Original subtitles

Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!

What kind of leader murders millions

and takes on the world's major powers on multiple battlefronts?

Adolf Hitler was a megalomaniac.

He had a god complex.

He had all of these different issues

that have been stemming since his childhood.

This gives Hitler a feeling of almost messianic superiority,

that he knows things

that even his professional marshals and generals don't know,

that he has these gut instincts that are unerring.

Could a disease caught in the trenches during World War I

have accelerated this delusional personality?

It was described by some as instant psychopath,

and these people became criminals,

particularly convincing con men.

Could another contributing factor

have been a raging drug addiction?

Hitler is a... is a heroin addict.

He's also getting up with, you know, crystal meth,

you know, Pervitin, and also taking cocaine.

He's really a wreck.

It was a recipe for disaster,

which led to ultimate crushing defeat for Hitler and the Nazis,

and the deaths of millions.

Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!

In the last days of the Reich's reign,

Adolf Hitler revealed the depth of his capacity for self-delusion.

Germany was under attack from both east and west.

Defeat was inevitable,

but Hitler ordered his men to fight to the death.

Hitler's war room was conducted in a fortified underground bunker

in Berlin's Chancellery gardens.

And when he's in the bunker in 1945,

awaiting the Soviet attack on Berlin,

and, you know, he's trembling

and some say this is Parkinson's disease.

Others say this is, you know, withdrawal symptoms

from the morphine he'd been taking,

and was unable to get

because the German pharmaceutical factories were getting bombed out

by the British and the Americans.

So, no, he's a... he's a wreck.

How did Hitler in a handful of years

go from Germany's apparent savior...

...to her nemesis?

A broken and deranged dictator

hiding in an underground bunker,

ordering his troops to certain death.

In the years leading up to World War II,

Hitler achieved a string of remarkable victories.

His apparently flawless military judgment

nurtured a messianic conviction of his own indestructibility.

This, coupled with his carefully staged managed public speeches and appearances,

turned Hitler into a feared military chief at the head of an unbeatable army.

In fact, his military skills remained largely

those of the lowly corporal he had been in World War I.

And his blundering,

coupled with his increasingly unstable personality,

proved ultimately to be one of the Allies' greatest weapons.

But was there something else going on behind the scenes

that even the Allies couldn't guess at?

There's no question that Hitler's decision making

deteriorated in the course of World War II.

People noticed it at the time.

He became more and more self-pitying,

maudlin, sleepy,

just kind of imprecise as the war went on.

And he became physically more and more debilitated.

We can see in those weeks in the bunker how he self-destructs

by becoming self-abusive,

picking his own skin with tweezers...

He just becomes a very unhappy, unhealthy,

horrible person.

Maybe that's the true Hitler that he always was.

Now it really comes out.

Hitler's spiraling decline while he was chief decision maker

was in part due to years of drug abuse.

From 1941, on a regular basis,

Hitler was injected with methamphetamine and morphine.

A syringe was his preferred method.

Was the man in charge of the biggest war machine in history

little more than a junkie?

Hitler is a... is a heroin addict.

I mean, this is a guy who by the end of the war

is taking intravenous heroin every day.

Other opiates, he's also getting up with, you know, crystal meth,

you know, Pervitin, and he's also taking cocaine,

he's also injecting himself with vitamins,

testosterone, bull testosterone...

He's really a wreck.

Hitler was displaying all these appalling symptoms,

yet he was still able to cling to power.

On the 20th of April, inside Hitler's bunker,

the Führer's most loyal supporters lined up to mark his 56th birthday.

Kilometers away on the edge of Berlin,

a puny number of German soldiers were desperately defending the city.

A few thousand Germans

against the massed ranks of the Red Army.

As his delusional world collapsed all around him,

Hitler's drug-addled mind kept alive his fantasy Germany would prevail.

Hitler's private secretary, Traudl Junge,

observed the worst the situation became on the front,

the happier Hitler was to discuss his plans for the future.

Hitler imagined he would surround himself

with artists, academics, and civilians

when the war was over.

He was becoming ever more delusional.

It wasn't just drug use.

The drugs were amplifying an already deranged character.

Adolf Hitler was a megalomaniac.

He had a god complex.

He had all of these different issues

that have been stemming since his childhood,

and which made him a broken man.

Hitler's a pathetic individual,

you know, he grows up, he's bullied by his father,

his mother and father die when he's a teenager.

He's sort of shiftless youth.

He ends up in art school, doesn't do well.

