Original subtitles

[distant explosions]

[radio announcer] German resistance is crumbling,

and we're in a situation today where anything may happen.

We take you to San Francisco. William L. Shirer reporting.

[Shirer] So Hitler is dead and destroyed,

like his country that he tried to make the master of the world,

and... and ended only by destroying.

I must say that, uh, in a sense,

in a very deep sense, of course,

uh, this is a day that I have been waiting for, for many a year.

Suddenly, we got the word, the surrender terms of the United Nations.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the end of the Second World War.

That is the word we have just received from the White House in Washington.

I didn't expect to hear a celebration here in our newsroom in New York,

- but you can hear what's going on... - [people cheering]

[gunshot]

[crowd cheering]

[announcer 2] Berlin had capitulated.

From their holes and their hiding places,

the German generals emerged like beasts ferreted out of their lairs.

Goering gave himself up.

- Goebbels preferred to shoot himself. - [gunshot]

Now the major war criminals were in the hands of justice.

It was decided to try them in Nuremberg.

Nuremberg, where the Nazis ran rampant.

Nuremberg, from which the demented Hitler hurled his threats to the world.

- [glass shatters] - [dogs barking]

[radio announcer 2] Nuremberg now lies in ruins and ashes.

Here, they were brought to answer for their crimes.

These warmongers and conspirators against nations.

[gunshot]

These butchers of whole people and plunderers of whole states.

[woman whimpers]

These child murderers and slave traders.

These 20th-century Huns.

For all this, they must now answer.

The hour of reckoning has come.

[dramatic music playing]

[radio announcer 2] Don't hide your face, Goering.

All the world knows you, and the world curses you.

[music crescendos, fades out]

[opening theme music playing]

[music fades to silence]

[propeller humming]

[radio announcer 3] We hear first from the man who knows Germany best,

whose broadcasts from Berlin and elsewhere in Germany

during the early days of Nazi aggression

were eagerly listened to all over the country.

Ladies and gentlemen, the author of Berlin Diary, William L. Shirer.

[Shirer] It's all over after 2,319 days of it,

nearly six years.

And not only the German leaders had no sense of responsibility,

there was not a word said by any of them when they surrendered

about being sorry for their crimes,

or feeling any sense of responsibility

for having tried to destroy our world.

For me, it was the last chapter of a story that had begun 11 years before,

in this very city,

when, as my first assignment in Hitler's Germany,

I had been sent there at the beginning of September 1934

to cover the annual Nazi Party rally.

[crowd shouting] Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!

[Shirer] I had got my first glimpse of Adolf Hitler and his henchmen,

Goering, Goebbels,

Himmler, and Hess,

and launched myself into covering the rise of the Third Reich

for the next six years.

Now, those of them Nazi leaders who had not committed suicide

were waiting trial for crimes against humanity.

Justice, at long last, had caught up with them.

[Francine Hirsch] The complete devastation that was brought by the Second World War,

was something that people really had to reckon with afterwards.

Like, how could there really be justice after something like that?

This was why the Nuremberg Trials were seen as critical.

[somber orchestral music playing]

[reporter 1] For the first time in the history of mankind,

a court consisting of American, British,

French, and Russian judges has been formed to pronounce a verdict

on crimes which have had no precedent in human memory.

[reporter 2] Crowding the spectators' gallery

are 400 newspapermen from every corner of the world.

The atmosphere in the courtroom is tense.

Nobody quite knows what to expect.

[spectators murmuring]

[Pendas] When the defendants walk in...

a kind of hush falls over the courtroom as people are staring at them.

[Shirer] This really is the end

of the long night of the hideous nightmare,

and how the mighty have fallen.

The sudden loss of power

seemed to have stripped them clean of the arrogance

that was their very being in all the years I knew them.

How quickly they have become broken, miserable little men.

The long Nazi night has given me much to think and write about.

All my years I have searched, like so many others, for some meaning.

[Pendas] One of the more striking aspects of the Nuremberg Trial

is who's not in the dock.

Hitler is not there physically,

but his presence is inescapable.

[somber orchestral music continues]

[Alexandra Richie] Every single human being has within him or her

the potential to be good or evil,

and if you look at Hitler's record as a young man,

there's really nothing to show that he was going to become

this terribly vengeful, hate-filled figure

whose whole motivation in life

was going to be to exterminate an entire race.

[dramatic musical sting]

[Christian Goeschel] Hitler was born in Austria.

He came from a middle-class family.

[Benjamin Carter Hett] Hitler's mother was probably the only person in his life

he really loved.

She seems to have been a very gentle, kindly person,

who had to deal with a very difficult husband.

Hitler is brought up fairly strictly.

His father beat him, but that was very common at the time.

[Goeschel] His father was a customs official

who had changed his name from Schicklgruber to Hitler.

Can you imagine? People would have had to shout,

"Heil Schicklgruber" instead of "Heil Hitler."

[Hett] Hitler was a bit of an oddball in some ways.

He liked to read a lot. He had a powerful imagination.

[Goeschel] Hitler was not a good student.

He was not industrious.

