8,000 Nazi personnel served here.
Auschwitz,
the most comprehensively-designed mass extermination concept
in the history of mankind.
- In 1944 came an order
that we're going to be taking out
from the ghetto, and,
they started sending transport to take us to Auschwitz.
And when we arrived,
men and boys separate a queue,
women and children, another queue.
And we moved forward and,
then we came to three high-ranking officers.
Mengele was one of them.
And they ask you your age,
looked at you, how fit you are.
I was 14 then.
And 180 of the children after 182
went to their death,
to the gas chambers with other people.
And then they gave us the number on the arm.
We lost our name from that day onwards, B-7608.
Every prisoner in Auschwitz had a number.
The Auschwitz camp complex
covered several miles
and consisted of Auschwitz I,
which was the prisoner of war camp
and the administrative headquarters.
Monowitz, or Auschwitz III,
which provided a slave labor force
for the giant IG Farben chemical factory.
There were also dozens of sub camps.
But the most notorious camp of all was Auschwitz II,
which became better known as Birkenau.
The other purpose-built death camps were
within Nazi-occupied Poland.
But Auschwitz, although on the soil of defeated Poland,
was at the time within the borders
of the greater German Reich.
- This is one of the most important pictures
from the Auschwitz album.
It shows the moment of the selection.
The spot from this picture
is right there behind us, the ramp, the platform.
This is one of the SS doctors,
conducting the selection.
In front of him, group of men waiting for that,
for the selection process.
The one that stood in front of the doctor,
somebody old, you can see that, cane, white hair.
People that are old, babies, handicapped,
almost all were sent to the gas chambers,
killed straight away.
They were taken this way,
and they walked to the end of the ramp.
It's this road, down there, at the end of the tracks.
There were two gas chambers and crematoria, two and three.
From the selection place down there to the end,
it was 10-minutes walk only.
- So, this is where most of the 1.1 million people walked.
- Yeah.
- Every day, we see trains arriving
and we knew on the left-hand side,
all the people were walking, they went to gas chamber.
There were four gas chambers
and four crematoriums, day and night working.
- These are the remains of the gas chamber
and crematorium number two.
They were underground, they were all hidden, the rooms.
Germans did on purpose, of course.
There was thousands of people select to die
and they all had to strip.
There were hangers on the walls, there were benches,
so they were told to leave their stuff together.
- A few hundred people went into a gas chamber, and then,
they shut the gate on the, it was all underground, and,
SS men, gas masked,
put the gas in and within about 15 minutes or 10 minutes,
they were all dead.
- They were told that they're gonna have showers.
They could see even the shower heads in that room.
The shower heads, of course, were fake.
That room was used as the gas chamber.
To kill 2000 people,
it used to take about 20 minutes,
using for that, of course, the Zyklon B.
Women, kids, men, in that one room
that had only 210 square meters of surface.
People were like cattle squeezed together.
It was a very painful death.
They were vomiting, choking, suffocating.
After they were killed, after they were murdered,
the gas chamber had to be ventilated first.
When this was done,
the members of the Sonderkommando had to go there.
They were given orders to clear the gas chamber.
They had to take the bodies out.
But the members of the Sonderkommando
were not collaborating with the general.
They were the prisoners of Auschwitz,
forced to do that job.
Among them, there were many Jews.
So when they were sent to the gas chambers,
many of them have found people that they knew.
They have found bodies of their friends,
cousins, sisters, brothers.
They had to take their bodies out to the crematorium.
And then of course, first, if they had found,
they had to take off the jewelry from the bodies,
rings, necklaces, they had to extract the gold teeth.
They shaved the head from the women's heads
and then they started burning the corpses.
It was like a factory.
Well organized, very systematic way of killing people.
This is one of the ponds for the human ashes, David.
And the ponds like this one
were also next to the other gas chambers.
Next to the gas chamber number two,
next to the gas chamber three.
Not always they dump the ashes to the ponds.
Sometimes they just put the ashes on the tracks
and dump them to the rivers.
Next to Auschwitz, we have two big rivers, Sola and Vistula.
- So here are the remains
of literally tens of thousands of people.
Yes, of course.
- Eventually I was chosen to work on agriculture,
with two horses.
For fertilizer, they used to bring us sacks from the,
gas chambers,
burned the bones.
And I used to put my hand in
and threw it on the floor.
I could feel the bones in my hand.
- Around you, you see now the remains
of some of the warehouses they called Canada.
So this is where the jail was kept.
Shoes, suitcases, thousands of personal belongings
the Jews were bringing with them to the camp.
So those things that were in a good condition were sent
to Germany to the Reich and they were reused.
Random prisoners were picked to do this job.
- This part of Auschwitz-Birkenau was called Canada,
simply because the prisoners had heard
that Canada was a nice place to live.
- I came to Canada in, I think it was April, 1944,
just as this thing was built, in fact,
all these huts were completely new.
My hut was the first hut here.
And so there were two huts
because were a day shift at the night shift,
and there were 800 of us.
So we were accommodated in these two huts.
And down here were the men.
The men's duty was to bring the stuff
from the train to Canada.
Let me just show you,
'cause that's a useful thing to see.
Here, you see people disembarking from the train, okay?
Some with the bundles, as you can see.
So some people are carrying the bundles.
So they were told to leave everything behind.
That luggage was brought by these men
of the Canada commando,
and that was then brought to Canada,
where we did the sorting.
- So most of the people coming in here
will not have known what was gonna happen to them.
- People had no conception whatsoever.
People walking into a building
of the gas chamber had no idea
that it was a gas chamber.
It said to disinfection.
He said, 'You're going to be disinfected.
"Please put your clothes together,
"bundle your shoes together so they don't get lost."
That's what these men of the Canada were supposed
to tell the people.
And they had to tell them
because the SS here were standing,
waiting for them to say that.
That's one of the Canada group, sorting shoes.
That shows you how many shoes they wear.
That particular hut was full of shoes
from the bottom to the ceiling.
And that's the overflow of the shoes that are outside.
- So this must be 10,000,
at least there... - Thousands.
And then, for years and years after the war,
there were Germans wearing... - Yeah.
- Dead Jew's shoes. - Absolutely.
- Murdered Jew's shoes. - Absolutely.
When I was actually first transferred to Canada,
one of the SS officers, I think it was a man called Pallage,
he just made a very short speech and he said,
"Remember what you're going to witness here.
"And because you are witnesses,
"you'll never be transferred back to the main camp.
"There's only one way out of here,
"and that's through the chimney."
So that, you can imagine, was a big shock.
That's how I got to Canada.
- The ones that worked here,
the prisoners sorting the belongings,
were aware that just behind the fence on the other side,
the Germans were killing those people.
The thousands of the Jews were coming here,
there were two other gas chambers just behind the fence.
And those that survived Auschwitz
and worked here in the Canada warehouses,
they remember that they have seen people in the woods,
down there waiting before they were killed.
This was a very organized,
very systematic way of killing people,
on the industrial scale.
- There were three cordons of assessment guarding Auschwitz.
They actually volunteered for the job.
They were very cruel.
And then they went home to see their families.
They had a good time at home, and had children.
And then they came back to Auschwitz
and did the same thing again.
- In 1944, at the height
of Auschwitz-Birkenau's mass murders,
the Nazis compiled two contrasting photo albums.
One, of the new arrivals at the death camp,
the other of the holiday camp,
for officers, guards, administrators,
and other Auschwitz complex personnel
to relax and enjoy themselves.
In one album,
most of the people photographed would be murdered.
In the other album,
most of the people photographed
would get away with those murders.
By May, 1944, they were killing 10,000 people a day.
The Nazis murdered 1.1 million men, women,
and children in the Auschwitz complex.
Approximately 7,000 of the butchers responsible,
mainly SS, survived the war,
yet only around 800 were ever prosecuted for war crimes.
Josef Mengele, arguably the world's
most wanted Nazi war criminal, targeted twins, Gypsies,
and dwarfs in particular in Auschwitz.
One of his many horrific experiments
was injecting eyeballs with a dye
to try to change the color.
This memorial in Mengele's hometown reads,
"No one can divorce himself
"from the history of his people.
"One should not and must not let history rest
"because otherwise it can rise again
"and become part of the present."
- Josef Mengele, the "Angel of Death,"
was born and grew up here
and his father was the largest employer.
And in 1956 when he was living in Argentina,
he was able to go to the German embassy
and get hold of a copy of his birth certificate.
And from that, he was able to obtain an Argentinian passport
in the name of Josef Mengele.
And then allegedly, later that year,
he flew to Switzerland and met with his wife and son,
and from there, sneaked back here to Günzburg
to see all his family and friends.
And then in 1959, when his father died,
he again came back here and was involved
in the wake and the funeral, and apparently,
most of the town knew he was here, all except the police.
And even more extraordinarily,
he actually stayed with some nuns.
Mengele avoided extradition requests
by the West German government
and escaped the Mossad attempt to capture him.
In 1979, he died, aged 67,
after suffering a stroke while swimming in Brazil.
His skeleton is stored at the
Sao Paulo Institute for Forensic Medicine,
where it is used for medical experiments.
- Six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust.
It's hard to comprehend
what six million people actually looks like.
I can only try to compare it to my own understanding.
I come from Yorkshire, which is the UK's largest county.
It takes two hours to drive north to south,
and two and a half hours to drive east to west.
There are over 1,100 cities, towns, villages, and hamlets.
Some, like adjoining cities Leeds and Bradford,
has 1.4 million living there.
Sheffield has 600,000 inhabitants.
In total, the population of Yorkshire
is currently 5.4 million people.
If the Nazis had exterminated
the entire population of Yorkshire,
what would the British government have done?
There are six million people living
in the US State of Maryland.
If they'd all been massacred by the Nazis,
what would the American government have done?
What would the world have done
if the almost six million people living in Denmark
had all been murdered by the Nazis?
At school in the 1960s, just 35 miles from here,
we were told that we British
could never have carried out the Holocaust.
We are civilized and above such things.
On the 16th of March, 1190,
following many weeks of antisemitic riots, 150 Jews,
the entire Jewish population of York,
were massacred, many by their own hands,
at a former castle on this site.
Had more Jews lived here,
they too would have been massacred.
Regardless of the actual numbers involved,
that was mass extermination.
In 1290, Edward I expelled all Jews from his kingdom
and Jews were only permitted to return 367 years later
when Oliver Cromwell allowed them back.
In the last 2000 years,
at one time or another,
in most European countries,
the Jews have been relentlessly persecuted.
The government sent a few
of us congressmen over to see those camps.
And if there's anybody left who wonders
if this war was worth fighting,
well, I wish they could have been along.
There it was, right in front of us,
fascism and what it's bound to lead to,
wherever it crops up.
In Germany, it led to over 400 camps like the ones I saw.
It was the worst thing I ever saw in my life.
- The shock of seeing
can never be taken away,
but is a fact that publicly and officially,
the Allies condemned what we now call the Holocaust,
and what they then just call the extermination of the Jews,
as early as the time of the Battle of Stalingrad,
in the winter of 1942.
And the exiled refugee governments in London
brought up the first set of principles
to punish the Nazis for war crimes.
And the Soviet authorities have been
publishing detailed descriptions of Nazi crimes,
including pogroms, as they called them,
very early in the war, and not just in the press,
but in official statements.
This Allied statement about the extermination of the Jews
was read out in the House of Commons
and there was a memorial,
a moment when Parliament stood in silence,
which it never did, except for the death of a king.
It was a ceremonial moment.
And this was broadcast on some 20 languages on the BBC.
I regret to have to inform the House
that reliable reports have recently reached
His Majesty's Government
regarding the barbarous and inhuman treatment
to which Jews are being subjected in German-occupied Europe.
German authorities, not content with denying
to persons of Jewish race in all the territories
over which their barbarous rule has been extended
the most elementary human rights,
are now carrying into effect Hitler's oft repeated intention
to exterminate the Jewish people in Europe.
From all the occupied countries,
Jews are being transported in conditions
of appalling horror and brutality to Eastern Europe.
The infirm are left to die of exposure and starvation,
or are deliberately massacred in mass executions.
The number of victims of these bloody cruelties is reckoned
in many hundreds of thousands
of entirely innocent men, women, and children.
