Real Dictators - Hitler: The Battle of Stalingrad (Part 22)

Episode Date: September 12, 2023

The myth of the Nazi war machine is blown apart in one of the pivotal battles of World War 2. Serious questions arise as to Hitler’s leadership, encouraging a growing German resistance. As Allied forces eye Sicily, a paranoid Führer retreats further into himself. His war of conquest is becoming a war of defence… A Noiser production, written by Jeff Dawson. This is Part 22 of the Hitler Story. Scroll down the Real Dictators feed for earlier episodes. For ad-free listening, exclusive content and early access to new episodes, join Noiser+. Click the Noiser+ banner to get started with a 7-day free trial. Or, if you’re on Spotify or Android, go to noiser.com/subscriptions Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

TD Direct Investing offers live support, so whether you're a newbie or a seasoned pro, you can make your investing steps count. And if you're like me and think a TFSA stands for Total Fund Savings Adventure, maybe reach out to TD Direct Investing. It's February the 22nd, 1943, just before 5pm. We're at Stadelheim Prison in Munich. This grim, grey jail is one of the largest in Germany. In 1922, an inmate named Adolf Hitler spent a month here for common assault. Now, under his Nazis, Stadelheim has become a repository for opponents of the regime. It's definitely not somewhere you'd want to end up.

In a room off the main cell block, three young people sit around. They share a cigarette, smiling, cracking morbid jokes. They eye the clock as its hands tick round to the hour. Their names are Hans and Sophie Scholl, a brother and sister, aged 24 and 21, and their friend Christoph Probst, aged 23. All are students at the University of Munich. And their crime? The reason they're here? Handing out flyers on campus,

albeit ones critical of the government, something which translates in Nazi Germany as high treason. At one point the Scholls were dutiful Nazis, but the scales fell from their eyes some time ago. They are part of a clandestine movement called the White Rose. This regime, Hitler's regime, is one they can no longer support. Fellow students, the nation is profoundly shaken by the defeat of our troops at Stalingrad,

reads their latest pamphlet. 330,000 Germans have been senselessly, irresponsibly led to death and destruction through the cunning strategy of a corporal from World War I. Our Fuhrer, we thank you. The three activists had taken great care to preserve their identities as they distributed the leaflets around the university, leaving them outside lecture theatres. Inevitably, there was going to be a slip-up. On February 18th, Sophie saw that the suitcase carrying their pamphlets had not been completely emptied.

There were a few handfuls left. At the top of a faculty staircase, she'd tossed them out to float down on the students in the atrium below. But the janitor had spotted her. And the janitor is a rabid Nazi. And so four days later, all three sit in Stadelheim. The other side of the wall, just feet away, is a guillotine. Sophie will be dead at 5pm precisely. Her brother, 5pm precisely. Her brother, 502,

propsed at 505. From Neuser, this is the story of Hitler's downfall. And this is Real Dictators. Back in 1942, as Hitler tightens his grip, the Nazis have begun implementing a full-on genocide against the Jews of Europe. The brutal repression elsewhere is beginning to be met with resistance. Czech partisans have taken a big scalp in the shape of Reinhard Heydrich, star of the SS In the vicious cycle, opposition to Nazi rule will only increase the savagery

But the United States is now in the war And Anglo-American forces have squeezed Rommel out of North Africa Hitler, however, remains transfixed by the Eastern Front. In a brand new offensive, Operation Blue, he is set out to seize the Soviet Union's key southern oil fields. But again, the Wehrmacht is running into difficulties, this time in its attempt to take a port on the Volga River, the city of Stalingrad.

Stalingrad will be a critical battle, so it seems a strange decision by Hitler to abandon his frontline headquarters and retreat to the solitude of his home in the Bavarian Alps, the Berghof. And again, as we know, Hitler's military decision-making is open to question. It's been tough enough for his generals to gain access to their Fuhrer as it is. Now they must deal with a leader ensconced nearly two thousand miles away, not to mention his pitbull gatekeeper, Martin Bormann. Despite the failure at Moscow, Hitler still has faith in ultimate victory.

