The Holocaust

Josef Felder, then a member of Germany’s Social Democratic Party: ‘That day Berlin was truly a sea of swastikasswastikas. I went out into the streets myself and watched the Nazi storm troopers proudly parading. Restaurants and bars stayed open all night. Everyone was drinking and making a tremendous noise. The ferocious enthusiasm and the sudden rush of devotion to Nazism were hard to believe.’

The causes of Germany's problems, he argued, lay in the Versailles system after the First World War and the incompetence of politicians. The age of party politics was now over, and Hitler himself would embody the national will.

Unions were banned to eliminate labor disputes. Workers were made to join the Nazi-led labor movement. During the Great Depression, unemployment reached thirty percent.

The Nazis received support from factories across the country. A helping hand was also extended to farmers driven into bankruptcy during the Great Depression.

Luise Essig: ‘At the harvest festival, our hearts became one. The same happiness. The same joy… We were sincerely grateful that light had returned to our future as farmers.

To combat unemployment, Hitler promoted a vast public-works project: construction of the autobahn, a four-thousand-kilometer highway network.

I reported that building the autobahns was a great achievement of which we Germans should be proud, and that it would continue.”

Horst Slesina: "Radio made Germans aware of their greatness. Propaganda instilled a sense of pride in people for the first time."

They blamed Jews for a variety of problems.

At the time, more than fifty percent of doctors and seventy percent of lawyers in Vienna were Jewish. Such things became factors giving rise to antisemitism.”

In March 1933, Hitler and Goebbels issued a nationwide directive to boycott Jewish-owned shops. Most German citizens merely stood by as shops were blocked and attacked.

The Schutzstaffel, commonly called the SS, were, so to speak, descendants of the medieval knights of myth.

At the time I thought it was wonderful. Being chosen greatly flattered my pride. The SS uniform was black, and it looked truly beautiful. I liked everything—the uniform, the boots, all of it."

SS leader Heinrich Himmler: “We advance according to eternal laws. We are on the path toward the distant future. We do not merely wish to surpass past generations. We wish to create future generations that will make the German people eternal.”

My wife was even asked about her tastes in clothes and perfume. We Germans believed we could create a new race that seemed perfect to us. I chose my wife according to these guidelines too."

The entire population was forced to live the ideal German life prescribed by the Nazis. To ensure people did not forget its purpose, local Party members regularly organized various events.

People who had spent their childhood in the small Saxon village of Leppner watched film of a festival from those days.

From 1933 to 1935, a series of Nazi laws barred Jews entirely from legal, medical and administrative professions, expelling them from Aryan workplaces and households.

The Nazis also regarded people with mental disabilities as dangerous. Claiming to prevent hereditary disability, they forcibly sterilized them.

Newsreel narration: ‘Our population has increased by fifty percent over the past seventy years. The number with hereditary defects has increased by 450 percent. At this rate, within fifty years every citizen will have diseased descendants. Endless terror will rule the nation.’

Norbert Lopper was a nineteen-year-old Jew living in Vienna.

In Austria, too, local Nazi organizations humiliatedhumiliated Jews.

Norbert Lopper: “One day they came to our houseuchi and dragged my sister away. They took her into the street and ordered her to scrub it clean. While she scrubbed, they stood there mockingazawara(u) her. ...It was humiliating.”

But the procedures for leaving took time. Long queues formed daily outside the American consulate in Vienna. Foreign governments consequently began limiting the number they would admit. Those who fled to neighboring countries would soon face Nazi invasion there too.

Those with blond hair and blue eyeshekigan were allowed to become German citizens. Others were forced into labor, expelled abroad or killed. More than three million Polish citizens were Jewish.

When war began, German policy toward people with physical or mental disabilities changed. Hitler issued a top-secret directive ordering their extermination. Reinhard Spitzy heard Hitler explain his reasons.

In this basement, more than ten thousand people were killed with carbon monoxide gas. In the adjoining room, bodies were dissected for medical research.

Only many years later did Rau learn the true cause of her mother's death.

Peter Bielenberg had resisted the Nazis since his days as a law student and viewed the deportation of Jews with suspicion.

The dunes of Libau, Latvia, in 1941.

Thousands of German Jews were thus taken to Latvia and murdered. But the bloodthirsty Nazi executioners did not merely wait for victims to be brought to them. They also formed special units that traveled from place to place, hunting down Jews and killing them.

Westerbork in the Netherlands: the departure point for trains deporting Jews. Hans Margules, who had fled Berlin for the Netherlands, was captured by German forces and ordered to help with the deportations.

At the time, Margules had no idea what Auschwitz, the train’s destination, was like.

Here the Jews are saying goodbye to one another. Everyone was saying things like, 'We'll see each other again soon.'

The railway tracks ran into the camp itself. This truly was the end of the line. Arriving prisoners were first separated into men and women. Then doctors selected those fit for labor and those to be killed immediately.

Dora Schwarz: "I was lucky. When the doctor made the selection, I was among mothers with children, but one of the staff ordered me to join another group. The women with children were sent straight to the gas chamber afterward. I escaped by a hair's breadth. It was truly a narrow escape from death."

Norbert Lopper, deported from Vienna, also joined this work detail.

Each child clutched a bread roll tightly. I can still picture them. The bread was confiscated, of course. Then the children took the hands of the nurses who had accompanied them and headed to the gas chamber."

Prisoners' bodies being burned outdoors. By the summer of 1944, the crematoria alone could no longer cope with the ever-growing number of corpses. The number of Jews murdered by the Nazis because they did not fit their racial policy is said to be six million. The number of Roma killed for the same reason reached 500,000.

After the war, the delusion of belonging to a superior race confronted Germans with a nightmare reality. When concentration camps were liberated and local Germans entered them, they were appalled to discover the true nature of the madness that had possessed them.

Traces of medical experiments.