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At the heart of the Third Reich's reign of terror was Adolf Hitler.

Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX

But he did not act alone.

Surrounding him was a loyal cadre of ruthless

enforcers who turned his twisted vision into reality.

Rudolf Hess, the devoted deputy.

Hermann Goering, the Luftwaffe's commander and looter of Europe.

Heinrich Himmler, the cold mastermind of the SS and the Holocaust.

Josef Goebbels, the propaganda genius who fuelled a nation's hate.

Reinhard Heydrich, the brutal organiser of mass murder.

Martin Bormann, the shadowy manipulator behind Hitler's throne.

Together they built a regime of unprecedented brutality,

leaving a legacy of destruction that haunts history.

This is their story.

Hitler returns to a Munich that is suffering post-war.

He believes Germany only surrendered because of the

betrayal by left-wing Jewish politicians, which only

fuels his hatred for the religion.

When Germany finally capitulates, Hitler is like millions

of other servicemen and indeed civilians who regard

the German army as being what's called stabbed in the back.

And this becomes this huge myth that basically

it's the people in Berlin who are responsible

for the defeat and not really the Allies.

And the people in Berlin are members of

the left, they are Jews, they are all

these sort of quote-unquote evil people that

Hitler and his fellow soldiers regard as having betrayed the likes of him.

This idea that the German army would have

been victorious on the battlefield and that this

peace treaty was signed in a way that

wasn't to Germany's benefit and of course that

peace treaty was very punitive.

So many articles in it making restrictions on

many things on the size of the German

army, which had to be limited to 100,000, to the standing army,

took away land that was German, it banned any union between

Austria and Germany and of course Hitler had

a lot to say about that, among many, many other harsh provisions.

Fuelled with anger and contained rage, Hitler discovers

the German Workers' Party, the underdog party with

only a few hundred supporters.

He is engulfed in their extreme political views

and wants to be involved in their manifesto.

After the war, Hitler's actually working for a

small army intelligence unit and he's actually tasked

with spying on extremist small political parties in Munich.

One day Hitler, kind of incognito, goes along

to this small party meeting and it's the

German Socialist Workers' Party and he's meant to

be spying on them, but actually he looks

at their message and what they're saying about

the way the world is and how Germany

should be and how they've been stabbed in

the back by their masters in Berlin and

how communism is on the rise and how

the Allies have utterly brought Germany to her

knees with the Versailles Treaty and those huge

reparations and Hitler looks at the message being

promulgated by this party and goes, you know what, I want a part of that.

Hitler joined the DAP, the German Workers' Party,

in 1919 and it was a very small

and unremarkable party on the radical right of

German politics and actually one of dozens of

similar parties and quite unremarkable until Hitler joined

and really made a difference.

The party soon notices Hitler's passion when speaking

and ranting about his views and appoint him as their chief of propaganda.

He shortly renames the party to the National

Socialism German Workers' Party, what we now know as the Nazi Party.

Hitler's initial job for the Nazi Party is

really in charge of their propaganda and that

job will later be done famously by Joseph

Goebbels, but Hitler is very much aware, and

this is where he's very advanced and very

sophisticated for his time, that actually what's key

is how you get your message out there.

Some of the important ways in which he

helped the party to develop was through the

initiation of a newspaper, so a party newspaper

called the Volkischer Beobachter, the People's Observer.

And also what Hitler is absolutely amazing at

is speech making and to begin to understand

Hitler, you've really got to understand that he

was the most amazing demagogue.

He got on that stage, this little man,

and he would sort of grow in stature.

He would absolutely take over the entire beer hall with his presence.

And he would shout and he would be quiet and he would almost enter into a

kind of trance.

And the audiences would be mesmerised by this.

And indeed they'd be mesmerised by it for

decades and this is key to how Hitler

gets into power because when he's on the stage he becomes another figure.

This country, its new mission, it corresponds to

the commandment that one of the German settlers

from all the valleys of the old Reich,

the oldest Ostbar of the German people, shall

from now on be the youngest bulwark of

the German nation and thus the German Reich.

Sitting in the crowd at one of the

meetings was first Nazi disciple, Rudolf Hess.

Young and impressionable, Hess was inspired by Hitler's tyrannical rants.

His admiration and respect for Hitler reached great

volumes as he instantly dedicated himself to the Nazi party.

Rudolf Hess was a very troubled man in many ways and you only have to look

at his somewhat uneven expressions whenever he's captured on film.

He's got these very thick brows and he

looks like he's puzzling about the world in general.

He was a very sort of troubled man and he was devoted to Hitler from the

very early days.

Hitler's aim is to gain power by force,

not election, and quickly enlists one of his

new favourite techniques, violence.

He forms a military organisation made up of

discontented ex-soldiers who display strong patriotism, much like himself.

The SA, who become known as the Storm Troopers, or the Brown Shirts.

They were prepared to commit violent acts of

force and terror to scare people into supporting

their party, no matter the cost of their actions.

His increase in popularity is noticed by World War I hero, Hermann Goering.

He sees the Nazi party as leverage to

gain more popularity and power for himself.

After Germany surrendered to the Allies at the

end of World War I, Goering became increasingly

angered with his government's decision, believing the war

was not lost because of the Germans, but

because of cowardly left-wing politicians, the stab -in-the-back theory.

Upon his return to Germany, he hears about

the Nazi party and their speaker, Hitler, and

believes due to his already heroic reputation, he

can grow the party and become a leader within it himself.

He meets Hitler in 1921 and joins the party.

