The Most Evil Men in History is a full-length documentary that takes you on an in-depth journey through the bowels of hell, revealing the truth - plain and painful as it ever was about our past, looking at the most horrific evils ever committed by some of the most infamous historical figures for various reasons, including despotism, cannibalism, genocide, and too many atrocities to imagine. They are considered some of history's most vile and appalling figures.
From the 1st century AD to the present day, evil is a fact of life. We can see it not only in the reigns of Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler but also in everyday crimes like rape and assault, quite apart from the millions of lives brutalized by political or religious oppression, poverty, disease, and starvation.
One factor unites all these infamous figures and the evil acts they committed: they all had unlimited power over the people whose lives they controlled. Their reigns of terror cover a time span of nearly 2,000 years, from the rule of Caligula over the Roman Empire starting in 37 AD to the mass killings of educated Cambodians under Pol Pot during the 1980s. Motivated by power, religion, political belief, or by sadism and lust - sometimes by insanity - they have become bywords for terror.
The most evil men featured in this film:
Bad King John: A callous, cold-hearted monarch
Prince Vlad Dracula: The Impaler
Nero: The fifth emperor of Rome
Adolf Hitler: Father of the Final Solution
From the 1st century AD to the present day, evil is a fact of life. We can see it not only in the reigns of Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler but also in everyday crimes like rape and assault, quite apart from the millions of lives brutalized by political or religious oppression, poverty, disease, and starvation.
One factor unites all these infamous figures and the evil acts they committed: they all had unlimited power over the people whose lives they controlled. Their reigns of terror cover a time span of nearly 2,000 years, from the rule of Caligula over the Roman Empire starting in 37 AD to the mass killings of educated Cambodians under Pol Pot during the 1980s. Motivated by power, religion, political belief, or by sadism and lust - sometimes by insanity - they have become bywords for terror.
The most evil men featured in this film:
Bad King John: A callous, cold-hearted monarch
Prince Vlad Dracula: The Impaler
Nero: The fifth emperor of Rome
Adolf Hitler: Father of the Final Solution
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TVTranscript
00:00:00In 1189, at Chinon in central France, King Henry II was dying.
00:00:27His empire, covering all of England and vast areas of France, was crumbling.
00:00:35What eventually broke the ageing kingdom, was not the rebellions which threatened his
00:00:39kingdoms, but the discovery that one of the leading rebels was his youngest and favourite
00:00:46son, John.
00:00:48John was a wonderful calculator, but in the end, there was something vicious in him,
00:00:52which is always going to come out, to smile to your face and stab you in the back.
00:00:57He was violent, he was cunning, he was witty and fun, but he was also not to be trusted.
00:01:08Throughout his 17-year reign, the man who would be known forever as Bad King John betrayed
00:01:14those closest to him, persecuted the innocent, and was the first king of England to be accused
00:01:20of murder.
00:01:21Writing after John's death, a medieval chronicler said of him, he feared not God, nor respected
00:01:30men.
00:01:31His punishments were refinements of cruelty, the starvation of children, the crushing of
00:01:37old men.
00:01:38His court was a brothel, where no woman was safe.
00:01:44John's oppression was so widely felt, that the legend of Robin Hood was born, the mythic
00:01:49outlaw of Sherwood Forest, who stole from the rich and gave to the poor.
00:01:55Knowing those who wereMake the same exaggerations, were the District of England were pressured to
00:01:56be accepted, but they were effective exaggerations because they were widely believed.
00:01:59Drive to despair.
00:02:00Driven to despair, John's subjects would try to impose a document on him called the Magna Carta,
00:02:09guaranteeing protection of their rights.
00:02:12John's refusal to abide by it would finally drive a desperate people into rebellion.
00:02:17John makes so many people so fed up, so angry, so ashamed, humiliated, that they choose to rebel.
00:02:29And it's just an awful shit.
00:02:34John was born in Oxford on Christmas Eve 1167,
00:02:38the fourth and youngest son of King Henry II,
00:02:42the head of the Angevin dynasty,
00:02:44a family of powerful nobles originating in Anjou in central France.
00:02:50Like William the Conqueror 100 years before them,
00:02:53they controlled all of England and vast territories throughout France.
00:03:01He was born into the most powerful family in Western Europe.
00:03:06His father, King Henry II, was not only King of England,
00:03:11but was also Duke of Normandy, Duke of Aquitaine, which is the whole of southwestern France,
00:03:17Count of Anjou, the rich lands in the Loire Valley,
00:03:20and was on the eve of invading Ireland and subjecting Ireland to his dominion as well.
00:03:28Henry and his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, had three other sons,
00:03:32Geoffrey, Henry the Younger, and Richard, later known as Richard the Lionheart.
00:03:38As John grew up, that family fell apart, became a classically dysfunctional family.
00:03:47For John, bad relations with his brothers were exacerbated by the fact that as the youngest son,
00:03:53his claim to any lands and entitlements was always unclear.
00:03:58John was haunted by the fact that his father, King Henry II,
00:04:02gave him the nickname Lachlan.
00:04:06To amend this in 1189,
00:04:09Henry gave the 18-year-old John the governorship of Ireland.
00:04:14One of John's castles still stands at Limerick in the Irish Republic.
00:04:18Whilst there, John exhibited one of his most notorious qualities.
00:04:26Two contemporary commentators comment upon his rapacity and avarice,
00:04:31that he wouldn't pay his soldiers, but seemed very keen to make as much money
00:04:35out of everyone there as he could.
00:04:38So right from the beginning, avarice, greed, is certainly one of the characteristics they pick up.
00:04:44They say they hope he will improve as he gets older.
00:04:47Just a lad, after all.
00:04:51The real troubles that beset that family were caused largely by his father's love for John,
00:05:00and his father's wish to provide for John.
00:05:03A wish which left behind a trail of people who felt themselves to be disinherited
00:05:09in the interests of the youngest son of the family.
00:05:11Things would never change.
00:05:15Regardless of how much his father tried to help him,
00:05:18John's appetite for power would always outweigh any sense of loyalty to his father.
00:05:24In the last year or so of his life,
00:05:27Henry was facing great problems from his oldest surviving son, Richard,
00:05:33and the King of France, Philip Augustus, and Henry feared that they might be allying against him.
00:05:40John wasted no time in joining his brother Richard and the King of France in rebellion against his father.
00:05:46It was clear that the future lay with Richard, and therefore John, I think, is just looking to where the advantage is.
00:05:57But it does testify to a terrible lack of loyalty to his father.
00:06:01So I think there, there was just self-interest, calculated the future is with Richard, not with my father.
00:06:07Contemporaries wrote about this as the final straw that broke the father's heart,
00:06:12that he had gone through so much, he'd made so many mistakes for John's sake.
00:06:16And in the end, it was the son he loved who betrayed him.
00:06:18With Henry's death in 1189, Richard was now the King of England.
00:06:27And though generous to John, John felt no sense of loyalty to his brother.
00:06:32From the time of the succession to the throne of his surviving older brother Richard, Richard the Lionheart,
00:06:39John was given fantastic wealth, particularly in England, but also in Normandy, and he was also Lord of Ireland.
00:06:45Now, if that wasn't enough for John, it just shows that it would have been impossible to satisfy him.
00:06:53What they don't really give him is the status of an Angevin prince.
00:06:57And so, from almost as soon as Richard sets off on crusade, we see him trying to cause trouble,
00:07:04or being drawn into the troubles which arise from Richard's absence.
00:07:08And he, in the end, took up arms and allied treacherously with the King of France.
00:07:15To John's astonishment, although Richard had been imprisoned in Germany on his return from the Crusades,
00:07:21he eventually made it back.
00:07:23Worried, John immediately broke off his alliance with the King of France and begged Richard's forgiveness.
00:07:28John falls on his knees before his older brother. Richard is supposed to say,
00:07:34Oh, come on, John, get up. You're just a child. You've been badly advised.
00:07:38Well, by that time, he was nearly 30 years old.
00:07:42So, not surprisingly, the French now felt they'd been betrayed by John,
00:07:47who had just betrayed Richard, who had betrayed his father.
00:07:49Amazingly, John still felt entitled to the throne and pressed Richard to be named as his heir.
