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00:00If I say the word holocaust, what springs to mind?
00:10Imagine something like this, a concentration camp, barbed wire, trainloads of victims,
00:18gas chambers and crematoria.
00:22Places like Auschwitz and its system of mass murder.
00:30I think most of us assume that this was always the predetermined destination, designed from
00:36the outset in some great master plan of extermination, but it wasn't.
00:41There was no master plan for this.
00:45Its origins were chaotic and spontaneous and improvised mass executions.
01:03It's believed that more than a million Jews were murdered in thousands of random killings
01:08that erupted all across Eastern Europe in a holocaust of bullets.
01:30Largely lost and forgotten for more than 80 years, this first chapter of the greatest
01:36crime in history is now being fully revealed for the first time, thanks to newly discovered
01:42aerial photographs and advances in forensic detection, finding lost victims, uncovering
01:50the true scale of the killing.
01:55It began in earnest in the midst of Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941.
02:01Things grew in scale and savagery, until just six months later, bullets gave way to
02:11gas in the first death camps of the final solution.
02:20My name is James Bulgin.
02:21I'm a historian and holocaust specialist at the Imperial War Museum.
02:27And this film tells a story that has never been fully told, of the crucial six months
02:34that ignited the holocaust.
02:57If you're going to search for the events that started the holocaust, Cambridge University
03:01Library might seem a strange place to look.
03:07But a researcher here thinks he can find that start point, using Second World War aerial
03:12archives.
03:13Hi, Chris.
03:14Ah, James.
03:15How are you?
03:16Good to see you.
03:17Good.
03:18Right.
03:19Well, let me show you what we've been putting together.
03:22This is a map of the German reconnaissance and air survey photography taken during the
03:28Second World War.
03:30It represents something like one and a half million air photographs taken by the Germans
03:37primarily over Central and Eastern Europe.
03:40But if we're looking for the ramshackle beginnings of the holocaust, as it were, the sort of
03:44ad hoc start of it all, one of the things that's really clear with air photography
03:52is that almost every action leaves a trace.
03:56So they were capturing the evidence of their own crimes?
03:58They were photographing the evidence of their own crimes.
04:01And there's a good example of this.
04:04Possibly, to me, this is the beginning of the entire sort of horrific process.
04:10This is Garzdaj in Lithuania.
04:12It's literally a stone's throw from the German border.
04:15That's the border here.
04:16Which is running there.
04:18Proper border town.
04:19A proper border town.
04:20This is a village where the Jewish inhabitants, it was about 20%, 30% Jewish before the war.
04:28They would have lived in the houses of the two Jewish streets here.
04:33And the synagogue was here.
04:35And on the 22nd of June, 1941, of course, the Germans pushed east.
04:42And within literally 24 hours of coming over the border, the Germans had destroyed the
04:49houses.
04:51You can see this whole area here was burned during that day.
04:55It's so striking to me that these forces come through here from this direction and,
04:59I mean, literally, what, within a few hundred metres of the German border?
05:02They come through and this incident happens here so quickly, so soon, so close.
05:09Absolutely.
05:10Well, look at this.
05:12If you look here, you can just see a slight linear feature there.
05:17You can see it more clearly in this other photograph, which picks it out in snow.
05:22And you can see it's just there.
05:26It's not part of the agricultural landscape, it's not a path.
05:29I think this is a trench.
05:31We have a certain amount of sort of testimony from the time to sort of indicate that this
05:36is precisely where the Jewish men had been marched up the street in which they had lived
05:43and were then shot to death and buried in that trench.
05:48So I've been circling this question.
05:53How do we get to this huge, vast, catastrophic act of mass violence and mass murder?
06:00And it's possible, likely, that this is where it began.
06:06It's very likely.
06:09If Chris has found a possible start point for the Holocaust, why is it in the Soviet
06:14Union as late as 1941?
06:23Hitler had always envisaged a world free of his two great enemies, Jews and Communists.
06:36By 1940, he'd conquered half of Europe and had millions of Jews rounded up and put in
06:41ghettos.
06:44His intention had always been to get rid of them entirely, but there was no concrete plan
06:50for how to do it.
06:53Then in June 1941, he set out to destroy his other great enemy, Bolshevik Communism.
07:02Hitler had always branded Communism a Jewish conspiracy.
07:17So his invasion of the Soviet Union offered the perfect opportunity to target both enemies
07:23at once.
07:26Gazdeh, on the border of Soviet Lithuania and Nazi Germany, was right on the front line
07:33of that invasion.
07:42The Wehrmacht, as they swept into this whole area, were charged with this instruction from
07:48Hitler and the commanders of the army that this was a war of annihilation.
07:51They were coming through this space to decimate it.
07:58The order was for Communism to be eradicated.
08:05No specific order was given to kill Jews.
08:11There is a monument here in Gazdeh, exactly where Chris's photos showed a trench.
