- 2 days ago
For educational purposes
By 1944 it was clear that the war was lost as the Reich shrank back to the borders of Germany, but there was plenty for the Gestapo to do.
Even within the dwindling resources of a doomed regime, the Gestapo was determined to keep its grip on the people.
They persecuted resistance members, the merely indifferent, "decadent" jazz musicians, and couples of mixed race.
As with any corrupt system, they lost touch with reality, and its violence spiraled out of control even while in its own death throes.
When the Stauffenberg plot to assassinate Hitler failed, the Gestapo was given a free hand. But amidst the bloodshed.
Many Gestapo officers prepared themselves for a future in a defeated Germany. Many were able to slip back into normal society at war's end and many prospered.
Some were brought to justice: Eichmann in Israel in the 1960s, others in Germany, France, and elsewhere--some pursued into the 1970s.
The Gestapo is long gone--but its crimes have not been forgotten.
By 1944 it was clear that the war was lost as the Reich shrank back to the borders of Germany, but there was plenty for the Gestapo to do.
Even within the dwindling resources of a doomed regime, the Gestapo was determined to keep its grip on the people.
They persecuted resistance members, the merely indifferent, "decadent" jazz musicians, and couples of mixed race.
As with any corrupt system, they lost touch with reality, and its violence spiraled out of control even while in its own death throes.
When the Stauffenberg plot to assassinate Hitler failed, the Gestapo was given a free hand. But amidst the bloodshed.
Many Gestapo officers prepared themselves for a future in a defeated Germany. Many were able to slip back into normal society at war's end and many prospered.
Some were brought to justice: Eichmann in Israel in the 1960s, others in Germany, France, and elsewhere--some pursued into the 1970s.
The Gestapo is long gone--but its crimes have not been forgotten.
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LearningTranscript
00:021942. Nazi Germany's armed forces controlled most of Europe. The Gestapo, Hitler's most potent and hated weapon of fear, was
00:11at full stretch, rooting out opposition and implementing Hitler's final solution, the extermination of the Jews.
00:18What had begun as a domestic secret police force had gained the power of life and death over millions of
00:24people. Later, by 1945, as the Third Reich hurtled towards its destruction and Hitler raged in his bunker, the Gestapo
00:33was to plumb new depths of lawlessness and brutality.
00:36But in the aftermath of war, its officers would simply melt away largely unpunished. And the greatest mystery of all
00:44remains to this day, the fate of the creator of the Gestapo, Heinrich Müller.
01:00Germans had lived in dread of the Gestapo since 1933. But what they would undergo in the declining years of
01:07Hitler's Reich would prove worse than their most horrific nightmares.
01:13Munich, the capital of Bavaria. This has been the breeding ground of the original Nazi movement. But in early 1943,
01:21leaflets began to appear around the university in the name of a group called the White Rose.
01:26It spoke for the growing number of Germans who were disillusioned by the war, and particularly Hitler's handling of it.
01:37It was directed especially at young people. The German people looks to you. We had to do it once before,
01:45when Napoleon ruled. Now let's rise against this leadership, against this regime.
01:52The Gestapo reacted with customary speed and venom. The White Rose group were inexperienced dissenters led by a young brother
02:01and sister, Sophie and Hans Scholl.
02:03Within days, the Gestapo had seized almost every member of the group. On the 22nd of February 1943, after a
02:12brief show trial, the Scholls, along with another White Rose supporter, were sentenced to death and executed by guillotine the
02:19same day.
02:20The Gestapo had made a strong public statement. Its bosses realized they faced something new. A rumbling groundswell of opposition
02:29at home.
02:30Some of this was prompted by the Third Reich's military performance, which was deteriorating fast.
02:35The assault on the East had failed. The extreme cold of the Russian winter had taken a savage toll, and
02:43the Wehrmacht had suffered immense losses.
02:46Almost a million men had died, most of them at Stalingrad, in the largest single battle the world had ever
02:53witnessed.
02:58The army's retreat was inevitable. Many of the Gestapo officers also found themselves returning to their homeland.
03:10But they didn't find the confident Germany they had left in 1941, although the leadership still appeared to believe in
03:17the Nazi dream.
03:19Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels continued to stridently urge the civilian population to total war.
