Previously in Hitler The Itinerary.
It's hard to imagine how this little baby
grew up to be a mass murderer.
Objectively speaking,
Hitler was a very good soldier.
His superiors knew they could always count on him.
(speaking foreign language)
Hitler's strength is above all is speaking,
as a powerful speaker, very energetic.
Unlike many politicians, he writes all his own speeches.
Berlin, January 30, 1933.
Adolf Hitler has become the most powerful man in Germany,
a dictator who would plunge the German people
and the entire world into
the 20th century's most murderous conflict,
the Second World War.
Hitler piled on victory after victory
after seizing power which in itself was a victory
over the German people and the planet.
It was only Hitler really who wanted war.
Neither Goering nor Goebbels nor the generals wanted war.
But, Hitler was convinced that he
was a military genius.
But, how did this man with no military training
manage to conquer the whole of Europe?
(dramatic music)
Why was he considered the greatest war leader of all time?
How did this former homeless layabout
become the architect of the final solution?
One man, a passionate historian,
has traveled the world to establish
the most exhaustive chronology yet of this journey.
Harald Sandner has spent over 20 years
picking about Adolf Hitler's life hour by hour.
Where was he during these early years
and as he waged war?
Where did he make his most momentous decisions?
Wherever Hitler was,
that's where the power was.
He was the very embodiment of an absolute dictator.
More than 70 years after Hitler's death,
Harald Sandner has uncovered numerous inaccuracies
even in the most serious published works.
(speaking foreign language)
There are something
like 80 biographies of Hitler,
but there ar always mistakes in some of the information.
From France to Austria, via Germany and Belgium
we went searching for the final traces
left by the dictator
to understand the journey of a war leader.
This is the itinerary of Adolf Hitler.
(dramatic music)
(mysterious music)
Berlin, April 30, 1945.
Adolf Hitler decides to commit suicide.
He has just learnt that the Russians
are fast approaching the Reich's chancellery.
His troops can only hold them off for another 24 hours.
Hitler knows that he's lost the war.
Life had no meaning for him
once he lost the war.
He did not want to stand trial.
He didn't want to be humiliated.
At about midday, the dictator bade farewell
to his closest collaborators and retired to this room,
his office in the Fuhrerbunker with his wife, Eva Hitler.
The couple committed suicide at 3:30 pm.
(speaking foreign language)
Eva took poison while Hitler made doubly sure
by biting into a capsule of poison
as well as shooting himself.
His doctor had advised him to do this
to be sure of killing himself.
The dictator's death almost immediately
brought an end to the hostilities.
Germany surrendered on May 8, 1945,
a week after the suicide of the man
who had dragged Europe and the world
into an unprecedented cataclysm.
It was a great relief.
Nazism died with him, just as it had been born with him.
Hitler's suicide meant for Jews who were still
in German captivity,
an end to their persecution and suffering.
But, how could such atrocities
have been allowed to go on for so many years?
Could the Second World War have been avoided?
To understand its origins, we must go back to a time
when Hitler still pretended he wanted peace.
(crowd cheers)
(dramatic music)
On September 29, 1938 it was in this building
in the center of Munich that the German dictator,
Adolf Hitler received several heads of state.
The Italian leader, Benito Mussolini,
French Prime Minister, Edouard Daladier,
and British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain.
It was a decisive encounter for international relations.
After annexing Austria to the German Reich in 1938,
Hitler now wanted Sudetenland,
the northwestern part of Czechoslovakia,
and he was determined to get it, whatever the opposition.
Hitler wanted to take back all territories
with German speaking people.
He thought that wherever German was spoken
was German territory.
It was on the first floor of this building
that negotiations took place on the night
of the 29th to the 30th of September, 1938.
We return to this historical setting
with the historian, Harald Sandner.
It was 1:50 in the morning when the dictator
got what he wanted.
Here we are in Hitler's personal office,
the Fuhrerbau in Munich.
This is the exact spot where the table stood
in which the so-called Munich Agreement was signed.
The treaty, in effect,
sacrificed part of Czechoslovakia.
In exchange, the dictator committed himself
to not invading the rest of that country.
In the days that followed,
around three and a half million Czechs
found themselves subject of the German state.
