Dan Snow's History Hit - THE LEADERS: Hitler

Episode Date: March 3, 2025

Could Germany have won the war if not for Hitler's hubris? Dan is joined by Professor Phillips O'Brien to explore Hitler's biggest decisions during WWII and how he shaped the course of the war. They examine his decision to invade Poland, the Soviet Union and his response to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour. With a deep dive into Hitler's background, rise to power and personal motivations as well, this episode gives insight into how individual leaders can influence the trajectory of history.This is the first episode in our THE LEADERS series, which runs throughout March.Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal PatmorePhillips' book is called 'The Strategists'.We'd love to hear your feedback - you can take part in our podcast survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on.You can also email the podcast directly at [e-mail].

Some days, I feel certain that history is the story of the massive forces that propel us humans hither and thither, like surfers on an ocean of mighty rollers. The course of our civilization is determined by the climate, geology, science, economics. And then there are other days. I think about humans, and well, I think about the random billion to one lottery winners or perhaps lottery losers who are thrown up to lead us. The people who get to decide. I think about Kennedy and Khrushchev who made decisions that took us to the brink of nuclear annihilation. I think about Napoleon who launched his assault on Russia or Putin who launched a

Russian assault on Ukraine. And in both those cases, scholars think they absolutely could have made the opposite choice. It was a momentous decision, freely made by them. The Second World War was the largest and most destructive conflict in our history. It transformed the global strategic picture. It left ancient treasured cities in utter ruin. It left hundreds of millions dead, wounded, homeless, abused. There was genocide of Europe's Jews. The first man-made objects entered space. The first atomic weapons were detonated. Billions of people had their lives affected. So how can the individual matter in that vast picture?

affected. So how can the individual matter in that vast picture? And yet they do. One person can change the course of history. And in this podcast series, I'm going to look at six of them. Six leaders from utterly different backgrounds, with completely different styles of leadership. backgrounds, with completely different styles of leadership. And in fact, they're the six men whose names loom largest, whose lives and experiences and motivations have been poured over in thousands of books in the last 80 years. That's the six leaders. Hitler, Churchill, Hitler, Churchill, Mussolini, Stalin, Roosevelt, and Hirohito. Who were these lords of war? How much could these men bend the arc of history? Which of the many decisions that they made are the ones that we now look back upon as truly decisive?

Over six episodes this March, I'm going to be joined by Professor Phillips O'Brien, author of the incredible book, The Strategists, as we examine the biggest decisions these leaders made during the course of the war. The single most important decision Churchill makes in the Second World War is not to gamble at all to save France. How they impacted, not just the trajectory of the conflict. What Stalin realizes is he has to step back. But the fate of the nations they ruled over. Hitler is willing to sacrifice Germany to keep himself alive a little bit longer.

If the German people need to suffer, need to die, as armies cross the border, then okay. You're listening to Dan Snow's History Hit. And this is my series, The Leaders. With all the leaders, we're going to begin, of course, by getting a sense of their history. We're going to work out how their upbringing shaped their ideas. And I think that will provide some essential context. We try and understand their leadership and their strategic thinking. We're going to start with the man without whom perhaps there

would have been no world war as we now know it. Hitler, the outsider, the eccentric, the electrifying speaker that soared from the streets and the beer halls to the Reich Chancellery, and then launched that campaign to impose German rule across Europe and exterminate his enemies, and doing so plunged the world into another terrible global conflict. Adolf Hitler was born into a quiet corner of Austria-Hungary on the 20th of April 1889 in the modest town of Branau am Inn, just inside what is now the Austrian border with Germany. His parents, Alois and Clara Hitler, were not German, but Austrian. Alois was born with the surname Schicklgruber, not Hitler, and was the son of an unmarried peasant woman. His father had taken off when Alois was only ten, leaving the boy with his uncle,

a man named Johann Heidler. Alois grew up to become a customs official, and his uncle was so proud that he officially brought his illegitimate nephew into the family name. And so Alois adopted the name Heidler, which officials misspelt as Hitler, a silly administrative error that gave us the most notorious name of the last century. And it gives us something to think about. Adolf Hitler was very nearly Adolf Schicklgruber. Adolf's mother Clara was born in the Austrian village of Spital, and she worked as a domestic servant in her teenage years. At the age of 16, she was hired as a maid by her second cousin, Alois Hitler. Yes, that means Hitler's parents were second cousins. The couple had gone on to have six children, but only Adolf and his younger sister Paula

survived infancy. Alois was very proud to be a local customs official. He was known to strut around in his fancy Habsburg uniform and obsess about his reputation. His work meant that the family moved around a lot. They moved from Branau am Inn to the regional capital of Linz. Professor Frank McDonagh is a great friend of mine, great friend of the podcast, and he is a leading historian on the Third Reich. Frank says that Hitler rewrote parts of his childhood to push a certain narrative about himself, a man born into poverty who rose to the top. But as we'll see, fabricating reality was something of a speciality for Hitler. Hitler says that his father was a lowly customs official. Makes out that he was kind of like a clerk, a pen pusher. But it turns out his dad was literally the customs official for the

whole of the city, Linz, the tax collector. So he hadn't, as we know, the tax collector has enormous powers and he wore a ceremonial uniform and he was well known in the area. His family weren't poor, but it was a turbulent household. By all accounts, Hitler's father Alois was an authoritarian and unforgiving man. He demanded absolute obedience, apparently, from Adolf and would punish his behaviour with a whip. He had a bad temper, he was liable to fly into a rage at the slightest provocation. Adolf would later describe their relationship as a battle of competing wills, and he recalled, I never loved my father. I therefore feared him all the more. Things only got worse for Hitler as he grew up and began to resist his father's attempt to push him into the civil service.

