Forbidden History - The Private Life of Hitler

Episode Date: March 20, 2025

TW: The following episode contains discussion of suicide, please listen with care.  In this episode of the Forbidden History podcast, we explore Adolf Hitler's childhood, his artistic ambitions, and his relationships, delving into how these personal experiences, shaped by the trauma of war, fuelled the motivations that ultimately led to widespread destruction. Cast List: Dr. Tracy Borman: Royal Historian & Chief Curator at Historic Royal Palaces Hallie Rubenhold: Author & Historian Tony McMahon: Author & Historian Dominic Selwood: Author & Historian Nigel Jones: Author & Historian  Herbert & Kerstin Weidler: Auktionshaus Weidler Martin Schmitt-Bredow: Munich Tour Guide Eric Meyers: Narrator  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Forbidden History Podcast. This program is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It contains mature adult themes. Listener discretion is advised. Adolf Hitler is probably the most despised figure of all time. He started the most destructive war in history, and his perverse racial policies resulted in the deaths of millions. And given the Nazi regime's reliance on propaganda,

centered upon a carefully curated public. image of the Fuhrer. But so much of the Nazi regime's terrible legacy came from what went on behind closed doors in his private life. In this episode, we'll join historian Tracy Borman as she looks into the private life of Adolf Hitler. But one thing I think we can say for absolutely certain, and that that was Hitler was enormously abnormal. How did Hitler's troubled upbringing mold him into the man that he would become? How did a personal passion for art and architecture fuel the worst excesses of the Nazi regime?

Why did most of his alleged lovers either end their life or attempt to? And what is the truth behind the tremendous self-belief that drove a down-and-out artist to become the Fuhrer of the Third Reich? Adolf Hitler was born in a small town in Austria called Braunau Amin. He was one of only two of his parents' children to survive into adulthood.

His mother, Clara, was incredibly warm and loving and positively doted on her only son. His relationship with his father, Alois, on the other hand, was fraught with tension. Hitler embraced the idea that Germany was what counted for all German-speaking people in Europe. Hitler had no time for what he saw as the degenerate hapspe-speople. Monarchy in Austria. Hitler's father was a small-time Austrian official.

He sat in an office and he did paperwork. And in his mind, that was the noblest job there was. Hitler was having none of it. Hitler wanted to be an artist. And Hitler clashed deeply with his father over it. But his father view was that Hitler could not be an artist. No, not as long as I live. Their conflicts turned physical.

Hitler's father would beat him. would beat him, but his mother would often try to protect him. His father had been a brutal, tyrannical man who tyrannized his entire family and beat Adolf fairly regular basis. But when Hitler was just 13 years old, Alois died. The conflict was at an end, and Hitler was now free to pursue his passions. It was a liberation for him, and I think that he felt freedom. There's no love for Hitler's father at all. All his love, such as it was, was focused on his mother. Hitler was an incredibly lazy and arrogant student,

and he left school at 15 without any qualifications. And he formed a friendship with a guy called August Kubizek, who was an upholsterer. They would go on long walks together, where Kubuzek often had to listen to Hitler's grandstanding on politics. Together, these young men lead a life which is very much a part of the time. They spend time lounging around the cafes. They talk about art and opera and books, and they dream together.

The pair immerse themselves in the city's culture. In particular, their shared passion for Wagner operas. For Hitler, Wagner's epic retellings of Germany's glorious past struck a chord. And it was this kind of past that Hitler would go on to believe lay in Germany's future. Hitler saw Wagner as his muse. He was obsessed by it. He saw his first Wagner production when he was age 12, Lowengrin, and he wrote in Meinkamp that from that moment on he was addicted.

He associated them with the myths of German history, and they became entangled, I think, in his mind with what the German past was like and what the German future could be. By the summer of 1907, Hitler's mother had been. become ill with breast cancer. But despite this, Hitler moved to Vienna to further his artistic ambitions and apply for a place at the prestigious Vienna Academy of Arts. Historian Tracy Borman is visiting an auction house in Nuremberg to hear about Hitler's

original artworks. Wow, so these are Hitler's actual paintings. He has different styles. He painted with water color. a mixture, watercolor and also used ink. And this is a painting in oil. They're actually quite beautiful. The Hitler's paintings come up for auction very often.

We sold 150 pictures. Wow. The highest prices was... 130,000. Really gives me a sense of how differently things could have turned out if Hitler had taken another path. Hitler's artistic dreams were shattered when the Art Academy stated that while he was good at drawing buildings, he was not good enough at drawing people.

