BERLIN STAYS GERMAN!
1945.
The Nazi regime is in its final throes.
In their heads and their hearts, all the senior Nazis must know this,
but they cannot publicly say it.
Many of Hitler's inner circle are falling away.
At the very last moment, here are rats
leaving the sinking ship and he's furious about it.
Amid the lunacy of late war,
SS Chief Heinrich Himmler is making clandestine deals.
Himmler isn't true anymore, he's planning treachery, he's planning treason.
And silent shadow Martin Bormann faces an impossible decision.
It's a mixture of I want to survive, I want to get out,
and I have to be loyal.
The hidden first lady of the Third Reich,
Eva Braun, is rewarded for her fierce loyalty.
The relationship has been secret from the German people.
And Hitler's flamboyant deputy, Hermann Göring, attempts to seize power.
If he gets it wrong, he will be assassinated.
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.
April 1945.
The Red Army are closing in on Berlin.
And Allied forces have now crossed the Rhine
and advanced into the heart of Nazi Germany.
The final and humiliating chapter for the Third Reich has begun.
Germany is at the point of defeat.
FOR THE GERMAN NATION
Once revered by millions,
Hitler and his ever-decreasing band of henchmen cower
in a reeking bunker, surrounded by enemy troops.
In the final weeks of the Third Reich, the inner circle is rapidly disintegrating.
[Sönke] It was really game over,
it was the very last, very brutal moment of a dying empire.
The Third Reich is the Third Reich in all but name.
Adolf Hitler, now a drug-addled physical wreck,
has retreated to his subterranean fortress beneath the Reich Chancellery gardens.
[Emma] Hitler's close to despair, but he still has moments
where his instinct for fantasy comes up again and he says,
surely we could break through from the southeast, break the ring around Berlin,
and he'll suddenly get excited that there's hope, there's a plan,
and of course, he is surrounded by people who won't confront him with reality.
Of the original circle, only Martin Bormann, Hitler's private secretary,
and Joseph Goebbels, propaganda minister,
are with Hitler in this nightmarish underground world.
But today is an important date in the Third Reich's calendar.
The Führer's 56th birthday.
And they're expecting visitors.
Hitler's birthdays have always been a really big deal
with loads and loads of presents sent by the German people,
and celebrations with the inner circle.
And that inner circle all make the journey to bomb-shelled Berlin.
SS Chief Heinrich Himmler has been one of Hitler's most loyal followers.
But for the past few months,
he's been steering clear of the underground madness,
residing in a sanatorium a hundred kilometres north of Berlin.
He is trying to keep away from all the kind of disintegration
that he knows is going on in the bunker.
ROAD MAP OF GERMANY
Whilst there, Himmler has been trying to make deals with the Allies.
He wants to be the man to take over Germany once the inevitable happens.
Despite his treasonous acts,
Himmler still leaves the haven of the sanatorium to visit Hitler.
Loyal Heinrich, as Hitler always used to call him,
will remain loyal for one last time.
He's gonna go down to Berlin to go to Hitler's birthday party.
The journey to bombed-out Berlin involves a dangerous 100-km road trip.
You can't underestimate the dangers
of what it is to go to Hitler's birthday party.
Hitler's birthday gift from the Soviets
is an artillery barrage right into the heart of the city.
And it's not just the enemy he has to watch out for,
his own organization, the SS, are assassinating deserters.
The SS and various military police formations are stringing up people
left, right and centre for treason.
In a sense, at the very moment Germany has effectively lost the war,
the regime becomes most dangerous.
He obviously decides that he's safer showing loyalty at this point.
Even for the SS boss, in these dangerous times,
it's important to turn up and give the illusion of allegiance.
Travelling by road is perilous, but by air it's positively suicidal.
Nevertheless, Minister of Armaments Albert Speer
risks the treacherous flight into Berlin.
[Guy] You have got to fly over territory that is occupied now,
increasingly, by the Red Army, or perhaps even by the Allies coming from the west.
And even if you managed to survive not being shot down,
you're gonna have to land, not in some nice airstrip,
you're gonna have to land on a street in the middle of Berlin
where there are potholes from artillery shells,
where there are fires raging all around you.
