All language subtitles for H T L T o t T R S01E06 The Collapse 1080p HULU WEB-DL DDP5 1 H 264-FFG (1)_track3_[eng]

Hitler spent so
much of his life performing.

He developed this propensity
to dwell in a, a fantasy world.

I'm convinced that lurking
in Hitler's psyche was a belief

that he was actually
living out some kind of

apocalyptic Wagnerian opera.

Germany, as it is
being bombed and occupied,

is a stage, a stage
in a gigantic opera,

in which he is about to
become the martyred, and fallen,

and betrayed savior of Germany.

And at the end, when the
catastrophe was looming,

this ability to dwell in
a world of make-believe,

and fantasy, took over
in some kind of sense.

In some sense, it is
absolutely bizarre to think

that this sort of aimless,
drifting postcard-painter of

the Vienna years
could have ended up;

A; the conqueror of 1940,

and then, B; the man
in the bunker in 1945.

But in another sense,
the personality actually

seems to be rather consistent.

He's both disengaged and
fueled by delusions of grandeur,

that's quite consistent
all the way through his life.

He was
an artist of evil.

He had created a kind of evil

that the world
had never seen before.

It wasn't that he'd done
pathetic little landscapes.

It was that he reshaped
the entire landscape of

half the world.

.

The war hadn't ended.

This was January 1945,
Bergen-Belsen,

where I was only 15 years old.

The conditions were truly...

Inhuman.

Nobody could survive in the
long run on one meal a day,

which consisted of
one piece of bread,

and turnips boiled in water.

There were epidemics;
cholera, pneumonia, dysentery.

Every night I went to
sleep hoping I would wake up

the next morning, and
when I did, I was surrounded

by people who had
died during the night.

Bergen-Belsen is often referred
to as a slow-death camp.

It didn't have gas chambers,

but the number of people
survived was very small.

Hitler wanted to
murder all Jews,

and get rid of them.

He was the epitome
of hatred, to me.

GÖRTEMAKER: From the
beginning of the war,

Hitler declared
victory or collapse,

all or nothing.

The Allied powers
were advancing.

The people around
Hitler were scared to death,

and they knew
they needed a victory.

In the winter
of 1944, and into 1945,

Hitler attempts, in the West,
a last-ditch counter-attack

into American-occupied Belgium,

which produces the
famous Battle of the Bulge.

Supreme Headquarters in
Paris say that Nazi armor has

advanced more than 20 miles int
Belgium and Luxembourg on this,

the fourth day of
the greatest German
counter-offensive of this war.

the Germans have ever had.

But by the
middle of January,

the American army is
pushing the German army

out of the Low Countries.

The
German salient is withering

like a winter's leaf.

In the air, at least 124 German
planes were shot down today.

Ultimately, the
Battle of the Bulge is

a calamitous defeat for Germany,

and sets the stage
for the big American and

British push
into Germany itself.

the Nazis fight back
with furious desperation.

Nazi rear-guard
action is fanatical

as they try to
stem the red tide.

GÖRTEMAKER: When Hitler
returned from the Western Front

to Berlin, the whole situation
in Germany was desperate,

and he himself was depressed.

He increasingly suspected
the German army of defeatism,

and he was absolutely
adamant that the war had to

be continued at any cost.

At some level, he
must have understood that

the war was over, and that
Germany was facing catastrophe.

But Hitler had no mercy,
or no pity, no sympathy

for anyone who did not
follow him, basically,

to the end.

The war'
most sustained aerial offensive

battling Berlin,
day and night blasting

Nazi oil plants,
industry, transportation.

GÖRTEMAKER: When a big
air raid destroyed almost

all of the center of Berlin,

Hitler moved into
the bunker permanently.

The bunker
complex was built beneath

the Reich Chancellery
building in central Berlin,

designed by Albert Speer,

Adolf Hitler's
favorite architect,

and now the Armaments Minister.

GÖRTEMAKER: The last
headquarter of Hitler

was a huge complex,

28 feet beneath
the Reich Chancellery.

And it contained actually

two bunkers,

with 36 rooms.

Even in the bunker,

Hitler couldn't be alone,

so he lived there,

with Eva Braun,

with his physician,

with his secretaries,

his cook,

and his bodyguards.

And this was

where Hitler spent the
last weeks of his life.

As the war turned,
and loss was impending,

as his health deteriorated,

I suspect that Hitler looked

back fondly to the
Austria of his youth.

