Original subtitles

In the 1930s, Adolf Hitler made the most ambitious boasts imaginable

about what lay ahead.

And just a few years later, it seemed to millions of Germans

that Hitler had indeed created a future that belonged to them.

In 1941, when this film was taken,

Hitler was all but worshipped by his followers.

In pursuit of his racist vision,

Hitler had led the German army to a series of momentous victories.

His promises were taken as gospel.

My diary of the time has that line:

"Come what may, the Fuhrer will sort it."

I wrote that myself.

I also believed, "Gosh, he's achieved so much already!"

That was the point - all the things he'd achieved!

But as the war progressed, the successes stopped coming.

And then, the end. We were abandoned.

We had to suffer our fate.

With insights from those who lived through these times -

most of whom were interviewed by the BBC over the last 20 years -

this film reveals how Hitler tried to retain his charismatic appeal,

as the bond between the German people and Hitler

was tested as never before.

Adolf Hitler loved this landscape.

It was here, amidst the mountains of southern Bavaria,

that he said his ideas matured.

And on 31st July 1940, at his house, the Berghof,

he announced his most ambitious idea yet to his military leaders.

Now that the Germans had conquered much of Western Europe,

Hitler was thinking in epic terms.

He wanted plans drawn up to invade the Soviet Union - a country which

in his warped view of the world was led by Jewish/Bolshevik criminals.

But it was also a country he'd signed a non-aggression pact with,

as well as a country twice as large as Europe.

The generals listened to Hitler's idea and many thought,

"Shouldn't be too difficult."

People thought, and the military leaders were among them,

that it would be relatively easy to eliminate the Russian army

with one short, forceful blow.

Based on the information we had about the Russian army,

I also believed that it would not be much of a problem.

These soldiers knew that Hitler had been saying for years

that the biggest danger Germany faced was the Soviet Union,

and many thought their Fuhrer was right.

Fresh from their recent victory over France,

German soldiers were full of confidence in Hitler's judgment.

So much so, that he was called

"the greatest military commander of all time"

by one of his leading generals.

Hitler was more than an ordinary leader.

By now, he was considered by many to be almost superhuman.

And it wasn't just Hitler who was thought to be a superior being.

His connection with those Germans he considered racially pure

was based, in part, on a shared sense of superiority.

Millions of ordinary Germans, especially the young,

had been told that they were special, too.

We had been taught that only the Germans were valuable human beings.

There was a little booklet called,

German Inventors, German Poets, German Musicians.

Nothing else existed.

And we devoured it,

and we were absolutely convinced that we were the greatest.

And since Hitler boasted that the Germans were a superior race,

he believed that victory over those he considered racially inferior,

like the people of the Soviet Union, would be relatively straightforward.

And so, on 22nd June 1941,

the Germans launched the largest invasion

in the history of the world.

Within just a week, the Germans had advanced more than 200 miles

into Soviet territory and reached Minsk, capital of Belorussia.

This wasn't just the biggest invasion in history,

it was turning out to be one of the quickest, as well.

You thought it was a doddle.

The Russians were all defecting in droves or were taken prisoner.

And we would have a splendid life

and the war would be over in six months - a year at most.

There were soldiers who advanced singing.

It's hard to believe, but it's a fact.

And soon, German troops were celebrating.

Back in Berlin, on 3rd October 1941,

Hitler publicly gloried in the successes on the Eastern Front.

At the Sportpalast, he basked in the adulation of the crowd.

Faith in Hitler's charismatic leadership

had been built on his ability to deliver success after success.

And here he was, so it seemed, successful, once again.

Hitler even went so far as to say

explicitly that the Red Army had been defeated.

All this euphoria about the invasion of the Soviet Union

highlighted a key aspect of Hitler's charismatic leadership.

His ability to allow those who worked for him

to dream of wildly ambitious schemes.

To work, as their Fuhrer did, unhindered by moral restraint.

German technocrats knew that Hitler had called for this to be a war

of annihilation,

and for months before the invasion, had been working out

how many people in the Soviet Union should be starved to death.

These people were surplus to Nazi requirements.

And one calculation was that there were 30 million of them.

