Original subtitles

This programme contains violent scenes and scenes which some viewers may find upsetting

Germany, 1937.

A young woman with a passion for home movies is filming

herself doing gymnastics.

She is full of hope for the future,

convinced her beloved Germany is on the rise again.

The country has a leader who promises to build an empire

that will last a thousand years.

But this film-maker has good reason to be proud.

This is Eva Braun, companion of the German Fuhrer.

A viewfinder is trained on her idol - Adolf Hitler -

captured as the public never saw him relaxed, informal...

..and playing uncle.

But Braun and Hitler were not alone in their love of home movies.

Across Germany, thousands record every aspect of their lives,

convinced they are filming the dawn of a new age.

Others record their thoughts in diaries.

Taken together, ink and 8mm film provide an unprecedented insight

into life in the Third Reich.

The footage and diary extracts come from civilians,

but also from Nazi groups, firemen and soldiers.

They all play a role capturing the New Reich.

We know how this story ends, with Hitler and Eva Braun dead

and Europe in flames.

As Germany lay vanquished, much of this footage was hidden away,

a reminder of a time most want to forget.

But over the years, as the war generation has died,

their descendants are finding the footage, revealing a candid

insight into life under the Swastika.

This footage has the power to surprise and shock,

while also showing how ordinary Germans experienced Hitler's war.

But it also poses a question...

..what did the ordinary Germans know

about the things being done in their name?

This is more than just an archive of domestic amateur film.

It depicts life around the edges of the darkest moral catastrophe

the world has ever known.

This is Klaus Hopper from Perleberg,

100 miles north-east of Berlin,

play-fighting with his father Albert.

Like thousands of others, Albert Hopper loves to make home movies,

meticulously documenting Klaus' childhood.

After four years of Nazi rule, the regime has spread its tentacles

into every aspect of people's lives.

For Klaus and his friends, the pathway into national socialism

is no longer left to chance.

As he reaches his tenth birthday, it's time for him to join

the children's section of the Hitler Youth.

Amazing how much they look like Boy Scouts, which, of course,

is really what the Hitler Youth was, in many ways,

sort of adopted, put under the Nazi banner.

Of course, what you're getting with the Hitler Youth is massive

indoctrination as well.

But you can see why a lot of these young lads found camps

and Hitler Youth and everything really good fun.

I mean, what's not to like when you're a young kid,

going on hikes, camping, cooking outdoors?

I mean, it looks quite fun to me.

Well, Hitler Youth is really important because, of course,

you're getting children at a young, impressionable age

and you're starting to kind of indoctrinate them,

sort of brainwash them, effectively.

That is what Hitler Youth is doing, you're giving them enough fun,

enough entertainment, camping, cooking, hiking,

all that kind of, sort of, sports and so on, which is very attractive.

But, at the same time, you're also hammering home the Nazi message,

you know, racial supremacy, anti-Semitism, militarism and so on.

And so, by the time that they get to a later age, they're already

primed and ready and plump for the cooking, effectively.

The Hitler Youth has been around since 1926,

but, in 1936, membership for boys like Klaus became mandatory.

I think, if I had a son, I would be even more struck

emotionally by this.

But, yeah, it's deeply, deeply disturbing

when you start a family and then a political system

is in place that, you know, was wanted by the majority

of the Germans, but that really takes your child away from you.

Ideologically, it must be very, must have been very disturbing

to some parents, if they had a more critical mind-set,

to see their child come home, say things that, you know,

were completely different from your own ideology.

Over the next five years, Albert's films document Klaus becoming

a teenager and a national socialist,

as laid out in chilling detail by Hitler himself.

"Our youth shall learn nothing but to think and act German.

"A boy or girl enters into our organisations at age ten,

"then moves on from the junior Hitler Youth to the Hitler Youth

"four years later.

"We will keep them for another four years and then put them

"into the party or the labour front,

"the assault division or the SS.

"They shall never be free again for the rest of their lives."

In 1943, Klaus, just 15 years old, will be sent to man an anti-aircraft

battery 100 miles from home.

The Nazis came to power promising national rebirth

and many Germans are thrilled.

