Original subtitles

(dramatic music)

(dramatic music)

(crowd cheering)

- [Narrator] The 1930s saw Germany turn

from a shattered nation into a military powerhouse.

It was to wage war on the nations,

which just 11 years earlier,

had left Germany a broken country

and a population bereft of pride

in the wake of World War One.

(Hitler speaking in foreign language)

- [Narrator] One man created this transformation:

Adolf Hitler.

- Hitler was one of the few people in Germany

who welcomed another war.

He wasn't scared.

(bomb exploding)

- Hitler's magnetism was not only something

which could convince enormous crowds,

but was also incredibly powerful, like a potent narcotic.

(Hitler speaking in foreign language)

- [Narrator] How did he become

the most powerful man in Germany?

Who were the Nazis

and how did they reinvigorate this fractured nation?

- In Weimar Germany there was a new kind of energy,

very visible on the streets.

- They wanted perpetual acclamation.

They wanted constant support from the people.

- Terror played a very important part in intimidation.

Nothing would be tolerated

that undermined the German national revolution.

(crowd cheering)

- [Narrator] Thousands were taken in by one man's magnetism,

which proved to be Germany's fatal attraction.

(Hitler speaking in foreign language)

(crowd cheering)

- Hitler, at this stage, sees himself not as the Messiah,

but as John the Baptist.

It's only at his time in Landsberg prison

that he actually realizes, my God, I am he.

(dramatic music) (crowd cheering)

(dramatic music)

- [Narrator] To fully understand the doomed love affair

of Germany and Hitler, we must first look

into the German nation of the late 19th century.

- Germany had become the most powerful country,

the most prosperous country, the most advanced country

on the European continent.

- It was a rather authoritarian state, on the one hand,

but it also had a national parliament with elections,

with some limited powers,

but those powers were most likely growing.

- A highly militarized, imperial state,

under the hereditary monarchy of the Hohenzollern dynasty.

- [Narrator] Having given support to the unification

of Germany, after the Franco-Prussian war,

Britain had become fearful of this new power.

Its growing industrial and military capability threatened

to overshadow Britain's diminishing empire.

- After the Franco-Prussian war,

Germany powered ahead economically,

overtaking Britain as an industrial power

by the time of the First World War,

second only to the United States.

- There was a great deal of catching up to do,

a great deal of nation building, of creating unity,

of creating vision.

- It was ambitious really to join the other great powers,

as well as the major European imperial states.

- Alongside that, both envy and arrogance

of the British Empire.

It was envy because it was so world powerful,

it was 25% of the world's surface

and 25% of the world's people.

But, in addition, a very strong sense of superiority.

- Many historians would say,

a dangerously expansionist power, with ambitions in Europe

that were certainly threatening

to the continuation of any existing balance of power.

(dramatic music)

- [Prof. Nicholas O'Shaughnessy] It was a mass

of seething tensions.

- Germany was beginning to be a colonial power,

late in the race.

- [Narrator] It is not in Germany however,

where our story begins, but in neighboring Austria-Hungary.

- We don't know much about Hitler's early life.

He was born in Braunau on the river Inn,

on the 20th April 1889, the son

of a minor Austrian official.

- His father wasn't a very nice man.

Knocked Hitler around a bit.

Because of that, Hitler's mother took on

a very protective role, we can gather that much.

- He had a rather unhappy childhood.

He had four siblings, who died before he was born.

- [Narrator] Hitler's childhood leads us

to believe it was a fairly ordinary upbringing,

comparable with his peers at the time.

- A problem for historians is that Hitler reinvented

quite a bit about his childhood.

- He was an indifferent student, it has to be said.

It was not that he was not very intelligent,

he certainly was.

But he was unable to focus.

- A bit of a loner as he continued to be,

but always a voracious reader.

He read everything he could get his hands on

and continued to do that.

- He created, in a sense, a kind of self-education,

which was a bizarre bricolage of all kinds

of sources of his own authorship.

In other words, what he didn't get

was really a coherent education

because he didn't pay attention.

- [Narrator] In 1907 a young Adolf Hitler made his way

to Vienna, to pursue a career as an artist.

