Vienna, 1910.
Adolf Hitler has no fixed abode.
He's 21 years old and manages to secure a place in this men's hostel.
To earn some money, he sells paintings of postcards to tourists.
Adolf Hitler is of no importance, a nobody,
and yet, 30 years later, he'd be the most powerful man in Germany.
[German spoken audio]
A man prepared to go to any lengths to achieve his goals,
who would plunge the German people and the entire world
into the 20th century's most murderous conflict,
the Second World War.
Six years of war and 65 million dead,
including six million Jews exterminated in death camps,
a wound seared forever into the collective consciousness.
Adolf Hitler is the most bloodstained figure in human history.
The extermination of the Jews went on hour after hour,
without a pause, day and night, sometimes as many as 10,000 people a day.
Hitler is conscious of what he's doing,
and he's conscious of the potential consequences
of his actions.
How, after living that early Bohemian life,
did Adolf Hitler become the architect of the Final Solution?
What path did this son of a customs officer
take to become the head of state?
One man, a passionate historian, has travelled the world
to establish the most exhaustive chronology yet of this journey.
Harold Santner has spent over 20 years picking apart Adolf Hitler's life,
hour by hour.
Where was he during these early years and as he waged war?
Where did he make his most momentous decisions?
Wherever Hitler was, that's where the power was.
He was the very embodiment of an absolute dictator.
More than 70 years after Hitler's death, Harald Sander has even uncovered
numerous inaccuracies in the most serious biographies.
There are around 80 biographies of Hitler,
but there are always mistakes in some of the information.
[German spoken audio]
We went to some of these places where Hitler once lived.
Their present owners exceptionally allowing us access.
Some even agreed to speak for the first time.
From France to Austria via Germany and Belgium,
we went searching for the final traces left by the dictator
to understand the ascent of a monster.
[German spoken audio]
This is the itinerary of Adolf Hitler.
October 1918.
The First World War is coming to an end.
Adolf Hitler has been in the German army for the last four years,
but the young soldier has to leave the front line,
having been partially blinded by a gas attack.
He learns of Germany's defeat from his hospital bed.
Adolf Hitler is devastated.
The defeat of 1918 was an absolute tragedy for him,
particularly traumatizing because he hadn't expected it.
Nobody in the government or the army had said there'd be a defeat.
Everyone thought they would win.
Hitler, like many Germans,
believed that the defeat has been caused by enemies on the inside.
Politicians, but not only them.
The Jews were a perfect scapegoat for the loss of World War One.
He perceives the Jews as the secret guiding hand
behind all of the other political movements,
pushed for the signing of the punitive peace at Versailles.
The year 1919 marked the beginning of his anti-Semitic tirades,
but why did Adolf Hitler bear such hatred for the Jews?
How did he go from hatred to mass murder?
A look back at the life of the man
behind the world's worst ever crime against humanity.
Adolf Hitler was born in Braunau am Inn,
a small town in Upper Austria, near the Bavarian border.
On the second floor of this former end, his mother, Klara Hitler,
gave birth to him on the 20th of April, 1889, at 6:30 in the evening.
His father, a civil servant in customs and excise, was named Alois Hitler.
We accompanied Harold Santner to Hitler's place of birth,
where it all began, where the monster was born.
It's hard to imagine how this little baby grew up to be a mass murderer.
A baby is by nature innocent.
No one could have imagined how Adolf Hitler would turn out.
This will probably be the last ever film of Hitler's birthplace.
The government will demolish the building to obliterate all trace of the dictator.
Shortly after his birth, the Hitler family moved into this building
a short distance up the road.
Hitler was only a few weeks old.
On the 2nd of May 1895,
his father was promoted to the post of Inspector of Customs in Linz.
At the age of six, Adolf Hitler started going
to this small school in Fischlham, to the southwest of Linz.
The dictator would return here in triumph on the 12th of June, 1939.
This color film was shot by Eva Braun, later to become his wife.
Back in his old school, he was quite moved.
He let these feelings from his childhood well up,
because his primary schooling had been good,
unlike his later schooling, which was less satisfactory.
Through these images, Hitler presented himself to the Germans
as a model pupil destined to have a brilliant political career.
Pure propaganda, because the reality had been very different.
On the whole, Hitler had been a poor student,
only doing well in certain subjects that he liked.
In the end, he left school without any qualifications.
He hated school.
He hated his teachers, and his teachers described him as lazy.
While Adolf Hitler showed little interest in school,
he enjoyed playing in the fields, especially at war,
in which he took the lead role.
He was a born leader who liked to be in charge
and boss his little friends around.
What he liked most of all was drawing.
He loved drawing and his family was very admiring of his efforts.
At the age of 13 or 14, he decided that he was going to be an artist, a painter.
However, his chosen vocation as an artist was not at all to his father's liking.
Alois Hitler wanted his son to follow in his footsteps
and become a civil servant like him.
When his father, a lawyer, found out that his son preferred drawing,
he became aggressive and violent, regularly beating his son.
The clearest testimony is that of his sister Paola,
who said he often got a beating,
but forced himself to remain stoic as he took the blows,
neither crying nor begging.
In 1903, a tragic event gave him the chance
to try to realize his dream.
His father died.
Hitler was 13 years old.
Henceforth, nothing and no one could stand in his way.
In September 1907, just after turning 18,
Hitler decided to leave the province of Linz to go to the capital, Vienna.
Once there, Hitler presented himself for the entrance exam
for the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts.
The selection was very strict.
The selection at the Academy has always been strict
and remains strict to this day.
Of the 113 applicants, only 28 were accepted.
Adolf Hitler had no qualifications, but this did not put him off.
Hitler entered the exam fully expecting to be selected.
If there's one thing that characterized him throughout his life
is that he never doubted his own talent.
He was always sure that his talent would be recognized.
Here are some of his drawings from that time.
However, Hitler was rejected.
His lack of originality was held against him, but not only that.
Hitler didn't do any preparation work,
thinking his inspiration alone would be enough to win over the examiners.
We now know that he failed the entrance for the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts twice.
Adolf Hitler found this rejection hard to stomach.
In his book Mein Kampf, written years later,
he described this day as the worst moment of his life.
It was a trauma he spoke about to no one.
He was ashamed and humiliated at his failure
and did not want to have to talk about it.
From November 1907, Hitler went back regularly to Linz.
Only two months after his rejection by the Academy of Fine Arts,
he found out that his mother was dying.
Clara Hitler had breast cancer.
She was being treated by a Doctor Bloch, who was Jewish.
He was distraught.
For as much as he'd hated his father, he absolutely adored his mother.
His mother succumbing to this disease marked him for life.
In this building in the center of Linz,
Hitler spent days on end at his mother's bedside.
Harold Santner only managed to locate it after years of research.
For the first time, its owner has allowed members of the foreign media inside.
Here we are in Klara Hitler's bedroom.
Her bed was somewhere around here.
What we now know is that once his mother was bedridden,
Hitler placed his own bed next to hers
to be there all night to tend to her in case she'd needed anything.
Klara Hitler passed away in this room on the 21st of December, 1907,
at 2 o'clock in the morning.
Adolf Hitler drew her one last time on her deathbed.
His mother was all the world to him.
You could say his mother was the only woman
he ever loved with a deep, genuine love.
Right up to his death, he carried a photo of her in his wallet.
On the day of the funeral,
the young Hitler warmly thanked Doctor Bloch for his care
and promised him his eternal gratitude.
Even though his anti-Semitic policies caused the death of millions of Jews
years later, he kept his word.
As Führer, Hitler spared the doctor's life,
letting him escape to the United States.
He used an expression for Bloch that he never used for anyone else.
Edler Jude, or noble Jew,
excluding him from the category in which he placed all other Jews.
