How the Third Reich Self-Destructed – Explained! DD
In the year of the German Revolution, Hitler was made Chancellor of Germany. This allowed the Nazi regime to seize complete power. The Wall Street Crash, the Reichstag Fire, and the death of Ernst von Rath all enabled the Nazis to further their tyranny. German military rearmament was prioritized, and in the year of the Wehrmacht, it saw its reincarnation following the disarmament after World War I.
Britain and France turned a blind eye to this contravention of the Versailles Treaty. The German people were excited by the prospect of the country becoming great again. Exploiting all aspects of the media, Joseph Goebbels masterminded the slick propaganda which was fed to the population. Goebbels’ great insight was that the best propaganda is disguised as something else. It’s carried on the back of entertainment.
Coupled with this, the violent persecution of all those opposed to the regime became progressively worse. A strong, powerful street presence, uniformed, marching men and boys, and a lot of them. The repetitive power of violent, brutal street theatre when it came to dealing with opposition. Terror played a very important part in the dictatorship throughout its entire length. No political dissent would be.
Tolerated. The Nazi Party delivered on their promise of higher employment, and although the German nation was not oblivious to the violence and persecution, they allowed it to continue in the hope that Hitler would restore their pride. The only real long-term aims were to stay in power, win back territory for Germany and to win back respect.
I knew there was a lot of unrest, but I didn’t think it would blossom into an all-out war. The Second World War would see the height of Nazi popularity, but it would also be their ultimate downfall. His idea is to refight the First World War, but on a better basis. His aim, very early on, is to conquer Eastern Europe.
Once it became clear that victory was not going to be easy, then a great many German people realised that this had been a gamble and that they’d lost. He maintained his faith because it was a matter of will. He’d come to believe that he was a messiah blessed by providence. He just believed that there was something of the divine about him.
To fully understand the outbreak of World War II, we have to look back to the year of the Nazi reoccupation of land lost from the Versailles Treaty. One of the fundamental principles of the GFSI had been national self-determination. Every nation should have its state. So the Habsburg monarchy had been broken up.
The Austrians, Hungarians, the Czechs, Yugoslavs, they got their own. Why should this be denied to the Germans? Hitler certainly sets out an agenda for moving into the Rhineland, which had become a demilitarized zone under the terms of the Versailles Treaty. German soldiers, again breaking a treaty, marched into the demilitarized Rhineland.
The Rhineland was sovereign German territory. It’s a re-militarization, it’s having military installations on it, it had been occupied up to the year of the war. The deal was that the Germans would have it under their own control, that the occupation forces would leave, but that there would be no military installations in it.
In the year of the war, Hitler sends his troops into the Rhineland and big military show. On March the twelfth of the year, the German army marched into Austria. They were met with cheering crowds as they crossed the border. Hitler’s appeal was growing rapidly. The Anschluss is popular with a lot of people in Austria, perhaps not as many as it looks because the previous regime of Dollfuss and Schuschnigg had done the work for Hitler by banning the left in the year of the war. The Social Democrats had been banned, they were underground, so there’s no opposition really in Austria either, I mean it’s a dictatorship as well.
Hitler said that he had no desire on any territory which had not had a historical memory of a German presence. The Germans were a pan-European tribe. They were not a nation in a country as the rest of us really are. They were everywhere. They were not in the Iberian Peninsula. They were not in the British Isles. But they were everywhere else, stretching deep into Russia.
So There’s no resistance in Europe to the German takeover of German-speaking Austria. German demand for the incorporation of two million German speakers on the western boundaries of Czechoslovakia in the year of the Thirty-Eight is exceeded, too, because it fulfills that principle. On September the thirtieth of the year, Germany, France, Britain and Italy signed the Munich Agreement, which attempted to appease Hitler’s designs on Czechoslovakia following the Anschluss of Austria.
Meanwhile at Munich, misguided statesmen were lulled into believing that Hitler would cage his stormtroopers in return for a sizable hunk of Czechoslovakia. They signed away the Sudetenland in a move to appease a rattlesnake. A rattlesnake who, having once blotted himself on the rich food of another nation’s land, would become ravenously hungry again and again.
