- 4 months ago
For educational purposes
Through interviews with still living SS members, describes the atrocities committed by these soldiers who pledged to fight to the death.
Describes the indoctrination of what were in many cases children who went on to commit war crimes.
Through interviews with still living SS members, describes the atrocities committed by these soldiers who pledged to fight to the death.
Describes the indoctrination of what were in many cases children who went on to commit war crimes.
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LearningTranscript
00:07They were, they thought, the Third Reich's racial elite.
00:13Men superior to others.
00:17Ready to do anything for the triumph of National Socialism.
00:25Men Hitler could count on to the death.
00:32To apply their racial theories, they were prepared to eliminate their adversaries.
00:39To decimate the Jewish people.
00:42To massacre civilian populations.
00:52Over 70 years later, some of them are still living among us.
00:59One people, one Reich, one Fuhrer.
01:02That was our motto.
01:04I felt anti-Semitic.
01:08We wanted a pure state.
01:12No Jews in the Third Reich.
01:17This is the story of SS Fanaticism.
01:21Bloodlust.
01:23And terror.
01:34Tolled from the inside.
01:52Central Germany, 1933.
01:58Hitler's been in power for several months.
02:04Here is one of the first movies shot by the SS.
02:09The Schutzstaffeln.
02:11Or protection squadrons.
02:15Recognizable by the skulls on their cap.
02:18And the lightning flash initials on their flags.
02:25They were not afraid of death, they said.
02:28Neither inflicting it, nor suffering it.
02:32All volunteers to join what according to their criteria was a grouping of superior Nazis.
02:44Wernher Fulkner is a former member of the SS Deaths Head Division.
02:50He was nine when Hitler came to power.
03:01He still knows by heart the Nazi party's official song, the Horstwessel lied.
03:13Born in Berlin in 1924, this German lives in the south of England, where he married and made a new
03:20life for himself.
03:22At the end of World War II, he spent several years an Allied prisoner of war camps, because he had
03:29been in the SS.
03:34The Wehrmacht went like this.
03:37The Wehrmacht went like this.
03:38No, this.
03:40And the SS went like this.
03:43What fascinated me was the military aspect.
03:47Sharp.
03:50Standing to attention.
03:51When I said good morning, I clicked my heels.
03:55I nodded and said, Heil Hitler.
03:58It was really great.
04:00The outlook on life was, well, get the job done and finish with.
04:10This documentary takes us to find SS members who are still alive.
04:15To try to understand the incomprehensible.
04:22After several months of research, we discovered over 20 SS veterans living in different countries across Europe.
04:31Words that often shock.
04:34Some have broken with Nazism.
04:36Others not.
04:39This man is one of them.
04:41Kurt Bockhausen.
04:43Age 92.
04:46He lives in central Germany.
04:49He, too, was in the Death's Head division, whose members often worked in concentration camps.
04:59What counted for us?
05:01First of all, the purity of the person.
05:05Who are you?
05:08What do you want from life?
05:11Secondly, you have a healthy family.
05:16You are married.
05:19Having children is a gift of God.
05:23A guarantee of happiness.
05:27After that, there is the people.
05:32How did our ancestors live?
05:36What did they believe in?
05:39What has made real Germans of us?
05:45These were our fundamental values.
05:54A vanished world.
05:56So little like our own.
05:58But at the same time, so near.
06:03Only 80 years separate us from these young men who embraced fanaticism.
06:12To justify themselves all point to 1918.
06:17When Germany lost the First World War, the Versailles Peace Treaty took several border regions away from Germany.
06:30The Versailles Treaty was a humiliation for Germany.
06:34A supreme humiliation.
06:39On top of the perceived humiliation came the nightmare of 1920s Germany.
06:46Unemployment.
06:47Poverty.
06:49In the years to come, when they looked to justify their crimes, the SS would often point to the tribulations
06:56of the 1920s.
07:01Naziism, they said, gave them back their dignity.
07:07They began to form ranks behind an Austrian World War I corporal Adolf Hitler.
07:12A radical nationalist who promised them he would wipe out the shame.
07:19We were on our knees.
07:22We had been poor and miserable.
07:24And then suddenly, we were somebody again.
07:30Where this commitment would lead them, the SS didn't know.
07:37We were delighted with this change.
07:42What they did know was that their first targets would be the communists.
07:47Those anti-Germans, as they called them.
07:50They've been fighting them in the streets since the end of the war.
07:55They accused them of betraying the nation and overthrowing the emperor with their 1918 revolution.
08:02While the German army carried on the fight against the Allies.