Just months after he made that historic statement,
Anthony Eden received a request
from the Bulgarian authorities
for help with moving 11,343 Jews
from the newly-acquired Bulgarian territories
of Greece and Yugoslavia
to British-controlled Palestine.
He refused.
Many of those Jews ended up instead
in the Treblinka extermination camp.
- United Nations War Crimes Commission
started work at the end of 1943,
at the height of the war,
and began compiling dossiers of evidence
against Nazi and Japanese war criminals.
And then just after the Nazis' surrender,
the four victorious powers in Europe came together,
not before time, many would say,
and agreed on a legal process
to try the Nazi leadership for the crimes they committed.
And this agreement, this charter then was the legal document
under which the top Nazis were brought
to account at Nuremberg.
Johann Robert Riss was a Wehrmacht sergeant
involved in the massacre of approximately 184 civilians
in a Tuscan town in 1944.
Living in Bavaria after the war,
in 2011, he was sentenced in absentia,
by the military court in Rome, to life imprisonment.
Germany declined to extradite him.
To date, he appears to be at liberty and unpunished.
- Churchill, Roosevelt,
and after him, Truman,
were all very supportive of trials.
However, within governments,
there was a certain amount of hostility.
And we know from records
that have been subsequently unearthed and published
that in Britain, for example,
a number of senior civil servants were opposed to trials.
Some described it as victor's justice,
others said it would be counterproductive
and it would push Germany into the hands
of a another would-be Hitler.
And in the US, the objections were slightly different.
But there was certainly a pattern
among a number of senior people
within government to resist the trials.
And it was only overcome by the top leadership.
- Henry Stimson managed the war effort
for Franklin Roosevelt, the Secretary of War.
His own history on war crimes goes back decades before
when he was part of the American team supporting the idea
that a war was itself a crime.
So he was very keen on prosecuting the Nazis
for crimes of aggression.
But he was also, in another way,
strongly opposed to the idea of crimes against humanity.
Because as Stimson told his staff,
he didn't want to see America in the dock
for the lynchings in the south of Blacks,
because they had, as America supported,
the idea that Germany could be prosecuted
for what it had done to its own citizens, the Jews.
And this sense that you had to preserve state sovereignty
against outside's interference was something
that also he was very strong on.
On the other hand, you had Ambassador Pell,
who is a real hero of these issues.
He went public back in Washington and created a huge fuss
and forced the State Department through the press
to agree that German crimes against German Jews
should be regarded as a crime.
And when Pell headed off to Europe,
he penned a note to a friend saying,
"We want to make sure after this is all over
"that the Gestapo officers can't sit around in the village,
"having a renaissance and talking of the joys
"of shooting Jews and looting France."
And he says explicitly, "We must make sure
"that the Nazis do not get a romantic revival,
"the way in which the Confederacy managed
"to do in America after the Civil War."
A very telling point to be written in 1943, I think.
As well as Nuremberg,
there seemed to be so many other trials focusing
upon the murderous crimes of the Holocaust
that it looked as if the Allies
in both East and West Germany were truly determined
to achieve real justice for all the victims
of mass slaughter.
But an estimation of the immense number
of perpetrators compared to those
who actually stood trial exposes
the minuscule tip of an iceberg.
- People hold up Nuremberg as a shining light
of justice, quite rightly.
And on the other hand, you get arguments, "Oh, well,
"Let's be pragmatic.
"It's too difficult, it's too costly.
"These people might become our friends."
Well, I think what one should remember
is the pragmatists almost succeeded
in preventing Nuremberg from ever happening.
- On Thursday the 18th of October, 1945 in Berlin,
the indictment was lodged with a tribunal.
And a copy of that indictment in the German language
has been furnished to each defendant
and has been in his possession more than 30 days.
The defendants
are to plead guilty
or not guilty for the charges against them.
You must plead guilty or not guilty.
- We're entering Courtroom 600.
So this was the side where the judges were.
There were eight judges, two of every country.
Here's the place where the translators sat.
This is the place where the defendants sat,
and this is the place where the defense councils were.
And here where the tables
where the prosecution teams had its place.
The most basic Nuremberg principle is
that such severe crimes as these mass crimes,
state crimes, crimes against humanity, war crimes,
must not be unpunished
but must be tried before
an international or a national court
in order to document and portray these crimes,
but also, in order to satisfy
the needs of the victims for a certain punishment
of those guilty of these crimes.
There were 21 defendants.
Originally there were 24, but one killed itself.
One, they could not find, it was then later clear
that he was also already dead.
And one was not capable to follow the trial
because he was very ill.
It is much, much more than a show trial,
especially the International Military Tribunal detailed,
portrayed the crime history of Nazi Germany
for the first time.
The tribunal collected evidences,
documents that still are very important
for the research that is done
on the so-called Das Dritte Reich, the Third Reich.
And the guilt, the individual guilt of the accused was very,
very meticulously proven.
When the first trial, 21 were tried,
12 were sentenced to death, and three were acquitted.
And the others, they got long-term
or even lifetime imprisonments.
The idea behind the Nuremberg
trials was to put to try the major war criminals,
not people who were on the lower hierarchy
in the Nazi regime, but those who were responsible
for the organization, for the planning,
and those who benefited most from this criminal system.
Feodor Fedorenko served
at Treblinka extermination camp.
He escaped to the USA in 1949
and became an American citizen.
He retired to Florida,
with its large Jewish population, in 1973.
In December, 1984, Fedorenko became
the first Nazi war criminal living in the USA
to be deported to the Soviet Union.
At his trial in 1986,
he was found guilty of treason
and taking part in mass executions.
He was executed by firing squad in 1987, aged 79.
Even though this filming is taking place
75 years after the end of the war,
I was surprised to have the opportunity to speak to someone
who'd actually prosecuted the Nazis at Nuremberg.
- You're now going to hear the presentation
by the prosecution.
- It is with sorrow and with hope.
- This was the tragic fulfillment
of a program of intolerance and arrogance.
Vengeance is not our goal, nor do...
Benjamin Ferencz is the last living participant
to give an eyewitness testimony of those historic trials.
- The slaughter permitted by these defendants
was dictated, not by military necessity,
but by that supreme perversion of thoughtful,
the Nazi theory of the master race.
- The International Military Tribunal was the only one
where the four occupying powers and successful powers,
United States, Great Britain, France, and Soviet Union,
joined together in response to promises which had been made
by President Roosevelt and Mr. Churchill,
that the criminals would be brought to justice.
And that attracted a great deal of attention
and great many reporters.
When that trial was over, the reporters went home.
The United States had decided
that it would conduct another series of trials,
it turned out to be 12 trials,
in order to give a more comprehensive picture
of what had happened, not just a snapshot,
which was the IMT trial itself,
but to explain how it is
that a civilized country like Germany
could not only tolerate this type of atrocity,
which the Nazis were committing,
but would accept it and support it.
- Over and over again,
Hitler asserted his belief in the necessity of force
as the means of solving international problems.
- Just as the international military trial
was coming to an end, I was invited, I would say,
by the Pentagon to go back and join them
for the trials which the army was conducting,
the military commission trials.
I went over to see Telford Taylor.
He had been asked by the president
to set up 12 additional trials.
And my first assignment from Telford Taylor was,
he said, "Look, we have a number of suspects.
"We are holding them in detention.
"We need the evidence, because if you have the suspect
"and no evidence, you've got nothing.
"And you've got the evidence and no suspect,
"you've got nothing.
"So we've gotta match together,
"proof of crime and the criminal in custody.
"And you provide the evidence for it,
"that'll be your job, okay?"
So I proceeded to Berlin to do that job.
I had a staff of about 50 people,
mostly former German refugees.
Had to speak German perfectly, of course.
And one day,
one of my assistants walks in
and he hands me a pile of papers and he said,
"Look what I found."
And I looked at him.
The title on it was
In German is, "Situation Reports,"
of a certain group known as Einsatzgruppen.
Their assignment was to murder.
They never used the word "murder."
To eliminate all Jews,
men, women, and children,
without pity or remorse,
to just exterminate them
as you would exterminate vermin.
That was the assignment
of the SS Einsatzgruppen action group
and the four divisions that they had within them.
And that's the job they carried out.
So I sat down with a little adding machine,
I began to add them up.
When I reached a million people murdered,
I said, "That's enough."
I took a sample, I took the next military plane
from Berlin back to Nuremberg.
I met then with Telford Taylor.
I said, "General, we have to put on a new trial."
He said, "We can't.
"We have already assigned all the lawyers.
"The Pentagon has already approved the budget.
"They're not inclined to allow any new trials to go on
"and we just can't do it."
Whereabout I blew my cool and I said,
"You've gotta put these people on trial!
"I have in my hand mass murder,
"mass murder on an unparalleled scale.
"We just can't let these people go."
And so I guess he noticed my desperation or something.
He said, "Well, can you do it
"in addition to your other work?"
And I said, "Sure."
He said, "Okay, you do it."
And so I was appointed by him
as the Chief Prosecutor
and what was later known as the Einsatzgruppen Trial.
- Genocide, the extermination
of whole categories of human beings,
as a foremost instrument of the Nazi doctrines.
It is therefore holy fitting for this court
to hear these charges of international crimes
and to adjudge them in the name of civilization.
The charges we have brought accuse the defendants
of having committed crimes against humanity.
- I rested my case in two days.
Quite remarkable.
Very simple, because I said, "Look,
"I have the evidence here, top secret German evidence.
"I have the defendant there whose name is on this report.
"He was the commander-in-chief there,
"and this is the total reports he sent in."
When I asked Ohlendorf, for example, with my lead defendant,
"Do you acknowledge that your unit killed 90,000 Jews?"
He said, "No."
I said, "What do you mean, no?
"Is that your signature?"
"Yes."
"Is it 90,000?"
"Yes."
"So how do you say no?"
"Well, some of the men used to brag about the body count.
"They wanted to show they killed even more
"than they actually killed."
So I said, "Well, would you say it's 70,000,
"80,000 would be more appropriate?"
"Yeah, yeah, that could be."
And this was Dr. Otto Ohlendorf, well educated man.
All of my defendants had either doctor degrees or high rank.
I selected very carefully.
How do you plead to this indictment?
Guilty or not guilty?
They put forward as their defense
that they were only obeying orders.
Another one was that the documents were fabricated.
And then some of them even actually went
as far as to say they weren't aware
that these mass murders were taking place.
- Well, let's take a all those excuses one at a time.
One, superior orders, right?
Every German soldier had to carry his own book,
they call a little book manual of his duties.
I had some of 'em, it listed the duties.
"You are to obey all legal orders."
Legal orders, it didn't say all orders,
including illegal orders.
I asked a question, "Did they think it was legal
"to murder thousands of children?"
By what stretch of the imagination could
that possibly be legal?
The next argument they came up with,
we didn't do it, of course.
Well, that was refuted by their evidence.
These were secret reports which they had signed
and sent to their headquarters.
They're not gonna lie to their headquarters
about what they did,
and the headquarters consolidated them.
The only mistake they made there was I found the reports.
And then they said, whatever excuse did they give us?
Well, the one of them, the only time I really got annoyed
in the courtroom was when one of these mass murderers,
whose reports I had, how many Jews they had killed,
he has the gall to say,
"Jews are killed?
"I heard it here in this court for the first time."
Oh man, I really just wanna jump over him,
putting a bayonet through his ears.
He'd put it through to the other end,
to improve his hearing.
But otherwise, they said,
you mentioned, two colloquial argument,
that everybody's feeling, "War is war.
"We had to do this because everybody was at war."
They made that argument in a very intelligent way.
And it was done by the lead defendant, Dr. Otto Ohlendorf.
Handsome young man, father of five children.
He said, "We did this in self-defense."
"Self-defense, nobody, Germany was not attacked.
"Germany didn't attack, by France,
wasn't attacked by Holland, by Belgium,
"by all the other country.
"Where do you come off with self-defense?"
"Well," he said, "Hitler let us know.
"And he knew more than I did.
I couldn't challenge him that Russia planned to attack us.
"Therefore it would be necessary for us
"to preempt that and attack first.
"And that's what we did.
"And I have here expert opinions from German lawyers
"in big bunch of them, saying preemptive self-defense
"is permissible, it is not a crime.
