Hitler - A Profile (6/6) : The Criminal
For educational purposes
A look at the horrific policies that Hitler made flesh after his rise to the level of Fuehrer in Germany.
His ideas had been formed years before when he was an alienated, penniless youth in Austria reading obscure right-wing philosophers who preached Aryan supremacy.
Hitler started his cleansing on the mentally ill in his own country until the Church objected - an objection that was particularly muted when he turned his attention to the Jews.
The episode also reveals that, as his power began to slip away in 1945, he issued the infamous 'Nero Order', dictating that everything in Germany was to be destroyed.
A look at the horrific policies that Hitler made flesh after his rise to the level of Fuehrer in Germany.
His ideas had been formed years before when he was an alienated, penniless youth in Austria reading obscure right-wing philosophers who preached Aryan supremacy.
Hitler started his cleansing on the mentally ill in his own country until the Church objected - an objection that was particularly muted when he turned his attention to the Jews.
The episode also reveals that, as his power began to slip away in 1945, he issued the infamous 'Nero Order', dictating that everything in Germany was to be destroyed.
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LearningTranscript
00:30When it came to struggle and death, Hitler reigned supreme.
00:53Proclaimer of the kingdom of death.
01:01Proclaimer of a murderous Weltanschauung.
01:08He had people killed simply because he had declared them enemies of his folk.
01:14That is what set Hitler apart as a criminal.
01:36Vienna after the turn of the century.
01:41The surface splendor of the metropolis was deceptive.
01:46In the shabby milieu of men's hostels, the young Hitler led a wretched life, with no
01:51real profession, teetering on the brink of oblivion.
01:58A complete contrast to the impact he would soon make.
02:06Society had cast him aside for the time being.
02:11The reject sought salvation and support from people he could take as models, like the renegade
02:16monk from Upper Austria, Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels.
02:25From his monastery in Werfenstein, Lanz propounded an obscure Aryan ideal.
02:32Are you blonde?
02:33Then you are a creator and preserver of civilization.
02:39Lanz's Ostara publications identified the enemy of the race, the Jews.
02:46Evil fantasies.
02:48For Hitler the outsider, the first outlines of a barbarous world view.
02:53August the 2nd, 1914.
03:00Amongst the crowd, filmed quite by chance, the happy, excited face of a man who finally
03:05knew where he belonged.
03:09The First World War offered Hitler the opportunity to break free from the long string of personal
03:14defeats, destroyed hopes, and inner isolation.
03:22The war.
03:23It helped the 25-year-old to flee into the apparent security of a community.
03:33This was his world from now on, the safe place he had always sought.
03:43Four years of war left their mark on Hitler's social consciousness.
03:49You survive only through brutal self-assertion.
03:55Humanitarianism is weakness, coldness is strength.
03:59With this lesson, Hitler returned from the war.
04:08By the time the German Empire collapsed, the foundations for Hitler's criminality had been
04:13laid.
04:15But his career as a criminal began only with his entry into politics.
04:22A scene from the summer of 1919.
04:27The man stepping out from the crowd on the left is Adolf Hitler.
04:32Deeply affected by Germany's defeat, he composed his first political pamphlet.
04:39There, he says,
04:48For Hitler, all Jews were traitors to the fatherland.
04:53To be blamed for its collapse, to be blamed above all for that treacherous death blow
04:57to the old order, the November Revolution.
05:03Greek revolutionaries such as Ernst Muzan, Kurt Eisner, Ernst Tholler, to him, these
05:10Jews were the poison that is eating away at our people.
05:16The foundation for Hitler's Weltanschauung was laid four years later in Landsberg prison
05:21after his failed Beer Hall Putsch of November 1923.
05:29Here he dictated Mein Kampf to Rudolf Hess.
05:33According to Hitler, it was the historic vision of future events, a detailed guide to state
05:40sanctioned criminality, contempt for democracy and humanity, glorification of war, nationalistic
05:49intolerance, hatred of the Jews.
05:54In his book, Hitler set out the full range of his obsessions and dark symbolism.
06:01The author reveals himself as a future mass murderer.
