This episode,’WHY WE FIGHT’, needs to be shown to kids in high school history classes around the world.They need to understand that this is what happens when humanity loses its unity.That this is what happens when we become divided by hateful leaders.They called the FIRST WORLD WAR...THE GREAT WAR...THE WAR TO END ALL WARS, yet just over a generation later,we were fighting an even more brutal war...more than 60 million dead(and that’s just a guestimate.Who knows how many more people are buried in mass graves around the world because of that war).Humanity never learns.We’ve had a war virtually every decade since World War Two ended in 1945.And now we have Ukraine.A war that could drag on for years.And just like Hitler,we have another despot,lunatic,in Putin.We never learn from history.NEVER LEARN.😪
The camp depicted in Band of Brothers is Kaufering IV (Hurlach) which was actually found and liberated by the 12th Armored Division on April 27, 1945 with some units of the 101st arriving on April 28. And there were only about 7 prisoners found alive and about 500 bodies. For dramatic purposes, Easy Company is shown liberating the camp. From the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: _As US armed forces approached the Kaufering complex in late April 1945, the SS began evacuating the camps, sending the prisoners on death marches in the direction of Dachau. Those inmates who could not keep up were often shot or beaten to death by the guards. At Kaufering IV, the SS set fire to the barracks killing hundreds of prisoners who were too ill or weak to move._ _When the 12th Armored Division and 101st Airborne Division arrived at Kaufering IV on April 27 and 28, respectively, the soldiers discovered some 500 dead inmates. In the days that followed, the US Army units ordered the local townspeople to bury the dead._
08:20 - Those soldiers executing Germans were French soldiers, this scene is meant to show the spirit of revenge that the French had at that moment in the war, that's why may German soldiers tried to surrender to the British and the US Army rather the French or the Russians. 22:43 - The allied command started to hear rumors of the atrocities starting from 1943... But they couldn't confirm if they were true or not, because, no one in the world wanted to believe that this could happen, but it happened...
This is why Eisenhower told his troops, "Get it all on record now - get the films - get the witnesses - because somewhere down the road of history some bastard will get up and say that this never happened." General Eisenhower was prophetic over a lot of things.
_Get it all on record now - get the films - get the witnesses - because somewhere down the road of history some bastard will get up and say that this never happened."_ *According to the Eisenhower Presidential Library this is a misquote that first appeared around 2007. Eisenhower did say the following in a letter to George C. Marshall on April 15, 1945:* *_The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick. In one room, where they were piled up twenty or thirty naked men, killed by starvation, George Patton would not even enter. He said he would get sick if he did so. I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to “propaganda._*
It's not about the skeptic being a bastard. It's about every nation in history using propaganda about their enemies during war. This is something we cannot allow people to be skeptic about. We need to remember this at all costs. I do think other genocides have been underappreciated(?) (I don't know a better word but basically they're not taught about well enough).
I am going to be a little bit political...in1942-1944 nobody knew about this camps...UK, USA France and others were at war bcs they were invaded by germans or japs...today we have war in my neighbour country in Ukcraine when every day i see russians kiliing civilians, bombing schools and murdering POW and nobody is doing anything...we are just blinded ilke those germans in the town...its sick...Sorry po political statement.
"If anyone ever tells you the Holocaust didn't happen, or that it wasn't as bad as they say, no, it was worse than they say. What we saw, what these Germans did, it was worse than you can possibly imagine." - Edward "Babe" Heffron
Dont remember who said it but the worst i've ever heard, still haunts me, was a kid who was ordered to beat his dad to death.. It has to be the highest level of evil possible in the universe.. Thank god there was brave men who chose to fight it, like ukrainians today, thank god for them!
@@CliffJumpingProdI was at a lecture of a Holocaust survivor named Michael Jacobs. He told the story of how he and the other older boys taken to the top of the tallest building in the ghetto and were ordered at machine gun point to throw the Jewish babies off. I was sick feeling for days after.
One of the ways they achieved such a convincing effect with the camps, a lot of the extras playing the inmates were actually cancer patients undergoing treatment choosing to help in the creation of such an impactful and important scene.
And even that isn't nearly enough to make them look as emaciated as the real deal was. To look as terrible as they did you'd have to get people with the most extreme cases of anorexia possible. Literally nothing but skin and bones, like walking corpses.
There was a WWII documentary way back when and this show recreated some of the photographs about the Holocaust that show presented. The one that really stands out is the boxcar full of dead bodies. The woman in red's husband was in the Wehrmacht, the regular German army, the camps were run by the SS but she knew she was culpable by going along with it and being willfully blind. Great juxtaposition of her looking at Nixon with disdain when he was looting her house and his feeling shame over it and then Nixon seeing her in the camp, still in shock, and her shame for being complicit. Awesome film making!
_Liebgott having to tell the prisoners to get back into the camp is always the parts that breaks me._ It was written to be emotional, but it is fictional. Easy Company never liberated a concentration camp.
My grandfather was a tanker in the 3rd Armored Division, and liberated Mittelbau-Dora. He never once talked about it. The only thing that would ever show is that whenever someone denied the Holocaust, he would get absolutely livid.
@@crackensvideo Nice, Sherman’s a great tank, my personal favorite. Probably about the same time your grandfather was rolling towards Berlin, my Great Grandpa was serving as a B-24 waistgunner. While your grandpa and his fellow tankers were mixing it up with Jerry on the ground, my great gramps and his squadron mates were pounding them from the air.
The look with the woman in red - when Nix was in her house looking to rob her booze, she stares at him with arms folded, accusatory and disapproving, from her moral high ground. And Nix leaves without a word because he knows he's wrong. At the end when the second staredown happens, she tries to maintain that same glare, but ultimately even the brazen wife of a Nazi leader can't maintain any claim to moral superiority in the presence of the horror they created, so she ultimately has to look away.
This. Whether she knew or not, she can no longer hold on to pride for her husband in the presence of what he was very clearly involved in. That’s the look. What is a Yank stealing some booze from a wealthy German officer’s home in comparison to this? It’s nothing and she knows it.
It's fictional. Easy Company never liberated a concentration camp. The camp depicted in Band of Brothers is Kaufering IV which was actually liberated by the 12th Armored Division.
12:45 man carrying older man, he is speaking Serbian, he is saying "People help, please help, he is still alive, you can still save him" Man I was just a kid when I first watched the series, to hear those words to understand them, while everything was subtitled. I still get chills down my spine...
Nixon dealing with survivor's guilt, trauma, and a divorce made me feel for him so much. I'm glad that Winters was essentially his best friend and there for him when he got hit with so many emotional situations in a short span of time.
When I was a teenager watching this series for the first time, the intro to this episode puzzled me. In every other episode the veteran interviews in the intros correspond obviously in some way to the theme or focus of the episode-Episode 2 intro is all about the big jump and losing the leg bag and the episode shows this. Episode 3 intro is about dealing with fear in combat and the episode follows Blithe as he works through that. This episode intro humanizes German soldiers with the overall message being “they were like us.” So when I saw that for the first time I had expected an episode that would maybe either show the humanity of some German POWs, or an American who was briefly captured and shown mercy by German soldiers or something in that vein. I was completely blindsided by the topic of concentration camps-and we don’t even see a single German soldier the whole episode (except for a photograph of a dead officer). But we do see the aftermath of what German soldiers did. I’m ashamed to say that it took me more than a couple re-watches and more life experience to finally understand the point of this episode’s intro in context of the overall episode: it’s that if they were like us, then we were like them. It’s a warning. If we might have been friends in different circumstances because we shared hobbies, interests, and duty to country, then maybe in different circumstances we might have ended up alongside them. The Holocaust didn’t happen overnight. It took years and baby steps of societal manipulation by charismatic figureheads to ostracize and dehumanize minorities-it’s something every society is susceptible to, and something we must continually guard against. To understand that manipulation and how the non-fanatical general public can play a role in such atrocities, I recommend the documentary Final Account, which interviews the last living generation of Germans that were alive during the Holocaust. It’s illuminating toward the question “How could they let it happen?” And consequently can help us answer the question “How can we make sure it never happens again?”
Let's be clear... the same types of subjugation and ostracizing we see in Nazi Germany, we are seeing here in the US. The targets are almost the same. "Communists, Socialists and Marxists". And of course, LBGT. And we're seeing the same type of tactics used. A propaganda force, where the information in it is unverified; but stronger than what's fact. A shear hatred. Calling other America's less than or non-patriotic. Threats made against specific groups and plans to fulfill those threats.
Stories about the camps were trickling out in the years prior, but they were so horrible and fantastic they weren't taken seriously. Really the first knowledge the world had about them was their discovery as the Allied armies advanced. The German citizens knew, by and large, but it was dangerous to know. If you made too much noise about them you were liable to be slapped into one. Germany was a police state, and it imprisoned political opponents, ethnic minorities, the mentally retarded, clergy who spoke out publicly against the camps, and several other demographics, in addition to the Jews.
I always find it difficult understanding the citizens marching the government towards my-niche nationalism and fascism thinking that because they are the "preferred demographic" so they will be prosperous. Nope you won't. You will end up being an oppressed working class with no freedoms under constant threat of becoming one of the imprisoned class for a minor offense or the will of someones quotas. Watching your friends, family and neighbors get hauled off to camps, in constant fear of it happening to you. There is no freedom in a country that does not value ALL citizens equally.
@@5353Jumper I agree with everything you said. The only answer is everyone is equal under the law. The problem is that some people demand that they should be more equal than others.
The FDR administration knew what was happening the Holocaust was uncovered by British spies they infiltrated the camps posing as prisoners. Allied command decided to keep it a secret because their troops would be much more likely to summarily execute German soldiers who surrender which would cause a situation where they don't surrender and try to fight to the last man like the Japanese. Goebbels would have had a field day spinning propaganda to keep the German fighting man fighting had the allies start killing German POWs in large numbers.
@@5353JumperI agree but Germany was fucked after WW1 they got all the blame and the det and weak government,they were so poor unemployment and people with no food and water skyrocketed so when the Devil came along and said he could fix everything and the rest is history they are fine now
Additionally the Russians had previously lied about atrocities, polish officers were killed by the Russians and they blamed the Germans. Which the allies found out to be a lie. So when word of the first camps came from the Russians, the allies were incredibly sceptical.
Yet we have Nazi's brazenly marching on the streets of America, in not insignificant numbers. Literal fucking Nazi's marching on our streets. And nobody cares. Not a single person cares. We are freely letting Nazism awaken in America. Its disgusting. Nobody even wants to talk about it. Most people don't even want to acknowledge it, yet there are dozens, upon dozens, upon dozens of videos over the last two years alone of actual Nazi parties marching on our American streets. Disgusting. This country is shameful, and we as Americans are also shameful. We are shameful for letting our current state of political affairs to come to pass. And its precisely because nobody cares, and nobody wants to talk about it, and nobody wants to do anything about it.
@@Lezzyboy87 _doesn't take away from the message though_ Is the message that Steven Spielberg wanted to include something related to the Holocaust in Band of Brothers?
@@iammanofnature235 This was'nt an concentration camp. It was a simple and small labour camp. The russian army found most of the concentration camps. And, the allied leaders where aware of the labour and conentration camp long before 1945..
Refeeding syndrome is very serious... even a relatively moderate amount of food can be very dangerous to someone who's starving. The sudden change in blood sugar can set off a chain reaction that just crashes the whole system.
@@joshuaortiz2031 Yes, but the more immediate danger is that the sudden release of insulin causes already depleted phosphate levels to crash, which can cause convulsions and heart failure.
