- 18 hours ago
For educational purposes
Also known by the acronym SS, the Schutzstaffel organization was a privileged instrument within the German state.
Created in April 1925 to ensure the close protection of Adolf Hitler, it became over the years a real state within a state.
Organizing the extermination of the Jews of Europe, but also assuming political functions, repressive, ideological and even military with the creation of the Waffen-SS.
This documentary looks back on its origins and its workings.
Nuremberg. In 1945 the main war criminals were tried in this city where Hitler gathered fanatical crowds. The Allies judge Nazi leaders and officials of the Third Reich, among the defendants - the Fuhrer's closest collaborators.
Defendant number 27 is not a person. It is a whole organization: the SS, A state within a state to which the entire police of the Nazi Reich is subordinate and which has its own army.
The judges find it guilty, Guilty of being a criminal organization - with 900,000 members.
In 1929 Heinrich Himmler was appointed Reichsfuhrer SS. In the following years he transformed the Schutzstaffel into a notorious state within the state.
When he took over there were 280 SS members. Two years later there are already over 15,000.
War crimes, human breeding programs, racial theory, extermination camps - the SS always plays a leading role.
How does this monstrous organization of Heinrich Himmler work? How are its members trained, selected and recruited? What is the logic behind their murderous behavior?
The film presents impressive archive material. It traces the origin and development of the SS, a terrible elite of horror, and lets well-known historians have their say.
Written and Directed by Mathieu Schwartz; Tournez S'il Vous Plait Production with RMC Decouverte for ARTE France
Also known by the acronym SS, the Schutzstaffel organization was a privileged instrument within the German state.
Created in April 1925 to ensure the close protection of Adolf Hitler, it became over the years a real state within a state.
Organizing the extermination of the Jews of Europe, but also assuming political functions, repressive, ideological and even military with the creation of the Waffen-SS.
This documentary looks back on its origins and its workings.
Nuremberg. In 1945 the main war criminals were tried in this city where Hitler gathered fanatical crowds. The Allies judge Nazi leaders and officials of the Third Reich, among the defendants - the Fuhrer's closest collaborators.
Defendant number 27 is not a person. It is a whole organization: the SS, A state within a state to which the entire police of the Nazi Reich is subordinate and which has its own army.
The judges find it guilty, Guilty of being a criminal organization - with 900,000 members.
In 1929 Heinrich Himmler was appointed Reichsfuhrer SS. In the following years he transformed the Schutzstaffel into a notorious state within the state.
When he took over there were 280 SS members. Two years later there are already over 15,000.
War crimes, human breeding programs, racial theory, extermination camps - the SS always plays a leading role.
How does this monstrous organization of Heinrich Himmler work? How are its members trained, selected and recruited? What is the logic behind their murderous behavior?
The film presents impressive archive material. It traces the origin and development of the SS, a terrible elite of horror, and lets well-known historians have their say.
Written and Directed by Mathieu Schwartz; Tournez S'il Vous Plait Production with RMC Decouverte for ARTE France
Category
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LearningTranscript
00:05Nuremberg, where the Nazi mass meetings were held.
00:12In 1945, in the city where Hitler gathered immense and fanatical crowds, the court held
00:18the greatest trial in history.
00:23The Allied victors judged the Third Reich's leading figures and officials.
00:32Among the accused were the Fuhrer's closest surviving collaborators.
00:38But not only, Defendant No. 27 wasn't a person, it was an entire organization, the SS.
00:47A state within the state that reigned over all the Reich's police, with its own army,
00:52inside the Nazi regime.
00:55The judges found it guilty, guilty of being a criminal association of 800,000 members.
01:03The SS represented the very worst of Nazism.
01:06Criminal extremity, violence, implacability and the absence of compassion or pity.
01:14War crimes, human breeding programs, racist theory, extermination camps.
01:20The SS was at the forefront every time.
01:24How did it work, this monstrous organization run by the shady Heinrich Himmler?
01:29How were these members that called themselves the SS trained, selected, recruited?
01:35What was the logic behind their murderous project?
01:39To do their worst, kill Jews, kill children, carry out genocide, organize genocide, was to
01:44sacrifice themselves in the name of other Germans.
01:49From the oath of allegiance on Munich's Odenplatz, to the prison cells at Dachau.
01:57From the celebrations at Kedlingberg Cathedral, to the death camp at Auschwitz.
02:07From Badtoltz military academy, to the martyred village of Oredur-sur-Glan.
02:18What was the mechanism that enabled the SS to turn hundreds of thousands of ordinary men
02:23into barbarians?
02:39The extremist Adolf Hitler gathered a dozen of his supporters in a beer hall.
02:44He had just been released from prison after a failed coup attempt.
02:47He decided to create a guard unit.
02:49It was a protection squadron, in German, the Schutzstaffel, represented by the initials
02:55SS.
02:57The SS was a Praetorian guard, a political militia.
03:01A militia made up of activists ready to risk their bodies, even their lives, to protect
03:08the chief, to protect the leader of the party, the Führer.
03:15A militia for the leader, nothing more.
03:18In the 1920s, the SS didn't amount to much.