Although he doesn't agree with all of the

party's extremist policies, he thinks he can become

powerful as a face for the party, therefore

dedicates his time to campaigning with them.

On 8th November 1923, Hitler and his Storm

Troopers burst into a beer hall where the

state prime minister is holding a meeting and

attempt to seize power, with Hitler firing a

single gunshot into the ceiling, declaring a national revolution.

They then march into Munich, declaring that they

will seize power, but the state police have

been alerted and they open fire.

They were very quickly fired upon by the

police forces and the event was a fiasco in the end.

I think that maybe the most important thing

that came out of this subsequently was that

Hitler realised that he would have to find

a way to take his power in Germany in a legal way rather than by force.

Goering attends the putsch alongside the party and

gets shot in the crossfire.

He finds himself badly wounded and escapes to

Austria with his wife where he undergoes treatment

for his injuries, becoming addicted to morphine in the process.

When he's recuperating from his wounds, he's given

morphine, heroin effectively, and it's that that he becomes addicted to.

And he develops his morphine addiction all the

way through to probably his dying days at Nuremberg in 1946.

14 Nazis are killed.

Hitler is wounded but manages to escape.

However, three days later, he is arrested and

charged with treason, being sentenced to five years in prison.

This looks like the end for the underdog extremist.

Whilst serving his sentence, Hitler grasps at the

opportunity to turn his extremist thoughts into literature.

During his time of reflection behind bars, Hitler

writes Mein Kampf, a book that outlines his

ideas for a Nazi political regime.

With fellow Nazi Rudolf Hess taking dictation, the

book becomes a manifesto for Nazi world order.

So what we've got in Mein Kampf is

anti-Semitism, very virulent anti-Semitism, really strong

language, and this is repeated time and again throughout that book.

The other key enemy, of course, was Communism or Bolshevism.

So in Mein Kampf as well, we have

many arguments and this kind of diatribe against

this enemy of Bolshevism or Communism.

It gives you a lot of insight into Hitler's state of mind.

It shows you that Hitler's thinking was kind of all over the place.

He would take a theory from there, a

theory from there, cobble it together and two and two would make six.

You know, it really was intellectually a real mess.

The other thing that he did in Mein

Kampf was really to create this, again, this

sort of myth or this idea of an Aryan race in Germany, the master race or

the Herrenvolk, and the idea that that German

race should be unpolluted or untainted by inferior or foreign blood.

Basically, everybody who isn't a purebred, decent German

son-of-the-soil or honest factory worker

is basically out to get him and the German people.

In Hitler's deranged universe, Jews are at the

bottom of the hierarchy, referring to them as

a cancer that is eating away at Germany,

holding it back from greatness.

He wants to eliminate them from the face of the earth.

He focuses on this idea of greatness and

how Germany should break its agreements to reform

itself to become a superior country.

He wants to break the Treaty of Versailles.

They should be allowed to reclaim their territory

that was lost after World War I and

rebuild the army to become the most powerful in Europe.

He explains his ideas behind Lebensraum, or living

space, deciphering that Germany has the right to

reclaim land from racially inferior people and countries.

In 1925, after Hitler's early release from prison,

he re-establishes the Nazi Party, using Mein Kampf as his manifesto.

He enforces this idea that he has been

chosen to save Germany, something he intends to do by any means necessary.

After Hitler was released from Landsberg prison in

1925, he set about refounding the Nazi Party,

which had fallen into disarray, and really not

just refounding it, but really trying to bring

it back to strength and indeed from strength to strength.

So between 1925 and 1928, he was very

much concerned to try to organise the Party

as best as possible, put a lot of

effort and energy into canvassing, trying to get

new membership and indeed trying to get new voters.

This shocking manifesto resonated well with one individual

extremist who has not yet joined the Party.

Heinrich Himmler has been struggling with his own

anger and fury towards the current state of Germany.

His approach towards others was very aggressive and

destructive, being somewhat of a loner and seen as a weak individual.

Little did people know he would go on to become one of the most brutal Nazi

leaders in history.

Himmler joins the Nazi Party shortly after Hitler's

release from prison and rises steadily in the Party hierarchy.

Himmler, like Hitler, looked like the very inverse

of the kind of Aryan, blonde, six-foot -five tall superhuman.

He was a very short man, he had a weak jawline, very ugly, he had some

pebbled glasses, former chicken farmer.

You know, he looked very, very unimpressive.

Wanting to gain mass support from the German

people, Hitler wants to reform the appearance of

the Nazi Party, focusing on propaganda rather than violence.

The establishment of a new propaganda system is

created by another rising figure within the Party, Josef Goebbels.

An aspiring writer with an inferiority complex, Josef

Goebbels becomes Hitler's most valued person when it

comes to winning over the German public.

Goebbels proves his talent producing mass propaganda for

the Nazi Party, gaining them more and more public support.

Josef Goebbels joined the Nazi Party quite early

on, as did Hitler, and he became very

much involved in those early years with helping

the Party to develop, and in particular with

these techniques of propaganda and really getting these

messages across to the German nation.

So he was very astute, he was very shrewd, in terms of trying to gain power

and trying to raise the profile of the Nazi Party in its early years.

Part of the way that he and Hitler did this was to use very short messages,

short slogans, but to keep repeating them so

that everybody knew what the Nazi Party was about.

Hitler starts to build up his power by

trying to employ and find the right people

who are going to listen to the beat of his drum and follow it.

And so there's a lot of very patient

politicking and a lot of persuasion, a lot of speech-making.

It's a very, very difficult rise to power.

