(tender music) ♪ (narrator) Germany, 1937.

A young woman with a passion for home movies is filming herself doing gymnastics.

♪ She is full of hope for the future, convinced her beloved Germany is on the rise again.

♪ The country has a leader who promises to build an empire that will last 1,000 years.

But this filmmaker has good reason to be proud.

This is Eva Braun, companion of the German Führer.

(ominous music) ♪ Her viewfinder is trained on her idol, Adolf Hitler, captured as the public never saw him: Relaxed, informal, and playing uncle.

♪ But Braun and Hitler were not alone in their love of home movies.

Across Germany, thousands record every aspect of their lives, convinced they are filming the dawn of a new age.

♪ Others record their thoughts in diaries.

♪ Taken together, ink and 8-millimeter film provide an unprecedented insight into life in the Third Reich.

♪ The footage and diary extracts come from civilians, but also from Nazi groups, firemen, and soldiers.

They all play a role capturing the new Reich.

♪ We know how the story ends, with Hitler and Eva Braun dead and Europe in flames.

As Germany lay vanquished, much of this footage was hidden away, a reminder of a time most want to forget.

♪ But over the years, as the war generation has died, their descendants are finding the footage, revealing a candid insight into life under the swastika.

♪ This footage has the power to surprise and shock, while also showing how ordinary Germans experienced Hitler's war.

But it also poses a question: What did the ordinary Germans know about the things being done in their name?

This is more than just an archive of domestic amateur film.

It depicts life round the edges of the darkest moral catastrophe the world has ever known.

♪ (soft music) ♪ This is Klaus Hopper from Perleberg, 100 miles northeast of Berlin, play fighting with his father Albert.

♪ Like thousands of others, Albert Hopper loves to make home movies, meticulously documenting Klaus's childhood.

♪ After four years of Nazi rule, the regime has spread its tentacles into every aspect of people's lives.

For Klaus and his friends, the pathway into National Socialism is no longer left to chance.

♪ As he reaches his 10th birthday, it's time for him to join the children's section of the Hitler Youth.

♪ (James) Amazing how much they look like Boy Scouts, which of course is really what the Hitler Youth was in many ways.

Sort of adopted, put under the Nazi banner.

Of course what you're getting with the Hitler Youth is massive indoctrination as well.

But you can see why a lot of these young lads found camps, and Hitler Youth and were having really good fun.

I mean, what's not to like when you're a young kid?

Going on hikes, camping, cooking outdoors.

I mean, looks quite fun to me.

Well, Hitler Youth is really important because of course what you're doing is you're getting children at a young, impressionable age, and you're starting to kind of indoctrinate them, sort of brainwash them effectively.

That is what Hitler Youth is doing.

You're giving them enough fun, enough entertainment, camping, cooking, hiking, all that kind of sort of sports and so on, which is very attractive, but at the same time you're also hammering home the Nazi message.

You know, racial supremacy, anti-Semitism, militarism, and so on.

And so, by the time that they get to a later age, they're already primed, and ready, and plump for-- for the cooking effectively.

(pensive music) ♪ (narrator) The Hitler Youth has been around since 1926, but in 1936, membership for boys like Klaus became mandatory.

♪ (Nora) I think if I had a son I would--I would be even more struck emotionally by this.

But um, yeah, it's deeply, deeply disturbing when--when you start a family, and then a political system is in place that, you know, was--was wanted by the majority of the Germans, but that really takes your child away from you um, ideologically.

It must be very--it must've been very disturbing to some parents, if they had a more critical mindset to see their child come home, say things that, you know, were completely different from your own ideology.

(tense music) ♪ (narrator) Over the next five years, Albert's films document Klaus becoming a teenager and a National Socialist, as laid out in chilling detail by Hitler himself.

♪ ("Hitler") Our youth shall learn nothing but to think and act German.

♪ A boy or girl enters into our organizations at age 10.

♪ Then, moves on from the Junior Hitler Youth to the Hitler Youth four years later.

♪ We will keep them for another four years, and then put them into the party or the labor front, the assault division or the SS.

♪ They shall never be free again for the rest of their lives.

