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The Secret End of the Most Inhuman Nazi Commander | Dark Docs | YouTubeToText
YouTube Transcript: The Secret End of the Most Inhuman Nazi Commander
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This content details the rise and fall of SS-Obergruppenführer Gottlob Berger, a key architect of the Waffen-SS's manpower and terror apparatus, whose career was marked by ruthless pragmatism, bureaucratic cunning, and a willingness to adapt ideology to serve Nazi goals, culminating in his trial for war crimes and a surprisingly lenient sentence.
In a remote Austrian military camp, thirty VIP Allied hostages anxiously
await their fate. Among them are Winston Churchill’s nephew,
members of the British royal family, and other invaluable figures.
It’s April 1945, and the Third Reich is crumbling, but they still wonder
if they will be used by the Germans as a bargaining chip or be executed out of spite.
Suddenly, a huge black Mercedes-Benz pulls up to the camp gates. Out steps
a menacing figure in a perfectly-pressed SS uniform with high-ranking insignia.
This is SS-Obergruppenführer Gottlob Berger, one of Hitler’s “twelve apostles”.
His men call him “The Almighty” - and he’s here to play god with the prisoners’ lives.
The sound of American artillery grew louder with every passing minute. But
Berger had come to make his final, Machiavellian move…
Like many other young men, Gottlob Berger was swallowed by the jaws of World War 1
in 1914. He rose to the rank of lieutenant in the infantry, was wounded four times,
and earned the Iron Cross First Class. By war's end, he was considered 70 percent disabled.
Yet instead of regret, he felt he had discovered his true calling. The chaos
of combat, the shared struggle, had awakened something primal inside him.
Berger returned to civilian life as a physical education instructor,
but he struggled to find purpose. In the 1920s, he found kindred spirits in Adolf
Hitler's fledgling Nazi Party. By 1931, he joined Hitler’s brown-shirted street-fighting militia,
the Sturmabteilung, or SA, drawn by their promise of revolutionary violence.
But Berger's ambitions exceeded what the organization's thuggish
leadership could offer, and by 1933, his SA career stalled.
For the next few years, he worked as a school inspector, then as a
senior official for the regional Ministry of Culture. But in 1936,
he was given the opportunity to join another organization: the Schutzstaffel, or SS.
Unlike the SA's chaotic street brawlers, the SS was envisioned by its leader, Heinrich Himmler,
as a disciplined, elite organization. It had initially served as Hitler's personal bodyguard,
but now, Himmler was attempting to transform it into something far more ambitious,
with its own military units, police functions, and administrative apparatus.
For a former officer like Berger, who valued organizational efficiency, the SS offered a
professional structure where his administrative skills would be prized. Seeing his talent,
Himmler made Berger the head of the sports office on his personal staff.
Yet the SS faced a critical problem that threatened its very existence:
it was failing catastrophically at recruitment. The Wehrmacht controlled
the draft, recruiting the best young men for themselves, while the SS was left with
the leftovers, hardly the makings of the prestigious unit Himmler hoped to build.
He needed someone who could solve this fundamental crisis,
and he suspected Berger was just the man for the job.
Himmler appointed Berger as chief of the SS recruiting office in July 1938,
and he set about revolutionizing the entire system. He couldn't compete
with the Wehrmacht for official recruits, so he would create his own pipeline: the Hitler Youth.
While other SS leaders focused on adults, Berger recognized that teenage boys were the key to
the future. He negotiated crucial agreements with Reich Youth Leader Baldur von Schirach,
creating what he called "a warm, working relationship" that gave
the SS preferential access to young men before they even reached military age.
Berger established seventeen recruiting stations across Germany, each one a sophisticated operation
designed to identify, cultivate, and ensnare potential SS members. They would approach
potential volunteers individually, spinning tales of SS elite status and special missions.
Berger's men emphasized "basic SS principles," that Germans were a
people without adequate living space, that the war was a struggle between opposing ideologies,
and that the SS represented the ultimate defense of German freedom. Service in the
SS was presented as an extraordinary honor reserved for the chosen few.
