Denazification: How The Allies Deradicalized A Nation After WW2

1945. Germany is defeated. Now the awful reality of what Adolf Hitler and his cronies have been up to is revealed. Germany has been mind-captured and committed the most heinous crimes in history. The Allies are adamant that this must never happen again. This is the story of the struggle to denazify Germany. Advancing through Germany, Allied forces make a gruesome discovery. On forward patrol, American soldiers of the US 3rd Army come across a sight that defies description. They found emaciated prisoners, they found disease, they found starvation. This was a huge shock to see this. But what stuck in their memory, of course, were the corpses. It is estimated that as many as 56,000 people died in the Buchenwald concentration camp, in some of the worst conditions imaginable. It was the second largest concentration camp on German soil. Some 900 children were liberated at Buchenwald, many of them in an absolutely terrible condition. Many of them died shortly afterwards. To put children, some so young as three or four, in these camps, and allow them to starve because they were useless eaters, as the SS put it, that was a level of inhumanity that I think shocked many of the Allies in a manner they simply could not come to terms with. The news is passed up the chain of command right to the top. Eight days later, the highest ranking American generals in Europe, Eisenhower, Patton and Bradley, visit the camp. When the camps were opened up, there was an intense feeling of anger that people like Eisenhower very strongly expressed. We must make these people suffer, we must punish them for what they've done. In the eyes of Supreme Commander Eisenhower and of the world, this kind of torture and beating practiced on the prisoners is a crime. He became determined that the world should know about these crimes. He became determined that they should be broadcast. Throughout Germany, the scene of death repeats itself in concentration camps along the path of the Allied advance. Films were made, photographs were taken, and as far as Eisenhower was concerned, it was a crime that the world was never to be allowed to forget, and the Germans never to be allowed to forget. This film shows the first time ordinary Germans are made to confront the horrific reality of what their beloved regime has been up to. But even worse than the concentration camps in Germany are the extermination camps like Auschwitz and Majdanek in Poland, liberated by the Russians. The discovery of a network of these camps provides solid evidence of the systematic wholesale industrial murder of millions of people by gassing and extreme work under starvation conditions. The Allies realize the Nazis are an enemy, the like of which has never been seen before. They haven't been fighting against any old nation here. They've been fighting against a gangster regime that kills Jewish people. And they can see just the depth of humanity to which this regime has sunk. As the scale of the atrocities becomes apparent, it reveals the number of people that must have been involved. It seems that almost every German is implicated. You've got the train driver driving a trainload of Jews across Europe. He knows what's going on, but he's not asking any questions. You've got the civil servant working in some small department in Berlin who's probably responsible for supplying the cattle trucks. You've got, obviously, the bigwigs making these decisions. But when you put all those cogs together, then you've got a murder machine. This sophisticated organization illustrates one of the Nazi regime's most insidious skills, making it easy for individuals to be part of this killing machine without feeling personally implicated, even if it was happening on their doorstep. They were sort of turning a blind eye to it. So either they were ignoring it and ignoring all the rumors that were obviously going about, or they knew about it and they were lying about what they knew about. Either way, it's a kind of morally bankrupt position. The extent of the crime is so great that the Allies realize that they need to change the mindset of the entire German people. The Allies think long and hard about what's appropriate and what's fair and what's just at the end of the Second World War. This has been a regime that has gone out consciously to exterminate whole populations. Millions of people have died. Enormous areas have been destroyed. So the sense is this needs something special, this needs something new. The Allies need to undo years of Nazi indoctrination. And prove to the German people that everything they have believed in and been acting on is wrong. The Allies decide that they need to adopt a program of denazification. They need to re-educate the German people. This is a huge challenge and will take time. The country is under military occupation, governed by regional commanders with differing agendas. A uniform, nationwide approach is needed. The Allies decide to implement a three-point plan. First, they abolish the Nazi Party. Crowds gather in the marketplace to hear Allied orders, to read the Allied proclamations disbanding the Nazi Party, Nazi laws and institutions. Secondly, they need to