Original subtitles

In June 1940,

just as the final phase of fighting with France

is winding down,

Hitler visited some of the World War I battlefields.

Places where he had fought.

The First World War was such a formative event

in Hitler's life.

The weird fact is, that in four years of war,

he never made it past the rank that is equivalent

basically to Private First Class.

First of all, it's super unusual for a soldier in

World War I to have been combat in 1914,

and to still be in combat and still alive in 1918.

If anyone did do that,

they would, virtually as a rule,

have been promoted up to lieutenant or captain

or something like that by the end.

The fact that Hitler was not,

is one of those facts that tells you,

there must have been something wrong with this man

as a soldier.

It is absolutely bizarre to think that this

sort of aimless, drifting, bohemian,

private could have ended up the conqueror of 1940.

In April 1939, Hitler turned 50.

The popular perception of Hitler in Germany,

and to some extent outside of Germany,

is that here is a sensationally successful statesman.

For Germans to see Hitler make good on his

promise about defying the Versailles Treaty,

catapulting Germany in a position of power and

greatness on the Continent,

that appealed to almost everyone.

As his successes piled up in the second half of the 1930s,

his sense of the grandness of his mission sort of

inflated to match,

and also his sense of the urgency of the timing.

He's in a desperate hurry to start a war.

Hitler's whole purpose in fighting the Second World War,

was to conquer Eastern Europe and turn it into a colony.

In Hitler's mind, the world was a series of struggles

between nations and a nation either expanded or it died.

The concept of expansion,

the concept of acquisition of Lebensraum,

or living space, was part of his program

from the get-go.

At the time, there is growing fear in Germany,

among the generals,

that Hitler might take them into a war that they

would not be able to win.

War with Czechoslovakia was probably

gonna bring in France and then probably gonna bring in Britain

and they don't wanna see their country crushed again.

Mr. Neville Chamberlain, the Prime Minister.

Since he took office,

Mr. Chamberlain has never wavered in his determination to

establish peace in Europe.

As luck would have it, right at this moment,

there's a new prime minister in Great Britain who's come into

office really aggressively determined to improve

relations with Germany.

Chamberlain goes to hear Hitler demand

Sudeten German areas of Czechoslovakia.

Germany would be able to take over the border

regions of Czechoslovakia, called the Sudetenland,

where about three million ethnic Germans lived,

but the rest of Czechoslovakia would remain independent.

And for a brief moment,

it seemed, to a lot of the world,

that Chamberlain had succeeded in what he was trying to do.

That this had averted the threat of war.

Yeah.

The Western allies had tried in various ways to appease Hitler,

to give him small chunks of territory in order to

prevent him from making larger claims.

But Hitler felt empowered by appeasement and realized that

Great Britain and France were really powerless to stop him.

In March of 1939,

Hitler takes Czechoslovakia,

thereby violating the trust that the British had placed in him.

Their nation was dismembered by the Munich Pact,

and is now destroyed.

Germans jubilant, but the Czech population is

silent and resentful.

Six months before,

he had agreed to respect the independence of

what remained of Czechoslovakia and now here

he's violating his own word.

Neville Chamberlain had decided that at this point

Hitler had to be stopped, and that the next aggression

would have to be resisted.

In the summer of 1939,

Hitler was surrounded by men and women who owed

him their career and their social status.

No one in this circle dares to criticize him.

On the contrary, they are pushing him,

they are supporting him.

As Hitler is looking at Europe,

he of course faces the same dilemma that every

modern German strategist has faced.

Germany is in the center of Europe.

It has Russia in the east, it has France and then,

by extension, Britain in the west.

It was important to avoid a two-front war

at all cost.

Hitler realizes, in July,

"Ah-ha. My only out here is to make a short-term alliance

with the Soviet Union.

Hitler realized that the time was ripe to invade Poland,

which was part of his greater strategy.

But knew that without a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union,

his plan to invade Poland would be an instant disaster.

These are ideological foes on both sides.

Now, the strange thing about this is that he's making

alliance with the Soviet Union in order to start a war,

which ultimately is about destroying the Soviet Union.

It was very clear to everyone that this was

a tactical maneuver.

It was clear to Hitler, it was clear to Stalin,

but it was in both of their interests to buy time.

Hitler was very good at making short-term deals in

the service of what he thought as the long-term project.

Hitler and Stalin both have psychopathic tendencies.

They both overestimated their abilities.

They were both ruthless and lacking empathy.

They were each impressed and fascinated with

the ability of the other one to maintain absolute power.

