[projector whirring]
[train rumbling]
[cool music]
[upbeat music]
[narrator] This film begins with a book.
The kind you find displayed next to the register,
an impulse buy for uncertain times.
The dystopian book of the week,
suggested reading for the coming catastrophe.
The cover catering to our deepest fears and anxieties.
The title loudly promising answers
to urgent questions during daily commutes.
[Haffner] The Meaning Of Hitler by Sebastian Haffner.
"Chaos.
Hitler never had nor sought an occupation;
on the contrary, he positively avoided one.
His shyness of occupation is as striking a trait
as his shyness of marriage or intimacy.
He did not wish to be the first servant of the state
but der Fuührer, an absolute master.
And he perceived correctly that absolute rule was not possible
in an intact state organism
but only amidst controlled chaos.
That was why from the outset,
he replaced the states with chaos."
[upbeat music]
You undermine the institutions of the state
because that magnifies your own position.
Everything's dependent on you.
You might as well get onto his similarities with Trump.
[narrator] We begin with the novelist Martin Amis.
He's been thinking about Hitler a lot lately.
The similarities are, in fact, an odd lot
between Trump and Hitler.
Fanatical cleanliness is one trait
and, of course, lying is another.
Here was a head of state who didn't mind lying.
There is no downside to lying.
It's terrific at first
because it looks for a moment as if everything is possible.
My understanding is you wanna clear the air
'cause you think you're being unfavorably compared
to Donald Trump.
Don't get me wrong, Conan. I agree with a lot he says, a lot.
Like 90% of what he says, I'm like, "This guy gets it."
-[Conan] Okay. -[audience laughing]
Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about Hitler
is how he resists understanding.
And there's not one historian, apart from Haffner,
who claims to understand it.
[cool music]
[narrator] Born in Berlin in 1907,
Sebastian Haffner witnessed Hitler come to power.
For Haffner, Hitler was the original radical loser,
a man whose whole identity
was staked on a fanatical project,
born from the radicalization
of his and his followers' perceived victimhood.
In 1940, Haffner observed
that for the world to be done with Hitler,
it had to kill not just the man, but the legend as well.
As the newspaper Der Spiegel put it,
-"Hitler is here again." -Was he a martyr to German nationalism?
Was he something of a German Jesse James?
[narrator] Fast forward four decades,
wary of cultural amnesia,
Haffner aimed to kill the legend.
[page flipping]- -[Haffner] " Hitler lived from April 20th, 1889
until April 30th, 1945.
For 30 years, he was an obscure failure.
Then almost overnight, a local celebrity
and eventually the man around whom
the whole of world policy revolved.
How does that go together?"
Uh, I don't really know.
I don't think anyone knows.
Fortunately, you cannot put Hitler
on a psychologist's couch.
Maybe I could start by the fact that in the course of history,
Hitler has been assigned almost any psychiatric diagnosis that's available.
Why can't he make appointments like any normal person?
[chuckles] Because, my dear Anna,
our patient is not exactly a normal person.
Oedipus complex, megalomania.
Bipolar disorder or schizophrenic and also as hysterical.
So, I think any psychiatric diagnosis has been assigned to him.
Our understanding of Hitler is central
to our self-understanding.
It's a reckoning you have to make
if you're a serious person.
And if anyone can advance
the understanding of Hitler by so much as a millimeter,
then that is well worth undertaking.
Well, good luck.
I mean... [chuckles] He has no-- not a chance
because I think there is such a num-- such a vast
conjunction of reasons, of factors.
[Evans] Historians are endlessly arguing
about the past and the meaning of the past.
There isn't any consensus on many, many issues.
[narrator] It was at this point
that we began to question the wisdom
of making a film called The Meaning of Hitler,
because you can't begin to understand the meaning of Hitler
without first understanding the meaning of history itself.
Professor Saul Friedlaänder would know.
He's spent the better part of his life
studying Hitler and the Holocaust.
He was born Pavel in Prague,
baptized Paul in France,
renamed Shaul in Palestine,
and is now simply Saul in California.
Understanding Hitler is, in my opinion, not the problem.
We are drawn towards Nazis
and towards the personality of Hitler
and that, I think, is the main problem.
[electronic music]
-Heil, do you know me? -...I'm fighting for Germany!
My whole life has been one long struggle for Germany!
[orchestral music]
[upbeat music]
[whispers] Adolf Hitler.
[audience applauding]
[speaking German]
[narrator] Hollywood has always loved Hitler,
but the most famous Hitler film
is the one he commissioned about himself.
Triumph of the Will,
Leni Riefenstahl's propaganda film
about the 1934 Nuremberg Rally
is arguably the most recycled
and imitated film in history.
The Nuremberg Rally was a kind of work of art.
It was kind of performance art.
It's very aesthetic.
The lighting, the fire-lit faces of those young men.
When Hitler's plane is coming in, the shadow of his little plane
is being cast on the spires and rooftops of Nuremberg.
It's pure kitsch. But if you knew nothing,
I think you really might think, "How beautiful."
It's like the Rockettes or something. It's like, you know, Radio City.
It's so-- I mean, if it's divorced from its origins and its purpose,
it's this kind of gorgeous pageantry,
but the minute you know anything, it makes your flesh creep.
[drums thumping]
[speaking German]
[Friedlaänder] The Nazis understood that martyrdom and death
were much more potent than "long live life"
because it was much closer to religious-- to a religious feeling
and a sense of eternity, in a way.
[people applauding]
The Nazis had a feeling that they were acting
in some huge historical play
for the future, for history,
and then people will remember this
for the next centuries and centuries.
That's the Wagnerian sense of him.
He was speaking of a performance
but a performance for eternity in a way, you see?
-[Hitler speaking German] -[TV narrator] Adolf Hitler.
If you switch on German TV,
you have a 95% chance to get a Hitler documentary.
