Living with Hitler

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

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

(Julia) Germany was in a really terrible state.

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

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

(Nicholas) This extraordinary messianic figure with his golden oratory.

(Lisa) 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.

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

This is the story of life in the Third Reich.

(Hitler speaking German) (crowd cheering) (narrator) 1936.

Hitler has been in power for three years and has transformed Germany.

The Third Reich is a one-party state.

The swastika, its flag.

The Hitler salute, its greeting.

(dark music) Ahead are years of diplomatic successes, territorial expansion, and the greatest war the world has ever known.

(sentimental music) The Berlin Summer Olympics of 1936 is well-remembered in the history of the Reich.

But the story of 1936 in Germany begins not on an athletics field but on the ski slopes.

The Winter Olympics of 1936 took place here, in the quaint Bavarian ski resort of Garmisch-Partenkirchen.

And it is an opportunity to brand the regime internationally.

The idea that so much has changed from 1933 onwards, that this defeated power of 1918 now has become this global power is very, very much admired at the time.

(narrator) Hitler opened the Games on February 6th.

They closed on the 16th.

And less than three weeks later, he sent troops into the Rhineland.

(Thomas Brodie) The Rhineland had been demilitarized ever since the Versailles Treaty of 1919.

German forces were not allowed to enter this zone.

(Thomas Neuhaus) France would have seen that as a potentially hostile act on the part of Germany.

(narrator) On March 7th, 1936, German troops crossed the Hohenzollern Bridge here in Cologne.

(Thomas Brodie) And they were entirely unopposed by local British or French forces.

That is a huge triumph for Hitler and does much to bolster his legitimacy.

(Thomas Schaarschmidt) Great Britain and France could have answered militarily, and they would certainly have succeeded.

(narrator) Those crossing the Rhine had carried sealed orders instructing them to turn back if challenged.

Hitler claimed that...

But they were not challenged.

Britain and France were unwilling to risk war.

German forces would never carry such orders again.

(Thomas Schaarschmidt) But in the following steps, there was always a certain mistrust from the German public how long would other nations tolerate these measures of the Nazi leadership?

(Aristotle) One of the constant themes we find in the public opinion reports which the Nazi Party and the Nazi regime meticulously collected was, "Yes, we want everything that Hitler has promised us.

We want the revision of the Versailles Treaty, but we don't want another war."

So the fact that Hitler was playing with fire, was getting away with it, a lot of Germans thought that Germany was heading towards a war.

(Alex) And this is inseparable from national socialism.

War and national socialism go hand in hand.

The Nazis have been gearing up for this ever since they've been in power.

(narrator) Hitler had been secretly building up the military since becoming chancellor, and by 1935 had reintroduced conscription in violation of the Treaty of Versailles.

But in August 1936, Hitler's military plans were made crystal clear with the commencement of the Four-Year Plan.

(Thomas Brodie) The Four-Year Plan, beginning in 1936, in many ways is a key moment in the economic history of the Third Reich.

It's the moment when Hitler and the Nazi state really put all their eggs in the basket of rearmament, preparing the German economy in many ways for war and for expansion.

(Michael) Hitler's sole driving ambition economically was to rearm.

He wanted Germany to be a strong, rearmed nation.

So the economy had to serve that purpose.

(Thomas Brodie) Germany's economic minister for the initial three years of the Nazi state, Hjalmar Schacht, he loses power at this point, and the Four-Year Plan is given over to Hermann Gring, right, who's very much not an academic economist.

He is a leading member of the Nazi state.

(Thomas Neuhaus) The main emphasis was on shifting to the production of more military goods and on making the German economy more self-sufficient and less reliant on imports from other parts of Europe and other parts of the world.

(Michael) Now, the workforce came second.

Wage rates, for example, they don't keep pace with inflation.

So the quality of life of Germans did not grow at the pace they had been led to expect.

(somber music) (narrator) Realizing the importance of keeping the German workforce content and in line, the German Workers Front had introduced the Strength Through Joy program, or Kraft durch Freude, in 1933.

By 1936, the program had over 30 million members.

One of the defining features of totalitarian regime is the blurring of the distinction between private and public life.

So the state is everywhere, invades every sphere of the life of people.

And one of the most successful-- successful in terms of popularity with the workers-- initiatives was the Strength Through Joy program.

