Original subtitles

(dramatic music)

(tense music)

- [Narrator] World War I had left Germany

in a state of shock.

Two million fatalities, spiraling inflation

and unpaid debts to the Allied countries

caused the nation to feel stripped

of its identity and pride.

- They felt that the Allies had deceived them,

had abandoned all notions of honor

by treating them as a conquered people.

- Hitler was a war hero, he won the Iron Cross 1st Class.

The First World War turned a nobody into a somebody.

(speaking in foreign language)

- [Narrator] Adolf Hitler had survived the conflict

and found a political home in the German Workers' Party,

a right wing organization with racist

and anti-Semitic roots.

- Hitler, like many others,

had to find some way of explaining it for himself

and like tens of thousands of others,

he blamed the socialist Marxist Jews,

people who had undermined Germany from within.

- [Narrator] Climbing the ranks,

he changed the name to the National Socialist

German Workers' Party and took control.

(speaking in foreign language)

- He was fulfilling a prefigured role

which had always existed in German history and culture,

the man who would deliver Germany from her enemies.

(tense music)

- [Narrator] As leader, he started plotting the takeover

of Munich and in turn, Germany.

The infamous Beer Hall Putsch was a resounding failure.

- It was built up into an iconic episode

in the history of the movement.

- Hitler was arrested, put on trial.

- [Narrator] Hitler was later imprisoned.

His intentions, however, were still for total power

and to return the nation to a state of pride.

Hitler knew that he would need a different approach.

- First of all, he had to get the army, police

and civil service and business on his side

and secondly, he had to develop a propaganda apparatus

which would win votes.

- If we can't outshoot them, we'll out vote them

and we'll do it by winning support.

- [Narrator] He would fuse violent acts of terror

with slick propaganda

which would all fuel this fatal attraction.

(crowd cheering)

(tense music)

In the late 1920s, the Nazi Party found themselves

with diminishing support

as the German economy became stronger.

- In 1928, Germany was in quite reasonable circumstances.

There had been a recovery from the depression after the war,

recovery from the inflation,

of stabilization of the currency in 1924.

The economy appeared to be booming.

This was largely because there was an enormous influx

of American money.

The Germans spent a lot of the loan money

on things that were very desirable

like concert halls and swimming pools and so on

but they weren't productive

so, Germany looked as if it was prospering.

- [Narrator] Unforeseen events in the world economy

would end up having huge ramifications for Germany.

- Post-war economic recovery under the Weimar Republic

which was genuine enough while it lasted,

that had collapsed, that had gone into free fall

as a direct result of the Wall Street Crash in New York.

- [Reporter] October 29th, 1929, Black Tuesday,

the New York Stock Exchange is in a panic.

Frantic investors have scrambled

to unload their stocks at any price, everyone wants to sell,

no one wants to buy.

Suddenly, even the most gilt-edged securities

are practically valueless.

The stock market crash has come

and the Great Depression has begun.

(tense music)

- [Jill] They just pulled the rug out from Germany,

they just withdrew their investments.

- American banks withdrew the loans

on which the German recovery

after the hyperinflation of 1923 had depended,

German banks collapsed,

they withdrew their money from businesses,

businesses collapsed.

- So many of the loans particularly

had been made on a 14-day basis,

they could just withdraw them.

So the German economy contracted very suddenly,

very quickly.

- Every European country was affected,

Germany was disastrously affected.

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

London caught cold and Germany nearly died of influenza.

It really was, first and foremost,

a crisis of industrial society

and the major unemployment was in industry

particularly the building trade.

- By 1932,

there was 35 to 40% unemployment in Germany.

- That is how catastrophic the depression was.

When you throw manual workers out of jobs,

of course, the people who are the clerks

in these occupations suffer as well.

- The continuity of the Great Depression

was absolutely critical

and once you got the worker in the dole queue,

you had him as a potential Nazi, a potential storm trooper.

- [Narrator] The people of Germany were down and out

and the now called National Socialist Party

had found a cause to champion

that would increase their visibility and popularity.

- In that atmosphere of crisis,

when governments were only able to rule by decree

because the parties couldn't get together

and get behind the policy to deal with

this massive economic collapse.

In that situation people, voters thought

this is the last straw.

We've had hyperinflation,

we've had international humiliation,

we've got political chaos.

The Nazis seemed to be the one party

that's led by youthful, determined, energetic individuals.

