Original subtitles

(narrator) Down this road on a summer day in 1944,

the soldiers came.

Nobody lives here now.

They stayed only a few hours.

When they had gone,

a community, which had lived for a thousand years, was dead.

This is Oradour-sur-Glane in France.

The day the soldiers came the people were gathered together.

The men were taken to garages and barns,

the women and children were led down this road,

and they were driven into this church.

Here, they heard the firing as their men were shot.

Then they were killed, too.

A few weeks later many of those who had done the killing

were themselves dead in battle.

They never rebuilt Oradour. Its ruins are a memorial.

Its martyrdom stands for thousand upon thousand of other martyrdoms

in Poland, in Russia,

in Burma, in China,

in a world at war.

(♪ military march)

Germany, 1933.

A huge, blind excitement fills the streets.

The National Socialists have come to power

in a land tortured by unemployment,

embittered by loss of territory, demoralised by political weakness.

Perhaps this will be the new beginning.

Most people think the Nazis a little absurd here,

too obsessive there.

But perhaps the time for thinking is over.

Adolf Hitler did not seize power.

He was offered it just as his voting strength was declining.

The politicians who made Hitler chancellor argued,

"We are hiring him."

Their figurehead was the ancient President von Hindenburg.

Communists and Socialists tried to take Hitler coolly.

"This wouldn't last," they said.

Conservative anti-Nazis took comfort from the fact

that their old war leader Hindenburg, still head of state,

was known to despise the vulgar little corporal.

(speaking German)

So, fertig?

Na, jetzt wird es fertig sein.

(all shout out "Heil!")

With mock solemnity, Hitler and his lieutenants

walked to the ceremonial opening of parliament.

The party's strength had been built up by revolutionary violence.

They had never imagined that they could take office legally.

When the old Reichstag building was mysteriously gutted by fire,

Hitler seized his chance to suspend all civil liberties.

His followers could hardly believe their luck.

The old Hindenburg, the symbol of apparent continuity, presided

as they turned office into power by acts of sham legality.

In March, when the Reichstag voted

to allow Hitler to govern without parliament,

Hindenburg made no comment.

The legal chancellor marched irresistibly

into the role of the legal dictator.

Hitler proclaimed the new Germany,

and meant it to last a thousand years.

The new Germany began to round up its enemies -

Communists, Socialists, impertinent journalists, even Reichstag deputies.

Antreten zum Arbeiten.

At Oranienburg concentration camp, just north of Berlin,

conditions were at first crude rather than brutal.

At this time the camps were run by the Sturmabteilungen - the SA.

They bullied more than they murdered.

From the first moment, Hitler unleashed his promised campaign against the Jews.

The SA organised boycotts of Jewish-owned shops.

The real point was to encourage the German people

to think and act anti-Semitic as a matter of course.

The outside world was horrified,

but there were those, including many German Jews,

who thought the anti-Jewish campaign the work of Nazi extremists -

something Herr Hitler would put a stop to when he felt more secure.

There was to be a cultural revolution, too.

German culture would be purged of the Jewish-Bolshevist taint.

(♪ singing in German)

Books flew into the fire.

Many of those who flung them were students and teachers.

And, as the sparks rose, the intellectuals fled -

writers and scientists -

to give their talents to Western Europe and America.

A hundred years before the German-Jewish poet, Heine,

whose books now went into the fire, had warned:

"Where one burns books, there one eventually burns people."

(peal of church bells)

Some of Hitler's most earnest followers found new ways to show loyalty -

they married or got married all over again under a Nazi ritual.

The Nazis had mass support among the unemployed,

but less among the organised workers.

The left wing of the party

wanted to start a workers' movement inside the factories,

but Hitler took a simpler course.

He granted the unions the May Day holiday they had always demanded.

Next day he abolished the unions.

Nazi supporters were basically middle class -

shopkeepers ruined by the Depression, clerks who had lost their savings,

craftsmen squeezed out by mass production.

(chants of "Sieg Heil!")

These were Hitler's worshippers.

(♪ congregation singing)

To this army of those who had come down in the world

belonged the small farmers, the peasants.