I was so invested in the series up until this point that my brain somehow completely forgot about the camps, and because of that, this remains one of the most effective hours of TV for me. Few things have come close to the feeling I got when I saw the camps and was like: "Oh my God, THIS happened".
It hit me the same way. It's pretty genius filmmaking if it was intentional. The show so far has been mostly battle after battle, campaign after campaign. It puts you in the same mindset as the soldiers, just expecting fights with more German defenders only to be blindsided by the reminder that the camps existed, and what all the fighting was for.
@10:34 the final solution was why it was important to stop the nazi and axis powers and THIS was just one moment where the allied soldiers fighting the war saw it first hand. it shook ww2 leaders like Eisenhower to their very core and insisted it be heavily documented so that it COUDLN'T be denied and that future generations needed to witness how terrible this moment in history was for all of humanity...he understood that if it were to be forgotten, it would surely be repeated.
@@ThurasizWe may be individuals but collective effort to educate and stop nationalism will be greater than the sum of our efforts. It's up to us to prevent this ever happening again.
Except things exactly like this happened "again" courtesy of anti-"Nationalists" like Mao's Chinese communist party - the Cultural Revolution, with at least 20 million murdered in the pursuit of wonderful, "equitable" socialism. Russian, British, Canadian, Free French and American "Nationalists" defeated Germany, Italy and Japan. Any body who tells you the average soldier was fighting for some amorphous ideal "United Nations" is kidding themselves. That's the label some politicians slapped on the war effort, immediately before they got right back to opposing and competing with each other, and in Russias case, General military occupation of half of Europe for 45 years. It doesn't in any way excuse the absolute inhumanity of what the Nazis did, or the collective guilt of the adult Germans who let it happen, but throwing a general condemnation of "Nationalism" out is dangerously simplistic.
@@Thurasizthe perverse irony of Nazism festering and becoming emboldened in the US today when we had a whole generation of men and women who helped to end it in Germany 80 years ago.
Liebgott was so traumatized that he never went to any Easy Company reunions or kept in touch any other way. Some of them were even questioning if he was still alive when the book was written.
A great misconception about Liebgott was that he was Jewish. Technically yes, he was half-Jewish on his mother’s side but he was raised Catholic. Still, it definitely had a direct impact on him seeing his kind treated that way.
Catholicism is just a religion. Jewish people are an ethnic group. You can go to catholic church and it doesn't make you not Jewish. And I wouldn't refer to it as a technicality. Not trying to go at you or anything here, as your intent doesn't seem negative. Just trying to clarify.
Technically they believe that having a Jewish mother makes you Jewish. The Nazis definitely would have seen it that way if he lived in Germany he would have easily been one extra holocaust victim.
@@ruthsaunders9507 yes because, for the most part, there is no question of your mother actually being your mother. of course, there is the possibility of 1 woman claiming a child to protect another for some reason. they were logical, atleast as far as being a member of the tribe is concerned.
My dad was a soldier in the Army at that time and his unit liberated one of the camps, he never talked a lot about the war in general. Some of my wife's family were in the camps, they were Hungarian Jews, her great aunt was one of those who survived the camps and I saw her numbers, she was a teen at that time. My dad passed away in 1983 and my wife's aunt in 1999. All of this must be remembered, we must never forget any of our human history.
This Episode always gets me. My grandad never really spoke about WW2 he was in the war from Dunkirk, but he did help clear a concentration camp and it's the look on his face when he told me but never went into detail.
With the work camp scene, it's really the music that pushes it to the next level, it really tugs at your feelings even more. When O'Keefe is sitting down, it's the first time Perconte calls him by his proper name, because he realizes it's not the time or place to fuck around anymore. And this is the first episode we see Spiers taken aback by something. When Liebgott addresses the prisoners, they react that way because those words are probably the same the Germans initially told them to get them inside the camps. "It's for your own good, we're here to help, blabla.."
The best episode of the show imo. It really solidifies this show as an all-time great, and even better, it manages to stick the landing with the next episode and finish strong. I go back and watch this series every year or two and man, it always holds up just as amazing as the first time.
@@John-gl6thI would ignore this person. They straight up defended the Nazis in another comment. They either love to troll or just extremely disturbed.
There's real footage of Germans being forced to "tour" the camps, where they saw bodies and jars of experiments done on prisoners, as well as the actual living prisoners, they were forced to look at it, some of the German citizens screamed out "we didn't know!" And it really pissed off the prisoners so much. They did know about what was happening so close to them, but they ignored it. It really is horrific. EDIT- if you want to look up more information about the events, look up Margaret Bourke-White and her photographs and writings on the camp of Buchenwald.
Really depends on location. Those in towns right near the camps had to be willfully ignorant at best. I can't imagine living within a couple miles of this and actually being unaware. But there certainly were Germans that didn't know if they weren't in close proximity to one of the camps. It wasn't something the Nazi govt advertised. But the ones portrayed in this episode almost certainly had to know. It's like Webster says, about how the baker must have smelled the stench.
@@snerdterguson Just look at what Russians are doing to Ukrainians now and how Russians at home not only know but celebrate it. I refuse to give any German who lived during WW2 the benefit of the doubt anymore.
I can understand the willful ignorance of the German citizens. I can imagine they chose to believe that everyone in those camps were prisoners of war or guilty of something that they did wrong. It’s hard to believe that such a massive holocaust could actually happen.
@@snerdterguson I mean, there is an army base relatively close to where I live, I've never actually seen it. I might have been next to it for all I know. I have zero clue what it looks like or what goes on inside. Like, I know that a concentration camp is very different from an army base, but at the same time, not everyone knows everything that goes on in their neighbourhood.
@@AnnekeOosterink yeah no. They were burning bodies. They aren’t doing that on the military base you lived near. It isn’t even apples and oranges. It’s apples and some type of matter from a completely different universe.
Fun Fact: The violin scene has a lot of symbolism to it. Both Mozart and Hitler were Austrian (not pure German), where as Beethoven WAS born in Germany.....so what the scene is depicting when Easy states "they know how to play Mozart", Nicks corrects them about it being Beethoven, and then the ending scene being of the violinist fading out and nodding approval as they end.....is that of "here is the true Spirit of Germany, not those that try to claim it, or the world 'thinks" it is....here is the TRUE Spirit of Germany".
@@John-gl6thNationalism most certainly did exist then. And claiming that Austrians are still ethnically German so it doesn’t matter is the same excuse Hitler used for Austria and Czechoslovakia, and the same excuse Putin is using for Ukraine today.
The question of guilt and who knew what and when have been debated endlessly. I am old enough that the adults in my childhood fought in the war, and an uncle toured the camps with Eisenhower. The consensus among them was that there were various levels and kinds of guilt, beyond those who planned and carried out the physical murders and genocide, and some of it went back to WW I. By 1944, to not know that such a large part of the population, especially so many members of the professional class, had disappeared is hard to buy. The German man who conveniently started sobbing once he saw Nixon looking at him is a good example of not knowing because you didn’t want to know. That man would have noticed the doctors, accountants, tailors, bankers, and other Jews in his professional and personal circles were suddenly gone. Middle and upper class homes in neighborhoods aren’t suddenly empty without people knowing that it happened to be all the Jews on the block. For anyone in the German army who knew what was happening on the Russian front after Stalingrad to pretend that victory was still possible and that the Allies would allow the Nazis to keep power after their inevitable defeat, even if they didn’t know anything about the Holocaust, they were guilty of perpetuating the war and therefore responsible for making, possible most of the genocide, which took place in the final few years of the war. For those who voted for the Nazis, or accepted their rule after they were elected to power in 1932, if they didn’t know the party’s policies on Jews, they should have: the Nazis were always ant-Semitic and violently reactionary, while Hitler said plainly in Mein Kampf, published in 1925, what he wanted to do about the Jews and all other non-Aryan peoples. One might also blame a parliamentary multi-party system that allowed a minority to win power because the majority was split among too many other options. And then the wholesale unwillingness from 1919 on to accept that Germany lost WWI on the battlefield. That’s what so many in my parents’ and grandparents’ circle were mad about: that they had to go back after already beating them the first time around. The myth that the German army was defeated, stabbed in the back, originated when they surrendered and came back to Berlin. But reality is that they never won a major offensive in the West and suffered loss after loss, until they finally collapsed in 1918. Versailles was probably unfair, but the German army was not betrayed by Jews or anyone else on the home front. We whipped their ass. The primary and most evil responsibilities were on Hitler the Nazis, but very few Germans were completely free of blame.
US (edit: not the only other country to do so, but it's the one I live in and am comfortable calling out in this context lol) is guilty of using the same tactic for mobilizing our population. Hitler gave them someone to blame for any problem that came up. We did it afterwards with russia/communism, we have been doing it with immigrants today. Obviously not to the extreme of Hitler and the nazi's but the same tactic.
I'm old enough to remember discussions among the allies, about whether this person or that person in Germany should be allowed to run for political office. Who could be trusted?
I'm from Sweden and in 9th grade when people are about 15/16 we study WWII. When I was young and for people who are older than me it was common for WWII survivors to come to schools and talk about their experiences. I will never ever forget this married couple who came to our school showing pictures and telling their story.
I can see all of you guys swallowing your tears in the camp scene. Respect. Especially the guy with the head. I don't know your name but I can feel your emotion all the way over here. Heartwarming to watch you control your emotions and preventing the attention from going to you instead of the scene. So powerful.
And he's portraying a French soldier. Note the uniform and helmet. I'm not trying to condemn the French or saying U.S. soldiers didn't do the same thing at times, but just pointing out that the French were probably more justifiably vengeful since their country had been conquered and brutally occupied by the Germans for over 4 years.
Amazing reaction guys. I really enjoyed this. A film making note, the actors of easy company were never told about this set and the other actors. So when they brought in for first day of shooting their reactions were genuine and shocked. They wanted to get that reaction of them never seeing something so traumatizing and heinous that they managed to captured their reaction with this. This was brilliantly done and I applaud the directors who made this and have us witness such an event.
They should watch the Russian film "come and see" it was directed by a man who survived Stalingrad as a boy and then later created the movie in the 80s drawing on his experiences. It's not about Stalingrad though it's about the massacre of the belorussians by SS penal battalions.
@@darkstar3116or... alternatively... They just really like good movies? Especially one like that which tugs on a certain emotional string that not too many movies or shows can ever manage to?
I hope you guys watch The Pacific after this show. Made by the same creators of Band of Brothers. It focuses on the War in Japan and in my opinion is just as good of a miniseries.
14:54 Malarkey points out some of the prisoners were branded with numbers like cattle. Later in the episode, it's referenced that the Russians discovered a concentration camp with gas chambers. The unnamed camp was Auschwitz since that was the only camp that tattooed numbers on their prisoners. The bodies in this episode were most likely prisoners that had been transferred from there.
on every camp they tattoed numbers on people there it was there way of one dehumanising them more and also know how many where at the camp because germans love effieciancy
No, only Auschwitz tattooed prisoners, and then only ones designated for forced labor. Many prisoners in other camps had been tattooed, but it was done in Auschwitz and then they were transferred. The poor men, women and children they just sent immediately to the gas chambers wouldn't be marked.
Listen to yourselves. Arguing over if the Nazis branded every prisoner or just the poor souls sent to that evil place! Drop the semantics and acknowledge that either way it is pure evil.
I had three great grandfathers who fought in WWII. One was in the field artillery and his unit liberated Dachau, which is the overall network of camps shown in this episode. He didn't tell my grandfather much until his 18th birthday and when my grandfather was almost drafted for Vietnam, my great grandfather told my grandfather to tell the recruiters, "I fought in WWII so you wouldn't have to fight another war."
