Original subtitles

In 1939, the Führer's declaration of war

heralds the rise of one of the most fanatical figures

within Hitler's inner circle.

SS boss Heinrich Himmler.

[Guy] The outbreak of war gives Himmler the opportunity to realise all his dreams,

all his twisted, racial thinking for the future of Germany.

These can all happen, in his view.

To make his dreams a reality,

Himmler has within his SS the most ruthless Nazi of them all.

His name is Reinhard Heydrich.

He is utterly ruthless, manipulative, a very clever operator

and a useful man to have if you're trying to set up a police state.

Heydrich and Himmler make a formidable pair.

But as they push forward their radical plans,

inner-circle rivals are already plotting to break up the deadly partnership.

Göring will look at Himmler and think, you know what?

Your boy's doing really well here. He's going to be trouble for you at some point.

And, of course, Bormann will be taking subtle credit.

It is a very, very old political game

and Bormann is absolutely masterful at playing it.

And Heydrich's meteoric rise will make him a target

both inside and outside Hitler's inner circle.

This is the inside story of Hitler's henchmen,

the power struggles, blind ambition and fawning sycophants

that would create a monster and fuel the most brutal horrors of the Third Reich.

September 1939.

The invasion of Poland is underway.

And for Hermann Göring, head of the Luftwaffe,

the most powerful man within Hitler's inner circle, everything is going to plan.

[Guy] The Luftwaffe is incredibly successful.

It pummels Polish towns and cities, it destroys Polish units.

It is, you know, an essential part of the blitzkrieg,

and Göring takes full credit for it.

In this film,

penetrating pictures

give the German people

a powerful impression of the Poland campaign

and show that every enemy we encounter

will be struck and destroyed.

This is a complete turn around for Göring.

At the beginning of that year, he had been openly against

Hitler's expansionist plans for the Third Reich.

Göring is a real sceptic of this entire enterprise,

but it goes really, really well and it goes well very quickly.

And this gives Göring the confidence to say,

yeah, this is a great idea. I'm all up for it.

But there are others in the inner circle

who also realise that Poland is their opportunity to shine.

Heinrich Himmler, the fanatical boss of the SS,

is looking to set in motion a radical plan to Germanise occupied Poland.

Himmler is an ideologue.

In many ways, he's kind of more ideologically driven than Hitler,

if such a thing is possible.

He's anti anyone who's not Aryan and Teutonic.

ILLUSTRATIONS

Himmler really is a dyed-in-the-wool National Socialist ideologue.

You know, he's got a vision of the future Germany and it's a frightening vision.

It's a vision that the Führer shares,

as he celebrates his victory from the Reichstag.

His plan are clear and uncompromising.

[archive, German]

The Führer's words confirm for Himmler

that Poland is where their shared ideological dreams can become a reality.

Himmler plans to turn a large part of Polish territory into Lebensraum

or "living space" for a new German master race.

He doesn't just want to get rid of the Jews,

he wants to get rid of the Slavs as well.

He wants to get rid of the handicapped as well.

He's got this idea, you know, I'm going to Aryanise German society.

REPRODUCTION OF SUPERIOR PEOPLE

I'm going to Germanise all the places that we occupy.

Himmler's goal is to expel millions of ethnic Poles and Jews from western Poland

to make way for German settlers.

It's a radical project motivated not only by Himmler's fanaticism

but also by his appetite for power.

Once they've all been cleared and this has become Germanified,

and they've taken over their Lebensraum,

it is the SS that are going to be kind of running the show.

So as they move into occupied territories,

so Himmler's own role and authority increases in tandem.

And Himmler has his very own example of Aryan supremacy to do the job.

Reinhard Heydrich is Himmler's second-in-command

and head of the infamous SD, the SS secret intelligence agency.

While Himmler fixates on detail and doctrine,

he's the one that gets things done.

[Robert] Well, Heydrich is a cold, pragmatic ideologue.

He's not a dreamer.

He's someone who tries to implement that ideological vision.

[Guy] If you want to draw the cartoon version of an evil SS man,

you're going to draw Heydrich.

Heydrich is tall, he is blond. Certainly he's clever.

