Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State

The very name of the most infamous Nazi death camp conjures up chilling images of its gaunt inhabitants and the unspeakable torture they suffered at the hands of their captors. Airing in conjunction with the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, this new three-part production combines never-before-seen Third Reich files, personal diaries and architectural plans, dramatizations, computer-generated images and gripping interviews with Nazi perpetrators and Auschwitz survivors to present the most complete picture of how history's largest mass murder site came into existence. The series traces the five-year evolution of Auschwitz, revealing the mindset of the monsters who perfected their murderous techniques within its walls, ultimately resulting in the extermination of more than 1.1 million prisoners. Veteran journalist Linda Ellerbee also interviews renowned historians to gain their insights on some of the issues raised by the series, including why it took a generation for the world to begin to talk openly about the Holocaust.

Begins Wednesday, January 19 at 9 p.m.

Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State

An interview with filmmaker
Laurence Rees

Q: Why is this series important?

A: Auschwitz is…the site of the single largest mass murder in the history of humanity. It is unique. Coming up now to the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the camp, we're able to draw on all of the new information that's come out of the East: the plans of Auschwitz that have been discovered and all the new research that's been done in the academic world relating to Auschwitz and its role in the whole Nazi scheme. What greater purpose can history have than to try and lead people toward a possible understanding of how this crime could ever have happened? Without an understanding of how it happened, you can't begin to look around the world and think why it might happen again.

Q: Auschwitz was one of many concentration camps. Why focus only on it?

A: We're using Auschwitz as the way to tell a larger story…as a prism to try and understand the whole of the extermination process and something of the mentality of the people who committed the crime. We're looking at the killings on the eastern front. We're looking at the deportations across Europe. We're looking at the course of the war as it affected this place. It's a much bigger canvas. What happens in Auschwitz and the decisions made by people running Auschwitz actually mirror the bigger decisions that are being taken elsewhere.

Many people think they know the story of Auschwitz. It's the place where Jews were murdered. End of story. But for nearly the first year and a half of its operation, it had nothing to do with the mass extermination program. But you can only begin to understand why it evolved into an extermination camp once you understand the series of incremental decisions, step-by-step-by-step-by-step. That's what is so phenomenally frightening about the whole decision-making process. It's gradual and incremental until actually it's very hard when you look back to say where the moment of absolute decision was.

Q: What is the difference between a concentration camp and an extermination center?

A: Concentration camps were not designed as extermination centers. In a concentration camp like Dachau, the majority of people were brutalized in horrible circumstances, but the majority of people came out alive after about 18 months or so. This place, Auschwitz, set up in the tradition of concentration camps, metamorphoses into a killing factory. And it's the only place on this scale to do that. Elsewhere they set up localized killing factories -- Treblinka's the biggest of them -- purely to kill people. But Auschwitz is the only one that forever combines these two functions. And it begins to evolve into a microcosm of the Nazi philosophy: As long as you're useful to me, you can live; the second you're not useful to me, I'll kill you.

Q: What is new about this series?

A: What has not been done on television before is to explore in detail the decision-making process of the Nazis -- to try and make people understand how it was possible that people actually sat down and made key decisions which ended up with the killing of six million men, women, and children. This did not happen by accident or because people were insane. These were rational human beings who made a series of decisions that ended up with this crime. In order to understand, you have to be able to see the various stages of development. Auschwitz goes through different stages of evolution.

We're really lucky in that we're able to draw on a number of new sources. The primary one is that during the 1990s, all of Auschwitz's building plans were uncovered in Russian archives. That's enabled us to be, I believe, the very first people to build complete computer models of the camp at its various stages. We have the raw data of what this place was doing at every stage of its development. We are recreating virtual images of what the Nazis never wanted anybody to see.

Q: How is it different from other programs about the Holocaust?

A: We have tried to dramatize key moments of decision -- the Wannsee Conference (held January 20, 1942, outside of Berlin to plan details of the "final solution to the Jewish question"), for example. We think it's appropriate to dramatize meetings within the camp, to do limited dramatizations of people trying to escape. You're not going to see drama of naked men and women and children being pushed into the gas chambers. We've made an absolute rule to not dramatize suffering.

Q: Why did you interview perpetrators?

A: Over the years [of making these documentaries], we've developed a large number of contacts, particularly through the archives in the East, which enabled us to approach these people. It's incredibly labor intensive and incredibly expensive. In order to find one perpetrator, researchers have to go through the original SS records and trawl through thousands and thousands of names. They've got to compare them against trial records. They've often got to go to the Russian archives to see whether any of these people were prosecuted. Then they've got to go through phone books in Germany. They've got to try and trace relatives and so on. It is enormously time consuming and then, of course, when you actually find someone whom you think was involved in this, nine times out of 10 they'll say, "Go away. I don't want to talk to you." It's an extraordinary testament to the research staff that we have found a number of people who actually openly talk about participating in the killing process.

Q: Why do they do it?

A: Number one, the risk of prosecution for them is very, very, very small. Another reason -- and this is the scary reason -- I genuinely think they want people to understand why they did it and that they're not mad. Some of these people want people to understand that they don't necessarily think it was a bad thing they did. The questions we asked and the way we actually use this material make it clear that we are not neutral between good and evil. On the other hand, if you actually interview someone who admits to shooting Jews and he's not sorry and you're able to ask, "How can you not be sorry?" and he says, "It's because I really hate Jews," you're providing something completely unique in terms of insight to the audience. There are profound lessons you can take from seeing that. When people in 50 or a 100 years time watch this, it will still be there for them to see.

Q: What would you like people to come away with after viewing this?

A: I've been making programs around this subject for 12 to 14 years. I've sometimes asked myself 'why?' I think it's because this is a crime that's committed by people who live in a cultured country at the heart of Europe. The people who did this were often extremely intelligent. A large number of people sitting around the table at the Wannsee Conference held academic doctorates, many of them doctorates in law, interestingly enough. Many of the people in charge of the killing squads were not mindless thugs. One of them held two Ph.D.s and he insisted his staff call him "Doctor-Doctor." [Reinhard] Heydrich (head of the German Security Service), who helped mastermind this, was an accomplished musician.

You're dealing with people who are extremely cultured. They made these decisions extremely calmly, extremely coldly, extremely -- as they thought -- rationally. So how on earth is it possible? It's fantastically easy to dismiss this kind of event as the work of insane people, of madmen. The disturbing thing is they're not mad. They're doing what they think is the right thing to do at the time. Unless we understand why people like this think it's the right thing to do at the time, we're helpless in the face of it happening again.

Edited by Mary Eileen O'Connor