From Obscurity to Power, Hitler's Rise

Previously on Hitler, the itinerary. It's hard to imagine how this little baby grew up to be a mass murderer. Objectively speaking, Hitler was a very good soldier. His superiors knew they could always count on him. Hitler's strength is above all as a speaker, as a powerful speaker, a very energetic, unlike modern politicians who write all their own speeches. Berlin, January 30th, 1933. Adolf Hitler has become the most powerful man in Germany, a dictator who would plunge the German people and the entire world into the 20th century's most murderous conflict, the Second World War. Hitler piled on victory after victory after seizing power, which in itself was a victory over the German people and the planet. It was only Hitler, really, who wanted war. Neither Goering nor Goebbels, nor the generals, wanted war. Adolf Hitler was convinced that he was a military genius. But how did this man with no military training manage to conquer the whole of Europe? Why was he considered the greatest war leader of all time? How did this former homeless layabout become the architect of the final solution? One man, a passionate historian, has traveled the world to establish the most exhaustive chronology yet of this journey. Harald Santner has spent over 20 years picking apart Adolf Hitler's life hour by hour. Where was he during these early years? And as he waged war, where did he make his most momentous decisions? Wherever Hitler was, that's where the power was. He was the very embodiment of an absolute dictator. More than 70 years after Hitler's death, Harald Santner has uncovered numerous inaccuracies, even in the most serious published works. There are something like 80 biographies of Hitler, but there are always mistakes in some of the information. From France to Austria, via Germany and Belgium, we went searching for the final traces left by the dictator to understand the journey of a war leader. This is the itinerary of Adolf Hitler. Berlin, April 30th, 1945. Adolf Hitler decides to commit suicide. He has just learned that the Russians are fast approaching the Reich Chancellery. His troops can only hold them off for another 24 hours. Hitler knows that he's lost the war. Life had no meaning for him once he'd lost the war. He did not want to stand trial. He didn't want to be humiliated. At about midday, the dictator bade farewell to his closest collaborators and retired to this room, his office in the Führerbunker, with his wife Eva Hitler. The couple committed suicide at 3.30 p.m. Eva took poison, while Hitler made doubly sure by biting into a capsule of poison, as well as shooting himself. His doctor had advised him to do this, to be sure of killing himself. The dictator's death almost immediately brought an end to the hostilities. Germany surrendered on May 8th, 1945, a week after the suicide of the man who had dragged Europe and the world into an unprecedented cataclysm. It was a great relief. Nazism died with him just as it had been born with him. Hitler's suicide meant for Jews who were still in German captivity. An end to their persecution and suffering. But how could such atrocities have been allowed to go on for so many years? Could the Second World War have been avoided? To understand its origins, we must go back to a time when Hitler still pretended he wanted peace. On September 29th, 1938, it was in this building in the center of Munich that the German dictator Adolf Hitler received several heads of state. The Italian leader Benito Mussolini, French Prime Minister Edouard Daladier and British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. It was a decisive encounter for international relations. After annexing Austria to the German Reich in 1938, Hitler now wanted Sudetenland, the northwestern part of Czechoslovakia. And he was determined to get it, whatever the opposition. Hitler wanted to take back all territories with German speaking people. He thought that wherever German was spoken was German territory. It was on the first floor of this building that negotiations took place through the night of the 29th to the 30th of September 1938. We return to this historical setting with this historian, Harald Sandner. It was 1.50 in the morning when the dictator got what he wanted. Here we are in Hitler's personal office of the Führerbau in Munich. This is the exact spot where the table stood on which the so-called Munich agreement was signed. The treaty, in effect, sacrificed part of Czechoslovakia. In exchange, the dictator committed himself to not invading the rest of that country. In the days that followed, around three and a half million Czechs found themselves subject of the German state. Czechoslovakia wasn't consulted and didn't have any representatives. By abandoning Sudetenland, France and Great Britain thought they'd avoided the worst. Both were firmly opposed to the prospect of another war. Chamberlain went back to London, waving his slip of paper at the airport. He reported that he'd negotiated with Hitler and that now there would be peace. He genuinely believed he'd secured peace for the coming years. Little did he suspect the Führer's true intentions. For while his generals thought that pulling