It's 1935, and as the Nazis make their first moves on the European stage,
the fortunes of some leaders are up...
Hail Hitler!
...and some are down.
Hail victory!
[James] What everyone's trying to do is get close to the Führer
and there's lots and lots of backstabbing.
Everyone is jockeying for position.
Joseph Goebbels is riding high with his Nazi feelgood propaganda.
Hermann Göring is fighting rivals and inner demons.
But it's Rudolf Hess who's the biggest loser.
[Guy] The inner circle around Hitler are like cats in a bag,
they're all fighting each other and the man holding the bag is Hitler himself,
and he's willingly letting this fight continue.
And now they're joined by a dangerous new player, Martin Bormann.
Cunning and ruthless, he'll work behind the scenes to undermine them all.
This is the inside story of Hitler's henchmen,
the power struggles, blind ambition and fawning sycophants
that would create a monster and fuel the most brutal horrors of the Third Reich.
It's 1935 and Rudolf Hess, the Deputy Führer,
is given a request by his leader, a request which he cannot refuse.
Adolf Hitler wants him to turn his country retreat, at Obersalzberg,
into what will be, in effect, his second seat of government.
It will be his Berghof, his mountain court.
Now, of course you can't say no to Hitler, when Hitler asks you a question,
no matter how tightly you're in that inner circle,
you've got to jump as high as possible.
Hess is Hitler's longest-serving and most loyal supporter.
As a devoted disciple,
doing his leader's bidding is his reason for being.
[Hess, archive] Heil Hitler! Sieg heil!
What you have to remember about Hess is that Hess is slavishly devoted to Hitler.
He's an absolute yes-man.
Intellectually, he's not a complete dolt.
[archive German speech]
Hess likes to think of himself as Hitler's right-hand man
and the architect of the great Nazi vision that will conquer Europe.
But he doesn't get that most of the time
the members of the inner circle are fighting each other, not the world.
And that's a battle he's not well equipped to win.
He's frankly all at sea in this incredibly Machiavellian world
of jockeying and positioning for power.
Hess is more of an ideas man, a thinker rather than a doer.
Running a building project at Obersalzberg,
even for his beloved Führer, is not up his street.
[Frank] It's not a very glamorous task, really.
I mean, here is a man who is nominally the Deputy Führer
and he's been given a role of, sort of, really, refurbishing Hitler's house.
So Hess decides to delegate.
And he knows just the man to take the job off his hands,
his own deputy, Martin Bormann.
[James] He passes the buck to Martin Bormann
and says please organise the Obersalzberg, get it sorted.
[Guy] Now, this is going to be a very fateful decision
because from that delegation there comes this accidental transference of power,
from Hess to Bormann.
Martin Bormann has a low profile in Nazi circles
and is virtually unknown in the country at large.
He is not a polished politician or an orator.
What marks him out is his skill as an organiser.
If you need a go-to man, Bormann will make things happen.
[Emma] Bormann is seen as a kind of oaf, as a thug.
He is not sophisticated and there's definitely a kind of class thing
operating in which he's looked down on as kind of rough on the edges.
[James] If Bormann were to walk into this room right now,
you wouldn't take any particular note.
He's not one of these people who fills a room with his charisma.
He's not a Hitler, he's not a Göring for that matter,
nor is he even a Goebbels. He is a quiet man.
But beware the quiet man. He can be dangerous.
The post of deputy at Hess's office in Munich
is just a stepping stone to Bormann.
He does servile well, but it's a front.
Bormann is determined to get to the real centre of power, whatever it takes.
[man] This man is completely ruthless.
Very ambitious and he will do anything that he can think of
to please Adolf Hitler... the man is a complete psychopath.
[James Holland] He sort looks a little bit like a Mafioso thug.
He has a photographic memory as well.
So for someone who has that attention for detail,
there are opportunities to rise up the greasy pole very, very quickly.
And that's exactly what he does...