Adolf Hitler was crushed by the loss of his mother.
Back in Vienna, he lived in this building at Stumpergasse 31,
a location rediscovered by Harold Santner.
Many documentaries erroneously claimed
that he lived in the yellow building next door,
false information persistently peddled by the Third Reich
and taken unchecked, at face value by the media ever since.
I suppose at the time they wanted to show
a more attractive building, the one next door,
because they didn't want people to know that, in fact,
Hitler had lived in a bit of a dump.
The young Hitler was living off the money left him by his mother,
and was sinking gradually into depression.
He was living a bohemian life.
He wasn't working, wasn't training for anything, wasn't studying.
He was a young man who rarely got up before noon.
He was still like that even after he became chancellor.
Hitler lived off this money until the summer of 1909,
when he could no longer pay his rent and found himself out on the street.
Some nights he slept on public benches,
until the winter came, when he took refuge in homeless shelters.
By day, he'd queue up at this convent, where the nuns ran a soup kitchen.
At the age of 20, Adolf Hitler was homeless.
He had nothing, he was a nobody, he had no future.
In 1910, he moved into this men's hostel,
which is now a very modern retirement home.
He scraped a living by selling paintings he did of postcards to tourists.
This marginal life went on for several years,
but in Hitler's mind, none of this was his fault.
He simmered with rage against the elite.
They alone were responsible for the situation he found himself in.
The elite were shortsighted,
because they couldn't see the genius of the young Adolf.
This is something we notice here, and it's a definite character trait.
He never questioned himself.
His enemies among the Austrian elite were clearly identified by Hitler.
The Jews.
Then, they held important positions
in the economic and cultural life of Vienna.
In 1913, Vienna was one of the most virulently anti-Semitic cities in Europe.
Hitler has good reason
to place the development of his anti-Semitism in Vienna.
Vienna had a large Jewish population.
Nearly 10% of the city's population was Jewish.
Hitler claimed in Mein Kampf
that it was at this time that his anti-Semitism developed,
but historians today are doubtful about some of his autobiographical claims.
He lied about his life up to that point.
He lied about having no qualifications,
he lied about having never had a job.
No one knew.
Mein Kampf is a piece of propaganda.
It's a fictional autobiography,
the purpose of which was to create the Adolf Hitler myth.
On August 1st, 1914, Germany declared war on Russia.
This was the beginning of the First World War.
Hitler was an Austrian national,
but he volunteered to enlist in the German Army.
Hitler considered himself an Austrian and a German.
He thought they should form one nation,
and that all the Germanic people should live under the same roof.
He saw this conflict as an opportunity to change his miserable fate.
At a large patriotic gathering at Odeonsplatz,
an historic square in Munich,
Hitler was bursting with enthusiasm, as this photograph shows.
On this photo,
he's brimming over with enthusiasm, almost in a trance.
This war was his chance to forge an identity for himself.
From the 17th of March 1915, his regiment fought
in the trenches near Fromelles, a small village in northern France.
For a year now, Adolf Hitler had been a courier
in the 16th Regiment of the Bavarian Infantry.
This is the bunker from which he'd ensure communications
between the battalions on the front and the staff headquarters
delivering messages.
This is an unprecedented find revealed by our research.
Adolf Hitler's role was not particularly glorious,
but was all the same, essential and decidedly dangerous.
Objectively speaking, Hitler was a very good soldier.
He conscientiously obeyed orders.
His superiors knew they could always count on him.
The rest of the time,
Hitler would sometimes stay in this house in Fournes en Weppes,
a village a few kilometers from the front.
In all, he would remain on French soil for about a year and a half.
All of a sudden, Hitler was enlisted, institutionalized, and taken care of.
He had no worries about money or getting enough to eat.
He'd found a place for himself in the army, and he was happy there.
There was meaning to his life.
Here he is with his comrades.
His face is thinner, with a long mustache.
He is unrecognizable as the Hitler we know.
His army companions were his new family.
There was no longer anyone close to him,
and he got on well with his new comrades.
They described him as a solitary and not very sociable young man,
but they all acknowledged his courage and determination.
In December 1914, he was made a corporal
and was decorated with an Iron Cross Class two,
his first ever accolade and something he'd wear for the rest of his life.
His Iron Cross in 1914 was the first social distinction he'd ever had.
It was very important to a young man of 25 who had hitherto never achieved anything.
Hitler was incredibly proud of it.
When Germany lost the First World War, the young soldier's life fell apart.
He did all he could to stay in the army, having no wish to leave it.
He decided to stay on in the army
because he had no home to go to, and he needed an income.
In February 1919, Munich was in the hands of the revolutionary far left.
The Army top brass was afraid that Bolshevik movements like this
would end up contaminating the troops.
It was in this context that Karl Maier,
the head of the intelligence service, urgently recruited propaganda agents
whose job was to spread the right ideology among the troops.
Hitler was a perfect candidate.
He had been known during the war
for holding forth at great length to his comrades.
He was incapable of engaging in a two-way discussion,
but he could talk and talk and talk.
It was thought he could uphold the political morale of the troops
and lead them along the right path of nationalism.
Hitler was sent on the first series of training courses
for anti-Bolshevik instructors held at the University of Munich.
The lectures in economy delivered by a certain Gottfried Feder,
particularly held his interest.
They were based on virulent anti-Semitism and had a powerful influence on Hitler.
All of this helped Hitler pieced together his own doctrine,
which was a lot more radical and unequivocal than Feder's.
By August 1919, his hatred of the Jews had become an obsession,
and he expressed it in a letter of four typed pages sent to a soldier.
This is the very letter which we were able to track down in the United States.
It's the first anti-Semitic text by Hitler
containing almost the entire future Nazi doctrine,
expressing as it does his opinion on the Jewish question.
They're parasites sucking the lifeblood of all the peoples on earth,
being incapable of founding their own state
or living off their own work and labor like everyone else.
They're a parasite with a capital P.
At the end of the letter, he couldn't be any more explicit.
The final objective, the goal to aim for, must be the removal of the Jews.
This was the first time Hitler revealed what would later be the driving force
of his anti-Semitic actions.
The idea that the state
must organize the anti-Semitism and rid the German territory,
the German society, once and for all, of all citizens of Jewish ancestry.
His anti-Semitism had become the central pillar of his thinking.
Adolf Hitler was at the time just a lowly Army NCO,
but the year 1919 would be a turning point in his ascent.
In September 1919, in a Munich beer hall,
Adolf Hitler met Anton Drexler, leader of the DAP,
the German Workers Party,
a small Bavarian far right group, both ultra nationalist and anti-Semitic.
The program called for the unification of all Germans in a single state.
It called for the denaturalization of Jewish citizens of Germany.
It was a decisive encounter.
A few days later, Hitler decided to join the party.
Karl Maier, his benefactor in the army,
encouraged him to become a card-carrying member.
To this end, he allocated Hitler secret funds,
making him henceforth a full time propagandist.
Adolf Hitler's political career was launched.
On October 16th, 1919,
he gave his first speech to the members of the German Workers Party
in this beer hall in the center of Munich, The hofbraukeller.
That evening, he spoke in front of a hundred or so people,
fascinating them with his powers of oratory.
[German spoken audio]
His performance was cheered.
Saying they were fascinated isn't just a figure of speech.
It was a sort of enchantment.
He was getting some recognition.
That was a very positive thing for him and it increased his confidence.
This speech marked the beginning of a long, successful period,
the beginning of his political ascent.
Very soon, Adolf Hitler became the star speaker of the DAP,
which was later renamed the NSDAP,
the Nationalist Socialist German Workers Party.
Faced with such popularity,
Hitler started working on his speeches like a professional actor,
preparing them down to the smallest detail.
He's strength is above all as a speaker, as a powerful speaker, very energetic.