Speer's motivations for taking the risky flight into Berlin are also puzzling.
According to his memoirs, months earlier,
he had been scheming to assassinate Hitler.
His plan, he'd later claim, was to infuse the bunker with poison gas.
But a newly fitted chimney, installed as an anti-gas precaution,
had thwarted the idea.
Now, 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.
Whatever the truth, Speer knows defeat is close.
He knows the war is over. He knows he's served a regime that's failed.
So why head to Berlin? Could Speer be harbouring some secret lofty ambitions?
I think Speer hopes that perhaps Hitler will hand on the kingdom to him.
Part of the kingdom is what was once
the most prestigious building in the Nazi state: the Reich Chancellery.
Now it's a desolate bombed-out shell.
An apt setting for the inner circle to gather
and pour their ritual congratulations to the deranged dictator on his birthday.
They meet in a room in the Reich Chancellery, which is quite extraordinary,
because there's such heavy shelling, that nobody normally goes
into the upstairs rooms of the Reich Chancellery any more,
and all the furniture has been removed.
Having survived their perilous journeys, for the inner circle,
there is now an awkward wait for their Führer to make his appearance.
Eight metres down below, in the impregnable bunker,
Hitler is going about his daily ritual.
It's after his breakfast and his cocaine eye drops
that Hitler feels sufficiently invigorated to go and see his inner circle
and receive their birthday wishes.
[Michael] The birthday party is a very good encapsulation,
in a microcosm, you could say,
of the absurdity, the unreality, of the bunker life
that they'd lived since January.
[bombs thud]
It's a ghost world they're living in.
Another key player in the inner circle who thinks travelling to Berlin
is worth the danger is Head of the Luftwaffe, Hermann Göring.
Göring still perceives himself
in the position of being the second man in the Reich.
For the last four months, the man who joined the Nazi Party
as a poster-boy war hero has been making plans for life after the Führer.
He's clearly now sniffing around like a big fat shark,
looking to see whether he's got an opportunity to finally seize power.
Hitler finally makes his entrance.
He's joined by the hidden first lady of the Third Reich, his mistress, Eva Braun.
The relationship between Eva Braun and Hitler was complex.
When they were together, Hitler was really kind of a different man.
Although they'd been together for the past 12 years...
...the Nazis maintain the illusion of Hitler as single,
devoted only to the German nation.
She has never had any public acknowledgement,
and the relationship has been secret from the German people.
To the inner circle, the sight of the Führer with his mistress
is an indication that for Hitler, the end is near.
More alarming still is his physical state.
I think a lot of the inner circle are completely shocked
by how completely wiped out he is as a person.
They're used to these birthdays being a time
when Hitler makes a great speech and self-congratulates
and again gees them on to achieve greater things.
But this is a very, very different affair.
It's awkward and it's depressing, and all the time, you can hear artillery,
reminding all of them that the end is near.
As always, Martin Bormann,
Hitler's private secretary and permanent shadow,
is close by when the Führer makes a momentous announcement.
Hitler will stay in Berlin and, if necessary, die in the bunker.
Hitler's inner circle react to this in different ways.
Everybody is very tense and awkward.
For Bormann, news that the Führer will stay in the bunker is devastating.
He was hoping the Nazi leadership
would relocate to the Berghof, Hitler's mountain retreat.
A decade earlier, Bormann had overseen its construction...
...including a network of impenetrable bunkers deep beneath the Alps...
...designed to keep the Führer, and Bormann, out of harm's way.
But it's not to be.
It's wishful thinking, and Hitler still has enough vestige of a brain
to realise this, that really it's an utterly pointless exercise.
Bormann's plan is, for now, foiled.
[bombs thud]
This is written in a way by Wagner,
and this is how Wagner's operas end, and they all know it.
[bombs thud]
But Göring watches with interest.
He interprets Hitler's statement as a resignation and his opportunity
to take control of the leadership.
Essentially, it's very obvious that Hitler has gone to Berlin
because he will never surrender, and ultimately,
he would rather die in his capital city than be seen to be fleeing.
