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If I say the word "holocaust", what springs to mind?
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Imagine something like this.
A concentration camp.
Barbed wire.
Trainloads of victims.
Gas chambers and crematoria.
Places like Auschwitz, and its system of mass murder.
I think most of us assumed that this was always
the pre-determined destination,
designed from the outset in some
great master plan of extermination.
But it wasn't.
There was no master plan for this.
Its origins were chaotic and spontaneous.
And improvised mass executions.
It's believed that more than a million Jews were murdered
in thousands of random killings
that erupted all across Eastern Europe...
..in a holocaust of bullets.
Largely lost and forgotten for more than 80 years,
this first chapter of the greatest crime in history is now being fully
revealed for the first time,
thanks to newly-discovered aerial photographs,
and advances in forensic detection,
finding lost victims,
uncovering the true scale of the killing.
It began in earnest in the midst of Hitler's invasion
of the Soviet Union in June 1941.
Atrocities grew in scale and savagery.
Until, just six months later,
bullets gave way to gas in the first death camps of the "Final Solution."
My name is James Bulgin.
I'm a historian and Holocaust specialist
at the Imperial War Museum.
And this film tells a story that has never been fully told,
of the crucial six months that ignited the Holocaust.
If you're going to search for the events that started
the Holocaust, Cambridge University Library
might seem a strange place to look.
But a researcher here thinks he can find that start point,
using Second World War aerial archives.
Hi, Chris. Ah, James. How are you? Good to see you.
Good. Right, well, let me show you what we've been putting together.
This is a map of the German reconnaissance and air survey
photography taken during the Second World War.
It represents something like
1.5 million photographs taken
by the Germans, primarily
over Central and Eastern Europe.
But if we're looking for the ramshackle beginnings
of the Holocaust, as it were,
the sort of ad hoc, the start of it all,
one of the things that's really clear with air photography
is that almost every action leaves a trace.
So they were capturing the evidence of their own crimes.
They were photographing the evidence of their own crimes.
And there's a good example of this. Possibly...
To me, this is the beginning of the entire sort of horrific process.
This is Gargzdai in Lithuania.
It's literally a stone's throw from the German border...
That's the border here? ..which is running there.
Proper border town. A proper border town.
And this is a village where the Jewish inhabitants...
It was about 20%, 30% Jewish before the war.
..they would have lived in the houses of
the two Jewish streets here,
and the synagogue was here.
And on the 22nd of June, 1941,
of course, the Germans pushed east.
And within literally 24 hours of coming over the border,
the Germans had destroyed the houses.
And if you look, you can see this whole area here
was burned during that day.
It's so striking to me that these forces come through here
from this direction. And, I mean, literally, what,
within a few hundred metres of the German border?
They come through and they... This this, this incident happens here,
so quickly, so soon, so close.
Absolutely. Well, look at this.
If you look here, you can just see a slight linear feature there. Yep.
You can see it more clearly in this other photograph,
which picks it out in snow.
And you can see it just there.
It's not part of the agricultural landscape. It's not a path.
I think this is a trench.
We have a certain amount of sort of testimony from the time, to sort of
indicate that this is precisely where the Jewish men
had been marched up the street in which they had lived,
and were then shot to death and buried in that trench.
So I've been...I've been...I've been circling this question.
How do we get to this huge, vast, catastrophic act
of mass violence and mass murder?
And it's possible, likely
that this is where it began.
It's very likely.
If Chris has found a possible start point for the Holocaust,
why is it in the Soviet Union, as late as 1941?
Hitler had always envisaged a world free of his two great enemies -
Jews and Communists.
By 1940, he had conquered half of Europe and had millions of Jews
rounded up and put in ghettos.
His intention had always been to get rid of them entirely,
but there was no concrete plan for how to do it.
Then, in June 1941, he set out to destroy his other great enemy.
Bolshevik communism.
Hitler had always branded communism a Jewish conspiracy.
So his invasion of the Soviet Union offered the perfect opportunity
to target both enemies at once.
Gargzdai, on the border of Soviet Lithuania and Nazi Germany,
was right on the front line of that invasion.