He ends up sort of painting postcards on the street

and sort of drifting around on the fringes of society.

So, you know, he endows himself with all these powers

as a way of I go... I suppose pumping up his fragile self-esteem.

All the leading politicians look at him with contempt,

you know, the Bohemian Corporal.

Hitler, the feckless youth,

living a penniless destitute life,

found a home in the German Army,

fighting against the Allies in World War I.

This, you know, German enlisted man from World War I

of absolutely no distinction,

who's trying to rise to the top of German politics.

And they... and they see, as his contemporaries saw,

that he's truly a pathetic figure.

But Hitler did have this kind of ability

to simplify matters for people

and narrow them down

to a couple of key grievances that people could cling to.

And this is what brought him fame and power.

So how did Hitler's experiences during World War I

shape his capacity as a war leader?

Was he up to the task of being a combat soldier,

let alone the military leader of Germany?

All of the soldiers that lived through the Battle of Ebro

were promoted to Lance Corporal, including Hitler.

His new role was to carry messages

between the frontline and regimental headquarters,

a job fraught with danger.

Many dispatch runners were killed in the line of duty.

But Hitler excelled.

By all accounts, Hitler was a very good soldier.

He has a number of awards that he receives and citations,

not least of which the Iron Cross.

We also know that he's exposed to very real dangers.

He gets wounded twice,

once in 1916, once in 1918.

In fact, in 1918, it's a gas attack.

One soldier from his regiment,

Hans Mend, described Hitler as odd and peculiar,

who preferred to paint and read rather than mix with the other soldiers.

Mend claimed Hitler would sit in the corner in silence,

then all of a sudden jump up and start ranting,

attacking Jews and Marxists,

who Hitler claimed were subverting the war effort.

Hitler's nickname...

was Crazy Adolf.

According to Hitler's close friend, Ernst Hanfstaengl,

fellow soldiers mocked Hitler when they saw him in the washroom,

claiming his genitals were almost freakishly underdeveloped.

Hanfstaengl was one of Hitler's few friends.

And he queried whether Hitler's genital abnormality

contributed to his terrifying and murderous rages.

He knew from a very early stage that he had congenital deformities,

which he was desperate to hide.

Now, Freud famously said, "Anatomy is destiny."

And I think we have to say, to a very large extent,

more so than most cases you look at, this explains Hitler.

And at the same time, this man is building gigantic,

impossible structures.

Well, you don't have to be a Freudian

to see there's a connection between the two.

And it's a simple projection of his inadequacy.

Hitler's career in the infantry wouldn't last long.

When he was wounded in a British mustard gas attack

in 1918 at Ypres in Belgium,

he became temporarily blind...

and was evacuated to a German military hospital.

Lying in his bed,

a local pastor would bring him the devastating news

of Germany's surrender.

Hitler claimed the news was so traumatizing,

it sent him into another bout of blindness.

And in the darkness, he claimed to have had an epiphany.

He would be the one to liberate Germany.

He said, "I would make Germany great.

I knew immediately that it would be realized."

Hitler's messiah complex had begun.

Was this a vision, a moment of delirium,

or something else entirely?

Latest theories suggest something else was at play.

A medical theory that might help us understand

where Hitler's delusional mind and psychopathic nature came from.

A disease caught in the trenches.

In late 1916, on the Western Front,

a new illness that had never been seen before broke out.

And the people affected by it mostly went into a deep sleep

from which they could be wakened.

They developed a range of neurological and psychiatric symptoms.

Forty percent of them died with the first episode.

But if they recovered, they would remain in a deep state of sleep.

They would have Parkinson's syndrome,

not Parkinson's disease, which you get when you're older,

or they would have a major personality change.

It was described by some as instant psychopath.

And these people became criminals,

particularly convincing con men.

Now, we know that Hitler was right at the spot

in the German front lines where the outbreak happened.

Shortly afterwards, he went to Munich,

which was a place where there were a lot of cases.

So the theory goes

that Hitler had encephalitis lethargica, he survived it.

And it led to two things,

his dramatic personality change,

and his well-known Parkinson's.

Whether Hitler had encephalitis lethargica remains a theory.

But what's not in doubt

is Hitler believed his divine destiny

was to restore Germany's standing in the world.

As we know now,

Hitler could not deliver on all his promises.

And his diseased, delusional mind would eventually lead Germany

down a path of humiliation and destruction.

But how would this so-called providence

take Hitler from his hospital bed to a podium?

In 1918, Hitler returned to Munich.

