Hitler's Henchmen (5/12) : Himmler - The Executioner
For educational purposes
Himmler, the enforcer with his SS brigades was the most powerful of all Hitler's aides as well as being the most ruthless.
His brave new world consisted of concentration and death camps, security services and the Gestapo. No-one more typified the terror of the Holocaust than Himmler.
Heinrich Himmler's skill was in being unprepossessing, he knew how to exploit the advantage he gained from being long underestimated by Hitler's other aides.
No one would ever have suspected that of all people he would become the most powerful man in the Third Reich after Hitler.
Utilising newly discovered archive material, original sound recordings and exclusive eyewitness testimonies, a picture is built up of an unassuming but single-minded enforcer of perhaps the most willing, but undoubtedly also the most terrible of Hitler's aides.
Himmler, the enforcer with his SS brigades was the most powerful of all Hitler's aides as well as being the most ruthless.
His brave new world consisted of concentration and death camps, security services and the Gestapo. No-one more typified the terror of the Holocaust than Himmler.
Heinrich Himmler's skill was in being unprepossessing, he knew how to exploit the advantage he gained from being long underestimated by Hitler's other aides.
No one would ever have suspected that of all people he would become the most powerful man in the Third Reich after Hitler.
Utilising newly discovered archive material, original sound recordings and exclusive eyewitness testimonies, a picture is built up of an unassuming but single-minded enforcer of perhaps the most willing, but undoubtedly also the most terrible of Hitler's aides.
Transcript
00:00Two weeks after the end of the Second World War, homeless people wandered the roads of
00:10Germany, survivors. Many were rounded up into camps, many were soldiers. A British internment
00:25camp near Lüneburg. Relief on people's faces. The nightmare is over. They've survived.
00:38On May the 23rd, 1945, one of those hot spring days, a thin sickly man with a patch over
00:45one eye and a torn uniform entered the camp commander's office. One of the millions who
00:50had lost the war. The man removed his eyepatch and gave his name in a weary voice. Heinrich
00:57Himmler. Reichsfuhrer of the SS, chief of police with its murder squads, and the Gestapo.
01:11He created the super army, the Waffen SS, whose soldiers sought death on all fronts.
01:20Minister of the interior. He saw to it that things were kept quiet in the Reich. He had
01:29people killed behind the front lines. Thanks to his secret service, he knew everything
01:36about everyone. He bred the racially pure Germans. He had millions of people shot, tortured
01:45to death, sent to the gas chambers. A thin, sickly man.
02:06Himmler came from a background that appeared decent. Catholic. Educated.
02:37Civilized. Bavarian. No other Nazi biography so calls into question the merits of Germany's
02:44humanistic education. The man most deeply involved in all the atrocities did not come
02:50from the proletarian underworld, nor from a small town in Austria, nor from the grey army
02:56of the uprooted and unemployed, the impoverished, those mentally or physically scarred by the
03:02Great War. His school in Landshut, a humanistic grammar school with a good reputation. The
03:12writer Ludwig Thorme went to school here. The poet Hans Carossa studied here before
03:17Himmler and the German president, Roman Herzog, after him. Himmler's father was deputy principal,
03:26the very model of a good teacher of the old school. Very German, very pedantic, very moral,
03:33but friendly and highly educated. Certainly not an anti-Semite. He did everything he could
03:39to educate his son as well as he taught his son's godfather, Prince Heinrich of Bavaria.
03:47What else, if not an education, should protect one from the dark abyss of the soul into which
03:53his son would plunge, taking countless others with him. A school outing in 1913. In the middle
04:05sits the schoolboy Heinrich Himmler. When war broke out, he was full of enthusiasm. No different
04:15from many boys his age. A scornful diary entry about the burghers of Landshut shows the
04:24characteristics of the future Reichsfuehrer of the SS.
04:45He desperately wanted to become an officer and go to war, but he was too young. He was not allowed to leave school until June 1917.
05:06As a cadet officer, he signed a letter to his parents, Miles Heinrich. Heinrich, the soldier.
