Hitler’s Climb: From Soldier to Führer

World War I had left Germany in a state of shock. Two million fatalities, spiralling inflation, and unpaid debts to the Allied countries caused the nation to feel stripped of its identity and pride. They felt that the Allies had deceived them, had abandoned all notions of honour by treating them as a conquered people. Hitler was a war hero. He won the Iron Cross First Class. The First World War turned a nobody into a somebody. Adolf Hitler had survived the conflict and found a political home in the German Workers' Party, a right-wing organisation with racist and anti-Semitic roots. Hitler, like many others, had to find some way of explaining it to himself. And like tens of thousands of others, he blamed socialists, Marxists, Jews, people who had undermined Germany from within. Climbing the ranks, he changed the name to the National Socialist German Workers' Party and took control. He was fulfilling a prefigured role which had always existed in German history and culture, the man who would deliver Germany from her enemies. As leader, he started plotting the takeover of Munich and, in turn, Germany. The infamous Beer Hall Putsch was a resounding failure. It was built up into an iconic episode in the history of the movement. Hitler was arrested, put on trial. Hitler was later imprisoned. His intentions, however, were still for total power and to return the nation to a state of pride. Hitler knew that he would need a different approach. First of all, he had to get the army, police, the civil service and business on his side. And secondly, he had to develop a propaganda apparatus which would win votes. If we can't out-shoot them, we'll out-vote them. And we'll do it by winning support. He would fuse violent acts of terror with slick propaganda, which would all fuel this fatal attraction. In the late 1920s, the Nazi Party found themselves with diminishing support as the German economy became stronger. In 1928, Germany was in quite reasonable circumstances. There had been a recovery from the depression after the war, recovery from the inflation with the stabilisation of the currency in 1924. The economy appeared to be booming. This was largely because there was an enormous influx of American money. The Germans spent a lot of the loan money on things that were very desirable, like concert halls and swimming pools and so on, but they weren't productive. So Germany looked as if it was prospering. Unforeseen events in the world economy would end up having huge ramifications for Germany. Post-war economic recovery under the Weimar Republic, which was genuine enough while it lasted, that had collapsed, that had gone into free fall as a direct result of the Wall Street crash in New York. October 29th, 1929. Black Tuesday. The New York Stock Exchange is in a panic. Frantic investors have scrambled to unload their stocks at any price. Everyone wants to sell. No one wants to buy. Suddenly, even the most gilt-edged securities are practically valueless. The stock market crash has come and the Great Depression has begun. They just pulled the rug out from Germany. They just withdrew their investments. American banks withdrew the loans on which the German recovery after the hyperinflation of 1923 had depended. Banks collapsed. They withdrew their money from businesses. Businesses collapsed. So many of the loans, particularly, had been made on a 14-day basis. They could just withdraw them. So the German economy contracted very suddenly, very quickly. Every European country was affected. Germany was disastrously affected. There was a saying of the time, New York sneezed, London caught cold, and Germany nearly died of influenza. It really was, first and foremost, a crisis of industrial society. And the major unemployment was in industry, particularly the building trade. By 1932, there was 35 to 40 percent unemployment in Germany. That is how catastrophic the Depression was. When you throw manual workers out of jobs, of course, the people who are the clerks in these occupations suffer as well. The continuity of the Great Depression was absolutely critical. And once you got the worker in the dole queue, you had him as a potential Nazi, a potential stormtrooper. The people of Germany were down and out, and the now-called National Socialist Party had found a cause to champion that would increase their visibility and popularity. In that atmosphere of crisis, when governments were only able to rule by decree because the parties couldn't get together and get behind policy to deal with this massive economic collapse, in that situation, people, voters, thought this is the last straw. We've had hyperinflation, we've had international humiliation, we've got political chaos. The Nazis seem to be the one party that's led by youthful, determined, energetic individuals. They promoted the party, actually, in 1930, particularly as the Hitler movement, die Hitlerbewegung. This, of course, was after Hitler had had the ban on his public speaking lifted, and so he had been going around speaking a great deal. It's very difficult to find anything to which the party was willing to commit itself. They were very, very vague on what they intended to do. They seemed to have to offer something to every constituency, Germany, the worker, the manager, the low-middle-class women. What he was saying in one place wasn't necessarily compatible with what he was saying elsewhere, in terms of, say, economic detail. We're going to make Germany great again, we're going to recover, we're going to have work for everybody, we'll put Germany back on the