Over the years, Hitler had
spent a lot of time re-imagining

the design of Berlin with
Albert Speer, and then Linz,

where Hitler had spent
some years as a young person.

GÖRTEMAKER: Hitler
envisaged this new residence,

where he could retire
together with Eva Braun,

this was their plan
they cling to until the end.

There exist pictures
taken by Walter Frentz,

one of Hitler's photographers,

on February 8th, 1945,

and you see Hitler greatly aged,

and kind of out of
the real world when
he looked at this model.

We have to understand
this was an escape fantasy;

he tried to flee the world
he couldn't control any more.

Overhead
the greatest air offensive of

the war is in full blast.

On February 13th, 1945,
the British Royal Air Force

destroyed most of the city
of Dresden in eastern Germany.

masses of high
explosive go down.

And some people
who tried to walk along,

they got pulled in by the fire.

There is such a draft
in a firestorm like that.

The city was of
course in flames,

but after three days
we had to go in and

try to find the people, and
take them out of the ruins.

There was no time to
dig individual graves,

we had to do big, mass graves.

About five to 600,000
Germans died in these bombings.

Hitler is unable to
empathize in any way with

the people who are
being bombed, and in that sense,

the bombing certainly has
no effect on him whatsoever.

In the
air war, German submarine yards

at Bremen, Hamburg
and Kiel, and oil refineries,

were hit today
by 2,000 planes of

the American Eighth Air Force.

and wounded, it makes
a daily total of losses

which is just too
high for any army to suffer

without being very
seriously weakened.

tons of destruction on
German industry, communications

and German armies.

The Germans are
acting like a tired,

confused army which
knows it is beaten.

GÖRTEMAKER: The Nero Decree
is the reaction of Hitler to

a desperate situation.

Hitler says, "Wherever
we are evacuating territory,

it has to be destroyed."

Now, the Germans have done it
over and again, scorched Earth.

They destroyed the Soviet Union
as they were retreating from it,

but now, Hitler is
saying do that in West German,

and that would mean
utter famine and destruction

to millions of Germans, and
Albert Speer refuses to do it.

Most of the information
we have about what was going on

in the bunker came
from those who survived it.

What you see with Speer
after the war is him attempting

to take all of
the credit for the
destruction not taking place.

GÖRTEMAKER: The
Nero Decree wasn't executed,

not only because of Speer,

but because the German
people had to save their lives.

Many of them had no shelter,

they had no food.

They tried to
protect the children.

But Speer later constructed a
story that during the last days,

he didn't obey, and was
kind of an opponent of Hitler.

He was an
exceptional liar.

He's trying to
save his reputation,

he's trying to save his skin.

But Albert Speer adored Hitler,

and was devoted to him,

and was as close
to him personally as

I think anybody could be.

apathetic and stunned.

There is no longer any
mass fanaticism or will to die.

Most Germans are
stupidly awaiting the end.

GÖRTEMAKER: We don't know what
Hitler really believed in this

desperate time, but we know
that he clinged to this notion

that there could
be a miracle victory,

and he was supported
in this delusion by

his girlfriend, Eva Braun.

There was nobody
else near and as close to him

like Eva Braun.

She loved him, really,
and she came, surprisingly,

to Berlin, and when she arrived,

Hitler tried to seem angry,
but he wasn't successful.

He was obviously so
happy that she was there that

nobody tried to,
to send her back.

GÖRTEMAKER: Eva Braun was
very calm during her time in

the bunker, but Hitler
was constantly on edge.

That he was betrayed, and that
he was the only one who tried to

build a new Germany,
but was hindered by others.

I
remember it very well.

I was one of the first
to deal with war crimes

in the American army.

A report would come
into Headquarters that
there's a camp somewhere,

and there are people
coming out of that camp.

It looks like they're skeletons,

they're in rags, get over there.

And I'd get into my Jeep
and race over there as fast as

I could and begin
to collect evidence.

The first such
camp was Buchenwald.

150 people died the day
we came, of malnutrition,

tuberculosis, typhus, et cetera.

I had peered into Hell.

My feeling was this is not real.

If I had not been able to
imagine that this is artificial,

I don't think I would have
been able to cope with it.

I think that it
takes a while to digest

what it is that they're seeing.

The issue of
knowledge is not necessarily

do you know the fact,
but can you digest it,

can you actually
understand what this means?