[German spoken audio]
Unlike modern politicians, he writes all his own speeches.
[German spoken audio]
He worked on the intonations of his voice, on his gestures,
on the rhythm of his speeches.
Two years later, one evening in February 1921,
the Circus Krone,
one of the biggest venues in Munich, was full to bursting.
Almost 6,000 people had come to listen to Adolf Hitler and cheer.
[German spoken audio]
His speeches were radical,
but the militants relating to his words were all won over.
[German spoken audio]
He was expressing what many didn't dare say,
that they had to tear up the Treaty of Versailles,
that democracy was not a political regime suited to Germany,
and that the Jews were responsible for all that.
People liked hearing this at the time,
because, economically, Germany was in a really bad way.
[German spoken audio]
These speeches helped the party to constantly attract new members.
From 200 at the end of 1919 to 3,300 in August 1921,
finally reaching 55,000 people by the end of 1923.
This popularity was a consecration for Hitler.
In 1921, the former homeless layabout became the leader of the Nazi Party.
His ambition was now huge.
He wanted to become the leader of an entire nation.
In the 1920s, Adolf Hitler lived in this apartment
on the Thierschstrasse in Munich.
A harmless looking location,
but in reality a place symbolic of his political rise to power.
We tracked down this apartment in the center of Munich.
Its present-day owner agreed to let us in, and for the first time,
she agreed to speak.
I heard that the neighbors were frightened every time they opened the front door.
They didn't want to go past his apartment,
as they thought they might be there when there was an attempt on his life.
By some tragic or ironic coincidence, the owner of the building was Jewish.
His name was Hugo Erlanger.
He owned a men's clothing shop on the ground floor.
He said that when he passed Hitler on the stairs,
he was perfectly pleasant to him.
The two men would cross paths regularly.
Erlanger would have no inkling he would be one of the many victims
of Hitler's anti-Semitic policies 13 years later.
One month after Hitler became chancellor, Erlanger's building was forcibly sold.
In 1938, Hugo Erlanger was sent to Dachau concentration camp.
An exception to the general rule,
he left safe and sound only after a month's detention.
He survived World War Two,
and had some difficulty getting back his apartment house.
He finally did in 1949.
In 1922, Hitler enjoyed a meteoric political rise.
He increased the meetings in beer halls, gatherings which were not without risk.
The party decided to recruit 300 musclemen to secure its protection against attack.
One of the leaders was Ernst Röhm.
This paramilitary organization was named the SA,
for Sturmabteilung or Assault Division and mainly consisted of former soldiers.
Later on, the S.A. would take on political opponents,
fighting them in the street.
They were basically a bunch of thugs.
These were the men who would help him grab power several years later.
Not a week went by without the press printing something about the Nazi Party.
Newspapers were full of their excesses,
so Hitler decided to haul himself to the top through violence.
He would carry out a putsch.
He was very inspired by Mussolini's March on Rome,
and with the prevailing widespread poverty and hyperinflation,
he judged the moment right to seize power in Munich.
On November 8th, 1923,
the Nazi leader took hostage members of the Bavarian government
who were having a meeting in a beer hall in Munich.
He was confident that,
with the support of his 2,000 SA men, he could seize power.
Hitler strode inside
and after firing his pistol at the ceiling to silence the crowd, said,
"The German revolution has begun."
That ensued negotiations between Hitler and the triumvirate governing Bavaria,
and an agreement was reached that they should march on Berlin.
The putsch had apparently got off to a good start,
but the Bavarian authorities dropped their support
for its initiators, Hitler and General Ludendorff.
The next morning,
the two men organized a protest march on the Bavarian Defense Ministry.
Popular support failed to materialize
and Hitler had underestimated the forces of law and order.
They clashed with the police and there was gunfire.
In the end,
the police sprayed the leaders of the demonstration with bullets,
killing many.
Hitler's bodyguard jumped in front of him and was hit by 11 bullets.
Hitler would certainly have been killed if not for his intervention.
He escaped with a minor wound to his left shoulder.
Adult Hitler was miraculously lucky.
Throughout his life, the dictator escaped nearly 11 attempts on his life.
The last of these took place during the war on the 20th of July 1944,
in his headquarters in Poland,
but once again, Hitler emerged unscathed
and he was sure he knew why.
He was convinced that he was protected by God,
and each attempt he survived merely reinforced this conviction.
After the failed putsch attempt, Hitler fled.
He was taken by car to the town of Uffing am Staffelsee,
an hour's drive from Munich.
Once there, they hid the car in the forest and continued on foot.
He arrived about seven at night,
taking refuge in a house owned by the Hanfstaengl couple.
This was one of Harold Sander's most important discoveries.
Hitler thought he was safe here
because the Austrian border was not far away.
However, he was wrong.
He was found two days later by the police.
The police showed up in front of the building on November 11th, 1923.
Hitler knew it was all over, he said,
"This is it, I'd rather die than get arrested by those pigs."
He picked up his revolver and held it to his head.
Helene Hanfstaengl took it out of his hand, thereby saving his life.
Wearing pajamas and a blue dressing gown,
he was arrested on the 11th of November,1923.
Hitler believed this was the end of the Nazi Party and his leadership.
In 1924, he, Ernest Röhm and General Ludendorff
went on trial in Munich for treason.
The head of the Nazi Party, used the trial as a platform
for presenting his defeat as a victory
and himself as the Savior of the Fatherland.
Hitler always rose to the occasion before an audience,
and he realized that some of the judges were sympathetic to his cause.
All of them were serving the Republic reluctantly.
With the press reporting his speeches during the trial,
Hitler used it as a medium of propaganda.
It was a plan that worked to perfection.
Very soon he became the star of the trial.
In the end, Hitler was sentenced to five years in Landsberg Prison,
but his performances had made him famous throughout the whole of Germany.
This was where Hitler began his period of incarceration
in altogether quite pleasant conditions.
Landsberg was a five star prison.
The leader of the Nazi Party received gift packages from all over Germany.
He was known as the Prisoner of Honor,
was shown respect, and could have visitors whenever he wished.
At the time, Bavaria was very right wing.
The government was very indulgent with its prisoner.
A communist prisoner wouldn't have enjoyed the same conditions.
Things would have been a lot tougher.
Once in prison, Hitler had time on his hands.
He decided to put this to good use,
synthesizing his ideas into a political program.
With the help of fellow prisoner Rudolf Hess, the future Deputy Führer,
he wrote Mein Kampf, My Struggle,
a mostly romanticized autobiography in which he was presented as a hero.
It was his only way of continuing to express himself freely from his cell.
In his book, Hitler developed his ultra nationalistic arguments,
insisting on the superiority of the Germanic race.
In his opinion, Jews were subhumans who had to be eliminated.
In Mein Kampf, the Jews are parasites, germs, vermin.
They're totally useless on this earth and are in fact positively harmful.
There was nothing new about anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria,
but it reached its peak with Hitler.
In Mein Kampf, Hitler uses the word eradicate to evoke the sort of fate
he envisages for the Jews.
This is clearly expressed in German.
It's a synonym for destroy and kill.
His theory of the primacy of the Aryan race would determine his foreign policy.
Germany would first have to reunite all countries with a Germanic population.
Then it would expand into Russia, after having destroyed the French army.
In those few lines,
he seemed to have predicted the Second World War.
The book is a warning that if Germans don't take these steps,
the German nation will become extinct.
Henceforth, Hitler was a changed man with a new attitude.
Once out of prison, he was convinced that he was the savior of the nation.
On December 20th, 1924, Adolf Hitler was released from prison
after completing only 13 months of his sentence.
Fired up anew, he decided to set about conquering Germany again,
but this time he was going to do so using the democratic process.
It appeared obvious to him
that he could use democracy as a means to achieve his ends,
and then get rid of it.
