DOG BARKS
BARKING
On 12th December 1944, some of the Nazis' top generals
are called to a woodland location in western Germany.
They were taken to an undisclosed, unknown location.
They were disarmed, forced to hand over their weapons.
It's all very, very secret.
And they're ushered into an underground room.
Since the assassination attempt, no-one has seen or heard
from Hitler in months.
There have even been rumours that he had died.
Now, he tells them he has a plan.
There's going to be a decisive blow where the Allies will be completely
defeated and will have to sue for peace.
It's an extraordinarily bold counterattack and it's never
going to work.
Hitler always had a capacity to imagine things, no matter
what the reality was.
He was very capable of self-delusion.
This is the story of the collapse of the Third Reich...
..as the Allied troops close in on Germany.
Our interest is the psychology of that collapse
as those at the heart of the regime cling to power.
It's the worst in human nature, you see during the collapse
of the Third Reich.
To help us tell the story,
we've asked historians and experts to take us inside the minds of each
one of the key protagonists as they are forced
to confront failure.
The cycle of thinking at that time wouldn't allow anyone to think
that what's happening is wrong.
GUNSHOT
Being picked up, shot, disappeared.
They are walking into an apocalypse on purpose.
Ultimately, who will stay loyal to Hitler?
And who will betray him?
And when?
By autumn 1944, Germany is broken.
Germany's cities and towns have been destroyed.
The German economy has been destroyed.
German society has been destroyed.
The Nazis provoked a war in which millions of Germans died.
They brought nothing but destruction.
And now the net is tightening on Germany.
From the west, the Americans, the British and their allies.
From the east, the Soviets are coming.
Any other leader would surrender.
His instinct is all or nothing.
Total victory or total defeat.
No compromise, no halfway measures.
He believes that a nation or a race can only really survive
through perpetual conflict.
This pursuit of total war will play out as a psychological drama
inside Hitler's inner circle.
For Hermann Goering, his punishment for the failures in the air war
is to be sidelined.
But for all the others, there's the dubious honour of promotions.
Albert Speer, Joseph Goebbels,
and Heinrich Himmler are all elevated
even higher, each with a new set of responsibilities for driving
the war forward.
Military experience, in a way, does not matter that much to him.
What counted for him was the men around him had a will to continue
and a fighting spirit.
In the new hierarchy,
propaganda chief Goebbels lands the job of Minister for Total War.
He must make sure there are enough soldiers to fight these battles.
But by now, Germany is running out of men.
The architect Speer must provide the weapons for the new offensive,
even though he doesn't have the workers to keep up production.
So as these men prepare for an impossible military task,
they must compete with each other for the few resources
Germany has left.
There is definitely a sense that Speer and Goebbels
are struggling for Hitler's attention, for Hitler's favour,
and they're struggling over who is the strategist of the final victory.
This is how power works in Nazi Germany.
You struggle against all of your political opponents
to please Hitler.
Speer has already been lying to Hitler about the amount
of armaments he's been producing.
Now he must convince him to back him further.
Speer is one of Hitler's closest friends.
Hitler trusts him.
Speer is educated, smart and ambitious, but also
he is as ruthless as the dictator he serves.
Speer now is the one who comes up with new production figures,
who tells Hitler that victory is possible, that he is producing
even more arms, that he is producing even more tanks and weapons.
But Speer has an obstacle.
Joseph Goebbels.
Goebbels believes that he's a man of history, that he is one of the
key actors in the great drama of German history.
Goebbels is suspicious of Speer.
He thinks of Speer as an opportunist, a personal friend
of Hitler that became a high-ranking Nazi.
Speer was not there for what the Nazis called
"the struggle". For Goebbels,
this is not about building the right tools for war,
for Goebbels, this is about unleashing the racial
spirit for survival.
Goebbels pushes ahead with the Volkssturm, or People's Storm.
A radical plan to boost Germany's dwindling army by calling
on all men, young and old, to join the battlefront.
No military experience required.
Goebbels at this point is trying to persuade himself that raising
the will of the German people in the form of this rabble,
this human leftover of military conscription, can still win the war.
The question is - what is more important, workers or soldiers?
Goebbels and Speer should convince Hitler
it's time to stop.
We can't do it any more.
We can't produce more weapons.
We can't produce more workers and soldiers because there's
no cause any more.
We've lost.
They do the opposite.
They prolong the war.
Speer's answer is to support his factories with more women, men
and children from the concentration camps.
One of them is Helene Podliasky.
Helene is just one of tens of thousands of young women who
tried to do something, right?
Anything in order to resist.
24-year-old engineer Helene has been captured by the Gestapo
while working as an agent for the French Resistance.
She doesn't know exactly what's going to happen, but she knows
they are to be taken out of France, to Germany.
You hold your breath, you close your eyes, and you try
and imagine yourself elsewhere.
And you try and think - "Me and my new friends,
"we're going to come out of this somewhere else."
After several days in a cattle car,
Helene arrives at Ravensbruck Concentration Camp
in north-eastern Germany.
Germany is the big, bad black hole of a monster.
It's the place of no return.
At this point,
what Helene knows is that in these concentration camps, people are shot
if they are not worked to death.
And that in many ways it is the lucky ones who are shot,
before they are worked to death.
Helene is thinking about the next thing to do.
The next way to resist, the next way to be relevant.
Helene is sent to work in an armaments factory in Leipzig.
In this aim to win the war,
Speer doesn't care about human beings.
He doesn't care about females, schoolgirls.
Speer is one of the most powerful organisers of total war.
By mid-December, Goebbels has delivered more men to fight
on the battlefront.
GOEBBELS:
The Red Army has paused its advance in the east, so Hitler decides now
is the time to launch his surprise attack on the west.
Hitler moves troops from the eastern front to the Ardennes, to exploit a
weak point in the American lines.
What he's looking for is essentially a repetition of the stunning success
of the spring of 1940, of the attack on France.
And he kind of recreates this in the belief
that this can repeat itself.
In the early morning of the 16th of December 1944, German divisions
launch an artillery barrage.
Across a 105-mile front.
With Allied aircraft grounded due to the fog, the Germans
make dramatic gains.
Hitler thought he was back in 1940.
He thought the same thing was happening.
A bold move driven by passionate belief in the Nazi world.
Germany was going to win the war.
Hitler was so pleased that he phoned Goebbels to tell him
"This is the great turning point in the war."
Goebbels is euphoric.
His faith is proven right, and so Goebbels takes the
opportunity to persuade Hitler to speak to the nation,
share the good news,
reaffirm their trust, reaffirm their belief.
Because this is what Goebbels does,
he turns information into political power.
HITLER:
Many people haven't heard Hitler's voice for a long time.
For many Germans, this is a reaffirmation of the hope
that they had been losing for two years now.
So the
Ardennes offensive is an expression of hope, an ideological
obsession over reality.
But by now, Speer is too close to reality to believe
Goebbels' spin.
He's all too aware of a threat coming from the eastern front.
Hitler's strategy of moving troops westward has left it exposed,
and the Red Army will begin
its advance into Germany within days.
This is weighing on Speer's mind when he arrives at Hitler's
western headquarters, just after midnight on the 1st of January 1945.
GERMAN PERIOD SONG
Speer arrived late
to find Hitler's entourage all toasting the New Year.
Hitler, was convinced that the New Year, 1945,
would bring ultimate victory.
Speer was thinking about, "How am I going to get the grim realities
"of the situation recognised by Hitler?"
Speer is too smart not to know the war can't be won any more.
Everyone knew, by this stage, that Hitler did not like bad news.
This is not the moment to confront
Hitler with the really desperate situation.
Speer has not the courage to say, "Stop the war.
"It can't go on any more."
Why?
He fears disloyalty.
He's not sure what will happen then, if he tells Hitler the truth.
For him, like all other high-ranking Nazis,
there is no way out.
Leaving Hitler in '44 or '45 means death.
Germany's initial success in the Ardennes is short-lived.
The weather clears and the Allies are able to exploit
their air superiority.
Pounding German positions and pushing them back.
The Luftwaffe suffers crippling losses when a quarter of their 800
planes are destroyed.
Hitler's hopes of a comeback are shattered.
Goebbels, as the liar in chief, is now in the most difficult
of all situations.
He's struggling because of his love and admiration for Hitler
and he's struggling because he's afraid of this defeat.
Goebbels focuses on deflecting the failure from himself.
He takes advantage of a crisis meeting at Hitler's
western headquarters, knowing Speer will be present.
Goebbels begins to make a shock announcement about another
mass recruitment drive for the battlefront.
Goebbels is looking to implement what he thinks, and his ideology
suggests, is the last chance for Germany.
Sensing that Goebbels is trying to steal the limelight by promising
an impossible rescue plan,
Speer snaps.
Speer says that the war can't be won.
They are still fighting, fighting, recruiting,
and it's totally senseless.
Goebbels jumped on him and essentially accused him of losing
the war for Germany.
