(dramatic music)
When Adolf Hitler came to power
in Germany in 1933,
he set up concentration camps
to incarcerate the opponents to his regime.
In less than a decade,
these deadly camps spawned evil killing factories,
theaters for a kind of barbarism and genocide
that is unique in the history of humanity.
Few know the real truth
regarding the story of the concentration camps,
one of the darkest events of which
took place in Berlin itself on January 20, 1942.
The minutes of this meeting list the number of Jews
to be eliminated, 11 million.
In addition to concentration camps
designed for imprisonment,
ghettos were created, along with extermination centers,
those gruesome factories of death.
Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Auschwitz-Birkenau
were the main ones.
But how did these camps become machines
to crush and destroy entire populations?
We were absolutely surprised
by the number of camps that we found.
Himmler couldn't cope
with the scene before him.
He put someone in ice cold water until they died.
How did these camps function?
Exactly how many were there?
How was it that a secret operation
invented the gassing process as early on as 1939?
Hitler of course could make a huge decision
that had big impact.
More than 70 years after the events,
research is still going on into the Nazi camps.
We have met the last survivors,
researchers, and archeologists,
and have access to unseen remains
that have only recently been uncovered.
You can see here, a coin with the victress from France,
from Drancy.
Arriving in Auschwitz
was like facing the apocalypse.
We have traveled to France,
Germany, the US, and Poland
to understand the nebulous history of the Nazi camps,
and to uncover the secrets
of how Adolf Hitler's killing machine functioned.
(melancholic dramatic music)
The Nazi regime surrender on May 8, 1945,
leaving behind it millions of victims
and traumatized people.
For the entire world, it was a time
to face up to one of the worst killing machines in history,
a macabre multifaceted machine
serving Adolf Hitler's racist, antisemitic dictatorship,
concentration camps and centers for extermination.
April 1945.
17 kilometers from the German city of Munich,
Dachau was one of the last camps
to be liberated by the Americans.
George Stevens, employed by the military's film department,
went ahead of the troops.
He filmed the camp in color,
and what he saw scarred him for the rest of his life.
Indeed, he was so traumatized
that his films were kept hidden in his house
in Los Angeles until 1984.
When it was liberated, Dachau had seen 200,000 prisoners
pass through its gates
and the deaths of 30,000 people, if not more.
But above all, it was the nerve center
for a model of terror,
at the very source of the concentration camp nightmare.
The concentration camps had a very definite set of rules
based on the practices that were developed
at the original camp at Dachau.
The Nazi state
owed the development of this model to two men,
Heinrich Himmler and Theodor Eicke.
They were both very close to Hitler,
the new chancellor of the Reich.
March 1933.
Adolf Hitler had only been in power for a few weeks,
but the order had already been given
to imprison the political opponents of the Nazi regime
in camps.
The aim of the concentration camps in '33
was to reeducate those who'd been judged as deviants.
But there's no legal framework for these camps,
which were opened in random locations
by the police and the Sturmabteilung, or the SA,
the paramilitary wing of the Nazi party.
Meanwhile, the elite SS guard
was determined to end the involvement of the SA
and to transform the chaotic camp system
into a machine to serve the Fuhrer.
It was within this context that Dachau was created,
near Munich in the south of Germany.
The place that would change the history
of the concentration camps.
It was the first major project of Heinrich Himmler,
one of Hitler's closest collaborators
and the head of the SS.
Heinrich Himmler was the head of the SS.
He had started life as a chicken farmer.
He spent some of his time strangling chickens,
so it was good preparation, you could say,
for the job that he later took on.
It was only in 1922 that he joined the Nazi party,
and then Hitler promoted him to be the leader of his SS.
On March 22, 1933,
96 prisoners were taken to the site of a disused factory.
They didn't know it yet, but the plans
for the camp they were about to build
came from the highest levels within the Reich.
When new director Theodor Eicke arrived,
Dachau became a laboratory,
and its detainees were the guinea pigs
for a diabolical plan.
Eicke was a Nazi from the outset.
As soon as he arrived in Dachau,
he established the basis for the concentration camp system
according to the Eicke model.
His aim was to reeducate prisoners by breaking them,
both psychologically and physically.
In the Nazi mindset,
there was that idea that Aryan blood,
German blood, was rare.
So it was better to reeducate than to kill.
For the time being,
the camps were prisons
from which one might potentially be freed.
They were aimed at Germans
who had strayed from the proper path.
When Adolf Hitler dismantled the SA in 1934,
the camps were left with a single commander,
Himmler, the Fuhrer's second-in-command.
It was the SS who took over the control
of the concentration camps completely,
including all of the death camps in the Holocaust.