Czechoslovakia wasn't consulted
and didn't have any representatives.
By abandoning Sudetenland,
France and Great Britain thought they'd avoided the worst.
Both were firmly opposed to the prospect of another war.
(speaking foreign language)
Chamberlain went back to London
waving his slip of paper at the airport.
He reported that he'd negotiated with Hitler,
and that now there would be peace.
He genuinely believed he'd secured peace
for the coming years.
Little did he suspect
the fuhrer's true intentions.
For while his generals thought that pulling off
such a victory without bloodshed was a stroke of genius,
Hitler had far greater ambitions.
(speaking foreign language)
Hitler himself would have said
that the British and French had deprived him
of the war he wanted to start in September 1938.
He was determined to have this war.
(crowds cheer)
Two days later, German troops marched
into Sudetenland without encountering any resistance,
the annexation becoming known as The Flower War.
Another success for the fuhrer
whose popularity was at its peak.
So far, he'd not put a foot wrong,
and was doing exactly what he wanted,
ruling foreign rulers.
(dramatic music)
While he waited to conquer France
and the rest of Eastern Europe,
Hitler sewed terror in his own country.
This was a different kind of war,
the progressive exclusion of German Jews.
During Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass,
the ninth to 10th November, 1938,
thousands of synagogues and Jewish shops
were sacked and destroyed.
Hitler wanted to force the Jews to emigrate.
Many were rounded up and murdered.
30,000 Jewish men are arrested
and put in concentration camps
and released when they promised to emigrate.
Hitler had thought the Jews as a subversive element.
That night, Nazi Germany crossed a line
in its implementation of antisemitic policies.
(speaking foreign language)
In his speech given before the Reichstag
on the 30th of January, 1939,
Adolf Hitler predicted the extermination
of the Jews of Europe in the event of a new world war,
a morbid prophecy which evoked no reaction
from the German people.
Even if, with indulgence,
one could interpret it as merely an expulsion plan
it's clear he was talking about a planned genocide.
With this speech,
the foundations of the Holocaust had been laid,
the face of Germany changed.
(mysterious music)
Hitler made his most important decisions
at Obersalzberg, the retreat in the Bavarian Alps.
The Berghof became the dictator's secondary residence.
It was up here in the mountains
that Hitler prepared his war.
Hitler spent about a quarter of his reign
in Obersalzberg.
Hitler claimed to have been renting this house
from 1928.
In fact, it was a year earlier.
The reasons for the lie were purely fiscal.
Even much later he supplied false information.
He said he'd spent very little time in Obersalzberg,
but that was not the case.
The Berghof was his favorite residence.
One in power, he made it a second chancellery, after Berlin.
(speaking foreign language)
He chose over Obersalzberg
as a seat of government because it had
a strategic significance in establishing his power.
He could retire there to be alone, yes,
but he could also receive whomever he wanted there,
including important visitors, using the setting
to stage manage his foreign policy.
The Nazi party were masters of spin.
Every day thousands of visitors gathered to get a glimpse
of the dictator.
And, he would devote hours of his time to this,
always appearing relaxed and smiling.
It was a major propaganda operation.
The messages put across
by these images in Obersalzberg
is that of Hitler's closeness to the people.
He was a chancellor of the people,
that's what they called him,
and who could be a chancellor of the people
without the people?
(crowd cheers)
And yet, for six years
Hitler had been keeping a secret from the German people.
His 25 year old mistress.
He name was Eva Braun, and only those closest to Hitler
knew of her existence.
He had this idea that his political mission
wouldn't allow him to be married.
He presented himself as a sort of solider monk,
a prophet committed to his mission.
That wouldn't fit with being married.
With a camera given to her by the dictator,
she shot color film of their private life.
On film, Eva Braun appears happy and fulfilled,
but in reality, the young woman was suffering.
She twice tried to take her own life.
(speaking foreign language)
These suicide attempts have to be seen
as cries for help.
They would also explain her frequent absences,
although it's hard to tell at this distance,
and even when Hitler was with her
there was a relatively big distance between them.
In the mountains of Obersalzberg,
Hitler was distant because he had other things on his mind,
such as getting ready for war.
