Germany, awake!
This rallying call was more potent
that any politician's catchphrase.
It rang out as a cry for salvation.
Germany, awake!
For a nation in turmoil, its identity shaken after a lost war,
the call brought the promise of a new dawn.
United under one symbol and one man.
The call came from a man who understood the magical power of simple imagery.
A man who liked to descend from the clouds to his people
like some kind of god.
Millions were ready to give
unquestioning loyalty to any man
who would promise them what they most needed:
Law and order, a sense of purpose,
and above all, belief in themselves.
Adolf Hitler
appeared to millions of Germans
as the man who could give them all this.
In him they saw the living proof
that the course of history could be bound up with the destiny of one man.
His Minister for Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels expressed it in these words:
Although it may be good to possess power
that is based on guns, it is better
and more gratifying to win the hearts of the people
and to keep them.
Hitler saw himself
as the saviour of a world on the brink of disaster.
And that was the image he cultivated.
He was constantly surrounded by hordes of cameramen.
Their pictures show him as a stylized,
almost monumental figure.
He was preparing his image for posterity.
A superb monument in a glorified setting,
drawing adoring crowds.
The provincial rabble-rouser from Bavaria
rose to be a national leader whose actions shook the world.
It was to be one of the most monstrous careers in history.
He captured the popular imagination
to a degree few politicians have equalled.
More than anyone,
he spread fear and satisfied sentimental longings
for the chosen one who stood alone,
burdened by greatness.
It was essentially a German career.
A career which could only spring from the very roots of German history.
But he also, more than any other man, represented the spirit of his age.
Millions flocked to his banner.
But the old Europe, which he claimed he would save, was already doomed.
And it was this same man who finally destroyed it.
The creative fire that carried him to power
was also a destructive force of unprecedented energy.
People's lives meant nothing to him.
He wanted to dam the course of history.
And his followers, trusting blindly to the last,
believed that he could.
They did not consider the victims.
Thanks to him, Germany and the old Europe
came to a catastrophic and inglorious end.
His success was built on oratory;
his powers of rhetoric attracted a massive following.
Striding through a mysterious semi-darkness
to the stirring sounds of the Badenweiler March
flanked by cheering crowds, he seemed transfigured.
Deep down, he never lost his provincialism. A pathetic little man
with unexceptional features.
But at times like this he took on the glowing charisma of a true demagogue.
For when our party consisted of just seven men,
it already laid down two principles.
Firstly, it aimed to be a party with a true ideology.
Secondly, its uncompromising goal
was to be the one and only power in Germany.
He started out after the First World War
as a right-wing agitator in Bavaria,
where he won a certain notoriety for his extremism.
He was enlisted by one of the tiny political factions
that met in Munich's beer cellars.
They could find a use for another loud-mouthed activist.
But he was passionate and angry, and the crowds responded.
He would make as many as ten speeches in a single day,
always studying and improving his impact on the audience.
He would pore over pictures taken by his photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann,
using them to perfect his poses and gestures.
Already the combination
of manic intensity and cool calculation was plain to see.
"I have made speech, after speech, after speech",
he declared.
Ten years later, he was in power.
A few days after his appointment as chancellor,
he gave a major speech at the Berlin Sports Palace.
At first,
he seems tense and uneasy.
The effeminate face
betrays submissiveness and sexual hunger.
Our Führer, the Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler,
will now speak.
His public appearances were carefully stage-managed.
Nothing was left to chance,
from the size and timing of the rally
to the ritual surrounding his entrance.
He would keep the crowd waiting before the speech began,
deliberately raising the tension to fever pitch.
A fumbling hesitancy marks the beginning.
Fellow Germans!
On January 30th of this year,
the new
national unity
government was formed.
I, and thus the National Socialist movement,
joined its ranks.
I believed...
"A mass rally", said Hitler,
"is designed to switch off the thinking process".
Only then would the people be willing to accept the magical
simplifications
before which all resistance crumbles.
His attack always followed the same pattern.
At that time, the fight against Marxism
was, for the first time,
declared a battle objective.
That was when I first made the vow,
as an unknown individual, to begin this war
and not to rest until this phenomenon is finally
eradicated from German life.
He would bemoan the loss of national self-confidence and pride.
...the loss of its honour and the loss of its standing.
The time came
when one could only express pride in being a German
when one cast his gaze into the past,
though one felt shame when regarding the present.
Our people then had to endure dramatic inflation,
which deprived millions of their savings.
All of this was instigated,
all of it was carried out by, and must be blamed upon,
the men of November 1918!
As the climax approached,
it was as if the spirits spoke through him.
We do not want to lie, we do not want to deceive.
This is why I have...
This is why I have hitherto declined to appear before my people
to make empty promises.
No one here can point to me and assert
that I have ever claimed
that the revival of Germany would be a matter of a few days.
It was his energy, not his reasoning, that made the performance so convincing.
The future of the German people lies within us ourselves.
If we help the German people to rise up once again
by means of our own hard work and diligence,
by our determination, our defiance and tenacity,
then we shall rise again, just as once the founding fathers
had to create Germany themselves and were not handed it as a gift.
As the speech draws to its close,
he stands drained, intoxicated,
as he moves into his grotesque travesty of a prayer.
I cannot withdraw from the love for my people
and I cling firmly to the conviction
that the day will come...
when the millions
who curse us today
will stand beside us and will welcome with us
the Reich we have created together, for which we have fought so hard:
The new German Reich in all its greatness,
its honour, its power and its glory
and justice. Amen.
He has courted and won his audience,
and now their communion is complete.
Incapable of forming satisfactory personal relationships,
he has discovered a kind of substitute fulfilment.
Tired and sweating, he makes his exit
with his henchmen keep the people at a distance from their exhausted hero.
It is a blissful exhaustion bred of satisfaction.
In these performances he saw himself close to fulfilling
his lifelong dream.
The son of the Austrian civil servant
would save the world from impending disaster.
This vision took shape in Vienna, at the turn of the century.
Hitler was 18 when first arrived in the Austrian capital,
intent on becoming a painter.
He was dazzled by the sights and sounds of the city.
He went to the theatre and the opera.
He saw the Ringstrasse with its shops and hotels, and its palatial houses.
He was overwhelmed
by the architectural splendours of the bourgeois world.
He stood gazing at the parliament building,
which he called "a Hellenic marvel on German soil".
He painted it in watercolours.
He even managed to sell his pictures from time to time.
The academy of art rejected him twice for lack
of artistic talent.
He drifted aimlessly, dismissing any idea of a steady job:
The thought of regular work offended his artistic aspirations.
There was much for him to admire in the imperial capital,
but there was also much to make him uneasy.
The Emperor, Franz Joseph,
celebrating 60 years on the throne,
seemed an apt symbol of the ageing
empire: Long-lived, but outdated.
Hitler was dazzled by this vision of opulence.
But the good life eluded him; his home was a men's hostel.
He feared for the future, seeing enemies at every turn.
The red flags had taken to the streets.
The young Hitler mingled with the middle-class bystanders,
nervously watching the marching workers.
He described later how he once stood with bated breath,
watching the human snake wind past,
until he made for home, a victim of fear and depression.
The city's growing population was a volatile racial mix,
with a large Jewish element.
Their world seem frighteningly alien to the bourgeoisie.
Their appearance provoked fantasies of murder and rape
in frightened minds.
Racial fears grew into an ideology
fostered by a series of shoddily-produced pamphlets.
The hero was inevitably the white knight.
The same white knight who rode through the world
of Richard Wagner's operas,
which lay at the root of Hitler's lifelong obsession.
Between the opera and the doss house,
he constructed a monstrous picture of the world.
He took every opportunity to escape from a harsh reality
into his shabby dream world.
"This is true nobility", he wrote on a postcard from Vienna.
This contradiction was to stay with him for the rest of his life.
Bewitched by the splendours of the bourgeois world,
at the same time he deeply resented its rejection of him.
Feelings of hatred festered
underneath his devotion for the decaying beauty of the old world.
That world
was destroyed and buried by the First World War.
Hitler volunteered and joined a Bavarian regiment.
After the war,
the revolution.
It proved the extent of the old world's decay.
For a while, the state was without a leader.
Power was there for the taking out in the streets.
The frightened public witnessed mutiny,
undisciplined troops, riots and shootings.
A hurrah to the New Order.
With the Kaiser gone, Friedrich Ebert
and the Social Democrats set up a bourgeois republic.
The Social Democrats could seize power only through an alliance with the army.
And with the army's help, they stamped out the revolution and restored order.
The result was a state of compromise to which few felt committed.
The revolution had been at its most violent in Bavaria.
For a long time, Munich was swamped with left-wing idealists
with visions of a new world.
