Original subtitles

Powell: Adolf Hitler caused the deaths of 50 million people.

An entire nation followed him to ruin.

He was hated by those he persecuted

and even by some of his own commanders,

yet, in 25 years, no one managed to kill him.

Winston Churchill had very few bodyguards,

whilst Hitler had thousands.

He needed them.

During his travels across Europe,

there were over 40 attempts on his life.

Now, with access to captured original SS records,

the producers of "Churchill's Bodyguard"

can reveal for the first time, in this new series,

how fate and a small number of hand-picked bodyguards

helped this evil genius to cheat death

on so many occasions.

Why did no one manage to kill Adolf Hitler?

Enough people wanted to.

But as this series shows,

it was not as simple as it sounds.

Within a few months of Hitler becoming Chancellor of Germany

in January 1933,

the number of his enemies increased enormously,

and he feared revenge attacks from all of them.

His bodyguards scanned the crowds

at every event he attended,

searching for a sudden move,

an aggressive gesture --

anything unusual that might betray

an imminent assault.

Germany's Jews seemed a particular danger.

They had overwhelming reasons for loathing Hitler

and wanting him dead.

Anti-Semitism was at the heart of Nazi ideology

from the beginning.

Brown-shirted SA men

routinely smashed the windows of Jewish shops

or scrawled anti-Semitic slogans on walls.

Jews were harassed

and attacked in the street by Nazi thugs.

Hitler's hatred of the Jews was profound

and long-lasting.

He didn't care what the rest of the world thought of him.

The Third Reich remained hideously anti-Semitic

until it was blasted to pieces

in the rubble of Berlin.

Those Jews who could afford

to flee Nazi Germany started a new life abroad

with their families.

But many could not,

and some would not.

They believed they were good and patriotic Germans

and would not be hounded out of their country by a madman.

[Crowd cheering]

Once Hitler had become

Chancellor in January 1933,

he wasted little time in ramping up the pressure

on Germany's Jewish population.

The burning of the Reichstag --

the German parliament --

in February gave him the excuse

to crack down on all opposition.

Prominent Jews were singled out

for their financial or political power

and their homes raided.

Among these was Albert Einstein,

the winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921,

whose theory of relativity had made him world famous.

But in 1933, he was just another Jew,

as far as Hitler was concerned.

He was believed to be

hoarding a huge arsenal of weapons

in preparation for an assault on the Nazi regime.

The raid made headlines around the world.

The New York Times reported what the Nazis uncovered.

"The nearest thing to arms they found was a bread knife.

"Professor Einstein's home, which for the present is empty,

"the professor being on his way

"back to Europe from the United States,

"was surrounded on all sides,

"and one of the most perfect raids

"of recent German history was carried out.

"The outcome was a disappointment to those

"who have always regarded Professor Einstein's

pacifist utterances as a mere pose."

It was a global embarrassment for Hitler,

but he shrugged it off.

The raid was for internal consumption to cow Germany's

Jewish population even more.

Shortly afterwards, Einstein renounced

his German citizenship and emigrated

to the United States.

He stayed there for the rest of his life,

becoming an American citizen in 1940.

The brain-drain of top German Jewish scientists abroad

was a major catastrophe for Hitler.

It meant that when war came, he had fewer

senior scientists to call on to develop new weapons.

And in 1939, it was Einstein

who wrote to U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt,

urging him to start work on a nuclear weapon

before Hitler did.

Ultimately, Hitler's expulsion of Jewish scientists

would be a greater threat to him

than any assassin.

In 1935, Hitler introduced

the Nuremberg Laws on citizenship and race.

These withdrew citizenship from people of non-German blood

and effectively banned Jews from the professions

and the civil service.

It was the first step towards their

total elimination from German society.

One of the results of this ban was to stop

Jewish students from studying at German universities.

It created a whole section of disaffected young men

who now sought ways to hit back

at the society that had rejected them.

While some Jews still hoped the new laws would be temporary,

others decided that it was time to fight

and joined underground opposition groups.

One formed around Otto Strasser.

With his elder brother Gregor, he had been among

the leaders of the early National Socialist Party.

But the brothers took the "Socialist" part

of the Nazis' name too seriously for Hitler's liking.