When the German army occupied the Soviet city of Kharkov,

they deliberately tried to starve the population.

German soldiers, who'd been told to steal provisions

from the locals, in order to feed themselves, sealed the city,

and only gave food

to the small number of people who worked for them.

The rest began to die of hunger.

In the final stages of starvation,

your lips get somehow stretched, and it's what they call a hungry grin.

You don't know whether a person is grinning or crying.

But the teeth are bare.

Then, diarrhoea, the so-called hungry diarrhoea.

And then comes a bitter taste in the mouth.

This murderous policy was based on the belief

that the Germans were superior.

But what if they weren't?

The arrival of the Russian winter brought the first major military

setback for the Germans since the end of the First World War.

When soldiers during the night had no opportunity to warm up somewhere,

they got frozen toes and fingers.

We were totally under-equipped.

The soldiers were overwhelmed by fatigue and couldn't think straight.

Nearly numbed by fatigue.

Hitler and his generals had been so confident of swift victory

that soldiers hadn't been provided with proper cold weather equipment.

And when the Red Army counter-attacked,

it looked like the whole German offensive might collapse.

It was the greatest test yet for Hitler's leadership.

And he responded by telling his soldiers

simply to hold their nerve and stand fast.

In the cold Soviet forests, they might die,

but that was what soldiers were supposed to do when asked.

Do you think Frederick the Great's grenadiers were happy to die, either?

In the same way, I consider myself entitled to ask

every German soldier to lay down his life.

Hitler's lack of compassion, lack of pity, hadn't mattered to most

of these German soldiers, as long as they were winning easy victories.

But now, Hitler's Darwinian beliefs meant that he could

see his soldiers die without a care.

After all, hadn't he always said

that the weak didn't deserve to live?

Ever since he came to power,

Hitler had been portrayed as a man of strength.

A man who could not make a mistake.

Goebbels, the propaganda minister, had said that building this image

had been one of his greatest achievements.

Via the creation of the Fuhrer myth,

Hitler has been given the halo of infallibility.

But now, Hitler was beginning to appear all too fallible.

He'd told the German people that the Red Army would never rise again.

But it just had.

To help solve this difficulty, Goebbels turned to history.

In March 1942, a film was released about a charismatic leader

from Germany's past - the Prussian king, Frederick the Great.

And every German knew that Frederick had also suffered setbacks,

but had triumphed in the end.

Frederick the Great was supposed to symbolise Hitler.

The German who watched it was supposed to think

that here was a similar situation to the present,

that the war could be as desperate as that, that there were still

possibilities to turn it round,

and that it could be brought to victory.

Since the start of the campaign against the Soviet Union,

Germany's new Frederick the Great, Adolf Hitler, had chosen

to spend his time here, isolated in a forest in East Prussia.

This was his field headquarters, known as the Wolf's Lair.

Hitler said to one of his generals that it was important to keep one's

distance from the suffering on the front line, so as not to feel pity.

But even though he and his staff were hundreds of miles away

from the fighting, it still wasn't possible to hide from

the stark realities of this war.

Just after the Soviets started their counter-offensive,

in December 1941, Hitler had gained a new enemy - the Americans,

with their vast industrial capacity.

It was around this time that Hitler held important discussions

about increasing the Nazi persecution of the Jews.

How Hitler did this

reveals a great deal about how his leadership worked.

Hitler hated formal government meetings.

Even though there was officially still a German cabinet,

Hitler had not allowed the cabinet to meet since 1938.

A charismatic leader like Hitler

didn't want to take part in some sort of committee meeting,

where he might have to listen to the views of others.

Instead, at the Wolf's Lair, Hitler met Heinrich Himmler,

head of the SS, on 18th December, 1941.

And the killing of Jews was discussed.

Just between the two of them -

unter vier Augen - under four eyes.

Several hundred thousand Jews had already been killed by the Nazis,

mostly in the Soviet Union, but now, starting in 1942, the Nazis

tried to round up the Jews of Europe and systematically murder them.

Hitler authorised the killings of the Holocaust,

but many others sorted out the detail of how it was to happen.

And despite the scale of the crime,

Hitler never had to deal with any mass public protest in Germany

about the deportation of the Jews.