In 1935, the Nuremberg Laws
adopted during the Annual Nazi Party Conference
strengthened measures
to exclude the entire Jewish population.
It was at that point that the camps
became an instrument of persecution.
When the Nazis came to power,
the first policy they introduced
aimed to rid the German territory
of any Jewish presence, by forcing the Jews to emigrate.
At that time,
Jews were imprisoned on a political pretext.
The extermination camps didn't yet exist.
But Eicke's model was evolving.
Prisoners now wore a striped uniform and cap.
Thousands of times over,
the men had to simultaneously remove their caps
with the same gesture,
and slap them against their thighs.
If they didn't get it right,
the session could last for three, four, or even six hours.
Different colored triangles were now used
to categorize and rank the prisoners.
There were badges for everybody
who was in a concentration camp.
For example, if you were a criminal
your badge was green.
If you were what was none as an antisocial,
your badge was purple.
If you were gay, your badge was pink.
If you had a green badge indicating you were a criminal,
usually a hardened criminal,
you were treated quite well
because the SS guards used the criminals
to police the camp.
These criminals were selected to become Kapos,
who managed the other prisoners with considerable power.
None of the prisoners had any idea
how long their sentence was.
The novel way Dachau functioned proved to be very effective.
As such, Eicke established the operating manual
for the perfect camp.
Eicke developed
a certain number of basic rules
that would become the norm for all Nazi concentration camps.
Three years after it was created,
the Dachau model was exported within Germany,
to create a new, even more successful camp
that the war would turn into a killing machine.
Somewhat surprisingly, the name of this bloody camp
is rarely heard, Sachsenhausen.
(gentle dramatic music)
Around 30 kilometers from Berlin is the town of Oranienburg.
It was home to a unique concentration camp
that played a key role in Nazi persecution.
The camp was called Sachsenhausen.
This camp went way beyond Dachau
in terms of the horror it contained.
Gunter Morsch, curator of the memorial, showed us around.
The camp is perfectly preserved.
This is Tower A,
which is the entrance to what was called the prison camp.
For the row, we can see four barracks
that are connected together.
Far off to the right is the wash house,
and on the other side the prisoner's kitchen.
To the left is a small camp
containing barracks for the Jews.
Over there, the cells
and of course a great many watchtowers.
And right over their on the right, the medical facility.
Until the camp was liberated in 1945,
some 200,000 prisoners passed through Sachsenhausen.
More than 90,000 died there.
But how did this place become a symbol
of the horrors of the concentration camps?
In July 1936, when the first stone was laid,
Berlin was celebrating, but for different reasons.
The Nazis build Sachsenhausen in 1936
during the Olympic games.
While almost 2,000 prisoners were building the camp,
Berlin was welcoming around a million foreign visitors,
just 30 kilometers away from where we are now.
Sachsenhausen
was Heinrich Himmler's special project.
He presented this camp
as the most modern and the most adaptable ever built.
Sachsenhausen was the first camp
to be designed by an architect.
The plans were drawn up
to create a symbol of Nazi power,
something powerful and terrifying.
It would be an equilateral triangle,
with barracks arranged symmetrically around a central axis.
Himmler's idea of modern
is translated by the architectural model of Sachsenhausen.
That is, a kind of geometry to evoke total terror.
From a single spot on the site,
they could manage all the prisoners.
On the edges of the triangle,
the towers each bore a letter of the alphabet.
Tower A was the main entrance,
but also the nerve center of the SS.
On the gate, you can read the words work sets you free.
This phrase was found at the entrance
of more camps that followed.
But once through the gates,
the prisoners entered Hell on Earth.
On one side,
there were disciplinary punishments.
You could get up to 25 blows with a stick.
But on the other, you could also be sentenced to death.
The camp was initially planned
for 7,000 prisoners.
But it was modular, and its capacity
was increased exponentially over the years.
The first detainees were political opponents,
Jews, and homosexuals.
Each had their position in the camp's social hierarchy,
a position justified by Nazi ideology.
Right at the top of the hierarchy
were naturally the German prisoners,
including political detainees and criminals.
At the other end were the Jews, the Gypsies,
Roms, gays, and Ukrainians.
Camps were run according to rules
that were part of the Nazi legal system
because they corresponded to the will of the Fuhrer.
Prior to the war,
Sachsenhausen was a showcase camp for the Nazis.
This is unimaginable
given how the camp then evolved up to 1945.
The International Chamber
of Trade and Industry
came to Sachsenhausen
with a delegation of 165 people
from many different countries.
