Darkness Falls

the History Channel, original podcast. On April 1, 1933, Adolf Hitler's first official act to persecute Germany's Jews is an attempt to sever them from all commercial life with a boycott. What follows over the next 12 years is an organized, sustained, cruelty, unparalleled in human history. It unfolds step by step. When he first grasps the enormity of the evil, Winston Churchill calls it, the crime without a name. It becomes known as the Holocaust. This is World War II with Tom Hanks, episode 7, Darkness Forms. In early 1939, Germany has seized Austria. Adolf Hitler, the Führer, wants to take even more land in Europe. On January 30, Hitler tells the German Reichstag that if war comes, it will not be his fault. The blame will lie with one people. The Jews. If international Jewish financiers inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the victory of the Jews, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe. Two months later, Hitler will take all of Czechoslovakia. On September 1, he invades Poland and World War II begins. One of the things that is critical for us to understand about the history of World War II and the history of the Holocaust is that all of these things are inextricably linked together. The ebb and flow of the war itself impacts the way the Holocaust unfolds on the ground. Anti-Semitism is central to Hitler's and the Nazi party's philosophy, which he clearly stated in his book Mein Kampf or My Struggle. Mein Kampf is a manifesto/autobiography of the young Hitler. It contains a rough sketch for the world as he would like it to be and an endless documentation of all the groups of people he has grievances against. Hitler reserves his greatest grievance for Germany's Jews. He uses basement efforts to describe them, playing on long-held anti-Semitic tropes. He portrays them as exploiting or manipulating the German people. In order to understand Hitler, one has to understand the importance of race, that underlines every single thing that he does. He believes that the whole human race is divided into categories. The Aryan race is at the top of that category. The Jews are at the bottom. Hitler is obsessed with Jews. He's obsessed with Jews as an internal enemy, as impure racially, as non-German. And he believes that Germany will fulfill its destiny when it's free of Jews. In 1934, Hitler appoints himself the Fuhrer, the leader of Germany. And he will quickly turn his hatred of Jews into law. In the fall of 1935 at a Nazi gathering in Nuremberg, Hitler's deputy Herman Gurring unveils a sweeping set of legal measures, targeting the country's Jewish population. Marriages between Jews and citizens of German or related blood are forbidden. The laws prohibit marriage or sexual relations between Jews and non-Jews. And strip German Jews of their citizenship. For Jews living in Germany, the Nuremberg laws are a huge turning point. It doesn't matter if you're not religious. Identity is now biological. It plants the seeds for saying Jews are a separate race that are polluting Germany. The Nazis intend to make life so difficult for German and Austrian Jews that they will want to immigrate. Around half of Germany's Jewish community of 500,000 go into exile. In November 1938, the Nazis coordinate a brutal wave of destruction and violence across Germany. Jewish businesses are looted and burned, synagogues raised, and homes left in ruin. Jews are killed and raped. The event is called in German Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass. The windows of Jewish shopkeepers are smashed. There's also incursions into their homes. They're kicking in the doors. They're dragging people out. They're beating them up to petrify the Jewish population. Police or military were instructed not to wear their uniforms when they went out to commit the violence on Kristallnacht to make it look like it was more spontaneous than it actually was. But it is a government coordinated terrorist attack against Jews. The morning after Kristallnacht, the Nazis arrest 30,000 Jewish men and march them off to concentration camps. I think Kristallnacht is an inflection point because it showed the Nazi government that average Germans would be willing to go along with the violence. By the late 30s, Jews living within Germany and Austria face persecution and intimidation. Even worse dangers are on the horizon. In early September 1939 German forces invade Poland. In just a few weeks, the Poles are conquered. Poland's 3 million Jews are now controlled by Hitler and the Nazis. When the Nazis enter Poland, they have no real coherent strategy about what they're going to do with Jews. So they start to improvise pretty quickly. And one of the things that emerges as part of this improvisation is an idea about creating ghettos. Within days of the German occupation, many Polish Jews are forced into ghettos. Jews are ordered to wear on-bands and are restricted on entering and leaving. The decision is made in Warsaw to create a closed ghetto. There is movement across the gates of guards and of Poles but not of the Jews themselves. They are locked into the ghetto. And a wall is created to restrict Jewish movement. It's a very visible signal of the racial segregation of the city of Warsaw. Over 100,000 Jews who lived in other parts of Warsaw had to move into this area. It was at 1.3 square miles, so it was tiny. The circumstances of the ghettos actually create the perfect breeding grounds for disease. This is exacerbated by the fact that running