'Murder of the Jews': The testimony of Germans & Austrians who were part of the Nazi murder machine

and herbstar one autumn day in the mid 70s a friend from school days from the united states came on a visit as always we talked firstly about politics to my astonishment he declared that the murder of millions of jews by the national socialists was an invention invented by jews themselves to blackmail the germans i was outraged and decided to find out the truth to question germans and austrians who had lived through these events until then i only knew what the victims had said the survivors but how did the germans and the austrians prominent people as well as the men in the street see the murder of the jews how did they find out about it and when i wanted to research this i wanted to substantiate not all the people i wanted to speak to gave me an answer those who remembered the truth and testified before the camera are also witnesses before history [Music] this film took more than ten years to make many of the people i interviewed have since died [Music] foreign [Applause] so [Applause] [Music] boom [Music] [Applause] peter von meisner born in 1920 grew up in the sudetenland and in austria his father under pressure from the national socialists had to emigrate to england during the war peter van meisner became a soldier and afterwards he worked as a journalist you are a sudeten german and during the angelus you lived in linz in austria what did you witness there in the same street where the grammar school is and still is today there was a shop with sweets confectionery and i used to go there every week to buy some sweets with my pocket money the zukul as they say in austria and about a fortnight three weeks after the so-called lunchless i went there there was a sentry a stormtrooper in front of the shop bearing a large placard don't buy from jews until then i had absolutely no idea that the owner was a jew he was a very nice very polite obliging man and i wanted to go into the shop and at that point the storm trooper blocked me with his leg and said can't you read i said i want to buy some sweets there's nothing to buy here i went across the road to the other side to see what would happen next and i'd scarcely reach the other side when the shopkeeper came out of his shop and he was wearing all his war decorations from the first world war he had the big silver medal of courage from the austrian army that is one of the highest decorations a private can have and a whole row of other decorations shortly after that a storm trooper commandant came along with a group of stormtroopers four men armed guns pistols they shoved the man back into the shop slammed the door then there were noises coming from inside a racket shouting obviously they were beating him up and shortly after that the door opened the shopkeeper came out his head was bleeding people looked at him he was almost in tears and his medals had been ripped off and one of the stormtroopers had a pistol in his hand and was waving it about triumphantly as if it were some kind of booty and then the shopkeeper said please leave me the pistol it's from the war when i was wounded it was washed in my blood [Music] [Music] heinrich setzler experience the night of the pogrom 9th november 1938 in baden barton you experienced the 1938 november program here in baden baden what did you see yes i came to baden-baden purely by chance and as i was walking down sophie and strassa or ale i suddenly saw a procession of men marching fast escorted by german police and some uniformed party members stormtroopers and ssh then i noticed that some people were really shocked by this pageant especially because right at the front there was a young man carrying a placard we jews are greater germany's misfortune the jews were then taken to the synagogue a very famous magnificent jewish synagogue had been built here there was a broad stairway leading up and at the front there was a small landing the jews were then taken up there and had to form themselves into a tableau a jewish prayer mat was spread out and then suddenly a ruffian went up to the well-known lawyer dr hauser and beat him to the ground what happened inside there were similar scenes going on inside the building too the synagogue attendant or a cantor had to read out a chapter of adolf hitler's mein kampf the horst vessel lead was also sung allegedly that's what i heard then the jews were taken to the hotel central opposite and there they were given they were forced to eat pork then i heard that the jews were taken to the railway station at about nine o'clock where they were loaded into cattle wagons and taken to dachau wolfgang scherler born in 1921 during the war he was a lieutenant and company commander after stalingrad he became a russian prisoner of war he was a lieutenant colonel in the bundeswehr after the war i was 17 years old in the middle of the night we heard a terrible noise we live near the synagogue and we ran to the window and in the street we could see a horde of stormtroopers going past and they had dressed themselves in prayer shawls they had draped them around themselves and some had the roles of the torah under their arms they all broke into wailing and lamentation this scene made a very deep impression on me somehow it seemed unreal the next day i found out that they had set fire to the synagogue they had burned it down first the police and the fire brigade came and then the storm troopers stormed into the synagogue probably poured petrol onto the oak benches and set the synagogue alight alexander primavasi born in 1926 enthusiastic member of the hitler youth and national socialist after the war he became a police officer during act that is the night of the 9th to the 10th of november in the morning some of us a few schools got the day off so did i other schools were led through the town by their teachers i grew up in a small town there were 10 000 inhabitants and there were 160 jewish people also living in this town the shops there were devastated on the morning of the 10th by storm troopers and s men articles of clothing were strewn about the street the male jews had been taken away they were taken to so-called labor camps or concentration camps until they signed over their assets to the states then they were released again the town synagogue there was on fire inside i saw that with my own eyes the curtains the prayer books the roles of the torah and so on had all been thrown on the floor and set on fire how many people were killed in this program according to present-day historical knowledge 90 jewish towns people were killed in the pogrom klaus hornig born in 1907. as a lieutenant during the polish campaign this lawyer refused to take part in atrocities against civilians he expressly instructed his company that paragraph 47 of the military criminal code gives every subordinate soldier the right to refuse to carry out an illegal command until the end of the war he was in buchenwald concentration camp because he had berated a murderer as an ss lout doctor were you there during cristina did you witness i witnessed kristallnacht in 1938 here in munich because i had moved from tria to munich in order to resume my law studies after a break of eight years and i mainly saw it in tayatinastrassa where the elegant shops were i saw how they were completely wrecked and in hildensburgerstrasse i saw how the jews were being brought out of their apartments the furniture was also being taken away at the same time and the jews were then taken to dhaka to the concentration camp to the concentration camp yes that's right and i was just amazed the way the police were standing by and not doing anything they didn't intervene you know it had all been arranged by higher authorities so the police were not allowed to intervene in any way against the storm trooper mobs who were carrying out this action what did the people there say people were just standing around gawking so in other words as if it served the jews right born in 1911 worked in his parents hardware wholesale business in weimar as a supplier of construction materials eyewitness to events in buchenwald concentration camp on the night of kristallnacht the so-called kristallnacht in the november pogrom the jews were taken to the concentration camp yes did you see the arrival of the jews the jews arrived in trains and were brought in via the so-called prince's entrance and the mercedes trucks were standing outside these old three and a half tonners they had in those days and the first to arrive was a train from leipzig this train from leipzig was mainly full of jews who came from leipzig was a center for furs and there were a great many galician jews they came in the old costumes with long curls etc and when they came through they were not allowed to walk they had to run and leap onto the wagons and if they weren't fast enough the ss beat