On 8 April 1945, starving prisoners at Buchenwald risked execution to send a secret SOS to the advancing U.S. Army: “They want to evacuate us. The SS want to destroy us.” Three days later, American troops liberated the camp—and uncovered horrors beyond imagination: mass graves, torture chambers, piles of corpses, and human remains preserved as trophies. Behind this system of terror was SS commandant Hermann Pister, a loyal servant of the Nazi regime who oversaw mass murder, torture, and death transports. This is the story of his rise, his crimes—and his long-delayed justice.
Up Next in Season 1
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Dachau’s Darkest Hour: Martin Gottfri...
On 29 April 1945, U.S. troops entered Dachau—the first Nazi concentration camp—and were met with a nightmare beyond imagination: piles of skeletal corpses, railway cars filled with rotting bodies, and 30,000 starved survivors on the brink of death. At the center of this horror stood Martin Gottfr...
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White Death of Sobibor and Treblinka:...
Franz Stangl was no sadistic brute screaming in rage or beating victims with his fists. He was worse. A cold, disciplined administrator who treated mass murder as an exercise in efficiency. After joining the SS, he became a key figure in the Nazi T4 euthanasia program before being appointed the f...
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Vengeance Rockets and Murder Camps: O...
As Allied forces stormed Normandy in June 1944, Nazi Germany unleashed a new horror on London – the V-1 flying bombs and later the V-2 rockets. These so-called "revenge weapons" were built using slave labor inside the hellish underground tunnels of Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp, where tens of...
