Nazi Germany: How Hitler Destroyed A Nation

0:02 In the aftermath of a world shattered by war, a fragile democracy stood on the edge of collapse. From the ruins of a broken nation, a dark force emerged. A regime driven by hatred, fear, and ambition. In that climate of hopelessness and despair, Hitler promised something different. Hitler promised that he could make Germany great again. Most people are struggling to survive. And of course, you know, like any really brilliant public speaker, he's going to use that to his advantage. It's like a conductor with an orchestra.

0:49 Can't be tight. [Music] [Applause] [Music] This is the story of how one man's vision led to the rise of the Third Reich and the world's descent into chaos. Hitler was a moody and sirly child. His

1:35 father was 52 years old, Alois, and his mother, Claraara, was quite a bit younger. So, he was much closer to his mother. Hitler's father was really abusive. He would often beat the young Adolf after he had had too much to drink. But his mother, on the other hand, was very loving a and she would often try to throw herself between Adolf and his abusive father. Of course, what Hitler's learning from his father at this very early stage I is that if you want to dominate someone, you got to be strong and you've got to be brutal. Hitler's father was very strict and authoritarian. And perhaps this had some influence on the young adult as he grew up. There's this extract in mine camp in

2:22 which Hitler remembers his old history teacher, a man called Leopold Poch a and the profound effect that his classes had on the man who would lead the Nazi party. Poch himself was born in what we today call Slovenia. But he was this kind of nationalist who believed in a kind of you know wider Germany a and he despises the rulers of AustriaHungary the Habsburgs you know and what Poch frequently voices are his political views in the classroom and there's no doubt that they are shaping Hitler's own nationalism. At the young age of 25, Adolf Hitler would witness the world plunged into a devastating global conflict that would leave an indelible mark on his psyche.

3:14 The outbreak of the First World War in 1914 swept across Europe with unprecedented violence, shattering the old order and ushering in an era of unimaginable destruction. what he does is to volunteer to join the Bavarian army. A and he goes off and fights and he's present at the first battle of Epra. He's at the battle of the Psalm. He's at the battle of Aris and he's even at Passanddale and at Som he's actually wounded. So he has what people call a good war. He's even decorated for bravery and gets the iron

4:01 cross second class in 1914. He was wounded in the war and in fact um blinded uh temporarily [Music] with the recovery from blindness. He suddenly seemed to think he had a mission in life that there was something pre-ordained. The fact that he'd survived the war and that he'd recovered his sight. um that he had a mission to fulfill. For Hitler, the war was a turning point, a crucible of chaos and bloodshed that transformed him from an aimless drifter into a man with a burning sense of purpose. The mood in Germany at the end of World War I uh was that of a humiliated and and defeated people and nation. This fight had been going on for four

4:47 years. Millions of people had died and no one had got anything or no one had got anywhere. Hitler and other German nationalists absolutely hated the treaty of Versailles and this was for a number of reasons. First of all, the victorious allies had blamed Germany for the outbreak of the war. So there was a clause in there called article 231 the war guilt clause uh which placed the blame. So not only that but also this meant that the allies could ask for reparations from this nation who had started the war um very very hefty sum of money. You know the Germans look at this and go

5:33 this is just a humiliation. You know not have we lost the war we're now made to pay for it. It was a a a mood of revolution, a mood of deep dissatisfaction, a mood of instability, and it felt like the country was on the brink of collapse. So in the aftermath of the first world war, prices had increased um greatly. So by the time of the hyperinflation you saw uh people going out with wheelbarrows worth of money because the currency had become practically worthless. So literally a wheelbarrow of money to buy a basic household provision. There was lots of political,

6:19 economic and social upheavalss and dislocations. So the Kaiser had abdicated. So now he'd been replaced that rule had been replaced with the VHimar government which was a liberal democracy. So this is a new experiment in democracy for Germany. Um and the VHimar Republic was attacked both from left and right in these early years after the war. Hitler's wartime experience really reinforces his sense of German patriotism. A and when Germany capitulates in in 1918 in November, he's incredibly bitter. A and it's that bitterness that's really going to start to form its political ideology. Hitler

7:06 pinned the blame for the loss of the first world war on what he called the November criminals, those who had signed the armistice on behalf of Germany. So really he believed that had the German army been allowed to continue on the battlefield, they would have won. Um and from here came this myth of the stab in the back that the army had been stabbed in the back. And this became very popular among German right-wing and uh paramilitary groups and so on. Those responsible for it were people like Hitler's claims of Jews and Marxists and basically anybody who had signed the armistice that ended the fighting. In addition, the Treaty of Versailles took away quite a lot of Germany's territory as well as her overseas empire too. So there was kind of quite a lot of nationalist resentment

