Original subtitles

(dramatic music) (crowd chanting)

(Adolf speaking in foreign language)

- [Narrator] Adolf Hitler liked to paint a rosy picture

of his childhood.

- If you look at the household Hitler grew up in,

it's really a classic model of a dysfunctional house.

- [Narrator] But detailed historical research

reveals that these were lies,

designed to hide a much darker truth.

(Adolf yelling) (crowd yelling)

- There was incest,

there was family intergenerational breeding

and very loose boundaries.

Sex cruises through all Hitler's dysfunctional behavior.

- [Narrator] With a family torn apart by infidelity,

abuse and violence,

this was a childhood that would spawn a monster.

- [Robert] Power was critical to everything Hitler did.

(dramatic music) (crowd chanting)

(gentle piano music)

- [Narrator] In 2017, Austrian officials

seized an historic three story building

in the center of the picturesque town of Braunau am Inn.

They plan to turn it into a police station.

It's hoped that will be enough to deter

the crazed neo-Nazis who flock to this site...

because it was here on the 20th of April, 1889,

that Adolf Hitler was born.

What form of nest could hatch such an abomination?

(Adolf speaking in foreign language)

Was Adolf Hitler the product of nurture or nature?

Even asking the question treads a very dangerous path.

Many people fiercely oppose attempts

to understand Hitler's genesis.

Their deepest fear is that finding the root of his evil

might give others a reason to excuse the inexcusable.

(dramatic music)

Others believe understanding Hitler's psyche

is of the utmost importance.

- We cannot guarantee that another Hitler will not arise,

but when you look at what is the greatest crime in history,

namely the Holocaust,

you need to do everything you can

to understand the perpetrator.

(dramatic music)

- [Narrator] As an adult,

Adolf Hitler would lie and possibly kill

to hide the truth of what happened within the walls

of the Hitler family home.

But what he experienced here

under the sway of his clingy dotting mother

and savage father would corrupt his view of the world

and skew his sexual urges for his entire life.

(Adolf speaking in foreign language)

Hitler fought hard to keep these grim secrets under wraps

and to perpetuate a heavily burnish myth

about his upbringing, his daily life

and his sexual appetites.

In 1938, with Europe teetering on the brink of war,

Hitler turned his attention to the tiny village

of Dollershiem in Austria.

This was the birthplace of Hitler's father Alois

and home to many of his relatives.

With the Fuhrer's knowledge,

the German army commandeered the village

to use as a training site,

displacing the residents and destroying the town

along with all traces of Hitler's family history.

What dark secret exactly was Adolf Hitler

so desperate to hide?

- Hitler was insistent on keeping a huge control

over his personal message and his personal image.

There wasn't gonna be a situation

in which any other message got out.

Hitler's obsession about his origins

was an instance of him saying,

"I will control the message."

(dramatic music)

- [Narrator] Hints of Hitler's sorted personal history

remain in archives, first-hand accounts

and wartime reports.

But as with all the loathes and chapters of his life,

it's not always easy to sort the truth

from the lies and misinformation.

(crowd cheering)

Some facts are beyond dispute.

Hitler's family came from a region in Austria

known as the Waldviertel.

Just after Hitler became chancellor,

a journalist visited the area to research an article

about the new leader of Germany.

In it, he described the Waldviertel

as so heavily inbred that populations of whole villages

are first and second cousins.

And the Hitler family was no exception.

By any definition, Hitler was inbred.

His mother Klara and father Alois were so closely related

that the local Roman Catholic Bishop

decided their blood relationship

was too close for them to marry.

Before they could wed,

Hitlers parents had to apply for a paper dispensation.

Although no one knows exactly how they were related,

the official Nazi story was that Alois's father

and Klara's great uncle were the same person.

After they began life together as man and wife,

48-year-old Alois called 24-year-old Klara, niece,

she called him uncle.

Sexual contact between close relatives

was the norm in the Hitler household.

As an adult, Adolf Hitler

would keep the family tradition alive.

It's impossible to know exactly how Klara Polzl

was related to Alois Hitler

because Alois's own paternity is uncertain.