Nay sayers be damned. Sir Anthony Beaver. Having said right from the start of Operation Barbarossa, you know, kicking the door and the whole rotten structure will fall to pieces, he couldn't really accept the fact he got that wrong. And even though he'd been warned by his generals that actually they kept on finding new formations in the Red Army, which they didn't know where they'd come from. They didn't realize that more and more of these armies and divisions and so forth were being reformed behind the front lines and being

pushed forward into the battle. Hitler refused to accept this. He really was in denial. General Friedrich Paulus' 6th Army has done well to reach Stalingrad. It arrived on the outskirts of the city in late August. As of September 11th, the Germans are pulverizing the port, around the clock, by land and air. And then the ground assault begins. But this is now a different kind of warfare. The fighting is savage, brutal, hand to hand. Germans and Russians fight street by street.

Not one step backwards, Stalin has decreed. Officers of his security force, the NKVD, stand in the rear, ready to shoot anyone inclined to retreat. Stalingrad's defenders have turned every house, every industrial building into a strongpoint. One armaments factory continues to pump out tanks even as it's being shelled. Hitler should have learned his lesson already because when they had the fighting right at the beginning of operation blue he'd actually told his troops to stay out of city fighting and this is where again hitler changed

his tactics he was here getting involved in urban warfare the whole defense of the city was incredibly difficult from the Russian point of view, because it meant you had to bring all your supplies across the river, totally exposed to air attack and artillery fire. And so from that point of view, actually, the Germans should have been in a much stronger position than they were. Dr. John Curatola Keep in mind the German army is really built as an armored force, a mechanized force for movement in large open areas. Now you're taking armor into a city and the fact is armor is at a distinct disadvantage. The things that make the Wehrmacht so effective up until that point are now pretty much negated once you get into the close confines of an urban environment.

Initially the Germans are successful. In the first phase they take the city center as well as key industrial facilities. The swastika flies on high. But amid the filth and the rubble, the Red Army becomes subterranean. Its soldiers fight from the drains and sewers, an unseen foe wreaking havoc from all around, and with no quarter given. It could only be fought with total brutality. I mean, even Russian children were shot down by Russian snipers to prevent them taking water to German soldiers. These were children who'd been cut off and been abandoned

in the city. And so for a crust of bread, they were prepared to get water for German soldiers. I mean, it was, I think, one of the most brutal battles ever imagined. It was just a relentless battle, which just went on and on and on. And this is again Hitler's other mistake. He always underestimated the problems of logistics and also numbers, because he would use, for example, substandard troops from the Allies, whether the Hungarians, the Romanians, the Italians, as it came on, to make up for the fact that he simply didn't have the sufficient German forces to achieve the objectives that he had set. And there's another factor to contend with. Russia's perennial saviour, General Winter.

As we roll into October, the weather turns and the mercury starts to plummet. On November the 19th, a blizzard rolls in. Forty Soviet divisions choose this moment to strike at the Axis weakpoint. They overwhelm the Hungarian and Romanian contingents before them. Two arms of a massive Russian pincer movement begin enveloping the German 6th Army. This is exactly the scenario the Fuhrer's generals feared. Led by General Zhukov, this encirclement of Stalingrad is soon complete. Two hundred thousand Germans and ninety thousand Axis allies are cut off, trapped inside the Stalingrad Kettle.

General Paulus could perhaps still wriggle his way out of it. He requests permission to break out, to punch through the Soviet lines and reconnect with the rump of the German army. But Hitler, now back at his field headquarters, denies him. The 6th Army must stay put. Hermann Goering now steps into the picture. He is a man growing conspicuous by his failures. He is never one to shy away from a spot of self-glorification.

His Luftwaffe will save the day, he decrees. He will supply the Sixth Army by air. Meanwhile, Hitler brings General von Manstein, the conqueror of France, into his inner circle. Unfortunately for Hitler, Manstein agrees with Paulus. Generals should be given freedom of action. Allow Paulus to call it as he sees it on the ground. This is not a situation to be micromanaged from afar.

And, Manstein says, Goering is talking nonsense. For some reason, the material the Luftwaffe are dropping includes cases of metals and condoms. To make any meaningful difference, they would have to airlift in 700 tons of cargo daily. Ammunition, food, everything.

