Original subtitles

[electricity flicks on]

[generators humming]

[audio feedback hums]

[radio frequencies squealing]

[radio announcer] At this time, the Columbia Broadcasting System

brings you the news of the world as reported by its correspondents

in the major world capitals.

First to be heard from tonight, is William L. Shirer.

This is Columbia in New York calling William L. Shirer.

Come in, Mr. Shirer.

[intriguing music playing]

[Deirdre van Dyk] My grandfather reported for Universal News Service in Berlin,

but then in 1937, he gets a job with CBS.

He can be based maybe in Geneva or Vienna,

and he chooses Vienna. It's where my grandmother's from.

He loves Vienna.

Meanwhile, this chaos is happening in Austria.

The Germans are massing on the border, they're talking about invading...

[crowd] Heil!

[van Dyk] There's a lot of fear and unrest in the capital.

Clearly, Austria's collapsing.

- [suspenseful music playing] - [items clattering]

[Linda Shirer Rae] In 1938, when my mother gave birth to my sister,

Nazi troops were marching through the streets.

My mother's Jewish doctor had to go into hiding.

It was frightening.

[Steve Wick] Shirer sees this incredible madness

unfolding right in front of him.

[crowd shouting in distance]

[Wick] But Shirer can't get to the radio broadcast center in Vienna

because it's controlled by the Germans.

He ends up taking a plane from Vienna to Berlin to Amsterdam,

and finally to London.

It's a huge moment for CBS

because they're now doing something that hadn't been done before.

He goes right on the air,

and he tells America what the Germans are doing in Vienna,

and it was an enormous radio coup.

[Shirer] This morning, when I flew away from Vienna at 9:00 a.m.,

it looked like any German city in the Reich.

Red, white, and black swastika flags

hung from the balconies of most of the homes,

and in the streets, people raised their hands in Nazi salute...

[crowd chanting in German] One People! One Empire! One Führer!

[in English] ...and greeted each other with, "Heil Hitler."

[crowd chanting] Adolf Hitler! Adolf Hitler!

[theme music playing]

- [typewriter keys clacking] - [moody music playing]

[Shirer] Hitler had a villa on the Obersalzberg,

a mountain ridge above the town of Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps.

[birds chirping]

[Shirer] It was only three hours by car or train from Munich,

the headquarters of the Nazi Party.

It was even nearer the Austrian border.

The mountain scenery, broken by green valleys, is superb.

This is one of the most beautiful spots in Europe,

and Hitler came to love it all the rest of the days of his life.

Hitler was in such a powerful position after the consolidation of the Nazi regime

that he could afford to spend weeks, months away

at his holiday resort on the Berghof.

[jaunty music playing]

[in German] ♪ On a day in Spring Happiness knocks on your door ♪

♪ And the world shines in a golden glow ♪

♪ Extend your hands to happiness Never let it leave you again ♪

♪ Hold on to it tightly, forever... ♪

[Anne Berg, in English] It's sort of like Hitler's Mar-a-Lago, if you will.

A kind of retreat in the Bavarian Alps

that has a closeness to nature,

the spectacular mountain panorama,

that gave Hitler the sense that he was on top of the world

without having to deal with the messiness of everyday politics.

[in German] ♪ On a day in Spring Happiness knocks on your door ♪

♪ And fulfills your most beautiful dream ♪

[song ends with flourish]

[in English] The Berghof was one of the most important power centers

of Hitler's rule.

He had a close circle of regulars.

Eva Braun was at the center of that life.

[contemplative music playing softly]

[Benjamin Carter Hett] Eva Braun was a young woman who had started working

in the studio of Hitler's photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann,

and that is almost certainly where he met her.

She was born in 1912,

so she was 23 years younger than Hitler.

They had a very long relationship,

but Hitler always made a point of keeping her secret.

Hitler never wanted the German people to know

that he had this permanent girlfriend.

He always said he was married to Germany.

[gentle music playing]

[Berg] It's kind of funny that Hitler was drawn to a woman like Eva Braun

because on some level,

she kind of embodies the new woman of the Weimar period,

um, or the American flapper, if we want to have an analogy.

The way that she presented herself,

she was not a timid woman

along the lines that Nazi propaganda imagined women as wives and mothers.

[film reel whirring]

[Hett] As someone who had been a photographer's apprentice,

she loved photography.

She made home movies.

We still can see these today.

[no audible dialog]

[Hett] Even when he is seen relaxing,

he is, of course, always still maintaining a kind of persona as the Führer.

But nonetheless, as relaxed as Hitler seemingly got,

these movies depict that kind of environment.

[Goeschel] They show Hitler awkwardly kissing the hand of women

at the Berghof.

They show Hitler joking,

and you see Hitler's dog, a German Shepherd called Blondi.

Blondi plays a huge part in Hitler's life.

[Blondi panting]

[Goeschel] Eva Braun's films form an interesting contrast

to the official, choreographed visual record

of National Socialism and of Hitler, the dictator.

[intriguing music playing]

[Devin Pendas] Hitler is fundamentally a lazy person.

He does not like to work at something he doesn't find interesting.

[Hett] He would sleep in very late, he would get up late.

He would have a kind of leisurely lunch,

then maybe he would receive ministers or military commanders

and hear some reports, and give them some orders.