His application was declined. Hitler was utterly dejected. Little did the Art Academy know that this rejection would change Hitler's life and, in turn, history. At the moment of his failure in Vienna, Hitler received more bad news. His mother's condition had drastically deteriorated. He returned home where she was being cared for by a Jewish doctor, Edward Bloch, but nothing could be done. And as she died, a distraught Hitler sketched her to preserve a lasting impression. Hitler only loved one person in his entire life, and that was his mother, Clara.

In fact, the doctor said that in his long experience, he'd never seen such a great love for anyone as Hitler exhibited towards his mother. After his series of setbacks, Hitler's mental health was deteriorating. He had a total breakdown, and he went into a downward spiral until he became a street urchin in Vienna, resentful of the world that had rejected him. When Hitler was first in Vienna, he was able to live a quite a generous family allowance that was given to him. But when that money ran out, he effectively became a vagrant tramp down and out. and he spent a lot of time in shelters for male vagrants like himself. They had dormitories, so he didn't have much privacy.

And he made what little money he could through selling paintings or postcards and drawings, often actually through Jewish middlemen. Hitler failed to register for Austria's compulsory military service as he was unwilling to fight for the state he vehemently detested. So he had to get away before he got into trouble. trouble with the authorities. He left for the place he'd always believed the future lay, Germany, settling in Munich.

He was in Munich doing roughly what he had been doing in Vienna, drifting, he was directionless, he was waiting for something to happen, and in August 1914, history obliged and something did happen. When Germany declared war on France, he leapt at the chance to fight for the country he really believed in. He was posted to the Western Front, and it would be an experience that would shape him more than any other. The First World War was a disaster for most people, but for Hitler it seems to have given him some sense of direction in life, you know, after years of being a loner, a drifter, a tramp. That said though, even though he had a regiment and he had human comrades, the only object,

really of his affection seems to have been this stray dog called Foxel. He was regarded as rather unusual. He didn't take leave. He didn't have any girlfriends or families who he wrote to constantly. And he got extremely angry when disillusionment began to creep in and people said, well, we can't win this war. He remained from first to last, an ultra-patriotic, uber nationalist soldier who was fanatically against any idea that Germany was not going to win the war.

But in October 1918, the war ended prematurely for Hitler. A gas attack saw him get a face full of mustard gas, and he was evacuated to a military hospital near the Polish border. But upon arrival, it was the psychiatric war that he was assigned to. After four years of war, the pressure had gotten to him. While he recovered both mentally and physically in the hospital, he received news of Germany's surrender, and he had another breakdown. Looking for someone to blame, he picked up on a feeling that was in the air at the time,

the idea that Germany had been stabbed in the back by pacifists, socialists, and Jews. Through the prism of Germany's defeat, his worldview was starting to crystallize. After leaving the hospital, he returned to Munich. Still on the army's payroll, Hitler came to the attention of their education and propaganda department. Spotting his talent for public speaking, they recruited him as an intelligence officer. He was assigned to spy on a new radical right-wing group, the German Workers Party. Tracy Borman meets with local Munich guide, Martin Schmidt-Bredaou, to learn about where Hitler's political journey began. Hitler has no job after the war and was very happy that he has got this agent spy job for a

propaganda section of a German army to observe these new parties, how left or how right they are. In a former beer hall in Munich, Hitler initially watched a party meeting uninterested. But when one of the guests spoke in favor of Bavaria becoming a separate state, Hitler was incensed.

He stood up and began to set the record straight. the record straight. As a speaker rhetorically, very good. The chief of this little party has said, oh, this guy is a very good speaker. We want to engage him. So Hitler had initially been sent to spy on the German Workers Party,

and he ends up joining it. Yes. But it's amazing, isn't it? Because it's so inconspicuous. You could just walk past without knowing the momentous events that happened in there. Hitler's talents saw him become leader of the party within a couple of years, and it was renamed the National Socialist German Workers Party,

better known as the Nazis. Hitler then turned his personal attention to their branding. In his early time, Hitler tried to develop a symbol for this Nazi movement. This is one of the early versions of Hitler's paintings. Okay. He looked for old air. for old Aryan race symbol, and he finds in the Hindu culture this swastika.

