Original subtitles

NARRATOR: Adolf Hitler.

He is the architect of one of the greatest disasters

the world has ever seen.

The most photographed leader of the early 20th century.

He'd spend hours in front of a mirror

practising different poses.

Every photo is a performance.

Hitler was photographed from boyhood to the Blitzkrieg...

He wants to be at the front. He wants to share the excitement.

He wants to smell the cordite.

...to the bunker.

These images reveal the secrets of Hitler's inner life

and the people he led.

Hitler comes in and he tells you, "You are important."

He tells you he has a plan,

and he tells you he knows what's gone wrong, and he can fix it.

Featuring rarely seen and newly digitised images,

this is the story of the rise and fall of Adolf Hitler,

picture by picture.

frame by frame.

I think Hitler created an image of political celebrity

that never existed before.

The manipulation of media, the presentation of himself -

you can draw a line from that to what film and rock stars

are doing today.

2nd of August 1914,

the Odeonsplatz, Munich.

Looking over the square is a photographer.

He's looking for the perfect newspaper shot of a crowd

celebrating the outbreak of the First World War.

His name is Heinrich Hoffmann.

He was a portrait photographer, and he was very well known for that.

He took pictures of artists,

of prominent people in Munich.

In the square,

Hoffmann takes a photograph.

It will become one of the most famous pictures of the 20th century.

Among the crowd, his camera captures a young man from Austria,

a painter unknown to Hoffmann...

...25-year-old Adolf Hitler.

He's down on his luck, shabby, with discoloured teeth,

living in a single rented room.

Life is not going well for Hitler in 1914.

He finds himself in Munich trying to eke out this somewhat pathetic

existence, you know, trying to sell a painting here and there.

So, actually, suddenly, the war actually might give him a role.

Although seen by many as evidence of a city united

at the prospect of war...

...Hoffmann's picture is not what it seems.

The newsreel camera tells the true story.

We see that a tram can move at normal speed through the crowd,

and we see kind of restless people.

And then, the moment the military band is starting to play,

and they realise that they're being filmed,

people put on a show of support, of jubilation.

And it is at that very moment that Heinrich Hoffmann

took his photograph,

zoomed into this part of the square,

creating kind of the false image of all of Munich

and, by extension, all of Germany

supporting the outbreak of the First World War.

Hoffmann, pictured here in the 1930s,

was later accused of doctoring the photograph,

moving Hitler to the front of the crowd

to make him look more important.

The photograph was just the start.

Adolf Hitler would become one of the century's

most photographed men.

Born in 1889,

childhood photos are rare.

One of the most striking was taken at his school

in the Austrian city of Linz.

Hitler wrote that he disliked most of his lessons.

His only passion was art.

One of Hitler's teachers later described him as lazy, cantankerous,

wilful, arrogant, bad-tempered and lacking in self-discipline.

You really get the flavour of Hitler's personality?

Look at that expression.

He looks really objectionable.

And like all schoolboys, you know, there's a thuggish-looking one,

there's the sort of kind of handsome chap at the bottom.

There's all the kind of cliche stock characters.

And Hitler is the cliche stock character schoolboy,

the kind of nasty little boy who no-one really likes.

I struggle to see another boy in that picture who looks

as friendless as that boy, top right,

young Adolf.

Hitler's father, Alois, was a customs official.

His mother, Klara, was Alois's second cousin.

Even after they were married, she called him uncle.

His father was very domineering, but it was with his mother

that Hitler had a close relationship, a loving relationship.

Their love was mutual.

Adolf carried her picture with him until his death.

By the age of 18, both his parents had died.

Young Hitler struck out on his own and tried to forge a career

as a painter, first in Vienna and later in Munich.

Hitler has this aspiration to being an artist

and this desire to not be an intellectual,

but be someone who creates and who thinks visually.

Now, in spite of those grand aspirations, Hitler's paintings

were thoroughly mediocre.

They are sort of quaint, oldy-worldy street scenes

and landscapes.

They hark back to a German early-19th-century style

that Hitler greatly admired, called Biedermeier,

which is really like the cuddly domestic cousin of Romanticism.

But Romantic painters painted impressive, spiritual,

awesome landscapes.

Biedermeier painters would paint more domestic scenes,

people having nice picnics in nature, and so on.

He applied to an art academy and was rejected

and felt very aggrieved.

