Hitler (2016–2017): Season 1, Episode 1 - The Opportunist - full transcript

So first of May 1918,
in the heat of battle,

a lowly German dispatch
runner put his life at risk

when he saw the chance
to become a hero.

But this was no ordinary German
soldier, this was Adolf Hitler.

Hitler was being sent up to
battalion HQ with a vital message.

On his way, he comes across
a unit of French soldiers.

Hitler pulls out his pistol.

They all put down their weapons and
Hitler fort marches them into captivity.

It was a daring capture of enemy troops
by a single man that won Hitler,

the Iron Cross First Class,
one of the German Army's highest honors.

There's just one problem -
the story was a lie.



It was the first of many tales of
self-promotion and deceit from a man

who would stop at nothing to
fuel his meteoric rise to power.

Hitler, who was the man behind the monster?

There were just so many parts of
this story that didn't add up.

Teenage loner turns national hero.

He was the messiah
for the German people.

How was he able to achieve it?

All of it was an act.
All of it was a show.

This is the definitive guide to
the most hated man in history.

HITLER
THE OPPORTUNIST

Adolf Hitler was not born a leader,
but in just 12 years,

the homeless drop-out turned soldier,

would rise to become the undisputed
head of a dynamic political party.

Late summer 1914, an rare
footage of a historic day.



In Munich's Odeonsplatz, it was announced
that Germany had just declared war on Russia.

This is also the earliest
known footage of Adolf Hitler.

Aged just 25, a nondescript face
in the crowd, captured on film.

Fast forward 25 years to June 1940,

and Hitler had marched his
fatherland into a Second World War.

Just eight weeks after invading France,
he led a triumphant parade in Berlin

to celebrate Germany's historic victory.

It's like a scene out of Imperial
Rome with Caesar coming back.

Flowers are being thrown everywhere,
people are Sieg Heiling.

It's just the most incredible sight,
and of course, Hitler is loving it.

The German people who were understandably
nervous when he launched that offensive.

They're now believing this guy.

He's really got something.

For the German people,
Hitler was raising their country

to the top of a new world order.

A pledge they bought into,
partly on his reputation as a hero

earned on the battlefields
of the First World War.

But recently discovered documents reveal
the truth about Hitler's early years,

was very different.

Spring 1913, 24-year-old Hitler
left his Austrian homeland

to avoid conscription into
the Austro-Hungarian Army.

Hitler grows up in the Austrian Empire,
where identity is increasingly governed

by questions of race.
Are you German? Are you Jewish? Are you Slav?

Hitler quite early on identifies
himself very much with Germany's,

Hitler has no desire to serve the Austro-
Hungarian empire in any military sense,

his loyalty simply lie with Germany,
which he sees as being the future.

Having fled Austria for Germany,
Adolf was now a wanted man.

After eight months on the run,
the authorities tracked him down in Munich

and hauled him into court.

There he played the sympathy card, portraying
himself as a struggling down and out.

The judge takes pity on him.
Lots of other people in Hitler's shoes

but somehow Hitler manages to
wriggle out of it and of course,

this is Hitler at his
absolute theatrical best.

And it's a talent that he'll build
throughout the rest of his life.

August 1914.
Germany declared war on France.

Hitler enthusiastically volunteered
to join the German army,

he was assigned to the 16th
Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment.

He takes a crash course as a soldier,

and within weeks he's on the
way to the Western Front

and he is immediately thrown into a battle.

Hitler’s regiment experiences
a devastating baptism of fire.

They are utterly unprepared
for the realities of war.

Over 2000 men were lost from Hitler's unit

by the end of the first
battle of Ypres in November.

But private Hitler survived and received
the only promotion of his career.

It is generally claimed that Hitler
becomes a lance corporal or corporal.

This is not true at all.
He, in fact, becomes a private first class,

at the reason why this matters is

that he is still an ordinary soldier.
He is not an NCO.

His superiors do not see any kind
of leadership qualities in Adolf Hitler.

And what's really curious is that
although he's promoted quite early on,

he remains in that rank
for the rest of the war.

