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0:06
On September 27th 1940, Hitler's Nazi Germany, Mussolini's fascist Italy and the Empire of Japan signed a pact to dominate the world. It was called the Axis Pact.
0:25
This secret Axis blueprint for world domination was the work of a man almost forgotten by history.
0:33
Hitler's special advisor on world affairs, a personal friend of the Japanese high command, and a master spy without whom there might have been no Pearl Harbor.
0:47
His name was Karl Haushofer.
0:53
Between 1920 and 1945, Karl Haushofer was one of the most influential men in Germany. A friend and mentor to Adolf Hitler, he helped guide the Nazi party to power.
1:06
Through his various acolytes and disciples, he gradually extended his influence into every sphere of Nazi policy.
1:14
His was the ideology that underpinned the Nazi drive for war and conquest, and through his Japanese connections, He forged the system of alliances that brought the world to the brink of destruction.
1:29
Professor Karl Haushofer has been called Hitler's Merlin. Just as King Arthur had Merlin the magician behind him, so Haushofer stood behind Hitler. And indeed, Karl Haushofer also dabbled in the occult.
1:46
Despite his influence, Karl Haushofer remained in the shadows, a secretive figure. Almost forgotten by history.
2:19
Karl Haushofer was born in Munich in Bavaria on the 27th of August 1869. He was a passionate German nationalist and became a career soldier and artillery officer.
2:32
His brilliance and attention to detail quickly led to his appointment to the German General Staff.
2:45
In October 1908, the German army sent Haushofer to Tokyo to study the Japanese army.
2:51
His experience changed Haushofer's life and the history of the 20th century.
3:04
The assignment marked the beginning of a love affair with the Orient. Haushofer travelled extensively in the Far East, adding Korean, Japanese and Chinese to his already extensive repertoire of languages, Russian, French and English.
3:22
In Japan, Haushofer made the personal acquaintance of the Emperor and began to develop a strong interest in militaristic and nationalistic Japanese culture.
3:36
In 1914, when war broke out, Haushofer returned to Germany to fight on the Western Front and rose to the rank of Major General.
3:56
Germany's defeat in the First World War led to the Versailles Treaty, which imposed a savage peace on Germany.
4:04
It must be remembered that the victorious Allies blamed Germany for the war.
4:10
The peace that the Allies imposed was savage. German overseas territories were taken away. The army was restricted to 100,000 men. There was no air force. And the reparations imposed on Germany practically brought the economy to its knees.
4:28
The British now controlled Africa, India and the Middle East. The United States dominated South America and the Pacific.
4:36
Between them, the Anglo-Saxon sea powers controlled the world's oil and trade routes.
4:45
Germany and the Eurasian landmass were isolated.
4:52
Karl Haushofer retired from the army a bitter man. Like many other officers, he felt Germany had been defeated not only by the British and Americans, but by the betrayal of communists and Jews.
5:06
While fellow soldiers like Hitler were unemployed and penniless, Haushofer's Japanese experience got him an appointment as professor of geography at Munich University in 1919. It was here that he began to plot... The rebirth of Germany's military might.
5:28
He formulated a political doctrine called Lebensraum, or living space, which asserted Germany's right to conquer and exploit the lands of her neighbors. This doctrine was based on Haushofer's view of race and history, both of which he believed were on Germany's side. The enemies? These were the naval powers. the United States and Britain.
5:51
What Haushofer wanted to create was an alliance across the Eurasian landmass, uniting Germany with Russia and Japan to build up a powerful enough group to stand up to the Anglo-Saxon sea.
6:07
In the 1920s, in the years following the First World War, Haushofer's great Eurasian alliance began to take shape.
6:15
Banned by the Versailles Treaty from having an air force or tanks, Germany signed a secret treaty with the Soviet Union.
6:23
Called the Rapallo Pact, it allowed Germany to secretly train its soldiers and airmen in communist Russia, hidden from the British and French.
6:38
German aircraft designers, forbidden by the Versailles Treaty from building warplanes at home, were sent clandestinely. to produce aircraft for the Japanese, aircraft that would eventually bomb Pearl Harbor.
7:05
Germany in the 1920s however remained divided and without a leader.
7:11
Karl Haushofer needed to find someone who could put Lebensraum into action. He found that person through a chance encounter with one of his students at Munich University, Rudolf Hess.
