All language subtitles for H T L T o t T R S01E05 The Final Solution 1080p HULU WEB-DL DDP5 1 H 264-FFG (1)_track3_[eng]

Klara Hitler seems to
have been the one human being in

Hitler's life whom he
unambiguously and deeply loved.

She became ill
with cancer in 1907,

and he was absolutely
stricken with grief when

she died towards
the end of that year.

And she was being
treated by a Jewish physician,

Dr. Bloch.

There's this myth that the
fact that Dr. Bloch was Jewish

and that Hitler's mother died
might have been the origin point

of Hitler's antisemitism,
but that's pretty clearly,

complete nonsense.

Hitler actually
maintained a certain reverence

for Dr. Bloch.

In 1938 Hitler recognized
that Dr. Bloch was gonna be in

some danger and he
actually intervened to arrange

Dr. Bloch's emigration
to the United States.

Racism is always somewhat
abstract and when confronted

with the actual human being,
most people are going to react

on an individual basis as
Hitler did with Dr. Bloch.

It's a paradox
with people holding
strongly racist attitudes.

When we're
wondering where Hitler's

antisemitism comes from, we're
not really just talking about

any old antisemitism.

I think what we're really
asking though is where does this

antisemitism that would
lead to the rise of the Nazis,

that would lead
to the Holocaust;

that would lead to
the persecution and
death of millions of Jews;

where does that
antisemitism come from?

I think Hitler tried
to explain his antisemitism as

something that was necessary;

as something that
really came from studied

evaluation of the situation.

From the beginning,
Hitler is quite consistent about

the Jewish question;

Jews have to be removed
from the face of the Earth.

Without Hitler, none
of this would have happened.

.

I, I can still
remember Hitler's voice.

It was unique.

The way he yelled and
screamed at these mass meetings.

Of course, there
wasn't television so

I didn't have a
visual image of him.

But it was a bad word;

"Hitler," was a bad word.

The Wolf's Lair was
Hitler's military command.

It's located deep in the woods,

on about 600 acres,

and there are
hundreds of structures,

enormous concrete bunkers,

and it's well protected,

it's camouflaged.

Other than radio communications

there's not much
contact with the outside world.

It was actually a pretty
awful place, everybody hated it.

It was a forested
location with terrible flies.

The accommodations
were uncomfortable.

But it had become this huge
complex with very complicated

security perimeters because
Hitler was very paranoid.

Hitler spends
three years or so living,

full time, in
these headquarters.

And it was from this
massive compound that Hitler and

the Nazi elite carried
out much of the war.

Hitler and a lot of
the top Germans, in 1941,

have a clear perception
that the United States is moving

steadily towards
war against them.

Hitler understands
that the United States is
gonna be a serious threat.

This comes as a
shock to President Roosevelt

who did not know that
these attacks were coming.

This is followed immediately
by a Declaration of War on

the United States
by Adolf Hitler.

This sense of
himself dictated that he be

the one to declare
war on the United States,

not the other way around.

This comes as a welcome
distraction to the unexpectedly

slow progress of the
war on the Eastern Front.

The war in Russia
was not going well.

The German idea of
invading the Soviet Union was,

this campaign will be
over in nine to 12 weeks.

But it's not.

The Germans
advance very quickly,

but it's not quickly enough.

Winter in Russia
is famously difficult and

the German army was not
prepared for a long winter.

On some level Hitler
knows he's in trouble and

he's got senior officials
telling him he's in trouble.

He knows he's running
out of time to win.

As of December 1941,

Germany is facing
the Soviet Union,

Great Britain
and the United States.

How can Hitler respond to that?

There are two ways;
the first is that,

"This proves what I
have said all along,
it's us against the world."

And what
kind of a world is it?

It's a Jewish world.

And the second thing
that Hitler then says is,

"In order for us
to win the war...

The Jews must be destroyed."

What that meant becomes
clear with the deployment

of Einsatzgruppen,
mobile killing squads,

that actually followed in the
footsteps of the German Army.

People were
rounded up, beaten up,

they were brutalized,

taken to a killing site;

everybody could hear it,
everybody could see it.

The killings were public;

there was nothing
secret about the killings.

So, on the local level,
everybody knows.

Hitler himself is very
well informed of this.

He gets type written reports.

The Holocaust begins
with these shooting pits and so,

by the end of 1941 roughly a
million Jews have already been

murdered during the German
invasion of the Soviet Union.

