How the Holocaust Began (2023) Movie Script
This programme contains
discriminatory language
and scenes which some viewers
may find upsetting from the start.
If I say the word "holocaust",
what springs to mind?
Imagine something like this.
A concentration camp.
Barbed wire.
Trainloads of victims.
Gas chambers and crematoria.
Places like Auschwitz,
and its system of mass murder.
I think most of us assumed
that this was always
the pre-determined destination,
designed from the outset in some
great master plan of extermination.
But it wasn't.
There was no master plan for this.
Its origins were chaotic
and spontaneous.
And improvised mass executions.
It's believed that more than
a million Jews were murdered
in thousands of random killings
that erupted
all across Eastern Europe...
..in a holocaust of bullets.
Largely lost and forgotten
for more than 80 years,
this first chapter of the greatest
crime in history is now being fully
revealed for the first time,
thanks to newly-discovered
aerial photographs,
and advances in
forensic detection,
finding lost victims,
uncovering the
true scale of the killing.
It began in earnest in the midst
of Hitler's invasion
of the Soviet Union in June 1941.
Atrocities grew in scale
and savagery.
Until, just six months later,
bullets gave way to gas in the first
death camps of the "Final Solution."
My name is James Bulgin.
I'm a historian and Holocaust
specialist
at the Imperial War Museum.
And this film tells a story
that has never been fully told,
of the crucial six months
that ignited the Holocaust.
If you're going to search
for the events that started
the Holocaust,
Cambridge University Library
might seem
a strange place to look.
But a researcher here thinks
he can find that start point,
using Second World War
aerial archives.
Ah, James.
Good to see you.
Right, well, let me show you
what we've been putting together.
This is a map of the German
reconnaissance and air survey
photography taken during
the Second World War.
It represents something like
1.5 million photographs taken
by the Germans, primarily
over Central and Eastern Europe.
But if we're looking for
the ramshackle beginnings
of the Holocaust, as it were,
the sort of ad hoc,
the start of it all,
one of the things that's really
clear with air photography
is that almost every action
leaves a trace.
So they were capturing the evidence
of their own crimes.
They were photographing
the evidence of their own crimes.
And there's a good example of this.
Possibly...
To me, this is the beginning of the
entire sort of horrific process.
This is Gargzdai in Lithuania.
It's literally a stone's throw
from the German border...
That's the border here?
..which is running there.
Proper border town.
A proper border town.
And this is a village where
the Jewish inhabitants...
It was about 20%, 30% Jewish
before the war.
..they would have lived in the
houses of
the two Jewish streets here,
and the synagogue was here.
And on the 22nd of June, 1941,
of course, the Germans pushed east.
And within literally 24 hours
of coming over the border,
the Germans had destroyed
the houses.
And if you look, you can see
this whole area here
was burned during that day.
It's so striking to me that these
forces come through here
from this direction.
And, I mean, literally, what,
within a few hundred metres
of the German border?
They come through and they... This
this, this incident happens here,
so quickly, so soon, so close.
Absolutely. Well, look at this.
If you look here, you can just see
Yep.
You can see it more clearly
in this other photograph,
which picks it out in snow.
And you can see it just there.
It's not part of the agricultural
landscape. It's not a path.
I think this is a trench.
We have a certain amount of sort of
testimony from the time, to sort of
indicate that this is precisely
where the Jewish men
had been marched up the street
in which they had lived,
and were then shot to death
and buried in that trench.
So I've been...I've been...I've
been circling this question.
How do we get to this huge, vast,
catastrophic act
of mass violence
and mass murder?
And it's possible, likely
that this is where it began.
It's very likely.
If Chris has found a possible
start point for the Holocaust,
why is it in the Soviet Union,
as late as 1941?
Hitler had always envisaged a world
free of his two great enemies -
Jews and Communists.
By 1940, he had conquered half
of Europe and had millions of Jews
rounded up and put in ghettos.
His intention had always
been to get rid of them entirely,
but there was no
concrete plan for how to do it.
Then, in June 1941, he set out
to destroy his other great enemy.
Bolshevik communism.
Hitler had always branded
communism a Jewish conspiracy.
So his invasion of the Soviet Union
offered the perfect opportunity
to target both enemies at once.
Gargzdai, on the border of
Soviet Lithuania and Nazi Germany,
was right on the
front line of that invasion.
The Wehrmacht, as they swept
into this whole area, were charged
with this instruction from Hitler
and the commanders of the army
that this was a war of annihilation.
They were coming through
this space to decimate it.
The order was for communism
to be eradicated.
No specific order was given
to kill Jews.
Yet, there is a monument here in
Gargzdai,
exactly where Chris's photos
showed a trench.
So, on the 24th of June, two days
after the German invasion
of the Soviet Union,
the commander in this area, a man
whose name was Bormann,
instructed that 200 Jews
should be rounded up
and that they should
be brought here...
..and they should be shot.
I tend to think of military
orders within the German army
at this period as all coming
from the top.
The people at the top telling
the people on the ground what to do.
But that's not what happens here.
And that's really important,
because actually what happens
is people on the ground, like
Bormann, take their own initiative.
Hitler has always wanted
to remove Jews from Europe,
and here these men take
the initiative to interpret
that in the most radical
way possible, to interpret
that as an instruction to murder.
And this starts
a process of mass murder
that spreads like wildfire
across this whole territory.
And the numbers grow,
and they grow and they grow.
Hitler's head of security was
SS Chief Heinrich Himmler.
Himmler had created special killing
squads, called Einsatzgruppen,
to follow in the wake of the army
and eradicate
Hitler's political enemies.
Capitalising on Bormann's
initiative, his deputy, Heydrich,
issued an instruction that any Jew
working for the communist state
must be shot.
Four Einsatzgruppen teams were ready
to carry out that order
across all newly-conquered
Soviet territory.
I'm following Einsatzgruppen A
from Gargzdai into Latvia,
in a town called Liepaja.
Here, there was another fierce
battle for control of the city.
In the aftermath of the battle,
the SS Einsatzgruppen
went in search of Hitler's enemies.
And we can see what they did
with them, in a unique piece of film
shot by a German serviceman.
In the opening of this film here,
we see a pit -
looks to be freshly dug -
and then the Einsatzgruppen soldiers
are milling around, waiting.
And there's this really hideous
sense of anticipation.
And then we see why.
We see a truck arrive and people
being loaded off the back of it.
We can see it's clearly Jews.
We know they're Jews because
they're wearing patches
on their front and their back,
and the people doing
the shooting are Germans.
But around them, we see
spectators around here.
We see members of the Navy here,
military here, and amongst
them, just people.
They're there in huge numbers.
They're smoking. They're talking.
They're clamouring to get a closer
look to see what's about to happen.
Group after group come,
and the people stay
and they watch it.
Here we can see this man just
looking into the camera, suggests
that he can see that he's being
filmed as this is happening.
He knows that this has been
captured
and that people will be
watching this moment when he's gone.
It's horr....it's horrible.
It's almost as if shooting Jews
has become a spectator sport.
What we see in this film
is where we are a few weeks
after the invasion.
So the Wehrmacht start to push
further into Soviet territory.
The Einsatzgruppen are coming
behind them, and they're finding
more and more Jewish communities
to target, and they're keeping
a running total of it as they go.
They want to be able to report
those figures,
up to Heydrich and Himmler. And
Heydrich and Himmler are saying,
"No, no, no, we want more, more,
more. Why haven't you done more?"
The commanders of the Einsatzgruppen
sometimes
get chastised for not
killing more people.
There's this impetus, this force
to constantly find
more Jews to kill.
And we see that recorded here.
We see the date.
So, 22nd of August '41, 544 people.
23rd of August '41, 7,525 people.
And now they include Judinnen and
Judenkinder - women and children.
It's only taken a few weeks from
those first murders at Gargzdai
for this to accelerate.
And there's a tally at the bottom.
At the bottom of this document here,
by the start of September 1941,
it says 47,614 people.
That's 47,614 human beings.
The Nazis wanted to do more than
just kill their victims.
They wanted to erase them
from memory.
The graves of many tens of thousands
have never been found.
And that matters to Dr Harry Jol.
So much so, he's devoted
his career to finding them.
You can't just hide the bodies.
The bodies will be found.