08:23On the 24th of June, two days after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the commander
08:29in this area, a man whose name was Burma, instructed that 200 Jews should be rounded
08:33up and that they should be brought here and they should be shot.
08:40We tend to think of military orders within the German army at this period as all coming
08:44from the top.
08:46The people at the top telling the people on the ground what to do, but that's not what
08:48happens here.
08:50And that's really important, because actually what happens is people on the ground, like
08:54Burma, take their own initiative.
08:56Hitler has always wanted to remove Jews from Europe, and here these men take the initiative
09:01to interpret that in the most radical way possible, to interpret that as an instruction
09:06to murder.
09:10And this starts a process of mass murder that spreads like wildfire across this whole territory
09:16and the numbers grow and they grow and they grow.
09:23Hitler's head of security was SS chief Heinrich Himmler.
09:28Himmler had created special killing squads called Einsatzgruppen to follow in the wake
09:33of the army and eradicate Hitler's political enemies.
09:39Capitalising on Burma's initiative, his deputy, Heydrich, issued an instruction that any Jew
09:45working for the communist state must be shot.
09:52Four Einsatzgruppen teams were ready to carry out that order across all newly conquered
09:56Soviet territory.
09:59I'm following Einsatzgruppen A from Gazdeh into Latvia, in a town called Liepāja.
10:10Here there was another fierce battle for control of the city.
10:25In the aftermath of the battle, the SS Einsatzgruppen went in search of Hitler's enemies, and we
10:32can see what they did with them in a unique piece of film shot by a German serviceman.
10:39In the opening of this film here we see a pit that looks to be freshly dug, and then
10:45the Einsatzgruppen soldiers are milling around, waiting, and there's this really hideous sense
10:52of anticipation, and then we see why.
10:55We see a truck arrive and people being loaded off the back of it.
10:59We can see it's clearly Jews.
11:01We know they're Jews because they're wearing patches on their front and their back.
11:04And the people doing the shooting are Germans, but around them we see spectators.
11:12Around here we see members of the navy, here, military here, and amongst them just people.
11:19They're there in huge numbers.
11:21They're smoking, they're talking, they're clamouring to get a closer look to see what's
11:26about to happen.
11:28Group after group come, and the people stay, and they watch it.
11:36Here we can see this man just looking into the camera, suggests that he can see that
11:41he's being filmed as this is happening.
11:43He knows that this has been captured and that people will be watching this moment when he's
11:47He's gone.
12:04It's horrible.
12:11It's almost as if shooting Jews has become a spectator sport.
12:17What we see in this film is where we are a few weeks after the invasion.
12:22So the Wehrmacht start to push further into Soviet territory,
12:25the Einsatzgruppen are coming behind them,
12:27and they're finding more and more Jewish communities to target,
12:30and they're keeping a running total of it as they go.
12:33They want to be able to report those figures up to Heydrich and Himmler,
12:36and Heydrich and Himmler are saying,
12:38no, no, no, we want more, more, more, why haven't you done more?
12:41The commanders of the Einsatzgruppen sometimes get chastised
12:44for not killing more people.
12:46There's this impetus, this force to constantly find more Jews to kill,
12:51and we see that recorded here.
12:53We see the dates, so 22nd of August, 41.
12:57544 people.
12:5923rd of August, 41.
13:017,525 people.
13:04And now they include Yudin and Judenkinder, women and children.
13:10It's only taken a few weeks from those first murders at Gazhdai
13:14for this to accelerate, and there's a tally at the bottom.
13:18At the bottom of this document here, by the start of September 1941,
13:22it says 47,614 people.
13:27That's 47,614 human beings.
13:34The Nazis wanted to do more than just kill their victims.
13:39They wanted to erase them from memory.
13:45The graves of many tens of thousands have never been found.
13:51And that matters to Dr Harry Joel.
13:54So much so, he's devoted his career to finding them.
14:00You can't just hide the bodies.
14:02The bodies will be found.
14:09I'm trained as a physical geographer, a geomorphologist,
14:13and people such as myself and academics and others need to say,
14:17let's take our tools that we use for other research projects
14:22and let's apply them to the Holocaust.
14:26We need to put closure to this.
14:29It does line up brilliantly.
14:31The first smoking building with the five smokestacks
14:35would be just beyond that modern building on the other side of it.
14:38So we can't see the pit from here, but if we back up...
14:41Harry works with fellow US academic Dr Phil Reeder.
14:45There's the pit.
14:47And every summer for the last seven years,
14:49they've been bringing teams of students to Eastern Europe
14:52in search of Holocaust victims.
14:54We have a different perspective on it now,
14:56but if we look up where the two students are,
14:59they're standing where the crowd was standing.
15:03Today, they're looking for the men in the film.
15:06But then as they run... Look, there's the lighthouse.
15:09You can see the lighthouse right there.
15:11That's it.