He's a brilliant fencer and he's deeply ambitious.

Such is Heydrich's reputation, even Himmler needs to watch his back.

Heydrich was absolutely ruthless and really knew how to terrorise people.

He managed to put fear both into friends and foes alike.

He could make people's blood run cold just by being in the same room.

But when Himmler first met Heydrich, he was a man without a future.

Back in 1931,

while Himmler was building up his new paramilitary organisation, the SS,

Heydrich was unemployed and desperate.

[James Holland] Before Heydrich joins up with Himmler, this is a man in disgrace.

After all, he'd lost his officer's commission in the navy.

The cause of Heydrich's disgrace was an embarrassing love triangle.

[Robert] He was simultaneously engaged to two women,

and one of the women's fathers

was a very influential man with good contacts to the senior naval command.

Heydrich made the mistake of dumping the wrong girl...

...and her powerful father demanded that her honour be restored.

Heydrich was dismissed as a result,

not so much of the dual engagements but because he treated the case with contempt,

which was deemed to be unacceptable for a German naval officer.

WAGGONBAU A.G. BERCHING, FOR RENT OR SALE ALONG WITH VILLA AND RESIDENCE

Heydrich's timing could not have been worse.

With the onset of the Great Depression,

he was left high and dry with zero career prospects.

But his favoured fiancée provided a lifeline.

The woman who he was going to marry, Lina von Osten, had unlike him,

been a supporter of the Nazi movement for quite some time.

It was her who introduced him to the movement

and also who encouraged him to seek the interview with Himmler.

Himmler was looking for someone to create

a new SD secret intelligence service as part of his SS.

Heydrich had never worked in professional espionage

but he didn't let that hold him back.

What experience does Heydrich have about intelligence networks? None.

All he has done is read as a boy some detective fiction and some spy novels.

And he uses his knowledge of those thrillers

to impress Himmler as to how an intelligence service would work.

Luckily for Heydrich,

Himmler, the wannabe soldier, was dazzled by the former naval officer's swagger.

[Robert] Himmler is someone who aspired to be a soldier

without ever having been a soldier, and is impressed by that military bearing,

that military language, the physical appearance,

and he decides to charge Heydrich with the task of building up the SD.

Having successfully completed his first act of deception,

Heydrich was now Himmler's new spymaster.

That is the limits of his experience, but it's enough and, as we shall see,

Heydrich learns on the job like no one else.

In Heydrich, Himmler had found a ruthless right-hand man

prepared to do the dirty work others couldn't stomach.

He's sublimely efficient, Heydrich. He's efficient because of his cruelty.

In 1934, while Himmler drank tea with the Führer,

it was Heydrich orchestrating a bloody purge of the SA,

the Nazi Party's original paramilitary group.

What takes place, of course,

is one of the most infamous acts of political violence ever known.

It's called the Night of the Long Knives and, boy, were those knives sharp.

[gunshot]

It's believed in just three days, between 150 and 200 people were murdered.

But the principal target was the SA leader, Ernst Röhm.

Rohm is, in fact, the godfather to one of Heydrich's children.

So they are willing to sacrifice a close personal friend

for their own political and personal gains.

The Night of the Long Knives would establish the SS

as the Nazi Party's foremost agency of security, surveillance, and terror...

...making the diminutive figure of Himmler Hitler's new leading henchman.

But it's Heydrich who becomes the one to watch.

In many ways, the extraordinary success of the SS can only be explained

because Himmler and Heydrich worked together so well.

They have complementary talents,

one is someone who manages to cultivate

very close relations within the Nazi leadership,

the other one is clearly a very efficient and talented administrator of terror.

Five years after the elimination of his SA rivals,

Heydrich is now in charge of every police and security agency within the new Reich.

And it's as the Nazi regime's top policeman

that he receives a short but highly sensitive memo

from the Führer's second-in-command, Hermann Göring.

It instructs him to begin work on a solution...

GET RID OF JEWS

...to Hitler's so-called Jewish problem,

by means of emigration or evacuation...

THROUGH EMIGRATION OR EVACUATION

...in the most convenient way possible.