Within eight months of taking charge, Berger had found 32,000 new recruits,
more than the General-SS had managed to recruit in several years. His success was
so dramatic that it enabled Himmler's most ambitious goal: creating the Waffen-SS,
armed SS units that would fight as elite military formations alongside the regular German army. The
Wehrmacht was forced to formally recognize these SS soldiers as a legitimate military force.
By the outbreak of World War 2, Berger had proven that with the right combination of manipulation,
bureaucratic cunning, and ideological fervor, he could build an army from nothing.
Among his fellow SS officers, he had earned a reputation that bordered on reverence. They
nicknamed him "der Allmächtige Gottlob," a play on the German words for "the Almighty God" - and
he was seen as one of Hitler’s so-called “twelve apostles”, the Führer’s inner circle of acolytes.
Yet the war, and the expansion of German-occupied territory that came with it,
would require more and more SS manpower. Berger would once again have to think outside the box.
The Wehrmacht had placed strict limits on how many recruits the SS could claim within
Germany, but there were no restrictions on recruiting from other territories. Berger,
who was promoted to head of the SS Main Office in December 1939,
proposed to Himmler that they should tap into the populations of other nations.
Many European countries were home to significant numbers of ethnic Germans,
known as “Volksdeutsche”. Starting in May 1940, Berger’s son-in-law Andreas Schmidt
helped him extract over 1,000 Volksdeutsche volunteers from then-neutral Romania.
However, Berger had greater ambitions. As German forces stormed across Europe,
he saw an opportunity to further bolster SS ranks with men from the newly conquered lands.
At first, Hitler was skeptical about recruiting foreigners into the racially
pure SS. But Berger was persuasive, and Himmler backed his ambitious plan on the condition that
they would only include men from what were considered to be fellow “Germanic” peoples.
But now Berger would have to find a way to convince the foreigners
to join forces with the very invaders they had just been fighting against.
Sophisticated propaganda campaigns were developed. In Scandinavia,
recruiters emphasized Nordic racial superiority and the fight against communism.
In the Low Countries, they promised autonomy and special status within the new German order.
By June 1940, Danish and Norwegian volunteers had formed the SS Regiment Nordland,
while Dutch and Flemish recruits created the SS Regiment Westland.
Berger had found the solution to the SS’s manpower problems. In late 1940,
he established a special training camp at Sennheim in occupied Alsace, where non-German recruits
could be physically conditioned and ideologically indoctrinated before joining SS units.
In June 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union. In order to have enough men to cover
the Eastern Front, Hitler authorized broader foreign recruitment. Those of the “Germanic”
peoples would remain under SS control, while other national legions made up of Frenchmen, Spaniards,
and Croats, considered less “racially pure” by the Nazis, would be assigned to the Wehrmacht.
The creation of the national legions, which would wear their own national
symbols instead of SS runes, not only made it easier for Berger to convince
foreigners to join the German cause without compromising their patriotic
ideals but was also a vindication of his belief that ideological flexibility and
bureaucratic maneuvering could serve Nazi goals better than rigid racial doctrine.
Success had made Berger indispensable to Heinrich Himmler. He was now one
of the chief architects of the SS's expanding empire of terror.
As the Germans continued their push into Eastern Europe, the Waffen-SS men Berger
had recruited were assigned a mission that many regular army officers found distasteful.
They were called “anti-partisan operations” and were in reality
little more than mass-murder campaigns against civilian populations, designed to depopulate
vast swaths of Eastern European territory to make “living room” for German settlers.
Hitler and Himmler had deliberately chosen the SS for these tasks precisely because
of their fanatical ideological indoctrination.
Berger embraced this brutality and actively protected those who carried it out. In January
1942, he had successfully lobbied for his old World War 1 comrade Oskar Dirlewanger's
unit to be formally incorporated into the Waffen-SS as the SS-Sonderkommando Dirlewanger.
This was no ordinary military formation;
it was composed largely of convicted criminals and court-martialed soldiers,
deployed specifically to execute the most abominable deeds of the Nazi occupation.
Operating primarily in occupied Poland and Eastern Europe,
Dirlewanger's men earned a reputation for extreme brutality and sadistic violence.