03:27The head of the German Secret Service, Walter Schellenberg, was a Nazi insider, a man in regular contact with the
03:34head of security, Heinrich Himmler.
03:37Our leaders had no understanding of conditions abroad. Their actions were determined entirely by their own narrow political views.
03:46None of them was willing to move from the recognition of the facts to the inevitable conclusion that the idea
03:54of victory was impossible.
03:58But the German people themselves were beginning to realize that the war was doomed.
04:03The upsurge of anger and overt challenges to the Gestapo mounted.
04:09Increasingly, it turned its focus back onto German society, too, in the last years of the war,
04:15as all the fears the Nazis had concerning the collapse of the home front come back to the surface.
04:24Nazi Party propaganda may have been telling the German people one thing, but in their own homes they were hearing
04:30another.
04:33The radio, once the most effective channel for disseminating the government's message, was fast becoming a threat to the regime.
04:41For radio waves know no borders.
04:46Here is the voice from America.
04:51First, the most important news.
04:53In the nights, on Sunday and Monday, the Royal Air Force had two big attacks on Berlin.
05:00Listening to foreign broadcasts was not only illegal, but treasonous, so the Gestapo clamped down.
05:09My grandfather was an enthusiastic radio amateur, and he always listened to English radio.
05:18My grandmother was summoned, and my grandfather said, I'll go with you, and he was immediately arrested by the Gestapo.
05:29Because he admitted that he had listened to Radio London, and the court sentenced him to two and a half
05:40years jail for listening to enemy broadcasts.
05:45Meanwhile, the Gestapo did not neglect its other task, to complete the racial purity scheme, the final solution.
05:52This was something that the Gestapo chief Heinrich Muller took charge of personally.
05:57It had been his brief to do so, given to him at the Wonsay Conference.
06:03And Muller took pride in completing an undertaking.
06:06Few pure-blood Jews remained in Germany, but Muller was determined to get rid of everyone.
06:12There were complicated regulations about the percentage of Jewish blood and intermarriage.
06:17Jews married to Aryans had hitherto enjoyed some protection from persecution, but no longer.
06:24Clara Holayna Grading's father was Jewish, her mother a Protestant.
06:29In 1919, she herself married a Protestant, a respectable businessman with whom she had three children.
06:35She worked with disabled youngsters in the Kronberg Hospital, and also did volunteer work with the Red Cross, a model
06:41citizen.
06:42But this did not impress the Gestapo.
06:46Her parents had been wealthy, but their fine house had been confiscated and turned into the local Nazi party offices,
06:54and their new home was also targeted.
06:58The letterbox was then smeared with, a Jewess lives here or something.
07:02And where there was a stone wall, the garden wall, big letters were smeared on it, and things like that
07:09happened.
07:11From 1939, like all Jews in the Reich, Clara had to add an extra name on all documents.
07:18Sarah for women, and Israel for men.
07:23Clara was careful to obey the rule, but one day in 1943, she forgot to write her extra name Sarah
07:29in her ration book.
07:31It was an absent-minded slip, but sufficient excuse for the Gestapo to call her in.
07:38Just a year later, on 25th May 1943, our mother had to report to the Gestapo as she had got
07:46a summons.
07:47We travelled in together.
07:49We went to Frankfurt West, then we separated.
07:54I went into the office, and my mother went to 27 Lindenstrasse.
08:00That was the Gestapo.
08:02We agreed, if we heard nothing by midday, we'd go there.
08:05We didn't hear anything, so we met up and we went there.
08:1527 Lindenstrasse, Gestapo headquarters, Frankfurt.
08:19It was here that Clara and her daughters encountered the man known as Death's Accomplice.
08:26Heinrich Baab joined the Prussian police force in 1928.
08:30Nine years later, he was appointed to the Gestapo, and since 1942 had worked in Frankfurt as Jewish affairs officer.
08:38Later, witnesses testified to his boasting that he had annihilated and exterminated 387 women.
08:50I came in. There was a big staircase that you had to go up to the office.
08:55An elderly man came tumbling down the steps with a loaf under his arm,
09:00and he said he'd been kicked down the stairs.
09:04He had only wanted to ask whether he should bring some bread to his wife in prison.
09:13He wasn't a human being, he was an animal.
09:19I don't know how to describe someone like that.