He had pipe dreams of becoming a great artist.

[Hett] So Hitler moved to Vienna in 1907

in the hopes that he would be studying art at the Vienna Academy of Art.

Then he was turned down for admission, which shocked him.

[Evans] He wanted to become a world-famous artist,

but he wasn't actually very good.

If you look at some of his paintings, they are mostly townscapes,

and he was rejected because he couldn't do people.

It's quite significant, in a way. He couldn't paint people.

He was forced to eke out an existence

by selling paintings that he copied from postcards.

[Hett] He lived for a few years in a men's shelter

in a northern part of Vienna.

[Evans] He lived a rather hand-to-mouth existence.

At that time,

German-speaking Austria was part of a much bigger political entity,

the so-called Habsburg, or Austro-Hungarian Empire.

[Hett] It was a very nationally and ethnically diverse empire,

and in the early 20th century,

almost all the major nations were in some sense trying to pull away from it

and assert their own autonomy.

[Evans] The Hungarians, the Czechs, the Romanians,

all of these different nationalities wanted their own state,

not necessarily independent, but certainly self-governing.

There's also the German Empire,

which was the most important economy in Europe.

It was a large, prosperous industrial power.

[Hett] And there was developing what was called a pan-German ideology,

an all-German ideology, among German-Austrians

who had nothing but contempt

for the other ethnicities within the empire,

and really wanted to break away from it

and unite themselves to the German Empire next door.

[Goeschel] There is a pervasive culture

among many on the right in the city of Vienna

that the German people are superior to other people

such as the Czechs, such as the Jews.

[Evans] Anti-Semitism, or hatred of Jews,

had been around for a very long time in Europe,

but a new kind of anti-Semitism emerged in the late 19th century,

and fringe political agitators began to write tracts

which expounded this racist view of the Jewish race as being subversive,

as plotting everywhere to undermine civilization,

to destroy hard-working small businessmen.

[Tiffany N. Florvil] There are a number of prominent politicians in Vienna

who were not only political anti-Semites,

but they're also talking about racialized anti-Semitism.

[Hett] Karl Lueger was mayor of Vienna,

calls himself and calls his movement Christian Social,

and anti-Semitism was a key element of it.

Hitler was watching all this as a young man,

and to some extent, drawing inspiration from it.

[Goeschel] Hitler, from early on, despised Austria,

and the multinational Habsburg Empire.

He saw himself, above all, as German and not as Austrian.

He thought Germany was the great nation.

[Evans] He lived in a kind of fantasy world.

Hitler spent more money than perhaps was wise

on going to the opera.

He was particularly taken with the music dramas of Richard Wagner.

[Wagner's "Ahntest du nicht" from Lohengrin playing]

He thought Wagner presented the Germany that he wanted to aspire to,

a Germany of gods and heroism and great leaders.

["Ahntest du nicht" continues playing]

[Richie] This music spoke to him. The messages spoke to him.

[Goeschel] One of the first Wagner operas Hitler sees is Lohengrin,

a romantic opera composed in the mid-19th century,

where the great hero Lohengrin

more or less sacrifices himself for the nation.

The powerful music by Wagner nurtured Hitler's idea

that he himself would one day become a great heroic leader.

[man] Attention! Tribunal.

[pensive music playing]

[Shirer] Hitler would one day become the dictator of Germany,

and then the conqueror of most of Europe,

but it must be added at once

that he was one of the cruelest, most bloodthirsty and barbarous tyrants

who ever lived.

He plunged the world

into one of the bloodiest and most destructive wars in history.

[Pendas] Robert Jackson, who serves as the chief American prosecutor

at the Nuremberg Trial,

is at the time of the trial an associate justice

on the United States Supreme Court.

His opening statement at Nuremberg in particular is... is simply a masterpiece.

[Jackson] The privilege

of opening the first trial in history

for crimes against the peace of the world

imposes a grave responsibility.

The wrongs, 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.

[Pendas] What Jackson does in his opening statement

is he makes plain the moral stakes of this trial

and the kind of symbolic message

that the Allies are trying to send with this trial.

This is not just political justice.

This is the full force of the law being mobilized

to try to punish and bring some measure of justice

for some of the worst horrors that humanity has ever seen.

[Shirer] I think we have heard today

one of the great trial addresses of history.

The words ringing out so that they match the hopes

and the aspirations and the great challenge of this moment.

As a human being,

I would have preferred to have escaped this long German chapter in my life,

but as a journalist and eventual writer, I did not regret it.

[Omer Bartov] William Shirer is an outside witness from the inside,

and that's a huge advantage that most historians don't have

because historians write about the past, not the past that they lived in.

[Hett] Shirer really was present at the confluence of a lot of new things

from 1934 to 1940.

He's really present at the early stages of the Nazi regime.

A lot of his broadcasts

were among the really pioneering international radio news broadcasts.

[bombs whistling]

[Shirer] I've seen what happens to nations and peoples that Hitler conquers.

I've seen how he destroys them with a brutality, with a ruthlessness,

that you have to see to really comprehend.

One personal word here, if I may.