In 1926, at a Nazi rally in Bamberg,

Gregor pushed strongly for a socialist agenda,

but Hitler rejected his proposals,

arguing that they sounded too much like

their Communist rivals.

Tension continued, and in 1930,

Hitler expelled Otto Strasser from the party.

Wisely, Strasser fled abroad

to Prague in Czechoslovakia.

There, he set up an anti-Hitler organization

called the Black Front.

Although Otto had been a Nazi, it did not stop him from

recruiting alienated Jewish students

who wanted to strike back at Hitler.

After his brother's escape,

Gregor's position became increasingly precarious.

In 1932, with the Nazis on the verge of political power,

came the final showdown.

[Crowd cheering ]

Knowing that Strasser and Hitler had very divergent ideas,

Chancellor Kurt von Schleicher attempted to split the Nazis

by offering Gregor the position of vice-chancellor.

Hitler was furious.

He insisted that the offer was refused

and accused Gregor of stabbing him in the back.

[Speaking German]

By the end of 1932, Gregor had resigned from the Nazi party.

But, less wise than his brother, he chose to remain in Germany.

An early member of Otto Strasser's Black Front

was Walter Stennes,

the SA leader in Berlin.

Like many brownshirts, he sympathized with

the anti-capitalist views of the Strasser brothers.

Following Otto Strasser's dismissal

from the Nazi party in 1930,

Stennes led protests against the luxurious lifestyles

of the top Nazis.

Hitler could see the imminent danger of a catastrophic mutiny

and rushed to Berlin to meet Stennes.

They patched up their differences,

but it was only a temporary truce.

Fearing that the SA was becoming uncontrollable,

Hitler now summoned Ernst Röhm, the brownshirts' former leader,

back from Bolivia.

He hoped his old comrade would help him reassert order.

In fact, this decision only made matters worse,

for Röhm also saw the Nazis and the SA

as a truly revolutionary organization.

Soon, he would be an even greater threat

to Hitler's personal security.

The fall-out from this affair would unite Nazi and Jew

against Hitler.

As he returned from Bolivia

to take day-to-day command of the SA,

Ernst Röhm was given a surprising warning.

The brownshirts' leader in Berlin, Walter Stennes,

told him that the Fuhrer should not be trusted.

By mixing with big business, he was intent on betraying

the true socialist principles of the Nazi Party.

Röhm may have been sympathetic to Stennes's views,

but he knew where the power lay,

and soon started to undermine Stennes's position.

In April 1931, Stennes was ordered to move from Berlin

to the SA's headquarters in Munich

to become its Chief of Organization.

He refused, even when directly ordered to do so by Hitler.

Once again, the SA seemed on the verge of a revolt.

And once again, Hitler acted swiftly,

using the SS to get the Storm Troops under control.

Stennes fled to Prague

and joined Otto Strasser's Black Front opposition group.

Before he went, he gave Röhm a grim prophecy --

Man: But I warn you.

I say, after you have liquidated me,

you will be liquidated yourself.

Powell: After Hitler became Chancellor in 1933,

Stennes made the mistake of returning to Germany.

He was arrested by the SS and faced

certain execution.

But Hermann Göring,

who had been his friend at cadet school

many years before,

arranged for Stennes to be exiled.

The former Brownshirt commander

sailed to China, where he became bodyguard

to the Chinese dictator Chiang Kai-shek.

Stennes's prophecy came true

just three years later

in the Night of the Long Knives.

Hitler liquidated

Ernst Röhm and other senior leaders of the SA...

[Gunshots]

and took the opportunity

to get rid of other opponents of the Nazi regime.

[Gunshot]

Otto Strasser was at the top of the list,

but he was safely out of the country in Prague.

His older brother was not so fortunate.

Gregor was arrested by the Gestapo and shot

at its Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse headquarters.

For two more years,

Otto welcomed angry young men into the Black Front.

They came from the stream of emigres

that escaped to Czechoslovakia

looking for justice against Hitler.

Not surprisingly,

the Nazis swiftly expanded the bodyguard agencies

designed to counter this threat.

