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Landsberg Prison, Bavaria. April 2nd, 1924. At 6am, the warder unlocks the door to cell number 7. Prisoner 45 stirs, rises, and steps to the window. In the outside world, dawn has already broken on what looks set to be a delightful spring day. The soft sun dapples the trees. It glints on the snaking river Lech.
Such a sight would seem a slap in the face to anyone serving a long stretch in jail, a reminder of what they're missing, in stark contrast to the grim life within these walls. But this inmate, this April morning, has particular resonance. It marks day one of a five-year sentence. Prisoner 45 attends to his ablutions. He spends an inordinate, obsessive amount of time on his oral hygiene, brushing his teeth, gargling, rinsing and repeating.
As an infantryman on the Western Front, he was the victim of a poison gas attack. It's said he can never rid himself of the acrid taste. For all his travails, prisoner 45 knows he is actually rather lucky. Despite how it looks, this is not a bad day at all. Charged with high treason after a failed attempt to instigate a Nazi uprising, an overthrow of the German state, he should have been facing a firing squad. At the very least, spending the rest of his life behind bars.
His impassioned performance at his trial, however, has won him many admirers. He has friends in the highest of places, including, evidently, the judiciary. When it came to sentencing, he got off incredibly lightly. Prisoner 45 is one Adolf Hitler. And this is Real Dictators. The popular image of Hitler's prison term is of him wallowing in a dark, dank cell,
But as we know already from the details of his jail, this was far from the case. Landsberg Prison, or rather Landsberg Fortress as it is known, is an architectural gem. In the heart of the baroque old town, nestled in a river valley, you'd be hard pushed to find a more idyllic setting. A view Hitler can observe from his comfortable top floor room, with its big double windows. Professor Claudia Kuhns.
It was a lovely fortress in a nearby Bavarian city. It was the kind of place where unruly sons of wealthy noblemen were sent when they had misbehaved in some way or other. So Hitler's jail service was actually quite pleasant. Anybody who wanted could come during visitor hours, especially his lady followers brought him cakes, cookies, and pastries. He had time to sit around with the other Nazis who were all in prison, and it was quite pleasant. Hitler makes himself at home.
He decorates his room. He puts up a swastika. He hangs laurel leaves. His shelves bulge with books. In appearance, it's not that different to a student hall of residence, to an undergraduate dorm room, apart from the swastika. Indeed, Hitler will later declare that Landsberg was his university,
There's even an initiation ritual in which Hitler gamely takes part, dressing up in fake robes, acting out a comedy version of the Munich Putsch, as if it weren't farcical enough already. Hitler is the big man on campus. In jail he's treated as a celebrity. Even the guards greet him with an enthusiastic Heil Hitler. New arrivals to the prison are told to report to the Führer without delay. Professor Thomas Weber.
This is almost like a hotel. He can wear his own clothes, he can have his own food being brought in. And particularly as he became so famous through the trial, it is people from all over Germany, including a lot of women who sent him a package full of goodies, of cakes, of other foods, of wine. I mean, Hitler gets so much stuff that he and the people with whom he is incarcerated cannot possibly even consume all this.
Hitler is also surrounded by his, I guess, brothers in arms. Most importantly, his personal secretary, later deputy, Rudolf Hess. There is an entire group of people, of his closest associates, who are all incarcerated together. They spend the meals together, they meet up at nighttime, they sing, they entertain themselves. Of what little duties there are, Hitler is excused.
He has no need to do the physical exercise drill, unless he wants to. There's a gym where they can box, wrestle, use the vaulting horse or parallel bars. Because of his dodgy shoulder, Hitler is often the referee. He prefers instead to take leisurely walks in the fortress gardens, while flunkies do his laundry, tidy his room, polish his big double windows. Sometimes, while out strolling, he can hear his pals singing party songs.
Prisoners from the ordinary criminal section join in. The hills are alive with the sound of Nazi music. I should say that there's still a common misconception about why he ended up in such a comfortable setting. It is true that there was the leniency towards Hitler in terms of the length of the prison, but the setting is a result of the Bavarian Penal Code, where people convicted to high treason actually are not put into prison, but into a fortress.
This really goes back to this kind of medieval idea. If some other aristocrat is trying to overthrow the king, you put him into house arrest, if you will, in some other castle. But here we have this confluence of this kind of idea that this is what you do with people who have done high treason, but then also a genuine outpouring of sympathy, for instance, for the director of the prison who quite likes Adolf. Meanwhile...