After breaking the Munich Agreement
by invading the rest of Czechoslovakia,
he signed a non-aggression pact with Stalin
in case he were to invade Poland.
(dramatic music)
It was now August 1939.
This was the last peaceful summer
that Europe and the world would know for many years.
(explosions)
(gunshots)
On September 1st, 1939,
Hitler launched the invasion of Poland.
2,500 tanks and 1,300 planes provided support
for a million and a half ground troops.
The dictator was determined,
even though many of his entourage opposed this move.
In fact, it was only Hitler really
who wanted war.
Neither Goering nor Goebbels nor the generals wanted war.
(speaking foreign language)
Hitler's mistake here was in thinking
that even if he invaded Poland,
the British and French still would not react.
But, on September 3, 1939,
Paris and London declared war on Germany.
It was now a World War.
(dramatic music)
Immediately after this, the dictator took
his personal train to the front line.
He followed the operations from the training camp
at Grosbone in Poland.
He was fascinated by the armed combat
going on right before his eyes.
Hitler felt a need to be right where the action was.
(speaking foreign language)
Hitler never stayed in the same place.
He liked to get out and meet people.
He didn't like to sleep in the same place
two nights in a row.
He was always going to the front line
and putting his life in danger.
He didn't care.
He was sure that God would protect him,
that nothing could happen to him.
Only six weeks after hostilities began,
Warsaw was surrounded.
Poland had been crushed in Hitler's blitzkrieg
or lightning war.
(dramatic music)
The day of the capitulation, Hilter divided up
the territory between himself and Stalin,
his ideological enemy.
To celebrate its victory, the German army
paraded through the streets of Warsaw.
(speaking foreign language)
Hitler was convinced,
after the swift and easy victory in Poland,
that he was a military genius, gifted with intuition.
He was always right, so if anyone disagreed
they were necessarily wrong.
This time, Hitler had let his generals
run the campaign, but from now on
he'd take charge of operations himself.
(dramatic music)
Around three million Jews were now in Nazi hands.
In defeated Poland, they were rounded up
and crammed into enormous ghettos.
The more territory
the Nazis took in Eastern Europe,
the more they were confronted with Jewish populations.
This only confirmed their conviction
that a systematic deportation and then extermination
of these Jews was necessary.
The everyday living conditions were inhuman.
They are controlled, brutalized, starved, and killed,
so it's the way then which Hitler
treats the Jewish population of Poland.
Hunger and epidemics
killed off thousands of them.
By 1940, 1941 in the big ghettos,
as many as 1,000 people were dying each month.
(dramatic music)
At the same time,
Hitler was extending his rule westward.
In April 1940, he invaded Norway and then Denmark.
He also set out the attack strategy for France,
even though he had no military experience.
Things didn't go as planned, however.
He postponed the invasion of France 29 times.
The reason France wasn't invaded earlier
is very simple, the weather.
The weather was an important factor for Hitler
because air support was used in a massive way
for the first time in this new lightning war.
But, tanks would also play an important role.
Building them and training the crews
held up the beginning of the offensive.
In the end, Hitler decided to launch the attack on France
on May 10, 1940.
As with Poland, this offensive began
with a massive air engagement.
(explosions)
Then the Weimar crushed the French troops
in just a few days.
(speaking foreign language)
The German army was like
an unstoppable steam roller with modern weapons,
with whole tactics,
and with extremely willing troops.
But, the fuhrer wanted to be, once more,
on the front line to witness France being brought
to its knees.
So, on May 19, 1940, Hitler's security detail
was tasked with quickly finding him
a location for his headquarters.
Time was of the essence.
France might counter attack at any moment.
(dramatic music)
On May 22, 1940, they decided on the isolated village
of Bruly-de-Pesche in Belgium.
Here is the head quarters today.
It has hardly changed.
At the time, it was a highly strategic site.
It was very well located in the forest,
easy to camouflage.
It was at the French-Belgium border
and just a few kilometers from the airport.
Hitler's entourage quickly
had three chalets built as lodgings and canteen
for the dictator's men.
As surprising as it may seem,
they even dug a small pool in case of a heat wave,
but for those in charge of Hitler's security,
the most urgent consideration was a bomb shelter.
