[ Projector running ] ♪♪ -Adolf Hitler.

-He is the architect of one of the greatest disasters the world has ever seen.

-The most photographed leader of the early 20th century.

-He spend hours in front of a mirror practicing different poses.

Every photo is a performance.

-Hitler was photographed from boyhood... to the Blitzkrieg... -He wants to be at the front.

He wants to share the excitement.

He wants to smell the cordite.

-...to the bunker.

These images reveal the secrets of Hitler's inner life and the people he led.

-Hitler comes in, and he tells you, "You are important."

He tells you he has a plan, and he tells you he knows what's gone wrong and he can fix it.

-Featuring rarely seen and newly digitized images, this is the story of the rise and fall of Adolf Hitler -- picture by picture, frame by frame.

-I think Hitler created an image of political celebrity that never existed before.

The manipulation of media, the presentation of himself.

You can draw a line from that to what film and rock stars are doing today.

[ Camera shutter clicking ] ♪♪ ♪♪ -Throughout his political career, Adolf Hitler presented himself as a good German.

He claimed that, unlike two-faced establishment politicians, what you saw was what you got.

That was far from the truth.

-It's very fashionable for politicians today to somehow use parts of their private life and their personality to sort of sell themselves on the public/political stage.

For Hitler, of course, this is a problematic card to play because his private life is anything but normal.

-That private life revolved around two great secret loves, two young women whose lives would end in tragedy.

♪♪ In Munich in the late 1920s, Adolf Hitler's official photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, took a series of pictures of a teenager named Geli Raubal.

-She was very outgoing, talkative.

She loved her life.

She wanted to be a musician, a singer.

-Geli was Adolf Hitler's niece, the daughter of his half-sister Angela.

Geli's father had died when she was young, so Hitler was made her legal guardian.

In 1927, he suggested Geli move out of her mother's house and come to Munich to study.

Two years later, Geli moved into his large apartment on Prinzregentenplatz in the city center.

She called him "Uncle Alf."

-She was only 19 years old, and he was already 38, an old bachelor.

He took her everywhere -- to party meetings, to the restaurant, to the opera.

-Hoffmann observes that under Geli's influence, Hitler's social life becomes much more active.

You know, they're like a normal couple.

And Hoffmann also notes that actually Hitler delighted in taking her for a drive, going for picnics in beauty spots in the woods.

So what you've got here is, on one level, it seems like a perfectly sweet relationship.

♪♪ -By 1929, the year Geli moved into his apartment, Hitler had been leader of the Nazi Party for eight years.

He kept his private life strictly private.

The outside world knew very little of Geli.

They lived intimately, in his apartment.

-For a long time, I thought that they had no sexual relationship at all, that this must have been a myth, a legend.

But then I came across a letter by Ilse Hess, a very close confidant of Hitler.

And she stated, in the 1960s, that she "experienced it all," she said, and that obviously Hitler had a sexual relationship with Geli Raubal.

[ Camera shutter clicking ] -She also appears to have had an affair with Hitler's chauffeur, Emil Maurice, which presumably would have put Hitler's nose out of joint on numerous levels.

But there's certainly conflict between the two.

-She was, for him personally, a weakest link, I would say, because he couldn't control her.

He couldn't control what she would say to others.

He couldn't control this niece.

And there was a constant conflict.

They were fighting a lot.

And she felt imprisoned with him.

♪♪ -On the 18th of September, 1931, Geli shot herself in her room at Prinzregentenplatz.

♪♪ She bled to death.

For Hitler, by now the leader of the second-largest party in the German parliament, Geli's suicide had the potential to wreck his career.

-The left-wing press particularly comes out with all sorts of scurrilous rumors that they're having an affair, that she was pregnant with his child, which is unsubstantiated, but it doesn't stop them from running with the story.

So this is a profound political embarrassment for Hitler.

And it's in 1931, which is a time when he is really the coming man of German politics.

So this is a profoundly dangerous moment for Hitler.

-The Nazi Party claimed Geli's death was an accident whilst playing with her uncle's revolver.

The police launched an investigation.

Hitler was in Nuremberg at the time Geli died.

The police ruled out foul play, so the scandal passed.

♪♪ Hitler turned Geli's room in Munich into a shrine.