09:22Cold. You couldn't get any colder.
09:25Fat, puffed up, like in that picture, that's what he looked like.
09:30That picture in the papers write, fat like that, bald and sneering and contemptuous.
09:39On Muller's instructions, the Gestapo continued to fill the concentration camps with Jews who had been overlooked in the first
09:46deportations.
09:47On the 10th of January 1944, Clara Grading was put on a train heading east.
09:53On 19th February 1944, we had a small message in the post box.
09:58How the card got to us, we don't know.
10:00And a few days later, the next message with the death certificate from Auschwitz.
10:07This was typical of Heinrich Muller.
10:10For him, the bureaucracy that condemned Clara to death was a useful instrument,
10:15and the complete eradication of the Jews, a goal worth spending Gestapo resources on,
10:20it was a belief fully shared by Hitler.
10:24One's got to remember that, to Hitler and to the Nazis, to Himmler, that the Jews were another enemy.
10:31In fact, they were the enemy of all enemies.
10:34They were the enemy behind the enemy powers.
10:37Nazi propaganda made this quite clear, depicted everywhere.
10:41The figure of a stereotyped, demonized, eternal Jew, supporting both the Soviet Union and the United States,
10:48in the form of international capital.
10:51He carries a whip with which he beats down the Germans.
10:54It is an obscene reversal of the truth.
10:57But this was the basic lie on which the Third Reich was built.
11:03And so, to them, it was vital that the process of the final solution, the extermination of the Jews,
11:11took precedence, really, over even military operations.
11:15And this happens time and time again, where trains bringing reinforcements to the Eastern Front
11:21are diverted, kept in sidings and that, whilst trains run to the death camps.
11:26But Mola's zeal was destined to go unrewarded, for the war was soon to require the Gestapo's undivided attention.
11:38In 1944, the propaganda machine was cranked up a gear.
11:43Without greater home support, victory would be impossible.
12:08German civilians at home were asked to do more to help.
12:23But it wasn't that easy.
12:26With the population increasingly disenchanted with the Nazi regime, words were not enough anymore.
12:31The Gestapo began by tackling all those who did not obviously conform to the Nazi archetype,
12:38and those not fully signed up to the Nazi people's community.
12:42Anyone who appeared to reject the Teutonic ideal was suspect.
12:46And anyone who imitated the lifestyle of the enemy became a Gestapo target for treason.
12:52We had other models. We had these pictures in the papers that the Nazis themselves put out.
13:02And we took them as models. And we tried to look like them, with longer jackets and longer hair.
13:10That was our attitude. And of course it was really a thorn in the side for the Nazis.
13:16It was obvious that we didn't belong. We were trying to distance ourselves from them.
13:26We were mad about jazz. And we danced swing. We were passionate about dancing.
13:33Later they called us the swing kids.
13:43The propaganda machine went into overdrive, viciously denigrating Americans, blacks in particular.
13:52Swing is trump.
13:54We are not in Africa, but in New York.
13:59On this dance competition of the Nigger,
14:02there are the new memories of the American civilization of the US.
14:12And white people are apparently looking forward to the Nigger.
14:26The German swing kids were just lads wanting to rebel.
14:31Swing was cosmopolitan and relaxed. Everything that the Nazis rejected.
14:35But they were accused of undermining their country and of betraying the brave soldiers at the front.
14:41It was put down in interrogation transcripts.
14:45What the youth was doing was a threat to the state.
14:48Building cliques outside of the Hitler youth.
14:50It threatened the state and national morale.
14:53Put state security in danger and so on.
14:57The Gestapo caught the swing kids in its net.
15:02Two figures stood there with hats and long coats and with a car.
15:06And we drove to the station.
15:13They got going there. They started beating me already.
15:17And then later at the interrogation in the basement, where we were locked up and interrogated,
15:21and we were kicked down the stairs.
15:25They got angrier and angrier.
15:30They wanted to hear something specific, that they'd set out already.
15:36Probably written it all down already, to report to Berlin their heroic action,
15:40what they found out amongst the youth, and how subversive they were, and criminals too.
15:46I couldn't give them that pleasure though.
15:48And the more they beat me, the more frightened I became, because I thought,
15:52there must be something terrible behind this, if people behave like this.
16:01It was the same story all across Germany.