Okay. He was incredibly good at branding. Yes, it was a genius. It was good for this time. It was very uncomplicated to read for everyone. And still just as recognizable today. Yes. Rebranding of the party complete,

Hitler worked to build support. With anti-capitalism, anti-Marxism, even anti-Semitism, all in the air in Germany at this time, he found a captive audience. And as the country's economy struggled to recover from defeat in the First World War, more and more people bought into the Nazi's message. In November 1923, Hitler decided that time was right to take power by force. It became known as the Munich Putsch and culminated in a showdown in the center of the city. So what happened here?

Here come 2,000 Nazis armed. They wanted to come to the Bavarian Defense Ministry. And here were a policeman chain of 120 policemen. Right. And they had machine gun. So the Nazis outnumbered the police forces. So why did Hitler fail? Because this was a narrow, narrow place.

here and they have had a machine gum. Only four policemen were dead, but 50 Nazis. The Munich Putsch had ended in disaster. While Hitler managed to escape in the chaotic aftermath to a friend's house, his reaction to the defeat was extreme. Pistol in hand, he contemplated suicide, but he was talked round, arrested, and put on trial. There, his talent for public speaking,

public speaking won over the court. The result was the most lenient sentence possible, a mere five years in Lansburg prison. Lansburg prison really was more of a hotel than a jail. In fact, one visitor who came to his cell said that Hitler's quarters were more like a delicatessen than anything else, piled high with wine, flowers, chocolate, everything that he could want.

And in fact, Hitler seems to have put on weight while he was in prison. While at Landsberg, Hitler was given a medical examination by a prison doctor. The report that was produced is incredibly thorough and revealing. He weighed 77 kilos, he still had a shoulder injury from the Munich Puch, but the key detail was that it seems that he only had one properly descended testicle. So a certain saucy song that was sung by British soldiers during the war may have had more than a shred of truth to it. Hitler's prison medical report, unsurprisingly,

remained a closely guarded secret. But he was far more open about the importance of his time there. He called it his, University paid for by the state, and it was a period of rest and reflection. He began to see himself not as the drummer of the National Socialist cause, but as the Messiah who would deliver it. He dictated his ideas to loyal party members,

Rudolf Hess, and the result was a book. Hitler wanted to name it a four-and-a-half-year struggle against lies, stupidity, and cowardice, a reckoning with the destroyers of the Nazi party movement. It wasn't the catchiest title, and Hitler was persuaded to rename it, My Struggle, Mind Kampf. The title says it all, my struggle. This is the story of how Hitler felt the world was against him and yet he triumphed. It's about how he developed the view of that he has. It's a mad book, but in it is distilled the entire essence of Hitler's views and of his program. So by the time Hitler was granted early release from prison in December 1924, he had a clear mission in his head, through his words in Mein Kampf and manifesto. Since the Munich Putsch had gone

so badly wrong, this time he was going to try and take power through the ballot box. But before he started campaigning for votes, the first step was to overhaul his wayward dress sense. His image in the early days was all wrong. He would pose in Austrian Leidenhausen, he would wear a shabby raincoat, he would carry for reasons which still seem a bit bizarre a whip around with him. Hitler started working with a photographer Heinrich Hoffman and he had very specific notions of the image that he wanted to present. One of the problems, of course, was that Hitler, his own appearance, did not adhere to this Nordic ideal.

And so he and Hoffman came up with the idea to just focus on the hypnotic quality of this leader's eyes, which was supposed to persuade people who were looking at his pictures, that he was this great force. Image overhaul complete, and with the party coming in increasingly under his control, Hitler went on the campaign trail. The carefully curated public image masked a very different man behind closed doors. On a vacation in the mountain region Ober Salzburg, in the autumn of 1926, he came into contact with a girl called Maria Ryder.

Maria, or Mimi, as she was known, was just 16 years old. Hitler was 37. Hitler, however, soon returned to Munich and the world of politics. But by playing with Mimi's affections, he had left a deep impression. She wanted to marry him. For Hitler, she was little more than a distraction, and he soon dropped her. In her despair, she attempted to hang herself. While she was unsuccessful, a similar story was to play out much closer to home,

to tragic ends. In 1929, Hitler moved into a large new apartment, and his niece, Gaylee Raubel, came to join him. During the next two years, they were seen together frequently, and rumors soon started to spread about the nature of the relationship between Uncle Alf and his niece behind closed doors. What actually went on in private is subject to guesswork and speculation. But in public, Gaylee was the only person Hitler ever allowed to become center of attention. He took her everywhere with him.