The Wehrmacht, as they swept into this whole area, were charged
with this instruction from Hitler and the commanders of the army
that this was a war of annihilation.
They were coming through this space to decimate it.
The order was for communism to be eradicated.
No specific order was given to kill Jews.
Yet, there is a monument here in Gargzdai,
exactly where Chris's photos showed a trench.
So, on the 24th of June, two days after the German invasion
of the Soviet Union,
the commander in this area, a man whose name was Bormann,
instructed that 200 Jews should be rounded up
and that they should be brought here...
..and they should be shot.
I tend to think of military orders within the German army
at this period as all coming from the top.
The people at the top telling the people on the ground what to do.
But that's not what happens here.
And that's really important, because actually what happens
is people on the ground, like Bormann, take their own initiative.
Hitler has always wanted to remove Jews from Europe,
and here these men take the initiative to interpret
that in the most radical way possible, to interpret
that as an instruction to murder.
And this starts a process of mass murder
that spreads like wildfire across this whole territory.
And the numbers grow,
and they grow and they grow.
Hitler's head of security was SS Chief Heinrich Himmler.
Himmler had created special killing squads, called Einsatzgruppen,
to follow in the wake of the army and eradicate
Hitler's political enemies.
Capitalising on Bormann's initiative, his deputy, Heydrich,
issued an instruction that any Jew
working for the communist state must be shot.
Four Einsatzgruppen teams were ready to carry out that order
across all newly-conquered Soviet territory.
I'm following Einsatzgruppen A from Gargzdai into Latvia,
in a town called Liepaja.
Here, there was another fierce battle for control of the city.
In the aftermath of the battle, the SS Einsatzgruppen
went in search of Hitler's enemies.
And we can see what they did with them, in a unique piece of film
shot by a German serviceman.
In the opening of this film here,
we see a pit - looks to be freshly dug -
and then the Einsatzgruppen soldiers are milling around, waiting.
And there's this really hideous sense of anticipation.
And then we see why.
We see a truck arrive and people being loaded off the back of it.
We can see it's clearly Jews.
We know they're Jews because they're wearing patches
on their front and their back, and the people doing
the shooting are Germans.
But around them, we see spectators around here.
We see members of the Navy here,
military here, and amongst them, just people.
They're there in huge numbers.
They're smoking. They're talking.
They're clamouring to get a closer look to see what's about to happen.
Group after group come,
and the people stay and they watch it.
Here we can see this man just looking into the camera, suggests
that he can see that he's being filmed as this is happening.
He knows that this has been captured
and that people will be watching this moment when he's gone.
It's horr....it's horrible.
It's almost as if shooting Jews has become a spectator sport.
What we see in this film is where we are a few weeks
after the invasion.
So the Wehrmacht start to push further into Soviet territory.
The Einsatzgruppen are coming behind them, and they're finding
more and more Jewish communities to target, and they're keeping
a running total of it as they go.
They want to be able to report those figures,
up to Heydrich and Himmler. And Heydrich and Himmler are saying,
"No, no, no, we want more, more, more. Why haven't you done more?"
The commanders of the Einsatzgruppen sometimes
get chastised for not killing more people.
There's this impetus, this force to constantly find
more Jews to kill. And we see that recorded here.
We see the date.
So, 22nd of August '41, 544 people.
23rd of August '41, 7,525 people.
And now they include Judinnen and Judenkinder - women and children.
It's only taken a few weeks from those first murders at Gargzdai
for this to accelerate.
And there's a tally at the bottom.
At the bottom of this document here,
by the start of September 1941,
it says 47,614 people.
That's 47,614 human beings.
The Nazis wanted to do more than just kill their victims.
They wanted to erase them from memory.
The graves of many tens of thousands have never been found.
And that matters to Dr Harry Jol.
So much so, he's devoted his career to finding them.
You can't just hide the bodies.
The bodies will be found.
I'm trained as a physical geographer, a geomorphologist,
and people such as myself and academics and others need to say,
"Let's take our tools that we use for other research projects,
"and let's apply them to the Holocaust."
We need to put closure to this.
