Hitler: How A Failed Artist Became The Most Feared Man In History

In the shadow of a nation defeated, a voice emerged. A voice promising revival, redemption and glory. His words ignited a fractured people, offering hope to the desperate and power to the vengeful. Adolf Hitler was no ordinary leader. He was a force of reckoning, wielding oratory like a weapon, his vision of empire as his shield. But behind the facade of order and prosperity lurked a darkness, one that would stain history forever. This is the story of a man who shaped history with fire and fury, and whose fall would leave an indelible scar on the soul of humanity. Before the storm of war, before the intoxicating grip of power and ideology, there was a child, a boy born into a world of conflict. Hitler's father was really abusive. He would often beat the young Adolf after he had had too much to drink. But his mother, on the other hand, was very loving, and she would often try to throw herself between Adolf and his abusive father. Of course, what Hitler's learning from his father at this very early stage is if you want to dominate someone, you've got to be strong and you've got to be brutal. Hitler was an aspiring artist and, you know, he wanted to follow his passion. He applies twice to the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, a really prestigious institution, but he's rejected twice. And between those two rejections, there was another blow for Hitler, and that was the death of his mother in 1907 from breast cancer. And that actually makes Hitler homeless. And he says at this period that, I owe it to that period that I grew hard and I'm still capable of being hard. It was in these formative years that the seeds of resentment, ambition and a desperate need for validation took root. The world was consumed by war and millions were swept into the chaos. Among them, a young Austrian joined the Bavarian army searching for purpose. When what we today call the First World War breaks out in August 1914, Hitler's living in Munich and what he does is to volunteer to join the Bavarian army. In the trenches, he served as a messenger, braving danger and earning the Iron Cross. What the army had done and the whole experience of war had given Hitler a purpose. So he has what people call a good war. He's even decorated for bravery and gets the Iron Cross second class in 1914. His personal life before the war had been this kind of destitute, homeless, failed artist. In the army, Adolf Hitler was someone. He was a decorated war hero. He felt like a big man. It was a rare honour for a corporal and the start of a path that would change history forever. He's at the Battle of the Somme. He's at the Battle of Arras and he's even at Passchendaele. And at Somme, he's actually wounded. A soldier, blinded by the chaos of battle, lay in darkness as the world around him crumbled. You have a German medic, a man called Dr Edmund Forster and he claims at this stage to have treated Hitler by hypnosis for what he calls hysterical blindness in 1918. And what he does is he appeals to Hitler's desire to be like a god. In the silence of his recovery, as his sight slowly returned, he believed it was more than just physical healing. To him, it was a sign. A sign that he was chosen for something greater. Hitler's like a lot of other German nationalists at this time. He believes in this thing called the Dachstosslegende. That's the stab in the back myth. And that claims that the German army, because, you know, she's been undefeated in the field, had actually been stabbed in the back by civilian leaders back on the home front in places like Berlin. And those responsible for it were people like Hitler, the claims of Jews, Marxists, and basically anybody who had signed the armistice that ended the fighting. From the despair of defeat, he would rise, convinced that his destiny was to lead, to reshape the future in his vision. Hitler's wartime experience really reinforces his sense of German patriotism. And when Germany capitulates in 1918, in November, he's incredibly bitter. And it's that bitterness that's really going to start to form its political ideology. Because like so many other men in Germany, he feels really let down. He thinks, why was I fighting? The echoes of defeat hung heavy in the air. A nation once powerful now fractured and humiliated. For some, it was a time to rebuild, to piece together a broken identity. But for others, it was a wound too deep, festering with resentment and a need to assign blame. Among these voices was a man whose bitterness would reshape the course of history. What the Treaty of Versailles does is to basically order Germany to get rid of some of its territories and to demilitarise a part of Germany known as the Rhineland. What the treaty also does, as well as taking things away, it also imposes these really tough economic sanctions