I'm trained as a physical
geographer, a geomorphologist,
and people such as myself and
academics and others need to say,
"Let's take our tools that we use
for other research projects,
"and let's apply them to the
Holocaust."
We need to put closure to this.
It does line up brilliantly.
Fish-smoking building with the five
smokestacks,
would be just beyond that modern
building on the other side of it.
So we can't see the pit from here,
but if we back up...
Harry works with fellow
US academic Dr Phil Reeder.
There's the pit.
And every summer for the last seven
years, they've been bringing teams
of students to Eastern Europe
in search of Holocaust victims.
We have a different perspective
on it now, but if we look up
where the two students are,
they're standing
where the crowd was standing...
Today they're looking
for the men in the film.
But then, as they run, look,
there's a lighthouse.
You can see the lighthouse
Yep, that's it.
The film gives them landmarks
they can locate
on historic air photos of the site,
allowing them to triangulate
where the men were shot,
and where they
should start their search.
But here is that road where
they would have taken people here.
And then we see
all those cars parked,
and where
they're actually dropped off.
So I think that's a good spot
for, in the video,
where they're getting
out of the trucks.
There's actually
Yeah.
And because you can see the people
up on this side, and people
up on this side, and then they would
run to the pit over here.
So the pit, to me, is right
out here in front of us.
Or at least that's the place
Yeah.
Judaic law forbids any physical
disturbance of the dead,
so they're digging with radio waves.
Ground-penetrating radar gives
them the ability to image
any large feature buried
in the earth, like a mass grave.
After a few hours, they find
what appears to be a buried trench.
But it's facing the wrong way
to be the one in the film.
It's literally
in that direction, right?
So it's almost 90 degrees off
what we were expecting,
looking at the photos and taking
Right.
So maybe means that there multiple
trenches and, you know, the video
is just one point in time,
where that particular trench
is being used.
So there could be trenches
everywhere.
After multiple passes
of the GPR,
another trench appears
beneath the tarmac...
..and this one lines up exactly
with the film.
As we take a look at this trench,
it's pretty impressive.
You know, this is 38 metres long.
You know, this is probably the first
or second time I've ever seen
Yeah, I mean,
it stands out very clearly.
I mean, from all the time spent
watching the video, it fits
very well with what we imagine
the angle would be of the trench
coming in towards the fortress.
And, you know, they were basically
brought into the trench and fell
against this side
Yep.
All the pieces of the puzzle
Yeah.
But at the same time, there's more
Most certainly.
The men in the film
have finally been found.
But it's clear there were
more people shot and
buried here
than anyone ever realised.
And further along
the same stretch of coast,
a few months after Liepaja's men,
thousands of women and children were
shot and buried in the sands.
No-one knows exactly how many,
or where their bodies lie.
It's only since the fall of the
Soviet Union that mass graves
like these, lost for over 80 years,
are being forensically
investigated for the first time.
But pioneers like Harry and Phil
are just scratching the surface
of a monumental task.
In Latvia, there are more than
70 suspected Holocaust sites.
Most are yet to be fully explored.
The same is true in neighbouring
Lithuania, with more than
200 suspected sites.
What seems extraordinary
is that there was
a single Einsatzgruppen team of
fewer than a thousand men to account
for an estimated
quarter of a million deaths
across both countries.
There's only one way
that was possible,
and it's one of the most disturbing
aspects of this entire story.
Widespread local complicity.
And there is evidence of that
happening here,
in the Lithuanian town of Alytus.
So we're just driving into the town
now, from exactly the same direction
that the Germans came in
on the 22nd of June in 1941.
So, from the very start of
the invasion, this is where
they were coming from.
And behind them were these
Einsatzgruppen soldiers,
with this task
of looking for the town's Jews.
They found them in the town
and the surrounding villages.
And according to Nazi records,
nearly 2,500 Jews were rounded up
and brought to be murdered
in the nearby forest.
Here we arrive at the end of the
town, and the very same road
driven on through the centre
of Alytus becomes...
You can see here,
it's becoming...
It's a dirt track.
And now we're in forest.
And what I find really,
really chilling,
and really unnerving,
is the fact that
it's walking distance
from the middle of the town.
But who brought the thousands of
Jews here, and who killed them?
Because the SS have fewer than a
dozen men stationed in this area.
I'm here to meet the leader
of Lithuania's
surviving Jewish community.
Faina Kukliansky believes
her grandmother was killed
in this forest...
..and she may have discovered
who the killers were.
My grandparents were
quite educated people,
and my grandmother
was a doctor in the hospital.
Then the war started, and my
grandmother was taken
from the street and imprisoned
by the local people.
She's held prisoner by local people?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And then what happened?
And what happened after that,
nobody knows.
But in any way,
she did not come back.
I asked the
Genocide Centre of Lithuania
to do the research
for me, especially on Alytus.
And it's written here clearly
that in 1941, in August,
there were mass killing
of Jewish children and women.
The victims were asked to go
into the pits, to jump
into the pits, to lie.
Then they were shot.
All the people who used to work
in the prison took part,
together with the
students of Alytus school.
So this is local school students...
Of the school.
..participating in the shooting?
Yeah.
And together, they came together
with policemen with guns.
And that confirms that - what my
uncle used to tell me -
that probably his classmates
killed his mother.
Faina, that is such a difficult
thing to comprehend.
The idea that it was
your parents' friends from school
who were some of the ones who were
actively participating
in this process. They must have
known her. They must have...
Her son was studying with
Lithuanians in a Lithuanian school.
Doesn't matter that they were
citizens of Lithuania,
that they live in the same city.
But it should be Judenrein,
"Jews should be killed."
And they were killing.
So her only crime was being Jewish?
Yeah. Well, that's enough.
Zinaida Kukliansky and more than
2,000 other Jews
were murdered here...
..not solely by Nazis,
but also by their fellow citizens.
No-one knows where
any of them are buried.
There is a cluster of monuments here
in the forest, but they were put up
relatively recently, and no-one
knows if they mark
any actual burials.
I do not know
where my grandmother is.
I would like very much to know,
where is her remains?
The sculptures, I think
it's more like art pieces,
not like the
document pieces.
And I do not see any information
here about the people.
When were they killed?
How many people were killed?
Where the women are.
Where the children are.
Who are they? We are missing that.
We just do not know
where they are.
OK.
On up.
Faina has invited Harry and Phil
down from Liepaja to try
and put that right.
But this forest holds a puzzle.
We know, in August, September 1941,
we had approximately 2,000 Jews
being executed and buried
at this site.
Flags in - red, white.
The idea that they're here is
interesting.
But where are they buried?
Are they all buried at this
location,
or are they buried at other
locations within this larger forest?
And so our job is
to try to find those sites.
The murders in Alytus's forests
troubled me for another reason.
The element of local collaboration.
And what happened here was just
the tip of the iceberg.
A truth some Lithuanians are
determined to lay bare.
I'm heading to a small town just
20km from Alytus to meet
a prominent author and Holocaust
researcher called Ruta Vanagaite.
Ruta introduces me
to 94-year-old Ona.
Hello.
Ona grew up here among the town's
Jewish population,
and she is the last known surviving
witness to their mass murder.
We go with her in my car, OK?
Perfect. It's very nice to meet you.
Is that comfortable?
She's going to show
where they used to live.
The massacre Ona witnessed
took place on
September 9th, 1941.
Not in the dark of a large forest,
but in the open fields
in front of
the house she lived in as a child.
So, what happened on that day?
There were a lot of
people being marched down the hill.
And when did you see the first
people coming past?
They heard the screaming.
A cry and screaming.
We looked through the windows only,
"What's going on?"
There were hundreds of people
being marched here.
My mum started crying, and
everybody...
The screaming was the first thing
that she heard,
before she saw anything?
And then we heard the shooting.
And who was in the column? The Jews?
They were mostly old people.
And later on, children.
And children were being shot
in another place.
And when you heard the shots,
you realised what was happening?
Yes.
This past is in my head.
This is Butrimonys, where most
of the victims lived.
Its historic heart lies empty
because, that September day,
740 Jews,
80% of the town's population,
were murdered.
The question is, who by?
The killers were Lithuanian killers
from Alytus, coming
to get rid of the Jews.
So we're talking about Lithuanians
Yes, yes.