Hitler was always sensitive to the mood of the general population,

even during the war.

What happened here in Bavaria in 1941 shows just how responsive

the Nazis could be to the feelings of ordinary Germans.

Bavaria was a largely Catholic area, and when a leading Bavarian Nazi

decreed that schools should stop displaying crucifixes

in the classroom, there was public outrage.

As a mother of eight,

our Fuhrer awarded me with the Mother's Cross in gold.

It is incomprehensible to me that my youngest,

whom last Monday I led to school for the first time,

should not see a crucifix there,

after his seven siblings

have grown up in the shadow of the crucifix, hitherto.

I often contemplate and cannot solve the mystery how such a measure

is possible at all, since our Fuhrer stands by his soldiers in the east

and fights against Bolshevikism.

Despite the fact that Hitler loathed Christianity himself,

the Nazis reversed the policy on crucifixes,

because it was damaging German morale.

With the disappearance of the Russian winter,

the Germans started to recover their optimism.

The Red Army counter-attack had ground to a halt

and, by the summer of 1942, German units were advancing again,

travelling across the steppes in the south of Russia.

In less than eight weeks, they advanced 500 miles.

We were better soldiers than the Russians. We were better.

It filled us with pride to advance that far to the east,

further and further.

We were all inspired by the belief that we succeed in whatever we do,

and that for us, nothing is impossible.

In August 1942, the German Sixth Army reached

the River Volga, 1,400 miles east of Berlin.

And then, suddenly, a broad silvery ribbon, the Volga.

We knew this was the goal, the ultimate goal of the war, maybe,

to get to the Volga.

It was an exciting feeling.

But on the bank of the Volga lay a city

still occupied by the Soviets, a city then called Stalingrad.

Hitler ordered the commander of the German Sixth Army,

Friedrich Paulus, to take Stalingrad at once.

And in a speech a few weeks later, Hitler said:

"You can rest assured no human being can remove us from this place."

But there was a growing disconnect between the promises

Hitler was making, and the ability of his troops to achieve them.

The basis of his charismatic leadership

had always been his certainty that his vision was attainable.

But now, with supply lines stretched almost to breaking point,

German generals questioned whether their troops had the resources

to do what their Fuhrer wanted.

A meeting, here in Berlin in August 1942, at the aviation ministry,

showed just how Hitler's unrealistic style of leadership

influenced those Nazis closest to him.

This giant office block, one of the biggest in the world

when it was opened, was built for Reich Marshall Hermann Goering.

A former fighter pilot,

Goering was not only head of the German airforce,

he was also helping to run the German economy.

On the 6th August, Goering met Nazi officials

from the occupied territories.

And Goering, attempting to manage them

in the same way Hitler would, simply told them what he wanted.

I have here reports from you on how much you expect to deliver.

This is nothing in view of your territories.

Last year, France delivered 550,000 tons of grain,

and now, I demand 1.2 million.

There will be no discussion about it.

They were unobtainable demands.

And Goering was constantly making them.

So much so, that some people who worked directly for him chose to

kill themselves, when they couldn't deliver what was asked of them.

Luftwaffe General Ernst Udet shot himself in 1941.

As did Hans Jeschnonnek, chief of the Luftwaffe General staff,

in 1943.

Jeschonnek left a suicide note, in which he said:

"It is no longer possible to work with the Reich Marshall.

"Long live the Fuhrer."

Also desperate, as autumn turned to winter in Stalingrad,

were soldiers of the German Sixth Army.

They were finding that fulfilling Hitler's order

to take the city was all but impossible.

This was street fighting, at close quarters,

and the Germans were used to driving their tanks across the steppes.

You had to make your way to the front ducking, crouching,

kneeling. Shots rang out from all sides,

from the front, from behind,

from above, from below.

And all around you was the noise of the artillery salvos.

We were repeatedly told, another 100 metres, and you've done it,

but how can it be done if you just don't have the strength?

Each attack resulted in such a high number of losses, that it was

easy to calculate how long it would be before there was no-one left.

In November 1942, Hitler learnt that the Red Army had launched

a huge offensive near Stalingrad, and the German Sixth Army,

fighting inside the city, was now cut off.