03:21The organization that counted was the SA, the party strike platoon.
03:26They were called the Brownshirts.
03:27They were troops from the working classes who fought in the streets against the communists
03:32and who wanted to sweep Hitler to power.
03:36The SA were battalions several thousand strong.
03:39The SS was a militia of just a few dozen.
03:42They stood out thanks to their black uniforms and the death's head insignia in memory of
03:47a Cossack regiment in the First World War.
03:51But in 1929, one man changed the destiny of the SS.
03:57Its new leader, an agronomist named Heinrich Himmler.
04:00Bit by bit, he would turn them into a state within the state.
04:03When he took over, there were 280 SS.
04:07Two years later, there were already over 15,000.
04:11Himmler was someone who had very precise ideas and plans for this unit that he saw as an
04:18elite, a racial and intellectual elite, a vanguard.
04:24Himmler sought to transform this modest militia into the elite of the German people.
04:29His first objective was to attract a new type of recruit.
04:33To achieve this aim, he gave the SS a new mission.
04:39Very rapidly, he created what was called the intelligence service, the SD, the SS's intelligence
04:45service, which was to build up dossiers, files first of all, on party members, but also the
04:51party's enemies, so as to control everyone.
04:55And the creation of this SD at the heart of the SS, of this intelligence service, totally
05:00changed the nature of this militia, because now they would recruit intellectuals, young
05:05intellectuals, young university graduates.
05:11By the beginning of 1933, 17% of the SS's members had a PhD, and that, if you like, acted
05:17as a magnet, made it desirable for a certain number of better educated Germans to join the
05:22SS.
05:25In other words, broadly speaking, you had on the one hand the SA commandos, the brown shirts,
05:30who were there to punch communists in the street, and on the other, the SS, in their
05:36close-fitting black uniforms, elitist and refined.
05:42Officially, to join this elite, you had to satisfy draconian selection criteria.
05:47The SS were to converge towards the ideal German as defined by Hitler.
05:51Between 25 and 35 years old, at least 5 foot 7 inches tall, long cranium, blonde with blue
05:57eyes, no physical defects.
05:59Lastly, and most importantly, you had to prove you were of so-called pure race, with a family
06:04tree traceable at least as far back as 1750.
06:08In fact, joining the SS was much easier than they made out.
06:12What really counted was being a Nazi activist.
06:15The inflexible selection criteria was propaganda.
06:20The organisation's membership grew very quickly.
06:24Of course, there was not at that moment any army of doctor raciologists ready with their
06:29double decimetre rulers to measure the skulls of party activists who wanted to join the SS.
06:36What mattered was not so much the reality of this aberrant racial selection, but rather the
06:41idea that allowed the SS to present themselves as an elite, to affirm within the Nazi party
06:46that here was the racial elite of the German people.
06:53In January 1933, Adolf Hitler, head of the Nazi party, was named Chancellor of the Reich.
07:01For his first speech, he put the SS, his new elite unit, in front of the rostrum.
07:06They were now a force of 50,000 men totally devoted to their leader.
07:22Munich's Odionsplatz, a symbolic place for the SS.
07:36November 1933, ten months after his nomination, the Fuhrer initiated a new ritual.
07:43Every 8th of November, on this square, the SS would gather to swear an oath of allegiance.
07:53A crucial stage in their indoctrination.
08:00What did it mean to join the SS?
08:02Simply, first of all, this oath, we swear fidelity to you, Adolf Hitler, to the death.
08:09And this, to the death, was very important, because it founded, if you like, a sort of radicality
08:15about entering into this organisation, and an abandoning of your own individuality to the
08:20extreme point of self-sacrifice.
08:25After this oath, the SS member was no longer an individual.
08:31He had to give way to the group and accomplish its tasks with fanaticism.
08:36What for us are the worst of human faults, fanaticism, anti-Semitism, became, for some Nazis, and obviously
08:43above all for the elite that was the SS, qualities.
08:47In the bureaucratic reports, the SS produced so regularly about their leaders, the first
08:53quality was, he's a true fanatic.
08:56It was a quality.
08:59This fanaticism the SS would put to the test on the 30th of June, 1934.
09:04Hitler had already turned Germany into a dictatorship, but some of its former allies had become troublesome.
09:11Ernst Röhm, for example, the head of the SA, the Brownshirts.
09:15He was extremely popular, a threat to the Fuhrer who wanted to get rid of him.
09:20On the night of June 30th, the SS assassinated Röhm and all the SA leaders.
09:26The Germans had been warned. The SS was capable of anything.
09:31Himmler had been given free reign.
09:33With the SS, he was going to be able to dedicate himself to his obsession, giving Germany a new destiny.
09:48In the Saxon countryside, the quiet little town of Kedlinburg.
10:03On July 2nd, 1936, an important guest was welcomed at the cathedral.
10:09Heinrich Himmler visited with SS officials.
10:15He'd come to celebrate the thousandth anniversary of the death of Henry I, otherwise known as Henry the Fowler.
10:22A glorious ancestor who resisted the invasions from the East.
10:28By bowing down in front of the royal tomb, Himmler wanted to impose a new German history.