Several months later than in Berlin, Free Corps units took over Munich.
These were paramilitary gangs
formed to oppose the ruling workers' councils.
Bavaria was no longer the home of revolution,
but the breeding ground of counter-revolution.
The liberation forces stayed on after the liberation.
Long-serving soldiers who refused to be re-integrated into civilian life.
The war had taught them to see the world in terms of
strict leadership, obedience, and martial law.
That was not going to change.
One of them: Adolf Hitler.
He had served in the war as a frontline messenger, and had won the Iron Cross.
But he was never promoted beyond the rank of corporal.
His superiors felt he lacked the qualities of leadership.
His comrades regarded him as something of an oddity.
Pale and aloof, he kept to himself.
After the war,
Hitler, still in the army, but describing himself as a writer,
took a room in Munich.
He was 30 years old
and frightened at the prospect of civilian life.
A rootless outsider,
he was soon caught up in the political dramas of the time.
He joined one of the innumerable political parties
late in 1919.
The young agitator
soon began to stand out from the crowd.
He became a key figure among the Free Corps and nationalist groups.
His personality began to take shape.
His countless speeches in Munich's beer cellars or in the city streets
were greeted with growing enthusiasm.
At first, his only aim was to drum up support for one greater than himself;
to present to the lost and resentful mob
the man who would lead their struggle against the enemy from outside,
and the enemy within.
The undisputed leader
was General Ludendorff.
Three years later, at the nationalist rally in Nuremberg,
Hitler had already become one of the principal figures.
He had come to the fore because he was impatient and hungry for power,
and also because he despised his reactionary cronies,
whom he regarded as futile relics of a dead age.
He soon began to attract attention in influential circles.
Wealthy society women jostled around the young agitator.
His notoriety grew,
and with it his confidence and his bullying aggression.
"All or nothing" was his maxim.
He attempted a coup d'état.
For a moment it seemed that Munich was in his grasp.
A proclamation to the German people
stated that the Berlin government had been overthrown
and that Ludendorff, Hitler and others
were now the leaders of a national government.
But the coup failed.
At the Hall of Heroes, the 'Feldherrnhalle',
the demonstration in support of Hitler and Ludendorff
was broken up under police gunfire
and Hitler fled in panic.
It seemed as though his career had come to an ignominious end.
In prison, waiting to learn his fate, Hitler fell into a deep depression.
His friends had to talk him out of thoughts of suicide.
But when he heard that he and his fellow conspirators
were to be tried for treason, he sensed that his big chance had come.
This would be the perfect platform for him to reach both the judges
and a mass public beyond the courtroom.
The accused would become the accuser.
Instead of protesting his innocence,
he would assume full responsibility for his actions,
claiming the role of saviour of the Fatherland.
In so doing, he could win fresh support
and turn imminent defeat into a personal triumph.
The plan worked perfectly.
Hitler upstaged the star of the trial,
and General Ludendorff was ousted from the leadership.
A photograph taken during the trial
shows Hitler's new-found self confidence.
Already the Führer,
though still tense and uneasy in the role.
The trial ended
in success and public acclamation for the accused.
Nevertheless, Hitler was sentenced to five years in prison
and was taken to Landsberg.
In prison, he still saw himself as the moral victor,
and soon the abortive putsch was transformed
into a legendary triumph.
He quite simply upended reality.
Years later, he re-staged
the 1923 fiasco again and again
as a march of victory.
Hitler would lay a wreath at the Munich Feldherrnhalle
in memory of the 16 who died on the 9th of November 1923.
From there, the procession would march to the nearby Königsplatz.
Hitler had two shrines erected at the entrance to the square
in memory of those who died that day.
And their names were ceremoniously read out in a roll of honour.
Present!
In these "guard houses of the nation",
it was claimed the movement's fallen heroes
had begun their eternal vigil.
As both director and star of the show,
Hitler solemnly paid his respects alone.
The great leader in his deliberate isolation.
"The 9th of November 1923 was the most fortunate day of my life",
he declared later.
His imprisonment was undoubtedly the turning point of his career.
He had time to work on his new tactics,
and to write 'Mein Kampf'.
Expounding his ideology of anti-Semitism
and the conquest of 'Lebensraum'.
After only a year, he was released on parole.
But his time had not yet come.
The despised republic was now firmly entrenched.
He waited morosely at Obersalzberg
watching Germany's growing infatuation with a culture he despised.
"Nigger-loving" was his characteristically offensive name for it.
As a politician, he was all but forgotten.
Not even the affair with his niece Geli attracted much attention.
Pictures of country life.
It was in cosmopolitan Berlin,
enjoying its finest hour,
that Hitler saw the embodiment of everything he loathed.
Political intrigue,
communists,
Jews.
His admonitions went unheard.
He was still out in the cold.
He came across as just another eccentric from the crazy twenties.
While Berlin fêted Charlie Chaplin,
who was later to film his classic parody of the great dictator,
Hitler was perfecting the role.
He'd learnt the lesson of the abortive coup:
From now on, Hitler avoided open violence
and presented himself as a respectable citizen.
He developed a taste for wearing dark suits
and surrounding himself with children in white.
"If we can't outshoot our opponents", he said, explaining his tactics,
"we must overwhelm them by force of numbers.
We must win support instead of spreading terror".
These new tactics held great promise for the future,
but first he had to organize his own party.
Not yet the undisputed leader,
Hitler was still working on his style.
Often his performance was awkward, even grotesque,
but he was learning all the time.
He imitated the mannerisms of the military leaders
to impress the lower ranks.
He made up for any lack in personal authority
by carrying a whip.
When old comrades-in-arms tried to be too familiar, Hitler became annoyed.
Julius Streicher was firmly put in his place.
Still, the performances were liable to backfire.
He was not yet the Führer he wanted to be.
In three years, he succeeded in organizing the National Socialists
into a tightly-knit party.
Local branches were springing up, many of them motorized.
Hitler paid particular attention to converting the young.
He offered what they wanted: Adventure, discipline,
and a chance to rebel against the staid world of their parents.
About two-thirds of the SA, the party's storm troopers,
were under 30 years old.
Every year, Hitler held a party rally at Nuremberg.
Supporters came from all over the country
to take part and to see their leader.
The National Socialists were still only a minority party,
but they were exceptionally well organized and it seemed as if they would stop at nothing.
This determination made a profound impression, even on the uncommitted.
People were becoming increasingly intrigued
by a man who could attract such a large and devoted following.
At the great closing parade,
thousands crowded into the Nuremberg market place,
hoping to see the party leader.
Hitler was already a past master at staging a political rally
as if it were a carnival.
People had experienced nothing like this since the days of the Kaiser.
Even Hitler could be caught up in the carnival spirit; the potent mixture of
uniforms, colour, and festivity.
But here he comes closer to his image of himself:
A man with a mission, grim and ready for battle.
He was all set to save Germany.
But Germany kept him waiting.
His moment came
to the all-too-familiar accompaniment
of riots and street fighting.
In 1929, the world was in the grip of an economic crisis.
In Germany,
unemployment figures topped three million.
Two years later, they had doubled.
It was the hour of the radicals.
Hardship and poverty were everywhere.
People felt that they were wasting their lives away.
The National Socialists countered the general malaise
with a message of refreshing optimism and bonhomie.
They had no solution to the problem of poverty.
They offered the public fun rather than theories.
Instead of haranguing the people
about exploitation and class warfare,
they gave them a sense of belonging.
All over the country, self-help programmes were set up,
and labour pools organized by party members
such as the Mayor of Coburg.
"Anyone who hasn't got a shirt to his back can always put on a brown shirt",
ran the motto.
And there was soup, too.
All this increased the National Socialists' popularity.
The crisis brought new members and new sympathizers.
The party organization was proving its worth:
Thousands of new recruits were netted in a nationwide campaign.
In public,
Hitler displayed concern about the widespread hardship,
while at the same time doing all he could to aggravate the crisis.
He knew this was his big chance.
And soon he felt he was in a position to go to the capital
and seize his opportunity.
As early as 1926
he had sent Joseph Goebbels to Berlin as Gauleiter to prepare the ground.
The Nazi party's most resourceful rabble-rouser
took his assault force straight into red territory.
His attack was not aimed at the weak and uncertain republicans,
but at the Communists.
Ernst Thälmann was the Communist leader.
In the jargon of the time, this was called a "march of provocation".
Soon, an underground civil war broke out.
Almost every weekend brought its toll of dead and wounded.
The republic had little real authority left,
but it had the stronger weapons.
The republic was tottering.
Just as the economic crisis began to bite,
it had lost its last commanding personality:
Gustav Stresemann.
With his death, the agony of the Weimar Republic began.
