Fact Check: Post-WWII Germany, Holocaust and Denazification Analysis

The nightmare of a new order. A furer, his people and race. Crimes against humanity.

A world of chaos and destruction. This is the story of humanity's darkest hour.

The Abyss Wenbant, April the 16th, 1945. A few days after its liberation by US

soldiers, the people of nearby VHimar are made to visit the concentration camp.

You're dealing with a defeated population that has also got to take responsibility for some of the biggest

crimes ever committed. The murder of six million Jews simply by virtue of being Jewish is mass murder on a scale beyond

anything that is conceivable in terms of ordinary warfare. For Germany, 1945 is the year of total

defeat. Really, a defeat on a scale never seen before. Not just military, not just in the political sense, but

also a moral defeat. It's a vision of hell just a few kilometers from the center of Vimar.

The Allies hope that the sight of this horror will force the Germans to confront their own responsibility.

The notion that we knew nothing about it is a postwar myth. the American photographer Margaret Burke White went

round Bhanvault when the good citizens of VHimar were made to come up and they're all saying we knew nothing about

it and she says when she writes about this it's become a national hymn that's what everyone is saying

similar scenes play out throughout Germany in the spring of 1945 the allies face a difficult task. What

are we to do with the Germans? Many of them were enthusiastic supporters of the system for 12 years. Others looked away

indifferent. Who should be punished? How can Europe be rebuilt after such devastation?

How do you set in place a system to make sure that this kind of war never happens again?

in Berlin. Fanatical Nazis fight on even after Hitler's death. But most Germans resign themselves to

defeat. On May the 8th, Germany surrenders unconditionally. The Second World War is over in Europe.

An estimated 65 million people have died. There's no agreement on the exact figure.

The Soviet Union with at least 27 million dead is hardest hit. But in proportion to its population,

Poland has suffered the heaviest losses. 6 million Polish citizens die in the war and through the Holocaust. That's 17% of

the population. Yugoslavia, Hungary, and France, the Netherlands, and Greece have also

suffered heavy losses. In cities throughout Europe, people celebrate the end of the war and welcome

Allied soldiers. But there are terrible scenes in the liberated concentration camps. For many,

the allies help comes too late. In Bergen Bellson alone, 13,000 prisoners die after the liberation.

>> It was a traumatic experience for the soldiers. There are several reports where soldiers say, "We could smell the

camp before we saw it." >> 6 million European Jews have been murdered by Germans and by their

accompllices. This is a crime against humanity. In addition, hundreds of thousands of

forced laborers, homosexuals, and political opponents, 290,000 disabled people, and 220,000

Cinti and Roma have been killed in organized campaigns of murder. Millions of Germans made this mass

murder possible. Not just those who actively participated in deportations and killings, but also those who

excluded the vulnerable and profited from it, who didn't help the victims. Few of these acts will be punished or

atoned for after 1945. >> The numbers of people who actively participated in the crimes of the Nazis

run into the tens of thousands. But the numbers of people who were prosecuted, let alone executed, were so

small that the punishment stands in no relation to the scale of the crimes. >> More than 8 12 million Germans joined

the Nazi party. And in 1945, it's not yet clear how comprehensively the victor's criminal proceedings will be

applied. Almost all Germans fought to the last breath.

They had an incredibly bad conscience. >> They were terribly afraid that the enemy, now the victors, would treat them

exactly as they had treated other people. German soldiers in particular know what

they have done. At the end of the war, there are more than 3 million German prisoners of war

in the Soviet Union. Almost 8 million are held by the British and Americans. The Western Allies don't have the

facilities to cope with such huge numbers. The US Army sets up provisional camps

along the Rine. Up to 2 million former members of the Vermacht and the SS are crammed onto farmers fields surrounded

by barbed wire. There's very little food in the first weeks after the surrender. Conditions

are critical. ity was. >> Of course, the US could have looked

after these people better without any problem. No question about it. But you have to consider the psychological

aspect. Let them experience some tough conditions. Let them suffer a bit. Then they can think about what they've done.

