All language subtitles for World War II with Tom Hanks - 01x07 - Darkness Falls.AMZN.RAWR+FENiX.English

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On April 1st 1933,

Adolf Hitler's first official act
to persecute Germany's Jews

is an attempt to sever them from
all commercial life with a boycott.

What follows over the next 12 years
is an organised, sustained cruelty,

unparalleled in human history.

It unfolds step by step.

When he first grasps the enormity
of the evil,

Winston Churchill calls it
"the crime without a name."

It becomes known as the Holocaust.

All wars change the world.

But none of them changed the world
like the Second World War did.

Japan's on the march,
Germany's on the march.

No one can imagine the nightmare
they're about to unleash.

The most destructive war
in human history.

Suddenly, the world is
turned upside down.

And all hell is let loose.

The west is stunned
by the speed of the advance.

You get the Allies led by the big
three, Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin.

Men who are dealing with
immensely complicated questions.

It's the biggest military
operation of human history.

The Allies have to come together,

not just militarily
but on an industrial scale,

it's a global perspective.

They have to fight in every climate

from the Arctic,
to the jungles of the Pacific,

to the deserts of Africa
and the depths of the ocean.

But there was no certainty of victory;

it was going to be
a horrific bloodbath.

We see humans at their absolute worst,

how they treat other human beings.

And we see them at their absolute best,

willing to give their lives
that others might live.

World War Two was a struggle
in which there could be one victor

and one vanquished.

In early 1939,
Germany has seized Austria.

Adolf Hitler, the Fuhrer,

wants to take even more land in Europe.

On January 30th,

Hitler tells the German Reichstag

that if war comes,

it will not be his fault.

The blame will lie with one people...

...the Jews.

Two months later, Hitler will
take all of Czechoslovakia.

On September 1st,

he invades Poland
and World War Two begins.

One of the things that's critical
for us to understand

about the history of World War Two
and history of the Holocaust

is that all of these things
are inextricably linked together.

The ebb and flow of the war itself

impacts the way the Holocaust
unfolds on the ground.

Antisemitism is central

to Hitler's
and the Nazi party's philosophy,

which he clearly stated in his book
Mein Kampf

or My Struggle.

Mein Kampf is a manifesto slash
autobiography of the young Hitler.

It contains a rough sketch
for the world,

as he would like it to be,

and an endless documentation
of all the groups of people

he has grievances against.

Hitler reserves his greatest
grievance for Germany's Jews.

He uses base metaphors
to describe them,

playing on long-held
antisemitic tropes.

He portrays them as exploiting
or manipulating the German people.

In order to understand Hitler,

one has to understand
the importance of race

that underlines every single thing
that he does.

He believes that

the whole human race
is divided into categories,

the Aryan race is
at the top of that category,

the Jews are at the bottom.

Hitler is obsessed with Jews.

He's obsessed with Jews
as an eternal enemy,

as impure racially, as non-German.

And he believes that Germany
will fulfil its destiny

when its free of Jews.

In 1934, Hitler appoints
himself the Fuhrer,

the leader of Germany.

And he will quickly turn
his hatred of Jews into law.

In the fall of 1935,
at a Nazi gathering in Nuremberg,

Hitler's deputy Hermann Goering
unveils a sweeping set

of legal measures targeting
the country's Jewish population.

Sieg Heil!

The laws prohibit marriage
or sexual relations between Jews

and non-Jews,

and strip German Jews
of their citizenship.

For Jews living in Germany,

the Nuremberg laws are
a huge turning point.

It doesn't matter
if you're not religious.

Identity is now biological.

It plants the seeds for saying Jews
are a separate race

that are polluting Germany.

The Nazis intend to make life
so difficult

for German and Austrian Jews
that they will want to emigrate.

Around half of Germany's Jewish
community of 500,000 go into exile.

In November 1938,
the Nazis coordinate a brutal wave

of destruction and violence
across Germany.

Jewish businesses are
looted and burned.

Synagogues razed.

And homes left in ruin.

Jews are killed and raped.

The event is called
in German "Kristallnacht",

"the Night of Broken Glass."