And with that promotion
came a new role for Hitler.

Dispatch runner, relaying messages to
and from units behind the front lines.

Newly discovered documents from
regimental archives reveal

that Hitler's role was not nearly as
dangerous as he went on to claim.

The reality, as he typically did not
have to run from trench to trench

that he typically did not have to take
messages right to the first line.

The man in the trenches thinks that
men like Hitler have a cushy job.

They think that unlike them,
they're not exposed to enemy fire.

They think of them as an
Etappenschwein or safe area pig.

The rediscovered records also
reveal another crucial discrepancy

in the account of a heroic
action by one German soldier,

later used as evidence of Hitler's heroism.

As I was starting to read it,
I thought, hang on.

This sounds surprisingly similar to the
Nazi propaganda account

of the arrest of a group of French soldiers,

but there was one crucial difference.

The hero of the account in Nazi
propaganda was Adolf Hitler.

The hero of the account in front of me
was Hugo Gutmann, Hitler's Jewish officer.

Halt!

But Nazi propagandists would later erase
Hugo Gutmann's name from the account

and replace it with Hitler's.

Achtung! Adolf Hitler.

Near the end of the war,
Hitler was awarded the Iron Cross

for delivering a dispatch under fire,
an entirely different incident.

As he's receiving the Iron Cross first class,
we can't help but imagine

that Hitler is thinking,
I finally made something of myself.

He will wear this Iron Cross with
pride for the rest of his life.

But for Hitler,
the war came to a sudden and agonizing end,

when the British attacked his
regiment with mustard gas.

Poison gas, of course,
is one of the most horrific aspects

of the World War One battlefield
and Adolf Hitler gets a face full of it.

By the following morning,
his eyes are absolutely streaming.

He can't see anything.

Hitler was evacuated to a military
hospital near the Polish border.

But the unit he's put into is not the
eye unit, it's the psychiatric unit

and so what seems to have happened is
after these four long years of war,

finally, the pressure has got too much
to him, and he's had a mental breakdown.

After four years on the Western Front,
Private Hitler's war had ended in failure.

But the seeds had been sown for
his transformation into the Fuhrer.

Adolf Hitler's passion for
Germany was all-consuming.

Yet by birth, he was an Austrian,
born in the small town of Braunau am Inn

on the 20th of April 1889.

Hitler comes from a dysfunctional family.
His mother calls his father uncle.

Their first three children die
in quick succession and Adolf,

the fourth child, is the survivor.

She goes on to have more children but
the only other son, Edmund, also dies,

and she absolutely dotes on her only boy.

But with his father,
it's very different indeed.

His father, Alois, is a very cold, elderly,
distant man who regularly beats Hitler

and as a result,
Hitler absolutely despises him.

Young Adolf lost himself in tales of cowboys
and Indians by German author Karl May.

These tales featured an Apache chief fighting
for a better existence for his people.

Perhaps it is those novels
of the American West

that first take young Adolf
out of this obscurity,

these being introduced to a fantasy
version of the broader world.

When Hitler was nine,
his family moved to the outskirts of Linz,

the capital of Upper Austria.

Here, Adolf dreamt of pursuing
his great passion - drawing.

But his father had very different
ideas for his son's future.

Hitler's father is a civil servant and
when Hitler shows an interest in art

and announces that he wants to be an artist,
his father is absolutely furious and says:

“Never in my lifetime.”
- Forbidden from studying art,

Adolf was sent to a technical school
with a focus on math and science.

Hitler is not a good student,
but there is one subject

that seems to excite his curiosity
and his interest, and that's history.

It is a certain kind of history, it is tales
of the great heroes of the German past,

the heroic kings and emperors and conquerors.

Adolf’s steepening German nationalism

only added to the growing rift
between father and son.

His father clearly identifies with
the Empire and the imperial project,

with the Habsburg monarchy, whereas the
young Hitler is clearly attracted much more

to ideas of Pan-Germanism,
thinks himself as German.