16:07I was locked up overnight in the basement of the Gestapo building,
16:10and stayed there 20 days.
16:12Then I was released.
16:14There was no official charge or anything on the part of the Gestapo.
16:18I was simply locked up.
16:25The Gestapo could imprison and torture with complete impunity.
16:32Every single one of these people was a state employee, was covered by state permission,
16:39and was capable of murder, without having to justify themselves afterwards as to why they'd shot someone.
16:46There were no limits at all.
16:50They were all potentially cold-hearted murderers.
16:56All their support among ordinary Germans was not what it once was.
17:00The Gestapo organisation still relied heavily on informers.
17:04The card indexes that were so religiously kept in each of its offices contain all the denunciations and records of
17:11what actions followed.
17:12Any German citizen, even the racially spotless, could now fall victim to the Gestapo.
17:21Anna Marie S. was denounced as a prostitute.
17:24She was taken to the Gestapo HQ in Cologne, the Elder House, on the 7th of November 1942.
17:31Held without charge for two weeks, she was then released under a curfew,
17:35under which she had to be home every night before midnight.
17:39For two years, Anna Marie obeyed the restriction.
17:43Then, one night, she arrived home 15 minutes late.
17:46Denounced by a neighbour, the defenceless woman was arrested and deported to Ravensbrück concentration camp.
17:55Two months later, she was dead.
18:02But these routine persecutions disguised the fact that the Gestapo was not reaching the core of real and growing German
18:09descent.
18:10And soon, it would have to confront a challenge that would prove all but overwhelming.
18:17The Nazis' bid to conquer Europe had seen all its able-bodied men drafted into the German armed forces.
18:25On the home front, the shortage of labour was severe.
18:28Vital industries, even the munitions factories, were in disarray.
18:32The Allies solved this problem by putting women workers into farms and factories.
18:38Nazi ideology, that decreed that a woman's place was in the home, prevented that happening in Germany.
18:45By 1944, Allied bombing had rendered the labour shortage even more acute.
18:49A solution had to be found urgently.
18:55For our equipment industry and our landwirtschaft,
18:59there were about 2,5 million foreign workers who now have to be eaten from us.
19:07Initially, the workers were voluntary recruits.
19:10But there were too few volunteers to keep the massive German military machine running for long.
19:15So, the authorities turned to forced labour and began to import workers from the German-occupied countries.
19:22In the end, almost 7 million of them.
19:25The Gestapo was entrusted with the task of choosing candidates for this involuntary journey.
19:31It was one of the biggest enforced migrations that had ever occurred in world history.
19:40Elena Moskiewicz was a young Jewish resistance fighter who had secretly infiltrated the Gestapo offices in Brussels.
19:53One of my daily chores was the sorting of various lists of hundreds of names and addresses,
19:57and classifying them by district in alphabetical order.
20:01The names were those of men to be impressed for forced labour in Germany,
20:04and they were to receive or had already received the dreaded summons.
20:08A few of these were usually earmarked for arrest for having failed to respond to the summons.
20:14And even though they were absolutely necessary to the war effort,
20:18these foreign labourers were far from well-treated.
20:24Polish and foreign workers came to Breslov.
20:29My brother and I, we saw that they were not only second-class human beings,
20:35but third-class human beings.
20:38They were labelled with a big letter P sewn onto their shabby clothes.
20:47We had to see how hungry they were, and how lots of people spat on them.
21:03But not all Germans were hostile. Some smuggled food and drink to the workers.
21:10For the Gestapo officers, this alienated workforce represented a huge security problem.
21:16Their solution was predictable.
21:18In the absence of accurate intelligence,
21:21they randomly made examples of anyone who attracted their attention.
21:25An Italian called Salvatore Bertorelli was falsely accused of sabotage.
21:30There was a shed like this room here, you see, and I was cutting the timber,
21:35and the foreman came in and said to me, go out.
21:39See, so immediately I went out.
21:41When I went out, you see, behind the door, there were two big, burly Gestapo men.
21:49You understand?
21:50And I went out innocent, you see, and of course they grabbed me.
21:55And I pulled back.
21:56And when I saw the Gestapo, I said, problem here, big trouble.
22:00You see, and I be peed myself.
22:03He was sent to a special Gestapo-run concentration camp for so-called work education.