10:34The SS intended to prove that the German had always been superior.
10:44From their point of view, the Germans had created everything that comprised our civilization.
10:50Philosophy was thanks to them. Mathematics was thanks to them.
10:54The music of Johann Sebastian Bach was thanks to them.
10:57They even went as far as to say that Plato and the Greeks of the classical period were German, because
11:02they had created a marvellous civilization.
11:08This race that was the very essence of distinction, was threatened by people who wanted to damage it.
11:15And first of all, there was that other people, or that other race that claimed itself to be the chosen
11:20people, which is to say the Jewish people, or as they put it, the Jewish race.
11:25And from their point of view, there was a sort of clash of the titans, a war of the giants
11:30that had structured the whole of history for thousands of years between, on the one hand, the nasty, destructive, hate
11:36-filled Jews, and on the other, Germans who were good, gentle, and culturally creative.
11:44So good indeed that they were naïve and therefore victims of their own moral goodness.
11:51All SS members were instructed with this re-reading of history. They studied it in evening classes.
11:58This monthly leaflet, for example, was written for SS officers.
12:02It contained articles about glorious ancestors, such as Prince Eugene of Savoy, and illustrious Germans such as Richard Wagner, but
12:09also instructions on how to be the perfect SS man.
12:12It also taught how to combat your enemies, and in particular, Christianity, which was considered a monstrous creation of the
12:18Jews.
12:21Christianity, in their eyes, was Judaism.
12:24You had, at the heart of the SS, a whole battery of courses on points of ideology, courses on history
12:30and biology,
12:33which taught you that the evangelization of Germany was priests, who were in fact rabbis, who had come to modify
12:39Germany's original culture,
12:42to introduce the idea of sin, and who came to promote values that were totally inimical to life.
12:52Humanism, universalism, SS members learned during their training that that was all nonsense.
12:57According to the SS ideologues, that was nothing but sentimental pity.
13:04Christianity as a culture, which is to say Judeo-Christianity, had to disappear, had to be eradicated and extracted from
13:11German culture,
13:12so that the Germans could return to what they were at the outset, which is to say, blonde beasts in
13:18a state of nature.
13:25But to say that the Germans were at the origins of civilization was not enough. It needed to be proven.
13:31This was one of the SS's first missions.
13:34The Ecksternstein is a rock formation deep inside the Saxon forest.
13:39It served as a hermitage during the Middle Ages, and maybe more than that.
13:45It was in any case Himmler's opinion that this was an ancient Saxon place of worship.
13:51Hoping to find here a trace of those glorious ancestors, he ordered the SS to carry out an archaeological dig.
14:01Himmler and the SS sent archaeologists all over Germany to try to find, in the earth of Germania,
14:08the irrefutable proof of German excellence, craftsmanship, art and intelligence.
14:19Himmler didn't stop at Germany's frontiers.
14:22He also dispatched an expedition to Tibet to find the traces of the first areas, and another in search of
14:27the Holy Grail.
14:29The results were very disappointing.
14:30But this research allowed the propaganda services to hammer home the message.
14:36The Germans were the descendants of a superior race.
14:39And the Nazis were their new representatives.
14:42Even if that meant taking a few liberties with reality, as in this advertisement for Hugo Boss,
14:47who made the SS's uniforms.
14:49Hitler and Goering were transfigured.
14:56This Hugo Boss advertisement showed a sort of idealization of Hitler, who appeared tall, with light brown hair.
15:06He was standing next to Goering, who was far slimmer than he was in reality.
15:11That didn't mean the public didn't see this.
15:16Of course, everybody knew Hitler wasn't so tall, that he wasn't blonde, and didn't conform to the Aryan ideal.
15:23On the other hand, there was the stimulation of the desire, the desire to be like an Aryan.
15:34But for the SS, defining the ideal did not suffice.
15:39Himmler was preparing his troops for a much more sinister mission.
15:42In 1936, the SS leader got a promotion.
15:46He was put in charge of all of Germany's police.
15:48Even the Gestapo, the formidable political police created by Goering, fell into the hands of the SS.
15:56This former activist group was becoming a gigantic force of repression.
16:041936 was the moment Himmler really started to reorganize the entire SS and the police,
16:10and merged the two institutions.
16:12He would merge an elite corps of political activists, with their ideology,
16:17and a political program ready to be put into practice,
16:19with a police force that should have been an apolitical state institution.
16:25A terrible result was being prepared.
16:28The police was not an instrument that was totally innocent,
16:32and by taking it over, as he did in 1936,
16:36Himmler was going to be able to sculpt himself a murder weapon.
16:42With the police under its orders, the SS was able to launch a new mission,
16:46the parasite hunt.
16:48Those who harmed, so said Nazi ideology, the German race.
16:52The first to be targeted were the disabled.
16:55Propaganda films described them as useless less than humans who had to be gotten rid of.
17:02They would be sterilized, and it was the SS who oversaw the program.
17:07And then, in a second phase from 1939 in the context of the war,
17:12people with what were considered hereditary illnesses were killed in a euthanasia program called T4,
17:19which led to the deaths of 200,000 people in the years up to 1945.