In 1931, Himmler had been authorized --

ironically, by Röhm, who was then his nominal boss --

to establish a security and intelligence service

within the SS to gather information about

enemies of the Nazi Party and to keep watch

on Party members.

Known as the Sicherheitsdienst, or SD,

this new department

was put under the command of an ice-cold

and ruthless ex-navy officer, Reinhard Heydrich.

And when the secret state police,

the Geheime Staatspolizei, or Gestapo,

also became part of Heinrich Himmler's police empire

in April 1933, it began to work alongside the SD,

doing the dirty work of arresting

and interrogating suspects.

In June 1936,

both organizations were placed formally

under Heydrich's control.

Together, the Gestapo and SD hunted down

anyone who might conspire against Hitler.

Jews, Communists, and any sort of dissident --

anyone who even told an anti-Nazi joke --

were arrested and sent to concentration camps.

Behind the apparent jubilation of the population,

it was Gestapo

and SD agents who arrested over 60,000

supposed enemies of the Nazi state in Vienna

when Austria was absorbed into the Third Reich

in 1938.

The SD took the lead in infiltrating opposition groups

outside Germany's borders,

and its tentacles spread across Europe.

While the intelligence-gathering

and secret-police functions of the SS

were being expanded,

Hitler's own security arrangements also saw

a quantum leap in size and complexity.

Alongside the eight-man SS-Begleitkommando,

Hitler's close protection squad,

came two new and potentially competing groups.

On March 17, 1933,

Hitler had ordered the recruiting

from SS ranks of his own palace guard

which soon became known as

the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler.

Initially just 120 men under the command of a tough

former army sergeant and police officer,

Sepp Dietrich, the Leibstandarte's role

was to guard Hitler's residences and offices,

form a human wall around the Fuhrer

during public appearances,

and to provide muscle for special security tasks.

Within a year,

the unit had grown to almost 1,000 men

and was based at the Lichterfelde Barracks.

Although nominally under the control of Himmler,

Dietrich always took his instructions

directly from Hitler.

To confuse matters, just two days earlier,

Himmler had authorized the establishment of

a Fuhrer protection group,

the Fuhrerschutzkommando,

staffed by detectives of the Bavarian State Police.

Headed by 36-year-old Inspector Johann Rattenhuber,

the Fuhrerschutzkommando initially only had

authority within Bavaria.

But the potential for confusion

between these new bodyguard units

was shown by an incident later in 1933.

Driving through Munich one evening,

Hitler became aware of a car following his own.

He told his SS driver-bodyguard, Erich Kempka,

to increase the speed of his supercharged Mercedes,

and eventually, the pursuing car was shaken off.

On further investigation, it turned out that

the strange car was part of Rattenhuber's protection group,

which had not bothered to tell the Fuhrer's close bodyguard.

Hitler took a dim view of this, having a strong aversion

to all police ever since his days in opposition.

But by 1934, Himmler had persuaded Hitler

that he needed the 12 officers of the Fuhrerschutzkommando,

and they were authorized to operate

throughout the Third Reich.

In 1935,

the Fuhrerschutzkommando became part of

a separate Reich agency, the Reichssicherheitsdienst,

or Reich Security Service --

the RSD.

As with the Leibstandarte,

the RSD was nominally part of Himmler's SS empire,

but, like Sepp Dietrich,

Rattenhuber answered directly to Hitler.

Responsible for Hitler's overall security,

the RSD followed up reports of assassination plots,

sometimes overlapping with the SD,

kept key places under surveillance,

secured travel routes,

and checked personnel and locations

before important public appearances.

By 1936, the RSD had 56 officers,

most still recruited from Bavaria.

They wore black SS uniforms or plainclothes,

depending on their missions.

If the array of security agencies now protecting Hitler

sounds complicated, that is not surprising.

It was meant to be like this.

Hitler encouraged a certain amount of chaos

in government since he believed

it kept the various departments and factions

competing and conspiring against each other and not him.

Nazi bureaucratic in-fighting

was yet another way of

safeguarding the Führer.

As Hitler tightened his control over the Third Reich

and the number of agencies and secret policemen

dedicated to his protection expanded enormously,

the Jewish opponents of his regime

were becoming increasingly desperate to act.

Soon their efforts

would be putting Hitler's bodyguard to the test.

