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00:00:00At the heart of the Third Reich's reign of terror was Adolf Hitler.
00:00:12But he did not act alone.
00:00:15Surrounding him was a loyal cadre of ruthless enforcers who turned his twisted vision into reality.
00:00:22Rudolf Hess, the devoted deputy.
00:00:26Hermann Göring, the Luftwaffe's commander and looter of Europe.
00:00:30Heinrich Himmler, the cold mastermind of the SS and the Holocaust.
00:00:35Josef Goebbels, the propaganda genius who fueled a nation's hate.
00:00:40Reinhard Heydrich, the brutal organizer of mass murder.
00:00:44Martin Bormann, the shadowy manipulator behind Hitler's throne.
00:00:48Together they built a regime of unprecedented brutality, leaving a legacy of destruction that haunts history.
00:00:56This is their story.
00:01:00Hitler returns to a Munich that is suffering post-war.
00:01:09He believes Germany only surrendered because of the betrayal by left-wing Jewish politicians, which only fuels his hatred for the religion.
00:01:16When Germany finally capitulates, Hitler is like millions of other servicemen, and indeed civilians, who regards the German army as being what's called stabbed in the back.
00:01:28And this becomes this huge myth that basically it's the people in Berlin who are responsible for the defeat and not really the allies.
00:01:37And the people in Berlin are members of the left, they are Jews, they are all these sort of kind of quote-unquote evil people that Hitler and his fellow soldiers regard as having betrayed the likes of him.
00:01:52This idea that the German army would have been victorious on the battlefield and that this peace treaty was signed in a way that wasn't to Germany's benefit.
00:02:00And of course that peace treaty was very punitive, so many articles in it making restrictions on many things, on the size of the German army, which had to be limited to 100,000, to the standing army.
00:02:12They took away land that was German, it banned any union between Austria and Germany, and of course Hitler had a lot to say about that, among many, many other harsh provisions.
00:02:24Fueled with anger and contained rage, Hitler discovers the German Workers' Party, the underdog party with only a few hundred supporters.
00:02:34He is engulfed in their extreme political views and wants to be involved in their manifesto.
00:02:39After the war, Hitler is actually working for a small army intelligence unit, and he is actually tasked with spying on extremist small political parties in Munich.
00:02:51One day Hitler, kind of incognito, goes along to this small party meeting, and it is the German Socialist Workers' Party.
00:03:00And he is meant to be spying on them, but actually he looks at their message, and what they are saying about the way the world is, and how Germany should be, and how they have been stabbed in the back by their masters in Berlin,
00:03:14and how the communism is on the rise, and how the Allies have utterly brought Germany to her knees with the Versailles Treaty, with those huge reparations.
00:03:25And Hitler looks at the message being promulgated by this party and goes, you know what, I want a part of that.
00:03:31Hitler joined the DAP, the German Workers' Party, in 1919, and it was a very small and unremarkable party on the radical right of German politics,
00:03:42and actually one of dozens of similar parties, and quite unremarkable, until Hitler joined and really made a difference.
00:03:49The party soon notices Hitler's passion when speaking and ranting about his views, and appoint him as their chief of propaganda.
00:03:58He shortly renames the party to the National Socialism German Workers' Party, what we now know as the Nazi Party.
00:04:06Hitler's initial job for the Nazi Party is really in charge of their propaganda, and that job will later be done famously by Joseph Goebbels.
00:04:15But Hitler is very much aware, and this is where he's very advanced and very sophisticated for his time,
00:04:21that actually what's key is how you get your message out there.
00:04:25Some of the important ways in which he helped the party to develop was through the initiation of a newspaper,
00:04:32so a party newspaper, called the Volkische Beobachter, the People's Observer.
00:04:36And also what Hitler is absolutely amazing at is speech-making.
00:04:41And to begin to understand Hitler, you've really got to understand that he was the most amazing demagogue.
00:04:49He got on that stage, this little man, and he would sort of grow in stature.
00:04:55He would sort of absolutely sort of take over the entire bill with his presence.
00:05:02And he would shout, and he would be quiet, and he would almost enter into a kind of trance.
00:05:07And the audiences would be mesmerized by this, and indeed they'd be mesmerized by it for decades.
00:05:13And this is key to how Hitler gets into power, because when he's on the stage, he becomes another figure.
00:05:19This land, his new mission, it corresponds to the command that the German soldiers of the Old Reich have been sent to him.
00:05:30The oldest coastline of the German people will now be the youngest soldier of the German nation, and thus the German army.
00:05:39Sitting in the crowd at one of the meetings was first Nazi disciple, Rudolf Hess.
00:05:50Young and impressionable, Hess was inspired by Hitler's tyrannical rants.
00:05:55His admiration and respect for Hitler reached great volumes, as he instantly dedicated himself to the Nazi party.
00:06:02Rudolf Hess was a very troubled man in many ways, and you only have to look at his somewhat uneven expressions whenever he's captured on film.
00:06:11He's got very thick brows, and he looks like he's puzzling about the world in general.
00:06:16He was a very sort of troubled man, and he was devoted to Hitler from the very early days.
00:06:24Hitler's aim is to gain power by force, not election, and quickly enlists one of his new favourite techniques.
00:06:30He forms a military organisation made up of discontented ex-soldiers who display strong patriotism, much like himself.
00:06:42The SA, who become known as the Stormtroopers, or the Brown Shirts.
00:06:48They were prepared to commit violent acts of force and terror to scare people into supporting their party, no matter the cost of their actions.
00:06:56His increase in popularity is noticed by World War I hero, Hermann Göring.
00:07:03He sees the Nazi party as leverage to gain more popularity and power for himself.
00:07:10After Germany surrendered to the Allies at the end of World War I, Göring became increasingly angered with his government's decision,
00:07:17believing the war was not lost because of the Germans, but because of cowardly left-wing politicians, the stab-in-the-back theory.
00:07:26Upon his return to Germany, he hears about the Nazi party and their speaker, Hitler,
00:07:32and believes due to his already heroic reputation, he can grow the party and become a leader within it himself.
00:07:40He meets Hitler in 1921 and joins the party.
00:07:44Although he doesn't agree with all of the party's extremist policies, he thinks he can become powerful as a face for the party,
00:07:52therefore dedicates his time to campaigning with them.
