women must be preserved, they have other tasks,
16:34they are for the family, they have to be children,
16:38and it would spoil their health and their morale if they are working in the factories.
16:46But Ukrainian women were being imported as maids, foreign conscripts for slave labor.
16:54Under Speyer, a great irony was fulfilled,
16:57for Germany was becoming exactly what the Nazis said it would not become.
17:01They had promised a return to the land, an end to great capitalism.
17:06Instead, the armaments drive was strengthening the vast industrial monopolies
17:11and swelling the cities with German and foreign labor.
17:16In two and a half years, Speyer multiplied armament production nearly four times.
17:22Eighty percent of industry came under his control.
17:25He brushed aside bureaucracies and worked through his own experts.
17:30He had ideas and he put all his energy behind these ideas and put them through with very much success.
17:43He didn't know how things had been done in the past because he hadn't anything to do with it,
17:50so he didn't know what was impossible and what was possible,
17:55and he succeeded sometimes in doing that impossible too.
17:59It is astounding for everybody who didn't live in our authoritarian system to hear that it was difficult to get through with orders,
18:12but it was difficult because Germany was divided in many districts, in 32 districts,
18:19and as the head of every district was a Gau leader.
18:22He was a strong political man and had absolute power in his district.
18:28He was only subordinated to Hitler himself.
18:32So when my orders didn't please one of the Gau leaders, possibly they weren't carried out.
18:41Tank production showed how even Speyer failed to get all of his way.
18:47He could not slice through the competing hierarchies which were Hitler's chosen style of government.
18:53There were too many types of tanks, too few tanks in all, too many calibers of gun, and different sizes of ammunition.
19:00Hitler thought he was far superior to such problems, and what for others would have been discussions of weeks and weeks for him was the decision of just a fraction of a minute.
19:13Of course, there was a change, too. One can never say that a man is always the same person, and Hitler changed a lot from 42 to 43.
19:22In 43, he was more and more convinced that he doesn't need no more advice of anybody, and he made the decisions by himself without listening.
19:32Hitler spent more and more time at the wolf's lair, his melancholy remote encampment at Rashtenburg in the East Prussian forest.
19:43Those around him were obsequious. The better advisors lost touch.
19:52Hitler's personal SS adjutant was Richard Schulze Kossens.
19:57Nearly all ministers were stationed at Berlin, and some of them had contact officers in the headquarters.
20:09Only Ribbentrop, Himmler, and sometimes Göring had their own headquarters, not so far from our headquarters.
20:18Speer was very often in the headquarters because his ministry was very important for the war.
20:25Only Bormann was always in the headquarters. There was only direct contact to Hitler.
20:35Bormann, as his secretary, was the most powerful man, more powerful, I think, than Hitler, because when the power was divided,
20:44all those men who were in power had to go via him to Hitler, except me. I had direct access to Hitler.
20:54There wasn't much cooperation. The cooperation was in the lower levels of the smaller technocrats.
21:02We didn't have anything like a cabinet. Ministers met, if at all, very seldom, and didn't talk about very important matters.
21:12So was my impression. Every ministry worked for itself, and sometimes they got orders from Hitler, but very, very seldom.
21:24Foreign visitors like Mannerheim, the Finnish leader, could see that Hitler was living in a world of illusion.
21:32He still trusted the reassurances of Göring, head of the Luftwaffe.
21:36Göring, a few months later, claimed that his aircraft could supply the Eastern Front, even when a whole army was cut off at Stalingrad.
21:44Achtung, ich rufe noch einmal Stalingrad.
21:49Hier ist Stalingrad. Hier ist die Front an der Volga.
21:53Achtung, die U-Bootfahrer im Atlantik.
21:56Christmas 1942.
21:57Achtung, die Tarnia. Hier ist die Mittelmeerfront und Afrika.
22:06The men at Stalingrad had come through on the radio link up loud and clear, but the brave words were faked in a Berlin studio.
22:15For the last time, the cathedral stood undamaged as the Christmas Fair took place in Berlin.
22:34But Stalingrad was still cut off, and deep down the nation sensed what was to happen.
22:403. Februar. Das Oberkommando der Wehrmacht gibt bekannt.
22:47Der Kampf von Stalingrad ist zu Ende.
22:51The Battle of Stalingrad has come to an end.
22:55For once the radio spoke the truth, and with some dignity.