People sensed that anyone who remained loyal to the republic
was in for a hard time.
And Hitler was at the gates.
The conquering hero was waiting in the wings.
He had taken full advantage of the crisis;
now he was ready to step into the limelight: the great saviour.
"Never in all my life have I felt so happy", he announced.
People were flocking to him.
They followed him wherever he went.
They were even prepared to get beaten up for him.
And Hitler was revelling in the part he had rehearsed and wanted for so long.
The middle classes now pinned their hopes on him.
They looked to his energy and his determination
to succeed where their old parties had failed.
Hugenberg's conservative right was anxious to enlist this rising demagogue
for their purposes. Here was a man who could win them mass support.
In the autumn of 1931,
they invited Hitler to a joint rally at Bad Harzburg.
Hugenberg's plan was going badly wrong.
Hitler kept them waiting.
He was not interested in an alignment with the conservatives,
he was not prepared to be used by others.
Harzburg was intended to be the signal for an all-out attack
on the republic by the forces of the right.
But the great alliance of conservatives and National Socialists
came to nothing.
It failed because of Hitler.
His self-confidence had grown.
Hitler intended to conquer power alone.
He was not open to bribery, he was not in league with big business.
He accepted money,
but only when it was given unconditionally.
In spring 1932 he made
his first propaganda tour by air,
covering 20 cities in seven days.
Five election campaigns
were fought in one single year.
Hitler was intent on destroying democracy
by taking advantage of democratic means.
"Hitler over Germany."
This ambiguous slogan was used to advertise
the tour.
For some it spelt out a threat,
to others it meant salvation.
One fact became increasingly clear as his campaign progressed:
Nothing could stop Hitler now.
His vision was unmatched by any other politician.
He seemed omnipresent,
it was almost uncanny.
And this helped promote the idea that he was not so much a politician
as some sort of Messiah.
But it was all engineered with military precision.
1932 was the year of Hitler's
most spectacularly successful speeches.
It was also the year
in which the Nazi Party became the most powerful in the country.
What appealed most to people was his promise that everything was going to be different.
Time and again he would
tell them that he shared in their problems,
that he understood their anxieties.
He was one of them.
Life had been no kinder to him than to them.
And like them, he had turned to politics
out of a sense of desperation.
He was indefatigable, constantly on the move.
Hitler himself spoke of those years of incessant chasing around,
chasing after new converts.
He would travel anywhere to meet them.
Goebbels spoke rather pompously of a world record
in personal encounters.
Hitler left the people in no doubt about his intentions.
We are intolerant. I have set myself a goal.
Namely, to sweep away the 30 political parties in Germany.
Bravo!
They constantly mistake me for a conservative or Marxist
politician,
who may be in the SPD today, then the USPD or KPD tomorrow, then a syndicalist,
or today a democrat, and tomorrow in the Deutsche Volkspartei,
and then in the Economic Party...
They take us for people of their kind.
We have chosen our goal and will pursue it with fanatical ruthlessness
all the way to the grave.
That was his aim: To tear down social barriers.
All were to free themselves of their conventional ties
and be united in a new
community of the people.
Any man who put his trust in Hitler
could count on his protection.
The frightened middle classes, the working man, or the unemployed.
His energetic platitudes were directed at everybody.
Governments come and go, but the people remain.
The republican government was powerless to stem the growing tide of chaos.
Its supporters kept out of sight,
leaving police to fight the government's battles against the enemies of the state.
Storm troopers under arrest in Berlin.
Hitler over Germany.
His goal was in sight.
His subordinates were waiting at the airfield.
Göring and the leader of the storm troopers, Ernst Röhm.
Hitler's audience now numbered hundreds of thousands.
People had no idea that the party was in the throes
of a major crisis.
The National Socialists had been rejected at the last election,
the party leadership was divided,
and there were financial problems.
For Hitler, this was all the more reason to step up his smear campaign.
They do not mention the tens of thousands
who, year after year,
take their own lives.
And not because they have it so good...
He was still determined to bring about the downfall of the republic.
He left no one in any doubt about that.
...created such a movement out of nothing.
They may oppress us!
They may even kill us. But we shall not surrender!
In January 1933,
the republic was finished.
Heil!
Yet all Hitler's energy, all his inflammatory speeches,
were not in themselves enough to carry him to power.
It took the resignation of his opponents to give him what he wanted.
Weary of the endless battles, they finally caved in.
On the morning of January 30th 1933,
Hitler went to the presidential palace.
Hindenburg appointed him chancellor.
Shortly after 11.00 A.M., the new cabinet was sworn in.
Please take a seat, Herr Vice Chancellor.
Hitler feigned a courteous manner.
But he reserved an angry glare for Hugenberg.
A word of dissent from him had almost ruined everything
at the last minute.
Too late.
Three Nazis were confronted by eight conservatives.
That would contain Hitler. That, at least, was the idea.
On the evening of January the 30th,
Hindenburg looked pensively down on the marching brown-shirted columns,
celebrating their victory with a torchlight procession.
A few windows away: Hitler.
He made it quite clear who the real victor was.
This was his army
and it was going to win him total power.
Ostensibly it was no more than a change of government,
but everyone sensed it was just a prelude to complete upheaval.
Four weeks later the Reichstag,
the German Parliament, was burning.
Whoever started the fire,
only the Nazis stood to gain.
That same night, a wave of arrests began.
The National Socialists worked their way busily to the top.
They called it "seizure of power".
To start with, Hitler demanded a better showing at the elections.
His brown-shirted storm troopers provided the intimidation.
On the eve of the election, Hitler went to Königsberg.
For the first time, every radio station in Germany
was instructed to broadcast the chancellor's speech.
People from the most remote towns and villages hurried here,
young and old were filled with anticipation
of the arrival of a man who embodied all their hopes.
Thunderous cheering accompanied...
Yet despite all the effort and all the pressure,
the National Socialists
polled only 43.9 percent of the votes.
But added to the conservative vote it was enough to give them a narrow majority.
On March the 21st,
the new Reichstag convened at Potsdam.
Hitler had planned a great
ceremony of national reconciliation to try to wipe out
the memory of the violence
which had marred his first weeks in power.
At the old Prussian Memorial, all difference were to be buried.
The presence of Hindenburg, the ageing field marshall,
gave the proceedings the melancholy aura
of something from a bygone age.
At noon,
the assembly gathered in the Garrison Church
at the grave of Frederick the Great.
Excluded were the Communists, who had been arrested,
and the Social Democrats.
The government of national uprising is determined
to carry out the task given it by the German people.
This sight set many anxious minds at rest.
The new chancellor
standing respectfully at the side of old Hindenburg.
The new men were usurping the old traditions.
Hindenburg was a mere figurehead.
Unaware of what was going on around him,
he represented the surrender of the revered past.
Only those who have reverence for the history of our people
are able to guide its future.
When you are going about your daily business
and you think back to this day,
remember this, my warning.
On that note, let us all proclaim:
Germany our beloved fatherland.
Hurrah!
And then, Hitler.
Boys of Germany!
Girls of Germany!
Our Reich President, General Field Marshal von Hindenburg:
All hail!
Germany's "community of the people" was becoming a reality.
Hitler's next move was to proclaim May the 1st
a national holiday with pay.
This was something generations of workers had fought for in vain.
Now it was theirs.
The German people
are no longer the people of infamy,
of disgrace, of self-flagellation,
of faint-heartedness and scepticism.
No, Lord, the German people have become strong once more
in their spirit, strong in their will,
strong in their tenacity,
strong in enduring every sacrifice.
Lord, we bid that you bless
our struggle for freedom
and thus our struggle for the German people and the Fatherland.
Heil!
The evening ended with hopes of unity,
as though Hitler had abolished class conflict.
The following day brought a return to violence.
Storm troopers occupied trade union offices,
meeting with no resistance.
In the end, all those who opposed Hitler
were gradually subdued or rendered powerless.
Soon, Hitler was able to tell a workers assembly:
...there will some among you who cannot forgive me
for having destroyed the Marxist Party.
But, my friend, I destroyed the other parties too...
"Community of the people":
"Volksgemeinschaft".
No one could opt out.
Everyone was brought into line with the new order.
They called it "Gleichschaltung": Unification.
It reached everybody,
even the country people.
On January 30th, the die was cast in Germany.
And I do not believe
that our opponents, who laughed back then, are laughing now.
Germans, defend yourselves! Don't buy from Jews!
Indeed, his opponents had nothing to laugh about now.
For some time, the SA picketed Jewish businesses.
They were itching to go further.
But Hitler did not yet feel strong enough to give full vent
to his old hatred of the Jews.
On May the 10th 1933,
a bonfire was lit in every university town.