(Lisa) The purpose of it was to try to bring the whole nation on side with the Nazi regime and with Nazi ideology.

But it was also done in a way that brought opportunities, in particular for the workers and the working classes, that they hadn't had access to before.

(Michael) If you work hard for the Fhrer, for Germany, these are the rewards that come your way as part of this great organization of German workers.

And the rewards were holidays, education for your children, medical care, social life, canteens, quality food.

What is there to dislike?

(Lisa) Other activities included bringing German high culture to the workers.

One example would be bringing German orchestras to factory shop floors so that the workers could hear a recital or a concert even in their factory.

(narrator) In 1934, over 2.3 million Germans had taken a Strength Through Joy holiday.

By 1938, that figure had risen to 10.3 million.

(Aristotle) It is the stick- and-the-carrot approach.

On the one hand, it keeps workers under control.

On the other hand, it offers them leisure activities, the opportunity to travel, the opportunity to take part in educational activities.

(Nicholas O'Shaughnessy) And this is part of the tragedy, but it's also part of the external propaganda of the Third Reich, the way they can bamboozle the world with the idea that they represent something new and wonderful in the great strides forward of the human race.

(narrator) But the Strength Through Joy program was not the only means of controlling the German population.

By 1936, Nazi Germany had a vast police network, and on June 17th, this network was centralized under the command of Heinrich Himmler.

(Michael) Heinrich Himmler is perhaps the most sinister of all those sinister members of the Nazi Party.

And Hitler can rely on him.

He very rarely gives Himmler instructions.

He lets him get on with it.

(Aristotle) Himmler becomes the head of a very powerful network in the Nazi regime that involves a number of operations.

It involves the SS and it involves the secret police, the Gestapo.

(Christopher) The Gestapo was the executive agent of Nazi terror.

It was responsible for discerning threats to the state, often working from informants or denunciations from ordinary members of the public.

(Aristotle) People very quickly came to believe that it was everywhere, it could hear everything.

It was an all-present monster of an organization.

We now know that the Gestapo was actually a relatively small and not particularly well-oiled organization.

(Alex) In 1937, there were 7,000 full-time Gestapo agents for 65 million Germans.

(Aristotle) And that was one of the major successes of Nazi propaganda, that it instilled the fear of something like the Gestapo, the idea that the regime is keeping an eye on everyone.

(Nicholas O'Shaughnessy) Propaganda is really effective.

People internalize the ideology.

If you can turn each citizen into a policeman, why have real policemen?

(shouting) (narrator) By 1936, the German education system had also become an important Nazi propaganda tool.

(Thomas Neuhaus) The Nazis really tried to get propaganda into all aspects of educational life, really.

A lot of schoolbooks were rewritten and reissued to fit Nazi narratives about race, for instance, or also about disability.

(Thomas Brodie) There were several horrendous mathematical problems where schoolchildren are encouraged to contemplate if it takes X number of Reichsmarks to support a mentally ill person in a care home, how many homes for young German families could we build with that money?

(Thomas Neuhaus) Students were taught what it meant to be Aryan, what it meant to be Nordic, what a Nordic skull looked like.

(Lisa) Geography textbooks portrayed Germany as a nation without space to show the whole concept of Lebensraum, or living space, that the Nazis were trying to achieve for a strong German nation that would be populous and would be able to expand.

So geography was taught in those terms.

(Thomas Neuhaus) Pupils were taught why Jews were evil.

Pupils were taught that in terms of racial signs, why they were supposedly racially inferior.

(narrator) In 1936, the German curriculum was also changed to include a minimum of two hours of physical education each day.

(Thomas Brodie) The Nazis thought it was absolutely crucial that the young be physically fit and athletic.

(Thomas Neuhaus) The main aim was to create a really strong German race, basically, that would be able to defend itself and produce good soldiers.

(Nicholas O'Shaughnessy) The result is that educational standards in Nazi Germany plummeted, so much so that the German Army was (unintelligible) about the problem of finding officer candidates, of finding people with a good enough education to be army officers.

(dramatic music) (narrator) But perhaps the most successful propaganda effort in the history of the Third Reich was the 1936 Berlin Summer Olympics.

(Julia) It was, in a way, the zenith of the whole Third Reich.

This was their big moment.

And Hitler and the Nazi regime wanted to showcase what they'd achieved to foreigners.