identify its criminal members. Finally, they need to bring its leaders to justice. But this is harder than it seems. Adolf Hitler, the criminal mastermind behind the Third Reich, is dead. Joseph Goebbels, his propaganda minister, also commits suicide. As does Heinrich Himmler, the man responsible for the Holocaust. But they have captured Hermann Goering. He had been with Hitler from the very beginning. He had led the Brownshirts, fought in the attempted coup in 1923, and built up and led the Nazi's air force. Here is a man known throughout the world as being Hitler's number two. He's been involved in everything. The Gestapo, the Final Solution, everywhere. His finger is in every single pie. Here is the man that they can hold up as one of the chief perpetrators of the whole war crimes machine of the Third Reich. Following the official German surrender, the Allies quickly round up other senior figures in the regime. They found representatives of the armed forces. So, Keitel, Jodl, who are the senior generals, Dönitz, who had been in charge of the U-boats and then had been briefly Chancellor after Hitler's suicide. Speer, the armaments minister who had drafted in millions of people from all over Europe to serve as slave labourers in Nazi Germany. They decide to prove to the German people once and for all that their leaders are no more than criminals. The Allies decide on an unprecedented step to put them on trial for war crimes. By the summer of 1945, the Allies are in full control of defeated Germany. Now they can begin the process of making sure atrocities like the Holocaust never happen again. The German mindset must be cleansed. They need to prove to the public that the Nazi leadership they so trusted and believed in are no more than a common criminal conspiracy. It was no longer sufficient for these individuals to say we were following the orders of the state. The Allies wanted to demonstrate that these actions, these decisions were not merely political actions but actions that had crossed a line into illegality. In London, during June 1945, the world's first international tribunal drafts an entire new set of laws. These laws define the crimes the Nazis have committed. There were four crimes. Crimes against peace, which is waging illegal war. War crimes. Breaking the rules on methods and means of warfare, the Hague Conventions. War crimes include shooting prisoners of war. But there is worse. Crimes against humanity. Terrible atrocities against individuals. And conspiracy. Conspiracy is essentially membership of criminal organisations like the SS. Participation in those organisations, participation in the regime, became a criminal act. What better place to show the world how evil the Nazi regime is than in its propaganda homeland, Nuremberg? Nuremberg had been the site of the great Nazi party rallies in the 1930s, and was where the infamous laws on German citizenship had been passed. In its favour, Nuremberg also has a surviving building suitable enough to house the proceedings. Prelude to the Nuremberg trials. The courtroom is being made ready. The funeral before which top-ranking Nazis will appear for the war criminal trial. The scarred Palace of Justice, with a bit of renovation, is an ideal location. This courtroom is temporarily expanded to provide a gallery for 350 representatives of the world's press and seating for 400 members of the public. This will be the venue for the trial of the century. Prisoners! Early in the morning, six months after the end of the war, Hermann Goering and the other defendants are ushered from their cells into the floodlit courtroom. Taking the Western legal approach, it will be up to the prosecution to prove the individual defendants guilty of the charges, beyond all reasonable doubt. Attention! Britain's Lord Justice Lawrence addresses the defendants. To plead guilty or not guilty for the charges against them. Not guilty. The proceedings soon become bogged down. Establishing guilt, especially linking witnesses to the final solution, proves surprisingly difficult. Perhaps I ought to just remind the tribunal that in the... In the course of the trial, the prosecutors ran into all sorts of difficulties. The individual defendants were able to claim that these documents didn't bear their signatures, that they didn't relate to the particular branch of the administration they had worked with, and in some cases, the defendants knew that context rather better than the prosecutors. But I trust the court is not unaware that outside of this courtroom... After four months, the prosecution finally rests, and Goering takes the stand. Off the drugs, slimmed down and fit, he is a skilled and formidable adversary. The responsibility implicit... He's cross-examined by Robert Jackson, and for Robert Jackson, it goes disastrously wrong. It turns out that Goering is a formidable individual with a remarkable memory. Goering, the showman, is in his element. He was the star of the trial. Every newspaper reporter who was there mentions this in the dispatches, how he keeps shaking his head. Taking off his headphones. Laughing at every moment when he thinks they're saying something ridiculous. Herman Goering rang rings around Robert Jackson. Goering was more