17:26The main enemies, the most dangerous from the Nazis' point of view, were of course the Jews.
17:31But this posed a problem for the SS.
17:33Unlike the disabled, the Jews were difficult to identify.
17:39In all other regimes that have been founded on race, such as apartheid in South Africa,
17:44or the segregation policies in the United States,
17:47there was always what was called a color line that enabled the separation,
17:52so to speak, of the white dominant people you want to build up,
17:55from the people that you can easily physically recognize who were the dominated people.
18:01In Germany, that was not the case. Why not?
18:04And this is why anti-Semitism is an extremely complex form of racism.
18:10Neither the Nazis, nor anyone else, could tell the Jews apart by their physical appearance.
18:16You don't have that sort of so-called ethnic racism based on direct recognition.
18:23Although the propaganda did its best to pretend otherwise.
18:26In newspapers and even in schools, you could study so-called Jewish features.
18:29Jews were described as the absolute antithesis of the Aryan model.
18:33Small, fat, dark eyes, hooked nose.
18:37Nazi doctors used color charts to try to validate their theories,
18:41by checking Jewish children's hair and eye color.
18:51But the SS itself realized that it wasn't very convincing.
18:55So Jews were attributed diabolical powers.
19:01There were two levels.
19:02There was a level where a lot of stress was put on images of typical Jews,
19:07with big noses, dark eyes, and so on.
19:11And then there was the masquerade, as the Nazis called it, by the Jews.
19:16So the Jew was someone who could be masked and mixed with the population without them knowing.
19:25That's where the Jew became problematic for the Aryan, according to Nazi ideology,
19:30because he was sometimes masked.
19:34You couldn't immediately see that he had characteristics that were not compatible with the Aryan men.
19:41Confronted with what it presented as a formidable enemy, the SS invented a new sort of anti-Semitism.
19:47As cold as it was radical, its members were trained to act methodically, without feeling.
19:54What the SS sought were rational definitions, biological definitions,
19:59and therefore a treatment of this question that was, if you like, without hatred.
20:03And it was actually stated, Himmler said it, hatred.
20:06Look, it's terrible what it reveals about the anti-Semitism of party activists,
20:11because to hate Jews in such a passionate way is, in the mind of the SS member,
20:16to care too much about them.
20:18The required solution needs to be extremely rational, cold.
20:22And that is really an SS invention, and explains a lot in the genocide that would follow.
20:30For the time being, there was no question of genocide.
20:33Just getting rid of the Jews.
20:36To harass them by all means possible, so that they would leave Germany.
20:42In the 1930s, discrimination followed discrimination.
20:46Shops were closed.
20:48People were forbidden from working in certain professions,
20:50from going to the cinema or to a restaurant, to sit on certain benches.
20:55Jews were forced into ghettos, and to wear the Yellow Star.
21:00But these solutions weren't going fast enough.
21:03The SS was preparing more radical methods.
21:15A few kilometers from Munich, in a former munitions factory, the Dachau camp.
21:25A work camp, said the Nazis.
21:28The formula displayed at the entrance of the camp, work makes you free.
21:35This enclosed space was in fact a private SS hunting ground.
21:41As soon as the camp opened in 1933, Himmler obtained control of it.
21:47He frequently visited what was presented as a model prison for political opponents.
21:52In fact, it was already a little hell.
22:00The SS leader wanted to make Dachau into an experimentation center for his policy of repression.
22:07A template for the camps to come.
22:09To work towards that aim, he recruited a new type of SS member.
22:13Very young men, maximum 22 years old, with little education.
22:18They were taught to become violent and pitiless.
22:21As this inmate's drawing recounts, the prisoners were greeted on their arrival in the camp with 25 blows from Akash.
22:27A way of breaking all resistance, but also of hardening the guards.
22:33Sharing a crime, however you look at it, brings people together.
22:39He therefore forced the SS to witness the meeting out of corporal punishment, to deal it out themselves or to
22:46watch.
22:47And in that way, he created veritable rites of passage, initiation rites that were very, very important formative experiences inside
22:56the SS.
22:59There was a term and an adjective that were repeated like a mantra, so to speak, in the SS.
23:05It was hart, hard.
23:07Man must hart sein.
23:08You have to be hard.
23:10Hard, first of all, towards yourself, towards what the SS called your inner bastard.
23:14Der innere Schweinhund, which is to say the weak, sensitive man.
23:18Weak because he had been weakened by Christianity, which is to say by Judeo-Christianity.
23:23He'd been taught pity, compassion, gentleness, all sorts of anti-natural feelings.
23:30He had to be silenced, this sensitive man, this inner bastard, in order to be hard with the enemies of
23:37the German race.
23:44Inside the camp, the prisoners crammed into the dormitories were reduced to the status of cattle.
23:59Any reason was good enough to torture them in their dungeon.
24:04Under the cover of the rolls, it was a reign of lawlessness.
24:09Outside the camp, even inside the Nazi regime, some were worried by the terror that reigned at Dachau.
24:16But no protest was possible.