But the sudden death of Hitler's
father in January 1903,

when 13-year-old Adolf
became the man of the house.

Four years later, in 1907, he left his
doting mother and ventured to the capital,

Vienna, where he hoped to enter art school.

He persuaded his only friend,
August Kubizek, to join him.

And there they indulged in
a shared passion for opera.

Hitler becomes enormously
attractive to Wagner.

What Wagner represents is a kind of
mythological pseudo Germanic past,

and so when he goes to Wagner,
it is imprinting upon him

an idealized form of society
that is entirely rooted in myth.

But this fantasy world was very different from
reality, as 18-year-old Adolf discovered

after taking the entrance exam for
Vienna's most prestigious art school.

The feedback he gets is that his drawings
of buildings are actually quite good,

but he's unable to draw people.

He thinks it's child's play to get
into it and when he is rejected,

he sees it as quote a bolt from the blue.

It hits him and it hits him hard.

Furious over the rejection,
he vowed to reapply,

but young Hitler's world
was about to fall apart.

Christmas 1907, and he rushed home to Linz
to be with his terminally ill mother.

The scene around Klara's bed
is just incredibly poignant.

You have a woman there, lying,
dying of breast cancer.

She's in a lot of pain.

They have this incredibly
strong emotional bond,

and Hitler is literally watching
not only his mother dying

but also that emotional bond just
disintegrating right in front of him.

Adolf was inconsolable,
despite the support of Dr. Eduard Bloch,

the family's loyal Jewish doctor.

Dr. Bloch observes that he has never seen
someone so overwhelmed with grief

as Adolf Hitler that day.

Bloch wrote: "It is natural that I
should have witnessed many scenes,

such as this one. Yet none of them
left me with quite the same impression."

"In all my career, I have never seen anyone
so prostrate with grief as Adolf Hitler.”

It is perhaps an example
of the extreme emotions

that Hitler suffers for the rest of his life,

his inability to come to terms with setbacks

when he faces loss and disappointment.

Between 1907 and 1909, we find Hitler
on a downward spiral into essentially

what we would call a street person in Vienna.

In 1909, he actually spends
Christmas in a homeless shelter.

Adolf Hitler was a broken man
with his dreams shattered.

He looked for someone to blame.

What we find happening is a
burning sense of resentment

at the bourgeois middle class world
which had rejected him

and which had failed
to see his chances.

While living in the
homeless shelter in Vienna,

Adolf was beginning to have his
head turned by the people in power.

One of the politicians that clearly influences
Hitler quite a lot is the mayor of Vienna

before the First World War,
Karl Lueger, a right wing mayor.

He admires Lueger's ability to understand
the nature of the crowd in front of him

to get the pulse of the crowd.

Hitler's later claim that
his revulsion toward Jews

began in Vienna at this time in
his life was pure fabrication.

He has Jewish friends; he deals with Jews
when selling his art, there is no evidence

that Hitler had any run-ins,
had any negative feelings about Jews

prior to the First World War.

Hitler's account of his years in Vienna
would be fictionalized over time

to serve his political agenda.

As were his recollections of the First
World War, which ended in humiliation,

when Germany surrendered in November 1918.

You find scapegoats, Jews, socialists,
pacifists on the home front.

He begins to speak of a stab
in the back of the German army

rather than what actually happened,
which was a battlefield defeat.

Hitler's anger and resentment grew,
but soon he would realize

he could channel it into politics.

He had a cause, and it would
bring the world to its knees.

September 1934,

the moment of glory Adolf Hitler had
fantasized about for the past decade.

He had become Germany's savior.

Addressing over 700.000 supporters at
the Nazi Party's annual Nuremberg rally,

he put on the performance of a lifetime.

After the death of President von Hindenburg,

Hitler merged the Office of President and
Chancellor, becoming all powerful as Fuhrer

with support from 90 percent of the public.

It's extraordinary to consider how great his
rise will be from a park bench in Vienna

to the Fuhrer of the Third Reich.

Fifteen years earlier,
at the end of the First World War,

Hitler recovered his eyesight and was
released from the psychiatric ward.