But Hitler knows that it can't take place through force.

It has to take place from the ballot box and not the bullet.

Hitler's charisma excites the German people.

His enthusiasm and dedication to Germany are exactly

what the public are looking for.

He encourages them to believe he can drive the country to greatness.

He is winning the support of the nation.

Then, in 1929, a revolutionary event that will

propel Hitler's popularity off the scale, practically making

him unstoppable.

The Wall Street Crash.

The Wall Street Crash leading to the Great Depression.

America suffers and drags Germany down with them.

American banks withdraw their loans, leaving the German economy in turmoil.

This put into place a really terrible situation

for Germany, economically, socially and politically, because it

brought about such a crisis and none of

the governments between 1929 and the time when

Hitler came into power in 1933 seemed to

be able to deal with the economic crisis.

And so it was political and economic turmoil.

Six million people become unemployed.

Families living in poverty.

Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party are seeing

a rise in popularity, with desperate German people

being more impressionable than ever.

Extremist politics thrives on chaos, poverty, destitution

and want.

And what you see as a result of the Wall Street Crash and the slump in

the late 20s, early 30s, are all those

things in this hideous cocktail that an extremist

like Hitler, and indeed don't forget that communists

are also trying to get into power at

the same time, and they're seeing this as an opportunity too.

So let's not think that Hitler is unique,

but obviously he is saying, I can solve this.

Hitler's promises for Germany and its people see a surge in the polls.

By September 1930, the Nazi Party is the

second largest political party in Germany.

By 1933, the Nazis become the largest party

in Parliament and Hitler is offered the chancellorship

of a coalition government.

With a God complex drilled into his mind,

Hitler sees himself as the only leader of Germany.

He uses democracy to build popularity, but has

every intention of destroying it.

With President Hindenburg growing increasingly ill, he persuades

Parliament to give him emergency powers, the Enabling

Act, and suspend the Constitution.

On the 30th of January 1933, Hitler was

appointed Chancellor of Germany, but of a coalition

government, so there were just three Nazi posts

in that coalition government.

It's very tempting to think that when Hitler

comes to power in early 1933, that his grip on power is absolutely total.

In fact, he has a very uneven, shaky start.

He's still quite worried about public opinion.

So what he does is a mixture of passing various laws that give him more and

more power, like the Enabling Act, that actually

makes him immensely powerful.

But also, he takes advantage of various events,

like the Reichstag fire, in which the German

Parliament building burns down.

Now, it's highly likely, but never proven, whether

the Nazis actually burned it down themselves.

But certainly, in a sense, it doesn't matter.

What happens is that Hitler and the Nazis

took advantage of the Reichstag burning down to

show that there was a communist plot against

what the Nazis described as still being a democratic government.

And it enabled them to seize more power, you know, by emergency decree.

Very quickly, he turned Germany into a one -party state.

So, first of all, he made sure to

eliminate the influence and power of the German political left.

So the Socialist Party and the Communist Party, for a start, were banned.

But over a short amount of time as well, the Nazi Party was the only legal

party too.

Eventually, in January 1933, he becomes Chancellor.

Now, don't forget, Chancellor in Germany, and this

still remains today, is not, at the time, the head of state.

The head of state is the President.

So it's the Chancellor, though, who has the real executive power.

The German people have full support for Hitler,

but are clueless to the horrors that are

to follow during his reign of terror.

Hitler begins by establishing his ideas of an

Aryan race, the pure master race of Germans,

who are to follow strict reproducing laws, sterilising

people who have hereditary traits he deems unacceptable

that don't match the master race principle.

You have a lot of laws being passed,

unsurprisingly, you know, to give the Nazis more power.

But also you've got a rise in the apparatus of state terror.

You have a thing called the Gestapo, now completely notorious.

But that stands for secret state police.

This is a new police force.

There's already a creeper, the criminal police, but

this is a new type of policeman.

It's a policeman who is in plain clothes,

it's a policeman who recruits informers, you know,

on every block, on every street, in every

block of flats, in order for the people to effectively police themselves.

And, of course, this becomes an incredibly important

part of the Nazi apparatus.

In May 1933, Goebbels arranges the burning of

all un-German books at the Opera House

in Berlin, an indication that the Nazis are taking control of everything.

He gets control of the media entirely, controlling

all aspects of the press.

Radio, theatres, films and television, literature, music and the fine arts.

Nazism is everywhere.

Joseph Goebbels is the Nazi propaganda minister.

He is married to a very striking blonde woman called Magda.

Now, Magda has been married before to a

very wealthy German industrialist, but she eventually gets

divorced and marries Joseph Goebbels, who was a real Casanova, actually.

Even though he was short, club-footed and

not an attractive man, he had a lot of sexual conquests.

Magda was very good for the Nazi party,

and when Goebbels introduced her to Hitler, Hitler

got on very well with her and could

see the advantages and encouraged them to get married.

Adolf Hitler absolutely adored Magda Goebbels and thought

that she was the perfect Nazi woman.

She was blonde and she was vivacious and

she was absolutely devoted to Hitler.

She absolutely adored him.

Essentially, they were in love with each other.

She and Goebbels get married as a way of both of them to get close to

Hitler.

So Hitler goes and visits the Goebbels couple,

uninvited, and spends entire evenings with them until

the small hours, chatting away.

Magda loves that attention, Hitler loves that attention

from Magda, and Goebbels is, of course, jealous,

but he also loves the fact that he's got the Fuhrer in his living room.

So he's right at the heart of power.

