Original subtitles

DOG BARKS

BARKING

On 12th December 1944, some of the Nazis' top generals

are called to a woodland location in western Germany.

They were taken to an undisclosed, unknown location.

They were disarmed, forced to hand over their weapons.

It's all very, very secret.

And they're ushered into an underground room.

Since the assassination attempt, no-one has seen or heard

from Hitler in months.

There have even been rumours that he had died.

Now, he tells them he has a plan.

There's going to be a decisive blow where the Allies will be completely

defeated and will have to sue for peace.

It's an extraordinarily bold counterattack and it's never

going to work.

Hitler always had a capacity to imagine things, no matter

what the reality was.

He was very capable of self-delusion.

This is the story of the collapse of the Third Reich...

..as the Allied troops close in on Germany.

Our interest is the psychology of that collapse

as those at the heart of the regime cling to power.

It's the worst in human nature, you see during the collapse

of the Third Reich.

To help us tell the story,

we've asked historians and experts to take us inside the minds of each

one of the key protagonists as they are forced

to confront failure.

The cycle of thinking at that time wouldn't allow anyone to think

that what's happening is wrong.

GUNSHOT

Being picked up, shot, disappeared.

They are walking into an apocalypse on purpose.

Ultimately, who will stay loyal to Hitler?

And who will betray him?

And when?

By autumn 1944, Germany is broken.

Germany's cities and towns have been destroyed.

The German economy has been destroyed.

German society has been destroyed.

The Nazis provoked a war in which millions of Germans died.

They brought nothing but destruction.

And now the net is tightening on Germany.

From the west, the Americans, the British and their allies.

From the east, the Soviets are coming.

Any other leader would surrender.

His instinct is all or nothing.

Total victory or total defeat.

No compromise, no halfway measures.

He believes that a nation or a race can only really survive

through perpetual conflict.

This pursuit of total war will play out as a psychological drama

inside Hitler's inner circle.

For Hermann Goering, his punishment for the failures in the air war

is to be sidelined.

But for all the others, there's the dubious honour of promotions.

Albert Speer, Joseph Goebbels,

and Heinrich Himmler are all elevated

even higher, each with a new set of responsibilities for driving

the war forward.

Military experience, in a way, does not matter that much to him.

What counted for him was the men around him had a will to continue

and a fighting spirit.

In the new hierarchy,

propaganda chief Goebbels lands the job of Minister for Total War.

He must make sure there are enough soldiers to fight these battles.

But by now, Germany is running out of men.

The architect Speer must provide the weapons for the new offensive,

even though he doesn't have the workers to keep up production.

So as these men prepare for an impossible military task,

they must compete with each other for the few resources

Germany has left.

There is definitely a sense that Speer and Goebbels

are struggling for Hitler's attention, for Hitler's favour,

and they're struggling over who is the strategist of the final victory.

This is how power works in Nazi Germany.

You struggle against all of your political opponents

to please Hitler.

Speer has already been lying to Hitler about the amount

of armaments he's been producing.

Now he must convince him to back him further.

Speer is one of Hitler's closest friends.

Hitler trusts him.

Speer is educated, smart and ambitious, but also

he is as ruthless as the dictator he serves.

Speer now is the one who comes up with new production figures,

who tells Hitler that victory is possible, that he is producing

even more arms, that he is producing even more tanks and weapons.

But Speer has an obstacle.

Joseph Goebbels.

Goebbels believes that he's a man of history, that he is one of the

key actors in the great drama of German history.

Goebbels is suspicious of Speer.

He thinks of Speer as an opportunist, a personal friend

of Hitler that became a high-ranking Nazi.

Speer was not there for what the Nazis called

"the struggle". For Goebbels,

this is not about building the right tools for war,

for Goebbels, this is about unleashing the racial

spirit for survival.

Goebbels pushes ahead with the Volkssturm, or People's Storm.

A radical plan to boost Germany's dwindling army by calling

on all men, young and old, to join the battlefront.

No military experience required.

Goebbels at this point is trying to persuade himself that raising

the will of the German people in the form of this rabble,

this human leftover of military conscription, can still win the war.

The question is - what is more important, workers or soldiers?

Goebbels and Speer should convince Hitler

it's time to stop.

We can't do it any more.

We can't produce more weapons.

We can't produce more workers and soldiers because there's

no cause any more.

We've lost.

They do the opposite.

They prolong the war.

Speer's answer is to support his factories with more women, men

and children from the concentration camps.

One of them is Helene Podliasky.

