The Nazi Regime From Start to Finish (1933–1945) | Extra Long Documentary

1934. Nuremburg, in Germany. Hundreds of thousands of Nazis gather for their party's annual rally, perfectly choreographed. Every element is carefully designed to seduce the senses.

You had posters, you had banners, you had music, you had a ceremonial entrance of the Storm Troopers and flags, you had lively speeches. Hitler, Sieg Heil! It was a show as well as a political meeting.

One thing which they have, which other parties don't have, is Adolf Hitler, who is a unifying and integrating figure within the Party.

And a master of propaganda. He was remarkably good at creating vibrant posters, vivid slogans.

Hitler even claims to have designed the Nazi's swastika flag. "I, myself, had laid down a final form: a flag with a red background, a white disk and a black swastika in the middle."

The Nazis have never looked more impressive. Their appeal has never been more dangerous.

Violence is always at the center of Nazism, from start to finish. Behind the glamour lies a violent, racist, apocalyptic ideology. Violence was the means by which they sought to intimidate their opponents and eventually secure their power.

But they project a very different image. The Nazis promote exciting new technologies, offer industrial reconstruction, jobs for all and an artistic renaissance. They promise order and discipline. The great art is to put everyone in a uniform. This is what the Nazis, I suppose, really understood: male vanity.

But Hitler only has one firm plan for his people: to lead them into a world war. The Nazis intend to send millions of people to their deaths. Hitler and the Nazis are using their mastery of design and technology to seize total power for themselves before plunging the whole world into its greatest ever tragedy.

[dramatic music plays] [foreboding music plays]

Germany, in the early 1920s. The First World War is barely over. Now, revolution is in the air. Shaken by the country's catastrophic defeat, communists and nationalists fight each other in the streets. The people are desperate for radical solutions to their terrible problems. If you think of what people in Germany had been through, they'd been through the First World War, when there's mass starvation. Over half a million Germans died because of the Allied blockade, of malnutrition in the First World War. There's the terrible carnage on the front, where huge numbers of German men are killed.

In Munich, the spiritual home of German nationalism, many former soldiers are drawn to a new, growing political force. It is the Nazi party with its charismatic leader, Adolf Hitler. A veteran of the trenches himself, he is winning the city over to his new, darker, more violent brand of politics. But his ambition stretches far beyond Munich's streets, to every part of Germany and beyond. In October 1922, he's ready to strike outside the city. Hitler has heard of a cultural event in the small town of Coburg, north of Munich. Socialists and communists will be taking part, so Hitler has decided to crash this party with hundreds of his paramilitaries, the Storm Troopers. He's taken the bold step of hiring a special train. He orders his men to gather here, at Munich's railway station. "The order came. The whole lot of the Storm Troops was to turn out. We were about 600 strong. It was a Saturday in the middle of October. We were to assemble early at the Central Station and bring along rations for two days. The band was to march at the front. Hitler turned up well beforehand, and we found a special train awaiting us. The music rang out gaily in the early morning air, and the people had hung out flags to make a sort of festival of the occasion. We stopped once or twice during the journey to pick up a few more of our comrades from the more outlying places, and arrived at last, 800 strong."

Coburg is a kind of dinky little town with a nice castle on a rock in northern Bavaria. It was a small town. It was very closely allied to the former princely families; they're very conservative. It's not really an industrial town at all, so the working class, which is the supporters of the communists and the social democrats, the most determined opponents of Nazism, they were very small. There were very few of them. And so it was an ideal stamping ground for the Nazis.

They disembark here at Coburg's now rundown railway station. City officials beg Hitler not to march his troops through these streets. They are afraid of conflict with local communists. But Hitler angrily defies them. Conflict is what he wants. The march of the Storm Troopers soon becomes a riot. "Sure enough, we soon encountered storms of abuse from the crowds en route. Hitler led, and we followed. Stones, however, began to fly around. Then things got hotter. The Reds set upon us with iron rods and cudgels. That was going a bit too far. Hitler swung round, flourished his walking-stick. That was the signal. And we flung ourselves upon our assailants. We counter-attacked for all we knew. It was jolly hard work, I can tell you. They rained tiles on us from the roofs and windows and tore up the cobblestones for missiles."

But with such slight opposition, it doesn't take very long for the Nazi Storm Troopers to demoralize and then scatter their enemies. Once the violence has died down, they spend the night here, at the local shooting club. The next day, they go sightseeing at Coburg Castle, before returning home to Munich. This bloody riot is portrayed in Nazi mythology as a tremendous victory over the hated communists. Ten years later, a special badge is awarded to those who were "with Hitler" in Coburg. It becomes the Nazi Party's most prestigious award. Hitler's credibility as a street fighter and diehard anti-communist is now established.

One thing which they have, which other parties don't have is Adolf Hitler, who is a magnet for support and also acts... and this is really quite important... He acts as a unifying and integrating figure within the Party. And he is one of the main reasons why, unlike many of their competitors, the Party doesn't fall apart. Nobody ever revolts or rebels against Hitler, and he has a sense of authority and an integrating power which keeps this thing together.

Hitler is crucial for boosting the Nazis' popularity. His name appears again and again in their publicity. No other nationalist leader can draw such large crowds.

When the movement began, it was tiny, insignificant, limited to Munich. And they had no resources, no money. The one thing they could do was hold political meetings to make propaganda. And Hitler realized that that was something he was extraordinarily gifted at.

He could hold an audience. And he could hold an audience week after week, after week, after week.

He captivates people with his simple, racist message. Germany has been betrayed, the Jews are to blame, only Hitler and the Nazis can make Germany great again. As well as his speeches, Hitler also takes charge of Nazi propaganda in 1920. The impact is immediate.

If you had to summarize the basic principles of Nazi propaganda, they would be: simplicity, repetition and emotional appeal. Propaganda had to be absolutely simple, so that the message could be understood by everyone. And it had to appeal to the gut, to emotion.

He was remarkably good at creating strong, rhetorical, vivid, dynamic posters and huge vibrant slogans, teaser questions, getting these all over the place. And people begin to notice them. And what happens is, because the posters are so damn good, people start turning up to the meetings out of curiosity.

But in 1920, Hitler doesn't just have to compete with other nationalist parties. He also has to overcome the most powerful political force of the 20th century: the Communist Party. With its red banners, powerful symbols, strong organization, clear message and support from Soviet Russia, it seems poised to take over Germany and perhaps the world. Millions of Germans support the communists, and thousands attend their rallies, as Hitler sees for himself. "In Berlin, after the war, I was present at a mass demonstration of Marxists in front of the Royal Palace and in the Lustgarten. A sea of red flags, red armbands and red flowers was in itself sufficient to give that huge assembly of about 120,000 people an outward appearance of strength. I was now able to feel and understand how easily the man in the street succumbs to the hypnotic magic of such a grandiose piece of theater."

[singing "The Internationale"]

Hitler wants a Nazi symbol and a Nazi flag at least as bold and popular as the communists'. He had an intuitive grasp of the importance of branding. Hitler spends hours in Munich Public Library looking for inspiration, looking for the signs and symbols the Party's going to use: the Nordic runes, the stylization. The stylization is his. And the colors are his. The red, black and white are really highly symbolic. And this is something of which Germans were very, very aware. The flag of the Empire was black, white, red. And the swastika flag is: black, white, red. So this is simultaneously looking forward to a new, modern, dynamic movement, but also looking back and saying that we are the heirs to a German national tradition.

As for who actually designed the swastika flag, Hitler couldn't have been clearer. Every detail was down to him. "I, myself, meanwhile, after innumerable attempts, had laid down a final form: a flag with a red background, a white disk and a black swastika in the middle. And this remained final."

But like so many of Hitler's claims, this is at best a gross simplification, if not an outright lie. The real creator of the flag is another Nazi, Dr. Friedrich Krohn, a dentist from Sternberg in northern Germany. Hitler dismisses his contribution as: "A good design very similar to mine." It will not be the last time he takes credit for someone else's work.

Hitler was a plagiarist in everything. He didn't originate at all; he stole. He stole the symbols, he stole the rhetoric, he stole everything. But it was re-stylized. He was a great re-imaginer, re-conceptualizer. He was also a synthesizer. So you have a cacophony of different symbols, different rhetorics, different ideologies. And he produces this harmony from all this discord. He gives it a narrative structure, he integrates it, he makes it a highly coherent and cohesive symbols system. He has a great natural talent to do this.

From its creation in 1920, the Nazi swastika flag becomes an increasingly common sight, carried by the Storm Troopers as they attack their left-wing enemies. But despite their violence, many Germans support the Storm Troopers.

There is certainly amongst large proportions of the German population a fear of Bolshevism and of "russische Zustände," Russian conditions, chaos. And the fear that if we don't suppress the left, and particularly the communists, this sort of thing could happen here. And we have to militantly prevent this sort of thing from happening.

Enemies of the Storm Troopers call them ill-disciplined thugs. But their smart brown uniforms are key to making them look respectable and popular. But who makes these uniforms? Metzingen, a small town in southern Germany. It has a long association with the fashion business, right up to today. It's also long been the home of the Hugo Boss company and the location of its worldwide headquarters. The Boss family's first shop was here, on Hindenburg Street. Hugo Ferdinand Boss takes over his parents' shop just after the First World War. But he has bigger plans. He decides to start making clothes, opening his factory in 1924 with just ten sewing machines. The workers make everything from underwear to traditional Loden coats. But one of the company's first big commissions is for a large batch of colored shirts for a distributor in Munich, including brown shirts for the Nazi Party and Storm Troopers. Hugo Boss may not have known who the shirts were for at this time, but in later adverts, he describes his company as a "supplier of Party equipment since 1924." The Hugo Boss factory is just one of many small- and medium-sized firms that make the huge number of uniforms needed by all the different Nazi organizations. All these companies profit from Nazi Party, and later Nazi government, contracts. The great art is to put everyone in a uniform. I counted actually about 170 different uniforms in Nazi Germany, but that's the marvelous thing, whether you're a coal miner or whether you're in the Hitler Youth, whatever you are, there's a uniform and a badge and a star and all the rest of it for you personally. And this is what the Nazis, I suppose, really understood, is male vanity, like no regime in history had ever done.

[singing marching tune]

But the actual design of these uniforms is the work of other people. One is Walter Heck, a badge designer. In 1929, he creates one of the most notorious symbols in history: the SS runes. Heck isn't well off. So he accepts just two and a half Reichsmarks, about 25 US dollars today, to allow the SS to use his new, sinister symbol. Another key Nazi designer is Karl Diebitsch. He joins the Nazi Party in 1920 and creates many of its most significant items, including the SS dagger. In 1932, Diebitsch and Heck work together to create their most important and most notorious product: the new, all-black uniform for the SS. By this time, the Hugo Boss factory is supplying uniforms to several Nazi organizations: the Storm Troopers, the Hitler Youth and the SS. All these uniforms, badges and symbols help forge a common bond among Party members. The unified look also projects the image of a disciplined and organized party. The Nazis are determined to maintain a single style and approach in everything they do. Remember that the Nazi Party is a voluntary organization. Most of the people in it are amateurs. It's doesn't pay them their wage. How do you get all those desirable images of high polish in an amateur organization? So they had a lot of training programs. They had a lot of manuals on how to do it, and they had very specific, detailed instructions on how to present a stage, for example. Where do you put the wreath? Where do you put the podium? What about the pleated curtains? What you could do and what you couldn't. Their instructions are very precise.

[singing rallying tune]

If you have singing, it must be proper singing. It can't be a kind of beery, sentimental festival of random songs. Also, you have to have clapping. The Party leaders must clap a speech even though they've heard it a thousand times before, et cetera. They must set the example. So they have this very tight, disciplined control...

[chanting "Heil"]

...to get this sense of high polish, which is what the Party really wants to convey as an index of its credibility and determination.

This image of determination and discipline is particularly attractive to former army veterans, as well as younger men disappointed to have missed out on the war experience.

Although Germany had lost the First World War, the men who had fought at the front came back as heroes, and they had a terrific reputation of having fought for Germany, particularly amongst the right-wing, ultra-patriotic parts of the population. The younger generation, who'd been just a bit too young to fight in the war, felt really inferior in comparison. And that, I think, fueled a lot of the violence which the younger members of the Storm Troopers movement were prepared to use.

When Hitler seizes power in 1933, Nazi ministers sign up many Storm Troopers as Auxiliary Policemen. With access to police records, now the Storm Troopers know the names and addresses of their political enemies. They start to raid homes and workplaces, seizing anyone they want. Violence is always at the center of Nazism, from start to finish. Violence was the means by which they sought to intimidate their opponents and eventually secure their power. So they were prepared to beat people up, knife them, kill them, even to torture leading figures in the other parties.

With the power of arrest, the Storm Troopers become even more violent. They feel invulnerable. They're no longer content just to beat their enemies up. They start to take them prisoner in a network of unofficial jails. This building is the only secret Storm Trooper prison that still exists. Within these cells, at least 500 people were held in 1933. This is where the Nazi concentration camp system begins. Over 200 jails like this are set up in Berlin alone.

Every party was involved in violence in the run-up to the Nazis' seizure of power, where the Nazis outdid all the others. In the elections of July 1932, no fewer than 400 people were actually killed in the campaign. It's a level of violence we'd find now absolutely impossible to accept.

As Auxiliary Policemen, the Storm Troopers now have the legal power to hold people in so-called "protective custody" as long as they want. So they can interrogate, abuse and even torture their victims. This harsh treatment leads to many deaths. The Nazis couldn't care less. But when their own people are killed, they are hailed as martyrs, such as Horst Wessel.

Horst Wessel was a young man from a very respectable background. His father was a Lutheran pastor, and he was attracted towards right-wing politics after the war in the 1920s. His family were very, very conservative, and he went one step further, became an organizer for the Brownshirts and got involved in violent altercations in the early 1930s.

The Nazis claim Horst Wessel was a brave, selfless young man who left university to live in a poor neighborhood. They say he helped local workers battle against left-wing agitators, which is why he was cruelly murdered by communist thugs.

[ominous music plays]

The leader of the Nazi Party in Berlin at the time is Joseph Goebbels. He is already developing the propaganda skills for which he later becomes notorious.

Goebbels, the master propagandist, turned this into a huge campaign, beginning with his funeral, of a man who had sacrificed himself for Germany against the evil Reds.

Goebbels arranges for Wessel's coffin to be paraded through central Berlin. Inevitably, there are clashes between Nazis, communists and the police. At the cemetery, Goebbels turns Wessel's funeral into a propaganda stunt. He gives an emotional speech at the graveside, praising Wessel's sacrifice, making him sound like a Christian martyr.

He was used, he was re-imagined, he was turned into something he never was. Throughout the life of the Nazi Party, he was the ultimate Nazi. He was a believer who'd been cruelly murdered by the communist bastards. "Horst Wessel has passed on. His mortal remains have given up on struggle and conflict. Yet I can feel almost physically his spirit rise, to live on with us. He believed it, he knew it. That is how he lived, that is how he died. A soldier of the German revolution. Once he stood with his hand on his belt, proud and upright, with the smile of youth on his red lips, always ready to risk his life. That is how we will remember him."

Wessel had written a marching song only a few months earlier. Following his death, the words seem eerily prophetic.

[singing "Horst Wessel Song"]

It soon becomes the official Nazi Party anthem.

So Horst Wessel was really Saint Horst Wessel to the Nazis. There was nothing sordid about him.

But the truth of Wessel's life, and death, is rather different from the Nazi propaganda version. What had actually happened is that he'd started living with a former prostitute, and it seems... at least the communists put this about... that his death was due to a personal dispute with her former pimp.

The most likely story is only slightly less sordid. Wessel and his girlfriend get into a dispute with their landlady over unpaid rent. The landlady goes to the local communists for help. She wants them to use force to get the couple to pay up. At first, they aren't keen to get involved in such a petty squabble. But when they learn the debtor is Horst Wessel, a well-known and hated Storm Trooper leader, they agree. But instead of beating him up, they shoot him in the head. He later dies from his wounds. Germany would have totally forgotten this violent, yet insignificant man, if Goebbels hadn't turned him into the perfect martyr. RAISE THE FLAG! Martyrdom is so important to the Nazis, they even publish a book listing 140 fallen members. And a guide to rituals, explaining how to conduct a Nazi funeral and showing the most tasteful Nazi gravestones. When one of the most senior Party leaders, Fritz Todt, dies in a plane crash, he is rewarded with an elaborate state funeral.

[speaking German]

Hitler himself leads the mourners. And comforts the family. The ceremony reveals how the Nazis are creating their own cult of death. It is rich in sinister symbolism, including frequent use of the Nazi salute.

[military dirge plays] [speaking German] [dramatic music plays]

The Nazi salute is one of the Party's most recognizable features. Members think it's a traditional Aryan gesture, a manly way for them to show their commitment. But once again, the salute isn't original. It's clearly copied from Mussolini and the Italian fascists. But some Nazis try to claim otherwise. The Nazis insist again and again, as well as students of folklore and those who looked into the origins of the salute, that it was actually a genuinely Germanic salute. This, in turn, brought the Italian fascists onto the scene, who insisted that this imperial Roman reference was their own, a crucial reference to their origins, so to speak. So the German Nazis and the Italian fascists had a never-ending debate with regard to the origin of the salute.

["Heil Hitler" call and response]

What is original is combining the salute with the cry of "Heil Hitler." This turns a greeting into a pledge of allegiance. The particular thing about the salute is that when people were first meeting, a clear association with Adolf Hitler was demanded and given. So with the salute and its reply, you were immediately able to carry out something like a conformity check of your counterpart, and that's what turns this salute into an excellent means of monitoring regime fidelity or regime affiliation. That's where the ingenuity, so to speak, of the salute lies. And that's its logic.

The Nazis want to sweep away all the traditional and familiar German greetings, replacing them with the Hitler greeting and the Nazi salute. Conformity is essential to the Nazi project. But first they have to win power. And by now, they've built a formidable organization for political campaigning.

It isn't simply about Hitler. We're also talking about thousands and tens of thousands and eventually hundreds of thousands of people who are working at local level, giving of their time, giving of their resources. They're doing it every night. I mean, these are people who are going out, organizing rallies, organizing marches and so forth without Hitler being in sight. They developed a correspondent's school for training public speakers, which claimed to have trained about 6,000 speakers by 1933. Now this was significant, because it allowed the Nazis to send speakers to every village and neighborhood in Germany. Towns that had never had a political speaker before suddenly got regular visits from Nazi speakers. Now these speakers weren't of Goebbels's and Hitler's quality, but they didn't have to be. They brought the Nazi message to areas that hadn't heard any political speakers before.

And one also shouldn't forget that this was an important source of revenue for the Party. This was a party which in its earlier years, activities on the ground are very largely self-financed. That is, by dues, by people contributing small amounts to the Party and also paying not merely membership dues, but also fees to come to hear the speaker. And, if a regional group could get Hitler to speak, they could make a lot of money.

[crowd cheering]

They also manufacture a lot of regime tat. All those little badges and so forth for Party rallies and everything else is actually a way of financing the Nazi Party. How does it have so much money? Well, it's a retail organization. It's selling gaudy merchandise, bright shiny buttons and all the rest of it as a way of keeping itself going and paying its officials. So there is a market dynamic to the Nazi party.

The meetings and rallies are major money-making opportunities.

You had posters, you had banners, you had music, you had a ceremonial entrance of SD Storm Troopers and flags, you had lively speeches. For the great masses of our people, sufficient food should be provided, so they can work with all their strength.

What the Nazis were very careful to do was to make all of their events entertaining, so you'd have, for example, a choir of the Hitler Youth, you'd have a brass band, then you'd show movies. The point is that it was a show as well as a political meeting.

One academic had said, actually, a Nazi Party rally in the early 1930s was one of the best ways you could have spent your time. And it conveyed this idea of excitement, that we're on the brink of an epic era. They were awfully good at doing that.

[cheering]

Relentless campaigning leads to electoral success in June 1929. The Nazi party wins political control of its first town. Coburg, where only seven years before, Hitler had been brawling in the streets. It's an important lesson in how to win power.

Hitler realized that you couldn't do it by violence alone. You had to have a kind of twin-track approach. Violence and intimidation on the one hand, and the quasi-legal, or pseudo-legal way to power on the other hand, which means getting votes, becoming the largest party and then getting into power by means that at least looked legal, passing laws.

Coburg is also the first town to elect a Nazi mayor. It proudly takes the name of "First German National Socialist City." By now, the Nazis are starting to gain support from almost all parts of German society.

In the early 1930s, they become a catch-all party of protest. So that they are able to appeal to virtually every sector of the population with the obvious exception of Jews. They might not do as well amongst working class voters than the socialists or communists, nonetheless they attract a considerable amount of working-class support. They might not be able to do as well as the Catholic Center Party in Catholic regions and particularly rural Catholic regions, but nonetheless, they're able to attract a considerable amount of Catholic support. So that one sees that the Nazis are able to gain support really from across the political spectrum.

We think of the Nazis sort of entering with a fixed ideology and a concrete program. It wasn't like that at all. There is one quote from them which says, "We don't want high bread prices, we don't want low bread prices, we don't want bread prices to stay the same. We want National Socialist bread prices." It was this indeterminacy, this flexibility, this whole process of, if you like, inventing it on the hoof which explains their electoral success.

By 1932, Hitler feels confident enough to make an audacious bid for power. He launches a nationwide election campaign to become president of Germany. To reach as many people as possible, he does something no German politician has ever done before. He takes to the air.

It was totally novel. Very few people had ever been by plane. Hitler recognized, though, the utility that he could hit many cities in a single day.

It's not the huge rallies necessarily in Berlin or Hamburg or Munich or whatever, but in district towns where he attracts ten, 15, 20 thousand people. It made for the most dramatic arrival possible.

Hitler's aircraft, the Junkers 52/3m, is the very latest technology, only a year old. He uses it to deliver 46 speeches in less than a month.

The idea of Hitler coming down through the clouds, attracting these tens of thousands of people many times a day, moving from one area to the next, made a big impression. And he was the first person to do this.

Everyone could have a direct experience of this rock star charisma. Anticipation could be built. Often, the schedule fell behind. Hitler was an hour or two late on arriving. But that only built the tension. And when Hitler would finally arrive, there would be an explosion of cheers and "Sieg Heils" and so forth. It was a very interesting and effective method of building the Hitler myth.

Nazi propaganda exploits the image of the daring Hitler, not afraid of this still quite risky technology.

One has to remember that this is a young man. A relatively young man for a politician. He is the representative of that younger generation who comes up from the trenches, and as such, is making a big impression on the German population.

Despite Hitler's dynamic and relentless campaigning, he doesn't win the presidency, losing to the incumbent, Paul von Hindenburg. But in fierce parliamentary elections, the Nazis do become the largest political party in the Reichstag, opposed by a similar number of communists and social democrats. German politics is increasingly polarized and violent. Democracy itself is becoming discredited. There are rumors the army is preparing a coup. Reluctantly, President Hindenburg appoints Hitler as Chancellor to create some kind of stability. Hitler grasps this opportunity to start the process of Nazi political domination.