>> By the late summer of 1945, the provisional camps have been closed down, and many German PS are being forced to

work, some clearing German mines from the Atlantic Wall. Of course, that was against international

law. But you have to look at it from the point of view of the other countries. Should our people risk their lives to

remove German mines? No. The Germans can remove them because they put them there in the first place.

>> In liberated Dal, a prisoner recognizes his tormentor. There's terrible fury at the Germans.

This scene was filmed by the French photographer Hri Katier Brass. Brassan was himself a prisoner of the

Germans during the war. And after the surrender, he makes a film about returning French forced laborers.

He's there when former prisoners give vent to their anger at an interim camp in Desau.

In this scene, a forced laborer identifies a Gustapo informant. Here,

former prisoners helped to expose Nazis who were trying to pass themselves off as prisoners.

>> Of course, people take revenge. Old accounts are settled. There are weeks of anarchy. And above all, this period is

marked by violence. The war doesn't just suddenly end. It's like a super tanker. It doesn't just simply come to a

standstill. It goes on. The violence continues. >> Spontaneous acts of revenge, a weak echo

of the millions of German acts of violence. Many soldiers of the victorious armies

see women as legitimate spoils of war. One estimate puts the number of rapes at 860,000.

In this amateur footage filmed after the surrender, German civilians in the Boris Lavka district of Prague are about to be

shot dead by Red Army soldiers and Czech militia. The Vermacht and the SS had held on to Prague to the bitter end.

Helena Devorashkova, seen here as a young child with her parents, was an eyewitness as her father filmed from the

balcony of their apartment. There are houses on the left, and on the right there's a great big field. I

remember the moment my grandmother pressed my face into her white apron so I wouldn't see.

The sequence that you see is one of the examples of the extreme brutality that some of the checks applied to the

Germans. You don't know if they were Nazis. You don't know if they deserve to go to prison, but nobody deserves to be

shot. And this is something that uh really characterized the immediate aftermath of postw war with absence of

any law and justice. >> Some Jewish survivors decide to hunt down Nazis.

150 strong group is called Nakam, Hebrew for revenge. It's founded by Abakovna from Vnos, a

writer and partisan with plenty of experience fighting the Germans. He wanted revenge. It was quite obvious

to him that the allies, including the Soviets, wouldn't take revenge on behalf of the Jews. The Jews had to do it

themselves. >> Most of their operations fail. Abakovna, seen here as a witness in the Aishman

trial, plans a poison attack on captured SSmen. The attack goes wrong and shortly after

Nakam is disbanded. >> Much much later close to his death told me,

>> "I'm glad it didn't work out." >> Yeah. then >> because then we would have been the same

as the Nazis. >> I didn't want that. Czechoslovakia, summer 1945.

3 million Germans are forcibly expelled. Before the war, the German minority was Hitler's excuse to annex the Sudetan

land. The allies now intend to put an end to this problem. The Germans are forced to leave their homes and join a

giant trek to the west. They believed that many of the problems um of second world war and the rational

for it came because uh the states of interval Europe in the you know in aftermath of Versail were ethnically

heterogeneous. So if they were to be ethnically homogeneous, that problem would not reappear. Um, nobody asked

about the human cost. A Czech propaganda film welcomes the expulsion.

The defeat affects these Germans even more harshly than others. And so Sudatan Germans were pushed out.

Germans from East Prussia, former East Prussia were pushed out. Germans from Sisia were pushed out. But it has to be

remembered that the same shift of the borders happens further east as well. >> So viet Union absorbs eastern Poland.

In exchange, Poland receives German territory up to the rivers Oda and Nicer.

The populations concerned must leave their homeland. 1.7 million Poles in the east and a further 3 and a half million

inside the country. On the German side, 12 to 14 million people flee their homes or are expelled.

>> When we look at the expulsions, they are a terrible situation for those people who are forced out of their homes. And

there's no question that that a great number of people died. But it in no way in no way mirrors the brutality of the

invasion of and the expected outcome of what Hitler had planned for the central and eastern European lands.