7:53 against that. And I think one of the parts that really rankled the most with Hitler was the clause in it that said that Austria, so that was Hitler's homeland and Germany should not be able to be unified. Hitler hated that and very much saw his mission to actually tear up the treaty of Versailles to achieve the union the ancelus between Austria and Germany. [Music] In July 1919, Hitler gets a new job and this is actually really crucial. one of the first steps that's going to take him to power. And what he's appointed to become is an intelligence agent uh for a

8:40 reconnaissance unit of the German army. A and what he is, you know, asked to do is to kind of influence other soldiers, but also what he's asked to do is to infiltrate political parties. And one of the parties that Hitler is asked to infiltrate is called the German Workers Party. So Hitler became leader of the party by July 1921. So quite early on still and he was determined to try and grow that party and of course eventually to make it a party that would allow him into power. The party ch changed its name from the German Workers Party to the National Socialist German Workers Party and there were quite important changes that Hitler made um at this early point. One of them was the

9:27 introduction of a paramilitary wing. So the SA um the stormab tailong or the stormtroopers. And this was important because all the other parties had their own paramilitary organization. And secondly to for the party to have its own newspaper, the folkta or the people's observer. And again this was important because it marked the arrival of the party. All the other parties had their own press. Hitler's initial job for the Nazi party uh I is really in charge of their propaganda. Um and that job will later be done famously by Joseph Gerbles. But Hitler is very much aware and this is where he's very advanced and very sophisticated for his time that actually what's key is how you get your message

10:13 out there. Hitler's speeches are really vitriolic, but they're very effective. A and they attract regular audiences. A what he's found, he's got this gift for speaking. He is a natural demagogue and he's really good at using populist themes and he labels scapegoats for losing the war. You name it, Jews, communists, you know, whoever Hitler hates on that given moment, he'll lay into them. Hitler's charisma and his ability to speak so well to really draw crowds and attract attention to the party meant that his role was crucial even from an early date. Listeners are listening and

11:00 watching this and they're thinking yes these are the reasons for our economic hardships. And Hitler's also got this huge personal magnetism. And he's got this instinctive understanding of the psychology of crowds. And of course, you know, like any really brilliant public speaker, he's going to use that to his advantage. It's like a conductor with an orchestra. A and what historians have noted is the kind of hypnotic effect that the his rhetoric has on these huge audiences. And also people notice, you know, how his eyes, you know, are so effectively used when he's talking to smaller groups. Really, what Hitler was doing with the Nazi party at this time was signaling its arrival and its advent um into a

11:45 serious political contender. And then it started to move away and make a place for itself in German politics. Hitler's aim was to gain power by force and quickly enlisted one of his favorite techniques, violence. Inspired by Mussolini's storm to power, Hitler attempted to overthrow the Bavarian government in Munich, arranging an armed uprising known as the beer hall push in 1923. In his early years when he was leading the Nazi party, you know, Hitler was was a big admire of Mussolini. you know what the Nazis had done, what Hitler had done is he he he looked at Italy, he looked at the Italian fascists, you know, uh as a model for some of their appearances,

12:31 some of their policies and what he has seen is is Bonito Muslim march on Rome in 1922 which had been so successful and Hitler thinks well look I can do this in Bavaria um and and by doing this kind of march I can actually challenge the government in Berlin I can take power in the same way as Mussolini did. In 1923, Hitler asked for the help of a general for the First World War, a man called Eric Ludenorf. And he says to Ludenorf, "I want to have a coup and I want to take control violently." And and this becomes known as the beer hall push. Whilst Hitler had had some support among the armed forces and among the upper classes that had made him

13:17 believe that this might be possible, the truth is he'd really overestimated that the Vhimar Republic, despite the problems that beset it, was not really on the verge of collapse at this stage. Actually, even though it was venerated by the Nazis, uh it was a disaster. It it was a complete cockup. There's no other word for it. On the 8th of November 1923, together with a band of his closest comrades and bodyguards, he stormed into the Burg Pella in Munich where the state commissioner for Bavaria, Gustaf Vancar, was holding a meeting. You have Hitler and various senior Nazis going to this beer hall where all these politicians were were assembled. Hitler

