Less than a minute into the 20th episode of The World at War the first interviewee appears. He is an old man, impeccably dressed in a black suit jacket with a white pocket square. After a few moments, a caption appears: ‘Karl Wolff’, it reads, ‘S.S. GENERAL’.

Wolff describes how he came to be a member of the elite SS (Schutzstaffel). ‘When I wanted to sign up’, Wolff explains, ‘the man in charge asked me, “Were you a soldier?”’ Wolff’s impressive military record in the Great War earmarked him for rapid promotion, and he came ‘by fate’, as he puts it, to be Himmler’s adjutant.

Wolff appears six times over the course of the episode – he is its most frequently featured interviewee. The episode, which is called ‘Genocide’, focuses on the Nazi persecution and genocide of Europe’s Jews. It features testimony from two other former SS members, an Auschwitz railwayman, seven Holocaust survivors, and the wartime British foreign secretary, Anthony Eden.

First broadcast on 27 March 1974, ‘Genocide’ is credited with introducing the Holocaust (a term still not yet in common use) to the British public. It helped to inculcate an awareness of the Nazi ‘Final Solution’ as a crime directed against a specific group. The episode was screened over four years before the US-produced television miniseries Holocaust, often cited as the televisual milestone promoting Holocaust awareness on both sides of the Atlantic.

‘Genocide’ provides an account of the Nazi persecution of Jews and the Holocaust that is succinct and accessible, yet not oversimplified. This is even more remarkable given that it preceded much of the foundational scholarship on the subject. It included themes such as the influence of racial science and eugenics on Nazi ideology, the rise of the SS, the role of the Einsatzgruppen (‘special task forces’ – mobile killing squads) in perpetrating what became known as the ‘Holocaust by bullets’ in the eastern occupied territories, and the ‘Aktion Reinhard’ death camps – Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka.

Despite receiving critical acclaim, not everyone was impressed with the episode’s unflinching depiction of mass murder. A review in the Guardian the day after the episode aired described it as ‘on the borderline of the unbearable ... I found it, in no narrow sense, wholly obscene and hardly fit to be seen’. 

‘Genocide’ was directed by British filmmaker Michael Darlow. The World at War’s producer, Jeremy Isaacs, had initially wanted to direct ‘Genocide’ but, given that members of his family had been murdered in the Holocaust, decided against it, fearing that he would be too ‘emotionally involved’.

From the outset, Darlow approached the production with two key aims: first, he wanted to relate what happened in the Holocaust through the eyes of those who had experienced it. And second, he wanted to focus particularly on those who were responsible for the Holocaust: ‘This is not primarily a film about the suffering of the people in the concentration camps’, Darlow wrote, ‘it is above all a film about the organisation, and [the] people behind the organisation of a calculated act of genocide.’ He wanted it to include ‘not only the stories and experiences of the people who had suffered ... but also, perhaps more importantly, the stories and explanations of the perpetrators’.

As such, ‘Genocide’ features extensive interviews with four Holocaust perpetrators. While these men performed different roles with different levels of seniority, they all shared one thing in common: they did not view themselves as perpetrators. They presented themselves as having little or no choice over their actions; they were ordered or even forced to undertake them and ultimately, therefore, their role in the ‘Final Solution’ was inconsequentially small.

To any researcher who has worked with perpetrator testimony, none of this will be surprising. What makes these interviews noteworthy is that these men were allowed to speak without interrogation or commentary. In Wolff’s case, a handful of especially misleading remarks were edited out of the broadcast interview, creating a narrative that the programme’s producers presented as ‘factual’ and giving an impression of legitimacy. For example, at one point Wolff explains how he was ‘forced’ to watch an execution of around 100 Jews at a site near Minsk. On the original recording, Wolff continues: ‘because they [the Jews] were the couriers for the resistance in this extraordinary partisan war’. This comment was cut. An even more striking example comes at the end of the episode, when a disclaimer appears relating to one of the featured perpetrators, Richard Böck, whose interview describes a gassing at Auschwitz in graphic detail. ‘The producers wish to make it clear that former SS Lance Corporal Richard Böck has been exonerated by investigators of Nazi Crimes at Auschwitz’, it reads: ‘He has been commended for steadfastly refusing orders to take part in the killings.’ This is the only time the episode comments directly on any of its interviewees. Böck is thus the only interviewee whose role in the Holocaust is depicted in a positive light – something that does not even occur for any of the interviewed survivors.

The World at War was produced in a cultural landscape very different from our own, particularly with regard to understandings of the Holocaust. What constituted perpetration in the Holocaust was, at that time, also understood differently: the long shadow of the Nuremberg Trials, in which high-level perpetrators could claim, with some success, that they were merely ‘following orders’, can still be sensed in the way perpetrator interviews were presented in ‘Genocide’. The producers perhaps did not realise who they were dealing with when they interviewed these men, or what their actions signified. Susan McConachy, Karl Wolff’s interviewer, later described him as ‘frightfully benign’ and said that the methods she used to get him to talk about his presence at a mass execution were ‘unfair’, because she had first prompted Wolff to tell the story while chatting in his kitchen. McConachy was more concerned about his role in the death of Carl Langbehn, a member of the German resistance, than she was in Wolff’s proximity to the decision-making process driving the ‘Final Solution’.

Yet ‘Genocide’ succeeded in its aim to educate a British public still largely ignorant about the nature of the Holocaust. It would also be unfair to judge ‘Genocide’ by the standards of present-day Holocaust scholarship and memorial culture. In some respects, it was a product of its time, but in many it was far ahead. The episode’s most significant achievement was to clearly explain who the Nazis targeted and why, and how this persecution developed from exclusion, to expulsion, to extermination. However, ‘Genocide’ also inadvertently encouraged a degree of understanding, perhaps even sympathy, for those who perpetrated the Holocaust. These men were allowed to position themselves as mere ‘cogs’ who had been placed in an impossible situation by a brutal, totalitarian regime; a regime in which the ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question’ was conceived, masterminded, ordered and approved of by a tiny coterie of the most senior Nazis.

Joseph Cronin is Director of the Leo Baeck Institute London and specialises in modern German and Jewish history.