23:0091,000 survivors surrendered.
23:04Only a few thousand ever saw Germany again.
23:07I was not long in the headquarter, but I felt very significant, the atmosphere on this day.
23:17All people were depressed, and Hitler himself was very serious.
23:25And he stared on his soup without saying any word, and he was very depressed.
23:40The world realised, and the Germans realised, that this was the turning point.
23:56This was the tragedy which could not be hidden.
23:59And Stalingrad did not come alone a week before the city fell.
24:12The Germans learned that the Allies would demand unconditional surrender.
24:17There was then to be no mercy for the Germans.
24:23Nazi and non-Nazi both lost some illusions and drew a little closer together.
24:29The escape hatches had been bolted.
24:31This was to be a total war, fought to the finish.
24:34The general feeling was, well, we can do nothing, it doesn't matter what we do, we'd better stick it out.
24:45Ausharren was the word I remember on everyone's lips.
24:50There's no alternative, we've got to fight to the bitter end.
24:54And this Goebbels used to the uttermost in his propaganda.
25:07Two weeks after Stalingrad, Goebbels brought a picked Nazi audience to a last mass frenzy.
25:12I ask you, are you convinced that the leader in the victory of the victory,
25:20by the death and death, of the hardest personal pressure?
25:30It was his own supreme moment.
25:33It was the proclaiming of total war, and the invoking of the nation's hidden power.
25:38The combat?
25:54Magnet von jetzt ab, die Parole nach.
25:58Nun Volk, stay auf, und Sturm. Brecht los!
26:02Now Folk rise up, and to a기로ors break loose.
26:06They were the words of 1812, of the national uprising against Napoleon.
26:13They were empty now.
26:28In 1943 it was better listening to music than to news.
26:36It was total war and retreat on all fronts.
26:49Total war meant that even German women must work.
26:57It brought its own sour humour.
27:00There was a slogan, do enjoy war, peace will be dreadful.
27:06There was a new sort of equality among the boys drafted to the mines and factory.
27:12The Hitler Youth was mobilised into production and eventually into battle.
27:17Under siege the barriers between people crumbled as they had crumbled in the London Blitz.
27:22People wanted to huddle together, to sing and forget. By the morning they might be there.
27:34By day the American bomber fleets ranged over the Reich.
27:47At night came the British.
27:49In the shelters the people waited for dawn and wondered if their cities would still be there.
27:56When we had the first bombs, we were shocked.
28:01We saw all the sky lighted up from the fire.
28:06It was an enormous and dreadful sight.
28:11We were very angry when we saw that so many residential areas were destroyed.
28:18There were so few men left that everybody who had the strength was firefighting.
28:26One by one, the German cities were incinerated by firestorms.
28:41Ten days' raids on Hamburg left 40,000 dead.
28:47The people in the West are gradually beginning to lose courage.
28:57Hell like that is hard to bear.
29:05I think that the bombing hadn't the effect one would have thought.
29:10It had the effect of bringing people together.
29:13If you were all under the same bombs, it didn't really matter whether your neighbour was a Nazi or what they were.
29:27To avoid seeing the ruins, Hitler's rare visits to Berlin were made by night.
29:32And yet, banners were ordered for his birthday.
29:36They read,
29:37Our walls have broken, but not our house.
29:42Hitler lost more and more his sense of reality.
29:47He never, never had the will he must see with his own eyes what the war was.
29:54We had no information from outside.
30:00And so, I had the feeling to live in a monastery, in a concentration camp.
30:12One of the generals once said, I feel like a concentration camp.
30:17We are included, and we all use the same phrases.
30:26We are all thinking the same.
30:27We are all hearing the same.
30:29We are all leaded in our thoughts and our feelings by Hitler.
30:36We are all playing on a play, each his role, and he was the only one who knew the script.
30:45He made us all do our play and speak our text.
30:50Nobody else knew how it would end.
30:59Neither Hitler nor Goering nor Himmler were seen in public.
31:04Only Goebbels.
31:07Whenever there was a very heavy bombing, Goebbels stood there on the marketplace and held his speeches and tried to say ausharren.
31:20I personally had respect because there was a sort of inspiring.
31:28You were sort of in a trance.
31:43A strained, exhausted nation could still lose itself in music.
31:50The orchestras still gave what was great and true in the tradition of German art.
31:59In the galleries, there was only the empty grimacing of Nazi painting, Nazi sculpture.
