All language subtitles for Apocalypse The Rise of Hitler - 1x01 - Becoming Hitler

In 1924 Adolf Hitler wrote “Mein Kampf”,
“My Struggle”,

a book filled with hatred. Its last
passage is this fanatical cry, a state

that refuses racial contamination
will inevitably dominate the world.

WARNING! DOCUMENTARY CONTAINS LOTS OF LIES
ABOUT NAZIS, OUT OF CONTEXT QUOTING AND ETC.

WARNING! THIS DOCUMENTARY LANGUAGE
USAGE IS VERY BIASED.

Adolf Hitler, born April 20, 1889,

he commits suicide on April 30, 1945.

How did this Austrian, who came out of
nowhere, succeed in conquering Germany?

How did he sold the seeds
of hatred and violence?

And how did Hitler and the Nazis
dragged the world into the apocalypse?

APOCALYPSE

HITLER

BECOMING HITLER

How was the Hitler phenomenon possible?

In “Mein Kampf”, Hitler writes:
“The First World War was the most unforgettable

and most sublime moment
in my earthly existence.

For four years corporal
Hitler has been a courier,

carrying messages for Bavaria's
16th infantry Regiment.

He runs from trench to trench,
delivering the soldiers their orders.

It’s a dangerous assignment;
he is decorated with the Iron Cross.

He will always wear his Iron Cross
underneath his Nazi party insignia.

During the First World War, Hitler learns
utter disdain for the value of human life

as does many other soldiers
in this terrible conflict.

Hitler gradually becomes
a fanatical nationalist.

Also, in the trenches, the confused idea
is born that one day he will bear witness

and stand up for his
companions in misery.

In other words get into politics.

Hitler will always know how to
effectively exploit his camaraderie

with fellow war veterans
as he does 15 years later,

in this speech to workers
at the Siemens factory.

My fellow countrymen,
my fellow German Workers,

I come from among your ranks,

I was one of you,
and I was right beside you

during the four years of War.

Then, progressively,
thanks to my perseverance,

by educating myself, and by enduring
great hunger, I hauled myself up!

But deep down,
I remained the same.

A succession of events would
accelerate his political engagement.

On the night of October 13, 1918, a gas
shell attack makes him temporarily blind.

He is evacuated to a field
hospital and then to Germany.

Meanwhile, at the front, the Germans are
pushed back, and many taken prisoner.

Hatred of the French is omnipresent,

fueled by the victor's injurious acts.

Here, a German soldier's last possession,
his pipe, is stolen by a French soldier.

Prisoners, the soldiers of the Kaiser,
German Emperor Wilhelm II,

try to maintain their dignity as they march
to the same French and Belgian villages

they've laid waste to
over the last four years.

The rest of the German Army begins its retreat
and good military order with its weapons.

These soldiers will keep
the bitterness of a defeat

that is betrayed by extreme
right-wing propagandists

as being caused by Germany's unpatriotic
elements, those who negotiated with the enemy.

At this moment an event
occurs in Hitler's life

that he will always
consider a turning point.

He slowly recovers and eventually regains
his site in the Pasewalk military hospital

north of Berlin where the Army
treats cases of shell-shock.

Hitler recounts that when he learned
of the Emperor's abdication;

the end of the German monarchy
in favor of a Republic

and the armistice of November 11, 1918,
that mark Germany's defeat,

he heard an inner voice.
He states:

“This voice called me to free the German
people and restore Germany's greatness."

Hitler will never cease
to exaggerate this event,

transforming the hospital
into a veritable temple,

dedicated to his miraculous mission.

Above his bust, these lines from
Mein Kampf will be engraved.

“And so it was that I
decided to go into politics."

To this hallucination,
Hitler will add his obsession.

For him,
the German eagle was stabbed by the Jews.

In Mein Kampf, he writes:
“If we had just once, during the war,

used poison gas on 12 or 15,000 of
those Hebrew corrupters of the people,

the sacrifice of millions of men
would not have been in vain."

Already at the end of 1916,
the heads of the Imperial Army,

Field Marshal Hindenburg
and his adjutant Gen. Ludendorff

and an ill-considered
ultranationalist gesture,

ordered an account of the Jewish soldiers
suspected of unpatriotic behavior.