- They promoted the party actually in 1930, particularly,

as the Hitler Movement, the Hitler Bewegung.

This, of course, was after Hitler had had the ban

on his public speaking lifted

and so he had been going around speaking a great deal.

(speaking in foreign language)

- It's very difficult to find anything to which the party

was willing to commit itself.

- They were very, very vague on what they intended to do.

They seemed to have to offer something to every constituency

in Germany, the worker, the manager,

the lower middle class, women.

- What he was saying in one place

wasn't necessarily compatible

with what he was saying elsewhere,

in terms of say, economic detail.

- We're going to make Germany great again,

we're going to recover,

we're going to have work for everybody,

we'll put Germany back on the international scene,

we're going to rescue the German family,

we'll give German women a much better life.

These are all cliches and when you probe,

they really don't have any particular policies

that they can actually present in a rational way

to the general public.

- Much of it rested simply on that Germany will be rescued,

Germany will become a great power

and Hitler will be the person to achieve it.

- [Narrator] Electoral success would come to the Nazis

at the beginning of the 1930s

and their popularity continued to rise

as the population grew more disillusioned

with the established government.

- I think that the electoral success

of Hitler's party in 1932 didn't necessarily reflect

the strengths of the party itself

or its ideological appeal,

it really reflected the extraordinary crisis

that Germany had gone through

as a result of the Wall Street Crash.

And I think what a lot of German people did

was they desperately looked round for some kind of messiah

and that's how Hitler was being sold to the public.

- Their appeal was many sided and of course,

their vision was of what they called a Volksgemeinschaft,

the folk community in which the party

could represent all social classes and groups.

- Hitler stands for election as president in April 1932

against Hindenburg who had been president since 1925

and he loses, but he comes second,

he comes a pretty creditable second.

It's given him a much higher profile

than he'd previously had.

The propaganda continues and in the election of July 1932,

the Nazi Party gets 37% of the vote

and is the largest single party in the Reichstag

with 230 seats, more than doubling its 1930 total.

That's a tremendous success

but Hitler is not offered the chancellorship.

Actually, it was his democratic right

to be offered the chancellorship but he's not.

He is offered the vice chancellorship and he turns it down.

(tense music)

- [Narrator] A large proportion of the middle class

voted for the National Socialist Party

in the July elections of 1932

as a protest to the Hindenburg government.

By November, they had retracted their support.

(tense music)

- There is another election in November

and the Nazi vote declines to 33%,

still like 196 seats in the Reichstag

but it's a matter of considerable disappointment

to a lot of followers.

- So what they do, they seem to be on the verge

of their death cough, their death rattle.

- There is now not such a pressing need

to offer Hitler the chancellorship.

Local election votes and so on at the time

are showing a decline in the Nazi vote,

I mean they might just have fizzled out.

- There is then a minor election in the state of Lippe

and what the Nazis do is flood it

with their marketing resource.

They throw everything at this miniature state of Lippe

and they win and it's at that point that Hindenburg

finally invites Hitler to be part of a coalition government.

- The small coterie of Conservative politicians

decided they could manipulate Hitler,

offered him a chancellorship and that was the start.

- [Announcer] Adolf Hitler,

leader of the German National Movement

is made chancellor of Germany

and Berlin goes wild in celebration of his victory.

(people cheering)

- [Narrator] Having secured the role as Reich Chancellor,

it took one more twist of fate

in favor of the National Socialists

to see the future of Germany take a deadly turn

and hand Hitler complete control.

- [Crowd] Hitler!

- [Narrator] The Wall Street Crash

had sent Germany into economic crisis.

The nation was subjected to a second wave

of spiraling inflation and soaring unemployment.

However, it gave the National Socialist Party

the means to win a large proportion of the vote

in a relatively short space of time.

In January 1933, Hitler was appointed Reich Chancellor.

His plan of total power was almost tangible.

Four weeks late on February 27th, 1933 at 9:25 p.m.,

an alarm call was taken in a Berlin fire station.

Fire had broken out in the Reichstag Building,

the home of the German parliament.

By 11:30 p.m., the fire was extinguished

but had left the building a gutted shell.

On searching the smoldering ruin,

a young Dutch Communist, Marinus van der Lubbe was found.

He was arrested for starting the fire.

According to police, he acted out of rebellion,

a call for the German workers to rise up

against the oppression of Fascism.