Goebbels humiliated him in front of Hitler, to prove Speer wrong
and to put his strategy ahead.
And then Hitler has his say.
Hitler starts to ignore Speer and address himself
to his subordinate, Saur.
"Saur will do the job," he says.
"Saur's really committed. He will sort it all out."
And between the two of them, Hitler and Goebbels,
they really humiliate Speer.
First of all, attacking him, and then ignoring him. And Speer
must have felt about that small when they did this.
Goebbels enjoyed the event, as he seems to have told Speer afterwards,
"Why do you let an underling speak to the Fuhrer
"like this, over your head?"
I wonder if Goebbels is twisting the knife, enjoying his little
victory over the opportunist Albert Speer.
The future is insecure and Speer feels anxiety and horror.
The economy is scrambling.
The Allied Forces are closing in.
They are on the German borders.
So actually there is nothing to quarrel about.
Speer and Goebbels quarrel on the sinking ship.
24 hours after being snubbed, Speer is feeling dejected.
It's only at this point that his mind-set begins to change.
Speer is not Goebbels.
Speer doesn't want to die in final victory,
and he thinks that for him
there might be a way to come out of this mess.
He's thinking of what may happen after the end of the Third Reich.
What will he do? What can he do?
How can he save himself?
His family?
He looks for an exit strategy.
One week later, Speer's concern about a Russian invasion
from the east becomes a reality.
A two-million-strong Red Army crosses over the River Vistula.
This is absolutely terrifying to the German population.
They already know what's in store for them from media reports
orchestrated by Goebbels, with photographs and lurid
descriptions of Red Army atrocities.
There'd been massacres.
There'd been hundreds of thousands of rapes
of German women.
Hitler's insistence on carrying on to the end meant death
for millions of Germans, which could have been saved
had a compromise peace been struck.
Desperate to show he's in control.
Hitler moves himself back to the capital, Berlin.
In a way that's typical of his refusal to accept reality
at this late stage of the war...
..he has the blinds turned down on the train windows.
So he can't see the terrible scenes of rubble, ruined buildings
through which the train is passing.
As they come into Berlin.
it's a scene of absolute devastation.
From now on, Hitler will direct the war from the Reich Chancellery.
But he's rapidly running out of options.
When he finally realised that his gamble has not paid off,
the Battle of the Bulge is definitively lost,
Hitler has something of a breakdown.
And he confesses that it's all lost.
"We'll go down", he said,
"But we'll take a world with us."
So Hitler orders the destruction of anything that might help the Allies.
All the facilities necessary for the continuation of normal,
everyday life, and then crucially, for the reconstruction of Germany
after the war, which, of course, Hitler didn't want to think about.
Meanwhile, Speer, who's holed up in a Hamburg hotel, is thinking
about life after the war,
more than ever, he wants to survive and secure a future for himself.
When he gets the news about Hitler's scorched earth policy,
it gives him an idea.
Speer knows very well that he is
responsible for millions of deaths.
And therefore, to survive the end of the war, it is necessary...
..to deny it.
He needs another image, not the image of Hitler's close friend,
but the image of an opponent of Hitler.
To tell the Allied Forces,
or to tell before a court that he is innocent.
Speer EMBARKS on a secret campaign...
..deliberately blocking Hitler's
scorched earth orders.
He gives guns to miners to fend off demolition squads.
This is his story, his exonerating story to save his life.
Persuades officials not to blow up factories.
The notion of a good Nazi is a powerful notion.
At least someone around Hitler tried to save lives.
This is one of Speer's biggest lies.
He puts a stop to the detonation of critical infrastructure.
Speer is rebranding himself.
Speer is THE spin doctor of the Third Reich.
Such a direct betrayal of Hitler is a dangerous strategy,
so for now, Speer must play a double game.
Speer in public, he presents himself as the one who is able
to continue fighting, who pushes others to continue the war.
He says, "Don't give up."
By the end of January, the Russians are advancing through Germany
and are almost within striking distance of Berlin.
In response, Speer is asked to produce more
Panzerfaust anti-tank weapons.
But they prove hopelessly unreliable.
Reports begin to circulate that these Panzerfaust are blowing
up in soldiers' faces and not hitting their targets.
And officials are sent round to investigate. As part
of their investigations,
they not only speak to the guards, but they ask,
"Who is managing the ovens?"
And someone points them to Helene.
So she's actually interrogated about her work.
"What is it that you do here?"
"Well, I don't really know.
"You know, there's a pointy thing and I just make sure
"that it stays right there."
She gives him exactly the answer that he's expecting.
And so he goes, "Good girl", pat, pat,
and moves on to the next person.
But Helene knows exactly what she's doing.
Using her engineering skills, she's come up with a way
of sabotaging the Panzerfaust, and she's recruited an underground
network of fellow prisoners to put her plan into action.
Parts of it is about an idea that she has of the effect
that this might have on the actual progression of the war.
Helene figures out that she could turn the heat all the way
down about halfway through the process and then turn it back
up again, so that when these shells came out red hot, they looked
and felt like they should have.
But actually, the tempering and forging process
had been sabotaged.
And her calculation is even if only one in ten of these missiles do not
go off, then that is slowing down that particular regiment
by at least 10%.
And her thinking is, this is my moment, this is my purpose.
This is the one thing that I can finally do.
As the Allies wreak untold destruction on Germany, Goebbels
decides it's time for the next stunt in his campaign to please Hitler.
He releases...a movie.
Having pulled 187,000 soldiers from the front to act as extras,
this is his most ambitious propaganda project yet.
The movie Kolberg depicts the heroic struggle
of this small German town against the French army
in the Napoleonic Wars.
It is meant to persuade German people that their blood contains
everything necessary for struggle, resistance and victory.
Goebbels and Hitler watch it together.
It becomes a moment of ideological, emotional, psychological communion
over the fate of the German race, over the historical place
of struggle and resistance and heroism.
OPERATIC SINGING
It also gives Hitler and Goebbels themselves hope that the final
victory can still be achieved and that there must be a trust
in the racial will of the German people to win.
And the message really is never surrender, never give in.
If the authorities want you to give in, just push them to one side.
I think Hitler felt yet again, Goebbels had delivered the goods
in terms of propaganda.
He felt it could not fail to inspire the German people,
just as it inspired him.
In search of salvation, Hitler's
attention turns to another favourite.
Himmler, the diabolical architect of the Holocaust, is promoted
to a major military role.
Himmler is Hitler's hard man.
Himmler is Hitler's man for carrying out the most brutal assignments.
Hitler knows that he can trust Himmler.
Hitler knows that Himmler will not disappoint him.
As Commander in Chief of Army Group Vistula,
Himmler is now in charge of the eastern front.
This is a really big moment for Himmler, who has never seen
active combat duty.
So Himmler feels elated.
He feels extremely happy. He feels proud.
Himmler feels that the fate of Germany is now in his hands.
Hitler thought that Himmler could do this simply by, as it were,
cracking the whip.
Himmler sets about reinventing himself as a military man.
His special train becomes his new army headquarters.
He comes across as a well-groomed man in a neat uniform,
with his shiny spectacles.
He continues to appear as someone who is extremely self-confident,
as someone who really knows how to lead.
But Himmler doesn't have any military experience to speak of.
Himmler says to military commanders that they should strike
at the flank.
He constantly talks about attack, attack, attack.
They know that the orders given by Himmler to attack the Soviets
are completely unrealistic.
So Himmler failed to impose his authority as a
Commander in Chief on the commanding officers.
Himmler, as a military amateur, does not understand the complexity
of military combat.
In an effort to prove to Hitler he's having some success,
Himmler resorts to what he does know how to do - terror.
To avoid concentration camp prisoners falling into enemy hands,
he orders they be marched away from the oncoming armies.
Among these prisoners is Helene Podliasky.
Helene and her comrades are feeling all sorts of things.
Hope, for one, because clearly the Allies are advancing.
Fear - that the Nazis may no longer have any use for them.
Uncertainty about where it was they were being taken.
You couldn't stop.
If you couldn't keep up the pace, you died.
If you were starving, you died.
There was no provision of water or food or rest
on any of these marches.
Helene saw one of her comrades, further down the line,
picking up a rotten apple.
GUNSHOT
It becomes clear that if they stay on this march, the likelihood
that they're going to survive is close to nil.
And for Helene, that's it.
It's now or never.
"We need to escape."
Helene and her group know the Allied soldiers are now within reach.
They can hear the front line.
They just need to work out which direction to take.
By now, Allied air raids have intensified.
This time, Hitler is directly in the line of fire.
His private quarters at the Reich Chancellery, a symbol of Nazi power,
are under attack.
There was nowhere else for Hitler to go now, but underground.
Hitler descends 15 metres under the Chancellery gardens
to his heavily fortified hideaway.
The Fuhrerbunker.
Bombardment continues to rain down on the area.