-Hitler's Friends. -Hitler in Private.
Hitler's Household.
The Ten Things You Didn't Know About Hitler,
and it's always the ten things you already know about Hitler.
[narrator] Call it the Hitler Channel.
We've seen Hitler's dogs, his women, his cars,
his food, his generals, his secretaries, his secret weapons
and his drug habits, never before seen footage
in glorious color.
Fascinating fascism.
Has history lost all meaning?
[foreboding music]
Which begs the question,
is it possible to make a film like this
without contributing to the expansion
of the Nazi cinematic universe?
I mean, the images you can show are very well known.
So, it would be redundant in many ways
and it's all propaganda.
[loud blast]
[narrator] After the war,
all Nazi monuments were destroyed,
but the images live on,
each and every frame a tribute to Nazism.
This is the spell of fascination we were warned about,
where propaganda is repackaged as reality,
sensation is confused with meaning,
and the Nazi past is normalized.
-Hitler did nothing wrong. -Hitler did nothing wrong.
Hitler actually wasn't that bad.
Hitler was right.
What we are saying is that this image
of National Socialism and of Hitler,
uh, ultimately has a greater impact
on the minds and the emotions of younger generations today
than...
[Friedlaänder continues]
Is that what you were saying?
[Hitler speaking German]
[wind howling]
[narrator] Momentarily rid of the impulse
to make yet another archival film,
we wondered if there was a better approach.
Perhaps we could come closer to understanding
the meaning of Hitler
if we started at the source.
Doöersheim, Austria,
Hitler's ancestral village
and the source of much speculation.
Was Hitler abused as a child?
A sexual deviant?
Or was there some dark secret in his family tree?
To control the many rumors about his past,
Hitler simply erased it
and Doöersheim was declared a restricted military area.
But the question remains.
What made Hitler Hitler?
Part of the spell of great evil doers
is that they do have this capacity to astonish.
And you can't believe anyone's going to behave
[stammers] as demonically as that
and that in itself confers a kind of aura.
[Haffner] "Hitler's life lacked everything
that normally lends weight, warmth, and dignity
to a human life.
Education, occupation,
love and friendship, marriage, parenthood.
There were a few women,
but he treated them as unimportant
and did not make them happy."
He liked his dog, but tested a cyanide pill on it.
He got married 24 hours before he and his wife went through with a suicide pact.
I mean, it's almost like a travesty
of what human relationships are.
[Haffner] "Hitler had no friends.
He enjoyed sitting for hours on end with subordinate staff,
drivers, bodyguards, secretaries,
but he alone did all the talking.
He refused to think beyond his own lifespan.
Everything had to happen through himself.
A continuous readiness for suicide
accompanied Hitler throughout his political career.
And at its end, almost as a matter of course,
stood a real suicide."
[Benecke] Yeah, we are standing here in the middle of Berlin.
That's the Holocaust Shoah Memorial over there
and here's the Mall of Berlin.
And yeah, this is just a parking lot
with very unspectacular prebuilt houses
and, well, somewhere down below the ground is the...
My name is Enno Lenze
and I run the Berlin Story Bunker
and the documentation Hitler How Could It Happen?
I'm doing a lot of tours with school classes here
and if you were born like in the year 2000,
then it was 55 years ago.
So, it's like dinosaurs for you
and you would say, "What do I have to do with it?"
Because you have never heard of any war.
Often we really have to explain what a war is
and what a bunker is because they think a bunker
is a place which rich people buy to set up lofts.
But there are many questions like this like,
"Were you forced to be a Nazi?"
Or, especially, from the US, people ask us,
"Why were the Nazis able to invade Germany?"
So, yeah, we're already beyond that point
that people lost the meaning of Hitler
and it's really often several times a day
that people ask us about, "Are you sure that he's dead?"
If he's still alive, he doesn't have jaws and teeth, so...
I'm Mark Benecke and I'm a forensic biologist.
In the Fuührerbunker, there was one room and it had a sofa
and on the sofa Hitler and his wife, Eva Hitler,
were just sitting
and then they killed themselves
by taking a cyanide capsule and shooting themselves.
[gunshot, thud]
Stalin first said that Hitler poisoned himself, his words, "like a wife."
Some people think that females have a tendency to use poison
to kill themselves.
Instead of soldiers, especially leading soldiers,
officers who are supposed to kill themselves
manly with a bullet.
[speaking German]
Many people think that once you take cyanide,
it's like in a movie.
Your eyes start to roll, which they don't,
or you gasp or you move.
None of this happens. You just suffocate
because the oxygen cannot bind to your blood anymore and then you die.
So, during that time,
you can still shoot,
write a letter or do whatever you want
for half a minute or a minute.
Now, darling.
[gunshot]
Afterwards, Hitler was taken outside
and wrapped in a blanket
and then they burned the body
because Hitler was very afraid
that his body would be presented like a loser.
So, he said, "Okay, just destroy my body." It's very child-like.
You know, like, "Okay, I don't want to be shown.
"So, burn me." [chuckles]
But that it was just him.
There was a lot of childishness in Hitler.
Suicidal ideation, as they call it, was always with him.
He just-- It's the answer to everything.
The tap doesn't work.
I know what I'll do.
I'll blow my brains out.
[narrator] Did you ever notice how the door always closes
or the camera pans away right before Hitler pulls the trigger?
-[gunshot] -Why does Hollywood grant Hitler
the kind of honorable death
that is never given to his victims?
We see them suffer every atrocity and humiliation on screen,
but Hitler is always allowed to die on his own terms.
And so, his legend lives on.
[car engine revs]
[upbeat music]
[church bell rings]
[Kotanko chuckles] Well, we are here in Braunau.
You can hear the bell.
It's number six among Austrian bell towers.
Braunau is a small town, about 17,000 inhabitants.
It's close to the border to Germany.
The house behind me
is the place where Adolf Hitler was born
on the 20th of April in 1889.