But he wouldn't let them make a fighting retreat.

He ordered them to stay where they were.

Hitler's stubbornness, his intransigence,

his refusal to listen to the advice of others -

qualities that had helped make him seem a strong leader

before the war - were now revealed as weaknesses.

Weaknesses compounded during the Stalingrad crisis

by Hitler's willingness to rely on the promises of Herman Goering.

Goering had boasted that the Luftwaffe could supply

the Sixth Army from the air.

So all these soldiers had to do in Stalingrad,

freezing, and surrounded by their enemy,

was to rely on Hermann Goering to keep his word.

Back in Germany,

the population was largely ignorant of what was happening in Stalingrad.

This was the film that Goebbels's propaganda ministry

chose to release for Christmas 1942.

An emotional attempt to show how German women and children

still believed in victory, and stood behind

husbands and fathers at the front line, and, crucially, their Fuhrer.

But increasingly, it was a fantasy, and this was the reality.

On the 2nd of February 1943, the last German soldiers

surrendered to the Red Army in Stalingrad.

Goering's Luftwaffe hadn't been able to provide the Sixth Army

with adequate supplies and all attempts to rescue them had failed.

The Red Army took more than 90,000 prisoners.

The commander of the Sixth Army, Friedrich Paulus,

also fell into Soviet hands.

He had been promoted by Hitler to the rank of Field Marshal

just before the German surrender.

It was a hint that Hitler wanted Paulus to commit suicide.

German Field Marshals were not expected

to be captured alive in battle.

Hitler was furious when he heard that Paulus hadn't killed himself.

At his headquarters, he raged against him.

"It hurts me so much, because the heroism of so many soldiers

"is obliterated by one single spineless weakling.

"What does this mean, "life"? The individual has to die, anyway.

"What lives on is the people."

Hitler also spoke of how he wanted those around him to behave,

if the situation ever seemed hopeless.

"You stand together, form an all-round defence,

"and shoot yourself with the last bullet."

It was another sign of the potential downside of having faith in Hitler.

He couldn't have made it clearer.

This war was all or nothing.

Life or death.

And death now seemed the more likely option

as the boasts of victory on the Eastern Front rang ever more hollow.

Now, in the spring of 1943,

with the war going as badly as this for the Germans,

there were concerted attempts to get rid of Hitler.

Officers serving with Army Group Centre on the Eastern Front

wrapped up a bomb, pretending it was two bottles of liqueur.

One of them then passed on the package to a passenger

who was travelling with Hitler on his plane.

The conspirators wanted Hitler's death to be blamed on a plane crash.

That way, they wouldn't be criticised by other officers

who remained loyal to Hitler.

But the bomb failed to go off, and Hitler's plane landed safely.

Though some army officers were prepared to try and blow Hitler up,

no-one could be found in 1943 who had access to Hitler

and could bring himself to shoot his Fuhrer face to face.

At least one conspirator said he was just not equal to the task.

The legacy of his personal charisma

might well have saved Hitler's life that year.

In the aftermath of the defeat at Stalingrad,

Hitler wasn't keen to speak in public,

and Josef Goebbels attempted to raise morale.

But Goebbels didn't just offer the German people

this fanatical talk of "total war."

He also gave them something else - escapism.

In March 1943,

one of the most expensive German films of the period was released,

The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.

"The entertainment film had a political purpose.

"That political purpose was to get the audience off the streets,

"away from their household cares and family worries."

Almost until the last day of his life,

Hitler would try to sell his own fantasy to those around him,

that Germany could still somehow win this war.

And to do this, he relied in large part

on his remaining charismatic powers.

"I experienced examples of it, of men who came to tell him

"it could not go on any longer, and even said that to him.

"And then he talked for an hour and then they went and said,

"I want to give it another try."

"Well, he had an enormously strong will, you know, and he had

"powers of persuasion that could gloss over any rational arguments."

This amateur footage of Hitler with General Manstein

gives a rare opportunity to see Hitler interacting

with his military commanders.

"At the end of every meeting,

"he would always personally turn to the Field Marshal in charge

"and say, "But you're not going to abandon me."