SUSTAINED BOMBING
For Hitler, this is a terrible blow.
As Berlin burns, the Allied leaders, Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin meet
in the Black Sea resort of Yalta.
Confident victory is just around the corner,
they are making plans for what to do with Germany after the war.
Unconditional surrender was the top priority, the main ultimate aim
of allies east and west.
Victory would be accompanied by dividing Germany into different
zones of occupation.
CONTEMPLATIVE PIANO MUSIC
Hitler hardly reacts at all to the news of this meeting.
He's determined never to surrender.
It would be like a repetition of the surrender of 1918.
And for Hitler, it's all or nothing,
it's victory or death.
With the Allies now so close, Speer spends the next few weeks collecting
official evidence for his exoneration story,
For his way out to save his life,
Speer really needs not only a story, but he needs paper.
He starts by writing a memo to Hitler calling for Germany
to be saved from the scorched earth policy.
Speer does not write these memos for Hitler.
He writes them for the advancing Allied Forces,
to show them
that he did everything to stop it, that he did everything
to save the German people.
Speer must now get his memo in front of Hitler,
to make it official.
But he knows better than anyone that Hitler
doesn't like to be challenged.
So he carefully choreographs his visit to the bunker.
Speer seeks to avoid the full force of the wrath that he knows.
Hitler will vent upon him when he reads the memo.
Speer hands the memo over to one of his assistants.
Speer tries to sugar the pill by professing his undying loyalty
to Hitler, and asking for a signed photograph as the mark
of his esteem.
But just as Speer thinks he's safe...
There's a tap on his shoulder.
He's summoned back to see the Fuhrer.
Hitler's seen the memo, which is a direct challenge
to his mantra of victory or death.
Hitler was appalled by the memo.
Hitler realises that Speer is no longer on the same wavelength.
He doesn't have the spirit of self-sacrifice
that true Nazis have.
As far as Hitler was concerned, this is a terrible betrayal.
This is a sin that Hitler cannot forgive.
It was the end for him.
After seven days on the run, Helene and her group make
it to the Mulde river.
They are now just a few miles from the American front line,
but in the other direction
are the Germans.
So it's life or death, depending on who they run into first.
They're exhausted. They're hallucinating.
Every few hours, at least one of them completely loses
the will to keep going.
But all they have to do is to keep pushing.
They can make it to the frontier.
When the car first approaches them, they're not sure
whether it's German soldiers.
But then, very quickly, she realises that it's the Allies.
Helene probably thinks that this is about liberating France
and the continent.
Helene feels that this is the point at which Europe is going to be free.
And that if she has made it, then many more are going to make
it and that her being alive is part and parcel of that liberation,
of that freedom.
In the first week of March,
the Soviets are now advancing towards the city of Kolberg.
The scene of Goebbels movie masterpiece.
Hitler orders this symbolic stronghold to be held at all costs.
But this time, there is to be no heroic defence.
On the 7th of March, the town of Kolberg fell to the Red Army.
The symbolic town which Goebbels had devoted so many resources
to presenting us the place that held out against the Napoleonic
invasions in 1813.
Hitler needs a scapegoat for this humiliating defeat.
He turns on one of his most loyal disciples.
Hitler felt that Himmler had let him down.
He'd failed altogether to stem the Soviet advance.
Hitler told him to his face that he was incompetent
as a military commander.
Didn't have any experience. Wasn't doing the job.
For Himmler,
the dressing down he receives
from Hitler is one of the low points,
not only of his career, but also of his life.
His world is coming to an end, almost.
Who is Himmler without Hitler's support?
Himmler knows that he is a nobody.
Himmler is ordered by Hitler to strip the armbands from the
SS soldiers who have been stationed in the east.
And five days later, Himmler is dismissed
from his military responsibilities.
Himmler really needs to think very carefully about where he stands
in the Nazi hierarchy, where he will stand in future.
For over a decade, Hitler has
encouraged his circle of deputies
to compete for his favour.
But this management strategy only works when you're winning.
With defeat now looming, Speer has betrayed Nazi ideals
and Himmler has failed.
Hitler feels increasingly isolated, increasingly alone.
The circle of people who Hitler feels he can unconditionally
rely on is getting smaller and smaller all the time.
This is no day for a birthday party.
It is deeply inappropriate and deeply weird.
They know they're going to be defeated.
They haven't got hope.
What they have got is champagne.
Himmler realises that Hitler is losing the plot.
Hitler says he doesn't want to be congratulated.
What is there to congratulate when everything is falling apart?
Well, this is the last recording of Hitler on film.
He's come out of the bunker, into the Chancellery garden,
and is congratulating members of the Hitler Youth, some
of whom seem very young indeed,
ten or 11, on their fighting prowess.
His left arm, which he keeps behind his back,
is shaking uncontrollably.
It's a pathetic scene.
This is what the Third Reich has been reduced to - a bunch of 20
kids who should not be there,
and who were sacrificing
themselves quite needlessly.
But here's Hitler congratulating them,
because the adults are beginning to betray him.
These are the people on whom he now relies.
Children.
This is the story of the collapse of the Third Reich.
As the allied troops close in on Germany.
Our interest is the psychology of that collapse,
as those at the heart of the regime cling to power.
It's the worst in human nature you see during the collapse
of the Third Reich.
To help us tell the story,
we've asked historians and experts
to take us inside the minds of each
one of the key protagonists,
as they are forced to confront failure.
The cycle of thinking, at that time, wouldn't allow anyone to think
that what's happening is wrong.
Being picked up, shot, disappeared...
They are walking into an apocalypse on purpose.
Ultimately, who will stay loyal to Hitler?
And who will betray him?
And when?
By early April 1945, Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime
is on the brink of collapse.
In the West, American troops have crossed the Rhine.
The British are closing in from the North.
The French, from the south.
From the east, a vast Soviet army has paused to regroup,
just 40 miles from Berlin.
Allied aircraft now control the skies over Germany...
..launching devastating air raids almost at will.
Factories, airfields and railways lie in ruins.
With Berlin under daily bombardment,
Hitler is in permanent refuge in his heavily-fortified bunker...
..a series of 30 cramped rooms covering 3,000 square metres.
It includes living quarters, a canteen, dog kennels
and a telephone exchange.
From the subterranean conference room,
Hitler attempts to co-ordinate Germany's military operations.
The bombing is absolutely devastating.
Berlin is almost completely destroyed.
But Hitler didn't really know the details
of what was going on above ground.
And part of the reason for that is because the people around him
are afraid to tell him.
They know that people who give Hitler bad news are likely
to be shouted out, dismissed, or declared to be cowards.
They might even be shot.
As Hitler's world becomes increasingly bizarre,
he and his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, look for signs
that fate will somehow intervene.
They study astrological charts,
and Goebbels reads Hitler stories
of incredible comebacks from German folklore.
Goebbels and Hitler are fixated with being men of history.
Men of destiny.
And Goebbels writes in his diary that,
"It is necessary to model ourselves on the heroes of the German past."
Hitler is particularly attached to the figure of Frederick the Great.
Because Frederick, like Hitler, had to fight against Russia and,
for quite a while, it looked like he was going to lose.
And he was saved by Providence.
Frederick's great rival, Empress Elisabeth of Russia, died
just in time to give Prussia a chance to win.
Goebbels fed Hitler's hope that for Nazi Germany, Providence
might provide like it did for Frederick the Great.
In some ways, Goebbels is now doing propaganda not only to German
people, but also to the Fuhrer,
shoring up the Fuhrer's psychology.
With the Soviets so close to Berlin,
and the Fuhrer losing his grip on reality,
Hitler's inner circle must consider their next moves.
Joseph Goebbels has placed himself firmly at the Fuhrer's side
in this hour of need.
But other senior Nazis take different approaches.
Albert Speer is still playing a dangerous double game.
On the surface loyal, while secretly undermining Hitler's orders,
in the hope of currying favour with the Allies,
when the war is over.
Hermann Goring, Hitler's designated successor, has been disgraced
and has retreated to his country estate.
Stripped of any real authority,
Goring has found his own way of coping.
Goring is something of a fantasist, living in a fairy tale world.
He has a large toy train set, set up in the attic, where he even
has a little model bomber that comes on, and drops bombs
on the trains below.
Just like a child playing.
But on the other hand, I think Goring is actually a much
more realistic figure than many of those around Hitler.
He does recognise that the war is over.
In the real world, things are not going to work out
the way he would like.
Heinrich Himmler has had a breakdown,
after being reprimanded by Hitler
for failing to hold the eastern front.
He has checked himself into a sanatorium outside Berlin
to focus on his health.
Himmler is physically shattered.
For him, the dressing down is like a kick in the teeth.
He feels extremely fragile because he knows that his position
as Reich leader of the SAS,
as Hitler's most loyal paladin, is at stake.
Who is Himmler without Hitler?
A nobody.
Himmler can't break with Hitler,
because breaking with Hitler
would break Himmler as a person.