So, in that sense had to pay begrudging acceptance.

Of course, Hitler thought of himself as

a foreign policy master

and that's where he thought that he had the skill

and the panache to outwit Stalin.

Stalin was smart.

He had long sought out other alliances,

but Stalin knew that he couldn't trust the Western

allies to really stop a German threat,

and so that's when he figured this chance for an alliance for

non-aggression with Hitler was his best bet to keep the

Soviet Union out of a war.

The Soviets were interested in territorial changes.

Stalin wanted Finland,

he wanted power in the Baltic states.

He was happy to take Eastern Poland, Romania.

The Western powers were not in a position to say,

"Poland, give up your sovereignty;

Romania, give up some territory."

Hitler is only too happy to say to Stalin,

"Of course."

Just, you know, "agree to what we want,

agree to come in against Poland,

agree not to fight us and we're good."

Stalin thinks, once a war starts,

the Germans will be bogged down fighting the Poles,

the French and the British and, eventually,

we will come in and pick up the pieces.

There are many theories today as to

the significance of the German-Russian deal.

One of the greatest sensations in the history of

diplomacy came out of Berlin and Moscow recently.

Men in high position now believe that war this fall

is an unavoidable certainty.

Both Hitler and Stalin were incredibly pleased and

made a show of, of being friendly toward each other.

Both Hitler and Stalin.

It seemed that once Germany and the Soviet Union had allied,

that all of Eastern Europe would fall in its wake.

No one knows what is going to happen within

the next 24 or 48 hours.

But the tension has become so terrific that

it does not seem possible to anyone here

that it can long continue.

In Berlin, Adolf Hitler made a surprise speech to

members of the Reichstag in the Chancellery.

.

"From now on,

I belong to my people as never before and beginning today,

I am the first soldier of the German Reich."

"We are not going to yield to you this time."

If the war starts, it will be Hitler who is the guilty party.

.

AUDIENCE Heil, heil, heil!

With the invasion of Poland,

Hitler assumed that nothing was going to happen.

That, basically, he was going to be able to get away with

Poland the way that he got away with Czechoslovakia.

Didn't work out.

He had to adjust and deal with the realities.

But Hitler, very quickly, regains his composure and

mobilizes for war.

What the Poles see in September of 1939 is a massive coordinated attack.

Poland is invaded on all three sides,

by a superior German force.

What the Poles had been told by the French is,

"if you hold out for two weeks,

we will then invade Germany from the other side."

The British and the French in fact did nothing.

The Poles are fighting valiantly and

desperately and taking terrible casualties and

basically sort of saying,

"So, Britain and France, when are you coming in on this?"

The problem was, British and French strategy rested on the

idea that they would beat Germany eventually by economic weight,

but that it would take a few years,

and that they wanted to stand on the defensive for maybe three years,

until they were strong enough to really take

aggressive action against Germany.

They didn't communicate this to the Poles.

Lasting all the way through September into October,

in these conditions,

reveals that Poland resisted and with some determination,

especially when we keep in mind that they were invaded

from the fourth side by the Red Army.

So, the Polish position becomes even more hopeless.

When the war is basically over,

on 28th September, 1939, the German Foreign Minister,

Joachim von Ribbentrop,

goes to Moscow for a second time.

They negotiate a,

"Treaty on Borders and Friendship", it's called.

This treaty redoes the original territorial dispensation.

Stalin has decided that he's no longer interested in Warsaw,

which was originally on his side of the line,

and more interested in having a clear hold on the Baltics.

The fact that Warsaw ended up being on the German side,

meant that suddenly the German Empire now includes far,

far more Jews than it did before.

And this changes completely what the Nazis think of

as the "Jewish Problem".

Up until 1939, the "Jewish Problem" was a matter

of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people.

Now it's a matter of millions of people.

As a young person, like millions of Germans,

Hitler read the novels of Karl May,

who wrote all of these stories about White settlers in North America

conquering the Western United States from the

"savage" Indians, so called.

From this, Hitler had absorbed certain ideas about

American westward expansion and about the sort of genocidal way

in which Native Americans were killed to make room for

Americans of European background to expand

across the West.

And Hitler very clearly seems to have had this in mind as

kind of a model for what the Germans could do

in Eastern Europe.

As far as Hitler was concerned,

anyone basically east of Germany was not fully human.

So the whole idea of Lebensraum was, always from the beginning,

really almost explicitly genocidal.

The Germans invade with the idea of mass murder.

That's built into the Polish invasion from the beginning.