22:09For most trainees, this represented a death sentence.
22:13So I was looking out the guard, you see, and there was an Italian prisoner kneeling down on the outside,
22:22the barrack, you know, making like a footpath or a carriageway,
22:26and he was putting bricks down, hedgeways, see?
22:32And he was kneeling down and laying his bricks down, you see,
22:36and two officers went by.
22:37I was looking through the keyhole, see, and they just took the pistol out, shot him dead.
22:46Just like that.
22:49Bertarelli was fortunate.
22:50He managed to survive until the camp was liberated by the British Army.
22:56The 20th of April, 1944, it was Hitler's birthday, a day of national celebration
23:02when the leaders of the Reich strove to outdo each other in gifts to please the Fuhrer.
23:08In the past, these have been reports of new successes against the enemy.
23:12This year, though, there was less success to offer.
23:40The flimsy paper flags and thin shears were a faint and puny echoing
23:45the giant rallies of Hitler's glory years.
23:50The Gestapo's technique of indiscriminate terror
23:53was successful in keeping disaffection under control,
23:56at least on the surface of society.
23:58But its inability to gather hard and accurate intelligence
24:02was a weakness that had cost it dear in the past and would do so again.
24:07The army had its own code of honour
24:09and had never been penetrated by Gestapo spies,
24:12and there were senior military traditionalists who increasingly despised the upstart Nazis.
24:18These high-ranking dissidents were quite capable of outmanoeuvring the Gestapo
24:23and planting a bomb right next to Hitler himself.
24:301944, and it was clear that Germany was heading for defeat.
24:34The Gestapo became increasingly arbitrary in its denunciations.
24:40Failing to grasp the rising level of anger within the military upper echelons,
24:44there was no inkling within its ranks that a group of conservative officers
24:49under the leadership of the charismatic Count Klaus von Stauffenberg
24:53was planning to depose Hitler.
24:56Stauffenberg was typical of the military leaders of this plot.
25:00He was without doubt a deeply committed Christian,
25:03but it was not these Christian elements in his make-up that motivated him to assassination.
25:09If that had been so, he would not have waited until July 1944.
25:13He was above all a passionate soldier,
25:17and he saw everything from the standpoint of his profession,
25:20and it took military disaster to shock him into the opposition.
25:26On the 20th of July 1944,
25:29Stauffenberg attended a meeting of the chiefs of staff called by Hitler.
25:33He had his briefcase with him, as usual, but this time it contained a bomb.
25:37Once again, fate intervened.
25:40At the last minute, Hitler moved the meeting from a concrete bunker
25:44to a wooden barracks above ground.
25:47Stauffenberg planted the bomb and left, and it exploded.
25:51But the flimsy wooden structure dispersed the blast,
25:54and although four officers died, Hitler survived without a scratch.
26:16It was chaos.
26:18In the immediate aftermath,
26:20Stauffenberg and the conspirators believed that Hitler was dead.
26:23They moved into action, making arrests, occupying important buildings,
26:28and mobilizing troops.
26:29But something was wrong.
26:31According to Stauffenberg, everything was proceeding splendidly.
26:35The tanks were on their way.
26:36They would reach the city center very soon.
26:39Then the real action could begin.
26:41As yet, we'd received no disturbing reports of Gestapo or Waffen-SS activity.
26:47I said urgently, too little is happening.
26:51Let's drive over to the Prince Albrechtstrasse.
26:53We must eliminate Müller and Goebbels.
26:56But Heinrich Müller had already recovered from the shock of the attack.
27:01The conspirators were easy to identify,
27:03and the Gestapo quickly set about rounding them up.
27:07Once it was known that Hitler was alive and well,
27:09the rebels knew they had no hope.
27:12Most of the ringleaders, including von Stauffenberg,
27:16were executed that very night.
27:18The Gestapo was smarting from the humiliation of yet another failure
27:22to protect the Führer from potential assassination.
27:25So its officers arrested and interrogated every contact and relative
27:29of those they believed to be involved.
27:32Hundreds were sent to the camps.
27:37Jacob Leonhardt, a Swiss double agent,
27:40was in a Gestapo prison at the time.
27:43We heard about the attack on Hitler on the 20th of July, 1944.
