Original subtitles

Hitler spent so much of his life performing.

He developed this propensity to dwell in a, a fantasy world.

I'm convinced that lurking in Hitler's psyche was a belief

that he was actually living out some kind of

apocalyptic Wagnerian opera.

Germany, as it is being bombed and occupied,

is a stage, a stage in a gigantic opera,

in which he is about to become the martyred, and fallen,

and betrayed savior of Germany.

And at the end, when the catastrophe was looming,

this ability to dwell in a world of make-believe,

and fantasy, took over in some kind of sense.

In some sense, it is absolutely bizarre to think

that this sort of aimless, drifting postcard-painter of

the Vienna years could have ended up;

A; the conqueror of 1940,

and then, B; the man in the bunker in 1945.

But in another sense, the personality actually

seems to be rather consistent.

He's both disengaged and fueled by delusions of grandeur,

that's quite consistent all the way through his life.

He was an artist of evil.

He had created a kind of evil

that the world had never seen before.

It wasn't that he'd done pathetic little landscapes.

It was that he reshaped the entire landscape of

half the world.

.

The war hadn't ended.

This was January 1945, Bergen-Belsen,

where I was only 15 years old.

The conditions were truly...

Inhuman.

Nobody could survive in the long run on one meal a day,

which consisted of one piece of bread,

and turnips boiled in water.

There were epidemics; cholera, pneumonia, dysentery.

Every night I went to sleep hoping I would wake up

the next morning, and when I did, I was surrounded

by people who had died during the night.

Bergen-Belsen is often referred to as a slow-death camp.

It didn't have gas chambers,

but the number of people survived was very small.

Hitler wanted to murder all Jews,

and get rid of them.

He was the epitome of hatred, to me.

GÖRTEMAKER: From the beginning of the war,

Hitler declared victory or collapse,

all or nothing.

The Allied powers were advancing.

The people around Hitler were scared to death,

and they knew they needed a victory.

In the winter of 1944, and into 1945,

Hitler attempts, in the West, a last-ditch counter-attack

into American-occupied Belgium,

which produces the famous Battle of the Bulge.

The latest dispatches from

Supreme Headquarters in Paris say that Nazi armor has

advanced more than 20 miles int Belgium and Luxembourg on this,

the fourth day of the greatest German counter-offensive of this war.

The troops we're now meeting are the best attack troops

the Germans have ever had.

But by the middle of January,

the American army is pushing the German army

out of the Low Countries.

The German salient is withering

like a winter's leaf.

In the air, at least 124 German planes were shot down today.

Ultimately, the Battle of the Bulge is

a calamitous defeat for Germany,

and sets the stage for the big American and

British push into Germany itself.

In every city and town,

the Nazis fight back with furious desperation.

Nazi rear-guard action is fanatical

as they try to stem the red tide.

GÖRTEMAKER: When Hitler returned from the Western Front

to Berlin, the whole situation in Germany was desperate,

and he himself was depressed.

He increasingly suspected the German army of defeatism,

and he was absolutely adamant that the war had to

be continued at any cost.

At some level, he must have understood that

the war was over, and that Germany was facing catastrophe.

But Hitler had no mercy, or no pity, no sympathy

for anyone who did not follow him, basically,

to the end.

The war' most sustained aerial offensive

battling Berlin, day and night blasting

Nazi oil plants, industry, transportation.

GÖRTEMAKER: When a big air raid destroyed almost

all of the center of Berlin,

Hitler moved into the bunker permanently.

The bunker complex was built beneath

the Reich Chancellery building in central Berlin,

designed by Albert Speer,

Adolf Hitler's favorite architect,

and now the Armaments Minister.

GÖRTEMAKER: The last headquarter of Hitler

was a huge complex,

28 feet beneath the Reich Chancellery.

And it contained actually

two bunkers,

with 36 rooms.

Even in the bunker,

Hitler couldn't be alone,

so he lived there,

with Eva Braun,

with his physician,

with his secretaries,

his cook,

and his bodyguards.

And this was

where Hitler spent the last weeks of his life.

As the war turned, and loss was impending,

as his health deteriorated,

I suspect that Hitler looked

back fondly to the Austria of his youth.

