Original subtitles

TOLAND'S DAUGHTER: I was very young when my dad was

doing this research.

His office was at the far end of the house and

I was definitely not to disturb him.

But then, at the end of the day, he would emerge,

but he would close his door.

So, I asked my dad, you know, what was in the office.

And he's like, "Oh well, where that's where uncle Adolf lives."

And so I believed that there was a person living in my

house that I'd never seen.

I don't remember the exact moment I had the epiphany but

I was, I was like, I kind of felt oh God,

oh, that was uncle Adolf.

I found these people were fascinated by the fact

that all I was trying to do was tell the facts.

And by the way, I taped it all.

The story of the rise of Hitler is an important

story for any time, but I do think there is a particular

urgency in understanding it now.

The story of Hitler shows that a seemingly obscure

person can come to take nearly total power.

It shows what a democracy can become.

It shows that the order that we take for granted can change

rapidly, from one day to the next.

Hitler launched history's most destructive

and terrible war.

The fact that he so completely targeted Jews for murder,

the sheer scale of the atrocities he committed,

figure it's important for us to understand that Hitler was not a

different species from us,

and to understand him as a human being.

I don't think to do that is to make excuses for him.

I think to do that is to really try to better

understand ourselves.

Adolf Hitler is more alive today than he ever was,

and unless we keep reminding people of what Adolf Hitler was,

an American Hitler could come up.

He would be 100% American, he'd look charming.

But there's one thing to beware, folks, if this man

says I'm going to do all this for you and the end justifies

the means, he is a potential Hitler.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

I shall start.

When Hitler came, in March of '38,

I was nine-years-old.

I still, was still going to school.

Children didn't, didn't speak about, "I am a Jew," or,

"I am not a Jew."

They, they were playing together.

In the moment Hitler came,

it, it started all the things

Hitler was doing on Jewish people.

I was very anxious.

I, I was running home right away and,

and I'm glad when

I make a bigger distance to this Hitler.

Germany is in full control of Austrian affairs tonight.

The Nazi swastika flag is flying from the government

buildings in Vienna and other cities.

Austria was declared to be a state of the

German Federation,

a state of the German Reich.

There is a festive, glorious weather spreading in all

directions, I might say, becaus the sunshine is so glorious.

It's a day filled with happiness in the

souls of all the people.

The annexation of Austria really seems to be a

crowning achievement at the moment when it occurs in 1938,

for Hitler's trajectory.

Hitler had had a complication relationship

with his home country.

But now here comes this native son, bringing the

German-Austrians, as they called themselves,

into this greater Reich.

When he appears there, the remarkable thing is

it all was easier than he thought it was going to be.

From Hitler's point of view, it's a sign that,

"I was right all along."

He stated today, "I announce the return of my

own home country into the fold of the Reich."

And then he closed...

.

My ears, it was fixed.

Hitler shouting and the people also shouting, "Heil."

Hitler was already in Germany and he was doing bad things

to Jewish people.

So, the Jewish people in Vienna did know that he was,

was thinking about killing us.

Hitler's baby picture is the scariest

picture of them all.

There's no way you could say that baby is going to turn

into a genocidal monster.

It's a baby.

And what that really means is that if you think about

its implications for human nature,

any child has within him

the possibility of turning into a Hitler.

Hitler was not the product of a bad father or a bad mother.

Hitler was the product of bad ideas.

From an early age, people who knew Hitler

described him as very strong-willed, as stubborn,

as irascible, and we can see signs in retrospect of a

narcissistic personality.

I think to understand Hitler's particular

German identity,

we really have to think about Hitler's Austria

is an empire that is sort of backwards looking.

Austria has not kept up with much of Europe,

and certainly not kept up with Germany proper

in any technological, military, economic sense at all.

Hitler, of course, very, very much wants to be German,

in the sense of belonging to the German nation state.

Hitler's father, Alois Hitler, died rather suddenly

in 1903, when Hitler was in his mid-teens.

Hitler does not seem to have mourned his father too much.

They had fairly typical father-son conflicts,

at least according to Hitler, about what kind of direction

Hitler's future life was going to take.

Hitler wanted to be an artist.

His father wanted him to be a civil servant and follow

in his own footsteps.

So, in a way, Alois' death may have sort of cleared Hitler a

little bit to follow more of the path that he wanted to

follow and try to become an artist.

The paintings are mostly street scenes in Vienna or

Munich, and they're often quite good in terms of

renderings of street scenes and buildings.

What is striking is that they either don't have any people

in them, or the people are very badly drawn.

Hitler could draw buildings well,

but he couldn't draw people.

Although it's a bit impressionistic, I think this

tells us something important about Hitler, about how his

mind worked, about where his priorities were.

Hitler applied twice to the Academy of Fine Arts, in Vienna.

