Original subtitles

By May, 1945, Nazi Germany was defeated.

Adolf Hitler was dead, and the Third Reich lay in ruins.

But allied victory was by no means inevitable.

I think, in the official conduct of the war,

the Nazis, in a sense, won the Second World War

until the sheer weight of numbers of allied production,

of trained allied forces, got the better of them.

They were winning the war.

And while in the midst of conflict,

it was the Third Reich that touched space,

Hitler's engineers that built a jet fighter,

and Nazi architects that planned

how future Germans would live

and how millions of Jews would die.

Behind the scenes of these immoral projects were engineers

like Hans Kammler.

Kammler is an implementer. He's a manager.

He takes those things,

and he makes them into settlement projects,

eventually into weapons factories.

As SS chief of construction,

Kammler didn't invent or build, but his cold management

turned Hitler's dreams into reality.

The capacity for industrial production, the capacity

for industrial killing, you couldn't do that

without engineers like Kammler.

And yet, his life, career,

and even ultimate fate

are only just beginning to be revealed.

Kammler rose without trace,

and it's only in recent times that we've come to realise

what a vital cog in the Nazi war machine Hans Kammler was.

Engineers were the beating heart

of the Third Reich, forging advanced weapons,

feeding the Nazi war machine

and motivating the masses.

They executed history's greatest horrors,

and yet for some, their true role would remain hidden

for decades.

The entrance to the extermination camp Auschwitz Birkenau

stands as testament to the horrors of Nazi Germany.

Thousands were worked to death under its shadow,

and for thousands more, it was one of the last things

they ever saw.

But this building is also a rare insight

into the mind of SS construction chief Hans Kammler.

I think it's quite revealing that the first part

of this building was only one wing.

As the camp expanded, they expanded the building,

so that it would be symmetric in 1943.

It didn't need to be symmetric.

There was no reason to make it symmetric,

but it was symmetric.

By 1943, Kammler had signed off

on the extension of this death camp's entrance,

purely to make it more pleasing to the eye.

The bricks were carefully chosen,

and the windows incorporated decorative elements.

I think one thing to take away from Birkenau

is that they lavish the kind of attention on this facility

to trivialise it, I suppose, that yuppies like to lavish

on their kitchen and bath renovations,

which to me makes it all the more terrifying

what they thought they were doing there.

The timing was significant.

1943 was the year Birkenau's first gas chamber

began operating.

This focus on design was not in spite of the camp's role,

but because of it.

This was part of the world that Hitler and Himmler

and Kammler imagined.

If it's part of your ambition,

then this is not a contradiction at all,

and it's something that was difficult, that was dirty work,

but it was work that was going to have a positive impact

on your world and on your life.

Kammler was a cruel product of his time,

of a world that turned husbands and fathers

into ruthless engineers,

who not only enabled the killing of millions of Jews,

but saw it as an almost religious duty.

Hans Kammler was born in 1901 in the German Empire.

It was an exciting time in the country's history,

for Germany was becoming a major industrial power

Germany, her technology in development of things

like steel processing, the invention of the motor car,

all those things, Germany surpassed her old rival Britain,

surpassed every other country in Europe

and became a highly technological, for the day, society.

But just as Kammler witnessed Germany rise,

he also saw it fall.

Germany entered the First World War

a great industrial power.

But after four years of brutal attrition,

the sheer resources of the British and French empires

combined with the United States proved overwhelming.

For teenagers like Kammler, defeat was humiliating.

Kammler was one of that generation born

in the very, very first years of the 20th century,

but just a little bit young

to have fought in the First World War,

but ashamed by German's defeat,

and determined to restore, as they saw it, German greatness.

So, they were possessed of a certain spirit of revenge.

The German empire collapsed,

and the Weimar Republic took its place.

But with this new democracy's armed forces

ruthlessly curtailed by the Treaty of Versailles,

its focus lay on domestic priorities.

