The Dark Charisma of Adolf Hitler (2012): Season 1, Episode 3 - Episode #1.3 - full transcript
In the 1930s, Adolf Hitler made
the most ambitious boasts imaginable
about what lay ahead.
And just a few years later,
it seemed to millions of Germans
that Hitler had indeed created
a future that belonged to them.
In 1941, when this film was taken,
Hitler was all but worshipped
by his followers.
In pursuit of his racist vision,
Hitler had led the German army
to a series of momentous victories.
His promises were taken as gospel.
My diary of the time has that line:
"Come what may,
the Fuhrer will sort it."
I wrote that myself.
I also believed, "Gosh,
he's achieved so much already!"
That was the point -
all the things he'd achieved!
But as the war progressed,
the successes stopped coming.
And then, the end. We were abandoned.
We had to suffer our fate.
With insights from those
who lived through these times -
most of whom were interviewed
by the BBC over the last 20 years -
this film reveals how Hitler tried
to retain his charismatic appeal,
as the bond between
the German people and Hitler
was tested as never before.
Adolf Hitler loved this landscape.
It was here, amidst the mountains
of southern Bavaria,
that he said his ideas matured.
And on 31st July 1940,
at his house, the Berghof,
he announced his most ambitious idea
yet to his military leaders.
Now that the Germans had conquered
much of Western Europe,
Hitler was thinking in epic terms.
He wanted plans drawn up to invade
the Soviet Union - a country which
in his warped view of the world was
led by Jewish/Bolshevik criminals.
But it was also a country he'd
signed a non-aggression pact with,
as well as a country
twice as large as Europe.
The generals listened
to Hitler's idea and many thought,
"Shouldn't be too difficult."
People thought, and the military
leaders were among them,
that it would be relatively easy
to eliminate the Russian army
with one short, forceful blow.
Based on the information
we had about the Russian army,
I also believed that it would not
be much of a problem.
These soldiers knew that Hitler
had been saying for years
that the biggest danger Germany
faced was the Soviet Union,
and many thought
their Fuhrer was right.
Fresh from their
recent victory over France,
German soldiers were full
of confidence in Hitler's judgment.
So much so, that he was called
"the greatest
military commander of all time"
by one of his leading generals.
Hitler was more
than an ordinary leader.
By now, he was considered
by many to be almost superhuman.
And it wasn't just Hitler who was
thought to be a superior being.
His connection with those Germans
he considered racially pure
was based, in part,
on a shared sense of superiority.
Millions of ordinary Germans,
especially the young,
had been told
that they were special, too.
We had been taught that only the
Germans were valuable human beings.
There was a little booklet called,
German Inventors,
German Poets, German Musicians.
Nothing else existed.
And we devoured it,
and we were absolutely convinced
that we were the greatest.
And since Hitler boasted that
the Germans were a superior race,
he believed that victory over those
he considered racially inferior,
like the people of the Soviet Union,
would be relatively straightforward.
And so, on 22nd June 1941,
the Germans launched
the largest invasion
in the history of the world.
Within just a week, the Germans
had advanced more than 200 miles
into Soviet territory and reached
Minsk, capital of Belorussia.
This wasn't just
the biggest invasion in history,
it was turning out
to be one of the quickest, as well.
You thought it was a doddle.
The Russians were all defecting
in droves or were taken prisoner.
And we would have a splendid life
and the war would be over
in six months - a year at most.
There were soldiers
who advanced singing.
It's hard to believe,
but it's a fact.
And soon,
German troops were celebrating.
Back in Berlin, on 3rd October 1941,
Hitler publicly gloried in the
successes on the Eastern Front.
At the Sportpalast, he basked
in the adulation of the crowd.
Faith in Hitler's
charismatic leadership
had been built on his ability
to deliver success after success.
And here he was, so it seemed,
successful, once again.
Hitler even went so far as to say
explicitly that the Red Army
had been defeated.
All this euphoria about the invasion
of the Soviet Union
highlighted a key aspect
of Hitler's charismatic leadership.
His ability
to allow those who worked for him
to dream
of wildly ambitious schemes.
To work, as their Fuhrer did,
unhindered by moral restraint.
German technocrats knew that Hitler
had called for this to be a war
of annihilation,
and for months before the invasion,
had been working out
how many people in the Soviet Union
should be starved to death.
These people were surplus
to Nazi requirements.
And one calculation was that
there were 30 million of them.
When the German army
occupied the Soviet city of Kharkov,
they deliberately tried
to starve the population.
German soldiers,
who'd been told to steal provisions
from the locals, in order to feed
themselves, sealed the city,
and only gave food
to the small number of people
who worked for them.
The rest began to die of hunger.
In the final stages of starvation,
your lips get somehow stretched, and
it's what they call a hungry grin.
You don't know whether a person
is grinning or crying.
But the teeth are bare.
Then, diarrhoea,
the so-called hungry diarrhoea.
And then comes
a bitter taste in the mouth.
This murderous policy
was based on the belief
that the Germans were superior.
But what if they weren't?
The arrival of the Russian winter
brought the first major military
setback for the Germans since
the end of the First World War.
When soldiers during the night had
no opportunity to warm up somewhere,
they got frozen toes and fingers.
We were totally under-equipped.
The soldiers were overwhelmed by
fatigue and couldn't think straight.
Nearly numbed by fatigue.
Hitler and his generals had been
so confident of swift victory
that soldiers hadn't been provided
with proper cold weather equipment.
And when the Red Army
counter-attacked,
it looked like the whole
German offensive might collapse.
It was the greatest test yet
for Hitler's leadership.
And he responded
by telling his soldiers
simply to hold their nerve
and stand fast.
In the cold Soviet forests,
they might die,
but that was what soldiers
were supposed to do when asked.
Do you think Frederick the Great's
grenadiers were happy to die, either?
In the same way,
I consider myself entitled to ask
every German soldier
to lay down his life.
Hitler's lack of compassion, lack
of pity, hadn't mattered to most
of these German soldiers, as long
as they were winning easy victories.
But now, Hitler's Darwinian beliefs
meant that he could
see his soldiers die without a care.
After all, hadn't he always said
that the weak
didn't deserve to live?
Ever since he came to power,
Hitler had been portrayed
as a man of strength.
A man who could not make a mistake.
Goebbels, the propaganda minister,
had said that building this image
had been one
of his greatest achievements.
Via the creation
of the Fuhrer myth,
Hitler has been given
the halo of infallibility.