off such a victory without bloodshed was a stroke of genius, Hitler had far greater ambitions. Hitler himself would have said that the British and French had deprived him of the war he wanted to start in September 1938. He was determined to have this war. Two days later, German troops marched into Sudetenland without encountering any resistance. The annexation becoming known as the Flower War. Another success for the Führer, whose popularity was at its peak. So far, he'd not put a foot wrong and was doing exactly what he wanted. Ruling foreign rulers. While he waited to conquer France and the rest of Eastern Europe, Hitler sowed terror in his own country. This was a different kind of war. The progressive exclusion of German Jews. During Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass, the 9th to 10th November 1938, thousands of synagogues and Jewish shops were sacked and destroyed. Hitler wanted to force the Jews to emigrate. Many were rounded up and murdered. 30,000 Jewish men are arrested and put in concentration camps and only released when they promised to emigrate. Hitler thought the Jews as a subversive element. That night, Nazi Germany crossed a line in its implementation of anti-Semitic policies. In a speech given before the Reichstag on the 30th of January 1939, Adolf Hitler predicted the extermination of the Jews of Europe in the event of a new world war. A sort of morbid prophecy which provoked no reaction from the German people. Even if, with indulgence, one could interpret it as merely an expulsion plan, it's clear he was talking about a planned genocide. With this speech, the foundations of the Holocaust had been laid. The face of Germany changed. Hitler made his most important decisions at Obersalzberg, the retreat in the Bavarian Alps. The Berghof became the dictator's secondary residence. It was up here, in the mountains, that Hitler prepared his war. Hitler spent about a quarter of his reign in Obersalzberg. Hitler claimed to have been renting this house from 1928. In fact, it was a year earlier. But the reasons for the lie were purely fiscal. Even much later, he supplied false information. He said he'd spent very little time in Obersalzberg. But that was not the case. The Berghof was his favorite residence. Once in power, he made it a second chancellery, after Berlin. He chose Obersalzberg as a seat of government because it had a strategic significance in establishing his power. He could retire there to be alone, yes, but he could also receive whomever he wanted there, including important visitors, using the setting to stagemanage his foreign policy. The Nazi Party were masters of spin. Every day, thousands of visitors gathered to get a glimpse of the dictator. And he would devote hours of his time to this, always appearing relaxed and smiling. It was a major propaganda operation. The message put across by these images in Obersalzberg is that of Hitler's closeness to the people. He was a chancellor of the people. That's what they called him. And who could be a chancellor of the people without the people? And yet, for six years, Hitler had been keeping a secret from the German people. His 25-year-old mistress. Her name was Eva Braun, and only those closest to Hitler knew of her existence. He had this idea that his political mission wouldn't allow him to be married. He presented himself as a sort of soldier monk, a prophet committed to his mission. That wouldn't fit with being married. With a camera given to her by the dictator, she shot color film of their private life. On film, Eva Braun appears happy and fulfilled. But in reality, the young woman was suffering. She twice tried to take her own life. These suicide attempts have to be seen as cries for help. They would also explain her frequent absences. Although it's hard to tell at this distance. And even when Hitler was with her, there was a relatively big distance between them. In the mountains of Obersalzburg, Hitler was distant because he had other things on his mind, such as getting ready for war. After breaking the Munich agreement by invading the rest of Czechoslovakia, he signed a non-aggression pact with Stalin in case he were to invade Poland. It was now August 1939. This was the last peaceful summer that Europe and the world would know for many years. On September 1st, 1939, Hitler launched the invasion of Poland. Two thousand five hundred tanks and one thousand three hundred planes provided support for a million and a half ground troops. The dictator was determined, even though many of his entourage opposed this move. In fact, it was only Hitler, really, who wanted war. Neither Goering nor Goebbels nor the generals wanted war. Hitler's mistake here was in thinking that even if he invaded Poland, the British and French still would not react. But on September 3rd, 1939, Paris and London declared war on Germany. It was now a world war. Immediately after this, the dictator took his personal train to the front line. He followed the operations from the training camp at Gros Bon in Poland. He was fascinated by the armed combat going on right before his eyes. Hitler felt a need to be right where the action was. Hitler never stayed in the same place. He liked