The windows of Jewish shopkeepers
are smashed.

There's also incursions
into their homes.

They're kicking in the doors,
they're dragging people out,

they're beating them up,
to petrify the Jewish population.

Police or military were instructed
not to wear their uniforms

when they went out to commit
the violence on Kristallnacht

to make it look like it was more
spontaneous than it actually was.

But it is a government-coordinated
terrorist attack against Jews.

The morning after Kristallnacht,

the Nazis arrest 30,000 Jewish men

and march them off
to concentration camps.

I think Kristallnacht is
an inflection point

because it showed the Nazi government

that average Germans would be willing

to go along with the violence.

By the late 30s, Jews living
within Germany and Austria

face persecution and intimidation.

Even worse dangers are on the horizon.

In early September 1939,
German forces invade Poland.

In just a few weeks,
the Poles are conquered.

Poland's three million Jews are now
controlled by Hitler and the Nazis.

When the Nazis enter Poland,

they have no real, coherent strategy

about what they're going to do
with Jews.

So they start to improvise
pretty quickly.

And one of the things that emerges
as part of this improvisation

is an idea about creating ghettos.

Within days of the German occupation,

many Polish Jews
are forced into ghettos.

Jews are ordered to wear armbands

and are restricted
on entering and leaving.

The decision is made in Warsaw
to create a closed ghetto.

There is movement across
the gates of guards and of Poles,

but not of the Jews themselves.
They are locked into the ghetto,

and a wall is created
to restrict Jewish movement.

It's a very visible signal
of the racial segregation

of the city of Warsaw.

Over 100,000 Jews
who lived in other parts of Warsaw

had to move into this area.

It was about 1.3 square miles,
so it was tiny.

The circumstances of the ghettos
actually create the perfect

breeding grounds for disease.

This is exacerbated by the fact
that running water is limited

and sewage systems are not adequate,

especially with the size
of the population.

Mendel Jakubowicz is 14
when his family is sent

to the ghetto in Ostrowiec,
Southeast Poland.

He later writes:

"I remember that as a small boy
I used to walk the ghetto streets,

and I could see people dying,
people screaming.

There was no food, especially
for the people that had no money."

The Jews fight to survive
in the ghetto...

...and even look for opportunities
to resist.

There were smugglers
who would smuggle in food

and smuggle out people sometimes.

For forced labour, they would
sometimes slow their work

or make sure that whatever they were
told to do

would be broken
by the time the Nazis get it.

There was all sorts of work
that they were doing

to try to resist as long as possible.

For the first year of the war,

life in the ghetto is the cruel
daily reality of Poland's Jews.

But Hitler is planning a new campaign.

And millions of people are about
to descend into horror.

By mid-1941, Germany controls
much of western Europe.

But Hitler's true goal is to create
Lebensraum,

"living space" for the German people.

Which will be found in the east.

Hitler now realised that this
was the ideal moment to begin

the secret planning of the invasion
of Russia,

the great climax of his life's work,

the destruction
of the entire Soviet Union.

Barbarossa.

For Operation Barbarossa,
Hitler and his generals will deploy

three army groups
and three million men...

...supported by thousands of tanks
and aircraft across a vast front.

The German preparations
for Barbarossa are on a scale

that's almost unimaginable.

This is going to be and remains the
largest invasion in human history.

Hitler adds another mission
to the plan.

He issues a directive stating
in the invasion there will be

"special tasks."

In charge of these will be
Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS.

If you want to know
what Hitler's thinking,

look at what Himmler was doing.

Because Himmler was talking
to and meeting Hitler

very, very frequently
across these periods of time.

Himmler has been a member
of the Nazi Party since 1923.

By all appearances,

Heinrich Himmler seems like
an ordinary human being.

He was born to a good family,
went to decent schools.

He hooks up with
various kinds of occupations.

He's a chicken farmer,
sells fertilizer for a time.

And like so many young men
of his generation,

came under Hitler's spell.

Himmler's mobile death squads,
the Einsatzgruppen,

will follow the advancing
German army into Soviet territory.

They have orders to move into
occupied communities

and kill anyone
who threatens the operation.

