More than any other man or any combination of events, Adolf Hitler was the cause of the Second World War. War, for its own sake, was his driving obsession. Prolonged peace, he once said, would make a nation rot.
Hitler never made a secret of his aims. He committed them to print and repeated them in countless speeches. He triumphed because the world was blind to the signals he constantly sent.
raised. Time and again Hitler could have been stopped by his fellow Germans at first, by foreign leaders later. Not until 1939 did the Allied leaders move to Chechnya and by then it was too late to blot The First World War ended in 1918 with Germany's surrender in response to an offer of an honourable peace by the victors Britain, France and America. Early next year, the victorious powers met at Versailles to draw up the terms of the treaties. Driven by public opinion in their own countries, the Allied leaders were in a vindictive mood when they assembled in the Hall of Mirrors.
They held Germany responsible for the war. They demanded safety and retribution. They stripped Germany of her colonial empire, reduced her armed forces to a mere 100,000, distributed pieces of her territory to the Allies, to her neighbors and ordered Germany to pay huge sums in reparations, compensation for the damage done by German aggression.
The German delegates had expected to be allowed to negotiate. Instead, they were summoned and given a week to accept, or suffer invasion and occupation. They signed. But Germans of every political persuasion were bitter. Versailles created a resentment that was to shape German politics for 20 years.
We felt in the German people that this treaty was dictated by hate on the other side. By tremendous hate, especially by the French, but partly, I'm sure, by British people too, and by the American people too. You feel so helpless when the victors trample on a loser who's already very rich on the ground, you see.
And this feeling was... And one of the reasons that later on, much later on, the people looked at Hitler because he brought another possibility for the future in their mind. Ten years later, in 1929, it was a campaign against further payment of reparations that brought the ex-corporal Adolf Hitler from local obscurity to nationwide prominence.
Reparations was already a national obsession and Hitler easily persuaded his crowds that they were being ruined by the peace treaties as a whole. It was fixed we should pay until 1983. 1983. And this was incredible, huh? And so the first idea, of course, was that all these payments should be stopped by Germany.
Definitely stopped. Not paying any more. The End The idea that allied injustice was the principal cause of German misery was a myth.
But poverty was real enough, and in 1923 hyperinflation wiped out the savings of millions of middle class Germans. Six years later, the Great Depression struck Germany, and confidence in parliamentary democracy largely collapsed. That was Hitler's chance. I can say Germany was a very bad year until Hitler came in 1933. Everybody was poor.
There were, I think, about seven million unemployed people. It was no hope. And Hitler, I must say that he was the first man who, with his speeches and his ideas, he gave hope to the people.
The First Man Hitler promised bread and jobs, but what captured his audiences was his aggressive self-confidence, his conviction that he could bring about national revival by overthrowing the existing order of things. We are still intolerant! I have set myself one goal, namely to drive the 30 parties out of Germany. No! No!
No! the Nazis who promised to overthrow parliamentary government. The Communist Party had made big gains in the cities, especially in Berlin, and the bourgeoisie was terrified of revolution. My feeling was we are just on our way to become a communist state, you see. And that was, in my opinion, the reason to to take again a gun in the hand and to fight it.
Because we had the feeling, young as we were, the elder ones have enough of the war and they don't want to fight. They take everything, accepted everything. And we, youngers, we wanted to fight.
In Germany in the early 1930s there was civil war on the streets. Nazis fought communists in all the big towns. We will fight and defend and so on.
As the democratic parties lost ground, the future became a choice between extremes, the far left and the far right. The far left and the far right. We young people saw the choice before us as communism or national socialism. It was now make or break for Germany. We've had it at the communist win.
So there was only one answer. National socialism. We must give it a chance. The road to war. Curiously, it was a series of general elections that brought the Nazis within reach of government.
No more than a splinter group in the Reichstag in 1928, they became in 1932 the biggest single party, with a third of the popular vote. That was their peak. What they lacked was an overall majority, and later that year they lost two million votes.
