Dan Snow's History Hit - Hitler's Third Reich

Episode Date: November 9, 2023

3/4. In this special 4-part series, we look back at the life of Adolf Hitler. With the help of Frank McDonough, a leading historian of the Third Reich, we follow Hitler from childhood to adulthood and learn how an awkward, aspiring artist became one of history's most infamous dictators.In this third episode, we pick up Hitler's story with the sweeping German military victories of 1939. Emboldened by these successes, Nazi Germany goes head-to-head with the Soviet Union. But the tide begins to turn as Hitler makes a series of strategic mistakes. His health deteriorates as the world closes in on the Third Reich. Finally, beneath the rubble of the German capital and surrounded by his enemies, Hitler's story comes to an end.Produced by James Hickmann, Mariana Des Forges and Freddy Chick. Edited by Dougal Patmore.Discover the past with exclusive history documentaries and ad-free podcasts presented by world-renowned historians from History Hit. Watch them on your smart TV or on the go with your mobile device. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code DANSNOW - sign up now for your 14-day free trial http://access.historyhit.com/checkout?code=dansnow&plan=monthly.We'd love to hear from you! You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

It's the 30th of April 1945. The Battle of Berlin has been raging for two weeks. The city that symbolised Hitler's Third Reich has been reduced to a smouldering ruin. The Red Army is rampaging through the streets from the east, exacting bloody, savage revenge for the brutal Nazi occupation of their homeland. To the west, battle-hardened Allied troops have smashed through German lines. A desperate defence is underway. Men, women and children are forced to pick up arms and fight the invaders. But it's pointless.

The writing is already on the wall. Eight feet below the shattered city lies the Führerbunker, a cavernous, subterranean complex built of coal, concrete and steel. This has been Hitler's home. It's been the headquarters of the Third Reich since January. He's joined by his close confidant, Martin Bormann, his old friend, Joseph Goebbels, who lives there with his wife and six children.

There's a skeleton staff of officers, typists and aides chosen to remain with their Führer. Their eyes nervously dart upwards. The dull thud of artillery resonates through the chamber. Dust, pieces of mortar cascade from the ceiling. It seems as if the roof will cave in at any minute. Everyone is terrified, but they can't show it. Hitler is apoplectic with rage. Anyone showing weakness is liable to attract the ire of his unpredictable outbursts they try and distract themselves with the tasks at hand they log reports they update troop positions on a map

it's a sort of fantasy it's futile the officers sending the reports have mostly been killed or captured the armies that they push about solemnly on the map have long since disintegrated. An air of unruliness has taken over. Many of the bunker's staff are now drunk, dishevelled. Against this strange atmosphere, the 16-year-old boy standing smartly to attention before the Fuhrer is something of a contrast. His sharp Hitler Youth uniform is bleached white by a thick layer of dust his forearms been torn and bloodied by flying debris his eyes are red with exhaustion he is a messenger ferrying letters orders reports from the frontline troops back to the bunker it's an enormously dangerous task the boy's already been awarded a medal for heroism But even as the world around him comes crashing down,

he remains bolt upright, proud, unquestioningly loyal to his Führer. But the man in front of him, that Führer, is not the headstrong, determined, confident leader of five or six years before. He's a shadow of the man who marched through Munich 20 years earlier. There are no more speeches to give now to packed stadiums full of people. Hunched over, his pallid skin stretched tightly over his face, his hands shaking. Hitler has met with the fate that he deserved. It wasn't the end that Hitler had been expecting. At the outbreak of war in 1939, his armies had swept across Europe. It seemed likely, for a few months, that he'd become Fuhrer of the entire continent.

You're listening to Dan Snow's History, and this is part three of our Hitler series. Today, the story of Hitler's war and his deterioration as the world closed in on him. Nazism had always looked east for its two key needs, labour and living space. As the Third Reich grew and prospered, it would need new fertile lands to settle. The arable land of the East was a natural fit, but that would have to wait. Hitler was pragmatic and for now, an alliance with the Soviet Union would better serve his purposes. If we can look at Hitler's big moments of the Second World War, the first big one is that extraordinary decision to ally himself with Stalin, his erstwhile nemesis. What's going on there in 1939?

That's amazing, isn't it? He allies himself with Stalin, the head of the Soviet Union. He said in Mein Kampf that he's got to break the Soviet Union. That's the place he'll get his Lebensraum and set up his thousand-year Reich. And here he is, he's got a deal with Stalin. He hates communism. He wants rid of communism from the world. And why does he do it? And the answer is that he's also pragmatic. He also sees that Stalin can open the door for him to invade Poland and he can see a

map and he realizes that the French and the British can't do anything about it. The chances of the French, he says, there's no chance of the French going on the offensive. They don't know how to do it now. The only way they walk is backwards. So it's a compromise. And we see that compromise a few times. You know, he compromises over Czechoslovakia, signs the Munich agreement, says he'll never sign any international agreement, but he does.