The Germans now understand
that they have the methods and

they have the willingness to
murder Jews on a mass scale.

Until that point, the
Jews that are being killed are

Jews in areas of Eastern Europe
that Germany has concurred.

Jews living in Western Europe,

they're still not being targeted

by the Nazi extermination.

The decision to

exterminate the Jews of Europe

happen in the
aftermath of the invasion of

the Soviet Union, prior to that.

The fantasy existed,

but the conditions for
implementation did not.

But what
happens in January, 1942,

is a coordination of the
top levels of the Nazi Regime

in order to
facilitate the killing
of Jews throughout Europe.

The Wannsee Conference
is an important moment for

putting together the
elements of the final solution.

Eichmann, says,
"Well, we're talking about

11 million Jews," so that's
a pretty major undertaking.

They
organize the construction
of extermination camps,

which would include
involving the entire system

of railroads so as to
transport people across

the continent to sites
where they would be killed.

There is no one document,

there is no one policy,

there is no one decision, not
even the Wannsee Conference that

leads to the final solution.

It was series of radicalized
policies that were made even

more radical by
the war in the East.

There's a
structure to this;

the reason for
why this happened.

It is not simply
that the war was brutal,

which it was, it is
that there was a policy.

And the policy was
declared by Hitler...

And it was a
policy of extermination.

Hundreds of Jews
were arrested that day,

from our neighborhood.

And then they came in trucks,
loaded us on trucks and took us

to the railroad station.

And there was a long cattle car.

60/70 people into one wagon,

very crowded, crammed together.

Pretty horrible beginning of,

of the deportation.

We were deported on
June 20, 1943 to Westerberg,

where most Jews
landed before they were

deported to death camps.

To 1942 when the
infrastructure and the planning

of gathering people up from

ghettos and transporting them by

trains to camps

becomes the norm.

It's into 1943 and 1944 where

the train rides are now longer.

They're from

the occupied Netherlands,

they're from Italy,

they're from Greece.

We came to
the railroad station...

And they had packed us in
box cars without food or water.

And we took off,
not knowing where.

They
brought us into Majdanek.

They told us to undress.

They put us into cold showers,
and they took away everything.

If you had a
child in your hands,

you went to the
crematorium immediately.

And that's the last
I saw of the family.

And they said,
"You see that smoke?

Do you smell it?"

And they said,
"That's gas chamber."

We didn't know nothing about it,

we never even heard of
such a thing as gas chambers.

He said,
"They're burning bodies."

But the minute
they got into Treblinka and

they saw what's
going there, dead bodies...

Everybody was
screaming, screaming, crying.

The next day,
they tattooed us.

My number was 88959.

That's 88841
and my brother had 8842.

2570...

Mine was 107984.

65360.

And my
number was 8-5143.

The system of
concentration camps

reached almost

unimaginable proportions.

And we know now

that there were at least

42,000 concentration camps,

sub-camps, satellite camps,

ghettos for Jews and

also formal death camps.

When you say,
"The Jews taken to Auschwitz

were submitted to
the final solution,"

what do you mean by that?

Birkenau
had four gas chambers,

each of which could gas
2,000 people at a time.

Then the bodies would be taken
to the crematoria and burnt and

the ashes would be then dumped
into pits in the ground or used

for paving roads, or they
would be buried in mass graves.

We have this image that
somehow these death facilities

were sterile and
separated from the rest of life,

we call them industrial.

The killing at these
places was just as horrifying

as shooting over a mass grave.

The killing in these places
involved bringing people into

this horrifying situation where
they can see what was happening

to other people and
where they realized that

they were going to die.

A girl want to run away,
we didn't know who she was,

and they found her

and they hanged her.

And they let her
hang in a windy day;

three days and three nights and
we were afraid to look at it.

It's gonna happen to us if
somebody will try to run away.

So nobody tried.

It all comes
gradually step-by-step,

it becomes worse.

And then, you realize,

you are probably
gonna be killed.

Adolf Hitler never
visited any sites of atrocities,

and he didn't even visit
German cities to show sympathy

and support for
the German people.

Hitler absolutely did not want
to face the real human cost of

what his war had brought.

We often look at the
Holocaust and think of it as

something that we only
understood after the war,

but this is,
of course, not true.

The word, "Holocaust,"

didn't exist, but the thing
was understood perfectly well

by the people who observed it.

Jews who are within its reach
understood what was happening.

They knew that they were
all going to be murdered.

Many people will say,
"Why didn't you fight back?"

