Hitler's Descent Into Darkness: From Failed Artist To Callous Dictator | Fatal Attraction | Timeline

Hi everybody, welcome to this Timeline documentary. My name is Dan Snow and here I am in a Lancaster bomber cockpit, one of the few remaining Lancasters from the Second World War, to tell you about my new history channel. It's called History Hit, it's like Netflix for history. Hundreds of history documentaries on there and interviews with many of the world's best historians. Follow the information below this film or just search online for History Hit and make sure you use the code Timeline to get a special introductory offer. Now enjoy this show. The 1930s saw Germany turn from a shattered nation into a military powerhouse. It was to wage war on the nations which just 11 years earlier had left Germany a broken country and a population bereft of pride in the wake of World War One. One man created this transformation, Adolf Hitler. Hitler was one of the few people in Germany who welcomed another war, he wasn't scared. Hitler's magnetism was not only something which could convince enormous crowds, but was also incredibly powerful, like a potent narcotic. How did he become the most powerful man in Germany? Who were the Nazis? And how did they reinvigorate this fractured nation? In Weimar Germany there was a new kind of energy very visible on the streets. They wanted perpetual acclimation, they wanted constant support from the people. Terror played a very important part of his leadership. Nothing would be tolerated that undermined the German national revolution. Thousands were taken in by one man's magnetism, which proved to be Germany's fatal attraction. Hitler at this stage sees himself not as the messiah, but as the John the Baptist. It's only at his time in Landsberg prison that he actually realizes, my God, I am he. To fully understand the doomed love affair of Germany and Hitler, we must first look into the German nation of the late 19th century. Germany had become the most powerful country, the most prosperous country, the most advanced country on the European continent. It was a rather authoritarian state on the one hand, but it also had a national parliament with elections, with some limited powers, but those powers were most likely growing. A highly militarized imperial state under the hereditary monarchy of the Hohenzollern dynasty. Having given support to the unification of Germany after the Franco-Prussian War, Britain had become fearful of this new power. Its growing industrial and military capability threatened to overshadow Britain's diminishing empire. After the Franco-Prussian War, Germany powered ahead economically, overtaking Britain as an industrial power by the time of the First World War, second only to the United States. There was a great deal of catching up to do, a great deal of nation building, of creating unity, of creating vision. It was ambitious really to join the other great powers as one of the major European imperial states. Alongside that, both envy and arrogance of the British Empire. It was envy because it was so world powerful, it was 25% of the world's surface and 25% of the world's people. But in addition, a very strong sense of superiority. Many historians would say a dangerously expansionist power with ambitions in Europe that were certainly threatening to the continuation of any existing balance of power. It was a mass of seething tensions. Germany was beginning to be a colonial power late in the race. It is not in Germany, however, where our story begins, but in neighbouring Austria-Hungary. We don't know much about Hitler's early life. He was born in Braunau on the River Inn on the 20th of April 1889, son of a minor Austrian official. His father wasn't a very nice man, knocked Hitler around a bit. Because of that, Hitler's mother took on a very protective role. We couldn't gather that much. He had a rather unhappy childhood. He had four siblings who died before he was born. Hitler's childhood leads us to believe it was a fairly ordinary upbringing. Comparable with his peers at the time. A problem for historians is that Hitler reinvented quite a bit about his childhood. He was an indifferent student, it has to be said. It was not that he was not very intelligent, he certainly was, but he was unable to focus. Bit of a learner, as he continued to be, but always a voracious reader. He read everything he could get his hands on and continued to do that. He created, in a sense, a kind of self-education, which was above bizarre bricolage of all kinds of sources of his own authorship. In other words, what he didn't get was really a coherent education, because he didn't pay attention. In 1907, a young Adolf Hitler made his way to Vienna to pursue a career as an artist. Vienna at the time was the city leading Europe in new artistic practice and philosophical thought. Hitler's plan was to apply and enroll at the Academy of Fine Arts. He went to Vienna when he was about 16 and really knocked it in, didn't do a lot. He never lived as rough as he later claimed. He was rejected from art