Alois's mother, Maria Schicklgruber

gave birth to him in 1837.

She was unmarried and no father's name

was listed in the birth records.

When her son was five years old,

Maria married Johann Georg Hiedler.

After his stepfather's death,

Alois Schicklgruber adopted Hiedler's name

and changed the spelling to Hitler.

- People forget it's only by an accident

that his name was Hitler.

It should have been Schicklgruber.

Now can you imagine

the masked SS troops gang Herr Schicklgruber?

It just doesn't work.

- [Narrator] Although public records were amended

to list Johann Georg as Alois's father,

many historians believe that was just a cover story.

It's possible that Johann Georg agreed to marry Maria

to protect the reputation of his married brother

and Alois's actual father,

Johann Nepomuk Hiedler,

and Johann Nepomuk was Klara Polzl's grandfather.

That meant that Hitler's mother and father

were either uncle and niece or first cousins once removed.

But there's another possibility,

it was one that would torment the Fuhrer

for the rest of his life.

Once he took power, Adolf Hitler

used the fire reaching powers of the Gestapo

to pick over his family history.

There's no question what was at stake.

(Adolf speaking in foreign language)

(crowd shouting)

Without clearing up the irregularities

in his paternal bloodline,

the Fuhrer couldn't lay claim

to the very thing he demanded of all good Germans,

a pure Aryan heritage.

There may have been one skeleton

lurking in Hitler's family closet

that terrified him more than anything else.

Rumors persisted that Alois Schicklgruber

wasn't the son of either of the Hiedler brothers.

After Maria gave birth to her child,

it was said that she was sent child support

by the family she had worked for in the town of Graz.

That family was Jewish.

And if the story is true,

the father of Maria's child, Alois

could well have been their 19-year-old son.

That would've made Adolf Hitler one-quarter Jewish.

Was this what he was so desperate to hide?

The suggestion that Hitler may have had Jewish ancestry

is one of the most controversial claims about his pedigree.

- There are different arguments about whether it's possible

that he could have had a Jewish ancestor.

I think the weight is leaning towards the fact

that he didn't.

The reason he tried to obliterate

all traces of his background

was according to the Nazi ideology he promoted,

it was appalling.

There was incest,

there was family intergenerational breeding.

All of this was totally antithetical to the image

Hitler promoted for Germany and of course himself,

it would've been highly embarrassing.

Hitler knew in a family with a lot of congenital problems

and several relatives who were born mentally retarded,

that no one was allowed to know this.

- [Narrator] In 2010, investigative journalist,

Jean-Paul Mulder and historian Marc Vermeeren

gathered DNA from Hitler's living relatives

in order to resolve this explosive theory once and for all.

Tests showed that Hitler carried

what's known as Haplopgroup E1b1b

common amongst Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews.

According to the pair,

it didn't necessarily confirm Hitler's grandfather

was a Jew, only that he was not the pure Aryan

he so desperately wanted to be.

- All the Nazis are obsessed with origins.

This was very, very important for them.

They were the master race.

So you're dealing with a regime

that has very, very deep fixations

with personal origins and with blood purity.

And that is why Hitler would have cared very much

about the origins of his own family,

and also felt insecure about those origins.

(dramatic music)

- [Narrator] Hitler's draconian, antisemitic,

Nuremberg race laws of 1935

meant millions of people who couldn't prove Aryan ancestry

were sent to concentration camps and killed.

Hitler was desperate to prove his own purity.

(Adolf speaking in foreign language)

In 1937, a year before the German army

destroyed his father's village, Dollersheim,

Hitler appointed a genealogist to trace his family tree.

It showed that Hitler's forebears

had lived in the same corner of Austria

since the 15th century,

because marrying outside the district

wasn't the done thing, there was plenty of inbreeding.

Unsurprisingly, he didn't find a single Jewish relative.

(crowd cheering)

This now became Adolf Hitler's official pedigree.

And with all parish records from Dollersheim destroyed,

there was no way to challenge any questions

about his father's paternity.

