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Transcript
00:00When the Third Reich fell in 1945, the world had no idea Adolf Hitler was a secret billionaire.
00:12He loved money all the time, he just wasn't prepared to do much work for it.
00:18Who had stolen from his own countrymen.
00:21He looks at Germany and he looks at himself as being one.
00:26Who dictated the last will and testament just hours before committing suicide.
00:33A tax evader who tried to hide the true nature of his wealth.
00:37And here you can see a lot of the things he just put a line through.
00:43Who collected great works of art for his own glory.
00:46He set out to form the world's supreme museum.
00:53Who built a secret property empire.
00:56All of these blue dots having something to do with Hitler and the Nazi party.
01:01And whose name and image could make another fortune.
01:05Whoever owns those intellectual property rights can continue to receive the income stream.
01:11This film will reveal how the Fuhrer really made his money.
01:15This is Hitler the man.
01:18And the man who translated his will tells his story for the first time on television.
01:24We were absolutely shocked at what was discovered.
01:39In every city and town the Nazis fight back with furious desperation.
01:44As the Russian army closed in on Adolf Hitler and his fellow Nazis in 1945, the Fuhrer realized
01:51the game was up and he'd lost the war.
02:04Just before dawn on April 29th, in his underground bunker in Berlin, he gathered his most trusted
02:10staff and aides together, married his longtime mistress Eva Braun, and then began to dictate
02:17a will.
02:21It took ten pages to set out what he called his political testament, a rant against the
02:33Jewish people, blaming them for the war.
02:39And then he devoted just three pages to his personal wealth and wishes, leaving it to
02:45his executor, Martin Bormann, to decide what each friend and relative got.
02:55It was nine days after his 56th birthday.
03:00This is London Corridor.
03:02The German radio has just announced that Hitler is dead.
03:11Two days later, when the Russians finally broke into Hitler's bunker, they were able
03:16to see how the Fuhrer had spent his final days, surrounded by oil paintings and fine
03:22furniture.
03:25But no trace of his will was found.
03:29It had already been smuggled out of Berlin.
03:42It's been almost 70 years since Hermann Rothman first came to this part of northern Germany,
03:49as an intelligence officer in the British Army.
03:52I thought I would have an odd feeling.
03:56I mustn't forget it was 1945.
03:59We are now in 2013.
04:02It's like entering into something new, which I've never seen before.
04:11This was once a German prisoner of war camp, called Stalag 11B.
04:19Almost 100,000 Allied troops were interned here.
04:26In the summer of 1945, the camp was in the hands of the Allies, processing captured Germans.
04:36Rothman was part of a specialist German-speaking team, trained to weed out SS and Nazi officers
04:42on the run.
04:44We decided whether people are going to stay in this camp or what's going to happen.
04:49Some of them are quite open and frank.
04:52Some they're not.
04:54Some conceal what really happened.
04:56And we had to make up our mind whether they're speaking the truth or not.
05:02Rothman's motivation for finding Nazis was stronger than most.
05:07My father was taken to concentration camp.
05:12And once I heard that, I think I cried, because I knew that I wouldn't see my father again.
05:20A lot of people like myself, Jewish refugees, it was our desire to see that Hitler should
05:27be beaten as quickly as possible.
05:31And I joined the army.
05:35I was 18.
05:40Then Hermann Rothman's world changed when he received an early morning call from his
05:45commanding officer.
05:48I remember that I was woken up at five o'clock in the morning.
05:53I was told that I must come immediately.
05:57I said, what's so urgent?
05:59He said, I can't explain anything on the telephone.
06:03Please come in.
06:07Rothman's colleagues had identified a German who they believed was not telling the truth.
06:17The man had been attempting to sell a story to the newspapers about Hitler's last days
06:22in the bunker.
06:25A routine search had already been carried out.
06:29But one of Rothman's colleagues wasn't satisfied.
06:35In our unit, there was a man who was tailored by profession.
06:40He saw it immediately there's something wrong.
06:43The shoulder pads don't look right.
06:47And he ripped it open.
06:50And he found documents.
07:00It's difficult to describe a reaction which one had at the time.
07:08We were absolutely shocked at what was discovered.