24:18Himmler made sure the camp was a place controlled by the SS and hermetically sealed.
24:26No state official was allowed to enter.
24:29No member of the judiciary, no policeman, no one was allowed to investigate or penetrate this closed space.
24:37That protected the SS because, obviously, the judiciary couldn't accuse them of murder.
24:42It was at that moment that the concentration camp system became a world, you could say, a world apart.
24:51By 1936, the template was in place.
24:55The SS opened five other camps like Dachau on German territory.
24:59Political opponents were joined by other undesirables.
25:03Jews, gypsies, beggars, homosexuals.
25:06Several thousand people were imprisoned and tortured with complete impunity.
25:12Three years away from the World War, the SS expanded its web.
25:23On August 31, 1939, Nazi troops invaded Poland.
25:32Hitler presented the operation as retaliation for an aggression.
25:36The Poles, he claimed, had attacked a radio transmitter inside German territory.
25:42In fact, it was an SS mock-up operation ordered by the Führer.
25:46It was even called Operation Himmler.
25:50In August 1939, Hitler was determined to finish with Poland, and Himmler gave the task to the SD and Gestapo
26:00chief to mount an operation that would be an act of provocation.
26:06They picked some seasoned SS members, made them into a group, took some Polish uniforms, pretended to attack a border
26:14radio post with a speaker that was supposed to transmit a message of provocation in Polish.
26:23Several inmates from a neighboring camp were dressed as Poles and killed near the transmitter to make the attack more
26:28credible.
26:29Hitler had his pretext for unleashing war.
26:33In response to the invasion of Poland, France and Great Britain declared war on Germany.
26:42The SS had just started the Second World War, and it was going to participate directly.
27:02In a Munich suburb, the Bad Tolz barracks had been built by Dachau prisoners.
27:08This is where SS officers were trained before going off to war, because the SS also had its own army.
27:15For several years, Himmler had been preparing this new branch of his organization, which was destined to become its biggest,
27:21the Waffen SS.
27:23The Waffen SS were soldiers, combat troops, who wore uniforms, but who were considered to be political soldiers.
27:31That meant that you joined the SS as an act of political militancy. You were not, in theory, a conscript.
27:39There was, from the SS point of view, the will to create an army of political soldiers who, even more
27:45than the regular German army, would fight pitilessly while following the precepts of Nazi ideology.
27:56The Waffen SS was thrown into battle alongside the Wehrmacht, the regular army.
28:02It took part in the invasion of Belgium and France.
28:06Contrary to the Nazi propaganda claims, the beginnings were not very glorious.
28:11The SS were not soldiers, first and foremost.
28:13They fought with their fanaticism and suffered heavy casualties.
28:30To compensate for their losses in battle, the SS were obliged to complete another mission.
28:36A mission that Himmler considered to be as important as fighting.
28:40The SS had to procreate.
28:44The SS were a biological elite from Himmler's point of view.
28:47They'd been selected and must be procreators.
28:50They had to have children, they had to produce biological material.
28:55From the beginning, Himmler imposed pronatalist rules on the SS.
29:00SS men had to marry women who were also considered racially pure, and procreate as quickly as possible.
29:08Himmler followed the marriages very closely, and the divorces in fact.
29:14And he would actually say, very clearly, that a childless marriage was a worthless marriage for society in general, and
29:23for the SS even more so.
29:26If they didn't contribute to the German people's biological regeneration, then, in theory, they could be subject to sanctions, of
29:34a financial sort in particular.
29:36There was a contribution, a sort of fine, that you were supposed to pay if, after a certain number of
29:41years, you hadn't had a sufficient number of children.
29:44So, according to Himmler, the aim was that every SS marriage provide at least four children.
29:53But the SS found it hard to live up to this ambition.
29:57When war broke out, Himmler's objectives were far from being reached.
30:03In fact, by the end of the 1930s, so after almost ten years of applying these criteria, only 40%
30:09of SS men were married.
30:11So, in fact, a large number of them were single.
30:15As for the numbers of children per family, it was about one child.
30:19So, the SS were typical of the German population generally.
30:22They did not conform as willingly as might be expected to the organisation's constraints.
30:29So, the SS leader made an extraordinary decision.
30:33In October 1939, a few months after the beginning of the war, he signed a procreation order inciting SS men
30:40to have extramarital affairs.
30:45He encouraged soldiers and members of the armed police, and of course the SS, to make children with German women
30:52outside of marriage.
30:56So, we were back with the idea that monogamy, only having one wife and only having children with one wife,
31:01had been imposed by the Catholic priests, which is to say by the Jews, in order to dry up the
31:06race.
31:07Himmler took the opposite stance, telling SS members, you have the duty to make children everywhere, all the time, wherever
31:14you can.
31:15It was understood that he meant even outside the couple.
31:24On June 22nd, 1941, Hitler entered a new phase.
31:29After the invasion of Poland, he attacked the USSR.
31:33He launched the great Nazi project, spreading to the east, Lebensraum, Germany's living space.
31:39According to Nazi doctrine, these conquered lands had to be cleaned of the subhumans who lived in them, so as
31:46to be replaced by authentic Germans.