Young Adolf had decided to take a more creative course in his life. He enjoyed painting and drawing. He set his sights on becoming an artist. To Adolf, nothing seemed worse than the monotony of an office job. To his father, the idea of raising an artist was unthinkable. In stark contrast, Clara was a doting mother. She pampered her son, encouraged him to pursue whatever he liked. Adolf's sister Paula would later describe her as a very soft and tender person, who struggled to keep Hitler in check as he became more and more headstrong. What we know is that Hitler had a very good relationship with his mother and a very bad relationship with his father. Some people have called this the Oedipus complex, and it went a bit far. They love their mothers, their mother dotes over them, but they don't like their father. And in this case, his father was very violent. Hitler says that he administered

beatings repeatedly against them. And he said, I loved my mother and I respected my father, but I didn't love him. While at school in Linz, Hitler performed below average academically. He did gravitate towards history though. Aged 11, it was in his history lessons that Hitler was first introduced to the idea of German nationalism. He idolised Germanic heroes like Frederick the Great and Otto von Bismarck. An avid reader, Adolf spent much of his childhood off in his own world. The hugely popular German writer Karl May was a favourite of his, and May's tales of the old American West appealed to Hitler, who admired underdog characters like Old Shatterhand. In these stories, the intrepid explorer befriends the brave Winnetou, an Apache chief.

His writing romanticised indigenous American culture and portrayed characters like Winnetou as honest and trustworthy in contrast to the pale-faced frontiersman. For its time, this was quite a radical departure from the more popular interpretation of the American West, and one that Adolf imbibed enthusiastically. He also loved imaginary war games, in particular re-enacting the Boer struggle against the British Empire, with himself playing, you guessed it, the underdog, rugged, boar commando. In 1903, Alois Hitler suddenly died of a lung hemorrhage. There was no resistance anymore to Hitler's artistic leanings, and he was able to throw himself into them completely. He was when he moved to Linz in about the late 19th century, he says he lived the life of a dilettante.

There's a kind of drawing of him. You know, he's got a moustache and he wears a hat. Apparently he had a cane and he would go to the opera quite regularly and hang out in local cafes. So if you mess him, he was that kind of guy. When you were 18, you'd go to a cafe and you'd meet some guy and he'd say, what are you doing? I said, I'm in a band, you know, and I've got a few gigs going on. You know, he wasn't someone you'd say, oh, you know, he's going to be a rabble-rousing dictator. More likely he was going

to be a poet. And that's how he saw himself at that stage. So he's in Linz, he's going to the opera, he sees himself as a poet. Is that when he goes to Vienna, this cultural capital? In Linz, he's going to the opera. He sees himself as a poet. Is that why he goes to Vienna, this cultural capital? Well, he has a friend who he meets in Linz called August Kubisak. And he's a musician and he wants to get into the Vienna music school. And Hitler has decided he's going to get into the Vienna School of Art,

one of the greatest art schools in the whole of Europe, based on a few drawings that he's done. But does he get into the school? No, he gets turned down, not once, but twice he drops out there. The strange thing about Hitler is that we have so little evidence, real source evidence for what he was doing in Vienna from 1907 to 1913. We know that he went to musical evenings, ironically, with a Jewish family. So we can't really say that he was anti-Semitic in his Vienna period. Then he says that he went along to the local parliament and he watched some speakers like the mayor of Vienna was called Karl Luger.

And he was very charismatic, fine speaker. And he was a populist, really, very anti-Semitic as well. So he said that he listened to that. He said he bought pamphlets on anti-Semitism. He says that when he looked around Vienna, he noticed that Jewish people were different. So for the first time he sees them as others, because most of them are Eastern European Jews. Anti-Semitism was pretty prevalent in Austria, pretty prevalent in France. In circles in Britain, it was pretty prevalent. And in Russia, of course, there were pogroms against Jews. So I think it was pretty uniform.

So he couldn't go through Vienna, a cosmopolitan city like that, with the highest Jewish population of any city in Europe, and not be inculcated in antisemitism. So Hitler is 25 years old at this point. He's in Vienna. It's a multicultural capital with all the energy and opportunities and prejudices that you find in a diverse city. He's exploring the potent antisemitism that's definitely sweeping across Europe. He's exploring the potent anti-Semitism that's definitely sweeping across Europe. He's reading about German nationalism. He's also dealing with his own insecurities. He's been rejected by prestigious artistic institutions. He's struggling to sell his work.

He's relying on payouts from his father's inheritance to make ends meet. It does seem like a very dangerous combination. All of those insecurities, those external factors, mixed with his strong sense of self-importance. And young Hitler doesn't have long to wait, for he finds himself drawn into one of history's greatest dramas. It's 1914, and Adolf Hitler is about to go to war. That transforms his life, really, because he signs up for the List Regiment, spends his time on the Western Front,

and he's a messenger, first on a bike, then on a motorcycle. He takes messages from the front. Hitler made a competent soldier. While his job as a messenger meant that he wasn't always right up in the frontline trenches, he wasn't the tip of the spear, he was still extremely dangerous. Artillery barrages would have been constantly landing around him, and there was always the possibility that he would get caught up in an enemy attack or raid, killed by a sniper, or choke on poison gas.

He was wounded several times by flying shrapnel and mustard gas, and he did win prestigious awards, like the Iron Cross First Class. And is he social? Does he make friends? Well, not really, because he's kind of a bit older. He's like 25. He's a bit older than the raw recruits who were in about 18. And they see him as rather strange. They call him Uncle Dolph. And he has a little dog called Foxel. Someone kills his dog. And he said, if only that person knew how much I love that dog, they never would have killed it. So he's obviously a loner.