As in the lead up to the trial, the flowers continue to arrive, in such quantity that they now have to allocate whole rooms for them. The prison wing has the bouquet of a florist's. Although visiting times are meant to be restricted to six hours a week, Hitler receives visitors for six hours a day, including assorted politicians and dignitaries. Robberneckers throng outside to get a glimpse.
Taking the trip to Landsberg, an hour's drive west of Munich, is like going on a pilgrimage. Devotion to Adolf Hitler feels weirdly like a cult. Maybe it is. During his time in prison, Hitler is inundated with over 300 visitors in total, plus sackfuls of fan mail, especially from those ladies, again, who, on hearing that he has a penchant for poppy seed strudel, an Austrian delicacy, deluge him with pastries.
Putzi Hamstengel, one of Hitler's collaborators, a rare close friend, has avoided a jail term himself. The towering, wealthy businessman visits Landsberg and is shocked by Hitler's bulging waistline. He tells him to cut out the sweets. Not that the Fuhrer's love handles are in any way a turn-off. His female fans continue to flock. There's Maria Reichert, Hitler's Munich landlady, who turns up regularly in the company of Prinz, Hitler's pet Alsatian.
There's Karola Hoffmann, aged 83, my beloved mutterchen, as he calls her, who rolls up every day, does his laundry, and brings him yet more cakes. There's Karin Goering, wife of Hermann, who bends Hitler's ear on how they might drum up some cash. They've since gone broke. Her husband, still on the run, is currently in Venice, hitting up Mussolini for a handout. There's Ilse Prohl, who every Saturday cycles all the way from Munich,
a four-hour round trip, and even smuggles in a camera for Hitler to use. Ilse is actually the fiancé of Rudolf Hess. One day she brings along her mother, who is so smitten with Hitler, sweet-talking her, kissing her hand, that she urges her daughter to ditch the ghastly Hess and take up with nice Mr. Hitler instead.
This is really a fascinating phenomenon, how there was this fascination of a lot of women with Hitler. For Hitler, relationships with women were really, really important, but in ways that are extremely unconventional. We're not talking about sexual attraction, or at least it doesn't seem that way, but more kind of emotional attraction.
So he obviously didn't favor the legal equality of the sexes. But at the same time, Hitler had frequent interactions with women, for instance, with Helena Hammelstengel, the wife of Putzi Hammelstengel, this old woman living just outside of Munich, sometimes called the mother of Hitler.
And now while he is in prison, he also really starts to have these close interactions with Elsa Brückmann. Elsa Brückmann was this really colorful high society woman in Munich of Romanian aristocratic background. They're very close. I mean, she's much, much older. So she again is almost a mother figure.
So Hitler doesn't seem to have the same kind of attraction to women as most men have. In a way, he seems to have been able to relax more with women than with men. We will explore Hitler and his relationships in more detail in the next episode. At 10 o'clock every morning, Hitler holds a conference where he greets his well-wishers and reads out his fan mail. There's one letter he receives from a philology student, someone who's just completed his PhD.
"God has given you a tongue," this fanboy tells Hitler, "with which to express our sufferings." His name is Joseph Goebbels, more from him later. At mealtimes the common room is commandeered. Hitler sits at the head of the table beneath a swastika banner, where he holds his quite literally captive audience spellbound, regaling them with his thoughts on autobahns and motorcars and futuristic cities built on the rubble of annexed Slavic lands.
For someone as tightly wound as Hitler, relaxation does not come easy. He cuts an awkward figure in his casual clothing. Stiff Bavarian lederhosen, worn with a shirt and tie underneath and a coarse peasant jacket. But that's because he's a man on a mission. These tributes, this adulation, these cakes, it's all well and good, very flattering, but it serves no purpose in the advancement of National Socialism.
Hitler has little time for indolence, for the card games, for the banter, and certainly not of an evening for the cigars and wine. Time is a precious commodity. It's not his or theirs to waste. He weighs up the situation. Violent revolution has proven incredibly difficult to achieve. It requires a huge coordinated commitment to arms.
At the beer hall in Munich, where they'd attempted to ignite their revolt, they'd behaved like amateurs. And he was let down by his lieutenants. In court, in the press, he clearly evoked sympathy. He was an everyman, a victim. In that civilian suit, no uniform, no armband, he attained a new respectability. He was a politician. That is the way forward, he determines.
