All language subtitles for How the Nazis Lost the War 105 ENG

[intro music playing]

[people chanting] Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!
Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!

[narrator]
Hitler and his Nazis swept to power

on a brutal racist platform.

Hitler and Goebbels actually
truly believed that the Jews

and other groups were seen as lethal
to the Aryan race and the Third Reich.

Hitler had said
that the Jews were standing in the way

of racial purity and pure bloodline.

[singing in German]

There was this curious
new pseudoscientific

Nazi idea that the Aryan race,
you know, was better built, handsomer,

smarter, purer,
ethically better, morally better.

It was complete nonsense, but this becomes
a big part of the Nazi state.

[narrator] So the Nazis
decided to fight two wars simultaneously,

one external and one within.

They didn't see killing these groups
as a detraction from the war effort.

They saw it as fundamentally linked
for certain groups to be exterminated

so that they were able
to ideally realize this Aryan ideal.

[narrator] But this additional
ideological war would greatly

undermine the Nazis' ability
to win World War II.

Ideology got
in the way of good military sense.

[tense music playing]

[people chanting] Sieg heil!
Sieg heil! Sieg heil!

[gunfire]

[man] Fighting on the grand scale
across the vast Eastern Front,

past town after liberated town,
through cities whose shattered masonry

is the cracking wall
of Hitler's Reich itself.

[narrator] On July the 23rd, 1944,

Red Army soldiers
stormed the Polish city of Lublin,

overthrowing the Nazi occupiers.

On the outskirts of town,
they confronted a vast building

with a towering chimney,

high walls covered
in barbed wire, and an iron gate.

The soldiers couldn't comprehend
what they were looking at.

Was it a prison?

Or with its smokestacks and barracks,
was it a factory?

What the Soviet soldiers didn't know
was that they had entered

a Nazi extermination camp,

a death camp
for the mass genocide of Jews.

What they saw that day was so obscene

that it eclipsed anything
they had seen before.

One soldier reported seeing shoes
in the thousands, all sorted.

Men's, women's,
and children's shoes piled high.

A mountain of ash was nearby,
warm to the touch.

They opened the door to a gas chamber

and then a crematorium.

Most of the German SS guards had fled.

There were no signs of life, only death.

The Red Army had come across
their first Nazi concentration camp,

Madjanek.

[dramatic music playing]

[narrator] Three weeks later
on August the 10th, 1944,

the first newspaper report
on the camp was published.

Russian journalist
Konstantin Simonov described

what he saw as a medieval concept of hell.

Stories followed
in the international media.

W.H. Lawrence wrote in the New York Times,

"I have just seen the most
terrible place on the face of the earth."

[foreboding music]

[man] A world shocked beyond belief

sees the barbaric work
of the dying Nazi beast.

[narrator] As the extent of Hitler's
atrocities slowly dawned

on a disbelieving world,

Nazi Germany's SS Officers continued
on their genocidal mission.

As the Allies and the Red Army advanced,

what else would they discover?

What other atrocities were concealed
behind enemy lines?

[Dr. Stahel]
How many camps did the SS set up?

That is every kind of camp imaginable.

Labor camps, transit camps,
also death camps,

42,500 camps. That shows
that is an empire built on camps.

[speaking German]

[narrator] Hitler's tyrannical control
over Nazi Germany had given him

and his party the opportunity

to act on a long-held hatred of the Jews
and of communists.

Hitler had compared Jews
to maggots in a rotting body.

And the Nazi propagandist,
the spin doctor Joseph Goebbels,

saw them as nauseating,
an object of disgust.

The Nazis had a term they used
to describe human beings

who they believed didn't deserve to live:

Lebensunwertes Leben.
Life unworthy of life.

The phrase was applied
to those who were racially inferior,

sexually deviant,

as well as enemies of the state
or mentally impaired.

What we saw in the context of Nazi Germany
is that in the 1920s,

a lot of groups such as the Jews,

the Roma, the Sinta, Poles,
Slavs, homosexuals,communists,

were all subjected to various
different processes of dehumanization.

But what happened
is that throughout the 1920sand '30s,

and into the '40s,
those practices became more extreme.