14:03 strides in, fires a revolver in the air, climbs onto the stage, and basically kind of arrests, if you like, these three major political figures and says, "If you don't work with me, I'm going to shoot you." Um, and I'm now in charge. You know, it's all very well to get on the stage in a beer hall and say, "I'm the king of the world." But actually, you've got to go out and radiate your power. Hitler says, "Well, we've got to march somewhere." So, why don't we march into Munich? And they say to the three guys they've arrested, "Do you promise not to run away?" And they go, "Yeah, we promise not to run away." And as soon as the Nazis walk out the building, those three politicians, "Run away." And they they tell, you know, the local police, the local armed forces to resist this, you know, Nazi push. And that's exactly

14:48 what happens. Hitler, Gurring, various other senior Nazis, they're walking through Munich, and then suddenly there's this gun battle. It only lasts 30 seconds, but during it, Herman Guring, very senior Nazi, he's shot in the leg. Quite a few Nazis are actually shot dead. Some local police are shot dead. It's just chaos. Hitler was also injured. He dislocated his shoulder. Yet, he was sort of bundled into the back of a getaway car and taken to the country house, the estate of his friend Anst Hanfangel. So he kind of hid out there for a couple of days, but then the police caught up with him and on the 11th of November he was arrested and brought to trial for treason.

15:35 Actually what the push does is brings Hitler to the attention of the wider German nation for the first time. A and it's you know obviously generating you big headlines in newspapers all over the world and you've got this 24-day trial uh which is hugely publicized and what a trial does you know you get this process called blowback. It's giving Hitler a platform to express his kind of vile ideology to the nation. [Music]

16:22 On April the 1st, Hitler is sentenced to 5 years imprisonment at Lansburg prison for his involvement in the beer hall push. And there he dictated my camp. So his struggles and his political ideas to Rudolph Hess and Emil Morris. [Music] What this book does is to lay out Hitler's plans in a kind of very rambling, incoherent fashion for transforming German society into a society based on race. So throughout the book, Jews are equated with with germs a and they're presented as the international poisoners o of society. Anti-semitism, anti-bulcheism

17:09 um were two of the key ideologies. He also despised democracy and these kinds of ideologies were written in very very fervent and strong terms in mine camp. So according to Hitler's ideology, there was only one solution to this and that was their extermination. In 1925, after Hitler's early release from prison, he reestablished the Nazi party using mine camp as his manifesto. He enforced the idea that he had been chosen to save Germany, something he intended to do by any means necessary. [Music]

18:02 Wanting to gain mass support from the German people, Hitler reformed the appearance of the Nazi party, focusing on propaganda rather than violence. Hitler's charisma excited the public. His enthusiasm and dedication to Germany were exactly what the people were looking for in a time of hardship. Then in 1929, a revolutionary event propelled Hitler's popularity off the scale, practically making him unstoppable. The Wall Street crash. The Great Depression was this severe worldwide economic depression that took place between 1929 and and you know basically lasted a whole decade till about 1939. What it saw was a major fall

18:50 in stock prices in the United States. A and you see basically an economic cataclysm worldwide. Hitler and the Nazi party you prepare to take advantage of the emergency. The emergencies are kind of great for them because with their extremist politics, they can say only we have the solution and they're going to use this to gain support for their party. And what they also promise to do is, you know, just sweep away the Versail treaty. And they say we're going to strengthen the economy and we're going to provide jobs. No real mention of how, but it looks like a solution. [Music] Whilst the Nazi party in 1928 before the

19:36 Wall Street crash had been polling a fractional percentage of the vote, in the elections of July 1932, the Nazi party pulled more than 37% of the vote. So this made it the largest party in Germany. So it was now a party to be reckoned with. So it was actually quite a symbiotic relationship. It was a kind of two-way street that there's the population um giving a large amount of consent and backing to these dictatorships. The reason for the success at the polls was that the Nazi party seemed to offer something to everyone. So to the young people, it was a party of dynamism and youth, elderly, and the pensioners who'd seen their life savings just decimate

20:23 overnight. he could attract the old, he could attract men and women even across the social classes. So he attracted support um from among the aristocracy, the middle class of course was the biggest part of his vote, but also a quarter of German workers um were voting for the Nazi party too by this point. But certainly within the first few years in which he was in power and it seemed like the economy was going well, you know, the majority of people in Germany, I think it's fair to say, really liked Hitler and they thought that actually he is transforming our nation. Hitler's promises for Germany and its people saw a surge in the polls.