[James Holland] Heydrich in 1939 is still very much in his thirties.

He's still comparatively young. He's a rising star.

So, when he is given an order to start looking into the Jewish question,

of course, that is a massive feather in his cap.

And you know that someone like Heydrich is ambitious enough, ruthless enough,

motivated enough that he won't disappoint.

Heydrich has in effect been chosen by the Führer himself

to make the Nazi dream of a racially pure Germany a reality

but as the army prepares to invade Poland,

he will soon acquire almost two million more Jews

for which there appears to be no definitive plan.

Orders from the top, if they're particularly strong,

they're quite often quite vague.

Hitler never says, I want them all to be executed.

He just says, we've got to get rid of all the Jews.

Now, what does that mean? Who knows? You know, just sort it out.

And the interpretation of those orders is left to Heydrich.

As German troops pour into Poland, it is Heydrich who has been tasked

with securing and preparing the new territory for Germanisation.

To do this, he has formed special SS task forces or Einsatzgruppen

to terrorise the civilian population into submission.

[Sönke] The task of the Einsatzgruppen in the Polish campaign

was to decapitate the Polish society, you have to kill the Polish elite,

you have to kill the priests, you have to kill the professors,

the politicians, the economic leaders, and kill them in the tens of thousands.

This was the task of the Einsatzgruppen.

But this is merely groundwork for more systematic measures

to make Himmler's dream of new German living space a reality.

Heydrich's men have new orders.

Millions of ethnic Poles are to be moved east to make way for German settlers.

And as for Poland's Jews, their fate is even less certain.

They are all to be corralled and held inside urban ghettos...

DETENTION INSTITUTION

...ready for future deportation.

They are suddenly marched out at gunpoint in the middle of the night

with every other Jewish family

with one suitcase for all their belongings.

They're put on these long train journeys to big centres in occupied Poland,

where they're crammed into tiny, tiny rooms,

literally crammed into them like sardines.

It is inhumane, it's disgusting, and it's barbaric.

By early 1940, hundreds of thousands of Jews

have been crammed into ghettos

inside a newly created zone known as the General Government.

Heydrich has no moral or practical concerns for their living conditions,

partly because it is only supposed to be a temporary measure.

But the impact of these huge forced migrations

is upsetting other senior Nazis.

Hans Frank is the powerful new Nazi boss of the General Government

which includes the Polish capital, Warsaw, and its second city, Krakow.

He is not happy about Heydrich and Himmler

using his new fiefdom as a holding station for their Jews.

[Robert] Frank becomes increasingly concerned

that his General Government would become,

as he calls it, a dumping ground

for undesirables from other occupied territories.

Frank also happens to be an old friend of Hermann Göring,

Himmler's inner-circle rival.

Himmler will refer to Göring as the king of the black markets,

he's always got his snout in the trough, whereas Göring will look at Himmler

and write him off as this sort of priggish, schoolmasterly, bourgeois,

you know, self-denying sort of shrew of a man.

You can't get greater differences between two individuals.

When Göring hears that SS activities

are threatening the economic viability of the General Government,

it's the perfect opportunity to throw his weight around,

so he calls Himmler and his old friend to a meeting.

[Frank] The real problem was Hans Frank had been given this job

of running the General Government in Poland,

and, of course, Himmler was given the task of Germanising Poland.

We have these disputes between Frank on the one side,

who's saying, look, stop dumping all these people on Poland,

and Himmler saying, look, where else are they going to go?

As the Führer's number two and Minister of the Economy,

Göring forces Himmler to agree that no further deportations

can happen without Frank's consent.

For Himmler, it's a frustrating reminder

of who holds sway within the inner circle.

Heydrich will have to find a new plan for Poland's Jews.

As for Göring, his priorities are on the frontline

as a new theatre of war is about to open.

Emboldened by his success in Poland,

Hitler decides to strike at his enemies in the west.

It's now their turn to experience

the devastating effectiveness of Göring's Luftwaffe.

It started in early April with Norway and Denmark,

and then on the 10th May 1940,

the Wehrmacht attacked the western countries

of France, Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands.

And flying combat missions over western Europe

is none other than Reinhard Heydrich.