Typically, his evenings would be filled with a movie,

sometimes two movies, sometimes three movies.

After which, he might talk with his inner circle.

Hitler had a very unusual leadership style.

He was not someone who gave orders all the time.

Instead, he seems to have rather consciously developed a technique

where his subordinate people and subordinate agencies

would have to compete for his favor.

It was their task to work towards the Führer.

Hitler made very few policies himself

or articulated goals or strategies,

but rather had these amorphous ideas

that were often quite outlandish and quite radical.

By presenting these sorts of abstract concepts and ideas

to his subordinates,

he invited them to write policy for him,

to come up with ideas and strategies that would appeal to him.

[ominous music playing]

[Hett] Everything in the whole governmental machine

is desperately trying to figure out what he wants.

This is definitely a process that leads to a radicalization,

or as historians sometimes put it, a cumulative radicalization of Germany.

[suspenseful music playing]

[Joseph Goebbels, in German] The age of an exaggerated Jewish intellectualism

has come to an end.

The breakthrough of the German revolution

has cleared the German path forward.

[Pendas, in English] Once the Nazis consolidate their control of government,

one of the things that they wanted to do was to purge undesirable elements

from intellectual, cultural, aesthetic life,

most famously in a series of... of book burnings.

[radio frequencies squealing]

[Berg] The Nazis needed to take control of the apparatus of culture,

control the press and radio in a way that would allow them

to present themselves in the kind of image that they would want to be seen.

[Pendas] The next step is to Nazify German society as a whole,

and the key policy for this is something they called Gleichschaltung,

translated as "coordination."

Basically, they say that all of the organized elements

of social life, of civil society,

need to be Nazified.

[troops marching in distance]

[Pendas] Many people eagerly and voluntarily participated.

Being more Nazi than their neighbor

allowed Germans to advance socially and professionally,

since the Nazi Party controlled everything.

And equally important,

it gave them a sense of belonging to a community.

[foreboding music playing darkly]

[Goeschel] Gleichschaltung coordination included greeting people differently.

Instead of saying guten Tag, "hello,"

people would start saying "Heil Hitler"

using the Heil Hitler salute.

All associations, for example chess clubs, football clubs,

were all brought under the control of Nazi Party organizations.

[patriotic music playing]

[Goeschel] They particularly wanted to appeal to youth,

and so the role of the Hitler Youth

became more and more important for the regime,

that by the late 1930s,

membership of the Hitler Youth became compulsory.

[Pendas] They did some of the things that traditional youth groups did,

but they were also instruments of... of ideological indoctrination.

These were places where people learned what it meant to be a real German,

according to the Nazis.

They learned a certain kind of vision of a militarized masculinity

that was central to the Nazi vision for what Germany should be.

[youths singing in German] ♪ German is the soldier's blood ♪

♪ German heart and German courage ♪

♪ As if made of steel and iron... ♪

[Shirer, in English] On many a weekend, tramping through the stretches of woodland

that surrounded Berlin,

I would run into companies of Hitler Youth.

It was a disheartening experience

to watch Hitler take over the youth of Germany,

poison their minds,

and prepare them for the sinister ends he had in store for them.

[somber music playing]

[Shirer] I had not believed it possible until I saw it with my own eyes.

[Tiffany N. Florvil] Everything you do is supposed to be for the good of the nation,

for the sort of improvement and betterment of the nation.

You have these, um, even sort of women's groups, girl groups.

[in German] ♪ Solar rays are a pleasure Smile for us on a jovial day... ♪

[Florvil, in English] All for advocating different aspects of Nazism.

A virtuous woman is a mother in Nazi Germany,

so maternalism was extremely important.

[uneasy music playing]

[Pendas] So one of the goals of this policy of coordination

was the creation of what the Nazis called a Volksgemeinschaft,

a people's community.

[church bells tolling]

[Pendas] This was a kind of comprehensive racial vision

for what the Nazis hoped Germany would become.

[Goeschel] So-called "racial science" became a subject in German schools.

Even math quizzes took on racist anti-Semitic dimensions.

The school in which I was involved at the age of six

was one of Hitler's special schools,

which he had set up for the training of his future leadership elite.

We saw publications in which Jews were depicted

as being fat,

rapacious, ugly,

with large hooked noses.

And those pictures, I think, stayed with me longer

than any verbal impression that could have been given to me.

[ominous music playing]

[Goeschel] Racism and eugenics,

the idea that some people were worth more than other peoples

because of their skin color,

because of their lineage,

that idea was not exclusive to Germany.

[Florvil] Eugenics was extremely popular in the United States.

It was quite pervasive across the nation.

You had prominent people who were invested in these ideas,

trying to determine the superiority and the inferiority of races.

They also use these ideas to codify law, to enact policies,

for example, immigration quotas.

So there's a set amount of individuals who can migrate to the US.

[Hett] Hitler thought this was a great approach

to building the kind of national community in the United States

that he wanted to see in Germany.

The Nazis were also influenced by Jim Crow laws

in the Jim Crow South of the time,

laws that enforce a racial segregation

and racial identification and separation.

[Pendas] African-Americans living in the American South

are being treated as second-class citizens

and subjected to violence on a regular basis.

[bell jingles]

[Florvil] The Nazis did look at racial laws in the Jim Crow South

as a model for how to implement similar legislation in Nazi Germany.