And so the extermination of the Jews

in particular was seen as a necessity

in order to allow the Aryan Race
and the Third Reich to flourish.

[narrator] The eradication of Jews

was considered vital
to the Nazi war effort

and the new Germanic world order
they hoped to create.

[singing in German]

The Nazis believed
they descended from a master race

at the apex of the human species.

[Dr. Wawro] There was this curious
new pseudoscientific,

you know, Nazi idea that the Aryan Race,

you know, was better built, handsomer,

smarter, purer,
ethically better, morally better,

more self-- I mean,
it was complete nonsense, right?

But this becomes
a big part of the Nazi state.

[narrator] This superiority complex

would shape Germany's war
against the world.

The genocide, the Holocaust, was just as
important to the Nazis as the war effort.

They fundamentally at least presented
in the propaganda that these groups

were irreconcilable to the flourishing
of their effort and to the Third Reich.

They didn't see killing these groups

as a detraction from the war effort.

They saw it as fundamentally linked
for certain groups to be exterminated,

so that they were able
to ideally realize this Aryan ideal.

[narrator] We now know the extent
of the horrors the Nazis committed.

But how did this evil
shape the outcome of the war?

Hitler's messianic belief
that the German people

were the master race

ruled the Nazi party's thinking
when it came to war strategy.

In fact, Hitler's hatred of Jews
and the Nazis' conviction

that the German people
were superior to all others

would get in the way
of Germany's war effort.

The desire to see an end

of the Jewish race in Europe,

it was a huge charge

on the German military machine,

the German administration,

and also on Germany psychologically,

to have to deal
with these ideological issues

as well as fighting a military campaign.

[narrator] Under Nazi ideology,
friends became foes,

and foes need to be destroyed.

A god complex rarely ends well,

and for the Nazis,
this delusion would ensure their defeat.

The master race
would be crushed in World War II.

[reporter] A coalition of governments

could be formed to satisfy
all the major bodies.

With that in mind,
wily politician Franz von Papen

convinced President von Hindenburg
to choose Hitler as the new chancellor.

[narrator] There is no clearer
turning point in the course

of Germany's dark racial history

than on January the 30th, 1933,

the day Hitler seized power
in a landslide victory.

As Chancellor,
Hitler and the Third Reich could make good

on their obsession to purify Germany

of what they saw as the Jewish problem.

There was quite a bit of anti-Semitism
in Germany in the 1920s as it was,

but as we rolled into the 1930s
and into the 1940s,

the Jews in particular were described

as being parasitical onto the body politic
of the Third Reich.

[narrator] As Chancellor,
Hitler summoned his spin doctor

Joseph Goebbels to develop a strategy

to act on their pathological hatred
of Jews.

Goebbels, a master manipulator,

was key to the Nazis' success
in glorifying the Reich.

Goebbels played an essential role

in projecting an image of the regime

and of Hitler,

not just to the German people,
but worldwide.

And that was very modern for the day.

It showed great forward thinking
on the part of the Nazi party.

And it made Goebbels an essential element

in whatever success the Nazi party had.

[Rhiannon] He designed the sieg heil

and the hand movements

in a way that would be quite
intentionally exhausting.

So it meant that by the time audiences
in these huge mass gatherings

at Nazi rallies had finished
with their sieg heils,

it meant that they were more susceptible
to propaganda

being spouted by Adolf Hitler
and by Goebbels himself.

[speaking German]

[narrator in English] And Hitler knew
they had to win hearts and minds.

The German people were suffering.

Their humiliation
by the defeat of World War I,

the pain of an economic depression

where millions of Germans
were out of work, had bitten.

[people chanting] Heil! Heil!

[narrator] Goebbels and Hitler played
on this desperation and offered hope.

They promoted Nazi Germany

as a growing, prosperous and proud nation.

[speaking German]

[in English] But with only half a million
Jews in Germany,

Goebbels knew the German public

would need to be convinced that the Jews

had been the source of their misery,
the enemy within,

in order to fulfill Hitler's vision

for a racially pure Germany.