Hitler had enlisted them during the Depression.

Now he told them that their blood and soil were Germany's treasure.

He passed laws to give them safe possession of their fields

and he gave them bread.

The Treaty of Versailles in 1919

had bitten deep into Germany's frontiers.

Alsace-Lorraine and the Saarland had been lost.

East Prussia was cut off by the new Polish state,

Silesia cut in two,

Danzig, a League of Nations city.

(man speaking in German)

To every patriot, Germany could not be free while Versailles stood.

Hitler alone seemed the saviour foretold by the monuments of the border:

"Never, German, forget what blind hate stole from thee."

(♪ German national anthem)

"Wait for the hour that avenges the bleeding frontier crime."

Abroad there were some who admired the way

this new Germany stood up for herself.

ln America we've had reports against your new government,

and, in most cases, this has caused hasty demonstrations everywhere.

l can now say to you that the American people today realise

these stories are untrue and without foundation.

l find that there's a new, fresh vitality here in Germany

under your great leader and chancellor, Adolf Hitler,

of whom I'm a great admirer.

The new Germany will live

for you have the best centralised government in the world today.

(narrator) ln fact, the new Germany

was a bundle of different interests and grievances

held together by the strap of the National Socialist Party,

and the buckle of the strap was Hitler.

(Hitler speaking German)

Well, really, it was the only party that promised to get us out of the hole.

And their idea was principally

that that would only be possible

if we developed as a nation a team spirit, a solidarity,

and pulling all on the same rope,

instead of quarrelling about petty differences of opinions

in foreign politics and social politics, and so on and so forth.

(speaks German)

(translator) What did he promise?

Work and bread for the masses,

for the millions of workers who were unemployed and hungry at that time.

Nowadays, in our prosperous society,

work and bread doesn't mean anything any more,

but then it was an absolutely basic need.

And this promise, which wouldn't make any sense today,

then it sounded like a promise of paradise.

(speaks German)

(translator) All this seemed ideal ground for a prophet to say:

"l will lead you to the promised land. l will deliver you from evil."

Anyone who said that would be greeted with enthusiasm.

Of course, there were people who said this is a false prophet,

but who was to know whether they were right or not?

At that time no one did.

(♪ people singing "Silent Night" in German)

(narrator) Christmas, 1933.

One year of Hitler's Reich.

Peace on earth, goodwill towards men.

The concentration camps were full, parliament a rubber stamp,

political parties and trade unions abolished,

the Jews out of the civil service, a free press strangled,

personal liberties destroyed.

Germany lived under a permanent state of emergency.

Adolf Hitler's state was all-powerful, even almighty.

(church bells ringing)

But he still felt threatened.

He feared his old conservative rivals.

He feared the army.

And he feared those sections of his own party which were still revolutionary,

like the leadership of the storm troopers.

The army, too, hated the SA.

Hitler saw how he could conciliate the generals and clear his own path.

The head of the SA was one of his oldest comrades, Ernst Röhm.

On June 30, 1934, Röhm was arrested...

(gunshot)

..and shot.

His SA commanders and more than 100 others

dragged from their beds were shot, too.

(gunfire)

Murder exploded across Germany.

The killers were the new force in Germany -

the SS, Hitler's bodyguard -

which now became his personal instrument of terror.

Göring gave a press conference at the propaganda ministry.

Goebbels was the minister of propaganda,

but Goebbels had wisely stayed with Hitler at that time

because Göring hated his guts

and might have taken the opportunity to bump him off if he'd been in Berlin.

Göring had that press conference for the foreign press.

Before that the telephones had been cut off to all foreign countries.

Göring came striding in and said,

"l know you boys always like to have a story," -

he used the English word - "I've got a story for you all right,"

and described how that previous night and that morning

he and Hitler had acted against dissident forces,

both of the Right and of the Left,

that Röhm had been shot,

that a second revolution had been quashed.

He also made a rather obscure reference to General von Schleicher

who had preceded Hitler as German chancellor.