Over the years, Hitler had spent a lot of time re-imagining

the design of Berlin with Albert Speer, and then Linz,

where Hitler had spent some years as a young person.

GÖRTEMAKER: Hitler envisaged this new residence,

where he could retire together with Eva Braun,

this was their plan they cling to until the end.

There exist pictures taken by Walter Frentz,

one of Hitler's photographers,

on February 8th, 1945,

and you see Hitler greatly aged,

and kind of out of the real world when he looked at this model.

We have to understand this was an escape fantasy;

he tried to flee the world he couldn't control any more.

Overhead the greatest air offensive of

the war is in full blast.

On February 13th, 1945, the British Royal Air Force

destroyed most of the city of Dresden in eastern Germany.

With terrible precision,

masses of high explosive go down.

And some people who tried to walk along,

they got pulled in by the fire.

There is such a draft in a firestorm like that.

The city was of course in flames,

but after three days we had to go in and

try to find the people, and take them out of the ruins.

There was no time to dig individual graves,

we had to do big, mass graves.

About five to 600,000 Germans died in these bombings.

Hitler is unable to empathize in any way with

the people who are being bombed, and in that sense,

the bombing certainly has no effect on him whatsoever.

In the air war, German submarine yards

at Bremen, Hamburg and Kiel, and oil refineries,

were hit today by 2,000 planes of

the American Eighth Air Force.

We gather in several thousand Germans, and with their killed

and wounded, it makes a daily total of losses

which is just too high for any army to suffer

without being very seriously weakened.

The Allies continue to drop

tons of destruction on German industry, communications

and German armies.

We counted 20,000 prisoners yesterday.

The Germans are acting like a tired,

confused army which knows it is beaten.

GÖRTEMAKER: The Nero Decree is the reaction of Hitler to

a desperate situation.

Hitler says, "Wherever we are evacuating territory,

it has to be destroyed."

Now, the Germans have done it over and again, scorched Earth.

They destroyed the Soviet Union as they were retreating from it,

but now, Hitler is saying do that in West German,

and that would mean utter famine and destruction

to millions of Germans, and Albert Speer refuses to do it.

Most of the information we have about what was going on

in the bunker came from those who survived it.

What you see with Speer after the war is him attempting

to take all of the credit for the destruction not taking place.

GÖRTEMAKER: The Nero Decree wasn't executed,

not only because of Speer,

but because the German people had to save their lives.

Many of them had no shelter,

they had no food.

They tried to protect the children.

But Speer later constructed a story that during the last days,

he didn't obey, and was kind of an opponent of Hitler.

He was an exceptional liar.

He's trying to save his reputation,

he's trying to save his skin.

But Albert Speer adored Hitler,

and was devoted to him,

and was as close to him personally as

I think anybody could be.

The mass of Germans are

apathetic and stunned.

There is no longer any mass fanaticism or will to die.

Most Germans are stupidly awaiting the end.

GÖRTEMAKER: We don't know what Hitler really believed in this

desperate time, but we know that he clinged to this notion

that there could be a miracle victory,

and he was supported in this delusion by

his girlfriend, Eva Braun.

There was nobody else near and as close to him

like Eva Braun.

She loved him, really, and she came, surprisingly,

to Berlin, and when she arrived,

Hitler tried to seem angry, but he wasn't successful.

He was obviously so happy that she was there that

nobody tried to, to send her back.

GÖRTEMAKER: Eva Braun was very calm during her time in

the bunker, but Hitler was constantly on edge.

That he was betrayed, and that he was the only one who tried to

build a new Germany, but was hindered by others.

I remember it very well.

I was one of the first to deal with war crimes

in the American army.

A report would come into Headquarters that there's a camp somewhere,

and there are people coming out of that camp.

It looks like they're skeletons,

they're in rags, get over there.

And I'd get into my Jeep and race over there as fast as

I could and begin to collect evidence.

The first such camp was Buchenwald.

150 people died the day we came, of malnutrition,

tuberculosis, typhus, et cetera.

I had peered into Hell.

My feeling was this is not real.

If I had not been able to imagine that this is artificial,

I don't think I would have been able to cope with it.

I think that it takes a while to digest

what it is that they're seeing.

The issue of knowledge is not necessarily

do you know the fact, but can you digest it,

can you actually understand what this means?