An impossible target to meet. To top it off, the Stalingrad Pocket is now surrounded by anti-aircraft guns, ready to take down Goering's slow-moving transport planes. Hitler concedes the point. Goering, as he puts it, is a fat, well-fed pig. From December the 23rd onwards, the 6th Army is truly on its own, and the Soviet noose is tightening by the hour. The Nazi propagandists go on the defensive. There is nothing that serves the Nazi cause better than a martyr, so how about 200,000 of them? For Josef Goebbels, propaganda chief, Stalingrad is not just a battle now,

but a mythic tale, one that the entire German folk should embrace. Professor Helen Roche. The Sixth Army were basically equated with Leonidas and the 300 at the Battle of Thermopylae, and just this idea of self-sacrificial heroism, which everyone in Germany should want to emulate, and that's also being peddled, you know, throughout the school system as well. On Christmas Eve 1942, Goebbels arranges a broadcast of the nation. Amid radio-static and atmospheric interference, a remote but cheerful voice comes through. It's from a frontline officer in Fortress Stalingrad.

The boys are in good spirits, he assures the German people. It's a tough old slog, but don't worry, they'll see it through. The lads in their foxholes even sign off with a chorus of Silent Night. The broadcast is a fake, created in a studio in Berlin. In reality, disease, starvation and frostbite are the order of the day. Ammunition is scarce. Forced underground, like their Soviet foe, the once proud men of the Wehrmacht are now scavenging like animals, living like sewer rats.

Professor Nicholas of Shaughnessy. Well, a lot of senior soldiers got very fed up with Goebbels. They felt that the PR was beginning to overwhelm the truth and their ability to organize and fight. They could have retreated, and instead they were reduced to cannibalism. In fact, there were cases of them eating the corpses of other Germans to survive. It becomes really quite squalid and disgusting. The Soviets reply with a broadcast of their own.

It's not so festive. Every seven seconds, it reminds its enemy, a German soldier dies. it reminds its enemy, a German soldier dies. General Paulus informs Hitler that his nephew, Leo Raubel, has been wounded. He could still be airlifted out. As if to underscore his resolve, Hitler refuses. Remember Geli Raubel? The young woman who was once the object of Hitler's infatuation and who killed herself for him?

Well, Leo is her brother. Now, he has been condemned to death by Uncle Dolph. Stalin, incidentally, has done something similar. His own son, Yakov, has been captured by the Germans. Stalin has declined his release as part of a prisoner exchange. Yakov will perish within weeks at Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Remarkably the charade continues. January 30th, 1943 marks the 10th anniversary of Hitler's ascension to power.

The congratulatory telegrams come in from around the German fronts, including one from General Paulus. Hitler replies, The whole German people are deeply moved by its heroes inside this city. Your sacrifice will not be in vain." Hang on, sacrifice? In another broadcast, Goering repeats the theme of the 300 Spartans. He even talks about the Sixth Army and the past tense.

To the German soldiers inside the Stalingrad pocket, the message is clear. They've been abandoned. Is Hitler's cause really worth all this? On January 24th, Paulus sends a further note to Hitler. Without munitions or food, effective command no longer possible Collapse imminent Army requests permission to surrender In order to save lives of remaining troops Hitler replies Surrender is forbidden

6th Army will hold their positions to the last man and the last round On January 31st Under a withering Soviet onslaught, he promotes Paulus to field marshal. It's a power play. No German officer of this rank has ever capitulated. Paulus won't want to be the first. The Fuhrer also arranges for an aide to supply the newly minted Field Marshal with a pistol,

so he can do the decent thing when the time comes. But the same day, Hitler receives news that the men of the Wehrmacht are now laying down their arms. What's more, the Soviets have located Paulus in his secret command post, in the bowels of a bombed-out department store. Paulus offers himself up. He signs off to Hitler. The Sixth Army, true to their oath and conscious of the lofty importance of their mission, have held their position to the last man and the last round for Fuührer and Fatherland unto the end. On February the 1st, Moscow announces the surrender.

In this frozen, crated moonscape, the Germans are coming out with their hands up, white flags waving. Just before noon the next day, the Soviets take in 91,000 prisoners, including 22 generals and 2,500 officers. The casualties of the Stalingrad campaign are staggering. Half a million men killed or captured. A quarter of Germany's military equipment destroyed. Even Goebbels can't duck this one.