07:15When we saw the signature of Adolf Hitler, it became evident that this was an exceptionally
07:23important document.
07:26Rothman realized he was looking at what might be the Fuehrer's last will and testament.
07:33I knew by interrogating Nazis, I had a picture of Hitler, which made me think it was genuine.
07:44The way he spoke, he kept in character.
07:50The man's name was Heinz Lorenz, a deputy press officer on Hitler's staff.
07:56He'd been on the run for more than two months.
08:00He confessed that he'd been entrusted by Hitler to smuggle the will out of the bunker.
08:06My commanding officer said, please close all the doors, close the windows, lock them.
08:22Behind the closed doors, Rothman and the rest of the team begin translating the will.
08:28It was on parchment.
08:31Hitler's character shone through.
08:33It was in two sections.
08:35One was a private one in which he disposed of his goods, which he had very little of
08:42apparently, and he gave it back to the German Reich.
08:48And on the other hand, he made a political will, which was, of course, a diatribe against
08:53who was responsible for the war, which was the Jewish people.
08:58The rant against the Jews in the political will is followed by the naming of a new Nazi
09:09government.
09:14And Hitler's brief, three-page private will disguises the fact that he was a rich man.
09:23I think the private will was also for consumption to the German people.
09:29He wanted to show in his private will, he had very little.
09:35I always felt that he thought about it very, very clearly.
09:40I wanted to show the people I had no benefits.
09:44My life was purely devoted entirely to the welfare of the German people.
09:50And that is what was evidenced by reading the private will.
09:58Hitler leaves his possessions, insofar as they are worth anything, to the Nazi party.
10:05He leaves his paintings, the ones bought by me, to what he calls a picture gallery in
10:11his hometown of Linz.
10:14Martin Bormann becomes his sole executor, with the full legal authority to make all
10:19decisions relating to personal mementos and the distribution of money to maintain the
10:24present standard of living of Hitler's siblings, mother-in-law, and faithful fellow workers.
10:35Reading Adolf Hitler's will for the first time made Hermann Rothman want to know more
10:40about the motives of the man who dictated it.
10:45What was the real Hitler?
10:48What makes this man tick?
10:49How did he get all this power, this immense power?
10:53How he used the power?
10:55Did he use it entirely for the German people?
10:58Well, some will think, yes.
11:02On the other hand, you'll find that people will say no.
11:06He projected one image to the German people, and there was a real Hitler.
11:15After the war, the real Hitler was hard to find.
11:19Whatever he left behind in the Führerbunker was taken by the Russians or souvenir hunters.
11:26The Allies seized his Munich apartment and bombed his country residence in the Bavarian
11:30mountains.
11:33Most of his huge personal art collection was missing, and the man who knew how to get his
11:38hands on Hitler's money, Martin Bormann, was found dead in a Berlin street two days
11:44after his boss committed suicide.
11:48Finally, in 1948, an Allied denazification court valued his entire estate at just 200,000
11:57Deutschmarks, roughly $60,000.
12:09The Bavarian State Archives keeps German artifacts of great historical value, particularly those
12:15from the Second World War.
12:18Dr. Helen Frey is a historian who's discovered there are traces of the real Hitler to be
12:25found if you know where to look and can get permission, hidden away in cardboard boxes.
12:40After Hitler's death, a number of his belongings were gathered from different residences all
12:45over Germany and Austria.
12:49And here, gosh, this is his gun license.
12:54A very young Hitler here, and he's actually signed across the photograph.
12:59Oh, look, Hitler with his mother.
13:04There are rumours that this was a very important personal photograph for him.
13:08He used to keep it at all times on him.
13:14Klara Hitler gave birth to six children.
13:18Adolf was one of only two to survive childhood.
13:21The other was his sister, Paula.
13:27His father, Alois, had been married twice before, and so Adolf already had an older
13:32half-brother and sister when he was born in April 1889.
13:38Oh, now here we have a document.
13:47In this box, there are more than just personal and family mementos.
13:52This is his original, well, first will, 1938.
14:00Hitler had set out plans for the distribution of his wealth once before, written in his
14:05own hand at the age of 50, when he was already ruling Germany.
14:11Hitler was convinced he would die young from a major illness, just as both his parents
14:15had while he was still a child.
