Original subtitles

(dramatic music)

(crowd cheering)

(dramatic music)

- [Narrator] In 1933, Adolf Hitler

was made Chancellor of Germany.

This allowed the Nazi regime to seize complete power.

The Wall Street crash, the Reichstag fire,

and the death of Ernst von Grass

all enabled the Nazi's to further their tyranny.

German military rearmament was prioritized,

and in 1935, the Wehrmacht saw its reincarnation

following the disarmament after World War I.

Britain and France turned a blind eye

to this contravention of the Versailles Treaty.

(dramatic music)

The German people were excited by the prospect

of the country becoming great again.

Exploiting all aspects of the media,

Joseph Goebbels masterminded the slick propaganda

which was fed to the population.

(man speaks in foreign language)

- Goebbels' great insight was that

the best propaganda is disguised as something else.

It's carried on the back of entertainment.

- [Narrator] Coupled with this the violent persecution

of all those opposed to the regime

became progressively worse.

- A strong powerful street presence,

uniformed marching men and boys and a lot of them.

The repetitive power of violent, brutal street theater

when it came to dealing with opposition.

- Terror played a very important part in the dictatorship

throughout its entire length. (crowd cheering)

No political dissent would be tolerated.

(dramatic music)

- [Narrator] The Nazi party delivered

on their promise of higher employment,

and although the German nation was not oblivious

to the violence and persecution,

they allowed it to continue in the hope

that Hitler would restore their pride.

(dramatic music)

(crowd cheering)

- The only real long-term aims were to stay in power,

win back territory for Germany,

and to win back respect for Germany.

- I knew there was a lot of unrest,

but I didn't think it would blossom into all out war.

(bombs exploding) (plane engine roaring)

- [Narrator] The second World War would see

the height of Nazi popularity,

but it would also be their ultimate downfall.

(bombs exploding)

- His idea is to refight the first World War

but on a better basis.

His aim very early on is to conquer Eastern Europe.

- Once it became clear

that victory was not going to be easy,

then a great many German people realized

that this had been a gamble and that they'd lost.

- He maintained his faith because it was a matter of will.

- He'd come to believe that he was

a Messiah blessed by providence.

He just believed that there was something

of the divine about him.

(dramatic music)

(suspenseful music)

- [Narrator] To fully understand the outbreak

of World War II, we have to look back to 1936

and the start of the Nazi re-occupation

of land lost from the Versailles Treaty.

(dramatic music)

- One of the fundamental principles of the Treaty

of Versailles had been national self-determination.

Every nation should have its state.

So the Habsburg Monarchy had been broken up.

The Austrians, Hungarians, the Czechs,

Yugoslav's they got their own.

Why should this be denied to the Germans?

- Hitler certainly sets out an agenda for moving into

the Rhineland which had become a demilitarized zone

under the terms of the Versailles Treaty.

- [Reporter] German soldiers again breaking a treaty

marched into the demilitarized Rhineland.

- The Rhineland was sovereign German territory.

It's a re-militarization.

It's having military installations on it.

It had been occupied up to 1930.

The deal was that the Germans

would have it under their own control.

That the occupation forces would leave,

but that there would be no military installations in it.

In 1936, of course, Hitler sends his troops

into the Rhineland and a big military show.

(crowd cheering) (dramatic music)

- [Narrator] On March 12, 1938

the German army marched into Austria.

They were met with cheering crowds

as they crossed the border.

Hitler's appeal was growing rapidly.

- The Anschluss is popular with a lot of people in Austria,

perhaps not as many as it looks

because the previous regime of Dollfuss and Schuschnigg

had done the work for Hitler by banning the left in 1934.

The social democrats had been banned.

They were underground,

so there's no opposition really in Austria either.

I mean it's a dictatorship as well.

(crowd cheering) (dramatic music)

- Hitler said that he had no desire on any territory

which had not had a historical memory of a German presence.

The Germans were a Pan-European tribe.

They were not a nation in a country

as the rest of us really are.