00:07:59John's claim would have been completely unassailable had it not been for the fact that from 1189, as his father was dying,
00:08:10through to 1194, when his brother was in prison in Germany,
00:08:16John had a track record of treachery, which appalled contemporaries.
00:08:21One of Richard's main concerns was for his reputation, for his honour,
00:08:27that he would do what honour required.
00:08:30John is clearly concerned to remain as rich as possible and as powerful as possible,
00:08:36but that honour, I think, never seems to cross his mind at all.
00:08:42Reputations notwithstanding, John would secure the throne.
00:08:47Wounded in battle at Chalouse in central France, Richard died on April 6th, 1199.
00:08:54On his deathbed, he named John as his heir.
00:09:01John is king by the grace of God.
00:09:03The records of his own household show that he didn't observe feast days,
00:09:08he didn't observe fasts, he ate meat on Fridays, he chatted during mass and everything like that.
00:09:14Once you've met John, it's very difficult any longer to believe this really can be a king by the grace of God,
00:09:20you know, because he's manifestly not a pious man.
00:09:23As king, John felt himself beyond reproach and free to have whatever he wanted when he wanted it,
00:09:31particularly when it came to women.
00:09:33His first marriage to Isabella of Gloucester in 1189 was annulled when she couldn't produce an heir.
00:09:38He then kept Isabella of Gloucester in the household or in his castles for the next ten years.
00:09:49Isabella wasn't permitted to remarry.
00:09:52John wanted to keep her lands, though he didn't want to keep her.
00:09:54In 1200, John decided to marry another Isabella, the French heiress, Isabella of Angoulême.
00:10:03But there was one problem, she was too young to marry.
00:10:07The chroniclers say, I suspect with a certain tinge of knowingness that she appeared to be about 12 years old.
00:10:15But Isabella could have been as young as eight or nine.
00:10:18A previous betrothal to Hugh de Lusignan, a neighbouring baron, had been postponed because of Isabella's youth.
00:10:26Hugh de Lusignan postponed the marriage until she should be old enough to marry.
00:10:32Then in comes John and takes her instead, ignoring the fact that she was not regarded as old enough to marry.
00:10:38He so alienated the local barons that thereafter the writing was on the wall.
00:10:44And from that sprang the rebellions that then swept John's territories from northern France off the map.
00:10:53John's high-handed attitude to women would also have huge consequences for him in England.
00:11:01Having mistresses for a king is not lettery, that's just normal.
00:11:05The problem is that John goes after, against their will, the women in the families of the elite of society.
00:11:12He was accused of sexually harassing their wives and daughters.
00:11:17Robert Fitzwalter, for example, said that King John tried to take his daughter by force.
00:11:23The other was William Longspake.
00:11:26Longspake had loyally gone out for John to fight for him at the Battle of Bouvard.
00:11:30He was captured. And while he was in captivity, John seduced his wife.
00:11:37I mean, all these kings were womanizers, but with John it had political consequences.
00:11:43Although only two years into his reign, John's reputation for treachery, greed and lustfulness was beginning to dominate and destroy the lives of his subjects.
00:11:58But no one could imagine that John would soon go down in history as the first English king to commit murder with his own hands.
00:12:07By 1199, John was king of England.
00:12:25Having betrayed his father, Henry II, and his brother, Richard the Lionheart, John was finally in possession of the throne he had always coveted.
00:12:35There isn't any reason, I think, why if John had behaved moderately sensibly, he shouldn't have continued to rule that huge empire.
00:12:49Almost immediately, though, John's right to rule that empire was under attack.
00:12:54In 1202, the legitimacy of his succession was challenged by his young nephew, Arthur of Brittany.
00:13:03There's no doubt that the challenge of kingship at the beginning of his reign causes John great problems.
00:13:11Although Arthur was the senior one in terms of descent, in every other respect he was the junior one.
00:13:17He was much younger than John. He was only 12 years old when John becomes king of England.
00:13:23John succeeded in capturing Arthur and imprisoned him at Rouen in northern France.
00:13:30But in this moment of triumph, John made his greatest mistake.
00:13:35When you have to get rid of a member of the Rouen family, it's a big, big deal to do it.
00:13:41And you generally try and find a legal process to go about it.
00:13:45John didn't do that.
00:13:47Accounts differ as to exactly what happened to Arthur.
00:13:50But it resulted in John being labelled as the first English king ever to commit murder.
00:13:57I think there is truth in this idea that John, in a drunken rage, simply lost his temper with Arthur.
00:14:03And I think John just flipped.
00:14:06The red mist came down.
00:14:08It's a very, very stupid thing to do, because the political values of the time in which John lived were values which said, you cannot kill eight members of the elite.
00:14:22But John presumably thinks, you know, it's silly letting them go, they'll only come back and cause trouble again.
00:14:29I'm going to eliminate him.
00:14:31But it's just an example of John's clever deviousness, which is actually profound stupidity.
00:14:36The murder of Arthur was crucial.
00:14:39It stamped in people's minds this image of a tyrant, of a king who would commit murder.
00:14:46The murder of Arthur of Brittany would dramatically affect the lives of those around him, and that of one man in particular, William de Bruise.
00:14:55We do know that William de Bruise had been one of his most trusted counsellors for many years.
00:15:04De Bruise knew something about what had happened to Arthur.
00:15:08John decided in 1200 May to turn against William de Bruise and to confiscate his property, to drive him into poverty and exile.
00:15:19De Bruise fled to Ireland and then to France.
00:15:21Out of his reach, John vented his anger on de Bruise's family.
00:15:26First of all, he impoverished de Bruise's wife, Matilda, by imposing an unpayable tax on them.
00:15:32And John, I think, what was it, 50,000 marks, 33,000 pounds that John demanded from her.
00:15:40An utterly impossible sum, which she has to agree to.
00:15:43And then when the king's envoys come to get the first payment from her, all she has is about sort of 13 marks and a few pieces of gold.
00:15:54Having failed to make their payments, John imprisoned Matilda and her son in Corfe Castle in Dorset.
00:15:59Here they were slowly starved to death.
00:16:04To starve her to death with her eldest son, it was just an appalling, terrible, terrible crime.
00:16:13It meant that all great landowners, pretty well all of whom were also in debt to the crown, had to fear that the law of the exchequer might suddenly be turned against them as it had been suddenly unleashed against William de Bruise.
00:16:28John was beginning to lose the trust and loyalty of his subjects.
00:16:34Crucially, when the French king, Philip Augustus, attacked John's French territories in 1203, John could only rely on paid mercenaries to fight for him.
00:16:45There are various references to these mercenaries pillaging the lands around, raping knights' wives, stealing peasants' carts.
00:16:52And this is given by contemporaries as one reason why John alienates some of the knights and barons who have until then been prepared to fight for him.
00:17:03Castle after castle fell to Philip Augustus.
00:17:06In the autumn of 1203, John fled to England, leaving his remaining castles in Normandy to fend for themselves.
00:17:13Within a couple of weeks, only three castles were holding out for John, but John fails to come back, and so these castles surrender, knowing that they won't receive any help from John.
00:17:28John would never regain his French territories, but throughout his reign, he continually raised armies to invade France.
00:17:36To pay for this, he imposed huge taxes on his English barons.
00:17:43The very, very large financial penalties that John asks of people certainly very greatly increases in this period.
00:17:52And therefore, the king can manipulate inheritances, technically the gifts of the marriages of widows and heiresses are in his hands.
00:17:59And it's not because he wants the money, it's because he wants to have this hanging over you, so that you know if you step out of line, the bailiffs are going to be in to get the money from you.
00:18:12You have to be reasonably sensible, perhaps even a good judge of human character, to be able to manage that political system well.
00:18:21But someone of John's character, I think, was clearly only able to make things even worse.
00:18:26Increasingly isolated and paranoid, John knew he could never expect his barons' automatic loyalty, so he decided to use fear to guarantee it.
00:18:38You need ways of compelling them to be loyal, whether they want to or not.
00:18:44And so, you can either, as you would, get them in your debt, and then say, well look, I won't demand repayment.
00:18:55Or, more dramatic still, of course, is, you hand over to me daughters or your sons, and then I can be fairly sure of your loyalty.
