How the Holocaust Began (2023)

[bunniefuu]

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 m*rder.

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 m*rder*d

in thousands of random killings

that erupted

all across Eastern Europe...

..in a holocaust of b*ll*ts.

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 k*lling.

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,

b*ll*ts 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 w*r 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 w*r

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 w*r.

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 w*r.

..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 m*rder?

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 n*zi 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 w*r 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 k*ll 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 m*rder.

And this starts

a process of mass m*rder

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 k*lling

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 sh**ting 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 sh**ting 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

k*lling more people.

There's this impetus, this force

to constantly find

more Jews to k*ll.

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 k*ll 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 n*zi records,

nearly 2,500 Jews were rounded up

and brought to be m*rder*d

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 k*lled 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 k*lled

in this forest...

..and she may have discovered

who the K*llers were.

My grandparents were

quite educated people,

and my grandmother

was a doctor in the hospital.

Then the w*r 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 k*lling

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 sh**ting?

Yeah.

And together, they came together

with policemen with g*ns.

And that confirms that - what my

uncle used to tell me -

that probably his classmates

k*lled 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 k*lled."

And they were k*lling.

So her only crime was being Jewish?

Yeah. Well, that's enough.

Zinaida Kukliansky and more than

2,000 other Jews

were m*rder*d 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 k*lled?

How many people were k*lled?

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 ex*cuted 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 m*rder.

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 m*ssacre 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 sh**ting.

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 m*rder*d.

The question is, who by?

The K*llers were Lithuanian K*llers

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 K*llers 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 k*lling 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 sh**ting, 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 m*rder*d,

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 ex*cuted 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 wh*re.

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 m*rder*d 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 k*ll the Jews, Lithuanians

k*ll 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 n*zi 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 m*rder 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 g*ns.

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

m*ssacre of the Holocaust thus far.

Yet it would become just one

notable landmark

in a continental k*lling spree.

By the end of 1941, over

a million people have been k*lled

under the hail of b*ll*ts

that the Nazis

and their collaborators

have thrown at them.

We've got 25,000 m*rder*d

here in Riga.

50,000 m*rder*d 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 k*ll them.

They can k*ll them, and they can

k*ll 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 m*rder

the millions of Jews languishing

in their ghettos...

..they did not use

millions of b*ll*ts.

By the end of 1941,

after more than

a million individual murders,

mass sh**ting 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 k*lling 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 k*lled,

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, K*llers 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 n*zi 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.

k*lling 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 m*rder

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 k*lling

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-w*r 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 k*lling 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

k*lling site here.

Yeah.

They were just trying out

different ways...?

Yeah, different ways

of k*lling people.

It's believed Lange k*lled 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 k*lling

the European Jewry.

So clearly there's an intention

being consolidated

from within the heart of the n*zi

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

k*lling 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 m*rder 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 k*lling,

inside a special secure facility.

In this quiet, old fort, Lange

had improvised a whole new concept

in mass m*rder.

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 m*rder every single Jew

across n*zi-occupied

and n*zi-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 m*rder of millions of people.

And it all started...here,

in this room.

From early 1942, millions of Jews

were taken from all across

n*zi-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 b*ll*ts 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 k*lled.