international scene, we're going to rescue the German family, we'll give German women a much better life. These are all clichés, and when you probe, they really don't have any particular policies that they can actually present in a rational way to the general public. Much of it rested simply on that Germany will be rescued, Germany will become a great power, and Hitler will be the person to achieve it. Electoral success would come to the Nazis at the beginning of the 1930s, and their popularity continued to rise as the population grew more disillusioned with the established government. I think that the electoral success of Hitler's party in 1932 didn't necessarily reflect the strengths of the party itself or its ideological appeal. It really reflected the extraordinary crisis that Germany had gone through as a result of the Wall Street crash. And I think what a lot of German people did was they desperately looked round for some kind of messiah, and that's how Hitler was being sold to the public. Their appeal was many-sided, and of course their vision was of what they called a Volksgemeinschaft, a folk community, in which the party could represent all social classes and groups. Hitler stands for election as president in April 1932 against Hindenburg, who had been president since 1925, and he loses. But he comes second, he comes a pretty creditable second, and it's given him a much higher profile than he'd previously had. The propaganda continues, and in the election of July 1932, the Nazi party gets 37% of the vote, and it's the largest single party in the Reichstag with 230 seats, more than doubling its 1930 total. That's a tremendous success, but Hitler is not offered the chancellorship. Actually, it was his democratic right to be offered the chancellorship, but he is not. He is offered the vice chancellorship, and he turns it down. A large proportion of the middle class voted for the National Socialist Party in the July elections of 1932 as a protest to the Hindenburg government. By November, they had retracted their support. There is another election in November, and the Nazi vote declines to 33%, still, I think, 196 seats in the Reichstag. But it's a matter of considerable disappointment to a lot of followers. So what do they do? They seem to be on the verge of their death cough, their death rattle. There is now not such a pressing need to offer Hitler the chancellorship. Local election votes and so on at the time are showing a decline in the Nazi vote. I mean, they might just have fizzled out. There is then a minor election in the state of Lippe, and what the Nazis do is flood it with their marketing resources. They throw everything at this miniature state of Lippe, and they win. And it's at that point that Hindenburg finally invites Hitler to be part of a coalition government. The small coterie of conservative politicians decided they could manipulate Hitler, offered him a chancellorship, and that was the start. Adolf Hitler, leader of a German national movement, is made Chancellor of Germany, and Berlin goes wild in celebration of his victory. Having secured the role as Reich Chancellor, it took one more twist of fate in favour of the National Socialists to see the future of Germany take a deadly turn and hand Hitler complete control. The Wall Street crash had sent Germany into economic crisis. The nation was subjected to a second wave of spiralling inflation and soaring unemployment. However, it gave the National Socialist Party the means to win a large proportion of the vote in a relatively short space of time. In January 1933, Hitler was appointed Reich Chancellor. His plan of total power was almost tangible. Four weeks later, on February 27, 1933, at 9.25pm, an alarm call was taken in a Berlin fire station. Fire had broken out in the Reichstag building, the home of the German parliament. By 11.30pm, the fire was extinguished, but had left the building a gutted shell. On searching the smouldering ruin, a young Dutch communist, Marinus van der Lubbe, was found. He was arrested for starting the fire. According to police, he acted out of rebellion, a call for the German workers to rise up against the oppression of fascism. The Nazis saw the Communist Party as a huge threat to National Socialism and also knew that a large proportion of the German population was suspicious of the far left. Stalin having come to power in the late 1920s, you have the first five-year plan in 1928, you have collectivisation starting in 1929. Word gets back about what it means. And the last thing German peasants want is collectivisation. A lot of German peasants, a lot of smallholders, they don't want collectivisation, neither do the big landowners. The fire allowed Hitler to pass two sets of legislation, the first of which was the Reichstag Fire Decree. This was drawn up the day after the incident and signed by President Hindenburg. The decree allowed the enforced imprisonment of anyone opposed to the Nazi regime and action to be taken against any publication deemed critical of the cause. The decree led to the Enabling Act, passed in Parliament on March 23rd, 1933. It gave the Nazi Party power to enforce laws without the intervention of the Reichstag. Passing of the Enabling Act essentially handed power to Hitler and the National Socialist Party. They immediately let it be known throughout Germany. Fritz Lustig, a Jewish emigrant who now resides in North London, was living in Berlin in 1933. I was born in 1919. I had a very happy childhood. I was the youngest of four siblings and I had a very happy time at school. Although I experienced