00:19:04There was always the question, would the king actually kill the hostages?
00:19:10With John, after Arthur, well, the chances were that he might well kill the hostages.
00:19:17John did exactly that.
00:19:19In July 1212, he hanged 28 hostages.
00:19:24All of them sons of Welsh barons who'd threatened rebellion.
00:19:27Relations between John and his barons had deteriorated to such a degree that in 1212 there was a plot to assassinate him.
00:19:38And the idea was, on the 1212 expedition to Wales, to either to leave him to his fate, or actually to kill him there.
00:19:49And, I mean, John heard about it just in time, shut himself up in Nottingham Castle, didn't go on the Welsh expedition, was clearly badly shaken.
00:19:59In 1215, that hostility would culminate in outright rebellion.
00:20:04Forty English barons, led by Robert Fitzwater, decided to confront John with a set of demands, effectively limiting his power as the king.
00:20:13They have to come up with something totally unprecedented.
00:20:18They have to develop a new kind of banner for rebellion.
00:20:22A programme of reform.
00:20:24A charter of liberties.
00:20:26And so we get Magna Carta.
00:20:30On June the 15th, 1215, at Runnymede near Windsor, John met with the barons to sign the Magna Carta.
00:20:38But he had no intention of abiding by it.
00:20:40What John did at Runnymede, on the 15th of June, 1215, was suddenly to bring the negotiations to an end and say to the barons,
00:20:52that's it, that's your lot, take it or leave it.
00:20:55John's attitude made civil war inevitable.
00:20:58A brutal year-long campaign was waged throughout the country.
00:21:04In January, 1216, John slaughtered the inhabitants of Berwick, on the Scottish border, as punishment for supporting the rebel barons.
00:21:14At Rochester and Kent, John personally directed the seven-week siege of this rebel stronghold.
00:21:21To torment the starving defenders even more, he ordered bacon fat to be smeared and burnt on the wooden props used to undermine the castle's west tower.
00:21:32The tower and the rebels' resolve soon collapsed.
00:21:35But total victory would elude him.
00:21:39In October 1216, whilst feasting at Lynn in East Anglia, he contracted dysentery.
00:21:47When he was dying, he clearly was a deeply, deeply troubled man.
00:21:53You can see that from what he was buried in, because he wasn't buried in a crown.
00:21:57He was buried in a cloth cap.
00:22:00This is the cap which is put on a monarch's head after he's been anointed to keep in all the holy oil,
00:22:06all the oil which was poured into the monarch, the blessings of the Holy Spirit, what's called the cap of unction.
00:22:10It's an absolutely sacred garment.
00:22:14John clearly had kept his cap of unction and he asked to be buried in it,
00:22:19in the hope that somehow or other the oil in it and the blessings would waft him as quickly as possible through the regions of purgatory.
00:22:29He died at Newark Castle in Lincolnshire on October 18th, 1216.
00:22:34In his hurried will, he specified that his body should be interred at Worcester,
00:22:38where today the body of bad King John still lies in the cathedral.
00:22:51The most evil men and women in history takes a break next Monday, because we've live international football.
00:22:57Football this Friday, two details of that in seconds.
00:23:00And next tonight, our Kevin Cosner season continues.
00:23:02Anthony Quinn and Madeline Stowe join Mr. C for the thriller Revenge after a news update.
00:23:09From the mountainous ancient kingdom of Wallachia, in what is now modern Romania,
00:23:17a man emerged who would excel himself in devising innovative methods of torture and mass murder.
00:23:24He had life, power of life and death over all of his subjects.
00:23:30He inspired a marvelous horror story.
00:23:33And it's an unusual horror story in that it was real.
00:23:36In a bloody six year reign, the ruler of this kingdom brought terror to citizens and foreigners alike.
00:23:45Prince Vlad Dracula was more than just the inspiration for the bloodthirsty vampire of legend.
00:23:51To this day, he's still referred to as Vlad Tepes, Vlad the Impaler, in memory of his favorite method of killing.
00:24:02From his birth in 1431, Vlad's home of Wallachia was wracked with Israel.
00:24:24From his birth in 1431, Vlad's home of Wallachia was wracked with instability and unrest.
00:24:34Wallachia in the 15th century was a small and backward principality.
00:24:41It faced two great powers, the Ottoman Empire to the south of the Danube and then the Kingdom of Hungary to the west.
00:24:49So the scene was set for a conflict between the two great powers.
00:24:54And it was in between these powers that the story of Vlad unfolds.
00:25:04As son of the Prince of Wallachia, Vlad was initiated into the Christian Order of the Dragon.
00:25:11A select group of European royalty dedicated to crusading against the infidel Turks
00:25:17and defending an empire in the name of the cross.
00:25:22The Ottoman Turks, they were the most successful fighters for Islam in the 15th century.
00:25:29Nobody could rival them in terms of spreading the religion.
00:25:34As head of the order, his father was known as Dracul, meaning the dragon.
00:25:39Vlad was very proud of the fact that his father got this very select honor.
00:25:47So he called himself Dracul, which means son of him who had the order of the dragon.
00:25:53In 1442, the Turkish invasion of Transylvania left Wallachia vulnerable to its Hungarian enemies.
00:26:03With his throne under threat, Vlad's father made a deal with the Ottoman Sultan.
00:26:09The Wallachia went through a series of rulers rather rapidly and it was in the interests of the Ottoman Sultan to keep them under control.
00:26:22They didn't try to overrun and conquer the land.
00:26:26They tried instead to extract tribute from the Wallachs and to demand troops from them if they needed them for their army.
00:26:35To seal the deal, Vlad's father sent his two young sons as tribute to the Sultan in Adrianople.
00:26:44Right into the lion's den.
00:26:47You had to leave an insurance policy.
00:26:50The best insurance in this case was to leave your two sons on the premise that you wouldn't dare go to war and risk the lives of your sons.
00:26:59But as a matter of fact, the father did and knew what he was doing.
00:27:06We have a letter from the father to the citizens of the town in Transylvania saying, how can you doubt my convictions?
00:27:15I've sacrificed my own sons in the Christian cause.
00:27:20Vlad was 13 and a hostage in a strange land.
00:27:24You have to think about this for a moment. Look, you're a young boy. Your father leaves you. You're bereft of your mother. Mother goes back with the father.
00:27:33You're among these Turks. You don't know Turkish. You don't know Islam. You're a Christian. I mean, it's a strange place. It's weird religion.
00:27:42It's definitely has affected him as a teenager. It could not have not affected his way of thinking. He had this hatred very much imprinted in him and this desire of revenge.
00:27:55Vlad's growing sense of abandonment and betrayal spawned a severe hatred for the sultan and his court.
00:28:05The sultan's eye was fixed firmly on Vlad and Radu as potential puppet rulers.
00:28:11They were being primed to take their native throne in the name of Islam.
00:28:15But Vlad was studying the enemy and biding his time.
00:28:21The most important thing was probably military.
00:28:25And I suspect that Vlad and Radu would have had a good military training in the Ottoman court.
00:28:31They would learn about warfare, particularly riding, how to fire a bow, swordsmanship.
00:28:37Because being a member of the ruling class, which is what they were destined to become, meant also that you had to fight on the battlefield and indeed you had to lead armies.
00:28:50And having learnt that, then they would have to learn the rudiments of Islam.
00:28:56It was here that Vlad witnessed the fear-inducing effect of public execution.
00:29:02Generally, executions were fairly public because the whole purpose of them was to show the power of the sultan and also to encourage people not to step out of line.
00:29:19Unlike Vlad, Radu had become fully indoctrinated into Ottoman culture and its army.
00:29:25His younger brother has given in to the sultan and gone over to the sultan and becomes a minion, a puppet.
00:29:33Vlad's motive primarily is to stop Islam and to maintain the independence as far as he could of his native Wallachian.
00:29:44He wanted to be ruler.
00:29:46His brother really accepted the Turkish way of life.
00:29:50He wasn't interested in war. Radu was not.
00:29:52He was interested in just being a prince and being pampered and leading the easy life.
00:29:57For Vlad, that was unthinkable.
00:29:59He had a fight. He had a motive. He was driven.
00:30:03And this was not something he could accept.
