Dan Snow's History Hit - The Rise of Hitler

Episode Date: November 8, 2023

2/4. 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 second episode, we pick up the story just after his failed coup. Hitler exploited the chaos of 1920s Germany to build his own popularity. He manipulates the levers of government to gain power and builds around himself a team of loyal sycophants to prepare Germany for war. Behind the scenes, the wheels of the Holocaust are already put into motion.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.

You're listening to Dan Snow's History Hit, and our four-part series on the rise and fall of the 20th century's most infamous dictator. At the end of the last episode, we saw how Adolf Hitler's slapdash coup to overthrow the Bavarian government failed. In total, 16 Nazis had been killed, and most of their senior leadership had been arrested.

We picked the story back up at Hitler's trial for the Beer Hall Putsch in late February 1924. It should have been an open and shut case. The coup involved a litany of very obvious and public crimes, including high treason. The Nazis had carried out dirty backroom deals with some renegade government officials, they'd illegally acquired weapons and marched through a major city as an armed mob seeking to overthrow the government.

This is the strange thing about the Munich Beer Hall Putsch is that it's kind of been elevated into this massive event, but only in hindsight, only by Hitler's biographers, you know, Kershaw and Ulrich. But at the time, it was humiliating, and he knew it. And he said in his trial something like, you know, I don't want to talk about the wounds are still open over the Beer Hall pooch.

It's a catastrophe, and it doesn't seem as though he's going to get anywhere from there. It's not catastrophe and it doesn't seem as though he's going to get anywhere from there. It's not as if you could say, well, here's Hitler, he's gone to jail, he's going to be Chancellor of Germany. It just seemed impossible. The odds must have been a million to one. By now, Hitler had realised that an armed coup would not work in Germany the way that it had in Russia or in Italy. Winning public support as a legitimate party was the key to power. It was time for the Nazi party to stop cooking up fanciful schemes in dingy beer halls and enter mainstream politics. And if he needed to win public support, then he

had the ideal platform. He would turn his trial into a showcase for Nazism. He was cunning and charming when he took the stand, and he had sympathetic right-leaning judges in the court who helped him transform this trial into a publicity event. Bavaria was full of these right-wing judges who were favourable to nationalism, and he just gave him a pulpit to give his views, which were reported in the national press. Hitler stood in the dock and was allowed to give a long speech like a preacher in a pulpit. He was planting seeds for the cult of personality that he knew any successful dictator needed. He believed he was Germany's saviour. Tater needed. He believed he was Germany's saviour, he just needed to convince everybody else.

He openly admitted to trying to overthrow the government, but he contested the charge of treason. How could he have committed treason if he was trying to punish the traitors who'd lost the war for Germany in 1918? He decried the deaths of the Munich Putsch martyrs. He portrayed the Nazis the solution to Germany's woes. The jury listened with bated breaths as journalists scrawled down every word for posterity. In the weeks to come, millions of Germans would read about the trial in the papers. For the first time, Hitler was in the national news. People began asking the question, who is this strange Austrian? People began asking the question, who is this strange Austrian? Hitler came away from the trial with a five-year sentence in the fortress prison of Landsberg, the minimum possible

conviction for treason. He would end up serving only eight months of it anyway. Locked away in a comfortable cell, he and his comrades began to reassess the Nazi route to power. He and his comrades began to reassess the Nazi route to power. So when he goes to jail, he has a rethink about his strategy. He thinks, I can't overthrow this state by force. I'm going to have to come to power through elections legitimately. And so therefore, he says, I've got to build a national party. Before then, the Nazi party is just based in Munich.

So it's a small local party, really, of rabble-rousers. Now he's saying, got to move out into the rest of Germany. And he recruits two people who help him in this. Fascinating characters in Nazi party history. Gregor Strasser, who is actually more of a socialist than he is a national socialist. And Goebbels, Joseph Goebbels, a brilliant propagandist, of course, and he's anti-capitalist too. He actually says that he'd like a state like Russia. So at that stage, these two left wingers start to have a big influence over the party. Goebbels over propaganda, Strauss, a brilliant organizer. So he organizes a national party for him. And this is

the kind of the bedrock of what will eventually become the electoral force that the Nazi party becomes later in the decade. But at that stage, Hitler thinks also, I need something tangible. You know, the Marxists have got, you know, they've got Karl Marx, you know, and we've got nothing. We've just got rantings in a beer hall. So he thinks, I'm going to write a book, a philosophy book on national socialism, and that will be our Das Kapital. And so that's what he starts out. Oh, I see. So not only does he think, I should definitely be a dictator,

he's also thinking, I just need to quickly bang out a quick works in the League of Das Kapital. Of going to be the bible of national socialism and it was said at the time you know if you wanted to have the worst bible for a religion you'd choose mein kampf he's not burdened with humility is he no He somehow thinks he can do this. That's the kind of thing about Hitler. He's one of those people who, you know, he sort of tells you, like a fairy tale, he's going to do this.

