Original subtitles

[chattering]

[narrator] German policemen in the occupied East, 1942.

They're here to enforce German rule in the conquered territories.

Diligently, they carry out their orders.

They have a special assignment:

To shoot Jews by the hundreds and thousands.

At point-blank range.

Historians and other experts have done extensive studies

into the men who pulled these triggers.

They want to know how a mass murder like this could happen.

And they make an astounding discovery.

Those men didn't have to kill.

They didn't have to obey the order.

[Browning] If you had the courage to say, "I can't shoot,"

you may have been considered a coward,

you may have gotten a bad letter in your file,

but you were not punished in any severe way.

[narrator] 20 years after the war, there's a trial

for the murders committed by a Hamburg police unit.

So, what was their motivation?

Why did they shoot?

[in German] They aren't ideologically-motivated,

willing executioners.

They're not trained killers.

They're people with civilian jobs, like taxi drivers or plumbers.

In every respect they were completely ordinary men.

- [ship horn blowing] - [birds squawking]

[narrator] Hamburg in the summer of 1942.

Three years into the war.

The regime is recruiting men for a special assignment.

[Browning] By 1942, you're really at the bottom of the manpower pool

because of the casualties, of course,

that the army is suffering in Russia

and the growing manpower they need

to occupy the ever-growing German empire.

They want every person they can get their hands on

simply to fill the manpower shortage.

[narrator] Older family men, who are no longer suitable for the German Wehrmacht,

are also called up. Many are not Nazi sympathizers,

nor are they overly hostile towards Jews.

But rather, they come from historically social democratic backgrounds.

[Kühl, in German] They ranged from bakers and craftsmen

to carpenters and tradesmen with office jobs.

That police battalion basically reflected

the average working population of Hamburg.

[narrator] They're drafted as reserve police officers.

Their training, however, hardly allows them enough time

to prepare them for what awaits.

On June the 21st, 1942,

they say goodbye to their families and leave home.

[in German] They were given a fairly abstract description of their mission,

which consisted of securing the German-occupied areas.

[narrator] They're taken to Poland.

On June 25th, Reserve Police Battalion 101 arrives

in the southern part of the district Lublin.

[Browning] We know there was then no preparation.

They didn't know they were going to do this when they're sent to Poland.

The officers didn't know. Trapp really doesn't...

Major Trapp doesn't learn what he's going to do until the day before.

[narrator] It is July 13th, 1942,

and the battalion has to report early in the morning.

[Welzer, in German] Major Trapp, who delivers the order, is an older man

who is very popular with his men

because he's not the typical authoritarian commander.

The men call him "Papa" Trapp.

That indicates what kind of relationship they have.

Major Trapp stands in front of the battalion and says,

"I have a terrible order to give you today."

[Browning] His voice is choking, he has tears streaming down his cheeks.

He's physically, you know, struggling visibly to control himself physically.

This was, for him, a very terrible and difficult thing to do,

to explain to his men what he was going to ask them to do.

[narrator] They are to shoot 1,500 Jewish men, women and children.

[Browning] And that's when he then makes this offer:

"If any of the rank and file don't feel up to it,

you can step out and you don't have to take part."

[Welzer, in German] Telling people to step out if they don't want to participate

requires them to take action.

But when we are faced with a decision

and we don't know exactly what the right thing is to do,

we usually do nothing.

[dogs barking]

[Browning] One man does step out.

The captain of his company, who's very embarrassed

that one of his men would be the first "coward," uh,

to not take part, starts to yell at him.

And Trapp cuts him off, takes the man under his protection.

And then about a dozen people follow his example.

[Trapp, in German] Attention! Dismiss!

[in German] From a historical perspective, it's an incredibly interesting situation

because the orders are documented

and it's clear from the way they were issued that the men did not have to kill.

Part of the post-war narrative was that you had to take part,

otherwise you would have been shot yourself.

Here we can clearly show that no, that was not the case.

They could decide.

[narrator] The same was apparently true for all killing units.