There are two ovens,

each with a capacity for six persons.

There are about 70 persons represented in this pile.

How do we grasp such an undertaking,

such an industrial effort to kill hundreds of thousands,

millions of people?

And I think that until today,

we are still faced with that question.

We interrupt this program to

bring you a special news bulletin from CBS World News.

A press association has just announced that

President Roosevelt is dead.

GÖRTEMAKER: Hitler told his circle, "This is a sign."

He compared the death of Roosevelt to

the death of Catherine the Second of Russia,

because after her death, Frederick the Great won the war.

It's a clear measure of Hitler's delusional state that

he has a brief moment of euphoria,

because it came in a moment when there was no good news of

any kind; it was nothing but disaster and impending doom.

The American Ninth Army is no more

than 45 miles from Berlin at this hour,

leading well behind the hurdle that failed to serve

the Germans; the Elba River.

Russian troops are reported within 18 miles of Berlin by

German account, where Germany's remaining forces plan

to carry on the war to the bitter end.

On a practical level, Hitler probably understood that

there was no way out, that whatever happened,

no-one was gonna let him live much past the end of the war.

But there's also his kind of Wagnerian histrionic side,

that we had seen, you know,

as early as the, the Beer Hall Putsch

when he threatened to kill himself if it failed, and probably,

Hitler had something like this in his mind as well,

that if he went down heroically,

Germany and the Nazi movement might revive again,

drawing on his heroism.

The German High Command communiqué

opened this afternoon with these words;

"In the heart of Berlin, the gallant garrison closely

gathered around the Führer is defending itself in

a reduced space against the superior Bolsheviks."

That's the first time during the crisis,

and probably the first time ever,

that the Nazis have put Hitler into one of his own communiqués

When Josef and Magda Goebbels

and their six children move into the bunker,

it is an utterly bizarre and macabre scene.

Their intention is to end their lives with Hitler in the bunker,

and they will take their children with them.

Everybody shook his hand and wished him the best,

and it was all very depressed.

It was not a, a happy birthday.

There really is nothing to celebrate.

But right after his birthday,

Hitler makes his last public appearance.

He comes out of the bunker to greet

a small contingent of Hitler Youth.

GÖRTEMAKER: It's significant because it shows

that at the end, they tried to mobilize even children.

This was the last army, the children of Berlin.

And he comes to them,

and he pinches one of their cheeks, and he sends them to die.

GÖRTEMAKER: It's a desperate image,

and it shows how ruthless this Nazi regime was,

that they would have let everyone die before

they'd dare to quit.

In the last week of his life,

Adolf Hitler received a number of...

Shocks.

One came from Hermann Goering.

GÖRTEMAKER: In April 1945, Goering,

one of the most powerful men in the Reich,

sent a telegram to Hitler...

That he could be in charge if Hitler wasn't able

anymore to lead.

This made Hitler furious.

And Hitler threatened to strip Goering of his offices and

throw him out of the party unless he changed his mind,

which he did.

Then came the news that loyal Heinrich Himmler,

the head of the SS, had been attempting some kind of

separate peace deal with the West.

Hitler considered this clearly to be an astounding act of betrayal,

and he strips Himmler of his offices, of his titles.

With the Red Army closing

in on the Chancellery itself,

there's no doubt

in Hitler's mind that

he is going to take his own life.

He doesn't want to be captured by the Soviets and paraded around,

and he learns about the fate of Benito Mussolini.

Under the roster of fascism,

the betrayers of Italy now hang by the heel.

Heads down in ghoulish caricature of life,

Il Duce gives his last salute.

Hitler saw no other way out than to commit suicide himself.

Eva Braun asked for the most painless method,

and Hitler said, "That would be cyanide.

You don't feel anything."

GÖRTEMAKER: Hitler was in a state of hysteria,

and everywhere, he imagined traitors.

He remembered suddenly that the poison came from

one of Himmler's staff, and Himmler had tried to betray him.

GÖRTEMAKER: To make sure the poison would work,

Hitler gave Blondi, his beloved dog, the poison first.

It's clear that the end is come,

and so he wants to leave a legacy.

He wants to leave a testament.

I must confess, that I was very excited,

because I would be the first and the only one who knows

why the war had come to this end.