♪ (narrator) In 1943, Klaus, just 15 years old, will be sent to man an anti-aircraft battery 100 miles from home.

♪ (ambient music) ♪ The Nazis came to power promising national rebirth, and many Germans are thrilled.

♪ New Autobahns snake their way across the country, a potent symbol of a modern nation.

♪ Hitler yearns for a fairy tale world of healthy Aryans bound together by blood and soil.

♪ But there is an unrelenting hatred directed at one particular group: Germany's Jews.

♪ The process of demonizing the Jews started immediately after the party came to power in 1933.

♪ (speaking German) The Nazis have one brutal idea that they repeat again and again a hypnotic repetition: "The Jews are Germany's misfortune."

(speaking German) ♪ (chanting) ♪ Germans grow accustomed to the sight of paramilitary brown-shirt thugs harassing Jews and vandalizing their businesses.

♪ Again and again we see how few aspects of German life survive untainted by an incessant drum beat of hatred for the Jews.

♪ The Nazis have taken control of the carnival associations.

This is 1938.

As the camera pans past the floats, one image leaps out: Grotesque caricatures of the Jewish population, followed by someone literally sweeping them from the streets.

♪ Well, anti-Semitism is quite deeply entrenched throughout Europe at this time.

It's not something that's peculiar to the Nazis, but it is a very strong part of their ideology.

But how that anti-Semitism manifests itself isn't immediately apparent, and it's not until the Nazis start to actually get power that they start to implement anti-Semitic laws.

The Nazis proceeded by passing just hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of laws, and edicts, and regulations, and there's a book was published that compiles them all, just the anti-Jewish laws, and it comes to 5 or 600 pages.

So, there are just hundreds and hundreds of them, and they were--very many of them were so incredibly mean spirited to attack the dignity of people by, you know, not letting them own cats, or taking the radio away, or making them give up fur coats or whatever.

These very, very petty, horrible, spiteful attacks.

♪ (narrator) For individual Jews living in Germany, it is a bewildering experience to be on the receiving end of such state-sponsored malice.

One such victim is Jewish professor Victor Klemperer.

Well, Victor Klemperer was an amazing figure.

He was born in Germany Jewish.

Very, very well traveled, well read.

Tremendously sophisticated.

He married a non-Jewish woman.

He had a job at the university in Dresden, and he was--he was injured in World War I.

In some cases, and very specific cases, if you were a World War I veteran, particularly if you'd received a decoration, you were sometimes treated a little bit better than--than other Jews who hadn't fought in World War I.

He becomes one of the most prolific but also amazing diarists of the rise of Hitler, of the rise of fascism, and of the Third Reich, and how it was to experience and witness the increasing persecution of the Jews in Germany, for example, but many, many other things besides.

(somber music) ♪ (narrator) Klemperer's diaries reveal what it is to be an outcast in your own society.

Life ruined by endless petty rules.

He writes with a finely tuned ear for the language of Nazi cant.

("Klemperer") The healthy sense of justice of every German was on display yesterday in a decree from Himmler with immediate effect: The confiscation of all driving licenses from all Jews.

Justification: Jews are unreliable, and therefore should not be permitted to sit behind the wheel.

Also, allowing them to drive offends the German community of road users, especially as Jews presumptuously make use of the Reich highways built by German workers' hands.

♪ (narrator) For those now under Nazi control, the future is uncertain.

(soft guitar music) For two Jewish families in Czechoslovakia, 1939 will be one last summer of normality before the world turns upside down.

♪ This is the Lederer family from Prague.

♪ They're on holiday with their friends, the Brooks.

♪ The father's name is Robert, his wife is Rose.

Their two children are Nina and Peter.

♪ The children can have no idea of the potential danger their family now faces.

♪ They're enjoying the sunshine.

♪ The adults seem relaxed.

♪ Or perhaps they're simply unable to fathom the magnitude of the horrors that lie over the horizon.

♪ (soft music) ♪ Another filmmaker now back in uniform is Adolf Dussel.

♪ Dussel fought in the First World War.

♪ Now 41, he is back in uniform as an infantry medic.