Helene is just one of tens of thousands of young women who

tried to do something, right?

Anything in order to resist.

24-year-old engineer Helene has been captured by the Gestapo

while working as an agent for the French Resistance.

She doesn't know exactly what's going to happen, but she knows

they are to be taken out of France, to Germany.

You hold your breath, you close your eyes, and you try

and imagine yourself elsewhere.

And you try and think - "Me and my new friends,

"we're going to come out of this somewhere else."

After several days in a cattle car,

Helene arrives at Ravensbruck Concentration Camp

in north-eastern Germany.

Germany is the big, bad black hole of a monster.

It's the place of no return.

At this point,

what Helene knows is that in these concentration camps, people are shot

if they are not worked to death.

And that in many ways it is the lucky ones who are shot,

before they are worked to death.

Helene is thinking about the next thing to do.

The next way to resist, the next way to be relevant.

Helene is sent to work in an armaments factory in Leipzig.

In this aim to win the war,

Speer doesn't care about human beings.

He doesn't care about females, schoolgirls.

Speer is one of the most powerful organisers of total war.

By mid-December, Goebbels has delivered more men to fight

on the battlefront.

The Red Army has paused its advance in the east, so Hitler decides now

is the time to launch his surprise attack on the west.

Hitler moves troops from the eastern front to the Ardennes, to exploit a

weak point in the American lines.

What he's looking for is essentially a repetition of the stunning success

of the spring of 1940, of the attack on France.

And he kind of recreates this in the belief

that this can repeat itself.

In the early morning of the 16th of December 1944, German divisions

launch an artillery barrage.

Across a 105-mile front.

With Allied aircraft grounded due to the fog, the Germans

make dramatic gains.

Hitler thought he was back in 1940.

He thought the same thing was happening.

A bold move driven by passionate belief in the Nazi world.

Germany was going to win the war.

Hitler was so pleased that he phoned Goebbels to tell him

"This is the great turning point in the war."

Goebbels is euphoric.

His faith is proven right, and so Goebbels takes the

opportunity to persuade Hitler to speak to the nation,

share the good news,

reaffirm their trust, reaffirm their belief.

Because this is what Goebbels does,

he turns information into political power.

Many people haven't heard Hitler's voice for a long time.

For many Germans, this is a reaffirmation of the hope

that they had been losing for two years now.

So the

Ardennes offensive is an expression of hope, an ideological

obsession over reality.

But by now, Speer is too close to reality to believe

Goebbels' spin.

He's all too aware of a threat coming from the eastern front.

Hitler's strategy of moving troops westward has left it exposed,

and the Red Army will begin

its advance into Germany within days.

This is weighing on Speer's mind when he arrives at Hitler's

western headquarters, just after midnight on the 1st of January 1945.

GERMAN PERIOD SONG

Speer arrived late

to find Hitler's entourage all toasting the New Year.

Hitler, was convinced that the New Year, 1945,

would bring ultimate victory.

Speer was thinking about, "How am I going to get the grim realities

"of the situation recognised by Hitler?"

Speer is too smart not to know the war can't be won any more.

Everyone knew, by this stage, that Hitler did not like bad news.

This is not the moment to confront

Hitler with the really desperate situation.

Speer has not the courage to say, "Stop the war.

"It can't go on any more."

Why?

He fears disloyalty.

He's not sure what will happen then, if he tells Hitler the truth.

For him, like all other high-ranking Nazis,

there is no way out.

Leaving Hitler in '44 or '45 means death.

Germany's initial success in the Ardennes is short-lived.

The weather clears and the Allies are able to exploit

their air superiority.

Pounding German positions and pushing them back.

The Luftwaffe suffers crippling losses when a quarter of their 800

planes are destroyed.

Hitler's hopes of a comeback are shattered.

Goebbels, as the liar in chief, is now in the most difficult

of all situations.

He's struggling because of his love and admiration for Hitler

and he's struggling because he's afraid of this defeat.

Goebbels focuses on deflecting the failure from himself.

He takes advantage of a crisis meeting at Hitler's

western headquarters, knowing Speer will be present.

Goebbels begins to make a shock announcement about another

mass recruitment drive for the battlefront.

Goebbels is looking to implement what he thinks, and his ideology

suggests, is the last chance for Germany.

Sensing that Goebbels is trying to steal the limelight by promising

an impossible rescue plan,

Speer snaps.

Speer says that the war can't be won.

They are still fighting, fighting, recruiting,

and it's totally senseless.

Goebbels jumped on him and essentially accused him of losing

the war for Germany.

