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.
(shouting in foreign language)
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 m any 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 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?
But 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 even uncovered numerous
inaccuracies in the most serious biographies.
There are something like
80 biographies of Hitler,
but there are always mistakes in some of the information.
(speaking in foreign language)
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.
(crowd yelling)
This is the itinerary of Adolf Hitler.
(soft dramatic orchestral music)
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 his devastated.
The defeat of 1918 was an
absolute tragedy for him,
particularly traumatizing because he hadn't expected it.
Nobody in government or the army had said
there's gonna 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 I.
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?
And 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.
It was on the second floor of this former inn
that 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 Harald Sandner 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.
(speaking in foreign language)
This will quite probably be
the last ever film of Hitler's birthplace.
The Austrian government plans to demolish the building
to obliterate all trace of the dictator.
Shortly after his birth,
the Hitler family moved into this building
just 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,
so 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 and 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.
(speaking in foreign language)
He let these feelings from his childhood well up
because his primary schooling had been rather good,
unlike his later schooling,
which was somewhat less satisfactory.
Through these images,
Adolf 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.
(speaking in foreign language)
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.
(speaking in foreign language)
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.
But what he liked most of all was drawing.
He loved drawing,
and his family was very admiring of his efforts.
So at the age of 13 or 14,
he decided that he was going to be an artist, a painter.
But 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.
(speaking in foreign language)
When his father Alois found out
that his son preferred drawing,
he became aggressive and violent,
regularly beating his son.
(speaking in foreign language)
The clearest testimony is that of his sister Paula,
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.
(dramatic music)
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 with
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, it's that he never doubted
his own talent.
He was always sure that this talent would be recognized.
Here are some of this drawings from that time.
But Hitler was rejected.
His lack of originality was held against him.
But not only that.
Hitler didn't do any preparation work,
thinking that his inspiration alone would be
enough to win over the examiners.
We now know he failed the entrance for
the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts twice.
Adolf Hitler found this rejection
hard to stomach.
In his book Mien Kampf, written years later,
he described this day as the worst moment in his life.
It was a trauma he spoke about to no one.
He was ashamed and humiliated at his failure,
and simply 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, the young man found out
that his mother was dying.
Klara Hitler had breast cancer.
She was being treated by a Dr. Bloch, who was Jewish.
(speaking in foreign language)
He was distraught.
For as much as he hated his father,
he absolutely adored his mother.
His mother succumbing to this disease
marked him for life.
It was in this building in the center of Linz
that Hitler spent days on end at his mother's bedside.
Harald Sandner only managed to locate it
after years of research.
This is the first time its owner has allowed
members of the foreign media inside.
(soft dramatic music)
(speaking in foreign language)
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
so he could be there all night to tend to her
in case she needed anything.
Klara Hitler passed away in this room
on the 21st of December 1907 at two o'clock in the morning.
Adolf Hitler drew her one last time, on her deathbed.
His mother was all the world to him.
(speaking in foreign language)
You could say that 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.
(speaking in foreign language)
On the day of the funeral,
the young Hitler warmly thanked Dr. Bloch
for his care and promised him his eternal gratitude.
And even though his anti-Semitic policies
caused the death of millions of Jews,
years later he kept his word.
As Fuhrer, 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,
(speaking in foreign language) 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 Harald Sandner.
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 that 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.
And 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.
And the elite were shortsighted, of course,
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.
And his enemies among the Austrian elite
were clearly identified by Hitler.
The Jews.
At the time 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 auto-biographical claims.
He lied, of course,
about his life up to that point.
He lied about having no qualifications.
He lied about never really having a job.
And 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 Austria 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 Frommel,
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 very 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.
(speaking in foreign language)
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's 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 enough 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
quite simply the first social distinction he'd ever had,
so it was very important to a young man of 25
who 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 Mayr,
the head of the intelligence service,
urgently recruited propaganda agents whose job
it was to spread the right ideology among the troops.
Hitler was a perfect candidate.
Hitler 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 this thought that he could uphold
the political morale of the troops
and lead them along the right path of nationalism.
Adolf 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 piece 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 in 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 anymore 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 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 de-naturalization
of Jewish citizens of Germany.
It was a decisive encounter.
A few days later, Hitler decided to join the party.
Karl Mayr, 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 Haufbraukeller.
(speaking in foreign language)
That evening he spoke in front of a hundred or so people,
fascinating them with his powers of oratory.
His performance was cheered.
(crowd clapping)
And saying they were fascinated
isn't just a figure of speech.
It really 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.
Hitler's strength is above all as a speaker,
as a powerful speaker, very energetic.
Unlike modern politicians,
he writes all his own speeches.
(shouting in foreign language)
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 6000 people had come to listen
to Adolf Hitler and cheer.
His speeches were certainly radical,
but the militants relating to his words
were all won over.
(speaking in foreign language)
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.
(speaking in foreign language)
These speeches helped the party
to constantly attract new members,
from 200 at the end of 1919 to 3300 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 his apartment in the center of Munich.
Its present-day owner agreed to let us in
and for the first time, she agreed to speak.
(speaking in foreign language)
I heard that the neighbors
were frightened every time they opened the front door.