Vienna, at the time, was the city leading Europe

in new artistic practice and philosophical thought.

Hitler's plan was to apply and enroll

at the Academy of Fine Arts.

- He went to Vienna when he was about 16

and really knocked around, didn't do a lot.

He never lived as rough as he later claimed.

- He was rejected from art school,

I think probably rightly, looking at his artworks.

He knew about art in general terms,

he knew about neo-classical art.

He knew the power of art, above all,

that great historic images had enormous moment,

so although his water colors didn't advance the Nazi cause,

he knew what art could do.

- Hitler claimed, throughout his life, that he was an artist

who was torn from his easel by the love of Germany.

- His mother was generous to him, as she provided him

with a series of allowances,

possibly without the knowledge of his father.

So some biographers of Hitler,

say that he was really a bit of a layabout.

He frequented café society in Vienna

and met up with a deeply flawed café intelligentsia,

who fed him a lot of the ideas

that Hitler later said in Mein Kampf,

"Became the granite foundations of my thought."

- Everyone assumes that Hitler was strongly influenced

by Austrian anti-Semitism.

There was a lot of it around before 1914.

But actually it's very hard to pin down

that he was influenced by it.

- All of the associations with Jewish people,

with whom there are a great many in Hitler's early life,

were not merely positive, but benevolent.

The doctor who treated his mother when she was sick,

the family doctor who treated all of them, he was Jewish.

The dealer who bought and sold the paintings Hitler painted

in Vienna, took the wolf from the door, again was Jewish.

- [Narrator] In receipt of the inheritance bequeathed

to Hitler from his father's estate

and finding little fortune as an artist in Vienna,

Hitler decided to move to Munich in 1913.

- [Prof. Jill Stevenson] Hitler was very conscious

of being ethnically German.

- As a German nationalist, Hitler believed

that he belonged more in Germany than in Austria.

- Austria-Hungary remained a great power in the scheme

of things, dominating a large part of south eastern Europe.

- But it was getting into crisis because of the growth

of nationalism, Czech nationalism, Hungarian, south Slav,

and the clash of these national groups

in the parliamentary assemblies made the parliament,

the Reichsrat and its Hungarian equivalent,

more or less unworkable, ungovernable.

Every meeting just erupted into shouting matches

between the different national groups,

either in Austria or in Hungary.

And that, I think, gave Hitler a contempt

for parliamentary rule.

He saw it as being ineffective, he saw the empire,

this large, ramshackle organization and he thought

that an authoritarian director, a strong leadership,

even a dictator, was the only way to solve these problems.

(dramatic music)

- [Narrator] It was the assassination

of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, in Sarajevo,

that would be the catalyst for the start

of the First World War.

Within weeks, Austria-Hungary were at war with Serbia.

Germany then mobilized, invaded Luxembourg

and Belgium and began to march on France.

This prompted Britain to declare war on Germany.

Hitler, although an Austrian citizen, living in Munich

at the time, managed to sign up to the German army.

- In the chaos of mobilization, in August 1914,

his papers were disregarded and he got into the army.

- The Austrian authorities were after him.

He'd eluded conscription from the Austrian army

and was living in Germany.

He didn't want to fight for something he didn't believe in

and he certainly didn't believe in the Hapsburgs

and in their empire.

(cannons firing)

- [Narrator] With war erupting all over Europe,

Germany would arrive in the position

of fighting a war on two fronts.

To the east, against the Russians

and to the west against Britain, France and Belgium.

Hitler had joined the army in support of the German Empire.

The experience of war would change the trajectory

of his life and, in turn, the lives

of millions of others forever.

Having failed as an artist, Hitler found himself in Munich,

a city in the modern German Empire.

He signed up to the German army

and was sent to the western front.

Here he found Germany at war with Britain and its allies.

- [Newsreel Presenter] Adolf Hitler played

but an obscure part, a corporal in the German army.

- Hitler was fascinated by the prospect of war.

- The First World War turned a nobody into a somebody.

- On the whole, most reports show

that he was a good soldier, well disciplined.

