Original subtitles

Adolf Hitler...

He is the architect of one of the greatest disasters

the world has ever seen.

..the most photographed leader of the early 20th century.

He spent hours in front of a mirror practising different poses.

Every photo is a performance.

Hitler was photographed from boyhood to the Blitzkrieg...

He wants to be at the front.

He wants to share the excitement. He wants to smell the cordite.

..to the bunker.

These images reveal the secrets of Hitler's inner life...

..and the people he led.

Hitler comes in, he tells you, "You are important."

He tells you he has a plan and he tells you

he knows what's gone wrong and he can fix it.

Featuring rarely seen and newly digitised images,

this is the story of the rise and fall of Adolf Hitler,

picture by picture, frame by frame.

I think Hitler created an image of political celebrity

that never existed before.

The manipulation of media, the presentation of himself,

you can draw a line from that

to what film and rock stars are doing today.

Throughout his political career,

Adolf Hitler presented himself as "a good German".

He claimed that unlike two-faced establishment politicians,

what you saw was what you got.

That was far from the truth.

It's very fashionable for politicians today

to somehow use parts of their private life and their personality

to sort of sell themselves on the public/ political stage.

For Hitler, of course, this is a problematic card to play

because his private life is anything but normal.

That private life revolved around two great secret loves,

two young women, whose lives would end in tragedy.

In Munich, in the late 1920s,

Adolf Hitler's official photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann,

took a series of pictures of a teenager named Geli Raubal.

She was very outgoing, talkative.

She loved her life.

She wanted to be a musician, a singer.

Geli was Adolf Hitler's niece,

the daughter of his half-sister, Angela.

Geli's father had died when she was young,

so Hitler was made her legal guardian.

In 1927, he suggested Geli move out of her mother's house

and come to Munich to study.

Two years later, Geli moved into his large apartment

on Prinzregentenplatz, in the city centre.

She called him Uncle Alf.

She was only 19 years old,

and he was already 38,

an old bachelor.

He took her everywhere -

to party meetings, to the restaurant, to the opera.

Hoffman observes that, under Geli's influence,

Hitler's social life becomes much more active.

You know, they're like a normal couple.

And Hoffman also notes that, actually, Hitler delighted

in taking her for a drive,

going for picnics in beauty spots in the woods.

So, what you've got here is, on one level,

what seems like a perfectly sweet relationship.

By 1929, the year Geli moved into his apartment,

Hitler had been leader of the Nazi Party for eight years.

He kept his private life strictly private.

The outside world knew very little of Geli.

They lived intimately in his apartment.

For a long time,

I thought that they had no sexual relationship at all,

that this must have been a myth, a legend.

But then I came across a letter by Ilse Hess,

a very close confidante of Hitler.

And she stated, in the 1960s,

that she "experienced it all," she said,

and that obviously Hitler

had a sexual relationship with Geli Raubal.

She also appears to have had an affair with Hitler's chauffeur,

Emil Maurice, which, presumably,

would've put Hitler's nose out of joint on numerous levels.

But there's certainly conflict between the two.

She was, for him personally, a weakest link, I would say,

because he couldn't control her.

He couldn't control what she would say to others,

he couldn't control this niece.

And there was a constant conflict.

They were fighting a lot, and she felt imprisoned with him.

On the 18th September 1931,

Geli shot herself in her room at Prinzregentenplatz.

She bled to death.

For Hitler, by now the leader of the second largest party

in the German parliament,

Geli's suicide had the potential to wreck his career.

The left wing press, particularly, comes out

with all sorts of scurrilous rumours that they're having an affair,

that she was pregnant with his child,

which is unsubstantiated,

but it doesn't stop them from running with the story.

So, this is a profound political embarrassment for Hitler,

and it's in 1931, which is a time when he is really

the coming man of German politics,

so this is a profoundly dangerous moment for Hitler.

The Nazi Party claimed Geli's death was an accident

whilst playing with her uncle's revolver.

The police launched an investigation.

Hitler was in Nuremburg at the time Geli died.

The police ruled out foul play, so the scandal passed.

Hitler turned Geli's room in Munich into a shrine.

On the anniversary of her death,

he would place flowers in front of a bust he'd commissioned.