>> Further atrocities now come to light. By the end of the war, the Germans have stolen up to 20,000 children from the

occupied regions in the east. This was the work of the SS Leensborn organization which becomes the subject

of much speculation after the war. >> Leensborn was not a place where um young newbald pretty Nazi women went to have a

lot of sex with young nubal Nazi soldiers. It was a place where you went when you were a young German woman with

uh good racial credentials and you were pregnant and not married. >> The Leensborn nursing homes looked after

mother and child. The SS devised a special ritual for newborn babies to receive them into the Aryan community in

place of a Christian baptism. >> It's a race war. We have to protect our race and outside of normal families, we

have to ensure that we can expand this German super race too. So children are stolen from the occupied territories.

>> Stolen children come to this Lebanon nursing home in Bad Pulsen, today's Pulchin Stroy.

Little Klouse holding hands with his Polish grandmother was still called Cheslaf when this picture was taken.

In 1942, SSmen kidnap him from his grandparents' home. When his mother gets back from work, he's gone.

Cheslaf becomes Klouse. He's not allowed to speak Polish. The SS issue new papers to conceal his origins. His social

security card is printed with the letters, okay? Ostkint or child from the east.

In 1944, the Sheaer family take him in as a foster child. Mother Ava has four children of her own and now a Levenborn

child, too. Father Johannes is an SS brigade leader. They're a picturebook Nazi family.

Klaus doesn't learn the truth until he's 75 years old. >> It's a cruel fate. And for today's older

adults, it's almost impossible to come to terms with the conditions under which they came into the world.

>> Some of the youngest victims of the war don't know if their families are still alive.

In a news reel made in the Soviet occupation zone, they look for their relatives.

At the end of the war, every fourth German is searching for relatives. 40 million people are moving across a

devastated continent. Some are fleeing their homeland. Others hope to finally return home.

prisoners of war, freed concentration camp inmates, and forced laborers abducted and uprooted by the Nazis.

It's really in 45 that the German economy collapses, if you like, across the finish line of defeat into something

close to complete disintegration. At this point, this is the moment at which millions of Germans actually face

starvation. The kind of starvation which they had inflicted on the rest of Europe up to that point.

>> For the thousands of Soviet prisoners of war in Germany, the situation is especially tense. After the liberation

of a camp near Padobon, a group of men weakened by forced labor and starvation fight over a piece of bread.

Their future is bleak. Stalin sees prisoners of war as cowards. >> That's how it was under the Soviet

regime. Anyone who'd been taken to Germany or to any Nazi occupied country as a forced laborer or was a prisoner of

war was stigmatized for life. >> Stalin comes to an agreement with the western powers that all Soviet prisoners

of war will be returned. But many don't want to go back. In the camp at Flatling in Bavaria, a

prisoner of war cuts himself badly to try to prevent his return. American soldiers display him in front

of the camera. Instead of being welcomed home, you were immediately labeled as a a treacherous

um possible criminal who' possibly collaborated and so on. And so these people were very very often for the most

part either killed outright or uh largely sent sent to the gulag. >> Stalin doesn't even spare his own

family. When his oldest son Yakov Jugashili is taken prisoner in 1941, Stalin categorically refuses a prisoner

exchange. Yakov dies on the electrified boundary fence at Zaxonhausen. France. Shortly after the liberation,

women accused of cooperating with the Germans are humiliated. Regardless of whether their behavior was due to

calculation, naivity, or love, mere suspicion is enough to make them the target for revenge.

It's a sad and violent reaction after a terrible and violent war against people who are seen to have been collaborating

and and perpetrators of this terrible system. And it would always depend on the each individual case because some of

the women really did deserve to be punished but not in that way. And some of them were were innocent or punished

for vindictive and unpleasant reasons. Women are humiliated. Collaborators violently attacked. Those who aided and

profited from the German occupation are hunted throughout Europe. Among them are notorious figures like

Petro Kau, a fanatical partisan hunter in northern Italy. Under the eyes of the Germans, he tortured Jews and communists

to death. His execution in Rome is a public event and

a public signal. You need a small group. It mustn't be too big that can be set apart,

marginalized, made up of the most obvious collaborators, perpetrators who worked

for the SS, who worked for the Gestapo, and they are executed or publicly punished. And then the others, the rest

are able to say, "Well, we were the good guys." >> In Germany, it's about more than

individual guilt. The Allies have clearly set out their political aims. They want a democratic, denazified

Germany. They want to turn the self-appointed master race into peaceful neighbors.