00:07:54On the 8th of November, 1923, Hitler and his stormtroopers burst into a beer hall where the state prime minister is holding a meeting
00:08:05and attempt to seize power, with Hitler firing a single gunshot into the ceiling, declaring a national revolution.
00:08:14They then march into Munich, declaring that they will seize power, but the state police have been alerted and they open fire.
00:08:20They were very quickly fired upon by the police forces and the event was a fiasco in the end.
00:08:28I think that maybe the most important thing that came out of this subsequently was that Hitler realised
00:08:33that he would have to find a way to take his power in Germany in a legal way, rather than by force.
00:08:40When he's recuperating from his wounds, he's given morphine, heroin, effectively, and it's that that he becomes addicted to.
00:09:05And he develops his morphine addiction all the way through, probably his dying days, at Nuremberg in 1946.
00:09:12Fourteen Nazis are killed.
00:09:16Hitler is wounded but manages to escape.
00:09:19However, three days later, he is arrested and charged with treason, being sentenced to five years in prison.
00:09:27This looks like the end for the underdog extremist.
00:09:30Whilst serving his sentence, Hitler grasps at the opportunity to turn his extremist thoughts into literature.
00:09:41During his time of reflection behind bars, Hitler writes Mein Kampf, a book that outlines his ideas for a Nazi political regime.
00:09:50With fellow Nazi Rudolf Hess taking dictation, the book becomes a manifesto for Nazi world order.
00:09:56So what we've got in Mein Kampf is anti-Semitism, very virulent anti-Semitism, really strong language.
00:10:05And this is repeated time and again throughout that book.
00:10:08The other key enemy, of course, was communism or Bolshevism.
00:10:12So in Mein Kampf as well, we have many arguments and this kind of diatribe against this enemy of Bolshevism or communism.
00:10:21It gives you a lot of insight into Hitler's state of mind.
00:10:25It shows you that Hitler's thinking was kind of all over the place.
00:10:29He would take a theory from there and a theory from there, cobble it together and two and two would make six.
00:10:34You know, it really was intellectually a real mess.
00:10:37The other thing that he did in Mein Kampf was really to create this, again, this sort of myth or this idea of an Aryan race in Germany.
00:10:45The master race or the heron folk and the idea that that German race should be unpolluted or untainted by inferior or foreign blood.
00:10:56Basically, everybody who isn't a purebred, decent German son of the soil or honest factory worker is basically out to get him and the German people.
00:11:07In Hitler's deranged universe, Jews are at the bottom of the hierarchy, referring to them as a cancer that is eating away at Germany, holding it back from greatness.
00:11:19He wants to eliminate them from the face of the earth.
00:11:24He focuses on this idea of greatness and how Germany should break its agreements to reform itself to become a superior country.
00:11:31He wants to break the Treaty of Versailles.
00:11:35They should be allowed to reclaim their territory that was lost after World War I and rebuild the army to become the most powerful in Europe.
00:11:44He explains his ideas behind Lebensraum, or living space, deciphering that Germany has the right to reclaim land from racially inferior people and countries.
00:11:53In 1925, after Hitler's early release from prison, he re-establishes the Nazi party, using Mein Kampf as his manifesto.
00:12:04He enforces this idea that he has been chosen to save Germany, something he intends to do by any means necessary.
00:12:12After Hitler was released from Landsberg prison in 1925, he set about refounding the Nazi party, which had fallen into disarray and really not just refounding it, but really trying to bring it back to strength and indeed from strength to strength.
00:12:28So, between 1925 and 1928, he was very much concerned to try to organise the party as best as possible, put a lot of effort and energy into canvassing, trying to get new membership and indeed trying to get new voters.
00:12:43This shocking manifesto resonated well with one individual extremist who has not yet joined the party.
00:12:51Heinrich Himmler has been struggling with his own anger and fury towards the current state of Germany.
00:12:58His approach towards others was very aggressive and destructive, being somewhat of a loner and seen as a weak individual.
00:13:06Little did people know he would go on to become one of the most brutal Nazi leaders in history.
00:13:13Himmler joins the Nazi party shortly after Hitler's release from prison and rises steadily in the party hierarchy.
00:13:21Himmler, like Hitler, looked like the very inverse of the kind of Aryan, blonde, six foot five tall superhuman.
00:13:28You know, he was a very short man, he has a weak jawline, very ugly, you know, some pebbled glasses, former chicken farmer.
00:13:36You know, he looked very, very unimpressive.
00:13:39Wanting to gain mass support from the German people, Hitler wants to reform the appearance of the Nazi party, focusing on propaganda rather than violence.
00:13:50The establishment of a new propaganda system is created by another rising figure within the party, Josef Goebbels.
00:14:00An aspiring writer with an inferiority complex, Josef Goebbels becomes Hitler's most valued person when it comes to winning over the German public.
00:14:10Goebbels proves his talent producing mass propaganda for the Nazi party, gaining them more and more public support.
00:14:17Josef Goebbels joined the Nazi party quite early on, as did Hitler, and he became very much involved in those early years with helping the party to develop.
00:14:29And in particular, with these techniques of propaganda and really getting these messages across to the German nation.
00:14:36So he was very astute.
00:14:37He was very shrewd in terms of trying to gain power and trying to raise the profile of the Nazi party in its early years.
00:14:45Part of the way that he and Hitler did this was to use very short messages, short slogans, but to keep repeating them so that everybody knew what the Nazi party was about.
00:14:57Hitler starts to build up his power by, you know, trying to employ and find the right people who are going to listen to the beat of his drum and follow it.
00:15:06And so there's a lot of very patient politicking and a lot of persuasion, a lot of speech making, you know, it's a very, very difficult rise to power.
00:15:17But Hitler knows that it can't take place through force.
00:15:20It has to take place from the ballot box and not the bullet.
00:15:24Hitler's charisma excites the German people.
00:15:28His enthusiasm and dedication to Germany are exactly what the public are looking for.
00:15:34He encourages them to believe he can drive the country to greatness.
00:15:39He is winning the support of the nation.
00:15:41Then in 1929, a revolutionary event that will propel Hitler's popularity off the scale, practically making him unstoppable.
