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00:30In July 1941, hundreds of Jewish men were marched to a secluded spot in the woods near Vilnius in Lithuania.
00:46Blindfolded, walking in single file, they reached a specially prepared pit, where they were lined up and shot.
00:55This was just the beginning.
01:02Throughout the war, 100,000 people would be killed at Panari.
01:06Dozens and dozens of people who tried to escape and were killed by dum-dum bullets.
01:21And the most shocking thing about it is that many of these Jews were shot not by Germans, but by their fellow Lithuanian countrymen.
01:45One of the dirtiest secrets of World War II is that right across the Baltic states, thousands of people actively supported the Nazis.
01:58They would form the Schutzmannschaft, so-called protection teams, death squads that were used to hunt down and kill hundreds of thousands of Jews.
02:10The Germans had created almost what you might call a criminal clique, a blood pact.
02:18Throughout Eastern Europe, there were tens of thousands of people who had covered their hands with the blood of Jews and communists.
02:26So what drove these men to hunt down and execute their neighbors?
02:31Were they forced into it by the Nazis?
02:34Did they do it for the money?
02:37Or were they simply vicious sadists with a thirst for killing Jews?
02:42This is the story of some of Hitler's most brutal collaborators.
02:48The collaborators of Lithuania and the Ukraine.
02:52This is the story of Lithuania and the Ukraine.
03:06June 1941. Operation Barbarossa.
03:13Hitler's armies invaded Russia on a huge 2,000-mile front.
03:19Panzers drove deep into Russian territory.
03:23From the air, the Luftwaffe pummeled any resistance.
03:29German infantry units followed the panzer spearhead.
03:39Taken completely by surprise, the Red Army didn't stand a chance.
03:51900,000 Soviet soldiers fell into German hands almost immediately.
03:58By the end of August, this figure reached one and a half million.
04:02Many more mutinied and deserted.
04:05But as the Germans pushed onwards, in some countries, they were welcomed as liberators.
04:22Cheering crowds turned out to greet them in their thousands.
04:27The reception was especially warm in the north.
04:30In the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia.
04:34The reason the people were particularly glad to see the Germans was that they hated the Russians.
04:50A year before the Germans arrived, the Russians had captured Lithuania.
05:00As part of a secret deal struck between Hitler and Stalin in August 1939, the Red Army had invaded and occupied the Baltic states.
05:09What made this so terrible is that these countries had previously been ruled by Russia for 120 years.
05:18They had only broken free after World War I.
05:22After just 20 years of independence, the Russians had come back.
05:28Stalin then wreaked havoc on his Baltic subjects.
05:37They were racial enemies of the Russians, if you like.
05:40They were a different race from the Russians.
05:42They had Western traditions.
05:44They always looked to the West.
05:46They were on the Baltic.
05:47They looked to nations like Sweden and Germany and Denmark.
05:50They were near neighbours and not to Russia.
05:53So I think he regarded them as a fifth column and as intrinsically enemies of Russians and, indeed, of Soviet communism.
06:03The Russians deported or executed thousands of families, viewed as anti-Soviet elements.
06:20Many more would die in prison camps in Siberia.
06:23Desperate to rid themselves of the Russians, the Lithuanian nationalists formed into guerrilla groups and prepared to rise against the Soviets.
06:41Little wonder that Hitler was seen as a better prospect than Stalin.
06:47For the Nazis, this was the perfect climate for recruiting collaborators.
06:52In the south, in the Ukraine, it was a similar picture.
06:59The Ukraine had once been one of the wealthiest parts of Russia, based on its fertile farmland.
07:14But all that had changed under Stalin.
07:17In the 1930s, he imposed a harsh new policy upon the Ukrainian peasants.
07:23They were forced to give up the land they had owned for generations and move to large collective farms.
07:29If farmers refused, they were made to hand over huge quotas of food to the state.
07:39Their homes were searched and destroyed by the Soviets.
07:43Their food and equipment confiscated.
07:46The rural population was left isolated and starving.
07:56The result was a famine of biblical proportions.
08:00As many as five million Ukrainians died.
08:07The Ukrainians call it murder by hunger.
08:09A genocide perpetrated by Stalin, with the sole aim of wiping out their culture and killing as many Ukrainians as possible.
08:19No wonder they saw the Germans as a more attractive proposition.
