Hitler: A Profile

How did Hitler's mother's death and his artistic dreams form his character? Follow his early life, and how his vague political ideas formed themselves into a doctrine of hate.

An investigation into the way Adolf Hitler created a cult of personality around himself in 1930s Germany. His impassioned speeches mesmerised and wooed a people who had suffered in the 1920s after the First World War. This film contains segments of his original speeches, and looks at the Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls movements, plus the orchestration of massive staged events like the Nuremburg Rallies.

This episode looks at the slide to war under Hitler, and the way he tried to force his European neighbours into armed conflict. He started by ignoring the Treaty of Versailles and rearming his country, realising at the time that Britain and France would do nothing to penalise him. He moved on to re-occupy the Rhineland, annex Austria to make it part of a bigger Germany, and then lay claim to the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. All of these provocative gestures met with no resistance, so he proceeded to invade Czechoslovakia before turning his focus on Poland - but this time the allies had had time to rearm.

"The Dictator" examines the conditions under which Hitler's seeds were able to bear fruit. This episode includes rare extracts from Hitler's speeches and film footage from German and international archives to draw a richly facetted and penetrating portrait of the dictator. Statements by prominent and competent contemporary witnesses of events, who experienced Hitler's rule for themselves, convey an impression of the "climate of fear" in Hitler's Reich. On the basis of the latest findings, this documentation analyses how a whole nation submitted almost completely to the diktat of a madman.

Newsreel and eyewitness accounts of Hitler's military strategy, revealing that the self-appointed commander-in-chief was so anxious to retain centralised power he created a war council best described as inept. More significantly, he also had an indecisive nature which led to a series of tactical blunders - notably the failure to stop the Allied retreat at Dunkirk, and the invasion of Russia, which left Germany hopelessly overstretched fighting on two fronts.

A look at the horrific policies that Hitler made flesh after his rise to the level of Fuehrer in Germany. His ideas had been formed years before when he was an alienated, penniless youth in Austria reading obscure right-wing philosophers who preached Aryan supremacy. Hitler started his cleansing on the mentally ill in his own country until the Church objected - an objection that was particularly muted when he turned his attention to the Jews. The episode also reveals that, as his power began to slip away in 1945, he issued the infamous 'Nero Order', dictating that everything in Germany was to be destroyed.