May 8, 1945: eight days after Adolf Hitler committed suicide in his Berlin bunker, Germany surrendered. Europe was a field of ruins, and the world discovered the horror of the concentration camps. For 12 years, from 1933 to 1945, an entire nation followed one man in his madness. Hitler wanted to create an empire, the Third Reich, that would last a thousand years, but his reign of terror caused millions of deaths... This sober, didactic documentary retraces a crucial episode in our history, explaining simply and clearly the context of those years, the rise and fall of Nazism. Exceptional color images, filmed in the intimacy of Nazi dignitaries, as well as moving documents filmed inside the Warsaw ghetto or during the liberation of the Buchenwald camp. Many of the images come from untapped archives whose owners were unaware of their existence. Director: David Baty