them with sticks they didn't have whips the ss that is a fallacy but most of them had canes and they thrashed these people with them then a train came done as frankfurt online this train came from frankfurt on mine a frankfurt online is generally known as the city of high finance and these businessmen were coming with their elegant fur coats and with the so-called what we used to call a pea a bibi you know the stiff round hat like englishmen still wear today and they too were shoved together exactly the same and rushed onto the wagons and transported away was an occupied warsaw as a soldier and witnessed the conditions in the ghetto after the war he was a legal official during the war you lived near the warsaw ghetto what was the ghetto and the ghetto was an enclosed part of the city of warsaw how was it enclosed partly with barbed wire partly with wooden fences were the centuries yes there were who lived there the people who lived there there were only jews living there how many people were there well i would guess i would guess about a hundred thousand i would guess about a hundred thousand did you go into the ghetto every day not every day no perhaps once every two or three weeks what did you do we were a motorized column a vehicle convoy and there were repair workshops in the warsaw ghetto where we used to take our vehicles for repair did the jews work for you the jews did work for us were they good workers they were good workers yes did they get something to eat in the return for doing the work i can't say in any case it would be very little it certainly wasn't much how starving and ill more than ill did you see people lying in the street people were lying in the street yes and some were dead and some were near death were the people afraid of you people were not afraid of the vermont but they were certainly afraid of the ss as they said among the jews in the ghetto the soldiers with the national emblem on the right hand side above on the chest they were good but the soldiers who wore the national emblem on their left sleeve up here right they were bad and that was the ss did you see this as brutalizing people yes i saw that a few times did they beat them i saw that a few times yes did you see shootings i didn't see any shootings no were people battling for food yes begging for food and also for drink why for drink probably because the water or anyway the ration of liquids was really meager there was not enough to manage you must bear in mind that there was i would guess about a hundred thousand people crammed into that quarter and i would doubt very much if the water supply there was always good and that's probably why they had to beg for a drink too did they back from you too for food or drink yes the people in the workshop sometimes for a cigarette or any kind of tobacco but certainly sometimes for bread how did people survive there yeah the uh do you mean the people in the workshop no there was a lot of bartering going on there would be one man with a pair of pants over his arm and he would trade it for a pair of shoes or someone who had let's say a pair of shoes he would trade them for potatoes or food that is if anyone had anything to trade did you also see dead bodies on the street there were bodies lying in the street yes did you talk to your comrades about the conditions in the ghetto sometimes we talked about it in fact some pictures were taken i was not the only one to take pictures others did too what did your comrades say well they were all saying the same that it was human slavery that mostly people just couldn't understand that they were crammed in and they were starving and lying dead in the street was it obvious to you that this was a systematic action to starve people to death because the rationing of food had been going on for almost a year in the time when i was there yes so things didn't get any better it was the contrary in fact things probably got even worse was it clear to you that this was a case of mass murder yes i didn't see mass murder in that sense i saw a few corpses on the streets or people who had starved to death and then once i saw a hearse and they were picking up the dead from the street and loading them for want of a better phrase onto a wagon full of bodies and then they carried them away until according to stories from people who were also in the ghetto they were said to have been buried in mass graves when did you see jews being mistreated yes i was on the transport to russia we were transported to rostov and on a little station just before chokov i saw a freight train and it was only later on that i realized that jews had been loaded onto this and had been taken to the extermination camp you took photographs in the ghetto have you still got these photos i still have the photos yes would you show them here in the first photo you can see a woman lying probably dead covered with a blanket in the next photo you can see the entry or exit to the ghetto guarded by a polish policeman and here is the wooden fence in closing the ghetto answered here and bachelor here is a beggar rather ragged with the saucepan he is probably begging for food here and here you can see a little market they are trading with wood here again you can see the fencing around the ghetto the snake's a bit sexy and june the next picture shows a young man with a plate in his hand who is presumably also begging for food and here you can see a hearse being drawn by hand here is an old woman starved to death probably dead again covered with an old blanket he was a young girl with her brothers and sisters here you can see the tram which traveled only in the ghetto with the jewish star on top these are numbers this photo again shows the polish part and here again is the polish part both connected by a bridge where this ghetto comes in here it's a kind of long narrow bit the bridge was built so that the poles did not have to come into contact with the jews here again you can see a little market where trading is going on presumably these are potatoes and this is wood the next picture is also the entrance to the ghetto where you can see the sign saying prohibited infected area no stopping allowed ludwig born in 1903 during the war director of a mattress factory in the warsaw ghetto he's been the chef's fur and the strikes work i was the chief executive of a branch in berlin and one day i was informed by the owner that apart from my factory in berlin there was also a factory in warsaw for me to manage and but there was nobody from the firm there it had all been organized by a labor exchange in the east which was to make the useful workforce in the ghetto available for the war economy there were already 160 jewish men and women designated and they were to bring everything with them what was that sewing machines their hand tools and so on so i mean 26 sewing machines were brought in for us how were these people paid do you really think if they had to pay they would have set up a factory the workforce had no choice the workforce belonged to the ss they were the property of the ss at the start that meant that we the firm had to pay off the ss for each one but i never saw any evidence that anything was being charged and then you see over the next few weeks there was such confusion it just wasn't possible anymore so to cut a long story short on the 15th of april 1942 i was sent to warsaw i was picked up at the main railway station and taken straight in my room was already booked everything had been arranged i was taken in through gate two of the ghetto the street which there was called shebowska and at number 25 there was a large factory where everything had been seized for the firm it was all prepared as i said the workforce had already been designated the tools which they had to bring with them from home were also already there everything was already there [Applause] and then paul who spoke with german was engaged together with his wife his wife was work supervisor and he acted as an interpreter as i spoke no polish i couldn't speak to the people you see nobody bothered about how the people were to live how they were to work if somebody fell down they just couldn't care less they were given nothing paid nothing no food why did they work there why did they work there yeah and i well in the eyes of the people there to work for a german company would mean you lived longer you see they knew that they had to die of course they knew that it was obvious by april 1942 they all knew even the jews every one of them they knew what was going on what was going on extermination extermination of the jews not only polish jews they were being deported from france holland belgium from germany i understand and many came from hungary czechoslovakia how many people lived in the ghetto [Applause] you mean sleeping yes did you see them on the streets of course there were people nearby and then we did this together