- 19 hours ago
For educational purposes
When the "Third Reich" surrendered, Heinrich Himmler's elite order became the "Army of Outlaws".
Some perpetrators are brought to trial and convicted by the Allies as war criminals, but some of the most wanted SS henchmen manage to escape abroad in a mysterious way.
What became of the SS after the war ?
This question leads to an almost impenetrable web of Nazi legends and historical facts that sound so unlikely that one can hardly believe.
At the center of the film is the mysterious organization "Odessa" - short for "organization of former SS members". Soon after the war ended, it appeared in secret files of the American secret service.
The fear is widespread that the elite of Nazi rule could re-form underground.
How influential could this underground network be ?
This final episode features interviews with Nazi hunters :
- Beate Klarsfeld
- Ephraim Zuroff
- Serge Klarsfeld
- Former members of the US secret service and army officers (William Gowen, James Milano and Wolfgang Robinow), and former SS members.
When the "Third Reich" surrendered, Heinrich Himmler's elite order became the "Army of Outlaws".
Some perpetrators are brought to trial and convicted by the Allies as war criminals, but some of the most wanted SS henchmen manage to escape abroad in a mysterious way.
What became of the SS after the war ?
This question leads to an almost impenetrable web of Nazi legends and historical facts that sound so unlikely that one can hardly believe.
At the center of the film is the mysterious organization "Odessa" - short for "organization of former SS members". Soon after the war ended, it appeared in secret files of the American secret service.
The fear is widespread that the elite of Nazi rule could re-form underground.
How influential could this underground network be ?
This final episode features interviews with Nazi hunters :
- Beate Klarsfeld
- Ephraim Zuroff
- Serge Klarsfeld
- Former members of the US secret service and army officers (William Gowen, James Milano and Wolfgang Robinow), and former SS members.
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LearningTranscript
00:29At the end of
00:29World War II, many members of the SS, the main perpetrators of Nazi terror, became
00:35wanted criminals. Those who escaped are thought to have been helped by a powerful network
00:44of SS veterans and sympathizers, codenamed Odessa.
00:51We had been aware of the name Odessa for a long time, because several Nazi criminals
00:55had been ushered out of Europe or Germany after the war, with the help of an organization
01:00under that name.
01:03But although many SS veterans met openly after the war, they denied the existence of an official
01:08underground organization.
01:11I think it's clear, though, that an organization did exist, it had resources, and it succeeded
01:18to a large extent.
01:22This is the disturbing story of that sinister network, Odessa, and of the Nazis' attempts
01:29to create the Fourth Reich.
01:39When Germany surrendered in May 1945, the victors began the hunt for SS war criminals.
01:48In the chaos that reigned after the war, it was no easy task for the Allies to identify
01:54the men they were after.
01:58There were some SS men, particularly those in the concentration camp guard, who managed
02:07to convince a soldier from the Air Force or from the regular army to give them their uniform.
02:16Somehow they managed to persuade them, sometimes by paying them or by giving them something.
02:22Anyway, somehow the soldier was persuaded to give up his uniform and swapped it with the
02:27SS man who wanted to get away.
02:30It was really a kind of camouflage.
02:35But there was one telltale sign of SS membership.
02:40Every SS man had a tattoo of his blood group under his left arm.
02:46Nearly everyone had to lift their arm up high, and then they knew that they were SS.
02:52They were taken to the special camps.
02:55I was incredibly lucky, as I never had to hold my arm up.
03:01When I was imprisoned in Aschaffenburg, a German medical orderly cut out the blood group to
03:07two for me.
03:11But the trick seldom worked.
03:16Naturally, whenever we had the chance, we looked under the left arm of all those we were
03:20suspicious about, because they can get rid of the blood group tattoo, but they can't
03:25get rid of the scar, which is still visible today.
03:30Many SS men tried to mix in with the soldiers of the regular army, held captive by the Allies.
03:41The Americans almost let us starve to death.
03:44They gave us nothing to eat and made us lie in swampy meadows.
03:48Things got so bad that my only thought was to get out of there.
03:52So I escaped from the camp and hid out in the Taublitz Mountains for a long time, during
03:57the winter.
04:02The mountainous terrain of Bavaria and Austria soon became the escape hatch for some of the
04:06most notorious SS leaders.
04:11Among them were mass murderer Adolf Eichmann, Alois Brunner, his deputy, and Otto Skorzeny,
04:20famous for his heroics as a commando.