Anti-Semitism goes back
centuries and knows no borders.

Dogged by this destiny throughout history
the Jews, whether poor and living in ghettos

or assimilated in bourgeois, periodically
become scapegoats in times of crisis.

In Russia,
at the beginning of the 20th century,

they have been victims
of pogroms, massacres,

many who fled the persecution
settled in Germany.

The big question is did Hitler
himself have Jewish blood?

One of the Nazi regime's most
closely guarded secret

is that he's unable
to prove the opposite.

He doesn't know who one
of his grandfathers was.

The identity of his
father's father is unknown.

Hitler's grandmother eventually
married a miller, Johann Hiedler,

who recognize the son,
giving him his name.

According to Nazi law,
Hitler doesn't meet

the so-called "protection of the blood"
criteria, imposed on the Germans.

Who to avoid persecution must prove

that none of their four
grandparents were Jewish.

Hitler cannot prove that he
isn't Jewish in Nazi terms.

April 20, 1889,
Adolf Hitler is born to a Catholic family

and what is then the Austro-Hungarian
Empire in Braunau am Inn,

a small town on the border
with the German Empire.

His father is a customs officer,
a widower;

he remarried his much younger cousin,
making it into an interbred union.

During Hitler's early childhood,
the family moves often,

due to his father's changing
assignments along the border.

A model student during primary school, at
eight, he is an altar boy in this monastery.

He sings and admires the priest
self-sacrifice and sense of mission.

He notices a strange cross
upon the monasteries pediment;

it prefigures the swastika which
will become the Nazi emblem.

Hitler will always remember the monasteries
cross as if it were important of his destiny.

In India, for centuries the swastika
has been a beneficial symbol

of the perpetual movement of humanity.

In the Nazis deviant interpretation,
it becomes the symbol of the Aryan race,

a mythical pure race of tall, blue-eyed
blonds to which Hitler will add a helmet

and the mystique of a superior race.

The German boy must be slim,

with long limbs, rapid as a hare,

tough as leather and solid as steel.

We are determined
to create a new race.

Growing up, Hitler doesn't correspond to
this ideal he is pampered by his mother.

He will return to this Austrian landscape
at important moments in his career

like this one,
a few weeks before his invasion to Poland

and his provocation of
the Second World War.

Images of his childhood home, filmed and
edited by his mistress Eva Brown and entitled:

“the Führer visits the homeland
of his childhood. June 12, 1939.”

He stops to place flowers on his
parent's graves as is the custom.

He bears no resentment towards his
father a strict disciplinarian who drank.

But his mother who died
from cancer at age 47

was the only person
Hitler ever really loved.

During all of the Fuhrer's birthdays,
she reigns over the presence

and in his bunker during his final moments
Hitler carries her portrait with him.

Hitler was in conflict with his father
who wanted him to become a civil servant.

But Hitler will not go far in school,

arrogantly considering himself
above the education system.

At 19, after his mother's death,
he leaves for Vienna.

He’s not predestined to go into politics,

since he dreams of attending
the Fine arts Academy.

Thanks to his modest inheritance he is
able to live the bohemian artist’s life.

Vienna at this time is one of
Europe's intellectual centers.

Hitler discovers the
upper-crust lifestyle,

against which the red flags of the
socialist activists are unfurled.

Having left his home province,
he discovers the many communities,

living in the Austro-Hungarian capital;

Czechs, Poles, Italians,
Croatians and Jews.

He will later state: “It appeared to me,
like the incarnation of racial proclamation.”

He makes a try at the Fine Arts
entrance exam that he barely prepares for

because despite all his ambition,
he has little courage. He isn't admitted.

The period that follows is a difficult
one, it's just before the great war.

He lives in a boarding house for men and
survives by copying postcards for tourists.

With a little money he earns he
attends the operetta here, Wagner,

which as a friend recounts
sends Hitler into a trance.

Hitler was everyday life is mediocre at best,
dreams of these heroes of Germanic legend.

One of his favorite operas is Rienzi

in which a young warrior takes on
the mission of saving his people.

Mobilization.
Hitler is 25 this August 2, 1914,

and the declaration of war will
transform his failed artist’s life.

Earlier to escape military
service he had fled Austria.

