All language subtitles for H T L T o t T R S01E04 The Sleepwalker 1080p HULU WEB-DL DDP5 1 H 264-FFG (1)_track3_[eng]

In June 1940,

just as the final phase
of fighting with France

is winding down,

Hitler visited some of
the World War I battlefields.

Places where he had fought.

The First World War
was such a formative event

in Hitler's life.

The weird fact is,
that in four years of war,

he never made it past
the rank that is equivalent

basically to
Private First Class.

First of all, it's super
unusual for a soldier in

World War I to have
been combat in 1914,

and to still be in
combat and still alive in 1918.

If anyone did do that,

they would,
virtually as a rule,

have been promoted up
to lieutenant or captain

or something
like that by the end.

The fact that Hitler was not,

is one of those
facts that tells you,

there must have been
something wrong with this man

as a soldier.

It is absolutely
bizarre to think that this

sort of aimless,
drifting, bohemian,

private could have ended up
the conqueror of 1940.

In April 1939,
Hitler turned 50.

The popular perception
of Hitler in Germany,

and to some extent
outside of Germany,

is that here is a sensationally
successful statesman.

For Germans to
see Hitler make good on his

promise about defying
the Versailles Treaty,

catapulting Germany
in a position of power and

greatness on the Continent,

that appealed to
almost everyone.

As his
successes piled up in the
second half of the 1930s,

his sense of the grandness
of his mission sort of

inflated to match,

and also his sense of
the urgency of the timing.

He's in a desperate
hurry to start a war.

Hitler's whole
purpose in fighting
the Second World War,

was to conquer Eastern Europe
and turn it into a colony.

In Hitler's mind, the
world was a series of struggles

between nations and a nation
either expanded or it died.

The concept of expansion,

the concept of
acquisition of Lebensraum,

or living space,
was part of his program

from the get-go.

At the time, there
is growing fear in Germany,

among the generals,

that Hitler might take
them into a war that they

would not be able to win.

War with
Czechoslovakia was probably

gonna bring in France and then
probably gonna bring in Britain

and they don't wanna see
their country crushed again.

Mr. Neville Chamberlain,
the Prime Minister.

Since he took office,

Mr. Chamberlain has never
wavered in his determination to

establish peace in Europe.

As luck would
have it, right at this moment,

there's a new prime minister in
Great Britain who's come into

office really aggressively
determined to improve

relations with Germany.

Sudeten German
areas of Czechoslovakia.

Germany would be
able to take over the border

regions of Czechoslovakia,
called the Sudetenland,

where about three million
ethnic Germans lived,

but the rest of Czechoslovakia
would remain independent.

And for a brief moment,

it seemed, to a lot
of the world,

that Chamberlain had succeeded
in what he was trying to do.

That this had averted
the threat of war.

Yeah.

The Western
allies had tried in
various ways to appease Hitler,

to give him small chunks
of territory in order to

prevent him from
making larger claims.

But Hitler felt empowered by
appeasement and realized that

Great Britain and France were
really powerless to stop him.

In March of 1939,

Hitler takes Czechoslovakia,

thereby violating
the trust that the
British had placed in him.

Their nation was
dismembered by the Munich Pact,

and is now destroyed.

Germans jubilant, but
the Czech population is

silent and resentful.

Six months before,

he had agreed to
respect the independence of

what remained of
Czechoslovakia and now here

he's violating his own word.

Neville Chamberlain
had decided that at this point

Hitler had to be stopped,
and that the next aggression

would have to be resisted.

In the summer of 1939,

Hitler was surrounded
by men and women who owed

him their career and
their social status.

No one in this circle
dares to criticize him.

On the contrary,
they are pushing him,

they are supporting him.

As Hitler is
looking at Europe,

he of course faces the
same dilemma that every

modern German
strategist has faced.

Germany is in the
center of Europe.

It has Russia in the east,
it has France and then,

by extension,
Britain in the west.

It was important
to avoid a two-front war

at all cost.

Hitler realizes, in July,

"Ah-ha. My only out here is
to make a short-term alliance

with the Soviet Union.

Hitler realized
that the time was ripe
to invade Poland,

which was part
of his greater strategy.

But knew that without
a non-aggression pact
with the Soviet Union,

his plan to invade Poland
would be an instant disaster.

These are ideological
foes on both sides.

Now, the strange thing
about this is that he's making

alliance with the Soviet Union
in order to start a war,

which ultimately is about
destroying the Soviet Union.

It was very clear
to everyone that this was

a tactical maneuver.

It was clear to Hitler,
it was clear to Stalin,

but it was in both of
their interests to buy time.

Hitler was very good
at making short-term deals in

the service of what he thought
as the long-term project.