And when he's with you personally, you kind of believe him that he might do it. And these people around him do believe it. They believe it. They believe, you know, he's going to be this dictator, even though there's no evidence to show that he can possibly be the leader of Germany. Mein Kampf, which means my struggle, became Hitler's magnum opus, a semi-fictional, semi-autobiographical manifesto that sat at the very centre of Nazi mythology and his own cult of personality. But the Nazi party had been officially banned after the Putsch

fiasco. Hitler, always careful to look after number one, relinquished the leadership of the party when it was forced underground. It was too risky to associate himself with them. Instead, he focused on the second volume of Mein Kampf. The strange thing is about Mein Kampf is if you go through it, he actually achieves most of what he sets out in Mein Kampf. It's amazing how close Mein Kampf is to what he does in power. Amazing. Even the foreign policy is identical. So a politician who actually enacts his manifesto.

Yeah, very unusual. So he served about a year in prison for high treason, which is punishable by the death penalty. But we need to remember that Hitler is an unknown figure. Even when he comes out of prison, he's an unknown figure. He's not the figure we think he is. He's only the figure, in hindsight, at the time he was very much an unknown figure.

He bursts into power later in the decade. Does he start a different party or resurrect the old one? He resurrects the old party and they meet at a place called Bamberg in 1926, which is really the rebirth of the Nazi party. And Strasser and Goebbels have put together a kind of program to make the Nazi party much more socialist, pro-socialist, anti-capitalist. And so at Bamberg, Hitler meets them face on and tells them, no, nationalism is what I'm in favor of, not socialism. It's nationalism. That's the core

of national socialism, right? And the socialism is just, it's a front, if you like, for what we want to achieve. He said, it's nationalist and you must, he said, accept my leadership unequivocally as well. And all the points in the Nazi party programme that were laid out in 1921, I want them to stay. And they agree. By 1926, the Nazi party had been resurrected.

Hitler had kept his head down for a few years and was now ready to take over the party once more. As leader once again, with a handpicked team of propagandists and sycophants behind him, he made preparations to catapult the Nazi party back into mainstream politics. In public, his political persona was going from strength to strength. But behind closed doors, his personal life was peculiar. In 1925, he'd invited his half-sister Angela to come and work for him as a housekeeper. She'd brought her daughter with her, 17-year-old Geli Raubau, Hitler's half-niece. Later, it's a bit later in the 20s, when he goes to live in a place called the Berghof.

This is like a holiday chalet in Berchtesgaden. And he gets his half-sister Angela to come and her daughter Geli. And then he develops a very close relationship with her. Whether it was sexual, we just don't know. Then there was the housekeepers who lived in the flats and then the Berghoff who say they didn't see any sign of a sexual relationship. Over the next few years, Geli's life became inextricably linked with Hitler's.

She spent time within his closest circle. She socialised with senior Nazis and attended business meetings and parties. And people noticed. One senior Nazi complained that Hitler's relationship with his niece seemed to take precedence over his political responsibilities. Hitler later fired him. Meanwhile, his closest friend, Putzi Hauschtengel, the guy whose house he'd hidden after the putsch, said that Geli had the effect of making him behave like a man in love. He hovered at her elbow in a very plausible imitation of adolescent infatuation. In 1929, there was a shift in their relationship. Hitler sent Geli's mother away to work elsewhere, leaving him and Geli to live in his new luxurious nine-room Munich

flat by themselves. People can have close relationship with their nieces and nephews. Probably we all do in a way. I think people have just extended it into this. It's always got to be sexual in some way. I think he was just over possessive of her as an uncle. Don't do this. Don't see him. Don't do that. You know, she wanted to break out of this and she wanted to be a singer. So she wanted to go for lessons in Rome. People said they heard arguments between them. You're not going to Vienna. Hitler shouting at her, things like this. In 1931, Geli's life ended in tragic circumstances. She was found dead in Hitler's apartment, circumstances she was found dead in hitler's apartment lying in a pool of her own blood shot through the chest with hitler's pistol beside her a hasty investigation followed into whether it

was murder or suicide the evidence is that hitler's got an alibi for the day that she killed herself he left the flat to go on a speaking engagement the people who were in the flat at the time housekeeper her mother and another servant also was there at the time and one of the housekeeper had the husband he was there so they say that definitely hitler left the apartment and she was still alive and then we've got trail of him being with these two close aides for the next 24 hours. He even got issued with a speeding ticket getting back to Munich after he found out she was dead.