Oh, he was a loner. Yeah. Yeah. He was a loner. But in the sense that he was a loner, but you know, it's like that thing about, you know, when they have a murder and he kills, you know, many people and then people go on about him being a loner. And then you find out that he's got all these friends and he went to the pub every week and so on. I think with Hitler, he was always in social situations, but he was a bit awkward. He couldn't have a conversation because he couldn't listen to the other person. He didn't have much empathy with other people. He loved the sound of his own voice. He decorated for bravery, though. Conspicuous gallantry.

Yeah. He gets two Iron Crosses for bravery, awarded, ironically, by a Jewish officer. There's a view that he was a corporal, but he actually wasn't. He was just promoted to a kind of assistant corporal, something like that. He had no power over any other officers.

And what about his politics? I've read in your books, he does start haranguing his mates at this point, doesn't he? He develops quite a powerful sort of world. He doesn't listen. He's happy to broadcast. Nationalism is his credo. He's a patriot, a super patriot. His colleagues in the trenches say that whenever someone talks about defeat, he stands up then

and he gives a big harangue, you know, and he's very patriotic. His officers even say they've never seen anyone as loyal and patriotic. He never seems to have another side to him to question authority. Interestingly enough, he just accepts authority. Authority to him is good. And I suppose that kind of army discipline inculcates into his eventual Nazism. It's the same thing. It's like he's running the country like it's an army.

And he's wounded a couple of times. Yeah, he gets wounded. He goes to a hospital in Paso. He's had a mustard gas attack and he's gone blind, briefly gone blind. And he's in this hospital. And then the chaplain comes in and says to him, Germany's lost the war. He says that he threw himself into his pillow and started to cry. And he said, it's all been for nothing.

And he says at that moment, he decided to enter politics. We should always take Hitler's account of his own life with a pinch of salt. His infamous autobiographical work, Mein Kampf, plays very fast and loose with the truth. It's really more of a mythical origin story for the cult of Hitler than a factual account of his life. But it does seem certain that at the end of the war, he was dejected. And like so many other Germans, he grew to resent those who had ended, as he saw it, dishonorably, ended it in a sort of surrender. And from this resentment grew a conspiracy that took hold in Germany, that it had been Jews and communists at home in Germany who had conspired to end the war disastrously early, yet for their own gain.

They'd betrayed good patriotic Germans who'd gone away to fight. It's often referred to as the stab in the back myth, and it's a recurring motif in Hitler's ideas, speeches, writing. For many Germans in the interwar period, the First World War was not something to be avoided at all costs, consigned to the past, to be moved beyond, but something that remained unfinished. I'm fascinated by these hardened, brutalized veterans who decide to enter politics, whether it's in Italy or in Britain or in Germany. What are they hoping to achieve? I think, first of all, it grows out of their own dissatisfaction. So you've got their dissatisfaction. The world hasn't turned out the way they wanted it. Germany didn't win the war. The Treaty of Versailles has come along. There's a democratic government. And they just feel as

though this is the worst hell imaginable. And they've suffered so much for a vision of the future that they were fighting for. Yeah. And because of course, Germany wasn't invaded, they could believe in this myth, this stab in the back myth that Germany wasn't defeated. It was stabbed in the back by Jews and socialists at home. And Hitler came to believe that when he goes back to Munich at the end of the war. But he's got no clear idea of what he's going to be. He sort of falls into it and he meets, obviously, he meets people, like all great people meet people, don't they, along the way. They always have a mentor. There's always someone, there's always a Brian Epstein for every Beatles. And in a way, politicians are like that. They meet people and Hitler, it's who he meets

that makes a difference, I think. By 1919, Hitler had been desperate to stay in the army, desperate to avoid unemployment, and he'd end up working seemingly as a spy in the German army intelligence. His job was to infiltrate subversive political parties and report back on them. It was this job that would fatefully connect him with the nascent far right political group called the German Workers' Party, or the DAP. The founder and chairman of the DAP was a man named Anton Drexler. In September 1919, Hitler attended one of Drexler's party meetings and speeches. He had a back and forth with the main speaker, and Drexler's party meetings and speeches. He had a back and forth with the main speaker and Drexler was impressed with Hitler's oratory skills, invited him to join the party. Hitler embraced

the ideology of the party. Throughout 1919, he encouraged the DAP to become more proactive, target working class Germans. The party ramped up its nationalistic language, its anti-Semitism, its anti-Marxism. Hitler began making public speeches. He won a reputation within the party as a skillful orator. Seeing Hitler's growing popularity, well, Drexler promoted him. He made him head of the party's propaganda machine in 1920. And what do you do when you're a new head of propaganda or spin? You change the name, you do a rebrand. From that point forth, there was a National Socialist German Workers' Party, the NSDAP,

or what we now know as the Nazi Party. And Hitler was fast becoming their main attraction. In 1921, a mutiny broke out. He basically takes over that party because he's a fantastic speaker. He's just one of those people who starts to speak and people listen. And he went round the beer halls. If you like, it was like Hitler mania, like Beatle mania really. And he went round these beer halls and people would say, Hitler's appearing tonight. And people said, oh, wow, go and see him. He was a great speaker.

I mean, he started out, when he gave his speeches, he'd come in with some papers and then he'd shuffle them. He'd be nervous. He did it all deliberately. He'd try and make it a personal story. You know, I'm just like you. He starts off trying to get empathy for himself. You know, I'm just like you.