The Nazis saw the Communist Party

as a huge threat to National Socialism and also knew

that a large proportion of the German population

were suspicious of the far left.

- Stalin having come to power late 1920s,

you have the first five year plan in 1928.

You have collectivisation starting in 1929.

Word gets back about what it means

and the last thing German peasants want is collectivisation.

There's a lot of German peasants, a lot of smallholders,

they don't want collectivisation

neither do the big landowners.

- [Narrator] The fire allowed Hitler

to pass two sets of legislation.

The first of which was the Reichstag Fire Decree.

This was drawn up the day after the incident

and signed by President Hindenburg.

The decree allowed the enforced imprisonment

of anyone opposed to the Nazi regime

and action to be taken against any publication

deemed critical of the cause.

The decree led to the Enabling Act,

passed in parliament on March 23rd, 1933.

It gave the Nazi Party power to enforce laws

without the intervention of the Reichstag.

(speaking in foreign language)

Passing of the Enabling Act

essentially handed power to Hitler

and the National Socialist Party.

They immediately let it be known throughout Germany.

(crowd cheering)

Fritz Lustig, a Jewish emigrant

who now resides in North London

was living in Berlin in 1933.

- I was born in 1919.

I had a very happy childhood.

I was the youngest of four siblings,

and I had a very happy time at school

although I experienced the Nazis coming to power.

We were rehearsing for a play at school

and suddenly, we heard martial music sounding

and we looked out of the window

and there was a Nazi demonstration passing with lit torches

and a band at the head of the procession.

We read in the papers the next day

that there had been similar processions all over Berlin

and we just happening to watch the one

which took place in that particular part of town.

(crowd cheering)

- [Narrator] The national election of March 1933

saw the National Socialist Party take 43% of the vote,

but they still failed to win a majority.

Unbeknownst to the German population,

this would be the last democratic election

until World War II.

(speaking in foreign language)

- So people still thought in March-April 1933

that the democratic system was not dead but it was.

We look at it backwards, we can see what happened.

People even say why did all these people vote

for a party that unleashed war and genocide?

Well, they didn't know that's what they were going to do.

(tense music)

(speaking in foreign language)

- [Narrator] The Nazis had taken Germany by lawful means.

Hitler's plan had worked and although his party

had still not managed to gain a majority,

they had total power.

They believed there was still an enemy

who may stand in the way of this domination,

that would come from within the party itself.

The termination of this enemy

would culminate on July 2nd, 1934.

The incident, known as the Night of the Long Knives

would see the murder of Ernst Rohm,

the head of the Sturmabteilung.

- Hitler and the party leadership

had arrived at the point where they felt

they had to take on the SA, the Sturmabteilung.

- Various senior paragons of the Reich

feared the power of Rohm, they coveted it for themselves,

specifically Himmler.

And so they began to tell Hitler

that Rohm was plotting against him

which was not in fact true.

The army hated that because they're a rival source of power.

- I think from Hitler's point of view,

the real problem was that he was worried

that Rohm really would develop a popular following,

more popular perhaps in the end,

than the following for Hitler.

There's a real distrust about Rohm's motives

and Rohm's political ambitions.

- [Nicholas] Major Rohm is very definitely

number two to Hitler and therefore, as some saw it,

a potential rival to his power.

- And they had a ready-made weapon

and that was the SS, the Schutzstaffel.

- [Narrator] The SS were originally a small battalion

of the much larger SA, but in 1929,

Heinrich Himmler was appointed leader

and taking inspiration from Rohm,

began to rapidly expand the unit.

Initially, they were Hitler's bodyguard, but by 1933

after the seizure of power,

it became the internal security of the Nazi regime.

- By 1934, they were growing into a real

and formidable private army, equipped

famously with their black uniforms, black helmets

with their own weaponry and they did much of the business

when Hitler decided it was time to move against the SA.

- [Narrator] Using falsified evidence,

Himmler had assembled a file which sited that Rohm

had been paid 12 million Deutschmarks by France

to overthrow Hitler.

In addition to this, Rohm's homosexuality

was used as a way of discrediting him.

He and others in the SA leadership

were accused of acts of drunkenness and debauchery.

This was used as a way of excusing the action

which Hitler was about to take.

- So it was an easy matter to set them up

with allegations of internal corruption,

particularly, homosexuality

and it was a chance to settle a lot of old scores.

