[Music] Adolf ikan the notorious Nazi who escaped Justice for 15 years before his trial brought Global understanding to the term Holocaust under oath ikan insisted he was a middle manager with no blood on his hands is this the truth or were his words all lie [Music] eyes most people from my generation don't understand how over 70 years ago a small group of Nazis could start a war that killed 60 million people I want to find out and to help me I'm going to use playing cards today they're used by both the military and law enforcement
to help identify their targets but nobody has ever put together a pack of cards for the most notorious group of killers in history wel with experts I want to know where each of these Nazis rank in the hierarchy of evil my name is James Ellis this is Hitler's Most Wanted it is interesting weighing up the different sides of this I find this is an extremely tough one because he played such an integral role to the Nazi Genocide but at the same time because he was a cog in that machine maybe he was replaceable what I
find most interesting about ikan is The Pedestrian nature to which he went about his work to him it was just automated he went to work he did his job he went back home you have to remember he wasn't a senior Nazi that uniform is that of an SS leftenant Colonel that's not that high it's middle ranking when anti-semitic measures were increased and persecution was ramped up he was on board a genocidal regime doesn't just need speechmakers doesn't just need people ranting at the podium it doesn't just need politicians it needs organizers people who make plans
and carry them out ikan was one of several senior Nazis to escape punishment after World War II he vanished Into Thin Air before being spotted in Argentina in the late 1950s he was captured in secret and brought to Israel to face his accusers his trial lasted for 4 months and was watched by millions around the world throughout ikan claimed he was purely an administrator who played no direct part in the mass genocide his Nazi bosses carried out I want to know if there is any truth to his defense so I've come to Germany to start
looking into Ian's story at a place that helped take him down that's the M nearly every spot here is a crime scene wow yen is a prosecutor at the central office for the investigation of National Socialist crimes on the outskirts of stutgart it's an amazing visual representation of the scale and scope of Nazi crimes and it's only a part of the scale so it must be a very daunting task for you then because you've got all these crime scenes here and you're trying to bring the people responsible for this to Justice get an enormous task
for small office like ours 70 years on Yen and his team are still chasing down suspected war criminals from the Third Reich they have identified some 28,000 War crime sites but with many of the men and women Under Suspicion now in their '90s time is running out these crimes happened seven decades ago but your office is investigating these crimes today well of course these are historical events during World War I but what we are doing are current investigations because the defendants some of them are still alive and it's also important for the victims or their
relatives for them that's a current issue let's move to the card index room we have 1.7 million index cards with names locations and military units 1.7 million 1.7 million more than 700,000 names of defendants or Witnesses from Hitler down to the lowliest thug the details of their crimes are recorded here so I'm interested in finding out more about ikan do you have anything on him here well there should be a file concerning him but first we have to check on the index cards um that's his index card you can see we have a lot of
cards concerning him eight in total eight cards is that unusual that's unusual because he was such a prominent figure responsible for a lot of victims um you have his personal data Adolf Amman and his actual position as um the head of a unit in the r head H and responsible for the killings and the robbery of Jewish citizens but as a bureaucrat who spent the second world war behind a desk he wasn't well known among Nazi Hunters when the conflict ended in postwar Germany the process of denazification undertaken by the Allies quickly became a lower
priority than preparing for the coming conflict with the Soviet Union so there was little appetite in postwar Germany to find and prosecute war criminals especially those who weren't at the very top of the regime this allowed ikeman along with many others to slip through the net it really blows my mind hundreds of thousands of people have blood on their hands and some of them are still out there ikan however was one of the highest profile escapees to be caught the arrest brought to light his astonishing story to find out more about how he got his
start with Nat M I'm heading 620 km Northeast to Germany's capital Berlin historian Dr Stephanie Fisher is taking me to where Ian's career under Adolf Hitler would flourish he actually went to the same high school as Adolf Hitler is that true yes um really yeah it um seems to be kind of surprising for us right and we immediately start thinking is their connection but it just doesn't seem that they met us yeah it wasn't like it was a school notorious for say radicalizing people or anything like that not that we would know born in 1906