05:19The start of a lifelong life. Unlike his later Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler, Himmler was never a soldier
05:27and the war was over before he had finished his training. He always yearned for war without
05:36knowing what it was like at the front. With romantic ideals of battle and German civilisation
05:44in his knapsack, he marched into a world rocked by the horrors of an industrialised war. With
05:51its bombs and gas attacks, the world was sliding helplessly into the modern age. November the 9th,
06:071923, Munich. Himmler, bearing the Reich battle flag, takes part in Hitler's failed putsch. A
06:13follower of Captain Röhm, he joined the NSDAP, the National Socialist German Workers' Party. He
06:20had found his spiritual home. Essen, 1926. Heinrich Himmler's first appearance in film footage.
06:51He was deputy leader of a small section of the SA, the Schutzstaffel, or elite guard, soon to be
06:58known as the SS. No one suspected what it would one day become, or that the young man in lederhosen
07:05at its head would rise to be Hitler's most powerful subordinate. Nuremberg, 1927. Hitler
07:16on the soapbox. Behind him SA chief Pfeffer and Heinrich Himmler. He had only met Hitler a year
07:24before, a charismatic leader who could fill the gap left when Himmler's mentor Röhm had emigrated
07:31to Bolivia. Himmler was to become the man who made loyalty to Hitler the highest virtue. 1929,
07:46Hitler, Pfeffer, Goering. Himmler had risen from deputy to be Reich leader of the SS. At the head
07:53of his small troop of 280 men, he paraded before those who held power in the party.
08:03The same year in Berlin, Himmler had stepped up. He no longer marched,
08:08he helped to review the parade, but he still stood on the sidelines.
08:15Himmler's insignificance in 1929, even as Reich leader of the SS, is evident in this promotional
08:24film about the SA. Chief of Staff Pfeffer with his staff in attendance. Heinrich Himmler appears
08:31among the also rams, without even being named. He merely presents a document.
08:36Himmler actually acted quite shy, not at all confident or military or even
08:47brutal. He just had the appearance of a somewhat shy, bourgeois man.
08:56He looked very harmless. Colorless. So I had no deeper impression. He was always
09:14friendly when he was there. I actually had no impression of him, none at all.
09:20Himmler was so inconspicuous that no one noticed his career moves. He quietly wormed
09:31his way to the center of power. His inconspicuousness itself worked to his advantage.
09:42He adopted a slogan from the Prussians. Later, he had it engraved on daggers.
09:471942, the funeral service in the Reich Chancellery for Reinhard Heydrich, assassinated by the Czech
10:04resistance. Without Heydrich, Himmler might always have stayed on the sidelines. Reinhard
10:12Heydrich, the young evil god of death, the most dangerous man in Germany, as he was called in
10:18Britain. He was a daredevil. He desperately wanted the Iron Cross and flew in combat until he was
10:26finally given it. He created the SD, the security service within the SS. Thanks to him, Himmler
10:34became the man who knew everything about everybody. Ha, ha, ha, Fat Goering once joked. Himmler's got a
10:43brain. It's called Heydrich. By 1942, he had long stopped making jokes about Himmler. The non-entity
10:50had overtaken Goering in the struggle for power under Hitler. Together, Heydrich and Himmler
10:58managed to take the Gestapo from Goering. The Gestapo was the traitor's reward given to Himmler
11:04for betraying the man Goering regarded as his real opponent, SA chief, Röhm.
11:23Ernst Röhm was Hitler's friend and Heinrich Himmler had come into the party through Röhm. Röhm had
11:30emigrated to Bolivia, but Hitler called him back. He couldn't get the upper hand in the SA and made
11:36Röhm its chief of staff, commander of an army of three million men. Röhm's growing power was a thorn
11:49in the side of the leadership of the army, the Reichswehr. Army minister Blomberg gave Hitler a
11:55choice. Either the army remained the only armed force or it would cease to support Hitler. Blomberg
12:02had the trust of the dying President Hindenburg. He could have stripped Hitler of his power. Röhm,
12:11however, liked to be center stage as the popular hero. Nobody, not even Hitler, could mobilize such
12:18huge armies. Röhm made the SA brownshirts a people's army in which they spoke of permanent
12:25revolution. He wanted to become the military leader of Germany and perhaps a lot more besides.
12:30The pictures prove it. Röhm received more acclaim than anyone except Hitler. Not only from the SA,
12:59the people also appeared to be behind him. He was a serious threat, even to Hitler himself.
13:04Under Stalin, Röhm would have been long dead, but Hitler's strategy was to talk the SA out of
13:13their desire for arms. The leaders of the Reichswehr just listened.