00:16:03The Wall Street crash, the Wall Street crash leading to the Great Depression.
00:16:13America suffers and drags Germany down with them.
00:16:17American banks withdraw their loans, leaving the German economy in turmoil.
00:16:23This sort of put into place a really terrible situation for Germany, economically, socially and politically, because it brought about such a crisis.
00:16:32And none of the governments between 1929 and the time when Hitler came into power in 1933 seemed to be able to deal with the economic crisis.
00:16:42And so it was political and economic turmoil.
00:16:47Six million people become unemployed.
00:16:50Families living in poverty.
00:16:53Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party are seeing a rise in popularity, with desperate German people being more impressionable than ever.
00:17:00Extremist politics thrives on chaos, poverty, destitution and want.
00:17:12And what you see as a result of the Wall Street crash and the slump in the late 20s, early 30s,
00:17:19are all those things in this hideous cocktail that an extremist like Hitler.
00:17:25And indeed, don't forget that communists are also trying to get into power at the same time, and they're seeing this as an opportunity too.
00:17:32So let's not think that Hitler's unique, but obviously he's saying, I can solve this.
00:17:36Hitler's promises for Germany and its people see a surge in the polls.
00:17:40By September 1930, the Nazi Party is the second largest political party in Germany.
00:17:49By 1933, the Nazis become the largest party in Parliament, and Hitler is offered the chancellorship of a coalition government.
00:17:58With a God complex drilled into his mind, Hitler sees himself as the only leader of Germany.
00:18:04He uses democracy to build popularity, but has every intention of destroying it.
00:18:10With President Hindenburg growing increasingly ill, he persuades Parliament to give him emergency powers,
00:18:17the Enabling Act, and suspend the Constitution.
00:18:20On the 30th of January 1933, Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany, but of a coalition government.
00:18:28So there were just three Nazi posts in that coalition government.
00:18:33It's very tempting to think that when Hitler comes to power in early 1933, that his grip on power is absolutely total.
00:18:41In fact, you know, he has a very uneven, shaky start.
00:18:44He's still quite worried about public opinion.
00:18:47So what he does is a mixture of passing various laws that give him more and more power,
00:18:52like the Enabling Act, that actually makes him immensely powerful.
00:18:56But also, he takes advantage of various events, like the Reichstag fire, in which the German Parliament building burns down.
00:19:05Now, it's highly likely, but never proven, whether the Nazis actually burned it down themselves.
00:19:10But certainly, in a sense, it doesn't matter.
00:19:13What happens is that Hitler and the Nazis took advantage of the Reichstag burning down
00:19:18to show that there was a communist plot against what the Nazis described as still being a democratic government.
00:19:24And it enabled them to seize more power, you know, by emergency decree.
00:19:30Very quickly, he turned Germany into a one-party state.
00:19:33So first of all, he made sure to eliminate the influence and power of the German political left.
00:19:40So the Socialist Party and the Communist Party, for a start, were banned.
00:19:44But over a short amount of time as well, the Nazi Party was the only legal party too.
00:19:49And eventually, in January 1933, he becomes Chancellor.
00:19:53Now, don't forget, Chancellor in Germany, and this still remains today, is not, at the time, the head of state.
00:19:59The head of state is the president.
00:20:01So it's the Chancellor, though, who has the real executive power.
00:20:04The German people have full support for Hitler, but are clueless to the horrors that are to follow during his reign of terror.
00:20:14Hitler begins by establishing his ideas of an Aryan race, the pure master race of Germans,
00:20:20who are to follow strict reproducing laws, sterilizing people who have hereditary traits he deems unacceptable,
00:20:27that don't match the master race principle.
00:20:29You have a lot of laws being passed, unsurprisingly, you know, to give the Nazis more power.
00:20:37But also you've got a rise in the apparatus of state terror.
00:20:42You have a thing called the Gestapo, now completely notorious.
00:20:48But that stands for secret state police.
00:20:52This is a new police force.
00:20:54There's already a creepo, a criminal police.
00:20:56But this is a new type of policeman.
00:20:59It's a policeman who is in plain clothes.
00:21:01It's a policeman who recruits informers, you know, on every block, on every street, in every block of flats,
00:21:08in order for the people to effectively police themselves.
00:21:13And, of course, this becomes an incredibly important part of the Nazi apparatus.
00:21:17Nazi-ism is everywhere.
00:21:47Joseph Goebbels is the Nazi propaganda minister.
00:21:51He is married to a very striking blonde woman called Magda.
00:21:56Now, Magda has been married before to a very wealthy German industrialist,
00:21:59but she eventually gets divorced and marries Joseph Goebbels, who was a real Casanova, actually.
00:22:05Even though he was short, club-footed and not an attractive man, you know, he had a lot of sexual conquests.
00:22:11Magda was very good for the Nazi party, and when Goebbels introduced her to Hitler,
00:22:16Hitler got on very well with her and sort of could see the advantages and encourage them to get married.
00:22:22Adolf Hitler absolutely adored Magda Goebbels and thought that she was the kind of perfect Nazi woman.
00:22:29And she was blonde and she was, you know, sort of vivacious, and she was absolutely devoted to Hitler.
00:22:36She absolutely adored him.
00:22:37And essentially, they were in love with each other.
00:22:40She and Goebbels get married as a way of both of them to get close to Hitler.
00:22:48So Hitler goes and visits the Goebbels couple, uninvited,
00:22:51who will spend tart evenings with them until the small hours, chatting away.
00:22:56Magda loves that attention.
00:22:57Hitler loves that attention from Magda.
00:22:59And Goebbels is, of course, jealous, but he also loves the fact that he's got the Fuhrer in his living room.
00:23:05You know, so he's right at the heart of power.
00:23:08Joseph Goebbels and his wife Magda are seen as the perfect German family, to set an example for the German people.
00:23:15She was very well-bred and very refined and elegant, always dressing very much in very beautiful, fashionable clothes.
00:23:25And this kind of image that she was projecting then was of the image of the mother of the Reich,
00:23:29because she and Joseph had six children.
00:23:31She had been to a finishing school.
00:23:33Her father was from quite a high echelon of society.
00:23:37And so she knew about etiquette, she knew about table manners, she knew how to dress, she knew about society.