ikan is 17 years younger than Hitler so their paths never crossed in the halls of their High School in Lin Austria akman was a non-descript adult and he had a non-descript childhood he left vocational school without completing his course of study as a mechanic he worked with his father he worked as a sales clerk incredibly nondescript and undistinguished and do we know why ikan became so interested in right-wing politics I think what he really finds appealing about is this idea of comradeship of belonging having a group of male bonding and being together and drinking beer
and having common goals about how to change the world and part of it is of course anti-Semitism so why was anti-Semitism part of his world view as crazy as may sound to us today uh it wasn't something very uncommon at a time like right after World War I among leftists and rtist as well we would have a high degree of anti-Semitism it wasn't something unique to the Nazi movement at the time but the Nazism just they pushed it to a new degree The Naz propaganda machine spouting Jewish conspiracies feeds right into Ian's pre-existing anti-Semitism he
joins the SS in 1932 in 1933 ikan was sent to daau for paramilitary training and he wasn't very excited by it he requested a transfer to the SD the security service of the SD and a transfer to Berlin he was ambitious and he wanted to rise up in the party but not through the military route in Berlin he is posted to the very center of Hitler's security apparatus I should have a picture of the original building oh let's take a look yeah so this is a photo of the building that was standing here yes before
exactly so this used to be the headquarters of the SS the security service SD Gustavo the SS was Hitler's Security Service the gust sto his secret police and the SD the intelligence Wing where ikeman worked the SD is going to become one of the most powerful organizations in the Third Reich it's there to gather every scrap of intelligence about every enemy now those enemies don't just include you know foreign powers they also include the other perceived enemies such as Jews Communists members of the church Freemasons you name it anybody Hitler doesn't like they are a
fair Target for the SD what we're responsibilities he was very much involved in collecting data from chws but in particular in setting up immigration plans for how CHS should leave Germany it's a major project I mean just think about it this is where he proves to be a very good bureaucrat the Nazis first attempt at removing Jews from Germany involved racist restrictive policies that pushed them to immigrate ikan was given the task of coordinating this effort through the SD and he Dove head first into the job why is it that he is willing to work
in an institution that is persecuting people like why is it that you he comes in he gets a desk job and stand that he wants to get away from the military service but then he's persecuting Freemasons and then he's persecuting Jews like what is it about him that drives him to do that we can only read the documents we have and the documents show that he chose to work there and it was not something um forced on him so he made a clear choice to to work in this department that persecuted Jews at his trial
ikan conceded that this was where he first honed his skills as an expert administrator though remained adamant he was nothing more but the historical record proved there was much more to his story in 1938 after Germany annexes Austria ikan is posted to Vienna he sets up the central office for Jewish immigration and gets straight to work hounding the Jews in the country where he grew up he was an expert in what we would call putting the squeeze on people ikan took steps especially in Vienna to compel immigration to make life for Jews so difficult and
so unlivable and to have the threat of Terror hanging over them that they would have no choice but to find some way to flee the country ikan dreams up Financial scams to seize Jewish property and freeze their Assets in May 1938 he boasts to his colleagues I have them completely in my hands they dare not take one step without first Consulting me in just one year ikan forces 100,000 Jews to leave Austria it's an act no one should endure not back then Nor today I'm on a quest to figure out where Adolf ikan fits into
Hitler's hierarchy of evil I've come to Berlin the city where ikan honed his skills overseeing the forced immigration of Jews from Europe his trial in 1961 ikan claimed he wasn't high enough in the chain of command to have any influence over what happened to them but his success in pushing thousands of Jews out of Austria suggests otherwise in fact ikeman and the Nazis were just getting started Ian's role in SD is to identify ways in which the Jews can be got rid of what we're looking at is forced immigration plunder of wealth and property with
Ian's help from the mid 1930s onwards Jews and other perceived enemies of the state were being persecuted to such a degree they had no choice but to leave their homelands only to discover their situation became even worse there was no place for Jewish refugees to go many Count's doors were closed to them in one famous example in May 1939 an ocean liner carrying some 900 Jewish refugees left Germany in search of a home the St Louis was denied entry to Cuba the United States and Canada and forced to return to Europe over 250 passengers were
later killed in concentration and death camps I want to find out what fleeing that kind of tyranny feels like since the second world war ended Germany has become far more welcoming to refugees how long have you lived in Germany land and though I can't speak to those who are aboard the ler I can speak to people who've endured similar [Music] torment Hamid novari is the director of Berlin Society for Iranian refugees a group that supports newly arrived Asylum Seekers After the revolution in 1979 Iran devolved into totalitarian rule persecution of political opponents and minority groups