They were everywhere.

They are not in the Iberian Peninsula.

They were not in the British Isles,

but they were everywhere else stretching deep into Russia.

- So, there's no resistance in Europe

to the German takeover of German-speaking Austria.

The German demand for the incorporation of two million

German speakers on the western boundaries of Czechoslovakia

in 1938 is acceded to because it fulfills that principle.

- [Narrator] On September 30, 1938

Germany, France, Britain, and Italy

signed the Munich Agreement,

which attempted to appease Hitler's designs

on Czechoslovakia following the Anschluss of Austria.

- [Reporter] Meanwhile at Munich misguided statesmen

were lulled into believing that Hitler

would cage his storm troopers in return

for a sizeable hunk of Czechoslovakia.

They signed away the Sudetenland

in a move to appease a rattlesnake,

a rattlesnake who having once glutted himself

on the rich food of another nation's lands

would become ravenously hungry again and again.

(suspenseful music)

- [Narrator] The agreement handed Hitler

the Sudetenland area of Czechoslovakia,

which left the country weakened,

and on March 16, 1939 Germany took control of the country.

- I think it may be true that Hitler felt he had been

cheated of his war over the Sudetenland.

He had a peculiar hatred for the Czechs.

I'm not entirely sure why.

Maybe it was just Czechs and Poles as Slavs.

It seems as if he may have felt denied a war

in the Autumn of 1938 at a time when he felt

his potential adversaries were too weak really.

(dramatic music)

- The re-militarization of the Rhineland,

Anschluss of Austria 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.

- [Narrator] The sequence of territory gains made by

the Nazi's in the late 1930s won back the majority

of land lost by the signing of the Versailles Treaty

after the first World War.

- Winning the foreign policy successes of the 1930s

without having to resort to war was a major gain

that was appreciated by a lot of people

and restored German pride in a big way.

- The turning point only comes in March 1939

when Hitler marches into the rest of Czechoslovakia

which is inhabited not by Germans but by Czechs.

At that point there's a general

realization in political elites

in other countries in Europe that he's after more

than simply recreating a kind of German nation state.

- Hitler gambled on the fact they'd get away

with doing these things without war,

and his gambling instinct served him well.

Britain, France, the Western democracies

did not respond militarily for all kinds of reasons.

The real gamble was 1939

when it came to the move against Poland.

(suspenseful music)

- [Narrator] Signed in 1939 in Moscow

the Non-Aggression Pact would establish

Nazi Germany and Russia as allies.

- By then he knew he could get away with it,

or he did by early August after the extraordinary

turnaround in the Reich's policy of signing a mutual,

Non-Aggression Pact with the Soviet Union.

That was the moment at which the field was cleared

for Hitler to move against Poland.

- [Reporter] Germany invades Poland

and the free state of Danzig.

The efforts and hopes of diplomats for peaceful settlement

are transformed into the roar of gunfire.

Warsaw is bombed, blasted, and shelled.

Poland is in ruins.

(tense music)

- Where the gamble went wrong was that Britain and France

honored their treaty obligations to Poland.

Hitler had never thought they would do that.

(dramatic music)

- [Narrator] The eve of war was upon the German nation.

It would be a conflict which would bring about

the demise of the Nazi regime,

but it would also facilitate mass genocide,

brutal murder and bloodshed on a scale

which no one could have imagined possible.

(dramatic music)

Territory gains made by the Nazi regime

were carried out with minimum of bloodshed and resistance.

The German nation was buoyant.

Their Fuhrer was delivering.

- [Reporter] War has struck again.

- [Narrator] However, on September 1, 1939,

Germany invaded Poland.

(bombs exploding)

(dramatic music)

With regard to the Treaty of Versailles,

this attack proved a step too far

for Britain and the allies.

- [Neville] I have to tell you now

this country is at war with Germany.

(alert blaring) (suspenseful music)

- [Narrator] The second World War had commenced.

- The wrong of Versailles had been righted.

They hadn't got Alsace-Lorraine back.