On the anniversary of her death, he would place flowers in front of a bust he'd commissioned.

Heinrich Hoffmann said later that had Hitler married Geli, it would have changed the course of history.

-Hoffmann was very suspicious that had Hitler entered into a kind of arena of domestic bliss, he might have been restrained by Geli and actually had he been restrained by, you know, a wife and children and all the kind of normal family things, that actually Hitler would have been far less adventurous as a political figure.

He wouldn't have basically gone to war so much.

And as Hoffmann actually observes, you know, it was these international adventures, as he calls them, that brought him to his ruin.

-[ Speaking German ] -With Geli's death, Hitler and his image makers had learned a lesson.

♪♪ -There has to be a cuddly Hitler, a soft Hitler, because of the questions that have been asked around the death of this young girl, a safe, trustworthy potential leader.

-A version of the informal, private Hitler was deliberately constructed in photo books with such titles as "Youth Around Hitler" and "The Hitler Nobody Knows."

The vast majority of the photographs were taken by Heinrich Hoffmann.

Empty albums could be bought for one reichsmark.

They were then filled with photographs that came free with cigarette packets or bought at corner stores.

-So, this is a publication from 1935.

A cigarette cards album entitled "Adolf Hitler."

The images in here, most of them photographs, were selected by Heinrich Hoffmann.

This particular album belonged to my father, Karl Ruehl, who was born in 1927, who put it together as a Hitler Youth in 1935.

And you can see just how carefully my father then collected and glued in these pictures.

For something geared primarily towards children and youths, the images are very powerful.

♪♪ They were traded in schools much like football cards would be today.

In the 1930s, about a billion of such cards would have been in circulation in Germany and about a million of these albums.

This was clearly a way in which the Nazis were trying to spread, to disseminate a particular image of Hitler.

It's fair to say that my father, who came from a petty bourgeois family, like most of his generation, he fell for the Nazis.

Thankfully, after '45, realized that he had put his faith in a seducer, in a destroyer, in a racist dictator.

-[ Shouting in German ] -The Fuhrer was depicted as a single man, alone, dedicated only to his people.

-I think Hitler found it very important to be publicly perceived as a single man because that gave him a tremendous sense of attraction for German women, and that's documentarily proved.

There are so many love letters from ordinary German women to Hitler through this period.

-This is almost certainly a result in part of the way he had been staged, the image of this bachelor who was all-powerful that made him kind of the most desired bachelor of Germany, if you will.

♪♪ -Face-to-face encounters with Hitler often had a powerful effect.

-One of the key components of Hitler's physical makeup and his image were his eyes.

People would often refer to his eyes.

And I think that on a black-and-white picture, you don't see them, but on a color picture, you do see them.

And people who met Hitler were instantly, you know, kind of entranced or hypnotized by his gaze.

And his gaze had a lot to do with the color of his eyes.

-One of the few color portraits of Hitler was taken by a photographer named Walter Frentz.

He worked with director Leni Riefenstahl on Nazi propaganda films such as "Triumph of the Will."

For his studio work, Frentz sometimes used a camera loved by the advertising industry.

-This is taken with a very, very interesting camera, a Bermpohl camera, which basically is a big wooden camera on a stand.

And it has three color plates within the mahogany camera -- red, blue, and green.

Very complicated.

Someone like me, who's not a great technician, it would have frightened the life out of me to use this camera.

But here you've got three different entries of light onto three different plates, for want of a better word, red, blue, and green, and then go off to a lab to be put back together again.

At the time, it was experimental.

It's how they thought color would be.

What happens now within film, say, Kodachrome, which we've all grown up with in cameras, it's all in the film, but these guys had to put it together in the camera and then reconstruct it.

Most portraits I've seen, head on, he's in control.

This one a little bit more intimate because he's not looking at the camera, but it's more the quality of the color.

One of the really good quality color pictures of him.

This now looks like a contemporary portrait.

I'd have been pleased with this of somebody last week.

♪♪ -Women were drawn to Hitler.

And despite the trauma of the death of his niece, Geli, Hitler still wanted female company.

But any relationship would have to be a secret one.

-In a way, what we're seeing here is something that runs through Hitler's entire life, which is the kind of, I think, need for him for female companionship, maybe not for a sexual relationship or not necessarily even a romantic one, but for female companionship.