became government policy just as Adolf ikan used the terror apparatus to push Jews out Iran's leader ayatollahi intimidated his people into submission many were forced to abandon the country of their birth why do refugees come to Germany what conditions are they fleeing Zan Burger Creek Afghanistan thei [Music] in 2015 more than a million refugees fing Civil War political persecution and economic hardship flooded into Europe in response Germany opened its borders how do you think Germany's history affects their attitude towards refugees the kind of state sanctioned persecution Hamid is describing resonates with Ian's work in 19
1939 the Germans invaded Poland this gives ikan an even greater challenge it becomes increasingly obvious that the more territory you conquer the more Jews are going to be under your control so when the Nazis do March into Poland suddenly they got 3 million more Jews now what are you going to do with them ever the problem solver Ian's policies escalate from Forced immigration to deportation and one of his pet projects for what to do with the Jews was truly bizarre if you want to get to the roots of basically crazy Nazi thinking look no further
than the Madagascar plan big island off the coast of Africa you know uh Nazis look at the map and go well why did we just dump the Jews there ikeman assembles a task force to plan Mass deportations from Nazi held Europe to the French Colony but the plans and practicality during wartime doomed it to failure it it's completely insane there's no infrastructure there and of course you know makes no sense you if you're going to dump a load of people on that island well actually you might as well kill them uh someone makes that mental
leap and that's what's going to happen this is a planned genocide through an industrialized mass murder program it's deeply disturbing the next leg of my journey into Adolf Ian's story brings me to a villa in the leafy Berlin suburb of vanzi the setting is beautiful yet the events that took place here over 75 years ago were anything but this really is a stunning property many people tell me that they are shocked by the contrast between the beauty of this place and the horrific uh history which we tell in our exhibition today this former SS guest
house is a memorial site for European Jews murdered in the Holocaust Hans Christian Yosh is the director now this property is most notorious for a meeting that took place here in January 1942 can you tell me what that meeting was for the basic idea of the conference was uh to coordinate government offices on what the Nazis euphemistically called the end fr the final solution of the Jewish question undoubtedly many conferences took place in the third right throughout the war about how genocide was going to be enacted the one that we know the most of because
the minutes of it were discovered is the van conference this was a business meeting discussing you know sales targets what it looked like to an outsider you had a map you had numbers and you had where those numbers were going to go but of course what all those numbers and Maps represented was industrial Slaughter this was where a small group of key Nazis agreed to the coordinated Mass extermination of European Jews ikan was among them at his trial ikan acknowledged he attended the vanzi conference but claimed he played no part in that decision he even
went as far as saying he was opposed to the violence of all the claims he made in court his fate hinged on this one more than any other so what was Ian's role in the conference Amman was the head of the desk for Jewish Affairs in the um op in the R's main Security office and he was therefore in charge of transport all of the deportations from Nazi ruled Europe to concentration and death camps in the East were overseen by Adolf ikan what was it about him that gave him such an important role in the
Nazi Genocide ikman took a lot of initiative um uh that he would actually interpret orders from his superiors very sort of flexible way that he even had been reprimanded sometimes for um being over zealous ikan worked tirelessly to maximize the efficiency of the train timetables the gas Chambers at aitz couldn't keep up with the number of people he was sending by 1944 even with the Allies advancing on all fronts ikan continued to wage his own war against the Jews when the deportation of the Hungarian Jews started in Spring 1944 he was actually overstepping himla orders
and sort of developed his own ambition in deporting as many Jews as possible as the Third Reich begins to crumble he forces thousands of Hungarian Jews to March to the camps when Heinrich himler ordered a stop to the death marches ikan disobey ikan carried this out with great efficiency he saw extermination as a task to be carried out as a logistical problem but we shouldn't forget he saw it as a problem that he was happy to solve he's an enforcer he's an administrator he is the man who makes the Holocaust happen so it wasn't just
a case that he was working in an office and overseeing uh or being involved in the genocide it was something that he really was passionate about that he saw it as his mission to try and eradicate the Jewish population of Europe yeah he wanted to kill as many Jews as possible this was his War aim basically inside is the evidence that tears apart Aikman's defense his own paper trail proves he was complicit in mass murder it's really chilling to be actually looking at the documents CU ikan was the one that put these minutes together it's