They could live without them.

The Polish corridor was the big issue territorially.

They had that.

They had Austria.

People would have been very happy to leave it at that

but the war was not concluded, and you do get complaints

even in the autumn of 1939.

This war has been going on too long.

- [Narrator] In the winter of 1939,

Hitler would unleash his Blitzkrieg upon western Europe,

and over the following months Germany would go on

to conquer many more countries.

- One victory after another.

The fall of France, the fall of Belgium,

the fall of Holland, the fall of Norway,

all of this is a kind of ecstasy.

(dramatic music)

- I think the euphoria is partly

that now it really is all over,

and we've done really well.

People were pretty pleased with that and Hitler.

It had been done under his leadership,

so he got a lot of credit for that.

- 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.

- Very rapid conquest, with relatively little bloodshed

and not much loss on the German side,

very short war all of this was treated

with huge enthusiasm by the German people.

Partly because they then thought the war had come to an end.

- That was certainly enough

for the overwhelming majority of Germans.

- I think that all those crowds you see in the newsreels

waving flags and screaming it's all true.

I mean, they couldn't believe it.

That in a few weeks they'd defeated an enemy

they couldn't defeat in four years of grueling war.

- Hitler was one of the few people in Germany

who welcomed another war.

He wasn't scared.

The first World War had made him somebody,

but for other Germans, two million German men

had been killed during the first World War

and an awful lot had been wounded.

You just had to look at the

the maimed ex-servicemen on the streets.

So it was a terrible prospect for an awful lot of people.

(dramatic music)

- [Reporter] In a drive as speedy as that to the Channel,

Nazi units pushed southward and rapidly outflanked

the famous French Maginot Line.

- Following the French surrender,

Hitler arranged for the armistice between Germany and France

to be signed in the same train carriage in the same location

which 22 years previously had been used

for the signing of the Armistice of 1918.

(gentle music)

Reaching the English Channel in May 1940

and outmaneuvering the British,

causing the retreat to Dunkirk,

the German army looked to be the far superior aggressor.

Britain was on the brink of seeking terms with Germany

but Winston Churchill argued

that nations which went down fighting rose again,

but those which surrendered tamely were finished.

- Hitler gave a rather empty speech, offering peace terms

which weren't very specified to Britain,

and when Churchill rejected them,

there was universal outrage and incomprehension in Germany.

Churchill knew that a peace with Germany at that point

would mean German control over Britain

would get greater and greater.

He would probably be ousted.

Fascists like Mosley would become the Prime Minister.

That it would be, in effect, a surrender in stages.

He was quite right to reject this very vague peace offer.

- But an interesting aspect of this is his view of Churchill

whom he respected as a fellow artist,

and for a long time his plan for Churchill,

in the event of German victory,

was to just leave him in a country house

where he could paint and not string him up

like all the others or put him in a concentration camp.

(plane engine roaring) (dramatic music)

- Trying to bomb Britain into submission

over the winter of 1940, 1941 was a huge miscalculation.

They did not have the offensive air power to do it.

- Hello America this is Edward Murrow speaking from London.

There were more German planes

over the coast of Britain today

than at any time since the war began.

Anti-aircraft guns were in action

along the southeast coast today.

(suspenseful music)

- [Narrator] Fought in the air the Battle of Britain

would start on July 10th

and would finish on October 31, 1940.

(plane engine roaring) (guns firing)

- I was speaking to Captain Eric Brown

who interrogated Goring.

That Goring at Nuremberg told him

that the Battle of Britain was a draw.

- I said to him what are your views

on the outcome of the Battle of Britain,

and he said, "I think it was a draw."

And I said, "How did you arrive at that conclusion?"

He said, "Well, if you look at the analysis

"of the final weeks of the Battle of Britain,

"the last week we were in the ascendancy."

"In other words we had less pilot

and aircraft causalities than the Brits."

Now if you look at the analysis this is perfectly true.

- Although the British had claimed victory,

Hitler's popularity within Germany was still strong.