"First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out. Because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out. Because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out. Because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me. And there was no one left to speak for me..." -Martin Niemöller
The original poem actually started with a similar line, "First they came for the communists", etc. Ironically, given the point of the poem, that line is often removed due to anti-communist sentiment that ballooned with the start of the Cold War.
What an incredibly emotional and impactful piece of television. Being a bit of a history buff I remember reading that the mayor and his wife of a town near one of the camps. After being forced to tour the camp went home and hanged themselves.
I have seen this show at least 8 times and this episode still gets me on every level. Outside of the amazing filmmaking, I hope It helps in reminding us that this should never happen again and that unfortunately, genocides are still going on today, despite what we have learnt from this.
@@joshuaortiz2031 I grew up in France and we were shown photos and videos of this at school at age 11 when we studied the holocaust. We also studied WW1 and saw pretty graphic photos from that as young as 8 years old in school. My teacher used as many local stories and photos to show us what our town looked during the wars. I guess for us it was important to be aware of all of this as young as possible because it's pretty common to dig up bullets/bodies/pieces of bombs/etc in fields and gardens, and a lot of kids would play in abandoned German bunkers that are scattered around everywhere. I never had nightmares, if anything it just made me want to learn more.
Having seen this Series when it first came out and having watched it countless times I still can't get through this episode without getting choked up and crying. Like lots who have watched it this for some reason sneaks up on you even though we all know about these Camps. Never forget..... 💔🙏💔
The opening/ending scene also has great significance. As they watch the band play they believed it was Mozart (who like Adolf Hitler, was from Austria) Nixon corrects them and informs the guys that it’s actually Beethoven, a true German. It helps signify Hitlers end and Germany being restored back to a country of peaceful values.
Most of the higher ups in the army knew about the camps and debated about bombing them but they did not. Decided the best way to stop it was by winning the war. Don't they knew the entire extent until they were liberated
Yes! Many allied higher-ups knew; they were getting so many similar reports from many disparate sources. There is a suspicion that many allied elites wanted it to happen, and could claim "clean hands", because it was the Nazis that did it. They also knew the Nazis were expending valuable material resources on this genocide program that have otherwise should have been spent for military purposes. They could have constantly bombed the camps and the railway lines. Bombing would have saved millions of lives. They could have dropped a parachute regiment on Auschwitz (perhaps a suicide mission) as a public stunt that would have publicly involved the whole Wehrmacht, from General to Private, so no one in the military could deny knowledge or responsibility. They could have constantly leafleted Germany with the information, so the German public could not deny it was happening, and could not deny that they were told. It stinks!!!
Yeah, the Polish resistance managed to get out what was going on pretty early (which was partially done by resistance members who voluntarily went to the camps to report what was going on), but they weren’t entirely taken seriously at first and even until the war ended people didn’t quite believe the scope of it
_debated about bombing them but they did not._ They did bomb the Buna (I.G. Farben) factory complex adjacent to Auschwitz III-Monowitz on several occasions which resulted in the death of 40-100 prisoners (estimates vary) and the wounding of many more, including some British POWs from the E715 POW camp.
There were both legitimate and cynical reasons for not bombing the camps. Some of the legit reasons were to preserve the evidence. More cynically, the Allies knew the Nazi genocide had become a suicidal obsession, and the enemy were diverting an increasing amount of resources away from war-fighting to accelerate the holocaust. In the end, Allied leaders calculated... or just hoped... that destroying the Nazi regime ASAP would have better results for its victims than trying to intervene on a fine-grained level while it still existed.
My grandma told me my uncle was in one of the first units that liberated Dachau. I remember asking him about it while at family reunion when I was 15. He just looked at me, turned, and walked away. Later my aunt told me he'd suffered from horrible nightmares for years.
Every time I watch I can just about hold it together. But the prisoner saluting Perconte gets me every single time without fail, and I'm a blubbering mess.
Same here. I come from a military family and served myself. I had a grandfather named Armando who was in the 82nd airborne, also fought in WW2 in all the big battles depicted in this miniseries and he also saw the camps. Idk why but the part when salutes gets to me more then anything else in this episode. Maybe the inmate was also someone from a military background.
@@joshuaortiz2031 Pretty likely actually, lots of men had fought in the first world war. Otto Frank, yes that Otto Frank, served too, as did his brothers. I don't remember where I read it, so grain of salt, but apparently Otto Frank felt very German, and was proud of having served his country.
To the question of whether German civilians knew, I'm sure to some extent there was also a degree of willful ignorance. I can imagine circumstances in which the civilians knew vaguely that something bad was happening but not exactly what, and for self preservation purposes didn't ask too many questions and just kept their heads down. There's also a degree of like, what if they did know? What could they have done about it? Even if it horrified them, I can imagine they knew to shut up so they or their families would stay safe.
A lot of it was willful ignorance. I can buy the Germans not knowing the true extent of their government's policies and atrocities but it's also true genocidal ideology like Lebensraum was a known thing the German people were okay with.
Yeah. It doesn't absolve anyone from collective responsibility, but if you're living under a brutal police state that has noissues with disappearing people, you probably don't want to know what exactly happens to those people. You'll just be glad that you aren't one of the targeted groups. Obviously, there are always heroes and striving to be like the one righteous person under a million cowed subjects is probably something to aspire to, but the majority will always stand back and go with the flow. That's simply how humans and society work. If you had most people in private and the guarantuee that they wouldn't lie, most people probably would tell you that whatever happened to them, it wasn't good. But it's something completely different to actually see it with your own eyes. Especially if all the Nazis are defeated and you have no one else to blame anymore.
Keep in mind, the Germans were murdering Polish, Russian, and Yugoslavian Jews more than anything. that's just where they were. That's what Hitler was doing, he was clearing Lebensraum-or “living space” for the Germans... Jews (and others) were certainly murdered in Germany too, and anywhere else he went, but were much less of the population in actual Germany. Add together the Holocaust, the military, the country gets invaded twice by Germany and Russia, 20% of Poland died in 6 years...
The Russians that were specifically targeted (besides Jews) were the political commissars. However, Russians, Poles and other Slavic peoples were among the ethnic minorities being killed. Also, there were handicapped (physical and mental), homosexuals, and clergy (both Catholic and Protestant) Who opposed what the Nazis were doing who were sent to the camps and killed.
I remember watching this episode in my junior year history class in high school. I didn't know what to expect, and it put a shock I haven't felt before. The whole rest of the day I was simply speechless, I tried to act my normal self, although, there were some people asking if I was ok, and I said yes, I remember a lot of my classmates seemed to move on from the episode like nothing happened, I remembered feeling I was the only one truly affected by the episode itself. But this episode really gets to me no matter how many times I watch it. It was beautifully well done, this episode alone was and always will be a masterpiece.
I’d highly recommend the pacific. Same HBO people involved but it takes place in the pacific theater. The tonel difference is significantly different but it shows the horrifying differences between the 2 theaters
This is one of the most beautiful and heart wrenching episodes of anything ever. They did such a brilliant job at showing just how horrible it was. This episode should be required viewing in every school in the world.
In the hometown of my relatives there was such a camp. My relatives were social democrats. Enemies of the Nazi state. They had to hide their political affiliation or else they would have ended in this camp. They told my parents that practically everbody around there knew whats going on. There were 3 groups of people. The ones who knew and were disgusted these atrocities but couldn't do anything. The ones who knew and agreed with whats going on. And the one ones who knew and just tried to avoid thinking about it. All of them had to burry the dead. Some of those got sick when working with the bodies and died of cholera and typhus. You couldn't even talk to close friends about it. There were so many snitches. Never forget!
_We have watched our soldiers go through hell but it's nothing compared too the hell the prisoners went through_ The camp depicted in Band of Brothers is Kaufering IV and what is shown is far from what actually happened. The camp was actually liberated by the 12th Armored Division on April 27, 1945 but for dramatic purposes Easy Company is shown liberating the camp. From the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: _In Bavaria, two major camp systems, Mühldorf and Kaufering, were set up as subcamps of the Dachau concentration camp. Its inmates provided the labor necessary to build subterranean facilities for fighter aircraft production in the Landsberg area. The region was chosen in part because of its favorable geological composition for the construction of huge underground installations, which were to be insulated by 9 to 15 feet thick concrete walls._ _To house the concentration camp prisoners, the SS created camps near the proposed industrial sites. At the Kaufering and Mühldorf camps, prisoners often slept in poorly heated and badly provisioned earthen huts, which were partially submerged in the soil and covered with earth to disguise them from the air. The larger of Kaufering's 11 camps each contained several thousand prisoners, the vast majority of whom were Jews. Disease, malnutrition, and the brutal conditions in the workplace and in the camps took its toll on the inmates, resulting in a high mortality rate._ _As US armed forces approached the Kaufering complex in late April 1945, the SS began evacuating the camps, sending the prisoners on death marches in the direction of Dachau. Those inmates who could not keep up were often shot or beaten to death by the guards. At Kaufering IV, the SS set fire to the barracks killing hundreds of prisoners who were too ill or weak to move._ _When the 12th Armored Division and 101st Airborne Division arrived at Kaufering IV on April 27 and 28, respectively, the soldiers discovered some 500 dead inmates. In the days that followed, the US Army units ordered the local townspeople to bury the dead._
I've been to Auschwitz & Birkenau, I cried then as I just did rewatching these scenes. If you go to Poland, you wont forget it. I can picture the scenes now.
The three Germans that were executed at 8:25 weren't killed because they were hiding, they were killed because they were captured by the French (the three soldiers who are stood around as the officer is shooting them are wearing French uniforms and Adrian helmets). If you were a German Prisoner of war the worst people to be captured by would be the Soviets (Hence why so many as the war was coming to a close tried to flee westward to surrender to the Americans and British rather than face soviet reprisals) followed by the French, the french had suffered 4 years of occupation at the hands of the Germans and many were unwilling to give quarter to German soldiers, surrendered or otherwise, even post war the French used German prisoners to clear minefields and for forced labour (including those unfit for such activities such as the sick and wounded) - figured this would provide some context behind this scene in short form.
_(the three soldiers who are stood around as the officer is shooting them are wearing French uniforms and Adrian helmets)._ Yes, they are wearing old early war French uniforms (c. 1940). The French soldiers of 1944-1945 weren't wearing that style of uniform.
"First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out- Because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out- Because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out- Because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me-and there was no one left to speak for me." Martin Niemöller
I've heard that one of the things that infuriated Major Winters in later life was the faction that tries to say the holocaust was not real. He would rarely get angry but when he heard deniers he would angrily say "I saw it! I was there!". Also, I recently listened to a podcast where Ross McCall who played Liebgott was interviewed and it was 20 years since thus episode was shot and he still remembered word for word in German the lines he spoke from the truck to tell the prisoners they had to go back into the camp. A moment he has never forgotten he said.