I'm the same as you. I come from nothing. But in the end, he sort of ends with some kind of flourish of patriotism, if you like. Before me comes Germany, in me marches Germany, and after me will come Germany. These are little phrases, but they are wonderfully evocative and passionate. Hitler was very passionate. And I think it's that passion that people started to buy into. You know, we need to get up, face this dreary democracy that we've got that doesn't go anywhere and has got faceless politicians. Hitler consolidated his passionate disdain for democracy and his ideas on racial purity into a book. It's called Mein Kampf, and he wrote it while he was in prison after the failed beer hole putsch of November 1923. When he was released, just nine months later,

he puritied. He started to pursue power by conventional, lawful means. And in the late 1920s, the Nazi party gained traction. Largely fuelled by the economic devastation of the Great Depression, Hitler seemed somehow ready for that moment. A powerful rhetoric, a mastery of new media platforms, an ability to spread propaganda with simple solutions that swayed the masses. By July 1932, the Nazis had become the largest party in the Reichstag. On January 30, 1933, President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Hitler as Chancellor. A month after that, Hitler used an arson attack on the Reichstag building as an excuse to suppress civil liberties. He passed the infamous Enabling Act of March 1933,

which gave him full legislative and executive control of Germany. After Hindenburg's death in August 1934, Hitler merged the roles of Chancellor and President. He declared himself Führer. Political opponents were swiftly eliminated. The first Nazi concentration camp at Dachau was established. He now had the power, he had the space to pursue his strategic goals. By March 1939, German forces had re-militarized the Rhineland, had annexed Austria, and invaded Czechoslovakia.

But Hitler's ambition did not stop there. Like all of us, Hitler was shaped by his early life, his hatred of the ethnic diversity and the perceived weakness of these Austrian homeland. The intense sense of belonging he felt when he was in the army, in the trenches. The rage he was filled at the end of the First World War. The assumption that it couldn't have been his band

of hardy frontline soldiers that lost. It must be Jews, socialists at home who'd sold them out. I also think with Hitler, luck is so important. He'd survived the trenches. He'd narrowly avoided bullets during his putsch. The Great Depression had elevated him from a loudmouth on the fringes of politics to main character. Britain and France, they had blinked in their early standoffs. I think Hitler felt like he was on a roll. He was a creature of destiny. I'm now joined by Phillips O'Brien, Professor of Strategic Studies at the University of St. Andrews, to look more closely at Hitler's three biggest decisions for the war. We're going to break down his invasion of Poland, his invasion of the Soviet Union, and his declaration of war on the United States of America.

You're listening to our Leaders series. What was Hitler thinking when he declared war on the USA? More after the break. 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. And crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts.

Phil, let's come to the summer of 1939. So Hitler's gambles are paid off. He's reoccupied the Rhineland. He's conquered and occupied Austria. He has managed to take the Czech lands. What's his next move? What do you think is going to happen? Well, his next move is Poland. Quite clearly, it's Poland.

He doesn't actually want to launch a world war. I think that's the key thing. He is not thinking in the summer of 1939, he's starting the Second World War in Europe. He's thinking he's going to do another step along his road to the recovery of German lands and the weakening of German enemies to the east. And he's going to go for Poland. I mean, he has eradicated Czechoslovakia. So he's taken all the Czech lands and Slovakia is an independent state, but closely allied to him. And Poland has a large German population in the north, in Danzig, and it's on the German border. So what he is trying to do now is basically

cripple Poland as a state. His worry is that the British and the French might fight for Poland. So far, he's always been able to keep the British and the French from fighting. He kept them out of re-militarizing the Rhineland first, and then the Anschluss, and then Czech. But he's not entirely sure whether they will or will not fight. So he's trying in the summer of 1939 to put together the international situation, an alliance structure to keep the British and the French out. He is not trying to start the war. And that's why he turns decisively to Stalin and the Soviet Union. It's his attempt actually to prevent a general European war. Because his view is if he can cut a deal with Stalin, then the British and

the French are going to have to accept the reality of the situation that Poland is doomed and that there would be a good chance they wouldn't fight. Is there an extent to which Hitler also wanted to show, without necessarily fighting them, but to sort of humiliate Britain and France? I think really important is Hitler. He never understood how dangerous he seemed to them. That he thought actually he and Chamberlain sort of could always cut deal. I mean, during the war, when the war is going badly, he has some of these evenings where he said, if only Chamberlain had stayed in power, we could have cut a deal. So he sort of thinks that at this point, he's looked at as a German leader with whom the British can make deals and had made deals. So he always has a healthy

respect for British power. I think we have to understand that he actually is very, always very cognizant of what the British have done with the Royal Navy and how important that is. In fact, he doesn't want to be a threat to it until very late does he actually start thinking about being a real naval threat to Britain. It's more about, in his mind, making it clear to them they can't do anything. How are they going to fight for Poland? If he has Stalin on side, how the heck are they going to fight for Poland? But Britain and France do give a security guarantee to Poland. He still can't bring himself to believe that the Brits and the French are going to intervene when they cannot do anything military to help Poland. It's impossible. It's a different side of Europe. It's inconceivable. And that's why he goes and invades Poland. Let me go back one. There had been security guarantees to Czechoslovakia.

So the idea that the British and French had given guarantees to Poland, the British and the French had pledged that Austria would never join Germany. They had pledged that they would defend Czechoslovakia. So he had learned that these pledges were pretty fungible and ones that they could compromise on. So it's not that he actually thinks they he thinks they won't fight or there's a significant chance they won't fight. I think that's could compromise on. So it's not that he actually thinks they – he thinks they won't fight or there's a significant chance they won't fight. I think that's the primary thing.