14:20But unlike his final will, this one gives much more financial detail.
14:31It names his heirs, and exactly how much he wishes to leave each.
14:39This is Hitler the man, you know, he's leaving ordinary possessions, a certain amount of
14:43money to his sister, his step-brother, his housekeeper.
14:48He left his sister, Paula, a thousand marks a month, equal to $650 back then.
14:55Had Hitler died in 1938, in the first year alone, his estate would have had to pay out
15:00nearly $60,000, over a million dollars in today's money.
15:08Oh, yeah, Hitler the artist.
15:14But Hitler was not always rich.
15:17In fact, he was once very poor, selling his own drawings on postcards for just a few cents.
15:26Homeless and hungry, he gave up his artistic career and fashioned a new image.
15:33Image was very important to him.
15:36He took acting lessons, he took speaking lessons from professionals, how to present himself
15:43on stage, photographs were taken so he could view himself and decide just how to be.
15:51It's the image of power.
15:54Hitler styled himself as the people's leader.
16:12He quickly realized the money-making potential of personal appearances, and right from the
16:17start, misled his followers.
16:24His notepaper is very pretentiously labeled, from the chancellery of Adolf Hitler.
16:32This is, we're talking 1920s, before he'd come anywhere near power.
16:38He used to say that he took no fees for his speeches, oh yeah.
16:44He didn't even have a bank account, and yet, underneath the chancellery, on the notepaper,
16:51it gives you his bank account number.
16:56Chris Wetton is a British author who has spent a decade trying to work out what Hitler was
17:01worth when he died.
17:04Let's try to talk in today's figures.
17:07I would say, for his lifestyle, that he was probably pushing 30,000 to 50,000 euros a
17:17year.
17:18But by the time we get to 1944, he's definitely in the billions of Reichsmarks, which would
17:26not be far off billions of euros today.
17:32Hitler set the foundation for his billions way back in 1923.
17:36When he was sent to prison for nine months for trying to overthrow the German government.
17:44While inside, he wrote the book which was to become the basis of his fortune, Mein Kampf.
17:53Published in 1924, Hitler received a 10% royalty from every sale.
18:01But it took a while to get going.
18:04Well, concerning the different versions of Mein Kampf, there were many of them.
18:08I just picked out some to give you a general idea.
18:11I brought along the very first edition, which appeared in two volumes.
18:16It was pretty expensive at the time, 10, 12 marks.
18:19This was a lot to deal with during the early 1920s.
18:23And they sold so-so.
18:27To be perfectly frank, it's not exactly a good read.
18:30So later on, they got this idea to produce a popular version.
18:39The popular version changed Hitler's fortunes.
18:44As soon as the money started to roll in, Hitler raised his standard of living.
18:50He bought himself a luxury Mercedes.
18:54And came up with the idea that would make him even richer.
19:00When Hitler was elected chancellor in 1933, newlywed German couples would get a free copy
19:07of Mein Kampf.
19:08Of course, there were a lot of marriages.
19:10There always are.
19:11And they all had to be paid for by the state.
19:15So the state bought the books to present to every wed married couple, and Hitler reaped
19:22the profits.
19:27At its peak, Mein Kampf was earning Hitler a million dollars a year in royalties alone,
19:33equivalent to 12 million dollars today.
19:36By the time the war ended, nearly 10 million copies of Mein Kampf had been printed.
19:42And Hitler once boasted that his book was only outsold by the Bible.
19:48He loved money all the time.
19:50He just wasn't prepared to do much work for it.
19:54He liked having it.
19:55It gave him the freedom to do whatever he wanted.
19:59Whatever he wanted wasn't enough.
20:01In 1938, he owed 400,000 Deutschmarks in tax, 120,000 dollars back then.
20:09He felt that paying taxes was beneath him.
20:12By the time he's become chancellor, the authorities, presumably with a little bit of pressure,
20:19said, we think it's reasonable that as chancellor, Hitler should not pay tax, and therefore we
20:26will take all of his tax papers and they will be destroyed.
20:31Well, they weren't.
20:34They were locked in a way in a safe.
20:36Conscientious civil servants.
20:39And here is a copy from 1925 through to 1933.