♪ His camera captures a vivid sense of life during the winter of 1939.

♪ For men of Dussel's generation, the return to the army brings back many ghosts from 20 years earlier.

♪ The Germans make their move on the 10th of May, 1940.

♪ This is the second time he has made the invader's journey, but now he has a camera to capture it forever.

♪ What he sees is a far cry from the picture we usually have of the fabled German blitzkrieg.

♪ (James) Germans on horses, you see, you can tell this is a private video, because if it was a public video, Germans wouldn't allow you to see on Die Wochenschau or on newsreels sent out around the world.

You wouldn't be seeing German troops on horses.

You'd see them on machinery.

(dramatic music) And bicycles.

Germans had lots of bicycles in France, and lots of horses, lots of surrendered troops.

♪ (Professor Stargardt) So, this is a series of home movie footage from the campaign in France in the summer of 1940.

What's interesting about it is the sense of orderliness as the Germans march in, and also orderliness as the French surrender.

(James) French prisoners of war here.

Their ridiculous long wool coats, which are just so ill suited for the job, left over from the First World War.

♪ (Professor Stargardt) They've hardly even got their uniforms dusty, and it conjures up a sense of how easy the victory was in 1940.

For somebody like Adolf Dussel, that really mattered, because they'd gone through the static trench warfare of the Western Front through the First World War, where they'd got nowhere, and they'd gradually been worn down.

(James) That's a French stolen vehicle.

That's interesting, 'cause again, Germans don't have anything like as much vehicles as we think they do.

They always talk about the Nazi war machine, but actually that's kind of-- that's not really being very accurate.

Lots of abandoned French vehicles.

♪ (Professor Stargardt) Then, we get into the trophy footage of the wrecked bridges, the wrecked cities, and towns, and villages.

Some of which are already being repaired.

There's a moment where you see somebody starting to mend a window frame, while the young Germans in uniform are inspecting or trying out what it would be like to be the French artillery gunner.

And part of what they're admiring is military hardware which they didn't themselves possess.

The French, in 1939, not only had a bigger army, but they had far, far, far bigger and more sophisticated armaments than Germany had, and so part of the miracle of the summer of 1940 from a German point of view is this idea that something impossible has been achieved.

In 1939, even the commanding generals on the Western Front on the German side did not see that they have a war plan that could possibly work.

All they have, until February 1940, is more or less the same plan as they had in August 1914, and it's not until the spring that they come up a feint attack through the north, and then a real attack through the southern sector of the Ardennes Forest, and this works simply because the Allies rush in to the trap.

(ambient music) ♪ (James) Well, it's amazing to see immediately the 14th General Hospital, 'cause obviously it's a British hospital, there's shrapnel marks on it, and actually my best mate's father was a doctor who managed to get away, and I kind of wonder whether this was the sort of place he was working.

♪ You can see British trucks in the background ruined.

More prisoners, those are French prisoners again.

♪ Abandoned guns.

German troops fiddling with another tank that's just been left.

♪ Lots and lots of abandoned vehicles.

That's a British-- British vehicle.

(Professor Stargardt) The sense that you get is you see these kids on-- all cramming onto their tiny tractor vehicle with their trophy dog.

Brings out the absolute euphoria and this sense of elation that they've achieved something miraculous.

♪ And the damage, the damage is just amazing.

I mean, you know, Dunkirk was ruined.

You know, when you look at the movie, they're going down a street and it all looks perfect-- a perfect nick.

It wasn't, it was absolutely trashed, and this--this footage you can see here, there's just-- oh God, look at the debris all over the place, I mean, it's really properly trashed.

And if you look at memoirs, you look at diaries of people that talk about the rubbish on the roads.

♪ (Professor Stargardt) We see the destruction and devastation of the Dunkirk aftermath.

It's a very different vantage point from that of the British evacuation, and it's a sense that the war is over.

♪ And images of Germans rescuing these abandoned horses, presumably from baggage trains, gives you a sense that this is now no longer a destroyed landscape.

It's going to be one which is made good again, and it's this sense of restitution, and of people coming back together and remembering their roles in civilian life as well as in military life.