What saved Hitler from probable oblivion was a deal with the conservatives. Each side despised the other, each expected to come out on top. The conservatives got nearly all the cabinet posts, but Hitler was chancellor and he made that his right-hand man, Hermann Göring, was in charge of the police.
It soon became clear that the conservatives had underestimated Hitler. Someone set fire to the Reichstag. Hitler pronounced it a communist plot.
He suspended all constitutional rights, arrested 5,000 communists and socialists, and declared what became a permanent state of emergency. The dictatorship was in place. What followed was summed up in the word Gleichschaltung, forcible coordination, which required systematic and public...
Big acts of brutality, like the burning of books. In Berlin, like in other universities in Germany, un-German and un-Sithian books were collected by the students and burned publicly. Nazi stormtroopers now enjoyed the protection of the state, and one of their favorite excesses, the persecution of Jews, was institutionalized. The Jews were driven out of business and the professions, and driven out of Germany.
Those that stayed ended up in concentration camps. The first camp opened in March 1933. It was built at a place called Dachau. Labour liberates, said the slogan on the gate.
Josef Felder was a socialist who voted against Hitler in the last free vote in the Reichstag. He was one of thousands of men and women whose names had been marked down during the Nazis'struggle for power. His fellow inmates were writers, mayors, Jews, trade unionists, social democrats and communists.
Felder was kept in chains in the punishment block. He was fed every fourth day. He remembers that one of those feeding days happened to be Christmas Eve. On December 24th, I was able to...
On Christmas Eve, the guards came to my cell door, which I could reach even though my legs were in irons, and they showed me a plate of Bavarian sausages with potato salad, and said,''What's that? '' This will be a nice gallows meal for you, but you don't deserve it, you traitor. And then the chief guard came carrying a rope and showed me how I could hang myself from the overhead pipes.
We'll give you an hour, he said. Then we'll come and do it ourselves. He came back twice during the night.
It was psychological pressure to try and make me commit suicide. Hitler now put the country to work, chiefly on public projects like roads. He formed a compulsory labor corps.
Unemployment fell dramatically. The six-year-old man is to show a giant mountain of our strength, our strength, our ability and our power. German workers to the mountain!
To the mountain! Hitler soon energized a nation that longed for decisive leadership. He showed an uncanny understanding of the attraction to the masses of a combination of force and success. His personal appeal was greatest among women and boys.
Günther Roos, then aged 12, remembers seeing the Führer in the flesh. I was so moved, I was speechless. I couldn't shout higher. I just stood there and looked.
And then the most incredible thing happened to me. Hitler looked deep into my eyes. I can't describe this moment with words.
After that, when he was gone, afterwards I stood there for half a minute or so, hypnotized. Then I turned to my friends and said, he looked deep into my eyes. The fascinating thing is that they said, no, he looked into my eyes.
It was a mass hypnosis. Good to roll. Bruce described his great day in his diary, and later that night the family spoke of their glimpse of the leader as a profound religious experience.
One of us said, it must have been like this 2,000 years ago when Jesus said to his disciples, leave your home and family and follow me. This was precisely the feeling I had. Hitler, now commander-in-chief, demanded an oath of loyalty sworn by every soldier.
In 1935, he revealed the existence of a German air force and announced that conscription would bring the army to five times the limits permitted by Versailles. Adolf Hitler! Adolf Hitler!
To justify his actions, he argued that universal discipleship somewhat, foreseen by the peace treaty, had never taken place. Unbedingten Gehorsam leisten! Unbedingten Gehorsam leisten! It was said by the Allies, the Allies of the First World War, I mean, that Germany must disarm first, and then they would follow with a disarmament. This was said obviously and clearly by the Allies.
But years and years passed away and nothing happened concerning the disarmament of the Allied side. On the contrary, the Czechs, the Poles, armed, aided by the French, and inserting Germany and so what was left? Germany was in the middle, you see?
