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Berlin, 1945.
A detailed historical overview of Hitler's rise to power and the early events leading to World War II.
Key Takeaways
- Hitler exploited political divisions and economic crises to gain power legally.
- Nazi ideology centered on nationalism, anti-Semitism, and territorial expansion.
- Appeasement by Western powers failed to stop Nazi aggression.
- The Nazi-Soviet Pact was a strategic move that shocked many and facilitated war.
- The invasion of Poland marked the official start of World War II.
Summary
- Berlin in 1945 marks the end of Nazi reign with the Red Army's final battles.
- Hitler rises legally to power in 1933, establishing a dictatorship and promoting nationalist and anti-Semitic ideologies.
- Hitler's goals include destroying France, reclaiming Lebensraum, and asserting Aryan supremacy.
- Nazi terror spreads through concentration camps like Dachau and Mauthausen.
- The Anschluss annexes Austria, followed by the occupation of Czechoslovakia after the Munich Agreement.
- Western democracies, exhausted from WWI, attempt appeasement but fail to prevent further Nazi aggression.
- The USSR signs a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany, surprising many and enabling Hitler's invasion plans.
- Hitler invades Poland on September 1, 1939, triggering declarations of war from Britain and France.
- The video highlights the political tensions, alliances, and failures that led to the outbreak of WWII.
- It also contrasts the cultural vibrancy of pre-Nazi Berlin with the horrors of the Nazi regime.
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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Europe has been freed from the Nazi reign of terror. The Red Army is waging its final battles.
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Captain Joseph Pravotov, a Russian officer.
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The hate.
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Hitler's days are numbered. He leaves his bunker for one final bit of showmanship, as seen in this propaganda film.
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Is there still a soldier or a child willing to die for him?
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German woman was referring to the Allied bombers that pounded her city into ruins.
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The Kurfürstendamm, Berlin's most fashionable avenue.
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13 years earlier, the showcase of Germany.
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A nation still plagued by crises.
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A monument commemorating the millions of victims of the First World War.
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Marlene Dietrich is singing The Blue Angel in Berlin.
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Alexanderplatz.
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Thomas Mann is savoring his Nobel Prize for Literature in the shade of the linden trees of Avenue Unter den Linden.
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Berlin is a major cultural center of Europe, one of the most open and tolerant cities in the world.
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Then in 1933, all that changes.
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Through intimidation, demagoguery and exploiting the bitterness of the German veterans, Hitler and his armed militias, like the SA with their hymn, the Horst Wessel Lied, seize control of Germany.
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The Nazis take advantage of the fact that the German left is splintered, and it even seems like Hitler, with his raised fist, revolutionary salute, wants to get on their good side.
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German communists take their orders from Moscow, which views the Social Democrats as the true enemy. No alliance is possible between them.
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So for the last time, German communists sing the Internationale.
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Hitler comes to power legally on January the 30th, 1933.
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Within a few months, his dictatorship is firmly in place. He becomes Der Führer, the leader.
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His supporters rise and chant, Heil Hitler.
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However, not all Germans are totally convinced.
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So again and again, Hitler hammers home his simplistic nationalist slogans.
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And he eventually wins more and more people over, for he has a remarkable power of persuasion over the masses.
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But what does Hitler want?
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In his book Mein Kampf, My Struggle, he clearly states what he calls his missions.
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Being one of the embittered veterans of the First World War, his first mission will be to destroy France, to wipe out the humiliation of the Versailles Treaty of 1919, that stripped Germany of its army and part of its territory.
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Then he wants to conquer what he calls Lebensraum.
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Living space.
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Germany has a population of 80 million, twice that of France. He wants to make Germany the world power that it deserves to be.
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A pathological anti-Semite, Hitler has also taken on the mission of asserting the superiority of the Germanic Aryan race, menaced by the Jews.
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For him, the Jews were the cause of the Great War, Germany's defeat, inflation, unemployment. The next war will be a war on the Jews.
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They will be sent to Dachau, the first concentration camp.
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Where Hitler locks up the anti-Nazis, the communists, social democrats, and all those opposed to the Nazi regime.
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Lastly, Hitler takes on the mission of bringing all German-speaking peoples into the Reich's fold, beginning with those of his homeland.
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The Anschluss, Austria is annexed, and immediately submitted to the same reign of terror as Germany, with the opening of one of the most infamous concentration camps at Mauthausen, near Linz.
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Which country will be his next victim? Neighboring Czechoslovakia, where there is a German population, the Sudeten Germans.
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But the country is recognized as an independent state by England and France.