But that idea of him being a creative genius who was thwarted

in his efforts, I think, then explains how he comes to think

about politics as a creative process.

Aged 25, Hitler, on the eve of the First World War,

had little money,

few prospects.

CANNON BLASTS

The chance to fight for Germany transformed his life.

He joined the Bavarian army and served as a runner,

carrying messages from the front to the regimental HQ.

Curiously, on most group photographs that have survived of Hitler

during the First World War, we see Hitler being on the fringes.

He stands on one side, and we can kind of see he wants

to be part of the group, but isn't quite part of it.

He doesn't appear to have been particularly sort of interested

in the kind of bawdiness of male military life, if you like.

He is considered a little bit sort of asexual, a little bit weird,

a little bit of a loner.

This was clearly someone who had difficulties connecting

to other people.

And in fact, he was never promoted to a rank,

during the First World War, which would have given him a command

over even a single other soldier.

25 years later, in June 1940, shortly after his troops

had conquered France,

Hitler reunited with his old comrades at the exact same spot

that first picture was taken.

The Geek,

the loner...

...was now in charge.

You can see it symbolically in the way the photographs

are being choreographed on how Hitler has moved

from being the man on the fringes to being the central character,

the guy who, according to the Nazi story,

single-handedly led Germany out of misery.

After four long years, the First World War ended in triumph

for the Allies.

Hitler isn't the only one who, in November 1918,

just doesn't understand what has happened.

How did this come to be?

We were winning the war.

CANNON BLASTS

There was the big March offensive in 1918.

The Germans were gaining ground,

more ground than in the last three years of the war,

and suddenly there was defeat.

So, in November, the German war effort collapses.

There is a sense of confusion, consternation.

Suddenly, both sides stop fighting,

pretty much where they were four years before.

So, that's why it doesn't feel like a kind of natural defeat.

On February 26th 1919,

three months after the end of the war,

photographer Heinrich Hoffmann returned to the streets of Munich,

taking pictures of the funeral procession of a politician

named Kurt Eisner...

...assassinated in the chaotic aftermath of the war.

Once more, just by chance,

Adolf Hitler was in Hoffmann's viewfinder.

Again, he's on the edge of a group of soldiers.

They were all paying their respects to a man who was everything

he would later despise.

Kurt Eisner was a Jew and a socialist.

Why Hitler was there is revealing.

Hitler is amongst tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands

of Germans, who are actually kind of drifting around a little bit,

who are trying out different political ideas.

In the case of Hitler, it seems that he was moving

between different political movements

as long as they were supportive of the nation.

By mid 1919, Hitler had decided where his allegiance lay.

Right wing politicians had his support.

He joined an Army propaganda unit,

ridding troops of communist sympathies.

They had these motivation sessions where soldiers were indoctrinated

by various speakers and professors in patriotism,

an attempt, really, to salvage German pride

through this, if you like, heavy petting session.

Hitler came under the wing of an officer in the unit

named Karl Mayr.

He thrived under Mayr's direction.

He very much talks to the people he trains like a teacher

or a father.

And it is really him who seems to have trained Hitler

to be a more effective orator.

Then, kind of miraculously, Hitler transforms within weeks

or months, from being this guy who is seen as an awkward loner

to a master orator.

And this is where his speaking programme really begins,

sending hope, sending hatred of the left, of the communists,

of all those that threaten Germany's greatness.

So, he is really a Mr Motivator, a motivational speaker,

and that's how he begins.

The future leader is starting to fall into place.

What he lacks is a political party.

On September 12th 1919,

Hitler was sent into Munich by Karl Mayr

to spy on a small, extreme right-wing group

known as the German Workers' Party.

And he looks at them, and he's meant to be sort of reporting back

on what trouble they might be causing.

And he's listening and watching their message.

And it's... actually, something clicks and he's thinking,

"This is talking to me.

"This is telling me what I want to hear."

Hitler has found his political home.

He will soon emerge from the shadows.

Over the next 20 years,

together with Heinrich Hoffmann,

he will create the image of a Fuhrer

that will both inspire... CHEERING

...and terrify.

In 1921, a small right-wing organisation,

the German Worker's Party changed its name

to the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei,

or NSDAP, Nazi for short.

Adolf Hitler had joined as member 555.

This was a con.

The numbers started at 501

to disguise the party's lack of support.