on Germany. And worse still for Germany, the Allies also say, right, you've also got to pay for the war. That's known as reparations. And, you know, the Germans look at this and go, this is just a humiliation. You know, not only have we lost the war, we haven't made to pay for it. Two famous German public figures, General von Hindenburg and statesman Fritz Ebert, tried to pick up the pieces of the political explosion and formed a coalition government of the more conservative thinkers. Ebert was elected president of the brand new Weimar Republic, and until his death in 1925 was faced with an economic chaos the likes of which the world has never seen equal. The aftermath of the Great War, with its crushing reparations and perceived betrayals, became the fertile ground upon which Adolf Hitler forged his worldview. One fuelled by anger at the victors, distrust of his own government, and a ruthless scapegoating of those he deemed responsible. The mood in Germany at the end of World War I was that of a humiliated and defeated people and nation. This fight had been going on for four years, millions of people had died, and no one had got anything or no one had got anywhere. It was a mood of revolution, a mood of deep dissatisfaction, a mood of instability, and it felt like the country was on the brink of collapse. As the turbulent winds of post-war Germany swept through a nation burdened by humiliation and economic despair, a shadow began to lengthen over the political landscape. Among the countless factions vying for relevance in this fractured society was a small and obscure group of nationalists, insignificant in size but potent in ideology. This was the stage upon which a disenchanted former soldier, Adolf Hitler, first emerged. Not yet a leader but an observer, an intelligence agent tasked with monitoring radical movements. In July 1919, Hitler gets a new job, and this is actually really crucial, one of the first steps that's going to take him to power. And what he's appointed to become is an intelligence agent for a reconnaissance unit of the German army, and what he is, you know, asked to do is to kind of influence other soldiers, but also what he's asked to do is to infiltrate political parties, and one of the parties that Hitler is asked to infiltrate is called the German Workers' Party. What began as a mission of surveillance would soon transform into something far more sinister. Drawn by a volatile blend of ambition and resentment, Hitler did not merely observe the group. He consumed it, reshaped it, and became its undisputed leader by 1921. In his hands, the party underwent a dramatic metamorphosis. Its name changed to the National Socialist German Workers' Party. Or Nazi Party. With this rechristening came a radical rebranding and a set of changes that would define its character and its trajectory, from incendiary propaganda to paramilitary organisation. With every speech he delivered in beer halls across Munich, Hitler transformed anger into a potent weapon, wielding words as blades to cut through the malaise of a defeated populace. His voice, a volatile mix of rage and conviction, electrified audiences and cultivated a following among those who yearned for a scapegoat and a promise of renewed glory. Hitler's speeches are really vitriolic, but they're very effective and they attract regular audiences. What he's found, he's got this gift for speaking. He is a natural demagogue, and he's really good at using populist themes and he labels scapegoats for losing the war, you name it, Jews, communists, whoever Hitler hates. Listeners are listening and watching this and they're thinking, yes, these are the reasons for our economic hardships. And Hitler's also got this huge personal magnetism and he's got this instinctive understanding of the psychology of crowds. And of course, like any really brilliant public speaker, he's going to use that to his advantage. It's like a conductor with an orchestra. And what historians have noted is the kind of hypnotic effect that his rhetoric has on these huge audiences. Between 1921 and 1922, Hitler's propaganda machine began to take form, laying the foundation of what would become one of the most infamous regimes in history. He directed his ire toward the November Criminals, the Treaty of Versailles and an alleged Jewish conspiracy, crafting an intoxicating narrative of betrayal and victimhood. At the same time, the Nazi party began to sharpen its focus, targeting groups Hitler deemed antithetical to his vision of a purified Germany. It's around this point where we have Hitler's earliest known written statement about the so-called Jewish question. And this is in a letter, 16th of September 1919, written to a man called Adolf Gemlich. The letter becomes known because of this as the Gemlich letter. And in it, Hitler actually argues that the aim of the government, quote, must