By the end of the 1930s,
Sachsenhausen had become the official school
for those SS officers who would then go on
to run different camps such as Buchenwald,
Ravensbruck, and one of the worst, Auschwitz.
With the war, the nature of Sachsenhausen changed
and it became a center for the coming genocide.
This was mainly due to its proximity to a key location,
but one that was little known,
a central place in terms of the organization of the camps
and the mass murders.
This place besides Sachsenhausen
was also perfectly symmetrical.
It was T-shaped, T for tot in German, or death.
Himmler was convinced
that the camps needed a shared management structure.
In 1933, this was simply an office.
Five years later, the Concentration Camps Inspectorate
set up shop in a huge building beside Sachsenhausen,
T-building, as the Nazis called it.
The Concentration Camps Inspectorate
directed the camps right down to the slightest detail.
At the heart of the system,
prisoners became victims, imprisoned within rules.
These rules were so tough,
setting prisoner rations to the nearest gram
and enforcing labor for 12 hours a day,
that they worked prisoners to death.
Inspectorate
soon became a central organization.
Hitler did not appear in the organization chart,
but he was not short on ideas.
But Hitler, of course, could make a huge decision
that had a big impact.
For example in the summer of 1942,
he gives the order that the General Government,
that's most of Poland,
has to be cleared of Jews by the end of the year.
In the hushed rooms of T-building,
Nazis like Glucks, Heydrich, and Mueller
worked with Himmler on organizing deportations,
medical experiments on detainees, and genocide,
camp by camp.
If you needed a wheelbarrow,
a truck, or to transport some Zyklon B,
you needed to obtain a request from the Inspectorate.
But T-building
didn't become the nerve center for the camps by chance.
(gentle dramatic music)
Its construction coincided with a toughening of Nazi policy
with a regard to their opponents and the Jews.
German Jews began being deported
to the camps in November 1938.
6,000 were sent to Sachsenhausen
simply because they were Jewish.
And the Inspectorate had some special treatment
in store for them.
The Reich had to be rid of the Jews,
and this idea was shared by everyone across the regime.
Germany didn't know it yet,
but the foundation stone of the Holocaust
had just been laid amidst general indifference.
(speaking in German)
In January 1939, the words Adolf Hitler spoke
in front of the Reichstag in Berlin
now ring out like a morbid prophecy
which provoked thunderous applause.
(crowd applauding)
The speech in January 1939
was one of the few speeches Hitler gave
where he talks about the Jewish question
in terms which mention the word extermination.
Nine months later,
Adolf Hitler triggered the Second World War
by invading Poland, a country that was home
to the biggest Jewish community in Europe at the time.
October 1939.
The Nazis set up the General Government
in the annexed territory of Poland.
But just when Hitler wanted to rid Germany
of any Jewish presence,
he found himself with two million Jews to manage
in this new territory.
It would be a systematic problem
for the Nazis.
The flip side to their territorial victories
was the problem of the Jewish people
who lived in those places.
Immediately, the Reich mobilized
every means at their disposal
to deal with the Jewish question.
But no satisfactory solution emerged.
Meanwhile, the Eisatzgruppen were created,
who followed the armies and killed everyone they encoutered
in the dark forests of Poland.
(gentle dramatic music)
There were killing units
that followed along behind the army
and shot large numbers of Jews.
It was decided to place the Jews
from occupied territories in ghettos,
to isolate them from the rest of the population.
We define ghettos as places where Jews were held
as a sort of ad hoc measure,
when the Nazis did not yet know
exactly what to do with them.
Everyone knows about the Warsaw Ghetto
because it was so huge
and had a very high death rate.
The latest research
shows that almost 12,000 ghettos were created
between 1939 and 1945.
In these ghettos, the Jews were enrolled
in forced labor schemes.
Many died from epidemics and famines.
Some were murdered to set an example.
Operation Reinhard, the codename given
to the extermination of all the Polish Jews,
had not yet been launched, but it was being developed.
The Reich was already testing a special system
for gassing a particular population.
Its codename was Operation T4.
This was the starting point
for what history now calls the gas chambers.
(gentle dramatic music)
In December 1939, the Reich recruited people
to man the secret operation known as Operation T4.
The name referred to the central office of the program,
located at 4 Tiergarten Strasse in Berlin.
Its aims had been defined by Adolf Hitler,
to exterminate every physically
or mentally handicapped person in the Reich.
This was an assassination operation
that was planned, thought out, and decided by Nazi leaders,
and specifically by Hitler.
Hitler even signed a secret classified document
protecting the murderers involved in the program.
It was backdated to the first of September, 1939,
to make it seem like a war measure.
The victims were transported in trucks to sanatoriums
to undertake fake examinations.