It does line up brilliantly.
Fish-smoking building with the five smokestacks,
would be just beyond that modern building on the other side of it.
So we can't see the pit from here, but if we back up...
Harry works with fellow US academic Dr Phil Reeder.
There's the pit.
And every summer for the last seven years, they've been bringing teams
of students to Eastern Europe in search of Holocaust victims.
We have a different perspective on it now, but if we look up
where the two students are,
they're standing where the crowd was standing...
Today they're looking for the men in the film.
But then, as they run, look, there's a lighthouse.
Yes. You can see the lighthouse right there. Yep, that's it.
The film gives them landmarks they can locate
on historic air photos of the site,
allowing them to triangulate where the men were shot,
and where they should start their search.
But here is that road where they would have taken people here.
And then we see all those cars parked,
and where they're actually dropped off.
So I think that's a good spot for, in the video,
where they're getting out of the trucks.
There's actually a structure right there. Yeah.
And because you can see the people up on this side, and people
up on this side, and then they would run to the pit over here.
So the pit, to me, is right out here in front of us.
Or at least that's the place to start. Yeah.
Judaic law forbids any physical disturbance of the dead,
so they're digging with radio waves.
EQUIPMENT BLEEPS
Ground-penetrating radar gives them the ability to image
any large feature buried in the earth, like a mass grave.
After a few hours, they find what appears to be a buried trench.
But it's facing the wrong way to be the one in the film.
It's literally in that direction, right?
So it's almost 90 degrees off what we were expecting,
looking at the photos and taking a look at it here. Right.
So maybe means that there multiple trenches and, you know, the video
is just one point in time,
where that particular trench is being used.
So there could be trenches everywhere.
After multiple passes of the GPR,
another trench appears beneath the tarmac...
..and this one lines up exactly with the film.
As we take a look at this trench, it's pretty impressive.
You know, this is 38 metres long.
You know, this is probably the first or second time I've ever seen
something like this. Yeah, I mean, it stands out very clearly.
I mean, from all the time spent watching the video, it fits
very well with what we imagine the angle would be of the trench
coming in towards the fortress.
And, you know, they were basically brought into the trench and fell
against this side when they were shot. Right. Yep.
All the pieces of the puzzle are here. Yeah.
But at the same time, there's more work to do. Yep. Most certainly.
The men in the film have finally been found.
But it's clear there were more people shot and
buried here than anyone ever realised.
And further along the same stretch of coast,
a few months after Liepaja's men,
thousands of women and children were shot and buried in the sands.
No-one knows exactly how many, or where their bodies lie.
It's only since the fall of the Soviet Union that mass graves
like these, lost for over 80 years,
are being forensically investigated for the first time.
But pioneers like Harry and Phil are just scratching the surface
of a monumental task.
In Latvia, there are more than 70 suspected Holocaust sites.
Most are yet to be fully explored.
The same is true in neighbouring Lithuania, with more than
200 suspected sites.
What seems extraordinary is that there was
a single Einsatzgruppen team of fewer than a thousand men to account
for an estimated quarter of a million deaths
across both countries.
There's only one way that was possible,
and it's one of the most disturbing aspects of this entire story.
Widespread local complicity.
And there is evidence of that happening here,
in the Lithuanian town of Alytus.
So we're just driving into the town now, from exactly the same direction
that the Germans came in on the 22nd of June in 1941.
So, from the very start of the invasion, this is where
they were coming from.
And behind them were these Einsatzgruppen soldiers,
with this task of looking for the town's Jews.
They found them in the town and the surrounding villages.
And according to Nazi records,
nearly 2,500 Jews were rounded up
and brought to be murdered in the nearby forest.
Here we arrive at the end of the town, and the very same road
driven on through the centre of Alytus becomes...
You can see here, it's becoming...
It's a dirt track. And now we're in forest.
And what I find really, really chilling,
and really unnerving,
is the fact that it's walking distance
from the middle of the town.
But who brought the thousands of Jews here, and who killed them?
Because the SS have fewer than a dozen men stationed in this area.
I'm here to meet the leader of Lithuania's
surviving Jewish community.