unshakably be the removal of Jews altogether. In 1923, Hitler asked for the help of a general for the First World War, a man called Erich Ludendorff. And he says to Ludendorff, I want to have a coup and I want to take control violently. And this becomes known as the Beer Hall Putsch. Italy's Benito Mussolini had marched triumphantly into Rome in 1922. His so-called march on Rome, a bold gambit that transformed a floundering political movement into a fascist regime. For Adolf Hitler, then an obscure agitator in the beer halls of Munich, Mussolini's audacious coup was not just a spectacle. It was a blueprint. In his early years, when he was leading the Nazi party, you know, Hitler was a big admirer of Mussolini. But what the Nazis had done, what Hitler had done, is he looked at Italy, he looked at the Italian fascists, you know, as a model for some of their appearances, some of their policies. And what he has seen is Benito Mussolini's march on Rome in 1922, which had been so successful. And Hitler thinks, well, look, I can do this in Bavaria. And by doing this kind of march, I can actually challenge the government in Berlin. I can take power in the same way as Mussolini did. But actually, what the Putsch does is brings Hitler to the attention of the wider German nation for the first time. And it's, you know, obviously generating big headlines in newspapers all over the world. And then, of course, he's arrested. And you've got this 24-day trial, which is hugely publicised. And what a trial does, you know, you get this process called blowback. It's giving Hitler a platform to express his kind of vile ideology to the nation. But while Mussolini's gamble ended in victory, Hitler's descent into the perilous dance of rebellion and ambition would meet a crushing and humiliating defeat. But fate had other plans for the man who sought to reshape Germany with fire and fury. What Hitler had done is fled to the home of a friend called Ernst Hans Stengel. And by some accounts, he had actually contemplated killing himself. You know, he was really depressed, you know, but he was pretty calm when he was finally arrested on the 11th of November 1923 for high treason. The echoes of his impassioned rhetoric and the chaos of the failed Beer Hall Putsch led Adolf Hitler not to the triumph he envisioned, but to the cold, unyielding walls of a Bavarian prison. On April 1st, Hitler is sentenced to five years' imprisonment at Landsberg prison for his involvement in the Beer Hall Putsch. Here, stripped of his political stage and surrounded by silence, he faced a crossroads. Would the defeat shatter his resolve, or would it harden his ambition into something darker and more dangerous? The answer lay in his next five years, a period marked by brooding introspection, ideological refinement and literary infamy. While he's at Landsberg, Hitler dictates the first volume of what will be known as Mein Kampf, my struggle. A manifesto born from resentment, defiance and a vision for a world remade in his image. There's this extract in Mein Kampf in which Hitler remembers his old history teacher, a man called Leopold Potsch, and the profound effect that his classes had on the man who would lead the Nazi party. Potsch himself was born in what we today call Slovenia, but he was this kind of nationalist who believed in a kind of, you know, wider Germany, and he despises the rulers of Austria-Hungary, the Habsburgs. You know, and what Potsch frequently voices are his political views in the classroom, and there's no doubt that they are shaping Hitler's own nationalism. Fourteen years ago, in writing Mein Kampf, Hitler foretold step by step his plans for Nazi Germany, forewarned every nation marked for destruction. Austria. Czechoslovakia. Someday Russia and her border states. And then a final reckoning with his eternal enemy, France. It was here, in confinement, that the seeds of a more calculated and ominous political resurgence were sown, a harbinger of the storm to come. What this book does is to lay out Hitler's plans in a kind of very rambling, incoherent fashion for transforming German society into a society based on race. So throughout the book, Jews are equated with germs, and they're presented as the international poisoners of society. So according to Hitler's ideology, there was only one solution to this, and that was their extermination. By the 20th of December 1924, he's actually pardoned by the Bavarian Supreme Court, even though the state prosecutor had violently objected to this, including his time on remand. I mean, Hitler only spends just over about a year in prison. It's not that long, considering what he was trying to do. At the time of Hitler's release from prison, politics in Germany had got a lot less combative, and the economy had improved. So of course, what this is doing is not providing such fertile ground for Hitler's political agitation, if you like. As a direct result of the Beer Hall Putsch, what the Nazi party and its organizations suffer from is a ban. You know, they're basically outlawed in Bavaria. Hitler gives this really inflammatory speech on the 27th of February, after which he's barred from public speaking by the Bavarian authorities, and that bar is going to remain in place until 1927. 