(speaking foreign language)
Very close to Hitler's own chalet,
there was a bunker.
It was a rainforest concrete cube,
measuring seven meters by seven meters
where he could take refuge if he came under air attack.
And, to guarantee maximum security,
all 28 neighboring villages
were evacuated at the end of May.
Mary Metens was 10 years old at the time.
She still remembers that very unusual day.
(speaking foreign language)
About four o'clock in the afternoon
two men came.
They weren't very nice at all.
I remember that very well,
and they told us we had to leave in two hours.
We were evacuated without knowing where we were going,
and we were told not to come back,
but we weren't told why.
(speaking foreign language)
They took a few of the local people hostage,
about 80 or so, and said that they would
pay with their lives if any of the evacuees
tried to return.
It was a threat, an extra bit of pressure
put on the local people.
On June 6, 1940, the dictator finally arrived
in Bruly-de-Pesche, the site now being completely secure.
It was in this school that Hitler directed
military operations.
Long tables were covered with maps.
This is where the fate of France was decided.
(dramatic music)
After only two weeks of fighting,
the dictator's efforts were rewarded.
(crowd cheers)
On June 17, 1940 Marshal Petain requested
a cessation of hostilities.
France was beaten.
The fuhrer was jubilant.
Hitler was completely euphoric.
In six weeks, he'd achieved what Germany
had failed to do in four years during the First World War,
defeat France.
The Nazi leader ordered his services
to drop the conditions for the armistice immediately.
It was done during the night
of the 20th to the 21st of June, 1940 in this church.
Historian Axel Tixhon is an expert on Bruly-de-Pesche.
The atmosphere was a bit odd
because they were writing it by candlelight
since they had to be wary of possible air raids.
This became the text that Hitler would impose
on the French in Compiegne.
Hitler summoned the representatives of France
to Compiegne, to the same railway wagon
in which the Germans had had to
acknowledge their defeat in 1918.
This victory was the dictator's revenge
for the First World War, a dream come true.
(dramatic music)
Right after this, Hitler visited Paris.
It was another dream of his to enter the French capital.
He went there on the 23rd of June, 1940.
The history books however, give us two different dates
for Hitler's visit to Paris, making some writers conclude
that he may have made two visits.
(dramatic music)
That isn't true.
Hitler only visited Paris once, on the 23rd of June
from 4:05 to nine in the morning.
The dictator hurried to the Opera Garnier
before stopping off for a photo
opposite the Eiffel Tower,
a very symbolic image which was seen around the world.
From that moment on, the media started talking of Hitler
as the greatest war leader of all time.
(dramatic music)
But, during the Battle of Britain,
the German navy and air force were held in check.
(speaking foreign language)
Hitler would have much preferred a treaty
with Great Britain rather than crushing it
in a military victory, as he had done to France.
But, the British were not about to cooperate.
They responded to Germany's attacks with fierce resistance.
This was his first setback of the Second World War.
Right up until the beginning of July,
Hitler was hoping that the UK would fall
like a ripe piece of fruit.
And, as the first British bombs
start falling on German soil,
Hitler was anxious to make sure
his most precious possession was made safe.
This, as unlikely as it might seem, was his art collection.
(dramatic music)
For several years, the dictator had been having
a gigantic art museum built in Linz,
the town in which he'd spent most of his youth.
He planned to exhibit the most famous works of Europe there.
(dramatic music)
And, it was here, in the bowels of the Fuhrerbau,
that he stored his treasure while he waited
for his museum to be built.
We went back to visit this rather unusual depot
with Harald Sandner.
The works of art were stored here.
For Hitler, works of art were always more important
than people's lives.
During the war, he always regretted
the destruction of museums and theaters,
but he couldn't care less about people's lives.
Around 700 works of art
were stocked in these corridors
and permanently guarded by SS men throughout the war.
Most were paintings that had been confiscated
or sold by force.
Many had been pillaged by the German army
in the occupied countries.
Hitler was the world's greatest art thief.
The dictator's purloined works of art
would stay hidden here until 1945.
Back in 1941, Hitler was busy waging his war.