Unlike his boss Himmler, the frustrated soldier,

Heydrich satisfies his craving to see real military action.

This was an incredibly risky undertaking

for a man of his immense importance and position within the Third Reich.

And it says a lot about his desire to prove

he wasn't just a man who could fly a desk but he was a man who could fly a plane,

he could take risks and he was a kind of alpha male, as we call them today.

Once again, the Luftwaffe's close support of the Army

is instrumental in defeating the French and the British.

In just six weeks,

Western Europe is under Nazi control and Göring is the man of the moment.

[Sönke] Göring became, after the fall of France,

the highest decorated and highest rank of all German military.

Decorated as Nazi Germany's new Reichsmarschall,

Göring's position as the Führer's successor appears unassailable.

The Nazi occupation of France has also potentially provided

a somewhat far-out solution for Heydrich's Jewish problem.

The island of Madagascar.

[Robert] Heydrich sees it as a huge opportunity

in using the former French colony of Madagascar

as a new Jewish home.

Heydrich's plan is to ship all of Europe's Jews almost 13,000 kilometres

to this remote island off the east coast of the African Continent.

It's a terrifying sign of the cruelty

Heydrich is prepared to inflict on millions of people.

Of course, it is always assumed

that because Madagascar has a very inhospitable climate,

particularly for Central Europeans,

that many people would die in the process but that is part of the calculation.

But there is one major obstacle to his plan.

The British Navy.

The plans for Madagascar are very much dependent

on a German victory over Britain.

As long as Britain is still in the war,

the sea passage to Madagascar cannot be guaranteed.

Göring, flying high on his success in France

is about to take his biggest gamble yet.

He promises the Führer that he can bring Britain to her knees by air power alone.

[Richard] Göring is very keen that the Luftwaffe should be seen to do this.

Somehow or other, it will put

the Luftwaffe on a pedestal above the army and the navy.

And at the same time, enhance Göring's own reputation with Hitler.

Göring throws the full force of his Luftwaffe against the enemy.

But his pilots meet unexpectedly stiff and well-organised resistance.

They didn't understand the British air defence system,

they didn't understand the radar system and how it was organised,

so they didn't quite get where the weak points were,

so therefore it was an intelligence problem.

For months, Göring personally assures Hitler that the RAF will be broken.

But as the conflict wears on, it is also clear that the Luftwaffe was never ready

for long-range operations over the Channel.

And of course, there was the problem

that Germans just don't have long-range fighters and long-range bombers.

So as long as the British don't lose their nerve, it was no chance whatsoever

for the German air force to win air superiority over Britain.

For Göring, it's a personal disaster.

Having promised so much,

all he can deliver is Nazi Germany's first major military failure.

It's the start of a growing distrust between Hitler and Göring,

a growing distrust of Göring's boastfulness.

Hitler's going to ask himself the question,

how much longer can I put up with Göring,

how much longer can I entrust him with things that I thought he could do?

By October 1940, the Battle of Britain is all but over.

For Heydrich, the Madagascar plan is effectively shelved.

But Göring's failure will lead to new possibilities for the SS

as Hitler focuses his attention back towards the East.

With Britain standing defiant, the Führer decides

that the Soviet Union now holds the key to Nazi supremacy over Europe.

Hitler's decided if you can defeat the Soviet Union, you have huge resources

then to turn against Britain, and anyway if you defeat the Soviet Union,

Britain has no more hope in Europe, so Britain will reach an agreement.

For Göring, invading the Soviet Union while Britain is still a threat,

is strategic suicide

but since his own military failure, his credibility is at all-time low.

For Göring, the British Empire is really the critical enemy at the moment.

Göring makes this clear to Hitler, but never actually pushes it.

He is at a point at which he realises if he pushes it any further, he's in trouble.

Himmler and Heydrich, on the other hand, have a rather different view.

On the 22nd June, 1941, the invasion of the Soviet Union

codenamed Operation Barbarossa begins.

For Himmler and Heydrich, this is the battle they've been waiting for,

the showdown with what they regard as the arch-enemy of National Socialism.