He was promoted to an NCO rank.

- He survived it from start to finish.

Now, of course, not everybody did.

- He served as a battalion runner,

close enough to the front line,

though he didn't spend as much time

as a front line combat infantry soldier as he later claimed.

But he was in danger, he was within firing range of British

and French artillery because at the very least,

if you were a runner, you had to get messages up

to communications trenches

and he was seriously gassed in 1918.

(bomb exploding)

- People have tried to belittle what he did in the war,

actually, but he won the iron cross second class

and then the iron cross first class.

- On the recommendation, ironically,

of a Jewish superior officer.

- This idea that he was some kind of coward is rubbish.

He actually manifested enormous courage.

- But messengers were often regarded

by the fighting troops as having rather a cushy time.

- The enigma is, why he was never promoted an officer,

of course.

- It may be apocryphal but I think it's been said

that he remained a corporal

because he didn't have leadership qualities.

- Hitler does not seem to have been well-liked

or well-respected by his fellow soldiers.

He was a bit of a loner, regarded as a bit of an eccentric.

He himself looked back on the First World War as a time

of unity, fellow feeling, brotherhood

and so on and mythologized it in his own mind,

until he came to want to recreate the spirit of 1914,

when all Germans united behind the Kaiser,

in the Third Reich in 1933.

- [Narrator] Russia mobilized its military

and defeated Austria-Hungary, but was stopped in Prussia

by the German forces.

Germany, being the far stronger military power,

forced the Bolsheviks to sign the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.

The Baltic states were given to Germany,

along with the recognized independence of Ukraine.

- Early in 1918, they had actually signed the treaty

of Brest-Litovsk with Russia

and so they'd acquired an empire in Russia.

- The dreaded two front war now no longer existed

from March 1918, so that was taken as a sign

that Germany was doing really well in the war

and it all hung on the western front.

But with the United States in the war,

Germany wasn't going to win on the western front.

(fanfare)

- [Newsreel Presenter] Swiftly the menace of war grew

into dread reality with American ships

and ships carrying American citizens were torpedoed.

Sent to the bottom by the ruthless campaign

of the unseen tigers of the sea, submarines.

- [Narrator] America entered the war

after Germany had started attacking all commercial ships

heading for Britain, which had meant the sinking

of American ships in the North Atlantic.

On April 6th 1917, America declared war on Germany.

With the superior resources the Americans brought,

the German army faced an impossible situation.

(cannons firing)

On November 11th 1918, the Armistice was signed,

which ended the war.

- The problem was that the political

and military establishment had not led Germans

to expect defeat.

- It's all near the end and their press are not telling them

just how effective the counter attack

of the Allies has been.

- Propaganda was still being pumped out,

saying that they were going to win, so in late October,

when they finally conceded defeat

and began to sue for peace, this came as a terrible shock.

It was very, very sudden to most Germans and then,

on top of that, there were the Armistice terms

and then even more, the peace terms in 1919,

which almost all Germans regarded with absolute outrage.

- [Narrator] The Treaty of Versailles was a series

of provisions and conditions placed on Germany

by the Allied nations.

One of these being Germany accepting responsibility

for all loss and damage caused by the war.

This was known as Article 231,

which later became known as the War Guilt clause.

The treaty also forced Germany

to make substantial territorial concessions

and pay reparations to the Allied countries.

In addition, Germany was only allowed a military force

of no more than 100,000 men.

- Versailles was, to them, the stab in the back.

What they'd given was an armistice, not a surrender.

- The Germans had to surrender their combat aircraft,

they weren't allowed to build any combat ships.

Their army was restricted to 100,000.

- 100,000 seems quite a lot to me actually,

but this meant all the cooks and bottle washers

and pen pushers were counted in the 100,000 men.

It wasn't 100,000 fighting men.

- They had to pay massive financial reparations

for the damage that German troops had caused

in the occupation of northern France and southern Belgium

and they rested on the War Guilt clause

which almost all Germans disputed.

Germany had not been guilty

for starting the First World War, it had been caused

by the encirclement of Germany by the Allies.