It's a mistake to think that Hitler's appointment on the 30th of January 1933 was "the seizure of power." It's only the beginning. Between then and July 1933, the Nazis use mass violence combined with a series of laws and decrees that they passed to seize complete power. By the summer of 1933, up to 200,000 opponents of the Nazis, again, mainly on the left, had been put into concentration camps. That's an essential part of the Nazi seizure of power.

[crowd singing forbidden verse of German national anthem]

With their enemies crushed, nothing can now stop the Nazi takeover of Germany. Nazi designs and symbols rapidly become state designs and symbols.

In March 1933, the swastika flag becomes a German national flag. In May, the "Horst Wessel Song" becomes part of the national anthem. And in July, the Nazi salute and Hitler greeting become compulsory for public employees. But they are soon being used by everyone. It took just a few months, and all greetings then common in Germany, regional or in different dialects, disappeared in no time at all, and were replaced, substituted, by the Hitler salute.

Most need little encouragement. But, for those who refuse to use the Nazi salute, there are severe penalties. CONSTRUCTION OFFICE

The first concentration camp was established in Dachau. Already in 1933, there are reports of people, vicars for example, who refused the salute, who were detained in the Dachau concentration camp for a few weeks or even for longer.

The Nazis insist this is now the only acceptable German greeting. The Nazi party reminded people again and again, in public, everywhere. Beer glasses were sold with the German greeting on them, with "Heil Hitler." On advertising columns, there were large posters saying that in Germany, you must greet with "Heil Hitler." So there was tremendous public propaganda favoring the adoption of this salute. So these two things complemented each other. There was a real readiness within the people to use this salute. But that, of course, was also supported by massive propaganda. It was extremely difficult to withdraw from the obligation to make the salute. If so, you were suspected straight away. And the suspicion was then, briefly, well... It led to the risk of you being denounced to the authorities.

With every passing day, the Nazis take over more and more of daily life.

The Nazis then reshaped the whole of German society to be part of the Nazi machine. For example, the trade unions were banned and abolished and their property seized. And a labor front, a Nazi labor front was created to represent all the workers. Nazism claimed to be much more than a political party that was only interested in winning the next election. It claimed to be a world view that had an interest in every aspect of human life. They simply were interested in everything. They were interested in transforming German views of art, German education, German media.

If you had a football club, it had to become part of the Nazi Football Association. Very often, local towns and communities would have three or four different choirs, for example: a socialist choir, a liberal choir, a conservative choir. It was a very highly politicized society. These are all scrapped by the Nazis and turned into the Nazi choir, as it were. So in the end, there was nothing left except the church and the army. The church and the army were the only two institutions that were not fully Nazified. And somebody once said, wherever two or three people met, Hitler was there in spirit as well.

In August 1934, Hitler's final obstacle falls away. The 86-year-old president, Paul von Hindenburg, dies. Hitler announces that the presidency has died with him. From now on, he declares, he is the head of state, with a completely new title: Leader of Germany, the "Führer." Total power is now in his hands.

[speaking German]

In just 15 years, the Nazis have grown from a tiny, eccentric fringe group to a huge political party totally dominating Germany. Its annual rally and congress in Nuremburg is a now a major national event. The Nuremberg rallies were a theatrical performance of Hitler's vision of Germany.

Hitler asks an up-and-coming young director to film it for him. Her name is Leni Riefenstahl.

Hitler comes through the crowd, he is of the crowd. He is of the people and rises above them. And so the leader speaks to the serried and ordered ranks of the masses, a vision of Germany which is about order, which is about hierarchy, the Führerprinzip, the leadership principle, and about hardness.

And every detail feeds into that. So, for instance, Albert Speer talks about the building of the Nuremberg arena, how it was made of granite and hard German oak.

Riefenstahl is given extraordinary resources. Thirty cameras and nine aerial photographers. She has a crew of more than 170 people, many dressed in Storm Trooper uniforms, so they can blend into the crowds. The result is one of the most infamous propaganda films of all time: "Triumph of the Will." It's a display of power to others. It's a way of saying, "We are big, and we are strong," and making people begin to believe that perhaps they are popular. Perhaps they are not very left field. In a sense, creating a norm of acceptability. And the rhetoric of your vision of society was made real within these acts of theater. People participated in them, and it made them believe in the reality of the society that could thereby be constructed.

[speaking German]

Goebbels was once asked what was his greatest propaganda achievement, and he said it's Hitler. It's the Hitler myth, it's the notion of this person who was utterly selfless. Who gives himself up for the people. Who is of the people. Who is for the people. Who tirelessly sacrifices and achieves for the people. And that image is central to Nazism.

Hitler was absolutely central to the Nazi movement. It's hard to imagine Nazism without Hitler. It would be like imagining Christianity without Christ.

["Heil Hitler" call and response]

He was the ideologist of the Party. He was at the beginning and throughout the chief propagandist of the movement. He was really the center point about which all of Nazism revolved. Without him, there was no Nazi movement.

[crowd chanting "Heil"]

What you're getting is this... creation of a sense of German identity and German community, which is defined and embodied in Hitler, which means if you see yourself as German, then you are bound to Hitler, and you are, in a sense, bound to follow Hitler.

But where is Hitler leading Germany to? In 1934, many Germans seem too dazzled by Nazi glamour to care. But Hitler has decided. He has already ordered the construction of thousands of new tanks and warplanes. They are essential for the next stage of his project. A great war of conquest, a war that would be the most destructive in history.

[patriotic music plays]

1934. The International Motor Show in Berlin. One of Adolf Hitler's favorite events. Here, he promotes the Nazis' boldest propaganda project: building the motorways. Hitler fetishized mobility and loved cars. And you could tell that.

Just weeks after becoming chancellor, Hitler makes a promise. His plans for motorway building and car manufacturing will make Germany great again, ending years of hardship and high unemployment. "In my opinion, the most appropriate way to guide the German people back into work is to get the German economy back into gear through great, monumental works." The Reich motorways were promoted and propagandized as the "Roads of the Führer."

For Hitler, the motorways are a powerful symbol of Germany's return to power after humiliating defeat in the First World War. And the youth of Germany will build them.

The building of the Autobahn was done deliberately in a way to make work for as many hands as possible. It wasn't particularly mechanized; just a lot of guys out there with shovels.

Hitler also promises to build millions of cheap "People's Cars" for the masses. But none of these promises are ever fulfilled. Not one person who subscribed to the car ever got one, because the war came, and it was converted to military purposes in the factory.

Instead, millions of forced workers and prisoners struggle and die building roads that can never be completed. Because Hitler only has one real drive: to wage war. His motorways are just another route to Germany's destruction.

[dramatic music plays]

1924. Landsberg Castle, in southern Germany. Adolf Hitler is imprisoned here for staging a coup. But the authorities are surprisingly tolerant. The conditions in Hitler's fortress prison are far from harsh. He has many visitors and many books. During his enforced idleness, Hitler re-reads one of his favorites: the autobiography of Henry Ford. "I will build a motor car for the great multitude. It will be so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one and enjoy with his family the blessing of hours of pleasure in God's great open spaces."

Hitler is inspired by Ford's vision of mass motorization. He also identifies with Ford himself, a brilliant industrialist from humble origins who creates the world's most famous car, the Model T. As soon as he's released, Hitler starts campaigning for the Nazi Party, right across Germany.

[chanting "Heil"]

But now he refuses to take "boring" trains. Instead, he prefers to travel by car to demonstrate his vision of national reconstruction through motorization. Hitler enjoyed driving powerful Mercedes cars at high speed or being chauffeured in them. Hitler was a real car fan.

But Hitler’s motorcade is something of a novelty. At the time, car ownership is still a privilege of the rich.

Germany had fewer motor vehicles per capita than either Britain or France, to say nothing of the United States during the 1920s and early 1930s.

Hitler wants to do for Germany what Ford has done for the United States. So he pushes his party to promise three things: jobs, cars and roads for everyone. Very quickly, he asserted and propagandized that the German economy should be grown or restored to health mainly through car manufacturing and road construction.

In 1933, Hitler consults an expert on road construction who is also a loyal Nazi Party member. His name is Fritz Todt.

Todt was a construction engineer, a road builder. He had a senior position at a very reputable construction company. He joined the Nazi Party very early on, in 1922 or '23, I think. In contrast to many other Nazis, he was very competent in his field, and most people describe him as a level-headed guy. The most crucial person in the development and realization of the motorways was definitely Fritz Todt.

Todt presents Hitler with a plan for a national motorway network. He argues it will create jobs, boost tourism and even have strategic military benefits. However, Todt's proposal isn't original. He borrows from plans created a decade earlier by the motorway lobby, HaFraBa.

The Autobahn program begins in the Weimar Republic. But the first Autobahn is the one between Bonn and Cologne, which was supposed to be the first leg of an Autobahn going from Hamburg down to Frankfurt down to Basel: the HaFraBa. So that the idea of the Autobahn are already there.

It is more than just an idea. These are comprehensive blueprints. These plans were very meticulous and were very advanced by the late 1920s. They had drawings for every 20 kilometer stretch, down to every last detail, which the Nazis were able to base their plans on, with only minor variations.

When the Nazis come to power, Hitler appoints Todt general inspector of roads. He gets to work immediately. Naturally, sweeping promises about route completions were made. By 1937/38, 10,000 kilometers were meant to have been completed. The overall plan envisaged 22,000 kilometers of motorway.

[speaking German] Germany had 35 or more percent of the workforce unemployed when the Nazis came to power. The depression in Germany was deeper than anywhere else in Europe, and it's a big reason why the Nazis managed to come to power, because they'd promised to try and deal with it. People were fed the propaganda: "This is a means to an end. A great glory will arise from this, and you're a part of that great glory." In other words, this idea that we live in epic times. You want to be part of that, then get digging the motorway, because everything will come to you, all the goodies, because then we'll be able to deliver by lorry, and it will be delivered fast, and you'll have a great future awaiting you.

Many unemployed people put great effort into applying for jobs on the motorways. The federal archives have records of the unemployed sending in poems and using these poems to put themselves forward to finally get a job on the motorways. "Queuing up for the dole, many years I spent. Now, finally, I hold a shovel in my hand. Doing physical work in nature out there worked on me like a miraculous cure. This is why I work with gratitude for the master builder of all time to realize the jewel in the crown of his monumental plan: the Reich motorway."

The building of the Autobahn was done deliberately in such a way as to make work for as many hands as possible. It wasn't particularly mechanized; just a lot of guys out there with shovels.

The routine was that workers were given work clothes and equipped with spades and shovels. The authorities would officially release them from the state of unemployment. Then, they marched off or were transported to the construction sites by lorries, which were driven by members of the SA in a kind of triumphal march. The population showed great interest. Sometimes, hundreds of thousands of people crowded around these construction sites.

These "back to work" ceremonies take place all around the country. Todt carefully schedules motorway construction to spread the propaganda message as widely as possible. All Germans are meant to feel that they are directly benefiting from the motorways. The commissioning of the construction sites always ran to more or less the same pattern, which was designed for propaganda purposes in both film and sound. It was very important that the radio was always there to broadcast, as well as the weekly newsreel.

And, when the cameras are rolling, even the Führer gets his hands dirty. Hitler often tells the workers that he understands their needs, because he, too, had suffered during his humble, earlier life, before his rise to power. "Back then they used to say: 'What does he want, that former builder or painter?' But I am happy and proud that fate forced me down this road. It is, perhaps, why I have a deeper understanding than others of the German worker, of his nature, but also of his vital needs." It's hard to imagine today the extent to which the motorway shaped the perceptions of the population across all media.

Fritz Todt takes charge of motorway-related propaganda personally. He edits the weekly magazine The Road and commissions films, which portray the Führer's project as a miraculous road to recovery. But this doesn't distract him from overseeing all the technical details. The motorway was intended to meet the following criteria: to have two lanes in each direction separated by a central reservation. It was meant to have no junctions and was reserved for car traffic only. In the early planning stages, quite a few railway engineers were involved, which means that their plans followed railway construction conventions: an elevated track, preferably going in a totally straight line over long distances.

Todt dismisses these coldly efficient straight lines. He prefers a route design known as "the curved path." In this conception of the curved path, two aspects come together: first, that landscape should be experienced, which links to the emphasis on travel and tourism, which was a priority. So they wanted to open up a panoramic vista for the driver. To a large extent, this was copied from the USA. These designs were based on the idea of landscape entertaining the driving audience.

Even though Todt has copied the curved path from America, he insists that Nazi ideology makes German roads different. "Motorways can, after all, be built by any nation, but that we should have been the first to span our fatherland with these ribbons of light, and that they are looked upon and felt by everyone in the nation as being throughout a work of National Socialism, is no mere chance. These roads bear witness to the unity of the Reich."

Driving on these "roads of the Führer" is both a convenient and political experience. They are the height of modernity, yet also lasting monuments to Germany's power. The first stretch of motorway completed by the Nazis links Frankfurt with Darmstadt in May 1935. Thousands line the 22-kilometer route. But there are still not many drivers, as even now, few Germans own a car. Germany was a very under-motorized country. If you look at early film, newsreel film of the Autobahn, there's hardly any cars on them. Just one or two.

Hitler hates the fact that cars are simply too expensive for most Germans. "It is bitter to think of the millions of brave, industrious and hard-working fellow men who are excluded from the start from owning motor vehicles. This class of people would really benefit from

Car ownership, especially on Sundays and holidays, when it would be a source of a joyous happiness previously unknown to them."

[narrator] But Hitler is planning a solution.

[German folk music plays]

The German people were meant to be furnished with the German "People's Car," similar to the Americans' Ford Model T, and as soon as possible.

[narrator] The "People's Car" has to be cheap enough for workers. Hitler tells German manufacturers that it must cost no more than two months' average earnings. "It must be possible to give the German people a motor vehicle that does not cost more than a mid-range motorbike used to." The price was set at 990 marks by diktat. The car was not allowed to cost any more. But economically, this was completely unachievable.

[Evans] It was a big problem for the motor industry. Because it... Selling it for 1,000 marks was not going to bring them in any profit.

[narrator] Despite their reservations, the car industry builds a prototype, designed by Ferdinand Porsche. It only just about managed to go without any frills, any luxuries at all; very, very uncomfortable.

[narrator] But the manufacturers calculate that even a basic "People's Car" will cost far more to make than Hitler has decreed. When they tell him, he is furious. "I was told, 'This is impossible!' My only reply to this is, 'What is possible in other countries, is also possible in Germany.' I hate that word 'impossible,' since it has always been the mark of people not daring enough to make and to implement great decisions. The automobile must become the means of transportation for the people!"

[narrator] And what the Führer wants, the Führer gets.

[Evans] The way the economy worked in Nazi Germany was, it was directed and controlled, increasingly so, by the Nazi government for political reasons, and then, in the end, Hitler, of course, could not be resisted, and he pushed through the idea.

[narrator] The car firms are desperate not to be stuck with a loss-making model. So they cast their eyes on another source of funds for the "People's Car." All workers are now forced to join the Nazi workers' organization, the German Labor Front. It takes over independent trade unions and confiscates their assets of nearly 500 million Reichsmarks, equivalent to more than eight and a half billion US dollars today. To produce the "People's Car," Hitler, like his hero Henry Ford, builds his own factory. And he steals German Labor Front money to fund it. So he's forcing German workers to take on the risk of this loss-making venture, now rebranded the "Strength through Joy" car.

[Schütz] This means that, from the word "go," this was an enterprise dependent on subsidies. A new factory was built, the "Strength through Joy" plant, which later became the Wolfsburg plant.

[narrator] The factory is planned to be the largest in the world, bigger even than Ford's, with enormous output.

[Schütz] Propaganda was spread that from 1939, 1.5 million "People's Cars" would be built each year.

[narrator] The Nazis come up with an ingenious way of taking yet more money from the workers. There was a peculiar hire purchase system where first you had to pay for the car, and then you got it somewhat later.

[narrator] Sales are limited to German Labor Front members who have to buy a "Strength through Joy" savings stamp every week until they reach the purchase price. But if they miss a single payment, everything they've spent is forfeit. So the workers are paying for their cars even before the factory is built. This was a new thing, the idea that I, in my remote village, might actually be able to have a car. And the Nazi Party were telling all the time: you could. It was only a matter of waiting: Be patient, and you'll get one. A lot of it was aspirational consumption. You lived in hope, and they played on your hope.

[narrator] Hitler wants more people to own cars. But there is one group he does not want to see on Germany's roads: the Jews. There's a great diary from Nazi Germany by a Jewish professor called Victor Klemperer, who, with great pride and joy, buys a car, and then, he's banned from driving it. Jews are banned from driving. "The Jews driving offends the German traffic community, especially as they have presumptuously made use of the Reich motorways, which were built by German workers' hands. This prohibition hits us terribly hard."

[narrator] Jews are banned from driving and even owning cars. Victor Klemperer records the growing list of small, everyday pleasures now denied to Jews like him. "They're wearing us down with ever new tricks. Ban on purchasing flowers. Ban on going to the barber. Compulsory surrender of bicycles. It is allowed to cycle to work, but Sunday outings and visits by bicycle are forbidden." Gradually, you see these things that he likes doing are gradually circumscribed and stopped, and his life kind of closes in, because he's able to do less and less.

[narrator] The Jews are persecuted, because the Nazis believe they are an inferior race. Whereas Germans are seen as superior, partly because of the concept of "German work." The idea was that there was a special element of honor in German work, that there was an element of sincerity of a work ethos that was specific to the German people. That was part of the Nazi ideology, and also something that Hitler very much stressed in his public speeches. I am asking you to bear in mind that we live in a time which sees work as an essential matter, and that we want to build a state which values work for its own sake and respects the worker, because he is fulfilling a duty to the nation.

[narrator] The Nazis create a new national organization to embody this ideal: the Reich Labor Service. It takes over existing job creation schemes around the country. School leavers, students and long-term unemployed men are forced to do at least six months' service, creating an army of cheap labor. The propaganda message is clear: Physical labor should be admired and experienced by every German, regardless of social class. I ask you to keep in mind that we want to build a state which uses its labor service to teach everyone, even the pampered son of high-born parents, to value work and respect physical labor in the service of the national community.

[O'Shaughnessy] Whether you were a prince or whether you were a pauper, you had to build roads.

[narrator] The Reich Labor Service's propaganda also says it is unifying the country and overcoming regional differences. The Reich Labor Service was an important organization of the Nazi regime, because it was an important element of Nazi propaganda. The most important propaganda opportunity was certainly the annual rally in Nuremberg, where the Reich Labor Service since 1933 was always a central element of the propaganda marches and demonstrations. So you would have 100,000 young men marching in front of Hitler, showing to the Führer that this organization was a powerful and important tool for the regime.

[speaking German]

[O'Shaughnessy] This is one of the great achievements of propaganda, this elevation of labor partly by making everyone for a period a laborer, but continuously producing posters and films and so forth celebrating labor as the sinews of the culture, the foundation of the culture. It was a symbol of the regime in its attempt to overcome the Great Depression. It had young men, mostly men, put to work to show that the regime was trying to help the people. That it was an active attempt to overcome the crisis. That was the most important propaganda element that it actually had. Young men walking with their spades through small villages, singing their songs, looking happy and being back to work.

[singing a patriotic tune]

[narrator] But beneath the happy image lurks the power of the Nazi state. The Labor Service obviously had an element of coercion in it. And the Nazi idea of work was one of self-sacrifice for the nation, whether you volunteered or not.

[narrator] The service is run in a quasi-military fashion. The Reich Labor Service had a specific uniform. It was brown. It didn't look particularly nice. People in the Third Reich also complained sometimes about the way the uniforms looked. It was almost like a military uniform, and there were all these badges and things that normally distinguish people in military organizations. "Each of us had a work shovel and a second spade, which we polished to perfection, which we handled like a gun. We were drilled in presenting it so that it flashed in the sunlight."

[O'Shaughnessy] All of this was very powerful propaganda, and it's very, very persuasive to people looking at Germany from outside. Sir Nevile Henderson, the British Ambassador, he actually was totally taken in. He said, "These are marvelous structures. Not everyone in Nazi Germany is an evil clown. It has some very great men, and it's created some fantastic nationalizing institutions, which destroy all the barriers of social class and create solidarity." It's a marvelous thing, and in many ways it is the new dawn they promise.

[narrator] Relentless propaganda shows the young men of the Reich Labor Service as heroes, serving the national community by constructing Hitler's roads. In fact, they are not really up to the job.

[Patel] The workforce of the Labor Service was unskilled labor. We have to remember that these are 17-, 18-, 19-year-old young men from all walks of life who have to do this kind of service, and therefore it is impossible to think of them as a qualified workforce. What it mainly did was infrastructure projects such as cultivating the ground, irrigation work for instance, but also some other jobs in that field of building smaller pathways, roads... So that was its main job in the early years.

[narrator] For the more complex work of motorway construction, Fritz Todt hires skilled labor and qualified engineers. They are vital, as he plans to build 20,000 kilometers of road across Germany. And progress in the first few years of Nazi rule is swift. Nearly 600 kilometers are completed each year. The completion of every regional section of motorway is celebrated and broadcast nationwide, with the Führer present, painting a picture of future prosperity.

[speaking German]

[narrator] Hitler claims his make-work schemes are curing unemployment. The reality is different. While it is true that unemployment levels are coming down... It would be wrong to say the Labor Service played an important role in reducing them. Other factors really were more important to explain the economic upswing. It had started already in 1932, prior to the rise to power, and a good part of it also owed to the rearmament of the military, so in that sense, it was also an artificial and aggressive form of overcoming the economic crisis.

[narrator] And the Nazi state is tightening its grip on the working class. There was the idea and the rhetoric of supporting workers and celebrating also the hard physical work of laborers, but in practice, the regime did little to support them. If you look at the development of wages, for instance, you see a downward trend in the second half of the 1930s.

[narrator] Workers had formed trade unions to protect their interests. But the German Labor Front, which replaces them, exists to control the workers, not represent them. The Labor Front doesn't care about the conditions of those toiling on the motorways. Obviously the moving workplace of building a motorway... They'd be living in very rough, temporary accommodation. They'd be served pretty basic food, the wages weren't great and if you objected, you got into trouble. The day would have started with flag raising, and then very much a routine day of work and of labor.

[Schütz] They had to do heavy physical work eight hours a day, sometimes ten hours a day. And this led to severe health problems. There was a new phrase, which nearly gained the status of a new medical condition: shoveler's sickness. This was caused by the uneven strain when shifting soil, and it presented itself through symptoms such as torn ligaments, joint strain, back pain and suchlike. They were not to be envied. Even after-work time was regimented too, so that the German Labor Front was responsible for after-work hours as well. The regime was making sure that people's leisure time also was quite heavily regimented.

[narrator] The Nazis start banning strikes as early as 1933. Yet conditions are so bad on the motorway construction sites that sometimes, workers feel they have to lay down their shovels. In 1934/35, there were some reports of strikes. Now, this is always difficult, because officially there were no such things. But we know that there were some minor uprisings.

[narrator] Strikes in the 1920s caused political unrest. The Nazis will not tolerate such dissent. Workers who had written stirring poems about their new jobs are now chanting different rhymes. "The motorway is knocking us dead. Tomorrow we'll go back to voting red!" But in those cases, the authorities took drastic measures. They threw these people in prison or sent them to re-education camps.