to get out and meet people. He didn't like to sleep in the same place two nights in a row. He was always going to the front line and putting his life in danger. He didn't care. He was sure that God would protect him, that nothing could happen to him. Only six weeks after hostilities began, Warsaw was surrounded. Poland had been crushed in Hitler's Blitzkrieg or lightning war. The day of the capitulation, Hitler divided up the territory between himself and Stalin, his ideological enemy. To celebrate its victory, the German army paraded through the streets of Warsaw. Hitler was convinced after the swift and easy victory in Poland that he was a military genius gifted with intuition. He was always right. So if anyone disagreed, they were necessarily wrong. This time, Hitler had let his generals run the campaign. But from now on, he'd take charge of operations himself. Around three million Jews were now in Nazi hands. In defeated Poland, they were rounded up and crammed into enormous ghettos. The more territory the Nazis took in Eastern Europe, the more they were confronted with Jewish populations. This only confirmed their conviction that a systematic deportation and then extermination of these Jews was necessary. The everyday living conditions were inhuman. They were controlled, brutalized, starved and killed. So the way in which Hitler treats the Jewish population of Poland. Hunger and epidemics killed off thousands of them. By 1940, 1941, in the big ghettos, as many as a thousand people were dying each month. At the same time, Hitler was extending his rule westward. In April 1940, he invaded Norway and then Denmark. He also set out the attack strategy for France, even though he had no military experience. Things didn't go as planned, however. He postponed the invasion of France 29 times. The reason France wasn't invaded earlier is very simple. The weather. The weather was an important factor for Hitler because air support was used in a massive way for the first time in this new lightning war. But tanks would also play an important role, building them and training the crews held up the beginning of the offensive. In the end, Hitler decided to launch the attack on France on May 10th, 1940. As with Poland, this offensive began with a massive air engagement. Then the Wehrmacht crushed the French troops in just a few days. The German army was like an unstoppable steamroller with modern weapons, with bold tactics and with extremely willing troops. But the Fuhrer wanted to be once more on the front line to witness France being brought to its knees. So on May 19th, 1940, Hitler's security detail was tasked with quickly finding him a location for his headquarters. Time was of the essence. France might counterattack at any moment. On May 22nd, 1940, they decided on the isolated village of Brouilly de Peche in Belgium. Here is the headquarters today. It has hardly changed. At the time, it was a highly strategic site. It was very well located in the forest. Easy to camouflage. It was at the French-Belgian border and just a few kilometers from the airport. Hitler's entourage quickly had three chalets built as lodgings and canteen for the dictator's men. As surprising as it may seem, they even dug a small pool in case of a heatwave. But for those in charge of Hitler's security, the most urgent consideration was a bomb shelter. Very close to Hitler's own chalet, there was a bunker. It was a reinforced concrete cube measuring seven meters by seven meters, where he could take refuge if he came under air attack. And to guarantee maximum security, all 28 neighboring villages were evacuated at the end of May. Mary Mettens was 10 years old at the time. She still remembers that very unusual day. About four o'clock in the afternoon, two men came. They weren't very nice at all. I remember that very well. They told us we had to leave in two hours. We were evacuated without knowing where we were going and we were told not to come back. But we weren't told why. They took a few of the local people hostage, about 80 or so, and said that they would pay with their lives if any of the evacuees try to return. It was a threat, an extra bit of pressure put on the local people. On June 6, 1940, the dictator finally arrived in Brüli-Lübesch, the site now being completely secure. It was in this school that Hitler directed military operations. Long tables were covered with maps. This is where the fate of France was decided. After only two weeks of fighting, the dictator's efforts were rewarded. On June 17, 1940, Marshal Pétain requested a cessation of hostilities. France was beaten. The Führer was jubilant. Hitler was completely euphoric. In six weeks, he'd achieved what Germany had failed to do in four years during the First World War, defeat France. The Nazi leader ordered his services to drop the conditions for the armistice immediately. It was done during the night of the 20th to the 21st of June 1940 in this church. Historian Axel Tickson is an expert on Brüli-Lübesch. The atmosphere was a bit odd because they were riding it by candlelight, since they had to be wary of possible air raids. This became the text that Hitler would impose on the French in Compiègne. Hitler summoned