..other Lithuanians?
But they are not...
Those, the killers were not
neighbours of those Jews, but those,
the policemen and the partisans
were neighbours of
And the
whole process throughout has been
managed by these people's
neighbours, the people doing the
Yes, the preparation was
managed by people's neighbours.
But killing was done by somebody
coming from outside.
From another
town nearby. And they're the ones
Yes.
They're the ones with their fingers
on the triggers?
And after the shooting, the
neighbours are taking the property.
Wow, that's quite a thought,
isn't it?
And then they move into
the houses around here,
presumably they take over the town,
and all the Jews are gone.
Yes. In one night.
In one night.
It's clear that the Holocaust
here was much more
than just
a series of spontaneous acts.
It was rapidly evolving
into organised ethnic cleansing
on a massive scale.
In Alytus' forest, Harry and Phil
think they may have stumbled on the
biggest mass grave
they've ever seen.
It's getting more pronounced here,
Yeah.
I mean, obviously we're walking
in a lower area
that has, what, to our left,
a mound of stuff.
Yeah, let's climb up.
Wow. I mean, that's
human-built.
Most definitely human-built.
Wow.
I mean, I mean, it's macabre,
but I mean, the idea
that where you are was where
the trench would be, and here
you would be lining up people
being shot, falling into the trench
where you are,
then burying, with that sediment
that you have, and then continuing
Right.
..for, potentially, months.
Right here.
This is a trench where you could
Yeah.
This is one that is not,
you can say, limited in...
The discovery is the result of
resolute detective work,
because the trench is nowhere near
any of the Holocaust monuments.
So we checked out the area
of the monuments.
All the data indicated, really,
that there was nothing there.
So I went back to the air photos
to try to find something
that potentially fits where a large
number of bodies could be buried.
And this is a 1944 Luftwaffe
air photograph of this area.
And if we zoom in, what's
interesting about it is this is
the road that we come
in on, and these two roads
that are coming off of it.
And this particular road
is essentially a road to nowhere.
So it's a road that goes into the
middle of a forest and stops?
And stops. I would... Yes, I would
agree with that.
But there is testimony of a family
member, soon after her father
and brother were murdered,
of visiting this site and seeing
the evidence of trenches
that were so fresh,
that they were stained with blood.
So that's what was
Yes.
That's what prompted us
to start to look
in this particular area.
And we'll have two people going on
this.
And then one person will be moving
the line.
And when, upon closer inspection, we
found a series of trenches leading
up to, at least visually,
potentially the largest trench,
and this may be a mass grave,
or a series of mass graves,
where there are tens of thousands
of people buried.
The evidence is compelling,
but it's only circumstantial.
The only way they can be sure
they've found a mass burial
is to look beneath the surface,
as they did so effectively at
Liepaja.
So what we've done at this site
is we've started collecting a grid
with ground-penetrating radar.
And now I'll show you a time slice
as we go down into the subsurface.
And remarkably, you know, we
never know what we're going to get,
we see this feature right here.
This is what we are interpreting
as a burial trench.
So, because that's anomalous
within the rest of this here,
it's clearly something distinctive.
Right, it's rectangular.
And so now we can start calculating
the dimensions of a trench here.
And it's not just here. It goes
all the way up to where this linear
feature goes,
and goes all the way down...
Right down to the end, there?
..right down to...
Almost to the end, and it does a
right-hand turn down there.
And there's... So, I mean, we can't
even start doing the calculations.
We were just looking
at the data right now.
This is a large feature.
It's huge.
All the way to there, to all the
way to there? And then...
And then we have seven to four...
seven to 11 metres here,
on the tapes here. But take a look.
All the trees have been taken out
at seven metres, and they're gone
all the way to 11 metres. All the
Walking past
every day, I wouldn't...I wouldn't
have noticed this detail.
How do you...? I wouldn't have
noticed. But now you point it out,
it seems so obvious that clearly
some...something
has happened to this earth.
Something has disrupted
the continuity of this space.
When we take... I mean,
I just take a look out here.
We thought there was going
to be nothing out here.
And we see some, you know, linear
features and things like that. I...
You know, I'm shocked when I walk
around now. I'm looking at things
and it's like, potentially,
we are sitting on thousands
of executed Jews at that site.
We could work here for
years and years...
.
Yeah.
Just the experience of being here
today has been a really stark
reminder of the point about taking
Jewish individuals into a site
like this and murdering them.
When the Nazis come into these
territories, they find, in various
different ways and in various
different capacities, different
people who are
prepared to support it,
to support it. Sometimes to allow
it to happen, but sometimes
to become directly involved,
to become the people who are...
..the people with their fingers
on the trigger.
It's so important to remember
that the Nazis were at the centre
of this, but they didn't act alone.
They required the active
participation of hundreds
of thousands of people.
They couldn't have done it
without that.
Like a lot of formerly-occupied
Eastern European nations,
modern Lithuania
has a history problem...
..because the truth of its role
in the Holocaust is finally coming
out of the ground,
and it's being
obliged to face up to it
by writers like Ruta Vanagaite.
In another 50 years, the people
will come to terms with it.
Ruta, this is something
that you've gone to great lengths
to investigate. What happened
when you did that?
My book about the Holocaust
was published.
It became a bestseller,
but the reaction was very violent.
Some people accepted it, but the
majority of my nation didn't accept
and I became, like,
enemy of the country,
because I was, like,
defaming my own people,
and they called me a Jewish whore.
So, in the end, when people
were attacking me
and spitting at me on the street,
I endured,
and in the long run, I had to leave
the country for a while until
they forgive... Not forgive me,
but forget me a little.
So speaking out came at great
personal cost to you?
I don't regret. Yes, it did,
but I don't regret.
Had I known that it would be such
a violent reaction,
I would have done it anyway because
I spoke for the victims.
This is my army,
those 200,000 murdered people.
This is my army.
They gave me a lot of strength.
And if you published the book today,
do you think you would get
the same reaction?
There won't... It wouldn't be
published. No way.
No way.
And nobody after me, nobody would
write a book about the Holocaust,
because people know that
you'll lose your friends,
and you get...you become
a public enemy.
So what is said, when this comes
up in conversation, what is said?
It is a defence
reaction. It is self-defence.
So they always say, "It wasn't us.
Yes, kind of.
I mean, I told my friend that
I am coming to see Butrimonys
with a BBC crew and she said,
"What? Are you going to tell the
whole world again,
"and defame our country and tell
everybody that, you know,
"we kill the Jews, Lithuanians
kill the Jews?"
I said, "Yes."
She said, "Why?"
I said, "Because they did."
We are bloody uneducated.
Uneducated.
The school hasn't educated us.
Our parents didn't educate us.
Our grandparents were too afraid
to speak about it.
Who could tell us about
what happened?
So, for the moment,
Holocaust subject is closed.
I don't know for how long.
80 years ago, many Lithuanians
welcomed the invading Nazis
for what seemed at the time
to be a very sound reason -
because the Nazis were liberating
them from communism.
The same nationalist response
manifested across all
the Baltic states, as well as
large parts of Ukraine.
Everywhere, nationalists fanned
the flames of anti-communism,
and the Nazis pushed the myth of
that communism
as a Jewish conspiracy.
As Hitler's invasion of the USSR
reached its fullest extent,
coercion and complicity across
territories under Nazi control
allowed the SS to initiate nearly
2,000 atrocities
across seven countries
from the Baltic to the Black Sea,
scaling up their murderous ambition
in village after village,
town after town.
As victim numbers grew, the SS
developed a system for ensuring
maximum efficiency
and minimal panic.
It began with a calming ruse.
Jews were told to assemble
with money, belongings
and warm clothing.
So they waited patiently,
expecting to be deported.
Then they were led away in groups,
often by local police, to be shot.
When the Germans took
the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv,
in late September 1941,
they claimed their biggest
Soviet city so far,
with tens of thousands of Jews.
And SS Commander Friedrich Jeckeln
saw the chance to perfect
mass murder on a monumental scale.
He issued the standard order
to the city's Jews to assemble.
Then he had them escorted
out of town by local police,
along this road,
to a 30m-deep,
half-kilometre-long
ravine called Babyn Yar.
Here, they were stripped naked,
ready for the waiting guns.