[ominous music continues]

[trial official] You'll repeat yourself after me.

I swear by God...

[Julius Streicher repeats in German]

[trial official, in English] ...the almighty and omniscient...

[Julius Streicher repeats in German]

[trial official, in English] ...that I will speak the pure truth.

[Julius Streicher repeats in German]

[trial official, in English] And will withhold and add nothing.

[Julius Streicher repeats in German]

[trial official, in English] Sit down.

[Marx, in German] In 1935, at the Party rally in Nuremberg,

the so-called "racial laws" were promulgated.

Were you consulted about the planning and preparation

of the draft of that law?

And did you have any part in it,

especially in its preparation?

[Streicher] Yes, I believe I had a part in it,

insofar as for years,

I had written

that any further mixture

of German blood with Jewish blood

must be avoided.

I repeatedly wrote such articles.

[dark music playing]

[Shirer, in English] I never got tough enough to stomach Julius Streicher,

the sadistic, pornographic Jew-baiter from Nuremberg.

Almost to the last,

Hitler had a warm heart for this psychopathic pervert,

the Nazi boss of Franconia

and editor of the unspeakably vulgar anti-Semitic mass-circulation weekly

Der Stürmer.

[Marx, in German] Were you of the opinion

that the legislation passed in 1935

represented the ultimate solution

of the Jewish question by the state?

[Streicher] With reservations, yes.

I was convinced that if the Party program was carried out,

the Jewish question would be solved.

[somber music playing]

[Pendas, in English] In 1935, Hitler and the Nazis attempt to codify

the status of Jews in Germany.

[in German] I now propose to the Reichstag that the laws be adopted,

which Party comrade Reichstag President Goering will read.

The first and second law owe a debt of gratitude to the movement

under whose symbol Germany regained its freedom.

[crowd cheering]

[Pendas, in English] The Nazis had already begun

a series of both legal and ad hoc measures

to exclude Jewish people from German life.

This is their attempt to really create a stable legal foundation for this.

[in German] Citizens of the Reich are only nationals of German or related blood

who demonstrate through their behavior

that they are willing and able

to faithfully serve the German people and the Reich.

- [typewriter keys clacking] - [pensive music playing]

[Shirer, in English] The Nuremberg Laws deprived Jews of German citizenship,

confining them to the inferior status of "subjects."

They also forbade marriage between Jews and Aryans,

as well as extramarital relations between them.

Hitler, as his party hacks never cease to proclaim,

had become the law.

There was no other in the Third Reich.

[Nazi official, in German] To our Führer, the savior and warrior...

- Hail Victory! - [crowd] Hail!

- [Nazi official] Hail Victory! - [crowd] Hail!

- [Nazi official] Hail Victory! - [crowd] Hail!

[Hett, in English] Although the Nazis saw being Jewish as a racial category,

they had to fall back on a religious definition,

so what the Nazis said was,

you would count as being fully Jewish

if you had four or three grandparents

who had been officially on the rolls of a Jewish community.

If you had one or two Jewish grandparents, then you were deemed

what was called in German a Mischling, or a person of mixed race.

In the first couple of years of the Third Reich,

there was a lot of bottom-up activism,

a lot of street violence, uh, directed at Jews by the SA,

but also by ordinary Germans.

And so, many German Jews

saw the Nuremberg Laws as stabilizing the situation

and as providing, in a sense, clear rules.

"We have some legal regulation around this situation."

"We can act accordingly, and we can survive."

[Christopher Browning] Most Germans were not out to kill Jews.

They didn't see this as the first step to isolating a group

as a step towards genocide.

We now see that step of isolation and robbing of human rights

as very crucial,

but that's not what most Germans asked.

They asked, "Is life economically better?"

[Pendas] Many, many Germans, probably a majority,

actively supported the regime.

And part of the reason for that

was the Nazis' success at solving the Great Depression.

You go from a situation in which, in the early 1930s,

millions of Germans are out of work

to a situation in which you've got full employment very quickly.

And so for ordinary Germans, this is miraculous,

especially if they look abroad,

and they look at the United States or Great Britain,

which are still struggling with the Great Depression

in 1935, 1936, 1937.

[Goeschel] The Nazis take a lot of credit where no credit is due.

The Nazis exploit existing plans for public work schemes,

such as building the Autobahn, the motorway,

and this becomes one of the most potent symbols

of Nazi propaganda about combating unemployment.

[fire roaring]

[Goeschel] The Nazis also massively increased spending on armaments.

[machinery whirring]

[Goeschel] They introduced conscription in 1935,

so many of the people on the unemployment register

were simply taken off this register when they were drafted into the army.

[Berg] In addition to the sort of basic economic stabilization,

there was a sense of participatory opportunities

that got Germans to feel themselves as having an impact

in their everyday lives.

[radio announcer] Where there's a will, there's a sway,

especially if it's the will to get fit and keep fit.

The Strength Through Joy celebrations are taking place at Hamburg.

Strength Through Joy is the slogan, so laugh and grow fit.

- [patriotic music playing] - [crowd cheering]

STRENGTH THROUGH JOY

[Pendas] This Nazi organization called Kraft durch Freude,

which means Strength Through Joy,

that promoted leisure activities for ordinary Germans.

A lot of these were small-scale and local.

"We're gonna go for a hike in the meadows on Sunday" kind of thing.