"And he took both his hands and shook them.

"He had an immense ability to manipulate and influence people."

When Hitler said goodbye to Manstein,

he looked him straight in the eye and held on to his hand for longer,

much longer, than normal.

But Hitler's motivational tricks were falling increasingly flat.

On the 6th of June 1944 came D-Day, the Allied landings in Normandy.

'Fast rocket boats showered the enemy with their rain of death.'

Two weeks later,

the Red Army launched a massive offensive on the Eastern Front.

All this demonstrated the sheer scale of the resources

at the disposal of the Allies,

resources the Germans could not hope to match.

'Our beachhead to Berlin was established.'

It was against the background

of these military catastrophes for the Germans

that the most famous attempt on Hitler's life was made,

here at the Wolf's Lair on the 20th of July, 1944.

Paradoxically, it would also show the lingering power

of Hitler's charismatic authority.

Count Claus von Stauffenberg,

appalled at the way Hitler was leading Germany,

planted a bomb under the table at Hitler's midday conference.

Stauffenberg then hurried to the nearby military airfield

and flew to Berlin, intending to help co-ordinate the coup there.

Ahead of Stauffenberg, a number of other plotters had arrived here,

at these offices of the German Army, on the Bendlerstrasse in Berlin.

Amongst the conspirators in the building was the man who was

supposed to be the new German Head of State, Ludwig Beck,

former Chief of Staff of the Army.

He waited to see how many other officers

would pledge their support for the coup.

But the question they asked was this - "Did Hitler still live?"

And the answer was yes.

Hitler had survived the bomb attempt with only minor injuries.

The wooden walls of the conference room had blown out,

dissipating the explosion.

That evening, Major Remer, commander of the Berlin Guard Battalion,

was uncertain what to do, until he spoke to Adolf Hitler on the phone.

Hitler told him to suppress the coup at once.

Sofort, mein Fuhrer.

It was the sound of Hitler's voice that made Remer act.

Forces loyal to Hitler re-took the Army offices on the Bendlerstrasse.

Stauffenberg and three other plotters were taken out

into this courtyard and immediately shot.

Over the next weeks,

several thousand other suspects were arrested, and 200 killed.

In the early hours of the 21st of July, Hitler spoke on the radio,

to tell the German people that he still lived.

But public reaction to the attempt on Hitler's life

showed how deep the roots of his charismatic power still reached.

This response was typical.

"I was outraged,

"I was totally outraged that something like this could happen.

"It was a horrible experience for me."

"There was widespread relief that the attack had failed

"and Hitler gained a lot of sympathy because of it."

But this feeling of gratitude

that Hitler had survived the assassination attempt

didn't mean that people had faith that the war could still be won.

Despite the image Goebbels' propaganda tried to project,

of an idyllic world peopled by perfect Germans,

Nazi internal intelligence reports

detected a growing disenchantment with the regime

and real fear about what lay ahead.

And by the autumn of 1944,

the Germans had a great deal to be fearful about.

The Red Army was advancing into Germany.

The countryside of East Prussia was the first German land

to be occupied by the Soviets.

And in some of the towns and villages,

the Red Army committed atrocities.

For Nazi propaganda, it was a gift,

the reason to keep fighting was clearer than ever...

to stop people Hitler called "animals from the steppes of Asia"

from gaining control of Germany.

What the Nazi propaganda didn't say, of course,

was that a strong motivation for this terrible Soviet revenge

was the countless horrors the Germans had perpetrated

in the Soviet Union.

Further inside Germany, faith in Hitler was being eroded.

Charismatic leadership relies on a connection between the leader

and the led, a connection based on faith that the leader knows best.

That was now all but broken...

..in large part because towns and cities

were being bombed to destruction,

and many blamed not just the Nazis in general,

but Hitler, in particular.

"The Fuhrer has it easy.

"He doesn't have to look after a family.

"If the worst comes to the worst in the war,

"he'll leave us all in a mess and put a bullet through his head."

"It's always claimed that the Fuhrer was sent to us from God.

"I don't doubt it. The Fuhrer was sent to us from God,

"though not in order to save Germany, but to ruin it."