(uplifting music) ♪ (James) And here we are, back on the seafront.

♪ Yeah, look at all those ships, look at all those sort of abandoned, again, abandoned boats.

That's a very famous image.

That broken vessel, you can see, it's just been completely destroyed.

Just left there, look at that.

♪ (narrator) The ship Dussel is filming is a French destroyer called L'Adroit, hit by a German bomber during the evacuation.

After beaching, the ship's magazine blew up, tearing the hull apart.

Amazingly, none of her crew was killed.

♪ (James) And again, when you see footage like this, don't know, it just sort of--it strikes home a little bit more than just a black and white photograph still picture.

Really properly wrecked.

Blimey.

I think what matters psychologically and emotionally for Germans as a population, both civilian and military, is this sense that the war is actually won now, the war is over, and they cannot believe that the British don't give up.

So, one of the other interesting things about Dussel is that he's a First World War veteran, and the legacy of 1914 to '18 is a dire one, because German defeat in 1918 both fueled national resentment at the sense that they'd been unfairly treated with the War Guilt Clause, the Reparations Bill, and that the peace treaty itself had been wrung out of Germany through the continuation of the British Blockade, and so part of the euphoria and relief in this footage of having driven the British off the continent, having conquered France, Dunkirk in a sense is the final victory of this war, as it should be.

That is really palpable.

It confirms a sense of intergenerational responsibility that Dussel belongs to the generation which lost, and now he belongs to the generation which has won.

(triumphant music) (narrator) On the 6th of July, 1940, France capitulates.

The Führer parades himself on the streets of Berlin, lovingly captured by Eva Braun.

Her relationship with Hitler is a secret closely guarded from the German people.

♪ She has to make do with filming from the window of the Reich Chancellery.

It's a far cry from the intimate private portrait of a few years earlier.

♪ Keen diarist Julius Putfarken, born in 1877, applauds the news of victory in France.

♪ He spent the First World War in a British prison camp.

For him, German national pride has been restored, and he is thrilled.

♪ ("Putfarken") Today, the Führer has returned in triumph to Berlin.

No man has ever been cheered like this before.

It is unbelievable all that the Führer has achieved for our fatherland without a single false step.

Two months ago, that dreaded France wanted to smash Germany into smithereens, and now France lies powerless on the ground, betrayed and abandoned by England, its boastful ally.

♪ (narrator) Across Germany, there are similar scenes.

In Dresden, a shopkeeper called Kurt Ehler films a returning infantry division.

♪ For Jewish diarist Victor Klemperer the news brings only despair.

♪ ("Klemperer") It's all turned much gloomier.

France, the boundless German triumph.

It's been reported that synagogues have been set on fire in Deluz and several other places.

On language, I note the ruthless, lightning fast changes of tone.

In Autumn, France was a chivalrous nation led astray by England, and it was courted.

Then, during the offensive, in ever increasing measure, "Jew-ridden, decadent, sadistic," their language is intensified by the frenzied arrogance of the victor.

(energetic music) ♪ (narrator) The conquering Germans have the playground of Paris at their mercy.

♪ (Nora) So, now they're having Paris-style breakfast.

Great, we've established ourselves now in this beautiful country.

♪ Yeah, the fashion, horse racing.

Everybody's having a great time.

♪ (James) What fun we're having in Paris.

Why not the city of-- the city of gaiety and jollity, of arts and music?

And these French people seem-- seem okay about it, don't they?

♪ You know, there was this sort of impression that just life goes on, you know?

Paris has fallen, France has fallen, but there's still time for sports, and athletic tracks, and so on.

Some Luftwaffe officers here.

♪ (Nora) It seems like they're trying to adopt that culture that they secretly admired.

Yeah, I mean, this is pure propaganda obviously.

♪ Excursions on the boat.

♪ And again, always this facial expression of being really pleased with yourself.

♪ (James) Wow, and a guy going on a little sort of mini bicycle advertising the cabaret, and here is the cabaret.

Again, it's just this sort of sug-- suggestion that nothing's really changed, you know, it's just gone from French control to German control, but Paris is still unmistakably Paris.