Heinrich Hoffmann said later that had Hitler married Geli,

it would have changed the course of history.

Hoffman was very suspicious that had Hitler entered into

a kind of arena of domestic bliss,

he might have been restrained by Geli,

and actually had he been restrained by, you know,

a wife and children and all the kind of normal family things,

that, actually, Hitler would've been far less adventurous

as a political figure. He wouldn't have basically gone to war so much.

And as Hoffman actually observes, you know, it was these international

adventures, as he calls them, that brought him to his ruin.

With Geli's death, Hitler and his image-makers had learned a lesson.

There has to be a cuddly Hitler,

a soft Hitler, because of the questions that have been asked

around the death of this young girl.

A safe, trustworthy potential leader.

A version of the informal, private Hitler

was deliberately constructed in photo books,

with such titles as Youth Around Hitler

and The Hitler Nobody Knows.

The vast majority of the photographs were taken by Heinrich Hoffmann.

Empty albums could be bought for one Reichsmark.

They were then filled with photographs that came free

with cigarette packets, or bought at corner stores.

So, this is a publication from 1935.

A cigarette cards album entitled Adolf Hitler.

The images in here - most of them photographs -

were selected by Heinrich Hoffman.

This particular album belonged to my father,

Karl-Heinz Ruehl, who was born in 1927,

who put it together as a Hitler Youth in 1935.

And you can see just how carefully

my father then collected and glued in these pictures.

For something geared primarily towards children and youths,

the images are very powerful.

They were traded in schools, much like football cards would be today.

In the 1930s, about a billion of such cards

would have been in circulation in Germany,

and about a million of these albums.

This was clearly a way in which

the Nazis were trying to spread, to disseminate

a particular image of Hitler.

It's fair to say that my father, who came from a petit bourgeois family,

like most of his generation, he fell for the Nazis.

Thankfully, after '45, realised that he had put his faith in a seducer,

in a destroyer, in a racist dictator.

The Fuhrer was depicted as a single man...

..alone, dedicated only to his people.

I think Hitler found it very important to be publicly perceived

as a single man because that gave him

a tremendous sense of attraction for German women.

And that's documentarily proved.

There are so many love letters from ordinary German women

to Hitler through this period.

This is almost certainly a result, in part,

of the way he had been staged,

the image of this bachelor who was all-powerful.

It made him kind of the most desired bachelor of Germany, if you will.

Face-to-face encounters with Hitler often had a powerful effect.

One of the key components of Hitler's physical make-up

and his image were his eyes.

People would often refer to his eyes.

And I think that, you know, on a black and white picture,

you don't see them, but on a colour picture you do see them,

and people who met Hitler were, instantly, you know, kind of

entranced or hypnotised by his gaze,

and his gaze had a lot to do with the colour of his eyes.

One of the few colour portraits of Hitler was taken by

a photographer named Walter Frentz.

He worked with director Leni Riefenstahl

on Nazi propaganda films such as Triumph Of The Will.

For his studio work, Frentz sometimes used

a camera loved by the advertising industry.

This is taken with a very, very interesting camera,

a Bermpohl camera,

which, basically, is a big wooden camera on a stand.

And it has three colour plates within the mahogany camera -

red, blue, and green.

Very complicated. Someone like me, who's not a great technician,

it would've frightened the life out of me to use this camera.

But here you've got three different entries of light

onto three different plates, for want of a better word,

red, blue, and green,

and then go off to a lab to be put back together again.

At the time, it was experimental.

It's how they thought colour would be.

What happens now within film, say Kodachrome,

which we've all grown up with, in cameras, it's all in the film,

but these guys had to put it together in the camera

and then reconstruct it.

Most portraits I've seen, head on, he's in control.

This one, a little bit more intimate,

because he's not looking at the camera,

but it's more the quality of the colour.

One of the really good quality colour pictures of him.

This now looks like a contemporary portrait.

I'd have been pleased with this of somebody last week.

Women were drawn to Hitler.

And despite the trauma of the death of his niece Geli,

Hitler still wanted female company.

But any relationship would have to be a secret one.

In a way, what we're seeing here is something that runs through

Hitler's entire life, which is the kind of,

I think, need for him for female companionship.

Maybe not for sexual relationship, or not necessarily even

a romantic one, but for female companionship.