Easy Company never liberated a concentration camp. The camp depicted in Band of Brothers is Kaufering IV which was actually liberated by the 12th Armored Division on April 27, 1945 with some units of the 101st arriving on April 28. Easy Company appears to be there for a few hours on April 29 before moving on. From the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: _As US armed forces approached the Kaufering complex in late April 1945, the SS began evacuating the camps, sending the prisoners on death marches in the direction of Dachau. Those inmates who could not keep up were often shot or beaten to death by the guards. At Kaufering IV, the SS set fire to the barracks killing hundreds of prisoners who were too ill or weak to move._ _When the 12th Armored Division and 101st Airborne Division arrived at Kaufering IV on April 27 and 28, respectively, the soldiers discovered some 500 dead inmates. In the days that followed, the US Army units ordered the local townspeople to bury the dead._
The man who answered Winters questions about the nature of the came (the one who told them there was a woman's camp at the next railroad stop) was named Otto Herzfeld. He is not a real person, but is a composite character based on several camp survivors. He is named for German actor Otto Herzfeld. The real Otto Herzfeld was imprisoned in Auschwitz because he was gay, not because he was Jewish. According to camp records, the real Herzfeld was executed 7 September 1942. The person playing the character is the acclaimed Swiss Anatole Taubman. Taubman is himself Jewish. He's been in over 50 movies made in a dozen countries, and is capable of speaking fluently and without accent in eight languages (including English). In addition to Band of Brothers, he was in "Captain America", "Taken", "Dark", the Watchmen TV series, "Men in Black: International", "The Transporter" and about a dozen more movies you might have heard of. The prisoner who carries what looks like a corpse to Babe Heffron and Burt Christenson was played by Serbian actor Goran Kostic. Kostic, like Taubman, was been in a lot of American productions, including Taken (where he shared a scene with Taubman, coincidentally), "Ant Man and the Wasp", and "The Children of Men." Incidentally, as he approaches Heffron and Christenson, he's saying (in Serbian), "Please help him! Help him! He's still alive! Help him!" According to an interview with Babe Heffron, the corpse-like man was, in fact, still alive at that time, but despite attempts to help him, died shortly after the camp was liberated.
_According to an interview with Babe Heffron, the corpse-like man was, in fact, still alive at that time, but despite attempts to help him, died shortly after the camp was liberated._ Easy Company never liberated a concentration camp. The liberation and associated scenes are fictional. The camp depicted in Band of Brothers is Kaufering IV which was actually liberated by the 12th Armored Division on April 27, 1945. Unfortunately, there are some for whom Band of Brothers has become akin to a religion.
@@iammanofnature235 And there are some whose religion is being a pedantic asshole who missed the point of the story. You should see about that, as being a pedantic asshole is a much worse thing.
This episode contains so many incredible details of writing, cinematography, and symbolism, but I think my favorite is the very last shot (which this edit cuts away from). There is a concept in German history and historiography called Sonderweg, which translates roughly as "the special path." It's a complex idea, and it can be interpreted in several different ways, but the gist of it is that German people and their society evolved uniquely over the course of European history. Because of this, there is a sense of legend and inevitability that can be extrapolated about the fate of Germany -- that Germany has a great and powerful future. It could be beautiful, and it could be terrible, but the idea of Sonderweg means that it's both fated and powerful. The last scene, as the musician puts away his violin, quietly reflects this idea. As the perspective of the camera changes, the shape of the violin case also mirrors the shape of a coffin. And that's the fate of the German nation, laid out in the public square in this episode: it can be beautiful, as is the music, and it can be terrible, as is the Holocaust.
_Just the shift from “why the fuck are we doing here?” to freeing the victims of the camp is so haunting_ It was written that way. Easy Company never liberated a concentration\labor camp.
This episode was shown in my history class at school. Little did I expect BOB would become one of my fave shows later on. Sure did leave an impression.
If you havent already, the bookend to this episode is a Soviet era Russian film, "Come and See." It covers the murder units the Germans used in occupied East Front areas. It is so horrific it seems impossible it could be true. Watch the special feature survivor interviews. They make it clear. The reality was worse.
I literally just left a comment recommending this same movie a few second before I read yours lol. That's not a war movie it's a horror movie about war.
That scene in come and see where they fire the live tracer rounds over the actors heads.... Holy shit. Hollywood would never have the balls to do that. I was in the US army served from 2006-2015. I was the M249 SAW gunner in my fire team when I deployed overseas so I know what that shit really looks like. It takes a lot for a movie about war or genocide to give me anxiety. Very few scenes have pulled that off but that scene literally had me getting down under my bed. The only other scenes in film that come close to affecting me like that is the one in the Pacific where the Japanese are using the Okinawans as human shields. That show is more brutal then band of brothers. Another scene that makes me shudder is when the uboat sinks the British ship in Dunkirk and everything suddenly goes black and submerged in water. That is literally my nightmare.
I sometimes rewatch the scenes where they sing blood on the risers, cause its such a good song, plus Perconte and Speirs have a fun little interaction regarding a certain lighter, Nix cheers up while singing, and then it ends with someone shouting "its gonna be good times Web!" as they ride through the german countryside and I immediately go :/ cause I remember whats happens next
Tom Hardy was born in September 1977, so was around 23/24 in this. His first appearance on TV was a few years earlier, when he entered a modelling competition on a breakfast show over here in England. He was only 20 at the time and the clip is on YT.
The soldiers executing the Germans were wearing Adrian helmets. They were French. After being occupied for 4 years many French were in the mood to eettle scores. The only documented incident was French troops executing Frenchmen who had joined the SS.
To think about the fact all of this happened to even too long ago is still surreal, the things people even some of my family members went trough that time is unbelievable to me. I could never be more thankful, specially after watching such incredible devastating scenes like in this episode 💔
When they found the camp, i have to imagine Nixon, an educated man, recalling the line from Henry V, "I was not angry since I came to France Until this instant."
One of the most powerfully emotional hours of tv. Ever created. It still brings you heartache and reminder of what humans can do to others that are full of pure hate and evil years and decades later.
Just read through all the comments, some heartbreaking testimonies, from first hand and first generation of the survivors and liberators. I think you guys need congratulating once again for triggering such heart wrenching comments. Thanks again fellas!
8:23 From their helmets those guys pulling the trigger were French Liberation Army, as in the French who never gave up and fought with the Allies through almost the entire war. These guys saw 90,000 of their fellow soldiers killed, 200,000 wounded in just the initial invasion of France. Civilian deaths, including women and children reached 68,778 and during the occupation another 150,000 died. Things like "right and wrong" tend to go out the window when that many of your people are killed. As for why the Germans backed Hitler and were so eager to militarize, Germany was in extremely rough shape after the Treaty of Versailles. They went from an industrial and economic powerhouse to needing a wheelbarrow of money just to buy a loaf of bread and a lot of it had to do with the fact that the French insisted that the Germans be punished and forced to pay huge amounts of money to France to pay for the reconstruction. Frankly, the Germans would have backed *anyone* who was willing to tear that treaty up and I think France has quite a lot of responsibility for why WWII started in the first place.
As a German, I am really deeply ashamed of this part of our history. I am all the more surprised that the international community accepted Germany back so quickly. Probably because of the experience with the massive punishment after WW1. My grandfather was drafted when he was 17, his family were not Nazis but they had to let him go. Many young soldiers were, of course, indoctrinated as children since the 1930s, but very many were unwilling to go to war voluntarily. The biggest Nazis were those who didn't have to fight and the SS. Although some Eastern European men joined from 1943 onwards, they perceived Russia as a greater threat.
Germany back so quickly... Hu which part? Because if I remind correctly Germany was separated in two and Berlin in several sectors after WWII... Well Nuremberg helped a lil. Besides West and East block didn't have choice as they were facing each other during the Cold War...
I hope you do not mind me asking this question, but you can only get so much from reading. What kind of long lasting issues have you all faced since East Germany was reunited with the West? I gather there have been economic issues, but what I am really curious about are the social difficulties. One people, two radically different societies for nearly 50 years.
@@Ghost7511 West Germany was founded in 1949, only 4 years after the war, the German Democratic Republic (DDR) which was a dictatorship under soviet union also. The occupation of west Germany ended officially in 1990, but since 1955 Germany was a sovereign state.
What punishment after ww1 ? Germany never really paid the war reparation despite the destruction they caused on French soil. About a quarter of France was totally destroyed, including 60% of it's industry, and the money that Germany gave covered less than a third of the desctruction the war caused on civillian infrastructure. In total, Germany paid about 2.1 to 2.4% of its GDP between 1919 and 1931, in war reparation. In comparaison to France that paid war reparation of about 60% of it's gdp after the Franco-Prussian war. And France didn't turn into a dictatorship right after.
I always remember hearing that at the beginning of the war even after all the military buildup many German soldiers were afraid to invade France they remembered the stories they heard as kids of The Great War it wasn’t until the fall of France that many Germans saw winning as possible
Best and toughest episode. I will say that I don't know for sure if the woman knew what was happening. The black ribbon on the picture means that he had died, and we don't know if he was a part of the camp. Certainly she was ashamed, though.
Watch the rest of our Reaction series to Band of Brothers on Early Access at www.patreon.com/blindwave
This episode,’WHY WE FIGHT’, needs to be shown to kids in high school history classes around the world.They need to understand that this is what happens when humanity loses its unity.That this is what happens when we become divided by hateful leaders.They called the FIRST WORLD WAR...THE GREAT WAR...THE WAR TO END ALL WARS, yet just over a generation later,we were fighting an even more brutal war...more than 60 million dead(and that’s just a guestimate.Who knows how many more people are buried in mass graves around the world because of that war).Humanity never learns.We’ve had a war virtually every decade since World War Two ended in 1945.And now we have Ukraine.A war that could drag on for years.And just like Hitler,we have another despot,lunatic,in Putin.We never learn from history.NEVER LEARN.😪
The camp depicted in Band of Brothers is Kaufering IV (Hurlach) which was actually found and liberated by the 12th Armored Division on April 27, 1945 with some units of the 101st arriving on April 28. And there were only about 7 prisoners found alive and about 500 bodies. For dramatic purposes, Easy Company is shown liberating the camp.
From the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum:
_As US armed forces approached the Kaufering complex in late April 1945, the SS began evacuating the camps, sending the prisoners on death marches in the direction of Dachau. Those inmates who could not keep up were often shot or beaten to death by the guards. At Kaufering IV, the SS set fire to the barracks killing hundreds of prisoners who were too ill or weak to move._
_When the 12th Armored Division and 101st Airborne Division arrived at Kaufering IV on April 27 and 28, respectively, the soldiers discovered some 500 dead inmates. In the days that followed, the US Army units ordered the local townspeople to bury the dead._
Is Ep 10 on ice till the strike is over? Stoked with the Faulty Towers reactions🙂
3weeks later still no episode 10. Feels very long
08:20 - Those soldiers executing Germans were French soldiers, this scene is meant to show the spirit of revenge that the French had at that moment in the war, that's why may German soldiers tried to surrender to the British and the US Army rather the French or the Russians.
22:43 - The allied command started to hear rumors of the atrocities starting from 1943... But they couldn't confirm if they were true or not, because, no one in the world wanted to believe that this could happen, but it happened...
This is why Eisenhower told his troops, "Get it all on record now - get the films - get the witnesses - because somewhere down the road of history some bastard will get up and say that this never happened."
General Eisenhower was prophetic over a lot of things.
_Get it all on record now - get the films - get the witnesses - because somewhere down the road of history some bastard will get up and say that this never happened."_
*According to the Eisenhower Presidential Library this is a misquote that first appeared around 2007. Eisenhower did say the following in a letter to George C. Marshall on April 15, 1945:*
*_The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick. In one room, where they were piled up twenty or thirty naked men, killed by starvation, George Patton would not even enter. He said he would get sick if he did so. I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to “propaganda._*
There are dumb ignorant people today who think it didn’t happen
I would not mind to fistfight the people saying it didn't happen.
Such a disrespect to so many people!
It's not about the skeptic being a bastard. It's about every nation in history using propaganda about their enemies during war. This is something we cannot allow people to be skeptic about. We need to remember this at all costs. I do think other genocides have been underappreciated(?) (I don't know a better word but basically they're not taught about well enough).
I am going to be a little bit political...in1942-1944 nobody knew about this camps...UK, USA France and others were at war bcs they were invaded by germans or japs...today we have war in my neighbour country in Ukcraine when every day i see russians kiliing civilians, bombing schools and murdering POW and nobody is doing anything...we are just blinded ilke those germans in the town...its sick...Sorry po political statement.