The family lived there for only a short period of time.
It's sure that he was born in this building
because there are other opinions he was born
in another part of this complex,
which was a stable.
You know? A stable birth place?
[laughs] So...
But it's not true. Um...
-That-- it's-- -[man] That would be very convenient, though.
Pardon?
[man]
Yeah, yes.
You have the connection to another.
[chuckles] Yeah, it's-- was... there's a book, uh...
which had the title Braunau, Bethlehem of the Third Reich.
Mm-hmm. It was an ordinary house and it was an ordinary family
and he started his life there,
but he did not start his career as a political criminal,
but it's connected.
You can't separate.
You can't cut his life from his political career.
This stone was brought here
from the concentration camp of Mauthausen.
This inscription is from the-- it's the political ideology.
It's the wording of the 1990s.
Maybe now we should have another
because the name Hitler is not mentioned.
The authorities are not hiding the fact.
But, uh, in my opinion, they are not dealing in the proper way.
We have to deal with the history,
but it's not fixed on there on some bricks.
It's not only the building.
The building, it's not as beautiful.
It's not a... [blows]
Well, it's a building, but it's all the connection
in the brains of the people who are coming here.
That's what we can influence.
[narrator] Two doors down from the Hitler house
is an Arab grocery store.
In 2015, Braunau was a hotspot
because we had thousands and thousands of people
from Africa, from Syria, who wanted to go to Germany.
Well, at this special time,
the people assisted the immigrants.
They tried to to help them.
They welcome them.
But after a period of time,
people began to think about the future.
If there really will come
thousands and thousands of immigrants,
how to deal with this?
People are mostly afraid of strangers
where there are very few strangers.
Those people who have no feelings of their borders
and put the borders of the country as their own.
So, if you sit somewhere in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern
near of Berlin and the country,
and somebody on the Italian or Austrian border
is pouring into Germany,
it's a threat to their skin.
[man speaking German]
[spectator speaking German]
[cameraman in English]
[man speaking German over PA]
[woman speaking German]
[speaking German]
It's a nationalist movement.
So, this is, once again, a movement
to separate one country or one community from the other.
Of course, this is connected then
with trying to get a distance to the Nazi time.
So, what the call the revision of history
is quite a central element
of right-wing extremist thinking.
[speaking German]
[applause]
[siren wailing]
[crowd] Say it loud, say it clear.
Refugees are welcome here.
[protestors chanting]
[chanting in German]
[in English] Nazis out!
[speaking German]
[woman shouting in German]
[chanting in German continues]
[chanting in German]
[narrator] Wird sind das volk, "we are the people,"
was the rallying cry of these Germans
that led to the collapse of the Berlin Wall.
But here the words don't unite.
-They divide. -[people shouting in German]
[narrator] "Luünpresse," the lying press.
The enemy of the people.
This is the language of Nazism.
-[chanting in German continues] -[producer in English]
What is happening now
is the great replacement.
By mass migration, by failed migration policy
you see a shift in European demographics
in every Western European nation.
In a few decades, the populations will be replaced.
Nationalisms look for enemies.
This is true of 2018, '19,
just as it is of the beginning of the 20th century.
[upbeat music]
[narrator] Much has been made of Hitler's time in Vienna,
especially by Hitler himself.
Hitler lived here, here, here, here,
and here he lived in a homeless shelter.
This is the art school he famously failed to enter twice.
He's an artist, but a failed artist
and I think that's worth giving some thought to.
[woman] We're in the US Army's Museum Support Center
at Fort Belvoir, Virginia.
[narrator] You know the warehouse
at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark,
where the US government stores artifacts
too dangerous to see the light of day?
This is that place.
[woman] So, this is an oversized head of Adolf Hitler.
It came to us from the Eagle's Nest.
When this piece was examined by conservators,
they noted graffiti along both sides of his neck,
um, and it has been removed.
But at one point, somebody painted the word "fool"
on one side of his face
and an anatomically correct,
um, phallus on the other side.
So I never know how to explain that. [chuckles]
You know? A portion of the male anatomy on the other side of his face.
[narrator] The army holds nearly 600 pieces
of confiscated art classified as either propaganda
or dangerously promoting Hitler and Nazism,
including work by Hitler himself.
So, the four watercolors by Adolf Hitler
were a part of Heinrich Hoffman's collection.
Heinrich Hoffmann was Hitler's personal photographer.
And at the end of the war, his collection of photographs
as well as these four watercolors
were confiscated by the US Army.
This one here is the first chronologically out of the four.
It was done during his period as a street artist in Vienna
around 1910 or so.
Um, it portrays, you know, a random street scene in Vienna.
There is one human figure,
uh, portrayed right there in the center.
You know, he has the attention to detail
that you might want to see in an architect,
um, but, you know, could he create this
if he was not standing in front of it
or copying from a postcard?
Probably not.
If I were on the board of the Vienna art school
when he applied,
and if he applied just based on these four watercolors,
my feedback would be "I wanna see more variety in your work."
You know, as an artist, he was not that good.
He could have ended his life as an unsuccessful artist,
just like Himmler could have ended his life
as a chicken farmer, which is something that he studied.
Uh, and Goebbels as a journalist at some paper.
But condition was such that it made it possible
for people like that to represent large numbers of people.
[man speaking German]
[speaking German]
[Haffner] "According to his account inMein Kampf,
the observation that Jews were different
was enough for the conclusion,
'Because they are different, they have to be removed.'"
[Evans] A lot of what he talks about in Mein Kampf
about his earlier life is invented or imagined.
It's not factually reliable but it is a clue to his ideology.
You can look at it and see quite a lot of what he actually believes in.
Hitler believed every word
of what he was saying, every word.
-[dramatic music] -What is antisemitism?
Antisemitism is a conspiracy theory.
And when social scientists talk about conspiracy theories,
they're talking about something that has no basis in rational fact.