But now, Hitler was beginning
to appear all too fallible.
He'd told the German people that
the Red Army would never rise again.
But it just had.
To help solve this difficulty,
Goebbels turned to history.
In March 1942, a film was released
about a charismatic leader
from Germany's past - the
Prussian king, Frederick the Great.
And every German knew that Frederick
had also suffered setbacks,
but had triumphed in the end.
Frederick the Great
was supposed to symbolise Hitler.
The German who watched it
was supposed to think
that here was a similar situation
to the present,
that the war could be as desperate
as that, that there were still
possibilities to turn it round,
and that it could
be brought to victory.
Since the start of the campaign
against the Soviet Union,
Germany's new Frederick the Great,
Adolf Hitler, had chosen
to spend his time here, isolated
in a forest in East Prussia.
This was his field headquarters,
known as the Wolf's Lair.
Hitler said to one of his generals
that it was important to keep one's
distance from the suffering on the
front line, so as not to feel pity.
But even though he and his staff
were hundreds of miles away
from the fighting, it still
wasn't possible to hide from
the stark realities of this war.
Just after the Soviets
started their counter-offensive,
in December 1941, Hitler had gained
a new enemy - the Americans,
with their vast industrial capacity.
It was around this time that Hitler
held important discussions
about increasing
the Nazi persecution of the Jews.
How Hitler did this
reveals a great deal
about how his leadership worked.
Hitler hated
formal government meetings.
Even though there was officially
still a German cabinet,
Hitler had not allowed the cabinet
to meet since 1938.
A charismatic leader like Hitler
didn't want to take part
in some sort of committee meeting,
where he might have to listen
to the views of others.
Instead, at the Wolf's Lair,
Hitler met Heinrich Himmler,
head of the SS,
on 18th December, 1941.
And the killing of Jews
was discussed.
Just between the two of them -
unter vier Augen - under four eyes.
Several hundred thousand Jews had
already been killed by the Nazis,
mostly in the Soviet Union,
but now, starting in 1942, the Nazis
tried to round up the Jews of Europe
and systematically murder them.
Hitler authorised
the killings of the Holocaust,
but many others sorted out
the detail of how it was to happen.
And despite the scale of the crime,
Hitler never had to deal with
any mass public protest in Germany
about the deportation of the Jews.
Hitler was always sensitive to
the mood of the general population,
even during the war.
What happened here in Bavaria
in 1941 shows just how responsive
the Nazis could be to the feelings
of ordinary Germans.
Bavaria was a largely Catholic area,
and when a leading Bavarian Nazi
decreed that schools
should stop displaying crucifixes
in the classroom,
there was public outrage.
As a mother of eight,
our Fuhrer awarded me
with the Mother's Cross in gold.
It is incomprehensible to me
that my youngest,
whom last Monday I led to school
for the first time,
should not see a crucifix there,
after his seven siblings
have grown up in the shadow
of the crucifix, hitherto.
I often contemplate and cannot solve
the mystery how such a measure
is possible at all, since our Fuhrer
stands by his soldiers in the east
and fights against Bolshevikism.
Despite the fact that Hitler
loathed Christianity himself,
the Nazis reversed the policy
on crucifixes,
because it was damaging
German morale.
With the disappearance
of the Russian winter,
the Germans started
to recover their optimism.
The Red Army counter-attack
had ground to a halt
and, by the summer of 1942,
German units were advancing again,
travelling across the steppes
in the south of Russia.
In less than eight weeks,
they advanced 500 miles.
We were better soldiers
than the Russians. We were better.
It filled us with pride
to advance that far to the east,
further and further.
We were all inspired by the belief
that we succeed in whatever we do,
and that for us,
nothing is impossible.
In August 1942,
the German Sixth Army reached
the River Volga,
1,400 miles east of Berlin.
And then, suddenly,
a broad silvery ribbon, the Volga.
We knew this was the goal,
the ultimate goal of the war, maybe,
to get to the Volga.
It was an exciting feeling.
But on the bank
of the Volga lay a city
still occupied by the Soviets,
a city then called Stalingrad.
Hitler ordered the commander
of the German Sixth Army,
Friedrich Paulus,
to take Stalingrad at once.
And in a speech a few weeks later,
Hitler said:
"You can rest assured no human being
can remove us from this place."
But there was a growing disconnect
between the promises
Hitler was making, and the ability
of his troops to achieve them.
The basis
of his charismatic leadership
had always been his certainty
that his vision was attainable.
But now, with supply lines stretched
almost to breaking point,
German generals questioned whether
their troops had the resources
to do what their Fuhrer wanted.
A meeting, here in Berlin in August
1942, at the aviation ministry,
showed just how Hitler's
unrealistic style of leadership
influenced those Nazis
closest to him.
This giant office block,
one of the biggest in the world
when it was opened, was built for
Reich Marshall Hermann Goering.
A former fighter pilot,
Goering was not only head
of the German airforce,
he was also helping
to run the German economy.
On the 6th August,
Goering met Nazi officials
from the occupied territories.
And Goering,
attempting to manage them
in the same way Hitler would,
simply told them what he wanted.
I have here reports from you
on how much you expect to deliver.
This is nothing in view
of your territories.
Last year, France delivered
550,000 tons of grain,
and now, I demand 1.2 million.
There will be
no discussion about it.
They were unobtainable demands.
And Goering
was constantly making them.
So much so, that some people
who worked directly for him chose to
kill themselves, when they couldn't
deliver what was asked of them.
Luftwaffe General Ernst Udet
shot himself in 1941.
As did Hans Jeschnonnek, chief
of the Luftwaffe General staff,
in 1943.
Jeschonnek left a suicide note,
in which he said:
"It is no longer possible
to work with the Reich Marshall.
"Long live the Fuhrer."
Also desperate, as autumn
turned to winter in Stalingrad,
were soldiers
of the German Sixth Army.
They were finding
that fulfilling Hitler's order
to take the city
was all but impossible.
This was street fighting,
at close quarters,
and the Germans were used to driving
their tanks across the steppes.
You had to make your way
to the front ducking, crouching,
kneeling.
Shots rang out from all sides,
from the front, from behind,
from above, from below.
And all around you was the noise
of the artillery salvos.
We were repeatedly told, another
100 metres, and you've done it,
but how can it be done if you
just don't have the strength?
Each attack resulted in such
a high number of losses, that it was
easy to calculate how long it would
be before there was no-one left.