7:24
Hess had acted as Haushofer's adjutant during World War I, and he followed Haushofer to Munich, where he was lecturing. Now, Hess had been born in Alexandria, Egypt. His father was a merchant there. Hess was young and impressionable, and he was excited by the ideas that Haushofer had of... bringing together the scattered German people.
7:45
Hess was already a member of the fledgling Nazi party led by Adolf Hitler. In 1923 Hitler and his small band of Nazis tried to stage a coup in Bavaria. They were easily routed. Hitler and Rudolf Hess were arrested and imprisoned in the notorious Landsberg Fortress.
8:13
In Landsberg, Hitler started to write his blueprint for Nazi world domination. He called it Mein Kampf, My Struggle, but maybe the work was not all his own.
8:31
Imprisoned in the Landsberg Fortress, Hitler and Hess received a frequent visitor. Dr. Karl Haushofer. When Hess was participating in the Beer Hall Putsch, he took hostages, and after the failure of the Putsch, he released the hostages, but he was then hid by Professor Karl Haushofer in his Munich flat, and he then escaped. He rejoined Hitler in Landsberg prison, where he became Hitler's secretary and took down Mein Kampf. While he was in Landsberg prison, which was a relatively gentle prison,
9:06
as prisons go, he was visited by General Professor Karl Haushofer, and through Hess, Karl Haushofer was introduced to Hitler, and Hitler was interested in his ideas on geopolitics and the case for more Lebensraum, and through Hess, some of Karl Haushofer's ideas were transmitted into Mein Kampf.
9:33
It is even possible Haushofer wrote or edited parts of the book.
9:38
Mein Kampf became a bestseller and transformed Hitler from a street fighter into a serious politician with mass support.
9:47
As the Nazi party's fortunes grew, so did those of Haushofer and Hess.
9:53
When Hess married, two witnesses signed the marriage register, Adolf Hitler and Karl Haushofer. Haushofer...
10:03
became the respectable face, the intellectual face of Nazism during the 20s and 30s. Hitler relied very heavily on his international contacts. Ribbentrop at the Foreign Ministry relied very heavily on his diplomatic knowledge. And also Albrecht, Haushofer's son, became second-in-command at the German Foreign Office.
10:28
Albrecht Haushofer was one of the most brilliant men ever to serve the Nazis. But unlike his father, he would quickly come to recognize the evil and brutal intent behind their ideology.
10:40
Albrecht Heisselberg was a key special advisor and their expert on Britain. He was regarded by many of them as an anglophile because he very much liked Britain. And indeed earlier on he had the dilemma as to whether he should emigrate to Britain when the Nazis came to power. But he did not wish to imperil his half-Jewish mother. So he supped with the devil. But in supping with the devil you need a long spoon and Albrecht's spoon was not. Long enough.
11:14
In January 1937, Hitler announced he was rejecting the provisions of the Versailles Treaty.
11:20
And in March 1938, he invaded Austria and made it a province of the Third Reich. Most German-speaking Austrians welcomed Hitler with open arms.
11:36
But his entry into Austria had been prepared in secret. A special Nazi body called the Association for Germans Abroad was set up to organize Germans outside the Reich. The association pretended to be an international cultural agency linking Germans scattered abroad.
11:57
Instead, in Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland and other countries in Eastern Europe, it acted as a Nazi fifth column, recruiting agents, fermenting unrest, and demanding reunification with the fatherland.
12:16
The Association for Germans Abroad was also active in America. Its president and key leader was none other than Professor Karl Haushofer.
12:31
In 1938, Haushofer's Association for Germans Abroad Organized unrest in the German-speaking parts of Czechoslovakia.
12:40
Hitler used this as a pretext to demand their return to the fatherland.
12:45
The British and French gave in to these demands and democratic Czechoslovakia was seized by the Nazis.
12:55
The betrayal of Czechoslovakia by the British and the French is one of the most shameful events in modern European history.
13:04
The Czechs weren't consulted,
13:07
and the very appeasement of Hitler, which was designed to hold off the war that everyone dreaded, did exactly the opposite. Hitler now thought the Western democracies, the French and the British, were pushovers, that they would fold whenever he made a demand. He believed from now on he could get away with murder.
13:28
Karl Haushofer's ideas were a useful smoke screen which obscured... the real purpose of Nazi aims. The Nazi aims were extremely aggressive, which were to have a series of small wars succeeded by a much bigger war against Russia. And, of course, Karl Heushofer's teaching in favour of Lebensraum and geopolitics, geographical imperialism and expanding frontiers was, of course, a useful smoke screen which obscured their real ambitions.