But some of them were sort of Club Med kinds of things.

"We're gonna take people to beaches."

"We're gonna go on cruises in the North Sea."

[ship horn blows]

[Pendas] Most people in Germany never came anywhere near a Kraft durch Freude trip,

but they were amazing propaganda tools.

If you watch newsreels from the 1930s,

the Strength Through Joy stuff is everywhere.

[man, in German] The biggest surprise came in Wilhelmshaven

when the Führer appeared on board.

[Pendas, in English] They're sending this message

that, "Thank God we don't live in a democracy anymore."

"Remember how terrible it was

and everybody was unemployed and there were riots in the streets?"

"And now everybody's going on cruises all the time, and it's amazing."

- [cheery music playing] - [women chattering happily]

[Pendas] It's a very effective propaganda message

because it's political, but it's not overtly political.

[cheery music fades to silence]

[Goeschel] By 1936, Hitler and the Nazi Party

have completely coordinated,

through the process of Gleichschaltung coordination,

German politics, German society,

the German economy, German culture, German everyday life,

that it's now time to focus on the international stage.

[horse neighs]

[Hett] And at this point,

Hitler started taking steps towards an aggressive foreign policy.

These steps always seemed to happen in March,

and so people started speaking about Hitler's "March Surprises."

In March 1936, we get what we call the militarization of the Rhineland.

[Pendas] The Rhineland is the western part of Germany

along the Rhine River that borders France.

As part of the peace settlement at the end of the first World War,

one of the provisions was that Germany was not allowed

to station military personnel in this part of Germany.

It was an attempt by the French to avoid being invaded by Germany again.

But the French were very deliberate about using French colonial soldiers,

both from Africa and then also using Asian soldiers

from Indochina to occupy the Germans.

It was certainly a purposeful affront to say, "Look."

"Now, you're occupied by alleged inferior people,

who are then inflicting even more humiliation and disgrace on you."

[dark music playing]

[Hett] So in sending troops into the Rhineland,

Hitler was ostentatiously breaching the Treaty of Versailles

and doing something which was at least implicitly threatening

to French military security.

And he takes this step very publicly by giving a speech before the Reichstag

just at the moment the troops are crossing the Rhine bridges into the Rhineland.

So it's a very dramatic moment

which Hitler makes a very important propaganda display out of.

[dark music intensifies]

[Wick] Shirer and all the correspondents had been summoned to the Reichstag,

all his government officials, all his devoted followers.

[applauding]

There's some military people there that Shirer is keeping a close eye on

to see how they react.

[Hitler shouting indistinctly]

[Shirer] Hitler says in a deep, resonant voice,

"Men of the German Reichstag,

in this historic hour,

when in the Reich's western provinces, German troops are at this minute marching

into their future peacetime garrisons,

we all unite in two sacred vows..."

[crowd applauding]

[Shirer] He can go no further.

Now the 600 deputies, all personal appointees of Hitler,

leap to their feet like automatons,

their right arms outstretched in a Nazi salute,

and scream "Heils."

[crowd] Heil!

[Shirer] The first two or three, wildly.

The next 25, in unison.

[crowd shouting] Heil! Heil! Heil!

[news program music playing]

[radio announcer] Germany startled the postwar world

with sudden reoccupation of the demilitarized Rhine area.

- [crowd cheering] - [pensive music playing]

[Goeschel] There's a lot of jubilation, celebration,

and enthusiasm among Germans

for the Nazi remilitarization of the Rhineland.

[Hett] For the Germans, this is a case of "Making Germany great again,"

recovering from the humiliations that had followed defeat in World War I.

[radio announcer] France and England accept the situation,

and the new policy of appeasing the man with the guns

sets a new international tune.

[Pendas] The British in particular,

they actually kind of agree with the Germans

that some elements of the peace treaty after World War I were unfair.

[Hett] Hitler sees the gamble pay off,

and this only strengthens his own ego, his own confidence,

and his sense that he can continue to take these gambles.

The fact that the Western allies do not, in fact, respond at all

also starts to tell him something about them,

that he feels the Western democracies are weak,

and he can continue to push at them because they won't respond.

But what Hitler really wants to show the world

is how happy Germans are,

what a, you know, peaceful, prosperous, thriving place Germany is.

[upbeat orchestral music playing]

[radio announcer] For three years, the Nazis have prepared

the German body and the German mind for this.

For the first time, the Olympic Games are given

a heavy political and propagandistic overtone.

[Berg] Hitler didn't give a rat's ass about sports.

He was actually not interested in international sports,

he wasn't interested in German sports.

The Olympics, however, offered him an opportunity

to present German greatness to the world.

To present Germany in his image.

To bring in the international community and refute all these arguments

about violence and oppression and censorship,

and show just what he had achieved in those few short years.

So when the international community arrives in Berlin,

they are being confronted with this lavish display.

The Nazis actually remove anti-Semitic slogans.

The press is not publishing their usual anti-Semitic rants

in a way that is really not at all in keeping

with the sort of thrust of the Third Reich.

- [upbeat orchestral music continues] - [crowd cheering]

[Hitler, in German] I hereby announce the beginning of the Berlin Games

in celebration of the 11th Olympiad of the new era.

[crowd cheering]

[Pendas, in English] One of the propaganda messages

that the Germans are hoping to send

with the Berlin Olympics

is the superiority of racially pure Aryan Germans

in athletic prowess.

