Germany in the aftermath of the First World War is broke, humiliated, and looking for someone to blame, and this film traces how Adolf Hitler turned that resentment into a movement inside little more than a decade. Archival footage and expert narration walk through the mechanics of the takeover: the propaganda machine built around Joseph Goebbels, the suppression of rivals, and the economic desperation that made a fringe party electable. The film follows the early triumphs that convinced Germans and much of Europe that Hitler could not be stopped, from the remilitarization of the Rhineland to the annexation of Austria and the Blitzkrieg campaigns that overran most of the continent within two years. It does not skip the Holocaust or the machinery of extermination built alongside the war machine. The back half tracks the reversal, from the failed invasion of the Soviet Union to the collapse of the Reich in 1945, arguing that the same overreach and delusion that built the empire is what destroyed it.