So I think that it's just, it's a compromise. He finds himself with the, you know, the wrong ally at the start of the war, but for a reason, he knows now he can crush Poland. And so on the 1st of September 1939, three German thrusts pushed into Poland. The Poles fought violently, but they were overwhelmed by German numerical and air superiority. The Polish military was pushed back, and by the 12th, all of western Poland had capitulated except for Warsaw. Now that, of course, left the east of Poland free, except that on the 17th of September, the Soviets invaded. In a coordinated attack, the Germans and Soviets had swamped the country.

They then divided it between themselves. Poland never stood a chance. What on earth, though, was Stalin thinking? How could these two diametrically opposed regimes end up on the same side? For as long as anyone could remember, Hitler had professed the inevitability of a German invasion of the Soviet Union. Nazi propaganda famously portrayed the Russians as racially inferior, a people whose sole purpose was to be conquered and enslaved. How could Stalin have turned a blind eye to this? Stalin thinks he can buy time. I mean, he thinks he wants to buy time.

He sort of thinks Hitler's going to eventually attack him, I think. But he thinks, I can buy time. If I can buy a couple of years and create a kind of buffer zone in Poland, he'll have to go through my buffer zone to get to attack us in the Soviet Union. So I think he's pragmatic as well. But he does believe in the Nazi-Soviet pact, Stalin. He's shocked when Hitler invades the Soviet Union in 1941. Now, whilst all this is going on, Hitler is also keeping an eye on the West. Hitler had always wanted to get the British on side.

He was very disappointed when they joined the war to support the Poles. He saw the British as fellow Aryans. They too had a vast empire. What's not to like? And he was keen to overemphasise the cultural and historic links between the two nations. There was a pragmatic side to this as well. The British up to now had been the world's superpower. They had the world's strongest navy. Hitler, they were a natural, valuable ally, and they would be a very troublesome enemy.

Did he think that Britain wouldn't go to war for Poland? He did. He did right up until the last moment. He thought that they wouldn't. So that was a bit of a shock. He got the wrong war. He wanted Britain on side in some way. Some way he thought he could get Britain to be neutral over what happened in Europe.

But that was never going to happen. That was complete pie in the sky. He didn't mind the idea of the British Empire, did he? He loved the British Empire. And in fact, you know, he said it was a model for other empires. It was run on the cheap. You know, he said there's a massive continent, India, ruled by about 3,000 administrators. He said, fantastic.

Let's hope we can do that, he said. So he did talk about the British that, you said. So he did talk about the British, that he felt as though the British were Aryans and that he'd like them to be on his side. And so he had a kind of soft spot for Britain, really. Once Britain and France had declared war on Germany, he was forced to accept that an alliance with Britain was a pipe dream. He now knew he had to conquer the West, he had to knock out Germany's most immediate threats. That would be the priority. For all its military strength, Germany was not going to start a war on two fronts. They'd learned that in the First World War. He had hopes that by

defeating the coalition in the West, Britain could be isolated and would join him once the rest of Europe had fallen. So 1989 doesn't go completely right because he ends up fighting Britain and France and their respective empires. He then has to make a big decision, I suppose, doesn't he? Like, does he continue pursuing his agenda in the East or does he have to deal with Western Europe first? He's got to deal with Western Europe. He says that to his generals, you know, we've got to knock out France. He says that to his generals, you know, we've got to knock out France. And he says that even earlier, you know, before then, that France is going to stand in the way of German expansionism on the continent. He said, we've got to deal with France. So weird, isn't it? It echoes in 1914.

You smash France first, then you turn it into... Yeah, yeah, yeah. So weird. Exactly. You know, it's sort of implanted in his brain. He's got to take out France. He hopes then that when France is knocked out, the British will retreat back to Britain and somehow he'll come to an arrangement with them. He'll keep offering them, which he does actually.

He keeps offering them an alliance, doesn't he? I'll leave the British Empire alone in return for you leave me alone. The British and the French go to war initially, not to save Poland, but to save their position in the world order. They are the two big empires and they want to save that position in the world. It would be now like America. America sees itself, doesn't it? It's like, you know, part of the world order. If anyone's going to threaten the world order, America's got to be stopping them. So by the end of 1939, all-out war was underwear in Europe for the second time in 25 years. In May 1940, a blinding German assault tore through

France and northwest Europe. Within a matter of weeks, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Belgium had fallen to the Nazis. The remnants of the French army and the British expeditionary force that had been sent to support them was beating an undignified retreat back to the English Channel. The invasion showcased Nazi Germany's fearsome new fighting techniques. Rapid, hard-hitting tank divisions, panzer divisions, backed up by infantry, punched holes in Allied lines and caused havoc in their rear. The German forces were well-trained and highly motivated. Their military doctrine made room for individual officers to make autonomous decisions on the battlefield. They could be responsive in the face of slow-moving and poorly-coordinated