Hitler and Stalin both
have psychopathic tendencies.

They both overestimated
their abilities.

They were both ruthless
and lacking empathy.

They were each
impressed and fascinated with

the ability of the other one
to maintain absolute power.

So, in that sense had to
pay begrudging acceptance.

Of course, Hitler
thought of himself as

a foreign policy master

and that's where he
thought that he had the skill

and the panache
to outwit Stalin.

Stalin was smart.

He had long sought
out other alliances,

but Stalin knew that he
couldn't trust the Western

allies to really
stop a German threat,

and so that's when he figured
this chance for an alliance for

non-aggression with Hitler
was his best bet to keep the

Soviet Union out of a war.

The Soviets
were interested in
territorial changes.

Stalin wanted Finland,

he wanted power in
the Baltic states.

He was happy to take
Eastern Poland, Romania.

The Western powers were
not in a position to say,

"Poland, give up
your sovereignty;

Romania, give up
some territory."

Hitler is only
too happy to say to Stalin,

"Of course."

Just, you know,
"agree to what we want,

agree to come in against Poland,

agree not to fight us
and we're good."

Stalin thinks,
once a war starts,

the Germans will be bogged
down fighting the Poles,

the French and the
British and, eventually,

we will come in and
pick up the pieces.

There
are many theories today as to

the significance of the
German-Russian deal.

diplomacy came out of
Berlin and Moscow recently.

is an unavoidable certainty.

Both Hitler and Stalin
were incredibly pleased and

made a show of, of being
friendly toward each other.

Both Hitler and Stalin.

It seemed that once Germany
and the Soviet Union had allied,

that all of Eastern Europe
would fall in its wake.

the next 24 or 48 hours.

it does not seem
possible to anyone here

that it can long continue.

members of the Reichstag
in the Chancellery.

.

I belong to my people as never
before and beginning today,

I am the first
soldier of the German Reich."

If the war starts, it will be
Hitler who is the guilty party.

.

AUDIENCE Heil, heil, heil!

With the
invasion of Poland,

Hitler assumed that nothing
was going to happen.

That, basically, he was going
to be able to get away with

Poland the way that he got
away with Czechoslovakia.

Didn't work out.

He had to adjust and
deal with the realities.

But Hitler,
very quickly,
regains his composure and

mobilizes for war.

What the Poles
see in September of 1939 is
a massive coordinated attack.

Poland is invaded
on all three sides,

by a superior German force.

What the Poles had been
told by the French is,

"if you hold out for two weeks,

we will then invade
Germany from the other side."

The British and
the French in fact did nothing.

The Poles are
fighting valiantly and

desperately and taking
terrible casualties and

basically sort of saying,

"So, Britain and France,
when are you coming in on this?"

The problem was, British and
French strategy rested on the

idea that they
would beat Germany
eventually by economic weight,

but that it would
take a few years,

and that they
wanted to stand on the
defensive for maybe three years,

until they were
strong enough to really take

aggressive action
against Germany.

They didn't communicate
this to the Poles.

Lasting all the way
through September into October,

in these conditions,

reveals that Poland resisted
and with some determination,

especially when we keep in
mind that they were invaded

from the fourth side
by the Red Army.

So,
the Polish position
becomes even more hopeless.

When the war
is basically over,

on 28th September, 1939,
the German Foreign Minister,

Joachim von Ribbentrop,

goes to Moscow
for a second time.

They negotiate a,

"Treaty on Borders and
Friendship", it's called.

This treaty redoes the original
territorial dispensation.

Stalin has decided that he's
no longer interested in Warsaw,

which was originally on
his side of the line,

and more interested in having
a clear hold on the Baltics.

The fact that Warsaw ended
up being on the German side,

meant that suddenly the
German Empire now includes far,

far more Jews than
it did before.

And this changes completely
what the Nazis think of

as the "Jewish Problem".

Up until 1939, the
"Jewish Problem" was a matter

of tens of thousands or
hundreds of thousands of people.

Now it's a matter of
millions of people.

As a young person,
like millions of Germans,

Hitler read the
novels of Karl May,

who wrote all of
these stories about White
settlers in North America

conquering the Western
United States from the

"savage" Indians, so called.

From this, Hitler had
absorbed certain ideas about

American westward expansion and
about the sort of genocidal way

in which Native Americans
were killed to make room for

Americans of European
background to expand

across the West.

And Hitler very clearly seems
to have had this in mind as

kind of a model for
what the Germans could do

in Eastern Europe.

As far as
Hitler was concerned,

anyone basically east of
Germany was not fully human.

So the whole idea of Lebensraum
was, always from the beginning,

really almost
explicitly genocidal.

The Germans invade
with the idea of mass murder.

That's built into the Polish
invasion from the beginning.