The city was in a state of civil unrest.

His job was to help the army infiltrate the German Workers' Party,

an anti-Marxist and anti-capitalist political party.

Instead, he joined them.

The German Workers' Party would later become

the National Socialist or Nazi Party.

Hitler rose through the ranks quickly,

propelled by the sheer power of his delusional self-belief,

and his ability to sell the Nazi Party message to the masses.

I think that explains

why Hitler was the most successful demagogue in history,

that away from the stage, the plenum,

where he was talking to a mass of people,

he was utterly insignificant.

There was just nothing there.

It was if you could take a personality and make it into jelly,

and you just... your finger would just keep going through it.

And this was remarked on by everybody who knew him around him.

When Hitler got on stage and he had to give a talk,

it was like a complete change of personality.

But of course, you got to remember that

he was speaking words the people wanted to hear.

As a result of that, he could capture

that desire that was certainly within the German people

for strong leadership and the fulfillment of a great vision.

Hitler started to really love the sound of his own voice.

And we start to see

all the characteristics of a true narcissist

come to the surface.

It's reasonable enough to take the general acceptance

that a narcissist is somebody totally self-obsessed.

They are the center of the universe.

Everybody around them either has to make them feel better,

or be punished for not doing that.

Another way of putting it

is simply that a narcissist

is a psychopath who hasn't been caught yet.

Because narcissism as people generally conceive of it

means you can rationalize and justify any behavior.

So you could argue, if you use that structure,

that Hitler was the greatest narcissist in history.

By August 1933, Hitler had become the chancellor,

head of the government.

And with the death of Head of State Paul von Hindenburg in 1934,

Hitler then declared himself the president.

He was now the Führer,

Germany's supreme leader.

Crazy Adolf, as he'd been known in the trenches,

was now one of the most powerful leaders in the world.

As military leader,

a vengeful Hitler instructed his generals

to prepare for a massive expansion.

He ordered his troops into the Rhineland,

an area that had been stripped of its military power

under the Treaty of Versailles.

Next, Hitler took control of his homeland, Austria.

It was a bloodless invasion.

He was welcomed with open arms.

Hitler rode in triumph into Vienna.

Even the very name of Austria disappeared from the map.

And he reclaimed the German Sudetenland

in neighboring Czechoslovakia.

Hitler saw himself as bulletproof

and Germany as unassailable.

It was only a matter of time

before he turned his attention to the rest of Europe.

Without even bothering to declare war,

the German Army's launched a coordinated attack.

I think there's a good case to be made for Hitler as overconfident.

In some ways, that's also the secret to his success,

the fact that he's ready to take so much risk,

but that feeds his narcissism,

that feeds his sense of inherent destiny

that he is the chosen one,

that he is going to lead Germany.

And in some ways, that's part of the reason why

so many people are buying into this.

Hitler's arrogance led him to believe

Poland's allies wouldn't fight back.

Hitler was contemptuous towards the Allies.

He saw them as weak and indecisive.

Hitler would later tell his generals,

"The Allies are small worms."

Referring to Britain's Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain,

Hitler said, "If ever that silly old man

comes interfering here again with his umbrella,

I'll kick him downstairs and jump on his stomach

in front of photographers."

I think this was characteristic of Hitler

from a very early age.

And it exemplified the fact

that he was totally self-centered,

totally obsessive,

incapable of having any opinion that he did,

that disagreed with him,

and he simply reacted in kind.

While the panzer divisions rolled through the Polish countryside,

England and France presented a cold ultimatum to withdraw...

Hitler's generals knew an invasion of Poland

would provoke a response from the Allies.

They asked Hitler for more time to fortify Germany

for what they believed was certain war.

Hitler dismissed their concerns.

In a matter of days, the swastika had plunged

the world into total war.

Could this have been the moment when Hitler's diseased,

delusional mind tipped over into outright psychopathy?

What we see in Hitler is the worst example,

possibly the only example, of somebody achieving absolute power.

This is somebody who came from being a complete nonentity in 1919

to a man in 1942 who was the greatest conqueror of Europe

since Napoleon and Caesar,

had the absolute worship of all the Germanic peoples,

and the belief that he was going to conquer the world.

So this just segued perfectly

into his self-image.

"I am the greatest man in the world.

I should control the world."

And it picked up from there.

Going forward into World War II itself,

Hitler feels that, you know, he's been touched by God,

that the generals are far too conservative,

and that he has this sort of divine ability

to find the weakness of the enemy,

pounce on it, and destroy the enemy.