They were pushed into a shower room,
which was in actual fact a carbon monoxide gas chamber,
where they were asphyxiated.
Their bodies were then incinerated in crematory ovens.
Officially, these euthanasia centers
were halted in the summer of 1941,
when the secret of their existence was revealed.
(melancholy music)
But in actual fact, the T4 program continued in secret
until 1945, killing perhaps as many as 300,000 people.
And many of the source of techniques
that ended up being used in the Holocaust
were used in the T4 program.
And many of the people who participated in the T4 program
ended up in the death camps.
It was like a training ground, really,
for the Final Solution.
The medical personnel didn't know it yet,
but these killers had just provided the answer
to the Jewish question the Reich had been pondering.
The Final Solution was in place.
April 1940.
A new camp was opened in Poland,
in a deserted military base.
Precisely here on this area,
before the war existed were Polish military barracks.
After the September campaign in '39,
when Poland was invaded,
so these barracks were empty, simply.
This town wasn't chosen at random.
It was at the center of Europe.
The town was Oswiecim.
In German, Auschwitz.
The first camp at Auschwitz wasn't designed
to implement the Final Solution,
but to imprison the Polish intelligentsia.
Initially, Auschwitz had nothing to do
with the Final Solution or the Jews.
It was a concentration camp that was created
within a very particular context,
that of the German colonization of Eastern Europe.
So how did this ordinary camp
evolve into a center for slavery and killing
that would eventually become a symbol of the Holocaust?
(gentle dramatic music)
Its destiny was closely connected to that of its director,
Rudolf Hoss, an SS officer trained at Sachsenhausen
and a disciple of Eicke.
Hoss considered himself to be,
and indeed was, a student of Eicke's.
And if you look at his memoirs,
he continually refers to what Eicke instilled in him.
Auschwitz, with its room for 10,000 prisoners,
was the biggest camp ever opened.
In 1940, it had 20 brick barracks,
including 14 single-story ones.
New floors and buildings would gradually be added.
Rudolf Hoss immediately began applying Eicke's rules there.
The first 30 prisoners at Auschwitz
were German criminals
who came from another camp, Sachsenhausen,
and who were sent to Auschwitz
to set up the internal administration of the camps,
the administration of the prisoners
who'd run the place.
Among these criminals
recognizable by their green triangles,
the SS named block chiefs and Kapos
to direct the Kommando labor gangs.
Auschwitz is a huge place made up of numbered blocks,
where the prisoners squeezed into at night.
They slept on straw mattresses on the ground
or on wooden beds, sometimes three to a bunk.
The sanitary facilities were rudimentary.
Over the years, these conditions deteriorated.
Auschwitz has up to 20,000 prisoners by 1942,
crammed into a section of the 28 blocks
that made up this 20 hectares site.
The living conditions, the working conditions
were so harsh that even,
except from the master extermination,
even without gas chambers,
the normal every day mortality rate was extremely high.
The prisoners' clothes
were soon filthy and full of bugs.
Every three months, the clothes and barracks
were cleaned with a product
that would later be used for something completely different,
Zyklon B.
From 1940 to 1945,
more than 1.1 million people died in Auschwitz.
90% of them were Jewish.
Daniel Urbejtel was deported there with his brother
from the French camp at Drancy.
He recalls their arrival.
Arriving in Auschwitz
was like facing the apocalypse.
We had to hurry off the cattle trucks,
and if we missed our step we'd fall.
The dogs were biting at our calves
and we had to rush over to be presented one-by-one
for an initial selection in front of an SS officer
who was picking out what he needed.
Those who were fit enough went to work,
and the others were killed.
Daniel Urbejtel and his brother were lucky.
They joined a labor Kommando.
They quickly learned
that the number one rule of survival at Auschwitz,
like in any other camps, was to eat.
There was a break from work at midday,
when a siren sounded and soup was distributed.
We lapped up every last drop,
aware of the starvation rations we were being given.
The prisoners tried to obtain extra food
on the black market.
They exchanged all kinds of things against a morsel of food.
A crust of bread could be worth a life.
There was a father and son
in one of the blocks.
I heard that one morning, they told the father
that his son had died in the night.
The father got up and went to his son's bed,
lifted the mattress because he knew
that's where his son kept his corner of bread
for the morning.
And it was only when he saw that the bread was gone
that he started to cry.
I don't know if he cried because the bread was gone
or because his son was dead.
(dramatic music)
In addition to the hunger
was the violence meted out by the guards.
Anyone who transgressed the rules
was punished with a whipping or was hanged in public,
sometimes accompanied by the songs of the prisoners.
