(birds chirping) (soft music) ♪ (narrator) On a visit to England, I'm walking back to the hostel with a group of friends after a party.

♪ We're all cheerful and a little bit tipsy.

♪ I'm strolling three meters behind the group.

Suddenly, you also start distancing yourself from the others.

I don't know much about you, only that you're American.

Tall and athletic with brown curly hair and the shoulders of a football player.

You look down to me and say, "Did you know that your grandparents killed my grandparents?"

It feels like you had taken a baseball bat and slammed it into my face.

♪ It's my first encounter with a Jewish person at 21.

♪ In these few seconds between me and you, I'm representing all the crimes committed by the Germans against the Jewish people, and I'm drowning in the guilt.

I've never met you again, but you made me wonder, how are we teaching German children about the Holocaust?

(film reel clicking) Will they resist strongly against the new rise of the right?

♪ It feels like a mantra from my time at school: "Never again, never again, never again."

Or is it just bleak rhetoric to brush the contaminated topic from the German kitchen table?

♪ I grew up on a farm in a rural town in West Germany.

This is how it looked like in 1933, and not much has changed since then.

Ostburen is a place with no bakery, no corner shop, no butcher, not even a church.

♪ My childhood was like the beginning of a Grimm Brothers' fairy tale.

My mother would pick me up from kindergarten on horseback.

I could drive my father's tractor and do my homework in the hay until, like every German child at 14, I had to attend a lesson that changed my view on the world forever.

(thunder rumbling) (piano music) ♪ (mixed chatter) (laughing) (bell sounds) (mixed chatter) (laughing) (narrator) This is the same school I attended.

It's an ordinary comprehensive school in an ordinary town.

I heard about the Holocaust for the first time in a lesson just like this, and my struggles with it were just the same.

(birds chirping) (ominous music) ♪ The question that every German reflecting on the Holocaust always comes back to is, "Why?

Why us?

Why in Germany?"

Most countries in Europe were anti-Semitic.

Why did it turn into an industrial-scale killing of minorities in Germany?

I suspect that the unbreakable support for Hitler by the Germans lay in their upbringing.

I went to the local archive to search for traces of our grandparents' school lives, and I struck lucky.

In 1934, local photographer Ludwig Müller begins to use his laboratory for developing film.

His favorite subject is his daughter, Irmgard.

He even lovingly hand-colored the shots he took of her.

♪ But apart from capturing beautiful images of his daughter, he films her everyday life in the local high school.

♪ In his little home video, we can see the Nazi education methods on display.

♪ (leaves rustling) (speaking in German) (springs squeaking) (shrieking) (laughing) (speaking in German) (pencil scratching) (bell sounds) (chalk scratching) (film reel clicking) (somber music) ♪ (narrator) In a playful way, children acquired skills that would become very useful for Hitler's bigger plan.

♪ The children put their hands to work and built up their practical knowledge.

♪ The Ministry of Education demanded to shrink the amount of hours dedicated to humanistic subjects and boost others like woodcrafting, sports, and political education.

♪ Every class was designed to heighten the children's excitement for war and combat.

♪ (distant conversation) ♪ (birds chirping) (mixed chatter) (soft piano music) ♪ (narrator) When Hindenburg appointed Hitler chancellor in 1933, it had an immediate effect on the children across the country.

Jewish, liberal, and democratic teachers were made redundant, and a new curriculum was established.

Less mathematics and languages, more biology.

More specifically, genetics.

♪ Gregor Mendel's rules of inheritance gained a new subtext.

The children learned how to crossbreed plants and to distinguish what is genetically pure from what is genetically mixed.

♪ By mixing seeds of different kind, like this white flower and this red flower, you will create what Mendel calls "hybrids" or "bastards."

♪ (mixed chatter) (solemn music) ♪ (narrator) The Nazis employed a simple method to enforce compliance that filmmaker Ludwig Müller recorded in a little scene.

♪ It's not the school staff surveilling the children, but the children surveil each other.

And those who snitch will be rewarded.

♪ With this technique, the new citizens are being turned into the most potent surveillance machine of the Third Reich.

♪ (whistle blowing) (speaking in German) (ominous music) (narrator) I thought I'd witnessed Nele growing into the German culture of guilt, but instead, she wonders if her history lessons may be manipulated.

(film reel clicking) ♪ Under Hitler, schools served as training camps for the military service.

The pressure was high to match the Nazi ideals: the political soldier, and the robust mother.

♪ Also, physical education had highest priority in order to build strong Aryans with a will made of steel and a devotion to the Führer.

♪ The teachers were not leading the class as a group of young children, but as a platoon.

♪ The boys leave high school with their first military education.

♪ The shooting club of Ostburen commemorates their local war heroes until today.

Lilly is training there as well, all in the traditions of the old times.