He saw himself as invincible

and his judgment impeccable.

The divine Führer was now beyond reproach.

Britain and France honored their agreement

to stand by their ally, Poland.

And on the 3rd of September, 1939,

World War II was declared.

Hitler was a great opportunist,

and somebody that would very much

want to ride the wave of success.

Hitler believed there was an opportunity to exploit.

And therefore, he went after his ideological aims

in terms of foreign policy like a dog after a bone,

and he just wouldn't give up

at any point during the war,

until there was either death or victory.

Germany crushed Poland in less than five weeks.

Hitler was emboldened.

Britain and France were next.

And it took only six weeks for France to fall.

He's counseled against the invasion of Poland.

He goes in, defeats Poland.

He's counseled against the invasion of France,

France falls.

This gives Hitler a feeling of almost messianic superiority,

that he knows things that even his professional marshals

and generals don't know,

that he has these gut instincts that are unerring.

He was a rock star to the German people,

delivering on all his promises.

But wherever there's a rock star,

drugs are often not far away.

Three years earlier in 1936,

Hitler had fallen in with Dr. Theodor Morell.

Morell was an experienced physician.

He'd amassed fortunes,

building pharmaceutical factories.

He made everything from lice powder

to chocolate vitamins.

Hitler's inner circle regarded him as a quack.

He was known by Nazi Party insiders

as the Third Reich's Syringe Master.

Morell always gave drugs by injections.

His... he thought pills work too slowly and he said to Hitler,

"You have to make fast decisions.

You cannot wait for a pill to dissolve.

You need the instant effect."

They had a special word for it.

They called it instant recovery.

So that the injection actually works very fast.

I mean, you feel terrible,

you get an injection intravenously,

you will feel like in heaven five seconds later.

This is... this is what impressed Hitler.

The irony is that when the Nazi Party came to power,

it was puritanical.

It had adopted a stringent antidrug stance.

Now it's supreme leader was an addict.

They were the first antidrug government in German history.

So all of this drug freedom

of the Weimar Republic of the '20s was suddenly gone.

Drug users were put in concentration camps

because the Nazi movement

tried to present itself as a clean movement,

cleansing the German population

from poisonous influences.

It was instrumental in the beginning

when they took power to connect Jews with drugs.

So they said the Jews among... amongst us,

they take more drugs than the proper...

Than the Aryan German, the non-Jewish German.

So they tried to push all the poisons,

the so-called poisons out of the German society.

In 1937,

the German pharmaceutical manufacturer Temmler

developed a new drug, Pervitin,

a methamphetamine.

And within a year, Pervitin was on the streets.

So when this product hit the market in 1938,

it was not considered to be a drug.

It was considered to be a performance-enhancing medicine.

This spread so wildly in the German population that, for example,

methamphetamine-laced chocolates came onto the market.

They were advertised as being perfect for the German housewife

because with those beautiful chocolates laced with methamphetamine,

the housework would be done easily

and would even be fun to stay at home and do the housework.

Uh, so in the morning, like,

we drink coffee,

the Germans in 1938, '39

used, um, a little bit of methamphetamine

to get ready for the day.

And Pervitin sold as a medicine, not a drug,

soon found its way into the German Army.

There was a professor. He was called Ranke.

And Ranke found out that in the attack on Poland,

already a lot of soldiers were using Pervitin,

so he suggested to the surgeon general of the army

that for the next phase of the war,

which was the attack against the west,

Pervitin should be an official medication for soldiers.

It should be supplied and every soldier

should take this on the first day of the attack.

So 35,000,000 dosages of methamphetamine

were being ordered from the German Army

from the Temmler company,

were being shipped to the front lines

and then were being taken on May 10th, 1940

when Germany attacked the countries in the west.

In fact, in the panzer corps, they referred to it

as panzerschokolade, tank chocolate.

There's also other names that people used like...

And this gives you an idea of just how powerful this stimulant was.

They didn't have to sleep at night.

The Brits and the French got tired

after eight hours of fighting.

They slept at night like every soldier on the planet

has always slept at night, but the Germans,

they just continued fighting all through the night.

It's particularly widely used in the medical corps

because they are overwhelmed by casualties.

Nurses and doctors are taking Pervitin

because they have access to it

and it gets to the point where people are taking it,

so much so, that they stop sleeping.

They stop sleeping for up to a week on end

and seemingly can function,

conducting operations, looking after wounded.

Then they talk about these enormous crashes

that they... that they sleep for a day or two on end.