Joseph Goebbels and his wife Magda are seen

as the perfect German family to set an example for the German people.

She was very well-bred and very refined

and elegant, always dressing very much in very

beautiful, fashionable clothes.

And this kind of image that she was projecting then was of the image of the

mother of the Reich, because she and Josef had six children.

She had been to a finishing school.

Her father was from quite a high echelon

of society, and so she knew about etiquette,

she knew about table manners, she knew how

to dress, she knew about society.

Whilst the Nazis were this kind of upstart

organisation, and we've seen that a lot of

the brownshirt activities was about violence and the

street and all of those kinds of things,

then the association that Magda gave was this

kind of social acceptability and the idea of

the Nazis getting an entree into upper middle

class or even aristocratic society.

Hitler plans to eliminate all other opposition, including

those on his own side.

He no longer wants to be seen as a violent party and plans to wipe out

his own paramilitary organisation, the SA.

Heinrich Himmler has established his own force of

elite bodyguards for Hitler, the SS.

They are tasked with wiping out the SA entirely.

Heinrich Himmler is one of the most pivotal

figures in the Third Reich and he's most

famous for being the head of the SS.

Now, that is the Nazi elite armed force.

It's not part of the army.

It's originally called the Schutzstaffel, the Protection Squad,

that's just there to protect Hitler.

And what Himmler does from, you know, almost

from the beginning is to build the SS

up into a state within a state because

by the height of Nazi power, Himmler is

in charge of an organisation that has a

kind of civil side to it, an administrative

side to it, which is huge and has fingers in so many pies, and also the

Waffen-SS, the armed SS, which is there to help fight the war.

And his troops are notorious for being some

of the most sort of kind of evil and deadly troops, you know, as part of

the war.

On the 30th of June 1934, a night that became known as the Night of the

Long Knives, Hitler took the opportunity to really

get rid of any opposition within the Nazi

Party, and really I think he was looking

for an opportunity to really eliminate those who

seemed to tarnish somehow the reputation of the party.

What he's very worried about is his relationship with the army.

Now, the army and the armed forces generally

do not like paramilitary organisations, and specifically the

brownshirts, the SA, the stormtroopers.

Now, these have been kind of on Hitler's side for a very long time in the

run-up to power, but now he's in

power, he doesn't need a paramilitary force because

he's got this thing called the actual armed

forces, you know, he's got a navy, an

air force, an army under his direct control,

and the generals, they don't like the stormtroopers.

They see them as a threat to them, they see them as a rival military force,

and they're trying to convince Hitler, look, you

know, you've got to get rid of the SA, the stormtroopers.

There was this idea that the stormtroopers, so

the SA, led by Ernst Rohm, were somehow

overstepping the mark, this idea that they were

going to have a second revolution, and this

was something that Hitler absolutely did not want,

so he wanted the party to be much more respectable and to really get rid of

any kind of rough and tumble, let's say,

that the stormtroopers still represented.

Becoming known as the Knight of the Long

Knives, he uses his SS organisation, considered his

personal bodyguards, to carry out this task.

The SS didn't have much of a reputation

at this point, therefore were no threat to the image of the Nazi party.

This is seen as the ultimate sort of

expression of Hitler's power, that he can even

turn upon his old allies in order to

consolidate his own power and in order to

get the army directly where he wants it.

Where's that?

Under his thumb.

This was considered a pivotal moment in Hitler's rise to power.

Himmler proves his worth to Hitler by carrying

out these assassinations carefully and with ease.

He is also assisted by a man who

Hitler later nicknamed the Man with the Iron Heart, Reinhard Heydrich.

Heydrich joined the SS in 1931, working closely with Himmler.

He soon gets promoted to take charge of

the Gestapo and the criminal police forces.

Heydrich was one of those Nazis who truly,

even today, makes one's blood run cold.

You just have to look at the man to see his evil.

He just looks like this nasty piece of

work and, boy, was Heydrich a nasty piece of work.

Himmler goes, well, why don't you join this

unit, this new unit called the Sicherheitsdienst, the

security service, which is the SS espionage service,

if you like, that's going to spy on

enemies within the Third Reich and enemies abroad.

And it's Heydrich who turns the SD into

one of the most redoubtable units of the

whole Nazi regime and will gain enormous amounts

of power because it's the SD, actually, that

ends up carrying out the Holocaust.

In August 1934, President Hindenburg dies and Hitler

unites the chancellorship and presidency into one role

for himself, Führer of Germany.

He's able to take on the role of

both president and chancellor and kind of create

this new role for himself, and that is

the role of Führer, the German word for leader.

That is a fascist term, be in no doubt.

This is a kind of new form of governance that Germany now has.

Other parties are banned.

The only party allowed is the Nazi Party.

This has become a totalitarian state and Hitler

can say to the German people, you voted for it.

It's a con and it's a con that worked.

With his support from the German people confirmed,

Hitler begins to enforce some of his tyrannical policies.

In February 1935, Hitler orders Hermann Goering to

establish the Luftwaffe, a German air force, which

once again defies the terms of the Treaty of Versailles.

One month later, he rearms the army with

the aim of completely undoing the treaty, uniting

all the German people who are delighted with

his dedication to their nation.

He does everything that the Versailles Treaty tells him not to do.

He re-militarises and marches into various zones

where he's not allowed to be, such as

the Rhineland, and he also starts building up

his armed forces, secretly at first, and then blatantly.

All this soon becomes really blatant and the

Allies, such as the British and the French,

they just look at it and what do they do?

They do nothing.

