1944.
And as the tide turns against the Nazi war machine,
Hitler's inner circle are starting to think the impossible.
Publicly they're denying that there's a crisis,
but, secretly and privately, they know it's a disaster.
Goebbels and Bormann remain loyal... for now.
But Hitler's deputy, Hermann Göring, prepares for life after the war.
Göring always wanted to have his big, fat fingers
on the leadership, on the ultimate prize.
And architect of the Holocaust, Heinrich Himmler,
secretly negotiates with the Allies.
[Guy] It's a really risky game he's playing.
The personal stakes could not be any higher.
But one man, Albert Speer, will be implicated in a plot
to put the German people before the Führer.
If Germany is to be saved, Hitler must be sacrificed.
This is the inside story of Hitler's henchmen,
the power struggles, jealousy and fawning sycophants
that would create a monster and fuel the most brutal horrors of the Third Reich.
July 1944.
It's a month since the Allies landed on the beaches of Normandy,
opening up a new front...
...while to the east, the Russians are coming.
And bombs fall unopposed on Germany's industrial heartland.
The onslaught is relentless.
Adolf Hitler is a shell of his former self.
But there's always one man at his side,
ready to tell the Führer what he wants to hear,
or manipulate his way to more power...
Martin Bormann.
[Emma] He's not a glamorous figure. He doesn't stand out.
He's not known to the public.
He doesn't say very much, but suddenly sort of creepily, spookily,
people realise he's actually always there.
As always, Bormann spends most of his time feeding Hitler's paranoia.
No one, he says, can be trusted.
[Emma] Bormann endlessly consolidates his position,
really on the grounds that Hitler can trust nobody but him,
and he's increasingly narrowing the kind of field
around Hitler and who Hitler can trust.
Bormann becomes the gatekeeper to Hitler's inner circle,
so if you are with Bormann, you will have the Führer's ear.
If Bormann turns against you, will probably also lose access to Adolf Hitler.
For Bormann, the war going badly only brings him closer to the Führer...
But others are in crisis.
For the last four months, Hitler's former golden boy, Albert Speer,
has been suffering from mental collapse.
The one-time architect is charged with the impossible job
of keeping the German army supplied with guns, bombs and bullets.
[Emma] He cannot produce the armaments at the rate that is demanded,
and by the summer of 1944, Germany is running out of fuel as well.
And Speer knows that while the Allies are destroying his factories,
his rivals are plotting to destroy him.
Being ill is very bad news for any Nazi.
It's an opportunity for the others to take over their role
and assert their closeness to Hitler.
So he's facing huge problems, which he cannot overcome.
Attempting to work from his sick bed, Speer is looking for a way out.
Meanwhile, Hitler's second-in-command has all but given up on the war.
He was once the man Hitler could rely on to deliver military victories,
but a series of disasters means Hermann Göring's reputation is now in tatters.
No longer trusted by Hitler,
he's now sitting out the war on his private estate, addicted to morphine.
This hugely important character in the Third Reich, still number two,
but, in many ways, this kind of drug-addled wastrel living on his estate.
But with Hitler visibly crumbling, Göring steels himself.
He believes he will be the man who leads Germany when the time comes.
Göring's greatest fear:
that on the way down, Hitler will drive the country to annihilation,
and he will lose everything.
Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels is now struggling
to make his defiant positive propaganda count.
THE FÜHRER WILL LEAD US TO VICTORY!
UNSHAKABLE, DETERMINED TO FIGHT, SURE OF VICTORY!
And as the situation deteriorates, he resorts to fuelling the paranoia.
BERLIN STAYS GERMAN!
Nazi propaganda is sort of feeding the idea that if Germany loses the war,
the entire population will be annihilated by the Russians
BERLIN STAYS GERMAN!
but also by, of course, the Jews.
Head of the SS Heinrich Himmler has the most to fear from a Jewish backlash.
As architect of the Final Solution, he's growing increasingly nervous...
...and begins to indulge in disloyal thoughts.
While Göring may see himself as Hitler's natural successor,
Himmler has other ideas.
Even someone as loyal as Himmler can imagine a life beyond Hitler.