So they went to enormous pains to organize it beautifully and, of course, the Germans are very good at organizing.

(narrator) The Olympics opened on August 1st in a very sanitized Berlin.

(Julia) Everything looked absolutely spick and span.

All the anti-Semitic notices were taken away.

(Aristotle) The regime has emptied Berlin of any kind of social problems so that the world sees the best image of Germany in many ways.

(Julia) The propaganda was all pointing to showing Germany to be a forward-looking, brilliantly organized, brilliantly run country that welcomed foreigners.

And foreigners flocked to Berlin like they never had done before, and most of them went back pleasantly surprised by what they'd seen.

So to that extent, the propaganda really did work.

(dark music) (narrator) Germany also dominated the medal tally that year, with 33 gold medals and 89 medals in total.

(Julia) But one of the interesting aspects of this 1936 Olympics, Hitler's Games, as it were, was extraordinary success of the African American athlete, which, of course, was not part of Hitler's plan.

The crowds loved Jesse Owens.

The used to call "Owens!

Owens!"

when he came on.

But there were many other successful Black athletes.

After the Olympics, they were interviewed by the American press, and they would say, "Well, no, we didn't see any dirty Nazis.

We only saw kind Germans, and we weren't told to sit in the back of the bus."

(narrator) The Olympic stadium is still in regular use as home ground of the Hertha Berlin Football Club.

In the last weeks of the war, the SS used it as the site for the execution of 200 people, many of them teenagers labeled traitors.

If 1936 was the year that confirmed the Nazis' hold on power, then 1937 was a year of consolidation-- the consolidation of all true Germans into the people's community, the Volksgemeinschaft.

(Alessandro) The idea of the National Socialist Party was to create a national community and a unified people following the will of the Fhrer.

(Geraldine) The Volksgemeinschaft referred to a community that was united by their link according to blood and according to soil.

(Stephan) They said, "We have something in common that goes way beyond culture, language, or just identity, but that is something that is unchangeable."

(Thomas Schaarschmidt) On the one hand, it was an offer of integration even to those people who stood rather on the political sidelines and had been maybe members of the Social Democrats before.

They were offered to join the people's community as long as they were loyal to the system and worked according to the expectations.

On the other hand, large chunks were excluded.

(Aristotle) You can't acquire racial equalities which meant those who didn't belong to this racial group were excluded forever.

(narrator) Before 1937, two actions confirmed the racial ideology at the heart of National Socialism, and each, in their own way, told Germans what would be most important in the coming years.

(Dina) The first change that's introduced comes in 1935 with the famous Nuremberg Laws which really involve two laws, two directives.

(Lisa) The first one was called the Reich Citizenship Law, and this was the law that essentially took away Jews' status as citizens.

(Dina) Which means that only Germans who have German blood are full citizens of this new Reich.

(Lisa) And the second one was called the Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor, and that was the law that prohibited sexual relationships and marriage between Jews and Aryans.

(narrator) Announcing the laws here at the 1935 Nuremberg Rally, Hitler declared: (Geraldine) So the language that was used was based really around the concept that the German nation was a body, as in a physical human body, and the Jewish people were an illness.

What do you do with an illness?

You get rid of it.

You find a cure.

So these sorts of metaphors set up a series of "logical steps" that have to be taken in order to make the German nation, the body, healthy again.

(Lisa) Many German Jews actually thought that maybe they'd be in a better position, that now that the legal parameters and framework were put in place, maybe the violence would stop, but the ramifications of the laws, at least in terms of the way their compatriots came to see them, was, again, just to really drive a wedge, I suppose, between them and the rest of the population, really starting to make the difference, isolationism, and really segregation coming out of those laws once they were put in place.

(narrator) More than 400 racist and anti-Semitic decrees would follow during Hitler's reign.

The founding of Lebensborn, the fount of life, on December the 12th, 1935, also confirmed the racial ideology of National Socialism.

(Arnd) The Lebensborn homes were homes where a superior race was to be created, a superior so-called Nordic or Aryan, as the Nazis said, race.

Women who complied to the racial criteria of the Nazis were selected in order to bear children, in order to raise children in Lebensborn homes even if these children were illegitimate.

So the homes were hotbeds of racial reproducing.