The Nazi commanders were all firmly behind Hitler.

However on May 10, 1940 one would take action

which would signal fractures within the regime.

- Hitler retained his charismatic control over

the second rank of Nazi leaders, Goring, Goebbels

and so on during the war.

Hess was the only exception,

because he was really eased out

of the central decision making circles of Nazi's men.

He thought he'd try and get back

in a rather muddle-headed way.

- One of the great mysteries of World War II

there is some speculation as to whether

Hitler in fact authorized it.

Because if we take Hitler as actually wanting

a negotiated peace with Britain not a conquest,

it would actually make sense.

- [Reporter] In the most bizarre and astounding event

of the war so far, Rudolf Hess, number three Nazi,

seen here going about his activities as confidant

and chief party leader for the Nazi warlord Hitler

is now a prisoner in Scotland,

after a mysterious solo flight from Germany.

- Hess had simply got into his head

that to restore his status with Hitler

he would fly to Britain and negotiate a peace.

- It was very easy for the Nazi

media to project Hess as deluded,

and indeed what he did was remarkable.

Firstly, he learned to fly specifically for this purpose.

- [Reporter] The Nazi leader took off from Augsburg

and headed straight for western Scotland

where an old friend of his, the Duke of Hamilton,

has an estate.

His mission: who knows.

- He flew and crash landed on the estate

of the Duke of Hamilton in Scotland.

The choice of landing was significant because Hamilton

had actually been very sympathetic to Germany before the war

and some suggested a kind of crypto-fascist himself.

But by this stage he's very anxious to clean up his act,

so he delivers Hess straight to the authorities.

- Hitler was furious because, of course,

he didn't know about it.

Furious, particularly because it was just

before the invasion of the Soviet Union.

(dramatic music)

- [Narrator] As Goebbels and the Nazi propaganda machine

were covering themselves from the Hess debacle,

Hitler was implementing the start of another battle.

Led by arrogance and self-belief, he would soon embark

on the largest invasion in the history of warfare.

The attack would stretch along a 3,000 kilometer front

and would send four million soldiers into Soviet territory.

It would mark the beginning of the pivotal phase

in deciding the victory of the war,

which would see Nazi popularity plummet in Germany.

It would bring death and destruction to millions of people.

(dramatic music)

1940 had seen the height of Hitler

and the Nazi regime's popularity within Germany.

The Battle of Britain had been unsuccessful,

but support was still strong

despite Hess's flight to Scotland.

What would come next, however, would be a battle

led by prejudice and vanity on the part of Hitler.

His own self-belief convinced him

to march on Moscow and conquer Russia

the very campaign that Charles XII

and Napoleon had failed to achieve.

(tense music)

- [Reporter] In a sudden coup German's military might

has been thrown against her former ally Russia,

in a gigantic attack by land as well as by air

along a 2,000 mile front from the arctic to the Black Sea.

- At first he was lucky.

His self-confidence paid off.

Took the Rhineland and walked into Austria

all that built up his self-confidence,

not only with the people but with himself.

This was the dangerous thing.

(dramatic music)

(guns firing)

- There were two reasons why

Hitler attacked the Soviet Union.

First of all, it was a way of bringing Britain to terms

because he thought, already in 1940,

that he wasn't going to conquer Britain by force.

He was gonna have to leave Britain totally isolated

without any allies at all,

and if he conquered the Soviet Union,

the British surely would see sense.

They'd have the entire continent against them.

- Secondly, his derision of the Bolsheviks,

they're being inherently incompetent,

and his racial dismissal of the Russians

he believed it would collapse like a house of cards.

- The Bolshevik state was rotten to the core.

You had only to kick the door in,

and the whole edifice would come crumbling down.

That's what they thought,

and, I think, flushed with success

from the Blitzkrieg in western Europe,

they thought all they had to do was attack.

In a way it was a bit silly actually

because that had been the mentality of 1914.

- With a bit of luck if he had gone earlier,

he may have succeeded in temporarily conquering Russia.

