The Nazis - A Warning from History

[LQB]

On disk 2, episode 2, they go through the ethnic cleansing/killing/mass execution operations that were going on in the East as the Nazis added territory during the invasion of Russia. They discuss a letter to Himmler from one of his Generals stating that his regular troops were breaking down and becoming unable to carry out the mass executions. Himmler had a wildly successful idea - encourage the locals (in which there existed previous ethnic tension) to carry out the executions by providing them all the necessary materials and infrastructure.

Now if Himmler was an essential psychopath, he knew that he could count on a small percentage of locals to carry out the executions and mass burials. And it worked very well.

The show goes on to interview one of these locals. The local goes on to describe how the ops were carried out with obviously no feeling or remorse. The interviewer states the he (himself) can understand how an adult man/woman can have an ideological/political position - but a child? Children have no understanding of ideological/political positions. He asks the local how he could execute the children. The local says it was just a gun shot, pow, pow, pow ... The interviewer then asks him "what did your conscience tell you?" . The local said he would not answer that question, period.

He would not say that he had none - the obvious, blatant, and scary truth. I think he knew that this would be admitting too much.

This is one of the best "in your face" examples of a psychopath that I've ever seen in a documentary. IMO these scenes should be extracted and published separately to help folks understand this horrible reality.

 

[H-KQGE]

I'm glad that plenty of people on the forum have seen this excellent documentary so long ago. In the last few years it' been repeated on many occasions on a digital channel called "yesterday."(united kingdom)
Right now it's not on & it'll probably be back around September/october times, it seems to be on around the cold gloomy rainy periods of the year(making it more powerful for me at least) & i've seen them all about 10 times just to ram it home.

I strongly recommend this to anyone in the UK especially if you love history, i certainly didn't learn this in school. In the meantime(for those that can get the channel)"Nazi Hunters", (all these are periodic re-runs throughout the year) looking at the assassination of reinhard heydrich- one of the architects of the holocaust, "Secrets of World War II" with various tales like the capture of the enigma code machine, or "Narrow Escapes of World War II"- tales of amazing wartime feats of heroism.

There's a lot more but i think you get the gist of it. There's another channel that does single random programs on the nazis (i only found it last year & it seemed genuinely random but i think they're "off season" too) that are good too such as focus on his mindset from the accounts of his aides & lover(s) or the ponerization of the children, thus forming the hitler youth etc.
But nothing comes close to the focusing on how a nation allowed a madman to come to power. These shows grow more pertinient as the days go by so please watch them when you can & pay close attention.