the Nazis coming to power, we were rehearsing for a play at school and suddenly we heard martial music sounding and we looked out of the window and there was a Nazi demonstration passing with lit torches and a band at the head of the procession. We read in the papers the next day that there had been similar processions all over Berlin and we just had been happening to watch the one which took place in that particular part of town. The national election of March 1933 saw the National Socialist Party take 43% of the vote, but they still failed to win a majority. Unbeknownst to the German population, this would be the last democratic election until World War II. So people still thought in March-April 1933 that the democratic system was not dead, but it was. We look at it backwards, we can see what happened. People even say, why did all these people vote for a party that unleashed war and genocide? Well, they didn't know that's what they were going to do. The Nazis had taken Germany by lawful means. Hitler's plan had worked, and although his party had still not managed to gain a majority, they had total power. They believed there was still an enemy who may stand in the way of this domination that would come from within the party itself. The termination of this enemy would culminate on July 2nd, 1934. The incident known as the Night of the Long Knives would see the murder of Ernst Röhm, the head of the Sturmabteilung. Hitler and the party leadership had arrived at the point where they felt they had to take on the SA, the Sturmabteilung. Various senior paladins of the Reich feared the power of Röhm. They coveted it for themselves, specifically Himmler. So they began to tell Hitler that Röhm was plotting against him, which was not in fact true. The army hated them because they were a rival source of power. I think from Hitler's point of view, the real problem was that he was worried that Röhm really would develop a popular following, more popular perhaps in the end than the following for Hitler. There was a real distrust about Röhm's motives and Röhm's political ambitions. Major Röhm is very definitely number two to Hitler, and therefore is some sort of potential rival to his power. And they had a ready-made weapon, and that was the SS, the Schutzstaffel. The SS were originally a small battalion of the much larger SA, but in 1929 Heinrich Himmler was appointed leader and, taking inspiration from Röhm, began to rapidly expand the unit. Initially they were Hitler's bodyguard, but by 1933, after the seizure of power, it became the internal security of the Nazi regime. By 1934 they were growing into a real and formidable private army, equipped famously with their black uniforms, black helmets, with their own weaponry, and they did much of the business when Hitler decided it was time to move against the SA. Using falsified evidence, Himmler had assembled a file which cited that Röhm had been paid 12 million Deutschmarks by France to overthrow Hitler. In addition to this, Röhm's homosexuality was used as a way of discrediting him. He and others in the SA leadership were accused of acts of drunkenness and debauchery. This was used as a way of excusing the action which Hitler was about to take. So it was an easy matter to set them up with allegations of internal corruption, particularly of homosexuality, and it was a chance to settle a lot of old scores. On the morning of June 30th, Hitler, with a large number of SS, marched into the hotel in Bad Wiessee, where Röhm and many leaders of the SA were staying. They were arrested at gunpoint and later executed. It was a brutal business when the move was made. The SA were taken totally by surprise, and much of their leadership was wiped out. With the brutal execution of Röhm and other potential opponents, Hitler sent a clear message to all that opposition would not be tolerated. The Jewish population and those on the left were already living with constant persecution, yet the Nazi Party's popularity amongst the German nation grew. The threat of violence, intelligent propaganda, and the complete monopoly of all institutions in Germany gave people no choice but to support. The National Socialist Party had not won a majority in any of the elections of the early 1930s. However, the passing of the Enabling Act saw Hitler gain complete control of Germany. In turn, the Night of the Long Nights had killed off any potential political threat he may have had. The German nation found themselves living under a dictatorship. Jews, Communists, Social Democrats were all targeted as enemies of the state. Persecution, imprisonment, and systematic execution were all threats to these members of society. Working closely with Hitler, it was Joseph Goebbels who saw to it that the veneer of the Nazi Party would appeal to the masses. This campaign intensified once power had been consolidated, but its roots were set long before. The self-image that they wanted to create was of a movement of youth. The existing politicians were all in their 50s and 60s. The Nazis were in their 20s and 30s. The embodiment of all the energies of a new Germany, a new, uncorrupted generation. The one party that's led by youthful, determined, energetic individuals. The Hitlerjugend, or Hitler Youth, was a personification of the Nazi image and gave the National Socialists a vibrant, youthful image. Because Hitler believes that too much education is dangerous, the young Nazi gets his only schooling after working hours. A daily lecture on Germany's need for expansion, and the triumph he will share when German armies march into the rich wheat fields