Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Joseph Stalin rose to power through strikingly similar paths, and this film traces those parallel trajectories side by side. It opens with Hitler's failed 1923 Beer Hall Putsch and follows the three men's climbs from fringe agitators to absolute rulers, then into the shifting alliances and rivalries that defined the era, including the pact between Hitler and Stalin that collapsed into invasion, and the Great Purge that hollowed out the Soviet military and party elite. Archival photographs, wartime footage, and historian interviews build out each regime's propaganda machine, secret police, and cult of personality, drawing out both the ideological differences between fascism and Stalinist communism and the shared reliance on terror to hold power. The film also tracks how their calculations and miscalculations about each other shaped the outbreak of World War Two and set the terms for the Cold War that followed. It closes with the fates of all three regimes and what outlasted them.