You know, I was-- if I was late to this interview this morning,
and I'd tell you the traffic on Broadway was horrendous
because they knew I was coming to this interview
and the antisemites were out there
to prevent me from getting here,
you'd say, "Cut, this woman is nuts.
We'll go onto the next person."
You know, think about the charges
that the antisemite makes against the Jews.
The Jews are clannish. The Jews are pushy.
How can you be clannish and pushy at the same time?
The Jews are all communists, leftists, and today's Soros, trying to overthrow society.
Well, how can you be a capitalist and a communist at the same--
It doesn't make sense. It's irrational.
So, when we try to figure out
where Hitler's antisemitism came from,
what we're trying to do
is rationally explain an irrational sentiment.
When people say, "Oh, well, his mother was treated by a Jewish doctor
and he couldn't save her."
So what?
The minute you're trying to give a rational explanation
for an irrational sentiment,
you're gonna be lost.
[cool music]
I think we're lost.
[Haffner] "Recently, an English historian, David Irving,
has disputed Hitler's responsibility
for the murder of the Jews,
which Irving claims
was performed by Himmler on his own initiative
behind Hitler's back.
Irving's thesis is untenable."
I'll offer you $1,000 if you can prove that
there's even one page, one wartime page
showing Adolf Hitler ordering the extermination,
or even knowing it was going on, whatever it was,
the extermination of the Jews.
David Irving, please. [chuckles]
David Irving, whom I met several times way back,
is really not a serious historian
and already in the late '70's, early '80's,
David Irving was considered very close to neo-Nazis,
if not to a neo-Nazi.
[reporter] In his books on the Nazi era,
British writer David Irving has argued Adolf Hitler
never ordered the mass killing of Jews.
His views have endeared him to neo-Nazis
and gotten him arrested in Germany and Canada.
He insists Auschwitz was no death camp
and he's suing an American author who calls him a liar.
It's an unfortunate consequence of this trial
that Auschwitz will lose all credibility by the time the trial is over.
[reporter] The defendant is Deborah Lipstadt.
I defended myself with everything I possibly could-- history.
That's how we defended.
We brought historians into the courtroom
and we followed the footnotes back to their sources
so that Richard Evans could say, "It's simply not true."
If you go through, as I did,
saw all his publications and his speeches,
you can see right to the very beginning
he tried to exonerate Hitler all the way through
from any involvement in the Holocaust
unless it was to try and stop it or minimize it.
"Hitler was probably the best friend
that Jews ever had in the Third Reich,"
he said on one occasion.
And I think he genuinely believed that.
The court called him a neo-Nazi polemicist.
The court described his work
as having no facilitated antisemitism.
The court spoke of his racism.
The verdict will be welcomed
by many around the world,
who see it as a triumph of truth
over attempts to rewrite a terrible chapter in history.
Irving now says he will appeal...
[narrator] You can't make a film about Hitler
and not talk to his biggest admirer.
So we reached out to David Irving for an interview.
He replied with an email that began,
"You may be a Jew."
He suggested that we meet in Poland
during one of his so-called real history tours
through notable Hitler sites.
[woman]
[woman humming]
Yeah. Yeah.
[blows whistle]
[Irving] He's a man who, according to the enemy,
has millions of notches on his rifle butt so to speak.
Millions of deaths that he's responsible for.
And so, that what's people know about him.
I announce that if people can come on the tours
and make up their own minds and see what they're saying,
see what they see and then see what they believe.
I don't try and push them one way or the other.
They're interested in this man who's been lied about.
They want to see him.
They want to see him close up
and this is about as close up as you get
with Adolf Hitler and the legend.
Seeing the actual bunkers where he and his staff lived.
And the interesting thing is to come and look at it here.
He was protected from the enemy
by these immense concrete walls,
but in the long run,
the truth will filter through, filter out.
[interviewer]
No, Hitchens did, though.
He came to see Christopher in Washington,
went down in the elevator
with Christopher's wife and and daughter
and sang a terrible song to the daughter.
It was a sort of racist limerick.
-About my little daughter? -Your not a--
"I am a something-something Aryan,
not Jewish or sectarian.
I have no plans to marry an ape or Rastafarian."
Christopher's wife, Carol, who's not easily shocked said,
"Don't ever leave me alone with that man again."
It was a very good poem or a very clever poem.
It was so clever. In fact, I wrote it down in my diary,
which is where the the enemy found it in the Lipstadt trial,
in my diaries.
And right at the very end,
they kind of dredged it up as being proof
Mr. Irving being a racist.
In this organized attempt to smear me into oblivion,
the enemy, as I recall,
traditional enemies of the truths
have generated-- constructed this picture
of me being a Holocaust denier,
which is a strange kind of phrase.
I never met this phrase, Holocaust denier.
It's one of these artificial kind of phrases.
It means nothing when you analyze it.
Old-fashioned Holocaust deniers
are essentially neo-Nazis or neo-fascists.
So, people with ultra right-wing views,
who are antisemitic
and believe that the Jews have invented all this...
It is a form of antisemitism, clothed in historical-like garb.
We're just examining history.
We only wanna get to the truth in history
and if this history can be rewritten,
any history can be rewritten.
And we've seen that today. We're seeing that today in the United States.
We're seeing that today in parts of Europe
where history just becomes a political play thing.
And this is what the danger of the times we are now living through,
when the very concept of truth itself has been questioned.
[Zuckerberg] So, let's take this a little closer to home, right?
-So, I'm Jewish... -[Swisher] Mm-hmm.
...um, and there's a set of people who deny
that the Holocaust happened, right?
I find that deeply offensive.
But at the end of the day,
I don't believe that our platform should take that down
because I think that there are things that different people get wrong.
Um, either... I don't think that they're
intentionally getting it wrong, but I think that they--
[Swisher] In the case of the Holocaust deniers, they might be, but go ahead.