Eventually, Dirlewanger’s cruelty was seen as too barbaric even by Nazi standards,
and an SS judge ordered a warrant for his arrest. But Berger intervened personally to protect his
old friend, telling Himmler: [QUOTE] “A savage country cannot be governed in a decent manner.”
Berger was becoming the living embodiment of SS ruthlessness.
Meanwhile, as Waffen-SS losses mounted on the Eastern Front,
Berger’s recruitment methods became increasingly coercive.
The days of persuasive propaganda and appeals to idealism were giving way to
outright conscription and threats. In occupied territories, his recruiters
press-ganged young men into service. Those who resisted faced imprisonment or worse.
While this undeniably helped boost the ranks, there were major concerns within the
SS that the quality of recruits was decreasing significantly. A recruitment drive in Hungary
between March and May 1942, aimed exclusively at Volksdeutsche, managed to extract 16,500 men,
but many turned out to be either ethnic Hungarians, medically unsuitable, or reluctant
to serve. Berger didn’t seem to care; to him, numbers were all that mattered by this point.
Indeed, his solutions to problems were now becoming as creative as they were cynical.
In November 1942, he proposed the formation of a new Hungarian division of the SS,
which could be funded by selling emigration permits to Slovak Jews attempting to leave their
country amid the terror of the Holocaust. The plan didn’t go ahead, but it was a
demonstration of the pragmatic opportunism that had come to define Berger’s attitude.
February 1943 signaled a turning point in the war, as the Germans suffered a catastrophic defeat at
Stalingrad. In the aftermath of the disaster, Berger told Himmler that the SS needed stronger
ideological training to maintain morale in the face of mounting defeats. The result was a series
of pamphlets on racial ideology, including "Der Untermensch" - "The Sub-Human" - which described
certain peoples as spiritually and mentally lower than animals. The propaganda was more vicious
than ever, designed to dehumanize the enemy and justify the increasingly brutal nature of the war.
Yet even as these pamphlets rolled off the presses, Berger decided to
completely abandon the racial principles they promoted. The emergency was too great,
the casualties too heavy, for racial purity to matter anymore.
Now, the SS began forming units from anyone they could, irrespective of ethnic background. The 13th
Waffen Mountain Division Handschar was made up entirely of Bosnian Muslims, while in April 1943,
the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division was formed from Ukrainian nationalists - among
the very people Himmler had referred to as "sub-human" just months before.
The hypocrisy was staggering, but Berger understood that ideology was merely a
tool to be used when convenient and discarded when it wasn't.
By April, his desperation had reached new heights. Over the
objections of Reichsminister Albert Speer, the Minister for Armaments and War Production,
Berger began recruiting directly from foreign workers within the Reich itself. By August,
he had recruited over 8,000 of these laborers for the Waffen-SS,
pulling them away from their already strained weapon manufacturing duties.
By the end of 1943, a quarter of the Waffen-SS was made up of non-German volunteers and conscripts.
When asked about the wisdom of sending foreign recruits to perish for Germany,
he simply responded that for every one of those fallen soldiers: [QUOTE] "no German mother weeps."
As the situation continued worsening for the Reich,
by 1944, Berger was descending into outright criminality.
June that year saw the implementation of one of his most controversial schemes yet. Codenamed
“Heuaktion” - which translates as “Hay Action” - the operation called for the systematic kidnapping
of 50,000 Eastern European children between the ages of 10 and 14. These children would be torn
from their families and transported to Germany to serve as forced laborers in the Nazi war machine.
Soon, Berger found himself taking on new responsibilities that would expand
his complicity in Nazi atrocities. On July 20, after the failed assassination attempt on Hitler,
the shaken regime turned to its most trusted figures. Himmler was given control of the
Replacement Army, and he immediately delegated the administration of all German prisoner-of-war camps
to Berger. He was now in charge of hundreds of thousands of captured Allied soldiers.
Yet the following month, he would be given another duty. On August 23,
an uprising broke out in Slovakia against the German puppet government.
On August 31, Berger was appointed Military Commander in Slovakia with orders to crush
the rebellion and restore order. For the first time in his career, the administrative mastermind
would have to prove himself as a field commander. He was given 10,000 men against
a rebel army of 47,000 fighters defending mountainous terrain they knew intimately.
