Last Days of the Nazis

It's 1945, and the Allies have rounded up as many Nazis as they can find. They'll interrogate party officials, war criminals and also minor players just to get to the bottom of how this nation operated. Their subjects include the leading Nazi propagandist and noted anti-Semite, Julius Streicher; the charming and likeable Albert Speer, Hitler's architect and Minister of Armaments; the commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolph Hoess; BDM leader Melita Maschmann and Nazi doctor Karl Gephardt. These Nazis share stories of their earliest encounters with Adolf Hitler. Speer presents a confounding portrait of an educated, likeable man seduced by his own ambitions. Maschmann explains how the Nazis cultivated racial hatred among young Germans. Occultist Karl Maria Wiligut explains the Nazi obsession with mysticism and ritual. The Nazis use spectacle and circus to obscure their dark agenda at the 1934 Nuremburg Party Rally and the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

Post-War Germany is a physical and moral ruin, and Allied interrogators must construct a narrative that explains the Third Reich. Julius Streicher, notorious anti-Semite, tries to rationalize his role in the Final Solution. Hitler Youth members Melita Maschmann and Armin Lehman recall the Night of Broken Glass. General Johannes Blaskowitz pays the ultimate price for challenging Hitler and Nazi brutality. Franz Stangel insists that it was not up to him to question the Nazis' euthanasia program against German citizens. Wilhelm Keitel tries and fails to persuade his interrogators that he was an honorable soldier. Lieutenant Colonel Phillipp Von Boeslager recalls the tenacity of Red Army soldiers and August Hafner recalls the psychological torment he and others endured while enforcing the Nazi agenda. Rudolf Hoess solves the managerial problem of industrialized killing at Auschwitz, and Franz Stangl runs a ruthlessly efficient mass extermination program at Treblinka.

After the war is over, the Allies are horrified to stumble across evidence of the Nazi's unprecedented crimes against humanity. Now they must question those who took part so they can prevent this from ever happening again. SS Investigator Judge Konrad Morgen describes his visit to Auschwitz to root out corruption there.