1935 sees the introduction of the Nuremberg Laws.

Hitler is beginning to convince the German people

that the Jews are to blame for Germany's previous struggles.

Marriage between Jews and German people becomes illegal.

Jewish people are stripped of their citizenship and all their civil rights.

So we know that from as early as

Hitler's writings in Mein Kampf that he was personally anti-Semitic.

And what we see once the Third Reich

comes into power is his personal anti-Semitism

translated into state policy.

So from the very earliest days and months

of the Third Reich, there were many different

measures, legal measures, taken against the Jews, and

also illegal measures as well.

Just as he had promised in Mein Kampf,

Hitler is treating the Jews in Germany as an internal enemy.

So what you see are laws stripping Jews of their German citizenship.

You see awful things like Jews not being

allowed to go to swimming pools because if

a Jew swam in a public swimming pool,

the water would have to be drained because the Jew had dirtied the water.

So you can see that you've got this

awful, awful, both political and cultural exclusion of

the Jewish community.

And if it wasn't enough to completely demoralise

the Jewish population, Hitler takes things one step further.

The Night of Broken Glass in 1938 sees

the destruction of over 7,000 Jewish shops

and 400 synagogues are burnt to the ground.

When we get to 1938, we come to quite a key moment in the history of

Nazi anti-Semitism.

We come to the night of the 9th to 10th of November 1938, to a night

known as Reichskristallnacht.

Reichskristallnacht, Kristallnacht, or the Night of the Broken Glass.

The Nazis just literally set fire to synagogues

everywhere and they smash up Jewish shops and Jews are killed.

Near on 100 people were killed in the

course of the night and between 20,000

and 30,000 German Jews were taken to concentration camps.

This absolutely horrific destruction, slaughter, violence carried out

by the state against its own people.

It showed the world what Hitler was.

He was effectively a gangster and a murderer.

Himmler and Heydrich bring their evil minds together

once more to orchestrate this terrible night of violence.

Heydrich orders the arrests of thousands of Jews

by the Gestapo and, with Himmler's influence, has

them all sent to concentration camps.

Himmler established the first Nazi concentration camp in

Dachau, indicating he had no issues with bringing

harm to the Jews as he considers them a vermin within Germany.

Heydrich is already establishing the idea of murdering all Jews.

It's the SS men doing not only the

exterminations, but they're also the ones who are

appropriating wealth from the Jews and all the

other slaves being used and appropriating all the

stuff that they own and also selling this

workforce to big German industries who are paying

for its use and all that is going to the pockets of the SS.

So the SS becomes incredibly rich as an

organisation and it's also running police forces.

You name it, as I say, it's the state within the state and the man at

the top of it is Heydrich Himmler.

30,000 Jews are arrested and sent to

concentration camps where they will see out the

rest of their lives in torture and unlawful conditions.

The German people are unaware of the inhumane

treatment that will take place in these camps

but are beginning to realise the severity of Hitler's anti-Semitism.

After the Night of the Broken Glass, the

situation for Germany's Jews just got worse and

worse from then until the war and, of course, during the war as well.

They were impoverished, they were made to pay a big atonement fine.

Money was taken from them in order to

pay for this calamity that they'd allegedly brought upon themselves.

There's no doubt about the centrality of anti

-Semitism to Hitler's world view, there's absolutely no doubt about that.

But what he seemed to be trying to do was sort of stay in the shadows

so that when we get a pogrom like

this, that the public, the German public and

the population were quite affronted by it.

I think he managed to maintain his popularity during this time.

First of all, because he was staying in

the shadows of more unpopular policies.

And there was certainly that sentiment among the

German population because of this myth that surrounded the Fuhrer.

But, well, if there were unpleasant things going

on or policies that they didn't like, all

of those sort of more difficult aspects of

the Third Reich, then somehow that Hitler couldn't

know about it, that he wasn't associated with it, that it had to be one of

the other leaders, it can't have been him.

If only the Fuhrer knew, this wouldn't be happening.

Alongside this, Hitler is keeping to his promises made in Mein Kampf.

Factories are helping to build up the German

army to become the most advanced in Europe.

This will all support Hitler's plans for Lebensraum,

taking back the land he claims they deserve.

With each area they take back, Britain and France are still all talk.

Nobody is opposing Hitler's army and their storm on attaining land.

More farsighted people in Britain and France are

sort of going, well, where's this going to end?

You know, because if you keep giving someone

something, they're going to keep wanting more, because

that's human nature and that's what you're going to do.

However, learning of his plans to invade Poland,

the Allied countries make it clear they will

declare war, but Hitler ignores their threat, as

they've never acted before.

On September 1st, 1939, Hitler launches an attack

on Poland, underestimating the start of World War II.

For the first time, foreign leaders become aware

of how insane Hitler really is.

Hitler divulges this concept of Blitzkrieg, a lightning

war, to his German public.

In September 1939, Hitler invades Poland, along with Stalin.

Stalin also, and Soviet Russia also invades Poland at the same time.

But what the world remembers is the fact

that Hitler invaded Poland and a couple of

days later, the British declare war on Germany.

Hitler himself claims it to be a war of racial annihilation.

No mercy is to be upheld.

Within just six weeks, Poland is crushed by

the German army and tens of thousands of Poles executed.

The German population, because of Hitler's popularity, and

even though they had experienced the horrors of

the First World War and the trench warfare

of the First World War and all of

the shell shock and everything that went with

it, because he was so popular, they might

not have been delighted to go to war

in September 1939, but they went along with it.