...thanks to the opportunity his boss Hess has unwittingly given him.
Martin Bormann understands how important Bavaria is to the Führer.
Hitler had first visited the small town of Berchtesgaden 12 years before
and fell in love with the area.
He had rented, then bought, a holiday home nearby at Obersalzberg.
[James Wilson] That house was called Haus Wachenfeld.
And he spent considerable time living in that house on the Obersalzberg
and eventually came to buy the house.
That house is now being completely rebuilt
as the centrepiece of a massive complex on the mountainside.
Others might see the Berghof project as little more than an admin job,
but Bormann is shrewd enough to realise
that taking the assignment on could be his ticket to the big time.
It has the potential to place him
in direct, and frequent, contact with the Führer.
[James Holland] So for Bormann, the opportunity to develop
Hitler's favourite place in the world,
well, that's a really, really great opportunity for him.
And he knows this and is going to grab it with both hands.
As work continues on the ambitious rebuilding of Hitler's mountain retreat,
the whole country is also undergoing something of a revival.
[Guy] Even some of the Nazi Party's greatest detractors
would have looked at Germany at this stage and seen
what the regime was bringing and looking... it's not all bad.
Unemployment is falling, GNP is going up.
Therefore maybe Hitler and the Nazi Party
are bringing this kind of economic miracle he had promised.
A new Germany is taking shape.
In March 1935, there was the first television broadcast in Germany.
There were a very, very small number of people
who could receive the broadcasts and this was a very early experiment.
[archive, musical whistling]
[Guy] TV, of course, is a great symbol of modernity and, of course,
anything modern was lapped up by the Nazis
because it enabled them to project the Third Reich
as this very forward-, futuristic-looking movement.
[James Holland] It is rebuilding, it is regrowing.
All this can be pushed out via radio, via television, via film.
The point is the message is getting across,
and everyone in Germany and beyond the German borders starts to believe it.
And Bormann is determined that nothing will reflect this growing confidence
in the new Reich more powerfully
than the Führer's Camelot rising high in the Bavarian Alps.
But there's a problem.
To fulfil his lavish plans, he'll need to acquire more land.
It's a challenge he takes on with characteristic brutality.
Bormann visits neighbours with a request: sell up and move out.
It's a proposition that's hard to refuse.
[Emma] Right next door to the Berghof itself
is a hotel and the owner of the hotel doesn't want to sell.
But Bormann's methods can be very persuasive.
Martin Bormann is determined to buy this building
and he approaches the owner, and the owner is reluctant. He refuses to sell.
Bormann's response is swift and merciless.
WORK LIBERATES
He sends the owner to Dachau concentration camp.
The owner comes around to the idea of selling the hotel.
Bormann offers an amount of money,
which was a fair market value at the time for the building,
but then at the last minute, he pays a considerable amount less.
He holds back on a large amount of the agreed sum.
Bormann's methods are blunt but effective.
[Emma] He forces the purchase of land
all around what is initially quite a kind of modest mountain chalet,
and in order to create this enormous sort of empire that becomes Hitler's court.
As the new Berghof takes shape, Bormann is in his element,
driving his workers on and stopping at nothing to fulfil the Führer's wishes.
He oversees this very, very fully,
and of course, you know, he's an incredibly hard taskmaster.
He's a complete bully.
He makes the life of his foremen an absolute misery, but it gets done.
[archive, German speech]
While Bormann begins to make a name for himself, his boss, Rudolf Hess,
is too busy to notice that his own deputy is stealing a march on him.
And having given Bormann a leg up to the Führer, he doesn't learn his lesson.
He's about to make the same mistake again.
Albert Speer is a young architect
working on various projects in Hess's ministry...
...including for the Nuremberg rallies, where the faithful come to reaffirm
their loyalty to the Führer and the Nazi Party.
Speer has designed an enormous eagle to use as a backdrop.
Not wanting to take the responsibility
for signing off the design himself, Hess sends him to Hitler.