He returned to Munich,
where he was one of thousands of soldiers,

facing an uncertain future
after Germany's defeat.

Hitler is in a state of relative aimlessness
at the end of the First World War,

like many other German soldiers, Hitler
is like a stray dog who needed a master,

someone who needed a cause,
a sense of belonging that he had lost.

Though Germany's forces were disbanded,
Hitler remained on the army payroll

and was selected for a
special propaganda course.

Hitler is one of those who
was chosen by the German army

to speak to small groups of returning
soldiers about the future of Germany,

to disinfect soldiers of
their Bolshevik propaganda,

especially recently demobilized soldiers.

Hitler threw himself into the program,

stumbling upon the defining talent
of his life - public speaking.

He was a natural performer
with a compelling style.

This caught the attention of the local army
unit's chief of propaganda captain Karl Mayr.

Karl Mayr immediately sees in Hitler someone

with a natural talent for speaking,

who would speak in simple, approachable terms

and therefore could address other
soldiers and ordinary people.

By the time Hitler was caught on camera
here at a right wing rally in May 1919,

he had been recruited as an informant.

One of his first assignments was to infiltrate

and monitor extremist political groups
emerging in Munich.

Hitler was sent to spy on a radical right-
wing group called The German Workers Party.

As all political meetings
in Munich in this period,

this one takes place in a rather
surprising environment - in a beer hall.

Hitler is not very impressed with what
he sees; a half dozen or a dozen people,

speaking about the issues of the
day and are not very educated way.

Hitler interrupted a debate on
Bavarian separatism to lecture them

on the importance of Germany remaining strong.

And in withering rhetoric, in rising volume,
he talks about the sacrifice

that he and the other soldiers have made
for Germany and it wasn't for Bavaria;

it wasn't for a state; it was for all Germans.

When Hitler starts to speak, it's
like a switch going off inside him.

He suddenly realizes that everybody in
the audience is hanging on his every word

and the leader of the party, Anton Drexler,
says, “My goodness, we could use him.”

Hitler was asked to join the
very party he was spying on,

believing they were in sync
with his own ideas. He accepted.

It is a radical party and Hitler sees
himself as a rather revolutionary figure,

somebody who is going to
shake Germany up from below

not somebody who's going to
sit on committees and say,

“We should do this, we should do that.”
Somebody who acts.

In October 1919, Adolf Hitler
delivered his first official speech

to the German Workers Party.

A pivotal moment,
he later recounted in Mein Kampf.

“I spoke for 30 minutes and what
before had simply felt within me

without in any way knowing it,
was now approved by reality."

"I could speak.”

Hitler quickly became a member
of the party committee,

recruiting followers with
his fiery propaganda.

There are plenty of people around
who are receptive to his ideas,

who are strongly anti-communist,
who also have views about the Jews,

who also think the Germany
has been stabbed in the back.

So in that sense, Hitler always has
his hand on the pulse of the public.

What's interesting is that Hitler doesn't
yet see himself as the savior of Germany.

Hitler left the army in March 1920

as membership of the German Workers Party
soared and a leadership fight developed.

Hitler has now become a
major figure in the party,

and he doesn't agree with the
strategies of Anton Drexler.

He resigns in a huff and
threatens to storm off.

But in the end, the people
around him come to realize

that there is something special about Hitler,

and they're going to exploit
those special qualities,

and the price for doing so is
to accept Hitler as leader.

July 1921, Hitler announced,

he was rejoining the newly renamed
National Socialist German Workers Party

and was made its leader.

For Hitler,
socialism is the socialism of the race,

so national socialism means not only
the revival of Germany as a nation,

it also means a social revolution.

Hitler drew from his days
as an aspiring artist

to create a new banner with an ominous icon.

Hitler is extraordinarily invested in
the smallest minutia of the visual.

He takes the swastika,
which was around beforehand

in some far right movements as early as 1907,

but he makes it fundamental to the Nazi image.
He's very smart, he knows

that he's not going to suddenly make all
these nationalists pure Nazis overnight,

so what he wants to do in
the choice of the colors -

the black swastika against
a white disc against red.