Heinrich Hoffmann, by now, also a fully paid-up Nazi,

photographed some of the first members.

This is a great picture in many ways because it shows us

the kind of demographic of early members of the NSDAP,

the early Nazi Party.

And you just have to look at the clothes

that these guys are wearing,

festooned with a very early manifestation

of the swastika armband.

It doesn't look quite as refined.

And you can see they're all wearing very different outfits.

If we look at this guy, here, he's actually very well dressed.

Look at the wing collar.

And there's another guy with a wing collar here.

So, that's suggesting he's sort of probably from a more sort of

refined background than, say, this chap here.

So, you're getting a sense, in this picture, of the broad appeal

of what is only, at this stage, a very small party.

A lot of these guys would have seen combat.

They would have seen the horrors of the trenches.

And they came back quite reasonably from the First World War

and thought, "Well, what was that all about?

"We feel betrayed. We've lost a lot of friends.

"So, we want to get our own back."

EXPLOSION, BLASTS

By August 1921, Hitler was the leader or Fuhrer

of the Nazi Party.

It's a very febrile atmosphere in the politics of post-war Munich.

There's extremists on both sides,

almost violent atmosphere.

That's the world that Hitler's sort of working in,

starting out as a politician.

One of the tricks that Hitler used in this period was that he tried

to ration the use of his own image,

which shows this really quite profound awareness

of the significance of the public image,

to such an extent that he used to send the SA, his Brown Shirts out

to sort of chase down any photographer that he realised

had taken his picture.

And they would sort of take the camera, smash the camera

to prevent the image from being publicised.

So, he's deliberately creating a mystique around himself

and around his own image.

Hitler's plan worked.

The Nazi leader was so elusive,

the satirical weekly magazine Simplicissimus

tried to guess what he looked like.

But then, everything changes

when Hitler realised, in late 1922 and early 1923, that if he wants

to become the leader of a political movement,

people really need to be able to put a face to him.

Hitler turned to Heinrich Hoffmann to take his picture.

It was a life-changing moment for both men.

It becomes one of the most significant relationships

of the Third Reich in terms of the creation of propaganda,

the creation of Hitler's public image.

Most of what the ordinary Germans saw of the Third Reich

and of Adolf Hitler

came through the lens of Heinrich Hoffmann.

So, he's crucially important in that creation

of that public image.

To my mind, as a photographer alone,

he's up there with the pioneers of photojournalism,

with Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa.

Some of his photography from that period is remarkable.

And it's really that toxic political aspect,

that political legacy, the political regime that he served,

it's that that has overshadowed

his brilliance as a photographer.

I mean, understandably so.

But we have to also acknowledge how good a photographer he was.

Hitler and Hoffmann worked side by side for years.

The photographer was a key figure in the Fuhrer's inner circle.

They were an unlikely pairing.

Hoffmann was a total opposite to Hitler.

He was very funny.

He liked to talk and he drank a lot.

He smoked.

But they both had been soldiers during the First World War.

They had the same experiences,

and they both perceived themselves as artists.

In 1923, Hitler commissioned Hoffmann to take

a series of photographs

that he could distribute as postcards

to help his fame spread.

This is a very formal portrait,

studio portrait, direct to camera.

Heinrich Hoffmann wrote of the time when he was photographing Hitler

that he had three poses -

one hand on one hip,

and another pose with two hands on two hips.

And the other one would be the folded arms.

A strange thing for me when I look at real pictures

of Hitler, it doesn't look like Hitler cos I'm so used

to the film representation of Hitler, played by everyone

from Charlie Chaplain to Robert Carlyle -

often thin, weedy sort of guys.

But it's quite interesting to say

this is actually what the man looks like.

What I get from it is a quiet confidence in this picture,

and he doesn't look the sort of scary monster figure

that we all have known in later life.

This image of Hitler, with the stern gaze

and the commanding pose,

was how he liked to be depicted for the rest of his life.

Hoffmann's picture captured something of Hitler's character,

but there was nothing better than seeing him in action.

At beer-hall meetings,

Hitler would speak without notes for up to three hours.

A photograph of him at one of those early Nazi meetings

captures his outward energy and aggression.

He's just given a speech.

He's wearing a white coat.

His parting, normally very well preserved, is in disarray.

His hair is hanging down.

And you can get a sense of what he's just done in there.

And he is, himself, still imbued with the performance

he has delivered.