The results were swift and humiliating. Berger's forces made little progress against the determined
Slovak rebels. The uprising continued to spread, and by mid-September, he had managed to pacify
only western Slovakia and the Váh valley. The main rebel stronghold remained intact, and the
insurgents had successfully tied down German forces that were desperately needed elsewhere.
On September 19, after less than three weeks in command,
Himmler replaced Berger with an SS police leader who would eventually crush the revolt
with additional troops and brutal methods. For Berger, it was a stinging defeat.
But the Nazi regime still had use for his organizational skills. Almost immediately
after his Slovak failure, Berger was appointed as one of two chiefs
of staff for the Volkssturm - Hitler's desperate attempt to create a civilian
militia from the remaining male population in Germany, mostly old men and teenage boys.
January 1945 brought the coldest winter in decades to Central Europe. Temperatures plummeted
to minus 13 degrees Fahrenheit, and blizzards swept across the frozen landscape. It was in these
conditions that Gottlob Berger would oversee one of the most brutal chapters of the war.
As Soviet forces launched their massive offensive on January 12,
advancing rapidly through Poland and East Prussia, German authorities began frantically evacuating
prisoner-of-war camps. Over 257,000 Western Allied prisoners were held in German military camps,
scattered across the collapsing eastern territories. Rather than leave them to be
liberated by the advancing Red Army, Berger's administration ordered them to march west.
The first evacuations began on January 19 and were joined by camps across Poland.
Columns of prisoners, many already weakened by years of captivity,
were forced to walk in sub-zero temperatures with inadequate clothing and virtually no food. They
marched between 10 and 25 miles per day, sleeping in barns, churches, or simply in the open snow.
Few had proper boots, some wrapped their feet in rags,
and others marched barefoot through the snow.
By the end of February, Berger had over 80,000 Allied prisoners
trudging westward across the collapsing Reich.
As the grimly named “Death Marches” continued into March and April 1945, the guards escorting
Berger's prisoner columns complained they had been abandoned to fend for themselves under impossible
conditions. They frequently reached railroad junctions where promised trains had been delayed
or commandeered for military purposes, forcing them to continue directionless treks on foot.
As the Third Reich entered its final weeks, Berger's role as the administrator of POW
marches had made him complicit in one of the war's most brutal episodes.
Thousands of Allied prisoners had lost their lives under the system he
coordinated. Yet Berger was preparing for one final calculated performance.
On the evening of April 12, SS troops arrived at the gates of Colditz Castle. The prisoners inside
had spent the day listening to distant American gunfire, knowing liberation was only hours away.
Instead, they watched as German soldiers formed a double line outside the fortress.
The SS had come for a specific group of prisoners - the "Prominente." These were
the relatives of high-ranking Allied leaders: Giles Romilly, nephew of Winston Churchill;
Viscount Lascelles and the Master of Elphinstone, both nephews of King George VI;
and other aristocrats and important figures. The prisoners had long suspected this day would come,
fearing they would be used as hostages in Hitler's rumored final stand in the Bavarian Alps.
Before midnight on April 13, thirty prisoners were loaded onto two ramshackle buses headed
east through the ghostly ruins of Dresden, eventually arriving at a military camp in Austria.
It was there that they encountered SS-Obergruppenführer Gottlob Berger. He
arrived in an enormous black Mercedes-Benz, a formidable figure in his crisp uniform.
Berger gathered the prisoners and made a dramatic announcement.
He had just returned from Berlin, he told them, from a personal meeting with Adolf
Hitler. The Führer had personally commanded him to execute them all.
The prisoners waited in tense silence as Berger let his words sink in. Then, after a calculated
pause, he delivered his surprise: he had no intention of following that order. Instead,
he would escort them safely to Allied lines and hand them over personally.
A dangerous journey through the Austrian valleys ensued,
as the convoy worried constantly about Allied air attacks. They also feared rogue SS units
in the mountains who might be eager to carry out Hitler's original sentence.
True to his word, Berger delivered the Prominente safely to American forces in Innsbruck. By saving
the lives of Churchill's nephew and British royalty, he hoped he had secured the most
valuable insurance policy possible for the war crimes trials that were certain to follow.