[narrator] This is the site of one of these camps, a former Labor Service barracks. After the barracks burn down, the Nazis turn this exposed site into a prison camp for workers. Now, it's a memorial to all who suffered here.

[Steffen Reinhard] SS Special Camp Hinzert was used for the retraining of German workers that were accused of anti-social behavior. For instance, they came to work too late, started drinking alcohol or complained about the bad working conditions. The conditions must have been, of course, inhumane. The prisoners had no proper uniforms or proper shoes. The climate is very rough, wet and cold. Screams and beatings and barking dogs "welcomed" the arriving prisoners. They had to work 13 hours a day. The head was shaved, and they had a special haircut, which means in the middle, it was very, very small. The prisoners called it "Hinzerter Autobahn." And it was actually used just in case a prisoner escaped, everyone saw from his haircut, he must be a prisoner. This was the intention. The idea was to retrain them. They had to do hard physical labor, military drills, and in the evenings, they were indoctrinated by Nazi ideology.

[narrator] The Nazis believe that the needs of the national community outweigh individual needs.

[Lisa Pine] As far as the Nazis were concerned, human beings were only acceptable if they were able to contribute to society in a positive way. So they needed to be healthy. They needed to be productive to society. So working and playing their part in society, whether they were women or men, boys or girls. Everyone had a role. The ideal Nazi family would have the father going out to work as the breadwinner in the public sphere, the woman at home as a wife and mother, keeping home, doing the cooking, nurturing her children, nurturing the future of Germany as it were.

[narrator] Hitler needs workers and soldiers to turn his vision of empire into reality. So what he wants from German women are German babies. But not enough of them are doing their "duty."

[Hester Vaizey] There had been a declining birth rate from the late 19th century across Europe, but most pronouncedly in Germany. And Hitler, especially with his territorial ambitions, was keen to reverse this with pro-natal policies. So when the Nazis came to power, they shut down birth control centers, which had been some of the most advanced in Europe at the time, and made abortion illegal. "German women, be true to your task. See to it that Germany shall not be a people without youth, that is, without a future. When you have blessed as many children as possible with life, only then will you have your greatest purpose in life."

[Vaizey] Propaganda posters at the time would depict women with babes in arms, surrounded by children, with a strong father figure. In contrast were films where women were wearing lots of makeup and might have been sort of lithe. Nazi propaganda portrayed women in much more of a strong, farmhand, breeding light.

[narrator] The regime also introduces a range of incentives to boost fertility. Very soon after the Nazis seized power, in June 1933, they brought in a marriage loan, which offered couples a monetary loan that was reduced by a quarter every time the couple produced a child. Contingent on being able to get this loan was being politically reliable, so you couldn't be an opponent to the regime, a communist or a social democrat. The Nazis attached a hierarchy to different levels of motherhood. One of the symbolic ways in which they did this was to distribute Crosses of Honor of the German Mother. And these were given out in bronze, silver and gold for mothers who had four, six and eight children, respectively.

[Vaizey] And members of the Hitler Youth were required to salute wearers of these medals in the street if they saw them.

[O'Shaughnessey] When a mother gave birth, members of the Hitler Youth and the Deutsche Mädchen Bund would come round and garland the house. It was made into an epic. You were made to feel terrifically important.

[narrator] So the regime strongly favors childbirth and motherhood. But there is another, sinister side to the Nazi's growing control over reproduction. They wanted to prevent births of what they considered to be the unfit. Those could be the racially inferior, which were considered to be the Jews and the Gypsies, and then the hereditarily inferior, or the people who were regarded to be unhealthy, unfit. The Jews were seen as particularly culpable for polluting the Aryan German race, in spite of the fact they were only one percent of the population of Germany.

[narrator] The Nazis turn their ideological policies into laws, which progressively strip Jews of their rights. The Nuremberg Laws were introduced in 1935. These were racial laws designed to take away the German citizenship of Germany's Jews, effectively turning them into subjects instead of citizens.

[narrator] Racial discrimination is now enshrined in law. The Nazi state intrudes into the most intimate areas of the people's lives. Germans and Jews were from this point onwards forbidden to marry or even have sex. Jewish men were forbidden from employing Aryan German women as housemaids. This was playing on a stereotype of a Jewish man as a sexual predator intent on defiling Aryan women. This was an example of the regime infringing and penetrating very strongly into family life, permeating family life in quite an unprecedented way.

[narrator] But all these Nazi laws, awards, propaganda and subsidies do not achieve their critical objective: boosting the birth rate of pure, Aryan Germans. There was a slight increase in the birth rate during the Nazi period of power, but arguably this was as a result of the recovery from the Great Depression and had little to do with all the efforts that were put into propaganda. Ultimately, the members of the Party could not stand over couples and force them to breed.

[narrator] Whether women have babies or not is affected at least as much by economics as Nazi policies or propaganda. Two million men died in the First World War, so many women have to work to survive. They are too busy being breadwinners to breed. The reality was: For working class women, they weren't working out of a sense of emancipation or personal fulfillment. They were working, because their husband's wage was insufficient. They worked out of financial necessity.

[narrator] German women actually participate more in the workforce than in Britain or the United States. But the Nazis prefer them to stay in acceptably female roles, such as agriculture.

[Vaizey] Women worked most frequently on farms. But there were also women doing factory work and increasingly doing secretarial work, too. The Nazis were keen, if women were going to work... they wanted them to work in what they considered their natural spheres.

[narrator] But Hitler is turning the country towards war. Having militarized the economy, the regime is now forced to soften its line on women's roles, because military conscription is taking many men out of the workforce.

[Evans] From spring of 1935 onwards, all young men had to join the armed forces, and that immediately snapped up a couple of million. Unless they came into the labor market, they went into the army. The massive arms build-up began in a small way already in 1933, but by 1936 or '37, the arms industry was sucking in labor and resources from all over the economy.

[narrator] A new source of labor is needed to replace the male factory workers. So Nazi ideological principles are abandoned. Even mothers leave the marital home to take up jobs.

[Vaizey] Women were a fantastically cheap labor source in comparison to men. Their wages remained persistently lower than men. They were a resource that the regime couldn't afford to ignore when they were in the business of rearming.

[narrator] Yet before Hitler can start his war in the east, he first wants to fortify his border in the west. He orders Fritz Todt to build an enormous defensive structure, the Westwall. But his workforce is busy building the motorways. So Todt turns to the unskilled workers of the Reich Labor Service.

[Patel] It was part of building these fortifications in the west of the country, the so-called "Westwall," which was an important new dimension that absorbed many of its units in 1938 and '39. So the whole idea of education, of indoctrination was less important, and work hours, work days become much longer.

[narrator] Six hundred thousand men build the Westwall, working seven days a week. Todt's work is so crucial to Hitler's war plans, he grants him authority over the nation's entire construction program, with his own task force: Organization Todt. Now Todt is able to complete the Westwall in just over a year. With its 630 kilometers of bunkers and fortifications, this is a real line of defense, as well as a show of strength. And it bears a striking resemblance to Todt's other propaganda project. When you saw the Westwall embedded in the landscape, it looked a bit like a prickly motorway, crossing hills and valleys, just like the curved path of the motorways. And the idea was that these massive concrete dragons' teeth and fortifications would stop tanks from penetrating, which is what happened. But perhaps even more powerful was its psychological and visual effect.

[narrator] Todt completes the Westwall in summer 1939. His career is made. September 1939. Germany is now at war. At first, Hitler is victorious. As the Reich's borders expand both east and west, Fritz Todt extends his plans for the motorway network. But the new roads are no longer intended for enjoyable drives with scenic views. These roads have an aggressive political purpose: supply lines for the army and routes for future German settlers.

[Schütz] They were already making plans for huge thoroughfares that would've connected the empire with the territories they planned to enslave in the event of victory, which they were convinced would come. These plans would have extended the motorway network from Holland, France and Italy, that is, from the west and the south, all the way to Moscow.

[narrator] These are big plans. But even at home, there is not enough labor to build the motorways. Workers have been lured away by the high wages offered creating the Westwall. So, to keep expanding his motorway network, Todt has to find another solution. It was one that had previously been rejected: mechanization, turning to technology. Remember that in the early years, work was done almost exclusively by hand. And now, road construction machines were deployed to replace labor.

[narrator] On the motorways, mechanization helps. But machines cannot replace men entirely. So Todt is forced to abandon another key Nazi principle. There had previously been plans to deploy Jews from concentration camps. Todt had rejected this, arguing that the honorable German motorway should not be sullied by Jewish hands.

[narrator] Todt reluctantly uses Jewish concentration camp prisoners on the Führer's roads. But the decision does not harm his career. In fact, he gains power when Hitler gives him an even more important job.

[Schütz] During the war, he was made Reich Minister for Armaments and Munitions. He successfully demonstrated his competence and was considered an authority. The Organization Todt went east too, of course, to Poland, to Russia, to Ukraine, to build roads, accommodation and so on. Everything that falls under military engineering, especially bridge construction. Organization Todt was also really involved in highly destructive tasks during World War Two. The most important example is probably building the Durchgangsstrassen, highways, basically, to the eastern occupied parts of Europe where forced labor and many Jewish forced laborers were employed. And there was this idea of exterminating them through work.

[narrator] From 1941, the Organization Todt uses forced labor and prisoners of war to construct these "Durchgangsstrassen," or thoroughfares. These men are literally worked to death.

[Schütz] You could argue that the further away you got from the center of the empire and the further you left behind the area where the population could monitor you, and the further the war progressed and became more problematic, the lower the reluctance to use forced labor, until you didn't even try to hide the fact that people were being worked to death.

[Patel] The Nazis had this very important idea that people who were not deemed to be part of the national community, of the Volksgemeinschaft, should be excluded and also be exterminated by work.

[narrator] At first this "extermination through labor" only takes place openly on the edges of the Reich. But even within Germany, the regime and private companies have no qualms about using forced labor in every part of the economy. Prisoners of war, along with people from occupied territories, are shipped into Germany to work. And again, the ideological objection to using Jews is abandoned.

[Schütz] After 1939/40, even Jewish forced labor was used. And forced laborers were treated decidedly worse than German workers. They lived in terrible conditions.

[Evans] Forced labor becomes increasingly necessary for a regime which is sending literally millions of men into their deaths on the Eastern Front.

[narrator] At Hitler's car factory, two-thirds of the workforce are forced laborers. But they are not building the promised "People's Car." Not one person who subscribed to the car ever got one, because the war came, and it was converted to military purposes in the factory.

[Schütz] In reality, only 600 cars were built, most of them for display or similar purposes. Whereas they built about 50,000 Kübelwagen and about 15,000 amphibious Schwimmwagen, which are military vehicles. The "People's Car" itself only existed in propaganda films or occasional propaganda rides.

[narrator] More than 300,000 German workers paid their weekly contributions in the hope of owning a "People's Car." They had hoped in vain. In January 1942, Hitler himself issues a decree banning all private car journeys. No one is now allowed to drive on the Führer's roads unless it directly supports the war effort. And finally, all motorway construction in Germany comes to a complete stop. But Fritz Todt does not live to see all this.

[Schütz] In February 1942, Todt was killed in a plane crash when he was visiting Hitler's headquarters, the Wolf's Lair.

[narrator] His death comes as a huge shock to Hitler. Todt's importance to the Nazi project is shown by the grandiose state funeral he is awarded, with military honors. Fritz Todt had used the enticing argument that the motorways would play a valuable military role. He had the idea that 60,000 men could be moved from one border to the other within two days. But this was delusional. Even if they had completed the motorway network, this would have been impossible, firstly because they lacked trucks. Secondly, rail transport was much more efficient. So the military was, in fact, quite skeptical about the motorways. They were concerned they might be used by enemy aircraft as guidelines. The motorways turned out to be incredibly useful for bombers, because they were very white and bright, and they went from one city to another. You could use them as navigational aids. In the end, they were painted over with camouflage.

[narrator] The army's fears about "the Führer's roads" are realized during the 1943 Allied bombing campaign. Germany's decisive defeat at Stalingrad is a sign of even greater reverses to come. But Hitler is in denial and carries on regardless. His propaganda machine starts using a new slogan: "total war."

[speaking German]

[Pine] Total war meant lots of mobilization on the home front as well as on the fighting front. And eventually in January 1943, the call-up for work began. Total war had a specific economic purpose, and that is to fully militarize its economy.

[narrator] The Nazis issue decrees that minimum working hours for all workers must go up. And Hitler is finally forced to accept that women must work in the munitions industry. Women were working in evacuation procedures, air raid protection. They were working in distribution of goods. So the real mobilization, although it went against earlier Nazi propaganda, and earlier Nazi motives, was a pragmatic attempt to get the whole nation working together for this total war effort.

[narrator] The very survival of Germany is in doubt. So now, almost every Nazi principle is sacrificed. Even children are drafted into military service. Hitler's top propaganda project, the motorway network, lies unfinished under camouflage. Todt's workers had only managed to build 4,000 kilometers, less than 20 percent of the promised network. Despite its scale, the Westwall only holds back Allied forces for a few months. Nazi Germany is now suffering defeat after defeat. The Allies are advancing on all fronts. The Allies, of course, did not show a great deal of respect for the motorways, but drove right over them with their tanks. The motorways were littered with destroyed, burned-out cars, which had been abandoned as people fled. And finally, the motorways were used to move German prisoners of war, because there were no trucks or trains to transport them. As was common with prisoners of war, they were marched along the roads partly to humiliate them. So once again, the motorways became the "roads of the Führer."

[narrator] Hitler promised a network of super highways to link up his European empire. But he failed to deliver. In the end, the limited scale of the motorway network reveals the huge difference between Nazi propaganda and the grim reality.

[narrator] September, 1942. A German climbing team battles its way to the summit of the highest mountain in Europe. It's a handpicked team of Nazi Germany's elite mountain troops. They raise the Nazi war flag on the summit of Mount Elbrus in the Caucasus Mountains, deep inside the Soviet Union. It's a decisive moment in the war.

[James Holland] People really did think that the Germans had everyone on the run in the autumn of 1942. If you look at the huge strides they make in the Caucasus and down into that part of the southern USSR, it looks like its completely one-way traffic, absolutely.

[narrator] This is the peak of Nazi Germany's power. It controls huge territory and enormous resources.

[Robert Kershaw] You've got to be aware of the extent of the German Reich by early 1942. It really stretched from Archangel in the north down to the Caucasus in the south. That is a huge land mass that they dominated.

[narrator] But Hitler wants much more. He believes the German people must dominate the globe. No matter how much territory or how many prisoners his armies seize, he is never satisfied.

[Richard Evans] The Nazi view of war was that it was essential for the health of the German race that they kept on fighting, that they never stopped. It was war without limit and war without end. A nation without war was a feeble, weak nation.

[narrator] Hitler's global war demands an ocean of oil for his enormous numbers of tanks, planes and ships. Just a few hundred kilometers beyond Mount Elbrus lie the vast oilfields of the Caucasus, which he must capture to defeat the Soviet Union and fuel further conquests. But Hitler must move fast. Despite Nazi propaganda, German industry is crippled by shortages of every kind, from steel to rubber. If Hitler can't capture everything that he needs for his war machine, his plans for world domination will fail.

[dramatic music plays]

[narrator] 1924. Adolf Hitler is in jail. His attempt to seize power here in Munich the previous year failed dismally. Forced out of politics, he turns to writing. In his book Mein Kampf, he creates an extraordinary vision of how he plans to turn Germany into a global power. But to create world-beating armed forces, Germany needs huge resources. Hitler's plan is simply to steal them, especially from the countries which lie to the east of Germany.

[Holland] If Germany is going to survive, then it needs to get resources from elsewhere. If it can't get those resources peacefully, then we have to get them by military might.

[narrator] Hitler believes that the land and resources of Poland and the Soviet Union are the German people's by right. But he can only gain this "Lebensraum," or living space, by conquest. But at the end of the First World War, Germany was virtually disarmed and its military industries crippled. So when Hitler comes to power, war seems impossible. In 1933, Germany no longer really had an armaments industry. There was a small army from the Weimar period, but it had no tanks, there was no air force and the navy had been frozen at a very low strength throughout the Weimar period. As for arms factories, they actually didn't exist at all.

[dramatic music plays]

[narrator] However, Germany's armed forces are not idle. Despite restrictions imposed by the Allies, they're working in secret to rebuild their combat power. They have plans for a rapid military expansion. In the 1920s, the Reichswehr had already trained its men one level above their actual rank. So this helped to increase, relatively smoothly, despite many problems, the increase of the army from a small force of 100,000 to 4.5 million.

[Robert Kershaw] The Weimar's army, the Reichswehr, always accepted that it was a transitory force in the sense that it sought to expand in the future and knew one day it would. They were forbidden an air force, they were forbidden a major navy and they were forbidden tanks. That meant, of course, they had to think outside the box, and that meant they were more open to technological solutions to their problem.

[narrator] The German military works covertly to create the very latest weapons that get around these restrictions. A fake corporation is set up in Holland to work on new U-boat designs, which are then built for other countries, such as Finland and Turkey. Germany gains valuable intelligence, which it then uses to make its own, improved submarines. Another German front company in Switzerland makes advanced machine guns. They will dramatically increase the army's firepower on the battlefield. So even before Hitler becomes chancellor of Germany, rearmament has already begun.

[Bessel] Hitler does come to power in 1933 by saying: You know, we are going to rearm. But he doesn't do this in a vacuum. The plans are already there. The plans which the military itself has developed are really very far advanced. It's not a matter of imposing rearmament on an unwilling military establishment. It's basically taking the brakes off.

[narrator] One of Hitler's earliest acts is to triple the size of the army. Two years later, he recreates the German Air Force, the Luftwaffe. He informs the world that Germany is no longer bound by the treaties that limit its military power. The time for secrecy is over. Hitler declares that the German economy will focus all its effort on rearmament. But rearming a nation still recovering from the Great Depression is a huge gamble. Germany has to import most of its raw materials from abroad and has to borrow money to buy them. So its industries are suffering many shortages. As far as equipping the army with modern weapons is concerned, there was simply no manufacturing infrastructure. In 1933, there were no tank manufacturing plants at all, so they had to build these factories first.

[rousing marching tune plays]

[narrator] But the rearmament drive is very popular, as it promises millions of new, well-paid jobs.

[Bessel] The Ministry of Propaganda and Enlightenment, as it was called, is able to make publicity out of winning the battle for work, getting people back to work. They did get people back to work. We can see that it was done in large measure through deficit financing, but they have something positive to sell.

[narrator] In 1936, Hitler announces a four-year plan to end Germany's economic dependence by making the country self-sufficient. His first target is to increase steel production. Without it, none of the weapons the army, navy and air force need will be made. Results seem to come quickly. October 3rd, 1936. Adolf Hitler witnesses the launch of the Scharnhorst. At 38,000 tons, it's by far Germany's mightiest warship. Its first new battleship since the First World War.

[crowd cheering]

[Holland] From Hitler's point of view, its all about size, it's all about scale. Where's the fun in smashing a Champagne bottle against the hull of a U-boat? A massive, great battleship bristling with huge guns... That's something he can feel proud about.

[narrator] The Scharnhorst is just the first of Hitler's new battleships. In the pipeline is its twin sister, the Gneisenau. Later, two even bigger battleships are launched, the Bismarck and the Tirpitz. At 50,000 tons each, they are among the largest battleships in the world. Hitler wants a navy that can challenge Britain's control of the seas. He is determined to avoid what happened during the First World War, when a naval blockade closed Germany's ports, starving it into submission. But there's a fatal flaw. Germany simply does not have enough resources to build a fleet anywhere near the size of its enemies'. The master plan to create a huge surface fleet is one of the most insane decisions that the Nazis ever make. It makes no sense on any level whatsoever. What they have is a very, very small navy. They have very, very low resource capacity, they have huge demands for iron ore and steel and so on, which they are using to build up their aircraft, the Luftwaffe, to build tanks, guns and all the other stuff to have a large army. What you absolutely don't need to do is to be sinking vast resources into a surface fleet of mighty battleships, which frankly are still going to come massively short compared to the Royal Navy and indeed the French Navy. And that's before you start comparing it with the US Navy.

[narrator] When the war begins, Britain's Royal Navy boasts 15 battleships, as does the US Navy. The French fleet has seven. Germany, just four, two of which are very old. So the German Navy is hugely outgunned. And Hitler's over-ambitious plan has also revealed major problems with the steel industry. There was a real shortfall, particularly from 1936, in smelting capacity. The demand for steel was just too great to be met. Not just for armaments, but also for new infrastructure.

[narrator] New smelting plants are needed to turn ever greater quantities of raw iron ore into steel. But before it can be used to make new weapons, vast quantities of steel are first needed to build the weapon factories. To equip the army and the Luftwaffe, first, a great deal had to be done to build factories and provide machinery, before weapons could be manufactured. Naturally, the steel industry profited enormously doing this. Building the factories required steel, so they benefited twice over, producing weapons and providing the steel for others to build their own weapons factories.

[narrator] German steel is famous for its quality. But the iron ore from which it's made is mostly imported from Sweden. To buy it, German manufacturers have to sell some of their steel abroad, limiting supplies to the arms industry at home. It's a vicious circle that Hitler's right-hand man, Hermann Göring, is determined to break. He wants to use Germany's own iron ore, but its quality is poor. The basic problem was that the iron content was minimal, and so it just wasn't worth using. Also, processing it was very labor intensive, so it was simply inefficient to use this ore. That's why iron ore was imported from Sweden.

[narrator] Göring threatens the steel bosses with punishment for industrial sabotage if they don't use German iron ore despite its low quality. To drive his message home, he builds a huge new processing plant right where the ore is mined in Salzgitter, central Germany, far away from the rest of the steel industry in the Ruhr valley. The Reichswerke Herman Göring will grow into the largest company in the world, a vast state-controlled steel conglomerate with half a million workers.

[Ray Stokes] Industry is being challenged by the Third Reich. "You don't want to do what we want you to do, we will set up a company in opposition to you, in competition with you." That obviously was not in the interests of private industry, because it meant that the state had become a competitor. Privately-owned firms obstructed this as much as they could. But, in the end, the state forced it through and ended up controlling production.

[narrator] But despite Göring's success, Nazi Germany never has enough steel for all its needs. It has to be rationed. They tried to cope with the shortage of iron and steel by allocating it to the most strategically important sectors, to building armaments factories or to production related to self-sufficiency, such as synthetic oil.

[narrator] Pölitz, on the Baltic coast. These shattered buildings were once one of the most important industrial sites in Nazi Germany. This huge complex was given very high priority for steel, because it produced the most crucial resource of all: oil. The problem is that Germany has very little crude oil itself. It increases pretty dramatically during the Nazi period, but it's still miniscule compared to the needs of the country.

[narrator] With very little oil of its own, Germany's world-leading chemical company IG Farben tries to find a way to make it synthetically. In the 1920s, it makes a breakthrough, creating a process to make crude oil from coal.

[Donges] Using chemistry, you can make a substitute for oil from coal. This was really important during the war. The war would never have lasted until 1945 if the Nazi state hadn't been able to create fuel substitutes, because it had hardly any natural oil supplies.

[narrator] But just before IG Farben can go into full production, it suffers a major setback.