08:09Why did we have to fight them?
08:13Because they wanted to build a workers' state.
08:18With workers from every country.
08:21Including America.
08:28I remember in Hamburg when I was a child, seeing big demonstrations in the street.
08:37My father said, if they get into power, we're screwed.
08:41He was talking about the Communist Party.
08:52National Socialism was more social than communism.
08:58And in political terms, was devoted purely to Germany.
09:04Whereas communism was aimed at the world and was largely run by Jews.
09:16The abhorrent view that the Jews were the real enemy, worse than the communists, they said, was taking hold.
09:25For Hitler, the Jews had profited from the German people's misery.
09:31They're hiding everywhere, said his manifesto.
09:34Behind the communists who seized power in Russia in 1917.
09:39Behind the capitalists in New York who pulled the strings of the world economy.
09:46For Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, the hour of the great confrontation was near.
09:52And when the jüdischen Zeitungen heute glauben, auf versteckte Drogen und die nationalsozialistische Bewegung einschüchtern zu können.
10:02Sie sollen sich bieten.
10:06Einmal wird unsere Geduld zu Ende sein und dann wird den Juden das breche Lügenmaul gestoppt werden.
10:22It was a visceral, revengeful hatred.
10:26Bottled up for too long.
10:29Born out of 19th century racist theories.
10:34A sinister indication of what was to come.
10:40Look at the SS men here in the hall.
10:44It was they who, within less than 10 years, would take the leading role in assassinating Jews in their millions.
11:05Since their creation in 1925, the SS had been Hitler's bodyguards.
11:12They stood out in their dashing black uniforms and could be seen everywhere alongside the party leaders.
11:21They wanted to be noticed.
11:24To distinguish themselves.
11:28I knew it was an elite formation.
11:33In other words, they wouldn't take any Tom, Dick and Harry.
11:37I wanted to be part of an elite division.
11:47They were the new regime's shop window.
11:52New recruits had to be tall.
11:55At least five foot six.
11:58And young.
12:00Under 23.
12:05No Jewish ancestry.
12:08They had to provide genealogical details dating back to the 18th century.
12:16Strength.
12:18Prestige.
12:21Virility.
12:23In the Third Reich, if you want a successful career, if you want a successful life, you join the SS.
12:39Women were very interested by the idea of getting to know SS men and making friends with them.
12:47They were obviously ideal fellows.
12:50The SS were very much in demand.
12:56Marrying a member of the SS was an honor.
12:59Of course.
13:04They were also known as the Black Order.
13:07A name that linked them to the Knights of the Middle Ages, when Germanic soldier monks colonized Eastern Europe.
13:17They were filled with grandiose ideas.
13:20That they were the new lords of Germany.
13:23Entrusted with replacing the old aristocratic elite that had always run the country.
13:36Ekehard Kuhr is a Protestant minister.
13:40His SS unit, the Das Reich Division, committed numerous atrocities during the war.
13:47At the age of 17, he says, he joined the SS to defy his parents.
13:53Who refused to allow a relationship with a young Catholic girl.
14:02There were images in Germany where you would see a young man sign up for the war for freedom.
14:09And he would kneel before his beloved, who would bless him.
14:15All of those emotions that I don't think we can understand or express today, they existed back then.
14:26Our motto, written on our belt buckles, was, my honor is my loyalty.
14:34It meant, no cowardice when facing the enemy.
14:41The ideology that Himmler had drilled into us was, you are nothing, your people is everything.
14:54You belong to the nation.
14:57The nation.
14:57The nation is, is, is, is you.
15:01You are, you are part of the nation.
15:04I wanted to prove that I was ready to risk my life for that ideology.
15:13So, let's kill.
15:22A clan.
15:25The intrepid new man.
15:28Able to remove pity from their hearts.
15:33The racial spearhead of the German people.
15:36As they saw themselves.
15:42This is Heinrich Himmler.
15:44Their chief.
15:46One of the greatest criminals of all time.
15:52He was from Munich's cultivated middle classes.
15:55Anti-Semitic.
15:57Anti-Communist.
15:59Anti-Christian.
16:01One of the first Nazis.
16:03And one of the most ambitious.
16:15In 1934, Himmler incited Hitler to eliminate his former brothers-in-arms.
16:21The leaders of the SA, the Nazi Party Militia.
16:26They would call this fratricidal massacre.
16:29The Night of the Long Knives.
16:33Carried out by his SS.
16:35This bloodbath consolidated his position.
16:38At the heart of the regime.
