Original subtitles

Mein Kampf means literally my struggle.

And it was published in 1925.

Hitler evolves in prison in the process of

writing Mein Kampf.

It was really a mythology that he invented about himself,

to cover up the fact that he was a nobody and,

in many ways, a failure.

Mein Kampf, of course, is a politician's autobiography.

Hitler wants to tell a story of the far right,

nationalist and antisemitic activists

whose ideas are formulated.

The most striking example of this is where Hitler describes

walking along the streets of Vienna and

seeing an orthodox Jewish person.

He sees this person who looks slightly scary to him,

and he runs through his mind, is this a Jew?

And is this a German?

Hitler obviously intends the answers to be yes and no.

He's articulating that there is a racial,

unbridgeable difference between being Jewish and being German.

Mein Kampf actually contains a coherent view of the world.

It's an insane, totalitarian and terrifying view of the world,

but it's coherent view of the world.

It's a view of the world which says,

"The Jews, they have to be removed from the world."

Lebensraum literally means living room or living space.

The basic idea is that Germany has too much population crowded

into too small a space.

And what the Germans really need is, in a sense,

to emulate the pattern of American settlement westward.

And what Hitler aspired to do is to create this vast empire in

the western reaches of the Soviet Union.

As far as Hitler was concerned,

anyone east of Germany was not fully human,

so the whole idea of Lebensraum was always,

from the beginning, almost explicitly genocidal.

It's so important to read what Hitler says in Mein Kampf,

because you get a strategic version of the world which then

plays itself out in his actions.

.

.

The sentence Hitler was given for his leadership of

the Beerhall Putsch was five years.

Hitler served only a very short sentence,

he was basically given parole after serving eight months.

Hitler was 35 years old when he was released from prison

at the end of 1924.

Germany, in the 1920s, is one of those really remarkable

flowerings of human creativity in music,

in literature, in painting,

in science, in technology,

in business, in film.

Much like the American Roaring '20s,

you have more of a political stabilization,

the economy has largely recovered from this

horrific hyper-inflation, and the government is,

to some extent, working.

There's not much Hitler can do with this,

he really needs crisis, crisis is his oxygen,

and stability is kind of stifling him.

He assembles party leaders there and he lashes out

and tears into the Nazi party.

Hitler had a very cunning and nasty,

but in many ways sophisticated,

understanding of how to persuade people.

And it's this series of events that really brings

Joseph Goebbels closer to Hitler,

and drawn in by his vision and charisma.

In the mid-1920s, Joseph Goebbels is working in

publicity and propaganda in the northern wing of the Nazi party.

Goebbels was quite short and very slight,

he was born with a club foot,

so he really stuck out, both intellectually but

also visually, within the Nazi party.

He actually earned a PhD in German literature,

so he had a kind of unusual academic profile for an early Nazi.

He had this deep desire for acceptance from these tough guys

in the Nazi movement, and he falls victim to

Hitler's one on one charisma.

Hitler was very good at meeting someone and shaking their hand

and looking deeply into their eyes and appraising them,

and it's clear he does this with Goebbels,

and it's at this moment that Goebbels really comes into

his element, and starts to be one of the successful and

major Nazi party figures.

To Hitler, politics was really personal.

The ways in which he orchestrated Nazi party events

demonstrated this.

He understood the power of spectacle.

Hitler made his first speech after prison

in a Beerhall,

and the reporter of the Munich Post was there.

Hitler attacked his political enemies,

the Jews,

the Social Democrats, the Democratic government in Berlin.

For the Post it was clear he wanted to reboot his movement,

and he still was a threat for the country.

It made Hitler very, very angry.

Hitler used to say that the Munich Post was

the poisoned kitchen.

He said they would prepare his reports with

untruths and defamations.

From Hitler's point of view,

the newspaper is the enemy,

because the newspaper reporter goes out into that real world

and writes about it in a, in an objective way.

Hitler is against that, he's against that entire model.

He uses a word which he didn't invent,

but which is quite common on the German right,

which is Lügenpresse.

Which translates quite literally as fake news.

In other words, you take the people who are doing the actual reporting

and you claim that the actual reporting is the lie.

Someone who does the work to find out the truth is a volksfeind.

An enemy of the people.

To Hitler, truth was not something that

you prove with evidence.

To Hitler, truth was something that you feel,

the truth was how he presented it that day.