I thought, "Now comes the moment of the truth."

And I was heart-pumping when I wrote down what Hitler said.

But he used nothing new.

He repeated his accusations to the enemy and

to the Jewish capitalistic system.

That testament really tells you something that

is fundamental to the man,

and that is fundamental to his world view,

because after all the destruction that he's wrought,

he believes that the job is not yet done,

and the job is to destroy the Jewish race.

He has changed the course of history,

and yet he's not changed at all.

He's dogmatic in that sense to the core.

And what do you recall of the night

when Hitler married Eva Braun?

GÖRTEMAKER: The whole wedding ceremony was unreal.

They pretended as if it was normal,

and after the ceremony they drank champagne,

and if we believe Traudl Junge,

Eva Braun was proud to be finally Hitler's wife,

because she told others,

"Now you can say,

'Frau Hitler,' to me."

GÖRTEMAKER: Hitler shot himself, and Eva Braun took poison.

It became clear later that Hitler, too,

had first taken poison, and then shot himself.

Hitler had given very explicit verbal and

written instructions that his and Eva Hitler's remains were to

be burned beyond recognition.

Their bodies are wrapped in blankets,

and they're taken outdoors.

The courtyard is being shelled as all of this is going on.

And the corpses are placed in shallow graves,

they are doused with petrol, and then they are burned.

This is London Calling.

The German radio has just announced that Hitler is dead.

We knew Hitler had a hideout in Berchtesgaden,

on top of a mountain.

So I get into my Jeep, I went up to the top.

Everything was a big mess.

I knew we were gonna have war crimes trials.

My objective was to find the evidence,

'cause you need two things;

you need the criminal, and you need the evidence.

There wasn't a heck of a lot of evidence I could use from

the Berchtesgaden hideout, so I headed for Berlin.

The National Broadcasting Company

delays the start of all its programs to bring you a special bulletin.

Germany has surrendered unconditionally to the Allies,

no strings attached.

Hitler and those who supported him had taken Germany

into the most destructive war in human history.

They were responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of people,

and for the attempted genocide of the Jewish people in Europe.

The entire continent was a pile of rubble.

I thought, here's a case we cannot

possibly do justice.

Hitler was already dead;

I knew he was dead, but he was not alone.

Here was his followers, the whole Nazi movement.

One day, one of my researchers said,

"Look what I found!

Situation reports from the Eastern Front.

Their assignment was to eliminate all Jewish men,

women and children."

I took a little adding machine,

and I added them up, and I had a million people,

over a million.

I have defendants, each one beyond any shadow of a doubt,

was an accomplice and a perpetrator of mass murder.

I said, "To balance the scales of justice,

I'd have to cut them into million parts and

feed them to the dogs."

But vengeance is not our role.

Because war is horrible; vengeance was even worse.

Here under the vigilant eyes of

a live military police, the 20 most important surviving member

of the Hitler gang go on trial.

High representatives of France, Britain, America

and Russia form the tribunal.

They will judge the ringleaders of a conspiracy

that brought war to all the world.

Hitler is obviously the leading, uh, missing guest

at the party, if you want.

There are other very senior Nazis

who've committed suicide, Goebbels, Himmler, and others,

but Hitler was the one whom everybody talks about.

The four charges for the Nuremberg defendants were;

war crimes; crimes against humanity;

digressive war; and conspiracy.

People often say, "What happened to genocide?"

Genocide was listed as a kind of war crime,

not as a crime in itself and not as a crime against humanity.

The rounds which we seek to condemn and

punish have been so calculated,

so malignant, and so devastating

that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored,

because it cannot survive

their being repeated.

The first trial has two dozen defendants.

Rudolf Hess was a prominent defendant.

A number of, of senior generals,

Keitel and Jodl,

Admiral Raeder and Admiral Doenitz, Rosenberg,

Albert Speer, and Balder von Shirach and

others who had been leaders of the Nazi regime.

One commits suicide on the eve of trial,

one's declared non-compos, so it's 22 defendants.

But defendant number one

was Herman Goering, Hitler's number two.

Hermann Wilhelm Goering.

I informed the court that defendants were

not entitled to make a statement.

You must plead guilty, or not guilty.