00:30:05So the relationship between him and his brother was terrible.
00:30:09To Vlad, Radu was a traitor, never to be trusted again.
00:30:14In 1448, Vlad's father was murdered by the power hungry Wallachian nobility in a plot to take the throne.
00:30:25After six long years in exile, Vlad's chance to rule had finally come.
00:30:32The Turks raised their army and put Vlad at the helm.
00:30:37He was to be the sultan's new prince of Wallachia.
00:30:41But within three years, Vlad had turned on the sultan and had thrown him out of what was now his realm.
00:30:49Barely 25 years old, Prince Vlad Dracula began his infamous and bloody reign.
00:31:00He came back to a country that was unstable.
00:31:05He had no idea who was for him, who was against him, who would help him, who would defy him.
00:31:10At first, it appears he was a popular ruler because he seemed to be independent, which was something they hadn't seen in a long time.
00:31:20Once in power, Prince Vlad increased security by building thick battlements, watchtowers and underground tunnels.
00:31:30Vlad Cepes really changed the way Wallachia looked by building a whole set of new fortresses, of using new key points that he reinforced.
00:31:43He knew he was on the brink of war with the Turks, that was clear.
00:31:47He was preparing then his country.
00:31:52To the new prince, Wallachia was now a war state.
00:31:55Once prevention of foreign attack was completed, he turned to ensuring the loyalty of the nobility.
00:32:05He assembles all the boyars, the nobles, to a great feast.
00:32:12And he wined and dined them.
00:32:16Ironically asked them how many rulers they had seen in their lifetime.
00:32:20And many, some of them mentioned 12, I mean, a large number of princes who had been on that throne.
00:32:27And what did this show to him?
00:32:30That they had no respect for the prince.
00:32:36And then afterwards, when they little suspected, he had the place surrounded.
00:32:41He took them on a death march to his mountain lair, Castle Dracula at Poinari.
00:32:49And made them work side by side, elbow to elbow, with the peasants, to rebuild and reinforce the Poinari Castle.
00:32:57And many of them fell from the rock, from the thousand foot drop on all sides.
00:33:04It's a precarious sort of place.
00:33:06Many died from exhaustion and from lack of proper nourishment.
00:33:13But soon turned from being, let's say, a man who was apparently, at first, relatively popular to someone who was feared.
00:33:23To ensure absolute loyalty.
00:33:27Prince Vlad employed a terror tactic he witnessed as a boy in Adrianople.
00:33:32Impalement.
00:33:34The classic way of impaling is to take the victim, put them spread eagle on the ground, tie the arms to one set of horses and the legs to another.
00:33:43Then you take a stake.
00:33:46What happens is, the horses move slowly forward, then the ropes are cut, and then you're hoisted up on this stake or pole.
00:33:56You die very slowly.
00:34:00Not from your innards being pierced, but from exposure to the elements generally.
00:34:05Purpose, a lasting example of what can happen to you if you disobey the rules.
00:34:12It's effective.
00:34:15With his ancestral throne secure, Vlad would restructure the social hierarchy and install a strict moral code that would result in the slaughter of thousands of his own people.
00:34:27Having established himself as sole sovereign, and with his court cleansed of disloyal noblemen, Vlad turned to restructuring the gentry to create a new nobility, loyal only to him.
00:34:46He got rid of most of the old gentry.
00:34:52There's a noticeable drop in the old families during his reign.
00:34:57What did he do?
00:34:58He replaced them with lower gentry, who would be beholden to him, and more loyal, more trustworthy.
00:35:08And those are the ones he used to carry out his terror tactics of impalement.
00:35:14With his henchmen in place, Vlad's obsession with loyalty and control led him to install a severe moral code, punishable only by death.
00:35:27He was an extreme law and order man, and all the chronicles testify that during his lifetime there was law and order in Valachia.
00:35:35He would punish you by impalement for little offenses, as well as big ones.
00:35:42If a woman committed adultery had her body skinned, and then exposed on the village square as a lesson to adulterous wives.
00:35:50Or if a woman was lazy, he'd have her hands cut off and impaled on the village square as a lesson to lazy wives.
00:36:00And he impaled the old people and the children, because they were useless.
00:36:05Naturally, the fear of his wrath kept rebellion down to a minimum.
00:36:14According to peasant tradition, Vlad placed a priceless gold cup in every village square for all the peasantry to admire.
00:36:23Many drank from it, but no one dared steal it.
00:36:28The cup remained in the square throughout Vlad's entire reign, as a symbol of his absolute power.
00:36:35What he wanted to do was to establish the fact that he was the absolute ruler.
00:36:40And what better absolute ruler is it than to be godlike? That's what it's all about.
00:36:46God has the power of life and death, and it's indiscriminate, let's face it.
00:36:52That's the essence of terror.
00:36:54Before long, execution was not only administered as a punishment, but became the prince's favorite pastime.
00:37:02Vlad would kill at a whim.
00:37:06Vlad liked to die amid his impaled victims in his local city, and the stench must have been unbearable throughout the place.
00:37:15He would have the blood gathered in bowls in front of him, and he took bread, dipped it in the blood of his victims, and slurped it down.
00:37:24In fact, one case, a Polish nobleman held his nose. He was there, you know, having dinner with Vlad.
00:37:34And Vlad turned to him and said, what's the matter with you?
00:37:37And the fellow said, my lord, I can't stand the stench of these rotting corpses all around.
00:37:42He said, very well. I'll take care of that.
00:37:44And then he had this fellow impaled on a higher stake than the others, and he said, well, now he's up there where the gentle breezes blow, and he doesn't have to worry about the stench down here anymore.
00:37:56People always gather to watch public executions, so when he did that, he had it refined to a point of perfection.
00:38:03This perverted approach to law and order took the lives of thousands of his fellow Christian citizens, and turned the royal capital into a stinking graveyard.
00:38:19Vlad's palace at Tietgoviste was surrounded by a high hedge three miles in length.
00:38:26There was a corpse hanging from every branch, and as soon as somebody came and cut down a corpse, a fresh corpse was put there in its place.
00:38:37And that is one of the reasons why, indeed, in Turkish, Vlad has the title Kazakhche Vlad, or Vlad the Impaler.
00:38:46Vlad was an Orthodox Christian with a growing reputation as a sadist, and a monstrous appetite for revenge.
00:38:56But as long as he fought against the Ottoman Turks, he was accepted in the Catholic center of Christendom.
00:39:02Vlad Dracula was the one who fought, and tried to stop the spread of Islam into his own area.
00:39:13And he was supported by the Pope.
00:39:16The Orthodox signed with the Catholics, and they formed one church on paper, which shows you that the theological differences were peanuts.
00:39:26It didn't mean anything to the Pope. This guy was Orthodox Christian. Who cares? He's fighting the Turks.
00:39:32In 1462, the Sultan Mehmed was on the warpath. The Wallachian border was lined with Vlad and his army, determined to keep the Turkish enemy out.
00:39:45Mehmed's army was much bigger than Vlad's, and much better equipped with cannon and a huge amount of cavalry.
00:39:52The first obstacle that he encountered was, of course, the river Danube, with Vlad drawn up on the northern bank, just ready to chop his army to pieces as it scrambled up the banks.
00:40:07They advanced slowly and drove Vlad back using their guns. They lost 250 men in this operation.
00:40:18The Sultan sent two ambassadors to see Vlad to negotiate possible settlement.
00:40:26Vlad asked them to remove their caps in his presence, and they said,
00:40:32And they said, Lord, it is our custom never to bare our heads to any person.
00:40:39He said, very well, I will confirm you in your custom.
00:40:44So he had his soldiers come out, and they took very small nails, and they nailed these caps to the heads of these ambassadors.
00:40:54And then Vlad said, when you come to visit a great ruler such as myself, you better go along with my custom.
00:41:02Go back and tell the Sultan what you have seen.
00:41:07And they did. And the Sultan was enraged and wanted vengeance.
00:41:12With an army three times the size of Vlad's, the Sultan advanced and forced Vlad into retreat.
00:41:20Vlad wheeled his forces around, started destroying everything.
00:41:25And his path marched across the Danube and destroyed villages on both sides of the Danube, which means he destroyed his own Romanian villages too.