- They felt that the Allies had deceived them,

had abandoned all notions of honor,

by treating them as a conquered people,

when they didn't think they were.

The things that had been promised to them,

specifically by President Woodrow Wilson

and David Lloyd George, had not been delivered.

Instead they'd been violated, their honor had been degraded.

- [Prof. Richard Overy] A very large proportion

of them felt a very great deal

of resentment against the rest of the world.

- Hitler was devastated by that,

like huge numbers of Germans.

- Hitler, like many others, couldn't explain it,

had to find some way of explaining it to himself,

and like tens of thousands of others,

he blamed the home front, he blamed the Socialists,

Marxists, Jews, people who'd undermined Germany from within.

(dramatic music)

- [Narrator] The stab in the back theory surfaced

in right wing circles after the end of the war

as a way to explain the sudden defeat.

It was believed that the left wing republican

and Jewish populations of Germany,

who had made up the home front,

had lost the war from within.

- Most Germans did not believe

in the stab in the back legend.

The independent Social Democrats

and the mainstream Social Democrats

and then the Communist party in the early 20s

were a major part of the German political system,

about a third of the electorate.

So this belief in the stab in the back

and the Jewish conspiracy in 1918 to 19,

was very much a lunatic fringe group on the right.

(cannons firing)

- [Narrator] The First World War had seen the young Hitler

in a role which suited him.

However, the sudden loss for Germany was too much to take

and not only for Hitler, but for the entire population.

This, along with the humiliation of Versailles,

Hitler and a dangerous minority

of the right wing population, looked for a scapegoat.

The search would see the birth of a new party

and bring together some of the most dangerous men

Germany has ever produced.

(dramatic music)

The shock defeat of Germany in World War One

left the nation humiliated.

The signing of the Treaty of Versailles saddled Germany

with being responsible for rebuilding the Allied nations.

(crowd murmuring)

Added to this, Germany had seen its own revolution in 1918.

However, it was not until 1919

that the Weimar Republic was established,

with the coming together of a national assembly in Weimar,

a town in central Germany.

(dramatic music)

- Germany had to pay reparations to the victorious Allies.

This was really what accelerated the great inflation.

It started in 1916, when the German government

started printing money to fund the war effort

and, as we know, printing money causes inflation.

Post-war German governments didn't make the slightest effort

to arrest inflation.

They could pin that on the peace treaties and on the Allies.

It got so out of hand in 1923, the Allies stepped in,

the Americans stepped in, particularly with the Daws Plan.

- [Newsreel Presenter] The Daws and Young Plans,

to schedule Germany's reparations payments,

are evolved and they fail.

- [Narrator] The Daws Plan was the brainchild

of the American banker, Charles G. Daws.

The plan was to lend the German government the money

to pay back the reparations which had not been given

to the Allied countries.

- America stabilized the German currency,

so that the Americans could give loans to Germany,

so that German could pay reparations to Britain,

France and others, so that Britain, France

and others could replay loans to the United States.

- [Narrator] During this time of change and uncertainty,

Hitler was keen to continue in the vocation

which had given him personal success.

After the war ended, he stayed in the German army

which was vastly depleted. - He didn't want to leave.

He liked the army.

Whatever inventions he may have resorted to

about his own service, he felt at home

within the secure structures and hierarchies of the army.

- He attended the courses for soldiers at Camp Neuenfeldt.

These courses were taught, some of them,

by the most famous academics of the era

and what they retailed was a dart

of sturdy German ethno-nationalism and patriotism.

They were a way of combating the activities

of the Bolsheviks.

- Right wing political propaganda,

masquerading as political education.

- Hitler proved not only a worthy pupil,

but he actually became one of them.

He was recruited to actually do this speechmaking,

this kind of incendiary pedagogy himself

and proved remarkably good at it.

It's there that he learns his oratorical techniques.

- He's actually sent by the army,

to which he still belonged, to observe a far right group,

called the German Workers' Party.

- [Narrator] The German Workers' Party was a group founded

in Munich in January 1919 by Anton Drexler,

a leading member of the occultist Thule Society.