And it seems that for the only time in his life, Hitler became emotionally dependent on a woman. She's about 19 years younger than him, but she's practically a prisoner. She describes her own uncle as a monster and says, you know, you cannot believe what he demands of me. The relationship between Hitler and Geli became more and more obvious and unhealthy. It became suffocating for her. until she got so desperate that it appeared there was only one way out. In September 1931, Galey was found dead in Hitler's apartment. His political enemies had a field day, and almost immediately, stories filled the newspapers.

There were even allegations that Hitler had murdered her, hardly, as he wasn't even in Munich at the time. Or that he'd ordered her killing, again, not likely that he would have ordered her to be killed. killed in his own apartment. So it's more likely that his treatment of Galey had led her to take her own life. Hitler fell into a deep depression. He spoke about giving up on politics, and those around him feared he was suicidal. But after paying a visit to Galey's grave, he felt able to move on and renew focus on his mission. Hitler's relationship with a woman had threatened to derail his bid for power. But as the Great Depression impacted households across Germany, women became an important part of his support base. He decided to keep future relationships very much behind closed doors.

Hitler believed that his appeal to women in Germany was that he belonged to Germany to the Reich and to the folk. And part of that was not marrying. It was a belief that every German woman could own the furor. But of course, there was one woman who was to stick with him throughout all that was to come, Eva Brown. She was middle-class Munich girl working as a sales assistant to Hitler's personal photographer Hoffman. It's alleged that Hitler walked into Hoffman's shop one day and saw her standing on a ladder, putting photographs away and liked the look of her legs, especially. she at first didn't even know who he was. He was going under the pseudonym of Herm Wolfe.

But quite quickly, in fact, after the death of Géli Rabel, she had a place in Hitler's life. She was very similar to Hitler's other women, 23 years younger and very much a plaything. So Hitler didn't pay her all that much attention. That was, until August 1932, when she shot herself with her father's pistol. She was taken immediately to the hospital, where Hitler visited her and brought her a large bouquet of flowers.

It's likely that she'd been trying to get his attention rather to actually kill herself. And it worked. She became the Chattelin, the housekeeper, if you like, at the Berkhoff at his mountain home, at Berthesgarten. And the relationship was known about among Hitler's close circle. She was certainly kept out of the limelight as far as a job. general public were concerned. So most Germans would never even have known of her existence. On the 30th of January, 1933, Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, and in August the following year, assumed total control over the country and became the Fuhrer. And with power, came money.

Hitler got very rich off the back of being in power. So, for example, he got royalties for allowing his face to appear on stamps. He got royalties for mine camp. They were given away when people got married, so he even got money for that. He was made tax exempt, which meant that he could keep all of this money. He didn't have to pay any of it to the state. So he was really rolling in it. The transformation from failed artist to Fuhrer of the Third Reich was complete, and the man who had been utterly directionless now had a mission. The recollections of his valet, Carl Wilhelm Klauser, provided a glimpse behind closed doors into Hitler's daily routine at this time. At 8 a.m., he would place the day's reports and newspapers on a stool outside Hitler's bedroom.

Hitler's arm would come out through a crack in the door and pull the papers into his room. His actual wake-up call wouldn't be until 9.30, and soon after, the valet would arrive with a rather unusual breakfast. According to his ballot, Hitler's breakfast would consist of two cups of lukewarm whole milk, up to ten Liebnitz biscuits, and a third to a half a tablet of chopped-up semi-bitter chocolate. Hitler tended to eat all of this standing up while in his library, reviewing the day's lunch menu, which would consist of one option for guests, and three for Hitler himself. After morning meetings, lunch would usually be served around one or two o'clock and was a highly choreographed affair. Hitler always sat in the same spot and would choose two guests to sit next to him.

The propaganda minister Gerbils usually sat opposite him. After the meal, Hitler would pick one guest to walk with him in the garden and talk some more, while the other guests retired for cigarettes and coffee. two things which Hitler resolutely avoided. Once the afternoon meetings were over, there would be dinner, when Hitler would hold court and expound his views on topics from vegetarianism to autobons to troop numbers. And the people around him would take note.

He wanted to deliver long monologues. Of course, it was completely forbidden to interrupt him. Even Magda Goebbels, the wife of the Minister Goebbels, said it was tedious beyond belief. Hitler disliked issuing written directives. A lot of his policies was interpreted by his followers from his monologues around the table. He just laid down general laws, what he wanted done, what his opinion on, for example, vivisection, women's makeup, all sorts of subjects.