What happens in the evolution of Nazi ideology and Hitler's own ideology

is this merging of

Bolshevism and "the Jew" together as a combined menace.

So, it becomes the Bolshevik Jew.

And antisemitism runs absolutely at the heart of it.

Russia's' vast territory also offers limitless living space

for their new German empire and they will give no quarter in trying to win it.

[Robert] This war against the Soviet Union will be

fundamentally different from all the other wars.

Certain rules which could not be broken quite simply do not apply

in the ideological war that will be waged on the Eastern Front.

Himmler predicts that millions of Russian Slavs will die through starvation alone

as the German army tears through Soviet territory.

In its wake, the Einsatzgruppen follow.

And it's soon clear that Heydrich has ordered

a terrifying escalation of violence against the Jews.

[Robert] Very quickly, Heydrich's task forces

begin killing Jewish men of military age.

And then very quickly thereafter start to kill Jewish women and children as well.

At this point, Heydrich is moving from

a territorial solution to an implementation of genocide.

Heydrich is proving to be

the inner circle's most committed follower of his Führer's creed of hate.

And just weeks after the invasion, he visits an embattled Göring

to sign off on what would become known as the Final Solution.

[Richard] Heydrich comes to Göring with a document which will authorise Heydrich...

THE JEWISH QUESTION

...to undertake the "Final Solution" to the Jewish question.

The term "Final Solution" is deliberately vague

but what is clear is that Heydrich wants to be in control of it.

Heydrich is looking for assurances from the Nazi leadership,

essentially from Hitler via Göring,

that it is him, not the army, not the civil administrators,

who is fully responsible for finding that solution.

A solution that is becoming bigger by the day.

Heydrich, the man who only joined the SS because he needed a job,

is now stepping out of Himmler's shadow as he takes responsibility for the policy

that lies at the heart of the Führer's ideological ambitions.

But ironically, it's antisemitism that almost ended his career before it began.

When Heydrich was only one year into his new job,

a file claiming the young SS officer was Jewish arrived on the Führer's desk.

It revealed that Heydrich's paternal grandmother

had remarried a man with a supposedly Jewish surname.

These accusations that he's tainted, quote/unquote, with Jewish blood,

which, of course, in the Third Reich is the worst thing that you can have,

are a serious thing.

The story had originally been used

to tarnish the reputation of Heydrich's father, Bruno Heydrich,

a well-known musician and composer.

Even though this idea that Heydrich has any Jewish ancestry

had been shown to be nonsense by his father many years before,

it still dogs and haunts Heydrich.

Though Heydrich could easily show he had no Jewish blood,

he's well aware that inside the inner circle,

even unfounded rumours are dangerous.

Therefore Himmler's support was crucial.

[Guy] There's no doubt that Heydrich does need Himmler's support.

You know, we see repeatedly within the Nazi regime

how it doesn't matter whether, you know, an accusation is true or false,

it will be used against you anyway, because the Nazis make up their own truth.

Heydrich knows this because he's one of the people who does that.

Now, eight years later, armed with the Führer's authority,

Himmler's protégé is proving that he is capable of anything.

Heydrich's Final Solution has evolved into a campaign of mass murder,

as his task forces develop their brutal methodology.

They would round up predominantly Jews from a given area.

They would march them to a wood or a nearby field

and they would get them to dig a deep trench.

They would shoot them in the back of the head.

[gunshot]

The next group would then have to stand at the edge of the pit,

they would be shot and they would fall on top... and so it would go on

until the pit was filled, and then they would cover it over with lime and soil.

And that was repeated right across the whole of the German front.

It's a genocide instigated not only by fanaticism

but also a cold, calculated bid for power.

[Robert] Himmler and Heydrich are certainly convinced

they will be rewarded for implementing what they consider to be Hitler's will.

Tens of thousands of Jews are now slaughtered at a time.

[gunshots]

And sites such as a ravine near the Ukrainian capital of Kiev

would become forever synonymous with mass murder.

The mental image that we all have of the Holocaust

is, fundamentally, the railway tracks

which lead under that famous building at Auschwitz.

But the Holocaust really began with executions like Babi Yar.