5,000 banks shut their doors to depositors now in greatest need of their savings. Many would never reopen. As the world grappled with the harsh realities of the Great Depression, a storm of economic despair and social unrest began to sweep across the globe. The Great Depression was this severe, worldwide economic depression that took place between 1929 and basically lasted a whole decade until about 1939. What it saw was a major fall in stock prices in the United States, and you see basically an economic cataclysm worldwide. While America reeled from the collapse of its markets and the widespread unemployment that followed far across the Atlantic, a man of ambition and ruthless cunning was watching, waiting for his moment. Adolf Hitler, who had long sought to exploit the cracks within the Weimar Republic, recognized that the dire economic situation in the United States provided the perfect opportunity to advance his own twisted vision. The impact in Germany of the Great Depression was huge. I mean, really dire. You know, thrown out of work, and you've got many, many major banks just collapsing. You've got huge inflation. And by 1932, you've got about six million Germans unemployed. That's 10% of the entire population. Being no doubt, the German people are already pretty down. You know, most people are struggling to survive. They're looking for a strong leader. They want someone to emerge who's going to take the country out of this kind of hell and transform it. Historians often point to this period as a crucial turning point, where the global crisis created a vacuum of instability that Hitler would not only exploit, but use as a tool to catapult his rise to power. With Europe in turmoil and the US struggling to recover, the Nazi leader's propaganda machine became a force of manipulation, promising salvation and prosperity to a German population on the brink of collapse. But more than just capitalizing on economic strife, Hitler's approach was grounded in a keen understanding of how the global depression could be leveraged, both as a catalyst for his own political ascension, and as a symbol of a world broken enough for his vision to take root. The emergency is kind of great for them, because with their extremist politics, they can say, we have the solution. They're going to use this to gain support for their party. And what they also promise to do is just sweep away the Versailles Treaty. And they say, we're going to strengthen the economy and we're going to provide jobs. No real mention of how, but it looks like a solution. The cold February night of 1933 was cloaked in both literal and metaphorical flames. On the 27th of February 1933, the Reichstag building is set on fire. As the Reichstag building burned, its roaring inferno illuminated not just the German capital, but also the rapid and chilling transformation of the nation's political landscape. Smoke billowed into the sky, carrying with it the fragile remnants of democratic ideals, as Adolf Hitler seized the moment to tighten his grip on power. Hindenburg, who's the president, responds by signing the Reichstag fire decree on the 28th of February, just the next day. That's drafted by the Nazis. And what it does is to suspend basic rights and to allow detention without trial. The fire became more than just a physical tragedy. It served as the crucible in which Hitler forged the tools of his totalitarian rule. In the wake of the destruction, the Reichstag fire decree was signed, an ostensibly temporary measure that granted the Nazi regime sweeping powers to suppress civil liberties and eliminate political opposition. Framed as an urgent response to a communist threat, the decree marked the first step in a carefully orchestrated campaign to dismantle Germany's democratic institutions and consolidate absolute control. One of the first things Hitler does with the Reichstag decree is to basically suppress the activities of the German Communist Party, and he got 4,000 members arrested almost overnight. Hitler exploited fear, chaos and propaganda to position himself as the nation's indispensable saviour, even as he quietly paved the way for a brutal dictatorship. It's very likely that the fire at the Reichstag was organised by the Nazis as a pretext for a kind of mass persecution of communists and social democrats in Germany. Of course, the purpose of the decree is, and the whole purpose of the fire, if the Nazis did indeed, you know, set it, was to manufacture an