On February 3rd, the German public is awakened to the sound of state radio playing somber music. An announcer intones that due to vastly superior enemy forces and unfavorable circumstances, the German army has faced defeat. A three-day period of mourning is declared. Theaters, cinemas, all forms of entertainment are shut down. Professor Thomas Weber. Stalingrad is an unmitigated disaster, but all the Nazi propaganda deals with this

brilliantly. I mean, again, brilliantly in an extremely unethical and immoral way, because what Goebbels and his propagandists decides is, okay, well, if we can't hide it, let's make the best out of it. Let's make this now a war of national survival. Let's make this really part of this apocalyptic battle. Hitler can now say, and Goebbels can now say, this is all part of this global showdown for survival that I've always told you that exists. The line, you will die so that Jeremy will live, is actually a line that keeps on being pushed time and time again. Which also helps to understand why so many Germans continue the war until 1945, until the bitter end. We have the example of Dunkirk. After all, didn't Churchill, as Goebbels well knew, turn that into the most magnificent PR event by transmogrifying defeat

into a kind of victory. The same here with Goebbels. He actually turns it into the ultimate epic of German heroic sacrifice. What is life? Life is the nation, muses Hitler. The individual must die anyway. Beyond the life of the individual is the nation. And so you have the deaths of 200,000 German soldiers. You have 90,000 taken into Russian captivity, of whom only 5,000 emerged in 1955 when they're sent back to Germany as ghost people, really they're mere shadows of men. One of these survivors, incidentally, will be Leo Rabo. He will defy the odds to make it through the gulags. The trouble with lie to the whole of your own country is that actually the truth is going to slip out at some particular point.

Already there'd be enough people coming back on leave or because they were wounded who knew perfectly well how bad things were. So words started to spread. Privately for Hitler, the loss at Stalingrad is crushing. He has failed in his conquest of the Soviet Union, beaten by the Bolshevik Untermensch, subhumans. His Aryan supermen were meant to have them for breakfast. There will be no German Empire in the East, no living space for his people. The dream of Lebensraum, the dream of Mein Kampf, is over.

The victory at Stalingrad was the psychological turning point of the war. There's no doubt about it, but people suddenly realized, right across the world, that this meant that actually the war was going to end in Berlin. If you talk to a German civilian, and I have, who were alive at the time, they will tell you that when Stalingrad turned out the way it did, they knew the war was over. They knew it wasn't going to end well for them. I remember one of the most striking things that I ever read when researching Stalingrad, which was as the German prisoners were being marched out on frostbitten feet out of the ruins of Stalingrad,

there was a Russian colonel who pointed at the ruins and shouted at them, this is what Berlin is going to look like. On February the 18th, at Hitler's behest, Goebbels makes a speech at the Berlin Sportpalast Arena. behest, Goebbels makes a speech at the Berlin Sportpalast Arena. The audience is packed with 14,000 hand-picked Nazi fanatics. Goebbels deploys a new phrase. He decrees that this is now a case of total war. For there is now also another threat to Germany.

The Anglo-American force building across the Mediterranean. They are poised, as Churchill puts it, to attack Europe's soft underbelly. The people of the Reich are under no illusion now as to the forces ranged against them. By night and by day, the bombers of the RAF and US Air Force, operating from bases in England, are pounding German cities mercilessly. Germany is no longer bringing war to others, others are bringing war to Germany. If the war in the air is swinging the Allies way, so too is the war at sea. Again there has been a lack of focus on

the part of the Fuhrer. The German navy, the Kriegsmarine, had started out with an impressive array of battleships. But these vessels were built to service raiders. They were designed to sink merchant shipping, not necessarily to engage in naval combat. Over the course of the war their bluff has been called. Many of these big beasts have been sunk. The others now sit bottled up in the North Sea, reduced to skulking in and out of the Norwegian fjords. As for the U-boats, that's a different story. At the peak of production, 400 German submarines were

unleashed upon the Atlantic. The goal has been to starve Britain out, to sever her vital lifeline of food, raw materials, oil. By the first half of 1942, the U-boats were sinking 4 million tons, over 100 ships a month. But, as always, Hitler has remained blinded by the Russian front. As the admirals plead for more U-boats, more men to twist the screws, their voices go unheard. The arrival of the US Navy, plus a massive increase in Canada's naval capacity, has changed the picture. Convoys can now be escorted all the way across the North Atlantic. And the Allies are occupying Iceland, and have established air bases there.