To this day, not a single case has been found

where a subordinate's life was in danger if he refused to shoot unarmed civilians.

It all starts in September 1939: the German Wehrmacht invades Poland.

In just a few weeks, the country is defeated.

Millions of Poles fall into German hands and should now be kept under watch.

For this, the regime needs security forces.

In the German Reich, tens of thousands of men enlist

to become policemen in the occupied territories.

They hope to avoid military service on the front lines.

With so many applicants, the regime has the luxury to be very selective.

[Klemp, in German] 160,000 men applied to volunteer for the police,

and only 26,000 to 30,000 could be accepted.

They were then trained for six months

and, most crucially, received ideological training

which made it fairly clear to them what would be expected of them.

They were told that, as the master race,

they should ensure that National Socialist policies

were established and executed in the occupied territories.

[narrator] After their training, the men find out what that means in reality.

Their job is to help implement

the brutal Nazi policies in the occupied territories.

Which is why the regime pick men who are sympathetic to the Nazi cause.

Grouped into police battalions, they are sent to Poland.

There they will oppress, persecute, and murder civilians,

in particular Jews.

[in German] As early as October or November 1939,

those units began shooting civilians:

Polish resistance fighters, clergy, intellectuals, even Jews,

driving people out, deporting them.

All in all, you could say that those units

put the National Socialist extermination policy into practice.

[narrator] Just two years later, the attack on the Soviet Union.

It is a war of conquest and annihilation.

According to Germany's plans,

30 million Soviets should die in order to free up space to live.

Mobile killing units comprised of police and SS task forces,

called "Einsatzgruppen," back up the troops in combat.

On June the 27th, 1941, Police Battalion 309 enters Bialystok.

The ideologically-programmed men lock 800 Jews in the synagogue

and set it on fire.

And then they kill even more.

The next day, the policemen are honored for "securing" the city, as they call it.

Altogether, 18,000 men advance behind the front into the villages and towns,

where the mostly young and indoctrinated gunmen

shoot all the Jewish men, women and children dead.

Now the Holocaust begins, the systematic mass murder of the Jews.

Many of the shooters are traumatized by the killings,

which is one reason why large extermination camps

like Auschwitz emerge at the end of 1941.

The process of mass murder needs to be made more effective

and more gentle on the perpetrators.

If we try to figure out

the proportions of Holocaust victims

in terms of how they perished,

the best estimate, I think, is that

about a half, close to three million,

died in the death camps, in the gas chambers.

That close to a million died in what we might call conditions of incarceration:

Starving in epidemics, in the ghettos, the death marches at the end of the war.

Which means that over two million died by firing squad,

died in these mass executions.

[narrator] Over two million people murdered, face-to-face with their killers.

A little-known fact even today, it is the "forgotten Holocaust."

Liepaja, summer 1941,

in Einsatzgruppe A's area of operation.

This is the only film discovered

that shows a shooting of Jews on the Eastern Front.

Officially, filming is forbidden,

because the killing is supposed to remain a secret.

[Ferencz] They only made two mistakes.

One, they kept a record of everything.

And it was sent to Berlin,

where it was consolidated with all the other from B, C and D.

And it gave a comprehensive picture of whom they had killed in which cities,

in which town, in which unit, which command at what time.

That was the first mistake, to keep the record.

The second was that I found them.

[narrator] Nuremberg after the war.

The so-called "Thousand-Year Reich" lies in ruins.

In the city where the Nazis once held their Nazi Party Rallies,

the Allies want to bring German crimes to justice.

In the Nuremberg Palace of Justice, the major war criminals are put on trial.

They ordered the crimes and will be prosecuted accordingly.

But who carried out the murders?

The 27-year-old lawyer Benjamin Ferencz is tasked with finding out

and sets off to look for clues.

In early 1947, his investigation team makes a significant find.

One day, one of my researchers came.

He said, "Look what I found."

And he handed me a bunch of papers, "Ereignismeldungen aus der UDSSR."

[narrator] These are death lists from the mobile killing units,

the SS Einsatzgruppen.