with the pole and his wife and we today it's very hard to even talk about it you know what was done we got provisions on the black market and set up a kitchen at the back but nobody had to know about it and then we could give people at least some soup to eat at midday or 160 people and the women in the course of the day of course they brought their children with them that's understandable so anyway we were able to help to some extent of any out invitation the whole firm would have been found out and us too of course did you see people who had no work on the streets the streets were packed with people it was like this on my first visit to warsaw on the 15th of april i went through the streets with the owner and another executive from the south german works and [Music] so we had to wend our way through and then somebody heard us speaking german this was a middle-aged woman she threw herself at us saying i was a piano teacher in berlin help me please and then the executive said in his dialect push off your stupid cow that was normal behavior in the ghetto between germans and jews you see the ghetto was blocked off did you see checkpoints at the your leadership gates course i saw them what was that like naturally with the polls i often had to leave the ghetto to go to the government offices and as we went in through the gate it was gate 2 again with a group of jewish workers there were children there too they were coming from some workplace or other in the city and they were being taken back into the ghetto and people were being searched for food or whatever and one of the children the little boy perhaps eight or ten had some food a couple of potatoes carrots and so on and the german police sentry lifted him up in the air and hit him on the head with the stock of his gun after you asked me about the relationship between germans and jews in a company like the one we're talking about from democracy isn't he when she in you know if you walked into the work rooms and saw these frightened people there you know they were fully aware of what was going on every woman every child every man had the fear of death in their eyes when a german the came in between the atmosphere in the company was terrible that was the worst thing for me and then when you came out our offices were opposite on the other side of shebowski number 30 a former jewish cafe when you cross the street how the people shoved each other one behind the other you know they were seeking refuge but they didn't know where to go they were being chased through the streets and then what was going on in the meantime these are no scheme for example i saw when i went out once i didn't like it i didn't do it often there were these three completely naked children about two or three years old with these bellies swollen heads protruding eyes in the gutters lying on the pavements and gulping the filthy water this ghetto spooge three years old still children perhaps they were even younger than that children who must have been thrown out by their parents because they simply couldn't feed them anymore lying there completely naked i stood on the edge of the curb and next to me stood a jew in a robe a beard and so on and he noticed obviously from my clothes that i was a and then he german in german half german half yiddish my god what are you doing to us and once i had a conversation with a judge from the regional superior court from poznan he'd been a lawyer in the days of the germans and as an old man he was packed off to the ghetto his face was highly intelligent but there was such fear in his face you know the fear of death not only for himself for his family for his wife for his grown-up children for his grandchildren who were all there together you have to imagine that and you know they came from what even in 1942 was still a blessed land they had everything when you came home into the arms of your wife and then suddenly suddenly right into this hell that feels kind of there are no words to express it you know not even a devil could behave the way our good compatriots behaved born in 1957 historian at the university of vienna for years he has been occupied with the role of the vermont in the extermination of the jews in kings at some unlike in the east meaning the soviet union in poland in serbia the army started the final solution of the jewish question in the autumn of 1941 how was this mass murder carried out executions this mass murder was performed by execution commanders of the army and was done under the military pretext of shooting hostages there weren't any gas chambers in serbia but after the army had shot all the jewish adult males in autumn 1942 this involved about six to seven hundred thousand men the women and children were left over and in the winter of 1941 42 they were interned in a concentration camp very close to belgrade in march 1942 thus after a few months a gas truck came from berlin to belgrade and within two and a half months these women and children had been murdered in a gas truck in this mobile device this gas chamber was this gas truck which in the national socialist terminology was described as a cover-up as a delousing truck as a special truck as a special vehicle was a converted sauer truck uh as early as the end of 1939 such gas trucks were being used to kill mentally and physically handicapped people and where were they made in berlin in the criminal technician they were produced in berlin in the forensic department of the state security headquarters and since the invasion of the soviet union in summer 1941 it also tried to introduce new technical innovations on these trucks such as sending the exhaust gasses directly into the inside of the truck angulated earlier steel flask with carbon monoxide had been used for this which was a very complicated undertaking and then in autumn 1941 40 trucks with these new technical developments were tried out in the saxon house and concentration camp on soviet prisoners of war when these trials were a success at the end of 1941 six prototypes of this gas truck were produced and used in the east how did they look inside externally there was nothing remarkable about them they were completely normal gas trucks inside these trucks there was an area of about 10 square meters of this the jews were placed on these benches and then a lever was thrown uh and then the driver of the vehicle pulled a gas lever on the outside so that the exhaust gases were then conducted directly into the interior in serbian they saw this in serbia what happened was that the jewish women and children were informed that they were to be transferred from the concentration camp to another camp so the people came in voluntarily for this resettlement action and in serbia this gas truck drove up every day for two months stopped in front of the camp and the people got in uh then the vehicle was closed and drove over the sever brook to belgrade after the vehicle had crossed the bridge it stopped briefly an ss driver got out the vehicle engine was stopped then the gas lever was pulled and then this journey of death went on through the middle of belgrade and during this journey the women and children were suffocated once the vehicle reached the military training ground of belgrade in hawala the people in the gas truck were already dead links commando they were unloaded by a serbian prisoner commando group and buried in mass graves this involved about six or seven hundred thousand women and children who are suffocated in this two and a half months killing action alfred spies born in 1919 was the senior state prosecutor in dusseldorf was counsel for the prosecution in several trials of national socialist criminals including both the so-called treblinka trials a senior state prosecutor who represented the prosecution in the two trablinka trials before the jury court in dusseldorf what was treblinka in fact where was treblinka and what was treblinka to treblinka was the largest of several extermination camps constructed in poland in the course of the so-called final solution to the jewish question treblinka lays some 100 kilometers northeast of warsaw what happened to the jews there as the name says it was built for extermination that is for killing jews the jews were killed there in gas chambers what is the difference between a concentration camp and an extermination camp concentration camps sometimes also had extermination areas in individual camps but they were primarily built to imprison political and other prisoners and were not inevitably geared toward the killing of these prisoners in fact a great many prisoners did in fact return from concentration camps what is the difference between auschwitz and treblinka auschwitz auschwitz was firstly a pure concentration camp but was later expanded to include the birkenau extermination area expanded into auschwitz-birkenau and was then a concentration and extermination