08:29All this ensured that when the Germans arrived, they were greeted as liberators.
08:36But for Hitler, these adoring people presented a problem.
08:41He now had vast new territories to run, and some 40 million more people to control.
08:48What was worse, was that he despised every one of them.
08:54He regarded them as a vast mass of slaves who were going to be used by the German settlers who he planned to plant on farms all over Poland, Russia, the Ukraine and the Eastern marches generally.
09:08They were going to be the slaves, the helots, mainly used as agricultural laborers.
09:13They weren't to be educated, but they weren't to be physically exterminated in a deliberate way as he planned to do with the Jews.
09:22But they were going to be used more or less as a population, expendable population of slaves.
09:33On top of this, these newly captured territories contained millions of undesirables, Jews, Gypsies and Russian prisoners.
09:42Controlling all of this would take a huge effort.
09:52The trouble was, Hitler just didn't have enough men.
09:57He couldn't spare any of his soldiers for police work, because they were committed to the front.
10:02So the Germans had no choice but to turn to their despised new subjects for help.
10:12And they came flooding in.
10:15Many men were recruited from the ranks of anti-Soviet guerrilla movements in Estonia and Lithuania.
10:21Or from Red Army deserters in the Ukraine.
10:24His call to arms happened within days of occupation.
10:35Their first official task was to deal with local communist organizations.
10:43Those who had experienced Stalinist oppression were eager to help.
10:46But this anti-communism masked another, much more sinister Nazi plan.
10:54The total annihilation of the Jews of Eastern Europe.
10:57Hitler had made no secret of his loathing for the Jews.
11:13He regarded them as parasitic vermin who polluted the blood of the German people
11:18and deserved to be eradicated.
11:20But crucially, in his eyes, all Jews were communists.
11:32Eliminate one, and he got rid of the other.
11:37He saw Judaism and Bolshevism as part and parcel of the same force.
11:42And it was his view that there was going to be a world struggle
11:47between the two rival ideologies of National Socialism and Judeo-Bolshevism.
11:54So Barbarossa was always on the cards.
11:56It was just a question of when.
12:02It wasn't hard to convince the Lithuanians to turn on the Jews.
12:06They had a long history of anti-Semitism
12:08and blamed them for the recent Soviet oppression.
12:13We're talking about the land that is the land of the pogrom.
12:17One always was, dating right back to Tsarist rule before the Communists ever took over.
12:22There was a very lively tradition of anti-Semitism,
12:25and vicious anti-Semitism at that, all over Eastern Europe.
12:29It was by no means unknown for Jews to be massacred and killed.
12:38Lithuanian nationalists had been preparing anti-Jewish propaganda for months.
12:42On the outbreak of war, they declared,
12:47The crucial day of reckoning for the Jews has come at last.
12:51Lithuania must be liberated not only from Asiatic Bolshevik slavery,
12:55but also from the Jewish yoke of long-standing.
13:02In fact, the Lithuanians were so enthusiastic that their own armed groups
13:06turned on the Jewish-Bolshevik menace within hours of the invasion.
13:12So-called Partisans rose up as soon as the fighting started along the border
13:19to join with the Germans.
13:21They often rose up in cities before the Germans arrived,
13:25started firing on Soviet units.
13:27And part of their activity was inciting people to join them,
13:33to join them in an anti-Soviet uprising.
13:36And that anti-Soviet feeling was almost indistinguishable
13:40from anti-Semitic feeling.
13:44One of these groups was called the Lithuanian National Labour Defence Battalion,
13:49or TDA.
13:51It's men identified by the white armbands they wore on their sleeves.
13:59These groups began murdering Jews in vicious pogroms on the streets.
14:04Most notorious were those carried out across the city of Kaunas.
14:09There, in June 1941, Jews were hunted down,
14:14humiliated and murdered by their Lithuanian neighbours.
14:18Crowds gathered round to watch members of the local militia beat Jewish men to death.
14:29In the background, they played the national anthem.
14:34So who were these men prepared to carry out such atrocities?
14:39One member of the TDA was a young man named Antanas Getsevichus,
14:49later known as Antanas Gekas.
14:52Antanas Gekas was a Lithuanian nationalist.
14:57He was born in Lithuania in comfortable circumstances.
15:05His parents were landowners.
15:07He'd gone to the military academy in Lithuania.