Students hurled the works of banned authors
into the flames.
In Berlin, Goebbels gave an inflammatory speech.
Therefore you are well advised,
at this midnight hour,
to consign the phantoms of the past to the flames.
The first Jews saw what was coming and left the country.
In the spring of 1933, the first concentration camps were set up.
No one wanted to see such pictures; it was all too embarrassing,
too shameful, too disturbing.
The misery of the victims
was drowned by jolly songs and joviality.
The terror behind the barbed wire
was covered with a gloss of family fun and folklore.
They were all one big, happy family.
Or nearly all.
Albert Einstein no longer belonged.
Nor did Thomas Mann.
But after all, many believed you can't have a revolution
without people getting hurt.
Max Reinhardt had to emigrate.
So did Fritz Kortner.
In desperation, Richard Tauber also left.
There was no place for them in the new German "Kultur".
Ernst Lubitsch had already gone. Countless others followed.
They left Germany to its "community of the people"
and its provincialism.
The German cinema did what it could to fill the breach;
Otto Gebühr stayed on.
We are playing out a drama that dates from a time
in which duty and sacrifice made a people great.
But our modern times demand duty and sacrifice too.
Give all you can to support the German People's Winter Relief.
And soon, other notables were roped in.
It was compulsory hotpot for all on Sundays.
The community of the people was gathering momentum.
Buttonhole souvenirs of Hitler
sold in their thousands.
But there were still five million unemployed in Germany.
Hitler knew that everything depended on his handling of the unemployment issue.
Before six years have passed, a monumental work shall attest
to our willpower, our hard work, our skill
and our strength of purpose.
German workers, set to work!
There was a sort of general mobilization.
Work began on the Autobahn.
He covered the length and breadth of the country,
launching the "Arbeitsschlacht",
the battle of work.
He radiated confidence, and his confidence was infectious.
Laying the foundation stone for the new
House of German Art in Munich.
The stone has been laid!
Many projects dated from long before his time:
The Autobahns, for example,
which are still linked with his name today.
This dynamism enhanced the regime's popularity.
People felt that things were improving.
But Hitler had not only promised work and bread.
The nation had never recovered
from the humiliation inflicted by the victors of the First World War.
Under him, national pride was to be restored.
We will not operate according to dictates!
Someone in Germany must stand up and say, "We want peace,
but we reject this constant oppression.
We cannot endure this austerity."
By the summer of 1933, Hitler had almost achieved his goal.
Growing confidence showed in his bearing.
The first phase of his seizure of power was complete.
But conflict lay ahead.
Hitler was in danger of being caught in the crossfire
between the country's two opposing armed forces.
The Reichswehr, the national defence force,
and the SA,
the four million storm troopers that Hitler had used during his rise to power.
The leader of the SA, Ernst Röhm, wanted to wipe out
the Reichswehr,
leaving his storm troopers as the only armed force.
And he wanted to stage a real revolution to seize power by force.
But this was not how Hitler saw the revolution.
His plan was to undermine the state from within.
Repeatedly, he had to call the SA to order.
A great era
has now begun.
And we are
its living witnesses...
Hitler was still undecided.
But Röhm's successor was already waiting right behind him:
Heinrich Himmler, chief of the SS.
A revolution is happening in Germany,
which differs from all the similar,
earlier predecessors of its kind,
due to the unprecedented discipline and meticulous planning
of its execution.
If an army is the arms bearer of a nation,
then you must be the bearers of its will,
who shall shape the political future of the German nation.
Röhm was not an easy man to move.
He was a maverick, aggressive and overbearing,
though not without a certain dog-like devotion to his master.
For a time, Hitler tried to bribe Röhm
by singling him out for honours.
Despite this, the conflict intensified.
At last, Hitler resorted to his tried and trusted double game.
Accompanied by an intimidating SS guard,
he turned up at an SA meeting.
SA, SS. Heil!
But the turn of his speech was curiously pleading, almost tearful.
I would like to thank you for not having faltered,
for not having abandoned me in that time.
Because you alone must take credit for all of this.
If you had turned away back then,
Germany would never have been saved.
Today you have earned the right,
due to your courage and determination,
to consider yourselves the saviours of the people and the Fatherland.
Sieg Heil!
At the end of June 1934, Hitler struck.
Röhm and nearly all the leading figures in the SA
were assassinated.
This time, it wasn't the Red Front
or the reactionaries reviled in the storm troopers' battle song
who pulled the trigger: It was their own comrades.
The murders shocked and alarmed the public.
But at the same time, people were thankful
that Hitler had removed the threat of the revolutionary SA.
They convinced themselves that the movement
had just come of age and would behave itself from now on.
It was an illusion which Hitler nurtured carefully.
A month later,
President Hindenburg died.
At Tannenberg, the nation mourned a man
who had been little more than a figurehead for some time.
Nevertheless, he had been the last
obstacle in Hitler's path.
Hitler had waited impatiently for this day.
Now he was in total control.
Two days later, the Reichswehr surrendered.
In the name of God...
I make this solemn vow...
to pledge the Führer of the German Reich and its people,
Adolf Hitler...
the Wehrmacht Supreme Commander...
my unconditional obedience...
In return for the murder of his old friend,
SA chief Röhm,
Hitler exacted a personal oath of allegiance from all armed forces.
At last, Hitler had assumed full power.
The Nuremberg Party Rally in September 1934
celebrated the new order.
Hitler announced to his party officials
that the transfer of power was complete.
"For the next thousand years", he declared,
"there will be no more revolutions in Germany."
No regime had ever proclaimed itself with such ostentation.
Forests of banners and marching columns
moved in endless permutations and patterns
through the massed ranks of the people.
The confusion of recent years had left its mark.
But for those who were alarmed by all the chaos and anarchy,
Hitler had repeatedly promised that under him everything would be different.
This was his answer:
He did not give the people their rights,
what he gave them was the fascination of geometry.
The climax of the rally was the homage to the dead.
Huge blocks of people formed the so-called "Road of the Führer".
With Himmler and the new SA chief Lutze behind him,
Hitler advanced to the memorial.
The regime never learned to honour life,
but it got plenty of mileage out of the cult of death.
All the regime's ceremonies displayed three basic elements:
power, order, solemnity.
The displays were designed to give people a moment of elevation,
preparing them for a submissive return to everyday life.
Hitler had seized power, he had brought the people into line.
Now he could direct his attention to foreign politics.
The Saar territory was returned to Germany.
That was the first step.
Shortly afterwards, Hitler broke the treaty of Versailles
by introducing conscription.
Then he began to re-arm Germany.
Soon he risked another bold step forward.
On March the 7th, 1936,
he sent his troops marching into the demilitarized Rhineland.
For the first time, he was throwing down the gauntlet.
Within Germany, his opponents had always backed down.
How other nations would react, he did not know.
It was a risk he was prepared to take.
The reoccupation of the Rhineland by our troops
was the most difficult
and boldest task
and undertaking of my life.
On the whole, the German people were not unhappy.
True, some problems remained:
The persecution of minorities,
the encroachments of the party, the feeling of insecurity.
But the long period of internal and external unrest
seemed to be over.
People went peacefully about their business
against a background of rampant injustice.
The republic and its endless conflicts belonged to the past.
Unemployment and humiliation by foreign powers were forgotten.
Wrapped up in their private lives,
most people withdrew into moral indolence.
And the regime
worked hard on its popular image.
A car! Do you want to have it?
There, you see!
Christmas celebrations in the totalitarian welfare state.
Now Uncle Göring will speak.
I am happy and pleased that you have all turned up...
so that we can celebrate the Christmas festival together.
And now, my dear children, let us take a moment
to think of our Führer.
It fell to Göring to give despotism a human face.
But then came more intimidation.
All the time, the regime had two faces,
striking a calculated psychological balance between fear
and the fairground.
On the one hand black uniforms, submission to strict discipline,
and the threat of a growing terror machine,
on the other, the sentimental interludes.
Occasionally Hitler himself, looking distinctly uncomfortable,
would play his part.
Twin faces of terror and joviality,
united in one man: SS leader Sepp Dietrich.
Under Heinrich Himmler,
the SS was built up as the ideological avant-garde of the regime.
It grew into a gigantic
network of bureaucratic departments
whose task was suppression and terrorization...
for the moment, only inside Germany.
The organization grew in the middle of an unsuspecting Europe,
ready to exterminate and rule.
The regime organized totalitarian welfare:
"Strength Through Joy" on steamers
to Madeira and the Norwegian fjords.
The good life
guarded by the nation's might.
Seduction of the people by social welfare programmes.
There was intense activity on the socio-political front.
A year's national service was introduced for girls.