One of the new constitution's key promises

was to give every German their own healthy home.

And so, in 1919,

with Germany on the cusp of a building boom,

Kammler started studying engineering at university.

But he would specialise not in construction

or architecture itself,

but in the management of building projects.

Because the scale of production

was increasing in modern industrial building,

that scale of production also had to be managed

from a bureaucratic end

and from a strictly managerial point of view.

And, so Kammler really was able to learn

both of these aspects really well.

Revolutions in management, paper forms,

statistical records, chains of command

created the stereotypical pen-pushing bureaucrats

that are with us to this day.

But these often-overlooked innovations enabled building

on a large scale.

The revolution in modern management

that was happening at this time is equally innovative,

let's say, in terms of modern organisation

as, say, the assembly line was

for mechanical engineering technology.

Kammler's studies put him at the cutting edge

of this new science of management,

and he soon found work in the growing city of Berlin.

With loans from the United States,

the city's engineers were constructing

modernist, brightly-lit apartments at scale,

many of which still stand.

He made sure that the supplies were there.

He made sure that there was a labour contingent.

In many ways, his work for Berlin

was a really good training ground

for the kind of job that he would ultimately do.

But this golden age of construction

was to be short-lived.

In 1929, the Wall Street crash saw America

call in its loans.

Germany sunk into recession.

The Weimar government could ill afford

to provide its citizens with basic necessities,

nevermind their own healthy home.

Building certainly continued after the depression began,

but nevertheless, the building environment,

the building economy was really devastated.

So, that kind of idealism of the 1920s

really collapsed fairly quickly in that moment.

Engineers like Kammler,

once told they would build Germany's future,

but now struggling to find work at all, began to feel

that their own government was holding them back.

They think, "If only I was unfettered

from these limitations.

I and my brothers, we could engineer the future."

But one person did promise

to free them from the shackles of economic misery

in order to build a positive new future: Adolf Hitler.

He promised to get them finally, to turn them

into these elite leaders that they wanted to be.

In 1932, Kammler joined Hitler's Nazi party.

They wanted to dream at the scale of the built environment

that Hitler was asking them to dream.

In July that same year, its growing popularity

saw it become the largest party in the Reichstag.

It represented a new, progressive, modern contemporary way

of doing things.

In 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor.

The Nazi leader poses with his cabinet,

which includes Von Papen, seated on his left,

who is now vice chancellor.

And in a few short months,

Hitler outmanoeuvred his cabinet

to seize full dictatorial powers.

Democracy ended, to the sound of thunderous applause.

Hitler soon started delivering for his engineers,

as they were put to work forging his new Germany.

A new road network, the Autobahn, was concreted

onto the landscape, and a massive programme of re-armaments

saw the building of new tanks, ships, and aircraft,

as the Treaty of Versailles was torn to shreds.

You have to understand, with the huge military expansion,

there was all sorts of construction;

everything from barracks to roads

to rail lines, things of that nature.

This new government soon found use

for Kammler's skills.

He advised on the construction of a housing estate,

only this time it was built on Nazi doctrine.

Still inhabited to this day,

Krumme Lanke is renowned

as one of the most beautiful housing estates in Berlin,

famed for design elements that hark back to the German past.

But this housing estate nestled

among the pines has a dark history.

It was built for an organisation

of which Kammler was a member, the SS.

The SS starts really small in 1929;

there's only 280 men protecting Nazi speakers

at their rallies.

But then of course, Himmler takes over,

and he turns it into a big enterprise,

and the SS then runs concentration camps

and becomes during the war, Waffen-SS, as well,

so a combat unit.

And they become all powerful.

As head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler

had even greater ambitions for his organisation.

He wanted it to control the very way in which future Germans

would live, based on the principles of blood and soil.

Blood and soil was an ideology promoted

by Kammler's own boss, Walther Darre,

and enthusiastically adopted by Heinrich Himmler.