Then he left the room, came back again in a few seconds and said:

"It's been suggested that l didn't make myself quite clear

about General von Schleicher."

"He was shot dead this morning while resisting arrest."

30 June, '34, was a very, very important day,

because it became obvious that this government, as a government,

started to become a murderer.

You remember that they shot a great number of people

without any bringing them to court.

They just killed them.

And not only direct enemies of Hitler in that moment -

not only Röhm, the head of the SA -

but also other people who they felt were unpleasant.

And they just did it at the same time.

(♪ solemn dirge)

(narrator) That summer another rival disappeared.

President Hindenburg died in his bed on August 2.

While the old man was still breathing

Hitler had abolished the office of president,

proclaiming himself Führer and Chancellor,

head of state and government.

And before his corpse was laid to rest,

Hitler usurped his command over the army.

The armed forces paraded to swear a new oath.

Where once they had sworn loyalty to the constitution,

now they pledged themselves to Hitler, personally, by name.

- Ich schwöre bei Gott... - (men repeat sentence)

..diesen heiligen Eid...

(men repeat)

..dass ich den Führer des Deutschen Reiches und Volkes...

(men repeat)

..Adolf Hitler...

(men repeat)

(narrator) For German officers, an oath was almost physically real.

Hitler had trapped them.

Now they could not disobey him without disobeying the fatherland.

- Ich schwöre... - (men repeat)

- Ich schwöre bei Gott... - (men repeat)

Ich schwöre Adolf Hitler...

Adolf Hitler.

(men) Adolf Hitler.

Adolf Hitler!

(men) Adolf Hitler.

Adolf Hitler!

(train whistle)

Hitler kept up the pace. That same month the Germans had to go again to the polls

to approve his assumption of state and government powers.

By now the machinery of ballot management

by threat, propaganda, forgery and fraud was functioning excellently.

(crowd chant in German)

Hitler had a 90% Ja.

Four million still voted Nein.

Hitler proclaimed:

"For the next thousand years, there will be no other revolution in Germany."

The Nazis preached the doctrine of "folk-community",

of learning to be Germans one of another.

Winter Help, the main street collection for charity, was one symbol,

and the leaders of the party, for the benefit of the cameras,

showed themselves as folk comrades, too.

Göring displayed himself -

a war hero, a man who laughed and enjoyed life,

a moderating force in the party, it was believed.

Joseph Goebbels, the little propaganda minister,

whom the backstreet called "poison dwarf".

His sharpness was feared, but respected.

- Warum lachen Sie? - Die Dame spricht nicht Deutsch.

The deputy Führer, Rudolf Hess, a puzzling figure to the crowds.

The Nazi way of ruling was to be remote, but to seem not to be.

All classes were encouraged to relish the same meals -

the soldier, the boss, the worker, the banker.

The party believed in community,

but the industrialists stayed rich.

They had financed the Nazis when they seemed likely to win,

and now they submitted to Nazi direction without too much distaste.

Business was picking up fast.

The economy was reviving when the Nazis came to power,

but they reaped the credit,

speeding recovery with an enormous public works programme

for the unemployed.

Other nations, where mass unemployment persisted, watched Germany with envy.

The workless built the autobahns - the first motorways in the world,

binding a still-provincial Germany together.

The autobahns were not least for private pleasure,

in the fascist notion of Strength through Joy.

And they were presented less as a transport system

than as a triumph of national will,

linked with other prestige projects,

like the design for the Führer's new Berlin.

(woman) Voll Anmut und Gesundheit,

gläubig und ihrer großen Pflichten und Aufgaben bewusst,

sind sie glückliche Mädel unserer großen Zeit.

(narrator) These were members of Faith and Beauty,

older sister to the League of German Maidens,

the girls' equivalent of the Hitler Youth.

And so on.

All young people learnt party songs, drilled and danced and belonged.

(cheering)

Each year the farmers and their wives gathered at the Buckeberg

to meet their Führer at harvest time.

ln 1936 those who stood and waited for the leader numbered one million.

The leader was late.

He always arrived late - it built up tension.

(crowd cheer and shout "Heil, Hitler!")