(narrator) The program began as a welfare institution for the wives of SS officers and also accepted unmarried Aryan women so they could raise racially pure children in secret, away from social stigma.

(children chattering) In 1939, membership of Lebensborn stood at 8,000, of which 3,500 were SS leaders.

(Geraldine) Hitler promised to undo thousands of years of civilization and to produce a race of people predominantly referring to men who were physically strong and fit, blindly loyal, unquestioning.

Of course, I think we're quite familiar with the stereotype of the blond-haired, blue-eyed Aryan.

And this notion of racial difference was based very much on pseudoscience.

(Thomas Neuhaus) There is effectively no real biological basis for much of what they say and, actually, a lot of Nazi racial science is really self-contradictory.

Many of the high-ranking Nazi elites did not fit the mold of what it meant to be Aryan.

In fact, quite a few of them were overweight, quite a few of them looked quite stumpy, had physical defects in some cases as well.

On the other hand, of course, the term "Aryan" was so broad and vague that I think it was more or less an acknowledged fact of life that the vast majority of people would not actually fit this mold.

(dark music) (narrator) A further irony of life in the Third Reich is that the majority of Germans were Christian.

By 1939, two-thirds of the German population were signed up to at least one of the Nazi Party's mass organizations.

But a greater number, 94 percent, still identified as members of either the Protestant or Catholic Church.

Christianity was obviously a central part of life for a lot of Germans.

Germany was largely a Christian country.

(Thomas Brodie) Most Germans have their children baptized, most of them get married in church, and most of them, when somebody dies, have a Christian funeral as well.

In terms of how that coexisted with Nazism, again, it's a very complex picture.

Christianity in Hitler, or say, the mind of Himmler as well, was not something that would necessarily, in their view, help prepare the German people psychologically for war.

(Thomas Neuhaus) But they knew that the German people were, in general, a Christian people and knew that it was unrealistic to expect the Germans to immediately abandon Christianity overnight.

(Thomas Schaarschmidt) They tried to influence the Christian religious life in the sense that it would fit into the Nazis' racist people's community, but not in a sense of eradicating Christianity altogether.

(Thomas Neuhaus) I think one of the most important ideas that you see most frequently in Nazi propaganda is actually the idea that Jesus Christ was crucified by Jews and that that justified, supposedly, the idea that Jews were evil.

(Julia) And in every congregation, there was a Nazi minder who would be listening to the sermon and report the pastor if he tried to preach against Nazi doctrine.

(Thomas Brodie) But I would argue the big picture is that the Nazi state wants Christians, as it were, to be able to support the Nazi regime.

It wants, on the whole, to avoid excessive conflict between church and state, especially during the years of the Second World War when preserving the unity of the home front was the key priority.

(melancholic music) (narrator) In 1937, Hitler's architect, Albert Speer, was given the task of transforming Berlin from the sprawling metropolis that it was into Germania, a gleaming new capital for the German people.

(Aristotle) And these plans captured this essential contradiction at the heart of National Socialism.

On the one hand, this traditionalism, this love of the German culture in a very old-fashioned way; on the other hand, this cult of modernity, this cult of technology, this cult of building new, building from scratch, starting a new kind of Germany.

(narrator) The vast People's Hall, close to the Reichstag, would've been the largest enclosed space in the world, with a dome 16 times larger than that of St. Peter's in the Vatican.

(Michael) Speer's relationship to Hitler is fascinating, because Hitler saw him as an artist, and Speer served him very well in that regard.

He produced lots of models.

Hitler loved models.

He played with them for hours.

People joked about him behind his back.

But Speer catered for this, and it's said that Speer could get to Hitler in a way no other minister could.

(Aristotle) These plans did not really come to fruition.

They would be completed after the end of the Second World War.

Of course, it never did.

(Arnd) But because of the large-scale structure, people like Albert Speer, and Hitler as well, hoped that the very destruction of Germany at the end of the war would pave the way for a new Nazi architecture, for new Nazi cities and towns.

But of course, this was an illusion.

(narrator) 1937 was also a year of exhibitions designed to instruct the people's community on proper German values.

(Aristotle) In 1937, there were two art exhibitions that were organized in Munich, and they're very much deliberately connected.

If you like, they're a mirror image of each other.

On the one hand, you have the exhibition of German art, a celebration of proper German, "Aryan" art.