a list of the number of Jews in Europe that the Nazis have identified we know that they managed to exterminate 6 million Jews but this list contains 11 million and that's because they've taken into account England Ireland Spain turkey it just sort of shows the scale of what they were planning it's deeply disturbing just revolting ikan saw these people not as human but as cattle livestock being sent to the abire the largest deportation in 1943 had 1750 58 Jews on one train 1758 on one train in my quest to determine Adolf Ian's place in Hitler's
hierarchy I've seen the evidence that proves he was complicit in genocide now I want to know just how deep his commitment was to carrying it out so where are we we are at the train station of kival which is basically Berlin's West End I'm with historian yav sapir at the main departure point for Berlin Jews destined to die in Nazi gas Chambers so the majority of Jews that were deported from Berlin were deported right where we're standing here right today gunal station is a Holocaust Memorial but during World War II it was arguably one of
the busiest stations in Europe at least when it comes to mass murder so what are these here these are plaques that commemorate each and every deportation that left Berlin between 41 and 45 the largest deportation in 1943 had 1758 Jews on one train 1758 on one train for 4 years Berlin's Jews were rounded up taken to gral and crammed into sealed Railway cars they were deprived of food and water and there was no sanitary facility other than a bucket many died on the trains themselves before they even reached the extermination camps what's so chilling to
me standing on a platform in Berlin is that you see that we're not dealing with genocide on the battlefield that was obviously had been happening but we're dealing with genocide that's been planned it's something that the state has decided to do in the most practical way possible they outsourced The Killing to these murder factories and then of course the question was how do we facilitate this Transportation how do we get the Jews from Germany France Belgium the Netherlands and so on and that's what aishman comes in that's what aishman is in charge in facilitating the
kidnapping of families from their homes forcing them onto trains making sure that everything works well the timetables having the Manpower having the resources having the trains on time to leave berin to leave Paris to leave Budapest on the way to aitz for example at his trial ikan was confronted by witness after witness they all testified to his role in deporting Jews to their deaths despite the damning words ikan continued to deny his direct involvement in their suffering one of the most confusing things about ikan was his seeming normality he he comes across as at least
is just sort of your everyday person that is scary to some extent because it suggests that uh that normal people might actually be capable of this level of atrocity ikeman approaches his role within the final solution with the utmost Zeal I mean he takes his job really seriously and that's what makes him know such a terrifying figure because you know this this is a big logistical exercise his department is quite small it's just a handful of people yet together under Ian's stewardship they manag to get all these people these millions of people sent to their
deaths now that we're approaching the end of the war this is the beginning of 1945 and so the numbers are very small these are the last Jews of Bine those who were trying to survive while hiding 27 of March 1945 at this point in the war the Third Reich is all but finished every Nazi knows it including ikan but he was determined to finish the job he started the last deportation that left Belin 18 Jews who almost made it and then in spite of everything we're still captured and by fanatic Nazis they were being deported
right before the Soviets and circled Berlin that's less than a month and a half before the end of the war in Europe this really hits things home for me because they're losing the war It's the final month of the war they're about to lose it and yet they are still deporting Jews to death camps indeed they were losing the physical War but for some Nazis the war against the Jews was more important Ian's profound commitment to the final solution is nowhere more apparent than on this abandoned train platform but he'd soon find himself unemployed the
Germans surrendered in May 1945 Hitler was dead and Germany lay in Ruins millions of displaced people jammed the roads of Europe desperately trying to get home hidden among them were Nazi fugitives in Disguise including Adolf ikan after the defeat of Nazi Germany ikan was actually briefly captured by the Americans but he got away using a fake identity for the final chapter in ikan story I'm turning to historian Tobias frer so we're in Spandau right now yes this is the neighborhood of Spandau he has the inside scoop on how ikan was finally brought to Justice 15
years after the war ended and it became clear that the man was not his uncle but it was in fact aan himself I mean that's just [Music] unbelievable Adolf ik man was a war criminal who evaded Justice for over a decade he'd hoped to live out his days in Argentina but his capture in May 1960 changed all that for the final leg of my journey I've met up with historian toas fry Miller to find out how Ian's arrest played out and the impact it had on our understanding of what the Nazis did and this is