Allied forces. With their backs to the ocean on the beaches of Dunkirk, the remaining Allied forces waited for their inevitable capture or deaths. But Hitler was about to make a fateful tactical error. He is successful in invading Denmark and Norway, then Netherlands, Belgium, France, Luxembourg. Stunning, stunning successes. Did he deserve any credit for those? I think he did in Germany. I think, you know, when you look look at it it was a remarkable series of victories

on the european continent he knocks france out but was that his you know when manstein's meeting with him and gradarian do you think he's well he's saying i think that plan looks like a good one well again you could say that he had a bit of luck on paper britain and france could have held germany on the western front they had the equipment They just had it in the wrong place. Manstein's plan was to go through the Ardennes, the impenetrable Ardennes, as it was called, the forested area in Belgium, and to bridge the River Meuse and then to move on to Sedan. Yeah, yeah.

And that was his plan, and it worked fantastically. And really, the French and the British were outwitted by this because what he did was he thrust a dagger through the two armies because some of them had gone to meet the invasion of Belgium and the others had been encamped further down in France. So it was like a wonderful corridor he created with these tanks. They drove all the way to the Channel and they ended up at the port of Dunkirk.

A matter of days. And so the Allies have been sliced in half. The northern rump is slowly reduced and evacuated through Dunkirk. Now, Hitler, does he deliberately let them escape? What's your thought on this old question that gets argued over again and again? I think he did. I think he did let them escape. I think so.

I mean, the evidence suggests that he could have intervened. He could have given orders to smash them on the beaches. It was really half-hearted effort to stop the British getting out. Later on, he says at a meeting with his generals something like, it's good. It's good for the British to go back, he said, because they'll have that humiliation, he said, and they won't want to fight again. But it didn't pan out the way he expected. The British were emboldened by the success of the

Dunkirk evacuations and could still rely on a world-class navy to protect them from a cross-channel invasion. And so, with invasion out of the question for now, Hitler turned his attention to the skies. He ends up having to launch the Battle of Britain, which he didn't want to do, did he? I mean- He didn't want to do it. Yeah. It's like sort of, you made me hate you. I didn't want to do it. He didn't want to invade Britain. And he was kind of pushed into it really. Operation Sea Lion. The plan was to gain air superiority over Britain first, aerial superiority, which was of course the Battle of Britain. And they didn't achieve it. You know, it was a defeat and people have underestimated this defeat. And I don't

underestimate it because I think the Battle of Britain is crucial. You know, I call my book, a second volume of the Hitler years, Disaster. And the disaster starts with the Battle of Britain because he didn't take air superiority over Britain. He didn't mount the invasion. Britain was free from invasion. It was never remotely in danger of being invaded. Why? Because the British Navy was too strong.

All he had was barges bobbing around. I mean, have you ever seen these barges bobbing around in the channel? Or have you ever been on a boat in the channel? It sort of bobs up and down all the way. You know, it's not by any means an easy sort of gig, if you like. But when you've got like 272 cruisers, for example, and the Germans have got, what, 20? It was never feasible that they could get them onto the beach. It was never feasible that we'd be overtaken by our navy,

battleships being destroyed. It wasn't possible. So the Battle of Britain is a major reverse for Hitler. Yes, and it also leaves open the possibility of Britain being used as an aircraft carrier if the Americans eventually come into the war. Hitler was forced to accept stalemate in the West, and he turned eastwards towards the Soviet Union. This was perhaps the most fateful decision he would make in the war. On the one hand, it made sense. Things were not looking good for the Russians. In a fit of

paranoia, Stalin purged the senior leadership of his army. He decapitated his best safeguard against Hitler. His troops weren't experienced, they were poorly supplied, and now they were very poorly led. By contrast, Germany was riding high off the back of sweeping victories. Its forces were experienced. They had tried and tested kit, and they were led by men who'd won victories on the battlefield. On the other hand, however, Hitler was not the first would-be hegemon who thought he could take a bite out of Russia. Historically speaking, it doesn't tend to end well for the invaders. of Russia. Historically speaking, it doesn't tend to end well for the invaders. The scale of Russia,

its sheer size, its savage climate, has made it the graveyard of many armies and imperial ambitions. The Russians were also able to draw on an enormous population to overwhelm their enemy with sheer numbers. Hitler was well aware of the example of Napoleon marching to Moscow in 1812 and the fate that befell his army. He was certain he would avoid that fate. So Germany has now got an undefeated Britain on its western flank with, as you say, all that amazing potential, biggest navy in the world, lots of help coming from the rest of the world, huge empire. And yet he decides to turn east, doesn't he, in focus. So rather than try and subdue Britain, take his time, build some battleships, panel them.