In November 1942, Hitler learnt
that the Red Army had launched
a huge offensive near Stalingrad,
and the German Sixth Army,
fighting inside the city,
was now cut off.
But he wouldn't let them
make a fighting retreat.
He ordered them
to stay where they were.
Hitler's stubbornness,
his intransigence,
his refusal to listen
to the advice of others -
qualities that had helped
make him seem a strong leader
before the war -
were now revealed as weaknesses.
Weaknesses compounded
during the Stalingrad crisis
by Hitler's willingness to rely
on the promises of Herman Goering.
Goering had boasted
that the Luftwaffe could supply
the Sixth Army from the air.
So all these soldiers
had to do in Stalingrad,
freezing,
and surrounded by their enemy,
was to rely on Hermann Goering
to keep his word.
Back in Germany,
the population was largely ignorant
of what was happening in Stalingrad.
This was the film
that Goebbels's propaganda ministry
chose to release for Christmas 1942.
An emotional attempt to show
how German women and children
still believed in victory,
and stood behind
husbands and fathers at the front
line, and, crucially, their Fuhrer.
But increasingly, it was a fantasy,
and this was the reality.
On the 2nd of February 1943,
the last German soldiers
surrendered to the Red Army
in Stalingrad.
Goering's Luftwaffe hadn't been able
to provide the Sixth Army
with adequate supplies and all
attempts to rescue them had failed.
The Red Army
took more than 90,000 prisoners.
The commander of the Sixth Army,
Friedrich Paulus,
also fell into Soviet hands.
He had been promoted by Hitler
to the rank of Field Marshal
just before the German surrender.
It was a hint that Hitler
wanted Paulus to commit suicide.
German Field Marshals
were not expected
to be captured alive in battle.
Hitler was furious when he heard
that Paulus hadn't killed himself.
At his headquarters,
he raged against him.
"It hurts me so much, because
the heroism of so many soldiers
"is obliterated by one single
spineless weakling.
"What does this mean, "life"?
The individual has to die, anyway.
"What lives on is the people."
Hitler also spoke of how he wanted
those around him to behave,
if the situation
ever seemed hopeless.
"You stand together,
form an all-round defence,
"and shoot yourself
with the last bullet."
It was another sign of the potential
downside of having faith in Hitler.
He couldn't have made it clearer.
This war was all or nothing.
Life or death.
And death now seemed
the more likely option
as the boasts of victory on the
Eastern Front rang ever more hollow.
Now, in the spring of 1943,
with the war going as badly
as this for the Germans,
there were concerted attempts
to get rid of Hitler.
Officers serving with Army Group
Centre on the Eastern Front
wrapped up a bomb, pretending
it was two bottles of liqueur.
One of them then passed on
the package to a passenger
who was travelling
with Hitler on his plane.
The conspirators wanted Hitler's
death to be blamed on a plane crash.
That way, they wouldn't be
criticised by other officers
who remained loyal to Hitler.
But the bomb failed to go off,
and Hitler's plane landed safely.
Though some army officers were
prepared to try and blow Hitler up,
no-one could be found in 1943
who had access to Hitler
and could bring himself to shoot
his Fuhrer face to face.
At least one conspirator said
he was just not equal to the task.
The legacy of his personal charisma
might well have saved
Hitler's life that year.
In the aftermath
of the defeat at Stalingrad,
Hitler wasn't keen
to speak in public,
and Josef Goebbels
attempted to raise morale.
But Goebbels didn't just
offer the German people
this fanatical talk of "total war."
He also gave them
something else - escapism.
In March 1943,
one of the most expensive German
films of the period was released,
The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.
"The entertainment film
had a political purpose.
"That political purpose was to
get the audience off the streets,
"away from their household cares
and family worries."
Almost until the last day
of his life,
Hitler would try to sell
his own fantasy to those around him,
that Germany could still somehow
win this war.
And to do this,
he relied in large part
on his remaining charismatic powers.
"I experienced examples of it,
of men who came to tell him
"it could not go on any longer,
and even said that to him.
"And then he talked for an hour
and then they went and said,
"I want to give it another try."
"Well, he had an enormously
strong will, you know, and he had
"powers of persuasion that could
gloss over any rational arguments."
This amateur footage
of Hitler with General Manstein
gives a rare opportunity
to see Hitler interacting
with his military commanders.
"At the end of every meeting,
"he would always personally turn
to the Field Marshal in charge
"and say,
"But you're not going to abandon me."
"And he took both his hands
and shook them.
"He had an immense ability
to manipulate and influence people."
When Hitler said goodbye
to Manstein,
he looked him straight in the eye
and held on to his hand for longer,
much longer, than normal.
But Hitler's motivational tricks
were falling increasingly flat.
On the 6th of June 1944 came D-Day,
the Allied landings in Normandy.
'Fast rocket boats showered
the enemy with their rain of death.'
Two weeks later,
the Red Army launched a massive
offensive on the Eastern Front.
All this demonstrated
the sheer scale of the resources
at the disposal of the Allies,
resources the Germans
could not hope to match.
'Our beachhead to Berlin
was established.'
It was against the background
of these military catastrophes
for the Germans
that the most famous attempt
on Hitler's life was made,
here at the Wolf's Lair
on the 20th of July, 1944.
Paradoxically, it would also show
the lingering power
of Hitler's charismatic authority.
Count Claus von Stauffenberg,
appalled at the way
Hitler was leading Germany,
planted a bomb under the table
at Hitler's midday conference.
Stauffenberg then hurried
to the nearby military airfield
and flew to Berlin, intending
to help co-ordinate the coup there.
Ahead of Stauffenberg, a number
of other plotters had arrived here,
at these offices of the German Army,
on the Bendlerstrasse in Berlin.
Amongst the conspirators
in the building was the man who was
supposed to be the new
German Head of State, Ludwig Beck,
former Chief of Staff of the Army.
He waited to see
how many other officers
would pledge their support
for the coup.
But the question they asked
was this - "Did Hitler still live?"
And the answer was yes.
Hitler had survived the bomb
attempt with only minor injuries.
The wooden walls of the
conference room had blown out,
dissipating the explosion.
That evening, Major Remer, commander
of the Berlin Guard Battalion,
was uncertain what to do, until he
spoke to Adolf Hitler on the phone.
Hitler told him to suppress
the coup at once.
Sofort, mein Fuhrer.
It was the sound of Hitler's voice
that made Remer act.
Forces loyal to Hitler re-took the
Army offices on the Bendlerstrasse.
