Hello and welcome to a new series of Legacy.

Today we're going to look at one of history's most chilling and best known subjects,

the Nazis.

We're going to look at how a movement that seemed marginal, maybe even laughable at first,

came to seize control of one of the most advanced societies on Earth.

Everyone knows the end of this story, genocide and disaster.

But we want to look at the beginning, at the rise of the Nazis in Germany in the 1920s and

the 1930s. We want to figure out how it happened. And the answer might surprise you,

because as well as politics, speeches and crowds, the story involves two

things you might not expect. Disease and religion. That's right. And the echoes of

pandemic outbreaks and the appeal of faith shape the mood in Germany after the First World War.

We're going to look at that in some detail. And that combined with

humiliation, poverty, despair created a perfect storm and a storm into which a charismatic

figure stepped. I don't think anyone will be surprised to learn his name and will get to him,

but not yet, because first, we need to set the scene.

So, Peter, know anything about the First World War?

I mean, that's a massively rhetorical question, because I know you know a lot.

No, no, I do, I'm really interested in the First World War, partly because I learnt about it so many times at school,

but there are lots of things that still don't make a huge amount of sense to me, like how and why the assassination of an Austrian Archduke in Sarajevo

triggered a sequence of events that left millions of people dead and destroyed European empires,

or why it was that generals on both sides, or all the sides in the war, kept sending men

to meet pretty much certain death rather than looking for a settlement.

...