The blood represented racially pure Germans

to be reconnected, almost mystically with the soil,

German land, through the return

to a traditional rural way of life.

A book Kammler co-wrote in 1934 is clear evidence

that he, too, had become a disciple of this cult.

He decries the way in which houses and settlements

are produced by businesses,

and so just become these kind of mere commodities,

you know, with a price tag on them.

He hated that.

What Kammler did was to contrast this

with the romantic national socialist idea

that houses would once again be made for the people,

and there'll be, once more, contact with the native soil.

And all this would help to bring about

a strong and unified Germany.

Krumme Lanke was blood and soil

in wood and stone,

but it was more than an eccentric eco-warrior movement;

for these eco warriors were to become soldiers,

conquering territory to rebuild in their image,

and slaughtering those

who did not fit their racial criteria.

The Krumme Lanke is like their little crystal

from which everything else was going to grow.

They were going to remake the East in their own image

as racial supremacists, through this settlement project.

So, we think about central Europe, Eastern Europe.

This is the territory that the Germans were thinking of

for this plan, just to take over that territory

and kill anyone in their way.

It's the most densely populated,

one of the most industrialised areas of the world,

and they get this brilliant idea, "We're gonna go

settle in in," right,

as if there's not anyone already there.

But they're planning these settlements

as if it's their Wild, Wild East,

I suppose, as the Wild, Wild West was for the United States.

On the 1st of September, 1939,

the German War of Conquest began

with the invasion of Poland.

Germany's forces combined with its ally, the Soviet Union,

to conquer Poland in less than five weeks.

Upon victory, Himmler asked for and received a new title.

He was named a Reichs Commissar

for the protection of the German East;

that was a title that Hitler gave him.

He really wanted to build an empire,

and the East was his opportunity.

This new position gave Himmler the go-ahead

to turn his dreams of a blood-and-soil future into reality.

This meant rebuild the agricultural system,

so that it would be Germanified.

It meant the cities were going to be Germanized,

and that meant getting rid of unwanted populations,

and create a kind of pseudo-medieval world

of German purity led by the SS.

It was to be a colossal task,

but Himmler had a ready workforce under SS control:

concentration-camp prisoners.

Anyone else who was less than the Germans,

less than the pure Aryan race would be used as slave labour.

They want to utilise these people to work for the aims

of the regimes and work them essentially until they die,

because there's always gonna be someone else

to replace them.

Annihilation through labour

would accomplish two goals:

the building of this new world and the extermination

of those deemed unworthy of living in it.

But for the SS to remodel Europe on such a scale,

it needed not only architects and labourers,

but someone to manage construction.

In June, 1941, they turned again to Hans Kammler.

For a guy like Kammler

who's been writing about settlements

since he got outta college,

that would've been the chance of a lifetime.

This was raising him up into historical time, right?

He was going to play a role in defining

his nation's history.

In his new position, Kammler would plan

the destruction of entire nations, histories,

and cultures through cold bureaucracy.

He would reduce human beings

to mere numbers on a balance sheet

and manage the building of the camps that enslaved

and murdered millions, all to prepare for the day

when ultimate victory gave birth to a new Nazi Europe.

Key to turning the sprawling, inefficient SS

into a building machine was the paperwork.

The bureaucratization of work

was not only about organising the distribution

of materials and labour,

but it was actually at the level of the forms themselves,

the paperwork, and that paperwork

was really, really important.

Kammler introduced forms

that broke construction projects down into individual tasks,

complex designs into standardised components,

and human beings into slave work units.

You could have a form that you filled out

that asked you what kind of labour you needed,

how many people you needed, the hours you needed,

what are the building materials,

what are the specs on the building materials?

Everything had to be recorded.

Everything had to be put down.

Things that, today, would be done on computer,

he did in forms, in duplicate and triplicate.

And because this is sort of boring and bureaucratic,

it hasn't attracted the attention that it should have done.