The murder of hundreds of thousands of people was documented

as a record of achievement.

[Ferencz] I took a little adding machine

and I began to add up Einsatzgruppe A reports.

10,000 killed here. 15,000 killed here. 20,000 killed here.

And I started to add them up.

When I added over a million, I said, "That's enough."

[narrator] Ferencz wants to put the SS men responsible on trial.

But his superior refuses.

They don't have the budget or the time.

I got a little bit furious and said,

"You can't let these guys go!

I have a million murders in my hand, you're not going let them go!"

So he said, "Well, can you do it in addition to your other work?"

I said, "Sure." He said, "Okay. You got it."

And so it came to pass that for my first case as a lawyer,

I became the chief prosecutor of the biggest murder trial in human history.

Vengeance is not our goal, nor do we seek merely a just retribution.

We ask this court to affirm by international penal action,

man's right to live in peace and dignity.

[narrator] The accused are 24 SS men from the Einsatzgruppen.

They all led mobile killing units.

[Welzer, in German] They don't fit with Hollywood's image of a Nazi perpetrator.

That image is a henchman who is not particularly intelligent

and who only cares about killing as many people as possible.

But the historical reality is that they were nothing like that.

Some of the Einsatzgruppen leaders had double doctorate degrees.

They're mostly middle-class, educated, really sophisticated people

who could definitely hold a conversation about Mozart or Beethoven.

We will begin with the defendant Ohlendorf.

[narrator] One of them is Otto Ohlendorf, the former head of Einsatzgruppe D.

He gave orders to 600 men who murdered 90,000 people in one year.

[Ferencz] Ohlendorf made a very good impression on me.

I knew he was the father of five children.

Uh, he was honest.

[Earl] He cut a good figure, you know?

He was handsome. He was articulate.

He had a sureness to himself

that people found attractive.

I think that the world kind of expected this person

who was in charge of...

in charge of a mobile killing unit to be something different.

They expected him to be ugly, old, crazy,

pathological, sadistic,

dumb, maybe, a misfit of some kind.

But he was an accomplished man.

The judge liked him.

The judge said: "I like this guy. He seems nice.

But he killed people. I don't understand it."

[narrator] Ohlendorf surprises the court with his openness.

The judge thanks him several times for the statements he already made

to the Allies during an interrogation in 1946.

[judge] In what way they were transported to the place of execution?

[Ohlendorf in German] They were driven there in lorries.

Always as many as could be executed right away.

[judge] Was that your idea?

[Ohlendorf in German] Yes.

[judge] In what positions were the victims shot?

[Ohlendorf in German] Standing or kneeling.

[narrator] Just as it was on July 13th, 1942.

Hamburg Reserve Police Battalion 101 is on its way to the first execution.

The policemen are unprepared for what awaits them.

They had certainly not been instructed in how to conduct a firing squad massacre.

It's all improvised the first time.

[Kühl, in German] They were taken to a forest.

Then the policemen led them into the forest one by one,

some of them women, some of them children.

So instead of depersonalizing the execution,

and instead of keeping distance between the killer and the victim,

here you have one-to-one identification with the person you're going to kill,

and you kill that person at point-blank range.

Several of the policemen reported having conversations

as they walked them into the forest.

Some, in fact, were German Jews who had left Germany earlier.

One of the Jews' family had owned the kino, the cinema, in Hamburg,

where this man had gone to see movies.

And he discovers he's going to kill the cinema owner

where he used to go watch the movies.

And needless to say,

the psychological toll of this was very great.

[in German] The victims feared for their lives

and knew death was moments away.

And the policemen were experiencing an emotional crisis

because they knew they were about to have to kill someone at point-blank range.

[Browning] So, it's an extraordinarily gruesome experience.

And that's when some of the men began to get sick,

because they're covered with brain matter and blood.

They... They throw up, they... they get demoralized, they can't continue.

[birds chirping]

[narrator] The massacre lasts for hours.