Goebbels humiliated him in front of Hitler, to prove Speer wrong

and to put his strategy ahead.

And then Hitler has his say.

Hitler starts to ignore Speer and address himself

to his subordinate, Saur.

"Saur will do the job," he says.

"Saur's really committed. He will sort it all out."

And between the two of them, Hitler and Goebbels,

they really humiliate Speer.

First of all, attacking him, and then ignoring him. And Speer

must have felt about that small when they did this.

Goebbels enjoyed the event, as he seems to have told Speer afterwards,

"Why do you let an underling speak to the Fuhrer

"like this, over your head?"

I wonder if Goebbels is twisting the knife, enjoying his little

victory over the opportunist Albert Speer.

The future is insecure and Speer feels anxiety and horror.

The economy is scrambling.

The Allied Forces are closing in.

They are on the German borders.

So actually there is nothing to quarrel about.

Speer and Goebbels quarrel on the sinking ship.

24 hours after being snubbed, Speer is feeling dejected.

It's only at this point that his mind-set begins to change.

Speer is not Goebbels.

Speer doesn't want to die in final victory,

and he thinks that for him

there might be a way to come out of this mess.

He's thinking of what may happen after the end of the Third Reich.

What will he do? What can he do?

How can he save himself?

His family?

He looks for an exit strategy.

One week later, Speer's concern about a Russian invasion

from the east becomes a reality.

A two-million-strong Red Army crosses over the River Vistula.

This is absolutely terrifying to the German population.

They already know what's in store for them from media reports

orchestrated by Goebbels, with photographs and lurid

descriptions of Red Army atrocities.

There'd been massacres.

There'd been hundreds of thousands of rapes

of German women.

Hitler's insistence on carrying on to the end meant death

for millions of Germans, which could have been saved

had a compromise peace been struck.

Desperate to show he's in control.

Hitler moves himself back to the capital, Berlin.

In a way that's typical of his refusal to accept reality

at this late stage of the war...

..he has the blinds turned down on the train windows.

So he can't see the terrible scenes of rubble, ruined buildings

through which the train is passing.

As they come into Berlin.

it's a scene of absolute devastation.

From now on, Hitler will direct the war from the Reich Chancellery.

But he's rapidly running out of options.

When he finally realised that his gamble has not paid off,

the Battle of the Bulge is definitively lost,

Hitler has something of a breakdown.

And he confesses that it's all lost.

"We'll go down", he said,

"But we'll take a world with us."

So Hitler orders the destruction of anything that might help the Allies.

All the facilities necessary for the continuation of normal,

everyday life, and then crucially, for the reconstruction of Germany

after the war, which, of course, Hitler didn't want to think about.

Meanwhile, Speer, who's holed up in a Hamburg hotel, is thinking

about life after the war,

more than ever, he wants to survive and secure a future for himself.

When he gets the news about Hitler's scorched earth policy,

it gives him an idea.

Speer knows very well that he is

responsible for millions of deaths.

And therefore, to survive the end of the war, it is necessary...

..to deny it.

He needs another image, not the image of Hitler's close friend,

but the image of an opponent of Hitler.

To tell the Allied Forces,

or to tell before a court that he is innocent.

Speer EMBARKS on a secret campaign...

..deliberately blocking Hitler's

scorched earth orders.

He gives guns to miners to fend off demolition squads.

This is his story, his exonerating story to save his life.

Persuades officials not to blow up factories.

The notion of a good Nazi is a powerful notion.

At least someone around Hitler tried to save lives.

This is one of Speer's biggest lies.

He puts a stop to the detonation of critical infrastructure.

Speer is rebranding himself.

Speer is THE spin doctor of the Third Reich.

Such a direct betrayal of Hitler is a dangerous strategy,

so for now, Speer must play a double game.

Speer in public, he presents himself as the one who is able

to continue fighting, who pushes others to continue the war.

He says, "Don't give up."

By the end of January, the Russians are advancing through Germany

and are almost within striking distance of Berlin.

In response, Speer is asked to produce more

Panzerfaust anti-tank weapons.

But they prove hopelessly unreliable.

Reports begin to circulate that these Panzerfaust are blowing

up in soldiers' faces and not hitting their targets.

And officials are sent round to investigate. As part

of their investigations,

they not only speak to the guards, but they ask,

"Who is managing the ovens?"

And someone points them to Helene.

So she's actually interrogated about her work.

"What is it that you do here?"

"Well, I don't really know.

"You know, there's a pointy thing and I just make sure

"that it stays right there."