[Guy] He is going behind Hitler's back,
trying to cut deals, trying to manoeuvre himself as a post-Third Reich Nazi leader.
While some of the inner circle's loyalty fractures,
outside there's also growing discontent, even within their own army.
Conservative military circles being increasingly concerned,
not only about the way in which the war is fought but also about the end result.
[Emma] Right from the beginning,
there's this tension between the Nazis and the German Army.
The German Army never fully accept the Nazis.
With wider devotion to the Führer eroding...
ONE NATION - ONE REICH - ONE FÜHRER!
...he knows he must be careful.
He has already had two attempts on his life,
he cannot afford to take any more chances.
Hitler's Eastern Front headquarters, the Wolf's Lair,
is hidden deep in the forests of East Prussia.
Reached only by a single railway, it's a camouflaged fortress teeming with SS.
And it's from this hideout that Hitler now runs the war.
Soon, Hitler will be entertaining
the Italian fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini.
But first he holds his daily conference
to try avert the military disaster unfolding around him.
But if Hitler feels safe here, he is mistaken...
An explosion rips through the compound.
A bomb has gone off inside Hitler's conference room.
It seems impossible that anyone inside could still be alive...
But somehow Hitler survives.
Hitler has suffered minor injuries.
His eardrums have burst and he has some cuts and burns.
But he is basically OK.
As the smoke clears, the hunt for the traitor is on.
They know it must be an inside job.
The only group that had any hope, realistically,
of assassinating Hitler were those closest to him physically.
As soon as the bomb has gone off, suddenly the blame game is afoot.
Behind the façade,
the Party is a rat's nest of envy, greed and vicious power plays.
For the inner circle, no one is above suspicion.
Over 600 kilometres west in Berlin,
Joseph Goebbels receives the news from the Wolf's Lair.
[phone rings]
He's eager to demonstrate his loyalty and further his political ambitions.
The bomb plot gives Goebbels in Berlin the chance to shine
and to show his beloved Hitler that he's made of the right stuff
to be a senior political leader, not just a minister for propaganda.
Goebbels springs into action.
We see a brief resurrection of the kind of fighting qualities
which had made him so successful before 1933.
Goebbels targets a weak link in the inner circle,
a man only just out of hospital and under increasing pressure...
Minister of Armaments, Albert Speer.
Speer had been a comparative latecomer to Hitler's circle,
but the young designer learned to play up to the Führer's weakness for architecture.
Hitler spots him as somebody that he can use,
and Hitler seems to be very drawn to Speer,
perhaps as someone who would have liked to have been an architect himself.
He was soon designing the icons of Nazi megalomania.
He is hugely successful, he gets off to a great start.
Goebbels had initially greatly admired Speer,
but he had become increasingly jealous
of the attention lavished on him by his beloved Führer.
With both Goebbels and Speer in their relationships to Hitler,
they have this kind of homoerotic quality.
Hitler had promoted Speer to Minister of Armaments,
responsible for equipping the German military.
But Goebbels suspects that in the face
of impossible demands and increasing desperation,
Speer may have a motive for assassination.
And with a vast army of migrant slave labourers,
Speer also had the perfect means to smuggle a bomb into the Wolf's Lair.
He is running the Organisation Todt
which supplies all these foreign workers to various sites
and there are a lot of Operation Todt workers at the Wolf's Lair.
Goebbels is incredibly suspicious of Speer
and so summons Speer and he tells him,
come round to see me, I wanna hear, you know, everything you know.
As Speer arrives at the propaganda ministry,
he is unaware that he's under suspicion.
Goebbels intends to question him about his Operation Todt foreign workers.
Goebbels accuses Speer of allowing these men to walk,
you know, haphazardly around the site
and therefore circumvent all the security they've got in place.
Maybe Speer had allowed this to happen deliberately,
and if so, is Speer the traitor?
But events soon overtake the interrogation.
Speer and Goebbels look out the window and they can see these troops
and they have no idea whether these troops are loyal to them or hostile to them,
so they're in a kind of limbo.
Troops of the Guard Battalion Großdeutschland
in full combat gear surround the building...