13:19Comrades of the SA, comrades of the SS and Hitler Youth, if the army is the weapon bearer of the nation,
13:29then you must be the will bearer, the politically shaping will bearer of the German nation.
13:38Himmler's SS was still part of the SA, making Röhm Himmler's superior. But the SS had sworn
14:04allegiance to Hitler, not Röhm. If Himmler wanted to continue his rise to power, he had to get out
14:11from Röhm's shadow. He concocted a conspiracy. On Himmler's orders, Heydrich forged documents
14:18showing Röhm had planned a coup against Hitler. Hitler believed him, or pretended to. With the
14:32help of the SS, the SA was stripped of power at the end of June 1934. In the night of the long
14:38knives, Röhm and many others were murdered.
15:02Now the Black Order, as the SS was also known, began to flourish. At its head, Himmler. No one
15:31now stood between him and his Führer. The Abbey Church at Quedlinburg. Here Heinrich Himmler wrote
15:50history, or rewrote it. Summer, 1936. One thousand years after the death of the German
16:17King Heinrich I, the SS took possession of the church of Quedlinburg. Here, as the Reich leader
16:24amongst his men, Himmler dropped the disguise of the zealous servant. Here he was grandmaster of
16:35the ultimate German order. Here, with his chosen ancestor Heinrich on his side, he could contemplate
16:44the daring plans for which he lacked the courage in Hitler's presence. If Himmler was ever more
16:54than merely an executioner, then it was here in Quedlinburg that he had his great moment of vision.
17:14The Reichsführer SS laid a wreath and oak branches from the German
17:44They turned German history into the prehistory of National Socialism. The past had been brought
18:04into line with Nazi dogma, but what vision for the future could Himmler offer his accomplices?
18:14SS roll call, a cult event. What idols did these young men worship?
18:45They marched off into a Nordic fog, a riffraff, will-o'-the-wisps flittering about in a gloomy
18:52future. Himmler's visions for the future were visions of the past. The Germans of the future
19:01would be nothing but the Nibelung heroes of old on rockets. The truth of it all was war.
19:15Himmler's death seekers in action. For them, there was no paradise on earth,
19:26and no paradise on the other side. They believed only in the fight for its own sake.
19:451939, after the invasion of Poland, Hitler went to the front. As the German army advanced,
19:53Himmler's sinister power settled over the vanquished Europe.
20:02A visit to the SS bodyguard regiment named after Adolf Hitler and under the command of
20:08Sepp Dietrich. Hitler's super soldiers proudly presented by his loyal Heinrich.
20:13Metz. The Waffen-SS wanted to be a military elite, but war crimes were committed from among
20:30its ranks too. The veterans are still wrestling with this today.
20:38...with good material, and so on, and so on. And then in the same company, so to speak,
20:48SS, comes the Gestapo and the whole SS. We had nothing to do with that.
20:56This SD commando wanted to offer itself to the troops, to the officers and to the teams.
21:04But for us, these people were dishonest people, like the henchmen in the Middle Ages.
21:10There was no connection and relationship. They were despised and despised.
21:17For all his pride in the Waffen-SS, Himmler was no soldier. He was a policeman.
21:22The SD, the Gestapo, the special killing squads known as Einsatzgruppen,
21:33they were Himmler's world. His war was waged against the defenseless.
21:38Under German supervision, a Polish policeman gives a young man the yellow star of David.
21:48It doesn't seem to mean much yet, but it's a death sentence.
22:03The genocide started quietly. A Czech policeman guarding a Jewish settlement.
22:10In Eastern Europe, Jewish quarters, the Städel and the ghetto, were nothing new.
22:15But now, they became prisons. At Theresienstadt, the whole town was turned into a concentration camp.
22:22These people building their own prison did not know what was in store for them at the end.
22:34Why is this girl laughing?
22:37They'd been announced as camps to reform anti-social elements.
22:43Himmler, Heydrich, the architects at the Berghof, Hitler's chalet on the Obersalzberg.
22:51They knew how to make their concentration camps sound harmless.
22:56Hitler's concentration camp
23:02The only time I saw Hitler at a table, was when he was talking to Himmler about concentration camps.
23:11But it was very typical. The impression was that they were work camps.
23:17Hitler mentioned that Himmler used a very sophisticated system.