"And so, we were just
"carrying out our patriotic duty wise."
And I, of course, countered the arguments
and the judges accepted my arguments,
saying, "That's not a defense at all
"because it's not required by law to preempt anybody.
"And it's a ridiculous and dangerous policy to adapt it."
- We shall establish, beyond the realm of doubt,
facts, which before the dark decade of the Third Reich,
would've seemed incredible.
Courts will show that the slaughter committed
by these defendants was dictated
not by military necessity,
but by that supreme perversion of thought,
the Nazi theory of the master race.
- My opening sentence to the court was,
"It is with sorrow and with hope
"that we hear disclose mass murder," et cetera, et cetera.
It was a combination of sorrow for the victims
and hope that we would be able to change it in future.
That was my theme when I opened the trial.
It was my theme when I closed the trial.
My closing statement, I said,
"The defendants in the dark were the cruel executioners
"whose terror wrote the darkest page in human history.
"Life was their toy, death was their tool.
"If these men be immuned,
"then law has lost its meaning,
"and man must live in fear."
That was my closing statement.
- On 29 September, 137 days ago,
the prosecution outlined the evidence
in support of the indictment,
which has been brought against these defendants.
On 30 September, 1947,
136 days ago, the prosecution rested this case.
In view of the nature of the crimes charged here
and the conclusive documentary proof and support thereof,
the desperate nonsense which you've encountered here
during the 21 intervening weeks
may jar the ear but it can hardly surprise the lie.
In summing up this case after four and a half months,
nearly a week for each defendant,
the prosecution sees no necessity for or benefit from
a tedious rehearsal of the details of the record.
- Defendants came out from, one at a time,
from the cellar down below.
There was a little lift going into the courthouse.
The doors opened this way, and they would step out.
And the judge would say,
"For the crimes of which you all have been convicted,
"this tribunal sentences you death by hanging."
Next one, "Death by hanging."
"Death by hanging."
I'm writing it down, and they had 13 of them,
and one after the other, "Death by hanging."
At the Einsatzgruppen trial,
Martin Sandberger was sentenced
to death by hanging for mass murder.
His defense was that he was only responsible
for carrying out a fraction of these killings,
which he estimated to be 300 to 350 people.
In 1951, his sentence was reduced
to life imprisonment due to powerful friends intervening.
However, he was released seven years later.
He died in 2010
in a luxury nursing home, aged 98.
- They're all equally guilty.
Everyone was a mass murderer or an accessory
to mass murder, beyond any doubt, any, no doubt whatsoever
because every day it was their daily bread.
We had 3000 members of the Einsatzgruppen.
I tried 22, 13 of 'em were sentenced to death.
They were all mass murderers or accessories to mass murder.
They limited the number of defendants I could have
to the 22 seats in the dock, a ridiculous idea.
Ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous,
from point of view of justice.
So you couldn't talk in terms of justice
on these circumstances, I knew that.
The crimes are so enormous
because people thought they were doing
the right thing for their country.
And that danger still exists and still persists today.
- In the early 1990s,
my parents were running a small
conference retreat center
in the farmhouse here for the church.
And we were going to create a small exhibition
to say this is important.
These terrible atrocities were a product
of European civilization.
And we need to wake up and understand how that came about.
How does an event
of the scale of the holocaust occur?
And then 50 years later, it wasn't even in our curriculum.
We go through the British education system
and learned nothing about it.
And if we don't
learn about that history,
what chance do we have of learning from it
and ensuring that these kind of
human-made tragedies never happen again?
And so that's the reason that this memorial developed here
in the Nottinghamshire countryside, next to Sherwood Forest.
- So I've got here a copy of the London Agreement
dated the 8th of August, 1945.
And it's between the UK, the USA,
the Provisional Government of the French Republic,
and the USSR.
In article three it says,
"The Signatories shall also use their best endeavors
"to make available for investigation
"of the charges against and the trial before
"the International Military Tribunal
"such of the major war criminals as are not
"in the territories of any of the Signatories."
Now this tells me two things.
Now in the film industry,
when you see in a contract,
and somebody's written, "best endeavors,"
you know that that person has no intention whatsoever
of carrying out the work they say they're going to do.
And the other point that worries me
is "major war criminals."
What is a major war criminal?
Is somebody like a sergeant
who's killed 150 people over two years,
is he a major war criminal?
Therefore, is this a get-out clause?
- Absolutely, it's a get-out clause.
The British government certainly had experience
of considering the cost and the scale
of investigating and prosecuting war criminals
on this kind of scale.
After the first World War,
the British government arrested 150 officers
from the Ottoman Army who'd been involved
in exterminating over a million Armenians
in what we now refer to as the Armenian genocide.
And they detained them on the island of Malta.
And in 1921, released them without prosecution.
And in part, that was because
there wasn't a legal framework.
The idea of crimes against humanity,
which was used to describe the extermination
of the Armenians, was that, it was a concept.
It wasn't embedded in international law.
But the British understood at the time,
even if they had the will
to establish this in international law
and create a tribunal to prosecute these crimes,
there was a massive cost of investigating and prosecuting.
And so they abandoned the whole idea
and released the Ottoman officers.
In fact, it was the release of those Ottoman officers
that set Raphael Lemkin, the Jewish-Polish lawyer,
of thinking about the nature of these crimes.
This was right back in 1921.
Also in that same year,
there'd been a trial of an Armenian
called Soghomon Tehlirian.
He was a survivor of some of these atrocities
in the first World War.
And he had pursued and assassinated one
of the architects of the Armenian genocide.
Raphael Lemkin was asking himself the question,
how is it that these 150 officers of the Ottoman Army
are released without investigation
or prosecution by the British
when they are responsible possibly
for the murder of a million people?
And yet for a survivor of that genocide
to assassinate one of those architects
of that genocide is put on trial for murder.
So you murder a million, you walk away free.
You murder one person,
and you're put on trial,
even as a victim of that genocide.
- In this valley, on the 22nd of August, 1939,
just one week before the Nazi invasion of Poland,
Adolph Hitler gave a speech to leading members
of the German Army, Navy, and Air Force.
And he starts with, "Our strength consists
"in our speed and our brutality.
"Genghis Khan led millions of women
"and children to slaughter
"with premeditation and a happy heart."
He says that he doesn't care about
what other European countries think,
but any member of the German armed forces
who criticize this will be executed by firing squad.
He urges them to send to death without compassion men,
women, and children of Polish derivation.
He finishes, "Who, after all, speaks today
"about the annihilation of the Armenians?"
Untold millions of people were murdered by the Nazis
and their collaborators in 22 countries
that were totally unrelated to any normal casualty of war.
Jews, Poles, Russian prisoners of war,
Roma, the mentally and physically handicapped,
political and religious dissidents,
homosexuals, and many more.
And of the three quarters to one million people
who enthusiastically carried out these barbaric crimes,
99% of them were never prosecuted.
They were never even looked for.
The Allies, America, Britain, France and the Soviet Union,
all started their pursuit of justice well enough.
But for some reason, they simply stopped,
deciding not to proceed any further.
Why?
- The American government and perhaps the public
were deeply divided.
The State Department and in public, Senator McCarthy,
were adamantly opposed to prosecuting the Germans.
They came up with all sorts of excuses
about the Germans who have been in jail,
why they should be let out.
So this process went on up to the late '40s, but by '48,
the State Department had really lost patience.
And with the looming Cold War,
the idea was to rebuild Germany.
And so you can argue, well, maybe we need these scientists
or these bankers or these industrialists
or these skilled people
to rebuild Germany against the communists.
But the answer, the question, really,
for the defenders of this or for the apologists is
why do you think you have
to let out the death squad leaders?
Why do you have to let out the concentration camp guards?
What do you need them for in rebuilding Germany?
And I think that is a very unpleasant reality
that people have to face up to
when looking to Allied policy in the later years.
- In 1948, there is a notorious telegram
which the Commonwealth Office
sends to various commonwealth countries advising them
to stop any further new war crimes trials.
And the reason that's given at the time is
what's called political developments in Germany,
which was the government's code
for the onset of the Cold War.
And we know from subsequent evidence
that the likes of Australia and Canada
did indeed stop completely for the next 40 years.
Two years later, in 1950,
the Foreign Office sends a note,
and this time,
as well as no new trials,
they also say that they're going to resist even
any requests for deportations
of alleged Nazi war criminals to other countries.
And the reason they give is one of
what I would consider to be staggering indifference.
They say, quote, "The wanted man
"will have been living peaceably
"in this country for many years.
"How can it be conducive to the public good
"for him to be deported?"
So if you think about that for a moment,
what they're actually saying is that there is no public good
in bringing a mass murderer to justice.
In 1987, the Australian government
set up a special unit to investigate 841 potential suspects.
It was shut down in 1992
without a single successful prosecution.
The Australian solution to the problem
of suspected Nazi war criminals was allegedly
to extradite them and make it someone else's problem.
It was suspected that well over 2000 Nazis
were living in Canada.
In 1994, the Supreme Court of Canada
made the Canadian War Crimes Law unworkable
by a ruling in the case of Imre Finta
who'd been responsible for sending Jews
to Auschwitz and other camps.
The court stated that even
where the orders are manifestly unlawful,
the defense of obedience to superior orders
will be available.
- The Nuremberg principles basically is the principle
that crimes like these war crimes or crimes against humanity
shall not be left unpunished.
This is the most important,
the core idea behind the Nuremberg principles.
But it ended in 1949 with the founding
of the German Democratic Republic
and the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany.
And from this moment on, the situation became
that every accused who was involved
in a mass killing situation like in a concentration camp
or in an extermination camp,
it was necessary to prove very meticulously
that he willingly, that he decided
to do a crime.
So you could say that a lot of the murderers got away
with what they've done in the Second World War.
On the 24th of March, 1944,
German troops massacred 335 people
at the Ardeatine Caves in Rome.
On the 22nd of September, 1944,
shortly after Italy's liberation,
Pietro Caruso, an Italian citizen,
was executed for his part in these crimes.
SS Captain Erich Priebke,
awaiting trial for his part in the massacre,
escaped by the Ratlines to Argentina
where he lived for 50 years.
The outrage following an interview he gave
on American television led to him being extradited to Italy.
In 1996, he was tried in the military court
and as he admitted his crimes,
was found guilty of complicity.
But the case was thrown out on the grounds
that the statute of limitations had expired.
Despite many multiple attempts by Italy and Germany
to have him properly incarcerated,
Priebke died in 2013, aged 100.
Argentina refused his request to be buried next to his wife
and the Vatican issued an unprecedented ban
in holding his funeral in any Catholic church in Rome.
Germany also refused to take the body,
which was seized by Italian authorities
and disposed of secretly.
Most of the well known Nazis,
the generals, they were all caught,
weren't they, and prosecuted?
- No, big Nazis got away with it.
The Ratline out via the Vatican,
via Italy to South America was very successful
in getting big people out.
The most notorious, obviously,
the one that everyone has heard about is Josef Mengele,
who went to South America
and was never found and prosecuted.
But a lot of former Nazis and perpetrators
and people who were guilty of all sorts of things
stayed within Germany,
many of them living under their own names,
not even bothering to change their identity
and simply not being brought to court.
If you look at the statistics,
99% of people who killed Jews were never brought
to court at all, 99%.
If you look at the sheer numbers
who were involved in carrying out the killings,
we've got somewhere between three quarters of million
and a million people actually involved
in killing Jewish civilians.
So when you actually look at the statistics
of who was brought to court, it's pretty pathetic.
The Allies immediately after the war did a pretty good job.
They tried hard to bring the principal perpetrators
to trial in the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal
and the Allied successor trials.
But it really was the emergence of the Cold War,
really from 1947-48 onwards when the major splits
between the west and the Soviet Union become evident.
And basically, the fight against communism
became more important for the Americans
and the West Germans than trying to deal with Nazism.
So that's one thing, the Allied attempts
just petered out very quickly.
The other thing is, I think if you look
at the three Third Reich successor states,
West Germany, East Germany, Austria,
once they take over their own attempts
to bring former Nazis to trial, the outcomes are variable,
but in every single one of those three cases,
quite inadequate.
If you contrast East Germany and West Germany,
East Germany instituted a communist state
that entailed a massive transformation
of personnel as well as a transformation of structures.