She gives him exactly the answer that he's expecting.

And so he goes, "Good girl", pat, pat,

and moves on to the next person.

But Helene knows exactly what she's doing.

Using her engineering skills, she's come up with a way

of sabotaging the Panzerfaust, and she's recruited an underground

network of fellow prisoners to put her plan into action.

Parts of it is about an idea that she has of the effect

that this might have on the actual progression of the war.

Helene figures out that she could turn the heat all the way

down about halfway through the process and then turn it back

up again, so that when these shells came out red hot, they looked

and felt like they should have.

But actually, the tempering and forging process

had been sabotaged.

And her calculation is even if only one in ten of these missiles do not

go off, then that is slowing down that particular regiment

by at least 10%.

And her thinking is, this is my moment, this is my purpose.

This is the one thing that I can finally do.

As the Allies wreak untold destruction on Germany, Goebbels

decides it's time for the next stunt in his campaign to please Hitler.

He releases...a movie.

Having pulled 187,000 soldiers from the front to act as extras,

this is his most ambitious propaganda project yet.

The movie Kolberg depicts the heroic struggle

of this small German town against the French army

in the Napoleonic Wars.

It is meant to persuade German people that their blood contains

everything necessary for struggle, resistance and victory.

Goebbels and Hitler watch it together.

It becomes a moment of ideological, emotional, psychological communion

over the fate of the German race, over the historical place

of struggle and resistance and heroism.

OPERATIC SINGING

It also gives Hitler and Goebbels themselves hope that the final

victory can still be achieved and that there must be a trust

in the racial will of the German people to win.

And the message really is never surrender, never give in.

If the authorities want you to give in, just push them to one side.

I think Hitler felt yet again, Goebbels had delivered the goods

in terms of propaganda.

He felt it could not fail to inspire the German people,

just as it inspired him.

In search of salvation, Hitler's

attention turns to another favourite.

Himmler, the diabolical architect of the Holocaust, is promoted

to a major military role.

Himmler is Hitler's hard man.

Himmler is Hitler's man for carrying out the most brutal assignments.

Hitler knows that he can trust Himmler.

Hitler knows that Himmler will not disappoint him.

As Commander in Chief of Army Group Vistula,

Himmler is now in charge of the eastern front.

This is a really big moment for Himmler, who has never seen

active combat duty.

So Himmler feels elated.

He feels extremely happy. He feels proud.

Himmler feels that the fate of Germany is now in his hands.

Hitler thought that Himmler could do this simply by, as it were,

cracking the whip.

Himmler sets about reinventing himself as a military man.

His special train becomes his new army headquarters.

He comes across as a well-groomed man in a neat uniform,

with his shiny spectacles.

He continues to appear as someone who is extremely self-confident,

as someone who really knows how to lead.

But Himmler doesn't have any military experience to speak of.

Himmler says to military commanders that they should strike

at the flank.

He constantly talks about attack, attack, attack.

They know that the orders given by Himmler to attack the Soviets

are completely unrealistic.

So Himmler failed to impose his authority as a

Commander in Chief on the commanding officers.

Himmler, as a military amateur, does not understand the complexity

of military combat.

In an effort to prove to Hitler he's having some success,

Himmler resorts to what he does know how to do - terror.

To avoid concentration camp prisoners falling into enemy hands,

he orders they be marched away from the oncoming armies.

Among these prisoners is Helene Podliasky.

Helene and her comrades are feeling all sorts of things.

Hope, for one, because clearly the Allies are advancing.

Fear - that the Nazis may no longer have any use for them.

Uncertainty about where it was they were being taken.

You couldn't stop.

If you couldn't keep up the pace, you died.

If you were starving, you died.

There was no provision of water or food or rest

on any of these marches.

Helene saw one of her comrades, further down the line,

picking up a rotten apple.

GUNSHOT

It becomes clear that if they stay on this march, the likelihood

that they're going to survive is close to nil.

And for Helene, that's it.

It's now or never.

"We need to escape."

Helene and her group know the Allied soldiers are now within reach.

They can hear the front line.

They just need to work out which direction to take.

By now, Allied air raids have intensified.

This time, Hitler is directly in the line of fire.

His private quarters at the Reich Chancellery, a symbol of Nazi power,

are under attack.

There was nowhere else for Hitler to go now, but underground.

Hitler descends 15 metres under the Chancellery gardens

to his heavily fortified hideaway.

The Fuhrerbunker.

Bombardment continues to rain down on the area.