school, I think probably rightly looking at his artworks. He knew about art in general terms. He knew about neoclassical art. He knew the power of art above all, that great historic images had enormous moments. So although his watercolors didn't advance the Nazi cause, he knew what art could do. Hitler claimed throughout his life that he was an artist who was torn from his easel by the love of Germany. His mother was generous to him. She provided him with a series of allowances, possibly without the knowledge of his father. So some biographers of Hitler say that he was really a bit of a layabout. He frequented cafe society in Vienna and met up with a deeply flawed cafe intelligentsia, who fed him a lot of the ideas that Hitler later said in Mein Kampf became the granite foundations of my thought. Everyone assumes that Hitler was strongly influenced by Austrian anti-Semitism. There was a lot of it around before 1914, but actually it's very hard to pin down that he was influenced by it. All of the associations with Jewish people, with whom there are a great many in Hitler's early life, were not merely positive but benevolent. The doctor who treated his mother when she was sick, the family doctor who treated all of them, he was Jewish. The dealer who bought and sold the paintings Hitler painted in Vienna to keep the wolf from the door, again was Jewish. In receipt of the inheritance bequeathed to Hitler from his father's estate and finding little fortune as an artist in Vienna, Hitler decided to move to Munich in 1913. Hitler was very conscious of being ethnically German. As a German nationalist, Hitler believed that he belonged more in Germany than in Austria. Austria-Hungary remained a great power in the scheme of things, dominating a large part of Southeastern Europe. But it was getting into crisis because of the growth of nationalism, Czech nationalism, Hungarian, South Slav. And the clash of these national groups in the parliamentary assemblies made the parliament, the Reichsrat and its Hungarian equivalent more or less unworkable, ungovernable. Every meeting just erupted into shouting matches between the different national groups, either in Austria or in Hungary. And that, I think, gave Hitler a contempt for parliamentary rule. He saw it as being ineffective. He saw the empire as this large ramshackle organisation. And he thought that an authoritarian director, strong leadership, even the dictator, was the only way to solve these problems. It was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in Sarajevo that would be the catalyst for the start of the First World War. Within weeks, Austria-Hungary were at war with Serbia. Germany then mobilised, invaded Luxembourg and Belgium, and began to march on France. This prompted Britain to declare war on Germany. Hitler, although an Austrian citizen living in Munich at the time, managed to sign up to the German army. In the chaos of mobilisation in August 1914, his papers were disregarded and he got into the army. The Austrian authorities were after him. He'd eluded conscription from the Austrian army and was living in Germany. He didn't want to fight for something he didn't believe in. And he certainly didn't believe in the Habsburgs and in their empire. With war erupting all over Europe, Germany would arrive in the position of fighting a war on two fronts. To the east, against the Russians, and to the west, against Britain, France and Belgium. Hitler had joined the army in support of the German empire. The experience of war would change the trajectory of his life and in turn the lives of millions of others forever. Having failed as an artist, Hitler found himself in Munich, a city in the modern German empire. He signed up to the German army and was sent to the Western Front. Here he found Germany at war with Britain and its allies. Adolf Hitler played but an obscure part, a corporal in the German army. Hitler was fascinated by the prospect of war. The First World War turned a nobody into a somebody. On the whole, most reports show that he was a good soldier, well-disciplined, he was promoted to an NCO rank. He survived it from start to finish. Now, of course, not everybody did. He served as a battalion runner, close enough to the front line, though he didn't spend as much time as a front-line combat infantry soldier as he later claimed, but he was in danger. He was within firing range of British and French artillery. It was at the very least, if you were a runner, you had to get messages up to communications trenches. And he was seriously gassed in 1918. People have tried to belittle what he did in the war, actually, but he won the Iron Cross second class and then the Iron Cross first class. On the recommendation, ironically, of a Jewish superior officer. This idea that he was some kind of coward as rubbish, he actually manifested enormous courage. But messengers were often regarded by the fighting troops as having a rather cushy time. The enigma is why he was never promoted an officer, of course. It may be apocryphal, but I think it's been said that he remained a