So if you look at the East German judiciary,
they trained up new judges, new lawyers,
new teachers, for example as well, journalists,
all those professions.
There was a radical turnover of personnel in East Germany.
In West Germany, there is an incredible continuity.
The legal profession is deeply Nazified.
And in fact, by the late 1950s,
some people have argued that there was a renazification
evermore former Nazis in the legal profession.
So by the 1950s and '60s,
you have a lot of judges, a lot of lawyers,
a lot of the police forces actually quite sympathetic
to the defendants in court.
And you can see this in the case
of some judgements, for example.
You can see it in the case of tip-offs given
to Nazi perpetrators that they're about to be tried,
investigated, and they get out of the country quickly
or they go underground in some way.
So there's a personnel issue in West Germany.
But secondly, I think there's a more structural issue,
which is to do with the choice
of using the ordinary criminal law definition of murder
and not the wider Nuremberg principles.
And so even if you get a totally anti-Nazi young lawyer,
that lawyer has to operate within the confines
of the legal system and the definitions
as they are in the penal code.
And so what this means is that it's simply inappropriate
to putting mass murder on trial.
State sponsored, initiated state-ordained violence,
you cannot put that kind of genocide on trial
under the ordinary definition
of individually-motivated murder.
Walter Rauff designed the gas fans
that killed Jews, communists, and the disabled.
Thought to have been responsible
for nearly 100,000 deaths,
he was arrested in 1945, but escaped.
Later, he worked for the Syrian intelligence
and an early incarnation of the Israeli Secret Service
who helped him escape to South America.
He died unpunished in Chile in 1984, aged 77.
- After the war, 1946,
Central Europe, particularly around
the Allied zones of occupation,
they resemble a giant refugee camp.
So you have somewhere in the region
of two million individuals,
all of whom are trying to register as displaced persons.
Now, to be a displaced person, you get food and shelter.
And the only condition that the Allies applied was
that you couldn't be a Nazi collaborator.
And in order to accept any individual,
they had to be screened.
Well, the British applied almost no screening.
It was entirely perfunctory.
And there's also, in many Allied countries,
particularly in France and in the UK, a huge labor shortage.
So somewhere in the region of 90,000 individuals
are brought over to the UK
to fill gaps in mainly manual jobs,
and most of them are Baltic, Ukrainian, Polish nationals.
And then a further 90,000 are brought over under a
resettlement scheme for brave Polish resistance fighters.
And of course, secreted within both of these caters
are a number of individuals who were responsible
for perpetrating crimes under the Nazis.
Just to give an indication as to
how little the British authorities were bothered
about who was coming in,
there was a story that we heard
from Baroness Ryder of Warsaw,
or Sue Ryder of Sue Ryder Homes, as she then was,
in 1946, she's a relief worker working
in a displaced person's camp.
And she's processing a number of Baltic nationals through,
and she notices that they all have a scar
under their right armpit in the same place.
And of course, what she realizes is this is
where their SS tattoo had been
and where they all had it removed.
And she raises this and she's told
to effectively mind her business
and get on with the job of processing.
What action did they take against them?
- I think one thing to remember is
that the UK government operated from the late '40s onwards
for the next 40 years under a perfect cover.
They didn't have to do anything
because there was no law in the UK
which would enable the prosecution of these individuals.
So it was only in the '80s,
after a major parliamentary fight over five years
that we actually got the War Crimes Act
in this country enacted in 1991.
- There's something I wanna talk about,
which I'm sure you know well.
These are two newspapers.
This is the Times, which I'll give to you.
And this is The Telegraph,
and it's dated Wednesday, the 4th of March, 1987.
And they're talking here in the editorials,
so there's nobody's name attached to it.
And it's discussing pressure from various individuals
and bodies who are asking and making demands
about the presence of, in Britain,
of 17 alleged former Nazis.
So there's this bit which I find extraordinary.
It says, "Nazi hunting has become a new
"and frankly distasteful blood sport.
"It is no reflection of antisemitism
"or the indifference to past atrocities
"to feel an overwhelming revulsion against the notion
"of further war crimes trials almost half a century
"after the alleged horrors took place."
I can't actually believe they're using that word,
"alleged horrors."
And this carries on and it says,
"There is a futility, a sterility
"about continuing a search for vengeance
"beyond the certain limits of time and space."
And this sort of predisposes
that there should be a time limit on justice.
- This is the Times the day before
the Telegraph article appeared.
And many of those who opposed any action
on Nazi war criminals in this country at the time,
pitted what was described as
the Christian God of mercy,
the New Testament God of mercy
versus the Old Testament God of vengeance.
And it's hard to imagine this appearing in the Times today,
but this was the late 1980s.
And this is just an extract
from the lead editorial that day, which says,
"Britain is a Christian country.
"Its laws enshrine principles of justice tempered
"with mercy, not vengeance."
The undertones of that I think are very clear.
Sad to say, the reason why vengeance
and the idea of vengeance was so powerful is
that it played into ancient antisemitic tropes
that the Jews are only out for an eye for an eye,
tooth for a tooth.
During the debate in the House of Lords,
a peer by the name of Lady Saltoun of Abernathy,
who is also the chief of the Fraser clan, stood up and said,
"How can it be justified
"to allow one group of aliens
"to pursue their vengeance against another group of aliens
"for crimes committed 50 years ago in a country far away?"
And I think more than anything I've ever heard on this,
I think that summarizes the indifference
of many on this question.
Vengeance is a very different thing.
What did the Nazis and their willing collaborators do?
They murdered, they committed genocide.
And to do the same is vengeance.
This is using the one thing that the Nazis denied
to their victims, the law and the right to law.
It's using the law
to give them a fair trial,
in a system which has got high evidentiary rules,
to enable them to put their very best defense
and to let justice take its course.
Anton Gecas took part
in executing up to 40,000 Jews and Russian prisoners of war
in the Baltic states in Belarus during 1941 to 1944
as a leftenant and the 12th police battalion
and was awarded the Iron Cross.
When he saw that Germany was losing, he switched sides.
He lived in Scotland from 1947
and worked for the National Coal Board
and ran a popular bed and breakfast.
Despite the Lithuanian authorities trying to extradite him,
he died in Edinburgh in 2001, unpunished, aged 85.
His neighbors in the Scottish capital were Jewish.
- I was the director of the
All-Party Parliamentary War Crimes Group from 1986 to 1991.
And the War Crimes Group was a cross-party group
of members of parliament and peers
who were constituted, or constituted themselves,
in order to pressure the government
to face up to its responsibility
for Britain not to be a haven for Nazi war criminals,
that there was a case to answer
against the number of individuals,
that the law should be changed,
and that a unit should be set up to investigate.
And following a fairly bloody parliamentary battle,
an act, the War Crimes Act, 1991,
was passed to enable this to happen.
As to what happened afterwards,
in terms of actual investigations and prosecutions,
what we do know is that at its height,
the Metropolitan Police's War Crimes Unit
had somewhere in the region of 400 active cases.
But there was only one successful prosecution.
There was only one prosecution.
And the reason that we're here is that for many years,
this was home to Anthony Sawoniuk.
This is the Rouel Road estate in Bermondsey.
He had managed to get himself here
as part of the Polish resettlement.
So he arrives in this country in '46
and he settles in Surrey,
and he does a number of jobs over the years,
from hospital water to ending up as a ticket collector
at London Bridge Station and living in this estate.
He retired and got a very nice pension
on which he could live out the remainder of his years.
- And how many people do we know that he killed?
- He was convicted for killing 18 people.
At his trial, there was testimony
from an old school friend of his
who witnessed him murdering 15 women
who he'd ordered to undress,
spraying them with machine gun
and then pushing them into pits.
There is plenty of evidence,
but the evidence wasn't strong enough
on which to mount the charges
that he was involved in many, many more murders.
The trial was successful, he was found guilty,
he appealed, his appeal was thrown out,
and he ended his final days in prison, dying in 2005.
- One month after Anthony Sawoniuk was sent
to prison in Norwich,
the Metropolitan War Crimes Unit was closed down
and all the information they'd gathered
over many years was put into boxes,
and then those were sealed for, I think, 50 years.
My feeling is is that somebody
in the Crown Prosecution Service or the government said,
"Look, we just spent 6.5 million prosecuting Sawoniuk.
"So if we were to spend the money prosecuting 10, 20, 30,
"whatever it was, men, it's going to be very expensive.
"And why should we do it?
"It all took place a long time ago, a long way from here."
So they just buried the information
and thought that nobody would kick up a fuss,
which as it turned out, was exactly the case,
apart from a few people in the Jewish community.
Therefore, if this was the case,
justice has a price tag.
Germany calling, Germany calling.
I want to discuss with you some topics of current interest.
Three weeks ago, Mr. Chamberlain predicted the possibility
of warfare in Scandinavia.
Nobody in Britain paid any great attention to his prophecy
as it lacked the note of novelty.
Four days ago, under the orders of their supreme commander,
the German forces established one of the greatest feats
and in the annals of military history.
- This is the last resting place of William Joyce,
better known as Lord Haw-Haw,
who broadcast Nazi propaganda
to the British people throughout the war.
Although a particularly offensive anti-Semite,
he never actually killed anyone nor incited murder.
Joyce had falsely obtained a British passport
simply by lying and this flimsy evidence was enough
to ensure that he stood trial for treason.
The trial judge directed the jury
that as a matter of law, he was British enough
and they need not be concerned anymore.
He was executed on the 3rd of January, 1946.
Joyce, who broadcast directly from Germany,
was actually an American citizen born in Brooklyn,
and he grew up here in neutral Ireland.
This is his former school.
Therefore, how could he possibly be prosecuted
for treason against the United Kingdom?
So the British government bend the rules
so they can hang a man for treason,
even though that man never actually committed treason
because they say that was justice and not vengeance.
However, for over 40 years,
almost 400 suspected Nazi war criminals,
many of them who had committed multiple murders,
are not prosecuted because that will be seen
to be vengeance and not justice.
Michael Karkoc was a founding member
and a leftenant in the second company
of the Ukrainian Self-Defense Legion,
which he admitted in his Ukrainian language memoir,
published in the USA in 1995.
He would later transfer to the Galician,
14th Waffen SS Division.
Both units carried out war crimes
against civilians in the Ukraine and Poland,
including the 1944 Warsaw Uprising.
Karkoc escaped to the USA in 1950,
lying to American immigration officers.
In March, 2017,
the Polish government announced
that it would be seeking the extradition of Karkoc.
However, he died before this happened
in Minnesota in 2019,
aged 100 years.
Karkoc's name surfaced after decades
of forensic research carried out
by London-based retired clinical pharmacologist,
Dr. Steve Ankier.
Some members of Karkoc's unit were among
the 400 suspected Nazi war criminals
that ended up living in the UK.
So I asked Stephen to show me where.
- We're in Oldham because my research showed
two people who belonged
to the Ukrainian Self-Defense Legion lived here,
who were originally,
I would guess, Ukrainian nationalists.
And they were against the Soviets
who had caused a major famine in the early 1930s,
known as the Holodomor.
But then they joined the Germans
and eventually they were turned into killers.
They were used to violently pacify villages for the Nazis,
and there were at least two of these killers
that lived in Oldham.
One of the killers was very near to where we are now.
His name was Eurico Parra,
but my research showed that that wasn't his real name.
His real name was Ivan Petrovich Lachmanyuk.
And I discovered this by being in touch
with the Ukrainian Security Services.
They sent me a photograph
of Ivan Petrovich Lachmanyuk,
with the address of Eurico Parra, which was very strange.
And then I found something else in Warsaw,
I visited the National Remembrance Library there.
And I eventually dug up an arrest warrant,
which the Russians issued in 1970
for Ivan Petrovich Lachmanyuk
for machine-gunning villages
in the Volyn region of present-day Ukraine,
under the command of Michael Karkoc,
and again on the arrest warrant,
the address for Eurico Parra.
- So you got all this information together in a dossier.
What did you do with it?
- I gave it to New Scotland Yard.
Very unfortunate, and these things happen,
the day that I presented it to them was one day
before he died in Oldham in a nursing home.
Well, we're still in Oldham.
We're in the street where a man
called Dmytro Wiazewycz lived,
and he was under the direct command of Michael Karkoc.