The party would meet regularly

and discuss ideas of nationalism.

The binding ideas of the German Workers' Party

were entrenched in racism and the hatred of Jews.

It was during this period of observation

that Hitler became more and more involved

with the party's politics.

- He started speaking at its meetings

and it soon became clear that he was a very gifted speaker

and took on board very much

these radical anti-Semitic ideas,

in which the war had been lost by some conspiracy,

he imagined the Jews had been undertaking against Germany.

- Hitler it's been said, had a mind a bit like a hoover.

He just sucked up and absorbed everything he read.

People like Adolf Lantz, a practicing racist

and a teacher of really bastardized Darwinism.

- There's a whole kind of mish-mash

of ideas that he puts together

to form the National Socialist ideology.

(Hitler speaking in foreign language)

- [Narrator] Having shown his strength as a public speaker,

Hitler began to take a bigger role

in the German Workers' Party.

He took on more responsibility,

soon becoming the head of propaganda.

- He starts not as leader, that remains Anton Drexler,

but as their PR man and what he does

is produce these amazing, inflammatory, exciting posters

and have these mass meetings

which increasingly large numbers of people come to.

- [Narrator] In 1920, Hitler decided

to rename the German Workers' Party,

in an attempt to broaden its appeal.

He called it the National Socialist German Workers' Party.

A year later, after an angry dispute, which saw him threaten

to leave the party, Hitler was named president.

Now he would start to gather around him a loyal,

intelligent and brutal inner circle.

- In a situation of great post-war turmoil in Bavaria

and Germany as a whole, rampant inflation, unemployment,

street disturbances, strikes, militant political action

by workers and by the left, so Hitler was certainly looking

for a political home and he appears to have found one.

- Hitler also gathered around him, bit by bit,

as his reputation as a speaker

of the radical right increased,

a group of acolytes, a group of disciples,

who brought their own particular techniques

and their own ideas, personalities and reputations.

- [Narrator] Hitler's closest ally at the time

was Rudolf Hess, who had been born on April 26th 1894,

in Alexandria, Egypt.

- Like Hitler, he had this extraordinary reaction,

how can we have lost and so on, who is there to blame?

He drifted off into university life,

but he was a frustrated radical nationalist

and when he met Hitler, he was absolutely transfixed by him.

- Hess saw, again, international politics in this notion

of the sort of struggle between different races

and he was a fanatical admirer of Hitler's.

You can see it in the films that were taken of him

at Nuremberg rallies, his face just glowing

with naive enthusiasm.

(dramatic music)

- [Narrator] The most decorated of Hitler's men

was Hermann Goering, from Rosenheim, Bavaria,

born January 12th 1893.

- Goering was an unusual recruit

to the infant national Socialist Party.

- At that time, in the 20s, a very dashing figure,

with a big military reputation.

- He'd been quite a distinguished air force pilot

during the First World War.

- He had succeeded Baron von Richtofen,

as head of the von Richtofen squadron,

after the shooting down of the Red Baron,

so he was an amazingly glamorous figure

and he maintained this astonishing persona

of the jolly ex-fighter pilot

which the German people found adorable.

- He was not the kind of person who gravitated easily

to these radical political movements.

But Goering too heard sort of that Hitler somehow

or other articulated his own sense of resentment

and loss and became a committed follower from that point on.

- [Narrator] One of the party's most sinister figures

was Heinrich Himmler,

from a Roman Catholic middle class family,

born October 7th 1900 in Munich.

- Himmler's father was a teacher who had been actually tutor

to the Bavarian royal family.

Himmler had something rather schoolmasterly about him.

- Heinrich Himmler's life was really dominated by the fact

that he wanted to fight in the First World War

but was to young.

You always have that sense with him that he was frustrated

in not being able to fight on Germany's behalf.

- He had this very pedagogic kind

of scholarly, dreamy manner.

Of course we know now what was going on inside him.

- He was a rather eccentric patriot,

a strong anti-Semite and he gravitated

towards National Socialism

because it seemed for him the natural home.

- [Narrator] Martin Bormann

became Hitler's most trusted disciple.