-About six months after Geli's death, Hitler turned to a young lab assistant who worked at Heinrich Hoffmann's studio in Munich who he'd first met in October 1929.

20-year-old Eva Braun.

♪♪ Hitler and Eva Braun's relationship began in 1932.

Only a few of his inner circle knew their secret.

Eva's official position was private secretary.

The couple was only ever publicly pictured together once -- a photograph Hoffman took at the 1936 Winter Olympics.

Eva was in the row behind the Fuhrer.

-She's not the first lady of Germany at all, so she's kept very much in the background.

So he made political capital out of presenting himself as a single man.

But at the same time, in his private life, he had Eva Braun at his right arm.

And he wanted that sort of element of domesticity to some extent that she provided.

♪♪ -Hitler's choice of Eva exposed the hypocrisy at the heart of the Nazi leadership.

-The image of the ideal Nazi woman was no alcohol, no cigarettes, no makeup, no French perfume.

And Eva Braun did all this.

She didn't smoke, but she loved makeup.

She had expensive clothes.

She had parties.

So she lived a privileged life, spoiled by Hitler.

She got everything she wanted.

-Eva was a passionate photographer.

She took hundreds of pictures of friends, family, and her boyfriend.

Some even showed the Fuhrer wearing glasses, which the German people never saw.

-Hitler doesn't want any idea of weakness to leak into his corporal image.

And so Hitler curates his photographs and he chooses them.

And he's absolutely ruthless about what he won't allow in the public domain.

No sign of weakness allowed.

♪♪ -Some of Eva's less-private photographs were bought by her boss, Heinrich Hoffmann, to be used by newspapers.

Hitler made sure Eva was given the latest cameras.

-She's using the best technology of the time because she's kind of got access to the best technology because her boyfriend is running the country and her boss is his photographer.

So the technology that she uses is absolutely at the forefront of the technological developments.

-Photographs showing Eva Braun using a 16-millimeter thinner camera survived the war, but at that time, there was no trace of her finished home movies.

There could be a treasure trove of images of Hitler.

In 1972, a filmmaker named Lutz Becker discovered that the films had been found in the last months of the war by American troops and handed over to the U.S. National Archives.

The trail led him to a vault of uncatalogued 16-millimeter film in a hangar outside Washington, D.C. -He starts searching through it, and it's like something out of a movie.

He finds this kind of heap of rusting, discarded old film canisters.

Some of these canisters have got German labels on them.

He opens up the first can, takes out a few frames, and he holds them up to the light.

And who does he see?

None other than Hitler.

These are Eva Braun's home movies, and Becker has found them and he's rescued them from obscurity after decades sitting in this hangar.

-The films revealed Hitler's private world for the first time.

♪♪ Lutz Becker was part of a team making a documentary called "Swastika," explaining Hitler's rise to power.

Eva Braun's home movies were included in the finished film, together with rare Nazi propaganda footage.

The documentary premiered at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival.

One member of the film's team was future Oscar-winning producer David Puttnam.

-I thought, "We're gonna have a press conference after this, and there's gonna be people who are gonna be offended or people that will say, 'Why did you do that?'"

And we basically had our explanation.

What we're trying to suggest is that societies can be wildly misled if you put your faith and your trust in the wrong people.

-Some of the audience at the screening hated seeing a side of Adolf Hitler they'd never seen before.

-The reaction occurred at a moment.

And I think this is very, very, very significant.

It occurred at the moment when Hitler is shaking hands with a group of women, and one little girl starts crying.

And Hitler pats her cheek and then holds her head.

And in that moment, someone in the audience screamed, "Assassin!

Assassin!"

And who knows?

It could have been someone whose life had been wrecked, maybe been a member of the resistance.

Who knows?

Something snapped.

And, weirdly, the purpose of the film was to try to say, "Do you realize that Hitler sold himself as an empathetic, sympathetic, you know, good guy?

You've just fallen absolutely straight into it, in that you've missed the point."

The point is that that audience for that moment in Germany, watching that moment, were absolutely taken in.

To me, to this day, it's an amazing irony that instead of leaning forward and saying, "How clever," people actually couldn't bear it.

♪♪ Now, by this time, cushions have been slung at the screen.

Actually 2/3 of the audience walked out.