...and take up positions to close off the Brandenburg Gate.
It is clear that the attempt on Hitler's life
is part of a larger conspiracy, a full-scale military coup.
Back at the Wolf's Lair, the hunt for the bomber continues.
Then Bormann learns that just before the explosion,
a colonel with a missing hand had been spotted leaving.
It could only mean one man: a veteran war hero, Claus von Stauffenberg.
And he had been at the meeting where the bomb was placed.
Claus von Stauffenberg was the only individual realistically
who could have got close enough to the Führer to carry out the assassination.
He'd suffered for Germany and therefore was
trustworthy and honourable in the eyes of many.
He was of an aristocratic background. He was an old-fashioned military type.
He certainly was no democrat but he was very much a German nationalist
but he didn't want to see Germany's name being dragged through the mud.
That Stauffenberg had placed the bomb is shocking news for the inner circle.
It means the German army were behind the plot.
[Roger] It actually is a moral revolt
against Nazi atrocities,
on behalf of the German military,
many of whom knew about the mass executions and so on
of Jews on the Eastern Front.
This was not like the other attempts on Hitler's life.
This time, it came from within.
And this is ultimate treason for Hitler.
But Hitler lives and he is bent on revenge.
Stauffenberg, believing the Führer to be dead,
had raced to Berlin and already launched the army takeover
codenamed Operation Valkyrie.
This is an official plan that the reserve army
will take over in the case of Hitler's death.
This plot to push the Nazis aside is now in full swing.
If it succeeds, the army will be in control of Germany.
The plan that the plotters put together
is to try and utilise the official Valkyrie plan,
which is for a sort of lockdown of Berlin and other prominent cities.
But there is a fatal flaw in the plot.
They left Goebbels with a live telephone connection to the Wolf's Lair,
which meant that Goebbels was able to make plans.
As the scale of the coup becomes clear, the inner circle is thrown into turmoil.
Everyone is a suspect.
They want to know how deep this plot has gone.
Is it just the generals? Is it just old Prussian aristocrats?
Or is it, you know, actual Nazis as well?
Heinrich Himmler is tasked by Hitler to fly to Berlin at once
and take charge of the situation.
One of the greatest beneficiaries of the bomb plot is Heinrich Himmler.
[Roger] There's a tremendous doubling down
on security and intelligence gathering,
so all of which falls within the aegis of the SS.
SS OFFICER ID NUMBER
He's able to pursue all those enemies of the Reich that he's got files on.
Himmler unleashes his Gestapo
to investigate any connections the inner circle may have had to Hitler's assassins.
His principal suspect is a man known for his contacts
within Germany's business and aristocratic circles: Hermann Göring.
He was an old war hero from the First World War.
He had a chest full of medals.
He had this very ostentatious style about him.
So he was very much an easy target
for those rather more radical individuals within the senior Nazi hierarchy.
Unaware that his old enemy, Himmler, has him in his sights,
Göring leaves his mansion and rushes to join Hitler at the Wolf's Lair.
Incredibly, despite perforated eardrums, burns and a cut to his hand,
Hitler insists that the planned visit from Mussolini goes ahead.
There's this extraordinary sort of tea party
that takes place in the Wolf's Lair that afternoon.
As Göring arrives, Bormann keeps a close eye on him.
The unsophisticated and unpopular Bormann has never liked
the glamorous former war hero.
With suspicion and tension running high,
the tea party soon descends into a major argument.
Admiral Dönitz blames the army for the failing war effort.
Göring agrees.
But Dönitz rounds on him and says
that the performance of the Luftwaffe is also responsible.
[Guy] Dönitz goes one step further, and says, you are losing the war, Göring,
and so therefore you have this kind of...
family row almost between Hitler's inner circle.
And all the time, meanwhile, Mussolini
is playing with his bits of cake like a child would with putty.
Hitler can take no more.
He erupts into a raging fury that lasts for an hour and half.
Unwilling to accept responsibility for the disaster he's created,
Hitler settles on a scapegoat...
...his rant ending with the megalomaniac cry,
"I'm beginning to doubt whether the German people
are worthy of my great ideals!"