The son of a post office worker, born June 17th 1900.

- [Prof. Nicholas O'Shaughnessy] Bormann is very much

the sinister Machiavellian manipulator, of course.

- Very soon joined one of the Freikorps,

the vigilante groups that were up in Germany

in the early 1920s, was sent to prison

for murdering somebody.

When he emerged, he again heard Hitler and thought,

well, you know, this man articulates the things I feel,

the resentment I feel, the loss in 1918,

that all Germans shared,

and he too became a devoted follower.

(Goebbels speaking in foreign language)

- [Narrator] Finally, arguably the most intelligent

of Hitler's men, Joseph Goebbels from the Ruhr valley,

born October 29th 1897.

- Goebbels was something of an oddball

in the National Socialist movement.

He had a university education, he got a doctorate,

he studied German literature in the 19th century.

- He's also a romantic nationalist and writes a novel

before even knowing Hitler, called Michael,

which is absolutely a description of a Hitler-type figure.

- This idea that Hitler had of a Germany

where all Germans were united on an equal basis

had a very powerful appeal to Goebbels.

- And he was looking for a political movement

that somehow represented his personal position.

He became a good recruit

for the National Socialist movement.

- And the supreme ability to organize propaganda

in the most ruthless possible way.

- [Narrator] The common feelings of loss, despair,

frustration and anger from losing the First World War

united these men.

However, these were not uncommon sentiments

in Germany at the time.

Something else activated and fueled their extremism.

All had experienced some kind of revelation

whilst listening to Hitler.

- He seemed to be an outsider, somebody almost sent

to Germany, to help Germany regain its trajectory

to great power status, to help Germany revenge itself

on the Allies.

- He was fulfilling a kind of prefigured role,

which had always existed in German history and the culture,

a Kaiser, a Frederick Barbarossa, King Redbeard,

the man who had delivered Germany from her enemies

and specifically now those enemies were gathering thick

and furious round them.

- [Narrator] For Hitler, all the signs were pointing

towards a burgeoning National Socialist political party.

He had managed to gather around him a loyal following

and some meetings were running into the thousands.

It was events in Italy, however,

which ignited Hitler's imagination.

They would have huge consequences on the fate of Hitler,

the National Socialist Party

and the rest of the German nation.

Hitler had gathered some of the brightest

and most dangerous men from the far right.

His National Socialist meetings often brought in

around 2,000 participants.

But Hitler's perception of himself

and his party was grossly exaggerated.

- He's the kind of man in a dirty raincoat standing

on a soap box in the middle of a town square,

talking to half a dozen people.

- Standing on platforms, on street corners and so on,

you know, old-fashioned kind of political activity.

- There were other, far more powerful,

far more publicly visible right wing parties

in Germany at the time.

- Well, it really was just an assembly of people

who'd come together, who shared roughly

the same kinds of views.

- [Narrator] Events in Italy inspired Hitler.

- [Newsreel Presenter] 1922, the bombastic newspaper editor

with a gladiator's jaw led his black-shirted legions

in a march on Rome.

- [Narrator] In October 1922, the Fascist leader Mussolini

and his black-shirt army, marched on Rome.

King Victor Emmanuel III was forced to hand control

of Italy to Mussolini.

At least this is how Hitler saw it

and almost immediately began to plot his own coup.

- Hitler was very influenced in 1923

by the successful coup staged by Mussolini.

(crowd cheering)

- [Prof. Sir Richard Evans] Hitler conceived the idea

of a march on Berlin.

- And so he began to fantasize in 1923

that the German state was so weak at the height

of the inflationary crisis and so on.

- He took advantage of the disintegration

of German politics in 1923

under the process of hyper-inflation,

the French occupation of the Ruhr

to seize reparations which weren't being delivered,

to stage a coup d'etat in Munich.

- [Narrator] Mussolini was also well aware

of the power of propaganda.

He knew how he wished to be perceived by the rest of Europe.

- Hitler was one of the victims of Mussolini's propaganda.

The King appointed Mussolini head of government

in a perfectly constitutional way.

It was not a coup d'etat.