water is limited and sewage systems are not adequate, especially with the size of the population. Mendel Jakubovic is 14 when his family is sent to the ghetto in Oistrovic, Southeast Poland. He later writes, "I remember that as a small boy, I used to walk the ghetto streets. And I could see people dying, people screaming." There was no food, especially for the people that had no money. The Jews fight to survive in the ghetto and even look for opportunities to resist. There were smugglers who would smuggle in food and smuggle out people sometimes. For forced labor, they would sometimes slow their work or make sure that whatever they were told to do would be broken by the time the Nazis get it. There was all sorts of work that they were doing to try to resist as long as possible. For the first year of the war, life in the ghetto is the cruel daily reality of Poland's Jews. But Hitler is planning a new campaign, and millions of people are about to descend into horror. G'day, I'm Justin Wolffers, host of the Platypus Economics podcast. If there's one thing I've learned from a career teaching economics, it's that your life is shaped by economic currents you'll never see. A single price tag can explain things a thousand experts can't. People who understand economics, they make better decisions. In their careers, their finances, their relationships, and their communities, and I want that for you. And follow Platypus economics, available now wherever you get your podcasts. By mid-1941, Germany controls much of Western Europe. But Hitler's true goal is to create libanes from living space for the German people, which will be found in the east. Hitler now realized that this was the ideal moment to begin the secret planning of the invasion of Russia, the great climax of his life's work, the destruction of the entire Soviet Union, of Russia. For Operation Barbarossa, Hitler and his generals will deploy three army groups and three million men, supported by thousands of tanks and aircraft across a vast front. The German preparations for Barbarossa are on a scale it's almost unimaginable. This is going to be and remains the largest invasion in human history. Hitler adds another mission to the plan. He issues a directive stating in the invasion there will be special tasks. When charge of these will be Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS. If you want to know what Hitler's thinking, look at what Himmler was doing, because Himmler was talking to a meeting Hitler very, very frequently across these periods of time. Himmler has been a member of the Nazi party since 1923. By all appearances, Heinrich Himmler seems like an ordinary human being. He's born to a good family, went to decent schools. He hooks up with various kinds of occupations. He's a chicken farmer, sells fertilizer for a time, and like so many young men of his generation came under Hitler's spell. Himmler's mobile death squads, the Einsatzgruppen, will follow the advancing German army into Soviet territory. They have orders to move into occupied communities and kill anyone who threatens the operation. The Einsatzgruppen will follow the Vermacht in the Barbarossa campaign, and their task is the long-term pacification of Soviet society. They are above all targeting what they believe are the two key facets of the Soviet social system, commissars or communist political leaders, and they particularly single out Jews. The conflict now was being raised to a new level of ideological and racial warfare. The annihilation of certain groups was encouraged, sanctioned and ordered, and this is a dark step. The world is dark and invisibly, as this operation begins. In June 1941, the Vermacht smashes through Soviet defenses and makes rapid advances across the front. There are over 5 million Jews in the Soviet Union. Jewish communities in the Soviet Union were very different from those in many parts of Eastern Europe like Poland and Romania. They weren't generally communities of Orthodox Jews with ringlets and black hats. Jews in the Soviet Union were assimilated within the general population. In the wake of the German army, the Einsatzgruppen begin their special task. Einsatzgruppen didn't know enough about who was Jewish, so locals would volunteer or be seized in order to give them exactly the information they wanted. There are groups within Eastern Europe of people who are already very anti-Semitic, and you will voluntarily sign up to be auxiliaries and help these units. The Einsatzgruppen usually would round up the Jewish populations that then assembled at a central location where they are guarded and then marched in groups to a killing site. They would be taken to a place of execution, on the edge of the town, they would be very often forced to dig pits for their own bodies and then they would be shot into these pits. Sometimes they used wooded areas or forests, and sometimes these executions were remarkably public. They were bringing Jews to a killing site, often in family groups, forcing them to undress and then making them lie down on the bodies of people that have already been murdered to wait to be shot themselves. This is grown men standing, aiming at but not the human being, it could be a man, it could be a woman, it could be a baby, I'm firing a gun at them, and it's happening on a huge scale, every huge territory. Einsatzgruppen killed nearly half a million Jews in the Soviet Union in the first six months of Operation Barbarossa. Such incredible numbers of human beings murdered by