So, because the others had broken the promise for disarmament, obviously they had broken this promise, they hadn't disarmed, no? So Germany was forced to rearm. Very simple. Britain and France protested against Germany's realignment. That was all they did.
A few weeks later, Britain, without consulting the French, concluded a naval agreement with Germany. It recognized Germany's right to build a powerful modern navy, from battleships to U-boats. Hitler hoped his agreement with the British would prove to be a breakthrough. He wanted a settlement with a passive Britain that would allow him to pursue his long-term plan of expansion to the East.
Herbert Friedrichs was now a member of the German naval staff. He loved England. That was a funny thing, you see. He loved everything which was might.
And he loved England because it was for, in his opinion, the expression of the building an empire as Hitler perhaps wanted to. He wanted to crush the Russians. He hoped the British would do nothing against it.
And I think that during those years when Hitler said, I hate the Russians and that's the greatest danger for Europe. England must always be a friend of us, or become a friend of us. That's what he meant.
The Road to War will continue in a moment. The Road to War. On a Saturday morning in March 1936, a German battalion entered Cologne and occupied both banks of the Rhine. The whole zone had been out of bounds to German soldiers since the war.
Wilhelm Meger, then aged 18, was on his way to his sister's wedding when he spotted German troops on the bridge. At 12 o'clock, the soldiers came together. At midday, the battalion fell in and marched across the bridge onto the left bank.
I was carried away by the military music. Full of enthusiasm, I followed the battalion, pushing my bike. Unknown to anybody else, the troops had orders to retreat if France's vastly greater forces moved.
Neither France nor Britain interfered, prompting Hitler to remark, the world belongs to the man with guts. I got to the left bank. I suddenly remembered the wedding.
I'd missed the lunch, but I got there just in time. time for coffee. Why are you so late? I said, I've got news. Our troops have occupied Cologne.
Great excitement and pleasure, especially from the younger people. We all drank an enthusiastic toast. In fact, we drank several.
Five months after the occupation of the Rhineland, Germany staged the Olympic Games in Berlin. Hitler's successful defiance of Britain and France had strengthened his prestige at home. confidence must have been boosted when the athletes from France, the country he had just humiliated, gave him the Hitler salute. The games were a public relations trouble.
triumph. Droves of white doves projected an image of Germany at peace with itself and at peace with the world. In 1937 Hitler explained that the German to his generals the grand design he had outlined years before in his book Mein Kampf.
He told them his defiance of the Treaty of Versailles was merely the overture. His real objective was the creation by conquest of an empire in the East. eastern part of Europe in which the German master race would subject the present inhabitants, Poles, Russians, Slavs and Jews to slavery.
His vision is said to have appalled some of his generals but no empire, said Hitler, had ever been built without force. Hitler followed a so-called plan in stages. What he had in mind was to become the dominant power in Central Europe, then to get the hegemony over the European continent, then in a next stage to conquer a living space in the Soviet Union, and in a fourth stage he had in mind to well to fight against the United States and to conquer a maritime Empire as well Hitler's first chance to expand into Central Europe presented itself in Austria where fervent local Nazis were exploiting ancient ties of language and culture and agitating for unshows or union with the fatherland this was expressly forbidden by the treaties lest Germany become too strong.
In an effort to hold back the tide, Austrian Chancellor Schoeschnig had asked Britain to guarantee his country's independence. When Britain declined, he proposed a plebiscite or referendum. Hitler ordered his generals to prepare to march on Vienna, but he had one nagging doubt. Would Britain intervene? The German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop was visiting London.
To him the Fuhrer sent an emissary, a young Austrian Nazi, Reinhard Spitz was summoned to the chancellery. I stood alone in front of the big Fuhrer and Hitler immediately said, I need now a messenger for Redentrop because I must know what the British would do if I enter in Austria. What is necessary because there is already a certain disorder and Schuschnitz and then he got furious and said, Shoshnik tried to cheat me with a faked election and babysit, and I'm not going to admit that. I must know what the British would do. Spitzey returned from London with Ribbentrop's assurance in writing that Britain would not interfere.