15:12The film gives them landmarks they can locate
15:14on historic air photos of the site,
15:17allowing them to triangulate where the men were shot
15:20and where they should start their search.
15:22But here's that road where they would have taken people here,
15:25and then we see all those cars parked
15:28and where they're actually dropped off.
15:30That's a good spot for in the video
15:32where they're getting out of the trucks.
15:34There's actually a structure right there.
15:36And because you can see the people up on this side
15:38and people up on this side,
15:40and then they would run to the pit over here.
15:43So the pit, to me, is right out here in front of us.
15:46Or at least that's the place to start.
15:48Yeah.
15:49MUSIC PLAYS
15:56Judaic law forbids any physical disturbance of the dead,
16:00so they're digging with radio waves.
16:05Ground-penetrating radar gives them the ability
16:07to image any large feature buried in the earth,
16:10like a mass grave.
16:14After a few hours,
16:16they find what appears to be a buried trench,
16:19but it's facing the wrong way to be the one in the film.
16:23It's literally in that direction, right?
16:26So it's almost 90 degrees off what we're expecting,
16:29looking at the photos and taking a look at it here.
16:32Right. So it maybe means that there are multiple trenches,
16:35and, you know, the video is just one point in time
16:37where that particular trench is being used.
16:40So there could be trenches everywhere.
16:44After multiple passes of the GPR,
16:47another trench appears beneath the tarmac.
16:51And this one lines up exactly with the film.
16:58As we take a look at this trench, it's pretty impressive.
17:01You know, this is 38 metres long.
17:03You know, this is probably the first or second time
17:05I've ever seen something like this.
17:07Yeah. I mean, it stands out very clearly.
17:09I mean, from all the time spent watching the video,
17:12it fits very well with what we imagined the angle would be
17:15of the trench coming in towards the fortress.
17:17And, you know, they were basically brought into the trench
17:20and fell against this side when they were shot.
17:23Right.
17:25Yeah.
17:27All the pieces of the puzzle are here.
17:29Yeah. But at the same time, there's more work to do.
17:31Yep. Most certainly.
17:36The men in the film have finally been found.
17:40But it's clear there were more people shot and buried here
17:43than anyone ever realised.
17:47And further along the same stretch of coast,
17:50a few months after Leopier's men,
17:52thousands of women and children were shot and buried in the sands.
18:00No-one knows exactly how many or where their bodies lie.
18:10It's only since the fall of the Soviet Union
18:13that mass graves like these,
18:15lost for over 80 years,
18:17are being forensically investigated for the first time.
18:22But pioneers like Harry and Phil
18:24are just scratching the surface of a monumental task.
18:33In Latvia, there are more than 70 suspected Holocaust sites.
18:37Most are yet to be fully explored.
18:40The same is true in neighbouring Lithuania,
18:43with more than 200 suspected sites.
18:47What seems extraordinary
18:49is that there was a single Einsatzgruppe team
18:51of fewer than 1,000 men
18:53to account for an estimated quarter of a million deaths
18:56across both countries.
19:02There's only one way that was possible.
19:04And it's one of the most disturbing aspects of this entire story.
19:10Widespread local complicity.
19:16And there is evidence of that happening here,
19:18in the Lithuanian town of Elitis.
19:23So we're just driving into the town now
19:26from exactly the same direction that the Germans came in
19:30from exactly the same direction that the Germans came in
19:34on the 22nd of June in 1941,
19:36so in the very start of the invasion.
19:39This is where they were coming from,
19:42and behind them were these Einsatzgruppe soldiers
19:46with this task of looking for the town's Jews.
19:51They found them in the town and the surrounding villages.
19:55And, according to Nazi records,
19:58nearly 2,500 Jews were rounded up
20:01and brought to be murdered in the nearby forest.
20:06Here we arrive at the end of the town,
20:08and the very same road driven on through the centre of Elitis
20:12becomes...
20:14You can see here, it's becoming... It's a dirt track.
20:17And now...
20:19..we're in a forest.
20:21And what I find really, really chilling
20:25and really unnerving
20:27is the fact that it's walking distance from the middle of the town.
20:34But who brought the thousands of Jews here?
20:38And who killed them?
20:44Because the SS have fewer than a dozen men stationed in this area.
20:50I'm here to meet the leader of Lithuania's surviving Jewish community.
20:56Faina Kuklianski believes her grandmother was killed in this forest.
21:01And she may have discovered who the killers were.
21:07My grandparents were quite educated people
21:10and my grandmother was a doctor in the hospital.
21:15Then the war started,
21:17and my grandmother was taken from the street
21:21and imprisoned by the local people.
21:24She's held prisoner by local people? Yeah, yeah.
21:27And then what happened?
21:29And what happened after that, nobody knows.
21:32But in any way, she did not come back.
21:37I asked the Genocide Centre of Lithuania
21:42to do the research for me, especially on Alitus.