He should have done that, really. I mean, that was his major strategic mistake was not to stop then and to really try and build up his forces and invade Britain. That was the way to go because unless he invaded Britain, he left over the possibility that the Americans would come into the war. And of course, he kind of dismissed the Americans too much. Churchill didn't. Roosevelt said, you know, himself that, you know, from 1938, he knew what the stakes were. And he'd already said to Churchill when he met him and put out the Atlantic Charter, Churchill said to him, what happens if the Soviet Union goes? And he says, well, then he says, it's a big power struggle, isn't it? We've got to come in. He said, at that stage, America will enter this war. He said, if the Russians are beaten, we'll enter the war. And he said, we'll supply the Russians with military equipment to beat them. So with America's military equipment, could Russia have lost that war when you think about it? And we now know,

don't we, that the Americans supplied much more armaments than we ever thought. Now we've got the Russian archives have opened, haven't they? We can see how much they supplied them with. So when we're talking about Hitler's big decision in the summer of, or the autumn of 1940, Britain hasn't been defeated. Hitler's thinking about what to do next. It looks like going to Moscow is easier than crossing the Channel. The Soviet army's in a bit of a disarray. The purges have taken out senior officers. He thinks that he's worried about this new tank coming in. If they attack before, you know, the equipment's up to par, he might be able to get a quick victory.

Is Hitler making that decision alone? I mean, isn't it Tatar? Is there a foreign policy establishment helping him? Or is this just him sitting there thinking about it? He's got his general staff, isn't he? By now, he's sort of encamped with his military generals in the Wolf's Lair in Rastenberg in Poland. And they are discussing the idea of attacking the Soviet

Union. Interestingly enough, they sort of fall in line with what he wants. They agree. They think it is a pack of cards. So they kind of have been buoyed up by these victories themselves. And they think, yes, it's doable. It will just collapse. It can be done. It's doable in two or three months. So they bolster him up in that way. It's funny, after the war, the generals will go, oh, Hitler was a terrible meddler. We lost the war to him. But at this stage, 1940, 41, you think they're all sort of on the same hymn sheet.

Yes, because I think the victories in Western Europe did lead even those generals to think he was a bit more than a corporal, that perhaps he did have some military genius. And he thought it himself. He definitely thought it could be done. And they told him, if we break it up into three armies, we can have objectives at the end of those three armies and win. They thought they could win in about three months. And so in June of 1941, three separate German army groups poured into the

Soviet Union along an 1,800 mile front line. One group heading for Leningrad, the other to Moscow, and another to the riches of the Ukraine. Something like 3 million Germans and 700,000 German Allied troops marched, supported by 3,000 tanks, 7,000 artillery pieces, while above them 2,500 aircraft crisscrossed the skies. Together this force smashed through Russian lines in the largest land invasion in human history. They faced enormous Soviet force, which on paper was around five and a half million soldiers. It's worth pausing to get a sense of the scale here. From day one, something like 10 million human beings mobilised to fight each other. The Western European theatre, the fight in the Pacific

and the North Africa are tiny in terms of the numbers of people involved on the Eastern Front. And even at the time, people like Churchill and the American President Roosevelt knew that the outcome of the war in the East would play a huge part in shaping the fate of the war at large. In the initial invasion, things did not look good for the Soviets. The Red Army was taken by surprise. It was in complete disarray. Their superiority in numbers mattered little as frontline Russian divisions were overwhelmed by German tactics and kit. Some three million Russian soldiers were taken as prisoners of war in the initial months of the invasion, with a further million killed or wounded in action.

In one enormous encirclement in Kiev, something like 700,000 Soviets killed, captured or wounded in one fell swoop. The situation looked dire for the Soviets, and the Germans, emboldened by these victories, pushed on towards the capital, Moscow. Behind these blinding military successes, Behind these blinding military successes, another war was being waged. In episode two, we saw how Hitler's Reich began persecuting the Jews. Laws were passed that excluded them from public life. Their property was seized, they were imprisoned in ghettos and work camps. But once all-out war was underway, things got significantly worse. The conflict gave Hitler the cover he needed, and he began ramping up his vile anti-Semitism. His, quote, final solution to the Jewish problem was a sinister

euphemism for what would become the wholesale genocide of Europe's Jewish population. From 1941 to 1945, millions of Jews were rounded up from German-occupied territories and sent to specially constructed concentration camps. Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Treblinka, Sobibor, just a few of the infamous examples etched onto European memory. The Holocaust, as it came to be known, was a well-oiled and efficient machine of death. In those camps, there were gas chambers that ultimately killed some six million Jews, as well as hundreds of thousands of Romani, homosexuals, people with disabilities and political opponents. But at first, the massacre of Europe's undesirables was carried out by hand. In the wake of the German invasion, the Soviet Union specially created SS units hunted down