Kammler's piles of forms

would, one day, lead to piles of bodies,

and to the greatest crimes in humanity's history.

But it rapidly became clear that,

to make a reimagined east a reality,

the SS needed far more slave labourers.

As Kammler was beginning his new role,

Hitler turned against his one-time ally

and invaded the Soviet Union.

It gave them, potentially, access to the oil fields

of the caucuses and the grain of Ukraine,

and so that the capacity to really imagine

and enact their goals came within their sights,

through that move.

And as the Nazi war machines thundered

through the Soviet Union,

Hitler's forces captured vast numbers of Russian soldiers.

If you think about the work that needed to be done

in the war, taking over the Soviet Union

created an opportunity for a lot more slave labour,

and that's how many of the Soviet people

and those of Eastern Europe die

is through their utilisation as slave labour.

Himmler made a deal with the German army

to transfer 350,000 prisoners of war to the SS.

Kammler's new task was to find a way of housing them.

He ordered the construction

of two new concentration camps on Polish soil.

One was Majdanek.

The other, more infamously, was Birkenau.

It was Hans Kammler who informed the administration

of Auschwitz, the headquarters of the concentration camp,

about the new plan of setting up a large POW camp

for Soviet prisons of war.

Kammler was here, and he discussed the issue

of the precise location for new camp.

So, the final decision was taken during this meeting.

Birkenau was less than three miles west

of another concentration camp, Auschwitz,

originally built for Polish prisoners.

But while Auschwitz held some 10,000 prisoners,

Auschwitz to Birkenau, as it was termed, was designed

to hold 100,000.

Hans Kammler played a very important role in the process

of planning of Birkenau.

He was here six times,

and he supervised the construction works.

Drawing on past experience,

Kammler managed the construction of accommodation,

but this time, it was based on maximum brutal efficiency

and could be replicated at scale.

He decides how many people could be forced

into each barrack.

So, he's got these 25 drawings,

and in them, he provides the construction specifications,

not only for Birkenau,

but for every concentration camp throughout the Third Reich.

In October, 1941,

nearly 10,000 Soviet prisoners of war arrived here

and were put to work, building the new camp.

But as they toiled in the snow,

they died in their thousands.

Kammler returned to Birkenau, this time to solve the issue

of growing piles of bodies.

He ordered to move the new revolutionary crematoria

with the capacity of almost 1,500 bodies a day

from Auschwitz to Birkenau,

because as he expected the average number of deaths,

the bodies, would be much higher in Birkenau

than in Auschwitz main camp.

Prisoners' deaths were of little concern

to Kammler.

He believed that more were on the way.

But by the end of the year, it became clear

that no more would be coming.

Hitler had underestimated the Soviet Union,

and with the Russians counter attacking,

more and more German men were called up to the front lines.

Soviet prisoners were assigned

to take their place in the Reich's factories,

and so Himmler would have to find a new population

to fill his camps.

He soon did.

With the first serious defeat

of the German army in the Battle of Moscow,

Heinrich Himmler decided that the Jews

would replace the Soviet prisoners

of war in Auschwitz and in Birkenau.

Despite the setbacks in the war,

the Nazis continue to prepare to build the future,

using this new labour force.

With a budget of half a trillion euros into today's money,

Kammler was given responsibility for the detailed planning

of post-war construction.

He started what we call the building brigades,

and these building brigades were a flexible supply

of forced labour that could be moved anywhere

in the occupied territories,

mostly in what is now Poland,

but they really could be sent anywhere they wanted to.

The brigades

were essentially mobile concentration camps.

They contained prisoners who had the skills

for future building projects,

but only a small proportion of Europe's Jewish population

were to be reserved as slave labour.

And while Kammler was planning building brigades,

decisions had been taken that would lead

to industrialised murder.

Birkenau was soon to be repurposed as a centre

for the Holocaust.

The role changed,

because it was originally a concentration and work camp.

The primary purpose was productivity.

