How the Holocaust Began

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.