Germany's Past became a central
issue for the student movement.
Many began to delve into
recent History, and
what they discovered
astounded them.
Not only had their teachers and
their parents been involved with
The Nazi Party, but many appeared
to have taken part in crimes.
There were terrible
confrontations
within families.
“There was complete confrontation,
one part of this people against the other.
The Students were convinced
that what they had uncovered
was a hidden continuity
with The Third Reich.
Beneath the facade
of a Liberal-Democratic country,
The Fascist State had continued, run
by the very same men and women
who had administered Hitler's regime.
Then a group emerged
determined to
expose this.
They were led by
Andreas Baader and
Gudrun Ensslin.
Their aim was to resist Fascism
where their parents had failed.
They were known as
The Red Army Faction.
The Red Army Faction embarked
on a series of bombings and
shoot-outs with The Police.
Their strategy was to use
violence to provoke The State
into exposing its true identity.
But as The Violence escalated,
some of The Terrorist leaders
began to have doubts.
In trying to expose Germany's
hidden past, they had unearthed
something far more complex and
far more sinister than
they had bargained for.
Gudrun Ensslin :
I had begun to realise that fighting
against The State by armed groups
with this revolutionary strategy
in mind was bringing up
Fascistic tendencies in
the reaction not only of
The Political Class but
of The People, too.
We ourselves became, in the same way,
fascistic as The Fascists were.
We didn't realise that Our Enemies,
Our Opponents, are Human Beings.
This is what is in The Heart of Fascism :
The Oppression of other Meanings,
of the political opposition, and
oppression means elimination...
..by killing.”
Q. : Was it frightening when You
realised that was happening?
Gudrun Ensslin :
Yeah, of course.
Awfully frightening.
This was one of the main points
in the development, the awareness
that We are from the same stuff
as The Fascists were.
We understood something.
We understood that Fascism is
a component in ALL of Us.
Q. : Do You Think that's
What We hid from ourselves
at the end of The War?
Gudrun Ensslin :
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly.
We have a picture of ourselves.
We want to be Good, we want
to be Human creatures with the
positive thinkings and so on,
but We are a contradiction
in ourselves, because
We don't know how to
handle this contradiction.
We don't have any means
to Live with this Evil part
in ourselves —
In the autumn of 1977, The Leaders
of The Baader-Meinhof Group
"committed suicide" in jail.
The attempt to change Germany
by opening up its past was over.
The threatening memories
were reburied."
"The Memory is A Swamp,
like this building, is built in
A Swamp, a swampy area.
So, in A Swamp, something
comes up, makes a sound,
a noise - bulp - and
You smell something.
And then, once again,
The Surface is clean
and clear, and so this
Memory comes up
sometimes, gives a noise,
gives a bad smell and then
The Surface is clean again."
But then, ten years later,
The Course of European History
suddenly changed.
The Communist Domination
of Eastern Europe collapsed.
In the summer of 1990, Berlin
celebrated the dismantling
of The Wall with a concert
given by Pink Floyd --
During the preparations,
hidden fragments of
The Past came to
The Surface.
In The No-Man's-Land between
The Two Berlins, a forgotten
Nazi bunker was unearthed --
It was found by chance
when here Pink Floyd has a
great spectacle at The Wall in
the Summer 1990, and they
telephoned me because, I told them
before one could find something.
And that was the beginning of The Battle
for safeguarding this bunker.
And what did you
find down there?
Can you show us
some of the things?
Yes, we...
There are some small
objects, of course.
So, here's A Bayonet —
We only took some samples.
Here, A Silver Spoon. It was
from The Official Silver.
These fragments, it was
like a frozen moment
of History years ago.
This frozen moment of Apocalypse,
The End of History, of
a certain part of History.
It wasn't just fragments
of The Nazi Past
that re-emerged.
As the Cold War came to
an end, a hidden history
of Europe was awakened.
Old rivalries and tensions,
suppressed for years,
were rekindled.
With them came the barbarism and
The Evil that The Good War
was supposed to have
banished forever —
REPORTER:
The infantry then went on
a foot patrol to look for more
casualties or evidence of atrocities.
They didn't have far to search.
They came upon a house
in the centre of The Village
where a family of seven had
died, two in the stairway,
another five in the cellar.
It's hard to look at some
of these pictures,
harder to tell the story of
Ahmici without them.
What happened here can frankly notbe shown in any detail,
but the room is full ofthe charred remains of bodies,
and they died in the greatest agony.
It's harder to imagine,
in our continent and in our time,
what kind of people could do this.
I just kept thinking that, you
know, they were people once.
You know?
And this is, you know, this is
Europe, 1993, not 1943.
GUNFIRE
The fragments of The Past that
have re-emerged in Europe are
frightening because they are
linked to a time many thought had
long been buried and forgotten.
But History will not repeat itself.
These forgotten pieces will be
reassembled to tell a new story.
They will be used to justify the new
political ideas of The Future.
We are at Zero Hour once again.
What The Hell was that?
Maybe something trying to
force its way into Our World.
CRASHING
SCREAMING
