Almost 76 years ago, the last Nazi concentration camp was liberated, putting an end to "the final solution".
In this new episode of the Europe 1 Studio podcast "At the heart of History", Jean des Cars recounts the unbearable reality discovered at the liberation of the death camps.
From the summer of 1944, the first concentration camps were liberated, revealing the abominable reality of Nazism. In this new episode of the Europe 1 Studio podcast "At the heart of history", Jean des Cars looks back on Adolf Hitler's seizure of power and explains his obsession for the "purity of the Aryan race".
After the war, we thought we knew everything about the inhuman sadism that descended on the prisoners of the Nazi camps ... We discovered the horror in 1956 through Alain Resnais' film "Night and Fog", a montage produced by alternating shots of the extermination camps as they appeared ten years after the end of the war and black and white archive images which described in detail the abominations of the concentration camp universe.
The film ended by asking the huge question: "Who is responsible?".
In a France where little was said about this most overwhelming aspect of World War II, it was a shock.
The abomination was beyond anything we had ever known ...
Since then, Europe has regained its memory through, in particular, the trials of former Nazi dignitaries alive, found and tried, such as the trial of Eichmann, architect of the "final solution".
We can also mention the creation, on the spot, of memorial museums and other feature films such as the documentary "Shoah" by Claude Lanzmann or the film by Steven Spielberg "The Schindler List".
The latter gave a little hope and light in this darkness since it recalls that some have risked their lives trying to protect designated victims of the exterminating machine ...
Today, a moving book "And we came back alone", by Lili Keller-Rosenberg, has just been published by Plon editions.
He makes us understand the mechanics of horror through the fate of a sibling: a 12-year-old girl, whose voice and gaze we follow, and her two little brothers, 11 and 5 years old.
They were arrested with their parents and interned with their mother, first in Ravensbrück then in Bergen-Belsen while their father was directed to Buchenwald.
How could children have suffered such an ordeal?
To find out, you have to go back a few years.
The irresistible rise of Adolf Hitler
Hitler was born in 1889 to a peasant family in Lower Austria.
Her father is an Austrian customs officer.
Adolf has a rather mediocre high school education in Linz, the regional capital.
A fairly young orphan, he went to Vienna alone at the age of 16, in 1905. He dreamed of becoming an architect but twice failed the entrance exam to the School of Fine Arts.
He remains miserably in the imperial capital.
He knows poverty, soup kitchens and night asylum.
He then earns his living by painting watercolors and postcards. From his childhood, he was enthusiastic about the idea of a "Greater Germany", which would not be only the military and traditional Prussian Germany of Bismarck.
He was very impressed by the spectacle of the decomposition of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and gave himself up to his first political reflections.
At the same time, he discovers the power of finance, the lack of parliamentarism, the distress of the proletariat and the threat that the Slavic world poses to minority Germanism.
He also discovered anti-Semitism, represented by his two first thinkers, Georg von Schönener, leader of the Christian Social Party and Karl Lieger, the mayor of Vienna.
Hitler read a lot, especially Darwin whose "Theory of Selective Evolution" fascinates him and Mommsen, the German historian of Ancient Rome.
Besides, Rome will be a great source of inspiration for Hitler.
But he also reads Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.
On the other hand, Marxism rejects him deeply.
In 1912 he moved to Munich.
It was at this time that anti-Semitism became the main theme of his personal mystique.
Still reduced to a mediocre life, unsuited to society, he enthusiastically welcomed the First World War.
We can say that for Hitler, as for Mussolini, the war of 14-18 was the great liberating experience, the opportunity to finally prove himself and to exist.
He was appointed corporal in November 1914 and received the Iron Cross 1st class, a very rare decoration for a corporal.
He spent a total of four years on the Western Front.
Gassed in Ypres in October 1918, he was blinded and hospitalized.
It was there that he learned of the German defeat.
He then decides to be the man who will take over the Reich.
He remained in the army for some time before being promoted to "political officer" in charge of tracking down the Communists and giving civic classes to demoralized troops.
In the fall of 1919, in Munich, he came into contact with a tiny far-right group, the German Workers' Party.
He becomes its… 7th member!