Göring, though, has no qualms about fleeing.
In fact, he's long been preparing for it.
His servants have already evacuated his acquired spoils of war,
some 5,000 works of art.
[Emma] He moves all his treasures, his paintings.
He moves all his money out of German bank accounts.
That morning, Göring's country residence, Carinhall,
had been rigged with 20 tons of explosives.
If he can't enjoy the grandiose estate, it must be destroyed.
It doesn't go unnoticed that Göring is the first to leave.
We've got to a point where it's every man for himself.
The once fiercely loyal SS chief, Heinrich Himmler,
feels he's been seen to toe the party line.
Now he can join Göring in making a tactful departure
and get back to his own escape plan.
He's trying to manoeuvre himself as a post-Third Reich Nazi leader.
It's fantastical, it's deluded, it's ultimately pointless,
but it's a measure of quite how detached from reality Himmler has become.
On leaving the party, Göring corners Himmler.
[Richard] Himmler's not the only one to think about
contacting the Western Allies.
Göring was also wondering, was it possible to go to the West,
and say, we know we've messed up but the Russians are a threat to everybody,
so why don't you join us and we'll face the Russians?
He seemed to be again deluded
that somehow or other, they would treat him as, you know, a major leader.
But Himmler is well ahead of the game...
Five days earlier, he had released 1200 Jews to the Allies.
Bargaining chips in a deal fostered at his sanatorium...
...by passing messages to the Red Cross via his masseur.
There's an arrogance to Himmler
that overrides what must be his natural fear of committing treason.
That's what he's doing.
Because if Hitler is to find out that he's trying to secure peace deals
behind his back or making deals with Jewish people...
I mean, these are highly treacherous acts in Hitler's eyes,
and would see him, you know, strung up with piano wire.
Himmler tells Göring he's beaten him to it.
And that he's due to meet Count Folke Bernadotte,
Vice-President of the Swedish Red Cross, that night.
[Emma] He feels the end is very close, he doesn't want other people
to kind of put themselves forward as the chief negotiator.
Himmler says Bernadotte has been sent to negotiate by Eisenhower.
He knows that Göring has officially got the position of number two,
but he wants to be in pole position.
But Himmler suddenly becomes aware they're being watched...
...and by the most dangerous of rivals.
Martin Bormann.
The sycophant Bormann had risen to power by ruthless manipulation
and by dripping poison into Hitler's ear.
Himmler knows that if Bormann has overheard them,
his days could be numbered.
By this very late stage, Himmler is in a kind of
complete, intense state of anxiety,
because he knows that by making an attempt at negotiating peace,
he is committing treason.
Himmler knows he must act fast.
He drives through the night to the Baltic coast
for two important meetings...
...the first with a representative of the World Jewish Congress.
Himmler cleverly established links to the Jewish World Congress
and to the Western powers via Sweden, and the reason for that is obvious.
He wanted to get out and he tried to have a life after the Third Reich.
By this point, the death toll of Jews is reaching six million,
all masterminded by Himmler,
but months earlier, he'd been trying to cover his tracks.
From early January '45, Himmler,
with an obvious intention of winning some favour
in the eyes of the Allies when the war ended,
began a programme of closing the concentration camps,
bulldozing over the worst aspects of them
and trying to present a more humane front for the Allies when they took over.
But there's no way Himmler could distance himself from the atrocities entirely.
His rebrand to become the person to rule Germany post third Reich
relies on these meetings between men of radically opposing ideologies.
For 45 minutes, Himmler gives a long-winded justification
of Germany's actions against the Jews.
He promises that the killings would stop
and that the camps would be handed over intact to the Allies.
By Himmler's second meeting that evening,
with the Swedish diplomat, Count Bernadotte,
he is becoming increasingly paranoid.
[Emma] He's in a kind of hysterical state,
and he's, you know, he's got his pistol in his pocket,
and he's worried the whole time that, you know,
Bormann's men are going to burst through the door.
Exhausted, Himmler leaves, believing he's one step closer to meeting Eisenhower.
But his fear remains, could he have been followed? Does Bormann know?