21:10 By September 1930, the Nazi party was the second largest political party in Germany. [Music] Hitler had quite a lot of disdain for the other political parties. He was convinced that his party was the one that was going to make a difference. and he was determined at the end of 1932 to accept not a vice chancellorship but only the top position. He was determined and uncompromising about being chancellor of Germany. And when

21:56 Hindenburg offered him this position, he hailed that as the Nazi seizure of power. So this was his moment. On the 27th of February 1933, the Reichstag building is set on fire. Herman Guring uh says this is definitely a communist plot. And at Hitler's urging, uh his hindenberg, who's the president, uh responds by signing the Reichag fire degree on the 28th of February, just the next day. This allowed the cabinet to have full autonomy and to take any steps it considered necessary in order to safeguard public order. So this was a fundamental step in Hitler's

22:42 consolidation of power. One of the first things Hitler does with a Reich stag decree is to basically suppress the activities of the German Communist Party. And he got 4,000 members arrested almost overnight. Essentially, Hitler was able to uh maneuver the situation so that the Nazi party became the only party. So, we see the arrival of a one party state. It's very likely that the fire at the Reich stag was organized by the Nazis as a pretext for a kind of mass persecution of communists and social democrats in Germany. Of course, the purpose o of the decree is and and and the whole purpose of the fire, if the Nazis did indeed, you know, set it, was to manufacture an

23:29 excuse for repression and control. In the end, it doesn't matter whether the Nazis start it or not. The fact is the Nazis used it as an excuse to gain more totalitarian power. Adult Hitler. [Music] shrimp and

24:29 D. Hurry. a lot of laws being passed

25:16 unsurprisingly to give the Nazis more power, but also you've got a rise in the apparatus of state terror. Uh you have a thing called the Gestapo now completely notorious but that stands for secret state police. This is a new police force. There's already the ko the criminal police but this is a new type of policeman. Uh it's a policeman who is in plain clothes. Um it's a policeman who uh recruits informers you know on every block on every street and every block of flats in order for the people uh to effectively police themselves. And of course this becomes an incredibly important uh part of the Nazi apparatus.

26:11 He had the idea of a very aggressive and expansionist foreign policy and essentially this idea of might over morality. So force over anything rational I suppose in a way force in terms of foreign affairs. And of course the League of Nations was designed to um promote peace and to enhance international relations and and security of course too. And so this was why Hitler wanted to remove Germany from it. And in addition, this was then going to allow him to start to tear up the Treaty of Versailles in the way that he had hoped and intended all along. Hitler's being expansionist. He wants more territory. He's looking to Czechoslovakia uh to an area called the Sudatan land where he's identified

26:56 people who he thinks should rightfully be Germans and he thinks that those people should be part of of of the new Nazi Germany. He of course is also looking uh uh east towards Poland and thinking maybe I want a bit of that. Um and he's also of course looking down to Austria which of course you know is is a Germanspeaking country and thinking maybe I want to have Austria as part of my new kingdom if you like. So, it's it's a mixture of of of slowly absorbing more power into himself, but also then using that power to go out and grab more land. Shortly after this, he planned to eliminate all remaining opposition,

27:43 including members of his own faction. Determined to distance himself from being perceived as leading a violent movement, he decided to dismantle his own paramilitary organization, the SA, and ordered the removal of its leader, Ernst Rome. On 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. And really I think he was looking for an opportunity to really eliminate those who seem to tarnish somehow the reputation of the party. What he's very worried about is his relationship with the army. Now the army and the armed forces generally do not like paramilitary organizations and specifically the brown shirts, the SA,

28:29 the stormtroopers. Now these have been kind of on Hitler's side for a very long time in the runup to power. But now he's in power. He doesn't need a paramilitary force because he's got this thing called the actual armed forces. You know, he's got a navy, an air force, an army under his direct control. And the generals, they don't like the stormtroopers. They see them as uh a threat to them. They see them as a rival military force. And they're trying to convince Hitler, look, you know, you got to get rid of the SA, the Storms. known as the knight of the long knives. He deployed his SS organization, regarded as his personal bodyguards, to execute the purge. At that time, the SS held little influence and posed no

29:15 significant threat to the Nazi party's image. You have this absolutely uh notorious event in 1934 called the night of the long knives in which Hitler and some of his closest acolytes go around and with the SS and with certain other other people close to him. They go around basically rounding up members of the SA including Ernst R who Hitler actually goes down to see in this hotel in southern Germany and and he gets him incarcerated and says right you've got to shoot yourself and and Rome refuses to do it and eventually he is actually shot but this is uh seen as the ultimate sort of expression of Hitler's power that he can even turn upon his old

30:01 allies in order to consolidate his own power and in order to the army directly where he wanted. Where's that? Under his thumb. This was considered a pivotal moment in his rise to power. For a man as disturbed as Adolf Hitler, the following day unfolded as if nothing unusual had occurred. The ordeal demonstrated to his close followers within the Nazi party that Hitler was a ruthless force not to be challenged. In August 1934, following the death of President Hindenburg, Hitler merged the roles of chancellor and president, proclaiming himself furer of Germany.