In 1940, Hitler's all-powerful army rules over

Denmark, Norway, Holland and Belgium, and eventually crushes

France with their number of tanks.

Germany is untouchable.

Really one of the high points of Hitler's

popularity was the image of the Nazis taking over Paris.

All of these attacks were very quick and

easy victories for the Nazis and they just

fed Hitler's success and popularity.

These successes are only fuelling Hitler's ego, which

leaves him with no hesitation to invade Stalin's

Russia, despite their previous peace pact.

Hitler enthuses his army with these ideas that

nobody is superior to the Aryan race.

Therefore all means of violence and mass murder will be tolerated.

With the German people feeling positive and patriotic,

focusing on the war, Hitler can now enforce

his most brutal horrors of the Third Reich.

The Nazi regime absolutely hated the Jews and

wanted to get rid of them from the very beginning.

So we see that with some of the earlier policies, but as we get into the

wartime period, of course the policies become more

and more radicalised, more and more extreme.

So essentially the Nazis created this idea of

a Jewish question or a Jewish problem that needed a solution.

And throughout the course of the Third Reich

they put into place a variety of different

measures to try to deal with their so -called Jewish problem.

Hitler's plans for the Jews and when he

decided to slaughter them still remain a topic

of a lot of historical controversy because there

is no piece of paper that says kill all Jews, signed A.

Hitler.

But I think that what is absolutely clear

is that in conversation he would have said

to his top leaders we need to start killing these people.

Hitler was smart enough to know this shouldn't be on a piece of paper.

The initial idea is that the Jews are

rounded up into ghettos and from those ghettos

they can then be sent to concentration camps

where they can be worked and worked to death.

And you see these camps all over occupied

Poland and all over Germany itself.

Suddenly around the time of Barbarossa, 1941, it

starts to get actually eliminations and you have

what's called Action Reinhardt in which you've got

the establishment of four actual death camps in what was occupied Poland.

Special death squads are sent in to murder

the Jews, the victims being made to dig

a trench then forced to stand inside, waiting to be shot.

Groups are continuously sent into the trench to

die until it is full of bodies.

With a shocking 1.5 million Jews shot

in this process, with Hitler's focus being turned

towards the extermination of the racially impure, war efforts are lacking.

Rudolf Hess notices the Führer is preoccupied and

decides to take matters into his own hands.

He has been losing his influence on Hitler.

Once being known as the Deputy Führer, he has now been pushed so far out of

the circle, he goes by unnoticed.

In a last drastic attempt to get back

into the circle, he decides to bring the

continuing military struggle between Germany and the Allies

to an end by means of a peace pact.

He carries out this absolutely extraordinary mission, takes

off from a Messerschmitt 110 in Augsburg and

flies to Scotland, obviously, where he parachutes out

to land on the land of the Duke of Hamilton, who he thinks is a friend

of his.

And he says, you know, I'm here to

basically forge a peace deal, that, you know,

if you allow Nazi Germany to have a

free hand in Europe, we'll allow the British

Empire and British colonies a free hand and

for Britain to maintain her influence all over the world.

And, of course, this is just complete nonsense.

You know, Churchill, by this stage, is in

no mood to start listening to what is clearly a semi-deranged individual.

And, indeed, he just remains in prison.

Once Hitler hears of his plan and capture

in Britain, he declares Hess has committed treason

and he is rejected from the Nazis.

The exile of Hess opened doors for a shadowy figure in the inner circle.

Martin Bormann was initially chief of staff to

Rudolf Hess, but after his capture in Britain,

Hitler promotes him to head of the party chancellery.

Bormann is seen as a secretive but extremely

powerful presence in the Third Reich, having the

most access and contact with Hitler.

He controlled all acts of legislation and party

promotions, as well as drawing up the Führer's

schedule and appointments calendar.

Bormann had the power to decide who was allowed to see Hitler and when.

This caused him to be hated by fellow

members of the inner circle, but they knew

they had to maintain a civil relationship with

him in order to get access to Hitler.

Martin Bormann is one of the most enigmatic

and cryptic figures of the Third Reich.

He was one of the old fighters, as it was called.

He was there from the very early days,

very loyal Nazi, but always in the shadows.

He was head of what was called the

chancellery, and as a result, he actually had

the keys to Hitler, if you like.

If you want to go and speak to Hitler, you've got to go through Bormann.

It doesn't matter who you are, everyone's got to go through Bormann.

And so that gives him enormous power, because if he can say you can and you

can't, you've got to carry favour with him.

And, of course, in any dictatorship, whoever's the

nearest to the dictator is going to have the most power.

In secret, Hitler's inner circle are experimenting with

other forms of mass murder to be deemed more efficient.

This is known as the Final Solution.

Reinhard Heydrich chairs a meeting known as the

Wannsee Conference, in which leading Nazis discuss ways

in which the Jews can be eliminated economically and efficiently.

The Wannsee Conference really was that moment, a

kind of very important moment in the evolution

of Nazi anti-Semitic policy and in what

we call the Final Solution, because this was

the moment that both retrospectively sanctioned what had

already been going on, these experiments at the

end of 1941, and really set in place

then the momentum for the establishment and running of these death camps.

And there were six of those, all of

them on Polish soil through the height of the war.

A secret department, known as T4, is instructed

to find a way to kill as many as possible, quickly and quietly, out of the

knowledge of the German public.

By the time we get to the end of 1941, the Nazis had already put into

place this Action T4, which was actually the

extermination of the German asylum population.