Alois Hitler was a womanizing alcoholic,

Austrian civil servant.

He married three times.

He sired as many as nine children,

four of those were conceived out of wedlock.

Alois's first marriage was to a much older woman,

Anna Glasl-Horer, who offered him

a healthy dowry and improved social standing.

While they were still married,

he impregnated a 19-year-old kitchen hand,

Franziska Matzelberger who gave birth to his first son,

Alois Junior.

At the same time,

he was sleeping with his niece,

16-year-old Klara Polzl

who was nursing his dying wife.

After his first wife Anna died in 1883,

Alois wed the by now heavily pregnant Franziska.

Hitler's half sister Angela was born three months later.

When Franziska died in August, 1884,

it cleared the way for him to marry his niece, Klara,

which he did the following year.

Studies have shown that inbreeding

can lead to an abnormally high incidence

of infant mortality.

Of Alois and Klara Hitler's six children,

only two would survive to adulthood.

During their first three years of marriage,

Klara bore three children, Gustav, Ida, and Otto.

All three died.

When a fourth child was conceived,

Klara must have been terrified.

The son she gave birth to on the 20th of April 1889

was feeble and sickly.

Certain that he would follow her other children

to the grave, Klara doted on baby Adolf.

- She suffered the tragic death of three of her children,

the previous children in one year.

And this meant, I think the sort of overbearing,

not so much possessiveness,

but concern for the son who'd survived.

And I think that led to a terrific closeness to his mother,

which was possibly even at the time suffocating.

- [Narrator] Young Adolf shared his parents' bedroom,

so that even when he slept,

he could be under his mother's vigilant gaze.

It has been suggested that Hitler was breast fed

until he was four,

a highly unusual thing to do in late 19th century Austria.

What developed was an unnaturally close bond

between mother and son.

Some historians and psychoanalysts

believe this laid the foundations

for what has been described

as a textbook Oedipal relationship.

This was one of the most sensational claims

made in a secret classified US government report in 1943,

prepared by respected psychoanalyst Walter Langer.

The report was exhaustive.

Based on over a thousand pages of interviews

with some of Hitlers closest confidants and associates,

it offered a dire prognosis.

Contained within its pages,

are frank and graphic descriptions

of the Fuhrers alleged sexual perversions

and deviant behavior.

And psychoanalyst Walter Langer

believed he knew why Hitler mutated

into the monstrosity he had become.

He believed it all began at home,

and the dysfunctional relationship with his suffocating

over-attentive mother and abusive father.

Many have challenged the approach

because his diagnosis was formed

without any direct contact with the subject.

And there's good reason to question the motives

of the disaffected informers whose vitriolic accounts

colored the lengthy report.

And one of the points Langer highlighted

was the abnormal attachment Hitler had to his mother.

- First of all, you've gotta look at his mother.

She'd lost a number of children.

So you could understand when she got a child who survived,

that she would pour her affections onto it.

And quite understandably so.

What you see from Hitler's side

is the other part of the story,

because first of all,

he had a doting mother and secondly,

he had a distant, rigid and punitive father.

And this almost sets off the contrast you make up

what you're missing from the father with the mother

and Hitler did that.

You've got the same kind of scenario there

that you have with many serial killers.

They have an over bonded relationship with their mother

and a much more distant relationship with their father.

- [Narrator] The Hitler's genial family doctor, Eduard Bloch

said that many of their neighbors gossiped

about Klara and her son.

They described Hitler's devotion to his mother

as verging on the pathological.

As an adult, Adolf was outspoken

about his fond memories of his mother.

One evening, he was reminiscing with his friend

and foreign press chief,

Ernst Hanfstaengl about his childhood.

He recalled that his most pleasant memories

were the times he was permitted

to sleep alone with his mother in his parents big bed.

- If you're virtually an only child

with a completely devoted mother,

you really do believe you're the center of the universe.

It would lead to intense narcissism.

And of course, that would apply in any relationship.

So any woman coming into the picture

would be competing with the image of his mother

and never be allowed to get close enough to threaten it.

- [Narrator] Hitler's mother fixation stayed with him.