Meanwhile, Hitler continues to live as a recluse in the bunker.
Hitler had never had an orderly kind of nine-to-five day.
But increasingly, his routine becomes
quite cut off from the real world.
He gets up later and later, goes to bed later and later, living
perpetually in artificial light.
So day and night are almost reversed in the bunker.
It's a kind of upside down routine that he has.
The once-charismatic Fuhrer now avoids public engagements.
He no longer makes speeches on the radio or in person.
So it falls to Goebbels, his most trusted deputy,
to be the face of the regime.
Goebbels travels in Germany.
He tries to encourage troops.
He gives speeches to cheer them up.
In many ways, Goebbels is having to nurse both Nazi Germany
and the leader of Nazi Germany.
These are desperate times and Goebbels knows that.
And so he must have seen this dire state of German troops,
the unpreparedness, and how unlikely it was that these troops
could defeat the Soviets.
This is very difficult for Goebbels,
as reality hits him that the war cannot be won.
Goebbels doesn't confront Hitler with the reality of the war,
to preserve Hitler's psyche.
At this point, Goebbels is essentially waiting for a miracle
to save Nazi Germany.
For destiny.
For Providence to provide salvation.
To the whole free world,
the stunning news has come that Franklin Roosevelt is dead.
Death in the hour of victory,
like President Lincoln before him.
Goebbels is returning to Berlin from the front line
when the news arrives.
As he hears the news of Roosevelt's death, he immediately feels,
"This is the chance we've been waiting for.
"This is the miracle that will save us."
Goebbels can call Hitler with great news.
For once, Goebbels has the chance to cheer up Hitler, in a period
of total catastrophe.
Hitler's absolutely overjoyed.
He goes down the corridor in the bunker telling everybody.
"Everything will now change.
"This is going to be the great turning point."
He will be able to divide the Allies.
The Americans surely will lose interest in continuing with the war.
Just like their hero, Frederick the Great
had been saved by the death of the Empress of Russia,
they thought that maybe this was the parallel.
This was history providing for Goebbels and Hitler.
Who are now locked in a cycle together where the two of them need
each other to continue to believe that the final victory
is still possible.
Just four days after President Roosevelt's death, the Red Army
launch a huge offensive.
This shatters the illusions that Hitler was entertaining
about somehow the Allies being divided, the Americans giving up,
the Soviets losing the support of the West.
The Russians begin to encircle Berlin.
Despite Germany's hopeless position,
Hitler issues an order to fight to the last.
"Anyone trying to save their miserable skins,"
he says, "..is a traitor and will be arrested and executed."
Right up until the end,
Hitler is issuing orders that everyone is to keep fighting.
They should sacrifice themselves.
They should allow themselves to be shot.
They should place themselves in the way of the guns.
For Hitler, it's all or nothing. It's victory or death.
News of the Soviet offensive soon reaches Hitler's inner circle.
Himmler is in a sanatorium as the world is falling apart.
And he is thinking about how the Third Reich
is about to lose the war.
He's increasingly unsure about what to do next.
Himmler still knows that his entire position exists,
his entire livelihood exists because Hitler trusts him.
Himmler never says anything in public against Hitler.
But for the first time in his life,
Himmler is a divided man.
Now that the chips are down, he's thinking very carefully
about his top priority,
about how to come out of the war,
how to save his own neck,
how to position himself in a scenario
where Hitler is perhaps no longer the undisputed leader
of the Third Reich.
Stuck in this dilemma,
an unlikely adviser comes to the rescue.
A physiotherapist trained in ancient Tibetan medicine.
Himmler is spending a lot of time with Felix Kersten,
who is Himmler's personal masseur.
Himmler is suffering from severe stomach cramps.
His pain increases as the Allies are closing in on Germany.
And he is using his masseur as a sounding board.
He starts exploring with Kersten potential scenarios
for how to reach out to the Western Allies to try to negotiate
a post-Hitler Germany.
Himmler lets Kersten travel to neutral Sweden on his behalf,
to find an intermediary who can sound out the Allied
leaders in secret.
It seems simply unimaginable,
absurd that the head of an organisation
that declares, "Our honour is our loyalty to Hitler,"
that was the SS mantra.
That this man,
the supposedly most loyal henchman of Hitler starts relaxing.
Acting behind Hitler's back.
Hitler occasionally leaves the bunker to take walks
with his girlfriend, Eva Braun,
in the Chancellery Gardens.
She has moved into the bunker to be with him.
Eva Braun presents him with the comfort that he wants.
She provides affirmation to him.
She supports his delusions.
And this mustn't be underestimated, the importance
of that stabilising domestic force.
She is his cup of tea. His packet of crisps, at the end of a hard day.
Eva Braun first met Adolf Hitler over 15 years ago
when she was just 17.
An aspiring model and actress...
..she was working as an assistant for Hitler's official photographer.
She is a young woman who likes athletics, who likes
going to the movies, who like skiing.
It's hard to imagine what this young woman
who daydreams about film stars, sees in this man.
But what it is, is.. ..is power.
But most of the German people don't know Hitler has a girlfriend.
Hitler wants to conceal his relationship.
Because he feels that he has great authority as the unmarried leader
of his nation.
In a sense, he's married to Nazi Germany.
This is very isolating for her.
And the more she's concealed, the more desperate she is that one
day all will be revealed,
and she'll be shown to be this incredibly loyal,
humble and hugely important support to the Fuhrer.
Germany is losing the war, but it doesn't cross Eva Braun's mind
to desert Hitler.
Her great mission in life is to become the First Lady
of the Third Reich.
Himmler's masseur
Felix Kersten, begins to explore the possibility of negotiating
with the Allies.
Kersten suggests Himmler, the architect of the Holocaust,
could offer to release imprisoned Jews as a gesture
of his humanitarianism and goodwill.
Kersten speaks to the World Jewish Congress who suggests
a Jewish intermediary. Norbert Masur.
So Masur faces a moral dilemma.
Should he negotiate with Himmler to save Jewish prisoners?
In the moment Norbert Masur gets that call,
it's an immediate response that he's ready to do it.
There's no hesitation whatsoever.
This lack of fear or anxiety in that moment is almost surprising.
But for him, it just seems such a clear, unquestionable thing to do.
It's a tremendous act of courage.
Just hours later, Norbert Masur boards a plane from Stockholm
to Berlin, for one of the most extraordinary meetings
of the Second World War.
Masur, a German-born Jew, left his homeland before the Nazis
came to power in the 1930s.
He hasn't been back for a decade.
Masur really sees a country on the run.
He sees a scared population that's defeated.
He's really observing now first-hand the end of this war,
seeing a very different Germany, a defeated regime.
Masur is driven by the Gestapo to Felix Kersten's country estate,
not far from the infamous Ravensbruck concentration camp.
In the time Masur has been away, six million Jewish people
have been murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators,
including members of his own family.
The Allies have liberated several concentration camps, and the scale
of the genocide is now becoming known to a horrified, wider world.
Masur was under no illusions about what this regime had done.
He's clearly aware of the fact that this could be his last mission.
The idea that you're going to find yourself, in a few hours,
face-to-face with the person singularly responsible for this kind
of death and destruction...
..it's really very dangerous.
Something could also go terribly wrong.
That same evening, while Masur waits patiently for Himmler,
Joseph Goebbels takes to the airwaves
to rally the German people, for one
last great effort on the Fuhrer's behalf.
It's just a few hours before Hitler's 56th birthday.
In a rare moment of quiet, Hitler escapes the bunker to inspect
the battered remains of the iconic Reich Chancellery building.
The last known photographs of him ever taken.
By now, Germany is almost cut in two.
Only a narrow corridor of land
divides the British and Americans from the Soviets.
And with the Soviets just ten miles from central Berlin,
there are just two shrinking passages in and out of the city.
Berlin is now on the front line.
And is openly described as the Reich's funeral pyre.
Its population of three million is suffering, and they've lost
their faith in their leaders' empty promises.
Pride and patriotism have turned to resentment and desperation.
They fear for their lives,
and have little access to food or fresh water.
Hitler's inner circle receive an invitation
that few of them want but cannot refuse.
It's Hitler's birthday.
On Hitler's birthday,
Eva Braun is very concerned that he gets a birthday cake,
so she ensures that one is baked for him that morning.
It seems quite bizarre that Eva Braun is concerned
with such small details.
And yet for her, this makes absolute sense, because what she wants
is to maintain appearances to the end.
Even in the dying days,
she is loyal to the ultimate degree, beside Adolf Hitler.
This is no day for a birthday party.
Berlin is being shelled by the Soviets.
Bombs are falling on the city.
It is deeply inappropriate and deeply weird.
With some of them already betraying Hitler,
his inner circle must now travel across Germany to the bunker.
The Soviets are attacking Berlin, the Allies are bombing the city
to smithereens, and all of the Nazi hierarchy, all these big figures,
travel to pay their tribute to the Fuhrer on his birthday.