On May 7, Germany surrendered unconditionally to the Allied forces. The Third Reich that Berger
had served so faithfully was officially over, but he remained at large in the chaos of the
collapsing Bavarian Alps. He commanded the remnants of the XIII SS Army Corps,
fragments of the very Waffen-SS divisions he had helped recruit over the years,
including pieces of the 17th SS Panzergrenadier Division and the 35th SS Police Division.
Berger knew his situation was hopeless. Unlike many Nazi leaders who chose futile
resistance or to take their own lives, he made a pragmatic decision. He would surrender separately
to American forces, avoiding capture by Soviet troops who would show no mercy to SS commanders.
On May 9, he managed to locate a regimental commander of the 101st Airborne Division and
formally surrendered to US forces. The next day, he was arrested and placed in Allied custody.
Now, the man who had spent his career managing other people's fates would discover his own.
For two years after his arrest, Berger remained in Allied custody while prosecutors prepared
their case against him. The scale of Nazi crimes was still being uncovered, and his role in the
SS hierarchy made him a prime candidate for the war crimes trials that would follow Nuremberg.
On November 18, 1947, the final indictment was lodged against Berger and his co-defendants in
what became known as the Ministries Trial. When proceedings began on January 6, 1948,
Berger faced eight counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The charges were devastating:
complicity in the murder of prisoners of war, participation in the concentration camp system,
the enslavement of children through the Heuaktion program, and membership in criminal organizations.
The prosecution had done their homework. They produced evidence that Berger had been present
at Heinrich Himmler's infamous October 1943 speech in Posen, where the Reichsführer-SS
had explicitly spoken of the extermination of European Jews. When Berger's defense counsel
claimed his client hadn't understood the word "extermination" to refer to Jews,
the prosecutors presented his own wartime writings contradicting his defense.
When it came to the marches, Berger's defense attempted to portray him as
simply following orders and Geneva Convention requirements. He claimed
Hitler had ordered the prisoners' execution, and that moving them westward was actually
protecting their lives. He insisted he had protested against the decisions and was:
[QUOTE] "without power or authority to countermand or avoid the order."
The prosecution countered with the brutal reality of what had happened under his administration.
Thousands succumbed on those frozen roads, and it had all been: [QUOTE] "conducted under the
authority of the defendant Berger, chief of Prisoner-of-War Affairs."
Yet the court also heard evidence of his intervention to save the Prominente.
American prosecutors acknowledged that Berger had disobeyed Hitler's direct orders to execute
high-ranking Allied prisoners, potentially saving their lives at great personal risk.
On April 13, 1949, the verdicts were announced. Berger was acquitted on some counts but convicted
on others, including the execution of French General Gustave Mesny, participation in the
concentration camp program, and his role in the forced conscription of foreign nationals.
He was sentenced to 25 years' imprisonment. At age 52,
the former teacher and SS commander faced spending the rest of his life behind bars for
his role in building and administering Nazi Germany's machinery of terror and genocide.
Even behind bars, Berger's talent for bureaucratic maneuvering did not abandon him. On January 31,
1951, US High Commissioner John J. McCloy reduced his sentence from 25 years to 10 years,
citing the intervention to save the Prominente as evidence of his character.
In December 1951, after serving just six and a half years in Landsberg prison,
Gottlob Berger walked free. He returned to his native Baden-Württemberg and settled
into civilian life as the manager of a curtain rail factory, a modest occupation for someone
who had once orchestrated the movements of thousands of soldiers across Europe.
Yet even in retirement, Berger could not entirely abandon his old allegiances. He
contributed articles to Nation Europa, a right-wing journal published in Coburg,
and occasionally wrote pieces encouraging NATO to give greater consideration to former members
of the Waffen-SS. The Cold War had created new enemies, and Berger argued that the West
would benefit from the experience of men who had fought against communism on the Eastern Front.
It was a final demonstration of his ability to adapt ideology to circumstances. Pragmatism,
not principle, had always been his guiding star.
Berger passed away on January 5, 1975, in Gerstetten - the same small Württemberg town
where he had been born 78 years earlier. The obituaries described him simply as a former
soldier and businessman, with little mention of his role in one of history's darkest chapters.
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