30:47 He's able to take on the role of both president and chancellor and kind of create this new uh role for himself and that is the role of furer, the German word for leader. Uh that is a fascist term be no doubt. This is a kind of new form of governance that Germany now has. Other parties are banned. The only party allowed is the Nazi party. This has become a totalitarian state and Hitler can say to the German people, you voted for it. It's a con and it's a con that worked. With his support from the German people confirmed, Hitler began to implement his tyrannical policies. In February 1935, he instructed Herman Guring to establish the Luftvafa, a

31:34 German air force, openly defying the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. The following month, he began rearming the military, determined to dismantle the treaty entirely and unite all Germans, who welcomed his commitment to restoring national pride. He does everything that the Versai treaty tells him not to do. He remilitarizes and marches into various zones where he's not allowed to be, such as the Rhineland. And he also starts building up his armed forces secretly at first and then blatantly. All this soon becomes really blatant. And the allies such as the British and the French, you know, they just look at it and what do they do? They do nothing. 1935 saw the introduction of the

32:20 Neuremberg laws and Hitler began to convince the German people that the Jews were to blame for the country's previous struggles. The creation of an enemy was very important and that could be an internal enemy or an external enemy or both. After Hitler came to power, life for Germany's Jews took a severe turn for the worse. The Jews in Germany were to feel the full effects of of of more than something like 400 decrees and regulations that restricted all aspects of their public lives and even their private lives. In the very early days and weeks after Hitler came to power, there was a boycott of Jewish shops and businesses.

33:05 There was also an Aryan clause inserted into the civil service law uh which removed Jewish civil servants from their jobs. All of that within the first few months. In the weeks and months that followed, Germany's Jews became increasingly isolated and excluded from one profession after another. You have the Neuremberg race laws being passed in 1935. A and these define Jews not by their religious belief but by their ancestral lineage. Uh and what they these laws also do is to kind of formalize the segregation um of the Jews away from the so-called Aryan population of Germany. It it's basically creating uh the Jews as kind of internal foreigners if you like. So throughout

33:51 the mid 1930s the German propaganda machine um was very busy putting out anti-semitic propaganda among other types of propaganda. So Julius Shriker's desma put out a lot of anti-semitic material but the same was true from the propaganda ministry in terms of posters and placards and as the years went on anti-semitic films radio propaganda and press propaganda too for the most part a lot of Germans accepted the Nuremberg laws partly because you know Nazi propaganda had successfully kind of swayed public opinion and fostered this general belief that Jews were a separate race and also no one wants to kind of oppose the regime because it would mean you know

34:38 you were going to leave yourself open to harassment or or worse still arrest by the Gestapo. A lot of people just kept their mouth shut. Anti-semitism was not new for Hitler. I mean he he had been very publicly uh expressing and harboring really anti-semitic views e ever since the Nazis published their 25point program way back in 1920. The Nuremberg laws marked a very significant moment in this history of the Third Reich and in the in the anti-semitism the escalating anti-semitism of the Third Reich. [Music] Fore [Music]

35:38 on the night of the 9th to 10th of November 1938. Gerbles the propaganda minister unleashed a pogram. So this was a masscale attack in full public view of German jewelry. A German diplomat called Erns vonrath is assassinated. He's murdered by a 17-year-old Germanborn Polish Jew called Hershel Grinban. And that is used as a pretext by the Nazis to carry out one of their most infamous actions. The night of the broken glass was a decisive turning point in Nazi anti-semitic policy. So Hitler had always back from mine camp talked about his hatred of the Jews. And here Gerbles

36:24 had presented him with something that pleased him very much because it was portrayed as this spontaneous response of the German population. Although of course it was heavily and carefully orchestrated from above and by gerbles and yet this was something that very much fitted in with Hitler's worldview. Cristallnact or the night of the broken glass was this whole kind of series throughout Germany in German towns and cities of really repulsive actions against Jews. You have Jews being beaten up. You have Jews being killed. You have synagogues being burnt down. You have Jewish shops and businesses being vandalized and smashed up. Tens of thousands of Jewish men were taken to concentration camps and

37:11 something like 91 people were murdered over the course of that night. You know, it it was a really horrific night and and the world looked at it and realized this was a result of Nazism. You can look at the night of broken glasses being undoubtedly a a precursor for what was going to come. And that of course was one of the darkest episodes in human history. Hitler advanced his mine camp goals by strengthening Germany's military, turning it into one of Europe's most advanced forces to pursue Laben's realm. Territorial expansion he deemed