The agreement handed Hitler the Sudetenland area of Czechoslovakia, which left the country weakened, and on March sixteenth, nineteen thirty-nine, Germany took control of the country. I think it may be true that Hitler felt he had been cheated of his war over the Sudetenland. He had a peculiar hatred for the Czechs, I’m not entirely sure why, maybe it was just Czechs and Poles as Slavs.
It seems as if he may have felt denied a war in the autumn of the year of the war, at a time when he felt his potential adversaries were too weak really. The re-militarization, the Rhineland, the Anschluss of Austria in the year of the Thirty-Eight, 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.
The sequence of territory gains made by the Nazis in the late nineteen thirties won back the majority of land lost by the signing of the Versailles Treaty after the First World War. Winning the foreign policy successes of the year of the war without having to resort to war was a major gain that was appreciated by a lot of people and restored German pride in a big way.
The turning point only comes in March of the year of the Thirty-Eight when Hitler marches into the rest of Czechoslovakia, which is inhabited not by Germans, but by Czechs. At that point, there’s a general realization in political elites in other countries in Europe that he’s after more than simply recreating a kind of German nation-state.
Hitler gambled on the fact they’d get away with doing these things without war, and his gambling instincts served him well. The Britain, France, the Western democracies did not respond militarily, for all kinds of reasons. The real gamble was in the year of the war, when it came to the move against Poland.
Signed in nineteen thirty-nine in Moscow, the Non-Aggression Pact would establish Nazi Germany and Russia as allies. By then, he knew he could get away with it, or he did, by early August, after the extraordinary turnaround in the Reich’s policy of signing a mutual non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union.
That was the moment at which the field was cleared for Hitler to move against Poland. Germany invades Poland and the Free State of Danzig. The efforts and hopes of diplomats for peaceful settlement are transformed into the roar of gunfire. Warsaw is bombed, blasted, and shelled. Poland is in ruin. Where the gamble went wrong was that Britain and France honored their treaty obligations to Poland. Hitler had never thought they would do that.
The eve of war was upon the German nation. It would be a conflict which would bring about the demise of the Nazi regime, but it would also facilitate mass genocide, brutal murder and bloodshed on a scale which no one could have imagined possible. Territory gains made by the Nazi regime were carried out with minimum of bloodshed and resistance.
The German nation was buoyant. Their Fuhrer was delivering. War has struck again. However, on September first, nineteen thirty-nine, Germany invaded Poland. With regard to the Treaty of Versailles, this attack proved a step too far for Britain and the Allies. have to tell you now, this country is at war with Germany.
The Second World War had commenced. The wrong of Versailles had been righted, they hadn’t got Alsace-Lorraine back, they could live without them. The Polish Corridor was the big issue territorially. They had that, they had Austria, people would have been very happy to leave it at that. But the war was not concluded.
And you do get complaints even in the autumn of the year of the war, this war has been going on too long. In the winter of nineteen thirty-nine, Hitler would unleash his blitzkrieg upon Western Europe, and over the following months, Germany would go on to conquer many more countries. one victory after another, the fall of France, the fall of Belgium, the fall of Holland, the fall of Norway, all of this is a kind of ecstasy.
I think the euphoria is partly that now it really is all over and we’ve done really well. People were pretty pleased with that, and Hitler, it had been done under his leadership so he got a lot of credit for that. That 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.
Very rapid conquest with relatively Little bloodshed, not much loss on the German side, very short war. All of this was treated with huge enthusiasm by the German people, partly because they then thought the war would come to an end. was certainly enough for the overwhelming majority of Germans. I think that all those crowds you see in the news fields waving flags and screaming, it’s all true. I mean, they couldn’t believe it that in a few weeks they’d defeated an enemy they couldn’t defeat in four years of gruelling war.
Hitler was one of the few people in Germany who welcomed another war. He wasn’t scared, the First World War had made him somebody. But for other Germans, two million German men had been killed during the First World War, and an awful lot had been wounded, you just had to look at the maimed ex-servicemen on the streets.