The increased presence of Hitler's security forces

on the streets of Germany,

both publicly and secretly, made operating within it

very difficult and dangerous

for active opponents of the Third Reich.

It is not surprising, therefore,

that one of the first major strikes against a senior Nazi

took place beyond German borders in Switzerland.

David Frankfurter was a 27-year-old Croatian Jew,

the son of a rabbi.

He had gone to Germany to study medicine but had been

forced to abandon his course by Hitler's

anti-Semitic Nuremberg Race Laws.

He hoped to find freedom from persecution in Switzerland,

but the Nazis were active there as well.

The head of the Nazi Party in the country

was the virulently anti-Semitic Wilhelm Gustloff,

a Swiss civil servant.

Frankfurter selected him as his target.

On February 4, 1936,

he went to Gustloff's home in Davos

and was welcomed in by his wife.

He calmly waited for his target

in his study while sitting opposite

a portrait of Hitler.

When Gustloff entered,

Frankfurter shot him five times in the head, neck, and chest.

He then gave himself up to the Swiss police.

The Swiss authorities resisted all pressure

to send Frankfurter back to Nazi Germany

and prosecuted the case themselves.

He was sentenced to 18 years in prison.

Hitler and the Nazi hierarchy were shocked

by the brazen shooting of Gustloff.

He was one of their keenest representatives abroad,

and they gave him an elaborate state funeral.

The killing was particularly

embarrassing and awkward for the Nazi regime

since it came just as Germany prepared to welcome

thousands of visitors to Berlin

for the summer Olympics.

[Crowd cheering ]

Thousands of SS agents were deployed to protect Hitler

and his Nazi henchmen as they paraded daily

before the world in their spectacular stadium.

His bodyguard's blanket coverage of the Berlin Olympics

ensured that they passed without incident.

Hitler suffered nothing worse than the embarrassment

of seeing his racist views undermined

when American black athlete Jesse Owens

won four gold medals.

David Frankfurter had almost certainly been a loner,

inspired to kill Gustloff by his personal hatred of the Nazis.

But the next serious attempts on Hitler's life

came from Otto Strasser's Black Front.

And they came in Nuremberg,

the symbolic heart of Hitler's regime.

It was in this medieval city in Bavaria

that the Fuhrer held his greatest rallies,

attracting hundreds of thousands of supporters.

[Crowd cheering ]

It was also the city that gave its name

to the hideously anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws

that banned them from public life.

Strasser and his Jewish conspirators intended to explode

two bombs concealed in suitcases --

one at the Nazi headquarters

and one at the offices of the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer.

Julius Streicher, the publisher of Der Stürmer,

was a key target for the Jews in the Black Front.

This bald-headed brute of a man was a former school teacher

who became notorious for his obscene verbal

and literary attacks on Germany's Jews.

Streicher used Der Stürmer to denounce the Jews

as degenerate sub-humans,

the source of all the ills afflicting Germany.

A 20-year-old Jewish student called Helmut Hirsch

was chosen to plant the bombs.

Like Frankfurter, Hirsch had been excluded from university

by the Nuremberg Laws, and moved to Prague.

On December 20, 1936,

Hirsch entered Nazi Germany,

telling the border guards he was visiting his sick mother.

Unfortunately, they knew his parents were living in Prague,

and began tailing him.

Hirsch had been instructed to pick up the suitcase bombs

in Nuremberg from a contact,

but he lost his nerve at the last moment

and went on to Stuttgart instead.

There the Gestapo were waiting, and arrested him.

Hirsch was taken to Gestapo headquarters in Berlin

and brutally interrogated.

During a secret trial,

it emerged that he had been betrayed

by a Nazi double agent working in Prague

within the Black Front.

In March 1937,

Hirsch was condemned to death and guillotined.

Further agents were sent to Prague

to eradicate the Black Front,

but it was the dramatic events of the following year

which effectively did the job.

Hitler's occupation of the Sudetenland

in western Czechoslovakia in October 1938

brought Nazi power too close for comfort.

Strasser left Prague for Canada, and the Black Front

soon lost its power base as Hitler completed

the takeover of Czechoslovakia in March 1939.