The military victory is going to be followed up by,

and indeed coincide with, the use of special forces,

which we now know as the notorious Einsatzgruppen.

This Einsatzgruppen, they come from the SS,

from the Gestapo, from the criminal police, from the regular police.

They moved right behind the fighting forces and

their task is to eliminate enemies of the Reich.

And the definition of enemies of the Reich,

to put it in the most general way,

is both political and biological enemies,

particularly Jews and Roma.

The idea is that if we can get rid of the people

who represent the heights of religion,

the people who represent the educated classes,

if we can get rid of the soldiers and the officers,

strip away the somehow existing elite,

which shouldn't exist,

so that the rest of the population can serve as slaves.

And that's meant literally.

Things began to change right the first night.

After dark, no one is supposed to leave the house.

A young man tried to cross the street and a German soldier

said "halt" and he kept on running and he got machine gun

all the way across.

And he fell right in front of our house.

They made me carry the body with four other persons.

And because the way he was machine gunned,

he was completely, like, cut in half.

And when I got home,

I always remember my mother's expression and my mother's fear,

my mother's cry out when she saw me,

completely covered with blood.

By the end of September,

the Poles are pretty thoroughly beaten and by early October,

the last bits of military resistance have been snuffed out.

Hitler gathers his generals and says,

"Okay, let's get going."

He wants to invade in the west right away.

Most people suspected that this was going to be a very,

very tough fight for the Germans.

But the French army collapsed in six weeks.

This was one of the great military shockers of

the 20th century.

The German military commanders realize,

"oh, hey, using tanks along with air power

is a super effective way to win quickly."

It succeeded spectacularly and precipitated the

absolutely shocking defeat of France in 1940.

The war in France ended an hour and 20 minutes ago.

Hitler, proclaiming that the triumph over France was

the most glorious victory of all time,

ordered a ten day celebration in Germany.

Through our glocken we saw the Fuhrer observe the

Reich war flags with their big swastikas in the center.

I thought he looked very solemn his face was gray,

but there was a certain spring in his step as he walked for

the first time towards his staff where Germany’s fate was

sealed on a November day of 1918,

a fate, which by reason of his own being,

is now being radically changed here on this spot.

The initial armistice with France is signed in the

Forest of Compiègne,

where the armistice in 1918 was signed.

And, to go a step further,

the very railway car where that armistice had been signed,

is hauled out of a museum so that Hitler can go there personally,

which he does,

and meet the French representatives to sign the armistice.

France, for Germany,

was considered the arch enemy of Germany,

going back to the 18th century,

to Napoleon and, of course, to World War I.

He must feel like he's come full circle because

the First World War was such a formative event in his life.

Now, he's back,

pretty much literally as the conquering hero.

Once the German army wins the war in France,

then for a while,

Hitler has this total power over his generals,

because many of them feel that he was right and

they were wrong.

They are particularly awed by Hitler as their commander,

as the leader of Germany.

I think Hitler's megalomania was very quickly

able to absorb the successes he achieved.

I must say, I've never actually noted anything where

he's expressing surprise.

He more sort of took it for granted as an obvious result

of what he saw as his own great genius.

We knew things about the war, what was going on.

Hitler was always the winner.

He was going to France, with Paris,

shouting that the soldiers are now on the Eiffel Tower.

We couldn't believe that the whole world was

running away before Hitler.

As of the summer of 1940,

the so called "Jewish Problem" is much larger than it

had been before.

Suddenly, Germany controls all of these Jews

and there's no clear plan for what to do with them next.

Hitler was obviously very clear about how much he despised the Jews,

and his rhetoric was so extreme,

some of his favorite terms were "eradicate", "eliminate".

And so, it created an atmosphere in which ever more

radical ideas about how to deal with that problem or

how to address that question were proposed to Hitler.

What is often misunderstood is that somehow there was

a plan behind this.

There was no plan of how this was supposed to be accomplished.

The first reaction of the Germans is we're gonna push

some Jews out of the territories we annex into our colony.

There are many hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews who

have been ghettoized and are living in ghettos under

very difficult conditions, with a very high death rate,

both because of epidemics and because of shortage of

food and because of very hard working conditions.

The dying is already very, very high and

had the war stopped at that point,

we could have certainly said that this was a genocide.

There were so many people and so many hungry and

dead and cold people and there was nothing that anybody can do.

The idea then becomes slowly,

we're gonna send them somewhere else, far away,

and let nature take care of them.

And for a while,

this means sending them to the Island of Madagascar.