I want to assure you that I am not one of those armchair civilians

who has come to incite you with a lot of fake stories about the enemy.

The truth about him needs no adornment.

[Deirdre van Dyk] While my grandfather is reporting from Nazi Germany,

he would write in his diaries about what he was seeing,

and all the things he couldn't say in his broadcast.

Those were uncensored accounts, day by day.

After the war, he kept writing.

He really had a sense of where history was going

and the implications of what was happening.

He thought democracy was important,

and it was always in danger.

What happened in Nazi Germany, it doesn't happen suddenly.

Changes are very slow and gradual.

My grandfather always told us to pay attention.

[typewriter keys clacking]

[Shirer] In the spring of 1913, when he was 24 years old,

Hitler left Vienna for Munich, in Germany.

The principal reason he left Austria was to escape military service.

For three years, since his 21st birthday,

he had dodged it.

He had, however, one thing,

an unquenchable confidence he would still make good.

Just how, he did not yet know.

The coming of World War I in 1914 offered Hitler an escape

from all the failures and frustrations of his personal life.

[pensive music playing softly]

For decades, all of the great powers of Europe,

Russia, Britain, France, Austria-Hungary,

had various alliances and treaties.

That started to break down by the beginning of the 20th century.

[Goeschel] World War I is caused by a lethal cocktail.

In 1914, there was a very fragile European alliance system,

but you also have territorial imperialist ambitions

of some powers,

national pride, and militarism

that facilitated the outbreak of World War I.

[Evans] World War I broke out because the heir to the Habsburg throne,

the Archduke Franz Ferdinand,

had been assassinated with his wife.

[Hett] They were assassinated by Bosnian-Serbian terrorists.

[tense music building]

[Hett] Tension immediately springs up in Europe.

[Evans] The Russian Empire said, "We back the Serbs,"

the German Empire said, "We back the Austrians,"

the French said, "We'll back the Russians,"

and the British said, "We'll back the French."

So the two sides lined up.

[Hett] Within a few weeks, you have a situation

where all of these major European powers are at war.

[Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" playing]

[Kaiser Wilhelm II, in German] In the midst of peace,

the enemy invades us.

So let's take up arms!

We will stand this fight even against a world of enemies.

[crowd cheering uproariously]

[Richie, in English] When World War I breaks out,

there's a general sense in Europe that it's an excitement.

And there was this idea that it was just a big, fun sports event.

["Ride of the Valkyries" continues]

[Richie] I mean, young men sign up all over these countries

so that they won't miss out on the adventure.

Nationalism had become very, very important

in the European psyche.

Suddenly, everybody says, "We're in this together."

EVERY SHOT, A RUSSIAN EVERY PUSH, A FRENCHMAN

Hitler feels this energy, this... this momentum,

and he wants to be involved in it. He wants to take part in it.

There's a famous photograph greeting the outbreak of war.

Hitler's there, ecstatic.

And so he volunteers to join the Bavarian Army,

which was part of the German Army.

[Goeschel] He refuses to serve

in the multiracial army of the Habsburg Empire

because Hitler sees himself as German.

[Evans] And it's a chaotic situation.

Thousands and thousands of young men are volunteering,

and the authorities can't really check their papers properly.

So he gets in,

though he's not actually Bavarian or German.

[Richie] For Hitler, war is glory.

War is something fantastic.

War is gonna be good for the German nation.

[Goeschel] Hitler suddenly has a purpose.

He has found a purpose

for his unglamorous, rather miserable life.

[Shirer] The coming of World War I in 1914 offered Hitler an escape.

"It came," he later said,

"as a deliverance from the distress that had weighed upon me

during the days of my youth."

"I am not ashamed to say that I sank down on my knees

and thanked heaven."

["Ride of the Valkyries" continues]

[Richie] It was the war to end all wars.

But this is something that the boys going off to war in 1914

have no concept of.

[rapid gunfire]

[Richie] There was no understanding of the terrible technological changes

that had taken place.

The horrors of mechanized warfare,

things like the creation of machine gun, poison gas being used,

the creation of tanks, the creation of flamethrowers,

the creation of planes dropping bombs,

and all of these other developments which are there to massacre human beings.

[distant explosions]

[Richie] They're there to destroy human flesh.

[explosion]

[Hett] Hitler was a runner who carried messages

from the regimental quarters to the frontline and back again.

[Evans] For four years,

he fought, carried messages, underwent dangers,

and railed against anybody who would betray the war

or disbelieve in it.

[foreboding music building slowly]

[Evans] During the war,

some of the shells fired are gas shells.

Poison gas, mustard gas.

It's very deadly and very dangerous.

And Hitler is attacked,

and he's hospitalized to recover.

[Shirer] On the dark autumn Sunday morning of November 10th, 1918,

a pastor came bearing unbelievable news for the wounded soldiers.

Kaiser Wilhelm II, the Emperor of Germany,

had abdicated and fled to neutral Holland, the pastor told them.

The German Army would surrender to the Allies at Compiègne, in France.

The war was lost.

The pastor began to sob.

So did the blinded Corporal Hitler.