Russia's Jewish and Romani populations. A place like Babyanikiev, SS executions shot some 33,000 Jewish men, women and children in two days. By the time the German occupation was over, somewhere between 100,000 and 150,000 Jews, Romani and Soviet POWs had been executed by hand at this one site alone. Let's be clear, this was not something that happened without Hitler's knowledge. This was a very natural result of the anti-Semitic, anti-Slavic bile and policies that he had been pushing for decades. Remember back to all that angry shouting and gesticulating in beer cellars about the inevitable war in the East, in which the great Aryan race would prevail over the Slavic subhumans?

Well, this was that war, and these execution squads were simply enacting the Fuhrer's policy promises. This was a politician doing the things he campaigned about. The Holocaust was sanctioned, it was pushed, it was overseen by the angry Austrian, Hitler, who had been blaming all of his own problems and that of his country on these groups for decades. Amidst all the chaos of late 1941, with the fate of Germany, the Soviet Union, Europe and the world, and the balance, things were getting heated in Nazi headquarters. Hitler's preoccupation with waging an ideological war of extermination in tandem with a military campaign was beginning to wear his generals down. At what stage does he start becoming a real drag on the military effort? annihilation where you've got this group in the SS called the Einsatzgruppen who are going to go about, you know, destroying people, civilians, communists, Jews. They don't really think that's

a good idea, but he wants that. He has this idea that it's got to be two wars. One is a war to destroy the Soviet regime, but the other is to destroy the Jews, destroy the communists as well. He creates this Einsatzgruppen. I think you could say that is a kind of added on nasty bit of the campaign, which the Nazis add to it. That's a Nazi innovation, really. But of course, they went along with it. And of course, at the Nuremberg trial and all the rest of it, they tried to say, you

know, they weren't privy to that. So I think the generals at the end of the war, they try and lie their way out. They try and say, oh, if we'd been running the war, we'd have won the war. You know, but when you look at the actual decisions, they always take the decisions or agree with the decisions. This is Dan Snow's History. There's more on this topic coming up. from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were

by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. As the German generals tried to tiptoe around Hitler's genocide back at headquarters, the invasion had been ground to a halt on the outskirts of Moscow. The Germans were tantalisingly close to their objective, but the vast distances in Russia made their progress a logistical nightmare. Motor vehicles had become bogged down all through the autumn in the vast Russian wilderness. The German army was relying on hundreds of thousands of horses to cart provisions up to the front lines, which definitely wasn't the quickest way to supply a modern army.

Hitler also brought strategic dissonance to the campaign. He was always concerned with Germany's lack of fuel, and so he wanted to move south towards the oil fields and the Caucasus. But he also wants to knock out the seat of Soviet power, Moscow. So at the last minute, he's swayed by his generals to switch back to something more resembling the initial plan and launch a giant thrust at the Soviet capital. The prospect of Hitler succeeding when Napoleon failed felt like a tantalizing triumph that Hitler's ego simply couldn't resist. The army want to go straight to Moscow, adamant about this, go straight to Moscow, knock off Stalin, and then the whole thing will collapse.

to Moscow, knock off Stalin, and then the whole thing will collapse. And Hitler says, no, we need to go south where the oil is. So we need to move through the Ukraine and we need to go through the oil fields. That's where the money is here, the economic side of it. So Hitler puts forward the economic plan, really, not the choice plan. He said, also, we've got to be aware that if we don't take Moscow it's going to be a psychological ball we all know who didn't take Moscow and people will be looking at me said that I didn't take Moscow as well in the end they go for the plan the which is the army's plan not Hitler's plan

Hitler's plan is to go for the economic targets in the Ukraine they go with the army's plan and of course they don't take Moscow. Well, Hitler argued with his generals. His troops were embroiled in a savage battle just outside the Russian capital. By October, both sides were battered. They were beleaguered after months of fighting. And the famed General Zhukov had been put in charge of the city's desperate defence. had been put in charge of the city's desperate defence. He had put a wall of men and machines around Moscow's western approach. They had held on by the skin of their teeth while hundreds of thousands of women and children dug trenches and anti-tank ditches and bunkers throughout the city. But by December, Zhukov had also managed to mobil mobilize a strategic reserve. Infantry from the far east, a million