About six months after Geli's death, Hitler turned to a young

lab assistant who worked at Heinrich Hoffmann's studio in Munich,

who he'd first met in October 1929.

20-year-old Eva Braun.

Hitler and Eva Braun's relationship began in 1932.

Only a few of his inner circle knew their secret.

Eva's official position was private secretary.

The couple was only ever publicly pictured together once -

a photograph Hoffmann took at the 1936 Winter Olympics.

Eva was in the row behind the Fuhrer.

She's not the First Lady of Germany at all,

so she's kept very much in the background.

So he made political capital out of presenting himself as a single man,

but at the same time, in his private life,

he had Eva Braun at his right arm.

And he wanted that sort of element of domesticity,

to some extent, that she provided.

Hitler's choice of Eva exposed the hypocrisy

at the heart of the Nazi leadership.

The image of the ideal Nazi woman was

no alcohol, no cigarettes, no make-up, no French perfume.

And Eva Braun did all this. She didn't smoke,

but she loved make-up. She had expensive clothes,

she had parties, so she lived a privileged life,

spoiled by Hitler.

She got everything she wanted.

Eva was a passionate photographer.

She took hundreds of pictures of friends, family, and her boyfriend.

Some even showed the Fuhrer wearing glasses,

which the German people never saw.

Hitler doesn't want any idea of weakness

to leak into his corporal image.

And so Hitler curates his photographs

and he chooses them. And he's absolutely ruthless

about what he won't allow in the public domain.

No sign of weakness allowed.

Some of Eva's less private photographs were bought by her boss,

Heinrich Hoffmann, to be used by newspapers.

Hitler made sure Eva was given the latest cameras.

She's using the best technology of the time

because she's kind of got access to the best technology

cos her boyfriend is running the country

and her boss is his photographer.

So, the technology that she uses is absolutely at the forefront

of the technological developments.

Photographs showing Eva Braun using a 16mm cine camera survived the war.

But, at that time, there was no trace of her finished home movies.

There could be a treasure trove of images of Hitler.

In 1972, a film-maker named Lutz Becker

discovered that the films had been found in the last months of the war

by American troops, and handed over to the US National Archives.

The trail led him to a vault of uncatalogued 16mm film

in a hanger outside Washington, DC.

He starts searching through it and it's like something out of a movie,

he finds this kind of heap of rusting, discarded,

old film canisters.

Some of these canisters have got German labels on them.

He opens up the first can,

takes out a few frames and he holds them up to the light.

And who does he see? None other than Hitler.

These are Eva Braun's home movies, and Becker has found them

and he's rescued them from obscurity

after decades sitting in this hanger.

The films revealed Hitler's private world for the first time.

Lutz Becker was part of a team making a documentary

called Swastika, explaining Hitler's rise to power.

Eva Braun's home movies were included in the finished film,

together with rare Nazi propaganda footage.

The documentary premiered at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival.

One member of the film's team

was future Oscar-winning producer David Puttnam.

I thought we were going to have a press conference after this,

and there's going to be people who are going to be offended,

or people will say, "Why did you do that?"

And we basically had our explanation.

What we're trying to suggest is that societies can be

wildly misled if you put your faith and your trust in the wrong people.

Some of the audience at the screening hated seeing

a side of Adolf Hitler they'd never seen before.

The reaction occurred at a moment,

I think this is very, very, very significant.

It occurred at the moment when Hitler is shaking hands

with a group of women.

And one little girl starts crying, and Hitler pats her cheek

and then holds her head. And at that moment,

someone in the audience screamed...

Who knows? It could have been someone whose life had been wrecked,

maybe had been a member of the Resistance. So, who knows?

Something snapped and, weirdly,

the purpose of the film was to try to say,

"Do you realise that Hitler sold himself as

"an empathetic, sympathetic, you know, good guy?"

You've just fallen absolutely straight in into it, in that

you've missed the point. The point is that that audience,

or for that moment in Germany, watching that moment,

were absolutely taken in.

To me, to this day, it's an amazing irony that instead of leaning

forward and saying, "How clever," people actually couldn't bear it.

Now, by this time, cushions have been slung at the screen.

I should think two thirds of the audience walked out.