Jeckeln's plan
was carefully engineered.
Yet Dina Pronicheva survived it.
These are the belongings
of those who didn't escape.
On 29th and 30th September 1941,
Jeckeln's men shot 33,771 men,
women and children.
1,700 people an hour...
..for two days.
Babyn Yar was the biggest single
massacre of the Holocaust thus far.
Yet it would become just one
notable landmark
in a continental killing spree.
By the end of 1941, over
a million people have been killed
under the hail of bullets
that the Nazis
and their collaborators
have thrown at them.
We've got 25,000 murdered
here in Riga.
50,000 murdered here in Kaunas.
70,000 here in Ponary.
We've got, in Minsk, 30,000.
In Kyiv, 34,000.
In Kamianets-Podilskyi,
we've got 25,000.
And down in Odesa,
we've got 30,000.
Hundreds of thousands of Jews,
and thousands more between
all of these places.
But it doesn't start as a plan
of total annihilation.
That's something that evolves as
part of these operations here.
What they've been able to do
here conceptualises something
within their...within their minds,
they hadn't previously anticipated
in this way, they can kill them.
They can kill them, and they can
kill them, all of them,
across the whole territory.
But the largest number of Jews
still alive are here
in occupied Poland.
They're living in ghettos.
They're living in terrible
conditions.
They suffered appallingly
during this period, but there's
been no central plan to
annihilate them until now.
And that's what changes
at the end of 1941.
But when the Nazis set out to murder
the millions of Jews languishing
in their ghettos...
..they did not use
millions of bullets.
By the end of 1941,
after more than
a million individual murders,
mass shooting had become
unsustainable.
And when we look at these photos,
we start to understand why that is.
You can see here these young men
are facing other human beings
and killing them,
and they're seeing
what they're doing,
first-hand, face-to-face.
And what senior Nazis become really
concerned about is
the mental health of the people that
are doing it - never the people
that are being killed,
the people that are doing it -
because they know that that's
something which is going
to be impossible for them
to deal with.
They talk about it
as a burdening of the soul.
There's reports here of these
soldiers getting nausea,
nervous tension during the
massacres.
In many cases, killers suffered
vomiting attacks
or developed severe eczema
or other psychosomatic disorders.
You know, there's this sense
that this whole generation
will be corrupted forever,
irreconcilably corrupted
by what they've been asked to do
in the name of the Reich.
The other big factor was location.
Everything that's happened so far,
everything that I've looked at
has happened a long way from the
heart of Germany.
It's in this kind of...this
Wild East in the Nazi imagination.
It's a different place where
different things can happen,
different permissibility.
We see here that absolutely
indescribable scene of carnage,
and it's so public
and it's so barbaric,
and it's completely grotesque.
And even the Nazis find this
kind of scene unconscionable.
Killing hundreds of thousands,
millions of people is something
that they can accept,
but from their perspective,
as things develop, there are ways
that it should be done,
and this isn't it.
And so they need to find
a new means of mass murder
that can be scaled up,
that can be efficient,
that can be secret,
and that can be civilised,
in their mind,
much more closely aligned with
this new Germany
that Hitler wants to create.
One of the men tasked with finding
those new civilised ways of killing
was an SS major called
Herbert Lange.
And this forest, called
Kazimierz Biskupi,
in the west of Poland,
is what Lange was given
to use as a laboratory.
A team of researchers from across
Poland is attempting to find
the evidence left behind
by Lange's experiments.
Traces of mass graves
can be seen in
the Nazis' own aerial photographs.
Agnieszka Nieradko
hopes they will help locate
extraordinary events described
in eyewitness testimony.
This is part of our team.
Sebastian.
Sebastian Rozycki,
University of Technology.
Nice to meet you.
Hello.
Hello.
Institute of Geophysics,
Polish Academy of Sciences.
Nice to meet you,
too. Thank you.
So, what have we found here?
OK, so, that. This is this
This bit here?
This is, yes. And you have a
rectangular shape,
and it could be the mass grave
we are looking for.
Just where we're standing now,
Yes.
From one perspective, it can look
like just a regular mass grave
from the wartime. However,
we know from a single testimony
we have of a pre-war vet,
Polish vet, who was brought here as
a prisoner, political prisoner,
he was brought here with
30 other Poles,
forced to assist the Germans
in killing Jewish people
from a neighbouring ghetto.
So people were
brought in carts here, alive,
and the pits were already
waiting for them.
They were not shot.
They were just...
They were just covered
with quicklime
and burned inside the pit.
And so they dug pits,
put quicklime into the pits?
Brought containers with water...
Brought people inside,
brought containers with water,
and put the water inside,
what make...what made the quicklime
Boil.
With...? Boiling people in...?
Yes. Inside.
And this is what we know from this
testimony of a Polish vet.
He was here from the very
beginning until the end,
forced afterwards with other
Poles to bury the victims.
So, right where we are here,
there was a pit
in which people boiled alive?
Correct.
Do we know how long it took?
According to Sienkiewicz,
several hours.
We think that is an experimental
killing site here.
Yeah.
They were just trying out
different ways...?
Yeah, different ways
of killing people.
It's believed Lange killed 3,000
Jews here in a series of trials,
which included not
just lime pits,
but mobile gas vans.
It was just a pure technical
rehearsal of which method
would be the most effective,
efficient, as if the Nazis
were just getting ready for
the big task that was ahead,
meaning killing
the European Jewry.
So clearly there's an intention
being consolidated
from within the heart of the Nazi
hierarchy, you know, from Hitler,
from the top down, there's
this idea, this intention
is becoming more and more and more
determined towards a Final Solution,
which is about complete
annihilation.
But, of course, as an intention,
that is meaningless without the
means of achieving it.
And that's what we see here.
The actual practical means
of achieving this, taking this...
This is what it meant, this is how
I understand it.
They are testing, they are trying,
they are drawing conclusions.
Lime, quicklime is expensive,
gas in wagons was also inconvenient,
so it just drives Lange to a
natural conclusion
that it doesn't work.
"We need to think about something
This is it.
And of course, the thing is,
you know, we're talking
about experimentation, but this
is... The people that are being
experimented on are real people.
Yes.
That's something
we can't forget.
Agnieszka's team continues to
search the forest
for more of Lange's victims.
But Lange himself concluded that the
answer he was looking for
did not lie in forests.
He'd found the most efficient
killing agent was gas,
but it needed to be used in a
completely different location.
What Lange realised, in fact,
was that the future of
mass murder lay in the past...
..in an old SS prison called
Fort VII.
Here, in 1939, Lange had been part
of a project called Aktion T4.
T4 was created to purge
the Third Reich of the disabled -
what the Nazis called
"life unworthy of life".
And the key to T4's efficiency,
Lange recalled, had been to bring
the victims to the means of killing,
inside a special secure facility.
In this quiet, old fort, Lange
had improvised a whole new concept
in mass murder.
What may be the world's
first gas chamber.
People were led up here.
The doors were closed behind them.
When they were all in,
clay was put around the edges
outside to seal it off,
and then tubes were put
through openings in the door.
Through those tubes, carbon monoxide
was pumped from sealed bottles,
and people would wait outside.
When there was no more noise inside,
people outside knew that everyone
in here was dead.
By the end of 1941, it's become
clear that Hitler's ambition
is to murder every single Jew
across Nazi-occupied
and Nazi-allied Europe.
And in order to do that,
he needs the necessary scale.
And that's what this offers.
It needs development,
and it's the development of that
idea which is what leads us
to the death camps.
So these urns contain ashes
from different camps across Europe.
The one directly in
front of me is from Chelmno.
Chelmno is where Herbert Lange went
directly from here, and it became
the first death camp.
And from that, a network was
developed that led
to the murder of millions of people.
And it all started...here,
in this room.
From early 1942, millions of Jews
were taken from all across
Nazi-occupied Europe
and sent to extermination
camps like this one...
..to become no more
than ash and memory.
It took just
six months to get here
from the first bullets fired
in the east.
How did that happen?
Of course, there was Hitler's
poisonous ideology,
but it needed more than ideology.
It needed tens of thousands
of ordinary people...
..to betray a neighbour,
or turn their backs and say nothing,
to help round up and rob,
to sign an order,
pull a trigger
or open a valve.