shooting over and over and over again. There's a close relationship between the actual military campaign Operation Barbarossa and the Holocaust. The Holocaust really begins the moment they crossed a border into the Soviet Union. The war enabled the entire Soviet Union to be treated as a killing zone. It meant that the lifting of norms of civilized behavior, the lifting of norms of warfare, all restraints were removed. The killing of Jews is reported back to Berlin every day. Senior Nazis discuss the next stages of Hitler's plan. Hitler's deputy Herman Gurring writes to Reinhard Hyderick, the SS official responsible for executing Nazi plans for the Jewish population. Reinhard Hyderick is one of the key figures in the SS. He's distinctly Aryan in his visage. He has icy cold blue eyes, and his face registered almost no emotion. In late July 1941, Gurring sends an official communique to Hyderick. He asks him to promptly submit an overall plan for the execution of the intended final solution of the Jewish question. This is essentially the order authorizing Hyderick to begin preparations for the final solution of the Jewish question in Europe. They're going to remove them from the world by murdering them. As the German army advances across the Soviet Union, the Vermacht works with units liquidating communists and Jews, the SS and particularly, the Einsatzgruppen. In August, SS leader Heinrich Himmler visits Minsk in Nazi-occupied Belarus. Himmler maintains a really close watch on what they are scripted to, because ultimately they're his responsibility, so he travels a lot around these to front. Himmler realizes that the shootings are taking an emotional toll on his men. It's difficult, no matter who you are, to wake up in the morning and to shoot people all day long and then to try to go to bed at night and know that the next morning you're going to wake up and do it all over again. I see how difficult it is to actually watch the killing of human beings, 'cause Himmler has never had to do this before, he's never really seen death firsthand. He reacts very badly to the sight of our bodies being murdered in front of him. And he turns green and he almost throws up. Himmler returns to Berlin to help design ways to execute mass killings that are more efficient. On the Soviet front, the killing continues. Babbiar is ravine just outside Kiev in Ukraine. In September 1941, over 33,000 Jewish men, women and children are marched here. Across two days, they are all shot. And then buried in a mass grave. The Nazis had already developed a method of mass murder. At the start of the war, Hitler authorized the killing of patients with disabilities, a Euthanasia program known as T4. The T4 program, which is codenamed after two garden straws number four, which is the building in Berlin that was the headquarters, was the program to murder with carbon monoxide, physically and mentally disabled Germans, because they were deemed to be trains on the state. The T4 program runs for two years before it's officially halted in August 1941. What you then have is a group of men with a particular set of skills. The use of gas to murder people, the transportation and logistics of that, the hiding of the evidence of that operation. And these people are then available to be used in another operation. The first extermination center where Jews are sent to be gassed is at Helmo, located in German-occupied Poland. The victims in the Helmo center are Jews from the ghetto of the Polish city of Loads and the Romani, who the Nazis also regard as an inferior race. On December 8, 1941, the first Jews are killed using gas vans. They are vans where the Nazis could pipe carbon monoxide into the back of the bed of the truck. Shlama Bearvenir is a Jew from Central Poland who is deported to Helmo. Shlama witnesses the death of his family in gas vans. He writes about this in a letter. The leader of the guard detail was a high-ranking SS man, an absolute sadist and murderer. He ordered that eight men were to open the doors of the lorry. The smell of gas that met us was overpowering. Out of my family of about 60 people, I was the only remaining survivor. I was left alone in this world now. The war against the Jews is about to take an ominous turn as the Nazis build additional killing centers and devise new methods to destroy a people. (intense music) December 1941. A villa overlooking Lake Vanse in Berlin is the location for a gathering of officials representing different parts of the Nazi regime. The organizer of the conference is Reinhard Hyderick. The topic is the Jewish question. But the conference is postponed. The conference of Vans, they was initially scheduled on the 9th of December, but it had to be postponed because, of course, on the 7th of December 1941, the Japanese launched a massive attack on Pearl Harbor. Punishment against Pearl Harbor. The American Pacific Fleet is in this port, the pride of the USA. (dramatic music) Three days after the attack at Pearl Harbor, Adolf Hitler declares war on the United States. The fear of coal for revenge on the war monger and hypocrite, Franklin Roosevelt. Hitler has long predicted a world war and now he has brought it about. In a speech, he accuses the Jews of manipulating the American president, Franklin D. Roosevelt. We know the power behind Roosevelt. It is the same eternal Jew that believes that his hour has come. So it was that the Jews and all their satanic baseness gathered around this man and he relied on them. At a briefing on