There are two ovens,

each with a
capacity for six persons.

There are about 70 persons
represented in this pile.

How do we
grasp such an undertaking,

such an industrial effort
to kill hundreds of thousands,

millions of people?

And I think that until today,

we are still faced
with that question.

We
interrupt this program to

bring you a special news
bulletin from CBS World News.

A press association
has just announced that

President Roosevelt is dead.

GÖRTEMAKER: Hitler told
his circle, "This is a sign."

He compared the
death of Roosevelt to

the death of
Catherine the Second of Russia,

because after her death,
Frederick the Great won the war.

It's a clear measure of
Hitler's delusional state that

he has a brief
moment of euphoria,

because it came in a moment
when there was no good news of

any kind; it was nothing but
disaster and impending doom.

The
American Ninth Army is no more

than 45 miles from
Berlin at this hour,

leading well behind the
hurdle that failed to serve

the Germans; the Elba River.

German account, where
Germany's remaining forces plan

to carry on the
war to the bitter end.

On a practical level,
Hitler probably understood that

there was no way out,
that whatever happened,

no-one was gonna let him live
much past the end of the war.

But there's also his kind
of Wagnerian histrionic side,

that we had seen, you know,

as early as the,
the Beer Hall Putsch

when he threatened
to kill himself if
it failed, and probably,

Hitler had something like
this in his mind as well,

that if he went down heroically,

Germany and the Nazi
movement might revive again,

drawing on his heroism.

The
German High Command communiqué

opened this
afternoon with these words;

"In the heart of Berlin,
the gallant garrison closely

gathered around the
Führer is defending itself in

a reduced space against
the superior Bolsheviks."

That's the first
time during the crisis,

and probably the
first time ever,

that the Nazis have put Hitler
into one of his own communiqués

When Josef
and Magda Goebbels

and their six children
move into the bunker,

it is an utterly
bizarre and macabre scene.

Their intention is to end their
lives with Hitler in the bunker,

and they will take
their children with them.

Everybody shook his
hand and wished him the best,

and it was all very depressed.

It was not a, a happy birthday.

There really is
nothing to celebrate.

But right after his birthday,

Hitler makes his
last public appearance.

He comes out of
the bunker to greet

a small contingent
of Hitler Youth.

GÖRTEMAKER: It's
significant because it shows

that at the end, they tried
to mobilize even children.

This was the last army,
the children of Berlin.

And he comes to them,

and he pinches one
of their cheeks, and
he sends them to die.

GÖRTEMAKER: It's
a desperate image,

and it shows how
ruthless this Nazi regime was,

that they would have
let everyone die before

they'd dare to quit.

In the last
week of his life,

Adolf Hitler
received a number of...

Shocks.

One came from Hermann Goering.

GÖRTEMAKER: In
April 1945, Goering,

one of the most
powerful men in the Reich,

sent a telegram to Hitler...

That he could be in
charge if Hitler wasn't able

anymore to lead.

This made Hitler furious.

And Hitler threatened to
strip Goering of his offices and

throw him out of the party
unless he changed his mind,

which he did.

Then came the news that
loyal Heinrich Himmler,

the head of the SS, had
been attempting some kind of

separate peace
deal with the West.

Hitler considered
this clearly to be an
astounding act of betrayal,

and he strips Himmler of
his offices, of his titles.

With the Red Army closing

in on the Chancellery itself,

there's no doubt

in Hitler's mind that

he is going to
take his own life.

He doesn't want to
be captured by the
Soviets and paraded around,

and he learns about the
fate of Benito Mussolini.

the betrayers of Italy
now hang by the heel.

Heads down in
ghoulish caricature of life,

Il Duce gives his last salute.

Hitler saw no
other way out than to
commit suicide himself.

Eva Braun asked for
the most painless method,

and Hitler said,
"That would be cyanide.

You don't feel anything."

GÖRTEMAKER: Hitler was
in a state of hysteria,

and everywhere, he
imagined traitors.

He remembered suddenly
that the poison came from

one of Himmler's staff, and
Himmler had tried to betray him.

GÖRTEMAKER: To make
sure the poison would work,

Hitler gave Blondi, his
beloved dog, the poison first.

It's clear
that the end is come,

and so he wants
to leave a legacy.

He wants to leave a testament.

I must confess,
that I was very excited,

because I would be the first
and the only one who knows

why the war had
come to this end.