(tense music)

- [Narrator] On the morning of June 30th,

Hitler with a large number of SS

marched into the hotel in Bad Wiessee

where Rohm and many leaders of the SA were staying.

They were arrested at gunpoint and later, executed.

- It was a brutal business when the move was made.

The SA were taken totally by surprise

and much of their leadership was wiped out.

- [Narrator] With the brutal execution of Rohm

and other potential opponents,

Hitler sent a clear message to all,

that opposition would not be tolerated.

The Jewish population and those on the left

were already living with constant persecution,

yet the Nazi Party's popularity

amongst the German nation grew.

The threat of violence, intelligent propaganda

and the complete monopoly of all institutions in Germany

gave people no choice but to support.

(speaking in foreign language)

The National Socialist Party had not won a majority

in any of the elections of the early 1930s.

However, the passing of the Enabling Act

saw Hitler gain complete control of Germany.

In turn, the Night of the Long Knives

had killed off any potential political threat

he may have had.

The German nation found themselves

living under a dictatorship.

Jews, Communists, Social Democrats

were all targeted as enemies of the state.

Persecution, imprisonment, and systematic execution

were all threats to these members of society.

Working closely with Hitler, it was Joseph Goebbels

who saw to it that the veneer of the Nazi Party

would appeal to the masses.

This campaign intensified once power had been consolidated

but its roots were set long before.

- The self image that they wanted to create

was of a movement of youth.

- The existing politicians were all in their 50s and 60s,

the Nazis were in their 20s and 30s.

- [Ian] The embodiment of all the energies of a new Germany,

a new uncorrupted generation.

- The one party that's led by youthful, determined,

energetic individuals.

- [Narrator] The Hitlerjugend or Hitler Youth

were the personification of the Nazi image

and gave the National Socialists a vibrant, youthful image.

- [Announcer] Because Hitler believes

that too much education is dangerous,

the young Nazi gets his only schooling after working hours.

A daily lecture on German's need for expansion

and the triumph he will share when German armies

march in to the rich wheat fields of the Russian Ukraine.

- The Hitler Youth eventually became almost compulsory.

The Nazis market them very, very heavily,

in other words, what we'd imagine them to be

as a rigidly a hierarchical organization

with cruel discipline and bullying and so forth

is not actually how they're self-presented.

They're actually self-presented

as a kind of adventure holiday.

- [Announcer] At 18, every young man must serve six months

in the Arbeitsdienst.

- There was one boy in my form whom I quite liked

who was in the Hitler Youth.

I was very keen on associating with him,

I think he was less keen to associate with me.

- The man who was first given charge of it,

Baldur von Schirach was an able organizer,

good at recruiting but the real take off

was only after the Nazis took power,

within 18 months, they were able to claim

3 1/2 million members,

and that doesn't count, of course,

the women's and girls organizations

that were set up in parallel too.

- [Fritz] The girls' organization

was called Bund Deutscher Madel,

the League of German Girls.

- There were a lot of young people

who gravitated to the Hitler Movement,

actually then influenced their parents,

not the other way round.

- [Narrator] It wasn't just youth groups

that were monopolized by the Nazi Party,

all organizations were, in turn, affected.

- The Nazis forced every single

voluntary society organization in Germany

to join the Nazi Party and become part of a Nazi apparatus.

That meant all orchestras, opera houses,

singing clubs, amateur dramatic societies, all of that,

they had to become part of the Reich Chamber of Culture

which is under the propaganda ministry

and of course if you wanted to practice art

and exhibit your work,

you had to be admitted to the Chamber of Culture

and if you were Jewish, you wouldn't be admitted,

if you were a modern artist, you wouldn't be admitted,

so this is a way of imposing control.

- [Narrator] All aspects of life were effectively taken over

by the National Socialists.

These changes were witnessed

by the school child Fritz Lustig.

- We had a new headmaster.

Our current headmaster was not Jewish

but he was a Social Democrat and therefore,

his politics were not acceptable to the Nazis

and a new headmaster was appointed.

He introduced several new measures.

One of them was that the weekly

Monday morning assembly was completely transformed.

After everybody had sat down,

one of the boys who was stationed at the entrance door

shouted Achtung, attention, and then the headmaster

walks in along the central aisle all through the hall

with his arm outstretched in the Hitler salute,

turned smartly round when he reached the podium,

shouted Heil Hitler and the whole school

had to answer with the same.