The time had finally come for him to realize another dream,
that of annihilating Bolshevism,
the mortal enemy of national socialism.
(dramatic music)
(explosions)
On June 22, 1941, Hitler launched his offensive
against the URSS, one of the greatest invasions
in military history.
Four million soldiers, 600,000 vehicles, and as many horses.
Hitler was wary of fighting on two fronts,
but he ended up giving the order.
You have to realize that he was convinced
of his own strategic genius
and was sure he could defeat the Soviet Union
with the same ease with which he had overrun France,
meaning in just a few weeks.
At this point,
Hitler's idea was to deport the Jews
into the conquered Soviet Union.
This was the original plan of The Final Solution,
but for three years now,
the dictator had also been using the Einsatzgruppen.
These were special units which followed the army,
eliminating Jews and political opponents,
like Soviet apparatchiks.
These death squads now started carrying out mass executions.
(speaking foreign language)
At first it was just the men
who were systematically killed,
but then the women and children
were increasingly included in these atrocities.
40% of the Jews who would died in the Holocaust
were killed in shooting operations.
(dramatic music)
At the front the dictator was winning
victory after victory.
He conquered Minsk and then Leningrad.
In August 1941, he visited soldiers
on the Eastern front in Ukraine.
Entire swaths of territory were coming under Nazi control.
Hitler was sure that Russia would fall before the winter.
There was real enthusiasm
during the summer and early autumn of 1941
as the German troops advanced
at incredible speed through Russia.
But, now the dictator made a strategic decision
which would cost him dearly.
He decided to seize the agricultural, industrial,
and oil resources of Southern Russia.
(speaking foreign language)
What's more, he had a furious showdown
with some of his generals who wanted to head straight on
and attack Moscow.
(speaking foreign language)
These discussions seriously slowed down the blitzkrieg,
the lightning war, launched against the Soviet Union
in July 1941.
And, by the time the attack on Moscow
began in October 1941, it was too late.
The Weimar was overtaken by the winter.
Temperatures as low as minus 30 degrees.
The German soldiers were exhausted,
and the Soviet counter offensive
drove them back hundreds of kilometers.
It really is a major setback.
The Soviet Union has not collapsed.
It's fighting back.
It seems to have limitless resources
and far more men and equipment than anyone had suspected.
Hitler held his generals
responsible for this debacle.
Since the beginning of the war,
he'd been highly suspicious of his military top brass.
The battle for Moscow marked a turning point
in his relations with them.
(speaking foreign language)
Hitler had never really trusted his generals.
He despised them because they had
advised against the French campaign,
and now he blamed them for the failure
of the Great Offensive of the summer of 1941.
Hitler always had this tendency to blame others
for his own failures.
To cover up for his own mistakes,
the dictator dismissed 30 of his generals,
including Walther von Brauchitsch,
the commander and chief of the German land army.
Hitler now assumed this function
along with that of supreme commander
of all the armed forces.
(dramatic music)
From June 1941, the dictator was hunkered down
in his Polish headquarters, located six kilometers
from Rastenburg.
It was from this vast complex of bunkers and tunnels
that he directed the war in Russia.
The place had the codename Wolfsschanze, or wolf's lair.
The fuhrer would remain based at this headquarters
for over two years.
This was the opposite
of what Hitler had done up until this point.
He'd never stayed in the same place,
but this became his Second World War trench.
This hunkering down showed that he was losing control,
no longer able to wage his mobile war.
Being so close to the fighting
meant that more elaborate surveillance was necessary.
Located deep in the forest, the site security was extreme.
It was very well protected.
All around there was a minefield with 50,000 mines,
there were the natural obstacles of lakes and swamps,
and the entire site was fenced in.
(speaking foreign language)
Watchtowers were set up,
and trenches were dug to dissuade approaching enemies.
The 50 or so buildings and bunkers
were protected by machine gun posts and searchlights
camouflaged by the surrounding vegetation.
Everything was thought out to the last detail.
(speaking foreign language)
Hitler was always wary
of a threat from the inside.
It was easy to imagine a commando operation
against his lair, so there was a succession
of security checkpoints to get past.
It was extremely difficult to reach Hitler.
