Living with Hitler

(narrator) A new world rose from the ashes of the First World War.

(dramatic music) In Germany, an empire collapsed and was replaced by a republic that could not last.

(woman) Germany was in a really terrible state.

(man) Hyperinflation, economic crisis, political instability, you name it.

(narrator) Amongst the chaos, Germany turned to one man.

(man) This extraordinary, messianic figure with his golden oratory.

(woman) He was going to make Germany great again.

(narrator) A man who would drive the nation to war and would be responsible for history's largest genocide.

(doors clanging) It took just 12 years for the nation to be defeated, devastated, and divided.

This is the story of life in the Third Reich.

(shouting in German) (crowd cheering) (tense music) In 1914, Germany was led into the First World War under Kaiser Wilhelm II.

(explosions, gunfire) (shouting) By the end of 1918, facing the collapse of the home front and a civil revolution, the Kaiser abdicated and an armistice was signed with the Allied powers.

(Julia) Well, right after the First World War, Germany was in a really terrible state.

There was civil unrest everywhere, people were starving.

The country was in a really terrible state mentally, as it were, but physically, the country was pretty much untouched by the war because the fighting had all taken place outside Germany.

(narrator) By 1929, American banks had loaned Germany $8.5 billion.

Then, the Wall Street Crash wiped $10 billion off the value of the market, and the Americans wanted their money back.

In the years immediately before Hitler came to power, Germany was in the depths of a severe economic crisis.

There was a climate of hopelessness, desperation, economic crisis, political crisis.

(narrator) Someone surely had to stand up for Germany.

(Alex) When we're talking about the Nazi rise to power, I think we have to go back certainly to 1918, the end of the First World War.

This was a collective trauma for the German nation, and it also explains why support for democracy in the years between 1918 and 1933 was very limited.

(narrator) On the 11th of August, 1919, a new German Republic was formed here in Weimar.

(Alex) There was no tradition of democracy in Germany, and the democratic parties were associated very much with the surrender in 1918 and the turmoil that followed.

(Aristotle) The Weimer Republic was born out of an act of treason, according to the Nazis, which was the Versailles Treaty.

(Thomas N.) The Versailles Treaty was seen by a lot of Germans as a series of impositions by the victorious powers designed to keep Germany down.

(Alex) The loss of German territory in the north, in the east, and in the west, the loss of industry, the reparations that Germany had to pay, and just this idea that this peace had been forced on them by the victorious Allies.

This was a collective trauma.

(gentle music) (narrator) For many, the words "Weimar Republic" conjure up images of wheelbarrows full of worthless paper money and violent political demonstrations on the street, and all of that is true but that is not all of the truth.

(Julia) Well, it was very exciting.

You know, there were sexual freedoms, there was all this avant-garde cinema and theater.

(Nicholas) The German film industry had been second to none in the 1920s.

It had been a pioneer of experimental film with films like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

For Germans, it was a dream factory.

(Julia) And there was wonderful music everywhere.

Strauss's operas were being premiered in Dresden, and there was an excitement, I think.

(applause) (Dina) This is a highly developed society, and it has one of the best universities in the world at this point.

(narrator) During the Weimar years, Germany celebrated 15 Nobel laureates in physics and chemistry compared to the USA's five.

The majority of them would be forced to flee from national socialism.

Eight of those refugees worked on the Manhattan Project, building the atomic bomb.

(explosion) (upbeat music) In the 1920s, Berlin, Weimar's capital, was the third largest city in the world after London and New York.

Berlin was the epicenter of Weimar culture.

It was the center of Prussia as well, which was a social democratic stronghold till 1932.

Berlin was very exciting because there was new buildings and infrastructure and art-- Dada, Expressionism, Bauhaus-- so there was a lot going on in Germany.

(narrator) Berlin also had the fastest underground railway, the highest ratio of telephones to population, and, by 1930, Tempelhof Airport was the largest airport in the world.

How did it all go so wrong?

(ominous music) Here in Munich, on the 5th of January, 1919, the precursor to the Nazi Party, the German Workers' Party, was formed by Anton Drexler.

(Thomas N.) At that point in time, German politics was really quite unstable.

There were a lot of different right-wing factions who were disenchanted with what had happened to Germany, and the Nazi Party started out as one of those.

(narrator) Soon after its formation, the party attracted the attention of the German authorities.