Stauffenberg and three
other plotters were taken out
into this courtyard
and immediately shot.
Over the next weeks,
several thousand other suspects
were arrested, and 200 killed.
In the early hours of the 21st
of July, Hitler spoke on the radio,
to tell the German people
that he still lived.
But public reaction
to the attempt on Hitler's life
showed how deep the roots of his
charismatic power still reached.
This response was typical.
"I was outraged,
"I was totally outraged that
something like this could happen.
"It was a horrible experience
for me."
"There was widespread relief
that the attack had failed
"and Hitler gained a lot
of sympathy because of it."
But this feeling of gratitude
that Hitler had survived
the assassination attempt
didn't mean that people had faith
that the war could still be won.
Despite the image Goebbels'
propaganda tried to project,
of an idyllic world
peopled by perfect Germans,
Nazi internal intelligence reports
detected a growing disenchantment
with the regime
and real fear about what lay ahead.
And by the autumn of 1944,
the Germans had a great deal
to be fearful about.
The Red Army
was advancing into Germany.
The countryside of East Prussia
was the first German land
to be occupied by the Soviets.
And in some
of the towns and villages,
the Red Army committed atrocities.
For Nazi propaganda, it was a gift,
the reason to keep fighting
was clearer than ever...
to stop people Hitler called
"animals from the steppes of Asia"
from gaining control of Germany.
What the Nazi propaganda
didn't say, of course,
was that a strong motivation
for this terrible Soviet revenge
was the countless horrors
the Germans had perpetrated
in the Soviet Union.
Further inside Germany,
faith in Hitler was being eroded.
Charismatic leadership relies
on a connection between the leader
and the led, a connection based
on faith that the leader knows best.
That was now all but broken...
..in large part
because towns and cities
were being bombed to destruction,
and many blamed
not just the Nazis in general,
but Hitler, in particular.
"The Fuhrer has it easy.
"He doesn't
have to look after a family.
"If the worst
comes to the worst in the war,
"he'll leave us all in a mess
and put a bullet through his head."
"It's always claimed that the Fuhrer
was sent to us from God.
"I don't doubt it.
The Fuhrer was sent to us from God,
"though not in order to save Germany,
but to ruin it."
In the face of such criticism,
Nazi terror increased
against the general population
and thousands of Germans
were shot for defeatism.
The irony was not lost
on these people that,
just before the war began,
one leading German had promised
that no bombs would fall on Germany.
Hermann Goering,
commander of the Luftwaffe
and serial breaker of promises.
With much of Germany in ruins,
in January 1945,
Adolf Hitler spoke on the radio.
And he revealed
the gap that had grown
between him and the German people.
They knew the war was lost.
He didn't appear to.
Amidst this crisis,
Joseph Goebbels thought he knew
how to raise the morale
of the German people.
He released Kolberg,
a historical epic about the heroic
resistance of a small Prussian town
to the invasion of the French,
140 years before.
Goebbels was so keen on this film,
that he ordered thousands
of German soldiers
to act in it as extras.
"Goebbels even said to me
that it was more important
"that the soldiers act in his film,
rather than fight at the front,
"which was no longer worth doing,
"since we were in the middle
of a total collapse."
And the message Goebbels
wanted the German people
to take from the film could scarcely
have been more obvious.
By January 1945, the Red Army
had reached here, the River Oder,
just 40 miles east of Berlin.
They now outnumbered the German
defenders more than three to one.
Over the next weeks,
the Soviets gathered their strength
before crossing the Oder
in April 1945,
and launching 2.5 million soldiers
against the German capital.
In Berlin,
Hitler was living in a bunker
underneath the Reich Chancellery,
which stood on this site
on the Vossstrasse.
As his empire crumbled,
he tried to control
what was left of the German Army.
But he also spent his time
dreaming of this...
The city of Linz in Austria.
Hitler had gone to school here
and his parents were buried
in one of Linz's suburbs.
Hitler had huge plans for Linz
and a large-scale model of the new,
Hitler-approved Linz
had been assembled in a cellar room
of the Reich Chancellery in Berlin,
early in 1945.
So that Hitler,
as the Red Army closed in on him,
could fantasise about what
the new city would look like.
Hitler had planned
to retire to Linz,
and a giant Adolf Hitler museum
was to be built here.
He also wanted the bodies
of his parents to be dug up
from their existing graves
and re-interred
in a specially-constructed bell
tower in the centre of the city.
His ability to construct visions
of the future
had always been a central part
of his charismatic appeal.
But by now, his visions had parted
company completely with reality.
Close by worked another fantasist.
This was Joseph Goebbels'
Propaganda Ministry.
And here, in April 1945,
this was on his mind.
The power of film to alter history.
Goebbels tried to convince his staff
to stay and make a last stand,
because, he said,
"In 100 years time,
"a film will be made
about this epic period."
"Gentlemen, don't you want
to play a part in this film?
"To be brought back to
life in 100 years' time.
"I can assure you that it will
be a fine and elevating picture.
"And for the sake of this prospect,
it is worth standing fast.
"Hold out now,
so that 100 years hence,
"the audience does not
hoot and whistle
"when you appear on the screen."
Goebbels planned what he thought
was a heroic ending
for himself,
his wife and six children.
They all came with him
to Hitler's bunker
where Goebbels
had his children killed.
After these children
had been murdered,
Goebbels and his wife
committed suicide.
Hitler had killed himself
the day before, on 30th April 1945
and his body was taken
by other Nazis
and burnt here, in what was then
the garden of the Reich Chancellery.
Just over a week later,
Germany surrendered.
In his last days,
underground in this bunker,
Hitler had composed
a final testament,
one that revealed his views
of the world had not altered.
He still blamed
the Jews for everything,
and possessed unshakeable confidence
in himself.
"In these three decades, all my
thoughts, my actions, and my life
"have been guided solely
"by the love and loyalty
to my people."
Even in his last hours,
Hitler had not changed.
Almost all the elements
that had enabled him to become
a charismatic leader still existed
within him, until his last breath.
What had changed was other people's
perception of him.
This was Hitler's legacy,
one of unparalleled destruction.
Seven million Germans dead.
Around 34 million dead in the
countries that had fought Nazism,
with six million Jews alone
killed in the Holocaust.
Hitler had said that those
he considered racially-pure Germans
were better than anyone else,
and many had believed him.
Hitler had not hypnotised
these people into supporting him.
They had chosen to follow
a leader they felt had charisma.