camp while treblinka was just an extermination camp it had been built only for the purpose of killing jews and also it was only an action for a year and a half it was you who indicted staniel he was commandant of treblinka after himmler heydrich and eichmann he was called the fourth worst war criminal why was he called that then we look at the chain of command for the final solution then we know that hitler gave the order for the final solution that the leading organizers were him learn under him heydrich while heidrick was still alive he was assassinated then the commandants of the extermination camp were immediate subordinates inspectors and so on were sent in but the commandants of the extermination camps were then in this ranking shall we say fourth from the top i see a plan of treblinka here on the table how did this plan come into existence this plan is this plan was produced on the basis of the main hearing in the first treblinka trial 1964-65 i must point out here that the treblinka extermination camp was raised to the ground after an uprising which took place there in august 1943. there were no drawings and there were no documents even the foundations of the camp were gone and only on the basis of witness statements and also the details of the accused in the first trapinka trial were we then able to produce this sketch which we did as accurately as possible and then of course we watched with particular interest in 1970 the statement by the camp commandant france stangle after his extradition from brazil and it's still very vivid in my memory when i recall how stangle came here and we laid this sketch which we had produced in the first tribenka trial before him of the camp we laid a sketch of the camp before him which we had produced in the first trebinka trial and stangle had to know whether it was correct or not because he had fitted out the camp to the last detail and to this day i can see him sitting before me and going over the sketch thoroughly for almost a quarter of an hour if not longer yeah and he only looked up at me once and i can still see in his eyes the astonishment and a certain admiration too when he said to me mr prosecutor this sketch is completely accurate and then he was fully prepared to tell me all about the mass killings in detail and he mentioned that when activity was at its height in summer in certain summer months when lots of transports came when we had to work from early in the morning until late at night under floodlights in treblinka up to eighteen thousand jews were killed daily friends dangled the commandant told me that himself how was this camp organized how did this factory of death function the infernist the extermination camps in poland were basically all structured according to the same plan each camp was split into three zones one was the so-called accommodation camp this included the living area for the ss people the ukrainian sentry units allocated to them and inside the accommodation camps were strictly ghettoized again for the so-called labor jews they were jews who had been selected from the transports in order to use them as a labor force until they were killed separate from the accommodation camp again divided off was the so-called reception camp as the name implies reception camp because that was where the transports were received from the reception camp they're then led from the undressing area undressing area for women for men they then led the so-called tube or as the jews called it the stairway to heaven into the actual killing zone that was the so-called death camp where the tube emerged into the gas chamber building in which the jews were then crammed into six chambers and they there they underwent the dreadful death by suffocation after the killing dead bodies were originally put into large graves with a capacity of up to a hundred thousand victims later on in order to get rid of all the traces they began to burn the jews on a grate but first so as not to slow down the efficient progress of the gassing by sick and frail people the sick and frail old people were picked out and taken here past the bogus station the jews were in fact tricked by telling them they were being resettled to a hospital this was none other than a place disguised by a red cross where people were shot in the back of the neck where the jews were then murdered by a shot in the neck and fell into a burning pit where documents and such like were also being burnt at the same time what kind of gas was used in treblinka and then under a furniture slag in poland in treblinka and the other extermination camps in poland apart from auschwitz birkenau and lublin madanik the victims of these extermination camps were killed by the exhaust gases from an engine and in fact in treblinka there was a motor from a russian tank a t-34 which had been captured converted and installed there in concentration of auschwitz in the concentration and extermination camps auschwitz birkenau and lublin madanik the killing was done with zyklon b so these zyklon b cartridges were thrown into the gas chamber that was the leader of the whole reinhardt action which covered three extermination camps treblinka sobibor and belson insisted that his system for killing with motor exhaust gases was the best and he always protested about the fact that he was forced to use cyclone b death by this murder by means of motor exhaust gases was dreadfully cruel there was even a report on it the famous yextein report in which an ss officer described how it looks when one opens the gas chambers with the dead bodies sprawled all over each other and cramped up and the way the victims had piled up were the strongest that climbed to the top in their struggle for air and the weakest was underneath how are the bodies removed from the gas chamber in treblinka in treblinka and in the other extermination camps the gas chamber doors were opened after the killing had been done actually the gas chamber doors were like our modern garage doors they flipped up and over and then the bodies which were all cramped up against each other were pulled out with sticks and then two or three bodies were laid on a stretcher and were taken to the large graves by the so-called death jews these were labor jews who were brought in to help with the killing procedure in large mass graves the death jews that was what they were called because they were there at the killing they had to take the bodies to the graves and tip them in and in the graves there were also other jews who had to lay the bodies next to and on top of each other so that there was room for as many bodies as possible in the grave and now while these bodies were being carried to the graves on these stretchers the so-called dentists were busy they were jews armed with pliers who had to break out the gold teeth of the victims and this gold was then collected later and purified at the end of 42 beginning of 43 it was decided that instead of committing the jews to graves they would now go over to burning the victims on a huge grave the great was simply several concrete sleepers on which rails had been laid sheen and the victims were then burnt there the ashes were crushed and some were also used for building paths in the camp and that happened as i said around new year 1943. in stalingrad the fortunes of war had finally turned against hitler if i may put it like that and people were now reckoning that the russians could one day occupy this zone and they didn't want to leave any traces behind court franz born in 1914 trained butcher and cook command on to the treblinka extermination camp sentenced by the dusseldorf district court for joint murder of at least 300 000 persons for murder in 35 cases of at least 139 persons and because of attempted murder to life imprisonment court france has since been released he has never admitted before the german judicial authorities that he was the commandant of the treblinka death camp her friends it was quite clear that treblinka was a death cam a camp where people doesn't mention yes people died there or were killed there by guests in it people were brought into the camp here and wagons i think there are always 20 wagons i don't know stangle or and the jews were brought down and the people were taken into the barracks and had to undress so far as i can say stripped naked yes naked there was a space a corner here where the women had their hair cut off that was in this corner here i was very angry with him because he caused me a great deal of trouble to be honest i did not see or hear of any children then the jews were taken out and into a so-called tube which was completely camouflaged with fur branches by the camouflage commando everything was covered with branches the commando was led by a deputy troop commander i think his name was who was entrusted with all that so that it was impossible to see in then up to the so-called gas