On October 5th, 1929, Hitler left his lodgings on Thierschstrasse
and moved into this luxurious apartment on Munich's Prinzregentenplatz.
Having lived in a flat measuring 12 square meters,
and then one of 50 square meters,
he was now living in a 400 square meter, nine room apartment.
Today it's a police station.
He'd never have come up so far
without the support of some major German fortunes.
Hitler could afford the apartment
thanks to increasingly large donations from his partisans
and certain well-off figures.
He was also receiving royalties from his book Mein Kampf.
Thanks to his financial backers, he now had at his disposal
considerable funds with which to organize a massive electoral campaign.
This was a first in Germany.
The leader of the Nazi Party traveled only by plane,
enabling him to hold up to four rallies per day.
Hitler became a major political player, followed everywhere by the German media.
Hitler was the first politician to use the media in a deliberate way
He recorded his speeches on records and sold them.
He was the first politician
to charge an entrance fee for coming and listening to him speak.
He used the proceeds to finance his party.
In his speeches,
Adolf Hitler heaped promise after promise on his potential electors
with grand, eloquent slogans.
We will make Germany great, we will get Germany back to work,
when there's 37% unemployed.
We're going to revise the Treaty of Versailles.
He made it clear that they would ban the other 32 political parties in Germany,
but even this didn't seem to shock the German public much.
While the Nazi Party was only pulling 3% of the vote in the late 1920s,
this rose to 20% in 1930, and then on the 31st of July 1932,
the Nazis became the largest party in parliament.
None of this would have happened if not for the Great Depression of 1929.
Nearly 7 million Germans were unemployed while the country was heavily in debt,
struggling to pay its reparation for the First World War.
It was easy to stir up the German people's bitterness about that defeat.
My father told me that he voted for Hitler because the poverty was too much to bear.
Along came this party, which promised bread and work.
Therefore, he joined them.
On January 30th, 1933, Adolf Hitler achieved his goal.
He was made chancellor.
The little troublemaker from Bavaria
had become the most powerful man in Germany.
His remaining obstacle was the president of the Reich,
Paul von Hindenburg.
[German spoken audio]
Once in power, Hitler lost no time establishing a dictatorship.
It all began on February 28th, 1933,
with an arson attack on the Reichstag, the German parliament.
Exactly how it started is still a matter of conjecture.
What we know for sure is that Hitler and the Nazis used it to their ends,
claiming it was a communist plot.
They used it as a pretext for eliminating communists.
Not only did they start arresting communists after the Reichstag fire,
but they forced Hindenburg to sign a decree
suspending key civil liberties, saying that it was only temporary.
In fact, the decree remained in force in one form or another
until May 8th, 1945.
Hitler didn't stop there.
He dismantled the institutions of the Republic.
The press was censored, and on the 24th of March 1933,
he had the Enabling Act passed whereby the cabinet, in effect, Hitler,
could enact laws for four years without involving Parliament.
From that point on, it was a totalitarian regime.
In the following months, all other parties were either dissolved
or forced to commit harakiri.
Except for the Nazi Party.
At the same time, the first concentration camp
opened its gates at Dachau,
taking in political opponents of the regime.
Once securely in power, Hitler had just one idea in mind,
making Germany the greatest nation of all time.
He turned the country into one huge work site,
building railways and highways.
The initial need was to get the economy back on its feet,
providing the unemployed with jobs
and then showing that Nazism wasn't some medieval regime,
but the embodiment of modernity and German technological genius.
The public works were being carried out for military ends.
The highways would help the Army and its tanks
to move swiftly around the country.
Because the dictator's ultimate goal was none other than to wage war.
When Hitler comes to power, he immediately plans for a war.
He tells the army generals to get their support,
that he's going to have a new European war.
First, he had to get rid of the SA,
the assault divisions which formed a state within the state
advocating permanent revolution.
The SA's ambition was ultimately to form the top brass
of the new German Army.
They wanted to infiltrate the military,
but the traditional officers were not well disposed
to making room for these lower-class upstarts.
The Führer decided, therefore, to sacrifice the SA,
because without the army's support,
he could see his projects for war coming to nothing.
This is the town of Bad Wiessee.
On the 30th of June 1934,
Hitler summoned around a hundred S.A. leaders to this hotel.
They thought they were attending a conference
and have a few days holiday.
Far from it.
Hitler had hatched a machiavellian plan.
Hitler had set up a trap for the SA chiefs and they were all caught in it.
Hitler wanted to get rid of all of them over the coming days.
In place, he decided to deal personally with Ernst Röhm, the head of the SA,
one of very few people on close personal terms with him.
It was 6:45 in the morning when Hitler came up these steps,
pistol in hand, and went toward Ernst Röhm's room.
He opened the door, pointed his gun at him, and said:
"Röhm, you're under arrest."
Röhm was hauled away there and then by Hitler's personal bodyguard,
along with all the other SA leaders, on the same floor of the hotel.
The arrests were heavy handed and Hitler had taken every precaution
in case things got violent.
I remember my father telling me that the village carpenter was brought in
to screw all the tables and benches to the floor,
so they couldn't be thrown around.
They thought there'd be a big fight.
In the following days,
all the SA chiefs were murdered in cold blood in Munich and Berlin.
Ernst Röhm himself was executed in his cell on the 2nd of July, 1934.
This will probably be the last ever film of Hotel Hanselbauer.
It's due to be demolished in a few months,
taking with it the bloody history of the night of the Long Knives.
Having rid himself of the SA,
the dictator had a free hand to rule the country,
when, just a month later, Paul von Hindenburg died.
The president of the Reich alone had had the power to dismiss him.
Hitler took on the functions of the president,
meaning that he now possessed ultimate power
and was head of the armed forces.
Henceforth, his main goal was to rearm Germany
in preparation for a new war.
The dictator had been dreaming of a revenge since the defeat of 1918.
Hitler was obsessed with war.
It was the basis of his political program,
but it was also a value all by itself.
As far as he was concerned,
Germany could only know happiness through military success.
He hid his warmongering intentions from the whole world.
The German Navy Museum claimed the dictator
was visiting a U-boat there on the 28th of September, 1935.
We now know, however, that the photo had been taken a month earlier.
In fact, on the 28th of September he was at the Krupp AG in the Ruhr region.
The industrial group was a producer of steel,
but above all, of weapons.
Hitler visited several times in total secrecy,
because the Treaty of Versailles banned any rearming of the country.
Just one example among many of the Führer's intentions
to keep what he was planning hidden.
A year later, he decided it was time to begin hostilities.
The first decisive step was on the 7th of March, 1936,
when he sent military forces into the Rhineland,
a demilitarized German region since the defeat of 1918.
In doing so, he was taking a considerable risk.
By doing this, he was violating the Treaty of Versailles,
thereby putting himself in danger of a military intervention
by the treaty's signatories.
However, neither France nor Great Britain reacted.
A first victory for the Führer,
whom nothing appeared to divert from his goals.
That is greeted with absolute hysteria by Hitler's supporters.
He's got back control of the country,
he's got control back of its borders in a military sense.
The consecration came for Hitler on the 12th of March 1938,
with the Anschluss, Germany's annexation of Austria.
His dream of uniting the German speaking nations
had become a reality.
In 1938, in his Eagle's Nest hideaway in Bavaria,
the dictator was already drawing up plans for future conquests.
After Austria, his heart was set next on Czechoslovakia.
Adolf Hitler dreamt of war because it echoed
the battle raging inside him.
The title of his book, Mein Kampf,
My Struggle or My Fight, shows how combat was something inherent in his personality.
It was always in Hitler's plans
to kill hundreds of thousands, even millions of people.
Even the deaths of Germans don't really touch Hitler.
They are a part of his view of the history of human struggle.
