Video Description

On 20 November 1945, the trial of the top brass of the Third Reich, including Göring, opened in Nuremberg, the city where the anti-Jewish laws were drawn up in 1935. One year later, the international military tribunal sentenced 12 of the accused to death, and a further seven to jail terms. Throughout the hearings, there was very little mention of the Holocaust; a handful of Jewish witness were called on to testify, and only Hans Frank, the Governor General of Poland, acknowledged the persecution which the Jews had suffered. But for post-war France, Britain and Germany, there was no wish to hold another trial. It was the American authorities who would bring to justice the senior figures, doctors and diplomats who were involved in the Holocaust. A young lawyer aged 27, Ben Ferencz, was entrusted with finding documents which could substantiate the accusations in 12 new trials, despite the fact that the Nazis had destroyed nearly all their archives at the end of the war. He managed to find hundreds of documents stored in a cottage in the forest of Dahlem, notably four notebooks containing reports from the Eastern Front. These contained detailed accounts of mass shootings and massacres perpetrated against Ukrainian Jews in the Baltic countries between 1941 and 1944 by the Einsatzgruppen mobile death squads. Ferencz managed to convince his superiors to hold a trial, at which he was prosecutor. He charged 24 officials with war crimes and crimes against humanity, fully aware that this was a drop in the ocean compared to the scale of the mass killings. But this first trial dealing exclusively with genocide went totally unnoticed. Also charged were the doctors who carried out pseudo-medical experiments on deportees, and the management of IG Farben, who unfailingly backed the Nazis when heading the German chemical giant, producer of the notorious Zyklon B, the cyanide-based poison used in the gas chambers, and whose factories had used Jewish deportees as labor. But this ongoing “denazification” was out of step with the looming Cold War and the reconstruction of Germany. To rebuild an administration, and to make the university system and judicial institutions operational once again, those in charge turned to men of experience, those who had held posts in the administration of the Third Reich. In Poland, the return of the survivors was no easy matter. Only a tiny minority made this choice in the months following their liberation. They found their homes had been occupied by others, so they gathered in the country’s major cities. That is, until the pogrom of Kielce. On 4 July 1946, in the wake of rumors about the kidnapping of Christian children by former deportees, 40 Jews were killed. Half the Jews who survived left Poland in the three months that followed. The Polish government turned the Auschwitz camp into a place of commemoration dedicated to the memory of the Polish victims of the Second World War. Documentary: Annihilation EP7 Autposy of a Mass Murder (2016) Directed by: William Karel & Blanche Finger Production: ZADIG PRODUCTIONS #fulldocumentary #documentary #history #thirdreich #ww2 #german #holocaust #war