A young Austrian war veteran named Adolf Hitler was sent to investigate.

(Nicholas) Hitler didn't actually leave the German Army after the end of the First World War.

He was retained, and the Army found great value in him.

They wanted to disinfect the Army of communist infiltration, and Hitler was a major tool.

He had developed this speaking persona, and they asked him to investigate this German Workers' Party, and he attended their meeting, and in no time, had taken it over.

(crowd chatter) (narrator) In late 1923, with membership of the Bavarian-based National Socialists rising to 55,000, Hitler made his first play for power by seizing a Munich beer hall where the leader of the Bavarian government, Gustav von Kahr, was addressing a large audience.

(Michael) The Beer Hall Putsch, a failure, of course, but extraordinarily, it was the event that elevated Hitler to national attention.

(Nicholas) What Hitler had actually done is kidnap the leadership of Bavaria, and he'd fomented a march towards the Ministry of Defense in Bavaria with the idea of taking over the whole state and then marching to Berlin.

(tense music) (narrator) When Hitler and the Nazis began their march, they were met in the city square by armed police.

Hitler was arrested two days later and convicted of treason.

He turned his trial into a kind of piece of public theater where he could preach the virtues of hyper-nationalism to a fascinated German public.

(Julia) The judge and even the prosecutor were very sympathetic.

(Michael) He makes a long, passionate speech about, "The future belongs to us.

You may imprison me now, but our movement goes forward."

(birds chirping) (quirky music) (narrator) Hitler would spend just nine months in cell number seven, here at Landsberg Prison.

(Michael) And he has the most comfortable time you could imagine.

His own cell with flowers and fruit provided daily.

People would come and see him from outside or in the prison.

He dictates his great magnum opus, Mein Kampf.

(Thomas N.) His plans for Germany are in Mein Kampf, to a degree.

There's a sense there that Germany needs to expand.

There's a sense there that Jews are evil.

But it's all interwoven with a big, big rant, effectively.

It's not a very coherent rant either.

(Christopher) Many Germans saw him as either a raving fanatic, kind of the beer hall demagogue, or as a clown, he wasn't to be taken seriously.

(Julia) In the mid '20s, Germany was relatively prosperous, and his message of racial hatred and anti Treaty of Versailles and anti Jews, people weren't that interested, they were trying to forget the First World War and get on with their lives.

But then, of course, there was the Wall Street Crash.

(commotion) (gloomy music) (narrator) Following the Wall Street Crash of October 1929, the German economy was in free fall and unemployment was rapidly increasing.

In the first three months of 1930, 3.3 million people were unemployed.

A year later, that number was nearly 5 million, and it had jumped to 6.1 million in early 1932, and with it, support for the Nazis increased dramatically.

(Nicholas) Germans were fearful.

They were angry, still, about Versailles.

They'd suffered the hyperinflation of the 1920s already under Weimar where you'd had workers carrying their wages home in wheelbarrows, and now you had masses on the streets, angry young men unemployed, and you had this voice, this kind of prophet in the wilderness, this extraordinary, messianic figure with his golden oratory, with his dynamic performance, and people begin to hear him.

People begin to listen to him, and suddenly, the Nazis break through.

(narrator) In 1928, just 800,000 voters had supported the Nazi Party, but by 1930, that number had jumped to 6.4 million and would continue to surge in the 1932 federal election.

(Julia) He provided excuses for Germany's troubles: the Treaty of Versailles, the Jews, and the communists.

And it was much easier for people to focus on that for their problems rather than the fact that they were still struggling with what had happened after the First World War.

(narrator) In the 1932 federal election, 13 million Germans voted for the Nazis, but they were not the majority.

(Michael) In the elections that were held variously through to 1932, the Nazis never gained more than 36 percent at most.

(Alex) Which means they never gained a majority.

Yes, they were the biggest party from 1932 onwards, but they never gained a majority.

(Michael) But that wasn't Hitler's intention.

He didn't want popularity for its own sake.

He wanted notoriety.

He wanted attention paid to the Nazis, which he achieved.

And the SA, the bully boys on the streets, they're the ones who make Nazism a living reality for most Germans.

(narrator) By 1932, there were 400,000 stormtroopers, the Brownshirts of the Sturmabteilung.

They and other paramilitaries added to the sense that strength and discipline were needed, and the Nazis promised order, even if they were responsible for much of that disorder.