The response was a total misunderstanding of what we were

trying to achieve, cos God knows, if you look at the rest of the film,

you can't, at the end of the film, think, "Oh, Hitler was a good thing for Germany.

"That was a... that was a great idea." I mean,

at the end of the film, you're looking at a nation destroyed,

absolutely destroyed, but they couldn't wait to get to that point.

Future screenings of the documentary became impossible.

Our distributors pulled out. That's what happened.

We suddenly had a film that no-one wanted to distribute,

they didn't want riots in their cinemas.

And then in France, you had this anti-fascist group actually stealing

a print of the film and they kind of unwound the reels

and they wrapped them round this monument to the victims of Nazism.

On another occasion, a bomb was actually found in a cinema

where Swastika was going to be shown,

but it failed to go off. So it attracted, let's say,

a lot of negative attention.

Eva Braun's home movies shocked audiences in the 1970s

because they showed Hitler displaying affection.

They also revealed he had a close inner circle of friends.

The area around Hitler was full of people,

full of friends, men and women who really liked him,

who were convinced of his ideas, who supported him,

who accompanied him. But the notion that this man

was a loner was very attractive to the German people after 1945.

With this kind of demonising Hitler,

they could easily distance themselves from Hitler,

from the Nazi state and the crimes that were committed by the Nazis.

These home movies challenge our very idea of who the Fuhrer really was.

You have to view Hitler as an insecure climber,

as an insecure person who needed others.

He needed a circle of people who confirmed his actions,

who confirmed him as a leader. This was very important for Hitler.

The role of the Fuhrer was just a role.

There is a huge difference between the Fuhrer on the stage

and the person Hitler, in private.

Eva Braun's silent home movies

were shot mostly in the mid-1930s at the Berghof,

Hitler's mountain retreat at the Obersalzberg in the Bavarian Alps.

He originally bought it with royalties

from his sales of Mein Kampf in the late 1920s.

It was initially very small, it was one of numerous Alpine residences

up there on the Obersalzberg. And then it was subsequently enlarged,

to the extent that by the late 1930s, it's a huge complex.

It has its own sort of military installation behind it.

It became very much a sort of a second power base, really,

after Berlin from the mid-1930s onwards.

Hitler preferred to govern from the Berghof

and meet foreign dignitaries there,

such as British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain

and the Duke of Windsor,

before his abdication, King Edward VIII.

The Duchess said later, she couldn't take her eyes off Hitler

and admired his "great inner force".

Important foreign guests never met Eva Braun.

She wasn't included in official photographs.

But behind the scenes, she was a key figure in Hitler's household.

She was the princess there.

She decided who got an invitation to private dinners.

They had to tolerate her

because no-one could dare to challenge her position.

She became more and more important with the years,

she was kind of the centre of this inner circle at the Obersalzberg.

Life for Hitler and his entourage at the Berghof in the late 1930s

had a regular schedule.

It was dictated by the Fuhrer's daily routine.

Hitler led always a Bohemian lifestyle.

He was not punctual.

So, he was not a constant hard worker in an office.

Hitler slept late, sometimes not getting up until noon.

This meant that any guests who were there weren't allowed

to have baths in the morning,

should the water in the pipes disturb him.

He took a breakfast of two cups of warm milk, ten biscuits

and half a bar of chocolate, before going into his first meetings

in the Great Hall with his advisers and with his collaborators.

Photographer Walter Frentz

took many pictures of Hitler during the Second World War...

..including at the Berghof.

Here, we can see a sense of the scale of the size of the room.

Also, the size of those big picture windows

that gave a very scenic view of the Bavarian Alps outside.

Actually, in the summer of 1940, at quite a high point,

not only in his domestic policy, but also his foreign policy.

So, he's actually looking quite relaxed,

addressing four of his inner circle,

who are standing looking attentively at what he's telling them.

Many of Hitler's guests disliked his late routine.

It was a lot of waiting there and talking,

at the Obersalzberg. And you see this

on Eva Braun's pictures,

the circle sitting there and talking to each other.

Lunch would be quite a simple meal,

particularly because Hitler was a vegetarian himself,

so he often just had a plate of vegetables.

And he took the opportunity to talk about

the benefits of a vegetarian diet to those around him.

After lunch, Hitler would go for a walk.