00:23:45Whilst the Nazis were this kind of upstart organization,
00:23:48and we've sort of seen that a lot of the kind of brown shirt activities was about violence and sort of the street and all of those kinds of things,
00:23:56then the association that Magda gave was this kind of social acceptability.
00:24:00And the idea of Nazis, the Nazis getting an entree into sort of upper middle class or even aristocratic society.
00:24:11Hitler plans to eliminate all other opposition, including those on his own side.
00:24:17He no longer wants to be seen as a violent party and plans to wipe out his own paramilitary organization, the SA.
00:24:24Heimlich Himmler has established his own force of elite bodyguards for Hitler, the SS.
00:24:34They are tasked with wiping out the SA entirely.
00:24:38Heimlich Himmler is one of the most pivotal figures in the Third Reich, and he's most famous for being the head of the SS.
00:24:46Now, that is the Nazi elite armed force.
00:24:49It's not part of the army.
00:24:50It's originally called the Schutzstaffel, the protection squad, that's just there to protect Hitler.
00:24:56And what Himmler does from, you know, almost from the beginning, is to build the SS up into a state within a state.
00:25:05Because by the height of Nazi power, Himmler is in charge of an organization that has a kind of civil side to it,
00:25:15an administrative side to it, which is huge and has fingers in so many parties, and also the Bothan SS, the armed SS, which is there to help fight the war.
00:25:26And its troops are notorious for being some of the most sort of kind of evil and deadly troops, you know, as part of the war.
00:25:33On the 30th of June 1934, a night that became known as the Night of the Long Knives, Hitler took the opportunity to really get rid of any opposition within the Nazi party.
00:25:43And really, I think he was looking for an opportunity to really eliminate those who seemed to tarnish somehow the reputation of the party.
00:25:52What he's very worried about is his relationship with the army.
00:25:56Now, the army and the armed forces generally do not like paramilitary organizations, and specifically the brownshirts, the SA, the stormtroopers.
00:26:06Now, these have been kind of on Hitler's side for a very long time in the run-up to power.
00:26:12But now he's in power.
00:26:14He doesn't need a paramilitary force because he's got this thing called the actual armed forces.
00:26:18You know, he's got a navy, an air force, an army under his direct control.
00:26:22And the generals, they don't like the stormtroopers.
00:26:25They see them as a threat to them.
00:26:29They see them as a rival military force.
00:26:32And they're trying to convince Hitler, look, you know, you've got to get rid of the SA, the stormtroopers.
00:26:36There was this idea that the stormtroopers, so the SA, led by Ernst Rohn, were somehow overstepping the mark.
00:26:44This idea that they were going to have a second revolution.
00:26:46And this was something that Hitler absolutely did not want.
00:26:49So he wanted the party to be much more respectable and to really get rid of any kind of rough and tumble, let's say, that the stormtroopers still represented.
00:27:01Becoming known as the Knight of the Long Knives, he uses his SS organization, considered his personal bodyguards, to carry out this task.
00:27:09The SS didn't have much of a reputation at this point, therefore were no threat to the image of the Nazi party.
00:27:18This is seen as the ultimate sort of expression of Hitler's power, that he can even turn upon his old allies in order to consolidate his own power and in order to get the army directly where he wants it.
00:27:33Where's that? Under his thumb.
00:27:35This was considered a pivotal moment in Hitler's rise to power.
00:27:44Himmler proves his worth to Hitler by carrying out these assassinations carefully and with ease.
00:27:49He is also assisted by a man who Hitler later nicknamed the Man with the Iron Heart.
00:27:55Reinhard Heydrich.
00:27:58Heydrich joined the SS in 1931, working closely with Himmler.
00:28:03He soon gets promoted to take charge of the Gestapo and the criminal police forces.
00:28:09Heydrich is one of those Nazis who truly, even today, makes one's blood run cold.
00:28:13You just have to look at the man to see his evil.
00:28:16He just looks like this nasty piece of work.
00:28:19And boy, was Heydrich a nasty piece of work.
00:28:22Himmler goes, well, why don't you join this unit, this new unit called the Sicherheitsdienst,
00:28:27the Security Service, which is the SS espionage service, if you like,
00:28:32that's going to spy on enemies within the Third Reich and enemies abroad.
00:28:36And it's Heydrich who turns the SD into one of the most redoubtable units of the whole Nazi regime
00:28:44and will gain enormous amounts of power because it's the SD, actually, that ends up carrying out the Holocaust.
00:28:51In August 1934, President Hindenburg dies and Hitler unites the chancellorship and presidency
00:28:58into one role for himself, Fuhrer of Germany.
00:29:02He's able to take on the role of both president and chancellor and kind of create this new role for himself
00:29:10and that is the role of Fuhrer, the German word for leader.
00:29:14That is a fascist term, be in no doubt.
00:29:17This is a kind of new form of governance that Germany now has.
00:29:21Other parties are banned.
00:29:23The only party allowed is the Nazi party.
00:29:26This has become a totalitarian state and Hitler can say to the German people,
00:29:32you voted for it.
00:29:34It's a con and it's a con that worked.
00:29:38With his support from the German people confirmed,
00:29:41Hitler begins to enforce some of his tyrannical policies.
00:29:45In February 1935, Hitler orders Hermann Goering to establish the Luftwaffe,
00:29:50a German air force, which once again defies the terms of the Treaty of Versailles.
00:29:55One month later, he rearms the army with the aim of completely undoing the treaty,
00:30:02uniting all the German people who are delighted with his dedication to their nation.
00:30:07He does everything that the Versailles Treaty tells him not to do.
00:30:11He re-militarises and marches into various zones where he's not allowed to be,
00:30:16such as the Rhineland.
00:30:18And he also starts building up his armed forces, secretly at first, and then blatantly.
00:30:23All this soon becomes really blatant.
00:30:26And the Allies, such as the British and the French,
00:30:29you know, they just look at it and what do they do?
00:30:31They do nothing.
00:30:32So we know that from as early as Hitler's writings in Mein Kampf that he was personally anti-Semitic.
00:31:01And what we see once the Third Reich comes into power is his personal anti-Semitism translated into state policy.