To see others as sufficiently
different from them to be killed.
discriminatory language
and scenes which some viewers
may find upsetting from the start.
If I say the word "holocaust",
what springs to mind?
Imagine something like this.
A concentration camp.
Barbed wire.
Trainloads of victims.
Gas chambers and crematoria.
Places like Auschwitz,
and its system of mass murder.
I think most of us assumed
that this was always
the pre-determined destination,
designed from the outset in some
great master plan of extermination.
But it wasn't.
There was no master plan for this.
Its origins were chaotic
and spontaneous.
And improvised mass executions.
It's believed that more than
a million Jews were murdered
in thousands of random killings
that erupted
all across Eastern Europe...
..in a holocaust of bullets.
Largely lost and forgotten
for more than 80 years,
this first chapter of the greatest
crime in history is now being fully
revealed for the first time,
thanks to newly-discovered
aerial photographs,
and advances in
forensic detection,
finding lost victims,
uncovering the
true scale of the killing.
It began in earnest in the midst
of Hitler's invasion
of the Soviet Union in June 1941.
Atrocities grew in scale
and savagery.
Until, just six months later,
bullets gave way to gas in the first
death camps of the "Final Solution."
My name is James Bulgin.
I'm a historian and Holocaust
specialist
at the Imperial War Museum.
And this film tells a story
that has never been fully told,
of the crucial six months
that ignited the Holocaust.
If you're going to search
for the events that started
the Holocaust,
Cambridge University Library
might seem
a strange place to look.
But a researcher here thinks
he can find that start point,
using Second World War
aerial archives.
Ah, James.
Good to see you.
Right, well, let me show you
what we've been putting together.
This is a map of the German
reconnaissance and air survey
photography taken during
the Second World War.
It represents something like
1.5 million photographs taken
by the Germans, primarily
over Central and Eastern Europe.
But if we're looking for
the ramshackle beginnings
of the Holocaust, as it were,
the sort of ad hoc,
the start of it all,
one of the things that's really
clear with air photography
is that almost every action
leaves a trace.
So they were capturing the evidence
of their own crimes.
They were photographing
the evidence of their own crimes.
And there's a good example of this.
Possibly...
To me, this is the beginning of the
entire sort of horrific process.
This is Gargzdai in Lithuania.
It's literally a stone's throw
from the German border...
That's the border here?
..which is running there.
Proper border town.
A proper border town.
And this is a village where
the Jewish inhabitants...
It was about 20%, 30% Jewish
before the war.
..they would have lived in the
houses of
the two Jewish streets here,
and the synagogue was here.
And on the 22nd of June, 1941,
of course, the Germans pushed east.
And within literally 24 hours
of coming over the border,
the Germans had destroyed
the houses.
And if you look, you can see
this whole area here
was burned during that day.
It's so striking to me that these
forces come through here
from this direction.
And, I mean, literally, what,
within a few hundred metres
of the German border?
They come through and they... This
this, this incident happens here,
so quickly, so soon, so close.
Absolutely. Well, look at this.
If you look here, you can just see
Yep.
You can see it more clearly
in this other photograph,
which picks it out in snow.
And you can see it just there.
It's not part of the agricultural
landscape. It's not a path.
I think this is a trench.
We have a certain amount of sort of
testimony from the time, to sort of
indicate that this is precisely
where the Jewish men
had been marched up the street
in which they had lived,
and were then shot to death
and buried in that trench.
So I've been...I've been...I've
been circling this question.
How do we get to this huge, vast,
catastrophic act
of mass violence
and mass murder?
And it's possible, likely
that this is where it began.
It's very likely.
If Chris has found a possible
start point for the Holocaust,
why is it in the Soviet Union,
as late as 1941?
Hitler had always envisaged a world
free of his two great enemies -
Jews and Communists.
By 1940, he had conquered half
of Europe and had millions of Jews
rounded up and put in ghettos.
His intention had always
been to get rid of them entirely,
but there was no
concrete plan for how to do it.
Then, in June 1941, he set out
to destroy his other great enemy.
Bolshevik communism.
Hitler had always branded
communism a Jewish conspiracy.
So his invasion of the Soviet Union
offered the perfect opportunity
to target both enemies at once.
Gargzdai, on the border of
Soviet Lithuania and Nazi Germany,
was right on the
front line of that invasion.
The Wehrmacht, as they swept
into this whole area, were charged
with this instruction from Hitler
and the commanders of the army
that this was a war of annihilation.
They were coming through
this space to decimate it.
The order was for communism
to be eradicated.
No specific order was given
to kill Jews.
Yet, there is a monument here in
Gargzdai,
exactly where Chris's photos
showed a trench.
So, on the 24th of June, two days
after the German invasion
of the Soviet Union,
the commander in this area, a man
whose name was Bormann,
instructed that 200 Jews
should be rounded up
and that they should
be brought here...
..and they should be shot.
I tend to think of military
orders within the German army
at this period as all coming
from the top.
The people at the top telling
the people on the ground what to do.
But that's not what happens here.
And that's really important,
because actually what happens
is people on the ground, like
Bormann, take their own initiative.
Hitler has always wanted
to remove Jews from Europe,
and here these men take
the initiative to interpret
that in the most radical
way possible, to interpret
that as an instruction to murder.
And this starts
a process of mass murder
that spreads like wildfire
across this whole territory.
And the numbers grow,
and they grow and they grow.
Hitler's head of security was
SS Chief Heinrich Himmler.
Himmler had created special killing
squads, called Einsatzgruppen,
to follow in the wake of the army
and eradicate
Hitler's political enemies.
Capitalising on Bormann's
initiative, his deputy, Heydrich,
issued an instruction that any Jew
working for the communist state
must be shot.
Four Einsatzgruppen teams were ready
to carry out that order
across all newly-conquered
Soviet territory.
I'm following Einsatzgruppen A
from Gargzdai into Latvia,
in a town called Liepaja.
Here, there was another fierce
battle for control of the city.
In the aftermath of the battle,
the SS Einsatzgruppen
went in search of Hitler's enemies.
And we can see what they did
with them, in a unique piece of film
shot by a German serviceman.
In the opening of this film here,
we see a pit -
looks to be freshly dug -
and then the Einsatzgruppen soldiers
are milling around, waiting.
And there's this really hideous
sense of anticipation.
And then we see why.
We see a truck arrive and people
being loaded off the back of it.
We can see it's clearly Jews.
We know they're Jews because
they're wearing patches
on their front and their back,
and the people doing
the shooting are Germans.
But around them, we see
spectators around here.
We see members of the Navy here,
military here, and amongst
them, just people.
They're there in huge numbers.
They're smoking. They're talking.
They're clamouring to get a closer
look to see what's about to happen.
Group after group come,
and the people stay
and they watch it.
Here we can see this man just
looking into the camera, suggests
that he can see that he's being
filmed as this is happening.
He knows that this has been
captured
and that people will be
watching this moment when he's gone.
It's horr....it's horrible.
It's almost as if shooting Jews
has become a spectator sport.
What we see in this film
is where we are a few weeks
after the invasion.
So the Wehrmacht start to push
further into Soviet territory.
The Einsatzgruppen are coming
behind them, and they're finding
more and more Jewish communities
to target, and they're keeping
a running total of it as they go.
They want to be able to report
those figures,
up to Heydrich and Himmler. And
Heydrich and Himmler are saying,
"No, no, no, we want more, more,
more. Why haven't you done more?"
The commanders of the Einsatzgruppen
sometimes
get chastised for not
killing more people.
There's this impetus, this force
to constantly find
more Jews to kill.
And we see that recorded here.
We see the date.
So, 22nd of August '41, 544 people.
23rd of August '41, 7,525 people.
And now they include Judinnen and
Judenkinder - women and children.
It's only taken a few weeks from
those first murders at Gargzdai
for this to accelerate.
And there's a tally at the bottom.
At the bottom of this document here,
by the start of September 1941,
it says 47,614 people.
That's 47,614 human beings.
The Nazis wanted to do more than
just kill their victims.
They wanted to erase them
from memory.
The graves of many tens of thousands
have never been found.
And that matters to Dr Harry Jol.
So much so, he's devoted
his career to finding them.
You can't just hide the bodies.
The bodies will be found.