He takes the colors of
the old German Reich.

In 1939,
Adolf Hitler was dressed to impress.

His image had been
meticulously crafted to say,

he was not merely the leader of the
German cause, but the embodiment of it.

Creating brand “Hitler” was the
cornerstone of his success,

and it began in his earliest days in politics.

In the early 20s, Hitler is
an incredibly elusive figure.

Very few people have actually
seen photographs of him,

so there's this mystique and aura, which is
deliberately being built up about Hitler.

And this is all coupled in with this
nickname that he's got for himself, The Wolf.

To build support and funding for the fringe
Nazi Party, Hitler gave himself a makeover,

but his attempts to cultivate a public image
to match his high aspirations fell short

and he was mockingly
called The King of Munich.

As a party leader in Munich,
it's Hitler's job

to mingle with those in high society circles,
and he is completely inept at it.

He lacks table manners, he's utterly gauche,

he pours sugar into his wine, he doesn't
know how to hold a knife and fork properly.

He gobbles cream cakes off the plate
before others have had a chance.

He holds a dog whip and taps it
against his knee as he speaks.

It's clear he's still searching for a
way to mingle with the rich and powerful.

Hitler was a long way from the
comfort of a German beer hall,

but his common touch was about to pay off.

In 1923, Germany's failure to
pay its huge war debt to France,

amounting to billions in gold marks,
threatened to bankrupt the country,

triggering a financial meltdown.

1923 is a year of crisis
for the Weimar Republic.

The government is printing money 24/7,
in order to meet its obligations,

but everyone knows what
that adds up to - inflation.

Before the war, it was four marks to the
dollar, and it's going to get much worse.

Before long, it's going to
be 20.000 bucks the dollar.

With the economy in freefall, desperate
Germans were rapidly losing confidence

in the Democratic Weimar government.

Hitler took to the streets, inspired
by an event the previous year in Italy.

Hitler is very much an
acolyte of Benito Mussolini

and admirer when he makes
his first grab at power.

He's modeling himself very deliberately
on Mussolini's march on Rome for 1922.

It's a statement of violent nationalism,
which is what he was needed to power.

This is very attractive to Hitler,
you don't have to bother

with all the ballot boxes waiting.

You can just get on the street, marched
to the capital and say, “Give me power.“

In November 1923,
Hitler marched to one of Munich's beer halls,

accompanied by 600 of his
party's so-called stormtroopers.

Their Bavarian Prime Minister Gustav
von Kahr, was addressing a crowd of 3000

that included some of the
state's top politicians.

He's armed himself with a pistol,
immediately gets everyone's attention

by firing a shot into the ceiling.

Hitler, as only he can, announces,
that the national revolution has begun.

And there's massive cheering in the hall,
at this point

that Hitler thinks:
"Do you know, I've pulled this off."

3000 people in this hall,
and they're all convinced

that actually this change of
government is going to happen.

The next day, Hitler led a 2000 man march
through Munich to take control of the city.

The government ordered
an immediate response.

They are fired apart by a
cordon of army and police units.

Marchers to Hitler's right and
to Hitler's left are killed,

but Hitler is miraculously left untouched.

Four police officers, and 14 of
Hitler's fellow Nazis were killed.

In the chaos, Hitler escaped
and hid at the home of friend

and Nazi supporter Ernst Hanfstaengl.

For the third time in his life, Hitler
had been hit with a devastating setback.

He spends two days there,
in the blackest of moods.

He's toying with his pistol.

Hanfstaengl’s wife talks
him out of killing himself,

but it's clear to Hitler that the putsch
has failed. The party has been shattered

and that he himself has become
something of a laughingstock.

The following day,
Hitler was found and arrested.

As the arresting officer
comes to take him away,

Hitler insists that his Iron
Cross be pinned onto his lapel.

In his most despondent moment,
this is still a man,

extraordinarily concerned with his own image.

Hitler's vision of saving
Germany was now viewed as a joke.