December 12th, Hitler summons Nazi party leaders. In his diary, propaganda minister Joseph Gerbels writes what is discussed. The furor is determined to make a clean sweep. The world war is here. The destruction of Jewry must be the inevitable consequence. On January 20th, 1942, Nazi officials arrived at Lake Van Saif for Hydrix rescheduled conference. The SS officers are in their full formal uniforms or they're being served cognac and canopays. It looks like a very civilized gathering, but of course, what's being discussed at the Van Saif conference is anything but civilized. The Van Saif conference is a coordination meeting. It is not a meeting to decide whether or not to kill the Jews of Europe. It's a meeting to determine how that's going to take place. And what the responsibilities are of all of the bureaucratic elements of the Nazi state in achieving this goal. At the conference, Hydrix lists the number of Jews to be exterminated by the final solution. The list includes the Jews of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, the Jews in France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Scandinavian countries. It also includes Jews in countries fighting alongside Germany, such as Italy, Romania, and Hungary. Even Jews in undefeated Great Britain and neutral Ireland are included. Grand total, over 11 million. The Nazis now have a plan to implement the Holocaust. The Germans had succeeded in taking France, as well as Holland, Denmark, Norway, and so on, which meant that they suddenly had control over other massive populations of Jews. The fact that basically the whole of Europe outside Britain was now part of Hitler's Nazi empire. Gave a feeling that things could be done which had never been done before. Across all of Europe, a whole people are targeted for annihilation. Following the von Sey Conference, the Nazis are working on the construction of killing centers where people, most of them Jewish, will be sent to die. The majority are from Eastern Europe and Soviet territory. The Nazis also begin to target the Jews of Western Europe. The Holocaust begins as an Eastern phenomenon. But soon it extends to every single corner of German controlled Europe. Amsterdam and the Netherlands and France and Italy and as far north as Scandinavia, Jews are being shipped to these various new establishments in the East and murdered. In the spring of 1942, Himmler visits Amsterdam to address a police battalion specially trained to round up and deport the city's Jewish population. A few weeks after his visit, one Jewish father, Otto Frank, decides his family must go into hiding. His daughter Anne writes in her diary, "Our many Jewish friends and acquaintances "are being taken away in droves. "This scape is almost impossible." In France, many Jews who fled Germany earlier now find themselves threatened along with the country's large friends. French Jewish population. Elaine Baer, a young French Jewish woman, writes, "A wave of terror has been gripping everybody else as well these past few days. It appears that the SS have taken command in France and that terror must follow." Over the next months, Jewish families are deported by German forces and their collaborators. They are informed they are being resettled in Eastern Europe and told to ring belongings and valuables with them. Instead, they are being sent to the new Nazi extermination centers. They are crammed into airless, lightless railway cars and transported hundreds of miles without food or water. Modern bureaucracies and trains enable the movement of people to cross Europe in huge numbers which had really never been seen before. There are four major extermination centers, Helmo, Treblinka, Subibor, and Belzeck. There are two additional extermination centers which also serve as forced labour camps, the Donek and Auschwitz. All of these centers are located in Poland. In the centers, the Nazis designed methods to kill as many people in as short a time as possible, including using diesel engines. The Nazis pumped carbon dioxide from these engines into the chambers themselves and killed a lot of people that doesn't necessarily mean that they were as kind of efficient in that process as is somehow supposed. These were very crude places, they were very improvisational places and they were spaces of extraordinary and appalling, suffering. The Nazis used a pesticide called Zajklan B. Zajklan B is a cyanide derivative, originally for exterminating vermin, for killing rodents in your house. It's a blue crystal, you open the can and it emits a poison gas. They also begin construction on an extension to Auschwitz in the neighboring village of Berkenau. This site is solely dedicated to extermination and has several gas chambers. When Jews arrive at Auschwitz, Berkenau, they are sorted into two groups, those who are determined fit for forced labour and those who are not. Mindel Jakubovic is deported from a Polish ghetto to Auschwitz. He describes his arrival. The SS people were walking up and down. I stood at attention on my toes. Finally after a while I was chosen to the right, some of my friends to the left. Mindel is selected to join a work battalion. His family is sent to the gas chamber. The people who have been brought into their gas chambers would be separated into men and women and children that will be heard into this room. They told them that they were going there to be showered. They would be given fabric ties to tie their shoes together under the ruse that it would be easier to find