It's 11 a.m. on January the 20th, 1942 where in Berlin, in the southwest of the city is

an address known simply as 56 to 58 Amgolson-Vanze. It's a sumptuous villa with spectacular views across

the lake. In the lobby, an attendant takes guests' coats. The atmosphere is calm, gentile.

Today's invitees are gathering for a special Nazi conference. They're an elite band, 15

by-up SS officers. They look smart in their black Hugo Boss uniforms, exchanging pleasantries,

partaking of the coffee and pastries. But the conviviality belies this meeting's deadly purpose,

it is top secret. Officially, it doesn't exist. The third Reich is at a critical juncture.

The war in the east is not going well. Everyone here knows it, even if the general public doesn't.

Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union, is ground to a shuddering halt in the snow outside

Moscow. It has campaign has been waged with extreme barbarity. Behind the front line,

Einsatzgruppen, death squads, have been rounding up Jews and executing them by the thousands,

tens of thousands, shooting on armed men, women and children into giant pits,

pile upon pile of corpses. It is this which is the concern of today's conference.

Not the question of its morality, not at all. The issue is with its inefficiency,

mobile gassing vans, which they've also tried just can't handle the workload.

A suggested scheme to relocate Europe's Jews to Madagascar is at very best half-baked.

Now, if Jews are to be dispatched on an industrial scale, then doesn't it make sense to

dispatch them by industrial methods? Around the big oak table of the committee room

soundings are taken, heads nod. The extermination of Europe's Jews requires a determined,

ultimate strategy, with a Jewish problem, a final solution.

From Noiser, this is the Hitler story, and this is Real Dictators.

When we left Adolf Hitler at the end of the last episode, it was late 1941,

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