In the end, 1,500 Jewish men, women and children lie dead in the forest.

[Browning] When they went home that night, they were offered liquor,

and most of them got drunk, but most of them couldn't eat.

The... The food was put out, but most of them had no appetite to eat.

Uh, and some of them had nightmares that night.

One man even, I guess, shooting his gun into the ceiling in a kind of nightmare.

And, uh, as another man told one of his... his noncommissioned officers,

"If I had to do that again, I would go crazy."

Uh, so there were...

For some of the men, this was just an absolutely horrifying experience,

and they couldn't imagine ever doing it again.

[narrator] The regime knows what it is asking of the men.

As early as the summer of 1941,

a high-ranking SS leader refers to the "psychological support

for the men involved in this deed."

The "impressions of the day" were to be "blotted out

by holding gatherings of camaraderie in the evenings."

Otto Ohlendorf faced the same problems

with his men who took part in the massacres.

[in German] Otto Ohlendorf said,

"My men suffered more than the victims."

Looking at that from today's perspective,

that's an absurd reinterpretation.

It's the perpetrators looking for psychological mechanisms

that they can use to cast themselves as victims

because of the fact they had to do things that made them suffer.

[Ferencz] He had Mitleid with his men if they had to, uh, do something

which would be painful for them.

Some of the Einsatzgruppen soldiers

would take an infant child and smash their head against a tree.

Save ammunition.

He... Ohlendorf explained, "I didn't allow my men to do that.

If there were infants, I told them to have the mother hold the infant to her chest,

and then aim for the baby.

Because then, they kill both of them with one shot,

and they save ammunition, and the mothers stop crying."

So, that was Mitleid for his men, not for the victims.

[narrator] In the Einsatzgruppen trial,

the court wants to know what motivated Ohlendorf to issue these orders to kill.

He claims he was simply being loyal to his government.

[Ohlendorf, in German] The order to liquidate

came from the Führer of the Reich.

So, in that sense, it's a policy determined by the Führer.

[narrator] In the spirit of Nazi propaganda,

Ohlendorf believes the Jews are responsible

for communism in the Soviet Union,

and therefore enemies of the German Reich.

Why does Ohlendorf believe propaganda is truth?

I don't think he believed it was propaganda.

He was raised in a nationalist family.

University, he had professors who taught

about the problems of... of Bolshevism,

the problems of communists, the problems of Jews.

You get fed it, and you get fed it, and you get fed it.

And it reinforces, I think, your already existing beliefs, you know?

And then a government comes to power that says, "Yes, you know, this is true."

He certainly believed that, um... that Bolsheviks were Jews

and that they should be killed.

[narrator] A survivor of one of the massacres

testifies in court after the war.

[survivor, in Russian] They lined us up at the edge of the pit, squeezed together.

Then they started shooting.

I closed my eyes, clenched my fists,

tensed all my muscles and jumped.

The fall seemed to take forever.

Finally, I landed on the bodies.

I hadn't been hit.

After a while, the shooting stopped.

I heard the Germans coming down into the pit...

[attendee coughs]

...to finish off those who were still moaning.

Some were still twitching and convulsing in their death throes.

They shot everyone who was still alive.

I played dead, scared of being discovered.

[snapping]

[narrator] Most of the men in Reserve Police Battalion 101

were not Nazis by conviction.

Twenty years after the war,

they describe to the investigators how they experienced the murder of the Jews.

[officer 1, in German] I can still see the image in my mind.

I remember thinking back then

that we didn't have enough earth to cover so many bodies.

[officer 2, in German] I was angry that we had become animals, murderers.

[officer 3, in German] We didn't see Jews as human beings.

The first massacre of Jews in Jozefow

was very upsetting, was very traumatic.

And then they get used to it very quickly.

The speed with which they became habituated to what they were doing,

the speed with which they got used to killing as a kind of normal routine

was one of the real surprises to me,

uh, that came out of the interrogations.

You can see in the first few killing operations...

[clears throat] ...the men can describe those in great detail.