So it was a terrible prospect for an awful lot of people. In a drive as speedy as that to the channel, Nazi units pushed southward and rapidly outflanked the famous French Maginot Line. Following the French surrender, Hitler arranged for the armistice between Germany and France to be signed in the same train carriage, in the same location which twenty-two years previously had been used for the signing of the armistice of nineteen eighteen.
Reaching the English Channel in May nineteen forty, and outmanoeuvring the British, causing the retreat to Dunkirk, the German army looked to be the far superior aggressor. Britain was on the brink of seeking terms with Germany, but Winston Churchill argued that nations which went down fighting rose again, but those which surrendered tamely were finished.
Hitler gave a rather empty speech offering peace terms which weren’t very specified to Britain. And when Churchill rejected them, it was universal outrage and incomprehension in Germany. Churchill knew that a peace with Germany at that point would mean German control over Britain would get greater and greater. He would probably be ousted. A fascist like Mosley would become the prime minister, that it would be, in effect, a surrender in stages.
He was quite right to reject this very vague peace offer. But an interesting aspect of this is his view of Churchill whom he respected as a fellow artist. And for a long time his plan for Churchill in the event of German victory was to just leave him in a country house where he could paint and not spring him up like all the others or put him in a concentration camp.
Trying to bomb Britain into submission over the winter of the year of the war was a huge miscalculation. They did not have the offensive air power to do it. Hello, America. This is Edward Morrow speaking from London. There were more German planes over the coast of Britain today than at any time since the war began.
Anti-aircraft guns were in action along the southeast coast today. Fought in the air, the Battle of Britain would start on July tenth and would finish on October thirty-first, nineteen forty. I was speaking to Captain Eric Brown who interrogated Goering. That Goering at Nuremberg told him that the Battle of Britain was a draw.
I said to him, what are your views on the outcome of the Battle of Britain? And he said, I think it was a draw. And I said, how did you arrive at that conclusion? He said, well, if you look at the analysis of the final weeks of the Battle of Britain, the last week we were in the ascendancy.
In other words, we had less pilot and aircraft casualties than the Brits. Now, if you look at the analysis, this is perfectly true. Although the British had claimed victory, Hitler’s popularity within Germany was still strong. The Nazi commanders were all firmly behind Hitler. However, on May tenth, nineteen forty, one would take action which would signal fractures within the regime.
view. Hitler retained his charismatic control over the second rank of Nazi leaders, Goering, Goebbels, and so on, during the war. Hess was the only exception because he was really eased out of the central decision-making circles of Nazism and thought he’d try and get back in a rather muddle-headed way.
One of the great mysteries of World War II, there is some speculation as to whether Hitler in fact authorized it. Because if we take Hitler as actually wanting a negotiated peace with Britain, not a conquest, it would actually make sense. In the most bizarre and astounding event of the war so far, Rudolf Hess, number three Nazi, seen here going about his activities as confidant and chief party leader for the Nazi warlord Hitler, is now a prisoner in Scotland after a mysterious solo flight from Germany.
The pest had simply got into his head, but to restore his status with Hitler, he would fly to Britain and negotiate a peace. It was very easy for the Nazi media to project Hess as deluded. Indeed, what he did was remarkable. Firstly, he learned to fly, specifically for this purpose. The Nazi leader took off from Augsburg and headed straight for western Scotland, where an old friend of his, the Duke of Hamilton, has an estate.
His mission? Who knows? He flew and crash landed on the estate of the Duke of Hamilton in Scotland. The choice of landing was significant because Hamilton had actually been very sympathetic to Germany before the war and some suggested a kind of crypto fashion to himself. But by this stage he is very anxious to clean up his act. So he delivers Hess straight to the authorities.
Hitler was furious because, of course, he didn’t know about it. Furious particularly because it was just before the invasion of the Soviet Union. As Goebbels and the Nazi propaganda machine were covering themselves from the Hess debacle, Hitler was implementing the start of another battle.