[Dr. Geoffrey]
Hitler's particular genius was,

was to take this kind of
latent suspicion of Jews,

particularly after there were
big migrations of Jews

westward during World War I.

So there was some resentment of these--

of these new Jewish immigrants there
and Hitler inflames this.

He appeals to his working class

and sort of untere Mittelschicht,

lower petty bourgeois,
lower middle class base,

and sort of riles them up
against the Jews.

But what I think
really allows him to launch

is the Wall Street crash,

the Depression that settles over Germany,
the economic crisis,

the feeling of desperation
felt by so many people,

the search for solutions,

and Hitler's identification
of this scapegoat,

that if we deal with this scapegoat,

we're gonna have this kind of rebirth
of German prosperity and greatness.

[narrator] Hitler's mantra was that
Germany's defeat in World War I

was because Germany was stabbed
in the back by socialists,

and in particular, Jews.

[Dr. Stahel] When Hitler comes out
with a message that says,

"We are the good people,
we're the people of--

people of culture and learning."

And our real demise is very simple.

It's not political calculations.
It's not that we didn't fight the war.

Well, it's not that
we chose the wrong allies.

It's not that we didn't have
access to resources.

It's the Jews.

It's the Jews at the end of the day.

And that subsequently is a theme,

not just in anti-Semitism,

but in how he styles subsequent enemies.

[narrator] One of the first steps
in this campaign

was a nationwide boycott
of all Jewish businesses.

Propaganda Minister Goebbels

ordered SS troopers to be stationed

outside Jewish stores.

State sponsored anti-Semitic graffiti
was painted on walls

and propaganda billboards were erected.

But it didn't wash with the German people.

There was always a fringe in Germany
susceptible to anti-Semitic propaganda

on the basis that the Jews
control international capital.

The Jews control business,
the Jews control the media,

the Jews manipulate our politics.

But, you know, intelligent Germans
didn't fall for this.

And, you know, there were so many Jews

that were embedded
in the German government,

the German civil service,
the German military had fought bravely

in World War I, been decorated for valor.

So I'd say most Germans
were not anti-Semitic at all.

[narrator] Many walked straight
into the Jewish grocers and stores.

Goebbels' plan was a flop.

The people were not on board.

It was going to take more than a boycott

to turn a country of civilized people
into terrorists.

Goebbels tried another tack.

He would use the power of the media

to broadcast Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda.

He seized control
of all German radio stations

and nationalized all German media.

Goebbels' plan
was to broadcast Nazi propaganda

into every home
and on every street in Germany.

The spin was that the Jews
have too much influence.

They run the banks,

the institutions that have too much power.

Joseph Goebbels really pushed hard
to have radios

be very cheaply available
so that all German households

could have access to them,

but then meticulously monitored

the types of news that were presented
on those radio broadcasts.

[narrator] At the same time,

the Nazis' SS Leader and chief of police,

Heinrich Himmler, established Dachau,

the party's first concentration camp.

Initially set up to incarcerate
enemies of the state,

SS Leader Himmler

created his first prototype

for the Nazis' extermination camps.

The camp would be dwarfed
by what was to come.

Himmler was one of Hitler's

most trusted allies.

Being in control
of the national administration

was a huge responsibility

and provided him with a huge power base.

Also having responsibility for the SS,

if you like, the party's
own political military force,

gave him the ability
to project his own power

throughout Germany
and also onto the battlefield.

The SS is not just running
an extermination program.

They're not just the terror organization
of the Nazi Party,

they have a whole economic empire
that they are building

and that they're going to be raising more
and more Waffen-SS

and arming those men
through their own private industry.

[narrator] The Nazi Party
accelerated their policy of control

over the lives
of Germany's Jewish population.

The Reich limited the number
of Jews allowed in public schools.

Nazis burned all books
The Reich deemed as un-German.

People with physical
and mental disabilities were sterilized.

The September 1935 Nuremberg rally

became a chance to enshrine in law

the persecution of Jewish people.

The so-called Rally of Freedom

was a massive Nazi propaganda event.

[speaking German]

Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels

delivered a savage and malicious attack

on the Jewish people.