I thought, "Now comes
the moment of the truth."

And I was heart-pumping when
I wrote down what Hitler said.

But he used nothing new.

He repeated his
accusations to the enemy and

to the Jewish
capitalistic system.

That testament
really tells you something that

is fundamental to the man,

and that is fundamental
to his world view,

because after all the
destruction that he's wrought,

he believes that the
job is not yet done,

and the job is to
destroy the Jewish race.

He has changed the
course of history,

and yet he's not changed at all.

He's dogmatic in
that sense to the core.

And
what do you recall of the night

when Hitler married Eva Braun?

GÖRTEMAKER: The whole
wedding ceremony was unreal.

They pretended as
if it was normal,

and after the ceremony
they drank champagne,

and if we believe Traudl Junge,

Eva Braun was proud to
be finally Hitler's wife,

because she told others,

"Now you can say,

'Frau Hitler,' to me."

GÖRTEMAKER: Hitler shot himself,
and Eva Braun took poison.

It became clear
later that Hitler, too,

had first taken poison,
and then shot himself.

Hitler had given
very explicit verbal and

written instructions that his
and Eva Hitler's remains were to

be burned beyond recognition.

Their bodies are
wrapped in blankets,

and they're taken outdoors.

The courtyard is being shelled
as all of this is going on.

And the corpses are
placed in shallow graves,

they are doused with petrol,
and then they are burned.

The German radio has just
announced that Hitler is dead.

We knew Hitler had
a hideout in Berchtesgaden,

on top of a mountain.

So I get into my Jeep,
I went up to the top.

Everything was a big mess.

I knew we were gonna
have war crimes trials.

My objective was
to find the evidence,

'cause you need two things;

you need the criminal,
and you need the evidence.

There wasn't a heck of a lot
of evidence I could use from

the Berchtesgaden hideout,
so I headed for Berlin.

The
National Broadcasting Company

delays the start of
all its programs to
bring you a special bulletin.

Germany has surrendered
unconditionally to the Allies,

no strings attached.

Hitler and those who
supported him had taken Germany

into the most destructive
war in human history.

They were responsible
for the deaths of tens
of millions of people,

and for the attempted genocide
of the Jewish people in Europe.

The entire continent
was a pile of rubble.

I thought,
here's a case we cannot

possibly do justice.

Hitler was already dead;

I knew he was dead,
but he was not alone.

Here was his followers,
the whole Nazi movement.

One day, one of
my researchers said,

"Look what I found!

Situation reports
from the Eastern Front.

Their assignment was to
eliminate all Jewish men,

women and children."

I took a little adding machine,

and I added them up,
and I had a million people,

over a million.

I have defendants, each one
beyond any shadow of a doubt,

was an accomplice and a
perpetrator of mass murder.

I said, "To balance
the scales of justice,

I'd have to cut them
into million parts and

feed them to the dogs."

But vengeance is not our role.

Because war is horrible;
vengeance was even worse.

Here
under the vigilant eyes of

a live military police, the 20
most important surviving member

of the Hitler gang go on trial.

High representatives
of France, Britain, America

and Russia form the tribunal.

They will judge the
ringleaders of a conspiracy

that brought war
to all the world.

Hitler is obviously
the leading, uh, missing guest

at the party, if you want.

There are other
very senior Nazis

who've committed suicide,
Goebbels, Himmler, and others,

but Hitler was the one
whom everybody talks about.

The four charges for the
Nuremberg defendants were;

war crimes;
crimes against humanity;

digressive war; and conspiracy.

People often say,
"What happened to genocide?"

Genocide was listed
as a kind of war crime,

not as a crime in itself and
not as a crime against humanity.

The rounds
which we seek to condemn and

punish have been so calculated,

so malignant, and so devastating

that civilization cannot
tolerate their being ignored,

because it cannot survive

their being repeated.

The first trial
has two dozen defendants.

Rudolf Hess was a
prominent defendant.

A number of, of senior generals,

Keitel and Jodl,

Admiral Raeder and
Admiral Doenitz, Rosenberg,

Albert Speer, and
Balder von Shirach and

others who had been
leaders of the Nazi regime.

One commits suicide
on the eve of trial,

one's declared non-compos,
so it's 22 defendants.

But defendant number one

was Herman Goering,
Hitler's number two.

Hermann Wilhelm Goering.