04:23After the war, Skorzeny ran an escape network in Austria.
04:29That's where we all met each other, and then we were in this so-called SS network.
04:34Two of Skorzeny's comrades at the Linz discharge camp had smuggled themselves in there and brought
04:41American discharge papers to us at the Alpine farm.
04:45Then we discharged ourselves with the farm stamp by pressing our fingerprints on the paper.
04:51That's how we discharged ourselves.
04:55SS Colonel Otto Skorzeny, Knight of the Iron Cross, had specialised in missions behind enemy
05:01lines.
05:02One of Hitler's heroes, he's often rumoured to be Odessa's ringleader.
05:09He was a strong character.
05:11He was a natural leader.
05:14And he was used to having his orders obeyed.
05:20In 1951, American intelligence reported that Skorzeny was head of an underground army that
05:27was 800,000 strong.
05:29In July 1948, he had escaped from internment and joined other SS men in hiding.
05:39He fled from the denazification camp after announcing his intention to do so and hid away for a time
05:46in Bavaria.
05:50Among other places, he was on a farm in Watzmann.
05:54And then he had his hair dyed blonde and used a pseudonym for many years, even in his business
06:01correspondence.
06:03It was Rolf U.S. Steinbauer.
06:09Skorzeny is thought to have found his way through Austria to Italy and on to fascist Spain.
06:15He may well have gone through the Zilletal Valley, one of the main SS escape routes through the
06:21Austrian Alps.
06:22Following old mountain tracks, local smugglers took escapees across the mountains to Italy.
06:28There, they were often helped by clergy in the Catholic Church.
06:33To these high-ranking Catholics, the SS men were perceived as comrades in the ongoing struggle
06:38against communism.
06:41The priest organized the passports.
06:43He told us which trains to take and how to do this and that.
06:46He was like the travel guide.
06:49We sat in the train and then all the carabinieri came by and it was really exciting.
06:54It was night and we weren't allowed to say anything until we got over the Brenner Pass.
07:00Then we immediately cracked open the bottles of wine.
07:03We were celebrating that we had got past Brenner.
07:05Italy was perfect.
07:09In Rome, the Vatican Secret Service is thought to have played a key role in securing SS men
07:15a safe passage to freedom.
07:17One of the most difficult things in the world is to know anything about Vatican intelligence.
07:21Now, you can talk all you want to, but I don't think anybody's ever cracked that one.
07:26Now, we know that the Vatican was supporting the Latin American countries by willing to send
07:34Catholics with visas to help fill their quotas with respect to skilled labor.
07:39We knew that that was Vatican policy.
07:42The favorite destination of German fugitives, including SS men on the run, was Santa Maria
07:48dell'Anima, the German national church in Rome.
07:52Its seminary was run by the Austrian bishop Alois Hudal, now defended by his successors.
08:02He had German nationalist views.
08:05His main concern was that Germany should revert to what it was like before the Treaty of Versailles.
08:12He dreamt of that.
08:14Maybe he did help a few people, but I don't think it was systematic work in any way.
08:19At least not according to the files we have here.
08:25In fact, Hudal called Hitler the architect of German greatness and believed Nazism and Catholicism
08:31could triumph together.
08:33His support for SS war criminals was confirmed by his secretary.
08:36In the year 1947, you had to do a Christmas feast.
08:44And this Christmas feast was presented in the Casa Generalizia de Franciscana in Sardinia.
08:54And I know that Bishop Hudal stood up and said, I'm glad to welcome you to 110 war criminals.
09:04They must be looking for where they want.
09:08Here they are safe.
09:13After the war, Rome became a gateway for escapees from all over Europe.
09:18The International Red Cross had papers ready for people with no ID.
09:26It was the primary method for so-called displaced persons to get some form of identity papers,
09:33which they needed to reach their destination.
09:38To get where they wanted to go, they needed some kind of ID.
09:44Quite obviously, this method was liable to abuse.
09:51It is well known that whenever representatives of the Vatican requested such papers for their charges,
09:57then someone would immediately comply with their wishes.
10:06The names of would-be emigrants were seldom checked.
10:10These instructions were set up.
10:13You went up the big Spanish stairs, up a little right, then a bibliothĂšque of Rappaport,
10:22then you went up the stairs.
10:22You had to believe what they said.
10:26It was the first time a duty of the International Red Cross.
10:35According to Hans Mahler, some priests were expert counterfeiters.