It's an introduction that will change Speer's life.
Hitler warms to this new whizkid.
[Emma] Hitler has seen Speer, this rather glamorous young architect,
and whisked him up to work for this wonderful Nazi project.
So for a period,
Speer is in this golden world where he is achieving so much.
He's so on top of things,
and he's in the kind of glow of Hitler's appreciation.
Before long, Speer is appointed Hitler's official architect.
He's completely overwhelmed, having come from nowhere
to being a fully paid-up member of the inner circle in less than four years.
After his eagle design,
the young star has more big ideas for the annual gathering.
He wants something dramatic for the Nuremburg Rally,
so he's heard that in America they use these searchlights
that go into the sky, so if you turn them upwards to the sky,
they look like never-ending classical Roman pillars.
But Speer's ambitions bring him into conflict
with one of the Reich's heavyweights.
Naively, he thinks he can just ask the Luftwaffe
to lend him 130 anti-aircraft searchlights.
But he's treading on the toes of the wrong man.
Commander-in-chief Hermann Göring throws a fit,
saying it'll jeopardise national security.
Göring makes the point that, you know, you can't just take bits of my Luftwaffe
and use them for some ceremonial occasion.
Of course, he's just jealous that, you know, that really Albert Speer
has risen as this young man, but it does reveal that his ego can be pricked.
Undeterred, Speer goes over Göring's head direct to the Führer.
Hitler agrees with his golden boy and overrules the revered war hero.
[James Holland] What you've got is a kind of rather cheeky upstart,
a young whippersnapper who's coming in
and actually bending the ear of the Führer... and that's annoying.
Speer gets his way, and his so-called Cathedral of Light
becomes an iconic image of Nazi propaganda.
The newcomer to Hitler's circle has got the better of the Nazi stalwart,
but he's made an enemy who won't forgive or forget.
That's the sort of thing that's going to wind up people like Göring,
and from Speer's point of view, he just needs to watch it a little bit.
Rudolf Hess's introduction of new members to the inner circle
isn't helping his relations with the old guard.
And to make matters worse, too late, Hess begins to realise
that his own deputy is making himself rather too indispensable to Hitler.
Martin Bormann is using the Berghof project
to worm his way ever closer to the centre of power.
And the Deputy Führer is beginning to feel surplus to requirements.
[Frank] So I think this is a really important moment, really,
in the schism between these two men.
And also, Bormann wins on this one, he's given this huge task.
And of course, he does it very well.
Hitler is very impressed by the whole project.
Hess isn't the only member of the inner circle's old guard under pressure.
Hermann Göring is starting to become concerned
about Hitler's expansionist plans
as his Führer prepares to seize a first objective, the Rhineland.
Since the end of the First World War,
Germany has been banned from having any soldiers stationed
in this region along its western border.
But in 1936, Hitler decides to reoccupy the buffer zone with troops.
He knows it'll be a popular move at home and a signal to France and Britain.
It was a way of saying we are no longer going to be a vassal state,
told what to do out of the terms of Versailles,
we are reasserting our German freedom.
But it's a gamble.
Göring fears the Allies will retaliate
to this blatant provocation with military force.
Göring was undoubtedly correct in feeling that this was
an unnecessary provocation, but, of course, he's overruled.
Once again, Göring is forced to back down, his pride wounded.
You could clearly see that Göring followed Hitler.
He was very loyal to Hitler, but he could not quite get the point
what Hitler wanted to achieve, he didn't understand that.
And he definitely wanted to avoid a great war.
[archive, German speech]
But things are even worse for Hess.
He may be Deputy Führer, but he's not even been consulted
about the plans to reoccupy the Rhineland.
[Michael] Hitler doesn't allow others to be informed who should have known.
And Hess is one of those, suggesting he wasn't high in the pecking order.
He would use him but he's not prepared to give him information
you would think would be critical to a major minister.
But while Hess is excluded...