And German athletes do well.

But the problem for the Nazis

is that the real star of the Olympics who emerges in international media

is the African-American track athlete Jesse Owens.

[pistol fires]

- [engaging music playing] - [crowd cheering]

[Pendas] He wins several gold medals.

He humiliates several German stars.

And above all,

he attracts the lion's share of the international media attention.

[dramatic music playing]

[crowd cheering]

[Pendas] He's the one who's in the newsreels.

He's the one who's on the front page of international newspapers.

He's the one who comes out of that Olympics

as the one name that everyone remembers.

For the Nazis, they perceive this as a humiliation.

[Jesse Owens] I'm very glad to have won my three events in the games at Berlin.

Wonderful competition here, wonderful stadium, and a wonderful crowd,

and the days have been very nice.

And the people here in Germany have been very nice to me,

and I'm very glad to display my talent here. Thank you.

[intriguing music playing]

[Goeschel] Ultimately, the 1936 Olympics gave a major boost

to the international reputation of the Third Reich.

Many visitors go back to their home countries,

and they believe an image of Germans living in harmony with the Nazi regime.

[Ken Cuthbertson] William Shirer was reporting at the Olympics

with Universal News Service, the Hearst Agency, in Berlin.

And well-known Americans and other foreigners

came to Berlin for the Olympics,

influential people like Charles Lindbergh,

and they looked around and said,

"The Germans can't be that bad, and Hitler's not a bad guy."

William Shirer considers these people dupes.

They've got a completely false impression of what's going on in Germany,

and they haven't really seen the tiger.

He started writing about how the Nazis had dialed back their anti-Semitism.

The Germans see this, and immediately, the Propaganda Ministry

and the various other high-ranking officials

go berserk, and they say, "What the heck's this guy doing?"

[phone ringing]

[Cuthbertson] So they're all over him about this,

uh, accusing him of writing fake news.

[intriguing music continues]

[Shirer] Tess turned on the radio for the news

just in time for us to hear a ringing personal attack on me...

- [radio switches on] - [indistinct speaking on radio]

[Shirer] ...implying that I was a dirty Jew

and was trying to torpedo the Olympic Games

with false stories about the Jews and Nazi officials there.

The front pages of the afternoon papers

were full of typically hysterical Nazi denunciations of me.

I went over to the Propaganda Ministry

and burst into the office of the staffer in charge of foreign press,

demanded an apology and a correction in the German press and radio.

[fist slams]

[Shirer] He started to roar at me.

I roared back and dared him to expel me.

But I began to realize what I should have known.

That I was getting nowhere.

That no one, and he least of all,

had the power or the decency

ever to correct a piece of Nazi propaganda once it had been launched,

regardless of how big the lie.

[typewriter keys clacking]

[Hett] One of the ironies of the Olympics

and the propaganda piece that accompanied the Olympics,

is that just as the Olympics are in progress,

Heinrich Himmler, who has recently become the chief of all German police forces,

has ordered the construction of a new concentration camp

just north of Berlin, uh, called Sachsenhausen.

[tools clanking]

[somber music playing]

[Berg] Heinrich Himmler is one of, if not the most, important architect

of Nazi racial policy.

He is in charge of the SS.

He was not bound by any laws, any other ties.

He answered directly to Hitler, which basically meant

that the SS functioned as a state within a state.

In 1936,

Himmler is working on establishing

what we call the second generation of concentration camps,

that are designed to extract labor from the interned population,

not to merely contain them.

CONCENTRATION CAMP

[Remy] It's not yet the Nazi Party's intention

to imprison large numbers of German Jews.

Instead, the emphasis is on "asocials,"

people who are not conforming,

people who don't fit into the envisioned Volksgemeinschaft,

the envisioned people's community.

Those who appeared capable of working,

but were not working regularly,

alcoholics,

petty criminals,

repeat criminal offenders.

It would come to include gay men

as a particular target of the regime.

[Goeschel] The Sachsenhausen concentration camp

reflects the radicalization of Nazi domestic policy.

It reflects the dramatic escalation of Nazi racial policy.

WORK SETS YOU FREE

[Goeschel] It is built in 1936.

1936 is also the year

where the Nazi regime makes distinct steps

to prepare German society for war.

[trial official] Now, the Four-Year Plan had as its purpose

to put the entire economy in a state of readiness for war, did it not?

[Goering, in German] I have explained that it had two tasks to fulfill.

Firstly, to safeguard the German economy against crises.

That is to say, to make it immune from export fluctuations,

and as regards to food, from harvest fluctuations,

as much as possible.

And secondly, to make it capable of withstanding a blockade.

Which means, in the light of experiences in World War I,

to position it in such a way that in a second world war,

a blockade would not have such disastrous consequences.

[trial official, in English] To get a specific answer if possible,

uh, didn't you say that you saw it to be your task,

within four years,

to put the entire economy in a state of readiness for war?

[crowd murmuring]

[trial official] Did you say that, or didn't you?

[in German] Of course, I said that.

[plaintive music playing]

[Goeschel, in English] Hitler writes a secret memorandum

which comes to be known as the Four-Year Plan,

and he appoints Goering as the chief of a new authority

called the Office of the Four-Year Plan.

The direction of travel is clear.