10:41I can give a small course, Mr. Pope.
10:45Then he showed me it.
10:46You buy a cellophane paper, very clean.
10:50This cellophane paper, you put it on the stamp.
10:54You have to have an original.
10:56You take a very fine feather and you take a stamp.
11:01And now you draw.
11:02We had an old Venezuelan pass.
11:04I think five people went to Venezuela to the same name.
11:07Yes.
11:12But Bishop Hudal wasn't the only priest in Rome orchestrating the escape of SS war criminals.
11:21During the war, Catholic priest Krunoslav Draganovic had served the fascist regime in Croatia.
11:31In post-war Rome, he used his monastery as a base to help Croatian SS men escape.
11:42He became the mouthpiece for Ante Pavlic, the Croatian dictator who had backed Hitler, and whose whereabouts were now secret.
11:53But he too escaped, sailing from Genoa to Argentina in October 1948.
12:04And that was the model trial run of the Rat Line.
12:08In other words, if you could do it for Ante Pavlic, who was a high, what do you call it,
12:15high profile character, who was wanted, you could do it for practically anybody else.
12:21Astonishingly, American forces based in Rome used the very same Rat Line to smuggle out double agents whose lives were
12:29in danger.
12:30We were collecting information about the Russians.
12:34And in order to do that, we dealt with Russian deserters, we mounted operations into the Russian zone of Austria
12:42and so forth.
12:43And then we found that we had a number of these people on our hands and we didn't know what
12:47to do with them.
12:49The Americans turned to Father Draganovic, despite his support of Hitler.
12:54We knew that Draganovic did obtain visas through the Vatican somehow.
12:58We didn't know how he obtained them.
13:00And he wanted American money.
13:02He charges $1,500, $1,400 to $1,500 in greenbacks.
13:09And he would produce visas.
13:11Now he made the pretense that they had to be good Catholics and all of that sort of thing.
13:16So everybody we sent down the Rat Line was a good Catholic.
13:20The Americans use of Draganovic's network to smuggle out their own agents compromised the Allied hunt for war criminals.
13:29Draganovic and other people could funnel other people down that line because they knew it was perfectly safe.
13:33As everybody knows, their whole army of them went down through the Rat Line.
13:38Among them was Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo chief who was a US agent after the war.
13:44The Americans paid Draganovic to help Barbie flee to Bolivia.
13:50Adolf Eichmann, SS mass murderer, left Rome for Argentina in 1950.
13:56His application for a new passport was signed by a Catholic priest.
14:01Walter Rauf, the SS colonel who devised the gas vans, escaped to Chile.
14:06He sarcastically called himself a state-certified war criminal.
14:16And every one must cost about at least $5,000, $6,000 that we sent down the Rat Line.
14:21In other words, the visa was $1,500, but then you had, you know, the people at the safe house,
14:26you had the people at the port.
14:28You know, we always had one of the police chiefs at Naples and one in Genoa that we had on
14:33the payroll.
14:34I'd always ask, where did these people get all this money? Because it took quite a bit of money to
14:38do the bribing that we did.
14:41After the war, the Allies seized a lot of Nazi funds.
14:45But rumours persist of secret SS accounts, treasure troves and money laundering.
14:51A Swiss inquiry team recently found evidence that high-ranking SS men were transferring large sums of capital long after
14:591945.
15:02There were financial networks that continued their activities after the war and well into the 1950s, namely movements of what
15:11we called fugitive capital.
15:13The question is, what actually happened to this money after the war, and what happened to the Nazi officials who
15:21were perhaps involved in this business during the war?
15:25The SS also did its utmost to hide away forged currency for future use.
15:30In February 1945, a strange sequence of events took place at Lake Toplitz in Salzkammergut.
15:40At five in the morning, there was a knock at the door, and two SS men were standing there.
15:45Which was really strange for us, because there weren't very many SS men in this area.
15:50And then they told us to get the horses ready and travel to the Toplitz Lake.
15:55And I said, why?
15:56Why?
15:57They said that they had to transport something there immediately.
16:01There were about 70 or 80 boxes, and an SS man had to accompany every load that the horses carried.
16:08Then, with him travelling along on the carriage, we drove to Toplitz Lake and unloaded the boxes, and were told
16:15to turn back straight away.
16:17They forbade us to watch what they did with the boxes, but I turned around and saw that they sank
16:24them in the lake.
16:28In 1959, this secret treasure was recovered.