of the Russian Ukraine. The Hitler Youth eventually became almost compulsory. The Nazis market them very, very heavily. In other words, what we'd imagine them to be, as a rigidly hierarchical organization with cruel discipline and bullying and so forth, is not actually how they're self-presented. They're actually self-presented as a kind of adventure holiday. At 18, every young man must serve six months in the Arbeitsdienst. There was one boy in my form whom I quite liked, who was in the Hitler Youth. I was very keen on associating with him. I think he was less keen to associate with me. The man who was first given charge of it, Baldur von Schirach, was an able organizer, good at recruiting, but the real take-off was only after the Nazis took power. Within 18 months, they were able to claim 3.5 million members. And that doesn't count, of course, the women's and girls' organizations that were set up in parallel to it. The girls' organization was called Bund Deutscher Mädel, the League of German Girls. A lot of young people who gravitated to the Hitler movement actually then influenced their parents, not the other way around. It wasn't just youth groups that were monopolized by the Nazi Party. All organizations were in turn affected. The Nazis forced every single voluntary society or organization in Germany to join the Nazi Party or become part of a Nazi apparatus. That meant all orchestras, opera houses, singing clubs, amateur dramatic societies, all of that, they had to become part of the Reich Chamber of Culture, which is under the propaganda ministry. And, of course, if you wanted to practice art and exhibit your work, you had to be admitted to the Chamber of Culture. And if you're Jewish, you wouldn't be admitted. If you're a modern artist, you wouldn't be admitted. So this is a way of imposing control. All aspects of life were effectively taken over by the National Socialists. These changes were witnessed by the schoolchild Fritz Lustig. We had a new headmaster. Our current headmaster was not Jewish, but he was a Social Democrat, and therefore his politics were not acceptable to the Nazis. And a new headmaster was appointed. He introduced several new measures. One of them was that the weekly Monday morning assembly was completely transformed. After everybody had sat down, one of the boys who was stationed at the entrance door shouted, Achtung! Attention! And then the headmaster walked in along the central aisle all through the hall with his arm outstretched in the Hitler salute, turned smartly around when he reached the podium, shouted, Heil Hitler! And the whole school had to answer with the same. Heil Hitler! I suppose I must have outstretched my hand in the Hitler salute because not to do that would have drawn attention to me. I didn't want to draw attention to myself by raising the question of whether I was excluded. Today the Nazi propaganda machine is seeking to make Adolf Hitler the only god of the German people, out to destroy every established religion. As the party took control of all areas of society and permeated into the lives of every German citizen, the need for greater, more effective propaganda became paramount. There was nothing which wasn't propaganda of one sort or another. Every surface was interrogated for its propaganda potential. The press was censored, and Nazi newspapers really had the lion's share of circulation. The Volksempfänger, the people's radio, was an affordable device manufactured on the orders of Joseph Goebbels. More people owning radios meant a larger audience for propaganda. The propaganda barrage, to confuse, to make them lose faith, to divide and conquer. To lull the fears of the little neutrals, propaganda minister Goebbels told them Germany didn't want a war at all. It was Britain and France that caused all the trouble. Radio was taken over, and there was a Reich Broadcasting Company, and radio, of course, was dominated completely by state output. 70% of German homes owned a radio by 1939. There were loudspeakers installed on lampposts and trees, and when any of these features took place, of course, you were expected to stand still and listen to them. Film production was taken over by the Nazis as well. Joseph Goebbels was very much aware of the fact that people would get bored very quickly if they were subjected to a constant barrage of propaganda about how wonderful the Nazis were. He was rather upset when Hitler commissioned a propaganda film of the Nuremberg Party rally of 1934 from the young actress Leni Riefenstahl. Triumph of the Will was a film directed by Leni Riefenstahl, which documents the 1934 Nuremberg rally. Its main themes are unity and returning power to Germany. It was no mistake that Nazi symbolism and imagery are prominent throughout the film. Hitler understood the power of the Nazi brand. You actually have a core brand symbol system. You have, obviously, the swastika, you have the starlight eagle, you have the other things like the oak leaves, the acorns. Then, of course, there's the uniforms. I once counted out the number of uniforms in Nazi Germany. There were about 150. These uniforms were highly symbolic. For example, the SS uniforms were vaguely modelled on the death's head hussars of German history, which was a black uniform with the scarlet crossbones and the stark silver. This was a way of boosting morale, of boosting identity, of priming solidarity. The brown shirts were the first organisation to be costumed by Hugo Boss. I mean, it's just impossible to imagine, in fact, almost any other historical leader in history going to a catwalk showing off