Once he signs with Stalin, which he is ecstatic about, I mean both Stalin and Hitler basically celebrate the night of the Nazi-Soviet pact. His celebration is that he thinks he has made it so that the British and the French will give him Poland or that there's a very good chance of it. Now, the other thing to remember is this time, he's up and down all the time. So he's ecstatic the night of the Nazi Soviet pact, but then he gets depressed when he realizes Mussolini won't fight for him. So he's very emotionally volatile in the summer of 1939. Many of the people around him are worried that they're going to launch a world war. I mean, Herman Goering, the head of the Luftwaffe and his deputy is quite nervous that they are going to unleash a war with the British and the French.

So he has his vision. He knows it has potential weaknesses, but ultimately he wants to see it through. I'm always struck by that moment when they're in Berlin and they get news of the British ultimatum. They invade Poland. The Brits then do issue the ultimatum and Hitler looks at Ribbentrop furious and just goes, what now? Because they realize they've miscalculated. Yep. When the British and the French definitely go to war, it's a blow. The also thing is that the German population doesn't seem that excited in September 1939.

It's not like 1914 where some crowds went on the street. I know we have probably overstated the depth of the crowds of 1914, but it's not like Germany is gripped by war joy in the summer of 1939. But Hitler now has to see it through. He's got to because he signed the Nazi-Soviet pact. He's committed himself to invading Poland and Stalin coming the other way. He's got to do it. Basically, he's thrown the dice and he's got to see what ends up. With the swift, effective invasion of Poland in September 1939, Hitler's war machine pivoted. He secured Denmark and Norway in the spring of 1940. Days later, German forces launched a blitzkrieg across Western Europe, the Low Countries, France.

His enemies collapsed in a matter of weeks. By the summer, nearly all of Western Europe was under Nazi control, and Hitler turned his sights on Britain. He'd hoped Britain would sue for peace, but Britain fought on. Hitler believed that Britain was militarily hopeless, and their declaration that they continued to fight was merely a bluff. But over long summer weeks in 1940, the Royal Air Force inflicted a stunning defeat on the German Luftwaffe, which had been trying to gain control of the skies above Britain. What's the impact the defeat for the German Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain had on Hitler himself? Hitler believes when France falls that he's going to win the war. He really has this moment, okay,

I am going to win the war. France is gone. Britain will have to see reason, by Hitler's idea of reason, that they're going to have to cut a deal with him. And he really believes this. And if not, well, the German armed forces are so great, we'll find a way to beat them. But what happens is over the summer and into September in 1940, that's just simply not true. And no matter what he says or blusters, he isn't going to knock Britain out of the war. He's not winning the war at sea. He's not winning the war at air. And that means he's sort of frustrated because he's now thought he had great victory. He thought the war was basically over in the summer of 1940. And it's not. And this is what we can say supercharges his desire to attack the Soviet Union in 1941. When he talks about the need to attack Stalin and launch Barbarossa, he often says regularly that it's to keep the British from having another ally because he can't win the Battle of Britain.

So he's got to find some way to damage Britain, to force Britain out of the war. And in his mind, if he can then knock Stalin out of the war, which by the way, he was probably going to do at any time. At some point, he was going to go for the Soviet Union because that was his ultimate endpoint. But going forward in 1941 with Britain still in the war is something he had said in the interwar period Germany should never do.

Germany should never fight a two-front war. This was something he said over and over again, shouldn't do. But he has to do it because in his mind, that's the only way to strike at Britain. So Barbarossa is partly an anti-British operation. It's so chilling because people who know about the Napoleonic period, of course, will know that the path to London lay through Moscow. And it's so fascinating to see the strategic geography playing out in a similar way in 1940-41. We know what happened. So we've got to try and leave hindsight behind you. The greatest war within a war in history, millions of men and machines battling at

unparalleled intensity for years on end. Did Hitler believe that defeating the Soviet Union was doable in 1940-41? If you're a First World War soldier in the German army, what you see is Russia can be conquered. That Russia was not actually able to withstand German power in the First World War. I think that is really important. The Germans, with a relatively small force, the Germans never have a majority of their troops on the Eastern Front, are actually able to make far greater advances against the Russians than they're able to do on the Western Front. Russia lost the First World War on the battlefield. It loses it on the battlefield. And I think his view is that actually the German army is going to be able to throw most of its

land forces against the Soviet Union in 1941. That he sees, by the way, very important, the poor Russian military performance against Finland. Yeah, the Finns actually extort very high casualties on the Red Army. And he says, Russia is a house of cards. I will collapse it. And by the end of 1941, he assumes the war will basically be over, that the Soviet Union will be unable to resist because of where the military situation should be by the end of 1941. So this is the beginning of his plan of annihilation and conquest in the East. What were his plans for settlement, for conquest? Are we talking about a German empire now stretched into Vladivostok? And what does this look like? Probably to the Urals.

Whether he wanted to go over the Urals is an interesting question. At one point when he's in a very weird mood, he talks about, well, we'll go to the Urals and leave sort of barbarians on the other side to keep ourselves tough. We'll basically have to put up Hadrian's Wall in wants to get all of the resources of the Caucasus. I mean, the oil of the Caucasus is extremely important. So I think he sees certainly everything up until the Urals as definitely part of a new German empire. Now, knowing Hitler, he wouldn't have stopped. That's the thing. If he actually had gotten to the Urals, I'm sure he would have pushed over them because he would have wanted to take more and more. And he probably would have tried to cut a deal with the Japanese to divide up Russia at that point and what was East and what was West. But it is absolutely the beginning of his conquest of resources. So there's two things we can say. One, he makes no plans to actually try and work with the local populations. There was a lot of anti-Soviet feeling, particularly in Ukraine.