He declared the Jews enemies of the state

and the assembled Nazis
responded with enthusiasm.

Heil! Heil! Heil!

Hitler then authorized
new legislation to be drafted,

a legal framework
for the Nazi anti-Semitism.

The new laws were called
the Nuremberg Race Laws.

The Nuremberg Laws

defined a Jew not
by a religious faith in Judaism,

but by blood.

The Nazis determined

that anyone with three grandparents
that were Jewish

could be classified as a Jew.

And as a Jew,

they were stripped of German citizenship,

marriage was forbidden between Jews
and other Germans,

and they were denied access
to an education.

With Goebbels, the spin master,

the wheels were now in motion.

The Nazis were building a racial state.

Hitler and Goebbels
actually truly believed that

the Jews and other groups were seen as

lethal to the Aryan race
or the Third Reich.

But Hitler had said that the Jews

were standing in the way of racial purity
and pure bloodlines.

[narrator] By late 1938,

the attitudes of ordinary Germans

towards their Jewish neighbors
had shifted.

Nazi propaganda
and fear was cutting through.

What once had been
considered radical measures,

like boycotting Jewish stores,

was now part of everyday life.

On November the 7th, 1938,

a 17-year-old Polish student,
Herschel Grynszpan,

fatally shot Ernst von Rath,

the third secretary
of the German Embassy in Paris.

When the young Jew was arrested, sobbing,

he told the French police
that being a Jew was not a crime,

and he had the right
to live and exist on Earth,

and not be chased like an animal.

When news of the diplomat's death
reached Goebbels,

his reaction was clear.

The German Jews would have to pay,

and pay they did.

The Nazi race war had begun.

Jews have no other service
other than competition.

I mean, the whole idea of Nazism is built

on this social Darwinist conception

of competition in the natural world.

But Hitler is adapting that
to the human world

and seeing races,
such as he understands races,

to be in competition,

and the antithesis
of the Aryan is the Jew,

and therefore
the Aryan must fight the Jew.

[narrator] Two nights later,

on November the 9th, 1938,

the sound of glass shattering

was heard throughout Germany.

Broken glass littered the streets

after the vandalism and destruction

of Jewish-owned businesses,
synagogues, and homes.

The crowds cheered the SS on.

This event was called Kristallnacht,

the Night of Broken Glass.

By the following morning,

7,000 Jewish businesses were destroyed.

More than 900 synagogues damaged.

Ninety-one Jews were dead

and thousands more injured or disappeared.

The Nazis deported around
30,000 Jewish men

to concentration camps.

The Nazis' grand plan to rid Germany

of its Jewish population

was a step closer to being realized.

The Second World War

gave the Nazis an opportunity

to act on their racist vision.

The mass extermination
of the Jewish people

would be carried out in the chaos of war.

But how the Nazis managed
the Jewish problem,

as they referred to it,

would contribute significantly
to Germany's downfall.

On January the 30th, 1939,

seven months before
World War II was declared,

Hitler made a speech at the Reichstag,

revealing how far the Nazis
were prepared to go

to purge Germany
of their Jewish population.

Hitler wasn't predicting the future

under the cover of a war
he would bring about.

He was planning the extermination

of the Jewish race in Europe.

The New York Times

published excerpts of Hitler's speech

but did not include his passage

on the annihilation of the Jewish race.

How could the international press
pay so little attention

to Hitler's naked threat
to wipe out the Jews?

The alarm bells should have been ringing.

But the Allies

couldn't comprehend
the depth of Hitler's madness.

And on September the 1st, 1939,

Germany invaded Poland.

As a result, the Allies
declared war on Germany.

[reporter] Germany invades Poland
and the Free City of Danzig.

[narrator] World War II had begun.

[reporter] ...had transformed
into the roar of gunfire.

[narrator] Germany's assault
on Poland was a bloodbath.

The German army took Poland
in less than five weeks.

The Nazis immediately identified

and rounded up Poland's Jews.

Many were killed or transported to Warsaw,

Poland's largest city.

Around 30 percent
of Warsaw's entire population

was crammed into a ghetto.