37:56 Germany's right. With each territory the Nazis reclaimed, Britain and France issued diplomatic protests but took no decisive action. Their reluctance to intervene allowed Hitler to press forward unchallenged in his pursuit of territorial expansion. European peace is what I am aiming at. And I hope that this journey may open the way to get it. More farsighted people in Britain and and and France are sort of going, "Well, where's this going to end?" You know, because if you keep giving someone something, they're going to keep wanting more because that's human nature. And

38:42 that's what it did. However, when news spread of Hitler's intention to invade Poland, the Allied powers delivered a firm warning that any further aggression would result in war. Undeterred, Hitler dismissed their threats, confident they would once again fail to follow through. Throughout the course of the 1930s, he had torn up the treaty of Versailles, one clause after another, got what he wanted without the need to resort to war. So in 1938, he got his anelus, his union with Austria. Following that, um, he took the Sudatan land and then the rest of Czechoslovakia. And then it comes to

39:27 this point in September 1939 where he makes his attack on Poland. It was at that moment they went to war. On 1st September 1939, Hitler launched an attack on Poland, marking the start of World War II. For the first time, foreign leaders recognized the extent of Hitler's madness. He introduced the concept of Blitzkrieg or Lightning War to the German public. Within 6 weeks, Poland was crushed by the German army and tens of thousands of Poles were executed. The 2 million Jews living in Poland now found themselves under German rule. Their fate was grim as Hitler viewed anyone outside the Aryan race as

40:13 undeserving of mercy. This was a war that Hitler wanted. He was an outandout aggressor. He'd kind of got all of his aims up until then without even needing to go to war. And yet, it was this moment that sparked the Second World War. Hitler believed that this severe decline in living standards in Germany uh was a result of a an economic crisis that could only really be stopped by military aggression. The German population were a bit more reluctant to go to that war. But with all of these foreign policy successes that Hitler had achieved through the 1930s, his position as infallible and the kind of whole cult of the leadership that surrounded him had only continued to grow. And of course, the first months of the war were very successful for

40:58 Germany with the Blitzkrieg lightning strike on Poland and then very quick successes in the west. Mussolini is watching the progress of Hitler with actually quite a lot of jealousy. He's a bit bitter to be honest, you know, and as he sees each fresh German victory. He gets more and more livid. Uh, and he's starting to express the hope that maybe the Germans will be slowed down or they'll have a defeat or some form of reverse and that will make him feel a little bit better. You know, we don't like it when our friends are too successful and this is what's going on here. But Germany of course just advances westward you know and not only takes all the low countries but even you know takes France and when France is on the verge of collapse uh

41:45 you know Mussolini felt he can't delay any longer so then on June the 10th 1940 there's this fateful declaration of the Furer's ambitions did not end with Poland and Western Europe he later set his sights on Russia a move that would prove to be a significant gamble in his quest for European domination. You know, this desire to just keep fighting and then to start fighting on multiple fronts is ultimately going to lead to Hitler's demise. [Music]

42:30 Throughout the course of the 1930s, he had torn up the treaty of Versailles, one clause after another, got what he wanted without the need to resort to war. So in 1938, he got his anelus, his union with Austria. Following that um he took the Sudatan land and then the rest of Czechoslovakia and then it comes to this point in September 1939 where he makes his attack on Poland. It was at that moment they went to war. On 1st September 1939, Hitler launched

43:16 an attack on Poland, marking the start of World War II. For the first time, foreign leaders recognized the extent of Hitler's madness. He introduced the concept of blitzkrieg or lightning war to the German public. Within 6 weeks, Poland was crushed by the German army and tens of thousands of Poles were executed. The 2 million Jews living in Poland now found themselves under German rule. Their fate was grim as Hitler viewed anyone outside the Aryan race as undeserving of mercy. This was a war that Hitler wanted. He was an outandout aggressor. He'd kind of got all of his aims up until then without even needing to go to war. And

44:03 yet it was this moment that sparked the Second World War. Hitler believed that this severe decline in living standards in Germany uh was a result of an economic crisis that could only really be stopped by military aggression. The German population were a bit more reluctant to go to that war. But with all of these foreign policy successes that Hitler had achieved through the 1930s, his position as infallible and the kind of whole cult of the leadership that surrounded him had only continued to grow. And of course, the first months of the war were very successful for Germany with the Blitz Creed lightning strike on Poland and then very quick successes in the West. Mousolini is watching the progress of Hitler with actually quite a lot of