16:32It turned out to be boxes of forged palm notes, the legacy of the Nazis' counterfeiting scheme.
16:39Codenamed Operation Bernhard, it was run by SS man Friedrich Schwent.
16:47Schwent's task was to use the forged pounds and dollars, in fact, all the forged currency, to buy essentials for
16:55the war effort.
16:57The money was also exchanged for gold and jewellery, and so on.
17:01And Schwent seems to have helped himself to it, unstintingly.
17:12Labe's castle in southern Tirol was the SS headquarters for forging foreign currency during the war.
17:21If the mysterious Friedrich Schwent did put some of his money aside for Odessa, he left no evidence.
17:31Schwent is supposed to have administered finances for Odessa for a while, so there must have been a certain organization,
17:38a network.
17:39There's no doubt about it.
17:41Skorzeny was, for example, involved.
17:43Rudel was in on it, too.
17:45Rauf as well.
17:46Schwent, and definitely Barbie.
17:49In 1946, Schwent fled to South America, to the Peruvian capital, Lima.
17:56U.S. intelligence was informed in 1965 that he was running the Latin American section of Odessa, but this remains
18:04speculation.
18:07What is certain is that Schwent kept in touch with his old comrades.
18:12Among his business partners was one Klaus Altmann.
18:19Altmann was Klaus Barbie.
18:20We had no doubt about it.
18:22He was known in South America in La Paz for boasting in a German club about being a former Nazi.
18:27Of course, he never admitted to being the Gestapo chief in Lyon.
18:34I will never forget how Barbie sat at the head of the table, with Schwent sitting on his left.
18:40In the course of the conversation, I said that the way Hitler exploited the idealism of German youth, as we
18:46realize today, was enough to make you weep.
18:50Altmann then jumped up, his face turned bright red, and still holding on tight to his wine glass, he said,
18:57Nobody says a word against the FĂŒhrer in my presence.
19:08Many SS men headed for Argentina.
19:11It had been officially neutral during the war, but General Perron had always cultivated links with the Nazis.
19:17Now he organized their welcome.
19:23Perron planned to turn Argentina into a fascist Catholic Republic.
19:32He was very much inclined towards the fascist regime and fascist ideology.
19:38I don't think that Perron was a racist in a biological sense, but he liked the ideology of this regime.
19:46He also wanted to establish a special service for the anti-communist cause.
19:52That's why he invited so many Nazi secret service and SS men to come to this country.
19:59One Jewish immigrant arrived with highly suspect fellow passengers.
20:07There were 450 people who got onto this ship with their families.
20:14Then when they got off the ship at the port in Buenos Aires, they were all dressed as Capuchin monks,
20:22with long brown habits and a prayer book under the arm.
20:27And they were no longer with their families.
20:30They had said goodbye to their families in the cabin.
20:36And coaches were waiting to take them straight to the town of Rosario,
20:40so that they could quickly disappear from the scene.
20:45And a year later, my wife arrived on a ship carrying 800 more of them.
20:52Fascist leaders, SS leaders, and Ostasi activists from Croatia.
20:59Argentina became a mecca for many SS fugitives.
21:06I read a lot about Argentina.
21:10It sounded interesting, and I heard the Germans were treated well,
21:13and that the climate was good.
21:18I just wanted to go somewhere.
21:21I couldn't go back home yet because I had escaped imprisonment.
21:27There were SS men who had already gone there, who helped us when we arrived.
21:34A Flemish soldier also from the Waffen SS helped me to settle in.
21:44Many new arrivals set up colonies like Villa General Belgrano in the province of Cordoba.
21:50To this day, German origins are still highly prized in this little pocket of Germany in Latin America.
22:04The Germans were conservatively nationalistic, and we tried to retain that.
22:11It was the only thing that we could take with us.
22:14The language, the habits, the Christmas celebrations, Easter.
22:20Hardly anyone made the effort to do a language course at all.
22:24You just learned it as you went along, but you stayed German.
22:38And what suited the SS war criminals best of all was that no one asked you any awkward questions.
22:49People scratched each other's backs, but they didn't ask what you'd done in the war or where you came from.
22:54Whether you were in the Waffen SS or if you were a soldier.
22:57We didn't talk about it at all.
23:01Everyone was friendly over there.
23:03People helped each other out, spoke the German language, and were really happy when there was news from the homeland,
23:08or someone new turned up.