(Michael) The Sturmabteilung, the stormtroopers, they are to defend the party, and they break up communist meetings, they bash people in the street.

(Aristotle) They were going around, attacking the usual suspects: the communists, the socialists, the trade unions, the Jews.

(Michael) And Hitler greatly approves of the tough-guy method, but he always says, "Don't involve me directly in it.

I support all of this, but do it on your own initiative so that I can always stand back from it."

(shouting) (mellow music) (narrator) On February the 26th, 1932, here, in Braunschweig, Hitler gained German citizenship which allowed him to become a candidate in the presidential election in March.

(Aristotle) President Hindenburg, who had already served one whole term from 1925, stood up for re-election.

Hindenburg, of course, was this decorated, heroic First World War general, and Hitler fights a very modern election against him.

Not by himself.

There were other people like Hitler's photographer, for example, Hoffmann.

(Michael) Heinrich Hoffmann would develop photographs, full-frontal facial pictures of Hitler just looking hard at the camera.

Very effective black and white.

But then it was Goebbels, probably the most intellectually gifted of the Nazis.

(Aristotle) Joseph Goebbels built the Nazi brand.

He built the visual image of the Nazi Party.

He built the moving image of the Nazi Party.

Goebbels was one of those people who understood the power of the different media.

(Michael) He understood what moved people, what influenced them, what impressed them, and so his techniques in the election campaign were very successful.

(narrator) But these efforts were not enough.

No candidate obtained an absolute majority in the first election on the 13th of March, but in the run-off election on the 10th of April, there was a clear winner.

The monumental President Hindenburg was returned to office at the age of 85.

(crowd cheering) (ominous music) (Michael) But he wasn't expecting to win but to project himself as a national figure, and with that as his justification, he then told the party, "Now we wait to be invited, and we'll accept the invitation on our terms."

(Christopher) The political situation in Germany preceding Hitler's appointment as Chancellor was marked by an impasse.

The Reichstag is immobilized because it has a majority of MPs from the Nazi Party, the Communist Party, who are against the overall system.

Government is carried out by President Hindenburg exercising his powers under Article 48 of the constitution.

(narrator) The complicated Weimar Constitution enabled President Hindenburg to rule by decree as well as directly appoint the Chancellor.

(Christopher) But this is not a sustainable approach to governance, and this is one reason why the nationalists and conservatives around Hindenburg start to look at Hitler more favorably as a way for getting out of this impasse.

(Michael) The politics go very badly for Weimar, and by the end of '32, von Papen, who'd been Chancellor, resigned.

A man called Schleicher, a general, takes over.

But neither can form a strong cabinet, and so at that point, Hindenburg reluctantly-- because he'd always despised Hitler as that little corporal, the upstart-- Hindenburg decided he'd have to call Hitler.

He asked von Papen first, and he said, "Will it be a bad move?

Can we control Hitler?"

Von Papen said, "Yes.

If we let him become Chancellor, we've got him boxed in, so much so he'll squeak and squeal when we press."

Very big mistake.

(narrator) And so, at half past 11, on the morning of Monday, January the 30th, Hindenburg administered the oath of office, installing Adolf Hitler as Chancellor.

(Aristotle) But we should always remember that between '33 and '34, Hitler is not complete dictator of Germany.

He's a chancellor of a coalition government.

(narrator) Hindenburg and his advisors made Hitler agree to limit the Nazis in cabinet to three and to accept von Papen as his Vice Chancellor.

This meant that Papen would always have an 8-3 majority in cabinet.

However, it soon emerged that Hitler was a very clever politician.

(Alex) If you look at Hitler's first cabinet from the 30th of January, 1933, yes, it only contained three Nazis, but the other members of the cabinet were all right-wing conservatives, so there was a considerable degree of ideological overlap.

(dramatic music) (narrator) On the evening that Hitler was appointed Chancellor, here, on the streets of Berlin, Joseph Goebbels organized a massive torchlight procession.

(chanting) (Aristotle) And in fact, the parade was so organized that it passed from outside the building of the Chancellery and Hitler could actually greet the public from his window.

It was a very mystical event.

The torches, as you can imagine, gave it an almost religious dimension to it.

(Thomas B.)

That sort of symbolic takeover of Berlin by the National Socialists in many ways is also a sign of things to come.

It's about a gesture that we hold the power now.

We have the authority.