It becomes, in some ways, I think, an act of loyalty.
For discredited Luftwaffe chief Hermann Goring,
it's awkward, as he's been so publicly humiliated. As Hitler's
nominated successor, he has long harboured fantasies of taking
over the Third Reich.
After months and months when he's been on the outside,
it's impossible to take seriously any longer
the idea that Goring might become the Fuhrer if anything happened
to Hitler, because nobody seems to obey him.
They have no respect for him at all.
They don't regard him as the legitimate heir of the Fuhrer.
Himmler has also been invited in from the cold.
He knows what's happening on the outskirts of Berlin.
Even in the worst moment in the history of the Third Reich,
when defeat is imminent...
..top Nazi leaders are unable to confront Hitler with the truth.
They simply do not have the guts,
because they all owe their positions of power to Hitler.
This tells you so much about the mind-set of the Nazis.
They're all trying to come out of the war alive.
They are, essentially, cowards.
When they arrive, Hitler is nowhere to be seen.
The Fuhrer is refusing to get out of bed.
Hitler says he doesn't want to be congratulated.
It's all completely meaningless.
What is there to congratulate when everything is falling apart?
It is Eva Braun who is sent to collect him,
to stir him back into life.
Eva Braun is riding high at this point.
She is at the height of her power.
She is the only one that can, not just have access to Hitler
in his bedroom,
but can also bring him back out to face the world.
It shows the consolidation of her power and she loves this.
While the inner circle wait for their Fuhrer, he receives
his daily pick-me-up.
By April, Hitler's having 28 different medications per day.
Amphetamines to try and bolster his physical and mental state,
and keep him going in a situation which was hugely stressful
and where he doesn't have a lot of sleep.
He can't stand the thought of meeting his staff, who must also
surely know that everything is lost.
He's come right to the end of his tether.
The meeting is uneasy, uncomfortable...
..and, for the first time, perhaps for many attendees, there's doubt
as to Hitler's capability.
Goebbels is assessing, particularly, Goring and Himmler.
What are they doing?
Are they loyal? Are they useful?
Are they what we need?
Will they betray the Fuhrer?
Himmler is greatly shocked when he sees Hitler,
because Hitler is a wreck.
Trembling, looks much older than 56.
Himmler realises that Hitler is losing the plot.
Little does Hitler know,
Faithful Heinrich, as he affectionately calls him,
is already making plans behind his back.
Himmler is feeling stressed out.
Where do his loyalties lie now?
Himmler certainly doesn't want to stay in the bunker.
He's trying to get out as soon as possible, but he feels
that he cannot leave before other Nazi bigwigs leave, because Himmler
fears that if he leaves before others, other Nazi leaders
will talk behind his back,
and say something critical about him to Hitler.
Before Himmler can make his excuses,
Hitler urges everyone
into his Situation Room, to discuss their next moves.
Hitler has always dominated strategy meetings,
but now he looks to them for answers.
Himmler and others suggest that Hitler should go southwards
to lead Germany from there.
Hitler has none of it.
This is a turning point.
Himmler thinks this is the moment where everything changes.
Hitler is written off as Germany's leader.
When they've had their conference,
most of them make their excuses and leave rather hurriedly.
When Himmler leaves the bunker...
..he probably knows that this is the last time he is meeting Hitler.
His mentor.
His staunchest supporter.
His idol.
He is somewhat nostalgic, but he also knows that now
is the time to make alternative plans
for his, Himmler's, own future.
Himmler escapes the party and immediately heads north.
The head of the SS has arranged another meeting that night.
Just after the party, Himmler drives through the night to the estate
of Felix Kersten, his masseur, to meet with Norbert Masur.
During the course of the evening, Mazer received a telephone call
that Himmler would not come until around 2:30am in the morning.
He's sitting in that place waiting for Himmler,
agitated at the thought that, in a few minutes,
he would be face-to-face with one
of the worst murderers of the Jewish people.
It is an extremely tense, eerie atmosphere.
There isn't a single word of apology by Himmler towards Masur.
There isn't a single word of regret.
What is going on here?
Masur is really sitting there and not allowing himself
to burden himself with the horrors of the entire Holocaust,
not allowing his pulse
to start to pace at a faster rate,
to maintain his calm throughout.
Masur is forced to listen to Himmler's lies.
And Himmler totally downplays the severity of the Holocaust.
For Himmler, it has been a moral duty to murder the Jews.
For Himmler, these Jewish prisoners are not really human beings.
They are simply bargaining chips.
This is the moment where Masur really wants to reach
across the table and grab his counterpart by the throat.
He really worries that his resolve to stay calm
and collected, might crumble.
So what Masur does is negotiate the release of as many inmates
of these concentration camps as he can.
In the end, Himmler concedes that 1,000 Jews will be released
from the Ravensbruck concentration camp, to the Red Cross.
For him, it perversely is an act of generosity, an act of goodwill.
Himmler, mass murderer,
he thinks that by releasing some Jewish prisoners, he may well clean
up his reputation, that the Western Allies will actually start
listening to him.
Meanwhile, in Berlin, Hitler has long gone to bed.
His girlfriend, Eva Braun, takes the party upstairs
to her old apartment in the Reich Chancellery building.
Hitler's birthday party provides a huge opportunity for release.
The pressure in the bunker, the smell, the atmosphere,
the knowledge of almost certain death is incredibly oppressive.
They absolutely know they're going to be defeated.
They haven't got hope.
What they have got is champagne.
Eva leads a gang of revellers for one last dance.
They've only got one record which they play over and over again.
And it's quite a manic scene, really.
Eva is determined to be at the centre, at the heart of things.
One thing that she can affect now is the mood and the atmosphere,
the environment of the people she's with.
And she's always loved a party.
But the party atmosphere is soon interrupted by the sound
of artillery shells landing all around the Reich Chancellery.
Hitler decides on this desperate moment,
on one last throw of the dice.
To launch a huge assault on the besieging Red Army.
He makes it clear that anybody who disobeys his orders
for this final assault is going to be shot.
And he sits back and waits for the reports of the victory.
Hitler has very few believers left by now.
Everyone in the bunker knows that Nazi Germany has been defeated,
that they have lost.
But Hitler is determined to fight on until the bitter end.
And the human cost of this is tens of thousands of lives.
But Eva Braun is one of the key enablers keeping him going.
To prepare for the arrival of the Red Army,
Eva Braun practises her shooting in the Chancellery Gardens.
She is resolute and determined, and she is absolutely confident
that she can play the role to the end.
She has agency and she makes active choices to support the regime,
and to support the leader of that murderous criminal regime.
She absolutely is culpable.
She is a Nazi.
Hitler is expecting to hear of stunning victories around Berlin.
And is told that the attack never took place.
The troops weren't there.
The whole plan was simply a fantasy.
He breaks down completely.
And has a half an hour rant, screaming and shouting at them.
By the end, Hitler was commanding troops that didn't actually exist.
But he sees it in terms of lack of bravery,
lack of commitment, lack of will.
Hitler believes that everyone has betrayed him.
There will be a complete defeat, and Germany will go down with him.
He's going to kill himself.
He's going to end it all.
Hitler's staff are appalled by this outburst.
The only thing they can think of doing is telephoning Goebbels
and asking him to come along straight away to calm Hitler down.
He goes into Hitler's bedroom, finds him exhausted, dishevelled.
The very picture of defeat.
In many ways, this is a moment of liberation for Goebbels,
because Hitler gives up on the delusion that the war
can still be won.
Goebbels decides himself to stay in Berlin in the bunker, and share
the Fuhrer's fate with him.
Hitler starts preparing for the Red Army's arrival,
instructing staff to destroy top secret documents
from his private safe.
And in a moment of magnanimity towards his staff, Hitler grants
permission for them to leave the Fuhrer bunker to flee
for their lives.
He's now seeing the rats leaving the sinking ship.
He has this feeling of being left alone and deserted
by his closest comrades.
There's no point in in carrying on.
Hitler's outburst only encourages those of his disciples
who have decided to save themselves.
When Himmler receives the news of Hitler's meltdown,
Himmler feels emboldened.
He feels a certain sense of liberation.
He knows that Hitler is going to die within the next few days.
He feels that his decision to enter into negotiations with the Western
Allies is now more urgent than ever before.
As Himmler thinks about life without Hitler, he entertains
the idea that he could be the next leader of Germany.
At this moment, you can see the true colours of Himmler.
As a ruthless, selfish egomaniac who cares only about himself.
Himmler wants to create a new role for himself
in a post-Hitler Germany.
This, while the war is still raging on all fronts.
This, while Nazi terror is still going on.
This, while Hitler is still alive.
Now is the time, Himmler believes, for himself to step up.
As Himmler makes plans to save his own skin,
there is news from Stockholm.
Following Norbert Masur's negotiations with Himmler,
concentration camp
have been released.