REPORT
...a more savvy member of the inner circle
sees the Rhineland as a golden opportunity to impress the Führer.
Joseph Goebbels has the job of selling the Nazi dream.
And this is the kind of propaganda opportunity
he's dreamt of for years... it's his moment to shine.
The troops march in.
And alongside them are an army of Goebbels' film crews and news men.
For the first time since 1918, he says, Germans have something to be proud of.
The message is loud and clear: Germany is on the rise again.
[Guy] We see the soldiers marching along
and we see this woman rush up to one of them and pin this flower to a tunic,
and with that flower onto that lapel
is the kind of hopes of Germany
in what Hitler has done and this great gamble's worked.
As the Nazi Party takes stock after this first move on the European stage,
the fortunes of some of the leaders are up and some are down.
Hail! Hail!
Goebbels has created a wave of euphoria in Germany
and is in Hitler's good books.
Göring has been put in his place, and Hess has been sidelined.
But for Martin Bormann, things couldn't be better.
In the Bavarian Alps, he's ensured that the building of Hitler's Berghof,
mountain court, is completed on time and to the highest possible standard.
So, Bormann's stock as being the man behind the redeveloped Obersalzberg
is in a much stronger position than he was before.
Where the old house stood, there's now
a new, much more impressive residence befitting the status of the Führer.
The secure compound includes administration buildings,
barracks and guest houses.
For the German people, the Berghof becomes a place of pilgrimage.
Parties of school children and admirers of their beloved leader
travel to Bavaria from all over the country.
And favoured foreign dignitaries are invited to visit.
Among them, Italian dictator Mussolini...
...and the former king of England, Edward VIII,
and his wife, the Duchess of Windsor.
[James Holland] When you get to the Berghof,
you're treated with lots of smart salutes
and SS sentries and guards,
you're ushered in, it's all very luxurious.
You're left with no doubt that this is the place of the leader of the Third Reich.
The whole site covers 26 square kilometres.
And below ground, Bormann has plans for a Nazi stronghold.
[James Wilson] A vast area, probably capable of accommodating
up to as many as 1,000 people below ground, in what the Allies
believed would have been an underground fortress
where Hitler might make a last stand.
But in the summer of 1936, there is no talk of defensive fortresses.
No thoughts about a last stand.
Bormann has created for Hitler a fantasy rural escape and an HQ all in one.
I think Hitler had this idea he was going to have
the Berghof as a kind of alternative seat of government, partly because he was lazy.
He liked to run Germany from his living room.
All the decisions that Hitler takes, and all these plans and schemes,
are thought up on a chintz settee in his living room.
I mean, that is pretty amazing.
And for the cronies at the top of the heap, this is the best of times.
They will become known as the Berghof Set.
But although an invite to Hitler's Camelot is seen as a sign of approval,
it comes at a price.
If you were transported to the Berghof after it was completed in the late '30s,
it would have been like going to kind of
the most difficult and awkward weekend house party you could possibly imagine.
Let's just look at your host for starters.
This is Adolf Hitler, this is a man who gets up late and goes to bed very late,
and every evening, you've got to spend your night listening to him
holding forth in the drawing room until three or four in the morning,
and, you know, to leave early would be treacherous and disloyal.
[Frank] Everybody else was bored stiff, but he loved the idea of,
you know, a nice meal followed by a Hollywood film,
followed by a ranting monologue that went on till three in the morning.
He thought this was wonderful.
And the new Berghof is the stage on which the rivalries and intrigues
between Hitler's courtiers are played out.
[Guy] So you're there on a balcony and you're wearing your kind of Sunday best
and then out comes Hitler, and you'll have to jostle around him
and sort of allow your heads to be patted and make all the right noises.
And at the same time, you're aware of the fact
that your other member of the inner circle next to you is trying to be
even more oleaginous and greasy than you are.
And so there's almost a kind of horrible vicious circle, if you like,
amongst the inner circle of who can basically suck up to Hitler the most.