[Evans] At one blow,

four years of his life had been deprived of meaning.

They'd been destroyed.

Most people believed Germany was winning.

That's because the German military government had,

all the way up to within a few weeks of the defeat,

insisted that Germany was winning.

They had concealed the deep problems of the German Army

from the populace at large.

[Hett] It becomes clear to Germany's army commanders

that they've been unquestionably defeated on the battlefield.

So the High Command draws the only rational lesson they could draw,

which is that they need to get out of the war as quickly as possible.

And this meant that the imperial government collapsed.

The Emperor of Germany, Kaiser Wilhelm II, abdicated.

[Goeschel] World War I fundamentally transforms Germany.

Germany ceases being an empire.

Germany ceases being a monarchy.

Germany in 1918 is turned into a liberal democracy

that came to be known as the Weimar Republic.

[in German] Workers and soldiers.

The old and the rotten, the monarchy, has collapsed.

Long live the new! Long live the German Republic!

[Florvil, in English] The Weimar Republic was largely led

by a coalition of the Social Democratic Party.

These are sort of mostly leftist groups

and many Jewish politicians.

[Pendas] So it's up to the new government to sign the armistice

in a railroad car in France.

The Social Democrats are essentially left holding the bag.

- [crowd cheering] - [uneasy music playing]

[Hett] Then comes the Treaty of Versailles in June of 1919,

with no German involvement.

The treaty took from Germany about 13% of its pre-war territory.

[Eaton] The victors put horrible reparations on Germany

to make Germany take all of the war guilt.

The winning powers accused Germany of having the most expansive aims,

but most Germans were aghast

at the idea that they were supposed to take on the war guilt...

WE WANT TO BE FREE OF VERSAILLES!

...which they saw as a part of a big international situation

and not German aggressive war aims.

[Anne Berg] The Treaty of Versailles was so upsetting to Germans,

and it basically served as a national consensus.

The rejection of the Treaty of Versailles, the rejection of this punitive peace,

the rejection of the reparations...

That was something pretty much everyone across the political spectrum

could agree on.

But the government reluctantly signed it.

[uneasy music continues]

[Goeschel] The conservative German Army leadership

has completely abrogated its responsibility.

They basically say,

"We will not have anything to do with the surrender."

[Pendas] It is, in fact, the military leadership

that begins actively promoting the conspiracy theory

that Germany did not lose World War I on the battlefield,

that it was not defeated militarily,

but that it was stabbed in the back

by a left-wing Jewish civilian leadership...

GERMANS, REMEMBER!

...that prevented Germany from winning.

This is, of course, absurd.

[speaking indistinctly]

[Goeschel] Hitler firmly believes in this conspiracy theory.

Hitler is raging.

He is blaming the Jews, he is blaming socialists

for undermining the victorious German Army.

[Evans] He found a paranoid explanation.

Like Siegfried in the Wagner operas,

he thought German troops had been stabbed in the back

by the home front.

[Goeschel] Hitler claims that his life mission

will be to claw back control from the dark forces of history

and to make sure that Aryan Germans like Hitler

will run the fortunes of Germany

and that they will make Germany a great country again.

[Jackson] What makes this inquest significant

is that these prisoners represent

sinister influences that will lurk in the world

long after their bodies have returned to dust.

We will show them to be the living symbols of racial hatreds,

terrorism, and of violence,

and of the arrogance and cruelty of power.

They are the symbols...

[Shirer] My spine throbbed today as Jackson used the power of language

to build up hour after hour his masterly case

against the Nazi barbarism.

More important to me than the trial itself

was the making public by the prosecution of hundreds of tons of secret documents

that had been seized by the Allied armies

before the Germans had time to destroy them.

The Nazi defendants are going to be convicted by their own words,

their own records,

their own foul deeds.

[Pendas] These four charges, in the minds of the prosecution,

are all interconnected.

Conspiracy, the first count of the indictment,

was the glue that was going to hold all of these other charges together.

Crimes against peace,

the idea is essentially that the prosecution is saying

it's illegal under international law

to attack your neighbors unprovoked.

War crimes...

You can't kill civilians, you can't kill wounded POWs,

you can't attack hospitals... Those sorts of things.

And finally, there's the charge of crimes against humanity,

which, like crimes against peace, is a new invention at Nuremberg.

And the idea behind crimes against humanity

was that there was now an international law

against political mass murder of your own citizens.

Jackson says that these crimes,

they are all derivative of the war itself.

If you don't have the war, you don't have the atrocities.

And so if we can prevent future wars

by using the law,

we will prevent all of these kinds of horrors from happening again.

- [dramatic music playing] - [woman shouting indistinctly]

[Pendas] World War I basically ended with political chaos

and revolutionary ferment in Germany and in Eastern Europe.

[crowd clamoring]

[Hett] The Bolshevik Revolution in Russia created a completely mistaken belief,

but the widespread belief, that there's a connection

between communism, or as they said in those days, "Bolshevism,"

and Jews.

And this was applied in Germany as well,

the idea that democratic politicians were also Jews and communists.

So there's a violence that permeates the early Weimar Republic.