Over just two days in September 1941,

more than 33,000 Jews were systematically shot dead and thrown into the abyss.

And how the SS leadership justify these atrocities

both to their men and themselves is truly horrifying.

People like Himmler and Heydrich would have rejected our western moral code

as weak and decadent, as something of the past.

Their commitment was primarily to the Germanic race.

So, what we consider heinous crimes,

from their point of view, was a service to their people.

But for all of Himmler and Heydrich's commitment to the cause,

the Führer has decided that once Russia is defeated,

control over this vast new territory will be given to civilians, not the SS.

Hitler is always careful not to concentrate power into too few hands,

and even though he is extremely grateful to them,

he is actually trying to limit the power of the SS

and other agencies run by Himmler and Heydrich.

But Heydrich is far from giving up.

He has already in his sights the perfect opportunity to gain real political power.

His target, the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia in Czechoslovakia.

For the Nazis, the Protectorate of Bohemia -Moravia is particularly important.

In an economic sense,

there are major armament productions in the Protectorate

and with the beginning of Operation Barbarossa,

we see a massive increase in resistance activities.

Czech saboteurs are severely damaging the Nazi war effort.

For Heydrich, this is a job for the SS but they need an ally,

someone who has the Führer's ear, to help make their case.

[Guy] There's one man that Heydrich has to impress

in order to take over Bohemia and Moravia.

The man he has to impress is Martin Bormann,

who is head of the Party Chancellery

and is basically in the shadows behind Hitler all the time.

That's why he's called the Brown Eminence.

I think that you have to realise

just about every member of the inner circle's

route to Hitler is through Bormann.

Heydrich mobilises his intelligence network to compile reports

to disparage and denigrate the civilian administration in Prague.

What they are saying is that the civilian administrators

in charge of these territories are unable to control the situation.

[Guy] And he is desperate to, you know, seize control of a place like that

and literally grab it by the neck and strangle it

until all the people start doing as they're told.

Bormann needs little persuading,

as Heydrich's promotion will give the wily bureaucrat

a way to control Himmler's rising star.

[Guy] If you look at Hitler's inner circle and you look at how Bormann behaves,

he is incredibly cunning.

He knows that if Heydrich goes to Prague,

that means he will be reporting directly to Hitler, but that actually means

he's reporting directly to Hitler through him, Martin Bormann.

When Bormann presents Heydrich's report, it has the desired effect.

Hitler is furious. The Czechs, he says, need to be taught a lesson.

Heydrich is coming to Prague.

On his arrival, Heydrich wastes no time getting to work.

Heydrich cracks down very hard on the resistance

as soon as he arrives in the Protectorate.

[Guy] Heydrich's strategy is brutally effective.

Now, the common perception is, actually, what he just does

is he just rounds up everybody and shoots them and that's how he takes control.

But as well as that ultimate stick, he also offers a lot of carrot.

So he improves the rations of workers.

This is going to make people happy.

Essentially, what he wants to achieve is a situation

in which the labourers in the armament factories and other important industries

will no longer succumb to the propaganda of those inciting them to go on strike.

It's an incredibly devious plan

because he is taking away with one hand and he's giving with another.

+(not german)

Heydrich's strategy soon yields results.

The Czechs appear to have been brought to heel

and production figures are back up.

When Heydrich returns to Berlin, he is the man everyone is talking about.

Goebbels, the Nazi head of propaganda

and one of Führer's closest confidants, is particularly impressed.

[Thomas] As Goebbels wrote into his diary,

he managed to play cat and mouse with the Czechs

and really managed to get them under his thumb.

It was really then Heydrich was increasingly seen by other people

within the Nazi hierarchy as a leader in his own right.

While Heydrich is personally congratulated by the Führer,

Himmler's rivals watch with interest.

Everyone wants a little Heydrich stardust.

It's like a kind of soap opera, Hitler's inner circle.

They're constantly looking at who's doing well and who's doing badly,

and Göring is watching Heydrich's supreme efficiency.

He can sort of look at Himmler and think, you know what?

Your boy's doing really well here.

He's going to be trouble for you at some point.

And, of course, Bormann will be taking subtle credit.

He's very much associating himself with success.