♪ (gunshot) ♪ (soft music) ♪ (narrator) In their classes, pupils even studied a shorthand called Wurzelschrift, which allowed them to communicate more efficiently.

♪ With this form of writing, the children only needed six weeks to learn how to read and write, which gave them more time to study more important topics.

♪ Because war loomed on the horizon.

But there were not only jobs to be filled in the army, but also in the SS, SA, and Gestapo.

(heartbeat) ♪ Ludwig Müller's recordings didn't serve any propagandistic purpose.

It's his private view on the happenings in the school in Plattenburg.

♪ What Müller saw was conventional.

♪ Similar scenes took place in schools all over Nazi Germany.

♪ (birds chirping) (applause) (laughing) (narrator) Mr. Heller's class is scheduled to visit Sachsenhausen in two days.

(speaking in German) (narrator) But I'm surprised to observe that they had only seen a plan of Sachsenhausen, and no photos or video material.

Sachsenhausen used to serve as a training camp for SS officers who would later oversee other camps.

It's one of the most common camps for German students to visit.

The kids are allowed to spend exactly 60 minutes inside of the camp.

(narrator) The children don't have the visual memory yet to fill in the empty space.

Mr. Heller does, but also for him, it's the first time in the camp.

(sniffing) (solemn music) ♪ ♪ (rain pouring) (bell ringing) (film reel clicking) (soft piano music) (narrator) This is the point where I struggle the most to comprehend the millions of bystanders that accepted the suppression of other millions for a little improvement of their quality of life.

♪ What does it take to nurture and nourish a generation in the belief of a superior race and make them complices in the biggest mass killing on European soil.

♪ Nele's grandmother knew her role in the National Socialist (indistinct).

♪ An article from the newspaper The Mittelschule describes the girl's position in the Third Reich.

The teachers must make every female student understand that they are the guardians of the pure Aryan seed.

A girl should not marry the man she loves, but a man with healthy genes.

A girl had to scrutinize the family tree of her potential partner and make sure that his bloodline is what they they considered uncontaminated.

♪ I'm wondering, was Ludwig Müller content with the future prospect of his daughter, Irmgard?

♪ (solemn music) ♪ (applause) ♪ (mixed chatter) ♪ (narrator) 2014.

Siegfried Borchardt, nicknamed SS-Siggi, gets elected into Dortmund City Council and his supporters storm the City Hall.

(clapping and chanting) Ten people get injured that day.

Rapidly, Dortmund develops into a center of the West German neo-Nazi scene.

With their yellow and black T-shirts, they associate themselves with the local football club, Borussia Dortmund.

(yelling in German) (whistles blowing) (narrator) The fear of people who are ready to exercise violence had its destructive effect back in Nazi Germany, but also today.

Apparently, a multitude of personal interpretations and alternative truths circulating outside the classroom dilute the historical facts.

Studies find that 40% of German children today don't know what Auschwitz is.

So I'm wondering, can teachers alone be responsible for passing on the fundamental lessons of the Holocaust?

(birds chirping) (soft music) ♪ Okay.

(piano music) ♪ (speaking in German) ♪ (clapping) ♪ (crowd roaring) (applause) (yelling) (cheering) (narrator) Repeatedly, the club bans right extremist fans from the stadium.

Hearing screams of "Sieg Heil" during the game is nothing new for the young Dortmund supporters, and I'm worried about how normal it became.

(soft music) ♪ (engine buzzing) (narrator) Last class before summer holidays.

The kids are counting down the hours until the school bell rings.

They have been given the same lesson that I received 15 years ago.

We must make sure that it never happens again.

It feels like we have a general understanding of World War II simply because we're German, but would we even recognize if a similar tendency returned?

(solemn music) Would we resist another rise of the extreme right?

♪ (bell sounds) (soft music) ♪ (film reel clicking) (narrator) Soon, there will be no witnesses anymore to report on their experiences under the fascist Nazi regime.

♪ But also no Germans like Nele's grandmother who remember how it all started.

The feeling of being flattered and favored, to be entitled to more than the others.

♪ (mixed chatter) (classical music) ♪ (narrator) I still think of meeting you in this foggy English night.

You words still echo in my bones.

"Your grandparents killed my grandparents."

I dread the idea that most Germans will grow up without ever having encountered your pain, the door still wide open for indifference.

(soft music) So why us?

Why in Germany?

What is still inside of me that made the Holocaust happen?

I was told many times that this genocide could have also occurred in other countries, but I've never found comfort in this thought.

I have no reason to assume that I would have been a rebel.

I'm rather obedient, and I don't like breaking the rules.

My entire adolescence, I struggled with the question, "What would I have done?"

When times get harder, it's easy to tell ourselves that the bad things we do are a necessity of human nature, but if we have learned one lesson, it's that we always have a choice.

(birds chirping) (piano music) ♪