[James Wilson] So we've got all these huge egos, these big personalities,
the neighbours-from-hell scenario,
with all these people wanting to curry favour with Hitler,
maintain their positions and climb that ladder.
They weren't friends, they weren't personal friends.
Bormann and Göring, for instance, are mortal enemies.
They absolutely hate each other.
Himmler hated Goebbels, Goebbels hated Himmler.
Himmler and Goebbels hated Göring.
None of them really liked each other, except the relationship with Hitler.
[Guy] And amongst some of the Nazi wives, there's quite a lot of friction,
so some of the older children may have been aware of that,
but most of the time, there was this very nice man
who would have been called Uncle Adolf
who would have kind of pinched your cheek and you would have played
with a puppy with him and actually would have been probably very agreeable.
But beneath it is something very, very disagreeable.
And as the court plays on,
the master of ceremonies is that ambitious man in the shadows, Martin Bormann,
who is despised by all his rivals.
But that doesn't bother him.
He's developed a taste for power and having gained his leader's trust,
he revels in the attention.
The Berghof becomes a place where Bormann really is the person in charge.
It becomes like it's Hitler's court
but it's Bormann's fiefdom and these are his glory days.
And Bormann is about to pull a masterstroke.
He commandeers a local children's home and moves in.
It's one of the largest houses in the area and right above the Berghof.
Bormann had already started to control access to Hitler.
Now he is literally his gatekeeper.
[James Wilson] This house overlooks the Berghof
and so he can see all the comings and goings to the Berghof from his own home.
He doesn't have to rely on being kept informed.
Too late, the other members of the circle realise
that they have been outmanoeuvred by Bormann
and scramble to reassert themselves.
[Emma] Everybody gets frantic about who Hitler's inviting to the Berghof,
who's kind of hanging out with him and they want to be nearby
so that they can join in and not see anybody
sort of getting closer to Hitler than they are.
Each tries to outdo his rivals by displaying his craven loyalty
to the leader, the Reich, and everything it stands for.
And in this private world of the Berghof,
they feel safe formulating plans for the "Jewish problem"...
For as cultured, urbane and sophisticated as the Berghof set seems,
it is easy to forget that on these chintzy sofas,
the most depraved ideologies were crafted.
There's a curious paradox and it's only really made sense of
by the fact that there is a new morality, if you like, in inverted commas,
a new morality within Nazism which allows people to be
cultured, intelligent, educated, and at the same time...
...espouse those most radical, hideous, racist ideas.
Behind the scenes, Bormann is ever tightening his grip on his rivals
and moulding himself as Hitler's enforcer.
He takes charge of the Führer's personal finances
and the coffers of the whole Nazi Party.
He says who gets what. And where there's money, there's power.
[Guy] The ever-cunning Bormann, who now is becoming known as the Brown Eminence,
which is a kind of vaguely scatological phrase to describe him,
is gaining more and more power
by having the keys to the Party treasury and the Party finances.
That gives him enormous power and leverage over the person who's,
you know, borrowed the money.
As Bormann's power grows,
the fortunes of Hess, still his boss, in theory, continue to fall.
He is the one person missing from these carefree images at the mountain retreat.
[Guy] You can look at no better evidence for Hess's marginalisation
by the fact that he is not in this footage on the Berghof, he is very rarely there.
He is not a very clubbable figure. He's an outsider.
Hess's refusal to engage in the inner circle's vicious power plays
means he's slipping ever further down the pecking order.
With each slight, real or imagined, his hurt increases.
He becomes a hypochondriac,
trusting in alternative therapies to treat his various perceived ailments.
His behaviour grows increasingly bizarre.
Göring, after mentioning to Hess his neuralgia,
one day receives a surprise bundle of packages.
[Thomas] To his great amusement, Hess told him that he should use those pots and pans
in order to treat his neuralgia
and that he fill them up with water at different temperatures
and then immerse different parts of his body in them.