Now he's in Germany, in Munich,

swept up in the folly of
extreme nationalist sentiment

that is hurtling all of Europe
towards the great massacre.

Hitler has been identified
in the midst of the crowd,

enthusiastically welcoming
the declaration of war.

This photo will reappear opportunity
during the 1932 election campaign.

The Nazis make sure it's widely viewed,

their adversaries will
announce it as a photomontage.

But one thing is certain,
Hitler was indeed there,

he fought in the war
and the war transformed.

After four years with his regiment,
he returns to Munich,

to a Germany,
in the throes of revolution.

Hitler is 30 years old a decisive
period opens up before him.

Above all, he wants to remain in the
Army which guarantees order and stability

for the new regime of the social
Democrat president Friedrich Ebert.

The young Republic must deal with the Marxist
revolutionary movement “The Spartacus league,”

for trying to seize power like the
Bolsheviks did in Russia two years before.

The Army crushes them, aided by volunteer
nationalists, “The Free Corps,”

a spawning ground for
the future Nazi party.

Hitler serves in the
Army with great zeal.

His primary goal is to
keep a roof over his head

and keep his # for which
he'll stoop to anything.

He becomes a provocateur and informer

denouncing comrades he
suspects of being reds.

His superior officers, whose duties
include controlling the population

by combating communist ideas, take
note of his anti-revolutionary fervor.

They give Hitler a mission;

the political re-education of returning
German soldiers and prisoners of war.

Hitler's commanding officer notes:
“He's a natural born orator

as fanaticism and populism captivates
listeners forcing one to think as he does.”

Hitler says: "At that moment
I understood that I knew how to speak".

Next, he would learn to use theatrical
effects and how to dominate his audience,

as shown in this 1933 film of which
we have kept the original soundtrack.

From his beginnings,
Hitler knew how to escalate intensity

and to feed his listeners exactly
what they wanted to hear.

In 1919 he denounces the national
shame of the Treaty of Versailles.

After months of discussions
among themselves,

the victors above all France,
England and the United States

impose harsh peace terms on Germany

as if it alone are responsible
for the massive carnage.

The Treaty of Versailles,
signed on June 28, 1919,

condemns Germany to pay
enormous reparations

which will create a great
burden on the economy

and will become a central issue
in Germany's popular grievances.

Germany also sees 13% of its territories
and 10% of its population amputated.

Alsace-Lorraine once again becomes French and
the Rhine's entire left banks demilitarized.

A German film of the period denounces
the carving up of the national territory.

The worst is the separation
of East Prussia from Germany

to reconstitute Poland partitioned in the
18th century, giving it access to the sea.

The Polish Corridor will be the issue that
ultimately leads to the Second World War.

For many Germans, the allies’ condition

that paramilitary antirevolutionary
forces be disarmed adds insult to injury.

They witnessed the destruction
of their submarines,

their battleships,

and their Air Force.

Germany's army is reduced to 100,000 men.

Hitler, against his wishes,
is demobilized into this Bavarian region

where the right-wing
extremist groups proliferate.

Here he is filmed for the first time
during a demonstration of the DAP

the German Worker's Party.

As early as 1919 the Army has ordered
him to infiltrate and spy on this group.

Lacking better prospects
he remains a member

and develops into a full-time
political agitator.

Politically Bavaria is on the far
right whereas power in Berlin

is with the center-leftist Weimar
Republic named after the city

with a new constitution has
just been voted into law.

Hitler, transformed into a full Bavarian,

howls with the wolves against
the November criminals,

the signatories of the armistice and
of the shameful Versailles’s dictate.

These sentiments are shared by the Army,
especially by the war veterans,

who gather in Munich's large beer halls.

One of these is the Bürgerbräukeller,
where on August 13, 1920,

Hitler makes his political debut with a
lecture entitled “why are we anti-Semitic."

For Hitler, the answer is:

“Beyond his visceral hatred for
the Jews since the German defeat,

that anti-Semitism is the best strategy
for attracting nationalist militants".

Hitler galvanizes the radicals of
his small right-wing extremist group.

They make him their leader and buy
him a car - evidence of his importance.

Hitler changes the party's name, associating
the terms "national" and "socialism".

His goal is to create a wider appeal
to show his anticapitalistic stance.