32:04True Aryan models simpered and scowled, their features carefully designed to portray the victorious Nordic race.
32:20Race was the empire of Himmler and the SS.
32:33But now the SS was itself an empire.
32:36Himmler, the ex-chicken farmer, ruled the death camps and the concentration camps.
32:41The SS had its own schools and factories and courts.
32:46It administered huge tracts of the occupied East.
32:50It was the instrument of German dominion over Europe.
32:53It was even an army.
32:55The generals had little control over the hundreds of thousands of elite troops in the Waffen-SS divisions.
33:02Into the SS training schools there were drawn Aryan-looking volunteers from the occupied countries.
33:08For the SS state was to be not merely German, but European.
33:12All had volunteered for active service in the Waffen-SS because I regarded the fight against Bolshevism as the most important task in Europe.
33:25New was the point of European education because we were of the opinion that only an imaginary contrast existed between nations who have the same or were from the same origin, yes?
33:49For those of different race origin, there was no place.
33:55For the Jews, there was deportation to eastern ghettos and then the gas chambers of the SS.
34:02The official word was resettlement.
34:05Most Germans prefer to believe that it meant no more than that.
34:09Hitler often mentioned that he is hating the Jews and he gave many examples already in an early time when I was with him.
34:21And I should have been warned that he is serious about it because he proved to be serious about other things he predicted too.
34:32One night, it must have been around midnight, the doorbell rang.
34:41I opened it and in front of me there stood a Jewish couple.
34:45This was how I began to help persecuted Jews.
34:49All of a sudden I entered into an invisible circle of people who smuggled Jews about.
34:56As soon as one hiding place had been detected, they were quickly passed on.
35:02They'd always move about at night.
35:05That's how I came to belong to a group who had to put up Jews when they were passed on like this.
35:11I've never found out who it was who'd sent them to me in the first place.
35:16Decent people, I'm sure.
35:19The problem started with the feeding of the Jewish people.
35:23Well, they neither had food rationing cards nor did they have any money.
35:28So we, in our turn, we made use of friends who exchanged their cigarette ration cards for the odd potato or some bread.
35:38One day, a friend of ours who used to collect food cards for these Jews came to me and she came with another woman with dyed blonde hair.
35:57I can see her sitting there now twisting her wedding ring and telling me that it wouldn't be for long that she would help me in the house and her husband need never go out.
36:13He could live in the cellar or wherever.
36:16But Christopher Bielenberg's husband was away and he was involved in a plot to overthrow Hitler.
36:22She consulted her trusted neighbour and friend, Karl Langbein, another conspirator.
36:28Langbein told her compassionately but firmly that the risks to herself and her family and to the conspiracy were too great.
36:37I was astonished, overcome really, at the response that I got from my neighbour who told me that on no circumstances whatsoever could I house these people.
36:49That housing of Jews meant concentration camp not only for myself but for my husband, possibly also for my children.
36:58I can remember going through and out into the road and out of the darkness came a voice.
37:07I knew there was somebody there, came a voice saying,
37:10Frau Bielenberg, haben Sie einen Entschluss gefasst?
37:17Which means, have you decided?
37:19And I simply couldn't say no.
37:25I just said, well, I can't for longer than two days.
37:31And I let him into the cellar.
37:39They stayed for two days.
37:43And after, on the second day, or rather in the evening, they must have left.
37:53Because in the morning, she was gone.
37:56The cellar was empty.
37:58The bed, the little bed I put up, all tidily arranged.
38:02And they had gone.
38:04I knew later that they were caught buying a ticket
38:12at a railway station and were transported to Auschwitz.
38:19And why I say this is the most painful and terrible story for me to have to tell
38:25was because after they left, I realised that Hitler had turned me into a murderer.
38:37One day, in 1944, Gauleiter Hanke came in my office and told me that he was visiting a concentration camp in Upper Silesia
38:50and warned me never to go in a concentration camp there because horrible things would happen.
38:59This, together with other hints I got, should have made my decision to go to Hitler immediately or to Himmler
39:12and to ask them what is going on and to take my own steps.
39:19But I didn't do it and not doing it was, so I think nowadays, the biggest fault in my life.
39:28We felt that people should know what was going on.
39:34And maybe typical is this little experience which I had one day standing in the line for vegetables or something like that.
39:43I told my neighbours standing around me that now they start to kill the Jews in the concentration camps.
