The video’s title sequence began as stirring violins set the mood. The title ‘THE WORLD AT WAR’ appeared across the screen, and successive black and white images of forlorn and devastated faces were burned away by roaring flames. Already ill at ease, Ritter was suddenly struck by a cold and irrational fear, although he couldn’t explain why.
The title sequence had been intended to strike an emotional chord in those of a time when the war was long past, and where television was an accepted norm: the effect upon someone unaccustomed to audio-visual imagery of such standards of production was inevitably far greater. The episode’s title appeared in stark, white lettering that was superimposed over the continuing images: ‘GENOCIDE’; and Ritter was gripped with an instinctive feeling that he desperately didn’t want to see what was to come from this strange motion picture displayed on that equally-strange television screen… yet something within compelled him to keep watching.
The documentary began innocuously enough with some stock history of Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler that Ritter suspected he may have already seen… and with an interview with Karl Wolff, who would become Himmler’s SS adjutant. The black and white footage possessed an eerie quality that matched the strange tone of Laurence Olivier’s rich narration. Included in it were excerpts of newsreels that Ritter actually remembered, yet things that had seemed ‘normal’ as they’d been presented at the cinemas suddenly acquired a feeling of incredibly abnormality: the ideas of a Nazi ‘superman’ and pure Aryan race somehow suddenly appeared almost laughable, and at the same time quite unsettling.
The camp at Dachau was mentioned, as was the motto over its gates: ‘arbeit macht frei’ (‘work makes you free’). It was a phrase that suddenly seemed insidious and very frightening. So were the developing, underlying themes of the Nazis ideals… their hatred of the Jews. Ritter couldn’t understand how he’d not seen the injustice of it all as the video brought the memories of those times flooding back, and he now recalled it all quite clearly. November 1938 - Kristallnacht — and Ritter remembered that too… remembered the Jewish males being marched away in the days that followed from the areas around his home in Köln.
The video commenced with a brief history of the opening stages of the war, but the images shown were of events quite different to Ritter’s recollections of the Polish Campaign, although that was hardly surprising. It would’ve been unlikely for front line combat pilots to encounter what was occurring below on the ground, and his stomach churned at the recounted tales of beatings and persecutions of Jews and other ‘undesirables’ behind the lines in Occupied Poland.
‘The Jews started the war…” Those familiar words were spoken, and Ritter remembered many he knew saying the same thing in the early days.
What army did the Jews have? What air force? Yet why had he never before questioned such a preposterous idea? He knew nothing of the Warsaw Ghetto where thousands of Jews were herded and imprisoned during 1940 and forced to live in terrible, squalid conditions. Narration by witnesses of the times gave more weight to the powerful scenes as someone lay starving in the street, perhaps already dead, and the sight of skin drawn taut over fragile bones that were far too visible made the pilot’s stomach turn.
As the recounting of ‘history’ passed the present day, Ritter was astounded by the possibility of war with the Soviet Union. He was at a loss to understand how this could happen, when all the newsreels continued to declare to all and sundry that Germany and Russia were allies. Once again, a common theme was present: an obsession with the Jews. Three million in Poland, the narrator said, and another five million in Russia following this unbelievable invasion. The SS officer who’d spoken earlier asked the rhetoric question of how they should deal with ‘all these Jews’. The simplicity of it all chilled the German pilot to the core as Olivier suddenly revealed the final answer: ‘kill them all…’
Einsatzgruppen… where had Ritter heard that title… had he heard it before? They were ‘Special groups’, created for the sole purpose of disposing of the Jews, and from that point on the story became more and more horrific. Accounts of Jews rounded up and pleading with their captors as they were shot and dumped in open graves… often falling on the bodies of those who had preceded them… friends… relatives… family. ‘A pit full of blood…’ one survivor recounted, and footage of the mass graves and the executions went on and on.
Ritter could almost believe the so ludicrously German pragmatism of it all as a witness told how Himmler decided shooting just wasn’t fast enough or economical enough: that another, more efficient method should be devised to carry out this ‘Final Solution’. Reinhard Heydrich, Himmler’s insidious and widely-feared subordinate was mentioned, and at a conference at Wansee in 1942, they decided to instead use a deadly gas called Zyklon-B.
The horrific stories continued of the transportation of prisoners in railway cattle cars to these camps, where they were forced into ‘shower’ blocks by the thousand under the pretence of ‘delousing’ and stand huddled together, terrified, until the gas would come on and the screaming began. Silent tears began to roll slowly down Ritter’s face as a witness told of the removal the bodies — of ‘pyramid’-like piles clustered at the centre of the rooms, where hysterical, terrified victims had screamed and clawed for escape that would never come. His body was racked by an uncontrollable shudder, tense fingers clutching nervously at the arms of the chair, and his mind could barely conceive of the magnitude of such atrocities… yet there was no recourse other than to believe it all. The footage was too real — he couldn’t imagine that it could possibly be false.
There was worse still to come. The reality of what was happening was finally revealed to the world as the Red Army pushed into Germany in 1945, poised to crush the Wehrmacht in the east. Only as the Russians ‘liberated’ camp after camp could the true obscenity of it all be comprehended… if that were even possible. Bulldozers pushed emaciated, shattered and mostly-naked bodies into mass graves dozens at a time… the remnants of the Nazis’ handiwork as the SS deserted the camps and retreated westward. Men, women and children alike… all were subject to the mass exterminations… and even those found alive by the liberating forces were often too weak to survive, eventually dying of starvation or exhaustion. In the end the images were too much.
“Enough,” Oberstleutnant Carl Ritter croaked weakly, his mouth dry as Thorne leaned in to move the mouse once more and stopped the disc. The pilot’s face was drawn and ashen. The scenes it had shown…! The images…! Death of a scale he’d never experienced, and a level of extermination that made Guernica and the entire Spanish War seem like nothing.
“How many…?” He asked finally, his eyes staring away and to the floor. “How many…?”
“Nearly six million,” Thorne said softly, also visibly shaken by what they’d seen, despite having seen it before. “Probably more than that when you include the disabled, homosexuals, political prisoners and other ‘undesirables’ as well… they had dozens of those camps running: Auschwitz, Sachsenhausen, Bergen-Belsen and many others…”