chamber where they were gassed but it was too often i only know that earlier on there was no grill in the beginning before i got there there was no grill that was somehow set up by another deputy commander then trenches were dug these are the pits for the bodies pits were dug and i suppose the bodies were buried with cranes that is the bodies were carried there they were carried down from the gas chamber as i remember it and then i think after a while there was this grill and they were taken out with this crane this excavator they were taken down to they were brought out and placed here and then the bodies were burnt off and then i think sieves were set up like sifting sand and the ashes were sieved through them and whatever was still too big too big to go through the sieves i think that was either crushed or crumbled so that it all somehow as far as i know at that time i did not see but i know that somehow a french lorry was involved if i am not mistaken it was a sour or a sour motor and then the exhaust gas was conducted into the cells the cells were on the side how long did the people in there suffer you know i really couldn't say about that either there was talk about it it was i think they said it was four or maybe ten minutes but i really could not say i was not responsible over there there was a senior troop commander but he wasn't really a troop commander he was some kind of senior watch sergeant in deblinka they were all policemen mattis was responsible in belzeck at that time an ss man never did the work which this mattis was then doing in treblinka so you saw gassings in two camps you did not see but you were there i did know that it happened i do know that yes and nor was i sent to treblinka in my opinion in order to make it known because that was all done secretly and on the quiet that is why everything was covered up too i knew i had already seen it been outraged in belzeck and in belseck at that time i was with the lieutenant who would come from marburg in order to investigate something there or my opinion they wanted to bring in a new gas baby capsules or whatever to carry out the extermination and there was another deputy commando leader or a senior commando leader i don't know what his name was he was there i can't remember any of their names anymore anyway at that time i went to the lieutenant in belzeck and asked if it was possible for him to arrange for me for me in german to be relieved you did not want to participate i did not want to participate and i also thought this would mean death for german and that also meant death for this alexeia be an olexy the ukrainian who was then shot did you know ss boils ss boils a certain he was in the ss and he did not want to join in and he scratched out his boils and then he was transferred out did you know him no blinker no boils boils and i didn't know him you said that the women had their hair cut off the women there were the gold jews who took the gold they were the dentists people who ripped out teeth here where the jews were accommodated that was now where was it where the jews were accommodated no here it was here the jews were accommodated here kutner was responsible for them and i was responsible for the sentry patrols and that was over here that duty was all shared out kutner would not have listened to anything i said kutner was already at that time chief of police that is the most senior rank did you see how things were handed over clothing for example and it was done here here in the barracks all the things were everything was sorted here these were the sorting barracks at the platform and the clothes were simply piled up they were then somehow sorted by the jews by the work shoes and the glasses and things were sorted that was done openly that could be seen definitely that was here on the square the german ranks which service that they belong to with a few exceptions they were people who were active in the general ss and waffen ss from the waffen ss there was only an accountant and me and there were so many german speakers i think you can't call them ukrainians i think ethnic germans i cannot say that either i think they lived in russia beyond the euros there were so many people i think and they spoke perfect dialect like vertenbergers in dialect i think they had been settled there as long ago as their parents grandparents but they spoke perfect german they were yes perhaps they were ethnic germans we used to call them captive that was how it was her friends her friends half a century has now passed these mass murders happened half a century ago what are your thoughts on them if i had known at the time what was going to happen to me when i left the army and transferred to the ss and i never would have come to the ss why for the simple reason that i cannot bear the thought of what i witnessed this belzic why were people killed were they criminals because if that was the case then i never would have had this conversation in belzeck with the woman and her daughter were begging for each other's lives the daughter was begging for the mother's life and the mother was begging for her daughter's life her friends why were these people killed but they were civilians they were inoffensive people i have never in my life anywhere ever had any problems whatsoever with jews although and i must stress this now the accessory prosecutor at the time in the treblinka trials doctor dr joseph noeberger dr joseph neuberger said that as a young man i had been present in his apartment on hootenstrasse in dusseldorf and threatened him but i did not even know the man i have never had anything against jews for example i played handball with jews at ratigan04 played handball with jews in the stadium in dusseldorf in dusseldorf i played handball as an opponent there were never any problems i did not see any difference between catholics or protestants or jews i think there is still a restaurant in rating the hubertus steuben he was my friend for example again i went to the ground as this pub was called with my wife i was still very young then 18 19 or even younger and i went there with my wife when we were still young but dancing this is what we did in those days he was called hirsch kurt hirsch i was friends with him i had no reason to kill people her friends in treblinka and in belgium too women men and children were murdered thousands tens of thousands what did you think at the time i was against it really what happened in the beginning was that for example in belzic that no one could not have known what would happen there then i think trenches were dug when i got there nothing was going on that was in march 1942 when i came to belzeck at that time i didn't know what was going on i had no idea at the time for what purpose there were the demarcation lines the old demarcation lines between i think austria and russia there between belzek and ravaruska was a demarcation line i do know that but until then i really had no idea what was going to happen what would happen if you were to receive the same order today never never again hans phil hellmunk born in 1911 utter storm fury refused to select prisoners who were unfit for work for the gas chambers and went to berlin to demand a transfer this was refused because he was privy to a state secret when auschwitz was liberated he was taken prisoner by the red army and handed over to the polish authorities in january 1947 he was the only one of 40 accused to be released by the krakow court for the reason that he was absolved from sin and atonement that's in 1943 it was already becoming apparent that uh himmler and also the entire german war effort could not do without the labor force one simply could not afford to in general destroy this great potential of as we said millions of jews simply to annihilate them as had been done previously in maidanac and treblanca and the other extermination camps in the protected territory we could simply no longer afford to do this and everybody who was fit for physical labor was separated out before the gassings straight after the arrival of the transports they were selected and this selection should have been or was done according to orders done by experts by doctors so how were they selected on one side those who could work and on the other those unfit for work unfit certainly and that included children women and children women and children and also children capable of work for example mothers who were young and strong but with several young children who were calling for their mother when they were selected than they were so as not to interrupt the selection process they were also then selected put with their children among those selected to be guests among those to be gassed how did that happen there were large rooms prepared which were camouflaged shower rooms a sort of large shower room that then the people were brought in sometimes they were also pushed in and