(Aristotle) Gring himself-- Hitler's number two-- said on that night that this is an event equivalent to the declaration of the First World War, 1914, which, in Germany as well as in other countries, was marked by this eruption of enthusiasm and emotion for the country.

(narrator) But many in Germany did not sense the weight of this monumental moment.

(Arnd) When Hitler came to power, many Germans did not perceive this as a major break because they thought, "Well, it's just another government which will probably collapse within a few months."

(Nicholas) The feeling was that the holding of office would tame them.

Once these street agitators, these street brawlers and bullies and thugs, got a taste of power, they would be civilized by it.

They'd become like a normal government.

And in fact, they had let in a pack of hyenas.

(crowd cheering) (narrator) In his first broadcast after becoming Chancellor, Hitler pledged his government to "declare merciless war against spiritual, political, and cultural nihilism," which meant there would be no more Weimar cabaret, no more Bauhaus, no more--in Hitler's words-- "anarchistic communism."

(Julia) It changed overnight.

Nightclubs were closed down.

The jazz, which had become a big feature of life in Berlin, that was all stopped.

Berlin was a city where homosexuals felt relaxed, and that, of course, all stopped immediately.

And many people thought this was a good thing.

(Arnd) For the "ordinary," if you like, in inverted commas, Germans, life did not change that much because they were not persecuted.

Quite on the contrary, they seemed to benefit from the Nazi seizure of power because Hitler had made promises to them, reducing unemployment, creating new jobs.

So they hoped for a good future and a bright future.

(marching music) (narrator) Soon after becoming Chancellor, Hitler announced that his first priority would be the salvation of the German worker in an enormous and all-encompassing attack on unemployment.

An array of public works programs were carried out.

(Michael) You'd have workers building bridges, building hospitals, building schools, building-- what everyone remembers-- the Autobahn, the new roadway.

Now, one of the great boasts of the Nazi movement and of Hitler personally was that they had cured the scourge of unemployment.

There's some element of truth in it.

The big question is, were they a reaction to Nazi policy or was it part of an international recovery from the depression of the early '30s?

And most scholars now suggest it's the latter.

(Aristotle) Hitler was lucky because he came to power in 1933 at a time when the German economy started picking up.

(dramatic music) (mellow music) (birds chirping) (narrator) It was here, just after midnight on the evening of the 27th of February, 1933, that passersby heard the sound of breaking glass coming from the German parliament, the Reichstag.

Shortly afterwards, flames began to light up the interior of the building.

(flames roaring) (Aristotle) Political figures of the Nazi Party immediately accused the communists, and Hitler, of course, seizes the opportunity.

(Alex) The Nazis--very skillfully, it has to be said-- were able to portray it as the signal for a communist insurrection.

(narrator) The next morning, the cabinet met to draw up an emergency decree that abolished many civil liberties across Germany, including... (applause) (Christopher) The Reichstag Fire Decree is passed hurriedly the day after the Reichstag fire and this essentially suspends individual rights under the Weimar Constitution.

(Nicholas) Which meant that they could arrest communists and they could remove the Communists from parliament, from the Reichstag.

(Alex) And that brought the conservatives even more on his side, not just within his cabinet, but in general in society and the political sphere.

(dark music) (Christopher) From this point on, Nazi Germany is in a permanent state of emergency.

(narrator) Marinus van der Lubbe, a young Dutch communist, was arrested at the scene, found guilty, and sentenced to death.

Modern evidence substantially supports the finding of guilt.

Van der Lubbe was the first civilian to be executed by Nazi special courts.

Twelve thousand were to follow.

The response of the general public to the Reichstag fire was mixed.

Members of the labor movement were highly suspicious of the Nazis' account, and it did seem to be a little bit too convenient that there would be this kind of event just before an election which was due a week away.

(narrator) The Reichstag elections on March 5th, 1933, were held in an atmosphere of national euphoria coupled with Nazi violence and police repression.

But the National Socialists again failed to secure a majority.

In response, Hitler called a meeting of the Reichstag on March 23rd to debate a law to remedy the distress of the people and the Reich, a law that became known as the Enabling Act.

(Alex) The Enabling Act was, I would say, fundamental in the establishment of a Nazi dictatorship.

Up until that point, we can't really talk about a Nazi dictatorship.

This is the turning point.

(Michael) Under the terms of the constitution, the power of the Chancellor was limited, but the Enabling Act bypassed those restrictions and left him in a very strong position.