One thing is certain. Himmler is playing a very dangerous game.
The next day in the Führerbunker, at Hitler's daily conference,
his generals give a report on the military situation.
The 22nd of April sees this key meeting with Hitler
and senior members of the inner circle, various generals,
but also Bormann and Goebbels.
And it's when he finally realises
that the military situation is now hopeless.
They have lost the war, there is now no doubt.
This is a huge moment, because up till this point,
he has always said, we will win, I will be like Frederick the Great,
I will push back my enemies at the gates.
He looks at the military situation,
and even for one of history's worst commander-in-chiefs,
he realises that the war is over.
Goebbels, who has been loyal since the beginning, is devastated.
There is no future without Hitler, for himself or his family.
Hitler has this enormous rant that can be heard
almost throughout the entire bunker complex,
and his generals are sort of shaking and quaking at this absolute apoplexy of rage.
It's the end of this enormous odyssey,
that's taken him all the way from the beer hall to the bunker
and all that it's ended in is just doom and catastrophe.
The last escape routes are disappearing and the Red Army is on the approach.
[Robert] To a certain extent, one could say that the actual realists are people
who stay in the bunker because they realise that there is no exit strategy.
Cyanide capsules are distributed to all Hitler's staff.
Bormann has a sudden realization that he is expected to die for the cause.
[Sönke] Although they only have a few days to live,
Bormann was never a team player.
Bormann had never in mind, what can we achieve together?
Unlike other people who stayed there until the very end,
he has no interest in dying
and very much wants to live another day.
So he's in a dilemma, does he stick with Hitler, or does he just get the hell out?
He wants to do both, but he can't.
For now, Bormann is trapped.
He can only dream of the Nazi stronghold he'd built in the Alps years earlier.
But Göring is already enjoying the fresh mountain air.
He's heard the news of Hitler's acceptance of defeat and despite Himmler's plan,
Göring decides he'll make his play for the top job.
But until Hitler is dead, it's a very dangerous move.
It is his official duty, if the Führer has died,
or if the Führer has been kind of rendered incompetent by circumstances,
for him to take over the governance of Germany.
He's carefully dictates a tactful message to Hitler,
requesting authorisation to take over as successor.
[Michael] "Mein Führer, you are under such pressure,
unless I hear anything to the contrary from you within 24 hours,
I shall assume you have lost the capacity to govern and I will become Führer."
He immediately recognises that this is very sensitive, very difficult.
If he gets it wrong, he will be assassinated.
As is usual protocol, Bormann is the first
to take receipt of the telegram from Göring.
[Emma] Everything that comes to Hitler is filtered through Bormann.
For Bormann, making sure that nobody else becomes powerful is important,
and specifically, he doesn't want Göring to be the next leader of Germany
and to take over, because if he, Martin Bormann, survives,
he doesn't have a good relationship with Göring.
And so, he very much puts it to Hitler that the telegram is an act of betrayal.
Bormann steers Hitler into seeing the telegram as an act of appalling treachery.
It shows that everything has failed.
If he can't keep Göring, then he can't keep anybody.
So even the carefully crafted telegram is a disaster for Göring.
And Bormann goes further.
He fires off a message to Göring saying,
"I forbid you to take any steps in the direction you have indicated.
Signed, Adolf Hitler."
Göring sees the writing's on the wall, he cables back and says yes, OK, I'll resign,
and the German public are told that Göring's had a massive heart attack
and he's gonna have to resign from all his offices.
But Göring's resignation is not enough for Bormann.
He orders Göring's arrest and execution.
He is arrested by the SS but, luckily, a unit of Luftwaffe soldiers comes past
and Göring says, help, I'm being held by the SS, do something about it.
And they clear the SS off and Göring is rescued.
Luck is on Göring's side and he lives to fight another day.
Another target in Bormann's sights is Heinrich Himmler.
Since his covert meetings to try to make peace with the Allies,
Himmler has been nervously awaiting a response.
He can only hope that his act of treason remains secret.
Bormann has been sniffing around
but he can't find anything conclusive to pin on Himmler.
But then the Allies come to Bormann's aid.