What happens is that there are so many people who've made their peace with the Nazi regime, who've been complicit in

the Nazi regime, who've been involved in perpetration on behalf of Nazism that it really is a massive problem.

It's easy to remove Nazi symbols from buildings, but how do you identify and re-educate 8 12 million party members

and countless sympathizers? In the American occupation zone, every adult has to fill in a questionnaire to

qualify for ration cards. That's 13 million Germans. In the end, 99% are classified as

passive followers or simply innocent of wrongdoing. The denazification procedures

themselves, I think, were not very successful. It was very easy to tell stories. So, denazification itself

didn't assist in sorting out who was guilty, who was not. It just assisted in a kind of massive cover up job on the

part of Germans. It was a one-sizefits-all summary procedure, but it was still important

because it made a new start possible, a new beginning. It didn't damn the German people for all

time. >> The Allies go about it in different ways. Dennazification in the West is

soon halted. In the Soviet zone, it becomes a communist style purge. At the end of the war, Soviet forces set

up 10 special camps in their occupation zone. The biggest is special camp number seven, formerly Zaxenhausen

concentration camp. One of the prisoners is Wilhe seen here in a self-portrait. He's

arrested by Soviet military police age 16 after being denounced for slandering and insulting Stalin and he's sentenced

to several years in the camp. In 1950, Vilheimbre is released and forbidden to speak about his

imprisonment. But he records the horror in his art. On one of the pictures he writes,

Saxonhausen in old concentration camp garb. There are undeniable similarities. They

were not, however, labor camps in the same way as was the case under Nazism. So they were not used as slave laborers.

And the victims within these special camps did include people who should certainly not have been there. But it

also included many ex-Nazis and people who definitely were people who should have been interned for the acts they had

committed under the Nazi regime. >> The Soviets decide that in their zone the elites need to be fundamentally

replaced. 90% of the teachers and the judges must go. so-called people's judges and new teachers are trained in

crash courses. The criterion is their loyalty to the new system. Even if you had been sort of some minor

Nazi, if you professed your loyalty to Stalin and you uh you know took up a position and and never made a fuss and

you were well behaved uh Stalinist and your children went to the coms small you know school of whatever then you were

pretty well okay. >> Most of the people who went along with the Nazis got off scot-free in the west

and the east. The GDR couldn't change the average citizen. They just carried on under the socialist flag. It was

different with the elites. And in the west, they carried on under a new system, too. That was no problem.

>> Anti-fascism becomes the grounding myth of the GDR, communist East Germany. The evil Nazis are the others. The

capitalists, junkers, and imperialists are all in the West. And apart from communist heroes, the

Nazis other victims are forgotten, especially the Jews. In the Soviet occupation zone of

Germany, the emphasis was on combating fascism, not about the question of what had actually happened to the Jews.

You could say the persecution of the Jews was simply swept under the carpet. It was hushed up.

in November 1945. Surviving senior Nazis face an international tribunal. 21 defendants representing the party,

the state, industry, and the military are tried as principal war criminals. It's a revolution in international law.

>> This is the first time in human history that a group of individuals who work for a state and are servants of its

sovereign are put on trial for something called international crimes. One of the four charges is crimes

against humanity, a new criminal offense created to prosecute acts of violence against civilians.