31:49To conquer this living space, the SS would once more show their fanaticism.
31:54The regular army was followed into the conquered zones by the Einsatzgruppen, the SS task forces.
32:02The mission of these death squads was to eliminate all opponents, as well as people who were considered inferior, starting
32:08with the Jews.
32:09They executed men by firing squad, razed villages, burned down synagogues.
32:17There were 3,000 members of the Einsatzgruppen in the Soviet Union between the 22nd of June 1941 and, let's
32:25say, Christmas 1941, which is to say six months.
32:29They killed 550,000 people.
32:33If you do the maths, to be one of the Einsatzgruppen shooters in the USSR meant killing a man every
32:41day for six months.
32:43Each one of them has, on average, 180 people on their conscience.
32:48That is for the first year of the war, not counting the rest.
32:53Summer 1941. A new peak was reached on the scale of crime.
32:58Berlin requested that women and children be killed too.
33:01Even for the fanatical SS, this task would be hard to carry out.
33:05And Himmler knew it.
33:08It was clear to him, as it was clear for the other SS officials, that it was not easy to
33:13kill.
33:13And that if it was easy to kill, then that would be a sign of moral degeneration.
33:20Killing should be done not for pleasure, nor out of vice.
33:23Killing was a moral duty.
33:27There was violence that had become the norm, that had been normalised.
33:32It was very intense, it was monstrous what these people did.
33:35But killing children was nevertheless put within the limits of this normalised violence.
33:40It was disgusting, they didn't want to do it, they didn't think it was good to do it, but, well,
33:45for them, they had to do it.
33:47There was a certain necessity about it.
33:49There was a whole and very effective argument to justify that.
33:54This perversion of the moral argument had it that the moral good was not to spare the four-year-old
33:59child standing on the edge of the pit.
34:02That would be cowardly.
34:04It would be cowardly towards our race, towards our country, towards our own children.
34:11Because the four-year-old child in front of the pit wasn't a charming little child.
34:15He was a Jew, who, when he grew up, would come and kill your own children.
34:20Therefore, the higher morality was to force yourself to kill this child, because you were conscious of the danger he
34:26represented.
34:30This barbarous logic reached its climax in October 1941, when the Einsatzgruppen attacked the city of Kiev.
34:40Another massacre, but this one would be the most monstrous of all.
34:47It started on the 28th of September 1941, with posters put up all over the place that gave the order,
34:54on pain of death, to Jewish citizens to gather for deportation in a certain area.
35:03They were then brought, on the morning of the 29th of September 1941, to the ravine of the grandmother, Babi
35:10Yar, at the exit to the town.
35:14Most of the Jewish families responded to the call.
35:17They came with their luggage, convinced they were going to be evacuated.
35:21They were asked to undress and to lie down on the ground.
35:25At that moment, those units put into place what would remain the most gigantic, genocidal massacre of the Second World
35:33War,
35:34with the killing of 33,771 people, men, women and children, over two days.
35:45The first bodies were covered with earth, then they started again.
35:49The killing went on, hour after hour.
35:51The SS took shifts to kill families, as if they were working on an assembly line.
35:58At Babi Yar, it was the shooters with their rifles who forced people to lie down before shooting them with
36:03a bullet in the head,
36:04but they were using war weapons that caused considerable bodily damage.
36:08The heads exploded, so there was a confrontation with extreme violence.
36:13It was extremely important.
36:17In total, during the war, one and a half million people were assassinated in mass shootings.
36:26While his men were engaged in the mass execution of Jewish children,
36:30Himmler was still looking for ways to accelerate the multiplication of pure-race Germans.
36:35Those who would, in the future, live in the new living space liberated in the East.
36:40He wanted to avoid abortions that could deprive the Reich of a future SS member.
36:49He made maternity wards available where SS men's fiancées could go and give birth at their ease.
37:00By SS fiancées, I mean fiancées who were going to be married,
37:05but also mistresses with whom SS members had had extramarital affairs.
37:13The moral fault was not that a young and beautiful German would procreate outside of marriage.
37:19Marriage was a Christian, which is to say, Jewish institution.
37:24The true moral fault was not to have children.
37:28Therefore, if this racially pure woman fell pregnant and had children,
37:31the SS was duty-bound to look after her and make sure she gave birth in the best possible conditions.
37:42The SS created Germany's first nurseries before the war.
37:46With the extension of the conflict, they opened more of them around Europe.
37:49These nurseries included foreigners, women considered racially pure,
37:54who had had relations with SS members.
37:57But it wasn't enough for Himmler to breed children. He also stole them.
38:03In one of his speeches, Himmler used a very surprising formula, which was,
38:08we are going to steal German blood wherever it can be found.
38:11Because in the history of the German race, there had been two migrations.
38:16Himmler said, there was German blood, German pockets,
38:19pockets of German blood in the Slav zones, in the Jewish zones, etc.
38:25They had to go and find this blood and bring it back, re-Germanize it.
38:32In the territories of occupied Poland, in Ukraine, in Russia,
38:36the SS searched the kindergartens and school playgrounds.