And this, in the end, was where
their belief in Hitler had led them.
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the most ambitious boasts imaginable
about what lay ahead.
And just a few years later,
it seemed to millions of Germans
that Hitler had indeed created
a future that belonged to them.
In 1941, when this film was taken,
Hitler was all but worshipped
by his followers.
In pursuit of his racist vision,
Hitler had led the German army
to a series of momentous victories.
His promises were taken as gospel.
My diary of the time has that line:
"Come what may,
the Fuhrer will sort it."
I wrote that myself.
I also believed, "Gosh,
he's achieved so much already!"
That was the point -
all the things he'd achieved!
But as the war progressed,
the successes stopped coming.
And then, the end. We were abandoned.
We had to suffer our fate.
With insights from those
who lived through these times -
most of whom were interviewed
by the BBC over the last 20 years -
this film reveals how Hitler tried
to retain his charismatic appeal,
as the bond between
the German people and Hitler
was tested as never before.
Adolf Hitler loved this landscape.
It was here, amidst the mountains
of southern Bavaria,
that he said his ideas matured.
And on 31st July 1940,
at his house, the Berghof,
he announced his most ambitious idea
yet to his military leaders.
Now that the Germans had conquered
much of Western Europe,
Hitler was thinking in epic terms.
He wanted plans drawn up to invade
the Soviet Union - a country which
in his warped view of the world was
led by Jewish/Bolshevik criminals.
But it was also a country he'd
signed a non-aggression pact with,
as well as a country
twice as large as Europe.
The generals listened
to Hitler's idea and many thought,
"Shouldn't be too difficult."
People thought, and the military
leaders were among them,
that it would be relatively easy
to eliminate the Russian army
with one short, forceful blow.
Based on the information
we had about the Russian army,
I also believed that it would not
be much of a problem.
These soldiers knew that Hitler
had been saying for years
that the biggest danger Germany
faced was the Soviet Union,
and many thought
their Fuhrer was right.
Fresh from their
recent victory over France,
German soldiers were full
of confidence in Hitler's judgment.
So much so, that he was called
"the greatest
military commander of all time"
by one of his leading generals.
Hitler was more
than an ordinary leader.
By now, he was considered
by many to be almost superhuman.
And it wasn't just Hitler who was
thought to be a superior being.
His connection with those Germans
he considered racially pure
was based, in part,
on a shared sense of superiority.
Millions of ordinary Germans,
especially the young,
had been told
that they were special, too.
We had been taught that only the
Germans were valuable human beings.
There was a little booklet called,
German Inventors,
German Poets, German Musicians.
Nothing else existed.
And we devoured it,
and we were absolutely convinced
that we were the greatest.
And since Hitler boasted that
the Germans were a superior race,
he believed that victory over those
he considered racially inferior,
like the people of the Soviet Union,
would be relatively straightforward.
And so, on 22nd June 1941,
the Germans launched
the largest invasion
in the history of the world.
Within just a week, the Germans
had advanced more than 200 miles
into Soviet territory and reached
Minsk, capital of Belorussia.
This wasn't just
the biggest invasion in history,
it was turning out
to be one of the quickest, as well.
You thought it was a doddle.
The Russians were all defecting
in droves or were taken prisoner.
And we would have a splendid life
and the war would be over
in six months - a year at most.
There were soldiers
who advanced singing.
It's hard to believe,
but it's a fact.
And soon,
German troops were celebrating.
Back in Berlin, on 3rd October 1941,
Hitler publicly gloried in the
successes on the Eastern Front.
At the Sportpalast, he basked
in the adulation of the crowd.
Faith in Hitler's
charismatic leadership
had been built on his ability
to deliver success after success.
And here he was, so it seemed,
successful, once again.
Hitler even went so far as to say
explicitly that the Red Army
had been defeated.
All this euphoria about the invasion
of the Soviet Union
highlighted a key aspect
of Hitler's charismatic leadership.
His ability
to allow those who worked for him
to dream
of wildly ambitious schemes.
To work, as their Fuhrer did,
unhindered by moral restraint.
German technocrats knew that Hitler
had called for this to be a war
of annihilation,
and for months before the invasion,
had been working out
how many people in the Soviet Union
should be starved to death.
These people were surplus
to Nazi requirements.
And one calculation was that
there were 30 million of them.
When the German army
occupied the Soviet city of Kharkov,
they deliberately tried
to starve the population.
German soldiers,
who'd been told to steal provisions
from the locals, in order to feed
themselves, sealed the city,
and only gave food
to the small number of people
who worked for them.
The rest began to die of hunger.
In the final stages of starvation,
your lips get somehow stretched, and
it's what they call a hungry grin.
You don't know whether a person
is grinning or crying.
But the teeth are bare.
Then, diarrhoea,
the so-called hungry diarrhoea.
And then comes
a bitter taste in the mouth.
This murderous policy
was based on the belief
that the Germans were superior.
But what if they weren't?
The arrival of the Russian winter
brought the first major military
setback for the Germans since
the end of the First World War.
When soldiers during the night had
no opportunity to warm up somewhere,
they got frozen toes and fingers.
We were totally under-equipped.
The soldiers were overwhelmed by
fatigue and couldn't think straight.
Nearly numbed by fatigue.
Hitler and his generals had been
so confident of swift victory
that soldiers hadn't been provided
with proper cold weather equipment.
And when the Red Army
counter-attacked,
it looked like the whole
German offensive might collapse.
It was the greatest test yet
for Hitler's leadership.
And he responded
by telling his soldiers
simply to hold their nerve
and stand fast.
In the cold Soviet forests,
they might die,
but that was what soldiers
were supposed to do when asked.
Do you think Frederick the Great's
grenadiers were happy to die, either?
In the same way,
I consider myself entitled to ask
every German soldier
to lay down his life.
Hitler's lack of compassion, lack
of pity, hadn't mattered to most
of these German soldiers, as long
as they were winning easy victories.
But now, Hitler's Darwinian beliefs
meant that he could
see his soldiers die without a care.
After all, hadn't he always said
that the weak
didn't deserve to live?
Ever since he came to power,
Hitler had been portrayed
as a man of strength.
A man who could not make a mistake.
Goebbels, the propaganda minister,
had said that building this image
had been one
of his greatest achievements.
Via the creation
of the Fuhrer myth,
Hitler has been given
the halo of infallibility.
But now, Hitler was beginning
to appear all too fallible.