(Alex) The Enabling Act was voted on in the Reichstag, and all of the political parties there actually voted in favor of it apart from the Social Democrats.

(Michael) Most of the socialists had been either imprisoned, arrested, or they're too frightened to turn up.

(Arnd) He no longer needed the support of the other parties.

He was able to virtually dissolve, you know, the parliament.

(Michael) So there's no parliament to restrict Hitler after March of 1933.

(marching) (narrator) Here, on March the 22nd, 1933, a day before the passage of the Enabling Act, the first Nazi concentration camp was opened: Dachau.

Dachau is a pretty violent place from the beginning.

(Thomas B.)

The early victims are communists, socialists, the leftist political opponents of the Nazi state.

And they're typically sent to these institutions for several months on end to be beaten up and brutalized and terrorized before being released back to their communities to spread fear.

(Alessandro) The National Socialists had no interest at all on hiding these concentration camps.

(Christopher) They were widely publicized in the media by the regime.

(Nicholas) And they made out a lot of aspects of the police state to be fundamentally benevolent, protecting people from leftist hoodlums, protecting people from communist insurrection, and so forth.

(Aristotle) But we normally understand the institution of the camp with hindsight with what happened during the Second World War, and I think these were very different camps to the later camps.

(Nicholas) Prisoners were, as the phrase was, shot while trying to escape, but the concentration camps weren't death camps.

They were a sort of reform school with machine guns.

(narrator) By April, the number taken into protective custody in Prussia alone was 25,000.

By the summer, more than 100,000 Communists, Social Democrats, and other opponents of the Nazis had been sent to concentration camps.

The Nazi era had begun.

Its most notorious characteristic was also launched at once.

(Arnd) In April 1933, there was the first major boycott of Jewish shops.

(Aristotle) That happens within two and a bit months after Hitler's appointment, so it's a very early, if you like, sign, of where the regime, um, is heading.

(Thomas N.) There's guards standing outside of Jewish shops encouraging people not to go there, not to shop there, painting swastikas on those shops.

(Aristotle) But there was no real violence at that point.

There was a lot of psychological violence, of course, as you can imagine, and Hitler knows that this is very important.

He knows that he should contain the radicalism of his party now that he has got the prize of power.

(Michael) Jews made up barely one percent of the population.

This is why it's extraordinary, the attack upon them.

But most people had an anti-Jewish feeling anyway, so anti-Jewish policy would not deter most Germans.

This is the disturbing aspect looking back.

(Lisa) Following on from that just a week later, there was the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service which was a law that excluded Jews from working in the civil service.

And lots of people in those professions were willing to see people pushed out who were Jewish because they could take their place.

(Alex) From then on, anti-Jewish laws were passed continually.

Jews were steadily removed from every aspect of political, economic, cultural, and social life in Germany.

(grim music) (narrator) On the 10th of May, 1933, the Nazis began their attack on the cultural and intellectual life of Germany.

Great bonfires were built at universities across the nation for a literary purge.

(crowd shouting) (Nicholas) It was such a symbol of barbarism, such a symbol of a regression to a kind of primordial order that the whole world should've sat up and watched.

It didn't.

(flames crackling) (narrator) In Berlin, the climax of the evening was an appearance by Joseph Goebbels who declared... (Dina) The intellectual was associated with everything that was bad about the Weimar Republic.

They called this Cultural Bolshevism.

(Nicholas) The message was that you must think our thoughts.

Authors who were Jewish, who were suspect, who were liberal, who were left wing, were no longer acceptable.

The symbolism said everything about what was to come.

(shouting) (tense music) (narrator) The German press was also brought into line.

(machines whirring) (Nicholas) Obviously they closed down the left-wing papers, but they preserved the edifice of the so-called middle-class press which the party carefully controlled to make it look as if there was a genuine culture of debate.

(Geraldine) The Propaganda Ministry started to issue press directives, instructions to the press on how they should report certain issues, certain events.

(Nicholas) So, on the surface, nothing changed.

In fact, everything had changed.

(solemn music) (Aristotle) In 1933, Goebbels becomes Propaganda Minister.

He becomes head of the Culture Chamber which becomes a kind of massive, overarching organization that touches on every aspect in everyday life, from radio and newspapers, film, to rallies, to exhibitions, all these things come under his remit.