15:10He'd become a lieutenant in the Lithuanian Air Force.
15:14So he was very patriotic.
15:16He had military training, experience,
15:18but he was also an opportunist of the worst kind.
15:26In June and July of 1941,
15:28Kekas' unit was largely responsible for rounding up and executing hundreds of Jews
15:34at a site known as Fort Seven on the outskirts of the city.
15:37This violence was encouraged and incited by the Nazis, who reported,
15:48How easy it was to convince the Lithuanian circles
15:52of the need for self-purging actions
15:55to achieve a complete elimination of the Jews from public life.
16:01It was just a taste of things to come.
16:03Watching all this unfold was Heinrich Himmler,
16:18as head of the German secret police in the SS.
16:21He was the man to drive through Hitler's racial policies
16:24in the Soviet territories.
16:27Right from the start, Himmler realized the Lithuanians
16:30were people he could do business with.
16:33He ordered,
16:35No steps will be taken to interfere with any purges
16:40that may be initiated by anti-communist or anti-Jewish elements
16:44in the newly occupied territories.
16:47On the contrary, these are to be secretly encouraged.
16:50As the word secret shows, Himmler was careful to disassociate himself from the work of these Lithuanian thugs.
17:01At the same time, every precaution must be taken to ensure that those who engage in self-defense actions
17:10are not subsequently able to plead that they were acting under orders or had been promised political protection.
17:16Himmler found there was no shortage of willing and competent executioners.
17:23And what happened to the Jews in the Ukraine was even worse.
17:26In the first days of the invasion of the Soviet Union, the Germans had swept into the Ukraine, hammering the cities of Odessa, Kiev and Lvov.
17:42They captured huge swathes of Ukrainian territory and pushed back the Soviet army.
17:47In Lvov, the Germans made a gruesome discovery.
17:58Hundreds of people had been slaughtered in the city jail.
18:02They were Ukrainian nationalists, murdered by the retreating Russians.
18:06The nationalist groups blamed the Jews.
18:18Under the approving eye of the Nazis, they rounded up the city's Jews and forced them to remove the dead bodies.
18:24Then they wreaked their revenge.
18:32Jews were driven into the streets from their homes, their businesses.
18:37They were hacked to pieces in the street, beaten to death, shot.
18:41Women were raped.
18:44The violence, the destruction was extraordinary.
18:47The Germans had encouraged it, they stood by and watched it, and they enjoyed it.
19:02The Germans were so entertained by what they saw, that they filmed it.
19:09When the pogrom was over, 5,000 Jews were dead.
19:13The violence was so extreme, that the Nazi leadership became concerned.
19:21This angry rabble was one step away from turning into an uncontrollable mob.
19:29It was time to channel this anti-Semitism and apply some rigorous German discipline.
19:33Himmler announced that the anti-Soviet militias were to be disarmed and reformed into the Schutzmannschaft, or Schumer for short.
19:48It means protection team.
19:50These were auxiliary police battalions under the direct control of the Nazis.
19:55Many young men eagerly grabbed their chance.
20:01So what motivated them to join the ranks of the Germans?
20:06Some, like Antanas Gekas, transferred from armed Lithuanian units like the TDA.
20:13He wrote a letter to the local German commander, dedicating himself to the military success of the Reich,
20:23and the greater glory of Adolf Hitler.
20:26But despite this, he clearly wasn't a committed Nazi.
20:31During the Soviet occupation, Gekas had actually worked for the Russians.
20:36In his mind, the obvious thing to do was to immediately offer his services to the Germans in the most obsequious way possible.
20:47I don't think Gekas was really very ideological.
20:51I think he was probably a patriotic Lithuanian.
20:54He certainly didn't like Jews.
20:56But I don't think that he was a follower of Adolf Hitler.
20:59He hadn't read Mein Kampf.
21:00He was above all an opportunist who wanted to save his own skin, and he used any kind of excuse for self-promotion.
21:16There were many other reasons why collaborators signed up to the new battalions.
21:21For some it was a job, security, food and money for their families.
21:26Many would claim to be fighting for their country against Russia.
21:31A lot of them believed that this was a patriotic job, working for the Germans in the security apparatus,
21:42which of course meant hunting down, suppressing communist Jews who they regarded as their enemy.
21:48This was respectable work for someone who was a nationalist and a patriot.