Faina Kukliansky believes her grandmother was killed
in this forest...
..and she may have discovered who the killers were.
My grandparents were quite educated people,
and my grandmother was a doctor in the hospital.
Then the war started, and my grandmother was taken
from the street and imprisoned by the local people.
She's held prisoner by local people? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And then what happened?
And what happened after that, nobody knows.
But in any way, she did not come back.
I asked the Genocide Centre of Lithuania
to do the research for me, especially on Alytus.
And it's written here clearly
that in 1941, in August,
there were mass killing
of Jewish children and women.
The victims were asked to go into the pits, to jump
into the pits, to lie.
Then they were shot.
All the people who used to work in the prison took part,
together with the students of Alytus school.
So this is local school students... Of the school.
..participating in the shooting? Yeah.
And together, they came together
with policemen with guns.
And that confirms that - what my uncle used to tell me -
that probably his classmates killed his mother.
Faina, that is such a difficult thing to comprehend.
The idea that it was your parents' friends from school
who were some of the ones who were actively participating
in this process. They must have known her. They must have...
Her son was studying with Lithuanians in a Lithuanian school.
Doesn't matter that they were citizens of Lithuania,
that they live in the same city.
But it should be Judenrein,
"Jews should be killed."
And they were killing.
So her only crime was being Jewish?
Yeah. Well, that's enough.
Zinaida Kukliansky and more than 2,000 other Jews
were murdered here...
..not solely by Nazis,
but also by their fellow citizens.
No-one knows where any of them are buried.
There is a cluster of monuments here in the forest, but they were put up
relatively recently, and no-one knows if they mark
any actual burials.
I do not know where my grandmother is.
I would like very much to know, where is her remains?
The sculptures, I think it's more like art pieces,
not like the document pieces.
And I do not see any information
here about the people.
When were they killed? How many people were killed?
Where the women are. Where the children are.
Who are they? We are missing that.
We just do not know where they are.
You guys got everything? Yep. OK.
On up.
Faina has invited Harry and Phil down from Liepaja to try
and put that right.
But this forest holds a puzzle.
We know, in August, September 1941,
we had approximately 2,000 Jews
being executed and buried at this site.
Flags in - red, white.
The idea that they're here is interesting.
But where are they buried?
Are they all buried at this location,
or are they buried at other locations within this larger forest?
And so our job is to try to find those sites.
The murders in Alytus's forests troubled me for another reason.
The element of local collaboration.
And what happened here was just the tip of the iceberg.
A truth some Lithuanians are determined to lay bare.
I'm heading to a small town just 20km from Alytus to meet
a prominent author and Holocaust researcher called Ruta Vanagaite.
Ruta introduces me to 94-year-old Ona.
UNTRANSLATED
Hello.
Ona grew up here among the town's Jewish population,
and she is the last known surviving witness to their mass murder.
UNTRANSLATED
We go with her in my car, OK? Perfect. It's very nice to meet you.
UNTRANSLATED
Is that comfortable?
UNTRANSLATED
She's going to show where they used to live.
The massacre Ona witnessed took place on
September 9th, 1941.
Not in the dark of a large forest,
but in the open fields in front of
the house she lived in as a child.
So, what happened on that day?
INTERPRETS: There were a lot of people being marched down the hill.
And when did you see the first people coming past?
They heard the screaming.
A cry and screaming.
We looked through the windows only, "What's going on?"
There were hundreds of people being marched here.
My mum started crying, and everybody...
The screaming was the first thing that she heard,
before she saw anything?
And then we heard the shooting. And who was in the column? The Jews?
They were mostly old people.
And later on, children.
And children were being shot in another place.
And when you heard the shots, you realised what was happening?
Yes.
INTERPRETS: This past is in my head.
This is Butrimonys, where most of the victims lived.
Its historic heart lies empty because, that September day,
740 Jews,
80% of the town's population,
were murdered.
The question is, who by?
The killers were Lithuanian killers
from Alytus, coming to get rid of the Jews.
So we're talking about Lithuanians killing... Yes, yes.
..other Lithuanians? But they are not...