And you can see in his eyes that sense of achievement,

that sense of mission.

And you can also see it, to some extent,

in the eyes of the SA guards

who are standing on his sides.

In another photo from the time,

Hitler enters a hall with a whip in his hand.

In these early meetings, there would always be people

in the crowd who would say,

"You idiot, what are you talking about?"

And they would sometimes try to get on the rostrum and attack him.

On the way out, you know, he would be assaulted.

Sometimes admirers would come too close, too,

and he would use that to just hit them.

It became a sort of a trademark in those early years.

In every speech, Hitler raged against Jews and Communists

and the government for signing the Treaty of Versailles,

which penalised the country financially,

territorially and militarily.

Germany, at the end of World War I, is deliberately

and uncompromisingly punished.

So, in 1919, the signing of the Versailles Treaty,

this is a belittling, a humiliation of Germany on the world stage.

They now have millions of Germans outside their border.

Their diaspora is enormous.

It's an unreconciled country.

And don't forget the reparations.

I mean, it was a great play that was made for with the Nazis,

later on, that, you know, the terms of the reparations,

even when they were modified,

"Well, it's going to take us till 1988 to pay them off."

Hyperinflation in the early 1920s wiped out millions

of people's life savings.

By 1923, a single US dollar was worth 4.2 trillion Reichsmarks.

People are being paid twice a day because the exchange rate

will have changed in the meantime

between lunch time and the time you go home in the evening.

So, it was absolutely chaos for ordinary people on the streets

of German cities.

And when infrastructure fails, when money fails and people

can't afford to buy bread any more,

then they need to do something.

They need to react to it,

and they want to find someone to blame for it.

They want to fix the situation.

That's the easy part. People understand that.

We call that kind of realistic threat in the psychology world.

The second part is perhaps a little more difficult

for people to understand, and it's kind of like a blow

to a country's ego,

a blow to the sense of where they fit in the world.

"Am I still important? Am I still great?

"Is German still an important language?"

These are questions that are harder to pin down in some ways,

but they really matter, and things that seem to threaten that,

in your mind, we call that symbolic threat in psychology -

the idea that our culture is being eroded,

or our place in the world isn't as important as it was.

Those things also matter, and those things also lead people

to feeling negatively towards other groups of people

and toward being hostile towards those groups of people.

In January 1923, on the outskirts of Munich,

the Nazis held their first party rally.

Heinrich Hoffmann was there to record the scene.

CROWD CHANT Heil! Heil!

The so called Hitler salute was now part of every Nazi event.

So, it comes from, originally, ancient Rome

via Mussolini's fascist Italy.

It's adopted by the Nazis.

It's used as a sort of standard greeting between party members.

Hitler, incidentally, he has a curiously sort of

limp-wristed version, often in response to people greeting him

with this sort of straight arm.

He often used to boast to his secretaries about how long

he could hold his arm up.

Presumably in his mind,

this was some show of his own virility.

Heil! Heil! Heil!

For all the show of strength at the January rally,

one Hoffmann picture revealed the weakness of the party.

Hitler had yet to perfect his image of a leader in waiting.

On these pictures, he looks like someone who just had walked by.

He was in civilian clothes,

a civilian trench coat

with a walking stick, a hat.

He doesn't look like a leader.

The man photographed in the snow is a long way from power.

It's really tempting to look back and think, "Well,

"there's an inevitability from 1919, 14 years later

"to Hitler walking into the chancellery."

It's simply not like that.

The Nazi Party is one of many of these small, somewhat angry,

buzzing little political parties.

And Hitler is just one of, frankly, a lot of other kind of very angry

men on stages, shouting into the smoke of beer halls.

Let's not think that this is definitely going to happen.

This is not inevitable by any stretch of the imagination.

In late 1923,

post-war Germany, known as the Weimar Republic,

was weakened by economic chaos and political extremists.

Hitler decided something drastic needed to happen if his ambitions

were to become reality.

The previous year in Italy,

Benito Mussolini's fascist party had staged a so-called march on Rome

and taken control of the government.

Hitler believed he could do the same.

To his mind, if he could seize power,

starting in Bavaria, and carry out

his own effective march on Berlin,

then he could take power.

He could end that political and economic chaos

of the Weimar Republic.

He could start to put right some of those things

that he was complaining had gone wrong in the previous five years.