SUSTAINED BOMBING

For Hitler, this is a terrible blow.

As Berlin burns, the Allied leaders, Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin meet

in the Black Sea resort of Yalta.

Confident victory is just around the corner,

they are making plans for what to do with Germany after the war.

Unconditional surrender was the top priority, the main ultimate aim

of allies east and west.

Victory would be accompanied by dividing Germany into different

zones of occupation.

CONTEMPLATIVE PIANO MUSIC

Hitler hardly reacts at all to the news of this meeting.

He's determined never to surrender.

It would be like a repetition of the surrender of 1918.

And for Hitler, it's all or nothing,

it's victory or death.

With the Allies now so close, Speer spends the next few weeks collecting

official evidence for his exoneration story,

For his way out to save his life,

Speer really needs not only a story, but he needs paper.

He starts by writing a memo to Hitler calling for Germany

to be saved from the scorched earth policy.

Speer does not write these memos for Hitler.

He writes them for the advancing Allied Forces,

to show them

that he did everything to stop it, that he did everything

to save the German people.

Speer must now get his memo in front of Hitler,

to make it official.

But he knows better than anyone that Hitler

doesn't like to be challenged.

So he carefully choreographs his visit to the bunker.

Speer seeks to avoid the full force of the wrath that he knows.

Hitler will vent upon him when he reads the memo.

Speer hands the memo over to one of his assistants.

Speer tries to sugar the pill by professing his undying loyalty

to Hitler, and asking for a signed photograph as the mark

of his esteem.

But just as Speer thinks he's safe...

There's a tap on his shoulder.

He's summoned back to see the Fuhrer.

Hitler's seen the memo, which is a direct challenge

to his mantra of victory or death.

Hitler was appalled by the memo.

Hitler realises that Speer is no longer on the same wavelength.

He doesn't have the spirit of self-sacrifice

that true Nazis have.

As far as Hitler was concerned, this is a terrible betrayal.

This is a sin that Hitler cannot forgive.

It was the end for him.

After seven days on the run, Helene and her group make

it to the Mulde river.

They are now just a few miles from the American front line,

but in the other direction

are the Germans.

So it's life or death, depending on who they run into first.

They're exhausted. They're hallucinating.

Every few hours, at least one of them completely loses

the will to keep going.

But all they have to do is to keep pushing.

They can make it to the frontier.

When the car first approaches them, they're not sure

whether it's German soldiers.

But then, very quickly, she realises that it's the Allies.

Helene probably thinks that this is about liberating France

and the continent.

Helene feels that this is the point at which Europe is going to be free.

And that if she has made it, then many more are going to make

it and that her being alive is part and parcel of that liberation,

of that freedom.

In the first week of March,

the Soviets are now advancing towards the city of Kolberg.

The scene of Goebbels movie masterpiece.

Hitler orders this symbolic stronghold to be held at all costs.

But this time, there is to be no heroic defence.

On the 7th of March, the town of Kolberg fell to the Red Army.

The symbolic town which Goebbels had devoted so many resources

to presenting us the place that held out against the Napoleonic

invasions in 1813.

Hitler needs a scapegoat for this humiliating defeat.

He turns on one of his most loyal disciples.

Hitler felt that Himmler had let him down.

He'd failed altogether to stem the Soviet advance.

Hitler told him to his face that he was incompetent

as a military commander.

Didn't have any experience. Wasn't doing the job.

For Himmler,

the dressing down he receives

from Hitler is one of the low points,

not only of his career, but also of his life.

His world is coming to an end, almost.

Who is Himmler without Hitler's support?

Himmler knows that he is a nobody.

Himmler is ordered by Hitler to strip the armbands from the

SS soldiers who have been stationed in the east.

And five days later, Himmler is dismissed

from his military responsibilities.

Himmler really needs to think very carefully about where he stands

in the Nazi hierarchy, where he will stand in future.

For over a decade, Hitler has

encouraged his circle of deputies

to compete for his favour.

But this management strategy only works when you're winning.

With defeat now looming, Speer has betrayed Nazi ideals

and Himmler has failed.

Hitler feels increasingly isolated, increasingly alone.

The circle of people who Hitler feels he can unconditionally

rely on is getting smaller and smaller all the time.

This is no day for a birthday party.

It is deeply inappropriate and deeply weird.

They know they're going to be defeated.

They haven't got hope.

What they have got is champagne.

Himmler realises that Hitler is losing the plot.

Hitler says he doesn't want to be congratulated.

What is there to congratulate when everything is falling apart?