Germany has to be ready for war within the next four years.

[Hett] Hermann Goering in the 1930s was typically thought of

as being the second man in Nazi Germany.

He's really Hitler's right-hand man.

He becomes the Mr. Fix-It, who gets sent to do all kinds of different jobs.

This is in keeping with the whole overarching concept

of working towards the Führer,

of creating diverse entities that will compete with each other

in order to arrive at a policy outcome that Hitler wants.

[Goeschel] Hitler wasn't interested at all in bureaucratic procedure.

He thought that, as a true leader, his task was to focus on big problems.

Hitler is incapable of friendship.

All Hitler cares about is politics.

Hitler has no private life.

One of the few people who are almost friends with Hitler

is Albert Speer.

[Hett] Hitler had dreamed of being an architect when he was a young man.

Here then was this young architect whom Hitler saw as being very talented.

[plaintive music continues]

[Hett] Speer was also good-looking.

He came from a well-off family. He was well-spoken.

For his part, Speer clearly idolized and hero-worshiped Hitler.

And so their relationship had this worshiping part on Speer's side

and paternal mentoring relationship on Hitler's side.

Hitler had the idea that he was creating what would be a Thousand-Year Reich,

and Berlin would be a kind of world imperial capital.

[upbeat orchestral music playing]

[Richard J. Evans] Berlin was going to be Germania,

was gonna have a huge set of boulevards going into the center of town,

a massive new airport.

It was going to have an Arc de Triomphe,

much bigger than the French one, of course,

a great hall of the people with a dome bigger than St. Peter's in Rome.

Everything was great, huge, monumental.

When Albert Speer's father visited him and met Hitler

and saw these models,

he simply tapped his forehead and said, "You're all mad."

"You've gone completely mad."

[pensive music playing]

[Pendas] Hitler is convinced that he is a man of destiny.

He is convinced that he and he alone can lead Germany

into the greatness for which it is destined,

and he feels like he needs to secure victory for Germany

while he's still young enough and robust enough

to provide the kind of leadership that he thinks only he can provide.

[Goeschel] Hitler doesn't know when exactly he will go to war,

but Hitler knows that he needs an ally,

and the most suitable ally for him is Mussolini's Italy.

Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler share a similar ideology,

and that ideology is fascism.

You cultivate politics not through debate,

but through violence.

You believe in a world order

where the strongest will prevail over weaker states,

over weaker institutions.

ITALIAN POST

[Hett] Mussolini, of course, had come to power in Italy in 1922,

long before Hitler.

So he viewed himself in a sense as the senior dictator,

and Hitler seemed to accept that.

But one of the issues between them is Austria.

Mussolini had posed as a defender of Austrian independence,

but Hitler had always been a pan-German nationalist

right from his young days in Austria.

So the idea of incorporating German Austria into Germany

was something that he had thought about for a long time.

Hitler is eyeing Austria hungrily in his preparations for war.

Austria has iron deposits,

it has other resources that Hitler thinks would be beneficial.

So in 1937, Benito Mussolini makes a state visit

to Berlin to see Hitler.

And Hitler is courting Mussolini.

He wants to impress upon Mussolini that Germany is a viable partner.

[Hett] The Nazis pull out all the stops when Mussolini visits.

They go to enormous lengths to create huge events.

[Goeschel] They take Mussolini around Germany.

They show off the strength of the new German Army, the Wehrmacht.

[plane engines roar]

[Hett] There's no doubt that this meeting is a moment at which the alliance

between these two men and their regimes is cemented.

In the end, Mussolini and Hitler agree

that Italy would give up any claim to be the defender of Austria.

[Pendas] So by February of 1938,

Hitler's putting enormous pressure on Austria

for closer economic cooperation.

He wants military cooperation.

Austria, at this point, is already being ruled

by their own domestic fascists,

who are sympathetic ideologically to Hitler,

but who want to preserve Austrian sovereignty.

[somber music playing]

[Pendas] And so the Austrian Chancellor, Kurt Schuschnigg, goes to visit Hitler

in Bavaria at his retreat

to try and soothe over relations between them.

[Remy] Hitler greets Schuschnigg politely when he arrives at the Berghof,

but then over the next several hours,

Hitler is trying to browbeat and intimidate Schuschnigg

into agreeing to what, for Schuschnigg, are impossible demands.

Putting pro-Nazi Austrians in important positions

in the Austrian government in order to arrange economic union

between the two countries,

and also to take increasing control over Austrian police and the military.

And this is something that Kurt von Schuschnigg

does not want to see happen because he understands it will be the end,

in effect, of Austria as an independent state.

[Pendas] Hitler corners him,

dresses him down like he's some kind of juvenile delinquent.

Berates him, yells at him,

and essentially bullies Schuschnigg into a new agreement

that gives the Germans everything that they wanted.

[unsettling music builds]

So after enduring this browbeating by Hitler at the Berghof,

Schuschnigg returns to Vienna

and decides to hold a plebiscite

on a unification with Nazi Germany.

[Pendas] He thinks that if he can secure an overwhelming majority of Austrians

voting to say that they're willing to cooperate with Germany,

but they want to remain an independent sovereign state,

it will give him international support

to resist some of the more assertive German, uh, demands.