.

Right.

Berchtesgaden is a town in the Bavarian Alps,

a couple of hours from Munich,

and actually very close to Salzburg, Austria.

Hitler had been renting a house on the mountain above Berchtesgaden,

he liked to spend time there.

He would go there almost every weekend,

and sometimes for longer.

GÖRTEMAKER: If you look at Hitler's social relations

from the beginning,

you'll see that he never, ever was alone,

he did nothing alone.

He didn't eat alone, he didn't went to a restaurant

or hotel alone.

He was surrounded by men and women

who became his substitute family.

Hitler was very insecure,

that he hated to meet people he didn't know.

To this day, Adolf Hitler is viewed as a person without

human bonds or feelings,

the truth is, Hitler was a weak person who needed

the huge circle around him to function,

and they took care even of his private matters.

Rudolf Hess, for instance, took care of Hitler's girlfriends.

Hitler's sexuality and his relations with women is

something that has been written about a lot,

it's been speculated a lot.

We know that he was very much a sexist,

to some degree a misogynist, he seems to have liked women

who were sort of round faced,

and certainly a good bit younger than he was.

Angela Raubal, or Geli, as she was called,

was Hitler's niece, she was in her mid-teens.

They seem to have become romantically involved in the late 1920s,

Hitler's father was the uncle of Hitler's mother,

it's certainly factual that Hitler was the uncle of Geli Raubal,

and there was some kind of romantic relationship there.

Geli Raubal seems to have been a very extroverted, cheerful,

vivacious young woman, and,

for whatever reason, that either gravitated to her being

trapped into this rather stifling relationship with

this rather odd man.

GÖRTEMAKER: Hitler and Geli Raubal moved in an

apartment together at Prinzregentenplatz 16.

Their relationship became difficult.

They often had disputes.

There's some indication that she might have been jealous

of him when he flirted with, with other women.

There's evidence that Hitler's attitude to her

might have been really controlling.

Black Tuesday, suddenly the stock market crash has come

and the Great Depression has begun.

The world economic crisis started and

the massive unemployment became a reality, not only,

but also in Germany, changed the political landscape,

the economic landscape completely.

I think it's very hard to see the rise of Nazism

in the way it happened without the Great Depression.

Germany, of all the major countries in Europe,

is the hardest hit.

Unemployment around a third.

Industrial production falling 40, 50%.

You've got a large share of the population almost

literally slowly starving to death.

You've got a kind of creeping famine.

And it's the kind of crisis that can give Hitler the oxygen

he needs to be a, a crisis politician.

His message is that the liberal democratic republic

in Germany, the Weimar Republic,

is a disaster, it's full of corrupt,

squabbling politicians who don't do anything.

Meanwhile, Germany is being victimized by Marxists and by Jews.

Hitler was someone who was seen as a politician outside

of the norm, because clearly the norm was not working.

Someone seen as having all Germans' interests at heart.

And, really, above all else, someone who was simply an outcry

of protest against what was happening.

Ernst Röhm, as a former military man was one of

the individuals that actually facilitated Hitler's entry into

the higher circles of power.

The SA crystallized under the leadership of Ernst Röhm into

this paramilitary formation, it really becomes a personal army

that is at the beck and call of Hitler.

What part does the SA play in the battle for power?

The SA is short for the Sturmabteilung,

which is the paramilitary wing of the Nazi party.

It is essentially the muscle of the Nazi party at the time.

The function of the SA, or the Stormtroopers,

was to move into neighborhoods

that the Nazis wanted to control politically,

very often this would be a working class,

big city neighborhood dominated by

the social democrats or the communists.

And they would basically fight a gang war with them.

Germany was characterized by a situation

of almost a civil war.

This permanent violence between

the communists and the, uh, Nazis.

Serious rioting breaks out,

the Nazis are deliberately causing trouble to force

the people of Germany to believe that there is a threat

of violent communism in their midst,

that only by supporting the Nazis can they avoid another revolution.

Hitler played cleverly on the SA as an image.

Many middle-class people that Hitler was trying to court as

voters might be expected to be put off by that violence, but,

the violence the SA committed was against communists,

so it seems that a lot of middle-class people would

react by saying, "Well, those SA boys, they're rough,

but they're beating up communists, so

God love 'em, they're, they're beating up the right people."