Four hundred thousand Jews

were forced into a 1.3-square-mile block.

In Germany, anti-Semitism was rife.

The tabloid newspaper, Der Sturmer,

writes that "The Jewish people

ought to be exterminated root and branch.

Then the plague of pests

would have disappeared
in Poland at one stroke."

A curfew is imposed
on Germany's Jewish population.

They are forbidden to be on the streets

after 8:00 p.m. in winter
and 9:00 p.m. in summer.

[reporter] Somewhere
in Germany, probably...

[narrator] On the battlefront,

having skirmished indecisively
with the British,

Hitler's next major target was Russia.

On June the 22nd, 1941,

Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa.

It was one of the largest
military operations in human history,

with over three million German soldiers

in three different offensives

marching towards the Soviet Union.

He doesn't refer to it
as the Soviet Union.

It becomes Jewish Bolshevism.

With the Russian Revolution
installing a Bolshevik government,

it seemed that this is
already the beginnings

of a state that is not
just opposed to Germany

because of strategic interests,

but that exists largely
to destroy Germany.

[narrator] But the majority
of the Soviet population was Slavic,

a detail Hitler dismissed.

To Hitler, anyone not Aryan,

not a member of the master race,

was immediately inferior.

Most of the Soviet population
is not Jewish,

but they are Slavs.

And that already puts them lower
on this racialized pecking order,

and allows Germans to think less of them.

And once you've dehumanized them,

you see how much easier it is
to treat them very poorly.

[narrator] "We have only
to kick in the door

and the whole rotten thing
will come down."

He believed the German army
would crush the inferior Russians.

And now we see the German armies,

more than three million men,

mobilizing for the great showdown
against Jewish Bolshevism.

[narrator] But Hitler underestimated
the challenges ahead.

Russia was a vast country,

with subzero winters,

terrain unfit for tanks.

Russia had the strategic advantage.

By 1941,

Germany was also fighting the Allies

in the West and the Mediterranean.

Against the advice
of his military strategists,

Hitler insisted on the Russia offensive,

confident Germany would overwhelm Russia

in a matter of months.

[Dr. Stahel] What is national
socialist military thinking?

The national socialist way
allows you to go further

in what is possible
because that's the language of the time.

And if you're not allowed
to voice critical views,

then it allows you to think
that the impossible is possible.

[narrator] Germany was unprepared

and not equipped
for the Russian offensive.

[man] The snow-covered truth about...

[narrator] The German army
had no winter clothing.

[reporter] Miles of roadside
ditches full of frozen Nazis...

[narrator] Many soldiers
died of pneumonia.

And as the battle progressed,

the German army
suffered massive casualties.

Hitler's deluded belief
in Germany's racial superiority

over Russian Slavs cost his army dearly.

He underestimated his enemy.

[reporter] For these men,

the goose step
has become a slow march to defeat.

The Germans would have done far better

in their invasion of the Soviet Union

had they not entered that space

with all of these racial ideas.

If they had entered as a liberating force
rather than a crusading conquering force,

but Hitler would never consider
any of these options.

[narrator] Hitler failed to recognized

that the Russian people
could have been an asset.

Instead,

the Germans made them a foe.

Ideology got in the way
of good military sense.

We've got to remember
that when the Germans

invaded the Soviet Union,

particularly the Ukraine in 1941,

that part of the Soviet Nation

hated Joseph Stalin.

But what Hitler did,
rather than turning them

towards the German nation,

perhaps even getting
that part of the Soviet Union

to fight on the Germans' behalf,

was actually to take them prisoner,

to put them into concentration camps

and eventually to execute them.

And therefore,

more broadly we see that ideology

had a great impact upon
the number of resources,

human resources,

and eventually industrial resources

that the Germans
could put into the battlefield.

[narrator] At every turn, Nazi ideology,

the belief in the Aryan master human,

stood in the way
of Germany ever winning a war.

In September,

four months after the Russian invasion,

the Nazis began killing Jews
in the Soviet Union.

Hitler sent in SS mobile killing squads,

the Einsatzgruppen,

tasked with exterminating
entire Jewish communities.