[Stokes] The first commercial synthetic fuel plant in the world opened in 1927, and that's exactly the time when huge discoveries were made in Texas and Oklahoma. What happens then because of the discovery of oil, because of the Depression, the price of oil collapsed, and therefore it was completely uneconomic for IG Farben to produce these synthetics.

[narrator] But when Hitler comes to power, he makes IG Farben an extraordinary offer. He guarantees to pay the full market price for every drop of synthetic fuel oil it can make. For the Nazis, these subsidies are worth it, if they make Germany self-sufficient. The country's shortage of oil will be supplied from its abundant reserves of coal. Twelve synthetic refineries are built. IG Farben chemists also develop another vital resource for German rearmament: an artificial rubber called Buna, also made from coal. It is needed for thousands of aircraft and truck tires, as well as millions of gas masks. It's also used in tank gun sights and watertight seals on U-boat hatches. German scientific skill is making Hitler's military build-up possible.

[Stokes] They're absolutely essential for his ability to actually take the war beyond German borders. It was essential to have synthetic fuel. It was essential to have synthetic rubber. It's using the one thing that Germany has in abundance, which is coal. And ingenuity, which it has in abundance in that particular industry.

[narrator] There's no shortage of scientific brilliance, but German industry does lack coordination and planning. The Nazi's favorite industrialists get the best contracts, but they often waste money on pet projects.

[Holland] The whole structure of the Nazi state is one of private enterprise, in-fighting, divide and rule policy. It does not encourage mass production. So it's a lack of mass production, over-engineering and a lack of focus on what was really required. It's important to realize that the economy of the Third Reich wasn't state controlled, like it was in the Soviet Union. In other words, private firms continued to own their own factories. The owners also ran their factories, and their goal was to increase profits. Naturally, that also meant their main motivation was not to produce as many weapons as possible, but, quite simply, "How can I maximize my profits?"

[Holland] For me, the absolutely classic example of misuse of resources is the humble gas mask case. It's so iconic. When you look at German troops whether it be in a Commando comic, a film or black-and-white photographs, what you see is that cylinder stuck on their backside. It's grooved. It's got a little hinge on it. It's got a gossamer wire and a little case for extra lenses in it. It's totally over-engineered. It's completely pointless. What's wrong with a canvas sack?

[narrator] It's not just steel that gets wasted like this. Water canteens, issued to millions of German soldiers, are made from aluminum, even though it all has to be imported. And aluminum is desperately needed to make aircraft. When Hitler seizes power in 1933, Germany has no air force. The aircraft industry employs fewer than 4,000 workers who make fewer than 400 aircraft that year, all civilian. To have any chance in a future war, Germany needs to rebuild its air force, and fast. For this vital task, Hitler once again turns to his most senior minister, Hermann Göring. In April 1933, the former First World War fighter ace is put in charge of the new Air Ministry. He oversees massive state investment, turning the aircraft industry into the most important sector of German rearmament. But almost everything has to be created from the ground up. New housing has to be built for the workforce, which grows dramatically to 60,000 in just two years. But for German bosses, all this effort is offset by the prospect of huge profits.

[Evans] The way the economy worked in Nazi Germany was: It was a capitalist economy with free enterprise, as it were. It wasn't like Soviet Russia where everything's nationalized. But it was directed and controlled, increasingly so, by the Nazi government for political reasons and then pushing military production. The German aircraft industry, of course, was highly developed. But the problem was, it wasn't centralized. It dissipated its energies across all kinds of different models, different parts. It was enormously complicated.

[Stokes] German industry in the 1930s is, in many ways, far behind the US in terms of mass production. The introduction of mass production is very limited, as we understand it. The automobile industry is mostly craft-based in Germany at that time. A whole range of different other industries are mostly craft-based. The arms industry is just the same. Compared with the United States, it was certainly still using outdated production methods. In the USA, Henry Ford-style assembly line production had been strongly developed by the 1920s. This kind of mass production was still rare in Germany. Partially, this was because, it was claimed, German industry was creating better-quality goods. But ultimately, productivity was being neglected. So although it can be said that the armaments industry in Germany had relatively high quality standards, it was not able

To produce weapons in large quantities. This was true in the 1930s and, to a large extent, also during the war.

[narrator] Despite these limitations, by 1936, some of Nazi Germany's most iconic aircraft have been designed and built. The Bf 109 fighter. The fast, twin-engined Heinkel 111 bomber. And the fearsome Stuka dive bomber. With these modern aircraft, the Luftwaffe can make up for the army's shortage of tanks and heavy artillery.

[Holland] The Luftwaffe is a tactical air force, i.e. in support of the ground troops. That's what it's organically risen up to do, and that's because it's all about the ground forces.

[Lieb] The Luftwaffe provided a shield for the ground forces, so that the armored forces and the infantry could maneuver freely. It was also used as a fist. So like a flying artillery, the Luftwaffe could support ground troops at crucial points and bring the decision.

[Evans] German airplanes were good, but there weren't enough of them, and there were too many different types, and therefore, it was difficult to replace them.

[narrator] To boost aircraft production, Göring entrusts one of the most important jobs in the Luftwaffe not to an expert, but to an old friend and fellow veteran, Ernst Udet.

[Holland] In those early years, the chief of procurement is a chap called Ernst Udet, who is a wonderful fellow, a brilliant barnstormer and a fantastic First World War fighter ace. And by all accounts, a jolly good bloke and a great cartoonist, but is all at sea in the Machiavellian world of Nazi politics. He's just completely out of his depth, and that leads to yet more inefficiency.

[narrator] Udet is convinced that dive bombers are what the Luftwaffe needs more than any other aircraft. He personally intervenes to ensure that the Stuka goes into production. But he fails to realize that aircraft technology is changing rapidly. On August 27th, 1939, aviation history is made when the world's first jet aircraft, the Heinkel 178, takes off. Udet gets to see this revolutionary plane for himself at a later demonstration arranged for senior Luftwaffe officials. But he is not impressed. He rejects it in favor of more conventional aircraft. If the Nazis had produced a jet fighter early in the war, it could have given them an unassailable lead in this new technology. It's a vital opportunity missed.

Germany struggles to make enough of any kind of aircraft because of its chronic shortage of crucial metals, such as aluminum. Other examples include copper, nickel and other vital metals. The country was dependent on imports. Within Germany itself, there were very few deposits. For example, the country's copper deposits were very, very poor. From an economic point of view, it was not a good idea to exploit them. But they did it anyway, to enable at least some local copper production. But this required more and more labor, and was relatively unproductive.

[narrator] But Hitler gets an extraordinary stroke of luck when the Spanish Civil War breaks out in 1936. Hitler joins in enthusiastically, claiming he just wants to help General Franco, a fellow fascist, protect Europe against communism.

[Lieb] Between 1936 and 1939, the Germans deployed the Legion Condor to the Spanish Civil War. There they gained experience in modern warfare, particularly with regards to close air support and to armored warfare. And the German Army was quick to disseminate this experience, so it became more or less common knowledge within the German armed forces.

[narrator] However, Hitler is not crushing Franco's enemies for free. Germany is paid with huge supplies of iron ore, copper and other vital metals. To use this windfall, in 1936, Hitler sends troops to reoccupy the Rhineland, home of much of Germany's steel production. It's a flagrant breach of the Versailles Treaty. But Hitler gets away with it. And the peaceful takeover of neighboring Austria in March 1938 literally adds a mountain of raw materials to the Reich, as well as millions more workers. The annexation of Austria was particularly important for the steel industry, as Austria had substantial deposits of high-grade iron ore. There was even an "Iron Mountain," so-called because it contained so much high-grade ore. As well as seizing this, they also took over all the steel production of Austria, which included a whole range of companies which produced and processed steel.

[narrator] Czechoslovakia is Hitler's next target. First, he absorbs the ethnic German region, the Sudetenland. Then he seizes the rest of the country by force in March 1939. The extra manpower is welcome, but that's not all he's after. The interesting thing about Czechoslovakia is that it's quite advanced militarily by the standards of the day, and particularly in the Sudetenland, the German-speaking part where there's a Skoda works already producing a vast number of tanks, and pretty good tanks. I mean, they have a reputation as being armaments manufacturers.

[narrator] Absorbing these countries doesn't just deliver new military hardware. Germany also loots their central banks for vital foreign currency.

[Bessel] The Germans faced in the mid-late 1930s considerable problems of insufficient foreign exchange, which they're able to solve by taking over the foreign exchange of Austria and then of Czechoslovakia. So that that's the way that the problems of limited resources get solved.

[narrator] This asset stripping goes a long way to easing Germany's chronic shortage of resources. But it's still not enough to create armed forces large enough for Hitler's dream of world domination.

[Bessel] The amount of resources that Germany had at its disposal: They were certainly able to provide a substantial amount of armament. Not to fight the entire world, but certainly, as it turned out, to conquer much of Europe. And also, at each stage when they succeed in taking over other territories, they're able to take over resources.

[narrator] Hitler has long argued that the land and resources of the Soviet Union are Germany's by right. But he's not yet ready to fight for them. Instead, Hitler astonishes the world by agreeing a peace pact with the Soviets. In secret, the two countries also agree to divide up Poland and the Baltic states when Germany invades. And the pact also gives Germany vital economic security.

[Stokes] The agreement with the Soviet Union is not just something that is short term in terms of allowing the conquest of Poland. It's also a way of guaranteeing supplies and not having a second front in a war of attrition that Germany doesn't think it can win.

[narrator] In return for technology advice, trainloads of oil, metals and enormous amounts of grain begin to flood into Germany from the Soviet Union. Hitler has now achieved as much as he can through diplomacy. And the German economy is reaching a critical point. It can't just keep on making weapons forever.

[Stokes] But there's no question that the economy ramps up very rapidly into the late '30s. But there are severe problems there. Everyone recognizes that would only be... It was only a preparation for going to war to get resources, somewhere else to feed that economy. So it was approaching its limits really, mainly in terms of raw materials.

[dramatic music plays]

[narrator] On September the 1st, 1939, Hitler launches the war he has long been planning. German troops smash through Polish border defenses. Bombers pound cities, roads and railways. In just 36 days, it's all over. Poland has been crushed. It's a stunning victory. But the parades and propaganda films conceal the truth about Germany's readiness for war.

[Kershaw] You could be forgiven for thinking that the Polish campaign, for example, was conducted purely by mechanized forces because most of the footage is of motorized tank units. But even so, the main bulk of the Germany Army was still foot-borne, and its artillery was horse-drawn. But you do not get a terrific amount of that on the newsreels.

[narrator] France and Britain support Poland and declare war on Germany. Flushed with victory, Hitler wants to attack the Allies immediately. But his generals say this is impossible. The armed forces were not fully equipped when war began in 1939, or during the rest of the war. So inevitably, the problem got worse.

[narrator] General Georg Thomas is head of the army's Economy and Armament office. In a detailed report, he makes it clear that the army is short of everything, from ammunition to fully-trained troops. It needs time to rebuild its strength after the losses in Poland before taking on France and Britain. Hitler reluctantly postpones the attack until the following year. But when the time comes, his first move is not against France, but Norway. He's keen to secure Germany's supplies of high-quality iron ore. The majority of good-quality iron ore came from Scandinavia, especially Sweden, in the 1920s and 1930s, and ultimately right up to 1944. However, the ore was often shipped through Norway. So Norway and Sweden had a special strategic importance for Germany.

[narrator] In winter, when Swedish ports are blocked by ice, iron ore has to travel by rail to the Norwegian port of Narvik before being shipped to Germany. To secure this economic lifeline, Hitler launches a surprise invasion in April 1940. Narvik is the scene of bitter land and sea battles before falling into German hands. They secure the rest of Norway in just two months.

[rousing music plays]

[narrator] The invasion of western Europe is just as rapid. German panzer divisions smash through the defenses of France and the Low Countries. The British Army is forced back to the coast and retreats across the Channel. In six weeks, France surrenders. It's a lightning victory. But, once again, the propaganda images of German mechanized might represent just a fraction of Hitler's armies.

[Holland] The truth of the matter is, the spearhead of the Blitzkrieg, particularly when you're looking at the fall of the West, France and the Low Countries in 1940: Only 16 of the 135 divisions they use are mechanized, of which only ten are panzer divisions. So that gives you an indication of just how under-mechanized they are.

[narrator] And much of this military equipment is not German-made, but looted during Hitler's earlier land grabs.

[Bessel] The invasion of France was successful not least because the Germans had access to a lot of military kit that they were able to take from Czechoslovakia, which they took over in 1939.

[narrator] Speed and brilliant tactics allow German forces to defeat its much more powerful opponents. This is the kind of war its armed forces are designed for. They can defeat their enemies before they can bring their much greater military resources onto the battlefield. But the first signs that Hitler's war machine is running out of steam appear in the skies over southern Britain. Aircraft production's always been its biggest problem. The Battle of Britain, for example, it's not a shortage of pilots, it's a shortage of planes that undoes them. You simply cannot have a situation where, at the absolute height of the battle, you've got some squadrons that simply don't have any flyable planes on a given day. It's absolutely ridiculous. And at the height of the Battle of Britain, in July, the best figures that the Germans are able to do is 50 percent of what the British are producing in terms of single-engine fighters. It's no wonder they lose.

[narrator] The Nazis now dominate Europe, although Britain remains undefeated. But Hitler isn't concerned. He knows how to get all the resources he needs. He plans to seize them from the Soviet Union.

[Stokes] Clearly the desire for more control of raw materials, oil as well as other things, is driving a lot of the military policy. Thus the decision eventually in 1941 to go to war against the Soviet Union.

[narrator] Everyone knows invading Russia is an enormous risk. But the generals who were so doubtful about Germany taking on Britain and France are now all in favor of continuing the war.

[Kershaw] Hitler's victory parade after the fall of France made a big impression on both them and German society. So maybe this man is unusual, maybe this man is different. And so with Barbarossa, they go in with the benefit of the doubt. Hitler had made it work so far, why shouldn't it happen again?

[narrator] But one military man disagrees. General Thomas prepares another report. It reveals that the army only has enough fuel for two months of campaigning, and that its artificial rubber tires will not survive Russia's harsh conditions. Göring refuses to pass the report on to Hitler. He tells Thomas that with all the loot they're taking from the West, they cannot fail.

[Stokes] Thomas is one of the few in the army that really is thinking in those terms, and is thinking very deeply about it, and thinking, as it turns out, correctly about what the limits were of the German economy and the relation to military capability.

[narrator] On June 22nd, 1941, Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union, begins. Three million German soldiers in three vast armies storm towards Leningrad, Moscow and Kiev. These cities, Hitler believes, are the key centers of communism. At first, the invasion is a stunning success. The German Army kills and captures hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers and seizes vast territories. The army believes the capital, Moscow, should be the main target. But after just two months, Hitler suddenly orders all efforts to be directed south to Kiev and the Ukraine. When his baffled generals complain, he tells them they know nothing of "the economic aspects of war." Hitler may have accused the generals of not understanding economics, but he didn't understand economics very well either. And basically what you're describing is not so much an economic view of the world or an understanding of the world, it's really the raw materials, the goods, the power that comes through that, both in terms of consumption and in terms of projection of power militarily that is what Hitler is after.

[dramatic music plays]

[narrator] Hitler wants to capture the huge coal fields around the city of Kharkov. The war is depleting Germany's previously plentiful supplies of coal. And it's the railways, the Reichsbahn, which are suffering.

[Holland] You have to remember that the glue that is holding the entire German war effort together in terms of mobility is not the air force or indeed panzers, it is the Reichsbahn. And the reason the Reichsbahn plays such a crucial role is because it doesn't use oil. Steam trains operate with coal, which is one resource that the Germans do have something of.

[narrator] The Ukrainian coalfields are captured. But Hitler's diversion has used up much vital oil. Other shortages reveal that the German military is not prepared for such a massive operation. The advance grinds to a halt, even before the winter snows arrive.

[Lieb] There's a long list of the reasons why Operation Barbarossa failed. For example, it was a lack of logistics, lack of resources, lack of reserves, stiff Soviet resistance, the constant shift of operational aims, be it Moscow, be it Kiev or be it St. Petersburg. But there was certainly one factor which did not play a role for the German failure: the onset of the winter. When the winter started in 1941, Operation Barbarossa had already failed.

[narrator] It's the Nazis' first serious setback. Over 180,000 German troops are killed. The Luftwaffe also suffers heavy losses, in both pilots and aircraft, which it's struggling to replace.

[Holland] The Luftwaffe is the symbol which epitomizes all that is successful and brilliant about the German armed forces.

[speaking German]

[Holland] And yet it is in terminal decline by the summer of 1941. It's been involved in every single campaign that the Germans have been fighting. It has been flying nonstop, it is massively over-stretched and no service suffers more from fighting on multiple fronts. They still haven't recovered their numbers from the Battle of Britain. It's no wonder they're on the back foot and simply cannot deliver what Hitler wants them to deliver.

[narrator] But their Soviet opponents are also suffering terrible casualties, and their economy is also massively damaged.

[Holland] The losses the Russians suffered in 1941 are absolutely enormous, and they're also busy moving their factories to the Urals and also regathering their strength. So the German war effort is pretty full-on, and there is no question that the German Army in the spring of 1942 is still an incredibly impressive one.

[narrator] Hitler decides to risk everything on another colossal offensive. This time, he aims for the Soviet oilfields of the Caucasus in a final attempt to grasp the resources he still desperately needs.

[Stokes] It was a very important objective, and it clearly was an indication that the synthetic industry is not able to supply everything that Germany needs.

[narrator] Germany's synthetic fuel plants have been at maximum capacity since the beginning of the war. But they can only supply a quarter of the country's total consumption. The Allies have far more oil than the Nazis.

[Holland] To put this in perspective, the most the Germans ever use in terms of fuel is five and a half million gallons in 1944. Now British domestic use alone is 22 million gallons in 1944. That's not including Britain's war effort usage. So that puts it in some kind of... Basically, Britain, domestically alone, is using four times more oil than Germany is for its entirety in one year.

[narrator] Capturing the extraordinarily productive oilfields around Baku in the southern Caucuses would make a huge difference to Germany. They supply 85 percent of the Soviet Union's oil. In great secrecy, tank divisions are sent south to provide the armored fist for the attack. Its codename is "Fall Blau," Case Blue. The operation begins on June 28th, 1942. Stalin is so convinced that the next German attack will be against Moscow, the Red Army is taken completely by surprise. The first few weeks of the offensive go well. One million German soldiers, 2,000 tanks and 1,600 aircraft advance, as Soviet forces fall back. But then Hitler makes a disastrous decision.

[Kershaw] There is no doubt that the move to the south to secure the oil supplies in the Caucasus was the correct move. But where it went wrong, of course, was that with the initial success of Operation Blau, the Soviets for the first time retreating rather than fighting to the death, Hitler thought that, as a consequence, his belief in the innate superiority of the German Army was triumphing over the Soviet Untermensch, and that therefore, he didn't have to wait until he'd captured Stalingrad before moving on to the Caucasus. He could do both at once.

[narrator] Hitler's plan starts to break down almost immediately. The Germans simply don't have enough fuel to keep their enormous forces moving. The Luftwaffe has to fly in supplies to stranded tank columns. On August 9th, 1942, German troops achieve a small success when they capture the oilfields at Maikop on the Black Sea. But the retreating Red Army has wrecked the wells. German engineers can only get 70 barrels of oil a day out of the devastated facilities. The advance on the rest of the oilfields grinds to a halt. By October, even Hitler accepts they are out of reach. The Nazis' final resource raid has failed. But it probably never could have succeeded.

[Holland] The operation in the Caucasus in the summer of 1942 is a fool's errand, because what are they going to do even if they do get to Baku and the oilfields of Azerbaijan? How are the Germans actually then going to transport that oil once they get it and refine it and all the rest of it? Well, the way oil moves around the world in 1942, and, in fact, still does to this day, largely is by ship. The Germans don't have any shipping, and even if they did, they wouldn't be able to move it through the Mediterranean, past Britain and all the way round to the Baltic and the North Sea to get to their ports. The only way that's going to move is by the railways, which are already completely overstretched and over capacity. So the idea that this is going to be their salvation is just never going to happen.

[narrator] The failure in the Caucasus is overshadowed by the disaster now unfolding at the other objective of Case Blue: Stalingrad. On November 19th, 1942, the Soviets launch an offensive to surround the German 6th Army inside the city. The trap is closed in just four days. Attempts to relieve the 6th Army fail. The demoralized and starving Germans make no attempt to break out. After a two-month siege, the last of the defenders surrender.

[Kershaw] I think after losing the 6th Army at Stalingrad, most rational Germans recognized the chances of winning the war outright were now ended. This was not going to happen.

[narrator] Many people believe that the German defeat at Stalingrad is what ended Hitler's dreams of world domination. But his failure to capture the oilfields south of the city was an even more serious blow. Yet even if he succeeded, Hitler's belief that Germany could loot its way to victory by seizing the resources it lacked was fatally flawed.

[Holland] They're like kids in a sweet shop who just clear it all out and ship it back to Germany. All the resources: fuel reserves and coal reserves of France, for example. And then it's used. Then it's spent, and then there's no more.

[narrator] The lure of more and more resources draws Hitler into invading ever greater territory, making more and more enemies. It's a recipe for eternal war. A war Germany cannot possibly win. But that's not how Hitler sees it.

[Holland] For Hitler, the world is a black-and-white place with no gray area whatsoever. It's the thousand-year Reich or it's Armageddon, and we're all in it together. And either the German people are man enough to be able to take on their enemies and win, or they're all going down, in which case, they deserve what they get. That is his world view. That's how he sees it. The Nazi view of war was that it was essential for the health of the race, of the German race, that they kept on fighting, that they never stopped. It was war without limit and war without end.

[narrator] Without enough critical resources, steel, rubber, aluminum, coal and especially oil, Germany's fate is sealed. Even though its factories continue to hum, they are building planes that will never fly and tanks that will never run, because there will never be enough fuel for their engines. Hitler's dream of world domination is over.

[narrator] Adolf Hitler is determined to change the way German people think and feel. And he is doing so by creating a new, Nazi form of art and culture.

[Randall Bytwerk] Culture was extraordinarily important to National Socialism. They wanted films, they wanted art, they wanted music that were consistent with Nazi ideology.

[narrator] Every artist must conform to Hitler's harsh and brutal vision.

[David Chipperfield] Hitler was obsessed with art and architecture to the point at which he burned books and delegitimized a whole artistic movement.

[Okwui Enwezor] Hitler was going to clean house, both in the domain of culture, as he had done in the domain of politics.

[narrator] He is taking total control of radio and film. The Nazis are using culture to spread their propaganda, to win power and prepare Germans for war.

[Nicholas O'Shaughnessy] It's actually wonderfully subtle as a form of mind manipulation.

[narrator] They are creating an artistic dictatorship with no room for dissent. By controlling the media, the Nazis are converting the German people into willing, active participants in their evil regime, including mass murder.

[Stephen Reicher] If you say, "My group represents the highest aspirations of humankind, and if anybody threatens my group, they threaten virtue," then I have a warrant for genocide.