So his alibi is kind of watertight. And I suppose in the modern world, this probably would have wrecked a modern politician. Your niece has been found dead in your apartment. And people were hinting, you know, the socialist press was saying that he was having a sexual relationship with her and that he'd beaten her and that it'd been covered up and stuff like that. It's a strange situation that he got away with it really. It didn't really affect his image at that time. There's been decades of conjecture about exactly what happened here.

The truth is that we know very little about Hitler's romantic life, and the exact parameters of his sexuality remain a mystery. The fact this very unusual relationship, and that's putting it mildly, ended in a violent death just begs even more questions that we haven't been able to fully answer. Despite what was going on in his private life though, Hitler's public image at the time remained intact. In fact, his political career was at the beginning of a meteoric rise. So it's the late 1920s, he's out of prison, he's got the beginnings of a national party. Is he a big prominent national figure or is it all about the big economic crash that's about to come? I think you'd have to say that the events played in to Hitler's rise to power. Two events stand out really. First of all, in 1929, there is a referendum on the Young Plan.

This is the reparations plan that the Allies have put together so that Germany can make its payments backed up by loans. And Hitler is recruited by Alfred Hugenberg. He's the head of the German National People's Party, like a conservative party of Germany. He's like Rupert Murdoch. He controls all the national newspapers. He also owns the Ufa film studio,

which makes all the big films of the 1920s, Metropolis and The Blue Angel, all of those. And he brings Hitler on board for this young campaign. And Hitler's profile goes up. He gives him lots of money to go on speaking tours, gives Goebbels money to do his brilliant propaganda. And Hitler does reach a far larger audience, newsreels, for example. So that lifts Hitler and the Nazi party starts to rise up in local elections. Now it's getting now, whereas it was only getting like sort of 2% of the 1928 election, it's starting to pull like 15%, 20% after the Young Plan campaign.

So that definitely lifts him into another realm. Since 1918, Germany had been more or less a democracy. It's a period that we now call the time of the Weimar Republic. It had faced serious challenges from the get-go. Coup attempts, a crippling economic depression that played havoc with the German economy, unemployment sky high, millions of war-ravaged veterans coming home from the front lines. The public's faith in government was practically non-existent. Extreme right and extreme left parties literally fought it out in the streets with fists and batons and firearms. The German cities had become battlefields. The Weimar Republic had one great buttress against chaos, a big, stern-looking,

mustachioed buttress, Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg. He was an immensely popular figure in Germany. He had been effectively supreme commander during the First World War, and he'd been made president of the Weimar Republic in 1925. He was a man who could appeal both to citizens and veterans alike. He was seen as a steadying presence in a time of great political upheaval. But unfortunately, it was this steadying presence that gave cover to the Nazi party. Fed up with ineffectual coalitions, in the late 1920s, Hindenburg decided to set up his own cabinet, a group of hand-picked ministers that would be able to bypass the parliament and issue decrees. The political system starts sort of to collapse. I mean, people forget it's not just Hitler rising and his popularity.

The political system is collapsing. It's collapsing because governments keep coming and going and they can't maintain themselves in power. And people around Hindenburg, and Hindenburg has a number of people around, just a small number of people. Hindenburg's the president. Hindenburg's the president, yeah. And- Big national treasure, former-

National treasure, former- Field Marshal, global one, yeah. Yeah, he's the most famous military figure in Germany. And he's indifferent towards democracy. And he just says, look, this political system doesn't work. I can't get a viable coalition that can stay in power for more than a few months. I think the average lifespan of a German coalition government in Weimar was eight months. So he decides that he's going to dispense with parliament.

He talks to General von Schleicher. He's this kind of man behind the scenes, if you like. He also talks to his son, Oskar. Otto Meissner, he's his state secretary. He's involved in these discussions. And they bring in a fellow called Heinrich Brüning. And they have this idea. The idea is floated by Schleicher. He's like the kingmaker. And he says to Hindenburg, look, this system's not going to work, but there is a way out. You could become, if you like, a president over the system itself. You could have a presidential cabinet. You could

select the cabinet. It could bypass parliament and you could issue decrees, presidential decrees. Hindenburg thinks, yes, this is a great idea. And he starts what's called a presidential cabinet. The first one is headed by Heinrich Brüning. He comes from the Catholic center party called Zentrum. He's the speaker of that party in the Reichstag. And he talks to Hindenburg about it. And he says, you know, it might not work, he said, because the constitution says that the Reichstag can have ultimate power. And he said, ultimately they could, he said, if the constitution says that the Reichstag can have ultimate power. And he said, ultimately, they could, he said, if they wanted to impeach you, the Reichstag could impeach you. And that's talked about, actually. So he goes ahead with it.