His first public appearance, on February 24, 1920 in the large Hofbrau brewery, demonstrated his talents as a speaker.
He then sets out his program, in twenty-five points.
The German National Socialist Workers' Party, the NSDAP, was founded a few months later, in August 1920. Very quickly, the last three letters disappeared and only "National Socialism" remained.
Among the first faithful, there are many veterans including two officers, Röhm and Goëring.
Hitler is therefore recognized as the leader, the guide, the Führer, a bewitching orator, but also a lucid tactician of propaganda and the political use of violence.
He gave himself three goals: to erase what he called the "diktat of Versailles", to restore German power and to lead a decisive fight for the salvation of the "Aryan race" threatened, according to him, by the "Jewish peril. ".
In August 1921, he added to his party a paramilitary formation, the SA, led by Röhm.
As an admirer of Mussolini's "March on Rome", Hitler took advantage of the anger aroused in Germany by the occupation of the Ruhr to try to overthrow the Bavarian government on November 8, 1923. But after a brief shooting, his demonstration in the streets of Munich fails.
On April 1, 1924, he was sentenced to five years in a fortress in Landsberg.
Imprisoned, he dictates to his secretary Rudolf Hess the work that will become the Bible of National Socialism: "Mein Kampf" ("My fight" in French).
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Released in December 1924, Hitler seems finished ... Thanks to the American Dawes plan, Germany regains financial equilibrium and economic prosperity.
His party was dissolved and Hitler was threatened by powerful socialist or activist rivals like his former faithful Röhm.
But in prison, Hitler thought about it.
He abandoned the idea of a coup.
What he now aims for is the legal conquest of power: he reconstitutes his National Socialist Party in February 1925, creates the SS, a kind of internal police force, and in May 1926 the Hitler Youth.
The fact remains that for a few years, his party made little progress: in 1928, it had only twelve deputies in the Reichstag ... But two years later, in 1930, it had 107. Between the two, the crisis of 1929 provoked the repatriation of American capital, the fall in exports and dizzying inflation plunging Germany into a perilous situation.
Hitler then attracted millions of unemployed, ruined petty bourgeois but also large industrialists who count on his party to block communism.
After his great success in the elections of 1930, he formed, with the right-wing opposition, the Harzburg front fighting against the government in place.
Having received, thanks to his friends, a post in the Cabinet of the State of Brunswick, in Lower Saxony, Hitler was automatically naturalized German on February 24, 1932. This allowed him to stand for the presidential election against Marshal Hindenburg .
He made a lightning campaign, flying around Germany, giving three to four speeches a day in front of huge crowds, continuing to denounce communism, the victors of 1918 and the Jews.
Although defeated by Hindenburg, he obtained thirteen million votes, or 36.8% of the vote, on April 10, 1932. Chancellor Brüning banned the SA and the SS but he was forced to resign.
His successor, von Papen, will be much more conciliatory with Hitler ...
The July 1932 elections gave Hitler 230 deputies but the Reichstag was again dissolved.
This time Hitler only obtained 196 deputies for his party.
Von Papen will then secretly negotiate against the new Chancellor, General Schleisser who resigns.
Hitler then agrees to share power with the conservatives who naively imagine being able to use the ambitious and misunderstood painter.
On January 30, 1933, Hindenburg called him to the Chancellery.
Although he only took a few National Socialists into his Cabinet, once in power, Hitler only needed six months to establish his dictatorship.
First, the Reichstag fire on February 27, 1933, was exploited to obtain from Hindenburg a decree suspending "fundamental freedoms".
After a new dissolution, the elections give 43.9% of the vote to the National Socialist Party on March 5, 1933. Two weeks later, Hitler is granted full powers for four years.
He pronounces the dissolution of the Communist Party, of the trade unions and declares the National Socialist Party single party.
The Administration is then subjected to a political and racial cleansing.
The boycott of Jewish traders was a reality from April 1933. A month later, the SA opened the first concentration camps, including that of Dachau, near Munich which, at the beginning, only welcomed political opponents.
While the majority of the German population is enthusiastic about the new regime, others are worried, especially German Jews.
We can cite the case of the famous filmmaker Fritz Lang.