[Goeschel] There is a civil war-like atmosphere.

[gunshots]

[Goeschel] It's a hotbed of extreme political polarization.

There are several attempts by the political left

to impose socialist, communist-style regimes,

and right-wing military veterans come together

to fight what they see as the left-wing threat.

[Hett] And the army in Munich is trying to keep tabs

on what's happening politically in the city.

[Goeschel] The army leadership is very much interested in what is going on

on the right-wing fringes of the political spectrum,

and they're using Hitler

and other fairly small, insignificant figures

to gather information on the breadth and scope of the German right.

[people murmuring indistinctly]

[Hett] Hitler starts being sent out as a kind of political spy

to look at the meetings of various political groups

and report back to the army command on what's going on there.

On one of these occasions,

Hitler goes to a meeting put on by a small fringe group.

It's called the German Workers' Party.

And Hitler is supposed to just watch,

record what happens, and report back.

But what happens at this meeting

is a speaker there speaks in favor of Bavarian secession from Germany.

And for Hitler, this is absolutely rank treason,

and Hitler stands up and unloads on this man

in a torrent of angry rhetoric.

And the leading figures of this small German Workers' Party

are incredibly impressed by Hitler's tirade.

One of the leaders, a man named Anton Drexler, comments,

"That man's got a mouth on him. We could use him."

[Berg] The chairman of the German Workers' Party

approached him, handed him a pamphlet, and invited him to join.

[Goeschel] Hitler decides to leave the German Army

after six years of service.

He sees that this party has great potential.

ORDER! LAW! FREEDOM!

[Goeschel] This party is actively against the Weimar Republic.

This party is actively against liberal democracy.

This party is hostile to communism and socialism.

This party is hostile to the Jews.

[Hett] And then, pretty quickly, he starts to make a reputation in Munich

as the most effective speaker

at things like rallies and beer hall meetings and so on,

for this fledgling German Workers' Party.

[crowd clamoring]

[Shirer] To the surprise of all who had come into contact with him,

Hitler suddenly revealed a ferocious energy and drive.

All the warped ideas which had been bubbling in his strange mind

since the lonesome days of hunger in Vienna,

now found an outlet.

[Goeschel] He develops his own distinct rhetorical style.

[Hett] When he started to speak, this huge voice would somehow come out

of this rather frail person,

and that gave him a very commanding presence.

[Richie] Hitler was a genius at tapping into already-existing feelings

in the German population.

[Goeschel] We are talking about resentful army veterans

who think that Germany's reputation has been dragged into the mud.

[Berg] That was something that Hitler was really good at,

riling up the masses for speaking to this resentment and anger

that was so pervasive in German society.

To read the room and feel the energy

and ride that energy to incredible heights.

[pensive music playing]

[Evans] He began to focus on a number of different messages.

One thing that came through very strongly was his hatred of the Jews.

It's important to remember that Jews in Germany

were only less than 1% of the population. It's a tiny minority.

He talks about making Germany great again.

He rails against the Versailles Treaty.

[Richie] So this then becomes this maelstrom

of self-pity and of hatred and of resentment,

and of watching this great Germany turn into this subjugated, poor nation.

Germany had been such an important power,

and all of a sudden it's nothing?

And so he taps into that.

[Hett] Eventually, he was able to use this power

to force out the original leadership

and to get himself named the one clear leader

of the German Workers' Party,

whose orders would never be questioned.

He made it clear this would not be a democratic or a consensus party,

that it would be a leader party.

[Berg] The party rose quite substantially after 1921,

when Hitler addresses mass meetings, talking to 2,000 and more people,

making Hitler and the Nazi Party into a regional force.

But it is not yet a force

that actually has a wider recognition across Germany.

GERMAN WORKERS PARTY

[Goeschel] He molds the German Workers' Party

into his own party...

NATIONALIST SOCIALIST GERMAN WORKERS PARTY

...and renames it the Nationalist-Socialist German Workers' Party,

which is also known as the Nazi Party.

Hitler adopts the swastika symbol as the Nazi Party emblem.

The swastika symbol goes back thousands of years,

representing fortune and peace.

Hitler claims that he himself designed the Nazi flag.

He claims that the red stands for the socialist aims of the Nazi Party,

the white stands for the nationalist aims,

and the swastika itself stands for the aspirations of the German people.

[Hett] Important to have the "national" on the front there,

because if you just had a party called the Socialist German Workers' Party,

you would normally think this must be a left-wing party of some kind.

Having "National" in front of that, indicated that the party had a mixture

of nationalist, more right-wing ideology.

The idea was that it would be an effort to bring working-class people,

who would typically vote left in some way, socialist or communist,

to bring them into a nationalist political group.

[Goeschel] The Nazi Party buys its own newspaper

called Völkischer Beobachter or "People's Observer,"

an anti-Semitic newspaper

in which Nazi officials peddle their hateful views.

[patriotic band music playing]

[Goeschel] The Nazi Party wanted to appeal to the senses,

they wanted to appeal to the emotions of German voters,

through speech, through images, through flags,

through songs like "Deutschland Erwache," "Germany Awaken."