[dramatic music plays]

[narrator] In 1913, Adolf Hitler is struggling to make a living. A self-taught artist, he sells his watercolors of Munich's sights to the tourists. But he wants much more. His burning ambition is to become a great artist.

[Richard Evans] Hitler grew up in provincial Austria, but he moved to Vienna and tried to get into the Academy of Arts. Though he could paint and draw buildings, he was never any good at people. And so he was turned down. And he was actually told, rather kindly, I think, by the examiners that he should be an architect. He didn't listen. He tried again, was rejected again, and his ambition to become an artist was not fulfilled.

[narrator] Hitler never forgets this painful rejection. His revenge is to transform German art, making his own image its most potent icon. Germany in the 1920s is in the middle of an artistic revolution. Defeat in the First World War causes political turmoil and a national identity crisis. The Nazis exploit the instability created by this growing cultural conflict. On one side are conservatives, clinging to a precious German past they fear is under threat. Opposing them are Modernists, open to experimental art, embracing foreign ideas and intoxicated by the new.

[Chipperfield] Modernism was to some degree a revolution. The whole concept was to somehow reject history.

[narrator] A wave of Modernism shakes up every form of art, challenging traditional beliefs and attitudes.

[Chipperfield] There was a sense of revolution in the 20s. And that was expressed by artists, by poets and inevitably, of course, by architects, because there was a belief that there should be a new architecture for a new society.

[rousing marching tune plays]

[narrator] The German people are used to very traditional architecture.

[O'Shaughnessy] There is a huge amount of pastiche medievalism. The fondness for pitched roofs is a straight harking back to the German past.

[narrator] But in 1927, the Modernist revolution strikes Stuttgart. The city's housing problem demands a bold solution. So the authorities commission young, avant-garde architects from across Europe to design 33 new buildings. The result is a radical flagship for Modernist architecture: The Weissenhof Estate.

[Karin Kirsch] It was the first exhibition of construction and architecture which was intended for long-term residential use. Usually, these show homes would have been knocked down.

[Anja Krämer] The architecture of the Weissenhof Estate was very new aesthetically, very colorful, with flat roofs. The flat roof was completely new for the Stuttgart area. Another striking element was the large windows. The designers were using new, mass-produced, prefabricated elements to make the buildings cheaper for the masses.

[narrator] These Modernist architects have a social conscience. They create cheaper housing, which they feel is also liberating. Homes for people to live in radical new ways.

[Krämer] What's being expressed here is a reform movement. People wanted to live in more open, freer ways, no longer bound by tradition. It was about being more open, rethinking everything. The large windows were part of it, allowing in a lot of sunlight, all the way inside, to reflect a new attitude to life.

[narrator] The Weissenhof's left-wing, international vision of living attracts visitors from around the globe. And they can buy postcards of the buildings.

[Kirsch] I've brought along my postcards, which I've been collecting for years. Each one has its own story.

[narrator] For many, the Weissenhof's design is too radical, too challenging. Satirical postcards even depict the estate as if it has been lifted out of the Arabian Nights. German visitors write home about their discomfort and confusion.

[Kirsch] "This afternoon, I walked around the exhibition. I can't critique it, because I don't seem to get it. The picture doesn't show military barracks, but houses of the future."

[narrator] For traditionalists, the Weissenhof Estate is a threat, not just artistically, but politically. One critic even calls its flat roofs a "Jewish-Bolshevik design." Cultural turmoil grows in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The Weissenhof's architects, led by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, along with artists such as Picasso and expressionist filmmaker Fritz Lang, are criticized, abused and even blacklisted. Their radical art and architecture is making many Germans uncomfortable and even afraid. Hitler and the Nazi party exploit these fears of the radical and foreign. They present themselves as the champions of a brave, new and pure German culture. They also use the arts and media to spread their propaganda.

[Bytwerk] Culture was extraordinarily important to National Socialism. Because they claimed to be a worldview that encompassed everything. They wanted films, they wanted art, they wanted music that were consistent with Nazi ideology.

[narrator] Hitler's views about culture owe a lot to Alfred Rosenberg, an uncompromising traditionalist who had joined the Nazi party before him. Rosenberg hates Jews and communists, partly due to his own experiences.

[Evans] Alfred Rosenberg was a Baltic German. He of course had to flee with the Bolshevik Revolution and Lenin's takeover. This made Rosenberg a bitter enemy of the Russian Bolsheviks and of communists. It was really Rosenberg who introduced to Hitler the idea that communism was controlled by the Jews, that it was a means by which there was a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world.

[narrator] As an author and editor, Rosenberg writes passionately about Aryan superiority. He spreads conspiracy theories, blaming influential Jews for "poisoning" and undermining German culture. This, he argues, is the Nazis' most important battleground. In 1929, he creates an organization that takes this battle onto the streets and into art galleries and concert halls, confronting the Nazis' artistic enemies.

[Evans] The Fighting League for German Culture would go around and attack modern works, demand for exhibitions to be closed, pour scorn on Modernist paintings and art and so on. And that had some resonance with Hitler.

[narrator] Rosenberg is successful. His hatred of communists, Jews and non-Aryans profoundly shapes Nazi ideology. Later, it helps define the Nazis' racist vision of architecture, art and culture. The Nazis viewed everything through a racial prism. Jazz music was hated, because it was regarded as black. Abstract art was hated, because it was regarded as Jewish. The argument, you see, for a Nazi is that the Jews are trying to sabotage German culture. So it was this idea of an existential threat to Germandom. But it was primarily cultural. "They're going to destroy our culture by subverting it." That was the reason.

[narrator] In reality, Jewish artists, musicians and writers are fully integrated into German society and have been for generations. But with society disenchanted and bitter after the First World War, the Nazis play on centuries-old anti-Semitic fears to portray Jews as the enemy within. Nazi propaganda says Jews are polluting the people and are a threat to the nation's racial and cultural purity. A threat that must be eradicated.

[Reicher] If you say, "My group is the sum of all good in the world, my group represents the highest aspirations of humankind, so my group's interest is the universal interest, and if anybody threatens my group, they threaten virtue," then I have a warrant for genocide. By destroying them, I'm protecting virtue. And I think that's absolutely central to the Nazi ideology.

[narrator] But first the Nazis have to take power. In 1933, they do just that when Hitler is appointed chancellor of Germany. This key victory allows him to make bold changes to Germany's government, gaining total power over the next few months.

[narrator] One of Hitler's earliest changes is to create the Ministry of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda. Hitler knows exactly who he wants to lead it to win the nation's hearts and minds for Nazism, and it isn't Rosenberg. Instead, he chooses the much more practical and effective Joseph Goebbels.

[Evans] Joseph Goebbels came from a Catholic background in the Rhineland. He fancied himself as an intellectual, and he was regarded as a Nazi radical. He certainly liked the socialism in national socialism more than some other Nazis did. I think Hitler realized his ambition, his ruthlessness, his talent for propaganda.

[speaking German]

[cheering]

[narrator] Goebbels had proved himself to Hitler serving as Nazi leader in Berlin with his violent, provocative tactics and bold propaganda. Now his mission is to carry out the same role for the whole of Germany.

[Evans] Goebbels was clearly a very gifted propagandist. He had a way of drumming up issues, of putting things on the front page, of creating sensations. He was a great media manipulator, and Hitler recognized this.

[narrator] To clear the way for the Nazi's new cultural regime, Goebbels takes part in an intellectual purge. In May 1933, in 19 university towns across the country, Nazi supporters organize mass book burnings. It's called "The Action Against the un-German Spirit." Books on philosophy, history, politics, even novels, are hurled into the flames, as well as anything written by or about Jews.

[Goebbels] The era of an exaggerated Jewish intellectualism is now at an end. And the future German man will not only be a man of the book, but also a man of character. And to this end we want to educate you.

[O'Shaughnessy] That was a frightening symbol for all of the world. It was a crematorium of learning and scholarship, which actually anticipated another kind of crematorium years later.

[narrator] The book burnings are intended to halt Modernism and cleanse German society of anything that doesn't fit into Hitler's worldview.

[singing a patriotic tune]

[narrator] The Nazis are closing down the artistic and cultural experiments of the 1920s.

[Meike Hoffmann] Educational institutions were immediately brought into line in 1933. The Bauhaus, for instance, but also art academies. At the same time, professors who were known for supporting the avant-garde movement, and teaching it, were immediately fired.

[Evans] Jews, for example, are fired from their civil service positions. And what's important to realize is that civil servant, or Beamter in German, doesn't mean just people sitting in Berlin running the ministries. It covers universities, it covers a lot of legal officials, it covers teachers, it covers a huge area of German life.

[speaking German]

[narrator] Hitler's government passes law after law, dismantling personal freedom piece by piece. The Nazis also use boycotts and bans against Jews and communists. The threat of the concentration camp enables them to take control of German society.

[Evans] There were a lot of independent companies working: film companies, publishing houses and many others whose employees were not state employees, and again, it took a bit longer for it to happen there. But it happened there in the end, too. So this is a massive purge, first of all of Jews, and then secondly of political oppositional figures.

[narrator] Journalists are muzzled, dissenters silenced. The Nazis fill the vacuum with their own news and images.

[Evans] One of the things the Nazis want to do is to bring culture to the masses. Their kind of culture, obviously; their image of culture. But still, to bring it to the masses.

[narrator] The Nazis are keen to use television for their propaganda. But, in the 1930s, the technology is quite primitive, and few people own expensive TV sets. So, to get their message into as many German households as quickly and cheaply as possible, the Nazis focus on radio. In 1933, Goebbels takes over the House of Broadcasting, the world's first dedicated broadcasting center and the home of Germany's public radio network. The Nazis now control the airwaves. But only a quarter of German households have a radio set. So Goebbels insists that a cheap radio must be designed and produced at once.

[Evans] Electricity was getting much cheaper, because more power stations were coming online, and the price was going down, as with all new mass technologies. And so you can get a "People's Receiver," the Volksempfänger.

[O'Shaughnessy] The Party radio was sold at budget discount. And they produced one within nine months of getting to power, and an even more bargain one half its size a few years later. Suddenly, every family has a smart radio. You had radios in public places, in squares. You also had factory radios, you had radios in banks, you had radios in shops, you had radios in restaurants.

[narrator] But to keep out unwelcome ideas, these radios have a crucial limitation. These new sets were fixed, so that you couldn't hear foreign broadcasts without great difficulty.

[narrator] The new radio's official name is the "People's Receiver." But it is soon nicknamed "Goebbels's gob."

[O'Shaughnessy] Goebbels literally owned radio. He actually has a switch in his office, actually showcased in the media. "Look, our great Goebbels only has a switch in his office, so he can cut out any program and address you directly." It's an extraordinary symbol of one's power over the message of meaning, one kind of media dictator of the country.

[narrator] Transmitting from the House of Broadcasting, thousands of radio employees cover every political event. At their peak, Hitler's speeches can be heard by 90 percent of Germans.

[Evans] When Hitler gave a speech, it was broadcast on all the radios. You had to stop work and gather round the radio wherever you worked.

[broadcast in German plays over the radio]

[narrator] But Goebbels knows that a diet of pure propaganda is the best way to make people switch off. He believes it's best to give the people a lot of what they really want alongside Party messages to make them more palatable.

[O'Shaughnessy] It was not, emphatically not, screaming ranting speeches from Party officials.

[woman singing "In einer Nacht im Mai"]

[Evans] A very high proportion of broadcasts on these radios were of entertainment programs. If game shows had existed in the time of Nazi Germany, Goebbels would've loved them. Any sort of non-political thing that people enjoyed.

[woman singing "In einer Nacht im Mai"]

[narrator] With radio totally in his power, Goebbels now targets the artists directly. Writers, musicians, architects and artists are all forced to sign up with a new government agency: the Reich Chamber of Culture. At first, joining is easy. The admission criteria were set very low, so that the entire art community could easily be absorbed into the Reich Culture Chamber, as this was the only sure way for Goebbels to control everybody. So everyone who painted in a modern style was accepted, even Jewish artists.

[Evans] The Reich Chamber of Culture had a lot of subdivisions: the Reich Chamber of Music and the Reich Chamber of Arts and Literature. And all the rest of it. Film and so on. And this was a compulsory state organization. They also included art dealers, art gallery directors, all the rest of it. And so in this way, right across the board, Goebbels got control of the entire cultural apparatus of Nazi Germany and everybody who worked in it.

[narrator] Now Goebbels knows the name of everyone in the German art world. Modernist artists like Ernst Kirchner, Otto Dix and Ludwig Gies. German Jewish composers like Arnold Schoenberg. They are all on his register. With this information, Goebbels can wield enormous power over the cultural community. But not yet. We cannot imagine the resurgence of the German people without the resurgence of German culture, and above all, German art. Today, we are performing a symbolic act.

[narrator] October 15th, 1933. Adolf Hitler lays the foundation stone for a new institution that will drive the Nazis' cultural transformation of Germany: an art gallery in Munich called "The House of German Art." Hitler wants this building to be a temple to the new Nazi vision of art. So its design has to reflect this.

[Enwezor] There was an enormous interest in the plans of the building to create a ceremonial space, a space that has a certain kind of aura, that has a certain kind of spatial power.

[narrator] Hitler designs The House of German Art with one of his favorite architects, Paul Troost. Classical styling is combined with modern engineering. The result is a totally new building, absolutely in line with Nazi ideology, reflecting their imagined historical origins. They like the word "Eternal Germany." The idea that the roots of Germany went back to the distant past, even going back to the Romans and the Greeks. So it was essential that culture be incorporated into the Nazi worldview in ways that suggested Nazism was not a recent development. It was really an ancient tradition come to new expression.

[Chipperfield] It feels pompous and monumental. Bombastic. It's to do with the expression of power and to do with the humiliation of the individual in a way. So it's all about belittling people and impressing you. What's sinister about the architecture of that period and what Hitler wanted to do with it is not the architecture itself, it's the fact that it represents an attitude towards the individual and authority.

[narrator] Hitler's gallery will take four years to build. He wants Germany to be racially and culturally pure by the time his temple to Nazi art opens. In 1935, new anti-Semitic legislation, known as the Nuremberg Laws, is announced. These don't just restrict the political and human rights of Germany's Jews even further. They are the start of a plan to drive Jews out of German cultural life. The moment has come for Goebbels to wield his new powers. Many artists, composers, writers and filmmakers have their membership of the Reich Culture Chamber suddenly cancelled.

[speaking German]

[Hoffmann] And now, after 1935, every individual member had to re-register with the Reich Culture Chamber. They had to submit an Aryan certificate, or proof of ethnic identity. And this is when they began to systematically exclude Jewish artists, as well as those artists who still worked in a modern style.

[narrator] Approved artists are given licenses to continue working under a new registration system.

[Erica Carter] You can't have a license unless you can prove that you have "Aryan heritage," so-called. That's a very effective, brutal but effective mechanism for excluding Jews from the industry.

[narrator] As Goebbels's grip on Germany's artists tightens, Modernist paintings disappear from the walls of art galleries. Museum directors who dare to support Expressionist art are sacked. Artists who can go abroad, flee. Goebbels also wants to control and purify Germany's most popular cultural activity, the cinema.

[Carter] He knows that this is the medium that's going to change hearts and minds. He spots this as a means of ideological manipulation, or ideological control.

[narrator] Universe Film Corporation, UFA, is the largest German film production company. Their studios at Babelsberg are still in use today. Here, Goebbels shows UFA executives that he is now effectively their boss. He lectures them about his vision of German film rising to new artistic heights, suffused with the Nazi spirit. He talks about the need to create a new film art. A film art that will rival Hollywood, but a film art that will be very specifically German. So no Jews, a lot of more-or-less-subtle anti-Semitism, but also a general repudiation of anything that looks culturally different.

[narrator] The Nazis introduce censorship as early as 1934. But this isn't enough for Goebbels. He wants influence at the very heart of the film industry while maintaining the appearance of artistic freedom. So Goebbels encourages UFA to set up an artistic committee. Officially, its purpose is to boost German cinema into a world-leading art form. But unofficially, it acts as a proxy for Goebbels's own ideas.

[Carter] It is fascinating, reading the minutes of that committee, because what you see in microcosm is fascism and a totalitarian regime at work. Because you see people whose careers are on the line. They want to make money, they want the studios to be successful and they also want themselves to be promoted. They quote Goebbels extensively. And it's by no means without conflict. There is real debate that goes on. Of course, always against the background of a regime that rules by terror.

[narrator] Goebbels is determined to find the right filmmaking formula to engage cinema audiences while educating them in the Nazi way of thinking. He realizes that he needs to understand how people respond to films.

[O'Shaughnessy] The Nazis had their own forms of market research. Specifically with films, there was ticket sales, but the other was to have observers in the audience. And they could tell if a German film was being hissed, which they sometimes were.

[Carter] From the mid-1930s, the secret police are everywhere. They're going into public places, listening and reporting back on the state of public opinion. Goebbels refers to them very often in his diaries, and they do tell a fascinating story of what's going on in the cinemas.

[O'Shaughnessy] Goebbels came rapidly to the conclusion that the key art of propaganda was to embed it in entertainment. And that is the insight, the genuinely original insight, which he has. It's the propaganda of disguise.

[jazzy music plays]

[narrator] Under Goebbels's control, German cinema is effectively nationalized. But it also flourishes. More films, with better quality and popular themes, draw bigger audiences and even win international acclaim.

[Carter] There are exotic adventures, there are musical comedies, there are comedies, there are melodramas. They target different audiences, and they capture people in different ways. It seems to me that that is really what certainly the early years of National Socialism are about. They're about laying the ground for the increasing reign of terror of the National Socialists. They're about creating consent amongst a population that is learning to live with national socialism, and that doesn't need to see images of terror. What it needs to see is that something new and good is happening.

[narrator] So cinemagoers in Nazi Germany and abroad see a highly edited version of reality.

[O'Shaughnessy] They wanted to project the feeling, the sense, the look of a modern Western country. It shouldn't look like a totalitarian dictatorship. It shouldn't feel like that to the people who lived there. It's actually wonderfully subtle as a form of mind manipulation.

[narrator] Spring, 1937. Hitler's House of German Art is nearly complete. The moment has come to define the new Nazi vision of art. But this is no easy task.

[Evans] There had been constant arguments about what was German art. Massive arguments about "should we show Expressionist art?" or "should we show more traditional 19th century German art?"

[narrator] The Nazi Party is split into two factions. Back-to-basics traditionalists like Rosenberg want conventional, figurative art: heroic people and striking landscapes. Progressives like Goebbels prefer the bold, abstract images of the Expressionists. Each side is desperate to win Hitler's personal endorsement. Even within the Nazi Party, there were many who defended Expressionism. Both Expressionism and Expressionist artists were regarded and defended by them as being essentially German art.

[narrator] But it is widely known that personally, the Führer is no fan of Expressionism.

[Evans] Hitler tried to be an artist and failed with his painstakingly pedantic representations of buildings and scenes. Expressionist paintings: colorful, vivid, alive, but not particularly representational. And Hitler thought, "Why are these people succeeding with this rubbish, when I failed?"

[narrator] Hitler appoints a jury to chose works for the first "Great German Art Exhibition." They present 800 works for his approval. But they are not to the Führer's taste. When Adolf Hitler came to look at the first selection in the spring of 1937, he flew into a rage and tore painting after painting off the walls, because they were still much too modern by his standards.

[narrator] It seems only one man can decide what is allowed inside the Führer's House of German Art: Hitler himself. He fires the jury and makes a new selection, just in time for the opening in July 1937.

[Enwezor] The first "Great German Art Exhibition" was not only to launch the building, this "temple of German art," as Hitler called it, but also to put a stamp on the kind of iconography of the Nazis' imagination of the Reich. The purpose was really to inscribe Hitler's personal vision of art.

[Hoffmann] The final selection of artworks was in line with the officially approved artistic ideal. This means themes of war, glorification of man as a warrior, glorification of woman as a mother and nurturer of the German nation.

[Enwezor] The curatorial conception of Hitler during this period would have been not

necessarily about the quality of the art, about the formal aspects of it, but more on the imagery. It was just simply pure propaganda.

Hitler fills 40 rooms with nearly 900 landscapes, portraits and sculptures. The Nazi vision of art is now clear. The House of German Art is packed with strong, simple, representational and naturalistic artworks, with the occasional classical pastiche. Adolf Wissel's paintings of idealized farming life hang next to Adolf Ziegler's neoclassical nudes. Weakness, disease and doubt are all banished. A superficial beauty dominates. Hitler's favorite sculptor, Arno Breker, creates muscle-bound male nudes, Aryan supermen in stone. "National Socialist Germany wants art that is once again German art. And it will be an art that lasts forever, as all of the creative values of the nation will last forever."

Hitler's intent was to introduce a new imagery, a new iconography that elevated the people, that brought the vision of this wholesome society more clearly to the public. His statement of intent obviously had a sinister dimension, which was the destruction of the progressive forces that were preaching a completely new vision of what modern art ought to be. Hitler was going to clean house in the domain of culture, as he had done in the domain of politics.

For four years, a civil war has raged for the artistic soul of Germany. But when the public first step inside the House of German Art, it becomes clear that the supporters of Modernism, including Joseph Goebbels, have just lost.

Consequently, after those four years had passed, in 1937, the definitive, destructive blow against modern art was executed. And at this point, Joseph Goebbels started playing the part of an opponent of Modernism, taking over leadership of the campaign of defamation.

Goebbels soon swallows his personal enthusiasm for Modernism. Now, he enthusiastically names and shames the art that offends the newly-defined Nazi sensibility.

By special order of the Führer, a commission was sent throughout Germany's museums to confiscate offending works of art. Within a very short period of time, almost 700 artworks were seized and taken to Munich.

Works by Picasso, Cézanne, Van Gogh and Gauguin are confiscated and displayed in an "Exhibition of Degenerate Art" in Munich, alongside German expressionists such as George Grosz, Ernst Kirchner, Otto Dix and Ludwig Gies. It opens in the Archaeological Institute the day after the start of Hitler's exhibition in the House of German Art just across the road.

Goebbels speaks at the opening, condemning the featured art. His cynical transformation from Expressionist lover to bitter opponent of Modernism does not go unnoticed. His rival, the arch-traditionalist Alfred Rosenberg happily crows about Dr. Goebbels's dissembling in his diary. "And now Dr. G. was forced to speak against the 'incompetents' in Munich, when it was his representatives that had been defending them for four years. He behaved, as usual, as if he had been the true leader in the fight against artistic degeneration all along."

The Nazis present the "degenerate" art as badly as possible.

Hardly any light was allowed into these rooms. So it was basically impossible for these artworks to come across well. They were literally shown in a bad light. This criticism was increased even more by painting derogatory slogans on the walls, to shape the visitor's opinion of the art.

Over 3,000 people a day visit Hitler's bland exhibition at his House of German Art. But the "Exhibition of Degenerate Art" attracts 20,000 visitors a day. They come to be scandalized and outraged.

Busloads of Nazis were taken in from the countryside who'd never been to an art exhibition before. They were there standing, jeering at it and making faces, which is, of course, part of the exhibition in a way.

The exhibition tours Germany's major cities and is seen by a million people. The aim is to explain to the nation what makes "degenerate art" unacceptable. Anything depicted that deviated from its life model was viewed as degenerate, and the same applied to unrealistic color schemes. Any work of art by a Jewish artist was considered degenerate. This is how they tried to define more clearly what they were against.