20:46A lot of the things he just put a line through.
20:50Look, everything dashed out.
20:52Blank, blank.
20:55The tax authorities, they always wanted to know what happened to the collections and
20:59the admission fees for the meetings that he spoke at.
21:03And he would say, I don't know.
21:06It doesn't come to me.
21:07It goes to the National Socialist Party.
21:10Sieg Heil!
21:12Sieg Heil!
21:14Sieg Heil!
21:17Hitler was also secretly investing his money in a property empire.
21:23He had a luxury apartment in the center of Munich, and also an interest in a villa used
21:28by his mistress, Eva Braun.
21:34But his real home and most valuable asset was in a far more desirable location.
21:42Since the early 1920s, Hitler holidayed near the Alpine village of Berchtesgaden on the
21:48southern tip of Germany, close to the border with Austria.
21:55He fell in love with Berchtesgaden area.
21:59It was his ambition to get a house there, which he did.
22:03There's a lot of documentation about the property around the Obersalzberg, particularly
22:08this one from 1937.
22:12And here we see the house of Achenfeld as it was when Hitler bought it.
22:17And we have the price here, 40,000 gold marks.
22:23And he slowly enlarged it.
22:25He was very, very proud of it.
22:29Hitler called his home the Berghof.
22:31Fancy rooms filled with expensive furniture, rare Persian carpets, tapestries, and paintings
22:38by Dutch, Italian, and German masters.
22:44Table silver engraved with the initials A.H. and stamped with the German eagle and Nazi
22:48swastika.
22:51And there were other changes by his own hand, but not always successful.
22:59He fancied himself as an architect, although he had no formal training whatsoever.
23:06And he went ahead to modify the house himself to suit his grandiose vision.
23:14He had this huge picture window, and right underneath it was a garage.
23:21So any time anybody started a car in the garage, up came the fumes from the exhaust straight
23:26through the open picture window.
23:38The Berghof was one of the few places Hitler could relax with Eva Braun.
23:46From the very beginning, he had tried to keep their relationship a secret from the German
23:50people.
23:53We are only able to see this today because Eva Braun was a home movie fanatic, and no
23:59one dared stop her from filming or being filmed.
24:07Hitler spent more and more time at the Berghof, surrounded by loyal henchmen, barely recognizable
24:16without their Nazi uniforms.
24:22And we see here on the map, point 16, point 16, this was Haus Wachenfeld, which became
24:28the Berghof.
24:30But by 1944, all of these blue dots, each one having something to do with Hitler and
24:37the Nazi party.
24:39The hangers-on, Goebbels, Goering, Speer, plus SS barracks, anti-aircraft emplacements,
24:46and so on and so forth.
24:49Eventually, Hitler's mountain retreat became the unofficial second seat of the Third Reich.
24:58Hitler wasn't just focused on military victory.
25:01He was also fighting a dirty cultural war.
25:04Hitler, the man who wanted to rule the world, is only the public face.
25:10The private man is something that few people seem to understand.
25:15His beating heart was all to do with art, on which he had strong judgments.
25:22He held dinner parties at Berchtesgaden, in which the arts were freely discussed with
25:30visiting generals, and not a word is spoken about the blood spilt in camps within 50 miles.
25:41Dachau, the village south of Munich, which housed one of the filthiest of the concentration
25:47camps, was also a place where Hitler housed art.
25:51Somehow, this schizophrenic person managed to live in two different worlds.
25:58Godfrey Barker is an expert on Hitler, the art lover.
26:03Hitler was an artist.
26:05He leaves behind about 2,300 watercolors, mostly of fine classical architecture and
26:13buildings.
26:14They're meticulous, they're well executed, but they're invariably wooden and lifeless.
26:24Hitler became an art collector in the 1930s.
26:31In his will, he leaves his paintings to an as-yet-unbuilt Führermuseum in his hometown
26:38of Linz in Austria.
26:44By the end of the war, he'd gathered 8,500 paintings for this purpose.
26:50That aroused my interest.
26:55Hitler and his fellow Nazis were art collectors on an industrial scale.
27:01The whole of Europe was at their mercy.
27:04What they liked, they took.
27:07But the Führer was an exception.