This has allowed them to close the gap which had been leaving ships exposed in the middle part of the Atlantic Passage. There have been other technological advances. ASDIC, a forerunner of sonar, specially adapted aircraft carriers. And then there is Enigma. Enigma is a top secret cipher machine. The Royal Navy have captured one of the Nazi encoding devices, and now code breakers at Bletchley Park are intercepting and reading German messages. Armed with this intel, the tide turns.

In the Black May of 1943, 41 U-boats are sunk. Allied shipping is now getting through unscathed. Within months, the Kriegsmarine will be down to its last 64 vessels. In yet another staggering statistic yielded by this war, 8 out of 10 German U-boat crewmen will die in action. The Battle of the Atlantic, too, is over. Securing the sea lanes

now raises the possibility of something else, an Allied invasion across the English Channel. The underestimation of American power and above all of American production was certainly one of Hitler's most serious mistakes. And this was something that was going to affect everything, war in the air, war at the sea, and of course, war on land and the ability to help arm the Red Army

and keep it in the field. Don't let us ever underestimate the fact that American-led lease provided nearly half a million military vehicles to the Red Army. The great irony, of course, is that the Americans would have got to Berlin long before the Russians if they hadn't given them all those military vehicles. After Stalingrad, Hitler is cast into one of his regular deep, dark funks. Back at the Wolf's Lair, he spends days in his room, conversing only with his pet Alsatian Blondie, and with his personal quack, Dr. Theo Morel, on hand to shoot him up with uppers and downers. Adolf Hitler, still middle-aged, is in appalling physical shape,

hunched, gaunt, with an uncontrollable tremor in his left hand, possibly an onset of Parkinson's disease. He's plagued by intestinal problems and high blood pressure, and is hoovering up antidepressants. His daily routine is characteristically manic. He sleeps late and sits up all night, regaling reluctant listeners with senile monologues about the old days. As to the war, he rarely attends military briefings at all, and when he does, it's all black and white. His favourites are praised.

Anyone who disagrees with him is an idiot or a coward. There is a small consolation. Spring is in the air. The sap is rising. And Hitler, away from Eva Braun, is distracted by another young woman. She is a new recruit to his pool of secretaries. Her name is Gertraut, or Traudl, Humps, and she's 21 years old.

Years ago, when wooing Mitzi Reiter, Hitler had masqueraded under his pick-up name, Mr. Wolf. He used his dog to get a young woman's attention, and his modus operandi is still the same. Here, on the grass of the Wolf's lair, Mr. Wolf puts on a show for Troudel, making dutiful blondie run up ramps and jump through hoops. And so yet another impressionable young woman is bewitched by kindly Uncle Adolf. And that is an important key to his success, that he wasn't in person a fire-breathing monster. He could actually show enormous warmth, remembering her birthdays, courtesies.

Hitler was the ultimate, to these women, good boss who cared for them, was interested in the families, interested in their private life. When you think how many bad bosses there are, it's actually quite terrifying to think of Adolf Hitler as a good manager of his office staff. But still, Hitler is paying more attention to his dog tricks than he is to his soldiers. If you remember from last time, the Allies on their way to victory in North Africa had staged a conference at Casablanca. The Allies, on their way to victory in North Africa, had staged a conference at Casablanca. President Roosevelt had announced the new war doctrine of unconditional surrender.

It's a simple message. The Nazi regime must be finished off once and for all. No ifs or buts. But, as some amongst the Allies mutter, is it wise strategically? The Russians are moving in from the east. That brings its own fears. Of Stalin rolling through to Germany. Of communism in Central Europe.