The military victory is
going to be followed up by,

and indeed coincide with,
the use of special forces,

which we now know as the
notorious Einsatzgruppen.

This Einsatzgruppen,
they come from the SS,

from the Gestapo,
from the criminal police,
from the regular police.

They moved right behind
the fighting forces and

their task is to
eliminate enemies of the Reich.

And the definition of
enemies of the Reich,

to put it in the
most general way,

is both political and
biological enemies,

particularly Jews and Roma.

The idea is that if
we can get rid of the people

who represent the
heights of religion,

the people who represent
the educated classes,

if we can get rid of the
soldiers and the officers,

strip away the
somehow existing elite,

which shouldn't exist,

so that the rest of the
population can serve as slaves.

And that's meant literally.

Things began to
change right the first night.

After dark, no one is
supposed to leave the house.

A young man tried to cross
the street and a German soldier

said "halt" and he kept on
running and he got machine gun

all the way across.

And he fell right in
front of our house.

They made me carry the body
with four other persons.

And because the way
he was machine gunned,

he was completely,
like, cut in half.

And when I got home,

I always remember
my mother's expression
and my mother's fear,

my mother's cry out
when she saw me,

completely
covered with blood.

By the
end of September,

the Poles are pretty thoroughly
beaten and by early October,

the last bits of
military resistance
have been snuffed out.

Hitler gathers his
generals and says,

"Okay, let's get going."

He wants to invade in
the west right away.

Most people
suspected that this
was going to be a very,

very tough fight
for the Germans.

But the French army
collapsed in six weeks.

This was one of the
great military shockers of

the 20th century.

The German
military commanders realize,

"oh, hey, using
tanks along with air power

is a super effective
way to win quickly."

It succeeded spectacularly
and precipitated the

absolutely shocking
defeat of France in 1940.

Hitler, proclaiming that
the triumph over France was

the most glorious
victory of all time,

ordered a ten day
celebration in Germany.

Reich war flags with their
big swastikas in the center.

I thought he looked very solemn
his face was gray,

but there was a certain spring
in his step as he walked for

the first time towards his
staff where Germany’s fate was

sealed on a
November day of 1918,

a fate, which by
reason of his own being,

is now being radically
changed here on this spot.

The initial armistice
with France is signed in the

Forest of Compiègne,

where the armistice
in 1918 was signed.

And, to go a step further,

the very railway car where
that armistice had been signed,

is hauled out of a
museum so that Hitler
can go there personally,

which he does,

and meet the French
representatives to
sign the armistice.

France, for Germany,

was considered the
arch enemy of Germany,

going back to the 18th century,

to Napoleon and,
of course, to World War I.

He must feel like
he's come full circle because

the First World War was such
a formative event in his life.

Now, he's back,

pretty much literally
as the conquering hero.

Once the German
army wins the war in France,

then for a while,

Hitler has this total
power over his generals,

because many of them
feel that he was right and

they were wrong.

They are particularly awed
by Hitler as their commander,

as the leader of Germany.

I think Hitler's
megalomania was very quickly

able to absorb the
successes he achieved.

I must say, I've never
actually noted anything where

he's expressing surprise.

He more sort of took it for
granted as an obvious result

of what he saw as his
own great genius.

We knew things about
the war, what was going on.

Hitler was always the winner.

He was going to France,
with Paris,

shouting that the soldiers
are now on the Eiffel Tower.

We couldn't believe
that the whole world was

running away before Hitler.

As of the
summer of 1940,

the so called "Jewish Problem"
is much larger than it

had been before.

Suddenly, Germany
controls all of these Jews

and there's no clear plan
for what to do with them next.

Hitler was
obviously very clear about
how much he despised the Jews,

and his rhetoric was so extreme,

some of his favorite terms
were "eradicate", "eliminate".

And so, it created an
atmosphere in which ever more

radical ideas about how
to deal with that problem or

how to address that question
were proposed to Hitler.

What is often misunderstood
is that somehow there was

a plan behind this.

There was no plan of how this
was supposed to be accomplished.

The first reaction of
the Germans is we're gonna push

some Jews out of the territories
we annex into our colony.

There are many hundreds
of thousands of Polish Jews who

have been ghettoized and
are living in ghettos under

very difficult conditions,
with a very high death rate,

both because of epidemics
and because of shortage of

food and because of very hard
working conditions.

The dying is
already very, very high and

had the war
stopped at that point,

we could have certainly
said that this was a genocide.

There were so many
people and so many hungry and

dead and cold people and there
was nothing that anybody can do.

The idea
then becomes slowly,

we're gonna send them
somewhere else, far away,

and let nature
take care of them.

And for a while,

this means sending them
to the Island of Madagascar.