News of Himmler's clandestine deals is broadcast to the world.
Himmler's secret is out and he knows exactly what this will mean to Hitler.
The enemy's broadcasts reveal his loyal Heinrich, as he calls him,
has gone behind his back and betrayed him, tried to sue for peace.
[Sönke] There is, to me, a difference between Göring and Himmler.
The whole thing with the Göring telegram,
I think, is just a misinterpretation from Göring.
Himmler was really dealing with the enemy.
Hitler once referred to Himmler as the only "truer" man in Germany.
Meaning the only man he could truly rely on.
He couldn't believe that Himmler would betray him.
But he had. And with encouragement from Bormann,
the Führer strips Himmler of all his offices and orders his arrest.
To Hitler, Himmler's is the ultimate betrayal.
Hitler is particularly devastated, because he has always thought
that the one thing about Himmler is he's loyal.
He really thought that this was someone that he could trust to the death.
In a matter of days, Bormann has struck off his two arch rivals,
Hitler's number two, Hermann Göring, and SS Chief Heinrich Himmler.
It's a hollow victory as the whole regime is clearly now defunct,
but in Bormann's mind, he's finally made it.
These final days, at one level, must have been quite satisfying for Bormann,
because all his rivals are, one by one, being knocked out,
and in the end, it's just him and Goebbels who are there.
Now, amid the underground lunacy,
Hitler turns his attention to the utterly pointless task
of finding a new successor on his rapidly sinking Nazi ship.
And these two men,
silent shadow Bormann...
...and ever-loyal Goebbels...
...are the only two candidates from Hitler's inner circle left in the bunker.
But Hitler chooses neither.
Where's the power going? Well, it's going to Großadmiral Karl Dönitz.
Dönitz is nowhere near the bunker.
He's in the far north of Germany in the port of Flensburg.
This is a man who is not part of Hitler's inner circle.
Dönitz was a man that basically Hitler felt he could trust,
while all around him had disappeared and had betrayed him.
Dönitz had gained Hitler's trust
partly because he'd delivered on a promise of a revolution at sea,
achieved by new U-boats that could remain submerged for long periods.
Since the start of 1945, the two men had grown close.
Dönitz represented a new figure, a break from the circle,
and a man who could probably do some business with the new Germany.
He is not someone who has been part of this in-fighting
and this whole soap opera that's been running for two decades.
For what it's worth, Goebbels is given
the cursory title of Reich Chancellor of Germany.
REICH CHANCELLOR: DR. GOEBBELS
While Bormann is made head of what's left of the Nazi party.
To him, it's a great honour.
HEAD OF THE NAZI PARTY: BORMANN
Bormann likes to see himself, I think, as being super-loyal.
Whatever happens, he will be there.
He knows his power has always relied on staying close to Hitler.
For Bormann, there's no way out.
Bormann is failing to persuade Hitler to leave,
so he knows he's facing his own death, and he's facing it reluctantly.
Goebbels' loyalty is more fanatical.
For him, there's no future without the Führer.
[Emma] Goebbels writes a letter from the bunker, to his stepson,
so we know quite a lot about his state of mind.
And he is saying, everything I have, I have because of Hitler,
who I am, I owe completely to Hitler.
And it would be an act of terrible disloyalty,
not to stand beside him, right to the death.
So great is his devotion to Hitler, he brings his wife, Magda, into the bunker.
His wife, Magda Goebbels, is similarly obsessed with, devoted to Hitler,
and she insists on bringing their children.
They tell the children they're going into the bunker
so that they can be in the thick of it...
...for the victory that is about to happen.
[Guy] Goebbels is a very, very intelligent man,
but what would override all this intelligence
was this utterly misplaced loyalty towards this most evil of men.
There is one other hidden but equally devoted member
of Hitler's inner circle still in the bunker.
His companion for the last 12 years
and one of the most successfully guarded secrets of Nazi Germany.
[Thomas] Eva Braun was fun-loving. We see her on trips, we see her swimming.
We see her doing yoga. She really was quite an outgoing person.
They had met in Munich when Eva was just 17
and assistant to Hitler's official photographer.