But when it was decided to use the gas chambers

as a primary method of execution, of extermination

of the Jews, it turned into the death camp.

Kammler's role also changed.

He would no longer solely plan the Nazi future,

he would now enable the wholesale extermination

of those not deemed worthy of living in it.

I think an ambitious, capable young man

like he was would've jumped at that chance,

because he was all in.

Ideologically, he was already all in.

It's not like he had to be convinced

that this was a worthy project, sadly.

Kammler was back at Birkenau in July, 1942.

His new task: to adapt it to fulfil two functions;

as a prison camp for the small proportion of Jews required

for future building projects,

and as an efficient killing machine for the rest.

Well, the first crematorium in Birkenau was composed

of three major functional parts.

The first one was dressing room;

the second, the gas chamber; and the third,

the crematory itself.

These three components were designed

to make the prisoner's journey from gas chamber

to crematorium as short and efficient as possible,

and their deaths would be accomplished

with a mass-produced artificial pesticide, Zyklon B.

This was murder on an industrial scale,

as wrought by engineers.

They had to have the most advanced technology.

They had to have the most advanced chemicals,

the products of German engineering

to murder the people in Birkenau.

It's the only system to this day

for the extermination of human beings

on which patents have been filed.

It was at this time that the second wing

to Birkenau's entrance was added

to reflect its new prominent role in the Holocaust.

I think we have to see that Auschwitz was a positive

for the SS, as contradictory as that sounds.

But for them, they were building a positive New East.

They were building a positive new centre

for an SS empire.

Birkenau alone would kill over a million Jews,

but the tide of war was turning.

In August, 1942, nearly 4,000 miles away from Birkenau,

the battle of Stalingrad was raging,

but after six months of brutal fighting,

the city that bore the name of Hitler's greatest adversary

became the scene of his greatest defeat so far.

Propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels took to the airwaves

to rally the German people for the tough road ahead.

The Third Reich was mobilised for total war,

as the allies began bombing Germany around the clock.

Himmler's concentration camp prisoners set aside

to build the future would now be used

in Germany's struggle just to survive.

They're gonna come and take

his precious little labour force.

So, fortunately, in his eyes, for Himmler,

he had Hans Kammler in his engineering corps.

Kammler was tasked

with deploying prisoners in his building brigades

to repair bomb damage.

But his role was soon to grow,

for he was about to be entrusted

with Germany's most advanced engineering project,

the V-2 rocket.

The result of more than eight years of development

at Peenemunde in northern Germany,

Hitler believed the V-2 was the miracle weapon

that would change the course of war.

But as the assembly lines began producing them in quantity,

disaster struck.

Peenemunde was ideal until August, 1943,

when the Royal Air Force visited it and bombed it.

This attack threw the Nazi high command

into panic, but it would spark Kammler's inexorable rise.

To continue the production of the V-2,

the decision had to be made to make it safe

from the RAF's raids,

and the decision was made to move production underground.

The site for this new underground

rocket factory was to be beneath the mountains

near Nordhausen in central Germany;

the move to be completed by New Year, 1944.

It was to be a monumental task.

Before the summer of 1943, it started to used

as a fuel depot was a very raw place.

There was no electricity in the water

because it was not used.

Transforming a primitive fuel depot

into a rocket production line would require

vast manual labour and precise management.

The two would come together in the form

of SS concentration camp prisoners and Hans Kammler.

He chose what he learned at university.

He was very obsessed with the idea of efficiency.

And he analysed the project as a whole,

using the principles of scientific management,

and divided the project into different parts.

So, there was the first part of transforming

those tunnels into facilities for the production.

And there were some parts of the system

would actually have some more boring of new metres

of tunnel, so it was more complicated.

Kammler's strict prioritisation enabled

the maximum amount of space to be made ready

in the shortest amount of time,

and a new concentration camp, Mittelbau-Dora,

was built nearby to ensure

a constant supply of slave labour.