He reported to the leader. I entered in the room and greeted him in a normal way. Then we said, sit down, I'm going to read that. Oh, that's fine. Good, so we can trust the British, we'll do nothing.
He said, well, the whole embassy has the same opinion. Nothing will happen. That's good, and then he told me, so tomorrow we are going to Austria. Spitz's reward was a place in the motorcade as the Führer returned to the land of his birth. Hitler was full of emotion, and sometimes he nearly had tears in his eyes.
It was without any doubt the greatest moment in his life. The enormous crowds welcomed Hitler to the Heldenplatz, the main square in Vienna. The peace treaties have reduced Austria's importance... the world and most of its citizens longed to be part of Germany's national revival. Ingeborg Swinney, then aged 20, was one of thousands transfixed by the Fuhrer.
When he came in, you could see people were in tears and some even fainted. And I personally, I think all the others too, So in Hitler, our savior. Almost like that. Because we in Austria had such a bad life, very sad life.
It was high unemployment and people were Many people had nothing to eat. So it was really like in the last minute that Hitler came in, brought the people food and work. I now report before the German face the entry of my home into the German Reich. Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!
Sieg Heil! One of the reasons why we supported Hitler was all about the truth, how they behaved, how they lived. Amongst us, very, very many lived in Vienna at this time.
First of all, it was their behavior and their appearance. They looked so dirty and with their long hairs and rather strange amongst us. You know, they didn't really belong to Vienna in a way.
But they had the power. All the banks and all the shops, everything was in Jewish hands. The road to war will continue in a moment on...
To war. As they had done in Germany, the Nazis were able to build on the ingrained anti-Semitism of so many Austrians. The treatment of Jews in Vienna was savage. Within a day or two, Jews were rounded up in the streets.
Elderly Jews, including my father, were forced to scrub the streets on their knees to wash off the slogans from the Kshushnik plebiscite. When it happened, I happened to see it. My father was there on his knees, surrounded by a group of 30 or 40 people.
In brown shirts and also passers-by who yelled and clapped and shouted, Jewish speak, and it went on for about 20 to 25 minutes. And he was pushed away. Of course, thousands more were doing the same, forced to do the same things in Vienna over the next two or three days.
You see, it went on and on. Later, Edward Arie's father died of starvation in a concentration camp. The annexation of Austria opened the door to the next objective Czechoslovakia, where the Versailles Treaty had left three and a half... million Germans on the Czech side of the border.
Encouraged by the example of the Austrians, Sudeten Germans as they were called agitated to join the Reich and for Hitler their grievances provided the pretext for a short sharp war of conquest. He ordered his generals to prepare a lightning strike. Nazi propagandists busily spooked up the crisis. German newsreels showed persecuted Sudeten Germans fleeing to the fatherland. Lüge!
Verrat und Wortbruch der Tschechen! Wir schwören die Gefahr eines allgemeinen Krieges heraus! What the world was to call the Munich crisis brought Europe to the brink of war and Britain's Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain to Hitler's home at Berchtesgaden. Hitler wanted armed conflict. The Czechs wanted to fight with British and French support.
Chamberlain was determined to arrange concessions and save the peace. At the height of the negotiations, Hitler was struck by doubts about the martial spirit of his people. Hitler had the glorious idea to let a brigade of tanks, a whole division of tanks pass through the center of Berlin and he would have had wished enthusiasm of the Berlinese people and shouting and content, but nobody was in the street.
Everybody went home. Poor old women looked a bit, then they went away. It was a complete disaster for Hitler.
And Hitler looked a bit and said, with this people I can't lead a war. The fear of a general war was shared by sections of the aristocracy and the upper classes, notably by men in key positions in the army and the foreign service. They believed that Hitler could be overthrown if his demands met with greater resistance in Britain and France.