(♪ band strikes up)

Then he came, letting the excitement spill over.

As he marched to the rostrum,

the masses were allowed to see him close and even to touch him.

Deliberately, women were placed in the front rows.

(translator) When he went up the mountain,

l couldn't understand how it was possible

that people could shout so much.

Yet when he came towards our group, l too came under his spell

and shouted "Heil!" just like everyone else.

But then when he was really close, greeting people to his left and right,

shaking their hand and exchanging a few words, and he also shook my hand,

l suddenly noticed that everybody in his immediate presence

was completely silent.

For the first ten minutes he wasn't a good speaker.

He just began warming up and finding the words.

But then he turned out to be a terribly good speaker, you know.

He just... l don't know the words in English.

Er massierte his public!

And the whole atmosphere

grew more and more hysterical.

He was interrupted nearly after every phrase by big applause,

and women began screaming.

It was like a mass religious ceremony.

Well, l listened to his speech

and l felt that more and more excited atmosphere in the hall

and for some seconds again and again l had a feeling,

"What a pity that l can't share that belief

of all those thousands of people,

that l am alone, that l am contrary to all that."

It was very funny. l thought, "He is talking all the nonsense l know,

the nonsense he always talked."

But still, l felt it must be wonderful

just to jump into that bubbling pot

and be a member of all those who are believers.

(siren / uproar)

(woman) One lady in our village, she went to Berlin

to a birthday reception for Adolf Hitler,

and she came back and told us, "The Führer shook hands with me."

And from this time on she was like a saint in our village.

(♪ "Adolf Hitler's Edelweiss")

Hitler's home life took place on a ledge in Bavaria, at Berchtesgaden.

These pictures are from the home movies of Eva Braun,

the discreet young woman who stayed with him till his death.

To the Berghof, for tea and tactics, came the elect.

Some a little ill at ease,

some genuinely intimate.

(♪ song continues)

Even in private Hitler had to correspond to the image sold to the public.

Adolf with children.

Adolf with dogs.

Adolf with a magnifying glass.

Adolf with friends.

Out for a walk, like a good Bavarian bourgeois on a Sunday.

ln this closed circle Eva Braun posed herself

as the girl who was natural, healthy, joyfully physical.

Up at the Berghof there were jovial, friendly bodyguards

and colder ones.

Heinrich Himmler, lord of the SS,

came with Heydrich, his terrible, handsome lieutenant.

On formal occasions, the SS Guard turned out.

They were the reality of the great tyranny centred in distant Berlin,

their hands soon to be red with the blood of millions.

For that reality, Hitler would leave his chintz chair,

his tea parties and his mistress.

The car was waiting at the foot of the steps.

(♪ brass band)

If Germany was to be strong again, Germany must re-arm.

A people frightened by war had to become once more familiar with arms,

to touch them,

to play at soldiers.

Germany had to train pilots.

Versailles forbade Germany an air force,

so the League for Air Sports used gliders

to train men, still officially civilians, for the future Luftwaffe.

(excited shouting)

And the army began to swell beyond the limits set by Versailles

from the moment Hitler became chancellor.

ln secret, it trebled its strength in two years.

(men singing)

Any foreign military attaché could see what was happening,

but the world did nothing decisive,

and in March 1935 Germany announced conscription -

a peacetime army of half a million men.

The new tanks came out into the open.

The first Luftwaffe squadrons flew past.

The new German navy was under way.

Hitler kept Europe bewildered.

Proclaiming Versailles extinct, he proposed a limit on armaments.

Britain, the first democracy to make a pact with the Nazis,

signed a naval agreement.

Hitler was reassured.

It might be safe to start tampering with the hated frontiers.

One part of Versailles had already been undone.

ln January 1935 the territory of the Saar,

the little coal-mining region which had been German before 1918,

voted overwhelmingly, and under international supervision,

to return to Germany.

Next door, the Rhineland remained a demilitarised zone.

Beyond dispute, this was part of Germany,

but to recover it would directly challenge the Allies

and, above all, France.

The troops rode over the Rhine bridges at dawn on March 7, 1936.