Crazy though that might sound,

after June,
when France surrenders,

this idea suddenly gains
resonance, because Madagascar,

an island off the
southeast coast of Africa,

is a French possession.

But the British
don't surrender,

the British keep fighting,
the British control the ocean,

so Madagascar as a
solution quickly fades.

And then, by the end of 1940,

it becomes clear that
the Jews are gonna have to

be pushed somewhere else.

Now, the Germans
daily would go out and

catch people in the street,

put them in trains
and send them out.

After a while, we
started hearing that...

that those people are
not being sent to work.

And, you know,
nobody wanted to believe.

Now that France
is defeated, thinks Hitler,

the British will find
some kind of honorable
excuse to leave the war.

Hitler keeps thinking,

"we've got them in Britain,
they have their empire,

the British are
surely gonna pull out."

Hitler's view is, "I should
be able to take what's mine,

and the British should
understand because it doesn't

post any kind of
direct threat to them."

He's hoping,
basically, that the British,

at some point,

will see sense and they'll
make a deal and it will be over.

But by now,
Churchill is in power.

Churchill
takes this situation,

which is quite
dismal for Britain really,

all of Britain's
allies have lost...

It's now facing alone a
Germany which still has the

Soviet Union as a
de facto ally...

But Churchill keeps
Britain in the war.

The Germans had
the most powerful ground army

in the world and if they
could somehow land that army

in Great Britain, they would
probably win fairly easily.

But to do that, they've gotta
get their army across water,

which is dominated by the
world's most powerful navy,

still the British Royal Navy,

and covered by the
British Royal Air Force,

which is, arguably,
the world's most powerful

air force at that time.

But the Germans
can't get air superiority,

which means they can't invade.

Please.

When the
Battle of Britain turns out

not to be short and
sweet for Germany,

then Hitler has
to make a choice,

and the choice is do
I keep fighting the British,

kind of pointlessly, or do
I return to the main goal?

And remember, the main goal
from the beginning has always

been the destruction
of the Soviet Union.

If he fights the
Soviet Union with the British

still in the war, that
means a two-front war.

It means a strategic
nightmare that, you know,

every German
understands immediately,

and that turns out to be the
thing which brings him down.

The funny thing
about Hitler is that a lot of

what he did seems
inexplicable unless you
consider his starting premise,

and his premises are
usually either crazy, or evil,

or horrific, or something.

But if you accept his premise,
his actions then sometimes

actually flow fairly
logically from that.

The British must be counting
on the Soviets as their kind of

last potential ally on
the European continent.

If the Germans can
knock the Soviets out,

then the British will see his
stance and they will have won

the war and, of course,

he'll have control of the
resources of the Soviet Union,

which will make Germany
impregnable against any kind

of Anglo-American assault.

almost without ceasing.

before he violated the
sanctity of Soviet borders.

The
invasion itself is the largest

invasion in human history,

just in terms of the
number of people involved.

By the time it happens,
in June of 1941,

about 3.5 million soldiers
invade the Soviet Union.

The invasion
does start off as a very clear

military strategic move,
but then the planning sort of

morphs into something
much more, in a sense, evil.

The elements of outright
genocidal assault on the

peoples of Eastern Europe
starts to become clearer and

clearer and clearer.

The notion was that
we're not carrying out a

conventional military campaign,

we are carrying
out a campaign of political

and social destruction,

which is gonna prepare
the way for an empire.

On the eve of the
invasion of the Soviet Union,

Hitler issues the
Barbarossa Orders.

The Barbarossa
Orders are a whole set
of orders that have to do,

both with the
military operations,
but also with conduct.

So when the German
army marches in,

it is already equipped with a
set of orders that legitimize

what we would recognize
today as war crimes.

One of the most
notorious of these is the

so-called Commissar Order,

which specified that captured
Soviet political officers

were to be executed.

Stalin tried to read
Hitler in the sense that he

tried to think of Hitler
as a rational actor.

Stalin's main blunder is that
he thought that Hitler wouldn't

dare do something so irrational
as to engage in a two-front war.

But, of course, Hitler
was aware of this common

perception, and a
very good perception,

that a two-front war would
be terrible for Germany,

and that's precisely
why he was able to get
this element of surprise.

When Hitler moved to
his East Prussian headquarters,

Hitler thought within three
months they would be victorious

over the Soviet army.

Hitler's top generals
were going to kill Hitler.

I think that marks the
point where he kinda loses it.

And without Hitler, none
of this would have happened.

But there were millions
of people involved,

not those who were killed,
those who made it possible.

They have
the methods and they have

the willingness to murder
Jews on a mass scale.

Nobody came to our aid.
Nobody helped the Jews.

Captioned by
Cotter Media Group.