I'm trained as a physical
geographer, a geomorphologist,
and people such as myself and
academics and others need to say,
"Let's take our tools that we use
for other research projects,
"and let's apply them to the
Holocaust."
We need to put closure to this.
It does line up brilliantly.
Fish-smoking building with the five
smokestacks,
would be just beyond that modern
building on the other side of it.
So we can't see the pit from here,
but if we back up...
Harry works with fellow
US academic Dr Phil Reeder.
There's the pit.
And every summer for the last seven
years, they've been bringing teams
of students to Eastern Europe
in search of Holocaust victims.
We have a different perspective
on it now, but if we look up
where the two students are,
they're standing
where the crowd was standing...
Today they're looking
for the men in the film.
But then, as they run, look,
there's a lighthouse.
You can see the lighthouse
Yep, that's it.
The film gives them landmarks
they can locate
on historic air photos of the site,
allowing them to triangulate
where the men were shot,
and where they
should start their search.
But here is that road where
they would have taken people here.
And then we see
all those cars parked,
and where
they're actually dropped off.
So I think that's a good spot
for, in the video,
where they're getting
out of the trucks.
There's actually
Yeah.
And because you can see the people
up on this side, and people
up on this side, and then they would
run to the pit over here.
So the pit, to me, is right
out here in front of us.
Or at least that's the place
Yeah.
Judaic law forbids any physical
disturbance of the dead,
so they're digging with radio waves.
Ground-penetrating radar gives
them the ability to image
any large feature buried
in the earth, like a mass grave.
After a few hours, they find
what appears to be a buried trench.
But it's facing the wrong way
to be the one in the film.
It's literally
in that direction, right?
So it's almost 90 degrees off
what we were expecting,
looking at the photos and taking
Right.
So maybe means that there multiple
trenches and, you know, the video
is just one point in time,
where that particular trench
is being used.
So there could be trenches
everywhere.
After multiple passes
of the GPR,
another trench appears
beneath the tarmac...
..and this one lines up exactly
with the film.
As we take a look at this trench,
it's pretty impressive.
You know, this is 38 metres long.
You know, this is probably the first
or second time I've ever seen
Yeah, I mean,
it stands out very clearly.
I mean, from all the time spent
watching the video, it fits
very well with what we imagine
the angle would be of the trench
coming in towards the fortress.
And, you know, they were basically
brought into the trench and fell
against this side
Yep.
All the pieces of the puzzle
Yeah.
But at the same time, there's more
Most certainly.
The men in the film
have finally been found.
But it's clear there were
more people shot and
buried here
than anyone ever realised.
And further along
the same stretch of coast,
a few months after Liepaja's men,
thousands of women and children were
shot and buried in the sands.
No-one knows exactly how many,
or where their bodies lie.
It's only since the fall of the
Soviet Union that mass graves
like these, lost for over 80 years,
are being forensically
investigated for the first time.
But pioneers like Harry and Phil
are just scratching the surface
of a monumental task.
In Latvia, there are more than
70 suspected Holocaust sites.
Most are yet to be fully explored.
The same is true in neighbouring
Lithuania, with more than
200 suspected sites.
What seems extraordinary
is that there was
a single Einsatzgruppen team of
fewer than a thousand men to account
for an estimated
quarter of a million deaths
across both countries.
There's only one way
that was possible,
and it's one of the most disturbing
aspects of this entire story.
Widespread local complicity.
And there is evidence of that
happening here,
in the Lithuanian town of Alytus.
So we're just driving into the town
now, from exactly the same direction
that the Germans came in
on the 22nd of June in 1941.
So, from the very start of
the invasion, this is where
they were coming from.
And behind them were these
Einsatzgruppen soldiers,
with this task
of looking for the town's Jews.
They found them in the town
and the surrounding villages.
And according to Nazi records,
nearly 2,500 Jews were rounded up
and brought to be murdered
in the nearby forest.
Here we arrive at the end of the
town, and the very same road
driven on through the centre
of Alytus becomes...
You can see here,
it's becoming...
It's a dirt track.
And now we're in forest.
And what I find really,
really chilling,
and really unnerving,
is the fact that
it's walking distance
from the middle of the town.
But who brought the thousands of
Jews here, and who killed them?
Because the SS have fewer than a
dozen men stationed in this area.
I'm here to meet the leader
of Lithuania's
surviving Jewish community.
Faina Kukliansky believes
her grandmother was killed
in this forest...
..and she may have discovered
who the killers were.
My grandparents were
quite educated people,
and my grandmother
was a doctor in the hospital.
Then the war started, and my
grandmother was taken
from the street and imprisoned
by the local people.
She's held prisoner by local people?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And then what happened?
And what happened after that,
nobody knows.
But in any way,
she did not come back.
I asked the
Genocide Centre of Lithuania
to do the research
for me, especially on Alytus.
And it's written here clearly
that in 1941, in August,
there were mass killing
of Jewish children and women.
The victims were asked to go
into the pits, to jump
into the pits, to lie.
Then they were shot.
All the people who used to work
in the prison took part,
together with the
students of Alytus school.
So this is local school students...
Of the school.
..participating in the shooting?
Yeah.
And together, they came together
with policemen with guns.
And that confirms that - what my
uncle used to tell me -
that probably his classmates
killed his mother.
Faina, that is such a difficult
thing to comprehend.
The idea that it was
your parents' friends from school
who were some of the ones who were
actively participating
in this process. They must have
known her. They must have...
Her son was studying with
Lithuanians in a Lithuanian school.
Doesn't matter that they were
citizens of Lithuania,
that they live in the same city.
But it should be Judenrein,
"Jews should be killed."
And they were killing.
So her only crime was being Jewish?
Yeah. Well, that's enough.
Zinaida Kukliansky and more than
2,000 other Jews
were murdered here...
..not solely by Nazis,
but also by their fellow citizens.
No-one knows where
any of them are buried.
There is a cluster of monuments here
in the forest, but they were put up
relatively recently, and no-one
knows if they mark
any actual burials.
I do not know
where my grandmother is.
I would like very much to know,
where is her remains?
The sculptures, I think
it's more like art pieces,
not like the
document pieces.
And I do not see any information
here about the people.
When were they killed?
How many people were killed?
Where the women are.
Where the children are.
Who are they? We are missing that.
We just do not know
where they are.
OK.
On up.
Faina has invited Harry and Phil
down from Liepaja to try
and put that right.
But this forest holds a puzzle.
We know, in August, September 1941,
we had approximately 2,000 Jews
being executed and buried
at this site.
Flags in - red, white.
The idea that they're here is
interesting.
But where are they buried?
Are they all buried at this
location,
or are they buried at other
locations within this larger forest?
And so our job is
to try to find those sites.
The murders in Alytus's forests
troubled me for another reason.
The element of local collaboration.
And what happened here was just
the tip of the iceberg.
A truth some Lithuanians are
determined to lay bare.
I'm heading to a small town just
20km from Alytus to meet
a prominent author and Holocaust
researcher called Ruta Vanagaite.
Ruta introduces me
to 94-year-old Ona.
Hello.
Ona grew up here among the town's
Jewish population,
and she is the last known surviving
witness to their mass murder.
We go with her in my car, OK?
Perfect. It's very nice to meet you.
Is that comfortable?
She's going to show
where they used to live.
The massacre Ona witnessed
took place on
September 9th, 1941.
Not in the dark of a large forest,
but in the open fields
in front of
the house she lived in as a child.
So, what happened on that day?
There were a lot of
people being marched down the hill.
And when did you see the first
people coming past?
They heard the screaming.
A cry and screaming.
We looked through the windows only,
"What's going on?"
There were hundreds of people
being marched here.
My mum started crying, and
everybody...
The screaming was the first thing
that she heard,
before she saw anything?
And then we heard the shooting.
And who was in the column? The Jews?
They were mostly old people.
And later on, children.
And children were being shot
in another place.
And when you heard the shots,
you realised what was happening?
Yes.
This past is in my head.
This is Butrimonys, where most
of the victims lived.
Its historic heart lies empty
because, that September day,
740 Jews,
80% of the town's population,
were murdered.
The question is, who by?
The killers were Lithuanian killers
from Alytus, coming
to get rid of the Jews.
So we're talking about Lithuanians
Yes, yes.
..other Lithuanians?