Ukrainians had just gone through Holodomor. They had been absolutely brutalized by Stalin. They had suffered massive millions of famine deaths. They were not enamored of the Soviet regime and Stalin. Many of them would have very happily switched and accepted the Germans as liberators. But that is not anything Hitler wants to do. He does make no attempt to try and work with the anti-Soviet populations in any real way. And secondly, the Germans actually bring in a policy of keeping their army going by starving

the local population. That is the German plan of conquest. Because taking the Soviet Union, even the eastern part, is going to be really hard. It's very big. Supplying it's not easy. How are they going to supply it? They're going to strip it of conquest. Because taking the Soviet Union, even the eastern part, is going to be really hard. It's very big. Supplying it's not easy. How are they going to supply it? They're going to strip it of food. So the German army is going to strip basically the local population of its food. And if they have to starve, so be it. So against some pretty stiff competition, Hitler's Wehrmacht will be worse than Stalin. They both are willing to kill millions to get what they want. But they managed to drive significant numbers back into Stalin's, well, back into a position where they're supporting

the reconquest by Stalin, their homeland. So Hitler's determination that Soviet Union was decaying, useless, crumbling empire, a house of cards. Does that affect how he organizes this offensive? You mentioned there's less focus on logistics. From that political determination, do technical logistical factors cascade down through that invasion force? Basically, yes. The German army is designed to win battles, but not wars. So if you're going to be the German army invading Russia, what's the most important thing you're going to need to advance? It's railways. Okay, that's it. The German army doesn't have the trucks that it needs to actually support a major advance. So any major advance is going to have to be on supplies carried on railways.

What the Germans sort of think is, oh, we'll capture working Russian rail stock. Yeah, it's based on these fanciful notions that basically they can keep moving because they'll conquer the Soviet Union as they are. They'll take over the Soviet rail lines and they'll be able to switch supplies. The Soviet rail lines are different than the German rail lines. They're a wider gauge. That goes back to Russia. The Russians had a wider gauge than the Germans, partly for these –

But deliberately so. Deliberately so. And so – but they just – a lot of it's on a wing and a prayer. They just assume this will work out and it doesn't. So what happens when Barbarossa is launched is Germany advances, advances, stops. And then they stop for weeks at a time while the rail lines have to be switched to the German gauge because they're not capturing the Soviet rail stock. The one thing the Soviets do really well in 1941 is they pull back the rail stock. So the Germans are left having to use German carriages, and that means entirely rebuilding the rail lines.

And so Barbarossa, everyone talks about lightning advances. It's a lightning advance, but then a long period of sitting there. Late summer. Well, they have two or three major periods of stopping. The first one, they go up to Minsk, then they stop. Then they go to Kiev, to Ukraine, and then stop. And then they try to go to Moscow and don't reach it. And Hitler changed his mind a few times in that process as well.

Well, that's because they have a long time to debate. No, they really do. They have weeks as they can't move forward. They don't have the supplies. They have weeks to decide what's going to go next. So the idea of just that laser-focused strike on Moscow, that's actually not there through this campaign? No, never, not at all.

I mean, I think Hitler probably thinks they'd collapse before they'd get to Moscow. I think he's sort of thinking the Red Army will be eaten up in eastern Russia. And by German calculations, that should have happened. By the losses inflicted on the Red Army in the first four or five months of the campaign, June to December, the Red Army should have ceased to exist before they got to Moscow. But then they're confronted by millions of more troops, which they just simply hadn't counted on. Strange. He thought the same thing about the RAF. They're down to their last few fighters. By 1941, as Hitler achieved almost mental supremacy over his generals, who initially were nervous all the way through Hitler's early moves.

The conquest of France really represents a moment where the German generals are demoted, you might say, in both Hitler's mind and their own. Hitler believes he was responsible for the conquest of France, that he chose the plan to go through the Ardennes, to take the risk. German generals, many of them, were more cautious about what they should do. So he believes that's a vindication of his own greatness. Actually, a lot of German generals from the fall of France, and there was a lot of opposition to Hitler and the German army before that, they really go quiet. They sort of say, okay. Maybe this guy does have the secret sauce. Yeah. Or I mean, how do you actually take on someone who's won? And that, I think, influences what goes on in Barbarossa, that Hitler eventually will decide and the German army will go along with him.

Now, there are a lot of people who are worried. They're worried about a two-front war. General Holder, who's the chief of staff of the German army, is very worried about the logistics. He's very worried because he's the one who has to make sure all these supplies get up front. That's one of his jobs as chief of staff. But he can't go to Hitler and say, this won't work. They just don't have that ability. So they can increasingly fall out and the relationship becomes very tense. But ultimately, the German army does what Hitler wants it to do. Could Germany have won the war if it hadn't have been for Hitler's hubris?

Join us after the break. 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,

and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. You can just imagine Hitler high on success. His gambles have worked. And someone's coming in talking about rolling stock and train gauges he's like don't bother me what are you talking about

oh my god I'm touched by the divine here the monologues Hitler was always been a monologue giver this is how he sort of behaved at his meals he would have these lunches and dinners most days and he would have handpicked cronies

or in the war he had some generals and what he would do is spend much of the time just monologuing. I mean, they just sound endlessly dull, because there was no exchange. It was Hitler just talking, endlessly talking. We do have a lot of these, by the way, recorded, because they wrote down what Hitler said. They even recorded what Hitler said at different times. And what is happening in the fall of 1941 is that Hitler is monologuing about his own greatness and how they will win and what they will do when the Soviet Union's gone. He's already won

the war in the fall of 1941. And he is absolutely going on and on about it. And the generals are sitting there obediently. Yeah, again, it reminds me of Napoleon sort of talking about in the Italian campaign, he starts saying, well, people like me and Alexander and Caesar, I mean, there is just a megalomaniacal effect, I think, probably of success and of thinking you're indestructible. So as the German armies approach the outskirts of Moscow, it's astonishing timing this, because they're being bogged down in appalling weather. The Red Army is not defeated.