New autobahns snaked their way across the country, a potent symbol

of a modern nation.

Hitler yearns for a fairy tale world of healthy Aryans,

bound together by blood and soil.

But there is an unrelenting hatred directed at one particular group...

..Germany's Jews.

The process of demonising the Jews started immediately after

the party came to power in 1933.

ANNOUNCEMENT IN GERMAN

The Nazis have one brutal idea that they repeat again,

and again and again, a hypnotic repatition...

..the Jews are Germany's misfortune.

Germans grow accustomed to the sight of paramilitary brown shirt thugs

harassing Jews and vandalising their businesses.

Again and again, we see how few aspects of German life survive

untainted by an incessant drumbeat of hatred for the Jews.

The Nazis have taken control of the carnival associations.

This is 1938.

As the camera pans past the floats, one image leaps out -

grotesque caricatures of the Jewish population,

followed by someone literally sweeping them from the streets.

Well, anti-Semitism is quite deeply entrenched throughout Europe

at this time, it's not something that's peculiar to the Nazis,

but it is a very strong part of their ideology.

But how that anti-Semitism manifests itself isn't immediately apparent.

And it's not until the Nazis actually start to get power

that they start to implement anti-Semitic laws.

The Nazis proceeded by passing just hundreds and hundreds

and hundreds of laws and edicts and regulations.

And a book was published that compiles them all,

just the anti-Jewish laws,

and it comes to five or 600 pages,

there were just hundreds and hundreds of them.

And very many of them were incredibly mean spirited,

to attack the dignity of people by not letting them own cats,

or taking the radio away or making them give up fur coats or whatever.

These very, very petty, horrible, spiteful attacks.

For individual Jews living in Germany,

it is a bewildering experience to be on the receiving end

of such state-sponsored malice.

One such victim is Jewish Professor Victor Klemperer.

Victor Klemperer was an amazing figure.

He was born in Germany, Jewish.

Very, very well travelled, well read, tremendously sophisticated.

He married a non-Jewish woman and he had a job

at the university in Dresden, and he was he was injured in World War I.

In some cases, very specific cases, if you were a World War I veteran,

particularly if you'd received a decoration,

you were sometimes treated a little bit better

than other Jews who hadn't fought in World War I.

He becomes one of the most prolific but also amazing diarists

of the rise of Hitler, of the rise of fascism and of the Third Reich,

and how it was to experience and witness the increasing

persecution of the Jews in Germany, for example,

but many, many other things besides.

Klemperer's diaries reveal what it is to be an outcast

in your own society,

life ruined by endless petty rules.

He writes with a finely-tuned ear for the language of Nazi cant.

"The healthy sense of justice of every German was on display

"yesterday in a decree from Himmler with immediate effect.

"The confiscation of driving licences from all Jews.

"Justification? Jews are unreliable and therefore

"should not be permitted to sit behind the wheel.

"Also, allowing them to drive offends the German community

"of road users, especially as Jews, presumptuously, make use

"of the Reich highways built by German workers' hands."

While life for Klemperer grows unbearable, for the Nazi faithful,

things could not be better.

After annexing Austria in spring 1938, Hitler turns his sights

on the Sudetenland, a strip of land along the Czechoslovakian border.

The map of Europe and central Europe, particularly,

is completely redrawn in 1919, with a Treaty of Versailles,

following the end of the First World War.

One of their creations is Czechoslovakia

and, within Czechoslovakia, particularly along the German border,

is an area which had previously been part of Germany

and where there are predominately German-speaking people.

And you, actually, frankly, you can understand why Germany

would want, in the late 1930s, to take that bit back

and have that incorporated back into Germany's borders.

And so what the Germans do, they go in the autumn of 1938

and go, "Right, we're having it back, thank you very much."

And, unfortunately for Czechoslovakia,

that is where most of their defences are and they are just surrendered

to Germany in the Munich Agreement.

The British and French allow the invasion to proceed.

For those now under Nazi control, the future is uncertain.

For two Jewish families in Czechoslovakia,

1939 will be one last summer of normality

before the world turns upside down.

This is the Lederer family from Prague.