Now, after more than a decade of clandestine courtship,
she's finally going to get her man.
Not long after midnight on the 29th of April,
we have probably one of history's most depressing, surreal, bizarre weddings
that, of course, takes place between Hitler
and his long-term mistress/girlfriend, Eva Braun.
And they are married in a conference room in the bunker.
He told Eva to leave. She declined to, so instead he marries her.
Which is a nice twist in the story
but she'd said she couldn't live without him, she'd rather die with him.
She dresses in a black dress, which actually was a traditional colour
for wedding dresses, and she chooses her jewellery, and she does her hair.
And they get rings, they get gold rings from the Gestapo prison in Berlin,
where they've been collected from Jewish victims.
Immediately afterwards, they kind of go to celebrate,
but Hitler quickly leaves the party.
And Eva Braun is left to drink champagne with the secretaries.
Above ground and unaware of the subterranean drama in the bunker...
...the people of Berlin are living with the effects of the debauched regime.
Suffering is on a terrible scale.
Most are close to starving and all are living in constant danger.
Everyone desperately wants peace.
People have started destroying evidence of any link to the Nazis.
Photographs of loved ones in army uniform are torn up.
[Emma] Berlin is in ruins.
The defence of Berlin is depending mostly on Hitler Youth.
15-year-old boys trying to defend Berlin, with barely any weapons,
and the Russians just coming closer and closer and closer, on all sides.
The core of remaining Nazis
have now been in the bunker for three months and discipline is waning.
The last 24 hours in the bunker are... like a sort of vision of hell.
It's people sitting around, drunk, half drunk,
plotting ways in which they're gonna kill themselves,
plotting ways in which they're gonna escape.
It's a hole in the ground and they're living very grim, unreal lives.
The image I've always got in my mind, I can't get out of my mind
is the noise and smell of the bunker.
Air-conditioning system running on diesel, very noisy system and the smell,
it was said, of urine and fetid body odour and cabbage.
The remaining SS officers are permanently drunk,
and along with the bunker's women,
determined to make the most of their last hours.
The bunker itself is becoming an increasingly sordid, smelly, smoke-filled,
you know, alcoholically charged cesspit.
[Richard] There's no doubt life in the bunker was amazingly claustrophobic.
It was a small area, people all bound up together.
All knowing, of course, that their fate now hung in the balance.
The Soviets are now only a kilometre away.
For those in the bunker, time is running out.
This is the end of the Reich.
That day, news from Milan reaches the bunker.
Hitler's fellow fascist and one-time ally, Benito Mussolini,
has been captured by Italian partisans.
Hitler is absolutely horrified when he learns of Mussolini's fate,
how he's not only been executed,
but he has been strung up with his mistress in a Milan square.
And it's a humiliation that Hitler is determined not to have,
and he is determined that the Russians mustn't get hold of his body.
[Guy] The final act, Hitler would probably have liked it
to have been leading his troops into battle and died a noble death,
but, no, it's a squalid end, actually.
Hitler and his new wife, Eva,
retreat to their sitting room with cyanide capsules and a pistol.
[gunshot]
Hitler takes his pistol and shoots himself in the face, and his wife poisons herself.
They, in likelihood, do it simultaneously.
Bormann nervously opened the door,
just to check that what they think's happened has happened.
After Hitler and Eva Braun kill themselves,
this sort of strange atmosphere descends on the bunker.
People who've basically got into the bunker
because they are such followers
suddenly have to make decisions and take actions themselves.
Given the public display of Mussolini's corpse,
the first task for Bormann is to dispose of Hitler and Eva's bodies.
[Richard] When the bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun are carried out
to the Reich Chancellery garden to be burnt,
it must have been an extraordinary moment for them.
They'd bound their lives to this man for 20 years and now he was dead.
Now Germany was ruined. Now they were likely to die as well.
It summed up, in a sense, the bankruptcy of the system they'd served.
Hitler is now being burnt, he is now finally being destroyed.
Now Hitler and Eva are mere embers, there's an even more daunting task.
To inform the world.