It was usually spent working on the land.
Large families were encouraged.
The future of Germany and the future of Berlin
relies on its genetically healthy children.
Nazi leaders never tired of saying the German people were short of living space,
while adding still further to the population pressure.
These young people were to be soldiers in the fight for Lebensraum.
For this purpose, they were militarized.
Boys and girls were recruited at an early age
and prepared for their role
in the National Socialist state.
Heil Hitler!
Good work! - Thank you.
Ilse, how's your farmer girl doing? Is she well again?
Yes, she's better, thank you.
What's nicer, Helga? Going to school or doing the washing?
Hard work does you good. - Say hello from me. - Thank you.
The regime exploited their good will,
taking advantage of their youthful romantic idealism
and their natural longing for comradeship.
"The future of Germany lies in the
organized military camps," Hitler declared.
Hitler was constantly summoning the young to mass rallies.
Here, the spirit of the new order became a sensual experience for them.
Here they learned that the individual was nothing,
the community everything.
Besides, Hitler saw in them
the seed of a new race upon which
he'd built his ideas of salvation.
We must create a new man...
so that our people do not
succumb to the symptoms of degeneration
that are typical of modern times.
It is our view that German boys of the future
must be lean and slender,
nimble as a greyhound, tough as leather and as hard as Krupp steel.
In summer 1936, the Olympic Games were held in Berlin.
This was the regime's chance to play host to the world.
World opinion believed Germany to be rearming feverishly under a reign
of terror.
Hitler deliberately presented idyllic scenes of a nation
enjoying peace and busy contentment.
It was all so convincing.
Most nations joined
in the Hitler salute. Not so the British.
But the French, among many others, were carried away.
The deception had succeeded.
The Third Reich was well able to show itself off to its foreign visitors
as a modern industrial state. In many fields it led the world.
There was still the odd discordant detail to spoil the picture:
The glorification of blood,
soil and farm life, for instance.
Or the revival of the ancient Germanic drama.
But these tended to be written off as mere fads,
like the cult of the blood banner of 1923,
whose mystic power was supposed to flow
into all other banners and flags.
But these were not mere fads.
They showed how deeply the regime's roots
sank into the sinister depths of a magical past.
The ominous undercurrents
surfaced even in the midst of exuberant celebrations.
Hitler was not unduly conscientious
about his routine duties as chancellor.
In his youth he had dreamed of a life spent drifting around in style.
Now the dream was coming true.
An opinionated dilettante on a merry-go-round of travel and speeches.
He was in great demand, he made sure of that.
The whole of Germany had become his stage.
There was always a guaranteed audience and a full supporting cast.
He had never found the idea of regular work appealing.
"A single stroke of genius", he would say,
"is more valuable than a lifetime of uninspired drudgery."
It was the old fantasy of the artist's life.
He was seldom to be seen in Berlin.
It was as though he was always running away from his duties.
This blatant indolence provoked Oswald Spengler's remark
that the Third Reich
was the organization of those who couldn't get any work
by those who wouldn't do any.
He moved restlessly from stage to stage.
The Führer contributes to the Winter Aid Organization.
He knew how to adapt to his audience.
Workers were fed with the myth of the dictator's years of toil and hardship.
...and by my own hard work
by studying, and I must say, starving, I slowly worked my way up.
Leading a life of idleness
after a series of visits, receptions, and speeches,
he would grow vague and apathetic.
But the sound of applause would rouse him from his torpor
in time to make yet another speech.
Let us welcome the greatest worker of the people,
Adolf Hitler.
Before us lies Germany,
within us marches Germany, and behind us comes Germany.
He played his various parts with consummate skill.
But occasionally the switch was too abrupt even for him.
Hitler's aimless wanderings gave the people the impression
that their Führer was omnipresent.
During those years, he rarely stayed
in one place for any length of time.
He was a regular visitor to the Bayreuth Festival.
And frequently a private guest
of Winifred Wagner.
His pleasures were as changeable as his moods.
There was a constant stream of visitors
who were treated to a wordy explanation of his pet projects.
This time the audience was a group of British war veterans.
...of Schleswig-Holstein will be embanked with dikes.
He had a passion for architecture, and whatever the pressures of political life,
he always found time to indulge his architectural leanings.
With Albert Speer and other architects
he planned the rebuilding of numerous cities,
often producing sketches of his ideas.
Everything was to be on a monumental scale.
"If I hadn't become involved in politics", he would say, "I would have been
one of Germany's finest architects".
Albert Speer's new chancellery was one such project.
It was built in nine months; one of the few buildings to be completed.
The rest never got beyond the planning stage.
Hitler's study was seldom used.
The desk was merely an ornament.
The cabinet room met a similar fate:
No cabinet meeting was ever held there.
And then, out of a clear blue sky,
Austria was showered with swastikas.
It was the 12th of March 1938,
and Hitler
had finally emerged from his self-imposed inactivity.
He crossed the border near his birthplace at Braunau.
The people rejoiced at this first act of expansion,
which they saw as the fulfilment of an old dream of the German nation:
The "Anschluss".
An emphatic display of self-determination.
A right denied to the German people under the Versailles Treaty,
whose terms were generally considered unjust.
Therefore, the foreign powers would not interfere.
Visibly moved,
he entered Vienna.
And the city
that had seen his early failures now gave him a hero's reception.
Homage was being paid to the man
who had achieved the unification of the German people.
From the balcony of the imperial palace, he announced:
As the Führer
and Chancellor of the German Reich and nation,
I hereby make this historical announcement to mark the entry
of my homeland into the German Reich.
Without the tacit approval of fascist Italy,
the "Anschluss" would not have been possible.
Benito Mussolini had sacrificed
his old friendship with Austria
for the sake of a new alliance with Adolf Hitler.
And Hitler was grateful.
Hitler had worked hard to win favour with Italy's dictator.
Mussolini's distrust of the powerful northern state
was overcome only when Hitler lent his support
to the Duce's aggressive foreign policy.
The personal bond between the two
was strengthened during visits to each other's country.
Their political alliance became,
in their emotive fascist terminology,
the axis on which the destiny of the world would turn.
Mussolini's visit to Germany
in the autumn of 1937
ended with a nocturnal rally in the Olympic Stadium in Berlin.
There was ambitious talk of world power.
Fascist Italy has become, due to the ingenious creativity
of a man of action,
a new empire.
Benito Mussolini, in the coming days
you will witness the reality of the National Socialist state:
Germany too, with its public spirit and military strength,
has become a world power again.
Mussolini declared his loyalty to Hitler, for better or for worse.
It was his virtual surrender to Hitler,
the man he had despised.
...that our two great peoples,
whose growing throng now numbers an immense
115 million people,
stand shoulder to shoulder in unified, unwavering resolve.
"Floods of rain, floods of emotion, and clever choreography"
was the ironic verdict of Count Ciano, the Italian foreign minister.
Hitler's propaganda experts preferred to hold their ceremonies at night.
Time and again,
they organized torchlight processions to lend the proceedings a demoniac glow.
The fascist cult of fire
was an omen of the fire that was to consume the world.
The darkness also served to disguise
what was often a very ordinary setting.
Hitler did not relish the sight of his party officials, who had grown fat
and complacent in office.
They did not correspond to his vision of the movement and its mission.
For many it is an enigma and a mystery
how these hundreds of thousands of people were united,
and how hardship leads them to endure suffering, and deprivation.
This order was not given by any mortal superior!
It was given by God, who created our people!
It was a setting that looked like a funeral pyre.
Hitler himself became enthralled
by the mystical spectacle he had created.
It was a foretaste of the approaching holocaust.
For a long time the shrewd politician in Hitler
had held his desire for self-glorification in check.
But now he began to be taken in by the adulation that surrounded him.
At the Munich art exhibition, a portrait of the Führer,
selected by himself, was the centrepiece.
Many Germans expected him to lead them
into a golden age.
In their blindness, they never suspected
that his only goal was war.
Six months after marching into Austria
Hitler was again reaching across Germany's frontiers,
this time to grab a piece of Czechoslovakia.
Britain and France sent their heads of state to Germany.
Neville Chamberlain wanted peace at any price.
Édouard Daladier, the French prime minister,
was equally committed to avoiding war.
The people of Munich cheered them.
At Hitler's headquarters in the Brown House,
the democratic leaders were expected.
Mussolini had arrived some hours earlier.
The two leaders had already made their decisions.
Sudetenland was to be ceded to Germany.
When the British and French delegates arrived at the conference,
there was nothing left to discuss.
Daladier and Chamberlain signed the agreement
concocted by the axis partners.
Once again, Hitler had gambled everything and won.
That had always been the simple secret of his success.
Two days later, German troops marched into the Sudetenland.