23:12In the 1990s, the Argentine government belatedly investigated Nazi activities on its own soil.
23:20It only found evidence of 180 war criminals settling in Argentina.
23:25Many files were burned. The real number runs into thousands.
23:29It includes some very prominent SS men who left their mark on Argentina forever.
23:38The biggest war criminals who settled in the country were Eichmann and Mengele.
23:46They advised the police on strategies to combat communism.
23:54But at the same time, they introduced a culture of terror in the heart of the police force and the
24:00army.
24:04This enabled a legitimization of torture in order to get information and established an ideology of violence.
24:15All this was apparent in Argentina at the time of the dictatorship in the 1970s.
24:21It was very visible in the 1970s.
24:26In 1960, Adolf Eichmann was running a rabbit farm near Buenos Aires.
24:31The Israeli Secret Service captured him.
24:34He'd made the cardinal error of recording an account of his war crimes.
25:00Tried in Jerusalem, Adolf Eichmann maintained his innocence to the very end.
25:06In May 1962, he was hanged.
25:13In July 1965, a sinister meeting appears to have been held in Marbella, Spain.
25:19The supposed minutes of the meeting state that it was called by Odessa, the institution of former members of the
25:25SS.
25:26In the minutes, this SS network vows to strike back for what it sees as the injustice carried out against
25:33their former leaders.
25:34The minutes were found by John V. Schneider Merck.
25:37He is convinced of their authenticity.
25:43It's basically the report of a meeting of like-minded individuals from 123 different countries, or 123 people anyway.
25:51There were people from Africa, Croatia, America, Argentina, the Ukraine, plus Russian members of parliament and delegates from Arabia and
26:00God knows who else.
26:02People from Timbuktu to Fuego, they were all there.
26:07According to the minutes, a unanimous decision was taken to declare war on Israel.
26:17At this time, many SS men in Germany had successfully evaded justice.
26:24They were seldom pursued by the media or by the authorities.
26:30After the war, some of them spent a few years as prisoners of war under the Allies, but most were
26:35never called to account.
26:36And it was the most atrocious ones who stayed in Germany.
26:39Only Barbie, Mengele, Eichmann and a few others went to South America.
26:43The ones who stayed in Germany were well protected, because for years the German courts didn't want to take any
26:49action against them.
26:51There were exceptions.
26:53In the German state of Hesse, Chief Public Prosecutor Fritz Bauer hunted down Nazi war criminals.
26:58In the 1960s, he secured the convictions of several SS men for crimes at Auschwitz.
27:05There are still murderers who have not found.
27:08But I believe we have done a lot in the Republic since 1945 since 1945.
27:13We have made a statistic that has been dealt with the protests from 1945 to 1961.
27:21After this statistic, there were 2,024 people in Hesse.
27:30There were 942 people in Hesse.
27:33There were 942 people in Hesse.
27:34That's about 45%.
27:38Hundreds of war criminals were convicted in Hesse.
27:41In revenge, according to the minutes of the meeting at Marbella,
27:44Odessa then sentenced Bauer to death.
27:51Three years later, in June 1968, Fritz Bauer was found dead in his bath.
28:00The post-mortem did not reveal the slightest clue to suggest that he had been drowned.
28:07On the contrary, his stomach was full to the brim with pills.
28:12There was a whole jam jar of pills in there.
28:17The authorities made no attempt to investigate any further.
28:23Naturally, there have to be certain grounds to classify a death as suspicious.
28:28Such grounds could certainly have been found here,
28:31as it's rather an unusual situation when someone is found in the bath.
28:36I have only come across that maybe two or three times in almost 30,000 post-mortals.
28:44Fritz Bauer's life was devoted to bringing Nazi war criminals to justice.
28:48Whether he died for the same cause, as the Odessa minutes suggest, remains a mystery today.
28:56Odessa's existence is still unproven, but no doubt surrounds HIAG, the Mutual Assistance Association.
29:04Founded in West Germany in 1951,
29:07HIAG became a successful lobbying group and relief fund for SS veterans and their families.
29:17Over there in Germany we had HIAG, and so we adopted it here in Austria and built it up.
29:24We were given the task of looking after Adolf Hitler's sister in Berchtesgaden.
29:28She was in a very poor state of health.
29:31I'll never forget how when we went there we found this poor woman sitting in a damp room,
29:36without any heating, riddled with rheumatism.
29:41Then we took on the job of caring for Himmler's family.