For attempting a coup, he was charged
with treason and faced the death penalty.

This is not a jury trial,
it's an administrative proceeding,

overseen by three judges, all of whom had
been appointed during the old imperial period

and all of whom had at least some
sympathy for Hitler’s patriotic goals.

Hitler turns the courtroom
into a platform for his views.

What he says is recorded in
the local and national press.

He is allowed to speak at length,
and of course,

it is in that very act of speaking that
Hitler realizes - he still has power.

Hitler in a way that breaks
through at his trial,

because now he becomes
more visible to Germans.

Now he's able to distill his
message of hate and resentment

and persecution to the Germans.

Hitler was found guilty, but the judges
were lenient, spared the guillotine.

He was sentenced to five
years at Landsberg prison.

The time that Hitler spends in
Landsberg prison is very important.

It's a time when he's forced
really to just to sit

and start to think of more about
just political strategies.

It's clearly for Hitler, I think, the critical
moment in which he suddenly realizes that,

that he's reached the point where he
has to define himself politically.

The failure of the beer hall putsch could
have been the end of Hitler's career.

Instead, it was a new beginning.

He receives a steady stream of guests
and visitors and well-wishers,

who bring him all sorts of gifts,
who bring him all sorts of food.

Hitler has and will have for the rest
of his life, a notorious sweet tooth.

He actually puts on a few pounds.

From his cell he dictated to his
trusted henchman, Rudolf Hess,

what would become Hitler's infamous
autobiography, Mein Kampf, My Struggle.

Interestingly enough,
he does not write the book himself.

Mein Kampf is a man pacing around the room,
blurting out

whatever pops into his head at the moment.

Mein Kampf is an interminably
boring book and so boring

that it makes you want to gouge your eyes out.

It's just a terrible read, but important

if you want to understand the
sources of Hitler's ideas.

Hitler tells us in Mein
Kampf what he's going to do,

that he is going to declare war on the Jews,

that he is going to destroy the
Jewish population of Europe,

that he is going to upset the
balance of power in the world.

The language in Mein Kampf about
the Jews is shocking even today -

maggots and parasites and cancers
living upon the body-politic

of the various European nations.

He's really starting to believe that he
can shape the world according to his will.

I think we have a real sense with Hitler now
that he no longer sees himself as a drummer.

He's going to be the one
to lead the German people.

He's going to be the Messiah
for the German people.

After nine months in prison,
Hitler was released early, for,

of all things, good behavior.

But in his absence, dissent had been
brewing inside the Nazi Party ranks.

Hitler now faced the toughest challenge
of his political career, and his strategy

to retain his leadership would prove
to be as inspired as it was ruthless.

If he fails,
he absolutely knows it's game over.

December 1924,

Adolf Hitler was released from
jail and returned to Munich.

His Nazi party was in chaos and the
Bavarian government had banned him

from playing his trump card, public speaking.

For an orator and a demagog like
Hitler, this is a huge handicap.

Hitler decided to switch tactics.

He no longer sought revolution, but change
from within Germany's Weimar government.

The fiasco of the beer hall
putsch has convinced Hitler

that revolution in the
old style is impossible.

He comes out of prison,
determined to act legally.

His first priority was to
shed his gangster image.

The challenge of rebranding Adolf Hitler
fell to a former paparazzi photographer,

Heinrich Hoffmann, an ally who greeted
Hitler as he emerged from Landsberg prison.

Together, Hoffman and Hitler
tried lots of different poses,

lots of different costumes, if you like.
One of them is lederhosen,

and when they see the contact sheet of
all the images of Hitler in lederhosen,

he scrubber’s them all out, puts red crosses
over it and just thinks he looks silly.

Hitler will never wear lederhosen in
public again, and it's at this point

when Hitler start thinking of mutating into
becoming more of a statesmanlike figure.

Those who know him are shocked
by the change Adolf Legalite,

some of his friends mockingly
call him - Legal Adolf.

Hoffman took over two million photos to
perfect Hitler's idealized image of himself.