Strange units are appearing who ought not to exist. And at that exact moment, Japan bombs Pearl Harbor and Hitler faced a decision. At the very moment that the decision is being made on the Eastern Front, he faced a decision about the USA. Why, Phil, does he declare war at that moment against the USA? Hitler seems to have decided or believed from, say, the summer of 1941 onwards that eventually Germany is going to get involved in the war with the USA. So he doesn't think it's avoidable. The question is how long he can delay it.

And his own mind is he wants to delay it long enough that he can beat the Soviet Union. Because he believes Roosevelt is going to get in bed with Churchill. He looks at the Anglo-Americans sort of as one. He's trying to delay it. Through the fall of 1941, he's actually ramping down tensions. He's saying to the German Navy, don't provoke the US. Just don't do it. Even if it means that the Battle of the Atlantic, the British get to bring goods across the Atlantic, just don't do it. Don't take any risks. Once you beat the Soviet Union, that's going to happen. across the Atlantic, just don't do it. Don't take any risks. Once you beat the Soviet Union, that's going to happen. When the Japanese attacked the Americans in early December 1941,

Hitler believes, okay, this is it. We are now going to be at that point. The Soviet Union, he doesn't think is going to survive. We're pretty much at Moscow. We're pretty much at Moscow. We've inflicted such horrible losses. The US is going to get in against us. So we might as well go in against them now. And what we can do is do what we haven't been doing for six months, which is really attack trade throughout the Atlantic. The German Navy had been pulling back in 1941. And they've been chomping at the bit to go after the trade. And so in his mind, okay, now we're one on the east. Let's go and attack the trade.

Was there a little sense that it might encourage, if he showed such willing and ally ship with the Japanese, that they might maybe invade Siberia from their alliance in northern China? Well, in fact, the Japanese, in many ways, I have to say, they screw Hitler. Oh, they shaft him. Because they want to have good relations with the Soviet Union. I mean, the Japanese army talks about invading Siberia every once in a while, but the Navy doesn't want to because it's not going to play any role in that. The Japanese leadership, including Emperor Hirohito, seem to want to keep on quite good terms with the Soviet Union. The amazing thing is Hitler is obviously convinced the Soviets are so

doomed he doesn't need the Japanese to attack Siberia, which is a huge miscalculation because it allows Stalin to transfer the Siberian army to Moscow or to the Eastern Front. Had the Japanese attacked North, they probably wouldn't have done well. I think the Japanese might have overestimated what they could do. But had they attacked North, then Stalin could not have transferred those troops. But Hitler, I think it's an idea of how Hitler was so confident of where things were that he doesn't think through. So in many ways, the Japanese let him down strategically, but he goes and declares war on the US anyway. point, is he just fighting a massive defensive war that is going to be unimaginably costly, but really there is now no chance for Hitler to sort of win? Well, there's a few things that go on. One, not long after he declares war on the US,

things go bad outside of Moscow. There is to be almost a psychological, I don't want to say breakdown, that's too strong of a word for Hitler. But there is this moment of crisis in late December 1941. He gets rid of the few dissenting voices left in the German army. He basically starts taking command of German units at the lowest level because a lot of German officers are saying we're going to have to pull back from Moscow. He's like, no, no, no, we must fight. He believes the generals are weak, that they're not willing to see it through. But this also begins him ranting and raving. So he really has an extraordinary period. In his own mind, the war is not lost in 41-42. But I think what he does realize, if he is going to have any chance at victory, what he has to do is really deal the Soviet Union a blow in 1942.

But if he can't do that, it's going to be a real problem. There, by the way, some Germans in the leadership who probably in their heart of hearts know the war is over. There's a really interesting argument about Hitler fighting a war of catastrophic defeat from 1942 onwards. And I actually think Hitler can believe two things at the same time. A lot of the war leaders can. They can actually believe two almost diametrically opposed things at the same time. So, and there might've been part of him always knowing the war was lost, but then there's part of him who says, well, we can salvage it this way. And he goes up and down. He tells himself things at different times, which explains, I think, the very erratic moods he goes under.

In terms of his leadership, when things start to go wrong, it's been convenient for his generals, the people who outlived him and left behind memoirs and accounts, to blame him for everything that went wrong. What do you see his role being 41, 42, 43, 44, 45? And how much blame should he get for the, well, the catastrophic defeats that are inflicted on the German army? I mean, this is actually brilliant.

And the two interesting ways that post-war reputations are made, we might say, are Hirohito and Hitler, where Hirohito is whitewashed. And Hitler gets all the blame for every, because every German general basically writes a memoir, we would have won and I'd be in charge, but Hitler never listened to me. And you could just say, they endlessly say, oh, I knew, I knew, and I suggested this, but Hitler, of course, didn't. And a lot of that is seriously overblown. I mean, Guderian being one of the prime examples of this.

But on the other hand, Hitler does bear a significant blame for the way Germany is defeated. I mean, that's without a doubt, because what happens is he dumbles down on his own control after 1941. The great contrast is to Stalin. Stalin begins as a micromanager in the way that Hitler was, really calling up generals at the front and telling them to do this and this and trying to micromanage military operations, usually with a disastrous result. What Stalin realizes is he has to step back because he will trust certain officers like Zhukov. I'll give you the resources. Will you go about it? Hitler goes the other way.

