The World at War

Down this road on a summer day in 1944,

the soldiers came.

Nobody lives here now.

They stayed only a few hours.

When they had gone,

a community, which had lived for a thousand years, was dead.

This is Oradour-sur-Glane in France.

The day the soldiers came the people were gathered together.

The men were taken to garages and barns,

the women and children were led down this road,

and they were driven into this church.

Here, they heard the firing as their men were shot.

Then they were killed, too.

A few weeks later many of those who had done the killing

were themselves dead in battle.

They never rebuilt Oradour. lts ruins are a memorial.

lts martyrdom stands for thousand upon thousand of other martyrdoms

in Poland, in Russia,

in Burma, in China,

in a world at war.

Germany, 1933.

A huge, blind excitement fills the streets.

The National Socialists have come to power

in a land tortured by unemployment,

embittered by loss of territory, demoralised by political weakness.

Perhaps this will be the new beginning.

Most people think the Nazis a little absurd here,

too obsessive there.

But perhaps the time for thinking is over.

Adolf Hitler did not seize power.

He was offered it just as his voting strength was declining.

The politicians who made Hitler chancellor argued,

"We are hiring him."

Their figurehead was the ancient President von Hindenburg.

Communists and Socialists tried to take Hitler coolly.

"This wouldn't last," they said.

ConserVative anti-Nazis took comfort from the fact

that their old war leader Hindenburg, still head of state,

was known to despise the vulgar little corporal.

So, fertig?

Na, jetzt wird es fertig sein.

With mock solemnity, Hitler and his lieutenants

walked to the ceremonial opening of parliament.

The party's strength had been built up by revolutionary violence.

They had never imagined that they could take office legally.

When the old Reichstag building was mysteriously gutted by fire,

Hitler seized his chance to suspend all civil liberties.

His followers could hardly believe their luck.

The old Hindenburg, the symbol of apparent continuity, presided

as they turned office into power by acts of sham legality.

ln March, when the Reichstag voted

to allow Hitler to govern without parliament,

Hindenburg made no comment.

The legal chancellor marched irresistibly

into the role of the legal dictator.

Hitler proclaimed the new Germany,

and meant it to last a thousand years.

The new Germany began to round up its enemies -

Communists, Socialists, impertinent journagists, even Reichstag deputies.

Antreten zum Arbeiten.

At Oranienburg concentration camp, just north of Bergin,

conditions were at first crude rather than brutal.

At this time the camps were run by the Sturmabteilungen - the SA.

They bullied more than they murdered.

From the first moment, Hitler unleashed his promised campaign against the Jews.

The SA organised boycotts of Jewish-owned shops.

The real point was to encourage the German people

to think and act anti-Semitic as a matter of course.

The outside world was horrified,

but there were those, including many German Jews,

who thought the anti-Jewish campaign the work of Nazi extremists -

something Herr Hitler would put a stop to when he felt more secure.

There was to be a cultural revolution, too.

German culture would be purged of the Jewish-Bolshevist taint.

Books flew into the fire.

Many of those who flung them were students and teachers.

And, as the sparks rose, the intellectuals fled -

writers and scientists -

to give their talents to Western Europe and America.

A hundred years before the German-Jewish poet, Heine,

whose books now went into the fire, had warned:

"Where one burns books, there one eventually burns people."

Some of Hitler's most earnest followers found new ways to show loyalty -

they married or got married all over again under a Nazi ritual.

The Nazis had mass support among the unemployed,

but less among the organised workers.

The leff wing of the party

wanted to start a workers' movement inside the factories,

but Hitler took a simpler course.

He granted the unions the May Day holiday they had always demanded.

Next day he abolished the unions.

Nazi supporters were basically middle class -

shopkeepers ruined by the Depression, clerks who had lost their savings,

craffsmen squeezed out by mass production.

These were Hitler's worshippers.

To this army of those who had come down in the world

belonged the small farmers, the peasants.

Hitler had enlisted them during the Depression.

Now he told them that their blood and soil were Germany's treasure.