They're on holiday with their friends, the Brooks.

The father's name is Robert, his wife is Rose.

Their two children are Nina and Peter.

The children can have no idea of the potential danger

their family now faces.

They're enjoying the sunshine.

The adults seem relaxed.

But perhaps they're simply unable to fathom the magnitude

of the horrors that lie over the horizon.

As the summer fades, Hitler invades Poland and British and French

patience comes to an end.

We are used to hearing Chamberlain announce that Britain is now

in a state of war with Germany.

The Germans learn about it very differently.

ANNOUNCEMENT IN GERMAN

This footage was taken on 1st September, 1939.

Hitler can be heard to say "Since 5:45am,

"we have been shooting back."

In Britain, it is widely understood that the Germans started the war.

But this is far from how it is seen in Germany.

German propaganda was to try and stitch up the Poles and say,

"You know, they've been provoking us," and all the rest of it,

and there was the kind of fake attack on the radio station

by German SS troops, who are dressed up as Polish troops,

to kind of make people think, you know, "Look at this outrage,

"they started it first," all the rest of it.

But there is this other point that western Poland

was largely dominated by German-speaking people

that had been within, you know, East Prussia back up until 1919.

The Danzig corridor had been part of Germany up until 1919.

And a lot of Germans think, you know, "Hang on a minute,

"that was stolen from us, it's German-speaking peoples,

"they should be part of Germany, it's only right that

"we should have this back."

Most Germans felt that the invasion of Poland

was entirely justified.

Even on 1st September, 1939, when the Germans do invade Poland,

in Germany, that's not treated as the outbreak of war proper.

It's treated as a police action, as retaliation for Polish incursions

on the border, for Polish treatment of ethnic Germans

in the western borderlands, and not as an outright invasion,

let alone a planned imperial expansion.

The vast majority of German people in 1939, when Germany invades Poland,

are really dismayed about it. I mean, no-one wants war.

The whole point, they've lived through the First World War.

Most adults can remember the First World War

and they don't want to have it again, they don't want their

children growing up and having to fight in another war.

The fear of war in September 1939 is that Britain and France

will declare war and that, once they do,

as they do on the 3rd of September, that they will immediately attack

and we'll have a repeat of the First World War.

But that doesn't seem to happen initially because, of course,

the phoney war and, although Britain and France

have declared war on land, at any rate, there isn't much activity

until the following spring.

So a lot of Germans are kind of thinking, "OK, phew, you know,

"we've got past that one OK."

In Dresden, Victor Klemperer is blunt about what this means

for Jews like him.

"On Friday morning, the butcher's boy came

"and told us the war is upon us.

"I said to Eva, 'A morphine injection is the best thing for us.'

" 'Our life is finished.' "

The invasion of Poland is over in a month

and, for many in Germany, the war starts to feel all rather unreal.

Walter Lunger, a keen film-maker, has been conscripted as part

of the general mobilisation.

His posting is to a prison camp just outside Leipzig,

better known to us as Colditz Castle.

Colditz is home to Polish prisoners of war and the furtive shooting

angle suggests he isn't really supposed to be filming this.

For Lunger, the war is a good excuse

to mess around while playing soldiers.

Another film-maker now back in uniform is Adolf Dussel.

Dussel fought in the First World War.

Now 41, he is back in uniform as an infantry medic.

His camera captures a vivid sense of life during the winter of 1939.

For men of Dussel's generation,

the return to the Army brings back many ghosts from 20 years earlier.

The Germans make their move on May 10th, 1940.

This is the second time he has made the invader's journey,

but now he has a camera to capture it forever.

What he sees is a far cry from the picture we usually have

of the fabled German blitzkrieg.

Germans on horses - you see, you can tell this is a private video

because, if it was a public video, Germans wouldn't allow you to see.

On Die Wochenschau, on newsreels sent out around the world,

you wouldn't be seeing German troops on horses,

you'd see them on machinery.

Look at the bicycles! Germans had lots of bicycles in France

and lots of horses, lots of surrendered troops.

So, there's a series of home movie footage from the campaign in France

in the summer of 1940.