So Bruning comes to power with a program of austerity. And we've seen austerity in Britain, forget about that. This is the most incredible type of austerity. Pay cuts of 25%, public sector workers. You get an extra... Because we're in the middle of the Great Depression. The Great Depression, which comes in 1929. So 1930, you started this presidential dictatorship. This is sort of March. And then he says to Bruning, look, you go to the Reichstag, you put through these austerity proposals, and if they vote them down, I'll pass them.

So he goes to the parliament going, oh, you know, I'm going to pass these. He said, I'm going to pass this legislation. If you don't like it, he said, the president will ratify it later. So the head of the Social Democrats said, no, we don't like it, he said, the president will ratify it later. So the head of the Social Democrats said, no, we don't like it. He said, we're going to issue a vote of no confidence in you. They'd have a vote of no confidence and the vote of no confidence, he loses it, which means there's got to be an election in 60 days. So it's this idea of having a presidential dictatorship that brings about this election of September 1930,

when Hitler is already rising in the polls. And so by September of 1930, the scene had been set for the Nazis to make their mark in a national election. The political environment was now just right. That noxious mix of public discontent and far-right fervour was palpable, with the Great Depression reaping destruction and Hindenburg abandoning his more moderate positions. Hitler campaigned himself to exhaustion during the run-up to the 1930 elections. Joseph Goebbels orchestrated a whirlwind of rallies and speeches for him. It's impossible to overstate just how deeply the Nazis understood propaganda and marketing. These tours were unlike anything that any nation had seen before on the campaign trail. Hitler was approachable. He walked the streets speaking with citizens, wandered into beer

holes, shook hands, delivered speeches, posed for pictures. Goebbels organised mass torch-lit parades, visually breathtaking events that conjured up images of pagan rituals and ceremonies. Millions of posters featuring chiseled Aryans breaking loose from their shackles were plastered across cities. At a time when your typical German couldn't even afford to go to the cinema, these visual spectacles were deeply powerful things to witness. They drew people into the Nazi fold by the tens of thousands. Of course, Hitler was the star of the show. Everything revolved around him. Everywhere he went, he found audiences that were primed by years of misery for his core messages. Simple yet effective. He drilled home his focus on national

pride and the promise of stability. He would make Germany great again. And he had something for everyone. Work for the unemployed, protection for the business elite, expansion for the army, the preservation of culture for the middle classes. Even the party's name, the National Socialist German Workers' Party, was designed to sit slap-bang in the middle of the political spectrum. There was a word in there for everyone. His speeches were carefully orchestrated spectacles. Hitler would arrive intentionally late, letting the crowds whisper and murmur amongst themselves in anticipation.

He would then march through the crowd to the stage, flanked by members of the brown shirts, wielding golden banners, marching to the steady and defiant chant of Heil Hitler. He would then give his speech, beginning in low, rumbling tones, speaking faster and faster until he reached a crescendo of frenzied raving and hand-waving. Combined with the theatrical lighting and the intimidating symbol, black, red and white of the swastika, these speeches were overwhelming, almost religious experiences. Hitler had begun to find his groove, but at this stage he really appealed to rural

voters, people who were more traditionally conservative and suspicious of liberal-minded urbanites. Without the support of the cities, the party wasn't ever going to pull the voting numbers they needed to win an election. And in September 1930, the Nazi party makes this spectacular breakthrough. 107 seats, now 7 million people from nowhere support it. And most people would say, ah, but that's because of the Wall Street crash. But in the areas where the unemployment is the highest, the communists win, the big cities, they're where the major industry is. But Hitler wins in the small towns. The most noticeable Nazi voter lives in a community where there's only 5,000 people live there.

There's no cabarets there. There's no decadence. There's no trade unions. There's agriculture, farms. He wins there. Hitler actually wins the votes of people who are Protestants who live in a small community to begin with, not the people who suffered because of the Great Depression in the big cities because they don't vote for him. They vote for the communists. So that's one of the misnomers, I think, that I've highlighted. So why are these people voting for Hitler? Because he looks like he's just going to get in there and sort this out. He's going to drain the swamp. I think they like the idea of there needs to be something strong done to Germany. So they're sort of saying, yeah, you know, but Brüning's policies don't help the rural areas. So Hitler's saying he's going to have a new deal for rural voters.