on top of the facts about the Nazis. Goering was able to point to the paradoxes of British and American actions which appeared to be unlawful, and Jackson made no progress with him at all. He tries to influence the other defendants to keep on following this line, and to say this court has no legitimacy, let's stick to that line, and he does get through to many of them. Things aren't going to plan for the Allies. Goering in particular is skilled at fighting the prosecution. His clever challenges and bold statements hold the courtroom's rapt attention. But it can't last. Eventually, the Allies nail him. Their trump card is the testimony obtained from the camp commandant of Auschwitz whilst in prison. He then tells the court all about the complicity of Goering in the final solution, which of course maps out the slave labour and the killing process of the Jews in Europe. Goering's co-defendants are all cross-examined before the defence rests in June 1946. The evidence was so overwhelming and so comprehensively proved on the basis of documents and witness testimony and images and video footage that I think there wasn't a hope in hell that the major perpetrators were going to get off. What remained was what the sentence would be. At 3pm, in private, away from the glare of the cameras and public, the defendants are returned from the cells to the court to hear the verdicts. As the highest-ranking remaining Nazi, Goering is sentenced to death. Chief of Operations Staff, General Jodl, and his boss, General Keitel, are also condemned to death, along with Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop. For others, it's a prison sentence. Admiral Dönitz, Hitler's official successor, gets 10 years. Armaments Minister Speer gets 20. And former Deputy Fuhrer Rudolf Hess gets life imprisonment. The message to the German public is clear. The people who had led them and who they died for are no more than common criminals. But Goering has no intention of making it easy for the Allies. With his fate sealed, he faces two final decisions. How and when he will die. He's faced with the guilty verdict. He knows he's going to be executed. He even tries the negotiator's form of execution. He says that as a military man, he should face a firing squad and not be hung. But the Allies insist he be hanged. Just two hours before he is due to be executed, Goering is brought his personal effects. Amongst his toiletries is a jar of hair cream. It seems that hidden within it was a capsule of potassium cyanide. At 10 minutes to 11, the last of the Nazi leaders takes his own life. He escapes the hangman right at the 11th hour. Right to the very end, he's a survivor and he leaves the earth on his own terms. Even so, phase one of denazification is successfully completed. The Nazi leadership have been dealt with. But now the Allies face a much bigger problem. How do you denazify 70 million Germans? Following the execution of the Nazi leadership, the Allies face a massive task. The denazification of the German people themselves. The point about Nazism is that it overtook every facet of life. So it was almost impossible to avoid in some way being associated with Nazism. Only now does the truly insidious nature of Nazism become clear. It pervades all aspects of life. From birth, through marriage and into death. It even dictated what you ate for dinner on Sunday. This regime that have held on to this society, whose tentacles have gone right through almost every organisation, every community, have influenced almost every aspect of people's lives. This has to be removed from German society for Europe to move forward. As the scale of the Holocaust becomes apparent, the wholesale murder of 6 million Jews, it reveals the full extent to which everyone in Germany is implicated. One war crimes investigator actually told me we were unprepared for the sheer volume of criminality that we encountered. And there were so many people who had committed just, in inverted commas, one or two murders. I mean, you're looking at around 100,000 people you've got to track down. So that's a major challenge. An obvious place to look is within the military. But that also presents a problem. By the end of the war, 5 million German soldiers are POWs, held in temporary camps in appalling conditions across Europe, waiting to be processed. Prisoners are interviewed, the interviews are analysed, and a check is maintained on the trends of German morale. Right through 1945, particularly through the summer of 1945, there is a process of vetting going on. And in all of the Allied prisoner of war camps, there was an attempt to screen these millions of people and to sift out from amongst them those who were potentially war criminals and should be subject to some kind of legal process. Even capture cannot shake the arrogant faith in the Nazi creed that's been bred in them from childhood. You've had this criminal mentality that's overtaken a nation, and you need to eradicate it. And what you can't do is allow the idea of Nazism to be involved in public life at all. Eradicating every aspect of Nazism is a mammoth task. The visible signs are the easiest to remove, the swastika is banned, and symbolic eagle imagery is destroyed. But breaking down