new clothes for the soldiers. Only Hitler, and for reasons unique to him and unique to the Third Reich. The National Socialists found success in running both well-planned propaganda and brutal acts of violence simultaneously. However, it was the Olympic Games of 1936 which would see a halt to the terror and the suppression of anti-Semitism. Hitler understood the power of the Games and exploited them in order to show Europe and the rest of the world a false image of a peaceful, tolerant Germany. Captain Eric Brown was a spectator at the Games, along with his father. It was clear that the Nazi propaganda machine was sending out the message it desired. But it was a black American athlete who stole the show. I was 17 when we went to the Olympics. It was a wonderful occasion. Of course, to me, the highlight at that time was to see this wonderful athlete, Jesse Owens... ..who won the 100 metres, the 200 metres, the 100 metres relay and the long jump. Quite incredible. He was poetry in motion. The lanky star from Ohio State shatters all existing records as he takes the gold medal in the men's broad jump with a sensational leap of 26 feet, 5 516 inches. Owens in particular was staggered by his reception in Germany as he got off the boat wherever he went. The crowds chanted, Owens, Owens, all over the place. And for a brief time, an American black man was more popular in Nazi Germany than Adolf Hitler himself. The Olympics had placed Hitler in a favourable light throughout the world. However, once the Games were over, the Nazis would renew their persecution. The Jewish population would soon face a greater terror than they had ever previously suffered. The 1936 Olympics allowed Hitler to project to the world a vision of a tolerant, progressive nation. His popularity within Germany was also rising. Those parts of the nation who were not seen as a threat were being shown that the Nazi Party would deliver on the promises they made. But as with all aspects of the regime, there was a more sinister subplot. The thing that had led people to vote had been the unemployment problem of the early 1930s and the promise that the Nazis would solve that. Well, they did, with a vengeance. If anybody was unemployed, they were rounded up and made, for example, to chop wood, which was given to the elderly or the very poor. Certainly by 1938, there were 400,000 unemployed in Germany. I mean, it is nothing. But there were always offers to tempt them to join the Nazi Party. You join the ranks, be paid, be uniformed. It seemed quite attractive. Although it seemed that the whole nation was behind them, the main anti-Semitic message of the Jewish conspiracy was still being played out by the Department of Propaganda. The idea of a Jewish world conspiracy was not one that was present in more than a very tiny fragment of the German population. They were successful in business up to a point. They controlled some of the big departmental stores in Germany. But in no sense were they in control of the life of the Weimar state. In every village, in every town and city, are stormtroopers from whose headquarters the local party leader directs his district campaign of terror, marks victims for persecution. Hitler was keen on keeping the suppression of Jews at the forefront of Nazi policy, as Germany and the German nation were historically not known for their anti-Semitism. It had been the place that many Jews had gone to from countries that genuinely were anti-Semitic. There was strong anti-Semitic tradition in Austria, strong anti-Semitism in Romania. Soviet anti-Semitism was always kept under wraps, but it was certainly there. And, of course, Polish anti-Semitism, where a very large proportion of Europe's Jews lived. A young Eric Brown, teaching in Germany, could see from an objective point of view the effect of the Nazis' anti-Semitic policies. I was very aware of the fact that the Nazi regime was building up into a very, very clamorous political body and a very ruthless political body too. The Nazis began to unroll their own brand of anti-Semitism, radical anti-Semitism. It was an evil aspect, if you like to put it that way, of the Nazi regime. On November 7th, 1938, Ernst von Rath, a German diplomat in Paris, was shot by Herschel Grinspan, a young German Jewish man. His motive was a direct response to Nazi anti-Semitism. Two days later, von Rath was pronounced dead. Orders were given to the SA and SS to take to the streets and destroy all Jewish-owned property and businesses and arrest all Jewish men. The following two nights were an orchestrated and systematic series of attacks on Jews throughout Germany. It would become known as Kristallnacht. 91 Jews died and 300,000 were arrested and sent to concentration camps. On November 9th, after a chamber music performance in which he was playing cello, Fritz Lustig returned home. When I reached home, I saw that there was a great crowd in front of the entrance to the building where our flat was situated. The window had been smashed and the people outside the shop was having themselves freely to any alcoholic drinks that were there. I went up to our flat unmolested, was told by my parents that this crowd had been there for some time and they had in fact set fire to the shop. Fritz and his father found hideouts at two different houses in the suburbs of Berlin. Neither faced arrest, but the events of Kristallnacht were immediately felt. There were too many Jewish men in Berlin to arrest them all because in the provinces we knew that there had been no exemptions. I went to my office the next morning. It was a Jewish-owned firm