There is a Jewish principle in Hebrew called Pidyon Shvuyim.
It means the redemption of prisoners, which is that the act
of saving a soul is the act of saving humanity.
There are not just 1,000 plus people who are alive thanks to him.
But they're the descendants,
and their descendants' descendants,
who are alive, thanks to him.
The heroes of wars are very often people such as Norbert Masur, people
who rise to the moment and rise to the occasion and do
the right thing.
This is the BBC Home Service.
Here is the news.
Berlin is tonight completely surrounded by Russian armies.
That is the good news.
There are signs that the Germans are on the run.
And the Germans say Hitler is still inside the city.
With Berlin completely encircled by the Allies, the Fuhrer remains
over 15 metres underground in his concrete bunker, accompanied
only by a few secretaries and die-hard loyalists.
On the 25th of April, Russians succeed in cutting off
communications to the bunker.
Telephone wires are cut.
All that Hitler has got left is radio, and even
that is problematic.
They become ever more isolated.
By this time, you can hear the Russian guns and shells
from inside the bunker, deep underground.
The Russians are clearly coming.
The Red Army is moving in.
It's only a matter of days, perhaps even hours, to the end.
There's no more talk of forces coming with relief from outside.
So it looks as if the Nazis are preparing to write off
both their Fuhrer and their capital.
The Red Army is already nearing the Reich Chancellery,
threatening it.
The Goebbels' decision to take their children in the bunker seems
crazy, but in their own logic, it made a lot of sense.
It's an act of courage.
It's probably his last resort.
This is a grim event, but she's facing a grim reality.
The clock is ticking.
Time is running out.
By this stage, almost every building in Berlin has been flattened,
but there's still a partially intact concert hall.
And in this concert hall, the Nazis organise a final concert
by the Berlin Philharmonic.
APPLAUSE
The concert features Wagner's Gotterdammerung,
in which the gods of Valhalla are consumed in flames.
MUSIC: Gotterdammerung by Richard Wagner
The last scene features a suicide at its centre.
There's a clear implication here that Germany, Hitler,
and as many people as possible...
..are going to end it all.
APPLAUSE
It's an extraordinary event.
And at the end of the concert, as the audience streams out,
there are Hitler Youth handing out cyanide capsules.
It's an invitation to the audience to bring everything to an end,
to kill themselves as well.
This is the story of the collapse of the Third Reich
as the Allied troops close in on Germany.
Our interest is the psychology of that collapse,
as those at the heart of the regime cling to power.
It's the worst in human nature you see during the collapse
of the Third Reich.
To help us tell the story, we've asked historians and experts
to take us inside the minds of each one of the key protagonists
as they are forced to confront failure.
The cycle of thinking at that time wouldn't allow anyone to think
that what's happening is wrong.
Being picked up, shot, disappeared.
They are walking into an apocalypse on purpose.
Ultimately, who will stay loyal to Hitler?
MUSIC CRESCENDOS
And who will betray him...
..and when?
When Adolf Hitler sweeps to power in the 1930s,
he promises the German people a thousand-year Reich,
a thousand years of undisputed glory.
Seduced by this vision of global domination,
Hitler's millions of followers think he's invincible.
Now, at the end of April 1945,
the war Hitler started has come back to haunt him.
Germany is on the brink of total defeat,
and the all-powerful Fuhrer is living in an underground bunker.
Most of Germany is occupied by invading Allied forces,
and a two-million-strong Soviet army
is just a mile from Hitler's hiding place.
With the Red Army now inside Berlin,
even Hitler's most loyal deputies
have started to turn their backs on him.
Albert Speer, once a close personal friend of Hitler's,
believes the Allies will need him to help rebuild Germany after the war.
Speer is looking for his own future,
his way out of the Third Reich.
He's collecting material for the Allied forces,
to show them that he did everything to stop the war,
to save the lives of people.
He twists the truth.
Speer now tries to appear as Hitler's opponent.
Meanwhile, Hermann Goring, Hitler's notional successor,
is convinced he's the one the Allies will choose to collaborate with.
After all these years of waiting, you think the possibility might now
arrive that I will actually become Hitler's successor.
This is a point to which I've been working for many years.
It's arrived at the wrong time, of course,
but nevertheless there's still a possibility
I can play an important role again.
While he waits to stake his claim as leader,
Goring tries to preserve the wealth and status he's enjoyed for so long.
The artworks, the tapestries, the jewellery,
all the things that he's collected as Hitler's deputy
across the years of the war are all being packed up.
He wants to keep around him the apparatus
that made him the great figure he thinks he is.
Hitler believes Heinrich Himmler is still his most loyal follower.
Himmler knows that his idol is going to die soon.
Himmler must shape his own future now.
What is keeping Himmler going at this stage
is his determination to survive...
..his determination to maintain his reputation
as one of the most powerful men in Germany.
And he is really keen on crafting a new role for himself
in a post-Hitler Germany.
Behind the Fuhrer's back,
Himmler is secretly making plans for peace with Germany's enemies.
If Hitler discovers Himmler's plan, it could cost him his life.
MUSIC: Song Of The Plains by Boris Alexandrov
The Soviets are now taking Berlin street by street,
hour by hour.
Brutalising the German people as they go.
Heading to Hitler's bunker from all directions.
DISTANT EXPLOSIONS
On 27th of April, Hitler decides he wants to go upstairs,
into the garden, and inspect the ruins of the Reich Chancellery.
He gets his valet, Anslinger, to lead him up to the door
that opens out onto the garden.
EXPLOSION
But just at that moment, a Russian shell lands in the garden.
It's clearly far too dangerous to go.
The Russians are now surrounding the chancellery area
and bombarding it very heavily, and so they have to go back downstairs.
DISTANT EXPLOSIONS
By this time, he's realised that the end is approaching.
Hitler knows he is now trapped.
With the Nazi regime disintegrating,
only his most die-hard loyalists stay by his side.
Propaganda Chief Joseph Goebbels is one of the last true believers.
Goebbels understands that the war is lost.
But he still urges the German people
to fight to their utmost, to fight to the bitter end.
This is not because they expect victory any more,
but rather they are walking into an apocalypse.
They want to make a historical last stand,
they want to go down in flames and take Europe down with them.
Nazi ideology is based on the belief,
in a Darwinian struggle between races,
only the strongest can survive.
Now the Germans are losing the war,
Hitler and Goebbels turn this racist ideology against their own people.
Hitler and Goebbels had come to believe their own propaganda
about racial struggles for survival,
and that if German people did not win,
they did not deserve to survive.
They did not care for the lives of German people
if they were not victorious.
Goebbels is so indoctrinated by Nazism,
he makes a shocking choice.
The Goebbels' decision to take their children with them
in the Hitler bunker seems crazy.
But in their own logic, it made a lot of sense.
Goebbels was not going to leave the side of the Fuhrer.
Magda declared very openly,
"I belong to my husband, and my children belong to me."
Obedient as she is,
there is far more to Magda than a doting wife.
Magda is a very committed Nazi.
All of the Goebbels' children have names beginning with H
in a tribute to Hitler.
Hitler outright believes that she is the model
of the perfect Aryan woman that represents the purity,
the dedication, the devotion and the ideological radicalism of Nazism.
She has been printed in every magazine.
Every German would have known her face
because she is the ideal Nazi matron.
Goebbels hopes his family's show of loyalty
will boost Hitler's morale.
But in reality, Germany's military position is hopeless.
Things are so desperate in April 1945
that Hitler issues a proclamation that everybody should fight.
People shouldn't do deals with the Allies,
they shouldn't raise white flags,
men, women and children should resist until the last.
This is an invitation to die in the interests of a future Germany,
as Hitler saw it.
Hitler believes that the most shameful thing in German history
has been the surrender, the capitulation of 1918,
at the end of World War I.
This time, there will be no surrender.
While Hitler demands self-sacrifice from his bunker in Berlin...
..in southern Germany, American forces are just a few miles
outside the historic town of Ansbach.
19-year-old student Robert Limpert fears many lives
will be needlessly lost by resisting Germany's inevitable defeat.
Robert, this person who wanted to speak out,
he wanted to think freely.
He doesn't want to just follow the orders of the Nazis
without questioning.
The town's commander, Colonel Ernst Meyer,
calls on local people to fight until the last bullet.
Few have the capacity to resist his senseless command.
They either still support the Nazis
or are too exhausted by war to defy him.
It's very strange.
Like, speaking about the Nazis, I feel myself speaking about Isis.
Because it's exactly what they did.
People lose track of what they are.
People forget at one point that they are being oppressed.
While a student at Wurzburg University,
Robert witnessed the devastation of the city by Allied bombers.
Robert saw all that destruction
and thought, "I have a chance to prevent this
"from happening in my town."
He believes in the power of words.
He believes in the power of thoughts.
Now he decides it's time to show the people how ugly this war is.
He began distributing those leaflets.