What's interesting about it is the sense of orderliness

as the Germans march in and also orderliness as the French surrender.

French prisoners of war here.

Their ridiculous long wool coats,

which are just so ill-suited for the job,

left over from the First World War.

They've hardly even got their uniforms dusty

and it conjures up a sense of how easy the victory was in 1940.

For somebody like Adolf Dussel, that really mattered

because they'd gone through the static trench warfare

of the Western Front, through the First World War, where they'd got

nowhere and they'd gradually been worn down.

That's a French stolen vehicle.

That's interesting cos, again, Germans don't have anything

like as much vehicles as we think they do.

They always talk about the Nazi war machine,

but, actually, that's kind of...

..that's not really being very accurate.

Lots of abandoned French vehicles.

Then we get into the trophy footage of the wrecked bridges, the wrecked

cities and towns and villages, some of which are already being repaired.

There's a moment where you see somebody starting to mend a window

frame while the young Germans in uniform are inspecting or trying

out what it would be like to be the French artillery gunner.

And part of what they're admiring is military hardware,

which they didn't themselves possess.

The French in 1939 not only had a bigger army, but they had far,

far, far bigger and more sophisticated armaments

than Germany had, and so part of the miracle of the summer of 1940,

from a German point of view, is this idea that something impossible

has been achieved. In 1939,

even the commanding generals on the Western Front, on the German

side, did not see that they have a war plan that could possibly work.

All they have until February 1940 is more or less the same plan

as they had in August 1914.

And it's not until the spring that they come up with a feint attack

through the north and then a real attack through the southern sector

of the Ardennes Forest, and...

..this works simply because the Allies rush in to the trap.

It's amazing to see immediately the 14th General Hospital

because obviously there's a British hospital, there's shrapnel marks

on it, and actually my best mate's father was a doctor

who managed to get away

and I kind of wonder whether this is the sort of place he was working.

You can see British trucks in the background ruined. More prisoners -

those are French prisoners again.

Abandoned guns.

German troops fiddling. Another tank that's just been left.

Lots and lots of abandoned vehicles.

That's a British vehicle.

The sense that you get as you see

these kids on...all cramming onto their tiny tracked vehicle,

with their trophy dog, brings out the absolute euphoria and the sense

of elation that they've achieved something miraculous.

The damage - the damage is just amazing.

I mean, you know, Dunkirk was ruined.

You know, when you look at the movie, they're going down a street

and it all looks in perfect nick.

It wasn't - it was absolutely trashed

and this, this footage you can see here... God! Look at all the debris

all over the place. I mean, it is really properly trashed.

If you look at memoirs, you look at diaries of people,

they talk about the rubbish on the roads.

You see the destruction and devastation

of the Dunkirk aftermath.

It's a very different vantage point from that of the British evacuation

and it's a sense that the war is over.

And the images of Germans rescuing these abandoned horses, presumably

from baggage trains, gives you a sense that this is now

no longer a destroyed landscape.

It's going to be one which is made good again,

and it's this sense of restitution

and of people coming back together and remembering their roles

in civilian life, as well as in military life.

And here we are, back on the seafront.

Yeah. Look at all those ships - abandoned, again, abandoned boats.

That's a very famous image, that broken vessel.

You can see it's just been completely destroyed.

Just left there. Look at that.

The ship Dussel is filming is a French destroyer called

Le Droit, hit by a German bomber during the evacuation.

After beaching, the ship's magazine blew up, tearing the hull apart.

Amazingly, none of her crew was killed.

And, again, when you see footage like this...dunno, it just sort

of it strikes home a little bit more than just a black and white

photograph still picture.

Really properly wrecked. Blimey.

I think what matters psychologically and emotionally

for Germans as a population, both civilian and military,

is this sense that the war is actually won now.

The war is over and they cannot believe

that the British don't give up.

So one of the other interesting things about Dussel

is that he's a First World War veteran

and the legacy of 1914 to '18

is a dire one, because German defeat in 1918

both fuelled national resentment at the sense

that they'd been unfairly treated with the War Guilt Clause,

the Reparations Bill, and that the peace treaty itself

had been wrung out of Germany through the continuation

of the British blockade.