And the response was a total misunderstanding of what we were trying to achieve.

Because God knows, if you look at the rest of the film, you can't at the end of the film think, "Oh, well, Hitler was a good thing for Germany."

[ Chuckles ] "That was -- That was a great idea."

I mean, the end of the film, you're looking at a nation destroyed, absolutely destroyed.

But they couldn't wait to get to that point.

-Future screenings of the documentary became impossible.

[ Projector running ] [ Projector slows ] -Distributors pulled out.

[ Laughs ] That's what happened.

We suddenly had a film that no one wanted to distribute.

They didn't want riots in the cinemas.

-And then in France, you had this anti-fascist group actually stealing a print of the film, and they kind of unwound the reels and they wrapped them 'round this monument to the victims of Nazism.

On another occasion, a bomb was actually found in a cinema where "Swastika" was going to be shown, but it failed to go off.

So it attracted, let's say, a lot of negative attention.

-Eva Braun's home movies shocked audiences in the 1970s because they showed Hitler displaying affection.

They also revealed he had a close inner circle of friends.

-The area around Hitler was full of people, full of friends, men and women, who really liked him, who were convinced of his ideas, who supported him, who accompanied him.

But the notion that this man was a loner was very attractive to the German people after 1945.

With this kind of demonizing Hitler, they could easily distance themselves from Hitler, from the Nazi state, and the crimes that were committed by the Nazis.

-These home movies challenge our very idea of who the Fuhrer really was.

-You have to view Hitler as an insecure climber, as an insecure person who needed others.

He needed a circle of people who confirmed his actions, who confirmed him as a leader.

This was very important for Hitler.

The role of the Fuhrer was just a role.

There is a huge difference between the Fuhrer on the stage and the person Hitler in private.

♪♪ -Eva Braun's silent home movies were shot mostly in the mid-1930s at the Berghof, Hitler's mountain retreat at the Obersalzberg in the Bavarian Alps.

-He originally bought it with royalties from his sales of "Mein Kampf" in the late 1920s.

It was initially very small.

It was one of numerous alpine residences up there on the Obersalzberg, and then it was subsequently enlarged to the extent that by the late 1930s, it's a huge complex.

It has its own sort of military installation behind it.

It became very much sort of a second power base really, after Berlin, from the mid-1930s onwards.

-Hitler preferred to govern from the Berghof and meet foreign dignitaries there, such as British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and the Duke of Windsor... before his abdication, King Edward VIII.

The Duchess said later she couldn't take her eyes off Hitler and admired his "great inner force."

Important foreign guests never met Eva Braun.

She wasn't included in official photographs.

But behind the scenes, she was a key figure in Hitler's household.

-She was the princess there.

She decided who got an invitation to private dinners.

They had to tolerate her because no one could dare to challenge her position.

She became more and more important with the years.

She was kind of the center of this inner circle at the Obersalzberg.

♪♪ -Life for Hitler and his entourage at the Berghof in the late 1930s had a regular schedule.

It was dictated by the Fuhrer's daily routine.

-Hitler led always a bohemian lifestyle.

He was not punctual, so he was not a constant hard worker in an office.

-Hitler slept late, sometimes not getting up until noon.

-This meant that any guests who were there weren't allowed to have baths in the morning, should the water in the pipes disturb him.

He took a breakfast of two cups of warm milk, 10 biscuits, and half a bar of chocolate before going into his first meetings in the Great Hall with his advisers and with his collaborators.

-Photographer Walter Frentz took many pictures of Hitler during the Second World War... including at the Berghof.

♪♪ -Here we can see a sense of the scale of the size of the room.

Also, the size of those big picture windows that gave a very scenic view of the Bavarian Alps outside.

Actually in the summer of 1940, quite a high point, not only in his domestic policy, but also his foreign policy.

So he's actually looking quite relaxed, addressing four of his inner circle who are standing, looking attentively at what he's telling them.

♪♪ -Many of Hitler's guests disliked his late routine.

-It was a lot of waiting there and talking at the Obersalzberg.

And you see this on Eva Braun's pictures -- the circle, sitting there, and talking to each other.

Lunch would be quite a simple meal, particularly because Hitler was a vegetarian himself, so he often just had a plate of vegetables.