And ever since, Göring really had difficulties taking Hess seriously
and really thought that he had gone off the rails.
[Guy] Hess was a deeply troubled man,
he was deeply insecure about his role within the inner circle.
And I think that he was becoming more withdrawn,
into the kind of slightly out-there weirdo that he always was.
But one area where Hess is still useful
is in nurturing his links with Nazi supporters in Austria,
where the Party has been banned following a failed uprising.
Hess's work as a go-between helps to prepare the ground
for the takeover of Germany's neighbour
which Hitler dreams of achieving as his first step to European domination.
FEDERAL STATE OF AUSTRIA
But when words become action and the operation to take over Austria begins,
the Deputy Führer is elbowed aside.
Instead, it's Göring that forges the way.
[James Holland] Göring first of all puts on a massive demonstration
of Luftwaffe strength,
there's a huge fly-past, and they sort of keeping coming over and rotating,
going back, refuelling and continuing on.
The overwhelming show of force has its desired effect.
The Germans march in without a shot fired.
Again, the gamble has paid off.
They walk in unchallenged and it is without casualty.
An extraordinary piece of diplomacy backed by force, but it works.
The Anschluss, or "joining together" of Germany and Austria
is Hitler's greatest triumph yet
and the Austrians seemingly welcome their new master with open arms.
[Michael] It's like the Rhineland, it worked.
If it works, it's great, if it fails, it's disaster. But it worked.
It's a bluff that's not called.
After laying much of the groundwork, this should be Hess's finest hour,
but when Hitler is hailed by the vast crowds in Vienna,
the Deputy Führer is nowhere to be seen.
[Michael] It's very possibly Hitler's way of saying
you are not in the front rank of those who are going to serve from this point on.
-Hail victory! -Hail victory!
On the surface, the Anschluss appears to be a peaceful uniting of nations.
But the day after Hitler's victory speech, the terror begins.
It's led by Heinrich Himmler, one of those men at the Berghof
who like to think of themselves as cultured...
NATIONAL SOCIALIST PARTY
...and sophisticated.
He's the cowardly wannabe soldier
who doesn't have any military experience to fight armies.
Instead, he wages war on defenceless civilians.
His SS starts rounding up thousands of Jews
and taking them into protective custody.
[Richard] Jews were being arrested, their property was being taken,
they were taken off to camps and, in some cases, murdered by Austrian Nazis.
This was really the start of an open programme of antisemitism
and it became a model that was then transferred to Germany itself.
[cheering]
But back in Berlin, Göring takes the plaudits alongside his Führer
as an adoring and oblivious German public celebrates
another great, and apparently peaceful, victory.
Now, far from the horrors unfolding in Austria,
Hitler immerses himself in the high ideals of his architectural vision for the Reich.
Albert Speer beguiles his patron
with plans to redevelop the heart of the capital.
It will be on a breathtaking scale,
fit for an empire that will last a thousand years.
They both had grandiose plans for what Germany was going to look like,
these enormous buildings, these big domed buildings, and these big arches.
And Hitler's going, yes, I love it, tell me more, and how about if we do this?
"That's a brilliant idea, mein Führer!"
Hitler even wants to rename Berlin Germania,
the name given to the region by the ancient Romans.
The new city will be his legacy to the grateful German people,
and Speer will make it happen.
[Guy] What you see is that Speer and Hitler are kind of egging each other on.
[Guy] Both men were visionaries, both men regarded themselves as artists,
but then there's a fine line between being a visionary and being a dreamer.
And I suggest that both of them, ultimately, were dreamers.
Their shared vision and passion means the two men become close.
Speer is one of very few people
who can bypass Bormann's increasing ring of steel and approach Hitler directly.
To Bormann, Speer's relationship with the Führer
is a threat he'll need to address.
But there's another member of the inner circle
whose personal ties to Hitler he cannot interfere with.
And that person is Eva Braun.