excuse for repression and control. In the end, it doesn't matter whether the Nazis started it or not, the fact is the Nazis used it as an excuse to gain more totalitarian power. But for Hitler, consolidating power was only the beginning. Beneath his rhetoric of national rejuvenation lay an insidious ideology that targeted specific groups as scapegoats for Germany's struggles. Chief among them were the Jewish people, vilified as both the architects of Germany's humiliation in World War I and the alleged saboteurs of its potential rebirth. The Jews in Germany were to feel the full effects of more than something like 400 decrees and regulations that restricted all aspects of their public lives and even their private lives. What followed was not merely persecution but the systematic dehumanisation of an entire community, a policy that would define his reign and scar humanity forever. The Nazi propaganda machine roared to life, fusing hate with spectacle as films, posters and speeches cast Jewish communities as the architects of Germany's misfortune. This crescendo of malice found its apex in 1935 with the enactment of the Nuremberg Laws, a cornerstone of the Third Reich's systemic oppression and a crucial step toward the Holocaust. You have the Nuremberg Race Laws being passed in 1935 and these define Jews not by their religious belief but by their ancestral lineage and what these laws also do is to kind of formalise the segregation of the Jews away from the so-called Aryan population of Germany. It's basically creating the Jews as kind of internal foreigners, if you like. The Nuremberg Laws, passed unanimously at the Nazi party rally in Nuremberg, were presented under the guise of protecting German blood and honour. These laws stripped Jewish citizens of their rights, reclassifying them as subjects rather than members of the Reich. The two primary statutes, the Reich Citizenship Law and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour, codified discrimination into the legal fabric of Nazi Germany. Anti-Semitism was not new for Hitler. I mean he had been very publicly expressing and harbouring really anti-Semitic views ever since the Nazis had published their 25-point programme way back in 1920. The Reich Citizenship Law deprived Jews of German citizenship, reducing them to second-class status, while the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour forbade intermarriage or sexual relations between Jews and Germans, criminalising intimate associations under the pretext of racial purity. The laws also extended to define Jewish identity through meticulous racial classifications based not on faith but on ancestry, dragging even those with partial Jewish heritage into the regime's web of persecution. This legislative framework marked a turning point, effectively isolating Jews from public life. They were barred from certain professions, denied access to education and excluded from the cultural and social fabric of Germany. As propaganda reinforced these restrictions, the once vibrant Jewish communities were suffocated into silence and despair, setting the stage for more sinister plans to come. For the most part a lot of Germans accepted the Nuremberg Laws, partly because you know Nazi propaganda had successfully kind of swayed public opinion and fostered this general belief that Jews were a separate race and also no one wants to kind of oppose the regime because it would mean you know you were going to leave yourself open to harassment or worse still arrest by the Gestapo. A lot of people just kept their For years hatred had been simmering, fanned by propaganda, exclusionary laws and incendiary rhetoric, but on the night of November 9th 1938 the storm erupted with a ferocity that left Germany forever scarred. During the night of broken glass you have scores, hundreds of horrible actions being carried out against Jews by the Nazis. A lot of historians look at Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass, as a prelude to the final solution. That of course is the Holocaust and they see this is where you know the Holocaust begins, this is where the murder of six million men, women and children starts. Broken glass littered the streets, the distant cries of terror pierced the air and the glow of flames painted the night sky with horror. A German diplomat called Ernst von Rath is assassinated, he's murdered by a 17 year old German born Polish Jew called Herschel Grinspan and that is used as a pretext by the Nazis to carry out one of their most infamous actions and this takes place on the 9th to the 10th of February 1938 and it's a pogrom, it's a pogrom against Jews carried out by the SA which is this paramilitary wing of the Nazi party. At the centre of it all stood Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda. Goebbels seized the moment to unleash a wave of violence disguised as