Shortly afterwards, the increasingly camera-shy Hitler is caught on film
alongside Bormann and Göring as he bids farewell to Mussolini.
This will be the two dictators' last meeting.
And as the train pulls out, it's back to business.
The bomb plot.
OPERATION VALKYRIE II
In Berlin, Operation Valkyrie is still underway
as troops surround Goebbels and Speer at the Propaganda Ministry.
In charge of the replacement army is Major Otto Remer.
Believing Hitler is dead, Remer is unaware that he's acting as part of a coup.
But the plotters have left Goebbels with an active telephone.
He called in Remer, immediately won him over and said,
you must drop this immediately. Hitler is alive.
Major Remer falls into line, but the coup still hangs in the balance.
Himmler issues orders
cancelling the mobilisation of Operation Valkyrie, but it's not enough.
There was a good deal of panic, of course, in Berlin and in Party circles.
And there were many people who heard
about the assassination and hoped he was dead.
Propaganda minister Goebbels realises what has to be done.
Knowing Hitler lives will surely pull the rug out from under Valkyrie.
Hitler has to break his year-long silence
and tell the German people that he is alive.
The one thing that the Nazis can do is communicate.
They've got to convince the German people
that it's all OK, the show's still on the road.
But the broadcast is beset with technical difficulties,
and the rumour of Hitler's death is spreading fast.
If they don't broadcast soon, Operation Valkyrie may be unstoppable.
Finally, just after midnight, they're ready.
And then suddenly, the voice comes on the radio, and it's unmistakably Hitler.
[Hitler] I speak to you today...
...for two reasons. Firstly,
so that you can hear my voice
and know that I am unharmed
and in good health.
That still carried great weight with people.
It still had an enormous impact.
[radio, Hitler in German]
The coup is off.
All the plotters, of course, know that they've failed.
For the German people, there's a strong sense that they've been saved,
that somehow if Hitler is alive, maybe they can still win the war.
The plotters are quickly rounded up.
[gun cocks]
Stauffenberg and his men are led into the courtyard to be shot.
[gunshot]
As the echoes of gun shots die down, Bormann fires out the message:
"Attempted putsch by irresponsible generals bloodily crushed.
All ring leaders shot."
[gunshot]
It's now clear that the assassination was to be
the start of a military and political revolt against the regime.
So, this is actually a very diverse movement
which includes liberals, people who hold up Christian values,
but also conservatives who are very seriously concerned.
And Himmler's intelligence network has also uncovered
unsettling evidence that incriminates one of the inner circle.
In the conspirators' safe, the SS find a draft list
of those who would head a new government should the coup succeed.
Next to armaments minister was the word "Speer".
OPERATION VALKYRIE II
Win over Speer if possible?
Albert Speer is back in the frame.
In Stauffenberg's diary, Himmler also discovers that Speer
had been invited for a meeting with the conspirators
on the same day as Hitler's assassination attempt.
Things are looking bad for Speer.
Himmler immediately issues the orders. There must be no more executions.
For a mass purge of any opposition, Himmler needs information...
...and dead men can't talk.
They're tortured brutally until they cough up their last secrets,
and then they can finally be hanged.
Rumours spread that Albert Speer has been arrested, even executed.
But in fact, the Gestapo finds the evidence against Speer is inconclusive.
Fortunately, he'd declined the invitation to the meeting with the conspirators.
Speer said, I just can't make it, I'm too busy, exhausted, tired. Genuine reasons.
And the choice of Speer as Armaments Minister
may have been wishful thinking on the part of the plotters.
Luckily, in pencil, scribbled next to his name
was a question mark and the two words..."If possible."
It's a difficult moment for Speer, but he survives it,
and the question mark is enough.
[Guy] Had that question mark and "'if possible" not been there,
then the Nazis would've assumed that he had already said yes
to being in a future government which didn't feature Hitler,
which would've meant he was complicit in the coup,
and which would've meant he would've been strung up.
In the aftermath of the plot,
thousands are executed, many hung up like meat carcasses.
Some executions are even filmed, by order of Hitler,
to be watched at his convenience.