21:53But the Germans weren't too picky about the people they enrolled, and the auxiliary units also attracted criminal elements and opportunists.
22:05Membership in these units was quite fluid.
22:09The paying conditions were not exactly highly regulated.
22:11A lot of Lithuanians joined the Schutzmannschaften in the early period because they knew it would give them an opportunity to rob and to plunder, particularly the property, the homes of Jews.
22:25Across the occupied countries, volunteers and conscripts flooded in. Estonia would eventually provide some 9,000 men, 5,000 Lithuanians would sign up.
22:40And the Nazis had a specific role in mind for their new recruits.
22:48The Schumer would be used alongside the most brutal of Nazi units, the Einsatzgruppen.
22:54These Einsatzgruppen were special operations SS units, and they took their orders from Himmler's deputy, Reinhard Heydrich.
23:10Their job was to follow the German army into occupied countries and murder communists, undesirables and especially Jews.
23:18They would go to a village or town, they'd make contact with sympathetic elements, anti-Soviet nationalists, and ask them, where are the communists living?
23:35Where are the people who used to work for the Soviets? Are there any stay-behind Red Army soldiers? Where are the Jews?
23:42Where are the Jews? They would then target these groups, round them up, march them out of town or to the edge of a city to places where there were anti-tank ditches or ravines, and murder them.
23:59The Einsatzgruppen had already done this grisly work in Poland.
24:12There they murdered an estimated 50,000 people.
24:20But it became apparent that the Germans didn't have the stomach for the slaughter.
24:24Morale began to sag.
24:28So, in the Soviet territories, Himmler needed someone else to do his dirty work.
24:34And the Schutzmannschaft seemed ideal.
24:36The Lithuanian Schumer, including Gekas's battalion, joined the death squads of Einsatzgruppe A, led by the fiercely ambitious Brigadeführer, Dr. Walter Stahlecker.
24:52His squad operated in the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
24:59Of the four Einsatzgruppe units, his were the most murderous.
25:06Throughout the rest of the war, they would round up and execute Jews.
25:09For a short time, they stuck to men, but their policy of murder soon spread to women and children.
25:20Entire communities would be wiped out, herded into pits and shot.
25:30Extraordinarily, local people far outnumbered Germans in these death squads.
25:35Once the Nazi leadership had decided that it was going to cleanse the occupied territories of all Jews except those who were useful to their war effort, they absolutely had to have local collaboration.
25:49They needed local collaborators to show them where the Jews were, to guard ghettos, to march Jews out to the killing sites, to guard the killing sites, to shoot the Jews.
26:03They needed tens of thousands of local volunteers to carry out what was becoming a genocide on a vast, and to us, unimaginable scale.
26:14The Schumer's first mass execution sites in the Soviet territories were in Kaunas, in Lithuania.
26:30Between June and October 1941, in a series of forts around the city, they perfected their deadly skills.
26:37They were led by Major Antanas in Pulevicius, a former member of the Lithuanian militia, and a notorious sadist.
26:50From Kaunas, the death squads fanned out across Einsatzgruppe A's territory, dividing into smaller units.
26:57One group was led by SS Standartenfuhrer Karl Jäger.
27:07He kept a chilling, meticulous account of the Jews and undesirables murdered by his men.
27:13It became known as the Jäger Report.
27:16Across Lithuania, the numbers racked up.
27:22Until in December 1941, his unit had killed over 137,000 Jews.
27:29In cold, efficient detail, men, women and children were recorded separately.
27:35At the end of the report, Jäger summarized.
27:40I can now state that the aim of solving the Jewish problem for Lithuania has been achieved.
27:48There are no more Jews in Lithuania apart from the work Jews and their families.
27:55What the report also detailed was the integral part played by the Lithuanian auxiliaries in this liquidation process.
28:02One of the most notorious massacres carried out by Jäger's men was the liquidation of the Jews of the Vilnius Ghetto in Lithuania.
28:24Jews were routinely rounded up and marched to the nearby woods of Panari by armed Lithuanian guards.
28:30In these woods, the Soviets had built huge pits for the storage of tank fuel.
28:38They had never been used for this purpose, but they were just right for what the death squads had in mind.
28:45Between July and December 1941, at least 48,000 Jews were lined up by the edge of these pits and shot.