They didn't want to go past his apartment
because 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 that he would be
one of the numerous 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.
But an exception to the general rule,
he left safe and sound only after a month's detention.
He survived World War II
and had some difficulty getting back
his apartment house.
He finally did in 1949.
(dramatic music)
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 muscle men
to secure its protection against attack.
One of the leaders was Ernst Rohm.
This paramilitary organization was named the SA,
for Sturmabteilung or assault division,
and mainly consisted of former soldiers.
(speaking in foreign language)
Later on the SA would take on
political opponents, fighting them in the street.
They were basically just 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 hyper inflation,
he judged the moment right to seize power in Munich.
On November 8th, 1923,
the Nazi leader took hostage certain 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 2000 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."
There then 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 during the night the Bavarian authorities
dropped their support for its initiators,
Hitler and General Ludendorff.
So the next morning, the two men organized
a protest march on the Bavarian defense ministry.
But popular support failed to materialize,
and Hitler had underestimated the forces of law and order.
(speaking in foreign language)
They clashed with the police
and there was gunfire.
(guns firing)
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 certainly would have been killed
if not for his intervention.
He escaped with a minor wound to his left shoulder.
Adolf 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.
(explosion booming)
But once again, Hitler emerged unscathed,
and he was sure he knew why.
He was convinced he was protected by God.
And each attempt he survived merely
reinforced this conviction.
(speaking in foreign language)
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 in the evening,
taking refuge in a house owned by the Hanfstaengl couple.
This was one of Harald Sandner's most important discoveries.
Hitler believed he was safe here because
the Austrian border was not far away.
But 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.
But 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.
(dramatic music)
In 1924, he, Ernest Rohm, 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.
And 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.
(crowd cheering)
In the end Hitler was sentenced to five years
in Lansdberg prison, but his performances had
made him famous throughout the whole of Germany.
(soft piano music)
This is where Hitler began his period of incarceration,
in all together 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've 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 Rudolph Hess,
the future Deputy Fuhrer,
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 sub-humans
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 quite 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 those countries
with a Germanic population.
Then it would expand into Russia,
after having destroyed the French Army.
In just those few lines, he seems to have
predicted the Second World War.
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 in the world
without the support of some major German fortunes.
Hitler was able to afford the apartment
thanks to increasingly large donations from his partisans
and certain well-off figures.
(speaking in foreign language)
He was also, of course, receiving royalties
from his book Mein Kampf.
(speaking in foreign language)
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 really
to use the media in a deliberate way.
He recorded his speeches on records and sold them.
(speaking in foreign language)
He was also the first politician to charge
an entrance fee for coming and listening to him speak.
And he used the proceeds to finance his party.
(speaking in foreign language)
In his speeches, Adolf Hitler heaped
promise after promise on his potential electors
with grand eloquent slogans.
We're going to make Germany great again.
We're going to get Germany back to work
when there's 37% unemployed.
We're going to revise the Treaty of Versailles.
He made it quite 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.
But none of this would have happened
if not for the Great Depression of 1929.
Nearly seven million Germans were unemployed,
while the country was heavily in debt,
struggling to pay its reparation for the First World War.
It was all too easy to stir up the German people's
bitterness about that defeat.
(speaking in foreign language)
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.
So 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 one remaining obstacle was the president of the Reich,
Paul von Hindenburg.
(speaking in foreign language)
Once in power, Hitler lost no time
establishing a dictatorship.
It all began on February 28, 1933
with an arson attack on the Reichstag,
the German parliament.
Exactly how it started is still a matter of conjecture.
(speaking in foreign language)
What we do know for sure is that
Hitler and the Nazis immediately used it to their ends.
Claiming that 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 8, 1945.
And 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 hara kiri,
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 that it was the very embodiment of modernity
and German technological genius.
The public works were basically
being carried out for military ends.
The highways would make it easier for 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 gonna have a new European war.
But first he had to get rid of the SA,
the assault divisions which formed a sort of
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 obviously the traditional officers were not
well disposed to making room for these lower class upstarts.
The Fuhrer 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 a hundred or so SA leaders to this hotel.
They all thought they were coming to attend 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 Rohm,
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 Rohm's room.
He opened the door, pointed his gun at him,
and said, "Rohm, you're under arrest."
Rohm was hauled there and then by Hitlers'
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.
(speaking in foreign language)
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 really 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 Rohm himself was executed in his cell
on the 2nd of July 1934.
This will quite probably be the last ever film
of Hotel Hanselbauer.
It's due to be demolished in the next 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 completely 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 all 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 revenge
since the defeat of 1918.
Hitler was obsessed with war.
It was the basis for 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.
But he hid his warmongering intentions
from the whole world.
The German Navy Museum claimed that 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 rural 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 specifically
banned any rearming of the country.
Just one example among many of the Fuhrer's intentions
to keep what he was planning hidden.
(dramatic music)
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.
But neither France nor Great Britain reacted.
A first victory for the Fuhrer,
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 back control of its borders again
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.
(dramatic music)
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.
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 1, 1939, he invaded Poland,
thereby plunging the world into the greatest
armed conflict of history,
humanity's darkest period.
(dramatic music)