(suspenseful music)
Around 6,000 lived at this site
on a permanent basis.
While thousands of soldiers were dying on the frontline,
Hitler's entourage here enjoyed various facilities
for their relaxation, a cinema for example,
but that wasn't all.
You had a sauna because of the troops and so on
like to sauna.
Hitler would never go into a sauna, of course.
As a general rule,
the dictator rarely got up before noon.
He would then get to work, making his military decisions.
Finally at about two in the morning
he would indulge in the ritual of taking tea
with his favorite secretaries while talking about himself.
Hitler's monologues
became increasingly unbearable for his entourage.
It was always the same thing.
The secretaries took turns listening to him.
They had no choice, of course.
It was Hitler's way of switching off
from the war for a while.
By this stage, Hitler had understood
that the invasion of the USSR
would be harder than he had first thought.
He gave up on his plan of deporting the Jews
to the occupied Soviet Union,
and it was in Poland in the autumn of 1941
that he hatched his definitive plan for the Final Solution.
(dramatic music)
The fate of millions of Jews was sealed once and for all
on January 20, 1942 at Wannsee Conference.
At the end of this meeting, organized by Reinhard Heydrich,
Hitler's right hand man and boss of the Einsatzgruppen,
a report was drawn up of the number of Jews
to be exterminated, 11 million.
(speaking foreign language)
Following the Wannsee Conference,
the Jews in Europe were methodically rounded up
and then channeled towards murder factories.
These were extermination centers
designed to eliminate Jews within hours of their arrival.
Hitler believed in the virtues
of a Jewish genocide.
He was sure that if he carried out
a mass extermination of the Jews,
he could regain the geo-political advantage
since the Jews were helping all of Germany's enemies.
In the spring of 1942,
the selections for Auschwitz began
with a streamlining of the extermination process.
The weakest were sent
directly on arrival to the gas chambers.
Hitler himself never set foot in a concentration camp.
Hitler never directly witnessed
the consequences of what he set in motion.
He never once visited a concentration camp,
unlike Himmler.
(dramatic music)
In the summer of 1942,
Hitler moved his headquarters to Vinnytsia in Ukraine.
It was from this camp of log cabins that he gave the order
to his troops to take Stalingrad.
The fighting was intense, and from November onwards,
the situation rapidly deteriorated.
Within a few months, the German Sixth Army
was surrounded by 90 Soviet divisions.
They were hemmed in right to the end.
They were starving, they had no food,
no ammunition, nothing.
From this point on, the great weaknesses
in Hitler's strategic planning became apparent.
The failure of the invasion
of the Soviet Union revealed his flaws,
showing that he was just a mediocre war leader,
not the military genius he though he was.
What he have here is an individual
hunkering down in the bunker of his HQ,
increasingly cut off from the realities of the war
on the ground, but who's nevertheless
delegating less and less.
On February 2, 1943,
the 330,000 German soldiers finally surrendered.
It was the first capitulation by the German army.
The defeated Stalingrad was a turning point
and the beginning of the end for the great war leader.
Not long after the defeat, Hitler left his headquarters
and went to Saint Florian Abbey in Austria.
Here he took part in a religious ceremony
with his closest collaborators.
Harald Sandner has discovered
this previously unseen photograph taken of the dictator
during this event.
He wanted to show us the exact spot,
now loaded with symbolism.
Adolf Hitler sat right here
on the 4th of April, 1943.
They had set out two rows of chairs
for him and his entourage.
The body language of the fuhrer
speaks volumes about his state of mind.
The battle for Stalingrad seems to have affected him deeply.
(speaking foreign language)
In this photo,
he's letting his inner feelings show,
something he never did as fuhrer.
He is pensive and withdrawn.
I'm sure that at this point, he knew the war was lost.
Once the ceremony was over,
Hitler went to Linz, the town where he had spent
most of his youth.
He didn't know it, but this was the last time
he would ever go there.
(dramatic music)
Germany was now under heavy attack by the Allies.
Hitler was back in his Polish headquarters,
and the bad news poured in from everywhere.
Germany was being bombed,
entire cities were being destroyed,
and the civilian casualties were considerable.
That didn't bother him.
They were only buildings of people.