29:44Frau Himmler and her daughter, and then Frau Rosenberg and her daughter,
29:48who lived near Munich in a goatshed.
29:55The pressure on Nazis in public life was increasing.
29:59In 1968, Nazi hunter Beate Klaasfeld slapped the German premier Kurt Kiesinger,
30:05denouncing him as an ex-Nazi.
30:07Known as the slap heard around the world,
30:10it highlighted the role of Nazis in German politics.
30:15In Latin America, too, she made life difficult for war criminals.
30:24S.S. Rolf! S.S. Rolf! S.S. Rolf!
30:30Face this Rolf! Face this Rolf!
30:34Why the Pinochet, the dictator Pinochet, why can he not send out of this country a man like Rolf, who
30:39killed innocent victims?
30:42In Bolivia, Klaasfeld hounded Klaus Barbie.
30:48Barbie denied it for a long time.
30:50Even in front of French TV cameras, he insisted,
30:53I am Klaus Altmann, I am not Klaus Barbie.
30:57I am not Barbie.
30:58I am not Barbie. As I already said, I am Klaus Altmann.
31:01I am Klaus Altmann.
31:01I am Klaus Altmann.
31:02And the Straserwart MĂŒnchen have the opportunity to leave the Bolivia's authorities to leave this country.
31:08I made my second journey there in 1971.
31:12Later, S.S. General Karl Wolf and his friend Klaus Barbie recalled this second trip.
31:18The famous Glasfeld.
31:20Oh, the one who gave it to Gorfelsk?
31:23Yes, the one who was here.
31:25She made a hole here.
31:29She made a hole here.
31:30She made a hole here.
31:31She made a hole here in my office, on a bank bank, and said,
31:35in Bolivia there is no right.
31:38She made a sale here and they made it with bad tomatoes.
31:42You say, that's the shriek.
31:43That's the shriek.
31:45In Paris on the 6th of July 1979, a warning was delivered to the Glasfeld family.
31:55That night, someone slipped into an underground car park on the Avenue de Versailles.
32:00The target was the Glasfeld's car.
32:06A bomb was attached to it under the wheel arch.
32:15Although the car was destroyed, the Glasfeld's had a lucky escape.
32:27Shortly afterwards, the Glasfeld's received a letter claiming responsibility.
32:32We are called Odessa.
32:35This bomb is a warning.
32:42There were very specific threats in the letter, directed at us, at our family, and in particular at our children.
32:48And it was signed Odessa.
32:53If Odessa did exist, it was no help to Klaus Barbie.
33:01In 1983, the butcher of Lyon was extradited back to France.
33:11People may talk about feelings of compassion, but I'll have none of it.
33:15I just think it's a pity that it happened so late.
33:18He was a thief, a fraud, and a blackmailer.
33:21Yes, sir.
33:24Barbie was held on remand for four years, then sentenced to life imprisonment.
33:31His defense was paid for by a Swiss banker, Francois Genoux, the trustee for many leading Nazis.
33:38He's said to be a passionate admirer of Hitler.
33:44This is confirmed by his friend, the Swiss right-wing politician, Ahmed Hubert.
33:54I said to him, listen, Barbie and his like are enough to make one sick.
34:02Then he said, I agree, but we are fighting against an entire system.
34:08And to do that, you also have to lend a hand to unpleasant people so that they can defend themselves.
34:15Because some of those prosecuting Barbie are bigger scoundrels than he is.
34:22Hubert believes that Francois Genoux was a Nazi fund manager since 1945.
34:32He said to me that after the war, he had been given the honourable task of helping to rebuild the
34:38National Socialist Financial System,
34:41Envie de QuatriĂšme Reich, with a view to the upcoming Fourth Reich.
34:49Much circumstantial evidence suggests that Odessa exists, but it remains a mystery.
34:56Sympathisers like Hubert claim there's no central organization, just a series of shifting networks.
35:05They got together and formed small groups of comrades and help groups and all sorts.
35:12They joined forces and even established a kind of network.
35:16But Odessa is more a kind of amusing publicity stunt.
35:20A public relations name that was very effective.
35:25In Chile, former Nazis and their sympathisers openly showed their faces in 1984 at the funeral of Walter Rauf.
35:39In Spain, Nazis at the funeral of Hitler's paratrooper Otto Skorzeny were just as brazen.
35:48Nazi hunters like Efrain Zuroff were determined to bring to justice the last living SS war criminals.