spontaneous public anger. In reality the pogrom, later named the night of broken glass, was a carefully orchestrated operation sanctioned by Goebbels and supported by the Nazi hierarchy. He issued the orders with cold precision ensuring that the SS and SA would unleash chaos while police and fire brigades were instructed to stand down except to prevent damage to non-Jewish property. Kristallnacht or the night of the broken glass was this whole kind of series throughout Germany in German towns and cities of really repulsive actions against Jews. You have Jews being beaten up, you have Jews being killed, you have synagogues being burnt down, you have Jewish shops and businesses being vandalised and smashed up. You know it was a really horrific night and the world looked at it and realised this was a result of Nazism. As dawn broke over Germany thousands of Jewish homes businesses and synagogues had been destroyed. Nearly a hundred lives taken and tens of thousands of Jews arrested and sent to concentration camps. This was not merely an act of hatred, it was a grim prelude to the horrors of the Holocaust with Goebbels' fingerprints all over the shattered glass. You know you can look at the night of broken glass as being undoubtedly a precursor for what was going to come and that of course was one of the darkest episodes in human history. without the formal cry of war. Each step a calculated gamble, each victory a testament to his cunning and ruthlessness. In 1936 Hitler had taken his first bold step by re-militarising the Rhineland, a region of Germany that had been demilitarised under the Treaty of Versailles after World War I. This move was a direct challenge to the post-war order but it met little resistance. In 1938 he annexed Austria, adding the country to the Third Reich. Later that same year, after an orchestrated crisis, he seized Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland, an area with a large ethnic German population without firing a shot. Hitler believed that this severe decline in living standards in Germany was a result of an economic crisis that can only really be stopped by military aggression. In those tense uncertain days of 1939, diplomacy and restraint still had a chance to prevail. History paused, holding its breath. Then, on September 1st 1939, Hitler made his choice. With the thunder of tanks and the piercing wail of dive bombers, German forces crossed into Poland. The invasion was swift, brutal and uncompromising, the spark that would ignite a global inferno. And so, you know, this desire to just keep fighting and then to start fighting on multiple fronts is ultimately going to lead to Hitler's demise. German bombs. Mussolini is now watching the progress of Hitler's war with kind of bitterness and alarm and he's actually frankly a bit jealous. And as he sees each fresh German victory, he gets more and more livid and he's starting to express the hope that maybe the Germans will be slowed down or they'll have a defeat or some form of reverse and that will make him feel a little bit better. You know, we don't like it when our friends are too successful and this is what's going on here. But Germany, of course, just advances westward and not only takes all the low countries but even, you know, takes France. And when France is on the verge of collapse, you know, Mussolini felt he can't delay any longer. So then on June the 10th, 1940, there's this fateful declaration of war. But of the fascist nations in Europe today, Germany emerges as the supreme example. Democracy is destroyed. The dictator is a demigod who can do no wrong. Propaganda dominates the nation's mind. Nazi Germany faces her destiny with one of the great war machines in history. Had Hitler stopped after he'd successfully conquered France and the low countries and not decided in June 1941 that he was going to invade this really quite big country called Russia, he may have stayed in power. Only the Bolshevik party headed by Lenin lifted its voice courageously against the war, against this bloody slaughter. This is a war that Hitler has fought for too long and he's fighting it to the death and he's fighting it to the death of the people who he supposedly loves and he no longer loves them by the end of the war. And he says that basically the German people don't deserve him, the German people don't deserve Germany and everybody should fight to the death because basically, you know, they don't deserve to be alive because they failed him. Classic narcissistic thinking. The world is for him. You know, he's not there for the world. While his generals fought battles on distant fronts, Hitler retreated to the tranquility of the mountains. Far from the cries of the battlefield, in the quiet seclusion of his Alpine refuge, he found solace in isolation. An escape that would have profound implications for the course of history. The