But they are not...
Those, the killers were not
neighbours of those Jews, but those,
the policemen and the partisans
were neighbours of
And the
whole process throughout has been
managed by these people's
neighbours, the people doing the
Yes, the preparation was
managed by people's neighbours.
But killing was done by somebody
coming from outside.
From another
town nearby. And they're the ones
Yes.
They're the ones with their fingers
on the triggers?
And after the shooting, the
neighbours are taking the property.
Wow, that's quite a thought,
isn't it?
And then they move into
the houses around here,
presumably they take over the town,
and all the Jews are gone.
Yes. In one night.
In one night.
It's clear that the Holocaust
here was much more
than just
a series of spontaneous acts.
It was rapidly evolving
into organised ethnic cleansing
on a massive scale.
In Alytus' forest, Harry and Phil
think they may have stumbled on the
biggest mass grave
they've ever seen.
It's getting more pronounced here,
Yeah.
I mean, obviously we're walking
in a lower area
that has, what, to our left,
a mound of stuff.
Yeah, let's climb up.
Wow. I mean, that's
human-built.
Most definitely human-built.
Wow.
I mean, I mean, it's macabre,
but I mean, the idea
that where you are was where
the trench would be, and here
you would be lining up people
being shot, falling into the trench
where you are,
then burying, with that sediment
that you have, and then continuing
Right.
..for, potentially, months.
Right here.
This is a trench where you could
Yeah.
This is one that is not,
you can say, limited in...
The discovery is the result of
resolute detective work,
because the trench is nowhere near
any of the Holocaust monuments.
So we checked out the area
of the monuments.
All the data indicated, really,
that there was nothing there.
So I went back to the air photos
to try to find something
that potentially fits where a large
number of bodies could be buried.
And this is a 1944 Luftwaffe
air photograph of this area.
And if we zoom in, what's
interesting about it is this is
the road that we come
in on, and these two roads
that are coming off of it.
And this particular road
is essentially a road to nowhere.
So it's a road that goes into the
middle of a forest and stops?
And stops. I would... Yes, I would
agree with that.
But there is testimony of a family
member, soon after her father
and brother were murdered,
of visiting this site and seeing
the evidence of trenches
that were so fresh,
that they were stained with blood.
So that's what was
Yes.
That's what prompted us
to start to look
in this particular area.
And we'll have two people going on
this.
And then one person will be moving
the line.
And when, upon closer inspection, we
found a series of trenches leading
up to, at least visually,
potentially the largest trench,
and this may be a mass grave,
or a series of mass graves,
where there are tens of thousands
of people buried.
The evidence is compelling,
but it's only circumstantial.
The only way they can be sure
they've found a mass burial
is to look beneath the surface,
as they did so effectively at
Liepaja.
So what we've done at this site
is we've started collecting a grid
with ground-penetrating radar.
And now I'll show you a time slice
as we go down into the subsurface.
And remarkably, you know, we
never know what we're going to get,
we see this feature right here.
This is what we are interpreting
as a burial trench.
So, because that's anomalous
within the rest of this here,
it's clearly something distinctive.
Right, it's rectangular.
And so now we can start calculating
the dimensions of a trench here.
And it's not just here. It goes
all the way up to where this linear
feature goes,
and goes all the way down...
Right down to the end, there?
..right down to...
Almost to the end, and it does a
right-hand turn down there.
And there's... So, I mean, we can't
even start doing the calculations.
We were just looking
at the data right now.
This is a large feature.
It's huge.
All the way to there, to all the
way to there? And then...
And then we have seven to four...
seven to 11 metres here,
on the tapes here. But take a look.
All the trees have been taken out
at seven metres, and they're gone
all the way to 11 metres. All the
Walking past
every day, I wouldn't...I wouldn't
have noticed this detail.
How do you...? I wouldn't have
noticed. But now you point it out,
it seems so obvious that clearly
some...something
has happened to this earth.
Something has disrupted
the continuity of this space.
When we take... I mean,
I just take a look out here.
We thought there was going
to be nothing out here.
And we see some, you know, linear
features and things like that. I...
You know, I'm shocked when I walk
around now. I'm looking at things
and it's like, potentially,
we are sitting on thousands
of executed Jews at that site.
We could work here for
years and years...
.
Yeah.
Just the experience of being here
today has been a really stark
reminder of the point about taking
Jewish individuals into a site
like this and murdering them.
When the Nazis come into these
territories, they find, in various
different ways and in various
different capacities, different
people who are
prepared to support it,
to support it. Sometimes to allow
it to happen, but sometimes
to become directly involved,
to become the people who are...
..the people with their fingers
on the trigger.
It's so important to remember
that the Nazis were at the centre
of this, but they didn't act alone.
They required the active
participation of hundreds
of thousands of people.
They couldn't have done it
without that.
Like a lot of formerly-occupied
Eastern European nations,
modern Lithuania
has a history problem...
..because the truth of its role
in the Holocaust is finally coming
out of the ground,
and it's being
obliged to face up to it
by writers like Ruta Vanagaite.
In another 50 years, the people
will come to terms with it.
Ruta, this is something
that you've gone to great lengths
to investigate. What happened
when you did that?
My book about the Holocaust
was published.
It became a bestseller,
but the reaction was very violent.
Some people accepted it, but the
majority of my nation didn't accept
and I became, like,
enemy of the country,
because I was, like,
defaming my own people,
and they called me a Jewish whore.
So, in the end, when people
were attacking me
and spitting at me on the street,
I endured,
and in the long run, I had to leave
the country for a while until
they forgive... Not forgive me,
but forget me a little.
So speaking out came at great
personal cost to you?
I don't regret. Yes, it did,
but I don't regret.
Had I known that it would be such
a violent reaction,
I would have done it anyway because
I spoke for the victims.
This is my army,
those 200,000 murdered people.
This is my army.
They gave me a lot of strength.
And if you published the book today,
do you think you would get
the same reaction?
There won't... It wouldn't be
published. No way.
No way.
And nobody after me, nobody would
write a book about the Holocaust,
because people know that
you'll lose your friends,
and you get...you become
a public enemy.
So what is said, when this comes
up in conversation, what is said?
It is a defence
reaction. It is self-defence.
So they always say, "It wasn't us.
Yes, kind of.
I mean, I told my friend that
I am coming to see Butrimonys
with a BBC crew and she said,
"What? Are you going to tell the
whole world again,
"and defame our country and tell
everybody that, you know,
"we kill the Jews, Lithuanians
kill the Jews?"
I said, "Yes."
She said, "Why?"
I said, "Because they did."
We are bloody uneducated.
Uneducated.
The school hasn't educated us.
Our parents didn't educate us.
Our grandparents were too afraid
to speak about it.
Who could tell us about
what happened?
So, for the moment,
Holocaust subject is closed.
I don't know for how long.
80 years ago, many Lithuanians
welcomed the invading Nazis
for what seemed at the time
to be a very sound reason -
because the Nazis were liberating
them from communism.
The same nationalist response
manifested across all
the Baltic states, as well as
large parts of Ukraine.
Everywhere, nationalists fanned
the flames of anti-communism,
and the Nazis pushed the myth of
that communism
as a Jewish conspiracy.
As Hitler's invasion of the USSR
reached its fullest extent,
coercion and complicity across
territories under Nazi control
allowed the SS to initiate nearly
2,000 atrocities
across seven countries
from the Baltic to the Black Sea,
scaling up their murderous ambition
in village after village,
town after town.
As victim numbers grew, the SS
developed a system for ensuring
maximum efficiency
and minimal panic.
It began with a calming ruse.
Jews were told to assemble
with money, belongings
and warm clothing.
So they waited patiently,
expecting to be deported.
Then they were led away in groups,
often by local police, to be shot.
When the Germans took
the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv,
in late September 1941,
they claimed their biggest
Soviet city so far,
with tens of thousands of Jews.
And SS Commander Friedrich Jeckeln
saw the chance to perfect
mass murder on a monumental scale.
He issued the standard order
to the city's Jews to assemble.
Then he had them escorted
out of town by local police,
along this road,
to a 30m-deep,
half-kilometre-long
ravine called Babyn Yar.
Here, they were stripped naked,
ready for the waiting guns.
Jeckeln's plan
was carefully engineered.