So Action T4, between 1939 and 1941, had

used poisonous gas to kill Germany's mentally and

physically ill population.

That was something like 70,000 adults and

maybe up to 6,000 children and teenagers.

It really was the most repellent form of

kind of Nazi quote-unquote medicine that you can imagine.

It is basically chopping people out of life.

You're killing them.

You're killing children with epilepsy.

You're killing people who've got mild spinal deformities.

You're killing people who've even got stutters because

you're saying they're genetically weak and we don't

want them if we're going to make this

strong, blonde Aryan race full of perfect superhumans.

When the truth about the killing emerges, German

people become distressed that their friends and family

members may be targeted.

They begin to protest and express their dismay

towards the horrors they have just uncovered.

Hitler quickly withdraws the programme, realising he may

have gone too far, realising the limit of

what the German people would accept.

It happened in secret, in these kind of horrific hospitals and castles.

And these are the sites of some of

the worst murders carried out by the Nazis.

So it was a repellent programme, and the

German people knew it when they found out about it.

And when it was really appreciated by the public, it was stopped.

So it shows you that Hitler was sensitive

to public opinion and would go with public opinion when it went to end him.

He depicts that future killings needed to be

well hidden and he shouldn't be associated with it.

He must fool the German people to portray

a kind and caring persona as their Fuhrer,

not wanting to lose support from his country.

He never personally signs a document for these

killings again, keeping his own image in the clear.

However, all the other Nazis act in his

name, organising this destruction themselves.

Hitler keeps his public image very clean.

People are aware that bad things are happening

to Jews and they're being deported, but they're not precisely sure.

But you do see glimpses of it, because

sometimes you get German parents telling their children,

if you don't behave, you'll go up the chimney like Jews.

So clearly that suggests there was a sort

of kind of knowledge that maybe something like that was going on.

But also a lot of German families were

more worried about the fate of their own

sons, fathers and uncles fighting, especially on the

Eastern Front, which is turning into a bloody bloodbath.

Hitler moves the killings from Germany, with the

idea they must happen as far away as possible.

Building a network of death camps in Poland,

this was the beginning of the final solution.

The Germans were involved in their own experience

of the war, preoccupied with their own difficulties,

and in a sense then once the Jews

weren't there anymore, they were sort of out

of their frame of reference and just not in their thoughts.

Heinrich Himmler is tasked with creating death camps,

elimination rooms where thousands can be executed at once.

He becomes responsible for the murders and slaughtering

of millions of Jews, a total atrocity.

He was responsible for the Holocaust, because, you

know, it was the SS largely who carried it out.

And when he went to go and kind

of witness a slaughter, you know, some brains

were splattered upon his coat, and it caused him to vomit.

He never, you know...

This is the man responsible for it, and he can't cope with it.

I'm not saying it's desirable that he should

have coped with it, but it just shows

you that he didn't actually have the personal

appetite for butchering people himself and got other people to do it.

In many ways, he was a coward.

Jews from all over Europe are transported to

these camps, unaware of the inhumane scenarios they are about to face.

Horror.

Screams.

Mass murder.

An unimaginable scene of death and destruction.

Millions of Jews were murdered because of one

man's horrific desire for a racially pure nation.

Death camps, all of those were on Polish

soil, so they were out of the immediate

frame of sight or reference of the Germans.

So, again, in some way, they were happening

elsewhere and not really in their immediate field of vision.

These are places that are places of deep,

deep horror because you didn't go there to work, you went there to die.

And you would arrive, and within 30 minutes, you'd be dead.

Treblinka, for example, is no bigger, if you

visit it, than a football stadium, the size of a football pitch.

And in that very small area, around 850

,000 men, women and children were gassed.

It's just the most horrific thought if you ever visit a place like that.

Auschwitz, again, a very huge, iconic place associated

with the Holocaust, of course, famously where a

million Jews were put to death, many of

whom were gassed on arrival, but it also

was a concentration camp rather than just an extermination camp.

So it has these two horrific roles.

And don't forget, Auschwitz and places like this, they're huge.

Auschwitz is three camps spread over about ten miles.

I mean, these are factories of death, there's no doubt about it.

Reinhard Heydrich, the man who would have murdered

millions if he had not been stopped.

Operation Anthropoid, two men trained in Britain to

carry out the planned assassination of Heydrich.

On May 27th, 1942, the men approached the

car taking Heydrich through Prague's Kobylice district, in

which he was travelling without an armed escort.

Unfortunately, the operation didn't quite go as planned,

as the gun jammed within meters of the car.

Quick thinking led to a grenade being thrown

towards the vehicle and exploding inside, wounding Heydrich badly.

He was taken to hospital, but after refusing

to let any non-German surgeon operate on

him, he died several days later of septicemia.

All members of the Nazi party were required

to be a part of the final solution, as it was genocide on a mass scale,

therefore needed mass participation.

By the end of 1944, six million Jews

have been murdered upon his approval, due to

his own horrific ideals and regime.

Hitler is absorbed with the focus on creating a pure race.

He is losing the war he created.

The inferior nations around him are now closing in on his territory.

The war is closing in on Berlin, reducing

Hitler and a circle of his closest, most

trusted Nazis into a bunker under the ruins of his chancellery.

Hitler's image of an all-powerful dictator is

slowly decreasing, as his tremor gets worse.

Once the Red Army came into German territory

in 1945, then Hitler's position as this infallible

ruler and leader really not only became to

be called into question, but really came to

its end, because the Soviet troops were very

vengeful, they were retaliating for all the terrible

brutalities and atrocities that the Nazis and the

German army had put into place in Soviet territory.