00:31:09So from the very earliest days and months of the Third Reich,
00:31:13there were many different measures, legal measures taken against the Jews and also illegal measures as well.
00:31:20Just as he had promised in Mein Kampf, Hitler is treating the Jews in Germany as an internal enemy.
00:31:29So what you see are laws stripping Jews of their German citizenship.
00:31:35You see awful things like Jews not being allowed to go to swimming pools because if a Jew swam in a public swimming pool,
00:31:42the water would have to be drained because the Jew had dirtied the water.
00:31:46So you can see that you've got this sort of awful, awful, both political and cultural exclusion of the Jewish community.
00:31:53And if it wasn't enough to completely demoralize the Jewish population, Hitler takes things one step further.
00:32:02The Night of Broken Glass in 1938 sees the destruction of over 7,000 Jewish shops and 400 synagogues are burnt to the ground.
00:32:11When we get to 1938, we come to quite a key moment in the history of Nazi anti-Semitism.
00:32:19We come to the night of the 9th to 10th of November 1938, to a night known as Reichskristallnacht, Kristallnacht or the Night of the Broken Glass.
00:32:30The Nazis just literally set fire to synagogues everywhere and they smash up Jewish shops and Jews are killed.
00:32:40Near on 100 people were killed in the course of the night and between 20,000 and 30,000 German Jews were taken to concentration camps.
00:32:50This absolutely horrific destruction, slaughter, violence carried out by the state against its own people.
00:32:58It showed the world what Hitler was. He was effectively a gangster and a murderer.
00:33:04Himmler and Heidrich bring their evil minds together once more to orchestrate this terrible night of violence.
00:33:12Heidrich orders the arrests of thousands of Jews by the Gestapo and with Himmler's influence has them all sent to concentration camps.
00:33:20Himmler established the first Nazi concentration camp in Dachau, indicating he had no issues with bringing harm to the Jews, as he considers them a vermin within Germany.
00:33:35Heidrich is already establishing the idea of murdering all Jews.
00:33:38It's the SS men doing not only the exterminations, but they're also the ones who are appropriating wealth from the Jews and all the other slaves being used and appropriating all the stuff that they own and also selling this workforce to big German industries who are paying for its use.
00:34:01And all that is going to the pockets of the SS. So the SS becomes incredibly rich as an organisation.
00:34:09And it's also running police forces. You name it. It is, as I say, it's the state within the state. And the man at the top of it is Heinrich Himmler.
00:34:2030,000 Jews are arrested and sent to concentration camps where they will see out the rest of their lives in torture and unlawful conditions.
00:34:27The German people are unaware of the inhumane treatment that will take place in these camps, but are beginning to realise the severity of Hitler's anti-Semitism.
00:34:39After the night of the broken glass, the situation for Germany's Jews just got worse and worse from then until the war and, of course, during the war as well.
00:34:47They were impoverished. They were made to pay a big atonement fine.
00:34:51Money was taken from them in order to pay for this calamity that they'd allegedly brought upon themselves.
00:34:56There's no doubt about the centrality of anti-Semitism to Hitler's worldview. There's absolutely no doubt about that.
00:35:02But what he seemed to be trying to do was sort of stay in the shadows so that when we get a pogrom like this, that the public, the German public and the population were quite affronted by it.
00:35:11I think he managed to maintain his popularity during this time. First of all, because he was staying in the shadows of more unpopular policies.
00:35:18And there was certainly that sentiment among the German population, because of this myth that surrounded the Fuhrer, that, well, if there were unpleasant things going on or policies that they didn't like, all of those sort of more difficult aspects of the Third Reich, then somehow that Hitler couldn't know about it, that he wasn't associated with it, that it had to be one of the other leaders.
00:35:39It can't have been him. If only the Fuhrer knew this wouldn't be happening.
00:35:45Alongside this, Hitler is keeping to his promises made in Mein Kampf.
00:35:49Factories are helping to build up the German army to become the most advanced in Europe.
00:35:55This will all support Hitler's plans for Lebensraum, taking back the land he claims they deserve.
00:36:03With each area they take back, Britain and France are still all talk.
00:36:08Nobody is opposing Hitler's army and their storm on attaining land.
00:36:12More farsighted people in Britain and France are sort of going, well, where's this going to end?
00:36:18You know, because if you keep giving someone something, they're going to keep wanting more, because that's human nature and that's what Hitler did.
00:36:28However, learning of his plans to invade Poland, the Allied countries make it clear they will declare war, but Hitler ignores their threat, as they've never acted before.
00:36:37On September 1st, 1939, Hitler launches an attack on Poland, underestimating the start of World War II.
00:36:49For the first time, foreign leaders become aware of how insane Hitler really is.
00:36:54Hitler divulges this concept of Blitzkrieg, a lightning war, to his German public.
00:37:00In September 1939, Hitler invades Poland, along with Stalin. Stalin also, Soviet Russia, also invades Poland at the same time.
00:37:10But what the world remembers is the fact that Hitler invaded Poland, and a couple of days later, the British declare war on Germany.
00:37:19Hitler himself claims it to be a war of racial annihilation. No mercy is to be upheld.
00:37:24Within just six weeks, Poland is crushed by the German army, and tens of thousands of Poles executed.
00:37:31The German population, because of Hitler's popularity, and even though they had experienced the horrors of the First World War and the trench warfare of the First World War, and all of the shell shock and everything that went with it, because he was so popular, they might not have been delighted to go to war in September 1939, but they went along with it.
00:37:53In 1940, Hitler's all-powerful army rules over Denmark, Norway, Holland and Belgium, and eventually crushes France with their number of tanks. Germany is untouchable.
00:38:06Really one of the high points of Hitler's popularity was, you know, the image of the Nazis taking over Paris. All of these attacks were very sort of quick and easy victories for the Nazis, and they just fed Hitler's success and popularity.
00:38:21These successes are only fueling Hitler's ego, which leaves him with no hesitation to invade Stalin's Russia, despite their previous peace pact.
00:38:33Hitler enthuses his army with these ideas that nobody is superior to the Aryan race, therefore all means of violence and mass murder will be tolerated.
00:38:43With the German people feeling positive and patriotic, focusing on the war, Hitler can now enforce his most brutal horrors of the Third Reich.