38:39Those with blonde hair and blue eyes were rounded up and put into orphanages
38:43or given to SS foster families.
38:46Some 200,000 children were kidnapped in this way
38:49and grew up without knowing their real parents.
39:04A few kilometers from Krakow, Auschwitz camp in Poland.
39:09It was one of the new camps installed by the SS in the Concord zone.
39:18On July 17, 1942, Himmler went to Auschwitz on a secret mission.
39:26He came to observe a new means of execution.
39:31With the introduction in a closed room of Zyklon B, a gas used to disinfect the camp,
39:37he witnessed the killing of 449 Dutch Jews in a matter of minutes.
39:43Himmler left the camp quite pleased.
39:45These SS men had just started to put the final solution into practice.
39:52The principle had already been agreed for some months.
39:55The Fuhrer wanted to find a solution that was more radical than deportation,
39:59to put an end to those he called Germany's racial enemies.
40:02The mass shootings weren't killing fast enough,
40:05and many of those doing the shooting were troubled by the monstrousness of their mission.
40:13What had been observed on the ground in the experience of the mobile units,
40:17carrying out the massacres in the east from June 1941,
40:22was that it was very hard to kill,
40:24and that being face to face with your victim led to psychological damage for the killers,
40:29for the executioners.
40:34It was, therefore, both out of a sort of morbid concern to improve efficiency,
40:39and to spare the executioners that the gas chambers were installed.
40:44At Auschwitz, a second camp was built, Birkenau,
40:48which would enable the transformation from a concentration camp to an extermination camp.
40:55They thought up what they called killing centres,
40:58in other words, places where you bring people,
41:01where you concentrate a population that has to be killed,
41:04and killed according to a certain procedure,
41:06one that would spare the executioners as much as possible
41:09by splitting the job into separate tasks.
41:16The deportees arrived by trainload in the middle of the camp.
41:19They were then separated.
41:21Those who would be killed straight away,
41:23and those who would be worked to exhaustion.
41:27The new arrivals were stripped of all their belongings,
41:29which were saved and methodically sorted.
41:33Suitcases.
41:37Shoes.
41:41Shoes.
41:42Glasses.
41:48Each task was carried out by different groups of SS members,
41:52in order to make the massacre easier for the assassins.
41:57There were those who got people out of the trains,
42:00those who then took them to have their head shaved and to be stripped,
42:04those who closed the doors,
42:06those who put on gas masks,
42:07opened the hatches and poured in the poison,
42:09the Zyklon B.
42:11Splitting the job into separate tasks
42:13permitted a sort of diluting of responsibility,
42:16which spared the executioners,
42:17because killing face-to-face is a source of moral discomfort.
42:23Meanwhile, for the SS, life went on.
42:26A stone's throw from the gas chambers,
42:28leisure activities were organized for them.
42:31Himmler insisted that care be taken to keep up morale.
42:35The massacre of thousands of people had to be just another job.
42:41All the camps were situated outside towns, in the countryside,
42:46so you could go hiking, visit your fiancé,
42:49receive letters, take snapshots, etc.
42:54In fact, SS members went to the cinema,
42:57led a life that was more or less normal during the war,
43:01and I would say even that it was more or less comfortable,
43:05and that they didn't suffer from the shortages.
43:07They were always well fed,
43:09and were a long way from the bombardments.
43:17Unlike the Nazis' other crimes,
43:19what happened in the extermination camps was to remain as secret as possible.
43:24Himmler thought public opinion was not yet ready to understand what they were doing
43:29as the detainees came from all over Europe.
43:35Killing Soviet Jews with mobile death squads,
43:38where everyone saw they were dragging dozens and dozens or thousands of Jews,
43:42in the case of Babi Yar, to pits and executing them.
43:45Everyone knew that was happening.
43:47But for the Nazis, that didn't matter very much.
43:50These were Soviet Jews in Soviet territory.
43:54The fact that the news spread wasn't that important.
43:56On the other hand, the policy that sought to spread this extermination to all European Jews,
44:02including therefore assimilated Jews,
44:05Jews in positions of power in some countries,
44:07French Jews, Dutch Jews,
44:09here a much stronger taboo was transgressed,
44:12and there was much more concern about public opinion,
44:15including German public opinion.
44:20And the SS would always be careful to destroy all traces of the murder.
44:25So, in fact, that's why the cremation units were so large,
44:29almost as large as the death squads in the gas chambers,
44:33because once the detainees had been killed,
44:36the bodies had to be disposed of straight away.
44:39They had to be burnt, so as not to leave any trace of those murders,
44:44what today we would call a genocide.
45:02The war was at its turning point.
45:02At the beginning of 1943, the war was at its turning point.
45:06The German army lost the Battle of Stalingrad.
45:13This defeat reinforced SS power, because it started to look like the last resort.
45:19The military branch of the SS, the Waffen SS, was continuing to grow in size.
45:24Its numbers doubled in a year to reach half a million fighters.
45:29To facilitate recruitment, the famous selection criteria were quietly softened.
45:34The minimum height, five foot seven at the start of the war,
45:37was lowered to five foot two and a half for some units.