Barister Hash Laapak plays a leading role in the drafting of the charge. He was born in Polish Galysia and

studied law in Lmberg before immigrating with his wife to Britain. What Laapact is interested in is looking

at the ways in which international law can protect each of us because we are human beings. Not because we're a member

of a group, but because we are living, breathing, sentient human beings. And his basic idea was that every human

being has minimum rights under international law, including in times of war and conflict and horror and

atrocity. Laapak has a personal stake in the trial. On its very first day, the topic is a crime against humanity in

Lmberg, Laapak's former home. At that point, the 20th of November 1945, he has no news as to the fate of

his parents, his siblings, his nieces, his nephews, his cousins in Lmberg. And at that very moment on the first day in

the trial, a Soviet prosecutor describes what happened in Lmberg. Thousands of Jews were murdered in an

operation guided by the German occupation forces. Laap's family was among them.

The Neuremberg trials are also the beginning of the historical processing of Nazi crimes. Documents, photographs,

films, and witness statements are admitted. Evidence of a new dimension in crime.

What was important was that it would showpiece the horrors that had occurred, the

invasions, the acts of killing, the atrocities and so on and so forth. And it was broadcast daily on the news reels

and it was in the front pages of the newspapers most days. The Americans conduct regular opinion

polls in their zone. According to these, the defeated Germans take a largely positive view of the principal war

crimes trial. 80% believe the trials are fair and 70% consider that the defendants are guilty.

The victor's message is clear. There will be justice in the place of arbitrary desperatism.

Put simply, the Second World War is a war of good against evil. In spite of all the problems there are on the Allied

side, all the war crimes the Allies also committed, there simply is no holocaust, no mass deaths of Soviet prisoners of

war. It's a different dimension. And so, one can speak of a certain moral superiority.

out. >> The legacy of Nuremberg is a warning to all governments, not least today.

>> Those judgments went straight to the United Nations General Assembly. They were endorsed and they became the basis

for modern international law. And if you move forward to Rwanda, to Yugoslavia, to the International Criminal Court, to

Iraq, to Syria, to Guantanamo, to the Rohhinga, every road leads back to Nuremberg.

Thousands of Germans appear before the courts in war crimes trials, but the majority of the guilty avoid

prosecution. By 1949, 12,478 Nazi war criminals have been convicted.

Yet, at least 200,000 people were directly involved in carrying out the Holocaust.

In addition, sentences are often lenient. offenders are released early or declared unfit for detention.

>> So it's a very difficult dilemma that are faced by the allies as to what to do. Do you uh punish everybody uh and

then have this very unstable society that becomes resentful or do you punish the top criminals that you try in

Nuremberg and some of the other trials that follow uh and rather turn a blind eye to other people's uh Nazi legacy?

Many Nazi criminals seek to evade punishment. They can count on discreet assistance.

Ricardo Clement, supposedly from South Troll, applies to the International Red Cross for travel documents.

His real name is Adolf Aishman and he's one of the organizers of the Holocaust. His

false papers enable him to evade justice. The main escape route leads from Germany

across the Austrian Alps to South Tiroll. A network of helpers in Austria and Italy guides the fugitives across

the Alps unnoticed with false papers, accommodation, and food. The route continues on through Italy to

South America. South Terroll plays a part in almost every escape story. After 1945, the

Alpine region is a perfect bolt hole for Nazis. South Troll was on the escape route to

Italy and the population there were very friendly to the Germans and so they helped all the fugitives from Germany

and South Tillians were considered stateless in 1945. This statelessness was very useful to

Nazi fugitives for getting papers from the Red Cross. Senior figures in the Catholic Church

are especially helpful to the fleeing Nazis. They saw communism as the archeneemy of

the church and national socialists were obviously anti-communist. They saw allies there and they also

argued on religious grounds saying that forgiveness, forgiving and forgetting was the best policy looking to the

future. One person who benefited from the church's anti-communism was SS General

Ottovea. He fled to South Troll and hid for years with another SS leader in a mountain hut

high in the Alps. >> The plan was and was implemented that they hid above 2,000 m. Borard said to

Vea, "The British are too stupid and too lazy. The Americans too stupid and too lazy. We go up. We hide above 2,000 m."