Crazy though that might sound,

after June, when France surrenders,

this idea suddenly gains resonance, because Madagascar,

an island off the southeast coast of Africa,

is a French possession.

But the British don't surrender,

the British keep fighting, the British control the ocean,

so Madagascar as a solution quickly fades.

And then, by the end of 1940,

it becomes clear that the Jews are gonna have to

be pushed somewhere else.

Now, the Germans daily would go out and

catch people in the street,

put them in trains and send them out.

After a while, we started hearing that...

that those people are not being sent to work.

And, you know, nobody wanted to believe.

Now that France is defeated, thinks Hitler,

the British will find some kind of honorable excuse to leave the war.

Hitler keeps thinking,

"we've got them in Britain, they have their empire,

the British are surely gonna pull out."

Hitler's view is, "I should be able to take what's mine,

and the British should understand because it doesn't

post any kind of direct threat to them."

He's hoping, basically, that the British,

at some point,

will see sense and they'll make a deal and it will be over.

But by now, Churchill is in power.

Churchill takes this situation,

which is quite dismal for Britain really,

all of Britain's allies have lost...

It's now facing alone a Germany which still has the

Soviet Union as a de facto ally...

But Churchill keeps Britain in the war.

The Germans had the most powerful ground army

in the world and if they could somehow land that army

in Great Britain, they would probably win fairly easily.

But to do that, they've gotta get their army across water,

which is dominated by the world's most powerful navy,

still the British Royal Navy,

and covered by the British Royal Air Force,

which is, arguably, the world's most powerful

air force at that time.

But the Germans can't get air superiority,

which means they can't invade.

Please.

When the Battle of Britain turns out

not to be short and sweet for Germany,

then Hitler has to make a choice,

and the choice is do I keep fighting the British,

kind of pointlessly, or do I return to the main goal?

And remember, the main goal from the beginning has always

been the destruction of the Soviet Union.

If he fights the Soviet Union with the British

still in the war, that means a two-front war.

It means a strategic nightmare that, you know,

every German understands immediately,

and that turns out to be the thing which brings him down.

The funny thing about Hitler is that a lot of

what he did seems inexplicable unless you consider his starting premise,

and his premises are usually either crazy, or evil,

or horrific, or something.

But if you accept his premise, his actions then sometimes

actually flow fairly logically from that.

The British must be counting on the Soviets as their kind of

last potential ally on the European continent.

If the Germans can knock the Soviets out,

then the British will see his stance and they will have won

the war and, of course,

he'll have control of the resources of the Soviet Union,

which will make Germany impregnable against any kind

of Anglo-American assault.

The German and Russian forces have been fighting

almost without ceasing.

Hitler presented no claim, gave no reasons,

before he violated the sanctity of Soviet borders.

The invasion itself is the largest

invasion in human history,

just in terms of the number of people involved.

By the time it happens, in June of 1941,

about 3.5 million soldiers invade the Soviet Union.

The invasion does start off as a very clear

military strategic move, but then the planning sort of

morphs into something much more, in a sense, evil.

The elements of outright genocidal assault on the

peoples of Eastern Europe starts to become clearer and

clearer and clearer.

The notion was that we're not carrying out a

conventional military campaign,

we are carrying out a campaign of political

and social destruction,

which is gonna prepare the way for an empire.

On the eve of the invasion of the Soviet Union,

Hitler issues the Barbarossa Orders.

The Barbarossa Orders are a whole set of orders that have to do,

both with the military operations, but also with conduct.

So when the German army marches in,

it is already equipped with a set of orders that legitimize

what we would recognize today as war crimes.

One of the most notorious of these is the

so-called Commissar Order,

which specified that captured Soviet political officers

were to be executed.

Stalin tried to read Hitler in the sense that he

tried to think of Hitler as a rational actor.

Stalin's main blunder is that he thought that Hitler wouldn't

dare do something so irrational as to engage in a two-front war.

But, of course, Hitler was aware of this common

perception, and a very good perception,

that a two-front war would be terrible for Germany,

and that's precisely why he was able to get this element of surprise.

When Hitler moved to his East Prussian headquarters,

Hitler thought within three months they would be victorious

over the Soviet army.

Hitler's top generals were going to kill Hitler.

I think that marks the point where he kinda loses it.

And without Hitler, none of this would have happened.

But there were millions of people involved,

not those who were killed, those who made it possible.

They have the methods and they have

the willingness to murder Jews on a mass scale.

Nobody came to our aid. Nobody helped the Jews.

Captioned by Cotter Media Group.