39:53They said that it is not true that they only are brought there and can live there as they live here as it was told them.
40:00They are killed and they even make soap out of them.
40:04I know that.
40:06And they said, Frau Bonhoeffer, if you don't stop telling such horror stories, you will end in a concentration camp too.
40:15And nobody of ours can help you.
40:17It is not true what you are telling.
40:18You should not believe these things.
40:20You have them from the foreign broadcasts or so.
40:23And they tell these things to make enemies against Germany.
40:27They say, no, that is not from broadcasts or that.
40:30I know that directly from first hand.
40:32You can be sure.
40:33It is that way.
40:34And coming home, I told that my husband in the evening.
40:39And he was not at all applauding to me in the very contrary.
40:44He said, my dear, sorry to say, but you are absolutely idiotic what you are doing.
40:52Please understand, a dictatorship is like a snake.
40:59If you put your foot on its tail, as you do it, it will just bite you.
41:06And nobody will be helped.
41:09You have to strike the head.
41:12Only the commanders of the army could strike effectively at the head.
41:19Others had struck bravely at the tail and perished.
41:22In Munich, a few students from the Schull brother and sister protested with leaflets and been slaughtered.
41:28In Berlin, a communist spy team led by Haro Schulze Boysen and the Harden Axe had been crushed.
41:37Communists, socialists, Christians, anonymous men and women defied the dictator in tiny groups.
41:43150,000 Germans suffered prison or worse for political resistance.
41:49The plot against the snake's head was a federation of plots.
41:53There were conservatives like Goedler, aristocrats like Moltke, churchmen like Bonhoeffer, diplomats like Trott.
42:00Faced with defeat, many staff officers joined in.
42:05All were slow to accept that a strike at the head demanded the physical murder of Hitler.
42:12But in 1944, there appeared a man for action, Colonel Count Klaus von Stauffenberg.
42:19All the difference was brought in or caused when Stauffenberg came to Berlin.
42:25He had lost his left eye, his left hand, or three fingers of his left hand, and his right hand altogether.
42:35Originally, he was only the planner of the good Etat, but he had to report to Hitler's headquarters and to attend conferences there.
42:44This enabled him to get really near to Hitler and then to make an attempt, which he did on July 2044.
42:54Suddenly, there was a very alarming bang.
43:00We heard voices crying for a doctor, and we saw some generals with blood-stained uniforms.
43:08Then came one of the adjudants and said there was a bomb explosion, but the Fuhrer is not hurt, he's still alive.
43:18We went toward Hitler's bunker, and we met him.
43:23It may be it was an hour after this explosion, he looked funny, because his hair stood up like a brush, and his trousers were slit in small stripes.
43:45He said, you see, the fate has saved me from my mission. I am to do what I must do.
43:57At the war ministry in Berlin, the plotting generals believed that Hitler was dead.
44:03When I came to the headquarters, Stauffenberg was busy with telephoning, there were his army commands.
44:12And Hafen informed me of what had happened, how they have thrown the bomb.
44:17And then he said, Hitler's dead.
44:20And we really did believe it, because Stauffenberg then came in, we had a short talk with him, he was much too busy to give details.
44:27He said, Hitler's dead, leave everything alone, and we'll see to what can be done.
44:31But the man the plotters ordered to occupy the city was Major Otto Rehmer, a fanatical soldier programmed to obey any superior order.
44:41At first he obeyed the plotters, then Goebbels got hold of him.
44:45Goebbels begrüßte mich, sehr erleichtert und freudestrahlend,
44:51and sagte, Rehmer, was wissen Sie?
44:54Goebbels was really very pleased to see me. He was beaming.
44:57He said, Rehmer, what do you know about all this?
45:02What's going on here? What orders have you got?
45:05I said, Minister, I have come to you so that you can clarify the situation.
45:11Goebbels replied, they're trying to pull the wool over your eyes.
45:16Hitler's alive. I've just spoken to him.
45:18I was so astonished that I said, please let me speak to the Fuhrer.
45:24And this was done.
45:26On the other end of the line, Hitler said,
45:30Herr Rehmer, you see I am alive.
45:33I am Adolf Hitler.
45:35You recognize my voice.
45:36Now do you believe I'm alive?
45:40I live, so.
45:42I am Adolf Hitler.
45:44Hear my voice.
45:46Believe that I live.