men ready to launch a counter-offensive to drive the Germans back and these included specialist ski troops who thrived in the freezing cold of the Russian winter. While the Soviets defended, gathered their strength and prepared to launch a mighty counter-attack around their capital, the Germans were having terrible problems supplying their troops at the front line. Their logistic network failed to get warm clothing and fuel up to the front, leaving the fighting men to tear clothes off their fallen comrades or their enemy. Many fighting units were down to half strength. It was clear that while rapid victory was no longer on the cards, the Soviets just had too much time and space in which to recover. Finally, in December, Zhukov launched his counter-offensive. The German generals knew instantly they would not be able to rebuff this attack. They would have to fall back. They'd have to take up new positions if

they want to have a chance of weathering the storm at all. But their commander-in-chief, whose military experience did not extend beyond that of a corporal, refused to give ground to the Soviets. To Hitler, whose ego was so easily bruised, retreat meant shame. And I think Hitler, the politician, the spin doctor, the showman, knew what retreat meant in a way that the generals couldn't understand, seeing it from a purely technical point of view. And deep down, Hitler believed in the superiority of the Aryan race. He believed that his boys would be able to stand up to the overwhelming odds against these subhuman Slavs. Thousands of soldiers would die at the gates of Moscow. Like so many others, they were ideological pawns on a chessboard that really only existed in Hitler's

head. At one point, two of his generals defied his orders. They began a tactical retreat. Hitler found out, he cancelled the order, and he commanded his troops to hold every inch of ground, quote, digging trenches with howitzer shells if necessary. I think if there's one moment that spelt the beginning of the end for the Third Reich, for Nazi Germany, I think it probably is December 1941. With the Germans so close to Stalin's capital, the Soviet Goliath woke up. It drew on those infantry reserves from across the country. It rebuilt virtually a new army of enormous proportions. Russian industry kicked into gear. Thousands of tanks were churned out, planes, artillery pieces. Supplies from the Allies came

pouring in. And in that same month, far away in the Pacific, another industrial superpower was stirring. The devastating Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor brought a very angry United States of America into the war. Hitler's war on two fronts had just got a lot more serious. Even the most optimistic German general would have thought that fighting the Soviets, the British Empire, the Americans, and others all at the same time was now an impossible task. Zhukov, the most famous general of the Second World War, the Russian general, he mounts this amazing counter-offensive outside Moscow in December 1941. And at that point, that's the real turning point of the war on the battlefield.

Because from then on, Hitler's fighting, you know, a losing battle war on the battlefield because from then on hitler's fighting you know a losing battle really on the eastern front actually it takes another 18 months before the whole thing starts to collapse but the writing's on the wall outside moscow in late 41 and particularly because it's the most dramatic week in world history because just as hitler's troops are clawing their way towards the outskirts, allegedly one unit can see the Spires of the Kremlin, whether or not they could, we don't know. As that's happening, the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor and Hitler makes a very strange decision at this point.

What's he doing? He decides that he'll declare war on the USA. I mean, he has got a pact with Japan and I think it was inevitable that, wasn't it Roosevelt who said, you know, he saved me the task of declaring war on him. So Roosevelt would have declared war on Germany probably the next week anyway, if he'd done nothing. So, you know, I think he had to stand by his ally. And he did have some hopes, you know, he said, you know, the Japanese, they're unconquerable, they've never been defeated. He said, so, you know, that war's by no means over.

They'll tie down the Americans for quite a while. They've got a very good navy. He just felt as though he had to get on board with his Axis allies, including, of course, the useless Mussolini. Over the next year, the war in the East grew even more violent, even more destructive. Several Soviet counter-offensives were launched. They didn't recapture much territory, but they inflicted losses on the German army that were tough to replace. In June 1942, Hitler launched Case Blue, a summer offensive to capture the oil fields of the Caucasus. They fell short of those oil fields, instead found themselves locked in an infamous battle at Stalingrad, a symbolic struggle that foretold the fate of Germany's eastern invasion.

The city was utterly levelled over the next four months. Hitler forbade his men to retreat, turning the siege into a fight to the death, a catastrophic loss of human life. into a fight to the death, a catastrophic loss of human life. Eventually surrounded, the Germans fought long after the logical decision would be to have surrendered. Russia lost over a million men, captured, killed or wounded in the battle for this one city. That's about the same as the total US, British, French and Commonwealth casualties combined for the entire war. Around 800,000 Axis soldiers were also killed, wounded or captured. Of the 91,000 men who did eventually surrender, only 5,000 or so would ever return to their homes. All of this to capture a city of little strategic value beyond the fact that it bore Stalin's name. The destruction of the German force at Stalingrad showed the world that the German army

was not superhuman. They were beatable. It gave Germany's many enemies hope, and it marked the point at which the tide of the war had decisively turned. Even Hitler was forced to reconsider the German situation. His second great offensive into Ukraine and Russia is bogged down. It's been very disappointing. He's about to get annihilated in Stalingrad. His army's bogged down there. You've got the Americans have arrived in the Mediterranean theatre. The Battle of the Atlantic's going badly.

