The Last Nazis: Children of the Master Race Page #2

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'Hitler had ordered that Poland be reduced to a slave nation.

'Its aristocracy, clergy and intelligentsia were to be wiped out.

'During the invasion, Alvensleben led the Selbstschutz,

'a brutal paramilitary organisation made up of Germans living in Poland.

'Alvensleben told his men,

'"You are now the master race here. Don't be soft. Be merciless.

'"Clear out everything that is non-German."'

I will never understand how they came

to do the kinds of things they did...

..convinced they would get away with it.

They were even thinking they could rule the whole world,

convinced they would get territories for the...

LAUGHING:
..for the master race.

You know. Which was to govern the world.

'Guntram is heading to the War Crimes Office

'in Bydgoszcz, the town his father used as a Polish base.

'He and researcher Chris Dziadzielwialski

'have been granted rare access to view criminal case files

'detailing Alvensleben's crimes.

'Death Valley just outside town was the site of one of them.'

Death Valley, or the Fordon Valley, as it used to be known,

was a desolate and secluded forest,

away from the city of Bydgoszcz.

The Germans were transporting the people

and they were digging ditches

and then executing people there

during the war.

As you can see, this is case after case, after case.

Some are still open, still people seeking justice.

'On one day, 7 October 1939,

'Alvensleben's men executed over 4,000 Poles

'who were piled into shallow graves and left to rot in Death Valley.'

It does mention specific names of victims.

Here it mentions Betty Israel.

Betty Levine.

In Fordon.

And Fordon again.

Then Fordon again.

Always, um...

these killings always happened

with the participation of the Selbstschutz.

And there are pictures of victims.

There's a word "Zamordowany" which is "murdered".

And there are their names.

Franciszka Rupinska, Aniela Rupinska. Sisters or related.

You see photos of people

and they were killed just for having a certain nationality.

It's easy to put away written documents,

but it's not easy to put away the photos and the pictures.

'After the war, Guntram's father was captured by the Allies but escaped.

'Like many high-ranking Nazi war criminals,

'he fled to the safe haven of Latin America,

'living out his life as a free man in Argentina.'

I remember seeing some of the statements he made after the war,

when he was far away from Germany.

One of the statements was,

"There was something at the beginning of the war, but that wasn't much."

30,000 dead people in this area in three months.

I don't know what to say to someone who makes that kind of statement.

"Oh. There was something at the beginning of the war, but that wasn't much."

'Guntram's father's role in the "racial cleansing" of Poland

'was all part of a plan to accommodate the new master race,

'clearing Eastern Europe so that Lebensborn children, like his son,

'could settle there in an expanded Reich.

'Himmler said,

'"Should we succeed in establishing this Nordic race,

'"and from this seedbed produce a race of 200 million,

'"then the world will belong to us."

'Fuelling the empire's expansion by breeding was too slow for Himmler,

'so he turned to other means to expand the Lebensborn.

'He said, "I intend to take German blood from wherever it is found

'"and steal it wherever I can."

'Himmler instructed Lebensborn operatives

'to go out and kidnap "Aryan" children from their parents

'in the occupied eastern territories.

'Folker Heinecke discovered years after the war

'that he had been abducted from the Ukraine, trafficked to Poland,

'and forced into the Lebensborn programme.'

'Children like Folker were Germanised

'and forbidden to speak their own language.

'By the end of the war, over 200,000 "Aryan" children

'had been stolen from Poland and Russia alone.

'Building a numerically and physically superior master race

'was at the core of Nazi ideology.

'Hitler had perverted Darwin's survival of the fittest

'to justify his notion that a strong race should prove a right to exist.'

GISELA:
The idea was that there is a special race, the so-called Nordic race.

Blond, blue-eyed people and a special height

are the more precious race.

And they also have a good character.

This crazy maniac idea was that the Aryan race should be,

because they were so precious, should finally reign the world, this was the idea.

SPEAKS EMPHATICALLY IN GERMAN

CROWD CHANTS:
Heil Hitler!

GUNTRAM:
Look at them closely. Look at them closely.

Many of them were crazy.

They happened to be able

to be in power.

And they assumed that... it was their right

to shape all of Germany in their own image.

'This new world order had no space for flawed imperfection

'or genetic corruption.

'After all, why should the hard-working Germans

'be burdened by the impure?

'While the Nazi propaganda machine was spreading hatred,

'Dorothea Buck was a school student living near the north German coast.'

'Hitler himself had always been an advocate of enforced sterilisation,

'arguing its case long before he came to power in 1933.

'Following a nervous breakdown in 1936,

'19-year-old Dorothea discovered how quickly Hitler's policy

'had become actual medical practice.'

'Dorothea was one of 350,000 forcibly sterilised

'because they were mentally ill, blind or even just depressed.

'Master race logic soon dictated

'that sterilisation would progress to extermination.

'In the autumn of 1939, while Hitler unleashed Nazi barbarity in Poland,

'in Germany he also sanctioned a secret euthanasia programme.

'Over the next two years, more than 70,000 genetic undesirables were murdered.

'Dozens at a time were crammed into small gas chambers,

'their brains dissected on crude tables for genetic research.'

If the Nazis would have known all the scientific results

of genetic experiments, if they knew what we know now - my God!

I had times when I felt like shivering

and, my God!

Well, we have to be very happy that they lost the war.

'After Germany's defeat in 1945,

'the world began to see the full horrors of the Nazi regime.

'Millions had been systematically wiped out.

'The Nazi experiment lay in tatters, Germany shamed and in ruins.

'Although Hitler and Himmler had committed suicide,

'over the next two years, the Nuremberg trials put 200

'of the surviving key architects of the regime to justice.'

This tribunal sentences you to ten years in prison.

'Lebensborn leaders escaped prosecution,

'claiming the programme was merely a socially progressive network for orphans and illegitimate children.

'After Nuremberg, many Lebensborn mothers, still loyal to the Reich,

'continued lying to their children about their origins.'

GISELA:
I felt it.

I felt that there was something...

It was always since I was a child, something was wrong with me.

My story is that I was born in a Lebensborn home in Oslo.

My mother was employee of the Lebensborn

and she was still working in Oslo.

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