The Black Front was gone,

but its threat still haunted Hitler.

Strasser's thirst for revenge seemed to remain

a clear and ever-present danger,

even though he was far away across the Atlantic.

It was not for several years

that Hitler would have an opportunity to eliminate

what he regarded as one of his most implacable opponents.

But when rumors finally reached him

that Strasser had returned to Europe,

Hitler was determined to make no mistake,

and put one of his most lethal SS hit men on his trail.

[ Knocking ]

The man selected to track down and terminate Otto Strasser

was a senior SS counter-intelligence officer,

Walter Schellenberg.

He had joined the SS from university

in 1933 and quickly impressed

Himmler and Heydrich.

By 1939, he had become deputy head

of the Sicherheitsdienst, or SD, the security

and counterintelligence arm of the SS.

In addition to investigating plots against Hitler,

the SD sometimes undertook preemptive strikes to kidnap

or assassinate potential enemies.

Early in 1941, the SS began receiving rumors

that Otto Strasser had returned to Europe.

He was working with British and American agents

in neutral Portugal on plans to assassinate Hitler.

This was enough for Hitler.

He had killed Strasser's brother, Gregor,

and he wanted Otto tracked down and eliminated.

Early in April, Schellenberg was called to a meeting

with Himmler, Heydrich, and Hitler

at the Reich Chancellery and given his instructions.

The method to be used was a bacterial poison

developed by a Nazi scientist.

One drop of it would be sufficient to kill Strasser.

With his deadly cargo,

the SS hit man set off by air across wartime Europe.

Flying to Lyon, Barcelona, and Madrid,

he finally reached Lisbon.

The mission turned out to be a wild goose chase.

Schellenberg spent 16 days in the Portuguese capital

searching for him, but Strasser could not be found.

In fact, he was still in Canada.

Hitler would never get Strasser

and would have to live with the constant threat he posed.

Despite the impression of power and control

that the great Nuremberg Rally of 1936

was designed to reinforce, the assassination

of Wilhelm Gustloff and the attempt by Helmut Hirsch

to plant bombs during that year

convinced Hitler's security services that the Jews

would be a constant threat.

But it is a curious fact that throughout this period

of growing racial persecution,

Nazi intelligence agencies were in

constant contact with Jewish organizations abroad,

and not just in order to infiltrate them.

Hitler's attempt to rid Europe

completely of all Jews by exterminating them did not begin

until World War II was well underway.

Before the war, forced emigration

was the preferred tool for driving Jews

out of Germany and Austria.

And Palestine, the historic "lost homeland of the Jews,"

came to be seen as a good place to go.

At the time, it was under British rule

and contained a substantial Arab population.

Nevertheless,

tens of thousands of Jews

forced out of Germany settled there.

Local Arab opposition to this massive influx

was fierce and violent.

To protect themselves,

Palestinian Jews set up a paramilitary organization --

the Haganah.

And it made contact with Himmler's SS

to facilitate further emigration to Palestine.

A meeting was arranged between SS agent Adolf Eichmann

and a Haganah representative in Haifa

in Palestine on October 2, 1937.

Arab anti-Jewish riots

prevented that meeting,

but they eventually met in Cairo, Egypt,

on November 10, 1937.

There, the Haganah agent attempted to

enlist Eichmann's help by hinting at

at least one other Jewish conspiracy,

based in Paris, to kill Hitler.

He promised to look further into this plot

and amazingly even offered to spy

for the Nazis in return for help

in getting Jews out of Germany.

These inducements had considerable success,

as Yitshaq Ben-Ami,

a former member of Haganah, reported after the war.

He helped us.

He gave us foreign exchange.

He gave us permits to take people

out of Bohemia and Moravia,

out of Slovakia, out of Vienna.

As long as we could move people out,

we had his support.

Haganah's twisted view was that Zionists

should collaborate with Nazi policies

because they built up the number of Jews in Palestine.

But what Haganah was probably unaware of was that Eichmann

was also meeting the Grand Mufti,

Amin al-Husayni,

who was organizing bloody uprisings against the Jews.

He would eventually become

Hitler’s main Arab ally in the war against Britain.

By 1939, the level of violence between the Arabs and the Jews

had forced the British to ban any further Jewish

emigration to Palestine.