The Soviets have survived. The Japanese are in trouble in the Pacific. How does Hitler get out of bed in the morning? How does that stress not break him? He can't, or does he believe he can still win? Well, I think that there's a kind of, you know, an inability to look defeat in the face, really. I mean, I think if you see the meetings that he has with Goebbels,

they're all in his diaries. And Goebbels is quite pragmatic. He thinks they have lost the war and he keeps saying to him, you've got to decide who you're going to have a peace settlement with. So they have like little meetings, you know, in the right chancel and Goebbels is saying, you've got to come to peace with Stalin somehow or the West. And he says, well, the West, he said, they're not going to come to a deal with me. He said, the Americans and the British have built up this idea of themselves as morally

superior. They're fighting a moral war. So they're not going to come to me. And he said, Stalin doesn't have to come to me. He's winning. He said, what kind of a peace settlement do you get out of somebody who's winning? It's not a peace settlement. It's a capitulation. And then he said, now they're saying they want unconditional surrender. So in those conversations, you can see that he does kind of know that the game is up, really. He does sometimes reveals that he is losing, but he's going to fight on doggedly right to the end and something might turn in his favor. He always had this idea, you know, events have always turned in my favor. And he was lucky, wasn't he? The Wall Street crash, Hindenburg being old and elderly and deciding to pick him as the Chancellor,

Chamberlain being stupid enough to sign the Munich Agreement. He always believed that someone would pull his chestnuts out of the fire. And after all, change of regime saved Frederick the Great's bacon, didn't it? So these things happen in history, I suppose. This is probably a good time to step back and assess Hitler's mental state. It should be pretty clear by now that Hitler was not a well-adjusted person at the best of times. From a preening, narcissistic teenager to a despotic cult leader, Hitler had always been prone to emotional outbursts. He had a distinct lack of self-control.

He would rant and rave when things didn't go his way. He'd lash out at anyone but himself, of course. Jews, Slavs, cowardly generals, communists, these people were all at the root of his problems. And as the situation slowly deteriorated, he had a physician on hand to provide him with a constant supply of experimental drugs to pep him up. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research

from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions. And crusades.

Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. When does his health start to deteriorate and the use of drugs and all this kind of stuff? I think his health was always bad. If we go through him talking to people, he had his own personal doctor who was with him all the time, Dr. Theodore Morell. He sort of specialized in homeopathic cures and things like that. He gave Hitler all kinds of stuff.

and things like that. You know, he gave Hitler all kinds of stuff. And he had these sorts of preparations, but at the core of some of this was, you know, amphetamines, speed. But he didn't think he was taking amphetamine, if you see what I mean. He thought he was taking vitamin boosters, as he called them. But the only thing that was going to get you up out of them, it wasn't the beetroot juice or anything. It was the amphetamines.

And he said, God, I love that. I love that concoction that you've got. And it gave him more energy. Now, we know, don't we, that lots of people were taking amphetamines. I mean, one of the most famous amphetamine addicted people in the government was Anthony Eden. He lived on them. And they didn't do him any good because, of course, they bring paranoia and stuff like that, don't they, in strange moods. So he was definitely hooked on amphetamine to begin with. It was called pervertin. They started giving it to the troops as well.

So then there was his stomach troubles. So he was, like, endlessly having stomach troubles. That's why he was a vegetarian. So it was like that. He had gas, excessive gas, and he used to get these gas pills. And he'd also have pills made from the excrement of a Bulgarian peasant who supplied the excrement for these pills. And he'd take these pills. Yeah. And of course, they didn't work, did they? In the end, all of his homeopathic medicines didn't work.

By the summer of 1944, even the drug-addled Hitler could see the writing on the wall. Germany was fighting a three-front war against the combined strength of the world's greatest superpowers. There was no way that Germany could have won the war, even with the best decision-making in the world at that point, was there? 43, 44, 45. Even if you transferred Roosevelt over in like a lucky dip, even Roosevelt couldn't have got Germany out of that situation. Fighting on three sides. I mean, it was literally, you know, revive President Kennedy after that assassination attempt in the hospital. You know, no team of surgeons could have saved Kennedy. The best in the world if they'd been in that operating room. His head had been blown off, hadn't it? And really, Hitler's head had been blown off much

later than he blew his own head off. It was starting really through 43. He was losing heavily by then. The overwhelming power of the Allies meant that Germany never stood a chance. And that's where we need to be aware that Germany was not a major power. It was trying to be a major power, but it didn't really have the resources in the long term or the planning needed to do it. And I don't think you could have beaten, I don't think any major power could have took on America,