00:41:39Vlad burned food stores and poisoned wells to slow the invading army.
00:41:44Scorched earth. Brilliant policy. Very, very, very cruel.
00:41:51But they say an army travels on his stomach. This is especially true in the 15th century.
00:41:56They lived off the land. Well, if you create scorched earth, there's no food around.
00:42:01Vlad the Impaler raced back to the capital, and with sadistic delight, watched the invading army approach.
00:42:09The first wave of Turkish came through, crossed the border and came into Romania.
00:42:15He won that battle, took all the corpses and the wounded and the prisoners,
00:42:21and had a whole forest of sticks brought up in this big open field.
00:42:27And when the second wave came with the main army, they just stopped dead on their tracks.
00:42:38And so this forest of bleeding, agonizing bodies on sticks, and it looked, it was just a big, huge forest of dead bodies.
00:42:4920,000. Over 23,000, some odd. It was a deliberate attempt to frighten the Sultan.
00:42:57And when the Sultan saw this, he said,
00:43:00What can you do against a man who does such terrible things?
00:43:05It was just so barbarous, so atrocious, that even for them, they couldn't stand it.
00:43:10He just turned around and fled.
00:43:11His brother, Radu, was the only man ambitious enough to cross this barricade of death, and follow the Impaler Prince all the way to his mountain retreat.
00:43:22The Sultan sent a small contingent on ahead to pursue Vlad to Castle Dracula, Polynar.
00:43:31Led, of course, somewhere from behind, probably, by his little brother.
00:43:36He had been promised by the Turks that he would be the ruling prince of Romania once they defeated his older brother.
00:43:41He was trapped at this Castle Dracula. I mean, he was no longer capable of mounting any campaign against the Turks.
00:43:52And they besieged the place, and Vlad then escaped, with the help of some gypsies, actually, through a tunnel, and had his horses shod backwards, shoes backwards to confuse pursuit,
00:44:07and escaped over Figarash into Transylvania. Amazing.
00:44:13Vlad the Impaler had repelled the massive Turkish army and escaped, outwitting his brother, Radu, only to be captured by his other enemy, the Hungarian king.
00:44:25Vlad's bloodstained throne was filled by his hated brother.
00:44:30When they got rid of Dracula, they put this puppet on the throne, Radu the Handsome, who was, after all, a native Wallachian, okay, but he was also a pawn of the Turks.
00:44:44Almost twelve years after his capture, Vlad was released.
00:44:48With the Hungarian borders under threat from the advancing Turks, Vlad united with the king in the fight against the common enemy.
00:44:55Vlad was finally on his way home.
00:45:00Soon after Radu's death in 1475, Vlad the Impaler reclaimed his place as Prince of Wallachia.
00:45:09Still mourning the bloodbath of his past atrocities, the citizens could only see death and destruction in their future.
00:45:17Within two months of his ill-fated reign, Vlad's decapitated body was found in a murky bog, just miles from the capital.
00:45:31According to peasant tradition, in the final battle against his Turkish enemy, Vlad was murdered by the Sultan's hired assassin.
00:45:38His head was cut off, encased in honey to keep it in good shape, and sent to the Sultan as proof that Kaziklovoevoda, the impaling prince, was finally dead.
00:45:51Vlad's severed head was presented on a high stake for the crowd to witness that the great impaler had himself been impaled.
00:46:00As the bloodthirsty murderer of some 100,000 people, Vlad the Impaler would be immortalized as the infamous vampire Dracula, whose legend continues to evoke fear in the hearts of all that know of him.
00:46:19We're heading out to the battlefield after the break to learn about the terrifying challenges facing medics during the Battle of the Somme.
00:46:36He was a perverse, cross-dressing exhibitionist who had an incestuous relationship with his mother and married his stepsister.
00:46:43He murdered members of his own family in fits of jealous rage.
00:46:49His cruelty, violence and grotesque appetite for self-indulgence brought the Roman Empire to the brink of financial and political ruin.
00:46:57And he viciously persecuted the Christians.
00:47:01They would remember him as the ultimate embodiment of evil, the Antichrist.
00:47:06Nero was born on the 15th of December 37 AD in Antium.
00:47:17His father Gnaeus was from an old Roman aristocratic family.
00:47:21He was a cruel, hard-drinking man who once ran over a child in his chariot for pleasure.
00:47:27Gnaeus died when Nero was three years old.
00:47:30For the first 20 years of his life, Nero would be dominated by his mother, Agrippina.
00:47:37She was a sister of the Emperor Caligula.
00:47:41She was ambitious, a moral and a born survivor.
00:47:45Nero's mother was a very strong-minded woman.
00:47:50The Roman sources like to say that she behaved like a man, by which they mean that she understood politics and tried to wield political power.
00:47:58She was absolutely determined that her son was going to become emperor and she didn't care how many people she had to walk over in order to achieve it.
00:48:07When the Emperor Claudius was widowed, Agrippina embarked on a campaign of seduction.
00:48:12Within a short time she had married him and began to work relentlessly on the advancement of her son.
00:48:20When Nero was 13 she persuaded Claudius to adopt him and when he was 16 she engineered his marriage to the Emperor's daughter Octavia, Nero's stepsister.
00:48:31While Nero's fortunes rose, the position of Claudius' natural son Britannicus was becoming increasingly difficult.
00:48:41Nero was four years older which meant he took official precedence over his step brother.
00:48:46As Nero took on more and more duties, Britannicus was sidelined.
00:48:53In 54 AD, Agrippina decided the time was right to make a bid to put Nero into power.
00:49:00According to the Roman historian Tacitus, only one obstacle remained, the ageing Emperor Claudius.
00:49:07Agrippina had long decided on murder.
00:49:11Now she saw her opportunity. Her agents were ready.
00:49:14The poison was administered by the eunuch Halotus.
00:49:19It was sprinkled on a particularly succulent mushroom.
00:49:23Claudius' weakness for cooked mushrooms brought about his death on the 11th of October 54 AD.
00:49:31The next day the Praetorian Guard declared Nero Emperor.
00:49:36At the age of 17 he had become ruler of the biggest empire the world had ever seen.
00:49:41But while the Romans celebrated their new boy emperor in the streets, Nero was already showing a disturbing tendency towards violence.
00:49:50The year was a time of peace abroad, but disgusting excess by Nero in Rome.
00:50:01Disguised as a slave, he ranged the streets, brothels and taverns with his friends who pilfered goods from shops and assaulted wayfarers.
00:50:09When it became known that the waylayer was the emperor, attacks on distinguished men and women multiplied.
00:50:16For since disorderliness was tolerated, pseudo-Neros mobilised gangs and behaved similarly, with impunity.
00:50:23Rome by night came to resemble a conquered city.
00:50:27Nero's growing appetite for violence would soon find a target closer to home.
00:50:36Nero was insecure because he knew that Britannicus was actually the natural son of the previous emperor and that he had been adopted.
00:50:46And some people thought that Claudius had been manipulated into adopting him.
00:50:50Nero decided to murder his rival, but according to his first century biographer, Suetonius, he needed a method that would not arouse suspicion.
00:51:00To achieve this, he would need help.
00:51:02Against Britannicus, he employed poison, no less because of the competition he posed in singing.
00:51:08He had a much pleasanter voice than through fear that one day he would prevail in public favour.
00:51:13He obtained it from a certain Lacusta, who was an expert poisoner.
00:51:19He gave orders that the substance be brought to the dining room and given to Britannicus.
00:51:24When Britannicus collapsed, Nero rewarded Lacusta with immunity from prosecution and an ample estate.
00:51:32He even sent her pupils.
00:51:34With Britannicus out of the way, Nero and his mother reigned with impunity.
00:51:45They passed laws and appeared on Roman currency together, with Agrippina acting as the young emperor's self-styled regent.
00:51:54She was determined to maintain absolute control of her son, and according to Tacitus, she was prepared to go to any lengths to do it.
00:52:02According to one author, Cluvius Rufus, Agrippina's passion to retain power carried her so far that at midday, the time when food and drink were beginning to raise Nero's temperature,
00:52:18she several times appeared before her inebriated son, all decked out and ready for incest.
00:52:24Their companions observed sensual kisses and evilly suggestive caresses.