Power must be attained by legal means, or at least within a facade of legality. But then the crushing thought: in all likelihood, his Nazi Party will now be banned. Even on release, whenever that may be, Hitler will almost certainly have a gagging order slapped upon him. Preventing him from speaking in public, he needs to sustain the momentum. To keep his philosophy fresh in the public consciousness, to communicate his ideas, he will write a book.
Hitler's already a prolific scribe. He's been a furious pamphleteer, a copywriter, a propagandist. He's the current owner of the Nazi newspaper, the Volkische Beobachter, the People's Observer, founded by his late pal Dietrich Eckart. The paper, increasingly influential and with rapidly rising sales, has been unstinting in its worship of all things Adolf. If you remember, Hitler has written a book before,
a minor one, under an aristocratic pseudonym. Titled Adolf Hitler, His Life and Speeches, it was a gushing hagiography, in which he himself was the subject of his own adoration. This new effort, though, this will be his blockbuster. With Max Amann, the Nazi Party publisher, locked up with him, Hitler has wise counsel to hand. Amann uses his outside connections to start striking up publishing deals,
Of course, they'll need a title, says a man. You know, for the sales pitch. Hitler declares his forthcoming work to be called, rather loftily, four and a half years of struggle against lies, stupidity, and cowardice. A man suggests they settle on something a little snappier. How about just, my struggle, mein Kampf?
So Hitler understood at that point he needed to reform the party so it would become a regular, normal party. It meant that Hitler had to create his own document, his own sort of equivalent of Marx's Das Kapital. And when he was in jail, he dictated Mein Kampf. And that became the party orthodoxy.
And I think there are really two reasons why he is writing Mein Kampf. He is writing it for others, and he's writing it for himself. Bear in mind that once Hitler has his sentence, he knows that he won't be in prison forever, but his expectation still is, once he is out, he will still not be allowed to do public speaking.
The expectation still is his political life as an orator is kind of over, or at least it won't resume for quite some time. So therefore, he moves towards being not kind of an orator, but to being a writer, which is something he always wanted to be anyway. Even at a time when Hitler hadn't really written anything of substance yet, when he had to fill in forms or he had to write a CV, he frequently had referred to himself as Schriftsteller, as a writer,
And so, that July, Hitler gets to work. Though Hitler is familiar with the authorly process, he's far too important these days to sit and bash away at a typewriter. That task can be left to minions. Hitler's preferred method is to pace up and down, pontificating. He finds a couple of willing, dutiful secretaries. First, his chief flunky, Emil Maurice, a man ironically of concealed Jewish ancestry. Then, most significantly,
Rudolf Hess, a war veteran like Hitler. Hess has even obtained a university degree, a rare thing for a high up Nazi, though with his bulging forehead and monobrow, he doesn't always come over as the sharpest knife in the drawer. Hess has an obsession with astrology, ghosts, telepathy, and mesmerism. He sleeps with magnets dangling over his bed. His devotion to more earthly matters is, unfortunately, far less thorough.
Hess sums up everything that was farcical about the Beer Hall Putsch. Indeed, his part in the would-be revolution was scarcely believable. Having abducted several Munich dignitaries, Hess transported them to a Nazi safe house 30 miles away, deep in the countryside. When he left the room to make a telephone call, however, they all escaped, taking Hess' truck and its driver with them. Stuck out in the sticks, Hess managed to contact the faithful Ilse Prul.
On her trusty bicycle, she had pedaled furiously through the snow to rescue her fiancé. They'd taken turns cycling and walking all the way back to Munich, during which time Ilse fell ill, throwing a spanner in the works of whatever half-baked plan might have been in the oven. Hess eventually escaped to Austria, like several of the others, before returning to Germany to turn himself in. No matter, Rudolf Hess is devoted to Hitler.
even if his boss has been schmoozing his prospective mother-in-law. He's more than happy to sit at the feet of his master, hanging on his every word. "The time in prison is a period," reflects Hitler later, "that gave me a chance to obtain clarity on certain concepts I'd previously understood only instinctively." The bookshelves in Hitler's room are, by now, a large collection of writings on philosophy, geopolitics, religion, German mysticism, eugenics,
There are works by Nietzsche, Goethe, Schopenhauer, Charles Darwin, Martin Luther, even Karl Marx. And Hitler has devoured them all. Karl Haushofer, a Nazi general turned academic is a frequent visitor to Landsberg, spurring Hitler on. Haushofer was Hesse's old geopolitics professor at Munich University. He's a member of the occultist Thule Society. He's big on the issue of racial purity.