How do you fight
machine guns and

sub-machine guns
with your bare hands?

I'd like, I'd like them to
tell me how this can be when

you're surrounded by
hundreds of storm troopers with

heavy weapons and
you stand there naked!

The fight should have started
before when the world knew,

from 1932 on that
antisemitism became very,

very strong and it, it...

Ultimately, they
must have known,

or should have known,
what will happen.

Nobody came to our aid,
nobody helped the Jews.

They
were like the articles,

but they were on the,
on the back pages.

Nobody made a
headline out of it.

So, you know, and
people were skeptical.

If somebody would
come and tell you,

"They're taking little
kids to the gas chambers,"

would you believe that?

What he started
was not him simply doing it.

There were millions
of people involved,

not those who were killed;

those who made it possible.

People who became involved in
a vast genocide or undertaking.

What we know about Hitler
is that there would not have

been a Holocaust without him.

And yet, we don't see his hand
on these major policy decisions

about how to carry it out.

Hitler had
charged Heinrich Himmler for

carrying out this operation.

And Himmler did it,
without question.

GÖRTEMAKER: Heinrich Himmler is

a very powerful man.

He commands the SS,
the police in Germany,

and he is a fanatic
follower of Hitler,

a total fanatic.

Himmler convenes a
meeting of about 200 SS officers

in the Polish town of Posen.

Himmler, knowing that this
is already late 1943 and that

anybody with eyes in their
head knows that Germany is

losing the war, and knows that
what they have been involved in

is a horrendous crime.

They don't have
the word genocide yet,

but they know that they
murdered millions of people.

Himmler is trying to
distribute responsibility.

He's telling those people,
"We are all in it together."

He is painting a picture
that is horrifying precisely

because he tries to make
genocide into a glorious act.

There is one reference
to Hitler in the speech,

which is the crucial reference.

He said, "We were told to do it.

And we did it as best we could."

Heil!

Sieg!
Heil!

So many of these
horrible decisions that led to

the utter disregard
for human life,

came in very small ways.

By all kinds of bureaucrats
and police officers and

housewives agreeing to go along.

A whole society
can become involved,

with very little resistance.

The relationship of Hitler
with his military commanders

during World War II is one
of the most complicated and

fascinating stories
of his whole regime.

He didn't trust them,
and he had a propensity to

insert himself in
tactical decisions.

The problem for Hitler,
when it came to his generals,

was that he
demanded the impossible;

Complete, total
unquestioning loyalty but also,

high levels of competence.

Hitler and his generals
knew that in order to continue

the war effort they needed
to capture the resources in

the southern part
of the Soviet Union.

Stalingrad, as a city
named after Stalin, was...

.

Highly symbolically
important to both sides.

Stalingrad,
without question,

is one of the single
most important turning points

of the entire war.

It takes place
over five months and

the fight goes
through the dead of winter.

It is an extraordinarily
hard fight for both sides.

The German
effort is collapsing and

Hitler is refusing to
listen to his generals, mainly,

Friedrich Von Paulus,
the Commander of the 6th Army.

Hitler told
Paulus not to surrender,

at any cost, and to allow
the entire army to be destroyed

before he gave up the fight.

Paulus disregarded the order
and surrendered in order to

save the lives of the troops.

The Russian
say Von Paulus gave orders that

no Red Army
prisoners were to be taken.

Now he's a prisoner himself.

And he forbade
Germans to surrender.

Now he himself surrenders,
with his army.

For Hitler this is more
proof of the incompetence and

perfidy and treachery
of his leading generals.

For Germany, when the
defeat was announced,

it had a tremendously negative
effect on German public opinion.

Stalingrad made
it obvious to everyone,

the lightning speed successes of

the early war years
had come to an end.

For Hitler, I think that
marks the point where...

He kinda loses it.

He felt betrayed,
by his own race,

by his own German nation.

For a small
group of military officers,

Stalingrad is really the
turning point in pushing them to

take the ultimate step,

and that is; the
assassination of Hitler.

After the
complete defeat at Stalingrad,

it's clear that if you
want to continue the war,

if you're not about
to see reality and say,

"We cannot win this, we
have to somehow negotiate

our way out of it,"

which is not
Hitler's state of mind,

then you have to
demand everything
from the German people...

To the death!

The
Allied invasion of Europe from

the west is launched.

D-Day, the second front,
4,000 ships and thousands of

smaller vessels are
involved in the enterprise.