"If anyone ever tells you the Holocaust didn't happen, or that it wasn't as bad as they say, no, it was worse than they say. What we saw, what these Germans did, it was worse than you can possibly imagine." - Edward "Babe" Heffron
Dont remember who said it but the worst i've ever heard, still haunts me, was a kid who was ordered to beat his dad to death.. It has to be the highest level of evil possible in the universe.. Thank god there was brave men who chose to fight it, like ukrainians today, thank god for them!
@@SearingNinja If you have to ask that question, you won't understand the answer
@@TheKyrix82 because their is no answer, you just made a dumbass statement and realized you couldn't back it up
@@SearingNinja "What does genocide have to do with genocide"? - SearingNinja
@@CliffJumpingProdI was at a lecture of a Holocaust survivor named Michael Jacobs. He told the story of how he and the other older boys taken to the top of the tallest building in the ghetto and were ordered at machine gun point to throw the Jewish babies off. I was sick feeling for days after.
One of the ways they achieved such a convincing effect with the camps, a lot of the extras playing the inmates were actually cancer patients undergoing treatment choosing to help in the creation of such an impactful and important scene.
Cast weren't shown the set or extras either, adding to their genuine shock.
And even that isn't nearly enough to make them look as emaciated as the real deal was. To look as terrible as they did you'd have to get people with the most extreme cases of anorexia possible. Literally nothing but skin and bones, like walking corpses.
And the actors weren't allowed to see it until the filming.
There was a WWII documentary way back when and this show recreated some of the photographs about the Holocaust that show presented. The one that really stands out is the boxcar full of dead bodies.
The woman in red's husband was in the Wehrmacht, the regular German army, the camps were run by the SS but she knew she was culpable by going along with it and being willfully blind. Great juxtaposition of her looking at Nixon with disdain when he was looting her house and his feeling shame over it and then Nixon seeing her in the camp, still in shock, and her shame for being complicit. Awesome film making!
Easy Company never liberated a concentration camp.
Liebgott having to tell the prisoners to get back into the camp is always the parts that breaks me. the pain and anguish on his face is soul crushing
The actor said that his crying was not scripted--it was his emotional reaction to seeing the people in the camp, and his being part of keeping there.
It's also important to appreciate that Liebgott was Jewish.
@@claudec2588 True
Definitely the hardest part of the episode to watch.
_Liebgott having to tell the prisoners to get back into the camp is always the parts that breaks me._
It was written to be emotional, but it is fictional. Easy Company never liberated a concentration camp.
My grandfather was a tanker in the 3rd Armored Division, and liberated Mittelbau-Dora. He never once talked about it. The only thing that would ever show is that whenever someone denied the Holocaust, he would get absolutely livid.
I'm guessing he was in Shermans?
@@zachboyd4749 That was his assigned Nazi Extermination implement. He drove it from Normandy all the way through to the end of the war.
@@crackensvideo
Nice, Sherman’s a great tank, my personal favorite. Probably about the same time your grandfather was rolling towards Berlin, my Great Grandpa was serving as a B-24 waistgunner. While your grandpa and his fellow tankers were mixing it up with Jerry on the ground, my great gramps and his squadron mates were pounding them from the air.
Very common among veterans not to relive the horrors they saw if they can help it. This was also before terms like PTSD were officially recognized.
Everything about "Why We Fight" is top tier filmmaking.
@Dio-xo9rv And you never did anything of worth to anyone, but you still feel like piping up.
@Dio-xo9rv Buddy just love spreading bullshit. If the Allies brought evil, then what the fuck did the Nazis and Japanese do ??
Agreed.
@Dio-xo9rv Oh look, a Not See.
@Dio-xo9rvmust be a troll
The look with the woman in red - when Nix was in her house looking to rob her booze, she stares at him with arms folded, accusatory and disapproving, from her moral high ground. And Nix leaves without a word because he knows he's wrong. At the end when the second staredown happens, she tries to maintain that same glare, but ultimately even the brazen wife of a Nazi leader can't maintain any claim to moral superiority in the presence of the horror they created, so she ultimately has to look away.
This. Whether she knew or not, she can no longer hold on to pride for her husband in the presence of what he was very clearly involved in. That’s the look. What is a Yank stealing some booze from a wealthy German officer’s home in comparison to this? It’s nothing and she knows it.
The women in red reminds me of the little girl in Schindler's list that wore red. Spielberg did that intentionally to connect the two.
@@joshuaortiz2031 yeah, always thought that had to be a nod to Schindler's List.
Love the juxtaposition of those two scenes.
It's fictional. Easy Company never liberated a concentration camp. The camp depicted in Band of Brothers is Kaufering IV which was actually liberated by the 12th Armored Division.
12:45 man carrying older man, he is speaking Serbian, he is saying "People help, please help, he is still alive, you can still save him"
Man I was just a kid when I first watched the series, to hear those words to understand them, while everything was subtitled.
I still get chills down my spine...
Nixon dealing with survivor's guilt, trauma, and a divorce made me feel for him so much.
I'm glad that Winters was essentially his best friend and there for him when he got hit with so many emotional situations in a short span of time.
When I was a teenager watching this series for the first time, the intro to this episode puzzled me. In every other episode the veteran interviews in the intros correspond obviously in some way to the theme or focus of the episode-Episode 2 intro is all about the big jump and losing the leg bag and the episode shows this. Episode 3 intro is about dealing with fear in combat and the episode follows Blithe as he works through that. This episode intro humanizes German soldiers with the overall message being “they were like us.” So when I saw that for the first time I had expected an episode that would maybe either show the humanity of some German POWs, or an American who was briefly captured and shown mercy by German soldiers or something in that vein. I was completely blindsided by the topic of concentration camps-and we don’t even see a single German soldier the whole episode (except for a photograph of a dead officer). But we do see the aftermath of what German soldiers did.
I’m ashamed to say that it took me more than a couple re-watches and more life experience to finally understand the point of this episode’s intro in context of the overall episode: it’s that if they were like us, then we were like them. It’s a warning. If we might have been friends in different circumstances because we shared hobbies, interests, and duty to country, then maybe in different circumstances we might have ended up alongside them. The Holocaust didn’t happen overnight. It took years and baby steps of societal manipulation by charismatic figureheads to ostracize and dehumanize minorities-it’s something every society is susceptible to, and something we must continually guard against.
To understand that manipulation and how the non-fanatical general public can play a role in such atrocities, I recommend the documentary Final Account, which interviews the last living generation of Germans that were alive during the Holocaust. It’s illuminating toward the question “How could they let it happen?” And consequently can help us answer the question “How can we make sure it never happens again?”
Excellent comment.
This isn’t my interpretation of the intro but I appreciate the thought you’ve put into this.
Let's be clear... the same types of subjugation and ostracizing we see in Nazi Germany, we are seeing here in the US. The targets are almost the same. "Communists, Socialists and Marxists". And of course, LBGT.
And we're seeing the same type of tactics used. A propaganda force, where the information in it is unverified; but stronger than what's fact. A shear hatred. Calling other America's less than or non-patriotic. Threats made against specific groups and plans to fulfill those threats.
Stories about the camps were trickling out in the years prior, but they were so horrible and fantastic they weren't taken seriously. Really the first knowledge the world had about them was their discovery as the Allied armies advanced.
The German citizens knew, by and large, but it was dangerous to know. If you made too much noise about them you were liable to be slapped into one. Germany was a police state, and it imprisoned political opponents, ethnic minorities, the mentally retarded, clergy who spoke out publicly against the camps, and several other demographics, in addition to the Jews.
I always find it difficult understanding the citizens marching the government towards my-niche nationalism and fascism thinking that because they are the "preferred demographic" so they will be prosperous.
Nope you won't.
You will end up being an oppressed working class with no freedoms under constant threat of becoming one of the imprisoned class for a minor offense or the will of someones quotas.
Watching your friends, family and neighbors get hauled off to camps, in constant fear of it happening to you.
There is no freedom in a country that does not value ALL citizens equally.
@@5353Jumper I agree with everything you said. The only answer is everyone is equal under the law. The problem is that some people demand that they should be more equal than others.
The FDR administration knew what was happening the Holocaust was uncovered by British spies they infiltrated the camps posing as prisoners. Allied command decided to keep it a secret because their troops would be much more likely to summarily execute German soldiers who surrender which would cause a situation where they don't surrender and try to fight to the last man like the Japanese. Goebbels would have had a field day spinning propaganda to keep the German fighting man fighting had the allies start killing German POWs in large numbers.
@@5353JumperI agree but Germany was fucked after WW1 they got all the blame and the det and weak government,they were so poor unemployment and people with no food and water skyrocketed so when the Devil came along and said he could fix everything and the rest is history they are fine now
Additionally the Russians had previously lied about atrocities, polish officers were killed by the Russians and they blamed the Germans. Which the allies found out to be a lie. So when word of the first camps came from the Russians, the allies were incredibly sceptical.
This episode always breaks my heart. Everyone should have to watch this
Yet we have Nazi's brazenly marching on the streets of America, in not insignificant numbers. Literal fucking Nazi's marching on our streets.
And nobody cares. Not a single person cares. We are freely letting Nazism awaken in America. Its disgusting. Nobody even wants to talk about it. Most people don't even want to acknowledge it, yet there are dozens, upon dozens, upon dozens of videos over the last two years alone of actual Nazi parties marching on our American streets.
Disgusting. This country is shameful, and we as Americans are also shameful. We are shameful for letting our current state of political affairs to come to pass. And its precisely because nobody cares, and nobody wants to talk about it, and nobody wants to do anything about it.
It's fictional. Easy Company never liberated a concentration camp.
@@iammanofnature235doesn't take away from the message though
@@Lezzyboy87
_doesn't take away from the message though_
Is the message that Steven Spielberg wanted to include something related to the Holocaust in Band of Brothers?
@@iammanofnature235 This was'nt an concentration camp. It was a simple and small labour camp. The russian army found most of the concentration camps.
And, the allied leaders where aware of the labour and conentration camp long before 1945..
Refeeding syndrome is very serious... even a relatively moderate amount of food can be very dangerous to someone who's starving. The sudden change in blood sugar can set off a chain reaction that just crashes the whole system.
Exactly you burn calories in order to digest food.
@@joshuaortiz2031 Yes, but the more immediate danger is that the sudden release of insulin causes already depleted phosphate levels to crash, which can cause convulsions and heart failure.
I was so invested in the series up until this point that my brain somehow completely forgot about the camps, and because of that, this remains one of the most effective hours of TV for me. Few things have come close to the feeling I got when I saw the camps and was like: "Oh my God, THIS happened".
It hit me the same way. It's pretty genius filmmaking if it was intentional. The show so far has been mostly battle after battle, campaign after campaign. It puts you in the same mindset as the soldiers, just expecting fights with more German defenders only to be blindsided by the reminder that the camps existed, and what all the fighting was for.
@10:34 the final solution was why it was important to stop the nazi and axis powers and THIS was just one moment where the allied soldiers fighting the war saw it first hand. it shook ww2 leaders like Eisenhower to their very core and insisted it be heavily documented so that it COUDLN'T be denied and that future generations needed to witness how terrible this moment in history was for all of humanity...he understood that if it were to be forgotten, it would surely be repeated.
And yet people deny it, and more than a few would happily do it all over again. All over the world.
@@ThurasizWe may be individuals but collective effort to educate and stop nationalism will be greater than the sum of our efforts. It's up to us to prevent this ever happening again.