As the German army advanced,

the SS would follow,

rounding up the Jewish populations
in villages and towns.

One particular slaughter

in Babi Yar near Kiev

would later be described
as the largest single massacre

in the history of the Holocaust.

SS officers rounded up men,

women, and children.

They made them dig huge burial pits,

and then one by one,

SS soldiers shot them.

Almost 34,000 men, women, and children

were slaughtered over two days.

Some SS officers struggled,

affected by their role in the massacre.

News of the soldiers' torment
reached Himmler,

who sought another solution

to exterminate the growing number
of Jewish prisoners.

There was rampant PTSD

among many of the soldiers
who were charged

with committing these egregious crimes

and mass shootings
that ultimately ended in mass graves.

And so the establishment
of the concentration camps

and the death camps
was a way to further disassociate

how close many of the Nazi soldiers were
to the actual killing of the Jews.

[narrator] A plan was developed
to eliminate all European Jews.

On January the 20th, 1942,

Nazi Chief of the Secret Police
Reinhard Heydrich

met with high-ranking Nazi officials
at Wannsee in Berlin.

Under discussion
was the most efficient way

to exterminate
the 11 million Jews in Europe.

They talk about, "Look, we've got
to deal with the Jewish problem."

What is the Jewish problem?
Well, the Jewish problem arises

from the fact that the Germans
have invaded Poland

and the USSR,

where eight million
of Europe's eleven million Jews reside.

So by invading Poland and the USSR,

Hitler has raked
this massive population of Jews

into the German embrace.

What can you do with them?

Suddenly I've annexed 11 million Jews.

So the next step is,
well, we're gonna kill them all.

[narrator] Codenamed the Final Solution,

the Nazis would construct
extermination camps

with fixed gas chambers

to murder on an industrial scale.

Himmler's henchmen

developed an arm's length
cost-effective method

of mass murder...

that could kill thousands
of people in minutes.

In Poland, six extermination
or death camps were established.

[suspenseful music playing]

[narrator] By now,
news of the atrocities in Poland

was reaching the West.

In December 1942,

the British House of Commons

condemns the massacre of Jews.

During a broadcast on the BBC,

British foreign minister Anthony Eden
attacks Germany,

describing their
cold-blooded extermination

of Jews as bestial.

Parliament held a one-minute silence

for the victims of the Nazi Holocaust,

a tribute usually reserved
for deaths in the Royal Family.

While the Nazis' ideological war on Jews
is costing them on the battlefront,

it's also galvanizing the Allies.

For the Allies,

any peace agreement is now off the table.

It has become a hand-to-hand struggle

between good and evil.

In Poland, the killing continues.

Hitler is pouring vast resources
into the extermination camps.

It's difficult to put a number

on the personnel that were required

to handle the hundreds of thousands

of prisoners from the Eastern Front.

And of course, the extermination camps,

the Holocaust required
the building of great sites.

They needed security personnel,
there needed to be administration.

[narrator] The Nazis
are running parallel campaigns,

one a massive military operation,

and the other an ideological campaign

to ensure their master race.

This was unsustainable.

The irony for the Germans

thinking that they were kind of cementing

and solidifying the Nazi state
by purging the Jews

was that purging the Jews almost ensured
the destruction of the Nazi State.

Why? Well, I mean, consider for--
that in March of 1942,

80 percent of the victims of the Holocaust
were still alive.

In March of '43, 80 percent of the victims
of the Holocaust are dead.

So, this '42 to '43 is a killing spree.

A large fraction

of Germany's precious resources
needed for this multi-front war

are diverted into collecting Jews
from all around Europe,

transporting them to ghettos,

then transporting them again
to death camps,

then killing them,
then disposing of the bodies

and it's sort of--
I mean, it's a huge diversion

of logistical resources
for the Final Solution.

And what's happening in this period?

Operation Torch in North Africa,

the Battle of Stalingrad on the--
on the Eastern Front.

The Allied invasion of Sicily and Italy.

All requiring massive infusions
of reinforcements,

materiel, ammunition,

none of which the Germans can afford

because of these big diversions
made for the Holocaust.