And so part of the euphoria and relief in this footage

of having driven the British off the continent, having conquered

France, Dunkirk, in a sense,

is the final victory of this war as it should be.

That is really palpable.

It confirms a sense of intergenerational responsibility

that Dussel belongs to the generation which lost

and now he belongs to the generation which has won.

On July 6th, 1940, France capitulates.

The Fuhrer parades himself on the streets of Berlin,

lovingly captured by Eva Braun.

Her relationship with Hitler is a secret

closely guarded from the German people.

She has to make do with filming from the window

of the Reich Chancellery.

It's a far cry from the intimate private portrait

of a few years earlier.

Keen diarist Julius Putfarken, born in 1877,

applauds the news of victory in France.

He spent the First World War in a British prison camp.

For him, German national pride has been restored and he is thrilled.

"Today, the Fuhrer has returned in triumph to Berlin.

"No man has ever been cheered like this before.

"It is unbelievable, all that the Fuhrer has achieved for our

"fatherland without a single false step.

"Two months ago, the dreaded France wanted to smash

"Germany into smithereens

"and now France lies powerless on the ground,

"betrayed and abandoned by England, its boastful ally."

Across Germany, there are similar scenes. In Dresden,

a shopkeeper called Kurt Ehler

films a returning infantry division.

For Jewish diarist Victor Klemperer, the news brings only despair.

"It's all turned much gloomier.

"France, the boundless German triumph.

"It's been reported that synagogues have been set on fire in Toulouse

"and several other places.

"On language, I note the ruthless, lightning fast changes of tone.

"In autumn, France was a chivalrous nation led astray by England

"and it was courted. Then, during the offensive, in ever-increasing

"measure, Jew-ridden, decadent, sadistic.

"Their language is intensified

"by the frenzied arrogance of the victor."

The conquering Germans have the playground of Paris at their mercy.

So now they're having Paris-style breakfast.

Great! We've established ourselves now in this beautiful country.

Yeah. The fashion, horse racing...

Everybody's having a great time.

What fun we're having in Paris.

Why not? The city of the city of gaiety and jollity,

arts and music.

And these French people seem OK about it, don't they?

You know, there's this sort of impression that just life goes on.

You know, Paris has fallen, France has fallen, but there's still time

for sports and athletic tracks and so on.

So, Luftwaffe officers here.

It seems like they're trying to adopt that culture

that they secretly admired.

I mean, this is pure propaganda, obviously.

Excursions on boats.

And, again, always this facial expression

of being really pleased with yourself.

Wow.

And a guy going on a little mini bicycle, advertising

the cabaret, and here is the cabaret.

Again, it's this this sort of suggestion

that nothing's really changed,

you know, it's just gone from French control to German control,

but Paris is still unmistakably Paris.

German officers having a lovely time - lots of drinks,

cigarettes, dancing, music...

Reality very different for French people, though.

The Germans were absolutely appalling occupiers,

stole everything, nicked all the cars, nicked all the wine,

nicked all the Champagne,

made sure that they came first in absolutely everything.

It makes me feel really angry.

I've got to say, if I was a Frenchman and I was watching this,

this would just be making my blood absolutely boil.

And you can also understand, when you see footage

like this of Germans kissing French girls and so on, and everyone

having a lark and raising bottles of Champagne, you can see why,

at the end of it all, those who suffered were not massively

impressed by those who collaborated.

Yeah, I don't know. I mean, it's just disturbing.

Throughout 1940, there was a feeling that Hitler can do no wrong.

But for diarist Julius Putfarken,

Britain's refusal to negotiate is beyond the pale.

"We Germans love the Fuhrer ever more deeply and thank him

"for what he has done for our people.

"To us, he is a gift from God.

"Even though we thought the end was close, after the Armistice

"with France, it will not come to an end with England.

"Churchill is a ruthless snake, propped up by Jews around the world,

"especially in the USA, who long for financial dominion."

Yet while Putfarken fixates on war with Britain, Hitler's gaze turns

to the nation that has obsessed him his entire political life -

the Soviet Union.