(narrator) But perhaps the most important tool in Goebbels' arsenal was radio.

In 1933, at Goebbels' request, German radio manufacturers began developing the Volksempfnger, the "people's receiver."

(Nicholas) The "people's receiver" was a very cheap radio.

It was a revolution because everyone before that time has been disconnected.

Suddenly you're in a new world of media, and it was the mediatization of life which the Nazis bought with the people's radio.

They could get into every home with their propaganda, with their spin on German culture, their kind of German music, and so forth.

(narrator) Many people labeled it "Goebbels' snout."

Goebbels had a switch in his office where he could simply come onto any program and stop it and speak to the people direct, and these radios, significantly, you couldn't actually get foreign broadcasts or at least not very easily.

It was an extraordinary achievement.

(narrator) Amid much fanfare, Hitler declared May 1st, 1933, a public holiday.

Germany would join other European nations in celebrating Labor Day.

(cheering) Trade union leaders were flown to Berlin from all parts of Germany, and Joseph Goebbels staged the greatest mass demonstration Germany had seen so far.

Hitler told the workers' delegates... Just a day later, trade union offices across the nation were raided, their funds confiscated, and many of the union leaders Hitler had addressed were arrested.

(Christopher) Germany had the largest and most powerful labor movement in the world in 1933, and it's rolled up quite quickly through extreme violence.

So it's estimated that during 1933, around 200,000 Germans, overwhelmingly members of the labor movement, were beaten up, kidnapped, or terrorized at some point in the year.

So that leaves a huge gap which needs to be filled in, and what steps in is the so-called German Workers Front.

(Alessandro) It was more to the service of the employers than the employees.

(Michael) They were told where they could work.

They were told what wages they could have.

They had no rights of negotiation.

This organization did it all for them.

(Alessandro) And despite some improvement in the quality of life in the beginning of the regime, generally speaking, the condition of workers didn't change much for the good during the regime.

(chatter) (dreary music) (narrator) On July the 13th, 1933, the Reich Interior Ministry enacted a memorandum requiring all German employees to greet one another with a Hitler salute.

(Geraldine) Most people were aware of the fact that this was considered compulsory in public spaces and there was a threat of being punished, so you could lose your job, you could be arrested, you could be prosecuted, you could be imprisoned if you didn't use the greeting.

Young children adapted to it very quickly because, of course, they may not have known anything else.

There are even reports of women, whilst giving birth, yelling it out, but this, of course, comes from official documentation.

(narrator) In the year Hitler came to power, one-third of female teachers were compelled to take early retirement in accordance with the Nazi ideal of Kinder, Kche, Kirche-- "children, kitchen, and church."

(bell tolling) (Lisa) That was a slogan that was attached to desired behaviors for women and indeed where they should be: firmly in the home, in the private sphere, whilst the public sphere of work and civic life or professional life was for men, not for women.

(Geraldine) Paid employment outside the home for women was described as a burden, that before the Nazis came to power, they had been forced to go out to work and that this had led to a degeneration of the family.

(Lisa) The Nazis were quite concerned that the nation was in demographic decline.

So there was a high expectation on German women to give birth to as many children as possible, and in order to facilitate that, they needed to get married as young as possible as well.

So there were lots of policies in order to bring this about.

(Thomas S.) For example, the Law for the Encouragement of Marriage, which offered marriage loans to couples but on the condition that the women gave up their jobs and stayed at home.

(Lisa) And the incentive there was that the loan obviously had to be paid back, but the loan would be reduced by a quarter for each child born so that, in effect, with the birth of the fourth child, then the loan repayment was waived altogether.

Women that produced four, six, or eight children were awarded the so-called Mutterkreuz, the Mother's Cross, the Cross of Honour of the German Mother.

(Julia) The really important thing was the Reich that was going to last forever needed lots and lots of people, so women were encouraged to breed and look after the home.

(dark music) (narrator) But not all women were encouraged to have children.

(Christopher) If they were Jewish, where they were seen as being mentally deficient or seen as being asocial and beyond the pale, they were not supposed to procreate, and the hope was that they would be eradicated from the German gene pool through forcible sterilization.

(Aristotle) Perhaps the most defining feature of Nazi propaganda was the notion of race.

And it's not a coincidence that one of the first pieces of legislation that the Nazi regime put in place in 1933 was the so-called Sterilization Law.

(Julia) Anybody who the Nazis considered unfit to reproduce was forcibly sterilized.