But of course, it's also addictive.

So it becomes a real problem.

Was the entire Nazi war effort

a drug-fueled rampage across Europe

on the highly addictive methamphetamine Pervitin?

Hitler's right-hand man,

Hermann Goering, had been a morphine addict

since he was wounded in the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923.

And he was in charge of the Luftwaffe.

And with Hitler now in the hands of the Syringe Master,

Dr. Morell, drugs were now part of Nazi Germany

from the top down.

But drugs and feelings of invincibility

don't explain all of Hitler's blunders.

In 1940,

when Germany failed to obliterate the Allies

at the Battle of Dunkirk,

Hitler was not yet injecting hard drugs.

Hitler made a lot of good decisions early in the war,

but he also made a very bad one,

uh, concerning Dunkirk when he stopped the German tanks,

and this decision had nothing to do with drugs

because he wasn't using heavy drugs,

uh, in the spring of 1940.

At Dunkirk,

the Allies had been losing the battle

to keep France out of Germany's hands.

The Allies were in retreat.

And the beach of Dunkirk

was one of their only escape routes

back across the English Channel.

The Allies were sitting ducks.

Then, Hitler decided to halt the offensive.

Hitler sometimes had a,

what could be termed as schizophrenic style of leadership,

where he would sometimes do exactly the opposite

of what would be expected of him.

Previous victories would indicate that he would be very confident,

yet sometimes he would have cold feet and stop short.

He also had a tendency to listen to the general

that last spoke to him,

and then that would become policy.

Had Hitler not stopped the panzers

at this critical point around Dunkirk,

there is little doubt that the BEF,

the British Expeditionary Force,

the best part of the French Army,

and some Belgians would have been destroyed.

They would have been taken out of the game.

What that would have done

for British and French morale

can only be imagined.

It didn't matter to Hitler

that the bedraggled BEF

was allowed to make its way back to Britain

with its tail between its legs.

He already had his sights set on a much greater prize.

Hitler's errors of judgment came thick and fast.

As Hitler grew more maniacal,

his micromanaging became more intense.

After he and the morphine addict Goering

blew the Battle of Britain,

he turns his attention to the east

and planned to invade Russia.

To keep on top of things,

Hitler needed something stronger from Dr. Morell.

So in 1941 in August

when Germany attacked the Soviet Union,

when Hitler wanted to divide the German troops,

part of the troops should go up to Leningrad,

part should go to Moscow and the other,

uh, heading for the oil reserves of the Soviet Union,

um, his generals disagreed with that.

They wanted to take Moscow first.

They said, "If we take Moscow, that's how we win the war."

Hitler, he became quite sick for the first time.

He had what was called the Russian flu.

So he asked Morell to give him something stronger

than just vitamins because he wanted to get up,

and Morell then for the first time gave him,

uh, an opioid and Hitler got out of bed,

walked into the military briefing room

and was able to command the on-goings.

So this was the first time he tasted something stronger,

and he would not forget that.

Was this the moment that turned the war?

Were opiates the unknown secret ingredient

that would cloud Hitler's judgment

and fatally undermine the German Army's efforts in the east?

Hitler was confident the war would last two months,

three at the most.

Hitler was wrong again.

Here 27,000 Nazi soldiers died.

The war against Russia lasted almost four years.

The early victories

give Hitler the self-confidence

to press ahead for more military action.

Right the way through until 1941

in the invasion of the Soviet Union,

Hitler's generals were saying to Hitler,

"We shouldn't be doing this.

We don't have enough time.

We do not have the plans.

We do not have the resources

to undertake the military campaigns that you want."

As the war progressed,

Hitler's drug use accelerated.

By 1942, Hitler's morning ritual

was injections from his doctor, Theodor Morell.

Hitler would become a heavy user of cocaine and eukadol,

a morphine cousin of heroin.

Hitler's narcissism,

his belief in his divine mission,

and his drug addiction made for a deadly cocktail.

Just like anyone high on drugs

is not that much in contact with reality

and if you are the leader in a war,

you have to be very much in contact with reality.

You cannot live in a dream world.

This ultimately has to lead to terrible decisions.

Hitler's generals were noticing how their Führer's behavior

was changing in daily military conferences.

Hitler's armament minister, Albert Speer,

observed Hitler lacked the ingenuity

he possessed prior to 1942.

Hitler's mad plan to take Russia,

the Eastern Front unraveled.

Instead of admitting he was wrong,

Hitler purged the high command of the Nazi armed forces.