On September 1st, 1939, he invaded Poland,
thereby plunging the world into the greatest armed conflict of history,
humanity's darkest period.
Previously on Hitler the Itinerary.
It's hard to imagine how this little baby grew up to be a mass murderer.
Objectively speaking, Hitler was a very good soldier.
His superiors knew they could always count on him.
Hitler's strength, above all, is speaking.
He was a powerful speaker, very energetic.
Unlike modern politicians, he writes all his own speeches.
Berlin, January 30th, 1933,
Adolf Hitler has become the most powerful man in Germany,
a dictator who would plunge the German people and the entire world
into the 20th century's most murderous conflict,
the Second World War.
Hitler piled on victory after victory after seizing power,
which in itself was a victory over the German people and the planet.
It was only Hitler who wanted war.
Neither Goering, nor Goebbels, nor the generals wanted war.
Hitler was convinced that he was a military genius.
How did this man with no military training manage to conquer the whole of Europe?
Why was he considered the greatest war leader of all time?
How did this former homeless layabout become the architect
of the Final Solution?
One man, a passionate historian,
has traveled the world to establish the most exhaustive chronology
yet of this journey.
Harald Sandner has spent over 20 years picking apart Adolf Hitler's life,
hour by hour.
Where was he during these early years and as he waged war?
Where did he make his most momentous decisions?
Wherever Hitler was, that's where the power was.
He was the very embodiment of an absolute dictator.
More than 70 years after Hitler's death,
Harald Sandner has uncovered numerous inaccuracies,
even in the most serious published works.
There are something like 80 biographies of Hitler
but there are always mistakes in some of the information.
From France to Austria via Germany and Belgium,
we went searching for the final traces left by the dictator
to understand the journey of a war leader.
This is the itinerary of Adolf Hitler.
Berlin, April 30th, 1945,
Adolf Hitler decides to commit suicide.
He has learned that the Russians are fast approaching the Reich Chancellery.
His troops can only hold them off for another 24 hours.
Hitler knows that he's lost the war.
Life had no meaning for him once he'd lost the war.
He did not want to stand trial.
He didn't want to be humiliated.
At about midday,
the dictator bade farewell to his closest collaborators
and retired to this room,
his office in the Führerbunker with his wife, Eva Hitler.
The couple committed suicide at 3:30 p.m.
Eva took poison,
while Hitler made doubly sure by biting into a capsule of poison
as well as shooting himself.
His doctor had advised him to do this to be sure of killing himself.
The dictator's death almost immediately brought an end to the hostilities.
Germany surrendered on May 8th, 1945,
a week after the suicide of the man who had dragged Europe and the world
into an unprecedented cataclysm.
It was a great relief.
Nazism died with him, just as it had been born with him.
Hitler's suicide meant for Jews who were still in German captivity
an end to their persecution and suffering.
How could such atrocities have been allowed to go on
for so many years?
Could the Second World War have been avoided?
To understand its origins,
we must go back to a time when Hitler still pretended he wanted peace.
On September 29th, 1938,
it was in this building in the center of Munich
that the German dictator Adolf Hitler received several heads of state:
The Italian leader Benito Mussolini, French Prime Minister Édouard Daladier,
and British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain.
It was a decisive encounter for international relations.
After annexing Austria to the German Reich in 1938,
Hitler now wanted Sudetenland,
the northwestern part of Czechoslovakia.
He was determined to get it, whatever the opposition.
Hitler wanted to take back all territories with German speaking people.
He thought that wherever German was spoken was German territory.
It was on the first floor of this building that negotiations took place
through the night of the 29th to the 30th of September, 1938.
We returned to this historical setting with the historian Harald Sandner.
It was 1:50 in the morning when the dictator got what he wanted.
Here we are in Hitler's personal office of the Führerbau in Munich.
This is the exact spot where the table stood
on which the so-called Munich Agreement was signed.
The treaty, in effect, sacrificed part of Czechoslovakia.
In exchange,
the dictator committed himself to not invading the rest of that country.
In the days that followed, around 3.5 million Czechs
found themselves subject of the German state.
Czechoslovakia wasn't consulted and didn't have any representatives.
By abandoning Sudetenland,
France and Great Britain thought they'd avoided the worst.
Both were firmly opposed to the prospect of another war.
Chamberlain went back to London, waiving his slip of paper at the airport.
He reported that he'd negotiated with Hitler
and that now there would be peace.
He genuinely believed he'd secured peace for the coming years.
Little did he suspect the Führer's true intentions.
For while his generals thought that pulling off
such a victory without bloodshed was a stroke of genius,
Hitler had far greater ambitions.
Hitler himself would have said that the British and French
had deprived him of the war he wanted a start in September 1938.
He was determined to have this war.
Two days later,
German troops marched into Sudetenland without encountering any resistance.
The annexation becoming known as the Flower War.
Another success for the Führer, whose popularity was at its peak.
So far he'd not put a foot wrong
and was doing exactly what he wanted: ruling foreign rulers.
While he waited to conquer France and the rest of Eastern Europe,
Hitler sowed terror in his own country.
This was a different kind of war, the progressive exclusion of German Jews.
During Kristallnacht,
the Night of Broken Glass, the 9th to 10th November 1938,
thousands of synagogues and Jewish shops were sacked and destroyed.
Hitler wanted to force the Jews to emigrate.
Many were rounded up and murdered.
Thirty thousand Jewish men were arrested and put in concentration camps,
and only released when they promise to emigrate.
Hitler had thought the Jews as a subversive element.
That night, Nazi Germany crossed a line
in its implementation of antisemitic policies.
In a speech given before the Reichstag on the 30th of January 1939,
Adolf Hitler predicted the extermination of the Jews of Europe
in the event of a new world war,
a morbid prophecy
which provoked no reaction from the German people.
Even if, with indulgence,
one could interpret it as merely an expulsion plan,
it's clear he was talking about a planned genocide.
With this speech, the foundations of the Holocaust had been laid.
The face of Germany changed.
Hitler made his most important decisions at Obersalzberg,
the retreat in the Bavarian Alps.
The Berghof became the dictator's secondary residence.
It was up here in the mountains that Hitler prepared his war.
Hitler spent about a quarter of his reign in Obersalzberg.
Hitler claim to have been renting this house from 1928.
In fact, it was a year earlier.
The reasons for the lie were purely fiscal.
Even much later, he supplied false information.
He said he'd spent very little time in Obersalzberg
but that was not the case.
The Berghof was his favourite residence.
Once in power,
he made it a second chancellery after Berlin.
He chose Obersalzberg as a seat of government
because it had a strategic significance in establishing his power.
He could retire there to be alone, yes,
but he could also receive whomever he wanted there,
including important visitors
using the setting to stage manage his foreign policy.
The Nazi Party were masters of spin.
Every day, thousands of visitors gathered to get a glimpse of the dictator.
He would devote hours of his time to this, always appearing relaxed and smiling.
It was a major propaganda operation.
The message put across by these images in Obersalzberg
is that of Hitler's closeness to the people.
He was a chancellor of the people, that's what they called him,
and who could be a chancellor of the people without the people.
Yet for six years, Hitler had been keeping a secret from the German people.
His 25 year old mistress,
her name was Eva Braun,
and only those closest to Hitler knew of her existence.
He had this idea
that his political mission wouldn't allow him to be married.
He presented himself as a sort of soldier monk,
a prophet committed to his mission, that wouldn't fit with being married.
With a camera given to her by the dictator,
she shot color film of their private life.
On film, Eva Brown appears happy and fulfilled.
However, in reality, the young woman was suffering.
She twice tried to take her own life.
These suicide attempts have to be seen as cries for help.
They would also explain her frequent absences.
Although it's hard to tell at this distance.
Even when Hitler was with her,
there was a relatively big distance between them.