He was also, during his military days, an attache to the Imperial Japanese Army. He not only speaks Japanese fluently, but also has ideas about a commonality of purpose between the two peoples. Professor Nicholas O'Shaughnessy
Hitler had probably read more books than any leader in history. I mean, his library was vast and it was, of course, captured by the Americans and so forth, all recorded. A lot of it, I think, is in the Library of Congress. Point is, though, it was reading according to a rigid ideological schemata. So the readings were not broad. They were shriveled, narrow, and mean-spirited.
So that you had, obviously, texts like the great myths about Jewish people, about the international Jewish conspiracy, and everything else sourced from the far right. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, for example. But you have no breadth. You have in economics, philosophy, politics, history, or anything else, you have no breadth at all.
And so we know a lot about the mind of Hitler. He could talk very brilliantly, in fact, ranging across the centuries, down the epochs, full of ideas, full of interesting insights.
but also full of completely confected myths. So he speaks about Christianity. He says Jesus Christ is a very great man and the first anti-Semite, and that the religion of Christianity he founded was Judaized by Saul of Tarsus.
who turned it into a branch of Judaism. And then he says that Jesus was probably the son of a Gallic Roman legionnaire who was based in Judea. And this is what he sounded like. Some of it was quite remarkably insightful and full of facts and figures and insights from history. But quite a lot of it was so loopy that you'd want a stiff brandy to kind of get over it.
Hitler's writings, in some instances heavily plagiarized, are synthesized, fused with his own ideas. His thoughts flow thick and fast in a stream of consciousness babble. Poor Hess is hard pressed to keep up, rattling away at the keys into the early hours. Hitler is quite the dictator. Hitler is a devotee of Houston Stuart Chamberlain.
a British-born philosopher, now a naturalized German, and a son-in-law of Hitler's favorite composer, Wagner. Another card carrying antisemite, Chamberlain supports the world ice theory, a cosmological proposition in which the planets of the solar system are but giant circling blocks of ice. Nothing is ruled out in Hitler's new world order, which will be constructed from the Earth to the stars.
The main thrust of Mein Kampf is unsurprising. There is the rage against the Treaty of Versailles and a vowed retribution for its injustices. There is belief in a manifest destiny and Germany's inherent superiority as a culture. Almighty God, Hitler writes, "Bless our arms when the hour comes." As an extension, there's a vaunting of fetishization of the Aryan race and the purity of the Teutonic peoples.
There is no room in Hitler's universe for their enemies, the Slavs and especially the Jews, whom Hitler labels "parasites", the "masters of lies", cold-blooded and shameless. To his mind, they must be eradicated like tuberculosis. The Germanic people, a single organic entity, are being smothered by these subhumans, he claims.
The German bloodstream infected as if by a gangrenous ulcer. Only here, in Mein Kampf, Hitler sets out for the first time how he's going to deal with these issues. To restore German greatness and smite those who might stand in his way. And these directives must come from the top. Democracy is a monstrosity born of filth and fire, he proclaims. Something rather at odds with his newly professed legitimacy.
If anyone later were under any misapprehension about Hitler, then they did not delve into Mein Kampf. It's virtually a manifester, a blueprint, divesting Jews of their rights, liberating the Germans living under foreign rule, uniting them as one folk, one volk, then expanding that volk eastwards into a God-given living space. He deploys a phrase of Haushofer's here, "Lebensraum".
This new Reich will "spring from the tears of war. There will come inevitable conflict with the Soviet Union, as well as revenge in the West against the implacable enemy, France." Hitler is conciliatory towards Great Britain and its empire, hoping for peaceful coexistence. But he's not so coy about the next steps: ripping up Versailles, reversing disarmament, rebuilding Germany's military forces.
There are peculiar meditations thrown in for good measure on puberty, copulation, syphilis, perversion, more syphilis, decadent art, bad fashion, syphilis again. But it's all there, in black and white, a hygienic universe of rulers and ruled, of masters and slaves. As passages are read out daily to his eager entourage, there are rounds of spontaneous applause and nods of approval at these evident pearls of wisdom.
There are even musings on the cultivation of flowers. In his dying days, his old pal Dietrich Eckart had voiced concerns about Hitler's mounting delusions of grandeur, his messiah complex. Lord knows what he'd have thought now. Max Amann, meanwhile, winces. He's been cutting deals in the publishing business based on a rip-roaring rags-to-riches tale. Triumph over tragedy. One man's attempt to seize power in Munich of the trial. But this...