23:24For example, he appointed a notorious fire-fighter in charge of the fire station.
23:32And of course, Himmler said, you can be sure, my Führer, that no fire will break out.
23:38You had the impression that it was a well-organized, psychologically skilful work camp.
23:45That's how it was back then.
23:47That was the only time I heard of a concentration camp.
23:52And also the only time Hitler talked about Himmler.
23:56And there was a kind of admiration for his organizational talent.
24:08The concentration camp is certainly, like any liberation movement, a sharp and strict measure.
24:16Hard, new value-creating work.
24:20A regulated life cycle.
24:23An unceasing cleanliness in housing and in body care.
24:27A tasteless meal.
24:30A strict but just action.
24:33The proof that is always above these camps.
24:38There is a way to freedom.
24:41Its milestones are called
24:43order,
24:45suffering,
24:46honesty,
24:48order,
24:49cleanliness,
24:50soberness,
24:52truthfulness,
24:54sacrifice and love for the fatherland.
24:56Himmler basked in the Führer's favor and continued to construct his sinister world.
25:02His Black Order was a secret state within the state.
25:06Now he wanted it to have a capital.
25:11The SS bought Wewelsburg Castle in Westphalia and converted it into a center for their cult.
25:18They modeled it on the castle from the legend of Parsifal,
25:22Monsalvat, which had housed the Holy Grail, the object of the knight's quest.
25:27Himmler's Monsalvat was also meant to be a grail,
25:30a home for the spirits of the fallen SS knights.
25:40The Village
25:45The village had to go sooner or later.
25:48Himmler's capital could not have a village next to it.
25:51The construction work on the castle was carried out, surprise, surprise, by prisoners.
25:57The sign reads,
25:58We owe our work here to the Führer.
26:01In the cult room, in the mausoleum,
26:13the column hall, the marble floors were sanded by hand.
26:22The concentration camp
26:29The little village of Wewelsburg got its own concentration camp,
26:33one of the hundreds in Himmler's Gulag.
26:38It was not an extermination camp,
26:41and yet most of the people who came here had to die.
26:50The SS construction management was interested in the fact
26:55that the houses for the SS families, which were then built,
27:00settlements, that they were finished,
27:03while the camp as such was aimed at destruction.
27:11The statistic of 1943
27:16was 63.7% dead,
27:23of which 21 were brothers of faith.
27:30Max Holweg belongs to the Jehovah's Witnesses,
27:34known then as Bible Students International.
27:37Like Jews, gypsies and homosexuals,
27:40Jehovah's Witnesses were persecuted by the Nazis.
27:44Holweg spent seven years in concentration camps,
27:47including Wewelsburg.
27:49Out of necessity and compassion,
27:51he took up natural healing.
27:54An abused prisoner,
27:59an asocial with a black corner,
28:03had a phlegm.
28:05A phlegm is an itching of the tissue
28:10in the bleeding skin.
28:15Every evening, when I had to bandage him,
28:19we tore strips from shirts
28:25and bandaged the wounds.
28:28But every evening I had to get the worms out of the wound
28:32with a wooden spatula.
28:35A handful of worms, every evening,
28:41until the worms had eaten up the whole thigh
28:47and the man had passed away.
28:53That's what it was really like in Himmler's concentration camps.
28:57This was in the middle of Germany,
28:59in a village near Paderborn.
29:01The Holocaust was going on somewhere else.
29:04Himmler had a closed meeting.
29:07Whether the other nations live in prosperity,
29:09whether they starve to death,
29:11that only interests me so much
29:14as we need them as slaves for our culture.
29:17I'm not interested in anything else.
29:20Whether 10,000 Russian women
29:24are killed in the encirclement of a tank trench,
29:27or not,
29:28that only interests me so much
29:30as the tank trench is being finished for Germany.
29:36At the rear of the Eastern Front,
29:39Jews, communists, resistance fighters were shot.
29:57Enjoying their work,
29:59Himmler's Einsatzgruppen,
30:01special squads of the SD.
30:04Having once forced himself to watch a shooting,
30:07Himmler was concerned about his killer's nerves.
30:10The special squads were responsible for the murders.
30:14It was secret Reich business,
30:16but it leaked out.
30:38For example, in my field hospital,
30:41Jewish girls were employed as helpers.
30:45They were fed and so on,
30:47because they could speak a little German
30:50to the Jewish girls.
