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With this 10-part documentary series "The Abyss - Rise and Fall of the Nazis" is using the power of film to take a stand against ignorance towards the past. 

The project tells the story of the rise and fall of National Socialism from an international perspective, examining the causes of the rupture in civilization at the hands of Germans, which led from a crisis-ridden democracy to war and genocide.


















Rare, and newly discovered film and photo footage, as well as 40 field-leading experts such as Richard J. Evans, Mary Fulbrook, Peter Longerich, Moshe Zimmermann, Alexandra Richie, and Götz Aly, offer new perspectives on the history between 1918 and 1948.

Based on the latest research, the series focuses on both the motives of the perpetrators, but also on the responsibility of a significant portion of the German people What facilitated the rise of the Nazis. What paved the way for the genocide of the Jews? This is the story of how humanity's darkest hour took place. The Abyss.
























Part01:

In 1940, Adolf Hitler forces the defeated French to sign their surrender in a train carriage - the Germans had experienced the same humiliation at the end of the First World War.


Part02:

By 1923 the Nazi Party had grown to around 55,000 members, with Adolf Hitler at its head. Hitler presented himself as the strong-man of the right-extremist scene, but what was he up to?


Part03:

At the end of the 1920s, the “Rural People’s Movement” began demonstrating against social decline. From the protests a radical movement was born, whose anger and bitterness was harnessed by the Nazi-Party and Hitler.


Part04:

Recently elected Reich Chancellor, Adolf Hitler clamps down on all opposition. In less than two years he transforms Germany from a democracy to a dictatorship.


Part05:

Hitler's anti-Jewish policy is supported by millions of Germans. Openly and publicly, Jews are discriminated against, disenfranchised, and persecuted.


Part06:

At the end of 1939, the German army invaded Poland. They are closely followed by SS task forces, which have only one mission: to exterminate the Polish intelligentsia. Thousands are murdered.


Part07:

On June 22, 1941, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. In the shadow of war, German soldiers commit mass-exterminations of the local Jewish populations.


Part08:

Together with Treblinka and Majdanek, Sobibor is one of the camps of "Operation Reinhardt" – a Nazi murder campaign that took nearly two million lives within a few months in 1942/43.


Part09:

The defeat at Stalingrad in 1943 was not only the turning point of the war but also convinced the Nazi leadership to intensify their terror and propaganda campaigns. While the Gestapo suppressed all resistance, the infamous Death Marches of 1944 began.


Part10:

How do you deal with a people who remained loyal to their regime until the very end, who carried out the mass extermination of Jews and other minorities, and supported the destruction of Europe?