The Einsatzgruppen will follow
the Wehrmacht

in the Barbarossa campaign,

and their task is the long-term
pacification of Soviet society.

They are, above all, targeting
what they believe are

the two key facets of
the Soviet social system:

Commissars or
Communist political leaders.

Then they particularly single out Jews.

The conflict now was being raised
to a new level

of ideological and racial warfare.

The annihilation of certain groups
was encouraged,

sanctioned, and ordered.
And this is a dark step.

The world is darkening visibly
as this-as this operation begins.

In June 1941, the Wehrmacht
smashes through Soviet defences

and makes rapid advances
across the front.

There are over five million Jews
in the Soviet Union.

The Jewish communities
in the Soviet Union

were very different from those
in many parts of Eastern Europe,

like Poland and Romania.

They weren't generally communities
of orthodox Jews

with ringlets and black hats.

Jews in the Soviet Union
were assimilated

within the general population.

In the wake of the German army,

the Einsatzgruppen begin
their special task.

Einsatzgruppen didn't know enough
about who was Jewish.

So locals would volunteer
or be seized in order to give them

exactly the information they wanted.

There are groups within Eastern Europe

of people who are already
very anti-Semitic

and will voluntarily sign up
to be auxiliaries

and help these units.

An Einsatzgruppen usually would
round up the Jewish population,

they'd then assemble in a central
location where they're guarded

and then
marched in groups to a killing site.

They would be taken to a place of
execution on the edge of the town.

They would be very often forced
to dig pits for their own bodies.

And then they would be shot
into these pits.

Sometimes they used wooded areas
or forests,

and sometimes these executions
were remarkably public.

They're bringing Jews
to a killing site,

often in family groups,

forcing them to undress...

...and then making them lie down
on the bodies of people

that have already been murdered,
to wait to be shot themselves.

This is grown men, standing,
aiming at another human being.

It could be a man. It could be a woman.

It could be a baby.
And firing a gun at them.

And it's happening on a huge scale,

over a huge territory.

Einsatzgruppen killed
nearly half a million Jews

in the Soviet Union in the first six
months of Operation Barbarossa.

Just incredible numbers
of human beings murdered

by shooting
over and over and over again.

There's a close relationship between

the actual military campaign,
Operation Barbarossa,

and the Holocaust.

The Holocaust really begins
the moment they cross the border

into the Soviet Union.

The war enabled the entire
Soviet Union to be treated

as a killing zone.

It meant that the lifting of norms
of civilised behaviour,

the lifting of norms of warfare,
all restraints were removed.

The killing of Jews is reported
back to Berlin every day.

Senior Nazis discuss
the next stages of Hitler's plan.

Hitler's deputy Herman Goering
writes to Reinhard Heydrich,

the SS official responsible
for executing Nazi plans

for the Jewish population.

Reinhard Heydrich is one
of the key figures in the SS.

He's distinctly Aryan in his visage.

He has icy cold blue eyes,

and his face registered
almost no emotion.

In late July 1941,

Goering sends
an official communique to Heydrich.

He asks him to promptly submit an

"overall plan for the execution
of the intended final solution

of the Jewish question."

This is essentially
the order authorising Heydrich

to begin preparations for
the final solution

of the Jewish question in Europe.

They're going to remove them
from the world by murdering them.

As the German army advances
across the Soviet Union,

the Wehrmacht works with units
liquidating communists and Jews,

the SS and, particularly,
the Einsatzgruppen.

In August, SS leader
Heinrich Himmler visits Minsk

in Nazi-occupied Belorussia.

Himmler maintains a really close
watch on what the Einsatzgruppen

are doing, because ultimately,
they're his responsibility.

So he travels a lot around
the Eastern Front.

Himmler realises that
the shootings are taking

an emotional toll on his men.

It's difficult no matter who you are,

to wake up in the morning
and to shoot people all day long

and then to try to go to bed
at night and know that

the next morning you're going to
wake up and do it all over again.

A massacre of 100 people is set up
for him so that he can see

how difficult it is to actually
watch the killing of human beings.

Because Himmler has never
had to do this before.

He's never really seen
death first hand.