This was his moment.

In what would become known as the Beer Hall Putsch,

Hitler tried to hijack a public meeting where he knew

the three men who ran Bavaria would be present.

They refused to join his march on Berlin.

The following day...

...while Heinrich Hoffmann took pictures of the SA

getting into position and blocking the streets,

the real action was taking place elsewhere.

Hitler and a war veteran named General Ludendorff led a column

of 2,000 Nazi stormtroopers into the Odeonsplatz.

He hoped the people of Munich would join his cause.

This was a last chance saloon for Hitler.

They meet the guns of the Bavarian State Police

on the Odeonsplatz.

14 Nazis and four policemen were killed.

Hitler fled.

He later lied he'd carried a child to safety.

He was arrested two days later.

Hitler, in many ways, was lucky

that no photographs have survived of the scene.

So, that allowed his propaganda

to create paintings of the scene

that were as dramatic and as heroic as they possibly could have been,

and that would tell to Germany and the rest of the world the story

of how Hitler risked his life to save Germany.

The Beer Hall Putsch is a disaster.

There's no other way to describe it.

And actually, this looks to many outside the Nazi Party

as both the end of the Nazi Party

and, actually, as the end of Adolf Hitler as a realistic

political figure.

In March 1924, Hitler and General Ludendorff

and the other rebels were tried for high treason.

Not wishing to miss out on a story,

Heinrich Hoffmann smuggled a camera into the courtroom.

Pointing the lens through the buttonhole of his coat,

he took a surreptitious picture.

The subsequent trial, for many politicians,

would have seen the end of their career.

And indeed, the New York Times at the time said that actually

this is the end of Hitler.

"That's the end of you."

Against the odds, the trial was a triumph for the Nazi leader.

The other defendants played down their role in the Putsch.

Hitler exaggerated his.

He is very happy to admit that he did what they say he did,

that he carried out treason.

But he says that it was in the name of a higher ideal,

which was Germany.

Hitler was given a lenient sentence of just five years

and sent to Landsberg Prison.

It seemed that his 15 minutes of fame was over.

But Hitler had other ideas.

Suddenly, then, to be put in prison, he's forced to have a period

of contemplation, of reflection.

It gives him time to think.

He's a bit like Napoleon.

He never quite knows when to stop.

There's this constant whirring and burring.

Heinrich Hoffmann wanted to take a propaganda photograph

of Hitler in prison.

But cameras were forbidden.

Despite this, a portrait of Hitler in his cell emerged.

Looking surprisingly well dressed for a prison picture.

The Bavarian jacket, the shirt and collar.

But the strange thing about this picture -

Hoffmann says that he smuggled a camera in and gave it to a guard.

Now, this guard is probably one of the best photographers

I've ever known in the prison service,

because this is a very, very good photograph, given that it's 1924.

It looks to me as though it's on a tripod.

So, how do you smuggle a tripod in?

The picture is very good.

The lighting is an old trick that lots of us photographers use

as the window light.

He's looking out the window to get light on his face.

And with respect, if you ask someone,

"Can you just grab a picture for me?"

there'll be something wrong with it.

A pole will be coming out the top of his head,

or his eyes will be closed.

It's just too perfect.

It's a striking photograph, and I doubt whether a guard

would have taken it.

So, I think there's the hand of Hoffmann on this,

and he just wanted to create the drama with the crowd.

The Governor of Landsberg Prison had supported the Putsch,

and so let Hitler live in luxury.

He was allowed visitors.

Over 300 came to see him during his incarceration.

Crucially,

Landsberg proved to be, in Hitler's words,

"My state-paid university."

He read scores of books and wrote a vicious

political manifesto and memoir, which he called

Four And A Half Years Of Struggle Against Lies, Stupidity And Cowardice.

The publisher suggested My Struggle,

or in German Mein Kampf.

There's a literary genre in 19th-century Germany,

which is called the Bildungsroman.

"Roman" is novel, and "bildung" is building or becoming.

So, they're stories of self-becoming,

and they were centred around a young male protagonist

who goes through life, has various important experiences,

and his character and worldview

formed through those experiences.

And this is what big sections of Mein Kampf tap into.

It's a very personal story of Hitler's growing up

and reaching particular political views or conclusions

through this lived experience.

That's not to say that it's a coherent narrative at all.