It was very arbitrary.

(Michael) And it's among children that the worst effects are felt.

Children were taken off from schools, from hospitals, and sterilized without parental permission.

Now, how do you do that?

How do you get the medical profession to accept that?

And this is part of the tragedy of Nazi Germany.

It couldn't have been done without the willingness of the medical profession to work on that demand.

(Alex) And it's actually resulted in the forced sterilization of 400,000 German and Austrian people up until 1945.

(narrator) But popular support for the regime continued to grow.

(upbeat marching music) By the end of 1933, membership of the Hitler Youth, the youth movement of the National Socialists, soared from 50,000 to 2,000,000.

(Lisa) There's this new regime.

It's speaking to the youth, it's dynamic, and the youth were attracted to it.

The young German boys were very keen to put on the uniform and to go on the different camping activities and sing the songs and all of those kinds of things.

(Christopher) It was exciting.

It was a chance to go out with friends to camp, play at being soldiers, and even the Social Democratic underground, which took reports on working-class families, could see that many young people found the whole process very fulfilling.

(solemn music) (Thomas S.) All these activities were mixed with ideological and political components, training the youth for their place in the people's community.

(Thomas B.)

The Hitler Youth in particular sought to make boys physically fit, to train them in the use of firearms, to indoctrinate them with nationalism.

(Lisa) And so the purpose of the youth group was indeed to toughen up young German boys and to make them really the foundations for the forthcoming army.

(speaking in German) The major turning point was in 1936.

(Christopher) From this point onwards, it was compulsory for all so-called Aryan children to become members.

(Lisa) And all other youth groups apart from the Hitler Youth were banned or had to dissolve themselves very quickly.

(narrator) The League of German Girls was the female equivalent to the Hitler Youth.

(Geraldine) And it was compulsory for girls aged 14 to 21.

There was another organization called the League of Young Girls, the Jungmdel, and that was for girls aged 10 to 14.

(Lisa) The League of German Girls was designed to bring all the nation's girls under its umbrella and, again, to inculcate them with Nazi ideology.

(Geraldine) The idea was that once girls had reached the age of 14, they were ready to be trained, to be educated in the roles of mothers and homemakers.

(narrator) Slowly, the Nazi youth programs drove a wedge between families.

(Julia) It was relentless.

There were activities all the time, and so the families felt their children had, in many ways, been taken away from them.

(Christopher) The Hitler Youth were encouraged to inform on their parents and also on their classroom teachers if they felt that these adults were not living up to the values of the Nazi dictatorship.

(Julia) And of course, this was part of Nazi doctrine, that the children did not belong to the families but to the state.

(Alessandro) The goal of the National Socialists was to change the whole structure of German society, and in this sense, colonizing the time of the population.

(crowd cheering) (narrator) Still, many Germans approved of these drastic changes.

(Julia) You saw Hitler putting his country back to work, restoring his country's self-confidence, giving them back pride after the humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles.

(Nicholas) What he offered over the next few years was an extraordinary odyssey, a whole number of diplomatic triumphs like nothing they'd ever experienced, restoring morale to the German people and honor to the German flag, at least that's how they saw it.

(narrator) The first of Germany's diplomatic triumphs took place here on October the 14th, 1933, at the League of Nations in Geneva.

Germany withdrew from both the League and the Disarmament Conference.

(foreign minister) "It is now clear that the Disarmament Conference will not fulfill what is its sole object, namely, general disarmament.

The German government is accordingly compelled to leave the Disarmament Conference."

(narrator) Hitler followed these actions with a plebiscite in which he received 95 percent support for the withdrawal.

(Alessandro) The plebiscite was, of course, overwhelmingly positive because the voting actions were overwhelmingly tampered with.

But it's a common opinion that, even without these manipulations, the plebiscite would have been successful.

(cheering) (ominous music) (narrator) At the beginning of June, 1934, President Hindenburg, in failing health, retired to his Prussian estate.

(Aristotle) President Hindenburg was a pillar of continuity between the Weimar Republic and the new regime.

And remember that Hitler does not have free reign over Germany.

He's under the supervision of Hindenburg.

(Thomas B.)

But I think Hindenburg is starting, quite clearly, to demonstrate signs of mental decline, and in that sense, his own ability to act as a check on Hitler's activities is increasingly restricted.

