ONE TO WATCH
Hunting killers
Rise of the Nazis: The Manhunt / BBC Two, September
In late July 1944, the advancing Soviet Red Army reached the city of Lublin in eastern Poland. Here it found an industrial-scale killing facility that must have horrified even the most battlehardened soldiers: the Majdanek concentration and extermination camp, where it’s believed that as many as 78,000 people perished. Majdanek was the first major camp to be liberated, and was largely intact when the Soviets took it.
As German forces retreated across territory to which people persecuted by the Nazis had been shipped, the horrors of camps such as Belsen and Auschwitz-Birkenau were exposed, becoming synonymous with the worst excesses of human depravity. And when the war in Europe finally ended, it was clear that those behind the Holocaust and other war crimes must be brought
