All language subtitles for World at War e01 A New Germany (1933-1939).en

(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.

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

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

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

these stories are untrue
and without foundation.

I 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) In 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:

“I will lead you to the promised land.
I 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,

“I 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 I 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.

In 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,

I couldn't understand
how it was possible

that people could shout so much.

Yet when he came towards our group,
I 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,

I 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…
I 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, I listened to his speech

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

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

“What a pity that
I can't share that belief

of all those thousands of people,

that I am alone,
that I am contrary to all that.”

It was very funny. I thought,
“He is talking all the nonsense I know,

the nonsense he always talked.”

But still, I 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.

In 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.

In 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.

In 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,

Italy'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, I 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.

I 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.

In my particular case, I think
I 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.

I 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 I still want him
to look after my children?

And I was tired and I 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) In 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, I 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
I 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? I 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 Israel,” or “The Jew Itzik,”—
I 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, I 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.

I 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 Parteiabzeichen—
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.

In 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.

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

In 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,

I 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) I had a girlfriend
whom I wanted to marry

and I said, “Well, I'll dare go home.”

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

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

The tone of the German press
was absolutely hysterical.

And I thought what a fool I was.

I had just gone home in that moment!

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

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