They were of no importance.
What did bother him however,
was the Allied landings in Normandy on June 6, 1944.
130,000 men came across the channel from England.
Within 24 hours, they'd broken through the German lines
and outflanked the defending forces.
There's a success.
Hitler again is furious as always,
furious about his generals.
They're not strong enough, they're not tough enough.
He continues however, to believe in this fantasy world
in which things will turn around.
At the time, Hitler was developing
technologically advanced weapons.
For years, German scientists had been working
on long range missiles which would be a booster
for German morale and maybe even
break the enemy's resistance.
The first such rocket was fired at London on September 8th,
and the dictator had every intention
of going even further.
They were working on the atom bomb,
so there's a huge number of very advanced
military technologies.
People believed in these wunderwaffe, these miracle weapons.
(explosions)
The German Reich was gradually being surrounded
by the Soviet and Allied forces,
so Hitler launched one last offensive in the west,
the Battle of the Bulge.
This was a counterattack on the French-Belgium border,
aimed at showing that Germany was still standing
and still determined.
(speaking foreign language)
It was a totally desperate move
and had no support from the German generals
because the army had no resources left,
either human or logistical, with which to fight the Allies,
especially in the sky which was totally controlled
by the Allies.
The chances were slim or nonexistent
of their turning the tide in the West.
As the dictator went from setback to setback,
his health was in serious decline.
He suffered from cardiac problems
and was showing the first symptoms of Parkinson's.
Theodore Morell, who had been his personal physician
since 1935, was never far away.
(speaking foreign language)
He was taking up to 28 medicines day,
or the equivalent in injections.
He'd have shots to pick him up
and others to calm him down.
He was afraid of dying before he achieved his goal.
At the beginning of 1945,
he left his headquarters in Poland
to return to the capital, Berlin.
He still thought he could win the war.
He was hoping that the coalition
between the Allies and the Russians would break down.
It was now March 1945.
The bombing of the German capital intensified.
The dictator buried himself eight meters underground
in his Fuhrerbunker, a complex of 20 underground rooms
built to withstand air raids.
(dramatic music)
The outer walls were nearly four meters thick,
and the ceiling was concrete reinforced with metal beams.
It was all but indestructible.
This is a model of the fuhrer's bunker
in the garden of the Berlin Reich chancellery.
Hitler and Eva Braun lived in six rooms,
each with their own bedroom, one for Eva and one for Hitler.
An important room was the command center
where a daily briefing was held.
Hitler directed the end of the war from here.
Across from the rooms reserved for the dictator,
the six other rooms were taken up
by his closest collaborators,
his personal physician, Theodore Morell
and Goebbels, his minister of propaganda,
but also the maintenance staff.
10 or so other people lived with him.
Legend has it that there were many tunnels
leading out of the bunker.
None of this was true, according to the historians.
(speaking foreign language)
All the rumors about secret tunnels
linking it to the metro or Tempelhof Airport
are just that, rumors.
The bunker had no other exits than the main one
and the emergency exit into the garden.
But, the dictator rarely left the bunker.
The red army was carving a path straight to Berlin.
Nowhere was safe.
(ominous music)
On April 11, 1945, the Americans liberated
Buchenwald concentration camp,
discovering its unspeakable horror.
They decided to march the local villagers through the camp
to see what atrocities the Nazi regime had been committing
right next door.
They were deeply shocked and of course distressed by this,
but in fact they knew, of course, that there was a camp.
They knew about the extermination
because by spring of 1942, if you wanted to find out
about the extermination of the Jews, you could do it.
Almost 56,000 died in the camp.
The Russians were pushing into Berlin in their thousands.
Hitler raged when he heard the news.
(speaking foreign language)
At a briefing on the afternoon of April 22nd,
Hitler learned that no troops would be coming to his rescue.
For the first time, he had to acknowledge
that the war was over.
He announced that if such were the case,
he would shoot himself.
Even today, many documentaries claim
that this is the last photograph ever taken of Adolf Hitler.
This is not so.
(speaking foreign language)
That's not true, of course.
The actual last photo of Hitler was taken on April 20th,
his birthday, in the ruins of the Reich chancellery.
The historians are unanimous.