the representatives of France to Compiègne, to the same railway wagon in which the Germans had had to acknowledge their defeat in 1918. This victory was the dictator's revenge for the First World War. A dream come true. Right after this, Hitler visited Paris. It was another dream of his to enter the French capital. He went there on the 23rd of June 1940. The history books, however, give us two different dates for Hitler's visit to Paris, making some writers conclude that he may have made two visits. That isn't true. Hitler only visited Paris once on the 23rd of June from 4.05 to 9 in the morning. The dictator hurried to the Opera Garnier before stopping off for a photo opposite the Eiffel Tower. A very symbolic image which was seen around the world. From that moment on, the media started talking of Hitler as the greatest war leader of all time. But during the Battle of Britain, the German navy and air force were held in check. Hitler would have much preferred a treaty with Great Britain rather than crushing it in a military victory, as he had done to France. But the British were not about to cooperate. They responded to Germany's attacks with fierce resistance. This was his first setback of the Second World War. Right up until the beginning of July, Hitler was hoping that the UK would fall like a ripe piece of fruit. And as the first British bombs started falling on German soil, Hitler was anxious to make sure his most precious possession was made safe. This, as unlikely as it might seem, was his art collection. For several years, the dictator had been having a gigantic art museum built in Linz, the town in which he'd spent most of his youth. He planned to exhibit the most famous works of Europe there. And it was here in the bowels of the Führerbau that he stored his treasure while he waited for his museum to be built. We went back to visit this rather unusual depot with Harold Santner. The works of art were stored here. For Hitler, works of art were always more important than people's lives. During the war, he always regretted the destruction of museums and theatres, but he couldn't care less about people's lives. Around 700 works of art were stocked in these corridors and permanently guarded by SS men throughout the war. Most were paintings that had been confiscated or sold by force. Many had been pillaged by the German army in the occupied countries. Hitler was the world's greatest art thief. The dictator's purloined works of art would stay hidden here until 1945. Back in 1941, Hitler was busy waging his war. The time had finally come for him to realize another dream, that of annihilating Bolshevism, the mortal enemy of National Socialism. On June 22nd, 1941, Hitler launched his offensive against the URSS, one of the greatest invasions in military history. Four million soldiers, 600,000 vehicles and as many horses. Hitler was wary of fighting on two fronts, but he ended up giving the order. You have to realize that he was convinced of his own strategic genius and was sure he could defeat the Soviet Union with the same ease which with he had overrun France, meaning in just a few weeks. At this point, Hitler's idea was to deport the Jews into the conquered Soviet Union. This was the original plan of the final solution. But for three years now, the dictator had also been using the Einsatzgruppen. These were special units which followed the army, eliminating Jews and political opponents like the Soviet apparatchiks. These death squads now started carrying out mass executions. At first, it was just the men who were systematically killed. But then the women and children were increasingly included in these atrocities. About 40 percent of the Jews who would die in the Holocaust were killed in shooting operations. At the front, the dictator was winning victory after victory. He conquered Minsk and then Leningrad. In August 1941, he visited soldiers on the Eastern Front in Ukraine. Entire swaths of territory were coming under Nazi control. Hitler was sure that Russia would fall before the winter. There was real enthusiasm during the summer and early autumn of 1941 as the German troops advanced at incredible speed through Russia. But now the dictator made a strategic decision which would cost him dearly. He decided to seize the agricultural, industrial and oil resources of southern Russia. What's more, he had a furious showdown with some of his generals, who wanted to head straight on and attack Moscow. These discussions seriously slowed down the Blitzkrieg, the lightning war, launched against the Soviet Union in July 1941. And by the time the attack on Moscow began in October 1941, it was too late. The Wehrmacht was overtaken by the winter. Temperatures dropped as low as minus 30 degrees. The German soldiers were exhausted and a Soviet counteroffensive drove them back hundreds of kilometers. That really is a major setback. The Soviet Union is not collapsed. It's fighting back. It seemed to have limitless resources and far more men and equipment than anyone has suspected. Hitler held his generals responsible for this debacle. Since the beginning of the war, he'd been highly suspicious of his military top brass. The battle for Moscow marked a turning