NOVA uses recently discovered documents to uncover the complicity of German architects and engineers in the Holocaust. Focusing on Auschwitz, the program tells a tale of ever-deepening evil as the prison camp was methodically converted into a super-efficient factory for genocide.
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00:01Tonight on NOVA, the discovery of top-secret Nazi files reopens a painful chapter in history.
00:07They shout men and women to separate, and I'm taking for granted that my mama is following.
00:14From that day on, I haven't seen my mother alive.
00:18Chilling new evidence reveals the careful planning behind the Nazi death camps.
00:23It says very clearly you will be able to kill and to burn simultaneously in this building.
00:29Nazi designers of death.
00:44Funding for NOVA is provided by...
00:47Merck. Dedicated to pharmaceutical research. Committed to discovery. Improving health. Extending life. Merck.
00:57And, Lockheed. America's aerospace company. Supporting math, science and engineering education for national technology leadership.
01:07Major funding for NOVA is provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and by annual financial support from viewers like you.
01:16In the spring of 1944, long train loads of men, women and children left Hungary, heading for Auschwitz.
01:45In just three months, hundreds of thousands of Jews were gassed to death and piled into crematoria that could burn 3,000 bodies a day.
02:00The industrial extermination of the Jews in Auschwitz began in the summer of 1942, when four huge crematoria were designed and built by Hitler's stormtroopers, the SS.
02:18As Germany faced defeat, the Nazis tried to destroy all evidence of their crimes. But the files of the architects of Auschwitz were overlooked.
02:30Only now are these documents being analyzed. Revealing long hidden secrets behind the planning of the Holocaust and pinpointing the guilt of men who designed and built the machinery of death in Auschwitz.
02:45These men belonged to the SS, the armed wing of the Nazi party led by Heinrich Himmler.
03:00The SS had its own construction department in Berlin, headed by Fritz Kammler.
03:05In Auschwitz, a branch office known as the Neubeleitung, or New Building Office, was established under Karl Bischoff, an architect.
03:15Other architects, Walter de Jaco and Fritz Ertl also served the Third Reich here.
03:23For four years, this office produced drawings and documents for the construction of all new buildings in Auschwitz.
03:32In 1947, some of these papers were used as evidence in the trial of Rudolf Huss, the Commandant of Auschwitz, and other war criminals.
03:41These documents eventually were housed in a museum that was set up in the old concentration camp buildings in Auschwitz.
03:54There, they remained largely ignored until a young professor of architecture, a Dutch Jew, Robert van Pelt, decided to reexamine them to counter claims of those who denied that the Holocaust ever happened.
04:05The words gas chamber never appeared on any plans, but he knew that he could interpret the blueprints to expose the precise mechanics of the Holocaust.
04:16There are so-called Holocaust deniers who, on the basis of the kind of opaque nature of these plans, have started to argue that, in fact, there were no killings or that no mass murder or genocide took place in Auschwitz.
04:33And you really have to do some very careful detective work to see these things.
04:42In 1945, the Soviet army liberated Auschwitz.
04:51Members of the KGB who entered the camp took all the documents they could find and transported them to a secret library in Moscow.
04:58There, since 1945, access to these papers has been denied to anyone.
05:09In 1991, Gerald Fleming, a professor of German literature and author of a book on Nazi war crimes, found out about the existence of the files in this special archive.
05:24There appeared that this article in Isrestia saying that their chief investigative reporter had been given permission to have a look at this special trophies archive, as it was called then.
05:38And I sent a telegram to the editor of Isrestia, thanking him for having made this topic, and said, I will follow it up.
05:45And then, as I said, telegrammed to Mr. Shabbat.
05:49Now I'd say, this research is very expensive business, you know.
05:54One telegram after another, until in the end you got all in place.
05:58And I went over there in 1991, I think it was in October, but it was already getting cold.
06:08And I began working on the captured Auschwitz central building administration archive, which the Germans, thank God, had forgotten to destroy.
06:19In these secret files, Gerald Fleming sought eyewitness accounts and confessions of those who had engineered the Holocaust.
06:31These he found.
06:33He also discovered a mass of invoices, letters, minutes and other paperwork of the Auschwitz architects.
06:47These archives contained an important new source of information.
06:51It is the absolute duty of a very, very small number of scholars, you can count them with less than one hand, to make sure that all the material that has until very, very recently been closed,
07:11and is now accessible to a tiny number, a bare handful of scholars, be worked through, analyzed, and that it should go into the public domain.