16:41At the head of several hundred thousand SS members.
16:44He managed in the space of a few years.
16:47To extend his control to all German police.
16:51From his young men in black.
16:53He demanded total submission.
16:58When you are a soldier.
17:00You have to carry out orders.
17:02You're not there to think.
17:04That's how it was.
17:07Today it's different.
17:11At the time we said.
17:13Leave the thinking to the horses.
17:16They have bigger heads.
17:19We weren't telling jokes and having a laugh.
17:25Attention, quick march.
17:28Left, right.
17:31An order was an order.
17:35If somebody gave me an order to do, then I do it.
17:40Blood and soil.
17:43Himmler's new creed.
17:46In exchange for their obedience, the SS Reichfuhrer offered his men a new imaginary world of German mythology and racial
17:56superiority.
17:59Pursuing the slightest trace of exploitable German history.
18:03He created a religion that could replace Christianity.
18:07A religion based on race.
18:10With its particular beliefs and rituals.
18:19Here, a child's baptism.
18:22With no priest.
18:24The minister is an SS officer.
18:28And the crucifix has been replaced by a portrait of Hitler.
18:34The atmosphere and the ceremonial mythology I found fascinating.
18:39I've never forgotten it.
18:49The SS were promised healthy, smiling wives.
18:54Before their weddings, the women were sent on courses to Nazi party schools.
19:15The wedding plans had to be approved by the SS Racial Service.
19:20In devoting themselves to their husbands and to the procreation of future SS members,
19:26these women would be joining an order of knights and becoming Nazi combatants themselves.
19:36To rise in the ranks of the SS, a member had to be married by the age of 26.
19:43Have his first child by 28.
19:46Then another every two years.
19:49With at least four in all.
19:56Unprecedented in any previous political organization,
20:01Himmler controlled the private lives of its members.
20:06Do not be afraid of death, he told them.
20:09The individual dies, but through his children, his people will grow beyond life.
20:22Most of the SS we've met were still children in the mid-30s.
20:28Raised in a totalitarian state, they were subjected to Hitler's propaganda.
20:35Some of the most extensive brainwashing of the 20th century.
20:44This man, Egon Kuhn, a left-wing activist and trade unionist in Hanover,
20:50is a former SS man from the Viking division.
20:54His radicalization, now totally repudiated, began at infant school.
21:05The Nazis made sweets for children with swastikas on them.
21:09I was proud to eat those sweets.
21:14But I was even prouder when I was five years old.
21:18In school.
21:20And we'd go on walks or on visits.
21:24And I could wear my swastika armband.
21:31This was all drilled into us quite deliberately.
21:37To the point that in 1934, when I was 10,
21:42that state of mind, with the uniforms and the Hitler salute,
21:48was quite natural.
21:54In fact, I didn't know anyone who was opposed to it.
22:07Children were being conditioned with insidious fascist ideology
22:12and hideously anti-Semitic racism on a daily basis.
22:16For Hitler, they were to be regarded as future soldiers of the Reich,
22:21with the best of them destined to join the SS.
22:27My parents were devastated.
22:29I deeply hated Jews.
22:33I would never have sat next to a Jew at school.
22:38Never.
22:40They were quite simply not of our race.
22:44Jews were an abomination.
22:48Crooks.
22:50Traitors.
22:52Lazy.
22:55Obsessed with money.
22:58Cutthroats.
22:59Well, they were alien to the German people.
23:09In the youth organizations, budding SS members were given military training from an early age.
23:17Like in Sparta and ancient Greece, the state educated the children.
23:27We used to like singing songs.
23:30The waves will close in on them. The world is at peace. It means the extermination of the Jews.
23:38They would be drowned, wiped out.
23:42At the time, the extermination of Jews was not on the agenda.
23:48But the barriers were falling, like here at a carnival in Nuremberg, where an effigy of a Jew was hanged
23:56from offload.
24:01Or in this vile, racist propaganda film.
24:07After the war, they fell off.
24:10After the war, they fell off.
24:12After the war, they fell off.
24:14The Revolution.
24:20Now, repeat.
24:23You snowed you out.
24:24specialists of Chinese culture,
24:35Unitedii,
24:43This twisted view of Germany as a victim of its Jewish communities ran so deep that it
24:49continues to warp the minds of some former SS men.
24:55Even today, their abhorrently racist views have not been diminished by time.
25:04I don't know if you would like it, when you have a very precise type of blood, to accept
25:12a race that is fundamentally different in its way of being, its religion, and its very conception
25:22of life, and that they would be as prevalent in society as true blood Germans who were born
25:32here.
