Original subtitles

Adolf Hitler is planning a new capital...

..for his new Nazi empire.

Before he is finally stopped,

many of his fanatical ideas will become a reality.

Hitler's story shows where the unchecked power

of a dictator can lead.

Now, we are looking at him through different eyes.

His friends...

..his admirers...

..his enablers.

Most are Nazis...

..few can be trusted.

But perhaps if we see him as they did,

we can grasp who Adolf Hitler was and what made him possible.

By summer 1940, Hitler is on the way

to realising his dreams of world conquest.

His armies have stormed through Europe,

invading one country after another.

Most of his fellow warmongers will later be sentenced to death.

But General Walter Warlimont survives to tell the tale.

He helps Hitler implement the attack on France.

How did Hitler himself react during the French campaign?

He was terribly nervous.

He is frightened by his own success.

And nobody could have foreseen

a success...

..of such a totality...

..in hardly one month.

Arriving in the airspace over Paris,

I observed that great columns

of German infantry had already entered the town.

I felt such joy and exultation...

..that I asked the pilot

whether it would be possible

to perform a landing on the place de la Concorde,

which was entirely free of any traffic...

..and we landed on the Champs-Elysees.

German might has arrived in Paris.

After the French surrender,

the streets are cleared for one man.

I was in the car with him and we told immediately

to the opera building, and he said to us.

"It was always the ardent wish of my life

"to see this building once in my lifetime."

And from there we were close to the Eiffel Tower,

and he admired this technical work of a genius.

Hitler has always craved glory.

Now he's eclipsing even the great conqueror, Napoleon.

Hitler and his propaganda took care

that the overwhelming success of the campaign

was attributed to him

as the greatest strategist of all times.

CROWD CHEERING

My feelings towards Hitler were such as if he were

some superhuman being between man and a God.

He told the German people all the time,

he was sent by Providence.

The whole people believed it, I too.

Now Hitler is ready to inform his generals of his next big idea.

General Walter Warlimont is one of the first to hear.

Hitler wants to conquer vast areas of

the Soviet Union to make way for German settlers.

He mobilises the largest invasion force ever assembled.

We had no fear.

Because we thought we will win

the war against Russia...

..because the wars against

Poland and France...

..we had ended with victories for Germany.

But fatally ill-equipped for the onset of winter,

the German advance falters.

This unique recording, made without Hitler's knowledge,

reveals a rare moment of doubt in the normally unshakeable leader.

But in the face of the enemy's overwhelming military strength,

instead of backing down, Hitler raises the stakes.

Hitler becomes obsessed with the idea

of capturing the Russian city named after the Soviet leader...

..Stalingrad.

Johann von Kielmansegg is in Army HQ.

Hitlers plan leads to disaster.

His troops are surrounded and starving.

But he demands victory even

when presented with a dire situation on the map.

But no amount of wishful thinking can change

the reality on the ground for Hitler's forces.

Hitler has left his troops to their fate.

Half a million of his soldiers are wiped out.

After disaster at Stalingrad, Hitler withdraws

to his mountain retreat, the Berghof.

One of the few people he sees

is his new secretary, Traudl Junge.

She was at his side when he heard the news of defeat at Stalingrad.

It was such an unpleasant mood everywhere,

and Hitler himself stared on his soup...

..without saying any word, and he was very depressed.

But on Berghof it was necessary

for us to take the meals with Hitler and to entertain him,

because he said, I cannot make real holidays,

but every day, a little hour to relax.

He liked only a very light, very easy conversation,

and he began to speak about his dog, which he liked very,

very much, or he began to talk about his former

successes in the beginning of the Nazi Party.

EXPLOSIONS

While Hitler hides away,

Allied bombing raids are flattening German cities.

We heard reports about destroyed towns.

It was really alarming,

especially after my own house has been destroyed.

I reported and I told him how awful it is.

And then Hitler became very earnest

and his eyes were very fanatical, and he swore revenge.

"It will not last long.

"I soon will change this situation and I will stop this cruelty."

In his rage, Hitler turns on his usual scapegoats.

Hitler's programme of genocide has begun.

He sends millions to die in secret killing centres...

..and expects his orders to go unquestioned.

Henny von Schirach has known Hitler since childhood.

After seeing Jews being transported to their death,

she confronts him.

Henny suddenly began to talk about

her experience on the station when she saw a train

full of Jews and these deported people.

TRANSLATION: So I told him what I'd seen.

His reply was, "You're sentimental."

Then there was a terrible row.

He stood up, I stood up, I said,

"Herr Hitler, You ought not to be doing that."

I thought, I can allow myself to say such

a thing because I've known him so long.

Then Hitler said, "Every day 10,000

"of my best soldiers die on the battlefield

"while the others carry on living in the camps.

"That means the biological balance in Europe is not right any more."

His mask fell down and...

..his friendly smile vanished off his face,

and he stood up and went to bed.

And Henny Schirach was never again invited.

