- 2 days ago
For educational purposes
This episode looks at the Death's Head Battalion, whose members were identified by the badge with a skull on the right lapel of their uniform.
They underwent rigorous training to abolish every trace of human emotion and independent thought, leaving them willing tools of the unimaginable crimes committed in its name.
Interviews with :
- Nuremberg Chief Prosecutor Benjamin Ferencz.
- Former Auschwitz inmate and author of People in Auschwitz Hermann Langbein.
- Holocaust survivors (Heinz Junge, Kazimir Smolen, Helmuth Szprycer and Hans Frankenthal).
- SS men Hans Münch and Harry Seidel.
This episode looks at the Death's Head Battalion, whose members were identified by the badge with a skull on the right lapel of their uniform.
They underwent rigorous training to abolish every trace of human emotion and independent thought, leaving them willing tools of the unimaginable crimes committed in its name.
Interviews with :
- Nuremberg Chief Prosecutor Benjamin Ferencz.
- Former Auschwitz inmate and author of People in Auschwitz Hermann Langbein.
- Holocaust survivors (Heinz Junge, Kazimir Smolen, Helmuth Szprycer and Hans Frankenthal).
- SS men Hans Münch and Harry Seidel.
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:27Death's Head
00:29units of the SS ran the Nazi concentration camps. These 40,000 guards were responsible
00:37for slaughtering millions. They were trained to commit acts of barbaric cruelty in Hitler's
00:45name. They were perfectly normal people, who were in no way different from other people.
00:58The SS specialised in turning ordinary men into monsters.
01:05It wasn't Hitler, Goering, Goebbels, Himmler, or whatever the others were called who had
01:10ducted me and beat me. No. It was the ordinary shoemaker, the neighbour, the milkman, the
01:17postman. They received a uniform, an armband and a cap with a Death's Head on it, and then
01:22they belonged to the master race. Without the Death's Head uniform, there was little to
01:30distinguish these practitioners of Nazi violence from anyone else.
01:37I pulled off Schwarzhuber's boots and took off his jacket to clean them, and he stood there
01:42in his vest. He looked like a nobody. They were nobody when they weren't in their uniform.
01:51They were nothing. But when I put his jacket back on, and he put his boots and cap on, then
02:00he, like all of them, turned into a monster. They were madmen. All at once, it was as if
02:08they ruled the world.
02:13In March 1942, in Darmstadt, not far from Frankfurt, the students at the Justus Liebig Grammar
02:19school faced their final exams. Among them was a local lad who'd had a poor academic record
02:27as a schoolboy, but now he was unusually well prepared for his exams. His chosen essay topic
02:34was Adolf Hitler's liberation of Germany from the chains of the Versailles Treaty.
02:42The student's name was Hans Stark. He wore the uniform of the SS Death's Head unit, sewn for him
02:50by concentration camp prisoners.
02:54Concentration camp, I asked. What is that then? And my brother said, you're a Latin scholar,
03:01you know. It's where the people are concentrated in a camp, and a fence is built around them.
03:07That is a concentration camp.
03:12Hans Stark's uniform was made at Auschwitz. This was his workplace throughout 1941.
03:18At just 17, he was in charge of Block 7, which housed Polish prisoners.
03:23And this is where he revised for his college exams, tutored by some of the death camp's most cultured inmates.
03:33Above all, we had to help him with German literature, with Goethe or Schiller.
03:38But when we gave him the answers, he didn't actually want to believe that, as Poles,
03:44we could possibly know anything about Goethe or Schiller.
03:50The son of a low-ranking policeman, young Hans was always keen to improve his lot.
03:59Ambition was a characteristic he inherited from our father.
04:04He was always aiming higher.
04:09When Hans left school at 16, he was still too young to join the German army.
04:14But not too young for the SS.
04:17With his father's encouragement, he joined the Death's Head Guards.
04:22My father was happy that he could present his son to his acquaintances and relatives as a member of the
04:30SS.
04:32As a member of the Führer's Elite.
04:35And he probably received a lot of admiration for it as well.
04:41From 1934, the SS Death's Head units were fully responsible for the concentration camps,
04:47where opponents of Nazi rule were held.
04:51Soon, Hans Stark was on duty as a sentry at Oranienburg.
04:54In December 1940, he started work at Auschwitz.