28:54One teenager escaped from the Vilnius Ghetto and witnessed what happened.
29:01They took us in to collect bodies of dozens and dozens of people who tried to escape and were killed.
29:15They were killed.
29:16They were killed by dum-dum bullets.
29:24And collecting elderly people who were hitting their heads and see what's happening.
29:38And seeing children, mothers holding children and young couples embracing each other.
29:54And you take all these people and throw them into the pit.
29:58These were things you can't forget.
29:59Day after day, the Lithuanian shooters executed their countrymen.
30:17How could they have done it?
30:18One motivation was money.
30:24These murder expeditions were also a chance to rob the homes and steal the property of the Jews.
30:29One Schumer unit was employed further afield, in the neighbouring territory of Belarus.
30:42And it was developing quite a reputation.
30:45This was the death squad that Antanas Gekas had joined, the 12th Lithuanian Battalion.
30:50In September 1941, they were sent on a special operation in and around Minsk.
31:04Their task was the complete eradication of Jews from the ghetto and surrounding towns.
31:10The Germans were very clever in the way that they deployed the Schutzmannschaften.
31:15They sent Ukrainians to Poland, they sent Lithuanians to Belarus.
31:21They used them in areas where they would feel no kind of local ties, no local allegiances.
31:27Very often there were linguistic barriers.
31:30So they were virtually mercenaries.
31:33They could be sent to an area, detailed, to carry out a killing operation without any sense of affiliation or affinity to the local people.
31:46The 12th Battalion's crowning achievement came in a town called Slutsk.
31:55Here, as part of a German police battalion, they swept through the streets, rounding up Jews.
32:02They tore screaming children from their mothers and shot all who tried to evade capture.
32:10They then herded the Jews to pits outside the city.
32:17One of Gekas's officers described the massacres that followed.
32:21We were driving the Jews to the pits.
32:26They went in rows of four persons, in long columns.
32:32One part of the guards were driving them, and the others were waiting to shoot.
32:37The victims were lying in pits, and then were shot.
32:44We were killing with Russian rifles.
32:47We shot first their parents, and then their children.
32:51It was terrible to kill.
32:56We did it automatically, without thinking.
32:59As a platoon commander, Antanas Gekas took a prominent role in these operations.
33:11He knew German.
33:13He was able to liaise between the officers and the Lithuanian rank and file.
33:20Gekas was involved in the entire process, in deploying the Lithuanians as guards, as shooters,
33:27as communicating with the German senior officers, and in the shooting, personally taking part in the killing of Jewish men, women and children at the death pits.
33:41In Minsk, Gekas and his battalion also took part in a macabre public spectacle.
33:51The hanging of 17-year-old Masha Broskina and her fellow resistance fighters.
33:59In Belarus, Gekas's battalion would participate in the murder of 300,000 people.
34:05Walter Stahlecker neatly summarised the killings in a special document.
34:13It's known as the Coffin Map.
34:17The map details the total number of people killed by Stahlecker's men and their auxiliaries,
34:23and declares Estonia to have been completely cleared of Jews.
34:29After this initial wave of killings, he reports 128,000 Jews remaining.
34:36Presumably Jews who could be used for the German war effort.
34:42Meanwhile, in the Ukraine, Nazi collaborators were carrying out an equally ruthless extermination of the Jews.
34:51They operated within the Einsatzgruppe of Friedrich Yekeln, SS and police commander in eastern Russia.
34:57Yekeln's murder squads swept through the countryside and the death toll mounted.
35:082,500 Jews at Krivy Ria.
35:1023,600 at Kamyonets Padilsky.
35:18And in September 1941, they helped to carry out the largest single mass killing by Nazis and their collaborators throughout the entire Soviet campaign.
35:26A convenient pretext for this extermination fell into the Nazis' lap.
35:44The Germans' headquarters in Kiev, the captain of the Ukraine, were blown up by the retreating Soviets.
35:55The Germans pinned the sabotage on the Jews.
35:58They were rounded up by Ukrainian police and marched to a huge ravine called Babi Yar.
36:08It was the ideal place to try out one of Friedrich Yekeln's most notorious techniques, known as sardine packing.
36:14Victims were forced to climb into the ravine by Ukrainian militiamen and shot from above.
36:24Another batch of Jews were ordered to climb down and position themselves head to foot with the dead.