point in his relations with them. Hitler had never really trusted his generals. He despised them because they had advised against the French campaign. And now he blamed them for the failure of the great offensive of the summer of 1941. Hitler always had this tendency to blame others for his own failures. To cover up for his own mistakes, the dictator dismissed 30 of his generals, including Walter von Bauschitz, the commander in chief of the German Land Army. Hitler now assumed this function along with that of supreme commander of all the armed forces. From June 1941, the dictator was hunkered down in his Polish headquarters, located six kilometers from Rastenburg. It was from this vast complex of bunkers and tunnels that he directed the war in Russia. The place had the codename Wolfschanze or Wolfsler. The Fuhrer would remain based at this headquarters for over two years. This was the opposite of what Hitler had done up until this point. He'd never stayed in the same place. But this became his second World War trench. This hunkering down showed that he was losing control, no longer able to wage his mobile war. Being so close to the fighting meant that more elaborate surveillance was necessary. Located deep in the forest, the site's security was extreme. It was very well protected. All around, there was a minefield with 50,000 mines. There were the natural obstacles of lakes and swamps. And the entire site was fenced in. Watchtowers were set up and trenches were dug to dissuade approaching enemies. The 50 or so buildings and bunkers were protected by machine gun posts and search lights camouflaged by the surrounding vegetation. Everything was thought out to the last detail. Hitler was always wary of a threat from the inside. It was easy to imagine a commando operation against this lair. So there was a succession of security checkpoints to get past. It was extremely difficult to reach Hitler. Around 6,000 lived at this site on a permanent basis. While thousands of soldiers were dying on the front line, Hitler's entourage here enjoyed various facilities for their relaxation. A cinema, for example. But that wasn't all. It had a sauna because some of the troops and so on liked the sauna. Hitler would never go into a sauna, of course. As a general rule, the dictator rarely got up before noon. He would then get to work, making his military decisions. Finally, at about two in the morning, he would indulge in the ritual of taking tea with his favorite secretaries while talking about himself. Hitler's monologues became increasingly unbearable for his entourage. It was always the same thing. The secretaries took turns listening to him. They had no choice, of course. It was Hitler's way of switching off from the war for a while. By this stage, Hitler had understood that the invasion of the USSR would be harder than he had first thought. He gave up on his plan of deporting the Jews to the occupied Soviet Union. And it was in Poland in the autumn of 1941 that he hatched his definitive plan for the final solution. The fate of millions of Jews was sealed once and for all on January 20th, 1942 at Wannsee Conference. At the end of this meeting, organized by Reinhard Heydrich, Himmler's right hand man and boss of the Einsatzgruppen, a report was drawn up of the number of Jews to be exterminated. Eleven million. Following the Wannsee Conference, the Jews in Europe were methodically rounded up and then channeled towards murder factories. These were extermination centers designed to eliminate Jews within hours of their arrival. Hitler believed in the virtues of a Jewish genocide. He was sure that if he carried out a mass extermination of the Jews, he could regain the geopolitical advantage since the Jews were helping all of Germany's enemies. In the spring of 1942, the selections for Auschwitz began with the streamlining of the extermination process. The weakest were sent directly on arrival to the gas chambers. Hitler himself never set foot in a concentration camp. Hitler never directly witnessed the consequences of what he set in motion. He never once visited a concentration camp, unlike Himmler. In the summer of 1942, Hitler moved his headquarters to Vinnytsia in Ukraine. It was from this camp of log cabins that he gave the order to his troops to take Stalingrad. The fighting was intense. And from November onwards, the situation rapidly deteriorated. Within a few months, the German 6th Army was surrounded by 90 Soviet divisions. They were hemmed in right to the end. They were starving. They had no food, no ammunition, nothing. From this point on, the great weaknesses in Hitler's strategic planning became apparent. The failure of the invasion of the Soviet Union revealed his flaws. Showing that he was just a mediocre war leader, not the military genius he thought he was. What we have here is an individual hunkering down in the bunker of his HQ, increasingly cut off from the realities of the war on the ground, but who's nevertheless delegating less and less. On February 2nd, 1943, the 330,000 German soldiers finally surrendered. It was the first capitulation by the German army. The defeat at Stalingrad was a turning point and the beginning of the end for the great