Smoke, Blood, and Mirrors

S1 E101: It's 1945, and the Allies have rounded up as many Nazis as they can find. They'll interrogate party officials, war criminals and also minor players just to get to the bottom of how this nation operated. Their subjects include the leading Nazi propagandist and noted anti-Semite, Julius Streicher; the charming and likeable Albert Speer, Hitler's architect and Minister of Armaments; the commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolph Hoess; BDM leader Melita Maschmann and Nazi doctor Karl Gephardt. These Nazis share stories of their earliest encounters with Adolf Hitler. Speer presents a confounding portrait of an educated, likeable man seduced by his own ambitions. Maschmann explains how the Nazis cultivated racial hatred among young Germans. Occultist Karl Maria Wiligut explains the Nazi obsession with mysticism and ritual. The Nazis use spectacle and circus to obscure their dark agenda at the 1934 Nuremburg Party Rally and the 1936 Berlin Olympics.