The Soviet advance is entrenching all Germans, regardless of their politics, into a battle for survival, a do-or-die position. That will be a tough nut to crack. And then there are the noises now coming out of the Reich, picked up in Allied intelligence circles. There are senior military figures in Berlin, prepared to strike a peace with the West. Some are even willing to do away with Hitler altogether. Whether they're genuine anti-Nazis or just opportunists, they can see the writing on the wall. For some while now, General Hans Oster has been part of an anti-Hitler conspiracy.

It emanates from within the Abwehr, Germany's military intelligence. Oster has found someone willing to be their hitman. His name is Major General Henning von Tresckau. Tresckau is no innocent. He was involved in the invasion of France and was fully subscribed to Hitler's ripping up the Treaty of Versailles. But, privately, he was appalled by the anti-Semitism and the thuggery that brought Hitler to power.

He's expressed a revulsion over the atrocities in Russia. Tresckow is chief of staff to Field Marshal von Kluge. This means he has access to Hitler's schedule, his travel arrangements. The best way to isolate Hitler is when he's on one of his rare trips to the Eastern Front. There were actually about 25 conspiracies against Hitler. Their failure meant that he believed himself, in his own words, to be a man walking with destiny, a man protected by providence. Remember that in the Night of the Long Knives, two generals were actually murdered. And so the disenchantment begins then with people like Tresco and Oster. The resistance begins then. These men are, in the end end German patriots. They want Germany to survive.

They see that Hitler is destroying Germany and that the high loyalty is not to the head of the army and the head of state but actually to the German entity itself and this is what motivates them. Amid the fallout from Stalingrad, an opportunity presents itself. Hitler is due to make a flying visit to his frontline headquarters at Smolensk. He will return immediately to the Wolf's Lair in Rustenburg, East Prussia. It's a small window. And so, Treskow gets to work. It's the evening of March 13th, 1943.

A giant Condor plane sits on the runway at Smolensk, ready to spirit Hitler away. As the engines rev up, Trescault hands something to Colonel Heinz Brand, a member of the Führer's entourage. It's a gift-boxed pair of bottles. Quantro. A debt that Treskow owes one of the other generals back at the Wolf's Lair. Would Brandt mind passing it on? The contents are absolutely not any kind of liqueur.

Instead, the bottles are packed with a British-made plastic explosive and a fuse set to detonate mid-flight somewhere over Minsk. Later in their field post, Treskow and his aide-de-camp, Lieutenant von Schlabrendorff, sit by the phone. Time drags. They smoke like crazy and wait for the news. The devastating announcement that the great Adolf Hitler has just perished in an air crash.

When the phone does ring, they jump out of their skin. But the word coming through is not what they expect. An insider confirms that the Fuhrer has landed safely in Rastenburg. Schlabrendorff heads straight off to East Prussia. Incredibly, he somehow manages to intercept the package without arousing any suspicions. It turns out that the cold of the cabin hold caused the fuse to malfunction. And so the conspirators try again, and again, and again.

Some of their attempts are truly extraordinary. There was the one with Axel von dem Busch. He is in a German cavalry regiment. He's selected because he is the ultimate handsome German officer. And what he's going to do is model new uniforms on the catwalk for Hitler. And this is mid-war, and it shows the absolute lunatic nature of the Third Reich and its obsession with imagery and fetishism that there should be a catwalk modeling uniform display for the Fuhrer

to plan new uniforms for the German army. What dear little Axel is actually doing is taking two prime bombs in his pocket. And when he twirls on the catwalk, he's going to release them, blow himself up in Hitler. He's going to do a kamikaze act. Unfortunately, and this is what happens with all the conspiracies, something goes wrong. That trainload of uniforms is blown up by Allied bombing, and so no catwalk, no modeling, no uniform fetishism, and Axel is sent off to the Eastern Front where he loses a leg. Axel resurfaces, actually, at St. Antonis College, Oxford, in the early 1980s, where he is working on some kind of thesis, and proceeds to astonish the dons of Oxford University,

both by his drinking capacity and by the extraordinary richness of his anecdotes. It's no longer just the military men who are turning against the Fuhrer. It's the morning of February 22, 1943, at the Palace of Justice in Munich. We're back to the characters that opened this episode, the student conspirators of White Rose. Hans and Sophie Scholl, plus their friend Christoph Probst, had been turned into the Gestapo. The students, they hadn't always had totally anti-Hitler convictions.