27:48But even without this, we'd have soon realised
27:50that something bad had happened to the Nazis.
27:53There was a clampdown in the prison.
27:55Any relaxation of the regime or special treatment
27:58was immediately cancelled.
28:01Then something strange started to happen.
28:03Women, old men, even children,
28:07started to be brought into the prison under this so-called protective custody.
28:11For days the prison echoed with the cries of pain
28:14of the women being tortured half to death,
28:16who called out just to go home.
28:19Once again we thought our hour had come.
28:21At any moment we expected to be liquidated en masse,
28:25just to make place for more German racial comrades.
28:29Some of the Stauffenberg conspiracy cases reached court,
28:32but only as show trials for propaganda purposes.
28:36The Gestapo had been above the law for 11 years,
28:39as Jacob Leonhardt had already discovered
28:42the Gestapo's word was judge, jury and executioner.
28:45The courts were there simply to rubber stamp
28:48whatever the Gestapo had said,
28:50and at the same time to humiliate its victims
28:53and to issue ever harsher sentences.
28:55The members of the court came back into the courtroom
28:58bareheaded and silent.
29:01Accused, stand up.
29:03Accept our judgement and the reasoning behind it.
29:06There is no direct proof of anything of which you have been accused.
29:10However, it can certainly be assumed that you are guilty.
29:14The People's Court therefore sentences you to death on the guillotine.
29:19The sentence will be carried out immediately.
29:22The property of the accused will be seized.
29:25There was no chance at all that any of the conspirators
29:29would receive anything resembling a fair trial.
29:31Their only hope was to run or to go underground.
29:35Anyone not already executed would fall into the Gestapo's hands within hours.
29:41The Gestapo was there very quickly, the same day, and then all the time.
29:53Franz von Hammerstein's father, Kurt, had already died a loyal army officer
29:58who despised Hitler and his thugs.
30:01Two of his sons, Kunrat and Ludwig, were part of the Stauffenberg plot,
30:05and the Gestapo soon discovered this.
30:09They tried to find out from us where my brothers were.
30:15We pretended we didn't know anything, and it actually worked.
30:29But then, at the beginning of August, I was arrested.
30:33And then my mother and two sisters in October.
30:37And I was brought to the Gestapo prison in the Lertestraße.
30:43The von Hammerstein family somehow kept their secret,
30:47and the brothers were never caught.
30:50Very few others escaped the net.
30:53Hans Bernd Gusevius escaped over the border into Switzerland,
30:57painfully aware of the horrific fate of his fellow conspirators.
31:01For day and night, even when they ate, even when they walked to the scaffold,
31:06they were fettered hand and foot.
31:09They were not fed so well or treated so comfortably as the Nuremberg war criminals.
31:15But it is not possible to describe the kind of interrogation
31:20that took place in the Prince Albrechtstrasse.
31:23We do know, however, those martyred men heroically kept their silence.
31:30But it could not have been easy to die amid the mocking laughter of the Gestapo men.
31:37Muller's sadistic bloodbath was his revenge for the Gestapo's failure to prevent the attack.
31:42However, the days of his lethal rule were already numbered.
31:47In late 1944, Allied bombing destroyed the Gestapo's head office in Prince Albrechtstrasse,
31:53although it did not hold its work.
31:55Groups of officers reformed around impromptu bases carrying on much as before.
32:01But the Allies were closing in.
32:03As the day of reckoning approached,
32:06the Gestapo officers began to feel something familiar to their victims.
32:10The shiver of cold fear.
32:171945, and time for the Gestapo had almost run out.
32:23The concentration camps were still full.
32:26Some of the prisoners had been kept alive for show trials,
32:29planned to celebrate the final Nazi victory.
32:32They included prominent anti-fascist activists,
32:35among them military men, Christians, and Georg Elser,
32:40the carpenter who had tried to assassinate Hitler in 1939.
32:44With victory of forlorn hope,
32:47the ever-efficient Gestapo chief, Heinrich Muller,
32:50took the time to issue an order to the camp commandant.
32:54Elsa and the others were shot on the 9th of April,
32:57just days before the camp was liberated.
33:00As the Red Army tanks approached Berlin,
33:03Hitler emerged from his bunker one final time
33:06to survey the wreckage of his dreams.