- [Reporter] Today American news agencies report

Russia is strongly counterattacking,

and that less than 150th of Russia's

vast area has been invaded.

These pictures show them the beginning

of the Blitz that turned into a siege.

- There was some encouragement.

In that, Stalin had done a great deal of damage to his

armed forces through the purges of the mid, later 1930s.

- But how Hitler would ever police it

for the rest of his time I don't think

he'd even begun to think it through.

(guns firing)

- [Reporter] Panza troops in action.

From the Baltic to the Black Sea great clashes between

Russian and German tank squadrons have been reported.

- In the autumn of 1941,

the Germans were on course just cutting through butter,

going to take Moscow, going to Leningrad,

and they didn't and they were stopped.

(dramatic music) (bombs exploding)

- [Narrator] Operation Barbarossa would be a definitive

turning point in the fortunes of the Nazi regime.

The march on Moscow was the end of what had started

as a successful campaign.

Hitler had gained many territories in Eastern Europe,

but it was the harsh Soviet winter

and the tough belligerence of the Red Army

that would finally see the Nazi's defeated

and home support of the regime finally turn.

- [Reporter] Here apparently the Germans got their

first sight of the Russian's scorched earth tactics.

Scorched earth tactics that American reporters say

should be even more effective now that winter has set in,

and Hitler's photogenic army must face

general snow and general mud.

(tense music)

- Once you get into 1942, (gentle music)

they're now fighting on quite a number of fronts.

Army leave is being canceled.

So people aren't getting home.

Food rationing is getting more stringent.

People are becoming depressed and disillusioned.

- [Narrator] It was not just the German population

who were becoming despondent,

many officers in the German army

were also starting to question their Fuhrer's actions.

- Throughout the war there were

attempts to assassinate Hitler,

many of them orchestrated by

anti-Hitler generals and soldiers,

but they could none of them manage it.

- All the former social democrats and communists,

I say a third of the electorate in the last free election

in 1932 they had effectively been brought in line.

Their resistance movements mostly distributing leaflets

and kind of keep the flame going as it were,

they'd all been suppressed by the Gestapo.

It was very difficult to resist in the Third Reich

because denunciation was widespread.

If somebody overheard you or got a clue

that you were doing X, Y and Z, then they would

go down to Gestapo headquarters and turn you in.

- So the only people who could really resist

as a group were the senior army officers,

with a few conservative politicians attached,

and they're the ones who then prepared

the assassination of Hitler as things were beginning

to go really seriously wrong in 1943 to four.

(dramatic music)

- [Narrator] Claus von Stauffenberg

was a general in the German army

who had been injured serving in North Africa,

losing his right hand, two fingers on the left,

and also his left eye.

- Von Stauffenberg was a most unlikely assassin.

He'd been seriously injured.

He could prime the bomb only with great difficulty,

and so on, but nobody else could be found to do it.

And he was determined now that his German patriotism

could only be expressed by destroying Hitler.

Hitler would destroy Germany.

If you were a patriot, your job was to destroy Hitler.

(bombs exploding)

- [Narrator] Although the bomb von Stauffenberg

detonated killed four people,

Hitler was shielded by a solid oak table

and was only left with minor injuries.

Von Stauffenberg was found guilty of high treason

and subsequently executed.

Having survived the assassination attempt,

Adolf Hitler was still convinced

that the war was for winning,

even though the German nation suspected the worst.

- He's always hoping when he looks back at history

that something will happen,

something will happen politically.

The alliance will fall apart,

or Germany will invent an amazing new weapon

or somehow or other you can pluck

victory from the jaws of defeat,

just as his great hero Frederick the Great had done.

I'm not sure there's ever a point actually

which Hitler says I recognize it.

I failed, we're going to be defeated.

(dramatic music)

- [Narrator] The battle on the Eastern front

turned into a long war of attrition.

The German army was ill prepared for this,

and the Russian army, with the far greater resource,

would in 1944 finally defeat the attacking German army.