In fact, much of Mein Kampf is borrowed from a huge range

of sources, and that was another main function of that book.

It was to show how National Socialism supposedly

grows out of existing and much-loved traditions,

a kind of cultural canon.

The Bible is cited and Cicero is cited.

So, all of this serves to ground the outlandish and crazy

and abhorrent conclusions that Hitler presents in that book

to show this as deriving from a very familiar

and acceptable cultural canon.

Hitler's two main goals when he wrote Mein Kampf

were turning Germany into a superpower state

and ridding it of Jewish influence.

The origins of Hitler's defining obsession with Jews

were in plain sight.

A few weeks before the failed Beer Hall Putsch,

Hitler had given an explosive interview to a Catalan journalist.

They discussed what was to be done with the Jews,

and Hitler told the journalist at the time

that it would be best to kill all the Jews,

but that he had looked at it from all sides

and had concluded it was just impossible.

Therefore, they had to go for the second-best solution,

namely to drive Jews out of Germany.

But he also made it very clear that it would have been preferable

to kill all the Jews.

In that sense, I believe there is a direct line of continuity

between the early 1920s and the Holocaust.

Hitler left Landsberg in December 1924

after serving only five months of his sentence.

Hoffmann was waiting with his camera.

He wasn't allowed to photograph Hitler outside the prison,

so they found somewhere that looked the part.

Few noticed the deception.

Hoffmann sold the picture to newspapers across Germany

and around the world.

It was in the car after this picture was taken that Hitler told Hoffmann

he planned to start the party again from the beginning.

Violent revolution was not the answer.

Hitler realised, to a people who are so legitimacy seeking

as the Germans, so culturally conservative as the Germans,

so civic minded as the Germans, there must be legitimacy.

He has to do it through the ballot box.

So this becomes the quest.

With the political change came an image change, a makeover

for the Fuhrer.

So you see a restaging of Hitler on his release from Landsberg,

where it's about trying to achieve a normalcy, a self-image that isn't

going to frighten the bourgeoisie.

Something that is going to appeal more generally.

So, yeah, he's going to have his SA, his thugs, his paramilitary,

but there's going to be a detachment -

Hitler and his image is going to be separate from that

because that is the only way he's going to be able to take

the majority, or at least a significant minority

of Germany, with him.

It would be a difficult task.

Support for far-right-wing parties was declining

and the Weimar Republic was achieving what Hitler feared -

stability.

In 1924, the Nazis had only 32 seats out of a possible 472

in the German parliament, the Reichstag, in Berlin.

Hitler needed a base to relaunch the party.

Heinrich Hoffmann offered Hitler rooms in one of his old photographic

studios in Munich.

Hitler relaunched the party as a national organisation involved

in democratic politics.

But happy to use violence and intimidation

against its opponents.

What we see emerging over the next few years is Hitler building

together this team of people who he really thinks

can help him achieve power.

And you've got three really dominant personalities here.

You've got Heinrich Himmler, whose qualifications

were being a chicken farmer.

But actually what he now finds himself being is head of

what was called the protection squad, the Schutzstaffel, or SS,

that essentially had been born out of the Stormtroopers.

Then you've got this much more enigmatic figure in the form

of Rudolf Hess, who was Hitler's deputy.

You've then got this very sinister figure indeed, the man who's

going to end up becoming the propaganda chief

of the Third Reich.

And that, of course, is Joseph Goebbels.

For two years after his release

from prison, Hitler was banned

from speaking in public,

much to his disgust.

The Nazis still had access to the public through their

own newspaper - the Volkischer Beobachter.

The paper was filled with stories of Nazi triumphs, and importantly,

photographs of Hitler.

If you look at the Volkischer Beobachter, most of the pictures

were actually taken by Heinrich Hoffmann, who was completely

indispensable to Hitler.

And Hoffmann made a small fortune actually selling pictures of Hitler

to supporters and other newspapers all over Germany.

Like all narcissists, Hitler was completely obsessed

with how he looked.

So if he buys a new suit or a hat, or any sort of uniform, Hoffmann

photographs him wearing it so Hitler could see how he looks on camera.

And then once, looking at the pictures, it's only

then that Hitler decides to wear that new outfit in public.

He can manage, he can stage manage his image, important

for, really, a man who was oh so very average to look at,

even the way he moves,

the way he looks.

He's hardly an Aryan pin-up.

So he has to make sure he curates that image.