Those, the killers were not neighbours of those Jews, but those,
the policemen and the partisans were neighbours of
the Jews were killed, yes. And the whole process throughout has been
managed by these people's neighbours, the people doing the
round-ups? Yes, the preparation was managed by people's neighbours.
But killing was done by somebody coming from outside.
All Lithuanians? Yes. From another town nearby. And they're the ones
who do the shooting? Yes.
They're the ones with their fingers on the triggers?
And after the shooting, the neighbours are taking the property.
Wow, that's quite a thought, isn't it?
And then they move into the houses around here,
presumably they take over the town, and all the Jews are gone.
Yes. In one night. In one night.
It's clear that the Holocaust here was much more
than just a series of spontaneous acts.
It was rapidly evolving into organised ethnic cleansing
on a massive scale.
In Alytus' forest, Harry and Phil think they may have stumbled on the
biggest mass grave they've ever seen.
It's getting more pronounced here, Phil. Yeah.
I mean, obviously we're walking in a lower area
that has, what, to our left, a mound of stuff.
Yeah, let's climb up.
Wow. I mean, that's human-built.
Most definitely human-built. Wow.
I mean, I mean, it's macabre, but I mean, the idea
that where you are was where the trench would be, and here
you would be lining up people
being shot, falling into the trench where you are,
then burying, with that sediment
that you have, and then continuing that along here... Right.
..for, potentially, months.
Right here.
This is a trench where you could have thousands of people. Yeah.
This is one that is not, you can say, limited in...
The discovery is the result of resolute detective work,
because the trench is nowhere near any of the Holocaust monuments.
So we checked out the area of the monuments.
All the data indicated, really, that there was nothing there.
So I went back to the air photos to try to find something
that potentially fits where a large number of bodies could be buried.
And this is a 1944 Luftwaffe air photograph of this area.
And if we zoom in, what's interesting about it is this is
the road that we come in on, and these two roads
that are coming off of it.
And this particular road is essentially a road to nowhere.
So it's a road that goes into the middle of a forest and stops?
And stops. I would... Yes, I would agree with that.
But there is testimony of a family member, soon after her father
and brother were murdered,
of visiting this site and seeing
the evidence of trenches that were so fresh,
that they were stained with blood.
So that's what was at the end of the road? Yes.
That's what prompted us to start to look
in this particular area.
And we'll have two people going on this.
And then one person will be moving the line.
And when, upon closer inspection, we found a series of trenches leading
up to, at least visually, potentially the largest trench,
and this may be a mass grave,
or a series of mass graves,
where there are tens of thousands of people buried.
The evidence is compelling, but it's only circumstantial.
The only way they can be sure they've found a mass burial
is to look beneath the surface,
as they did so effectively at Liepaja.
So what we've done at this site is we've started collecting a grid
with ground-penetrating radar.
And now I'll show you a time slice as we go down into the subsurface.
OK. And remarkably, you know, we never know what we're going to get,
we see this feature right here.
This is what we are interpreting as a burial trench.
So, because that's anomalous within the rest of this here,
it's clearly something distinctive. Right, it's rectangular.
And so now we can start calculating the dimensions of a trench here.
And it's not just here. It goes all the way up to where this linear
feature goes, and goes all the way down...
Right down to the end, there? ..right down to...
Almost to the end, and it does a right-hand turn down there.
And there's... So, I mean, we can't even start doing the calculations.
We were just looking at the data right now.
This is a large feature. That's massive. It's huge.
All the way to there, to all the way to there? And then...
And then we have seven to four... seven to 11 metres here,
on the tapes here. But take a look.
All the trees have been taken out at seven metres, and they're gone
all the way to 11 metres. All the way down this way. Walking past
every day, I wouldn't...I wouldn't have noticed this detail.
How do you...? I wouldn't have noticed. But now you point it out,
it seems so obvious that clearly some...something
has happened to this earth.
Something has disrupted the continuity of this space.
When we take... I mean, I just take a look out here.
We thought there was going to be nothing out here.
And we see some, you know, linear features and things like that. I...
You know, I'm shocked when I walk around now. I'm looking at things
and it's like, potentially, we are sitting on thousands
of executed Jews at that site.