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The clouds of war gather.
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In Munich, Temple of Nazism, an 11th-hour peace conference is organized.
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On one side, Adolf Hitler, who is becoming more and more frightening, and his ally, the Italian dictator, Benito Mussolini.
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Mussolini, the founder of fascism, an indoctrination of an entire nation, from childhood on.
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On the other side, the Western democracies, victorious, but exhausted from the Great War.
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Neville Chamberlain, the conservative British Prime Minister, and the radical socialist French Premier, Edouard Daladier, want to save the peace.
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They end up accepting the unacceptable. They give up the Czech province of Sudetenland to Hitler, in exchange for his solemn promise to make no more claims on another European territory.
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But what is Hitler's promise worth?
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Just six months later, he invades the rest of Czechoslovakia.
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And enters Prague, accompanied by Marshal Hermann Goering.
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Goering, a former First World War fighter pilot, one of the founders of the Nazi Party, is now the Air Minister, and an ogre trying to charm the Czech children.
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Hitler no longer needs the excuse of reuniting German-speaking people. The powerful Czech industry will be working for him.
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Why shouldn't he take advantage of it?
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The Allies.
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The USSR is the last major neighboring power left to counter Hitler.
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It has signed a mutual assistance treaty with France.
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The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is the official name of Communist Russia and its satellite republics.
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Manipulation of the masses in Red Square masks the iron-fisted dictatorship of Stalin, who has also thrown millions of poor wretches into his labor camps, the Gulag.
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Industrialization and forced militarization have made the USSR a major power.
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Despite their fear of communism, the Western powers rely on the USSR.
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Hitler is going to beat them to the punch.
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In the summer of 1939, in his Berchtesgaden chalet, with his Minister of Foreign Affairs, Joachim von Ribbentrop, he prepares a blocking maneuver.
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Hitler, who swore to destroy communism, sends von Ribbentrop, the Nazi, to Moscow to sign a history-making treaty with his worst enemy.
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When Stalin's Foreign Affairs Minister, Molotov, signs the Germano-Soviet Pact, communists are totally taken aback.
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Like these French party members, it's August 1939, and people in France are enjoying their first paid holidays, one of the major victories of the Socialist Popular Front.
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What are the reasons behind this non-aggression pact?
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The Soviets answer that Stalin is playing for time, letting Hitler and the Western powers kill each other off.
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Perhaps Stalin, who intends to grab the Baltic countries and part of Poland, even has the illusion that he could share Europe with Hitler on a permanent basis.
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In 1936, the US Congress had passed the Neutrality Act to avoid being dragged into a European war once again.
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So with nothing to fear either from the United States or from Russia, Hitler decides to wipe out what he calls the worst monstrosity of the Versailles Treaty, the Danzig Corridor.
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In 1919, German territory was cut in two in order to give Poland access to the sea.
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Hitler decides to launch his invasion of Poland and recover Danzig on the 1st of September 1939 at 5:35 AM.
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The first cannon shot of the Second World War is fired on Danzig.
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Danzig.
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Hitler is convinced that the French and the British will not take action.
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Yet the two governments meet immediately and send him an ultimatum demanding that he halt all military action against Poland.
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Hitler declares, our enemies are little worms, and he adds, who wants to get bogged down in a world war for Danzig?
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September the 3rd, 1939.
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At 11 AM, the Ambassador of Great Britain in Berlin delivers a declaration of war. At 5 PM, France declares war on Germany.
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Hitler can hardly believe it.
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German generals find themselves facing their worst-case scenario, war on two fronts.
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But the die is cast.
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Hitler unleashes the Wehrmacht, the armed forces of Nazi Germany, onto Poland.
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Entering battle as if in a bygone age, the Polish cavalry charges the German tanks and is slaughtered.
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France, September 3, 1939.
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Paris, the Gare de l'Est train station.
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Many of these men had shipped out from these same platforms 25 years ago in a totally different atmosphere.
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In August 1914, they marched off to war in high spirits, with flowers in their rifles.
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But there are no flowers this time, and no rifles.
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Nobody wants to fight this war.
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Four million men are mobilized.
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Many of them are farmers, France is still a largely rural country.
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They head for the German border on foot.
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With their officers following on horseback.
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Armies still rely heavily on horses, and these are requisitioned throughout the country.
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Motorization has not kept up.
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Gaston Sirec, a driver of one of these outdated trucks with solid rubber tires, recalls.
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There was such a shortage of equipment.
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We had one rifle for two per truck.
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We had one box of 10 bullets.
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Which we weren't allowed to open.