corporal because he didn't have leadership qualities. Hitler does not seem to have been well-liked or well-respected by his fellow soldiers. He was a bit of a loner regardless, a bit of an eccentric. He himself looked back on the First World War as a time of unity, fellow feeling, brotherhood and so on, and mythologised it in his own mind until he came to want to recreate the spirit of 1914 when all Germans united behind the Kaiser in the Third Reich in 1933. Russia mobilised its military and defeated Austria-Hungary, but was stopped in Prussia by the German forces. Germany, being the far stronger military power, forced the Bolsheviks to sign the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. The Baltic states were given to Germany, along with the recognised independence of Ukraine. Early in 1918, they had actually signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Russia, and so they'd acquired an empire in Russia. The dreaded two-front war now no longer existed from March 1918, so that was taken as a sign that Germany was doing really well in the war, and it all hung on the Western Front. But with the United States in the war, Germany wasn't going to win on the Western Front. Swiftly, the menace of war grew into dread reality, as American ships and ships carrying American citizens were torpedoed, sent to the bottom by the ruthless campaign of the unseen Tigers of the Seas. America entered the war after Germany had started attacking all commercial ships heading for Britain, which had meant the sinking of American ships in the North Atlantic. On April 6th, 1917, America declared war on Germany. With the superior resources the Americans brought, the German army faced an impossible situation. On November 11th, 1918, the armistice was signed, which ended the war. The problem was that the political and military establishment had not led Germans to expect defeat. It's all near the end, and their press are not telling them just how effective the counterattack of the Allies has been. Propaganda was still being pumped out, saying that they were going to win. So in late October, when they finally conceded defeat and began to sue for peace, this came as a terrible shock. It was very, very sudden to most Germans. And then on top of that, there were the armistice terms, and then even more, the peace terms in 1919, which almost all Germans regarded with absolute outrage. The Treaty of Versailles was a series of provisions and conditions placed on Germany by the Allied nations. One of these being Germany accepting the responsibility for all loss and damage caused by the war. This was known as Article 231, which later became known as the War Guilt Clause. The treaty also forced Germany to make substantial territorial concessions and pay reparations to the Allied countries. In addition, Germany was only allowed a military force of no more than 100,000 men. Versailles was, to them, the stab in the back. What they'd given was an armistice, not a surrender. The Germans had to surrender their combat aircraft. They weren't allowed to build any combat ships. Their army was restricted to 100,000. 100,000 seems quite a lot to me, actually. This meant all the cooks and bottle washers and pen pushers were counted in the 100,000 men. It wasn't 100,000 fighting men. They had to pay massive financial reparations for the damage that German troops had caused in the occupation of northern France and southern Belgium. And they rested on the War Guilt Clause, which almost all Germans disputed. Germany had not been guilty for starting the First World War. It had been caused by the encirclement of Germany by the Allies. They felt that the Allies had deceived them, had abandoned all notions of honour by treating them as a conquered people when they didn't think they were. The things that had been promised to them, specifically by President Woodrow Wilson and David Lord George, had not been delivered. Instead, they'd been violated. Their honour had been degraded. A very large proportion of them felt a very great deal of resentment against the rest of the world. Hitler was devastated by that, like huge numbers of Germans. Hitler, like many others, couldn't explain it, had to find some way of explaining it for himself. And like tens of thousands of others, he blamed the home front. He blamed Socialists, Marxists, Jews, people who'd undermined Germany from within. The stab-in-the-back theory surfaced in right-wing circles after the end of the war as a way to explain the sudden defeat. It was believed that the left-wing Republican and Jewish populations of Germany, who had made up the home front, had lost the war from within. Most Germans did not believe in the stab-in-the-back legend. The Independent Social Democrats and the Mainstream Social Democrats and then the Communist Party in the early 20s were a major part of the German political system, about a third of the electorate. So this belief in the stab-in-the-back, in the Jewish conspiracy in 1918-19, was very much a lunatic fringe group on the right. The First World War had seen the young