Warnings of Aryan damsels being molested by "satanically glaring Jewish youths" - even in 1920s Germany this is still pretty niche material. And the prose? Hardly purple. Hitler writes exclusively in nouns. It takes three and a half months for Hitler to finish Mein Kampf. Or rather, to finish the first volume, subtitled "A Reckoning".
Mein Kampf is an attempt to prolong his 15 minutes of fame, if you will. And so he's preaching there to the converted. He's telling a political story through his life. He's using the convention of a Bildungsroman, which at that time would have been something that would be immediately recognizable to kind of anyone in Germany.
A Bildungsroman is the kind of the novel of the formation of a young hero. It tends to be this story of someone through hardship experienced, they become the men that they are. There's this kind of longing for a totally new kind of political leader coming out of nowhere who had extraordinary talents. And Hitler really plays into this longing for genius, for someone who's really coming out of nowhere. And he's therefore telling this kind of story, almost like a fairy tale.
No sooner has Hess struck the end upon the final page, than there is further good news. Word is coming in of parole. On the outside, since the verdict, Hitler's supporters have been petitioning hard for his release. In September, the prison governor Otto Leibold even submitted an enthusiastic report. Hitler shows himself to be a man of order, of discipline, not only with regard to his own person, but also to his fellow internees.
Hitler, he adds, is a model inmate. There is opposition. The Munich police board are less than enthused about the prospect of an armed revolutionary, backed by a private army, set loose again upon the city streets. A free Hitler would, in their opinion, constitute a constant danger for the internal and external security of the state. On October 6th, the Bavarian Supreme Court initially rejects the request to release Hitler.
But, assured that the Nazi leader would be banned from public speaking and the Nazi party outlawed, they eventually relent. On December 19th, parole is granted. The next day, a telegram is issued to the governor of Landsberg, informing him of the decision. Hitler can be freed. At 12:15 pm on the afternoon of December 20th, 1924, with Christmas decorations up again, Hitler is officially at liberty.
The state prosecutor's office is apoplectic. Of an already lenient five-year sentence, Hitler has nearly four of those years yet to serve. From sentencing to release, this man accused of high treason, a capital offense, has served just 264 days. Quite comfortable days at that. There are noises made again about getting him deported, but with the not insignificant detail that he's not a German citizen. Though Hitler has already got the wheels in motion on that one.
As Hitler's lackeys pack up their master's things, the prison staff gather to bid him an emotional farewell. Governor Leibold has tears in his eyes. Unlike the hullabaloo surrounding his incarceration, Hitler's release is a low-key affair, in part down to its immediacy. No crowds this time, no press. Waiting outside by the Mercedes sent to pick him up is a Nazi photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann. Hitler poses stridently in the winter chill for the compulsory propaganda snap.
though the setting is unimpressive. So they relocate to a nearby Gothic arch, restaging the walk to freedom in front of this suitably Germanic backdrop. A couple of hours later, back in Munich, Hitler is walking through the door of his modest two-room apartment on the top floor of 41 Tierstrasse. There are friends waiting, including Julius Streicher and Hermann Hesse, editor of the Beobachter. There are yet more flowers.
Prince, the Alsatian is so excited to see his master he bounds up and nearly knocks him over. For Hitler though, after the putsch, the trial, prison, after pouring his heart and soul into Mein Kampf, it all feels somewhat deflating, anticlimactic. In jail he existed in a Nazi echo chamber. He had no estimation of the outside world. But here, everyday life has been carrying on. The economy is recovering, it seems.
There's more work available. Under an American financial relief package, the Doors Plan, millions of US dollars are now stimulating Germany's financial sector. In international affairs, he learns, the new foreign minister, Gustav Stresemann, has engineered a reconciliation with France. Stresemann has been engaging enthusiastically in disarmament talks, and has also advanced Germany's membership of the League of Nations, the forerunner of the UN.
Germany has come in from the cold. This isn't the turbulent fatherland that Hitler left behind, but an evolving, stable nation. For a man who thrives on chaos, this is terrible news. Since being banned, the Nazis have had to contest the never-ending rounds of elections under the umbrella of the National Socialist Freedom Movement. They've been under the stewardship, God forbid, of General Ludendorff. Him again.
There are cracks in the ranks, divisions over policy. National socialism, in whatever guise, has been hemorrhaging votes left, right and centre. And as for Mein Kampf, it won't, Hitler learns, come out until next summer. Let's hop back to Mein Kampf for a minute, for it will, despite how it may seem at this very moment, become a literary phenomenon. Under a deal with a Nazi publishing house, the book will be released on July 18th, 1925.