The DAP will now be the NSDAP,

the National Socialist German Workers Party,
the abbreviated form of which is Nazi.

In his small headquarters in a Munich
beer hall, he draws his party's emblem.

He will write in Mein Kampf:

“After innumerable attempts, I chose a red
flag to show our movement social dimension

with a white circle representing
our nationalism and the swastika;

a symbol of the Aryan
the eternal anti-Semite".

To protect their meetings he creates
the SA, Storm troopers, his assault unit.

A small militia whose uniforms he obtains

from a stock of the former
Austro-Hungarian customs office.

His radicalism increases the parties’
membership from 2000 to 20,000,

multiplying by 10 in one year.

He succeeds,
thanks to the help of a racist sect;

the Thule society,
named after a legendary Nordic kingdom.

Its members finance a newspaper
with funds of questionable origin.

This publication becomes the
official Nazi party newspaper,

under a new title “Völkischer
Beobachter”, the racist people’s observer.

Its editor, Alfred Rosenberg,
is a member of the Thule society

and acts as the theoretician of anti-Semitism,
confused if not to say deranged;

he will
be an important inspirer of the show.

Another former member of the Thule society,
during his student days, is Rudolf Hess.

He will become Hitler's secretary and one of
his most servile and fanatical accomplices.

Another addition to the early militants
ranks is a World War I hero Hermann Göring,

one of Germany's most
celebrated fighter pilots.

Like many other veterans, he has
difficulty re-adapting to civilian life.

In Hitler, he finds someone who articulates
his own antirevolutionary ideas.

He will become the number
two at the Nazi regime

and an instigator of
the concentration camps.

In 1922, in a political march, Hitler
places Göring next to Gen. Ludendorff,

still wearing his spiked helmet,
to show veterans

that their great
wartime chiefs support the Nazis.

Ludendorff, one of the men
responsible for prolonging the war

is convinced that the politicians
denied him his victory.

This theory is shared
by many German generals.

Ludendorff adhesion to nationalist ideas
opens up new perspectives for Hitler.

Everything seems possible.

In Italy, the extreme right Benito Mussolini's
Fascist party has just seized power.

Will the German’s Mussolini be Hitler?

1923 will be the decisive year.

January 11, 1923,
stunned Germans watch helplessly

as French and Belgian soldiers
take control of the Ruhr,

Germany's mining and
steel production region.

This results from Germany's
refusal to pay its war reparations

the indemnities imposed by
the Treaty of Versailles.

The French and Belgians are taking
payment directly in the form of coal.

Consequently, the German government
orders passive resistance;

miners and rail workers strike.

The French will simply
replace the strikers.

No coal is left for the Germans.

The situation becomes dangerously tense.

On March 10, 1923,
a French officer Lieut. Pierre Colpin,

of the 17th infantry Battalion,
is assassinated.

His coffin travels home through towns
and French officers slap any Germans

who don't remove their hats.

Indelible images, captured forever,
will be profitably exploited by the Nazis

such as the 13 crop factory workers
killed by the French on March 31.

And the execution of
saboteur Albert Schlageter;

the Nazis newspaper
depicts him as a martyr.

In addition, it accuses African soldiers in
the French army of having raped German girls.

Once in power, Hitler has the
offspring of these unions sterilized

and will take further
cruel revenge in 1940.

Hitler denounces the
weakness of the government

that allows the French to treat Germany
like one of its colonies.

Germans are cold.

Germans are hungry.

They try to steal coal
back from the French.

The Weimar Republic must import
its coal and paid striking miners.

These enormous expenses prompt the mint to
begin printing huge quantities of new money.

The market depreciates dramatically.

One day Germans are paying 1 billion
marks for a kilo of potatoes

and the next day 460 billion
for a loaf of bread.

In this ferment of off the charts,
inflation and unemployment,

the Bavarian extreme right mobilizes
with Gen. Ludendorff as its leader.

Thanks to Ludendorff, Hitler manages
to unite all the veterans groups,

embittered by the defeat. He wants
to attempt a putsch, coup d'état,

to march on Munich and then Berlin.

Hitler says: “Our people are subjected
to such extreme economic conditions

that if we don't act now, they'll
change over to join the Communist”.

Thanks to their accomplices in the Army
the Nazis succeed in procuring guns.