14:05
It seemed only a matter of time before the Nazi drive for Lebensraum would engulf all in a new world war.
14:20
In August 1939, Nazi Foreign Minister Ribbentrop and his deputy, Albrecht Haushofer, took another step towards creating the great Pan-Eurasian alliance against the British and Americans. When Hitler's Nazi Germany and Stalin's Russia signed a non-aggression pact,
14:38
the next month, the German blitzkrieg rolled over Poland.
14:53
The Second World War had started.
15:17
During his time in the Orient, Karl Haushofer, a keen linguist, discovered and translated many ancient Tibetan, Hindu and Buddhist religious texts.
15:28
Here he discovered ancient occult beliefs and the Hindu symbols of the Aryan race that Hitler and the Nazis would later adopt.
15:40
You have to remember that the carnage and death of the First World War had led many people to doubt Christianity.
15:48
So that even intellectuals like Karl Haushofer began to look for comfort elsewhere in the old pagan religions of pre-Christian Germany.
16:01
Haushofer discovered something else in the East. Western-style political parties did not exist in Asia. Instead, the Japanese created secret societies with ultra-nationalistic aims, bound together with oaths and secret rituals.
16:23
The Black Dragons were an ultra-nationalist secret society founded by Ryohei Uchida in 1901.
16:31
Infiltrating Japanese military, business and government circles, they used terror, espionage and bribery to further the expansion of the Japanese Empire.
16:44
The Black Dragons. were probably amongst the most powerful of the secret societies and sects that were operating in Japan at the time. They were financed largely through their control of the Chinese opium trade, and they got their way by a combination of bribes and assassination. Now, the Japanese government didn't mind them. They tolerated them for a number of reasons. One is, they were ultra-nationalists, and also, very importantly, they could help further Japan's imperial ambitions.
17:19
Like the Nazis, the Black Dragons were motivated by military expansion.
17:25
In 1910, Korea was annexed, then the Shandong region of China.
17:37
From these territories and from Taiwan, the Black Dragons strengthened their influence in China by controlling the opium trade.
17:44
When Manchuria was conquered in 1931, they turned their attention to the rest of China and Soviet Siberia.
17:57
In Germany, Karl Haushofer helped create secret societies similar to the Black Dragons. He helped found the Luminous Lodge, whose objective was to explore the origins of the Aryan race, and he was also closely associated with the Tula Society.
18:17
The Thule Society was the most important of all the occult secret societies in Germany at the time because it was very influential with the extreme right-wing nationalist politicians. And the Thule Society, of course, adopted the swastika and the other Aryan symbols long before the Nazis did.
18:38
Thule was a legendary island in the far north, similar to Atlantis, supposedly the center of a lost civilization. Guarded by ancient, highly intelligent beings who would help to create a race of supermen of Aryan stock to rule the world.
18:56
The uncanny parallels between the Thule society in Germany and Japanese societies like the Black Dragons can only be explained by Haushofer's intimate knowledge of the Japanese secret societies.
19:14
As a public front to promote their ideas among Bavarian industrial workers, the Thule Society set up a group called the Workers' Political Circle, with Thule Society member Karl Harrer as chairman.
19:26
The Workers' Political Circle grew rapidly, and in 1920 it was renamed the National Socialist German Workers' Party, or Nazi Party.
19:44
An ex-corporal was sent by the army's secret service to infiltrate the Nazis. His name was Adolf Hitler. Within a short time, he had become their undisputed leader.
20:01
Soon, the Nazis were marching openly with the Aryan symbols of the secret Tula society and its belief in a master race to rule the world.
20:10
Behind this bizarre spectacle... Lei Haushofer's belief in the virtues of race, obedience and selfless courage, epitomized in the warrior traditions of ancient Japan.
20:26
For over 800 years, the samurai warriors had developed a code of absolute loyalty to the emperor and unhesitating sacrifice.
20:34
This was called Bushido, the way of the warrior.
20:42
The cult of Bushido would also inspire the infamous kamikaze suicide attacks at the end of the war.
20:49
Haushofer formulated a theory that the Bushido warrior's way was very similar to the mystical Teutonic spirit of National Socialism.
21:04
He saw the Nazi SS stormtroopers as the German samurai. Haushofer saw the Japanese as the Aryans of the East.