- [Children] Heil Hitler!

- I suppose I must have outstretched my hand

in the Hitler salute because not to do that

would have drawn attention to me.

I didn't want to drawn attention to myself

by raising the question of whether I was excluded.

- [Narrator] Today, the Nazi propaganda machine

is seeking to make Adolf Hitler the only god

of the German people,

out to destroy every established religion.

- [Narrator] As the party took control

of all areas of society

and permeated into the lives of every German citizen,

the need for greater, more effective propaganda

became paramount.

- There was nothing which wasn't propaganda

of one sort or another.

Every surface was interrogated for its propaganda potential.

- [Jill] The press was censored and Nazi newspapers

really had the lion's share of circulation.

- [Narrator] The Volksempfanger, the people's radio

was an affordable device manufactured

on the orders of Joseph Goebbels.

More people owning radios

meant a larger audience for propaganda.

- The propaganda barrage.

To confuse, to make them lose faith, to divide and conquer.

To lull the fears of the little neutrals,

Propaganda Minister Goebbels told them Germany

didn't want a war at all.

It was Britain and France that caused all the trouble.

- Radio was taken over

and there was a Reich broadcasting company

and radio, of course, was dominated completely

by state output.

70% of German homes owned a radio by 1939.

- There were loudspeakers installed

on lampposts and on trees

and when any of these speeches took place,

of course, you were expected to stand still

and listen to them.

- [Jill] Film production was taken over

by the Nazis as well.

- Joseph Goebbels was very much aware

of the fact that people would get bored very quickly

if they were subjected to a constant barrage of propaganda

about how wonderful the Nazis were.

He was rather upset when Hitler

commissioned a propaganda film

of the Nuremberg Party Rally of 1934

from the young actress Leni Riefenstahl.

(triumphant music)

- [Narrator] Triumph of the Will

was a film directed by Leni Riefenstahl

which documents the 1934 Nuremberg Rally.

Its main themes are unity and returning power to Germany.

It was no mistake that Nazi symbolism and imagery

are prominent throughout the film.

Hitler understood the power of the Nazi brand.

- You actually have a core brand symbol system.

You have obviously the swastika,

you have the stylized eagle.

You have the other things like the oak leaves, the acorns.

Then of course, there's the uniforms.

I once counted up the number of uniforms in Nazi Germany,

about 150.

These uniforms were highly symbolic.

For example, the SS uniforms were vaguely modeled

on the Death's Head Hussars of German history

which was a black uniform with a skull and crossbones

and the stark silver.

This was a way of boosting morale, of boosting identity

of priming solidarity.

The brown shirts were the first organization

to be costumed by Hugo Boss.

I mean it's just impossible to imagine,

in fact, almost any other historical leader in history

going to a cat walk showing of new clothes for the soldiers.

Only Hitler and for reasons unique to him

and unique to the Third Reich.

- [Narrator] The National Socialists

found success in running both well-planned propaganda

and brutal acts of violence simultaneously.

However, it was the Olympic Games of 1936

which would see a halt to the terror

and the suppression of anti-Semitism.

(tense music)

Hitler understood the power of the games

and exploited them in order to show Europe

and the rest of the world a false image of a peaceful,

tolerant Germany.

Captain Eric Brown was a spectator at the games

along with his father.

It was clear that the Nazi propaganda machine

was sending out the message it desired

but it was a black American athlete who stole the show.

- I was 17 when we went to the Olympics.

It was a wonderful occasion.

Of course, to me, the highlight at that time

was to see this wonderful athlete Jesse Owens.

(starting pistol bangs)

(spectators cheering)

- [Announcer] Owens is ahead.

Back and forth, up by 20.

Owens is up now.

- Who won the 100 meters, the 200 meters,

100 meter relay and the long jump.

Quite incredible.

He was poetry in motion.

- [Announcer] The lanky star from Ohio State

shatters all existing records as he takes the gold medal

in the men's broad jump with a sensational leap of 26 feet,

5 5/16 inches.

- Owens in particular were staggered by his reception

in Germany as he got off the boat wherever he went.

(crowd cheering)

The crowds chanted Owens, Owens, all over the place

and for a brief time an American black man

was more popular in Nazi Germany than Adolf Hitler himself.

(tense music)

- [Narrator] The Olympics had placed Hitler

in a favorable light throughout the world,

however, once the games were over,

the Nazis would renew their persecution.