[suspenseful music playing]

[Remy] Hitler's fear, of course, is that the vote is not going to go his way

and that most voters will reject closer union with Nazi Germany,

and it's at this point that he begins mobilizing

for an invasion of the country.

[G.D. Roberts] Hitler, uh, when he heard

that Schuschnigg was going to obtain the opinion

of the people by plebiscite,

he decided to invade at once, did he not?

[in German] Yes, I was told, when he heard that there was to be a...

grotesque violation of public opinion

through the trick of a plebiscite,

he said that he would certainly not tolerate this

under any circumstances. This is what I was told.

[Roberts, in English] He wouldn't tolerate public opinion being ascertained.

[in German] No, he would not tolerate public opinion being abused

through this trick.

That is how it was told to me.

[in English] So the armed forces of Germany

then marched into Austria?

That's right?

[Jodl, in German] That is right. The Wehrmacht marched in.

[Roberts, in English] And Austria, from that day,

received all the benefits of National Socialism?

Is that right?

[in German] That's a political question.

At any rate, it could perhaps have become the happiest country on earth.

[crowd murmuring]

[Goeschel, in English] The Anschluss of Austria

is not really an invasion.

Normally, when there is an invasion

of a foreign power into another country,

there is military resistance.

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

[Goeschel] In Austria, there is no military resistance whatsoever.

Instead, German soldiers are greeted by enthusiastic crowds.

- [crowd cheering] - ["Ride of the Valkyries" continues]

[Pendas] To the surprise of a lot of people,

certainly to the surprise of the Austrian government,

the German troops are greeted as heroes.

[Hett] We should remember that the population of post-World War I Austria

was overwhelmingly German in its composition,

and most of those people had favored some kind of union with Germany.

[Goeschel] As Hitler goes into Austria,

he travels through Braunau, his birthplace.

He travels through Linz,

the city where he had experienced his very unglamorous youth,

and then he enters Vienna.

["Ride of the Valkyries" swells triumphantly]

[crowd cheering]

[Goeschel] This is a personal triumph for Hitler.

He has been a vagrant in Vienna.

He has been a nobody before the First World War in that city.

Now, he returns to Vienna 25 years later

as the leader of destiny

who brings Austria back into Germany.

[crowd cheering]

[Pendas] Up till that point,

the plan really had been to turn Austria into a subordinate client state,

but this popular enthusiasm convinces Hitler

that he can simply annex Austria entirely

and incorporate it fully into the German Reich.

[Hitler, in German] German men and women,

I now proclaim a new mission to this country.

It corresponds to the commandment that once called the German settlers

from all parts of the old Empire to this place.

From now on, the oldest eastern territory of the German people

shall be the youngest bulwark of the German nation,

and thus of the German Reich!

[crowd cheering wildly]

[Goeschel, in English] For Hitler, the Anschluss

is one of the greatest personal triumphs of his life.

He boasts that he has fulfilled one of the biggest historical injustices,

and that is that Austria had been a separate state from Germany.

[Hitler, in German] As the Führer and the Chancellor

of the German nation and the Reich,

I now announce before all the German history

the entry of my homeland into the German Reich.

- [crowd cheering] - [tense music playing]

JEW

[Pendas, in English] For Austrian Jews, the Anschluss is a catastrophe.

They're one of the larger Jewish populations in Central Europe,

heavily concentrated in the city of Vienna.

And when the Nazis take control in Austria...

JUDAISM IS A CRIME

...Austrian Jews face the entire process

of exclusion, discrimination, expropriation

that had been unfolding in Germany over the previous four years

very, very dramatically and very quickly.

[crowds shouting in distance]

[Shirer] The SA and SS were picking hundreds of Jews off the streets,

or hauling them out of their homes

to clean the latrines in the barracks and other buildings seized by them.

I'd never seen quite such humiliating scenes

in Berlin or Nuremberg,

or such Nazi sadism.

[somber music playing]

After Hitler marched in,

a non-Jewish friend that I had known for many, many years

threw me on the street and made me scrub the street,

and he called me "Du sau Jude," "you pig Jew."

That following week, the benches in the parks

were already marked, "No Jews. No Jews allowed."

FOR ARYANS ONLY

[Heller] Jews were dismissed from their job.

JEWS FORBIDDEN!

[Heller] People disappeared.

People were scared to death.

[Hett] There's a degree of brutality and barbarity

which is something entirely new.

It represents a big escalation in Nazi anti-Semitic persecution.

THE SAME BLOOD BELONGS IN A UNITED REICH!

[Cuthbertson] Shirer begins reporting for CBS Radio on air in 1937,

and at the time of the Anschluss in March of 1938,

Shirer was living, uh, in Vienna.

And Shirer's wife Tess had a very difficult pregnancy.

[Linda Shirer Rae] My mother developed complications after the Cesarean

and was seriously ill for several weeks.

She had a Jewish obstetrician

who had to go into hiding,

rather sensibly.

But at some point,

she needed to have another operation,

and he operated on her in secrecy.

But it took her a very, very long time to recover.

[van Dyk] Now my grandfather wants to get my grandmother out of Vienna,

and he wants to move her to Geneva,

where she and my mother Eileen will be safe.

[somber music playing]

[Shirer] It was not so easy to leave Austria

now that Hitler had taken over.

The Gestapo was on the prowl,

not only for Jews and dissident Austrians, but for foreigners.