And he took the opportunity to talk about the benefits of a vegetarian diet to those around him.

-After lunch, Hitler would go for a walk.

In the early years at the Berghof, he would greet the crowds who flocked to the Obersalzberg encouraged by the cult of the Fuhrer.

-Almost in an act of pilgrimage, they would line up outside the fences at the edge of the Obersalzberg estate and hope that Hitler would come down to sort of greet them and say a few words and pat their children and so on.

♪♪ -In the evening, Hitler and his inner circle watched German films and films from abroad, many unreleased.

Hitler loved cartoons and Hollywood adventure films.

He'd make running comments, sometimes walking out if he didn't like the story.

Hitler had his own suite of rooms at the Berghof.

Eva Braun had exclusive access.

-What was special with Eva Braun's room on the Obersalzberg was the connecting door to Hitler's rooms so they could see each other secretly.

There is no proof of what kind of relationship they really had, if this really was a sexual relationship, because their relationship was, I would say, hidden, and they could do whatever they wanted secretly on the Obersalzberg.

-Hitler's sexuality is another part of Hitler's private world that has long been discussed and fought over by historians and indeed even psychoanalysts.

I think that he certainly had problems forming relationships.

And I think it's likely to say he had problems with sexual intimacy.

-In 2010, an old medical report from the 1920s surfaced that offered a vital clue to Hitler's sex life.

After being found guilty of treason following an attempted coup known as the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich in 1923, Hitler was examined by a doctor at Landsberg Prison.

The medical report said that Hitler had a birth defect -- an undescended right testicle.

This may have affected Hitler's attitude to sex.

-The point here is not just whether or not he could physically have that kind of relationship, but also how he thought about himself and what he would have seen as his imperfections.

That is also borne out by the fact that Hitler never really wanted to undress, not even kind of in front of his physician or in private.

Even with Eva Braun, there are all these images where Eva Braun is wearing a bathing suit, but Hitler is still in a suit.

It's perfectly plausible to argue that he thought of himself that he wasn't quite normal.

♪♪ -News about Hitler's secret medical condition somehow made it to Britain.

It inspired a bawdy song about Hitler having just one ball, which was first sung by British soldiers in 1939.

[ Men whistling "Colonel Bogey March" ] -One possibility is, it's absolutely coincidental that whoever created the song thought that he was just making things up, but it is equally plausible and maybe even more likely that British intelligence had learned from someone close to the Nazi leadership that Hitler only had one testicle.

This would not have been a widely known medical fact, but it certainly would have been in his prison file.

That file was, in fact, seen by people who later shared information with intelligence.

It seems that the song is part of information warfare, where British propaganda deliberately leaked confidential information that they had received through intelligence.

[ Men whistling "Colonel Bogey March" ] ♪♪ -In 1936, 47-year-old Hitler became increasingly obsessed with his health.

He started to have frequent stomach cramps and developed eczema on both legs.

His official photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, introduced Hitler to his own doctor, Theodor Morell.

-Dr. Theodor Morell is this both fascinating and repugnant figure.

He's often forgotten today, but actually he's at the heart of a whole kind of Third Reich soap opera, if you like.

He was this sort of corpulent, sweaty, physically really unprepossessing individual who also smelt really badly of body odor.

Eventually, he ends up striking gold by actually having a man he would always call "Patient A" as one of his patients, and, of course, "Patient A" was none other than Adolf Hitler.

♪♪ -As Hitler avoided medical examinations, he liked Morell's preferred healing methods of pills and injections.

-You name it, Dr. Morell prescribed it to Hitler.

You know, he had his own sort of almost proprietary vitamin drugs that he would give Hitler, which almost certainly did no good at all.

♪♪ He gave him experimental forms of penicillin.

He gave him effectively what we would today call speed.

He would prescribe all sorts of drugs for all sorts of ailments that either Hitler may have had or Hitler may not have had... and created new dependencies that you then needed other drugs to deal with the effects of the drugs you prescribed.

-Even in official photos, Hitler looked increasingly frail.

-So, what you're ending up, by the mid-1940s, there's no other word.

Hitler under Morell's care became a junkie.

♪♪ -Eva Braun's home movies offer an insight into Adolf Hitler's private world and the people he saw as friends.

-What we see in these private films is people having fun.