They were welcomed as liberators.
For twenty years, the Sudeten Germans had lived as a minority
in a multi-racial Czechoslovak state;
a situation dictated by the terms of the treaty of Versailles.
For them, it was like a home-coming.
For Hitler, it was another stage in his conquest of land.
They called it
"the War of Flowers".
Such scenes made it easy for Hitler
to claim that he had remedied an injustice
without resorting to open force.
Violence was practised behind the scenes.
The feelings Hitler's appearance aroused
cannot be classed as purely political.
There was also a religious and erotic element in them.
He was invested with mythical potency.
Subconscious desires reached a climax
in outbursts like these.
Hitler stood like an idol
inviting abandon, promising release.
Then reaching down to break the tension.
The sexual overtones are obvious.
But his own image of the Führer
was rather of a monumental figure
standing unmoved
amid the excitement and hysteria.
Distance turned belief into religious fervour.
For years he had moved among cheering crowds.
However artificially the mass enthusiasm was generated,
he found in it the justification
for his authority.
But at the same time he responded to the element of eroticism
underlying the display.
His words betrayed as much.
Where are the democracies of other nations?
Where else is it possible
that a people and its leaders,
a nation and its government,
converge in such a manner,
standing shoulder to shoulder in mutual support?
He was constantly recharged by these encounters with his followers.
Recharged for new acts of aggression.
In November 1938, he ordered
the burning of the synagogues.
He wanted to mobilize his people by building up a fictitious enemy: the Jew.
The next aim for aggression: Prague.
In the spring of 1939, regardless of all his promises,
Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia.
With his troops,
he entered the old royal castle overlooking the city.
From the window of Hradčany Castle he acknowledged the applause
of a hastily assembled crowd.
This was no longer a war of flowers.
Now he was openly flanked by SS men.
Himmler and Heydrich accompanied the conqueror
whilst their henchmen occupied the country.
A wave of fear and horror swept through Europe.
People were dismayed to read
of mobilization.
Farewells
and despair.
And at last came the decision
to fight back.
Lord Halifax declared that he could well understand
Hitler's preference for bloodless victories
but that from now on bloodshed was inevitable.
Hurriedly, the nations began to organize some form of defence.
It was a poorly planned,
largely improvised affair.
No one was properly prepared.
A carefree and unsuspecting Europe
had suddenly to face the prospect of war.
For weeks after entering Prague,
Hitler celebrated his 50th birthday.
He marked the occasion with a huge military parade.
He was now determined to go all the way.
Europe's fears only aroused his contempt.
"I saw my enemies at Munich", he said. "They were little worms."
The centre of Berlin had been turned into a vast military encampment.
Hitler wanted the parade to fire the enthusiasm of the hesitant German public.
He was still annoyed about the ovation
Chamberlain and Daladier had received in Munich.
He issued orders for a large contingent
of foreign visitors to be invited to the celebrations,
including as many representatives as possible
from the "cowardly democratic nations", as he called them.
He would parade before them the most modern army on Earth.
For four hours, units from every branch of the armed services
marched past the platform.
Visible proof of the frantic re-armament which Hitler had inaugurated.
From the beginning of his career,
Hitler had set out his aims:
The conquest of Lebensraum in the East,
and ultimately world domination.
Germany's armed might was to be the instrument to achieve these aims,
despite his protestations that he only wanted peace.
The parade along the newly constructed East-West Road
made a deep impression on the masses.
The German people saw the whole performance simply
as a confirmation of the fact that their country was once again strong.
And they were jubilant.
Peace would now be more secure, they thought.
Birthday festivities.
But Hitler only thought of war.
Once again, the forests of banners passed by in dramatic array,
with Hitler posing as custodian of a tradition that really meant nothing to him
other than just a background against which he could demonstrate his art of deception.
Hitler's talent for the theatrical was plainly visible behind the special effects.
Once more, but for the last time, death was glamorized
in a manner recalling the world of Wagner's operas,
from which Hitler drew so much inspiration.
The spectacle was both colourful
and awe-inspiring.
The motorized army that was to fight the coming war.
And then nostalgia for the Prussian past.
As a finale, the Wehrmacht made an extravagant gesture
of submission to their commander in chief.
Six years later,
these same banners lay in the dust of Moscow's Red Square.
Posed pictures were released to mislead the world.
Visitors who flocked to the Obersalzberg house
met a pleasantly relaxed and cheerful Hitler
who gave them hours and hours of his time.
Finally, he would retire into the Berghof.
Eva Braun, his mistress, recorded his private world on film.
It was always the same round of people.
A few close friends with their wives, aides and secretaries.
Ribbentrop, Hitler's foreign minister.
And Josef Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda.
He had come from Berlin for the occasion.
Albert Speer, Hitler's favourite architect, who had a house of his own
on the Obersalzberg.
Hitler himself seldom emerged from his isolation.
Himmler and Heydrich,
the dreaded SS chiefs, in their reassuring middle-class clothes.
There was rough horseplay on the terrace.
Hitler took little part in it all.
In some ways, he was still the same awkward and unsociable corporal.
Eva Braun fared little better than the others.
Most of the time, she was left to her own devices,
amusing herself as she could.
Recalling the atmosphere of the Berghof, Albert Speer remembers
only a sense of oppression and emptiness.
But this bleakness was something Hitler took with him wherever he went.
When he left the house for important engagements and mass rallies,
the loneliness went with him.
Only the setting changed.
Over the years, the Berghof had almost become his official residence.
It was used increasingly for the reception
of visiting statesmen and diplomats.
The Italian Foreign Minister, Count Ciano, was one such visitor.
Hitler loved to imitate his guests.
Then he was himself again.
There are few pictures showing Hitler with Eva Braun.
Outside the inner circle,
few knew of her existence.
To outsiders she was just another member of the Obersalzberg staff.
Hitler's daily stroll was an important ritual.
To be allowed to walk at his side or accompany him
was an honour which was jealously noted by the others.
It was here, said Hitler, gazing at the mountains,
that he took all his momentous decisions.
Before he could feel certain about anything,
he needed weeks, sometimes months, of unbroken inactivity.
From the Berghof, Hitler looked across
to the Untersberg Mountain,
the legendary resting place of the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa.
August, '39.
Europe had enjoyed another long, quiet summer.
On September the 1st 1939,
the 'Schleswig Holstein' fired
the opening shots of World War Two.
In the morning, Hitler drove to the Reichstag
to declare war on Poland
when the attack was already underway.
Last night was the first time that Poland
fired on our territory using regular soldiers.
Since 05:45 AM, we have been returning fire.
And from now on, bombs will be met with bombs!
Poland's courage and faith
was scant protection against
the might of the German Army.
After only a few days, Hitler visited the front.
The awareness of doing battle before the Führer's eyes
continually inspired the troops to unimaginable feats.
Drunk with success, Hitler hardly noticed that Britain and France had declared
war on him.
He was confident that his
war machine would overrun Poland
in a matter of days,
and present the Western powers with a fait accompli.
Eight days after the war began, German troops reached Warsaw.
Hitler gazed spellbound at the burning city,
unable to tear himself away.
Overwhelmed by his own powers of destruction,
he declared that this was the fate awaiting all who stood in his path.
After only two weeks, Poland was crushed.
Hitler had expected the war to last longer.
Filled with respect for his generals, he was eager to learn from them.
A new concept was born: Blitzkrieg.
On the day Poland capitulated, German and Soviet troops
met at Brest-Litovsk.
To ensure that nothing should interfere with the attack on Poland,
Hitler had not hesitated to strike a bargain
with his ideological arch-enemy, Stalin.
They had agreed how the spoils would be shared,
and now the precise boundaries were drawn up.
The comrades in arms celebrated victory
with a joint parade.
Then Hitler turned towards the West.
At the beginning of April 1940, he swept into Denmark and Norway.
A month later he was urging his generals
to march against the old mortal enemy, France.
This time, he had prepared his own strategy.
Paratroopers attacked from the rear
and destroyed the enemy positions
in Holland and Belgium.
At the same time, tanks pushed deep into French territory,
concentrating the attack on the almost impenetrable Ardennes.
The enemy was taken by surprise.
Hitler had put his daring plan into operation
despite the opposition of his top generals.
Success brought him new confidence:
He now saw himself as a military leader.
More and more, he took the conduct of the war out of the hands of his general staff.
The campaign in the west was decided on in a matter of days.
Victory could have been even more complete
had Hitler not stopped at Dunkirk.
Hundreds of thousands were taken prisoner,
but the main body of the British expeditionary force
managed to escape across the Channel.
Europe was not prepared for a ruthless enemy like Hitler.