Not only a source of coveted natural resources, but home to tens

of millions of people the Nazis view as racially worthless.

This is Helmut Machemer, a medic in a Panzer unit.

He took extensive footage during the invasion of Russia.

It's really interesting how the Germans

perceive the invasion of the Soviet Union.

But the truth is the Germans don't have any choice, or Hitler

doesn't have any choice in the matter.

You know, they've had their victories.

They've rampaged these occupied territories like kids in a sweet shop

and, by the end of 1940, you know, the cupboard is pretty much bare.

So what are you going to do?

You know, if you can't actually manufacture

because you're manufacturing for your own war effort,

you can't sell it and you can't get anything in, where

are you going to get the stuff? Well, you have to go and get it.

And there's only one place where this can be got from,

and that is the Soviet Union.

Look at that. Wow, that's amazing, isn't it?

I mean, you know, iron metal rows,

just vast open spaces of nothingness.

And this is a problem because literally the wheels start

to come off because the distances are just so great.

Machemer's footage is fascinating in a number of ways.

One of them is simply that he

wants to show that he's a good film-maker and so he tends to copy

things which he will have seen in the Wochenschau, the newsreels,

which are shot by splicing together the film

recorded by thousands of cameramen and photojournalists,

who are embedded in the Wehrmacht.

But in most cases, even serving soldiers

go and see film footage of where they've been

when they're on leave. They find confirmation of themselves

and confirmation of what they've done by looking

at footage like this.

I mean, that is...for me, that's in my mind's eye,

that's what I'm thinking about when I'm thinking

about the absolutely insane decision to go into the Soviet Union.

I mean, that vast open space. You know, problems...

I mean, this is not an easy thing to get across. It's a dried riverbed.

You can see it, there's lots of dust.

There's a Panzer III. The problem is

you've got to keep these vehicles going in the field and over vast

distances, where there's no infrastructure,

there's no workshops and stuff.

You know, how do you repair them?

Lone cow standing pathetically by a burning village.

It's just so counterproductive and it's a reminder

that this is an ideological war, suddenly.

And we're into the morass and we're into the torching

of village houses. And even this is sort of posed

for the cameras, as the man with the flame looks back

over his left-hand shoulder at the camera, which is lingering

on him and he's lingering on it.

And so there's a sense...not that this is a covert activity,

but that it's part of what you would do.

And this is what they do do all the way through.

And, of course, it means that the liberating Red Army troops,

as they come back westwards,

find destroyed village after destroyed village.

All they see is the brick chimneys of houses which had stood there

because the wood and the thatch and everything

that was flammable has gone.

Again, no asphalt on the roads.

Lots of Soviet prisoners.

Massive problem because what do you do with them all?

You know, there's almost half again what they're expecting.

The clusters of Red Army prisoners in the snow,

sitting outside with no cover, no accommodation,

insufficient food,

and they gradually collapse

and this is filmed as dead prisoners.

There's no sense that the Germans should have provided better.

Although the victories are enormous to start off with, nothing

less than total annihilation of the Red Army will do.

There is no alternative.

This is an ideological war, not just a war of military conquest.

And the violence which is unleashed right from the outset,

that the moment they go in - the burning of villages

in Ukraine and so on, and Byelorussia and all the rest of it,

and in the Baltic states - that just sets the bar.

And it means that nothing less than complete conquest will do.

This is, of course, the story of the first six months of the Soviet

campaign, where over three million Red Army prisoners are taken

by the Germans with no provision for how they'll be treated.

And, by the end of 1941, nearly three million of them have starved

to death. And terrible acts of cannibalism, but also acts

of starvation, acts of disease

and of random executions by the Germans

have gone hand-in-hand with that horror.

The fate of Russian POWs is bleak.

Race and race hatred are at the core of Nazi ideology, and now

they have millions of their Slavic, Bolshevik

and Jewish enemies at their mercy.

This amateur footage was filmed by a member of the Luftwaffe's

51st fighter group.

His camera captures what the relationship between conquerors

and conquered really entails.

Leaning on the...

..window sill.

Ultimate imperial gaze

of power,

of condescending to have his palm read by the local gypsies.