He passed laws to give them safe possession of their fields

and he gave them bread.

The Treaty of Versailles in 1919

had bitten deep into Germany's frontiers.

Alsace-Lorraine and the Saarland had been lost.

East Prussia was cut off by the new Polish state,

Silesia cut in two,

Danzig, a League of Nations city.

To every patriot, Germany could not be free while Versailles stood.

Hitler alone seemed the saviour foretold by the monuments of the border:

"Never, German, forget what blind hate stole from thee."

"Wait for the hour that avenges the bleeding frontier crime."

Abroad there were some who admired the way

this new Germany stood up for herself.

ln America we've had reports against your new government,

and, in most cases, this has caused hasty demonstrations everywhere.

l can now say to you that the American people today realise

these stories are untrue and without foundation.

l find that there's a new, fresh vitality here in Germany

under your great leader and chancellor, Adolf Hitler,

of whom l'm a great admirer.

The new Germany will live

for you have the best centralised government in the world today.

ln fact, the new Germany

was a bundle of different interests and grievances

held together by the strap of the National Socialist Party,

and the buckle of the strap was Hitler.

Well, really, it was the only party that promised to get us out of the hole.

And their idea was principally

that that would only be possible

if we developed as a nation a team spirit, a solidarity,

and pulling all on the same rope,

instead of quarrelling about petty differences of opinions

in foreign politics and social politics, and so on and so forth.

What did he promise?

Work and bread for the masses,

for the millions of workers who were unemployed and hungry at that time.

Nowadays, in our prosperous society,

work and bread doesn't mean anything any more,

but then it was an absolutely basic need.

And this promise, which wouldn't make any sense today,

then it sounded like a promise of paradise.

All this seemed ideal ground for a prophet to say:

"l will lead you to the promised land. l will deliver you from evil."

Anyone who said that would be greeted with enthusiasm.

Of course, there were people who said this is a false prophet,

but who was to know whether they were right or not?

At that time no one did.

Christmas, 1933.

One year of Hitler's Reich.

Peace on earth, goodwill towards men.

The concentration camps were full, parliament a rubber stamp,

political parties and trade unions abolished,

the Jews out of the civil serVice, a free press strangled,

personal liberties destroyed.

Germany lived under a permanent state of emergency.

Adolf Hitler's state was all-powerful, even almighty.

But he still felt threatened.

He feared his old conserVative rivals.

He feared the army.

And he feared those sections of his own party which were still revolutionary,

like the leadership of the storm troopers.

The army, too, hated the SA.

Hitler saw how he could conciliate the generals and clear his own path.

The head of the SA was one of his oldest comrades, Ernst Röhm.

On June 30, 1934, Röhm was arrested...

..and shot.

His SA commanders and more than 100 others

dragged from their beds were shot, too.

Murder exploded across Germany.

The killers were the new force in Germany -

the SS, Hitler's bodyguard -

which now became his personal instrument of terror.

Göring gave a press conference at the propaganda ministry.

Goebbels was the minister of propaganda,

but Goebbels had wisely stayed with Hitler at that time

because Göring hated his guts

and might have taken the opportunity to bump him off if he'd been in Berlin.

Göring had that press conference for the foreign press.

Before that the telephones had been cut off to all foreign countries.

Göring came striding in and said,

"l know you boys always like to have a story," -

he used the English word - "l've got a story for you all right,"

and described how that previous night and that morning

he and Hitler had acted against dissident forces,

both of the Right and of the Leff,

that Röhm had been shot,

that a second revolution had been quashed.

He also made a rather obscure reference to General von Schleicher

who had preceded Hitler as German chancellor.

Then he leff the room, came back again in a few seconds and said:

"lt's been suggested that l didn't make myself quite clear

about General von Schleicher."

"He was shot dead this morning while resisting arrest."

30 June, '34, was a very, very important day,

because it became obvious that this government, as a government,

started to become a murderer.

You remember that they shot a great number of people

without any bringing them to court.

They just killed them.