21:13
And he managed to convince Hitler, the supreme racist, that the Japanese and the Germans could therefore become allies, because they shared common Aryan attitudes. In 1931, Hitler was thrilled by the success of the Japanese invasion of China.
21:35
The League of Nations did not intervene. Hitler now knew he could tear up the hated Versailles Treaty.
21:46
In April 1934, a year after Hitler came to power, the Japanese naval attaché in Germany attended a secret meeting with Hitler's deputy, Rudolf Hess.
21:57
The meeting took place in the house of Karl Haushofer in Munich. The outcome changed the course of 20th century history.
22:06
That 1934 meeting, eight years before Pearl Harbor, in Karl Haushofer's house, was the start, really, of the Axis Pact. Rudolf Hess, Haushofer and the Japanese naval attaché began the process of creating the alliance between Germany and Japan.
22:28
In March 1941, the Japanese foreign minister, Yosuke Matsuoka, a friend and supporter of Haushofer, put the final piece in place.
22:38
Matsuoka had already helped to negotiate Japan's entry into the Axis Pact and signed a non-aggression pact. With Stalin in Moscow,
22:52
Karl Haushofer's great Pan-Eurasian alliance was taking shape. A superpower with limitless supplies of men and resources, backed by German, Italian and Japanese technology, driven by an insatiable lust for conquest.
23:12
Haushofer was delighted. He wrote his last great... book entitled The Continental Block, praising the Hitler-Stalin pact. Everything was now in place to defeat the Anglo-Saxons.
23:31
On December 7, 1941, as Japanese planes set out to attack the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor, they had detailed information on the location of every ship.
23:41
The spy who provided this information was watching the attack from his home, a German agent recruited by none other than Karl Haushofer.
24:04
On December 7, 1941, the Japanese launched a surprise attack on the American Pacific Fleet.
24:11
A total of 423 planes flying from six aircraft carriers caught the fleet at anchor in Pearl Harbor.
24:20
Nearly 200 American aircraft were destroyed, most of them on the ground.
24:25
The Japanese had been given detailed information on the fleet's deployment and the locations of all the major harbor installations, supply dumps, and air bases.
24:57
The intelligence had come from a German master spy called Bernard Julius Otto Kuhn.
25:03
Kuhn had served as an officer in the Imperial German Navy during the First World War.
25:09
Like many others, when Germany was defeated, he felt the country had been betrayed, and he very soon joined the Nazi party.
25:19
Kuhn soon became friends with Heinrich Himmler, Hitler's ruthless secret policeman, and with Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's chief propagandist. He also met Karl Haushofer, who introduced him to the Japanese.
25:35
The university department at the University of Munich, his geopolitics institute, was actually a front for recruiting spies for the German secret service. Haushofer hand-picked the people he thought could be useful as spies either for the German diplomatic service or for the Abwehr.
25:59
In 1935, Kuhn and his family moved to Honolulu, where Dr. Kuhn pretended to work on a history of the Hawaiian islands based on Karl Haushofer's theory of geopolitics.
26:16
Kuhn rented a house that overlooked Pearl Harbor, from which he could survey naval activity through binoculars.
26:25
Details were passed on to the Japanese consul, Otagiro Okuda.
26:33
Six days before the attack, Kuhn visited the Japanese consulate with a map of Pearl Harbor, pinpointing where the main American ships were.
26:46
Near dawn on December 7, 1941, Kuhn stood at the window of his house with a flashlight, ready to signal the Japanese consulate information about the coming attack.
26:58
In November 1941, the U.S. military... picked up radio signals from the Japanese consulate in Honolulu to Tokyo, explaining that they had a spy in place near Pearl Harbor who was going to use flashlights at night to signal the movement of American aircraft carriers. Bizarrely, the FBI did nothing about it, though they thought the man involved might be Bernard Kuhn.
27:26
Well, after Pearl Harbor, of course, Kuhn was arrested, and all the implements of... of his spying trade were found.
27:34
Kuhn was put on trial by a secret US military court and sentenced to be shot.
27:43
Now, when the American government discovered this, they got rather frightened because the military courts had actually no right to try civilians in the United States. And Roosevelt got very worried that if they shot Mr. Kuhn, Then there would be retaliation against American civilians being held by the Germans. So in the end, Kuhn was thrown into Fort Leavenworth jail to do hard labor.
28:10
And at the end of the war,
28:12
the Americans deported him off to Argentina in 1948. So in fact, he got away with it.