07:26Today, the entire Moscow archive, as well as the papers from the Auschwitz Museum, can be found here, in the Holocaust Museum in Washington.
07:43Robert Van Pelt can now work on the complete record of the building of the Auschwitz concentration camp.
07:51A number of documents have surfaced in Moscow, of course, which have been very important.
07:55We didn't know about the existence before, and have provided absolutely crucial evidence about the transformation of Auschwitz from a labor camp into an extermination camp in early 1942.
08:07Auschwitz began as an internment camp for Polish prisoners when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.
08:14The country was divided between the Soviet Union and Germany.
08:17The Nazis imposed a reign of terror on the Polish population, rounding up their political opponents and jailing them in a prison camp they established at Auschwitz.
08:30Life here was violent and inhuman, and the prisoners were subject to arbitrary punishment and execution.
08:37If anyone escaped, the roll call would take 5-6 hours longer. What I lived through.
08:48The roll call was an enigma for every prisoner. He would come back, but never knew when he would be allowed to go and warm himself. And it was minus 20 below.
09:00Long before the final solution was implemented, the brutality of the SS in Auschwitz meant that the death toll was very high, and many bodies had to be disposed of.
09:13Already quite early in the history of concentration camps, there is a clear sense that they wanted to cremate bodies quickly without asking permission of the relatives.
09:30An engineering company in Germany, Topf and Sons, had supplied the crematoria for several other prison camps.
09:38And the engineers from Topf would become closely involved with the new building department in Auschwitz.
09:44They were Gustav Braun, the technical director.
09:47Karl Schulz, the ventilation engineer.
09:50And the chief designer, Kurt Prufer.
09:53Prufer's crematoria for the SS were very different from civilian incinerators.
09:57His design combined two ovens, or muffles, in the same incinerator.
10:02Two bodies could be burned at the same time, saving on fuel.
10:07After Topf and Sons had built the first oven in Auschwitz,
10:11correspondence now found in Moscow shows that the SS asked them to build a second set of ovens in autumn 1940,
10:18and then a third set a year later.
10:20By early 1942, there were three incinerators here, double muffled incinerators.
10:28We have here the first one, which was built in the summer of 1940.
10:33Then there is here one, which was built in the fall of 1940.
10:36And to the back is a third oven, which isn't there anymore, which was built in the fall of 1941.
10:42They're cheap. I mean, you see they're very simple structures.
10:47If we would go to a civilian incinerator, we would have some kind of appropriate decoration,
10:53which gives a certain dignity to the piece as a last place where a corpse is transformed into ashes.
11:00The next stage in the transition of Auschwitz from prison to death camp came in 1941.
11:07Himmler, head of the SS, made his first visit,
11:11with a plan that would rapidly enlarge the number of inmates.
11:15That has to do with a large program of what we call today ethnic cleansing,
11:19in which the Polish population in this area moved out in a very big scale,
11:24and ethnic Germans from Eastern Poland are brought here to Germanicize the area.
11:28This book was given to all the settlers who moved in the area just south of Auschwitz.
11:51And perhaps one of the most telling illustrations is this one,
11:55where we see the ethnic Germans moving from wherever they had lived for centuries
12:01to a new and brighter future in the area of Auschwitz.
12:06The area around Auschwitz had large deposits of coal and plentiful supplies of water,
12:12and the giant chemical company IG Farben became interested in locating a massive factory there.
12:18Himmler now sees a few opportunities in Auschwitz, which didn't exist before.
12:24First of all, he sees that he can in some way supply labour to the building up of the plant,
12:32and get money for that, get an income for that.
12:35Now, that's why he comes in March 1941 to Auschwitz, visits the area with IG Farben officials,
12:42and then decides to establish in Birkenau initially a camp for 100,000 prisoners.
12:47The German invasion of Russia would provide prisoners of war for the slave labour to build the IG Farben factory.
13:01The location for the new camp to house these prisoners was to be three kilometres from Auschwitz,
13:13at a windswept water log site called Birkenau, named after the birch woods that fringed it.
13:22The slave labour camp for 100,000 prisoners was larger than anything the SS had organised before.
13:28This is the first plan which was created by a young architect, Fritz Ertel,
13:39who was working, already been working for a year in the SS Neubau Lightroom,
13:46and he drafts his plan on the, what is this, the 14th of October,
13:52actually we have another one too, a plan here, even one week earlier,
13:57we can actually follow these designs week by week almost, as they are created and as they are changed.