If caught with his anti-Nazi propaganda,
Robert faces certain death.
But with countless lives at stake, he cannot stand by and do nothing.
Robert has to convince the people of Ansbach not to fight back
when the Americans arrive.
In his last line, he wrote "Death to the Nazi executioners!"
This is the ultimate level of resistance to the Nazis.
His opposition against the system
is putting him at the danger of death,
that he might be killed at any moment.
But he knows deep inside his heart and mind
that this is what should be done.
Hitler is really now cooped up in the bunker.
The situation is getting desperate.
The Red Army is going to be there within hours.
In this atmosphere, discipline begins to fall apart.
People start smoking in Hitler's presence.
They started drinking, which he also didn't like, as a teetotaller.
People started disrespecting him.
They didn't stand up when he entered a room, didn't give Nazi salutes.
It's a situation in which Hitler, in some sense, is already dead.
He's already treated as if he's no longer the great leader.
You can smell the fear, the sweat of people.
The toilets are blocked,
and so the stench is spreading throughout the bunker.
There is a sense of impending doom.
This is the moment when his charisma finally breaks and disappears.
In these darkest hours, Hitler relies evermore
on the unconditional support of his girlfriend, Eva Braun.
MUSIC: Piano Concerto No. 5 by Ludwig van Beethoven
Eva Braun is not a particularly political creature.
She is not following things in great detail.
Eva's fantasy is about her place in Nazi history.
The clock is ticking.
Time is running out.
I now need to make sure that I am at Hitler's side.
Most rational people would be trying to get out of Berlin.
Eva has a different ambition.
Her life doesn't hold value to her
unless she can achieve her greatest ambition,
which is to secure her place in future Nazi history,
being Hitler's loyal support to the end.
Even if it costs her life.
Despite his rapidly waning authority,
Hitler still holds daily military briefings.
He now pins his hopes on the 12th Army,
but they are nowhere near Berlin.
Heather's Situation Conferences came to focus more and more
on enormous maps he'd had made...
..with little flags that he could move around,
each representing a division.
And he became almost obsessed with these maps.
But the problem was each division was severely depleted.
In reality, the little flags, they represented nothing at all.
They were purely imaginary.
One of the generals, Keitel, requests permission
to rejoin the remnants of the 12th Army
to make sure Hitler's demands are carried out.
Keitel is the last of the totally loyal generals around Hitler.
He's there at the centre of things because Hitler trusts him
not to object to anything he orders.
Even Keitel realises that Hitler is indulging in fantasies
so bizarre and so hopeless that it would not make any sense
to carry out these orders.
Keitel simply disappears.
He just fled.
As the situation in Berlin worsens,
Himmler senses an opportunity to improve his own chances of survival.
Himmler feels emboldened to press on with plans for the future.
Himmler thinks that Hitler is incapable at this stage
of acting decisively.
Himmler needs to take charge from now on.
As he contemplates a new Nazi order, Himmler allows himself to imagine
a world in which he is the next Fuhrer.
He even considers a new name for the Nazi Party -
the Party of National Union.
He's a man who boasts about loyalty.
He is a man who boasts about honour.
But what really matters to Himmler in the end is his own prestige,
it is his own position.
Himmler thinks the best way to secure his position
in future Germany is to sound out a peace deal with the Western Allies.
To make this bold move, he travels 175 miles
north of Berlin to the Baltic coast.
Himmler is meeting an intermediary, Count Bernadotte,
who is a senior representative from the neutral Swedish government.
Himmler tells Bernadotte that he has authority from Hitler
to negotiate with the Western Allies.
Himmler boasts that he will force the German troops
fighting on the Western Front to surrender.
This is exactly what Hitler promised would never happen.
Going over the Fuhrer's head
is a very dangerous game to be playing.
Himmler is not really having lots of moral qualms.
He simply talks about business.
Himmler is determined to have a meeting with the Supreme Commander
of the Allied Forces in Europe, General Eisenhower.
And he is wondering whether he should shake hands with Eisenhower
or whether he should bow.
He is acting under delusion if he believes
that the Western Allies will seriously negotiate with him,
the architect of the Holocaust.
In the town of Ansbach,
Robert Limpert continues his one man campaign of resistance.
But he needs more than just leaflets to save lives
and starts taking ever bigger risks.
To disrupt the defence of the town,
Limpert cuts telephone wires leading from the headquarters
of the local Nazi commander, Colonel Meyer.
It's probably his last resort.
It's an act of courage,
but at the same time, he knows...
..the step he is taking has only one end.
Boys from the Hitler Youth saw him...
..and they reported him immediately to the police.
When Robert is arrested, a show trial is quickly held.
And in two minutes, he is sentenced to death.
They don't care about killing him physically.
They are so afraid of what Robert would say
if he was given the right to speak
because they know it is the power of his words that will last.
Even at that moment, Robert was resisting.
He somehow managed to escape.
I believe he died with some sorrow, looking at his people.
But at the same time, satisfied that he had done the right thing.
Meyer said, "Let him stay here until he stinks."
They wanted to leave him hanging.
To that extent, they were trying to dehumanise him.
But they forgot that Robert is no more this body.
Robert is the value of what it means to be a free man.
I believe freedom is what he stood for.
And it's freedom, what he died for.
Tragically, the Americans arrive in Ansbach
just a few hours after Robert's execution.
His town surrenders without a fight.
Robert is one of 10,000 German citizens executed by the Nazis
in a final wave of terror.
EXPLOSIONS
In Berlin, Russian shells pound the streets surrounding the bunker.
EXPLOSION
Underground, life is becoming increasingly squalid.
Fans supplying fresh air are turned off
after they start sucking in smoke and fumes
from the heavy shelling above.
The war is so close,
an emergency field hospital is set up inside the bunker itself.
Surrounded by the dead and dying,
ever more dreadful news reaches those trapped inside.
An Allied radio broadcast has been intercepted.
Hitler and Goebbels are together when Hitler's press secretary
comes in and lets them know that the Allied press has published
attempts by Himmler to make peace with England and the United States.
Himmler had been the truest of the true.
Hitler used to call him "Treu Himmler" -
"Faithful Himmler".
Now, Goebbels and Hitler are outraged.
They see any attempt at peace whatsoever as a betrayal.
Hitler goes incandescent in another outburst of rage.
This is a cause of absolute despair for Hitler.
Hitler finds this the last, final, worst betrayal of all.
Faithful Heinrich has become Faithless Heinrich.
"It is the greatest betrayal in history," he says.
Stunned, Hitler takes out his fury on one of Himmler's subordinates,
Hermann Fegelein, who he suspects to be part of Himmler's plot.
Fegelein was close to Hitler
because he was married to Eva Braun's sister, Gretl.
But Fegelein was also, of course, close to Himmler.
Astonishingly, he ordered Fegelein to be shot.
GUN COCKS
GUNSHOT
Not content with Fegelein's death and fuelled by paranoia,
Hitler orders the unthinkable -
the execution of Himmler himself.
But Himmler is more than 100 miles away from the Fuhrer bunker,
near Germany's Baltic coast.
Himmler is completely shocked that Hitler, his erstwhile patron,
staunchest supporter, is now ordering the execution of Himmler.
This is something which comes as totally unexpected news.
He has lost almost everything.
He is absolutely shattered.
Hitler and Himmler have stood side by side in the Nazi Party
for over 20 years.
With the news that the Allies will not even consider negotiating
with Himmler, he realises he's betrayed his Fuhrer for nothing.
The ties between Himmler and Hitler are now cut for good.
With his inner circle in disarray,
Hitler makes time for one last grand gesture.
After keeping her in the shadows for 15 years,
Hitler is finally ready to acknowledge his girlfriend,
Eva Braun.
When Eva Braun went to stay with him in Berlin in the last days,
resisting all attempts to persuade her to leave and go into hiding...
..he was, I think, grateful, perhaps rather touched.
He decided now was the time to give her a public thanks
for her loyalty and devotion by marrying her.
It's hard to accept, but Hitler did have ordinary human emotions.
He was capable of love.
He does seem to have loved Eva Braun.
MUSIC: Oboe Concerto No 2 in D minor by Albinoni
When Eve signs her name, she begins writing "Braun",
before correcting it to "Eva Hitler, nee Braun".
This is all Eva's ever wanted.
And she's really pleased to become Frau Hitler.
She's got her eye on the history books.
Finally, she'll be recognised as belonging to the heart
of the Third Reich.
Eva Braun had imagined a wedding on a grand scale -
a royal wedding...
..a celebration, a couple of days of partying...
..cameras filming everything, flowers and meadows.
What she gets is a plate of cold sandwiches
in a hole 25 foot beneath the ground.
This is a grim event, but she's facing a grim reality.
The nuptials are short-lived.
Hitler leaves the celebrations to dictate to one of his secretaries
his last public statement as Fuhrer.
Hitler's testimony's a very depressing document.