When he grew to adulthood,

Hitler always hung Klara's portrait over his bedhead.

And as a young man,

he carried his mother's likeness in a locket.

- Nobody can overestimate the importance

of Hitler's mother to his life.

He had her picture everywhere.

He was her particular favorite and very special to her.

And that unquestioning devotion

definitely nursed his view that he was special

and he would go far.

- [Narrator] If Klara Hitler,

pampered and suffocated her son

under a blanket of maternal affection,

the exact opposite was true of Adolf's father.

Alois Hitler was a violent and sadistic tyrant.

Just the sound of his voice made young Adolf cringe.

- Adolf Hitler was physically abused very frequently,

if not daily by his father reportedly at a young age.

He and his brother were both physically beaten with a whip

of some kind.

Hitler, the way he dealt with it as a boy

was he sealed himself and he refused to even cry.

- [Narrator] Adolf's half brother, Alois Junior

would later reveal the dark truth about what had gone on

in the Hitler household.

His family had lived under a pool

cast by the threat of Alois's explosive fits of rage.

He would beat his children to the point of unconsciousness.

When gripped by the foulest moods,

he would also strike Klara.

And when Alois called for his son,

he didn't use his name,

but put two fingers in his mouth

and whistled for him as he did his dog.

His mother was afraid of what Alois might do

to her precious son.

In conversations with his secretary, Christa Schroeder,

Adolf would recall his violent childhood.

He told her he had never loved his father

because he had a terrible temper and often whipped him.

His mother was afraid of what Alois might do

to her precious son.

- When children are abused in that way,

physically or emotionally,

they suffer from what we call a narcissistic injury.

And so the child is extremely hurt,

but at the same time is also extremely angry.

And so there develops this kind of narcissistic rage,

and that rage consists of this anger,

this feeling of wanting to lash out,

of needing retribution,

of needing some kind of revenge,

and it's quite unrelenting.

- [Narrator] But is it rarely possible

that the root causes for some of the most barbarous crimes

in human history can be laid at the door

of an unhappy and abusive childhood?

Yes, Hitler was beaten by his father,

but in Germany at the turn of the century,

physical punishment was the rule

rather than the exception when it came to raising children.

Yet only one of those children became Adolf Hitler.

In the battlefield, that was Hitler's home,

Adolf's closest ally was his smitten mother.

When Hitler's father beat him,

he would run to his mother and she would protect him.

- Adolf was a specially protected child

by this rather modest mother,

his father would regularly beat him.

And when that happened,

the mother and his elder sister

would stand in front of their father

and prevent him beating his son Adolf,

which meant that Adolf saw women as protectors

from quite early on.

- [Narrator] But that feeling of protection

was indelibly associated

with the unceasing threat of violence.

There are some who believe a family dynamic like this

is likely to spawn a person with deep-seated

sado-masochistic tendencies.

Could this dynamic have been a root cause

for making Adolf Hitler the monster he would become?

- If you look at the household Hitler grew up in,

it's really a classic model of a dysfunctional house,

and this must have imprinted on him.

Connection between sexuality and violence is not uncommon

because it's really,

if you look at the basis of sado-masochism,

the two are so totally entwined,

not just what you do sexually,

but how you carry it out.

Power was critical to everything Hitler did.

You know, in any relationship it was,

"I've gotta get power first,

"the rest can follow."

So there's an expression of superiority of power,

seems to course through him

like big stones in a very small stream.

(dramatic music)

- [Narrator] By young adulthood,

violence was a language Hitler was well versed in.

Assault and brutal oppression

were the norm in the Hitler family.

And Adolf grew up knowing nothing else.

But some suggest an even darker moment would imprint itself

on young Hitler's psyche.

- You go to the famous Freudian primal scene

that every child is in a way traumatized

or changed by witnessing their parents having sex.

Whether this affects them drastically

is a source of much argument,

but living in an environment,

not so much where you see your parents having sex,

but you see violence does have an effect on you.

It imprints on you.

(dramatic music)

- [Narrator] Hitler was just 13 years old

when his father died over his morning pint.