Encouraging, possibly even forcing one of them to dance semi-naked.

They give a palpable sense of what it meant to conquer the East.

And journalists had been told for generations

that Russia was barbaric, and the Nazis added layers to this.

They added layers of anti-Semitism.

They added the layers of anti-Bolshevism.

But underneath it, there's still a fundamental sense

that this is an alien and inferior culture.

And in that few frames of sitting on the veranda, condescending,

looking down at the people you've just conquered, but knowing

that they are both exotic and inferior to you,

you see all of those thwarted ambitions

of Germans to be colonists.

Of people who'd lost their own colonies in 1918, and yet see

the possibility of living this out in some vicarious way in the east.

It's like they're suddenly in their own museum of ethnography.

And that tipping of condescension into atrocity is very easy,

as we see, and partly it comes with the idea that these are not

people who are individuals. They do not have individual conscience.

They don't have individual soul. They don't have artistic depth.

They've been hammered into a collective

under the blows of Soviet rule,

and so the only way to treat them is also as a simple collective.

Following behind the front line troops

are SS units on a mission to kill

all the Jews and communists they can find.

This footage was shot by a soldier called Reinhard Wiener in Latvia

at the far north of the invasion.

The phrase "the Holocaust by bullets"

is actually extremely important

if you want to understand what took place once the war started,

and it refers to the fact that, for quite a long time

after the invasion of Poland and even the invasion

of the Soviet Union,

most of the killing was done face-to-face.

So they would round up groups of Jews, march them

out of their village into a forest, and then shoot them.

So at least half the people who were murdered in the Holocaust

were murdered in that face-to-face way.

So the idea that the Holocaust is entirely a sort of industrialised

process is very misleading,

but at least half the victims were kind of walked into muddy

fields and just...saw their killers down the barrel of a gun.

This was a terrible, brutal, despicable phase of Barbarossa

of World War II that's not so well-known.

And, in fact, it's so brutalises, even the SS and the Einsatzgruppen

and the special battalions that Himmler goes to a special

programme in Minsk to show him the brutality of this kind of murder.

And Himmler watches the execution of 100 Jewish people, and he sees

for himself how difficult it is for his "poor SS guys" -

how psychologically they're being traumatised.

Moving toward the creation of the extermination camps is not

because it's going to be more humane to the victims, it's because it's

seen to be more humane to those who were being asked to do the killing.

But in 1941 and the invasion of Soviet Union,

it is pistols out, it's machine guns, it's gallows up.

I mean, you know, what's so amazing about that footage

is just how medieval and barbaric it is.

And yet it becomes normal.

And yet, you know, it's this sort of casual footage of people being strung up,

casual footage of people being burnt and chucked in pits

and being shot in the back of the head.

I mean, it is absolutely horrible.

We had a school teacher from Eichstatt who writes home

to his wife about the terrible images that he's seen.

He doesn't describe them to her in the letters - he does in his diary.

He promises to tell her everything when he's at home with her.

And, at the same time, he talks about

the photos of the small child - Reiner - that she sent him.

He was born at the outbreak of war.

And he says, "It's terrible where I am, but it's better that I am

"here and that I go through this hell, even if I have to die here,

"rather than that Reiner should be the third generation

"who has to come and fight a war like this."

These so-called special operations are repeated across the whole

front line and are a common spectacle for German soldiers.

This conversation was recounted

by a Wehrmacht officer called Von Rothkirch.

I knew an SS leader pretty well and we talked about this and that,

and one day he said, "Listen, if you ever want to film one

"of these shootings, I mean, it doesn't really matter.

"These people are always shot in the morning.

"If you're interested, we still have a few left over.

"We could shoot them in the afternoon, if you like."

In time, even the population back home begin to learn

what is being done in their name.

So much of the knowledge which we have was also knowledge

that the German population had at the time.

Soldiers' letters, the stories that people tell each other on trains,

often talking in the darkness of night journeys

to comparative strangers, trusting

people whom you only know as a bird of passage. But also

the photography, the photos that soldiers take of atrocity

sites, of the mass hangings, mass shootings, the open graves,

the ditches being covered in lime

and then shovelled in by local Soviet civilians afterwards.