14:05And now suddenly he has to design something for 100,000 people,
14:09so what he does is create a field of 1100 metres by around 720 metres,
14:16and he is going to put in this large field a number of barracks, arranges barracks in what he thinks is a sensible way.
14:26But the architect had to modify the plans when Himmler ordered a further enlargement of the camp to take an extra 25,000 prisoners.
14:34So in accordance with Himmler's instruction of March 1, 1941, suddenly they decide to increase the capacity of each barrack.
14:45So he crosses the house to 550, puts in 744, and that's the new official capacity of the camp,
14:50so now the camp can hold 125,000 inmates instead of a little under 100,000 inmates.
14:56And this is what such a drawing translates into.
15:01This barrack was designed to hold 750 people after an initial calculation of around 550 people,
15:10and the change was made by simply increasing the number of people who would live in a bay like this, on a roof like that,
15:19from three people to four people.
15:23Now I calculated this once, the space of this barrack.
15:28Literally people had 59 cubic feet per person, inclusive the corridors, inclusive all the other space,
15:36which is more or less the space of a coffin.
15:42Not only were the barracks horribly overcrowded, they contained no sanitation facilities at all.
15:47This section of the camp was supposed to house 12,000 people, and there were two of these barracks,
15:55where in each sitting 400 people could defecate simultaneously.
16:00So that means that you have in fact one barrack for 6,000 people.
16:05Now this is already horrible, you had to do it all in a hurry,
16:0910, 15 minutes in the morning was all the time allowed for this.
16:12Then of course there was no way to flush these sewers.
16:15The Russian prisoners died by the thousands of dysentery and typhus.
16:22The SS realized that a camp of 125,000 prisoners would need to dispose of a large number of bodies.
16:29As we know from a letter off the top of the 14th of October, so that's exactly the same day that the second plan is approved,
16:40that Prüfer should come to Auschwitz in order to design for them, in a kind of dialogue with Bischoff, the chief architect, a new crematorium for Birkenau.
16:50Prüfer came to the meeting in Auschwitz with a bold concept. Five sets of three oven incinerators were to be constructed in a row, all linked to one chimney and housed in a grand new building.
17:04What is remarkable about this is the size of this crematorium.
17:09Fifteen corpses can be burned at the same time, maybe even more.
17:12What we see here is a main incinerating room in which we see five ovens, perfectly labelled one to five, each with three incinerators.
17:25And here, a detail which is quite interesting, this is a door outside and there are actually stairs going into that basement and a rutsche, it's called, a slide.
17:38So you can somewhere bring corpses in and then you can slide them down into the basement, you don't have to carry them.
17:44The corpse chute, or rutsche, was designed to give access to two large underground morgues, with ventilation systems built into the walls.
17:52These were key elements in the future transformation of the crematoria into gas chambers.
17:59But on the plans at this time, there is no indication that this building is for any other purpose than disposing of the bodies of the dead prisoners of Birkenau.
18:09This grand crematoria was an expensive project, and the Bauleitung did not want to build it in Birkenau in what they considered to be a temporary labor camp.
18:22They planned to build it in the Auschwitz prison.
18:29In October 1941, Reich Marshal Goering overrode Himmler's claim on Russian prisoners of war.
18:36And Himmler had to look elsewhere for the slave laborers that he needed for the IG Farben factory.
18:41Jews who were being rounded up and killed were the only other available source.
18:53Himmler's decision to use the Jews as slave labor at Birkenau was a fundamental break with a policy that had started with the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941.
19:03Following behind the German army were the Einsatzgruppen, or special groups, teams of SS men and police whose job it was to round up the Jews in Russia and slaughter them immediately.
19:17Men, women and children were driven from their homes to places near their villages and towns and shot.
19:37In cities with a large Jewish population, the killing went on for days.
19:41These mass shootings were too public and too psychologically stressful, even for the SS, as the Soviet archives revealed to Gerald Fleming.
19:52He investigated these crimes and unearthed interrogations of some of the Nazi officers responsible.
19:56We have Himmler speaking to Jekyll, the higher SSN police leader again, and he says, the shooting of all these people, he was referring to the shooting of over 20,000 Jews in Riga, that is to say outside Riga, in the Rumbly forest, which was witnessed by a number of people.
20:18By a number of people, and also there were houses not far, people standing there with binoculars watching this, as was said later on by witnesses.