- So there's no indication that Hitler grieved

the death of his father.

What we do know is that having,

if you want to look at it as a triangular relationship,

him, his mother and father,

suddenly it became a binary relationship

and his mother had no restraint then

in expressing affection,

but which came out as she could spoil him

to her heart's content.

And as the recipient of this,

he of course was perfectly happy.

- [Narrator] Hitler was free to do whatever he wanted.

He spent his days drawing, painting, and writing poetry

and later described them as the happiest days,

like a beautiful dream.

But life for the women in the Hitler household

was less dreamlike.

His youngest sister, Paula was press-ganged

into helping Klara serve the slothful teenager.

In her journal, Paula described 15-year-old Adolf

slapping her across the face.

The cruelty Adolf Hitler had learned

at his father's knee had taken hold.

- When we think of someone like Hitler,

we have someone who feels this need for power,

for control over other people.

It's a compensation for what was not there in childhood.

And we have someone who also harbors this tremendous hatred,

this tremendous rage,

this tremendous hostility toward others

and toward the world.

- [Narrator] But for the time being at least,

Hitler reveled in being the sole focus

of his devoted mother's undivided attention,

which would prove every bit as damaging to his psyche

as the abuse he suffered at his father's hand.

- A narcissist is somebody totally self-obsessed.

They are the center of the universe.

Everybody around them either has to make them feel better

or be punished for not doing that.

Another way of putting it is simply

that a narcissist is a psychopath

who hasn't been caught yet

because narcissism, as people generally conceive of it

means you can rationalize and justify any behavior.

- [Narrator] And the catalyst for that transformation

from narcissism into raging psychopathy was about to strike.

In 1907, just four years after the death

of her abusive husband and with Hitler,

an impressionable 18-year-old,

Klara Hitler was diagnosed with terminal breast cancer.

When Hitler learned that Klara was dying,

he rushed home to Linz from Vienna,

where he'd been living with his boyhood friend,

August Kubizek.

Klara died on the 21st of December, 1907 at the age of 47.

On the night before she passed away,

she appealed to Adolf's companion August

with a stark message to be a good friend to Hitler

because he has no one else.

- He was certainly shattered when his mother died.

The Jewish family doctor said he'd never seen anyone

as devastated at a funeral

as he saw Hitler there when his mother died.

- And then when she died,

he stayed in the room.

He wouldn't let her go.

He stayed in the room sketching her

because by that time he'd begun to believe

that he was the genius artist,

just simply wouldn't let her go.

- [Narrator] Hitler would describe his mother's passing

as the greatest loss he ever had.

- Hitler was distraught by his mother Klara's death.

Watching somebody,

probably the only person really loves you die terribly

is a traumatic thing.

He would always recollect the extreme grief that caused him.

It was a huge rupture psychologically for him

in his early life.

- [Narrator] But what would Adolf Hitler's mother

have thought of the inexorable rise to power

of the weak little boy she had brought into the world.

(Adolf speaking in foreign language)

When he was appointed chancellor,

Hitler's aunt told a journalist

that his mother had wanted him to be ambitious

and lift himself from his surroundings.

He had certainly done that,

but the violence and misery he would unleash on millions

would've made it hard, even for a loving Klara

to admire what he became.

Both his parents were dead,

but many believe the psychic scars they inflicted

would impede Adolf Hitler's

sexual and psychological development

as he grew into adulthood.

American psychoanalyst, Walter Langer

believed it went further than that.

He claimed that Hitler's dysfunctional relationship

with his parents shaped his warped political views

and his feelings of abandonment and betrayal.

As a soldier in the First World War,

Hitler was devastated

when the Triple Alliance forces surrendered.

He blamed the defeat on the Austria-Hungarian empire.

As far as Adolf was concerned,

Germany had been betrayed

by the decaying Austrian Hapsburg monarchy.

To Hitler, Germany was not the fatherland,

which was the term used by most to describe it.

To Adolf, it was the motherland.

(crowd cheering)

Austria, old, exhausted and corrupt,

embodied Hitler's loathed Austrian father.