All the defendants at Nuremberg wanted to get in

the fact that in effect, they were following superior orders.

When they spoke of Hitler's charismatic,

spellbinding powers, it was always to their advantage to

say so, even Albert Speer, who's the only defendant

who shows what might be taken as remorse.

But in the end, Speer doesn't talk about his own guilt.

He talks about Hitler, and how he served Hitler,

but not really about his own criminality.

In the afternoon, by order of

the tribunal, no cameramen were allowed to be present

when the guilty men received their sentences.

Hermann Wilhelm Goering,

the International Military Tribunal

sentences you to death by hanging.

Rudolf Hess, imprisonment for life.

Albert Speer, 20 years in prison.

Joachim von Ribbentrop, death by hanging.

18 people are convicted, 12 are sentenced to death.

Three were found not guilty.

Hermann Goering, as they say,

he cheats the hangman by committing suicide

shortly before he was scheduled to be executed.

Soon, the guilty men will

receive their just reward but, behind them,

they leave a legacy of sorrow

and suffering that 1,000 years will never wipe out

In this momentous trial now ended,

the world itself has been the judge.

John Toland, perhaps

no-one on the face of the Earth

knows more about Adolf Hitler than you do at this moment.

I think I've interviewed more people that

were close to Hitler, and they all revealed themselves because

I didn't present myself as an adversary,

only I asked, "What happened?"

My dad definitely understood that history is

a living creature, and that we perceive it through

whatever current lens, um,

is available.

The tapes themselves had a lot of value,

and needed to be preserved, in that it would be important for

future generations to have the ability to go back,

to hear the voices, and take from it what they could.

The story of Hitler and the Germans is not really

a story fundamentally about this one person,

or this one country.

It's a story about human beings,

and what human beings are capable of.

It's a conversation that happens not only about the past,

but also a conversation that happens about our present,

and our future, something not only to be understood,

but to be dealt with.

Germans like long, compound words,

and one of them is, "Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung."

It's a continued confrontation with the ways

in which the crimes of our past affect our societies today.

The Iron Curtain comes down in Germany, and

the city of Berlin,

once its capital,

now lies deep within the Soviet Zone.

So de-Nazification in East Germany was really

a top-down affair; the government promoted it.

They acknowledged guilt.

But as the Cold War began in West Germany,

fighting communism and putting a lot of money into the economy

and focusing on consumer goods was considered

much more important than fighting Nazism.

There was certainly no national reckoning with

the Nazi period in West Germany.

Finally, in 1970,

the first Social Democratic Chancellor of Germany,

Willy Brandt, went to Poland,

to the memorial at the Warsaw Ghetto,

and he was so moved,

he felt that laying a wreath was not enough,

and he fell on his knees in a gesture of atonement.

That picture has been iconic for many people's views

of post-war Germany.

But there was an awful lot of backlash for that gesture

within Germany, although it won him the admiration of

the rest of the world, and, indeed,

the Nobel Peace Prize.

If we want to ever conceive a world where

these crimes against humanity do not happen anymore,

we have to talk about it, learn of the Holocaust.

I'm struck by some of the echoes I see in our world today.

What I ask myself is, "How come we haven't learned more?"

Jews will not replace us!

How can I understand that?

That people still can sing.

I can't believe it.

That kind of cult, that was created by and

around Hitler, is a poison, and it has not gone away.

The story of Hitler is still important today,

not because the Holocaust is gonna happen again in the same form,

not because anybody else is Hitler,

but because if these things are possible,

that means similar things are possible.

I don't subscribe to a view that there was something in

Hitler's character that made him particularly suitable to

fulfill that role, but rather the other way round,

that the ways in which the times unfolded created an opportunity

for someone like Hitler to find a receptive audience.

People of an extreme point of view talk

as the Nazis talked.

They talk about certain groups of people who are inhuman,

who have to be removed;

foreigners, immigrants, people of a different color,

or of a different race.

If you let that talk just linger on the margins,

it will move to the center at some point.

You can't feel with me what I have suffered.

I was a child.

It is necessary to tell it again and again,

and so I, I'm telling you.

I, I don't think this could've happened in

the United States, but who knows?

We must all watch out.

Captioned by Cotter Media Group.