(narrator) The failing health of the President made the resolution of a growing issue with the SA more urgent.

(Aristotle) Ernst Rhm, the head of the SA, wants to turn the SA into the elite armed forces of Germany.

(grim music) And of course, that causes quite a lot of friction with the old armed forces, which are not necessarily pro-Nazi, they're not anti-Nazi, but they're not enthusiastically pro-Nazi.

(narrator) The President was head of the armed forces, and Hitler grew increasingly concerned by the prospect of a military coup if Hindenburg died.

(Aristotle) And Hitler came to the decision in June 1934 to put an end to the SA.

(Michael) Rhm served his purpose, as Hitler sees it.

"He's got us into power, he's helped us on the streets, he's browbeaten our opponents.

We don't need him now."

So in 1934, famously, the Night of the Long Knives, Rhm is removed and shot under the orders of Adolf Hitler.

(Alex) Almost a hundred people are murdered in the stormtrooper leadership along with a number of other potential oppositional forces and conservative leaders.

(narrator) Amongst those murdered were former Chancellor von Schleicher and Gustav von Kahr.

(Aristotle) So it wasn't just the SA, although the SA was the main target.

It was a number of political opponents that stood in the way to Hitler's assertion of full power over the party, over the regime, and very soon, over the whole of Germany.

(crowd chatter) (mellow music) (narrator) But Hitler was politically undamaged by the bloodletting.

(cheering) (Thomas B.)

Paradoxically, Hitler's popularity receives a boost after the Night of the Long Knives.

(Alex) Hitler was able to portray these events as a very narrow escape from a state of permanent revolution.

(Thomas B.)

The way in which Ernst Rhm and the other leaders of the SA are assassinated are seen as evidence of Hitler restoring order, Hitler being willing to execute even his old comrades within the National Socialist movement if that was in the interests of the nation and of the state.

(narrator) President Hindenburg sent Hitler a cable thanking him for rescuing the German people from a serious danger.

(dreary music) (narrator) On August 2nd, he died.

(Aristotle) "Luck" is a word that historians necessarily don't like, but it is very important in understanding how things turned out.

What if Hindenburg had lived longer?

(Thomas B.)

Hindenburg's death is extremely important in many ways in completing and closing the phase that we as historians term the seizure of power.

It's at that point that, legally and formally, the new job title of Fhrer, or leader, is bestowed upon Hitler.

(Aristotle) It was the point where Hitler was liberated from that pretense of constitutional order, and it is, in many ways, the beginning of the proper Nazi dictatorship.

(narrator) In January 1935, a plebiscite took place here, in the Saarland, which had been placed under British and French control in accordance with the Treaty of Versailles.

The choices were continuation of the status quo, union with France, or union with the Reich.

Just under 91 percent of the electorate chose the Reich.

(Thomas S.) The return of the Saar in 1935 was extremely popular and was seen as a kind of peaceful revision of the Versailles peace treaty.

(Aristotle) The most emotional part of the Nazi political message pretty much from the very first point was the revision of the Versailles Treaty.

(narrator) The return of the Saar was just the first step.

(Nicholas) It was a glorious march into the future, one thing after another, uninhibited by any foreign power.

(marching) (narrator) On March the 16th, 1935, Hitler announced the introduction of general military service.

Germany was preparing for war.

(planes rumbling) But it did not appear that the population at large cared.

(Aristotle) I think Hitler's popularity grew and grew and grew in the 1930s.

Don't forget, he came to power in 1933 promising end to austerity, jobs for everybody, the revision of the Versailles Treaty.

He delivered on all those.

(Michael) German policy under Hitler seemed to be working.

Unemployment was dropping very dramatically.

People are happier.

There's a general disposition that we've recovered from the horrors of the 1914-'18 war.

We're now a major player on the scene in Europe.

Germany is becoming great again.

(narrator) On September 15th, 1935, the swastika was made the national flag of Germany.

In just two short years, Germany had been transformed, all political opposition had been quashed, and all power lay with the Fhrer.

(Thomas B.)

Hitler stood at the zenith of a political system in which people were rewarded for coming up with the most radical ideas possible to please the Fhrer's own extremely radical visions of Germany's future.

There was no handbrake in the Nazi dictatorship, there was only the accelerator towards ever more radical policies.

(narrator) With Hitler and the Nazis' takeover of Germany complete, Europe was next.

(explosion) (dramatic music)