mountain retreat was not just a physical sanctuary, but a symbol of his growing detachment from the reality of the war. Here, in this remote setting, surrounded by rugged peaks and the distance from the destruction he had caused, Hitler spent increasing amounts of time in contemplation, or perhaps in his delusions. The Führer, once an imposing figure in the heart of Nazi power, was slowly disappearing into the shadow of his own mind. As the cold winds of winter began to give way to the bitter chill of spring in 1945, Germany stood on the precipice of its own demise. The Reich, once vast and powerful, now teetered on the edge of collapse. The first half of 1945 is probably the darkest six months in Germany's history. It was a time when the very soil of Germany seemed to bleed with the weight of the war's horrors. Cities, once vibrant and proud, lay in smouldering ruins, their skylines disfigured by the wreckage of bombs. Civilians, starved and broken, wandered the streets, haunted by the specter of a nation they no longer recognized. In the east, the Red Army closed in, a juggernaut of vengeance. In the west, the Americans and the British pressed forward, unrelenting in their pursuit of victory. It's the Russians who reach Berlin first. And when they reach Berlin, it's a city in rubble, it's a city in flames, it's a city in chaos. It's a city in which squads of marauding, loyal Nazis are going around hanging people who are not taking part in the resistance in the city. It's a city in which you then got some Nazis committing suicide. It is the most benighted, appalling place you can imagine. And you've got the Soviet army literally raping and pillaging this city. And in Berlin, within the confines of an underground concrete fortress, Adolf Hitler, the architect of this nightmare, faced the ultimate reckoning. His military advisors, the remnants of his once mighty inner circle, had long since abandoned any hope of victory. Betrayed by the very system he had built, the dictator now found himself trapped in the ruins of his ambition. It was in these final months, the first half of 1945, that the darkest chapter of Germany's history would unfold. A time of desperation, of madness, of utter chaos. The end of the war was imminent, but the toll had already been paid. Germany had been invaded from all angles, its people shattered, its future uncertain. As the horrors of war raged across Europe, the world's attention was fixed on the chaos Hitler had unleashed. But amid the turmoil and bloodshed, a striking shift was occurring in the mind of the Führer. One that would reveal a darker, more solitary aspect of his final years. Hitler's last days in the Führer bunker, under the Reich Chancellery in the centre of Berlin, are a kind of terrible end of a Shakespearean tragedy, as the thunder of Russian artillery all around them, and they're deep, deep inside this sort of concrete underground fortress. Everybody's sort of kind of going mad, and especially Hitler, who then gets married to his long-term girlfriend Eva Braun, in this sort of kind of bizarre ceremony. As the world plunged deeper into the horrors of World War Two, the actions and ideology of Adolf Hitler revealed a profound and disturbing paradox. On one hand, he preached the supremacy of the German people, rallying them to believe in their destiny as masters of Europe. On the other, his inner circle began to see a chilling revelation. Hitler believed the German people were not worthy of his vision, an idea that would drive some of the most ruthless and self-destructive policies the world has ever witnessed. The scorched earth strategy, a policy rooted in Hitler's profound nihilism, was not just about securing victory at any cost. It was about condemning the very people he had once promised to lead. He would rather see Germany burn to the ground than allow the Germans to inherit a future he believed was beyond their grasp. His actions, dictated by a delusion of divine destiny, reveal a profound betrayal. A leader willing to destroy his nation rather than leave it in the hands of those he considered unworthy of his twisted vision. On the 28th of April 1945, Mussolini is shot dead by partisans in the north of Italy while he's attempting to flee to try and get on a plane. The death of Benito Mussolini, the once vaunted leader of fascist Italy, struck like a thunderclap across Europe, sending shockwaves through the ranks of the Axis powers. The day after Mussolini is killed, on the 29th of April 1945, his corpse and that of his mistress Clara Petacci, they're dragged along and they're dumped on the ground in front of the old Piazzale Loretto. They're kicked and they're spat upon and then the bodies are then hung upside down from the roof of an Esso petrol station. The bodies are then stoned. I mean it's kind of endless abuse of these corpses by civilians. For