05:00My brother went to Auschwitz, and Commander Huss met him and asked him what his profession was.
05:07And he said, pupil, or something like that. High school pupil.
05:15And then he said, that's great. Then you can take over admissions.
05:20And so my brother was head of admissions at 17.
05:25In the camps, the SS promoted those who could kill without hesitation,
05:30even if they were young enough to be at school.
05:34The SS leaders at Auschwitz were all relatively young people,
05:38who moved up the ladder very quickly because their superiors thought they were good.
05:44They could make a successful career for themselves and quickly climb the ladder.
05:49You mustn't forget, at the time, they spoke of the Thousand-Year Reich.
05:54A thousand years is a long time, and it's nice up there.
06:02Naturally, I was proud of my brother's position.
06:05Once I went to the cinema with him,
06:07and the next day my classmates wanted to know who they'd seen me with in the cinema.
06:11When I said it was my brother, they were very impressed.
06:17But it seems Hans never spoke to his family or friends about what went on at Auschwitz.
06:23Once he'd passed his final exams in 1942,
06:26he returned there without a word about the mass murder or his role in it.
06:35He beat the prisoners an awful lot.
06:38We often saw him with the punishment battalion there in Block 11,
06:42where the prisoners were shot.
06:45He was more brutal than the other SS officers.
06:49I got the impression that because he was so young,
06:51he wanted to prove he was a fully fledged SS man.
06:58They promoted the youngsters who would beat up Jews without making a fuss.
07:04They gave them special leave when they did what was expected of them.
07:09That was the evil system.
07:14Stark may have believed that needless acts of cruelty would speed up his promotion.
07:23When he came back from murdering, he was very quiet.
07:27He washed his hands, sat down at his desk and smoked, even though he wasn't a smoker.
07:33He took in deep drags and breathed in and out.
07:36He didn't say a word.
07:38And then he would go out and not come back for hours.
07:54Later, I asked him over and over again whether he ever did more than he had to.
08:00And he would always answer,
08:03Believe me, I only ever did what was ordered of me.
08:11All SS men were trained to follow orders without question.
08:15The proud wearers of this uniform were no exception.
08:19It was an honour to serve under the symbol of the Death's Head.
08:24After a day of service, it was very good.
08:26After a day of service, it was very good.
08:28But the night is at the end.
08:31It was already called to rise.
08:36Nazi propaganda portrayed the Death's Head men as a prestigious new elite,
08:40who never spared themselves in the service of the Third Reich.
08:48Many Germans were deeply impressed.
08:53My sister was really enthusiastic.
08:56She had seen SS officers and thought they were all really attractive.
08:59Strong and hard-working young men.
09:02She loved their uniforms.
09:03You have to go, she said to me.
09:05And I enlisted.
09:07Out of sheer stupidity.
09:12A baker's son, Harry Seidel joined the SS in 1938,
09:17after spending three years in the Hitler Youth.
09:25He soon found himself serving as a guard at Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp.
09:35When we were told to mount guard, we mounted guard.
09:40Or to get on the towers, we stood on the towers.
09:46We did whatever they told us.
09:48We enjoyed it.
09:50I'm not complaining.
09:51I was happy.
09:53I was glad to be an SS soldier.
09:59Life as camp guards turned young men like Seidel
10:02into ideal candidates to carry out mass murder later in the war.
10:06In the camps, they learned how to terrorize and kill so-called enemies of the state.
10:13We were in a permanent state of fear.
10:15It was normal to be afraid.
10:17As a prisoner in the camp, you had to be prepared to die at any moment.
10:32Looking back, Seidel claims his job as a concentration camp guard was uneventful, even tedious.
10:43You could answer riddles or tell each other stories.
10:46You could look out and watch what was happening below.
10:51It was a boring job.
10:52It wasn't ideal.
11:00The Death's Head units had their own hierarchy, designed to create competition as well as obedience.
11:09Everyone wanted to outdo the others.
11:11Everyone wanted to show the others that he was a man and that he was tough.
11:16But there's a hardest.
11:21In this environment, concentration camps were soon to become extermination camps.
11:30In July 1934, Hitler placed the SS Totenkopf, or Death's Head units, under the command of Theodor Eicher, the merciless
11:39commandant of Dachau concentration camp.
11:43He was always cold, and I'd even call him brutal.