A great Allied
cooperative effect,

which sets forth to
seal the fate of Germany.

The Coast Guard, the Navy,

the Air Forces land
hundred of thousands of British

Canadians and Yanks on Hitler's
doorstep within a few days!

This was one of the
greatest intelligence successes

for the Western Allies
of the entire war,

because the
Germans never found out

where the Allies
were going to land.

The situation
is really looking very,

very bad for
Hitler by July, 1944.

We know that there were
somewhere around 40 people

who plotted to
assassinate Hitler,

from the time he
became Chancellor
to the end of the war.

Hitler had the
most extraordinary luck.

He survived
attempt after attempt that

he just shouldn't have survived.

It's pretty clear to most
Germans in powerful positions

that they're
going to lose the war.

And this is really important
for the Anti-Hitler Resistance

in particular, the
officers who become

the core of the Valkyrie Plot.

The men in the actual
planning are in the Military;

they are very conservative.

They're mostly people who
had been in support of Hitler.

A key figure is
Claus Von Stauffenberg.

Stauffenberg
was a very energetic,

gung-ho man who
brought the burst of energy

that the plot needed.

On the 20 July, 1944,

Stauffenberg is
briefing Hitler...

He goes into the meeting room
with a bomb in a briefcase.

What Hitler's top
generals were going to do was

initiate Operation Valkyrie.

They were going to kill Hitler,

using a bomb
under the big oak table

where Hitler studies
maps in the Wolf's Lair.

Stauffenberg had left
the briefcase right by Hitler,

but somebody seems to
have sort of push it behind a,

a heavy table leg.

And so when the bomb went off,

the heavy table leg also
contained some of the blast.

Stauffenberg and his
accomplice did manage to escape

the Wolf's Lair, barely.

And they got on a
waiting airplane that

took them back to Berlin.

Hitler is not dead.

They failed.

Hitler was wounded;
his eardrums were burst,

he had splinters in his
leg and his hair was singed.

His arm was swollen...

But he was very much alive.

There is a
ferocious response from Hitler.

Stauffenberg and some
of his close associates were

immediately shot at the
Military Headquarters in Berlin.

He ordered
about 5,000 arrests.

Many of these
people were put on trial,

many were tortured,
many were executed.

When Hitler got an idea of the
full scale of the resistance,

he was very deeply shocked.

This only fueled his
tendency to paranoia.

Toward the very end,
the accumulating psychological

pressure most certainly had
a deleterious effect on him

physical and psychologically.

By this time Hitler's
really in terrible shape.

It has been speculated that
he had Parkinson's disease.

Some have speculated that he was
in a tertiary stage of syphilis.

He shook, he had tremors.

He had long been taking an
exotic concoction of medicines

that were administered by
his doctor, Theodor Morell.

Doctor Morell was not
afraid to experiment with quaky

and untested
remedies and some of these

seemed to make
Hitler feel better.

So Hitler developed a, a
certain affection for Morell.

In fact Morell was
feeding him all kinds of,

of terrible things,
including methamphetamine.

And these
drugs were, no doubt,

starting to have a pretty
bad effect on him by 1944.

All of this starts to mount.

The casualties are mounting,
the despair is mounting,

food is starting to
get shorter and shorter.

It was an absolute terrible
time for ordinary Germans.

And the destruction on
German cities was massive.

There was a logic of
destruction built into that war

that had to end with
fast destruction of everyone.

I think there were
a lot of unanswered questions

about why he did what he did.

The reason we're so
fascinated by him is that

he seems to be telling
us something different from

what we thought
about human nature.

We didn't think any
human being was capable of

killing six million people,
50 million if you wanna count

the war that he started.

And there is always
that concern in history that

violence on an unimaginable
level we want to understand but,

perhaps not too much.

At the same time, it's also very
problematic to just simply say,

"That was a different time.

Hitler was evil as were all
of those who followed him."

It doesn't allow us
to look at ourselves and

the potentials that we
might face in the future.

We were hiding away.

And everybody hoped
that there will come a day

that we will be liberated,

and you only lived
with one thought in mind;

to live one day
longer than Hitler.

In the bunker at the end
Hitler probably understood that

there was no way out.

GÖRTEMAKER: Hitler's last
army was the children of Berlin.

He pinches one of their
cheeks and he sends them to die.

When I entered the
camp I had peered into hell.

If we want to conceive a
world where these crimes against

humanity do not happen anymore,

we have to talk about
Hitler and of the Holocaust.

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Cotter Media Group.