44:48 jealousy. He's a bit bitter to be honest, you know, and as he sees each a fresh German victory. He gets more and more livid. Uh and he's starting to express the hope that maybe the Germans will be slowed down or they'll have a defeat or some form of reverse and that will make him feel a little bit better. You know, we don't like it when our friends are too successful and this is what's going on here. But Germany of course just advances westward you know and not only takes all the low countries but even you know takes France and when France is on the verge of collapse uh you know Mussolini felt he can't delay any longer so then on June the 10th 1940 there's this fateful declaration of

45:36 the furer's ambitions did not end with Poland and Western Europe he later set his sights on Russia a move that would prove to be a significant gamble in his quest for European domination. You know, this desire to just keep fighting and then to start fighting on multiple fronts is ultimately going to lead to Hitler's demise. [Music] While the German people remain absorbed in the war effort filled with patriotic fervor and support for Hitler's vision, the Nazi regime seizes this distraction

46:22 to unleash its most horrific atrocities in secret. Special death squads were deployed to systematically murder Jews in Nazi occupied territories, resulting in the horrifying execution of approximately 1.5 million Jewish victims by gunfire. By 1941, the Nazis had implemented what they called the final solution. Over the next four years, approximately 6 million Jews were systematically murdered by Hitler's forces, with many spending their final moments inside gas chambers.

47:14 Foreign speech. Foreign speech. Foreign speech. [Music] Turkish can for me.

48:07 is I mean [Music] Hitler's personal anti anti-semitism came to be translated into state policy and as the years progressed the policies became more and more radical. The final solution to the Jewish question um it's a kind of horrific phrase if you like. Um but that was the kind of official name for the murder of all Jews that the Nazis could get their hands on. And it wasn't just restricted to the European continent.

48:56 They tried a variety of different policies from immigration to territorial solutions and eventually they settled on the mass murder of European jewelry through the use of poison gas. The international community had a very good idea from the word go that the Nazis were anti-Semitic. But I don't think anybody believed that Jews were going to be killed on an industrial scale. Uh it was a fullyfledged industrial genocide. The Jews were murdered in thousands at a time in gas chambers and then their

49:42 bodies were subsequently cremated. When the Allied forces turned up at the camps, places like Bellson, uh the world was horrified when they saw the footage that emerged, you know, corpses piled up having to be bulldozed into pits. And the Allied forces when they saw what had been done to all these people in the camps, they often got local Germans in to come and see what had been done in their name. and and obviously they also made you know some of the people running the camps the SS not only help you know clean up the camps and and you know dispose of the bodies but obviously there was also summary justice uh even though it's not kind of officially recorded there are many stories of troops getting absolutely livid with um

50:27 some of the SS who you know ran the camps and just shooting them out of [Music] However, horrors committed by the Third Reich remained largely unknown until the war reached an end. Had Hitler stopped after he had successfully conquered France and the low countries and not decided in June 1941 that he was going to invade this really quite big country called Russia, he may have stayed in power. Tide turned for Germany at the battle of Stalingrad. And I think that the

51:13 feeling that the German population had for him as this infallible leader really changed from that point onwards. This is a war that that Hitler has fought for too long and he's fighting it to the death and he's fighting it to the death of the people who he supposedly loves and he no longer loves them by the end of the war. And and he says that basically the German people don't deserve him. The German people don't deserve Germany and everybody should fight to the death because basically, you know, they don't deserve to be alive because they failed him. Classic narcissistic thinking. the world is for him, you know, and he's not there for the world. So whilst by this point after Stalinrad

51:58 the cult of the leader was diminished somewhat um he'd created this myth of the Soviet hordes and this great Soviet enemy to such an extent that out of fear and out of desperation the both the army and the home front really worked until the bitter end in early 1945. 5. Allied forces advanced through Western Europe with British, American, and Canadian troops pressing from the west while Soviet forces launched a major offensive from the east. By January, the Soviets reached the Oda River. In midappril, they captured Vienna and fully encircled Berlin, sealing Nazi Germany's fate.