He reacts very badly to the sight of

bodies being murdered in front of him.

And he turns green,
and he almost throws up.

Himmler returns to Berlin
to help design ways to execute

mass killings that are more efficient.

On the Soviet front,
the killing continues.

Babi Yar is a ravine just
outside Kiev, in Ukraine.

In September 1941,

over 33,000 Jewish men, women
and children are marched here.

Across two days, they're all shot.

And then buried in a mass grave.

The Nazis had already developed
a method of mass murder.

At the start of the war,

Hitler authorised the killing of
patients with disabilities...

...a euthanasia programme known as T4.

The T4 programme,

which is code named after
Tiergarten Strasse number four,

which is the building in Berlin
that was the headquarters,

was the programme
to murder with carbon monoxide,

physically and mentally disabled
Germans,

because they were deemed
to be drains on the state.

The T4 programme runs for two years,

before it's officially halted
in August 1941.

What you then have is a group of
men with a particular set of skills;

the use of gas to murder people,

the transportation
and logistics of that,

the hiding of the evidence
of that operation.

And these people are then available
to be used in another operation.

The first extermination centre,
where Jews are sent to be gassed,

is at Chelmno,
located in German-occupied Poland.

The victims in the Chelmno centre
are Jews from the ghetto

of the Polish city of Lodz
and the Romani,

who the Nazis also regard
as an inferior race.

On December 8th, 1941,

the first Jews are killed
using gas vans.

They are vans where the Nazis
could pipe carbon monoxide

into the back of the bed of the truck.

Szlama Ber Winer is a Jew
from Central Poland

who is deported to Chelmno.

Szlama witnesses the death
of his family in gas vans.

He writes about this in a letter.

"The leader of the guard detail
was a high-ranking SS man,

an absolute sadist and murderer.

He ordered that eight men were
to open the doors of the lorry.

The smell of gas that met us
was overpowering.

Out of my family of about 60 people,
I was the only remaining survivor.

I was left alone in this world now."

The war against the Jews is about
to take an ominous turn,

as the Nazis build additional
killing centres

and devise new methods
to destroy a people.

December 1941.

A villa overlooking Lake Wannsee
in Berlin is the location

for a gathering of officials

representing different parts
of the Nazi regime.

The organiser of the conference
is Reinhard Heydrich.

The topic is the Jewish question.

But the conference is postponed.

The conference at Wannsee was
initially scheduled

on the 9th of December, but it had
to be postponed because,

of course, on the 7th December 1941,

the Japanese launched
a massive attack on Pearl Harbor.

Three days after the attack
at Pearl Harbor,

Adolf Hitler declares war
on the United States.

Hitler has long predicted a world war,

and now he has brought it about.

In a speech, he accuses
the Jews of manipulating

the American President,
Franklin D. Roosevelt.

At a briefing on December 12th,

Hitler summons Nazi Party leaders.

In his diary,

Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels
writes what is discussed.

"The Fuhrer is determined
to make a clean sweep."

"The world war is here;

the destruction of Jewry must be
the inevitable consequence."

On January 20th, 1942,

Nazi officials arrived at Lake Wannsee

for Heydrich's rescheduled conference.

The SS officers are
in their full formal uniforms.

They're being served cognac
and canapes.

It looks like
a very civilized gathering.

But, of course, what's being
discussed at the Wannsee conference

is anything but civilized.

The Wannsee conference is
a coordination meeting.

It is not a meeting to decide

whether or not to kill
the Jews of Europe.

It's a meeting to determine
how that's going to take place

and what the responsibilities are

of all of the bureaucratic elements
of the Nazi state

in achieving this goal.

At the conference,
Heydrich lists the number of Jews

to be exterminated
by the "Final Solution."

The list includes the Jews of
the Soviet Union and eastern Europe.

The Jews in France, the Netherlands,
Belgium and Scandinavian countries.

It also includes Jews in countries
fighting alongside Germany

such as Italy, Romania and Hungary.

Even Jews in undefeated
Great Britain and neutral Ireland

are included.

Grand total: over 11 million.

The Nazis now have a plan
to implement the Holocaust.