00:38:55The Nazi regime absolutely hated the Jews and wanted to get rid of them from the very beginning. So we see that with some of the earlier policies.
00:39:02But as we get into the wartime period, of course, the policies become more and more radicalized, more and more extreme.
00:39:09So this idea, essentially, the Nazis created this idea of a Jewish question or a Jewish problem that needed a solution.
00:39:17And throughout the course of the Third Reich, they put into place a variety of different measures to try to deal with their so-called Jewish problem.
00:39:26Hitler's plans for the Jews, and when he decided to slaughter them, still remain a topic of a lot of historical controversy.
00:39:36Because there is no piece of paper that says, kill all Jews, signed A. Hitler.
00:39:42But I think that what is absolutely clear is that in conversation, he would have said to his top leaders, we need to start killing these people.
00:39:52You know, Hitler was smart enough to know this shouldn't be on a piece of paper.
00:39:56The initial idea is that the Jews are rounded up into ghettos.
00:39:59And from those ghettos, they can then be sent to concentration camps where they can be worked and worked to death.
00:40:06And you see these camps all over occupied Poland and all over Germany itself.
00:40:12Suddenly, around the time of Barbarossa, 41, it starts to get actually eliminations.
00:40:19And you have what's called Action Reinhardt, in which you've got the establishment of four actual death camps in what was occupied Poland.
00:40:28Special death squads are sent in to murder the Jews.
00:40:32The victims being made to dig a trench, then forced to stand inside, waiting to be shot.
00:40:37Groups are continuously sent into the trench to die until it is full of bodies.
00:40:44With a shocking 1.5 million Jews shot in this process.
00:40:52With Hitler's focus being turned towards the extermination of the racially impure, war efforts are lacking.
00:40:58Rudolf Hess notices the Führer is preoccupied and decides to take matters into his own hands.
00:41:05He has been losing his influence on Hitler, once being known as the deputy Führer.
00:41:11He has now been pushed so far out of the circle, he goes by unnoticed.
00:41:15In a last drastic attempt to get back into the circle, he decides to bring the continuing military struggle between Germany and the Allies to an end by means of a peace pact.
00:41:29He carries out this absolutely extraordinary mission, takes off from a Messerschmitt 110 in Augsburg and flies to Scotland, obviously,
00:41:39where he parachutes out to land on the land of the Duke of Hamilton, who he thinks is a friend of his.
00:41:45And he says, you know, I'm here to basically, you know, forge a peace deal that, you know, if you allow Nazi Germany to have a free hand in Europe,
00:41:54we'll allow the British Empire and British colonies a free hand and for Britain to maintain their influence all over the world.
00:42:01And of course, this is just complete nonsense.
00:42:03You know, Churchill by this stage is in no mood to start listening to what is clearly a semi-deranged individual.
00:42:11And indeed, he just remains in prison.
00:42:14Once Hitler hears of his plan and capture in Britain, he declares Hess has committed treason and he is rejected from the Nazis.
00:42:22The exile of Hess opened doors for a shadowy figure in the inner circle.
00:42:27Martin Bormann was initially chief of staff to Rudolf Hess, but after his capture in Britain, Hitler promotes him to head of the party chancellery.
00:42:38Bormann is seen as a secretive but extremely powerful presence in the Third Reich, having the most access and contact with Hitler.
00:42:47He controlled all acts of legislation and party promotions, as well as drawing up the Führer's schedule and appointments calendar.
00:42:56Bormann had the power to decide who was allowed to see Hitler and when.
00:43:01This caused him to be hated by fellow members of the inner circle.
00:43:05But they knew they had to maintain a civil relationship with him in order to get access to Hitler.
00:43:11Martin Bormann is one of the most enigmatic and cryptic figures of the Third Reich.
00:43:16He was one of the kind of old fighters, as it was called. He was kind of there from the very early days.
00:43:21Very loyal Nazi, but always in the shadows.
00:43:24He was head of what was called the Sir Chancery.
00:43:27And as a result, he actually had the kind of keys to Hitler, if you liked.
00:43:32If you want to go and speak to Hitler, you've got to go through Bormann.
00:43:35It doesn't matter who you are, everyone's got to go through Bormann.
00:43:39And so that gives him enormous power, because if he can say you can and you can't, you've got to carry favour with him.
00:43:45And of course, in any dictatorship, whoever's, you know, the nearest to the dictator is going to have the most power.
00:43:51In secret, Hitler's inner circle are experimenting with other forms of mass murder to be deemed more efficient.
00:43:58This is known as the final solution.
00:44:03Reinhard Heydrich chairs a meeting known as the Wannsee Conference,
00:44:07in which leading Nazis discuss ways in which the Jews can be eliminated economically and efficiently.
00:44:13The Wannsee Conference really was that moment, a kind of very important moment in the evolution of Nazi anti-Semitic policy
00:44:21and in what we call the final solution, because this was the moment that both retrospectively sanctioned
00:44:27what had already been going on, these experiments at the end of 1941,
00:44:32and really set in place then the momentum for the establishment and running of these death camps.
00:44:39And there were six of those, all of them on Polish soil through the, through the height of the war.
00:44:47A secret department, known as T4, is instructed to find a way to kill as many as possible, quickly and quietly,
00:44:54out of the knowledge of the German public.
00:44:58By the time we get to the end of 1941, the Nazis had already put into place this action T4,
00:45:05which was actually the extermination of the German asylum population.
00:45:09So action T4, between 1939 and 1941, had used poisonous gas to kill Germany's mentally and physically ill population.
00:45:22And that was something like 70,000 adults and maybe up to 6,000 children and teenagers.
00:45:27It really was the most repellent form of kind of Nazi quote-unquote medicine that you can imagine.
00:45:35It is basically chopping people out of life. You're killing them. You're killing children with epilepsy.
00:45:43You're killing people who've got mild spinal deformities. You're killing people who've even got stutters.
00:45:51Because you're saying they're genetically weak and we don't want them if we're going to make this strong,
00:45:56blonde Aryan race full of perfect superhumans.
00:46:00When the truth about the killing emerges, German people become distressed that their friends and family members may be targeted.
00:46:09They begin to protest and express their dismay towards the horrors they have just uncovered.