27:10He not only stole, he also used his own money to buy.
27:15I had expected to find that he was directly responsible for looting and stealing of paintings
27:26that he wanted for himself, and I couldn't find any evidence for it.
27:30I found evidence that he paid for them, sometimes at knock-down prices, but not direct theft
27:38in any way.
27:39I was quite surprised by this, and I have to say, in all honesty, that's what I found.
27:44Didn't expect it, but I did.
27:50When the Allies started to look for Hitler's art collection after his death, they couldn't
27:54find most of it.
27:57Nor could they trace the vast art haul stolen by his fellow Nazis.
28:02It was as if it had been spirited away.
28:08The Austrian village of Altaussee lies close to the southern German border, 50 miles from
28:14Hitler's house in Berchtesgaden.
28:18In April and May 1945, as the Third Reich crumbled, it was overrun by Nazis looking
28:25for somewhere to hide.
28:29But it also harbored another secret.
28:33Deep inside the mountains, 40 miles of tunnels on 18 levels had been carved out by miners
28:39extracting salt from the limestone rock.
28:47Many of these chambers date back over a thousand years.
28:56Salt has always been very important and has given the community an identity.
29:01This has led to uproars against authority since the Middle Ages.
29:08Helmut Kahls is a leading authority on the Altaussee salt mine, which was used by the
29:12Nazis to store art.
29:15They were inspired by a miner's chapel deep below ground.
29:23In the chapel, there were paintings for many years, and they were well preserved.
29:30So you realize that this might be a great place to store art.
29:34The wood is from 1943, and it still looks new.
29:42The 1943 wood is shelving put in by the Nazis to store more than 12,000 works of art.
29:53But when American forces arrived a month after Hitler's death, the entrance to the mine had
29:58been blown up.
30:00The German commander in the region gave the order to destroy everything.
30:08The U.S. Army sent in a specialist military fine arts unit who became known as the Monuments Men.
30:16They discovered the bombs had not damaged any of the treasures.
30:27By the time they had emptied the mine, they had filled 80 truckloads and recovered art
30:32worth more than $3.5 billion.
30:43But it turns out the real heroes of Altaussee were the mine workers, who have a long tradition
30:48of resisting authority.
30:53I believe from this tradition there was a resistance to Hitler.
30:57There were bombs in boxes here.
31:00The mine workers carried the boxes out.
31:04They just destroyed the entrance of the mine, and the artworks were saved.
31:12What the Monuments Men didn't realize is that they had not only recovered Nazi-looted treasure,
31:17but also Hitler's missing paid-for art collection.
31:22At the time, no one cared.
31:25They swept everything into one clearing center, and I think it was in Koblenz.
31:30There everything got mixed up.
31:32It doesn't seem to have been properly documented.
31:36And then it was decided, if it doesn't belong to the French, or Russia doesn't stake a claim
31:41for it, then they gave it back to the states of Austria or Germany, from whichever country
31:48it might have come from.
31:53With his personal art collection scattered, and his property empire in ruins, the Allies
31:59gave the German rights and royalties of Mein Kampf to the state of Bavaria, leaving little
32:04of any real value.
32:07This is how they came to calculate the worth of his estate at only $60,000.
32:13But as the file on Hitler's riches was seemingly closed in 1948, America's secret intelligence
32:19agencies already knew this was by no means the complete picture.
32:24This rarely seen, previously classified report by America's Office for Strategic Studies,
32:30the precursor of the CIA, reveals that as early as 1944, the OSS knew that Hitler had
32:37access to a massive amount of cash.
32:41In a secret operation, codenamed Safehaven, they found Swiss bank accounts holding 45
32:48million Reichmarks, including one controlled by Hitler's business manager, Max Amann, containing
32:54the foreign royalties from Mein Kampf.
32:59Amann was officially the owner of the Nazi publishing house which churned out Mein Kampf.
33:05He was also the sole guardian of the Fuhrer's money.
33:09He had a foul personality, but he was a good manager, and it was he who came up with the
33:17name Mein Kampf, not Hitler.
33:20Only Amann saw the books.
33:22Amann personally brought the account books to Hitler wherever he was, whenever it was
33:29an accounting period.
33:32There are several witnesses to this.