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It was pathetic.
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If we'd had what we needed, we'd have fought.
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Because we're no great friend of the Boche.
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The Boche was a pejorative term for the German soldiers during the previous war. They were also called Verdigris, which in French means field gray, the color of their uniform, which enabled them to blend in with their surroundings.
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But just who are these soldiers?
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Let's take for example one of these young Germans, marching as he sings, Our flag is waving before us. Our flag is a new age. Our flag is stronger than death.
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His name is August von Kagenek.
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He writes.
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I thought that a military career was the right choice.
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My parents thought so as well.
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My father would tell me, at least there you can still open your mouth and say what you like.
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And you don't have to do that Nazi salute.
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In September 1939, August von Kagenek is still training to become a tank commander.
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He writes.
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My father, who was a general, was telling me, the French have 40 divisions on the border.
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We have 15.
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All the rest are in Poland.
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500,000 men against 200,000.
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They outnumber us two to one.
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French forces attack on September the 7th, 1939.
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Four days after declaring war.
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This offensive, launched to show public opinion that Poland has not been abandoned.
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Advances 8 km into the Saar region.
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The Saar offensive stops there and degenerates into a series of skirmishes.
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Raids by elite commandos, led by the hero Joseph Darnand.
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Who receives the citation of Premier Soldier of France.
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Later, he will become one of the most rabid collaborators with the Germans, and eventually, he'll be executed after the war.
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The French army, in spite of its heroes and its superiority in numbers, takes no further action.
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General Maurice Gamelin, 67 years old, is commander-in-chief of the Allied Franco-British land forces.
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For the French outnumber the British.
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Who also think that this war isn't for real.
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And that it'll all be settled soon.
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Gamelin himself has no desire to refight the war of 1914.
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He wants to avoid another bloodbath at any cost.
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He considers that he needs two years, safe behind the Maginot Line, in order to rearm the country.
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The Maginot Line is the work of a former Minister of War, André Maginot.
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This complex of fortifications was meant to stop the German enemy once and for all.
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It took nearly 10 years to construct, and swallowed up 1 1/2 million cubic meters of concrete and 150,000 tons of steel.
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All these gun turrets are linked together by a labyrinth of tunnels.
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100 km of them.
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The line itself stretched for 720 km, from the Swiss to the Belgian borders.
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The Maginot Line ends at the foot of the Ardennes Forest.
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The French military command thought that German tanks could never cross this extremely rough terrain.
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The French didn't extend the line all the way to the sea because Belgium, before declaring its neutrality, was an ally of France and opposed it.
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This northern part of the front is manned by a French army and the British Expeditionary Forces.
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Later reinforced by Canadians.
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And troops from the far-flung British Empire.
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In Britain, a popular song of the day was The Washing on the Siegfried Line.
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The Siegfried Line.
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Is the string of fortifications constructed by Hitler facing the Maginot Line.
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The Germans don't attack.
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They're still trying to avoid a second front.
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The French nevertheless take some precautions.
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They evacuate the population of Alsace and Lorraine.
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To the regions of Perigord and Charente in the Southwest.
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Strasbourg.
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A ghost town.
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Abandoned by its population.
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Emptied of its soul.
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Especially that of the synagogues.
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The ordeal of the Jewish people begins.
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The Nazis now have 3 million Polish Jews at their mercy.
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Some of which are completely walled off.
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From the diary of one of these unfortunate souls.
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It's heart-rending to see the shameful scenes of violence that take place before our eyes.
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Our defense.
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We are so weak.
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The Jews here still feel confident that perhaps someday they'll be able to return to their homes.
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They don't know that they will die of hunger and cold.
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They don't know that the Shoah is about to begin.
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Warsaw is in ruins.
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Hitler comes to be filmed by a propaganda crew.
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Seen here traveling in a car in the background.
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These victorious German soldiers march their goose step to the sound of the Grenadiers March.
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But they weren't too efficient during the Polish campaign.
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Poor preparation, a lack of fighting spirit, and even cases of indiscipline.
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Are the points that the Commander-in-Chief, General von Brauchitsch, dares report to the Führer.
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Hitler is furious.
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But he is immune to doubt and orders the attack on the West to be prepared.
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An attack on the Netherlands, Belgium and France.
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Some of his generals think it's madness.
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Some of them begin plotting to overthrow the Führer.
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This is a crucial moment.
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The course of history lies in the balance.
Topics:HitlerWorld War IINazi GermanyBerlin 1945AnschlussMunich AgreementNazi-Soviet PactPoland invasionAllied powersHolocaust