These are images which were not kept just at the front

because the films themselves,

the photographic 35-millimetre film taken on the first SLR cameras,

were Leicas. They were sent back in little aluminium film canisters,

with letters and parcels from the front, to be developed

in the local town,

in the photo studio, sometimes in the pharmacy. And the prints

of the photographs were seen on the home front

before they were sent back to the men who'd taken them.

And yet what we have to think of is their provenance at the time.

They were known and they were part of a spreading knowledge,

a web of knowledge of mass eye-witnessing of mass executions

in which between one and two million

of the Jews who fell victim to the Holocaust

were killed in this way on the eastern front.

And there was no secret about this.

These were not secret death camps

to which no unauthorised eyewitnesses could visit.

They were endlessly visited

and, by early 1942, Germany is awash with stories and rumours

about what is happening to the Jews.

Hitler loyalist Julius Putfarken has no difficulty justifying

these reports of atrocities.

"The Jews are particularly hated. In Litzmannstadt, this hatred

"was expressed as retaliation after the Russians had pulled out,

"when a large number of Jewish men, women and children

"were beaten to death. That brings order.

"One human life is currently worth very little on the eastern front."

Hitler's invasion of Russia needs to be over quickly.

The Germans cannot sustain a war of attrition.

This desire to get it over with leads Hitler to one of his greatest

moments of hubris. As his forces approach Moscow,

he gives voice to his most heartfelt wish.

I declare today, and I declare it without any reservation,

that the enemy in the east has been struck down

and will never rise again.

But it was not to be.

This footage is by an amateur film-maker in a Panzer unit

70km from Moscow.

The lead German units come within just 15km of Moscow.

But on December 5th, 1941, Soviet forces and the Russian winter

stem the tide and force them back.

Two days later, the Japanese launched

their attack on Pearl Harbor.

Hitler is thrilled, saying, "We now have an ally which has never

"been conquered in 3,000 years."

Four days later, Hitler declares war on the United States.

It will prove as catastrophic a miscalculation as his invasion

of the Soviet Union and all hope of a swift end to the war is gone.

"This afternoon, Germany declared war on the United States,

"which the Fuhrer justified in one of his great speeches.

"This gives us clarity, and the mood is calm and confident.

"But there will be heavy fighting before we win peace and victory.

"Hitler also announced the Russian winter

"would interrupt the fighting in the east.

"How much noble German blood has flowed there

"against these Soviet beasts?"

On December 19th, 1941, Julius Putfarken

makes one brief final diary entry.

"It's an unfriendly, hard week for me."

He dies after a short illness just three weeks later.

The Hitler loyalist will be spared the sight

of his leader's slow downfall.

For Victor Klemperer, the future is uncertain.

His veteran status and Aryan wife have saved him

from deportation thus far.

But for how long?

He is under virtual house arrest, as Jews are forbidden

to leave their homes between Christmas and New Year.

He is scathing about Hitler's latest proclamation.

"A few weeks ago, the Russians were officially annihilated.

"Now they are to be annihilated in spring.

"We just need to hold on fanatically.

"Certainly Hitler will fall, but before we do?"

For the Lederer family from Czechoslovakia, the descent

into the night and fog has already begun.

Robert Lederer, who took his footage in the summer of 1939,

is in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.

He will never return.

His wife, Rose, and their children, Nina and Peter, are headed

into the Theresienstadt Ghetto.

From there, they will be deported to Auschwitz in 1944.

On arrival, Rose and Nina were eligible for work.

But Rose refused to leave Peter to face his fate alone.

They died together in the gas chambers.

In the next episode of Lost Home Movies of Nazi Germany,

cracks are starting to appear.

The allied bombing threatens the very future of the Reich...

..and life for internal enemies of the Nazis becomes unbearable.

One soldier hatches an audacious plan to save his Jewish wife.

This is my father now,

who is just giving narcosis to a wounded man, you know?

Yeah.

While from Holland to Stalingrad,

Normandy to the final desperate stand...

..home movies chart Germany's slide towards ruin.