20:28Himmler speaking to Jekyll, when he came to report that they have all been shot.
20:33Himmler says that the shooting, I translate this here, the shooting is a complicated and difficult operation.
20:41And we need the right people to do it. In other words, it's not up, not everybody's, uh, uh, not everybody's very fond of doing it.
20:53To make the genocide more covert, death camps were established at Chelmno, Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec.
21:09Using carbon monoxide to gas people to death indiscriminately.
21:14But in Auschwitz, some Jews would be selected to work as slave laborers, and were not immediately gassed.
21:19The Moscow archives revealed that around this time, a decision was also made to build the large crematoria in Birkenau, not Auschwitz.
21:30A plan dated 5 January 1942 clearly shows the location of the new building.
21:36Then this crematorium starts to move around. It is not the final place.
21:41And it ends up, in another plan, in June 1942, it sits here, right close to the railway line, at the end of the railway line.
21:51And then we have, uh, a plan of, uh, of August 1942, where there are two sitting right there.
22:00Why did the plans for this building change so much in the first six months of 1942?
22:06And why were two buildings planned, not one?
22:09The answer is that Auschwitz-Birkenau was now assuming its final function as a death camp.
22:13Commandant Rudolf Hurst had been told by Himmler in 1941 that Auschwitz was going to be a center for killing the Jews,
22:22and that he wanted a method that was more reliable than carbon monoxide.
22:26An experiment was conducted using a pesticide called Zyklon B.
22:29According to the testimony of Hurst and also his memoirs, the first trial gas sinks took place in this building in the fall of 1941.
22:40We do not know exactly when it happened in that fall. There are reports that it happened in September.
22:45These cellars here were, uh, small rooms, and they lent themselves to be transformed into experimental gas sink rooms.
22:52The experiment was performed on 600 Russian prisoners and 300 sick inmates who were locked into the cellars of Block 11.
23:01Then, tins of Zyklon B were thrown into the cells.
23:05It is reported that the victims took two days to die.
23:09Zyklon B was small pellets of hydrogen cyanide and was used as a pesticide and delousing agent in the camp to combat typhus.
23:18When they started to gas in the crematorium, cans started to arrive, and we could see that there was a name, Zyklon.
23:29I remember to this day because I had already worked in the administration bureau, and the first parcel came of these cans,
23:38and then our SS man, the one who was in the office, Hans Stark, well, he swore and said,
23:46what is this box doing standing in the corridor?
23:49Because his trousers were caught, as he had these so-called breeches, and he was as elegant as gearing this Stark.
23:56That's what he looked like. And then we told him it was Zyklon B.
24:01In February 1942, the first transport of Jews were loaded up and set off for Auschwitz.
24:20By then, the morgue of the first crematorium in Auschwitz had been converted into a gas chamber.
24:25They were brought into this space, and you have to fill the space, really, with people, because the agent to kill them, Zyklon B,
24:36was a gas which only evaporates at 27 degrees Celsius, so you bring in all the people, their body heat starts to heat the room,
24:43and then the gas crystals were thrown in through ducts like these, which we see here in the ceiling.
24:53The gas crystals came in and started to dissolve in the heat, and people died.
25:02The SS wanted the killings to be kept secret.
25:06Using the crematorium in Auschwitz caused problems,
25:08because the gassings could not easily be concealed from other inmates and visitors.
25:14So the killing operations were moved to Birkenau.
25:19Two farmhouses in the Birchwoods were converted to gas chambers by sealing the windows and doors.
25:26Little remains of them, except the excavated foundations of this, the second one to be converted.
25:32At this point, the bodies had to be disposed of by burying.
25:39They would take out the bodies, and they would bury the bodies at the site which we see over here,
25:44with all these stars of David and crosses.
25:47And throughout the summer of 1942, the Germans created mass graves here,
25:52in which bodies were stacked on top of each other, and then they closed their graves,
25:56and they hoped that that was the end of their problem of corpse disposal.
26:00But the decomposing corpses rapidly polluted the water table,
26:05and when the winter snows melted, the waterlogged earth of Birkenau brought the corpses back to the surface.
26:16In 1942, Himmler again visited Birkenau to inspect the progress at IG Farmen and observe plans for killing the Jews.
26:24He inspected a selection and observed a gassing in one of the farmhouses.