Thereafter, it becomes a real blur.

They can't even remember which town it was in.

[narrator] The men's behavior is strongly influenced

by the leadership of the battalion.

At the helm is Major Wilhelm Trapp,

who commands the 500 men.

[Welzer, in German] He was a popular, respected superior, and he said,

"If I had a choice, I wouldn't give you the order. But..."

He was calling on them for solidarity, to support him with this task,

which didn't come from him,

and asking them not to abandon him.

- [chattering] - [bottles clank]

[in German] It was a combination of coercion and free will.

They were told that they could refuse to do it,

but that they would have to accept their comrades having to do it instead.

That combination of,

"It has to be done, the police battalion has to do the job"

and, "If you're weak, you can refuse, but it's at the expense of your comrades."

That combination creates the pressure

which led to most of them taking part in the shootings.

[narrator] Only a few policemen refuse to carry out the order to kill.

[chattering]

[officer 1, in German] No! We were already hoping it was over.

More potatoes?

[Welzer, in German] Objectively speaking,

nothing bad happened to the objectors.

They were assigned work cleaning latrines and that kind of thing.

They were called names: bastard, dirty rat, sissy and so on.

Those men were not at home,

they didn't go back to their families at the end of the day.

Instead, they were in a group of men for an unforeseeable amount of time,

always with the same people, who could torment them,

insult them and exclude them.

You need to be very self-assured to be able to endure that.

It might be only a social punishment and not a physical one,

but for human beings, a social punishment is one of the hardest things to bear.

[chattering]

[dog barks]

[bottles clanking]

[laughs]

[Browning] What's most on their mind, what's driving them?

I don't think they're obsessed with Jews.

They're more motivated about...

by what they think other people think about them

than they are about what they think about Jews.

I think they're very much obsessed with themselves,

with how they're going to get through this.

[narrator] Captain Wolfgang Hoffmann believes he can take the pressure,

but he has a problem.

[Browning] One of the captains develops a psychosomatic illness.

He gets sick every time his company is supposed to carry out a killing action.

And so, he is in bed with terrible stomach cramps and can't even get out of bed.

And he has to have the killing action led by his subordinate.

He wanted to be a killer, but his body broke down.

And the men, of course, thought this was terribly cowardly.

He was desperately embarrassed.

[narrator] Things are very different for Captain Julius Wohlauf.

He is ambitious, wants to carve out a career and excel at his job.

And he's in love.

[jazz music playing]

Wohlauf had married in Hamburg in June, shortly before the first massacre.

As an officer, he is allowed to take his wife to Poland, to the area of operations.

He wants to make up for his missed honeymoon.

[shutter clicks]

[Browning] Wohlauf brings his pregnant bride on a ghetto clearing.

The most horrible ghetto clearing of the entire operation

in virtually all the men's testimony

was when they took 11,000 Jews from Miedzyrzec,

shot a thousand of them just in the ghetto clearing actions...

the streets were just lined with dead bodies...

and put the other 10,000 on the train to Treblinka.

The train is so overcrowded they have to force people in and nail the doors shut,

or they will burst open.

And she's standing on the square watching this, witnessing all of this.

That shows, in a sense, how Wohlauf was proud of what he was doing,

wanted to show it off to his bride.

He wasn't ashamed or embarrassed at all.

[narrator] Ghettos begin springing up all over the East.

People who are kept cooped up inside them before they are murdered.

The victims filmed and photographed by their tormenters.

Policemen guard the people and kill them.

But only as long as the National Socialists are in power.

Neither before nor after this period

did a policeman decide to kill Jews en masse.

[Earl] I don't believe that people are born to kill.

I do think that we can become killers, though, under the right circumstances.

We have to think about what the relationship is

between the individual and the state.

You know, if the state is a state that says,

"This is the group we hate

and I want you to... or we want you to make sure that that group is dealt with,"

that's a really important relationship.

[birds chirping]

These individuals, even if they share the ideology of the state

for whom they are actors or for whom they are instruments,

um, when the state no longer holds power,

uh, when governments change,

they no longer act, or they no longer have a raison d'être

to participate in the violence of the state.