He needs to work that image

so it plays for him and it hits the right note.

Despite Hitler insisting they were to be destroyed,

many rejected photographs remained in Hoffmann's archive,

unseen for decades.

In August 1927, with the ban on public speaking finally over,

Hitler went to Hoffmann's studio for an unusual photoshoot.

The Fuhrer wanted to improve his performance on stage.

So he asked Hoffmann to take a series of pictures so he could see

which poses were the most effective.

As Hoffmann worked, a gramophone played recordings

of Hitler's speeches.

RECORDING OF HITLER SPEAKING GERMAN

He's learning how he looks to a huge audience.

He's practising.

He had the nous to use a camera to record it, but he's also

using mirrors to see how he looks from the side, and trying to create

this power, this mystique, this figure

who's going to speak to thousands of people,

so you've got to get it right.

And various gestures, some gestures. work, it's all in the hands.

Even though I can't hear him, I sense his voice and the power.

And he's practising - how does that look to the person in row Z?

And it's a very scary time, and these are scary pictures.

Soon after these photographs were taken, Hitler led a Nazi

rally in Nuremberg.

He was always aware of the camera.

Free to speak once more,

Hitler tried out the poses perfected in Hoffmann's studio.

The large rallies were deceptive.

Few Germans were interested in the revamped Nazi Party.

They struggled to recruit new members and even

to finance the rallies.

Hitler's attacks on the Weimar Republic no longer hit home.

The currency had stabilised and the economy had recovered.

Then in October 1929, there was a dramatic turning point in Hitler's

political fortunes, and also his private life.

In September, Heinrich Hoffmann had opened a new studio in Munich

and hired extra employees.

One was a young girl named Eva Braun.

He took pictures of his new assistant posing in his office.

When Eva Braun started her work at Hoffmann's studio,

she was the age

of Hoffmann's daughter Henriette,

and she became friends with Henriette

and her brother, Heinrich Jr.

These were kids, teenagers, who had fun together,

who played together.

The story goes that when they first met, Eva had no idea

who Hitler was.

Based on statements by Ilse Braun, the sister of Eva Braun,

one day in October 1929 at Hoffmann's studio,

Hoffmann introduced Eva to Mr Wolf,

and the three had a meal in the studio,

and he offered her to bring her home afterwards, and she refused.

So Hoffmann then, so it's said,

asked her if she recognised this man, and she said no.

And he said, "But didn't you know this is Hitler, our Adolf Hitler?"

Our Adolf Hitler was 40.

Eva was just 17.

She would become a permanent figure in his life.

And 16 years later, they would die together as husband and wife

in the bunker in Berlin.

In October 1929, shortly after Hitler met Eva Braun,

an economic storm hit Germany.

Across the Atlantic, the New York stock market suddenly collapsed.

This was a global crisis.

But Germany, whose post-war recovery had relied heavily on international

borrowing, was particularly hard hit.

Millions were unemployed.

This was a national trauma the Nazis could exploit.

If you have a system with repeated crashes where things are repeatedly

going wrong, what you might end up with in that case is a sense

of a loss of control, which above

and beyond the negativity itself,

starts to affect people.

So it's not just that things

aren't going well.

It's that the rules don't work.

It's that you're not sure what to do.

It's that you've done everything right, you didn't commit any crimes,

you got a good job, and yet, life isn't what it's supposed to be.

And this loss of control affects people.

And psychologically, it makes you more likely to vote for someone

who gives you a quick, easy, bite-size, straightforward answer,

something that will just fix everything and get it all done

and make life better for you.

That is a danger of that loss of control.

It increases the appeal of a particular kind

of dangerous, authoritarian leader.

The Nazis still had less than 3% of the vote.

But they had a leader who was a recognised, distinctive national

figure, thanks to many years of Heinrich Hoffmann and the party

carefully crafting his image.

Now you've got people looking around going, "Hold on a minute,

"this Weimar Republic thing, this isn't working for us.

"Is there a new way?"

And they look at Hitler and he offers that in spades.

By 1932, the Nazis would be the biggest single party,

and Hitler one of the most photographed men on the planet.

Heinrich Hoffmann was just getting going.

During the Third Reich, it would be his photographs that would create

the public image of Hitler and of a new revitalised Germany.

Once in power, Hitler's vicious ideology would be unleashed

with terrifying results.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media