>> It must have been almost idilic. Their families visited them. They took pictures. They went for walks, mountain

hiking and skiing. It was virtually an alpine deal. In 1949, Vesta leaves his hiding place

and travels to Rome. A Catholic bishop, Alois Hudal, finds him work and a place to live. Ottovesta never makes it to

South America. He dies in the summer of 1949 in the arms of Bishop Hudal. This unholy alliance of Nazis and

priests corresponds with the beginning of the Cold War. Pursuing and trying Nazi criminals is no

longer the priority. The fight against communism is becoming more and more important. So are these former SSmen and

Nazis more important as defendants in a trial or as potential allies in the fight against communism?

This isn't about Aishman Mangala and a couple of others. This is about thousands and thousands of cases.

A Jewish family in the late 1930s. Nina is not quite 10 years old in these holiday pictures. Her little brother

Peter was probably born in 1933. friend be neighbors looked after these films during the war.

Robert dies in Zuen House and concentration camp. Rose and the children are taken to Ashvitz.

On the ramp, mother and daughter are selected for a work detail. But Rose doesn't want to be separated from Peter.

On May the 15th, 1944, they enter the gas chamber together. 6 million European Jews fall victim to

the Nazis racial mania in Latvia, Lithuania, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Greece, and the Netherlands. more than

70% of the Jewish population die. The largest group of victims by some way are the 3 million murdered Polish Jews.

More than half the Jewish population of Hungary and Albania die. Hundreds of thousands are deported from

other countries and murdered. The US Army sets up camps in Germany for Jewish survivors. This one is at Fervald

in Bavaria. It was once a housing estate for workers. In 1945, there are about 30,000 Jews in

the displaced person's camps. >> Very few Jewish DPS ever thought of staying in Germany. So it was quite

clear that each of these camps was a waiting room waiting for the opportunity to immigrate.

Most of the survivors want to immigrate to Palestine where the dream of a Jewish state seems to be becoming a reality.

But the authorities in the British mandate deny them entry. And the USA won't relax its immigration

laws either. Immediately after 1945, there wasn't a single country that said, "After this

catastrophe, we are opening our doors and all of you can come." >> In the US occupation zone, the Jewish

refugees run the camps themselves. After years of living in fear of their lives, there's a great need for

education and culture. Theater groups bring the horror of the concentration camps to the stage.

The survivors cut themselves off from their German neighbors. Playing football against Germans is forbidden.

>> The Jews saw the Germans rightly as the people who three or four years before had been German soldiers and had

murdered them. There was no denying that fact. something they

>> contacts with Germans are largely limited to bartering. Holocaust survivors have things to offer that

German civilians can't get. Coffee, cigarettes, chewing gum. Things the Germans deliver to the camps

but distribute far less of to the German population. The Germans saw the displaced persons as

a privileged group. They got more to eat and there were less restrictions on them than on the Germans.

Anti-semitism, which was still very widespread in Germany after 1945, was naturally directed at the people living

in these camps. The police in Munich talk of ceaseless hustling by these layabouts and workshy

elements. They talk of a rabble with criminal facial features.

Munich's police chief describes the fight against the black market as a cleansing operation. German

anti-semitism has not disappeared with Hitler's death. In December 1946, more than a third of

Germans still hold anti-semitic views. 18% are even radical anti-semmites. According to a poll by the Americans in

their occupation zone, the pollsters consider a further 21% are anti-semmites, 22% are racists, and 19%

are nationalists. Only a fifth display no such leanings. For many Jews, Germany is the blood

soaked earth upon which they will never set foot again. Others return to the land of the

criminals and build new Jewish communities. But they are few and far between.

They felt they were Germans and that was their tragedy. They didn't leave Germany because they

didn't feel German, but because the non-Jewish Germans told them they weren't German.

They were more comfortable in German culture than in other cultures. >> That's true of the actor Fritz Cartner.