28:22
Although Bernard Kuhn was unmasked as an Axis spy, The identities of the other spies and diplomatic contacts recruited by Karl Haushofer and his son Albrecht remain unknown. In 1935, Albrecht visited Britain six times, where he made contacts in the British aristocracy. In 1937, he visited America.
28:50
The two Haushofer's continued to maintain links with the Japanese secret societies. in particular the Black Dragons. In 1937 Albrecht also visited Japan.
29:10
The Black Dragons were highly organized among the overseas Japanese population in Brazil, Peru and the United States itself.
29:19
They used bribery and intimidation to spy and secretly acquire strategic materials for the Japanese war effort.
29:32
As World War II progressed, the beef and food supplies of Latin America were vital for feeding the Allied armies. By August 1942, German submarines had sunk 19 Brazilian ships. Someone was telling the U-boat commanders where to find their prey.
29:59
In 1942, there were 250,000 Japanese living in Brazil, fertile ground for the Black Dragons.
30:09
The Black Dragons could be the source of the information.
30:23
Under pressure from the United States, Brazil declared war on Germany and Italy.
30:28
But because of its large Japanese population, Brazil did not declare war on Japan, allowing the Japanese spy network to continue.
30:41
The Black Dragons were also active in North America.
30:46
There were 120,000 Japanese living on the west coast of the United States.
30:51
70,000 of these were American-born, but of these, 10,000 have been sent back to Japan for schooling under the new fanatical Japanese leadership.
31:01
Many feared that this group had been infiltrated by the Black Dragons.
31:06
In Los Angeles in 1940, just before Pearl Harbor, a Korean-Japanese infiltrated the Black Dragons and stole... that claim to show detailed plans for simultaneous invasions of the Panama Canal Zone, Alaska, California and Washington State.
31:26
In April 1942, President Roosevelt interned all U.S. citizens of Japanese extraction living on the West Coast as a way of containing the influence of the Black Dragons.
31:41
The Japanese living on the west coast of the United States were sent to internment camps in the middle of America. Now today that might seem a panic move, but there were real fears about black dragon sabotage. And it also has to be remembered that real Japanese sabotage was discovered in Brazil. So the fears were perhaps not unjustified.
32:02
In the murky world of Axis double-dealing, however, Karl Haushofer was still to play his strangest card, involving his protege. Deputy Fuhrer Rudolf Hess.
32:18
On June 22, 1941, on his 52nd birthday, Adolf Hitler invaded Russia.
32:25
His hatred of communism and the Slav and Jewish races triumphed over all reason, as well as over House offers cherished plans for a pan-Eurasian alliance.
32:41
The Household, whose life had been dedicated to nurturing a Eurasian alliance, Hitler's invasion of Russia was an act of madness. It would hand power to the Anglo-Saxons and lead to the eventual defeat of Germany.
32:57
Hitler's Russian venture was opposed on many levels. There were senior German generals who were privately horrified at the prospect of fighting a war on two fronts.
33:06
Hitler himself, after the defeat of France, had extended peace feelers to Britain through intermediaries in Spain.
33:15
There were some people in Britain, some very, very influential people, who were sympathetic to a peace settlement. They saw no threat from Germany's territorial ambitions in Europe, and they believed it would be in Britain's long-term interests and the interests of her worldwide empire to secure an agreement with Adolf Hitler and with Germany.
33:37
Peace deal would have to be brokered with the British before it was too late.
33:42
Before the Second World War, Karl Haushofer and his son, Albrecht, had been in regular contact with people in Britain who were also influenced by the occult ideas of the ancient Orient.
33:56
Among these was the Duke of Hamilton and the mysterious Alistair Crowley. A drug addict and a leading member of an occult society called the Golden Dawn.
34:10
Alistair Crowley was a self-confessed mystic and guru of the English upper classes, though I suspect he was much more into drugs and sex than anything spiritual. However, he was very important because he was a link between his contacts in the English aristocracy and the German occult world.
34:31
Among those connections was Karl Haushofer. who maintained contacts with the Golden Dawn and may have met Crowley in Germany. In 1941, Karl Haushofer used his influence with Rudolf Hess to make one last attempt at persuading the Nazis to make peace with the British before Hitler launched his foolish invasion of Russia.
34:53
On May 3, 1941, Hess was visited in secret by Karl and Albrecht Haushofer.