It was a perfectly constitutional act

on the part of the king, if a rather weak-willed one.

- It was all a bit of a gamble from Hitler's point of view.

- [Narrator] On November 8th 1923, Hitler,

along with 600 stormtroopers,

surrounded the Bürgerbräukeller,

a large beer hall in Munich.

Here the state commissioner of Bavaria, Gustav von Kahr,

was holding a meeting of around 3,000 people.

Hitler marched in, fired a shot into the air and announced

that the revolution had broken out and no one could leave.

Overnight, Hitler attempted to take power

from von Kahr, but failed.

It was decided early in the morning of November 9th

that they would march out of the beer hall

towards the Bavarian Ministry of Defense.

On the way they were confronted by the Bavarian police.

(dramatic music)

- Hitler hoped that the new German army,

the post-imperial creation of the Reichswehr,

would support them.

- He wasn't backed by the army,

the industrial elites refused to support it,

the civil service regarded it with contempt.

- When the Munich police opened fire,

most of them turned tail.

Some of them were hit, some wounded, a few killed,

but it wads built up into an iconic episode

in the history of the movement.

- Hitler was arrested, put on trial.

(dramatic music)

- [Narrator] His trial began on February 26th 1924

and ended on the 1st of April.

Other conspirators, such as Rudolf Hess,

were also arrested and tried in court.

The whole episode seemed to be a complete failure

on the part of Hitler and the National Socialist Party.

- What the beerhall putsch does,

which is marvelous for the Nazis,

is provide them with martyrs and provide them with a myth,

a legend and a whole new symbol structure.

For example, the blood flag, which is the flag carried

on that very day and when they fall,

is after that time the core sacramental edifice

of the Nazi process, so that at Nuremberg,

all of the standards of the stormtroopers are touched

by the blood flag.

The martyrs are symbolically reburied

in vast marble sarcophagi in the center of Munich,

after the Nazis take power,

and every year there is the famous re-enactment

of the putsch, where they marched down the streets.

There is a death watch held throughout Germany

the night before, there are radio link-ups,

everything is broadcast, great films, smoldering biers,

flames, the whole work,

and if it sounds quasi-religious, it is.

- [Narrator] The Nazi flag, the swastika,

which Hitler purported to have designed himself,

was taken from an ancient symbol,

embodying early Aryan history.

- The swastika is an ancient Buddhist symbol.

You see it all over India and China

and it has always been around.

It was originally a symbol of the sun.

But it began to be acquired by the German right

in the late 19th century as one of their symbols,

because they felt it stood for the idea of being an Aryan.

(dramatic music)

- [Narrator] It was Hitler's changes to the design

which marked it out as the Nazi symbol.

- The story he tells is that he invited people

to submit designs, and swastikas came in and none of them,

he said, quite did the job, so he said,

I'll do it myself and that's what he worked on.

It's a series of simple designs formulae

which were applied to it.

- The flag is in the colors of red, black and white,

which are the old imperial colors,

to contrast with the red, gold and black of the republic.

- What he did, very brilliantly, and I'm almost reluctant

to say this, it's a fantastic piece of graphic design.

He took it, he rotated it to give it a sense of dynamism,

he then calculated the widths of the bars very brilliantly.

He then set it in this circle,

and it doesn't quite touch the edges, which gives it a kind

of vibration and dynamism and then this red outer bit.

- So in all the aesthetic there's a massive amount of red

to stand for the Socialist Party.

- And it just goes boof!

And, by the 1920s, it had become the authorized symbol,

he said it was going to be the Nazi symbol,

and it was the Nazi symbol.

(dramatic music)

- [Narrator] At his trial,

Hitler had taken sole responsibility for the putsch.

It is reported that the judges found it hard not

to acquit Hitler, due to their pro-Nazi sympathies.

Finally the sentence of five years

of confinement was passed.

He was also banned from public speaking,

testament to the fact that his oratory was a key factor

in the rise of the National Socialist Party.

The enforced silence and confinement

gave Hitler time for introspection.

The outlet for his thoughts now came through the pen.

- [Newsreel Presenter] The German state, the bible

of the Nazis.