Germany, noble, but abused and neglected.

And which unlike Austria,

had accepted the young Adolf into their military ranks

was the motherland.

When asked why he insisted on remaining single,

when rumors were flying about his sexuality,

he replied that his only bride was his motherland.

It was a revealing response.

- I think there was a lot of nationalist mythology

that played a part, but I also think it was part

of Hitler's massive delusionary narcissism

that most people marry a single partner.

He marries a country,

and that was very much a political step as well,

was it just left him free to do what he wanted.

- [Narrator] With his beloved mother dead

and his adopted country defeated, Hitler floundered.

It was only a matter of time

before he filled the void she left in his life.

Walter Langer identified a string of older women

Hitler gravitated to for maternal support,

an emotional sucker early in his career.

It didn't hurt that his substitute mothers

were also wealthy and well connected.

- So Hitler had a couple of patronesses effectively,

elder, rich women with salons who took him up

and must have seen in him a young, charismatic character.

And they got on with him very well.

We know, perhaps because he had a very close relationship

with his mother that he was good with older women.

- [Narrator] Most prominent amongst them

was Helene Bechstein,

whose husband owned the Bechstein Piano Company.

She outfitted him with a new wardrobe,

trained him in the social graces

and introduced him to Bavaria's high society.

- They took him under their wing.

They were charmed by him.

So he had this ability...

And you can imagine basically,

he's a man who's spent such a long time

in close connection with his mother.

And so when these women come along,

people did want him to be their adopted son.

- [Narrator] Given their age difference,

most believed their relationship was platonic.

But as Otto Strasser,

a prominent Nazi who had an acrimonious falling out

with Hitler, described it,

their interaction was abnormally intimate.

Hitler would sit at her feet and close his eyes

while she stroked his hair,

calling him by his pet name, Little Wolf,

Bechstein told friends that she wished Adolf were her son.

- So we can see a pattern in his life

as he was advancing towards his leadership.

He developed strong relationships with older women

like Bechstein and Wagner.

And I think that fitted in with the underlying pathology

of never being able to let go of his mother

and needing maternal figures who weren't threatening,

but were cosseting and supporting him.

- [Narrator] As he became more politically powerful,

Hitlers sorted family history

would start to manifest in more disturbing ways.

And he would switch his attention to much younger women

in particular, his 17-year-old niece, Geli.

Her mother, Angela Hitler was six years older

than her half brother.

She was the youngest of the two children

Alois Hitler conceived with his second wife.

Her young daughter, Geli, Adolf's niece

was the one woman other than his mother

that Hitler is said to have loved.

And disturbingly, it's unlikely to have been

a platonic affection.

- Hitler's relationship with Geli

was definitely the most important relationship of his life.

And when you look at it, you're a bit taken aback.

It was semi-incestuous.

It was his half sister's daughter.

There was a very big age difference.

- She had known Hitler all her life.

And she came to Munich at the age of 17 to lodge with him.

But she wanted to make a name for her herself.

And Hitler obviously felt that she would be safer

living with him in his apartment.

So he took her in and we know that he became

infatuated with her.

She was much younger than him,

significantly younger than him.

- [Narrator] She was 17. Hitler was 36.

And as far as he was concerned, she was the perfect age.

- You choose very young women.

Well, they're no threat to you and they're pliant

and they can be molded.

And Hitler often spoke that,

you know, a perfect wife is somebody

who should be young and molded into shape by her partner.

- [Narrator] Very quickly, Hitler became smitten with Geli

and he didn't mind people knowing.

Hitler's Nazi comrades were irate.

Apart from the concerning optics,

they believed he was using party funds

to court and clothe his niece.

- He showed her off, which at that stage early in his power

was extremely unusual because he took her everywhere.

He took her to the cafe.

He took her to meetings.

He took her to the opera and so on.

So he didn't mind being seen with her.

- [Narrator] Ernst Hanfstaengl thought Geli

was dull and provincial,

but said Hitler was besotted by her.

And he believed it was absolutely certain

Hitler was having sex with his niece.