35:08
Karl was more famous than Albrecht, but Albrecht was much more brilliant than Karl.
35:14
And Albrecht was called in by Hess as his personal advisor. He had been a special advisor to Hitler, Ribbentrop, and a personal advisor to Hess. And he was called in by Hess because Hess wanted to know why Britain would not respond to Hitler's peace offers. And Albrecht explained to him. The British regarded Hitler as Satan's representative on earth who had to be fought. And he wrote this down in a document for him.
35:45
And he explained at length why he thought there was no prospect of peace with Britain. But if he did wish to open up a channel, he explained to him how it should be done.
35:58
On May the 10th, Hess drove to the Messerschmitt airfield at Augsburg.
36:03
He asked to borrow a new experimental Messerschmitt Me 110. At 5.42 p.m., Hess took off heading north.
36:13
He never returned.
36:31
On the 11th of May 1941, Rudolf Hess, Deputy Fuhrer of the Third Reich, flew to Scotland, landing a few miles from the estate of the Duke of Hamilton.
36:42
His aircraft, an experimental Messerschmitt Me 110, had crashed on farmland nearby.
36:55
The flight of Rudolf Hess to Britain was an incredible feat. He flew alone, he flew through heavily defended airspace, and he made a pinpoint parachuting into a field very near from the house of the Duke of Hamilton, whom he'd come to visit. It should be explained that Hess came on the same evening that the House of Commons was bombed, so it could not have been a worse time for a peace mission. But the next morning...
37:24
That was the 11th of May. My father went through with the interrogating officer and Hess asked to see him alone. And he said, I don't know whether you know who I am, but I'm Rudolf Hess, Deputy Fuhrer of Germany. And I know Hitler's mind so well, I can tell you exactly what his peace terms are, although this is a personal, unauthorized mission. And he then explained that Hitler... wanted to offer Britain a free hand in the empire,
37:56
provided only that Germany should have a free hand in Europe and the East.
38:04
Rudolf Hess's journey to Britain rocked the world for a few days. Then he mysteriously disappeared for four years.
38:15
A shocked Hitler was told the news and flew into a rage. He did not want Churchill or Stalin to think that the Nazi leadership was divided or weak.
38:25
He publicly denounced Hess as a madman.
38:28
Everyone connected with Hess was now in danger.
38:39
Winston Churchill had Hess held at a secret location.
38:43
Surprisingly, no film of Hess in captivity ever appeared in the press, despite its propaganda value.
39:02
Churchill was totally opposed to dealing with Hess or making any peace agreement with Hitler. What Churchill wanted to do was to bring the United States into the war and defeat Germany. You must remember that Churchill's mother was an American, and he had an old and close personal relationship with President Roosevelt.
39:23
In 1941, Britain stood alone.
39:27
One by one, she had watched Europe fall under the German jackboot. First Poland, then Norway, France, the Low Countries, and Greece. And for almost a year, she had suffered a relentless pounding from the Luftwaffe.
39:42
Many people believed that America was the key to Britain's survival. Without American support, she would be defeated. But there were some in Britain who wanted peace with Hitler because they feared America would force Britain to give up its colonial empire as the price of that support.
40:00
Churchill could not afford to let them near Hesse.
40:16
There were even some British politicians and military leaders who saw America not as a potential ally, but as an enemy.
40:24
In 1919, after World War I, the British Royal Navy had even drawn up plans to fight a war with America.
40:32
One German knew about these plans, Karl Haushofer. In 1908, Karl Haushofer was on his way from Germany to Japan. Travelling through India, Haushofer met England's Lord Kitchener, who told the young Haushofer something he would never forget.
40:57
Kitchener prophesied that if Germany and Britain went to war, they would be ruined, and as a result, the United States would become the dominant power in the world.
41:09
Haushofer began to watch the United States more and more closely. And as the power of the United States grew, He became more and more convinced that Kitchener was correct.
41:22
But there was one American who was watching Haushofer and was alarmed by Haushofer's schemes of world domination. He was Father Edmund Walsh, a Jesuit academic and founder of Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service.
41:39
Father Edmund Walsh was one of the most distinguished Catholic academics in America in the middle of the 20th century. very, very influential with a number of American presidents. It's interesting that Walsh decided early on that Haushofer was a dangerous character and went out of his way to try and alert the American government to what Haushofer was preaching in Lebensraum.