33:08He was accompanied by Heinrich Muller,
33:11but Muller did not intend to see it through to the end with his Führer.
33:16He is recorded as saying,
33:18I know Russian methods.
33:20I haven't the slightest intention of being taken prisoner by the Soviet troops.
33:25Muller then disappeared into the smoke and chaos
33:28of the blistering Russian attack.
33:31His immediate superior, Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS,
33:35and joint founder of the Gestapo, also attempted to escape.
33:39But he was caught by British soldiers.
33:41In Lunarburg lies the body of the most hated man in Europe,
33:45Heinrich Himmler, chief of the Nazi secret police and the savage SS troops.
33:50Captured while posing as a civilian,
33:52Himmler was carrying tiny vials of poison.
33:55Under examination, he bit into one concealed under his tongue.
34:00Cropped up for official photographs,
34:01this Nazi who terrorized the continent has met in violent death his proper end.
34:09Hermann Göring, the first leader of the Gestapo, was also captured.
34:13Facing an almost certain death sentence at the Nuremberg trials in 1946,
34:18he too swallowed a smuggled cyanide capsule.
34:21It killed him instantly and turned his corpse bright green.
34:25So ended the Gestapo, Hitler's deadliest weapon.
34:30The sword had been shattered.
34:32But what of the Gestapo officers who, for so long,
34:36had presided over a reign of terror above the law?
34:40What happened to the men who had tortured and killed
34:43with neither reticence nor restraint?
34:46Some were brought to justice.
34:49Heinrich Barbe, the Jewish affairs officer at the Frankfurt Gestapo,
34:53who deported Clara Grading,
34:55was brought to trial in his hometown, Frankfurt.
34:59He stood accused of deporting gypsies as well as Jews
35:02to the death camps in the east.
35:04Witnesses were called who testified to the brutality
35:07with which he treated the victims.
35:09He denied everything.
35:12The whole police force, including female officers,
35:15was involved in these mass evacuations.
35:17There were about 40 to 50 regular police,
35:20finance officers and rationing officers.
35:22We followed the guidelines of the Reich Security Office
35:25to the letter.
35:27Obeying orders was not accepted as a valid defence.
35:32Bob was involved in the deportation of some 20,000 people
35:36between 1941 and 1942.
35:38He was convicted and sentenced,
35:41remaining in prison until 1972,
35:44long after most other Nazis had been released.
35:48Oswald Gundelach, who had delivered deportees from Wurzburg
35:53by train to the death camps in eastern Poland,
35:55went undetected until 1947,
35:58when he was arrested by the Americans.
36:00He was accused of hunting and killing US bomber crews
36:05that had been shot down,
36:06a favourite Gestapo exercise.
36:09At his trial, there was no mention of his role
36:12in the deportations.
36:14Nonetheless, he was sentenced to death.
36:17But this sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.
36:20In 1953, he was released, having served just six years.
36:26The following year, Oswald Gundelach
36:30was back in uniform.
36:31He joined the regular police force.
36:34His war record and conviction deemed no impediment.
36:37He was promoted to superintendent and retired in 1963.
36:42His retirement certificate thanks him for his 40 years of service.
36:47Those 40 years include his time as a Gestapo officer
36:51deporting men, women and children to death camps
36:53and murdering allied bomber crews.
36:57Kurt Lischka had been bureau chief of the Gestapo,
37:01first in Cologne, then Paris,
37:03where he had been responsible for the deportations of Jews
37:05and the arrest and torture of resistance fighters.
37:09After the war, he returned to Cologne,
37:11where he lived quietly in the suburbs.
37:14Then, in 1971, he was tracked down by the French Nazi hunters,
37:19Serge and Beate Klaasfeld.
37:21Although he had been convicted in absentia by an allied military
37:25tribunal in France, a legal anomaly meant that Lischka
37:29could not be tried in Germany.
37:38We tried to bring Lischka to France,
37:41to the French military tribunal that would be able to convict him.
37:45We wanted to bring him to Paris,
37:47to his former office in the Rue des Saussets even,
37:50and tell journalists, Lischka is back in France
37:54and the French authorities should arrest him and try him.
38:01The attempt to transfer him to France failed,
38:04but the pressure brought by the Klaasfelds
38:07led to a change in German law.