Despite signs that the regime is falling apart,
some members of the inner circle still feel
they can make capital out of the chaos.
Months earlier, Goebbels had given a rousing speech
to the people of Germany,
calling for the entire nation to be mobilised as part of the war effort.
Hitler had initially rejected the idea.
But now he finally gives Goebbels his full backing for Total War.
For a moment, it feels like he's got complete power
over what is going to happen, how the war is conducted,
and how the nation's resources are used.
What it means is that Goebbels is now going to draw more power.
Goebbels goes about trying to procure 1.2 million men
from the civilian sector to be deployed on the front line.
Everything will now be unleashed.
But Goebbels is not the only member of the inner circle to get an upgrade.
As the mastermind of the Final Solution,
so far, Himmler's career has consisted of waging war on civilians.
But he has always dreamed of military conquest.
Himmler had turned 18 in the final days of World War One
and had been desperate to prove himself as a soldier.
But it was too late.
Himmler had harboured dreams of military command ever since.
Now, more than two decades later, Himmler finally gets his chance.
In the wake of the failed coup, the wannabe soldier is appointed
commander of an army responsible for defending Germany's industrial heartland.
So now he's got all this military power and might,
he's a commander of an army,
got two million men, he now feels like a soldier.
He's not just the head of the SS but he's also a proper soldier.
And that's enormously important for him.
More important still,
he has finally usurped Hermann Göring as Hitler's chosen one.
But some believe Himmler's dream promotion
is a plan to undermine him
by the inner circle's most dangerous plotter.
There's a theory that actually it was Bormann who secretly persuaded Hitler
to allow Himmler to have this military post in order to let him fail.
If true, Bormann's timing is impeccable.
Himmler's army is struggling, desperate for supplies and equipment.
It's a crisis that immediately throws Himmler into conflict
with the man who'd only just escaped his Gestapo death squads.
Albert Speer.
Having survived the rumours of his involvement in Valkyrie,
Speer, as head of armaments, clashes with Himmler over manpower.
Himmler wants them in the army.
Speer wants more people in the factories making planes and making bombs.
[Richard] There was always that tension between the key players.
Where can I get my resources from?
Where am I going to get my extra men from?
Is somebody going to take them from me?
Speer, Goebbels, Himmler, Göring, they're all being asked to do the impossible.
[Guy] And so you have these sort of meetings
in which these men are kind of jostling for power over centres of production,
and in the end, it's becoming increasingly marginal
because they know this is all in vain, this is bald men fighting over a comb.
In the end, it is Himmler who gets Hitler's backing.
It was really a question of who had the most power.
In the end, at this point, it was Himmler.
And it won't be long before Himmler's ability
as a military commander is put to the test...
At the Wolf's Lair, Hitler is still convinced he can win the war.
Since the bomb attack, he's become a drug-addled wreck...
...with military tactics that are increasingly irrational.
Hitler now devises a last-gasp plan to grab victory from impending defeat.
He plans to break through in the Ardennes region,
splitting the Allied armies in two, and pushing on to Antwerp.
The Americans will call it the Battle of the Bulge.
This is gonna punch a hole all the way through to Antwerp,
encircle the Allied armies,
and take hundreds of thousands of men prisoner and the Reich will be saved.
The Ardennes offensive is absolutely the last throw of the dice
as far as the Germans are concerned.
The idea is to attack west, again using the same sort of techniques
and often the same terrain as they'd used very successfully in 1940.
Back then, the Blitzkrieg had been made possible
by overwhelming fire-power from the air.
But the Ardennes Offensive will have no such help.
Göring is a much weaker figure at this point,
but also he, you know, he's still nominally in charge of the air force.
[Guy] But he's drug-addled,
and constantly fantasising about the might of the Luftwaffe,
which is increasingly being hammered by the British and American air forces.
The pressure is on.
To pull this off, the Nazis will need 200,000 men
and a vast amount of tanks, artillery and ammunition.
[Roger] Strategically, it would have been a master stroke,
but the problem was that the Germans simply didn't have the fuel,
or the manpower or the military hardware to carry it off.