[narrator] Germany was now suffering
immense casualties

at the hands of the Allies.

The Nazis' ideology
denied Germany a great resource

in manpower and expertise.

There is no question

that targeting the Jewish population
is harming the German war economy

from the fact that a lot of Jews
have very good education.

They have technical skills,
they have professional skills.

Those could have been utilized
for the war effort.

I mean, there are a lot of German Jews

who are wondering,
"Why am I being targeted?

Because I served in the First World War.

I won medals for Germany.

And I am a good German."

They would perhaps in a different world
have served the German army

and forwarded its aims,
as absurd as that might sound

given its national socialism.

But Hitler begins this process
and pursues it

even to the point of economic self-harm.

[narrator] In 1933,

Jews made up only one percent
of the population,

but they accounted for almost a third
of the country's Nobel Prize winners.

Jewish, German, and Hungarian scientists,

including Albert Einstein,

had fled to the West
fearing Nazi persecution.

[man] Twelve thousand to France,

twelve hundred to Spain,

three thousand to Czechoslovakia,

six thousand to America,
twenty-three thousand to Palestine.

[narrator] Some refugees
made crucial contributions

to the Manhattan Project in America,

the team that built the atomic bomb.

The Third Reich
drove their best and brightest

into the open arms of the Allies.

[sentimental music playing]

[narrator] By 1945,

the Allies were on the final road
to victory.

As the Allies advanced
through Poland and Germany,

news of the horror of the Holocaust
spread across the world.

The liberating Allies
encountered camp after camp.

Heartbreaking and shocking scenes

of unbelievable depravity
confronted the Allies.

Emaciated,

barely alive prisoners,

others dead,

mass graves,

gas and torture chambers.

Testimony of what the survivors
had endured

was unimaginable.

Their discovery had a galvanizing effect
in the final battles.

The Allies now approach the enemy

with a renewed conviction.

Once the Holocaust was recognized,

ensured that the Allies,

um, would fight Germany

to a point of unconditional surrender,

but knowledge of it
came at a very important time.

It was really necessary to ensure

that the moral justification for the war,

the reason why they were fighting

was reinvigorated and re-emphasized.

The horrors that certainly
the western Allies saw

once they had crossed the German border
and the Polish border

was something that was an extra motivating
factor at a particularly difficult time.

[narrator] In April 1945,

General Eisenhower,

American Supreme Commander
of the Allied Forces,

and his battle-hardened
Lieutenant General Patton

toured Ohrdurf camp in Poland.

According to one witness,

General Patton dashed
behind a shed and vomited,

he was so sickened by what he saw.

Eisenhower later said
it was indescribable horror,

overwhelming evidence of cruelty

and mass murder.

And in Berlin,
the perpetrator of this cruelty,

Adolf Hitler, the ideologue,

who had determined
his master race should rule Europe,

had retreated to his bunker,

protected from the Red Army's advance.

Facing certain defeat,

Hitler maintained
his delusional war on the Jews,

ordering the SS
to continue their slaughter

into the final hours of the war.

It was as if the military war
against the Allies was merely a sideshow.

The Allies continue to liberate
camp after camp,

death camps, labor camps,

work camps,

42,500 camps in total.

And as bombs dropped from above,

Hitler, determined never to surrender,

committed suicide
in his underground bunker

on the 30th of April.

A week later on May the 7th, 1945,

Germany surrendered.

History's deadliest war was over.

[man] The surrender of Hitler's
defeated soldiers

ended Nazi rule in Europe.

[dramatic music playing]

[narrator] To this day,

World War II casts a dark shadow
over history.

Hitler's savage racial war
killed around six million Jews,

two thirds of Europe's entire
Jewish population.

Millions of soldiers, political prisoners,

gypsies, homosexuals,

disabled people and civilians
were killed across occupied Europe.

Nazi spin meister Joseph Goebbels

has been much quoted
since his death by suicide in 1945.

He once said, "We shall go down in history

as the greatest statesmen of all time

or the greatest criminals."

He was right about the latter.

[mournful music playing]