21:48And it's written here clearly
21:50that in 1941, in August,
21:54Alitus was killed.
21:57And it's written here clearly
21:59that in 1941, in August,
22:04there were mass killings of Jewish children and women.
22:13The victims were asked to go into the pits,
22:17to jump into the pits, to lie.
22:20Then they were shot.
22:25All the people who used to work in the prison
22:30took part together with the students of Alitus school.
22:36So this is local school students?
22:38Yeah, of the school.
22:40Participating in the shooting?
22:42Yeah, and they came together with the policemen with guns.
22:47And they confirmed that, what my uncle used to tell me,
22:51that probably his classmates killed his mother.
23:00I find that it's such a difficult thing to comprehend,
23:03the idea that it was your parents' friends from school
23:07who were some of the ones who were actively participating in this process.
23:11They must have known her.
23:13Her son was studying with Lithuanians in a Lithuanian school.
23:17Doesn't matter that they were citizens of Lithuania,
23:21that they live in the same city,
23:23but it should be Judenrein.
23:26Jews should be killed.
23:28And they were killing.
23:29So her only crime was being Jewish?
23:32Yeah.
23:33Well, that's enough.
23:40Zinaida Kuklianski and more than 2,000 other Jews were murdered here.
23:46Not solely by Nazis, but also by their fellow citizens.
23:54No-one knows where any of them are buried.
23:59There is a cluster of monuments here in the forest,
24:02but they were put up relatively recently,
24:05and no-one knows if they mark any actual burials.
24:11I do not know where my grandmother is.
24:14I would like very much to know where is her remains.
24:21The sculptures, I think it's more like art pieces,
24:24not like the document pieces.
24:27And I do not see any information here about the people.
24:34When were they killed?
24:36How many people were killed?
24:38Where the women are? Where the children are?
24:40Who are they?
24:42We are missing that.
24:45We just do not know where they are.
24:48You guys got everything?
24:49Yep.
24:50OK.
24:51On up.
24:53Feiner has invited Harry and Phil down from Liepāja
24:56to try and put that right.
24:59But this forest holds a puzzle.
25:04We know in August, September 1941,
25:06we had approximately 2,000 Jews being executed and buried at this site.
25:12So flags in, red, white.
25:15The idea that they're here is interesting.
25:21But where are they buried?
25:23Are they all buried at this location?
25:25Or are they buried at other locations within this larger forest?
25:29And so our job is to try to find those sites.
25:41The murders in Elita's forests trouble me for another reason.
25:45The element of local collaboration.
25:49And what happened here was just the tip of the iceberg.
25:54A truth some Lithuanians are determined to lay bare.
26:00I'm heading to a small town just 20km from Elita's
26:04to meet a prominent author and Holocaust researcher called Ruta Vanagaita.
26:10Ruta introduces me to 94-year-old Ona Budrykina.
26:16Hello.
26:18Hello.
26:23Ona grew up here among the town's Jewish population
26:26and she is the last known surviving witness to their mass murder.
26:33We go with her in my car, OK?
26:35Perfect. It's very nice to meet you.
26:41Is that comfortable?
26:53She's going to show where they used to live.
26:57Mm.
27:18The massacre Ona witnessed took place on September 9, 1941.
27:24Not in the dark of a large forest,
27:26but in the open fields in front of the house she lived in as a child.
27:33So what happened on that day?
27:42A lot of people being marched down the hill.
27:45And when did you see the first people coming past?
27:54They heard the screaming.
27:57A cry and screaming.
28:07We looked through the windows, only what was going on.
28:10There were hundreds of people being marched.
28:16My mum started crying and everybody else...
28:18But the screaming was the first thing that she heard
28:20before she saw anything?
28:24And then we heard the shooting.
28:27And who was in the column?
28:37They were mostly old people.
28:41And later on, children.
28:44And children were being shot in another place.
28:47And when you heard the shots, you realised what was happening?
28:53Yes.
29:24This past is in my head.
29:33This is Butrimonis, where most of the victims lived.
29:37Its historic heart lies empty,
29:39because that September day, 740 Jews,
29:4480% of the town's population, were murdered.
29:48The question is, who by?
29:53The killers were Lithuanian killer squad from Alitus,
29:56coming to get rid of the Jews.
29:58So we're talking about Lithuanians killing other Lithuanians?
30:01Yes, but those killers were not neighbours of those Jews.
30:05But those, the policemen and the partisans,
30:07were neighbours of the Jews who were killed.
30:09And the whole process throughout has been managed
30:11by these people's neighbours?
30:13Yes.
30:14The people doing the work?
30:15Yes.
30:16The preparation was managed by people's neighbours,
30:18but killing was done by somebody coming from outside.
30:20But all Lithuanians?
30:21Yes.
30:22From another town nearby,
30:23and they're the ones who do the shooting.
