True Evil: Making of a Nazi

A profile of Josef Goebbels, the failed academic who channelled his resentment into a hatred of Jewish people, and enthusiastically led the Nazi campaign of terror.

Of all the leading Nazis in the series, Von Braun is by far the most fortunate, rewarded with a new life and fame in the United States. For one simple reason. He knew how to build rockets. Von Braun's story is similar to that of passionate young scientists who will do anything to pursue their vision. His ultimate dream is space travel, but to get there he will cooperate fully and enthusiastically with the Nazis, even becoming an SS officer, and working directly to Heinrich Himmler.

Himmler, one of the most evil men in human history, begins as a mild-mannered bookish intellectual, who loves tradition and country pursuits and nature. He will become one of the most terrifying champions of the Third Reich, a monster even by Nazi standards. Himmler will help to define Nazi ideology. His transformation into a Nazi monster is the story of the total collapse of morality and civilisation in Germany.

Speer is the Nazi leader who escaped the noose and spent the rest of his life trading off his Nazi celebrity. He was the architect who ‘designed' and ‘branded' the Nazis. He will also murder millions of worker slaves as head of the Nazi arms industry. At Nuremberg, he will lie, and deny all knowledge of the holocaust.

The capture of Adolf Eichmann by Mossad in Argentina is one of the most dramatic of all Nazi hunting stories. His trial in Israel revealed to the world the workings behind the holocaust. Eichmann himself described and how and why so many German public officials were so complicit with the cries of the Nazis. The most terrible crimes in history were committed, not by a few crazed serial killers, but by legions of government officials. The men behind the holocaust were civil servants who were drawn from the brightest university graduates, whose jobs were famously secure and come with generous pensions.

Hermann Goering‘s story is that of Germany's military aristocratic elite, who turn to the Nazis for salvation. The status and fortunes of Germany's aristocracy are based on land, but by the early decades of the 20th Century, a new Germany is emerging … an industrial and commercial Germany, in which the old nobility struggle to find a role and see their incomes decline. Goering's family is part of Germany's old Imperial elite.