Krieg und Holocaust – Der deutsche Abgrund - Season 1

In 1940, Adolf Hitler forces the defeated French to sign their surrender in a train carriage - the Germans had experienced the same humiliation at the end of the First World War. 

By 1923 the Nazi Party had grown to around 55,000 members, with Adolf Hitler at its head, presenting himself as the strong-man of the right-extremist scene, but what was he up to? 

At the end of the 1920s, the "Rural People's Movement" demonstrated against social decline. Their anger and bitterness was exploited by the NSDAP and Hitler. 

Recently elected Reich Chancellor, Adolf Hitler clamps down on all opposition. In less than two years he transforms Germany from a democracy to a dictatorship. 

Hitler's anti-Jewish policy is supported by millions of Germans. Openly and publicly, Jews are discriminated against, disenfranchised, and persecuted.

In 1939 the German army invaded Poland. They are closely followed by SS task forces, which have only one mission: to exterminate the Polish intelligentsia. Thousands are murdered. 

On June 22, 1941, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. In the shadow of war, German soldiers commit mass-exterminations of the local Jewish populations.

In 1942, occupied Poland witnessed the beginning of "Operation Reinhardt". Within a matter of months, more than two million Jews were murdered up for one purpose: genocide.

The defeat at Stalingrad was the turning point of the war and convinced the Nazi leadership to intensify their terror and propaganda campaigns.

While the war ended in 1945, the violence did not. The survivors of Nazi atrocities as well as the victors wanted to hold the Germans to account. But who was to blame?