Led by arrogance and self-belief, he would soon embark on the largest invasion in the history of warfare. The attack would stretch along a three thousand kilometre front and would send four million soldiers into Soviet territory. It would mark the beginning of the pivotal phase in deciding the victory of the war, which would see Nazi popularity plummet in Germany. It would bring death and destruction to millions of people.
At Nineteen forty had seen the height of Hitler and the Nazi regime’s popularity within Germany. The Battle of Britain had been unsuccessful, but support was still strong, despite Hesse’s flight to Scotland. What would come next, however, would be a battle led by prejudice and vanity on the part of Hitler. His own self-belief convinced him to march on Moscow and conquer Russia. The very campaign that Charles XII and Napoleon had failed to achieve.
In a sudden flu, Germany’s military might has been thrown against her former ally, Russia, in a gigantic attack by land as well as by air, along a two thousand mile front from the Arctic to the Black Sea. first, he was lucky. His self-confidence paid off. He took the Rhineland and walked into Austria. All that built up his self-confidence, not only with the people, but with himself.
This was the dangerous thing. There are two reasons why Hitler attacked the Soviet Union. First of all, it was a way of bringing Britain to terms because he thought already in the year of the war that he wasn’t going to conquer Britain by force. He was going to have to leave Britain totally isolated without any allies at all. If he conquered the Soviet Union, the British surely would see sense that he’d have the entire continent against him.
Secondly, his derision of the Bolsheviks, them being inherently incompetent, and his racial dismissal of the Russians. He believed it would collapse like a house of cards. The Bolshevik state was rotten to the core, you had only to kick the door in and the whole edifice would come crumbling down, that’s what they thought.
And I think flushed with success from the blitzkrieg in Western Europe, they thought all they had to do was attack. In a way, it was a bit silly actually, because that had been the mentality of the year of Hitler, with a bit of luck if he had gone ill. He may have succeeded in temporarily conquering Russia, Today, American news agencies report Russia is strongly counterattacking, and that less than one-fiftieth of Russia’s vast area has been invaded.
These pictures show them the beginning of the blitz that turned into a siege. There was some encouragement in that Stalin had done a great deal of damage to his armed forces through the purges of the mid-later one-thirty. But how Hitler. but we’d never police it for the rest of his time. I don’t think he’d even begun to think it through.
Panzer troops in action. From the Baltic to the Black Sea, great clashes between Russian and German tank squadrons have been reported. In the autumn of one-thirty, the Germans were on course just cutting through butter, going to take Moscow, going to take Leningrad. And they didn’t, and they were stopped.
Operation Barbarossa would be a definitive turning point in the fortunes of the Nazi regime. The march on Moscow was the end of what had started as a successful campaign. Hitler had gained many territories in Eastern Europe, but it was the harsh Soviet winter and the tough belligerence of the Red Army that would finally see the Nazis defeated and home support of the regime finally turned.
Here, apparently, the Germans got their first sight of the Russian scorched-earth tactics. Scorched-earth tactics that American reporters say should be even more effective now that winter has set in. And Hitler’s photogenic army must face General Snow and General Mud. Once you get into the year of the war, they’re now fighting on quite a number of fronts.
Army leave is being cancelled, so people aren’t getting home. Food rationing is getting more stringent. People are becoming depressed and disillusioned. It was not just the German population who were becoming despondent. Many officers in the German army were also starting to question their Fuhrer’s actions.
Throughout the war, there were attempts They wanted to assassinate Hitler, many of them, orchestrated by anti-Hitler generals and soldiers, but they couldn’t, none of them, manage it. All the former Social Democrats and Communists, I’d say a third of the electorate in the last free election in the year of the war, they had effectively been brought in line, their resistance movements mostly distributing leaflets and trying to keep the flame going, as it were. They’d all been suppressed by the Gestapo.
It was very difficult to resist in the Third Reich because denunciation was widespread. If somebody overheard you or got a clue that, you know, you were doing X, Y and Z, then they would go down to Gestapo headquarters and turn you in. So the only people who could really resist as a group were the senior army officers with a few conservative politicians attached.