German officers having a lovely time, lots of drinks, cigarettes, dancing, music.

(upbeat piano music) Reality very different for French people, though.

♪ You know, the Germans were absolutely appalling occupiers.

Stole everything, nicked all the cars, nicked all the wine, nicked all the champagne, made sure that they came first in absolutely everything.

♪ It makes you feel really angry.

♪ I've gotta say, if I was a Frenchman and I was watching this, this would just be making my blood absolutely boil.

♪ And you can also understand when you see footage like this of Germans kissing French girls and so on, and everyone having a lark and raising bottles of champagne, you can see why, at the end of it all, those who suffered were not massively impressed by those who'd collaborated.

(grim music) ♪ Yeah, I don't know, I mean, it's, uh-- it's just disturbing.

♪ (narrator) Throughout 1940, there is a feeling that Hitler can do no wrong.

♪ But for diarist Julius Putfarken, Britain's refusal to negotiate is beyond the pale.

♪ ("Putfarken") We Germans love the Führer ever more deeply, and thank him for what he has done for our people.

To us, he is a gift from God.

♪ Even though we thought the end was close after the armistice with France, it will not come to an end with England.

♪ Churchill is a ruthless sneak, propped up by Jews around the world, especially in the USA, who long for financial dominion.

♪ (narrator) Yet while Putfarken fixates on war with Britain, Hitler's gaze turns to the nation that has obsessed him his entire political life: The Soviet Union.

(ominous music) ♪ Not only a source of coveted natural resources, but home to tens of millions of people the Nazis view as racially worthless.

♪ This is Helmut Machemer, a medic in a Panzer unit.

He took extensive footage during the invasion of Russia.

♪ (James) It's really interesting how the Germans perceive the invasion of the Soviet Union.

But the truth is the Germans don't really have any choice, or Hitler doesn't have any choice in the matter.

You know, they've-- they've had their victories, they've rampaged these occupied territories like kids in a sweet shop, and by the end of 1940, you know, the cupboard is pretty much bare.

So, what are you going to do?

You know, if you can't actually manufacture, because you're manufacturing for your own war effort, you can't sell it, and you can't actually get anything in, where are you going to get the stuff?

Well, you have to go and get it.

And there's only one place where this can be got from, and that is the Soviet Union.

♪ Look at that, wow, that's amazing, isn't it?

I mean, you know, unmetalled roads, just vast open spaces of nothingness.

And this is a problem because literally the wheels start to come off because the distances are just so great.

(Professor Stargardt) Machemer's footage is fascinating in a number of ways.

One of them is simply that he wants to show that he's a good filmmaker, and so he tends to copy things which he will have seen in the Wochenschau, the newsreels, which are shot by splicing together the film recorded by thousands of cameramen and photojournalists, who are embedded in the Wehrmacht.

But in most cases, even serving soldiers go and see film footage of where they've been when they're on leave.

They find confirmation of themselves and confirmation of what they've done by looking at footage like this.

♪ (James) I mean, that is--for me, that's--that's in my mind's eye, that's what I'm thinking about when I'm thinking about the absolutely insane decision to go into the Soviet Union.

I mean, that vast open space.

You know, problems-- I mean, this is not an easy thing to get across, it's a dried riverbed.

You can see (indistinct), there's lots of dust.

There's a Panzer Mark III.

The problem is you've got to keep these vehicles going in the field, and over vast distances where there's no infrastructure, there's no workshops and stuff.

You know, how do you repair them?

Lone cow standing pathetically by a burning village.

It's just so counterproductive, and it's a reminder that this is an ideological war suddenly.

♪ (Professor Stargardt) And we're into the morass, and we're into the torching of village houses.

And even this is sort of posed for the camera, as the--as the man with the flame looks back over his left-hand shoulder at the camera, which is lingering on him and he's lingering on it.

And so, there's a sense not that this is a covert activity, but that it's part of what you would do, and this is what they do do all the way through.

And, of course, it means that the liberating Red Army troops, as they come back westwards, find destroyed village after destroyed village.

All they see is the brick chimneys of houses which had stood there, because the wood, and the thatch, and everything that was flammable has gone.