Yet Dina Pronicheva survived it.
These are the belongings
of those who didn't escape.
On 29th and 30th September 1941,
Jeckeln's men shot 33,771 men,
women and children.
1,700 people an hour...
..for two days.
Babyn Yar was the biggest single
massacre of the Holocaust thus far.
Yet it would become just one
notable landmark
in a continental killing spree.
By the end of 1941, over
a million people have been killed
under the hail of bullets
that the Nazis
and their collaborators
have thrown at them.
We've got 25,000 murdered
here in Riga.
50,000 murdered here in Kaunas.
70,000 here in Ponary.
We've got, in Minsk, 30,000.
In Kyiv, 34,000.
In Kamianets-Podilskyi,
we've got 25,000.
And down in Odesa,
we've got 30,000.
Hundreds of thousands of Jews,
and thousands more between
all of these places.
But it doesn't start as a plan
of total annihilation.
That's something that evolves as
part of these operations here.
What they've been able to do
here conceptualises something
within their...within their minds,
they hadn't previously anticipated
in this way, they can kill them.
They can kill them, and they can
kill them, all of them,
across the whole territory.
But the largest number of Jews
still alive are here
in occupied Poland.
They're living in ghettos.
They're living in terrible
conditions.
They suffered appallingly
during this period, but there's
been no central plan to
annihilate them until now.
And that's what changes
at the end of 1941.
But when the Nazis set out to murder
the millions of Jews languishing
in their ghettos...
..they did not use
millions of bullets.
By the end of 1941,
after more than
a million individual murders,
mass shooting had become
unsustainable.
And when we look at these photos,
we start to understand why that is.
You can see here these young men
are facing other human beings
and killing them,
and they're seeing
what they're doing,
first-hand, face-to-face.
And what senior Nazis become really
concerned about is
the mental health of the people that
are doing it - never the people
that are being killed,
the people that are doing it -
because they know that that's
something which is going
to be impossible for them
to deal with.
They talk about it
as a burdening of the soul.
There's reports here of these
soldiers getting nausea,
nervous tension during the
massacres.
In many cases, killers suffered
vomiting attacks
or developed severe eczema
or other psychosomatic disorders.
You know, there's this sense
that this whole generation
will be corrupted forever,
irreconcilably corrupted
by what they've been asked to do
in the name of the Reich.
The other big factor was location.
Everything that's happened so far,
everything that I've looked at
has happened a long way from the
heart of Germany.
It's in this kind of...this
Wild East in the Nazi imagination.
It's a different place where
different things can happen,
different permissibility.
We see here that absolutely
indescribable scene of carnage,
and it's so public
and it's so barbaric,
and it's completely grotesque.
And even the Nazis find this
kind of scene unconscionable.
Killing hundreds of thousands,
millions of people is something
that they can accept,
but from their perspective,
as things develop, there are ways
that it should be done,
and this isn't it.
And so they need to find
a new means of mass murder
that can be scaled up,
that can be efficient,
that can be secret,
and that can be civilised,
in their mind,
much more closely aligned with
this new Germany
that Hitler wants to create.
One of the men tasked with finding
those new civilised ways of killing
was an SS major called
Herbert Lange.
And this forest, called
Kazimierz Biskupi,
in the west of Poland,
is what Lange was given
to use as a laboratory.
A team of researchers from across
Poland is attempting to find
the evidence left behind
by Lange's experiments.
Traces of mass graves
can be seen in
the Nazis' own aerial photographs.
Agnieszka Nieradko
hopes they will help locate
extraordinary events described
in eyewitness testimony.
This is part of our team.
Sebastian.
Sebastian Rozycki,
University of Technology.
Nice to meet you.
Hello.
Hello.
Institute of Geophysics,
Polish Academy of Sciences.
Nice to meet you,
too. Thank you.
So, what have we found here?
OK, so, that. This is this
This bit here?
This is, yes. And you have a
rectangular shape,
and it could be the mass grave
we are looking for.
Just where we're standing now,
Yes.
From one perspective, it can look
like just a regular mass grave
from the wartime. However,
we know from a single testimony
we have of a pre-war vet,
Polish vet, who was brought here as
a prisoner, political prisoner,
he was brought here with
30 other Poles,
forced to assist the Germans
in killing Jewish people
from a neighbouring ghetto.
So people were
brought in carts here, alive,
and the pits were already
waiting for them.
They were not shot.
They were just...
They were just covered
with quicklime
and burned inside the pit.
And so they dug pits,
put quicklime into the pits?
Brought containers with water...
Brought people inside,
brought containers with water,
and put the water inside,
what make...what made the quicklime
Boil.
With...? Boiling people in...?
Yes. Inside.
And this is what we know from this
testimony of a Polish vet.
He was here from the very
beginning until the end,
forced afterwards with other
Poles to bury the victims.
So, right where we are here,
there was a pit
in which people boiled alive?
Correct.
Do we know how long it took?
According to Sienkiewicz,
several hours.
We think that is an experimental
killing site here.
Yeah.
They were just trying out
different ways...?
Yeah, different ways
of killing people.
It's believed Lange killed 3,000
Jews here in a series of trials,
which included not
just lime pits,
but mobile gas vans.
It was just a pure technical
rehearsal of which method
would be the most effective,
efficient, as if the Nazis
were just getting ready for
the big task that was ahead,
meaning killing
the European Jewry.
So clearly there's an intention
being consolidated
from within the heart of the Nazi
hierarchy, you know, from Hitler,
from the top down, there's
this idea, this intention
is becoming more and more and more
determined towards a Final Solution,
which is about complete
annihilation.
But, of course, as an intention,
that is meaningless without the
means of achieving it.
And that's what we see here.
The actual practical means
of achieving this, taking this...
This is what it meant, this is how
I understand it.
They are testing, they are trying,
they are drawing conclusions.
Lime, quicklime is expensive,
gas in wagons was also inconvenient,
so it just drives Lange to a
natural conclusion
that it doesn't work.
"We need to think about something
This is it.
And of course, the thing is,
you know, we're talking
about experimentation, but this
is... The people that are being
experimented on are real people.
Yes.
That's something
we can't forget.
Agnieszka's team continues to
search the forest
for more of Lange's victims.
But Lange himself concluded that the
answer he was looking for
did not lie in forests.
He'd found the most efficient
killing agent was gas,
but it needed to be used in a
completely different location.
What Lange realised, in fact,
was that the future of
mass murder lay in the past...
..in an old SS prison called
Fort VII.
Here, in 1939, Lange had been part
of a project called Aktion T4.
T4 was created to purge
the Third Reich of the disabled -
what the Nazis called
"life unworthy of life".
And the key to T4's efficiency,
Lange recalled, had been to bring
the victims to the means of killing,
inside a special secure facility.
In this quiet, old fort, Lange
had improvised a whole new concept
in mass murder.
What may be the world's
first gas chamber.
People were led up here.
The doors were closed behind them.
When they were all in,
clay was put around the edges
outside to seal it off,
and then tubes were put
through openings in the door.
Through those tubes, carbon monoxide
was pumped from sealed bottles,
and people would wait outside.
When there was no more noise inside,
people outside knew that everyone
in here was dead.
By the end of 1941, it's become
clear that Hitler's ambition
is to murder every single Jew
across Nazi-occupied
and Nazi-allied Europe.
And in order to do that,
he needs the necessary scale.
And that's what this offers.
It needs development,
and it's the development of that
idea which is what leads us
to the death camps.
So these urns contain ashes
from different camps across Europe.
The one directly in
front of me is from Chelmno.
Chelmno is where Herbert Lange went
directly from here, and it became
the first death camp.
And from that, a network was
developed that led
to the murder of millions of people.
And it all started...here,
in this room.
From early 1942, millions of Jews
were taken from all across
Nazi-occupied Europe
and sent to extermination
camps like this one...
..to become no more
than ash and memory.
It took just
six months to get here
from the first bullets fired
in the east.
How did that happen?
Of course, there was Hitler's
poisonous ideology,
but it needed more than ideology.
It needed tens of thousands
of ordinary people...
..to betray a neighbour,
or turn their backs and say nothing,
to help round up and rob,
to sign an order,
pull a trigger
or open a valve.
To see others as sufficiently
different from them to be killed.