And this is one of the reasons, I think, understanding perpetrators is vital

is for us to think critically about, um... about our relationship to the state

and what the state is telling us to do.

[narrator] The German Reich before the war.

In 1933, the Nazis come to power

and change the laws to conform with their ideas.

The ruthless hatred of Jews becomes state doctrine,

and they immediately begin to drive all the Jews out of German society.

About 2000 anti-Jewish laws are passed.

A group of people is systematically excluded, stigmatized and humiliated.

[Welzer, in German] The first step towards mass murder

is a categorical distinction between "us" and "them."

Everyone noticed people losing their jobs,

being forced to leave their homes,

having their belongings auctioned off, businesses being "Aryanized."

All of that was a public process.

It wasn't a secret.

And that process reinforces the division.

They are "them," while "we" are the others.

If I define someone as different in theory

and also treat them differently in practice,

the willingness to use violence against that person

will naturally grow.

[narrator] The physical violence escalates during the war.

Under German occupation, pogroms occur in the East.

Jews are attacked by civilians.

Pictures from Lemberg in the summer of 1941.

The occupiers fuel these outbreaks of violence.

Those who do survive are later killed by the Germans.

A perpetrator who was present in Lemberg testifies in court after the war.

[in German] Our leader told our group of 12 men about our future tasks.

We would have to gather up and shoot the Jewish population.

The convoy stopped about 70 to 90 meters from the pit.

[speaking in Russian]

[in German] The Gruppenführer divided up his men as follows...

[speaking in Russian]

...six men to guard and six men to shoot.

[speaking in Russian]

[in German] I was tasked with shooting.

[speaking in Russian]

[in German] The shooting then proceeded as follows...

[speaking in Russian]

...about 45 to 50 people were separated and led to the pit.

[speaks in Russian]

[in German] They had to line up facing us.

[speaks in Russian]

[in German] And that's how they were shot.

They saw this as the job, as the task, as arbeit,

uh, something that this was what they had to do.

Uh, so, in that sense, it is... it is routinized.

But I think they were still always aware of the difficulty of it.

As I said, they're always aware that they got a dirty deal.

They were asked to do something that was extremely hard,

uh, and it was their bad luck that they had been assigned to this battalion

and sent to do this.

[Welzer, in German] Each of the perpetrators developed their own way

of justifying what they were doing.

"Someone has to do the dirty work."

Or maybe, "We have a historical duty to fulfill."

Another factor might have been, "I'm better at this than other people."

They all had justifications

that allowed them to find meaning in the murders.

Ultimately, this shows that mass murder

is committed by thinking people who do not execute orders like a machine,

but who think and comprehend what they are doing.

[officer, in German] I tried, and was able, to shoot only children.

The man next to me would shoot the mother, and I would shoot her child.

I told myself that the child, after all,

would not be able to live without its mother.

[in German] He translates his truly appalling act

into something morally good in a sense of "redemption."

That's the key to understand why the men did this.

It is not blind obedience.

Instead, they interpret the commands in a way that is acceptable for them

and allows them to see themselves as morally righteous.

[narrator] Why were children also shot?

Ohlendorf is asked to explain.

This question is crucial

to the proceedings against the leaders of the Einsatzgruppen.

[Ferencz] I put that question.

He said, "Because if they grew up,

and they knew what we did to their parents,

they would be enemies of Germany.

And I was interested in a long-range protection of my Vaterland.

And therefore, it's necessary to kill the children, too."

[narrator] Otto Ohlendorf, himself a father of five children,

does not show the slightest hint of remorse.

What about Major Wilhelm Trapp?

Does he understand his wrongdoing?

[Browning] He knows what he is doing is terrible.

He even says to his chauffeur at one point,

"God forbid Germany lose this war,

because if what we are doing here in Poland is ever,

in a sense, brought to justice, God have mercy on us Germans."