(Thomas Brodie) Which is supposed to sort of glorify the Aryan body, glorify the German nation, as it were.

(Aristotle) And on the other hand, you had the exhibition of the so-called "degenerate" art, everything that the Nazi regime despised.

(Thomas Brodie) Degenerate art refers to all works of art which were deemed inappropriate, not ideologically sound, not aesthetically proper, and in many ways, refers to the works produced by artists in the Weimar Republic.

(Thomas Neuhaus) And all that art was collected together with commentary basically explaining why it was degenerate.

(Aristotle) Internationalist, Bolshevik, Jewish.

These were kind of adjectives that were being used by the Nazis almost interchangeably to attack artists of a modern artistic complexion.

And what is the point of these exhibitions?

These exhibitions are there to celebrate how the Nazi regime "cleansed" German art of all these alien, harmful influences, like it "cleansed" the German community, the Volksgemeinschaft, of all those "harmful" influences of the left.

(narrator) By the end of four months, the Great German Art Exhibition attracted 600,000 visitors.

By contrast, over two million people visited the Degenerate Art exhibition, ironically making the exhibition one of the most successful cultural events staged during the Third Reich.

And despite the profound changes that had occurred, Nazi Germany was still a popular destination for international tourists.

(Julia) The Germans hated internationalism, but they did understand the power of getting foreigners on site.

So, they set up the Reich Committee for Tourism, and Germany was presented as this wonderful, fun-loving country where the people will welcome you and charm you.

The Rhineland was very popular with the British because it was very easy to get to.

They used to drive up the Rhine, looking at the castles and the lovely villages and drinking the wine.

Bavaria was very popular, of course, too.

The beautiful scenery and the picturesque villages, and the women in their dirndls, and there were beer gardens.

And people were very welcoming.

There was a vulnerability in all the accounts that I read in diaries and letters.

The Germans wanted to be liked, and they were desperate for approval from the British and the Americans, particularly.

(narrator) In 1938, as tourists flocked to Germany in droves, Hitler's attention turned abroad.

(dark music) On the 12th of March, soldiers of the 8th Army of the Wehrmacht crossed the border into Austria in an event known as the Anschluss.

(Aristotle) The annexation of Austria in 1938, a very important moment, in some respects, the first peak of Hitler's popularity.

(Thomas Brodie) The Anschluss is seen by many Germans as indicative of the Nazi regime's restoration of Germany's greatness, which again occurred without any resistance by Britain or France.

(narrator) Rather than facing any opposition, the German forces were met with cheers as they occupied the country.

The fact that he was pulling away the restrictions of the Versailles treaty one by one without war was very much appreciated by the Germans.

(Thomas Brodie) And for Hitler as well, it's of course, of tremendous personal meaning, because he was born in Austria and grew up there.

(narrator) On March the 15th, after visiting his hometown of Braunau am Inn, Hitler arrived here, in Vienna, to a roaring crowd.

(Aristotle) The imagery of the Anschluss, Hitler parading Vienna, and enthusiastic crowds lining the street on both sides.

It is definitely a high point in the Hitler myth during the time.

(narrator) In a speech to 200,000 ecstatic Austrians gathered at the Heldenplatz, Hitler declared: A plebiscite retroactively confirming the annexation took place on the 10th of April.

99.08 percent of Germans and 99.75 percent of Austrians voted for the Anschluss.

(Stephan) It was appreciated by most of the Austrians and most of the Germans.

The two countries united in something that people actually wanted.

(dramatic music) (narrator) In the wake of the Anschluss, Germany took control of Austria's gold reserves, four times greater than those of the Reich, and widespread anti-Jewish measures began at once.

In the aftermath, so many Viennese Jews committed suicide that the city's gas company temporarily suspended supply to Jewish households.

The Saar, a remilitarized Rhineland, and now Austria had been incorporated into the Reich.

But Hitler wasn't finished yet.

(Aristotle) In fact, I would say that Hitler made a step change in foreign policy from 1938, which is the time when Germany starts amassing territories.

(Lisa) This whole idea of the myth, this kind of whole ethos and aura that surrounded Hitler, and he simply just became more and more popular through a succession of foreign policies.

(Thomas Brodie) These had all driven the Hitler myth to new heights, as it were.

And Hitler's own personal popularity, therefore, relied heavily upon success.

He needed successes to keep his charismatic legitimacy going.