(somber music)

The paradox of the attack eastwards

was that the more territory Hitler gained,

greater was the Jewish population he acquired.

- The war changed everything,

and Germany's victories across Europe

and then in the east after June 1941,

from having a population of 600,000 Jews in 1933

the number of Jewish people under the Reichs in

inverted commerce administrative military control

soared to many millions of people.

- Hitler's problem,

self-inflicted problem, is he attacks Poland,

and the largest concentration

of European Jews falls into his hands,

and as he moves elsewhere in Eastern Europe

more Jews come under his rule.

The original idea had been to expel German Jews from Germany

and Jews were expelled into Poland for example,

but that doesn't solve the problem

once you've invaded Poland.

(somber music)

- [Narrator] The Madagascar Plan was an idea to establish

a Jewish colony on the African island of Madagascar.

It was subsequently shelved in 1942.

- I don't think anybody ever asked Madagascar

to settle a Jewish colony there, to ship out European Jews,

but that was, I think, was never really

going to come to anything.

- There had been talk about enforced deportations

of a captive Jewish population out of Germany,

out of Europe.

How were they going to do that?

That, by its very nature

would have been a brutal, murderous exercise.

(dramatic music)

- [Narrator] The Wannsee Conference was a meeting

of Nazi officials in Wannsee, a suburb of Berlin,

to establish a final solution to the Jewish problem.

- They formalized the operation of the holocaust

while it was already under way,

while it had already started.

People like Eichmann, Heydrich showed up

to take the decisions in a chillingly managerial way.

No need for Hitler to be present they didn't need him.

They knew Hitler would sanction what they were going to do.

(tense music)

- [Narrator] The extermination camps would eventually

operate around the clock.

In the last acts of this brutal conflict

Adolf Hitler would unleash one final command

that would order the futile resistance

of his party faithful.

(dramatic music) (guns firing)

War on the eastern front was a battle too far.

It signaled the end for the Nazi regime.

The German nation was heavily rationed

and those dwelling in the urban centers were facing

ever increasing bombing raids by the allied forces.

Hitler however remained defiant.

- Later on Hitler lived in a fantasy world` of his own.

Even in the last days of the war he was conjuring up

in his own mind imaginary armies, secret weapons,

extraordinary make believe scenarios.

- He maintained his faith.

Because it was a matter of will.

The 1934 party rally was called Triumph of the Will,

and Hitler and Goebbels to a very great extent,

and some other close followers,

maintained this belief that their will would prevail.

- Nobody had the nerve to try to disabuse Hitler

of his fantasies even in the last days.

- In the Autumn of 1944,

a group of generals come to Hitler's headquarters.

The generals go in and say to Hitler,

"We are convinced that the war is lost."

They're in there for about, I don't know,

an hour and a half or something, and they come out again.

Their eyes shining saying, "The Fuhrer

"has convinced us that we can win the war."

- By then, he'd already decided

that the German people had betrayed him.

They had proved unworthy of their great destiny

and deserve the fate that was descending upon them.

Extraordinary mental and moral universe to inhabit.

(somber music)

- [Narrator] June 6, 1944 saw the D-Day landings

and would be the start of the allied invasion

of occupied western Europe.

Germany found they were retreating from all fronts

as the Red Army marched from the east.

Close to defeat, Hitler issued

what became known as the Nero Decree.

On March 19, 1945 an order was sent out

that all German infrastructures must be destroyed

to prevent the allies utilizing them as the advanced.

It also called for every last house

and street to be fought for.

- It happened in small villages,

which had nothing to do with the war,

they had to stand and fight when American tanks came.

That kind of thing it just was absolutely criminal.

- So he blamed reverses and defeats

on a lack of willpower in his generals,

not on the lack of material or the superiority of the enemy.

- It had terrible repercussions for Germans

because it meant that the whole of Germany

had to be invaded, fought over, occupied by foreign troops,

in a way that had not happened in the first World War

because Hitler wouldn't surrender.

- [Narrator] In the closing stages of the war

a large number of the Nazi faithful realized

that the war was effectively lost.