11:50Eicher made Dachau a prototype concentration camp.
11:55Often poorly educated, his units terrorized their prisoners, so-called enemies of the state and inferior racial groups.
12:03Many were tortured and murdered.
12:07What moves us to the depths of our soul is the helplessness, the complete powerlessness, the feeling of being at
12:14the mercy of everyone, without even the primitive right to be treated as a human being.
12:20Above the law, Eicher's men could kill with impunity, and did so.
12:28Those who have murdered once realize what it's like.
12:32They know what it's like when someone dies.
12:35The agony suffers.
12:37Then they get used to this agony.
12:41In concentration camps like Dachau and Buchenwald, Eicher's men learned the Nazi arts of torture and murder.
12:50Eicher once said that to serve in the Death's Head units was the highest honor.
12:56His instruction manual to Dachau's staff ordered his men to be hard on themselves and hard on their enemies.
13:02The camps must run like clockwork.
13:07Disorder is wrong.
13:08Order is right, Eicher instructed.
13:14When prisoners disembarked from trucks, lack of supervision is wrong.
13:19Supervision is right.
13:23His men duly obeyed.
13:29It was drummed into them, you see.
13:32They are all traitors.
13:33They are enemies of Germany.
13:35They must be liquidated.
13:37And so we must be tough with them.
13:39They must be strong.
13:44By the end of the summer of 1939, tensions were high throughout Europe.
13:51Set on a course of conquest to the east, the Nazis fabricated a pretext for invading Poland,
13:57accusing the Poles of territorial aggression.
14:08On the first of September, Hitler's forces attacked.
14:12The German army stormed through Poland with astonishing speed.
14:18They were soon followed by a new kind of shock troop.
14:22The death squads of the SS Einsatzgruppen.
14:25They included many who'd served in the death's head units in the concentration camps.
14:31Already brutalized, these men were now let loose in Poland.
14:39In massacre after massacre, they eliminated much of the Polish ruling class and intelligentsia.
14:47Later, the death's head men took part in the systematic shooting of hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews.
14:55The scale of the atrocities they perpetrated in the east, dwarfed their earlier crimes in the camps.
15:02A clerk recording a massacre noted,
15:05morale was good.
15:08Their training by Theodor Eicher was bearing fruit.
15:16When the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941,
15:20the death's head soldiers again served in the Einsatzgruppen.
15:25They spearheaded the war within the war.
15:28Hitler's campaign to annihilate Soviet Jews and Communists alike.
15:34From 1941 to 1943,
15:37Harry Seidel served in Einsatzgruppen C.
15:40We had no idea what it would be like,
15:43only that we were to join a unit and take over the guard and security duties.
15:47It gradually dawned on us what was going on.
15:52Working behind the lines, the Einsatzgruppen's mission was to kill partisans and Jews,
15:58especially the Jews.
16:00The Pripyat marshes near the Russian city of Pinsk
16:03was the scene of one of countless massacres.
16:06In July 1941, the German army advanced into the region.
16:10The SS followed close behind on horseback.
16:15The Germans came on white horses.
16:20I remember it well.
16:22They rode directly past our village,
16:24further towards Ivanishi.
16:28They obviously knew their way around because they rode straight there.
16:33And then we heard a commotion.
16:34And screams.
16:42Claiming to be hunting down partisans,
16:44the riders marauding through the surrounding villages, killed at will.
16:55When I looked out of the window, I saw what was happening.
17:00The SS men stood at the front.
17:03Behind was a vehicle on which the mothers had been tied up,
17:07and their sons followed behind them, also shackled.
17:12They were flanked by the German horsemen.
17:16I saw the horses had the blood of the victims on their hooves.
17:24Throughout the region, Jews were driven out to the edge of their villages and shot.
17:30Some were even forced to dig their own graves.
17:39They kept on digging until the earth was almost up to their waists.
17:48And the Germans cried out,
17:50that's enough.
17:57Then they shouted out,
17:59dance to you, dance.
18:08And a mouth organ was played.
18:14My father said to me,
18:16that, Nina, is the SS.
18:24In SS newsreels, it was all so different.
18:32No mention was made of the mass killings.
18:44The SS were portrayed as noble warriors who were kind to animals.
18:55The head of the SS cavalry units was Captain Hermann Fagerlein, a well-known playboy.