- He didn't actually think until the putsch,

it doesn't seem to us, that he was the chosen one,

he was the Messiah.

It's only at his time in Landsberg prison

that he actually realizes, my God, I am he,

and is somehow liberated

into becoming what he does in fact become.

- He served less than a year of his sentence.

He served it with Rudolf Hess, amongst others,

and he used the time to write Mein Kampf.

- [Newsreel Presenter] "Democracy is a man's perversity,

"born of filth and fire."

- It's interesting that Hitler decided,

when he was sent off to prison in 1924,

that he would take this opportunity to sit back

and write a book about his experiences,

how he'd reached the point he'd reached,

why he had the beliefs that he did.

But it was very important for him to do that, I think,

to sit back and take stock of, you know,

of how he'd arrived there.

- Hitler's title for the original manuscript was My Four

and a Half Year Struggle Against Lies, Cowardice

and Stupidity, a Final Reckoning

with Those Who Would Destroy the German Nation.

Well, his publishers recommended to him

that he go for something that might be a little snappier

and catchier for the market.

So they extrapolated the two words, My Struggle, Mein Kampf.

(dramatic music)

- The really interesting part

of it is the famous fifth chapter,

which is the theory of propaganda.

The rest of it are really a collation of emotional spasms.

It's not a recipe for a system, as for example,

Marx is with the Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital.

- [Newsreel Presenter] God has made Germans a race

of supermen.

Almighty God, bless our German blood.

- The publishers shifted 300,000 copies and many more,

for perhaps obvious reasons, after that.

Big book, big, the original thing's a hefty volume.

You're talking about 600 pages.

(dramatic music)

- [Narrator] The writing of Mein Kampf fueled his desire

for power and the need to lead Germany.

However, Hitler knew he would need a different route

to domination.

But without being able to speak publicly,

it would have to wait.

- Stopping him from speaking was going to keep the peace.

He was regarded as an influential speaker.

- I think if we're looking for an explanation

for why it took a long time for the party to revive again

and for the party to really take Hitler seriously again,

it was the ban on his speaking.

- He alone in Germany is not allowed to speak,

so he used that as propaganda, really,

to attack the Weimar government for censorship.

(Hitler speaking in foreign language)

- [Narrator] In 1927, the ban on Hitler's public speaking

was relaxed and later lifted completely.

Once more, Hitler took to the stage.

- Something about his performance, there's something

about that which really attracted people,

you know, like modern day pop stars.

- There were people who do appear

to have been mesmerized by him.

(Hitler speaking in foreign language)

- As son as he would start speaking, you have that run up

to the successful parliamentary elections in the late 1920s.

When I look at Hitler on a stage, I think of him

as being in a political theater,

but I don't believe that what he says is great oratory.

(dramatic music)

- [Narrator] At the time of Hitler's silence,

Germany began to see a certain recovery.

Thanks to American investment, unemployment was declining

and the economy was improving.

A sense of optimism rippled through the German nation.

(dramatic music)

- A lot of Americans invested,

so Germany looked as if it was prospering by 1928.

- [Narrator] The National Socialists

could have been banished to the history books

as a marginal far right political party,

with their eccentric leader

and the failed beerhall putsch of 1923.

However, fate dealt them a favorable hand.

- The post-war economic recovery under the Weimar Republic,

which was genuine enough while it lasted,

that had collapsed as a direct result

of the Wall Street Crash in New York.

- There was a saying of the time, New York sneezed,

London caught cold and Germany nearly died of influenza.

(dramatic music)

- [Narrator] The implications of the crash

would eventually lead the National Socialist Party

to total power.

- The continuity of the Great Depression

was absolutely critical.

Seven million men became unemployed.

There seemed to be no lifting.

And once you got the worker in the dole queue,

you had him as a potential Nazi, a potential stormtrooper.

(dramatic music)

- [Narrator] What further measures would be imposed

on the German population to consolidate the Nazis' power

and what terror would be unleashed

before the dramatic toppling of this evil regime?

(dramatic music)

(bomb exploding)

(dramatic music)