30:25They're the ones with their fingers on the trees.
30:27And after the shooting, the neighbours are taking the property.
30:30Wow.
30:31That's quite a thought, isn't it?
30:33And then they move into the houses around here,
30:35presumably they take over the town and all the Jews are gone?
30:38Yes.
30:39In one night.
30:40In one night.
30:42It's clear that the Holocaust here
30:44was much more than just a series of spontaneous acts.
30:49It was rapidly evolving into organised ethnic cleansing
30:53on a massive scale.
31:02In Elita's forest, Harry and Phil think they may have stumbled
31:06on the biggest mass grave they've ever seen.
31:09It's getting more pronounced here, Phil.
31:11Yes.
31:15I mean, obviously, we're walking in a lower area
31:19that has to our left a mound of stuff.
31:22Yes.
31:23Here, let's climb up.
31:26Wow.
31:27I mean, that's human built.
31:32Most definitely.
31:33Wow.
31:34Human built.
31:35I mean, it's macabre,
31:37but I mean, the idea that where you are
31:39is where the trench would be,
31:41and here you would be lining up people,
31:43being shot, falling into the trench where you are,
31:46then burying with that sediment that you have,
31:50and then continuing that along here.
31:52Right.
31:53For potentially months here.
31:55Right.
31:58This is a trench where you could have thousands of people.
32:00Yes.
32:01This is one that is not, you could say, limited in number of people.
32:05The discovery is the result of resolute detective work,
32:09because the trench is nowhere near any of the Holocaust monuments.
32:15So we checked out the area of the monuments.
32:18All the data indicated, really, that there was nothing there.
32:22So I went back to the air photos to try to find something
32:25that potentially fits where a large number of bodies could be buried.
32:30And this is a 1944 Luftwaffe air photograph of this area.
32:35And if we zoom in...
32:39What's interesting about it is this is the road that we come in on,
32:42and these two roads that are coming off of it,
32:44and this particular road is essentially a road to nowhere.
32:47So it's a road that goes into the middle of a forest and stops.
32:51And stops.
32:52I would, yes, I would agree with that.
32:54But there is testimony of a family member
32:57soon after her father and brother were murdered of visiting this site
33:02and seeing the evidence of trenches that were so fresh
33:05that they were stained with blood.
33:07So that was at the end of the road?
33:09Yes.
33:10That's what prompted us to start to look in this particular area.
33:14And then we'll have two people going on this,
33:16and then one person will be moving the line.
33:18And when, upon close inspection, we found a series of trenches
33:22leading up to, at least visually, potentially the largest trench.
33:27And this may be a mass grave or series of mass graves
33:30where there are tens of thousands of people buried.
33:36The evidence is compelling, but it's only circumstantial.
33:41The only way they can be sure they have found a mass burial
33:44is to look beneath the surface, as they did so effectively at Leopaya.
33:51So what we've done at this site
33:53is we've started collecting a grid with ground-penetrating radar.
33:56And now I'll show you a time slice as we go down into the subsurface.
33:59Okay.
34:00And remarkably, we never know what we're going to get.
34:03We see this feature right here.
34:05This is what we are interpreting as a burial trench.
34:09Because that's anomalous within the rest of this here.
34:11It's clearly something distinct about that.
34:13Right. It's rectangular.
34:14And so now we can start calculating the dimensions of a trench here.
34:18And it's not just here.
34:19It goes all the way up where this linear feature goes
34:22and goes all the way down...
34:24Right down to the end there.
34:25Right down to the... Almost to the end.
34:27And it does a right-hand turn down there.
34:29And there's... So...
34:31I mean, we can't even start doing the calculations.
34:34We're just looking at the data right now.
34:36This is a large feature.
34:37That's massive.
34:38It's huge.
34:39All the way to there, to all the way to there, and then...
34:41And then we have seven to four...
34:43Seven to 11 metres here on the tapes here.
34:46But take a look.
34:47All the trees have been taken out at seven metres
34:50and they're gone all the way to 11 metres.
34:52All the way down this way.
34:53Walking past every day, I wouldn't have noticed this detail.
34:56I wouldn't have noticed.
34:57But now you point it out, it seems so obvious
34:59that clearly something has happened to this earth.
35:03Something has disrupted the continuity of this space.
35:08When we take... I mean, I just take a look out here.
35:10We thought there was going to be nothing out here.
35:12And we see some linear features and things like that.
35:15I'm shocked when I walk around now.
35:17I'm looking at things and it's like...
35:19Potentially we are sitting on thousands of executed Jews at this site.
35:27We could work here for years and years...
35:29And just find more.
35:30And just find more.
35:31Yeah.
35:38The experience of being here today has been a really stark reminder
35:42of the point about taking Jewish individuals into a site like this
35:47and murdering them.
35:50When the Nazis come into these territories,
35:53they find, in various different ways and in various different capacities,
35:57different people who are prepared to support it.