We could work here for years and years...
And just find more? . .and just find more. Yeah. Yeah.
Just the experience of being here today has been a really stark
reminder of the point about taking Jewish individuals into a site
like this and murdering them.
When the Nazis come into these territories, they find, in various
different ways and in various different capacities, different
people who are prepared to support it,
to support it. Sometimes to allow it to happen, but sometimes
to become directly involved,
to become the people who are...
..the people with their fingers on the trigger.
It's so important to remember that the Nazis were at the centre
of this, but they didn't act alone.
They required the active participation of hundreds
of thousands of people.
They couldn't have done it without that.
Like a lot of formerly-occupied Eastern European nations,
modern Lithuania has a history problem...
..because the truth of its role in the Holocaust is finally coming
out of the ground,
and it's being obliged to face up to it
by writers like Ruta Vanagaite.
In another 50 years, the people will come to terms with it.
Ruta, this is something that you've gone to great lengths
to investigate. What happened when you did that?
My book about the Holocaust was published.
It became a bestseller, but the reaction was very violent.
Some people accepted it, but the majority of my nation didn't accept
and I became, like, enemy of the country,
because I was, like, defaming my own people,
and they called me a Jewish whore.
So, in the end, when people were attacking me
and spitting at me on the street, I endured,
and in the long run, I had to leave the country for a while until
they forgive... Not forgive me, but forget me a little.
So speaking out came at great personal cost to you?
I don't regret. Yes, it did, but I don't regret.
Had I known that it would be such a violent reaction,
I would have done it anyway because I spoke for the victims.
This is my army, those 200,000 murdered people.
This is my army. They gave me a lot of strength.
And if you published the book today, do you think you would get
the same reaction?
There won't... It wouldn't be published. No way.
It wouldn't be published? No way.
And nobody after me, nobody would write a book about the Holocaust,
because people know that you'll lose your friends,
and you get...you become a public enemy.
So what is said, when this comes up in conversation, what is said?
What do people say? It is a defence reaction. It is self-defence.
So they always say, "It wasn't us. It wasn't us." Yes, kind of.
I mean, I told my friend that I am coming to see Butrimonys
with a BBC crew and she said,
"What? Are you going to tell the whole world again,
"and defame our country and tell everybody that, you know,
"we kill the Jews, Lithuanians kill the Jews?"
I said, "Yes."
She said, "Why?"
I said, "Because they did."
We are bloody uneducated. Uneducated.
The school hasn't educated us.
Our parents didn't educate us.
Our grandparents were too afraid to speak about it.
Who could tell us about what happened?
So, for the moment, Holocaust subject is closed.
I don't know for how long.
80 years ago, many Lithuanians welcomed the invading Nazis
for what seemed at the time to be a very sound reason -
because the Nazis were liberating them from communism.
The same nationalist response manifested across all
the Baltic states, as well as large parts of Ukraine.
Everywhere, nationalists fanned the flames of anti-communism,
and the Nazis pushed the myth of that communism
as a Jewish conspiracy.
As Hitler's invasion of the USSR reached its fullest extent,
coercion and complicity across territories under Nazi control
allowed the SS to initiate nearly 2,000 atrocities
across seven countries
from the Baltic to the Black Sea,
scaling up their murderous ambition in village after village,
town after town.
As victim numbers grew, the SS developed a system for ensuring
maximum efficiency and minimal panic.
It began with a calming ruse.
Jews were told to assemble with money, belongings
and warm clothing.
So they waited patiently, expecting to be deported.
Then they were led away in groups,
often by local police, to be shot.
When the Germans took the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv,
in late September 1941,
they claimed their biggest Soviet city so far,
with tens of thousands of Jews.
And SS Commander Friedrich Jeckeln saw the chance to perfect
mass murder on a monumental scale.
He issued the standard order to the city's Jews to assemble.
Then he had them escorted out of town by local police,
along this road,
to a 30m-deep,
half-kilometre-long ravine called Babyn Yar.
Here, they were stripped naked, ready for the waiting guns.