So he's got that idea of the new deal, if you like, for them. And that's his first appeal. His first appeal, the people who first vote for Hitler, a lot of them never voted before, but there's 2 million who never voted who come out and vote for him. He draws a lot of support from the DNVP, who he did the referendum campaign with, Day Junkhouse. And what's emerged in the mid-twenties are all special interest parties. So in these rural communities, there's the agricultural party, the middle class party, and they all coalesce around Hitler. He unites the

right of Germany in a way that no other political party did. You listen to Dan Snow's history, there's more coming up. 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. If the Nazis couldn't win by themselves, they'd just have to absorb other right-wing parties. And fatefully, this made Hitler a perfect candidate for Hindenburg and his entourage, who'd become increasingly frustrated with the socialist elements in Germany's parliament. They were on the hunt for a right-wing coalition partner. And just like that, in a very short-sighted effort to achieve his own goals, Hindenburg invited Hitler into bed with him and set in motion the horrific process that would end with the Third Reich. the horrific process that would end with the Third Reich.

So what happens next is that Hindenburg gets fed up with Brüning because he becomes so unpopular with his austerity program, which he won't change. So he decides he's going to move to a much more right-wing coalition because the Social Democrats actually prop up Brüning on the basis that if they don't prop up bruning they'll get hitler so the social democrats kind of accommodate bruning in that way and that sort of worries hindenburg that you know we haven't got rid of this socialist element in germany at all and we need to get rid of it so he lights lights on his next one is Franz von Papen. They call him a Nazi

in a pinstripe suit. And he creates what was called the Cabinet of Barons. Every single one of them is an aristocrat. They've got absolutely no support in the Reichstag at all. And he's going to rule as part of this presidential decrees. By the time the 1932 elections rolled around, the Nazis were in their prime. Goebbels sent his propaganda machine into overdrive, coming up with new ways to push Hitler into the lives of everyday Germans. Hitler über Deutschland, or Hitler over Germany, was the big campaign to drum up support for the Nazis, which saw Hitler fly from one city to another, sometimes visiting as many as five cities in a day. The sheer scale of public appearance was unprecedented. It gave Hitler a substantial

leg up over his competition simply by being more present in the public psyche. In the elections, they became the largest party in the Reichstag, although they still didn't gain the crucial majority that they needed. Hitler surges in the July 1932 election. He goes up to 37.2%. 13 million people vote for him in that election. What's interesting here is that 13 million people are voting for a party that says it's going to destroy democracy.

13 million people. That's why the German people have to have some responsibility here. They swallowed Hitler's message. They voted for him. And that's what put him in the position to become chancellor. If they'd not voted for him, he could have been ignored, but he couldn't be ignored now, not with 13 million voters. So does Hindenburg try to bring him in? They think they can control him, bring him to that von Papen cabinet? Well, in August of that year, they have a meeting. Hitler meets von Papen and he meets Hindenburg. And in the meeting with Hindenburg, Hindenburg says,

I can't give you the chancellorship because I think you'll want to turn this into a one-party state. And I want to move away from partisan politics towards the idea of a presidential cabinet. And Hitler says, no, I want to either be chancellor or I don't want to come into the government. He offers him the post of vice chancellor. So Hitler storms out of the right chancellery saying, you know, that Hindenburg, he stabbed me in the back.

And he stays out of it. Now, the upshot of this is von Papen then has to get his vote of confidence in the Reichstag itself. He goes there in September to do this. The speaker of the Reichstag is none other now than Hermann Goering, because he's the leader of the largest party, which is that is the precept for being the speaker. And what he does is the oldest member can put forward a proposal.

Ernst Togler, he's a communist deputy and he puts forward a vote of no confidence in Papen's government. And so Papen arrives, you know, with his briefcase. He intends to go to the Reichstag and try and suspend the Reichstag and order a dissolution of the Reichstag in another election because he thinks that we can have more elections, we can bankrupt the Nazi party. communists have joined together and they vote a vote of no confidence. And he gets out and says, I've got the dissolution order. And Goering just looked over to him. He says, that's no longer relevant. We're voting on no confidence in your government. So they vote on it. And it's a massive vote, 512 votes, only 41 in favor.

So he's out. He's got to call another general election. Called for November. Now the Nazi party slips back in that election by about 2 million voters. They've reached a peak really at that stage. And he calls on General von Schleicher to become the next chancellor.

Now he wears a uniform. So, you know, we're shifting more and more to the right here, election by election. And does he ask Hitler to join the government? Schleicher puts out feelers. Hitler says he doesn't want to join the government, coalition government, and that's the end of it. But then it becomes clear Schleicher's got no support. And then in the middle of December, Schleicher tries to get in with Gregor Strasser and see if he'll come into the government to break Hitler, if you like, get a group of these socialist members of the Nazi party to join him. Gregor Strasse doesn't want to do it. And so that falls down. So now Schleicher's facing, in January, probably a vote of no confidence,

which he knows he's going to lose. And at that stage, von Papen, who still feels he's been stabbed in the back by Schleicher, he decides to open negotiations again with Hitler. And then in January, they have a number of meetings. And he starts to convince Hindenburg that they can control him, bring him into a government surrounded by conservatives, which they will control and stop him becoming a dictator. And in the end, Hindenburg says, yes, we'll do it. So that's how it happens.