They'd been members of the Hitler Youth. The Scholls had quite bought into the regime. It's been suggested that it was the war service of the male members of the group that encouraged them to take a stand and start distributing these leaflets. They also had quite strong religious convictions. So at first they were just distributing these anti-Nazi pamphlets around Munich. And then later on, they had secret carriers taking them to other cities, but still mainly in southern Germany. And in total, I think there were six leaflets, which had a total of about 15,000 copies.

So what's also happening now during the war is that on the one hand, a surprisingly large number of the German people rally behind the war effort. But there's also a growing number of Germans who either really just see, look, this is a war we cannot win, but also who increasingly think this is an immoral war. And this is also why resistance is slowly but steadily growing within Germany. launched the Holocaust. Feisler is a Nazi's Nazi, as frothingly rabid as they come. Little more than a thug in robes who screams abuse at defendants. Feisler is doing an absolute idyllic. He is really almost like a character

from some kind of Hollywood B-movies about the Nazis, because he seems to kind of fulfill every stereotype we may have about the Nazis. Someone who was always nasty, who was always shouting, who's not trying to hide how vicious he is. But Sophie is brave. In her brief moment at the stand, she states, Somebody, after all, had to make a start. What we wrote and said is also believed by many others. They just don't dare express themselves as we did. Judge Freisler charges them with treason, troop demoralization, and abetting the enemy.

That very same day, the three young students go to their deaths. Sophie's last words are, The sun still shines. These were simply students doing what students do. They were passing out literature. There's nothing more serious than that. You can hardly call it resistance. And the Scholls were beheaded, which is a particularly ghoulish detail. In a testament to their bravery, the RAF will drop reprinted versions of the White

Rose leaflets over Germany. As far as the Allies are concerned, what the White Rose protesters wrote, they couldn't have put any better themselves. Dr. Chris Dillon. The fact that the shoals were executed so quickly and brutally is a reminder that we're not talking about citizens who enjoy the space to express their views clearly. I think many historians are guilty of rushing to read into the apparent silence of Germans' tacit enthusiasm for everything that the regime did. There are other resistance movements. The Swing Kids, the Edelweiss Pirates. The Swing Kids were very much upper-middle-class devotees of American jazz. Many of them were in Hamburg. They're also huge Anglophiles.

They dressed in bowler hats. They dressed up as comical Englishmen and women. And they listened to jazz, which was regarded as a very bad thing by the authorities of the Reich. They also cultivated long hair. Eventually, about 100 of them were arrested, and some were sent to concentration camps. The Edelweiss pirates are fascinating because they're proletarian working-class youths who hated the Nazis, and they specialized in ambushing Hitler youth and beating them up. The Edelweiss were very cruelly dealt with. Their leaders were hanged. And there are the millions, too, who are listening in secret to Allied radio.

They would say that at a certain point in the day when the BBC came on, suddenly every garden would be empty. And you had, of course, those extraordinary people who are hiding Jews. So you have various forms of civilian resistance. Albeit, at this point, it's a resistance that is quite passive. In early April 1943, Hitler returns to Berchtesgaden. This time he travels aboard his luxury train, along with his inner circle. In early April 1943, Hitler returns to Berchtesgaden. This time he travels aboard his luxury train, along with his inner circle.

The Hitler special is all mod cons, complete with showers, bathtubs, a mobile restaurant and everything else. The food, they say, is excellent. Eva Braun, the lady of the Berghof, hops on at Munich to accompany Team Hitler on the last leg home. It's no secret that she and Hitler are now living as man and wife, though it's quite obvious she is being snubbed by the wives of Goering, Goebbels and Ribbentrop. At Hitler's alpine retreat, the Führer's new crush, the wide-eyed Traudl Humps, is given a tour of the building and the beautifully presented sculptures and exotic vases. But with Eva back on the scene, Uncle Dolph has to rein in his flirting.