They're having the time of their life, and we would not waste one single second to watch these films if it wasn't about those people we see in there.

We see just normal people making normal things, and it shows us that we are not talking about monsters, even if what they were doing is monstrous.

But these were very well-educated people who know how to dress, know how to eat cake, how to make coffee and enjoy their life.

At the same times, they were going after the Jews.

And this makes it so frightening.

-Many of Hitler's associates who Eva Braun filmed relaxing at the Berghof were responsible for unspeakable crimes.

♪♪ -Heinrich Himmler is the individual most closely associated with the Nazi Holocaust.

He was the leader of the SS, the Schutzstaffel.

The SS were responsible for running the labor and extermination camps.

Himmler also oversaw the creation of the so-called Einsatzgruppen, the mobile death squads, who were responsible for about a third of the murders that constituted the Holocaust, so this operated well beyond the camp.

In these two roles, Himmler essentially oversees the murder of over 6 million people.

♪♪ -Martin Bormann coordinated the building of the Berghof and worked as Hitler's private secretary.

-Now, that doesn't sound very important, but it is crucial in a regime where there are so many competing voices.

So access to the Fuhrer has huge influences on policy, who gets to make policy.

So Bormann's channeling who got to speak to Hitler and who didn't crucially shaped policy in the Third Reich.

-Hitler relied on him because Bormann was a hard worker.

And when Hitler said something -- "Oh, I would like to have this and that" -- Bormann was the one who wrote it down.

He made it an order of the Fuhrer.

So Bormann became very powerful.

♪♪ -Heydrich was the chief of the Reich Security Main Office, so basically overseeing policing and security operations in Nazi Germany that included his directing the infamous Gestapo.

Heydrich also chaired the Wannsee Conference in 1942, where the so-called "Final Solution" was decided upon.

A number of plans had been discussed that was about the deportation and the removal of the Jewish populations, and really it's at the Wannsee Conference where the decision is made that only the mass murder of every single Jew Nazi Germany can bring under its control is the "solution" to that problem.

♪♪ -Karl Brandt worked alongside Theodor Morell as Hitler's personal doctor.

Fearing serious injury after an assassination attempt, Hitler took Brandt with him on every journey at home and abroad.

-Brandt was the kind of man Hitler liked.

He looked like the perfect Nazi.

With the beginning of the war, Brandt more and more became a special envoy for Hitler.

And when Hitler ordered the killing of disabled and sick people -- adults and children -- Brandt himself was the one who did the first lethal injection.

♪♪ ♪♪ -Of all Hitler's inner circle, the closest to the Fuhrer was Nazi architect Albert Speer.

-After the war, he claimed to be a technocrat, not to have believed in anything and not to have known anything, but throughout his career, he was massively involved in the persecution of the Jews.

He started as an architect.

He also was in charge of building the Reich Chancellery.

He also helped to stage the party rallies.

He also was involved in building the Olympiastadion.

♪♪ -Hitler perceived himself as an architect, so Speer was kind of his alter ego.

He saw in Speer himself, and these two men were very close.

And at the Berghof, he spent hours, Hitler, with Speer, looking at models, talking about architecture.

-He had huge plans both in Berlin, which he wanted to rechristen "Germania."

He had huge plans for his hometown of Linz.

And he would dream and he would envisage what they would look like.

-Film producer David Puttnam met Albert Speer in the early 1970s.

-He said that when he was designing and commanding the new Berlin, it was a vast model they created in the basement of the Chancellery.

And he said, "I used to sleep there.

I had a camp bed there."

He said, "And I woke up, and there was someone in the room."

He said, "I could see a flashlight."

It was Hitler in his dressing gown, and he was leaning down with a torch, looking down the streets -- this street and then that street.

-Speer took the opportunity to tell Hitler about all the equipment and materials he needed to be able to finish the new Berlin.

-Hitler said, "Speer, you don't get it."

He said, "Look."

"Look," he said.

"That's just about cement and building and...

This is the dream."

He said, "This is good enough for me."

And he said, "What I realized was that, in a sense, he was off with the fairies.

He wasn't interested in the issues of how to build a new city.

It was how to plan a new city, is what interested him.

-Architecture was the closest Hitler came to a hobby.

Thanks to the photographs of Heinrich Hoffmann, as far as the world was concerned, the Fuhrer spent his free time getting close to nature.