26:30He was concerned about the problem of the disposal of the corpses,
26:34and ordered that the bodies of over 100,000 victims were to be dug up and burned.
26:39The Slovak, his name was Arnoš Trozin, said,
26:46come with me.
26:48There were four of us.
26:50He then went to one of the barracks, one of the wooden barracks, opened the gate,
26:57and there we saw strange people sitting there such as I had never seen.
27:02Hairy, dirty, with dreadful smell, unwashed.
27:11They were the ones doing the dreadful job of digging out the corpses and burning them,
27:17pouring something over them, petrol or what.
27:20The bodies, the whole mass, has to disappear.
27:25When their job was over, at the end of November, or was it early December,
27:32the men were taken away.
27:35Himmler, however, realized that this could not be a permanent solution.
27:40It was a too visible way to dispose of the bodies.
27:42Proofer, the top engineer, was summoned to a meeting in the Bauleitung.
27:50Documents suggest that one month after Himmler's visit,
27:53a decision was made that would massively increase the ability to both kill people
27:58and efficiently dispose of their bodies in Birkenau.
28:03Again, the plans for the crematoria would be revised,
28:07with the addition of another two buildings called Crematorium 4 and 5,
28:11combining gas chambers and incinerators,
28:15although even now the gas chambers were never labeled as such on the plans.
28:20I have here a report of a meeting shared by Ertel on the 19th of August 1942.
28:27It mentions that Proofer proposes two triple muffled ovens
28:34for the badeanstalten für Sonderaktionen, which means for the bathing facilities for special actions.
28:41This is the jargon for killing.
28:43So he wants to build two incinerators right next to bunkers one and two.
28:48Proofer comes out of this meeting with an order for a second big crematorium with 15 muffles,
28:56plus two other crematoriums, each with eight muffles.
29:00The projects discussed in this meeting are now what lies in ruins in Birkenau.
29:07By the end of August, when Proofer had his commissions,
29:11the Zentralbauleitung completed the master plan of the camp,
29:15which was now to accommodate mass murder.
29:17And the structure of the camp was really very simple as it appears in these final master plans.
29:24Basically, we have the field here with the barracks, which follows very much Ertel's design of 1941.
29:31It has expanded.
29:33And then to the west side of the camp, away from the main line of traffic,
29:37the railroad between Czechoslovakia and Kakouf,
29:40we have the four crematoria, crematorium two, crematorium three,
29:47at both sides of the railway line, the spur into the camp, which will be completed in 1944.
29:53And then in the forest, crematorium four and crematorium five,
29:59clearly backup installations.
30:02So the trains would come from the main railway line on this spur,
30:06and then they would go through the gate and arrive in the station of Auschwitz.
30:11There, a selection would take place right at this point where there were a number of choices.
30:17People could be sent either towards crematorium two and crematorium three,
30:22here at the west end side of the station,
30:25or they could be sent through this road towards the north side of the camp,
30:32towards crematorium four and crematorium five.
30:39The report of the August 1942 meeting makes clear that Proofer was aware of what was happening in Birkenau.
30:46It is also apparent that the architects understood the purpose of the new buildings as well.
30:51Crematorium two was already under construction,
30:56and the blueprints reveal the changes they made to the buildings to transform the underground morgues into gas chambers.
31:03Now we have the next plan. This is dated on the 19th of December 1942.
31:09And here we find a very remarkable development. It's drawn by Wouter Diaco himself.
31:16He's an architect. He's not one of the inmates. It's obviously a kind of secretive job.
31:21We see now that the slide has disappeared.
31:24Now, why is there a new staircase, which is on the side of the railway tracks?
31:28The reason is very clear that now, for the first time, we have a design which indicates that those who will in some way occupy the morgues are alive when they come in.
31:41The transformation of the morgues into a gas chamber was made easier by an original feature of their design,
31:47seen here in this cross-section drawing, a ventilation system that was to be built into the walls.
31:52We're sitting here on the floor, what remains of the floor, of the gas chamber of Crematorium number three.
32:03And it's quite interesting because actually at this point we see the remains of the ventilation system,
32:11which had been designed from the very beginning for this morgue,
32:14and it was this ventilation system which made it possible to extract the gas very, very quickly.
32:20Other modifications included gas-tight doors with peepholes, and top supplied the gas detectors.
32:29At the end of 1942, work started on the three new crematoria in Birkenau,
32:35and the prisoners were organized into massive work groups.
32:39Well, the difference was enormous compared with all the other camps.