06:10If at the beginning of the war and during the war we had subjected 12 or 15,000 of these
06:16Hebrew corrupters of the people to poison gas, just as hundreds of thousands of our
06:21finest German workers of all classes and professions had to suffer on the battlefield, the sacrifice
06:27made at the front by millions of our people would not have been in vain.
06:33In the mid-1920s, many German Jews were convinced that their time as second-class citizens was
06:39over.
06:40The Weimar Constitution guaranteed them freedom and equality, and they identified with this
06:45state which had integrated them so unconditionally.
07:15Many Jews were patriots, firmly rooted in German culture and society.
07:33Many sealed their emancipation with marriages to Christians, more than 50 percent before
07:38Hitler came to power.
07:42Equality to everything that was German, even the hijinks.
07:50Many German Jews wanted to be Germans first, then Jews.
07:57But this man had other ideals.
08:42With Hitler's rise to power in 1933, German Jews became fair game for the Nazis.
09:08His Fuhrer turned that threat into action.
09:15At this stage, Hitler still wanted to use legal means to force the Jews out of Germany.
09:21It was zero hour for the criminal.
09:25The first step, a temporary boycott of Jewish businesses.
09:29Hitler appointed the Jew-hater Julius Streicher, stage manager of the campaign.
09:33The Jews defamed in Streicher's smear sheet, Sturmer, were not the only victims of persecution.
09:51Hitler hated on principle anyone who thought differently from him, communists, social democrats,
09:57homosexuals, gypsies and Jehovah's Witnesses.
10:27For the dictator's opponents, the first place of torture was established at the end of March,
10:38the Dachau concentration camp.
10:44The agents of terror were the SA and the SS.
10:48Hitler made them the legal enforcers of his unjust policy.
10:54The concentration camp, known as an institute of re-education, it was the seed of later
11:00mass extermination.
11:55The man who unleashed all this criminal energy showed his true colours when dealing with
11:59supposed opponents from his own ranks.
12:02Hitler made murder an instrument of government policy.
12:07In the early morning of June the 30th, 1934, at Bad Wiessee, Operation Hummingbird was
12:12led against Ernst Röhm, head of the SA storm troopers, by none other than the Fuhrer himself.
12:19At ten past seven, SS men open the door to the stairway of the Hanselbauer Hotel.
12:26Hitler storms up the stairs to the first floor.
12:32Flanked by the SS, he searches for Röhm's room, number 31.
12:38Half asleep, the SA chief recognises the man standing in front of him.
12:43Out, shouts Hitler.
12:45I'm arresting you for high treason.
12:52Two hundred out of favour victims, not only SA leaders, suffered the same fate as Röhm.
12:57They were liquidated and the killings subsequently declared lawful.
13:02Only now was his seizure of power complete.
13:05Only now did he have untrammelled power over life and death.
13:08All the authority of the state was vested in him.
13:24And who was the state?
13:25He was.
13:31The next phase of state violence was directed once more against the Jews.
13:37The terror intensified year by year with each new decree.
13:41The law on the protection of German blood and German honour, the Reich civil code, the
13:47prohibition on Jews practising as doctors, artists, journalists and professors, all drastically
13:52restricted the lives of the German Jews.
14:02The new Nazi culture, the Volkskultur, may do without them.
14:12Aryan film stars told people what they were playing at.
14:16German versus Jewish, in everyday life people became increasingly forced to distance themselves
14:36from their Jewish neighbours.
15:02Hitler's goal, a Jew-free Reich.
15:07The trains were full of Jews fleeing from Nazi Germany.
15:13By the beginning of 1938, more than a quarter of them had left their homeland.
15:18It was a lot, but not enough for Hitler.
15:26Hitler directed the persecutions from his Berchtesgaden idyll.
15:33He gave only spoken instructions to his henchmen.
15:36Nothing was put in writing.
15:40Thus Hitler himself never appeared personally responsible.
15:47Vienna's Jewish quarter.
15:52About 180,000 people lived here, a tenth of the city's population.
15:57Fear spread in mid-March 1938.
16:02The nightmare of the Anschluss, Hitler's dream.