36:31Then they, too, would be shot.
36:35Yekeln believed this was a more efficient way of killing Jews.
36:38It was also a more efficient way of filling the pits.
36:42You used the space more efficiently so you didn't have to dig longer and bigger pits.
36:49In his eyes, this was a terrific achievement, a great step forward in efficiency.
36:56To us, of course, it is simply the most extraordinary barbarity.
36:59And you do wonder how an intelligent and educated man, which is what he was, could have thought this through and sort of patted himself on the back for having come up with this solution to a difficult problem.
37:14Sardine packing proved very effective.
37:18After just two days, nearly 34,000 were dead.
37:23How could these people execute entire families?
37:26How could they justify killing women, children, babies?
37:34The hardcore Nazis, of course, viewed the Jews as a racial enemy that had to be exterminated.
37:40And as the next generation, children above all had to be wiped out.
37:46But what about the Nazis' Ukrainian collaborators?
37:50How could they do it?
37:52Many of these people had a primitive way of thinking.
37:56They believed in blood feuds, grudges.
38:00They had long memories within their own communities.
38:04And I think they worried that if anyone in a Jewish community survived, they would come back looking for revenge.
38:11They didn't want witnesses, they didn't want anyone who could say,
38:16he killed my mother or father.
38:19So even the children had to be killed because they could be witnesses.
38:24Having shown themselves willing to assist in the wholesale slaughter of Jews,
38:30Hitler's collaborators would soon be implicated in the very worst of his crimes.
38:34The world's first industrialized genocide.
38:35Death camps were set up to receive trainloads of Jews from across the occupied countries.
38:48The Nazis needed staff to run these death factories efficiently.
39:02So they turned to their Ukrainian puppets.
39:06So they turned to their Ukrainian puppets.
39:15One of the most notorious was a man thought to be called Ivan Marchenko.
39:20He was recruited and trained by the SS at a prison camp called Travniki.
39:26From there he was sent to the notorious extermination camp Treblinka
39:30to work the gas chambers where 3,000 Jews could be killed at one time.
39:38He was a vicious sadist and became known as Ivan the Terrible.
39:44Marchenko was almost certainly a former Soviet prisoner of war.
39:49The recruitment of these guards was officially voluntary
39:53but many would claim that their only real alternative was deportation
39:57or death in a prisoner of war camp.
40:01But once employed, they excelled in tormenting their victims.
40:06Especially Ivan Marchenko.
40:09He liked to use a sword to drive Jewish women to their deaths in the gas chambers.
40:18In these camps Marchenko and his Ukrainian colleagues could unload and kill an entire trainload of people
40:25in just four hours.
40:26A spirit of corruption began to fill the guard units at these killing sites.
40:37They had a lot of money.
40:39They were buying booze.
40:41They were drunk a lot of the time.
40:42Some of them took Jewish women from the trains, kept them from the gas chambers for a few days and used them as kind of sex slaves.
40:52These death camps were the most horrendous environments in which men became corrupt, depraved, violent.
41:03Any moral inhibition eroded.
41:13In Treblinka alone, Marchenko and his men helped to murder over three quarters of a million people.
41:18He was exceptionally evil.
41:23And in 1983, the Israeli courts thought they had got him.
41:27A Ukrainian named John Demjaniuk was arrested and accused of his crimes.
41:37But it turned out that Demjaniuk was not Ivan Marchenko of Treblinka and he was released.
41:42But he was not off the hook yet.
41:43Today, in Munich, Demjaniuk stands accused of being a guard at another killing centre in Poland.
41:56Subibor.
42:02Millions of Jews continued to be processed by Ukrainian collaborators right up to the end of the war.
42:08Even as the German army faced its destruction.
42:10In 1943, the tide finally turned and the war began to be badly for the Germans.
42:31The Russian army was striking back.
42:36Victory followed victory.
42:39Stalingrad.
42:41A resounding success for the Russian army.
42:44At least 275,000 Germans were wiped out.
42:53Many of them froze to death over the bitter Russian winter.
42:56The battle of Kursk.
43:07The biggest tank battle of World War II.
43:10500,000 German soldiers were killed, wounded or lost.
43:15The German army was running out of men.
43:20For Hitler, there was now no option.
43:24The Nazis, who considered Slavs and Eastern Europeans as barely human, would now have to rely on them.