This resulted in mass suicides throughout Germany.

(dramatic music)

- There was this feeling of got a dimmer

from the twilight of the gods we all die together

because life after the Reich isn't worth living.

Now that's an extraordinary sensation,

and I think one can't fully explain it.

You have to understand the extraordinarily rigid

hold the regime had on people.

(somber music)

- A great many of the party faithful committed suicide

because they simply couldn't face the idea of German defeat.

They'd been fed propaganda for years,

but defeat would mean the partition of Germany.

It might mean the deliberate impoverishment.

There were rumors that all German males would be castrated

and all kinds of extraordinary things went around in 1945.

- Historians have tried to quantify the numbers,

but in the ghastly chaos of the Third Reich

in its final days mass murder,

nihilistic orgies of killing by

the Nazi state in its death throes

it's hard to know what the actual figures really were.

- [Narrator] Knowing that the Soviets

were advancing swiftly towards his bunker,

Hitler gave his last will and testament

making Joseph Goebbels as Reich Chancellor

and naming no one as his successor as Fuhrer.

The next day April 30, 1945 Hitler shot himself.

- Two of Hitler's immediate circle,

Joseph Goebbels and Martin Bormann,

remained loyal to him right to the end.

They stayed in the bunker in Berlin.

For Goebbels there was nowhere else to go.

He felt that if the Third Reich collapsed,

if Hitler was killed that was it, everything was over.

- An extraordinary sense of apocalypse

seemed to overtake them and they felt that,

that was the only course of action open to them.

(somber music)

- [Narrator] On May 1st Joseph Goebbels

and his wife Magda committed suicide,

but before doing so killed their six children

by drugging them and then poisoning them with cyanide.

Both Himmler and Goering would commit suicide as well,

but this was not before they were

interrogated by the allies.

Captain Eric Brown, posted to Germany

to look for jet wind tunnels,

was tasked with the job of identifying Himmler

and was able to interrogate Goering.

Himmler was arrested near the Danish border

with false papers.

- The warrant officer phoned headquarters at Luneburg

and said, "We've picked up somebody

"who we think might be Himmler.

"Could you come up and identify him?

"You said when you saw Himmler in civil life

"that he used to walk with a slightly peculiar gait,

"and could you come up and try and identify this guy?"

So I went up to banister.

As soon as I walked in, I knew it was Himmler.

I mean, even without making him walk.

Absolute coward.

I think he was frightened out of his life.

(dramatic music)

Always trying to evade anything

that directly threatened him.

- [Reporter] Accompanied by these two SS men

Heinrich Himmler, most hated man in Europe,

was captured by British troops outside this town.

Concealed in Himmler's mouth

was a tiny vial of deadly poison.

While being examined, he swallowed it.

(tense music)

(dramatic music)

- [Narrator] Goering was in American custody

and Eric was able to ask him key questions

about Nazi aircraft strategy.

- He was charismatic, very intelligent.

He came out of World War I with great honor,

had a huge reputation in Germany.

A good man who went very wrong,

he was corrupted by the system he joined.

And he lost all his qualities of honor,

and began to really lust for power and luxury,

and that of course was his total downfall.

(tense music)

- [Reporter] At Luneburg Germany before a British

military court the greatest mass murder trial in history.

These Nazi's were guards at notorious

Belsen Concentration Camp where four million prisoners died.

- [Narrator] The end of the war signaled the beginning

of peace for many across Europe and the rest of the world.

There was a tangible sense of relief in the air,

but as occupied land was liberated,

the full horror of the Nazi regime was revealed.

Eric Brown was part of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen.

- Piles of dead bodies.

Piles of walking dead really.

Just a horror story.

- [Reporter] Now Belsen, the human slaughterhouse

where numberless victims were once burned to death,

is itself put to the torch.

Nearby, Nazi women guards are lined up for questioning.

- [Eric] He wanted me to interrogate

the camp commandant who was called Josef Kramer

and the lady camp commandant Irma Grese.