Russia and Britain at the same time. I don't think it was possible. By April of 1945, the Soviets had invaded from the east, the Allies from the south and west. Germany had lost the war. That much was very, very clear. But Hitler wasn't ready to give up. As the enemy pressed into the outskirts of Berlin, his Volkssturm, or people's storm, went into battle. In the ultimate act of total war, boys as young as 16 and men as old as 60 were told to take up arms against hardened, well-supplied Allied troops. Towards the end of the war, Soviet and Allied troops are marching over German soil. Did he ever think about trying to come to surrender or come to an agreement that would spare the lives of millions

and millions of women raped and people brutalized? No, he kept on clinging to the idea that there was no deal on the table that he could get, that the Allies were not going to give him a deal. He knew that really. It was people like Goebbels who thought we can get a deal. Let's do a deal with Stalin. Maybe he'll come on our side. Let's do a deal with the Allies on the basis that we'll turn against the Communists, you know. So he was weighing those kind of things up, but he really didn't think that there was any way out of the war. And then he was resigned to his fate, really.

As the fighting raged on the streets of the capital, Hitler and a skeleton crew of staff officers and confidants hid in a bunker complex eight feet below the Reich Chancery. Whatever empathy Hitler had once had was now well and truly stamped out. He blamed military setbacks on the cowardice of his own soldiers. He blamed the advance of the Allies on unarmed civilians who hadn't believed enough in his Reich. His final days were spent in solemn contemplation as the officers around him got drunk and tried to while away whatever life they had left. On the 29th of April, he married his long-term partner, the adoring Eva Braun, but their marriage was short-lived. Adolf and Eva killed themselves rather than face Soviet captivity.

In his last will and testament, Hitler blamed the Jews one last time for all his woes. He goes into kind of a ritual which people are going to die, go into in the few days before the end of his life, doesn't he? Like he's planned it. Like, you know, let's find the guns, let's find the cyanide that sounds like a person who's really thought about killing himself and he orders every german fight to the last and they've got a fight to the left why they fought to the last is still a mystery only explained by that they were loyal to hitler you know the german people have got to come to accept this they were loyal to hitler they wanted to stand by him right to the end

because they thought that all that would follow would be humiliation, slavery, and, you know, there was no other way out. There was no peace settlement. No one was going to believe them anymore when they said, you know, we've got an unjust peace settlement. And the Allies were determined that they had to suffer. Talk me through the last few hours of his life. Well, the plan was that he would take a cyanide capsule

and shoot himself at the same time, and she would take just the cyanide capsule, and they'd die like that in his kind of living room in the bunker, the Berlin bunker, the Führer bunker. And that's what they did. About 2.30, they went into the room. I think Mrs. Goebbels, Magda Goebbels, created a commotion because she wanted to knock on the door,

and the door was sort of half opened, and people had to drag her away, and she was saying, please, Fiora, don't kill yourself. I can't live without you and all this. So there was a bit of a kerfuffle. They then went in the room, and then you could hear a shot go off. One of the Goebbels' children thought it was a firecracker. Then they opened the door.

All the eyewitnesses say, you know, he was on the couch and there was a bullet through his head. The surviving autopsy suggested that he actually didn't take the cyanide capsule or it didn't work because there was no presence of cyanide. So obviously the bullet killed him. She was sort of ashen-faced and dead. She'd just taken the cyanide capsule. And then they carried them upstairs to the Reich Chancery garden

and they set fire to them. And so some of their child remains were taken away later by the Soviets. Pretty sure that some of the things like the jawbone was recovered so that the dentist, his dentist could look at it and they identified him through that. And so ends the story of Adolf Hitler, a shot that marked the end of the war in Europe. There'd be no trial, no moment of retribution for the millions of people whose lives were destroyed by his tyrannical rule. Instead, the man who dragged the entire planet through the fire of war would die on his own

terms. The war had cost the lives of between 15 and 20 million people in Europe alone. Europe's historic cities lay in ruins, smashed as the Allies took on a Nazi war machine, one that had ironically set out to build the greatest empire in history. Many of those who survived the war were living in rubble, brutalised, traumatised They had no homes to return to The Holocaust had left a terrible scar across the face of the continent Millions of Jews and other people had been torn from the fabric of European society

and slaughtered in the concentration camps of the Third Reich Generations of Germans and collaborators who'd stood by, or helped, would carry the shame of this to their graves. Such was the appalling legacy of Adolf Hitler. The scars, the trauma of his despotic regime, would be felt long after his death. It's still being felt. is still being felt. You've been listening to our series on the rise and fall of Adolf Hitler. For subscribers, we have a special bonus episode coming out this Friday, all about Germany after the war and the process of denazification.

If you want, you can subscribe by clicking the link in the show notes. If you've enjoyed the series so far, do leave us a review and rating wherever you get your podcasts. It was written and produced by James Hickman, edited by Dougal, Pat Moore, and supervised by Freddie Chick and Marianna Desforges. Goodbye. you