16:11Triumphal entry into the city, scene of his greatest defeats three decades earlier.
16:16The place where the seed for his hatred of the Jews had been sown.
16:29Hitler brought with him his enforcer, Heinrich Himmler, Reichsfuhrer of the SS.
16:35He immediately had 67,000 enemies of the Reich placed under detention.
16:42After the annexation of Austria, there were suddenly as many Jews living in Greater Germany
16:47as there had been in Germany alone in 1933, 600,000 in all.
16:53Now hysteria was whipped up.
16:55The aim?
16:56To throw the Jews out.
16:58With approval from the highest quarters, the mob rampaged through the streets of Vienna.
17:05All Jews were to be forced to leave Greater Germany.
17:11Many were willing to go, but where?
17:19He just wanted them gone.
17:21He didn't care how or where.
17:27In October 1938, deportations began.
17:33With Hitler's approval, the foreign ministry ordered the expulsion of 17,000 Polish Jews
17:38living in Germany.
17:40Amongst them, the Grinspan family.
17:46Their youngest son, Herschel, had just started studying in Paris when he heard of the fate
17:51of his relatives.
17:54In his fury, he acquired a revolver, gained admission to the German embassy, and shot
17:59dead the embassy secretary, Ernst vom Rath.
18:07Hitler's act of revenge prompted Goebbels, with Hitler's approval, to an unparalleled
18:11campaign of violence against the Jews.
18:15On the night of November the 9th, 200 synagogues in Germany went up in flames and thousands
18:20of Jewish shops were plundered.
18:23The broken windows everywhere gave the pogrom the cynical name Kristallnacht.
18:30The Aryan public stayed out of it by and large.
18:33Their entertainment that night?
18:35Heinz Rühmann in the 13 chairs.
19:04Hitler didn't like pogroms running wild.
19:06He wanted to torment the Jews systematically, under state control.
19:18He put Hermann Goering in charge of the official persecution of the Jews.
19:23The future Reichsmarschall knew what his Fuhrer expected of him, the complete, systematic
19:28and ruthless expulsion of all Jews from the German Reich.
19:36But Hitler was already thinking ahead, and Goering quoted his master.
19:41If the German Reich enters into a foreign policy conflict in the near future, it goes
19:46without saying that we in Germany will also be thinking primarily about settling our score
19:52with the Jews.
20:01The strategist of violence was Reinhard Heydrich.
20:04He turned Hitler's dark declarations of intent into practical plans.
20:10The form of the final solution to the Jewish problem began to emerge at the end of November
20:151938.
20:18At this stage of development, we are faced with the harsh necessity of exterminating
20:22the Jewish underworld, just as we exterminate criminals in our state of law and order with
20:27fire and sword.
20:29The result would be the actual and final end of the Jews in Germany, their total annihilation.
20:41Hitler's impatience found its first public expression in a speech to the Reichstag with
20:45far-reaching effects.
21:09Now the connection between war and their extermination was patently obvious to every last German
21:14Jew.
21:17What most of his contemporaries dismissed as one of Hitler's mad assertions became
21:21practicable at the beginning of 1939.
21:25What nobody knew, in an address to the army's group commanders, Hitler went one step further.
21:32The next struggle will be a war purely of Weltanschauung, that is, intentionally a war
21:38of folk and race.
21:47Hitler's curse first came down on the Jews of Czechoslovakia.
21:52After the collapse of the Munich Pact, they were deported in their thousands.
21:59Anyone who saw any chance of getting out in the summer of 1939 fled.
22:04A particularly tragic chapter was the odyssey of the St. Louis, a steamer to freedom headed
22:09for Havana with a thousand passengers on board.
22:13Hopes of a new life, with daily board visas and ten Reichsmarks in their pockets.
22:17We left Hamburg, there was a chapel down there, and we played music from the little town.
22:33My parents had tears in their eyes.
22:40For me, it was one of the greatest joys to get out of Germany, to make a new life, where
22:49we had no more dangers, where people didn't want to beat me up anymore.
22:55And I promised myself, if anyone calls me a dirty Jew again in the new country, I'll
23:05beat him up, so to speak.