war leader. Not long after the defeat, Hitler left his headquarters and went to St. Florian Abbey in Austria. Here, he took part in a religious ceremony with his closest collaborators. Harald Sandner has discovered this previously unseen photograph taken of the dictator during this event. He wanted to show us the exact spot now loaded with symbolism. Adolf Hitler sat right here on the 4th of April, 1943. They had set out two rows of chairs for him and his entourage. The body language of the Fuhrer speaks volumes about his state of mind. The battle for Stalingrad seems to have affected him deeply. In this photo, he's letting his inner feelings show, something he never did as Fuhrer. He is pensive and withdrawn. I'm sure that at this point, he knew the war was lost. Once the ceremony was over, Hitler went to Linz, the town where he had spent most of his youth. He didn't know it, but this was the last time he would ever go there. Germany was now under heavy attack by the Allies. Hitler was back in his Polish headquarters and the bad news poured in from everywhere. Germany was being bombed. Entire cities were being destroyed and the civilian casualties were considerable. That didn't bother him. They were only buildings and people. They were of no importance. What did bother him, however, was the Allied landings in Normandy on June 6, 1944. 130,000 men came across the channel from England. Within 24 hours, they'd broken through the German lines and outflanked the defending forces. This is success. Hitler, again, is furious. He's always furious about his generals. They're not strong enough. They're not tough enough. He continues, however, to believe in this fantasy world in which things will turn around. At the time, Hitler was developing technologically advanced weapons. For years, German scientists had been working on long range missiles, which would be a booster for German morale and maybe even break the enemy's resistance. The first such rocket was fired at London on September 8th and the dictator had every intention of going even further. They were working on the atom bomb. So there's a huge number of very advanced military technologies. People believed in these wunderwaffen, these miracle weapons. The German Reich was gradually being surrounded by the Soviet and Allied forces. So Hitler launched one last offensive in the West. The Battle of the Bulge. This was a counterattack on the French-Belgian border aimed at showing that Germany was still standing and still determined. It was a totally desperate move and had no support from the German generals because the army had no resources left, either human or logistical, with which to fight the Allies, especially in the sky, which was totally controlled by the Allies. The chances were slim or non-existent of their turning the tide in the West. As the dictator went from setback to setback, his health was in serious decline. He suffered from cardiac problems and was showing the first symptoms of Parkinson's. Theodore Murrell, who had been his personal physician since 1935, was never far away. He was taking up to 28 medicines a day or the equivalent in injections. He'd have shots to pick him up and others to calm him down. He was afraid of dying before he achieved his goal. At the beginning of 1945, he left his headquarters in Poland to return to the capital, Berlin. He still thought he could win the war. He was hoping that the coalition between the Allies and the Russians would break down. It was now March 1945. The bombing of the German capital intensified. The dictator buried himself eight metres underground in his Führerbunker, a complex of 20 underground rooms built to withstand air raids. The outer walls were nearly four metres thick and the ceiling was concrete reinforced with metal beams. It was all but indestructible. This is a model of the Führer's bunker in the garden of the Berlin Reich Chancellery. Hitler and Eva Braun lived in six rooms, each with their own bedroom, one for Eva and one for Hitler. An important room was the command centre, where a daily briefing was held. Hitler directed the end of the war from here. Across from the rooms reserved for the dictator, the six other rooms were taken up by his closest collaborators, his personal physician, Theodor Morell, and Goebbels, his minister of propaganda, but also the maintenance staff. Ten or so other people lived with him. Legend has it that there were many tunnels leading out of the bunker. None of this was true, according to the historians. All the rumours about secret tunnels linking it to the metro or Tempelhof airport are just that, rumours. The bunker had no other exits than the main one and the emergency exit into the garden. But the dictator rarely left the bunker. The Red Army was carving a path straight to Berlin. Nowhere was safe. On April 11th, 1945, the Americans liberated Buchenwald concentration camp, discovering its unspeakable horror. They decided to march the local villagers through the camp to see what atrocities the Nazi regime had been committing right next door. They were deeply shocked and, of course, distressed by this. But in fact, they knew, of course, that there was a camp. They knew about the extermination