25:35This Austrian SS member never committed any crimes himself, he says.
25:40But on his shelves, like a shrine to Nazi bloodlust, are his old dagger, and a cruel caricature
25:49of an East European Jew.
25:54They're still our enemies, he says, off camera.
25:59To avoid being sued, he uses a metaphor.
26:05When you have good apples, and you mix them with pears, then you end up with neither apples
26:15nor pears.
26:17That's all.
26:21It was at the age of 14 that Herbert von Mildenburg saw Hitler for the first time.
26:30There was something in his eyes when he looked at us, something fascinating.
26:41We sang, we're not going home, we're not going home before the Führer speaks.
26:55We were in heaven, like idiot football fans in a stadium today.
27:10Hitler, the man who would resurrect Germany.
27:20It was intoxicating.
27:30The fact was that six million unemployed found work within the space of five years.
27:37Everyone was involved.
27:41By increasing aid for workers, providing leisure activities previously reserved for the elite,
27:49and by funding massive rearmament and major building projects through the confiscation of
27:56Jewish assets and Jewish assets and massive debt.
27:58Hitler bought the approval of the German people.
28:05For the SS we met, it was a miracle.
28:12It was proof that Hitler had accomplished what he had promised.
28:22The man had guts.
28:24He wasn't a coward.
28:25Would you say that Hitler was the man of your life?
28:29Yes, a hundred percent.
28:33A hundred percent.
28:42SS fanaticism born out of humiliation, fascination with a savior, and an unshakable feeling of superiority.
28:58In just a few years, this infernal spiral led Germany, the land of Goethe, Kant, and Beethoven, over the brink.
29:11An entire people faced oblivion.
29:18There was a form of ideological blindness.
29:25I think the deeply destructive nature of National Socialism was masked at the time by the success it had.
29:42Repression began in 1933.
29:46Political opponents were isolated from the rest of society as a preventative measure, without trial.
29:55The task was entrusted to the SA, then the SS.
30:03The pretext was the burning of the Reichstag.
30:07The German parliament.
30:10Hitler presented it as the beginning of a new communist revolution.
30:16The communists want to bring down the state, they were told.
30:22They were considered a danger to the community.
30:27Well, they were taken out of the community, and the community could get on with their lives.
30:36I myself noticed that the people who had previously expressed opposition at party meetings had now disappeared.
30:48Either the communists joined our movement, or they continued to oppose us, and were sent to special camps, which were
30:57later called concentration camps.
31:03To the extent that there was almost no opposition in Germany, it just wasn't possible anymore.
31:10The communists and the communists were armed.
31:14The communists were armed with a better person had to move the country.
31:19The communists were armed with an embarrassment.
31:22The communists were armed with an arrest and the following Americans.
31:35The communists were armed with an arrest.
31:39Schaffer. He said, Ms. Bote, you're going to be a guard at a concentration camp. I said,
31:47what's a concentration camp? It's a camp and you'll be guarding women. Oh, I can't do that.
31:55If you refuse, you'll be sent to the camp yourself. My God, what could I do? So I went.
32:05They were not yet death camps, only internment camps.
32:11But the SS inflicted on the prisoners a regime of terror.
32:19They had to stay outdoors in both summer and winter.
32:24Among the ones standing in the cold, did some fall down?
32:30Yes, some fell down.
32:35From blows. Or had to stay on their knees. I don't know.
32:43So what did you do when you saw such brutality?
32:50I turned away. I didn't look. I couldn't watch that.
32:57Herta Bote, who would be sentenced to ten years in prison after the war, has little to say about the
33:03brutality.
33:07This photo reconstruction made by prisoners after the liberation shows one of the most common forms of torture at the
33:13time.
33:15With his hands tied behind his back attached to a rope, a prisoner has to stand on a stool when
33:21he falls from exhaustion.
33:23He's suspended by his arms and his shoulders are dislocated.
33:32He's suspended by his arms and his shoulders, and he's suspended by his arms and his shoulders.
33:33But who cared about torture?
33:34But who cared about torture?
33:36Public opinion saw the SS as bringing deviants back to the straight and narrow.
33:46These prisoners in striped uniforms were filmed close to the Dachau camp.
33:54The film maker, a baker who supplied the camp staff, owned various objects made by the prisoners.
34:01Such as these candlesticks, this rocking horse, and these beds.
34:14He filmed his friends, including SS camp officers.
34:20This is the swimming pool where guards could relax after work.
34:28Who could imagine that the prisoners behind the watchtower you see in the distance were going through hell?