This is definitely the last photograph of the dictator.
He is seen in the company of
his chief aide and adjutant, Julius Schaub,
who was ordered the following day to go to Berghof
to destroy all of Hitler's personal papers.
(dramatic music)
April 1945, Berlin was completely surrounded.
Hitler heard that his most loyal collaborator,
Heinrich Himmler, was negotiating with the enemy.
This provoked a fit of rage and made up his mind for him.
In the gloom of the bunker,
he married his longstanding companion, Eva Braun,
in the strictest privacy.
(speaking foreign language)
The ceremony took place
during the night of April 28th to 29th in the bunker.
You have to imagine the scene.
It was dark.
The lights were flickering and often going out
because of the air raids.
Everyone was tense.
It was damp and moldy.
It stank.
It wasn't glamorous at all.
(dramatic music)
Shortly after the ceremony,
Hitler drew up his political will and testament.
This is a copy.
Hitler's political will and testament
of April 29th is one of the most terrifying documents
in the history of humanity.
These few pages sum up the entire Nazi ideology and madness
which brought about the deaths of 50 to 60 million people.
But, there was no mention
of the number of victims.
Once again, the dictator lambasted
the officers of the German army for letting him down,
but also the German people who, in his eyes,
hadn't shown enough fight.
They were all responsible for the defeat,
the Jews most of all.
(speaking foreign language)
He explains that it was one of his
greatest achievements to have exterminated
such a large number of Jews,
and he asks his successors to continue this policy
of mass murder.
It's impossible to claim that Hitler
didn't want the Holocaust and knew nothing about it.
He knew everything and openly admitted it.
In all, six million Jews were exterminated
in the Nazi concentration and death camps.
(dramatic music)
On April 30, 1945 (gunshot fires)
Hitler killed himself in his office
in the Fuhrerbunker.
Eva Hitler died at his side,
but the dictator's itinerary doesn't end there.
Only 30 minutes after he died,
his body was taken outside and burnt in the garden
of the Reich chancellery by his valet, Heinz Linge,
as per his master's last request.
Hitler didn't want his body
to suffer the same fate as that of Mussolini
which was mutilated and hung upside down
at a gas station in Milan.
His body was doused in gasoline and ignited,
but since all of those involved got out of there in a hurry
they didn't make sure that he was reduced to ashes,
and his remains were found by Soviet soldiers.
But, no one was able
to identify the burnt corpse as being that of the dictator.
To be quite sure, Stalin ordered a thorough analysis
of the remains here in the northern quarter of Berlin.
After the autopsy,
they were able to identify the body as being Hitler's,
thanks to a close examination of his teeth.
It was vital information
which Stalin and his secret services
hid from the world for years.
Historians have several hypotheses as to why.
I think it's because he wanted to sow doubt and confusion
among the Western Allies,
and he wanted justification for a tough policy
towards post-war Germany built on the fear
that Hitler would come back like Napoleon had done
and start it all over again.
Stalin said nothing about it
at the Potsdam Conference which took place
from July 31st to August 2nd, 1945.
In fact, the blatantly lied.
You have to remember that the Cold War
had already begun at this point.
And his successors,
Khrushchev and Brezhnev, remained trapped in the lie
until 1968 when Brezhnev finally released
the autopsy report.
While the Allies
searched all over Europe for Hitler,
his remains were taken on a veritable odyssey
(dramatic music)
being buried and dug up again nine times
before ending up here at a Russian barracks
in northern Germany,
Beideritz by Magdeburg, April 4, 1970.
His remains were incinerated
and then thrown off this bridge.
Harald Sandner took these photos of this little known spot.
(speaking foreign language)
All that remains of Hitler today
are his teeth in Moscow.
25 years after the end of the Second World War,
this is where the itinerary of Adolf Hitler finally ended.
Hitler's 12 years in power was one of the most
destructive and negative periods in the whole of history,
if not the most destructive.
Tens of millions dead
and the whole of humanity shaken by what it was capable of,
the extermination of an entire part of itself.
Hitler was the personification of evil.
No one has been responsible for more deaths than him.
(dramatic music)
Adolf Hitler,
one of the greatest criminals of human history.