Adolf Hitler, the news was more than just a military setback. It was the symbolic collapse of the very ideology that had fuelled his rise to power. Mussolini's execution, a grim reminder of the fragility of dictatorships, marked the beginning of the end for the Nazi regime. And in the shadow of Mussolini's lifeless body, Hitler's descent into madness reached its conclusion. One man who sees what happens to Mussolini's corpse and learns from it is of course Adolf Hitler. And it's the abuse of Mussolini's corpse that leads Hitler to make a decision to actually kill himself a few days later. Hitler committed suicide, but so too did his propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels, and as did the head of the SS Heinrich Himmler, and also a man called Philipp Bühler, who had helped to mastermind the early medical exterminations. And then you've also got the head of the party chancellery, a man called Martin Bormann. He was killed in Berlin as he was trying to flee. What was particularly horrific about Goebbels' suicide was that he and his wife actually killed all their children before they killed themselves, because they couldn't face the idea of a world without Adolf Hitler, and they didn't think their children should have that fate. In some ways, you know, Hitler cheated by killing himself. You know, he got away with any punishment for all the suffering he had caused, not only to Germany, but of course to the world. And it was actually his generals and his inner circle who are going to pay the price. Vicious violator of international treaties, bloodthirsty Gering, creator of the Gestapo, and organizer of the bombings of Leningrad, London, and Warsaw, Field Marshal Keitel, inspirer of the atrocities committed by Hitler's soldiers. Hitler's chief military advisor, Rosenberg, the theoretician of race hatred. For years, the unimaginable atrocities committed during the Holocaust and other genocides remained obscured beneath a grim shroud of silence, denial, and incomprehension. But in the years that followed, as the ravages of war slowly receded and the dust of destruction began to settle, the world would be forced to confront an unthinkable truth, one that would echo through the annals of history forever. In darkened corners of Europe, buried beneath the rubble of cities and villages, stories began to surface. Stories of unimaginable cruelty, of lives extinguished, and of a systematic state-sponsored annihilation that defied human comprehension. The evidence was there, scattered across the lands, waiting to be uncovered. The final solution to the Jewish question, it's a kind of horrific phrase, but that was the kind of official name for the murder of all Jews that the Nazis could get their hands on. And it wasn't just restricted to the European continent. The unearthing of the Holocaust was not merely an act of excavation. It was an act of defiance, a demand that humanity remember what had been done, and a promise that such horrors would never be forgotten. The international community had a very good idea from the word go that the Nazis were anti-Semitic, but I don't think anybody believed that Jews were going to be killed on an industrial scale. It was a fully-fledged industrial genocide. During the war, word leaked out from people who had escaped some camps. There were aerial pictures taken of places like Auschwitz. So, you know, by the middle of the war, the world at large had a very good idea that this slaughter was being carried out on an industrial scale. You know, as well as places like Auschwitz, which were relatively easy to keep quite secret, what people also knew about from troops returning from the front, and especially from the eastern front, was the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing squads that went behind the German lines, killing anybody they regarded as being an enemy of the Third Reich, such as Jews and communists and so on. And the Einsatzgruppen killed millions of people. It was impossible to keep that quiet. And so, yes, the German people did know what was happening. So many of them, you know, just pretended not to know. When the Allied forces turned up at the camps, places like Belsen, the world was horrified when they saw the footage that emerged. You know, corpses piled up having to bulldozed into pits. And the Allied forces, when they saw what had been done to all these people in the camps, they often got local Germans in to come and see what had been done in their name. And obviously they also made, you know, some of the people running the camps, the SS, not only help, you know, clean up the camps and dispose of the bodies, but obviously there was also summary justice. Even though it's not kind of officially recorded, there are many stories of troops getting absolutely livid with some of the SS who ran the camps and just shooting them out of hand.