32:50On my second day there, I saw a prisoner's call to work, when the prisoners were grouping into four groups.
32:57Each group had two people holding a large banner with written signs,
33:04Crematorium 1, Crematorium 2, Crematorium 3, Crematorium 4.
33:11I kept staring at it, and I couldn't understand what it was all about.
33:19Then a Slovak prisoner came, who had been there for some time,
33:24and explained to me that four crematoria were being built all at the same time.
33:29I asked him, why four?
33:33Well, even for the two of us, he said.
33:37That made me realize I had come to a place where I was going to have my own funeral.
33:42Construction took place day and night, non-stop.
33:53But sometimes there were stoppages where materials were not delivered
33:59due to lack of wagons or the severe winter.
34:04Not one of the crematoria was finished on time.
34:16The delays created considerable anxiety in Berlin.
34:21Because the liquidation of the ghettos was proceeding apace,
34:24the transports were being loaded, and the momentum of the final solution could not be stopped.
34:29The head of the building administration in Berlin, Fritz Kammler, writes urgently to Auschwitz.
34:36He sends in the letter of the 11th of January,
34:39I know that you have some problems, but you really have to do everything to get the stuff finished,
34:44and please keep me au fait day by day, week by week, of what is happening.
34:49And so we have a first report on the 23rd of January 1943,
34:53in which Bischoff gives to Kammler a report.
34:55On the 29th of January, a week later, we have another report,
35:00which is one which has to do with the electricity.
35:04Signed by a member of AEG, the major German electricity company,
35:09which is going to create that installation,
35:11it says very clearly, you will be able to kill,
35:14and you will be able to burn simultaneously in this building.
35:17So we look at this, and we see it's not only Topf, it's not only the builders which are involved,
35:23but it's also one of the major German electricity companies, AEG,
35:27which still today has a very prosperous existence in the Federal Republic.
35:32Finally, the crematorium were finished and handed over to the SS.
35:39First, crematoria 2 was completed and gassed 600 Jews on March 13th.
35:47Then 4 and 5 were completed, and finally crematoria 3,
35:50a mirror image of crematoria 2, it was handed over in June 1943.
35:57Birkenau was fully operational.
36:00Poison gas and crematoria technology had been deliberately combined to create a mechanism of mass murder.
36:08Finally here, another document that says that in crematorium number 1,
36:13that 340 people can be incinerated every 24 hours,
36:17then number 2 and 3, 1440 people each, and then 4 and 5, 768.
36:23So there is a daily incineration capacity in Auschwitz at that moment of 4,756 persons.
36:33Jews in the ghettos throughout Europe would be rounded up
36:35and loaded with a handful of their belongings onto transport trains.
36:42Men, women and children would be slowly carried without food, water or sanitation towards Auschwitz.
36:57These transports would arrive on a daily basis on the railway lines at Birkenau.
37:02Here, those left alive would be unloaded.
37:08I don't know what time it was. It was light.
37:13The train stops.
37:15You hear Hobendale running. It must have been the SS, Gestapo.
37:26And the doors are opening up.
37:29And they shout to us,
37:31Aussteigen.
37:33Out, out.
37:35Quick, quick, quick.
37:37I saw a group of SS men standing here,
37:42or walking about.
37:44The railway trucks were there too.
37:46And it took some time for people to get out of the trucks.
37:49And then people were grouped into two lines.
37:52One was for men, the other was for women with children.
37:54They shout men and women to separate.
37:58Men one column, women on the other column.
38:02And we formed like a five row.
38:06So my sister and I, and my three friends, we stood like in fives.
38:11First, the men moved on, slowly, before the SS man, who stood about here somewhere.
38:20They came before him, one after the other.
38:24And he waved his glove, one way or the other.
38:27Those on that side went to that crematorium.
38:33The other stood waiting, having been detailed for work.
38:38Those were mainly young people.
38:41And we're all walking.
38:43And I'm taking for granted that my mama is following with my little brother.
38:48And as we approach the front to these SS and Gestapo,
38:54and they stand like this, with his finger, like you this way.
38:59I'm here, like I'm towards you.
39:02And he's standing there, and he's going like this.
39:05And us five girls, this, to this gate.
39:10And other people going through this gate.
39:14And for a slight second, I didn't turn around.
39:21I'm taking for granted that my mama is following me.
39:24But as I turned around to see where she's coming, she'd already gone.