52:46 Hitler was now caught in a relentless vice. The first half of 1945 is probably the darkest six months in Germany's history because it's being invaded by, you know, the Russians, the Red Army from the east, and you've got the other allies coming through from the west. And it's it's the Russians who reach Berlin first. And when they reach Berlin, it's a city in rubble. It's a city in flames. It's a city in chaos. It's a city in which um squads are marauding loyal Nazis are going around hanging people who are not taking part in the resistance of the city. It's it's a city in which you then got some Nazis committing suicide. It it is the most benited appalling place you can imagine and you've got the

53:31 Soviet army literally raping and pillaging uh this this city. [Music] Towards the end of the war, of course, Hitler was spending more and more time in his mountain retreat, the Bhoff, and then people were seeing less of him. He was making less and less public appearances. And then um eventually in the last months of the war into the Fura bunker and this is when public opinion of the Fura starts to crumble. Hitler's last days in the in the Fura bunker under the Reich Chancery in the center of Berlin um you know are a kind of terrible end of a Shakespearean tragedy as as the the

54:16 thunder Russian artillery all around them um and they're deep deep inside this sort of concrete underground fortress everybody sort of kind of going mad um and especially Hitler Hitler and the Nazi leadership felt increasingly desperate as the Allied forces advanced closer and closer to Berlin. Nevertheless, in that desperation, they were all the more determined to fight to the bitter end and to bring the nation with them. On the 28th of April, 1945, Mussolini is shot dead by partisans in the north of Italy while he's attempting to flee to try and get on a plane. The day after Mussolini is killed on the 29th of April

55:04 1945, his corpse and that of his mistress Claraara Patachi uh that they're dragged along and they're dumped on the ground in front of the old Pzali Lorto and they're kicked and they're spat upon and then the bodies are then hung upside down from the roof of an Eso petrol station. Um and then the bodies are then stoned. I mean it's kind of endless abuse of these corpses uh by civilians. One man who who sees what happens to Mussolini's corpse and learns from it is of course Adolf Hitler. And it's the abuse of Mussolini's corpse that that leads Hitler to make a decision to actually kill himself. Uh you know a few days later

55:51 on the 30th of April 1945 Hitler committed suicide with his new wife Ava Brown. Um, so he shot himself. She took a cyanide tablet determined to be a beautiful corpse. Hitler committed suicide, but so too did his propaganda chief, Joseph Gerbles. Uh, what was particularly horrific about Gerbles's suicide was that he and his wife actually killed all their children before they killed themselves because they couldn't face the idea of a world without Adolf Hitler. and they didn't think their children should have that fate. [Music] The furer was gone, but the dark stain of the Third Reich would remain etched

56:36 in history forever. The question of how much the Germans knew about what had happened to the Jewish population is very complex. So certainly they knew that their Jewish compatriots were disappearing, being taken away. They were being taken away. They believed, as indeed some of the Jewish people themselves believed, they were taken away to work um in the east.

57:22 During the war, word leaked out from people who had escaped some camps. There were aerial pictures uh taken of places like Achvitz. So, you know, by the middle of the war, uh the world at large had a very good idea that this slaughter was being carried out on an industrial scale. Yes, some rumors did circulate back um from soldiers on leave and um other information did filter back to the Reich, but the the German population was busy with facing its own war, dealing on a day-to-day basis with the course of the war, allied bombings, rationing, food shortages. There was a deliberate policy on the part of the Nazis that this extermination should take place not on

58:10 German soil. So these death camps were all in Poland. So they were out of the direct line of vision of the German population. You know, as as well as places like Achvitz, which were relatively easy to keep quite secret. What people also knew about from troops returning from the front and especially from the eastern front was the Inzat group and the mobile killing squads that went behind the German lines killing anybody they regarded as being an enemy of the Third Reich such as Jews and communists and so on. A and the group and killed millions of people and it was impossible to keep that quiet. So once again, there had been some knowledge but limited knowledge about

58:57 the extent of what the Nazi regime was putting into place in terms of um this genocide that was taking place in in the death camps. When when the Germans fully appreciated what had been done in their name by the Nazis, it took a very long time for that to sink in. If you look at public opinion polls carried out in the 40s and the 50s in Germany, there was still a lot of residual affection for Nazism. It was felt that this was something that had made Germany great again. It was something that had got things moving and done. Yes, there had been excesses, the small matter of the Holocaust clearly, but people some people in Germany were willing just to say if we can divorce the kind of genocide bit from Nazism,

59:42 you know, is Nazism so bad? So there was still this sort of kind of I'm not saying all Germans I mean but a minority of Germans were still you know affectionate uh towards Nazism and towards Hitler but I think yes ultimately when it was shown quite how evil Nazism was and the German people fully appreciated it then yes uh the opinion of Hitler was not quite so positive. [Music] After the discovery of the Nazis atrocities, a process of d-nazification was implemented across Germany. The Nazi party and its symbols, including the swastika, were banned and

1:00:28 promoting national socialist ideologies became a crime punishable by death. Modern Germany today has evolved far beyond its past horrors. But the actions of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party across the Third Reich still leave deep scars. [Music]