Original subtitles

Adolf Hitler is planning a new capital,

for his new Nazi empire.

Before he is finally stopped,

many of his fanatical ideas will become a reality.

Hitler's story shows where the unchecked power

of a dictator can lead.

Now, we are looking at him through different eyes.

His friends, his admirers,

his enablers.

Most are Nazis, few can be trusted.

But perhaps if we see him as they did,

we can grasp who Adolf Hitler was and what made him possible.

By summer 1940, Hitler is on the way to realising

his dreams of world conquest.

His armies have stormed through Europe,

invading one country after another.

Most of his fellow warmongers will later be sentenced to death.

But General Walter Warlimont survives to tell the tale.

He helps Hitler implement the attack on France.

How did Hitler himself react during the French campaign?

He was terribly nervous.

He was frightened by his own success,

that nobody could have foreseen

a success of such a totality in hardly one month.

Arriving in the airspace over Paris,

I observed that great columns of German infantry had already

entered the town.

I felt such joy and exultation

that I asked the pilot whether it would be possible

to perform a landing on the Place de la Concorde,

which was entirely free of any traffic,

and we landed on the Champs-Elysees.

German might has arrived in Paris.

After the French surrender,

the streets are cleared for one man.

I was in the car with him and we drove immediately

to the Opera building and he said to us

"It was always the ardent wish of my life

"to see this building once in my lifetime."

And from there we were close to the Eiffel Tower and he admired

this technical work of a genius.

Hitler has always craved glory.

Now he's eclipsing even the great conqueror, Napoleon.

Hitler and his propaganda took care that the overwhelming success

of the campaign was attributed to him as the greatest strategist

of all times.

My feelings towards Hitler were such as if he were some

superhuman being between man and a god.

He told the German people all the time he was sent by providence.

The whole people believed it, I too.

Now Hitler is ready to inform his generals of his next big idea.

General Walter Warlimont is one of the first to hear.

Hitler wants to conquer vast areas of the Soviet Union to make way

for German settlers.

He mobilises the largest invasion force ever assembled.

We had no fear

because we thought we will win the war against Russia,

because the wars against Poland and France,

we had ended with victories for Germany.

But fatally ill-equipped for the onset of winter,

the German advance falters.

This unique recording,

made without Hitler's knowledge,

reveals a rare moment of doubt in the normally unshakeable leader.

But in the face of the enemy's overwhelming military strength,

instead of backing down, Hitler raises the stakes.

Hitler becomes obsessed with the idea of capturing

the Russian city named after the Soviet leader.

Stalingrad.

Johann von Kielmansegg is in army HQ.

Hitler's plan leads to disaster.

His troops are surrounded, and starving.

But he demands victory,

even when presented with a dire situation on the map.

But no amount of wishful thinking can change the reality

on the ground for Hitler's forces.

Hitler has left his troops to their fate.

Half a million of his soldiers are wiped out.

After disaster at Stalingrad,

Hitler withdraws to his mountain retreat, the Berghof.

One of the few people he sees

is his new secretary, Traudl Junge.

She was at his side when he heard the news of defeat at Stalingrad.

It was such an unpleasant Mood everywhere

and Hitler himself stared on his soup without saying any word

and he was very depressed.

But on Berghof it was necessary for us to take the meals with Hitler

and to entertain him,

because he said I can't make real holidays

but every day a little hour to relax.

He liked only a very light, very easy conversation and he began

to speak about his dog which he liked very, very much,

or he began to talk about his former successes as,

in the beginning of the Nazi party.

While Hitler hides away,

Allied bombing raids are flattening German cities.

We heard reports about destroyed towns.

It was really alarming, especially after my old house

has been destroyed.

I reported, I told him how awful it is.

Then Hitler became very honest

and his eyes were very fanatical and he swore revenge.

"It will not last long, I soon will change this situation

"and I will stop this cruelty."

In his rage, Hitler turns on his usual scapegoats.

Hitler's programme of genocide has begun.

He sends millions to die in secret killing centres

and expects his orders to go unquestioned.

Henny von Schirach has known Hitler since childhood.

After seeing Jews being transported to their death, she confronts him.

Henny suddenly began to talk about her experience on the station

when she saw a train full of Jews

and these deported people.

TRANSLATION: So, I told him what I'd seen.

His reply was "You are sentimental."

Then there was a terrible row.

He stood up, I stood up,

I said "Herr Hitler you ought not to be doing that."

I thought I can allow myself to say such a thing

because I've known him so long.

Then Hitler said

"Every day 10,000 of my best soldiers die on the battlefield,

"while the others carry on living in the camps.

"That means the biological balance in Europe is not right anymore."

His mask fell down and the friendly smile vanished off his face

and he stood up and went to bed,

and Henny Schirach was never again invited.

Henny's husband, Baldur von Schirach,

is also a close friend of Hitler's

and the Nazi party's most senior official in wartime Vienna.