- [Reporter] Kramer's chief sadist was Irma Grese,

in curls, whose name struck terror

into the hearts of Belsen's inmates.

(suspenseful music)

- She's the worst human being I've ever met.

Cruelty was her trade.

There was nothing too cruel for this woman to do.

When it came to interrogating her,

I asked her if she had her time over again,

would she do all this.

She refused to answer.

After about four or five times like this

she suddenly leapt to her feet and gave the Nazi salute,

shouted Heil Hitler, sat down, and refused to talk.

But, we executed the lot.

You can hardly defend yourself when outside the window

there's a pile of bodies as high as this ceiling in a pit.

- [Reporter] Newsreel films of the atrocities

at Belsen shocked the world.

Even death for Kramer and his gang cannot avenge

the crimes of the beasts of Belsen.

(suspenseful music)

- [Narrator] What started as Hitler's strong

antisemitic beliefs in the wake of World War I

ended as what we now know as the Holocaust.

Six million Jews were murdered, along with tens of thousands

of gypsies, homosexuals, communists,

mentally ill and the physically disabled.

(somber music)

In the aftermath of the war the allied forces

would soon stake their own territorial claims,

which would lead the conquered nation divided.

- Germany in 1945 was an extraordinary mess.

60% of its urban area had been obliterated from the air.

- Germany was occupied by the allied powers.

The Soviet Union, the French, British, and Americans,

a very heavy military occupation.

- It was economically impoverished.

It was difficult to see, in fact, in 1945

where Germany was going to go,

how Germans were going to survive

widespread hunger, even starvation in places.

- There were all kinds of measures

to stop any recrudescence of Nazism.

Nazi laws are revoked.

There's a re-education effort of trying

to educate Germans in the evils of Nazism,

but in a sense that's all less important

than the fact that Nazism had brought,

in the end, nothing but death and destruction.

(dramatic music)

- [Narrator] After the war the nation of Germany

would be split in two.

To the east the Soviet occupied area

became the German Democratic Republic.

The area to the west which Britain, France,

and the U.S. occupied became

the Federal Republic of Germany.

This division was most notably illustrated in Berlin.

- The Berlin wall was erected in 1961,

and would be a chilling visual reminder of a nation divided.

(somber music)

- I was sent back to Germany in the mid 1950s.

I found it difficult to reform relationship with some

of them whom I knew what they had done in the war.

But in general, I realized that some of them

had been led like sheep to the slaughter.

- I think post war Germany is a great epic

in the act of remembrance and omission.

For a nation to confront its guilt like that

is extraordinary because a lot of other nations

have a lot of other skeletons in the cupboard.

- [Narrator] Hitler remains a source of intrigue

for many people throughout the world.

- Hitler exerts a kind of fascination

that you could never really imagine.

We spend so much time writing books

and programs about Hitler and so on.

I think Hitler would have been amazed by the extent

of historical attention that's paid to him.

(suspenseful music)

- You'll always get young bloods

who will be attracted to the style of the Nazi regime.

- They've actually given us the image,

not of themselves, but of their ideal.

(gentle music)

- It is an extraordinary story.

How this nondescript man, stateless,

radical politician with a whole lot of wacky ideas

in the 1920s could suddenly become Germany's dictator

that unleashed the largest war

and embark on the biggest crime the world has ever known.

And I think that the public 70 years on

are still fascinated by those paradoxes.

- [Narrator] Today Germany is a nation united.

The economic miracle that west Germany experienced

in the 1950s supported by the Marshall Plan

gave them the basis to develop a strong economy

and political stability.

The real miracle, however, should be credited

to the people of Germany.

By confronting their own brutal history,

they have allowed the world to learn

from the mistakes made in their past.

(crowd cheering) (dramatic music)

Although persecution, hatred, and war

are still a global problem,

Germany has sanctioned its history

to be used as the marker of a cruelty

which should never again be repeated.

(suspenseful music)

(crowd cheering)

(dramatic music)