Ugh, it's just a hopeless gamble.
The weather is terrible. The problem is they just can't get men to the front line.
They can't get anything to the front line.
Every time a plane does fly overhead, they have to hide under a wood.
Germany is in no fit state to be carrying out large-scale offensives like that.
In the deep winter of '44, '45, it's too far gone.
Himmler's small part in the operation,
and first taste of military command, ends in disaster.
But Hitler takes another punt on his rookie commander.
This time, his army are to defend Berlin
from the advancing Soviets on the Eastern Front.
[Roger] He's massively outnumbered on the Eastern Front
and he really lacks the wherewithal to make an effective defence.
There were other German commanders
who were brilliant at defence, improvised defence,
there were other German commanders who were completely ruthless.
But Himmler could do neither of those things.
If Bormann did want Himmler finished,
then Himmler realises too late that he's been passed a poisoned chalice.
Himmler is facing defeat and retreat on every side.
Himmler, the wannabe soldier, fails miserably
and Hitler accuses him of blatant disobedience.
This failure would undoubtedly have affected
Himmler's sense of his own success and his own worth.
He had grown the SS from a very small organization in the 1920s
up to the state within the state that effectively ran Nazi Germany.
[Robert] He has finally achieved his dream,
his objective of being the undisputed number two after Hitler
but he's sort of the number two of a vanishing empire.
With his dreams in tatters,
Himmler wants to resign, but he can't face confronting Hitler.
He doesn't have the courage, really, to admit it to Hitler
because he so wanted to be able to do this.
So in the end, he finally gets somebody else
to go to Hitler and he's able to step away.
Himmler heads 100 kilometres north of Berlin
to a sanatorium to be treated for stress and stomach pains.
[Guy] Where's he? Is he basically malingering? He is claiming to suffer
from all sorts of stress after the failure of the Ardennes Offensive,
but I think actually he's probably playing a far deeper and more cunning game.
With the German war effort on the verge of collapse and Bormann after him...
...Himmler decides his only hope of survival is an audacious rebrand.
He needs to rid himself of his murderous past.
Himmler, the man who for so long Hitler thinks he can trust above all others,
actually has an eye for the future from quite an early stage.
He's gonna distance himself from the mass murder
that he was so instrumental in carrying out.
Just a few months earlier, Himmler had ordered
concentration-camp gas chambers and crematoria to be closed down.
[Michael] That wasn't because he had some sympathy for the inmates.
He wanted to get in the good books,
if that were possible, of the Allies when they won.
His men start destroying evidence...
...setting fire to accommodation blocks, many with the prisoners still inside.
Meanwhile, Martin Bormann accompanies his Führer back to Berlin.
They're horrified by the destruction brought upon the city.
They'd last seen the Reich Chancellery a month earlier.
Now it's in ruins.
Every window shattered.
Only the ground floor and cellar are habitable.
Hitler's office and residence have now been relocated
to the barely completed Führerbunker, deep under the Chancellery garden.
Designed by the man Hitler still trusts more than any other: Albert Speer.
Eighteen rooms of bare concrete, his subterranean fortress...
...defended at all times by hand-picked SS guards.
But the Führer they watch over is a broken man.
By early 1945, Hitler is a shell of a man.
He's increasingly reliant on all sorts of weird and wonderful drugs.
By now, Hitler is a physical wreck,
developing a tremor on his left hand after the Valkyrie bombing.
Yet the inner circle do nothing, seemingly paralysed by fear.
It would take a brave man to actually say,
no, you're wrong, we're not following you any more... It's just impossible.
They know that if they put a foot wrong,
they could fall victim to Hitler's silent shadow, Martin Bormann.
It was very dangerous to get on the wrong side of Bormann
because Bormann in a way was the enforcer of Hitler.
If Hitler disliked someone,
he would tell Bormann, I never want to see this guy again.
[gunshots]
Everybody's very, very tense, everybody wants to keep Hitler happy.
Everybody knows that Bormann can send a hit squad and they can be killed.
But while languishing at his sanatorium, Himmler decides to risk everything.
He formulates an escape plan, sending a message through his masseur
to the Vice-President of the Swedish Red Cross.