Despite all the layers of police surveillance in Nazi Germany,

there was still room for a determined enemy agent

to penetrate the rings of security.

Increasingly, this threat came from abroad.

Hitler was now an international statesman,

and his aggressive views

on foreign policy alarmed many of his neighbors.

Some of them began to explore

the possibility of killing him.

Hitler both admired and hated the Soviet Union.

He remained anti-capitalist throughout his career

and ran Germany on semi-socialist lines,

copying Soviet five-year plans

for his big economic leaps forward.

He also admired the ruthlessness of Joseph Stalin,

leader of the Soviet Union.

But what Hitler hated was the way in which

German communists were ready to submit to

the aims of their masters in the Soviet Union.

The German nation was sacred to Hitler,

and he would never allow it

to be undermined by foreign influences.

Hitler had fought communism

on the streets of Germany to win power.

Now he was Chancellor,

he was determined to oppose it internationally.

His first major opportunity to do this came in 1936

with the outbreak of civil war in Spain.

Stalin backed the left-wing Republican government

with weapons and military advisers

in an attempt to add Spain

to the international communist movement.

So Hitler backed the Nationalists

and sent them military assistance,

including his Condor Legion

of advanced bombers and fighter aircraft.

The Spanish Civil War

became a dress rehearsal for World War ll.

It attracted thousands of volunteers

from outside Spain --

many of them left-wingers who served in

an international brigade supporting the Republican cause.

Among these was a 21-year-old Briton, Alexander Foote.

While serving in Spain,

he was recruited by Soviet military intelligence.

And in 1937, he was sent to Switzerland

to work as radio operator for a Soviet spy ring.

A year later, Foote was instructed to investigate

the feasibility of killing Hitler.

He traveled to Munich and homed in

on Hitler's favorite restaurant, the Osteria Bavaria.

His investigation revealed startling gaps

in Hitler's security.

The RSD did not seem to check

who had access to it,

and Foote decided that it would be easy to plant a bomb.

So he reported to Moscow that the German dictator

would be an easy target to eliminate.

But then he was told to take no further action.

A possible reason for this abrupt change of mind

is that the Great Purge,

which Stalin had unleashed in 1936

against his political rivals,

was now devouring his armed forces.

The Soviet Union was in chaos and militarily exposed.

To provoke a war with Germany by killing Hitler

seemed inadvisable

The disaster which was now convulsing the Red Army

may well have been begun, or at least stoked up,

by the Germans themselves.

For in early 1937,

Heydrich received a report from Nikolai Skoblin,

a White Russian emigre based in Paris,

which stated that the Soviet Marshal,

Mikhail Tukhachevsky,

was plotting to overthrow Stalin.

Tukhachevsky was one of Stalin's most talented generals.

At just 31 years old,

he became chief of staff of the Soviet Army

and was a key figure in its modernization.

To keep up with military developments,

Tukhachevsky made several trips to Germany to watch maneuvers

and had close links with its generals.

But this made him suspect in the eyes of the NKVD --

the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs,

forerunner of the dreaded KGB.

Heydrich saw a golden opportunity

to heighten Soviet paranoia...

and arranged a break-in at the Bendlerstrasse offices

of the German military intelligence, the Abwehr,

to search for hard evidence.

Not surprisingly, documents were found,

quite possibly planted by SD agents,

suggesting that Tukhachevsky was indeed

plotting with the German general staff.

These were then passed via Czech intelligence

to President Edvard Beneš, an ally of Stalin.

By May 1937, the information was in

the Soviet dictator's hands.

On June 4th, Tukhachevsky was arrested.

He was violently tortured.

His written confession was stained with his blood.

A week later, he was put on trial along with seven other

senior members of the general staff,

all accused of plotting to kill Stalin.

Despite being tortured,

none of the eight suspects pleaded guilty.

But in the typed trial report,

all their "nos" were changed to "yeses"

They were condemned to death.

Shortly afterwards, all eight generals were shot

and their bodies buried in anonymous graves.

Over the next ten days,

hundreds more high-ranking officers were arrested.

From May 1937

to September 1938, over 35,000 officers

were arrested or expelled from the Red Army.