actually the place where the synagogue was until it was destroyed in November 38 and what you see here is actually the names of the Jewish citizens of this neighborhood so these are the names of people that were deported yes exactly when the war ends Ian's name is not on the list of top Nazis that the Allies are trying to track down is he no he's not uh the Allies uh search for the top ranking Nazis they know his name is mentioned because it was clear from the very beginning that he was responsible for the deportations
but he was not seen as one of the leading Figures were brought before the court in the main Nar trial in Argentina ikan lived under an alias but his wife and children still carried his name he spends you know his days in Argentina drifting from menial job uh tomial job you know he tries to make a an angora rabbit farm work it doesn't work he's working as a mechanic at a Mercedes Benz Factory you know these aren't big jobs for a man who thinks you know he deserves more ikan coped with his lowly place in
the world by bragging about his past to other fascists he also gave extensive interviews to another former SS officer turned journalist when he started giving these interviews in the ' 50s the plan was to write a book and to publish a book where aishman would tell the truth about his history in the Third Reich and he would publish it under his real name then one second in the 50s he was going to write a book and he was going to talk about what he did and publish it I find that extraordinary but I suppose if
you're that fanatical and you genuinely believed what you did was right I suppose something that sounds as crazy as that now to him sounded like the logical thing to do absolutely he wanted to tell the truth from his point of view but it would be Ian's Twisted version of the truth no one else's and these Memoirs were never published so how was ikan ultimately apprehended it was in 57 when good Bo received a letter B was the state prosecutor of the state of Hessa and he was known as one of the very few people in
the Judiciary in West Germany who would really fight for the prosecution of Nazi crimes so he received a letter from bernes Iris and that letter was written by a Jew who' escaped Nazi Germany in 1938 he just learned about his daughter's new boyfriend this new boyfriend turned out to be clausman and it became clear that the man who lived with Claus was not his uncle but he was in fact aishman himself I mean that's just unbelievable Fritz Bower passed the tip onto mosad the isra Secret Service during a daring operation in May 1960 agents kidnapped
ikan from a buenos areis suburb and smuggled him back to Israel to stand trial it was a very very special case the trial in Jerusalem found a very huge echo in media worldwide it was the first trial at PA who had such a focus on the Holocaust Aman's trial was watched by millions the horrors inflicted on the Jews by the Nazis shocked the world we walked for 24 hours without food and those who could not carry on were shot [Music] arrived one morning and took the child away with them later I learned that the child
was thrown into the fire until that point I don't think that the World At Large really knew what had happened they knew there had been atrocities they knew there have been killings but but they hadn't realized that the Holocaust and it wasn't really called the Holocaust at this point was actually this genocidal act you had survivors telling their stories in front of a global audience and really for the first time bringing narratives of the Holocaust and the systemic nature of persecution and genocide together in one place to have this laid out so clearly and to
hear the testimonies and to see Amman in this glass box made a huge impression on especially on the younger generation of course who heard for the first time really what was the real nature of the Nazi crimes I think it's at the ikan trial where people really start to appreciate you know the mechanics and the Machinery of the genocide they realized that this isn't just something that just took place on a whim in camps this was something that was organized it was designed it was it was literally built trains and timetables were literally drawn up
and people who were doing it were men like ikan the trial inspired Jews around the world to recall their own experiences of persecution and loss under the Nazis it renewed calls for Action to hunt down war criminals still on the run it also forced Germans to confront their [Music] past so the German Society had to learn that responsibility was to be found everywhere um within every bureaucratic system within every family and every soldier who took part in the uh war in the East had seen and properly done terrible things and this took decades in Germany
to really get through so the Ian's trial really opened up this period of understanding and taking responsibility for the atrocities that Germany had committed and not just brushing under the carpet and say you know Hitler and a few other guys with the with the people who did it all absolutely what does Ian's performance at the trial tell us about him well it tells us pretty much everything that we know about him finally because there he was again and again making the argument uh that he only followed instructions that he had to do what he did
