- Inga is desperate to reunite with Karl, but her parents don't want to risk hiding her Jewish in-laws. Rudi runs away from their hiding place. Erik Dorf helps Heydrich plan and execute his Final Solution. Moses and Dr. Weiss are caught when the Nazis overrun Poland. Helena rescues Rudi from a patrol. Berta joins her husband in the Warsaw ghetto. Rudi and Helena escape to Russia.—mama.sylvia
- With Dr. Weiss deported to Poland, he sets up a new practice in Warsaw. His family - his wife Berta and his children Rudi and Anna - now live in a small apartment provide by their daughter-in-law Inga whose husband Karl is still in Buchenwald. Inga's parents are frightened at having Jews as tenants and their family friend, an ardent Nazi, suggests they evict them. Inga is desperate to see her husband but has to pay a very high personal price. Rudi runs away eventually making his way east and meeting Helena. Anna is raped and suffers serious trauma as a result but a seemingly friendly doctor offers Inga what she is told is treatment for the girl. Erik Dorf meanwhile continues to advance in the SS. General Heydrich likes his advice and his lawyer's mind and he is promoted to Captain. With the German occupation of Poland, it's Dorf who recommends to let Jews live and work in closed-off area and thus the Warsaw ghetto is born. After the invasion of Russia, he organizes roving commando squads whose sole purpose is to execute Jews.—garykmcd
- Rudi runs away from home (leaving the women behind), trying to escape the Nazis reach. Germany starts the mass extermination programs, starting with burning Jews alive in synagogues. Erik says that this is too random and German state needs a proper procedure.. he starts by concentrating Jews in a single location and calling them "autonomous Jewish territories", and isolating them from the rest of the population. Heydrich explains to him, how thousands of yrs of ideology if being used against the Jews in modern state policy, to bind the German people against a common cause. Jews are transported in cargo trains from Germany to Poland into Ghettos. Josef and Moses become members of the Judenrat (Jewish council) for the Ghetto. Josef doesn't like to decide who gets how much to eat, who gets to live and who dies. Slowly, Erik orders the building of a wall around the "Autonomous territory".. Even the German officers can see that a mass extermination is coming and they resent being asked to do Hitler's dirty work.
Erik and Marta are living a good life. He has been promoted and they enjoy many perks. At a party, he runs into his uncle Kurt Dorf, an engineer who has a contract with the Nazis to build roads.
Karl is having a tough time in the concentration camp. He is punished in the cold harsh open sir for sneaking bread in the barracks, with his accomplice KZ Inmate Weinberg (Cyril Shaps).. Inga tries to contact Karl in Buchenwald, to no avail. Through a friend of Inga's family, Heinz Müller (Tony Haygarth), an SS officer stationed at Buchenwald, Inga is able to get letters to and from Karl, but only if she has sex with Müller. Inga initially refuses out of loyalty to Karl. When Müller threatens to have Karl keep doing heavy labor at risk of death, Inga submits to him, hoping to save Karl's life. Müller uses Inga's sexual contact with him to taunt Karl; he does arrange for an easier indoor job, and then transfer to Theresienstadt to work in its art studio. Meanwhile Inga is under a lot of pressure from her mother and father to throw Berta and Anna out of their home.
Anna becomes more distressed and, on New Year's Eve 1939, she runs out of the apartment in a huff. While walking, she is accosted and raped by a bunch of German SA storm-troopers. Nearly catatonic as a result, she is committed to Hadamar. She and others suffering from mental illness are killed under the Nazi Action T4 (Her family is told that she died from pneumonia and was cremated). Eventually, Berta is deported from Berlin to Warsaw, where she reunites with her husband Josef (she tells Josef how Anna died, but not about her rape. How Rudy ran away and is in Prague. Karl is in a concentration camp). She teaches in the ghetto school.
Rudi Weiss reaches German-occupied Prague, Czechoslovakia, where he meets Helena Slomova (Tovah Feldshuh) in 1940, whose parents have been deported. She owns a luggage shop and saves him from being questioned by soldiers. They fall in love and run away together (Their plan is to get to Ukarine passing through Hungary). Meanwhile Heydrich and Erik formulate the formal policy for Russians and Jews settled all along the Russian front. All SS officers including SS Standartenführer Paul Blobel (T. P. McKenna) are organized into squads. They are move from one territory to another, exterminating all Jews and Russians, before moving to the next. Extermination is the official policy now. Hans is also transferred to the Russian front and joins up with German SS squads operating in the Ukarine. Erik visits the front, Blobel's unit and finds that he is carrying out public executions. Erik reprimands Blobel and asks him to maintain a sense of secrecy and discretion. Blobel is pissed and tells Erik to kill a few Jews himself.
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