And so, the Nazis could use the SA as a kind of

advertisement for their decisiveness and toughness.

This was a way to demonstrate that

the Weimar Democracy didn't function, so it was

also instrumental for Hitler.

Hitler always wanted to make the claim that

he was essentially married to Germany.

He also said, if German women knew he had a wife or,

or a serious girlfriend he would lose all the women's votes.

Hitler was driving away from Munich on the road

to give a speech,

Geli Raubal shot herself in his apartment with his gun.

The scandal that erupted after Geli's suicide

was his personal life blowing up in his face.

Here was an instance in which this kind of unknowableness

contributed to all kinds of wild speculation,

and if you were his enemy,

either on the right or, or on the left,

this was a great opportunity.

The Post reported with many details about

her death, it made Hitler very, very angry,

and some were afraid that he might kill himself.

He can speak out, he can threaten,

he can bluster, but, at that point in Germany he cannot

control what is reported in the non-Nazi press.

He is really grief stricken.

He is angry, and he's so controlling of

his public persona and his public presentation,

and this is a moment that really punctures that in a way

that he has absolutely no control over.

At a pretty delicate moment, politically,

because the electoral breakthrough is beginning.

Hitler's conception of himself as a leader rules out

the possibility of him doing something like

serving as an ordinary deputy.

It doesn't comport with his vision of himself destined to

lead Germany, serving it in some cabinet position,

was unthinkable to him.

Presidency, that was a different matter.

In the political system of a Weimar Republic,

the President is elected directly by the electorate,

he appoints the cabinet,

the chancellor, and has an unusual amount of power.

REPORTER (over TV); Von Hindenburg announces his reluctant decision to

run again for the Presidency.

Presidential election for Hitler was a, a long shot,

he was running against Paul von Hindenburg.

He was a absolutely legendary figure in German military history,

in German politics, he was the representative figure

of conservative nationalist Germany.

No one would claim Paul von Hindenburg was

particularly bright or particularly energetic.

Hindenburg is an old man by this point,

he's in his early to mid-80s.

He was so old that they were worried whether or not he could

handle another presidential campaign in 1932.

By this time, Hitler takes a really important lesson away

from the failure of the Beerhall Putsch.

He understands now that he's not gonna be able to see

his power in a violent coup d'état.

He's gonna have to come to power playing by

the constitutional rules of the Weimar Republic,

which is only going to put all the more emphasis on

his abilities as a speaker, as someone who can rally people,

you know, willingly, to his side.

He was the first modern politician to use

an airplane to fly from event to event.

It was exotic, politicians didn't do this, they,

they rode in motorcades or they rode on trains,

they didn't arrive in an airplane.

The landing of the airplane and the exit out of

the airplane, it was all very dramatic.

Flying from city to city enabled him, of course,

to reach a lot of audiences, it was the symbolism that was

really important, and, Goebbels, again,

in his clever way, kind of milked it.

He had a good idea of how modern media could be used.

The Nazis were really modern media forward, you know,

today they'd be masters of Twitter and, and whatever all else.

The slogan of their campaign actually was,

"Hitler over Germany."

Mm-hmm.

Sieg! Heil!

Sieg! Heil!

Heil! Heil!

Sieg! Heil!

Heil! Heil! Heil!

Women would faint in the excitement at his rallies, or,

or men would jump up on tables and pump their fists in

the air and yell approval.

If you look at a lot of his speeches there's not a lot

in there about the Jews.

A blunt, overt, aggressive, very hostile, racialist,

antisemitism is not a big vote getter.

He's talking about making Germany a great nation again, and,

combining those with a set of grievances.

What the Nazis really were was a successful,

anti-globalist protest movement.

That's the sort of common theme in everything Hitler's saying,

it's a protest about what the world's doing to Germany,

and it's an assertion of nationalism as the remedy.

The Nazi party finally reaches the position in which

it's the largest single party in the German Reichstag.

The problem though is can this momentum be sustained?

Heil! Heil!

At the age of 84 he is reelected,

defeating Adolf Hitler.

He loses the presidential election,

and the chancellorship is the only thing left for him.

He sees power so close, but Hitler's stubbornness

threatens to throw it all away.

It was very strongly that you,

of President Von from Hindenburg,

in the middle of 1932, that it would be most dangerous

to put power in Hitler's hands, wasn't it?