33:34Nobody else saw them.
33:37If he wanted money for something, he just used him as the bank.
33:44Max Amann died in 1957, taking the secret of Hitler's money to his grave.
33:55In New York, an American forensic accountant, Ken Uemmark, has spent a lifetime trying to
34:00track down the cash squirreled away in foreign banks by the Nazis.
34:06Hitler's bank accounts are not very well known.
34:10There's not a lot of information that's out there.
34:14He had accounts in Switzerland and in Holland.
34:19Uemmark believes that the trail to Hitler's millions might not yet be stone cold.
34:26I have been involved in cases where we were able to recoup information from 1937 going
34:33forward.
34:34It was reported that that information was destroyed.
34:36Well, in fact, it wasn't.
34:38You have to follow the funds.
34:41Following the funds is easier said than done, as far as Hitler is concerned.
34:49Even in death, the Nazi leader made it impossible to separate what was his from what really
34:54belonged to the German people.
34:59Looking at his will, you can clearly see his megalomaniac tendencies, where he looks at
35:04Germany and he looks at himself as being one.
35:07And as a result, all the assets of Germany are basically his own piggy bank.
35:15When Hitler died, he left behind around 20 close living relatives.
35:20His sister, Paula, was next of kin, and the one who followed the funds to try and find
35:26the piggy bank.
35:28His will clearly stated that Paula and a half sister should have their standards of living
35:37maintained for their lifetimes.
35:42When the Allies confiscated all his known assets, she went to court to try to get them
35:47back.
35:50In 1960, after a 12-year battle, a Munich court ruled she was entitled to two-thirds
35:56of his estate.
35:58The remainder went to her half sister and brother.
36:01But they put no value on it.
36:05The next step would have been to identify what legally still belonged to her brother
36:09and how much it was worth.
36:14Paula Hitler never got that far.
36:17She died in June 1960 at the age of 64, four months after her victory.
36:25The court subsequently ordered that any benefit from her brother's estate would now pass to
36:30her heirs and relatives.
36:37The bank has the obligation, after an account has been inactive for a specific amount of
36:42time, to reach out to that individual and try and find out whether they actually are
36:47still alive.
36:49If in fact they can't find that individual, then they have the obligation to reach out
36:54to an heir to try and find that heir.
36:57If one of Hitler's relatives were to attempt to do so today, I think it would stir some
37:02significant controversy.
37:04They would potentially have the right to attempt to try and claim some of those funds.
37:10Not only have the banks failed to reach out after all this time, they've almost certainly
37:15taken advantage of a new law.
37:18When an account becomes dormant and ultimately goes to the state, they can't use those funds.
37:25So there are big issues right now, for example, in Switzerland, where there's just recently
37:29been passed a ruling that after 62 years, an account would actually pass to the government.
37:38It's now been more than 70 years since Hitler's death, so the new law ensures that any cash
37:44the Fuhrer did have will never be seen, meaning someone, somewhere, has made a tidy fortune.
37:52Adolf Hitler's name and image is still earning.
37:57This is a music video from Thailand.
37:59The band don't want it to be seen anymore, but it's still on the world wide web.
38:06In India, there was a chain of Hitler tailors.
38:10In Bangkok, there is a group of fast food outlets.
38:17When a collection of his luxury Mercedes was put up for sale, it fetched $8 million.
38:24There are now all kinds of auctions involving items said to have been owned or used by Hitler.
38:33A signed copy of a two-part edition of Mein Kampf went for $64,000 to an anonymous online
38:39buyer in January 2014.
38:44Mein Kampf will soon be available for all to cash in on.
38:50Copyright ends 70 years after the author's death, which means copyright will be free
38:56and open. It will pass into the public domain at the end of 2015. And, well, starting on
39:02January 1st, 2016, everybody is basically allowed to do with a text whatever he wants.
39:09Some are already doing whatever they want with the book.
39:13A colleague of ours recently traveled to India and he discovered this English version
39:18of Mein Kampf in a bookstore in Delhi, New Delhi it was, I believe, right next to a biography
39:23of Gandhi. And it is presented here on the back of the book that it will give you an
39:30insight into one of the greatest evil geniuses of the last century. We were flabbergasted,
39:35I think the British term is, by this, because everybody would probably subscribe to evil,
39:40but not so much to genius. Hitler has even become a satirical attraction on social media.