They’re the ones who then prepared the assassination of Hitler as things were beginning to go really seriously wrong in the year of the war. to… Klaus von Stauffenberg was a general in the German army who had been injured serving in North Africa, losing his right hand, two fingers on the left and also his left eye.
Wolfenberg was the most unlikely assassin. He’d been seriously injured. He could prime the bomb only with great difficulty and so on, but nobody else could be found to do it. And he was determined now that his German patriotism could only be expressed by destroying Hitler. Hitler would destroy Germany. If you were a patriot, your job was to destroy Hitler.
Although the bomb von Stauffenberg detonated killed four people, Hitler was shielded by a solid oak table and was only left with minor injuries. Von Stauffenberg was found guilty of high treason and subsequently executed. Having survived the assassination attempt, Adolf Hitler was still convinced that the war was for winning, even though the German nation suspected the worst.
He’s always hoping, when he looks back at history, that something will happen, something will happen politically, the alliance will fall apart, or Germany will invent an amazing new weapon. But somehow or other, you can pluck victory from the jaws of defeat, just as his great hero, Frederick the Great, had done. I’m not sure there was ever a point, actually, at which Hitler says, I recognise it, I’ve failed, we’re going to be defeated.
The battle on the Eastern Front turned into a long war of attrition. The German army was ill-prepared for this, and the Russian army with the far greater resource would in the year of the war finally defeat the attacking German army. The paradox of the attack eastwards was that the more territory Hitler gained, greater was the Jewish population he acquired.
The war changed everything, and Germany’s victories across Europe and then in the East After June of the year of the war, from having a population of six hundred thousand Jews in the year of the war, the number of Jewish people under the Reich’s administrative military control soared to many millions of people.
Hitler’s problem, self-inflicted problem, is he attacks Poland and the largest concentration of European Jews falls into his hands. And as he moves elsewhere in Eastern Europe, more Jews come under his rule. The original idea had been to expel German Jews from Germany. And Jews were expelled into Poland, for example.
But that doesn’t solve the problem once you’ve invaded Poland. The Madagascar Plan was an idea to establish a Jewish colony on the African island of Madagascar. It was subsequently shelved in the year of the war. I don’t think anybody ever asked Madagascar to settle a Jewish colony there to ship out European Jews, but that was, I think, was never really going to come to anything.
There had been talk about enforced deportations of a captive Jewish population out of Germany, out of Europe. How were they going to do that? That by its very nature would have been a brutal, murderous exercise. The Wannsee Conference was a meeting of Nazi officials in Wannsee, a suburb of Berlin, to establish a final solution to the Jewish problem.
They formalized the operation of the Holocaust. While it was already underway, while it had already started, people like Eichmann, Heydrich showed up to take the decisions in a chillingly managerial way. No need for Hitler to be present. They didn’t need him. They knew Hitler would sanction what they were going to do.
The extermination camps would eventually operate around the clock. In the last acts of this brutal conflict, Adolf Hitler would unleash one final command that would order the futile resistance of his party faithful. War on the Eastern Front was a battle too far. It signalled the end for the Nazi regime. The German nation was heavily rationed, and those dwelling in the urban centers were facing ever-increasing bombing raids by the Allied forces. Hitler, however, remained defiant.
Later on, Hitler lived in a fantasy world of his own. Even in the last days of the war, he was conjuring up in his own mind imaginary armies, secret weapons, extraordinary make-believe scenarios. He maintained his… It’s faith. Because it was a matter of will. The the the thirty-fourth party rally was called Triumph of the Will.
And Hitler and Goebbels, to a very great extent, and some other close followers, maintained this belief that their will would prevail. Nobody had the nerve to try to disabuse Hitler of his fantasies, even in the last days. In the autumn of the year of the war, a group of generals come to Hitler’s headquarters.
The generals go in and say to Hitler, we are convinced that the war is lost. They’re in there for about, I don’t know, an hour and a half or something. And they come out again, their eyes shining, saying, the Fuhrer has convinced us that we can win the war. By then, he’d already decided that the German people had betrayed him.