Hindenburg decides to bring him in to the government. On the basis, they'll tame him. But then, right when the Nazis needed a little extra something to get people to commit to them completely, the German parliament building burnt down. The Reichstag fire, as it's now known, became a rallying call for the far right. They used it as a pretext to usher in a swathe of authoritarian decrees. as a pretext to usher in a swathe of authoritarian decrees. This was an attack upon Germany. There's been much speculation as to whether the Nazis orchestrated the fire by themselves.

And the next month, surprisingly, the Reichstag burns down completely. Yeah. Was that a coincidence? Well, we don't know, do we? I mean, most people would say that maybe the Nazis had some involvement in the Reichstag fire. There's not really enough evidence to prove that. But even if they didn't, the Reichstag fire was great because it provided Hitler with a pretext to destroy democracy. He was going to destroy democracy anyway, but it was very helpful that in a high profile way, he could ban the Communist Party before the last election. And talk me through the fire. Why is it a chance to ban the Communist Party? Because the guy behind it, Marinus van der Luber, he's a communist. And he's a fan of the Boxer Matches? He's a fan of the Boxer Matches and a few fire-lighters. So it's sort of thought that

he did it. He acted alone. And in his trial, he maintains that he's acted alone. And even under torture, he still says that he acted alone. There's been a couple of books that have sort of questioned whether he did act alone. On the balance of what we've got, I think we can say that he probably did act alone and it was exploited by the Nazi party. What happened is the building just went up, did it just? The building went up in flames, yeah.

There was a lot of combustible materials, I think, big curtains, wooden panelled rooms. So it was a good tinderbox. So Hitler immediately thinks this is a good opportunity. I'll blame the communists and put some anti-terrorist legislation through. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

They have what's called the Reichstag Fire Decree, which sort of bans most left-wing parties. The Communist Party is virtually banned during that last election. That's why it's not really a democratic election. Then he goes on from there, doesn't he, to put through an enabling act. This enabling act allows him to bypass parliament, bypass the president and issue his own decrees. So that's the end of democracy. And then in July, he bans every single political party except the Nazi party. Here you can see Hitler's remarkable powers

of persuasion. Not only can he wrap crowds of thousands around his little finger, but it seems he can also win over Germany's most prestigious citizens. Is there a point to which President Hindenburg or any of those other General Schleicher and these other right-wing figures go, oh, we made a terrible mistake here? I think von Papen sort of early on thinks he's probably made a mistake. But Hindenburg has won over because I think Hindenburg wanted a popular right-wing authoritarian regime. And Hitler won Hindenburg over as well. In his memoirs, von Papen says, two or three months ago, I had the ear of Hindenburg. And in his company, in a room, you could see that he venerated towards me. and he sort of was a bit cold towards Hitler. He said, now it's the opposite. Now it's sort of everything Herr Hitler says, you know, is wonderful. And he says, I think he's won over the old man.

The tragedy is that Hindenburg went along with all of this. He kind of wriggles his way out of condemnation somehow. You know, people emphasise, oh, yes, but he didn't want Hitler to become chancellor. But when he became chancellor, he opened a lot of doors for him to destroy the democracy. That shows Hindenburg wanted democracy destroyed. And he was moving in that direction before Hitler ever rose to the position

where he was going to be offered chancellor. As I explained before, these presidential cabinets, they were a move towards that already. So I'd say Hindenburg was the, he was the grave digger of the Weimar Republic and probably the undertaker too. Hitler became Chancellor of Germany on the 30th of January 1933. And this date effectively marks the death of Weimar democracy, the birth of the Third Reich. From here it would be a rapid slide into the all-encompassing, all-permeating dictatorship that we recognise from our history books. The first thing that Hitler did was shut down any

rival form of political expression. In tandem with that he put his trusty propaganda master Joseph Goebbels in charge of clamping down on the cultural existence of German citizens. He ensured that only the Nazis' virulent brand of racially charged nationalism was pumped into their lives. Radio and film were the weapons he used on the front lines of this culture war. Is it just becoming a dictatorship through that summer of 1903? Well, he creates the Ministry of Propaganda and he brings in Goebbels to run that. And then that tries to control all of culture. So culture has to go through Goebbels.