39:47Oh, well, maybe not. What?
39:50Hipster Hitler is a comic book with a very 21st century genesis.
39:57We're talking on Skype and we'd always wanted to do a comic together. One of us said something
40:02like ironic Hitler and the other person said hipster Hitler. And we were like, oh, that
40:06has a ring to it.
40:07So I said, oh, I'll draw something right now.
40:10And we put it up and then we woke up the next morning and there were like 50,000 hits
40:15on the website, which was weird.
40:17So then that's when we decided to actually make it a full comic. Hipster Hitler is basically
40:22a comic that envisions Hitler if he was openly treated as a hipster and acted to an extreme
40:30level of hipsterism in that World War II period.
40:35There are a lot of traits Hitler had that were in line with what we consider the modern
40:40hipster. He was a vegetarian. He was a big animal rights activist. The comic I have open
40:44is called Rhineland. So it's about Hitler deciding to reclaim the Rhineland. And in
40:49the comic, the reason he takes it back is not because of territorial issues. It's because
40:54it contains hops, flax and hemp, which can be used to make beer and hemp for like T-shirts.
41:03So he's happy for that reason.
41:06I think Hitler would absolutely put this on the list of books to burn.
41:13An even greater irony is that the publishers of Hipster Hitler pay nothing for the use
41:18of his image. Any other well-known person would cost them money because they would almost
41:24certainly have an agent.
41:28Take Mark Rosler, who is based in Indiana and specializes in representing deceased stars
41:33like James Dean, as well as other more infamous celebrities, earning him the nickname, Agent
41:41of the Dead.
41:44We've often been approached by family members of people like John Dillinger, to the Son
41:49of Sam, to Al Capone, people like that. Whoever owns those intellectual property rights can
41:56continue on and not only protect those, but continue to receive the income stream that
42:01comes from those intellectual property rights, which can often be very substantial.
42:08In the case of Hitler, we know about his book. We know that upon his death, those copyrights
42:13were assigned or conveyed to someone else. In addition to that, it is possible that certain
42:21family members could take out trademark registrations to his name or even his image. But the third
42:30area in the right of publicity, it's a right that we all have, whether you're famous or
42:35not famous or infamous or not, and that's generally the right that someone would have,
42:43a descendant or an assignee, to protect the name and likeness and the overall goodwill
42:48associated with Hitler. You know, so it could be goodwill, badwill, notoriety, infamy, whatever.
43:02Infamy and notoriety have always been part of Hitler's image. And it's emerged that he
43:09was well ahead of today's game when it came to cashing in.
43:15In 1921, when he became leader of the Nazi Party, Hitler appointed this man his official
43:21photographer, Heinrich Hoffman. It made them both rich.
43:27Now it was Hoffman who had the great idea of copywriting Hitler's image. And nobody
43:34then could do anything without paying the fees to Hoffman's agency, which of course
43:39then came to Hitler. They had a copyright on any Hitler image, anything and everywhere.
43:48When they put his head on Germany's postage stamps, few realized that the man himself
43:54was getting a personal commission for the use of his image. It's almost certain that
44:02no one will ever know exactly how much Adolf Hitler was worth when he died, nor what the
44:08real intentions of his personal will were.
44:19For the man who first translated Hitler's will in 1945, the place where it was found
44:25will always evoke strong memories.
44:40I was a 20-year-old boy, a boy, yes, who experienced quite a lot. There's no life here whatsoever.
44:50It's funny, isn't it? You don't see any birds. I think the birds must realize what
44:58happened here before.
45:06I think there must have been a Hitler who wasn't exactly the type he projected to the
45:12German people, but there was an inner private Hitler, and that private Hitler wanted to
45:19make use of the position which he had, the use of the power which he had. But he knew
45:25that he's going to commit suicide, yes, and therefore he said, no, I have to make a will.
45:33He wanted to show his ambition as purely for the German people. And a man like that wanted
45:42to project that image for eternity. That's why he made this private will very, very little.
45:50What was the real Hitler, I think, will take many years to find out.