36:01To support it.
36:02Sometimes to allow it to happen,
36:04but sometimes to become directly involved.
36:07To become the people who are...
36:09the people with their fingers on the trigger.
36:15It's so important to remember
36:17that the Nazis were at the centre of this, but they didn't act alone.
36:21They required the active participation of hundreds of thousands of people.
36:27They couldn't have done it without that.
36:38Like a lot of formerly occupied Eastern European nations,
36:41modern Lithuania has a history problem.
36:45Because the truth of its role in the Holocaust
36:47is finally coming out of the ground.
36:50And it's being obliged to face up to it by writers like Ruta Vanagaiter.
36:55In another 50 years, the people will come to terms with it.
36:59Ruta, this is something that you've gone to great lengths to investigate.
37:03What happened when you did that?
37:05My book about the Holocaust was published.
37:08It became a bestseller, but the reaction was very violent.
37:12Some people accepted it, but the majority of my nation didn't accept it.
37:16And I became the enemy of the country,
37:19because I was defaming my own people.
37:23And they called me a Jewish whore.
37:27So in the end, when people were attacking me
37:31and spitting at me on the street, I endured.
37:35And in the long run, I had to leave the country for a while
37:38until they forgave me.
37:40Not forgive me, but forget me a little.
37:42So speaking out came at great personal cost to you.
37:46I don't regret. Yes, it did, but I don't regret.
37:49Had I known that it would be such a violent reaction,
37:52I would have done it anyway, because I spoke for the victims.
37:55This is my army, those 200,000 murdered people.
37:58This is my army. They gave me a lot of strength.
38:00And if you published the book today,
38:02do you think you would get the same reaction?
38:04No. It wouldn't be published.
38:06It wouldn't be published?
38:09No way.
38:11And nobody after me, nobody would write a book about the Holocaust,
38:14because people know that you lose your friends
38:17and you become a public enemy.
38:19So what is said? When this comes up in conversation, what is said?
38:22It's a defence reaction, a self-defence.
38:25So they always say, it wasn't us, it wasn't us.
38:27Yes, kind of.
38:29I mean, I told my friend that I am coming to see
38:32the Budzimonis with the BBC crew,
38:35and she said, what?
38:37Are you going to tell the whole world again
38:39and defame our country?
38:41And tell everybody that we killed the Jews,
38:44the Lithuanians killed the Jews?
38:46I said, yes.
38:48She said, why?
38:50I said, because they did.
38:52We are bloody uneducated.
38:54Uneducated.
38:56The school hasn't educated us.
38:58Our parents didn't educate us.
39:01Our grandparents were too afraid to speak about it.
39:03Who could tell us about what happened?
39:06So, for the moment, the Holocaust subject is closed.
39:10I don't know for how long.
39:1880 years ago, many Lithuanians welcomed the invading Nazis
39:22for what seemed at the time to be a very sound reason,
39:26because the Nazis were liberating them from communism.
39:31The same nationalist response manifested across all the Baltic states,
39:36as well as large parts of Ukraine.
39:47Everywhere, nationalists found the flames of anti-communism,
39:52and the Nazis pushed the myth of that communism
39:55as a Jewish conspiracy.
40:01As Hitler's invasion of the USSR reached its fullest extent,
40:05coercion and complicity across territories under Nazi control
40:09allowed the SS to initiate nearly 2,000 atrocities
40:13across seven countries, from the Baltic to the Black Sea,
40:18scaling up their murderous ambition in village after village,
40:22town after town.
40:31As victim numbers grew, the SS developed a system
40:35for ensuring maximum efficiency and minimal panic.
40:42It began with a calming ruse.
40:44Jews were told to assemble with money, belongings and warm clothing.
40:51So they waited patiently, expecting to be deported.
40:56Then they were led away in groups, often by local police, to be shot.
41:11When the Germans took the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, in late September 1941,
41:16they claimed their biggest Soviet city so far,
41:20with tens of thousands of Jews.
41:26And SS commander Friedrich Jeckel saw the chance
41:29to perfect mass murder on a monumental scale.
41:36He issued the standard order to the city's Jews to assemble.
41:46Then he had them escorted out of town by local police along this road,
41:52to a 30-metre deep, half-kilometre-long ravine called Baben Yar.
42:02Here they were stripped naked, ready for the waiting guns.
42:22Jeckel's plan was carefully engineered.
42:25Yet Dina Pronicheva survived it.
42:52...and shot everyone.
42:57Many of them had a pre-mortem report.
43:00Many of them were in a hurry.
43:02They lit up their flashlights and shot everyone.
43:09I felt that this was the end for me.
43:21These are the belongings of those who didn't escape.
43:26On 29th and 30th September 1941,
43:30Jeckel's men shot 33,771 men, women and children.
43:421,700 people an hour.
43:47For two days.