19:04He was a brilliant showman.
19:07He had an eye to his own advantage and he was vain.
19:11In fact, this was the key to his success.
19:16He was well in with the Nazi leadership and knew how to stay in their favour.
19:22He married Gretel Braun, the sister of Hitler's mistress, Eva.
19:28A Nazi careerist,
19:30Fagerlein refused to let mass murder spoil his enjoyment of life.
19:36There was no mention of murder and manslaughter.
19:39I don't know.
19:41He just chatted away like a true Bavarian.
19:45And we all actually thought he was really nice.
19:51Fagerlein rose to become Himmler's adjutant.
19:58There were human beings and then there were brutes.
20:00The kinds of terrible things that a man like Fagerlein would stoop to.
20:04They were, in the context of the time, perfectly legal.
20:09In the Ukraine, the SS incited local people to terrorise their Jewish fellow citizens.
20:20Years of stored up anti-Semitism were suddenly given free reign.
20:30But they often did the killing themselves.
20:34In 1941, Einsatzgruppe C murdered thousands of Jews at Shitomir.
20:40Harry Seidel was present, but claims he killed no one.
20:47In the morning you get the order to line up and then off you go.
20:52You're told what is to happen, that there are this many people to be hanged because they've committed such and
20:57such a crime.
20:59And for us the matter was settled.
21:02It was done.
21:08Murder was now routine for Einsatzgruppe C.
21:11One SS man wrote home.
21:14My dear sister Cathy, we have another mission.
21:18We have to shoot dead all the Jews in a 150 kilometer radius.
21:22In the past week we bumped off 14,000 in Minsk.
21:25I've got lots to tell you when we next see each other.
21:30Einsatzgruppe C marched on.
21:33In July Seidel and his comrades entered Kiev, alongside the regular German army.
21:45At first the city's Jewish residents reacted calmly.
21:52Reuvenstein was 14 at the time.
21:58My mother simply did not want to believe it.
22:03She had had experience of the Germans in the Ukraine from 1918.
22:08Then they hadn't done any harm to the civilians.
22:14She said that the Germans were civilized people.
22:17And that they certainly would not allow anything to happen to civilians.
22:24On the 29th of September 1941, Einsatzgruppe C rounded up all the Jews from Kiev.
22:35Their fate was now obvious.
22:44I remember my mother said to me, try to save yourself.
22:48Muzis and I won't make it.
22:53Her eyes were so full of fear and her lips were trembling.
22:57But somehow she managed to remain calm.
23:00And I would say she was almost cold.
23:04I will never forget her face at that moment.
23:25I will never forget her face at that moment.
23:32The Nazis had robbed in the world of gold and silver, watches and jewellery.
23:35And then they collected it all up in cigar boxes or on plates.
23:43The SS forced the Jews towards Babi Yar Ravine.
23:52There was a flat ledge over the ravine.
23:56The people were lined up, naked.
24:00Their clothes had been taken away, and then they were herded down the slope.
24:15At the bottom, the marksmen stood waiting for them.
24:18And if someone didn't immediately fall down, then they were given a shove with a rifle butt.
24:37I was made to watch as they led along an old man and an old woman in a cart.
24:42The woman lay under a cover and was wringing her hands.
24:46She was obviously very ill.
24:48Her husband sat next to her.
24:51They took both of them directly to the ravine, swung them around, and then laughing, threw them into the ravine.
25:07Within two days, the SS murdered a total of 33,771 Jews.
25:17Some SS men calmly took photographs of the slaughter.
25:21Among them was Harry Seidel.
25:25I then went back again, went up to the ravine, and took two or three photos of how it looked
25:30down there.
25:31And then I had to leave again, because it wasn't our concern.
25:35We didn't really worry about it.
25:43Though Seidel denies he shot anyone himself, he does admit that he might well have done, if he'd been ordered
25:49to.
25:53Whether I would have shot, I really can't tell you.
25:56Probably.
26:03This is Sonderkommando 4A, the unit which carried out the Babi Yar massacre.
26:10They are shoemakers, bakers, craftsmen and academics.
26:16Ordinary men.
26:22We regarded it all as necessary.
26:24They were Jews, they were Bolsheviks.
26:27There was only one answer.
26:29To shoot them.
26:33Babi Yar was one of the most notorious crimes of World War II.