Hans von Herbert, then an attache in Moscow, was one of a group that planned to arrest the Chancellor as soon as he gave the final order to invade Czechoslovakia. I consider this my duty as a good German to try everything to prevent Hitler to start a second world war. The idea was to convince the British and the French not to give in to Hitler. But unfortunately, all what we told the British in London and in Moscow, and also what we told the French, did not induce the French and the English to take a firm stand. Finally, in Munich, they gave in.
The conspiracy collapsed when Chamberlain and the French showed once again they were not prepared to stand up to Hitler. Instead, they compelled Czech Slovakia to hand over the Sudeten area without a fight. Hitler's gains included the elaborate Czech frontier defenses, large supplies of coal, and three and a half million new Germans.
But Hitler was ungrateful, as Reinhard Spitzit, here revisiting the building where the Munich Agreement was signed, recalls. Hitler didn't like this Munich conference because he had the feeling... that he was cheated of his little war, smashing Czechoslovakia, and Hitler was very much annoyed by this sort of democratic conversation. He wasn't impressed by Chamberlain and he had the feeling that Britain has gone to the dogs, that it's in the hand of capitalists, Jews, Democrats, liberals and so on, no more empire spirit and he thought that Britain is not. In the shape and has not the will to defend the empire in an energetic, decisive way.
What made headlines outside Germany was a piece of paper supposedly promising peace for our time. Both Chamberlain and Hitler had signed it. But according to Spitze, only one of them took it seriously.
When Hitler and Rymtok stepped out from this building, I was following them, and I listened to their conversation. Rimtrop complained about the ridiculous piece of paper that Hitler had signed together with Chamberlain. Hitler said, don't bother. This piece of paper has no importance at all.
And then I heard and I was convinced that Hitler did not intend to keep the Munich Agreement. In March 1939, Hitler tore it up. German troops occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia.
This time, there was no welcome for the Germans. It was an act of pure, unprovoked aggression. Czechoslovakia was an independent foreign country shorn of its German-speaking districts five months before. When he entered Prague, he said, within a few weeks, nobody will talk about it. Well, I don't say that he meant this.
It was a way of talking. But he thought that the British would forget. And he forgot that that was the turning point, this moment. Then he enslaved other nations and didn't unite Germans. And from that very moment he became an imperialist.
Hitler's unopposed conquest of Czechoslovakia altered the balance of power in Europe. The Czech army of 30 divisions was disbanded, its aircraft, tanks and weapons used to re-equip the units of the Wehrmacht, as was Czechoslovakia's impressive armaments industry. The Road to War Next target was Poland. Again, there was a ready-made pretext Hitler could use.
Versailles had deprived Germany of the city of Danzig, and the Polish corridor, giving Poland access to the sea, had cut off East Prussia from the Reich. But those were secondary considerations. Poland was to be a launching pad for Hitler's historic confrontation with the Soviet Union.
Because if he wanted to win war with the Soviet Union, to win a living space in the East, to win a living space in the East, Hitler needed a common frontier with the Soviet Union. He could get this with his own hands. of the Poles allowed the German army right of passage.
But he could also get this, and this of course is what happened, if he conquered Poland, then he would not only have a common frontier with the Soviet Union, but a base from which to launch his attack. In Britain, Neville Chamberlain had experienced an abrupt awakening. Convinced that Hitler must be stopped, he offered a guarantee of Polish independence. Distance, however, made the guarantee worthless without a military alliance with the Soviet Union. So in August, an Anglo-French delegation set off by sea to negotiate with the Russians.
On the British side, at least, it was a half-hearted enterprise, but it jolted Hitler into action. It came to a crisis when Hitler got the news that the French and the British were negotiating with the Soviets about the treaty, anti-German treaty. Then he got nervous.
He thought these three powers against me is a little bit too much and then he started to put pressure on the embassy in Moscow and also on the negotiations in Berlin and said you must come to a positive end. Hitler now pulled off the greatest and most cynical diplomatic coup of his career. He sent his foreign minister to Moscow to do a deal with Stalin, whose country he planned later to destroy.