But the most secret killings happened
at the back end of the camp against the Wall of Death.
It ran up against block number 10,
the windows of which were shuttered tightly.
(gun cocking)
Thousands of Poles were killed here.
On the ground, a thick layer of sand
absorbed the victims' blood.
Beside it was another block, number 11,
a hellhole greatly feared by the prisoners.
It would also be a key to future mass murders.
Because in the spring of 1942,
Auschwitz's destiny became far more horrific still.
(cannons blasting)
When war broke out, it served as a pretext
to toughed up life in the camps,
which were also places of slavery to serve the Reich.
Nazi Germany reintroduced
what the Romans had introduced centuries before,
free labor.
How many camps and ghettos
thus served Nazi Germany?
For many years, historians have estimated
that there were around 5,000 detention centers,
including six death camps.
(gentle dramatic music)
But recent research has shown
that the total number has been largely underestimated.
We were absolutely surprised
by the number of camps that we found.
We have a working figure of 42,500.
(gentle dramatic music)
June 1942.
The first brothel was opened in the Mauthausen Camp
to increase the productivity of the non-Jewish prisoners.
The following year, Block 24 at Auschwitz
was turned into an outright brothel to serve the camp.
Access to the brothel
was reserved for prisoners who had received a yield bonus,
which was used to pay for the brothel pass.
The rules surrounding the brothel
were very strict,
defined by the Camp Inspectorate in Sachsenhausen.
The brothel rules
included the opening and closing times.
You can see in the archives
how it was sometimes closed due to breakdowns,
problems with the water supply,
and also on one given date
because the Fuhrer was giving a speech.
So the brothel was closed that day
because the Fuhrer was going to be speaking on the radio.
But these brothels
were reserved for an elite,
a few hundred prisoners at most.
(gentle dramatic music)
The war was also a pretext
for atrocities in the heart of the camps.
All kinds of experiments were carried out on prisoners
treated like guinea pigs.
Experiments took place in Sachsenhausen
in order to find a drug to heal the results of mustard gas.
These experiments usually were classified
as being top secret.
In 1943, the appalling doctor Josef Mengele
began subjecting Auschwitz prisoners
to the worst kinds of horrors.
He gave lethal injections and carried out amputations
all in the name of science.
He put someone in ice cold water until they died,
and see how long it would take for them to die.
Experiments in castration as well, on gay prisoners.
What Mengele did was outright criminal.
It was certainly no question of medical necessity.
In Block 10, for example,
Jewish women were attached to dissection tables
to be sterilized.
After the war, very few of these barbarous doctors
were punished, their activities having been kept so secret.
Worse still, some of their work
even influenced current science.
(gentle dramatic music)
Many of the results of experiments in concentration camps
were real useful for the medicine not only in Germany,
but in the world.
And Mengele himself actually escaped
at the end of the Second World War.
He was never caught.
(gentle dramatic music)
In June 1941,
the biggest German military operation
of the Second World War began,
under the codename Operation Barbarossa.
Hitler invaded the Soviet Union.
A few weeks earlier, Heinrich Himmler
had taken the decision to relieve the concentration camps
of all non-useful prisoners.
He contacted certain Nazis
that had been involved in Operation T4
and asked them to find a solution.
It was established in Sachsenhausen,
and the Camps Inspectorate gave it the codename 14 f 13.
In April 1941 started the 14 f 13 campaign.
14 f 13 was an abbreviation.
14 f meant killing in concentration camp.
And 13, the number 13 meant by gas.
269 prisoners were selected from Sachsenhausen
and then taken to Operation T4 euthanasia centers
to be gassed with carbon monoxide.
Similar operations took place in other camps,
including Auschwitz and Mauthausen.
On the end of 1941,
Auschwitz concentrated on killing those prisoners
who were unable to work, and Jews from forced labor camps.
For the moment,
Auschwitz had still not become a mass extermination center.
More surprising perhaps
is that when Himmler ordered the construction
of the Auschwitz II camp in the village of Birkenau
in the spring of 1941,
a decision had still not yet been taken
on the fate of the Jews.
When the Nazis
planned the invasion of the USSR,
Himmler gave the order to build a new camp at Auschwitz.
Not a camp for 10,000, as had been the case in early 1940,
but a camp that would very quickly
hold some 200,000 prisoners.
Birkenau was just a camp for Soviet prisoners.
Located just two-and-a-half kilometers from the main camp,
it sadly left its mark
as the biggest Nazi killing machine in history.
Its final configuration covered 170 hectares,
surrounded by 16 kilometers of electrified barbed wire.
But how did this prison become a center for slaughter?