Under his watch,

65,000 Austrian Jews were deported to concentration camps.

Did Hitler often use the phrase 'the final solution'

- the great phrase that we hear now? - No.

- Did he use it a lot? - No. Never.

I have never heard it from him.

But we've seen how close you were to Hitler too,

I mean it must have been very difficult not to know

just from his own attitudes, wasn't it?

He hated the Jews.

That was a thing that you heard

almost every time you were there.

But he would never tell you directly

what he considered the final solution that is now,

now quoted so often.

I mean I suppose that, when Hitler kept enquiring again

about the number of Jews in Austria,

I mean that was another time really when, you know,

one had to just not, somehow not question the reason why

he was asking, as it were.

Was that so?

What could I do?

I enquired, when I came to Vienna,

"Where are these people going to?"

"They are going to special camps with other Jews."

"Yes, I mean, what about food and so on?"

"Yes, they get food for their transport and everything,

"that's all settled and so on," you know.

The SS could be so very sweet about answering such questions.

You always thought they were so nice and kindly.

And Mr Frost, something else.

Now, I do not want to excuse myself,

I just want to...

An old man has no other interest

but the truth, the historical truth.

I was there, I had a job.

Mr Frost, I didn't have the damn time to think about anything else.

From day to night, I was working.

We felt that people should know what was going on,

and maybe typical is this little experience which I had one day

standing in the line for vegetables or something like that.

I told my neighbours standing around me

that now they start to kill the Jews in the concentration camps

and it is not true that they only are brought there and can live

there as they live here, as it was told to them.

And they said,

"Bonhoeffer, if you don't stop telling such horror stories,

"you will end in a concentration camp too

"and nobody of us can help you.

"It's not true what you're telling, you shouldn't believe these things.

"You heard them from the foreign broadcasters

"and they tell these things to make enemies against Germany."

I say, "No, that's not from broadcasters,

"I know that directly from first-hand.

"You can be sure, it is that way."

And coming home I told that, my husband in the evening,

and he was not at all applauding to me, in the very contrary.

He said, "My dear, sorry to say

"but you are absolutely idiotic, what you are doing.

"Please understand a dictatorship is like a snake.

"If you put your foot on its tail, as you do it,

"it will just bite you, and nobody will be helped.

"You have to strike the head."

Emmi Bonhoeffer and her family belonged to a growing group

of anti-Hitler resisters.

Appalled by Nazi crimes,

they believe Hitler is leading them to disaster.

As Allied forces advance towards Germany, high-ranking

officers in the army feel compelled to act.

Still posted at Hitler's HQ is General Walter Warlimont.

It was a normal day but in very depressing circumstances

on account of this disaster on the Eastern Front.

We went in and we were standing around and Hitler came in

and then the conference began,

and suddenly the door opened again,

Claus Stauffenberg came in, and he stood there quite erect,

and I remember that Stauffenberg had a big black briefcase

that he put under the table

and I haven't seen that he left the room shortly afterwards.

It was as if a lightning had come down.

Everything was on fire.

I went down for a fraction of a second and shortly afterwards

Hitler was let out of the room.

It was a chaotic scene.

The room looked terrible.

Tables destroyed, chairs split up.

The windows blown out of the frames.

Picture of destruction.

Four die in the explosion, but Hitler escapes

with only minor injuries.

Hours later, nursing a sprained right arm,

he greets former Italian dictator, Benito Mussolini.

Hitler said to Mussolini,

"People in the room were killed, burnt to death,

"blown out of the window,

"and nothing happened to me, and when I look at it now,

"I must say that I'm protected by something,

"I'm supposed not to perish that way,

"and after this narrow escape of today,

"I think we'll have the same kind of escape

"in our big common enterprise and we'll win through."

At first that was immediate thankful, grateful feeling

that he was not hurt, he was still alive.

But then he became angry to the criminals

who had done this plot.

He accused all the generals

and he started to claim that they were not faithful

and so on.

Consumed with rage, Hitler sets out

to exact his revenge.

Stauffenberg and the ringleaders are shot.

Hundreds of other suspects are rounded up,

tortured and put on trial.

On Hitler's orders,

the court proceedings are filmed.

Knowing he'll be watching,

the Nazi judge puts on a performance.

While Hitler consoles victims of the plot,

he thinks up ways to inflict maximum suffering on the plotters.

The conspirators are strung up from meat hooks,

and hanged by piano wire.

Their deaths are specially filmed

and photographed for Hitler.

I saw how Hitler grabbed at these photographs

and how he looked at it with cruelty and gleefully

and I saw the face of one of my friends,

of Peter Graf Yorck who was executed among these people

and I was so terribly shocked

about how Hitler acted in this moment

that I had to leave the room.

To most Germans, resistance to Hitler's regime

now seems futile.