It's full of the settling of old scores, of revenge, hatred,
as well as expressions of loyalty to the people who've
unquestionably followed him.
He also has diatribes full of hatred for people who have betrayed him.
And then at the end, he has another anti-Semitic rant against the Jews.
He accuses them of having plotted the destruction of Germany.
Complete paranoid fantasy.
And then he says,
"And the Jewish people have had to suffer the same fate."
And that is a confession that he has ordered
and had carried out the Holocaust,
the mass murder of nearly six million Jews.
MUSIC: Symphony of Sorrowful Songs by Gorecki
ARTILLERY FIRE
With the Russians almost at Hitler's door...
..staff in the bunker receive dramatic news from Italy.
Hitler's ally, dictator Benito Mussolini,
and his mistress have been killed by communist partisans...
..their mutilated bodies publicly strung up
outside a petrol station...
..near Milan.
Hitler's not a man who fears death.
What he did fear was to be captured, taken prisoner, humiliated,
put on trial, subjected to the mockery and contempt of the world.
Hitler gets the news of Mussolini's death.
This is the last straw.
He says he's not going to suffer the same fate.
He is going to die, as far as he can, a dignified death.
And he wants his body and that of Eva Hitler - as she now is -
to be burned until they are unrecognisable,
so there's nothing left of them to mock or defile.
Hitler assembles his staff in the bunker on the 30th of April
and says formally goodbye to them,
shaking their hands and thanking them for their service.
Finally, he has reached a point where he knows it's total defeat.
In a sense, that makes him rather calm.
The decision has been made.
There's no more hope of turning the tide,
there's no more hope of a victory,
and so he knows he's going to shoot himself.
And so he's reconciled himself to his fate.
GUNSHOT
The proclamation that Hitler had died a hero's death,
fighting at the head of his troops, was, of course, a complete lie.
He died a squalid death in the bunker by shooting himself
and poisoning his partner.
When Hitler dies,
for many Germans, the world is over.
It too dies.
He had loomed so enormously large in the consciousness of the Germans
under the Third Reich that there was an enormous wave of suicides
in Nazi Germany, one of the largest mass deaths in history.
GUNSHOT
The defeat was total.
Germany was occupied.
There was no obvious reason to carry on fighting.
GUNFIRE
The Fuhrer may be dead,
but he's left a crucial set of orders to be carried out.
Hitler's private secretary sends a message
disclosing news of his successor.
In his final testament, Hitler has made a surprise appointment.
Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz will be Reich president.
Doenitz may be an outside choice for Supreme Commander,
but he is a committed Nazi.
The Navy, in complete contrast to the Army,
had been faithful to Hitler all the way through.
And Hitler, I think, felt that Doenitz, as the head of the Navy,
represented the one institution in Germany that he had trusted,
that remained loyal to him all the way through.
Doenitz summons the disgraced Himmler
to his temporary headquarters in northern Germany.
Himmler sees this invitation as a chance to salvage his reputation
among the Nazi elite.
Himmler now feels completely liberated of any loyalties,
of any ties, of any obligations to Hitler,
so Himmler can now do whatever he likes.
Himmler still commands the SS and the police.
Himmler still has a considerable amount of power.
He is so deluded that he thinks he will play a major role
in a post-Hitler government.
Himmler appears with armed guards in Doenitz's office
because he wants to remind Doenitz
that the SS and Himmler are still extremely powerful,
that they are still forces to be reckoned with.
Fearing a violent confrontation,
Doenitz has concealed a gun with the safety catch removed
under papers on his desk.
Doenitz knows that Himmler has been expelled from the Nazi Party
and that Himmler is a traitor in Hitler's eyes.
The atmosphere is extremely tense.
Himmler still thinks that he is far more powerful than Doenitz,
who is, after all, only a Grand Admiral,
the leader of the German Navy.
Doenitz hands Himmler a copy of Hitler's final order,
identifying the Admiral, not Himmler, as his successor.
After 22 years a member,
Himmler is unceremoniously dismissed from the Nazi Party.
Himmler has always suppressed his own feelings.
He's never shown any emotion in public.
But now, after his fall from power, he must be feeling a total failure.
Himmler offers his services as a second-in-command,
but Doenitz refuses.
Himmler has always been very sure of himself.
He's always known his identity.
He's always known the purpose of his life.
But now he doesn't.
What is his plan B?
What is he going to do next?
One thing he knows is that he wants to save his own neck.
Speer, keen to keep himself at the heart of power,
also meets with Doenitz.
He, too, is shunned and gets no official position.
For a once close friend of Hitler...
..it's a personal humiliation.
But Speer soon senses an opportunity in this rejection...
..a chance to distance himself from the excesses of the Nazi regime.
It's, for him, part of his exit strategy.
Speer claims that he is just a civilian,
he is a bystander,
he has nothing to do with all these atrocities, with crimes.
This is important for Speer to create a new image
as the innocent man.
With their hero dead at his own hand,
Joseph Goebbels and his wife Magda now face an appalling choice.
They are locked into a terrible struggle.
They have decided to stay there until the end
and share Hitler's fate,
and so they discuss what to do with their children.
The Goebbels are so fervently Nazi, so ideologically committed,
there is nothing for them to live for.
A world without Nazism was not a world for their own children.
Goebbels, the mastermind of Nazi indoctrination,
is the one member of Hitler's inner circle
who most fervently swallows his own propaganda.
Magda writes, "The world which will succeed the Fuhrer
"and National Socialism is not worth living in.
"And for this reason, I have brought the children here too.
"They are too good for the life that will come after us,
"and a gracious God will understand
"if I myself give them release from it."
The Goebbels' children are sedated,
before cyanide capsules are crushed into their mouths.
Their parents then shoot themselves.
Magda didn't kill her children because she was a monster.
Magda was a person that had been radicalised by these ideas,
radicalised to such an extent that she did the most unnatural thing
a mother could do and killed her own children.
On the 7th of May 1945, a representative of the German Army
signs Germany's unconditional surrender.
After six years of conflict, the war in Europe is over,
Nazism defeated.
HITLER SHOUTS IN GERMAN
When Hitler rose to power in 1933, Germany was a liberal democracy.
Then he and his fanatical deputies stripped the German people
of their basic freedoms to establish a ruthless dictatorship.
Fuelled by hatred and a flawed belief in racial superiority,
Hitler instigated a global war that cost 60 million lives.
But as his dream of an Aryan empire collapsed,
he turned his anger on his own people...
..and finally himself.
The Third Reich shows us how dangerous ideas are.
Where Hitler and the Nazis are different
is that they wanted to ultimately conquer the whole world.
Their ambitions were without limit.
Nazis, like all nationalists,
do not believe that there's such a thing as humanity.
For them, we're different species locked in a struggle for survival.
Underlying that is a total contempt for human life.
Even though Europe is now at peace,
for some Nazis, the story is far from over.
Goering makes no effort to run away at the end of the war -
in fact, the opposite, really.
Goering gives himself up to the American Army.
And I think he does so because he still has this idea
that he'll be treated as a senior figure now,
perhaps the most important senior figure, after Hitler's death.
And so Goering hopes he'll be taken to Eisenhower
and be able to talk to him as one senior officer
to another senior officer.
Goering has no idea that, instead,
he faces trial for crimes against humanity.
What Goering doesn't really expect is that he will end up
in a prison cell along with other major war criminals.
It's so bizarre.
I think he has no sense that he is one of them.
While Goering is behind bars...
..Himmler is on the run.
Himmler's main priority now is to get as far away
from the advancing Soviet troops as quickly as he can.
He has really fallen from power.
But there is no evidence whatsoever that Himmler is feeling any remorse.
He is completely unrepentant.
Himmler is carrying a fake ID,
pretending to be just an ordinary soldier.
But his forgery is quickly discovered.
Himmler is acutely aware of the fact
that he's one of Europe's most wanted men.
He knows that he will be put on trial and that
he will be, in all likelihood, sentenced to death.
As Himmler is searched,
he bites down on a cyanide capsule he's concealed in his mouth.
The architect of the Holocaust
and the man responsible for the deaths of millions of people
is dead.
His death by suicide is a rather pathetic, cowardly act.
At the same time, Allied forces arrive
at Admiral Doenitz's headquarters in northern Germany.
Any hopes the remaining Nazis have of playing a role
in Germany's post-war government are dispelled when they're arrested.
Speer is very clever.
He knows that pictures are very powerful.
On the day of the arrest, he shows up in civilian clothes,
in a trench coat.
All others wear uniforms.
He shows with this,
"I'm a civilian and I don't belong to this group.
"I'm different."
He lies. He has to lie.
Even other members of Hitler's inner circle don't lie like Speer lies.
Now, the world must seek retribution and Germany must deal with its role
in one of the deadliest episodes in human history.
As dozens of Nazis are rounded up and put on trial...
..tens of thousands more are on the run or hiding in plain sight...
..as they begin to process what they've done....
..in the name of the Fuhrer.