43:52Baben Yar was the biggest single massacre of the Holocaust thus far.
43:58Yet it would become just one notable landmark
44:01in a continental killing spree.
44:22By the end of 1941, over a million people have been killed
44:26under the hail of bullets that the Nazis and their collaborators have thrown at them.
44:30We've got 25,000 murdered here in Riga,
44:3350,000 murdered here in Kaunas,
44:3570,000 here in Ponary,
44:38we've got in Minsk 30,000,
44:40in Kiev 34,000,
44:43in Kamianets-Podilskyi we've got 25,000
44:46and down in Odessa we've got 30,000.
44:49Hundreds of thousands of Jews and thousands more between all of these places.
44:53But it doesn't start as a plan of total annihilation,
44:56that's something that evolves as part of these operations here.
44:59What they've been able to do here
45:01conceptualises something within their minds
45:04that they hadn't previously anticipated in this way.
45:07They can kill them, they can kill them,
45:09and they can kill them, all of them, across the whole territory.
45:12But the largest number of Jews still alive are here in occupied Poland.
45:17They're living in ghettos, they're living in terrible conditions,
45:20they suffered appallingly during this period,
45:22but there's been no central plan to annihilate them until now.
45:26And that's what changes at the end of 1941.
45:40But when the Nazis set out to murder the millions of Jews
45:43languishing in their ghettos...
45:47..they did not use millions of bullets.
45:55By the end of 1941,
45:58after more than a million individual murders,
46:01mass shooting had become unsustainable.
46:07And when we look at these photos, we start to understand why that is.
46:12You can see here these young men
46:15are facing other human beings and killing them.
46:21And they're seeing what they're doing first-hand, face-to-face.
46:29And what senior Nazis become really concerned about
46:32is the mental health of the people that are doing it.
46:36Never the people that are being killed, the people that are doing it.
46:41Because they know that that's something
46:46which is going to be impossible for them to deal with.
46:51They talk about it as a burdening of the soul.
46:56There's reports here of these soldiers getting nausea
46:59and nervous tension during the massacres.
47:02In many cases, killers suffered vomiting attacks
47:05or developed severe eczema or other psychosomatic disorders.
47:09You know, there's this sense that this whole generation
47:14will be corrupted forever,
47:16irreconcilably corrupted by what they've been asked to do
47:19in the name of the Reich.
47:23The other big factor was location.
47:30Everything that's happened so far, everything that I've looked at,
47:34has happened a long way from the heart of Germany.
47:37It's kind of this wild east in the Nazi imagination.
47:40It's a different place where different things can happen,
47:43different permissibility.
47:45We see here the absolutely indescribable scene of carnage
47:48and it's so public and it's so barbaric and it's completely grotesque.
47:52And even the Nazis find this kind of scene unconscionable.
47:57Killing hundreds of thousands, millions of people
48:00is something they can accept.
48:02But from their perspective, as things develop,
48:04there are ways that it should be done
48:06and this isn't it.
48:14And so they need to find a new means of mass murder
48:18that can be scaled up,
48:20that can be efficient,
48:22that can be secret
48:25and that can be civilised in their mind,
48:30much more closely aligned with this new Germany
48:33that Hitler wants to create.
48:37One of the men tasked with finding those new civilised ways of killing
48:41was an SS major called Herbert Langer.
48:48And this forest, called Kazimierz Biszkupi in the west of Poland,
48:52is what Langer was given to use as a laboratory.
48:57A team of researchers from across Poland
49:00is attempting to find the evidence left behind by Langer's experiments.
49:07Traces of mass graves can be seen in the Nazis' own aerial photographs.
49:16Anieszka Nieragko hopes they will help locate
49:19extraordinary new ways of killing.
49:26Extraordinary events described in eyewitness testimony.
49:36This is part of our team.
49:38Hello. Sebastian.
49:40Sebastian Różycki, Warsaw University of Technology.
49:43Nice to meet you.
49:44And Szymon. Hello.
49:46Hello. Szymon Ryński, Institute of Geophysics, Polish Academy of Sciences.
49:50Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you too. Thank you.
49:53So, what have we found here?
49:57OK, so, this is this depression here.
50:01This bit here? Yes.
50:03And you have a rectangular shape.
50:05And it could be the mass grave we are looking for.
50:09Just where we're standing now, if you want to say. Yes.
50:12From one perspective, it can look like just a regular mass grave
50:16from the wartime.
50:19However, we know from a single testimony we have
50:24of a pre-war vet, Polish vet,
50:27who was brought here as a prisoner, political prisoner.
50:31He was brought here with 30 other Poles,
50:34forced to assist the Germans
50:37in killing Jewish people from a neighbouring ghetto.
50:41So, people were brought in carts here, alive.
50:45The pits were already waiting for them.
50:49They were not shot.
50:51They were just...
50:53They were just covered with quicklime
50:56and burned inside the pit.