the Nazi mentality is much harder. There are 8 million members of the Nazi party, 10% of the population, with millions more enrolled in affiliated organisations. One of the problems of denazification is that just if you're a member of the Nazi party, it doesn't automatically make you a Nazi with a capital N. There were people joining the Nazi party simply because if they weren't in the party, they couldn't keep their jobs and therefore they would be out of work and their children and families would suffer. Anybody who's been in any position of leadership or authority for the last decade and a half is going to in some way have some sort of tainting with Nazism. The Allies initially decree that all party members be removed and excluded from public office and positions of power. But this proves impractical. It's a very complicated, difficult thing to do because Nazism had gone so deep in German society that if you literally remove all people who had any link with the Nazi regime, you're going to be left with almost nobody, maybe a few bus conductors or railway clerks or people whose jobs were completely unpolitical. With so many people involved in every aspect of the Nazi regime, the Allies decide to focus their attention on locating and pursuing the most committed Nazis. People working in the public services, in education, in the police, the judiciary, were required to fill in a questionnaire, a lengthy questionnaire, upwards of 80 questions, which effectively probed their political history. By Christmas 1945, 500,000 forms have been processed at a rate of 10,000 a day. But with 7 million still to assess, the task will take another two years, and even then only a small proportion are prosecuted. On trial or awaiting trial before special German courts are some 2 million indicted Nazis. Penalties for the guilty range from long terms of hard labour for the worst offenders to fines for those less culpable. But what many people don't realise is that many of the most serious perpetrators are being allowed to slip through the net and get away with it deliberately. As denazification progresses, the Allies discover they have more important issues to deal with. It becomes increasingly apparent that Nazis are yesterday's enemy. There's a new enemy to the East, and if you're a Russian, you've got a new enemy to the West. This is the start of the Cold War, an escalation of political and military tension that would set the Allies against each other and take the world back to the brink of war. I mean, the Cold War pretty much starts, you could argue, on the 9th of May, 1945, the day after the collapse. So whilst the official public policy might be to hunt down Nazis, secretly the West takes a leaf out of the Nazi handbook and pursues a very different agenda in private. They actually seek them out and protect them. I think that there's a large amount of cynicism that you can attach to the behaviour of the Americans and the British and, indeed, the Soviets in the wake of the collapse. Yes, they want to find war criminals, but at the same time, you are taking over a country which has got a lot of very important people who are extremely well-qualified to help you with your projects back at home. There's no clearer example than in the case of the German rocket scientists. The extraordinary rocket programme that the Germans developed from the mid-30s onwards is led by a young aristocrat, a man called Wernher von Braun, and he has the science and the leadership powers to drive a community of very brilliant scientists really into the future, into the next generation of science. Wernher von Braun's weapons, the V1 flying bomb and V2 rocket, had terrified London, killing over 15,000 civilians and damaging up to 20,000 houses a day at the height of the campaign. His V2 is capable of more than five times the speed of sound. Once launched, there are no effective countermeasures. This technology is far in advance of anything the Allies have. In 1942, one of their rockets is even the first man-made artefact to reach space. A landmark moment for mankind. Rockets are the future. Rockets are the future militarily as well as in terms of space exploration. And a man of von Braun's qualifications, expertise and success could not be dismissed lightly. And the Americans want him. The problem is that by anyone's standards, von Braun and his fellow rocket scientists are committed Nazis and are clearly guilty of crimes against humanity. Von Braun, who had a very black record in terms of his morality, his factories, his armaments production areas were based upon slave labour. Some of the most appalling stories of suffrage occur in those camps where those in forced labours are held. The amount of people who died in the factories and camps that are associated with von Braun probably numbers greater than the people who were killed by some of the rockets he made. So this is a very morally iffy area. Despite the awful atrocities he has committed, the Americans decide they need him. In this climate of escalating tension between the superpowers, the Americans start breaking the rules. 