Jeckeln's plan was carefully engineered.
Yet Dina Pronicheva survived it.
These are the belongings of those who didn't escape.
On 29th and 30th September 1941,
Jeckeln's men shot 33,771 men, women and children.
1,700 people an hour...
..for two days.
Babyn Yar was the biggest single massacre of the Holocaust thus far.
Yet it would become just one notable landmark
in a continental killing spree.
By the end of 1941, over a million people have been killed
under the hail of bullets that the Nazis
and their collaborators have thrown at them.
We've got 25,000 murdered here in Riga.
50,000 murdered here in Kaunas.
70,000 here in Ponary.
We've got, in Minsk, 30,000.
In Kyiv, 34,000.
In Kamianets-Podilskyi, we've got 25,000.
And down in Odesa, we've got 30,000.
Hundreds of thousands of Jews,
and thousands more between all of these places.
But it doesn't start as a plan of total annihilation.
That's something that evolves as part of these operations here.
What they've been able to do here conceptualises something
within their...within their minds, they hadn't previously anticipated
in this way, they can kill them.
They can kill them, and they can kill them, all of them,
across the whole territory.
But the largest number of Jews still alive are here
in occupied Poland. They're living in ghettos.
They're living in terrible conditions.
They suffered appallingly during this period, but there's
been no central plan to annihilate them until now.
And that's what changes at the end of 1941.
But when the Nazis set out to murder the millions of Jews languishing
in their ghettos...
..they did not use millions of bullets.
By the end of 1941,
after more than a million individual murders,
mass shooting had become unsustainable.
And when we look at these photos,
we start to understand why that is.
You can see here these young men
are facing other human beings
and killing them,
and they're seeing what they're doing,
first-hand, face-to-face.
And what senior Nazis become really concerned about is
the mental health of the people that are doing it - never the people
that are being killed, the people that are doing it -
because they know that that's
something which is going to be impossible for them
to deal with.
They talk about it as a burdening of the soul.
There's reports here of these soldiers getting nausea,
nervous tension during the massacres.
In many cases, killers suffered vomiting attacks
or developed severe eczema or other psychosomatic disorders.
You know, there's this sense that this whole generation
will be corrupted forever, irreconcilably corrupted
by what they've been asked to do in the name of the Reich.
The other big factor was location.
Everything that's happened so far, everything that I've looked at
has happened a long way from the heart of Germany.
It's in this kind of...this Wild East in the Nazi imagination.
It's a different place where different things can happen,
different permissibility.
We see here that absolutely indescribable scene of carnage,
and it's so public and it's so barbaric,
and it's completely grotesque.
And even the Nazis find this kind of scene unconscionable.
Killing hundreds of thousands, millions of people is something
that they can accept,
but from their perspective, as things develop, there are ways
that it should be done, and this isn't it.
And so they need to find a new means of mass murder
that can be scaled up, that can be efficient,
that can be secret,
and that can be civilised, in their mind,
much more closely aligned with this new Germany
that Hitler wants to create.
One of the men tasked with finding those new civilised ways of killing
was an SS major called Herbert Lange.
And this forest, called Kazimierz Biskupi,
in the west of Poland,
is what Lange was given to use as a laboratory.
A team of researchers from across Poland is attempting to find
the evidence left behind by Lange's experiments.
Traces of mass graves can be seen in
the Nazis' own aerial photographs.
Agnieszka Nieradko hopes they will help locate
extraordinary events described
in eyewitness testimony.
This is part of our team.
Hello. Sebastian.
Sebastian Rozycki, University of Technology.
Nice to meet you.
And Shimon. Hello.
Hello.
Institute of Geophysics, Polish Academy of Sciences.
Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you, too. Thank you.
So, what have we found here?
OK, so, that. This is this depression here. This bit here?
This is, yes. And you have a rectangular shape,
and it could be the mass grave we are looking for.
Just where we're standing now, could be one just here? Yes.
From one perspective, it can look like just a regular mass grave
from the wartime. However,
we know from a single testimony
we have of a pre-war vet,
Polish vet, who was brought here as a prisoner, political prisoner,
he was brought here with 30 other Poles,
forced to assist the Germans in killing Jewish people
from a neighbouring ghetto.