23:09I'm just like everyone else.
23:13Hitler was relaxing in his Alpine home.
23:21In a few weeks, there would be war.
23:27Meantime, the St. Louis was heading for Cuba.
23:30In Havana, a nasty surprise awaited the passengers.
23:34They were not allowed to disembark.
23:39Relatives who had come to the port could do nothing for their loved ones.
23:48Nobody wanted them.
23:51The steamer had to return to Europe.
23:55I was standing there on the ship, and suddenly a man ran out, his blood ran out of his veins,
24:03and he jumped into the water.
24:06He was rescued by one of the sailors, but he didn't really want to be rescued, because
24:11he had tried to tear his veins out.
24:14But he was taken to the hospital in Cuba, but his family was not allowed to visit him there.
24:22The thousand homeless Jews returned to a trap.
24:26In Antwerp, their odyssey was over for the time being, but they had not escaped.
24:34Eighty percent of these people would not survive the year 1945.
24:43The war began and concealed the injustice.
24:52On September the 1st, Hitler signed his only written authorization for state-sanctioned mass murder.
24:58Not yet of the Jews, but of the so-called mentally ill.
25:04Euthanasia they called it, really, eugenics.
25:07The eradication of lives unfit for living, 75,000 were killed.
25:13Propaganda films like The Legacy were commissioned by Hitler in person,
25:17and were to be shown in all German cinemas.
25:31Examples from the animal world were said to prove that the weaker have to be killed.
25:37Contempt for everything of inferior quality is contrasted with the heroic existence of the racially pure human type.
25:54Protests by the church put an end to this program of murder.
25:58Would Hitler have also reacted to resistance to the mass murder of Jews?
26:04With the beginning of the war, this new order was translated into action.
26:12Poland became the first scene of the crime.
26:15Exterminate, wipe out, annihilate.
26:18The individual counted for nothing.
26:21The mass murder of the Jews was the beginning of a new order.
26:26Poland became the first scene of the crime.
26:29Exterminate, wipe out, annihilate.
26:32The individual counted for nothing.
26:41In March 1941, Hitler made his top officers his accomplices for the next crime in the Soviet Union.
26:47None of them spoke against it.
26:50We must distance ourselves from the attitude of soldierly comradeship.
26:54There were no comrades before and will be no comrades after.
26:56This will be a war of annihilation.
26:59He issued the so-called Commissar Order, the liquidation of all Soviet leadership, both military and civilian.
27:07So, not just the Jews.
27:11Hitler, the war criminal, and Hitler, the mass murderer, became one.
27:24Propaganda used film to try to win over the German people to Hitler's insane objectives.
27:30They are treacherous, cowardly, and cruel, and usually appear in large numbers.
27:40They represent the element of domestic, underground destruction among the animals.
27:46No different from the Jews among the people.
27:50The propaganda implicitly points to genocide.
27:54But that had not been decided yet.
27:57Hitler only dared do what seemed feasible at the time.
28:01The next stage was the creation of inhabitants before the war.
28:06Hitler's helpers turned it into a ghetto of half a million people.
28:10In October 1940, the ghetto was walled in because of the alleged danger of epidemics.
28:28Well, it was a terrible feeling.
28:34It was a feeling of being in a trap, of being caught in a trap.
28:38There was no way out.
28:40And we were completely helpless.
28:45Hans Frank, Hitler's governor in Poland, set the ration at 184 calories per person per day.
28:54You know, death from hunger is terrible.
28:56It takes a long time for somebody to die of starvation.
29:00A very long time.
29:01And it's a very painful death.
29:11The greatest human trap in history, starvation and epidemics.
29:17More than 100,000 Jews had already died before the first train left for Auschwitz.
29:31In the spring of 1941, Hitler withdrew to his mountain idyll.
29:37Here his decision took shape for a radical solution to the Jewish question.
29:45March the 13th, 1941.
29:47The first tangible indication of Hitler's new extremism was his guidelines for special areas for the future Russian campaign.
29:58March the 30th, 1941.