And his acolytes interpreted those and actually put those into law, thinking that they were working towards the furor, that they were actually. putting into effect Hitler's own wishes and desires. This method of government was proving rather successful at the end of the 1930s as the Nazis began to march across Europe, and in Hitler's mind, they could not afford to wait. He commented that he could no longer delay his plans and that only he could achieve them, since a genius is only born once a century. Back in 1922, one of the senior party members had said that

Hitler had megalomania halfway between Messiah Complex and the Emperor Nero. And as the victories mounted up, Hitler's sense of self-belief reached new heights. In 1938, Hitler achieved a dream he'd held since childhood, when the Anschloss saw Austria incorporated into the Third Reich. The country that had produced the father he so hated, and that had rejected his younger self's artistic talents, was now under his control. Austrian Jews soon found themselves on the receiving end of Hitler's warped racial policies. But there was one Jew whom Hitler could not help but make an exception for, the doctor

who had nursed his dying mother. Hitler never forgot Dr. Bloch's care for his mother. He later called him the noble Jew and claimed that if all Jews were like him, there would be no Jewish question. After the Anschluss with Austria in 1938, Hitler ensured Blach was safe until he helped him to emigrate to the United States in 1940 and avoid the fate that awaited his fellow Jews. The union with Austria had been achieved without a shot being fired. But this was all to change. And Hitler's very private act of mercy towards Dr. Bloch was not to be repeated.

Hitler, high on his personal popularity, was ready to unleash destruction. And in September 1939, his invasion of Poland sparked the Second World War. Hitler's titanic self-belief was what drove him to think he could achieve what he'd set out for himself and Germany. But so many of Nazi Germany's objectives stemmed from Hitler's private life. One key example concerned art and architecture. Hitler's taste in art was incredibly parochial. He liked anything that was German or that had classical themes to it. The one thing he couldn't abide was modernism or anything that challenged his view of what art should be.

Almost from the moment Hitler came to power in 1933, his personal taste in art became law. And so modern art was banned, and any artists who wanted to work in Germany had to register with the government to ensure their work fitted with Hitler's own preferences. But the Nazis went further. As they swept across Europe, they plundered art from every country they occupied on a scale never before seen in history. Hitler had his failure as an artist thrown in his face throughout his youth.

But now as Fuhrer, he believed he could write that terrible wrong. But the problem is that everything he did showed what a Philistine he was. And that included the theft of precious works of art. And it was almost as if he thought that by having those paintings and those sculptures by great artists, that this would somehow rub off on him

and make him a greater artist as Fuhrer. Some of the art stolen by the Nazis was sold off or destroyed. But if it met with Hitler's approval, then much was destined for what was planned to be the biggest art gallery in the world. The Fuhrer Museum. To be located in the city he'd grown up in. Lins. As a teenager, Hitler had wandered the streets with his friend August, dreaming of remodeling it to his designs. And now that he was Fuhr, those dreams seemed to be within his grasp.

But he set his sights further. Other German cities, including Berlin, Munich, and Hamburg, were also to be substantially redesigned. In fact, Hitler, the artist with a particular talent for drawing buildings, saw his chance to stamp his architectural ideals across Europe. Hitler's architectural plans were as symptomatic. of his megalomania as his territorial ones. Influenced by the classical world, everything had to be bigger, larger, grander

than every other building to stab his mark on the world for centuries to come. But these were not just pipe dreams. They were a key driver of the concentration camp networks, the persecution of Jewish people, and peoples of occupied territory, and even the course of war itself. The concentration camps, in fact, became an integral part of the German economy, obviously unpaid slave labour. We can draw a connection between Hitler's own love of architecture and his desire to build these grandiose constructions with the work that went on in concentration camps.

The fact that camps like Mauthausen in Austria and Flotsenberg in Germany were built next to quarries, where the stonework that would go into the building projects was actually dug out. dug out. Concentration camps came to be used to an even more devastating effect. Quite typically, these horrifying plans seem to have grown out of one of the furor's discussions at the dinner table. Hitler was having a meal with Heinrich Himmler, the overlord of the SS, Tsaitzler, who was a leading general and Lammers, who was a bureaucrat within the office of the chancellery. And he is recorded as having said that he had been extraordinarily merciful to the Jews, but he was coming to see that the only solution was extermination.

And this is the only actual written link that we have that Hitler ordered the policy of the Holocaust. With the biggest genocide in history set in motion over lunch, Hitler then wanted to keep away from it. When it came to the extermination of Jewish people, Hitler was very hands-off. While atrocities were being carried out in his name, he never visited an extermination camp.