35:56We found literally thousands of suspected Nazis who escaped to the West.
36:00But another thing that we did was to issue a most wanted list of the ten most wanted Nazis.
36:07And what we have to remember is that every one of the victims of the Nazis was someone's brother or
36:14sister or father or mother or grandfather or uncle or whatever.
36:18And these people deserve the simple justice.
36:22The fact that the people who murdered them because they were Jews will be held accountable.
36:28That's one thing. And the second thing, of course, is the fact that the passage of time in no way
36:35diminishes the crime.
36:37The Nazi hunters knew that if justice was to be done, they faced a race against time.
36:46High on the Nazi hunters most wanted list in the 1980s was an SS man who'd been welcomed in Syria.
36:56Alois Brunner, Eichmann's deputy, sent 128,000 Jews to their death.
37:03One of his main areas of activity was Vienna.
37:07He later boasted that he'd made it Judenfrei, free of all Jews.
37:15One of Brunner's victims remembers his brutality on the day of her deportation.
37:22And then Brunner appeared and said,
37:26You old Jewish pig, you are a criminal.
37:29You have betrayed the people and all the money that you had and all sorts of things.
37:35He insulted him terribly and now and then gave him a kick with his boot.
37:42I can remember my mother was sitting next to us and covered her ears so as not to hear the
37:47whining.
37:48And of course Brunner told him to stop whining and then shot him.
37:55And then the door of our compartment opened suddenly.
37:58And Brunner, with the revolver still in his hand, said to my father,
38:03Did anyone in here hear anything?
38:06And my father stood up and said,
38:08No, Herr HabstrumfĂŒhrer.
38:16Whenever deportations were delayed, Eichmann sent in Brunner as his troubleshooter.
38:21He was on hand after Hitler's troops occupied the south of France in 1943.
38:27Thousands of Jews fled the CĂŽte d'Azur for the port of Nice, only to find the SS waiting for
38:33them.
38:34Serge Klasfeld saw Brunner's henchmen take away his father.
38:40One night they arrived at our house, but my father had foreseen that ever since the first raids,
38:45and so he had constructed a double wall out of wood at the back of a cupboard.
38:50My father hid my mother, my sister and me there, and then he opened the door to the Germans.
38:56So they searched, they looked in the cupboard, they rummaged through the clothes.
39:02My father had told us that if they arrested us, we would die,
39:05that he might live because he was strong, but that we would be dead.
39:10So my sister and I, who normally bickered with each other,
39:13we were very calm and didn't move at all.
39:15We didn't say anything, not a word.
39:19That's difficult when you have death on the other side of the door.
39:22Then my father left and was taken to Auschwitz,
39:25where he had a dispute with a prisoner on special surveillance duties.
39:30The other prisoner hit him, and he died from that.
39:37Until 1954, Brunner stayed in Germany under a false name,
39:41then fled via Rome to Syria.
39:44Just who helped him isn't clear.
39:46It wasn't the SS warrior Otto Skotzeny,
39:49who said to have sent a message from Spain which read,
39:52I won't help a swine like that.
39:56In 1984, a warrant for Brunner's arrest was issued in Germany.
40:00The Syrian authorities denied that he was in Damascus.
40:04But those who wanted to could easily find him.
40:07In 1985, the German magazine Bunter tracked him down in the Syrian capital,
40:12still unrepentant.
40:13In 1985, he gave an interview to the Bunter magazine
40:17in which he said that his only regret in life
40:20is the fact that he didn't murder more Jews.
40:23This mass murderer twice received parcel bombs from his enemies
40:26and was severely maimed.
40:30Well, I'd like to think that it was the Mossad
40:33and that they were doing their job
40:34and trying to operate against Nazi war criminals.
40:37But that's the rumour.
40:39He lost an eye, he lost three fingers.
40:41But, listen, we're talking about a man
40:45who, besides being responsible for the deportation to death camps
40:49of 128,500 Jews,
40:52he also was a fanatic anti-Semite.
40:58Brunner once wrote,
40:59the Jews are the devil's crowning glory.
41:02At the UN, the article in Bunter magazine was angrily displayed by Benjamin Netanyahu.
41:10Here is Alois Brunner, distinguished delegates, and Mr. President.
41:15Here's his picture in Damascus.
41:19Rather happy, I must say.
41:21He is called the right-hand man of Hitler.
41:26Here's another picture in his villa supplied by the Syrian government in Damascus.