30:00Before high-ranking Wehrmacht officers, the commander-in-chief set out what his troops were to do in the occupied east.
30:08And shortly after, to Reichsleiter Alfred Rosenberg, who confided, appalled, to his diary,
30:15there is something I do not want to write down today, but will never forget.
30:20Also in March, Governor General Hans Frank was summoned to Berlin by Hitler.
30:27Poland will be the first area to be free of the Jews, the Führer told him.
30:32A little later, Adolf Eichmann noted,
30:35Party Comrade Heydrich has been appointed Polish Governor General by the Führer for the final evacuation of the German Jews.
30:44Final evacuation of the Jews, and at the same time, creating a Jew-free Poland.
30:50Here was the first impulse to actually carrying out genocide.
30:55Exactly two months later, Reinhard Heydrich issued a decree which said,
31:00In future, the emigration of Jews is to be prevented, in view of the doubtlessly imminent final solution of the Jewish problem.
31:17Hitler broke his pact with Stalin on June the 22nd.
31:22The army's rapid advance accelerated the start and extent of the mass destruction.
31:32Hitler's order to kill initially referred only to the Jewish Bolshevist functionaries,
31:37but by July 1941, all the Jews in the East were on the hit list.
31:41Hitler wanted genocide, but it had to be systematic.
31:46The first documented indication is an instruction from Goering on July the 31st, 1941.
31:55He authorised Heydrich to make all necessary organisational, practical and material preparations for a complete solution of the Jewish question in the area of German influence in Europe.
32:07Goering would never have been able to issue this order without Hitler's approval.
32:15Once the dictator had made up his mind, he left it to his helpers and his helpers' helpers to take action,
32:22but he made very sure his name could not be connected with the decision to murder the Jews.
32:28I think the mystery, the greater mystery, lies in the fact that the whole nation followed him so blindly
32:35and that all these acts of absolute inhumanity were perpetrated.
32:42And I think that this is the greatest mystery of all.
32:46And the fact that the whole nation followed him so blindly
32:50and that all these acts of absolute inhumanity were perpetrated by people who were otherwise, as we all know, normal citizens, fathers of families,
33:04good to children, good to animals, you know, liking their homes and their gardens.
33:10And for me the fascinating thing is how do you reconcile this and what they did to the population outside when they left the church or whatever.
33:25The so-called final solution posed an organisational challenge.
33:29Hitler's obedient henchmen took care of the choice of murder sites, the methods of killing and the ways of covering it all up.
33:41Riga on the Daugava, capital of Latvia.
33:44After the beginning of Operation Barbarossa, the ghettos in the occupied countries only served as holding areas on the way to death.
33:54Like here, in the Rumbola forest near Riga, where the death squads went directly into action.
34:01Hurry up!
34:02Don't look over there!
34:04To the left!
34:07Beginning in autumn 1941, mass executions were intended to solve the Jewish question on the spot.
34:14Fire!
34:16In one of the biggest single massacres, on one November day more than 15,000 men, women and children were murdered.
34:25Fire!
34:31Fire!
34:34At the end of 1941, the mass murder entered a new phase.
34:38Occupied Russia now became a destination for Jews deported from the German Reich.
34:43They were transported over long distances, straight to the death squads in the Baltic.
34:49Fire!
34:54Here, in an old Tsarist fortress, fort nine at Kaunas in Lithuania, on November the 25th, 1941,
35:02special commando number three from Einsatzgruppe A murdered the first 2,934 German Jews deported from Frankfurt, Munich and Berlin.
35:13Fire!
35:18Also involved in the crimes, the German Wehrmacht.
35:48As far as the matter is concerned, one has to turn, and with all sharpness,
35:53against the very cleverly advanced partialization of the accusations,
36:01i.e. the imprisonment of all former members of the Wehrmacht in the accusations,
36:06because that is, God knows, wrong in every way, and also a humiliation and humiliation of almost all soldiers.
36:15Fire!
36:32The state crimes carried out on Hitler's behalf were top secret, but they did not always remain so.
36:38Soldiers on leave from the front brought home rumors that had been quietly going the rounds.