The proclamations and orders posted by the occupying forces
were received with dismay.
People understood neither the man nor his motives.
Six weeks after the start of the campaign,
France asked Hitler for an armistice.
General Keitel hailed him as the greatest military leader of all time.
Hitler's exuberance rather got the better of him
as he received the congratulations of his entourage.
Then he began planning the ceremonial signing of the armistice.
Shortly before 3 o'clock on the afternoon of June 21st 1940,
he arrived in the forest of Compiègne.
The French delegation, led by General Huntziger, followed closely behind.
To satisfy his need to humiliate the French,
Hitler had the very railway coach
in which the 1918 Armistice had been signed
wheeled out of its museum.
Hitler himself took the seat where Marshall Foch had sat.
When the French delegation entered the carriage,
Hitler could fully relish the peak of his career.
Long ago, on entering politics, he had sworn never to rest
until the shame of November 1918 had been wiped out.
Now he had done it.
The preamble to the armistice agreement again harked back to the past,
declaring that there where Germany's years of suffering had begun,
they would finally come to an end.
Afterwards, Hitler visited Paris.
After driving for three hours through the silence
of empty streets, he left the city.
But the dream of his lifetime, he said, had been fulfilled.
Berlin greeted him with flowers and jubilation.
The city was decked out as if for some religious procession.
This time the crowds did not have to be specially assembled.
However senseless the war might have seemed to many Germans at first,
Hitler's triumphal return to Berlin silenced their doubts
in a flood of respect and adulation.
Heil! Heil!
But this was to be the last triumphal procession of his career.
Too often, the world had been deceived and betrayed by Hitler
ever to trust him again.
To the German masses, this was the man
who had obliterated the humiliation of the First World War.
What the masses did not realize,
and what Hitler himself seemed to forget in the midst of all the jubilation,
was that he had defeated the wrong enemy.
France had been eliminated,
but the war with Britain was just beginning.
After the triumph came
a period of uncertainty.
No one knew how to approach
the war with Britain.
Hitler travelled about aimlessly,
waiting for fortune to come to his aid
as it had so often at critical moments in the past.
In August 1940, Göring was ordered
to intensify air attacks on England.
But Hitler did not want to bring the British to their knees just yet:
He just wanted to soften them up for negotiations.
He kept appearing on the Channel coast,
as though willing the intractable island to make some conciliatory gesture.
He wanted Britain out of the way so he could finally turn his attention eastward.
This had always been his ultimate goal.
But the British remained unapproachable.
All his attacks only provoked
fiercer resistance.
Even the howling dive-bombers failed to wear down the British people.
In Poland and France they had produced devastating results,
but not in England.
Although Hitler soon resorted to wiping out whole cities,
Churchill remained adamant:
"However long and hard the road may be,
we shall never surrender."
In Churchill,
Hitler had met his first real challenge.
At the Führer's headquarters, they still put on a show of confidence.
In fact, they had become so used to repeated success
that they scarcely understood what was happening.
With the war in the west unresolved,
Hitler decided to turn east.
Just before dawn on June the 22nd 1941,
German troops took up attacking positions on the eastern frontier.
The concentration of troops on the Soviet border
had been achieved in total secrecy.
The Russian campaign had begun.
As usual, the attack came without any formal declaration of war.
The government quarter of Berlin.
While the city still slept,
German assault forces had already overrun the frontline enemy positions.
At 5:30, people were awakened to the sound of fanfares.
The radio announced the opening of hostilities.
The surprise was complete.
The first Russian units awoke to find themselves taken prisoner.
The Germans advanced deep into Russia,
crushing all resistance.
Hitler planned to enter Moscow within three months.
This was the war he had always longed for.
Military confrontation with his
ideological arch-enemy: Communism.
At first he even found some support within the Soviet Union.
Here and there, as they advanced,
the conquerors were welcomed as liberators.
They didn't realize what sort of "liberator" this was
until they went through experiences like these.
"The fight of a master race against an inferior breed":
Hitler's own unsavoury phrase to describe the campaign.
The invading forces
followed by special units whose job it was to exterminate
all Jewish and loyal Soviet elements in the population.
The commanding officer of one of these units
stated in the Nuremberg Trial
that in the first year of the war
his men had murdered 90,000 men, women and children in this way.
Hitler over Russia.
This was his war.
He mobilized the biggest fighting force the world had ever seen.
He was prepared to sacrifice all other fronts
to victory in this campaign.
He waged war in Russia
not only as a commander-in-chief for purely military ends:
The driving force behind him was his old mad dream,
the fantasy of saving the world.
He was not just fighting a war,
he had embarked on a campaign of destruction.
In the autumn, the German front lines ground to a halt.
Four days after the start of the battle for Moscow,
the autumn rains set in.
German operations became bogged down in the mud.
The German soldier marches relentlessly onward.
For him, no obstacle is insurmountable.
The advance guard was already in sight of Moscow
when winter arrived.
For a few days, the front seemed to waver.
Hitler's grim determination held it together, with heavy losses.
Despairingly he confessed that he found the mere sight of snow unbearable.
As he began to face the inevitable for the first time,
he said that the war was lost.
Cajoling and bullying,
he pushed the advance forward again in the spring.
But 1942 was the turning point.
In North Africa, the British overran
the positions of the axis powers.
The German expeditionary force under General Rommel,
which had been sent to help their Italian allies against the British,
was forced to retreat.
Within a few weeks, the German Africa Corps
was shattered.
With America's entry into the war, the allies achieved supremacy in the air.
1942 saw the
first 1000-bomber attack of the war.
The U-boats were faring no better.
Radar and a new convoy defence system
put an end to the series of German successes.
The enemy was gaining ground on all fronts.
It seemed as though there was a curse on him,
Hitler complained.
In the face of so many setbacks,
Hitler remembered his allies.
He turned to his comrade-in-arms, Mussolini.
At the same time, Himmler was enlisting support in the
conquered regions of Eastern Europe.
In the West, too,
recruiting was underway for a crusade against Bolshevism.
Walloons, Flemings and Dutchmen
volunteered for the SS.
Franco sent a division.
Scandinavians enlisted,
and so did Frenchmen.
But the response to the campaign was small.
There was not enough hatred to support a crusade.
But running the gauntlet was a different matter.
Captured British and American bomber pilots are led through Paris.
Stalingrad came to symbolize
the turning point of the war.
For three months, the German 6th Army,
hopelessly cut off,
had stood its ground against superior Soviet forces.
On February the 2nd, 1943,
Field Marshall Paulus presented himself before the victors.
He signed the first German capitulation of the war.
The remnants of the defeated army.
Only hours before, worn out
by cold, hunger and disease,
the troops had received a telegraph message from Hitler
urging them to fight like heroes.
91,000 German soldiers were taken prisoner.
Years later, 5000 were to return.
This series of blows had left its mark on Hitler.
Almost overnight, his appearance disintegrated.
He seldom ventured out in public now.
It was as though he were afraid to face the victims of his war.
All his strength seemed to have drained from him.
After Stalingrad,
Hitler made only three major speeches.
Events were closing in on him.
He now looked to the veterans to give him
just what they wanted from him: the courage to go on.
Suddenly he seemed to have grown senile.
At his headquarters he became increasingly withdrawn,
lonely and bitter, his mind confused by drugs.
He delivered tedious monologues about dog training and the wickedness of the world.
Only death could still sometimes bring him out:
State funerals,
services of remembrance for the fallen.
These were no longer the elaborately staged
displays of contempt for life:
Defeat and death were staring him in the face.
Thoughts of death became increasingly attractive to him.
"It's just one brief moment", he said,
"and you're free of everything. Just everlasting peace and rest."
He had decided on Linz, in Austria, for his old age.
Building work in the town continued even during the war years.
He planned to erect a museum there.
And to be buried
in the bell tower of a vast building complex.
But he hoped to have a few more years studying and developing his ideas,
absorbed in his dreams
and his 'glimpses through the side door of paradise'.
At the centre of his vision stood
the "new man".
He was to be a military being with no existence outside the unit.
He would come marching out of the ruins of the old world
to conquer and rule over vast tracts of land.
He would be submissive,
yet constantly aware of his superiority.
Without emotion,
yet in intimate connection with the irrational.
In these contradictions was something of National Socialism itself.
A combination of the medieval and the modern;
of old Nuremberg
and the cold, inhuman world of the SS.
Hitler himself embodied the contradictions.
He was not simply a reactionary,
he had no intention of restoring an outmoded order of things.
He led his crusaders through the past into a hackneyed utopia.
He remained a revolutionary, even when at his most old fashioned.
We wanted
to accomplish a revolution, and a revolution was accomplished!
Only small-minded people
see the essence of a revolution
exclusively in terms of destruction.