He was almost certainly involved in the destruction
of villages in the Lublin area
and the murder of several hundred villagers.
Dmytro Wiazewycz lived in this house.
- You actually got to meet this man, then?
- I didn't get to meet him, I went to his front door.
My intention was to confront him
and ask him about his career during the war,
whether he was involved in war crimes.
I had a lot of evidence, a lot of rosters with his name on,
matching date of birth, place of birth,
with his naturalization certificate.
Unfortunately, at the time,
there was a carer there and he was,
I think, having some medical attention.
So we weren't allowed to go in,
but I could hear his voice inside.
And very, very soon afterwards, he died.
So that was the end of it.
- Up until 1290 when Edward I kicked them all out,
Lincoln was the largest population of Jews
in the whole of the UK.
And it just strikes me as really odd
that a possible killer of Jews chose to come here.
What's his name?
- My research showed that there was a man
called Mikhail Mankel,
and he was in the fourth company
of the Ukrainian Self-Defense Division.
And there was a massacre
in a place called Chłaniów and Władysławin
where 44 villagers were killed.
They threw grenades into burning houses.
Amongst the 44 killed were some children.
There are several rosters
of members of the Ukrainian Self-Defense Legion,
which I uncovered, they show where they were at the time,
the full name of the members of the various companies,
the date of birth, and also the place of birth
of members of the Legion.
And with that information,
I searched an online directory in the UK
and looked for the names of various people
and found several names which matched.
Like in the case of this particular individual,
when I looked, he'd actually been long dead.
We're in Keighley at the moment in Yorkshire,
it's quite near Selby,
where there was a camp for these men
of the Ukrainian Self-Defense Legion.
And because of that, there are a number
of potential war crime suspects in this area.
And the one that I discovered here in Keighley
was called Ostap Kykawec.
He's dead now, but he did serve
in the fourth company of the 31st Punitive Battalion.
And had he been alive,
then he would've been a very suitable case
to have been referred to the War Crimes Unit
of the Metropolitan Police Service.
Here in Bradford, there were another two suspects.
There was somebody called Alexander Némirovsky,
who is recorded as having been a machine-gunner
in the Warsaw Uprising, working for the Nazis in 1944.
And then there was a man called Ostap Jastrov
who was also known as Alexander Baranchuk
who had his photograph taken with Michael Karkoc
during the war with some of the other members of the unit.
- And they're both dead.
- They're both dead.
That's very unfortunate
because they were both very good suspects
for the War Crimes Unit to have a further look at
and hopefully some justice would've come.
But unfortunately, it's another example of justice denied
and two people potentially having got away with murder.
- Stephen did very detailed research over many decades,
and he threw up a lot of suspected war criminals,
all of them men, no women at all.
All over the UK and Birmingham, and Leeds,
and Middlesbrough, Derby, Bolton, Wolverhampton,
Halifax, Kings Lynn, Rugby, Camden in London.
Stephen though is an amateur.
He did hand over all his information
to the Metropolitan War Crimes Unit.
But the unit was closed down.
This has all come about because the powers that be,
for whatever reason,
when they should have investigated this
in the '40s and '50s, they didn't.
And now what we have is a very shameful chapter
in British criminal history.
After the war, the narrative defense
that many countries adopted was
that they were forced into their actions against the Jews
because they were an invaded country and they had no choice.
Although Bulgaria had Jews deported
from the newly-occupied Yugoslav and Greek territories,
they stopped short of delivering
their own Jews to the Nazis,
saving the lives of 48,000 people.
Courageous Danish citizens managed to evacuate 7,220
of Denmark's 7,800 Jews
to neutral Sweden by boat.
Albania, 80% Muslim,
was the only occupied country
where almost no Jews died or were handed over.
And the Albanians heroically protected Jews
who sought refuge in their country during the war.
These were the few exceptions.
The minutes from a Slovak German meeting
on the 29th of April, 1942 state,
"For every Jew of Slovak citizenship
"transferred into the Reich's territory,
"the German government will be paid an amount
"of 500 Reichsmarks."
The death camps were the only German territory they visited.
- One way to think about the Nazi system
is that to all intents and purposes,
it was a morality-free zone.
We are used, in the West, to seeing our legal systems
as being built very much on the template
of the 10 Commandments.
So we're used to seeing laws such as,
"Thou shalt not steal.
"Thou shalt not bare false witness.
"Thou shalt not murder."
We're very familiar with these concepts.
And what the Nazis did is they upended all of that,
and they said it's okay to steal, it's okay to lie,
and it's fine to murder.
And they legislated for all of that.
So they reversed the 10 Commandments.
They gave their victims no recourse to law.
There was no due process.
And that's why it's so important that
when we look at how we approach Nazi war criminals,
we apply to them the justice and the rule of law
that they denied to their victims.
Herberts Cukurs, "The Butcher of Riga,"
was a pre-war aviator and national hero
who directly participated in the mass murder
of over 30,000 Latvian Jews.
In one instance, in 1941,
he ordered an elderly Jewish man
to rape a young Jewish woman.
And any prisoners who looked away
were personally beaten to death by Cukurs.
He escaped to Brazil after the war
where the Soviets tried unsuccessfully to extradite him.
He was assassinated by Israeli Mossad agents
in Uruguay in 1965, aged 64.
In Latvia today, there are those who insist
that he was totally innocent
despite the great many eyewitness statements
about his crimes.
For them, he is still a hero.
A musical about him premiered in Liepaja in 2014.
What do you know about your grandmother?
- Her name was Ilse, Ilse Cohn.
She had just one child, my mother.
Her husband had died in 1938 of a heart attack.
So there was just the two of them left
as the war approached.
My mother got out, she got a visa
as a domestic servant to come to Britain.
But her mother, my grandmother, couldn't
because she was considered to be too old, she was 42.
So she stayed behind.
So I'll read you what it says.
"This is the place where Nazis
"and their assistants killed more than 30,000 Jews
"from Lithuania and other European countries."
And among the people
from other European countries killed here
was my grandmother who was brought here from Germany
from her hometown of Breslau.
The Nazis had invaded here only a few months previously,
and this was one of their killing fields.
My grandmother was one of the very first German Jews
to be deported, to be killed on a site like this,
on that one day 2000 people were killed here on this site.
This is one of the burial pits.
This is where the bodies fell.
And then in 1943-44,
they dug them all up again and burnt them
because the Nazis wanted to get rid of the evidence.
And you just look at the size of a pit like this.
It defies the imagination.
They you are, says it all, four words.
"The way of death," English, Hebrew, Russian, Lithuanian.
This is an extraordinary document.
This is a report that was written by the man
who was in command of the killing squads here,
a man called Colonel Karl Jãger.
And it's one of the very few documents that survived
that actually spells out in clinical detail
who was killed when, every day.
How many Jewish men, how many Jewish women,
how many Jewish children were killed.
And he actually says,
"This is a complete tabulation of executions carried out
"in the Einsatzkommando 3 zone
"up to the 1st of December, 1941."
And he specifies, "These executions were carried out
"by Lithuanian partisans on my instructions
"and under my command."
Let me just show you this one page here.
29th of November, 1941.
693 Jewish men,
1,155 Jewish women,
152 children from Vienna and Breslau
killed on this one day.
And of course one of the 1100 women was my grandmother.
You go back a month earlier, 29th of October, 9,200 people,
here on this site of one day.
These were Jews from the ghetto in Kaunas
who were marched up here and shot.
And of those 9,200, look at this.
4,273 were children.
Children who were shot here at the Ninth Fort in Kaunas.
And you go to the end of this report
and he tots up the total.
And the grand total, here it is, 137,346
in less than five months.
Well, this is a really rather appalling place,
Paneriai Forest, where tens of thousands
of people were massacred between 1941 and 1944.
The have a memorial stone here in Lithuanian Hebrew,
Russian inscriptions.
But what's interesting is
that the original Soviet narrative was that the people
who were slaughtered here were Soviet citizens.
So it's quite interesting how history gets rewritten
over a period of time.
What this says is that originally,
this memorial simply paid tribute
to the 100,000 Soviet people
who were slaughtered here in the forest.
Then in 1989, on the initiative,
it says of the Lithuanian Jewish community,
one of these granite stones was inserted
to make it clear that 70,000
of the people killed here were Jews.
And then again, in 2004, another change was made.
The phrase "Soviet citizens" was covered up
with a new plaque, just replacing it
by saying 100,000 people were killed here.
This is one of the burial pits
into which they threw the bodies
of all the people who were killed here.
"For the Germans,
"300 Jews are 300 enemies of humanity.
"For the Lithuanians,
"300 Jews are 300 pairs of shoes, trousers, and clothes."
Kazimierz Sakowicz, journalist and witness.
- The numbers are so huge,
it's so difficult to come to terms with it,
to imagine that these were real people.
What makes this place so special is
that there are photographs
of what happened here on the dunes,
on the edge of these huge ditches that had been dug.
So their bodies just fell straight into the ditches.
German officers took the photographs,
presumably as some kind of grotesque souvenir,
and then at the end of the war,
they fell into the hands of Russian authorities
and they were handed over and used
in evidence at the Nuremberg war crimes trials.
These are the photographs that were taken here,
right here on the beach in December, 1941.
And you can see the people huddling
under the guard of the German officers.
- Yeah, and you can see how cold it is,
look at their thick coats. - Absolutely,
this was December.
And has anybody been identified from them?
- Yeah, some of them have actually been identified by name.
I mean, you can see the faces
and that's what makes it so real.
And then you look,
they were made to take their clothes off, taking...
- And look at all the guards.
- Look at all the guards, yeah.
- There's lots, why are there so many?
- Do you know, some of them came here actually
to watch what's called execution tourism.
I mean it's obscene,
fit like sort of public executions today
in Iran or in Saudi Arabia.
- He's got a, some kind of a list of people.
- Yes, exactly, exactly, a list of people.
And worse and worse, worse and worse.
- So in this one, all of them are very young.
She's 17 or 18. - In her teens, yeah, yeah.
- They're totally naked, and they're running.
You can see she's running, she's running.
It's like they're doing it
for some extraordinary titillation...
- That they are being made to humiliate themselves.
- Of the people who killed them.
- Exactly. - I mean they,
because they're all young, they're getting off on it.
And then, and then they're gonna kill them.
- Totally obscene.
And then,
this is literally moments before they're shot.
- So let's have a look at this, this is,
so there's that edge, so... - They're looking out
over the sea, aren't they?
Almost exactly on this spot, I thought.
- So what's the next...
- And then the next, oh, it's, and this, I mean...
- Oh, God, that's them dead. - Do you know what's
happening here?
This is a guy who walks along
and he kicks the bodies,
those who hadn't fallen at the moment of their death.
He goes on, he's called the kicker.
- The kicker. - The kicker.
There are hundreds.
- Exactly. - They're all...
- Under our feet. - Buried here.
Over 200,000 Jews were killed in the Baltic countries
of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia.
In each country, the Einsatzgruppen were helped
by willing local citizens.
Almost all of those who enthusiastically played
their murderous part were never prosecuted.
They were never even questioned.
In 1945,
after killing Robin Lustig's grandmother
and the other 137,000 Jews in Lithuania,
former SS Officer Karl Jãger returned to live in Germany.
All the time, he used his real name.
He was eventually arrested in March, 1959
after 14 years of freedom.
- One of the earliest cases of the Central Office,
The Central Office had been established
on December 1st, 1958
and the 14th case
is the case against Karl Jãger.
That's one of our index cards.
You can see he was responsible
for the Einsatzkommando 3
within the task force A in Lithuania.
And what you can see here is the evidence
against his deeds with Jews killed.
And what you can see is that he was in prison
and then he committed suicide
by hanging himself in the night in June, 1959.
We have seen that a lot of Nazi criminals, war criminals,
have committed suicide just to avoid being convicted.
All these boxes, how many boxes in total?
- It's about 50,000.
And altogether, it's dealing with this criminal past,
what has been done, what was not possible,
what has been overlooked over political constraints
in investigating these crimes.
All that is here in these boxes.
And all together, we have here 7,600 cases
since 1958, here in this room.
This is the Central Office
for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes
and our task is to prepare cases
before German public prosecutors' offices and courts
when it comes to murders committed by Nazi criminals.