30:52It was a nicer and better way of dealing with it.
30:58Those who had reported,
31:02as we later found out,
31:06were shot and buried.
31:09In the area of Taganrog,
31:12there are such canyons.
31:14They were thrown in there.
31:24The villa at Großen Wannsee in Berlin.
31:27A meeting in early 1942.
31:29With Heydrich in the chair,
31:31it took them just one and a half hours
31:33to decide how the Jews of Europe might best be killed.
31:37The final solution was adopted.
31:39But the slaughter had to be cleaner,
31:41neater, quieter and more efficient.
31:47It was not clear at this point
31:49just how many millions of people
31:51would have to be exterminated.
31:53Ministries and state offices
31:55had to be notified of the new measures.
31:57The words murder or gas chamber were never used.
32:00Anyone who didn't want to know
32:02what happened at the end of the deportations
32:04didn't need to know.
32:06Murder by car exhaust.
32:10The insecticide Zyklon B,
32:12the poison used in the gas chambers.
32:15In the camps, doctors became murderers.
32:17Only instead of murder, it was called selection.
32:20Many doctors thought selection was an act of mercy.
32:33In this way of selection,
32:35you die in a more humane way
32:37than if you were killed.
32:41If you have ever seen what happens
32:43when someone starves
32:45in front of a full pot.
32:47You had those soups in the camps
32:49where you could hit your stomach.
32:52Calorically, you didn't necessarily
32:54have to die.
32:56You could have lived.
32:58But you were absolutely,
33:00the expression was,
33:02you were mussel men.
33:04You were extremely skinny.
33:06You had no water supply.
33:08You didn't have any food.
33:10You didn't have anything to eat.
33:12You didn't have anything to drink.
33:14You didn't have anything to eat.
33:16You didn't have anything to eat.
33:18You didn't have anything to drink.
33:20You had water in your feet,
33:22water in your face.
33:24It was a real,
33:26a thirst for water
33:28from a lack of protein.
33:50The children used in Dr. Mengel
33:52as experiments.
33:54Some of the few survivors.
33:57One child who lived through Auschwitz.
34:20We threw a certain material
34:22to the root of the tree,
34:24which, unfortunately,
34:26in a very short period of time,
34:28the house collapsed
34:30for us and for my brother-in-law.
34:34And there was a high wall
34:36surrounded by
34:38the ruins.
34:42A complete loss of speech,
34:44a complete loss of voice.
34:46They were
34:48sewn together
34:50with their backs,
34:52with their hands.
34:58It was terrible.
35:02It wasn't clean.
35:04The wounds were swollen.
35:06The children screamed.
35:08Of course, all the others
35:10were scared.
35:12It was a...
35:14It was a block of hell.
35:18They injected me with poison.
35:24To this day,
35:26I don't know what.
35:28As a result of the experiments,
35:30I am two-thirds disabled.
35:32My body trembles.
35:34I get epileptic seizures.
35:36What a life!
35:42I don't know what to do.
35:44I don't know what to do.
35:46I don't know what to do.
35:50The SS doctor's experiments
35:52on humans were conducted
35:54with what passed for scientific detachment
35:56and with the permission of Himmler.
35:58He knew how to justify them.
36:02If I carry out high-altitude trials
36:04on Russian prisoners of war,
36:06I may save the lives
36:08of German pilots.
36:12A speech to a closed meeting.
36:16We can never be calm
36:18and heartless,
36:20where it shouldn't be.
36:22We Germans,
36:24who are the only ones
36:26in the world
36:28who have a decent attitude
36:30towards animals,
36:32will have a decent attitude
36:34towards these human beings.
36:46There was a room,
36:48a relatively small
36:50under-roof room,
36:52furnished
36:58with,
37:00let's say,
37:02building materials
37:04or furniture
37:06made of human raw materials.
37:12A table with
37:14thigh bones
37:16or thigh bones
37:18as table legs,
37:20a three-legged table.
37:26A kind of
37:28furniture made of
37:30a human pelvis,
37:32combined with
37:34bones.
37:38A lamp,
37:40a lampshade
37:42made of human skin
37:46and a handwritten,
37:50large copy
37:52of Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf.
37:56We were given the information
37:58that it was human skin,
38:00back skin.
38:06Hungary, autumn 1944.