Hitler in a role which suited him. However, the sudden loss for Germany was too much to take, not only for Hitler, but for the entire population. This, along with the humiliation of Versailles, Hitler and a dangerous minority of the right-wing population looked for a scapegoat. The search would see the birth of a new party and bring together some of the most dangerous men Germany has ever produced. The shock defeat of Germany in World War I left the nation humiliated. The signing of the Treaty of Versailles saddled Germany with being responsible for rebuilding the Allied nations. Added to this, Germany had seen its own revolution in 1918. However, it was not until 1919 that the Weimar Republic was established, with the coming together of a national assembly in Weimar, a town in central Germany. Germany had to pay reparations to the victorious Allies. This was really what accelerated the Great Inflation. It started in 1916 when the German government started printing money to fund the war effort. And as we know, printing money causes inflation. Post-war German governments didn't make the slightest effort to arrest inflation. They could pin that on the peace treaties and on the Allies. It got so out of hand in 1923, the Allies stepped in, the Americans stepped in, particularly with the Dawes Plan. The Dawes and Young plans to schedule Germany's reparations payments are evolved and they fail. The Dawes Plan was the brainchild of the American banker Charles G. Dawes. The plan was to lend the German government the money to pay back the reparations which had not been given to the Allied countries. America stabilized the German currency so that the Americans could give loans to Germany, so that Germany could pay reparations to Britain, France and others, so that Britain, France and others could repay loans to the United States. During this time of change and uncertainty, Hitler was keen to continue in the vocation which had given him personal success. After the war ended, he stayed in the German army, which was vastly depleted. He didn't want to leave, he liked the army. Whatever inventions he may have resorted to about his own service, he felt at home within the secure structures and hierarchies of the army. He attended the courses for soldiers at Camp Lechfeld. These courses were taught, some of them by the most famous academics of the era, and what they retailed was a dart of sturdy German ethno-nationalism and patriotism. They're a way of combating the activities of the Bolsheviks. Right-wing political propaganda masquerading as political education. Hitler proved not only a worthy pupil, but he actually became one of them. He was recruited to actually do this speech-making, this kind of incendiary pedagogy himself, and proved remarkably good at it. It's there that he learns his oratorical techniques. He was actually sent by the army, to which he still belonged, to observe a far-right group called the German Workers' Party. The German Workers' Party was a group founded in Munich in January 1919 by Anton Drexler, a leading member of the occultist Thule Society. The party would meet regularly and discuss ideas of nationalism. The binding ideas of the German Workers' Party were entrenched in racism and the hatred of Jews. It was during this period of observation that Hitler became more and more involved with the party's politics. He started speaking at its meetings and soon became clear that he was a very gifted speaker and took on board very much these radical anti-Semitic ideas in which the war had been lost by some conspiracy that he imagined the Jews had been undertaking against Germany. Hitler, it's been said, had a mind a bit like a Hoover. He just sucked up and absorbed everything he read. People like Adolfo Lentz, a practising racist and a teacher of really bastardised Darwinism. There's a whole kind of mishmash of ideas that he puts together to form the National Socialist ideology. Having shown his strength as a public speaker, Hitler began to take a bigger role in the German Workers' Party. He took on more responsibility, soon becoming the head of propaganda. He starts not as leader, that remains Anton Drexler, but as their PR man. What he does is produce these amazing inflammatory exciting posters and have these mass meetings which increasingly large numbers of people come to. In 1920, Hitler decided to rename the German Workers' Party in an attempt to broaden its appeal. He called it the National Socialist German Workers' Party. A year later, after an angry dispute which saw him threatened to leave the party, Hitler was named president. Now he would start to gather around him a loyal, intelligent and brutal inner circle. In a situation of great post-war turmoil in Bavaria and Germany as a whole, rampant inflation, unemployment, street disturbances, strikes, militant political action by workers and by the left. So Hitler was certainly looking for a political home and he appears to have found one. Hitler also gathered around him bit by bit as his reputation as a speaker of the radical right increased. A group of