Ian played a fictitious role at that trial he made himself out to be the little man he made himself out to be the Cog in the machine he made himself out to be just the type of bureaucrat that all governments and indeed all dictatorships need if they are to function but everyone else in the courtroom saw right through him we know that he has was very convinced of what he did and until the very end of the war he still tried to keep up the deportations even if it was pretty clear that the one was
lost ikan was found guilty on all charges and sentenced to die he was hanged on May 31st 1962 a cow to the end he never once expressed remorse for his complicity in the murder of millions during the second world war now it's time for me to figure out where this Nazi bureaucrat fits into Hitler's hierarchy ikan gets his close as I can imagine anyone getting to Pure Evil My travels to Germany have given me a much clearer picture of Adolf Ian's role in the Holocaust now it's up to us to find out where he fits
in the hierarchy of evil using our unique system of playing cards I want to determine where ikeman ranks among Hitler's Most Wanted so what was it about his character and abilities that gave him such an important role in the Holocaust you know what he was he was good at Logistics he was good at organization and he was good at following where those lines led to their most cruel and horrible conclusions without batting an eye well I think the thing about ikan that I notice is how how bureaucratic he was how administrative he was or at
least he tries to portray himself in that way as a quite normal person just going about his business and that was certainly um how he portrayed himself in the dock uh in Jerusalem in the 1960s well what you have to remember about ikan was that he was a Gusto officer and he had an enormous amount of power in determining the mechanics of the Holocaust he's sometimes called the architect of the Holocaust I think that maybe some other characters actually deserve that epithet but what he did do was he helped manage it and he managed it
very very fervently Aikman's bureaucratic diligence wasn't just about following orders to him his job was everything and he relished in the administration of Terror bman was there right from the very beginning he was up there you know exploring the options whether all the Jews should be deported to Madagascar and ultimately as to where they should be murdered and when the Nazis escalated from persecution to mass murder he went to Great Lengths to keep the mechanics of genocide running smoothly the place that really struck me was Grille train station in Berlin and this is where a
large number of Berlin Jews were deported to the east to be murdered and ikan was responsible for those deportations but the thing that was most disturbing about that place was learning that those deportations were happening right up until the final weeks of the war it was not incidental they were diverting resources to it and at the very end of the war they ramped up the extermination in order to make sure there wouldn't be any Witnesses in Argentina ikan cavorted with ex-nazis and would be Nazis and was quite quite proud of what he' accomplished he bragged
about how many Jews he was able to deport to extermination you're absolutely right and he he actually said once I will jump into my grave laughing that I killed six million Jews you this was not a man who was in any way ashamed of what he had done so it's really frightening to grasp the fact that what he was doing he believed was right and he felt a conviction to the cause it wasn't so much that he believed what he was doing was wrong and did it anyway like a like a psychopath would he truly
believed that his behavior was justified and that doesn't necessarily make his behavior any less evil but it is again scary to think that somebody can undertake immoral behavior and actually feel Justified to do so ikman saw no moral B in the bureaucracy of genocide and his Central role in it that is what cements his place among Hitler's most hated disciples so I'd like to come to a conclusion now of where you think he ranks in the Nazi hierarchy of evil so guy we'll start with you well I'm going to put him down in the late
teens which may seem a little bit surprising considering he's this kind of household name amongst Nazis uh why yes his personality is is is revolting his anti-Semitism is pure evil what he did was pure evil but I think there would have been a lot of people who could have done that job in the Third Reich so therefore he doesn't really qualify for something much higher Anthony I think we all agree that ikman wasn't the faceless Cog he portrayed himself as but ikan gets as close as I can imagine anyone getting to Pure Evil he didn't
do this for fame for money he did this cuz he believed it was the right thing to do his skill at that means that he has to rank a little higher so I'm going to rank him at number 10 I agree I think he's necessary I think his personality profile is required and I think that he his Zeal demonstrates a pure evil but I do unfortunately believe that that evil that position is replaceable uh I rate him a 12 so obviously the three of you have difference of opinion but for me I just can't get
over the fact that he was responsible for the deaths of millions I'm therefore going to agree with Matt's ranking and he's at number 12 he's the Queen of Clubs [Music] for his Devotion to the logistics of the Holocaust and his unrelenting desire to deport all of hungary's Jews to their deaths Adolf ikan proves that even a bureaucrat can be responsible for great evil [Music]