Since Hitler has now decided which art is acceptable, there is no longer any need for art criticism. So Goebbels bans it. Reviewers are instructed to focus only on whether an artwork conforms or not. Artists themselves are given no choice: either conform or stop producing art. It was bigger than just a ban on certain artists. You couldn't even make modern art for your own delectation in the privacy of your own home. You weren't allowed to paint abstraction, period. Which is as totalitarian as they come.

Many artists simply went into inner exile. They tried to avoid attention, not to provoke, and shut themselves away. And then, of course, there were those artists who emigrated. Jewish artists had to emigrate. And there were also many politically persecuted artists.

At a stroke, "degenerate" art has been demonized, critics made redundant and German art largely purified of its "unwanted" elements. The opening of Hitler's House of German Art in 1937 also establishes a new annual event: The Day of German Art. It features grand parades and exhibitions of new Nazi-approved artworks, all glorifying Nordic myths and military strength. The aim is to make sure the German people know that Hitler and the Nazis are the true guardians of German culture.

The point was that the arts are critical to civilization and a critical way of distinguishing Nazi Germany from other countries, specifically America, which they regarded as the anti-culture. Therefore, they wanted to show how cultural they were. It was a source of power and distinction and as a way of branding the regime. It was all part of the cultural obsession, which is made central to Nazism as a brand, as an ideology.

1939. The war in Europe has begun. As the German Army seizes ever more territory, Alfred Rosenberg realizes it's a huge opportunity.

The Nazis began to collect artworks from the countries that they'd conquered. The Gestapo just went into an art collector's and took stuff off the walls.

Rosenberg heads a task force to steal cultural treasures from private, mainly Jewish collectors from across Europe and bring them back to Germany.

So Alfred Rosenberg headed west in 1940, straight after the occupation of the western territories. This is where he set up the Taskforce Reich Leader Rosenberg, which grew into the biggest ever art theft outfit.

Publicly, this mass theft is portrayed as artistic research or a noble campaign to save vulnerable artworks. But in his diaries, Rosenberg reveals his true motivation. "In Paris, on the morning of the 28th, I inspected the Jewish artifacts and artworks confiscated by my operational staff in France. Rothschild, Weil, Seligmann, etc. had had to give up the fruit of 100 years' worth of stock market profiteering: Rembrandt, Rubens, Vermeer, Boucher, Fragonard, Goya, etc., etc. were all represented in great number. Ancient carvings, tapestries, etc. The appraisers estimate the value to be nearly one billion marks."

Rosenberg's men steal 30,000 art objects from Jewish homes and collections in France and Belgium. As the war rages on, the Nazis take full control of the film industry, radio, the press, music and the theater. But by 1943, the war is going badly for Germany. Josef Goebbels is struggling to maintain morale at home.

During the last phases of the war, the propaganda expenditures kept steadily declining. Several reasons for that. First, the Nazis simply didn't have the resources. They'd sent a lot of their propagandists to the front lines. In fact, Nazi publications for propagandists regularly had the obituaries of former speakers, former propagandists who died here or there on the war fronts.

But Goebbels knows the show must go on. He orders UFA, Germany's biggest film studio, to keep making movies, even after some of their studios are destroyed in bombing raids. Escapism is what the people need.

The cinema comes up as a place of refuge. It was not only a place of safety, but it was also a place where you could lose yourself, where you could actually go somewhere else for a couple of hours. So what's wanted is a big, prestige color spectacle. So, in 1943, you have a film like Münchhausen. It's a big fantasy spectacular. It's a color film. It's a funny film. It doesn't appear to have anything to do with fascist ideology. One can argue about that, but it's a fantasy adventure.

Back in reality, the Nazi's own adventure is running out of time. Bombing raids are becoming ever more frequent. Goebbels orders cinemas to open as soon as possible after raids. To protect the film industry, Goebbels and Hitler draw up a list of cinema talent, so-called "God-gifted artists," who are exempt from frontline duty. They wanted to preserve the very best artists they had. These were all artists that could be depended upon to be productive in ways consistent with Nazi ideology.

But, by the winter of 1944, even God-gifted artists could no longer be spared by the military. Goebbels's stars of the silver screen were now a luxury the Nazis could not afford. The end comes swiftly. In April 1945, the Soviet Army enters Berlin. Film production at UFA's Babelsberg studios finally comes to a halt. The Soviets also capture the House of Broadcasting, just a week after it had announced Hitler's suicide. Many of Germany's other buildings were destroyed during the war. But examples of Nazi architecture can still be seen today. Some remain in use, with their sinister origins looming over them. Ironically, the Weissenhof Estate in Stuttgart survived the war. This Modernist icon resisted both Allied bombing and a Nazi plan to destroy it.

They actually wanted to build an army headquarters on this site. But then, the headquarters was transferred to Strasbourg, and the war, thank God, went differently to what they had expected. So the demolition never took place. Therefore, it is pure coincidence, or rather fate, that it survived. But the Nazis had always regarded it as the disgrace of Stuttgart.

Now, the Weissenhof estate is the pride of Stuttgart, housing a museum celebrating Modernist architecture. Hitler's House of German Art also survives. It's an art gallery once more, with a special weight of history resting on its columns.

Insofar as the building being guilty, I've oftentimes said that buildings have no subjectivity. You can't put them on trial. While, you know, it is important to think about the building and its legacy, it nevertheless remains an inanimate thing. It's architecture.

No longer limited to German art, the building is now just the House of Art. Hitler's art collection has long been replaced with the kind of challenging, international works that the Nazis tried to eliminate. The building's portico displays the artwork: "The Joys of Yiddish."

We have to continue to, in a sense, de-Nazify the building through acts of disobedience against the strictures placed on the building in terms of the art that it formerly hosted. That's part of our reflection on the legacy and the history of the building and its place in Munich and Germany.

In the end, the Nazi's cultural war came to nothing. The artworks Hitler selected to represent his new Nazi vision of art are now derided as unsophisticated kitsch and remain hidden away. Alfred Rosenberg's ideas have been discredited. His vast stash of looted art was confiscated. Efforts continue to restore them to their rightful owners or their descendants. But many artworks stolen by the Nazis are missing, either destroyed, hidden in private collections or lost within museums. And as for Josef Goebbels, perhaps his winning formula of mixing propaganda with entertainment remains the Nazis' most potent and sinister legacy.

May, 1945. Germany is in ruins. The Nazis have been defeated. German soldiers are surrendering to the British Army to avoid capture by vengeful Russians. But the British know that Nazi criminals are hiding among them. They notice a short, middle-aged man wearing an eye patch behaving suspiciously. His identity papers say he is Sergeant Heinrich Hitzinger. When they confront him, he makes an extraordinary revelation. He takes off his eye patch, replaces it with spectacles and announces his real name: Heinrich Himmler.

For the people who captured Himmler, he's almost as big as Hitler himself. He's one of the most famous/infamous Nazis of them all.

Himmler was totally committed to Hitler's plans for world domination. Himmler was someone Hitler always trusted. He knew that Himmler would always be loyal to him.

He commanded the most evil organization in history: the SS. It sent millions of people to their deaths.

This is the man who has been in charge of the network of terror, the tentacles of terror.

Starting as Hitler's bodyguard, Himmler grew the SS into a vast organization, a model for a future Nazi state. And he would stop at nothing to create it. The SS was the central pillar of the Nazi regime in the Third Reich. It was the most violent organization. They carried out the mass crimes. They planned the mass crimes. Without the SS, the Holocaust couldn't have been carried out.

1923. Munich, in southern Germany. Armed right-wing nationalists are making a dramatic attempt to seize power, led by Adolf Hitler. One of them is Heinrich Himmler. He's carrying the Nazi flag at the head of Hitler's troops. This is the Beer Hall Putsch, the Nazis' first attempt to overthrow democracy. For Himmler, who fantasizes about being a great military leader, it's the most exciting moment of his life.

Himmler starts out as a minor figure in the Third Reich. He actually is from a very conservative, comfortable Bavarian family. So for Himmler to be taking part in a street, kind-of paramilitary putsch in 1923 is a real quantum shift from anything he's done previously in his career. He missed out on being involved in the First World War, because he was still in training. This is a real moment. He announces himself in the public sphere and starts to live up to some of these masculine fantasies of being a soldier.

But the Nazis are stopped right here in front of an old war memorial by the police. Bullets fly. Sixteen of Hitler's men are killed. Himmler is no hero. He flees, dropping the flag on the ground, where it's soaked in the blood of the Nazi dead. By chance, Himmler is linked to the Nazi Party's most sacred icon: the Blood Flag. Martyrdom was really the essence of a lot of what the Nazis were doing with their rituals. For example, the ritual of the Blood Flag at Nuremberg, where Hitler carries the flag, and he baptizes every flag of the Storm Troopers with the Blood Flag. So it's a kind of transmission of divine essence.

Himmler's connection with the Blood Flag is a crucial factor in his rise to power. He joins the Storm Troopers, the Nazi Party's paramilitaries. Their job is to take on Hitler's political enemies in the streets. Himmler joins in, but he's out of place among so many hardened brawlers. When Hitler creates a totally new force, he has a chance to make his mark.

The SS roots are in 1923 when Hitler first forms a personal bodyguard to look after him in public, because his appearances are causing increasing agitation on the Munich scene. Its from this point onwards that you start to see the trajectory of the SS that Himmler picks up with and accelerates.

The new unit is simply called the "protection squad," Schutzstaffel in German. The SS is born. Himmler exploits his connection with the Blood Flag to be accepted into the SS. What he lacks in military experience, he makes up with his natural organizational skills. In just four years, he pushes everyone else aside to become the leader of the SS.

He does seem to have this genius for manipulating people, for administration, for organization, and takes his opportunities when they come. But it is extraordinary how he rises up the ranks and how quickly he does. And how quickly he grips this whole regime within the regime.

In his first two years as leader, Himmler expands the SS tenfold, to 3,000 members. He founds schools and training academies to indoctrinate new recruits with Nazi ideology, including extreme anti-Semitism. But despite his organization's youth and rapid growth, Himmler portrays the SS as the spiritual descendants of Medieval German warriors.

The SS was able to create a myth around the organization. They also considered themselves as an order, so rituals and symbols like daggers were very important. They very often had one element of a German or even Germanic past. You can see this with the names of many SS divisions. Götz von Berlichingen, Frundsberg, Hohenstaufen were all personalities of Medieval times or early modern German history. Each single SS member should consider himself like being part of an old, long tradition dating back centuries.

Himmler doesn't just want the SS to look superior, he wants them to be superior: racially superior. His SS men must prove that they are thoroughly Germanic, with no Jewish ancestors, at least as far back as 1800. 1760 for officers. To encourage them to breed more Aryan supermen, Himmler invents a pseudo-pagan SS marriage ceremony. It's all part of his plan to make the SS the dominant elite of the future Nazi state.

Himmler becomes one of the foremost ideologues in Nazi Germany. He conceives of the SS as being a kind of ideological cavalry of the Third Reich, perhaps some sort of priesthood, a possessor of the deeper secrets of the Nazi creed. How much he really believed in it is impossible to gauge. But he saw it as a very effective political tool. And he sees this as a way to make the SS seem more mysterious, more select, and a means of creating a common ethos amongst the increasingly diverse elements of the SS.

But standing in Himmler's way are the Storm Troopers, the original Nazi paramilitaries. Its leader, Ernst Röhm, is a tough war veteran with medals and scars to prove it. He recruits millions of volunteers to fight the Nazi Party's enemies. By 1933, the Storm Troopers have become so powerful even Hitler feels threatened by them. The relations between the Nazi Party and the SA, the Brownshirts, or Storm Troopers, were always a bit fraught. Because the Storm Troopers are, in a way, more radical in terms of the use of physical force than the Nazis.

The Storm Troopers are also more politically radical than most Nazi leaders. Its working class members believe in the "socialist" part of "national socialism." They look forward to seizing the aristocracy's land. And Röhm boasts about turning his force into a "People's Army." Their leader, Ernst Röhm, was making a lot of noises about using the then four million-strong Brownshirts to replace the army. And the army generals say, "No, you can't do this."

In the past, Hitler depended on Storm Trooper muscle to drive his political enemies off the streets. But in 1933, Hitler becomes chancellor and wants to look more respectable. Röhm and his thugs threaten the establishment Hitler has just joined. They are becoming an embarrassment.

The SA were really not disciplined at all. They were kind of layabouts who just got very, very drunk. People were terrified of them, in fact. They were armed, semi-mutinous thugs. But for a time, they served Hitler's interest, and when it didn't serve Hitler's interest, he quite literally, of course, beheaded them.

July 1934. Senior Storm Troopers relax at an alpine hotel. Early in the morning, SS men burst in and arrest Ernest Röhm in his bedroom, along with other Storm Trooper leaders. Dazed and in shock, they are executed without trial. The organization never recovers from this "Night of the Long Knives." Its independence is over, and Storm Trooper membership rapidly declines.

Hitler wanted to get rid of the SA. The SS was seen as much more loyal. Himmler saw the chance that his SS could fulfill the new central role within the Nazi Party, within the Nazi regime. This is why he supported the "Night of the Long Knives."

Himmler takes advantage of this power vacuum to infiltrate his own men throughout the German state.

What he is able to do is say, "Look, you don't like those Prussian aristocrats, you don't like the army. This way we can maintain control. We can be your own personal military. We can be your own personal security office, your intelligence office. We can have control of every part of the state, which means that you have control of every part of the state." This is incredibly attractive to Hitler, and he thinks, "Well great, fantastic."

Himmler now accelerates his plan to establish an SS state. He created the first Nazi security and intelligence organization, the Sicherheitsdienst, or SD, in 1932. They spy on anyone seen as a threat. Communists, trade unionists, journalists, even Nazi Party members are investigated. So when Hitler takes power in 1933, the SD are ready. They already have lists of their political opponents, who are arrested and sent to the first SS concentration camp: Dachau.

Dachau is by far the most important of the early Nazi concentration camps, because it's the first camp that's set up solely by the SS. And to an extent, it's a model for the later SS camps in the 1930s, even up to Auschwitz.

By the summer of 1933, it's up to 200,000 opponents of the Nazis, again, mainly on the left, had been put into concentration camps, beaten up, maltreated. Even the official figures show that 600 were killed.

Prisoners who survive in Dachau are forced to work. They build the camp itself and then produce everything it needs, from furniture to boots. Himmler soon realizes that his captive workforce is a valuable asset. He takes a close interest in the creation and construction of Dachau, visiting it several times. Dachau becomes probably the SS's most important economic initiative in the 1930s. You have the concentration camp itself, you have an enormous training barracks for concentration camp guards and you have the prisoner labor. And here you see kind of the first roots of deployment of prisoner labor for economic purposes that you will see flourish throughout the system.

Prisoners are soon forced to turn out a range of goods for the commercial market. The SS even corners the bottled water market. The SS becomes more and more powerful. It takes up all kinds of different functions. It has a whole economic empire. Himmler, for example, was a fresh water fanatic. He didn't believe in alcohol, and the most popular German mineral water, called Apollinaris, became part of the SS economic empire. I can never drink a glass of Apollinaris without thinking about this.

As his business empire grows, Himmler also gains power over state security. Hermann Göring creates his own Secret State Police from the political and intelligence sections of the Prussian police in 1933. Within a year, Himmler wins control of it. It's known as the Gestapo. Its headquarters on Prince Albert Street in Berlin becomes notorious. Today, a memorial stands in its place. In the 1930s, this building and the men who work here strike terror into all who oppose the Nazis. The Gestapo set up a prison here, in the basement of the southern building. There were 38 single cells and a larger common cell. Here, people were held for the duration of their interrogation by the Gestapo. When someone was arrested by the Gestapo, he was brought here, and it was the Gestapo's aim to get them to talk as quickly as possible. During the interrogation, there would be brutal torture. Torture was always an integral part of the investigation. It was normal.

So normal, in fact, that the work of the Gestapo was well known by the German public. When you think of the title of the Gestapo, the Secret State Police, you get the impression that it was an organization that worked in secret, identifying hidden enemies of the regime. And to some extent they did that, of course. But the Gestapo was anything but a secret organization. They operated in the open. Their work was reported in the newspapers, so the people definitely knew the Gestapo existed and what its job was.

In 1936, Hitler makes a fateful decision. He centralizes control of all the existing local and regional police forces under Himmler, hugely increasing his empire. Himmler soon not only controlled his own SS, but also the police. So police and SS did not merge. They were still two separate organizations, but all under one umbrella.

German police, just like any other police service, has its detectives, its plainclothes policemen, the criminal police, it has its ordinary day-to-day policemen who do traffic, who do home security, all sorts of safeguarding the welfare of the people. All that gets incorporated into the SS as well.

Himmler now controls the regular uniformed police, armed paramilitary units, as well as thousands of detectives. They don't resist Himmler's takeover. The police forces were generally much more positive towards Nazism and their ideology than, for instance, the army. This also helped this process to integrate the police into the SS. The SS starts like this, and it just goes... until its got its arms and tentacles into literally every single aspect of the Third Reich.

The whole of Germany's security apparatus is now firmly under Himmler's control. The Nazis deploy all these state forces to implement their racial policies. Their aim is to "purify" the country.

They proceeded to purge the German people from elements which they considered alien, such as Jews, homosexuals and so on. And the SS and their various sub-organizations, like the Security Service, the Gestapo, played a crucial role in this.

November 9th, 1938. Himmler orders the Gestapo and SD to orchestrate a nationwide attack on Jewish businesses and synagogues. His men destroy thousands of buildings and murder hundreds of Jews. They send 30,000 more to concentration camps. So many shop windows are broken that the attacks become known as "The Night of Broken Glass," Kristallnacht. Many Germans find the violence shocking. But that didn't mean they sympathized with the Jews. The sight of smashed shops, of broken glass, of buildings being burnt, of disorder, of things getting out of control, disturbed a lot of people. But one has to distinguish between distaste for some of the public acts of anti-Semitic violence and being willing to look the other way, being indifferent to violence being done to the Jews.

So even though Germans hate disorder, Himmler now knows they tolerate his persecution of the Jews. To consolidate his power further, he creates the Reich Security Head Office, or RSHA, basing it here at the Gestapo HQ in Berlin. The Nazis have now totally penetrated all the country's security forces.

This was the center of the SS and the police, the center of Himmler's SS state. The most important thing about the Reich Security Head Office was that state institutions, namely the Gestapo and the Criminal Police, were brought together with a Party organization, the security service of the SS: the SD. And this is a typical characteristic of this apparatus of terror, and also of the Nazi regime, this linking of party and state institutions.

That's a kind of coordination of the entire security apparatus in Nazi Germany. And it does give them a great deal of power, which grows and grows during the war. And some historians have even said it was starting to swallow up the normal apparatus of the state.

Gestapo offices across Germany become local command centers for Himmler's SS state. Nazi terror was now systematically applied from places like this, the regional Gestapo office in Cologne. On the one hand, there is this bureaucratic terror, which took place in the offices. People were recorded, lists were written, people were summoned and interrogated. And, when they were suspect in the eyes of the Gestapo, heavily tortured, sometimes in the offices. But, most importantly, there were these cells. The cells were used very consciously for intimidation, especially in the mid-1930s. People were brought here without any judicial process, with no access to a lawyer, and then they were sitting in these cells and often did not even know what they were accused of.

One community is particularly targeted by the Gestapo. The Nazis despise the Roma and Sinti, popularly known as Gypsies. They portray them as incorrigible thieves and vagrants. It was a very, very small minority of the population, really a fractional percentage, and they had kind of kept themselves to themselves in their way of life. It was a way of life that didn't fit very comfortably or very easily with the German settled population. It became very clear, actually quite early on, from 1934/35, from those kinds of years onwards, that the Nazis wanted a clean Germany without a sullied image, and that involved removing the Sinti and the Roma. And that was in many cities: Cologne and others.

To satisfy Himmler's obsession with racial distinctions, all the physical details of Roma and Sinti families are measured and recorded before they are sent to concentration camps. The techniques first used during the rounding up and transportation of the Sinti and Roma will be perfected during the Holocaust, when millions of other "racial undesirables" will be exterminated.

It's important to take into account that there was more than one genocide going on. So the Nazi extermination of Europe's Jewish population, that was one genocide. At the same time, going on was the genocide of the Sinti and Roma. They called it the "porajmos." That was their great devouring, their equivalent of the Shoah. So of Gypsy victims, in total a figure of around one million... So one million Sinti and Roma victims of National Socialism across Europe from the occupied territories.

On August 31st, 1939, Polish troops strike at this German radio station in Gleiwitz. The attack is reported by German radio news and even the BBC. Hitler is furious and orders the invasion of Poland in retaliation. But, of course, the Gleiwitz attack is a fake, part of an elaborate SS deception plan: Operation Himmler. The attackers are really German SD agents, dressed as Poles. They seize control of the radio station, then broadcast a garbled anti-German message in Polish. Finally, the Nazi agents dump several bodies at the scene. Nazi propaganda claims these are the Polish attackers. The truth is much more sinister. Around a dozen prisoners from Sachsenhausen are murdered, dressed up in Polish uniforms, as evidence of a Polish border incursion, and therefore justifying the declaration of war against Poland.

Himmler has given Hitler the excuse he wants to launch his war in the east. The German Army rolls across the border into Poland, a dramatic conquest ahead of them. Himmler wants his men to lead the way. His plan is to turn his secret policemen and concentration camp guards into an elite fighting force, the Waffen-SS. These entrance posts at Germany's National Archives hide a sinister reminder of its Nazi past. Beneath the concrete stand two huge statues of SS men. Because 70 years ago, this was the barracks of Hitler's elite SS bodyguard, the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler.

They may look impressive, but these are far from being super soldiers.

Nazi propaganda had always portrayed the Waffen-SS as an elite force. However, the reality was quite different, particularly in the early days of the war. The SS was not very well equipped, their training standards were absolutely poor and the quality of the officers corps was also very low. Very often, SS officers were former army officers or NCOs who were seen as second class or third class. There was no real perspective of a great career, so that's why they joined the SS.

The Leibstandarte and two other SS regiments take part in the conquest of Poland. Himmler believes they are more than ready to carry the SS emblem onto the battlefield. But appearances are deceptive.

They look more efficient than they are. They're the first people to have camouflage, which Himmler immediately patents. But just having the kit doesn't make you a soldier. The problem with the kind of militarized units of the SS, which then later becomes the Waffen-SS is that their whole organization, their whole leadership is based around people who simply don't have the experience of that leadership. So what you don't get is good military, tactical and operational leadership. And that is really shown up in terms of their lack of military training, lack of military prowess. And they have to learn the hard way, through bitter experience, before they become pretty efficient.

Normal army generals and officers got really fed up with them, because they would storm into the enemy without any thought for themselves and be mown down in huge numbers, whereas the conventionally-trained military men were saying, "Hold back," you know, "Let's have some tactics here." So in many ways, they weren't that effective. They were just too fired up, really, to engage in military offensives in a rational way.