765 top scientists and engineers from Hitler's military research programmes are whisked away to America without undergoing any process of denazification. This is part of the top secret Operation Paperclip. And so a cover or a partial curtain is drawn over the background of some of those arrested. If they can be of use to the Allies individually, then the denazification policy won't be followed through 100%. But there are complications. Officially, US law prohibits any Nazis from entering America. And President Truman himself has expressly forbidden proven Nazis to be recruited. To get around the slightly embarrassing fact that a lot of the scientists have got a link with the Nazi Party, the American intelligence agencies actually just rewrite their pasts. They bleach out their Nazi associations, give them sort of new sets of papers. I mean, it's really quite scandalous looking back on it, what's done. There was a cover-up. Lies, we have to say. So that the true reality of what some of these Nazis have done would not be revealed. With his record wiped clean, Wernher von Braun becomes something of a celebrity in America. This is a model of the US Army's Redstone guided missile. Initially, he works for the US Army, before becoming director of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. Wernher von Braun is, if you like, the acceptable face of Nazism. He's a man whose scientific achievements probably outweigh, certainly in the eyes of the West, his sort of Nazi association. But the rocket scientists aren't the only type of Nazi the Americans recruit. At a higher, more secret level, they also make illegal deals with the very worst kinds of Nazi, those who are actually responsible for murder and genocide. At the end of the war, the West is committed to eradicating Nazism and hunting down all war criminals. But the advent of the Cold War and mounting tensions between East and West starts to shift the focus of the Allies. There was never a total commitment to denazification. Perhaps there should have been in moral terms, but there wasn't. And the politics tells us why. The Soviet and the West are at loggerheads. Germany becomes the front line in this new conflict between East and West. The division of Germany is agreed upon. Troops of the United States, Britain and France are to occupy the western portion of the country. The Soviet Union, the eastern portion. These zones, separately controlled by the Allies, create a hotbed of intrigue and espionage, fueling an atmosphere of suspicion. The Soviet zone encircles Berlin, which itself becomes a divided city, creating far-reaching problems for the occupying troops. The West has a problem in the post-war period. It wants to create new political communities that must be anti-fascist, that must not have any taints with Nazi ideology in Germany. But they also, of course, want leaders who are going to be anti-communist. The rapid transformation of Stalin from Uncle Joe to the Red Soviet menace leaves the western Allies scrambling for intelligence on their new enemy. We genuinely felt that the Soviet Union represented a threat to our existence. And ultimately, you're going to use whoever you can to gain information about the new enemy. The US needs help to tackle this new enemy. But who can they turn to? The only people who have got knowledge of how the communists operate, who've got a determined anti-communist position, are the old Nazis. They're the only people who have the authority and the knowledge to counter the Soviet communist position. The Nazis' long-standing hatred of communism had led them to gather data files on the Red Army. They know how the communists operate. What is more, they are used to tracking down and infiltrating Soviet intelligence cells. They've been doing it for 15 years and already have agents in place to spy for them. They've got a picture of Soviet politics and Soviet decision-making that a lot of people in Britain and America just don't have. That's a big area of ignorance in the West. To acquire this vital new intelligence, the Americans need to recruit from the very worst Nazi agencies. They need people from the Gestapo and SS. Amongst those they recruit is former Gestapo officer Klaus Barbie. Barbie was a career Nazi with a brutal streak. As a boy, he had joined the Hitler Youth. Barbie's Nazi career then flourished. Firstly, he joined Hitler's elite SS, perfect specimens of the master race, hand-picked for their hatred of Jews and extreme fanaticism. Before moving into the Gestapo, the Nazis' dreaded secret police. If you wanted to think of the classic kind of comic book pantomime Gestapo officer, Klaus Barbie is going to fit the bill. He ended up performing absolutely foul acts of brutality on men, women and children in the names of trying to extract information. At just 29, Barbie is a brutal, sadistic killer who laughs whilst personally torturing and murdering prisoners. In France, he became known as the Butcher of Lyon, actively participating in the worst crime of all, the Holocaust. This is an absolute prima facie war criminal. Historians estimate that Barbie was directly responsible for the deaths of up to 14,000 people, including the deportation to Auschwitz of 44 Jewish orphans. But Klaus Barbie has also been specially trained in counter-espionage, skills he's honed, amongst others, on the Russians. These same