Except things exactly like this happened "again" courtesy of anti-"Nationalists" like Mao's Chinese communist party - the Cultural Revolution, with at least 20 million murdered in the pursuit of wonderful, "equitable" socialism.
Russian, British, Canadian, Free French and American "Nationalists" defeated Germany, Italy and Japan.
Any body who tells you the average soldier was fighting for some amorphous ideal "United Nations" is kidding themselves. That's the label some politicians slapped on the war effort, immediately before they got right back to opposing and competing with each other, and in Russias case, General military occupation of half of Europe for 45 years.
It doesn't in any way excuse the absolute inhumanity of what the Nazis did, or the collective guilt of the adult Germans who let it happen, but throwing a general condemnation of "Nationalism" out is dangerously simplistic.
@@Thurasizthe perverse irony of Nazism festering and becoming emboldened in the US today when we had a whole generation of men and women who helped to end it in Germany 80 years ago.
@@Thurasiz it's happening now. Ironically in Palistine
Liebgott was so traumatized that he never went to any Easy Company reunions or kept in touch any other way. Some of them were even questioning if he was still alive when the book was written.
A great misconception about Liebgott was that he was Jewish. Technically yes, he was half-Jewish on his mother’s side but he was raised Catholic. Still, it definitely had a direct impact on him seeing his kind treated that way.
Catholicism is just a religion. Jewish people are an ethnic group. You can go to catholic church and it doesn't make you not Jewish. And I wouldn't refer to it as a technicality.
Not trying to go at you or anything here, as your intent doesn't seem negative. Just trying to clarify.
Technically they believe that having a Jewish mother makes you Jewish. The Nazis definitely would have seen it that way if he lived in Germany he would have easily been one extra holocaust victim.
@@snerdterguson Isn't it also passed down through the mother?
@@ruthsaunders9507 yes because, for the most part, there is no question of your mother actually being your mother. of course, there is the possibility of 1 woman claiming a child to protect another for some reason.
they were logical, atleast as far as being a member of the tribe is concerned.
My dad was a soldier in the Army at that time and his unit liberated one of the camps, he never talked a lot about the war in general. Some of my wife's family were in the camps, they were Hungarian Jews, her great aunt was one of those who survived the camps and I saw her numbers, she was a teen at that time. My dad passed away in 1983 and my wife's aunt in 1999. All of this must be remembered, we must never forget any of our human history.
This Episode always gets me. My grandad never really spoke about WW2 he was in the war from Dunkirk, but he did help clear a concentration camp and it's the look on his face when he told me but never went into detail.
If he was British is was Bergen-Belsen he helped clean up. Everyone mentioned the smell, they all felt they'd never be able to wash it out.
My grandparents were Holocaust survivors who were liberated by the US army. Forever grateful. 🙏
Then I am doubly glad you're here among us.
Bless them.
Happy to hear they survived. God bless them and the rest of your family. We must never forget.
With the work camp scene, it's really the music that pushes it to the next level, it really tugs at your feelings even more.
When O'Keefe is sitting down, it's the first time Perconte calls him by his proper name, because he realizes it's not the time or place to fuck around anymore.
And this is the first episode we see Spiers taken aback by something.
When Liebgott addresses the prisoners, they react that way because those words are probably the same the Germans initially told them to get them inside the camps. "It's for your own good, we're here to help, blabla.."
The best episode of the show imo. It really solidifies this show as an all-time great, and even better, it manages to stick the landing with the next episode and finish strong. I go back and watch this series every year or two and man, it always holds up just as amazing as the first time.
@Dio-xo9rv found the Nazi
@Dio-xo9rvso concentration camps were just fiction?
@@John-gl6thI would ignore this person. They straight up defended the Nazis in another comment. They either love to troll or just extremely disturbed.
@@John-gl6th the twit you're debating is literally a Nazi sympathizer. Don't bother with him.
There's real footage of Germans being forced to "tour" the camps, where they saw bodies and jars of experiments done on prisoners, as well as the actual living prisoners, they were forced to look at it, some of the German citizens screamed out "we didn't know!" And it really pissed off the prisoners so much. They did know about what was happening so close to them, but they ignored it.
It really is horrific.
EDIT- if you want to look up more information about the events, look up Margaret Bourke-White and her photographs and writings on the camp of Buchenwald.
Really depends on location. Those in towns right near the camps had to be willfully ignorant at best. I can't imagine living within a couple miles of this and actually being unaware. But there certainly were Germans that didn't know if they weren't in close proximity to one of the camps. It wasn't something the Nazi govt advertised.
But the ones portrayed in this episode almost certainly had to know. It's like Webster says, about how the baker must have smelled the stench.
@@snerdterguson Just look at what Russians are doing to Ukrainians now and how Russians at home not only know but celebrate it. I refuse to give any German who lived during WW2 the benefit of the doubt anymore.
I can understand the willful ignorance of the German citizens. I can imagine they chose to believe that everyone in those camps were prisoners of war or guilty of something that they did wrong. It’s hard to believe that such a massive holocaust could actually happen.
@@snerdterguson I mean, there is an army base relatively close to where I live, I've never actually seen it. I might have been next to it for all I know. I have zero clue what it looks like or what goes on inside. Like, I know that a concentration camp is very different from an army base, but at the same time, not everyone knows everything that goes on in their neighbourhood.
@@AnnekeOosterink yeah no. They were burning bodies. They aren’t doing that on the military base you lived near. It isn’t even apples and oranges. It’s apples and some type of matter from a completely different universe.
Fun Fact: The violin scene has a lot of symbolism to it. Both Mozart and Hitler were Austrian (not pure German), where as Beethoven WAS born in Germany.....so what the scene is depicting when Easy states "they know how to play Mozart", Nicks corrects them about it being Beethoven, and then the ending scene being of the violinist fading out and nodding approval as they end.....is that of "here is the true Spirit of Germany, not those that try to claim it, or the world 'thinks" it is....here is the TRUE Spirit of Germany".
@@John-gl6thNationalism most certainly did exist then. And claiming that Austrians are still ethnically German so it doesn’t matter is the same excuse Hitler used for Austria and Czechoslovakia, and the same excuse Putin is using for Ukraine today.
The question of guilt and who knew what and when have been debated endlessly. I am old enough that the adults in my childhood fought in the war, and an uncle toured the camps with Eisenhower. The consensus among them was that there were various levels and kinds of guilt, beyond those who planned and carried out the physical murders and genocide, and some of it went back to WW I.
By 1944, to not know that such a large part of the population, especially so many members of the professional class, had disappeared is hard to buy. The German man who conveniently started sobbing once he saw Nixon looking at him is a good example of not knowing because you didn’t want to know. That man would have noticed the doctors, accountants, tailors, bankers, and other Jews in his professional and personal circles were suddenly gone. Middle and upper class homes in neighborhoods aren’t suddenly empty without people knowing that it happened to be all the Jews on the block.
For anyone in the German army who knew what was happening on the Russian front after Stalingrad to pretend that victory was still possible and that the Allies would allow the Nazis to keep power after their inevitable defeat, even if they didn’t know anything about the Holocaust, they were guilty of perpetuating the war and therefore responsible for making, possible most of the genocide, which took place in the final few years of the war.
For those who voted for the Nazis, or accepted their rule after they were elected to power in 1932, if they didn’t know the party’s policies on Jews, they should have: the Nazis were always ant-Semitic and violently reactionary, while Hitler said plainly in Mein Kampf, published in 1925, what he wanted to do about the Jews and all other non-Aryan peoples. One might also blame a parliamentary multi-party system that allowed a minority to win power because the majority was split among too many other options.
And then the wholesale unwillingness from 1919 on to accept that Germany lost WWI on the battlefield. That’s what so many in my parents’ and grandparents’ circle were mad about: that they had to go back after already beating them the first time around. The myth that the German army was defeated, stabbed in the back, originated when they surrendered and came back to Berlin. But reality is that they never won a major offensive in the West and suffered loss after loss, until they finally collapsed in 1918. Versailles was probably unfair, but the German army was not betrayed by Jews or anyone else on the home front. We whipped their ass.
The primary and most evil responsibilities were on Hitler the Nazis, but very few Germans were completely free of blame.
US (edit: not the only other country to do so, but it's the one I live in and am comfortable calling out in this context lol) is guilty of using the same tactic for mobilizing our population. Hitler gave them someone to blame for any problem that came up. We did it afterwards with russia/communism, we have been doing it with immigrants today. Obviously not to the extreme of Hitler and the nazi's but the same tactic.
I'm old enough to remember discussions among the allies, about whether this person or that person in Germany should be allowed to run for political office. Who could be trusted?
I'm from Sweden and in 9th grade when people are about 15/16 we study WWII. When I was young and for people who are older than me it was common for WWII survivors to come to schools and talk about their experiences. I will never ever forget this married couple who came to our school showing pictures and telling their story.
I can see all of you guys swallowing your tears in the camp scene. Respect. Especially the guy with the head. I don't know your name but I can feel your emotion all the way over here. Heartwarming to watch you control your emotions and preventing the attention from going to you instead of the scene. So powerful.
also, very short shot but the soldier who kills the 3 germans while their driving pass is Tom Hanks
And he's portraying a French soldier. Note the uniform and helmet. I'm not trying to condemn the French or saying U.S. soldiers didn't do the same thing at times, but just pointing out that the French were probably more justifiably vengeful since their country had been conquered and brutally occupied by the Germans for over 4 years.
Amazing reaction guys. I really enjoyed this.
A film making note, the actors of easy company were never told about this set and the other actors. So when they brought in for first day of shooting their reactions were genuine and shocked. They wanted to get that reaction of them never seeing something so traumatizing and heinous that they managed to captured their reaction with this. This was brilliantly done and I applaud the directors who made this and have us witness such an event.
I’m no masochist but I’d love to see a reaction to schindlers list … I try and watch it at least once per year … it’s a masterpiece
The “I could have done more” breaks me every time. And this episode too
I think they've all seen it.
@@CrimsonCharan i doubt Aaron has
They should watch the Russian film "come and see" it was directed by a man who survived Stalingrad as a boy and then later created the movie in the 80s drawing on his experiences. It's not about Stalingrad though it's about the massacre of the belorussians by SS penal battalions.
@@darkstar3116or... alternatively... They just really like good movies? Especially one like that which tugs on a certain emotional string that not too many movies or shows can ever manage to?
hoping for part 10 to come out soon
18:38 “It’s an important story”
A simple sentence that carries so much weight.
I hope you guys watch The Pacific after this show. Made by the same creators of Band of Brothers. It focuses on the War in Japan and in my opinion is just as good of a miniseries.
Rick is so good in not giving anything away. I respect the restraint!
14:54 Malarkey points out some of the prisoners were branded with numbers like cattle.
Later in the episode, it's referenced that the Russians discovered a concentration camp with gas chambers.
The unnamed camp was Auschwitz since that was the only camp that tattooed numbers on their prisoners. The bodies in this episode were most likely prisoners that had been transferred from there.
on every camp they tattoed numbers on people there it was there way of one dehumanising them more and also know how many where at the camp because germans love effieciancy
@@valkeery1216 no, it was only Auschwitz that did tattoos
No, only Auschwitz tattooed prisoners, and then only ones designated for forced labor. Many prisoners in other camps had been tattooed, but it was done in Auschwitz and then they were transferred.
The poor men, women and children they just sent immediately to the gas chambers wouldn't be marked.
@@jandm4ever716 it's interesting because I knew people who had family members in the camps not aushwits and had tattooed numbers on their hands
Listen to yourselves. Arguing over if the Nazis branded every prisoner or just the poor souls sent to that evil place! Drop the semantics and acknowledge that either way it is pure evil.