It is a very, very old political game.

And Bormann is absolutely masterful at playing it.

Himmler's inner-circle rivals

see Heydrich's success as a way to break a formidable partnership.

[Robert] Heydrich now reports directly to the Führer.

Some people perceive that as the beginning of a rivalry between Himmler and Heydrich

in the sense that Heydrich is becoming a lot more independent.

Heydrich is fast becoming a leading member of Hitler's inner circle

in his own right.

Now is the perfect time to take his Final Solution to the next level.

On the 20th January 1942,

the Berlin suburb of Wannsee is the venue for a top-secret meeting

of high-ranking civil servants,

party officials and members of the security services.

Chaired by Heydrich,

it will be one of the most infamous gatherings in history.

Heydrich called the Wannsee conference, really, for two reasons.

Firstly, in order to gain control over anti-Jewish policies,

and second, in order to coordinate other German state agencies

in the implementation of the Final Solution.

Heydrich's Final Solution will involve corralling and moving

up to 11 million people across the continent.

He'll require almost dictatorial control

of numerous government agencies to make it happen.

[Richard] Heydrich wants to make it clear

that he is number one when it comes to this programme.

I'm in charge, this is what's going to happen

and nobody is going to get in the way.

The meeting is shrouded in bureaucratic detail

about how they will identify and classify all of Europe's Jewry...

THROUGH EMIGATION OR EVACUATION

...and then move them to their final destination.

They'd now reached a new level with the Jewish question.

They were going to be deporting Jews to the East.

The meeting didn't spell out that they would then be killed,

but the implication was that they're not coming back.

[gunshot]

With millions of Jews imprisoned in ghettos all over Europe,

Heydrich's Final Solution is about to evolve

into a genocide on an industrial scale.

[Richard] What Heydrich and the Gestapo officials are attracted to

is the idea of setting up purpose-built camps where you can kill

very large numbers of people in one day and dispose of the bodies.

In other words, you moved from a very violent face-to-face form of killing

to a more abstract, industrial form of killing.

By March 17th 1942, the first stationary gas chamber

at Bełżec in eastern Poland is operational,

where, in just three months, 80,000 people are killed.

[Richard] And that's what happens after the Wannsee conference.

These camps are set by March 1942

and that's where millions and millions of Jews are murdered.

Himmler and Heydrich are planning the systematic murder of millions

of innocent men, women and children.

Perversely, the management of this depraved project

is the pinnacle of Heydrich's career.

As spring arrives in Prague, Heydrich is celebrating.

As overlord of the Czechs and architect of the Final Solution,

the days of defending his family's racial purity are long gone.

And appropriately, he marks his new status

with a concert of his father's work.

[Robert] This is a moment of self-celebration through music.

Something that, of course, throughout his career in the Third Reich

was very close to his heart.

[Guy] Heydrich is now at the apex of his power.

He's in charge of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.

He's in charge of all the security apparatus within the Third Reich.

And he is effectively in charge of another one of Hitler's pet projects,

the genocide of the Jewish people.

That evening, the icy Heydrich for a moment

shows a new side to his personality.

He was schmoozing, he was very gregarious, he was very sociable.

And it seems, ironically, he now had kind of found

a kind of social confidence that he had never really had before.

So it was a mark of the fact that he must have felt on top of the world.

The following day, Heydrich is expected in Berlin to meet with the Führer.

After his success in Prague, he is hoping to take control of security

in the occupied territories of both Eastern and Western Europe.

The SS leadership's ambition in 1941-42

is to expand their powers

to the rest of Eastern Europe and then to Western Europe,

which is still very firmly controlled by a military-occupation regime.

It could be a major breakthrough for the SS.

But Heydrich's rising status as a member of the inner circle

could also make him a target.

The next day, Heydrich takes his customary journey

to a waiting plane that will take him on to Berlin.

[Guy] It's a mark of Heydrich's arrogance that he travels around in an open-top car.

Not for Heydrich, the idea of cowering in an armoured limousine

with a whole line of tanks and armoured cars and outriders.

No, he wants to show, you know, I can go around

in an open-top car and no one's going to touch me.