In the early years at the Berghof,

he would greet the crowds who flocked to the Obersalzberg,

encouraged by the cult of the Fuhrer.

Almost in an act of pilgrimage, they would line up outside the fences

at the edge of the Obersalzberg estate

and hope that Hitler would come down to sort of greet them

and say a few words and pat their children and so on.

In the evening, Hitler and his inner circle watched German films

and films from abroad, many unreleased.

Hitler loved cartoons and Hollywood adventure films.

He'd make running comments,

sometimes walking out if he didn't like the story.

Hitler had his own suite of rooms at the Berghof.

Eva Braun had exclusive access.

What was special with Eva Braun's room

on the Obersalzberg was the connecting door

to Hitler's rooms, so they could see each other secretly.

There is no proof of what kind of relationship they really had,

if this really was a sexual relationship,

because their relationship was, I would say, hidden,

and they could do whatever they wanted

secretly on the Obersalzberg.

Hitler's sexuality is another part

of Hitler's private world that that has long been discussed

and fought over by historians, and indeed even psychoanalysts.

I think that he certainly had problems forming relationships.

And I think it's likely to say he had problems with sexual intimacy.

In 2010, an old medical report from the 1920s surfaced

that offered a vital clue to Hitler's sex life.

After being found guilty of treason following an attempted coup

known as the Beer Hall Putsch, in Munich in 1923,

Hitler was examined by a doctor at Landsberg Prison.

The medical report said that Hitler had a birth defect,

an undescended right testicle.

This may have affected Hitler's attitude to sex.

The point here is not just

whether or not he could physically have that kind of relationship,

but also how he thought about himself

and what he would have seen as his imperfections.

That is also borne out by the fact that

Hitler never really wanted to undress,

not even kind of in front of his physician,

or in private. Even with Eva Braun, there are all these images

where Eva Braun is wearing a bathing suit,

but Hitler is still in a suit.

It's perfectly plausible to argue that he thought

of himself that he wasn't quite normal.

DRUM ROLL

News about Hitler's secret medical condition

somehow made it to Britain. It inspired a bawdy song

about Hitler having "just one ball",

which was first sung by British soldiers in 1939.

SOLDIERS WHISTLE

One possibility is it's absolutely coincidental

that whoever created the song

thought that he was just making things up.

But it is equally plausible, and maybe even more likely,

that British intelligence had learned from someone close

to the Nazi leadership that Hitler only had one testicle.

This would not have been a widely known medical fact,

but it certainly would have been in his prison file.

That file was, in fact,

seen by people who later shared information with intelligence.

It seems that the song is part of information warfare,

where British propaganda

deliberately leaked confidential information that they had received

through intelligence.

SOLDIERS WHISTLE

In 1936, 47-year-old Hitler

became increasingly obsessed with his health.

He started to have frequent stomach cramps

and developed eczema on both legs.

His official photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann,

introduced Hitler to his own doctor, Theodor Morell.

Dr Theodor Morell is this both fascinating

and repugnant figure. He's often forgotten today,

but, actually, he's at the heart of the whole kind of

Third Reich soap opera, if you like.

He was this sort of corpulent, sweaty,

physically really unprepossessing individual

who also smelt really badly of body odour.

Eventually, he ends up striking gold by actually having

a man he would always call "Patient A"

as one of his patients. And, of course, Patient A was none other

than Adolf Hitler.

As Hitler avoided medical examinations,

he liked Morell's preferred healing methods of pills and injections.

You name it, Dr Morell prescribed it to Hitler.

You know, he had his own sort of almost proprietary vitamin drugs

that he would give Hitler, which almost certainly did no good at all.

He gave him experimental forms of penicillin,

he gave him, effectively, what we'd today call speed.

He would prescribe all sorts of drugs for all sorts of ailments,

that either Hitler may have had, or Hitler may not have had...

..and created new dependencies that you then needed other drugs

to deal with the effects of the drugs you prescribed.

Even in official photos, Hitler looked increasingly frail.

So, what you're ending up by the mid-1940s,

there's no other word - Hitler, under Morell's care,

became a junkie.

Eva Braun's home movies offer an insight

into Adolf Hitler's private world and the people he saw as friends.

What we see in these private films is people having fun.

They're having the time of their life.