In 1933, the year Hitler became chancellor, he was Time magazine's Man of the Year.

The cover reflects Hitler's love of the outdoors.

-It's not a very good painting, to be honest, but it's certainly sort of depicting a kind of friendliness about him.

This is meant to be the picture of a nice man at rest in his garden.

And look.

There's a faithful dog in the background.

Everything about this image is radiating a kind of simplicity, a kind of homeliness, a kind of decency, despite the uniform.

He's on what looks like some sort of nice garden chair.

What message is that sending out?

It's your regular guy, you know, at the weekend, relaxing.

So it's a kind of weird blend of the dictatorial and the very homely.

[ Chuckles ] -Hitler's choice of a mountain retreat and the length of time he spent there shows that his public love for nature was genuine.

That passion had a political message.

-Much of Nazi ideology was not new.

It was a kind of perversion and extreme radicalization of many things that were already there in German culture.

And part of this cultural canon, if you like, is the supposed German ability to immerse oneself in nature and draw a kind of spiritual strength from communing with nature.

So we see this in Hitler's performances for the camera, but this is also something that's taken up by millions of Germans who are in this period running around with their own cameras, making their own photo albums all the way through the Third Reich.

Millions of albums that depict the Sunday outing, the holiday, and always very closely modeled on what Hitler's doing.

It was that same ability to commune with nature.

♪♪ -The Holocaust Museum in Washington has in their collection a series of photographs taken by Karl Hoecker, second-in-command at the Auschwitz extermination camp in occupied Poland.

♪♪ -I mean, they're astounding because we don't have that many photographs taken at Auschwitz.

-The album includes a day trip on July 22, 1944, to the Solahutte, a forest resort in the heart of nature for Auschwitz guards to reward them for their so-called "hard work."

-It was built in the style of a Black Forest chalet, and this in itself is really significant.

It conjures up an image of the ideal, typical German forested landscape with its characteristic vernacular architecture that kind of prefigured the ideal world that the Nazis were trying to build in the East.

[ Camera shutter clicking ] -Karl Hoecker took pictures of a group of SS female auxiliaries who worked as communications specialists.

These women believed that, as good Nazis, they were entitled to enjoy nature.

They were merely copying the Fuhrer.

-So we see SS staff from the Auschwitz camp system relaxing on their time off, sometimes joined by family members, in deck chairs, enjoying the sunshine, performing, having a good time.

And one of the spectacles that's put on is a blueberry-eating competition.

So blueberries are picked in the forest around the Solahutte, and then everybody is sitting on the terrace, and they're having competition about who can finish the bowl of blueberries first.

-One of the women is pretending to cry with her bowl turned upside down, and she's crying because she's got no more blueberries left, which, of course, makes it even more heinous that it's this sort of playacting and performing.

You know, blueberries were unimaginable to the people who were imprisoned and being put into gas chambers.

♪♪ -The eerie subtext of all of this is, this is 1944 when the extermination camp at Auschwitz is running at maximum capacity, when much of the area around Auschwitz is filled with a thin coating of white dust which comes out of the crematoria -- the human remains.

They're staging their blueberry-eating competitions in the middle of that.

The smell also must have been quite unbearable.

It's that ostentatious, aggressive fun in spite of it all, because of it all, because of the violence.

This is not an innocent retreat.

This is literally in the shadow of the greatest genocide of human history.

♪♪ -In January 1945, only six months after these Auschwitz photographs were taken, the camp was liberated.

Over 1 million men, women, and children had died in Auschwitz.

♪♪ In April, Hitler's mountain retreat, the Berghof, was destroyed by the Allies.

The terraces where Eva Braun filmed were wrecked.

The Great Hall became a popular location for American troops to take souvenir photos.

♪♪ In the previous six years, a different side of Adolf Hitler had been shown to the world -- the fanatical warlord.

♪♪ -He himself had gone through this sort of baptism of fire during the First World War, and he saw it as something that had strengthened him, that it had sort of given him his mission in life.

And I think he saw the same thing for the German people.

War was something that would harden them, that would make them the new Germany that would be strong and lead Europe.

It was Germany's baptism of fire.

-He sees himself as a master tactician.

He's simply not.

He was completely deluded.

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