She has been Hitler's mistress for at least the past six years.
Eva was 17 when she was introduced to the 40-year-old Nazi Party leader
whilst working as an assistant to his official photographer.
[Thomas] Eva Braun was quite an outgoing person.
She was fun-loving, she liked exercise,
she liked to smoke and these were all things that Hitler did not really like.
So when Eva Braun was on her own on the Berghof
with a small number of close friends,
she led a totally different kind of life than from the time that Hitler was there.
While Hitler was around, which she of course was always longing for,
she had intimate moments with him which she really cherished
but she also really resented that she could neither be herself
and that she was hidden away by Hitler.
Eva is kept out of sight, a closely guarded secret from the German people.
It was necessary for Hitler's PR that, rather like Elvis in his early days,
he shouldn't have an open girlfriend because it would turn off lots of fans.
And it would have been very, very bad for Hitler
as Germany's rock-star politician to be seen...
in a loving marital or sexual relationship with another woman.
So that's why Eva was kept under wraps.
Eva Braun may come across
as a typical fun-loving girl in her home-movie footage,
but she had unique influence over the Führer,
and the competing rivals of the inner circle knew it.
[Emma] Unsurprisingly, it seems that Eva Braun and Martin Bormann hate each other
as they sort of jostle for supremacy in this Hitlerian court.
And the wives of the Nazi leaders are wary of Eva too.
They're embroiled with jealousy and intrigue just as much as their husbands.
But they know for their partners to keep close to Hitler,
they must ingratiate themselves with young Eva, however galling that may be.
[Emma] There are a lot of women staying at the Berghof
but they mostly despise Eva Braun and look down on her
as an unmarried woman, as Hitler's mistress,
as somebody who really shouldn't have any position at all in their view.
The one wife who is not seen in Eva's footage is Emmy Göring,
Hermann's larger-than-life partner.
In public, the glamorous Emmy likes to be thought of as First Lady of the Reich,
a role model for German womanhood.
She despises Eva and thinks she is not worthy of the Führer.
[Emma] They're also probably an element of jealously
because, through her relationship with Hitler, she obviously is very close
to the source of power that their husbands are jostling for.
Even the men tread carefully around Eva and are not above trying to flatter her...
...as she records in her occasional diary.
[as Eva Braun] Goebbels sent me a really wonderful pearl necklace and wrote,
"The prettiest gift I can present to my honoured and beloved Führer
is this small token of my respect for you."
But Goebbels' extravagant gesture
to ingratiate himself with Eva Braun misfires.
[as Braun] "Goebbels, with all his brains, is still an impossible man.
He still does not know that Adolf hates pearls
and that I am never allowed to wear them in his presence.
He says they bring bad luck."
Throughout 1938, the jostling in the Führer's entourage continues
as the next step in Germany's domination of Europe begins to unfold.
Once the Anschluss had been successfully completed,
it was apparent to everyone that Hitler
would be turning his attention towards Czechoslovakia.
An area of Western Czechoslovakia, the Sudetenland,
includes a sizable minority of German speakers
who are already being mobilised to support the Nazi cause.
Hitler's plan is to use them as an excuse to invade...
...but he can't just march in without justification.
So once again, he turns to his propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels
to come up with a pretext.
[Frank] And this really explains how much Goebbels is involved
in the foreign policy and also the ideological aims of Adolf Hitler.
You know, if Hitler had decided to invade the moon,
Goebbels would have dressed up as an astronaut.
That is the kind of person that he was.
He was intimately involved in all of Hitler's actions
and he didn't question this one.
Goebbels' propaganda machine goes to work again.
He stokes up division and hatred
by portraying these Germans as victims of Czech oppression.
There are calls for the Sudetenland
to be brought into the Fatherland to restore order.
[Thomas] He cooked up bogus stories about aggression against ethnic Germans
in order to present Germany as the protector of ethnic Germans.
So, Goebbels very much sold German intervention there
as a humanitarian intervention.