[Zuckerberg] It's hard to impugn intent.
The minute you give room to people
who are clearly twisting history and distorting history,
not just a different interpretation of history,
but such a distortion
and you say, "Oh, everybody's a right to their opinion."
There are facts,
there are opinions,
and there're lies,
and that's lies.
History is not propaganda.
[birds chirping]
[Haffner] "During the war, Hitler was politically happy.
Only his antisemitism remained unsatisfied
but otherwise, things went splendidly well for four years."
He was here in the chaotic phase of the war.
The war-- The front was not consolidated at that time,
but everything was very chaotic.
There was still very hard fighting over here.
[teacher]
[Emily]
[girl]
When we stand here today, it's a very peaceful,
a very beautiful and a nice landscape.
It's very difficult to get in touch
with the atmosphere of those days.
The noise and the smell and the war material,
but we still miss the part of the story.
It's too quiet. It's too touristic.
[laughs lightly]
[trumpet fanfare playing]
[narrator] In 1940, as the British evacuated Dunkirk,
Hitler went on a car tour of World War I sites.
Here is the village where his first wound was treated.
[trumpets continue]
A command bunker.
At one point, he stopped the car and asked some locals,
"My name is Hitler. Do you remember me?"
He then visited a cemetery.
[trumpets continue]
[somber music]
-I am blind. -No organic damage.
No sign of gas poisoning.
His eyes are completely normal
but he insists that he can't see.
He probably can't.
A case of hysteria, shock.
An emotional, unbalanced mind
retreating into illness.
We know from other documents
that the diagnosis he's been given was gas poisoning,
but there has been a tremendous speculation going on
that he was actually being treated for psychiatric reasons
and the speculation goes like this.
He underwent psychiatric treatment
that he had been hypnotized, actually.
Hypnosis is often effective
in certain types of battle neuroses,
such as amnesia.
Put your mind on going to sleep.
All right. Now keep your eyes on mine.
Keep your eyes on mine. Going into a deep, deep sleep.
-Going into a deep, deep sleep... -Had been suggested that, okay,
a person of exceptional qualities can overcome
the blindness you suffer from.
And you are this person and you're born to be Germans' savior
in the moment of surrender.
This was used to overcome his blindness,
but it was never taken back, the hypnosis.
And he acted under control or manipulated
by the hypnotic suggestion for which there is
no evidence whatsoever.
We have the desire to fill in the blanks
and make up stories where we have no certain knowledge.
But the underlying rationale is always the same.
It's that of reduced responsibility.
We have been hypnotized.
He was hypnotized.
So in the end, it's no one's guilt.
It's some obscure illness or hypnotic process.
People are afraid of identifying
with the Nazis and with Hitler.
But Hitler was a perfectly normal person.
Uh, his psychological problems are no different
from those of many millions of others.
[bell rings]
[music playing]
[Nerdinger] Munich is from the outside,
not much connected with the Nazi history,
but everything started here.
We are here exactly at the place where until 1945
was the representative headquarters of the Nazi Party.
Here we are at the place of the perpetrators.
And here we do not want to create empathy.
We do not want to make an event out of history.
We want to have a distant, rational approach
so that you can learn out of history.
We do not want to make Nazi history interesting.
We do not want to make it an event.
Hitler started his career here.
Hitler founded the Nazi Party
here in 1920 and he got help from
all different groups of society.
Munich was called the capital of the movement.
[Haffner] "The party, when Hitler joined it,
was an obscure backroom organization
with a few hundred members of little importance.
The breakthrough experience was his own discovery
of his power as an orator,
when with sweeping success,
he made his first speech at a mass rally."
[Frevert] So he studied his audience.
And he had all these kind of ideas about mass.
The mass being feminine,
the mass being easily won over
by a certain way of addressing the mass,
by the mass being open to contagion.
When you are in the crowd
and the crowd is very close
and the crowd has this certain
power of changing you,
then it can be like in a love affair.
You can become another person.
He wanted to whip up their emotions,
but also tame them and channel them.
The masses are put into a form
and then they are no longer a threat.
'Cause that's one thing that he never wanted.
He didn't want chaos.
Hitler puts those people into blocks.
They have to... [whistles] stand like this on the field in a row,
in a vertical and horizontal row and all of them,
their gun in the same way.
Blocks and blocks and blocks and blocks.
A nation of 80 million people standing in blocks.
That's the fascist fantasy.
He then would give them
an outlet for their emotions
and say, "Well, look, it's the Jew.
It's the system." It's--
In this way of talk, they... [sniffs] smell
a proposal, something...
There will be the day you are allowed
to put your structure into violent actions
and to get in your own way of big living.
What's threatening them has to disappear, totally.
You don't have to worry
and you don't have to think anymore.
That is his mastership.
That way he is the loud speaker of
that what was present
in the German nation,
in the German population.
[Heyne] Oh, you are really intent in having
good sound of this microphone already?
Okay, all right.
Believe it or not, there are still people today
that care about good sounds.
Whether it's Barbra Streisand or Brian Adams or Adele,
these are all people that care very much
that their emotional delivery is translated properly.
And it started with this microphone.
It started in the late 1920s.
There was all of a sudden a revolution.
So what we have here is the CMV3, uh,
sometimes referred to as the Neumann bottle,
but more often now, especially in America,
referred to as the Hitler bottle.
Up to mid 1920s,
the microphones that were used were carbon microphones.
Little carbon crystals suspended,
and when they get excited by audio waves
or by sound waves, they would generate electricity.
The problem was that you had to be incredibly close to it.
If you would go even this far away from the microphone,
the volume would drop by 50% or more.
So all of a sudden,
Hitler was able to be more evocative,
more animated in his delivery because
he wasn't shackled by the technology.
He could actually use the technology to help him deliver.
By being able to move, by being soft,
by being whispering and then building up
and then getting super loud and it would still sound good.