To understand, we must travel 800 kilometers from here
to Minsk, the capital of Belarus.
(gentle dramatic music)
In the middle of the summer of 1941,
Himmler went to Minsk with Wehrmacht troops.
He wanted to watch the work of an extermination squad,
Einsatzgruppe B, which was killing Jews in its path.
During this trip,
he witnessed the shooting of 100 Jews
executed in Minsk right in front of him,
to show how it went.
Except that Himmler quailed before the spectacle,
not because he was traumatized by the fate of the Jews,
but because killing men and women
is an unpleasant job for an executioner.
So Himmler asked Berlin
to find a solution as quickly as possible.
The aim was to kill large groups
while protecting the soldiers
whose job it was to kill them.
The Germans are starting to figure out
that shooting doesn't work so well.
It's too public, it's too hard on the shooters,
it's too difficult to keep it a secret,
and logistically it's too difficult.
It's easier to set up extermination centers
and bring the Jews to them.
The SS considered various options
and tried various methods,
eventually settling on gassing
as used in the T4 program.
Meanwhile in Auschwitz,
Rudolf Hoss's assistant, Karl Fritzsch,
noted the precautions being taken
with a product used to disinfect the barracks in the camp,
Zyklon B.
It's an extremely toxic recipe
that kills when it is inhaled.
Hoss was on vacation and Karl Fritzsch
was free to do as he pleased,
so he tried it out on the prisoners.
This was in September 1941.
This insecticide was tested
on a few hundred Polish and Soviet detainees
who were at Auschwitz, in the basement of Block 11.
Block 11 was an institution in Auschwitz
feared by all.
Isolated from the rest of the camp,
it was used as an internal prison,
but also as a place
where rebellious prisoners were tortured.
In the cellars of Block 11,
Fritzsch's first gassing with Zyklon B was a great success.
These people were murdered
in the basement of block number 11 with Zyklon B.
And that was the first test, first trial.
The rest of the gassing
was then carried out in the morgue at Auschwitz,
which was more spacious,
having been remodeled into a gas chamber.
The bodies were transported
by a special team of Sonderkommandos
and then burned.
(gentle dramatic music)
When the people were gassed,
they also got the people out of the gas chambers,
led them to the crematoria,
and then they burned them inside the crematoria.
It was a terrible task to be picked out.
For the Reich,
the task now involved working out
how to apply these deadly techniques
to the entire Jewish population.
(dramatic music)
And it was this mission
that Hitler's right-hand man Hermann Goering
gave to the head of the SS, Reinhard Heydrich,
in a secret dispatch in the summer of 1941.
For this ambitious young Nazi, this was an honor.
Heydrich was seen to be Hitler's natural successor.
He was, if you'd like, the sort of poster boy
of Nazi Germany.
He was six-foot-four, he was blonde,
he was tall, he was handsome,
he looked good in his SS uniform.
And so Hitler had picked him out, really,
as this sort of golden boy of the SS.
In December, after the Fuhrer
had declared war on the United States
and German troops were caught up in the east,
Heydrich organized a meeting at the top level,
a meeting to validate a new kind of camp,
considered by the SS to be a state secret,
the extermination centers.
These deadly camps would kill almost three million Jews.
January 1942.
A big house in the Wannsee neighborhood of Berlin
was chosen as the stage for a morbid, top secret meeting
organized by Reinhard Heydrich,
the Wannsee Conference.
The conference had been planned
and prepared in the utmost secrecy.
We know, thanks to some of the participants,
that there were just one or two secretaries,
suggesting that the participants
were carefully hand-picked.
Before Heydrich,
and on the request of both Goering and Hitler,
15 or so Nazi dignitaries
had to answer a single question,
how to permanently rid the Reich of all Jews.
And this was Heydrich's opportunity
to pull representatives of other bureaucracies
within the regime and explain to them
that they were going to physically exterminate the Jews,
and everyone was to report to him.
It was a conference
at which the question of genocide was openly debated,
where they got right to the point.
Heydrich's discourse was a veritable plea
because he needed the cooperation
of all the men present in the room.
At the end of the meeting minutes,
of which only 30 copies were produced,
listed the number of Jews to kill, 11 million.
Auschwitz thus became the camp
where Jews from Western Europe
were brought together and exterminated.
The Jews in occupied Poland
were deported to three other death camps.
(gentle dramatic music)
This operation for the physical elimination of Europe's Jews
bore a wretched name, Operation Reinhard.
The camps in Operation Reinhard
were specifically designed to kill the prisoners
in less than three hours after their arrival.
In Eastern Poland,
the towns of Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka
were selected to host three death camps
as part of Operation Reinhard.