(James) Again, no asphalt on the roads.

Lots of Soviet prisoners.

Massive problem because what do you do with them all?

You know, there's almost half again what they're expecting.

(suspenseful music) ♪ (Professor Stargardt) The clusters of Red Army prisoners in the snow, sitting outside with no cover, no accommodation, insufficient food, and they gradually collapse, and this is filmed as dead prisoners.

There's no sense that the Germans should have provided better.

♪ (James) Although the victories are enormous to start off with, nothing less than total annihilation of the Red Army will do.

There is no alternative.

This is an ideological war, not just a war of military conquest, and the violence which is unleashed right from the outset, that the moment they go in, the burning of villages in Ukraine, and so on, and Byelorussia, and all the rest of it, and in the Baltic states, that just sets the bar and it means that nothing less than complete conquest will do.

♪ (Professor Stargardt) This is, of course, the story of the first six months of the Soviet campaign, where over three million Red Army prisoners are taken by the Germans with no provision for how they'll be treated.

And, by the end of 1941, nearly three million of them have starved to death.

And terrible acts of cannibalism, but also acts of starvation, acts of disease, and of random executions by the Germans have gone hand-in-hand with that horror.

(somber music) ♪ (narrator) The fate of Russian POWs is bleak.

♪ Race and race hatred are at the core of Nazi ideology, and now they have millions of their Slavic, Bolshevik, and Jewish enemies at their mercy.

♪ This amateur footage was filmed by a member of the Luftwaffe's 51st Fighter group.

♪ His camera captures what the relationship between conquerors and conquered really entails.

♪ (Professor Stargardt) Leaning on the window sill.

Ultimate imperial gaze of power, of condescending to have his palm read by the local gypsies.

Encouraging, possibly even forcing one of them to dance semi-naked.

They give a palpable sense of what it meant to conquer the East.

And journalists had been told for generations that Russia was barbaric, and the Nazis added layers to this.

They added the layers of anti-Semitism.

They added the layers of anti-Bolshevism.

But underneath it, there's still a fundamental sense that this is an alien and inferior culture.

And in that few frames of sitting on the veranda, condescending, looking down at the people you've just conquered, but knowing that they are both exotic and inferior to you, you see all of those thwarted ambitions of Germans to be colonists, of people who'd lost their own colonies in 1918, and yet see the possibility of living this out in some vicarious way in the East.

It's like they're suddenly in their own museum of ethnography.

(grim music) And that tipping of condescension into atrocity is very easy, as we see, and partly it comes with the idea that these are not people who are individuals.

They don't have individual conscience.

They don't have individual soul.

They don't have artistic depth.

They've been hammered into a collective under the blows of Soviet rule, and so the only way to treat them is also as a simple collective.

(narrator) Following behind the frontline troops are SS units on a mission to kill all the Jews and communists they can find.

♪ This footage was shot by a soldier called Reinhard Wiener in Latvia at the far north of the invasion.

♪ The phrase "The Holocaust by bullets" is actually extremely important if you want to understand what took place once the war started, and it refers to the fact that for quite a long time after the invasion of Poland, and even the invasion of the Soviet Union, most of the killing was done face-to-face.

♪ So, they would round up groups of Jews, march them out of their village into a forest, and then shoot them.

So, at least half the people who were murdered in the Holocaust were murdered in that face-to-face way.

So, the idea that the Holocaust is entirely a sort of industrialized process is very misleading, but at least half the victims were kind of walked into muddy fields and just-- saw their killers down the barrel of a gun.

♪ This was a terrible, brutal, despicable phase of Barbarossa of World War II that's not so well-known.

And, in fact, it so brutalizes, even the SS, and the Einsatzgruppen, and the special battalions, that Himmler goes to a special program in Minsk to show him the brutality of this kind of murder.

♪ And Himmler watches the execution of 100 Jewish people, and he sees for himself how difficult it is for his "poor SS guys," how psychologically they're being traumatized.

♪ Moving toward the creation of the extermination camps is not because it's going to be more humane to the victims.

It's because it's seen to be more humane to those who were being asked to do the killing.