He'd told the German people that
the Red Army would never rise again.
But it just had.
To help solve this difficulty,
Goebbels turned to history.
In March 1942, a film was released
about a charismatic leader
from Germany's past - the
Prussian king, Frederick the Great.
And every German knew that Frederick
had also suffered setbacks,
but had triumphed in the end.
Frederick the Great
was supposed to symbolise Hitler.
The German who watched it
was supposed to think
that here was a similar situation
to the present,
that the war could be as desperate
as that, that there were still
possibilities to turn it round,
and that it could
be brought to victory.
Since the start of the campaign
against the Soviet Union,
Germany's new Frederick the Great,
Adolf Hitler, had chosen
to spend his time here, isolated
in a forest in East Prussia.
This was his field headquarters,
known as the Wolf's Lair.
Hitler said to one of his generals
that it was important to keep one's
distance from the suffering on the
front line, so as not to feel pity.
But even though he and his staff
were hundreds of miles away
from the fighting, it still
wasn't possible to hide from
the stark realities of this war.
Just after the Soviets
started their counter-offensive,
in December 1941, Hitler had gained
a new enemy - the Americans,
with their vast industrial capacity.
It was around this time that Hitler
held important discussions
about increasing
the Nazi persecution of the Jews.
How Hitler did this
reveals a great deal
about how his leadership worked.
Hitler hated
formal government meetings.
Even though there was officially
still a German cabinet,
Hitler had not allowed the cabinet
to meet since 1938.
A charismatic leader like Hitler
didn't want to take part
in some sort of committee meeting,
where he might have to listen
to the views of others.
Instead, at the Wolf's Lair,
Hitler met Heinrich Himmler,
head of the SS,
on 18th December, 1941.
And the killing of Jews
was discussed.
Just between the two of them -
unter vier Augen - under four eyes.
Several hundred thousand Jews had
already been killed by the Nazis,
mostly in the Soviet Union,
but now, starting in 1942, the Nazis
tried to round up the Jews of Europe
and systematically murder them.
Hitler authorised
the killings of the Holocaust,
but many others sorted out
the detail of how it was to happen.
And despite the scale of the crime,
Hitler never had to deal with
any mass public protest in Germany
about the deportation of the Jews.
Hitler was always sensitive to
the mood of the general population,
even during the war.
What happened here in Bavaria
in 1941 shows just how responsive
the Nazis could be to the feelings
of ordinary Germans.
Bavaria was a largely Catholic area,
and when a leading Bavarian Nazi
decreed that schools
should stop displaying crucifixes
in the classroom,
there was public outrage.
As a mother of eight,
our Fuhrer awarded me
with the Mother's Cross in gold.
It is incomprehensible to me
that my youngest,
whom last Monday I led to school
for the first time,
should not see a crucifix there,
after his seven siblings
have grown up in the shadow
of the crucifix, hitherto.
I often contemplate and cannot solve
the mystery how such a measure
is possible at all, since our Fuhrer
stands by his soldiers in the east
and fights against Bolshevikism.
Despite the fact that Hitler
loathed Christianity himself,
the Nazis reversed the policy
on crucifixes,
because it was damaging
German morale.
With the disappearance
of the Russian winter,
the Germans started
to recover their optimism.
The Red Army counter-attack
had ground to a halt
and, by the summer of 1942,
German units were advancing again,
travelling across the steppes
in the south of Russia.
In less than eight weeks,
they advanced 500 miles.
We were better soldiers
than the Russians. We were better.
It filled us with pride
to advance that far to the east,
further and further.
We were all inspired by the belief
that we succeed in whatever we do,
and that for us,
nothing is impossible.
In August 1942,
the German Sixth Army reached
the River Volga,
1,400 miles east of Berlin.
And then, suddenly,
a broad silvery ribbon, the Volga.
We knew this was the goal,
the ultimate goal of the war, maybe,
to get to the Volga.
It was an exciting feeling.
But on the bank
of the Volga lay a city
still occupied by the Soviets,
a city then called Stalingrad.
Hitler ordered the commander
of the German Sixth Army,
Friedrich Paulus,
to take Stalingrad at once.
And in a speech a few weeks later,
Hitler said:
"You can rest assured no human being
can remove us from this place."
But there was a growing disconnect
between the promises
Hitler was making, and the ability
of his troops to achieve them.
The basis
of his charismatic leadership
had always been his certainty
that his vision was attainable.
But now, with supply lines stretched
almost to breaking point,
German generals questioned whether
their troops had the resources
to do what their Fuhrer wanted.
A meeting, here in Berlin in August
1942, at the aviation ministry,
showed just how Hitler's
unrealistic style of leadership
influenced those Nazis
closest to him.
This giant office block,
one of the biggest in the world
when it was opened, was built for
Reich Marshall Hermann Goering.
A former fighter pilot,
Goering was not only head
of the German airforce,
he was also helping
to run the German economy.
On the 6th August,
Goering met Nazi officials
from the occupied territories.
And Goering,
attempting to manage them
in the same way Hitler would,
simply told them what he wanted.
I have here reports from you
on how much you expect to deliver.
This is nothing in view
of your territories.
Last year, France delivered
550,000 tons of grain,
and now, I demand 1.2 million.
There will be
no discussion about it.
They were unobtainable demands.
And Goering
was constantly making them.
So much so, that some people
who worked directly for him chose to
kill themselves, when they couldn't
deliver what was asked of them.
Luftwaffe General Ernst Udet
shot himself in 1941.
As did Hans Jeschnonnek, chief
of the Luftwaffe General staff,
in 1943.
Jeschonnek left a suicide note,
in which he said:
"It is no longer possible
to work with the Reich Marshall.
"Long live the Fuhrer."
Also desperate, as autumn
turned to winter in Stalingrad,
were soldiers
of the German Sixth Army.
They were finding
that fulfilling Hitler's order
to take the city
was all but impossible.
This was street fighting,
at close quarters,
and the Germans were used to driving
their tanks across the steppes.
You had to make your way
to the front ducking, crouching,
kneeling.
Shots rang out from all sides,
from the front, from behind,
from above, from below.
And all around you was the noise
of the artillery salvos.
We were repeatedly told, another
100 metres, and you've done it,
but how can it be done if you
just don't have the strength?
Each attack resulted in such
a high number of losses, that it was
easy to calculate how long it would
be before there was no-one left.
In November 1942, Hitler learnt
that the Red Army had launched
a huge offensive near Stalingrad,
and the German Sixth Army,
fighting inside the city,
was now cut off.