43:35They were able to take advantage of this very successful Soviet counterattack.
43:41To say to the peoples of Eastern Europe, unless you rally to our cause, the Bolsheviks are going to come back.
43:46And after this period of collaboration with us, after you profited from looting the Jews, the killing of the Jews, they're not going to look very kindly on you.
43:57So if you want to defend your ill-gotten gains, if you want to defend any chance of Ukrainian independence or Lithuanian autonomy, join the German military forces.
44:09The collaborationist police battalions were phased out.
44:20Their men transformed into frontline soldiers, fighting for the Germans all over the Eastern Front.
44:27Even the elite SS was forced to recruit from the Soviet states.
44:3113,000 men formed an Estonian legion.
44:39Himmler even agreed to the recruitment of a Ukrainian SS division.
44:45But he obliterated any claims they could make to be patriots, fighting for their own country.
44:51They were not allowed to use the word Ukraine in the name of their unit.
44:55So in April 1943, they were formed into the SS Galizia division.
45:0215,000 Ukrainian volunteers were signed up and sent to the Eastern Front.
45:08And when the Lithuanian police battalions were disbanded, Antanas Gekas joined a Luftwaffe labor unit and served on the Italian Front.
45:16These collaborators were now a vital part of Germany's armed forces and fought by their side to the bitter end.
45:33The Germans had created almost what you might call a criminal clique, a blood pact.
45:39Throughout Eastern Europe, there were tens of thousands of people who had covered their hands with the blood of Jews and Communists,
45:49who had profited from the German occupation.
45:53And the Germans knew that they could rely on these people for a last-ditch defence of the occupation.
46:03These collaborators, brutalised by years of killing and lawlessness, were now fighting for their lives against a Russian army, hell-bent on revenge.
46:16But it was all too little too late. The Russians were coming, and there was nothing the German army or its collaborators could do to stop it.
46:32As the war ended, many former Schumer volunteers surrendered to American and British troops and escaped to the West.
46:51And there was good reason to run.
46:54Many who stayed behind after the war were hunted down by partisans seeking revenge.
46:59One of these partisans was Menachem, the Jewish teenager who had escaped the Vilnius Ghetto.
47:08He was part of a group who tried to track down the perpetrators of the massacres at Panari.
47:14But a great many more escaped justice.
47:20Among these was the commander of the 12th Battalion, Antanas Impulovicius.
47:24He lived in America until his death and was never tried or punished for his crimes.
47:33And what of his one-time platoon commander, Antanas Gekas?
47:37Incredibly, he had changed sides right at the end of the war and fought for the Allies.
47:42He took part in the fighting for Bologna in the last months of the Second World War, actually got a medal from the British and was able to settle in Britain after the war with the men of the Polish divisions who, because they had fought under the British flag, were given the right to settle in Britain.
48:04He moved to Scotland and led an apparently blameless life until information was provided by the Soviets that revealed that he'd taken part in some of the worst atrocities of the Second World War.
48:18In 2001, Scotland agreed to extradite Gekas to Lithuania, but he died before he could be brought to trial.
48:33After the Second World War, these Lithuanian and Ukrainian collaborators proved frustratingly hard to bring to justice.
48:40As a result, it's difficult for us to understand their motives.
48:46It's clear that some were anti-communists and were haunted by the atrocities committed on their friends and families by Stalin.
48:54Others had no choice.
48:57The Germans offered their best hope of survival, food and money for their families.
49:02But this cannot justify participating in the mass slaughter of millions of people.
49:08Many of these collaborators weren't just following orders, they killed for personal gain and sometimes they enjoyed it.
49:21And their help ensured that Hitler could carry out his genocide against the Jews.
49:38But these people couldn't believe the Germans of Protesters, whether it was a nightmare or a place in the sky.
49:42And my family, I'm glad you came here because of the whole world and I started to win.
49:46And I think that from those of you, you know, there was such a situation where they were against, why, you know, they were the ends.
49:49You know, that there were maybe some of these families, the ones that were in front of the church.
49:53But by this day, there were a kind of trouble.
49:55The people who had been arrested for this year.
49:59You know, that we could be just a hope of the reality of the world and the world.
50:01The people who were born then, there would be the most inclusive in the world.
50:03And you never thought about it.
50:04You know, maybe it was a force-time big fan.