00:52:28His mother had been the architect of his rise, and she wanted him to remember it all the time.
00:52:39And initially, of course, he was prepared to be grateful, but he got tired of it and decided that the only cure was to get rid of her.
00:52:47As Nero's thoughts turned from devotion to murder, he hatched a bizarre plan.
00:52:55He ordered the construction of a booby-trapped boat designed to fall apart when under sail.
00:52:59When the boat was completed, he invited Agrippina to join him at the resort town of Baiai for a festival.
00:53:09After a pleasant evening together, Nero kissed his mother farewell and left by land, while Agrippina left by sea.
00:53:16Midway across the bay, concealed lead weights crashed through the boat's roof and it began to sink.
00:53:23But the injured Agrippina managed to swim to safety.
00:53:27When Nero heard his mother had survived, he was terrified of what she might do and immediately dispatched assassins to her villa.
00:53:35The murderers closed round around Agrippina. First, the captain hit her on the head with a truncheon.
00:53:43Then, as the lieutenant was drawing his sword, she cried out, strike here, pointing to her womb.
00:53:56Nero's rise to power had cost the lives of his mother, his step-brother and his adoptive father.
00:54:02Now, with absolute control of the empire, Nero would indulge his appetites for cruelty and self-indulgence to the full.
00:54:23The role of the Roman emperors was to protect Roman citizens and secure the empire's borders by force.
00:54:29Nero had little interest in the affairs of state.
00:54:34He preferred to indulge himself in lavish banquets where he would perform his own compositions to his friends.
00:54:41As the empire began to go into decline, Nero's response was to perform before his people on stage.
00:54:49In his performances, Nero liked to play the parts of both men and women.
00:54:55The aristocrats of the empire were outraged.
00:55:00It was as if the revered traditions of the emperors were being dragged in the mud before their very eyes.
00:55:08When he was singing, it was not permitted to leave the theatre even for the most pressing of reasons.
00:55:14Thus it has alleged that women gave birth during his shows.
00:55:18And many who were tired of listening and applauding when the entrance gates were closed
00:55:23either jumped furtively off the wall or else pretended to be dead and were carried out for burial.
00:55:30Nero's thin husky voice would be heard on the stages of Naples, Greece and Rome.
00:55:40But whatever the audience felt about his performances, his compositions were always met with applause.
00:55:45He had some young men who were called equites and these followed him around and applauded him.
00:55:52And then one day he was told that in Alexandria there was a tradition of actually training people to clap.
00:55:59And he thought it was a wonderful idea so he had his clack trained to do this.
00:56:03But apparently he was so pleased with the effect that he couldn't pass it up.
00:56:06While Nero's performances exposed him to public ridicule, his private behaviour was becoming increasingly salacious.
00:56:23He prostituted his own body to such a degree that when virtually every part of his body had been employed in filthy lusts,
00:56:30he devised a new and unprecedented practice as a kind of game in which disguised in the pelt of a wild animal,
00:56:38he would rush out of a den and attack the private parts of men and women who had been attached to stakes.
00:56:47It was becoming clear that Nero's appetite for self-indulgence was out of control.
00:56:53The Emperor was turning into a monster.
00:56:56As a ruler, the most serious thing he does is to exploit the Empire and to take its resources for his own purposes.
00:57:11And by doing so, to actually endanger the safety and security of his subjects.
00:57:17In 60 AD on the edge of the Empire in a place called Britain, Roman tax collectors brutally robbed the Queen of a local tribe.
00:57:28She was flogged and her daughters were raped.
00:57:32It was a big mistake.
00:57:35Queen Bodicea incited her people, the Iceni, to revolt.
00:57:39In a lightning campaign across southern Britain they destroyed Colchester, London and St Albans,
00:57:44killing the Roman inhabitants.
00:57:47In Rome, Nero panicked and made plans to evacuate the island forever.
00:57:53But his generals were prepared to stand firm and fight for the Roman Empire.
00:57:58The first great battle of Britain took place at an unknown location in central England.
00:58:04The 10,000 legionnaires of General Paulinus made a desperate stand against an enemy that outnumbered them more than 20 to 1.
00:58:14Against all odds, the legionnaires carried the day.
00:58:18Bodicea poisoned herself.
00:58:20Nero's empire was safe.
00:58:23For now.
00:58:24In Rome, Nero's behaviour was becoming even more cruel and more eccentric.
00:58:31In AD 62 he had his first wife Octavia murdered so he could marry his mistress Poppea.
00:58:38Nero would later kick the pregnant Poppea to death when she scolded him for coming home late after a chariot race.
00:58:45It was a murderous act that Nero deeply regretted.
00:58:51In a fit of remorse he took a boy called Sporus who reminded him of Poppea.
00:58:56The boy was castrated, dressed and made up to look like the dead empress and married to Nero in an extravagant ceremony.
00:59:05In AD 64 a great fire ravaged the centre of Rome for six days.
00:59:20It was the biggest urban fire the ancient world had seen and would not be equaled in its destruction until the fires of Dresden in the Second World War.
00:59:29Nero was away from Rome at the time.
00:59:33It's unlikely that he fiddled while his city burned but many believed the emperor had started the fire.
00:59:42Nobody dared fight the flames. Attempts to do so were prevented by menacing gangs.
00:59:48Torches too were openly thrown in by men crying that they acted on orders.
00:59:53The great Roman fire left hundreds of thousands destitute and the Roman economy in such a crisis that the currency had to be devalued.
01:00:04One man alone seemed to benefit from the carnage.
01:00:08The fact was a lot of land became available because a lot of houses were burned down.
01:00:13And the emperor took advantage of this in order to build this palace and he started building it in various quarters of the city simultaneously.
01:00:23So the impression that he was taking over the city and also the sufferings of the individuals who lost their property created a very bad impression.
01:00:32Nero cleared an area the size of London's Hyde Park in the centre of Rome.
01:00:39Here he built a new sprawling palace complex called the Golden House after the plates of gold which were set to cover its ceilings and walls.
01:00:48It contained an enormous lake and expansive ground which were populated with all manner of exotic animals.
01:00:54The banqueting halls had coffered ceilings fitted with panels of ivory which would revolve scattering flowers and pipes which would spray perfume on those beneath.
01:01:07The principal banqueting chamber had a dome which revolved continuously both day and night like the world itself.
01:01:13When the house was brought to completion in this style and he dedicated it, he said nothing more to indicate his approval than to declare he had at last begun to live like a human being.
01:01:26It is as it were Nero's great statement in the city of Rome and remember that in front of it is this gate, this enormous colossal statue of the sun but with the features of the emperor.
01:01:35The purpose of the golden palace, to lord and praise the name of the great man, it becomes yet one further reason to condemn him after his fall.
01:01:48In Rome the word on the streets was that Nero had ordered the fire so he could build his enormous palace.
01:01:55It was a rumour that would not go away.
01:01:59To regain the trust of his people, the emperor needed a scapegoat.
01:02:03He hit on the idea that anybody would believe anything of the Christians and also that there was a marvellous way of getting them to confess because everybody knew that if you were a Christian you wouldn't deny your Christianity.
01:02:18So if you announced that the Christians started the fire, anyone who confessed to their Christianity was assumed to have confessed to arson.
01:02:27It is clear that Nero treated the Christians with particular cruelty and barbarity.
01:02:36Tacitus tells us that he had them rounded up, he had them dressed in animal skins and attacked by dogs, he had some crucified and he also had many burned.
01:02:46In the evening he lined up his garden with Christians as human torches.
01:02:54Nero's attack on the Christians would be the first persecution of Christianity under the Roman Empire.
01:02:59It's believed both the disciple Peter and the apostle Paul were tortured and killed during Nero's reign.
01:03:10In the Bible's book of revelations John describes the end of the world and warns of a beast with two horns.
01:03:17Was it Nero that he had in mind?
01:03:27Here is wisdom.
01:03:29Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man, and his number is six hundred threescore and six.
01:03:38In languages such as Greek and Hebrew, there was no separate set of numbers.
01:03:45The numbers were represented by the letters of the alphabet.
01:03:48When the name Nero Caesar is transliterated from the Greek, Nero and Kaiser, into the Hebrew,
01:03:53that is to say when the Greek characters of the name are replaced by Hebrew characters,
01:03:58then the numerical value of the name in Hebrew comes to 666.