38:09And in 1978, he was finally put on trial in Germany
38:13in a blaze of media publicity.
38:1535 years after he committed his heinous crimes,
38:19he was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
38:27When I saw Lischka, I just thought,
38:29what a cowardly, wretched figure he was.
38:32And I had to think, this man had made decisions
38:35about life and death.
38:41In 1960, Adolf Eichmann, chief bureaucrat of the Final Solution
38:46and officer of the Gestapo, was snatched from hiding in Argentina
38:50and brought before an Israeli court.
38:52The man who had lounged beside the fire with Heydrich and Muller
38:56after planning the genocide of millions,
38:58found himself on trial.
39:00He also claimed to be following orders
39:03and that, as a mere pen-pusher,
39:05he didn't kill anyone.
39:08He was a threat.
39:10He said to you, if the Reichsführer told you that your father
39:15would have taken their own way,
39:16you would have taken their own way.
39:18If he was a fool ...
39:42But there was sufficient evidence to prove that Eichmann did indeed have the blood of
39:47millions of Jews on his hands.
39:51Eichmann's assistant, Dieter Vislaceni, gave evidence of this at his trial.
39:56Eichmann told me that the word's final solution meant the biological extermination of the Jewish race.
40:03I realized that the order was a death warrant for millions of people,
40:07and that the power to execute this order was in Eichmann's hands, subject to the approval of Heydrich.
40:14And yet Eichmann denied all responsibility.
40:20My fault is my trust.
40:23My fault is my service.
40:30Under Fahreneid and Diensteid.
40:56Eichmann was sentenced to death but here's the exception rather than the
41:02rule. Perhaps the most astonishing thing in the whole story of the Gestapo is how few
41:07of its officers were punished for their crimes. Even high-profile officers, known to be guilty
41:14of gratuitous cruelty, survived de-Nazification and re-entered the post-war police force.
41:24The majority of Gestapo officers whose actions had brought terror, suffering and death to
41:29millions of human beings, merely removed their swastika insignia and got on with their careers.
41:36But the fact is, they had convinced themselves that they were just ordinary policemen caught
41:42up in a cycle of madness devised by Adolf Hitler. The deeds of those years simply dissolved in
41:49their memories. As for Heinrich Muller, whose cold-blooded efficiency had shaped the Gestapo
41:54and forged its reputation, his fate remains a mystery. His was not among the bodies found
42:00in the bunker with Hitler.
42:02There was a rumour that he'd gone over to the Russians in Berlin in May 1945 and surfaced
42:09in Moscow where he carried on his trade as a secret policeman. Another story is that he
42:15was scooped up by the Americans. And this story gained some credibility when one remembers what
42:23happened to Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo chief of Lyon, who was in fact recruited by the Americans
42:30after the war as an expert on subversion and communist activities.
42:37None of these rumours have ever really been substantiated, and all the best evidence we
42:43have, circumstantial as it is, really suggests that Muller was killed in the last couple of
42:47days of the war. There were many people who had been part of that circle around Hitler in
42:54the bunker in the last few days who claimed to have seen his body.
42:59Unlike Himmler and Heinrich, Muller had remained anonymous, and he alone of the Nazi bosses could have
43:05walked the streets of Berlin completely unrecognised. There is a grave with his name on it, but
43:11when it was investigated, it proved to hold the corpses of three people, none of them Heinrich Muller.
43:21Ultimately, the Gestapo could not have been as effective as it was without the complicity
43:26of the people. Its inability to prevent assassinations shows its inadequacy as a police force, but it
43:33excelled at encouraging people's basest instincts. It brought about a climate of fear in which pettiness
43:40and disloyalty could flourish, where denunciation became a way of life, and where opposition became
43:47treason.
43:49Out of my experience with 12 years of Nazism, I cannot help maintaining that German guilt does
43:55exist. It is a reality. All of us fell into dangerous, evil ways. We were guilty of failure
44:02to understand, of willful blindness, and misguided obedience. In the final analysis, there were
44:11millions of unteachable persons across the world who made a pact with the forces of Nazi
44:15revolution. They only came to their senses when the revolution swallowed them alive. I have no intention of clapping myself
44:24or my friends'
44:25hands on the shoulder saying, at least we did what we could. The success of our oppositional efforts
44:31proves we should have done much more.
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