The first time, his application made it through to

the second round before they decided that his skills were

not adequate to get him into the class.

When he applied again, he was rejected at the first cut.

This coincides with the period of his life in which his

mother became ill with cancer, in 1907, and so all these

disasters are hitting him more or less at the same time.

Hitler, by all accounts, cared for her with a devotion that's

both striking and maybe somewhat unusual.

And he was absolutely stricken with grief when she died.

'Cause it seems to be after her death that he really

kind of loses direction.

And this opens up that period of about seven years of his

life where he's just drifting.

I think what's significant about Hitler in

his younger years is Hitler's aimlessness,

or lack of direction.

Hitler had left Austria as a man who, in that phase of

his life, had been a failure.

He'd been living at basically a men's homeless shelter in

Vienna, and eked out just a bare, bare living,

painting pictures mostly for tourists.

This very, very young man, by most estimations,

doesn't seem to really be anyone particularly special.

Vienna was a very multi-ethnic city, by the

standards of Europe in the day.

Very, very diverse.

Vienna has a very clear Jewish culture to it.

Depending on how you calculate it, it has an eight, nine or

10% Jewish population.

And many members of that community are really

artistically and culturally prominent.

Hitler doesn't have the economic resources.

He doesn't have the obvious artistic talent.

He's just not able to get into that circle.

So, he's starting to stir up grievances about what he sees

as a kind of established cultural elite,

which is not open to him.

As a German nationalist, Hitler leaves Austria finally

because he knows that he's soon gonna get caught up in

having to do his compulsory military service in the

Austro-Hungarian army.

Because of the ethnic ad religious diversity of

Austria, he doesn't wanna have anything to do with that.

So, he basically flees Vienna in 1913, and moves to Munich.

Hitler was very happy when the war broke out.

He rushed to enlist in the Bavarian army.

In Berlin, the Germans know the hour of glory

is at hand.

In Vienna, Hitler was a rather aimless character.

It's not really until the war that we see that Hitler

seems to find some sort of place.

This ability to enter into a war, to show Germany's might,

very clearly excited him.

Hitler served with a unit that became quite famous,

known as the Litz regiment of the Bavarian army.

His job was to carry orders from the regimental headquarters

to the headquarters of the various battalions.

His billet, if you will, was not in the trenches,

it was in the relatively more comfortable

regimental headquarters.

That also means his service was less dangerous than it was

to be a rifleman in the trenches.

In August of 1918, the military high command realized

that they were going to lose and there wasn't much point

in keeping on fighting.

Having been subjected to four years of propaganda saying,

"We're just about to win. We're just about to win,"

the German people cannot grasp that they've actually lost.

And it was in this environment that several of the army

commanders very deliberately formulate a complete fairytale.

The collapse of the German army is justified by

the generals at the time by saying we were stabbed in the

back by the socialists and the Jews.

Antisemitism was very central in Germany at that time.

It's normal to see the expression of the idea that

Jews should be excluded, Jews should be completely out,

that everything literally is the fault of the Jews.

All of this was a fantasy, but it had a powerful

psychological hold for Germans who didn't quite understand

how they could have lost the war and so that myth really

gained widespread belief in Germany in the inter-war years.

The Treaty of Versailles was the legal instrument

that formally brought World War I to an end.

It included losses of territory, certain clauses

that, for example, disallowed the unification between

Germany and now Austria.

But the thing that really infuriated almost all

Germans was that Germany was obliged by the treaty to

accept sole responsibility for the outbreak of World War I,

and then as a consequence of that, to pay reparations to

the powers that had defeated it.

And it was widely seen as unfair, punishing

beyond all reasonableness, indeed to the point where it

would not allow Germany to survive.

With the end of World War I, in the way that

it ends, the utter devastation he feels, realizing that that

intense sacrifice was to amount to nothing,

he does seem to finally find an aim.

This devastating moment is actually what sets him on his

path towards becoming the leader of the Nazi party and

ultimately he Chancellor of Germany.

While the war may have stopped,

the violence doesn't.

There is blood running in the streets, essentially.

You see political assassinations happening

quite frequently, both of left-leaning figures and

right-leaning figures.

And what we also see if that all of the various

political parties then get paramilitaries.

These armed members are going out and fighting with their

fists, fighting with knives, fighting with guns,

producing bloodshed that is really just built in to

the turmoil of the period.

Hitler started to come under the wing of an officer

who was heading up basically an educational unit for

soldiers, really trying to school them in kind of more

right-wing and nationalist politics.

Hitler, who is still in the army, is sent as almost

an informer, to go and look at public assemblies that are

being held by various groups in Munich at the time.

And the real concern here is to make sure that radical left

groups don't gain a foothold.

On one occasion, Hitler goes to a meeting of a group

called the German Workers' Party, or DAP,

in its German abbreviation.

Hitler is supposed to just be there to observe and to take

notes and to report back.