They were in operation virtually around the clock
between March 1942 and November 1943.
Then they were totally destroyed by the Nazis
in order to destroy the evidence.
Secrecy was the biggest factor in where they were located.
Secrecy and access to railroad lines,
because obviously they had to get people to the camps.
The mission was entrusted
to the head of the SS in Lublin, Odilo Globocnik.
He was a rampant antisemite.
It's said at the the trial
that he tied a Jew to the back of his car
and he drove the Jew all the way through a town,
obviously killing him.
Globocnik wanted to make Operation Reinhard
a reference for the extermination of the Jews,
and also to steal their property.
To design the gas chambers,
he called upon the experts from Operation T4,
and mainly Christian Wirth,
who had played a role in the assassination
of disabled people in the Reich.
The idea
came directly from Hitler's chancellery,
where those responsible for Operation T4
would meet with Globocnik.
The gas chambers
in Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka
used carbon monoxide to gas their victims,
killing them in a matter of minutes.
Their bodies were then burned on huge pyres.
In these three centers,
they used the engines from Soviet trucks
with heavy diesel motors,
and Wirth made them use showerheads
to trick the victims right up to the very end.
(melancholy music)
They tricked their victims
right up to the last minute
by making them believe they had arrived in a transit camp.
That was one of the signatures of Operation Reinhard,
to avoid mass panic.
Belzec was the first center to open.
That was the one that had the shortest life,
operating from March 1942 to December 1942.
And during that very short time,
between 430 and 460,000 Polish Jews were murdered.
When they arrived,
the victims had to get undressed.
The SS officers gave them a pebble with a number on it
so they could get their things back at the exit.
But there was no selection
and all the prisoners were systematically dispatched
to the gas chambers.
(melancholy music)
In the spring of 1942,
the second Operation Reinhard center was opened, Sobibor.
There, 250,000 people, including French people from Drancy,
were murdered.
Nothing remains today of the camp,
so determined were the Nazis to hide their crimes.
And they succeeded.
That is, until a team of Polish and Israeli archeologists
decided to carry out soil analysis in the early 2000s.
Among them was Wojciech Mazurek.
We are now outside of the camp, Sobibor.
We are on the other side of the railway.
So it was freedom on this side.
From here, we can still see the green house
where the SS commander of the camp lived back then,
and also the station sign, now sadly famous.
By analyzing the soil in different places,
the archeologists found remains of the camp
that enabled them to work out how it was organized.
On the map, we can recognize all of our results.
And we have recognized the most important part of the camp.
In 2014, Wojciech Mazurek
made a very significant discovery.
We discovered remains of the crematorias.
It's very sensitive because of the place
of clear sand was changed,
was not yellow sand but black and brown.
And you can feel the smells.
The archeologist
showed us some exceptional pieces
found during the most recent excavation.
They have never been shown to the general public before.
We had found not only personal finds,
for example of the victims,
but also remains of the camp,
like barbed wire pieces, the nails,
and also some pieces of concrete, of bricks,
connected for example with the gas chamber fundaments.
This cup once belonged to one of the children
who lost their life here.
So before the Second World War,
it was also the sign of the kids.
(melancholy music)
You can see here, a coin with the Victress from France,
from Drancy.
Coins, jewelry, little bottles of perfume.
All these objects belonged to men, women, and children
who thought they'd arrived in a transit camp.
(melancholy music)
More moving still are the things that were forgotten
or deliberately hidden by the Sonderkommandos,
like these gold teeth,
just more proof of Nazi barbarism.
1.6 million Jews were killed
in the three Operation Reinhard centers.
In this macabre operation,
they were helped by another nearby camp in Majdanek,
which became a death camp at the end of 1942.
On his own initiative
without being requested by Himmler,
Odilo Globocnik created three gas chambers
in the Majdanek camp.
Before entering the gas chambers,
the victims were bundled into real showers.
This allowed the SS to pick out those in better health
who could work.
The rest were gassed with carbon monoxide or Zyklon B.
(gentle dramatic music)
On the fourth of June, 1942, Reinhard Heydrich had died.
He was murdered.
And it was in homage to him
that Operation Reinhard bore his name.
(gentle dramatic music)
On November 4, 1943, Globocnik wrote to Himmler.
He congratulated him
on seeing the project through to the end
and destroying all the camps.
Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka were wiped off the map.
But the massacre was far from finished,
because in the west of Poland
the Auschwitz complex had been transformed.
The second camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau
had become a death camp.
In the spring of 1942,
the situation at Auschwitz changed radically
with the introduction of prisoner selection
when the Jewish convoys arrived at the camp.