What we saw was the contrary: A massive reconstruction.
The image of the "new man" typified the solemn
insanity that lay at the heart of the regime.
In the studios of the official state sculptors,
the Aryan superman
had already taken shape.
He was to be created by selective breeding.
The prototype already existed in model form.
We are determined
to create a new dynasty.
And who can doubt
that the members of this dynasty
do not merely exist in our imagination, but stand before us now.
The fixed stare
betrayed a certain readiness to submerge individual identity
and to become a mindless cog.
The "new man" would rule supreme, especially in the East.
The ministry in Berlin spoke of "mongrel races",
which, if necessary, must "simply be scrapped".
"We shall make Russia our garden of Eden",
Hitler said.
Whole tracts of land were depopulated.
Heinrich Himmler was
the master of the network of camps which was spreading
throughout Europe.
The victims: Mainly Jews.
Hitler had demanded their extermination.
Images of misery and despair.
The SS executioners tracked down the Jewish population
everywhere.
Manhunt.
Herded together and registered,
they waited to be packed on board special trains.
Their fears were soothed with lies.
Many believed that the cattle trucks were taking them to pleasanter surroundings.
Auschwitz was the end of the line.
Posing as a romantic elite,
the SS was nothing more than a brutal murder squad.
It ruled the horrific world of the extermination camps.
Hitler ordained that their sole aim should be the destruction of others.
Six million died in the camps.
Behind the Final Solution
lay the dream of ruthless law and order fanatics.
A rigid order ruled the death machine.
A strictly-regimented dictatorship, conditioning its inhabitants
from an early age...
and completely suppressing every human quality.
The bottled-up aggression that resulted
would be unleashed in persecution and conquest.
Rising up from a devastated continent,
the new world of Hitler's vision.
This was the setting for the "new man".
In the centre,
the world capital: Germania,
comparable only to ancient Babylon according to Hitler.
In the model, the Brandenburg Gate stands like a watchman's hut
in front of the great domed hall.
Every year, Hitler declared,
a delegation from the slave races would be led through the streets of Germania
so that they could report back to their homelands
on the splendour and glory of the Reich.
The Tannenberg Memorial was to be the model
for other monumental charnel houses.
They were planned as outposts of the great Reich of the future,
which would extend from the Atlantic in the West deep into the Russian steppes;
from the North Cape of Norway to Africa.
They would be symbols of the brutal power of Germanic organizing genius,
standing at an ever-bleeding boundary.
Berlin, 1943.
There were no dreams left to distort reality.
This was reality.
Powerful air armadas were operating almost
unopposed over Germany,
leaving behind a trail of fire and destruction.
British and American bombs flattened entire cities.
The regime had declared total war;
now, total war was being waged
on Germany itself.
The people were defenceless.
All they could do was try to escape.
Using all available transport, the cities were evacuated.
Hitler avoided the real world whenever he could.
In 1943 he celebrated his birthday
on a remote stretch of the Autobahn.
His great demonstrations of power
on the East-West road in Berlin, lay four years in the past.
More and more, Hitler moved in a world of make-believe.
He had cultivated an ability to see only those things
which confirmed his hope that the tide would turn.
He was constantly having new weapons demonstrated,
but few of them were ever used.
June the 6th, 1944,
the allies landed in Normandy.
The end of the war was approaching.
They met only brief resistance;
the Western Front collapsed.
Even in retreat, Hitler understood only one thing:
Destruction.
"If we cannot win, we shall drag half of the world into the abyss with us."
Scorched earth.
But even that failed to halt the enemy's advance.
A determined group of officers decided to assassinate Hitler.
They had tried before.
This attempt also failed.
Hitler emerged from the rubble virtually unharmed.
Shortly afterwards, he visited the military hospital.
Luck had been with him, as it had on other, similar occasions.
The failure of that attempt on July 20th 1944
gave Hitler renewed confidence.
At midday he received the congratulations of his entourage.
He felt he'd had a miraculous escape.
He decided this was an omen.
The war would be brought to a successful conclusion.
But anxiety spread among those closest to him.
His death would have meant the end for them too.
That afternoon, Mussolini arrived
at the Führer's headquarters.
When they met, Hitler said
that he'd just experienced the greatest piece of luck of his life.
Even during the visit, he was discussing with Himmler
how he should settle his score with the conspirators.
A week later, the first of them stood before the court.
Roland Freisler presided.
Investigations had unearthed the existence
of a widespread conspiracy involving officers, lawyers,
trade unionists and clergy. In great haste,
the accused were dragged before the bench and condemned after a brief hearing.
"Don't let them talk too much", were Hitler's
instructions to the president of the court.
The moral motives behind the attempt
were scarcely touched on.
...I thought about the numerous murders...
Murders? - Both here and abroad. - You are...
a lousy wretch!
The executioners were already present in the courtroom.
In almost every case, the sentence was death.
The nation still hung on,
Hitler managed to keep vain hopes alive.
There were rumours of miracle weapons,
and there was fear.
WAR-TORN BERLIN WELCOMES THE FÜHRER
Amid all the ruins and desolation,
the regime still put on the familiar shows.
But the optimism was strained.
The processions had become rather thin on the ground.
Although the music on the German newsreel was as solemn
and rousing as ever.
OUR WALLS BROKE, BUT NOT OUR HEARTS!
Hitler sent the party stalwarts out in a desperate bid to rally support,
but they could drum up little enthusiasm for the cause.
Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring:
He was responsible for air defences.
Now and then, Hitler came to the front line as it closed in on him.
He was feeble and wasted,
but still he tried to bolster the morale of his troops.
His left hand shook;
he was unable to control his body.
He talked of armies that no longer existed,
and of victory that had long since been gambled away.
In the East too, the front had been
pushed back over the German border.
Refugees on the frozen Courland Plains.
FOR FREEDOM AND LIFE...
Old people and children were called up as last-ditch troops,
and were instructed in the use of anti-tank weapons.
With their help, the enemy would be held in check.
And women are also able to use this gun with ease.
The regime entered its final days.
Joseph Goebbels was commissioner for the defence of the Reich.
He had little left to offer now except pins and crosses.
The Third Reich
was ending as it had begun: Churning out propaganda.
Every division that has already been assigned to small offensives,
and in the coming weeks and months will be assigned to large offensives,
will go into this battle
as if attending a church service.
And when they shoulder their guns and climb into their tanks,
all they will picture
is their slain children and their violated wives.
And a cry of vengeance will rise from their throats
which will make the enemy grow pale.
At the beginning of 1945,
resistance broke down on all fronts.
Everyone now scrambled to save what they could.
The last major offensive of the war
was launched by the Red Army.
The Soviet assault on Berlin
began in mid-April.
The Americans and the British had halted their advance;
the capital of the Reich was left for the Soviet Army to take.
But Hitler still refused
to give up the struggle. He had nothing left to lose.
But he still hoped that if the end was impressive enough,
he would live on in legend.
He now hardly ever left the bunker under the chancellery.
Shortly before the end,
he received boys of Hitler Youth in the garden behind the building.
The Soviet Army was closing in;
they must fight on, he told them.
On April 29th, Soviet troops
advanced into the government quarter of Berlin.
Only then did Hitler decide to die.
The last picture.
The Soviet troops who stormed the chancellery
on May 1st found it deserted.
It was the end.
When the shooting was over, people began to emerge from the cellars.
Some committed suicide; senior Nazis escaping justice.
More victims.
In the ruins of the chancellery,
Russian soldiers began the search for Hitler's body.
Here, in a bomb crater,
they came across the charred remains.
The uniform coat,
a pair of pyjamas.
Now it was the victor's turn
to appear on the balcony of the chancellery.
Celebrations were worldwide.
In London, jubilant crowds cheered Winston Churchill.
In Paris, Moscow, Warsaw,
Prague, New York... It was the same picture everywhere.
Over 50 nations had taken part in the war
against Germany.
But for the Germans there was only shame,
despair and defeat.
They too had been liberated,
but their country lay in ruins.
The Reich was no more.
Their very name was a symbol of horror.
An inhuman system,
the terror.
It was all over.
Everywhere, ruins marked Hitler's passage.
50 million people had died.
The victors made the Germans face up to what had happened.
It had all been done in their name.
It was like an awakening from a nightmare.
In the face of all this horror,
it was hard to grasp what had happened.
To the victors it seemed that the Germans had been in the grip of some disease.
Those who had been committed confirmed such impressions.
SS men who bore the mark of the order
now denied their complicity.
The emblems were taken down,
the symbols were burned.
The regime and all its power
had perished with the rest.
Nothing remained.
But what ends
when the symbols shatter?
Translation: Alex Zuckrow