then the doors were slammed shut with altitude and from above these uh through these are right next to these pseudo showers cyanide gas uh without tracer color was let in did you see how the people died in the gas chamber that's the next one at first there was nothing to see the doors were very large barn type doors and there was just a small spy hole in them through which the people who were meant to be supervising could supervise the procedure or could check whether the gas had taken effect yeah effect thank you i never looked in during this uh shall we say during the phase when people were dying i was not in the right frame of mind i was not strong enough to look inside only when the commando came and opened the doors so that the gas chambers could be opened so that the doors were open not the doors through which they had entered but the doors on the opposite side which were just as big and when the extractor fans were running uh i looked in this spy hole and saw they were in a tangled heap uh cramped up and then uh well lying curled up on the floor and saw how they were dragged out with poles and instruments by special command on the other side of the well where the doors were open and loaded onto trucks to be transported away and for reprocessing in the crematorium in the crematorium so then the doors on the other side were opened the gas came streaming out yes first there were extractors running extractor fans what does that mean ventilators first the gas was extracted by ventilators and then the doors were opened and then the bodies were hauled out with poles so the people who worked there were not guessed by this guest streaming out they also had not all but i think certainly most of them had clothes over their noses wet claws and they were pulling them out how long did this guessing take a very as far as i can remember a relatively long time because you can't just estimate that but it was generally said we reckon down 10 minutes then you can be quite sure it's all over but then we still waited anyway because there was no rush because there would always be plenty of time before the next load came in fact there were several crematoria guest chambers several gas chambers running at the same time so we were not under orders to gas people in rapid succession but there were several guessings in each gas chamber each day during 1944 during the big transports from hungary and holland there were naturally there were gassings every day when normal operations were going on everything was postponed until the night then there were only gassings during the night i wasn't a camp doctor but i was assigned to the camp as a hygienist and i primarily i had nothing to do with these gassings but when the large scale gassings came in in the summer of 1944 and there were simply not enough personnel doctors were not enough doctors then they fell back on everyone at this great auschwitz complex who had been doctors and had nothing directly to do with selections they were drafted in then to help out and were detailed to do this and then you watched as it happened can i refuse to do so how is it that you refuse to do selections the work to which i had been assigned was something with which i could identify to some extent as a hygienist in the camp ensuring that the hygiene conditions were reorganized that was something which was completely compatible with my medical knowledge but i could not bring myself to collaborate with these killings in the gas chamber in these matters uh and so i refused did you speak to your colleagues about the guessings yes of course i was in constant contact with them what did they say i was still acting as a hygienist and of course it did happen that we spoke about the gassings but strangely what we really talked about were the shortages and the problems which we had because of the fact that a certain amount of the reports had to be improvised because auschwitz was not in fact primarily a gassing camp and as to the fact that the jews had to be gassed or shall we say there was certainly no doubt among those who actively collaborated and with the fact that the uh humanitarian ethos with the medical ethos they were not responsible since they had each come to terms with this a long time since there was no longer a question one had agreed to do it and it was now so long as it went all right part of it that is uh everyone was trying from his own point of view and from his own options to justify the whole matter of these gassings that was the view the official opinion of people who were all convinced that the gassing the extermination of the jews was right and the gassing was the best method until then that could be found to do this that was their opinion there was no discussion on that and in that sense it was not open to debate ella lingan's born in 1919 doctor and lawyer in vienna after the anschluss of austria in 1938 she helped jews to emigrate she was denounced and sent to auschwitz as a political prisoner where she worked as a doctor i personally actually got the first real impression at about the end of august 43 i couldn't sleep and went against orders out of the block for some fresh air and there were these at that time it was still trucks open trucks full of people driving along the ramp in the direction of the crematorium and the people were screaming obviously there were some people who knew what was going to happen to them which was not the case with everyone and the last vehicle in the column was a red cross fan i was told later that the ss man drove and i saw them disappear into the crematorium and about 10 minutes or a quarter of an hour later the flames were leaping out of the chimney and there was thick black smoke coming out yet and then i realized now these people had been killed and their bodies were being burned dr lincoln's you are a privileged prisoner a doctor did it ever happen that you spoke to an ss doctor about the guessings of the jews yes i spoke to several of them about it one was klein from siebenberg and hermenstadt who often visited us female doctors on sundays and talked to us and once that was the time of the hungry transports when uninterrupted day and night these flames were coming out of the chimney and you could even see the fire outside the crematorium from a distance and i was standing right next to him and he was watching that to him and i said to him how can you reconcile that with your hippocratic oath and then he replied because i have sworn a hippocratic oath i cut a festering appendix out of the human body the jews are the festering appendix in the body of europe and must be cut out that was one of the conversations were there any other talks one talk with mengele was actually only indirectly about the guessings when i right at the start when he asked me why i was in the camp and i said because i tried to help jews flee abroad and then he said so did you think that was possible and i said to him then sometimes it succeeded by bribing the gestapo and then he said yes of course we sell jews we would be stupid not to do that so that was the attitude when we get something out of it and we let them we could let them go and it was quite obvious that the rest will just go under here whether they were gassed or killed in the camp in reality it didn't really make much difference how they died because the camp itself meant death with or without the gas chambers 80 percent of my patients died firstly those in the sick parades which took place every four or five weeks and then the selections on the ramp and the railway tracks which went right past our camp you could see them going by and stopping the masses coming out of the wagons is asked an ss doctor was always standing there and he used to wave and he made a selection according to facial features any layman could have done that just as well he used to let any person who looked quite strong and fit for work into the camp it was completely arbitrary there were always some kind of group coming in it also happens at once for example beautiful young girls were brought in by a camp doctor because it made him sad that they were going to be killed but to describe that as selection well that's completely meaningless the camp was constantly being filled up again and when there was no more room for anything they went straight to the crematorium to the gas chambers and the terrifying thing for me was that when one of these trains came in and there was no more room where we were my patients were lying three and four to a bed there were no blankets and no sheets and no medicines and nothing at all and the thought that here comes some more was simply terrifying and then one was shocked at oneself because the first thought was don't let them come to us and the second thought was yes but if they don't come to us then they go to the gas all we saw was that masses of people came like the time for example