Hitler never wanted to be confronted with the brutal reality of what was going on. He just wanted to know that it was being done. This system of management worked while the opportunity was there. Time after time, he'd ignored the advice of his generals and was rewarded with success. His self-belief had reached new heights, and he invaded Russia. It was a massive strategic blunder as unshakable self-belief became catastrophic self-delusion.

Any defeats on the battlefield are a result of the stupidity or the treachery of his army officers or the weakness of the German people, it never seems to have landed on Hitler that his entire project may have been doomed from the outset. Defeat in Russia became increasingly inevitable. But the surrender of the First World War was not to be repeated.

Hitler, distrustful of his generals, started micromanaging the war effort himself badly. And as the Allies reigned bombs on Berlin, Hitler just asked if the town hall had been destroyed, because it was a building he didn't like. Hitler himself was to live out his final days from January 1945 in the Fuhrer bunker, below the ruined Reich Chancellery as the Allies tightened the noose on the capital. Hitler, now a frail man, who'd aged beyond his years, continued to live out the fantasy that things were going to change

and that the Nazis would win the war. He frequently quoted his hero, Frederick the Great, who'd snatched victory from the jaws of defeat and only really ventured out of the bunker for daily walks with his dog, He was always surrounded by these portraits of Frederick the Great. He had a particular favorite that went with him everywhere. It was put in kind of a bulky crate and even had its own seat in his private plane. Hitler's hopes for a Frederick the Great style change in fortunes were pinned on General Steiner

and a relieving force that Hitler had ordered to rescue him. But on the 22nd of April, four of Hitler's top generals broke the news to him that it was not coming. He did not take it well. Hitler, as is famously portrayed in film, went crazy at this point, screamed, shouted, and swore that everyone was a traitor, that he should have done with the generals, what Stalin did with his generals, i.e. executed them all, and he more or less collapsed like a sack of sawdust. At the end of it, I think when they left the room, they must have thought,

you know, this really is the end. And it was the countdown essentially to Hitler's suicide and the end of the Third Reich. With the Red Army mere miles away and those in the bunker either getting drunk or discussing the best methods of suicide, Hitler decided to reward the woman who'd been his most loyal companion throughout his life,

Eva Brown with marriage. And on the 29th of April, 1945, in a simple ceremony just past midnight, they were married. They exchanged rings stolen from a couple of Gestapo prisoners before Hitler retired to his study with his secretary to dictate his last will and testament. Once this was complete, events moved fast.

On a sofa in the study, Ava took a cyanide capsule, and Hitler shot himself in the temple. Their bodies were taken outside, and once enough diesel could be found, burnt. a fitting honeymoon for a marriage that lasted just 40 hours. Just seven days later, Germany surrendered to the Allies. Rumors that Hitler did not die in the bunker have been advanced until the present day.

But suicide was totally in keeping with his personality. His private life was littered in moments where he pointed a gun towards his head. And when final defeat arrived, he did what he always threatened to do. and pulled the trigger. One thing I think we can say for absolutely certain, and that that was Hitler was enormously abnormal. But without him and without that malign worldview that he had about the Jews,

about the mentally and physically handicapped, about races, about Germany's place in the world, without that, he might have been a force for good. He might have been a good architect or an artist, but he had that kink, that abnormality of character. which brought so much destruction to the world. Now, 80 years later, the Nazi-era buildings in Nuremberg and beyond are crumbling, relics of a truly awful time in the world's history.

But they were also the pet projects of the failed artist Adolf Hitler himself. A man whose public ideology, combined with his private tastes and fanatical self-belief, drove Europe to the brink of destruction. Unexplored catacombs buried beneath the city, a crumbling castle perched on a mountain peak, a top secret government bunker, a cursed mansion cloaked in legend. I'm Sasha Auerbach.

Join me in Tom Ward every Wednesday and Sunday as we reveal the mysteries and histories behind these abandoned places and ask, where did everyone go? We'll hear from Sasha, who knows the history the best. In fact, there's a very famous book by a chap named Marcus Rediker called The Many-Headed Hydra, and he talks about pirate ships

as an experiment in radical democracy. And me, who knows nothing, aeronautical scientists can't quite explain it. They say, we don't actually know how it gets up there. How it stays up? You're just not good at a science. No, there are explanations? There are explanations.

It's just plain physics. Brought to you by Like a Shot, makers of forbidden history. Search for Where Did Everyone Go on your favorite podcast platform.