their pair afterwards. The Nazis want to cram as many people into the gas chambers as possible because that generates this environment of high heat and humidity which creates the hydrogen cyanide gas. The scenes that followed after that defied imagination. What often you would find families or loved ones that were clutching each other so tightly that it was impossible to pull their arms apart from each other. The victims are cremated, a perpetual pile of death hangs over the area. It was generally the case that people since death camps were murdered within about 45 minutes to two hours of arrival. The creation of the extermination camps is Hitler's final solution to the Jewish question. An industrial-scale system to mass murder human beings in their thousands every day. Just the pinnacle of evil. This is murder on an industrial scale, but each death is uniquely suffered. In the summer of 1942, Himmler visits the extermination center at Auschwitz-Berkenau. He watches enslaved prisoners working in a chemical plant and sees train cars of Jews arriving to be murdered. Himmler later attends a dinner party where he explains that the Nazis have murdered two million Jews and will continue to do so. His boasts make their way to a Western intelligence agent who passes the information to a German exile living in neutral Switzerland, Gerhard Rignor. Gerhard Rignor, who worked for the World Jewish Congress, learns from a German businessman that the Nazis have a plan. They are trying to round up, deport, and murder the remaining Jewish communities of Europe. Shocked by what he hears, Rignor attempts to get this information to rabbi Stephen Wise. Rabbi Stephen Wise is the head of the World Jewish Congress and maybe the most influential American rabbi and maybe one of the most influential American Jews at the time. He has a relationship with a president Roosevelt. Rignor's message gets to the US State Department, but officials treat it like a war rumor and don't pass it on. The State Department refuses to send this information to Rabbi Wise. They call it an unreliable war rumor and they bury it. Why are we going to get people riled up about this if it's just probably a war rumor? There's no way that the Nazis are actually doing this and so they shelve it. But Rignor persists. He reaches a British member of Parliament who contacts Rabbi Wise by telegram. The US State Department now investigates the report, but the Roosevelt administration is not ready to take it public. They had a feeling that American soldiers would not agree to fight if they believed that they were being asked to fight for the rescue of European Jews. We're fighting for these ideas of democracy and idealism. We're not fighting for the Jews. After their investigation, the State Department allows Rabbi Wise to share the information about the mass murder of the Jews. The news spreads around the globe and Jewish communities react. The world is beginning to learn the truth. At the beginning of December, there's a day of mourning, not just in the United States, not just in Britain, but internationally. There are vigils, there are ceremonies and services in synagogues across the Western hemisphere. And then finally on December 17th, the Allied governments issue what is called the Allied Declaration on Atrocities. And they are condemning in very strong language what the Nazis and their collaborators are doing. They are using phrases like cold-blooded extermination and bloody atrocities. Roosevelt particularly is very concerned and church is appalled as well. He says the best thing that we can do to help Europe's Jews is to win this war as quickly as possible and we need to divert all of our resources in service of doing just that. They knew that these mass killings were happening. I do think they can imagine quite the scale of the infrastructure that Nazis have devoted to this. I think that the leaders have not quite grasped the extent of it. In 1933 Hitler's perverse vision was to expel the Jews from Germany. By 1942, he is on the verge of exterminating the entire Jewish population of Europe. After two years in hiding and Frank and his sister are discovered by Dutch police officers and sent to a Nazi extermination center. They eventually die of typhus just weeks before the end of the war. Alain Baer is deported from Paris to Auschwitz and then to Bergen-Belsen, where she also dies from typhus April 1945. Schlama Baer v. Nier writes a report about the gas fans at Helmo. hoping to bring the truth to the world. But he is found by the Nazis and deported to Belzeck, where he is murdered in the gas chambers. Mendelje Kubovic survives Auschwitz and moves to the United States after the war. He changes his name to Mike Jacobs and founds a scrapped metal business in Dallas, Texas. The Holocaust, the Shoah, will continue until Nazi Germany is defeated and the Third Reich is completely destroyed. In 1942, the Allies gather their forces for a massive assault on the Vermacht in North Africa. World War Two with Tom Hanks is produced by Neutopia Limited, A&E Factual Studios, Play Tone Productions, and Backpocket Studios in association with motion entertainment for the History Channel. This episode was narrated by Tom Hanks and mixed by John Lloyd, additional voicing provided by me, Jeremy Reagan. From the History Channel, our Executive Producers are Eli Lara and Liv Fiddler. For Play Tone, Executive Producers are Tom Hanks and Gary Getsman. For Backpocket Studios, our Executive Producer is Ben Dickstein.