The Jewish population would soon face a greater terror

than they had ever previously suffered.

The 1936 Olympics allowed Hitler to project to the world

a vision of a tolerant, progressive nation.

(crowd cheering)

His popularity within Germany was also rising.

Those parts of the nation who were not seen as a threat

were being shown that the Nazi Party

would deliver on the promises they made.

But as with all aspects of the regime,

there was a more sinister sub-plot.

- The thing that had led people to vote

had been the unemployment problem of the early 1930s

and the promise that the Nazis would solve that.

Well they did, with a vengeance.

- If anybody was unemployed, they were rounded up

and made for example to chop wood

which was given to the elderly or the very poor.

- [Jill] Certainly by 1938, there were 400,000

unemployed in Germany.

I mean it is nothing.

- But there were always offers

to tempt them to join the Nazi Party.

You joined the ranks, be paid, be uniformed,

seemed quite attractive.

- [Narrator] Although it seemed

that the whole nation was behind them,

the main anti-Semitic message of the Jewish conspiracy

was still being played out by the department of propaganda.

- The idea of a Jewish world conspiracy

was not one that was present

in more than a very tiny fragment of the German population.

- They were successful in business up to a point.

They controlled some of the big departmental stores

in Germany.

But in no sense were they in control

of the life of the Weimar State.

- [Announcer] In every village, in every town and city

are storm troopers from whose headquarters

the local party leader directs

his district campaign of terror.

Marked victims for persecution.

- [Narrator] Hitler was keen on keeping the suppression

of Jews at the forefront of Nazi policy.

As Germany and the German nation

were historically not known for their anti-Semitism.

- It had been the place that many Jews had gone to

from countries that genuinely were anti-Semitic.

There's strong anti-Semitic tradition in Austria.

Strong anti-Semitism in Romania.

Soviet anti-Semitism was always kept under wraps

but it was certainly there

and, of course, Polish anti-Semitism

where a very large proportion of Europe's Jews lived.

- [Narrator] A young Eric Brown teaching in Germany

could see from an objective point of view

the effect of the Nazis anti-Semitic policies.

- I was very aware of the fact that the Nazi regime

was building up in to a very, very clamorous political body,

and a very ruthless political body too.

- The Nazis began to unroll

their own brand of anti-Semitism, radical anti-Semitism.

- There was an evil aspect, if you like, to put it that way

to the Nazi regime.

- [Narrator] On November 7th, 1938,

Ernst vom Rath, a German diplomatic in Paris

was shot by Herschel Grynszpan, a young German Jewish man.

His motive was a direct response to Nazi anti-Semitism.

Two days later, vom Rath as pronounced dead.

Orders were given to the SA and SS

to take to the streets and destroy all Jewish owned property

and businesses and arrest all Jewish men.

The following two nights were an orchestrated

and systematic series of attacks on Jews throughout Germany.

It would become known as Kristallnacht.

91 Jews died and 300,000 were arrested

and sent to concentration camps.

On November 9th, after a chamber music performance

in which was playing cello, Fritz Lustig returned home.

- When I reached home, I saw that there was a great crowd

in front of the entrance to the building

where our flat was situated.

The window had been smashed and the people outside the shop

was helping themselves freely

to any alcoholic drinks that were there.

I went up to our flat unmolested,

was told by my parents that this crowd

had been there for some time

and they had set, in fact, set fire to the shop.

- [Narrator] Fritz and his father found hideouts

at two different houses in the suburbs of Berlin.

Neither faced arrest but the events of Kristallnacht

were immediately felt.

- There were too many Jewish men in Berlin

to arrest them all because in the provinces,

we knew that there had been no exemptions.

I went to my office the next morning,

it was a Jewish-owned firm and when I arrived,

I was told that both our boss and his two sons

had been arrested and put into concentration camps.

When I went to the bank, the cashier asked me

whether it was true as he had heard

that my boss had been arrested and I said yes, it was true

and he shook his head and said

and I always thought he was an honest man.

(man speaking in foreign language)

- I think the German population obviously knew it

because it was there happening in front of their eyes

but to them, the stakes were so high

in getting their pride back.

I think about 80% of them were prepared to

put up with anything if they could become

what they wanted to be, a proud nation once again.

