This is the forgotten chapter of the Holocaust. While Nazi ideology targeted Jews and other so-called “enemies of the state,” it also persecuted Black people in Germany and across Europe. Gert Schramm was one of them. Deported to Buchenwald at the age of 15, he survived unimaginable cruelty and l...

In the shadow of Nazi Germany’s collapse, the crimes of the concentration camp system come to light. Among the perpetrators stands Hermann Florstedt—SS officer, camp commandant, and one of the most feared figures in Majdanek. Once described as “tough and energetic” by his superiors, Florstedt’s a...

After the German defeat at Stalingrad shattered Hitler’s dreams of conquest, the war turned into a brutal retreat—but the suffering in the Nazi camps only intensified. Max Koegel, an ambitious SS officer, rose from humble origins to command some of the deadliest camps in history, including Majdan...

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...

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...

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...

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, ...

He stood among cheering crowds during Hitler’s triumphal entry into Austria in 1938. But behind the smile was a man who would become one of the most sadistic killers of the Holocaust. As commandant of the Plaszow concentration camp, Amon Göth brought death with him wherever he walked. He shot pri...

Behind the gates of Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka stood a man whose name is nearly forgotten, but whose crimes are immeasurable. Christian Wirth, a ruthless SS officer shaped by the Nazi belief in racial murder, helped turn genocide into a system. From the first gas chambers of the T4 program to...

On April 15, 1945, British troops liberated the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and uncovered horrors beyond imagination—piles of unburied corpses, tens of thousands of starving prisoners, and a cesspit of disease and death. Among those arrested was Josef Kramer, a fanatical SS officer whose bru...

On 6 April 1941, Nazi Germany invaded Greece under Operation Marita, but the brutal occupation that followed would leave scars far deeper than the battle for territory. Three years later, on 5 April 1944, soldiers of the 4th SS Polizei Panzergrenadier Division, aided by Bulgarian collaborators, d...

Hidden deep in the forests near Wejherowo, one of the earliest Nazi mass murder sites claimed the lives of up to 16,000 people. They were Poles, Kashubians, Jews, and the mentally ill — executed simply because they were deemed “undesirable.” This is the chilling story of Piaśnica, a crime Europe ...

This episode uncovers the chilling life of Johann Reichhart, one of the most prolific executioners of the 20th century—a man who served both the Weimar Republic, the Nazi regime, and later even the U.S. military authorities in post-war Germany. From his beginnings in a family of executioners to h...

He lied his way into the hangman’s job. He botched executions. He smiled as men struggled for life at the end of a rope. At Nuremberg, John C. Woods became infamous for delivering slow and agonizing deaths to Nazi war criminals. But who was he—and why did he take pleasure in killing?

On 22 June 1941, Nazi Germany launches Operation Barbarossa, invading the Soviet Union and unleashing a war of extermination. In occupied Belarus, entire villages are wiped out in brutal reprisals. One of the most horrifying atrocities occurs in Khatyn, where 149 civilians – including 75 children...

June 1944. As Allied forces storm the beaches of Normandy, the German 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich begins a campaign of terror across occupied France. In the town of Tulle, 99 men are hanged in public as a warning to others. The next day, the same SS unit destroys the nearby village of Oradou...