38:08These Jews,
38:10who were asked to be transported to Auschwitz,
38:12did not know what was in store for them.
38:18Himmler's mastery of secrecy
38:20was not perfect,
38:22but it was good enough to keep his victims
38:24in ignorance,
38:26and no one who knew of the mass murders
38:28had the strength to put a stop to them.
38:30The horror did not come until after the war,
38:32when the crimes had stopped.
38:40Major attack
38:42by the Red Army.
38:58By the beginning of 1945,
39:00the war was lost.
39:10Himmler
39:12was finally able to realise
39:14his childhood dream.
39:16He became a soldier,
39:18even the senior commanding officer
39:20of the Weichsel Army Group.
39:22While the SS fought its last battles,
39:24the overtaxed Himmler
39:26admitted himself to the Hohenleuchten Sanatorium
39:28just outside Berlin.
39:34Here, he tried to cure himself
39:36of his real and imaginary diseases.
39:38A Wehrmacht general
39:40took over his command.
39:42He knew deep inside that nothing could be saved,
39:44but he still drove on
39:46to sacrifice those who didn't know.
39:48Our cursed enemies
39:50will find out
39:52and have to see
39:54that an invasion of Germany,
39:56even if it succeeds,
39:58will cost the attackers
40:00their lives
40:02which will be equal
40:04to the national suicide.
40:06The last reserves
40:08of a defeated nation.
40:10Now all those who had been
40:12previously spared were called to arms.
40:14The cult of Armageddon.
40:18And Himmler himself?
40:28He was in Hohenleuchten
40:30trying to find a solution.
40:32His chief of espionage, Schellenberg,
40:34urged him to strip Hitler of his power
40:36and offer to surrender to the West.
40:38Strip Hitler of his power?
40:40He didn't dare.
40:42But he did secretly meet an emissary
40:44from the free world,
40:46the Volker Bernadotte of the Swedish Red Cross.
41:04Himmler had deserted.
41:06His meeting with Bernadotte in this villa
41:08was high treason.
41:10Loyal Heinrich had broken off his allegiance
41:12to the man he idolized.
41:14He had betrayed and murdered his mentor Röhm
41:16in 1934.
41:18He turned, albeit fearfully
41:20and suffering from convulsions,
41:22against Hitler.
41:28On April the 20th, 1945,
41:30the most powerful men of the Reich
41:32gathered for a celebration in the Führer's bunker
41:34under the Reich Chancellery.
41:36Hitler's last birthday.
41:38Himmler was there too.
41:40From there, he fled.
41:45He set out for the estate of his masseur,
41:47Felix Kersten,
41:49in the north of Berlin.
41:51There, at the dead of night,
41:53Himmler met a delegate of the World Jewish Congress.
41:57Kersten had brought in the negotiator,
41:59Norbert Massur, from Sweden.
42:01His goal?
42:03To save as many Jewish prisoners as possible
42:05from the maelstrom into which Himmler's
42:07concentration camps were now descending.
42:15What did Himmler expect from this meeting?
42:17He told his masseur
42:19he wanted to bury the hatchet with the Jews.
42:21It was as if Himmler didn't realize
42:23who he was.
42:25As if he'd forgotten what he'd just done.
42:27As if one could simply bury the hatchet
42:29after a Holocaust.
42:31Himmler thought the world would accept him
42:33of all people
42:35as a partner in negotiations.
42:37The meeting was a failure.
42:40According to Kersten,
42:42Himmler left in tears.
42:44Bernadotte was waiting for him
42:46in Hohenlüchen.
42:48Himmler proposed peace with the West,
42:50but continued warfare against the Soviets.
43:10Bernadotte passed on Himmler's offer
43:12to surrender.
43:14The Allies did not reply.
43:16Instead, there was an announcement
43:18on the enemy radio.
43:31Himmler of all people.
43:33Betrayal is part and parcel of ruin.
43:39He called the betrayal of Himmler
43:41from his point of view
43:43the greatest disappointment.
43:49He then said
43:51that the youth had kept
43:53what Himmler had promised them.
44:01Pictures from better days.
44:03Axman and Himmler recruiting
44:05adolescent cannon fodder.
44:07Countless Hitler youths died a futile death
44:09in the so-called final battle.
44:16Himmler's last abode.
44:18Kalkhorst Castle near Travemünde.