It's a journey Heydrich has made many times before,

and with the hope of a new promotion, his spirits are high.

He must have been feeling super confident

and very happy about how everything was going.

The reports to Berlin were looking good.

The reports from Berlin were looking good, everything looked perfect.

But as the car slows to take a tight corner, something isn't right.

The next thing he sees is a man step out in front of the car,

with a Sten gun, and points it at him.

Heydrich immediately goes for his gun.

The bomb thrown by a second assassin explodes by the side of the car.

All sorts of stuff is thrown into the Heydrich's side.

But it doesn't seem to affect him.

He continues to fire at the conspirators as they run away.

But he then slumps back. He's wounded.

He falls to the side of the car.

He is now in a lot of trouble.

On hearing the news of the attack,

Himmler immediately sends his personal physician, Karl Gebhardt.

Heydrich's wounds are serious but do not appear to be life-threatening.

Seven days after an operation to remove debris from his spleen,

Heydrich appears to recover.

But then, without warning, he goes into shock...

...falling into a deep coma from which he never recovers.

[Guy] When news that Heydrich was killed reaches Berlin,

there is enormous shock within Hitler's inner circle.

It makes not one of those men himself feel safe.

If this can happen to Heydrich, then it can happen to any of them.

Himmler's investigators soon discover

that Heydrich's attackers were Czechs trained by British secret intelligence.

But the fact that Heydrich died under the watch of Himmler's personal physician

sparks rumours within the inner circle.

[Guy] There's a lot of conspiracy theory attached to Hitler's inner circle.

And we even see it in the case of Heydrich's assassination.

Did Himmler deliberately get Heydrich's treatment wrong?

But why? The theory is that in the long term, Heydrich could have been a threat.

Heydrich was unique. You couldn't have had

a more ruthless and efficient mass murderer than Heydrich.

You know, he could have easily been the Führer, there's no doubt about it.

[James Holland] My own view is that had he survived,

I suspect that he would have ended up getting rid of Himmler eventually,

because I think he's probably cleverer and better at the job than Himmler is.

Despite the rumours and speculation at the time,

experts are sceptical that Himmler really wanted to cut short his deputy's career.

The rumours about internal involvement in the assassination of Heydrich

have really been around since the day he died.

Some people, I'm pretty certain,

were relieved when he died, although I wouldn't count Himmler among those.

Heydrich died because medical science at that stage couldn't save him.

It's as simple as that.

You know, it's a cock-up, it is not a conspiracy.

Himmler was absolutely mortified that Heydrich was killed.

He needed Heydrich. He could not replace Heydrich.

If the SS boss did have any concerns about Heydrich's rise to power,

they are soon overshadowed by outrage.

This is the first time a leading member of the inner circle has been assassinated.

And Himmler is not the only one who wants revenge.

Hitler is apoplectic, you know, he really wants the Czechs to suffer.

Heydrich was so popular and it was clear that they have to do something.

Two villages are identified as being connected to the resistance

but it's merely a pretext for merciless revenge.

I mean, there was a brutal and very fierce reaction.

They totally wiped out two villages, Lidice and Ležáky,

and they killed nearly 500 civilians, men, women and children.

In full view of the world,

the male inhabitants are executed on site

while almost 300 women and children are sent to concentration camps,

where almost half of them would perish in the gas chambers.

While the two villages are literally wiped from the face of the earth,

Heydrich's body is returned to Berlin for a lavish state funeral.

In the minds of Hitler's inner circle,

Heydrich's death is a shock but also a moment to take stock.

For Göring, isolated over the decision to invade Russia,

it is time to get back into the fray.

Whereas Bormann will have to find new ways to play his rivals off each other.

As for Himmler, it's horrifyingly simple,

just continue what his fallen lieutenant had started.

Himmler begins to take more of the, if you like, direct responsibility

for pushing the genocide on as fast and extensively as possible.

OPERATION REINHARD

He's very keen that Heydrich's memory stays alive,

that the Final Solution is a final solution.

Signed off as Operation Reinhard, Himmler will green-light

the murder of over six million men, women and children

in what will become the single worst crime against humanity in history.

The Holocaust.