50:59So, they dug pits, put quicklime into the pits?
51:03Brought containers with water, brought people inside,
51:07brought containers with water and put the water inside,
51:11and that's what made the quicklime to react chemically.
51:15Boil? Boil.
51:17With pit-boiling people inside? Exactly, yes.
51:20And this is what we know from this testimony of a Polish vet.
51:24He was here from the very beginning until the end,
51:28forced afterwards with other Poles to bury the victims.
51:34So, right where we are here,
51:37in which people boiled alive?
51:40Correct.
51:42Do you know how long it took?
51:44According to Sienkiewicz, several hours.
51:49We think that is experimental killing site here.
51:53Right where we're standing? Yeah.
51:55They were just trying out different ways?
51:58Yeah, it's a different way of killing people.
52:01It's believed Lange killed 3,000 Jews here in a series of trials,
52:07which included not just lime pits, but mobile gas vans.
52:15It was just a pure technical, like, rehearsal
52:19of which method would be the most effective, efficient,
52:23as if the Nazis were just getting ready for the big task that was ahead.
52:28Meaning killing the European Jewry.
52:31Clearly, there's an intention as being consolidated
52:36from within the heart of the Nazi hierarchy.
52:39You know, from Hitler, from the top down,
52:41there's this idea of this intention is becoming more and more
52:44and more determined towards a final solution,
52:47which is about complete annihilation.
52:49But, of course, as an intention,
52:52that is meaningless without the means of achieving it.
52:55And that's what we see here,
52:57the actual practical means of achieving this.
52:59This is what it meant.
53:00This is how I understand it.
53:01They are testing, they are trying, they are drawing conclusions.
53:05Lime, quick lime, is expensive.
53:08Gas in wagons was also inconvenient.
53:12So it just drives Lange to a natural conclusion that it doesn't work.
53:17We need to think about something else.
53:19Yeah, yeah, yeah.
53:21And, of course, the thing is, you know,
53:24we're talking about experimentation,
53:26but the people that are being experimented on are real people.
53:30Yes, that is something we can't forget.
53:37Arieszka's team continues to search the forest
53:40for more of Lange's victims.
53:46But Lange himself concluded that the answer he was looking for
53:50did not lie in forests.
53:54He'd found the most efficient killing agent was gas,
53:58but it needed to be used in a completely different location.
54:07What Lange realised, in fact,
54:09was that the future of mass murder lay in the past...
54:15..in an old SS prison called Fort Seven.
54:19Here, in 1939, Lange had been part of a project called Aktion T4.
54:28T4 was created to purge the Third Reich of the disabled,
54:32what the Nazis called life unworthy of life.
54:37And the key to T4's efficiency, Lange recalled,
54:40had been to bring the victims to the means of killing,
54:44inside a special, secure facility.
54:48In this quiet old fort,
54:50Lange had improvised a whole new concept in mass murder.
54:58In this quiet old fort,
55:00Lange had improvised a whole new concept in mass murder.
55:07DOOR CREAKS
55:14What may be the world's first gas chamber.
55:25People were led up here.
55:27The doors were closed behind them.
55:30When they were all in,
55:32clay was put around the edges outside to seal it off.
55:36Tubes were put through openings in the door.
55:38Through those tubes, carbon monoxide was pumped from sealed bottles.
55:44And people would wait outside.
55:47When there was no more noise inside,
55:49people outside knew that everyone in here was dead.
55:56By the end of 1941, it's become clear that Hitler's ambition
56:00is to murder every single Jew
56:03across Nazi-occupied and Nazi-allied Europe.
56:06And in order to do that, he needs the necessary scale.
56:11And that's what this offers.
56:14It needs development, and it's the development of that idea
56:18which is what leads us to the death camps.
56:34So, these urns contain ashes from different camps across Europe.
56:43The one directly in front of me is from Helmau.
56:46Helmau is where Herbert Lange went directly from here.
56:50And it became the first death camp.
56:52And from that, a network was developed
56:55that led to the murder of millions of people.
56:58Millions of people.
57:00And it all started here.
57:04In this room.
57:28From early 1942, millions of Jews were taken
57:32from all across Nazi-occupied Europe
57:35and sent to extermination camps like this one.
57:41To become no more than ash and memory.
57:49It took just six months to get here
57:51from the first bullets fired in the east.
57:55How did that happen?
57:59THE DEATH CAMPS
58:07Of course, there was Hitler's poisonous ideology.
58:11But it needed more than ideology.
58:15It needed tens of thousands of ordinary people
58:20to betray a neighbour
58:23or turn their backs and say nothing
58:26to help round up and rob,
58:30to sign an order,
58:32pull a trigger
58:34or open a valve.
58:41To see others as sufficiently different from them
58:46to be killed.
58:56THE DEATH CAMPS
59:26THE DEATH CAMPS