But he wouldn't let them
make a fighting retreat.
He ordered them
to stay where they were.
Hitler's stubbornness,
his intransigence,
his refusal to listen
to the advice of others -
qualities that had helped
make him seem a strong leader
before the war -
were now revealed as weaknesses.
Weaknesses compounded
during the Stalingrad crisis
by Hitler's willingness to rely
on the promises of Herman Goering.
Goering had boasted
that the Luftwaffe could supply
the Sixth Army from the air.
So all these soldiers
had to do in Stalingrad,
freezing,
and surrounded by their enemy,
was to rely on Hermann Goering
to keep his word.
Back in Germany,
the population was largely ignorant
of what was happening in Stalingrad.
This was the film
that Goebbels's propaganda ministry
chose to release for Christmas 1942.
An emotional attempt to show
how German women and children
still believed in victory,
and stood behind
husbands and fathers at the front
line, and, crucially, their Fuhrer.
But increasingly, it was a fantasy,
and this was the reality.
On the 2nd of February 1943,
the last German soldiers
surrendered to the Red Army
in Stalingrad.
Goering's Luftwaffe hadn't been able
to provide the Sixth Army
with adequate supplies and all
attempts to rescue them had failed.
The Red Army
took more than 90,000 prisoners.
The commander of the Sixth Army,
Friedrich Paulus,
also fell into Soviet hands.
He had been promoted by Hitler
to the rank of Field Marshal
just before the German surrender.
It was a hint that Hitler
wanted Paulus to commit suicide.
German Field Marshals
were not expected
to be captured alive in battle.
Hitler was furious when he heard
that Paulus hadn't killed himself.
At his headquarters,
he raged against him.
"It hurts me so much, because
the heroism of so many soldiers
"is obliterated by one single
spineless weakling.
"What does this mean, "life"?
The individual has to die, anyway.
"What lives on is the people."
Hitler also spoke of how he wanted
those around him to behave,
if the situation
ever seemed hopeless.
"You stand together,
form an all-round defence,
"and shoot yourself
with the last bullet."
It was another sign of the potential
downside of having faith in Hitler.
He couldn't have made it clearer.
This war was all or nothing.
Life or death.
And death now seemed
the more likely option
as the boasts of victory on the
Eastern Front rang ever more hollow.
Now, in the spring of 1943,
with the war going as badly
as this for the Germans,
there were concerted attempts
to get rid of Hitler.
Officers serving with Army Group
Centre on the Eastern Front
wrapped up a bomb, pretending
it was two bottles of liqueur.
One of them then passed on
the package to a passenger
who was travelling
with Hitler on his plane.
The conspirators wanted Hitler's
death to be blamed on a plane crash.
That way, they wouldn't be
criticised by other officers
who remained loyal to Hitler.
But the bomb failed to go off,
and Hitler's plane landed safely.
Though some army officers were
prepared to try and blow Hitler up,
no-one could be found in 1943
who had access to Hitler
and could bring himself to shoot
his Fuhrer face to face.
At least one conspirator said
he was just not equal to the task.
The legacy of his personal charisma
might well have saved
Hitler's life that year.
In the aftermath
of the defeat at Stalingrad,
Hitler wasn't keen
to speak in public,
and Josef Goebbels
attempted to raise morale.
But Goebbels didn't just
offer the German people
this fanatical talk of "total war."
He also gave them
something else - escapism.
In March 1943,
one of the most expensive German
films of the period was released,
The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.
"The entertainment film
had a political purpose.
"That political purpose was to
get the audience off the streets,
"away from their household cares
and family worries."
Almost until the last day
of his life,
Hitler would try to sell
his own fantasy to those around him,
that Germany could still somehow
win this war.
And to do this,
he relied in large part
on his remaining charismatic powers.
"I experienced examples of it,
of men who came to tell him
"it could not go on any longer,
and even said that to him.
"And then he talked for an hour
and then they went and said,
"I want to give it another try."
"Well, he had an enormously
strong will, you know, and he had
"powers of persuasion that could
gloss over any rational arguments."
This amateur footage
of Hitler with General Manstein
gives a rare opportunity
to see Hitler interacting
with his military commanders.
"At the end of every meeting,
"he would always personally turn
to the Field Marshal in charge
"and say,
"But you're not going to abandon me."
"And he took both his hands
and shook them.
"He had an immense ability
to manipulate and influence people."
When Hitler said goodbye
to Manstein,
he looked him straight in the eye
and held on to his hand for longer,
much longer, than normal.
But Hitler's motivational tricks
were falling increasingly flat.
On the 6th of June 1944 came D-Day,
the Allied landings in Normandy.
'Fast rocket boats showered
the enemy with their rain of death.'
Two weeks later,
the Red Army launched a massive
offensive on the Eastern Front.
All this demonstrated
the sheer scale of the resources
at the disposal of the Allies,
resources the Germans
could not hope to match.
'Our beachhead to Berlin
was established.'
It was against the background
of these military catastrophes
for the Germans
that the most famous attempt
on Hitler's life was made,
here at the Wolf's Lair
on the 20th of July, 1944.
Paradoxically, it would also show
the lingering power
of Hitler's charismatic authority.
Count Claus von Stauffenberg,
appalled at the way
Hitler was leading Germany,
planted a bomb under the table
at Hitler's midday conference.
Stauffenberg then hurried
to the nearby military airfield
and flew to Berlin, intending
to help co-ordinate the coup there.
Ahead of Stauffenberg, a number
of other plotters had arrived here,
at these offices of the German Army,
on the Bendlerstrasse in Berlin.
Amongst the conspirators
in the building was the man who was
supposed to be the new
German Head of State, Ludwig Beck,
former Chief of Staff of the Army.
He waited to see
how many other officers
would pledge their support
for the coup.
But the question they asked
was this - "Did Hitler still live?"
And the answer was yes.
Hitler had survived the bomb
attempt with only minor injuries.
The wooden walls of the
conference room had blown out,
dissipating the explosion.
That evening, Major Remer, commander
of the Berlin Guard Battalion,
was uncertain what to do, until he
spoke to Adolf Hitler on the phone.
Hitler told him to suppress
the coup at once.
Sofort, mein Fuhrer.
It was the sound of Hitler's voice
that made Remer act.
Forces loyal to Hitler re-took the
Army offices on the Bendlerstrasse.
Stauffenberg and three
other plotters were taken out
into this courtyard
and immediately shot.