of the hungry transports five to six hundred thousand people within six weeks and if they had not been killed there would have been there would have had to be a whole city we should have seen food transports coming in nothing of the sort where were they then here and there small groups went back and forth taken to the armament factories but the vast majority were only seen coming in and they never came back valtter s vinsky born in 1905. after the anschluss of austria in march 1938 he was deported to the dachau concentration camp as an opponent to the national socialists and later to mauthausen and auschwitz after the war he was director general of the austrian national bank for a time it was actually a miracle in itself that when we arrived in auschwitz all of a sudden 300 german prisoners were arriving and they were all politicals this was at the time of year that was summer 1944 you know it was no longer possible such numbers of political prisoners were no longer seen in austria what we went through i myself was in the construction management on outward roads so i had the opportunity and i went to see these trenches because crematoria were no longer sufficient they used the trenches what was done in the trenches that's where the gassed hungarian jews who would come at that time in the great transports were thrown into these pits and set on fire i could only do that because i had the chance as head of this construction commander in auschwitz of going outside too and the others too who did not have this opportunity they could smell it because when the bodies were being burned there they gave off such a smell that well even though we had very little to eat it put you off your food because the stench was dreadful of the bodies the burning bodies not the bodies the burning of the bodies there was a sickly sweet smell which is terrible also we always knew what was going on because the ss didn't keep it to themselves the way it was going they could already tell that things were coming to an end and that the army not all but part of it had been talking about it so that was no longer a secret for them did they give any kind of explanation as to why they had done it yes it skipped an assistant yes there was an ss man there were ss people who told me how they'd come to do it voluntarily compulsorily it was certainly not simple to explain in austria for example people young men were brought into the ss during 44 whose fathers had been killed in the camps so that was going on too you know but the um thing was a talk with an ss man who said well we grew up like that the priest that is the clergyman who gave us instructions he said well it was the jews who killed christ you know and so that's stuck in our minds of course and for all the others too that is not the explanation but that was his uh justification justification that the others had told him that the jews were guilty of something namely of the murder of christ although the people were really not at all pious so you can't say that was the reason for it but that was an explanation for him a justification for him did you see this elections none something invasively no but certainly the result namely those left over one example two hungarians came into the commander in auschwitz jews of course who had been taken out of the selection because they were engineers and it was believed that something like that was needed in the construction management too because the building was going on forever and one of the masters now i want to know where my wife and children are then we said don't you know where they are haven't you been listening to the television because we risked our lives against the english french and russians you mean radio not television don't you yeah radio yes radio haven't you heard he said no we are not interested in politics right we say you are if you ask where your wife and your children are and that was in those dreadful days when the ghast people were being burnt and so you could smell it you see that is that so i knew that he had come with his wife and children and they were now all dead so he was the only survivor because he had a trade which meant the nazis believed that they needed him for the constructions mika monjo married to the painter franz monjo who was killed as a half jew and buchenwald concentration camp she hid the artist yulo levin whom she had befriended until he was discovered and taken to auschwitz in 1942 and murdered there as a jew pictures by both painters hang in the dusseldorf city museum in berlin i was at the station station in berlin and i saw a train standing on the tracks with auschwitz on the front i thought auschwitz auschwitz so i went to the ticket window and asked what is there a trained auschwitz here yes he said every day at such and such a time there is a train to auschwitz i thought then i could and can anyone go on it he said yes anyone can go you can buy a ticket the reason was that i had a female friend whose brother had been in auschwitz for a long time but he was able to write and also receive parcels he was um what do you call it he was involved with diamonds he was a diamond cutter in antwerp the familia but and of course the family had paid so this ss man accepted the parcels gems yes with gems or diamonds i'm not really sure of the difference exactly so i got this address and i also wrote to this ss man but i always made out that i was interested in my brother and so then he wrote yes come down sometime and we set a date and so i went to auschwitz and on the way there that was really dreadful for me on the fields everywhere there were prisoners and prison uniforms mainly women working in the fields and done imports [Applause] and then in the town there were all these small troops of prisoners guarded of course by ss men with guns and they were dragging some kind of heavy load or pulling carts and he kept on driving them on hurry hurry hurry and these were such emaciated figures that was shockingly and at the time that i had agreed with the ss man i went into the camp only into the part where the officers in the centuries lived that was the excuse and he was saying which i found really ironic yes if it wasn't saturday tomorrow sunday i'd take you with me to the works and you could talk to him yourself but you can't do that right now as if i would believe that the prisoners got saturdays and sundays off so anyway i had to act as if i believed that and i turned over in my mind whether or not i should mention something and ask about eulo levin and it was all so strange for us what was going on there i still had some hope that he was working there somewhere as a carpenter and it might be possible to find something out so i asked him later and he said yes he would make inquiries but of course i never heard anything but now i couldn't go back home until the evening my train was not leaving until just before midnight and there i was i had to pass the time somehow i was with a soldier who had a cart a sort of little cart who was driving around there and i asked him if he could take me with him to drive around a bit and we drove around a part of this camp and that was really dreadful on one side the barbed wire and the watch towers and on the other side were countless barracks with company names on top all the big companies you can think of filming norman allergos i can't remember it in detail now but aeg and lots of others i didn't take it all in they all had their barracks there and then it suddenly dawned on me why a normal passenger train went there every day because all the german employees of these companies worked in these barracks all the office work the factories they had those somewhere else they weren't open to the street but these offices and the employees the managers they were all there they processed orders and i don't know what else they were traveling back and forth from berlin to auschwitz yes of course it's like that in any business what was the officer's mess like because you know about us in the officer's mess in the evening there was a tremendous hullabaloo blaring music but what was interesting for me was that it was a large hall which was painted about halfway up the walls [Music] it was painted with a continuous freeze with these scenes from the middle ages dancing maidens and nights from the age of chivalry and such life is so then i spoke to the ss man i said that's really wonderful what you've got here all these pictures he said we have plenty of jews who are painters we made them do that for us and after that he went in the meantime they were all getting more and more drunk and i was very much on edge as soon as he was gone i just ran away and went out and went to the railway station and went home helmut frank born in 1923 as a soldier he became a russian prisoner of war after the war he built up a company and became managing director of a paper factory dr