45:48Now Rehmer was reprogrammed.
45:54He marched back to the war ministry and arrested everyone he found.
45:58The plot collapsed.
46:00The wavering army returned to its own.
46:02Many of the plotters, after prison and torture, were to face a ghastly sham trial conducted by Roland Freisler, the star judge of Nazi Germany.
46:18Their families were seized and their children sent to orphanages.
46:23The luckier conspirators, among them Stauffenberg, had been shot out of hand in the war ministry courtyard.
46:28Some attempted to explain their motives in court.
46:33Count von Schwerin was an officer who had served in Poland.
46:36The political experience I personally had, for me, had some difficulties in the following.
46:42Because I worked for Germany in Poland for a long time.
46:47And from this time, I experienced a lot of things in the position of Poland.
46:52I experienced a lot of things in Poland.
46:55Mm!
46:56It's a...
46:57But I was to say, and I was to say, that you have to defend national-sozialism.
47:02I thought...
47:04...to the many murders.
47:07Morde!
47:09They are a dead man!
47:14the condemned were hanged slowly on meat hooks a film of their agony was made and shown later
47:27to hitler but the plot left hitler a frightened damaged man the depression after the 20th of
47:36july broke the power of the aristocracy and of the prussian tradition forever but there
47:42was no ruling caste to take their place to hitler all generals now seemed suspect only goebbels
47:53bohrmann and himmler could get close to him
47:56slowly but steadily he became weak the doctors went in and out and he became
48:12totally apathetic none interested in everything and it was a very critical situation on the west front
48:22and on the east front too and some days it was like hitler doesn't didn't exist he was deteriorating
48:34certainly in his health but i wouldn't go so far to say that he was no more responsible of what he was
48:42doing in some way he was i have the experience of a prisoner of 20 of years he was some in some way
48:51he was behaving like a prisoner
48:58through the devastation the germans somehow kept going
49:06down ruined streets the workers made their way to ruined factories where a few machines could still be made to turn
49:13a few machines could still be made to turn
49:20life retreated to the cellars
49:28people learned that eight bombs fell in a row and then you were safe
49:35they learned to live a day at a time
49:39it was really dreadful to endure it
49:58we were so tired
50:01you were always in a hurry all the railways were destroyed and the lorries had no petrol
50:10we had russians from the beginning
50:13step by step it was worse and worse
50:17Germany itself was near the end of its tether
50:22seven million foreign forced laborers were not enough
50:27everything oil metal food was running out
50:32everything from clothes to planes was patched and made to serve again
50:37men too
50:42the war cripples were recycled for the factories
50:46the brain damaged soldiers were taught to speak again
50:50now we want to call this
50:53what is that for a loud
50:56a
50:57a
50:58a
50:59a
51:00a
51:01a
51:02a
51:03a
51:04a
51:05a
51:06a
51:07a
51:08a
51:09a
51:10a
51:11a
51:13a
51:14a
51:15a
51:16a
51:17a
51:18a
51:19a
51:20a
51:21a
51:23a
51:27a
51:28a
51:29possible
51:30now the enemy was approaching the very front chairs of the right
51:33the folks dude the home guard of the elderly the underage and the unfit was
51:35sworn in
51:38the
51:40front
51:41ta
51:43to
51:44ziest
51:450
51:46the
51:47s
51:48박
51:49They listened with closed faces.
52:19To Oratory from Goebbels about fighting to the bitter end.
52:49The Volksturm trouched out through that same Brandenburg Gate which had seen the soldiers march back from Paris four years before.
53:14They went towards the Russians keeping their thoughts to themselves.
53:26The Volksturm
53:30The Volksturm
53:34The Volksturm
53:36The Volksturm
53:38The Volksturm
53:40The Volksturm
53:42The Volksturm
53:44The Volksturm
53:46The Volksturm
53:48The Volksturm
53:50The Volksturm
53:52The Volksturm
53:54The Volksturm
53:56The Volksturm
53:58The Volksturm
54:00The Volksturm
54:02The Volksturm
54:04The Volksturm
54:06The Volksturm
54:08The Volksturm
54:10The Volksturm
54:12The Volksturm
54:14The Volksturm
54:16The Volksturm
54:18The Volksturm
54:20The Volksturm
54:22The Volksturm
54:24The Volksturm
54:26The Volksturm
54:28The Volksturm
Be the first to comment