I informed the
court that defendants were

not entitled to
make a statement.

You must plead guilty,
or not guilty.

All the defendants
at Nuremberg wanted to get in

the fact that in effect, they
were following superior orders.

When they spoke of
Hitler's charismatic,

spellbinding powers, it was
always to their advantage to

say so, even Albert Speer,
who's the only defendant

who shows what might
be taken as remorse.

But in
the end, Speer doesn't
talk about his own guilt.

He talks about Hitler,
and how he served Hitler,

but not really about
his own criminality.

In
the afternoon, by order of

the tribunal, no cameramen
were allowed to be present

when the guilty men
received their sentences.

the International
Military Tribunal

sentences you to
death by hanging.

Rudolf Hess,
imprisonment for life.

Albert Speer,
20 years in prison.

Joachim von Ribbentrop,
death by hanging.

18 people are convicted,
12 are sentenced to death.

Three were found not guilty.

Hermann Goering, as they say,

he cheats the hangman
by committing suicide

shortly before he
was scheduled to be executed.

receive their just
reward but, behind them,

they leave a legacy of sorrow

and suffering that
1,000 years will never wipe out

In this
momentous trial now ended,

the world itself
has been the judge.

no-one on the face of the Earth

knows more about Adolf Hitler
than you do at this moment.

I think I've
interviewed more people that

were close to Hitler, and they
all revealed themselves because

I didn't present
myself as an adversary,

only I asked, "What happened?"

My dad definitely
understood that history is

a living creature, and
that we perceive it through

whatever current lens, um,

is available.

The tapes themselves
had a lot of value,

and needed to be preserved, in
that it would be important for

future generations to
have the ability to go back,

to hear the voices, and
take from it what they could.

The story of Hitler
and the Germans is not really

a story fundamentally
about this one person,

or this one country.

It's a story about human beings,

and what human beings
are capable of.

It's a
conversation that happens
not only about the past,

but also a conversation
that happens about our present,

and our future, something
not only to be understood,

but to be dealt with.

Germans like
long, compound words,

and one of them is,
"Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung."

It's a continued
confrontation with the ways

in which the crimes of our past
affect our societies today.

the city of Berlin,

once its capital,

now lies deep
within the Soviet Zone.

So de-Nazification
in East Germany was really

a top-down affair; the
government promoted it.

They acknowledged guilt.

But as the Cold War
began in West Germany,

fighting communism and putting
a lot of money into the economy

and focusing on
consumer goods was considered

much more important
than fighting Nazism.

There was certainly no
national reckoning with

the Nazi period in West Germany.

Finally, in 1970,

the first Social Democratic
Chancellor of Germany,

Willy Brandt, went to Poland,

to the memorial at
the Warsaw Ghetto,

and he was so moved,

he felt that laying a
wreath was not enough,

and he fell on his knees
in a gesture of atonement.

That picture has been
iconic for many people's views

of post-war Germany.

But there was an awful lot
of backlash for that gesture

within Germany, although
it won him the admiration of

the rest of
the world, and, indeed,

the Nobel Peace Prize.

If we want to
ever conceive a world where

these crimes against
humanity do not happen anymore,

we have to talk about it,
learn of the Holocaust.

I'm struck by some of the
echoes I see in our world today.

What I ask myself is, "How
come we haven't learned more?"

Jews will not replace us!

How
can I understand that?

That people still can sing.

I can't believe it.

That kind of cult,
that was created by and

around Hitler, is a poison,
and it has not gone away.

The story of Hitler
is still important today,

not because the
Holocaust is gonna
happen again in the same form,

not because
anybody else is Hitler,

but because if these
things are possible,

that means similar
things are possible.

I don't subscribe to a
view that there was something in

Hitler's character that made
him particularly suitable to

fulfill that role, but
rather the other way round,

that the ways in which the times
unfolded created an opportunity

for someone like Hitler to
find a receptive audience.

People of an
extreme point of view talk

as the Nazis talked.

They talk about certain groups
of people who are inhuman,

who have to be removed;

foreigners, immigrants,
people of a different color,

or of a different race.

If you let that talk
just linger on the margins,

it will move to the
center at some point.

You can't feel
with me what I have suffered.

I was a child.

It is necessary to
tell it again and again,

and so I, I'm telling you.

I, I don't
think this could've happened in

the United States,
but who knows?

We must all watch out.

Captioned by
Cotter Media Group.