because by the spring of 1942, if you wanted to find out about the extermination of the Jews, you could do it. Almost 56,000 died in the camp. The Russians were pushing into Berlin in their thousands. Hitler raged when he heard the news. At a briefing on the afternoon of April 22nd, Hitler learned that no troops would be coming to his rescue. For the first time, he had to acknowledge that the war was over. He announced that if such were the case, he would shoot himself. Even today, many documentaries claim that this is the last photograph ever taken of Adolf Hitler. This is not so. That's not true, of course. The actual last photo of Hitler was taken on April 20th, his birthday, in the ruins of the Reich Chancellery. The historians are unanimous. This is definitely the last photograph of the dictator. He is seen in the company of his chief aide and adjutant, Julius Schaub, who was ordered the following day to go to Berghof to destroy all of Hitler's personal papers. April 1945. Berlin was completely surrounded. Hitler heard that his most loyal collaborator, Heinrich Himmler, was negotiating with the enemy. This provoked a fit of rage and made up his mind for him. In the gloom of the bunker, he married his longstanding companion, Eva Braun, in the strictest privacy. The ceremony took place during the night of April 28th to 29th in the bunker. You have to imagine the scene. It was dark. The lights were flickering and often going out because of the air raids. Everyone was tense. It was damp and moldy. It stank. It wasn't glamorous at all. Shortly after the ceremony, Hitler drew up his political will and testament. This is a copy. Hitler's political will and testament of April 29th is one of the most terrifying documents in the history of humanity. Those few pages sum up the entire Nazi ideology and madness, which brought about the deaths of 50 to 60 million people. But there was no mention of the number of victims. Once again, the dictator lambasted the officers of the German army for letting him down. But also the German people who, in his eyes, hadn't shown enough fight. They were all responsible for the defeat. The Jews, most of all. He explains that it was one of his greatest achievements to have exterminated such a large number of Jews, and he asks his successors to continue this policy of mass murder. It's impossible to claim that Hitler didn't want the Holocaust and knew nothing about it. He knew everything and openly admitted it. In all, six million Jews were exterminated in the Nazi concentration and death camps. On April 30th, 1945, Hitler killed himself in his office in the Führerbunker. Eva Hitler died at his side. But the dictator's itinerary doesn't end there. Only 30 minutes after he died, his body was taken outside and burnt in the garden of the Reich Chancellery by his valet, Heinz Linge, as per his master's last request. Hitler didn't want his body to suffer the same fate as that of Mussolini, which was mutilated and hung upside down at a gas station in Milan. His body was doused in gasoline and ignited. But since all of those involved got out of there in a hurry, they didn't make sure that he was reduced to ashes and his remains were found by Soviet soldiers. But no one was able to identify the burnt corpse as being that of the dictator. To be quite sure, Stalin ordered a thorough analysis of the remains here in the northern quarter of Berlin. After the autopsy, they were able to identify the body as being Hitler's, thanks to a close examination of his teeth. It was vital information which Stalin and his secret services hid from the world for years. Historians have several hypotheses as to why. I think it's because he wanted to sow doubt and confusion among the Western allies. And he wanted justification for a tough policy towards post-war Germany, built on the fear that Hitler would come back like Napoleon had done and start it all over again. Stalin said nothing about it at the Potsdam Conference, which took place from July 31st to August 2nd, 1945. In fact, he blatantly lied. You have to remember that the Cold War had already begun at this point. And his successors, Khrushchev and Brezhnev, remained trapped in the lie until 1968, when Brezhnev finally released the autopsy report. While the Allies searched all over Europe for Hitler, his remains were taken on a veritable odyssey. Being buried and dug up again nine times before ending up here at a Russian barracks in northern Germany. Bideritz by Magdeburg, April 4th, 1970. His remains were incinerated and then thrown off this bridge. Harald Sandner took these photos of this little-known spot. All that remains of Hitler today are his teeth in Moscow. Twenty-five years after the end of the Second World War, this is where the itinerary of Adolf Hitler finally ended. Hitler's 12 years in power is one of the most destructive and negative periods in the whole of history, if not the most destructive. Tens of millions dead and the whole of humanity shaken by what it was capable of, the extermination of an entire part of itself. Hitler was the personification of evil. No one has been responsible for more deaths than him. Adolf Hitler, one of the greatest criminals of human history.