Having won back Hitler's respect following the success of the Anschluss,
Göring urges caution once again.
[man] His warrior instincts may have been,
we must go forward, we must take territory, we must conquer,
but he also was practical enough to understand that military action is risky,
and you make the bad choice,
then the whole house of cards could come tumbling down.
But again, Hitler ignores Göring's advice.
The old war horse hasn't learned
that his leader can't be talked round once he's made up his mind.
German troops pour into the Sudetenland and they don't stop there.
Six months later, they push on and take another large chunk of Czechoslovakia.
Another gamble has paid off, and Hitler's house of cards remains standing.
[marching band plays]
Yet once again, Göring must swallow his pride.
[Sönke] For Göring, it was a disappointment.
I mean, Göring was in his perception the second most important man in Germany
and now from autumn '38 to spring '39 onwards,
for the first time, he was losing power, not gaining power.
So it was definitely a blow for Göring.
Knocked back, Göring has another problem, an old addiction rears its head.
Fifteen years earlier, during the attempted Munich Putsch,
Göring had been shot and seriously injured.
Treated with morphine to kill the pain, he became hooked on the drug.
It took him two years to kick the habit.
But now, another medical problem leads to him once again taking morphine.
[James Wyllie] Göring suffered some severe dental issues
that involved some quite painful dental surgery.
And as part of his recovery, the dentist gave him some painkillers
that had a certain amount of opiate in them.
He is soon hooked again and in the war years to come,
strong rumours of this addiction to morphine will blight Göring's career
and his reputation will continue to seesaw.
His focus is taken away from the job of running the Luftwaffe
and, you know, he is seen kind of lying on couches in the middle of the day
in a sort of haze of overeating, overdrinking and taking too many drugs.
Hitler's 50th birthday, everything is going according to plan.
Austria and Czechoslovakia
have been incorporated into the new Germany without bloodshed.
The Führer reigns supreme and the Berghof set is in Party mood.
[James Holland] These leading Nazis all recognise that this is a key moment,
that this is a time where if you can just curry a little bit more favour
that you can just manoeuvre yourself into a slightly stronger position.
But what present do you give the man who has the biggest empire since the Kaiser?
[James Holland] All these leaders are jostling
to give the ultimate leader the best present.
It's like a kid's birthday party,
they're hoping that the recipient is going to pat their head the most
if they've given him the nicest present.
Each member of Hitler's entourage tries to upstage the others
with extravagant gestures to show their loyalty.
Goebbels organises the largest military parade
since the Third Reich came to power.
Göring lays on an impressive fly-past of his Luftwaffe.
Speer presents an enormous model
of a victory arch he wants to build in the Führer's honour.
It's actually childish, you know,
it's actually sort of showboating to each other.
"Look how much I care for the Führer, compared to you."
But Bormann, predictably, trumps them all.
At vast expense, he has built
a stunning mountaintop tea house for Hitler above the Berghof.
It's later to be dubbed by the Allies the Eagle's Nest.
[James Wilson] The Eagle's Nest is a spectacular building,
it dominates the area.
It is really the icing on the birthday cake.
The Third Reich is reaching the zenith of its power.
These are giddy times for the inner circle around its triumphant leader.
They are on the sunlit uplands and they look to the future with confidence.
All except one.
[archive, crowd] Sieg heil! Sieg heil!
There is perhaps one leading Nazi
for whom the future isn't quite so bright, and that's Rudolf Hess.
He's been superseded by people who are simply better than he is,
cleverer, cannier, more Machiavellian,
more ruthless and more ambitious.
So the future for Hess doesn't look quite so sunny.
But the Deputy Führer is not ready to give up yet.
A radical idea is starting to take shape in his mind.
It's his way to outflank his rivals, win back Hitler's favour,
and create a pact to enable Germany
to have total domination over the European mainland.
Hess's secret plan will lead to the most bizarre episode in the Second World War.