And we would not waste one single second to watch these films

if it was not about those people we see in there.

We see just normal people, making normal things,

and it shows us that we are not talking about monsters,

even if what they were doing is monstrous.

But these were very well-educated people who know how to dress,

know how to eat cake,

how to make coffee and enjoy their life.

At the same times, they were going after Jews.

And this makes it so frightening.

Many of Hitler's associates who Eva Braun filmed relaxing

at the Berghof were responsible for unspeakable crimes.

Heinrich Himmler is the individual most closely

associated with the Nazi Holocaust.

He was the leader of the SS, the Schutzstaffel.

The SS were responsible

for running the labour and extermination camps.

Himmler also oversaw the creation

of the so-called Einsatzgruppen, the mobile death squads,

who were responsible for about a third of the murders

that constituted the Holocaust, so this operated well beyond the camp.

In these two roles, Himmler essentially oversees

the murder of over six million people.

Martin Bormann coordinated the building of the Berghof

and worked as Hitler's private secretary.

Now, that doesn't sound very important,

but it is crucial in a regime

where there's so many competing voices,

so access to the Fuhrer has huge influences on policy,

who gets to make policy, so Bormann's channelling

who got to speak to Hitler and who didn't

crucially shaped policy in the Third Reich.

Hitler relied on him because Bormann was a hard worker.

And when Hitler said something,

"Oh, I would like to have this and that,"

Bormann was the one who wrote it down.

He made it an order of the Fuhrer.

So Bormann became very powerful.

Heydrich was the chief of the Reich Security Main Office

so, basically, overseeing policing and security operations

in Nazi Germany, that included his directing the infamous Gestapo.

Heydrich also chaired the Wannsee Conference in 1942,

where the so-called Final Solution was decided upon.

A number of plans had been discussed that was about

the deportation and the removal of the Jewish populations.

And, really, it's at the Wannsee Conference

where the decision is made that only the mass murder

of every single Jew Nazi Germany can bring under its control

is the "solution" to that problem.

Karl Brandt worked alongside Theodor Morell

as Hitler's personal doctor.

Fearing serious injury after an assassination attempt,

Hitler took Brandt with him on every journey, at home and abroad.

Brandt was the kind of man Hitler liked.

He looked like the perfect Nazi.

With the beginning of the war,

Brandt, more and more, became a special envoy for Hitler.

And when Hitler ordered the killing of disabled

and sick people, adults and children,

and Brandt himself was the one who did the first lethal injection.

Of all Hitler's inner circle,

the closest to the Fuhrer was Nazi architect Albert Speer.

After the war, he claimed to be a technocrat,

not to have believed in anything,

and not to have known anything.

But throughout his career

he was massively involved in the persecution of the Jews.

He started as an architect.

He also was in charge of building the Reich Chancellery.

He also helped to stage the party rallies.

He also was involved in building the Olympiastadion.

Hitler perceived himself as an architect.

So, Speer was kind of his alter ego.

He saw in Speer himself,

and these two men were very close and, at the Berghof,

he spent hours, Hitler with Speer,

looking at models, talking about architecture.

He had huge plans, both at Berlin, which he wanted to rechristen

Germania, he had huge plans for his hometown of Linz. And he would dream

and he would envisage what they would look like.

Film producer David Puttnam met Albert Speer in the early 1970s.

He said that when he was designing Germania, the new Berlin,

it was a vast model they created

in the basement of the Chancellery. And he said, "I used to sleep there.

"I had a camp bed there." He said, "I woke up and there was

"someone in the room." He said, "I could see a flashlight."

It was Hitler in his dressing gown.

And he was leaning down with a torch, looking down streets,

this street, and then that street.

Speer took the opportunity to tell Hitler

about all the equipment and materials he needed

to be able to finish the new Berlin.

Hitler said to Speer, "You don't get it." He said, "Look."

"Look," he said. "That's just about cement and building.

"This is the dream."

He said, "This is good enough for me." And he said,

"What I realised was that, in a sense, he was off with the fairies.

"He wasn't interested in the issues of how to build a new city.

"It was how to plan a new city, is what interested him."

Architecture was the closest Hitler came to a hobby.

Thanks to the photographs of Heinrich Hoffmann,

as far as the world was concerned,

the Fuhrer spent his free time getting close to nature.