It is unknown how many of these were executed

or died in the gulags.

Such a savage assault on the Red Army

inevitably had repercussions.

In 1939, when Stalin turned to it

to invade Finland, it lacked

the experienced officers needed.

The resulting chaos meant that

68,000 Soviet troops died

in what should have been an easy victory.

The lamentable performance of the Red Army in Finland

encouraged Hitler to press ahead

with his plans to attack the Soviet Union.

By drastically reducing the strength of Germany's

major adversary, Heydrich and his SD agents

had arguably done more to protect their Fuhrer

than anyone else.

By the end of 1937, Hitler was confident

that his regime was securely established in Germany,

but the threat of assassination still lurked.

[Crowd chanting]

The oppression of Germany's Jews continued.

17-year-old Herschel Grynszpan wanted to leave Germany

for Palestine but was too young to go.

Instead, he moved to Paris to live with his uncle.

In the autumn of 1938,

he received disturbing news from his sister.

His family was part of a large group of Jews

which had been forcibly deported to Poland.

Grynszpan was enraged and decided to take revenge.

On the November 7, 1938, he shot Ernst vom Rath,

the Third Secretary at the German Embassy,

who later died of his injuries.

Hitler went mad when he heard news of the assassination

and unleashed a pogrom

against all Jews who remained in Germany.

[Speaking German]

This erupted on the night of November 9th.

Synagogues were destroyed.

Jewish shops and houses

were burned and looted.

Thousands of Jews were arrested.

The horror became known as "Kristallnacht",

the Night of the Broken Glass.

Gunther Triedwindt, then a schoolboy,

watched the Storm Troops

trashing the neighbors' flat.

Man: I didn't understand

the world any more.

I asked my mother, "Why are these men doing such things?"

And she told me, "Don't worry, they are Jews anyway."

And I said, "What, are there other kind of people?"

And she said, "Yes, they are like vermin in the larder."

Like many in Germany,

his mother had been brainwashed by an unrelenting diet

of Nazi propaganda portraying Jews as responsible

for all Germany's problems.

A few weeks after Kristallnacht,

Hitler made a speech to the Reichstag

in which he stated, for the first time,

the appalling logic of his hatred of the Jews.

[Hitler speaking German]

[Crowd cheering ]

Hitler's hatred of Jews could not be more

clearly displayed to the world.

It sent a chill through those living abroad.

One of them decided enough was enough.

A. E. Clouston,

a New Zealand test pilot living in Britain,

was approached by an anonymous Jewish businessman

with an extraordinary proposition --

a million pounds if he would kill Hitler.

The plan was that

Clouston would fly to Berlin and bomb Hitler

as he reviewed a parade.

He would use the de Havilland DH.88 Comet,

an innovative long-range aircraft

that Clouston had just flown on

a record-breaking journey around the world.

The aircraft would set off from a secret airstrip

in northeast England, heavily disguised to hide its origin.

It would then cross the North Sea

and turn in towards the Baltic,

flying low over the sea to avoid detection.

The round trip to Berlin was 1,600 miles,

but the Comet would still have two hours left.

On arrival,

the aircraft would fly down the Charlottenburger Chaussee

and drop two bombs on Hitler's reviewing stand.

The Jewish businessman had his plan

all worked out and the money to back it.

Clouston was astonished.

The money was a huge amount at the time,

and, for a moment, he was tempted.

But he concluded that the Gestapo would never give up

on the man who murdered the Fuhrer,

and he would be hunted down wherever he tried to hide.

Also, he was not Jewish, and had no personal quarrel with Hitler.

But soon,

even a New Zealander like Clouston

would be thrust into a world war by the madman --

unless he could be stopped.

As the march to war began, the next most

deadly threat to Hitler would come

from an unexpected direction.

Many of his army generals began to dread the outbreak

of another European war.

They believed that Hitler had to be stopped

before the Allies ganged up on them.

Secretly, they devised a plan to arrest the dictator,

and, if he resisted, shoot him.

Having survived all the attempts by his enemies

to assassinate him, it looked as though Hitler

might now become a victim of his own

military protectors.

The men who had sworn to safeguard him with their lives

were plotting to kill him.

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