In the mountains of Obersalzberg,
Hitler was distant because he had other things on his mind,
such as getting ready for war.
After breaking the Munich Agreement by invading the rest of Czechoslovakia,
he signed a non-aggression pact with Stalin
in case he were to invade Poland.
It was now August 1939.
This was the last peaceful summer
that Europe and the world would know for many years.
On September 1st, 1939, Hitler launched the invasion of Poland.
Two thousand and five hundred tanks and 1300 planes
provided support for a million and a half ground troops.
The dictator was determined even though many of his entourage opposed this move.
In fact, it was only Hitler who wanted war.
Neither Goering nor Goebbels, nor the generals wanted war.
Hitler's mistake here was in thinking that even if he invaded Poland,
the British and French still would not react.
However, on September 3rd, 1939,
Paris and London declared war on Germany.
It was now a world war.
Immediately after this, the dictator took his personal train to the front line.
He followed the operations from the training camp at Gross-Born
in Poland.
He was fascinated by the armed combat going on right before his eyes.
Hitler felt a need to be right where the action was.
Hitler never stayed in the same place.
He liked to get out and meet people.
He didn't like to sleep in the same place two nights in a row.
He was always going to the front line and putting his life in danger.
He didn't care.
He was sure that God would protect him, that nothing could happen to him.
Only six weeks after hostilities began, Warsaw was surrounded.
Poland had been crushed in Hitler's blitzkrieg or lightning war.
The day of the capitulation,
Hitler divided up the territory between himself and Stalin,
his ideological enemy.
To celebrate its victory,
the German army paraded through the streets of Warsaw.
Hitler was convinced, after the swift and easy victory in Poland
that he was a military genius gifted with intuition.
He was always right, so if anyone disagreed,
they were necessarily wrong.
This time, Hitler had let his generals run the campaign.
However, from now on, he'd take charge of operations himself.
Around 3 million Jews were now in Nazi hands.
In defeated Poland, they were rounded up and crammed into enormous ghettos.
The more territory the Nazis took in Eastern Europe,
the more they were confronted with Jewish populations.
This only confirmed their conviction that a systematic deportation
and then extermination of these Jews was necessary.
The everyday living conditions were inhuman.
They were controlled, brutalized, starved and killed.
The way in which Hitler treats the Jewish population of Poland.
Hunger and epidemics killed off thousands of them.
By 1940, 1941, in the big ghettos,
as many as 1,000 people were dying each month.
At the same time, Hitler was extending his rule westward.
In April 1940, he invaded Norway and then Denmark.
He also set out the attack strategy for France,
even though he had no military experience.
Things didn't go as planned, however.
He postponed the invasion of France 29 times.
The reason France wasn't invaded earlier is very simple: the weather.
The weather was an important factor for Hitler
because air support was used in a massive way for the first time
in this new lightning war.
However, tanks would also play an important role.
Building them and training their crews held up the beginning of the offensive.
In the end, Hitler decided to launch the attack on France on May 10th, 1940.
As with Poland, this offensive began with a massive air engagement.
Then the Wehrmacht crushed the French troops in just a few days.
The German army was like an unstoppable steamroller
with modern weapons,
with bold tactics
and with extremely willing troops.
However, the Führer wanted to be once more on the front line
to witness France being brought to its knees.
On May 19th, 1940, Hitler's security detail was tasked
with quickly finding him a location for his headquarters.
Time was of the essence.
France might counter attack at any moment.
On May 22nd, 1940,
they decided on the isolated village of Brûly-de-Pesche in Belgium.
Here is the headquarters today.
It has hardly changed.
At the time, it was a highly strategic site.
It was very well located in the forest, easy to camouflage.
It was at the French-Belgium border
and just a few kilometers from the Ardennes.
Hitler's entourage quickly had three chalets built as lodgings
and canteen for the dictator's men.
As surprising as it may seem,
they even dug a small pool in case of a heat wave.
However, for those in charge of Hitler's security,
the most urgent consideration was a bomb shelter.
Very close to Hitler's own chalet, there was a bunker.
It was a reinforced concrete cube measuring seven meters by seven meters,
where he could take refuge if he came under air attack.
To guarantee maximum security,
all 28 neighboring villages were evacuated at the end of May.
Marie Metens was ten years old at the time.
She still remembers that very unusual day.
About four o’clock in the afternoon, two men came.
They weren't very nice at all, I remember that very well.
They told us we had to leave in two hours.
We were evacuated without knowing where we were going,
and we were told not to come back.
However, we weren't told why.
They took a few of the local people hostage.
About 80 or so,
and said that they would pay with their lives
if any of the evacuees try to return.
It was a threat, an extra bit of pressure put on the local people.
On June 6th, 1940,
the dictator finally arrived in Brûly-de-Pesche,
the site now being completely secure.
It was in this school that Hitler directed military operations.
Long tables were covered with maps.
This is where the fate of France was decided.
After only two weeks of fighting, the dictator's efforts were rewarded.
On June 17th, 1940,
Marshall Pétain requested a cessation of hostilities.
France was beaten.
The Führer was jubilant.
Hitler was completely euphoric.
In six weeks, he'd achieved what Germany had failed to do in four years
during the First World War: defeat France.
The Nazi leader ordered his services to drop the conditions
for the armistice immediately.
It was done during the night of the 20th to the 21st of June 1940, in this church.
Historian Axel Tixhon is an expert on Brûly-de-Pesche.
The atmosphere was a bit odd
because they were riding it by candlelight,
since they had to be wary of possible air raids.
This became the text that Hitler would impose
on the French in Compiègne.
Hitler summoned the representatives of France to Compiègne
to the same railway wagon
in which the Germans had had to acknowledge their defeat in 1918.
This victory was the dictator's revenge for the First World War.
A dream come true.
Right after this, Hitler visited Paris.
It was another dream of his to enter the French capital.
He went there on the 23rd of June, 1940.
The history books, however, give us two different dates
for Hitler's visit to Paris,
making some writers conclude that he may have made two visits.
That isn't true.
Hitler only visited Paris once on the 23rd of June,
from 4:05 to 9:00 in the morning.
The dictator hurried to the Opera Garnier
before stopping off for a photo opposite the Eiffel Tower.
A very symbolic image which was seen around the world.
From that moment on,
the media started talking of Hitler as the greatest war leader of all time.
However, during the Battle of Britain,
the German Navy and air force were held in check.
Hitler would have much preferred a treaty with Great Britain,
rather than crushing it in a military victory,
as he had done to France.
The British were not about to cooperate.
They responded to Germany's attacks with fierce resistance.
This was his first setback of the Second World War.
Right up until the beginning of July,
Hitler was hoping that the UK would fall like a ripe piece of fruit.
As the first British bombs started falling on German soil,
Hitler was anxious to make sure his most precious possession
was made safe.
This, as unlikely as it might seem, was his art collection.
For several years, the dictator had been having a gigantic art museum
built in Linz,
the town in which he'd spent most of his youth.
He planned to exhibit the most famous works of Europe there.
It was here, in the bowels of the Führerbau,
that he stored his treasure
while he waited for his museum to be built.
We went back to visit this rather unusual depot
with Harald Sandner.
The works of art were stored here.
For Hitler, works of art were always more important than people's lives.
During the war, he always regretted the destruction of museums and theaters.
However, he couldn't care less about people's lives.
Around 700 works of art were stocked in these corridors
and permanently guarded by SS men throughout the war.
Most were paintings that had been confiscated
or sold by force.
Many had been pillaged by the German army in the occupied countries.
Hitler was the world's greatest art thief.
The dictator's purloined works of art would stay hidden here until 1945.
Back in 1941, Hitler was busy waging his war.
The time had finally come for him to realize another dream,
that of animating Bolshevism, the mortal enemy of National Socialism.