[chattering]

[officer, in German] Only afterwards did it occur to me that it wasn't right.

[officer 2, in German] You started to flounder,

the clear ideas you used to have were gone.

[in German] Stop arguing!

[narrator] The men are desensitized by the constant killing.

- [in German] Stop it! - [in German] He started after all!

For God's sake!

- What do you want? - I want to go home!

To me, in a sense, one of the most horrifying conclusions

that came out of this is that over time,

the battalion kind of broke into three groups.

One group was a group of men who learned to enjoy killing other human beings.

Uh, and they came back from these killing operations

and had a big lunch and would joke about what they had done.

[narrator] One person who finds particular pleasure in killing is Hartwig Gnade.

He becomes a brutal and sadistic murderer who takes pleasure

in torturing the victims before the shootings.

Jews are forced to crawl naked along the path to the pit,

while Gnade orders his men to beat the victims with clubs.

So here is someone who was literally changed

by what they were doing and by what they were seeing,

and degenerates into a very horrible person

in a fairly short period of time.

And there was a middle group. They were kind of the passive ones.

When they were asked to take part in an operation,

they did whatever they were told,

but they never took the initiative

either to get out of it or to do more.

[narrator] The third group are the objectors.

Like Lieutenant Heinz Bumann,

who had himself transferred back to Hamburg

after just a few weeks.

But that didn't make him a hero.

[in German] They always found ways to do it

that would keep the machine running.

Someone would say they were indisposed or they felt too weak that day.

But it wasn't an act of resistance,

it was just an attempt to extract the individual

without questioning the legitimacy of the police battalion as a whole.

[all singing in German] ♪ We will not let life make us bitter ♪

♪ Don't be afraid Don't be afraid, Rosemary! ♪

♪ Not even when the whole earth shakes ♪

♪ And the world is lifted off its hinges ♪

[bottles clanking]

[chattering]

[narrator] The members of the Reserve Police Battalion

are involved in the shooting of 38,000 Jews.

And they send another 45,000 to extermination camps.

[in German] The terrifying and central issue

in the case of Police Battalion 101

is that you don't need to act out of conviction,

to be motivated by ideology,

to carry out a mass killing.

[narrator] There are over 130 police battalions during the Second World War.

Of all these units, the Hamburg Battalion has the fourth highest murder rate.

Reserve Police Battalion 101, in a sense, is atypical.

And that, in a sense, makes it even more frightening.

We see what a battalion without any preparation,

without selection, without indoctrination, without nazification,

can nonetheless become one of the most prolific killing units

in the German order police.

[narrator] Nuremberg, April 10th, 1948. The day of the verdict.

[Ferencz] Death by hanging.

Then they take their hands off, put it down, nod to the judge, step back.

And boom, to the lift.

And down they go into hell.

I went down to the death house, which is right underneath the courthouse,

to talk to him.

I had never talked to any defendant, not one word, outside of the courtroom.

[keys jingle]

[door closes]

Although I hoped that he would say to me...

When I went down to see him, and I knew he was going to hang for sure,

um, "Can I do something for you?"

I thought he would say, "Tell my children I love them, tell my wife I'm sorry."

Not one word of remorse or regret.

He said he would shoot his own sister if he had to under similar circumstances.

"Goodbye, Mr. Ohlendorf," I said, and slammed the door on him.

I did a broadcast for CNN, and they said,

"How did it feel to be talking to these monsters?"

And I said, "They were not monsters."

They said, "What do you mean? They killed thousands of children.

You don't call that monster?"

I said, "Is the man who dropped the bomb, the atomic bomb on Hiroshima,

was he also a monster?"

That was President Truman.

I never got an answer to that question.

So, I have no doubt that Ohlendorf was a German patriotic man

and he carried out what he thought was in the interest of his country.

But that's not an argument which a normal human being

should be allowed to make and walk free.

[narrator] After the war, the Germans want to forget.

[birds chirping]

And so do the police.

60,000 police officers were involved in mass shootings during the war.

Many stay in law enforcement after 1945.