Hitler wanted the many photos
he didn't like, destroyed,

but Hoffman kept them and
they survived to this day.

It's so interesting that
Hitler had such a vision

of what he wanted his image to look like
that he actually took photographs of him,

trying out different poses for his speeches.

I mean, this is a short little
man with a funny mustache,

and yet our iconic image of him is of
this large, charismatic character.

All of it was an act,
all of it was a show.

I'm so intrigued with
this particular posture.

Look how large and expansive it is,
how this arm goes away from the body

in forms into a fist,
which is a symbolic weapon.

Looks like you're about to attack.

Hitler knew that,
Hitler knew that if he expanded his posture

and put out a symbolic weapon,
he would rouse the audience

to feel that strong emotion
of danger and anger.

Hoffmann's photographs were only
part of Hitler's political overhaul.

By February 1926, he turned his attention
to the next obstacle in his path -

those challenging his political authority.

One of his closest followers,
Gregor Strasser, has more

or less formed a breakaway party
in the northern districts.

Hitler has to bring him under control, but
he also has to prove to the men in Munich

that he is still the leader.

Hitler summoned party leaders to
an emergency meeting in Bamberg.

Nazi senior members from across Germany
attended, including Gregor Strasser,

the Hitler demanded his
party's unconditional loyalty.

It's a do or die moment for Hitler,
it is a moment

when Hitler's got to re-impose
his authority over the party.

Hitler takes a deep breath.
And then starts on,

what he knows is going to be the most
important speech of his political career.

Hitler now feels confident enough
to deliver that knockout blow,

which is to demand loyalty from every
member of the party, including Strasser.

At the end, the 60 gather around Hitler,
swear an oath of allegiance to him.

The party is once more united
and once more

under the firm control of its Fuhrer,
Adolf Hitler.

This is the first sign of
Hitler being utterly ruthless.

As a result of Bamberg,
his self-belief just skyrockets,

and he feels he's now well on his way to being
the man that Germany so desperately needs.

Hitler had stamped his authority on the party,

but one member was not convinced -
Joseph Goebbels.

Hitler has realized that Goebbels
has the communication skills,

the propaganda skills that he wants for his
campaign, and he's determined to woo him.

He takes him to Munich;
he takes into Stuttgart;

he gives rides to Goebbels in his car and he
basically charms Goebbels into following him.

After the Bamberg conference,
he clearly becomes convinced

that Hitler is the leader that they need.

He is the person who will revive Germany's
fortunes, and he switches his support.

Goebbels, who kept a diary throughout
his life, writes in his diary:

“I love him, I stood next to him,
he spoke to me. He gave me a photograph,”

and from that point,
Goebbels is loyal to Hitler until the death.

At the party's next conference at
Weimar, he revealed his new image.

One which would soon spark a
deadly cult of personality.

With Hitler has self-styled Fuhrer.

One of the interesting things about the
title Hitler chooses, the title of Fuhrer,

is that it doesn't just mean
a political leader, of course,

and he doesn't intend to
mean a political leader.

A Fuhrer is a kind of guide,
a kind of prophet figure.

He stretches out his arm in the salute,
which will from then on,

become the calling card of the Nazi Party.

The whole Hitler salute
to greet him everywhere is now compulsory,

and it just shows that his grip is
authority on the party is iron strong.

In just eight years,
Adolf Hitler had risen from a common soldier

to the undisputed leader of
a dynamic political party.

Certainly, he has gifts,
a kind of rough personal charisma,

public speaking, political organization.
But there's also a certain ruthlessness

and a willing to move against
those who stand in his way.

In 1927, the ban against Hitler’s
speaking in public in Bavaria was lifted.

Hitler once again can
be in the public eye.

At last, he's got what he needs -
a public platform.

Hitler had honed his skills
and perfected his image,

and he was now ready to unleash them
upon a struggling Germany

and an unsuspecting world.

Perhaps never in history have the man
and the times been so closely aligned.

And of course, the stage is now
set for Hitler's rise to power,

not just in Munich, but overall of German.