42:03
In the years before America's entry to the war, Edmund Walsh was a powerful advocate for intervention, arguing the case in Congress and with President Roosevelt.
42:20
But in the spring of 1941, America was not yet in the war.
42:25
What Karl and Albrecht Haushofer feared most was that the efforts of Walsh and Winston Churchill might succeed and that Roosevelt would bring America into the war.
42:41
If Germany was locked in mortal combat with Russia, American intervention could prove decisive.
42:47
Which is why they persuaded Hess to fly to Scotland, to try to arrange a truce and avert the catastrophic consequences of a grand alliance against Germany.
43:06
Karl Haushofer wished to open up a Fila to Britain and he suggested to Hess that an approach should be made to a neutral country. Either to General Sir Ian Hamilton or to the younger Hamilton, by whom he meant the Duke of Hamilton, my father.
43:26
On May 12th, only two days after Hess had flown to Scotland, mass arrests began in Germany under an operation codenamed Action Hess.
43:37
The detained included the personal staff of Rudolf Hess, but also many others unconnected with him.
43:44
Adolf Hitler had ordered the roundup of all Germany's leading astrologers.
43:57
Rudolf Hess had left a letter for the Fuhrer. Now, its contents have never been discovered, but it's every likelihood that it contained an occult warning about Germany going to its doom if it invaded Russia. Now, to the superstitious Nazis... That would have been a very dangerous thing to get abroad, so Hitler was determined to keep it secret.
44:19
Both Karl and Albrecht Haushofer were now questioned by the Gestapo.
44:24
Albrecht was taken to Hitler's mountain retreat and personally interrogated by Reinhard Heydrich, Himmler's deputy.
44:35
Well, Hitler knew very well that Hess's great friend had been Karl Haushofer. And also that his son Albrecht, who had been a special adviser to the Hitler regime, were very much connected with Hess, and he suspected correctly that the Haussovers very much wanted peace with Britain and were totally opposed to a war fought on two fronts.
45:05
Slowly, everything Karl Haussoffer had come to fear through years of study and preparation came to pass.
45:12
As soon as the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Hitler declared war on America, confident that far-off America was militarily weak.
45:22
He was wrong.
45:24
Churchill's gamble paid off. Hess was silenced as America joined the Allied powers.
45:44
Weapons to defeat Hitler and Japan poured from America's factories.
45:49
Britain quickly became an unsinkable aircraft carrier from which to bomb German cities.
45:55
American warships patrolled the Atlantic sea lane searching for U-boats, and U.S. troops landed in the Axis-held territories of North Africa.
46:05
The Soviet Red Army and Air Force, short on arms but with men by the million, was equipped with American weapons.
46:19
With this support, Stalin launched an offensive against Hitler, leaving America to fight an isolated Japanese empire.
46:33
The Battle of Stalingrad, November 1942.
46:37
Here, Hitler suffered his first major defeat.
46:41
The city was once a citadel of the Tsars and was known as the gateway to Asia.
46:47
In a bid to cut Russia's supply lines to the south and break into the Asian steppe, Hitler had committed half a million men to capturing the city, the cream of the German armed forces in the east.
47:02
For three months the grey tide surged through the ruins of Stalingrad. The Russians were driven back to a shallow bridgehead.
47:11
Then winter came, and with it a change in the fortunes of war.
47:16
Soviet attacks unfurled on every front.
47:28
In November, the Axis satellite armies of Italy, Romania and Hungary were destroyed in a series of massive Red Army offensives. And by the end of January 1943, an entire German army had been swallowed up in the maelstrom.
47:47
For Italy, it was a mortal blow, and for the Axis alliance, the beginning of the end. It seemed that Haushofer's prophecy of doom was coming to pass.
48:00
Stalingrad was a catastrophe. Germany lost 20 divisions, more than a quarter of a million men.
48:08
It was also a major strategic disaster. Allies began to melt away. A few months after, Italy surrendered.
48:16
After Stalingrad, there was no real prospect of a German victory.
48:25
Albrecht Haushofer realized that only Hitler's death could save the Germany he and his father had helped to piece together for years, and he began to plot the Fuhrer's assassination.
48:43
Although the tide had turned on Haushofer's idea of world domination, his sphere of influence continued to resonate in Japan.
48:51
Using Axis technology, The Japanese were hard at work developing secret weapons years ahead of their time.
48:58
With them, the outcome of the Second World War could have been very different, with consequences that can hardly be imagined.
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