[male choir singing in German] ♪ Germany ♪

♪ Awake from your nightmare! ♪

♪ Don't give foreign Jews ♪

♪ Room in your kingdom! ♪

♪ We want to fight ♪

♪ For your resurgence ♪

♪ Aryan blood ♪

♪ Shall not perish! ♪

[Goeschel, in English] Nazism is born out of the ashes of World War I.

The First World War certainly saved Hitler.

It saved his life.

It sounds perverse to us that a war saved someone's life.

Without the war,

Hitler wouldn't have had a purpose in his life.

Without the First World War,

we wouldn't be speaking about Hitler today.

[male choir singing in German] ♪ Hail our leader! ♪

♪ Hail Hitler to you! ♪

[crowd cheering]

[Jackson, in English] This war did not just happen.

It was planned and prepared for over a long period of time.

[unsettling music playing]

[Jackson] The chief instrumentality of cohesion in plan and in action

was the National Socialist German Workers' Party,

known as the Nazi Party.

Some of these defendants were with it from the beginning.

The membership took the party oath.

This was the oath...

"I vow inviolable fidelity to Adolf Hitler."

"I avow absolute obedience to him

and to the leaders he designates for me."

[unsettling music continues]

[Shirer] These subordinate leaders

who helped Hitler on the road to political power in Germany

were an odd assortment.

There is Goering,

a famous fighter pilot during World War I,

and a drug addict.

At last, he has achieved his ambition of being number one,

though not precisely as he had once dreamed.

At first glance, I scarcely recognize him.

His faded air force uniform,

shorn of the insignia and of the medals he loved so childishly,

hangs loosely on him.

And gone is his old burliness,

his old arrogance,

his flamboyant air.

How a twist of fate, I marveled, could reduce a man to size.

Rudolf Hess, for long, the closest of all the Nazi aides to Hitler.

Now in the dock, he struck me as a broken man.

His face so emaciated, it looked like a skeleton.

His mouth kept twitching nervously,

his once-bright eyes stared vacantly about the courtroom.

It was the first time I had ever seen Hess out of uniform.

Alfred Rosenberg,

once the mentor of Hitler and the Nazi movement.

He who contributed so much to the Nazis' race hatreds

and who helped direct the extermination of the Slav people,

is nervous in the dock,

lurching forward to catch every word,

his hands shaking.

[Evans] Hitler had a knack of attracting

these rather footloose, purposeless nationalists

who were looking for someone to represent the cause

and take them to victory.

[Dr. Stahmer, in German] Tell the Tribunal when and under what circumstances

you came to know Hitler.

[Goering] I inquired and found that I could hear Hitler speak

as he held a meeting every Monday evening.

I went there, and there Hitler spoke about The Treaty of Versailles

and the repudiation of Versailles.

These convictions were spoken word for word

as if from my own soul.

Now, finally I saw a man here who had a clear and definite aim.

[Berg, in English] In the 1920s, because militarism is forbidden, basically,

by the terms of the Treaty of Versailles,

there are these forces of paramilitary groupings

who mobilize in terms of politics, but militarized politics.

[Hett] The Nazis' band of thugs

is particularly notorious and particularly important.

They're the group known as the SA,

stands for Sturmabteilung in German,

or translates basically as "storm troopers."

They were known for their brown shirts,

and their role was basically to move into areas of German cities and towns,

particularly working-class areas

where the social democrats or the communists might be dominant,

and to start engaging in basically gang warfare

with the paramilitaries of those parties, and literally gain control of territory.

[Goering, in German] I strove from the beginning

to bring into the SA those members of the Party

who were young and idealistic enough

to devote their free time and their entire personalities to it.

For at that time, things were very difficult

for these good men.

[crowd chanting]

[Goeschel, in English] Some of the early members of the SA

are military veterans who believe that the war hasn't ended in 1918.

They believe that they have to fight the Weimar Republic,

they have to fight the Jews, they have to fight the communists,

they have to claw back control so that Germany can be great again.

And Hitler's very much part of that.

This is not a shameful war.

No. "We're gonna get our revenge. We're gonna get back at them."

[frenetic string music playing]

[Berg] And lots of them had nowhere to go, nothing to eat,

nothing to do with themselves.

And these soldiers say, "Oh, well, this is our savior."

"This is the guy who's going to bring us back

to where we should have been, because we should have won this war."

[Hett] For a young man who couldn't settle down to civilian life,

and still wanted action, they wanted violence and excitement,

it's something that you have instant comradeship.

You join a unit where you have friends.

All you have to do is beat up communists, beat up other political opponents,

and for many young men seeking adventure, that's an appealing mixture.

They would also engage in murder and assassination and political violence.

[Goeschel] Ernst Röhm was an officer in the German Army.

He is one of the most violent Nazis.

Röhm molds the SA into a violent crack troop.

[glass shattering]

[Hett] He was one of the people who just could not get enough combat,

who couldn't settle down after the war.

[Evans] He'd been wounded in World War I.

His face was quite badly scarred.

