Hitler's Gold

Germany. September the 12th, 1919.

At the Sterneckerbrau restaurant

located in the heart of Munich's Old Town,

history is about to be changed by a single man.

He was basically a loser.

I mean, his chosen profession, to be an artist,

it was a failure.

He barely earned a living.

There was nothing that would mark him out for greatness.

For the past few months,

a new political movement known as the German Workers' Party

has been holding regular meetings

at the Leiberzimmer on the first floor.

He had attended a lecture

in which a professor had advocated

a various splitting off from the rest of Germany.

He got up to rebut this professor

and he launched into a tirade.

And when he stopped speaking, he looked around

and he could see people with their mouths hanging open.

That stranger's rant

would impress Anton Drexler,

the founder of the German workers movement,

who would invite him to join the party.

Drexler would later write to a friend.

An absurd little man

has become number seven in our party.

13 years later on January the 30th, 1933,

and that absurd little man would be saluted

and acclaimed by thousands on the packed streets of Berlin

as the new chancellor of Germany.

We read that a funny little man called Hitler

had come into power in Germany.

The Nazi Party became a huge organization,

and when we see the propaganda tactics that they did,

it becomes obvious how much money was needed.

But how was that even possible

when Germany had been on her knees economically

since the end of World War I?

Who paid for the massive propaganda machine

that helped Hitler become a media sensation,

tour the country in a private airplane,

and even build his own private army?

He's backed by these petitions

signed by prominent far-right politicians

and industrialists and bankers.

You've got a lot of powerful people supporting Hitler.

Was Hitler being manipulated

by the shadowy financiers and industrialists

who were funding his irresistible rise to power?

Or was Hitler the one doing the manipulating?

All along when they started to say

that he was a puppet of big business,

Hitler said, "Come and have a look

at the accounts of the Nazi Party,

and you'll see that all of our money

comes from membership fees."

August, 1936.

The height of the Nazis' glory and power.

Hitler was the supreme fuhrer of a resurgent German Reich.

Its growing economy was admired and envied

by leaders from around the world,

who flocked to the epic opening ceremony

of the Berlin Olympics.

Not even the triumphs of America's new track and field star

could spoil Hitler's opportunity

to show off on the world stage.

A few months later, in a note in his diary,

Hitler's propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels

couldn't help but reflect on the meteoric rise of the Nazis

since their chaotic attempt to stage a coup and seize power

in the aborted Munich Beer Hall Putsch of 1923.

How poor we were then.

The fuhrer tells how he wanted to shoot himself once

because the bill debt grew over his head.

Goebbels was writing about a time

when the very idea of Hitler as fuhrer of Germany

would have been laughable.

When the man who would become Germany's supreme leader

was fresh out of prison

for his failed Beer Hall Putsch of 1923,

banned from speaking in public

and struggling to keep his party against internal divisions

and soaring financial debt.

This was the third devastating blow

Hitler had suffered in his life

after losing his beloved mother

to breast cancer when he was just 18.

And then, the humiliation of defeat

at the hands of Britain, France, and America

in the First World War.

Back then, Hitler was a mere army corporal.

Though Austrian by birth,

he had proved his loyalty to Germany

and her Prussian ideals by his bravery in the trenches.

There was nothing that would mark him out for greatness

except that he had won the Iron Cross.

When he joined the German army in World War I,

they put a rifle in his hand, they gave him self-discipline,

they taught him how to kill,

and he was a completely different character

coming out of that war.

After the German capitulation,

Hitler feared for his future in the army,

the only place where he had so far found

the purpose and recognition that he was looking for,

but the impoverished and increasingly desperate

Weimar Republic would be fertile hunting ground

for his extremist ideas.

And of course, we have these sort of famous images

of people taking wheelbarrows full of money

to buy one loaf of bread and a bit of ham.

It is absolutely chaotic.

You know, the country is in a mess,

so that creates a lot of resentment,

and what you get emerging in Germany

is increasing political fanaticism.

So what you've got is a country

becoming more and more poor, more and more fanatical.

It's the perfect breeding ground

for a fanatic like Adolf Hitler.

During his military service,

Hitler had shown he had the gift of gab

and a knack with public speaking,

with which he had openly voiced

his strong nationalist beliefs.

This was something the new German army,

the Reichswehr, could make good use of.

At the end of the war, he would be drafted

into the army's new education and propaganda division.

He kept on an army salary and his job

was to talk to the troops before they were demobilized

and keep them loyal to Germany and the army,

keep them from going over to communism.

And his commander was a Captain Mayer

who spotted his talent early.

Captain Karl Mayer

was a young ambitious officer

with a talent for picking the right agents

and choosing the right missions.

These skills earned him the commanding post

of the education and propaganda department in Munich,

and he would be the man who,

with the help of the army's secret slush fund,

would kickstart the Hitler money trail.

In 1919, the Treaty of Versailles

had dictated that the German army

should be limited to only 100,000 men.

To tackle these terms, the commanding officers

created a special money reserve

that would be kept under the noses

of the allied supervising commission

and finance a secret army reserve

named the Black Reichswehr.

This was mostly formed

by nationalist private paramilitary organizations

made up of demobilized soldiers from the Great War

and known as the Freikorps,

who would be used to fight and contain

the growing number of communist uprisings in the streets.

There's no doubt that some of these paramilitary groups

were being financed by the army

because the army had the intention of suppressing socialism.

In a way, the army in Germany

was a kind of state within a state.

It was sort of saying, look, we call the shots here.

We want to have a big say in who rules Germany.

So that's why the army was getting involved.

Black Reichswehr funds would also be used

to infiltrate newly emerging political organizations

and disrupt those who could pose

a potential threat to the army

or support those who were sympathetic to their aims,

such as the German Workers' Party.

They get Hitler to go along to a meeting

of this Deutsche Workers' Party led by Anton Drexler,

and he goes along.

He's supposed to actually be eavesdropping on them

to take information.

And that's how Adolf Hitler would be invited

to join the German Workers' Party, the DAP,

which would eventually become the Nazi Party.

Karl Mayer trusted his agent's capacity

and would give him an extra 20 gold marks a week

on top of his salary for the young corporal to help

in the fledgling party's expansion.

Mayer's investment paid off.

In just a few weeks,

Hitler would organize his first public speech

on October the 16th, 1919,

before an audience of 111 people.

On February the 20th of the following year,

more than 2000 would listen to the presentation

of the 25-point party program at the Hofbrauhaus in Munich.

Hitler would soon become the party's star speaker,

mesmerizing audiences hungry for someone

who could show them new direction.

In 1921, Hitler would be elected

the leader of the now-rebranded

National Socialist German Workers' Party,