acolytes, a group of disciples who brought their own particular techniques and their own ideas, personalities and reputation. Hitler's closest ally at the time was Rudolf Hess, who had been born on April 26, 1894 in Alexandria, Egypt. Like Hitler, he had this extraordinary reaction at the end, how could we have lost and so on, who is there to blame. He drifted off into university life but he was a frustrated radical nationalist. And when he met Hitler, he was absolutely transfixed by him. Hess saw, again, international politics and this notion of struggle between different races. He was a fanatical admirer of Hitler. As you can see it in the films that were taken of him at Nuremberg rallies, his face just glowing with naive enthusiasm. The most decorated of Hitler's men was Hermann Goering from Rosenheim, Bavaria, born January 12th, 1893. Goering was an unusual recruit to the infant National Socialist Party. At that time in the 20s, a very dashing figure with a big military reputation. He'd been quite a distinguished air force pilot during the First World War. He had succeeded Baron von Richthofen as head of the von Richthofen squadron after the shooting down of the Red Baron. So he was an amazingly glamorous figure and he maintained this astonishing persona of the jolly ex-fighter pilot, which the German people found adorable. He was not the kind of person who gravitated easily to these radical political movements. But Goering, too, thought that Hitler somehow or other articulated his own sense of resentment and loss and became a committed follower from that point on. One of the party's most sinister figures was Heinrich Himmler from a Roman Catholic middle-class family born October 7th, 1900 in Munich. Himmler's father was a teacher who'd been actually tutored to the Bavarian royal family. Himmler had something rather schoolmasterly about him. Heinrich Himmler's life was really dominated by the fact that he wanted to fight in the First World War but was too young. You always had that sense with Himmler that he was frustrated in not being able to fight on Germany's behalf. He had this very pedagogic, kind of scholarly, dreamy manner. Of course, we know now what was going on inside him. He was a rather eccentric patriot, a strong anti-Semite and he gravitated towards National Socialism because it seemed for him the natural home. Martin Bormann became Hitler's most trusted disciple, the son of a post office worker born June 17th, 1900. Bormann is very much the sinister Machiavellian manipulator, of course. Very soon joined one of the Free Corps, the vigilante groups that grew up in Germany in the early 1920s, were sent to prison for murdering somebody. When he emerged, he again heard Hitler and thought, well, you know, this man articulates the things I feel, the resentment I feel, the loss in 1918 that all Germans shared. And he too became a devoted follower. Finally, arguably the most intelligent of Hitler's men, Joseph Goebbels from the Ruhr Valley, born October 29th, 1897. Goebbels was something of an oddball in the National Socialist movement. He had a university education, he got a doctorate, he studied German literature in the 19th century. He's also a romantic nationalist and writes a novel before even knowing Hitler called Michael, which is absolutely a description of a Hitler-type figure. This idea that Hitler had of a Germany where all Germans were united on an equal basis, a very powerful appeal to Goebbels. And he was looking for a political movement that somehow represented his personal position. He became a good recruit for the National Socialist movement. And a supreme ability to organise propaganda in the most ruthless possible way. The common feelings of loss, despair, frustration and anger from losing the First World War united these men. However, these were not uncommon sentiments in Germany at the time. Something else activated and fuelled their extremism. All had experienced some kind of revelation whilst listening to Hitler. He seemed to be an outsider, somebody almost sent to Germany to help Germany regain its trajectory to great past status, to help Germany revenge itself on the Allies. He was fulfilling a kind of prefigured role which had always existed in German history and culture. Kaiser Friedrich Barbarossa, King Redbeard, the man who would deliver Germany from her enemies, and specifically now those enemies were gathering thick and furious around him. For Hitler, all the signs were pointing towards a burgeoning National Socialist political party. He had managed to gather around him a loyal following and some meetings were running into the thousands. It was events in Italy, however, which ignited Hitler's imagination. They would have huge consequences on the fate of Hitler, the National Socialist Party, and the rest of the German nation. Hitler had gathered some of the brightest and most dangerous men from the far right. His National Socialist meetings often brought in around 2,000 participants. But Hitler's perception of himself and his party was grossly exaggerated. He's the kind of man in a dirty raincoat standing on a soapbox in the middle of a town square talking to half a dozen people. Standing on platforms on street corners and so on, you know, old-fashioned kind of political activity. There were other far more powerful, far more publicly visible right-wing parties in Germany at the time. Well, it really was just an assembly of people who'd come together who shared roughly the same kinds of views. Events in Italy inspired Hitler. 