[Emma] As so often, when a dictator dies,
it takes a long time for the people around him
to actually kind of come to terms with what's happened
and admit it publicly.
They pretend that Hitler is still alive.
Goebbels, the man tasked with party communications for the last decade,
remains tight-lipped.
This delay will give him and Bormann a final opportunity
for a negotiated surrender to the Red Army
without consulting the new head of state, Dönitz.
But, for Goebbels, the new Reich Chancellor,
his only attempt at international negotiation ends in abject failure.
It's not until 10:53am the following day
that Bormann eventually telegrams Dönitz, and the news soon spreads.
Hitler has killed himself and his last testament is in force.
HITLER IS DEAD
The news quickly reaches Hitler's former friend, Armaments Minister Albert Speer.
[Richard] When he heard about Hitler's suicide,
he picked up the picture Hitler had given him and wept at the sight of the picture.
But he then wrote in his memoirs
that that was when the bond finished, the spell was broken.
For Bormann, Hitler's death has broken no spell,
but it has loosened his grip on power.
His telegram was an attempt to keep hold of it.
There's this pathetic telegram that Bormann sends to Dönitz,
informing Dönitz that he's now the Reich President
but says, "I will bring you written authorisation."
Now, this, I suggest, is the mark of a man
who's desperate to cling on to these levers of power,
i.e., I, Martin Bormann will bring you the authorisation, only I can do this.
It's nonsense, the telegram is enough,
the order transmitted by Hitler is enough.
But it does give Bormann a reason to escape the bunker.
For the deeply fanatical Goebbels and his wife Magda,
escape doesn't even enter their minds.
There is only one thing left to do.
They'll follow Hitler to the last.
With Hitler's death, the new Chancellor of Germany, albeit very briefly,
Joseph Goebbels and his wife know that they're next.
They're terrified, they're going to die and they're going to do it to each other.
But first, they need to deal with the children.
Magda has her children sedated and she poisons them with cyanide.
[Michael] 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.
An hour after poisoning her children, Magda is seen playing cards,
pale, red-eyed, stony-faced and smoking endlessly.
She sat and played Patience.
Now, you say, how inhuman, but what else would she do?
What else could you do when you'd killed your own children?
Later that evening, Magda bites into her cyanide capsule
and Goebbels delivers the coup de grâce, shooting her in the back of the head.
[pistol shot]
Then he bites on his own capsule and shoots himself in the temple.
[pistol shot]
It's a proof of utter loyalty that Goebbels and Magda
will follow Hitler, the leader of their inner circle, to death itself.
SS guards douse the bodies in petrol
but there isn't enough left to set fire to them properly.
Even in death, Goebbels plays second string to Hitler.
There's not enough petrol left for Goebbels,
and so, of course, what's left of Goebbels,
this sort of contorted, burnt, charred corpse, hideous in itself,
but not fully consumed in the flames like his master.
With everyone else either fled or dead,
the inner circle now consists of one man: Martin Bormann.
For decades, he has snooped, manipulated,
and done whatever it takes to increase his power.
[Michael] Bormann is a man with self-interest
uppermost in his mind at this point.
One can't see him staying and dying.
[Thomas] Bormann's triumph at the end of the war is really bittersweet.
Finally, in the dying days of the Third Reich,
he has become the number two but he knows the party is over.
The reality is Bormann is head of a party that no longer exists.
Any power he had went up in smoke along with Hitler's corpse.
The only way to regain it is to make the 400-kilometre trip to Dönitz in Flensburg.
[dogs bark]
I mean, it's an incredibly ambitious journey.
Specifically, to get to the north.
And he could definitely hope to become indispensible to Dönitz,
as he has been to Hitler, and this is a man he could hope to control.
And I imagine that's a sort of fantasy
that keeps him going, as he makes his escape.
Bormann is desperate to get out, he's desperate to get up to the north,
he's desperate to join the new government.
Bormann packs Hitler's last will and testament in his briefcase.
He still wants to feel like he's almost literally carrying
the Führer's authority with him, even though the actual person is dead.
There is no Adolf Hitler anymore.
If he's going to make it to Flensburg,
first he'll need to get through the Russian lines.