and when I arrived, I was told that both our boss and his two sons had been arrested and put into concentration camps. When I went to the bank, the cashier asked me whether it was true, as he had heard, that my boss had been arrested. And I said, yes, it was true. And he shook his head and said, I think the German population obviously knew it because it was happening in front of their eyes. But to them, the stakes were so high in getting their pride back, I think about 80% of them were prepared to put up with anything if they could become what they wanted to be, a proud nation once again. Hitler commanded his popularity amongst the German nation through a series of non-violent territory gains in the latter half of the 1930s. Most Germans are terribly anxious. They do not want another war. They're afraid that their cities will be bombed. They don't want to go through another First World War. So there's huge relief when the various crises of the re-militarisation, the Rhineland in 1936, the Anschluss of Austria in 1938, the Czechoslovak crisis, they're all solved basically without bloodshed. That gains Hitler a reputation and popularity in Germany, but not because he's being militaristic. His idea is to refight the First World War, but on a better basis. So his aim very early on is to conquer Eastern Europe, use it as a kind of breadbasket, as a source of supplies, because one of the reasons why Germany lost in 1914-18 is because Germany did not have enough supplies. More than half a million Germans died from starvation or malnutrition in the First World War. So he wants to right that wrong. Although Hitler was re-militarising at an unprecedented rate, the German nation, nor the rest of the world, could see war on the horizon. We did not know how close war was going to be. We did know that the Nazis had started re-arming very soon after they came to power. All the other great powers realised that Germany was re-arming in the 1930s. It was secret, of course, until 1935, then declared openly. They had good intelligence on what was going on. But on the other hand, I think a great many politicians abroad thought it was a bad idea to disarm Germany anyway. A modest re-armament might satisfy German ambitions. They would allow Germany back into the family of nations again. Everybody who was anti-Nazi thought that the Allies would take steps to prevent further re-armaments, but they never did. The only reason I can think of why they didn't do it was because there was a great anti-war feeling in all those countries. None of the populations in Britain, France or Poland wanted a war to happen. I knew there'd be trouble, but I certainly didn't think all out war. After the events of Kristallnacht, thousands of Jews had been forced to emigrate, and those that hadn't realised it was time to leave. After the events of November 1938, it became obvious to everybody, including my parents, that to stay in Germany might be termed suicide because one could no longer be sure that one's life was not in danger. Fritz Lustig's parents managed to find refuge in Portugal, where his eldest sister lived. As war became inevitable, Eric Brown had no choice in leaving. I was asleep on a Sunday morning, the 3rd of September, when there was a thunderous knock at the door. When I opened it, there were two SS officers who said, our countries are at war, which was technically incorrect at six o'clock in the morning because it wasn't until 11 o'clock we were at war, but I didn't think that was a very strong point to argue. And the SS chap said, you'll have to come with us, so get dressed and get ready. Eric Brown was detained for three days and then dropped at the Swiss border. From here, he made his way back to Britain, where he immediately signed up to the war effort. Having stayed in England in 1936, Fritz Lustig found refuge with the Quaker family, with whom he had lodged. When I emigrated, that was on a transatlantic steamer which was going from Hamburg via Cherbourg in France and Southampton in England. We interlanded in Cherbourg, and this was the first time I was able to walk about without being aware of having to look over my shoulder to see whether anybody was listening to what I said. In other words, to feel free. And that was a marvellous feeling which I remember to this day. In just ten years, Hitler and the Nazis had moved from a marginal fascist party with a small following into a military dictatorship ready to wage full-scale war. The promise of rebuilding Germany and reinstating pride to the nation fuelled Hitler's popularity, despite acts of savage violence that left thousands dead and a great deal more seeking refuge in other countries. When the curtain was raised on the theatre of combat, Germany rallied behind their Führer. The victory over Poland was certainly welcomed because it righted the wrong, as people saw it, of the territorial settlement at the end of the First World War. I think most Germans would have been very happy to leave it at that. The high point of Hitler's popularity was undoubtedly the summer of 1940, after the very rapid conquest with relatively little bloodshed. The victories of 1939, 1940, created what proved to be a short-lived period of absolute mass euphoria in Germany. One victory after another. All of this is ecstasy because the Prophet is what he says he is. He is real. He is an earthly god by this stage. And, of course, the trouble is he begins to believe his own mythology. The beginning of the Second World War would see the decline of Nazi support. It would take a costly and bloody war to end this horrific regime.