01:04:03So as far as the church is concerned, there's no goodness in Nero.
01:04:12He is an antichrist figure.
01:04:14He is an embodiment of evil.
01:04:19In a bid to remove any potential rivals, Nero had systematically murdered every member of his family.
01:04:25When finally a major plot was hatched against him in 65 AD,
01:04:29it was masterminded by his friend, the senator Piso.
01:04:34The conspirators included senators, officers of the imperial guard,
01:04:39and even Nero's tutor and mentor, Seneca.
01:04:44The fatal blow was to be struck while Nero attended the Circus Maximus,
01:04:49Rome's vast chariot arena, during the feast of Ceres.
01:04:52But the conspiracy was betrayed by a slave.
01:04:57One after the other, the conspirators were rounded up and put to death by Nero's execution squads.
01:05:03Piso was lucky. He was allowed to commit suicide by cutting his wrists.
01:05:08After his narrow escape, Nero began to see enemies everywhere.
01:05:12Each year he murdered more and more senators, aristocrats and army officers.
01:05:20The final death toll would never be known.
01:05:24He comes to distrust those who are very competent.
01:05:29And on the other hand, he's afraid of them, because he knows that they don't respect him.
01:05:33By the end of the reign, he's actually putting them to death.
01:05:37One of the reasons for the big rebellions, I think,
01:05:40is that all those people in charge of legions think that their days are numbered.
01:05:4468 AD would be known as the year of the great rebellions.
01:05:50In March, Governor Vindex raised an army of 100,000 against the emperor in Gaul.
01:05:56They were butchered by Nero's legions.
01:05:59But at the same time, a more serious rebellion was brewing in northern Spain, headed by the governor Galba.
01:06:09In Rome, Galba's agents took control of Nero's palace guard.
01:06:14When they refused to take his orders, Nero knew his days as emperor were over.
01:06:19Nero was completely paralyzed. He was terrified that the armies had turned against him.
01:06:24He didn't trust anybody, and in the end he decided to flee Rome and give it up.
01:06:29But it was this terror, inspired by the awareness that he had made so many enemies.
01:06:36Nero fled some miles outside the city to the countryside villa of one of his ex-slaves.
01:06:43He made plans to adopt a new identity as a travelling musician.
01:06:47But Galba's agents had convinced the senate to declare him a public enemy and issue orders for his arrest and execution.
01:06:57Realising there was no escape, Nero snatched up two daggers which he had brought with him and tried the blade of each.
01:07:05At that moment, some horsemen drew near under orders to bring him back living.
01:07:13Aware of this, he hesitantly said,
01:07:16The thunder of swift-footed horses echoes round my ears.
01:07:19He then drove the dagger into his throat with the help of his secretary, Epaphroditus.
01:07:34Nero was dead, but for the Roman people the nightmare would continue.
01:07:38In the year following his death, the empire would be ravaged by civil war.
01:07:44It would be called the year of the four emperors.
01:07:47First Galba, murdered after seven months in office.
01:07:52Then the emperor Otto, driven to commit suicide three months later.
01:07:57Followed by Vitellius, whose short reign would end when he was tortured to death by the new emperor Vespasian.
01:08:04Later emperors would try to eradicate the memory of Nero.
01:08:10They carved their own faces onto Nero's old statues and tore down his golden house, building baths over the ruins.
01:08:19But the legend of Nero would not die.
01:08:23For years after his death, there were wild rumours that Nero had somehow survived.
01:08:28The provinces were alive with sightings of men claiming to be the Roman emperor who played the lyre.
01:08:39An enormous arena was built obliterating the great lake that once reflected Nero's palace.
01:08:45The arena was called the Amphitheatre of Titus.
01:08:48But everyone calls it the Colosseum because once a colossal statue of Nero stood there.
01:08:55And no one could forget the sun god emperor, Nero.
01:08:59He could play at lots of levels. In other words, there was a type of folksy earnestness which appealed to the lower classes.
01:09:20You know, this was a man who'd shake your hand firmly and tell you that he'd worked on the building site.
01:09:24Whereas, of course, one look at him you could tell that he hadn't.
01:09:28On the other hand, he moved very easily in society drawing rooms where it's quite obvious that society ladies thought of him as a bit of attractive ruff.
01:09:38That he had a sort of bohemian chic about him.
01:09:43Hitler encouraged his female supporters by presenting himself as a hermit-like, celibate figure who devoted all his energies to the good of Germany.
01:09:52But again, the image he projected was a lie.
01:09:56He was at the time involved with a number of teenage mistresses, beginning with Maria Reiter, the daughter of an innkeeper from Berchtesgarten.
01:10:05He was 37, she was 16, so she was literally young enough to be his daughter.
01:10:11And he felt much more at home when he could be patronising, could be superior, could be avuncular, could be the older man.
01:10:20The mistress that made the biggest impression on Hitler was 16-year-old Geli Raubel.
01:10:27She was Hitler's niece, the daughter of his half-sister, Angela.
01:10:30In 1929, Geli moved into Uncle Alf's grand apartment on Munich's Prince Regentenplatz.
01:10:39She took a bedroom adjoining his on the second floor.
01:10:44Geli was vivacious, idealistic and free-spirited.
01:10:48Hitler was controlling, strict and possessive.
01:10:52Geli felt trapped, but Hitler would not let her go.
01:10:55The longer they were involved, the more she saw of the seamy side.
01:11:06There was obviously a nasty side to his sexual nature, just as there was a very nasty side to his political nature.
01:11:19On the 19th of September, 1931, Geli was found dead in Hitler's flat.
01:11:23She was bleeding from a wound near her heart.
01:11:28One arm was stretched out towards a pistol, a Walther 6.35.
01:11:33The police recorded a verdict of suicide.
01:11:37Geli was the first mistress to be driven to a violent death by Hitler, but she would not be the last.
01:11:43The actress, Renata Müller, threw herself to her death from a window in 1937, and Eva Brown attempted suicide at least once before her final pact with Hitler.
01:11:55But it was Geli's picture that Hitler kept in his bedroom in Munich and Berlin until his death in 1945.
01:12:04In 1932, the global depression hit Germany hard.
01:12:11When it came to the elections, the Germans needed a radical solution.
01:12:15The solution they chose was Hitler and the Nazi party.
01:12:18Germany is in a state of absolute chaos, and along out of nowhere comes this unknown soldier figure, the Messiah, whose role it is to lead the German people into a time of paradise on earth.
01:12:39And you don't have to wait until the afterlife. This is in the here and now.
01:12:48But Hitler's new German paradise was not a place where everyone was welcome.
01:12:53They are treacherous, cowardly and cruel, and appear in large swarms.
01:13:04In the animal kingdom, they represent the elements of underground destruction.
01:13:08In fact, they are just like the Jews.
01:13:10From the very beginning, Hitler's propaganda had portrayed the Jewish people as the source of everything that was wrong in German society.
01:13:27When Hitler came to power, he banned marriage and sexual intercourse between Germans and Jews.
01:13:40And he reintroduced a medieval law forcing Jews to wear a yellow star of identification.
01:13:49In November 1938, Hitler whipped up anti-Semitic feeling into a nationwide frenzy of violence.
01:13:55Jewish shop windows were broken, over 100 Jews were killed, and 27,000 were interned in camps for their so-called protection.
01:14:05It was called the Reichskristallnacht, the Imperial Night of Crystal.
01:14:11In the morning at school, we knew that the local synagogue was burning.
01:14:16And as a young boy, you're curious and you want to see.
01:14:19So we sped off on our bikes about 10 kilometers.
01:14:21By the time we got there, the synagogue had pretty much burned down.
01:14:25The fire brigade was standing there watching, but they weren't putting out the fire.
01:14:30At the same time that Hitler was inciting violence against Jews, he was also conducting a campaign to brainwash the German children he considered racially pure.
01:14:43These were to be the seeds from which he would grow a master race.
01:14:54My German youth, we expect you German boys and German girls to embody everything that we hope for in Germany.
01:15:08We want to be one nation, and you, my German youth, shall become this nation.