They had proved unworthy of their great destiny and deserved the fate that was descending upon them, extraordinary mental and moral universe to inhabit. June, the sixth, of the following year, saw the D-Day landings and would be the start of the Allied invasion of occupied Western Europe. Germany found they were retreating from all fronts as the Red Army marched from the east. Close to defeat, Hitler issued what became known as the Nero Decree. On March the nineteenth, nineteen forty-five, an order was sent out that all German infrastructures must be destroyed to prevent the Allies utilizing them as they advanced.
It also called for every last house and street to be fought for. It happened. In small villages, which had had nothing to do with the war, they had to stand and fight when American tanks came. That kind of thing was just absolutely… So he blamed reverses and defeats on the lack of willpower in his generals, not on the lack of material or the superiority of the enemy.
It had terrible repercussions for Germans, because it meant that the whole of Germany had to be invaded, fought over, occupied by foreign troops in a way that had not happened in the First World War, because Hitler wouldn’t surrender. In the closing stages of the war, a large number of the Nazi faithful realized that the war was effectively lost. This resulted in mass suicides throughout Germany.
There’s this feeling of Gotterdammerung, the twilight of the gods, we all die together because life after the Reich isn’t worth living. Now that’s an extraordinary sensation. And I think one can’t fully explain it. You have to understand the extraordinarily rigid hold the regime had on people. A great many of the party faithful committed suicide because they simply couldn’t face the idea of German defeat. They’d been fed propaganda for years that defeat would mean the partition of Germany, it might mean the deliberate impoverishment, there were rumours that all German males would be castrated, and all kinds of extraordinary things went around in the year of
Historians have tried to quantify the numbers, but in the ghastly chaos of the Third Reich in its final days, mass murder, nihilistic orgies of killing by the Nazi state in its death throes, it’s hard to know what the actual figures really were. Knowing that the Soviets were advancing swiftly towards his bunker, Hitler gave his last will and testament, making Joseph Goebbels as Reich Chancellor and naming no one as his successor as Führer.
The next day, April thirtieth, nineteen forty-five, Hitler shot himself. Two of Hitler’s immediate circle, Joseph Goebbels and Martin Bormann, remained loyal to him right to the end. They stayed in the bunker in Berlin. For Goebbels, there was nowhere else to go. He felt that if the Third Reich collapsed, if Hitler was killed, that was it, everything was over.
An extraordinary sense of apocalypse seemed to overtake them, and they felt that that was the only course of action open to them. his sons, on May first, Joseph Goebbels and his wife Magda, committed suicide. But before doing so, killed their six children by drugging them and then poisoning them with cyanide.
Both Himmler and Goering would commit suicide as well, but this was not before they were interrogated by the Allies. Captain Erich Braun, posted to Germany to look for jet wind tunnels, was tasked with the job of identifying Himmler and was able to interrogate Goering. Himmler was arrested near the Danish border with false papers.
The warrant officer phoned headquarters at Lüneburg and said, we’ve picked up somebody who we think might be Himmler. Could you come up and identify him? You said, when you saw Himmler in civil life, that he used to walk with a slightly peculiar gait. And could you come up and try and identify this guy? So I went up to Badenstett. As soon as I walked in, I knew it was Himmler.
I mean, even without making him walk. Absolute coward. I think he was frightened out of his life. Always trying to evade anything that directly threatened him. Accompanied by these two SS men, Heinrich Himmler, most hated man in Europe, was captured by British troops outside this town. Concealed in Himmler’s mouth was a tiny vial of deadly poison. While being examined, he swallowed it.
Goering was in American custody and Erich was able to ask him key questions about Nazi aircraft strategy. He was charismatic, very intelligent. He came out of World War I with great honour. Had a huge reputation in Germany. A good man who went very wrong. He was corrupted by the system he joined. And he lost all his qualities of honour.
And began to really lust for power and luxury. And that, of course, was his total downfall. At Lüneburg, Germany, before a British military court, the greatest mass murder trial in history. These Nazis were guards at notorious Belsen concentration camp, where four million prisoners died. The end of the war signaled the beginning of peace for many across Europe and the rest of the world.