Secretly, the commanders were ready to bolt back across the river

if France showed any sign of fight.

But there was none.

The Rhineland city of Cologne and all Germany

went wild with relief and delight.

A part of German honour had been recovered.

Hitler had taken a chance and won.

Two years later, Austria, Hitler's birthplace, lay ripe for the taking.

Austrian Nazis were rioting for Anschluss - union with Germany.

To prevent a plebiscite on independence, Hitler marched in.

The German troops were greeted by hysterical crowds.

Vienna suffered a Jew-baiting terror which even Germany had not yet seen.

Austria became a province.

Germany's neighbours, appalled, uncertain, unprepared,

once again did nothing.

Czechoslovakia was no lost German province,

but an independent nation, allied to Britain, France and the Soviet Union.

Within its northern border lived the Sudeten Germans.

Hitler incited this minority, which had never been part of Germany,

to demand union with the Reich.

Europe prepared for war.

But though Czechoslovakia was ready to fight,

Britain and France gave way.

At Munich, in September 1938,

Chamberlain for Britain,

ltaly's Mussolini,

Daladier for France

signed with Hitler the treaty

which stripped Czechoslovakia of the Sudetenland

and left her broken and abandoned.

The Germans crossed the border,

welcomed as liberators by the Sudeten population.

At home, the German generals who opposed Hitler,

hoping that a rebuff over Czechoslovakia would fatally injure his prestige,

gave up their plots in despair.

Hitler sat with his troops in the field and planned ahead.

The Sudetenland was easily digested.

The next course could be taken fast.

The shrunken Czech lands and Slovakia lay helpless before him.

He struck on March 15, 1939.

The German troops reached Prague the same day.

There was no resistance.

The last democracy in Central Europe was wiped out.

The Czechs would never trust the West again.

The West trusted Hitler no more,

and realised at last that only force would stop him.

Berlin: more cheers, more worship.

Yet what was in the minds of those who cheered?

Very few wanted wars of conquest

or hoped, like Hitler,

for a German empire from the Urals to the Atlantic.

Most thought they were taking back what had been robbed from them

and restoring, not destroying, the order and unity of Europe.

(jubilant singing)

For these crowds it seemed that Hitler's statesmanship could never fail.

Others who stayed at home that night

feared a war was coming which might destroy Germany itself.

But now they saw no hope for a rising against Hitler,

they were left with the moral question:

"Should one resist a tyranny without hope of success?"

Well, l think it's difficult first of all to make up your mind

that you should do something against a government.

This is very rare, first of all.

Secondly, if it is extremely dangerous,

as it is in a dictatorship,

it's even more complicated because everybody likes his own life.

l think everything that came to us when we were living in Germany

came very gradually.

That was part, perhaps, of the way Hitler managed these things.

It came on us rather drip by drip,

rather like an anaesthetic, one could almost say,

and it was only when a specific thing that he did hit you personally

that you actually realised what was going on.

ln my particular case, l think l could say that it hit me personally

when the Jewish doctor of my children,

whom I'd always had, came...

He was a very busy man, but he seemed to be having always more time to spare.

l remember one night

he came and spent the night looking after my very sick child.

And in the morning the child was better

and when he left he asked me,

did l still want him to look after my children?

And l was tired and l said, "Well, for goodness' sakes, why not?"

And he told me that his clinic, his children's clinic,

which he had started in Hamburg was going...

He was going to be dismissed, and he'd had threatening letters

that if he laid his hands on Aryan children, he was in for trouble.

(narrator) ln November 1938 a Jew shot a German diplomat in Paris.

The Nazi leaders organised a reprisal.

Synagogues were burned and Jewish shops looted all over Germany.

On that "Crystal Night",

named for the smashed glass sparkling in the gutters,

thousands of Jews were thrown into concentration camps.

(speaks German)

(translator) Do you want to know how the night was?

If you want to know, l will tell you.

We were all shoved together, beaten and punched

and made to stand in ranks and be counted and so on.

Because I'd been a soldier l didn't find that so very difficult,

but the others who didn't fall in properly,

they were beaten right away.