Over the next weeks,
several thousand other suspects
were arrested, and 200 killed.
In the early hours of the 21st
of July, Hitler spoke on the radio,
to tell the German people
that he still lived.
But public reaction
to the attempt on Hitler's life
showed how deep the roots of his
charismatic power still reached.
This response was typical.
"I was outraged,
"I was totally outraged that
something like this could happen.
"It was a horrible experience
for me."
"There was widespread relief
that the attack had failed
"and Hitler gained a lot
of sympathy because of it."
But this feeling of gratitude
that Hitler had survived
the assassination attempt
didn't mean that people had faith
that the war could still be won.
Despite the image Goebbels'
propaganda tried to project,
of an idyllic world
peopled by perfect Germans,
Nazi internal intelligence reports
detected a growing disenchantment
with the regime
and real fear about what lay ahead.
And by the autumn of 1944,
the Germans had a great deal
to be fearful about.
The Red Army
was advancing into Germany.
The countryside of East Prussia
was the first German land
to be occupied by the Soviets.
And in some
of the towns and villages,
the Red Army committed atrocities.
For Nazi propaganda, it was a gift,
the reason to keep fighting
was clearer than ever...
to stop people Hitler called
"animals from the steppes of Asia"
from gaining control of Germany.
What the Nazi propaganda
didn't say, of course,
was that a strong motivation
for this terrible Soviet revenge
was the countless horrors
the Germans had perpetrated
in the Soviet Union.
Further inside Germany,
faith in Hitler was being eroded.
Charismatic leadership relies
on a connection between the leader
and the led, a connection based
on faith that the leader knows best.
That was now all but broken...
..in large part
because towns and cities
were being bombed to destruction,
and many blamed
not just the Nazis in general,
but Hitler, in particular.
"The Fuhrer has it easy.
"He doesn't
have to look after a family.
"If the worst
comes to the worst in the war,
"he'll leave us all in a mess
and put a bullet through his head."
"It's always claimed that the Fuhrer
was sent to us from God.
"I don't doubt it.
The Fuhrer was sent to us from God,
"though not in order to save Germany,
but to ruin it."
In the face of such criticism,
Nazi terror increased
against the general population
and thousands of Germans
were shot for defeatism.
The irony was not lost
on these people that,
just before the war began,
one leading German had promised
that no bombs would fall on Germany.
Hermann Goering,
commander of the Luftwaffe
and serial breaker of promises.
With much of Germany in ruins,
in January 1945,
Adolf Hitler spoke on the radio.
And he revealed
the gap that had grown
between him and the German people.
They knew the war was lost.
He didn't appear to.
Amidst this crisis,
Joseph Goebbels thought he knew
how to raise the morale
of the German people.
He released Kolberg,
a historical epic about the heroic
resistance of a small Prussian town
to the invasion of the French,
140 years before.
Goebbels was so keen on this film,
that he ordered thousands
of German soldiers
to act in it as extras.
"Goebbels even said to me
that it was more important
"that the soldiers act in his film,
rather than fight at the front,
"which was no longer worth doing,
"since we were in the middle
of a total collapse."
And the message Goebbels
wanted the German people
to take from the film could scarcely
have been more obvious.
By January 1945, the Red Army
had reached here, the River Oder,
just 40 miles east of Berlin.
They now outnumbered the German
defenders more than three to one.
Over the next weeks,
the Soviets gathered their strength
before crossing the Oder
in April 1945,
and launching 2.5 million soldiers
against the German capital.
In Berlin,
Hitler was living in a bunker
underneath the Reich Chancellery,
which stood on this site
on the Vossstrasse.
As his empire crumbled,
he tried to control
what was left of the German Army.
But he also spent his time
dreaming of this...
The city of Linz in Austria.
Hitler had gone to school here
and his parents were buried
in one of Linz's suburbs.
Hitler had huge plans for Linz
and a large-scale model of the new,
Hitler-approved Linz
had been assembled in a cellar room
of the Reich Chancellery in Berlin,
early in 1945.
So that Hitler,
as the Red Army closed in on him,
could fantasise about what
the new city would look like.
Hitler had planned
to retire to Linz,
and a giant Adolf Hitler museum
was to be built here.
He also wanted the bodies
of his parents to be dug up
from their existing graves
and re-interred
in a specially-constructed bell
tower in the centre of the city.
His ability to construct visions
of the future
had always been a central part
of his charismatic appeal.
But by now, his visions had parted
company completely with reality.
Close by worked another fantasist.
This was Joseph Goebbels'
Propaganda Ministry.
And here, in April 1945,
this was on his mind.
The power of film to alter history.
Goebbels tried to convince his staff
to stay and make a last stand,
because, he said,
"In 100 years time,
"a film will be made
about this epic period."
"Gentlemen, don't you want
to play a part in this film?
"To be brought back to
life in 100 years' time.
"I can assure you that it will
be a fine and elevating picture.
"And for the sake of this prospect,
it is worth standing fast.
"Hold out now,
so that 100 years hence,
"the audience does not
hoot and whistle
"when you appear on the screen."
Goebbels planned what he thought
was a heroic ending
for himself,
his wife and six children.
They all came with him
to Hitler's bunker
where Goebbels
had his children killed.
After these children
had been murdered,
Goebbels and his wife
committed suicide.
Hitler had killed himself
the day before, on 30th April 1945
and his body was taken
by other Nazis
and burnt here, in what was then
the garden of the Reich Chancellery.
Just over a week later,
Germany surrendered.
In his last days,
underground in this bunker,
Hitler had composed
a final testament,
one that revealed his views
of the world had not altered.
He still blamed
the Jews for everything,
and possessed unshakeable confidence
in himself.
"In these three decades, all my
thoughts, my actions, and my life
"have been guided solely
"by the love and loyalty
to my people."
Even in his last hours,
Hitler had not changed.
Almost all the elements
that had enabled him to become
a charismatic leader still existed
within him, until his last breath.
What had changed was other people's
perception of him.
This was Hitler's legacy,
one of unparalleled destruction.
Seven million Germans dead.
Around 34 million dead in the
countries that had fought Nazism,
with six million Jews alone
killed in the Holocaust.
Hitler had said that those
he considered racially-pure Germans
were better than anyone else,
and many had believed him.
Hitler had not hypnotised
these people into supporting him.
They had chosen to follow
a leader they felt had charisma.
And this, in the end, was where
their belief in Hitler had led them.
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