The British 11th Armoured Division reaches Belsen, north Germany. Deep in the woods, they approach a German camp. Bergen-Belsen is the first concentration camp encountered by British troops. British soldiers are confronted with both the victims and the perpetrators of these crimes. Rise of the Nazis s4e1: The Manhunt I, BBC 2023
After the Second World War some of the worst war criminals in history go to ground. Many change their names and the most wanted flee to South America. Others claim the Holocaust never happened or had nothing to do with them. ibid.
In the dock will be Goering, Hitler’s right-hand-man, Albert Speer … and Ribbentrop, Hitler’s foreign minister. In total 22 of the highest-ranking Nazis who will face charges of war crimes, crimes against the peace, conspiracy and crimes against humanity. ibid.
By 1949 the Allies had convicted 5,025 Nazi criminals in the western occupied zone, and subsequently carried out 486 death sentences. ibid.
The Nazis allow a film to be made that documents the infrastructure behind the holocaust. Recorded without sound, it provides a glimpse of their worst crime. Rise of the Nazis s4e2: The Manhunt: The Ratline, BBC 2023
The man who organised this transport network was SS Officer Adolf Eichmann. After the war Eichmann was still at large. ibid.
‘Eichmann is one of the most terrifying Nazis. Eichmann encapsulates the essence of Nazism.’ ibid. Dr Christian Soeschel
He obtains false papers … He manages to escape and goes into hiding. ibid.
Eichmann is just one of thousands of wanted Nazis who remain at large. But the hunt is on to find them. ibid.
‘Barbie: He is on his own. He has no place to go. His greatest fear is getting caught and being executed for his crimes. And that is a real possibility.’ ibid. historian
The Americans find Barbie a new home. And offer him a generous monthly salary. ibid.
Armed with false papers, Klaus Barbie and his family travel along the secret escape route the Ratline, used to smuggle wanted Nazis out of danger. ibid.
Draganovic tells Barbie he has already helped many wanted war criminals flee to South America in the hope that the Nazis may one day return and rise again. ibid.
1968: West Germany is now a prosperous democracy … Many former Nazis who have returned to positions of power in Germany … against the backdrop of a world that wants to forget and move on. Rise of the Nazis s4e3: The Manhunt: The Reckoning
But there are a handful of people still determined to bring the thousands of Nazi war criminals still at large to justice. ibid.
One high-ranking Nazi is about to be released from a 20-year prison sentence: Albert Speer. ibid.
Against a backdrop of collective amnesia in West Germany, former Nazis are doing very well for themselves. ibid.
November 1942: An armada of 200 British and American ships appears off the coast of north Africa. Operation Torch is about to begin. Right before the eyes of the local people, 100,000 men pour on to the beaches of Morocco and Algeria. It is this singular theatre, north Africa, that between 1940 and 1943 was written a famous chapter of the Second World War, the Desert War. Hitler’s Disastrous Desert War, National Geographic 2022
The Desert War, the war that nobody wanted, was to turn the World War upside down. ibid.
Rommel is waging an overly ambitious war without a care for one decisive element: fuel and supplies. ibid.
Britain fought the Second World War with a bunch of ordinary office workers, grocers, bakers and housewives. Tony Robinson’s History of Britain IV: World War II
A memorial next to Bethnal Green tube station, erected surprisingly recently in 2017, marks the worst British civilian disaster in World War II: 173 people were crushed to death. ibid.
They [Allies] forged a coherent memory of the War. It is the memory of the Good War which we have lived with for fifty years. But in the process the victors buried those fragments that didn’t fit. Adam Curtis, The Living Dead I: On the Desperate Edge of Now, BBC 1995
The Allies selected certain memories: they used them to build the official version of the Good War. ibid.
The Nazis’ project was far more than a simple reawakening of history. Their aim was to use the power of the past to transform those they governed into new and better people. ibid.
We live, said one, on the desperate edge of now. ibid.
The Allies forged a simple, powerful story. But the memories and experiences that didn’t fit the story were quietly discarded and forgotten. ibid.
The Germans called it Zero Hour: the destruction of all belief in the past. ibid.
What frightened Jackson [prosecutor] was the link between the political ideas that Goering was explaining to the court and the terrible crimes the Nazis had committed. ibid.
What was buried at Nuremberg was any idea of examining why Nazism had happened in the first place. What the social and political forces were that had led ordinary people to such savagery. ibid.
The students were convinced that what they had uncovered was a hidden continuity with the Third Reich. Beneath the facade of a liberal democratic country the fascist state had continued run by the very same men and women who had run Hitler’s regime. ibid.
They were known as the Red Army faction. The Red Army faction embarked on a series of bombings and shoot-outs with the police. Their strategy was to use violence to provoke the state into exposing its true identity. But as the violence escalated, some of the terrorist leaders began to have doubts. ibid.
The Second World War revealed how frightening and deceptive human beings could be particularly in Nazi Germany. Adam Curtis, Can’t Get You Out of My Head II: Shooting and Fucking are the Same Thing, BBCiplayer 2021