1922, combastic newspaper editor with a gladiator's jaw led his black-shirted legions in a march on Rome. In October 1922, the fascist leader Mussolini and his black-shirt army marched on Rome. King Victor Emmanuel III was forced to hand control of Italy to Mussolini. At least, this is how Hitler saw it and almost immediately began to plot his own coup. Hitler was very influenced in 1923 by the successful coup staged by Mussolini. Hitler conceived the idea of a march on Berlin. So he began to fantasise in 1923 that the German state was so weak, the height of the inflation, the crisis and so on. He took advantage of the disintegration of German politics in 1923 under the pressures of hyperinflation, the French occupation of the Ruhr to seize reparations which weren't being delivered, to stage a coup d'etat in Munich. Mussolini was also well aware of the power of propaganda. He knew how he wished to be perceived by the rest of Europe. Hitler was one of the victims of Mussolini's propaganda. King appointed Mussolini head of government in a perfectly constitutional way. It was not a coup d'etat. It was a perfectly constitutional act on the part of the king, if a rather weak-willed one. It was all a bit of a gamble from Hitler's point of view. On November 8th, 1923, Hitler, along with 600 stormtroopers, surrounded the Burger Braukeller, a large beer hall in Munich. Here, the state commissioner of Bavaria, Gustav von Kahl, was holding a meeting of around 3,000 people. Hitler marched in, fired a shot into the air, and announced that the revolution had broken out and no one could leave. Overnight, Hitler attempted to take power from von Kahl, but failed. It was decided early in the morning of November 9th that they would march out of the beer hall towards the Bavarian Ministry of Defence. On the way, they were confronted by the Bavarian police. Hitler hoped that the new German army, the post-imperial creation of the Reichswehr, would support them. It wasn't backed by the army. The industrial elites refused to support it. The civil service regarded it with contempt. When the Munich police opened fire, most of them turned tail. Some of them were hit, some wounded, a few killed. But it was built up into an iconic episode in the history of the movement. Hitler was arrested, put on trial. His trial began on February 26th, 1924, and ended on the 1st of April. Other conspirators, such as Rudolf Hess, were also arrested and tried in court. The whole episode seemed to be a complete failure on the part of Hitler and the National Socialist Party. What the beer hall putsch does, which is marvellous for the Nazis, is provide them with martyrs, and provide them with a myth, a legend, and a whole new symbol structure. For example, the blood flag, which is the flag carried on that very day, and when they fall, is, after that time, the core sacramental edifice of the Nazi process, so that at Nuremberg, all of the standards of the stormtroopers are touched by the blood flag. The martyrs are symbolically reburied in vast marble sarcophagi in the centre of Munich after the Nazis take power. And every year, there is the famous reenactment of the putsch, where they march down the streets. There is a death watch held throughout Germany the night before. There are radio link-ups, everything is broadcast, great films, smouldering beers, flames, the whole work. And if it sounds quasi-religious, it is. The Nazi flag, the swastika, which Hitler purported to have designed himself, was taken from an ancient symbol embodying early Aryan history. The swastika is an ancient Buddhist symbol. You see it all over India and China. And it has always been around. It was originally a symbol of the sun. But it began to be acquired by the German right in the late 19th century as one of their symbols, because they felt it stood for the idea of being an Aryan. It was Hitler's changes to the design which marks it out as the Nazi symbol. The story he tells is that he invited people to submit designs, and swastikas came in, and none of them, he said, quite did the job. So he said, I'll do it myself, and that's what he worked on. It's a series of simple design formulae which were applied to it. The flag is in the colours of red, black and white, which are the old imperial colours, to contrast with the red, gold and black of the Republic. What he did very brilliantly, and I'm almost reluctant to say this, it's a fantastic piece of graphic design. He took it, he rotated it to give it a sense of dynamism. He then calculated the widths of the bars very brilliantly. He then set it in this circle, and it doesn't quite touch the