26:38We couldn't have changed anything anyway.
26:40Or what do you think?
26:41What could we have changed?
26:45Death's head units played a major role in the Jewish ghettos that became clearing houses for death camps like Auschwitz.
26:54In spring 1943 in Warsaw, the order came to empty the Jewish ghetto.
27:02The Jews rebelled.
27:05Thousands preferred to go down fighting rather than be transported to the death camps.
27:12Despite overwhelming odds, they put up a brave fight against the SS.
27:24As the rebellion began, none of us believed that we would survive.
27:30We had a completely different goal.
27:34It was the last opportunity for revenge against the SS soldiers for all the years of murder.
27:47These photographs document the suppression of the Warsaw Uprising.
27:53They come from the personal collection of a death's head officer, Brigadier Jürgen Strupp.
28:02Strupp wrote about this battle in the ghetto, as if it were a completely normal military operation.
28:10They were more than simply murderers, because they came and seized people who had been in hiding, who were starving.
28:23People who had already reached the last days of their lives.
28:32Strupp clearly believed that pictures like these could only be to his credit in Nazi Germany.
28:47He always wanted to get higher.
28:50He bragged about every Jew who was transported away or killed.
28:55He spoke about how brave his troops were and how perfectly he carried out his campaigns.
29:01That was his way of making a career for himself.
29:09That career began in the Westphalian town of Detmold.
29:15Strupp worked in the land registry as a lowly bureaucrat.
29:22In 1933, he seized the chance to join the SS.
29:29To many Nazis, the local memorial to the ancient tribal leader Hermann the Warrior King symbolized the new era of
29:38German nationalism.
29:42Once Strupp joined their ranks, he rose from obscure civil servants to SS general with astonishing speed.
29:51After the war, he maintained he'd always just obeyed orders.
30:01He said that he had faithfully followed the orders of his superiors and the most superior was Adolf Hitler.
30:07Hitler had demanded all that from him and he had only followed orders.
30:13The Einsatzgruppen were staffed by men from all over the Nazi empire.
30:18As well as death's head soldiers, they included SS men from the security police and the Gestapo.
30:25Others came from police reserve battalions.
30:28All followed SS orders.
30:35Those who found the slaughter difficult saw themselves as suffering for a higher cause.
30:43Then I asked him how they coped with this, with what they were doing to the Jews.
30:55And he said, yes, we've got the hardest job, but we are the Führer's most loyal servants.
31:05For the Führer, we are prepared to commit atrocities.
31:15Most obeyed the order to kill in cold blood.
31:19A few tried to find an escape clause from murder.
31:25There were many sick notes.
31:28Every day there were more than 30, sometimes even 50 or 60 people who wanted to sign off sick.
31:35But as a rule, only some of them were signed off.
31:38They were then given some kind of pill or other.
31:49But all the killing took a heavy mental toll on the killers.
31:56There were also some murderers who ended up taking their own lives.
32:04They killed themselves.
32:09If they had their own kids at home, and then they killed some kids, they were never quite the same
32:15again.
32:21And so the Nazis looked for a more impersonal way of murdering.
32:26That's why they came up with gas.
32:32The gas chambers made murder much more indirect,
32:35and much easier for the death's head murderers.
32:42At this training school near Berlin, SS men learnt how to administer poisonous gas to rats.
32:50Hans Stark was a pupil here.
32:54This is the roof of the gas chamber at Auschwitz.
32:58In 1942, the year of his exams, Hans Stark regularly used to fill it with Zyklon B, the lethal poison
33:06gas.
33:11St. Stark never showed any compassion.
33:16Quite the contrary.
33:18He mimicked those who begged for mercy.
33:22He acted as if it were all a prank.
33:25How could an educated human being be so brutal?
33:32Another prisoner remembers the sadism of Hans Stark.
33:36And she said,
33:37Mr. Commandant, please, let me live.
33:41I have not done anything.
33:44Come on, Sarah, stand up.
33:45Sarah, stand up.
33:46Sarah, stand up.
33:47You have to stand up.
33:49Then she said like this.
33:51Yes?
33:52And then she shot them all.
33:59At Auschwitz, the death's head soldiers carried out their orders so that the death factory functioned exactly as planned.
34:09The train hadn't quite stopped as the doors to the carriages were yanked open.