So if you've got a film script that you want to do, he's got to look at it. He vets plays. He controls the radio as well. The radio becomes a big medium in Nazi Germany. Hitler nearly always gives his speeches on national radio when he wants to say something to the public. So yes, he's got an iron grip. They get an iron grip over culture. Their kind of starting point is, what would the popular

culture of Weimar? Let's destroy that. So they try and destroy that kind of scene. Now it was time for Hitler to follow through on some of the promises he'd made to get him into power in the first place. He started with the big one, rolling back the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, the humiliating First World War peace settlement that had become so wrapped up in the German national psyche. With ideas of German strength and unity at the very heart of Nazi ideology, Hitler could hardly do anything else. He made it clear from their get-go that overturning the treaty was his first priority. Although, as it turned out, this would be as symbolic as it was real. And what about Versailles? So this idea that the international settlement after the First World

War, Germany's lost a chunk of its territory. It's not allowed to have an air force, no tanks, no battleships. How quickly does Hitler reverse all that? Well, if you go back to the Versailles settlement itself, Germany really doesn't accept it from the start. The biggest aspect of it is reparations. And people talk about, you know, Germany was defaulting on reparations, you know, year by year. And in the end, the Americans came in with the Dawes Plan, which helped them pay, and then the Young Plan, which helped them pay. And then in 1932, reparations were abolished completely.

And when you look at it, Germany never paid those reparations. Then they defaulted on all of their foreign debts when Hitler came to power. So really, you know, Germany, you could say, oh, Versailles. Versailles was a kind of a flag, if you like, to wave and to say to people, we're going to overturn that. Hitler always had the intention of overturning the military clauses and the territorial clauses stage by stage. He realized that the foreign office told him, you can't move early. We haven't got an army. We can't take on the Allies at the moment.

The Allies could have invaded Germany any time up until 1939, easily. Not only invaded, they could have controlled Germany as well. You know, when you look at the actual numbers before then, they've only got an army of 100,000 in 1933. The French have got an army of 1.5 million. It's a massive difference. And in 333, he starts to increase that army, doesn't he? Secretly, what he does is, behind the scenes, he tells the army, look, I am going to bankroll you with rearmament.

I'm going to pay for the rearmament of Germany. And as slowly as we emerge, we'll bolster our armies and we'll start then to build our military up and we won't be stopped. So he does that. He starts off with reneging on conscription. He brings back conscription. It's prohibited under the Treaty of Versailles, but the Allies don't do anything about it. Then he says he's going to have an army of somethingailles, but the Allies don't do anything about it. Then he says he's going to have an army of something like 500,000 originally. Again, way beyond the realm of what was set out in Versailles. And he goes ahead and does that.

And then he starts to build tanks and air force, which is illegal. And Goering announced he's got an air force. The overturning of the Treaty of Versailles was in practice quite a smooth process. Hitler expanded the military dramatically with little opposition from the outside world. Territorial expansion came without any real resistance as well. The Nazis re-militarized the thriving industrial region of the Rhineland in 1936. They annexed Austria as part of the Anschluss in 1938. And they took the German speaking Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia in the same year. And the Allies don't stop him doing that. They sort of make waves through the League of Nations and say things that indicate that they

won't put up with this, but they don't actually do anything. I suppose if you go back to the 1920s, the French did attempt to occupy Germany, the Ruhr occupation in 1923, which led to the great inflation. But really that was a catastrophe because it bankrupted Germany, the great inflation happened. So the French felt as though they'd made a mistake there. So were the French going to do an occupation of that type in the 30s? I don't think it was ever possible. The next thing he does is the occupation of the Rhineland. Then he moves on Austria. After Austria, he moves on Czechoslovakia, the Sudeten people then.

And that's what the people like Chamberlain didn't really see. Hitler was very good at just sticking to one objective and moving towards that. And then he'd have something else under his sleeve, if you like. But Hitler was, again, cunning. He took his time with this, allowing the Third Reich years to rearm, build its forces and consolidate dictatorial power before triggering outright war. At this stage, Hitler was ambitious enough to take gambles, but cautious enough to avoid provoking a conflict that Germany wasn't ready for. When war came, he wanted Germany to be ready. And remember, for him, war wasn't just inevitable, it was desirable. Back in 1934, he was already laying the foundations for the war that was to come. He was going to be commander-in-chief, there was no question about

that. And suddenly, former allies now appeared to be something of a hindrance. Both Hindenburg and his own paramilitary unit, the Stormtroopers, who'd been so valuable to him up to this point, it, the stormtroopers, who'd been so valuable to him up to this point, both became a threat. Hitler wants to get rid of Hindenburg eventually. He knows he's old. He knows he'll die. And he's got plans to amalgamate the chancellor with the presidency under the title Führer, leader. And the only problem is that Hitler's got these stormtroopers, and these stormtroopers are still talking about a second revolution. And the second revolution is not just, as they would see it, toadying around with Hindenburg and the army, but creating a truly national socialist state, you know, taking on the department