Shortly after his return from exile, he plays the leading role in the film The Last Illusion. He bases the screenplay

on his own experiences. >> Cartner plays Professor Maltner, who has to justify his decision to return to

Germany. In his memoirs, Cotner describes his first encounters with Germans after his

return. Though he tells them about the 11 members of his family who were gassed, there's no willingness to

recognize his misfortune. Germans persist in their belief that no one else's suffering comes close to

their own. Many German Jews who return in British or American uniforms may encounter

former neighbors and hear from them, "Yes, it's all right for you. You were much luckier than we were. You can't

imagine what happened here, especially during the war." There's often a reversal of roles of

victim and perpetrator that strikes many German Jews as utterly surreal. >> Anti-semitism does not just remain

virilent in Germany. Returning Jews encounter it in neighboring countries as well.

Joseph Fineold born in Warsaw in 1923. In the mid 1930s, his parents Rachel and Aeron move with their three sons to K.

His father, Aeron, has found work there as a carpenter. After winning the lottery, his family can even build their

own house. Happy years before the Germans invade Poland. In the war, the family become separated.

Aaron finds refuge in the Soviet Union with his older sons. At the end of the war, they return to Ky to look for

Rachel and their youngest. As they cross the border into their old homeland, they're pelted with stones.

The Jews describe the return of the survivors as a tragedy. People

who narrowly escape death come up against the indifference and the hostility of people who have taken over

their homes, believing that they would never return. >> The central clearing house for survivors

in Keltzer is the office of the Jewish committee. A few hours after his return, Joseph

Fineold hears shouting in the street. There was a crowd of people outside getting larger and larger, smashing

windows and shouting some incomprehensible demands or obscenities. They finally broke the door down and

started dragging us out of the room. They were just ordinary citizens. Some soldiers joined in, police and militia.

The Jews experienced violence almost everywhere they returned, especially in Eastern Europe. in Western Europe. Less

sir, >> on July the 4th, 1946, 40 Holocaust survivors are murdered in

Kie and 80 more wounded. The trigger for the pogram is a claim by a 9-year-old boy that he'd been

kidnapped by Jews. >> The program was a turning point in the history of the Jews in Poland. It led to

mass immigration. Tens of thousands of Jews fled Poland, mainly to camps for displaced persons in

Germany, Austria, and elsewhere. Joseph seeks out the protection of the American occupying forces, staying in a

displaced person's camp near Frankfurt before immigrating to the USA. The number of Jewish refugees arriving

in the American occupation zone from Eastern Europe reaches its peak at the end of 1946 at a total of 150,000.

Germans do not welcome the survivors. The provincial office of the Protestant church in Castle sends a questionnaire

to 25 parishes. One of the questions is >> how is public opinion reacting to the fact that the Jews in Poland were forced

to immigrate and that they have been accommodated here in our living space. The Fazan Hof Parish promptly sends its

summary of the local mood. One opinion is frequently heard. >> There must be reason nobody wants them.

The Poles are now doing exactly what we are being punished for. After so many years of indoctrination,

it's actually not surprising that there was a high degree of anti-semitism in the population.

And we can still see the consequences of that in our society today. Germany as an example of what human

beings can do to one another is a warning from history. The Holocaust is the extreme form. The

Holocaust is the most extreme form of a universal human disease. Under certain circumstances, any person can become a

mass murderer. Any one of us. If you're German, these are our fathers, grandfathers, or great-grandfathers.

And they were neither less intelligent nor less morally anchored than we are. They were very, very much like us. And

we can't pretend that we are different or better. The most depressing historical

conclusion from the history of national socialism, at least for me, is how many people were prepared to conform, to go

along with it, even if that involved murderous barbarity. And I'm afraid that this conformism is a

phenomenon that we did not necessarily leave behind us at the end of national socialism.

The important thing is that in a democratic system, we should constantly be asking ourselves, what's actually

happening right now, and what should I be doing to work against anti-democratic tendencies?

The problem with the struggle against populist movements is that it's a very particular kind of fight.

You can't fight it with conventional means. You have to find new methods against the language they use against

the manipulation of public opinion. Democracy must not behave as stupidly as it did in 1928 and 1933.

The lesson is never again. That is the task for all opponents of barbarism. There is no guarantee.