- [Narrator] Hitler commanded his popularity

amongst the German nation

through a series of non-violent territory gains

in the latter half of the 1930s.

- Most Germans are terribly anxious,

they do not want another war,

they're afraid that their cities will be bombed.

They don't want to go through another First World War,

so there's huge relief when the various crises

of the remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936

and Anschluss, Austria in 1938, the Czechoslovak crisis,

they're all solved basically without bloodshed.

That gains Hitler a reputation and popularity in Germany

but not because he's being militaristic.

His idea is to re-fight the First World War

but on a better basis, so his aim very early on

is to conquer Eastern Europe,

use it as a kind of bread basket, as a source of supplies

because one of the reasons why Germany lost in 1914 to 18

is because Germany did not have enough supplies.

More than half a million Germans

died from starvation or malnutrition in the First World War

so he wants to right that wrong.

- [Narrator] Although Hitler was remilitarizing

at an unprecedented rate, the German nation,

nor the rest of the world could see war on the horizon.

- We did not know how close war was going to be.

We did know that the Nazis had started re-arming very soon

after they came to power.

- All the other great powers realized

that Germany was re-arming in the 1930s,

it was secret, of course, until '35 then declared openly.

They had good intelligence on what was going on.

But on the other hand, I think

a great many politicians abroad

had thought it was a bad idea to disarm Germany anyway,

a modest rearmament might satisfy German ambitions,

they would allow Germany back

into the family of nations again.

- Everybody who was anti-Nazi thought

that the Allies would take steps

to prevent further rearmaments but they never did.

The only reason I can think of why they didn't do it

was because there was a great anti-war feeling

in all those countries.

None of the population's in Britain, France or Poland

wanted a war to happen.

- I knew there'd be trouble but not,

I certainly didn't think all out war.

- [Narrator] After the events of Kristallnacht,

thousands of Jews had been forced to emigrate

and those that hadn't, realized it was time to leave.

- After the events of November 1938,

it became obvious to everybody including my parents

that to stay in Germany might be termed suicide

because one could no longer be sure

that one's life was not in danger.

- [Narrator] Fritz Lustig's parents

managed to find refuge in Portugal

where his eldest sister lived.

As war became inevitable,

Eric Brown had no choice in leaving.

- I was asleep one Sunday morning on the 3rd of September

when there was a thunderous knock at the door.

When I opened it, there were two SS officers

said our country's are at war,

which was technically incorrect

at six o'clock in the morning

because until 11 o'clock we were at war,

but I didn't think that was a very strong point to argue

and the SS chap said you'll have to come with us,

so get dressed and get ready.

- [Narrator] Eric Brown was detained for three days

and then dropped at the Swiss border.

From here he made his way back to Britain

where he immediately signed up to the war effort.

Having stayed in England in 1936,

Fritz Lustig found refuge with the Quaker family

with whom he had lodged.

- When I emigrated, that was on a transatlantic steamer

which was going from Hamburg via Cherbourg in France

and Southampton in England.

We interlanded Cherbourg and this was the first time

I was able to walk about without being aware

of having to look over my shoulder

to see whether anybody was listening to what I said.

In other words, to feel free.

And that was a marvelous feeling

which I remember to this day.

(speaking in foreign language)

- [Narrator] In just 10 years,

Hitler and the Nazis had moved from a marginal Fascist Party

with a small following into a military dictatorship

ready to wage full-scale war.

The promise of rebuilding Germany

and reinstating pride to the nation

fueled Hitler's popularity despite acts of savage violence

that left thousands dead

and a great deal more seeking refuge in other countries.

When the curtain was raised on the theater of combat,

Germany rallied behind their fuhrer.

- The victory over Poland was certainly welcomed

because it righted the wrong as people saw it

of the territorial settlement

at the end of the First World War.

I think most Germans would have been very happy

to leave it at that.

- The high point of Hitler's popularity

was undoubtedly in the summer of 1940.

After the very rapid conquest

with relatively little bloodshed.

- The victories of 1939, 1940 created

what proved to be a short-lived period

of absolute mass euphoria in Germany.

- One victory after another.

All of this is ecstasy because the prophet

is what he says he is.

He is real.

He is an earthly god by this stage and of course,

the trouble is he begins to believe his own mythology.

- [Narrator] The beginning of the Second World War

would see the decline of Nazi support.

It would take a costly and blood war

to end this horrific regime.

(tense music)

(dramatic music)