The response to Hitler, the author, is at first underwhelming, dismissed as barely readable and priced prohibitively highly. Mein Kampf sells probably fewer than 12,000 copies. A second volume will be written over the coming months, obsessing over Hitler's worldview. It outlines the Nazi political program and elaborates upon plans for German expansion in the East. Mein Kampf, the sequel,
will make its way onto the bookshelves in December 1926, with the two versions later combined into a single edition. Though even then, the new, fatter, 800-page Mein Kampf omnibus will hardly set the publishing world alight. By contrast, in the year 1933, when Hitler becomes Chancellor, a new, cheap edition of the book will shift 1.5 million copies, available in numerous foreign editions, even in braille.
By 1945, Mein Kampf will have sold 10 million units in Germany alone, a work rivaled only by the Bible, who is the Messiah now. On a royalty of 15%, Mein Kampf will become officially Hitler's principal source of income. He will become the best-selling author in German history, worldwide one of the biggest of the 20th century, and fabulously wealthy with it. Mein Kampf will become an essential addition to every home in the Third Reich.
on display in every hallway, given to newlyweds as a present. Whether anyone actually reads it is another matter. It will prove dangerous not to own a copy. But going into 1925, all that success is a long way off. The putsch, the trial, prison, these have all been invaluable exercises for Hitler personally, all part of the learning curve. The experience has taught him that he needs to up his game if he's serious about a bid for power.
He must present himself as a slick political operator, one who can work the system, not a boorish rabble-rouser. He has also learned that some of his colleagues are dead-weights. There is no doubt too that when the spotlight is on him, Hitler the martyr, Hitler the savior, he has what it takes to be a national and international player. One who can command not just an audience, but a fanatical devotion. One who has sympathizers in the highest corridors of power.
He's no longer the mere drummer as he once styled himself, the one just keeping the beat. But he may well have had his moment in the sun. Hitler realized his strategy was wrong, that he would never be able to stage violent revolution like Mussolini or even like Lenin, like communists did.
that he lived in a democratic system with a well-developed middle class with a very strong constitution and he would have to work within the system to undermine instead of overthrow that system to figure out its weaknesses and to leverage what power he had to destroy the system from within. The Munich Putsch will attain mythical status in Nazi Germany.
Hitler will have the remains of the 16 Nazi fallen dug up and reinterred in an elaborate mausoleum, where a sacred memorial service is conducted every November 9th, the new Nazi Day of Remembrance. A bedraggled swastika banner retrieved from the skirmish, the blood flag is treated as a religious relic. The Munich dead, as Hitler declares, will pass into immortality.
As Hans Frank, Hitler's lawyer, will put it on the stand at Nuremberg shortly before his own execution, Hitler's entire historical life, the substance of his whole personality, was revealed in the course of the putsch. Germany, the world, cannot yet comprehend the scale of the horrors that lie in store. Hitler spends Christmas Eve with the Hanfstengels at their Swiss Munich city residence. They have a new baby, a daughter, Hertha,
whom Hitler delights in cradling while Puzzi plays the piano. Crazy little Egon, now four, tears around the place, working himself up into a Christmas frenzy, thrilled to have his Uncle Dolph back on the scene. As a child, he wouldn't notice it, but Hitler seems unkempt. He can't help but spot the dandruff on his shoulders. He looks out of shape. Hitler knows it, too. He pats his stomach. "He's gonna go easy on the food next year," he tells Puzzi.
In fact, he's going to bin meat altogether, become a vegetarian. And as for the booze, he was never much of a drinker. He'll kick that too. In a quiet moment later, kids asleep, Puzzi in another room, Hitler and Helene sit alone on the sofa. He drops to his knees and lays his head on her lap. She's taken aback, a little embarrassed. A maudlin Hitler confesses that he's lost, all alone.
She asks him why doesn't he find someone, settle down. "I can never marry," he says, "because my life is dedicated to my country." In the next episode of Real Dictators, Adolf Hitler, now at liberty, finds himself and his Nazi party barred from political life. Retreating to the Bavarian Alps, he seeks solace, a new home, and a female companion.
In the mountain air, he plots his comeback as a respectable politician. And when the Wall Street crash prompts the Weimar Republic's economic collapse, Hitler will seize his opportunity. That's next time on Real Dictators.