Henny's husband, Baldur von Schirach,

is also a close friend of Hitler's and the Nazi Party's

most senior official in wartime Vienna.

Under his watch, 65,000 Austrian Jews

were deported to concentration camps.

Did Hitler often use the phrase, "the Final Solution?"

The great phrase that we hear now, did he use it a lot?

No, never.

I've never heard it from him.

But we've seen how close you were to Hitler, too.

I mean, it must have been very difficult not

to know just from his own attitudes, wasn't it?

He hated the Jews.

That was a thing that you heard...

..uh, almost every time you were there.

But...

..he would never tell you directly...

..what he considered the Final Solution...

..that is now quoted so often.

I mean, I suppose that when Hitler kept inquiring again about

the number of Jews in Austria, I mean,

that was another time, really, when, you know,

one had to just not... somehow not question

the reason why he was asking, as it were.

Was that so?

What could I do?

I inquired when I came to Vienna...

..where are these people going to?

They are going to special camps with other Jews.

Yes, I mean, what about food and so on?

Yes, they get food for their transport

and everything that's all settled and so on, you know.

The SS could be

so very sweet about uh...

..answering such questions.

You always thought...

..they were so nice and kindly.

And Mr Frost, something else...

Now...

..I do not want to excuse myself.

I just want to...

An old man has no other interest but the truth...

..the historical truth.

I was there, I had a job.

Mr Fost, I didn't have the damn time to think about anything else.

From day to night I was working.

We felt that people should know what was going on.

And maybe typical is this little experience,

which I had one day standing

in the line for vegetables or something like that.

I told my neighbours standing around me

that now they start to kill the Jews in...

..the concentration camps.

And this is not true, that they only are brought there

and can live there as they live here,

as it was told them.

And they said, "Emmi Bonhoeffer, if you don't stop telling

"such horror stories, you will end in a concentration camp too,

"and nobody of us can help you.

"It's not true what you're telling, you shouldn't believe these things.

"You have them from the foreign broadcast or so,

"and they tell these things to make enemies against Germany."

I say, "No, that's not from broadcast.

"I know that directly from first hand.

"You can be sure it is that way."

And coming home, I told that my husband

in the evening and he was not at all applauding to me.

In the very contrary, he said,

"My dear, sorry to say,

"but you are absolutely idiotic what you are doing.

"Please understand...

"..a dictatorship is like a snake.

"If you put your foot on its tail...

"..as you do it,

"it will just bite you and nobody will be helped.

"You have to strike the head."

Emmi Bonhoeffer and her family belonged

to a growing group of anti-Hitler resisters.

Appalled by Nazi crimes,

they believe Hitler is leading them to disaster.

As allied forces advance towards Germany,

high ranking officers in the army feel compelled to act.

Still posted at Hitler's HQ is General Walter Warlimont.

It was a normal day, but a very depressing circumstances

on account of this disaster on the eastern front.

We went in and we were standing around and Hitler came in

and then the conference began.

And suddenly the door opened again,

Colonel Stauffenberg came in and he stood there quite erect,

and I remembered that Stauffenberg had a big

black briefcase that he put under the table,

and I having seen that he left the room shortly afterwards.

EXPLOSION

It was as if a lightning had come down.

Everything was on fire.

I went down for a fraction of a second,

and shortly afterwards, Hitler was led out of the room.

It was a chaotic scene.

The room looked terrible.

Tables destroyed, chairs split up,

the windows blown out of the frames.

Picture of destruction.

Four die in the explosion,

but Hitler escapes with only minor injuries.

Hours later, nursing a sprained right arm,

he greets former Italian dictator, Benito Mussolini.

Hitler said to Mussolini, "People in the room were killed,

"burned to death,

"blown out of the window, and nothing happened to me."

"And when I look at it now,

"I must say that I'm protected by something.

"I'm supposed not to perish that way.

"And after this narrow escape of today,

"I think we'll have the same

"kind of escape in our big common enterprise.

"And we'll win through."

At first, that was an immediate, thankful,

grateful feeling that he was

not hurt, he was still alive.

But then, he became angry

to see criminals who had done this plot.

He accused all the generals, and he started to claim

that they were not faithful, and so on.

Consumed with rage, Hitler sets out to exact his revenge.

Stauffenberg and the ringleaders are shot.

Hundreds of other suspects are rounded up,

tortured and put on trial.

On Hitler's orders, the court proceedings are filmed.

Knowing he'll be watching,

the Nazi judge puts on a performance.

While Hitler consoles victims of the plot,

he thinks up ways to inflict maximum suffering on the plotters.

The conspirators are strung up from meat hooks...

and hanged by piano wire.

Their deaths are specially filmed and photographed for Hitler.

I saw how Hitler grabbed at this photographs

and how he looked at it with...

..cruelty and gleefully.

And I saw the face of one of my friends,

of Peter Graf Yorck, who was executed among these people.

And I felt so terribly shocked about

how Hitler acted

in this moment, that I had to leave the room.

To most Germans, resistance to Hitler's regime now seems futile.