Kammler displayed all his inhumanity in motivating them.

The incentive was brutal force,

to make the prisoners know

that they could be killed in any moment

if the supervisors were not convinced

that the work was good.

Thousands toiled to produce weapons

aiming to save the very state that was killing them.

Kammler didn't give a stuff

for the conditions in the factories,

for the welfare of the workers.

He said at one stage, "Don't worry about the victims

of this process.

I'll look after that.

Just worry about the product."

Kammler successfully converted

these tunnels in record time, and V-2 production began.

The job that Kammler had done

had convinced his superiors that he was the man

who could do anything, that he was a superhuman

Over the bodies of more than 10,000 slaves,

Kammler had delivered what had seemed, to some, impossible.

His responsibilities would soon grow further.

Above ground, the allies had been continuing

to pound German industry.

And so, in early 1944, Hitler made the decision

to move more weapons production underground.

The V-1 flying bomb and the first production jet fighter

would soon join the V-2 rocket in the tunnels.

Kammler, having proved himself, would be tasked

not only to create their production lines,

but to deploy them against the enemy.

I think someone like Hans Kammler experienced that

as exhilarating.

I think he thought he was his best self, right?

And it was in the name of saving our country,

saving our great dream; hopefully, at some level,

building our utopia.

The man who began his career

managing building sites in the Weimar Republic

was now the Third Reich's greatest hope of survival.

He drove his slaves to dig more tunnels

into the mountainside and ordered waves

of V-2 rocket attacks against allied cities.

The Third Reich's jet fighter, the most advanced aircraft

of the war, took to the skies,

Even as the allies were scything their way through Germany.

Kammler fervently believed that the future

he had longed for was still within his grasp.

"If we could just get enough of these planes,

if we could just get enough of these rockets,

maybe we can push them back and survive."

He continues sending these telegrams to Himmler,

predicting exponential growth in SS construction.

Kammler has completely lost the plot.

But salvation through miracle weapons

proved a fantasy.

By April, 1945, bombs were landing on Nordhausen,

and Kammler was forced to face reality.

He would not, however, wait around

to watch his underground factory fall into allied hands.

It was becoming clear that, if it hadn't been clear

to even the dimmest intellect,

that it was all out with Germany.

So, Kammler decides to go to possibly the most secure place

from both the Red Army and the Western Allies

who were moving into Germany itself,

and that was Prague.

But on the 8th of May, 1945,

Nazi Germany surrendered.

Perhaps because he heard this news,

the very next day, Kammler took his own life.

As the years went by, Kammler's story faded into history.

But more recently, evidence has come to light that suggests

that his life did not end in 1945.

One piece is a document written by an investigator

at the Counterintelligence Corps,

an American military intelligence agency that searched

for Nazi criminals.

A further report lists him as a prisoner

of the US Air Force.

Rainer believes that the US sought

Kammler's knowledge of underground facilities,

which they feared might fall into the hands

of the Soviet Union.

And so, they spread false rumours of Kammler's death

to throw them off the scent.

Further documents that may provide

conclusive proof remain classified to this day.

Kammler was as enigmatic in death as he was in life,

but what is beyond doubt is that his story

gives us a tantalising glimpse

into the often overlooked work of the project engineers,

the lesser-known management men who did so much

behind the scenes to make Hitler's dream a living nightmare

for those who lived through it.

What they accomplished, to conquer half of Europe,

to develop things like the jet, and at the same time,

to be carrying out the crime of the century,

the Holocaust of European jury, was an amazing achievement;

an utterly amoral or immoral achievement,

an evil achievement, but an achievement nonetheless.

The capacity for industrial production,

the capacity for industrial killing;

you couldn't do that without engineers like Kammler.

In their eyes, they were the greatest generation.

They just ended up the greatest loser generation, right,

'cause there's nothing about having your country bombed

absolutely flat to give you a little bit of humble pie.