44:20Here he heard about Hitler's death
44:22and his own fall from power.
44:26Before his suicide,
44:28Hitler had stripped Himmler of all his offices.
44:30Himmler talked about creating
44:32an SS state in Schleswig-Holstein.
44:37But who was listening to him?
44:39History had overtaken him.
44:41His power was gone.
44:43His negotiations with Bernadotte failed.
44:51But the negotiations did save the lives
44:53of many of his victims at the eleventh hour.
44:57The war was not yet over.
45:03As his price for entering negotiations,
45:05Bernadotte had obtained from Himmler
45:07the release of about 15,000 prisoners,
45:09most of them Scandinavians.
45:21The liberated prisoners passed through the war zone.
45:25Hundreds of thousands of other prisoners
45:27still lost their lives in the last days of the war.
45:29North Germany was in British hands.
45:31Yet Himmler still offered his services
45:33to Hitler's successor, Dönitz.
45:37But no one wanted him anymore.
45:59Dönitz surrenders.
46:29On May the 12th,
46:31Himmler crossed the Elbe
46:33near the little harbour of Neuhaus.
46:35Under a false name,
46:37with a patch over one eye,
46:39his moustache shaved off,
46:41in a tattered uniform,
46:43accompanied by a few men.
46:45A pitiful bunch.
46:47They fled further on foot,
46:49mingling with countless other
46:51defeated German soldiers.
46:59Peace came.
47:13For Himmler, the end.
47:15For Himmler, the end.
47:27Himmler's band was finally picked up
47:29by a small British patrol
47:31near Bremerförde
47:33and put in Camp Baumstädt near Lüneburg.
47:35It was packed with prisoners of war.
47:41Somewhere among these men
47:43still unrecognized.
47:45On May the 23rd,
47:47he revealed his true identity.
47:51The following day,
47:53Himmler's adjutants, Grotmann and Macher,
47:55his last two faithful companions,
47:57were filmed.
47:59They didn't know their boss was already dead.
48:07Souvenir snap.
48:09British soldiers drink to the death of Heinrich Himmler.
48:11One of them tells the story.
48:13And I brought him to the microphone
48:15to tell you what happened.
48:17Sergeant Major asked him.
48:19Before I arrived, I didn't know it was Himmler.
48:21I was only told there was
48:23an important prisoner
48:25whom I was to guard.
48:27As he came into the room,
48:29not the arrogant figure
48:31which we all know,
48:33but dressed in an army shirt,
48:35a pair of underpants
48:37with a blanket wrapped around him,
48:39I immediately recognized him as Himmler.
48:45Speaking to him in German
48:47and pointing to an empty couch,
48:49I said,
48:51That's your bed.
48:53Get undressed.
48:55He looked at me
48:57and then looked at an interpreter
48:59and said he doesn't know who I am.
49:01I said,
49:03Yes, I do. You're Himmler.
49:05But still, that's your bed.
49:07Get undressed.
49:11He tried to stare me out,
49:15but I stared at him back
49:17and eventually he dropped his eyes
49:19and sat down on the bed
49:21and started to take off his underpants.
49:23The doctor
49:25and the colonel then came into the room
49:27and started to carry out
49:29a routine inspection
49:31looking for poison
49:33which we suspected
49:35he probably had on him.
49:37He looked
49:39between his toes, all over his body,
49:41under his armpits,
49:43in his ears, behind his ears,
49:45in his hair
49:47and then he came to his mouth.
49:49He asked
49:51Himmler to open his mouth.
49:53He did
49:55and he ran his tongue
49:57around his lips quite easily
49:59but the doctor
50:01wasn't satisfied.
50:03He asked him to come nearer
50:05to the light.
50:07He came nearer to the light
50:09and opened his mouth.
50:11The doctor tried to put two
50:13fingers into his mouth to have
50:15a good look inside, I
50:17suspected
50:19and
50:21Himmler
50:23drew his head away
50:25and, clamping down on the doctor's
50:27fingers, crushed the file
50:29of poison which had been carried in his mouth
50:31for hours.
50:33The doctor said he's done it.
50:37He died
50:45and when he died
50:47we threw a blanket
50:49over him and left him.
51:01He died
51:05He died
51:09He died
51:13He died
51:17He died
51:21He died
51:25He died
51:27He died
51:33He died
51:39He died
51:45He died
51:51He died