However, after hesitating,
the Army and police

decide to remain loyal
to the legal government.

For Hitler in Munich, all seems lost.

But he holds onto the wild
fantasy that he and Ludendorff

can still bring the
population along with them

so he orders his troops to advance on
the threatening police barricades.

The two camps are face-to-face with
Hitler in his white coat in the middle.

In fact, this is a Nazi photomontage,

intended to fabricate the myth
of Hitler's courage and reality;

he was cringing behind a bodyguard
who was killed in the shooting

for the police opened fire putting
an end to Hitler's 1923 putsch.

10 years later, after taking power,

Hitler will institute a funeral celebration
resembling a Nordic pagan right,

every November 9,
in commemoration of the 14 Nazis killed,

during the putsch attempt.

Their names are called out every year,

in response thousands of Nazis
and Hitler Youth shout “present”.

Andreas Bauriedl.
- Here.

Klaus von Pape.
- Here.

Hitler has a mausoleum built in Munich and
Germans are obliged to parade through it.

Their arms raised in memory of those
Hitler calls the November martyrs.

They must salute the mausoleum when
strolling past it even on a bicycle.

Further exploiting the putsch myth, Hitler
creates yet another grandiose Nazi ceremony

“The Blutfahne” or Blood Flag, at each
year's party Congress in Nuremberg.

He takes the sacred bloodstained
relic of the putsch

and with exaggerated and
forceful movements, he touches it

to the new Nazi army battalions’
flags as if to consecrate them.

This quasi-mysticall celebration

is part and parcel of the Nazis
science of falsifying history.

In fact, Hitler had badly prepared
his putsch, improvised and haphazard.

He showed himself to be impulsive,
ignoring the possible consequences.

All of these staged ceremonies,
occult of fiasco,

which could put an end
to the Nazi adventure.

For the putsch failed Hitler was arrested

and the national Socialist party banned.

The great Austrian author
Stefan Zweig wrote:

“Thus, in that year of 1923,
the swastikas and Stormtroopers vanished

and Hitler's name sunk
into oblivion again".

Three months after Hitler's arrest, the
trial of the putschist opens in Munich.

Hitler is accused of high treason and
the murder of four police officers,

crimes punishable by the death penalty.

Ludendorff,
who is not even been incarcerated,

arrives at the trial in a
luxury car with his attorneys.

He is freed without further ado,
out of respect for his glorious past

and because he continues to
have influential supporters.

He will be acquitted.

Hitler,
who was threatened to kill himself,

now realizes that the court is
not as hostile as he thought.

He draws on all his oratory
talents launching his usual fiery,

invective towards the
government and the Jews.

The trial becomes an unexpected pulpit, the
judge is becoming more and more sympathetic

and the public thronging to get in.

As a result, the verdict is much
less severe than Hitler feared.

His condemned to five years in
a relatively comfortable cell,

with a view of the countryside.

The conditions of his imprisonment
resemble a stay in a hotel

and that he is free to receive Nazi
sympathizers at any time of the day.

One supporter even brought
a Laurel crown for the man

he calls the incarnation of
the nation's ardent desire.

Hitler is free to receive any news,
publications he wants

and he even begins reading Marx.

Rudolf Hess, condemned to 15
months for his role in the putsch,

has the neighboring cell and joins the
small group who essentially discuss

infighting between the right-wing parties
who are tearing each other apart.

Hitler's return is becoming a necessity.

His accomplices on the outside devise a
strategy to have his release brought forward.

Hitler realizes,
he'll soon be freed and he feels the need

to expound his singular view of
life and his political principles.

He dictates his book to Rudolf Hess,
who types it on the machine,

provided by a banker and on paper
brought by Winnifred Wagner,

the daughter-in-law of
Hitler's idolized composer.

Like Wagner, Winnifred is a racist and
deeply admires her good friend Adolf.

Nazi journalists rewrite his
hurriedly written manuscript.

Hitler wants to name the book

“4,5 years of struggle against
lies foolishness and cowardice”,

but this title is considered too long

and is changed to “Mein Kampf, ”My struggle".

Even rewritten the
book remains unreadable

and yet it contains Hitler's entire worldview

and the Nazis will make it their new Bible.

Transcribed like the Holy Scriptures and
bound like the great medieval manuscripts.

