In Berlin, Germany, officials from Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan sign the ten-year Tripartite Pact (the Three-Power Agreement), a military alliance. The pact sealed cooperation among the three nations (Axis powers) in waging World War II. This footage comes from "The Nazi Plan," a film produced and used by the United States in the prosecution at the Nuremberg trials.
Item ViewJews were deported from Kavala, Seres, and Drama in Bulgarian-occupied Thrace. Some 3,000 Jews were taken to Drama and herded onto trains without food or water for transport to a camp in Gorna Dzumaya. The Jews were probably then taken to the Bulgarian port of Lom on the Danube River, where they boarded ships for Vienna. From there, the Nazis deported them to the Treblinka killing center.
Item ViewThe Romanian government was allied with Nazi Germany, but it generally did not deport Romanian Jews to German-occupied territory. Instead, Romania systematically concentrated and deported the Jews of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina to Romanian-occupied areas of the Ukraine. Here, Jews from the Bessarabian town of Balti are assembled in collection camps during the deportations. By the end of May 1942, Romanian security forces had killed or deported most of the Jews in the area. Only about 200 Jews remained in all of Bessarabia.
Item ViewMarshal Ion Antonescu was ruler of Romania from 1940 to 1944. Following the defeat of German forces at Stalingrad, Hitler suspected that some of the countries allied with Germany intended to negotiate a separate peace. In this German newsreel footage, Antonescu meets with Hitler in Berchtesgaden, Germany, primarily to reassure Hitler that Romania remained committed to the German war effort. In the year following this meeting, King Michael of Romania arrested Antonescu and signed an armistice with the Soviet Union in August 1944.
Item ViewAnte Pavelic was a Croatian fascist leader who headed a pro-German government in Croatia from 1941 until 1945. This captured German newsreel shows Pavelic walking through an adoring crowd and reviewing his units. Under Pavelic's rule, the Croatian government killed hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews, and Roma (Gypsies). Pavelic fled to Argentina after the war. He died in 1959 from wounds he received in an assassination attempt two years earlier.
Item ViewThis German newsreel footage shows Vidkun Quisling, leader of the fascist Norwegian Nasjonal Samling party, reviewing his troops. Quisling headed a pro-Nazi puppet regime in Norway during the war.
Item ViewIn this German propaganda newsreel, the former Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husayni, an Arab nationalist and prominent Muslim religious leader, meets Hitler for the first time. During the meeting, held in in the Reich chancellery, Hitler declined to grant al-Husayni’s request for a public statement--or a secret but formal treaty--in which Germany would: 1) pledge not to occupy Arab land, 2) recognize Arab striving for independence, and 3) support the “removal” of the proposed Jewish homeland in Palestine. The Führer confirmed that the “struggle against a Jewish homeland in Palestine” would be part of the struggle against the Jews. Hitler stated that: he would “continue the struggle until the complete destruction of Jewish-Communist European empire”; and when the German army was in proximity to the Arab world, Germany would issue “an assurance to the Arab world” that “the hour of liberation was at hand.” It would then be al-Husayni’s “responsibility to unleash the Arab action that he has secretly prepared.” The Führer stated that Germany would not intervene in internal Arab matters and that the only German “goal at that time would be the annihilation of Jewry living in Arab space under the protection of British power.”
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