In just over five weeks, the German military crushes Polish resistance. The SS do not distinguish themselves on the battlefield. But they do massacre hundreds of Jewish civilians behind the lines, to Himmler's satisfaction. Then Gestapo agents and SD men draw up lists of prominent Polish leaders who must be arrested and executed. The job is given to five so-called "action groups," or Einsatzgruppen. The Einsatzgruppen are drawn from various parts of Himmler's organization, so you have some SD men, you have concentration camp guards on secondment, you have some policemen. And they're essentially involved in operations against the Polish elite, against the intelligentsia. So against clerics, against army officers and increasingly also against Jews, who were perceived always by the Nazis to be implicitly a kind of malevolent opposition leadership.

The 3,000 men of the Einsatzgruppen murder more than 60,000 Poles by the end of 1939. Then they force Poland's Jews into improvised ghettos all over the country. Thousands die in the brutal round up. Many more will die of malnutrition and disease in the years to come. The SS are moving ever closer to their "Final Solution." But Himmler craves an even greater military role. So he convinces Hitler to allow him to increase the number of his combat troops. When the Blitzkrieg is unleashed on western Europe in May 1940, three full SS divisions are ready to take part. One is the Totenkopf or "Death's Head" Division, formed from former concentration camp guards. On the 26th of May 1940, they capture 96 British soldiers in the French village of Le Paradis and massacre them.

That is part of the SS culture. When you are a camp guard at Dachau, for example, you're used to treating your enemies like dirt. These are people to be despised, to be spat on, kicked, beaten, executed if they step out of line. And as far as the commander of Le Paradis, for example, was concerned, those British men had stepped out of line. So, therefore, he lines them up against a wall and shoots them.

The massacre is not a one-off. Two days later, members of the Leibstandarte SS Division murder another 80 British soldiers. Yet far from being condemned, these men win high praise from Hitler, who tells them: "Henceforth it will be your privilege to lead every German attack." He is already planning an assault on the regime he hates above all others, the Soviet Union. Hitler believes the ruthlessness of Himmler's combat units will be vital for his campaign.

Hitler believed very much in the power of the will. And so, therefore, you had to be aggressive. And if the enemy was going to overwhelm you, if you were strong enough, if your willpower was great enough, you could beat them back. What distinguished the Waffen-SS was, above all, their fanaticism. They were highly ideological. The kind of training they went through was very brutal, a very political kind of training.

Waffen-SS units were generally much more likely to commit atrocities than ordinary Wehrmacht units. This was at least partly due to indoctrination, or to be more precise, one element of indoctrination in Nazi ideology. I would call it a cult of toughness. So you have to be tough against yourself, but also you have to be tough against the enemy. You always see the world in black and white. So those who are not for you are against you, and you can treat them ruthlessly. Or you have to treat them ruthlessly.

June 22nd, 1941. The all-out attack on the Soviet Union begins. By now, the Waffen-SS has expanded to six divisions. One or two of them are attached to each of the three invading army groups. Their tenacity in defense and ferocity in attack finally earns them a reputation as elite forces. Four of the core divisions of the SS, the Leibstandarte, Das Reich, Totenkopf and Wiking, all became motorized divisions and later armored divisions. This meant they could be used as a mobile reserve. So every time in a time of crisis on the Eastern Front, Waffen-SS divisions were rushed in or were sent in in order to solve the crisis.

But, just as in Poland, combat divisions are not the only SS units which invade. Once again, Einsatzgruppen are formed to implement the Nazi's brutal racial policy.

It is these police battalions which are providing most of the Einsatzgruppen, which are action squads designed to follow up behind the armed forces, before the ground forces, and execute people. That is their job. Round up Jews, Slavs, anyone they don't like, the intelligentsia of Poland, kick them into pits, shoot them in the head, that kind of stuff. That is being carried out by the ordinary police, but they are part of the SS.

These "ordinary men" are soon committing extraordinary crimes. The 500 men of a single unit, Police Battalion 101, execute 83,000 people.

Very quickly, the Einsatzgruppen escalates from shooting males to also executing women and children if they happen to be Jewish. So you have a kind of self-radicalization, it seems, within the Einsatzgruppen very early on. And here we can see, quite clearly, a holocaust by bullets.

Shortly after the invasion begins, Himmler makes a special trip to the Eastern Front. He wants to find out how effectively the Einsatzgruppen are carrying out the mass killings he's ordered. But he is deeply disturbed by what he sees. Himmler, in August 1941, witnesses one of these mass executions and is really upset by it. He doesn't like seeing all this blood and horror. And he thinks: "Those poor men having to carry out those executions. It must be very traumatic; we've got to find a better way of doing it. There must be a more humane way, so that my guys, my boys, don't get traumatized by this." The concern is not at all with the victims. It is entirely with the people who are having to do these traumatic mass executions.

This is raw, brutalized personal killing on a nightmarish scale. You have relatively small groups of men who are shooting thousands and thousands of people every day. And the psychological impact of this on any kind of member of the Einsatzgruppen is enormous. And this helps to pave the way to the search for a more "humane," from the point of view of the Nazi perpetrators, way of accomplishing Himmler's genocidal goals.

October 13th, 1941. Himmler orders the construction of a totally new SS institution: purpose-built death camps. First Belzec, soon followed by Treblinka and Sobibor. They are specifically designed to murder thousands of Jews in poison gas chambers as soon as they arrive. In January 1942, the decision is taken to exterminate all of Europe's Jews. More camps are needed. Chelmno, Auschwitz and Majdanek. Three million people are thought to have been murdered at these six camps alone. Over the gates of many camps is fixed the slogan "Arbeit macht frei," "work will set you free." For those executed immediately at the death camps, it is a vicious lie. But some prisoners are selected for work. Himmler plans to turn even some of the death camps into profitable ventures, by exploiting a growing German crisis: a massive shortage of workers.

This does happens at a time when most male German labor is being called up to the Wehrmacht. Basically, the idea is that the SS controls a vast number of prisoners, and it would be a good idea to extract more labor from them before they actually perish.

The SS gets involved in the business of the exploitation of labor. The concentration camps become, effectively, labor exchanges. I mean, they are hiring out their prisoners on the cheap. The employers and the major German companies who are doing this don't have to pay very much and are able to make use of hundreds of thousands of slave laborers.

Every concentration camp forges close ties with local industries. In 1942/1943, you get a very large number of satellite camps, which gather around the concentration camps and generally based at firms or at particular resources where the prisoners can be put to work on a much wider scale. And here you'll find almost all the major German companies have some kind of involvement in a satellite camp. IG Farben, its plant at Auschwitz, is the most notorious example of that, but there were other companies. Siemens had a factory there as well. And so IG Farben basically has its own private concentration camp that is run by the SS, it's outsourced to the SS.

IG Farben, the largest chemical company in the world at the time, employs thousands of Auschwitz prisoners to build and operate a synthetic rubber plant. And it is not alone.

This is very much emblematic of a wider attitude of German commerce and business towards prisoner labor as a resource to be used. So there's a resource here that companies can say, "We should use, because if we don't, somebody else will. And we have a responsibility to contribute towards the German war effort and to protect the profits of our shareholders."

The Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp perfectly demonstrates the brutal SS business model. Prisoners were first sent here from Dachau in 1938 to work in the granite quarry. But Mauthausen rapidly expands to become one of the Nazis' largest labor camp networks, with nearly 100 sub-camps spread across Austria and southern Germany. Stone from the quarry is first used to construct the camp. Once completed, the SS starts selling stone on the open market, making a big profit.

The SS did have its own empire, economic empire, especially in the East, and that was focused on a combination of producing certain types of things. Craft goods, stone masonry, all sorts of things like that. So they are producing these goods, but they are also using up the humans in the process. This idea of killing people through work is something that is developed in the SS.

Mauthausen is far from being a normal business. Every block of granite is chiseled from the quarry by hand. Then the inmates are forced by the SS to carry them up the "Stairway of Death." For the sick and starving prisoners, carrying stone blocks up 186 steps is effectively a death sentence. But the SS policy of exterminating racial enemies through work conflicts with its other top priority, making money.

And so there's an attempt to transform to some extent the camps' culture of death, basically make the prisoners live longer and produce more. But it's very difficult to actually effect any kind of meaningful change, because the cultures at the camps are wired very much towards killing rather than preserving prisoners. They're too punitive, really, to extract labor in any kind of rational sense.

Yes, it's a concentration camp, not a death camp. There aren't gas chambers there. But the people there are as sure going to die as the people being led straight to the gas chambers. It's just a stay of execution. The whole point is to just get these people in, work them to death and then get another bunch in. So that you've got this constant cycle of prisoners and slave labor coming in and doing your work for you.

Mauthausen becomes notorious for its appallingly high death rate. So its labor force has to be constantly replenished. Political opponents of the Nazis are brought here from across Europe, including many resistance fighters and even thousands of Italian soldiers.

When Italy was defeated and surrendered in the summer of 1943, the entire Italian Army was carted off to Germany to man the factories, where they had a very hard time, because German workers resented them. They thought they'd let the side down by surrendering.

They're using these people, treating them like absolute filth, grinding them into the dust, so much so that it's actually called the Bone Grinder.

Himmler inspects Mauthausen during 1941, its most productive phase. Trading with 45 major companies, it is one of the Nazis' most lucrative concentration camps. In 1944, it generates more than 11 million Reichsmarks, equivalent to about 140 million dollars today. But the human cost is also enormous. Three hundred thousand prisoners die in the process. What was particularly chilling about the whole thing is the application of modern management techniques as time goes on to more effectively exploit people until they die, so that you get more production out of them by using these modern management techniques. But the assurance of death in the end, or of wearing people out completely is there as well.

By 1945, Himmler's SS business empire controls 500 firms. Its slave laborers are now a common sight all over the Reich. But they are not enough to supply Germany's ever more desperate need for workers. So millions of other people are shipped to Germany from the occupied territories to become forced laborers.

Forced labor becomes increasingly necessary for a regime which is sending literally millions of men into their deaths on the Eastern Front. And so the more men need replacing in the factories and on the fields of Germany, the more laborers are forced to come in. So there's seven million foreign workers in Germany by 1944.

Seventy years ago, this was part of GBI Camp 75/76. These barrack buildings housed up to 2,000 forced workers. The camp is in the middle of a residential area, so the primitive living conditions and harsh treatment of the inmates would have been obvious to local Germans. And this is just one of 3,000 camps that housed forced laborers in Berlin alone. Virtually the whole of the economy by 1944 becomes dependent upon labor which has been brought to Germany with various degrees of coercion. To some extent, these people have been enticed by promises of decent conditions and decent incomes. To some extent, people are just rounded up off the streets and hauled away into the country. And as I said, by the latter stages of the war, this is what kept the German war economy going.

At Gestapo headquarters in Cologne, the cell walls bear the names of forced workers from all over Europe. They are imprisoned for many offenses, from illegal sexual relationships to more serious charges, such as sedition or even sabotage. As the war went on, the situation got worse and worse. The cells were getting fuller and fuller.

They were no longer imprisoned in ones or twos, but five, six, ten in a cell. We know from an inscription, which a Frenchman left behind, that once there were even 30 people locked up together. This building became infamous among local people. You would hear about the prisoners who were locked up here. You were afraid of these Gestapo men. You were worried that you would be picked up and maybe never come back again. That was very intimidating. Then we have reports of people who passed by in the streets outside who could hear screaming coming from the cells. In the last months of the war, those still living in the surrounding houses could look into the courtyard and actually see prisoners being executed.

In the final months of the war, the Reich Security Head Office allowed local Gestapo offices to execute non-Germans without needing permission from Berlin first. After this, hundreds of foreign workers were executed here. With the power of life or death over millions of civilians, the SS has reached the peak of its power. It has an enormous industrial empire and almost a million men under arms. But to get the Waffen-SS up to this size, Himmler's previous insistence on Aryan purity has been abandoned.

Himmler's very dependent on taking what the army won't take or using people who have already served their spell in the army and bringing them into the SS. And he has to trawl through Europe finding ever-more spuriously plausible Volkish Germans in order to bring them into the Waffen-SS. The SS now recruited people who they considered racially inferior to them. And they formed their special SS units, be it Ukrainians, be it even French, be it Muslims from the Balkans and so on. However, with the exception perhaps of the Estonians and to a certain degree of the Latvians, these SS units always underperformed, so they can definitely not be seen as military elite.

When the British and Americans land in Normandy in June 1944, they smash the SS Panzer Divisions. As the Waffen-SS collapses, Himmler's empire crumbles.

As a Waffen-SS soldier, being tough against you meant you do not surrender. So it was explicitly forbidden for SS soldiers to surrender. In reality they often did, of course.

But Hitler still has faith in Himmler. In January 1945, he gives him what he has craved all his life: a major military command. He's put in charge of an army group with orders to hold back the Soviet advance on Berlin. But Himmler proves to be no better a soldier than many of his SS troops.

Himmler's fall from grace starts when he takes command of the Army Group Vistula in 1945 and performed disastrously. Even given the adverse conditions which he's facing on the Eastern Front, he breaks down with hypochondriac stomach complaints, has to go off to a sanatorium to convalesce and his grip on the empire is gone.

Totally out of his depth, Hitler dismisses him from his army command after less than two months. After more than 20 years, the bonds of loyalty between the two most senior Nazis are starting to break. Himmler's track record in the final months of the Third Reich really showed his character for what it was: grasping, insincere, treacherous and evasive. Here you find the empty, brittle hollowness of Himmler and his insincerity. And it comes somewhere to the bankruptcy of the whole SS ideology.

As the Red Army closes on Berlin, some SS men prepare for its final defense, even though they are not German. They include Frenchmen from the SS Charlemagne Division, alongside recruits from Scandinavia, the Low Countries and Baltic states. But their leader will not be with them. Incredibly, Himmler has started secret negotiations with the Allies behind Hitler's back. Hitler is enraged. He strips Himmler of all of his titles, expels him from the Nazi Party and orders his arrest. Himmler tries to escape.

This is very cowardly behavior he reveals from negotiations with the Allies right through to his final few days where he wanders into British captivity, dressed, as one of his subordinates said, like a character from a bad detective novel.

Disguised as Sergeant Heinrich Hitzinger, Himmler is finally stopped at an improvised checkpoint by a group of Soviet forced laborers. They hand him over to the British Army. When he arrives at an interrogation camp, Himmler finally admits his true identity.

So for the people who actually catch him, before their eyes is this rather pathetic-looking man with no chin and a kind-of... rather feeble moustache and myopia. You're thinking, "Really? Is this him? Is this the great Heinrich Himmler, the man who's had so much power in his hands, and he's reduced to this?"

While being examined by an army doctor, Himmler bites on a cyanide capsule. There's a desperate struggle to remove the poison. But within minutes, Himmler is dead. He has cheated justice, to the disappointment of both his victims and fellow perpetrators.

A lot of the SS men felt betrayed that Himmler didn't actually go before the dock in Nuremburg and account for the organization. So Hitler's already dead, and now Himmler's gone as well. So their spokesmen have vanished.

As the concentration camps are liberated, Himmler's horrific legacy emerges. The Nazis forced their victims into more than 40,000 camps and ghettos. Between 15 and 20 million people were imprisoned or killed in them.

The SS was the central pillar of the Third Reich and the Nazi regime. It was the most violent organization. It was the brain and the tool for all the mass crimes. Or in other words, without the SS, the Holocaust couldn't have happened.

Heinrich Himmler's body was buried in an unmarked grave somewhere in northern Germany. All trace of it has been lost. His millions of victims, however, should never be forgotten.

January 1945. The Allies are advancing on all fronts. The Nazi regime seems on the brink of collapse.

On the Western Front, the last major German offensive had just failed. On the Eastern Front, the Red Army launched a major offensive and is moving towards Berlin. And the air war is totally lost for the Germans.

Yet one man refuses to accept that the Third Reich is over: Adolf Hitler. He has such faith in Nazi power that he continues planning to build a brand-new capital city for his empire.

Hitler increasingly took refuge in fantasy plans for rebuilding Berlin with vast buildings.

Hitler was a sucker for anything that was big. "I'm going to build you the Volkshalle, which is going to seat 180,000 people." You know, Hitler loves all that stuff.

Hitler convinces the German people that victory is still possible with his sinister vengeance weapons.

One of the ways you still got solidarity of the fighting spirit is that you promised the German people that a new generation of miracle weapons would fight the war for them.

Nazi propaganda has such power that Germans fight for Hitler right up to the end.

These people don't stop fighting even when the Russians are in the garden of the Reich Chancellery.

Even children join up to defend Berlin. They are told that German design and engineering brilliance will defeat the Allies, despite their enormous resources. But reality is crushing this illusion.

Half of all of Germany's dead in the Second World War occurred in the last ten months of the war. I mean, this is a bloodbath without parallel in European and perhaps in human history.

Hitler claims Germany leads the world in design and technology. Now the world is putting that claim to its ultimate test.

13th of June, 1944. Just days after D-Day. British and American forces are spreading across France, flushed with success. But their advance is about to be stopped by one man and one tank. The man is Michael Wittmann, a German panzer ace. He's already credited with destroying over a hundred enemy tanks. His weapon is the much-feared Tiger, the most powerful German tank on the battlefield.

The Tiger tank certainly had two positive attributes. It was heavily armored, and it had a very powerful gun. And this allowed the Tiger tank to fight against Allied tanks at a range when the Allies' tanks were not able to knock out the Tiger tank. So they often could keep the enemy tanks at a distance.

The British 7th Armored Division advances from the Normandy beaches to the small French town of Villers-Bocage. They are greeted by cheering French civilians. The British soldiers are relaxed. In the morning, Michael Wittmann and his men strike. They realize there are lots of British troops and tanks in the village all just waking up and yawning and stretching and making their cups of tea. And Wittmann, who is the commander of this company, thinks, "Ah, here's a golden opportunity here," and splits into two. And he goes off on his own, pretty much, and careers round a road that is parallel to the main drag in Villers-Bocage, in which all these British tanks and units and carriers are waiting. And goes down this parallel road, and wherever there's a link, he turns his barrel to the right and fires and blows them all up. And then moves into the main high street and finishes off the job.

In less than 15 minutes, at least 13 tanks, two anti-tank guns and 13 other vehicles are destroyed by Wittmann and his men. For many Germans, the Battle of Villers-Bocage proves that their tanks and soldiers are inherently superior to the Allies'. German propaganda describes Wittmann as a noble hero for a country which desperately needs one. He is promoted to Captain and awarded one of Germany's highest honors, the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross with Oak Leaves and Swords, by Hitler himself. These events were massively played up by German propaganda, and it's very interesting that the cult of the ace was something that was absolutely integral to the German propaganda machine. And a lot of these people were kind of put on pedestals, whether they be U-boat aces, whether they be fighter aces, whether they be dive-bombing aces or whether they be panzer aces. And it is amazing how often these aces tended to be incredibly good-looking. They all absolutely conform to the ideal of the Aryan kind of superhero in a way that the Nazi leadership itself didn't. And Wittmann was no different.

But despite Wittmann's success, neither he nor any other Tiger commander prevents the Allied breakout from Normandy.

Really, all we're talking about here is a minor tactical engagement. The British didn't have much chance of exploiting that gap at the time anyway. Did it have an overall effect on the campaign? No. How significant were the losses? Well actually, by the time the two-day battle was all over, and it wasn't just that morning engagement, the Germans had only marginally fewer casualties than the British did, and six of their precious Tiger tanks had been knocked out.

German propaganda exaggerates Wittmann's achievement. The German armed forces magazine Signal shows the aftermath of the battle, but uses three different photographs joined together, creating a false impression of the destruction. And the Tiger tank is not the war-winning weapon the Nazis claim it is.

First, it was too slow. So that made it very difficult for the Tiger tank to advance quickly or to withdraw quickly. Second, it was too heavy. So this meant certain bridges were not passable. Third, it was not motorized enough; it was under-motorized. So: too slow and too difficult to maneuver. And fourth, as it was so heavy, the fuel consumption was also far too high, and that was something Germany could not afford in 1944 with the scarcity of its resources.

The Tiger is rushed into production. Early Tigers are particularly unreliable. They often break down during combat and have to be abandoned. In fact, more Tigers are destroyed by their crews than by the enemy. And it costs far too much money, resources and labor to produce. Only about 1,350 Tigers are built during the war, compared with 6,300 of the less glamorous Panther.

Generally, I would say that the Panther tank was superior to the Tiger tank. It had similar strengths, like strong armor and a powerful gun, but it was much more reliable, and it was also more maneuverable. So it would be logical if the Germans had focused solely on the Panther tank and not on the Tiger tank. However, this would mean not to understand the nature of the Nazi regime and the Nazi state.

The problem is, Hitler believes only conflict and competition get results. People misunderstand the nature of the Nazi state. The image we're kind of given is this ruthlessly efficient state in which people are told exactly what to do. Actually, Hitler created a chaotic state. He set up agencies against each other. He got them to compete and look to him for authority.

That's all a by-product of Hitler's method of rule, which was not to centralize and coordinate everything, but to appoint different people, institutions to do the same thing and let them fight it out amongst themselves. And whichever was the most ruthless, he thought, would be the best and come out on top.

In the end, this meant a waste of resources, because every company tried to produce its own tank, or first to conceive it and later to produce it. And so the Germans were unable to streamline their resources.

This in-fighting means Germany cannot produce enough of its best weapons for all its troops. But as for the quality of the soldiers themselves, Germany leads the world.

The German Army has often been portrayed as the most skillful and the most efficient army of the Second World War. They knew how to deploy their arms in a so-called "combined arms approach." So the cooperation between infantry, artillery, tanks and also the air force was generally pretty good. Second, the German Army was generally well-led, so officers and NCOs looked generally well after their men. And all this formed a glue for high combat motivation. And many believed, perhaps not in Nazism as such, but many of them believed in the Führer and the Reich's Chancellor, Adolf Hitler, as their great leader.

The skill, bravery and loyalty of the German military is constantly shown in German cinemas as part of the propaganda newsreels known as The Weekly Review, the Wochenschau.

It was a link between the millions of German soldiers who were at the front to their families back home, and their families then had an idea of what their achievements were. Because the Wochenschau films were all about achievement. How much ground has been taken, how many enemy vehicles have been destroyed. And all this was good for the soldiers' morale, because then their loved ones back home were truly appreciative of what was being achieved for them at the front. You do get images of wounded soldiers. Rarely many dead soldiers, for obvious reasons. And that really was the success of the Wochenschau, because there was sufficient truth in there, grainy realism, to enhance the value of the propaganda. I think because much of it is actuality footage, it's got that grainy feel that contemporary newsreels have. They're obviously unrehearsed. Not all, but many of them are unrehearsed in showing combat as it really is, because some of the sound effects are there.

Keeping up civilian morale is vital for the Nazis. They are convinced that, in the First World War, the German Army was not defeated. Instead, they believe it was the home front that collapsed. They are determined to stop that from happening again. Privations faced by German families during the Second World War were not as bad as you might have expected for the first few years of the war, because Goebbels was immensely aware of the fact that many people felt that the First World War had been lost by Germans due to insufficient rations towards the end of the war. So Goebbels was really keen to make sure that the home front was well provided for as long as possible.