39:29So, from that day on, that was 1944, very early September or so,
39:39I haven't seen my mother alive and my little brother.
39:47That took at least an hour, the whole procedure.
39:50It was perfectly well organized.
39:53The main Auschwitz camp probably had received a telegram or some other message
40:00that a transport was coming at such and such time.
40:03And they had by then given the order to start the fire in the ovens.
40:06The newcomers' luggage, which they were helped with, stayed here, piled up, and they went on without it.
40:17They were promised they would get it all back.
40:19Then, of course, they didn't need anything any longer.
40:23I had to get used to it slowly, like everyone else.
40:29Everyone got used to it.
40:32And the worst was when they carried women on an open truck in shirts.
40:36They were taking them to the crematorium.
40:37And we saw it all, you know.
40:45Those people who could not work, the old, the young, and those with children,
40:50were marched to one of the four gas chambers in Birkenau and gassed to death.
40:54All that remains now of this mass slaughter are blueprints and the twisted wreckage of the buildings themselves.
41:05This is the ruin of crematorium 2, of which we have seen the designs in the archive.
41:12The people who were condemned to die here would immediately file into the staircase which is behind here,
41:18come out of that door there at the subterranean level, file through a vestibule down here into the gas chamber.
41:30This is the place where the corpses were moved.
41:33And then to the side here we see five times three tracks for the trolleys,
41:41which allowed these undercommander to bring in the corpses inside the ovens.
41:46And we can check again the evidence as we find it on the side with the blueprints.
41:53And we see here the little railway track plus the railway tracks into the ovens.
42:00Again, all these decently labelled glideslubbers, Scheinung der Öfen, and so on.
42:05If we now move to crematoria 4 and 5, we come in a kind of different universe.
42:10Crematoria 2 and 3 were buildings which were adapted into killing installations.
42:17And there were always awkward elements in it.
42:18For example, that the killing took place underground and that the burning took place above ground.
42:24Here we have a completely rational design which accommodates killing and burning in a logical way.
42:32The great advantage of having above ground gas chambers was that it actually allowed for natural ventilation.
42:40In the killing process, of course, the question is always how quickly after you've killed the victims
42:47can you re-enter the gas chamber in order to clean the gas chambers out and burn the corpses.
42:52And that is the reason there are actually large doors in each of these gas chambers at the outside.
42:59As the final solution of the Jewish problem is, per definition, a project of limited duration,
43:06the Germans only want to spend the absolute minimum amount of money on it.
43:12All the bits and pieces which in some way had facilitated the working of the incinerators in crematoria 2 and 3 were abandoned.
43:19One of the most telling bits is this roller.
43:25They didn't have these very sophisticated kind of trolleys to move things in.
43:30The idea was that you just move the corpse over this roller into the incineration muffle.
43:35This is a real killing machine. It has no official link anymore to the official use of the camp as a prisoner of war camp.
43:49By examining the camp records and, more importantly, the documentation for the transports supplied by the German railways,
44:02it is possible to calculate the number of people murdered in Auschwitz.
44:06It was extremely difficult to estimate how many people came to the camp, especially Jews from various European countries,
44:20who were then led directly from the unloading ramp to the gas chambers and killed.
44:25Summing up all the data from individual countries, transport by transport, I came to the number of 1,300,000 deported to this camp.
44:41Following that, adding on the data concerning transferals to other camps, escapes, very few escapes, and very few releases.
44:54Similarly, we get a number of 1,100,000 killed in Auschwitz.
45:00In December of 1944, the prisoners were evacuated to other camps. The Soviet army fought their way into it in January 1945.
45:18The fighting went on three days, three days. There were trenches at the approaches to the camp.
45:28The first two kilometers away, with shells and tanks dug in.
45:34And this had to be knocked out. And this wasn't only right by the camp, but to the right and the left.
45:41And I saw with my own eyes, things with really shocked me.
45:47I didn't expect to see such atrocities I saw there with my own eyes.
45:51I saw children's shoes on big racks, little boots arranged very neatly, that big for babies of 18 months or 2 years.
46:09Then some a bit bigger. All of them numbered and neatly arranged.
46:20Apparently they were prepared for transportation to Germany.
46:27I saw boxes of spectacle frames, spectacles.
46:39All the people who wore them had been turned into ashes.
46:43Ashes.
46:44At first I didn't believe it was women's hair, a few tones.
46:50That moment I really suffered and I swore that until the end of the war I'd kill Germans.