At the Aspern Airport, I explained to the Gestapo chief

that Tess was too weak to stand up, and I would go over the luggage with him.

[van Dyk] While my grandfather is having their suitcases searched,

my grandmother is taken off by officials to be searched.

[Shirer] I explained that she was heavily bandaged,

the danger of infection.

Then they led me aside.

"Wait here," they said.

I heard the lock turn.

- [lock clicks] - [Shirer] I was locked in.

[no audible dialog]

[Shirer] Then I heard Tess shout, "Bill, they're taking me away to strip me!"

[Rae] The German inspectors insisted on taking the bandages off.

They apparently suspected

that my parents were trying to smuggle money out of the country.

They figured that the bandages were fake,

but they found out apparently very quickly that they were not.

[Cuthbertson] It was extremely painful, it was extremely embarrassing,

and Shirer was absolutely enraged.

They were able to get on the plane

only because the Swiss pilot of this airliner,

he knew what was happening, he was sympathetic,

and he held the plane for them.

[Shirer] We flew over the Alps to Switzerland.

Sanity, civilization, freedom

after the barbarian Nazi nightmare.

[somber music continues]

[in German] The prosecution assumes that in 1938,

a more severe treatment

of the Jews was introduced.

Is that true, and what is the explanation?

[Streicher] Yes, clearly in 1938,

the Jewish question entered into a new phase.

I myself can only say in this connection

that there was no preliminary conference on this subject.

I assume that the Führer,

impulsive as he was and acting on the spur of the moment,

only got around, probably on November 9,

to saying to Dr. Goebbels,

"Tell the organizations

that the synagogues must be burned down."

I myself did not attend such a meeting.

GERMANS DON'T BUY FROM JEWS

[Hett, in English] The Nazis had been trying to get

Jewish people to leave Germany for years,

but by 1938, the majority of German Jews had not left.

This may seem strange in retrospect,

but we have to remember that they didn't know what was coming.

The Nazis are becoming a bit frustrated with this situation,

and after the annexation of Austria,

both Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels are looking for an opportunity

to ratchet up the degree of anti-Jewish persecution.

[intense music playing]

[Pendas] They get that opportunity when a Jewish refugee in Paris

murders a German diplomat serving there.

News of the diplomat's death comes through on November 9th, 1938,

and for the Nazis,

this is the moment they've been waiting for.

[Goeschel] Hitler uses the murder

as a pretext to retaliate against Germany's Jews,

to make clear that Jewish life is no longer wanted,

will no longer be tolerated in Nazi Germany.

[music intensifies]

[dogs barking]

[Pendas] What happens is they unleash the SA and the SS and the police

on Jewish people in cities throughout Germany.

GERMANS! DEFEND YOURSELVES! DON'T BUY FROM JEWS!

To see my father punched

and to see that being done to my mother

was a frightening and painful experience.

[glass shattering]

We heard glass breaking.

My mother said, "Tonight we're gonna die."

I didn't know what dying was, but she was crying, and I cried.

JEW

WATCH OUT JEWS

[Pendas] They attack Jewish shops. They loot.

They burn down synagogues.

They drag Jewish individuals out through the streets.

They beat them mercilessly.

[music fades out]

[Goeschel] The events of 9th of November 1938

are often called Reichskristallnacht,

"Night of Broken Glass."

Not only glass was broken or shattered,

almost 100 people were bestially murdered by Nazis.

Up to 30,000 Jewish men were paraded humiliatingly

through Germany's streets and taken to concentration camps.

The Nazis present the events

as spontaneous outbursts of popular anti-Semitism.

This is a fabricated myth.

This is a Nazi lie.

The Night of Broken Glass, to use the euphemistic term,

was a coordinated anti-Semitic pogrom

that combined state-sponsored anti-Semitic violence

with grassroots anti-Semitic violence.

[Hett] And after all of this violence visited upon Jewish communities by Nazis,

the German-Jewish community is being made to pay for the damage.

It's, of course, entirely perverse,

but it is entirely in keeping with Nazi Jewish persecution.

[dark music playing]

[Goeschel] After the Night of Broken Glass,

Hitler and the Nazis had not decided how they will resolve

what they euphemistically called the Jewish Problem or the Jewish Question.

The events of the Night of Broken Glass

have shown that part of the solution

will be murder, violence, and mass incarceration.

Hitler gives a notorious speech on 30th of January 1939,

the anniversary of his appointment as Reich Chancellor in 1933.

He makes a catastrophic pronouncement.

[crowd cheering and applauding]

[in German] If international Jewish financiers

in and outside of Europe

succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war,

the result will not be the Bolshevization of Earth, and this the victory of Jewry,

but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!

[crowd cheering and applauding]

[Shirer, in English] I knew well enough that there was little hope for the Jews,

but for some reason,

this publicly-expressed threat by the dictator

did not register very strongly with me.

There had not yet been any mass killings.

I could not quite grasp that such a thing could occur.

After all, Germany was a Christian country

with a very deep and rich European culture.

WORK SETS YOU FREE

[Shirer] Hitler repeated the threat five times

in subsequent public utterances that year.

My own naïveté in regard to his designs was greater than I realized.

[Hitler shouting indistinctly in distance]

[Shirer] But no one can say

that Adolf Hitler did not give full warning

of the barbarian world he intended to make.

[plaintive piano music playing]