Hans von Herbert was in the Ribbentrop team. Neither the British nor French could believe that Hitler and Stalin, who were like fire and water, would come together. They didn't realize how dangerous the offers of Hitler were, because Hitler could offer... to the Soviet Union all what they wanted. Practically, he offered to Stalin all what the Soviet Union had lost after the first world war, the Baltic states and parts of Poland.
And so it was a wonderful deal for Stalin. It was also a wonderful deal for Hitler. With Stalin in the Nazi camp, Poland was isolated. and effectively defenseless.
With violence and fraud, the Germans from the Polish state area should be chased for the first time. In a constantly growing number, they flee from the Polish terror in the protection of the Reich. In faithful connection with our brothers in the East, all of Germany stands in readiness.
Hitler spent most of the summer at Berchtesgaden, his country home. His ambassador in London had warned him that Britain would fight over Poland. Hitler ignored him. His course was set on war.
He told his generals that the Western leaders would back down. I saw them at Munich, he said. Our opponents are little worms. The answer of Hitler was always the same. England will do everything bad against us what is possible.
Break diplomatic relations and so on. But one thing England would not do, enter a war. And that he said. Despite England had told the Polish government months ago, you stay on your side if you will be attacked. As Hitler told the story, the Second World War began at Gliwice, a small town on the German-Polish border.
To prove that Poland fired first and started the war, a unit of SS men mounted a sham attack on a German... radio station. As evidence, they left behind them corpses in Polish uniforms, actually the inmates of concentration camps.
So Hitler was able to claim the speech to the Reichstag next day that Polish aggression had caused the war. On the first of September Hitler launched his Blitzkrieg from prepared positions all along the border. It was to be a quick, easy, local war. This was a local war to get back old German territories. Nobody thought England or France would get involved because we completely trusted in the genius of the Führer, who was always proclaiming his love of peace.
We were also convinced that, as a veteran of the First World War, the Führer would never start a war on two fronts. On September the 3rd at 9 a.m., Britain's ambassador in Berlin, Sir Neville Henderson, delivered his government's ultimatum to Germany. He was received by the chief interpreter, Paul Schmidt. And he read the document to me. It was an ultimatum.
with the sentence that said, unless the German government declares its readiness to withdraw their troops to the German-Polish frontier, and unless they announce that readiness in two hours, there will be a state of war between His Majesty's government and the German government. Adolf Hitler was in his study at the Reich Chancellery. Schmidt hurried over to report. I walked straight into Hitler's study where I found him with his foreign minister, Herr von Ribbentrop, and I turned... Translated this ultimatum to him and when I came to the last sentence There was a state of complete silence in that very important Study or the most important study which existed in Germany at that time Now it had happened and they were holding their breath Because it was somewhat unexpected It was Hitler who broke the silence.
Glaring at Foreign Minister Ribbentrop, he asked, what now? Ribbentrop's reply, I assume that within the hour the French ultimatum will follow. There is no time in the world. Eyewitnesses have recorded that the German in the street was shocked at this extension of the conflict.
He had become accustomed to Hitler's bloodless victories and prepared at worst for brief, relatively painless wars. But the indefatigable young diarist Günther Roos was loyal to the last. After England presented us with an ultimatum, England and France declared war on us at midday.
These pigs. The pigs. You can see there...
You see, there are rage and bafflement that England and France should dare to interfere in purely German matters and try and prevent us from recreating the old German right. which prevented us from restoring the old German Empire. On his way to the front of Warsaw, the Führer greets his life-standards, which have been beaten in Poland in hard battles. The defeat of Poland gave Hitler his common frontier with Russia.
He had made war. But it was not the war he wanted. His misjudgment of the temper of Britain and France had wrecked his plan. Before the great march of conquest in the East could begin, he must eliminate both France and Britain, either that or plunge Germany into a prolonged two-front war.
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