45:45Himmler had had an idea.
45:47Confronted with the Wehrmacht's failures,
45:49he dreamed of making the SS into a complete substitute army.
45:56June 1944. Operation Overlord.
46:00The Americans landed in Normandy.
46:05For the German army, this new front was a catastrophe.
46:13Himmler sent Waffen SS divisions to fill the gaps in the regular army.
46:16The army's lines.
46:19Among them were some of the most radical,
46:21such as the Das Reich Waffen SS division,
46:24which had already distinguished itself on the Eastern Front.
46:30Oradeur Seugladen.
46:35A French village 20 kilometers from Limoges.
46:42On June 10, 1944, members of the Das Reich division surrounded the village.
46:52It was an operation intended to put a stop to the acts of sabotage carried out by the resistance.
47:02The inhabitants were ordered to gather in the village square.
47:08The men were taken away in small groups and shot in barns.
47:24Meanwhile, the women and children gathered in the church were burnt alive.
47:44642 dead. A village wiped off the map.
47:49This crime was seen as a symbol of SS barbarity.
47:53But it was nothing compared with the assassinations carried out in the East.
47:59Belorussia was 317 times Oradeur.
48:03317 times. Oradeur every other day for four years.
48:06So there's no sense in seeing Oradeur as an exception.
48:09The Nazis took the decision and racial determinism took over.
48:13In the East, people were barbarians who had to be kept in line,
48:16so all sorts of strategies of coercion and aggression were used against the civilian population.
48:22Other decisions had been taken in the West.
48:25But as soon as Operation Overlord happened, bringing back war to this part of Europe,
48:31the Nazis allowed a certain limited number of civilian massacres.
48:37These had what you might call a semiotic function, a function of communication.
48:44They said, be careful, don't move, otherwise we'll do that all the time.
48:49At Oradeur, it was all about terror and intimidation.
48:59Caught between the Russian front and the American landing, the German army withdrew.
49:04The generals knew the end was near.
49:08On July 20th, 1944, Hitler escaped an assassination attempt.
49:13Senior members of the German army were involved in the plot to kill him.
49:17This was the opportunity Himmler had been waiting for.
49:20In 2004, the Fuhrer, who had lost confidence in the Wehrmacht, made him head of the replacement army.
49:25The former agronomist had become the most powerful man in the Reich after Hitler.
49:30But it was too late.
49:34In April 1945, the Soviets entered Berlin.
49:42Hitler killed himself in his bunker.
49:45Himmler was arrested after attempting to flee and committed suicide by biting a cyanide capsule.
49:52It was the end of the war, the end of the SS Empire.
49:55The horrors of Nazism were displayed for all to see.
49:59Thousands of SS members took their own lives.
50:02Most of the others would remain caught inside their criminal logic.
50:09These people took full responsibility for what they had done.
50:13Guilty, they asked. Guilty of what?
50:16We saved Europe from Bolshevism.
50:18We saved Europe from Stalin.
50:20We cleaned Europe of those Jews who wanted to undermine Western and European civilisation.
50:25Instead of dragging us into the mud and making us stand trial, you should be raising statues in our honour
50:31and giving us medals.
50:34Today, it's absolutely insane, from our point of view, and absolutely unbearable when you know what these people did.
50:40When you know the atrocity and intensity of the crimes they committed.
50:44But these people considered themselves white knights.
50:48They never admitted their guilt.
50:51Not in the sense that they said they hadn't done anything, that they were innocent.
50:55No.
50:56They said, we did these things, we killed, but we were justified in doing what we did.
51:04At the Nuremberg trials, this fanaticism had its uses.
51:09The SS crimes were a perfect pretext for lifting all responsibility from the rest of Germany.
51:18As soon as the war ended, numerous generals were quick to say they hadn't known about the extermination camps, which
51:23had been under complete SS control.
51:31It was very convenient for the civilian administration, and for the army, after the war, to let the SS take
51:38the blame for all Nazi crimes.
51:42The SS wasn't alone.
51:44Nowadays, we know that, on the ground, no party was guiltless of crime.
51:50Neither the Wehrmacht, the regular police, the secret police, SS members, nor local populations, all took part in a policy
51:58of death.
52:00You cannot reduce Nazi horror to the SS.
52:04Nevertheless, this organisation was Nazism's sharpest point.
52:08It spread its ideology through the whole of German society.
52:13Loyal to the oath of its leader, Heinrich Himmler, it was indeed a terrifying vanguard.
52:19A vanguard of crime for the construction of the most barbaric of regimes.
52:25A vanguard of crime.
52:26A vanguard of crime.
52:30A vanguard of crime.
52:34A vanguard of crime.
52:35A vanguard of crime.
52:36A vanguard of crime.
52:38A vanguard of crime.
52:41A vanguard of crime.
52:42A vanguard of crime.
52:42A vanguard of crime.
52:43A vanguard of crime.
52:44A vanguard of crime.
52:44A vanguard of crime.
52:44A vanguard of crime.
52:45A vanguard of crime.
52:46A vanguard of crime.
52:52A vanguard of crime.
53:09Transcription by CastingWords
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