34:37On the eve of World War II, the SS camps had silenced all opposition.
34:44It seemed the camps were opposed by no one.
34:48If I'm told to guard prisoners, and I'm told to go up on the tower, there is an angry machine
35:00gun,
35:01and somebody tries to escape, you shoot them.
35:04Of course I would.
35:10November 9th, 1938.
35:14The Feldherrnhalle in Munich.
35:20Less than a year before the start of World War II, and the beginning of the carnage.
35:29These thousands of SS men are about to live one of the most important events of their lives.
35:50Among them, Eberhard Heder, a future captain in the Viking division.
35:59The square was packed, stands were filled with spectators on the right and left.
36:09The oath ceremony began at midnight.
36:13I saw Hitler arrive, very solemn.
36:19And then, men of the SS recite your oath.
36:28The word of the
36:29I swear to you.
36:30I swear to you.
36:32I swear to you.
36:34Adolf Hitler.
36:36Adolf Hitler.
36:38I swear to you.
37:00The phrase to the death was a shock, of course.
37:06Loyalty to that degree, that's going too far.
37:17But it was too late.
37:19The first large-scale massacre of Jews took place that very night.
37:25It would be known as Kristallnacht.
37:28Throughout the country, Nazi activists murdered almost a hundred Jews,
37:34smashed shop windows, and set synagogues on fire.
37:48These home movies show firemen arriving at a fire, and SS men at the bottom of the frame,
37:53smiling, and preventing them from putting it out.
37:59Himmler had given the order to let the synagogues burn without setting fire to the German buildings,
38:06as he called them.
38:13I saw how the windows had been smashed, the shop windows.
38:19I saw Jews being taken away, and I saw Jews badly treated.
38:31At that time, I didn't understand why.
38:38I felt anti-Semitic, yes.
38:43But not in the sense that people give the word today, which implies the extermination of the Jews.
38:57They would soon find out what their vow entailed.
39:06In September 1939, Hitler attacked Poland, starting the Second World War.
39:17On the eve of the offensive, the SS played a crucial role.
39:25To justify the invasion, the Fuhrer ordered them to fake a Polish provocation.
39:31The SS simulated a Polish attack, a bloody one, on the German border.
39:40Dirty work the SS had done since the start, and would do to the end.
39:51The SS also took part in the fighting alongside the regular army, the Wehrmacht.
39:59If the SS sacrificed itself on the front line, paying with its blood, explained their leaders,
40:04it would have the moral right to lead the repression in Germany.
40:13To these men destined to fight on the front line, Himmler gave a name.
40:19The Waffen-SS.
40:22The armed SS.
40:27800,000 men joined the Waffen-SS during the war.
40:33They saw themselves as political soldiers, and in the eyes of the regime, they were dependable.
40:41Hitler could count on them in the event of trouble, at home or abroad.
40:56At the time, there was a recruitment advert for armoured divisions.
41:00The Waffen-SS were armoured troops, and for me the term armoured troops was fascinating.
41:09Here is one of those Waffen-SS, Manfred Diener, age 16.
41:15For this baker's son from Thuringia, it was an opportunity for social advancement.
41:23With us there was no sir, lieutenant sir, or yes captain sir.
41:31The relations between soldiers and officers were completely different.
41:36A SS officer couldn't order a soldier to dig a hole, he had to do it himself.
41:42And there was also the fact that, at school, the ones who volunteered during their penultimate school year, graduated without
41:51having to sit their exams.
41:54In other Wehrmacht units, you needed your exams to be an officer.
42:02The Waffen-SS made an exception.
42:05Even if, like me, you only had a basic school certificate, you could become an officer.
42:18It was an ideal world.
42:22A fantasy.
42:25A model for the German people to follow.
42:31In reality, these men were no longer their own masters.
42:37With a tattoo of their blood group indelibly marked under their left arm, they had become someone else.
42:45Once inside the Black Order, there was no way back.
43:05Here they are again.
43:07The young Waffen-SS men we saw in a drill at their barracks are now at the vanguard of the
43:13invasion of France.
43:16As in Poland, SS soldiers committed war crimes.
43:28A few months later, they would take part in the invasion of Yugoslavia.
43:34Then Greece.
43:36And above all, in June 1941, the USSR.
43:44It was there against Stalin's troops that Himmler's SS would find their special rule.
43:52The SS chief had given them the order to liquidate Jews, communists, and anyone suspected of opposing the Reich.
44:07For the men in black, the ultimate horror of genocide would be their legacy.
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