The Germans had succeeded
in taking France,

as well as Holland, Denmark, Norway,
and so on,

which meant that they suddenly
had control over

other massive populations of Jews.

The fact that basically the whole
of Europe outside Britain

was now part of Hitler's Nazi empire,

gave a feeling
that things could be done

which had never been done before.

Across all of Europe,

a whole people
are targeted for annihilation.

Following the Wannsee Conference,

the Nazis are working on
the construction of killing centres,

where people, most of them Jewish,
will be sent to die.

The majority are from eastern Europe
and Soviet territory.

The Nazis also begin to target
the Jews of western Europe.

The Holocaust begins as
an Eastern phenomenon.

But soon it extends to every single
corner of German controlled Europe.

Amsterdam in the Netherlands
and France and Italy

and as far north as Scandinavia,

Jews are being shipped to
these various new establishments

in the East and murdered.

In the spring of 1942,
Himmler visits Amsterdam

to address a police battalion
specially trained to round up

and deport
the city's Jewish population.

A few weeks after his visit,
one Jewish father, Otto Frank,

decides his family must go into hiding.

His daughter Anne writes in her diary:

"Our many Jewish friends and acquaintances
are being taken away in droves.

Escape is almost impossible."

In France, many Jews who fled
Germany earlier

now find themselves threatened,

along with the country's
large French Jewish population.

Helene Berr,
a young French Jewish woman, writes:

"A wave of terror has been gripping
everybody else as well

these past few days.

It appears that the SS have taken
command in France

and that terror must follow."

Over the next months,

Jewish families are deported
by German forces

and their collaborators.

They are informed they are being
resettled in Eastern Europe

and told to bring belongings
and valuables with them.

Instead, they are being sent to
the new Nazi extermination centres.

They are crammed into
airless, lightless, railway cars

and transported hundreds of miles
without food or water.

Modern bureaucracies and trains
enabled the movement of people

across Europe in huge numbers,

which had really
never been seen before.

There are four
major extermination centres.

Chelmno, Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec.

There are two additional
extermination centres,

which also serve as
forced labour camps,

Majdanek, and Auschwitz.

All of these centres
are located in Poland.

In the centres, the Nazis design
methods to kill as many people

in as short a time as possible,
including using diesel engines.

The Nazis pumped carbon monoxide
from these engines

into the chambers themselves.
It killed a lot of people.

But that doesn't necessarily mean
that they were as kind of efficient

in that process as is somehow supposed.

These were very crude places.

They were very improvisational places,

and they were spaces of extraordinary

and appalling suffering.

At Auschwitz,

the Nazis use a pesticide
called "Zyklon B".

Zyklon B is a cyanide derivative

originally for exterminating vermin,
for killing rodents in your house.

It's a blue crystal.

You open the can,
and it emits a poison gas.

They also begin construction
on an extension to Auschwitz,

in the neighbouring village
of Birkenau.

The site is solely dedicated
to extermination

and has several gas chambers.

When Jews arrive at Auschwitz-Birkenau

they are sorted into two groups:

those who are determined fit
for forced labour,

and those who are not.

Mendel Jakubowicz is deported from
a Polish Ghetto to Auschwitz,

he describes his arrival.

"The SS people were
walking up and down.

I stood at attention on my toes.

Finally, after a while,
I was chosen to the right,

some of my friends to the left."

Mendel is selected
to join a work battalion.

His family is sent to the gas chamber.

The people who had been brought
into the gas chambers

would be separated into men
and women and children.

They'd all be herded into this room.

They told them that they were
going there to be showered.

They would be given fabric ties,
to tie their shoes together

under the ruse that it'd be easier
to find their pair afterwards.

The Nazis want to cram as many
people into the gas chambers

as possible because that generates
this environment of high heat

and humidity, which creates
the hydrogen cyanide gas.

The scenes that followed
after that defy imagination.

Quite often you would find
families or loved ones

that were clutching each other
so tightly

that it was impossible to pull
their arms apart from each other.

The victims are cremated.

A perpetual pall of death
hangs over the area.