There are multiple attempts of Hitler to try and

force Hindenburg's hand to offer him the chancellorship,

and he is repeatedly refused.

Hindenburg doesn't really see much in Hitler,

he doesn't like his politics, he doesn't like the man.

Hindenburg and his government really want to find

a way to get this big base of support,

which is nationalist and militarist behind them,

and they can use it basically to crush the social democrats.

But they wanna get it behind them in a way that

they can control it, they don't wanna just hand power to Hitler.

They want to basically co-opt Hitler's support for themselves.

Did you believe

Hitler was absolutely necessary for Germany?

Hindenburg decides that the only way to get a right wing coalition,

a real right wing big base of support to make

a stable government, is to let Hitler in the door.

So, January 30th, 1933, that's the day that Hitler

actually gets sworn in as Chancellor.

When he finally appoints Hitler Chancellor

on January 30th, 1933.

The historians would argue that Paul von Hindenburg was an

old man, he probably did not fully realize what he was doing.

But Hindenburg knew what he was doing.

When Hitler becomes Chancellor he gets to form

a cabinet, but, not the way that he wishes.

But rather, he's heavily monitored by Franz von Papen,

who has promised Hindenburg that he was going to watch over Hitler.

And there's a common feeling that they would keep

Hitler in line, that they would be, you know,

the adults in the room.

So there was this expectation this would be a short and

probably ineffectual government.

Many German Jews themselves also hoped that this

was going to just blow over and that Hitler was just going to be

one other chancellor of the Weimar Republic.

I think it's hard for us to imagine someone being

on trial for treason just less than a decade later

being made Chancellor of a country.

One can see that there is this real soft spot

for people who essentially commit all sorts of crimes.

That just sort of focus on the fact that they were really doing

it with their heart in the right place.

This is the single most catastrophic,

political miscalculation in modern history.

The Reichstag actually has two meanings,

it has a literally meaning of a building in Berlin where

Germany's parliament met, and it has the more abstract meaning of

being Germany's National Parliament.

The Reichstag fire comes four weeks exactly

into Hitler's time as Chancellor.

Everybody was running and panting towards the Reichstag, and

three black Mercedes cars drew up, and I said,

"I bet that's Hitler,"

and he said, "I do hope to God that this, as I believe,

is the work of the communists.

This will give us the chance that we need."

There has been a running debate from 1933 until now

over who actually set the fire.

Of course, the Nazis claimed it was the communists,

the communists, of course, claimed it was the Nazis.

This is a unsolved question,

and probably it will remain unsolved, uh.

But it is actually not the most interesting question,

because there is no doubt that the Nazis perfectly

instrumentalized the situation.

Hitler and his government immediately presented

a really draconian emergency decree,

which is known informally as the Reichstag Fire Decree.

Which basically tore the guts out of Germany's constitution

and ended all civil liberties.

Germany has been placed under a system

of martial law, decree having being signed which aims to

the total destruction of communism.

Hitler had long been promising to save Germany from

the communist menace, well, here was the communist menace burning

down the Reichstag, and so here is Hitler doing

what he said he was going to do.

The importance of this law,

for the rest of the Third Reich,

cannot be overestimated.

From then on, the Nazi terror against political opponents

was basically unlimited.

In the evening, SA troops went to the Post,

pillaged and destroyed the office.

They threw the furniture, copies and documents through

the windows and burned everything in front of the building.

Most of the editors of the Post went into exile.

The story of the Munich Post is very important.

They risk it, their lives,

for a free press and for democratic Germany.

The Munich Post predicted almost everything

that would happen in Germany.

Dictatorship, violation of human rights,

persecution of the Jews,

of political enemies.

In the end, the democratic experiment in Germany

had to be killed off, it had to be murdered,

and that's what Hitler and the Nazi party did.

From then on, the way was clear for Hitler

to realize all his demonic plans.

It's a typical Hitler pattern to delay and delay and

delay until the last possible moment,

and then, when he strikes,

to strike really ruthlessly and brutally.

The Night of Broken Glass,

30,000 Jewish men are sent to concentration camps.

The only crime was that I was born Jewish.

Hitler wasn't a politician at heart,

he was a visionary, that's how he would describe himself.

GÖRTEMAKER: Now Hitler's inner circle constantly told him that

he's a genius, that he can change and conquer the world.

Captioned by Cotter Media Group.