I had three great grandfathers who fought in WWII. One was in the field artillery and his unit liberated Dachau, which is the overall network of camps shown in this episode. He didn't tell my grandfather much until his 18th birthday and when my grandfather was almost drafted for Vietnam, my great grandfather told my grandfather to tell the recruiters, "I fought in WWII so you wouldn't have to fight another war."
"First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out. Because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out. Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out. Because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me. And there was no one left to speak for me..."
-Martin Niemöller
I love this quote so much. It will soon apply today.
The original poem actually started with a similar line, "First they came for the communists", etc. Ironically, given the point of the poem, that line is often removed due to anti-communist sentiment that ballooned with the start of the Cold War.
The first I watched this episode I felt a deep pain in my chest that could only be relieved by crying. Even when I watch reactions to it I cry.
This episode always breaks my heart. So powerful and devastating. It reduces me to tears.
What an incredibly emotional and impactful piece of television. Being a bit of a history buff I remember reading that the mayor and his wife of a town near one of the camps. After being forced to tour the camp went home and hanged themselves.
When can we expect episode 10?
I have seen this show at least 8 times and this episode still gets me on every level.
Outside of the amazing filmmaking, I hope It helps in reminding us that this should never happen again and
that unfortunately, genocides are still going on today, despite what we have learnt from this.
I watched this series when I was like 10 with my parents. I don't remember much of it, it's not possible to forget this episode.
I can't imagine seeing that at such a young age. Did you already know anything about the Nazis and the Holocaust? Did you get nightmares?
@@joshuaortiz2031 I grew up in France and we were shown photos and videos of this at school at age 11 when we studied the holocaust. We also studied WW1 and saw pretty graphic photos from that as young as 8 years old in school. My teacher used as many local stories and photos to show us what our town looked during the wars. I guess for us it was important to be aware of all of this as young as possible because it's pretty common to dig up bullets/bodies/pieces of bombs/etc in fields and gardens, and a lot of kids would play in abandoned German bunkers that are scattered around everywhere. I never had nightmares, if anything it just made me want to learn more.
Having seen this Series when it first came out and having watched it countless times I still can't get through this episode without getting choked up and crying.
Like lots who have watched it this for some reason sneaks up on you even though we all know about these Camps.
Never forget..... 💔🙏💔
The opening/ending scene also has great significance. As they watch the band play they believed it was Mozart (who like Adolf Hitler, was from Austria) Nixon corrects them and informs the guys that it’s actually Beethoven, a true German. It helps signify Hitlers end and Germany being restored back to a country of peaceful values.
Most of the higher ups in the army knew about the camps and debated about bombing them but they did not. Decided the best way to stop it was by winning the war. Don't they knew the entire extent until they were liberated
Yes! Many allied higher-ups knew; they were getting so many similar reports from many disparate sources. There is a suspicion that many allied elites wanted it to happen, and could claim "clean hands", because it was the Nazis that did it. They also knew the Nazis were expending valuable material resources on this genocide program that have otherwise should have been spent for military purposes.
They could have constantly bombed the camps and the railway lines. Bombing would have saved millions of lives. They could have dropped a parachute regiment on Auschwitz (perhaps a suicide mission) as a public stunt that would have publicly involved the whole Wehrmacht, from General to Private, so no one in the military could deny knowledge or responsibility.
They could have constantly leafleted Germany with the information, so the German public could not deny it was happening, and could not deny that they were told.
It stinks!!!
Yeah, the Polish resistance managed to get out what was going on pretty early (which was partially done by resistance members who voluntarily went to the camps to report what was going on), but they weren’t entirely taken seriously at first and even until the war ended people didn’t quite believe the scope of it
_debated about bombing them but they did not._
They did bomb the Buna (I.G. Farben) factory complex adjacent to Auschwitz III-Monowitz on several occasions which resulted in the death of 40-100 prisoners (estimates vary) and the wounding of many more, including some British POWs from the E715 POW camp.
There were both legitimate and cynical reasons for not bombing the camps. Some of the legit reasons were to preserve the evidence. More cynically, the Allies knew the Nazi genocide had become a suicidal obsession, and the enemy were diverting an increasing amount of resources away from war-fighting to accelerate the holocaust. In the end, Allied leaders calculated... or just hoped... that destroying the Nazi regime ASAP would have better results for its victims than trying to intervene on a fine-grained level while it still existed.
My grandma told me my uncle was in one of the first units that liberated Dachau. I remember asking him about it while at family reunion when I was 15. He just looked at me, turned, and walked away. Later my aunt told me he'd suffered from horrible nightmares for years.
Where is the ep 10 reaction
No matter how many times I see people watch this episode, it still hurts seeing the tears shed from witnessing the camp…
Love how the roles reverse here and Nicks in the one staring with disgust and she turns away.
Every time I watch I can just about hold it together. But the prisoner saluting Perconte gets me every single time without fail, and I'm a blubbering mess.
Yes….same here.
Same here. I come from a military family and served myself. I had a grandfather named Armando who was in the 82nd airborne, also fought in WW2 in all the big battles depicted in this miniseries and he also saw the camps. Idk why but the part when salutes gets to me more then anything else in this episode. Maybe the inmate was also someone from a military background.
@@joshuaortiz2031 Pretty likely actually, lots of men had fought in the first world war. Otto Frank, yes that Otto Frank, served too, as did his brothers. I don't remember where I read it, so grain of salt, but apparently Otto Frank felt very German, and was proud of having served his country.
To the question of whether German civilians knew, I'm sure to some extent there was also a degree of willful ignorance. I can imagine circumstances in which the civilians knew vaguely that something bad was happening but not exactly what, and for self preservation purposes didn't ask too many questions and just kept their heads down. There's also a degree of like, what if they did know? What could they have done about it? Even if it horrified them, I can imagine they knew to shut up so they or their families would stay safe.
A lot of it was willful ignorance. I can buy the Germans not knowing the true extent of their government's policies and atrocities but it's also true genocidal ideology like Lebensraum was a known thing the German people were okay with.
Yeah. It doesn't absolve anyone from collective responsibility, but if you're living under a brutal police state that has noissues with disappearing people, you probably don't want to know what exactly happens to those people. You'll just be glad that you aren't one of the targeted groups.
Obviously, there are always heroes and striving to be like the one righteous person under a million cowed subjects is probably something to aspire to, but the majority will always stand back and go with the flow. That's simply how humans and society work.
If you had most people in private and the guarantuee that they wouldn't lie, most people probably would tell you that whatever happened to them, it wasn't good.
But it's something completely different to actually see it with your own eyes. Especially if all the Nazis are defeated and you have no one else to blame anymore.
@Dio-xo9rv
😂
No idea why you would spread such ridiculous bullshit...
Keep in mind, the Germans were murdering Polish, Russian, and Yugoslavian Jews more than anything. that's just where they were. That's what Hitler was doing, he was clearing Lebensraum-or “living space” for the Germans... Jews (and others) were certainly murdered in Germany too, and anywhere else he went, but were much less of the population in actual Germany. Add together the Holocaust, the military, the country gets invaded twice by Germany and Russia, 20% of Poland died in 6 years...
@@hafor2846 he's clearly a nazi sympathiser
Are you guys not watching part 10???
The french soldier shooting the german POWs was tom hanks
The Russians that were specifically targeted (besides Jews) were the political commissars. However, Russians, Poles and other Slavic peoples were among the ethnic minorities being killed. Also, there were handicapped (physical and mental), homosexuals, and clergy (both Catholic and Protestant) Who opposed what the Nazis were doing who were sent to the camps and killed.
Gypsies were high on the list
@@JimJack-ng9yi Liebgott mentioned them when they were talking to the prisoner.
I remember watching this episode in my junior year history class in high school. I didn't know what to expect, and it put a shock I haven't felt before. The whole rest of the day I was simply speechless, I tried to act my normal self, although, there were some people asking if I was ok, and I said yes, I remember a lot of my classmates seemed to move on from the episode like nothing happened, I remembered feeling I was the only one truly affected by the episode itself. But this episode really gets to me no matter how many times I watch it. It was beautifully well done, this episode alone was and always will be a masterpiece.
I’d highly recommend the pacific. Same HBO people involved but it takes place in the pacific theater. The tonel difference is significantly different but it shows the horrifying differences between the 2 theaters
This is one of the most beautiful and heart wrenching episodes of anything ever. They did such a brilliant job at showing just how horrible it was.
This episode should be required viewing in every school in the world.
Guys! We're missing the last episode!
They got patients from a local cancer ward to play the jews, crazy film making
Any news on episode 10?
One of the best at telling the story of what happened. An important story to tell.
Is there no episode 10?
Christopher Lee was part of the military unit that found one those camps.
In the hometown of my relatives there was such a camp. My relatives were social democrats. Enemies of the Nazi state. They had to hide their political affiliation or else they would have ended in this camp. They told my parents that practically everbody around there knew whats going on. There were 3 groups of people. The ones who knew and were disgusted these atrocities but couldn't do anything. The ones who knew and agreed with whats going on. And the one ones who knew and just tried to avoid thinking about it. All of them had to burry the dead. Some of those got sick when working with the bodies and died of cholera and typhus. You couldn't even talk to close friends about it. There were so many snitches.
Never forget!
When do we get an episode 10 reaction?
Just an incredible episode from start to finish. 10/10. 😢😢😢
This episode is heartbreaking. We have watched our soldiers go through hell but it's nothing compared too the hell the prisoners went through 😢
_We have watched our soldiers go through hell but it's nothing compared too the hell the prisoners went through_
The camp depicted in Band of Brothers is Kaufering IV and what is shown is far from what actually happened. The camp was actually liberated by the 12th Armored Division on April 27, 1945 but for dramatic purposes Easy Company is shown liberating the camp.
From the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum:
_In Bavaria, two major camp systems, Mühldorf and Kaufering, were set up as subcamps of the Dachau concentration camp. Its inmates provided the labor necessary to build subterranean facilities for fighter aircraft production in the Landsberg area. The region was chosen in part because of its favorable geological composition for the construction of huge underground installations, which were to be insulated by 9 to 15 feet thick concrete walls._
_To house the concentration camp prisoners, the SS created camps near the proposed industrial sites. At the Kaufering and Mühldorf camps, prisoners often slept in poorly heated and badly provisioned earthen huts, which were partially submerged in the soil and covered with earth to disguise them from the air. The larger of Kaufering's 11 camps each contained several thousand prisoners, the vast majority of whom were Jews. Disease, malnutrition, and the brutal conditions in the workplace and in the camps took its toll on the inmates, resulting in a high mortality rate._
_As US armed forces approached the Kaufering complex in late April 1945, the SS began evacuating the camps, sending the prisoners on death marches in the direction of Dachau. Those inmates who could not keep up were often shot or beaten to death by the guards. At Kaufering IV, the SS set fire to the barracks killing hundreds of prisoners who were too ill or weak to move._
_When the 12th Armored Division and 101st Airborne Division arrived at Kaufering IV on April 27 and 28, respectively, the soldiers discovered some 500 dead inmates. In the days that followed, the US Army units ordered the local townspeople to bury the dead._
Love you guys' reactions!! It's very hard to believe human beings could do this to each other.
I've been to Auschwitz & Birkenau, I cried then as I just did rewatching these scenes. If you go to Poland, you wont forget it. I can picture the scenes now.
This is the episode I always want people to see. I think its the most emotionally impactful
The three Germans that were executed at 8:25 weren't killed because they were hiding, they were killed because they were captured by the French (the three soldiers who are stood around as the officer is shooting them are wearing French uniforms and Adrian helmets). If you were a German Prisoner of war the worst people to be captured by would be the Soviets (Hence why so many as the war was coming to a close tried to flee westward to surrender to the Americans and British rather than face soviet reprisals) followed by the French, the french had suffered 4 years of occupation at the hands of the Germans and many were unwilling to give quarter to German soldiers, surrendered or otherwise, even post war the French used German prisoners to clear minefields and for forced labour (including those unfit for such activities such as the sick and wounded) - figured this would provide some context behind this scene in short form.