Even to the very end, after July 20,

it was only the question either you wanted to be a martyr

or look away.

What could you do?

You couldn't emigrate any more, you know.

You couldn't refuse to be a soldier.

What, what...

You couldn't do anything, you could just shut your eyes

and say, let's go through.

That's the way it happened.

As the Allied armies advanced towards Germany,

bombing raids were destroying Hitler's war machine.

Head of Armaments, and Hitler's friend, Albert Speer,

realises that defeat is now a matter of time.

It was my duty to tell Hitler

that these are the last weapons you are getting

and I told him, which nobody dared to tell,

that the war was lost.

You can't do any more.

And he told me very bluntly,

"That's not up to you to tell me if the war

"is lost or not lost, that's my decision.

"I won't accept it."

Herr Speer, did Hitler change through the years you knew him?

Could you see him change?

He changed to a man who started to hate even his own people.

In the end of the war he made a statement to me that,

if this war should be lost,

the whole people should be lost too.

Slowly but steadily he became weak,

and the doctors went in and out and one day he didn't get up.

It was a very critical situation

on the West Front and on the East Front too

and the only man who could give order

and could have changed things lay in bed

and was not interested at all.

And some days it was like Hitler didn't exist.

As German defences collapse,

Hitler and his inner circle take refuge 50 feet below ground.

In the Fuhrerbunker.

How did he behave?

People say that he was mad.

Did he seem to be mad?

He could be very, very angry and he could explode.

He wanted to hear only flattering things,

so he lost the sense of reality.

It was about March

when the situation in Berlin got rather hopeless.

He was all of a sudden interested to see the model of Linz.

Linz was his home city and he had special plans

to make it the most beautiful town of Austria.

But I think it was only an escape for him

in this daydream of architecture.

On March 22 1945,

Hitler makes a rare public appearance

to decorate members of the Hitler Youth.

Even now, the bond between the Fuhrer and these devoted followers

is unbroken.

TRANSLATION: I told Hitler that I was a messenger boy for the army

and perhaps that struck a chord with him

because he'd been a regimental messenger during the First World War.

Anyway, he then patted my cheek and said,

"Well, done my boy."

Didn't you realise at the time that the war was lost?

TRANSLATION: No. Not at all.

We boys still thought, and we'd heard rumours,

that the Fuhrer somehow had a secret weapon in reserve.

With the Soviet Red Army in the heart of Berlin,

Hitler finally gives up.

Mr Lorenz, I should like to have you tell me...

The moment is recalled in this rehearsed testimony

by his Press Secretary.

His armies were defeated on all fronts and Berlin was flattened.

He ordered his troops forward to stop the advance but the troops

failed to attack.

The shock of realisation that he, Adolf Hitler,

had been disobeyed and that complete disaster was inevitable

was too much for him.

He collapsed and he said,

"It's all over and I'll shoot myself."

I expected that Hitler would regret what happened,

what had happened to the German people and I thought

he must be very conscious that he had brought misery

and hunger and death to the people.

He only repeated all the reproachful phrases

against the Jews and he even found

the German people was not worth his mission.

Suddenly we heard the pistol shot.

Goebbels and I ran back to Hitler's room and entered it.

Hitler's lower jaw was slightly distorted.

It was obvious he had shot himself in the mouth.

The sofa was stained with blood

and his pistol lay at his feet.

Every step until now was ordered by Hitler.

And suddenly we we're given our own lives back,

and I felt I must go out of this bunker

and go out in the fresh air.

Suddenly I saw the war in all its appearance.

There lay dead soldiers

and there were Russians and refugees and horses

and burning houses.

It was such a concentrated picture of war and defeat,

that I... I see it today like it was.

Sometimes I think that what I am telling you

is the story of another girl.

This is where following the Fuhrer has led.

Germans are forced to confront the atrocities committed

in their name.

While further revelations about the death camps

finally break the hold Hitler had over his supporters.

His closest collaborators are executed or jailed.

While the remnants of his regime are destroyed.

Today Hitler's life demonstrates the dangers of absolute power,

and what people can do when they are in its grip.

What about Hitler's and the Nazi racial attitudes?

How did you personally feel in the late 1930s,

when it really started?

Umm... I didn't pay too much attention, I said well,

it's not my, my thing. I, I didn't...

I was really neglecting my duty as a human being when I did that.

When people disappeared...

What is "disappeared"?

- (SPEAKS GERMAN) - How I know this?

How I know this?

There were so many things going on, weren't there?

Reading about it in foreign publications about extermination,

which you dismissed as propaganda.

There was the Jews leaving Vienna and everything like that, it...

It must have been very difficult

for two and two not to add up to four, surely.

Mr Frost, we are human beings

and human beings are not always very brave.

Also in these times we close our eyes

to many things that are happening.

We do not accept them as facts

because these facts are disagreeable.