I bet you it was just the same as
when the Beatles performed at Shea Stadium.
All of a sudden, there was a dimension
that was part of his delivery,
part of the masses responding in the same way,
uniformly, that was infectious.
And the microphone was able to allow that.
Hello. [screams]
[Heyne] And it's a feedback.
It goes back and forth
and it builds up and it gets to a crescendo.
And you see it in the footage of Hitler.
That was exactly how it worked.
He heard himself also through the loudspeakers.
They were to the side of the stage.
That means he also heard himself amplified.
It's almost like Jimi Hendrix hearing himself
through a Marshall stack.
That also was a positive feedback loop
in terms of the performance.
So, that whole technology, microphone all the way
to the loudspeakers, amplified the emotional translation
of the message.
I don't even know what that would be now.
Is it Twitter now that we don't quite get yet,
that some people use very effectively? I don't know.
So I know a lot about Twitter and Facebook.
-[audience clapping] -Actually, somebody said I'm the Ernest Hemingway
of 140 characters. Can you believe it?
Also the effect he had on women.
The National Socialists were the least friendly to women
of all the parties that were bobbing around in the '20s.
It was a very bad bet for a woman to be swooning at Hitler.
But swoon they did.
[Theweleit] The object of desire,
you can see very good in pop groups.
The Beatles were not standing with
their women before the cameras,
when the girls were shouting and so on.
So, he had to hide his own wife.
Eva Braun didn't appear in public,
so the place had to be open for the feelings of the totality
of German women to become Fuührer's brides in their,
not only fantasy, in their feeling.
He said, "We were nothing without your work.
We would be nothing.
It's your economy and leading the household.
And that's the way we have to lead the state."
How despicable can it get?
I mean, it's something that he...
That's wax, he uses as wax in his hands,
but that he does not respect or love.
In a way it's kind of weird that the masses didn't get that.
He produced his environment that sustained him
and that confirmed his quest for power,
um, through all kinds of mythologies,
but also a kind of day-to-day consent.
It's consent. He never found anybody who objected.
They all said, "Well, we believe you.
We trust you. We love you."
[Trump] This is a big crowd.
And normally I like talking about my crowds
'cause I get crowds like nobody...
[Haffner] "Hitler was all his life
exceedingly full of himself.
And from his earliest to his last days
tended to self-conceit.
With the Hitler cult,
Hitler was not only its object,
but also the earliest, most persistent
and the most passionate devotee."
My name is Werner Muüller. I'm the general manager of Kempinski Hotel, Berchtesgarten.
[speaking German]
Obersalzberg had a crucial part
for world history because Adolf Hitler and some other
leading Nazi figures lived here,
had their private houses.
And also, they made some crucial decisions here,
which meant the death of millions of people.
Adolf Hitler and basically his photographer, Heinrich Hoffman,
they really saw how they could use this area.
So in 1932, 1933,
they started to make a lot of pictures here
and to use the area to form an image of Adolf Hitler
as a person who makes walks in the nice countryside,
who visits neighbors, who talks to small children.
So who is the-- kind of the caring uncle
or he is some kind of this lonely guy.
He's standing in the mountains
and thinking about the fate of Germany.
So, basically the image of the Fuührer,
of the leader, was that he's kind of omnipotent.
So he can do everything, he knows everything.
He's an expert in everything.
But what is quite, it's interesting,
Hitler lived here in the mountain
and he showed himself in front of the mountain view,
but he never tried to make himself
a sports person, for example.
So he didn't go for hikes.
He didn't do any skiing in the winter.
If you see back down there, you can see the flag.
And behind the flag,
there was some kind of a small hill
where Hitler used to go afternoon.
And when he made this walk,
he just walked down and then they went back by car.
So if he made any walks,
it was always down, not up the hill.
Still, people come here,
also journalists with cameras
and then they say, "Ah, I'm standing here,
you can see the historic photograph
and it's exactly this place
where I'm standing, Adolf Hitler stood."
And this is the kind of fascination about Hitler
we regard carefully.
That's the place where the Berghof Adolf Hitler,
the private house of Adolf Hitler was.
The ruins were-- blew up in 1952
because the people were afraid
that this will be, yeah, some kind of Nazi shrine.
They planted those trees to keep the people
away from this area,
but they came every year.
Lots of people came here
because they still believe in this.
Yeah, in Hitler, they still believe in the Nazi ideology.
And that's the reason why the discussion,
how to deal with the history will never stop.
[car engine rumbling]
[Haffner] "Worse had been expected.
During 1933 and '34,
the terror slowly died down to give way
to the 'good Nazi years,'
to almost normal conditions,
only slightly disturbed by the continued existence of
the now less crowded concentration camps."
Haffner is 26 in '33
and he said the dominant emotion wasn't horror.
It was this utter unreality,
as if everything was clockwork,
that people moved around like mannequins.
Well, at the very beginning, enthusiasm was still mixed.
But as years went by,
through the '30s, enthusiasm grew for two obvious reasons.
The economic reorganization and reshaping
of the German economy.
And there were the successes in foreign policy
and those who were opposed were either in camps
like the communists and so on.
The Jews, that came later,
nobody really protested, as far as I know,
mainly in the universities and so on.
I mean, people took it in stride, you know, saying,
"Well, the reawakening of the country
and so on is so important,
so these are little problems."
And others would say,
"Well, good that Hitler is doing that.
I mean, after all, the Jews are foreigners," and so on.
I mean, there is a segment of the population
who certainly knew that this was
a very problematic regime.
But most Germans were enthusiastic.
And you should see the enthusiasm of the elites.
Doctors, lawyers, engineers.
The people who pioneered,
the people who first engaged
in the ways of killing
were doctors.
You see doctors who just flipped,
just flipped and began to talk in medical terms
of the need to starve patients before they start gassing them.
In certain places, they're killing them by starving them.