In the mid of the '50s,
there was a trial in the city of Ulm,
which is really nearby here from Ludwigsburg,
as Einsatzgruppen trial.
And this trial made two things obvious for the public.
There are still a lot of crimes not yet investigated
or properly investigated by German authorities.
And we need a central institution.
We can't leave it to the public prosecutors
or courts that are only responsible
for crimes committed in their area
or for defendants living there.
So this procedural system was not fit for mass crimes
that had been committed outside of Western Germany.
The idea is to deal with all national socialist crimes
that had been committed in Europe or North Africa.
So where German troops had been,
that's the scene of the crime.
And then the next step is to look
where are the people responsible for these crimes?
And of course, after the war,
they were not only in Germany, but all over the world.
And so we took steps to make sure
to find the whereabouts of these people.
The Ludwigsburg office was involved
with the 16-month Sobibor trial in 1965.
Alfred Ittner was sentenced to just four years
for participating in the murder
of approximately 68,000 Jews.
Erich Fuchs was sentenced to four years
for participating in the murder of at least 79,000 Jews.
Franz Wolf was sentenced to eight years
for participating in the mass murder
of at least 39,000 Jews.
Six other defendants charged
with the same crimes were acquitted.
- A lot of evidence, of course,
was not accessible for us
because most of the crime scenes were
behind the Iron Curtain and a lot of documents had fallen
in the hands of the Red Army and were now in Moscow
or in Minsk and other cities,
and during the Cold War, really hard to get.
Also in the beginning,
there were a lot of difficulties
in recruiting adequate personnel for the Central Office.
And adequate means people that are really fit
and eager to deal with these crimes.
And it's true that in the beginning,
lots of public prosecutors,
police officers, and even judges in office
in the Federal Republic had been
in the same office already during the Third Reich.
- In 1958, the Ludwigsburg Institute meant
that you could do federally-coordinated investigations
of Nazi crimes, and that assisted massively
in acquiring evidence and coordinating investigations
and spreading the net much wider.
But it only had a fairly small staff.
So even that was relatively limited.
But the other thing that changed in the late 1950s,
early 1960s, was the significance of the Cold War.
Now there is this real competition
between East Germany and West Germany,
a competition between the two regimes
and East Germany, as part of this new Cold War era,
starts criticizing West Germany
for having former Nazis in high places,
pointing to those big Nazis
who are in Adenauer's own government.
So the first federal chancellor of West Germany,
Konrad Adenauer, included in his government people
who had played a significant role under Nazism.
Hans Globke, his chief aide in his chancellery,
was the guy who had written the official commentary
on the Nuremberg laws for Hitler.
Theodor Oberlãnder,
who was his minister for refugees
and expellees from Eastern Europe,
knew all about Eastern Europe because they'd been out there
in the war alongside the Einsatzgruppen,
alongside the killing squads,
trying to deal with racial reconfigurations
during the Holocaust.
So East Germany starts pointing the finger
at people in high places in West Germany.
This is embarrassing for West Germany.
So they want to show that actually,
they are genuinely dealing with the Nazi past.
However, I think it's really crucial here
to say it's not West Germany putting Nazis on trial.
It's a few key individuals.
Very significant here is Fritz Bauer,
the attorney general of the land of Hessen,
who is socialist and Jewish,
and had to go into exile
to save his own life during the Third Reich.
He comes back and he's determined to prosecute former Nazis.
But I think it's very, very important to point out
that he did this against incredible opposition
in high places, in the government,
in the political and elite circles.
And it was Fritz Bauer who was determined
to put Auschwitz on trial.
And it was Fritz Bauer who gave the tip-off
to Mossad about Eichmann's whereabouts,
so that it would be the Mossad who kidnapped Eichmann
and took him to Jerusalem to put him on trial in Israel
because Fritz Bauer said if Eichmann came back to Germany,
he would not get the kind of trial
and conviction that he deserved.
Adolf Eichmann was a key executioner
of the Nazis extermination program.
After the war, he escaped to Argentina via the Ratlines,
finding work as a department head with Mercedes-Benz,
a company that, with the use of 40,000 slave laborers,
had become rich under the Nazis.
He was tracked down in 1960 by Mossad agents
and taken to Jerusalem for trial.
His defense of only following orders was rejected.
He was found guilty and executed in 1962.
- Eichmann should be here.
Eichmann.
- So many people.
- Yeah, we have more than
720,000 names here.
- 720,000 names.
- But not only defendant suspects,
but also witnesses that are mentioned in the files.
That's really important in order to make sure
that to put it to back at the exact same spot.
An index card would look like
that, we have information concerning
the person, name, date of birth,
his rank as SS-Obersturmbannführer.
We had here the information that he was arrested
by Israel agents in Argentina in 1960,
than the result of the trial in Israel.
- In the case with the Israelis,
because they snatched him in a very controversial way,
did you help them, in any case, preparing their evidence,
or did you step back and leave it to them?
- The exchange of evidence or legal assistance
was between the Public Prosecutor's Office in Frankfurt,
Fritz Bauer, and Israel.
What we did was to send an observer to the trial
in order to make sure that evidence
that is presented to the court could find its way
in our investigations here.
And it's really valuable up to today,
not when it comes to Eichmann,
but when we look into concentration camp cases today,
of course, we use the information
that have been established here or before courts
in the '60s and '70s when it comes to the crime itself.
What has happened in that camp,
how was the organization working,
who was responsible for what?
In German law, there's no crime against humanity.
Why is that?
- Well, the notion, crime against humanity,
from a legal point of view,
was invented in August, 1945
for the Nuremberg trial.
And there was a lot of reluctance
in Western Germany with that trial,
because of a lot of arguments.
A political argument was victor's justice,
the winners of the war,
only dealing with the crimes committed
by those who had lost the war.
And there's a legal argument.
Since the provisions
were made in August, 1945,
after the crime had been committed until May '45,
that these provisions are
not legally correct
because they were applied retroactively.
And there's a common principle, nulla poena sine lege,
that you should not apply criminal law
retroactively to the act.
So the German approach was, "Let's take the code,
"the law that was applicable
"during the crimes up to May, 1945."
And in that code, we only find notions
like manslaughter or murder.
But we do not find notions
like crimes against humanity or genocide.
We have to prove a certain contribution
to a specific killing in order
to establish individual responsibility or guilt.
- In 1979, the Americans created
the US Department of Justice Office
of Special Investigations,
headed for many years by Eli Rosenbaum
to track down Nazis in America.
In other countries, this work was carried out
by individuals like Serge and Beate Klarsfeld,
and most famous of all, Simon Wiesenthal.
Hermine Braunsteiner was a German SS guard
who served at Ravensbrück and Majdanek.
She hanged some women
and others she killed with her whip.
She was imprisoned in Austria
for her activities in Ravensbrück,
but served just three years.
She went to the USA in 1959 and became an American citizen.
Simon Wiesenthal tracked her down and in 1973,
she became the first Nazi war criminal extradited
from the USA to West Germany.
Following a long complex trial,
she was sentenced in 1981 to life imprisonment
and died in 1999, aged 79.
- When you look at the West German cases
for most of the latter half of the 20th century,
what's important is finding out
what the subjective intention of the perpetrator was.
You generally needed eyewitness testimony to say,
"I saw this man acting with excess brutality,
"sadistic intent," or, "he was very viciously anti-Semitic."
And to have eyewitness testimony,
you had to bring survivors to court.
And many of the survivors who had the courage
to appear in court then found they were mocked,
humiliated, vilified.
They had to face up to their former tormentors
and then see their tormentors go free
or come away with lenient sentences.
Whereas they had just had to relive everything
and then had been humiliated and told
that they were not telling the truth,
that they didn't have accurate memories,
that they couldn't say the date or the time.
And so this dependence
on proving subjective intent,
if you murder efficiently,
means perpetrators get away with murder, they really do.
It is not murder to put 300,000 people into the gas chambers
if you didn't actually individually intend to brutally
and sadistically murder a single individual.
How many people have you investigated
and how many have been prosecuted or convicted?
- The Central Office has led
7,600 investigations here
dealing with such complexes.
In that time, we had more than 120,000 defendants
in Western Germany whose cases were linked,
more or less, to the Central Office.
When it comes to convictions,
we have less than 7,000
at the end, in all
courts in Western Germany after the war.
So you see, there were a lot of effort
when it comes to investigations, looking into people.
But when it comes to the results as verdicts,
we have less than 7,000.
After the war, one of Auschwitz's most brutal
and sadistic guards, Gottfried Weise,
worked as a construction manager in Germany
under his own name, untroubled by his past war crimes.
- Gottfried Weise was free,
living in his own town of Solingen, for 40 years.
He'd been apparently denazified,
which meant he had to fill in a form, which he did.
He filled in a form and gave his service record,
but he left out his time in Auschwitz.
So it was never found out.
And that it was very difficult to find him.
And it took 40 years for him to be apprehended.
But it was a prolonged trial, don't forget,
because there were 60 witnesses
and they all came from all over the world.
And in parts, the court went to meet the witnesses.
So it was a really lengthy procedure.
Eventually, he was actually charged with six murders
and convicted of five
specific murders, these were,
where people were actually there at that point,
and managed to have a time scale
and a date when it happened.
And that was quite difficult.
I was cross-examined
for the defense and for the prosecution
on two days for seven hours.
Seven hours I was interrogated.
In a most minute detail.
For instance, they wanted to know
the construction of the hut.
"Were the planks this way or were they that way?"
This man was on bail
all the time during this trial.
He was allowed to live at home.
I think he was on house arrest or something like that.
And then came the point of the verdict.
And as they called him for the verdict, he disappeared.
Just like that.
And Interpol was searching all over Europe for him.
And as fate would have it,
he fled to Switzerland,
and had a stroke while he was there
and was brought to the hospital
and his identity was obviously found at that point.
And then Interpol and the police came
and brought him back to prison.
- I was born in Western Ukraine,
in a town called Volodymyr-Volynskyi,
But in actual fact,
the Jewish people called it Ludmire
because it was such a Jewish town.
The majority of the people in the town itself were Jews.
The Germans came into our town in 1942,
and then we had to leave our house.
And we were all ushered into a ghetto.
We lived in the ghetto.
There were 30 people from the whole town that survived,
nine children, 30 people.
So 30 people out of how many were...
- 25,000.
Yeah, they didn't take them
to concentration camps, they didn't.
In actual fact,
they took people away to
dig trenches.
And these trenches, they killed people.
They just lay down,
a layer of people, machine gun,
and layer of people, machine gun,
and layer people, machine gun.
His name was Westerheide
and Westerheide was in charge of our ghetto.
Anna Altvater was Westerheide's secretary
and they both were murderers.
I mean they were responsible for 25,000 Jews.
Anna Altvater would come in the ghetto,
and if there was a newly-born baby,
she would turn it
upside-down and tear it in pieces
and throw it in the gutter.
And she came back to Germany and she was working...
For the council in charge of youths.
Can you imagine?
And Westerheide, he was living somewhere
on the Swiss border.
And there was a court case,
first, I think, in Bielefeld,
and then I went with my mother the second time,
it was in Dortmund.
The questions that the judges were asking
were absolutely ridiculous.
"What time of the day was it when he was shooting?"
"What time did," I mean, we didn't have a watch.
The problem was the judges were sympathetic to them.
And what was the verdict, then?
Not guilty.
Nothing happened to them, lack of evidence.
And how many people gave evidence?
- There weren't many because there weren't many people.
But your mother gave evidence.
- Oh yes, because my mother was to the end
and she spoke German and Polish and all these languages now.
But what is interesting,
about a few months or years so earlier,
there was the first trial,
which was in Bielefeld,
and, I think it's Bielefeld, I can't remember exactly name.
And I went to see the judge.
It was a youngish sort of German guy, and I said to him,
"How could you let this man
"that had so much blood on his hand,
"how could you let him out
"and say that he's free and not guilty?"
So you know what, he turned round,
this is still, I remember, at that time,
that killing Jews was legal.
So that was it, that, and do you know
what happened to the two of them?
- No, they went back to their home
and lived their life.
And probably, they would start another
holocaust if they could.
Johanna Altvater once entered
a small hospital full of sick children.
For no reason, she just started throwing them
from a third-story window,
killing some and severely injuring others.