He surrounded himself with more and more yes-men.

Further feeding his narcissism

and consolidating power in his own hands.

Hitler always had a, uh, a tendency

to be incredibly self-confident

and only believing in his own ideas and beliefs.

His behavioral tendencies

towards, um, not allowing contrary opinion

comes to the fore and he alone

takes the key decisions in Nazi Germany,

supported by his henchmen,

who are protecting the power base that he's built.

End of the path of glory for this once proud Nazi Army.

The German front in Russia was collapsing.

The Soviets had gained the upper hand

and would soon advance on Germany.

By now, Hitler was also losing against the allies on the Western Front.

And the Führer had another problem closer to home,

multiple assassination attempts on his life.

There were at least 42 assassination attempts

on Hitler between the 1930s and the end of the war.

Um, and then certainly the most famous

is the 1944 Stauffenberg plot.

There were dozens of other plots.

Some of them near misses,

some of them Hitler never knew about.

You know, uh, he was a vegetarian.

They'd poisoned some meat on the table and he wouldn't eat it,

so he wouldn't get sick or die.

Or they put a bomb in a plane that he was on,

but the bomb would fail.

The fact that he survived them reinforced his view

that he was sort of a superman

that had been, you know,

chosen to lead Germany in this, you know,

struggle for survival and that nothing could do him in

and that... and that these merely confirmed his greatness.

But the famous von Stauffenberg attempt on Hitler's life

on July the 20th, 1944

had a more profound effect.

It sent his drug use into overdrive.

Hitler's psyche also suffered tremendously

from that assassination attempt.

This is when he started to use the cocaine.

Uh, he used cocaine over 50 times

after the assassination attempt

and on the days when he didn't use cocaine,

he used, um, eukadol,

the strong opioid that was injected into his veins.

So the assassination attempt by Stauffenberg didn't kill him,

but really turned him into a drug addict

and actually turned him into a junkie

because someone who receives an opioid intravenously

every other day for several months

can be called only a junkie.

Nazi prisoners,

some of them say that Hitler's war is lost.

But they fought to the last bullet.

As Germany's defeats mounted,

was Hitler's conviction that he was indestructible

influenced by his dependency on hard drugs?

Did Hitler's drug use affect his decision-making?

Historians and clinicians

believe methamphetamines, cocaine,

and heroin altered the Führer's mental state

and played a role in Germany's defeat.

There is absolutely no doubt

that the medical attention that Hitler was getting,

the drugs that he was taking,

was in a sense driving

an exhausted man further and further.

They were perhaps addling his brain,

affecting his decision-making in a negative way.

For example, when he's awakened during the D-Day invasion

on June 6, 1944, he's sleeping late as usual at Berchtesgaden.

You know, he's groggy and drowsy and doesn't really begin functioning

until midafternoon because he's so hung-over

from this cocktail of drugs that he takes all day and night.

As his judgment became more impaired,

Hitler became ever more determined

to focus military decision-making in his own hands.

So complete was his self-delusion,

growing paranoia, and neuroses

that he was losing touch with reality.

By January 1945,

the Russians were advancing on Germany.

Hitler had retreated to his fortified underground bunker

in the gardens of the Reich Chancellery in Berlin.

Allied plans to assassinate Hitler had been aborted.

They believed that the deluded, drug-addled, and unhinged Hitler

with his increasingly poor judgment

was more valuable to them alive than dead.

As news came through that Soviet troops had entered Berlin,

Hitler feared he'd be captured

and subjected to the same lurid public humiliation

that his onetime friend and ally, Benito Mussolini,

and his mistress, Clara Petacci, had suffered.

He'd heard rumors that the Red Army

planned to parade him through the streets of Germany in a cage.

The prospect was too much for Hitler,

and he opted to take his own life.

Fittingly, his suicide

was to come from one last drug, cyanide,

plus a revolver, just in case.

Like their beloved Führer,

Germany had descended into smoldering ruins.

Hollowed out, a shell,

decayed, and defeated.

By the end of April,

Soviet soldiers were only a few blocks from Hitler's underground bunker.

On the first of May, 1945, at20 p.m.,

Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz,

commander-in-chief for the north of Germany,

made an announcement on Hamburg radio.

With the strains of a violin opera playing,

he announced that the Führer was dead.

He said, "Hitler had fallen in battle,

fighting at the head of his troops."

But it was yet another fiction

to a party desperate to keep that myth alive.

Hitler had not fallen as a hero,

but died as a coward.