(Aristotle) After the annexation of Austria, Hitler set his eyes on another easy bit of territory that he could claim.

(narrator) On September 12th, at the 1938 Nuremberg Rally, Hitler told those assembled: (Thomas Neuhaus) The Sudetenland was an area in Czechoslovakia which bordered Germany and contained a population of quite a lot of ethnic Germans, and because of that, there had been calls to unite all these ethnic Germans into a bigger Germany.

(Aristotle) So in the spring and particularly summer of 1938, Hitler is building up tension with Czechoslovakia.

It should be remembered that Czechoslovakia is, by that time, an island of democracy in Central Eastern Europe.

So he demands the annexation of this part of Czechoslovakia.

Or else, there could be an escalation.

(Thomas Neuhaus) A lot of people across Europe, including in Germany, were very concerned that this would lead to a war, because other European powers would not let Hitler do that.

(Thomas Brodie) You need to remember, most German people don't want another world war, right, despite Nazi propaganda.

They remember the losses of the First World War.

This is something they want to avoid.

-Hip hip... -Hooray!

(narrator) As tensions simmered all over Europe, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain flew to Germany to meet with Hitler.

A series of negotiations followed, culminating in the Munich Conference on the 29th of September, 1938.

(Aristotle) Britain, France, but also Italy is part of that conference, and the goal is to buy peace at almost any price.

(Thomas Brodie) And the compromise which is reached is that the majority ethnic German areas of the so-called Sudetenland would be given to the Reich, and that the remainder of Czechoslovakia would then remain as an independent polity.

(Arnd) All these annexations, this territorial expansion of the Third Reich, did not lead to a major war, as many people had predicted.

(Stephan) The Western Allies said, "Well, we'll just accept it."

And this was something that the German public just loved.

Hitler did this without a gunshot fired.

Everyone thought he's a great foreign politician, a great statesman, and a huge, successful leader.

(narrator) Upon his return from Munich, Chamberlain declared: (eerie music) With war narrowly avoided and the Sudetenland in Hitler's possession, people across Europe breathed a sigh of relief.

(Thomas Brodie) But Hitler is privately extremely annoyed that Chamberlain, this "umbrella politician," as he termed him, was greeted with such enthusiasm by Bavarians as somebody who had helped avoid a war between the major powers.

(chanting) (narrator) This sense of peace did not last long.

On the 10th of November, 1938, a little over a month after the Munich Agreement, a fearsome pogrom was unleashed on the Jewish population of Germany: -Kristallnacht -Kristallnacht is an aggressive, violent, devastating, traumatic event that expands across Germany.

(Thomas Brodie) It happened in response to the assassination of a German diplomat in Paris by a Polish Jewish man.

(Aristotle) And that of course happened, but it was far from a spontaneous event.

(Lisa) It was orchestrated by Goebbels, the propaganda minister.

What he tried to do was create a spontaneous reaction of the German people.

But in fact, it was a very carefully orchestrated event.

(Thomas Brodie) And in this pogrom, many Jews are killed.

Thousands more are terrorized and beaten up.

Jewish businesses are destroyed, and a vast majority of Germany's synagogues have petrol poured on them and are set alight.

And in its aftermath, about 30,000 Jewish men are sent to concentration camps.

(Alex) This is another key turning point.

Only after the November pogroms of 1938 do we actually see Jews being sent to concentration camps in large numbers.

That was the very first time.

(Lisa) It became absolutely clear that it was going to be a very bleak, a very horrific, and a very devastating future for Germany's Jews, from this point on.

(dark music) (Aristotle) Did it go according to plan?

No, it didn't.

In fact, Hitler was not happy about it being a rowdy, violent event.

Hitler wanted this to be an outburst against the Jewish community, but he didn't want, necessarily, to reach that kind of level of violence.

(Lisa) As far as the rest of the population was concerned, they were very dismayed by the extent of the disregard for law and order and the extent of the violence.

So it didn't sit very comfortably with the German population as well.

(Aristotle) Now, we have to be very clear here.

Hitler and other people did not object to the actual message of Kristallnacht.

The Jews had no place in German society.

But they objected to the way in which this was organized.

(narrator) But once again, Hitler was politically unscathed by the violence.

He has this semi-god image, for many people.