This was done in the most advanced society
with the active participation of those elements of society
that we generally see as a counterweight
to this kind of authoritarian,
genocidal regime.
How is that possible?
But what is really historically important
is the readiness of an immense number of people in Germany
at the beginning to go after him and then to take even steps
beyond what the Nazis demanded.
Sir Ian Kershaw in Britain put it very clearly,
"Working towards the Fuührer."
He didn't have to say anything.
[Haffner] "The Third Reich was producing guns and butter
and a great many other things.
'The man may have his faults,
but he has given us work and bread again,'
was the million-fold view.
In the prologue to his biography of Hitler,
Joachim Fest performs an interesting speculative experiment.
He says, 'If Hitler had succumbed to an assassination
or an accident at the end of 1938,
few would hesitate to call him one of
the greatest of German statesmen.'"
Was he a great man?
Well, that's a strange question.
His appeal was to promise,
let's be very, very basic here,
work and a better life.
And they got it.
They were looking for a savior.
So here he was.
[Amis] It wasn't an ideology.
It was more like characterology in that
the ideology consisted of a rallying cry.
And this is quite close to what Haffner wrote.
He said, "And it was saying, with a bullhorn,
'Those of you who are willing to rob,
cheat, beat and kill people who have done you no harm,
then gather around my flag.'"
Well, Hitler was a racist and he believed that
human history is defined by the struggle
between different races for the survival of the fittest
and indeed for domination.
And that struggle had to be perpetual.
You had to keep going or you became soft and weak as a race.
Master race and what are they in daily life?
A piece of little shit.
When you belong to the master race,
you have to have the proof someday.
If it's a secret at all,
that would be the secret
that he gives the people the feeling
they will be allowed one day
to do the killings they are full with
and they are fantasizing.
And that's what really happened.
[Haffner] "For three years, day after day,
Jewish families throughout Europe
were taken from their homes or hiding places,
transported to the east and driven naked
into the death factories where the chimneys
of the cremating furnaces smoked day and night."
[blows whistle] They're coming.
They hear the whistle and they're frightened and they run this way.
We'll go further.
We're gonna go left.
Here we've got the road to the execution sites.
It's going to be a very pleasant walk.
[narrator] Treblinka. Between 1942 and '43,
the Nazis murdered over 900,000 people here.
It's also one of the highlights of Irving's tour.
[Irving]
The stones are symbolic of...
These Jews have a particular habit of inflating numbers.
They want big numbers.
We find out usually that the numbers are smaller.
I love seeing things like this.
This is where history began.
[clears throat]
[man laughs, wheezes]
[man]
[man laughs, wheezes]
[Irving]
[man laughs, wheezes]
[Irving]
[man] That's true.
[Irving]
[man]
[Irving] Hmm?
[man]
[Irving] Got no idea. Got no idea.
[Irving]
[narrator] Beate and Serge Klarsfeld are Nazi hunters
responsible for bringing many Nazis to justice,
including, most famously, Klaus Barbie.
[jet engine roaring]
[upbeat music]
Paris is celebrating Bastille Day and the World Cup final.
But Serge and Beate are worried.
[crowd cheering]
[narrator] A few months later,
Serge and Beate's concerns
about rising nationalism feel urgent.
[protesters chanting]
[man] It's an important event,
the restoration of independence after the First World War.
It became a kind of an occasion
for nationalist fringe
movements to come up in public space
and demonstrate.
And it became just a huge thing.
It's organized by these very radical fascists,
some of them organizations,
but it brings in also a lot of people who kind of
go there for a big demonstration and...
[protesters singing]
There is, from the interwar years,
a very well established and articulated fascist,
if you will, trajectory in Polish politics.
A party, which carries the same name
and uses the same paraphernalia, the same symbols.
Some of these flags, if you look closely,
you will see that it carries a symbol that in some way
is reminiscent of the swastika, of the hakenkreuz.
Made of a bent arm with a sword.
Before the war, it was a right radical splinter group
from the nationalist movement.
It had the same name then as now,
Obóz Narodowo-Radykalny, the National Radical Camp.
And they were just beating Jews in the streets.
And their ideology, heart of their nationalistic,
if you will, message to get rid of the Jews.
And this is a legal organization in Poland today.
This regime kind of winks to these groups and tells them,
"We're not going to touch you."
And they thrive.
-[gunshots] -In a natural way, what they would want to do is also,
of course, expunge these complicated parts of the history.
They are not interested in having it told as it was.
As a Pole, this is an extraordinarily upsetting
and dramatic event,
given what Poland has gone through.
Wartime history is on one hand
a history of incredible sacrifice
and suffering on the part of the Polish population.
And then slowly we discover that it is fraught,
the history of the Second World War, with this very dramatic story
of complicity in the persecution of the Polish Jews
during the Second World War.
This is not a Polish specificity.
This is a phenomenon of all of occupied Europe.
It makes confronting the history of the Second World War
very complicated.
[birds chirping]
[narrator] Saul Friedlaänder is in Berlin to address
the German Bundestag for Holocaust Memorial Day.
Among the audience are far right members of Parliament,
including Alexander Gauland, who as you may remember,
likened the Nazi period to a mere bird dropping
on German history.
[speaking German]
Every historian has some other historians he likes
and some other historians he likes less.
So I happen to like Saul Friedlaänder's approach.
We went to the same school, by the way, in Prague.
[laughs softly]
-[interviewer] Elementary school? -Pardon?
-[interviewer] High school? -No, elementary school.
He is six years younger than I am.
So we didn't know each other, you know, but, uh...
You know, they went to France, huh?
They went to France, why?
Because they were aware of the Hitler regime
and the occupation of Czechoslovakia.
And so, we managed to get out before that.
My father decided to leave Europe in 1934.
It took him four years to collect the money to do that.
But the decision was made way before.
One year after Hitler came to power.