skills in infiltrating communist networks make him and others like him hugely attractive to the Americans. You know, the world changes very, very quickly, and what someone like Klaus Barbie is very good at doing is recognising that the tables have turned. Despite being near the top of the list of wanted war criminals, when Barbie is finally caught, he is amongst a small group allowed to cut a deal with the Americans. He's sort of the ugly face of the Nazi regime. But he knows things, and he has information, and he has contacts that are of use to the West. So without anybody wanting to shout this from the rooftops, he becomes one of those people who the British and then the American intelligence services use as a way in to the Soviet networks in Germany. For the Americans, at this stage, the ends justify the means. Barbie provides a link between the CIA and his old networks, and the Americans are very pleased with the information he's feeding them. He is an opportunist. He will go wherever the cash is, and whoever is going to save his skin. But in June 1949, the truth comes out. The man the French had sentenced to death for war crimes is working for the Americans. By 1950, the writing's on the wall for Barbie's usefulness as an agent, and it's proving very embarrassing to the Americans to have someone who's committed some pretty bestial and heinous acts on their payroll. But rather than hand him over to be tried for war crimes, U.S. intelligence opts for a conspiracy plan straight out of the Nazi handbook. What the Americans decide to do is they think they'll send him down what has now become called the Rat Line. Operation Rat Line is an American-run escape route set up to get rid of embarrassing employees. After being given a new passport and new name by the U.S., Barbie becomes Klaus Altmann. The escape lines ran basically through Germany, Austria, and across the Alps into Italy, and then normally out through a port like Genoa. Within weeks of leaving Germany, he was on board a ship with $5,000 in his pocket, destination South America. It will be 32 years before he is seen in the West again. But in South America, under his new identity, he gets new blood on his hands. He is one of these people who thrives in dictatorships, and all the way through the 50s and 60s and 70s, he manages to work with various horrible, corrupt regimes. I mean, you know, if there's something shifting going on in Latin America in the 60s and 70s, you can pretty much bet your bottom dollar that Klaus Barbie's involved in it somewhere. He's quite wealthy. Although cases like Barbie are few and far between, as the years pass, the zeal to pursue Nazis begins to fail. Denazification is officially ended in 1951. Disgusted at how reluctant the authorities have become, increasingly it is down to individuals to take matters into their own hands. These are the Nazi hunters. The Nazi hunters are an extraordinary and curious phenomenon. These were people who had themselves suffered individually at the hands of the Nazis. There's therefore a sense of personal mission, a mission of justice as much as of retribution. It devolved to people like Simon Wiesenthal, independent people who tried to hunt down Nazis using limited resources. And really, that just shows you how little there was of a Nazi-hunting mentality amongst the Allies. It was sort of, let's forget about it, don't mention the war. These documents show that Gekis was not only a member of a police battalion which carried out the liquidation of Jews. But for individuals, the fight continues. Former Nazis are meticulously tracked down. Even as far afield as South America. A lot of people are aware of the fact that Klaus Altmann is indeed Klaus Barbie. And among them are these couple of Nazi hunters called Serge and Beate Klarsfeldt. And it's Beate Klarsfeldt who decides to go to South America and harangues the Bolivians that they've got Klaus Barbie in their borders. Thanks to the efforts of the Klarsfeldts, Barbie is sensationally returned to France. Where he is convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. He dies in the same Lyon prison where he committed so many vile acts in the 1940s. Although never simple, and at times morally questionable, denazification wasn't a sham. It did succeed. Its best testament is to look at what Germany is like today. Nazism has not been a significant political force in Germany since 1945. There's been a sort of massive change in the way that Germany deals with the Third Reich. They are now facing up to their past with the building of the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. The opening up of all these concentration camps as memorial sites, poignant memorial sites Germany has in fact embraced democracy and pluralism and individual freedoms with a degree of zest and commitment which puts other countries to shame. Ultimately, denazification did succeed in Germany. Those that had been mind-captured had their eyes opened. The Nazis had used lies and deceit at a time of economic crisis to seduce ordinary people into committing heinous crimes. By seizing power, a small group of criminals were ultimately responsible for the death of over 40 million people. This remains a warning to us all.