In the beginning, stunning military successes convince the people that Hitler is a great war leader. Poland is captured in five weeks, France in little more than six. But Hitler's ongoing lust for territory is undermining his popularity.

People's views of the Nazis weren't static over time. When Germany was winning lots of victories early on, that was sort of easy propaganda for Hitler. I guess people were keen to throw their weight behind the national cause out of patriotism, even if they had had reservations about Hitler. But as the war went on and there were more personal costs associated with the war, with men away fighting, rationing biting harder after the defeat at Stalingrad in '43, the popularity of the regime began to wane significantly, because the difference between propaganda and reality became ever starker.

What you can't make successful propaganda out of is failure. And this is I think the reason why the propaganda efforts from particularly 1943 onwards are less and less successful.

When Hitler decides to invade Russia, he triggers a series of events which will destroy his military.

The Blitzkrieg really ran out of steam in Russia. When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, this was his best-armed and strongest foe to date. And the major change immediately was once they crossed the frontier, the tempo of the fighting was immediately very high. That, in time, led to obviously extremely heavy casualties, so that by, let's say, October 1941, the army that invaded Russia had had casualties to the equivalent of 30 divisions. And in terms of leadership, they had lost by that time the equivalent of 37 divisions' worth of junior officers and NCOs. As the new guys are promoted, they are the people that have been schooled in national socialism. So the, if you like, the social fabric and psychology of the army underwent quite profound changes in 1941 to '42. Nazi society and the Nazi state was very much a militarized state. When a young soldier entered the German Army as a young recruit, he had already went through various Nazi Party organizations. And research has also shown that the most Nazified soldiers within the Wehrmacht were the younger ones. So the younger a German soldier was, the more likely it was he was Nazified.

Despite their inexperience, Hitler benefits from the loyalty of these young soldiers. Since he became Führer in 1934, every one has sworn an oath to serve him personally. In the past, German soldiers pledged themselves to the state. But Hitler has changed all that.

The oath to Hitler was very crucial for the army's loyalty to Hitler. For instance, for the officers, and particularly those who were critical towards the Nazis and Hitler, for them it always posed a big barrier, because breaking the oath was out of the question. From then on, an individual soldier was no longer bound to the state, but to one person: Hitler himself.

Obedience, accepting orders without question, is central to the Nazi project. But no matter how loyal they are, the influx of dedicated Nazi soldiers cannot change the fact that by the summer of 1943, the war is going badly for Germany.

On the Eastern Front, the major offensive at Kursk had failed. The initiative now lay solely with the Soviets. Over the skies of Germany, the Allied bombing campaign intensified more and more. In North Africa, Army Group Africa had just surrendered, and the Allies were preparing to launch their offensive against Fortress Europe. And finally, in the Atlantic, the U-boats had lost the Battle of the Atlantic. The senior leadership of the German Army and the German armed forces saw that the war was against them, and there was no question anymore of winning the war. However, they still continued. They still waged the war as if there was still a chance to win the war.

Despite Nazi propaganda, the severity of the situation can no longer be hidden from civilians.

Women were dealing with bombing, rationing, possibly having their children evacuated and being worried about their relatives, husbands, fathers, brothers at the front. As the war began to bite and began to be felt more intrusively in people's lives, their attitudes towards the regime, to the fact that maybe the Nazi fat cats weren't feeling the same privations as ordinary people were... That maybe middle- and upper-class women, for example, weren't making such a contribution to the war effort in the way that working-class women were, that they were somehow able to kind of shirk their duties and get a cushier job or role... All of these things didn't go unnoticed, and caused a lot of acrimony. And it caused the regime to lose a lot of popularity.

British and American bombers are inflicting terrible damage on German cities.

The lack of availability of food, the long queuing, all of which was made much worse by bombing, and the fact that water pipes were broken, so people had to go and get their waters in buckets from wells. You know, daily life was completely disrupted, particularly in the major cities, as a result of the bombing and the rationing combined.

Hitler refuses to visit bomb-damaged cities. But he can't avoid seeing the devastation of Berlin. Yet he shows little concern. The destruction actually makes it easier for him to imagine his grandiose plans to totally transform the capital. Well, Hitler increasingly took refuge in fantasy plans for rebuilding Berlin, which he wanted to rename Germania, because he didn't really like Berlin very much... too many communists and socialists there... with vast buildings and a huge hall with a dome greater than St. Peter's, a triumphal arch bigger than the Arc de Triomphe and so on.

Ever since he took power in 1933, Hitler dreams of totally rebuilding Berlin, no matter what the cost. At its heart would be one of the largest buildings ever built. Hitler was a sucker for anything that was big, you know. "I'm going to build you the Volkshalle, which is going to seat 180,000 people." Hitler loves all that stuff.

This enormous temple, based on a sketch by Hitler himself, would have been nearly 300 meters high. Here, the German people would gather to worship Hitler and his successors down the centuries. It would be the heart of the Nazi cult. Germania actually began in 1934. A new sports stadium for 100,000 spectators was created for the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Hitler gave the crucial task of creating the vast new Reich Chancellery, which was 400 meters long, to his favorite architect, Albert Speer. The Chancellery was destroyed in the war. But other elements of Germania still survive in Berlin. This was the huge Air Ministry. With 2,800 rooms and nearly seven kilometers of corridors, it was the largest office building in the world. Today, it is the home of the Finance Ministry. Speer also creates a vast triumphal way leading west from the Brandenburg Gate. He decorates it with a huge 19th-century war memorial, the Victory Column, by moving it nearly two kilometers. The entrances to the pedestrian tunnels are Speer's own design. As are the street lamps lining the road. An important part of Hitler's plan are new embassies for his allies, including Spain and Italy. They remain in use by their original owners to this day. But the completion of the Japanese Embassy marks the end of Germania. The military situation in the east is getting worse, forcing Hitler to put his grandiose building project on hold. By 1943, Germany is beginning to face a manpower crisis. The loss of a complete army at Stalingrad meant not just the loss of numbers, but a wiping out of a huge chunk of experience and professionalism within the German Army at that time. So, really, the Germans are looking for technological solutions to compensate for its reduction in manpower and more importantly, experience.

Hitler was always very enthusiastic about technological progress. And Germany had a tradition of great engineering and of great science. So, in the Second World War, the Germans produced some of the most advanced weapons.

The most advanced weapons of all are created and tested here, a top-secret base on Germany's Baltic coast. Peenemünde.

Whole Peenemünde facilities, which actually were two armaments facilities, one of the army and one of the air force, were, of course, the biggest armaments center in the whole of Europe during World War Two. It was 25 square kilometers wide. Up to 12,000 people worked here. So it was an enormous industrial facility which spent lots of resources: material, financial and personal resources.

The mission of the scientists who work here is to develop weapons of enormous speed and power to penetrate the Allies' defenses. By 1944, conventional German bombers have little chance of attacking London successfully. An entirely new approach is needed. So the scientists at Peenemünde create two of the most advanced weapons of the Second World War. The first is a cruise missile, the V1. With a top speed of 630 kilometers per hour, it is faster than almost every Allied fighter. It carries 850 kilograms of explosive up to 240 kilometers. The V2 is an even more extraordinary weapon, the world's first ballistic missile. It carries 1,000 kilograms of explosive 320 kilometers. Traveling at well over 5,000 kilometers per hour, nothing could detect it or stop it. It arrives at its target without warning. High-tech guidance systems replace increasingly scarce pilots. Now, the Nazis believe, they have a chance to strike back. Here was the panacea. There will be this magic weapon that would clear the skies and devastate the landscape to Germany's favor.

On September 29, 1943, Albert Speer promises revenge against the Allied bombing of German cities with a "secret weapon." So, before they even exist, the V weapons are a vital tool of Nazi propaganda.

The idea was, in 1944, one of the ways you still got solidarity of the fighting spirit is that you promised the German people that a new generation of miracle weapons would fight the war for them. Firstly, it was anticipatory propaganda. They could tell people that, "We've got these weapons coming." Then they could actually show them they seemed formidable.

Any possibility that they can get out of this fix by some miraculous wonder weapon, or some reinforcement was going to come that the Führer was finally going to conjure, is something that people would like to believe in.

During the last ten months of the war, about 12,000 V1s and 3,500 V2s are launched against Britain and Belgium. Yet the amount of explosives carried by all these expensive weapons is only the same as that dropped by two or three large Allied bombing raids. By 1944, such raids take place every week. And many V weapons never reach their target. The British work out how to shoot V1s down, destroying more than 4,000 in the air. And even the apparently invincible V2 has serious flaws.

So, like, one-third of the rockets exploded in the air, because they had aerodynamic problems. And of 3,000 launched rockets, just about 2,000 of them really hit the ground. And also, these 2,000 didn't hit exactly, because the control system wasn't very exact. It has a radius of 15 kilometers.

The inaccuracy of the V2 is its biggest weakness.

They were technologically very advanced weapons, but in reality, their effects were rather limited. So, using them against point weapons, against specific targets, the V2 was a failure. For instance, the Germans launched several V2s against the port facilities of Antwerp in autumn and winter 1944/45 or also tried to destroy the bridge at Remagen in 1945. In both cases, the V2 could not destroy the target.

So instead, most are aimed at large cities, especially London and Antwerp, targeting their civilian populations.

It was a terror weapon. It was to terrorize the civilian population in, for example, London, because they came down at any time of the day, at any moment, absolutely without any possibility to hide, without seeing, hearing them come. And this is this terror effect.

More than 12,000 British civilians are killed by Hitler's terror weapons. And their propaganda effect is even greater.

They could tell the German Army that it's causing panic, mass panic on the streets of London. People are leaving the cities in droves.

I believe that the Germans, particularly at the political top, were starting to believe their own propaganda and feeling this would be the panacea to their problems. They're on the defensive, but they could get the Allies probably to bend to their will by being faced with new and terrible weapon types.

But the reality is rather different. In Germany, more civilians are killed by Allied bombing every month than by all the V weapons. And they're expensive. V2s especially use up a lot of scarce materials and need many skilled workers to assemble. Most are slave laborers, working in appalling conditions. In fact, more civilians die making V2s than are actually blown up by them. The V weapons are a final, desperate attempt to use technology to overcome Germany's economic weakness.

England, the United States, the Soviet Union... The biggest economies in the world of course have more. I mean, the only chance is that we have better, newer technology. A kind of progress as a hope of salvation.

But even the Nazi elite are realizing that the chances of German salvation are getting slimmer and slimmer.

The V stood for "Vergeltung," which means "retribution." And so these weapons were meant to pay back the Brits for what they'd been doing to Germany. They weren't advertised as being sources of victory. That was completely pushed to one side. It's just getting their own back. And so, in a way, the promise of a wonder weapon is also a confession of defeat.

Summer 1944 is a time of huge disasters for the Germans. In Normandy, the Allied landing had succeeded, and major German forces were encircled and destroyed in the Battle of Falaise. On the Eastern Front, Army Group Center had collapsed. And the Allied air campaign was now beginning to start as a full success. The Allies had now full air supremacy over the skies in Germany.

These hammer blows completely change Hitler's behavior.

Hitler can't really deal with defeat. He doesn't want to know about it. And so, increasingly, he refuses to appear in public. He is, of course, afraid that he might be shouted at or jeered. His appearances are less and less frequent. Towards the very end, he does pretty well vanish, and indeed his speeches are delivered over the radio by someone else. So he does become more and more of a recluse.

For Goebbels, this is a disaster. Hitler is his greatest propaganda weapon. But with the Führer now almost invisible, he must come up with ever more creative alternatives.

During the war itself, they went much more for pure entertainment. They still made films which were propaganda, but they were big budget epics, costume drama, where the propaganda message was heavily disguised beneath an 18th-century uniform or a 19th-century crinoline skirt.

And the biggest of Goebbels's box office spectaculars is the feature film Kolberg.

Well, in the later stages of the war, Goebbels tried to convince people to hold out against the enemy by spending huge amounts of money and resources on making a film about Kolberg, which is a town in the eastern part of Germany, which had been sieged by Napoleon in the Napoleonic Wars. And it's all a story in glorious color and enormous resources devoted to it. Parts of the German Army are actually diverted from fighting to put on Napoleonic era uniforms and take part in the film. And the idea is to show how the townspeople rallied round and defeated the enemy. And that's what the Germans should do.

Kolberg was an extraordinary phenomenon. The producer actually claims that he pulled back 100,000 troops from the front line, about the size, I think, of the current British Army, to act as extras in Kolberg. Certainly, the scenes are amazing, the cavalry sweeps and so forth. It's probably more likely to have been about 20,000, but that's still a huge number of troops to pull back from the front in the last stages of the Second World War.

Kolberg is the most expensive Nazi movie. Filming lasted nearly ten months, both on location and at the Babelsberg film studios. While based on real events, the film claims that the will of the citizens to defend their city is strengthened by the imposition of a dynamic new general. A kind of 19th-century Nazi. But by the time the fictional version is ready for release in January 1945, the real city is under threat from the advancing Soviet forces.

Then what happens is that the town of Kolberg is surrounded by the Russians, parallel to this, and so what Goebbels did is replace the older general with a thrusting new general, just like in the film. But then Kolberg surrenders, and Goebbels stifles the news of that surrender, so that everything will be consistent with the movie. So it's an extraordinary example of art and life not only imitating each other, but being inextricably intertwined.

In January 1945, the German Reich was on the brink of collapse. On the Western Front, the last major German offensive in the Ardennes in the Battle of the Bulge had just failed. On the Eastern Front in mid-January 1945, the Red Army launched a major offensive from Vistula and is moving towards Berlin. And the air war is totally lost for the Germans. And Allied bombing now heavily impacted on German industrial production.

The wonder weapons are not appearing in nearly enough numbers to turn the tide. Production of conventional weapons is also falling. And yet the German Army holds together, fighting to the very last, despite enormous casualties. Half of all of Germany's casualties, of all of Germany's dead in the Second World War, occurred in the last ten months of the war. The Wehrmacht in January of 1945 lost 450,000 men. This is three times as many as two years before in January 1943; that is the month of Stalingrad. I mean, this is a bloodbath without parallel in European and perhaps in human history.

With their enemies now threatening Germany itself, the Nazis might have been expected to withdraw to their country's borders. But Hitler will not allow any retreat.

Hitler often described himself as an "all or nothing" man. He said "When I bet I go for broke." And he believed very much in the triumph, the power of the will, as the film says. Willpower could conquer anything. So he saw retreat, even tactical withdrawal of such that the generals had all been trained to do in their military schools... Tactical withdrawal was a sign of cowardice.

To keep the armed forces fighting, the Nazis resort to their oldest tactic: repression.

It was kept together, they kept fighting partly because of increased terror. So there were increasing numbers of executions for deserting the colors, for cowardice and similar offences. Thousands and thousands of German troops were executed in the last stages of the war for these things.

It's estimated that German courts martial try three million cases during the war. They sentence 30,000 members of the German armed forces to death. The Nazi leadership and the senior German generals shared one big trauma: the defeat of 1918, when it was considered that the morale of the German Army had collapsed. It was considered that the German Imperial Army was too soft. This should not repeat. And this is why they imposed harsh, brutal, murderous measures very often in order to keep up the discipline in the Second World War. Up to 15,000 men were executed after having been court-marshaled for various true or alleged crimes like desertion and so forth and so on. And German soldiers were hence coerced to fight until the very last days of the war.

But it's not just the military that are terrorized. Civilians also face extreme punishments.

If one proceeds from the assumption that Germany was not defeated on the battlefield in the First World War, but lost because morale cracked, because the population didn't support the war, didn't have the backbone to continue the fight to the bitter end, then the logical policy to follow is to force them to do it this time. And to make sure that there's no backsliding. And this is the motivation for the application of terror against one's own population. They used an awful lot of coercion. A lot of people were fairly randomly executed by the Gestapo and the SS. And in the final days, left even hanging from lampposts. But another part is the power of the propaganda. Right to the bitter end, a lot, you see, continues to function in Berlin. The newspapers continue to be printed when the Russians are in the suburbs. There is even a story told about how one Russian commander picked up a telephone in Berlin and rang Goebbels and told him, blasted him with exactly what he thought of him. The point being that the telephone system was still functioning. So it was still a functioning system, including still a functioning propaganda system.

Particularly on the Eastern Front, they felt that they needed to protect Germany against the Bolshevik hordes, as they saw them. And, of course, there's a lot of fear of the Red Army, what they would do to civilians. Probably mostly justified fear.

Certainly, the notion of fighting to the death was linked to the fact that Germans... German soldiers had wreaked havoc on Soviet soil, and they had raped and plundered as they went about their warring. And German soldiers knew that that was going to happen to their wives and children if the Russians got to German soil.

And what's the alternative? To give up? To sue for armistice? After what they'd done, that simply isn't going to be possible. So they, because of the position in which they've put themselves, have no choice but to fight on. And also because of the Allied policy of unconditional surrender. This also gives the Germans a strong motivation to keep fighting, and finally to keep fighting to the very bitter end.

When the Nazis, in their desperation, call up the very last remaining German men as a militia to defend the homeland, about all they can give them is a fancy name: the "People's Storm."

It was this idea of popular vengeance. Actually, it was "Dad's Army." And unfortunately, try as you might with the propaganda, you couldn't disguise how young or how old these men were or the flash of vacancy or weariness. But it was this idea that the army has failed us, the generals had failed us, but the people won't. You can call the people to arms, and they will fight like demons to defend the Reich. So you have that great rally of the Volkssturm, which Goebbels creates in Berlin, the Greater Berlin Volkssturm, which Goebbels turns into one of the final and greatest propaganda events of the Third Reich.

If one takes a look at these young people who then get forced into SS units... teenagers... Or if one takes a look at the contribution of older men who get drafted into the Volkssturm, this people's militia, what they actually do in terms of military action is, at best, useless.

And yet the people's faith in Hitler himself does not collapse.

Even though the Nazi regime was often heavily criticized, often Germans would express that if Hitler only knew about it, he would do something about it. So, the figure of Hitler as kind of different and distinct and the savior of Germany lasted quite a long time, even despite the circumstances.

As the end comes ever closer, Hitler veers between fantasy and fatalism.

In the later stages of the war, it becomes a fantasy world for Hitler. He's having military consultations, moving around on a map armies that really no longer exist.

By now, he distrusts almost all his generals. In 1945, it was obvious that Germany had totally lost the war. However, there were still some generals which often sent out more optimistic messages. A chief example for that is Field Marshal Schörner, or General Schörner, a convinced Nazi who quickly rose from a Lieutenant-Colonel at the start of the war to a Field Marshal by the end of the war. So Schörner was someone Himmler, also Goebbels, always listened to. Himmler and Goebbels were often demoralized by the situation, and then they saw Schörner, and Schörner was saying, "Everything is... It's not too bad here. There's still a chance. I've just warded off the Soviets, and I'm very positive that in the next couple of days, I can launch another offensive, even if it's only a local offensive." This was something that Himmler and Goebbels and Hitler wanted to hear in this situation. But it didn't reflect reality.

Schörner's absurd optimism receives its final, hollow reward. On the 4th of April 1945, Hitler promotes him to Field Marshal. He is the last Nazi military leader of Germany's armed forces. Deep within his bunker, Hitler still finds some time to dream.

He spends a lot of time thinking about, looking at his great architectural plans, projects that he wanted to do after the war. He spends time with his friend and architect Albert Speer, playing around with ideas of what Germania would be like. And he also liked to play around with ideas for recreating Linz in Austria, which is his home town, as a kind of German Florence.

Hitler idealizes Linz. For him, it is the perfect small German town. This is where he lived as a boy with his mother.

He was going to have an art museum there, and, in fact, while Hermann Göring looted art for his own private house, Hitler collected art and stole art to put up in this new Museum of German Art. And he also wanted it to be a center for German music.

But as well as these fantastical dreams, Hitler is also planning a final and very real nightmare for the German people.

Hitler began to feel that the German people were not worthy of him. They let him down. Or they had shown in the Darwinian struggle for the survival of the fittest against other races, they'd shown that they were the weakest race. And so, he issued this infamous Nero order, after the Roman Emperor who said "Let Rome burn," that everything should be destroyed in the path of the oncoming armies. All the facilities should be destroyed, public utilities, factories, the basic necessities of life. "It is a mistake to believe that undestroyed or only temporarily paralyzed industrial and supply installations will be useful to us again after the recapture of lost territories. I therefore command: All military traffic, communications, industrial and supply installations as well as objects within Reich territory that might be used by the enemy in the continuation of his fight, either now or later, are to be destroyed."

It would be a final, historic example of national self-sacrifice.

"This time we're going to go down with honor. This time we're going to go down in flames. This time we're going to fight to the end, and we're going to fight to the end to make a shining example for future generations, who will then want to pick up the torch and start again."

Albert Speer is horrified by the Nero Decree. He claims he does everything he can to frustrate it, despite fanatical Nazis enthusiastically putting the plan into action. But in the end, it is the Allied advance that frustrates Hitler's apocalyptic vision. 20th April 1945. Hitler's 56th birthday. Since he seized power in 1933, this day has been a major national holiday in Nazi Germany. In the past, the streets would be decorated. There would be celebrations, speeches, songs and poems. The military would parade and oaths of loyalty sworn. This year is very different. Soviet forces are closing on Berlin. Hitler last appeared in public a few weeks earlier, congratulating a small group of Hitler Youth on their brave defense of the city. This is his final weapon: boys as young as 12. Now back in his bunker, the Allies have arranged a final birthday present for him: a massive artillery bombardment. And a bombing raid. The final Soviet assault on Berlin has begun. And yet the Nazi system continues to function.

I spoke to a German panzer commander who was awarded the Knight's Cross in the final months of the war. And he received his Knight's Cross on the last day of the war. A German dispatch rider had driven through all the rubble of the town he was defending, and got off his motorbike and handed him the certificates and his medal, the Knight's Cross. So right up until the end, the system is still working.

It's blatantly, patently obvious that Germany is going to lose the war. Hitler is completely aware of this. Then what is the point of continuing? And they do continue. And this is a truly remarkable chapter in German-European-human history. I mean, these people don't stop fighting, even when the Russians are in the garden of the Reich Chancellery.

On April 29th, Soviet troops cross here, at the Moltke Bridge. Their target is the Reichstag, the symbol of German power. The next day, finally succumbing to reality, Hitler commits suicide. He is not the last Nazi to do so. At the end of the war, there's an enormous wave of suicides. Many generals, ministers, regional leaders, high Nazi officials... quite an extraordinary wave of suicides.

Himmler, Bormann and Field Marshal Model are just a few of the senior Nazis and generals who kill themselves. Goebbels, the man more responsible than anyone for creating the Hitler myth, is appointed chancellor of Germany. His only act is to ask the Soviet forces for a ceasefire. They refuse. Goebbels then carries out his final, appalling act.

His wife and he then murdered their children by poison, because as his wife said to her son by an earlier marriage, adult son, in a letter, she could not think that life would be worth living after the fall of the Third Reich, and she didn't want to subject her children to this. It was an absolutely terrible act of ideological vindictiveness, really. And Goebbels and his wife then killed themselves.

From their foundation, the Nazis always said they will lead Germany to world domination. But it was always a fundamentally flawed plan. All it has led to is destruction. Germany is now in ruins. Project Nazi is over.