And when anything went wrong-- for instance, Kristallnacht-- people said, "Hitler wouldn't have known about this.

He would never have let that happen.

It's those terrible people around him."

(dramatic music) (narrator) In the end, 267 synagogues were burned down, 91 Jews were killed, and 20 percent of Germany's male Jewish population were incarcerated.

By the end of the year, more than half of Germany's Jewish population had left the country.

(Alex) The tragic circumstance is that those Jews who experienced most support from their neighbors-- so those Jews who experienced the least anti-Semitism during these years-- were the most likely to actually remain in Germany and ultimately be murdered.

(narrator) The sense of calm obtained from the Munich Agreement was further shaken in 1939.

(Aristotle) If the plan with the Munich Conference was to appease Hitler, it did not appease Hitler.

(Thomas Brodie) Of course, Hitler rips up the treaty within months and he sends in tanks into the rest of Czechoslovakia in early 1939.

(narrator) On March 15th, 1939, Hitler sent German forces into the remainder of Czechoslovakia, dividing the country into the protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia in the west and the Slovak Republic in the east.

The invasion of Czechoslovakia demolished the policy of appeasement and united public opinion in Britain and France against Germany.

On March 31st, 1939, the two nations announced they would intervene in any case of military aggression against Poland.

(Aristotle) Now, where does Poland come into the equation?

Well, if you look at the map that the Versailles treaty had created, you had essentially created two Germanies.

There is the bulk of Germany, and there is a little bit of Germany, the East Prussian part of Germany, separated by the fated Polish Corridor.

That Polish Corridor featured one big city, called Danzig.

(Thomas Neuhaus) There were various ethnic Germans living there.

And a lot of Nazi propaganda for some years effectively had said that it was an aim of Germany to unite ethnic Germans, to unite German speakers, and that this Polish Corridor was effectively preventing Germany from achieving that aim.

(Aristotle) And by 1938, '39, the writing is pretty much on the wall.

It's just a question of time.

The mobilization is there.

It is clear that Hitler has more or less taken a decision.

It's a question of how he can do it without antagonizing foreign powers.

(narrator) In August 1939, in the clearest indication that war was imminent, rationing was introduced in Germany.

(Lisa) Generally, people accepted the rationing scheme, although with grumbles and complaints, but they sort of accepted it, nevertheless.

There was a memory of the First World War, and Hitler as well was quite careful not to replicate this.

During the last winter of the First World War, they called it the Turnip Winter.

People were literally starving, and turnips, which previously had been regarded as fodder, were what people were dependent on if they were eating anything at all.

So the point of rationing was for Germany to be much more prepared for however long this war would last.

(narrator) Initially, most foodstuffs were rationed, together with clothing, shoes, leather, and soap.

(Lisa) The availability of butter, for example, had been reduced quite drastically and there was the substitute of inferior fats, and of course, people didn't like that.

But it was sort of better than nothing after a while.

(narrator) At the end of August 1939, a nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union was signed, bringing the war one step closer to reality.

(Aristotle) Hitler doesn't want to end up in a multiple-war situation, and the nonaggression pact takes away a big fear, if you like, that somehow, the Soviet Union would attack Germany as it was attacking Poland.

Now, of course, what Nazi propaganda is doing is building up a different kind of narrative.

(Thomas Brodie) The Nazi state is very careful to constantly stress that it does not want another major conflict.

It's a defensive war.

They say that, you know, "We had to invade Poland because the Poles were massacring ethnic Germans."

(Thomas Neuhaus) (unintelligible) false flag operations.

Germans had actually pretended to be Polish soldiers attacking German stations, German territories.

(Aristotle) So the attack on Poland is presented to the German public as a defensive action.

Germany is provoked by Poland.

Poland is rearming.

Poland has got the guarantee of the British and the French.

And Poland is mistreating the German minority, which is really what matters.

(narrator) On September 1st, one and a half million German soldiers, with air and naval support, invaded Poland.

On the 3rd of September, 1939, Britain and France declared war on Germany.

The Second World War had begun.

(Michael) Now, the war wasn't popular in 1939.

It became popular when they started to win.

But people worried about the war, including the military.

Many Germans were surprised.

As late as the 3rd of September, 1939, there's still hope that Britain and France would, in the end, shy away from the war.

And when war really started, there was no widespread enthusiasm, contrary to 1914.