In both trials, in 1978 and again in 1982,
her defense was that she was only a secretary.
She was acquitted both times.
She died in 2003, one week before her 85th birthday.
- This is a memorial for the Czechoslovak Paratroopers
who were responsible for the Operation Anthropoid.
On May 27th, 1942,
Reinhard Heydrich, who was Hitler's favorite,
he was one of the highest-ranking Nazis officers
and one of the architects of the Final Solution.
He was severely injured right here
in a botched assassination attempt.
Heydrich didn't die on the spot.
He died a week later of sepsis on June 4th.
- Right now we are standing in a really quiet
and peaceful place where
77 years ago stood a village, village of Lidice.
And this village was razed to the ground by Nazis
like a revenge for Czechoslovakian soldiers
assassinating Reinhard Heydrich in May, 1942.
The Gestapo needed to punish someone.
So on the ninth of the June,
the day of the Heydrich's funeral in Berlin,
the German police came to Lidice.
173 men were shot,
the women were taken to Ravensbrück
concentration camp near Berlin,
and most of the children were taken to Chełmno in Poland,
and these children were gassed.
After the murder of Lidice men,
the Nazis put explosives
and everything was razed to the ground
and nothing was supposed to stay here.
They wanted to release the Lidice from maps, from history.
It was their propaganda because they wanted
to show whole world what happened
if someone tried to attack Third Reich.
The people here didn't know
about the Czechoslovak soldiers.
This village was absolutely innocent.
After the war, from 500 people of Lidice,
only 143 women came back to Lidice
and only 17 children came back.
- This is a Baroque church,
it's called Cyril and Methodius Church,
and this is the place where the Czechoslovak Paratroopers,
who were responsible for the Operation Anthropoid,
this is where they were hiding.
Nazis performed a large investigation
after the assassination,
and they discovered them here on June 18, 1942.
And it was like a six-hours gun fight.
Those Czechoslovak paratroopers who were not shot by Nazis,
they committed suicide.
And the only one who could have survived was Jan Kubiš,
but he bled out and died in a hospital later that day.
Another village, Ležáky, did have a connection
to the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich,
as it was used as a hiding place for the paratroopers.
Apart from two children,
every inhabitant was murdered
and the entire hamlet was razed to the ground.
So were all those who carried out
the murders captured and punished?
- No, of course not.
The most important of them got their trials
and was executed, but some of them didn't.
For example, Max Rostock,
he was a chief of in Kladno.
He was sent to the death in 1951,
but communist president of Czechoslovakia,
Antonín Zápotocký, decided not to execute him,
and he changed his punishment
to stay in prison till the end of his life.
But in 1958,
the communist regime decided to hire Max Rostock
to Czechoslovak intelligence service
because he was a experienced secret agent, German.
So they hired him and sent him to the West Germany.
His life was really long
because he died by age in 1986,
somewhere in Germany.
After Heydrich's death,
Dr. Herta Oberheuser tried
to recreate sepsis in healthy people,
cutting them open without anesthetic,
then rubbing wood dirt or saw dust into the wounds.
Following the 10-month Nuremberg Doctors' Trial,
Oberheuser was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment.
She served just five years for killing countless children.
On release, she started practicing
as a family doctor in Germany,
and only after considerable pressure
was her license revoked.
She died in 1978, aged 66.
- Oradour-sur-Glane was one of two villages
where SS Gruppenführer Heinz Lammerding
ordered the murders of all the inhabitants
and razed the village to the ground.
Heinz Barth was the only SS officer to stand trial
for the massacre that took place here.
In 1983, he was imprisoned in East Germany
for his part in murdering hundreds of French citizens.
He was also at the Ležáky massacre,
yet just 15 years later,
he was released with a full war pension.
In 2007, he died, aged 86.
This is the picturesque town of Bad Tölz where in 1971,
at the age of 65, Heinz Lammerding died a wealthy man.
In 1953, a French court had found him guilty
in absentia of the murder of 750 French citizens.
The West German government did absolutely nothing about it.
His funeral was said to be a jolly affair of SS comrades.
- The Western ally put a provision in the treaty
with the new Federal Republic of Germany in the '50s
that West Germany was not allowed to reopen cases
that had already been finalized by the Allied.
So the idea was, "Don't touch our cases,"
because they feared a less-severe sentence
when Germany would reopen these cases.
But then when it comes to the verdicts in absentia
in France and in Italy,
that led to the almost paradox situation
that then Germany said, "Yeah, we can't reopen the case.
"We are not allowed to because you, France,
"have already dealt with the case."
So the reasoning just backfired.
Instead of keeping the verdict,
you got nothing from the point of view
of the French government.
And Germany then refused
to just take the verdict in absentia
and put him into jail because we think
that you need a trial with the defendant,
the accused present before the court.
So he got away with murder.
- The result of that situation,
especially with a verdicts in absentia in France,
was that for a long time, there was no verdict at all.
The French was just in paper
and in Germany, there was no procedure.
And the situation only changed in the mid of the '70s
when a special agreement was made
between France and Germany
that allowed Germany to reopen the cases.
Alois Brunner, Eichmann's assistant,
was responsible for sending 100,000 to ghettos
and concentration camps.
Condemned to death in absentia in France,
he fled West Germany in 1954
to a eventual residence in Syria.
Unrepentant, he received a generous salary
from the ruling Barth party
for his professional advice on torture.
He died in either 2001, aged 89 or 2010, aged 98.
Either way, he lived a longer life than all his victims.
- This is Salztorgasse, Salt Gate Street,
and this was the back entrance of the huge building
of the former Gestapo headquarters.
It was installed here because this was
a big hotel, a Jewish hotel.
And in 1938, this was seized by the Gestapo
and made the headquarters.
It had been completely destroyed
during the Second World War.
In the 1950s, it had been rebuilt as a condominium.
And this was the back entrance where the victims,
where the prisoners were brought to be questioned there.
And people who bought apartments here,
they contributed to establish that memorial site here.
And when Simon Wiesenthal looked for a new office,
he said, "Why not here
"in the former building of Gestapo?"
And this was exactly here.
So you have still the white plaque here.
Here was written, "Documentation center of the Association
"of Jewish-persecuted people of Nazi time."
So he specifically chose it
because it was a Gestapo headquarters.
- I am sure of it because,
yeah, it has a symbolic worth to do that work
on that place where the Gestapo
did its ugly work before, yeah.
Gustav Wagner, nicknamed "The Beast,"
was the first deputy commander
of Sobibor extermination camp in Poland.
He ran the selection process
that led to slave labor or death,
where 200 to 250,000 Jews were murdered.
Sentenced to death in absentia, he escaped to Brazil.
After his exposure,
several extradition requests were rejected.
In 1980, aged 69,
he was found dead with a knife in his chest.
His attorney said that he had committed suicide.
- The DOW, in German,
Dokumentationsarchiv des österreichischen Widerstandes,
Documentation Center of Austrian Resistance,
is an institution which was founded
to document resistance in Austria
at the time when everybody spoke only of the soldiers
of the Second World War in the 1960s.
But meanwhile, it has become one
of the leading institution for the whole period,
especially for Holocaust research in Austria.
And our big, biggest, most important project started
in the 1990s to compile a database
of all Austrian Holocaust victims.
Simon Wiesenthal was, in my opinion,
the most important person with respect
to the prosecution
of former Nazi criminals in Austria,
because he pushed the Austrian judiciary to do its work.
He was a Polish Jew of Eastern Poland,
and he was a survivor of many concentration camps.
But his career in the Nazi concentration camps ended
on Austrian soil, it was in Mauthausen.
And already during the last weeks
of the existence of the concentration camp,
he started to collect evidence against the perpetrators.
And when the Americans liberated us,
the concentration camp, he followed them to Linz,
Linz is very near to Mauthausen,
and established his own bureau of collecting of evidence
to help the American judicial authorities
institute proceedings against those criminals,
and to prepare the court cases,
both in Nuremberg and in Dachau.
In the former Dachau, the concentration camp,
American law officers prepared
some trials against the perpetrators of Mauthausen.
And there, Simon Wiesenthal was one
of the most important persons to collect evidence.
And immediately after the war,
you had more trials in Austria than,
for instance, in Germany.
And in that time,
some six or 7,000 out of them were
of cases of murder,
assault and battery, and...
Robbery, Aryanization, and theft and all that.
And we had 43 death sentences,
29 sentences with life imprisonment,
and around 300 or so sentences
in the upper range between 10 and 20 years.
But immediately after the last Ally troops
had left Austria in 1955,
started this period
where we had only a very few
amount of trials.
And Simon Wiesenthal played a very, very important role
to bring forward some of the most important
of those few Austrian trials.
Not only because he pushed forward some cases
and brought it to public attention, and also...
Forced Austrian judiciary to do something.
But when, as soon as
the court case started before the court,
you had the main trial and there,
witnesses were summoned.
And you had to prepare the witnesses.
You had, first, you had to find them,
there, he played a very important role.
And then you had to prepare them.
Austrian authorities were not interested
in what those people
had lived through in the Nazi time.
And how they could protect them
and how they could help them to deal with that?
It's not that easy to go inside a building
where you have people who have uniforms
who are not that different from the old Nazi uniforms,
and then to be a witness there
and to say what happened and to remember.
And Wiesenthal was the only person
who helped those people.
But half of those trials ended with a guilty verdict.
And most of those guilty verdicts were very, very lenient.
And this contributed to the meaning
that Austria is really a kind of safe haven.
Franz Murer was an Austrian SS officer
who, from 1941 to '43, served in Vilnius, Lithuania,
which was often referred to as the "Jerusalem of the North."
This capital city had a Jewish population
of around 80,000 before the war,
but just 250 afterwards.
Murer was found guilty in 1948 of murdering Soviet citizens
and sentenced first to death,
but then commuted to 25 years hard labor in the USSR.
He was released in 1955
as part of the Austrian State Treaty,
and returned to Vienna.
Because of the work of Simon Wiesenthal,
he was arrested and prosecuted again in 1963 in Austria.
The one-week trial ended with Murer's acquittal.
He died in 1994, aged 81.
- The Austrian courts were quite extraordinary.
After 1955, they brought virtually no one to trial.
They brought a couple of dozen cases in Austria.
But it was getting embarrassing
because juries would acquit known murderers,
like Franz Murer, the "Butcher of Vilnius."
And because it was getting embarrassing
that there were these acquittals
and that perpetrators were greeted
with flowers and applause,
and their mates were just cheering them
when they were acquitted,
by the mid 1970s, it seemed simpler in Austria
not to bring anyone to trial at all.
Certainly in my country,
there's the feeling that for a long time,
Austria had a narrative of,
"We were victims of the Nazis too.
"The Germans invaded Austria."
- Yeah, that's absolutely true.
That's absolutely true.
It was, the Austrians were invited
to have that narrative by the Allies.
The Allies had their conference,
the three Allies, in Moscow
in late 1943, and there, they made some declarations
about Nazi atrocities, about how to deal with Italy,
and how to deal with Austria.
And in that declaration of Austria,
they said, "Austria as a state,
"was the first victim of
"Hitler's aggression policy," which is absolutely true.
But it says nothing about the role of the Austrians
in the annexation process in 1938.
But you had in that declaration of Austria,
you had one very important sentence.
"Austria has a responsibility though
"for her participation in Hitler's war of aggression."
But this declaration was repeated again and again,
but only the first part of the declaration,
and Austria declared herself as a victim.
This was very practical.
They could hide behind the Germans.
The Germans were the perpetrates,
and the Austrians were the victims.
And the government held this official position,
"We are victims."
But in the beginning of 1937,
the claimed that the Nazi party
in Austria had around 70,000 members.
Austria was a country of six million inhabitants
at that time.
But after the annexation of March, 1938,
tens of thousands wanted to join the Nazi party.
And in Austria, you had more than half a million members
of the Nazi party after the annexation.
And in addition to all that,
you had the pogrom on the streets of Vienna.
And this was not the Germans,
it was the Viennese anti-Semites.
They felt, "Now it's possible.
"There will be impunity for that, we could do that."
They could beat and call their names
and humiliate our Jewish neighbors.
It started before the first
German soldier arrived in Vienna.
And it was not Hitler, it was the Viennese themselves,
what they were doing against their Jewish neighbors.