He-- that's it.
[narrator] Bauer's family went to Palestine.
Friedlaänder's parents found refuge for him in France
and then tried to escape to Switzerland.
After the war, Friedlaänder learned
that his mother and father were killed in Auschwitz.
I've been asked many a time whether writing the memoir
created a kind of catharsis, you know, therapeutic, as you say.
No, it didn't create anything. Um...
The memoir was what it was.
And then I decided to write
the history of the whole period.
I didn't know it would take so long,
but it did take 16 years or something.
But now I feel, you know, in this old age
that I've done what I wanted to do.
Look, one cannot compel memory to move in a...
It moves in its own direction.
You cannot do anything about it, right?
[interviewer] Speaking of that...
There are ways of putting an end to the spell, I think.
But what happened with many films is that
they prefer the spell because it's attracting the viewers.
But you should end in Sobibór or in Belzec.
I mean, you should end on the, in my opinion, I cannot...
You asked me, "How should we end?"
So, I took the...
[chuckles] In a way, I took the... [stammers]
I answer your question.
Maybe you should end in a place like that.
That would put an end to the fascination.
[narrator] It suddenly makes sense why Professor Friedlaänder implored us to come here.
This is what he calls the unknowable spot.
Here there is nothing. Little was photographed and nothing was filmed.
Everything was erased.
Himmler, speaking to the SS in 1943 said of the killing,
"This is the page never to be written."
Had the Nazis won the war and had there been no survivors,
the extermination would have remained secret.
The forest the only witness.
That is why Wojciech and the historians keep digging.
Hi...
[gunshot]
[Bauer] People believe in the destruction of other people.
People actually believe that this is the only way
to rescue their society, humanity, whatever.
And one of the great problems that people today have
who are educated in liberal or semi-liberal societies,
is they don't understand
how people can believe that stuff.
Contrary to others,
I don't think that Nazism
or the ideas behind Nazism are dead.
[Hitler speaking German on video]
[Rosenfled] In the world of the internet where people are spending more and more
of their lives online, the currency is, of course, attention.
And we are all probably familiar with the idea of click bait,
but in order to gain attention online,
you have to be sensational.
You have to be irreverent.
You have to be controversial.
You have to get eyeballs looking at you.
And, of course, Hitler is a very easy way
to accomplish that precise goal.
What?
What's with the Christmas...
I like the editing.
Subscribe to Keemstar.
[laughs hysterically]
Normalizing Hitler pays off for people.
But while they're doing that, they're radicalizing people.
They're introducing them to much more controversial
and extreme content.
I was invited to go to Charlottesville.
I was told, and this is what the event was.
It was called Unite the Right.
It's pretty self-explanatory.
[protesters] You shall not replace us.
Hell, yeah. What's up fam?
Let's keep moving forward. Okay, it's a zoo out here.
Out here with Brittany Venti.
What up, fam?
We're live too.
Shit is wild out here.
We got hundreds of people out here with torches.
It was a full-on like, almost like a mob, but not quite,
because a mob is like angry and disorganized.
Everyone here was very like calm and like focused.
Like calm at first, and then focused.
Everyone has their tiki torches. Everyone managed to bring one.
There was like 600 people.
I don't know, maybe there was 1000.
It just seemed like a sea of endless people.
I was breathless.
My breath was taken away.
Yeah, torchlight, it's beautiful.
You know, the way, the light on people's faces and so forth.
I mean, there's something very romantic
and very dramatic about it.
I mean, tiki torches, basically.
But in the context, it's horrifying.
So, you have beautiful on one hand
and horrifying on the other.
And you have to know the history
to know why it might be horrifying.
Oh, my God. History isn't pretty all the time, guys.
People get fucking slaughtered and killed.
We are in the process of undergoing a phenomenon
that's comparable to industrial revolutions,
like the invention of steam engines suddenly
and this information revolution that's taking place.
And there are no institutions
within this democratic, uh,
paradigm, if you will, to contain somehow and manage
the fact that people can communicate
with tens of millions of people instantaneously
without any sort of filters.
We grew up with the Internet.
So we have no centralized source of information
that controls what we think.
You have demagogues now that can reach
on their own instantaneously,
untold numbers of people.
Because you see, I know the truth
and people out there in the world,
they really don't know the truth. They don't know what it is.
[siren blares]
[Trump] The people, my people are so smart
and you know what else they say about my people?
The polls. They say I have the most loyal people.
Did you ever see that?
Where I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue
and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose any voters, okay?
It's like incredible.
No, they say, "Trump, we love you too, man.
Trump's voters are by far--"
I'm at 68, 69%.
I'm at 90% total.
Like, will you say absolutely,
I think it's 68 or 69%.
If there's no limit to what you can say,
it's easy to believe there's no limit to what you can do.
When somebody is the President of the United States,
the authority is total.
It's all a lie.
[siren blares]
[narrator] We are back in the city where this movie started.
[siren blares]
It took a catastrophe to see the obvious.
Never has age and human experience felt so precious.
Saul Friedlaänder is 87.
Yehuda Bauer turned 94 a week ago.
I'm still working.
[interviewer laughs]
I'm not quite dead yet.
Soon, but not yet.
[narrator] With that, he gets the final word
on the meaning of Hitler.
Humans are animals who kill other animals
of the same species.
They also develop the opposite,
because we are herd animals.
So we develop sympathy and love and collaboration and so on
because a herd cannot exist without that.
And so, there are two conflicting elements
in all of human society and all attempts to fight
the kind of Hitlerism that we are discussing here
are really the attempt to strengthen
one human reaction against another human reaction.
The problem that we have is not that the Nazis were inhuman,
but that they were human.
That's the basic problem that we have,
with ourselves, not with the Nazis.
We also act out our ideas.
Fortunately, they are not Nazi ideas,
but the Nazi ideas were acted out
by people who were absolutely normal.
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