It was generally the case
that people sent to death camps

were murdered within about
45 minutes to 2 hours of arrival.

The creation of the extermination
camps is Hitler's final solution

to the Jewish question.

An industrial scale system
to mass murder human beings

in their thousands every day.

Just the pinnacle of evil.

This is murder on an industrial scale,

but each death is uniquely suffered.

In the summer of 1942,

Himmler visits the extermination
centre at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

He watches enslaved prisoners
working in a chemical plant.

And sees train cars of Jews
arriving to be murdered.

Himmler later attends a dinner party,

where he explains that the Nazis
have murdered two million Jews

and will continue to do so.

His boasts make their way
to a Western intelligence agent,

who passes the information to

a German exile living
in neutral Switzerland

Gerhard Riegner.

Gerhard Riegner, who worked
for the World Jewish Congress,

learns from a German businessman
that the Nazis have a plan.

They are trying to round up,
deport and murder

the remaining Jewish communities
of Europe.

Shocked by what he hears,

Reigner attempts to get this
information to Rabbi Stephen Wise.

Rabbi Stephen Wise is the head
of the World Jewish Congress

and maybe the most influential
American rabbi

and maybe one of the most influential
American Jews at the time.

He has a relationship
with President Roosevelt.

Reigner's message gets
to the U.S. State Department,

but officials treat it like
a war rumour and don't pass it on.

The State Department refuses to
send this information to Rabbi Wise.

They call it an "unreliable war rumour"

and they bury it.

"Why are we going to get people
riled up about this

if it's just probably a war rumour?

There's no way that the Nazis are
actually doing this."

And so, they shelve it.

But Reigner persists,

he reaches
a British member of Parliament,

who contacts Rabbi Wise by telegram.

The U.S. State Department
now investigates the report.

But the Roosevelt administration
is not ready to take it public.

They had a feeling that American
soldiers would not agree to fight,

if they believed that they were
being asked to fight

for the rescue of European Jews.

We're fighting for these ideas
of democracy and idealism;

we're not fighting for the Jews.

After their investigation,

the State Department allows
Rabbi Wise to share the information

about the mass murder of the Jews.

The news spreads around the globe,
and Jewish communities react.

The world is beginning
to learn the truth.

At the beginning of December,
there's a Day of Mourning,

not just in the United States,
not just in Britain,

but internationally.

There are vigils.

There are ceremonies and services
in synagogues

across the Western Hemisphere.

And then finally on December 17th,

the Allied governments issue
what is called

the Allied Declaration on Atrocities.

And they are condemning
in very strong language

what the Nazis and
their collaborators are doing;

they're using phrases like
"cold blooded extermination"

and "bloody atrocities."

Roosevelt particularly is
very concerned

and Churchill is appalled as well.

He says that the best thing that
we can do to help Europe's Jews

is to win this war
as quickly as possible.

And we need to divert all
of our resources in service

of doing just that.

They knew that
these mass killings were happening.

I don't think they could imagine
quite the scale

of the infrastructure
that the Nazis had devoted to this.

I think that the leaders had not
quite grasped the extent of it.

In 1933,

Hitler's perverse vision was
to expel the Jews from Germany.

By 1942, he is on the verge
of exterminating the entire

Jewish population of Europe.

After two years in hiding,

Anne Frank and her sister
are discovered

by Dutch police officers and sent
to a Nazi extermination centre.

They eventually die of typhus, just
weeks before the end of the War.

Helene Berr is deported from
Paris to Auschwitz

and then to Bergen-Belsen,

where she also dies from typhus
in April 1945.

Szlama Ber Winer writes a report
about the gas vans at Chelmno...

...hoping to bring
the truth to the world.

But he is found by the Nazis and
deported to Belzec,

where he is murdered
in the gas chambers.

Mendel Jakubowicz survives Auschwitz

and moves to the United States
after the War.

He changes his name to Mike Jacobs

and founds a scrap metal
business in Dallas, Texas.

The Holocaust, the Shoah,
will continue until Nazi Germany

is defeated and the Third Reich
is completely destroyed.

In 1942, the Allies gather
their forces for a massive assault

on the Wehrmacht in North Africa.