- She was a rather attractive woman,

had a very outward personality.

Somebody described her as having a sort of

full of animal spirit,

an animal excitement about life

and very positive about life.

- [Narrator] According to the Langer report

for the US government,

there were even more distressing allegations

about the nature of their relationship.

The informant, Otto Strasser,

claimed that Geli had told him that Hitler wasn't interested

in conventional forms of sexual contact.

What he rarely wanted Geli to do was to urinate on him.

It pays to remember that Strasser had it in

for his former comrade.

Many experts questioned the credibility of his testimony.

But in his report for the OSS,

Walter Langer refers to other unnamed sources

who said the same thing.

- Hitler's relationship with Geli

brought out every aspect of himself

that he normally tried to hide.

So it's no surprise that if the rumors have any basis,

that what you can call a basic S and M practice,

being humiliated in the most personal way

with body fluids of the worst kind

are fitted into the scheme.

Inside the masochist, outside the sadist.

- [Narrator] The gossip about the true nature

of the relationship between uncle and niece spread.

Rumors of a folio of pornographic drawings

Hitler made of his niece and an explicit letter

he wrote to Geli detail the depraved things

he wanted to do to her are thought

to have exposed Hitler to blackmail threats.

Whatever the truth was,

it was clear to the people around them

that Geli was deeply unhappy.

- People said she became increasingly more inward

and more introverted and lost this sort of gaiety

that she'd had.

Hitler was controlling her

with an obsessive possessiveness actually.

And it was suffocating in the end.

- And ultimately she must have found the trauma

that Hitler must have inflicted on her too much to bear.

He wasn't just somebody who said,

"I'm gonna stop your allowance."

There was something much deeper

that actually became so traumatic for her,

that she killed herself.

- [Narrator] On the 18th of September, 1931,

Geli shot herself in Hitler's apartment with his gun.

She was just 23 years old.

He was devastated.

- Hitler was known to have been thrown

into a very profound clinical depression

after Geli's death.

The shock sunk him into depression,

people say for two years.

I mean, he really was very, very affected by it.

- After she killed herself,

he had her room locked up,

nobody was allowed to enter.

And he was reputed to go in there once a year

on the date of her death.

- Nothing was to be moved in the room.

Everything was to remain exactly as it had been.

It was like this Egyptian tomb

with the faded roses locked up.

Nobody had a key,

only he could go there and he would sit there for hours

just as he sat there for hours when his mother died.

(Adolf speaking in foreign language)

- [Narrator] In years to come,

Hitler would make every effort to cover up the sorted

and ultimately tragic details of his love affair with Geli.

But the stains of suspicion remained.

In the summary report Walter Langer prepared

for US President Roosevelt,

he concluded that Hitler's sexual preferences

were perverse in the extreme.

- I think Langer hit it right

when he said Hitler was isolated

from the love of normal human beings.

And it refers to this theme

that we've been pursuing of Hitler's existential,

inner emptiness.

Hitler couldn't form a bond with anybody.

- [Narrator] We'll never know how much blame

we can place at the feet of Hitler's mother and father,

for the aberrant human being he became,

but an account of a peculiar event that occurred

later in his life hints at how conflicted he was

with his feelings for his mother and father

for the rest of his life.

Even after Adolf rose to power

and accumulated great wealth,

his parents graves in the Austrian town of Leonding

remains neglected and unmarked.

It was only after local Nazi party functionaries

decided to honor their Fuhrer's mother and father

that a headstone was erected on the otherwise bear earth.

When he heard of what had been done,

Hitler visited the cemetery.

According to witnesses, he glanced at the memorial,

then left without comment.

He never visited their graves again.

Hitler's childhood may have been diabolical

and his family history might well

have been twisted and tainted.

Some of this may explain his irrational

and violent mood swings,

it might have fueled his paranoia

and meant he never developed a moral compass.

And there's a good chance it found expression

in deviant sexual practices,

but despite all that,

there is no evidence to suggest he was mentally ill.

He knew exactly what he was doing.

There's only one way to explain him.

He was pure evil.

(gentle music)