Röhm was quite close to Hitler,

and his SA, his Brownshirts, were absolutely vital

in trying to establish Nazi rule by force.

[Pendas] They were a really important instrument

of the Nazi disruption of the Weimar Republic.

They're helping to promote a crisis atmosphere.

They're helping to make Germany ungovernable.

[Hett] The first five years of the Weimar Republic

really were a time of nearly constant crisis.

Germany really is in the grip of a low-level civil war.

Day after day and night after night,

there are these complicated multi-way political gang warfare battles

going on in German towns and cities.

1923 was in many ways the most crisis-ridden of those years.

[Berg] Germany had a lot of war debt from the terms of the Treaty of Versailles.

And social costs are really high,

and the government had to pay war widows,

they had to pay insurance for veterans, and so on and so forth.

So there's a lot of money that needed to be shelled out,

and they basically started printing more money.

So at this point, inflation becomes astronomical.

[Goeschel] The economy has gone completely out of control.

One US dollar is worth more than four trillion marks.

Children play with banknotes because paper money has lost its value.

People are paid their wages. By the time they go to the shops,

prices have gone up that they cannot buy anything.

[Berg] So in this environment of hyperinflation

and civil strife and popular discontent,

Hitler decides that action is really the only way forward.

[crowd murmuring indistinctly]

[Goeschel] The Bavarian government organizes a rally

in one of Munich's main beer halls.

The Bavarian government is extremely dissatisfied

with the national government.

They think that the national government is not doing enough

to fight back against the political left.

[Hett] Hitler and several others

see this as the opportunity they've been looking for.

[Berg] And Hitler and his SA storm troopers march in.

[tense music playing]

[Berg] And all of a sudden, Hitler stands up on a chair,

shoots his pistol in the air...

[gunshot]

...and declares the current government deposed.

[Pendas] It was an attempt to overthrow the government

through a kind of armed insurrection.

[dramatic orchestral music playing]

[Goeschel] Hitler thinks that he can co-opt the Bavarian government

in his quest to seize power in Berlin,

and he takes members of the Bavarian government

into a side room at gunpoint.

[Berg] And he extracts promises from the political elites in the room

that they are going to play the assigned role

in this new dictatorship.

[Goeschel] Then Hitler goes back into the main room.

He gives a speech

in which he appeals to the ultra-nationalist sentiments

of the audience.

Some in the audience cheer him,

not necessarily because they agree with Hitler,

but simply because Hitler is a very effective speaker.

[crowd applauding]

[Berg] At the same time, the SA, Ernst Röhm in particular,

is trying to take over police and military stations,

which is where things go sour.

The police and the military do not play along,

and they fail to take over a telephone switchboard,

which actually means that the news is getting out.

Once the police show up, the political elites are like,

"Oh no, no, no, no. We made those agreements under duress."

Hitler and the Nazi Party had expected, somewhat unrealistically,

that the army and the police would just join in,

and that didn't happen.

The next day, however,

Hitler and the Nazi Party realize that the momentum had been lost,

and they don't really quite know what to do.

So they come up with this idea

that they could maybe just stage a march through Munich,

and potentially even take it all the way to Berlin.

[Hett] And Hitler and his people meet police forces

at the Feldherrnhalle in the center of Munich,

the very place where he had presumably been photographed

on the outbreak of World War I,

and there's a firefight.

[gunfire]

[Evans] They were met with a hail of bullets

from the Bavarian police.

Hitler was pulled to the ground by one of his co-marchers,

dislocating his shoulder.

Goering was wounded by a bullet,

and in order to dull the pain, took morphine,

and became a morphine addict the rest of his life, pretty much.

[gunshot]

Several Nazis were killed,

several policemen were killed,

and the putsch was a pathetic, miserable failure.

[intense music playing]

[Hett] The trial which occurred in 1924, was an incredible reversal for Hitler.

[Berg] In the trial, Hitler addresses the population

in a way that changes the narrative.

Not some lunatic with a gun

trying to take over the Weimar government from a beer hall,

but rather a man with deep-rooted national conscience

is appealing to the masses

to recognize the dysfunction of the system at large.

- [intense music continues] - [indistinct shouting]

[Berg] And instead of denying his responsibility,

he actually claims full responsibility, and says, "Yes, this is what I did,

but actually, the revolutionaries who destroyed the German Reich,

and cooked up this crazy republic, they are the real criminals."

[Florvil] He talks about the sense of himself as a victim,

but also Germany as a victim.

We're getting at the sort of core themes, core elements,

that are pervasive throughout Nazi ideology.

Democracy is rotten,

it's capitalistic, it's internationalist.

And so the Nazi order

will help to restore Germany

to its... its greatness once again.

[Goeschel] National and international newspapers

report the Hitler trial in detail.

The Beer Hall Putsch made Hitler and the Nazis famous across the globe.

[Florvil] The media writes about this figure,

this charismatic, very interesting figure that emerges through the trial.

He becomes the star.

[indistinct shouting]

[Hett] As he is giving his last speech at the end of the trial,

he memorably said to the court that they might convict him of treason,

and they might send him to jail,

but the goddess of history, with a smile, would acquit him

because what he had done,

he had done for his country, he had done out of patriotism.