01:15:14I was six or seven years old, and was lucky enough to meet Hitler.
01:15:39I gave him flowers, and he patted me on the head.
01:15:44I must admit, as a small boy, I was blown away by the man.
01:15:49It was like a religious experience.
01:15:52At one point, he makes a very crucial speech where he says,
01:15:55we're going to take a child of six or eight and put them into the junior branch of the Hitler Youth.
01:16:03Then they will go into the SS, the army, or whatever, and we will keep them.
01:16:06We will have captured them for the rest of their lives.
01:16:09My Führer, I think of you and love you like father and mother.
01:16:17I will always obey you like father and mother.
01:16:21And when I grow up, I'll help you like father and mother.
01:16:26And you'll be proud of me like father and mother.
01:16:29With complete control of the German political system, its army, and its youth, Hitler was ready to take increasingly extreme steps towards his vision of the new Germany.
01:16:44But to do this, he would need a war.
01:16:58When Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, he was embarking on a world war, which would cost the lives of more than 40 million people.
01:17:07In Germany, he was already waging another war, a war against the German people themselves.
01:17:19We will care for them, but we will not allow them to reproduce.
01:17:23These unfortunate creatures should not be allowed to live alongside our healthy children.
01:17:28Sterilization is just a simple medical procedure.
01:17:31Hitler was a hypochondriac and he had never been good at sport, yet he believed that the sick and weak were an unnecessary burden on the rest of society.
01:17:44In 1933, he ordered the brutal sterilization of 400,000 gypsies, disabled and long-term unemployed, people that he considered genetically substandard.
01:17:58When the war began, Hitler's genetic campaign took a murderous turn.
01:18:05He signed this document, ordering the clandestine murder of long-term patients in German hospitals and institutions.
01:18:18The nurse asked me once if I fancied carrying some dirty washing to the laundry.
01:18:22I said, why not? I was pleased to get out of doors for a bit.
01:18:27I noticed that the baskets were heavier than usual.
01:18:31So when they weren't looking, I had a peek under the laundry and in each of them were the bodies of three children, two boys and one girl.
01:18:37And on another day, it was the other way around.
01:18:39At first, the systematic killing was carried out by lethal injection.
01:18:48But as Hitler's list of murder candidates grew, a new technique for mass murder was developed.
01:18:55It was tested in six provincial hospitals, including Hadamar Asylum in Hessen.
01:18:59Here, the patients were taken into the basement where they were asked to undress.
01:19:06They were then directed to the shower room.
01:19:10But the drain in the floor was a fake.
01:19:25And the pipes didn't contain water, but carbon monoxide gas.
01:19:30The death notice arrived.
01:19:41There was a death certificate and a letter which said that the corpse of my mother could not be sent due to the danger of infection.
01:19:50It had to be cremated straight away.
01:19:53Hitler's hospitals of death claimed over 300,000 lives.
01:20:07The bodies were never released to the relatives, in case they uncovered the truth.
01:20:23While Hitler's troops laid waste to Europe, a million-strong army of slave laborers from Poland, France and Yugoslavia were toiling to build huge monuments to Hitler's vanity.
01:20:37Germany was changing beyond all recognition.
01:20:41It would have been a trans-European empire reaching into the Urals with various so-called tribesmen beyond the frontier who would get zapped and then led in defeat in Roman-style triumphs through Germania, as the capital Berlin would have been renamed by 1955.
01:21:04As Hitler's megalomania grew, he began to see himself as something more than human.
01:21:11He believed he was an agent of divine will, like the emperors of ancient Rome.
01:21:17When he ordered the building of a gigantic Nazi meeting hall, it was based on the Roman Colosseum.
01:21:23Only Hitler's Colosseum was to be twice as high and seat over 50,000 people.
01:21:28This was what Hitler's thousand-year Reich was to look like.
01:21:41If the international Jewish finance crew succeeds in plunging the peoples of the world into another world war,
01:21:48the result will not be the Bolshevization of the planet and the victory of the Jews.
01:21:52the result will be the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.
01:22:09At the outbreak of the war, Hitler had interned all German Jews in camps.
01:22:13In occupied territories such as Poland, they were corralled in inner city areas called ghettos.
01:22:21Here, they were to be worked to death, manufacturing material to help the German war effort.
01:22:27We were herded into the barbed wire enclosure at the lodge ghetto.
01:22:33Death soon claimed many of my friends, of my family, because it's difficult now to impart how miserable that life was.
01:22:46Constant hunger, cold, dirt, no matter how hard you tried.
01:22:53There were no means really, but we tried very hard to keep some semblance of human dignity.
01:23:06When the Americans entered the war in 1941 and Russian resistance stiffened,
01:23:12Hitler had to confront the possibility of defeat for the first time.
01:23:15It was at this point that he decided to annihilate the entire Jewish population of Nazi-occupied Europe.
01:23:23For the task of killing enormous Jewish population, they clearly needed some method which could be done on a huge scale,
01:23:32and wasn't psychologically upsetting for the people doing the killing.
01:23:35What they did essentially was to generalize the method used in the euthanasia program except using large, almost industrial sized gas chambers.
01:23:47At the beginning of 1941, the transportation began of all Jews within the Reich to the newly built death camps in the east.
01:23:56They were to be gassed and their bodies were to be burned in crematoria.
01:23:59The largest of these factories of death was Auschwitz.
01:24:04When we said, where are we? And they said, what do you mean? You don't know? No, this is Auschwitz.
01:24:13What is Auschwitz? They were angry.
01:24:16I mean, these were mostly also Jewish appalled people who were working at the, at the railways when we were arriving.
01:24:26This is a death camp.
01:24:30You have arrived, but we don't think that you will leave this place.
01:24:37Over a million men, women and children died in Auschwitz.
01:24:41Their shaven hair was kept for stuffing German furniture, and the dust of their bones was collected as fertilizer for the farms of Hitler's Reich.
01:24:51I was there with my mother.
01:24:54And while we were moving, moving, moving, people were saying to the youngsters like me,
01:25:00say you are 18 or 19, don't say you are younger, say you are 18 or 19.
01:25:07When it came to my mother, she just told the truth, and then realized we are 44, 45.
01:25:16I was told to go to one side, and I wanted to run after her, and I was asked how old I was, and I said 19,
01:25:22and I was put to the other side, and this is the last I, I saw of my mother.
01:25:34In 1942, the 270,000 men of Hitler's 6th Army were trapped by the Red Army at Stalingrad.
01:25:41Hitler refused to allow them to retreat.
01:25:45As they stared annihilation in the face, he ordered them to die like heroes.
01:25:54When the 90,000 survivors surrendered, Hitler went berserk, but the tide had turned.
01:26:00He was losing the war.
01:26:02I had a little room with a big map of Russia with flags in.
01:26:12I noticed that after the Battle of Stalingrad, the flags started moving backwards.
01:26:17Soon it was clear that the war was coming to Germany, and we wondered, what will happen then?
01:26:26As Russian tanks crashed across the German borders and headed towards Berlin,
01:26:30Hitler carried out yet another act of betrayal.
01:26:34Hitler had decided that, being an extreme social Darwinist,
01:26:39that the German people had shown that they were not fit for the fight
01:26:44against what had proved to be the stronger people to the East.
01:26:48And he thought, well, they haven't won it.
01:26:52They've shown themselves almost biologically deficient, so they must be useless.
01:26:56So therefore, I don't care whether we blow the whole place to pieces.
01:27:01And he orders the complete destruction of the whole infrastructure of Germany.
01:27:05Hitler's Nero order was never carried out.
01:27:09The Germans had finally had enough.
01:27:14Hitler appeared one last time before the cameras.
01:27:17He was a physical wreck, smiling inanely as he touched the faces of boy soldiers,
01:27:23about whose imminent death he cared nothing.
01:27:26On the 28th of April 1945, Hitler married Eva Braun,
01:27:34and on the following afternoon he poisoned and shot himself to avoid capture.
01:27:38In his final will and testament, Hitler declared his love for the country he had destroyed,
01:27:49and warned future German leaders to observe the laws of race
01:27:54and mercilessly oppose that universal poisoner of all peoples, the Jews.
01:28:00To be continued...
01:28:01To be continued...
01:28:02To be continued...