Austrian by origin, he produced a few masterpieces of silent cinema: in 1923, an adaptation of Nibelungen, Metropolis and M. Le Maudit.
Hitler and Goebbels admire the talent of Fritz Lang and decide that if they take power, the director would be the official filmmaker of Nazism.
Goebbels summons Fritz Lang to his office and announces his proposal to him.
But the director refuses, citing his Jewish origins.
It is to him that Goebbels then makes this famous response: "Only the one we designate as such is a Jew".
Frozen with horror, the director had planned everything before his summons by Goebbels.
He takes a plane the same evening, goes to France then Hollywood where he will make the new career that we know.
The following year, the camps came under the control of the SS.
The Gestapo was created in April 1933. Hitler quickly ensured the loyalty of the army by liquidating Röhm and all the heads of the SA during "The night of the long knives" of June 30, 1934. After Hindenburg's death, a plebiscite ratifies, by 88% of the votes, the law which henceforth unites in the person of Hitler the functions of President and Chancellor of the Reich, August 19, 1934. This time, Hitler's dictatorship is absolute.
Hitler's apotheosis at the Nuremberg Congress
Hitler chooses the old university town of Nuremberg for the Annual Congress of the National Socialist Party in 1935.
To give this Congress an even greater scope, the Chancellor wanted the Reichstag to participate in it.
This is why the deputies are called to attend an extraordinary session on September 15.
An event of such magnitude had not happened for two centuries.
Three new laws will be submitted to their votes.
The first states that the red swastika flag is now the only national emblem.
The second establishes two categories between Germans: on the one hand, citizens of "pure race" to whom a letter of citizenship is granted which confers on them the fullness of their civic rights.
On the other hand, the "subjects" who will not enjoy these rights.
To obtain this letter, it will be necessary to prove by his conduct and his loyalty to the Reich.
Being "Aryan" is not enough.
The third law is said "for the protection of German blood and honor".
It definitively regulates the condition of the Jews.
It absolutely prohibits any marriage between Jews and Germans and even all relationships outside of marriage, under severe penalties of up to 10 years in prison.
These laws will be accompanied by numerous implementing decrees which further extend the prohibitions: Any individual of Jewish origin cannot be a German citizen.
All his electoral rights are taken away from him.
He is prohibited from holding a public post.
Soldiers and officials of Jewish origin are placed on sine die leave.
Annuities are reserved exclusively for soldiers called up before August 1, 1914. Racial laws are also published.
Hitler now has all the means to put in place the great "purification" of which he has dreamed since his youth.
And for that, we have to build new concentration camps ...
In parallel, the Third Reich having full powers in Germany, the regime will embark on a policy of conquest.
And each time, he tested the absence of reaction from the Western democracies: the annexation of the Rhineland in March 1936, the Anschluss in March 1938, the annexation of the Sudetenland in September 1938 then of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 by the Prague shot.
The West remains passive, accepting the annexation of Czechoslovakia by the Munich agreements.
The surprise of the German-Soviet Pact on August 23, 1939 allows Hitler to attack Poland.
It follows the declaration of war of the democracies.
The German offensive of 1940 was meteoric with the occupation of Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and France.
In all these occupied countries, the Hitler administration will apply anti-Jewish laws.
But the summer of 1941 put an end to the German-Soviet Pact.
The Reich enters the USSR.
The war is becoming more and more difficult for Germany.
The deportee camps are filling more and more.
There are the Jews but also the gypsies, the homosexuals and also all the resistance fighters from the occupied countries.
The regime is getting tougher.
This is the reason why on January 20, 1942, fifteen high dignitaries of the Nazi Party met in a villa in Wannsee, on the outskirts of Berlin.
That day, they decide to apply "the final solution", that is to say the methodical extermination of the prisoners in the camps, using the gas chambers.
Horror then has no limits.
Bibliographic resources:
Lili Keller-Rosenberg, And we came back alone (Plon, April 2021)
"At the heart of History" is a Europe 1 Studio podcast
Author and presentation: Jean des Cars
Production: Timothée Magot
Director: Jean-François Bussière
Distribution and editing: Clémence Olivier and Salomé Journo
Graphics: Karelle Villais