36:46The murderers reached the limit of their capacity.
36:54Soon the murderers reached the limit of their capacity.
37:02Zyklon B solved this problem.
37:05A disinfectant used as a murder weapon.
37:08I don't know why there are Jews and bacteria and lice and fleas and insects of all kinds.
37:18Jews will and must be destroyed. That is our holy faith.
37:25When the goal of Lebensraum in the East was on the verge of failure, events came to a head.
37:31Millions of people who stood in the way of Hitler's plans,
37:35Millions of people who stood in the way of Hitler's insane idea,
37:39a new means of killing which promised the most thorough solution,
37:42the pressures of time to which Hitler subjected himself.
37:45So, in autumn 1941, the decision on the Holocaust was taken, the last dimension of mass murder.
37:56High-ranking officials met on January the 20th, 1942, under the chairmanship of Heydrich,
38:01to organize the mechanics of implementing the final solution.
38:05The meeting took place here, at Wannsee in Berlin.
38:13The infrastructure for assembly line mass murder was in place in the spring of 1942.
38:18Belzec, Chelmno, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek and Auschwitz were the first six extermination camps, abattoirs for people.
38:32Hitler realized his war of annihilation in the East could no longer be won.
38:36But the more frontline soldiers fell, the more he wanted to make the Jews pay.
38:44The bureaucrats of murder tried hard to carry out the wish of the Führer.
38:48To ensure the crime kept smoothly on course, they came up with a sophisticated system of deception.
38:55Every day, the Jewish councils had to meet a quota of 6,000 people for relocation, as it was officially called.
39:06The train went directly from the station to the death factories for labor deployment, as it was known in an SS euphemism.
39:16Mass murder by timetable.
39:18The State Railway was an efficient assistant.
39:21January 30th, Berlin to Auschwitz.
39:261,000 passengers.
39:30February 6th, Bialystok to Auschwitz.
39:352,000 passengers.
39:51The prices were fixed, 4 pfennigs per passenger per kilometer.
39:58One-way ticket, no return.
40:01In mid-1943, Himmler demanded even more goods trains.
40:05He got them.
40:12The terminal for the final solution.
40:16Its creator had never visited the place where his murderous plan was carried out.
40:25The gas chambers.
40:27They looked like shower rooms.
40:30The people were advised to remove their clothing and remember the number on the hook, so they could find their things again later.
40:45We had to remain silent and not say what would happen to them.
40:55The deception worked right up to the last moment.
40:58February 6th, Bialystok to Auschwitz.
41:05And when the last one came in, they closed the gate from the outside.
41:12And immediately the two SS men ran to a chair.
41:21And through the window, which was at the very top, they threw him into the cyclope.
41:27And immediately we heard the screams.
41:33It took a few minutes.
41:3610 to 15 minutes.
41:41Later, they opened two doors from the other side of the courtyard.
41:49And we got the order to quickly pull the people out.
41:56In the crematorium, you could only burn 1,000 people a day.
42:04And you burned 15,000 people in the three pits.
42:10It was a very long pit.
42:13Maybe 6 to 8 meters long.
42:17And 1.5 to 2 meters wide.
42:21And 1,000 people were thrown into the pit at once.
42:26It took minutes.
42:29Half an hour, they were all burned.
42:33Partly burned.
42:35There were still a few hands and feet that fell to the side.
42:42You had to put them back on fire.
42:45And nothing should remain of the people.
42:49Anyone not sent straight to the gas chamber was exploited as a slave laborer.
42:55Their use value to the German armaments industry was calculated exactly by the SS.
43:01Life expectancy, nine months.
43:04Revenue from hiring, six marks per day.
43:07Deduction for accommodation and food, 60 pfennigs a day.
43:121,631 Reichsmarks.
43:16That's the profit a slave laborer generated.
43:19One more way to finance the war.
43:22At the end of 1942, Hitler set aside the mask of public reticence.
43:27To party functionaries in the Löwenbräu Beer Hall in Munich, he declared...
43:45...that the eradication of the European races...
43:48...should be the eradication of Judaism in Europe.
43:56You have always laughed at me as a prophet.