Plus Traudl is now seeing a younger member of his staff, Hans Hermann Junge, an officer in the Waffen-SS. War being war, they're already engaged, hoping to be married as soon as possible. At the Berghof, everyone settles into the daily routine, which largely involves walking on eggshells for most of the day, lest they wake their Fuhrer. involves walking on eggshells for most of the day lest they wake their Fuhrer. It's a bit of a challenge for Eva, who must stop her two black Scottish terriers from yapping. Hitler likes to entertain around four o'clock in the afternoon,

when most of the staff have gone home, although Martin Bormann, his private secretary, seems ever-present. Eva doesn't much care for Bormann. He's a bit of a philanderer. A staunch vegetarian, Hitler will typically eat a late lunch of gruel or oatmeal soup with baked potatoes soaked in linseed oil. He rails against those who indulge in the cruel practice of eating meat. Without any trace of the grim irony at play, he describes how he once visited a slaughterhouse

in Ukraine. The treatment of the cattle was terrible. Before the sun goes down, Hitler and Eva like to take a twenty-minute walk to the Berghoff's teahouse, which looks out over the mountains. There Hitler drinks apple tea while they discuss plays and movies. Only then, in the evening, at around 7pm, will Hitler get down to business. The stream of vehicles arrives, discharging generals and staff officers. As Hitler eats again, mashed potatoes and salad, the nervous top brass will tell their Fuhrer what he wants to hear, about the successes on the Eastern Front, and how, despite the

little inconvenience of Stalingrad, everything's going to be alright. While the men discuss war, the women make themselves scarce. Eva, Traudl and the secretaries sneak off for cigarettes, wolfing peppermints to cover their breath. By this time, sitting in the armchairs, Hitler is droning on once more to his captive audience, who do their best not to nod off. In reality, as all but a fool knows, the noises from the Eastern Front are anything but encouraging. The same goes for the Mediterranean, where Mussolini is up against it and beginning to crack.

On April 7th, Hitler heads to meet his pal Benito at Klesheim Castle in Austria. Il Duce is not looking good either. His cheeks are sunken, his face is pale. Back home, he's fighting a serious, overt resistance to his rule. And another thing, he wants to pull his troops out of Russia, he tells Hitler.

And not just Russia, pretty much everywhere. The pair talk over four days. Hitler peps him up as usual, bolstering their bromance. They're in this for the long haul, he soothes. But these two dictators are no longer the glamour couple. When they come down the castle's marble steps, one of the Italian staff remarks that they look like a pair of corpses, the walking dead. Hitler is plagued, as ever, by morbid thoughts. He never believed he'd live much beyond his 50th birthday. And here he is, on April the 20th,

about to celebrate his 54th. Back home at the Berghof, Hitler has dark visions of tourists of the future walking around his home, nosing through his things. He doesn't want that. He wants to go down, or rather up, in flames. Him, his possessions, all torched on one big old funeral pyre.

Troutle gets a bit upset at such talk from her kindly host, a perfect boss. Surely the war will end soon, won't it? The Fuhrer has no answer. Out on the Eastern Front, the Wehrmacht continues to be rolled back. The Red Army has retaken Rostov and is poised to move into the Ukrainian Donbass region. retaken Rostov and is poised to move into the Ukrainian Donbass region. And someone in the German Signal Corps seems to be feeding the Soviets information. Hitler now needs eyes on the back of his head. July 10th, 1943, on the south coast of Sicily. At dawn, cutting through the waves, American amphibious assault craft

steer towards the shallow sandy beaches. They're packed with US Marines, part of General Patton's Seventh Army. Under thick air cover, a massive armada of Allied support ships brings up the rear, riding on the swell. of Allied support ships brings up the rear, riding on the swell. In land, under cover of darkness, airborne troops have already been at work, landing by glider or parachute, preparing the ground for the invasion. On the southeast tip of Sicily, it's a similar story.

Montgomery's 8th Army the fabled desert rats burst forth from the surf ready to push towards Syracuse Hitler is at the Berghof when he takes the call it's not just the Russians Allied forces have now planted their boots in Europe, on Italian, on Axis soil. In the next episode... In Italy, Mussolini is overthrown. Hitler must stage a daring mission to rescue his fascist partner. With the Red Army rampant, another epochal battle sends the Wehrmacht on the retreat.

Soon more bad news will reach the Berghof. Allied troops are landing in Normandy. But with the Fuhrer fast asleep in his quarters, will anyone dare break it to him? That's next time.