Not until the end of the 1950s does it actually become clear

as to what extent ordinary Germans were involved in the Holocaust.

The judiciary investigates more than 172,000 men,

including members of the SS, Gestapo, and the police.

Less than 500 of them are convicted

for their involvement in the genocide.

[Klemp, in German] The prosecution was a disaster.

Lots of material and documents had been collected,

there was really good evidence,

but there was a lack of will to punish those who had been involved in the crimes.

[narrator] The Hamburg battalion is also brought under investigation.

210 former members are questioned.

Fourteen of them are charged in 1967.

The trial succeeds in revealing details of the processes and patterns of behavior

within the battalion.

Julius Wohlauf is also prosecuted.

The man who brought his wife to Poland.

[all cheering, applauding]

Many of these men, they view themselves as the double victim.

They are the victim who has been chosen to do the dirtiest duty of the Third Reich.

And then they're the victim of a ex post facto new morality or new law

that is put in after the war,

uh, that they consider utterly unfair to be applied to them

because it wasn't illegal, uh, when they did it.

It was what the government was ordering to be done.

So, they are consumed with self-pity, not with guilt.

"Poor me."

Not the victim, it's, "Poor me. Look what I was asked to do and had to do."

[narrator] Only two defendants have to serve a prison sentence.

- One of the defendants... - [shutter clicking]

...is Julius Wohlauf.

83,000 people murdered, and none of them feel responsible.

They were the stooges on the ground.

But each policeman had a freedom of choice,

a not inconsiderable amount.

Those who didn't murder out of conviction, they conformed.

[Browning] I think, unfortunately, what it shows us

is that all sorts of people can become killers under certain circumstances.

That regimes that want to commit genocide or mass murder

will never fail to do so for a lack of people who will pull the trigger.

[in German] There have been several genocides since the Holocaust.

There have been massacres and mass murders.

There are other contexts

where we find those mechanisms

that lead people to kill others without any personal

or psychological motives.

Wherever people can say to themselves,

"I am only a cog in the wheel, I am not responsible."

With that attitude, almost anything is possible.

[narrator] The Holocaust was a unique crime in its planning and delivery.

Yet, to this very day,

people continue being killed for belonging to a different group.

[Browning] We like to think that we are the masters of our own destiny.

But I do think, uh, that, in fact,

we are more shaped by things we have little control over.

The way we gain greater control is simply by being more conscious of them.

One of the points of writing a book like Ordinary Men

is so that people become more aware of our vulnerability, of our malleability,

so that, uh, when we face those kinds of circumstances,

uh, we're not taken by surprise.

That we have an ability to make a more conscious decision

than we would otherwise.

[Earl] Is a normal man a monster?

I think all people are capable of doing things

that they don't imagine that they're capable of doing.

I think that we want to "other" perpetrators,

people like Ohlendorf,

because we don't want to look in the mirror and see ourselves reflected back.

They wore suits, they were well-educated, they went to university,

they spoke multiple languages.

And I think we want to believe that we would never do what those men did.

You don't have to be ideological.

You don't have to be, um, hateful.

You don't have to be anything, and you can still kill.

So, the question is, "Are normal or ordinary people monsters?"

I think we all have the potential to do that.

[narrator] The experience in Nuremberg shaped him forever.

Throughout his whole life, Benjamin Ferencz has worked to ensure

that crimes against humanity would not be repeated.

It was also on his initiative

that the International Criminal Court was founded in The Hague,

where war crimes are still prosecuted today.

[Ferencz] We are all inhabitants of one small planet.

The idea is when we recognize

not that we have different religions, different countries, different colors,

but all human beings inhabiting one small planet.

If we follow the same path, we will be successful.

If we don't, we'll cease to exist.

I've done my bit. I'm a hundred years old.

I don't know how much longer I can keep going.

But as long as I can, I will.

Now I leave it to the young people to take the torch.

- [in German] Come on, attention. For home. - [officers laughing]

- [shutter clicking] - Yeah, a little cuddling.

Good.