Originally a Prisoner of War camp for Soviet soldiers, SS Commander Rudolf Hoss oversaw the transition of Auschwitz from a political camp to a place to murder thousands of people. In the Autumn of 1941,the Nazis were about to embark on the most crucial few months in the planning of what they called 'The Final Solution' - the extermination of the Jews.

With optional Hebrew subtitles. Simon Schama's history of the Jewish experience plunges into the lost world of the shtetl, the Jewish towns and villages sewn across the hinterlands of Eastern Europe which became the seedbed of a uniquely Jewish culture. Shtetl culture would make its mark on the modern world, from the revolutionary politics of the Soviet Union to the mass culture of Tin Pan Alley and Hollywood. It was also the birthplaces of Hasidism, the most visible, iconic and, arguably, most misunderstood expression of Jewish faith and fervour. This chapter of the story travels from the forests of Lithuania, where Simon's own family logged wood and fought wolves, to the streets of the Lower East Side where the sons of shtetl immigrants wrote the American songbook. With grim inevitability, the story returns to Eastern Europe in 1940 - where the genocidal mechanisms of the 'final solution' were beginning to grind the shtetl world into dust and ash.

In the fourth episode of the series, eyewitnesses recall how those in power at Auschwitz lined their pockets with wealth stolen from Jewish inmates while also engaging in illicit affairs.