_(the three soldiers who are stood around as the officer is shooting them are wearing French uniforms and Adrian helmets)._
Yes, they are wearing old early war French uniforms (c. 1940). The French soldiers of 1944-1945 weren't wearing that style of uniform.
The Germans were also only teenagers, not much older the 16 or 17 according to one of the books.
Webster wrote about that execution. He said the Germans they killed were boys who were not old enough to shave.
"First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out- Because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out- Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out- Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me-and there was no one left to speak for me." Martin Niemöller
True now as it was then. Gradual division against trans people is the first step, and there'll be more unless we stop it.
I've heard that one of the things that infuriated Major Winters in later life was the faction that tries to say the holocaust was not real. He would rarely get angry but when he heard deniers he would angrily say "I saw it! I was there!".
Also, I recently listened to a podcast where Ross McCall who played Liebgott was interviewed and it was 20 years since thus episode was shot and he still remembered word for word in German the lines he spoke from the truck to tell the prisoners they had to go back into the camp. A moment he has never forgotten he said.
Easy Company never liberated a concentration camp. The camp depicted in Band of Brothers is Kaufering IV which was actually liberated by the 12th Armored Division on April 27, 1945 with some units of the 101st arriving on April 28. Easy Company appears to be there for a few hours on April 29 before moving on.
From the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum:
_As US armed forces approached the Kaufering complex in late April 1945, the SS began evacuating the camps, sending the prisoners on death marches in the direction of Dachau. Those inmates who could not keep up were often shot or beaten to death by the guards. At Kaufering IV, the SS set fire to the barracks killing hundreds of prisoners who were too ill or weak to move._
_When the 12th Armored Division and 101st Airborne Division arrived at Kaufering IV on April 27 and 28, respectively, the soldiers discovered some 500 dead inmates. In the days that followed, the US Army units ordered the local townspeople to bury the dead._
Where is Episode 10? Patiently waiting lol
The man who answered Winters questions about the nature of the came (the one who told them there was a woman's camp at the next railroad stop) was named Otto Herzfeld. He is not a real person, but is a composite character based on several camp survivors. He is named for German actor Otto Herzfeld. The real Otto Herzfeld was imprisoned in Auschwitz because he was gay, not because he was Jewish. According to camp records, the real Herzfeld was executed 7 September 1942.
The person playing the character is the acclaimed Swiss Anatole Taubman. Taubman is himself Jewish. He's been in over 50 movies made in a dozen countries, and is capable of speaking fluently and without accent in eight languages (including English). In addition to Band of Brothers, he was in "Captain America", "Taken", "Dark", the Watchmen TV series, "Men in Black: International", "The Transporter" and about a dozen more movies you might have heard of.
The prisoner who carries what looks like a corpse to Babe Heffron and Burt Christenson was played by Serbian actor Goran Kostic. Kostic, like Taubman, was been in a lot of American productions, including Taken (where he shared a scene with Taubman, coincidentally), "Ant Man and the Wasp", and "The Children of Men." Incidentally, as he approaches Heffron and Christenson, he's saying (in Serbian), "Please help him! Help him! He's still alive! Help him!" According to an interview with Babe Heffron, the corpse-like man was, in fact, still alive at that time, but despite attempts to help him, died shortly after the camp was liberated.
_According to an interview with Babe Heffron, the corpse-like man was, in fact, still alive at that time, but despite attempts to help him, died shortly after the camp was liberated._
Easy Company never liberated a concentration camp. The liberation and associated scenes are fictional. The camp depicted in Band of Brothers is Kaufering IV which was actually liberated by the 12th Armored Division on April 27, 1945. Unfortunately, there are some for whom Band of Brothers has become akin to a religion.
@@iammanofnature235 And there are some whose religion is being a pedantic asshole who missed the point of the story. You should see about that, as being a pedantic asshole is a much worse thing.
I have seen this episode well over 20 times, and I cry EVERY TIME!!!!!
The guy in the "postal" area is Jamie Tarrt's dad in Ted Lasso
and Pegla from Andor.
This episode contains so many incredible details of writing, cinematography, and symbolism, but I think my favorite is the very last shot (which this edit cuts away from). There is a concept in German history and historiography called Sonderweg, which translates roughly as "the special path." It's a complex idea, and it can be interpreted in several different ways, but the gist of it is that German people and their society evolved uniquely over the course of European history. Because of this, there is a sense of legend and inevitability that can be extrapolated about the fate of Germany -- that Germany has a great and powerful future. It could be beautiful, and it could be terrible, but the idea of Sonderweg means that it's both fated and powerful.
The last scene, as the musician puts away his violin, quietly reflects this idea. As the perspective of the camera changes, the shape of the violin case also mirrors the shape of a coffin. And that's the fate of the German nation, laid out in the public square in this episode: it can be beautiful, as is the music, and it can be terrible, as is the Holocaust.
Just the shift from “what the fuck are we doing here?” to freeing the victims of the camp is so haunting
_Just the shift from “why the fuck are we doing here?” to freeing the victims of the camp is so haunting_
It was written that way. Easy Company never liberated a concentration\labor camp.
@@iammanofnature235 Yes, I figured it was written that way because it’s a show.
Never forget history,Sadly we are starting to repeat it...😔
This episode was shown in my history class at school. Little did I expect BOB would become one of my fave shows later on. Sure did leave an impression.
If you havent already, the bookend to this episode is a Soviet era Russian film, "Come and See." It covers the murder units the Germans used in occupied East Front areas. It is so horrific it seems impossible it could be true. Watch the special feature survivor interviews. They make it clear. The reality was worse.
I literally just left a comment recommending this same movie a few second before I read yours lol. That's not a war movie it's a horror movie about war.
That scene in come and see where they fire the live tracer rounds over the actors heads.... Holy shit. Hollywood would never have the balls to do that. I was in the US army served from 2006-2015. I was the M249 SAW gunner in my fire team when I deployed overseas so I know what that shit really looks like. It takes a lot for a movie about war or genocide to give me anxiety. Very few scenes have pulled that off but that scene literally had me getting down under my bed. The only other scenes in film that come close to affecting me like that is the one in the Pacific where the Japanese are using the Okinawans as human shields. That show is more brutal then band of brothers. Another scene that makes me shudder is when the uboat sinks the British ship in Dunkirk and everything suddenly goes black and submerged in water. That is literally my nightmare.
I sometimes rewatch the scenes where they sing blood on the risers, cause its such a good song, plus Perconte and Speirs have a fun little interaction regarding a certain lighter, Nix cheers up while singing, and then it ends with someone shouting "its gonna be good times Web!" as they ride through the german countryside and I immediately go :/ cause I remember whats happens next
"Murders are not monsters, they're men, and that's the most frightening thing about them" - Alice Sebold
Tom Hardy was born in September 1977, so was around 23/24 in this. His first appearance on TV was a few years earlier, when he entered a modelling competition on a breakfast show over here in England. He was only 20 at the time and the clip is on YT.
The soldiers executing the Germans were wearing Adrian helmets. They were French. After being occupied for 4 years many French were in the mood to eettle scores. The only documented incident was French troops executing Frenchmen who had joined the SS.
It is a blink and miss, but the french soldier shooting them is Tom Hanks.
I cried like a baby when I watched this episode
To think about the fact all of this happened to even too long ago is still surreal, the things people even some of my family members went trough that time is unbelievable to me. I could never be more thankful, specially after watching such incredible devastating scenes like in this episode 💔
When they found the camp, i have to imagine Nixon, an educated man, recalling the line from Henry V, "I was not angry since I came to France
Until this instant."
The guy that played Webster got down to the screen test phase for Batman, between him and Christian Bale (there's footage online).
He was in fight club
One of the most powerfully emotional hours of tv. Ever created. It still brings you heartache and reminder of what humans can do to others that are full of pure hate and evil years and decades later.
Just read through all the comments, some heartbreaking testimonies, from first hand and first generation of the survivors and liberators.
I think you guys need congratulating once again for triggering such heart wrenching comments. Thanks again fellas!
One of the random guys in a GI crowd shot was Michael Fassbender
The emotional whiplash between this and ted lasso coming out on the same day
8:23 From their helmets those guys pulling the trigger were French Liberation Army, as in the French who never gave up and fought with the Allies through almost the entire war. These guys saw 90,000 of their fellow soldiers killed, 200,000 wounded in just the initial invasion of France. Civilian deaths, including women and children reached 68,778 and during the occupation another 150,000 died.
Things like "right and wrong" tend to go out the window when that many of your people are killed.
As for why the Germans backed Hitler and were so eager to militarize, Germany was in extremely rough shape after the Treaty of Versailles. They went from an industrial and economic powerhouse to needing a wheelbarrow of money just to buy a loaf of bread and a lot of it had to do with the fact that the French insisted that the Germans be punished and forced to pay huge amounts of money to France to pay for the reconstruction. Frankly, the Germans would have backed *anyone* who was willing to tear that treaty up and I think France has quite a lot of responsibility for why WWII started in the first place.
I've watched this so many times, and never caught that. I always appreciate new information like that. Thank you.
As a German, I am really deeply ashamed of this part of our history. I am all the more surprised that the international community accepted Germany back so quickly. Probably because of the experience with the massive punishment after WW1.
My grandfather was drafted when he was 17, his family were not Nazis but they had to let him go. Many young soldiers were, of course, indoctrinated as children since the 1930s, but very many were unwilling to go to war voluntarily. The biggest Nazis were those who didn't have to fight and the SS. Although some Eastern European men joined from 1943 onwards, they perceived Russia as a greater threat.
Germany back so quickly... Hu which part? Because if I remind correctly Germany was separated in two and Berlin in several sectors after WWII...
Well Nuremberg helped a lil. Besides West and East block didn't have choice as they were facing each other during the Cold War...
I hope you do not mind me asking this question, but you can only get so much from reading. What kind of long lasting issues have you all faced since East Germany was reunited with the West? I gather there have been economic issues, but what I am really curious about are the social difficulties. One people, two radically different societies for nearly 50 years.
@@Ghost7511 West Germany was founded in 1949, only 4 years after the war, the German Democratic Republic (DDR) which was a dictatorship under soviet union also. The occupation of west Germany ended officially in 1990, but since 1955 Germany was a sovereign state.
What punishment after ww1 ? Germany never really paid the war reparation despite the destruction they caused on French soil. About a quarter of France was totally destroyed, including 60% of it's industry, and the money that Germany gave covered less than a third of the desctruction the war caused on civillian infrastructure. In total, Germany paid about 2.1 to 2.4% of its GDP between 1919 and 1931, in war reparation. In comparaison to France that paid war reparation of about 60% of it's gdp after the Franco-Prussian war. And France didn't turn into a dictatorship right after.
I always remember hearing that at the beginning of the war even after all the military buildup many German soldiers were afraid to invade France they remembered the stories they heard as kids of The Great War it wasn’t until the fall of France that many Germans saw winning as possible
Best and toughest episode. I will say that I don't know for sure if the woman knew what was happening. The black ribbon on the picture means that he had died, and we don't know if he was a part of the camp. Certainly she was ashamed, though.
Where is episode 10?
I'm so tired of reading this comment. If you look above it's already been asked about 20 times.
8:30 is french troops, they were committing war crimes but they didn't give a single f*ck about committing war crimes after their occupation.