But yeah, it lasted really until the middle of the 1980s
that the Austrian public realized what had happened.
And this had to do with the
candidate of Kurt Waldheim
who was Secretary General of the United Nations.
And this really was the beginning
of a completely new approach
towards the Nazi time in Austria.
- For pretty much the entire decade of the 1970s,
Kurt Waldheim was the Secretary General
of the United Nations,
the Chief Humanitarian Officer for the world.
And as he's sitting there
in his United Nations building in New York,
in the very same building,
stored somewhere in the basement is a folder,
also compiled by his organization some 40 years earlier,
which has his name and accuses him of murder.
Waldheim stepped down from his position in the early '80s
when there was a furor
when all these allegations were finally revealed.
He was nevertheless selected as president of Austria,
his homeland, and the United States decided
to conduct its own very extensive investigation
into the charges.
And they discovered that there was a case
to answer on a number of camps,
including the fact that Waldheim
had surrendered many individuals to the SS
to become slave laborers,
and had also been materially involved
in the deportations of hundreds of civilians,
especially Jews, from Greece and Bosnia,
who ended up in concentration and death camps.
And as a result of this, the US decided to bar him
from entry onto its territories,
which means that Kurt Waldheim
became the very first serving head of state
to be put by the US on their immigration watch list.
This is where Hitler was born.
So we know there were lots of charges
brought against lots of people.
I mean, presumably, somebody brought charges against Hitler.
- Well, there was a quite a taboo against
prosecuting head of state.
But what should be very interesting to modern lawyers is
that in fact, yes, at the time of the Battle of the Bulge,
December, 1944, the Czech,
the Slovak government brought very lengthy dossiers
in two sets of charges against Hitler.
And the 16 countries, including the British,
and the Americans approved these charges.
And it isn't known that Hitler, when he died,
was in fact an indicted war criminal
by the Czechoslovaks, with the support of the Allies.
- This is where Hitler died, and like Göring, Goebbels,
Himmler, Bormann, and many other leading Nazis,
he was ultimately a coward
who took his own life rather than face justice.
- This is the Topography of Terror.
It was the former site of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt,
the Main Security Office of the Reich,
which was where Heinrich Himmler,
Reinhard Heydrich, and others had the center
of physical oppression, the SS,
the SD, which was the security service of the SS,
the Gestapo, the police forces,
all the people who were involved
in the reign of terror through physical force.
It was in the late 1980s that they started to dig here.
It had been used, it's hard up against the former wall
between East and West Berlin.
And it was just no man's land, really, being used
as a driving practice area or off-street driving.
And then they decided they were gonna dig the foundations
for building a block and discovered here the walls
of the former Gestapo cellars,
places where people had been held, had been tortured.
This kind of memorialization looking at perpetrators
is really from only from the late 1980s onwards.
And there is a resistance to facing up
to who'd done it, basically.
So this is the Tiergarten, Großer,
for the site which gave its name
to the so-called T4 Euthanasia Program
because it was the central headquarters
which coordinated a program of killing the mentally
and physically disabled across the Reich,
initially from 1939 to '41
in six main sanatoria institutes
where they installed gas chambers specifically to kill them.
Then unofficially, for the rest of the war across the Reich,
in care homes and hospitals,
killing patients by use of overdoses
of poisonous powders or simply starvation.
One guy, Fran Müller, in a Munich clinic,
was so proud of his hunger wards
that he actually took a bunch
of students around and showed them.
He picked up a baby by the skin hanging
off the back of its neck and said, "Look,
"I give this one another two or three days before it dies."
So in one case, a guy called Alfred Loy argued
that if he had not stayed in post
and killed only 80 to 100 children,
then a worse Nazi, a more fanatic Nazi would've killed 180.
So he got away with murder too.
In another case,
a guy called Horst Schumann managed to fake symptoms
so that he appeared too ill to stand trial.
He swallowed blood and then made himself vomit
on the way to the courtroom,
and thus the blood-fleck vomit made it look
like he was genuinely too ill to stand trial.
In other cases, people used legal defenses
like, "Never knew I was doing anything wrong,"
"didn't know it was criminal,"
even though it was explicitly a criminal act at the time.
This is the memorial to the homosexual victims of Nazis
And the number of victims was not enormous compared
to the six million murdered Jews.
It was maybe 10 to 15,000 gay men died
as a result of imprisonment, maltreatment by the Nazis.
But the problem after the war was
that homosexuality was still the subject
of criminal proceedings,
for a quarter of a century after the war
in East Germany, in West Germany, in Austria.
And you get a man like Heinz Hager,
that's a pseudonym for an Austrian who was gay,
who was arrested when his love affair was found,
he was sent to Flossenbürg, the concentration camp.
He was liberated at the end of the war, he went home.
The very same bureaucrat sitting in the same office
as who'd sent him to Flossenbürg under Nazism,
is still sitting there and says, "Sorry, mate,
"you've still got two years to run on your sentence.
"You have to spend two years in prison now
"to finish your sentence."
This is the memorial to the Roma and Sinti, the Gypsies
and it was only opened in 2012, so, really belatedly.
And this particular group is only recognized
as a group of victims of national socialism,
very, very belatedly after incredible pressure
from the Sinti community from the 1980s onwards.
- These brass squares we see
kind of everywhere, really, what do they mean?
- They're called Stolpersteine, "stumbling stones,"
and they have the names and the life dates
of individuals generally set outside the last place
where they voluntarily lived before they were arrested,
deported, taken to their deaths.
And so they're a kind of individual form of remembrance,
giving a name back to a person in a place
where they had lived.
And they raise the question, what were the people thinking
who looked out of the windows opposite,
who watched them being thrown into trucks
and taken away for deportation?
So I find them a very effective form of memorialization.
This is the memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe,
a massive memorial on what had been no man's land
between East and West Berlin at the time of division.
After unification, it's right in the heart
of Germany's new capital city, Berlin.
It's right up close to the Brandenburg Gate,
the Reichstag, but it's yet again,
Germany getting this great reputation
for facing up to the past,
a fantastically strong reputation by belated remembrance.
And yet at the time they could have brought Nazis to court,
could have brought the perpetrators to account, they didn't.
So it's part of that double story,
remembrance of victims,
but not really bringing those who were guilty
to account when they could have done decades before.
- War crimes are acts and omissions
in violation of the laws and customs of war.
The crime against humanity is not so delimited.
It is fundamentally different
from the mere war crime
in that it embraces systematic violations
of fundamental human rights, committed at any time,
against the nationals of any nation.
They may occur during peace or in war.
- I was born in Nuremberg, Germany,
and so I've grown up with hearing about this my entire life.
My own sense is that justice,
in terms of retributive justice
and in terms of restitution to the victims,
is never going to be what we hope that it would be.
And of course, avoiding the slaughter,
avoiding the atrocities is the most important thing
we can do as a matter of justice for the victims.
Hopefully, assuring that there are not further
similar atrocities and further victims.
It's impossible for me to say whether
what was done after the war was satisfactory justice.
But I note this,
if we look back to the Treaty of Westphalia,
upon which the entire European Nation
state system was founded,
it's a huge amnesty treaty, if you go back and read it.
And we've seen even at Nuremberg,
not with the International Military Tribunal,
but with all of the 12 subsequent proceedings at Nuremberg,
by 1958, every one of the convicted criminals was released
by the United States back into German society
as part of a deal that was cut
with Konrad Adenauer's government
to reconstitute the divisions of the German army
as a bulwark against Soviet expansion.
Where is the justice in that?
- Simon Wiesenthal always told
us young historians,
there was only one real winner in the Cold War,
and this was the old Nazis.
- There's 5.4 million people living in Yorkshire.
If the Nazis had killed the entire population of Yorkshire,
what would the British government have done then?
- Of course, the British government would've pursued
every last criminal to their last dying day.
But the Jews weren't that important.
They weren't important enough
for the British government and the other Allies
to have that same level of political will
to ensure that justice was
done and pursued, and that we never let up
on these most unbelievable crimes.
- Do you think any Holocaust survivor has actually forgiven
the Nazis for what they did?
- No, I've never met one Holocaust survivor
who forgiven the Nazis, what they did, never.
I will never forgive them as long as I live.
I lost 80 people, cousins, uncles,
parents, everybody,
from my family.
Is this justice?
- I've never
personally met a survivor
who has felt that justice has been done.
And I often think of
the words of Joseph Roth,
who was writing about another tragedy at another time,
and this is what he wrote.
"When a catastrophe occurs,
"people at hand are shocked into helpfulness.
"It seems that people expect catastrophes to be brief,
"but chronic catastrophes are so unpalatable to neighbors
"that they gradually become indifferent to them
"and their victims, if not downright impatient.
"The sense of order, regularity,
and due process is so ingrained in people
"that they're only willing to entertain the opposite,
"emergency, madness, chaos, confusion,
"for a brief period.
"Once the emergency becomes protracted,
"helping hands return to pockets
"and the fires of compassion cool down."
And I think Roth really understands
and sets us all a challenge,
which is to be alive to the suffering of others
and to care what happens about others
and not to be indifferent.
- Nowadays, we have to deal with Holocaust denial.
We don't, thank goodness,
have to deal with Holocaust triumphalism.
So this is a great achievement,
that people deny the Holocaust, they don't triumph it,
and you know, as sickening that that might be.
- There were roughly 3000 Einsatzgruppen men
who were responsible for killing
one and a half million Jews,
yet only 200 were ever prosecuted, why?
- Oh, so many reasons.
Some of them good reasons, some of them bad reasons.
The bad reasons,
because people didn't want
to confront the reality of what had happened.
It was too awful.
It was much easier just to look ahead,
to look to the future and not to look back.
Too many husbands, fathers, sons,
brothers had been involved.
A lot of the people responsible
for the killing were not German.
They were local people in the Baltic states and elsewhere,
and it was very hard for people to confront.
The good reasons, or the less bad reasons, I suppose,
Europe was in a shocking state
at the end of the Second World War.
There were hundreds of thousands of people without homes,
the displaced, who had to be found new homes.
Borders were being redrawn.
The Cold War was beginning.
The Soviet Union was exerting its power.
Prosecuting those responsible for the horrors
just didn't seem a priority at the time.
Justice wasn't done, plainly.
Justice often, it seems to me,
is regarded as a luxury that people can't afford.
Mass murder
goes unpunished.
- It certainly is difficult to quantify the effect today
on the Nuremberg trials.
I think the question as to what was the intended effect
is a very important one
that is still very much being wrestled with.
You will probably be aware that at Nuremberg,
the defendants were tried for war crimes
and for crimes against humanity,
and in the eyes of some, most importantly,
crimes against peace, the waging of aggressive war,
which Nuremberg branded as the supreme international crime.
And the statements of Robert Jackson,
the American chief prosecutor,
were very, very compelling about
why the court was trying the Nazi high command
for the crime of aggression.
He said, among other things,
that, "the common sense of mankind demands
"that law shall not stop with the punishment
"of petty crimes by little people.
"It must also reach men
"who possess themselves of great power
"and make deliberate and concerted use of it
"to set in motion evils which leave no home
"in the world untouched."
The ultimate step in avoiding periodic wars,
in which Robert Jackson said
are inevitable in a lawless world,
is to hold statesmen
accountable to law.
And he went on to say,
"Let me make clear that this law,"
which is now first being applied against German aggressors,
"if it is to mean anything,
"must be applied in the future against all nations."
And then he went on to say,
"including those who sit here now in judgment."
So this is the true legacy of Nuremberg pointing away
to a world where world leaders should know
that they will be held accountable.
The millions murdered by the Nazis
and their collaborators will soon reach their second death
where everyone who knew them has also died.
Almost all of those murdered
became victims for a second time.
But this was not perpetrated by people intent on evil acts,
but by the victors, the good guys,
who turned away and got on with other things
and did not do everything in their power
to bring about justice for all those murdered.
Their killers really did get away with murder.
Throughout the three years that I've been making this film,
I've often found myself wondering
if the warlords in Rwanda, or Bosnia,
Syria, Cambodia, Zaire, Darfur,
Indonesia, Myanmar, Russia,
did they paraphrase the infamous Hitler speech,
"Who still speaks today
"about the justice for the Jews?"