So people were brought in carts here, alive,
and the pits were already waiting for them.
They were not shot.
They were just...
They were just covered with quicklime
and burned inside the pit.
And so they dug pits, put quicklime into the pits?
Brought containers with water...
Brought people inside, brought containers with water,
and put the water inside,
what make...what made the quicklime to react chemically. Boil. Boil.
With...? Boiling people in...? Exactly, yes. Yes. Inside.
And this is what we know from this testimony of a Polish vet.
He was here from the very beginning until the end,
forced afterwards with other Poles to bury the victims.
So, right where we are here,
there was a pit in which people boiled alive?
Correct.
Do we know how long it took?
According to Sienkiewicz, several hours.
We think that is an experimental killing site here.
Right where we're standing? Yeah.
They were just trying out different ways...?
Yeah, different ways of killing people.
It's believed Lange killed 3,000 Jews here in a series of trials,
which included not just lime pits,
but mobile gas vans.
It was just a pure technical rehearsal of which method
would be the most effective, efficient, as if the Nazis
were just getting ready for the big task that was ahead,
meaning killing the European Jewry.
So clearly there's an intention being consolidated
from within the heart of the Nazi hierarchy, you know, from Hitler,
from the top down, there's this idea, this intention
is becoming more and more and more determined towards a Final Solution,
which is about complete annihilation.
But, of course, as an intention,
that is meaningless without the means of achieving it.
And that's what we see here. Yes, yes. The actual practical means
of achieving this, taking this...
This is what it meant, this is how I understand it.
They are testing, they are trying, they are drawing conclusions.
Lime, quicklime is expensive,
gas in wagons was also inconvenient,
so it just drives Lange to a natural conclusion
that it doesn't work.
"We need to think about something else." Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is it.
And of course, the thing is, you know, we're talking
about experimentation, but this is... The people that are being
experimented on are real people. I mean... Yes.
You know... That's something we can't forget.
Agnieszka's team continues to search the forest
for more of Lange's victims.
But Lange himself concluded that the answer he was looking for
did not lie in forests.
He'd found the most efficient killing agent was gas,
but it needed to be used in a completely different location.
What Lange realised, in fact,
was that the future of mass murder lay in the past...
..in an old SS prison called Fort VII.
Here, in 1939, Lange had been part of a project called Aktion T4.
T4 was created to purge the Third Reich of the disabled -
what the Nazis called "life unworthy of life".
And the key to T4's efficiency, Lange recalled, had been to bring
the victims to the means of killing,
inside a special secure facility.
In this quiet, old fort, Lange had improvised a whole new concept
in mass murder.
What may be the world's first gas chamber.
People were led up here.
The doors were closed behind them.
When they were all in,
clay was put around the edges outside to seal it off,
and then tubes were put through openings in the door.
Through those tubes, carbon monoxide was pumped from sealed bottles,
and people would wait outside.
When there was no more noise inside,
people outside knew that everyone in here was dead.
By the end of 1941, it's become clear that Hitler's ambition
is to murder every single Jew
across Nazi-occupied and Nazi-allied Europe.
And in order to do that, he needs the necessary scale.
And that's what this offers.
It needs development,
and it's the development of that idea which is what leads us
to the death camps.
So these urns contain ashes
from different camps across Europe.
The one directly in front of me is from Chelmno.
Chelmno is where Herbert Lange went directly from here, and it became
the first death camp.
And from that, a network was developed that led
to the murder of millions of people.
And it all started...here,
in this room.
From early 1942, millions of Jews were taken from all across
Nazi-occupied Europe
and sent to extermination camps like this one...
..to become no more than ash and memory.
It took just six months to get here
from the first bullets fired in the east.
How did that happen?
Of course, there was Hitler's poisonous ideology,
but it needed more than ideology.
It needed tens of thousands of ordinary people...
..to betray a neighbour,
or turn their backs and say nothing,
to help round up and rob,
to sign an order,
pull a trigger
or open a valve.
To see others as sufficiently different from them to be killed.