In 1933, the year Hitler became Chancellor,

he was Time Magazine's Man Of The Year.

The cover reflects Hitler's love of the outdoors.

It's not a very good painting, to be honest,

but it's certainly sort of depicting a kind of friendliness about him.

This is meant to be the picture of a nice man at rest in his garden.

And, look, there's a faithful dog in the background.

Everything about this image is radiating a kind of simplicity,

a kind of homeliness, a kind of decency, despite the uniform.

He's on what looks like some sort of nice garden chair.

What message is that sending out?

It's, "You're a regular guy, you know, at the weekend, relaxing."

So, it's a weird blend of the dictatorial and the very homely.

Hitler's choice of a mountain retreat,

and the length of time he spent there,

shows that his public love for nature was genuine.

That passion had a political message.

Much of Nazi ideology was not new.

It was a kind of perversion

and extreme radicalisation

of many things that were

already there in German culture.

And part of this cultural canon,

if you like, is the supposed German ability

to immerse oneself in nature and draw a kind of spiritual strength

from communing with nature.

So, we see this in Hitler's performances for the camera,

but this is also something that's taken up by millions

of Germans who are, in this period,

running around with their own cameras,

making their own photo albums, all the way through the Third Reich,

millions of albums that depict the Sunday outing, the holiday,

and always very closely modelled on what Hitler's doing.

It was that same ability to commune with nature.

The Holocaust museum in Washington has in their collection

a series of photographs taken by Karl Hoecker,

second in command at the Auschwitz extermination camp

in occupied Poland.

I mean, they're astounding

because we don't have that many

photographs taken at Auschwitz.

The album includes a day trip on July 22nd 1944,

to the Solahutte,

a forest resort in the heart of nature for Auschwitz guards,

to reward them for their so-called hard work.

It was built in the style of a Black Forest chalet,

and this, in itself, is really significant.

It conjures up an image of the ideal, typical German,

forested landscape with its characteristic,

vernacular architecture,

that kind of prefigure the ideal world

that the Nazis were trying to build in the East.

Karl Hoecker took pictures of a group of SS female auxiliaries,

who worked as communication specialists.

These woman believed that as "good Nazis"

they were entitled to enjoy nature. They were merely copying the Fuhrer.

So, we see SS staff from the Auschwitz camp system

relaxing on their time off,

sometimes joined by family members in deck chairs,

enjoying the sunshine, performing, having a good time.

And one of the spectacles that's put on

is a blueberry eating competition.

So, blueberries are picked in the forest around the Solahutte,

and then everybody's sitting on the terrace

and they're having a competition about who can finish

the bowl of blueberries first.

One of the women is pretending to cry

with her bowl turned upside down.

And she's crying because she's got no more blueberries left,

which, of course, makes it even more heinous,

that it's this sort of playacting and performing.

You know, blueberries were unimaginable

to the people who were imprisoned and being put into gas chambers.

The eerie subtext of all of this is, this is 1944,

when the extermination camp Auschwitz

is running at maximum capacity. Much of the area around Auschwitz

is filled with a thin coating of white dust,

which comes out of the crematoria, the human remains,

they're staging their blueberry eating competitions

in the middle of that.

The smell, also, must have been quite unbearable.

It's that ostentatious, aggressive, fun in spite of it all,

because of it all, because of the violence.

This is not an innocent retreat.

This is literally in the shadow

of the greatest genocide of human history.

In January 1945,

only six months after these Auschwitz photographs were taken,

the camp was liberated.

Over one million men, women and children had died in Auschwitz.

In April, Hitler's mountain retreat, the Berghof,

was destroyed by the Allies.

The terraces where Eva Braun filmed were wrecked.

The Great Hall became a popular location

for American troops to take souvenir photos.

In the previous six years,

a different side of Adolf Hitler had been shown to the world...

..the fanatical warlord.

He himself had gone through this baptism of fire

during the First World War.

And he saw it as something that had strengthened him,

that had given him his mission in life.

And I think he saw the same thing for the German people.

War was something that would harden them, that would make them

the new Germany that would be strong and lead Europe.

It was Germany's baptism of fire.

He sees himself as a master tactician - he's simply not.

He was completely deluded.