34:13And then came the yelling and the shouting, out, out, out.
34:16Leave your luggage in the carriage.
34:18And then we jumped out.
34:19They ordered the men to go to the right, women with children to the left, women without children further out
34:25to the left.
34:27From 1943, the man in charge of the main camp at Auschwitz was Arthur Lieberhenschel.
34:34I knew that he was at Auschwitz, but that didn't mean anything to me.
34:37I just thought that was where he worked.
34:42Before Auschwitz, Lieberhenschel had worked in Oranienburg, close to Saxenhausen concentration camp.
34:51He enjoyed a happy family life there, a stone's throw from the camp.
35:00My father was a very caring father.
35:03Every morning I got up with him.
35:05I can still see his hand as he spread honey on my bread.
35:08And now and again I was allowed to accompany him.
35:11His chauffeur picked him up and I was allowed to go in the back in my nightdress to the T
35:15building where he worked.
35:19As Eicher's chief of staff for the inspection of concentration camps, Lieberhenschel directed genocide from his office at Oranienburg.
35:29In November 1943, Lieberhenschel was transferred to Auschwitz.
35:35He said goodbye to his children.
35:38I will never forget you.
35:40And when your innocent hands fold into prayer, then pray to God that I shall stay healthy.
35:46Forever yours, Papa.
35:54The new commandant surprised inmates with the mildness of his manner.
36:04Lieberhenschel was a typical official.
36:07He was forever going round and inspecting things.
36:10I never saw him actually hit a prisoner.
36:14He was a gentle man.
36:16And I must say, he was also somehow a perfectly normal man.
36:23But the horrific truth of Auschwitz haunted him.
36:30He didn't feel good there at all.
36:32He suffered terribly.
36:33I know that from his second wife.
36:35She told us about it.
36:37When new trainloads arrived, he always had to go over there.
36:40He would say, my God, all the women and children.
36:44And when he got home, he would stand for ages under the shower as if he had to wash away
36:49all the dirt.
36:50And she often said, let's go for a bit of a walk out in the fresh air.
36:59Like many SS men, Lieberhenschel's actions in the death camps were a far cry from his life outside.
37:11These were ordinary people with ordinary lives outside.
37:15They weren't born sadists, although there were some sadists at the camps, but not many at Auschwitz.
37:22And I can't understand how these normal people could participate in mass murder day in, day out.
37:31But whatever he felt, the death's head commandant Lieberhenschel obeyed orders.
37:39He was never violent and was more gentle than the others.
37:43And yet he was a criminal like the others.
37:46Because he too took part in the selection on the ramp.
37:59He was in on it from the beginning, so he always knew what was going on.
38:03Even though he was working in an office, he was working on these things, so he must have known what
38:07was going on.
38:08And certainly when he got to Auschwitz, then he saw it for real, the suffering that went on there.
38:16Lieberhenschel was one of the most senior officials in the death's head killing machine.
38:22Once the full horror of the camps was revealed after the war, the Allies made it their business to track
38:28him down.
38:32When the concentration camps were liberated, the world learnt that the death's head units had gassed over a million Jews
38:39at Auschwitz alone.
38:41The Allied soldiers who opened up the camps were not prepared for what they found.
38:46Many still can't get over what they saw.
38:49I had been a liberator of many concentration camps as a soldier in the American armies.
38:55I had seen the product of mass murder in Buchenwald, in Ebensee, in Mauthausen.
39:02I certainly was shocked by that experience.
39:06I was traumatized by that experience, which has not left me to this day.
39:27Determined to prosecute those responsible, in 1945 Benjamin Ferencz made it a priority to hunt down those who'd given the
39:35orders for mass murder.
39:37The most important characteristic that I looked for was men of education and intelligence.
39:45I didn't want to have as a defendant some poor soldier that was ordered to go out and commit some
39:50criminal act and didn't realize what he was doing.
39:57Many pleaded they'd done nothing wrong.
40:09My reasoning was that if they were educated men, they would have been aware of the criminality and the magnitude
40:18of the crimes they were committing.
40:22In Nuremberg in 1947, there was a special trial of Einsatzgruppen leaders.
40:28Their troops, including many from the death's head units, killed between one and two million people in cold blood behind
40:36the lines.
40:37Guilty or not guilty?
40:41Guilty or not guilty?
40:45Guilty or not guilty?