On June 22nd, 1941,
Hitler launched his offensive against the USSR,
one of the greatest invasions in military history.
Four million soldiers, 600,000 vehicles and as many horses.
Hitler was wary of fighting on two fronts, but he ended up giving the order.
You have to realize that he was convinced of his own strategic genius
and was sure he could defeat the Soviet Union
with the same ease which with he had overrun France,
meaning in just a few weeks.
At this point,
Hitler's idea was to deport the Jews into the conquered Soviet Union.
This was the original plan of the Final Solution,
but for three years now,
the dictator had also been using the Einsatzgruppen.
These were special units which followed the army,
eliminating Jews and political opponents like Soviet apparatchiks.
These death squads now started carrying out mass executions.
At first it was just the men who were systematically killed.
However, then the women and children were increasingly included
in these atrocities.
About 40 percent of the Jews who would die in the Holocaust
were killed in shooting operations.
At the front, the dictator was winning victory after victory.
He conquered Minsk and then Leningrad.
In August 1941, he visited soldiers on the Eastern Front in Ukraine.
Entire swaths of territory were coming under Nazi control.
Hitler was sure that Russia would fall before the winter.
There was real enthusiasm during the summer and early autumn of 1941
as the German troops advanced at incredible speed through Russia.
Now the dictator made a strategic decision which would cost him dearly.
He decided to seize the agricultural,
industrial and oil resources of southern Russia.
What's more, he had a furious showdown with some of his generals
who wanted to head straight on and attack Moscow.
These discussions seriously slowed down the blitzkrieg,
the lightning war launched against the Soviet Union in July 1941.
By the time the attack on Moscow began in October 1941, it was too late.
The Wehrmacht was overtaken by the winter.
Temperatures dropped as low as minus 30 degrees.
The German soldiers were exhausted
and a Soviet counter-offensive drove them back hundreds of kilometers.
It really is a major setback.
The Soviet Union is not collapsed.
It's fighting back.
It seemed to have limitless resources
and far more men and equipment that anyone has suspected.
Hitler held his generals responsible for this debacle.
Since the beginning of the war,
he'd been highly suspicious of his military top brass.
The battle for Moscow marked a turning point
in his relations with them.
Hitler had never trusted his generals.
He despised them
because they had advised against the French campaign,
and now he blamed them for the failure of the great offensive
of the summer of 1941.
Hitler always had this tendency to blame others for his own failures.
To cover up for his own mistakes,
the dictator dismissed 30 of his generals, including Walther von Brauchitsch,
the commander in chief of the German Land Army.
Hitler now assumed this function,
along with that of Supreme Commander of all the armed forces.
From June 1941,
the dictator was hunkered down in his Polish headquarters,
located six kilometers from Rustenburg.
It was from this vast complex of bunkers and tunnels
that he directed the war in Russia.
The place had the codename Wolfsschanze, or Wolf's Lair.
The Führer would remain based at this headquarters for over two years.
This was the opposite of what Hitler had done up until this point.
He'd never stayed in the same place.
However, this became his Second World War trench.
This hunkering down showed that he was losing control,
no longer able to wage his mobile war.
Being so close to the fighting meant
that more elaborate surveillance was necessary.
Located deep in the forest, the site security was extreme.
It was very well protected.
All around there was a minefield with 50,000 mines.
There were the natural obstacles of lakes and swamps,
and the entire site was fenced in.
Watchtowers were set up
and trenches were dug to dissuade approaching enemies.
The 50 or so buildings and bunkers were protected
by machine gun posts and searchlights camouflaged by the surrounding vegetation.
Everything was thought out to the last detail.
Hitler was always wary of a threat from the inside.
It was easy to imagine a commando operation against this lair,
so there was a succession of security checkpoints to get past.
It was extremely difficult to reach Hitler.
Around 6,000 lived at this site on a permanent basis.
While thousands of soldiers were dying on the front line,
Hitler's entourage here enjoyed various facilities for their relaxation.
A cinema, for example, but that wasn't all.
It had a sauna because some of the troops and so on liked the sauna.
Hitler would never go into a sauna, of course.
As a general rule, the dictator rarely got up before noon.
He would then get to work making his military decisions.
Finally, at about two in the morning,
he would indulge in the ritual of taking tea
with his favorite secretaries while talking about himself.
Hitler's monologues became increasingly unbearable for his entourage.
It was always the same thing.
The secretaries took turns listening to him.
They had no choice, of course.
It was Hitler's way of switching off from the war for a while.
By this stage, Hitler had understood that the invasion of the USSR
would be harder than he had first thought.
He gave up on his plan of deporting the Jews to the occupied Soviet Union,
and it was in Poland in the autumn of 1941 that he hatched his definitive plan
for the Final Solution.
The fate of millions of Jews was sealed once and for all on January 20th, 1942,
at Wannsee Conference.
At the end of this meeting, organized by Reinhard Heydrich,
Himmler's right hand man and boss of the Einsatzgruppen,
a report was drawn up of the number of Jews to be exterminated, 11 million.
Following the Wannsee Conference,
the Jews in Europe were methodically rounded up,
then channeled towards murder factories.
These were extermination centers
designed to eliminate Jews within hours of their arrival.
Hitler believed in the virtues of a Jewish genocide.
He was sure that if he carried out a mass extermination of the Jews,
he could regain the geopolitical advantage,
since the Jews were helping all of Germany's enemies.
In the spring of 1942, the selections for Auschwitz began
with the streamlining of the extermination process.
The weakest were sent directly on arrival to the gas chambers.
Hitler himself never set foot in a concentration camp.
Hitler never directly witnessed the consequences of what he set in motion.
He never once visited a concentration camp,
unlike Himmler.
In the summer of 1942,
Hitler moved his headquarters to Vinnytsia in Ukraine.
It was from this camp of log cabins
that he gave the order to his troops to take Stalingrad.
The fighting was intense
and from November onward, the situation rapidly deteriorated.
Within a few months,
the German sixth Army was surrounded by 90 Soviet divisions.
They were hemmed in right to the end.
They were starving, no food, no ammunition, nothing.
From this point on, the great weaknesses
in Hitler's strategic planning became apparent.
The failure of the invasion of the Soviet Union revealed his flaws.
Showing that he was just a mediocre war leader,
not the military genius he thought he was.
What we have here is an individual hunkering down in the bunker of his HQ,
increasingly cut off from the realities of the war on the ground,
but who's nevertheless delegating less and less.
On February 2nd, 1943,
the 330,000 German soldiers finally surrendered.
It was the first capitulation by the German Army.
The defeat at Stalingrad was a turning point
and the beginning of the end for the Great War leader.
Not long after the defeat, Hitler left his headquarters
and went to Saint Florian Abbey in Austria.
Here he took part in a religious ceremony with his closest collaborators.
Harald Sandner has discovered this previously unseen photograph
taken of the dictator during this event.
He wanted to show us the exact spot, now loaded with symbolism.
Adolf Hitler set right here on the 4th of April, 1943.
They had set out two rows of chairs for him and his entourage.
The body language of the Führer speaks volumes about his state of mind.
The battle for Stalingrad seems to have affected him deeply.
In this photo, he's letting his inner feelings show
something he never did as Führer.
He's pensive and withdrawn.
I'm sure that at this point, he knew the war was lost.
Once the ceremony was over, Hitler went to Linz,
the town where he had spent most of his youth.
He didn't know it,
but this was the last time he would ever go there.
Germany was now under heavy attack by the Allies.
Hitler was back in his Polish headquarters
and the bad news poured in from everywhere.
Germany was being bombed, entire cities were being destroyed
and the civilian casualties were considerable.
That didn't bother him.
They were only buildings and people.
They were of no importance.