00:46:15Hitler quickly withdraws the programme, realising he may have gone too far.
00:46:21Realising the limit of what the German people would accept.
00:46:25It happened in secret in these kind of horrific hospitals and castles.
00:46:31And these are the sites of some of the worst murders carried out by the Nazis.
00:46:36So it was a repellent programme and the German people knew it when they found out about it.
00:46:40And when it was really appreciated by the public, it was stopped.
00:46:43So it shows you that Hitler was sensitive to public opinion
00:46:46and would go with public opinion when it went to end to him.
00:46:50He depicts that future killings needed to be well hidden
00:46:53and he shouldn't be associated with it.
00:46:56He must fool the German people to portray a kind and caring persona as their Führer,
00:47:02not wanting to lose support from his country.
00:47:06He never personally signs a document for these killings again,
00:47:10keeping his own image in the clear.
00:47:12However, all the other Nazis act in his name, organising this destruction themselves.
00:47:18Hitler keeps his public image very clean.
00:47:21People are aware that bad things are happening to Jews and they're being deported.
00:47:27But they're not precisely sure.
00:47:29But you do see glimpses of it.
00:47:31Because sometimes you get German parents telling their children
00:47:34if you don't behave you'll go up the chimney like Jews.
00:47:37So clearly that suggests there was a sort of kind of knowledge
00:47:41that maybe something like that was going on.
00:47:44But also a lot of German families were more worried about the fate of their own sons,
00:47:49fathers and uncles fighting, especially on the Eastern Front,
00:47:51which is turning into a bloody bloodbath.
00:47:54Hitler moves the killings from Germany with the idea they must happen as far away as possible.
00:48:00Building a network of death camps in Poland, this was the beginning of the final solution.
00:48:06The Germans were involved, you know, in their own experience of the war,
00:48:11preoccupied with their own difficulties.
00:48:14And in a sense then once the Jews weren't there anymore,
00:48:17they were sort of out of their frame of reference and just not in their thoughts.
00:48:22Heinrich Himmler is tasked with creating death camps,
00:48:26elimination rooms where thousands can be executed at once.
00:48:30He becomes responsible for the murders and slaughtering of millions of Jews,
00:48:35a total atrocity.
00:48:38He was responsible for the Holocaust because, you know,
00:48:41it was the SS largely who carried it out.
00:48:44And when he went to go and kind of witness a slaughter,
00:48:48you know, some brains were splattered upon his coat and it caused him to vomit.
00:48:53He never, you know, this is the man responsible for it and he can't cope with it.
00:48:58I'm not saying it's desirable that he should have coped with it,
00:49:01but it just shows you that he didn't actually have the personal appetite
00:49:04for butchering people himself and got other people to do it.
00:49:08In many ways he was a coward.
00:49:10Jews from all over Europe are transported to these camps,
00:49:14unaware of the inhumane scenarios they are about to face.
00:49:19Horror, screams, mass murder, an unimaginable scene of death and destruction.
00:49:29Millions of Jews were murdered because of one man's horrific desire for a racially pure nation.
00:49:36Death camps, all of those were on Polish soil,
00:49:39so they were out of the immediate frame of sight or reference of the Germans.
00:49:44So, again, in some way they were happening elsewhere
00:49:47and not really in their immediate field of vision.
00:49:49These are places that are places of deep, deep horror
00:49:52because you didn't go there to work, you went there to die.
00:49:56And you would arrive and within 30 minutes you'd be dead.
00:50:02Treblinka, for example, is no bigger if you visit it than a football stadium,
00:50:07the size of a football pitch.
00:50:09And in that very small area around 850,000 men, women and children were gassed.
00:50:17It's just the most horrific thought if you ever visited a place like that.
00:50:21Auschwitz, again, a very huge, iconic place associated with the Holocaust,
00:50:27of course, famously where a million Jews were put to death,
00:50:30many of whom were gassed on arrival.
00:50:32But it also was a concentration camp rather than just an extermination camp.
00:50:36So it has these two horrific roles.
00:50:39And don't forget Auschwitz and places like this, they're huge.
00:50:42Auschwitz's three cabs spread over about 10 miles.
00:50:45I mean, these are factories of death. There's no doubt about it.
00:50:50Reinhard Heydrich, the man who would have murdered millions
00:50:54if he had not been stopped.
00:50:57Operation Anthropoid, two men trained in Britain
00:51:00to carry out the planned assassination of Heydrich.
00:51:03On May 27th, 1942, the men approached the car
00:51:08taking Heydrich through Prague's Kobylisi district.
00:51:11In which he was traveling without an armed escort.
00:51:14Unfortunately, the operation didn't quite go as planned,
00:51:18as the gun jammed within meters of the car.
00:51:21Quick thinking led to a grenade being thrown towards the vehicle
00:51:25and exploding inside, wounding Heydrich badly.
00:51:29He was taken to hospital, but after refusing to let
00:51:32any non-German surgeon operate on him,
00:51:34he died several days later of septicemia.
00:51:37All members of the Nazi party were required to be a part of the final solution,
00:51:43as it was genocide on a mass scale.
00:51:46Therefore needed mass participation.
00:51:49By the end of 1944, six million Jews have been murdered upon his approval,
00:51:57due to his own horrific ideals and regime.
00:52:00Hitler is absorbed with the focus on creating a pure race.
00:52:07He is losing the war he created.
00:52:09The inferior nations around him are now closing in on his territory.
00:52:14The war is closing in on Berlin, reducing Hitler and a circle of his closest,
00:52:20most trusted Nazis into a bunker under the ruins of his chancellery.
00:52:25Hitler's image of an all-powerful dictator is slowly decreasing as his tremor gets worse.
00:52:31Once the Red Army came into German territory in 1945,
00:52:36then Hitler's position as this infallible ruler and leader really not only became to be called into question,
00:52:42but really came to its end.
00:52:44Because the Soviet troops were very vengeful,
00:52:48they were retaliating for all the terrible brutalities and atrocities
00:52:52that the Nazis and the German army had put into place in Soviet territory.
00:52:57What it meant was that they were coming closer and closer on their journey westwards to Berlin
00:53:02and eventually Hitler, in a very small inner circle around him,
00:53:07had to retreat to his bunker, his underground bunker.