47:05When Auschwitz was liberated, as soon as the enemy was driven back from the town,
47:24our front's political commander, Krajnyukov, came there.
47:35They even came from the internal affairs department and the CK, from counter-espionage, and grabbed the documents.
47:44When the Soviet army occupied East Germany, the KGB went in search of those who had left their trademark in the camp.
47:59And arrived in Erfurt, where the makers of the ovens, Topf and Sons, were based.
48:05A Russian GRU-NCO knocked at the door of Technical Director Gustav Brown.
48:16Kurt Prufer, the Chief Kremmer Engineer.
48:23Karl Schulze, the expert and the designer of ventilation and air extraction systems.
48:28They were taken to jail in Erfurt.
48:34And while they were in Erfurt, by the way, their wives received full pay from the firm Topf.
48:42Senior Engineer Kurt Prufer was interrogated in Erfurt.
48:47Which technical installations for the gas chambers were constructed and installed by Topf?
48:54Answer.
48:55At first, the gas chambers were called morgues.
48:59German word, Leichenkeller.
49:01In the morgue, a ventilation system was installed and subsequently it became clear to us
49:07that this gas chamber was used for the killing of human beings.
49:12There were other interrogations, of course, and it was Karl Schulze,
49:17who was interrogated one day prior to Prufer.
49:20Question.
49:21What were you able to observe when you were in the immediate vicinity of the crematorium and in the gas chamber?
49:31Answer.
49:32When I was in Auschwitz, I could see, at a distance of 20 paces, how SS men were driving a group of about 300 men, women and children in front of them.
49:44I had observed all this at about 4 p.m.
49:49On the following day, I was in the crematorium at 10 a.m.
49:54And there I saw 60 corpses, men, women and children of different ages.
49:59They were lying on the ground and judging by their external appearance, they had been suffocated in the gas chambers.
50:08Prufer was sentenced to 25 years and died in prison.
50:12Schultz, the ventilation engineer, and Brown, the technical director, were jailed for 14 years in Moscow.
50:19In 1955, they were released by the Russians as part of a general amnesty for German prisoners.
50:27They returned to Erfurt, then disappeared.
50:32The company of Toff and Sons had made several million Reichmarks in the years that they had worked for the SS.
50:38It survived an effort making brewing equipment and is now managed by the son of Gustav Brown.
50:46He refused to be filmed, but did allow us to record this statement.
50:51We took over the complete buildings from Toff, our fathers, you might say.
50:59Historians must look into the past to go forward, but I don't have the time or the leisure.
51:04There is only one question I have to concern myself with.
51:09Turnover and the profit column in between.
51:12If I took so much time to look into the damage done by this firm, then the bank would say,
51:19go home, that's it, this is quite trivial.
51:25The architects who had worked so diligently to design the four crematoria in their gas chambers
51:29and whose signatures were on the drawings were never rounded up.
51:35Bischoff, the chief architect, died in Germany in 1950.
51:42Ertl and De Jaco went to Austria and became successful architects.
51:46Until in 1972, they were finally brought to trial and charged with being war criminals.
51:52In Vienna, in the county court, a trial starts of the architects, and you would expect that during this trial,
52:05the documents, the actual blueprints, would have been the center of attention.
52:11The remarkable thing is that even in the trial of the architects, the documents were there,
52:15but in fact they didn't know how to interpret them.
52:19Ertl and De Jaco were found not guilty.
52:23It is not possible to say that the verdict would have been any different today.
52:28But the research that Robert Van Pelt, Gerald Fleming and others are doing in the long-ignored files of Auschwitz
52:35shows that there were many more people who were prepared to collaborate with the genocidal plans of the Nazis,
52:40and that they were precisely aware of the consequences of their actions.
52:45What this new research makes very clear is that the Holocaust was not just a fringe phenomena that involved an isolated few,
52:57but it was a wholesale, large-scale operation that involved multitudes
53:02who had measures of responsibility that were diverse,
53:08some of whom knew exactly what was happening,
53:12and some of whom could have known and would have known if they did not engage in the suppression,
53:18the inner suppression of difficult information as one of the ways of easing their own conscience.
53:26There is the beast in man, and these things could conceivably happen again at any time, anywhere.
53:33Whether human beings learn from history, I cannot say.
53:38But at least, where we have the facts, and where we can put up warnings, signals,
53:46it would be criminal not to do so.
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56:30And.
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56:30Move.
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