Hitler rants about the struggle of the master
race; the tall blonde Aryan Germanic race,

the necessary conquest of its living
space, the eradication of communism

and the crushing of France and the Jews,
who in Hitler's eyes

do not even belong to the human species.

At the time many readers judge
the book to be an errant madness,

a fatal error.
On the contrary,

it should have been
read carefully and taken seriously

for it’s at the root of the deaths
of 50 million human beings.

Hitler is released from prison on
December 20, 1924, for good behavior.

Now he dreams he's a successor

to the great founders of the
German nation such as Bismarck.

He claims: “My time in prison brought
me confidence optimism and belief

that nothing could ever shake me again".

And yet, his journey through the
political desert is only beginning.

Mein Kampf is a failure,
selling barely 20,000 copies.

Hitler spends much of his time in the
Bavarian mountain village Berchtesgaden,

where he rents a small chalet.

He meets a pretty 16-year-old waitress,
Maria Reiter,

and they have a brief affair.

She wants to marry Hitler. He refuses,
suggesting she be his shadow mistress.

He will ask the same of
the other women he seduces

so that nothing can
interfere with his mission.

She leaves him.

He writes the second
volume of Mein Kampf.

It deals mainly with this project of
expanding Germany's living space into Russia.

Sales of the book are average
until his taking of power in 1933.

When Hitler does take power,
Mein Kampf will almost be required reading.

The German state offering it
to couples as a wedding gift.

If it isn't on your bookshelf you
could be denounced by your hired help.

It will be distributed by crop steel
executives to their meritorious workers.

By hook or by crook, over 80 million
copies of Mein Kampf will be sold

and it's translated into
countless languages.

The royalty payments are astronomical,
making Hitler a very rich man.

On February 27, 1925,

Hitler makes his political comeback
in the famous Munich beer hall

where he launched the putsch reaffirming
his leadership of the Nazi party.

The next day an event occurs
that will advance his cause.

The very incarnation of
the new German democracy,

the first president of the Weimar
Republic, social Democrat Friedrich Ebert

dies at 57 from a badly
treated case of appendicitis.

Germans feel the loss strongly
as his government had succeeded

in cutting inflation and the
economy was recovering well.

Germans must elect a new president
and the swastika makes its comeback,

during the political campaign.

The ban on the Nazi party has recently been
lifted as it's no longer considered dangerous.

In fact, Ludendorff, the candidate
of the United extreme right parties,

obtains barely 1% of the vote.

Ludendorff's failure is what
Hitler secretly desires

as a disposes of his main rival for
whom he halfheartedly campaigned.

Revealing his political instinct he says:
“We gave him the finishing blow".

The man the German select is the other
great war commander Marshall von Hindenburg.

In 1870, as a young officer,

he was present at the proclamation
of the second German Empire

and their size hall of mirrors.

He reassures the Army and
unites the conservatives

which worry the left
and the rest of Europe.

Hitler will lie in wait.

The Nazi party succeeds in spreading
its cancer throughout Germany,

its membership reaching 170,000.

Hitler transforms his Stormtroopers
into a veritable private army.

They are younger and younger
but let there be no mistake.

This paramilitary order is composed
of brutal fanatics, killers.

Their new uniform earns them
the nickname “the Brown shirts”.

It imitates Mussolini's Black shirts who some
years before marched so successfully on Rome.

Another symbol borrowed from
Mussolini is the Roman salute;

the outstretched arm
accompanied by a guttural cry.

In Mussolini's case it's “Viva Il Duce”,

with Hitler it becomes “Heil Hitler",
”Long live Hitler".

The SA uniform is created by a
select team of German designers.

Among the manufacturers
is Stuttgart designer Hugo Boss,

who promotes it in his ad campaigns.

Hugo Boss, a Nazi party member,

will also produce the terrifying black
uniforms of the SS, the Schutzstaffel,

Hitler's new protection unit as
well as the Hitler Youth uniforms.

This is all a very costly.

The money mainly comes from rank-and-file
Nazi party members and from rich sympathizers

such as steel magnate Fritz Thyssen who’s
steel plants are ready to forge new guns.

They also include Henry Ford the
world's largest car manufacturer.

The anti-Semitic Henry Ford
will strongly support the Nazis

by giving them all the prophets
affords auto sales in Germany.