In the face of such criticism,

Nazi terror increased against the general population

and thousands of Germans were shot for defeatism.

The irony was not lost on these people that,

just before the war began,

one leading German had promised that no bombs would fall on Germany.

Hermann Goering, commander of the Luftwaffe

and serial breaker of promises.

With much of Germany in ruins,

in January 1945, Adolf Hitler spoke on the radio.

And he revealed the gap that had grown

between him and the German people.

They knew the war was lost. He didn't appear to.

Amidst this crisis, Joseph Goebbels thought he knew

how to raise the morale of the German people.

He released Kolberg,

a historical epic about the heroic resistance of a small Prussian town

to the invasion of the French, 140 years before.

Goebbels was so keen on this film, that he ordered thousands

of German soldiers to act in it as extras.

"Goebbels even said to me that it was more important

"that the soldiers act in his film, rather than fight at the front,

"which was no longer worth doing,

"since we were in the middle of a total collapse."

And the message Goebbels wanted the German people

to take from the film could scarcely have been more obvious.

By January 1945, the Red Army had reached here, the River Oder,

just 40 miles east of Berlin.

They now outnumbered the German defenders more than three to one.

Over the next weeks, the Soviets gathered their strength

before crossing the Oder in April 1945,

and launching 2.5 million soldiers against the German capital.

In Berlin, Hitler was living in a bunker

underneath the Reich Chancellery,

which stood on this site on the Vossstrasse.

As his empire crumbled,

he tried to control what was left of the German Army.

But he also spent his time dreaming of this...

The city of Linz in Austria.

Hitler had gone to school here

and his parents were buried in one of Linz's suburbs.

Hitler had huge plans for Linz

and a large-scale model of the new, Hitler-approved Linz

had been assembled in a cellar room of the Reich Chancellery in Berlin,

early in 1945.

So that Hitler, as the Red Army closed in on him,

could fantasise about what the new city would look like.

Hitler had planned to retire to Linz,

and a giant Adolf Hitler museum was to be built here.

He also wanted the bodies of his parents to be dug up

from their existing graves and re-interred

in a specially-constructed bell tower in the centre of the city.

His ability to construct visions of the future

had always been a central part of his charismatic appeal.

But by now, his visions had parted company completely with reality.

Close by worked another fantasist.

This was Joseph Goebbels' Propaganda Ministry.

And here, in April 1945, this was on his mind.

The power of film to alter history.

Goebbels tried to convince his staff to stay and make a last stand,

because, he said, "In 100 years time,

"a film will be made about this epic period."

"Gentlemen, don't you want to play a part in this film?

"To be brought back to life in 100 years' time.

"I can assure you that it will be a fine and elevating picture.

"And for the sake of this prospect, it is worth standing fast.

"Hold out now, so that 100 years hence,

"the audience does not hoot and whistle

"when you appear on the screen."

Goebbels planned what he thought was a heroic ending

for himself, his wife and six children.

They all came with him to Hitler's bunker

where Goebbels had his children killed.

After these children had been murdered,

Goebbels and his wife committed suicide.

Hitler had killed himself the day before, on 30th April 1945

and his body was taken by other Nazis

and burnt here, in what was then the garden of the Reich Chancellery.

Just over a week later, Germany surrendered.

In his last days, underground in this bunker,

Hitler had composed a final testament,

one that revealed his views of the world had not altered.

He still blamed the Jews for everything,

and possessed unshakeable confidence in himself.

"In these three decades, all my thoughts, my actions, and my life

"have been guided solely

"by the love and loyalty to my people."

Even in his last hours, Hitler had not changed.

Almost all the elements that had enabled him to become

a charismatic leader still existed within him, until his last breath.

What had changed was other people's perception of him.

This was Hitler's legacy, one of unparalleled destruction.

Seven million Germans dead.

Around 34 million dead in the countries that had fought Nazism,

with six million Jews alone killed in the Holocaust.

Hitler had said that those he considered racially-pure Germans

were better than anyone else, and many had believed him.

Hitler had not hypnotised these people into supporting him.

They had chosen to follow a leader they felt had charisma.

And this, in the end, was where their belief in Hitler had led them.

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