00:53:11During the last days of his life, Hitler is seen as a demented dictator,
00:53:15battling to rule what had become a Phantom Reich,
00:53:18with an army who were no longer listening to his requests.
00:53:24He believed Germany had failed him and no longer deserved his power or ruling.
00:53:30He wanted the whole country to be torn down with him.
00:53:33This is a war brought about by Hitler,
00:53:35and this is a war that Hitler has fought for too long,
00:53:39and he's fighting it to the death,
00:53:41and he's fighting it to the death of the people who he supposedly loves,
00:53:45and he no longer loves them by the end of the war.
00:53:48And he says that basically the German people don't deserve him,
00:53:51the German people don't deserve Germany,
00:53:54and everybody should fight to the death because basically, you know,
00:53:57they don't deserve to be alive because they failed him.
00:54:00Classic narcissistic thinking.
00:54:02The world is for him.
00:54:04You know, he's not there for the world.
00:54:08One by one, his inner circle begin to abandon him
00:54:11as they realise what will happen to them at the end of the war.
00:54:17Goering has already retired as much as he has permitted.
00:54:20Retreating to his estate with his wife,
00:54:23he was also framed in a scandal claiming he was attempting
00:54:26to take over the Führer's powers in the final days of the war.
00:54:31He became this kind of drug-addled alcoholic whale of a man
00:54:34who other Nazis would laugh at and not take seriously and saw him as an impediment.
00:54:38So actually, by the end of the war, he's this joke figure.
00:54:43Goering wrote a letter to Hitler,
00:54:45offering to relieve Hitler of his duties and act in his place
00:54:48as he had believed the Führer was encircled and helpless in Berlin.
00:54:53This was a reasonable act seemingly as Hitler had named him to be the political heir.
00:54:58However, scheming Martin Bormann saw this as an opportunity
00:55:01to wipe out another one of his threats within the inner circle.
00:55:04He intercepted the letter before it reached Hitler himself.
00:55:10He presented the letter to the Führer as though Goering was attempting to commit treason.
00:55:15Hitler issued a telegram to Goering and told him that he had committed high treason
00:55:21and gave him the option to resign his offices in exchange for his life.
00:55:24Rumors are indicating that Himmler has plans to succeed Hitler and continue running the Nazi Party.
00:55:33He has already made negotiations with the enemies to release Jewish prisoners from the concentration camps
00:55:38to freedom via Switzerland.
00:55:40Once Hitler finds out about Himmler's independent plans,
00:55:46he strips him of all offices and orders his arrest.
00:55:50Only his loyal mistress Eva Braun stands beside him,
00:55:54continuing to fuel his demented fantasy that he is still the greatest man in the world.
00:55:59Eva Braun was Hitler's best kept secret.
00:56:04Meeting him aged 17, she was young, impressionable and easily lead.
00:56:09Eva was a very mysterious character, always being in the background of all affairs and rarely seen in public.
00:56:19The normality of their relationship was unclear.
00:56:27The 30th of April, 1945.
00:56:30Hitler comes to terms with the fact that Germany is losing the war and is beyond repair.
00:56:36He hadn't made a public appearance or speech in months.
00:56:41His victories are long gone, needing a mixture of drugs to keep him sane.
00:56:45Hitler's last days in the Führer bunker under the Reich Chancery in the centre of Berlin,
00:56:52you know, are a kind of terrible end of a Shakespearean tragedy,
00:56:58as the thunder of Russian artillery all around them.
00:57:03And they're deep, deep inside this sort of concrete underground fortress.
00:57:08Everybody's sort of kind of going mad, and especially Hitler.
00:57:12On this day, he finally agrees to marry Eva Braun just hours before their suicide.
00:57:19The pair tie the knot with what's left of Hitler's loyal advisers as witness.
00:57:25Finally, after many years of being Hitler's long-term partner, Hitler married Eva Braun that night.
00:57:33It was to be a very short-lived marriage because two days later they both committed suicide together.
00:57:42He hands her a cyanide capsule and he holds his pistol.
00:57:45The pair commit suicide together, leaving Germany in ruins.
00:57:51Hitler would rather die than flee Germany and be seen as weak.
00:57:56Their bodies are burnt. I mean, this great kind of almost like a sort of Viking pyre, like a Viking longship going up.
00:58:03Europe's most evil dictator is dead.
00:58:11Just over a week later, Germany surrenders.
00:58:14As the death camps are uncovered, everyone learns the horrors of the Nazi regime.
00:58:18On the 7th of May 1945, Germany surrendered, and once that had happened, the atrocities of the Nazi regime came to popular attention.
00:58:31Ultimately, when it was shown quite how evil Nazism was, and the German people fully appreciated it, then, yes, the opinion of Hitler was not quite so positive.
00:58:40Joseph and Magda Goebbels are devastated at the suicide of their beloved Fuhrer. Magda does not want to raise her children in a world without Hitler and the Third Reich.
00:58:52And if you want to see the ultimate expression of this twisted, bizarre, dark, horrific love, if you like, it's the fact that they both killed themselves to follow Hitler into the afterlife.
00:59:06And they kill their own children in the bunker, poison all six children, because a world without Hitler and a world without Nazism is no place for their kids.
00:59:17That's how much they adored Hitler.
00:59:19After the discovery of the horrific secrets of the Nazi regime, remaining important party members were arrested and set to face the judge in the Nuremberg trials.
00:59:31Rudolf Hess was brought back to Germany after his prison sentence in Britain and found guilty at the trials, being given a life sentence.
00:59:40Heinrich Himmler was captured but committed suicide before he could be tried.
00:59:44Hermann Goering was sentenced to the death penalty but committed suicide in his cell by cyanide the night his execution was ordered, cheating the hangman.
00:59:56As for Martin Bormann, he disappeared shortly after Hitler's death.
01:00:00There were rumours that he had escaped and was living in hiding somewhere in the world.
01:00:06He was indicted at the Nuremberg trials and found guilty.
01:00:11The downfall of the Third Reich was the inevitable end of Hitler's inner circle.
01:00:15And although many of these monsters evaded trial for their horrendous crimes, there is no doubt the ultimate justice awaited them all.
01:00:23The End of the Third Reich
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