If they agree to waive human-rights claims,
Himmler will release the only asset he has left.
And so as bargaining chips, Himmler starts using concentration-camp prisoners.
He's trying to buy his freedom with Jewish lives.
So it's kinda disgusting, actually, he's using hostages, human shields,
in order to try and negotiate what he hopes are gonna be freedoms for himself.
These are highly treacherous acts in Hitler's eyes and would see him strung up.
But, actually, it's a mark of how little authority
is now being transmitted from Hitler to Himmler
that Himmler feels emboldened to act in this way.
It's a really risky game he's playing.
The personal stakes could not be any higher.
Himmler hopes that by releasing prisoners,
he can open up a channel of communication with the Allies.
He is entirely misreading the situation in his very naive hope that he can,
of all people, can negotiate a separate agreement with the Western Allies.
He even hopes that his rebrand as the Nazi who released the Jews
might secure him leadership of a post-war Germany.
[Emma] Himmler is a complete fantasist,
totally overestimating his own international status and capabilities.
Away from the sanctuary of the sanatorium, any hope he had evaporates
as the true horrors of Nazi atrocities are being uncovered.
A lone Soviet scout enters part of the vast Auschwitz-Birkenau complex.
He walks into a nightmare.
A recently abandoned concentration and extermination camp.
What's left of the systematic state-sponsored killing
of over six million Jews.
Inside, he finds 600 sick and dying men and women.
And mountains of clothes and shoes.
Evidence of the most horrific war crimes the world has ever seen.
POISON GAS
But the net is closing in on the Third Reich.
For Armaments Minister Albert Speer,
the Soviets' arrival in this region marks the end of all hope.
The key development for Speer is the loss of Upper Silesia
with its heavy industry and crucially with its coal fields.
He prepares a memo for Hitler
on the hopeless situation for armaments production.
Silesia had been providing 60% of Germany's coal supplies.
Now there is just two weeks' worth of stocks left
to fuel factories, railways and power plants.
He could see that German industry, which was already struggling
and on its last legs, was no longer able to effectively resist.
When he hears the news, Hitler's fragile ego disintegrates
and he turns his anger on the people he professed to love.
So he issues the so-called Nero Decree.
Scorched earth, there's to be nothing left for the Allies when they arrive.
It's the equivalent of a child at the end of the day on the beach
destroying his sand castle because he doesn't want anyone else to play with it.
It's the ultimate infantilised,
evil and morally bankrupt order
that can ever be issued by a man against his own people.
Speer receives the Nero Decree orders from the Führer.
Hitler declares the German people have failed in the war.
And they don't deserve the infrastructure to survive.
It's a step too far for Speer.
There's a great irony in Hitler's scorched-earth order
and the fact that he issues it to Albert Speer.
These two men regard themselves as architects, builders, constructors,
and yet Hitler turns round and says,
I want it all to be destroyed, I want every factory, every locomotive,
every bridge, every road, every railway, I want everything to be destroyed.
That Valhalla suicidal notion of going down in flames,
Speer certainly couldn't accept.
He doesn't want the German people to go down suicidally.
He doesn't want mass starvation.
We can't have the German people dying in hundreds of thousands.
Speer is summoned to the bunker to hear the Führer's orders firsthand.
He can't believe that his friend and mentor, Adolf Hitler,
could resort to such inhumanity against his own people.
Albert Speer is increasingly demoralised with his friend, Hitler.
He once says, "If Hitler ever had a friend, I would've been it."
Not only is it a patriotic thing for Speer
but also he feels it's a personal treachery.
As Speer leaves, he contemplates his own fate,
and a world without Hitler.
He'll later claim that it's now he considers
a plan to make that world a reality.
When Speer was interrogated by the Allies after the end of the war,
one of the first things he wanted to alert them to was an alleged assassination plot.
[Guy] Did Albert Speer really try to bump off his beloved Hitler?
It's likely, like a lot of people, Speer thought,
this man's mad, maybe it's best if I just bumped him off.
It's possible, it's absolutely possible.
Speer had designed the bunker, so he knows it inside-out.