In addition, Ford,
each year on Hitler's birthday,

makes a personal donation of $50,000,
a hefty sum in those days.

Ford will be the first foreigner the Nazis
decorate with the order of the German Eagle.

This is how the Nazis paid for
their enormous party congresses

and their best propaganda operations
meant to influence public opinion

and galvanize their followers.

The Nazi banner proclaims “Deutschland
Erwache!”, "Germany awake!".

In 1927 Hitler chooses Nuremberg,
a Nazi bastion,

and a medieval city of historical
significance with a Wagnerian allure

which brings out its connection to the
Germanic warlords of the dark ages.

Hitler calls Nuremberg's
his ideological capital.

He also wants to highlight the parties
sub-mission to the Führer, its leader.

This personality cult will
be enhanced to the work

of his personal photographer
Heinrich Hoffman.

Always at the center of events
a Nazi from the start,

a virtuoso of the Leica,
he is always close to his master.

Hoffman takes a series of
surprising photographs,

intended to show the great
leaders personal side.

To win over female voters

as far as the Nazis can
grasp their preferences.

In Hoffman small Munich photography shop,
Hitler as always inspired by Wagner

and fascinated by opera singers, theatrical
movements, study’s a whole range of gestures,

conveying domination which he will
use in the first big Nazi rallies.

Hitler states:
“The masses are feminine and stupid,

only emotion and hatred can
keep them under control".

Hatred, this is exactly what the
SA is sewing throughout Germany,

beginning with the Jewish
neighborhoods in large cities.

In what is still a peaceful society,

Stefan Zweig is a witness
to the birth of violence.

He writes: “It was the fascist method

but in the German style,
carried out with military precision.

At the blow of a whistle, the SA would
leap from the trucks with lightning speed,

beat people up with their billy-clubs
and at the sound of another whistle blow

they would jump back into their trucks
and race away as fast as they had come".

But the intimidation and
terror produce sparse results.

In Germany's 1928 legislative elections

the Nazis obtain only 2,6% of the vote,
less than 1 million ballots.

The communists received three times
as many, the central party 4 million,

and the right 5 million, the social Democrats
come on top with 10 million votes.

Yet in the Reichstag, Berlin's
Parliament, this 2,6% of ballots,

mainly from rural areas,
translates into 12 new Nazi deputies.

They create quite an impact as
almost all are wearing SA uniforms.

Among them making his
comeback is Hermann Göring.

Wounded in the lower
stomach during the putsch,

he's gained a lot of weight and
become addicted to morphine.

It is finally Josef Goebbels
grand entrance into politics.

He closely corresponds to a maximum formulated
by Nietzsche in the previous century.

Fanaticism is the only form of willpower
to which the weak and irresolute can rise.

Goebbels is hardly the
tall blonde Aryan type.

He is short, limps and has suffered
from an inferiority complex,

since childhood due to his clubfoot.

However, his diabolical cunning
compensates for this handicap.

His is a rebel against society
who flirted with Marxism,

until the decisive meeting of
his life with Adolf Hitler.

Goebbels then saw the light.
By refusing to publish his manuscripts,

the Jews has prevented him
from becoming a great writer

and the communists are responsible
for the chaos in society.

He states: “We enter the Reichstag,
like wolves, into the sheep den".

But it's impossible at this moment for
either the public or the deputies,

to grasp the significance
of his statement.

The general public's view of the Nazis

is expressed in the newspaper
Frankfurter Zeitung.

“Hitler has no coherent ideas or
thoughts. Hitler is a dangerous madman;

he's arrived at this point, by following
the wartime ideology to the letter,

interpreting it in a primitive way,
as if we lived in the times

of the barbarian invasions
at the fall of the Roman Empire”.

Germany is not worried; it would surely
take a major catastrophe for Hitler

to have any future in politics.

Historian Ian Kershaw writes:

“Without the Great Depression,
without the crash of 1929,

without the disintegration of the
bourgeois liberals and conservatives,

Hitler would've remained a nutcase
on the political sidelines.

But Hitler will never
abandon his mission.

We will continue our struggle,

fanatically and without pity,
until death!

TIMING & TRANSCRIPTION danel32
/eng. to.est@gmail.com/