There was a tangible sense of relief in the air, but as occupied land was liberated, the full horror of the Nazi regime was revealed. Erich Braun was part of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen. Piles of dead bodies. Piles of walking dead, really. Just a horror story. Now Baleson, the human slaughterhouse where numberless victims were once burned to death, is itself put to the torch.
Nearby, Nazi women guards are lined up for questioning. He wanted me to interrogate a camp commandant who was called Josef Kramer. And the lady camp commandant, Erma Grese. Kramer’s chief sadist was Irma Greysa, in curls, whose name struck terror into the hearts of Belsen’s inmates. She’s the worst human being I’ve ever met.
Cruelty was her trade. There was nothing too cruel for this woman to do. When it came to interrogating her, I asked her if she had her time over again. Would she do all this? She refused to answer. After about four or five times like this, she suddenly leapt to her feet and gave the Nazi salute. Shouted, Heil Hitler.
Sat down and refused to talk. But we executed the lot. You can hardly defend yourself when outside the window there’s a pile of bodies as high as the ceiling in a pit. Newsreel films of the atrocities at Belsen shocked the world. Even death for Kramer and his gang cannot avenge the crimes of the Beasts of Belsen. What started as Hitler’s strong anti-Semitic beliefs in the wake of World War I, ended as what we now know as the Holocaust.
Six million Jews were murdered along with tens of thousands of gypsies, homosexuals, communists, mentally ill and the physically disabled. In the aftermath of the war, the Allied forces would soon stake their own territorial claims, which would leave the conquered nation divided. Germany in the year of Hitler was an extraordinary mess.
Sixty percent of its urban area had been obliterated from the air. Germany was occupied by the Allied powers, the Soviet Union, the French, British and Americans, very heavy military occupation. It was economically impoverished. It was difficult to see, in fact, in the year of Hitler, where Germany was going to go, how Germans were going to survive.
Widespread hunger, even starvation in places, There were all kinds of measures to stop any recrudescence of Nazism. Nazi laws are revoked. There’s a re-education effort of trying to educate Germans in the evils of Nazism. But in a sense, that’s all less important than the fact that Nazism had brought in the end nothing but death and destruction.
After the war, the nation of Germany would be split in two. To the east, the Soviet-occupied area became the German Democratic Republic. The area to the west, which Britain, France and the US occupied, became the Federal Republic of Germany. This division was most notably illustrated in Berlin. The Berlin Wall was erected in the year of the war, and would be a chilling visual reminder of a nation divided.
I was sent back to Germany in the mid-nineteen fifties. I found it difficult to reform the relationship with some of them whom I knew what they had done in the war. But in general, I realized that some of them had been led like sheep to the slaughter. I think post-war Germany is a great epic in the act of remembrance and admission.
For a nation to confront its guilt like that is extraordinary because a lot of other nations have a lot of other skeletons in the cupboard. Hitler remains a source of intrigue for many people throughout the world. Hitler. exerts a kind of fascination that you could never really imagine. We spend so much time writing books about, programmes about Hitler and so on. I think Hitler would have been amazed by the extent of historical attention paid to him.
You always get young bloods who will be attracted to the style of the Nazi regime. They’ve actually given us the image not of themselves but of their ideals. It is an extraordinary story how this nondescript man, stateless, radical politician with a whole lot of wacky ideas in the the nineteen-twenties could suddenly become Germanist dictator, then unleash the largest war and embark on the biggest crime the world has ever known. And I think that the public, seventy years on, is still fascinated by those paradoxes.
Today, Germany is a nation united. The economic miracle that West Germany experienced in the mid-fifties supported by the Marshall Plan gave them the basis to develop a strong economy and political stability. The real miracle, however, should be credited to the people of Germany. By confronting their own brutal history, they have allowed the world to learn from the mistakes made in their past.
Although persecution, hatred and war are still a global problem, Germany has sanctioned its history to be used as the marker of a cruelty which should never again be repeated.