And he's well aware that a strategically placed gas bomb
in one of the air vents could kill everyone inside.
[Guy] There's a ventilation shaft
that lets the air into the building, and he thinks,
the easiest thing in the world for me to do would be to get some poison gas,
some Tabun, which is a nerve agent, incredibly toxic,
you don't last very long after you've ingested that,
and just introduce that into the air intake into the bunker
and the problem is solved.
According to Speer's account, he discovers that the air intakes had been moved.
[Guy] Hitler had ordered the air intakes
to be raised in case the Russians use gas to attack him,
and because gas is typically heavier than air, sinks to the ground,
therefore the gas won't get into the air intake.
Speer's alleged plan is thwarted.
I think there's no doubt that he did think about this
and talked to some of his staff about it and so on.
But I think it's much more likely that he used this story
in order to persuade the Allies
that he was actually not such a wicked Nazi as all the others.
It's the 12th anniversary of Goebbels' appointment as Minister of Propaganda.
As if to mark the occasion, a giant armada of bombers appears overhead.
But they are Allied planes, not German.
It's just one of the hundreds of air raids that month...
...releasing 2,000 tons of bombs on the city of Berlin.
And not a single one of Göring's Luftwaffe fighters tries to stop them.
[Roger] Aircraft are seen flying unhindered over Germany.
This is a bad omen for the future.
If they can fly across Reich territory unhindered, then that's a very bad sign.
And one of those raids wipes out Goebbels' already-damaged ministry building.
For the inner circle, it's clear: the game is nearly up.
Göring throws himself into ensuring his precious artwork,
stolen from the greatest museums in Europe,
is stored away from the advancing Allies.
When the war is over, Göring still hopes to display them
in his new home as the future Reich Chancellor of Germany.
When the leading Nazis realise that the game is over,
that Germany's gonna lose the war,
and that Hitler's project has failed, they react in different ways.
300 kilometres south of Berlin,
1200 concentration camp prisoners are released
and loaded onto a train to Switzerland.
Himmler's scheme devised in the sanatorium
with his masseur is taking place.
But if Himmler wants to rebrand himself as the man who saved the Jews,
he is going about it the wrong way...
...demanding payment of five million Swiss francs.
It's part of his deluded grand plan to position himself
as the man who will take over in Germany after a negotiated surrender.
Goebbels, on the other hand,
is unable to see the purpose of life without his Führer.
He works behind the scenes,
to ensure the German public are toeing the party line.
BRIQUETTES
Despite the approaching Red Army,
he engineers a rare public appearance for Hitler.
He's shuffling around. He's dishevelled. He's physically given up.
Martin Bormann also remains fiercely loyal to Hitler.
He'd hoped they'd escape to the bunkers he'd built in Obersalzburg.
But with Hitler staying put, Bormann knows he too must remain in Berlin.
His power relies entirely on proximity to the Führer.
I think it shows the extent to which Hitler is a kind of godlike figure.
A small band of dedicated Nazis now joins Hitler in the underground fortress.
Joseph Goebbels is accompanied by his wife Magda and their children.
Magda Goebbels is a passionate supporter of Hitler.
[Michael] I've always found this tragic and disturbing at the same time.
She said she couldn't live in a world without National Socialism.
And that's one of the most powerful comments from an insider
on the whole character of the takeover
of rationality and normality by the Nazi regime.
[Emma] They both make the decision
to stay with him in the bunker,
and they know that that means death.
Finally, there is the ever-loyal Eva Braun, Hitler's long-term mistress.
She was this sort of secret, unattainable figure,
and particularly in the bunker, she was a very glamorous figure.
She is smiling, you know,
she's walking around looking glamorous,
and representing something kind of good and positive
to the desperate people who are there.
But the days of the 1000-Year Reich are numbered.
After more than two decades of comradeship, conniving and carnage,
those above ground conspire to abandon the Nazis' sinking ship.
Believing that, for those in the bunker, the day of reckoning is coming.
[Michael] So they would go down in flames.
They would die in the cause. They would not compromise.
Only two of Hitler's inner circle will survive the days that follow.