I think we see that actually faced with the Führer's death,
he still has an urge to survive.
He wants to protect his own skin. He makes an attempt to get away.
Five days later, there is total and unconditional surrender.
[Richard] Though Hitler wouldn't surrender, didn't want to surrender,
there really was no choice and Dönitz, who'd now been made
the president of the new Germany,
sent an emissary to Eisenhower's headquarters and, on May 7th,
signed the paper saying we surrender unconditionally.
As for Martin Bormann, he didn't make it anywhere near Dönitz's headquarters.
After stumbling out of the bunker in the early hours,
eyewitnesses claim Bormann was terrified, silent and disorientated.
The Russians are right there,
and he knows if he's captured by the Russians, he'll be tortured,
and he'll never see the light of day.
It's thought that at the sight of approaching Soviet troops,
he had taken his own life.
[gunshot]
Three weeks later, as the Allies occupy Germany, Heinrich Himmler is on the run.
Himmler, interestingly, as the leader of SS,
you would expect he would fight in the ruins of the Chancellery in Berlin.
But this was not the case.
In May 1945, Himmler is finally captured by the British in Northern Germany.
But during a medical examination, he bites down on a cyanide capsule.
The cowardly murderer of millions takes the easy way out.
[soundtrack only]
Hermann Göring, the flamboyant former fighter ace,
has also been captured by the Allies.
[Michael] And he is offended when they ask him to allow him to be searched
and he finds that very distressing
because he's a soldier, he says, as well as an air-force leader,
and that he claimed that he should be treated with honour.
Göring is imprisoned at a converted luxury hotel.
With characteristic arrogance,
he still believes he can talk his way out of trouble.
Göring then thinks because he'd been so high in the Nazi hierarchy,
he can do a deal with the Allies and treats the Allies
as if they were simply diplomats and he's one of them.
But Göring is mistaken.
Six months later, the Nuremberg trials begin.
...here the respective age groups...
They will last almost a year.
Sat beside Göring is his one-time inner-circle colleague,
former deputy Führer and Hitler disciple Rudolf Hess.
Hess had been jailed in Britain ever since he'd flown to Scotland four years earlier,
on a crazed solo mission to try to make peace with Britain.
Now, reunited with Göring, their day of reckoning has arrived.
Ever the showman, Hermann Göring confidently denies any knowledge
of what went on in Nazi concentration camps.
I plead not guilty.
He paints himself as a peaceful diplomat...
...and insists everything they'd done was the result of their patriotism.
Göring's defence was, I'm here because we lost the war.
If we'd won the war, you would be here in the dock.
Despite his spirited performance,
Göring is sentenced to death for war crimes.
But just two hours before his sentence is carried out, a phial of cyanide,
thought to be smuggled in by a guard, allows him to escape the hangman's noose.
Albert Speer denies knowledge of the Holocaust
and denounces the crimes of Hitler and the Nazi regime.
He's jailed for 20 years...
...and when released, paints himself as the Good Nazi.
Only after his death at the age of 76 does the truth come out.
The last man alive is Rudolf Hess.
Serving a life sentence in Spandau, Berlin,
in 1987, at the age of 93,
he hangs himself in the prison-garden summer house.
Hitler's inner circle had been forged in the ashes of the First World War.
Misfits and war heroes united by a sense of betrayal...
...a twisted ideology and a thirst for revenge.
Only circumstance could've created the conditions for them to do what they did.
Determined and cunning, they had capitalised
on their nation's discontent and deceived their countrymen
to rise to positions of ultimate power.
But personal ambition and jealousy
had seen them turn on each other in bloody betrayal.
There's a bitterness underlying it, and if one adds personal rivalry to that,
you have a very powerful, explosive quality to it.
It was a regime in which all power derived from one man.
It's all about Hitler. He is the heart of the inner circle,
and without that heart, the whole thing falls apart.
In the end, the only legacy of Adolf Hitler's inner circle
is the terrible knowledge of how a few twisted individuals
could plunge the world into conflict...
[gunfire]
...and of the horror that human beings can inflict on their fellow man.