41:35Here's another picture of Alois Brunner.
41:42But Brunner remained safe in Syria.
41:45In 2001, he was tried in absentia in Paris.
41:51Alois Brunner was sentenced to life imprisonment.
41:54For prosecuting lawyer Serge Klaasfeldt, it was a pyrrhic victory.
41:59Brunner remained in Syria.
42:01If he is still alive today, he is 90.
42:06Other countries handed over criminals they'd sheltered.
42:10Josef Schwamberger, a ghetto commandant,
42:12was deported from Argentina in May 1990.
42:16Erich Priebke, responsible for a massacre near Rome,
42:20was also sent back to Germany.
42:22The sentence? Lifelong house arrest.
42:26But he is not an outcast.
42:29Organisations like Stillerhilfe, or Silent Aid,
42:32care for the ageing Nazi murderers they believe were wrongly imprisoned.
42:39Priebke is a very respectable man, a wonderful fellow.
42:42The way he behaves is fantastic.
42:45He behaves splendidly.
42:48And anyway, all that talk of how they behaved
42:50and how they treated the Jews, etc.,
42:52is such a scandal.
42:54It is scandalous to talk like that about such a man
42:57as this respectable 93-year-old,
42:59who made a personal stand against Bolshevism.
43:05Silent Aid is supported by the kind of Nazi sympathisers
43:09who gather every year in KĂ€rnten.
43:14In turn, Silent Aid often finances young Nazis.
43:21They are mostly financed by donations,
43:24with the younger members being helped out by the older ones.
43:28People directly involved in Silent Aid
43:30sometimes pass on considerable sums to younger comrades,
43:35finance court cases for them,
43:36help them out when it comes to paying fines.
43:41Silent Aid's sister organisation is HNG,
43:45another large source of funding for new generations of Nazis
43:49and criminals they regard as political prisoners.
44:15The HNG is the so-called community of aid for political prisoners and their relatives.
44:20The HNG is the so-called community of aid for political prisoners and their relatives.
44:22It's an organisation which mainly looks after neo-Nazi criminals.
44:28They see to their needs in prison, and they provide them with propaganda in prison,
44:33so that they can continue their campaigning with their fellow inmates.
44:46Incendiary bombs against asylum seekers and attacks on immigrants are supported by this Nazi network,
44:52and applauded by the new spiritual heirs of the SS.
44:59I valued Rostock-Lichtenhagen and Heuerswerda as popular uprisings against people of oriental origin.
45:06And the only thing you can find fault with in such spontaneous outbreaks of violence is the lack of violence.
45:17While young extremists fight for what they call national liberated zones,
45:22the ideologues in the background have already drafted the constitution of the Fourth Reich.
45:29They are also trying to define just who is, and who is not, a true German.
45:36I have demanded proof of true Teutonic roots and rejected proof of Aryan roots as too imprecise, weak and meaningless.
45:48There is a spiritual infiltration in process here which can be described as fruitful.
45:55And in this respect I am as a surviving member of my generation,
45:58and as someone who has never compromised, but remained loyal to the spirit of the times.
46:04I am a credible role model for young people.
46:11Today's fascist fringe groups spread their word via the internet.
46:16In outlawed games like Nazi Moorhen Hunt and Concentration Camp Manager,
46:22they deride the Holocaust and advocate the murder of Jews and foreigners.
46:34Even if they are no longer there physically, their heirs are there,
46:37those who follow their example, the people who are shaped and trained by them.
46:43Whether or not Odessa existed as an organisation,
46:46the evil of the SS did not die in 1945.
46:51The course of history continues even with the war lost,
46:54and I believe that the problems have remained the same,
46:58and that the Second World War is by no means over.
47:04The supporters of such ideas do not have the power to inflict anything like the suffering caused by the Nazis.
47:12But as the history of the SS shows,
47:16yesterday's fringe groups can become tomorrow's tyrants.
47:24This Saturday, as part of the History Channel Save Our Souls Maritime Disaster Programmes,
47:29we'll be showing the two-hour documentary charting the daring attempts across miles of storm-tossed ocean to sink the
47:35Bismarck.
47:36That's at eight on Saturday evening.
47:38Next, we chart the history of the ideological standard-bearers for the Nazi leadership,
47:43who gained notoriety for barbaric crimes, the Waffen-SS.
47:47origine2.org
47:47,
47:47.
47:47,
47:47.
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