edges, which gives it a kind of vibration and dynamism, and then this red outer bit. So in all the aesthetic, there's a massive amount of red to stand for the sexualist part. And it just goes, poof! And by the 1920s, it had become the authorised symbol. He said it was going to be the Nazi symbol, and it was the Nazi symbol. At his trial, Hitler had taken sole responsibility for the Putsch. It is reported that the judges found it hard not to acquit Hitler due to their pro-Nazi sympathies. Finally, the sentence of five years of confinement was passed. He was also banned from public speaking, testament to the fact that his oratory was a key factor in the rise of the National Socialist Party. The enforced silence and confinement gave Hitler time for introspection. The outlet for his thoughts now came through the pen. The German state, a rebel of the Nazis. He didn't actually think until the Putsch, it doesn't seem to us, that he was the chosen one, he was the messiah. It's only at his time in Landsberg prison that he actually realises, my God, I am he. And is somehow liberated into becoming what he does, in fact, become. He served less than a year of his sentence. He served with Rudolf Hess, amongst others, and he used the time to write Mein Kampf. Democracy is a monstrosity, born of filth and fire. It's interesting that Hitler decided when he was sent off to prison in 1924 that he would take this opportunity to sit back and write a book about his experiences, how he'd reached the point he'd reached, why he had the beliefs that he did. But it was very important for him to do that, I think, to sit back and take stock of how he arrived there. Hitler's title for the original manuscript was My Four and a Half Year Struggle Against Lies, Paradise and Stupidity. A final reckoning with those who would destroy the German nation. Well, his publishers recommended to Amigo for something that might be a little snappier and catchier for the market, so they extrapolated the two words, My Struggle, Mein Kampf. The really interesting part of it is the famous fifth chapter, which is a theory of propaganda. The rest of it are really a collation of emotional spasms. It's not a recipe for a system as, for example, Marx is with the Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital. God has made Germans a race of supermen. Almighty God, bless our German blood. The publishers shifted 300,000 copies and many more for perhaps obvious reasons after that. The big book, the original thing, hefty volume. You're talking about 600 pages. The writing of Mein Kampf fuelled his desire for power and the need to lead Germany. However, Hitler knew he would need a different route to domination, but without being able to speak publicly, it would have to wait. Stopping him from speaking was going to keep the peace. He was regarded as an influential speaker. I think they were looking for an explanation for why it took a long time for the party to revive again and for the public to really take Hitler seriously again. It was a ban on his speaking. He alone in Germany is not allowed to speak. So use that as propaganda, really, to attack the Weimar government for censorship. In 1927, the ban on Hitler's public speaking was relaxed and later lifted completely. Once more, Hitler took to the stage. Something about his performances, something about that which really attracted people, you know, like modern-day pop stars. There were people who do appear to have been mesmerised by him. As soon as he could start speaking, you had that run-up to the successful parliamentary elections in the late 1920s. When I look at Hitler on the stage, I think of him as being in a political theatre, but I don't believe that what he says is great oratory. At the time of Hitler's silence, Germany began to see a certain recovery. Thanks to American investment, unemployment was declining and the economy was improving. A sense of optimism rippled through the German nation. A lot of Americans invested, so Germany looked as if it was prospering by 1928. The National Socialists could have been banished to the history books as a marginal far-right political party. With their eccentric leader and the failed Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. However, fate dealt them a favourable hand. The post-war economic recovery under the Weimar Republic, which was genuine enough while it lasted, that had collapsed as a direct result of the Wall Street crash in New York. There was a saying of the time, New York sneezed, London court called, and Germany nearly died of influenza. The implications of the crash would eventually lead the National Socialist Party to total power. The continuity of the Great Depression was absolutely critical. Seven million men became unemployed. There seemed to be no lifting. And once you got the worker in the dole queue, you had him as a potential Nazi, a potential stormtrooper. What further measures would be imposed on the German population to consolidate the Nazis' power? And what terror would be unleashed before the dramatic toppling of this evil regime?