What did bother him, however,
was the Allied landings in Normandy on June 6th, 1944.
One hundred and thirty thousand men came across the channel from England.
Within 24 hours,
they'd broken through the German lines and outflanked the defending forces.
This is success. Hitler again is furious.
He's always furious about his generals, they're not strong enough,
and they're not tough enough.
He continues, however,
to believe in this fantasy world in which things will turn around.
At the time, Hitler was developing technologically advanced weapons.
For years, German scientists had been working on long range missiles,
which would be a booster for German morale
and maybe even break the enemy's resistance.
The first such rocket was fired at London on September 8th,
and the dictator had every intention of going even further.
They were working on the atom bomb.
There's a huge number of very advanced military technologies.
People believed in these wunderwaffen, these miracle weapons.
The German Reich was gradually being surrounded
by the Soviet and Allied forces.
Hitler launched one last offensive in the West.
The battle of the bulge.
This was a counter-attack on the French-Belgium border,
aimed at showing that Germany was still standing and still determined.
It was a totally desperate move
and had no support from the German generals
because the army had no resources left, either human or logistical,
with which to fight the Allies, especially in the sky,
which was totally controlled by the Allies.
The chances were slim or non-existent of their turning the tide in the West.
As the dictator went from setback to setback,
his health was in serious decline.
He suffered from cardiac problems
and were showing the first symptoms of Parkinson's.
Theodore Morrell,
who had been his personal physician since 1935, was never far away.
He was taking up to 28 medicines a day or the equivalent in injections.
He'd have shots to pick him up and others to calm him down.
He was afraid of dying before he achieved his goal.
At the beginning of 1945,
he left his headquarters in Poland to return to the capital, Berlin.
He still thought he could win the war.
He was hoping that the coalition between the Allies
and the Russians would break down.
It was now March 1945,
the bombing of the German capital intensified.
The dictator buried himself eight meters underground in his Führer bunker,
a complex of 20 underground rooms built to withstand air raids.
The outer walls were nearly four meters thick
and the ceiling was concrete reinforced with metal beams.
It was all but indestructible.
This is a model of the Führer's bunker
and the garden of the Berlin Reich Chancellery.
Hitler and Eva Braun lived in six rooms, each with their own bedroom.
One for Eva and one for Hitler.
An important room was the command center, where a daily briefing was held.
Hitler directed the end of the war from here.
Across from the rooms reserved for the dictator,
the six other rooms were taken up by his closest collaborators,
his personal physician, Theodore Morel,
and Goebbels, his minister of propaganda, but also the maintenance staff.
Ten or so other people lived with him.
Legend has it that there were many tunnels leading out of the bunker.
None of this was true, according to the historians.
All the rumors about secret tunnels linking it to the Metro
or Tempelhof Airport are just that, rumors.
The bunker had no other exits than the main one
and the emergency exit into the garden.
The dictator rarely left the bunker.
The Red Army was carving a path straight to Berlin.
Nowhere was safe.
On April 11th, 1945,
the Americans liberated Buchenwald concentration camp,
discovering its unspeakable horror.
They decided to march the local villagers through the camp
to see what atrocities the Nazi regime had been committing right next door.
They were deeply shocked and of course distressed by this,
but in fact, they knew that there was a camp.
They knew about the extermination, because by the spring of 1942,
if you wanted to find out about the extermination of the Jews,
you could do it.
Almost 56,000 died in the camp.
The Russians were pushing into Berlin in their thousands.
Hitler raged when he heard the news.
At a briefing on the afternoon of April 22nd,
Hitler learned that no troops would be coming to his rescue.
For the first time, he had to acknowledge that the war was over.
He announced that if such were the case, he would shoot himself.
Even today, many documentaries claim
that this is the last photograph ever taken of Adolf Hitler.
This is not so.
That's not true, of course.
The actual last photo of Hitler was taken on April 20th,
his birthday, in the ruins of the Reich Chancellery.
The historians are unanimous.
This is definitely the last photograph of the dictator.
He is seen in the company of his chief aide
and adjutant, Julius Schaub, who was ordered the following day
to go to Berghof to destroy all of Hitler's personal papers.
April 1945, Berlin was completely surrounded.
Hitler heard that his most loyal collaborator, Heinrich Himmler,
was negotiating with the enemy.
This provoked a fit of rage and made up his mind for him.
In the gloom of the bunker,
he married his long standing companion, Eva Braun, in the strictest privacy.
The ceremony took place during the night of April 28th to 29th,
in the bunker.
You have to imagine the scene.
It was dark.
The lights were flickering and often going out
because of the air raids.
Everyone was tense.
It was damp and mouldy.
It stank.
It wasn't glamorous at all.
Shortly after the ceremony,
Hitler drew up his political will and testament.
This is a copy.
Hitler's political will and testament of April 29th,
is one of the most terrifying documents in the history of humanity.
Those few pages sum up the entire Nazi ideology and madness,
which brought about the deaths of 50 to 60 million people.
There was no mention of the number of victims.
Once again, the dictator lambasted the officers of the German army
for letting him down.
However, also the German people who in his eyes,
hadn't shown enough fight.
They were all responsible for the defeat.
The Jews most of all.
He explains that it was one of his greatest achievements
to have exterminated such a large number of Jews,
and he asks his successors to continue this policy of mass murder.
It's impossible to claim that Hitler didn't want the Holocaust
and knew nothing about it.
He knew everything and openly admitted it.
In all, 6 million Jews were exterminated in the Nazi concentration and death camps.
On April 30th, 1945,
Hitler killed himself in his office in the Führer bunker.
Eva Hitler died at his side.
However, the dictator's itinerary doesn't end there.
Only 30 minutes after he died,
his body was taken outside and burnt in the garden of the Reich Chancellery
by his valet, Heinz Linge, as per his master's last request.
Hitler didn't want his body to suffer the same fate
as that of Mussolini,
which was mutilated and hung upside down at a gas station in Milan.
His body was doused in gasoline and ignited.
However, since all of those involved got out of there in a hurry,
they didn't make sure that he was reduced to ashes
and his remains were found by Soviet soldiers.
No one was able to identify the burnt corpse
as being that of the dictator.
To be quite sure, Stalin ordered a thorough analysis
of the remains here in the northern quarter of Berlin.
After the autopsy,
they were able to identify the body as being Hitler's,
thanks to a close examination of his teeth.
It was vital information
which Stalin and his secret services hid from the world for years.
Historians have several hypotheses as to why.
I think it's because he wanted to sow doubt and confusion
among the Western Allies, and he wanted justification
for a tough policy towards post-war Germany,
built on the fear that Hitler would come back
like Napoleon had done, and started all over again.
Stalin said nothing about it at the Potsdam Conference,
which took place from July 31st to August 2nd, 1945.
In fact, he blatantly lied.
You have to remember that the Cold War had already begun at this point.
His successors, Khrushchev and Brezhnev, remained trapped in the lie until 1968,
when Brezhnev finally released the autopsy report.
While the Allies searched all over Europe for Hitler,
his remains were taken on a veritable odyssey.
Being buried and dug up again nine times
before ending up here at a Russian barracks in northern Germany.
Biederitz by Magdeburg, April 4th, 1970,
his remains were incinerated and then thrown off this bridge.
Harald Sandner took these photos of this little known spot.
All that remains of Hitler today are his teeth in Moscow.
Twenty-five years after the end of the Second World War,
this is where the itinerary of Adolf Hitler finally ended.
Hitler's 12 years in power is one of the most destructive
and negative periods in the whole of history,
if not the most destructive.
Tens of millions dead,
and the whole of humanity shaken by what it was capable of.
The extermination of an entire part of itself.
Hitler was the personification of evil.
No one has been responsible for more deaths than him.
Adolf Hitler,
one of the greatest criminals of human history.