| 
Thursday, February
3 at
9 p.m.
"Murder
and Intrigue" (March 1944 -- December 1944)
The first segment explores the complex web of international politics
during this period. By the spring of 1944, the Allies knew about
Auschwitz. Yet despite the poignant pleas of Jewish leaders, the
British and Americans decided not to bomb the railways or gas
chambers. That spring and summer, hundreds of thousands of Hungarian
Jews were deported to Auschwitz at a time when the killing mechanism
had been honed to perfection. That autumn saw a significant act
of resistance in Auschwitz, when a group of Jewish prisoners revolted.
Amazingly, before their deaths, some secretly wrote about their
experiences.
“Liberation
and Revenge” (January 1945)
The second segment tells of the Red Army advancing on Auschwitz
in mid-January from the east, while the SS evacuated thousands
of prisoners and forced them to march west. Those who fell behind
or could not continue were shot. Others were put in open train
cars and transported to concentration camps in Germany. Of the
nearly 60,000 Auschwitz prisoners forced on these death marches,
more than 15,000 died. On January 27, the Red Army liberated the
camp and was confronted by 7,600 survivors. The search for the
perpetrators began.
About
this series:
Auschwitz:
Inside the
Nazi State
Sixty
years after the liberation of the most notorious Nazi death camp,
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. Award-winning
filmmaker Lawrence Rees traces the five-year evolution of Auschwitz,
revealing the mind-set of the monsters who perfected their murderous
techniques within its walls, ultimately resulting in the extermination
of more than 1.1 million prisoners. After each segment, veteran
journalist Linda Ellerbee interviews noted 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.
|
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.
One of the
threads we follow right through the series is the career of Rudolf
Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz. He's the person we see at the
very beginning and we follow him through almost to the end because
we have a fantastic source -- his own memoirs. Just before he
was executed after the war, he was made to sit down and write
his autobiography. So we have a first hand source as to what's
happening and what decisions are being made, related to him.
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 |