40:46This soldier.
40:47Guilty or not guilty?
40:49This soldier.
40:51They certainly were murderers, but not the traditional type of murderer.
40:55They were not sadistic, habitual criminals.
40:58That they were not.
40:59Murderers they surely were.
41:01Murderers in spades.
41:03Mass murderers on a scale never before seen in human history.
41:06Otto Ohlendorf was one of the Einsatzgruppen leaders.
41:10The Nuremberg judges were amazed to find that this cultured officer spoke with total indifference about the crimes of the
41:17century.
41:18I can only repeat what I only say for two and a half years ago.
41:23After my best memory, 90,000 were sent to the Einsatzcommandos.
41:29There were 90,000 were sent to the military.
41:35The biggest disappointment for me was the complete absence of remorse.
41:41I would have felt quite different about them if anyone had ever said he was sorry.
41:46They never said they were sorry, because they were not sorry.
41:49They were sorry they lost the war.
41:52At Landsberg prison, west of Munich, the judges pronounced 14 death sentences on leaders of the Einsatzgruppen.
42:02Four were carried out.
42:06But right to the last, none of the condemned ever expressed any remorse.
42:13One wrote,
42:15Discipline and loyalty brought me to the gallows.
42:18Even to this day, I do not know how I could have acted differently.
42:26This was the tie which bound all of them.
42:28Opera singers, lawyers, economists, architects.
42:33Another thing they had in common, they were all prepared to commit mass murder for their ideals without any hesitation
42:40or any regret.
42:43Years of indoctrination, from school days on, had helped prepare many SS men for genocide, and they were still convinced
42:51of this reasoning, even after the war.
42:57There is the master race, and then there are brutes.
43:01There are races of mankind which are distinguishable, not for historical reasons, but rather, as they said at the time,
43:09by blood.
43:10That was accepted.
43:12This ideology poisoned people, corrupted them.
43:16You are a member of the master race, which was great, because you could benefit from that.
43:23At least in a small circle, you could be a small Führer yourself.
43:32At Dakar, the Americans were holding high-ranking SS officers in custody.
43:37Among them was Arthur Lieberhenschel.
43:42Under questioning, Lieberhenschel protested his innocence.
43:46I have seen me everywhere, and I have seen me everywhere, and I have seen me everywhere, and I have
43:53seen me everywhere, and I have seen me everywhere, and I have seen me everywhere.
43:58I have seen me everywhere, and I have seen me everywhere.
44:02I have seen me everywhere, and I have seen me everywhere.
44:07I have seen you everywhere.
44:08But prisoners' accounts didn't bear out his claims.
44:11Extradited to Poland, he was tried and sentenced to death in Krakow in 1948.
44:17In the end, I do think he resigned himself to it.
44:22He even wrote a farewell letter, and at the bottom it said,
44:26have just received my sentence.
44:28They have sentenced me to death.
44:31There you go.
44:38In Frankfurt in 1964, after years of evasion, some rank-and-file deaths-head men from Auschwitz finally stood trial.
44:49They included Hans Stark.
44:54The hospital war in Frankfurt.
45:05Up till then, my brother hadn't said a word to his wife or family about him being in Auschwitz.
45:13and then when he was arrested in Cologne in reaction to his wife's questioning look he
45:21said that it was because of something to do with the wall stock was accused of single-handedly
45:29murdering 44 inmates to the last he said he was innocent of all the charges against him
45:37he denied everything
45:44foreign foreign foreign foreign foreign above all I cannot approve of the fact that he did not want
46:06to face what actually happened there what he brought about Han Stark was found guilty but
46:18because he'd been a minor at the time of the murders he was sentenced under the law for
46:23juvenile offenders to only ten years in jail he always insisted he'd only followed orders
46:37the mentality if the Fuhrer commands it we follow can lead to another Auschwitz
46:46and blind subordination to a leader is unacceptable and should not be seen as an inevitable part of
46:53human nature the image most people must take responsibility for what they do even in critical
47:00situations and that is something that still applies today the unquestioning loyalty of death's head men
47:14like Han Stark is a somber reminder of the terrifying power of the SS
47:39next on the history channel we investigate the mystery of Odessa the system by which it's thought German war criminals
47:45could find safe havens at the end of hostilities we explore the mysteries of the
47:49rat line after the break
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