Of all the death camps,
Auschwitz was the only one
where any form of work the SS called selection
was carried out.
20% of the Jews arriving there were spared, so to speak,
and placed in the concentration camp system.
The mass killings were first carried out
in the little red house in Birkenau,
a Polish peasant house at the end of the camp
that had been converted into a gas chamber.
But very soon, more space was needed
and a company was selected
to construct a huge crematorium.
(gentle dramatic music)
The representatives of a German company,
Topf & Sohne, visited Auschwitz
and decided to support the concentration camp
with four complete burning capacities,
with an efficiency of more than 4,500 bodies a day.
In the basement were the changing rooms
and the gas chambers that killed in 20 minutes.
On the ground floor were four crematoria
where the bodies were burned.
This barbary had reached its peak.
In May and June 1944,
the killing at Auschwitz reached its peak.
It's estimated that some 12,000 people
were being executed every day.
(melancholy music)
Thomas Buergenthal
was only 10 when he arrived in Auschwitz with his parents.
His memories are very clear.
And he wrote them down in a book, A Lucky Child,
that has been translated into a dozen languages.
I do remember the train to Birkenau.
They told us that we're all going towards Germany to work.
And my father, who knew that area very well,
said for a while, "Oh, they are right.
"We're going towards Germany."
And then at one moment, he said,
"No, they've turned and we're going to Auschwitz."
Thomas had come from a labor camp
and no selection was made on his arrival.
He was separated from his mother
and entered the huge complex
of Auschwitz-Birkenau with his father.
There was a table
with two or three people sitting at the table
who were doing the tattooing.
I was walking ahead of my father,
so my number's B2930, and his B2931.
(melancholy music)
He remembers the pain, the hunger,
and the horror of the crematoria
from the time he spent there.
The smoke going out of the crematorium
was there all the time.
You knew that that's where people were dying.
Thomas Buergenthal
was reunited with his mother in 1946.
70 years later, the emotion is still too strong
for him to be able to talk about it.
My mother only survived, my father did not.
I'd rather not talk about it
because to this day, I cannot talk about it.
It was so special.
Researchers have found six death camps,
including Majdanek and Chelmno,
a center that was open before Operation Reinhard
in the north of Poland,
using mobile gas trucks to kill.
But another needs to be added that history had forgotten,
that of Maly Trostinets in Belarus,
which had some 60,000 victims.
But how many were killed in total?
Historians will never be able
to provide an accurate answer to that question.
Of course we don't know everything,
but we aren't able to find out more.
There's nothing, not now, not in the future,
that could change the image we now know only so well.
It's estimated
that more than three-and-a-half million victims
died in the Nazi camps,
including just under three million Jews.
(gentle dramatic music)
In the spring of 1944, the Nazis,
caught in a vice by the approaching Allied forces,
ordered the evacuation of the camps
and the start of the death marches.
Thousands died because it was determined
that no prisoner should fall into enemy hands.
(gentle dramatic music)
Those who were too sick or weak to continue
were left where they fell, sure to die,
as the Allies moved ever closer.
(cannon blasting)
January 1945.
Six months after they discovered the Majdanek camp
and the remains of Operation Reinhard,
the Soviets arrived by chance at the gates of Auschwitz.
The Auschwitz site and the camps there
were discovered and not-strictly-speaking liberated
by the Soviets on the 27th of January, '45.
The Soviets came upon them completely by chance.
It wasn't part of their marching orders.
Among them was the soldier Ivan Martinouchkine.
He will never forget.
We found exhausted people,
their faces and bodies blackened.
We didn't know whether we were dealing with young people
or the very old, they were in such a terrible state.
The Nazis took care to dynamite the crematoria
before they left.
(gentle dramatic music)
In the north of Germany,
the British were liberating other camps
while the Americans reached Dachau and Buchenwald.
Inhabitants of the neighboring towns
were requisitioned by the American Army to help.
They all pretended not to know anything about it.
When the crematoria were functioning,
you could smell them for miles around.
Of course the Germans
knew all about this top secret state project.
There were too many people involved
in running the gas chambers.
Word of this got out, and it got out very broadly.
Almost 150,000 Nazis
were directly involved in the genocide,
and millions of Germans closed their eyes to it.
I suppose it was Heinrich Heine who said
when the Nazis burned books in 1933,
"Where you burn books, you'll eventually burn people."
And that's exactly what happened in the Holocaust.
On April 30, 1945,
the day after Dachau was liberated,
the very day the Soviets reached Ravensbruck,
Adolf Hitler killed himself with a bullet to the brain.
Historical investigations would show
that he never visited a single camp.
(dramatic music)