And the most terrible thing was

when somebody grabbed hold of a big, strong man,

he said, "Don't grab me."

"What? l shouldn't grab you!" And he hit him.

And this man was immediately overpowered by three people - SS people.

A block was brought.

He was tied down to it and the camp commander said,

"The Jew lsrael," or "The Jew Itzik," - l can't remember exactly now -

"is sentenced to 25 lashes."

Then a huge man came,

an SS man with a huge horsewhip, and started to beat him.

The man just groaned a bit at first, but then he shouted, "Stop, stop!"

The commander said, "What do you mean, stop?"

"We'll start all over again, from the beginning."

But after three more lashes the blood was spurting,

then he stopped and salt was rubbed into the wounds,

or pepper, l can't remember.

The man was dragged away.

We never saw him again.

Of course, in '38, when the synagogues were burning,

everybody knew what was going on.

l remember that my brother-in-law, the husband of my sister Lena,

when he went in the morning after the day of the Reichskristallnacht -

"Crystal Night", or how you say -

he went by train to his office downtown

and between the stations of Savignyplatz and Zoological Garden

there is the Jewish synagogue,ja, and he saw that it was burning,ja?

And he murmured, "Kulturschande."

That is an insult for culture - "Shame to our culture."

Well, right away a gentleman in front of him turned his Revers

and showed his Partelabzeichen - party badge,ja?

And took out his papers that he was a man of the Gestapo,

and he had to show his papers, to give his address,

and was ordered to come to the party office next morning, nine o'clock.

(narrator) April, 1939.

The Wehrmacht prepares to celebrate Hitler's 50th birthday.

They hope for the usual "Führer weather" - a fine day.

The Führer drives through Berlin, under the Brandenburg Gate

and down the Siegesallee - the Avenue of Victories.

The army lining his route has increased sevenfold in just four years.

Among the Wehrmacht's 51 divisions,

the new panzer units - the instrument of blitzkrieg.

ln spite of appearances, the high command is by no means sure

that this army is fit for war... yet.

Hitler is ready to overrule them.

The word in every diplomatic conversation that summer was Danzig.

The free city, with its mixed German-Polish people,

had been separated from Germany

and made the responsibility of a League of Nations commissioner.

Danzig and East Prussia were now sundered from the Reich

by a strip of Polish territory - the Corridor.

Hitler was demanding the return of Danzig

and free access to East Prussia across the Corridor.

Poland refused.

ln March, 1939, Britain and France guaranteed her frontiers.

ln August, Britain promised to fight if Poland was attacked.

Once again, myths about the persecution of a German minority were used

to build up a case for armed intervention.

German refugees told piteous tales of Polish brutality.

(speaks German)

Nazi propaganda filmed them greedily for the cinema newsreels

throughout July and August.

Hitler's plan was to wipe Poland off the map.

But this might mean war with Soviet Russia,

and he was not ready for that.

His foreign minister, Ribbentrop, flew to Moscow on August 23

to sign the Nazi-Soviet Pact.

Poland's fate was sealed.

The new alliance stunned the unsuspecting West.

(♪ newsreel intro)

Germany gloated.

(reporter speaking German)

You will have read the report about the agreement reached

between Russia and Germany, which has surprised the world.

As the life of all nations depends, in the last resort,

upon mutual respect for one another's rights

and reasonable confidence that they can each live their life in their own way,

l would earnestly hope...

..which cannot be retraced, reason may yet prevail.

(narrator) The German newsreels

tried to show Britain distracted, still uncertain.

(reporter speaking German)

(reporter continues in German)

(narrator) One young German left England for home.

(man) l had a girlfriend whom l wanted to marry

and l said, "Well, I'll dare go home."

When l came to Cologne l read the first German newspapers,

and l knew at once that there was great danger of a war now.

The tone of the German press was absolutely hysterical.

And l thought what a fool l was.

l had just gone home in that moment!

(narrator) All over Europe the reservists got their telegrams.

ln the last hours of peace, the soldiers put on uniform with a tired grin.