stores. He promised the department stores are closed down, didn't they? They didn't. Because they're very capitalist. They're very capitalist. Very American, yeah. So he's kind of like what's he done about interest

and all he's done nothing about it so he hasn't implemented any of the kind of socialist elements of the party program and so these stormtroopers

become a problem the army don't like them Hindenburg doesn't like them and Hindenburg sort of faces out and this shows that he's not completely in complete power without Hindenburg's't like them. And Hindenburg sort of faces out. And this shows that he's not completely in complete power without Hindenburg's blessings. So there's a point where they clash.

And Hindenburg says to him, you've got to deal with these stormtroopers or I'm pulling out from supporting you. And because he's still president, he can do that. Hitler didn't plan that into the long knives. He can do that. Hitler didn't plan the Knights of the Long Knives. He was forced into it by the conservatives and by Hindenburg, who brought him, the group who brought him to power, if you like. So then he sort of takes revenge against the stormtroopers, which he doesn't want to do, really.

He has Ernst Röhm killed. He's friendly with Ernst Röhm. He goes back to the early Nazi party. So he felt bad about it. He told people after the Knights of the Long Knives, don't talk to me about that again or I'll just get emotional. So he kills a lot of his more ideologically severe fellow travellers. With anti-capitalism.

Yeah. And he sacrifices them to sort of get in with mainstream establishment right-wing politicians. Yeah, and the army. Yeah. So it's sort of Hindenburg and the army all stay loyal. It's a monstrous betrayal, isn't it? It's a terrible betrayal. It kind of shows how cynical he is, really.

Beneath this sort of facade of passion and all the rest of it, there still remains that cynicism underneath him. What's best for me here? He's thinking, you know, what's best for me? Do I really want to fall from power by backing Ernst Röhm? Of course, he should have backed Ernst Röhm if he wanted to keep a Nazi party that was kind of true to its roots. He has them all killed. And the next month, Hindenburg dies anyway.

Hindenburg dies anyway, yeah. At that point, is Hitler absolute? Yes. There's nobody then in his way. Hindenburg's not really in his way, but, and he probably could have been more confident with Hindenburg than he was. You know, Hindenburg wasn't going to overthrow him. I don't think. I don't think. He was bluffed by Hindenburg and he went with it because big army figures were saying to him, oh, you know, we don't like this. I think we might take over in a kind of military coup. And he worried more about that.

And he wanted to keep the army on side, remember, because he really did want to fulfill his foreign policy objectives. They now took over from this early Nazi party agenda, really. He wasn't really keen on implementing all of that agenda anymore. He was into building up the army, taking on the Allies, and reversing the result from the First World War. Expanding Germany's borders and consolidating power weren't the only things on Hitler's to-do list. He'd made other promises, and his next steps marked the beginning of the Nazis' darkest legacy. The gradual exclusion and extermination of so-called

undesirables, those deemed racially inferior. The definitions of these groups were intentionally vague. They were designed to expand and contract depending on who the Nazis wanted to scapegoat. Everyone from criminals to socialists, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses were swept up in these umbrella definitions. But the one group that obviously suffered in particular was Germany's Jewish population. 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. Hitler's anti-Semitism had never been a secret. Mein Kampf was laden with hateful monologues about the racial tuberculosis of the Jewish people. For years, he'd said in his speeches that Germany's Jews were responsible for all of the country's woes. You might remember from episode one, the stab in the back myth, that conspiracy that said Jews were responsible for Germany's failure in the First World War. Well, again and again, Hitler had repeated the claim that Jews at home had schemed and plotted behind the backs of Germany's brave soldiers, causing their defeat and humiliation. causing their defeat and humiliation. He perpetuated the narrative that in the years since, German Jews, with the support of their Jewish-American backers, had gleefully profited as the country fell into turmoil. Antisemitism had been rife in Europe for centuries, and Hitler was just the latest in a long line of rulers to use Europe's Jews as a punch bag. This began with a boycott of Jewish businesses in the

April of 1933. It only lasted a day and most Germans ignored it. But nonetheless, this marked the beginning of the Nazis' campaign against Jewish Germans. The war against the Jews starts straight away. When Hitler comes to power, he decides that he's going to deal with it in a legislative way. So he tries, first of all, the male fist. So he has a boycott of Jewish businesses. That's on the 1st of April, 1933. But it's bad for business and it resonates badly in the international press.