One of the judges was heard to say at one point,

"What a splendid chap this Hitler is."

And these words had a considerable effect on the court,

which gave him the lightest sentence they could possibly give him,

which was five years in prison.

[indistinct murmuring]

[Goeschel] The sympathetic right-wing judge adds to the sentence

that Hitler will be eligible for parole after a mere six months.

He is sent to Landsberg Prison outside Munich.

[birds chirping]

[Goeschel] He doesn't face harsh living conditions in this prison.

[Hett] He doesn't have to wear any prison uniform.

[door opens]

[Hett] He receives food packages from admirers.

He was receiving so many packages

of sweets and sausages and cakes and things like that,

that he put on a lot of weight.

[Berg] And many people shower him with fan mail.

I would say this is the first time that women lose their heads over Hitler.

[Florvil] It's sort of like a revolving door of guests

coming in and out.

He's still a central figure of the Nazi Party.

So I think this says a lot about his ability to network,

the ways in which he's able to help facilitate his political rise.

[typewriter keys clacking]

[Goeschel] He uses his time in prison to write his autobiography Mein Kampf,

or My Struggle.

And it is Rudolf Hess who collaborates with Hitler

on Mein Kampf.

[Hett] Hess is in prison with Hitler, and he was always very much an acolyte,

we might say a groupie, of Hitler.

Hess begins to convey to Hitler

some of the lessons that he's learned at Munich University

about the idea of lebensraum.

[Richie] For Hitler, lebensraum, it's translated as "living space."

But actually, it's more complex than that.

It's part of 19th-century German propaganda ideology,

and Hitler has the idea

that the cultures that actually exist on these territories in the east,

the Slavs who he considered to be subhuman,

are sort of bastard cultures.

They shouldn't really be there.

The Jews are untermenschen, nonhumans.

And what we really need to do,

is go back to this idea of the German mission in the east,

where us, wonderful, civilized Aryan race will go in and cleanse these lands,

and recreate them with these beautiful little German towns and villages.

[Berg] And so for him,

the idea that Germany needed its own hinterland

into which to expand and extract resources,

and build up the kind of arsenal that would enable it to be a global power,

was of the utmost importance from the beginning.

For Hitler, war was not a question of if, but when.

[Goeschel] Mein Kampf is not an easy book to read.

It is a cocktail of hateful ideas.

One chilling point,

he says if only several thousand of those Jewish miscreants

had been gassed in World War I, uh, Germany would be in a better place.

[typewriter keys continue clacking]

[foreboding music playing]

[Hett] This book is an example of what Germans call a bildungsroman,

a novel or a story about a young person growing to maturity,

but with the idea of presenting himself as a political genius.

[Berg] Given the experience of the Beer Hall Putsch,

Hitler realizes that it is impossible to seize power by way of revolution.

He decided, as a political strategy,

you have to play within the system and then dismantle the system from within.

[paper rustling]

[Goeschel] Hitler realizes that the Nazis can only come to power

if they have the legitimacy

of as many people in positions of influence as possible.

They want to conquer Germany through violence

and through the ballot box.

[foreboding music continues]

[Evans] Hitler had always lived in a bit of a dream world.

There's very little political realism in Mein Kampf.

Here he is on the outer fringes of politics.

You could almost say the lunatic fringe of politics.

This extremism, the kind of language he uses

is not the language of a parliamentary democracy,

and that, I think, should have given people a clue

as to how untamable he would be if he got anywhere near power,

and how he would use it.

[Norman Birkett] It must be remembered that Mein Kampf

was no mere private diary

in which the secret thoughts of Hitler were set down.

By the year 1945,

over six-and-a-half million copies had been circulated.

[Shirer] Like almost everyone else who had bothered to read the Nazi Bible,

I had not taken the aims Hitler set down in that hodgepodge of a book seriously.

I have often thought subsequently

that if more people had digested Mein Kampf

and seen it not only as a lot of Nazi gibberish,

then history might have taken a different course.

[in German] Before I answer the question of the Tribunal

whether or not I am guilty...

[gavel bangs]

[man, in English] You must plead guilty or not guilty.

[in German] I declare myself in the sense of the indictment not guilty.

[somber music playing]

[Goeschel, in English] How can people in the modern age follow,

or seemingly follow, one man?

[man] Rudolf Hess.

[in German] No.

[Pendas, in English] It's not that a handful of evil men can do evil things.

It's that a handful of evil men

can convince a large majority of ordinary men

to help them do evil things.

[in German] I declare myself in the sense of the indictment not guilty.

I declare myself in the sense of the indictment not guilty.

I declare myself not guilty.

Not guilty.

I declare myself in no way guilty.

I declare myself not guilty.

[Shirer, in English] Adolf Hitler's rise would have a hold on the German people.

[crowd cheering]

[Shirer] They were prepared to follow him loyally and obediently.

[gunfire]

[Shirer] What he did with that power, and how he abused it, we shall see.

[plaintive piano music playing]

[music fades out]