But in 1941, in the invasion of Soviet Union, it is--it is pistols out, it's machine guns, it's gallows up.

I mean, you know, what's so amazing about that footage is just how medieval and barbaric it is.

♪ And yet it becomes normal, and yet, you know, it's this sort of casual footage of people being strung up, casual footage of people being burnt and chucked in pits, and being shot in the back of the head.

I mean, it is-- it is absolutely horrible.

♪ We have a school teacher from Eichstatt who writes home to his wife about the terrible images that he's seen.

He doesn't describe them to her in the letters.

He does in his diary.

He promises to tell her everything when he's at home with her.

And, at the same time, he talks about the photos of the small child, Reiner, that she sent him.

He was born at the outbreak of war.

♪ And he says, "It's terrible where I am, but it's better that I am here, and that I go through this hell, even if I have to die here, rather than that Reiner should be the third generation who has to come and fight a war like this."

♪ (narrator) These so-called special operations are repeated across the whole frontline, and are a common spectacle for German soldiers.

♪ This conversation was recounted by a Wehrmacht officer called Von Rothkirch.

♪ ("Rothkirch") I knew an SS leader pretty well, and we talked about this and that, and one day he said, "Listen, if you ever want to film one of these shootings, I mean, it doesn't really matter.

These people are always shot in the morning.

If you're interested, we still have a few left over.

We could shoot them in the afternoon, if you like."

♪ (narrator) In time, even the population back home begin to learn what is being done in their name.

(Professor Stargardt) So much of the knowledge which we have was also knowledge that the German population had at the time.

Soldiers' letters, the stories that people tell each other on trains, often talking in the darkness of night journeys to comparative strangers, trusting people whom you only know as a bird of passage.

But also, the photography, the photos that soldiers take of atrocity sites, of the mass hangings, the mass shootings, the open graves, the ditches being covered in lime, and then shoveled in by local Soviet civilians afterwards.

These are images which were not kept just at the front, because the films themselves, the photographic 35-millimeter film taken on the first SLR cameras were Leicas.

They were sent back in little aluminum film canisters with letters and parcels from the front, to be developed in the local town, in the photo studio, sometimes in the pharmacy.

And the prints of the photographs were seen on the home front before they were sent back to the men who'd taken them.

And yet what we have to think of is their provenance at the time.

They were known and they were part of a spreading knowledge, a web of knowledge of mass eye-witnessing of mass executions in which between one and two million of the Jews who fell victim to the Holocaust were killed in this way on the Eastern Front, and there was no secret about this.

These were not secret death camps to which no unauthorized eyewitnesses could visit.

They're endlessly visited, and by early 1942, Germany is awash with stories and rumors about what is happening to the Jews.

♪ (narrator) Hitler loyalist Julius Putfarken has no difficulty justifying these reports of atrocities.

♪ ("Putfarken") The Jews are particularly hated.

In Litzmannstadt, this hatred was expressed as retaliation after the Russians had pulled out, when a large number of Jewish men, women, and children were beaten to death.

That brings order.

One human life is currently worth very little on the Eastern Front.

♪ (narrator) For the Lederer family from Czechoslovakia, the descent into the night and fog has already begun.

Robert Lederer, who took his footage in the summer of 1939, is in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.

He will never return.

(somber music) His wife Rose and their children Nina and Peter are headed into the Theresienstadt Ghetto.

From there, they will be deported to Auschwitz in 1944.

♪ On arrival, Rose and Nina were eligible for work.

But Rose refused to leave Peter to face his fate alone.

♪ They died together in the gas chambers.

♪ (solemn music) ♪ In the next episode of Lost Home Movies of Nazi Germany, cracks are starting to appear.

♪ The allied bombing threatens the very future of the Reich.

♪ And life for internal enemies of the Nazis becomes unbearable.

♪ One soldier hatches an audacious plan to save his Jewish wife.

(veteran) This is my father now, who is just giving a narcosis to a wounded man, you know?

Yeah.

(narrator) While from Holland to Stalingrad, Normandy, to the final desperate stand, home movies chart Germany's slide towards ruin.

♪