43:59Countless of those who laughed back then no longer laugh today.
44:05Those who still laugh now may not laugh again in some time.
44:12Stalingrad.
44:14The beginning of the end for his criminal megalomania.
44:19The road to defeat was already mapped out.
44:25For the Jews, nothing changed, with the massacres continuing on a daily basis.
44:30If anything, Hitler's military defeats increased his will to destroy.
44:39He continued with the war for one single reason above all.
44:43To cover up the genocide.
44:45Hitler's reward in defeat was to be the extermination of all Jews.
44:55As the Soviet troops marched on unchecked towards the west...
44:59...Hitler instructed his henchmen to destroy all traces of earlier mass murders.
45:05Like here, in a forest near Vilnius...
45:08...concentration camp inmates were forced to dig up the bodies of victims of the firing squads.
45:13Work that lasted two years.
45:15More than two million corpses were subsequently incinerated.
45:26Those responsible were praised by SS chief Himmler in a confidential speech...
45:31...for enduring the effects on their morale.
45:39...and we expect you to support us in our program...
45:43...in the spirit of self-reliance, we will achieve equality.
45:48Most of you know what it means to have an unequal society.
45:55If you can live 100 years or 1,000 years...
45:58...and...
46:00...to have this through equality...
46:04...and...
46:07...regardless of human weaknesses...
46:12...to be responsible...
46:16...has made us strong and is...
46:20...a never-to-be-taken and never-to-be-mentioned peace.
46:26What did people in Germany know?
46:29What did we know about concentration camps?
46:31If someone had told me there were Jews being incinerated...
46:34...I would have said, you must be crazy.
46:37Or I would have spat in their face.
46:41Man, no one could have imagined...
46:44...that people would be incinerated.
46:48But what was accomplished there...
46:51...and what happened before that...
46:54...all the crimes...
46:56...we didn't know about.
46:59At least I was surprised...
47:01...that the number of people with the David-star-plaque decreased.
47:04And I said, where are they all going?
47:06We always thought they would be expelled...
47:08...or they would leave.
47:10But that they would be killed, we didn't know.
47:13But many people knew enough to know full well...
47:16...that they didn't want to know any more.
47:22By the time the Soviet army moved into Hitler's capital...
47:25...the murderous work was almost complete.
47:34In his last weeks, the dictator held forth about war, Lebensraum...
47:38...and the racial policy.
47:40He saw these as his real achievements.
47:56But in the closing phases of the war...
47:58...it was not only against the Jews...
48:00...that Hitler's fanatical desire for destruction was directed.
48:04The Führer's last mass murder campaign...
48:06...was aimed at the Germans themselves.
48:10His people, who had ruined his destined role...
48:13...as conqueror of the world...
48:15...and proved to be unworthy of their mission.
48:21Hitler's death sentence.
48:24The Germans should perish and be destroyed...
48:27...because the people have proved themselves to be weaker...
48:30...and the future belongs exclusively...
48:32...to the stronger people of the East.
48:35With the so-called Nero Order of March the 19th, 1945...
48:40...Hitler tried to rob Germany and the Germans...
48:42...of every chance of survival.
48:45The destruction of the very groundwork of existence...
48:48...Hitler's last order for annihilation.
48:54For six weeks, National Socialist fanatics...
48:57...competed with Allied air forces and artillery...
48:59...to smash the foundations of life in Germany.
49:05It was too short a time for the Germans...
49:07...to be able to conquer Germany.
49:10It was too short a time for the Germans themselves...
49:13...to be affected by the full force...
49:15...of the fate intended for them.
49:19But long enough to expose another side...
49:21...to Adolf Hitler, the criminal.
49:23A traitor to his own people.
49:34Traitor and criminal.
49:37The traces of Hitler's violence...
49:39...are still to be found everywhere.
49:45The genocide of the Second World War.
49:48That was his decision.
49:54But it could only have been carried out...
49:56...with the help of thousands and thousands of accomplices.
50:06The 20th century fall of man.
50:10Since Hitler, we know...
50:12...what people are capable of doing to each other.
51:06THE END