(Julia) A lot of Germans felt very vulnerable and still very insecure.

They weren't very happy about war being declared.

They were resigned to it.

They weren't as enthusiastic as they're often portrayed.

(Nicholas O'Shaughnessy) Sir Nevile Henderson, the British ambassador to Berlin, describes leaving Berlin to very sad crowds.

Very apprehensive.

They didn't want war.

The war had to be sold to them, and it was sold to them by this whole series of dynamic victories, starting with the fall of Poland within a few weeks.

(explosions) (narrator) On September 28th, the last Polish garrison surrendered, here, in Warsaw.

A stunning victory that was as fast as it was brutal.

(Aristotle) And that's of course the moment where Hitler stops being the peacetime hero who destroys the Versailles treaty without firing a single gunshot, and he kind of steps up the gear.

(Lisa) And with the very swift victory over Poland, it almost sort of seemed that there was nothing to lose, only something to gain.

(Julia) It was exactly what Hitler had promised them.

Germans were on the march and they were winning.

(Thomas Neuhaus) There are some really interesting diary entries, for instance, where a young teenaged girl comments on the German invasion of Poland and says, "This is great.

Hitler's displaying his military genius here.

He's like Frederick the Great."

(tense music) (narrator) Following its defeat, Poland was split between Soviet and German control, in accordance with the nonaggression pact.

Brutality ensued.

Ghettos were set up to contain Poland's 3.5 million Jews.

(Alex) In the ghettos in occupied Poland, tens of thousands of people starved to death.

This was very much intentional.

This was intended by the German occupation, firstly because of their disregard for human life in Eastern Europe, and secondly, in order to feed the German population and to maintain a relatively high level of sustenance for the German population throughout the war.

In occupied Poland alone, we have some 600 ghettos.

In the Warsaw ghetto, living conditions were a huge disaster, and even prior to the deportations that started in summer 1942, we have thousands dying every month of diseases of malnourishment.

It is a genocide prior to the actual extermination.

(narrator) Between October 1940 and July 1942, an estimated 92,000 Jewish prisoners in the Warsaw ghetto died of starvation, exposure, or disease, and throughout all of occupied Poland's ghettos, an estimated 500,000 died.

But in Germany, the immediate impact of the war was slight.

Between September 1939 and May 1940, it was easy to forget that there even was a war.

(Julia) Life was surprisingly normal.

Germany wasn't put on a total war footing.

Yes, there was rationing, and there was always somebody jangling a box, expecting you to contribute.

But life was pretty much all right.

(Alessandro) The German population didn't suffer much in the first phases of the war.

The regime was quite good in avoiding the fear of scarcity, for instance, of food and resources that there was in World War I.

(Michael) If you look at the rationing figures, for example, bread is not rationed until very late on.

Meat, fat, butter, milk, they decline in production and in consumption, but not that significantly until 1942.

People aren't starving in Germany until very late in the war.

(Thomas Schaarschmidt) Certain changes occurred with blackouts in the city and training for the air raid defenses.

(Thomas Brodie) The Nazi regime is very concerned about the threat to "morale" posed by enemy bombing, and so it makes sure that air raid shelters are provided to people.

(Thomas Schaarschmidt) And the public was confronted with the first lists of killed soldiers in the campaign against Poland.

But apart from that, a strange sense of normality pervades until 1942.

(narrator) And so, except for those in occupied territories, life went on.

No major engagements had occurred with Britain or France, and the Allied bombing efforts had been contained to German shipping.

(explosion) And then, in May 1940, the phony war came to an end.

German forces stormed into Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and France.

In the 20 months after the fall of Poland, eight European countries would be overrun by the German blitzkrieg.

(dramatic music) (Nicholas O'Shaughnessy) The fall of France, the fall of the Netherlands, the fall of Norway.

There's a long sequence of triumphs for several years, and every population loves victory.

So they swallowed their doubts.

And Hitler was really the walking definition of charisma.

(Alex) I think one could in many respects say that 1940 was the high point of Hitler's popularity and German support for the war.

(Nicholas O'Shaughnessy) He was elevated to a figure who is beyond human.

A cult, definitely a cult.

(Aristotle) And I think, from that point onward, it's a bit difficult to maintain those heights.

(narrator) What followed would be the most complete fall of any leader and any empire.

(bright music)