What it meant was that they were coming

closer and closer on their journey westwards to

Berlin, and eventually Hitler and a very small

inner circle around him had to retreat to

his bunker, his underground bunker.

During the last days of his life, Hitler

is seen as a demented dictator, battling to

rule what had become a phantom Reich, with

an army who were no longer listening to his requests.

He believed Germany had failed him and no

longer deserved his power or ruling.

He wanted the whole country to be torn down with him.

This is a war brought about by Hitler, and this is a war that Hitler has

fought for too long, and he's fighting it

to the death, and he's fighting it to

the death of the people who he supposedly

loves, and he no longer loves them by the end of the war, and he says

that basically the German people don't deserve him,

the German people don't deserve Germany, and everybody

should fight to the death because basically, you

know, they don't deserve to be alive because they failed him.

Classic narcissistic thinking.

The world is for him, you know, and he's not there for the world.

One by one, his inner circle begin to

abandon him as they realise what will happen to them at the end of the war.

Goering has already retired as much as he

has permitted, retreating to his estate with his wife.

He was also framed in a scandal, claiming

he was attempting to take over the Fuhrer's

powers in the final days of the war.

He became this kind of drug-addled, alcoholic

whale of a man who other Nazis would

laugh at and not take seriously and saw him as an impediment.

So, actually, by the end of the war, he's this joke figure.

Goering wrote a letter to Hitler, offering to

relieve Hitler of his duties and act in

his place as he had believed the Fuhrer

was encircled and helpless in Berlin.

This was a reasonable act, seemingly as Hitler

had named him to be the political heir.

However, scheming Martin Bormann saw this as an

opportunity to wipe out another one of his threats within the inner circle.

He intercepted the letter before it reached Hitler himself.

He presented the letter to the Fuhrer as

though Goering was attempting to commit treason.

Hitler issued a telegram to Goering and told

him that he had committed high treason and

gave him the option to resign his offices in exchange for his life.

Rumours are indicating that Himmler has plans to

succeed Hitler and continue running the Nazi Party.

He has already made negotiations with the enemies

to release Jewish prisoners from the concentration camps

to freedom via Switzerland.

Once Hitler finds out about Himmler's independent plans,

he strips him of all offices and orders his arrest.

Only his loyal mistress Eva Braun stands beside

him, continuing to fuel his demented fantasy that

he is still the greatest man in the world.

Eva Braun was Hitler's best kept secret.

Meeting him aged 17, she was young, impressionable and easily lead.

Eva was a very mysterious character, always being

in the background of all affairs and rarely seen in public.

The normality of their relationship was unclear.

The 30th of April, 1945.

Hitler comes to terms with the fact that

Germany is losing the war and is beyond repair.

He hadn't made a public appearance or speech in months.

His victories are long gone, needing a mixture of drugs to keep him sane.

Hitler's last days in the Führerbunker under the

Reich Chancellery in the centre of Berlin are

a kind of terrible end of a Shakespearean

tragedy, as the thunder of Russian artillery all

around them, and they're deep, deep inside this

sort of concrete underground fortress.

Everybody's sort of kind of going mad, and especially Hitler.

On this day, he finally agrees to marry

Eva Braun, just hours before their suicide.

The pair tie the knot with what's left

of Hitler's loyal advisers as witness.

Finally, after many years of being Hitler's long -term partner,

Hitler married Eva Braun that night.

It was to be a very short-lived

marriage because two days later they both committed suicide together.

He hands her a cyanide capsule and he holds his pistol.

The pair commit suicide together, leaving Germany in ruins.

Hitler would rather die than flee Germany and be seen as weak.

Their bodies are burnt.

I mean, this great kind of almost like

a Viking pyre, like a Viking longship going up.

Europe's most evil dictator is dead.

Just over a week later, Germany surrenders.

As the death camps are uncovered, everyone learns

the horrors of the Nazi regime.

On 7th May 1945, Germany surrendered, and once

that had happened, the atrocities of the Nazi

regime came to popular attention.

Ultimately, when it was shown quite how evil

Nazism was, and the German people fully appreciated

it, then, yes, the opinion of Hitler was not quite so positive.

Joseph and Magda Goebbels are devastated at the

suicide of their beloved Fuhrer.

Magda does not want to raise her children

in a world without Hitler and the Third Reich.

And if you want to see the ultimate

expression of this twisted, bizarre, dark, horrific love,

if you like, it's the fact that they

both killed themselves to follow Hitler into the afterlife.

And they kill their own children in the

bunker, poison all six children, because a world

without Hitler and a world without Nazism is no place for their kids.

That's how much they adored Hitler.

After the discovery of the horrific secrets of

the Nazi regime, remaining important party members were

arrested and set to face the judge in the Nuremberg trials.

Rudolf Hess was brought back to Germany after

his prison sentence in Britain and found guilty

at the trials, being given a life sentence.

Heinrich Himmler was captured but committed suicide before

he could be tried.

Hermann Goering was sentenced to the death penalty

but committed suicide in his cell by cyanide

the night his execution was ordered, cheating the hangman.

As for Martin Bormann, he disappeared shortly after Hitler's death.

There were rumours that he had escaped and

was living in hiding somewhere in the world.

He was indicted at the Nuremberg trials and found guilty.

The downfall of the Third Reich was the

inevitable end of Hitler's inner circle.

And although many of these monsters evaded trial

for their horrendous crimes, there is no doubt

the ultimate justice awaited them all.