frank when and where did you become a russian prisoner our beloved fuhrer sent me to russia very quickly and at 18 i was called up and 18 months later in august 1944 i was in bessarabia that's somewhere in moldavia near kishin f in romania from kishnev i was taken prisoner at the end of august 1944 now i'd had the misfortune to take a few splinters of shrapnel in the leg in the calf from a grenade a few days before at first things didn't go too badly but because we had to march for such a long time in the dust and huge marching columns as prisoners to the east the dust settle into the womb it got more and more swollen and that was lucky for me because of that they didn't take my shoes off me because they could hardly take the shoe from my foot because they were so swollen at least that one leg [Music] and i got quite a fever after about three or four weeks and the front line soldiers were not so mean as others found behind us so that i was taken to a military hospital and the fever was getting higher and higher gradually i began to get i was really unaware of things and not because it was so horrendously painful but because i was obviously already in a condition which stopped me realizing things so much but something still allowed me to be aware to some extent despite the reduced grasp of reality that a series of doctors who were whisking around my bed so fast were giving me a wide berth because they had obviously said to themselves there's nothing more to be done for this one so i just lay there until one day an attractive young female doctor came in she came up to my bed unlike the others and she [Music] how are you doing in german that was something that really struck me it really stood out and then i also noticed that she spoke with an accent which reminded me a bit of yiddish which i was used to hearing in vienna because we had friends who were from who also spoke a bit of yiddish so without more ado this woman looked at my leg and immediately five minutes later when she came back she gave me two injections and injections were harder to get at that time than anything else swear in short even giving injections was a small miracle and i took that in too despite my reduced grasp on reality i managed to take this in anyway this woman remained by my bed for nearly 24 hours she was only away briefly i don't know how many injections she gave me but there was no end of them it i also had something to drink and some kind of pills and some kind of bandage on the leg so anyway after these 24 hours i felt a lot more alert again and i took in my surroundings [Music] and of course i began with my little savior and had conversations with my beautiful little savior and we were together she kept coming back to see me for eight maybe even 14 days and it turned out firstly that she was jewish which i had already guessed on account of her accent and that she had studied in heidelberg heidelberg the fine which was still dear to her and she was not just a doctor but also a human being who had seen the medical profession as a vocation too otherwise she would not have stood by me since i had obviously been more or less a hopeless case she saved your life she certainly did save my life there's no doubt in my mind what i really regret is that well it was my inevitable fate as a prisoner after two three weeks i was thrown out that is sent back to to a pow camp into a transit camp and so i lost sight of this young woman doctor from heidelberg that is who had studied in heidelberg who was now something like a second lieutenant or a lieutenant or something in the russian army and i really regretted that because after the war after going home and after life had got back to normal i would so have loved to have talked to this lady and i would have said my dear child thank you from the bottom of my heart if one can in any event simply say thank you in a case like that because she really did save my life in that drafty barracks in dire conditions i was lying on a plank bed and she came to me like an angel as i see now looking back and she said i'll bring that lad back to health myself and that was that it's been other youth i often used to meet jews at the start of my imprisonment we had a jewish attendant in the prison camp in czechoslovakia who really made an effort for us german prisoners of war in that he provided good food to some extent and then later too in prison in russia in azerbaijan i came across jewish doctors both men and women who were very good to us that is they made an effort to ensure that the regulations were always observed as far as possible even if they usually or very often did not achieve what they wanted to achieve how did the doctors behave with the prisoners i myself also spent a long time in the military hospital when i was sick for the first time i was at death's door with dystrophy fluid retention edema so the jewish doctor often came to my bed and looked after me and then when i was back on my feet again i was assigned to him in the sick bay in his hospital barrack as an assistant and this was in fact after he had discovered that my father had been a doctor i must say this particular doctor has stuck in my memory he was a jew and came from kharkov and the most shocking thing for me was when he told me that in the war his wife his two children and his mother in kharkov had been shocked and according to him the ss had done that and to me it was somehow astonishing the way he behaved towards ss men which some of us prisoners were found because every time one of these sick ss men came he said i'll write you a note i'm giving you two days off work and giving you permission to rest in the barracks because uss men shot my wife and my children and my mother so this was an act of charity yeah secrets yes certainly two days off for prisoners was an act of charity and i must say once i must just add once we were in a camp which was somewhat remote there was no medicine that was only available a few kilometers away on the other side of the kura and once he raced out at night himself across the river and fetched the medicine for a prisoner of war because nobody else was allowed to go what kind of distance was that you had a sponsor for 16 kilometers yes that would have been about six seven kilometers on the other side of the koran the main camp and the hospital was on one side on the eastern side and our camp was a subsidiary camp on the other side of the quarter on the far side ursula fennig widow of german officer heinz fennig who became a russian prisoner at stalingrad and came home in 1956 your husband was taken prisoner by the russians in stalingrad at the same time as field marshal paulus yes was he injured yes he had frostbite in both hands and in both feet yes he was operated on in a russian military hospital what happened my husband weighed 80 pounds at that time and the doctor had told him he couldn't have an anesthetic he would never have survived it there were no local anesthetics available and then the doctor operated just like that as we say here it was like vivisection my husband was laid out on a table four nurses stood around him with a linen sheet and firmly held him down so that he couldn't move and he was then able to follow the operation for half an hour and then he passed out the doctor used a paring knife and a hook to rip out the joints and then laid the skin flaps over them and with that the operation was over um then they put a dressing on and two weeks later my husband was moved to a different military hospital but first he spoke to the doctor again he asked him how come he spoke such good german i and so the surgeon explained to him that he was a jew and that he had lost his whole family in germany but that he had just acted in accordance with the hippocratic oath he could certainly have just left him to rod gangrene would have been the result and he would simply not have come home what did your husband tell you about the doctor as a person all he told me was that he was a marvelous human being that he had been compassionate and also he told him that my husband was after all a prisoner of war and the very picture of misery what more can one say did you keep in touch after the war none no that just wasn't possible it was impossible because there was no contact with russia my husband didn't even know his name [Music] food [Music] [Music] baby [Music] [Music] boom [Music] booty be [Music] [Music]

Channel: i24NEWS English

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Keywords: i24NEWS, news today, i24news, i24, i24news direct, i 24, israel, i24 news, i24 direct, i24 news israel, holocaust, holocaust memorial day, yad vashem, shoa, nazi, adolf hitler, eichman, yad vashem israel, yad vashem holocaust memorial, holocaust memorial day israel, yom hashoah siren

Id: bDNZhtHU-4o

Length: 109min 10sec (6550 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 27 2022