Of course, there are always, even to the very end,

after the 20th of July, it was only the question

either you wanted to be a martyr or look away.

What could you do?

You couldn't emigrate any more, you know.

You couldn't refuse to be a soldier.

But what? You couldn't do anything.

You could just shut your eyes and say, let's go through.

That's the way it happened.

As the Allied armies advanced towards Germany,

bombing raids are destroying Hitler's war machine.

Head of armaments and Hitler's friend,

Albert Speer realises that defeat is now a matter of time.

It was my duty to tell Hitler

that these are the last weapons you are getting.

And I told him, which nobody dared to tell,

said, "The war was lost, we can't do any more."

And he told me very bluntly,

that's not up to you to tell me if the war is lost or not lost.

That's my decision, I won't accept it.

Herr Speer, did Hitler change through the years

you knew him, could you see him change?

He changed to a man who started

to hate even his own people.

In the end of the war, he made a statement to me

that if this war should be lost...

..the whole people should be lost too.

Slowly but steadily...

..he became weak and the doctors went in and out.

And one day he didn't get up.

It was a very critical situation on

the west front and on the east front too.

And the only man

who could give order and could have changed things

lay in bed and was not interested at all.

And some days it was like

Hitler didn't exist.

As German defences collapse...

..Hitler and his inner circle take refuge 50ft below ground...

..in the Fuhrerbunker.

How did he behave?

People say that he...that he was mad, that he seemed to be mad.

He could be very, very angry and he could explode.

He wanted to hear only flattering things.

So he lose the sense of reality.

It was about March

when the situation in Berlin was rather hopeless.

He was all of a sudden interested to see the model of Linz.

Linz was his home city, and he had special plans

to make it the most beautiful town of Austria.

But I think it was only an escape for him

in his day to dream of architecture.

On the 22nd of March 1945,

Hitler makes a rare public appearance

to decorate members of the Hitler Youth.

Even now, the bond between the Fuhrer

and these devoted followers is unbroken.

TRANSLATION: I told Hitler that I was

a messenger boy for the army.

And perhaps that struck a chord with him,

because he'd been a regimental messenger during

the First World War.

Anyway, he then patted my cheek and said, "Well done, my boy."

Didn't you realise At the time that the war was lost?

No, Not at all.

We boys still fought,

and we'd heard rumours that the Fuhrer

somehow had a secret weapon in reserve.

With the Soviet Red Army in the heart of Berlin,

Hitler finally gives up.

Mr Lorenz, I should like to have you tell me...

The moment is recalled in this rehearsed testimony

by his press secretary.

His armies were defeated on all fronts,

and Berlin was threatened.

He ordered his troops forward to stop the advance,

but the troops failed to attack.

The shock of realisation that he, Adolf Hitler

had been disobeyed and that complete disaster

was inevitable, was too much for him.

He collapsed and he said,

"It's all over and I'll shoot myself."

I expected that Hitler would regret what happened,

what had happened to the German people,

and I thought he must be very conscious

that he had brought misery and hunger

and death to the people.

He only repeated all the...

..reproachful phrases against the Jews,

and he even found the German people was not worth his mission.

Suddenly we heard the pistol shot.

And I ran back to Hitler's room...

..and entered it.

Hitler's lower jaw was slightly distorted.

It was obvious he had shot himself in the mouth.

The sofa was stained with blood...

..and his pistol lay at his feet.

Every step until now was ordered by Hitler.

And suddenly we were given our own lives back.

And I felt I must go out

of this bunker and go out on the fresh air.

Suddenly I saw the war...

..in all its appearance.

There lay dead...

..soldiers and there were

Russians and refugees

and horses and burning houses.

It was such a concentrated

picture of war and...

..and defeat...

..that I...I see it today like it was.

Sometimes I think that what I am telling you

is a story of another girl.

This is where following the Fuhrer has led.

Germans are forced to confront

the atrocities committed in their name.

While further revelations about the death camps

finally break the hold Hitler had over his supporters.

His closest collaborators are executed or jailed.

While the remnants of his regime are destroyed.

Today, Hitler's life demonstrates

the dangers of absolute power...

..and what people can do when they are in its grip.

What about Hitler and the Nazi racial attitudes?

How did you personally feel in the late 1930s

when it really started?

Erm, I didn't pay too much attention.

I said, well, it's not my thing.

I...I didn't, erm...

..I was really neglecting my duty as a human being when I did that.

When people disappeared... "What is "disappeared"?

HE SPEAKS IN GERMAN

How I know this? What...? How I know this?

There were so many things going on, weren't there?

Reading about it in foreign publications about extermination,

which you dismissed as propaganda.

There was the Jews leaving Vienna, and everything like that.

It must have been very difficult

for two and two not to add up to four, surely?

Mr Frost...

..we are human beings,

and human beings are not always very brave.

Also, in these times, we close our eyes

to many things that are happening.

We do not accept them as facts,

because these facts are disagreeable.

SINGING IN GERMAN