But what happens at this meeting is a man stands up and

gives a speech in favor of Bavarian separatism from

Germany, and this is too much for Hitler.

He sort of spontaneously stands up and unloads on this

person with a full kind of Hitlarian tirade, and he

really impresses the leaders of the DAP, especially the

main leader of it, a man named Anton Drexler.

And Drexler is reported to have said something along the

lines of, "This guy has really got a mouth on him.

We could use him."

And at this moment, you know, Hitler really seems to be

kind of launched on his way.

Nazi ideology is such an amorphous, toxic soup.

Hitler didn't really mobilize for anything.

Initially Hitler is just basically providing a

diagnostic of all that he sees is wrong with the world.

He is slapping groups left and right who he finds suspect,

dangerous, alienating.

He would resort to the Treaty of Versailles as

everything that his ideology was mobilizing against,

because it provided such a broad-sweeping consensus

amongst the German population

that it basically deprived Germany of its

destiny to become one of the great powers.

He understood what people would react to, and

that was really his gift, is that he could talk in a way

that people responded to

and then he could build on the response.

People who came to hear Hitler talk about the economy,

they would focus on those things and they would

deemphasize all the antisemitic hate speech

that came along with that, and said,

"Well, that's just for the stupid masses.

He has to convince some of those people, that's why he's

talking that way.

He's never actually going to do this."

Reeling from the loss of World War I,

angered by the dictated peace, going through things like

hyperinflation where, you know, people who had saved

their entire lives then saw it wiped out literally in a

couple of months, and in that context, someone who had this

ability to somehow find always the right message, always what

one wanted to hear, that person's voice, in the form of

Hitler's speeches, had resonance to a lot of people.

I'm sorry if I have to laugh at that.

I don't think Putzi Hanfstaengl cared about Jews

one way or another.

Certainly not enough that he would put off by it.

Hanfstaengl was a big and important supporter of Hitler.

Hanfstaengl really plays down how much he reacted and

responded enthusiastically to Hitler's antisemitism.

It's a post-war justification, much like most of the other

major Nazi figures or military figures, writing at a later

post-war date.

Every single one is going to have someone who is

trying to separate himself from Hitler's evil.

Yeah.

In between 1919 and 1923, Hitler's own profile

as a speaker has, has shot up.

He's become kind of a local celebrity in Munich,

and he's starting to develop a big following.

He speaks typically in Munich's beer halls and he can

draw bigger and bigger crowds, and so that draws more people

to this fledging National Socialist Party.

In these early years after the end of the monarchy

and the beginning of what we now know as the Wiemar Republic,

it's hard for us to imagine the level of uncertainty

in what the political system was gonna look like

a week later, a month later, a year later.

You had multiple attempts to topple the

Wiemar Parliamentary Democracy

from both the right and the left.

Munich certainly was a hot spot of this activity.

The beer hall putsch was an attempt by Hitler to

essentially take over not only Munich, but ultimately

the German government.

At a political meeting at a beer hall in Munich,

Hitler has gathered together some of the leading figures

in Bavarian politics.

He launches this whole proceeding by jumping up on a table in the beer hall,

grabs his pistol and he fires up into the ceiling.

He basically takes the other Bavarian leaders hostage

and says we're all gonna work together and we will start

from here and we will march on Berlin and we will take power

in the Reich.

His Nazis are stopped by troops.

The army and the police actually crush Hitler's revolt.

This banal incident helped to delay Hitler's

final suicide by the fateful stretch of 22 years.

The outcome of the trial was that Hitler was given what

was actually a very mild sentence for what he had done.

For the crime of high treason,

which he was found guilty of,

he only gets a small sentence of about five years.

The composition of the court was quite favorable to Hitler.

The judges were, were pretty right-wing and it seems clear

that they developed a fair admiration for him.

In the course of the trial, one of the judges was heard to

say something like, "What a tremendous chap, this Hitler is."

On the one hand,

this is a complete and utter failure.

But at the same time, now more people know who he is.

The trial is, in a way, Hitler's kind of coming out on

the German national stage.

It's the trial that makes Hitler a national figure

for the first time.

After the trial, Hitler gives a speech,

"You may convict me but the goddess of history will tear up

your conviction and smile."

Hitler is defeated, but many of his core supporters are not

only still around but they're reformulating the Nazi party.

From this, it's extraordinarily unlikely that

this particular man could rise to a position of very

considerable power, and yet it is going to happen,

along with years of crisis, of bloodshed and terror.

To Hitler, truth was not something that you proved with evidence.

To Hitler, truth was something that you feel.

Hitler was very insecure,

he needed the huge circle around him.

I think it's hard for us to imagine someone

being on trial for treason made Chancellor of the country.

This is the most catastrophic political

miscalculation in modern history.

Captioned by Cotter Media Group.