So he starts trying to put in officers that he can control and he starts interfering very low down the chain of command because he doesn't trust any officers really. There's only very few he trusts. chain of command because he doesn't trust any officers, really. There's only very few he trusts. So he does bear a huge amount of responsibility for the way in which Germany is defeated. There's no one you could say bears anything like his personal responsibility elsewhere in Germany. No one had a war-winning strategy. I would think that has to be admitted, but Hitler bears a lot. And what about his personal leadership? You mentioned the long rants earlier, his increasingly erratic behavior.

A lot of people, if you had a sort of word cloud, I think they'd talk about madness with Hitler. And how should we think about him, his personal approach to leadership as the war goes worse and worse? Well, he is sort of going to pieces. One, he is getting a lot of uppers. So his drug taking from his doctor, he's going up and down. So there's moments where he's basically, I think, on methamphetamine is what we would call. So he's incredibly intense. Then there's moments of great torpor where he's come down and he's lethargic and he still has to go and have his holidays in Obersalzburg where he can barely work. So I think it's the erratic nature, because part of Hitler, I think, understands. And by the way, as Mussolini understands, 42, 43, he's going to be dead soon. They're going to lose the war. Part of him, not all of him,

part of him understands that. And even though he might talk about the British and Americans changing side against the Soviet Union, part of him knows they'll never forgive him. He's going to die. He doesn't want to die. And I think this is why he has this extreme intense up and down moments, is he knows the end of his life is partly approaching. And he is someone who believed he was a creature of destiny. And he sees that falling apart in 42, 43, 44. Germany's not going to end up with this great empire. He has failed. And I think that is the kind of pressure that leads to these incredibly erratic moments. And then you get that extraordinary effect right at the end of the war where he says he has failed, but it's Germany. Actually, he turns finally, doesn't he, on Germany and its people. He said

they must pay the price. Is that blame? on Germany, its people. He said they must pay the price. Is that blame? Basically, the German people he's willing to sacrifice. And the Second World War, for the last, I don't know how long, but certainly the last six months or even last year, two years, is simply a war to keep Hitler alive. In 1918, we can say, actually, the German leadership takes a somewhat honorable decision. We don, we don't often think about it like that. But in 1918, before Germany has been invaded, the German leadership understands it's lost the war. We've lost, yeah.

Why prolong this? We've lost. They save the German population from a great deal of misery by doing that. Whereas Hitler simply doesn't care. If the German people need to suffer, need to die, as armies cross the border, then okay. And so I think that's the difference. Hitler is willing to sacrifice Germany to keep himself alive a little bit longer. And he keeps himself alive literally till the Red Army is just outside the bunker. We think of Hitler as one of those evil men who ever lived and also presiding

over one of the greatest catastrophes ever to befall a nation. So is it possible to sort of think about his strengths and weaknesses as a strategist? I mean, certainly at the beginning of the war, he enjoyed enormous success. I mean, he is one of the most evil people ever to live. So there's no doubt about that. His strengths are he creates a brilliant battle winning machine. He spends a lot of money on the German army in the 1930s and the German Air Force. So he invests very heavily in the Luftwaffe. And what they create is a brilliant military machine to win battles against the armed forces of another country.

And we see in the Battle of France is that in action. What we see in the opening of Barbarossa is that in action? What he has never fully grasped is how to win a war. How is he going to bring this to a conclusion? Particularly if you're going to fight Britain, which controls the seas and has an air force he can't conquer. So you might say he's got a very successful military machine that can accomplish very specific tasks on the battlefield, but it's not one that can actually knock Britain out of the war. So if he can't reach it with a tank, he's in trouble. And that is the ultimate shortcoming of his strategy. He can win all the battles on the European continent he wants, but that doesn't mean he's going to win the war. And he has no way to win the war.

By early 1945, Hitler's empire was staring at annihilation. Soviet forces were closing on Berlin, and he retreated to his underground bunker, issuing feverish orders to armies that no longer existed. On April the 30th, facing inevitable defeat, Hitler took his own life, leaving his remaining followers pretty directionless. The Nazi leadership was fractured, demoralised. It did attempt to carry on briefly, but without Hitler's authority and fanaticism, the regime just crumbled.

Days later, on May 8th, Germany surrendered unconditionally marking the official end of the war in Europe and the final extinction of the Third Reich Hitler's rhetoric was about Germany but the reality was that he was in it for himself Hitler could have sued for peace well, throughout the war, but certainly in late 1943 or throughout 1944, and millions would have been spared unimaginable trauma. German cities would

still have been standing proud, but it would have involved personal humiliation. It would have involved imprisonment, trial, probably execution. So instead, he did his best to ensure that all Germany would die alongside him. He forced teenagers to fight tanks with farm tools. For what? For me the biggest question, perhaps given world politics at the moment, but the biggest question is how else do we humans accept the power of these individuals over us? Why do so many of us submit to servitude? Next time, we'll rewind to a point of the war when Hitler's downfall did not look inevitable.

The time when Winston Churchill took over as British Prime Minister in 1940. Then the outcome of the Second World War looked like it was on a knife edge. The Norwegian campaign had been a disaster. The German army was sweeping through the low countries in France on their way to complete victory. Yet Churchill was defiant. But stopping fascism wasn't his only strategic aim. Churchill has one general thing that he wants to do. He wants to maintain the British Empire.

In his mind, without the Empire, Britain is not the great power that he wishes it to be. So I think Hitler, in his mind, does represent a big threat to that. So join me on Friday for the next episode of The Leaders as we look at Winston Churchill. If you hit follow in your podcast player, the episode will drop into your library automatically, like magic. You can listen anywhere you get your podcasts, including Apple, Spotify, even BBC Sounds. See you next time. Thank you. you